Floating Worlds (26 page)

She took the buckle out of her sleeve and held it out to him. “I saw you there, last watch, in the Tulan. Did you see me?”

His mouth opened. He took the buckle and turned it over. She snapped the lid of the flute’s box closed. Finally he tossed the buckle down on the couch.

“Not his house. You’ll have to follow him.”

“I’ll need Pedasen,” she said.

Tssa lived in the Tulan. For six watches she and Pedasen followed him wherever he went. He went nowhere interesting. Saba had set Bakan to spy on his nephew as well; Bakan stayed away from Paula. In the seventh watch, the low watch, Tssa came out of his rambling walled house, started off along the street, and lost all three of them.

Paula circled through the narrow grassy lanes of the Tulan and found him again, with three other men, in an alleyway watching the street. She guessed he was looking out for Bakan, who was there to be dodged. When Bakan did not appear, Tssa and his men went away at top speed into the Varyhus District.

Paula and the eunuch stayed about a hundred yards behind them. They took her around the factory, squat and stinking behind its high mesh fence, to a long house blackened with grime. The building was one story for most of its length but a narrow second-story annex was stacked up along the right side, with a stair running up the outer wall to its door. rUlugongon and drums pounded inside the windows of the ground floor. From the corner of the lane Paula watched the last of Tssa’s men go into the upper annex.

“Stay here,” she said to Pedasen. She went down the street to the stairs and climbed them. The stairs were worn sway-backed in the middle. On the landing at the door, a black and white kusin hissed at her, its long whiskers bristling, and jumped to the roof and ran away over the peak. She looked behind her. Pedasen was sitting on the ground at the corner watching her. She went into the building.

In the dark hallway she was blind a moment. The music boomed up from below, making the floor vibrate. She struggled with her fear. In the white slave clothes she felt conspicuous. Her eyes began to see in the gloom and she went down the hallway. Through an open door on the right she saw an empty room, a table, a window scummed opaque with dirt. The next door was shut. She put her ear against it but heard nothing except the pounding tuneless music. Under the banging another sound reached her, growing louder: feet coming up the stairs. She went into the empty room.

The footsteps passed her and stopped before the next door, and a knock rattled on it. She went across the little room to listen. The music drowned the words of the two voices. The plank wall between the room was so thin that it yielded when she touched it, but she could hear nothing but a loud laugh in the room beyond.

She had found Tssa’s meeting place, or one such, and she tried to convince herself that was enough. Saba would not think it was worth very much. She searched along the wall for a chink or a hole she could see through.

A voice bellowed in the hall. “Is there a nigger up here?”

She ran out the door. A big man leaned out of the next room: Tssa’s man. “Bring us a tank, and hop.” He ducked back inside and slammed the door.

She dashed down the outer stairs to the street. Pedasen stood up when he saw her, but she waved him down again and ran around to the front of the building and in the door.

The whole long ground floor was one room. In a corner six men played the deafening music. A few others sat around on the floor. Apparently it was the off-watch. There were no tables or chairs. On one side wall, beside a flight of stairs, was a big barrel with a tap faucet in the bottom and a row of jugs on a shelf beside it. The floor was deep in sand. She crossed to the barrel and took down the biggest jug on the shelf. Opening the tap, she filled the jug with the thick yellow beer.

“Hey!”

She nearly dropped the tank. A fat man in a smock blocked her way. He held out one huge hand. “Pay.”

“It’s for Tssa,” she said. “Upstairs.”

“Just the same, you pay now.”

She gave him the jug to hold and took the string of credit from her neck. The fat man said, “So now he’s bringing his own slaves. He won’t escape paying me that way.” The jug tucked under his arm, he snatched the string away from her. “He can pay what he owes me, too.” The credit jangled. He counted off more than half. Paula glanced around. A man near the door was watching and she looked hastily away from him. It was Mikka, Saba’s blood-stauncher brother. She took the jug and the raped credit string and hurried up the stairs.

Mikka had recognized her. She wondered if he worked for Tssa. The stair took her out at the end of the annex. She knocked on the closed door and it sprang open.

Tssa sat at a table under the window, counting out credit into stacks. Of her age, he was slightly built, with Saba’s marked sensual features. She put the jug down on the table. The room was crowded with men. She backed up to the wall, trying to memorize their faces. They ignored her. She was trembling, not from cold.

“Here comes Kolinakin,” said a man by the window. He nodded down into the street.

Tssa was drinking beer. He put the cup down and beckoned to another man. “Go make sure nobody is following him.” The man left. Saba’s nephew frowned at Paula. “What’s that doing here?”

“I’m supposed—” Her dry voice squeaked, and she coughed. “I’m supposed to ask to be paid.”

“Paid!” Tssa looked around at his men. “He thinks I’m a street vendor. Or that this slop is worth money; which is it?” The other men laughed. There were cups on the shelf beside the door, and the Styths took them down and passed the tank around. Tssa stretched his back, his hands behind his head. “Go,” he said to her.

“Please. He’ll beat me.” She was ruining her usefulness; he would certainly recognize her after this, but she wanted to see the man he was here to meet: Kolinakin.

“Maybe he likes beating you,” Tssa said, amiably.

The door banged open. A huge man stamped into the room. He walked flat-footed, his toes out, his knees bent; he was the tallest Styth she had ever seen, inches taller than Tanuojin. Tssa stood and they shook hands.

“That’s what I came for,” the giant said. He flicked one finger at the credit piled on the table.

Tssa sat down again. “You’d better be careful. My uncle is having us all watched.” He put his elbows on the table on either side of the money.

Kolinakin snapped his fingers with a crack that made Paula start. Quickly a man took a cup from the shelf and blew into it to blow away the dust and poured him beer. The giant said, “I know every man in Saba’s crew. He doesn’t even suspect I’m in this. I’m having him watched. You aristocrats.” He took the beer. “You think with your blood instead of your brains.” The cup vanished into his enormous hand.

Tssa’s eyes were half-closed. He studied Kolinakin. Paula licked her lips. Whoever the big man was, he was pushing Tssa, and not the other way; he was the master. Tssa said, “Girl.” When she looked up he tossed her a small credit. “That’s yours, for the whipping. Tell the slop-tender he can wait for his.”

She went to the door, glad to be leaving. Just as she reached it, the door flew open. Mikka stumbled into the room. She shrank back, her heart jumping into her throat. The air was suddenly charged with metallic heat. Behind Mikka came Saba.

Tssa stood. Kolinakin turned, and someone swore in a choked voice.

“Now, look who’s here,” Saba said. He faced Kolinakin. Behind him, his crew jammed the hall. “The Akellar of the Varyhus.”

Kolinakin lunged for the door. Paula reached it a step ahead of him. Saba’s men charged in. They ran her off her feet and carried her deep into the room, and the brawl broke out around her. She scrambled toward the door. Two men backed into her from opposite directions. She squeezed out of the press of bodies. On hands and knees she crawled between men thrashing and fighting and curled up underneath the table, as close to the wall as she could get, her arms over her head, while the annex rocked and the walls broke all around her.

She kept the heat in her house low, for David’s sake. While she was bathing him, Pedasen came into the steamroom behind her.

“The Akellar wants you in the Manhus.”

She glanced at him. David yawned; the inside of his mouth was pink as a cat’s. She wrapped him in a towel.

“What I’d like to know is why you let him go in there when I was still in the middle of it,” she said to Pedasen.

“I didn’t do anything. He just came. I think he was following us, on top of all the rest. Here, I’ll take him.” He reached for the baby.

Pedasen could dress David and put him to bed. She crossed the yard to the Manhus. During the brawl she had been stepped on twice and fallen on once and her ribs still hurt. Sril was standing just outside the maproom door, in the hall of the Manhus.

“Mendoz’,” he said. “You got us all blood-pay. I’ll buy you a cup sometime.” He opened the door for her.

The oval room beyond was lined with maps, set in frames along the wall like windows, green maps of Uranus and blue and white maps of the solar system. Saba sat on a pedestal chair in the middle of the room. He waved to her to stay where she was. The two men before him had their backs to her, but she recognized Tssa and Mikka.

“There is such a thing as family loyalty,” Saba said. “Honor, and regard for your own blood. Although anybody who would put his head together with a thug like Kolinakin—”

Kolinakin was dead. They had dragged him into the street and broken his neck. She put her hand to her sore ribs. Neither of the two bound men noticed her. Saba made a gesture with his left hand. A plastic glove sheathed his right to the elbow; he had broken three fingers in the fight. Sril brought him a pair of shears.

“I’m giving you a choice,” he said to Tssa. He nodded at the broad-bladed shears in the gunner’s hand.

Under his shirt Tssa’s shoulders were rigidly straight. “You never gave my father any choices. What are you trying to pay for, uncle?”

Saba nodded at her, where she stood in the doorway. “Look over there, Tssa.”

His nephew’s head turned. When he saw Paula his round eyes narrowed. Saba said, “That’s how I caught you. That slavewoman caught you for me. Your father was stupid but he would never have let a nigger trap him, and a woman at that.”

The younger man’s gaze fell. Mikka was staring at the far wall. Saba swiveled his chair back and forth in tiny rhythmic squeaks. “Take your choice. It makes no difference to me.”

Tssa’s head was bowed. The room was silent a long moment while he thought. At last he reached for the shears in Sril’s hand. He hacked off his own hair, just above the club, and dropped the knot of hair and the shears on the floor. His eyes looked blind. He came toward Paula, long-striding, and she moved out of the doorway and he brushed by her without looking at her. The door shut.

Saba tapped Sril’s arm. “Make sure he leaves Matuko.”

“Yes, Akellar.” Sril hurried out after Tssa.

Saba turned to Mikka. “Now, what about you?”

His brother took a step toward him. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. Ask her. I was just there having a jar.” He put his hand out to Paula. “Tell him. I saved your life, didn’t I?”

She looked from him to Saba. “He was Tssa’s lookout. He saw me, but he was too drunk to come upstairs.”

“I saved your life!”

Saba pushed at the hair knot on the floor with his foot. “Go get drunk in somebody else’s city.”

“I don’t have any money.” Mikka wiped his hand over his mouth. “Tssa owed everybody.” He tramped out of the room, grumbling.

Saba rotated the chair back and forth. Paula said, “I’m not a slave.”

“When you go out, you’ll use the slave door, and you’ll wear slave clothes. I won’t have people thinking I’d let my wife run around in the street.” He waved his plastic hand at her. “You can go.”

Boltiko sat down, pulling her skirts smooth over her knees, and sighed. “Sometimes I think I’ll just die. I can’t eat anything any more without getting sick.” She fanned her vast face, smooth with fat. Illy’s slave poured kakine, the sweet green Matukit liquor, into three glasses on the table before her.

Paula’s chair was a sling of white shaggy fur, big enough to sleep in. She curled her legs under her. Illy’s whole house was done in white, chrome, and glass. The young wife came in from the sleeproom. Against such a background, her beauty was riveting: there was nothing else to look at. Boltiko glared at her.

“That boy of yours is incorrigible.”

Illy had three children. Paula could never pick out which of the horde they were. The young wife sat down in the chair between the other women. “I’m sure I can’t be blamed.”

Boltiko snorted. She reached for a glass of kakine. “That baby is tiny,” she said to Paula. “You aren’t feeding him enough.”

“If he were any bigger I’d have to put wheels on him to move him around.”

“He cries. That’s a sign he’s hungry.”

“I think he’s just bad-tempered,” Paula said.

“He cries all the time.”

“All you ever talk about is children,” Illy said. She sent the slave away with a wave of her hand. “He’s in a good mood now.”

All she ever talked about was Saba. Paula rubbed her hand over the long white nap of her chair. The treaty had come back, signed, and the trade contracts had been covered by a syndicate of fifty-two Martian traders.

Boltiko said, “Nobody is blowing down Matuko, that’s why. Dakkar says the city is very peaceful.”

The house slave came in again with a tray of cut fruit. Like Pedasen, he was a eunuch. In his whispery voice, he said, “Mem, Pedasen is in the back. The Akellar will see Mem Paula in the Manhus.”

“In the Manhus,” Illy and Boltiko said, in one voice.

“I wonder what he wants,” Paula said. She slid down from the chair.

Pedasen waited in the back doorway of lily’s house, David in the crook of his arm. When the baby saw her he burst into an enormous smile. She took him from the slave. With Pedasen beside her she crossed the yard to the Manhus door.

“Boltiko says it means he’s hungry when he cries,” she said to Pedasen.

He shrugged. On the steps, he reached for the baby again. “She thinks that’s all that can be wrong with people, that they’re hungry.”