Floating Worlds (55 page)

The warm night was unusually windy. The long slope led away from the mouth of the tunnel toward the lake. She laid him carefully on one blanket and pulled it by the edge down across the grass. The wind rustled behind her and she started so hard she went cold, thinking it was Han Ra coming back.

A hundred feet from the tunnel, the slope broke off in a sheer fourteen-foot drop, like a bite taken out of the hillside. She hid Bunker in the shadow at the back of this notch and returned to the secret room. All their food was hidden in a hole dug out of the wall behind the bed. She put it into a sack, took the sack and some rope out across the wasteland to the only tree in the area, and hoisted it up to the high branches, away from dogs.

Bunker was where she had left him: awake now. She felt of the bandage. It was so full of blood it squelched when she touched it.

He whispered, “Tools. Fire.” His voice sounded as if it were rising through water.

“I’m afraid to leave you here. It’s too close to the tunnel.” She bundled him up again in the blankets. There were only three or four hours left until daybreak. His eyes were closed and she thought he was asleep again, but when she lifted him with his arm around her neck he pushed with his feet, trying to help. She took him off over the gentle hump of the next hill and down into a narrow gulley whose sandy bottom yielded under her feet.

When she had found him a soft shelter she went back at a run to the tunnel. On the slope, she stopped still. Above the tunnel, near the crown of the slope, was the flat turret of the building’s gatehouse. A light shone through it. While she watched it faded out. She went at a jog up to the gatehouse and looked in the door.

She could see down the stairway, and the light was just disappearing away along the corridor that led to Jennie’s flat. Quietly she followed it. For the first time, she remembered she had no clothes on. Her bare feet made no sound on the slick plastic floor. Ahead, the light bobbed along; the people carrying it were one dark moving thing, now and then a head and shoulders silhouetted against the ball of light before them. They went into Jennie Morrison’s old flat, and Paula went into the next one.

There was a hole blasted through the wall between this place and Jennie’s. Chunks of plasticrete and shelving littered the floor. She stepped carefully over a sink basin.

“They’re gone,” someone said loudly, in the next room. “That bitch got him out.”

“I told you to do for her.”

“We’ll find them.”

She put her hand on the wall and looked through the hole into Jennie’s flat. The low doorway under the sink was open wide and the light shone out from the secret room. Long shadows passed back and forth through it: the legs of the men walking past the light. They were looting the place. She backed up a step into the ruined apartment behind her, stooped, and in the rubble found a piece of plasticrete she could lift.

“We could use this cupboard for firewood,” one of the raiders said. “I wonder how they got it in here?”

She threw the chunk of building stone at Jennie’s kitchen wall. At the thud someone yelled.

“What’s that?”

Paula was hurrying through the darkened apartment, gathering up pieces of stone. She went back to the hole and threw the debris against the wall around the low doorway. Something crumbled and a shower of dust fell like hail.

“Hey! Who’s that? What’s going on?” A head poked out the doorway, and she flung a stone that came nowhere near him and he ducked back.

“Get away or we’ll shoot!”

She leaned against the wall in the dark room, listening to them. When no more rocks fell around them, they began to talk in low whispers, and suddenly three men burst out of the doorway. A gun went off half a dozen times, like thunder in the closed space, and the three men raced out Jennie’s door and down the corridor, taking their light with them. Paula went into the secret room. Bunker’s tools, matches, the last of their clothes, and the dip-lamp were all piled on the bed. She wrapped them up in her winter coat and lugged them up the tunnel to the wilderness.

From where she was sitting, she could see the whole lake. Three people were coming toward her along its edge. It was strange how even now that the lake had no water in it at all and the mud was dried firm as concrete, people walked along the edge instead of across. Habit. They saw what they were used to seeing. Paula sat cross-legged in the lee of the ruined building watching the three people come on.

The woman led them. Paula had seen that of the three of them the woman was the boldest. The two men followed her trustingly. They reached the big boulder that marked the southernmost tip of the lake and turned to walk along the edge of the meadow, following the curve of the next hillside. Paula stood up.

Instantly the man second in the line saw her and tapped the woman on the shoulder and pointed. Paula waved to them. They broke into a run toward her. Paula waited until they were nearly on her and went off past the ruin. They fell in around her.

“Where is your friend?” the woman said. “We were expecting him.”

“He’s busy.”

Beyond the ruin where Paula had waited for them the land was broken into ridges where the grass still grew thick and there were still many trees. Narrow defiles separated the ridges, their beds made of round stones. She led these people down a twisting gulley, past the place where she and Kasuk and Junna had come into the New York dome, two years before. At the mouth of this gorge, she went between two old trees and into a cave in the hillside. The cave was lined with polished tile. It was an old terminal on the Underground. A big blue arrow on the tile pointed into the gloom; a sign above it read INDEPENDENT LINE. The air car was parked against the opposite wall.

“Fantastic.” One of the men rushed to it and pried the bonnet up.

Paula put her hands into her pockets. So near its mouth the cave was light enough to make out the strange woman’s broad-nosed, pleasant face. Paula said, “Do you hear that?” and wagged her head toward the rear of the cave. The roar of the underground river came from the darkness.

“It sounds like water,” the woman said calmly.

“That’s how you get out. This car isn’t amphibious, so you have to be careful about getting it wet. Follow the river there downstream until you come to the waterfall. Then you go upstream. About fifteen miles up there’s a hole in the roof of the tunnel.”

The woman was smiling at her. In the same placid voice, she said, “You and he are the last ones, you know. Every free anarchist has gone.”

The two men were climbing over the air car. One called, “This is super-check, Kadrin.” The woman waved her hand at them.

Paula said, “If you’re smart, you’ll go when it’s light out. After dawn. The Styths don’t like bright light.”

“Thank you,” the woman said.

“Don’t thank me. I don’t think you’re going to make it. There’s nothing to thank us for.”

The woman laughed. She clapped Paula on the arm, as if Paula had made some tremendous joke, and went to join her friends. Their voices rose, excited, as they explored the car. Paula went out of the cave. She stopped in the gorge, still hearing their voices behind her, and listened awhile, as if they were friends.

“There was something snuffling around outside,” Bunker said. “When I woke up.”

She crawled in beside him and lay down. Her hair caught on the thorny brush above her. Carefully she freed herself. In the thicket, their latest hiding place, there was just room enough for him to lie on his back and for her to lie on her side next to him. The water bucket stood near his head. She drank a cupful of water.

“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.