Floating Worlds

THE EARTH January 1852—January 1853

“These people were giants,” Tony said. He waved up at the towering ruin before them. “They built on such a scale, their ideas were so absolute and universal—”

Paula said, “They were Fascists.”

“You can’t have everything.”

She scuffed her feet over the pavement, two thousand years old, seamed with moss. She had never been good at history. Down the wide, straight street, a man in a white hat leaned back to take a snapshot of the ruins. Paula went down the steps and turned to look up at the building. On the frieze above the doors stone masks hung, labeled. She tried to make out the lettering. BRA—

“Haven’t you ever been here before?” Tony said. He came up behind her, his hands in his pants pockets.

“Once. When I was little. My mother brought me. We had ice creams afterward.” Why was everything so large? She shaded her eyes to see the letters. MANTE. She would have to look it up.

“What was it used for?”

“A museum. A library. Something like that.”

She looked around them. Both sides of the street were lined with ruins. Opposite, a wall still stood upright, the windows worn soft and round with age.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “It’s arrogant.”

“You’re very provincial.”

She grunted at him. They went along the street. Her footsteps rang noisily after her off the ruined walls. The pavement was hard and her legs hurt. Other people strolled around, their heads tilted back.

On the street corner a woman sat painting at an easel. Tony went straight toward her. Paula ambled after him. Opposite the museum, green vines swallowed the last remaining wall of another building. The yellow tongues of sweet Mary reached out to the light. She veered across the pavement and picked one flower and sucked it for the trace of honey. She would have an ice cream on the way home. Voices here traveled far, perhaps the stone carried them; she could hear people talking in the next street. She went up beside Tony.

He stood next to the painter, his face pursed. Amused, she watched him put his head this way and that to see the picture from different angles. He was really a critic, not a writer at all; he knew every pose.

“The lighting presents an interesting problem,” he said.

The woman wiggled her brush in a muddy cup of water. “The domelight changes from day to day. Almost from hour to hour.”

Paula looked straight up overhead. The light was diffuse. It fell in pale sheets through the height of the dome, here blue and there definitely more yellow. It was hard to realize that the ocean covered them. Tony was discussing Art with the painter. He sounded knowledgeable but Paula did not understand anything he said. She went across the street. From here she could see through the broken walls to the next row of ruins, and through them to the next, all huge, the biggest buildings she had ever seen. The people who had built this city had dominated the Earth for three centuries, by money, by force, and by guile; they had colonized Mars, reached as far as Uranus, cracked atoms and made whole cities out of polymer, and Manhattan had been the heart of that empire.

“You know a lot about art,” the woman said to Tony. “Do you paint?”

He smiled at her. “I’m a writer. My name’s Tony Andrea.”

“Oh, really.” They shook hands. She had read his first book. Paula circled behind them to look at the water color. She did not like it. Cramped onto the square paper, the buildings looked small, like broken boxes. She put her hands in her jacket pockets, raising her eyes back to the ruins.

“Are you a writer too?” the painter said.

Paula shook her head. “I’m—”

“We haven’t figured out yet what Paula is,” Tony said.

They walked off down the street. A thick tarry slab of the concrete had buckled up the pavement in the middle. The street ran off straight to the shining wall of the dome in the distance, bordered on either side by raised strips of poured stone. Paula stepped up onto the border.

“Why is this part higher than the other?”

Tony walked along the lower level, beside her. She could see the balding crown of his head. Maybe when he was asleep she would draw an ivy wreath on it. He said, “They drove their cars on this part, and the people on foot walked up where you are. Out of the way, see?”

“They drove their cars on the ground?” No wonder the street was so broad. “Were they horse-drawn?”

“They were a little more advanced than that, kitch.”

Ahead of them the angle of the light changed. They were coming to the wall of the dome. A jagged shell of a building rose up from the street, hundreds of feet high, catching the light. She put her hand up between her eyes and the dome. “It’s glass.” The domelight shone green as leaves along the edges of the walls. “That’s a dumb thing to make a building out of.”

Tony laughed. He swung her off the border and down to the street beside him. “You really are a narrow-minded little materialist.”

“Did they live here? In glass buildings?” Some fable moved elusively at the edge of her memory.

“No. They lived somewhere else and came in here during the day.”

“Now tell me the truth.”

“I’m sorry, kitch, that is the truth.”

She stood looking up at the glass. Maybe in those days glass had been more common than it was now. Waves of stain crossed it, traces of dry dust like tracks from the time when the ruins had been under water.

“Atlantis.”

“That’s a different place entirely,” Tony said. “That’s in Aegea.”

They went on to the port. The covered boat waited in the brackish water of the dock, empty. Paula went down between the benches to the back, next to the steering box. Tony sat down beside her.

“The doctor says he won’t do the operation unless you sign a paper saying you know I can get you pregnant.”

“What?”

“I know it’s ridiculous, but he’s an old bastard, he says he’s tired of naturalizing the men and then six months later sucking out the women.”

Paula leaned on the wall of the steering box, looking in at the controls. “It’s not up to him.” The long handle coming from the floor was probably the brake. She was surprised that having a baby would be so complicated. The boat rocked; people crowded on board.

“Are you having dinner with me tonight?” she asked.

“I have to work,” Tony said. “I’ve been with you all day.”

He was writing a metaphysical novel, of which she had already read three drafts. He was endlessly inventive without being especially creative, which made his books easy to read. He told her how he was changing Chapter Three, where the hero murdered his wife. She wondered if he had made up the doctor’s demand. Maybe he did not want a baby after all. The painter was maneuvering her easel through the door into the boat. Behind her the boatman came in and pulled up the ramp. He got into the steering box beside Paula.

“Hang on, we may bump going through the locks.”

The deck shuddered under Paula’s feet. She heard the rumble of an engine. She turned to the window. The rubberized walls of the lock closed around the boat and slipped with a wet slick plop past the window. The interior lights came on, making everything white. The boat rose straight up. Outside the window the ocean was lit dark green from the dome wall they were passing. So close to New York, the sea was filthy. Flakes of garbage floated around the window. There was supposed to be an ancient dump here someplace, still leaking after hundreds of years. Tony was talking to the boatman about nautical design. The water outside the boat filled slowly with sunshine. She pressed her cheek against the clammy plastic of the window. Half a mile below, the Manhattan dome glowed like a moon in the ocean.

The boat surfaced. They flew across the choppy open water. Paula sat back. The other passengers talked in low voices. Tony sat absently licking the hairs of his mustache into his mouth and biting them off. Ahead, the southern end of the New York dome reflected the late sunlight back across the water in a coppery trail. In the western sky, rank with pollution, swirling with smoke, three images of the sun sank toward the horizon. Half the sky was brilliant ruddy orange. The boat yawed in the wind off the seacoast. They sank into the water again. The boatman steered them through the underwater lock and up to the surface of the terminal pond.

Tony helped her down the ramp, steering her by one hand on her arm. They went into the terminal building and took the crowded vertical car to the roof bus stop. Dark was falling. The winking white light of an air bus was coming above the trees. Tony stood beside her, rocking back and forth on his heels.

“Write something down I can show my doctor, so he can take the plug out.”

“I think you ought to go to a doctor who minds his own.”

The bus settled down onto the roof. She went up the steps beside the driver. She hadn’t paid for a bus ride in days; she put a dollar into the box. Tony came after her, crowding her in. The bus was full, all the side benches taken. She went down the aisle to the back.

“Do you like the name Jennie?” Tony asked.

“I like Jennifer better.”

“Jennifer Mendoza sounds terrible.”

She looked up at him, drawn by his earnestness. His eyes were blue, unexpected against his chocolate dark skin. Their baby would not have blue eyes.

“Andrea is a girl’s name.” It was a fad to name babies for their fathers.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said.

The bus slowed and settled down on a rooftop, and the lights blinked on and off. “Hobold Building,” the driver called. “Change for crosstown. Next stop the university.”

“What if it’s a boy?” Paula said.

Tony shrugged. “I have no preference in boys’ names.”

The bus flew off in a giddy curve. She clutched the railing to keep from falling. Out the window, beyond the fat woman on the bench, the blue night domelight shone on the surface of the lake. The bus crossed a hilly stretch of trees and lowered again. She slid between Tony and a row of knees toward the back door.

She got off the bus near the turret of the Biochemistry Building. There was an arrow-shaped sign pasted to it: Celestial Mechanics Conference. She went across the campus. Most of the university was underground. On the silo of the Technology Building was another arrow-shaped sign. She liked the phrase, “celestial mechanics.” Maybe she would name the baby that. She went through the park. It was dark under the trees and she stayed in the open. An owl hooted. She stopped and waited but heard nothing more.

The top three stories of her building were above ground. She went in the front door, past the crowds of bicycles, and up to the third floor. In the circular middle room of the commune a small knot of people already waited at the big table for the dinner rice. She stopped at the videone for her messages. There were no messages. She went to her room, in the back hall, threw her bag on the unmade bed, and went next door and knocked.

“Who’s there?”

She opened the door and went into a tiny, crowded room. An Chu was standing at her drawing table sketching. Paula took off her jacket, dropped it on the bed, and stretched herself out on top of it and the other woman’s stacked clean sheets and towels.

“We went to Manhattan. Have you ever been there? The undersea dome.”

An Chu’s beaked Aztec nose was an inch from the paper. “I can’t stand being under water. The job list is there on the bed.”

Like Paula, An Chu was out of work. Paula sat up. She piled the clean laundry up into a single stack against the wall and found the long sheet of paper advertising jobs. Outside in the hall, someone called, “The rice is out.” An Chu took the bowl and went to get their dinner. Paula toed off her shoes. She got up to see the long sleeveless dress An Chu had been drawing. The walls of the little room were papered with sketches of clothes. An Chu brought the nutty fragrance of rice into the room.

“Here’s one,” Paula said, sitting down on the bed again. “Swamper for an all-night bar. Prefer non-drinker.”

An Chu located her cutting board and a knife and began to chop vegetables. “You drink.” A piece of celery sailed into Paula’s lap and she ate it.

“I could quit. What’s a bramante?”

“I think it’s a place in Lisbon.”

“I think it’s a man. I’m glad I can’t type.” Rows and rows of uninteresting jobs required typing. She watched An Chu pile up the green and orange vegetables at the side of the chopping block. An Chu’s skin was golden, her lips full, her long eyes like jet. She swept the vegetables into the pot, where they sizzled.

“I have to get up early tomorrow,” Paula said. “Make sure I wake up, will you?”

“Why?”

“For the oral exam. For the Committee.”

“Oh, lord. You aren’t still doing that?”

“It’s a job. They pay better than anything else except the Martians.”

“If you ask me,” An Chu said, stirring the vegetables, “there’s no difference between the Committee and the Martians. They’re all a power train.”

Paula folded the job sheet and stuck it into a crack in the wall. She sat down on the floor, ready to eat. An Chu was right about the Committee. A worldwide company, it negotiated contracts and ran diplomatic errands for the rest of the Middle Planets. She had applied out of curiosity, and the tests had become a kind of joke; they asked for some training in interplanetary law, which she did not have, and gave aptitude tests in mathematics and science, which she knew she had flunked. It was amusing to answer tongue-in-cheek to all their solemn stupid questions. The other woman spooned up rice and vegetables into a bowl, and Paula reached for it, hungry.

The Committee for the Revolution had its New York office in a gulley between the campus and the lake. The building was one story, with three or four air cars parked on the roof. When Paula got there, the waiting room was already full of people. She crossed through the crowd, conscious of the stares, and read down the schedule on the bulletin board. Her name was third on the list for the oral exam. She could not leave to get her breakfast as she had planned. There was no place to sit. She stood by the wall next to the desk.

She had seen most of the other people at the written examinations. Nearly all were younger than she was by five or six years. They bent over their notebooks studying, or stared into space, book plugs in their ears. They took it all terribly seriously. The room was warm. She could smell her own body. She wondered why she was scheduled so early. Her stomach fluttered. It was easy to be facetious and irreverent to a piece of paper.

The inner door opened, and a tall redheaded girl came out. Behind her was a man in a white cotton pullover with NEW YORK LIBRARY stenciled on it in green. That was Michalski, the Committee secretary. Everybody in the waiting room came to attention. He said, “Carlos Sahedi?” and a boy with pimples left the couch and went in. Michalski shut the door.

The redheaded girl let out her breath in a loud shoosh. “Well, I’m glad that’s over.”

“What did they ask you?” Half the people waiting began to call questions. Paula crossed her arms over her breasts. Someone brought the redheaded girl a paper slip of water.

The girl drank. “Don’t bother studying, it’s not like that, it’s why-do-you-bite-your-fingernails?”

Paula bit her fingernails. She closed her hands into fists.

“Who’s on the panel?”

“Sybil Jefferson. Richard Bunker. Three or four others. I didn’t recognize them all. Where did this water come from?”

The people around the water cooler moved away to let her reach the spigot. Paula sighed. She stared across the room at the split-sphere projection of the Earth on the far wall.

After a long while, Carlos Sahedi came out, Michalski behind him. “Paula Mendoza.”

She went after him into the corridor. The cooler air brushed her sweating face and neck. Michalski said, “Are you thirsty? I can bring you some coffee.”

“No, that’s all right,” she said. “Thanks.” Her voice sounded scratchy. He nodded to a door on her right. Voices came through it.

“Go on in,” Michalski said. He went down the corridor.

Paula stood still a moment, listening to the people inside the room argue. A woman’s voice said, “Why hasn’t anybody learned it?”

“Who could use it?” said a voice she thought she recognized. “They aren’t exactly the likely people to have an anarchist revolution, are they?” Paula pushed the door in and entered the room.

Ranged behind a shiny table, the six members of the panel turned to face her. She shut the door and went straight up toward them, itching with nerves.

“I’m Paula Mendoza,” she said.

The six faces stared blankly back at her. The fat woman in the middle was Sybil Jefferson, her cheeks powder-white. She flipped over a page in the loose-bound book before her.

“Your father was Akim Morgan, the behaviorist, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” Paula said, startled.

“I met him once. He was very didactic.”

“He was strong-minded,” Paula said, angry. Her father was dead. “He wasn’t didactic.”

The slight dark man on Jefferson’s right leaned forward over the table. “Why do you want to work for the Committee?”

That was Richard Bunker, and it was his voice she had recognized. “I’m not sure I do,” she said.

“Sorry. I’ll rephrase it. Why did you apply?”

She made herself stare straight at him. “Because the Committee has forgotten its purpose. It was formed for the sake of revolution. Now it’s just a vestigial government. I wanted a chance to tell you you’ve failed.”

The six faces did not change. Nobody seemed outraged. Bunker leaned back. He was as dark as Tony, slight and short. His hands on the table were thin-boned like a woman’s. He said, “The general idea is that the Committee protects the condition of anarchy, and within the anarchy people have the freedom of their own lives. What do you think we should do—smuggle revolutionary propaganda to Mars and Venus? Form cadres? Blow up Crosby’s Planet?”

“No. I—”

At the other end of the table a man called, “Under what circumstances would you advocate the use of force?”

“Be brief,” someone else muttered. “Twenty-five hundred words or less.”

“Force is inefficient,” Paula said. A trickle of sweat ran down her side. She wished she had accepted Michalski’s offer of coffee. “I’ll reserve the remaining 2497 words.”

“You didn’t answer the question,” Sybil Jefferson said. She smiled at Paula. Her eyes were china-blue.

“It’s meaningless. If you’d rationalize force in one circumstance, you rationalize it all the time.”

Bunker said, “I still want to know how you’d promote the revolution.”

“Disband the Committee,” she said. “Any time there’s trouble, now, people just depend on you to negotiate it out. If you disbanded, people would have to find their own solutions.”

Michalski came in with a tray. She smelled coffee. He transferred the pot to the table in front of Bunker and a plate of sugar-nuts to the table in front of Jefferson, put two stacks of cups between them, and started out. Paula said, “Michalski, could I have some too, please?”

“There’s an extra cup.”

The six Committee members were clustered around the coffee pot. Jefferson bit into a sugar-nut. When she talked she sprayed white frosting across the table. “The anarchy has to have some means to defend itself. The rest of the system isn’t as advanced as you are.”

“Nobody can take anybody else’s freedom away,” Paula said. The other people were going back to their chairs. She poured coffee into the remaining cup. “Not unless you give it up.”

The broad breast of Jefferson’s red tunic was snowy with frosting. “I suppose you know about that. You were in prison once, weren’t you?”

“On Mars,” Paula said. “For six months.”

“What for?”

“For trying to take something out of Barsoom illegally.” Barsoom was the capital of Mars.

“A camera,” Jefferson said. “Did you forget about the export duty?”

“No. I didn’t think the Martian government had any right to charge me for taking my own camera with me.” She drank her coffee. They were watching her as if she were performing. She supposed she was. Bunker pushed his cup away across the table. He had a reputation for double-dealing; “Mitchell Wylie,” Michalski had called him once, behind his back, the folk name for Machiavelli.

Someone else said, “I thought you had connections on Mars, Mendoza?”

She put the cup down on the table. They did know everything about her. “I worked for Cam Savenia, when she ran for election to the Martian Senate, but when I was arrested, she fired me.”

“Cam Savenia.” Bunker’s head snapped up, wide-eyed. “Dr. Savenia? You worked in a Martian election?”

“I wanted to see what it was like.”

“That’s suspect.”

“It wasn’t my Planet.”

“Well, well, well.”

“What was it like?” asked the woman who had mentioned her connections.

“Hocus pocus,” Paula said, and the other people laughed. She looked at Bunker. “Why is that a well-well-well?”

“Dr. Savenia and R.B. do not get along,” Jefferson said. “You’re twenty-nine, Mendoza? You’ve never had a full-time job before?”

“Just with Dr. Savenia, that time.”

“But not on the Earth? How do you live?”

“I substitute with the university orchestra, I do a little pick-up work with the recording studios. That’s all the money I need.”

“What do you play?”

“Flute.”

“Oh, really?” The old man at the end of the table tilted himself forward over his fisted hands. “Do you like Alfide? Why didn’t you make a career out of that?”

“I’m not good enough. Alfide is my favorite composer. And Ibanov. And me.”

“What do you know about the Styths?” Jefferson said.

She drank the rest of her coffee. Obviously they had even discovered that. “They’re mutants. They live in artificial cities in the Gas Planets—Uranus and Saturn.”

“We all know that much.” The old woman pulled a sugar-nut apart with her hands. The edge of the table indented her fat stomach. “Don’t you know anything else?”

“Well,” she said, “I speak Styth.”

They all moved slightly, inclining toward her, their eyes intent. Bunker said smoothly, “So we’re told. You learned it in prison?”

“Yes. There were three Styths locked up in the men’s unit. The warden needed somebody to teach them the Common Speech.”

Jefferson ate the sugar-nut. “But instead you learned Styth. Why?”

“I couldn’t very well pass up the chance. Styth is the only other language still being spoken.” She stopped; that seemed enough, but they all stared at her as if they expected more. She said, “The warden was driving me crazy.”

“You don’t really expect us to hire you, do you?” Jefferson said.

“I’m not sure I want the job.”

“Well,” Bunker said, “we are offering you a job. The Interplanetary Council wants us to negotiate a truce between the Middle Planets and the Styth Empire. Unfortunately, none of us speaks any Styth.”

“Oh,” Paula said. “Well, get some tapes. It’s not hard. Lots of little rules and things. Genders.”

Jefferson was eating the last of the sugar-nuts. Paula saw why she was so fat. “Take the job, Mendoza. We don’t have time to scour the system looking for an anarchist who speaks Styth.”

“All right,” she said. Meanwhile she would find something else.

Tony said, “You’re selling your soul.”

“I don’t have a soul. And if I did, they’re paying me a fortune for it. Eight hundred dollars a month.” That was more than he made.

“You are an inveterate materialist.” He picked up a black pebble. On the grid between them, broken lines of black and white stones faced each other, shaping the space of the game. Tony’s hand hovered over the board. “You can always come here and live with me.” He put the black pebble down, watching her face.

“It’s educational.”

“Working for the Committee? Being a cop?”

Most people played Go in silence. Tony had developed the tactic of distracting conversation to the point where he could not play without talking. On the grid between them, she could close two positions with a single crucial play. Tony had to keep forcing her to play elsewhere, which he was doing. She sat back, taking a deep breath. Tony put his head forward.

“Look at what the Committee does. They leech off the anarchy. It’s in their best interests that people fail. Are you going to play or not?”

She played. “Aha,” he said, and with a click put a stone down on the grid, rescuing his men. “You just don’t have the stamina. I’m way ahead of you, you know.”

“Is wanting to win so much that you pant, a sign of materialism?”

His apartment was on the ground floor of an old stone building near the edge of the wood. The five rooms were stacked with books and manuscripts: he taught Style. They made dinner in his kitchen, arguing about the Committee, and went to bed, where he also attempted to teach.

A crash woke her up. She sat straight, the hair on her neck standing on end, and nearly fell out of the bed. They were sleeping on the porch of his apartment, and the bed sloped. Tony scrambled across her, reaching for his trousers.

They went down the hall to the bedroom, where there was a convenient window. She heard no more loud noises, but voices rose in the stairwell of the building, and someone shouted outside. Wrapped in a robe of Tony’s, she climbed after him out the bedroom window to the ground.

Between his building and the wood a meadow stretched flat and open in the domelight. Several people were running across it toward the trees. By the time she and Tony reached the wood, a small crowd had gathered. The night bus was parked on the flat ground at the edge of the trees and its few passengers were standing around outside it. A little two-seated car had crashed into the top of a tree and turned over. It rested like a strange hat in the branches. Paula went forward to see and Tony caught her arm.

“It might fall.”

The people around her milled about. One man was walking up and down saying, “I don’t even have insurance.” She looked up at the car. It was wrecked. A big branch had run through the side window and come out the top, and the front end was pushed in.

“Was anybody hurt?”

“That one doesn’t look too good to me. He was the passenger.”

She looked where these people were looking. A man sat under a tree, his head in his arms, a coat thrown over him, or a blanket. Paula wondered if she could do anything to help. Her feet were cold and she picked them one at a time off the ground.

“Watch out!”

Two men were pulling the air car down by ropes. The bigger man wore a jacket with NIGHT BUS SERVICE on the back in white script. The wreck slithered down out of the tree, breaking branches and scattering leaves onto the people below. Paula jumped back away from it. The car hit the ground with a crunch. Tony appeared beside her.

“The car ran into the bus’s air buffer,” he said. “The driver must have been drunk or something.”

The car’s driver was bent over the wreckage, moaning that he had no insurance. Tony and a woman bystander got into an argument about how fast the car had been going. Paula looked around for the car’s passenger. He was still sitting under the tree. Someone was offering him a drink from a half-liter bottle of whiskey. He ignored it, and when the other person pushed it at him, he raised his head and shouted, “Go away!”

The busman tramped around the car, coiling a rope. “Somebody ought to come down tomorrow and prune the tree.” He walked up face to face with the car driver. “Is he hurt?” He gestured toward the passenger.

“I don’t know.” The driver had half a papercase in his hand. He looked at it and threw it back into the wreck.

“What are you going to do?” the busman asked. “I have to leave. I have my run to finish.”

Tony called, “Take him to the hospital. Take him in the bus.”

The driver made a little gesture with one hand, his gaze on his passenger. “I don’t have any insurance.”

“I can run you by the Asclepius,” the busman said. He and the driver went to the hurt man under the tree and helped him to his feet.

“Hey—that’s my coat.” A tall woman trotted out of the crowd and retrieved the coat wrapped around the hurt man. He walked stiffly between the other two men toward the bus. The reflector strips on the sleeves of the busman’s jacket gleamed red and white. None of the other people moved to get back on the bus. The inside lights came on, shining across the grass. Through the big windows, Paula could see the lines of empty benches, the driver of the wrecked car and his passenger slumped together on the last seat. The horn tooted sharply three times. No one in the crowd paid any attention. The bus’s engines hummed and the long machine rose into the air and sailed away.

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.

Bunker was coming in on the underground train; at ten in the evening she went to meet him. He came across the platform toward her, putting on his sweater. “I thought it never got cold here.” Paula turned to walk beside him. They climbed the stairs to the ground level. She handed him an envelope.

“That’s the message to Melleno.”

They went out of the tube station and the cold wind struck her in the face. The paper flapped in Bunker’s hands. He turned to shelter it. Although the night had fallen long since, the domelight was bright enough to read by. Paula looked up at the hills. The wind was roaring out of the canyon behind them. The SoCal dome was huge; they were proud of their winds.

Bunker nodded. “I hope he can read it.” He gave her back the paper and they walked along the flat desert, their backs to the wind. The tall palm trees that marked the path milled their broad leaves like arms. “Do you suppose anybody there speaks the Common Speech?”

Paula shrugged. “Overwood does business with them. Overwood thinks crystal is some kind of super-battery.”

“I take it from your tone of voice that that shows his ignorance.”

“It’s not a battery. A transformer, sort of. Maybe.”

The path took them in toward the flank of the steep hills, where the houses clustered like a colony of barnacles above the bare dusty desert floor. A bike was wheeling toward her and she moved out of the way. They went up a steep path into the Old Town. The wind had blown weeds and leaves up against Overwood’s door. It was locked and the shop was dark. Paula stood looking in the window. Bunker turned.

“He must live around here somewhere.”

“I called him,” Paula said. “He said if he wasn’t at the shop, he’d be in the bar.” She pointed down the street. Two men were just going in a bright doorway. “I’ll bet that’s it.”

As they went through the doorway a bell clanged. There were three tiltball machines against the far wall, half-hidden behind a crowd of players. The room smelled of beer. Overwood was sitting in a booth in the back, behind a potted jacaranda tree, his hands laced over his little round stomach. Paula went up to him.

“Hello, there,” he said. “Have a seat. I’ll sit you a drink.”

Bunker shook his hand. “My name’s Richard Butler.”

“Whatever you say. Thomas Overwood here.”

Another chorus of bells rang out behind her. She slid between the jacaranda and the wall into the booth across from Overwood and held out the envelope to him. “For the Saturn Akellar.”

“Seven hundred dollars,” Overwood said.

Bunker pulled a chair around to the end of the table between them. He took a wallet out of his hip pocket and sat down. A waiter brought them a pitcher of beer and glasses. Bunker counted out money into a stack before him: fourteen fifty-dollar bills. The fifteenth he gave to her. “Sign that.”

It was an expense chit. She signed it.

“How long will this take?” Bunker said.

“Maybe four months.” Overwood put the money in one pocket and the message in another. “Maybe less. That’s a long way away, that.” The waiter poured the bright beer. “What’s the Committee’s interest in Styth?”

Paula reached for a glass. “Who supplies you with crystal?”

Overwood smiled at her. “Now, now.”

Bunker pushed the money over to him. “We want information. The Committee’s favorite food. We need good sources of information, first-generation, on the politics of the rAkellaron.”

“That’s funny.” Overwood laughed; his bushy eyebrows went up and down. The laughter rumbled on steadily, like a motor. “That’s very funny. I’ve been told they’ll buy information about the Earth.”

Paula put her elbows on the table. “I’ll send you a price list.”

“What have you told them?” Bunker asked.

“All they’re interested in is military stuff.”

“They don’t know much about the Earth,” Paula said.

“Our interests are a little broader,” Bunker said.

“I can’t help you.” Overwood nodded at her. “I don’t know anything about Styths. Ask her, she stepped on me twice today, trying to fake it. Venusian glass, maybe, or chess, or smuggling, but Styths—” He spread his hands.

“Do you buy the crystal directly from them?” Bunker said.

Overwood shrugged elaborately, smiling, his eyebrows arched. “I can’t talk about that.”

“We’ll pay.”

“Sorry.”

Paula watched Bunker’s face. There were deep creases marking the corners of his mouth, but otherwise he looked bored. She lifted her glass. The tiltballs bells rang like a carousel. Lights flashed.

“If I hear anything,” Overwood said, “I’ll let you know.”

“Call me.” Paula wrote down her name and extension number for him. With Bunker she left the bar.

They went to the end of the street, where the ground pitched off sheer to the desert below, and stood in the shadows of the trees. From this height she could see the even furrows of the cropfields on the desert below. Two circles of lights burned on the dark flat land. Bunker was looking back down the street toward Overwood’s shop.

“Come on.” He went at a swinging walk across the street. Paula followed.

“Where are you going?”

He led her down the alley between Overwood’s shop and the astrologer’s. When she came up beside him he was trying to open the back window.

“Do you have a knife?”

“No. I’ll go keep Overwood busy.” She went down the alley to the street again.

Even from here she heard the jangle of the tiltball bells in the bar. Two women walked unsteadily out of the bar and went off down the hill, their arms around each other. Paula strolled back to the doorway of the bar. The domelight drove her shadow to a puddle around her feet.

Overwood was standing up beside his booth, paying the waiter. She crossed the crowded room toward him. “Overwood.”

He looked up, his hands full of money. She went around beside him. “I want to talk to you.”

“Oh? Where’s the other fellow?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about. Let me buy you a beer.”

Overwood let her buy him a beer, two beers, and a third. She impressed him with the necessity of dealing with her and not Bunker, even though Bunker had the money, asked him if anybody in Saturn-Keda could read the Common Speech, and finally talked him into going out with her to show her the fastest way down the hillside. He took her to the end of the street, right past his shop, and pointed out three different trails, white as thread down the slope, among the aloes and manzanita.

“You’d better be careful. If you fall and hurt yourself, you could lie there all night.” He beamed at her. “To say nothing of the coyotes.”

“I like dogs.” Over his shoulder she saw Bunker coming down the alley by his shop.

He let out a rumbling laugh. “You wouldn’t like a coyote.”

She was looking out across the vast dome. The bracelets of lights on the desert floor held her gaze. “What are they doing down there?” She pointed. Each of the circles seemed to be made of a dozen little fires.

“Trance circles,” he said. “They sit around and chant and watch the fires and throw themselves into trances. Kids, bums, people like that.”

“Why don’t they just take drugs?”

“That’s too easy.”

“Well,” she said, “maybe I’ll try it. Thanks.” She started down the nearest of the paths he had shown her.

The hill was steep. She was inching across a narrows, her clothes snagged on the brush, when Bunker caught up with her.

“What did you find?”

“Nothing,” he said.

She glanced at him over her shoulder. He was watching his feet on the thin trail. The hillside was studded with spiky plants. Ahead the trail widened, tame.

“Nothing at all? I don’t believe you.”

“He’s smart. Nothing’s written down.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Frankly, junior, I don’t give a damn.”

“Why do you call me that?”

Beside her, his hands in his pockets, he smiled at her. “You don’t like it, do you?”

“No.”

“Junior,” he said, “you have a lot to learn.” He went off ahead of her down the trail. Burning, she stood still and let him walk up a good lead before she started off again.

Paula took the midnight train to New York. Walking up the aisle of the car, she saw Bunker sitting next to the window on a forward bench. After a moment she put her bag on the rack over his head and sat down opposite him. He had a book plug in his ear; he ignored her. She stretched her legs out before her. The train was almost empty. The lights flashed on and off, and the bench under her jerked forward. She braced herself. The train bounded forward, stopped cold, and started up again. They rolled off into the dark.

The windowless walls of the car were covered with graffiti. Gaining speed, the train swayed from side to side. She rocked with it, sleepy. Los Angeles was two and a half hours from New York; it would be nearly dawn when she reached her home. On the bench across from her, Bunker sat with the tape purring in his ear. He was spare and lean, even his kinky hair close to his head. He could have been forty, or fifty, or her age. She knew he was older than she was.

“The Styths don’t know much about us, either,” she said.

“Not if they want to know about our military.”

The train sailed wide around a curve. She flung her arm across the back of the seat. He was staring at the wall. Obviously he would say no more than he had to. She aimed her eyes at the figure-covered wall.

Her flute was gone. She kept it under her bed. Nothing else in her disordered room had been touched, so she knew as if he had signed his name who had taken it. She went next door to An Chu’s room.

“Shaky John has crooked my flute again.”

An Chu looked up. “Are you sure it was him?”

“I will be.” She tipped up the lid to the other woman’s sewing box. An Chu kept her sequins and sparkles in little plastine bags. Paula shook one empty.

“You shouldn’t accuse people when you aren’t sure.”

“Hunh.” She took the little bag and went across the common room to the kitchen.

Three people stood at the sink, singing an obscene round and washing dishes. Water puddled the floor. She opened the cupboard over the stove and filled up the plastine bag with baking soda. The boisterous singing followed her out again. She went down the other hall to the third door on the left and knocked.

“Go away.”

She tried the latch. The door was locked. John’s plaintive voice called, “Go away.” She felt in her pockets, found her pay envelope, slid the edge through the seam in the door and lifted the hook on the inside.

“Hey!”

She went into a dark, stinking room. The floor was caked with rotting food. The mattress against the far wall smelled of piss and mildew. John sat huddled on it, his arms crooked up to his chest.

“Why you coming in here?”

“Why you stealing my flute? Where is it?”

He was trembling. He curled up on the mattress. “Let me alone.”

Paula crouched before him. At her feet was an apple core fuzzy with mold. She kicked it away. She took the plastine bag out of her jacket pocket and waved it at him. He straightened slowly out of his curl. His face was broken out and his nose dripped. He scratched around in his crotch, his eyes on the bag.

“Where is it?” she said.

“Don’t have it. You can look. Let me—” He reached for the bag. She drew back, holding it in the air above her head.

“Where is it?”

“Don’t have it. Pi-please, Paula. I’m sick. Look how sick I am.” He held his shaking hands out. “You can’t be mad at me, Paula.”

“Where’s my flute?”

“Sold it. I sold it. Don’t have it any more.”

She clenched her teeth. “Who bought it?”

“I’m sick.” His fingers dug into his armpits, his hair. His clothes stuck to him. “I’m real sick.”

“John! Who bought my flute?”

“B-Barrian. Barrian.”

“How much?”

“Please—”

She shook her head. He was playing sick, mostly; if he whined enough, people gave him money to score just to be rid of him. There were several running bets in the commune on how long it would take him to die. She said, “John, how much?”

“Forty dollars.”

She muttered, “Forty dollars.” Of course he had none left. She threw the plastine bag down on the stinking mattress. He lunged for it.

“John, if you do this to me once more, I’ll make your life miserable. Even more miserable. You hear me?”

He was scrambling around, looking for his works. “Sure, Paula. You’re a good girl.” With his shaking hands he lit a candle to cook the soda he thought was morphion. She went out.

Barrian’s was a music store in the underground mall south of the campus. She stood looking at a violin in a glass case while the shopman talked to another customer. The violin’s body was burnished to a chestnut glow. A small sign identified it by a Latin name and the date A.D. 1778. It was nearly four thousand years old. She went up to the counter.

“A loadie came in here over the weekend and sold you an ebony flute.”

The shopman had white hairs growing out of his ears and nose. “That’s right,” he said. “And a beauty it is, too.”

“It’s mine.”

“Not any more.” He tapped the glass counter. She looked down. On the velvet-covered shelf, her flute lay in its open box. A small sign on it gave it a Latin name, an age of fifty years, and a price of six hundred dollars.

She said, “If you look under the lip with a magnifying glass, you’ll find my name. Paula Mendoza.”

“We bought it in good faith.”

“For forty dollars.”

The shopman smiled at her. “Of course, if you pay our price—”

“I’ll give you back the forty dollars.”

“Sorry.”

She drew in a deep breath. Paying out forty dollars would reduce her to eating rice for the next week, until she was paid again. Six hundred was impossible. She tapped her fingers on the counter.

“I want my flute.”

“I can see that. The price is six hundred dollars.”

“I work for the Committee.”

“I’m very happy for you.”

“Give it back, or I’ll go through our files and find something on you.”

“You’ll be looking a long time, we’re honest.”

She went off around the shop. On the wall, in plastic clips, hung swatches of paper music. She could try to steal the flute, but the shop, being underground, was tight against thieves, and the glass case was probably locked. She could borrow the money. Save it over weeks. Maybe Tony would loan it to her. A fat boy with frizzy blond hair down to his waist came into the shop, a guitar over his shoulder.

“Wait.” She intercepted him. “Please let me talk to you a minute.”

The boy swung the ax down between them, “Sure.”

“Please don’t buy anything here. A junkie stole my flute and sold it to them for a ridiculous low price and they won’t sell it back to me.”

The boy’s blue eyes looked past her. The shoulder of his shirt was ripped. He swayed the guitar gently against his knees. Finally, he said, “Check,” and left.

The shopman came around the counter at top speed. “You can’t do that.”

She showed him her teeth. “Watch me.”

“Get out.”

She went out the door, into the dark subway walk, and loitered under the red sign marking the shop. A man in a plaid shirt started in; she talked to him, but he went in anyway. For half an hour she walked up and down before the door, until the shop closed.

The next day she called Michalski at the office and told him where she would be, and she sat down in front of Barrian’s and told everybody who would listen that the shop was stealing her flute in collusion with a junkie. Most people ignored her. Some argued. A few turned away. Barrian’s people tried to chase her off. An Chu brought her lunch. The day following, when she called the Committee, Michalski said she had been given a week’s unpaid leave. She took a chair to Barrian’s. A man from the hourlies came and interviewed her. Every half hour the shopman from Barrian’s threw buckets of water on her. She talked to everybody who went into the store. Two out of three did business there anyway.

Tony was unsympathetic. “You shouldn’t own something you can’t afford to lose. You’re a hostage to your possessions. Property is theft.”

Shaky John was still angry with her for burning him, but she gave him five dollars, and he sat in front of Barrian’s for a day and fired himself up, hour after hour, with morphion, aspirin, barbiturate, horse-downer, distilled water, plastic blood, and milk. Without even talking he turned more people away from Barrian’s in one hour than she had in four days. That evening, the shop sold her back her flute for fifty dollars.

The little tree outside her window put forth pink flowers. Michalski told her it was a dogwood. She spent hours in her office watching the progress of its bloom.

She had dinner with Tony and they went to a reading of Aeschylus at the university. Tony insisted on leaving at the intermission because the translation was so bad. They sat in a booth in the campus bar and he explained to her that the heart of Greek tragedy was ritual appeasement and no anarchist could ever fathom that because ritual was meaningless to anarchists.

“How can you say that?” she said. “You can understand something without committing yourself to it, can’t you?”

“Only in the head, Paula. Not in the gut.” He folded his napkin into quarters. He had already lined up the sauceboats, both their glasses, and the salt and pepper dishes and match-lighter. “You miss the whole absoluteness of the thing. The whole sense that there is nothing else. The self-punishing aspect of nonconformity.”

Paula set her chin in her hand. She wondered if Tony ever enjoyed anything. It occurred to her that she had heard all this before from him, that he had already told her everything he would ever say to her. She got up and went through the dark barroom toward the door.

She cut across the park toward the round house of the Biochemistry Building. When he shouted at her, behind her, she stretched her stride. She thrust her hands deep into her jacket pockets. The domelight silvered the grass. Tony galloped up beside her.

“I’m sorry.” His arm slid around her waist. “Maybe you’re pregnant and that’s why you’re so sensitive lately.”

“I’m not pregnant.”

They walked down a slope through the birch trees. A deer bolted away from them. She heard low voices in the dark bushes ahead of them and swerved off to avoid the people there.

“Tony,” she said. “Good-bye.”

“What?”

He stopped, and she turned to face him; she could not see him in the dark, but she knew how he looked, she knew him far too well. She said, “Good-bye, Tony,” and went away through the trees.

The open room of her commune was dark. She stepped across a man asleep on the floor to reach the videone and took a slip of paper out of her box. She stuffed it into her pocket and went down the hall to An Chu’s room. The girl was a long still shape under her bedclothes.

Paula sank down on the narrow bed in the darkness. “Wake up.” She shook her by the shoulder. “I just broke with Tony.”

An Chu murmured, still half-asleep, wrapped in blankets, warm against Paula’s hip. In the quiet Paula could hear water dripping in the bath across the hall. Tony would take her back, if she asked him. But she did not want him. She would end up like her mother and father, alone all her life.

“Paula?”

“I’ll talk to you in the morning.” She went next door, to her room, turned on the light, and remembered the message.

“Paula Mendoza,” it read. “Meeting room tomorrow at 10:30. Melleno has answered. RB.”

When she went into the Committee office, half a dozen people were packed around the videone in the corner. She stopped to see what they were looking at.

The screen was off; the newsband was on. “—Damage estimated in the millions. Thus far the reports list no dead and thirteen injured, with eighty-seven missing. Both attacking Styth ships escaped apparently without damage. Repeating the lead line: the Martian-ruled asteroid Vesta has sustained a space-to-surface attack by Styth ships. This is a—”

She went down the corridor to the meeting room in the L. She was early. Only Michalski was there, sorting mail into stacks. Rubbing her sweating palms together, she went around the book-covered room.

“What’s the message?”

“Bunker has it. He was on night duty when it came in.” Michalski shook the papers before him into neat piles. “I don’t know anything, I just work here.”

“Have you heard any jabber about the raid on Vesta?” She took off her jacket and dropped it across a chair. “There must be two brands of Styths, ones who shoot and ones who talk.” Or they were turning down the negotiation.

Bunker came into the room, his papercase in one hand. He swung it flat onto the table and unsnapped the clasps. “I don’t follow all these large gestures.” He took out a transparent page. Paula reached for it and he held it away from her.

“Don’t be grabby, junior.” He gave the page to Michalski. “Transcribe this.”

Michalski left the room. Bunker sat down, his eyes on Paula. “I don’t know what it says, except that it’s relatively long. You heard about the attack on Vesta?”

“Yes. What does that mean?”

“Emphasis, I guess.”

Talking behind her, Jefferson backed in the door. She wore a red suit that made her look massive. Michalski followed her in, his cheeks ruddy. He had a tape plug in one hand. He dropped it into the socket in the table and pressed a button.

A sexless computer voice said, “By Melleno, in Saturn-Keda. We have received your message. We know what the Committee for the Revolution is and what your request really means. Since the beginning the Sun-worlds have robbed us and lied to us. Now when the Empire is great, you beg for our friendship. Nothing you can say will change the course of justice. If you want to talk, you must show the good faith. You submit the names of your people and the places you can meet us, and we will choose your agent and the place and moment. Answer by this light band. Ended. Melleno.”

Paula bounced in her chair. The tape shut off with a double click. Jefferson settled herself in her chair. “Congratulations,” she said to Paula. She opened her purse and took out a hard-cooked egg and a paper twist. “I missed breakfast.”

Bunker shook his head. “Curious.”

“How many ships attacked Vesta?”

“Two. One lured the patrols off and the other got in and out in eighty-five seconds, shooting all the way.”

Paula stood up, excited. “Then Melleno must not be connected with the raiders.”

“Not necessarily,” Bunker said. “At the moment, Vesta happens to be directly in line with Uranus and the Earth. It could be a warning.”

Jefferson opened out the paper twist and rolled the egg in salt and pepper. “The message came from Saturn.”

Bunker slid down in his chair, his hands on his flat stomach. “Uranus is the brain of the Empire.”

“He didn’t say anything about the rAkellaron,” Paula said. Michalski was still standing at the foot of the table. “Give me a copy of that.” He bent over the recorder.

“He said ‘we.’”

“He also said ‘Answer by this light band.’” She dropped back into her chair. “The rAkellaron meets in Vribulo.”

Jefferson said, “I favor Mendoza’s interpretation. Obviously Melleno dissents from Machou’s authority.” She ate part of the egg. “Didn’t you say Melleno was once the Prima Akellar? What was that about the course of justice?”

Paula made circles with her fingertip on the table. The recorder paid out a long tongue of paper, and Michalski ripped it off, like taking an hourly out of the dispenser. She grabbed the page away from him. Another copy was rolling out of the table. She put the letter down flat in front of her.

“Hurrah,” she said.

“What shall we answer?” Jefferson said. “The three of us as possible negotiators—”

“Start with a preamble on the purity of our motives,” Bunker said. He reached across the table for the next copy.

“Where can we meet them? Mendoza, what do you think?”

“What about Titan? It’s more like the Earth than a Gas Planet. And we could see more what they’re like.”

Bunker wrote on his copy of the letter. “That’s probably their idea, to look at us. I don’t think they’ll want a look at Titan.”

Michalski brought Jefferson a pad of paper, and the old woman busied herself in her purse. Looking for a stylus. Nothing will change the course of justice. Paula traced a line under the sentence. Maybe they were the raiders. She could not see how it all fitted, Machou’s indifference, the raid on Vesta, Melleno’s offer to talk. Except if Bunker was right, and they wanted to take a reconnaissance.

“Let’s see where they want to go,” she said. “Give them a choice of Mars or the Earth.”

Jefferson was writing. Her pen jigged across the yellow paper. “Where on Mars?”

“What about the Nineveh Club?” Bunker said.

Paula laughed. Jefferson put her forearms on the table. “Isn’t that some kind of sex club? Wine enemas and trained dogs?”

“I’ve never been there.”

“The Styths won’t negotiate a walk to the door with a woman,” Paula said. “They’ll certainly choose him.” She glanced at Bunker. “You mean you do have fun sometimes?”

Jefferson hooted in a piercing voice. “I think she’s warming to us, Richard. Good. The Nineveh Club. Where shall we have them on the Earth? Tahiti?”

“That’s fine with me,” Bunker said.

“I’ll give them New York. If they have the good sense to come here, they should see us at our most confusing.”

“We have an added starter.” He put his head back against the back of his chair. His glance flicked toward Paula. “Has either of you ever heard of the Sunlight League?”

Paula turned her gaze toward Jefferson. The old woman said, “A political club, isn’t it? Fairly recent.”

“An anti-Styth political club,” Bunker said. “With some important members. Martian, I think, most of them. Also anti-Committee.”

“Naturally,” Jefferson said. “Where did you hear about the Sunlight League?”

Bunker flicked at the papers in front of him with his finger. “Around.”

“When?”

“A while ago.”

Paula said, angry, “Four months ago. In Los Angeles. When he broke into that smuggler’s shop. Isn’t that right?”

He never even looked at her; he said to Jefferson, “Any time, Sybil.”

“I don’t like to see you taking candy from babies,” Jefferson said.

“You lied to me.” Paula’s cheeks burned hot. She pushed her chair back loudly from the table. “You told me you didn’t find anything there.”

“Tsk,” Bunker said. “I have another meeting. Is there anything else important?”

Jefferson groped in her purse. Paula stared at the far wall. After a moment the man across the table from her rose, closed his papercase, and went out.

“Damn him,” Paula said. “I feel like a fool.”

“You look like one,” Jefferson said. “Have a mint.”

The commune bath was filthy. On Paula’s day off, she took off her clothes, filled a bucket with soapy water and ammonia, and started to scrub the walls of the shower room. Turning on the nearest shower, she twisted the head around to rinse off the section of tile she had cleaned.

“Do you mind if I wash?”

She plunged her arm into the bucket, holding her nose against the ammonia. “Just stay in the end I haven’t done yet.”

The young man stood at the last spigot, soaping himself in the spray. “It’s about time somebody cleaned up in here.” Paula glanced at his brown back. She hardly knew him; he lived in the other hall. The faucets and showerheads were rough with scale. She stood scrubbing at them with all her strength.

“Aren’t you on the Committee?”

“Yes.”

He turned in the shower. The soap washed white down his body. “I just lost my job.”

There were a lot of people out of work. She picked at the grit on the faucet. Stay out of this. “That’s too bad.”

“Charmichael has laid about fifty people off in the past week.”

“Charmichael? The Moneyer?” She glanced at him, interested. Stooping, she dunked the brush into the bucket. The shower behind her was on full heat. The steam billowed around her. Her skin was pebbled with condensation although she was nowhere near the water.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“Media analyst.”

Which was a fancy name for file clerk. She stood and washed the wall. “Did they offer to retrain you?”

He turned off his shower. “Just a second, while I get a towel.” He went out to the next room. Paula washed grime off the wall. Where she had scrubbed, the white wall shone like china.

“I’m sorry.” The man from Charmichael Money & Credit spread his hands. His face was cheerful as a sun. “We aren’t retraining anybody any more. It’s too expensive. We have statistics to prove it.”

“Oh, god, don’t rain numbers on me.” She swiveled her chair back and forth. The dogwood was losing its leaves. She studied the man from Charmichael, who smiled back at her.

“Andressen,” she said. “Richard Bunker is bringing an action against you for double-billing. How would you like a copy of his file on you?”

The man’s smile broadened by six teeth. “Very much.”

“Enough to retain my clients?”

“Yes.”

“At full pay.”

“At half pay. You’re talking about fifty-two people, Mendoza.”

She nodded. “I accept.” She opened her desk drawer and took out three thick file folders and a paper for him to sign.

The dogwood tree was completely bare. She pruned off the dead branches and raked up the leaves. She saw nothing of Tony, not even a call. There had been no more incidents with the Styths since the raid on Vesta. Jefferson went to Crosby’s Planet, where the Council met. Thomas Overwood called from Los Angeles. He had information for Paula, and he had found a Styth living on the Earth.

The Styth was somewhere in Alm’ata, in Central Asia. Overwood soured when she pushed him for an address. “I found his dome for you, isn’t that enough?” Reluctantly she called Dick Bunker, who went to Alm’ata, while she took the tube across the continent to Los Angeles.

Overwood gave her a thin paper pamphlet. The title on the cover was The Mutant Menace. She held it under the light and turned the pages. “This is propaganda. This is no good.” On the last page was printed THE SUNLIGHT LEAGUE.

The shopman looked disappointed. He would not say how he had gotten it. She gave him two hundred dollars, took the pamphlet, and went by rocket to Alm’ata.

In flight over the ocean, she read through the booklet. It was a collection of fact and lie and mixtures of the two, all written like slanders. The print was perfect, an expensive production, on high-quality paper. Near the end was a piece of thinner paper, folded in half and stuck into the binding. She worked it loose.

It read:

Merkhiz and Matuko were cities of the Empire; saba meant “he knows.” Ebelos was a grade of crystal. She turned the paper over. There was nothing else. SIF looked like an acronym. Styth Imperial. Styth Imperial Fleet. She bounced up and down in her seat. The old man across the aisle gave her a look of disapproval. She spread the paper flat on her knee. Then Ebelos, Ybix, and Kundra could be the names of ships.

The rocket was descending. She folded the paper and put it in her pocket. Below, through the little window like a gun-slot in the wall, she saw the crumpled surface of the Great Asian Lake. Alm’ata was the Earth’s primary surface harbor; the long narrow dome, open at both ends, enclosed half the water. Her seat faced the back. She twisted around to watch the approach. The floor thumped under her feet. The secondary engines had come on. The jet skimmed over the surface of the lake. Scum rolled in patches on the water. Greenish threads of pollution trailed by the window. The flared round tunnel of the dome swept up around them. Abruptly the air was clear, the water sparkled and broke in white curls of foam. The rocket circled once and set down on the spiral runway.

Bunker was not at the terminal to meet her. She seethed all the way down the ramp. Outside, she put down her bag and put on her jacket. The air was icy cold. She walked across the city park, asking directions here and there. Little children in brilliant orange coats raced in a game under the bare trees. She came to the Lenin Hotel, an old-fashioned above-ground building in an orchard of fruit trees leafless in the winter cold.

When she let herself into the hotel room, Bunker was lying naked on his back on the couch under the vitamin lamp, a tape plug in his ear, wet balls of cotton on his eyes, and a pink napkin tented over his crotch. Paula shut the door. He did not move.

“This place looks like the University of Barsoom,” she said. The room was white, the boxy chairs and tables painted in black lacquer. The carpet was dark red. She put her bag down and went through to the kitchen. The carpet skidded slightly under her feet, treacherous.

“I hope you’re doing the cooking,” she said. “I can’t boil water.” She took a beer out of the cold drawer.

“Mendoza, what can you do?”

She swallowed the nasty remark in her throat. The kitchen smelled of must. She opened the window and let in the cold wind. Something mewled overhead, and a gull sailed by. Its wings were black-tipped. She went out to the white and black room again. The vitamin lamp glared on the wall.

“Did you call Jefferson?”

“Don’t unpack.” Bunker switched off the lamp. “The Council is balking, they may null the case.” He threw the tape jack across the room.

“Oh, shit.”

He put his shirt on. “Did Overwood have anything?”

She took the paper out of her shirt pocket and gave it to him. He went into the bedroom. A drawer slammed open. She sat on the couch, still warm from the lamp, and pulled off the paper tab on the can of beer.

He came back into the room, pulling his pants on, the paper in his hand. “What is this?”

Paula tucked her feet up under her on the couch and sipped the beer. One-handed, he fumbled the tongue of his belt through the buckle. He said, “What does Ybix mean?”

“I don’t know the word.”

He sat down beside her, taking a pencil off the end table. “So, SIF 4 Ebelos. That’s the ship, and Merkhiz is her base. Ybix and Kundra attacked Vesta.” He wrote on the paper.

Paula grunted. “You got more than I did.”

“Where did you find this? Overwood? How much did you pay him?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

“Mendoza. You’re improving. Let’s go talk to my Styth.”

They went up three flights of stairs to the roof of the hotel, to catch the air bus. Bunker said, “He’s a local celebrity, Kary is. It took me fifteen minutes to find him, every bum knows him.”

Paula walked to the edge of the roof. In the gray trees below her a child in a red coat dashed about, singing in a breathless voice. The cold made her face tingle. The air bus was coming. She went over to the square of paint on the roof and stood with Bunker waiting. The bus driver let down the ladder for them.

They flew back across the city toward the beach. Paula looked out the window. They passed over the Central Market. Piles of fruit covered the stalls, Hessian sacks of almonds and cashews. Tightly packed together in a pen, the white backs of goats looked like fish in a net.

“What’s this mean?” Beside her on the bench he was looking at the note again. “Say-ba.”

“Saba. Long a’s. It means ‘he knows.’”

“He. Who?”

“You’re the genius.”

The air bus was settling down to park before the terminal. They went down the back ramp to a stone pier. The lake stretched before her. She could hear the crash of the surf on the beach. The wind sliced across the open harbor.

Bunker led her along the pier to a line of shops. They went into a drugstore and he bought two quarts of red wine for fifty cents each.

Single-file they descended the steps of the pier to the beach. Her feet sank into the wet sand. Bunker walked into the shade under the pier. A man was lying in the dark between two stone uprights. He was black as soot, and stretched out across the sand he looked ten feet long.

“Kary,” Bunker said. “Remember me?”

The Styth sat up. “You again,” he said, in a deep alcoholic rasp. Bunker gave him a bottle of wine, and he tore off the paper cap and drank deeply.

Paula sank down on her heels beside an upright. Kary’s shaggy hair was frizzy with malnutrition. His mustaches hung thin as string down over his chest. Around his eyes and mouth, his skin was graying. He was old, past mere grandfather old, ninety, perhaps over one hundred. She said, “Where are you from, Kary?”

He glanced at her around the bottle. “What’s this?” He looked her over, leisurely. “Skinny little cow, isn’t she?” he said to Bunker.

“Where are you from?” This time she said it in Styth.

Kary had the bottle midway to his mouth. He put it down again. “You speak Styth?”

She looked at his hands. “Yes.” His right thumb was missing at the first joint. The rest of his fingers ended in blunted nubs. “What happened to your claws?”

He held up the stub of his thumb. “This one was bitten off in a fight in Vribulo when I was a—” She missed the word. Sadly he folded his fingers into his palms. “The others just don’t grow any more.”

“You’re from Vribulo? How did you get here?”

He blinked at her. His eyes were round as carbuncles. To Bunker he said, “Your cow speaks Styth.”

Bunker shook his head. “I don’t know the language.”

Kary emptied the bottle of wine. His head wobbled. Paula said, “How did you get here?”

“I got in a fight. Real bad fight. I killed somebody who had a lot of. relatives. One the Prima’s lyo.” He tried the collapsed bottle again and dropped it to the sand. “Just enough to get me thirsty.”

Bunker took the other bottle out of his jacket. Kary’s two hands reached for it. “Ah, you’re a kindly little people,” he said, in the Common Speech.

Paula laughed. She could not judge his height. Probably he was a couple of inches over seven feet, tall even for a Styth. He smelled of stale clothes. Carefully he set the bottle in the sand and wiped his mouth. “You speak Styth,” he said to her. His gaze moved over her, and he turned toward Bunker. “Don’t you feed her?”

Bunker said, “I like them skinny. It keeps them eager.”

Paula looked around her. The stone pillars that held up the pier stood solid in the dark. Kary lay down on the sand, one hand protectively on his bottle.

“I’m going to sleep now.”

The two anarchists laughed. “Good-night.”

They walked back to the hotel, and she unpacked her bag. Bunker was right. If the Council aborted the case, they’d have to go home again, but she wanted to stay awhile to talk to Kary. She hung up the long white dress, which wrinkled easily. There were two beds, covered in the same dark red as the slippery carpet. On the wall above them was a woven hanging, Turkoman, or Uzbek. A sweet spicy odor made her sniff. She went across the sitting room to the kitchen.

Bunker stood by the counter cutting peaches into a big stew pot. She went in behind him and took a beer out of the cold drawer. Neither of them spoke. She swallowed a cold mouthful of the beer. The sun was going down, and the kitchen lights were coming on in the ceiling. She turned the dial on the wall to brighten the light. Bunker put the lid on the stew pot. He ran the spoon and knives through the washer spray and wiped off the counter.

“You’re certainly tidy,” she said.

“I don’t like to leave tracks,” he said.

The pot buzzed. He turned it off and ladled the flavorsome stew into bowls and handed one to her.

They went into the living room. Sitting on the floor, she blew across the top of the stew to cool it. Bunker crossed to the couch.

“I take it the Styths live in families.”

She ate a sweet stewed peach. “Big families. They’re polygynous.” She thought with sympathy of Kary, family man, alone in an anarchist world. “This is pretty good chicken.”

“I’m glad you approve.”

“Maybe you missed your real art. When you went into burglary.”

He went to the massive antique videone behind the door and dialed through the range of the local radio. At last he settled on progressive music. She spooned up the last juices in her bowl. He flopped down on the couch, cradled his bowl in his lap, and began to eat.

“Actually burglary is only a hobby. How well do you know Cam Savenia?”

“I traveled with her for eight weeks. That was a long time ago.”

“She’s ambitious.”

Paula lifted one shoulder and let it fall. “She’s a Martian. And a woman.”

“I’ve never noticed women are more ambitious than men.” His spoon clicked on his bowl.

“I meant being a woman on Mars she has a lot to make up for,” Paula said.

The videone buzzed. Paula leaped to her feet, dropping the empty bowl. She reached the cabinet one step ahead of Bunker, got between him and the controls, and flipped the switch from radio to intercom. The camera swung on a flexible arm. She yanked it down to her level. The face on the screen belonged to the desk clerk.

“I have a message coming through for you from Crosby’s Planet.”

“Jefferson,” Bunker said.

A flicker rolled across the screen. Paula rapped her fingers on the cabinet. The message was in block letters; it appeared slowly on the yellow ground, at first too dim to read, and she reached for the adjustment knob and Bunker caught her hand. Slowly the print darkened.

Jefferson to Bunker. Council voted 270–265 to continue the case.

Zed.

Paula screeched. She backed away from the videone and spun in a circle. Bunker said, “Five votes. Nobody handles the Fascists like Roland.”

“Do you think she had to negotiate the vote?”

“Any time it’s that close, she doesn’t leave it to their goodwill.”

He switched the videone back to the music. Paula sat down on the floor again. “What did you call her? Roland.”

“Madame Roland,” he said. “Always meddling.” Rolling to his feet, he went into the kitchen. She heard the hiss of the washer.

Paula took a shower. While she was drying herself off, Bunker came into the bathroom doorway. “What’s this?” He had the propaganda leaflet in his hand.

“Overwood gave it to me. It’s supposed to be by the Sunlight League.” She shook the damp towel and hung it up on the back of the door. “Some of it’s true.” She glanced at herself in the mirror. Little drops of water glistened in her puffed coppery hair. She went out to the bedroom.

“The bed on the left is mine,” he called.

She pulled back the red cover on the right bed and climbed in. Limp, her eyes shut, she stretched out, and the fluid mud-filled mattress gave softly beneath her. Bunker came in, reading the pamphlet.

“Listen to this. The Styth is incapable of culture. Like all the dark races. The cities of Uranus were designed and built by technicians of the Earth of the Pre-Contention Period. Most of the ships in the Styth Fleet are Martian. At least 75 per cent.” The paper crackled in his hand. “Are broken sentences the product of a broken mind? Also remark what goes for culture to the Sunlight League.”

“What’s the Pre-Contention Period?” Paula asked.

“I guess the Three Planets Empire.”

The mud bed gave in waves beneath her whenever she moved. Bunker lay down on the other bed. She had to admire his ability but she refused to like him. She yawned, drowsy.

Kary unstopped the bottle of wine. The armchair was too small for him, and he hitched himself awkwardly up straight in it again, his legs braced on the floor. He drank once, looked around, and drank again. “Nice trap you have here.”

“Thank you. The Lenin Hotel thanks you. Do you mind speaking Styth? I need the practice.” Paula sat down sideways on a straight chair in the sunlight. “What does ‘Ybix’ mean?”

“Ybix.” He put the bottle down on the arm of the chair, keeping fast hold of it. “That’s a fish. In the lakes in some places in Uranus.” Without letting go of the bottle, he formed a square of his thumbs and forefingers. “Kind of that-shaped. A little fish, but it bites.” The bright sunlight behind her was making him squint. She got up and pulled her chair into the shade.

“What is ‘Kundra’?”

“That’s a spell-caster. A witch.”

“A man?” ‘A’ was a masculine ending.

Kary shook his head. “All witches are women.”

“How did you get here? After the fight in Vribulo.”

“Shipped out. Some friends of mine were running a load of crystal down to meet somebody in the Trojan Asteroids. A couple of us kept on going down toward the Sun. Just to see, you know. Got in trouble in Mars, because in fucking Mars being the wrong fucking color is a fucking crime—”

He stopped to drink, and she watched the level of the liquor fall in the bottle. He wiped his mouth on his hand.

“So when I got out of prison they said Where do you want to go, and I’d heard there weren’t any police in the Earth. I’ve been here ever since.”

“You haven’t had any trouble here?”

“Not me. You won’t catch me picking trouble with an anarchist. They always get you in the end.”

Bunker was coming in, with more wine. They worked with Kary the rest of the morning. He drank three bottles of red wine and ate some of Bunker’s stew, taught them a children’s song, and told them his life story. He had been on the Earth at least twenty-five years; he remembered the riots of the thirties, water rationing, and Noah Mataki, who had been on the Committee until 1829.

Kary told them that the Styths had been born of the wives of the first Uranian colonists—Moon-people, he called them, “because they left the Planet and went up to the moons to live, when the strange babies were born. But they sent the Styths into the crystal farms and made them slaves, and if a Styth fought back, the Moon-people caught him and chained him, hand to hand and foot to foot, and threw him into the farm to starve, in the dark and the cold. That’s why the Prima wears a cuff, to remind us where we came from.”

He drank another bottle of wine. In the middle of a long sad monologue on the beauties of Vribulo, he fell off the armchair. Bunker took his shoulders and Paula his feet, and they dragged him in and put him to sleep in her bed, which she had not made anyway.

“You’re as much of a slob as he is,” Bunker said.

“If it bothers you so much, make it yourself.”

They went up to the roof. Below, in the gray trees, several people were shooting their bows. The wind flapped her jacket. They sat on the low rail at the edge of the building and watched the sunset light flash on the dome wall. She taught him Styth grammar.

“It’s like a game. All those rules.”

Darkness settled over them, so cold the air hurt her lungs. The blue domelight flickered overhead. She thought of Tony, wondering what he was doing. If he had another friend yet.

“What do you make of the Sunlight League?”

She bundled her hands into her sleeves. The domelight ran in ripples across the darkness high overhead. “The Styths are black. You know how Martians are about skin color. They’re harmless.”

“Fascists are always harmful in mass. And they don’t come any other way.”

“I’m freezing. I’m going inside.”

He slid off the rail to his feet. They went down the stairs together.

“By Melleno. We will take Richard Bunker for a hostage. Paula Mendoza will meet at the Nineveh Club with the Matuko Akellar, by your time the ten mid-days of April 1853. You arrange safe-conducts for the Styth Fleet ship Ybix and fifteen men. Ended. Melleno.”