Floating Worlds (70 page)

“I’ll take you.”

“You stay out of this,” Tanuojin said.

“Why? She’s your oldest friend. She saved your life. Vida died for you. Why shouldn’t I help her?”

The Emperor settled into the couch, one arm across the back, his head down. “Is that your substitute for thinking?”

Paula hung the white napkin over the handle of the cart. “He’ll take me himself,” she said to Junna. She went back for her glass, on the floor beside the couch. “Sooner or later.”

Junna was scowling at Tanuojin. Paula held out her empty glass, and he took it and went to the cart full of drink.

“Sooner or later,” Tanuojin said to her, “you’ll do as I say.”

She went to sleep alone in the wide cool bed. Presently she woke, or seemed to wake. The back of her neck crawled with nerves. Tanuojin stood beside the bed. His eyes were like mirrors. She felt unable to move, as if in a dream. He lay down on the bed next to her.

“Paula—” He took her face between the cold blades of his hands. “Pauliko, now you submit.” She thought,
It is a dream
. His narcotic touch lulled her. She closed her eyes. His mouth touched her. A dream. He disappeared. Silence and darkness closed around her. Restless, she tried to waken. Her mind was scattered. She struggled to think. It was no dream; Tanuojin had her.

She collected her mind, floating in a black emptiness like deep space. Without her senses she was confused and could not decide what was actually happening, or what she should do. Perhaps nothing. Other people panicked and fought uselessly until they died or were too tired to resist. If only she could see, she would have something to hold on to. She strained to see.

A green world spread out around her, trees and meadow grass yellowed with sunlight. That was her imagination. She could go in there and rest. With an effort she wiped it away. The black blindness fell around her again. She had to keep away from that trap of telling herself what to see. She organized her mind to use her eyes.

A light flashed so bright it dazed her. Her mind stopped, stupid, in the grip of a gray after-image. It faded. She mastered herself again, encouraged; she must have almost broken out, to be driven back like that. She pitched herself against the dark.

This time the brilliance shattered her. Five or six of her circled aimlessly around each other, like voices talking at once, all numb. What happened?
Give up
, one voice said, loudest.
Give up. Give up
. She was lost in the midst of herselves, helpless. Two brushed together, saying the same thing, and she made them lap and fit together. Several after-images of the light flash hung around her. As she formed her mind together again all the images blended into one, and she focused on that. The cogent loud voice telling her to give up faded away. That was Tanuojin. She fastened her attention on the after-image, dying in the black.

The image was not featureless, like the first time. In it she saw white on white a doorway, another room. A roll of light showed in the background, the bright false fire in the hearth of the sitting room of her suite.

The dark closed over her. She rested, hoarding her strength. All her selves had melded again, and she could not find the seams between them. This time she had to keep trying, she could not let him drive her back. She gathered herself up and went forward into the dark.

Suddenly, without the blast of light, the corridor of the hotel lay before her. A Styth coming toward her stopped and saluted her. She relaxed, triumphant. The corridor was darker than before, and the colors strange, muted to halftones, the shading between dark and light more distinct than she was used to. It was a Styth image. Styths saw that way; he was tricking her. She refused to see what he was feeding into her mind, she forced it to dissolve.

The light struck her, dazzling, destroying her. In the sheet of light figures moved. She strained toward them. The light pierced her, merciless, she was glass, she was sheer to the brilliance, and she passed through into a dim room, where a white Martian face hung before her, concerned, mouthing words she could not hear.

She was in some other part of the hotel. The Martian, looking reassured, went out a side door. She had no physical control over the single eye she occupied, and it blinked and she was blind. Not the same dark as before: blood tinged the eyelid. When the eye opened, Newrose was there in front of her.

He talked, smiling all over his pink face, and she apparently answered him. They passed into another room. On the left was a plush stuffed couch and on the right a desk. She went straight between them to a window and stood staring out over the garden, one story below her. She could see nothing of Newrose; she might as well have been blind again.

She needed to hear. She reached out, struggling to hear. Newrose’s voice sounded faintly somewhere behind her, and she snatched for it. It was a bait. She was thrown back. Like a knife the black fell across her sight. The sound was gone. She was locked tight in her mind again.

He was in here with her. It was her body. She had done it wrong, the first time, stupidly attacking the dominant, most disciplined sense. She had to move fast. Collecting her will and her concentration, she flung herself out along all her nerves.

Feeling sprang alive in her hands and feet and along her back, spread over her face and her belly, running hot like blood under her skin. She shut her blind eyes and doubled up, falling. Her cheek and hip hit the yielding floor. Her stomach clenched in a cramp. Something clawed at her, deep in her body. She almost weakened. She nearly yielded. Gasping for breath, she struggled to hear, and sound burst alive in her ears.

“Miss Mendoza—” Newrose squeaked. “I’ll get help.”

“No! Leave me alone.”

She blinked, panting. Her guts and belly were knotted, like the fierce cramps of labor. The light hurt her eyes. She forced herself to see. The floor stretched away shiny past a pair of modish two-tone shoes. Over there was the couch. She pushed herself up to her knees and the claws ripped her as if he were trying to tear a way out through her stomach. She could not straighten. Newrose held his pink hands down to her. His eyes were round as a Styth’s. She shook her head at him.

He spoke to her. She paid no attention. Putting her feet under her, she lurched up and staggered to the couch. Her muscles fluttered with weakness. Her mouth tasted of copper. The jagged edge slashed her stomach. She wiped her drooling mouth on her hand.

“Shall I bring you something?” Newrose danced around her. “Water? A little brandy?”

“No.” Her strength was ebbing. A long pain stabbed into her lungs. She pressed her arms against her body, where her prisoner gnawed her.

“Please,” Newrose said.

She got up onto her feet and started toward the door. Her lungs were burning. She wondered if he could save himself by killing her. Newrose came into her way, and she brushed by him to the door.

“You have to help me.” Newrose pursued her across the anteroom beyond, past his startled aides rising like puppets off their chairs. “I need your help.”

She threw him a wild look. Her throat was closed; she could not speak even if she had wanted to tell him anything. Her breath burned going down. She went out to the hall.

“Miss Mendoza!”

Her knees were buckling. For a moment her lungs froze and she could not breathe, and she nearly panicked. She leaned against the glass wall of the corridor and made herself calm and insisted on breathing and the air crept down her swollen throat. The glass before her was fogged with the breath leaving her. Out there lay the gardens. She started down the hall toward the stairs.

Twice on the steps she fell, and the second time she rolled all the way to the bottom. She nearly lost consciousness. Lying in a knot at the foot of the stairs, her face against the floor, she felt him rising through her, ready to seize her as soon as she weakened, and she throttled him down again. This time it was easy. He was tiring. She got to her knees and pushed herself up to her feet and went across the corridor to the door.

The gardens spread off toward the thick fence of the trees along the golf course. The colors of the flowers were drowned in the blue domelight. The air chilled her cheeks. The pain seemed to be gone, or she was numb to it, but her body felt as if it were melting away. She could not lift her feet, she dragged them along, plowing through the beds of poppies, the peonies and wildflowers.

No, he said, in her mind; not a voice but a thought.
Go back. Take me back
.

She blundered on through the heavy branches of the deodars to the edge of the sweeping lawns of the golf course. Behind her someone shouted her name: she thought it was Ketac. She let her body down to the ground, her dense flesh like mud, all the feeling gone, and shut her eyes. If she died, he would die.

No. Don’t. No
.

Her will had kept her alive, and she could will her death. Freed of her nature she would reach across the Universe, she would instantly be home.

Tajin
, she thought,
you made a mistake
. He still needed her for shelter. He was her child, her beast, the unimaginable future, which she had nurtured and protected until he was strong and his course was inevitable. She thought,
We are finished with each other
.

Please
, he said.
I’ll do anything you want.

Ketac shouted again, closer. She turned her head to answer.

“I’m getting rid of her.”

She raised her head, coming awake in a start. She was lying on her bed, alone, with her clothes on. She could not remember anything beyond the moment when Ketac found her lying on the grass. The door to the next room was open and voices came through it: Junna’s now.

“You can’t kill her, Pop.”

Sliding off the bed, she went to the open door and stood on the threshold. The back of her neck hummed. Ketac was directly in front of her, his broad shoulders blocking her view of the room. He said, “I don’t see how you can even think of killing her.”

“She’s malicious,” Tanuojin said. “And she’s perverse. Whatever I think she believes the opposite, to spite me.”

Paula went by Ketac and stood between him and the wall. Junna faced Tanuojin, who was sitting on the couch. Tanuojin was excited; the measure of it was that he did not notice her.

“She’s your friend,” Junna said.

“She has never been my friend. We have always hated each other.”

Ketac was staring at her. She said, “I’m thirsty. Bring me a glass of water.” Tanuojin had seen her. He was unexcited. He was simply refusing to look at her.

Junna said, “You can’t kill her, Papa, she hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“I said I would get rid of her. I didn’t say I’d kill her.”

Paula looked down at his head. Studiously he avoided her glance. He could not help but see her in his mind. Ketac came back with a cup of cold water. She went back into her bedroom to change her clothes.

Red sand blasted the window. Paula glanced down at the holograph, in which
Ybicket
was flying through a blizzard of green lights. She tipped her head up again toward the window. Junna said, in the drive seat, “Do you have a temperature for the geosphere?”

“About 30 degrees at the bottom margin. There’s a change in density up ahead in the gas that looks like a clearing. Bearing course plus 72.” Tanuojin pushed the radio deck up and pulled out the scan on its hinge from the wall.

Ybicket
swooped into a shallow gliding descent. They flew out of the dust storm. Paula stood up in her seat to see. The sand was rippled like a washboard into red dunes. Against it the hard blue sky blazed with sunlight. The light glared on a lake ahead of them.

“We’re about three thousand feet above the geosphere,” Tanuojin said. He was in the kick-seat navigating. “Where are you leveling off?”

“Pretty soon. You should feel the ship. She’s really hoopy, but the gravity’s like the deep Planet.”

“Saba used to say flying in the Earth was more risky than fighting.”

“Over there.” Paula pressed her nose against the window. “Down over the lake.” Ahead, the sun caught on a jagged glassine edge at the shore. They flew low over the choppy water and passed the broken shell of a dome, rising a thousand feet above them. Sand was drifted like a tide along its sheer flank. Sand was filling the lake.

“Alm’ata,” Paula said.

Junna took the ship up steeply over the ring of mountains. They flew on above ridges of high rock, bleak as iron bones. The window was cold against her cheek. The two Styths complained of the bright sun and put their helmets on. They passed the ruin of another dome. Night covered them. Paula sat back. She looked up at Luna like a silver mask in the sky.

“Go around to the light side again,” Tanuojin said. “Paula, put your helmet on.”

They climbed and raced around the Planet into the day. Junna took them along a northerly coastline. Paula looked out over the shore, deeply embayed, into the hills in the distance. The air along the horizon was brown with dust. Below the ocean laid an edge of foam along the narrow beach.

“Junna, take her down,” Tanuojin said. “At the water’s edge. Do you see that lump of mineral down there? Sit down, Paula.”

The needle ship dropped its nose toward the ground. She sat down, craning her neck to see over the bottom edge of the window. Below, the water foamed along a strip of beach. A boulder broke the surf, weed streaming green along its base. The ship upended smoothly and settled down on her tail, so that Paula was lying on her back in the deep seat. Tanuojin climbed up next to her in the vertical lane between the seat and the wall.

“Watch out for the radiation,” he said to Junna.

Paula got to her knees on the flat back of her seat. Junna swung the hatch out, and a burst of cool fresh air swept in over her face. A bird shrieked just outside. The sunlight was brilliant. Tanuojin took her by the arm and helped her to the hatch and lowered her down to the sand of the beach.

The air smelled of salt. It was warm, and she pulled open her pressure suit. Two brown gulls were floating in the air above the ship. Junna ran off along the line of the breakers, away down the beach.

“Here.” Tanuojin handed her flute to her in its case.

She pulled off the sleeves of the suit. “Why is the air fresh here?”

“All this grass is making the oxygen.” He waved his hand toward the inland. On the dunes blades of sawgrass sprouted out of the loose sand. “But it’s only this stretch. Twenty miles that way the air’s foul again.” He nodded down the beach after his son. “Ten or twelve miles the other. Three miles inland.” He stood over her while she tugged her feet up out of the boots of the space suit. “There’s sweet water, and if you work, you can find enough food to live. But you don’t get off this beach until you realize where your place is.”

She stepped out of the pressure suit. “You’d better call your son before he swims to China.”

Tanuojin looked up. Junna’s head bobbed in the ocean, forty feet beyond the breakers. His pressure suit and uniform lay in a heap on the wet sand. Paula took her flute and walked away along the beach. She stopped once and looked back. Tanuojin stood there staring down at the sand at his feet. He would not look at her. Perhaps he could not. She turned and went on her way.