Floating Worlds

by Cecelia Anastasia Holland

“Ybix.” He put the bottle down on the arm of the chair, keeping fast hold of it. “That’s a fish. In the lakes in some places in Uranus.” Without letting go of the bottle, he formed a square of his thumbs and forefingers. “Kind of that-shaped. A little fish, but it bites.” The bright sunlight behind her was making him squint. She got up and pulled her chair into the shade.

  “What is ‘Kundra’?”

  “That’s a spell-caster. A witch.”

  “A man?” ‘A’ was a masculine ending.

  Kary shook his head. “All witches are women.”

  “How did you get here? After the fight in Vribulo.”

  “Shipped out. Some friends of mine were running a load of crystal down to meet somebody in the Trojan Asteroids. A couple of us kept on going down toward the Sun. Just to see, you know. Got in trouble in Mars, because in fucking Mars being the wrong fucking color is a fucking crime—”

  He stopped to drink, and she watched the level of the liquor fall in the bottle. He wiped his mouth on his hand.

  “So when I got out of prison they said Where do you want to go, and I’d heard there weren’t any police in the Earth. I’ve been here ever since.”

  “You haven’t had any trouble here?”

  “Not me. You won’t catch me picking trouble with an anarchist. They always get you in the end.”

  Bunker was coming in, with more wine. They worked with Kary the rest of the morning. He drank three bottles of red wine and ate some of Bunker’s stew, taught them a children’s song, and told them his life story. He had been on the Earth at least twenty-five years; he remembered the riots of the thirties, water rationing, and Noah Mataki, who had been on the Committee until 1829.

  Kary told them that the Styths had been born of the wives of the first Uranian colonists—Moon-people, he called them, “because they left the Planet and went up to the moons to live, when the strange babies were born. But they sent the Styths into the crystal farms and made them slaves, and if a Styth fought back, the Moon-people caught him and chained him, hand to hand and foot to foot, and threw him into the farm to starve, in the dark and the cold. That’s why the Prima wears a cuff, to remind us where we came from.”

  He drank another bottle of wine. In the middle of a long sad monologue on the beauties of Vribulo, he fell off the armchair. Bunker took his shoulders and Paula his feet, and they dragged him in and put him to sleep in her bed, which she had not made anyway.

  “You’re as much of a slob as he is,” Bunker said.

  “If it bothers you so much, make it yourself.”

  They went up to the roof. Below, in the gray trees, several people were shooting their bows. The wind flapped her jacket. They sat on the low rail at the edge of the building and watched the sunset light flash on the dome wall. She taught him Styth grammar.

  “It’s like a game. All those rules.”

  Darkness settled over them, so cold the air hurt her lungs. The blue domelight flickered overhead. She thought of Tony, wondering what he was doing. If he had another friend yet.

  “What do you make of the Sunlight League?”

  She bundled her hands into her sleeves. The domelight ran in ripples across the darkness high overhead. “The Styths are black. You know how Martians are about skin color. They’re harmless.”

  “Fascists are always harmful in mass. And they don’t come any other way.”

  “I’m freezing. I’m going inside.”

  He slid off the rail to his feet. They went down the stairs together.

  “By Melleno. We will take Richard Bunker for a hostage. Paula Mendoza will meet at the Nineveh Club with the Matuko Akellar, by your time the ten mid-days of April 1853. You arrange safe-conducts for the Styth Fleet ship Ybix and fifteen men. Ended. Melleno.”

  MARS

  April 1853

  Paula walked down an accordion tunnel from the rocket. Every few yards, there was a sign on the pleated wall reading “Terminal,” with an arrow pointing ahead, like encouragement, since there was nowhere else to go. When she walked out of the mouth of the ramp into the expanse of the waiting room, a tall blond woman stepped forward to meet her.

  “Hello, Madame Diplomat.”

  “Cam,” Paula said. She switched her bag to her left hand. “How did you know I was coming? I was going to call you when 1 got here.”

  Cam Savenia’s handshake was cool and white. “Oh, I have ways. How long has it been?”

  “Five years,” Paula said. She was tempted to say, Four and a half years and six months in prison. Cam was much taller than she was. “You came here just to meet me. I’m flattered.”

  They started across the waiting room, cutting through the rows of molded plastic benches. The flooring was rippled for traction. Cam said, “This is a pretty important mission. When did you join the Committee?”

  “A year ago.”

  “I always thought you had too much brain to waste your life sitting under a tree. You’ll go far with them, if you’re as smart as I think you are.”

  Paula followed her up an ascending ramp. The other passengers from the rocket went on before them. They passed a videone screen showing times of arrival and departure. In spite of the crowd, the place looked barren. Nobody lived here, they just came and went. The walls were papered with the drawings of schoolchildren: giant birds, and people like monsters in space helmets and uniforms. Cam led her to the rooftop parking lot.

  “I’ll take you out to the Nineveh.” She steered Paula down a lane between a wall and a rope. Ahead, a row of air cars waited under a sign that read INTERDOME TRANSPORT.

  “Doesn’t your term end this year?” Paula asked.

  “Yes. The Senate is impossible. Really small beer. I’m announcing for the Council. I have three party endorsements, how do you like that? Want to write my speeches?”

  Paula laughed. “Write your own. Mine were awful.” She slid into the back seat of a cab.

  “Oh, no. I know my limits. I can think and I can do, but I can’t express.” Cam leaned across the back of the front seat. “Driver, the Nineveh Club.” Sitting down, she slid the door closed and locked it.

  The cab rolled forward, its engine sputtering, and leaped up in a rush that turned Paula’s stomach over. They sailed away across Barsoom. Paula looked out the window. They were entering a stream of traffic, three or four lanes deep and a dozen lanes wide. Below the clutter of cars streamed the puffed heads of the palm trees that lined Cleveland Avenue.

  “Do you know what’s ahead of you?” Cam said. “Incidentally, I’ve met this Styth.”

  “You have?” Paula swiveled around, her arm on the satchel between them. “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “He’s here already?”

  “He’s at the Nineveh. Him and eight bodyguards. Turning the place into a zoo.”

  Just beyond the cab window a private air car flew. Inside it, the old woman driving hunched forward over the steering grips, her teeth set. Below them the land was cut into perfect squares of green, each framing a tilted roof, set with the blue jewel shapes of swimming pools.

  “He’s at the Nineveh. What’s he like?”

  Cam shook her head. “Impossible.” She took a cigarette from her purse and set it into a long black holder.

  “Does he speak the Common Speech?”

  “Yes. He’s not stupid. I didn’t realize they’re so big.”

  They were coming to the lock. The driver swore softly. The traffic was packed around the entrance to the lock, and far ahead a red light flashed. The driver turned his head.

  “Be a little while, ladies.”

  Cam leaned forward. “Go around by the auxiliary.”

  “I’m not supposed—”

  The Martian woman flashed a badge under his nose. “My authority.”

  “Yes, Senator.” The driver pulled the car straight up, out of the traffic jam, and swung it off to the side, and Cam sat back, smiling. She puffed on her cigarette.

  “How old is he?” Paula said.

&nb
sp; “I can’t tell. Older than I am.” Cam was thirty-two. “God, they are black, too.”

  Paula stiffened. She looked out the window again. They passed through the auxiliary lock in the wall of the dome and went into the dark Martian day. Barsoom was at the edge of a line of craters. They flew above the hollow hills. For miles around them the surface of the Planet was heaped up with red dust, the wastes of the water bears, the native organisms that mined out the minerals and water. There was no wind. They flew above a crater. The dust lay in geometric cones among the steep red walls. She wondered if Cam were here to pitch to her or just to spy. The smoke from the Senator’s cigarette hurt her nose. Now they were flying over the virgin Planet. They crossed a rill like a seam in the red crust. Paula knew Cam was watching her. Ahead, the sunlight glanced off the shining dome of the Nineveh.

  “What do you think of the Committee?” Cam asked.

  “It’s a job.”

  “Sybil Jefferson has the morals of an ax-murderess. As for that rat Bunker—”

  “The guts of a burglar,” Paula murmured, looking out the window.

  “Right. And to prove it they send a green girl in to take their beating for them.”

  “Thanks for the confidence.”

  “Damn it, you don’t know what you’re into.”

  Paula stared out the window at the dark world. “I learn.”

  “These people are animals.”

  “You’re so civilized, Cam.”

  “You’re damned right.” Cam sucked intently on the last of the cigarette. Her fingernails were shaped to points. “I believe in law and order and authority, right and wrong, little old-fashioned things like honor and responsibility and morality. Why did you bring him to Mars? He’s interested as hell in the dome, I’ll tell you that.” She pushed the butt out of her cigarette holder. “I guess to a primitive, Mars must be mind-swamping.”

  Paula cleared her throat. They passed through the wall of the dome, from the subdued natural light to the brilliant green of the Nineveh Club. They flew over an arm of a golf course, a patch of dark trees, another long strip of lawn. She sat up straight, looking forward over the driver’s shoulder. Surrounded by lakes, the hotel stood in a long white wedge among the trees in the distance.

  “There’s the river,” Cam was saying. She pointed past Paula’s shoulder. “Every drop of water manufactured in Barsoom.”

  The car circled once and lowered toward the front of the hotel. They swooped over a swimming lake, formed into round coves and little inlets framed in trees.

  “How long has he been here?” Paula said. Probably Cam had pitched to him, too.

  “The Akellar? Since yesterday. His ship is parked in orbit. If he’s taking a look at Mars, I can tell you we’re taking a good look at Ybix. It’s an old Martian Manta destroyer, which proves something, I guess.” Savenia pointed to a flock of yellow birds flying off toward the golf course. “They even sing.” Every feather manufactured in Barsoom.

  “What has he been doing?”

  Cam gave Paula an oblique look. “You’re single-minded.” The cab was parking. Trim as a bugle boy, a man in a wine-red uniform rushed up to open the door. When Paula slid out to the pavement, he reached for the satchel, and she held it around behind her out of his range.

  “Take the luggage to Room 2017,” Cam said. “Pese-pese.”

  “Yes, Dr. Savenia.”

  Paula let Cam marshal her through the hotel’s main doors. The lobby spread out around her, hushed and elegant. The walls were set with glass boxes, back-lit, displaying hats and jewels. A woman and a man in golf knickers passed her.

  “Straight ahead,” Cam said. “You have to register. The Styths don’t do much, except at night. Then they want everything in the place. They beat up a waiter who made the mistake of talking back to them.”

  Paula said, “The light here is much brighter than they’re used to.” She went between two rubber plants to the registration desk.

  “So they maul people? Why didn’t the Committee send a man?”

  “The Styths requested me.” Which meant they weren’t serious about negotiating, a minor obstacle. The desk clerk approached her, his gaze directed over her head, as if he didn’t quite see her.

  “May I help you?”

  “This is Paula Mendoza,” Cam said, behind her.

  “Yes, Miss Mendoza.” The clerk snapped like a soldier to his work. He put a voice box down in front of her. “Your suite is ready. Second floor overlooking the gardens, near our other interplanetary guests.” Paula said her name and the Committee’s name into the flat box. It whirred and a pink card popped up from the top. The clerk said, “Now, if you’ll give us your thumbprint—”

  She pressed her thumb against the patch on the card.

  “Come on,” Cam said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

  Paula followed her across the lobby, the satchel in her left hand. “Come up to my room. I have a bottle of Black Label.”

  “I never pass up an invitation like that.”

  They went up a flight of steps. On the second-floor landing, the corridor branched off in three directions. Cam led her off down the middle. Two old people crept toward them, the woman leaning on two canes. She gave Paula a look focused three feet beyond her. Cam took her by the arm again.

  “I think you’re—”

  A Styth was walking down the corridor. Paula stopped, and Cam bumped into her. The Styth ignored them. He sauntered past, black as a stone in the white plastic Martian world. He disappeared out the door to the stairs, ducking his head to miss the lintel.

  Cam said, “They walk like a bunch of women. It’s funny to see all those huge men pussyfooting around.” She strode across the corridor to a door. “Try the lock. It ought to be working by now.”

  Paula set her thumb on the white patch on the door, and it slid back into the wall. The lights in the ceiling in the room beyond came up bright as sunlight. She walked into a room as big as the public room in her commune. At one end was a bar with three stools; at the other end a massive brick hearth, set up with logs and a revolving phony fire. She went around the couch to the long draped wall opposite the door and pulled at the curtains until she found an opening and looked out at a broad garden, laid out in curves and squares of hedge.

  “Do you like it?” Cam said.

  “It’s fantastic,” Paula said. She turned around again. The wall beside the door was an aquarium four feet square. She went toward it, drawn by the flight of red fish.

  Cam said comfortably, “You pride yourselves on your poverty.” She opened the door behind the bar. Paula followed her into the next room. Her suitcase lay open on the rack at the foot of the bed. She put down the satchel and stepped out of her shoes. The carpet was deep enough to sleep on.

  “Here.” She took out one bottle of the Scotch and gave it to Cam. “Go pour while I take a fast shower.”

  “Fine.”

  Cam went back to the opulent front room. Paula looked quickly around. The cushioned furniture and draped blue walls offered a dozen hiding places for spy devices. Cam had always been fond of gimmicks. She peeled off her clothes, stiff from travel, and found the washroom.

  There was a sheet of fancy paper tucked into the mirror. “For Our Single Guests.” While she was turning in the dryer, she read it. “The Nineveh provides a wide range of excitement and self-discovery for the man or woman with sophisticated tastes.” Call girls, call boys. Press a button and we’ll send up an amputee. She remembered this had been Dick Bunker’s idea.

  “Paula?”

  “Yes?” She went out to the bedroom.

  Cam turned, brisk, saw her, and averted her eyes. She scratched quickly at her upper lip. Naked people made her nervous. “The Akellar is on the videone. Not literally, they’ve disconnected the camera. He wants you to come up there now.” She glanced shyly at Paula’s body.

  “I don’t want to do that,” Paula said. She took her long robe out of the suitcase. “Tell him my respects and I’d like to get some
rest first.”

  “Right-o.” Cam went out. Paula put the robe on and dug around in the suitcase for the belt. She heard Cam’s voice in the next room, rising with temper, and started through the door.

  Cam stood over the videone in the far corner by the hearth. Her face was stained pink across the cheekbones. “Now, you listen to me, tough guy—” Paula went up to the videone and shut it off.

  The Senator stepped back, her face smooth. They stared at each other a moment. Finally Paula went past her toward the bar.

  “Tell me why you’re here, Cam.”

  The bottle stood on the countertop, unopened. She circled the bar and squatted to take a glass from the shelf below the cold drawer. The bar was stocked with mixers and soft drinks.

  “I don’t think you understand what this confrontation is all about,” Savenia said.

  Paula straightened up. She poured Scotch into her glass. “Tell me.”

  “The Styths are our enemies, Paula. They can never be anything else. They’re mutants. They’re genetic pollution.”

  Paula took a bracing sip of the Scotch and licked her lips. She had heard that phrase before. Cam stalked across the room. “I can help you. I know a little bit about Styths, and about this Styth in particular. You are a sacrificial lamb, baby. Jefferson and Bunker have set you up.” She was a gifted speaker, all fire no matter what she was saying. She marched up to the bar. “He isn’t really human, Paula. Sometimes I don’t think the Committee is human either.”

  “Have you ever heard of the Sunlight League?” Paula asked.

  Cam’s face twitched. She put her white hands on the bar. “Are you listening to me? Because—” She backed up in a rush, startled, her eyes aimed beyond the bar.

  Paula turned around. Her bedroom door was opening. A big Styth walked through it, not a tall man, for a Styth, massively built. He was staring at Cam. He said, “You think you’re a man, I’ll treat you like a man. You have until the light comes back to leave.”

  Cam stood straight as a flagpole. She said, with great dignity, “This is my Planet, Akellar.”

  Paula set her glass down. “Cam, you made your speech, now go.”