“I keep telling you,” Saba said to Fisher. “I’m not here to talk to you. I’m here to talk to her.” He nodded toward Jefferson. “Now, you can shut—”
Fisher’s nostrils flared, yellowish. He turned to the old woman at the end of the table. “Do I have to put up with this?”
Saba said, “Shut your mouth, or we will talk where you can’t hear us, and you won’t know anything.” The big Styth’s hands thumped the arms of his chair. He wagged his head at Paula. “She does my advance work. If you want some arrangements with me, talk to her.”
The Martian stood up straight off his chair. “You insufferable, arrogant barbarian.” His aides ranked themselves behind him. “I demand an apology.”
“I don’t apologize to niggers,” Saba said, and Fisher started for the door.
“Wait.” Tanuojin caught his arm. Fisher’s eyes glittered. In a sweeping gesture he threw off Tanuojin’s hand and rushed out the door. His aides followed him.
Leno grunted. “I don’t understand any of this.”
Paula dropped the toothpick on the scarred top of the table. She looked behind her at the closet. Jefferson took out her false eye and wiped it on a cloth.
“Officially, we are supposed to be negotiating for the Council.”
Saba put his hands behind his head. “I can’t see why we should maintain your fictions.” Tanuojin sauntered around the edge of the room. Leno had started up, thinking the meeting was over, but now he settled down again.
“I can see how you would consider it a fiction,” Jefferson said. The eyelid fluttered over her empty socket. Tanuojin had wandered around behind her. “We need some organization, and at present the Council serves. Don’t touch me, Yekka.”
Tanuojin’s long face narrowed. He came slowly past her toward Paula. Saba said, “You can’t be our friend and the Martians’.”
“I am nobody’s friend.” Jefferson slipped the eye back into her face. “I am certainly not your friend.”
Paula planted her elbows on the arms of her chair. “He means ally. Don’t get caught on semantics.”
“I’ll avoid it. You may lord it over Fisher, Akellar, but you still are only representative of part of the Empire—one small part.”
“The rest of them will follow me. Most of them. Just as they did with the crystal trade.”
Tanuojin stood behind Paula’s chair. His cold fingers moved down her cheek to her throat. The touch of his claws sent a shudder through her. Saba and Jefferson discussed his influence in the Empire. The old woman was well informed, and a master of such talk: she had him on the defensive within moments. Paula leaned forward, away from Tanuojin’s hand.
“Jefferson, stay on the line, will you? It’s to your advantage to make him look like the Emperor.”
“To maintain your fictions?”
“Life follows art.”
Jefferson laughed. Leno was staring at the wall, his face slack with boredom. Saba said, “You have Fisher in your sleeve. You can control what the Council hears about this.” He gave Leno an oblique look. “We’ll keep up your face in front of Fisher and talk behind him.” He pushed his chair back. Leno jumped out of a doze. “Tomorrow.”
Jefferson said, “As you wish, Akellar.” Her voice was velvet. Everybody stood.
Paula went out to the hall, and Tanuojin came after her. “What did you tell her about me?” He smacked her between the shoulder blades.
“Nothing. She guessed from the way you’ve been pawing Fisher. What’s going on?”
“You really think you can play her against us?”
She looked behind them. Saba was coming after them down the hall, giving Leno an edited version of the talk with Jefferson. Tanuojin went ahead of her out the door. She put her jacket on.
“They are my children,” Tanuojin said. “I’m sick of the way you meddle with my children.”
“Tut tut tut,” Saba said.
“Junna is still a little boy! The next he’ll be taking morphion—” His voice rose, and Paula took the tape plug out of her ear and turned the volume down. She put her feet up on the frayed arm of the couch. None of the Styths was awake yet. A flat blade of sunlight pierced the curtained window opposite her, yellow with dust motes. In her ear Tanuojin and Saba differed sharply about Junna. She picked at the threads on the worn couch cover.
“You and Paula, you both take your crumbs so seriously.”
“You’re such a hypocrite.”
She heard her conversation with them in the car going down to New York, and the meeting with Jefferson and Fisher. Something was missing. She had expected to hear something between them that would tell her where Tanuojin had gone. Glumly she realized they had talked about that before Saba put his clothes on.
“We’re just trying to get rid of the pinch-faced Martian,” Saba told Leno.
The time meter on the wall read ten minutes to noon. At four they were due in New York again. Stacks of bound hourlies cluttered the floor. She sat up and rested her feet on a bundle. In her ear the plug played back the maddening small talk of the trip from New York to New Haven. Maybe she should wire Tanuojin. Plant a homing device on him in case he went somewhere else. That was desperate. She wondered what they would do when they found out she was spying on them.
“What about Fisher?” Saba said. “Did you reach him?”
“When he’s angry he’s clear as water. He saw Savenia over the rest-days, it’s all set up. I’d love to know how much the old woman knows.”
“Paula must have told her not to let you touch her.”
“No. She figured that out for herself. Or Bunker told her.”
“Does Paula know? About the coup.”
She went taut as a wire. Tanuojin said, “No. Not yet.”
“I don’t like treating her as an enemy.”
“Part of her is everybody’s enemy. You heard her tell Jefferson that she’s only interested in what she can get for herself. The bitch. After all we’ve done for her.”
“I also heard her call me the Emperor.”
“That’s how she sells it to you. It sounds a little different when she’s talking to Jefferson.”
“Naturally. Did you check on Ybicsa?”
“Saba, we can’t go back and forth every watch between here and the ship. I hid her in a ditch. Nobody will find her. The League is planning to spring the coup the day we leave. They’ll arrest the Committee first, and then they’ll take us. All we have to do is let them destroy the Committee, and then we step in and save the Earth from the Martians. What could be simpler?”
She yanked the plug out of her ear. Everything fitted. She should have made sense of it before, when Saba was telling her she had to choose.
She sat down on the couch and made herself think about what she would do. There seemed very little choice. The League probably thought they could pull off their plot without enlarging it into a war, and Tanuojin thought he could contain everything in a counterplot. There was too much involved, too many rearrangements, too many people. The coup would spread like bursting atoms. It would stop only when it had brought everything else in the system into a balance with itself. She went down the hall to the library, where the videone was, and called the Committee office in New York.
Jefferson took a long time to answer; or Paula imagined that she did. Paula stood over the cabinet banging her fingers on the screen. The red and white holding pattern on the videone screen split apart to show her Jefferson’s face, tinged green.
“Yes, Mendoza. I—”
“I can’t chat,” Paula said. “The Sunlight League is mounting a coup against the Committee and the Styths. Saba and Tanuojin know about it and intend to use it to wipe you out and grab the Earth.”
Jefferson’s eyes popped round as a Styth’s. “The League. Who?” She leaned forward into the screen, and the green color increased in her cheeks: she looked dead. “Fisher and Savenia?”
“I don’t know anything more,” Paula said. “I’m going up to talk to them—they can help you
if they want to.”
“Mendoza, wait.”
She went out to the hall and up the stairs. The house was quiet enough that she could hear the whisper of the upstairs hall curtains billowing over the open windows. The bed in her room was empty. She went back around the corner to Tanuojin’s room.
They were both there, Tanuojin before the closet putting his shirt on, and Saba lying on his back across the bed. She threw the tape plug at him. “You have one hell of a gall talking about honor.” She slammed the door.
Saba caught the tape. He sat up on the bed. Tanuojin was staring at her with an intent look on his face. She turned on his weakness: Saba. “You pirate. You’re no better than your father. You’re a cheap, sleazy politician, just like Machou.”
“Don’t listen to her.” Tanuojin reached his lyo in one long stride. Saba put the tape into his ear.
“Has she told anybody else?”
Paula looked beyond him at Tanuojin. “If this is all you can do with your mind, you should do it for money in a carnival.”
His heat flared. He pulled back one arm to hit her, and Saba caught him. There was a knock on the door. Paula backed away from the bed. Her head was pounding as if she were feverish.
“What is it?” Saba shouted.
Sril answered him through the door. “Akellar, that fat old woman is on the box downstairs.”
“Jefferson,” Paula said. “Who I told. Talking about choices. What are you going to do?”
Saba still sat on the bed; he looked back over his shoulder at Tanuojin, and she saw in their faces that their minds were set. She started toward the door.
“You can do it without me.”
Saba grabbed her arm. “They’ll kill you.” He pulled her around bodily and pushed her toward Tanuojin. “Send her back to the ship.”
“Akellar,” Sril called.
“I’m coming!” He thrust her into Tanuojin’s grasp and went out the door.
Tanuojin twisted her arm up behind her back and hoisted her over to the unmade bed. “I brought something for you all the way from Yekka, in case this happened.” He let go of her, and she took her throbbing wrist in the other hand. He swung a straight chair down in front of her. In his other hand was a plastic hand-yoke.
“Tanuojin, don’t do it. You’ll lose everything. You can’t manage a war.”
He pulled her arms through the slats in the back of the chair. “I’m not doing anything. It’s nigger eating nigger, just like in the books.” He snapped the yoke onto her wrists.
“Ouch.” The inside edges of the yoke were knife-sharp. The tight fit pinched her.
“Bleed.” He went out. The door shut. She heard the key turn in the lock.
She put her head against the back of the chair before her. In the hall, Sril called some question. Her wrists throbbed in the yoke. She straightened, lifted the chair up on her forearms, and carried it over to the window.
From here she could see the backyard, the barn, and the meadow. The Dutch car was parked beneath the window. The bonnet was tilted up, and Leno bent over the engine. Kasuk walked across the meadow. Her wrists were numb. There was a springtab in the side of the yoke. Her fingers would not reach it, and when she pressed it against the wall, the knife edges of the yoke slit her skin. She cocked her arms up and bit the tab, without result.
Saba spoke in the hall. She turned toward the sound of his voice. No one came in. She took the chair once around the room. The sunlight streamed in the window and stretched across the floor. Leno was still working in the car’s engine. The yoke cut into her wrists. If she broke the back of the chair she could at least free herself of that. She laid the chair down on its side, one end against the bedframe, put her foot on the middle slat, and kicked it out.
Her numbed arms pulsed, swelling up fat, and she sat down a moment to get her breath. A man laughed in the hall outside her door. She stood up again, holding her arms out carefully to balance the yoke. Below the window, Leno slammed the bonnet down on the car. Grease covered his hands. The cook’s white cat was trotting across the meadow toward the trees. A daw flew at it, shrieking, and the cat broke into a gallop. The bird harassed it into the trees.
The door opened behind her. Tanuojin circled the foot of the bed toward her. He kicked the broken chair aside.
“You could get out of anything.”
She stood with her back to the window. The late sun hit his chest. He said, “Saba has Jefferson half-convinced you misunderstood us. I want you to tell her you did.”
She shook her head. “It’s a mistake.”
“It isn’t a mistake. Listen to me. You call yourself an anarchist.” His hand shot toward her into the sunlight, palm up, his claws like hooks. “Then when you come to the crunch you get stuck on some damn rule about being peaceful. This is where we take it all. Are you going to let some idiot weakness about a little bloodshed keep you out of it?”
“What do you know?”
He shouted at her, “I know I need you and you’re letting me down.”
“For my own reasons.” Her fists were clenched. Her wrists hurt. Her whole body shivered with anger. “I’m doing what I want, not what you want, not anybody else—”
“Because you’re a coward.”
“Who is a coward? Why do you do everything you do, your whole life, everything—because you’re afraid—Hit me.” She watched his hand cock back. “Go on, big man, show it off. You’re down on your knees to that Empire, and I’m not, so you have to beat me down to your level.”
She was watching his hand, expecting him to hit her, and to her surprise he lowered it. He said, “One last time, Paula. Join us.”
She turned back to the window and looked out. Her arms hurt. She felt his presence like a pressure against her. Finally he went off around the bed toward the door. Halfway there he stopped.
“You’ll beg me to take you back, Paula. When this is over.”
She ignored him, and he left. She went once more around the little room. Everything was over, her whole life for nothing. He might revenge himself on David. Saba would protect his son. Dark was coming. The colors faded out of the room. Her eyes strained in an ashen darkness. The Styths’ world. She had to get away, she could not live with them any more. The floor rippled under her feet. A wave of heat struck her and carried her into the wall.
A sheet of light blasted her eyes. She dragged herself back to consciousness. She was lying face down on a burning floor. Flames crept toward her along the seams of the floor. Her lip was burned when it had touched the wood.
She pushed herself up on her hands and knees. The walls were burning, and the bed. No use trying the door. She staggered up and went to the window. The curtains burst into flames. The heat made her eyes itch. When she touched the window frame her hands shrank from the heat. The bedtable was beside her, with its lamp and clock. She swept them off the tabletop and picked it up and threw it into the window. The glass burst outward. The curtains had burned to nothing in an instant. She put her head out the opening in the window.
It was Saba’s voice. “Paula! Jump! Hurry!”
Her dazzled eyes could not find him in the dark below her. She put her feet up on the window sill, flinching from the heat, and launched herself into the outside air. He caught her.
The cool air bathed her face. She turned her head away from the fire, still uncomfortably close. Saba took the yoke off her wrists. Somebody was screaming.
“What happened?” Kasuk said, behind her. “Where’s my father?”
“Somebody just bombed the house,” Saba said. “I haven’t made up my mind if it was the Committee or the Sunlight League.”
“Where is Tanuojin?”
“In the barn. There’s seventy bricks of fuel in there. Go help him.”
The young man raced off. Paula raised her arms, scored and welted from the yoke. The fire crackled in her ears. Saba knelt beside her.
“Was it the Committee?”
She shook her head. The whole house roared with the fire
; its rippling orange light brightened the meadow back to the trees. She stood. Leno ran up, his arms pumping.
“We have all the ships safe. And the fuel. The shed is burning now, that’s a hot fire.”
“We have to call Ybix and Ebelos. My scout’s parked in the desert. We can meet the big ships halfway here. You and I and Tanuojin.”
Leno stuck his hands on his hips. “I’m not leaving my crew here.”
“We can pick them up in a watch and a half. Leno, we have to get off the Planet. If they catch any of the three of us, no one has a chance.”
Paula stood watching the house burn. Her face was tender. In a stream four or five men raced around the edge of the heat ball. Sril led them.
“Mendoz’. Somebody said you were in there when it blew up.” He turned toward Saba. “Akellar, Ybix is all here and sound.”
“They got the cook and the cat.” Saba swung around. “Kasuk!” His hand closed on her wrist. She gritted her teeth. Her torn skin stung at his touch. Kasuk came up, smelling of smoke.
“You take care of her,” Saba told him.
“Yes, Saba.”
Saba went off through his men. He was gone in a moment. She backed away from the heat of the fire. The Styths’ faces glistened in its light.
“Come on,” Kasuk said softly. “This is dangerous, standing around here. Junna!” He touched her shoulder, and she went obediently out of the crowd, into the dark, the two young men flanking her.
“Do you know where to meet Ybix?” she asked.
Kasuk glanced behind them. They reached the wood. The flickering light from the fire poked its long fingers ahead of them among the trees.
“I know one thing, which is not to stay around here.”
Junna said, “Where did Gemini go?”
“To Ybix. Tanuojin brought Ybicsa down on the Sun Day.”
A web broke against her face. She scrambled down a short rocky slope through a screen of brush. The roar of the fire dimmed away. Now she heard the soft, particular voices of the crickets and birds around her. Her eyes ached.
Floating Worlds Page 41