Floating Worlds

by Cecelia Anastasia Holland

  “I dismiss you.” She snapped her fingers at Cam and went out the door. Someone caught her by the arm: a soldier.

  “Let her go,” Rodgers said. He pushed her on across the hall.

  “Dr. Savenia—”

  “Dr. Savenia is a civilian.” Rodgers hurried her into the vertical.

  They went up three flights in silence. Beside her Rodgers stood with his hands clasped behind him, his feet exactly eighteen inches apart. He took her down the hall to the little room.

  “I’ll call General Hanse,” he said. He shut the door on her. The lock turned over.

  She had never been here before without being tied up. There was little to explore. Three strides across by four strides down. The room was without windows. While she was walking around it, the door opened and Bunker was put in with her. The door shut and the light in the ceiling went out.

  “Is this place wired?” she said, in the dark. She sat down with her back to the wall.

  “I don’t think so.” His voice passed her, going down the room. “Why couldn’t you keep out of this?” He sat down against the opposite wall.

  “You gave me to Hanse, you can help me get away.”

  “It won’t be easy. Probably impossible, in fact. You’d be better off staying here.”

  “Have they been working you over?” she asked.

  He made an indefinite sound. For a long while they sat in the dark without saying anything. Finally, he said, “I would love to pay them back. More than anything. I’d pass up getting away to pay them back.”

  “I’d sooner get away.”

  Another silence fell. She got up and walked up and down the room, trailing her fingers over the wall. The seamless plastic felt cold to the touch. There was no way out but the door. Maybe she had misjudged his intentions. Maybe he had no way to escape. She sat down but in a few moments she started to pace around the room again.

  “Don’t step on me,” Bunker said.

  She went around and around the room in the dark, avoiding him. Her mouth was dry with thirst. For eight days she would get no water. Finally she sat down in a corner. Hours seemed to pass, or maybe just minutes. Bunker got up and went down the room to the door. He returned to his place against the wall opposite her.

  She managed to doze. He shook her awake.

  “Let’s go. The guard’s left for a few minutes.”

  Muzzy with sleep, her heart pounding, she followed him to the door. She could hear a faint metallic click, like a combination lock being dialed, and then the door opened. The bright light hurt her eyes. They went into the long empty corridor.

  “Hurry.” He took her arm and pulled her along, and they ran down the corridor, past the vertical and past the door to her room. The guards were all gone. Many of the overhead lights were out. It seemed to be late at night. At the end of the corridor was a door marked EXIT. Bunker led her through it onto a stair landing.

  “Sssh.” He put his finger to his lips. The stairwell was painted glossy gray. She looked up overhead, up the stairs, and went to the rail and looked down.

  “Which way?”

  He started down. She took her shoes off, to keep from making noise, and went after him. The stair treads chilled her bare feet. They passed another door, marked with a big red 5.

  Below them, voices sounded. The hollow of the stairwell distorted them so that she could not make out the words. Bunker stopped. She went by him, cautious, down past the door marked 4, and he came after her. On the third-floor landing she put her head out over the railing.

  On the next landing down was a table, with three men sitting at it. She held her breath, disappointed.

  “Hey, did you hear this one?” said a man on the landing. “How do you tell when an anarchist is lying?”

  She raised her head. Bunker was on the steps above her. She shook her head at him.

  “You got me,” another Martian voice said, below her.

  “His lips are moving.”

  There was general laughter. She climbed back away from it, and Bunker turned and preceded her. At the third-floor landing, he pushed the door open onto the corridor where Cam’s office was.

  “What—”

  He beckoned her after him. The corridor was dark except for a single light over the vertical doors. Her feet sank into the deep carpet and she stopped to put her shoes on. Bunker went ahead of her to Cam’s door, fastened his magnetic key to the lock, and bent to fiddle with it. He had given up on escaping and was going for his revenge.

  She went at a trot down the hall to the vertical. There had to be some way out of the building. She could not take the vertical down for fear of meeting someone else, but there was certainly some other way. A chime rang over her head, and she jumped. The vertical arrow flashed. Someone was coming to this floor. She sprinted back down the hall to Bunker, who was just sliding Cam’s door open. They went into the office.

  “What are you going to do?” She made sure the door was locked again. The office was dark, but as she spoke Bunker turned on a light midway down the room.

  “I didn’t ask you along,” he said. He circled behind Cam’s big desk to the big wheel-file against the wall.

  Paula looked up at Marat, hanging on the wall over the door to Cam’s private lift. The wound in his chest was like a mouth, like his slack mouth. Bunker was trying to open the drawers of the file with his key. She sat in Cam’s chair and tried the desk drawers.

  They were unlocked. She yanked them out and turned the contents over in a heap on the floor. When she tipped over the deeper drawer on the bottom shelf, a mass of photographs and slides fell out, and a little white egg rolled after. She picked it up.

  “Dick.”

  He turned, and she held Sybil Jefferson’s eye under his nose. He sucked in his breath. When he put his hand out to take the eye, she closed her fingers over it and put it in her pocket.

  Bunker pushed the file box. “I can’t open this. It must be important.” He gave the box a savage kick.

  Paula took the cigarette lighter off the desk and knelt by the pile of papers and film on the floor. “They killed her.” She held the flame to the edge of a photograph.

  “That’s your diagnosis, is it?” He punched the call button on the vertical several times with his thumb.

  “You need a key for that, too.”

  The flames caught and ran over the heap of papers. The holographs burned better than anything else, and she took one by the corner and torched the rest. Bunker was pushing and rocking the waist-high round file cabinet.

  “I have an idea. Help me.”

  She helped him push the box up onto two legs. It fell over onto its side and he caught it before it toppled onto its back.

  “Now.”

  The door of the vertical slid open easily, exposing the empty shaft. They propped open the door with a chair and pushed and groaned and heaved at the file box until it rolled like a wheel between the wall and the desk toward the vertical. Paula’s fire was beginning to light the carpet. She rushed around ahead of the file, pushed the chair through into the shaft, and held the door open, and Bunker guided the rolling file through the gap. It crashed below. Bunker leaned after it. He braced the door open.

  “Look what happened.”

  She put her head over his shoulder out into the shaft. The file had broken into the car parked in the basement of the shaft. Bunker stretched his arm toward the back wall and caught a heavy cable hanging down from the darkness above. He yanked hard on it to test it. The fire leaped crackling in a burst toward the ceiling. Paula wrinkled her nose at the smoke. Bunker swung himself into the shaft, clinging to the cable, and climbed down hand over hand.

  An alarm bell in the ceiling clanged. Bunker was scrambling through the hole torn in the roof down into the vertical car, Paula wrapped her hands around the cable. Using her leg around the cable to brake herself, she slid down after him.

  Voices sounded in the room she had just left. She jumped down into the vertical car. The floor was covered with l
oose film. Her feet slipped out from under her and she landed on her backside.

  “Hurry up. I can’t see.”

  She went after Bunker out the car’s usual door, into a vast darkened room. She could tell by the sound his voice made that it was large but not empty, and she smelled dust and cardboard and guessed it was a storage basement. Now, about twenty feet away, she made out a faint gray oblong. A window. She grabbed Bunker by the sleeve and towed him through the room toward it. They met a wall of boxes and climbed over them. Two or three alarm bells were ringing insistently overhead. She put her hand out and touched the wall. The window was an arm’s length over her head. She felt over it for a latch. Bunker put his arms around her legs and boosted her up so high a spiderweb draped itself over her face. She found the latch and the window swung open. They crawled out to the cool open air.

  “Put that thing away.”

  She cupped her other hand over the false eye. “I keep thinking we ought to do something with it.”

  They were walking toward the west wall of the dome. All the trees in the park had been cut down, and the ground was cluttered with stumps. It was like a wasteland. No birds sang and all the animals were gone. She sat on the edge of a gulley and slid down the bank. A cascade of dirt and stones followed her to its foot.

  The Martians would probably find out almost immediately that they were gone. Sooner or later Cam’s police would catch them again. She thought of Jefferson, who had been caught, and drew her left hand out of her pocket. Opening her fingers, she looked down at the false eye.

  “Here.” Bunker snatched it out of her hand. His arm cocked back and he flung the thing off into the dark, out of the gulley.

  “What did you do that for?”

  He went off at a fast walk along the floor of the gulley. An air car droned across the dome over her head. Red lights flashed in the sky. At the end of the gulley was a house built back into the hillside. A row of garbage bins flanked it. As soon as she and Bunker approached, a dog began to bark inside the house. The garbage bins were head-high. She climbed up onto the edge of the first one and dug out a moldering sack full of squeezed oranges and coffee grounds.

  “Where did you get that key?” she asked Bunker.

  He leaned over the edge of the bin and groped around in the heap of garbage. “I made it. They gave me a keyboard.”

  She turned half an orange inside out, ate off the pulp, and threw the hull back into the bin. “To write letters? Did you write their correspondence? You don’t know the language very well. What was this exchange about?”

  “The Styths have two pilots Hanse thinks he needs. He offered them money but they aren’t having any.”

  “Who mentioned me?” The dog was barking steadily in the house. She found a heel of soggy bread and bolted it down.

  “Nobody in my hearing. The Styths said they wouldn’t take money but they might consider meat. Their term. And henceforth in this matter Hanse could communicate in the Common Speech. That was the last I heard.” He jumped down and went to the next bin. “Here. You can use this.” He dragged something large out of the bin: a heavy coat, missing one sleeve.

  They ate until they were satisfied and went on. Without trees, the land looked strange, flat, naked, vulnerable. Bunker led her along at a fast walk. There was no wind and the air smelled dry, dusty, and bitter. They came to a building scooped hollow like a grave. The below-ground floors had been bombed out.

  “Well,” Bunker said, “so much for that.” He sat down heavily on the ground.

  Paula went to the edge of the pit. She guessed he had lived here. The destroyed building gaped below her. She sat down next to Bunker and put her arm awkwardly around his shoulders, and he raised his head.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t you find it comforting?”

  He snorted up a laugh. “Junior, comfort maketh the mind dull.”

  Day was coming. The eastern wall of the dome shone with fresh light. Her arm hung around his neck. He resisted; he would not rest on her. She took her arm away and buried her hands in her lap.

  They sheltered in the ruins, in a forest of melted plastic drippings. She woke with the sunlight shining in her face. Bunker lay beside her. He had her shirt open down the front; his hand cupped her breast. She put her arms out to him.

  “That was nice,” he said, after. “I kept telling myself the first thing I’d do when I escaped was get laid.”

  Paula picked black chunks of grit off her clothes and out of her hair. “Do you want to stay together?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it. Do you?”

  She sat up, spreading out the coat he had found in the bin. It was stained and torn, a long heavily lined man’s coat with a notched collar. “For a while, at least. Until we find out what’s going on here.”

  He stood to pull on his pants. His body was thin and bony, his chest sprinkled with crisp hair, graying like the hair on his head. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  By daylight the whole dome seemed changed. Nothing was left of the wood but the stumps of trees. She could see from the ridge near the old campus all the way across the lake to the yellow hills south of the water. Everything looked much smaller. Many of the buildings had been blown up and packs of dogs drifted around the middle and south of the dome. The only birds she saw were crows.

  Tony Andrea’s building was still lived in. She left Bunker digging through a trash can at the edge of the meadow and went cautiously in the side door. There was a big poster on the wall at the foot of the stairs reading: WORK IS LIFE. The floor was dirty and black handprints marked the walls around the doorways. She knocked on Tony’s door.

  “Who’s ’ere?” a woman called, behind it.

  “I’m looking for Tony Andrea.”

  “Who?”

  Paula backed away, looking up and down the hall. At the far end she saw another poster: HELP THE STATE—COOPERATE! In red paint across it and part of the wall beside it was scrawled: STRIKE—STRIKE—STRIKE. The woman behind the door called, “Who’s ’ere?” Paula went away.

  She remembered An Chu’s message and went down the dome to the Nikoles Building. It was underground; she was shy of going into a place with so few ways out. At last she went down into the guts of the building and found the corridor where An Chu had said she was living. She could not remember the number of the apartment. On the corner of the green corridor was a list of the tenants. She stood before it, reading through it, without finding An Chu’s name. While she was looking down the list for the third time, a woman’s voice said, “Can I help you?”

  She wheeled around, her hair standing on end. It was a tall, black-haired woman, too dark to be a Martian. Paula swallowed. “I’m looking for An Chu.”

  “Who?”

  The closed space around her suddenly pressed tighter on her mind. She turned down the corridor. The woman cried, “Wait!” Paula broke into a run. She reached the stairs and went up into the open day.

  Bunker was waiting for her on the surface and they went off along the edge of the drying lake. There seemed to be a boundary of a sort, at the head of the lake, cutting the dome in half. South of this border, no building stood intact. Here and there a tree still grew, its branches fuzzed with leaves just unfolding from buds. The lake shore was scummed with dead weed. She saw no animals until just before dark, when a brown dog began to trail them.

  “Dick.”

  “I see her,” he said. He gestured at her. “You go that way.”

  They split up. The dog followed Paula. Patiently she led it along the shore, moving slowly, careful not to look at it too much. Bunker circled around behind it. Paula sat down on the mud beach. There was a thick yellow froth in the water at the edge of the lake, like soap. The lake smelled of rot. The dog slunk toward her, until about fifty yards from her it lay down on its belly, its ears flat to its head. Under its rough dun-colored hide its ribs looked round and sharp as wire hoops. When she moved, it leaped up, its tail curled between its legs. Its dug
s hung down along its belly. Paula settled on her hams again. She was painfully hungry. The dog watched her from the weeds, its head on its paws.

  Bunker crept up on it, but he made some sound, and the dog bolted away. The man retreated, and the dog paused, its ears pricked up. Paula swore.

  “Come on,” Bunker said. “Let’s walk it down.”

  Her legs were already sore. She got up and went after him. The sun was setting. They followed the dog into the darkness. It ran in short bursts ahead of them, galloping out of reach, turning to watch them, dashing away again when they got too close. About an hour after dark, they lost it in the gulleys south of the lake.

  Paula was too tired and hungry even to complain. They slept in the shelter of a sheer hillside, shivering. Three or four times during the night air cars flew overhead, waking them. Once a searchlight sliced through the dark around them, and they huddled against the cold ground, their heads buried in their jackets, until it left. Before dawn hunger drove them out again.

  Crisscrossing the ridges and notched hills below the lake, they divided up, moving along on parallel courses three hundred feet apart, searching for food. She chased a gray snake along a dusty hillside from tuft to tuft of grass. The air was smoky yellow. The dry ground gave up an odor like an empty husk. Her thigh bones ground in the sockets of her hips. Her mouth was filmed and gluey.

  In the late afternoon Bunker shouted on the far side of a gulley. She scrambled down the steep bank, knocking loose a shower of small stones and dirt, and ran toward his voice. He was on his knees digging into the bank of the ravine. His arms were gray with dirt.

  “I knew that mutt had a den up here somewhere.” He scooped dirt away. “Watch out—she’ll be back.” He plunged his sleeve down over his hand, reached deep into the hole he had dug, and took out a squirming black puppy.

  Its yips were small as rabbit sounds. Paula straightened. The brown dog came running along the floor of the ravine. Paula charged it, shouting, and the dog veered off. Its stained teeth showed. Bunker was taking pup after pup out of the den. Their squeaks brought their mother forward, snarling. Paula moved between her and the den. She snatched a long branch off the ground. The dog faced her, its ears flat, and growled.