Floating Worlds (51 page)

“Look what happened.”

She put her head over his shoulder out into the shaft. The file had broken into the car parked in the basement of the shaft. Bunker stretched his arm toward the back wall and caught a heavy cable hanging down from the darkness above. He yanked hard on it to test it. The fire leaped crackling in a burst toward the ceiling. Paula wrinkled her nose at the smoke. Bunker swung himself into the shaft, clinging to the cable, and climbed down hand over hand.

An alarm bell in the ceiling clanged. Bunker was scrambling through the hole torn in the roof down into the vertical car, Paula wrapped her hands around the cable. Using her leg around the cable to brake herself, she slid down after him.

Voices sounded in the room she had just left. She jumped down into the vertical car. The floor was covered with loose film. Her feet slipped out from under her and she landed on her backside.

“Hurry up. I can’t see.”

She went after Bunker out the car’s usual door, into a vast darkened room. She could tell by the sound his voice made that it was large but not empty, and she smelled dust and cardboard and guessed it was a storage basement. Now, about twenty feet away, she made out a faint gray oblong. A window. She grabbed Bunker by the sleeve and towed him through the room toward it. They met a wall of boxes and climbed over them. Two or three alarm bells were ringing insistently overhead. She put her hand out and touched the wall. The window was an arm’s length over her head. She felt over it for a latch. Bunker put his arms around her legs and boosted her up so high a spiderweb draped itself over her face. She found the latch and the window swung open. They crawled out to the cool open air.

“Put that thing away.”

She cupped her other hand over the false eye. “I keep thinking we ought to do something with it.”

They were walking toward the west wall of the dome. All the trees in the park had been cut down, and the ground was cluttered with stumps. It was like a wasteland. No birds sang and all the animals were gone. She sat on the edge of a gulley and slid down the bank. A cascade of dirt and stones followed her to its foot.

The Martians would probably find out almost immediately that they were gone. Sooner or later Cam’s police would catch them again. She thought of Jefferson, who had been caught, and drew her left hand out of her pocket. Opening her fingers, she looked down at the false eye.

“Here.” Bunker snatched it out of her hand. His arm cocked back and he flung the thing off into the dark, out of the gulley.

“What did you do that for?”

He went off at a fast walk along the floor of the gulley. An air car droned across the dome over her head. Red lights flashed in the sky. At the end of the gulley was a house built back into the hillside. A row of garbage bins flanked it. As soon as she and Bunker approached, a dog began to bark inside the house. The garbage bins were head-high. She climbed up onto the edge of the first one and dug out a moldering sack full of squeezed oranges and coffee grounds.

“Where did you get that key?” she asked Bunker.

He leaned over the edge of the bin and groped around in the heap of garbage. “I made it. They gave me a keyboard.”

She turned half an orange inside out, ate off the pulp, and threw the hull back into the bin. “To write letters? Did you write their correspondence? You don’t know the language very well. What was this exchange about?”

“The Styths have two pilots Hanse thinks he needs. He offered them money but they aren’t having any.”

“Who mentioned me?” The dog was barking steadily in the house. She found a heel of soggy bread and bolted it down.

“Nobody in my hearing. The Styths said they wouldn’t take money but they might consider meat. Their term. And henceforth in this matter Hanse could communicate in the Common Speech. That was the last I heard.” He jumped down and went to the next bin. “Here. You can use this.” He dragged something large out of the bin: a heavy coat, missing one sleeve.

They ate until they were satisfied and went on. Without trees, the land looked strange, flat, naked, vulnerable. Bunker led her along at a fast walk. There was no wind and the air smelled dry, dusty, and bitter. They came to a building scooped hollow like a grave. The below-ground floors had been bombed out.

“Well,” Bunker said, “so much for that.” He sat down heavily on the ground.

Paula went to the edge of the pit. She guessed he had lived here. The destroyed building gaped below her. She sat down next to Bunker and put her arm awkwardly around his shoulders, and he raised his head.

“What are you doing?”

“Don’t you find it comforting?”

He snorted up a laugh. “Junior, comfort maketh the mind dull.”

Day was coming. The eastern wall of the dome shone with fresh light. Her arm hung around his neck. He resisted; he would not rest on her. She took her arm away and buried her hands in her lap.

They sheltered in the ruins, in a forest of melted plastic drippings. She woke with the sunlight shining in her face. Bunker lay beside her. He had her shirt open down the front; his hand cupped her breast. She put her arms out to him.

“That was nice,” he said, after. “I kept telling myself the first thing I’d do when I escaped was get laid.”

Paula picked black chunks of grit off her clothes and out of her hair. “Do you want to stay together?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. Do you?”

She sat up, spreading out the coat he had found in the bin. It was stained and torn, a long heavily lined man’s coat with a notched collar. “For a while, at least. Until we find out what’s going on here.”

He stood to pull on his pants. His body was thin and bony, his chest sprinkled with crisp hair, graying like the hair on his head. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

By daylight the whole dome seemed changed. Nothing was left of the wood but the stumps of trees. She could see from the ridge near the old campus all the way across the lake to the yellow hills south of the water. Everything looked much smaller. Many of the buildings had been blown up and packs of dogs drifted around the middle and south of the dome. The only birds she saw were crows.

Tony Andrea’s building was still lived in. She left Bunker digging through a trash can at the edge of the meadow and went cautiously in the side door. There was a big poster on the wall at the foot of the stairs reading: WORK IS LIFE. The floor was dirty and black handprints marked the walls around the doorways. She knocked on Tony’s door.

“Who’s ’ere?” a woman called, behind it.

“I’m looking for Tony Andrea.”

“Who?”

Paula backed away, looking up and down the hall. At the far end she saw another poster: HELP THE STATE—COOPERATE! In red paint across it and part of the wall beside it was scrawled: STRIKE—STRIKE—STRIKE. The woman behind the door called, “Who’s ’ere?” Paula went away.

She remembered An Chu’s message and went down the dome to the Nikoles Building. It was underground; she was shy of going into a place with so few ways out. At last she went down into the guts of the building and found the corridor where An Chu had said she was living. She could not remember the number of the apartment. On the corner of the green corridor was a list of the tenants. She stood before it, reading through it, without finding An Chu’s name. While she was looking down the list for the third time, a woman’s voice said, “Can I help you?”

She wheeled around, her hair standing on end. It was a tall, black-haired woman, too dark to be a Martian. Paula swallowed. “I’m looking for An Chu.”

“Who?”

The closed space around her suddenly pressed tighter on her mind. She turned down the corridor. The woman cried, “Wait!” Paula broke into a run. She reached the stairs and went up into the open day.

Bunker was waiting for her on the surface and they went off along the edge of the drying lake. There seemed to be a boundary of a sort, at the head of the lake, cutting the dome in half. South of this border, no building stood intact. Here and there a tree still grew, its branches fuzzed with leaves just unfolding from buds. The lake shore was scummed with dead weed. She saw no animals until just before dark, when a brown dog began to trail them.

“Dick.”

“I see her,” he said. He gestured at her. “You go that way.”

They split up. The dog followed Paula. Patiently she led it along the shore, moving slowly, careful not to look at it too much. Bunker circled around behind it. Paula sat down on the mud beach. There was a thick yellow froth in the water at the edge of the lake, like soap. The lake smelled of rot. The dog slunk toward her, until about fifty yards from her it lay down on its belly, its ears flat to its head. Under its rough dun-colored hide its ribs looked round and sharp as wire hoops. When she moved, it leaped up, its tail curled between its legs. Its dugs hung down along its belly. Paula settled on her hams again. She was painfully hungry. The dog watched her from the weeds, its head on its paws.

Bunker crept up on it, but he made some sound, and the dog bolted away. The man retreated, and the dog paused, its ears pricked up. Paula swore.

“Come on,” Bunker said. “Let’s walk it down.”

Her legs were already sore. She got up and went after him. The sun was setting. They followed the dog into the darkness. It ran in short bursts ahead of them, galloping out of reach, turning to watch them, dashing away again when they got too close. About an hour after dark, they lost it in the gulleys south of the lake.

Paula was too tired and hungry even to complain. They slept in the shelter of a sheer hillside, shivering. Three or four times during the night air cars flew overhead, waking them. Once a searchlight sliced through the dark around them, and they huddled against the cold ground, their heads buried in their jackets, until it left. Before dawn hunger drove them out again.

Crisscrossing the ridges and notched hills below the lake, they divided up, moving along on parallel courses three hundred feet apart, searching for food. She chased a gray snake along a dusty hillside from tuft to tuft of grass. The air was smoky yellow. The dry ground gave up an odor like an empty husk. Her thigh bones ground in the sockets of her hips. Her mouth was filmed and gluey.

In the late afternoon Bunker shouted on the far side of a gulley. She scrambled down the steep bank, knocking loose a shower of small stones and dirt, and ran toward his voice. He was on his knees digging into the bank of the ravine. His arms were gray with dirt.

“I knew that mutt had a den up here somewhere.” He scooped dirt away. “Watch out—she’ll be back.” He plunged his sleeve down over his hand, reached deep into the hole he had dug, and took out a squirming black puppy.

Its yips were small as rabbit sounds. Paula straightened. The brown dog came running along the floor of the ravine. Paula charged it, shouting, and the dog veered off. Its stained teeth showed. Bunker was taking pup after pup out of the den. Their squeaks brought their mother forward, snarling. Paula moved between her and the den. She snatched a long branch off the ground. The dog faced her, its ears flat, and growled.

“Don’t take them all—leave her a few.”

“Paula Pityheart.” He took off his jacket and wrapped the puppies up in it. “Let’s go.” He slung the wiggling bundle onto his shoulder. When Paula moved, the dog darted past her and rushed into its den. Paula and Bunker went down the gulley to the open ground, made a fire, and roasted five puppies.

Day after day, from the first light to the last, they searched for food. Some days they found nothing at all. Paula fell sick, but she dared not stop hunting even for an hour. One resting while the other tracked, they walked down wild dogs and foxes. In the bombed-out buildings they cornered rats. They went north again, past the head of the lake. Paula dug sacks of rotting garbage out of the trash bins. They broke into an apartment but found nothing to steal except water. Even the clothes in the closets were as shabby as their own. As the lake dried up and turned foul, good water was nearly as scarce as food, until they found the narrow opening into the underground river, whose water was sweet. One evening, while she was rummaging through a garbage can outside the Nikoles Building, someone called her name.

She ran. The voice screamed, “Wait!” Twenty strides away, at the corner of the building, she turned to look back, ready to run again. A small figure was walking after her.

“An Chu.” She took a step forward. Maybe it was a trap. A smile spread across the other woman’s round face. She put out her hands, and Paula rushed toward her.

“I knew it was you—Jennie said it was somebody with brassy hair—”

Paula hugged her tight, her face against the other woman’s coarse black hair. Her throat thickened. She could say nothing. An Chu babbled in her ear, “We’ve been looking for you—Willie thought he saw you once—” An Chu held her tight, one arm around her shoulders, one around her waist. “Where are you living?”

Paula stepped back. “In the…” She nodded toward the south of the dome. She cast a look around them, to be sure they went unwatched.

“In the open?” An Chu took her hands. “Are you hungry?”

“I’m starving.”

“Come with me.”

Paula followed her down the long side of the building, but An Chu did not go through the door. She hooked her arm through Paula’s arm. “The hourlies say you’re dead.” She squeezed Paula’s arm against her, smiling wide. “The Dragon Lady of the Styths. I took the hourlies around to everybody I knew and told them who you really are.” They passed the end of the building and went into the open. The evening was warm. Mosquitoes buzzed around her face. High overhead, the red lights of an air car flashed off and on. An Chu glanced up casually and walked Paula in a circle.

“Aren’t you living there?” Paula asked.

“Yes—we all are, Willie and Jennie and I. Jennie’s the only one who’s official. You can’t have an apartment unless you have a job-card. You don’t get a job-card unless you work. With everybody on strike, that’s hard. Jennie works in the dome-maintenance crew. We decided she could, since it’s for our sake as much as the Martians’.” She looked up into the sky. “He’s gone. Hurry.” Stooping, she pulled up a round piece of the turf. Paula climbed into the hole in the ground.