She turned her head. Her mouth was sticky. Through a pink blur she saw the Styths sitting on their perches, doing their work. They bore the pressure without effort. It hurt her to breathe. She closed her eyes.
“Saba, hold your course. We’ll run over you. Can you dock at this speed?”
“I’ve got this sled in tow.” Saba’s voice was coming from inside the cage.
Bakan said, “Akellar, four rockets are still tracking us.”
“What rockets?” Saba cried, alarmed.
“Akellar,” Sril said loudly, “she can’t breathe.”
She could breathe. Her eyes hurt, and her ears ached as if needles were run through them. Saba said, “What’s your pressure?”
“Eight plus,” Tanuojin said.
“Compensate. What missiles?”
She fought for air. Her chest lightened. She felt her lips pulled back from her teeth, and her hands rose. She blinked her pink blurred eyes clear.
“Akellar, there’s a hammerhead coming up fast on Ybicsa.”
Paula moved around to Sril’s back, her arms around him. If she fell she would land on the cage. She wiped her eyes on his shoulder.
“Two rockets still tracking, two minutes back. I read fission warheads.”
When she leaned her head on Sril’s back she left a smear of blood across his shirt. She touched her mouth. Down past her feet, Ybix sailed through the green map. At the edge of the hologram another image was forming, a needle-shape: Ybicsa. The smaller ship fell back into the green field around Ybix. Now she saw a third ship, T-shaped, flying up toward Ybicsa from the bottom of the hologram. The three flights converged. Ybix flew over Ybicsa, covering her with her flat shape. The hammerhead veered to chase them, seconds behind them.
“Rockets closing—ten—nine—” In the green glow of the hologram the hammerhead exploded.
The men roared. Tanuojin said, “See, General Gordon, it’s all god’s will.” Against her face Sril’s back bounced in a soundless laugh.
“Saba. Can you dock?”
Ketac’s voice came through the cage, high and rapid with excitement. “Akellar, we’ll dock. We’ll need three men in the chamber to inboard this sled.”
Paula was floating. She let go of Sril and put her hands to her face. The holograph light glowed on her rumpled trouser legs. Sril said, “If Ketac is flying, I’ll wait back at Luna.” He twisted toward her. “How do you feel?”
The hatch was over her head. She stretched her arms up toward it and went out to the corridor.
She stayed in the wetroom while the ship accelerated to cruising speed. That took fifteen hours. She woke up once, in the dark in a roar of noise. She could not move at all. The wetroom held her in its supporting membranes. She was afraid but there was nothing she could do. The weight of the air against her face hurt her nose. Her eyes were shut and she could not raise the lids. The metallic ring in her ears went on and on like something heard in a seashell. She was losing consciousness. She passed into a noisy dream.
The next time she woke she could move her head, open her eyes, and turn over. She was back in free fall. Someone was banging on the door below her feet. That had wakened her.
“Who is it?” Her stomach was clenched with hunger.
“Paula,” Ketac said. “You can come out now.”
She tried to push herself backward, fumbling with her bare feet for the door. “No,” he called, “go forward, go through the dryer. Do you have any clothes on?”
“No.” She crawled head-first through the dark.
“I’ll be out in the corridor.”
Her head poked up into the open air. With a click a blower fired a gust of warm wind into her face. She drew herself out of the wetroom into a closed dark space. Her arms and legs were painfully cramped and her back had kinked up like a rope. She turned over, working her stiff muscles. Below her a disk of light showed pale in the dark. She dove through it into the cabin.
After the wetroom the oval cabin was huge. She tumbled across it, somersaulting, rolling in the air, her arms and legs flung out. She crashed into the soft wall and rebounded. It was wonderful to move. Her skin tingled in the cold air.
“Paula,” Ketac called.
“Yes.” She brought herself up against the wall, dizzy. “What is it?”
“Are you dressed yet? Can I come in?”
“Wait.” She went around the room, looking for the compartment with her clothes. She put on two pairs of trousers and a shirt and a jacket and two pairs of socks. The cold air was delicious. She opened the hatch and went into the corridor.
Ketac’s hair floated like an aureole around his face. “Why didn’t you talk to me in Styth, before? All that time I could have been talking to you.”
“I don’t speak it very well.” She reached the corridor of the arrows. She could not remember which way the galley was. Ketac came up beside her. Below her a man dove out of a hatchway, and she went in that direction.
“Pop says I’m supposed to show you around the ship.” He came after her into the narrow galley. The rows of levers on the wall were tagged in neat handwritten Styth labels. She pulled one and ran herself straight up into the ceiling. Ketac jeered at her. One hand on the wall and the other on the tab, she pushed in opposite directions. Out the slit-mouth below came a water tube.
“Where is Saba?”
“In the bridge. He’s on watch.”
She stowed the water tube in mid-air and worked another lever, which produced a strip of protein. The dim light strained her eyes. Her hands and face were cold.
“All right.” She drank the water and took a bite of protein bar. “Show me around the ship.”
“Actually, I think The Creep is right, for once. This is a warship. You ought to stay in my father’s cabin.”
She went along the tunnel. Ketac glided along beside her. They turned into the blue corridor. “What’s this, for instance?” She put her head into a big open hatchway. Inside was the largest room she had seen, including the bridge. The round wall was plastered with posters, most of them of naked women. There was no one in the room. The lights were out at the far end. She went in. The lights rose.
Ketac followed her. “You shouldn’t be in here.” He cast a look of horror around at the beaver shots on the wall. “This isn’t any place for a woman.”
“Don’t be silly.” She went back to the hatchway. “What’s up there that you think I haven’t seen? Where do you sleep?”
He led her on down the curving tunnel. He traveled effortlessly beside her; she had to struggle to keep up with him. He brushed his thick hair back with his hand. “That’s the Tank—where we just were. The off-duty room.” Scooting off ahead of her, he spun the wheel on the next hatch and pulled the cover open. “This is the library.”
The deep narrow room was dark. The light from the corridor reached in across the round honeycomb wall of books. Ketac was already scooting off, and she followed him.
“This is the aft bridge hatch—” He struck in passing at a doorway. Beside it was a bank of meter faces like clocks. “And that’s the aft engine hatch.” Paula went after him in short energetic dashes.
“How many watches are there?”
“Pop’s, Tanuojin’s, and Kobboz’s. You don’t know anything, do you?”
They went down the black and white corridor again. “No,” she said. “Not a thing.”
“There are five men in each watch—the watch officer, the helm, the gunner, the sparks—you know, communications—and the greaser. That’s me. I just do what everybody else says.” He scooped his wild hair back with his hands. His feet milled steadily to keep him upright. “Pop’s is the high watch, The Creep is the middle watch, Kobboz is the low watch.”
“Where is Tanuojin now?”
“Asleep, I guess. He has the cabin up beside the library.” He dropped away from her into the twilight. “Ask me anything. Go on, ask me something.”
“How fast are we going?” She was learning how to move, and she kept up with h
im all the way down to the next hatch. He looked at her sideways, as if it were a trick question.
“About one and a half miles an hour.”
“I mean the ship, Ketac.”
“Oh. Thirty-two hundred leagues above course point. Plus six acceleration. That’s not very much, we were up to plus 185 in the low watch. Uniform hyperbolic course. Ask me something else.”
“I didn’t understand the first one.” They went into another tunnel, marked with yellow stripes, so there were three: red, blue, and yellow, curved, meeting the black and white corridor at each end. Ahead, the metal tube jogged, and in the dim light someone moved. She started violently all over. A strange Styth raced around the bend and brushed between her and Ketac.
“Ask me something.”
“How long will it take us to reach Uranus?”
He stopped at a hatchway. “This is the crew’s quarters. The Hole. We’re going to Saturn first.”
“Let me see.” She pulled on the wheel in the hatch. He opened it, and she put her head inside, into a long dim room in which the Styths slept wrapped in their bedrugs like bats in their wings, attached by their feet to the wall.
“When we get there,” Ketac said, “we use the Planet’s fields to brake and fall into orbit, so we can supply up.” He pushed the hatch closed. She turned toward him. “Then we use the fields to boost back to cruising speed and head for Uranus. My father calls that a counter-inertial equivalency system.”
“Oh.”
“My father is the best engineer in the fleet. Ask me something else.”
She led him along the corridor. “Ketac, I don’t understand anything you’re saying. I wouldn’t understand it in the Common Speech.” They came to another hatch: the supply room, lined with computers, their checkerboard faces blinking in three colors. He refused to take her into the men’s toilet. While she was still hunting for arguments, a bell rang somewhere down the corridor.
“That’s the end of my watch,” Ketac said. His hair floated on end around his head. “You’d better go back to Pop’s cabin now.”
She backed away from him. Backing up was easier than moving forward. “Go on, do as you please. I’ll be all right.”
“Paula, this is a warship. You can’t wander around—”
“Thank you.” Head-first, she went into the black-white corridor, twisted to change direction, and flew down through the cool dim tunnel.
Ketac had not shown her all the ship. There was a tiny observation room in the nose of the ship, just big enough for two people. Saba took her there, shut the hatch, and pushed a button in the wall. The black wall over her head split down the middle and folded back on either side, and she was looking into the depthless black of space.
“Oh.” She put her hand out. Her fingertips grazed the cold plastic of the window.
He stretched his legs out past her, along the foot of the window. His shoulders packed the end of the little pyramidal room. She looked out at the clouds of stars. With difficulty she made out the rectangular constellation Gemini.
“Can I see Uranus?”
“Uranus is on the other side of the ship. Scorpio sector.” For navigating the sphere of the stars was divided up into sectors according to the major constellations. He pointed with his little finger at a bright white spark in the long box of Gemini. “That’s Jupiter.” His claw ticked on the plastic. “Castor and Pollux.” He pointed out the two bright stars at one end of the rectangle and the fainter pair at the other end, butting against the Milky Way. “The Star Gate. The Mouth of Hell. Gemini is called the House of Hell. Half the time Uranus’s pole axis points to the Sun, but when the Sun enters Gemini the pole slips and starts to wander.”
On Uranus the polar axis lay close to the plane of the ecliptic. The star shell was the same, but their astrology would be totally unlike hers.
“I used to dream about space,” he said. “Before 1 ever saw it. I dreamt I crawled up and up through the Planet, until I came to the surface, outside of everything, and I floated away.”
“A nightmare?”
“No.” He said a word she did not know. “It was a good dream. It was a good feeling. My father was space-drunk. He used to say he could bring his body back to Matuko but his heart stayed in deep space.”
The starlight shone on his face. She took hold of his sleeve, fingering the thick material. There were thin dark gray stripes in the light gray ground. “What do these mean?” She ran her thumb down the diagonal stripes sewn on his forearm cuff.
“Rating stripes. Subtenant, lieutenant, commander, master commander, master.” He put his hand on her stomach. “Then there’s general and master general, which nobody ever gets.”
Directly below her Tanuojin’s voice said, “Saba, call the bridge.”
She rolled out of the way. He reached for the speaker tab in the wall. “Bridge.”
“Akellar, Ketac is tearing up Uhama in the Tank.”
“Damn him.” He left. Paula shut the hatch to keep out the light. She lay in the air staring out at the black fields of space. The stars eased her mood, scattered thick past counting over the window, unimaginably distant. After a while she found the switch that hooded the window again. She went out to the ship’s glossy tunnels.
There was another place Ketac had not shown her: the brig, off in a corridor of its own above the number six engine, in the tip of one wing. Saba threw his son into this jail for fighting with Uhama. Two bells rang: the beginning of the middle watch. She wrapped herself in a blanket and Saba rolled them both in the thick rug of his bed, and they slept, attached to the wall by a ring near their feet. The shag fur made her nose feel dusty. The big Styth slept with his arms around her. She wondered what Matuko would be like and shut off her curiosity. If she went with expectations she would only confuse herself. She put her face against the sleeping man’s bare shoulder.
At three bells he went to the bridge. The Tank was crowded and she did not go in. She went to the library, but Tanuojin was there. She wandered around the halls, bored. At the end of the black and white corridor, under a storage hatch, she found three little fish swimming behind a round window in the hall.
She searched around the ship and found five more fish bowls. The little fish were dull gray, with spines on their backs. She went into the blue corridor and down the short wing tunnel to the brig.
The pounding of the engine below vibrated the air. The heat was terrific. At the blind end of the tunnel, Ketac hung upside down, his eyes closed. His skin was oily with sweat. She went back out to the arrow tunnel and down to the galley.
Two men crowded it. One was Marus, Tanuojin’s helmsman. She watched outside for them to leave.
“One thing about Sril,” Marus said. “He does all his fighting in the ship, where it doesn’t matter he isn’t big enough to see over his old woman’s ass.” He came out past her, ignoring her, as all Tanuojin’s men did. She got a tube of water from the galley wall and went back to the brig.
Ketac was staring at the wall. The side of his face was deeply scratched. There were rings set into the wall, but he did not seem to be tied.
“Here,” she said.
He jumped, his hands flying up. “Paula.” His voice croaked. He tore open the tube and sucked out the water. Soaked dark with sweat, his overalls were open down to his crotch. The racket jangled her; she felt gritty.
“Thanks, Paula.” He squeezed the last of the water into his mouth.
“I’ll bring you another.”
He followed her around the bend to the hatch. “Stay here—don’t leave me alone here.”
“The hatch isn’t locked. You can leave.”
He scrubbed his face with his hands. “I promised my father I’d stay here.” His voice was raw. “He’d tie me if I left.”
“I’ll bring you something to eat.” She went out to the cool, quiet tunnel beyond.
When she came back, he was floating in the blind end again. He beamed at her, relieved to see her, and grabbed the tube of water.
“Thanks. Nobody else has even come in here.”
The vibration set her teeth on edge. The boy hung sidewise in the air. The tip of his forefinger was bloody and scabbed over, the claw broken off deep in the quick.
“What are those fish for?”
His teeth mashed through a mouthful of food tablets. “They’re scouts. If the hatches leak they die.” He drank the rest of the water. Bits of plastic wrapping floated around him.
“How long will you be here?”
“Until he lets me out.” He kicked, knocking himself back into the wall. “Nobody cares about me—I’m going crazy—” He banged around the end of the tunnel. She moved away from him, wary.
“Paula, don’t go—”
“I can’t even hear you.” The heat made her face itch. “I’ll come back later.”
“Paula! Stay here—please—”
“Ketac—” A bell sounded, muffled. “I’ll come later.” She left him alone.
She went to the bridge, to meet Saba coming off watch. He had already gone. Kobboz was sitting down in the cage. She looked in the Tank and in the library, and turned on the monitors in her room and hunted through them. He was nowhere. Neither was Tanuojin; they were together. She stopped looking.
She went to bed. The rug folded around her like a great loose skin. Drowsily she wondered why they fastened up the foot instead of the head. It was pleasant to float free in the air. She yawned.
The hatch opening woke her. Saba swung himself in through the oval doorway. She started to call to him but she heard Tanuojin’s voice.
“Come down to the library. I’ll show you.”
“I’m tired.” Saba was stripping off his overalls. “Next watch.”
“Jesus.” The deep voice rasped. “All your off-time now you spend with her.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
The hatch slammed. Tanuojin went away. She heard Saba give a low laugh.
Halfway through the middle watch, she thought of Ketac again and took him a dozen food tablets and two tubes of water. When he saw her his face split in a broad smile. “Paula.”
She wiped her face on her sleeve. He ripped open a water tube.
Floating Worlds Page 17
