Floating Worlds (66 page)

David was frowning at her. “Mother, he’s the Prima.”

“He isn’t my Prima. I’m my Prima. Come have dinner with me.”

He was already moving toward the door. “No. I have something else to do. Can I use your room to clean up?”

“You can live here. Nobody is using your room.” She smiled at him. “I’m glad you’re back, David.”

“So am I, Mother.”

While she was walking up the street toward Colorado’s, she heard her name called behind her. She stopped and looked back. Marus was jogging down the curved street after her. He veered around a pushcart and reached her, breathing hard.

“The Akellar wants you.”

“Later. I’m hungry.” She walked off up the street.

“He says it’s about David Mendoza.”

She went back to him. “What about David?”

“I don’t know. The Akellar said I should tell you that.”

She hurried back toward the end of the city. On either side of the street were buildings marked to be torn down; she heard children playing in them. They reached the Barn and she went into Tanuojin’s office.

David was not there. Tanuojin was sitting at the desk in the front office recording a book tape, a set of earphones over his head. He gestured to Marus to leave. She leaned on the desk, impatient. He turned a switch on the recorder and another on the left earcup.

“What is this about David?” she said.

“Nothing. That was the best way to get you here. I have to talk to you.”

Her shoulders sank an inch. For a moment, speechless, she could only stare at him. He took off the headset and put it on the desk. She went out of the office.

He came after her. “I have a tax I want you to arrange in the Middle Planets. Newrose will accept it if it comes from you.”

“Get away from me.” She was walking as fast as she could, even though there was no way to outrun him. She left the arcade and turned into the street past Colorado’s, and he steered her toward the drinking dock. She gave up trying to go anywhere else and went into the vast dark room.

It was all but empty. The blue lights were lit along the pipe-wall and a slave on a ladder was swabbing out a barrel with a mop. Two more slaves raked off the sand. She went into the brightest corner and sat down.

“No,” she said to Tanuojin. A slave hovered nearby; she sent him for her meal.

“It’s very simple,” he said. “Listen to me before you refuse.”

The slave brought her a split dish of beans and leaf, Colorado’s staple lunch. She broke the piece of bread in half. “No. I don’t like taxes, and I don’t work in the Middle Planets for your benefit.” She used a piece of bread to shovel up the beans.

He dropped on one knee beside her. “I need that money.”

The slave who had served her was back. “Mendoz’, Kuuba wants to know if this goes on Matuko’s bill.”

“Matuko.” She swallowed a mouthful. “Why should Ketac pay my bills?”

“Uuh—” The slave touched his upper lip with his tongue. His gaze slid toward Tanuojin.

“You put it on my bill,” she said. “You put everything I buy on my bill.” The beans were syrupy with red sauce. She ate the soaked bread. Tanuojin leaned over her.

“Don’t make me angry, Paula.”

“Tsk.”

“You don’t really think Ketac can take me.”

The salad was oily. She ate the crunchy leaf. “Are you going into the pit again? Show off your peculiar talents in front of everybody?” She looked into his face. “Saba is dead now, you’re all alone.”

His white eyes dilated, round as targets. She saw he was still afraid of the mob. When he stood up, his kneejoint cracked.

“You remember I said once I’d break you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Not in those words.” She put the dish down. Her fingers were greasy and she wiped them on the sand. Tanuojin started to speak and turned.

David was coming into the great empty drinking dock. He crossed the deep sand toward them. He had washed and changed his clothes, and his long thick hair hung untied down past his shoulders. He reached Tanuojin.

“Uncle, I apologize for what I said. I—”

“I don’t care about your diseased half-breed raving,” Tanuojin said. Fish-lean, he stood over David by sixteen inches. He said, “You’re as bad as your slut-mother. You’re white-hearted.”

The slaves leaned on their rakes watching them. The kitchen master put his head out the doorway. Tanuojin pointed at Paula. “Do you know what she’s been doing? Saba wasn’t cool ash before she was turning up her heels for Ketac at a drunken party.”

“Ketac.”

David’s jaw set tight. He flung her a nasty look. “You Creep,” he said to Tanuojin, “I’m surprised your tongue hasn’t rotted away.”

The tall man gave off a spurt of rage. Both hands hooked in David’s hair. “Club it up!” David clawed at him, and Tanuojin swung him around by the hair and dragged him to the door. “It’s not just for looks, you see, no matter what you anarchists think.” He slung David out the door.

The slaves were motionless, rapt. The man on the ladder had dropped his mop. Tanuojin walked back toward Paula, picking clumps of David’s hair off his hands. “You slut. You won’t even fight for your own cub.”

“He does well enough by himself, doesn’t he?” She circled past him toward the door. “Not so much rotted, I think, as pickled.” She laughed and went off to the door.

In the next watch, Ketac, Dakkar, and Junna ambushed David on the plain of the House and clubbed him. A crowd gathered to watch. Paula came out on the second-story balcony. David fought them. They wrestled him down on his knees and Ketac wrenched his hands in front of him to give him the oath.

Paula glanced behind her. Tanuojin had come out onto the balcony.

“Did you put them up to this?” she said.

“That’s right.”

David burst up, his hair flying, and Junna sprawled across the concrete. The crowd cheered, boisterous. Ketac and Dakkar trapped David between them. Ketac was laughing. They forced David down on the pavement.

Tanuojin said, “He’s too stupid to know when he’s beaten.”

Ketac had David’s hands stretched out before him. Junna pinned him down by the shoulders, and Dakkar leaned past him to knot David’s hair into the club. Ketac shouted the oath.

“Who is the man?”

“Styth,” the crowd roared. David made no sound.

“Which is the way?”

“The Sun!”

“Keep faith!” Ketac milled his brother across the cheek with his open hand. Paula twitched.

David bounced onto his feet. His brothers danced away from him, teasing him; Ketac clapped his hands under David’s nose. Paula went indoors.

She was sitting on her bed in her room writing to Newrose, and Tanuojin came into the room. She closed her notebook. There was a high-backed chair against the wall by the chest, which he took and turned toward her and sat on. His long legs bent like a spider’s.

“Paula,” he said. “You are letting yourself in for this. I—”

“Wait. Let me. You are about to tell me how fond you are of me, and you don’t want to hurt me or David, but for the good of the Empire…” She stood up on her bed and swung the shutter closed over the window, cutting off the noise of the city. “Not with me, Tanuojin.”

“Get me that money.”

She sat down cross-legged on the bed again. She had the feeling if she took her eyes off him he would change to another form: a poison mist.

“You’re in debt already,” he said, reasonable. “Leno wants you to leave. You’ll have to come to me sometime. Why get me angry?”

“It’s good exercise.” Ketac had just bought a house in Upper Vribulo. She could live there. She leaned against the wall behind her and folded her arms over her chest.

“You’ll regret it.” His deep voice rasped; he was beginning to lose his temper. “And you can’t live with Ketac. It’s already the ripest scandal in Vribulo. You’re twice his age.”

She laughed. “Well, I’m remarkably preserved.” There was a tap on the door, and she lifted her voice. “Yes?”

David came in behind Tanuojin. His knotted hair was already falling loose. He said, “Mother, I need money.” His slanted brown eyes flicked at Tanuojin, sitting with his back to him. “Hello, Uncle Tajin.”

“Do you want work?” Tanuojin said. But he was watching Paula.

“What?”

She said, “You can work for me.”

“What would you pay him with?” Tanuojin said. His hands slid under his belt. He never looked at David. “Vida, I need a pilot. I’m buying
Ybicket
.”

“
Ybicket
,” David said. He came two steps into the middle of the room, circling Tanuojin’s chair to face him, and she knew she had lost. “Where is she now? How much are you paying for her?”

“I still owe Ketac four million dollars of it, which I won’t have until your mother starts to cooperate. The ship’s in Matuko. Can you go get her?”

David stuck his open hand out. “I need bus money.”

“Take Junna to navigate for you.” Tanuojin gave him credit. Paula sat, watching them, silent. His hair was too fine to stay clubbed. The side of his face was bruised. Tanuojin said, “Dock her in the number 4-A slip in the mid-city gate. Report to Marus when you’re done.”

“I’ll bring you something from Matuko,” David said to her. He left.

“That’s the anarchist in him,” Tanuojin said. “No loyalty.”

“He’s Saba’s son too.” Her voice sounded rough. She coughed to disguise it. Useless.

“I warned you,” he said.

Tanuojin went to Yekka. Ketac took her to the Akopra. During the interval between the first two dances, Bokojin came into the box. Ketac had obviously expected him; they stood talking. Paula sat with her back to them, sipping kakine. They agreed to meet sometime indefinitely later and the Illini Akellar went out.

The Vribulo company performed three more short dances, two old, and one experimental. New rAkopran were rare and she watched this one with attention. It bored Ketac, who played with her hand, talked to her, and tried to get her to caress him.

“Come to my house,” he said, when they were leaving the theater.

“Not if Bokojin is going to be there.”

They went across the lobby, through little knots of people dressed splendidly in long brocaded shirts, in dresses trimmed with metal lace. Ketac took a firm grip on her arm. “How do you know Bokojin is going to be there?”

“You agreed to meet him, don’t you remember? Just two hours ago.” She went ahead of him out the door. The long blue paper banners hanging on the eave of the porch advertised the next cycle. The street was thick with the people just out of the theater.

“He won’t stay long,” Ketac said.

“I hate him. Ask him what he thinks of me. I’ll see you in the middle watch.” She pulled her arm out of his grip, and he let her go. She went down the street toward the corner.

There, in the midst of the crowd, she turned and looked back. Ketac was going off in the opposite direction, toward his house. She trotted after him through the swarming traffic and followed him across the city, staying about forty feet behind him. He was easy to keep in sight, taller than the crowd, his black hair tied sleek among the shaggier Vribulit heads of the other men. Whenever his long stride took him to the limit of her vision, she broke into a run to catch up. He led her through the edge of the slums by the lake and down the Steep Street, cut into broad steps. At the foot of the hill he went through a gate in the wall of his new house. Paula circled around the corner into the next block, ran down the alley, and climbed onto the recycling bin and dropped over the fence into the yard.

The house was built in a hollow square, one room thick all around. In front of each of the windows was a trellis covered with vines, to keep the place private. She crawled between the wall and the vine screen over Ketac’s bedroom window. The skirt of the black dress caught on a strut of the trellis and ripped.

Ketac’s room seemed empty. She reached in across the deep sill and dragged herself into the room. The torn skirt of the dress tangled in her legs. She got up, pulling the dress off; she wore a pair of overalls under it against the cold.

The bed was on a bench built out from the wall on her left. A blue curtain hung from the ceiling hid it. She looked in to make sure it was empty and tossed the ruined dress onto the pillow. Crossing to the door, she slid it open an inch.

All the rooms opened onto a circular inner yard. Ketac liked to spend his time there, and he was there now, standing at the far end beside the bilyobio tree reading a piece of paper. She pressed her eye against the crack in the door. A slave came from one of the eight rooms ringing the yard and spoke to him, and Ketac nodded. Paula watched him cross the yard toward her. He ambled, looking around him with a proprietor’s critical eye, moving a chair and stooping to fuss with a loose flag in the neat grass-seamed pavement. Bokojin came out of the house.

Paula sucked on the inside of her cheek. They met with the little greeting ceremony of their way of life, jibing, punching each other, and finally shaking hands and sitting down. Bokojin sat facing her, his feet primly together.

“Where is she?”

“I let her go back to the House.”

“You what?”

“I couldn’t very well drag her off in the middle of the street. She doesn’t like you. She said she wouldn’t—”

A slave brought them a tray with cups and a jug. Bokojin reached for one. Peevish, he said, “Damn it, I left her to you because you said you could—”

“Why are you so high?” Ketac said. He waved the slave away. “I’ll handle my mother. You handle Tanuojin.”

Paula straightened away from the door and rubbed her eye. She wondered if they were planning a gambit in the Chamber or something more direct. Bokojin said, stiff, “I wish you wouldn’t call her your mother.”

Ketac laughed. “She’ll do anything I say. Don’t worry about her.” He slung one leg over the arm of his chair. “How is Machou?”

“Drunk. How is he ever? When we’ve done this, we should get rid of him. He’s useless.” Bokojin got up, a cup in his hand, and sauntered around the yard, expansive. “The main thing is to put the rAkellaron in order, the way things are supposed to be.”

There was a crash inside the house on the far side of the yard. Paula put her face against the slit in the door to see better. Ketac stood and Bokojin’s head turned. The door of the far side of the yard flew open.