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.
On Paula’s left, the tall woman folded her coat over her arm. With the rest of the crowd she moved down toward the wreck. A man climbed over the smashed front end.
“Here’s a radio—I’ll share it with anybody who helps me get it out.”
Paula and Tony went back across the grass toward his place. She turned to look back. There was a whoop of triumph from the crowd clustered around the car. Two men dragged a seat out of the ruin.
“Vultures,” Tony said.
Paula hurried on her cold feet toward the light of his hall. “What’s wrong with salvage?”
“That’s a euphemism. The word is theft.”
“If nobody took anything, the dome would be littered with junk.” She pushed the window in and slung one leg across the sill. By morning every relic of the car would be gone, even the plastic, which brought 1.5 cents a pound at the recycling plant. She and Tony went onto the porch.
Her first meeting in the matter of the Styth Empire was in the same room where she had had her oral examination. When she let herself in, Jefferson sat at the table rummaging through a handbag like a satchel. “Mendoza,” she said. “Richard is late, as you can see. How do you like your office?”
“It’s terrible. The window looks right out on the gulley bank.” She pulled out a chair and sat across the table from the fat old woman. “I have a terrific view of roots and yellow clay.” That was not entirely true, since a spindling tree grew between the window and the bank. So far it had no leaves. She hoped it was dead. Jefferson was peeling the wrap off a roll of mint candy.
“What did you do for Dr. Savenia?”
“Speechwriting. She had two kinds of speeches, personal attacks and issues. I wrote the attacks.”
Jefferson chortled. Her face was papery white and looked soft, like dough. “Were you good? And here comes Richard.”
A flat papercase under one arm, Richard Bunker walked in the open door and shut it behind him. He put the case on the table. “Hello, Mendoza. Sybil.” He had a windbreaker over his shoulder and he hung it on the back of the chair beside Paula. He clicked up the lid of the papercase.
“Where have you been?” Jefferson said. “You know, I do have other things to do now and then besides wait for you.”
“I’ve been in the copying room trying to get the film transcriber to work.” He dropped a thick file onto the table in front of Paula. It was more than an inch thick, held together with plastic clips. She picked it up while Bunker and Jefferson traded jibes on the state of the machines and people of the Committee.
“You can read that later,” Jefferson said to her. “Dick, give her a brief, so we can get on with it.”
He sat down in the chair beside Paula’s, and she shut the file. Bunker said, “In the past thirty-six months there have been twenty-one reported shooting incidents between ships of the Styth Empire and ships from either the Council Fleet or the Martian Army. All these shootings have been below the asteroid Vesta. Eight have been below Mars. The Council wants us—” his voice rose to a singsong, “to negotiate a truce and any other permanent or semi-permanent arrangements necessary to maintain the peace.” He was slumped down in the chair, his head against the back. “The Council never asks us to do anything possible.”
“Shooting incidents,” Paula said. She had heard nothing ab
out any shootings. “Is it serious?”
They both laughed, humorless, and she heard how stupid she had sounded. Jefferson put a candy into her mouth. “More serious is that we can’t seem to reach the Styths.”
“They keep to themselves,” Paula said. Most of the mutant race lived in Uranus, billions of miles away.
“Not any more,” Bunker said. “Do you have any idea why they might be coming here now?”
She shook her head. The Styths had always seemed in a different Universe from the Middle Planets, living in their floating cities far from the Sun. Bunker said, “Do you know what an Akellar is?”
“The chief officer of a Styth city. They have a central council called the rAkellaron. That’s just the plural of Akellar.”
“Yes. We’ve been trying to make contact with the Prima Akellar, a man named Machou.”
“Machou,” she said. “The Vribulo Akellar.”
“You’ve heard of him.”
“One of my teachers was from Vribulo. Machou’s city. If it’s the same Machou.” She frowned, trying to remember everything the three Styth prisoners had said. “Has anybody been killed?”
Jefferson fingered the roll of candy. “Yes, about twenty Martians that they’re admitting. We don’t know about Styths. We don’t even know if all this action constitutes a systematic policy by the Styths or just random piracy. You said one of your Styths was from Vribulo. What about the others?”
“They were both from Saturn-Keda. The chief city of Saturn.” Saturn-Keda was usually the closest Styth city to the Middle Planets. She reached for the thick file and thumbed down the pages. “What’s in this? What do you know about them?”
“Nothing immediately useful,” Bunker said. “Nothing at all.”
“The Saturn Akellar was the Prima Akellar before Machou,” Paula said. “Apparently a very…a great man. He built six or seven new cities and reformed the fleet. Cleaned up the laws. Outlawed infant marriage, that kind of thing. Kind of a liberal. For a Styth.”
“Infant marriage,” Bunker said, in a titillated voice.
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