Floating Worlds

by Cecelia Anastasia Holland

  The windowless walls of the car were covered with graffiti. Gaining speed, the train swayed from side to side. She rocked with it, sleepy. Los Angeles was two and a half hours from New York; it would be nearly dawn when she reached her home. On the bench across from her, Bunker sat with the tape purring in his ear. He was spare and lean, even his kinky hair close to his head. He could have been forty, or fifty, or her age. She knew he was older than she was.

  “The Styths don’t know much about us, either,” she said.

  “Not if they want to know about our military.”

  The train sailed wide around a curve. She flung her arm across the back of the seat. He was staring at the wall. Obviously he would say no more than he had to. She aimed her eyes at the figure-covered wall.

  Her flute was gone. She kept it under her bed. Nothing else in her disordered room had been touched, so she knew as if he had signed his name who had taken it. She went next door to An Chu’s room.

  “Shaky John has crooked my flute again.”

  An Chu looked up. “Are you sure it was him?”

  “I will be.” She tipped up the lid to the other woman’s sewing box. An Chu kept her sequins and sparkles in little plastine bags. Paula shook one empty.

  “You shouldn’t accuse people when you aren’t sure.”

  “Hunh.” She took the little bag and went across the common room to the kitchen.

  Three people stood at the sink, singing an obscene round and washing dishes. Water puddled the floor. She opened the cupboard over the stove and filled up the plastine bag with baking soda. The boisterous singing followed her out again. She went down the other hall to the third door on the left and knocked.

  “Go away.”

  She tried the latch. The door was locked. John’s plaintive voice called, “Go away.” She felt in her pockets, found her pay envelope, slid the edge through the seam in the door and lifted the hook on the inside.

  “Hey!”

  She went into a dark, stinking room. The floor was caked with rotting food. The mattress against the far wall smelled of piss and mildew. John sat huddled on it, his arms crooked up to his chest.

  “Why you coming in here?”

  “Why you stealing my flute? Where is it?”

  He was trembling. He curled up on the mattress. “Let me alone.”

  Paula crouched before him. At her feet was an apple core fuzzy with mold. She kicked it away. She took the plastine bag out of her jacket pocket and waved it at him. He straightened slowly out of his curl. His face was broken out and his nose dripped. He scratched around in his crotch, his eyes on the bag.

  “Where is it?” she said.

  “Don’t have it. You can look. Let me—” He reached for the bag. She drew back, holding it in the air above her head.

  “Where is it?”

  “Don’t have it. Pi-please, Paula. I’m sick. Look how sick I am.” He held his shaking hands out. “You can’t be mad at me, Paula.”

  “Where’s my flute?”

  “Sold it. I sold it. Don’t have it any more.”

  She clenched her teeth. “Who bought it?”

  “I’m sick.” His fingers dug into his armpits, his hair. His clothes stuck to him. “I’m real sick.”

  “John! Who bought my flute?”

  “B-Barrian. Barrian.”

  “How much?”

  “Please—”

  She shook her head. He was playing sick, mostly; if he whined enough, people gave him money to score just to be rid of him. There were several running bets in the commune on how long it would take him to die. She said, “John, how much?”

  “Forty dollars.”

  She muttered, “Forty dollars.” Of course he had none left. She threw the plastine bag down on the stinking mattress. He lunged for it.

  “John, if you do this to me once more, I’ll make your life miserable. Even more miserable. You hear me?”

  He was scrambling around, looking for his works. “Sure, Paula. You’re a good girl.” With his shaking hands he lit a candle to cook the soda he thought was morphion. She went out.

  Barrian’s was a music store in the underground mall south of the campus. She stood looking at a violin in a glass case while the shopman talked to another customer. The violin’s body was burnished to a chestnut glow. A small sign identified it by a Latin name and the date A.D. 1778. It was nearly four thousand years old. She went up to the counter.

  “A loadie came in here over the weekend and sold you an ebony flute.”

  The shopman had white hairs growing out of his ears and nose. “That’s right,” he said. “And a beauty it is, too.”

  “It’s mine.”

  “Not any more.” He tapped the glass counter. She looked down. On the velvet-covered shelf, her flute lay in its open box. A small sign on it gave it a Latin name, an age of fifty years, and a price of six hundred dollars.

  She said, “If you look under the lip with a magnifying glass, you’ll find my name. Paula Mendoza.”

  “We bought it in good faith.”

  “For forty dollars.”

  The shopman smiled at her. “Of course, if you pay our price—”

  “I’ll give you back the forty dollars.”

  “Sorry.”

  She drew in a deep breath. Paying out forty dollars would reduce her to eating rice for the next week, until she was paid again. Six hundred was impossible. She tapped her fingers on the counter.

  “I want my flute.”

  “I can see that. The price is six hundred dollars.”

  “I work for the Committee.”

  “I’m very happy for you.”

  “Give it back, or I’ll go through our files and find something on you.”

  “You’ll be looking a long time, we’re honest.”

  She went off around the shop. On the wall, in plastic clips, hung swatches of paper music. She could try to steal the flute, but the shop, being underground, was tight against thieves, and the glass case was probably locked. She could borrow the money. Save it over weeks. Maybe Tony would loan it to her. A fat boy with frizzy blond hair down to his waist came into the shop, a guitar over his shoulder.

  “Wait.” She intercepted him. “Please let me talk to you a minute.”

  The boy swung the ax down between them, “Sure.”

  “Please don’t buy anything here. A junkie stole my flute and sold it to them for a ridiculous low price and they won’t sell it back to me.”

  The boy’s blue eyes looked past her. The shoulder of his shirt was ripped. He swayed the guitar gently against his knees. Finally, he said, “Check,” and left.

  The shopman came around the counter at top speed. “You can’t do that.”

  She showed him her teeth. “Watch me.”

  “Get out.”

  She went out the door, into the dark subway walk, and loitered under the red sign marking the shop. A man in a plaid shirt started in; she talked to him, but he went in anyway. For half an hour she walked up and down before the door, until the shop closed.

  The next day she called Michalski at the office and told him where she would be, and she sat down in front of Barrian’s and told everybody who would listen that the shop was stealing her flute in collusion with a junkie. Most people ignored her. Some argued. A few turned away. Barrian’s people tried to chase her off. An Chu brought her lunch. The day following, when she called the Committee, Michalski said she had been given a week’s unpaid leave. She took a chair to Barrian’s. A man from the hourlies came and interviewed her. Every half hour the shopman from Barrian’s threw buckets of water on her. She talked to everybody who went into the store. Two out of three did business there anyway.

  Tony was unsympathetic. “You shouldn’t own something you can’t afford to lose. You’re a hostage to your possessions. Property is theft.”

  Shaky John was still angry with her for burning him, but she gave him five dollars, and he sat in front of Barrian’s for a day and fired himself up, hour after hour, with m
orphion, aspirin, barbiturate, horse-downer, distilled water, plastic blood, and milk. Without even talking he turned more people away from Barrian’s in one hour than she had in four days. That evening, the shop sold her back her flute for fifty dollars.

  The little tree outside her window put forth pink flowers. Michalski told her it was a dogwood. She spent hours in her office watching the progress of its bloom.

  She had dinner with Tony and they went to a reading of Aeschylus at the university. Tony insisted on leaving at the intermission because the translation was so bad. They sat in a booth in the campus bar and he explained to her that the heart of Greek tragedy was ritual appeasement and no anarchist could ever fathom that because ritual was meaningless to anarchists.

  “How can you say that?” she said. “You can understand something without committing yourself to it, can’t you?”

  “Only in the head, Paula. Not in the gut.” He folded his napkin into quarters. He had already lined up the sauceboats, both their glasses, and the salt and pepper dishes and match-lighter. “You miss the whole absoluteness of the thing. The whole sense that there is nothing else. The self-punishing aspect of nonconformity.”

  Paula set her chin in her hand. She wondered if Tony ever enjoyed anything. It occurred to her that she had heard all this before from him, that he had already told her everything he would ever say to her. She got up and went through the dark barroom toward the door.

  She cut across the park toward the round house of the Biochemistry Building. When he shouted at her, behind her, she stretched her stride. She thrust her hands deep into her jacket pockets. The domelight silvered the grass. Tony galloped up beside her.

  “I’m sorry.” His arm slid around her waist. “Maybe you’re pregnant and that’s why you’re so sensitive lately.”

  “I’m not pregnant.”

  They walked down a slope through the birch trees. A deer bolted away from them. She heard low voices in the dark bushes ahead of them and swerved off to avoid the people there.

  “Tony,” she said. “Good-bye.”

  “What?”

  He stopped, and she turned to face him; she could not see him in the dark, but she knew how he looked, she knew him far too well. She said, “Good-bye, Tony,” and went away through the trees.

  The open room of her commune was dark. She stepped across a man asleep on the floor to reach the videone and took a slip of paper out of her box. She stuffed it into her pocket and went down the hall to An Chu’s room. The girl was a long still shape under her bedclothes.

  Paula sank down on the narrow bed in the darkness. “Wake up.” She shook her by the shoulder. “I just broke with Tony.”

  An Chu murmured, still half-asleep, wrapped in blankets, warm against Paula’s hip. In the quiet Paula could hear water dripping in the bath across the hall. Tony would take her back, if she asked him. But she did not want him. She would end up like her mother and father, alone all her life.

  “Paula?”

  “I’ll talk to you in the morning.” She went next door, to her room, turned on the light, and remembered the message.

  “Paula Mendoza,” it read. “Meeting room tomorrow at 10:30. Melleno has answered. RB.”

  When she went into the Committee office, half a dozen people were packed around the videone in the corner. She stopped to see what they were looking at.

  The screen was off; the newsband was on. “—Damage estimated in the millions. Thus far the reports list no dead and thirteen injured, with eighty-seven missing. Both attacking Styth ships escaped apparently without damage. Repeating the lead line: the Martian-ruled asteroid Vesta has sustained a space-to-surface attack by Styth ships. This is a—”

  She went down the corridor to the meeting room in the L. She was early. Only Michalski was there, sorting mail into stacks. Rubbing her sweating palms together, she went around the book-covered room.

  “What’s the message?”

  “Bunker has it. He was on night duty when it came in.” Michalski shook the papers before him into neat piles. “I don’t know anything, I just work here.”

  “Have you heard any jabber about the raid on Vesta?” She took off her jacket and dropped it across a chair. “There must be two brands of Styths, ones who shoot and ones who talk.” Or they were turning down the negotiation.

  Bunker came into the room, his papercase in one hand. He swung it flat onto the table and unsnapped the clasps. “I don’t follow all these large gestures.” He took out a transparent page. Paula reached for it and he held it away from her.

  “Don’t be grabby, junior.” He gave the page to Michalski. “Transcribe this.”

  Michalski left the room. Bunker sat down, his eyes on Paula. “I don’t know what it says, except that it’s relatively long. You heard about the attack on Vesta?”

  “Yes. What does that mean?”

  “Emphasis, I guess.”

  Talking behind her, Jefferson backed in the door. She wore a red suit that made her look massive. Michalski followed her in, his cheeks ruddy. He had a tape plug in one hand. He dropped it into the socket in the table and pressed a button.

  A sexless computer voice said, “By Melleno, in Saturn-Keda. We have received your message. We know what the Committee for the Revolution is and what your request really means. Since the beginning the Sun-worlds have robbed us and lied to us. Now when the Empire is great, you beg for our friendship. Nothing you can say will change the course of justice. If you want to talk, you must show the good faith. You submit the names of your people and the places you can meet us, and we will choose your agent and the place and moment. Answer by this light band. Ended. Melleno.”

  Paula bounced in her chair. The tape shut off with a double click. Jefferson settled herself in her chair. “Congratulations,” she said to Paula. She opened her purse and took out a hard-cooked egg and a paper twist. “I missed breakfast.”

  Bunker shook his head. “Curious.”

  “How many ships attacked Vesta?”

  “Two. One lured the patrols off and the other got in and out in eighty-five seconds, shooting all the way.”

  Paula stood up, excited. “Then Melleno must not be connected with the raiders.”

  “Not necessarily,” Bunker said. “At the moment, Vesta happens to be directly in line with Uranus and the Earth. It could be a warning.”

  Jefferson opened out the paper twist and rolled the egg in salt and pepper. “The message came from Saturn.”

  Bunker slid down in his chair, his hands on his flat stomach. “Uranus is the brain of the Empire.”

  “He didn’t say anything about the rAkellaron,” Paula said. Michalski was still standing at the foot of the table. “Give me a copy of that.” He bent over the recorder.

  “He said ‘we.’”

  “He also said ‘Answer by this light band.’” She dropped back into her chair. “The rAkellaron meets in Vribulo.”

  Jefferson said, “I favor Mendoza’s interpretation. Obviously Melleno dissents from Machou’s authority.” She ate part of the egg. “Didn’t you say Melleno was once the Prima Akellar? What was that about the course of justice?”

  Paula made circles with her fingertip on the table. The recorder paid out a long tongue of paper, and Michalski ripped it off, like taking an hourly out of the dispenser. She grabbed the page away from him. Another copy was rolling out of the table. She put the letter down flat in front of her.

  “Hurrah,” she said.

  “What shall we answer?” Jefferson said. “The three of us as possible negotiators—”

  “Start with a preamble on the purity of our motives,” Bunker said. He reached across the table for the next copy.

  “Where can we meet them? Mendoza, what do you think?”

  “What about Titan? It’s more like the Earth than a Gas Planet. And we could see more what they’re like.”

  Bunker wrote on his copy of the letter. “That’s probably their idea, to look at us. I don’t think they’ll want a look at Titan.”r />
  Michalski brought Jefferson a pad of paper, and the old woman busied herself in her purse. Looking for a stylus. Nothing will change the course of justice. Paula traced a line under the sentence. Maybe they were the raiders. She could not see how it all fitted, Machou’s indifference, the raid on Vesta, Melleno’s offer to talk. Except if Bunker was right, and they wanted to take a reconnaissance.

  “Let’s see where they want to go,” she said. “Give them a choice of Mars or the Earth.”

  Jefferson was writing. Her pen jigged across the yellow paper. “Where on Mars?”

  “What about the Nineveh Club?” Bunker said.

  Paula laughed. Jefferson put her forearms on the table. “Isn’t that some kind of sex club? Wine enemas and trained dogs?”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “The Styths won’t negotiate a walk to the door with a woman,” Paula said. “They’ll certainly choose him.” She glanced at Bunker. “You mean you do have fun sometimes?”

  Jefferson hooted in a piercing voice. “I think she’s warming to us, Richard. Good. The Nineveh Club. Where shall we have them on the Earth? Tahiti?”

  “That’s fine with me,” Bunker said.

  “I’ll give them New York. If they have the good sense to come here, they should see us at our most confusing.”

  “We have an added starter.” He put his head back against the back of his chair. His glance flicked toward Paula. “Has either of you ever heard of the Sunlight League?”

  Paula turned her gaze toward Jefferson. The old woman said, “A political club, isn’t it? Fairly recent.”

  “An anti-Styth political club,” Bunker said. “With some important members. Martian, I think, most of them. Also anti-Committee.”

  “Naturally,” Jefferson said. “Where did you hear about the Sunlight League?”

  Bunker flicked at the papers in front of him with his finger. “Around.”