Floating Worlds (19 page)

“Akellar, she can’t—”

“Akellar,” the helmsman called. “I have a course to intercept
Ybicsa
.”

Over his shoulder, Tanuojin called, “Ready to break orbit.” He leveled his pale eyes at Sril. “You keep your mouth shut, bang-boy.” He dropped away toward the cage. The hatch was just over her head, and she reached for it. Sril pulled her by the arm against his side.

“Hold on, Mendoz’.”

“Launch on point.” Tanuojin was climbing into the cage. Behind the voices of the other men, talking in numbers, ran the beep and mutter of the machines along the wall. A red light came on near her face. Sril turned her around, her back to his chest.

“Akellar, the missile is firing a cluster. Make it five minutes behind us. Heat-chasers. Four minutes thirty-one seconds.”

The sound level rose to a low mechanical rumble that made her ears itch. She moved against Sril’s chest. The ship was sliding away from her. She sank back against the man behind her. He spoke to her. The roar drowned his voice. The pressure hurt her eyes. She could not move, wedged against Sril’s side. Painfully she strained for breath. Like footsteps her pulse beat louder and louder in his ears.

“
Ybix, Ybix
,” Saba’s voice shouted, above the racket.

She turned her head. Her mouth was sticky. Through a pink blur she saw the Styths sitting on their perches, doing their work. They bore the pressure without effort. It hurt her to breathe. She closed her eyes.

“Saba, hold your course. We’ll run over you. Can you dock at this speed?”

“I’ve got this sled in tow.” Saba’s voice was coming from inside the cage.

Bakan said, “Akellar, four rockets are still tracking us.”

“What rockets?” Saba cried, alarmed.

“Akellar,” Sril said loudly, “she can’t breathe.”

She could breathe. Her eyes hurt, and her ears ached as if needles were run through them. Saba said, “What’s your pressure?”

“Eight plus,” Tanuojin said.

“Compensate. What missiles?”

She fought for air. Her chest lightened. She felt her lips pulled back from her teeth, and her hands rose. She blinked her pink blurred eyes clear.

“Akellar, there’s a hammerhead coming up fast on Ybicsa.”

Paula moved around to Sril’s back, her arms around him. If she fell she would land on the cage. She wiped her eyes on his shoulder.

“Two rockets still tracking, two minutes back. I read fission warheads.”

When she leaned her head on Sril’s back she left a smear of blood across his shirt. She touched her mouth. Down past her feet,
Ybix
sailed through the green map. At the edge of the hologram another image was forming, a needle-shape:
Ybicsa
. The smaller ship fell back into the green field around
Ybix
. Now she saw a third ship, T-shaped, flying up toward
Ybicsa
from the bottom of the hologram. The three flights converged.
Ybix
flew over
Ybicsa
, covering her with her flat shape. The hammerhead veered to chase them, seconds behind them.

“Rockets closing—ten—nine—” In the green glow of the hologram the hammerhead exploded.

The men roared. Tanuojin said, “See, General Gordon, it’s all god’s will.” Against her face Sril’s back bounced in a soundless laugh.

“Saba. Can you dock?”

Ketac’s voice came through the cage, high and rapid with excitement. “Akellar, we’ll dock. We’ll need three men in the chamber to inboard this sled.”

Paula was floating. She let go of Sril and put her hands to her face. The holograph light glowed on her rumpled trouser legs. Sril said, “If Ketac is flying, I’ll wait back at Luna.” He twisted toward her. “How do you feel?”

The hatch was over her head. She stretched her arms up toward it and went out to the corridor.

She stayed in the wetroom while the ship accelerated to cruising speed. That took fifteen hours. She woke up once, in the dark in a roar of noise. She could not move at all. The wetroom held her in its supporting membranes. She was afraid but there was nothing she could do. The weight of the air against her face hurt her nose. Her eyes were shut and she could not raise the lids. The metallic ring in her ears went on and on like something heard in a seashell. She was losing consciousness. She passed into a noisy dream.

 The next time she woke she could move her head, open her eyes, and turn over. She was back in free fall. Someone was banging on the door below her feet. That had wakened her.

“Who is it?” Her stomach was clenched with hunger.

“Paula,” Ketac said. “You can come out now.”

She tried to push herself backward, fumbling with her bare feet for the door. “No,” he called, “go forward, go through the dryer. Do you have any clothes on?”

“No.” She crawled head-first through the dark.

“I’ll be out in the corridor.”

Her head poked up into the open air. With a click a blower fired a gust of warm wind into her face. She drew herself out of the wetroom into a closed dark space. Her arms and legs were painfully cramped and her back had kinked up like a rope. She turned over, working her stiff muscles. Below her a disk of light showed pale in the dark. She dove through it into the cabin.

After the wetroom the oval cabin was huge. She tumbled across it, somersaulting, rolling in the air, her arms and legs flung out. She crashed into the soft wall and rebounded. It was wonderful to move. Her skin tingled in the cold air.

“Paula,” Ketac called.

“Yes.” She brought herself up against the wall, dizzy. “What is it?”

“Are you dressed yet? Can I come in?”

“Wait.” She went around the room, looking for the compartment with her clothes. She put on two pairs of trousers and a shirt and a jacket and two pairs of socks. The cold air was delicious. She opened the hatch and went into the corridor.

Ketac’s hair floated like an aureole around his face. “Why didn’t you talk to me in Styth, before? All that time I could have been talking to you.”

“I don’t speak it very well.” She reached the corridor of the arrows. She could not remember which way the galley was. Ketac came up beside her. Below her a man dove out of a hatchway, and she went in that direction.

“Pop says I’m supposed to show you around the ship.” He came after her into the narrow galley. The rows of levers on the wall were tagged in neat handwritten Styth labels. She pulled one and ran herself straight up into the ceiling. Ketac jeered at her. One hand on the wall and the other on the tab, she pushed in opposite directions. Out the slit-mouth below came a water tube.

“Where is Saba?”

“In the bridge. He’s on watch.”

She stowed the water tube in mid-air and worked another lever, which produced a strip of protein. The dim light strained her eyes. Her hands and face were cold.

“All right.” She drank the water and took a bite of protein bar. “Show me around the ship.”

“Actually, I think The Creep is right, for once. This is a warship. You ought to stay in my father’s cabin.”

She went along the tunnel. Ketac glided along beside her. They turned into the blue corridor. “What’s this, for instance?” She put her head into a big open hatchway. Inside was the largest room she had seen, including the bridge. The round wall was plastered with posters, most of them of naked women. There was no one in the room. The lights were out at the far end. She went in. The lights rose.

Ketac followed her. “You shouldn’t be in here.” He cast a look of horror around at the beaver shots on the wall. “This isn’t any place for a woman.”

“Don’t be silly.” She went back to the hatchway. “What’s up there that you think I haven’t seen? Where do you sleep?”

He led her on down the curving tunnel. He traveled effortlessly beside her; she had to struggle to keep up with him. He brushed his thick hair back with his hand. “That’s the Tank—where we just were. The off-duty room.” Scooting off ahead of her, he spun the wheel on the next hatch and pulled the cover open. “This is the library.”

The deep narrow room was dark. The light from the corridor reached in across the round honeycomb wall of books. Ketac was already scooting off, and she followed him.

“This is the aft bridge hatch—” He struck in passing at a doorway. Beside it was a bank of meter faces like clocks. “And that’s the aft engine hatch.” Paula went after him in short energetic dashes.

“How many watches are there?”

“Pop’s, Tanuojin’s, and Kobboz’s. You don’t know anything, do you?”

They went down the black and white corridor again. “No,” she said. “Not a thing.”

“There are five men in each watch—the watch officer, the helm, the gunner, the sparks—you know, communications—and the greaser. That’s me. I just do what everybody else says.” He scooped his wild hair back with his hands. His feet milled steadily to keep him upright. “Pop’s is the high watch, The Creep is the middle watch, Kobboz is the low watch.”

“Where is Tanuojin now?”

“Asleep, I guess. He has the cabin up beside the library.” He dropped away from her into the twilight. “Ask me anything. Go on, ask me something.”

“How fast are we going?” She was learning how to move, and she kept up with him all the way down to the next hatch. He looked at her sideways, as if it were a trick question.

“About one and a half miles an hour.”

“I mean the ship, Ketac.”

“Oh. Thirty-two hundred leagues above course point. Plus six acceleration. That’s not very much, we were up to plus 185 in the low watch. Uniform hyperbolic course. Ask me something else.”

“I didn’t understand the first one.” They went into another tunnel, marked with yellow stripes, so there were three: red, blue, and yellow, curved, meeting the black and white corridor at each end. Ahead, the metal tube jogged, and in the dim light someone moved. She started violently all over. A strange Styth raced around the bend and brushed between her and Ketac.

“Ask me something.”

“How long will it take us to reach Uranus?”

He stopped at a hatchway. “This is the crew’s quarters. The Hole. We’re going to Saturn first.”

“Let me see.” She pulled on the wheel in the hatch. He opened it, and she put her head inside, into a long dim room in which the Styths slept wrapped in their bedrugs like bats in their wings, attached by their feet to the wall.

“When we get there,” Ketac said, “we use the Planet’s fields to brake and fall into orbit, so we can supply up.” He pushed the hatch closed. She turned toward him. “Then we use the fields to boost back to cruising speed and head for Uranus. My father calls that a counter-inertial equivalency system.”

“Oh.”

“My father is the best engineer in the fleet. Ask me something else.”

She led him along the corridor. “Ketac, I don’t understand anything you’re saying. I wouldn’t understand it in the Common Speech.” They came to another hatch: the supply room, lined with computers, their checkerboard faces blinking in three colors. He refused to take her into the men’s toilet. While she was still hunting for arguments, a bell rang somewhere down the corridor.

“That’s the end of my watch,” Ketac said. His hair floated on end around his head. “You’d better go back to Pop’s cabin now.”

She backed away from him. Backing up was easier than moving forward. “Go on, do as you please. I’ll be all right.”

“Paula, this is a warship. You can’t wander around—”

“Thank you.” Head-first, she went into the black-white corridor, twisted to change direction, and flew down through the cool dim tunnel.

Ketac had not shown her all the ship. There was a tiny observation room in the nose of the ship, just big enough for two people. Saba took her there, shut the hatch, and pushed a button in the wall. The black wall over her head split down the middle and folded back on either side, and she was looking into the depthless black of space.

“Oh.” She put her hand out. Her fingertips grazed the cold plastic of the window.

He stretched his legs out past her, along the foot of the window. His shoulders packed the end of the little pyramidal room. She looked out at the clouds of stars. With difficulty she made out the rectangular constellation Gemini.

“Can I see Uranus?”

“Uranus is on the other side of the ship. Scorpio sector.” For navigating the sphere of the stars was divided up into sectors according to the major constellations. He pointed with his little finger at a bright white spark in the long box of Gemini. “That’s Jupiter.” His claw ticked on the plastic. “Castor and Pollux.” He pointed out the two bright stars at one end of the rectangle and the fainter pair at the other end, butting against the Milky Way. “The Star Gate. The Mouth of Hell. Gemini is called the House of Hell. Half the time Uranus’s pole axis points to the Sun, but when the Sun enters Gemini the pole slips and starts to wander.”

On Uranus the polar axis lay close to the plane of the ecliptic. The star shell was the same, but their astrology would be totally unlike hers.

“I used to dream about space,” he said. “Before 1 ever saw it. I dreamt I crawled up and up through the Planet, until I came to the surface, outside of everything, and I floated away.”

“A nightmare?”

“No.” He said a word she did not know. “It was a good dream. It was a good feeling. My father was space-drunk. He used to say he could bring his body back to Matuko but his heart stayed in deep space.”

The starlight shone on his face. She took hold of his sleeve, fingering the thick material. There were thin dark gray stripes in the light gray ground. “What do these mean?” She ran her thumb down the diagonal stripes sewn on his forearm cuff.

“Rating stripes. Subtenant, lieutenant, commander, master commander, master.” He put his hand on her stomach. “Then there’s general and master general, which nobody ever gets.”

Directly below her Tanuojin’s voice said, “Saba, call the bridge.”

She rolled out of the way. He reached for the speaker tab in the wall. “Bridge.”

“Akellar, Ketac is tearing up Uhama in the Tank.”

“Damn him.” He left. Paula shut the hatch to keep out the light. She lay in the air staring out at the black fields of space. The stars eased her mood, scattered thick past counting over the window, unimaginably distant. After a while she found the switch that hooded the window again. She went out to the ship’s glossy tunnels.