Floating Worlds

by Cecelia Anastasia Holland

  “He says you have some idea we can use this subpoena against Machou.” Saba’s hand on her shoulder steered her across the hard-packed dirt toward the opening in the curved wall. Tanuojin went ahead of them through the gap. He looked back over his shoulder at her, his eyes yellow as bile. He knew everything. Saba shook her. “Tell me.”

  She shrugged against his grip, and he let her go. They went out of the theater. Tanuojin was some way ahead of them. She said, “They have no case against you on any of those counts except the one. You’ll make them look very stupid, if you go down there and prove it.”

  “How does that help me against Machou?”

  “Machou can’t deal with the Middle Planets. Show you can, and who will the others listen to, you or Machou?”

  On the far side of the bridge, Tanuojin stopped beside a paddy, sank down on his heels, and thrust his hand into the water. She slowed her walk. Saba was staring at the ground in front of him. He fell to her pace.

  “Jesus, you talk well.” He thrust his head up, toward Tanuojin, on the far side of the bridge. “He wants to do it. Not for your reasons. He’s afraid of losing that money. Did you guess that, too? I don’t trust you, Paula, you’re running me again, like at the Nineveh.”

  She led him onto the bridge. If Tanuojin wanted to go, he could talk Saba into it. “What are those vines?”

  “Rellah vines.” He went down the slope of the bridge to the paddy. Kneeling, he pulled the end of a vine out of the water. He pierced the thick dark skin with one claw and pressed his thumbs on either side of the wound. A trace of pale sap oozed out. “When they mature, they’re transplanted into a dry bed and staked up, and a tube is grafted into the body to tap off the gul. The milk. Most of the plastic in Styth is made out of rellah gul.”

  “What’s the cloth for?” She pointed through the standing water.

  “They’re tender babies. They have to be in the shade or the radiation burns them.”

  The rellah vine sank back into the water. Tanuojin’s reflection floated on the still surface. “Was he finished? My son?”

  “Yes.” She stood up. They went along the path toward his compound. Saba cast a sharp look at his lyo.

  “Are you going to try it again?”

  Tanuojin nodded.

  “Let her watch it,” Saba said. Paula raised her head.

  “It will frighten her,” Tanuojin said.

  “Just the same, let her watch.”

  “Let me watch what?” Paula asked. “What are you doing?”

  Tanuojin shrugged his shoulders. His gaze was directed straight ahead. “If you want. Maybe she’ll learn something.”

  They reached the compound. In the front hall of his main house, his younger son came up to him with a message, and she and Saba went on down a side corridor to Tanuojin’s room. Paula opened her coat. She had seen no other woman in Tanuojin’s compound, even among the few slaves.

  “What was his wife like?”

  He dropped onto the bed and reached for a pad of sketchpaper covered with drawings of ships. “She wasn’t very pretty. Kasuk looks like her.” The pages turned under his hand. “She had an opinion of everything, Diamo.”

  “Did he love her?”

  “She wanted him, I think, more than he wanted her.”

  Paula sat on a box against the wall. Out the window she could see the green wall of the city in the distance. “How did she die?”

  “Bearing the younger boy. We were in space, we couldn’t get back in time. The midwives hacked her to pieces.”

  “Oh.” Her hands made fists. That would not have been here; Yekka had not been made then. She remembered Tanuojin’s pleasant touch. He had drugged her. He had touched her. He came into the room, shutting the door behind him.

  Saba was bent over the sketchpad, a stylus in his hand. Tanuojin said, “Do you think you can leave that miracle ship alone for ten minutes?” He leaned past Saba and drew the window screen down.

  Paula crossed her legs under her. Putting down the sketchpad, Saba stood up beside the bed, and Tanuojin lay down on his back on it. Saba glanced at her.

  “You’re sure of this?” he said to his lyo.

  “Yes. The tree is gone now, we can do it now.”

  Saba’s head turned toward her again. “Watch.” He brushed his mustaches back, put one knee on the edge of the bed, and stooped to kiss Tanuojin on the mouth.

  She started. Her scalp prickled up unpleasantly. Tanuojin’s hand slipped off the cot and hung limp over the edge. Saba rose. He staggered a step and flung out his arms to balance himself. His eyes looked strange, like a pale reflection in the wide black pupils. His face was gaunt. She glanced at the man on the cot, asleep, dead, gone. She bit her fingers.

  “You and I have something to talk about,” he said, in a voice deeper than Saba’s.

  He crossed the room toward her, Saba’s body, Saba’s face: not Saba. She pressed against the wall behind her. He came between her and the door.

  “Tanuojin, stay away from me.”

  He crouched over her, his breath in her face, and caught her wrist tight. His touch made her wince. “You gave us to the Martians.”

  She could say nothing. Tanuojin’s expression floated in Saba’s face like an image in water. His voice sounded in Saba’s voice. He wrenched her arm, and blood filled her mouth: she had bitten her tongue.

  “I ought to tear out your witch-heart.”

  The pain and the threat stiffened her. She ducked her shoulder, trying to ease her arm in his fingers. “If I wanted to hurt you I would have done it a long time ago.”

  “You couldn’t hurt me.”

  “If the wrong people found out about you, they’d give you to the Planet. Wouldn’t they?”

  His grip loosened on her arm, and he raised her wrist up between them, letting the pressure off her elbow. “You’re going to talk yourself into being killed.”

  “You won’t do that.”

  He stared at her, Saba’s eyes, Tanuojin’s look. She turned her head and spat blood onto the floor. Her tongue hurt in pulses. She said, “You’ve tried before, a couple of times, but I’ve never tried to pay you back, have I?”

  “That’s a woman’s argument. ‘Don’t hurt me, I’m harmless.’”

  “That isn’t what I said.”

  Out of the haunted face before her a different voice spoke. “Let her alone.” It was Saba.

  Every porpentine hair on her head stood on end. He rose and walked away from her, slouching like a tall man in the short man’s body. She spat out more blood and wiped her mouth on her hand. He prowled around the room. Now his way of moving was Saba’s: the straight back, the solid step. On the bed the empty body looked like a corpse. She should fix in her mind everything that she was seeing. The inhabited body stood by the window, and she could hear their low voices talking back and forth.

  He sat down on the bed and put his mouth on Tanuojin’s mouth. Tanuojin’s long hand rose. For a moment Saba stayed bent over him, his hands on the bed on either side of the other man, protective. They spoke. She could not hear the words. Saba stood erect, turning toward her. Her shoulders slumped with relief. He gestured at her.

  “We’re going to Crosby’s Planet—the three of us. You call the Committee.”

  “We won’t need the Committee,” she said.

  YBIX

  Watch logs M15, 432—L15, 434

  They went to Crosby’s Planet. From a feeling she did not analyze, she insisted that David come with them. He loved Ybix, the free fall and flying, and got into everything and into everybody’s way. He sneaked onto the bridge, where he was not allowed, and nearly blew up the ship. Unfortunately he chose Tanuojin’s watch for this experiment, and Tanuojin took him into the cage, where there was gravity, and spanked him until David’s throat and backside were raw.

  For the next several watches he stayed within arm’s length of Paula. Whenever he saw Tanuojin, he hid behind her, which made the men laugh. She took him to the Beak, the little pyramidal room in t
he nose of the ship, while she talked to Saba about the court.

  Tanuojin was going to argue the case for Ybix. Saba was not convinced of it. She said, “He was there. His memory is perfect, and he knows more law than any three other people.” She looked beyond him at the field of stars in the window.

  “Styth law.”

  “Law is law.”

  David pressed his nose to the window. Saba drew his floating mustaches down. “Who argues against us? The—what did you call him?—the adversary.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Somebody from the Committee?”

  “I doubt it. I don’t think anybody from the Committee would get involved in this dubious a case.”

  “You think they’ll fake the evidence?”

  “They have to. I have three computer graphs to prove Ybix never fired at the second ship. They’ll have General Gordon to swear to their version, and we have you and Tanuojin.”

  David flattened his cheek against the window, trying to see behind the stars. The blazing Sun in the lower corner of the glass streamed its fiery hair. The hatch opened, and Tanuojin squeezed up into the little room. David shrank back, circled behind Paula, and dove head-first out the hatch.

  Paula nodded at Tanuojin. “The problem will be to break Gordon. That’s why he’s the best defenser. He was there, it’s first-hand for him.”

  Tanuojin spread himself out horizontally in the cramped space, his back to the stars. “Can we bribe the judge?”

  Paula laughed. She moved around Saba, trying to give them all enough room. “Maybe. If we can, so can the adversary.”

  “Hunh.”

  Saba said, “Ask her.”

  She turned her head. “Ask me what?”

  “I want you to do something with me,” Tanuojin said.

  “What?”

  “That—what Saba and I did, in Yekka.”

  When she shook her head, her whole body turned from side to side. “No. I told you before. Do it with Saba.”

  “I want to try it with somebody else. To see if I can do it with somebody else.”

  “You can’t. Not me.”

  Saba got her by the arm and pulled her around in front of him. “You want us to do some strange things, sometimes. It’s not dangerous for you, it’s dangerous for him.”

  She made a sound in her throat. Now she was between them. Saba’s hands cupped her shoulders. Tanuojin said, “Besides, I have to know about this court. It would take you hours to tell me everything, and then you might garble it, knowing you.”

  That made sense to her. She wondered why she was afraid, anyway, perhaps just of the novelty. She looked over her shoulder at Saba.

  “You stay here.”

  “I will. Look, there’s nothing to it. I’ve done it six or eight times.”

  Tanuojin’s long hands reached for her. She flinched from his touch. He put one hand on the back of her neck and fit their mouths together. There was no sensual interest in the pressure of his open mouth. She tasted copper on her tongue. Her throat numbed downward. She went blind.

  “Saba!”

  She flung her hands out. Her arm struck something floating in the air. Saba seized hold of her. She said his name again, but no sound came from her mouth. She could hear nothing. Saba held her tight. His arms around her. His breath against her cheek. Then she felt nothing at all: her sense of touch, her body was gone, he was gone; she was alone.

  Her mind stuck. A brilliant passage of colors rolled through her imagination. Orange and green stretched in rays infinitely away. She struggled to feel. She had forgotten how. The colors began to spin.

  “Paula.”

  A very small voice somewhere in her mind. She fought to see. She could not think without some sense to feed on, someplace to start from. The colors wheeled faster, in streamers. She was exploding. Not me: I am not here. Something was here. What? What is I? False. False. The colors pinwheeled brighter and brighter. False.

  “Paula!”

  Confused, she stopped struggling. The colors faded to black, like space, like a Styth.

  “Good, that’s better.”

  It was Tanuojin’s voice. She waited for him to say something else. Where is he? In here with me. Abruptly Saba stood in front of her. In an instant he was gone. She had imagined him. Gone. Stray music came into her mind. Flecks of color, odd smells. My wool-gathering imagination. Saw hands plucking fat apples of wool from trees.

  She thought of Mella Square in Havana, blue twilight, walking home. The pavement was checked with seams. Step on a crack and break your mother’s back. She stepped on all the cracks. Years of no result made it no less satisfying. Reciting Yeats and Fu Sheng at the top of her lungs. Toil and grow rich—

  I wish I had an ice cream.

  May I buy you an ice cream?

  O thank you.

  She ate ice cream, changing the flavor with each bite. Plum. Vanilla. Mint chocolate. Chocolate made her skin break out. When she was a little girl, afraid no one would ever want her. She rode a horse bareback along a country road. The sun was bright and the horse stretched out, it hurtled along the road like a rocket. The trees streamed past in a blur. The triple beat of the hoofs pattered faster. The horse stumbled and threw her. She flew in a tremendous arc through the blazing blue sky and fell softly (it is only a dream) into the grass.

  She sat up. She was bored, and slightly disoriented: where was she? Wherever you want to be. In rising panic she blundered through a series of random images until she remembered that she was in Ybix, in the Beak, and Tanuojin possessed her. She thought, I don’t like this.

  She strained to see. Saba was able to see when he did this, hear and even talk to the other creature in his mind. She concentrated on what she knew was out there: the Beak, Saba, and the stars. Her skin burst with feeling. She was kissing Tanuojin again. She began to hear again, the constant low throb of the ship sprang into her ears. A coppery taste flooded her mouth. She saw Tanuojin as if through gauze, and then clearly, and he moved away from her, his eyes turned away.

  She stroked her hands down her sleeves. Her body was vigorous with sensation. Saba took her by the chin.

  “You looked so different. You looked like him. It didn’t hurt, did it? You weren’t afraid?”

  “I’m going to find David.” She opened the hatch and went out to the corridor.

  CROSBY’S PLANET

  Maye—Juine 1857

  Saba announced he would take six of his crew down to Crosby’s Planet. The crew drew lots. Then the high-ranking losers fought the low-ranking winners in the corridors and the Tank and the galley, until the four men of Saba’s watch and Marus and Kany from Tanuojin’s watch wound up with the red tickets, strictly in order of their rank.

  “Why hold a lottery at all?” Paula asked, when they were on the space bus.

  “Because then nobody can say I keep pets.”

  Beneath the window, the cone-shaped mechanical Planet rolled its pitted surface into the sunlight. Its silver skin was a solar battery, gleaning energy for the interior. Saba moved around on the seat beside her, David on his lap. She knew the bench was too narrow for him. The gravity bound her down. She wondered how David felt.

  The men behind her were arguing loudly about the conical Planet ahead of them. Sril insisted a gunshot would pierce the skin. Paula sat back, her hands in her lap. She had heard that a solid missile would dissolve in the Planet’s fields long before it reached the surface. They were the only passengers on the bus. David stared open-mouthed out the window. She glanced over her shoulder at Tanuojin, two benches back and across the aisle. He sat with his arms folded, a book tape in his ear, his eyes on the floor. She turned straight again. She was sick with anticipation; Crosby’s Planet was the first terrestrial Planet she had seen in nearly four years.

  “Mama!” He stood up in Saba’s lap, pointing out the window. Saba dropped him down again.

  “Sit still for once. You have the manners of a white anarchist.” Paula laughed.

  The mout
h of the entry port opened round and dark before them, marked with red lights like a wreath. The interior lights in the bus came on. Paula set the edge of her hand on the window to shade the glass. The entry port was a shaft running down the Planet’s axis. On the curved metallic walls, a red arrow flashed. Although she could see nothing she pressed her forehead against the sour-smelling plastic-window. The bus slowed, turned, and ran into a slip against the wall.

  “Please remain seated until the spacecraft is anchored.”

  Paula took David by the hand. His crew moved up around them. The driver opened the hatch. They filed out through an inflated tunnel. At the far end they came into a brilliantly lit white room.

  Saba flinched from the light. David wheeled and hid his face against Paula’s body. The other men stopped around her.

  “Jesus, it’s like a furnace.”

  A phalanx of people approached them, small, light-skinned people. Licking their smiles. They introduced themselves to Saba: a welcoming party from the Politburo of Crosby’s Planet. Hands pumped. Tanuojin went up beside his lyo, and everybody began talking insincerely in the Common Speech. They were in a cell along the edge of a vast white terminal. Paula went up to the rope that cordoned them off from the rest of the place. A crowd was gathering to stare at the Styths.

  “What are they? Are they real?”

  “That one must be almost eight feet high.”

  David clung to her, his arms around her thighs. She blinked. It was warm here, and she unbuttoned the front of her coat. The people pressing up against the rope were pale and dark and brown, all short, like her. None of them even noticed her, their eyes on the Styths, the freaks. Their weight on the rope knocked over one of the standards.

  “Mendoz’,” Sril said.

  She let him take her back in among the crew. Someone murmured, “Here, little boy,” and Kany picked David up. They started off through the terminal. A string of policemen escorted them. In the midst of the Styths, Paula went along unnoticed. They took a moving stair down one level, to the Styths’ raucous amusement.