Floating Worlds

by Cecelia Anastasia Holland

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “It hurts like hell.”

  She could barely see his face. Dawn would come in less than an hour; she was tired, and she put her head down on her curved arm. He had his hands pressed to his belly.

  “I’m beginning to know what Saba meant,” she said. “About the debts between people. There must be something. There has to be something people do for each other besides prey on each other.” The thorny brush smelled bitter, and her teeth were full of gritty dust. She wiped her face with her fingers. “Something we owe each other.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “To take those people to the air car. Kadrin and her friends.”

  “Oh. I didn’t recognize the mood.”

  “They won’t get away. The Styths will get them if the Martians miss them. Why should they even bother?”

  “Oh, junior, come on.”

  “What do you mean, come on?” Her throat felt tight.

  “I mean you’re a little old to be searching for the meaning of life.”

  Rebuked, she lay still, her head on her arm, and watched while he crooked his arm up over his head and felt for the cup and dipped himself up some of the water. He did not drink it, but rinsed his mouth with it and spat it out.

  “There must be something,” she said.

  He made a sound like a laugh. She thought his eyes were closed.

  “Why did you join the Committee?” she asked. “If not to help.”

  “I like to watch people.”

  “A spectator? You make a pretty lively audience.”

  “Not an audience,” he said. “A witness.”

  She did not understand the difference. She lay still, listening to the sounds around her. Something little scurried through the dense brush of the thicket. Mouse. She would eat him if she caught him. Far away a dog howled. Probably that had snuffled around the thicket, waking Bunker. She wondered if he had been frightened. A witness. It meant something exact to him, a word from his private language. She had lived as close to him as she had without learning even that much about him; after so long together she knew him as indistinctly as she saw him in the darkness. There was no bond. There was no debt, only the longing for one, for some connection, some common understanding. It was all a lie, like hope and love and faith. She reached for the cup again, to get herself some water.

  In the late afternoon, she went up to the elm tree, climbed into its branches, and lowered the sack of food she had cached on a rope over a high fork. While she ate bread and the last of the rotten meat, she looked through the branches. There were three or four people walking around on the mud of the lake. In the middle a man was digging with a shovel. She knew them all; they lived in three or four caves in a gulley about half a mile south of her thicket. She could just see the glittering metal fences that ringed the nearest Martian compound. The foul meat made her stomach churn. She climbed down to the ground and circled around the thicket, keeping watch for Han Ra’s men. In a ditch, near another elm tree, Willie Luhan lay dead on the ground.

  She did not go near him. His face and hands were half eaten away. The putrid smell was strong. She wondered what had killed him. His jacket was gone, his shoes gone, his legs inside his ragged trousers swarmed with feeding insects. She went back fast to the thorn thicket, to Bunker. That night the Styths bombed the dome from sundown to sunrise.

  She went up to the Martian compound and caught a fat little dog, throttling it with her hands. She also found an hourly.

  OPERATION DUNKIRQUE

  In the most ambitious mass operation ever undertaken, the Combined Services today began to relocate the populations of sectors endangered by Styth raids.

  To her surprise, Bunker laughed. He lay back, one arm curved under his head. “Well, junior, put it in the pot, maybe it will flavor the dog.” He held out the other hand in the air. A spider crawled over his thumb.

  “They’re giving up,” she said bitterly. The spider reached the end of his thumb and paused, confused. “They’re running and leaving us to take it in the face. How can you let that bug crawl on you?” The spider was groping cautiously over his hand.

  “I am intimate with every insect in this bush, which is your fault for bringing me here.”

  She sat under the elm tree, looking across the dome. Dawn was coming. Up toward the north, two points of yellow light glowed in the darkness: the fires of Han Ra’s men. If the Martians left, they would take the dogs, her main source of meat. She would not steal from Han Ra’s people and the people who lived in the caves, for fear of bringing them down on her. Bunker was stronger, the hole in his belly had closed, and soon he would be able to help her. Her feet were cold. She went back down the slope to the thicket and crawled in beside him.

  The dawn made the air above them white, each leaf of the thicket sharp against it, like a woodcut. They fell asleep in the ripening day.

  The terminal pond at the Manhattan dock connected with the ocean. In spite of the drought it was full. Paula and Bunker climbed over the sagging fence to reach it. The wall of the dome came down just beyond it, streaked with condensation. Paula went to the sandy shore of the pond. The three buildings on the far side had been blown up, and the water was clogged with the wreckage.

  Bunker took off his jacket and stepped out of his pants. He dropped his shirt onto the heap of his other clothes. He felt of the water with his hand, stuck one foot in, shivering, and jumped into the pond.

  Paula gathered his clothes. At the edge of the pond she stood leaning over the water trying to see down to the bottom. Bubbles broke the surface. Far down there, she had no idea how far down there, was the boat he was fixing. A great shining gobbet of air burst up out of the water. That was the hatch opening. The boat’s environment still worked, and he could stay down there nearly ninety minutes before he had to come up again and fill the air tank. She waded in the shallows, her trouser legs rolled up, hunting for turtles and crabs which were safer to eat than mussels.

  Bunker brought the boat’s air tanks up and filled them. Night was coming. Paula made a fire to cook the four little green crabs. Bunker’s pump chugged; it ran on fusion cells he stole from the Martians and broke nearly every time he used it. Little waves slapped on the pond shore, mimicking the great ocean just beyond the dome wall. She split the red backs of the crabs with her knife.

  They ate in silence. She sucked the meat from a crab’s spidery leg. Bent over the fire out of the cold, his beard ruddy in the light, he ate crabmeat and wiped his fingers on his sleeves. There was an aftertaste in the back of her mouth. Probably tomorrow she would be sick to her stomach. Far up the dome, a siren began to whistle.

  Paula got up and kicked apart the fire. They sat side by side in the dark listening to the alarm. The barrage began, first the thunderous boom and then the silent, blinding explosions of light, coming faster and closer together until her ears and eyes were clogged and she could hear and see nothing any more, as if the whole world had vanished. Bunker put his arm around her shoulders. She pressed her face against his neck.

  The gash opened like a mouth in the floor of the ravine, lipped in mossy concrete. A dead tree stood over it. She unslung the coil of rope from her shoulder and knelt down. The underground river roared in the cavern below. She put two stones into the skin bag and lowered it down through the gap in the ground.

  Behind her, the sirens whined; they had been crying all morning, all the night before, the day before that, without an attack. She paid out the rope, holding it looped around her wrist to keep from losing it when the bag struck the flying water below. She squatted down and pulled the bottoms of her trousers over her half-frozen feet. Her cracked and bleeding toes were more important than the distant sirens. The rushing river caught the bag and flung it out to the limit of the rope. She held on tight. More than once she had lost the whole apparatus down the river, and they were hard to make.

  Hand over hand, she reeled it in a little, to see if the bag was full, and let it down again.
When the weight convinced her, she began to draw it up. The rope was soaked and bitter cold. Halfway up, it snagged. She tugged. There was nothing down there to foul it. Puzzled, she jerked on the rope, and it yanked back, flying out of her hands.

  She leaped away, bounding down the ravine. At the edge of the open ground, she wheeled to look. Her hair stood on end. A huge man was dragging himself up through the cleft. He wore a heavy helmet over his head, but his arms were bare and black as tar. She turned and ran.

  She went toward the lake at a steady lope. Her feet were cold and bruised and she began to limp. She glanced over her shoulder.

  The Styths were swarming up out of the ground, spreading over the ravine. She turned forward again. Her feet banged on the cold ground. There was no place to hide. She swerved across the dead lake. Just as she reached the far side, an explosion burst in the ground behind her. They were widening the way in.

  She went down into the gulleys and hills between the lake and the southern end of the dome, looking for Bunker. When she could not find him, she ran north, stopping every few moments to walk and catch her breath. In the middle of the dome, near the ruins of the campus, two Styths caught her.

  She was too tired and footsore to be afraid, only glad they did not rape her. They made her run and laughed when she fell. Half-dragging her, they took her north to the plaza in front of the government building, where already hundreds of other prisoners were gathered. She lay down in the dirt near the steps of the dispensa and slept.

  She woke and went through the mob. Most of the prisoners were Martians. They sat on the ground or stood leaning on one another. Their pale faces were stained with dust and tears. The small children screamed. No longer hunting the other anarchist, she wandered around the plaza, too frightened to sit still.

  Styths ringed them. She recognized none of them. Her feet hurt. She sat down to rest, but her nerves drove her on again, around the plaza in circles. The afternoon dragged past. More people crammed into the space, until she could hardly move. Taller people surrounded her and she could see nothing.

  “You will divide up by sex,” a Styth voice shouted, in the Common Speech. “The men will come this way. The women will stay here.”

  All around her the people cried out, and the mob stirred. Paula sighed. She wiped her face with her hands. Maybe Bunker had not been taken. The air car was almost finished; maybe he could escape.

  “Now,” the Styth voice said, “all you pigs take your clothes off.”

  The women raised their voices in a yell. The men had been sifted out, and the crowd was much looser than before. Paula sat down cross-legged, her hands in her sleeves, watching them move restlessly around her. They refused to obey, and the Styths closed in around them. Catching one woman by the arms, they stripped her naked. They laughed and pulled on her breasts and jabbed her in the crotch. Paula lowered her eyes. She was afraid of being raped. Around her the other women were silent.

  “Take your clothes off, or we’ll take them off.”

  “But it’s cold,” a girl murmured, behind Paula. They began to shed their clothes. Their pretty white blouses fluttered to the ground. Some of them tried to keep on their underthings but the Styths made them remove those too. Paula sat still, her hands in her jacket sleeves.

  “Tanuk,” a Styth called. “The dark one here isn’t stripping.”

  The Martian women around her muttered in their throats. They closed in around her, stooped, and clutched her and kicked at her. Paula rolled up in a knot, her arms over her head. The women tore at her clothes. A foot thudded into her side. Blood ran into her mouth. The women cursed her, shrieking, and ripped at her heavy jacket and trousers.

  “Get away!”

  She curled into a ball, swallowing blood. The women backed away from her. She sobbed for breath. Her chest hurt. She was hauled up by the front of her jacket. She looked up at a blurred black face. He had something in his free hand: a photograph.

  “Maybe. It could be.” He spoke to her in Styth. “Are you Paula Mendoza?”

  She said nothing. She closed her eyes, stiff with the pain in her chest and side. He lifted her up. “Call the Akellar.”

  He took her into a little room on the first floor of the government building, sat her down in a big leather chair, and brought her a mug of hot meat soup. While she was drinking the soup, the Lopka Akellar came into the room. His face was a patchwork of little scars.

  “That’s the one,” he said. “Do you remember me, Mendoz’?”

  She stared at him, unwilling to speak the other language. He glanced at the man behind him. “Send to the Prima that we have his wife.”

  “The Prima.” She put the cup down, startled.

  “Saba is the Prima now. Machou tried to block him on the war action.”

  She looked in another direction. Ymma left her alone. She moved stiffly around the room. The door was locked and there were no windows. Her side hurt. Aimlessly she paced around the room. She drank the rest of the soup and sat thinking about Bunker and trying idly to reduce to an aphorism the fact that she was always well fed in jail and starved when she was free.

  After some time Ymma came back and took her out to the verticals. “If you won’t go willingly, I’m supposed to carry you.”

  Her feet hurt. The corridor was crowded with Styths. The overhead lights had been shut off. At the end of the dim busy corridor the outer doors shone pale with sunlight. She stopped, drawn like a moth, and Ymma pushed her. She had not been indoors in months and the closed spaces made her hunch her shoulders.

  “We took London last watch.” He led her into the first vertical car. “So’ Bay the same watch as here. If we had more men we could have them all at once.”

  “What happened to the Martian Army?”

  “Since we won Luna, they have no base. We were flying them around the Sun anyway. The Creep isn’t a bad strategist, you know. Not a bad strategist at all.”

  She wrapped her arms around her. The language was exotic in its inflections and order and accents. The car stopped and the doors slid apart. She stayed where she was. Ymma stood watching her from his ruined face, his black eyes like wells. She went out to the dark hall.

  Half a dozen men were lined up against the far wall. She went past them into a broad, dim room. The windows were covered in black paper. Saba was sitting on the desk, talking to Ketac.

  She stopped, and her hands fisted at her sides. Saba was graying. On his wrist was the iron cuff of his rank. He and Ketac turned to face her; she glanced at his son and stared at Saba, her jaw clenched with anger.

  “Go on,” Saba said to Ketac. “We have to hurry this up.”

  Ketac paused as he approached her, maybe to say something, changed his mind, and went out. Saba came after him, his hands on his belt, his eyes on her.

  “What’s the matter with you? You should be thanking me. You’d be down there being sorted and numbered if we hadn’t gone out of our way to save you.”

  “To save me!” She felt swollen with rage. She said, “You have it screwed around a little.” Wheeling, she started for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Down out of your way.”

  He caught her arm. “Listen to me, damn you!”

  Her breath whined in her throat, and her temper snapped. He had hold of her arm. She clawed at him with her fingernails, first his hand, and when he wrenched her around and flung his arm around her waist she lunged at his face. He picked her up, pinning her hands. He was carrying her somewhere, through a doorway. She struggled around in his grip and sank her teeth into his face. He wrenched free. Skin tore in her teeth.

  “Paula—Pauliko—I’ll number you—”

  She twisted hard, corkscrewing back and forth, and rammed her arm into his chest. They fell lengthwise onto a bed. Kicking and elbowing him, she fought free at last and lunged away, and his weight landed on top of her.

  All her wind rushed out of her. Her head whirled. He was pulling her jacket off. His breath was hot on he
r face. His heavy odor filled her nose and mouth. He took his hand off her to unbuckle the belt of his leggings and she jerked one arm loose and raked at his bleeding face with her nails. His arm crooked around her throat. She tried to bite his hand and got a mouthful of thick armor-shirt. He pinned her under him again, face down.

  “You’ll like it, Paula.” He was panting. “You always liked me best.” He pulled down her pants and shoved himself into her.

  She yelled. His whole hot weight buried her. Every time he moved it hurt. She bit her lips, her eyes squeezed shut. Stinking and hot, he groaned in his climax.

  He moved away from her, his harsh breathing loud. She turned over onto her back. Her legs and groin were stiff with pain. He was watching her. The deep moon-shaped bite on his jaw bled in a stream. She got her feet under her and attacked him again.

  “Hey!” He caught her. They fell off the bed onto the floor, and she landed on top of him. He was wedged between the bed and the long chest of drawers against the wall. Snarling and crying, she scratched his eyes. He heaved himself up and threw her bodily across the room. The wall hit her. Dazed, she pushed herself up on her arms. He bolted out the door and she heard the lock turn over.

  She sat on the foot of the bed, her chest heaving. A deep bleeding scratch ran across her belly. Her thighs were smeared with his slime. She cried out and scraped at the greasy skin with her nails, tearing at the only part of him she could reach.

  She slept in the bed. When she woke up there was a pile of women’s clothes on the chair. She picked up a long white sleeve and the fabric snagged on her roughened fingertips. The door was still locked. She went into the little washroom connected to the bedroom and took a shower. She dried herself off and went out to the bedroom. Tanuojin was sitting on the bureau, joined at the back to his reflection in the mirror.

  “Oh,” she said.