He sauntered off behind the bar. The Akellar, with nothing else to look at, was watching her. He said, “I haven’t seen that other—that white woman around. Your friend.”
“My friend. You mean Cam Savenia? She left.”
He liked that; he made an approving sound in his chest. “You know her, don’t you?” he said, and stopped, his eyes on the mirror again. Another pretty woman was coming into the bar.
Paula sat back. The barman put a bell-glass of brandy and ice cream in front of her, and she paid him. The Styth ignored her; he was staring at women. She smothered her irritation. She saw a way to use what he was giving away about himself. She took the spoon out of the glass and sipped the creamy brandy. The object of his stare had disappeared out of the room and he turned back to her.
“What’s that you’re drinking?”
She spooned up ice cream and brandy and held it out to him. He put his head back to look at it, suspicious, and finally opened his mouth and let her feed him. She said, “I worked for Cam once. We don’t know each other very well.”
He savored the ice cream. “That’s good. What is it?”
“Ice cream.” She took another sip of the brandy, cooled and sweetened with the melting milky dessert. He turned sideways on the stool, facing her, his elbow on the bar. She said, “I—,” and broke off. She had lost his attention again to a woman leaving the bar.
“I can’t get used to all these women going around with their faces uncovered,” he said. He reached for his glass. Paula spooned up another bite of the ice cream. She started to eat it, but his eyes followed it, and she offered it to him. He ate it eagerly.
“Mars is a strange place,” she said. She swirled the brandy in the glass. “I have these fish in my wall, swimming around. Of course, this being Mars, they’re probably plastic.” She drank the last of the liquor and pushed the glass away across the bar. “Come up and look at them and tell me if they’re plastic.”
Now his eyes were fixed on her, and he smiled. The smile made him look much younger. He said, “Do you have any of that whiskey left?”
“I have another bottle.”
He got up off the bar stool. They went out the door.
The sun was going down. Long hazy light struck across the garden and penetrated in shafts into the room. She pulled the curtains closed and poured them each a glass of whiskey. They sat on the couch opposite the aquarium.
“What is the Earth like?” he asked. “Like this?”
She shook her head. She was sitting in the curved limb of the couch. “The Earth is the original of which Mars is the copy.”
“Then it is like this.”
She put her glass down on the table, untouched. Toeing off her shoes, she folded her legs under her. “No. You’d have to go to the Earth to see the difference. Do Styths kiss?”
“I don’t know. I don’t recognize the word.”
She knelt beside him, facing him, and leaned forward and put her mouth against his. His mouth was unresponsive. She touched his lips with her tongue, her hand on his shoulder, and his arm went around her waist. A rush of his heavy metallic scent surrounded her. He twisted, pushing her down under him on the couch.
“You’re hurting me.” She could not breathe. Her face was smothered against his shoulder. “You’re too heavy.”
He straightened up on his arms. She could scarcely breathe in the dense fragrance he was giving off. When she kissed him again, his skin was warm, almost feverish. They got up and undressed. His body was perfect. Dressed, he simply looked massive. His broad chest swelled into his back, the muscle and bone smoothly shaped down to his long waist. He had an erection. They lay down side by side on the couch. His skin warmed her. While she explored him with her hands and her mouth she tried to get used to his scent. All in silence they joined together. His eyes closed, as if he were doing it alone. She rubbed herself down on his thick stalk, her hand on his hip, intent on the swelling tension in her groin.
The couch was too narrow. They went down to the floor and handled each other, moving around each other almost without speaking. He was so tall she could not kiss his face when he was inside her. The watery light from the aquarium rippled over his chest. She touched him all over, to see what he liked. Her body swelled closed around him. He took her hips in his hands and drove himself into her, gasping.
“Oh, Jesus.”
She sat back, pleased, her legs across him, and gave him the full tumbler of whiskey. His arms stretched out over his head. For a long while they stayed as they were, the man lying on his back on the floor, and Paula beside him, without saying anything. She felt revenged on him for his condescension. The videone buzzed. She ignored it and it buzzed again.
“Aren’t you going to take that?” he said.
“It’s just my boss.”
“What would he do if he knew we were here like this?” His hand slipped over her thigh.
“Not he, she. Sybil Jefferson.”
“How many men have you had?”
“You aren’t a personal friend.”
His fingers pressed and stroked over the inside of her thigh. His claws grazed her. “Which means what?”
“That I won’t answer a personal question.”
“A lot.” Patterns of light from the aquarium lay across his face like a mask. “How did I do?”
“You didn’t talk,” she said, “which I liked.”
He turned his face toward the aquarium. He was cooling off, and she swung her legs across his body and sat beside him. His cock had drawn back inside the sheath of his foreskin. With her fingers she traced the heavy muscles of his chest. He had no hair on his chest. He wasn’t perfect after all. He put his hand on her hand and pressed her palm against him.
“So it’s not personal, this—” He caressed himself with her hand. “Then it’s business? Are you trying to sell me something?”
“Sell you something?”
“I’ve heard an anarchist can sell anything to anybody.”
“What do you want?”
“The only thing you have that interests me is that whiskey.” He folded his arms behind his head. His scent had disappeared.
“Good,” she said. “I’ll send you a case every aphelion for the rest of your life. Courtesy of the Committee.”
His teeth flashed in a white smile. “Are you serious?”
“I’ll make it two cases.”
“Do it.”
She touched his stomach. His skin was velvet black. “Do you believe in god?”
“I believe in Planck’s Constant and the speed of light. Truth at 186,000 miles per second. What else are you going to sell me? A little philosophy?”
“The Council wants to establish permanent embassies with the Empire.”
“We don’t treat with other governments. The only law in the system is Styth, the rest of you are all outlaws. There’s nothing you can offer us except to submit to us.”
“You didn’t listen to me.”
He pushed her hand away from him. “I don’t have to listen to you—you listen to me.”
“I said that was what the Council wants, not what I want.”
Between his round black eyes two short vertical lines appeared. He rolled smoothly onto his feet. “You think you can talk around me.” His clothes were scattered about the room, and he collected them. Paula sat watching the fish. He sat on the couch and pulled his leggings on. Instead of underwear he wore a kind of cup to protect his organs. He hung a medal on a chain around his neck. The marking in the heavy disk was the sign of the fish.
She said, “Actually, what I want is to make you rich.”
He was putting his shirt on. His head emerged through the neck, and he stood up and tugged the shirt down over his body. He sat back down on the couch. She turned her gaze away from him, back to the red stream of fish in the wall.
“How are you going to do that?” he said.
“There’s no trade now between the Middle Planets and your city, is there?”
&nb
sp; “No. You have nothing I want.”
“But there is a lot of smuggling.”
“Not much.”
“Whatever you say.” She watched the fish reverse direction, perfectly aligned. “I could get you a report on it. We estimate about forty to fifty thousand dollars’ worth of goods come and go between Matuko and the Earth every Earthish month.”
“That’s exaggerated.”
“Suppose you brought the smuggling inside the law and controlled it yourself, you’d make that money, instead of the smugglers getting it all.”
He said nothing. She turned around to face him. He had his belt in his hands; after a moment he seemed to remember it was there and rose and slung it around his waist.
“You’re brave,” he said, “offering me a bribe.”
“That’s your word.”
“Why would I sell my people for a couple of thousand nigger dollars?”
She leaned on the couch. “We can negotiate you a contract that would guarantee you one million dollars the first year, a caesium year, climbing to ten million a year by the fifth year.”
There was a long silence. She drew with her fingernail in the yellow plush of the couch. He sat down again to put on his boots.
“It’s still a bribe.”
“Whatever you want to call it. Why don’t you go think about it?”
“I don’t have to think about it,” he said, and walked out. In his wake the door slammed shut, rebounded, and bounced off its track. She tried to shut it but it was stuck halfway open. She took a shower, wrapped herself up in her robe, and went out to the front room again. Jefferson had worked him out, sight unseen: his key was money. She turned out the lights, barricaded the bedroom door with chairs, and went to sleep.
Tanuojin’s bassoon voice said, “You mean she seduced you?”
“I wouldn’t have thought of it myself, looking at her—she’s nothing to look at, is she? What do you think they’re trying to do?”
“They’re trying to buy you.”
Paula was washing her hair in the bathroom sink. The soap smelled of egg. The Akellar’s voice came up from the recorder on the floor by her feet. “How long is a caesium year?”
“It’s a lie. She’s lying. Why do you go soft-headed over any woman who sleeps with you?”
“Ah, shut up.”
“Can you keep her out of her room long enough for me to search it?”
Paula rinsed her hair and turned on the dryer in the ceiling. The Akellar said, “I can think of something to do with her. And she doesn’t cost me fifty dollars an hour, either.”
A strange voice said, “Jesus, it’s hot.” “Jesus” was their favorite expletive. They pronounced the J like a hard g.
“You think it’s hot in here, stud, stand out there in the radiation.” That was Sril, the small one with the wire in his nose. His voice grew louder. “Akellar, I see you get along better with that Earthish woman now.” Several men laughed.
“No,” the Akellar said. “She gets along better with me.”
She took the recorder into the sitting room and listened to it while she collected everything she did not want Tanuojin to find: the wires from the recorder, the devices Savenia had left. The men talked about their ship and the Martian food, which they loved.
“How long is a caesium year?”
“Saba, don’t listen to her!”
“I asked you a question.”
Sulky: “Around twelve hundred watches.”
The Akellar and Tanuojin puzzled her. They talked like equals, intimately, not the way the Akellar talked to the other men, but now and then he leaned over Tanuojin, and Tanuojin always yielded. Now the deep, surging voice said, “I called the ship, while you were down there letting that woman make use of you.”
“Ah?”
“Kobboz says they—”
The wire ran out. She loaded the recorder again, packed everything she was removing from the suite into her satchel, and took it down to the lobby.
“My door is broken,” she said to the clerk.
He was bent over the desk doing the anagram in the ten o’clock hourly. He did not look up. “Did it involve a Styth?”
“Unh—”
“We’ll have to move you to another room.” He circled an answer in red ink. “We’re leaving all that damage for the underwriters’ inspector.”
“Never mind.” She put the satchel on the desk. “I want this kept in the vault.”
He took it away. She went into the restaurant to eat her lunch. While she was sitting at a table near the windows eating a minji and drinking coffee, Lilly M’ka came up and took the chair opposite her.
“The one with the yellow eyes is back.”
“I know that,” Paula said.
“Yes, I guess you have your own ways of finding things out.” The whore straightened the ruffles on her halter top. Paula envied her tiny waist. “I hope you don’t plan on taking any more of my clients.”
“Do you have any more like that?” Paula bit into the minji.
“He’s good, isn’t he?”
Paula swallowed a mouthful of bread and sausage and hot sauce. “He has a beautiful body.”
“He’s a very handsome man. Or haven’t you looked that far?”
Over the girl’s shoulder, at the far end of the room, Paula saw the Akellar coming in the door. “You sound as if you’re in love with him.”
“I have a thing for men who pay cash.”
He had seen them; he was coming toward them. Lilly said, “Besides, he—” and Paula jabbed her chin at him, and the whore turned and saw him. She sat back. The Styth stood beside the table, between them, looking from one to the other.
“Hello, Saba,” Lilly said. She got up, taking her shoulderbag off the back of her chair.
“Hello, Lilly.”
“See what I mean?” Lilly said to Paula, and went off across the bar to the door. The Akellar sat down in her place.
“Comparing things?”
Paula drank her milk. “What do we have in common? I thought you were giving up on me.” She pushed her plate out of the way. Lilly was wrong: his features were too coarse to be handsome.
“I may give you another chance,” he said. “After all, you’re just a woman.”
“You broke my door.”
“One of my crew will fix it. Come outside with me. It’s like a hot-box in here.”
She went with him out to the park. She had gotten up well after noon, and the sun was falling toward the horizon, the domelight was coming on. He stayed in the cool and shade of the great deodar trees that lined the golf course. The ground was deep in spongy grass, even where the trees’ cloaking branches kept the light out all day long. Paula lagged behind him. On the far side of the path he stopped to let her catch up. Two Martians in knee-length pants, a man and a woman, were coming toward her. Another man in the hotel’s livery pulled a cart full of golf clubs after them. She paused to let them pass.
“Stunning little negress,” the woman said.
The man had seen the Akellar, standing in the deep shadow on the far side of the path. He hurried the woman on. Paula went up beside the Styth, and the Martians gave her another, harder look.
“They hate us together,” he said. “They don’t like us one at a time but they hate us together.”
The sun had gone down. They went into the cool open ground of the golf course. Paula walked fast and he walked slow. He bent to take her hand.
“Are you married?” she said.
“Four times. Two of them are back with their fathers where I should have left them in the first place.”
Holding his hand made her uncomfortable. They were coming to a bridge and she used the chance to free herself. She went ahead of him across the bridge.
“How many wives are you allowed?”
“As many as I can keep.” He kicked at the ground, tore up a piece of turf, and bent to touch it. “My father had twenty-three wives. He was a greedy son of a bitch.” He pulled apart the bi
t of turf in his hands. “This isn’t real, is it?”
“Nothing here is real, Akellar.”
There was no wind; the Nineveh dome was too small for wind. The golf course swept off before them, blue-white in the domelight, toward the white three-story block of the hotel. The yellow glow of windows studded it. He said, “We want to go to the Earth.”
“We. Who’s we?”
“I. Ybix. My ship.”
She went off down the smooth lawn, her back to him. “What’s a ybix?”
“It’s a fish.” He caught up with her. His cold fist closed around her hand again. “It’s one of my family emblems.” His fingers were cold. His grasp held her too close to his side; she felt like a child next to his height and bulk.
“What was your ship’s Martian name?”
“Martian? My father built Ybix.”
“I thought your ship was Martian.”
“The hull was Martian-built. Metal is scarce, in Styth. My father captured the original ship off Jupiter and tore out her guts and rebuilt her.” The golf course dipped away. She scrambled down the grassy bank beside him. He said, “Martian ships are fuel-driven. Laser-imploded hydrogen plasmas. My ships are crystal-driven. There isn’t a ship in the Council Fleet that could stay in the same space with Ybix for five minutes.”
She tugged on her hand in his grip. He tightened his hold on her. In the dark sweep of grass, the sand trap in the embankment glinted white and blue. They sat down in the cool sand.
“Why don’t you like me to touch you?”
“Please let go of my hand.”
At last he did. She clasped her fingers over her knees. He said, “You weren’t faking—back in your room. You liked it then.”
“I just don’t favor being dragged around, that’s all.”
He kissed her. She showed him a few more ways to use his tongue and his lips. He began to shed his scent. That reminded her of the night before, which excited her; she enjoyed the smell. They lay back in the sand. She fingered his shirt. It was heavy, some kind of armor.
He said, “Are you going to take me to the Earth?”
“I can try. It would help if it looked as if you were cooperating.”
“By taking your bribe?” He unfastened her blouse down the back. She let him peel her clothes down. His body heat kept her warm. “Are all Earthish women this little?”
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