Floating Worlds (41 page)

Stoop-shouldered, the big man came up beside her in his slouching walk. “I don’t think, Mendoz’. I just do as I’m told.” They went down the path toward the compound.

The window of her room in the compound opened on the yard. She sat on the ledge playing her flute and watching the vast green city fade into its bright twilight. About midway through the watch the toyman from the White Market came in through the gate, crossed the yard to the main door, and there met Marus who took him into the house. She played a jig. After half an hour the toyman left again. His face was fretted. She was tempted to call to him, to find out how much Tanuojin wanted for his slaves, but there was a knock on her door.

“Mendoz’, the Akellar will see you.”

Tanuojin was in the hall, eating his high meal. His sons waited behind him to serve him. Paula stood on the far side of the table from him, waiting for him to decide to recognize her presence. He ate fast, hardly chewing or savoring anything, as if someone might steal the food out of his mouth. He had grown up an outsider in a flock of children. Kasuk took his empty plate away to the side. He drained his cup and Junna, the younger son, filled it again from a pitcher.

“We’re going to Vribulo in eight watches,” Tanuojin said. He sat back, his hands on his stomach.

“To Vribulo,” she said. “Why? Have you talked to Saba?”

“Not yet. He’ll call this watch. The fleet is awarding us each a flag. For taking Vesta.” Kasuk brought a pala fruit and a knife.

“What’s a flag?” she said.

“The highest award in the fleet. An automatic promotion, among other things. Like money.” He split the fruit in two. She made a face; she was tired of the sweet, damp, greenish meat. He picked the seed out with the tip of the knife. “We’re trading you, too.”

“You mean I’m going home?”

“That’s right.”

“You told me the Vesta mission was a failure.”

“Propaganda. It’s the first time any Styth has mastered an Asteroid. But the Martians took it back again. Psychological warfare, it’s all worthless. Usually the result’s just the opposite of what you expect.”

She laced her fingers together behind her back. “How much are the Martians paying you for those slaves?”

“I told you to stay out of that,” he said. “Get out.”

The crews of the Styth Fleet overflowed the plain of the House. They stood on the steps and in the street, blocks of men in long gray shirts, arranged by height, standing rigidly at respect. Paula was shivering with cold. She stood with
Ybix
’s crew beside the front doors to the House. She pulled her coat tighter around her.

Saba and Tanuojin stood square as brackets twenty feet in front of her. Beyond them, Machou was reading in a roaring voice from a long citation.

“Salute!”

The thousands of identical figures swung up their fists. “Styth! Styth! Styth!” She folded her arms. Their singlemindedness bewildered her. Machou came up to Saba. He hung a black sash around Saba’s neck and over his left shoulder.

“If you keep doing this, Matuko, we’ll have to invent a new rank for you.” He and Saba shook hands.

“Thank you, Prima.”

Machou draped the flag over Tanuojin’s shoulder. They stared past each other, they did not shake hands. The fleet shouted the salute again. Their commanders dismissed them. Machou and the rAkellaron came up to surround Saba and Tanuojin, congratulating them.
Ybix
’s crew broke their ranks. Paula stayed where she was, beside the high metal-bound door. All this for six feet of black cloth.

Marus laid his hand flat between her shoulders, and she went obediently across the plain toward Saba and Tanuojin. The spectators rushed over the steps, crowding around the new heroes. Small among them, she was jostled off her feet. Marus thrust one arm out straight to fend off the mob. She walked under his armpit, closed in by huge people, seeing nothing but their backs. Marus led her to Saba.

He stood talking to Machou, with Tanuojin a few feet away. The crowd surged around them, and hands thrust out toward them. Saba shook one hand after another, paying no attention, his eyes on Machou. She hung back from the Prima. Someone stepped on her foot, and an elbow worked her away from Saba.

Marus pushed her. She went into the shelter between Saba and Tanuojin.

“What are you doing?” Tanuojin said.

“I’m being stepped on.”

Marus spoke to him, and he moved off a few steps, stooping to hear, his hand covering one ear to keep the racket out. Saba turned around. A broad hand reached toward him at her eye-level, and he shook it briefly. To Paula, he said, “Are you going to act decent from now on?” Three more hands appeared out of the crowd. He twisted toward Machou, pumping arms. In the roar he had to shout to be heard. “Anarchists, you know, they have the morals of—”

A hand shot past her toward him, a white-skinned hand full of a small black gun. The clamor drowned everything. She heard no shots. She grabbed the arm by the wrist. Someone screamed. The gun arm yanked back and pulled her after it into the mob. She clung tight, left her feet, was dragged into the thick of people suddenly running or trying to run. The body attached to the arm struck her. Its white face screamed at her, a red mouth hedged with teeth, the sound lost in the howl of the mob packed around them. Marus heaved the Martian gunman up away from her. She lost her grip and fell. Through the running legs she saw Saba lying on his stomach on the pavement.

Machou stooped over him. “He’s dead!”

A screech went up around her. She scrambled toward Saba. They would trample him. The mob trapped her in their midst, shoving back and forth. Tanuojin brushed past her. She struggled after him, and at the edge of the crowd someone caught her and held her by the arms.

Tanuojin knelt; he bent over Saba, and his lips moved in Saba’s name. Blood stained the broad black sash across the dead man’s back. Paula whined in her throat. Tanuojin pulled his lyo up into his arms, Saba’s head against his shoulder, rocking him back and forth. Ybix’s crew was around them, driving the crowd back. She heard Tanuojin’s voice: “Saba—Saba—” Calling to him. It was Machou who held her so tight her arms hurt. Tanuojin’s hand pressed flat over the blood splash in the dead man’s back.

“Saba!”

Saba moved. Paula gathered her breath. Machou’s grip eased on her arms, and she edged away from him. In Tanuojin’s arms, Saba turned his head and groaned.

Paula was trembling from head to foot. She cast a look at the hundreds of people waiting and turned to the Prima. “You said he was dead.”

“He was.” Machou’s voice was suddenly reedy, his gaze unblinking on Tanuojin.

Ketac broke through the ring of
Ybix
’s crew and knelt beside his father. Tanuojin slumped down on the blood-splattered pavement. His skin was gray around the eyes. Exhausted, he was helpless. She fisted her hand in Machou’s shirt sleeve and wrenched his attention around to her.

“He wasn’t dead. You were wrong.”

The Prima struck her hand away. “That freak.”

Ketac was lifting Saba cradled in his arms. She went over to Tanuojin and stooped, her hand on his shoulder. “Can you walk? We have to get out of here.” Around them were thousands of people, all watching them. She helped Tanuojin up, one arm wrapped around him, and hurried him after Ketac down the steps.

Saba had been shot through the heart. While Paula was taking his clothes off, in the back room of his office in the Barn, a crowd gathered outside: she could hear their shouts and the tramp of their feet. Ketac came in with a pack of bandages.

“Is he badly hurt?”

“He’ll be all right,” she said. She ripped open the package and unrolled three inches of bandage.

“What happened out there, anyway?” Ketac said. “Who shot him?”

“I don’t know, Ketac. Go away, you’re bothering me.”

“Do you need help?”

She shook her head. Swinging the washbasin out of the wall, she turned on the hot water. Finally Ketac left her. Saba was out cold. She washed the small hole in his chest and the gaping hole in his back, and picked out the black fibers the bullet had carried into the flesh. The wound was scabbing over when she put the bandage on. She covered him with blankets and left him to sleep.

Sril and Bakan were throwing a bone for money on the desk in the front office. The front door was shut. Still she heard the bellow of hundreds of voices in the street beyond and a crackle of something breaking.

“How is he?” the two men said, in unison.

“He’ll heal.” She went to the door, and Sril dashed over to stop her.

“Don’t go out there.”

“What’s going on?” She pulled his hand off the door and unlatched it.

Armed men paraded up and down the arcade between the offices and the street. Most of
Ybix
’s crew was massed around this office and the last one in the row, Tanuojin’s. In the street facing them people swarmed thick along the foot of the rAkellaron House steps. Many of them carried sticks and handfuls of street shards. More men joined this mob with every moment. Their voices rose in a throaty roar; she could not make out the words.

“It’s getting worse,” Sril said.

She went to the window in the other wall of the front office. That street was empty. “What’s going on?” A howl outside brought her around, every hair stiff. Bakan was still sitting at the desk. He turned the knobbed bone over in his claws. Sril slapped a credit chip down on the desk.

“Doubles.”

Paula walked the length of the room. “What’s going on out there?”

“Who knows?” Bakan said. “Whatever happened up on the steps last watch, it was strange. People don’t like strange things.”

Something struck the outside of the door. She twitched. Sril said, “Sit down, Mendoz’. There’s nothing to do, even for you.”

She walked around the room. The racket of the crowd, growing louder, sawed on her nerves. Ketac came in through the inside door and shut it behind him.

“Has there been any word from the House?”

Bakan shook his head. The bone rattled on the top of the desk, and Sril yelped; he had won. Paula sat down in the chair by the window.

The mob swelled larger through the watch, packing the street and crowding through the arches of the arcade. Fights broke out here and there. At one bell, Leno came down from the House, his bullet head set forward on his shoulders. The man who had shot Saba had confessed: he was an agent of the Sunlight League. Leno went away, but the mob stayed. Their noise kept Paula awake. She sat at the front desk while Ketac slept in the chair before the window and Sril and Bakan walked aimlessly around the office.

“Why don’t you sleep?” Sril said to her, deep in the low watch.

“I can’t.” Her elbows propped on the desk, she pressed her fingers flat to her cheeks. Outside the mob was chanting something she did not want to hear. “That damned Machou.”

He glanced at Ketac, sprawled across the chair. Bakan was in the next room. Sril sat on the edge of the desk. “You think Machou is driving this?”

“You don’t see him down here stopping it, do you?”

“Because of what Tanuojin did?”

She raised her head. The chant pierced her hearing: “Kill, kill, kill,” growing louder. Sril bent down, his voice at a murmur.

“He brought Saba back again.”

“Don’t talk about what you don’t understand.” What she did not understand. Whenever she thought about what had happened on the porch a strange exultation swelled her, that drove out fear. The mob voice thundered. She went to the door. Sril reached it first and opened it; Ketac, rubbing his eyes, went after him into the arcade.

The mob surged along the street. Clubs waved in their fists. In an archway Sril was surrounded. Bakan rushed past her out the door, saw, and plunged back into the office. Seizing the first chair he came to, he lifted it over his head in both hands and ran down to the edge of the crowd. A steady banging reached her ears. They were breaking down Tanuojin’s door. Bakan held the chair before him with the legs out horizontal and forced his way into the crowd. They yielded, their hands up. A man in the forefront lost his footing and fell and Bakan walked over him. In the arch Sril had his back to the pillar, fighting off people armed with sticks. Bakan reached him. Together they cleared the arch. Other men ran by Paula’s doorway to help them. She saw Ketac down near Tanuojin’s door.

At a dead run, Leno passed her with a dozen of his men streaming along behind him. They formed a line and thrust the mob back into the street. Stones and filth pelted the cordon of men.

Leno roared, “Drive those fuckers back!” Half the line broke rank and rushed into the crowd, scattering the mob ahead of them. Paula yanked the door shut.

In the relative quiet she heard a new sound, a low whimper from another room, and went through the office to the back bedroom. Saba had wakened. He was crying with pain. She sank down on one knee beside the bed, afraid to touch him.

“Saba.”

“My head.” He turned his head from side to side. “My head is killing me.”

The mob yell rose again to a hysterical pitch. The noise made him sob, his head rolling back and forth. She brought him a cup of water but he could not drink. The door in the next room banged open. Tanuojin came into the room. The black sash hung crumpled across his chest. He sat on the edge of the bed and put his hands on his lyo.

Paula went back to the doorway. Tanuojin helped Saba sit and fed him the water from the cup. He said something too softly for her to hear, and Saba nodded. She went into the computer room. On the walls the analog decks blinked in panels of red and green. Ketac and Sril packed the next doorway, watching.

“How is he?”

Tanuojin came out of the bedroom. “He’s good. He’s better than I thought.” He put his back to them, facing Paula. “There’s too much going on here. I can’t take it, I’m spinning my wheels, I have to get away. Can you take care of him?”

“I’ll take him back to Matuko,” she said.

“Keep him quiet. Don’t let him do anything at all.” His head turned slightly toward the men in the doorway. The strange joy swelled in her again, so close to him. She put her hand on his chest.

“Go back to Yekka. I’ll call you when we’re in Matuko.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll keep track of you.” He turned and walked out of the room.

“I could fly my own ship.”

Paula kept hold of the grip in the wall of the compartment. The bus bounced and swayed along in its course toward Matuko. Saba walked in two steps the length of the compartment. “Why can’t I fly my own ship?”

Sril coughed into his rolled hand. “The Creep said—”

“What is he, my mother?”

Sril and Bakan, sitting opposite each other, passed weighted looks across the compartment. Saba dropped down on the bench next to Bakan. To Paula, he said, “When are you going to ask me about Illy?”

She glanced at Sril. “Will you bring me a drink of water?”

“Yes, Mendoz’.” He and Bakan filed out the door. The bus lurched and the door shut with a crash.

“I divorced her,” Saba said. “I sent her back to Merkhiz. First I whipped her backside so bad she probably stood the whole way.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Enjoy it. How could you do that to me? I’d never catch her in bed with Tanuojin.”

She tightened her fingers around the grip. Her stomach heaved with the motion of the bus. “How is David?”

“He’s fine. Boltiko has care of him.” He put one foot against the side of the bench to brace himself. “That doesn’t bother you? About Illy.”

“I’m glad she’s gone. I was going to end it anyway.”

“How long were you lovers?”

Her throat was sweet with nausea. She stiffened against his curiosity. “I’m going to be sick.” She staggered onto her feet. He called Sril to take her down to the slave toilet in the back of the bus.