Floating Worlds (13 page)

The scarred man said, in Styth, “Don’t let him turn the music off.”

The manager strode out the door. Paula looked after him down the corridor, worried. Narcotics were illegal on Mars. Sril raised his head. He was hunched over the opium bowl; he held the long tube in his fingers like a paintbrush. “Ketac,” he said, in his own language, “find out what that was all about.”

Ketac was slumped on the floor, his forehead resting on one raised knee. He made no response. Paula knelt beside Sril. The music was so loud she had to shout.

“Sril. You have to get out of here. He’s gone for help.”

Sril laughed. The whites of his eyes were stained with red. “He needs help.”

“You don’t know them. He’ll bring a security team—”

Ketac lifted his head. His eyes were only half-open. His mouth hung slack. “You think we can’t take their whole army—”

She shook her head. “I can’t understand Styth in this racket.”

Sril said, “We fight two Martians each. Guns too.” He held up two fingers. “Maybe three.” With effort he added another finger.

“I’m sure you can. That only makes it worse, don’t you see?” She took his hands, trying to make him pay attention to her. “Sril, they’ll throw us all in jail.”

“We can fight anybody,” Ketac said. “Anybody.”

Sril straightened up. “Yes, but we shouldn’t make trouble for her. Come on. Bakan—”

Beneath the thunder of the music there was a pounding on the door. “Open up in there! This is Security!”

Paula looked around for some place to hide them. Ketac started to his feet and sat down hard. Sril bent to help him.

“Open this door!”

“In here.” She pointed to the bedroom door.

Bakan and Sril lifted Ketac up by the arms and hauled him away. She went around the couch to turn off the videone. The bedroom door shut, and the front door crashed open. The Martian hotelman and three policemen in gray bugle-boy uniforms charged in a wedge into the room. Paula went between them and the bedroom. Three bell-shaped pistols veered toward her.

“Where are they?”

She looked up at him. “Who?”

The red furred face of the hotelman puffed up fat with rage. “You have twelve hours to get yourself and those animals—those—” He was shouting in her face. She blinked.

“Mr. Lanahan, this is opium!”

The Martian’s windy voice rose to a shriek. “You’ll get thirty years in prison for this, if it takes me that long to put you there.”

“What is this?” The Akellar came in the broken door behind them.

Lanahan swung around. The Styth walked into their midst. The three guns swiveled from Paula to the bigger target. He ignored them. To Lanahan he said, “You’re bothering her. Leave her alone.”

The Martian said, stiff, “I don’t exactly think you—”

“Put your hands up!” a policeman cried.

The Akellar got Lanahan by the wrist and swung him around between him and the gunman, one hand on his collar and one on his arm. Paula stood where she was. She glanced at the bedroom door. The police backed up, their guns pointed at their chief’s belly.

“Mr. Lanahan—”

“Do as he says—” Lanahan stood up on his toes, his arm twisted up behind him.

“Out,” the Akellar said.

The police backed out the door. The Styth lifted Lanahan in big steps toward the threshold. He said, “Don’t talk back, nigger, it’s painful, see? See?” Lanahan screeched. The Akellar thrust him out the door. Paula went up beside the Styth to look out to the corridor. Lanahan sagged down on his knees, cradling his hand to his chest. He sobbed, his face gray with pain. The policemen stood around him. The Akellar lifted the door back onto its tracks and slammed it shut.

Sril came up to them. “I’m glad you’re here. Ketac has fallen out in her bed.” Bakan stood in the bedroom doorway.

“Go back to the trap. We’d better leave. I was getting a little tired of this Planet anyway.”

Paula went into her bedroom. Ketac lay sprawled on his face on her bed. The Akellar came after her.

“You can’t free slaves, you see? They just forget who they are and make trouble.” He sat on the edge of the bed and shook his son. “Wake up, crumb.”

“They aren’t slaves. We don’t keep slaves.”

Ketac was limp as rope. If he was awake, he gave no evidence. The Akellar said, “They talk like slaves. They work like slaves. The difference is when they get old and sick you don’t take care of them.” He heaved his son up across his shoulders.

She followed him out to the front room. Ketac’s head and arms hung down his father’s back. She gathered up the opium heater and the straw and piled them into the crook of the big man’s arm. “You have a diplomatic license and I don’t.”

“Will you be safe here?”

“Yes.”

“I won’t leave you here if you’re going to have trouble.”

She raised her head, smarting. “How did I ever get along without you?”

He started to say something. Instead he left, angling his child’s long legs through the door.

The cruise ship’s corridor was just wide enough for one person. Paula held her suitcase awkwardly before her, reading the numbers on the brown sliding doors on either side. At 113, she knocked.

“Who is it?” Bunker called, inside, and she pushed the door back and went in.

Two stacks of beds filled the little stateroom. Bunker sat on the end of the near lower shelf, his shirt off. A medic in a white coat was pasting sensors to his chest. Paula threw her bags on the upper bed. The phony gravity held her feet down to the floor as if she had glue on her shoes. She looked curiously at Bunker.

“How was it?”

The medic said, “Breathe in, Browne.”

Bunker inhaled. She wondered if he ever told his real name to strangers. “Interesting. I’ve never been in a deep-space ship before.” The medic made notes in a notepad.

“Are you Paula Mendoza?”

“Yes.”

“I’m supposed to give you a physical.”

Paula sat down on the lower bed opposite Bunker. She took off her jacket, unsnapped the pocket, and pulled out a piece of paper, which she gave to Bunker. She said, “You look pale.”

“He’s anemic,” the medic said. “Free fall and rich atmosphere.”

“You were in free fall on Ybix? What was it like?”

Bunker was reading the rough draft of the agreement. “This is solid check. Mendoza, I don’t know how you did it.” He folded up the paper and gave it back to her.

“He’s getting what he wants.”

“He’s getting what he thinks he wants. We get what we need.”

Paula looked around the room. There were no ports. The walls were covered in textured beige plastic. It was smaller than the bath at the Nineveh. The medic put his computer on the bed and gave Bunker a towel to wash the sensor paste off his chest. Paula pulled her shirt off over her head. She turned her back to the medic.

“Did you get to know any of the crew?”

“All the ones inboard.” Bunker put on his shirt. He stood and pulled a ring in the beige wall, and a panel opened out. The medic held something cold against her back. Bunker said, “Some of them are real compulsives.”

“Is he honest?” She glanced over her shoulder at the medic.

“Yes. Breathe in.”

She breathed deep. Bunker took a small film can from the shelf in the wall. Paula reached for it. The medic thumped her back. The end of a strip of film stuck out of the can. She pulled out half a roll of pictures. The first several frames were exteriors of a kite-shaped spaceship. On its metal back was painted a black three-pointed star.

The door rattled under a rapid knock. “Who is it?” Bunker said, and Jefferson came in, squeezing sideways through the door.

“Well, Richard, you look fit.”

Paula held up photographs of a spherical room. “What’s this?”

“The bridge.”

“They let you go all over the ship? Hello, Jefferson.”

Jefferson slid between the medic and Bunker and sat down on the bed beside Paula. The medic’s fingers pressed gently under Paula’s jaw. He felt along her shoulder.

“You’re tense, relax.”

Jefferson unbuttoned the front of her suit. The frilly blouse underneath made her breast look a yard wide. “Mendoza was run out of the Nineveh Club,” she told Bunker. “After only five days.”

“The food was awful,” Paula said.

Bunker said, “Mendoza, for six days I’ve had nothing to eat but chalk buttons and water.”

She looked at film of a winding tubular corridor. Jefferson said, “I gained five pounds sitting in a hotel room waiting for Mendoza’s infrequent calls. I think we all suffered appropriately.”

Paula gave her the film and the draft of the treaty. The medic was writing in his notebook. She turned to Bunker.

“You went all over
Ybix
? What’s it like?”

“A Mylar wormhole. And
all over
isn’t very far.”

The old woman covered her right eye with her hand. She held the single typed page of the agreement out to read it. “My. What’s this scrawl here?”

“That’s his signature.”

Jefferson’s head wagged. “Fair, for a first draft. In five days.”

The medic stabbed Paula’s finger with a metal clip. He picked up the blood in a long glass straw. She said, “It doesn’t mean much. He talks for his own city, and that’s all. There was another man down there, Tanuojin—”

Bunker lay down on his back along the narrow bed. His shirt was unbuttoned. His bony chest looked hard as a carapace. “I heard all about him.
Ybix
’s second officer. They call him The Creep. Not exactly the most popular man with the crew. Is he the Akellar’s brother?”

“His lyo. It’s a sworn friendship. Remember, Kary said something about it.”

“And is he an Akellar himself?”

“I think so.”

The medic straightened. “That’s all, Mendoza.” He sealed up his computer. “He’s anemic.” He turned to the door. “And she’s pregnant.” He went out. Paula stared stupidly at the dark panel shutting in the wall.

Bunker and Jefferson burst out laughing. Paula said, “No,” and they roared.

Jefferson said, “Paula, you’ll have to apply for a bonus for hazardous duty.” Bunker howled. He gasped for breath; tears ran down his face.

Paula put her hands up to her cheeks. Jefferson said, chuckling, “I’m sorry, Mendoza, but it’s terribly funny. Here, have a mint.”

Bunker wiped his eyes. “So that’s how you did it.”

She bared her teeth at him. “You take over. I’d like to see you handle him, rat.”

“I wouldn’t get pregnant.” He smirked at her, and Jefferson burbled again with laughter. He propped himself up on his elbows. “I’ve always wished I could, actually. Give it to me, Mendoza, if you don’t want it.”

Paula leaned against the wall. She put her hand on her stomach. “What would you do with a baby?”

“I’d be very loving. The perfect parent.”

She grunted.

“Then when he got to a nice size, I’d cook him and eat him.”

Jefferson said, “You did get pregnant at the Nineveh.”

Paula’s stomach fluttered. She counted days on her fingers. It was only ninety-six hours. The medic couldn’t be sure. “That bastard. He didn’t even warn me.”

Jefferson patted her shoulder. “I’m glad I’m not young. You can have the bottom bunk.” She climbed onto the deck above Bunker’s head.

“You should have warned him,” Bunker said. He folded his arms behind his head. “But you were so busy taking advantage of the poor dumb chump—”

“Shut up,” Paula said, between her teeth.

All Luna was built below the surface, thirty decks of halls and rooms cut from the rock. Its only important industry was cryogenics. The natural gravity was weaker even than on Mars and the floors were treated with plastograv. The officer who met the three anarchists at the space port took them through customs, where they changed out of their own clothes into blue and white striped coveralls with their names and photographs on the left breast. With the officer they rode the fast track of the moving sidewalk past blocks of living rooms. Here and there, the walls were painted with flowers and bushes and grass. Most of the people they saw on the sidewalk wore uniforms: the black and white of the Lunar Army, the tan of the Martian Army, now and then the dark blue tunics and white pants of the Interplanetary Police. The ceiling and walls shed an even light. There were no shadows.

Paula rubbed her face. She was tired. The trip from Mars had taken 135 hours. She was space-sick and she could not eat. Bunker tapped her arm. She went after him and Jefferson down a step to the middle track and onto the slow track and to the motionless floor. The officer took them down ten levels in a vertical car.

“We’re coming to a security area,” he said, smiling. “We’ll try to keep the inconvenience to a minimum.” The vertical settled to a stop and the doors whirred open. They went out to a small room; the lights came on automatically. Paula looked up at the ceiling. She walked beneath a round lens like an eye that moved to keep her in its field. Jefferson sat down on the sofa. She crossed her legs.

A tall redheaded girl came in, carrying a box. She said, “My name is Karene, I’m your technician.” Her voice was meaninglessly intimate, like a nurse’s. She took a small box off the bigger box and showed it to them. “A simple radiation detector.” One at a time, she ran the device over them, an inch from their bodies. Cleared, they all went down a corridor, single-file, and through a narrow door. When Bunker stepped across the threshold the door buzzed.

“You must be carrying something metal,” Karene told him.

“I have two gold fillings,” he said.

“That would not register. Oh. It must be your ring.”

He took the ring off his little finger and gave it to her. Without it the door passed him. Karene put the ring in her bag. “I’ll just hold this for you. Now, if you’ll come this way—”

They were in a corridor painted glossy white. Jefferson was already standing on a red dot in the floor. “Oh,” Karene said. “You’ve been here before. Look straight ahead, please.”

Paula turned to the slight man beside her. “Gold fillings?”

“I meant it in a lighter spirit than it was taken.” The corners of his mouth were stressed in deep lines. She knew that meant he was trying not to smile.

“Next,” Karene said, and he took Jefferson’s place on the dot. The redheaded girl stood by the wall, pressing buttons.

“Next.”

“If that’s an X-ray,” Paula said, “I’ll pass.”

“I’m sorry. We can’t change our procedures.”

“I’m pregnant.”

“Oh.” Karene’s face fell. She stood still a moment, staring at Paula. Nobody said anything. Finally the girl said, “I’ll have to ask. Please wait here.” She went to the end of the corridor. A door clanged open and shut. Almost at once, a young man in a black uniform came in. He smiled at the three diplomats and stood with his hands clasped behind him. They waited a long while, in silence, until Karene returned.

Her cheerful smile was back. She sent the soldier away. “If you’ll come this way, please.”

They went down the corridor. Every few steps they passed through a sensor ring built into the walls. Cameras watched them from the ceiling. Paula walked along behind Jefferson.

“If you’ll wait in here, General Gordon will see you soon.” Karene stood beside an open door. “I hope you enjoy your visit to Luna.”

Paula went through into a wood-paneled room. The bulky furniture was made of leather and wood. She crossed the room to a white window frame opposite the door. Beyond lay a green meadow, flecked with yellow and red flowers. The three-dimensional effect was perfect, even to the puffy clouds in the sky. When she looked down, she could see over the outer sill. She touched the window: plastic.

“General Gordon,” a mechanical voice announced.

The Luna tyrant came in a side door. He was short and balding. His uniform looked padded. He went behind his desk.

“My apologies if I’ve kept you waiting. I’ve been in my chapel.”

Jefferson lowered herself into a corner of the overstuffed couch. “Do you know my associates, General? Richard Browne—”

“I know who you are.” Gordon did not offer to shake hands.

“And Paula Mendoza.”

Gordon gave her an instant’s glance and sat down. She rubbed her upper lip with her forefinger. This would not be easy. Gordon fussed with the styli and pencils on his desk blotter while Jefferson made talk. The photograph on the wall behind him was of Marshal David King, the first tyrant of Luna. Between it and the state emblem was a large tau cross.

Jefferson said, “Now we need your cooperation, General.”

Bunker was sitting down on the couch beside her. Paula glanced at the window again. Gordon said brusquely, “I do not cooperate with gross immoralism, Miss Jefferson.”

“That’s a highly subjective comment.”

“No, it isn’t. You were hired to negotiate a truce with the Styth Empire, not flaunt your godless anarchist immorality all over the Middle Planets.”

“General,” Bunker said, “from certain perspectives there’s no difference.”

Gordon jabbed his sharp chin at Paula. He talked almost without moving his lips. “You don’t deny she became the mistress of a Styth pirate.”

Paula frowned at Bunker. “What’s a mistress?”

“What you think.”

Jefferson said, “The Matuko Akellar is one of the most powerful men in Styth. If he’s a pirate, General, so are you.”

Gordon stood up, turning his back on them, his eyes on the cross on the wall. He jammed his fists into his pockets. “My tolerance for insult is very low, Miss Jefferson.”

“The Styths are there,” Jefferson said. “The interface between them and us will only grow with time. We’d like to develop a relationship that will give everybody a reasonable stake in keeping the peace.”

“By seducing them?” Gordon sat down again. His hands danced over his collection of pens. “God is not mocked, Miss Jefferson. The future won’t belong to those who suck tit with the devil, but to those who serve god.”

Paula thought of the Akellar, flying away into space, sucking tit with Planck’s Constant. She raised her eyes; the ceiling was pocked with sensors and cameras.

“Is that his baby?” Gordon barked.

She leveled her gaze at him. “It’s my baby.” Taking the treaty out of her pocket, she went up to his desk and put the paper down on the blotter. “We have two objectives, a truce and a workable trade agreement. We have the trade. If he comes to the Earth, we’ll get the truce.”

“A piece of film.”

Jefferson said, encarameled, “The Council is enthusiastic.”

The general’s sharp face was stiff. His cheeks sucked in. To Paula, he said, “What guarantee do you have he’ll keep this?”

“He signed it,” she said. “He’ll keep it. Which is the kind of devil you like to deal with.”

“The devil’s always handsome to a whore.”

Thinking of Lilly M’ka, she had to laugh. His mouth pinched to a slit. He snapped the paper around and read it. She moved away from him. Bunker slid down on the couch, his hands in his lap.

Gordon said, “If this ship comes here, she’ll spy on every facet of our operations. Luna is the chief harbor of the Middle Planets. You want to bring this damned pirate—”

“We’d like you to take a look at the ship, if you can,” Bunker said.

“The Martian Fleet’s scan failed.”

“They looked in the wrong places for the wrong things. I just spent six days inboard
Ybix
, I have some ideas.” He crossed the room, past Paula, to the desk. “This ship has accounted for three out of the five patrol craft lost so far in the war. Including both ships lost below Vesta.” He dropped the packet of photographs on the blotter.

Gordon took out a laser cutter and opened the envelope. He spilled the photographs onto the desk. “Unh.” His white hands held the strips of film up to the ceiling lights. “That’s certainly a Manta hull. How do they make it go so fast?”

Jefferson said, “We’ve been running into static from some of the Martians, General. If they’ve been talking to you—”

“I don’t listen to the Martians.” Gordon sprang up again. His hands disappeared in his pockets. “I’ll keep these photographs. You can park that ship here for ten days Earth. Send me your recommendations for a scan.” He pressed a button on his desk. “Escort these people out.” He gathered up the strips of film and left the way he had come.

“That’s the kind of devil you don’t like to deal with,” Bunker said.

“Richard,” Jefferson said, “park your mouth.”

They were escorted back the way they had come. On the moving sidewalk none of the anarchists spoke. The officer who had brought them took them through customs again. They got back their clothes, sealed into clear plastic bags. Bunker’s ring was attached in its own little sack.

With the hundred-odd other passengers they boarded the Earth-Luna shuttle. The benches in the coach section were just wide enough for two people, and they found a pair in the back where no one else was sitting and Bunker and Paula turned one to face the other. Bunker sat down.

“You know, Gordon’s cracked. They’ll pick him up someday in sackcloth and ashes announcing the Second Coming.”

Paula took off her jacket. The bus was stifling hot and smelled of antiseptic. “He seems reasonable to me. So he’s a little paranoid.” She watched Jefferson fish inside her purse.

“We could sell him a report on his security system,” Bunker said. “That would make him even more paranoid.”

Jefferson popped out her right eye and split it between her fingers like an egg. She picked out the sensor inside. “They’re looking for weapons.” She took her false eye from her purse and slipped it into the socket. Paula swallowed, her stomach quivering. On the armor-gray wall of the bus, next to her, was a face drawn in black ink. During the fifteen-hour shuttle flight a graffist could take time on a piece. The hair swirled away in ringlets, which turned into curlicue words.

This floating world is but a phantasm It is a momentary smoke

She turned her head almost upside down to read it. It sounded like Zen. She would have to look it up. She sat thinking of the thousands of things she had always meant to look up.

“What have you done with that crystal?” Jefferson asked.

Paula straightened on the bench. Bunker said, “What crystal?”

“The Styths gave her a huge energy crystal,” Jefferson said.

“Oh?”

“It’s in my luggage,” Paula said. She glanced over her shoulder. The other passengers were sleeping, or singing; no one was within hearing. She turned back to Jefferson. “He gave it to me. It’s mine.”

Bunker was frowning at her. The old woman said, “We paid for the knife.”

“Why did they give you something that rich?” Bunker said. “The knife is a bauble.”

“What do you think—that I took their bribe?” She looked from Jefferson to him. “Because he wanted to keep the knife. Therefore he had to give me something, or he’d have stood in my debt. Crystal isn’t worth that much to them.”

“Exactly,” Jefferson said. “He gave it in return for the knife, which we gave him, not you.”

Paula crossed her arms over her chest. She was already resigned to giving up the crystal. She thought of the baby, the Akellar’s other little present. She would rather have the crystal. Morose, she stared at the wall.