Floating Worlds (2 page)

The inner door opened, and a tall redheaded girl came out. Behind her was a man in a white cotton pullover with NEW YORK LIBRARY stenciled on it in green. That was Michalski, the Committee secretary. Everybody in the waiting room came to attention. He said, “Carlos Sahedi?” and a boy with pimples left the couch and went in. Michalski shut the door.

The redheaded girl let out her breath in a loud shoosh. “Well, I’m glad that’s over.”

“What did they ask you?” Half the people waiting began to call questions. Paula crossed her arms over her breasts. Someone brought the redheaded girl a paper slip of water.

The girl drank. “Don’t bother studying, it’s not like that, it’s why-do-you-bite-your-fingernails?”

Paula bit her fingernails. She closed her hands into fists.

“Who’s on the panel?”

“Sybil Jefferson. Richard Bunker. Three or four others. I didn’t recognize them all. Where did this water come from?”

The people around the water cooler moved away to let her reach the spigot. Paula sighed. She stared across the room at the split-sphere projection of the Earth on the far wall.

After a long while, Carlos Sahedi came out, Michalski behind him. “Paula Mendoza.”

She went after him into the corridor. The cooler air brushed her sweating face and neck. Michalski said, “Are you thirsty? I can bring you some coffee.”

“No, that’s all right,” she said. “Thanks.” Her voice sounded scratchy. He nodded to a door on her right. Voices came through it.

“Go on in,” Michalski said. He went down the corridor.

Paula stood still a moment, listening to the people inside the room argue. A woman’s voice said, “Why hasn’t anybody learned it?”

“Who could use it?” said a voice she thought she recognized. “They aren’t exactly the likely people to have an anarchist revolution, are they?” Paula pushed the door in and entered the room.

Ranged behind a shiny table, the six members of the panel turned to face her. She shut the door and went straight up toward them, itching with nerves.

“I’m Paula Mendoza,” she said.

The six faces stared blankly back at her. The fat woman in the middle was Sybil Jefferson, her cheeks powder-white. She flipped over a page in the loose-bound book before her.

“Your father was Akim Morgan, the behaviorist, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” Paula said, startled.

“I met him once. He was very didactic.”

“He was strong-minded,” Paula said, angry. Her father was dead. “He wasn’t didactic.”

The slight dark man on Jefferson’s right leaned forward over the table. “Why do you want to work for the Committee?”

That was Richard Bunker, and it was his voice she had recognized. “I’m not sure I do,” she said.

“Sorry. I’ll rephrase it. Why did you apply?”

She made herself stare straight at him. “Because the Committee has forgotten its purpose. It was formed for the sake of revolution. Now it’s just a vestigial government. I wanted a chance to tell you you’ve failed.”

The six faces did not change. Nobody seemed outraged. Bunker leaned back. He was as dark as Tony, slight and short. His hands on the table were thin-boned like a woman’s. He said, “The general idea is that the Committee protects the condition of anarchy, and within the anarchy people have the freedom of their own lives. What do you think we should do—smuggle revolutionary propaganda to Mars and Venus? Form cadres? Blow up Crosby’s Planet?”

“No. I—”

At the other end of the table a man called, “Under what circumstances would you advocate the use of force?”

“Be brief,” someone else muttered. “Twenty-five hundred words or less.”

“Force is inefficient,” Paula said. A trickle of sweat ran down her side. She wished she had accepted Michalski’s offer of coffee. “I’ll reserve the remaining 2497 words.”

“You didn’t answer the question,” Sybil Jefferson said. She smiled at Paula. Her eyes were china-blue.

“It’s meaningless. If you’d rationalize force in one circumstance, you rationalize it all the time.”

Bunker said, “I still want to know how you’d promote the revolution.”

“Disband the Committee,” she said. “Any time there’s trouble, now, people just depend on you to negotiate it out. If you disbanded, people would have to find their own solutions.”

Michalski came in with a tray. She smelled coffee. He transferred the pot to the table in front of Bunker and a plate of sugar-nuts to the table in front of Jefferson, put two stacks of cups between them, and started out. Paula said, “Michalski, could I have some too, please?”

“There’s an extra cup.”

The six Committee members were clustered around the coffee pot. Jefferson bit into a sugar-nut. When she talked she sprayed white frosting across the table. “The anarchy has to have some means to defend itself. The rest of the system isn’t as advanced as you are.”

“Nobody can take anybody else’s freedom away,” Paula said. The other people were going back to their chairs. She poured coffee into the remaining cup. “Not unless you give it up.”

The broad breast of Jefferson’s red tunic was snowy with frosting. “I suppose you know about that. You were in prison once, weren’t you?”

“On Mars,” Paula said. “For six months.”

“What for?”

“For trying to take something out of Barsoom illegally.” Barsoom was the capital of Mars.

“A camera,” Jefferson said. “Did you forget about the export duty?”

“No. I didn’t think the Martian government had any right to charge me for taking my own camera with me.” She drank her coffee. They were watching her as if she were performing. She supposed she was. Bunker pushed his cup away across the table. He had a reputation for double-dealing; “Mitchell Wylie,” Michalski had called him once, behind his back, the folk name for Machiavelli.

Someone else said, “I thought you had connections on Mars, Mendoza?”

She put the cup down on the table. They did know everything about her. “I worked for Cam Savenia, when she ran for election to the Martian Senate, but when I was arrested, she fired me.”

“Cam Savenia.” Bunker’s head snapped up, wide-eyed. “Dr. Savenia? You worked in a Martian election?”

“I wanted to see what it was like.”

“That’s suspect.”

“It wasn’t my Planet.”

“Well, well, well.”

“What was it like?” asked the woman who had mentioned her connections.

“Hocus pocus,” Paula said, and the other people laughed. She looked at Bunker. “Why is that a well-well-well?”

“Dr. Savenia and R.B. do not get along,” Jefferson said. “You’re twenty-nine, Mendoza? You’ve never had a full-time job before?”

“Just with Dr. Savenia, that time.”

“But not on the Earth? How do you live?”

“I substitute with the university orchestra, I do a little pick-up work with the recording studios. That’s all the money I need.”

“What do you play?”

“Flute.”

“Oh, really?” The old man at the end of the table tilted himself forward over his fisted hands. “Do you like Alfide? Why didn’t you make a career out of that?”

“I’m not good enough. Alfide is my favorite composer. And Ibanov. And me.”

“What do you know about the Styths?” Jefferson said.

She drank the rest of her coffee. Obviously they had even discovered that. “They’re mutants. They live in artificial cities in the Gas Planets—Uranus and Saturn.”

“We all know that much.” The old woman pulled a sugar-nut apart with her hands. The edge of the table indented her fat stomach. “Don’t you know anything else?”

“Well,” she said, “I speak Styth.”

They all moved slightly, inclining toward her, their eyes intent. Bunker said smoothly, “So we’re told. You learned it in prison?”

“Yes. There were three Styths locked up in the men’s unit. The warden needed somebody to teach them the Common Speech.”

Jefferson ate the sugar-nut. “But instead you learned Styth. Why?”

“I couldn’t very well pass up the chance. Styth is the only other language still being spoken.” She stopped; that seemed enough, but they all stared at her as if they expected more. She said, “The warden was driving me crazy.”

“You don’t really expect us to hire you, do you?” Jefferson said.

“I’m not sure I want the job.”

“Well,” Bunker said, “we are offering you a job. The Interplanetary Council wants us to negotiate a truce between the Middle Planets and the Styth Empire. Unfortunately, none of us speaks any Styth.”

“Oh,” Paula said. “Well, get some tapes. It’s not hard. Lots of little rules and things. Genders.”

Jefferson was eating the last of the sugar-nuts. Paula saw why she was so fat. “Take the job, Mendoza. We don’t have time to scour the system looking for an anarchist who speaks Styth.”

“All right,” she said. Meanwhile she would find something else.

Tony said, “You’re selling your soul.”

“I don’t have a soul. And if I did, they’re paying me a fortune for it. Eight hundred dollars a month.” That was more than he made.

“You are an inveterate materialist.” He picked up a black pebble. On the grid between them, broken lines of black and white stones faced each other, shaping the space of the game. Tony’s hand hovered over the board. “You can always come here and live with me.” He put the black pebble down, watching her face.

“It’s educational.”

“Working for the Committee? Being a cop?”

Most people played Go in silence. Tony had developed the tactic of distracting conversation to the point where he could not play without talking. On the grid between them, she could close two positions with a single crucial play. Tony had to keep forcing her to play elsewhere, which he was doing. She sat back, taking a deep breath. Tony put his head forward.

“Look at what the Committee does. They leech off the anarchy. It’s in their best interests that people fail. Are you going to play or not?”

She played. “Aha,” he said, and with a click put a stone down on the grid, rescuing his men. “You just don’t have the stamina. I’m way ahead of you, you know.”

“Is wanting to win so much that you pant, a sign of materialism?”

His apartment was on the ground floor of an old stone building near the edge of the wood. The five rooms were stacked with books and manuscripts: he taught Style. They made dinner in his kitchen, arguing about the Committee, and went to bed, where he also attempted to teach.

A crash woke her up. She sat straight, the hair on her neck standing on end, and nearly fell out of the bed. They were sleeping on the porch of his apartment, and the bed sloped. Tony scrambled across her, reaching for his trousers.

They went down the hall to the bedroom, where there was a convenient window. She heard no more loud noises, but voices rose in the stairwell of the building, and someone shouted outside. Wrapped in a robe of Tony’s, she climbed after him out the bedroom window to the ground.

Between his building and the wood a meadow stretched flat and open in the domelight. Several people were running across it toward the trees. By the time she and Tony reached the wood, a small crowd had gathered. The night bus was parked on the flat ground at the edge of the trees and its few passengers were standing around outside it. A little two-seated car had crashed into the top of a tree and turned over. It rested like a strange hat in the branches. Paula went forward to see and Tony caught her arm.

“It might fall.”

The people around her milled about. One man was walking up and down saying, “I don’t even have insurance.” She looked up at the car. It was wrecked. A big branch had run through the side window and come out the top, and the front end was pushed in.

“Was anybody hurt?”

“That one doesn’t look too good to me. He was the passenger.”

She looked where these people were looking. A man sat under a tree, his head in his arms, a coat thrown over him, or a blanket. Paula wondered if she could do anything to help. Her feet were cold and she picked them one at a time off the ground.

“Watch out!”

Two men were pulling the air car down by ropes. The bigger man wore a jacket with
NIGHT BUS SERVICE
on the back in white script. The wreck slithered down out of the tree, breaking branches and scattering leaves onto the people below. Paula jumped back away from it. The car hit the ground with a crunch. Tony appeared beside her.

“The car ran into the bus’s air buffer,” he said. “The driver must have been drunk or something.”

The car’s driver was bent over the wreckage, moaning that he had no insurance. Tony and a woman bystander got into an argument about how fast the car had been going. Paula looked around for the car’s passenger. He was still sitting under the tree. Someone was offering him a drink from a half-liter bottle of whiskey. He ignored it, and when the other person pushed it at him, he raised his head and shouted, “Go away!”

The busman tramped around the car, coiling a rope. “Somebody ought to come down tomorrow and prune the tree.” He walked up face to face with the car driver. “Is he hurt?” He gestured toward the passenger.

“I don’t know.” The driver had half a papercase in his hand. He looked at it and threw it back into the wreck.

“What are you going to do?” the busman asked. “I have to leave. I have my run to finish.”

Tony called, “Take him to the hospital. Take him in the bus.”

The driver made a little gesture with one hand, his gaze on his passenger. “I don’t have any insurance.”

“I can run you by the Asclepius,” the busman said. He and the driver went to the hurt man under the tree and helped him to his feet.

“Hey—that’s my coat.” A tall woman trotted out of the crowd and retrieved the coat wrapped around the hurt man. He walked stiffly between the other two men toward the bus. The reflector strips on the sleeves of the busman’s jacket gleamed red and white. None of the other people moved to get back on the bus. The inside lights came on, shining across the grass. Through the big windows, Paula could see the lines of empty benches, the driver of the wrecked car and his passenger slumped together on the last seat. The horn tooted sharply three times. No one in the crowd paid any attention. The bus’s engines hummed and the long machine rose into the air and sailed away.