Floating Worlds (3 page)

On Paula’s left, the tall woman folded her coat over her arm. With the rest of the crowd she moved down toward the wreck. A man climbed over the smashed front end.

“Here’s a radio—I’ll share it with anybody who helps me get it out.”

Paula and Tony went back across the grass toward his place. She turned to look back. There was a whoop of triumph from the crowd clustered around the car. Two men dragged a seat out of the ruin.

“Vultures,” Tony said.

Paula hurried on her cold feet toward the light of his hall. “What’s wrong with salvage?”

“That’s a euphemism. The word is theft.”

“If nobody took anything, the dome would be littered with junk.” She pushed the window in and slung one leg across the sill. By morning every relic of the car would be gone, even the plastic, which brought 1.5 cents a pound at the recycling plant. She and Tony went onto the porch.

Her first meeting in the matter of the Styth Empire was in the same room where she had had her oral examination. When she let herself in, Jefferson sat at the table rummaging through a handbag like a satchel. “Mendoza,” she said. “Richard is late, as you can see. How do you like your office?”

“It’s terrible. The window looks right out on the gulley bank.” She pulled out a chair and sat across the table from the fat old woman. “I have a terrific view of roots and yellow clay.” That was not entirely true, since a spindling tree grew between the window and the bank. So far it had no leaves. She hoped it was dead. Jefferson was peeling the wrap off a roll of mint candy.

“What did you do for Dr. Savenia?”

“Speechwriting. She had two kinds of speeches, personal attacks and issues. I wrote the attacks.”

Jefferson chortled. Her face was papery white and looked soft, like dough. “Were you good? And here comes Richard.”

A flat papercase under one arm, Richard Bunker walked in the open door and shut it behind him. He put the case on the table. “Hello, Mendoza. Sybil.” He had a windbreaker over his shoulder and he hung it on the back of the chair beside Paula. He clicked up the lid of the papercase.

“Where have you been?” Jefferson said. “You know, I do have other things to do now and then besides wait for you.”

“I’ve been in the copying room trying to get the film transcriber to work.” He dropped a thick file onto the table in front of Paula. It was more than an inch thick, held together with plastic clips. She picked it up while Bunker and Jefferson traded jibes on the state of the machines and people of the Committee.

“You can read that later,” Jefferson said to her. “Dick, give her a brief, so we can get on with it.”

He sat down in the chair beside Paula’s, and she shut the file. Bunker said, “In the past thirty-six months there have been twenty-one reported shooting incidents between ships of the Styth Empire and ships from either the Council Fleet or the Martian Army. All these shootings have been below the asteroid Vesta. Eight have been below Mars. The Council wants us—” his voice rose to a singsong, “to negotiate a truce and any other permanent or semi-permanent arrangements necessary to maintain the peace.” He was slumped down in the chair, his head against the back. “The Council never asks us to do anything possible.”

“Shooting incidents,” Paula said. She had heard nothing about any shootings. “Is it serious?”

They both laughed, humorless, and she heard how stupid she had sounded. Jefferson put a candy into her mouth. “More serious is that we can’t seem to reach the Styths.”

“They keep to themselves,” Paula said. Most of the mutant race lived in Uranus, billions of miles away.

“Not any more,” Bunker said. “Do you have any idea why they might be coming here now?”

She shook her head. The Styths had always seemed in a different Universe from the Middle Planets, living in their floating cities far from the Sun. Bunker said, “Do you know what an Akellar is?”

“The chief officer of a Styth city. They have a central council called the rAkellaron. That’s just the plural of Akellar.”

“Yes. We’ve been trying to make contact with the Prima Akellar, a man named Machou.”

“Machou,” she said. “The Vribulo Akellar.”

“You’ve heard of him.”

“One of my teachers was from Vribulo. Machou’s city. If it’s the same Machou.” She frowned, trying to remember everything the three Styth prisoners had said. “Has anybody been killed?”

Jefferson fingered the roll of candy. “Yes, about twenty Martians that they’re admitting. We don’t know about Styths. We don’t even know if all this action constitutes a systematic policy by the Styths or just random piracy. You said one of your Styths was from Vribulo. What about the others?”

“They were both from Saturn-Keda. The chief city of Saturn.” Saturn-Keda was usually the closest Styth city to the Middle Planets. She reached for the thick file and thumbed down the pages. “What’s in this? What do you know about them?”

“Nothing immediately useful,” Bunker said. “Nothing at all.”

“The Saturn Akellar was the Prima Akellar before Machou,” Paula said. “Apparently a very…a great man. He built six or seven new cities and reformed the fleet. Cleaned up the laws. Outlawed infant marriage, that kind of thing. Kind of a liberal. For a Styth.”

“Infant marriage,” Bunker said, in a titillated voice.

“Don’t you know who the rAkellaron are?”

Jefferson shrugged. “A few names. Did you keep notes from your prison meetings?”

“The warden took all my notebooks. Maybe there are some Styths still in the joint.”

Jefferson fed herself another candy. Her cheeks sucked in around it. “I checked when we found out about your episode. The Martians very efficiently executed them all. What was the name of this paragon?”

“The Saturn Akellar? Melleno. I don’t know if he’s still in the rAkellaron.”

“Can we reach him?” Bunker said.

“I’ll try,” Paula said.

Her new office was a bare white box with a desk and chair, another chair, and a file. The window let in no direct sunlight because of the high wall of the gulch just outside. She had already decided not to put anything on the walls since she was keeping this job only until she found other work. She sat down beside the desk and opened the file on the Styths, but before she had read more than a paragraph, two men came into the office.

“We have a case for you,” the shorter of the two said.

Paula shut the file. She looked from one man to the other. “Yes, what?” Immediately she disliked them: they were smiling. She opened the deep drawer in her desk and stuffed the file in on top of a pile of multicolored forms.

The shorter man sat down. He wore a brown sweater with the initial R in red on the right breast. “We live in a building in the south dome that’s owned by a Mister Roches, and we want something done about it.”

“We’ve been writing him letters of complaint for a year,” the other man said. “Without even the grace of a reply.”

The man in the chair crossed one leg over the other. Carefully he straightened his trousers. “We aren’t the only ones who are complaining. The place is infested with mice, it smells of mildew, the verticals are usually broken, none of our flats has been painted or refloored in more than two years, and the old fellow is a dreadful gossip. The piping is absolutely antique, you can’t get an air filter installed—”

She put her elbows on the desk. “What do you want me to do?”

Their faces slid down out of their smiles. Intense, she leaned forward, looking from one to the other. “Why the hell do you come in here with something like this? You’re supposed to be anarchists. You’re supposed to take care of yourselves. If you don’t like it, move. If nobody likes it, get everybody to move, open the gas cocks and throw in a match. Get away from me.”

The shorter man popped up out of his chair. “You’re supposed to be here to help people.”

“If you need help for something like that, go someplace where there’s a government. Like Mars.” She yanked the drawer open and put the Styth file on the desk in front of her.

“No wonder everybody hates the Committee.” The taller man rushed to the desk. She ignored him, pretending to read. He and his friend strode out of the office.

She leaned back in her chair, pleased. Outside the window the sunlight was at last reaching the ground, where a green sprinkling of grass grew near the tree. In places the claybank was yellow as lemons, in places orange. She sat thinking of the Styths in the Martian prison. The man from Vribulo had been waiting to be gassed for murder. Lonely and angry and homesick and frightened, he had shouted at her and tried to attack her and talked, when she had finally begun to understand him, talked in a desperate flood. That had been five years ago. She had not thought of him in a long while. She had liked him and his death had hurt; she had made herself go to witness it. She turned over the first page of the file.

Overwood’s Import Shop was in the Old Town of Los Angeles, between an optometrist’s and an astrologer’s. When Paula went in, a bell rang in the back of the store. It was so dark she ran into an air fern hanging from the ceiling in a bucket. The air smelled of marijuana. At the back of the shop a little man in an apron leaned on a counter.

“Help you?”

“Are you Thomas Overwood?”

“That’s right, honey. Call me Tom.”

She went up to the counter. “I understand you deal in crystal.”

His round face settled. “Call me Mr. Overwood.”

“I’m from the Committee.”

“Oh.” He reached his hand out to her, smiling again. “Whyn’t you say so? Sure, I traffic in crystal. But it’ll cost you.”

“Where does it come from?”

“Uranus. Farmed in the White Side.” Overwood ducked down behind the counter and brought up a stack of black and white holographs. “One thousand dollars the ounce.”

She lifted off the top photograph. Against the black background the crystal polyhedron looked like a jewel. Overwood tapped the photograph.

“That’s Relleno. There are five grades, all I deal in are the premier grades, Relleno and Ebelos. Sixteen O-Z’s of Ebelos would power the whole California dome for six months.”

Paula leafed through the photographs. “I don’t believe you.”

Overwood muttered something.

“How do you get it?” she said.

“Oh, now—”

She put the holographs down. “We have a message for someone in the Styth Empire. Can you arrange to deliver it?”

His wide eyebrows rose. “I see. That will cost you, too.”

“Can you guarantee?”

“Who do you want to reach?”

“Melleno. The Saturn Akellar.”

Overwood leaned his forearm on the counter. “Maybe.”

“For a maybe, you’d better not ask much.”

He gathered up the photographs and put them away under the counter. Even here on the Earth, where there were no laws and no police, he was cautious. She wondered who his enemies were. Maybe other smugglers. He said, “My connection can get into Saturn-Keda.”

The doorbell jangled. She turned to watch a woman with a white dog cross the dark shop. Overwood went from behind the counter.

“Help you?”

“I’m looking at your splendid glassware.”

Paula strolled around the display cases along the wall. They showed rows of incense jars, plates, figures of animals. Amulets and books on Zen. She admired an old ivory and ebony chess set. On the wall above it was a corkboard, with bits of paper pinned to it.

Commune share 25/mo. Drugs check, one kid check.

Overwood sprayed foam around a dish of Venusian glass. While the casing dried, he took the woman’s money and gave her change. She tucked her white dog under one arm and the foam case under the other. The bell rang her out.

“Cost you fifteen hundred dollars to send a message to Saturn-Keda,” Overwood said. “In advance.”

Paula glanced at him over her shoulder. “For a maybe?”

“For certain. He’ll deliver.”

“One thousand. When we know it’s delivered.”

“No chance. My connection is a busy man.”

“I don’t doubt it. Where does he go? Does he go to Uranus?”

“Vribulo. Matuko. Flying around in a Gas Planet isn’t something I’d do, for instance. These spacemen are crazy.” Overwood took a tray out of the counter. “Direct from Saturn.” With a little flourish he turned back the lid. “Genuine reproductions.”

There were five big medals inside the box. Paula lifted one out by the chain. “What are they?”

“When a Styth warrior goes into military orders, you see, he wears a medal with his sign, here.” He pointed at the design cut into the medal’s face. “That’s the Fish. They’re very superstitious people.”

She reached for another. “What’s this one mean?”

“Unh—”

“Twelve hundred. Seven in advance, five when we know it’s delivered.”

“Now, my connection is a busy man.”

“So are we.”

He pursed his lips. “For the Committee.” He offered his wide hand, and Paula shook it.

The SoCal dome reached out to the deep water. The surf was too dirty to swim in. She walked along the beach, watching the waves break sluggishly over, brown with dirt. Garbage encrusted the sand. The filth lowered her mood, or maybe she had come here because her mood was already low and needed celebration.

The poet Fuldah had thought that all societies contained a finite number of persona, and the people left over from this cast could only wander around outside making trouble. She felt herself being forced into a role. Her life was closing in on her. She hated the Committee job, even the Styth case bored her, but it paid well and she kept putting off quitting because she liked the money. Tony would make her pregnant which would determine the next eighteen or twenty years while she raised her child. She felt as if her life were over.

The beach was studded with black rocks. Ahead, the brown cliffs rose, cut with gulleys. The edge of the water was strewn with purple and white jellyfish. A sea carrot, alive with flies, lay rotting along the high-tide line. She swerved away from its stink toward the cliffs, took her clothes off, and sat on a warm rock.

In spite of her restlessness she could not think of anything to do.
Free as a bird
, her father would have said. Free to do what every other bird did. She picked at the white scale on the rock. Out past the surf, the dome wall shone in the sunlight. It was not solid: ionized gas, held by a magnetic field, because of the earthquakes. Two boys came down the beach looking for rocks. She waved; they waved. After a while she put her clothes on and went back to the rooming house to eat.