“You’re scrawny as a chicken’s neck,” he said. “I’m surprised he still wanted you.”
His eyes were pale as lamps. She put on the white dress, which hung around her like a sack, and hunted among the other clothes for a belt.
“How is Kasuk?” she asked, bent over the chair.
“My son is dead.”
Her head flew up. Her lips made a round, soundless word. She flung the clothes in her arms aside. “What was it—an honorable sacrifice? Did you kill him in your war?”
“Yes, he died in the war. There was no way to avoid it. Even you have to see that all this came out of the mouth of the past.”
She sat down on the bed. Her fingers laced together in her lap. She thought of Kasuk’s blind adoration of him.
“I need your help,” he said.
Her gaze snapped up to him. “No.” She went past him to the door.
The room beyond was crowded with a tall forest of Styths. When she came in, their talk hushed, their heads turned toward her, round-eyed. She went through them toward the door, dwarfed among them.
“Akellar,” a man said, behind her, “Pert’ is asking to surrender.”
The bedroom door clicked shut. Tanuojin said, “Call the Prima. He’s in Ybix.”
She went out the door. Leno stood in the middle of the hall, a swarm of men around him. “If I have to deal through The Creep—” She brushed past them toward the vertical. The familiar people unnerved her. She felt herself sucked into that world again, that life.
She went down the hall to the rank of verticals. No one came after her or tried to stop her. They were letting her go. The call button on the wall between the double doors of the verticals was blinking on and off and she put her back to the opposite wall to wait. A steady stream of Styths walked by in both directions. She tried not to understand their talk. It was still hard to realize that Kasuk was dead. The war ate him. The vertical doors on the right slid back and a flood of men strode out toward her. She waited for them to pass. One was still shaven. A boy. Smaller than the others. A shock ran through her to her heels. She said, “David?” His narrow brown eyes turned on her. His mouth opened. He put his arms out to her, and she rushed into his embrace.
Naked, joined by ropes from neck to neck, the Styths’ captives squatted in the cold. The air reeked of their bodies. Her skirts caught in her hands, she passed the rows of women, sorted by age, the rope wearing their shoulders raw. All but the youngest children had been taken away from them. She tried not to look at their faces. An old woman passed her, carrying a bucket of water with a ladle in it, and in the lines the prisoners’ voices rose, crying for a drink.
She reached the men and stopped, her shoulders slumped. There were thousands of them, fair heads, dark heads, bald and furry. She would never find Bunker among them, even if he were there. A Styth was coming toward her. She started along the first row of men, and the guard caught her by the arm.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
She pulled on his hand. “Send for Tanuojin.”
He grinned at her. A long scar indented his cheekbone. “Send for Tanuojin. This one is funny.” He shook her arm, lifting her half off her feet. “Who do you think you are? Where did you get these clothes?”
“I’m Paula Mendoza.”
He let go of her. “Oh. I’ll call up top.” He went off at a long-striding walk. She started along the row of captives.
They were nearly all Martians, their hair clipped short in the military fashion. They sat or lay in the dirt, their heads down, and did not look at her as she passed. Their expressions frightened her and she stopped looking at their faces. The stench was making her sick to her stomach. Halfway along the row she passed two men shoveling the waste and filth into buckets. On one round white back there were deep scratch marks like ruts. She began to hurry.
The next row was of old men. She started on to the string beyond until she remembered that Bunker was gray-headed. She knew he was not old but a Styth might think so. She went along the line. Halfway along the row a scrawny old man lay curled on the ground. His flesh was white as cheese. His open eyes were glazed and unseeing. His hands were already stiff. On either side of him other old men sat, their heads turned away. She stepped across an iridescent stream of piss. The hem of her skirt was heavy and wet and scraped her bare feet. She went along the third string, still without finding Bunker. The fourth row was of adolescent boys and she skipped over it to the fifth.
Bunker was sitting on the ground halfway along the row. His eyes were closed. He seemed to be asleep. She squatted down beside him.
“Dick.”
His head rose, his eyes opening, and to her surprise he smiled at her. “I thought it was probably a waste of time to worry about you, junior. What happened?”
“Somebody recognized me,” she said. “Dick—” She held out her hands to him. He took her wrists and pressed his face against her palms. It was so like the Styth gesture that she drew back, and he let her go.
“What will they do now?” he said.
Her ears caught the drone of an air car. She looked around the sky for it, then stood up. The air car was hovering down above them. Ten feet over her head Tanuojin swung out the door and dropped to the ground beside her. He gave a humorless yelp of laughter.
“Richard Bunker.” He put his foot on Bunker’s shoulder and knocked him on his back.
“Let him go,” Paula said.
Tanuojin looked down at her from his towering height. “Why?”
“You said you wanted my help. Well, I’ll help you, if you let him go.”
He pulled his catfish whiskers straight. “It’s no use, Paula. There’s no place to let him go to. When I’m done here, we’ll blow up the dome, and we’ll blow up all the others as soon as we can get the people out.” He kicked Bunker again, and the anarchist got up onto his feet. “If you want him,” Tanuojin said, “take him. I’ll give him to you.”
Bunker’s neck was rubbed raw by the rope. He said to her, “Come with me. What kind of a life will you have with them?”
“I can manage,” she said. “Go.”
Tanuojin made a scornful sound in his chest. He pulled the rope off the anarchist’s neck, and Bunker started down the row of prisoners. After a dozen strides he broke into a run. Paula watched him until he was out of her sight. Tanuojin stood beside her like a tree. Slowly she went back toward the buildings in the distance.
She went with Tanuojin down to the third level of the cellar. In the vertical, he took her suddenly by the hand, and the unexpected cold touch startled her and she snatched her hand away from him. The vertical car boxed her up. She felt unable to breathe.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
The car settled to a stop, and the doors began to slide apart into the walls. He glanced at them and they shut again.
“Oh,” she said, “that must be useful.”
“Are you going to cooperate with me?”
She hunched up her shoulders. “I said I would.” She refused to look at him.
He opened the doors with another look and they went into a narrow gray corridor. The concrete floor was icy to her feet. A guard let them in a metal door to a wide room. The only lights were on an I-beam suspended from the center of the ceiling. The floor under her feet shone with wax. It was painted with red circles and alleys: a games floor, a gymnasium. The walls were lined with Martians. Tanuojin’s fingers closed on her wrist.
“Bring a light,” he said to the guard. He held her arm doubled in his grip. Against her will she felt the cool pleasure of his touch. With the guard carrying a light before them, Tanuojin led her along the rank of Martian prisoners against the wall.
“Who do you want?” she said to Tanuojin.
“Just look at them and let me do the thinking.”
She went on along the row of prisoners, staring into their faces. Some of them she had seen before, at Cam’s and Hanse’s meetings. At t
he end of the first row was Captain Rodgers, his uniform crisp, his buttons shined, his feet exactly eighteen inches apart.
Their eyes met; she remembered the things he had done to her and her cheeks went hot. His wet lips parted. Before he could speak Tanuojin let go of her and grabbed the Martian by the front of his uniform. Rodgers squealed. Tanuojin threw him flat back against the wall and his head hit the concrete with a thud. He sank down, limp, against the base of the wall. Paula went away across the gymnasium.
Tanuojin came after her. His hand gripped her again. She said, “You’re no different than he is.”
“You made me do that.” He stooped to talk into her ear. “You did that.”
“You have an excuse for everything, don’t you? Don’t talk to me. It makes me sick to talk to you.”
“Saba’s right. You’re hysterical.” He pushed her toward the next row of prisoners. “Who is that?”
Against the wall stood a line of women, medics, in white uniforms. Paula scanned their faces. The third from the end was Cam Savenia.
Tanuojin said, under his breath, “I thought so.” He nodded to the guard. “That one. There’s a room up on the sixth floor all ready for her.” He let go of Paula.
The guard took hold of Cam’s arm. Her face went dark with rage. “You swine.” She shouted at Tanuojin, her eyes flashing. “You dirty black dog. You can do what you want, but you can’t break me. You can’t break me!” The guard hauled her away bodily. Tanuojin laughed, his hands on his belt. He kicked the heel of his boot against the floor.
“It’s the same room they kept you in,” he said. Paula left.
The prisoners were gone. The barren hillside stretched down toward the lake. A haze of dust stood in the air. Three or four buildings, ruins, rose among the forest of tree stumps. The dead pan of the lake was cracked and dry as the surface of a moon. She stood there trying to remember what it had been like before the war, green and alive, a free world.
The Styths were still claiming that they fought to save the Earth from the Sunlight League, but the last anarchists were mixed in with the Martians in the slavepens, and the Earth was wasted, and the war was not over. Hanse had escaped with most of the Martian Army. Saba was in a hurry to take his base of operations to Luna, which he could defend. Paula was going with them. She could stay here. She could die with planet. She wanted to go with them; she had some vague tangled thought that she could make them feel her rage. And she was afraid to die. Bunker was somewhere in the ruined dome, maybe dead already. Unwitnessed. Her son was calling her. She went back up the barren slope toward the government building.
LUNA
Martius–Averellus 1865
“I don’t understand,” David said. “Why aren’t you living with me and Papa?”
Paula opened the rattan cabinet on the wall. Inside were two shelves of bottles. “What does Saba say?”
“He says you’re crazy.”
“I’m crazy.”
She took out a bottle of gin. Behind her, two men brought more furniture into the room. She had the whole suite to herself, three rooms, pretty as a hotel. Ketac came in, directing the workmen around. She poured gin into her glass and filled it up with limon-woda. Luna was stocked with the spoils of the Earth. It was like being in jail again.
“Paula,” Ketac called. “Come see what I found you.”
She went down the long room toward him. His attentions made her suspicious. He had spent the morning putting carpet down and now he was unpacking a large box. He set a big yellow ball on the table and held it with one hand to keep it from rolling while he fished in the carton.
“See if you can find the base.”
David had followed her. He stood with his hands behind him, his forehead grooved. Paula took a plastic foot out of the box and Ketac put the yellow ball on it.
“It’s not to scale,” he said. He took a handful of smaller balls out of the box and tossed them up into the air. They flew toward the yellow ball and swung into orbit around it. Paula murmured. It was a magnet-driven model of the Middle Planets. The Earth and Luna passed her, turning around and around each other, painted with their surface features.
Ketac said, “There’s been some kind of change in the Council. Not by force.”
“An election.”
“Whatever. Now they’re asking us for peace terms.”
Paula said, “Those bastards,” under her breath.
“The Prima will need your advice.”
She gave him a sharp glance. Then that was why he was here. His long ugly face was aimed at the model. She reached for her glass on the sideboard along the wall. “All right. Tell him I will.”
His head nodded. The men were bringing a big backless couch in the door, and he went to tell them where to put it. David came up beside her.
“I don’t understand,” he said stubbornly.
“Don’t act like a baby.”
“Don’t you love us any more?”
“David, I’m not playing this little heartbreaker game with you. If Saba is putting you to it, you’re a fool, and if not, you’re a sadist.”
His face stiffened. When he was angry he looked younger, a little boy again. “I hate you,” he said.
“At least that’s honest.”
He ran out of the room. The wrong man’s son. She looked down at the model, Mars was spinning toward her, busy in its coils of moons. She batted it across the room. Unharmed, it flew back to its orbit around the yellow Sun. Ketac had gone. The workmen banged chairs into each other. Deep in her thoughts, she watched the model turning. Suddenly she knew someone was staring at her, and raising her head she saw Tanuojin behind her.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “I thought you were planning an elegant suttee in memory of your lover.”
She turned back to the model. “Impractical.”
“Maybe you just have a short memory.”
“Oh, no, my dear. I remember everything.”
The workmen sprang to attention. Saba was coming in, trailed by a procession of men, Leno and Ymma, their aides, David, Junna, and half a dozen others. Paula moved away from Tanuojin, up to the middle of the room, where she could see them all. Leno stood before the big chair on her left, waiting for Saba to sit down. Paula leaned against the waist-high bookcase that ran the length of the wall.
“Who is Alvers Newrose?” Saba said. He sat down on the backless yellow couch, and the other men lowered themselves into their chairs.
“He’s a Martian politician,” Paula said. “He was Council First Secretary before Cam Savenia, I don’t know what he is now.”
“Can I trust him?”
“Probably not.” It was strange to be talking so civilly to him. She wished she had scratched his eyes out. She said, “Jefferson liked Newrose. She dealt with him by preference.”
“What happened to her?”
From the end of the room by the model, Tanuojin said, “Savenia had her shot.”
Saba stood up again, and all around the room the lesser men bolted to their feet. He paced around the low couch. “This Newrose is coming here to talk. If we can get the Council to surrender, we can handle the Martian Army on our own time.”
“They won’t surrender,” Ymma said. The overhead lighting made grotesque shadows on his hacked face. “Not while their fleet is still out. Will they?”
“They saw what we did to the Earth,” Saba said.
“Where is the Martian Fleet?” Ymma asked.
Leno was standing behind his big chair, his hands on its back. When he leaned his weight on it, he nearly tipped it over. “Scattered around in the first and second rings of the Asteroids. I sent eighteen ships to scout them out.” His mustaches, braided with silver, trailed down over his chest.
“We’ll have to fight them anyway,” Tanuojin said to Saba. “Why do you bother with this Newrose? Let him wait. When we’ve beaten their fleet, the Martians will go down on their knees to us, where they belong.”
“That could take forever.” Saba w
ent back to the couch. David stood at the head of it, attending him, but now he left Saba and came across the room to Paula’s side.
“They have to go back to their base sometime,” Ymma said. He leaned against the wall, a few feet away from Leno.
“Obviously they have bases in the Asteroids,” Saba said.
Beside Paula, David murmured, “Are you still angry?”
“No,” she said. She put her hand on his arm, relieved at his friendliness. The men were arguing. She watched her son’s face. “I still love you, David, but there’s nothing between me and him any more.”
“That isn’t what he wants,” he said, stubbornly. “That doesn’t have to be so.”
“If you really want to find the Martians,” Tanuojin said, in the middle of the room, “don’t send Leno to look for them.”
Paula’s attention snapped back to the Styth Council. Leno strode up the room. “What did you have in mind, Creep?”
“Shut up,” Saba said. He palmed Tanuojin roughly on the shoulder. Leno’s blunt head was thrust forward, and he came straight up to Tanuojin.
“I’m sick of—”
“I said shut up,” Saba said. “The meeting’s over. You’re all dismissed.” He went up between Leno and Tanuojin, one hand on Tanuojin’s arm, but his face to Leno. “Just get me some approximate idea where the Martians are.”
Leno was swollen with temper. He and Tanuojin glared at each other over Saba’s shoulder. The other men were filing out. Paula turned to David again.
“It is so. You’d better accept it, because that’s how I want it.”
“Mother—”
“Vida,” Saba said, and the boy wheeled. Saba nodded at the door. Leno had gone. “Go with Merkhiz, in case he has messages for me.”
“Yes, sir,” David said. He went out of the room at a trot.
“Stay away from Leno,” Saba said to Tanuojin. He gave his lyo a shove for emphasis. “How are you doing with Dr. Savenia? Can she help us with Newrose?”
“She’s coming along.”
“Bring her here. Let me see her.” Saba nodded at Junna, behind his father. “Go get her.”
Floating Worlds Page 50
