Floating Worlds

by Cecelia Anastasia Holland

  “General,” Bunker said, “from certain perspectives there’s no difference.”

  Gordon jabbed his sharp chin at Paula. He talked almost without moving his lips. “You don’t deny she became the mistress of a Styth pirate.”

  Paula frowned at Bunker. “What’s a mistress?”

  “What you think.”

  Jefferson said, “The Matuko Akellar is one of the most powerful men in Styth. If he’s a pirate, General, so are you.”

  Gordon stood up, turning his back on them, his eyes on the cross on the wall. He jammed his fists into his pockets. “My tolerance for insult is very low, Miss Jefferson.”

  “The Styths are there,” Jefferson said. “The interface between them and us will only grow with time. We’d like to develop a relationship that will give everybody a reasonable stake in keeping the peace.”

  “By seducing them?” Gordon sat down again. His hands danced over his collection of pens. “God is not mocked, Miss Jefferson. The future won’t belong to those who suck tit with the devil, but to those who serve god.”

  Paula thought of the Akellar, flying away into space, sucking tit with Planck’s Constant. She raised her eyes; the ceiling was pocked with sensors and cameras.

  “Is that his baby?” Gordon barked.

  She leveled her gaze at him. “It’s my baby.” Taking the treaty out of her pocket, she went up to his desk and put the paper down on the blotter. “We have two objectives, a truce and a workable trade agreement. We have the trade. If he comes to the Earth, we’ll get the truce.”

  “A piece of film.”

  Jefferson said, encarameled, “The Council is enthusiastic.”

  The general’s sharp face was stiff. His cheeks sucked in. To Paula, he said, “What guarantee do you have he’ll keep this?”

  “He signed it,” she said. “He’ll keep it. Which is the kind of devil you like to deal with.”

  “The devil’s always handsome to a whore.”

  Thinking of Lilly M’ka, she had to laugh. His mouth pinched to a slit. He snapped the paper around and read it. She moved away from him. Bunker slid down on the couch, his hands in his lap.

  Gordon said, “If this ship comes here, she’ll spy on every facet of our operations. Luna is the chief harbor of the Middle Planets. You want to bring this damned pirate—”

  “We’d like you to take a look at the ship, if you can,” Bunker said.

  “The Martian Fleet’s scan failed.”

  “They looked in the wrong places for the wrong things. I just spent six days inboard Ybix, I have some ideas.” He crossed the room, past Paula, to the desk. “This ship has accounted for three out of the five patrol craft lost so far in the war. Including both ships lost below Vesta.” He dropped the packet of photographs on the blotter.

  Gordon took out a laser cutter and opened the envelope. He spilled the photographs onto the desk. “Unh.” His white hands held the strips of film up to the ceiling lights. “That’s certainly a Manta hull. How do they make it go so fast?”

  Jefferson said, “We’ve been running into static from some of the Martians, General. If they’ve been talking to you—”

  “I don’t listen to the Martians.” Gordon sprang up again. His hands disappeared in his pockets. “I’ll keep these photographs. You can park that ship here for ten days Earth. Send me your recommendations for a scan.” He pressed a button on his desk. “Escort these people out.” He gathered up the strips of film and left the way he had come.

  “That’s the kind of devil you don’t like to deal with,” Bunker said.

  “Richard,” Jefferson said, “park your mouth.”

  They were escorted back the way they had come. On the moving sidewalk none of the anarchists spoke. The officer who had brought them took them through customs again. They got back their clothes, sealed into clear plastic bags. Bunker’s ring was attached in its own little sack.

  With the hundred-odd other passengers they boarded the Earth-Luna shuttle. The benches in the coach section were just wide enough for two people, and they found a pair in the back where no one else was sitting and Bunker and Paula turned one to face the other. Bunker sat down.

  “You know, Gordon’s cracked. They’ll pick him up someday in sackcloth and ashes announcing the Second Coming.”

  Paula took off her jacket. The bus was stifling hot and smelled of antiseptic. “He seems reasonable to me. So he’s a little paranoid.” She watched Jefferson fish inside her purse.

  “We could sell him a report on his security system,” Bunker said. “That would make him even more paranoid.”

  Jefferson popped out her right eye and split it between her fingers like an egg. She picked out the sensor inside. “They’re looking for weapons.” She took her false eye from her purse and slipped it into the socket. Paula swallowed, her stomach quivering. On the armor-gray wall of the bus, next to her, was a face drawn in black ink. During the fifteen-hour shuttle flight a graffist could take time on a piece. The hair swirled away in ringlets, which turned into curlicue words.

  This floating world is but a phantasm It is a momentary smoke

  She turned her head almost upside down to read it. It sounded like Zen. She would have to look it up. She sat thinking of the thousands of things she had always meant to look up.

  “What have you done with that crystal?” Jefferson asked.

  Paula straightened on the bench. Bunker said, “What crystal?”

  “The Styths gave her a huge energy crystal,” Jefferson said.

  “Oh?”

  “It’s in my luggage,” Paula said. She glanced over her shoulder. The other passengers were sleeping, or singing; no one was within hearing. She turned back to Jefferson. “He gave it to me. It’s mine.”

  Bunker was frowning at her. The old woman said, “We paid for the knife.”

  “Why did they give you something that rich?” Bunker said. “The knife is a bauble.”

  “What do you think—that I took their bribe?” She looked from Jefferson to him. “Because he wanted to keep the knife. Therefore he had to give me something, or he’d have stood in my debt. Crystal isn’t worth that much to them.”

  “Exactly,” Jefferson said. “He gave it in return for the knife, which we gave him, not you.”

  Paula crossed her arms over her chest. She was already resigned to giving up the crystal. She thought of the baby, the Akellar’s other little present. She would rather have the crystal. Morose, she stared at the wall.

  NEW YORK

  April—May 1853

  “If he won’t do it,” An Chu said, “you can go to the women’s center. They give you a pill and you go to sleep and when you wake up there’s no more baby and you hardly bleed at all.”

  They walked down a flight of steep gray stairs into the doorway of the building. The corridor beyond was lined with doctors’ offices. Paula rubbed her palms on the thighs of her trousers. Her father had hated doctors. If you go in with a hangnail you have a fifty-fifty chance of coming out alive. On each door they passed, a white rectangle told the doctor’s name, followed by several letters. At Thomas Adena, M.D., O.B., GYM., she and An Chu went in.

  The waiting room was divided in half. Three women sat on one side, all pregnant, so huge they could hardly sit up straight. Four little children climbed and screamed in the bright-painted bar-gym beyond the railing down the middle of the room. Paula sat on the couch and leafed through a magazine full of pictures of babies. An Chu told the enormous women a web of lies about her sex commune, her thirty-three friends, their fourteen mutual children. They shared recipes for baby food.

  The doctor was a man. He took a blood sample and made her lie on her back on a white table so that he could feel around through her insides. An Chu followed them patiently from room to room until they reached his office again. The office walls were painted with sunflowers. On the shelves behind his desk were several models of human guts.

  “How do you feel?” the doctor said.

  “Awful. I can
’t eat, I throw up all the time, my breasts are sore, I go to sleep in the middle of dinner. I feel terrible. Maybe I’m just sick.”

  The doctor shook his head. He was almost as dark as a Styth. His trim little beard reminded her of Tony. “You’re two weeks’ pregnant. I gather this is unplanned?”

  She nodded. Counting back on her fingers, she came to the Nineveh Club.

  “Your friend didn’t warn you he was natural? He might not know, sometimes the valve opens spontaneously—”

  She said, “The father is a Styth.” She was on the verge of a hot temper, for no reason, although the sudden hilarity on the doctor’s face was a reason.

  “A Styth. Where did you find a Styth?” He reached for a long yellow notepad and a pencil.

  “On Mars. I’m on the Committee.”

  He scribbled. “Well, well. And this conception was in the course of a normal relationship?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean he didn’t attack you, or—”

  “No.” She glared at him. “Would you ask that if he were Earthish?”

  He smiled at her behind his prim little beard. “He isn’t Earthish.”

  Behind her, An Chu whispered, “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go to the women’s center.”

  “Are you planning an abortion?” the doctor asked. He rolled his pencil in his fingers. His eyes reflected two little sparks of lamplight.

  “Yes.”

  “Then let me offer you an alternative. I can transplant the fetus into an artificial uterus.” He got up. The back of his white coat was wrinkled from the chair. He took a clear plastic model down from a shelf over his head and put it on the desk. “This is constructed to allow the fetus to develop as normally as possible outside the mother. We can observe it at every stage.”

  The model was threaded with tubes and chambers like a tiltball maze. An Chu whispered, “Come on, Paula, let’s go.”

  The doctor sat down, one hand resting on his plastic mother. “I realize it’s a little hard to accept at first—”

  Paula said, “What about when it’s born?”

  “We’ll find a suitable foster home and continue observations.” His hand patted the uterus, which resounded softly. “You could be saving the lives of hundreds of babies. The first being your own.”

  They were both watching her. After a while she looked up. “Is it alive?”

  “It was alive from the moment of conception. I’d like to examine the father—”

  She sat up straight. “He’s gone. He’s in space.”

  “Oh. Is he a diplomat too?”

  “No, he’s a pirate.” She was getting angry again, her mood boiling over. She could not look away from the chambered shell under the doctor’s hand. An Chu was tapping her foot on the floor. Paula said, “I’ll keep it.”

  The doctor leaned back. His chair creaked. “That’s a risky—”

  “I don’t care. If you can raise it, I can.”

  “It might be a better idea to transplant it anyway—as it develops, it may—”

  “No. I’ll keep it.”

  His mouth crooked behind his mustache, and he took his hand off the plastic uterus. Standing, he put it up on the shelf again. “Do you want me to deliver it?”

  “No,” An Chu said.

  Paula said, “Yes.”

  “Very well.” He sat. “My fee is three hundred fifty dollars.”

  Paula leaned on the arm of the chair, her gaze on his face. “Why don’t you do it for free? After all, you’ll be able to observe it almost as well in me as in that thing.”

  The doctor was writing on his yellow pad. “I’ll have to do a lot of tests. There will be some inconvenience.”

  “Fine.”

  “Half price. One hundred seventy-five dollars.”

  “Fifty.”

  “One hundred.”

  “Seventy-five.”

  “Agreed.” He nodded at her. “Come into the lab again and let me have a few more blood samples.”

  “Does Daddy know yet?” Sybil asked. She was driving.

  “No,” Paula said.

  “When are you—”

  “I’m not.” She crooked her arm over the back of her seat. Jefferson drove at an elephantine pace just above the trees. Other cars swerved in and out around them, barely missing them. In the back seat, Bunker was staring fixedly out the window. Paula had been watching Jefferson since they left the Committee building; the old woman had traveled three miles without referring to any of the side-view mirrors. They were lowering down over the park. Ahead was the beehive shape of the entry port. Sybil beat a long green taxi into the entrance to the parking lot.

  Paula sighed. Sybil seesawed the car back and forth, trying to fit it into a parking space large enough for a bus. At last they got out of the car. They crossed the dark parking lot to the door to the outside ramp. Paula walked along the rail. Gradually the city appeared, spread out below her. All the trees were springing with green leaves, burying the above-ground houses and offices. The lawn below her was spotted with dandelions.

  Jefferson said, “Dick thinks you should resign the case.”

  Paula swung around toward him. “Oh? Why?”

  He gave her an oblique, feline look. Jefferson said, “Some of your techniques are rather original, Mendoza.”

  “Pah.”

  “The Council is not happy.”

  “The Council loves it,” Paula said. On the curved wall of the building was the door to the Committee’s reserved port. She followed the other diplomats into the waiting room, and Jefferson turned the lights on.

  “What you really mean is you think I might sell you out,” Paula said to Bunker.

  He dropped into a molded plastic chair against the wall, sliding down, sitting on his spine as usual. “That’s exactly what I mean.” He wore a thin shirt, plain dark pants, cloth shoes, nondescript, like a disguise. She braced her shoulders against the clear wall between the waiting room and the dock.

  “Take him,” she said. “Go on, you do it.”

  Jefferson was watching them from the far side of the room. Bunker put his head back. “Your career with us hasn’t been a raging success, junior. The only other case you’ve even accepted was one where you took a personal interest. Right?”

  So he had found out that she had stolen his files. Before she could answer, a light flashed on the wall over her head. They all went out onto the dock platform.

  The air wall roared. The big car was sinking down into the cradle of the dock. Paula rubbed her sweating hands on her pants legs. When she touched the railing she got a shock. The Styths poured out of the bus.

  The Akellar tramped up the steps. She had forgotten how big he was. Jefferson spoke to him, but he brushed her off. When Bunker approached him the Styth sidled toward him and would have knocked into him if Bunker had stayed where he was. The Akellar reeked; he stood over Paula.

  “I told you to come alone.”

  “What’s wrong? Did you have trouble?”

  “Yes.” He snarled at the other men, crowded onto the platform, and they spilled into the waiting room.

  “You’ve made your point,” Bunker said into her ear. He and Jefferson disappeared. The Styths towered around her. Ketac’s wild brush of hair bobbed among the trim heads of the men. Most of the others were strangers to her. There was a brief, fiery argument, which the Akellar resolved by knocking someone down.

  Paula opened the door to the ramp. The Akellar shouted his crew into order. Tanuojin came out past her, nearly scalping himself on the top of the door, and made for the railing. The rest followed him. The Akellar took her arm and started off at top speed. She stopped, resisting him, and he turned.

  “What’s the matter with you? Look, I’m warning you—”

  “Don’t tow me around.”

  He opened his hand. His men were packed against the rail. “Look!” They leaned out to stare at New York.

  “What happened?” she asked. She had to tilt her head back to
meet his eyes.

  “I had a long talk with General Gordon.”

  “Oh.” The spring breeze touched her face. Panicked, she remembered that Gordon knew about the baby. At her pace they went on down the ramp. The other Styths were strung out along the railing, pointing and laughing at what they saw.

  “Did you go to surface-Luna?”

  He shook his head. Bad-tempered, he shed a harsh rush of his odor. She went ahead of him into the dark parking lot. The hot bright scent had certain connotations for her. The parking lot stretched off into the dark, scattered with air cars, the pavement marked into stalls. The three Committee cars were lined up near the exit. Their drivers leaned against the fender of the big bus, passing a cigarette around.

  “We have a house out in the New Haven dome,” she said. “It’s the only place where you could all stay together.” She slid into the back seat of the small car. The Akellar folded himself into the space beside her. If he knew about the baby he would have said something by now. He took her chin in his hand, and she kissed his cool mouth.

  The driver said, drawling, “You two want to get going sometime today?”

  They pulled apart. Paula touched her mouth. She looked out the window. The driver rolled the door shut and put the plastic divider across the seat between him and them.

  “Gordon gave me a whole long sermon on how I ought to behave,” the Akellar said. He was cramped into the narrow seat, his arms and legs folded up to his body. “With a lecture on the side on the sanctity of women.”

  The car rolled forward. She said, “He’s an ass.” He leaned forward to watch the driver shift and steer. The car rose off the ground. Below them, the green heads of the trees rolled in the wind. The lake glittered, down toward the south.

  “You’re right,” he said. “This isn’t like Mars.”

  Above the wood a flock of daws circled and fought. The driver circled over the lake, lined with naked and half-naked bathers. Out the back window she could see the two cars following them. The Styth shaded his eyes from the light.

  They left the dome. The stretch of coast between New York and New Haven was heaped with ancient slag. The torrential summer rains had eroded the hills into canyons and cliffs white with the droppings of wild birds. The sun was setting behind them. Sharp against the smoky sky, the ridge ahead poked up its two round humps. She pointed it out to him.