“Do as you’re told.”
“But—Uncle—I can’t navigate in the Planet.”
“Then this is a good time for you to learn.” Tanuojin climbed into the seat with him, and David tumbled out, giving way.
“Paula—”
“Leave me out of it,” she said. She leaned forward and groped for the lifeline to attach it to her suit. David climbed down past her to the kick-seat.
When they got back to the House, Saba was sitting in her favorite chair in the front room of the Prima Suite, writing on a workboard. Paula took her coat off. “How was the Akopra?”
“Terrible.”
David came in, still warm under the friction of Tanuojin’s pedagogical sarcasms, and Tanuojin after him. Saba put the workboard down. “What did you find out?”
“The films are perfect.” Tanuojin unslung his coat. “All twenty-six of them came through, the probe worked perfectly.”
“I’ll see them when the laboratory sends them down. Have they gotten any photographs yet?”
Tanuojin shook his head. He picked up the workboard from the floor and wound back the surface to read what Saba had written. “I told them not to send the stuff down here piecemeal, to wait until everything is together. They need more money.”
“They always need more money.”
Paula stood watching them together. She saw what she should have noticed long before. Saba was gray-headed, but Tanuojin’s hair was still jet black. He looked no older than he had when she first met him, at the Nineveh, sixteen years before. He was not aging.
“Tell him about your little pink men,” Tanuojin said to her. He threw down the workboard. “Wait until you hear this,” he told Saba. “You’ll like this one.”
Melly turned and turned at the far end of the room, dancing. She held out her skirts in her hands, her head to one side. Paula stood in the doorway watching the girl play. Abruptly the Styth girl saw her and stopped.
“Go on,” Paula said. “Dance. I like it.”
Melly watched her enter the room. Paula’s favorite chair had a little step built into the base for her use. She settled herself in the chair, her back to the window. Melly said, “I am not a toy for your amusement, Mendoz’.”
“Then don’t act like a pompous little lady,” Paula said.
The girl’s face tightened up, much older when she scowled. Paula laughed. Melly was allowed to go unveiled in the suite, but not outside; Paula wondered if she had ever been outside. She wondered if Melly were pregnant yet.
“My father says I ought to be friendly with you,” Melly said. “But I don’t see why. You aren’t friendly to me.”
“I could be.”
“You stole my wedding to make into your—coronation.”
“I’m sorry. We were a little pressed.” She was reminding herself of Jefferson. Uneasily she moved around in the oversize chair.
Melly began to speak. Something she saw in the hall stopped her, and she went to the threshold and made her extravagant bow.
“Prima.”
Paula looked out into the hall. Saba was coming into the room. To Paula, he said, “I have a headache—I’m going to lie down on your bed. Make sure nobody bothers me.” Melly stood watching him expectantly. He touched her face. “Not now, baby.” He went down the hall toward Paula’s room.
Paula climbed down from her chair and ran after him. Going ahead of him into the room, she turned the heat lower and pulled the window shade closed. “What about Tanuojin?”
“He’s sick too. Go on, leave me alone.”
She went out to the corridor and shut the door. Melly was watching her from the doorway of Saba’s room. As Paula came into the hall the bride vanished into the room. Paula went back to the sitting room.
She wrote a letter to Newrose, asking for information and giving him suggestions. They wrote back and forth every three or four watches. The situation in the Middle Planets always seemed desperate. She was beginning to think that was a standing condition of life there.
Just before one bell, she went down to her room. Saba lay on her bed with his head turned away. She walked to the side of the bed. His face was smooth, without any sign of pain. She put her hand on his forehead. He was dead. He had been dead for hours.
She sat down beside him. The room was utterly still. She touched his mouth and the inside of his wrist. With her hand on him she sat still, in the quiet. Finally she went to the door to call David.
The room was so crowded Paula could not see the bed. She backed away toward the wall. Everybody was talking at once. Melly was crying, and Ketac took her away. David stood by the bed like a guard. Paula’s face felt tight and stretched. She was still surprised by the death. Tanuojin came into the room.
His hair was down over his shoulders and his back. Sleep rumpled his face. His eyes were intent on Saba. David saw him and grabbed his shirt in both hands.
“Bring him back. Bring him back.”
Paula went toward them, elbowing a way through the gaping slaves and onwatchers. His gaze never leaving Saba, Tanuojin thrust David hard away from him, but the young man clung to him, his hands fisted in Tanuojin’s shirt.
“Bring him back, you did it before—if you’re a god you can bring him back—”
Paula took him by the arm, turning him to face her. “David, stop.”
“Bring him back.” He twisted to shout at Tanuojin, his mouth open, and she slapped him with all her strength. He ran out of voice. He stared at her, round-eyed, his mouth open and empty. Ketac appeared beside her and took him out of the room. Tanuojin sat down on the edge of the bed. There was nothing he could do; she had known that as soon as she touched Saba. She drove the other people out, to leave him alone with the dead man.
Under the sweet odor of incense she could smell the rotting body. She had been sitting here a watch and would sit here two watches more, Melly beside her shedding tears like a sweat behind her veil, and Boltiko beside Melly, her mouth thin as a seam.
The incense had a woody smell, like cedar. The smoky air and the constant drumming of the rUlugongon had her half-drugged. Her aching eyes dressed each of Saba’s sons, standing around the dead man, in a shimmering cloak of light. They were in the entry to the rAkellaron House. Beyond Ketac and Dakkar the Gold Wall rose, spangled with the names of the rePriman. The people of Vribulo were filing through the right side of the double doorway, around the body on its bier, and out the left. From talk she overheard she knew many of them had come from Matuko, and some from other cities, as far away as Ponka on the far side of the Planet.
David stood near the foot of the bier, between two of his tall brothers. He looked like an old man. His cheeks glistened. He was crying again. She looked away from him, made uncomfortable by his grief, made lonely. She had never loved Saba that much. Now that he was dead her circumstances were utterly changed. Her only assets were her influence in the Middle Planets and her relationship with Tanuojin.
Tanuojin himself had been stripped by the death. The highest ranking officer in the fleet, he had no ship, since Ybix would go to Ketac. Officially he was ranked only eleventh or twelfth in the Chamber; Leno would be Prima now, who hated him. None of that would get in his way. He had enemies, but she was his only rival.
Sometime in the next watch David went out and did not come back. She was too numb to care where he went. Probably he would be better off away from the sight of his father. Melly collapsed with much exhibition, and was carried out. Paula’s eyes throbbed. She was determined to sit there until the end. The steady stream of people passed by. They moaned, or reached out to touch Saba, or put something down by the body. The bier was covered with bits of paper and grass braided into rings, mourning symbols.
She closed her eyes a moment. When she looked Tanuojin had come in. He stood by the foot of the bier. Above the neck of his shirt, a metal chain crossed his collarbone. It was Saba’s order medal; she wondered if anyone but her knew he wore it.
One bell rang. The crowd went away. The slaves sh
ut the doors. Boltiko rose, groaning with effort, and stood over the bier. “My boy,” she said, in a low voice. She laid her palm against Saba’s cheek. “My poor boy.” Paula was beside her. The two women turned to each other, reaching out, and took each other in an embrace.
They went up to the Prima Suite. David was not there. Paula poured three fingers of Ponkan gin into a cup and drank it all. The others of the family were wandering around, even Saba’s daughters, with their children, their faces unveiled. Ketac sat in her chair, by the window.
“That’s my chair,” she said, and he moved.
The cold air coming through the window made her feel better, her head clear. Ketac slouched against the wall beside her, one foot propped on her chair.
“Who will be the Akellar now?” she said.
“Dakkar is the heir.”
“I think you’d make a better Akellar than Dakkar.”
Ketac straightened. He put his foot on the floor. “So do I.” He looked around the room. Two of his sisters came in, chattering about children.
“Can you take him?” Paula asked.
“I can try.”
“Where? Not in Matuko, that’s his ground. You’d better do it here.”
“I’m in sack shape,” he said. Two more people came into the room, and he lowered his voice. “I’ll go to Ybix. I can turn the pressure up to double and work up my strength.”
“I’ll call you when he comes here to claim his seat in the Chamber.”
“Good.”
She held her jaws together against a yawn. Junna stood just outside the door in the hall. She wondered again where David was. The bland innocence on Ketac’s face almost made her laugh. Saba had preferred him to Dakkar anyway, and obviously he had been thinking about it. He did not come virgin to this bridal. She closed her eyes.
David had disappeared into the city. She knew better than to look for him. Leno was taking over the Prima’s offices on the second floor, and his eight wives sent a slave to ask when Paula and Melly would move out of the Prima Suite. Melly was going back to Lopka, her father’s city. Paula was busy watching Dakkar and had no place to go anyway.
Tanuojin had gone back to Yekka, but every other Akellar was in Vribulo. Leno proclaimed the first session of his Primat for the eighteenth high watch after Saba was made ash. The wives’ slave brought Paula a pointed invitation to move out of the suite. That same watch, Dakkar arrived in Vribulo to claim his father’s place in the rAkellaron.
She went down to the second floor, to talk to Leno.
She could not see the door to the Prima’s office through the thick press of men around it. She wound a way through them to the open door. The waiting room was jammed. The benches were full of men, and other people stood leaning against the walls between the maps and recognition charts. At the table in the middle, Leno’s pitman argued in a loud voice with a man in a patrol uniform. She went around him to the half-glassed door in the back and knocked.
“Who is it?” Leno called. He sounded angry. She tried the latch, which was unlocked, and went into the long room.
Tanuojin was sitting on the bench before the middle window. Leno glared at her from the middle of the room. “You could wait until you’re asked.” He pulled his belt up over his stomach. Both of them were giving off a marginal reek of bad temper. Shutting the door, she crossed the room, going in between them.
“Leno,” she said, “let me stay here. You can open up the rest of the Prima Suite—there’s plenty of room.”
His lips parted with surprise. Tanuojin laughed. The Prima flung his arms out. “Here. No.” He wheeled away, his broad back to her. A dark patch of sweat showed between his shoulder blades. “Get out. I’m busy.”
“I have to have someplace to stay.” She glanced at Tanuojin. “When did you get back? I thought you were in Yekka.”
“Last watch.”
Leno loomed over her, his hands on his hips, his blunt head forward. “I told you to leave.”
“I have nowhere to go.” She raised her eyes to his face, shining with temper. He and Tanuojin had been arguing before she came in. She put that away in her mind to think about later. Her eyes on the Prima’s angry face, she said, “I suppose you’ll want Saba’s presidency?” She turned back to Tanuojin. “I’m sending Newrose a notice of Saba’s death—what about Dr. Savenia?”
Leno said, “I’m the Prima now. Why is it neither of you will admit that? You’re both insane.” He strode off across the room. The three windows across the wall let in the city racket. “You don’t belong here, Mendoz’. And the presidency of the Middle Planets goes with the office of Prima.”
“I’ll have to look that up,” she said. She scratched her nose, staring at his back. It did not work to be subtle with him. “I could go back to the Earth, I suppose. Although without me you’d certainly lose four-fifths of the Empire.”
Leno turned. Rather than look at her he faced Tanuojin. The tall man shrugged. “Well, she is the only one of us who knows anything about the Middle Planets.”
Leno’s shoulders dropped an inch. Paula went to the door. With her hand on the latch, she looked over her shoulder at the new Prima. “You don’t have to feed me, I’ll eat by myself.”
“I’m the Prima!”
“Yes, Prima. Thank you.” She went out.
The Fleet Office was in Upper Vribulo. The broad street, patched with blue grass, was lined with drinking docks and sack-houses. She passed a swinging half-door that let out a boom of noise and a rush of odors: beer, Styth, and vomit. A man slept in the high grass in the next alley. The narrow front of the Fleet Office was indistinguishable from the docks and flops around it and she walked past it twice.
The dark, deep room inside smelled of copying ink. A handprinter was clacking behind the high barrier that cut off the back of the room from the front. A line of men in fleet uniforms slacked up against the wall beside a closed door.
“Hey, I love you, let’s go next door.”
An old man with jewels in his nose came up to the barrier. Paula’s head just cleared the top rail. She said, “I want to send a message to a ship in orbit.”
“Which ship?” He leaned on the barrier, looking down at her.
“Ybix.”
“Ybix hasn’t been answering our signals since the Prima died.” He spat past her; she smelled the rich odor of laksi. “Deep sleep to him.”
“He doesn’t have to answer,” Paula said. “Just say that his mother wants him to come home.”
The old man’s mouth curled thoughtfully. “His mother.”
“Just send that message.”
“Yes, Mendoz’.”
She walked back past the Akopra. A loudspeaker on the porch announced the theater was closed to mourn the Prima. The new Off-World Market was empty. Green paper banners, the Styth mourning color, hung from the gates of the houses. She climbed the steps to the rAkellaron House and went inside.
She went in through the slaves’ entrance to the top rung of the Chamber. Her coat made her uncomfortably warm and she opened it down the front. Half the rAkellaron stood and talked and scratched and spat and bragged on the ledges above the pit. A slave scampered past her with a tray of cups. She went down the enormous steps, her skirts and the heavy skirts of her coat bunched in her hands.
Tanuojin was in his place on the second tier, his arms out straight across the rail and his head down. No one spoke to him. His own aides stayed away from him. She stood beside him. Machou was up on the high ledge, talking to Bokojin. She sat down on the hard bench. Tanuojin did not move.
Leno came down the steps. Behind him was Dakkar, with three of his men in his track. Leno went to his place on the second tier, and Dakkar continued down the steps to the pit. He looked like Saba, a black-haired, slender Saba.
“This session is open,” Leno said. “Dakkar, you are in the pit.”
Dakkar walked across the sand. “I am Dakkar, Saba’s oldest son. I’m dominant in Matuko, and I mean to take my father’s place here. Does an
ybody challenge my right?”
The men on the ledges canted forward to watch him. Leno stood. His mustaches hung down heavy with braid to his chest. Paula looked around the Chamber, surprised. None of the other men were standing up.
“If nobody—”
“I challenge,” Ketac said, above her. He came down the steps past her.
She got up onto her feet, her fingers tight around the rail. Several of Ybix’s crew followed him. David was not among them. Dakkar crouched. When Ketac stepped into the pit, his brother attacked him.
The rAkellaron roared. All around the rings they leaped up, bellowing. Their hot reek made her stomach heave. Ketac fell and rolled, Dakkar hanging on his back. Even through the screams of the men watching she heard the brothers’ snarls. Her heart pounded in her throat. Tanuojin towered over her, banging his hands on the rail. The sand was splattered with blood. Dakkar jammed his knee into Ketac’s spine, his hands splayed over his brother’s face, bending him backward.
“Kill him!” someone howled. “Kill him!”
Ketac reached over his shoulders. His claws hooked in Dakkar’s shirt. Tanuojin shouted so loud she flinched. Ketac dragged his brother down into the sand. He reared up and brought his elbow like a club into Dakkar’s face.
Paula let go of the rail. Ketac leaped up, panting, his shirt crusted with sand. Dakkar doubled over, one arm across his broken face. The cheers of the rAkellaron faded, cooling. Ketac held his hands over his head.
“I am the Matuko Akellar. Does anybody challenge me?”
The whole Chamber was on its feet. They let out another buoyant cheer. She was sweating from their heat. Tanuojin sat down, and the other men began to settle. Paula shifted, her heavy coat on her shoulders. Tanuojin called, “How long did it run?”
“Fifty-two seconds,” Machou called, hoarse. “He’s no Saba.”
Dakkar’s friends were stooped over him. Ketac leaned on the pit rail. Dakkar put one foot under him and pulled himself up on his friends’ shoulders. They were both bleeding, she could not see the wounds, just the red slime on their faces. Ketac spoke to Dakkar, and the taller man nodded. He hung one arm around Ketac’s neck. The rAkellaron cheered again, pleased. Paula sat down. Ketac and Dakkar climbed the steps.
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