Floating Worlds

THE EARTH November 1862—March 1865

“Hot Jesus Christ,” Leno said. He was leaning across the seat in front of her, his cheek flattened against the window. Paula moved into the corner of the seat. If the air bus bounced, he would land in her lap. The other Styths were plastered to the windows on either side of the bus. She stretched her neck to look down the aisle. Saba was in the cockpit, talking to the pilot. She could not see Tanuojin.

She folded one leg up before her. Out the window, thick smoke shrouded the wing of the bus. The sky split. Miles beneath them, red and ocher in the sun, gouged with canyons, the mountains spread across their path. A brown river looped through the humps of the ridges.

“What are they made of? Are they solid?”

“Rock,” she said. “Like moons.” On the far side of the mountains, the funnel-chimneys of smelters sent up plumes of red smoke. The dense air closed around them again. The bus bucked up and down. Beside her head Leno’s claws sank into the foam cushion.

Kasuk dropped into the seat next to hers, on the aisle. “This place is mad. Everything curves the wrong way.”

The bus danced through a crosswind. Paula ducked under Leno’s arm, bending closer to the window. The clouds thinned. Now they were swept away again. The bus soared over the whitened crest of a mountain. A banner of snow blew off the peak.

All around her, the Styths yelled, delighted. Kasuk said, “Does anything live here?”

Paula said, “Insects. Lichens. A few birds.” She put her hand on the window sill. She had forgotten how bright the Earth was.

“What’s that white stuff?” Leno pointed.

“Snow.” She used the word from the Common Speech. “Frozen water.”

He frowned at her. “Frozen water is ice.”

“Snow is water that freezes into crystals and falls from the—” She stared at him, startled. There was no Styth word for sky. “From the upper air,” she said, lamely.

Kasuk said, “All this is natural? No one made it?”

“The Sun made it,” Leno said. “Everything comes from the Sun.”

They were flying toward the Western Sea, red with pollution. The shore was encrusted with robot factories. Feathers of thick smoke streamed past the window. Kasuk leaned over her shoulder.

“Can you imagine flying here? This layer is so thin, and I’ll bet you couldn’t even get a ship into that layer down there.” He pointed to the ground.

Behind Leno, Tanuojin said, “Saba has flown over twenty hours in this Planet.”

Paula looked up past the Merkhiz Akellar’s thick shoulder. “Not in a Styth ship.”

“No. Your friend Jefferson is meeting us in New York. We’re staying in that same place we stayed before. That square house with the short beds.”

New Haven House was the only place where the Committee could put up eighteen people. She turned to look out the window.

Kasuk said, “Paula. Does anything live here?”

They were flying over the brown scummy water of the sea. Patches of oil-eating weeds made islands below them. She said, “That’s alive. There are sharks. Fish, gulls. Snakes.” She turned to look between the seats for Tanuojin. Junna had hauled him to a window at the back of the bus. He stood with one hand on his younger son’s shoulder, holding him away. She put her nose against the window again, looking for something else to explain to them.

Sybil Jefferson met them at the entry port. When the Styths walked out onto the broad ramp down to the ground, a swarm of people with cameras and recorders rushed to surround them. The three rAkellaron withdrew into the shell of their men. The cameras whirred. Jefferson hurried around threatening and cajoling. Paula went to the rail. No one paid any attention to her. She looked out over the city. The autumn air was bright and crisp, the grass champagne-colored, the wood toward the south sorrel and yellow and earth-brown. She put her hands on the rail. She had forgotten or never realized how life teemed here. Everything below her was moving, every leaf, every stem of grass, the birds and all the people stirring. A woman in a white coat was walking away from the building, off across the grass. Paula straightened. The woman turned a corner and disappeared.

“Mendoza,” Jefferson called. “Are you coming?”

Sybil had shooed off the picture men and voice men from the hourlies. With the Styths she was going down the ramp. Paula followed them.

Jefferson pattered along beside Saba. “You see, Akellar, you’re celebrated men.”

Paula went to the rail, searching the ground below them for the woman she had just seen. Tanuojin walked beside her, Sybil Jefferson just beyond. Paula reached across him to pluck at Jefferson’s sleeve.

“Jefferson, I saw Cam Savenia just now. What’s going on?”

“Savenia.” Saba stopped where he was. Leno was going on several feet ahead of them, gawking at the city, and did not seem to be listening. Jefferson kept on walking.

“Was it Cam?” Paula said.

“Possibly,” the old woman said. “The Council wanted to send her as an observer, but we talked them out of it.”

Tanuojin walked in between her and Paula, and his hand dropped onto Paula’s shoulder. “Who did they send?” he asked. Paula pulled his hand away.

“Caleb Fisher,” Jefferson said.

They were coming to the foot of the ramp. Saba walked on Jefferson’s far side. Tanuojin grasped Paula’s wrist, his touch cold as metal. She knew who Caleb Fisher was: a Council member for Mars, once a minister, she thought a defense minister. She said, “Is he a member of the Sunlight League?”

“Ask him.” Jefferson’s lips curled into a stiff smile, but her blue eyes looked angry. “Since you’re so full of snappy questions.”

They went into the parking lot. Tanuojin and Saba circled off into the dark behind a row of cars and stood talking. Jefferson sorted out the rest of the Styths among three Committee buses. Paula leaned against the door of a yellow three-seater car with the Committee emblem on the roof. Kasuk came over to her.

“Is this where you lived before?”

“Yes.” She watched Leno’s men line up at the steps to the biggest bus.

“It’s beautiful.”

“So is Styth,” she said.

“But in another way.”

Jefferson came around the rear end of the three-seater. “Mendoza, we were trying to ease them gently into the notion of the observer.”

“You could have warned me,” Paula said. ’I’d have known how to act.” She touched the arm of the young man beside her. “Jefferson, this is Yekka’s prima son, Kasuk.”

“Hello,” he said. He put his hand out to Jefferson, changed his mind, and drew it back. Jefferson had already reached to shake it. She lowered her hand, but Kasuk, with a Styth’s sense of protocol, stuck his out to her again. Finally they connected, Jefferson looking much amused. Kasuk stood head and shoulders over her. He said, in a false voice, “We are all—”

A shout cut him off. Paula slid past him. At the bus Sril faced Leno’s towering second-in-command. He pushed the Merkhizit, and the taller man shouted, “You little worm,” and jumped on him.

Kasuk took a step toward them. Paula caught his sleeve. Sril and the Merkhizit tumbled over the paved ground, and the other men roared. They rushed out of the bus to watch. Bakan leaped out the door. Midway between the fight and Paula, Junna stood fixed in his tracks. From two directions, Saba and Tanuojin and Leno ran up and scattered the men away.

Jefferson said, “Did I err in the programming?”

“You did,” Paula said.

In the midst of the Styths, Saba had Sril by the arm. The small man’s face was bleeding. He shouted, “You should have heard what he said about Ybix, and after we saved them, too.”

Leno turned away. “I’ll never hear the end of that.”

Tanuojin glared at him. “Your crew’s got a big mouth.”

Kasuk moved again, and Paula tightened her grip on his sleeve. The bus swayed back and forth. Saba was herding the crews of the two ships up the steps. His fists on his hips, Leno thrust his blunt head forward at Tanuojin.

“Don’t get me angry, Yekka. I’ll cut you into twenty pieces.”

“I don’t think you can count that high.”

Kasuk laughed. Saba came out of the bus and burst between the two men, driving them apart. “Let’s get out of here.”

Jefferson said. “What was that all about?”

Behind Saba, Tanuojin shot a vicious look at Leno. The Merkhiz Akellar sneered at him. “Nigger eyes.” Tanuojin turned his back. Paula let go of his son’s shirt.

To Jefferson, she said, “Two pegs trying to fit into the same small hole. Where is R.B.?”

“Sitting under the bodhi tree.”

Saba came up to them. “I’m sorry,” he told Jefferson. “It won’t happen again.”

“Is it safe to divide them by family?” Jefferson said.

Paula pulled open the door to the yellow car. “You drive,” she said to Saba, and scrambled across the row of seats to the far side.

“When do we meet this Fisher?” Saba asked.

Paula was staring out the window. They had just left the dome behind them for the thick yellow smoke of the open air. The homing beam blinked blue and red on the dashboard in front of Saba.

In the seat beyond him, Jefferson said, “There’s a meeting Friday morning. Tomorrow.”

“Are you sure it was Dr. Savenia you saw?” the Styth asked, in his language.

Paula shrugged. “She was pretty far away, and her back was to me.”

“I’m not sitting down with anybody from the Sunlight League.”

The air outside was so dense it turned the window into a mirror. She twisted around in the seat to face him. “Why? And why do you automatically assume Sybil doesn’t speak Styth? And that this car isn’t wired? She does. It is.”

He glanced at Jefferson. The old woman picked up her handbag, popped it open, and rummaged in it. Paula said, in the Common Speech, “I don’t suppose you’ve given us separate rooms?”

“There isn’t enough space.” Jefferson fed herself a mint. “Unless you’d take the closet. With the queens and skeletons?”

“I could be bounded in a nutshell. But I think I’d like a window. Where’s the meeting?”

“At our New York office. I was looking forward to seeing your child again.”

“The last time we brought him it was a disaster.”

“Such a charming little boy. He reminded me of you.”

“He isn’t little any more.” They were talking past Saba, and she could not see much of Jefferson at all. She crooked one leg under her. Surrounded by the opaque yellow mist, the car seemed to hang still in the air. Saba reached forward under the steering grips and turned down the heat.

“Children do grow up,” Jefferson said. “After all, it’s been ten years since you left. Ten years would change anybody.” The old woman sucked her candy, her soft white cheek hollowed. “Is he a Styth or an anarchist?”

Paula’s hand rose to her face. Sybil was no longer talking about David. “Neither.”

“In between?”

“Neither.” She glanced at Saba’s profile. “He doesn’t listen to anybody but himself.”

“That’s reasonable,” Jefferson said. She ripped the paper away from the roll of mints. “Have a sweet?”

“No, thanks.”

“Akellar?”

Saba’s gaze slid toward Paula. “Sure,” he said. He reached for a candy.

Caleb Fisher was short and slight, his sparse hair combed across his dome of waxy head. His mustache hid his upper lip. To Paula’s surprise, all three Styths shook hands with him. Afterward Fisher looked as if he wanted to wipe his fingers off. They sat around the long table in the Committee meeting room, with Jefferson at the end and Michalski in the corner taking notes. Dick Bunker was not there. Paula had not seen him since their arrival on the Planet. She knew he was watching.

Jefferson said, “We’ve been very satisfied with the Mendoza Treaty. It’s worth noting that there wasn’t a single violation of the truce in the whole ten years, not by either side.”

Fisher’s little gray toothbrush mustache quivered. Paula watched him through the tail of her eye. In a salesman’s voice, Jefferson was recounting all the virtues of the Mendoza Treaty. Paula guessed Jefferson had been caught out on a thin branch, to have Fisher forced on her. Paula was willing to let them make her out the hero. Now Fisher was leaning across the table.

“Miss Jefferson, I have to insert one small comment.”

Paula raised her head. “I thought you were an observer.”

“I am.”

“Then observe, and keep the comment in back.”

In the big chair on her right, Saba put his hand out to quiet her. Fisher’s mustache jerked up like a curtain from his little teeth. “This negotiation is in the interests of the Council. I am here for the Council.” He straightened up, looking at Saba. “Maybe there have been no technical violations of the truce, but the past ten years, the years of this much-acclaimed Mendoza Treaty, have been the bloodiest between the Styths and the Middle Planets in centuries. Only fifteen months ago there was an awful raid against a Martian colony in the Asteroids—civilians, women and children—carried off into an unspeakable life of slavery.”

“I have no treaty with the Martians,” Saba said.

“We have a right to insist on minimum standards of human decency.”

Paula shoved her chair back and walked away across the room. There were no windows; book racks like honeycombs covered the walls. At the closet door, she tried the latch. It was locked. Saba said, “What’s your minimum standard for murder?” His voice had a short-tempered edge. In the next chair Tanuojin sat picking at his claws, his eyes on his hands. Around the corner of the table from Jefferson, Leno looked bored: their observer. He could barely speak the Common Speech.

Fisher said, “I beg your pardon.”

“I’m talking about the Sunlight League,” Saba said.

“The Sunlight League?”

“Sure.” Saba’s hand struck the table. “It’s too bad we didn’t bring some pieces of the man you sent to murder me.”

“We are not responsible for the actions of private citizens.”

The air smelled bitter. Behind the Styths, Paula watched Tanuojin’s long hands flex. Jefferson was scratching her throat, her pale eyes on Fisher.

The Martian said, starchy, “We will not accept a new treaty that does not settle the issue of slavery. That’s absolutely fundamental.”

“I’m not treating with you,” Saba said. “I’m treating with her.” His hand jerked toward Jefferson.

“You’re treating with the Council,” Fisher said.

“I wouldn’t lower myself.”

“That’s enough,” Jefferson said.

Fisher snapped up onto his feet. “I will not—”

“Fisher.”

He turned toward her; the strings showed in his neck. “I—”

“Fisher,” Jefferson said, “sit down.”

Meekly Fisher took his place again. The old woman said, “In the interests of progress, suppose we all go and have lunch, and when we come back this afternoon try to talk like people with wits and objectives and not like little boys in a sandpile.”

Fisher was still watching her, and when she stood he stood. Paula went back to her chair for her jacket. Around her the Styths’ chairs growled and the big men got to their feet. Jefferson, busy with her purse and her candy and scarf, her eyes lowered, was giving no opening for conversation. She headed for the door.

“Don’t touch me,” Fisher snarled.

Paula looked up. Tanuojin was moving away from him.

Saba went out the door. The rest of the Styths followed him. Leno and Tanuojin reached the door simultaneously and bristled at each other. After a moment Tanuojin let Saba’s cadet go first. They went down past Paula’s old office to the way out into the park. Paula squeezed between Tanuojin and the wall.

“What did you find out from Fisher?”

His shoulders moved. “Nothing.” He stretched his legs and went ahead of her out the door to the gulley.

When Paula went back into the building, she found Jefferson in her office, her fingers going like hammers over her keyboard. The bare white walls of the office were stained in streaks, like watermarks. The only thing hanging on them was a long calendar behind the desk. Jefferson looked up from her work.

“Oh. Mendoza. I thought you were Michalski and my diet biscuit.” The old woman rolled her chair away from the keyboard shelf. “Sit down. Have you eaten?”

“We just had lunch.”

Paula sat down sideways in a straight chair. She took her jacket off and draped it over the back. Jefferson said, “Where are your companions?”

“Out in the park cooling off. This will never get us any place as long as Fisher is there.”

“Caleb Fisher is no problem.”

“Not to you, maybe. What did he do, murder his mother and bury her in your backyard?”

Jefferson daubed at her bad eye. Her hair was mushroom-white. She looked old. The door opened for Michalski carrying a cup of coffee on a little tray, which he put on Jefferson’s desk. A white plastic heat-folder steamed beside the cup.

“Mendoza,” he said. “You’ve really gotten bad-tempered. There’s a message for you on the board in the waiting room.” He went out. Jefferson was tearing open the heat-folder. A hot biscuit rolled out onto the tray.

“I’m on a diet.” She nodded at the biscuit. “Now they say my heart will have to be replaced. They’re turning me into a robot piece by piece. We won’t get anywhere unless the Styths are reasonable.”

“They’re reasonable,” Paula said. “As long as it profits them.”

“What do they want?”

“Everything. You might as well give it to them, it will make them easier to handle.”

Jefferson chuckled. She broke the biscuit in half and scattered crumbs across the desktop. “You like to talk in code, Mendoza. Rather like a Styth. I don’t entirely accept your proposition that you’re a new kind of creature.” She ate a mouthful of biscuit, burped, and patted her chest. “All this shooting at people does have to stop.”

Paula hung her arm over the back of the chair. “We need a universal truce.”

“The only people we’re having any difficulty with are your clients, dear girl.”

“Right. So we will arrange a universal truce, and let Saba enforce it.”

Jefferson munched her biscuit. Her bad eye was tearing. Slowly her head began to nod. “Ingenious. I like that, Mendoza. Have you discussed it with them?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Certainly Tanuojin knew. He and Saba had been happy to see her off to this meeting; they wanted to talk alone.

“You gave me to think you want something for yourself.”

“I’d like to be recognized.”

“In what form?”

“I’m the only link you have with the Styths. I’ll stay that. Keep Bunker out of Styth, and stop trying to make contacts behind my back.”

“Have some coffee.” Jefferson reached for her cup.

“No, thanks.”

“What about the Styths? Do they recognize you?”

“I’ll need your help.”

“How?”

Paula said, “We’ll get to that.” She looked around the stained walls of the room, thinking of Bunker again. “I want rank. My own means and place to live, free of either of them. The right to have my son inherit from me.” She felt Bunker hiding somewhere, watching.

Michalski came in again, saying, “Jefferson, two-thirty.” He popped out without pausing. Paula stood, picking up her jacket.

“You’re busy, I guess.”

“My dear, you can’t know. Is there anything else?”

“Give me a listening device. Just an ear, not a transmitter. Something I can hide in Saba’s clothes.”

Jefferson opened a drawer in her desk and took out a three-inch plug like a large book plug. She pulled a wire out of the top. “This will stick to any metal surface.” She pushed the wire back into the plug. “Turn to zero to erase and to ten to play.”

“Thanks.” Paula took it. The white band around the plug was marked with numbers. “I’ll see you in half an hour.” The afternoon meeting started at three.

That session was a repeat of the morning’s, except that Saba walked out. Tanuojin followed him, and Leno unfolded his arms and uncrossed his legs and stood.

“Is there some reason we’re here?”

Fisher gave Paula a sullen, furious look. “You whore,” he said, in a low voice. His gray mustache bristled, and he stalked out the door. Leno looked down at her.

“He sounds like Machou.”

Paula followed him into the hall. Fisher was disappearing into the waiting room midway along it. “Merkhiz, you know all the right words.” Michalski had said something about a message. She went down to the waiting room, where Fisher stood among his aides, having his coat put on and his papercase handed to him.

The message board was just inside the threshold on the wall.

Paula: if you ever come back, I’m living in the Nikoles Building, Room 68, Green Wing. An Chu.

She took the slip of paper off the board and put it in her pocket.

The Styths had gone back to the air cars. Just as she joined them, Leno took off in the two-seater, his second-in-command in the passenger seat. The car hovered overhead a moment and swooped off toward the wall of the dome. The sun was setting and the domelight was coming on. Saba leaned against the door of the yellow Dutch car.

“Why did you leave?” she asked him.

“I’m getting a headache.”

“Do you want me to drive?”

Tanuojin came around the car to her. “I’ll drive.”

They got into the car, Tanuojin in the middle seat, and started toward the East Lock. Below them the lights of buildings glowed through the trees. The heat was off and she began to shiver and reached behind the seat for a car blanket. Saba pressed his hands to his face.

“Can’t you help him?” she asked Tanuojin.

“Not while I’m flying.” He turned to Saba on his other side. “Shall I stop?”

“I’ll be all right.” The big man moved in the cramped seat, his legs bent into the space under the dash. “Is there any place you want to go while we’re here, Paula? Anybody you want to see?”

She shook her head. She would see An Chu later and look for Tony. They were coming to the lock. The orange light was flashing; somebody was in the shaft ahead of them, perhaps Leno.

“What about your father?”

“My father is dead. Are you trying to get me out of the way?”

“Isn’t that nigger-mean,” Tanuojin said. He turned to Saba. “Do you know her father killed himself?”

She stared out the window, angry. Saba said, “No.” His voice was taut. Beyond the window the clear wall of the lock was glowing intensely blue. White arrows flashed in the glare. Tanuojin bumped twice going through the dogleg. Saba winced at the second light contact with the wall.

“Watch where you’re going.”

“Let me drive,” she said to Tanuojin, “and you can help him.”

“No,” they said, in unison.

They flew through the smoky night. A light rain began to fall and Tanuojin turned the blowers on. The lights on the roof of the car shone white on the cottony mist. Saba doubled over, his head in his hands. His breath whistled in his throat. Paula’s muscles were kinked with tension. She made herself relax. Tanuojin shook his head. She frowned at him.

“What’s the matter?”

“My head hurts. Can I land here?”

“Yes.” She bent down and felt along the floor for the switch. The lights on the skids came on. Through the spy window in the floor she could see the ground.

He set the car down on a flat mud plain in the slagheaps. The barren blades of hills stood around them. The rain fell steadily. The ground under them was firm and they had a full pack of oxygen. Paula switched the lights off.

“We can stay here awhile. A couple of hours.”

Neither of them spoke. She looked out the window. The rain tapped on the roof over her head. She did not want to think about her father. She had been thirteen when he died. The rain sluiced down the windows, heavier than before, and she looked at the skids to make sure the ground wasn’t washing away under them. She thought of the listening device in her pocket. The two men with her were as close to her as brothers, but she could not trust them. She had trusted her father. Lonely, she stared out the window. Tanuojin pushed her.

“It’s getting worse. Take us back.”

She changed places with him and drove them back to New Haven.

The wire was sticky. She laid the belt across the top of the chest of drawers, in front of the mirror. In it she could see Saba still asleep in the bed behind her. The windows were heavily shaded. The wire was invisible in this light. She pressed it under the rolled edge of the buckle.

She went out to walk in the wood and got lost. Dark came. She found the stream and followed it through thick trees and brush, but it seemed to take her nowhere familiar. Thrashing her way through a thicket she came up against three strands of wire. She stopped, breathing hard. Ahead of her lay an open field, pale blue in the domelight, that sloped up on her right into an arm of the birch wood. The stream shone through the trees below her. In the distance was a group of buildings she recognized: Halstead’s. Relieved, she climbed through the wire and crossed the field toward the roadhouse.

Both the Committee cars were parked on the roof. She went in the ground door. Although it was a weekend night, the long L-shaped room was half-empty. Farmers took no days off. Kasuk sat at a front table playing Go with an old man in bib overalls. Two or three other Styths drank among the dozen people at the bar. She went over to watch Kasuk play, but just as she reached the table the old man stood up.

“I quit. I know when I’m beaten.” He wore no shirt. His shoulders ended in knobs, his beard hung in thick yellow twists like yarn. “What will it be?”

“Another beer,” Kasuk said. He saw Paula and got to his feet, eager. “Hello. Will you play?”

The old man went to the bar. She shook her head. “No, I want to go home. Did you come down here alone?”

“My uncle is here someplace.” He scanned the room. “So is my brother. I wonder where they went.”

Paula was picking burrs and foxtails out of her clothes and her hair. “Well, drive me home, and then you can bring the car back.”

“My uncle has the key.”

The old man returned with three liter steins of beer. Paula tried to pay him for hers but he refused the money. They sat at the wooden table drinking while Kasuk swept the Go pebbles into the box and shook them through the sorting screen.

“Play with me,” he said to her.

“I’m tired. I’ve been out lost in the wood for five hours.” She licked beer foam off her upper lip. “Where is Tanuojin?”

“Back at the house.”

She raised the stein and drank a long swallow of the beer. Kasuk folded the grid. Her curiosity was sparked. Kasuk was telling her a lie. Tanuojin would never allow his sheltered younger son to go off to a drinking dock; therefore Tanuojin was gone.

Kasuk was staring over her head toward the door, and she twisted around on the bench to see. A girl in a brick-colored jacket slipped into the half-lit room and crossed it to the bar. Kasuk said, “That’s the woman my uncle was talking to.”

The old man put his stein down. “One more game, sonny?”

“Sure.”

Paula gulped the rest of her beer. “If Saba comes in again, hold him for me.” She went out the front door to the yard, spread with the pale blue light. Around the three buildings of the Halstead complex the grass was clipped short, but a hundred feet away the high straw sprang up, crackling dry. She walked slowly out past the barn and the guesthouse. The wind was cold. On the high ground behind the bar, she came on Saba, Junna, and two girls sitting on the ground passing a little bone pipe around.

“I thought I saw you go in,” Saba said. “Where have you been?” He was not wearing the belt with the wire; he was not even wearing a shirt.

“I forgot that it gets dark here.” She sat down beside him. The girls were much nearer Junna’s age than Saba’s. One handed her the pipe. “Which car did you bring?” Relieved, she saw the rest of his clothes on the ground beside him.

“The three-seat.”

“Give me the keys,” she said, “so Kasuk can drive me home.” She sucked on the pipe. The fire was out. She passed the pipe to Junna.

“I’ll take you.” Saba got up, stooping for his shirt and belt.

One girl had struck a match. Junna bent to light the hashish. His heavy hair hung over his shoulders. The two girls were watching him, solemn. Their youth made them all similar. Saba went off through the high grass, slinging his belt around his waist. Paula ran to catch up with him.

“Uncle Saba,” Junna shouted, and Saba wheeled; he kept walking, backward now. Junna cried, “Will you come get us?”

“Walk,” Saba shouted.

“Hey!”

Saba laughed. He turned front again. Paula jammed her hands in her pockets. She wished she knew where Tanuojin was. There was a ladder up the side of the tavern, and she went around the corner of the building to it.

“I take it you feel better?”

He climbed up the ladder after her to the parking lot on the roof. “I feel top.”

The yellow Dutch car was parked in the center of the roof. The door was locked. She watched him try the keys; he was in a very high mood, and she guessed he had smoked a lot of the bhang.

“Where is Tanuojin, while you’re out educating his sucklings?”

“He took one of the other cars out.”

It was a bad lie, since she could see the only other car available to him from where she stood. He swung the door up and she slid across the three seats to the far side. Saba got in next to her, behind the steering grips.

“You never told me your father killed himself.”

“No, I never did.”

“How did he do it?”

Slumped in the seat, she put her head back and looked out the clear roof. He started the car. They rose in a looping spiral into the air.

“Are you cold?” he said.

“I’m hungry.”

“Why did your father kill himself?”

“Oh, Christ. He left me a letter. I kept it for years, I finally burned it. He said he was afraid of losing his mind. He was afraid of being helpless. He left the dome, and the pollution killed him. I wish Tanuojin had kept quiet about it. I didn’t know he knew.”

“How old were you?”

“Junna’s age.”

The car was settling down over the tops of trees. She sat up, thinking about what she could have to eat. She put her father and his flight out of her mind easily; she had been doing it for years. He landed the car and they went into the darkened kitchen, smelling of roast pork.

“Give me something to eat.” He sat down at the table and propped his feet on the other chair. “It must have been hard for you, what your father did.”

She opened the cold drawer and took out a sack of milk, a bowl of apples, and a cheese. “Don’t be fatuous.”

“I’m making a point.”

She put the food down on the table between them. He straightened to reach the apples, taking his feet off the chair, and she sat. The room was too dark for her to see his face. He said, “I’ve been thinking about this all watch. He was an intelligent man, your father, you’ve told me that, but being intelligent didn’t save him, or you. That’s what drove him crazy.”

“He wasn’t really crazy.”

He drank milk. The domelight threw an elongated reproduction of the window onto the floor.

“There’s only one thing in life,” he said. “To do whatever comes to you as well as you can. That’s what honor is, the perfect image, the ideal life. Anarchists have no sense of honor. That’s why they can kill themselves like that.”

She ate cheese. “Your father was murdered.”

“He didn’t desert me. Your father abandoned you.”

The hallway door creaked, and Leno came in, his feet scraping on the floor. He and Saba made half-worded noises at each other. Paula reached for the sack of milk. Everybody with any intelligence sometimes was afraid of going crazy. Leno took another piece of cheese and a loaf of bread and went out the back door into the yard.

“My father did not desert me.”

“Maybe it doesn’t look like that to you, but that’s what I’m getting to. These people here can live like this, without wars and feuds and governments, because they give up the most important things in life. There are debts people owe each other out of the fact of nature. Just common humanity. The anarchists refuse them. They’re not real people, they’re just shells of people.”

She poured milk into a glass. She was the only anarchist he knew well.

“You have to make a choice,” he said. “Actually you made it a long while ago but you have to face it now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Jefferson and the Committee have never done anything for you. You and I and Tanuojin, we belong to each other. Fate, Karma, whatever you want to call it, something brought us all together because we need each other.”

“What if I call it chance?”

“Nothing happens by chance.”

She wiped her mouth on her hand. “Everything is by chance. The readiness is all.” He gave an exasperated shake of his head. She took an apple out of the bowl in the middle of the table. What he had said burned in her mind and made her angry. He was always trying to steer her into something. She took another apple and left her chair.

“I’m going to bed.”

“Stay here and keep me company,” he said.

“Go find Tanuojin,” she said. “Talk to him.” She went down the hallway to the stairs.

She woke late Sunday afternoon. Saba lay asleep beside her, naked. She found his belt and pried the wire loose and went down to the kitchen, where she had hidden the plug half of the device.

The recording was flawless. The voices were precise and there was no background noise at all. Sitting in the meadow, she listened to Saba collect his nephews to go to the roadhouse.

“Where’s Paula?”

“I don’t know,” Kasuk said. “I haven’t seen her. Do you suppose she’s all right?”

“If you do see her, remember, she isn’t to know about Tanuojin.”

Then he had already left, before she put the wire on Saba’s belt. She tore up a handful of dry grass. The cook’s old white cat was creeping around the side of the barn. The daws shrieked and fought in the spread branches of the elm tree. She listened to Saba and a strange girl pick each other up at Halstead’s. They hardly spoke; they never even exchanged names. It was the girl who suggested they go outside. Hollow people. Another strange female voice said, “Want to smoke some hash?”

“Sure,” Saba said.

Junna said, in a whisper, “My father will find out.”

“Do you want to look like a baby to those girls?”

She listened to him talk about the debt owed to common humanity. Lying down in the grass, she spread herself out to the late sun. The birds scrapped in the elm tree. On the far side of the house someone shouted. She thought about David. She could call him on the Committee’s photo-relay. He would like that, a message all the way from the Earth just for him. The tone of the birds’ racket changed. She raised her head. Tanuojin was walking under the tree toward the back door.

Sitting up, she scanned the last few centimeters of the wire and put it through the plug to erase it. He vanished into the house. She went after him, left the plug in a kitchen drawer, and caught up with him on the stairs.

“Where have you been?” Carefully she stayed out of his reach.

He was fighting the will to yawn. His eyelids drooped half-closed. “I got lost in the trees.” At the top of the stairs he turned left to his room and she went right, to go back to Saba and replace the wire on his belt.

Paula sat sideways in her chair, cleaning her fingernails with a toothpick. She had stopped listening to Fisher a long time before. He had brought two other Martians with him and the room was stuffy from too many people. Beside her, Tanuojin pulled himself up straight in his chair and slung his right leg over his left, jittery in the close quarters.

“I keep telling you,” Saba said to Fisher. “I’m not here to talk to you. I’m here to talk to her.” He nodded toward Jefferson. “Now, you can shut—”

Fisher’s nostrils flared, yellowish. He turned to the old woman at the end of the table. “Do I have to put up with this?”

Saba said, “Shut your mouth, or we will talk where you can’t hear us, and you won’t know anything.” The big Styth’s hands thumped the arms of his chair. He wagged his head at Paula. “She does my advance work. If you want some arrangements with me, talk to her.”

The Martian stood up straight off his chair. “You insufferable, arrogant barbarian.” His aides ranked themselves behind him. “I demand an apology.”

“I don’t apologize to niggers,” Saba said, and Fisher started for the door.

“Wait.” Tanuojin caught his arm. Fisher’s eyes glittered. In a sweeping gesture he threw off Tanuojin’s hand and rushed out the door. His aides followed him.

Leno grunted. “I don’t understand any of this.”

Paula dropped the toothpick on the scarred top of the table. She looked behind her at the closet. Jefferson took out her false eye and wiped it on a cloth.

“Officially, we are supposed to be negotiating for the Council.”

Saba put his hands behind his head. “I can’t see why we should maintain your fictions.” Tanuojin sauntered around the edge of the room. Leno had started up, thinking the meeting was over, but now he settled down again.

“I can see how you would consider it a fiction,” Jefferson said. The eyelid fluttered over her empty socket. Tanuojin had wandered around behind her. “We need some organization, and at present the Council serves. Don’t touch me, Yekka.”

Tanuojin’s long face narrowed. He came slowly past her toward Paula. Saba said, “You can’t be our friend and the Martians’.”

“I am nobody’s friend.” Jefferson slipped the eye back into her face. “I am certainly not your friend.”

Paula planted her elbows on the arms of her chair. “He means ally. Don’t get caught on semantics.”

“I’ll avoid it. You may lord it over Fisher, Akellar, but you still are only representative of part of the Empire—one small part.”

“The rest of them will follow me. Most of them. Just as they did with the crystal trade.”

Tanuojin stood behind Paula’s chair. His cold fingers moved down her cheek to her throat. The touch of his claws sent a shudder through her. Saba and Jefferson discussed his influence in the Empire. The old woman was well informed, and a master of such talk: she had him on the defensive within moments. Paula leaned forward, away from Tanuojin’s hand.

“Jefferson, stay on the line, will you? It’s to your advantage to make him look like the Emperor.”

“To maintain your fictions?”

“Life follows art.”

Jefferson laughed. Leno was staring at the wall, his face slack with boredom. Saba said, “You have Fisher in your sleeve. You can control what the Council hears about this.” He gave Leno an oblique look. “We’ll keep up your face in front of Fisher and talk behind him.” He pushed his chair back. Leno jumped out of a doze. “Tomorrow.”

Jefferson said, “As you wish, Akellar.” Her voice was velvet. Everybody stood.

Paula went out to the hall, and Tanuojin came after her. “What did you tell her about me?” He smacked her between the shoulder blades.

“Nothing. She guessed from the way you’ve been pawing Fisher. What’s going on?”

“You really think you can play her against us?”

She looked behind them. Saba was coming after them down the hall, giving Leno an edited version of the talk with Jefferson. Tanuojin went ahead of her out the door. She put her jacket on.

“They are my children,” Tanuojin said. “I’m sick of the way you meddle with my children.”

“Tut tut tut,” Saba said.

“Junna is still a little boy! The next he’ll be taking morphion—” His voice rose, and Paula took the tape plug out of her ear and turned the volume down. She put her feet up on the frayed arm of the couch. None of the Styths was awake yet. A flat blade of sunlight pierced the curtained window opposite her, yellow with dust motes. In her ear Tanuojin and Saba differed sharply about Junna. She picked at the threads on the worn couch cover.

“You and Paula, you both take your crumbs so seriously.”

“You’re such a hypocrite.”

She heard her conversation with them in the car going down to New York, and the meeting with Jefferson and Fisher. Something was missing. She had expected to hear something between them that would tell her where Tanuojin had gone. Glumly she realized they had talked about that before Saba put his clothes on.

“We’re just trying to get rid of the pinch-faced Martian,” Saba told Leno.

The time meter on the wall read ten minutes to noon. At four they were due in New York again. Stacks of bound hourlies cluttered the floor. She sat up and rested her feet on a bundle. In her ear the plug played back the maddening small talk of the trip from New York to New Haven. Maybe she should wire Tanuojin. Plant a homing device on him in case he went somewhere else. That was desperate. She wondered what they would do when they found out she was spying on them.

“What about Fisher?” Saba said. “Did you reach him?”

“When he’s angry he’s clear as water. He saw Savenia over the rest-days, it’s all set up. I’d love to know how much the old woman knows.”

“Paula must have told her not to let you touch her.”

“No. She figured that out for herself. Or Bunker told her.”

“Does Paula know? About the coup.”

She went taut as a wire. Tanuojin said, “No. Not yet.”

“I don’t like treating her as an enemy.”

“Part of her is everybody’s enemy. You heard her tell Jefferson that she’s only interested in what she can get for herself. The bitch. After all we’ve done for her.”

“I also heard her call me the Emperor.”

“That’s how she sells it to you. It sounds a little different when she’s talking to Jefferson.”

“Naturally. Did you check on Ybicsa?”

“Saba, we can’t go back and forth every watch between here and the ship. I hid her in a ditch. Nobody will find her. The League is planning to spring the coup the day we leave. They’ll arrest the Committee first, and then they’ll take us. All we have to do is let them destroy the Committee, and then we step in and save the Earth from the Martians. What could be simpler?”

She yanked the plug out of her ear. Everything fitted. She should have made sense of it before, when Saba was telling her she had to choose.

She sat down on the couch and made herself think about what she would do. There seemed very little choice. The League probably thought they could pull off their plot without enlarging it into a war, and Tanuojin thought he could contain everything in a counterplot. There was too much involved, too many rearrangements, too many people. The coup would spread like bursting atoms. It would stop only when it had brought everything else in the system into a balance with itself. She went down the hall to the library, where the videone was, and called the Committee office in New York.

Jefferson took a long time to answer; or Paula imagined that she did. Paula stood over the cabinet banging her fingers on the screen. The red and white holding pattern on the videone screen split apart to show her Jefferson’s face, tinged green.

“Yes, Mendoza. I—”

“I can’t chat,” Paula said. “The Sunlight League is mounting a coup against the Committee and the Styths. Saba and Tanuojin know about it and intend to use it to wipe you out and grab the Earth.”

Jefferson’s eyes popped round as a Styth’s. “The League. Who?” She leaned forward into the screen, and the green color increased in her cheeks: she looked dead. “Fisher and Savenia?”

“I don’t know anything more,” Paula said. “I’m going up to talk to them—they can help you if they want to.”

“Mendoza, wait.”

She went out to the hall and up the stairs. The house was quiet enough that she could hear the whisper of the upstairs hall curtains billowing over the open windows. The bed in her room was empty. She went back around the corner to Tanuojin’s room.

They were both there, Tanuojin before the closet putting his shirt on, and Saba lying on his back across the bed. She threw the tape plug at him. “You have one hell of a gall talking about honor.” She slammed the door.

Saba caught the tape. He sat up on the bed. Tanuojin was staring at her with an intent look on his face. She turned on his weakness: Saba. “You pirate. You’re no better than your father. You’re a cheap, sleazy politician, just like Machou.”

“Don’t listen to her.” Tanuojin reached his lyo in one long stride. Saba put the tape into his ear.

“Has she told anybody else?”

Paula looked beyond him at Tanuojin. “If this is all you can do with your mind, you should do it for money in a carnival.”

His heat flared. He pulled back one arm to hit her, and Saba caught him. There was a knock on the door. Paula backed away from the bed. Her head was pounding as if she were feverish.

“What is it?” Saba shouted.

Sril answered him through the door. “Akellar, that fat old woman is on the box downstairs.”

“Jefferson,” Paula said. “Who I told. Talking about choices. What are you going to do?”

Saba still sat on the bed; he looked back over his shoulder at Tanuojin, and she saw in their faces that their minds were set. She started toward the door.

“You can do it without me.”

Saba grabbed her arm. “They’ll kill you.” He pulled her around bodily and pushed her toward Tanuojin. “Send her back to the ship.”

“Akellar,” Sril called.

“I’m coming!” He thrust her into Tanuojin’s grasp and went out the door.

Tanuojin twisted her arm up behind her back and hoisted her over to the unmade bed. “I brought something for you all the way from Yekka, in case this happened.” He let go of her, and she took her throbbing wrist in the other hand. He swung a straight chair down in front of her. In his other hand was a plastic hand-yoke.

“Tanuojin, don’t do it. You’ll lose everything. You can’t manage a war.”

He pulled her arms through the slats in the back of the chair. “I’m not doing anything. It’s nigger eating nigger, just like in the books.” He snapped the yoke onto her wrists.

“Ouch.” The inside edges of the yoke were knife-sharp. The tight fit pinched her.

“Bleed.” He went out. The door shut. She heard the key turn in the lock.

She put her head against the back of the chair before her. In the hall, Sril called some question. Her wrists throbbed in the yoke. She straightened, lifted the chair up on her forearms, and carried it over to the window.

From here she could see the backyard, the barn, and the meadow. The Dutch car was parked beneath the window. The bonnet was tilted up, and Leno bent over the engine. Kasuk walked across the meadow. Her wrists were numb. There was a springtab in the side of the yoke. Her fingers would not reach it, and when she pressed it against the wall, the knife edges of the yoke slit her skin. She cocked her arms up and bit the tab, without result.

Saba spoke in the hall. She turned toward the sound of his voice. No one came in. She took the chair once around the room. The sunlight streamed in the window and stretched across the floor. Leno was still working in the car’s engine. The yoke cut into her wrists. If she broke the back of the chair she could at least free herself of that. She laid the chair down on its side, one end against the bedframe, put her foot on the middle slat, and kicked it out.

Her numbed arms pulsed, swelling up fat, and she sat down a moment to get her breath. A man laughed in the hall outside her door. She stood up again, holding her arms out carefully to balance the yoke. Below the window, Leno slammed the bonnet down on the car. Grease covered his hands. The cook’s white cat was trotting across the meadow toward the trees. A daw flew at it, shrieking, and the cat broke into a gallop. The bird harassed it into the trees.

The door opened behind her. Tanuojin circled the foot of the bed toward her. He kicked the broken chair aside.

“You could get out of anything.”

She stood with her back to the window. The late sun hit his chest. He said, “Saba has Jefferson half-convinced you misunderstood us. I want you to tell her you did.”

She shook her head. “It’s a mistake.”

“It isn’t a mistake. Listen to me. You call yourself an anarchist.” His hand shot toward her into the sunlight, palm up, his claws like hooks. “Then when you come to the crunch you get stuck on some damn rule about being peaceful. This is where we take it all. Are you going to let some idiot weakness about a little bloodshed keep you out of it?”

“What do you know?”

He shouted at her, “I know I need you and you’re letting me down.”

“For my own reasons.” Her fists were clenched. Her wrists hurt. Her whole body shivered with anger. “I’m doing what I want, not what you want, not anybody else—”

“Because you’re a coward.”

“Who is a coward? Why do you do everything you do, your whole life, everything—because you’re afraid—Hit me.” She watched his hand cock back. “Go on, big man, show it off. You’re down on your knees to that Empire, and I’m not, so you have to beat me down to your level.”

She was watching his hand, expecting him to hit her, and to her surprise he lowered it. He said, “One last time, Paula. Join us.”

She turned back to the window and looked out. Her arms hurt. She felt his presence like a pressure against her. Finally he went off around the bed toward the door. Halfway there he stopped.

“You’ll beg me to take you back, Paula. When this is over.”

She ignored him, and he left. She went once more around the little room. Everything was over, her whole life for nothing. He might revenge himself on David. Saba would protect his son. Dark was coming. The colors faded out of the room. Her eyes strained in an ashen darkness. The Styths’ world. She had to get away, she could not live with them any more. The floor rippled under her feet. A wave of heat struck her and carried her into the wall.

A sheet of light blasted her eyes. She dragged herself back to consciousness. She was lying face down on a burning floor. Flames crept toward her along the seams of the floor. Her lip was burned when it had touched the wood.

She pushed herself up on her hands and knees. The walls were burning, and the bed. No use trying the door. She staggered up and went to the window. The curtains burst into flames. The heat made her eyes itch. When she touched the window frame her hands shrank from the heat. The bedtable was beside her, with its lamp and clock. She swept them off the tabletop and picked it up and threw it into the window. The glass burst outward. The curtains had burned to nothing in an instant. She put her head out the opening in the window.

It was Saba’s voice. “Paula! Jump! Hurry!”

Her dazzled eyes could not find him in the dark below her. She put her feet up on the window sill, flinching from the heat, and launched herself into the outside air. He caught her.

The cool air bathed her face. She turned her head away from the fire, still uncomfortably close. Saba took the yoke off her wrists. Somebody was screaming.

“What happened?” Kasuk said, behind her. “Where’s my father?”

“Somebody just bombed the house,” Saba said. “I haven’t made up my mind if it was the Committee or the Sunlight League.”

“Where is Tanuojin?”

“In the barn. There’s seventy bricks of fuel in there. Go help him.”

The young man raced off. Paula raised her arms, scored and welted from the yoke. The fire crackled in her ears. Saba knelt beside her.

“Was it the Committee?”

She shook her head. The whole house roared with the fire; its rippling orange light brightened the meadow back to the trees. She stood. Leno ran up, his arms pumping.

“We have all the ships safe. And the fuel. The shed is burning now, that’s a hot fire.”

“We have to call Ybix and Ebelos. My scout’s parked in the desert. We can meet the big ships halfway here. You and I and Tanuojin.”

Leno stuck his hands on his hips. “I’m not leaving my crew here.”

“We can pick them up in a watch and a half. Leno, we have to get off the Planet. If they catch any of the three of us, no one has a chance.”

Paula stood watching the house burn. Her face was tender. In a stream four or five men raced around the edge of the heat ball. Sril led them.

“Mendoz’. Somebody said you were in there when it blew up.” He turned toward Saba. “Akellar, Ybix is all here and sound.”

“They got the cook and the cat.” Saba swung around. “Kasuk!” His hand closed on her wrist. She gritted her teeth. Her torn skin stung at his touch. Kasuk came up, smelling of smoke.

“You take care of her,” Saba told him.

“Yes, Saba.”

Saba went off through his men. He was gone in a moment. She backed away from the heat of the fire. The Styths’ faces glistened in its light.

“Come on,” Kasuk said softly. “This is dangerous, standing around here. Junna!” He touched her shoulder, and she went obediently out of the crowd, into the dark, the two young men flanking her.

“Do you know where to meet Ybix?” she asked.

Kasuk glanced behind them. They reached the wood. The flickering light from the fire poked its long fingers ahead of them among the trees.

“I know one thing, which is not to stay around here.”

Junna said, “Where did Gemini go?”

“To Ybix. Tanuojin brought Ybicsa down on the Sun Day.”

A web broke against her face. She scrambled down a short rocky slope through a screen of brush. The roar of the fire dimmed away. Now she heard the soft, particular voices of the crickets and birds around her. Her eyes ached.

“It’s so open,” Junna said. “I feel so left open here.”

Behind them another thud of an explosion bumped in the air. There was a clatter of sharper noise. Kasuk caught her arm.

“Guns. We need someplace to hide.”

A hot Styth cheer went up, bloodthirsty. Junna cried, “They’re fighting!” He started back through the trees.

Kasuk pulled her into the curve of his left arm and got his brother by his right. “They’re asking to be killed. We have to hide. Paula, where can we hide?”

She wiped her scalded face. Cold and dark: a cave. “Halstead’s. The Underground.” She had no idea how to find the roadhouse on the ground.

“Kak,” Junna said. “They’re fighting back there. I’m going back.”

“Listen to me,” Kasuk said. His voice was intense. “Papa told me to watch you. He’s gone now, he’s a thousand miles away. If you’re hurt, he can’t heal you, you might die.” He pushed his brother ahead of them into the wood.

They went on through the trees. She could not keep up with them at a walk. When they reached the edge of the wood and came out to a cornfield, the two Styths broke into a trot. They ran through the stubble of the corn. When she fell behind, Kasuk came back for her.

“Run.” He took her arm and half-carried her along. They jumped a narrow stream at the edge of the field and ran down a steep open slope.

An air car was coming toward them, its white running lights flashing. Kasuk plowed to a stop. He pushed her away and disappeared into the dark.

“Junna!”

She stood still, panting. The air car was circling toward her. A blinding light glared in her face. A voice shouted down at her.

“Stay where you are! Put your hands over your head!”

A long shape burst up from the ground and caught the air car’s rear skid. The light reeled off away from her. A gun clattered. Paula took two steps back. The car lurched over, Junna clinging to the skid. The light wheeled in a circle. Kasuk jumped out of the dark. He met the car in mid-air and brought it down nose-first. He tore open the cab door. The gun rattled again. It sounded like a toy. Junna stood beside her, his chest beating in and out. Kasuk came toward them.

“They look like Martians to me. They have uniforms on.”

They went down the field. At the edge of the trees was a low stone wall topped with a strand of wire. They climbed over it into the wood. Kasuk’s shirt was torn along his side. He held her by the arm, helping her run, and when she flagged, he picked her up and carried her. They crossed another field and a stretch of ancient paved roadway. Ahead, a sign glowed white in the domelight: Halstead’s.

“Be careful,” she said.

He stopped and put her down on her feet. Junna was just ahead of them. The windows glowed with light. On the far side of the yard was a small barn.

“There,” she said. “That’s where they cool their beer. It’s an old station on the Underground.” Inside the tavern a burst of music played.

The barn door was open. They went single-file into the dark. The horse nickered in the corner. The barn smelled of hay. Paula went to her left.

“There are steps, somewhere—”

“Here,” Junna said, ahead of her.

Her feet groped down slippery stone steps. A dank cold blew into her face. Mildew. A wet echo rebounded back to her from below. She bumped into a wall. Her outstretched hands touched boxes stacked higher than her head. She went down another flight of steps in the darkness. Under her feet the ground was smooth and wet. She began to shiver.

“It’s running like a river,” Kasuk said. His voice boomed hollow ahead of her. “There’s a tunnel—Paula, where does it go?”

“All the way to New York, if it isn’t blocked.”

Junna said, “What’s going on? Kak, shouldn’t we stay where Papa left us?”

Paula walked forward into the dark, feeling her way with her feet. Something brushed her hip. Groping on the wall, she found a cold metal rail along the wall.

“Junna, stay here with her.” Kasuk was passing her in the dark. “I’m going to look around. I’ll be right back.”

Above her, several yards away, a patch of gray light shone an instant and faded. She closed her eyes, useless in the dark. Junna touched her.

“We should stay where Tanuojin left us.”

“No,” she said. “Kasuk is right, we’d just be killed.”

“Is this a war, now?”

“Yes. I guess so.” Just like in the books.

“Who are we fighting?”

“I don’t know, Junna.”

“Are you afraid?”

“I’m cold.”

He moved; she expected nothing; a moment later the heavy clammy material of his shirt surrounded her. Her skin shuddered at the contact. It slipped down her back and she clutched at it.

“Aren’t you—”

“No,” he said. “I’m not cold. It’s nice in here.”

She put the shirt on, shivering, and moved around to warm it. Her feet slipped on the slick tile floor. Kasuk had been gone a long while.

“We need a torch. Maybe there’s something to eat here.” She found the steps again and started up, and Junna caught her arm.

“Stay here. You said yourself my brother is right.”

“But—”

“Do as he said. He has two stripes, and you’re just a woman.”

She stood breeding arguments suitable for the adolescent mind. A wedge of light pointed across the barn from the door. Kasuk’s broad shape came through it and the light thinned and disappeared.

“We have to get out of here,” Kasuk said. He came down the stairs past them. A narrow beam of light shot from his hand, glistening on black water stretching off as far as the light reached. “There are ships all over the sky, and the people in the house are all listening to the box. Something is going on.”

Up over their heads, a dog began to bark. He shone the torch along the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, overgrown with weed. They went down to the cold water. Along the edge it lapped barely to her ankles, but when Junna walked toward the center he fell in over his head. Kasuk held the torch down at his side. Junna swam toward them.

Paula stooped and dipped her hand in the water. It tasted brackish but not polluted. Something splashed away from the light ahead of them. The red beads of its eyes gleamed at them. Above them, on the surface, the dog was barking steadily.

“What is this?” Kasuk asked.

Paula said, “It was an underground railroad, all up and down the coast.”

“You said it goes to New York.”

“Hundreds of years ago. Before the island sank. Who knows where it goes now?”

He aimed the torch beam at the far end of the cavern. The light glanced off the narrowing walls. The water swirled into the black mouth of the tunnel. A wave broke in a ripple of foam.

“Come on.” He took her arm.

“Kasuk. I can’t swim. You go. Leave me here. I’ll be all right—”

A dull thud sounded like a thunderclap somewhere above them. The floor trembled under her. Her knees quaked. The water leaped along the walls of the cave. Kasuk said, “There, you see? Hold on to my back. Junna, stay behind me.” Paula put her arms around him, her cheek against his back, and he dove into the river.

She breathed deep and shut her eyes. The cold water closed over them. She raised her head into the air. Kasuk swam strongly under her. The light was gone. The air smelled of wet rot. One hand on the neck of Kasuk’s shirt, she let him tow her through the water. She heard the current rushing loud along the tunnel walls, and they were swept along in a close roar of water. Kasuk straightened and switched on the torch.

“Hold this.” He gave it to her over his shoulder. “Junna?”

“Here,” his brother called, behind him.

Kasuk swam on his stomach down the tunnel. Paula aimed the light ahead of them. The walls were massed with velvety weed. Thick curtains of it hung down from the ceiling. She ducked her head.

“Watch out!” Junna cried, behind them.

The river swelled. Paula clutched the torch. The water lifted them up and crashed them into the overhead wall. Greasy water filled her mouth and nose. She lost Kasuk. Her head broke the surface of the water and she gasped for air. She held the torch with both hands. The water leaped around her, booming on the walls of the tunnel. The light of the torch glowed in a green band under the water. Kasuk reached her. She flung her arms around his neck.

“Don’t strangle me.” He caught her hands. “I have you.”

Junna swam up to them. “What was that?”

Paula changed her grip to the back of Kasuk’s shirt. He took the torch. “Another bomb. Maybe the drinking dock, that was close. Let’s go.”

They swam off. The river swept them through the tunnel. Junna went on before them, his hair sleek, diving under the surface and popping up again like a water-puppy. They could not reach New York this way. Somewhere ahead, the air would turn foul, the tunnel would collapse, the roof fall in, they would drown in the dark.

“There’s light ahead,” Junna cried.

Kasuk switched the torch off. Ahead, an irregular patch of light shone into the tunnel through a hole in the roof. Paula sighed.

“It’s another station.” The air was clean. They were still inside the dome. Kasuk swam toward the light. Her feet struck the shelving ground, and she let go of him. She walked out of the water. Through the break in the tunnel roof, she could see the domelight. Kasuk grabbed her arm.

“Where are you going?”

“Kasuk—” She turned toward him, her hands on his arms. “Let me go. I have a chance here.”

He wiped his hand over his face. “How far is it to New York?”

“Ten hours. Eight. Depending on the current.”

“Good. Then we can make it.”

“Kasuk! I’ll drown!”

“You heard what Saba said. I may be stupid, Paula, but I know what he told me.” He turned to Junna. “Watch her. I’ll be right back.” He looked up at the hole in the roof, ten feet above them, crouched, and jumped. Swinging from the lip of the opening, he muscled himself up and out of the tunnel.

Paula went into the shallowest water. “We’ll all die,” she said to Junna.

The boy sank down on his hams in the water. “Papa will save us. He always does.” His hands played over the water. In his voice was the cheerful courage of someone who had never been afraid.

In the distance, up on the surface, a dog began to bark. She looked around the tunnel. There was nowhere to go. The opening overhead was too far for her to reach. It darkened, and Kasuk swung down through it. He had a coil of rope around his shoulder and a jug of milk in one hand.

They sat in the shallow water and drank the milk. Outside, the dog barked steadily. Kasuk wiped white foam off his mouth and his young mustaches. “You hear that? They’ll come through this city with packs of those things. We have to get out of here.”

She knew he was right. They tied the rope around their waists, five feet of slack between Kasuk and Paula and twenty feet between Paula and Junna, and she looped her arms around Kasuk’s neck and they swam into the dark.

The tunnel closed in tight around them. They came to a sheet of plastic thrust down through the ground, a foot thick: the wall of the dome. Kasuk dove under it. The air on the far side stank. The light glanced off patches of foam on the walls. The white crusts thickened to nests of round bubbles hanging just above the water. It buzzed. A million wings quivered all over the walls. Wasps zipped back and forth in the air.

“Take a deep breath.”

She filled her lungs and he dove. They tore through the water. It streamed over her face. They shot to the surface. The bubbles and the boom of wings lay behind them. They swam on. Bare rock walls lowered down around them, encrusted with salt. Her throat began to hurt when she breathed. Her mouth was full of a bitter numbing taste. Kasuk swam in a kind of breaststroke, silently, his hands only occasionally breaking the water. The light hung around his neck, shining through the water. A reek of gas clogged her nose. Her lungs refused it. She locked her fingers in his shirt, dizzy. Putting her head down close to the water, she drank the rotten air.

The two Styths swam steadily. In places the current carried them faster than they could swim. Once she lost her grip and was yanked away from Kasuk. Junna caught her before she could scream. She climbed back onto Kasuk’s shoulders. Her head pounded.

Her eyes itched and streamed. The poisonous air clawed at her lungs. The water rose in the tunnel until they scraped their backs against the rock roof. The walls widened abruptly. They were swept into the cavern of an ancient terminal.

Kasuk switched off the light. The terminal was not completely black. Through a wide crack in the roof, she could see the night sky. Far up there, Luna showed, silver-white. They swam into the black tunnel and he switched the light on again.

Wings fluttered past her. Something bobbed against her in the water, crawled along her side and leaped away. She kept her eyes closed against the stinging air. Her throat was raw. She licked her lips and her tongue began to itch.

“Kasuk—Kasuk—” Just beyond the light, Junna choked and gasped for breath. Kasuk spun around, grabbing for him. She clung to his shoulders. The boy gagged; he vomited; mucus streamed from his nose. He was dying. Kasuk pressed his mouth to his brother’s and breathed into him. Paula laid her head against his back. Something bumped her. Tore at her; cut her wrist with its teeth. She struck at it, whining, and it darted away, green in the flashlit water.

Kasuk said, “Can you breathe now?” His voice was hoarse.

“Yes,” Junna whispered. “Better.”

Her teeth chattered. The fish was back, swarms of fish, nibbling at her arms, swimming into the deep sleeves of the shirt. She fought them off. Kasuk slid his arm around her.

“Should we go back?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“How close are we?”

“I don’t know.”

Junna swam beside them, his lips near the surface of the water, sipping off the air where it was least poisonous. Kasuk reached for him.

“We can’t stop now.”

They swam on. When Junna began to drag at the end of the rope, Kasuk lashed him and Paula to his back. The light went out. He carried them on through the dark. His strength amazed her, his measureless endurance. She clung to him in a half-delirium. If he had dived to the bottom she would have drowned rather than leave him.

He dragged them on and on through the tunnel. She swallowed water and heaved it up again. Her head reeled. She clung to Junna with one arm. The current whirled them around in a dizzy eddy. Kasuk hit something solid and held tight. She raised her head. Her eyes were swollen almost shut. They had come to a fork in the river. The wild current, leaping across a bar of concrete, was dragging them into the left-hand channel. On the right, overhead, another stream thundered straight down twenty feet to meet them. Kasuk dragged them to the right side of the tunnel. With them hanging on his shoulders he climbed hand over hand up the weed-covered wall, through the roar and the flying spray of the waterfall, into a cold sunlit layer of sweet air. She gulped it into her aching lungs. Kasuk pulled them through a crack in the earth out to the surface. They lay on cold stones and slept.

She woke up shivering. Her mouth tasted foul. His black skin rough with gooseflesh, Junna slept curled up beside her. Kasuk was gone.

High above her the sky was brilliantly sunlit but she lay in deep shadow on the floor of a gorge. The steep slopes on either side were overgrown with brush and wiry pine trees. The air tasted fresh and delicious. They were inside a dome; the only dome it could be was New York. She sat up, looking for Kasuk. She still wore Junna’s shirt. The boy stirred in his sleep, his length doubled up on the ground, and his hair caught with leaves. There was a stream running along the foot of the far wall of the gulley. She climbed down through rocks to the inch-deep water and drank from her cupped hand.

Above her the brush rustled violently. She stood. Kasuk was climbing down the slope, a dead swan hung over his shoulder, one long wing trailing.

“Let’s eat.”

“That?” she said, uncertain.

He stepped across the trickle of water and went up through the jumbled boulders toward his brother. She followed him. When she sat down beside him, he was tearing open the swan’s belly with his claws. Its long neck stretched out over the ground, the feathers rumpled. The swan had fattened on eelgrass and popcorn and children’s lunches. The raw meat made her gag. The Styths picked out the bird’s heart and liver, packed in congealing yellow fat.

“Kak,” Junna said. He hooked his arm around his brother’s neck. “You saved our lives.”

Kasuk was using a swan feather to pick his teeth. He pushed Junna away. The younger boy turned to her. “Didn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said. “You saved both of us.”

His heavy shoulders lifted and fell. “I just kept thinking about my father. I couldn’t let him down again. So it was really my father.” He grabbed Junna by his shaggy hair and shook him. “Go keep watch. Make sure nobody sneaks up on us.”

The boy raced off. Paula’s eyes followed him in his headlong run across the gulley and in among the trees. The swan’s broad wings sprawled around her, the feathers broken. Kasuk wiped his hands on the grass.

“My father told me to protect him. I’m just dragging us deeper. Can we leave the dome?”

“You’ll need an air car,” she said. “But I’ll be damned if I’m going with you.”

“Saba told me—”

“I don’t care what he said. I’m telling you what I’ll do.”

He made a little harried gesture, avoiding her eyes. A flap of his torn shirt hung down over his stomach. His chest was massive, his shoulders like a beam. His strength was perfect. He wore no scars from fighting, no killing marks.

“I have to follow orders,” he said.

“I can only help you if you let me go.”

“Then I’ll have to get us out by myself.”

The smell of smoke reached her nose. She said, “Which way is the lake from here?”

“Out there.” He pointed behind them. “There’s fighting here, too—what’s going on?”

“Here comes your brother.”

Junna was bounding down the slope, tall as a young tree, scattering stones and dirt on ahead of him. He jumped across the stream and ran up to them. Scratches decorated his body; he was naked.

“Cover yourself up,” Kasuk said.

“Why? She doesn’t care. I’m hungry again. When will Papa come? Will we start fighting when he gets here? There are fires up there, and people shooting guns.”

“What’s going on?” Kasuk turned to Paula. “I thought the Martians were just attacking us, but there aren’t any Styths up there.”

“The Sunlight League is staging a coup against the anarchy.”

“To kill us,” Junna said.

She bobbed her head, her gaze on Kasuk. He said, “What does Gemini have to do with it?”

“Everything.”

Junna raked at the ground with his claws, his head bent. “Papa knows what he’s doing.”

Kasuk said to her, “Then I can see why you don’t want to go back. I won’t take you back.”

“Kak!” Junna cried. He grabbed his brother’s arm. “Who will protect her?”

Kasuk scrubbed his face with his hand. He crooked his fingers in the neck of his shirt and pulled at it. “I wonder what’s happening to the rest of the Ybix.”

“Kak!”

“Shut up. I’ve made up my mind.” He looked at Paula. “You get us an air car.”

“I’ll try,” she said.

Night came. The domelight did not shine. She made her way toward the middle of the dome. A siren raised its hound-voice ahead of her. In the dark she had trouble finding a way through the trees. She skirted the east edge of the lake. Faint moonlight gleamed on the water. The swans were all roosting in the high grass near the head of the lake. As she crossed the open ground between the beach and the wood, near the hourly stand, a shot cracked out.

She sprinted into the cover of the trees. Another bullet followed her, whining like a hornet. She stopped beside a tree. Her ears strained to hear. The wood was full of sounds. The brush crackled behind her. Leaves rustled. The wind rose in a low call that lifted the hackles of her neck. In spite of the cool, she was sweating.

She went on, trying to keep silent. Twice she saw lights moving in the trees ahead of her. An air car droned above her. The wind made the branches dance. She went around the edge of a meadow. On the far side, four little deer grazed, their tails busy. Through the trees she saw a building burning like a torch, crackling, sending up a thick roll of smoke. The bright yellow light spilled into the wood so that pebbles and ferns and bits of twig threw shadows ten feet long. She circled a great pit, still smoking, where an underground building had been blown up.

She heard more gunshots. The woods ended. She trotted across the south end of the campus. The place looked different in the dark. The air hummed with cars. Three or four searchlights swung back and forth over the uneven ground. She went into the shadow of the turret of a university building. Voices sounded, coming toward her. Several people passed by, arguing. She ran across the campus into the mouth of the gulley where the Committee office was.

The smoke around the building made her eyes itch. On the hillside to the north, a mob of people was gathered. She heard the rattle of a gun. The door to the building was open.

The waiting room was jammed with rubble. The back wall ended halfway up to the ceiling. The place had been bombed. She stopped in the smashed doorway. The floor of the hall was covered with broken glass. She went down through the darkness toward Jefferson’s office. An overturned desk blocked the way. She crossed the slippery spill of papers beyond it. Jefferson’s door was unlocked. She opened it slowly inward.

The room was dark. A little light came from the window. She touched the inside wall, hunting for a light switch, and the wall crumbled away under her fingers. She went toward the window and tripped on a piece of the shattered desk.

Something clicked behind her. A thread of bright light shot past her, shining on the edge of the ruined videone. Dick Bunker said, “Junior, I knew you’d come here, sooner or later.”

She turned one hand up against the light. He was sitting on the floor behind the door. She saw him only for an instant; he switched off the torch and the dark covered them.

“What happened?” she asked.

“The Martians are rescuing the Earth from the Styths. As you can see, the Committee is considered Styth. You aren’t alone, are you?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you, Paula, you aren’t that stupid.”

She sank down on her hams, her feet under her, her arms around her knees. He would know where to find a car and how to smuggle Kasuk and Junna out of the dome. She rubbed her nose, itching from the smoke.

“How did the League find out we knew about the coup?” she asked.

“Jefferson told them.”

“Jesus. Why?”

“To bring them on before they were ready.” His voice speeded up into a snarl. “I was hoping they’d account for the Styths, but that fool Savenia can’t do anything well.”

She caught the glint of light on his hand torch. She was beginning to make out his shape in the dark. She groped over the floor around her, over shards of split plastic, the shell of the videone screen, and sat cautiously down on the litter.

“Where’s Jefferson now?”

“I don’t know. The Central Committee had a meeting. What we always do in times of crisis, talk. It lasted five minutes, we voted the strike notice in three and disbanded the Committee in two.”

“Strike,” she said. “You’ve called a general strike?”

“What else are we supposed to do? There are three thousand Martians in New York and New Haven alone. It’s too late to talk them out of it.”

She pursed her lips. Bunker moved, the trash grating under him. He said, “Mr. Black escaped.”

“Yes. Both of them.”

He grunted. “She can’t do anything right.”

“I have Tanuojin’s two sons with me. I have to get them out of the dome. Will you help me?”

“I hate the Styths.”

“Don’t be so emotional.”

“Find your own way home.”

“I’m not going. I’ve had enough of the master race.” Now she could see him passing the torch from hand to hand. His sweater was ripped at the elbow and his white shirt showed through.

“Then why help them at all?”

“One of them is honest.”

A dull explosion sounded outside the building and something fell off the wall. The floor heaved under her. She flung one hand out, startled. She had to get out of here.

“Do you think a strike will work?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Nothing will ever be the same again, that’s sure. You have your revolution, junior.”

“Help me get Tanuojin’s sons off the Planet.”

“Why should I? They’re no better than the Martians. Why help a pack of Fascists?”

“The debt owed to common humanity.”

He squinted at her in the darkness. “What?”

“Insurance.”

“You are baroque.”

Another bomb rumbled in a long explosion, farther away than the first, and the window behind her rattled. She said, “Put Tanuojin in your debt. You may need that someday.”

“For what?”

“Don’t be obtuse. You know what he can do. The more he does, the more he’s capable of. Who knows what his limits are? I need an air car.”

“The Committee cars are all in the entry port. The League holds that, and the locks.”

“The Manhattan boat.”

“What?”

“Why not? The tourist boat to the underwater dome.” She shivered. The broken window breathed cold air down her back. “They love water.”

“Maybe. I can…I have a key to the lower lock.” He opened the door. “Come on, junior.”

She followed him out to the corridor. He walked with a limp. The hall reeked of char. “They’re down at the southern end of the dome, in the park, near the wall.” Carefully she picked a way over the rubble blocking the hall. “Can you whistle?”

“Yes.”

She taught him Ybix’s recognition code. “Remember, everything you tell them, Tanuojin will find out.” She stumbled on the pile of papers and nearly fell. Bunker let her go first down the hallway past the overturned desk. She put one hand on the wall for balance.

“Go right,” he said.

Innocent, she went in through a door, and he slammed it shut on her. She whirled. Her shin collided with a chunk of plastic, and she fell. The lock clicked in the door. She slammed against it.

“Dick!”

Silence. She shook the latch. The room was totally dark. She stepped on trash. Stooping, she ran her hands over the littered floor. Books, and a bookcase, and a jumble of wires half-melted into a clump. The meeting room. She brought an image of it into her mind. There were no windows and only the one door. In the table, somewhere, was a switch to unlock the door. On her hands and knees she crawled into the depths of the room and found the tabletop, lying on the floor, its broken legs under it.

Another bomb exploded, so close the building trembled. She felt carefully along the underside of the table’s edge. Maybe Kasuk would develop a vicious streak and take Bunker along with them to Ybix. Hunting for the switch, she occupied her mind with the various things the Styths would do to him for doing this to her. She found a switch and pressed it. A light flashed on in the ceiling and exploded. The wrong switch. While she was searching for the right one the door burst open. A blinding torchlight glared in her face.

“Stay where you are! We are government police. Put your hands up.”

She turned her back to the light. Her eyes hurt. Grim, she raised her hands, surrendering.

“Out.” The gun jabbed her in the back.

She climbed out of the air car. She had paid no attention to where they were taking her. They were somewhere in the north of the dome. She stepped down into a plaza in the middle of three tall buildings. Banks of light shone down from the roofs, flooding the place with a blue-white glare. The soldiers pushed her forward. Other people swarmed around her. She was so tired she staggered.

She was coming to a scaffold. A crowd gawked around it, shading their eyes from the blazing lights. She slowed, her eyes on the carcasses that hung upside down from the frame. There were four of them. One was Sril. She stood staring at him, ignoring the men around her and their orders. The gold wire had been ripped out of his nose. Her eyes swam and overflowed with tears.

They took her into the nearest building. She wiped her eyes but they filled again instantly. She wondered how long it would be before she was hung up beside him. The soldiers hustled her along a wide carpeted lobby and through a door.

“Yes,” Cam Savenia said. “That’s Mendoza.”

The Martian woman came down the long office toward them. Her fair hair was smooth as metal over her head, her mouth was painted on. “You said Bunker wasn’t there.”

“No, Dr. Savenia. We posted a guard.”

“Go look for him. I don’t want that particular specimen out loose.” Cam waved impatiently. She wore white gloves, buttoned at the wrist. “And find out how she got into this dome. It must have been the air bus. Check into it.”

Paula stood in the center of the room. At the far end was a desk, and heavy matching wooden chairs were ranged along the walls: an office. The doors behind the desk probably went to a private vertical car. The soldiers left, and Cam sauntered back toward Paula. Her trousers and tunic were white, like a uniform.

“There must be something we can say to each other,” she said.

Paula gave her a hard look. She was too tired to argue. Cam circled her. “Your big hero won’t rescue you. In two hours half the Martian Army will be here to blast Ybix and Ebelos into another Universe.” Cam struck her hard in the chest with the flat of her hand. “Do you understand? You are through.”

A stream of soldiers came into the room, their feet loud on the floor. Cam turned, crisp, to meet the little fat man in their midst. “General Hanse. You’re right on time. Have you heard from the Army?”

The fat man stared curiously at Paula. “Still two hours out, doctor, we can only go so fast.” Paula looked into his glittering little eyes. He was only a few inches taller than she was. He said, “Who’s that?”

“General Joseph Hanse,” Savenia said. “Meet Paula Mendoza. Late toady of the Styth Empire.”

Paula sat down in the big soft chair behind her. Her stomach was gripped with hunger. She felt wrung up to the breaking point, ready to scream. Their voices sawed back and forth over her head.

“What are you going to do with her?”

“Put her on trial,” Cam said. “Get a full public confession, and execute her.”

Paula lifted her head. The front of Cam’s white coat was buttoned in gold. “I’m hungry.”

“You’ll live,” Cam said.

The fat man waved, and a soldier hurried up with another chair. The general sat. He took a stick of candy from one pocket and a long brown cigar from another. He gave the candy to Paula and licked off the cigar.

“How well do you know the Matuko Akellar?”

“I worked for him for ten years.”

“General,” Cam said, “she’s my prisoner.”

“Worked for him. How?”

“She was his whore,” Cam said.

Paula stripped off the candy wrapper and bit into the flat chocolate. “Kind of a lawyer, I guess.”

“Kind of a traitor.” Cam planted her fists on her hips. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said to the little fat man.

Hanse stuck the tail of his cigar into his mouth. A soldier sprang forward to light it. The general and Savenia measured each other. If they had been Styths they would have been starting to smell. Savenia said evenly, “We have an agreement, remember?”

More people were crowding into the room. Cam sidled away from Hanse, her head rising. “Good. You got him.”

Three of her gray-jacketed police were leading Richard Bunker down the room. Paula crowed.

“Enter the Grand Fink, attended by constabulary.”

His hands were tied, and a yard of rope connected his ankles together. He ignored her. The policeman beside him said, “We caught him at the excursion boat terminal—he’d sabotaged all the boats.”

Bunker said to Cam, “You told me if I delivered Mendoza you’d let me go.”

“A promise to an anarchist,” Cam said, smiling. Before the ragged man she stood spotlessly white and clean. “Especially to you.” She looked at the police. “Was he alone?”

“Yes.”

Paula licked chocolate off her fingers. Then Kasuk was gone. She thought of Sril again. If he was dead Bakan was surely dead. As she would soon be dead.

Bunker was looking at the floor. He shot a murderous sideways glance at Cam. His trouser legs were wet to the knees. Cam swaggered around him toward Paula.

“He’ll talk. He’ll tell us where they all are, from Jefferson on down. Mendoza is mine. We made an agreement. I handle the civilians and you handle the military.”

“Exactly,” Hanse said, genially. He sat down again, his knees spread to accommodate his great melon of stomach. “She’s necessary for military intelligence. She probably knows half their general staff.”

Savenia’s cheeks were patched with red. “She’s a criminal. She—”

“I’m not exactly letting her loose,” Hanse said.

“Neither am I.”

A man in a brown uniform brushed through the crowd, stopped before Hanse, and stuck out one arm in salute. “General, the Styth Manta is maneuvering very close to the dome.” Hanse went at top speed out the door.

Paula sank down into the yielding chair. Now that she saw a way out of it, she began to be frightened of dying. Cam bent over her.

“Don’t get your hopes up, baby. You’re done.”

Behind her, Bunker murmured, “The Bearded Lady of the Sunlight Freak Show.”

Cam turned around and slapped his face. Paula blinked. “I thought that went out with girdles.” Bunker had not moved; the only sign he had been hit was the faint mark on his dark cheek.

“Shut up,” Cam said, and went away down the room.

“Why did you listen to her?” Paula said to him. “She’ll kill you.”

General Hanse came back down the room, trailing a little plume of cigar smoke. “They’ve made another rendezvous. If Luna would cooperate we could gun down the bastard when he stops dead in the air like that.” He huffed at Cam, whose back was to him. He pointed at Paula with the cigar between his fingers. “You speak Styth?”

“Like a Styth,” she said. She could not resist robbing Cam. She stuck her chin out at Bunker. “So does he. If you need corroboration.”

Hanse swung around, interested. “Oh?”

Cam hurried down the room. “I’m serious, General. I need these two for propaganda purposes.”

“Do you need the Army?” Hanse said. He planted the cigar between his teeth. Cam’s face settled. He nodded to Paula. “Lock them both up.”

The Martians gave her pills, weighed her, bandaged her arms, bathed her like a baby, and locked her into a small room on the sixth floor of the same building. She slept. She dreamt of Sril and woke up crying. She paced around the room, thinking of David. He was safest in Matuko. She would never see him again.

The room was equipped with a bed, a desk and chair, and a little washroom, so she expected to stay there awhile. The window was of triplex glass and did not open. Down below, many floors below, crowds moved along, ropes of people, like one animal, never stopping. When night fell the glow of fires lit the dome with brilliant rippling orange light, fading to black and shooting up again, fiery, like an aurora.

The following day and for days and days thereafter, from early morning until well after dark, men in uniforms brought her lists of questions and taped her answers. Most of the questions were military: they wanted to know where the Styth cities were, how they could be attacked, how Ybix was laid out inside, what her crew was. Sometimes she had no idea what they were talking about. She told them the truth, except when they asked about Saba’s assassination; then she said they had shot the wrong man. Her door was locked and a guard posted outside. The men who sat on the far side of the desk reading questions at her never spoke to her personally—never even said hello to her. The woman who brought her meals didn’t talk at all. Once the guard outside her door made some careless remark to her while an interrogator was leaving. The next hour he was gone and a stranger there who would not look at her.

At night the dome was a great display of light, flickering here and there, red to yellow. The room was sound-proof. She could see the crowd churning below the window, but she could make no sense of what they did, she couldn’t even see if they were anarchists or Martians. Whenever the interrogators left her alone, she looked out the window, trying to see what was happening.

One morning while she was drinking her coffee, General Hanse came in. She turned her back to the window and put her cup on the sill. The fat man settled himself in the chair by the desk.

“Well, you look a lot better than you did.”

She went around her chair and sat down, the desk between them. His wide cheeks rolled down to his chin. When he leaned back the chair creaked. He said, “You’ve been very forthcoming. I guess it hasn’t been easy on you, the last week, but you’ve passed the test. Bunker corroborates practically everything you say.” He took a flat leather case from his jacket. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Yes.”

With the cigar halfway out of the case, he paused, his moist eyes unblinking. Finally, he took out the cigar and got a clipper from his pocket. “That’s too bad,” he said, with genuine regret in his voice.

“What do you want?”

He said, “I want to know what the enemy is going to do. That’s simple enough.” He lit the cigar, puffing his cheeks full.

Paula rocked her chair back on its hindlegs. She knew who her enemy was.

“Are you married to him?”

“To who?” she said, startled. “To Saba? God, no.”

“But you did bear him a child.”

She stared at his pear-shaped face. “He gave me my son. That was ten years ago.”

“Dr. Savenia says he’s the motive force behind the Styths, but you and Bunker both seem to think it’s this—Tan-you-gin—”

“Tanuojin,” she said. “Four syllables. Accent on the antepenultimate. They’re a matched pair. Tanuojin does the long-range thinking.”

“That isn’t what Dr. Savenia thinks.”

Paula lifted one shoulder in a shrug. She didn’t care if he believed her. His questions baffled her. They had nothing to do with what she knew would be happening in Styth. Maybe he did not know what to ask.

“Well,” he said, “we have the psychological advantage, at any rate—they have to come to us.”

Sharp in her memory, Tanuojin’s voice sounded, denouncing psychological tactics. She moved her chair back and forth. “Can I get out of this room? Walk somewhere—in the park?”

“No.”

“I’m—I hate being cooped in.”

“We’re afraid someone might try to do you some damage.”

“Damage,” she said. “Who?”

His round body bulged his uniform out in tires of fat. “Another anarchist, perhaps. There’s been a certain bitterness. Although you people are submitting pretty tamely.” He took out his cigar case and removed a thick brown finger from it. “You know—” He wagged the cigar at her. “You screwed yourselves. You made such a fetish out of peace, and then when the bite came, you couldn’t even defend yourselves.” He peeled the plastic wrapper off the cigar and licked it all over. With almost no effort she saw it as a thin brown penis. He stuck it in his mouth. “I can see being shy of irrational force, but rational force is what holds a community together.” He lit the end of the cock in his mouth.

She covered her mouth with one hand to hide her smile. He put the light-stick down beside the ashtray.

“You know, I don’t understand you.” He set the cigar down on the dish. “You’re an intelligent, pretty woman, you know your way around—what’s the attraction in a tribe of primitives who paint their faces and pound their chests?”

The cigar was smoking in her face. She thrust the dish aside. “Have you ever met a Styth?”

“I’ve seen them.”

“Talked to one?”

“I don’t speak the language.” He put his round shoulders back against the chair. “I’m told they smell bad. Their bodies certainly do.”

She circled her hand over the desktop. “They have scent glands in their necks that open when they get angry. Or sexy. It has an aphrodisiac effect after a while. Do you belong to the Sunlight League?”

“I’m not interested in politics. You didn’t answer my question. How did a woman like you ever get involved with the Styths?”

She rocked the chair back and forth, her eyes on him. “Oh, I’m noted for cultivating the lower orders. I even know some Martians.”

His mouth closed up tight. She said, “Don’t rub me up, General.”

He reached for the cigar and tapped off another round of ash. “I’m trying to make this more pleasant for both of us.”

She made a nasty sound with her tongue. He fooled elaborately with the big cigar, watching his hands. “You know, Dr. Savenia has some interesting ideas about what to do to you and Bunker. When—” He smiled at her, cherubic, putting the cigar in its dish. “If I ever release you to her.”

“Fine.” She leaped up out of her chair. “Torture me. Kill me. The Earth is dead anyway, and you killed it.” She knocked the ash and the cigar flying. “You and the Sunlight League.”

The fat man’s jaw was clamped shut. His jowls hung loose over his jawbone. She went away to the window. The crowd below carried signs and waved flags. Hanse shouted, “Rodgers!”

A young man came in, cracking to his salute like a spring straightening. Hanse pointed to the dish and the smoking cigar. “Pick that up.”

The impeccable soldier gathered the cigar and the ashtray and reassembled them on the desk. Hanse said, “Captain Rodgers, this is Paula Mendoza.”

Paula turned her head. Rodgers glanced at her. “I’m pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

Hanse said, “Captain, I want this place kept clean. Go arrange it.” Rodgers left. The fat man’s chair wheezed. His eyes were fixed on her.

“Yes, General. You were just threatening me.”

He scratched his rolled chins. “I wasn’t threatening you, honey. You’re being very useful.” He pried himself up out of the chair. “Keep it up, and we’ll get along.” He went out.

When Hanse had been gone about half an hour, Captain Rodgers came into her room again. “I can see you need some behavior training.” He took her down the hall to an empty room and tied her up, her knees crooked around a length of pipe, and her wrists fastened to her ankles. She lay alone in the dark room for a full day. When he came back and untied her she could not stand. He dragged her back to her own room and left her. She rubbed and worked her legs for hours until she could walk again.

Rodgers seemed to be in charge of her. He brought papers and supervised the rare appearances of the maid. He hardly ever spoke to her. Periodically he took her down to the little room and tied her up and left her. Once he hung her head-down from the ceiling. Her meals came at irregular intervals, with now and then a day when she went unfed. Although he pulled her hair he never beat her. She thought he was afraid of leaving marks.

One night a knocking on her door woke her. She rolled over in her bed.

“Yes?”

“Please dress, Miss Mendoza. You’re wanted downstairs.”

“Forget it. I’m tired.” She buried her head in her arms.

“Miss Mendoza.” Rodgers banged on the door. She put the pillow over her head, but he went on hammering. Finally she got up and put on clothes: a long dress. All the Martians would give her was dresses.

“All right, I’m coming.” She picked at her hair with her fingers.

They went down to Cam’s vast office. Sleek as an otter, Cam herself sat behind her desk, smoking a cigarette in a plastic holder. General Hanse was talking to a group of his own people. Paula walked down the room. There was a tall statue opposite her, a young man made of stone; a six-foot acrylic poster hung on the wall beside it. She looked slowly around the room, startled. On the wall on her side of the room was an illuminated initial from Kells. Rodgers touched her arm, and she sat down in the chair he indicated.

Dick Bunker was coming in the door. She yipped, delighted: he was wearing a uniform. Three of Hanse’s khaki soldiers followed him down the far side of the room.

“Paula,” Cam said. Rodgers tapped her shoulder again. She went up to the desk. There was a little gold cherub beside the ashtray; it looked old. Probably it had been converted into a cigarette lighter. Cam leaned back in her swivel chair. She was smiling, her mouth red with paint. General Hanse beside her looked rumpled. She held out a medal on a chain.

“What does this mean?”

Paula lifted it by the chain. It was the medal of the order of the Supernova; on the back in Styth characters was Sril’s name and the word Matuko and a saying: “I flower where I bleed, rose without thorns.”

“Did it come in the mail?” she asked. She put it down on Cam’s desk.

“What does it mean?”

“Somebody considers you responsible for the death of a Styth. It means they’ll take vengeance.” She looked from Cam to the fat general. “Which of you got it?”

Hanse wheeled toward Cam, leading with his jutting chin. “Satisfied, Dr. Savenia? You brought us all here just for an audience for this.”

Cam smirked at him. They started to argue, and Paula backed away from the desk. Bunker was standing in front of the marble statue. She went across the room to him.

“Look at this,” he said. “She’s looting the Earth.”

The statue was almost six and a half feet tall. Its smile and magnificent body reminded her of Kasuk. She turned back to the other anarchist.

“Why are you wearing that cowboy outfit?”

He moved one shoulder to indicate Hanse and Savenia. “She tried to detach me, so he drafted me into the Army. I’m a major, which is one higher than that plastic captain you came in with. What did that medal mean?”

“I’m not sure.”

“A message to you, maybe.”

“Maybe.” Hanse was coming toward them, his face oiled with sweat. Clearly he had lost his argument with Cam. Paula moved away.

“Are you getting along all right?” Hanse said. His little eyes gleamed. “Rodgers is treating you well?”

“Very well,” she said. “A perfect gentleman, Captain Rodgers. The flower of Martian manhood.”

“I’m going to Luna for a few days. We’ve had a tempting offer from some friends of yours.” He was watching her intently, unblinking. The creases of his face were marked in talcum powder. “The Styths have two flag officers of mine they’re willing to exchange for you.”

“You’re going to do it?”

“I need those officers. You’re outstaying your usefulness. As much as I enjoy our conversations.”

She turned her face away from him. That was what the medal had meant. Her hand rested on the desk and she beat her fingers on it. She would go back to Styth with nothing, at their mercy, like a slave. Sold like a slave. Hanse stood, his uniform jacket bulging over the pad of his stomach.

“If everything on Luna goes as I expect it will, I won’t be seeing you again—we’ll exchange off Ceres in an Earthish month. I’d like to feel we parted friends.” He put his hand out to her.

Paula bounded out of her chair. She felt too large for her body, a scream coming up from the gut, a bursting rage. “Get out.” She looked around for something to throw. Hanse, scrambling, was already at the door, calling for Rodgers. She threw the ashtray at him. He went out fast and the door slammed.

She was not ready for Rodgers; she barricaded her door with the desk. They spent two hours taking the door off the hinges. She went three or four times around the room, which she knew now inch by inch. When Rodgers came in she was sitting on the bed, resigned. He hauled her down to the little room and tied her up to the wall so she could neither sit nor stand straight and left her. The worst was waiting for him to come back.

Slumped against the wall on her throbbing legs, she thought with alarm of the exchange Hanse was planning. The Styths wanted her back because of what she knew about the Middle Planets. Hanse certainly realized that. He would never send her to them in any condition to serve them. Her half-bent knees gave way and she fell, hit the rope that fastened her arms to the wall, and jerked them almost out of her shoulders. Grimly she pushed herself back up to a crouch. This was all Hanse’s idea, so she would complain and he could rescue her from Rodgers and make her trust him. She closed her eyes.

The first thing she saw in Cam’s office was the large painting by Jacques-Louis David of Marat, dead in his bath. The oil hung directly over Cam’s desk. Paula stopped near a chair to the side of the room, looking around, while other people filed into the room. On the paneled wall beside her a dragon-robe was spread out like a pair of scarlet wings, feathered in gold thread. The room was cluttered. Pictures hung thick as scale from the walls. Here and there among the living people statues stood. Paula sat down in the chair behind her. Surrounded by soldiers, she rubbed her fingers nervously together, her eyes on the painting of the dead revolutionary above the desk.

The wall below it split open. Cam came out of her private lift. Two trim young men followed her. The soldiers in the room straightened rigidly to attention. Cam was neat as a mannequin. Her hair gleamed. An aide held her chair for her. She spoke to him, sitting down, and he laughed at what she said.

“At ease, gentlemen.”

In unison they relaxed. Paula looked curiously around at their scrubbed, shaven faces. In their midst Bunker stood with his jacket unbuttoned, his cheek blurred with beard. Cam folded her hands together.

“He defiled the uniform, putting you into it.”

Behind Paula, Rodgers muttered, “In she goes.”

“Are you drunk?” Cam said to Bunker.

He shuffled his feet. “Slightly.” He glanced up at the clay-colored corpse on the wall above her. “Not enough.”

“You’re a disgusting little man.”

“Thank you. I was hoping you’d appreciate my modest efforts.”

“Cut his balls off,” Paula said. “Make him walk the plank.”

Cam swung back and forth in her chair. “It makes me sick to see him in a Martian uniform.”

“Shall I take it off?” He pulled one arm out of the sleeve.

“You’re out of uniform,” Cam said, “for which you’ll spend the next five days in solitary.”

Paula cheered. She clapped her hands together three or four times, the only sound in the crowded room. Cam threw her a hard look. “Do you want to join him?”

“Then we wouldn’t be in solitary,” Bunker said. He shrugged into his jacket.

“Complete solitary,” Cam said. “In the closet. No food, no water, no lights. No liquor.” She sat back, smiling. Bunker said nothing. Alert, Paula settled deep into her chair, watching him, thinking about what he had just done. Cam’s gaze swung toward her. “Why aren’t you cheering, baby?”

“I hope you got me down here for some purpose,” Paula said. “Other than making an ass of yourself, which is less entertaining than it used to be.”

“Rodgers, the same for her. Five days.”

Rodgers was standing behind Paula. He said sharply, “Doctor, you’re going to put them together?”

“That’s what I said. Put them both in the closet. Maybe they’ll tear each other to pieces.”

“That’s immoral. General Hanse—”

“Joe isn’t here,” Cam said. She took a sheet of clear paper from her desk and held it out to one of her aides, who brought it up the room to Paula. Cam was lighting a cigarette. She said, “Read that, Paula.”

“You’re crazy,” Paula said.

Cam smiled at her. Her lip-paint was the color of venous blood. “Six days in the closet.” The aide was holding the paper out to Paula, who ignored it. Bunker was paying no attention to any of this.

“Seven days,” Cam said.

Rodgers said, “You can’t put them in together, for Christ’s sake, it’s immoral.”

Cam gave him an instant’s angry look. She stared at Paula. “Eight days.”

Paula took the page. Around the room, the men stirred, commenting to each other, impressed by Cam’s techniques. Paula turned the plastic around. The message was in Styth. When she read it, her heart quickened.

“It’s a declaration of war,” she said. “How formal.”

“Read it,” Cam said.

“To Mars, by the rAkellaron. We have warned you in many ways to submit to us before justice brought you into its course. Now you have violated the Earth, our mother, and wakened her children dead even in dreams. If you resist us, we cannot say how you will suffer, only that you will suffer.” She handed the page to a soldier, who took it to Bunker.

“What tripe,” Cam said.

Bunker was reading through the paper. “I don’t follow this dead even in dreams.”

Paula was chewing the skin around her thumbnail. “The old heroes. You know they’re all descended from heroes.” Krita was ringing his bell again. It was a stronger declaration than she had expected: very strong.

“It sounds as if they’re committing the whole Empire.”

“Yes.”

“They double-crossed you,” Cam said to her. She tapped a cigarette on the desk, her holder in the other hand. “They’re using you as an excuse. I told you that bastard would do this. Why the hell didn’t you listen to me?”

Paula got up. “Come on, Rodgers. The dark is more edifying.” She started toward the door.

“Paula! Get back here until I dismiss you.” Cam bounced up onto her feet, poised behind her desk. At the door, Paula wheeled.

“I dismiss you.” She snapped her fingers at Cam and went out the door. Someone caught her by the arm: a soldier.

“Let her go,” Rodgers said. He pushed her on across the hall.

“Dr. Savenia—”

“Dr. Savenia is a civilian.” Rodgers hurried her into the vertical.

They went up three flights in silence. Beside her Rodgers stood with his hands clasped behind him, his feet exactly eighteen inches apart. He took her down the hall to the little room.

“I’ll call General Hanse,” he said. He shut the door on her. The lock turned over.

She had never been here before without being tied up. There was little to explore. Three strides across by four strides down. The room was without windows. While she was walking around it, the door opened and Bunker was put in with her. The door shut and the light in the ceiling went out.

“Is this place wired?” she said, in the dark. She sat down with her back to the wall.

“I don’t think so.” His voice passed her, going down the room. “Why couldn’t you keep out of this?” He sat down against the opposite wall.

“You gave me to Hanse, you can help me get away.”

“It won’t be easy. Probably impossible, in fact. You’d be better off staying here.”

“Have they been working you over?” she asked.

He made an indefinite sound. For a long while they sat in the dark without saying anything. Finally, he said, “I would love to pay them back. More than anything. I’d pass up getting away to pay them back.”

“I’d sooner get away.”

Another silence fell. She got up and walked up and down the room, trailing her fingers over the wall. The seamless plastic felt cold to the touch. There was no way out but the door. Maybe she had misjudged his intentions. Maybe he had no way to escape. She sat down but in a few moments she started to pace around the room again.

“Don’t step on me,” Bunker said.

She went around and around the room in the dark, avoiding him. Her mouth was dry with thirst. For eight days she would get no water. Finally she sat down in a corner. Hours seemed to pass, or maybe just minutes. Bunker got up and went down the room to the door. He returned to his place against the wall opposite her.

She managed to doze. He shook her awake.

“Let’s go. The guard’s left for a few minutes.”

Muzzy with sleep, her heart pounding, she followed him to the door. She could hear a faint metallic click, like a combination lock being dialed, and then the door opened. The bright light hurt her eyes. They went into the long empty corridor.

“Hurry.” He took her arm and pulled her along, and they ran down the corridor, past the vertical and past the door to her room. The guards were all gone. Many of the overhead lights were out. It seemed to be late at night. At the end of the corridor was a door marked EXIT. Bunker led her through it onto a stair landing.

“Sssh.” He put his finger to his lips. The stairwell was painted glossy gray. She looked up overhead, up the stairs, and went to the rail and looked down.

“Which way?”

He started down. She took her shoes off, to keep from making noise, and went after him. The stair treads chilled her bare feet. They passed another door, marked with a big red 5.

Below them, voices sounded. The hollow of the stairwell distorted them so that she could not make out the words. Bunker stopped. She went by him, cautious, down past the door marked 4, and he came after her. On the third-floor landing she put her head out over the railing.

On the next landing down was a table, with three men sitting at it. She held her breath, disappointed.

“Hey, did you hear this one?” said a man on the landing. “How do you tell when an anarchist is lying?”

She raised her head. Bunker was on the steps above her. She shook her head at him.

“You got me,” another Martian voice said, below her.

“His lips are moving.”

There was general laughter. She climbed back away from it, and Bunker turned and preceded her. At the third-floor landing, he pushed the door open onto the corridor where Cam’s office was.

“What—”

He beckoned her after him. The corridor was dark except for a single light over the vertical doors. Her feet sank into the deep carpet and she stopped to put her shoes on. Bunker went ahead of her to Cam’s door, fastened his magnetic key to the lock, and bent to fiddle with it. He had given up on escaping and was going for his revenge.

She went at a trot down the hall to the vertical. There had to be some way out of the building. She could not take the vertical down for fear of meeting someone else, but there was certainly some other way. A chime rang over her head, and she jumped. The vertical arrow flashed. Someone was coming to this floor. She sprinted back down the hall to Bunker, who was just sliding Cam’s door open. They went into the office.

“What are you going to do?” She made sure the door was locked again. The office was dark, but as she spoke Bunker turned on a light midway down the room.

“I didn’t ask you along,” he said. He circled behind Cam’s big desk to the big wheel-file against the wall.

Paula looked up at Marat, hanging on the wall over the door to Cam’s private lift. The wound in his chest was like a mouth, like his slack mouth. Bunker was trying to open the drawers of the file with his key. She sat in Cam’s chair and tried the desk drawers.

They were unlocked. She yanked them out and turned the contents over in a heap on the floor. When she tipped over the deeper drawer on the bottom shelf, a mass of photographs and slides fell out, and a little white egg rolled after. She picked it up.

“Dick.”

He turned, and she held Sybil Jefferson’s eye under his nose. He sucked in his breath. When he put his hand out to take the eye, she closed her fingers over it and put it in her pocket.

Bunker pushed the file box. “I can’t open this. It must be important.” He gave the box a savage kick.

Paula took the cigarette lighter off the desk and knelt by the pile of papers and film on the floor. “They killed her.” She held the flame to the edge of a photograph.

“That’s your diagnosis, is it?” He punched the call button on the vertical several times with his thumb.

“You need a key for that, too.”

The flames caught and ran over the heap of papers. The holographs burned better than anything else, and she took one by the corner and torched the rest. Bunker was pushing and rocking the waist-high round file cabinet.

“I have an idea. Help me.”

She helped him push the box up onto two legs. It fell over onto its side and he caught it before it toppled onto its back.

“Now.”

The door of the vertical slid open easily, exposing the empty shaft. They propped open the door with a chair and pushed and groaned and heaved at the file box until it rolled like a wheel between the wall and the desk toward the vertical. Paula’s fire was beginning to light the carpet. She rushed around ahead of the file, pushed the chair through into the shaft, and held the door open, and Bunker guided the rolling file through the gap. It crashed below. Bunker leaned after it. He braced the door open.

“Look what happened.”

She put her head over his shoulder out into the shaft. The file had broken into the car parked in the basement of the shaft. Bunker stretched his arm toward the back wall and caught a heavy cable hanging down from the darkness above. He yanked hard on it to test it. The fire leaped crackling in a burst toward the ceiling. Paula wrinkled her nose at the smoke. Bunker swung himself into the shaft, clinging to the cable, and climbed down hand over hand.

An alarm bell in the ceiling clanged. Bunker was scrambling through the hole torn in the roof down into the vertical car, Paula wrapped her hands around the cable. Using her leg around the cable to brake herself, she slid down after him.

Voices sounded in the room she had just left. She jumped down into the vertical car. The floor was covered with loose film. Her feet slipped out from under her and she landed on her backside.

“Hurry up. I can’t see.”

She went after Bunker out the car’s usual door, into a vast darkened room. She could tell by the sound his voice made that it was large but not empty, and she smelled dust and cardboard and guessed it was a storage basement. Now, about twenty feet away, she made out a faint gray oblong. A window. She grabbed Bunker by the sleeve and towed him through the room toward it. They met a wall of boxes and climbed over them. Two or three alarm bells were ringing insistently overhead. She put her hand out and touched the wall. The window was an arm’s length over her head. She felt over it for a latch. Bunker put his arms around her legs and boosted her up so high a spiderweb draped itself over her face. She found the latch and the window swung open. They crawled out to the cool open air.

“Put that thing away.”

She cupped her other hand over the false eye. “I keep thinking we ought to do something with it.”

They were walking toward the west wall of the dome. All the trees in the park had been cut down, and the ground was cluttered with stumps. It was like a wasteland. No birds sang and all the animals were gone. She sat on the edge of a gulley and slid down the bank. A cascade of dirt and stones followed her to its foot.

The Martians would probably find out almost immediately that they were gone. Sooner or later Cam’s police would catch them again. She thought of Jefferson, who had been caught, and drew her left hand out of her pocket. Opening her fingers, she looked down at the false eye.

“Here.” Bunker snatched it out of her hand. His arm cocked back and he flung the thing off into the dark, out of the gulley.

“What did you do that for?”

He went off at a fast walk along the floor of the gulley. An air car droned across the dome over her head. Red lights flashed in the sky. At the end of the gulley was a house built back into the hillside. A row of garbage bins flanked it. As soon as she and Bunker approached, a dog began to bark inside the house. The garbage bins were head-high. She climbed up onto the edge of the first one and dug out a moldering sack full of squeezed oranges and coffee grounds.

“Where did you get that key?” she asked Bunker.

He leaned over the edge of the bin and groped around in the heap of garbage. “I made it. They gave me a keyboard.”

She turned half an orange inside out, ate off the pulp, and threw the hull back into the bin. “To write letters? Did you write their correspondence? You don’t know the language very well. What was this exchange about?”

“The Styths have two pilots Hanse thinks he needs. He offered them money but they aren’t having any.”

“Who mentioned me?” The dog was barking steadily in the house. She found a heel of soggy bread and bolted it down.

“Nobody in my hearing. The Styths said they wouldn’t take money but they might consider meat. Their term. And henceforth in this matter Hanse could communicate in the Common Speech. That was the last I heard.” He jumped down and went to the next bin. “Here. You can use this.” He dragged something large out of the bin: a heavy coat, missing one sleeve.

They ate until they were satisfied and went on. Without trees, the land looked strange, flat, naked, vulnerable. Bunker led her along at a fast walk. There was no wind and the air smelled dry, dusty, and bitter. They came to a building scooped hollow like a grave. The below-ground floors had been bombed out.

“Well,” Bunker said, “so much for that.” He sat down heavily on the ground.

Paula went to the edge of the pit. She guessed he had lived here. The destroyed building gaped below her. She sat down next to Bunker and put her arm awkwardly around his shoulders, and he raised his head.

“What are you doing?”

“Don’t you find it comforting?”

He snorted up a laugh. “Junior, comfort maketh the mind dull.”

Day was coming. The eastern wall of the dome shone with fresh light. Her arm hung around his neck. He resisted; he would not rest on her. She took her arm away and buried her hands in her lap.

They sheltered in the ruins, in a forest of melted plastic drippings. She woke with the sunlight shining in her face. Bunker lay beside her. He had her shirt open down the front; his hand cupped her breast. She put her arms out to him.

“That was nice,” he said, after. “I kept telling myself the first thing I’d do when I escaped was get laid.”

Paula picked black chunks of grit off her clothes and out of her hair. “Do you want to stay together?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. Do you?”

She sat up, spreading out the coat he had found in the bin. It was stained and torn, a long heavily lined man’s coat with a notched collar. “For a while, at least. Until we find out what’s going on here.”

He stood to pull on his pants. His body was thin and bony, his chest sprinkled with crisp hair, graying like the hair on his head. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

By daylight the whole dome seemed changed. Nothing was left of the wood but the stumps of trees. She could see from the ridge near the old campus all the way across the lake to the yellow hills south of the water. Everything looked much smaller. Many of the buildings had been blown up and packs of dogs drifted around the middle and south of the dome. The only birds she saw were crows.

Tony Andrea’s building was still lived in. She left Bunker digging through a trash can at the edge of the meadow and went cautiously in the side door. There was a big poster on the wall at the foot of the stairs reading: WORK IS LIFE. The floor was dirty and black handprints marked the walls around the doorways. She knocked on Tony’s door.

“Who’s ’ere?” a woman called, behind it.

“I’m looking for Tony Andrea.”

“Who?”

Paula backed away, looking up and down the hall. At the far end she saw another poster: HELP THE STATE—COOPERATE! In red paint across it and part of the wall beside it was scrawled: STRIKE—STRIKE—STRIKE. The woman behind the door called, “Who’s ’ere?” Paula went away.

She remembered An Chu’s message and went down the dome to the Nikoles Building. It was underground; she was shy of going into a place with so few ways out. At last she went down into the guts of the building and found the corridor where An Chu had said she was living. She could not remember the number of the apartment. On the corner of the green corridor was a list of the tenants. She stood before it, reading through it, without finding An Chu’s name. While she was looking down the list for the third time, a woman’s voice said, “Can I help you?”

She wheeled around, her hair standing on end. It was a tall, black-haired woman, too dark to be a Martian. Paula swallowed. “I’m looking for An Chu.”

“Who?”

The closed space around her suddenly pressed tighter on her mind. She turned down the corridor. The woman cried, “Wait!” Paula broke into a run. She reached the stairs and went up into the open day.

Bunker was waiting for her on the surface and they went off along the edge of the drying lake. There seemed to be a boundary of a sort, at the head of the lake, cutting the dome in half. South of this border, no building stood intact. Here and there a tree still grew, its branches fuzzed with leaves just unfolding from buds. The lake shore was scummed with dead weed. She saw no animals until just before dark, when a brown dog began to trail them.

“Dick.”

“I see her,” he said. He gestured at her. “You go that way.”

They split up. The dog followed Paula. Patiently she led it along the shore, moving slowly, careful not to look at it too much. Bunker circled around behind it. Paula sat down on the mud beach. There was a thick yellow froth in the water at the edge of the lake, like soap. The lake smelled of rot. The dog slunk toward her, until about fifty yards from her it lay down on its belly, its ears flat to its head. Under its rough dun-colored hide its ribs looked round and sharp as wire hoops. When she moved, it leaped up, its tail curled between its legs. Its dugs hung down along its belly. Paula settled on her hams again. She was painfully hungry. The dog watched her from the weeds, its head on its paws.

Bunker crept up on it, but he made some sound, and the dog bolted away. The man retreated, and the dog paused, its ears pricked up. Paula swore.

“Come on,” Bunker said. “Let’s walk it down.”

Her legs were already sore. She got up and went after him. The sun was setting. They followed the dog into the darkness. It ran in short bursts ahead of them, galloping out of reach, turning to watch them, dashing away again when they got too close. About an hour after dark, they lost it in the gulleys south of the lake.

Paula was too tired and hungry even to complain. They slept in the shelter of a sheer hillside, shivering. Three or four times during the night air cars flew overhead, waking them. Once a searchlight sliced through the dark around them, and they huddled against the cold ground, their heads buried in their jackets, until it left. Before dawn hunger drove them out again.

Crisscrossing the ridges and notched hills below the lake, they divided up, moving along on parallel courses three hundred feet apart, searching for food. She chased a gray snake along a dusty hillside from tuft to tuft of grass. The air was smoky yellow. The dry ground gave up an odor like an empty husk. Her thigh bones ground in the sockets of her hips. Her mouth was filmed and gluey.

In the late afternoon Bunker shouted on the far side of a gulley. She scrambled down the steep bank, knocking loose a shower of small stones and dirt, and ran toward his voice. He was on his knees digging into the bank of the ravine. His arms were gray with dirt.

“I knew that mutt had a den up here somewhere.” He scooped dirt away. “Watch out—she’ll be back.” He plunged his sleeve down over his hand, reached deep into the hole he had dug, and took out a squirming black puppy.

Its yips were small as rabbit sounds. Paula straightened. The brown dog came running along the floor of the ravine. Paula charged it, shouting, and the dog veered off. Its stained teeth showed. Bunker was taking pup after pup out of the den. Their squeaks brought their mother forward, snarling. Paula moved between her and the den. She snatched a long branch off the ground. The dog faced her, its ears flat, and growled.

“Don’t take them all—leave her a few.”

“Paula Pityheart.” He took off his jacket and wrapped the puppies up in it. “Let’s go.” He slung the wiggling bundle onto his shoulder. When Paula moved, the dog darted past her and rushed into its den. Paula and Bunker went down the gulley to the open ground, made a fire, and roasted five puppies.

Day after day, from the first light to the last, they searched for food. Some days they found nothing at all. Paula fell sick, but she dared not stop hunting even for an hour. One resting while the other tracked, they walked down wild dogs and foxes. In the bombed-out buildings they cornered rats. They went north again, past the head of the lake. Paula dug sacks of rotting garbage out of the trash bins. They broke into an apartment but found nothing to steal except water. Even the clothes in the closets were as shabby as their own. As the lake dried up and turned foul, good water was nearly as scarce as food, until they found the narrow opening into the underground river, whose water was sweet. One evening, while she was rummaging through a garbage can outside the Nikoles Building, someone called her name.

She ran. The voice screamed, “Wait!” Twenty strides away, at the corner of the building, she turned to look back, ready to run again. A small figure was walking after her.

“An Chu.” She took a step forward. Maybe it was a trap. A smile spread across the other woman’s round face. She put out her hands, and Paula rushed toward her.

“I knew it was you—Jennie said it was somebody with brassy hair—”

Paula hugged her tight, her face against the other woman’s coarse black hair. Her throat thickened. She could say nothing. An Chu babbled in her ear, “We’ve been looking for you—Willie thought he saw you once—” An Chu held her tight, one arm around her shoulders, one around her waist. “Where are you living?”

Paula stepped back. “In the…” She nodded toward the south of the dome. She cast a look around them, to be sure they went unwatched.

“In the open?” An Chu took her hands. “Are you hungry?”

“I’m starving.”

“Come with me.”

Paula followed her down the long side of the building, but An Chu did not go through the door. She hooked her arm through Paula’s arm. “The hourlies say you’re dead.” She squeezed Paula’s arm against her, smiling wide. “The Dragon Lady of the Styths. I took the hourlies around to everybody I knew and told them who you really are.” They passed the end of the building and went into the open. The evening was warm. Mosquitoes buzzed around her face. High overhead, the red lights of an air car flashed off and on. An Chu glanced up casually and walked Paula in a circle.

“Aren’t you living there?” Paula asked.

“Yes—we all are, Willie and Jennie and I. Jennie’s the only one who’s official. You can’t have an apartment unless you have a job-card. You don’t get a job-card unless you work. With everybody on strike, that’s hard. Jennie works in the dome-maintenance crew. We decided she could, since it’s for our sake as much as the Martians’.” She looked up into the sky. “He’s gone. Hurry.” Stooping, she pulled up a round piece of the turf. Paula climbed into the hole in the ground.

She slid feet-first along a steep lightless tunnel, smelling of clay. The curved wall was slippery under her hand and a protruding root lashed her face. At the bottom of the slide she came to rest against a plastic wall. An Chu came after her. She reached over Paula’s shoulder and tapped on the wall. It slid open. Paula climbed through into a long room hollowed out of the dirt beside the wall of an underground building.

“Who are you?”

She stood, facing a strange man, fair-faced, with long yellow hair. An Chu crawled after her into the narrow room. “She’s Paula Mendoza. I told you we’d find her.”

The only furniture in the room were two cots against the outer wall and a big old breakfront cupboard opposite. An Chu opened the wing-doors and took out a loaf of bread and a chunk of cheese.

“Here.” She gave them to Paula. “This is Willie Luhan. He’s my friend, mine and Jennie’s.”

Paula sat down on the cot and sank her teeth into the cheese. Her stomach clenched with yearning. An Chu said to the yellow-haired man, “She’s been living in the open. She can stay with us.”

“It’s fine with me,” Willie Luhan said.

“I’m not alone.” Paula tore off a piece of the bread and stuffed it into her mouth.

“Who’s with you?” An Chu asked. She brushed back a strand of her black hair. It was much longer than Paula remembered.

“Dick Bunker. He was on the Committee.”

“We don’t know him.”

“I know him.”

An Chu pressed her fingers to her cheeks, her gaze turning to her friend. The man scowled. “Nobody comes in here unless we know him. That’s our rule. We have to do it that way, you see.”

Paula wiped her mouth on her arm. The taste of the cheese lingered on her tongue. “Then I’ll stay out there with him.”

The two people before her looked at each other again. Willie licked his lips. His wide face was troubled. An Chu nodded to Paula.

“Bring him.”

“I have to get to Vancouva,” Bunker said. “Isn’t there any way at all?”

“I’m sorry.” The woman spoke with a Martian accent. “Unless you have travel papers from the dome secretary, I’m not authorized to sell you tickets. If you’ll just—”

Only her head and shoulders showed above the back of her chair. Paula slid through the door behind her. There were three or four other people in the office waiting room, on the far side of the partition, and she dropped to her hands and knees to keep from being seen.

“But my wife is there,” Bunker cried. “I have to get there. Can’t you see that?” He gestured dramatically with both hands. “I have to!”

“Well,” the woman said nervously, “I can’t do anything about that, I’m sorry.”

Bunker launched into his passionate lie. Her eyes followed the wide movements of his hands. Paula sneaked up behind her and lifted a card-folder out of the shoulder bag hanging on the woman’s chair.

In the corridor outside the travel office, Martian soldiers stood talking, rifles on their shoulders. Paula went past them, her head down. She wore An Chu’s clothes, even An Chu’s shoes, which pinched her feet. A lunch cart rolled toward her, and a soldier called out to the man pushing it to stop. The Martians gathered around the cart. There was an hourly stand against the wall between Paula and them. She took the card-folder out of her pocket and thumbed a dime from the coin slot. She bought an hourly. The Martians were buying hot rolls and minjis from the cart; the pusher clicked change from the machine on his belt. She dropped the hourly and stooped among the Martians to pick it up, and thieved two handfuls of rolls off the bottom shelf of the cart.

Outside, the loudspeaker on the corner of the building was playing high-spirited marching music. She walked along the side of the building, past the line of people waiting to get into the travel office. Bunker had waited nearly two hours for three minutes of diversion. The ground was scattered with discarded hourlies. She threw away the one in her hand.

Bunker caught up with her at the end of the walk. From habit they went along twenty or thirty paces apart, not talking. An air car buzzed overhead; on its side was the blue star of the government. They went down through the waste land toward the Nikoles Building.

An Chu lit the candle. The ends of the narrow room stayed in deep shadow. The little door that led to the underground building was open, a square cut in the wall, through which Paula could see the pipes and canisters of the garbage-eater under Jennie Morrison’s kitchen sink. The flat beyond was one small room, only a little larger than the secret room. The square of plastic that covered the door between them hung on the wall over it, and An Chu pulled it down and fastened it in place. Bunker pulled the stolen job-card out of the plastic folder.

“You got one,” An Chu said. “How?”

“Stole it,” Paula said. “The Martians are too easy.” She took the hot rolls out of her jacket and put them on the sway-backed cot.

“Do you have a magnifying glass?” Bunker asked. He sat on the head of the cot and peeled the plastic wrap off a hot roll. Paula ate a ham minji.

An Chu gave Bunker a pocket magnifier from the cupboard. She pushed the wing-door shut, sat on the bed, and took a roll out of its wrapping. “Meat. Wonderful.”

The folder lay open on the cot, its plastic windows full of other cards. While she ate the minji, Paula took eaach one out and looked it over. Bunker held the magnifier up to his eye and the job-card into the light.

“The green cards are for women, the white cards for men?”

“Green for civilian women, white for civilian men, blue for soldiers, red for Martian topshots.” An Chu sat on the bed beside Paula. Paula found a pocket in the back of the folder and took out three dollars. It was worthless; all the paper money was worthless.

A sharp knock banged on the door to the kitchen. Kneeling, An Chu unfastened the square cover from the wall and leaned it up against the foot of the cupboard. Jennie Morrison crawled into the secret room. Paula hardly knew her. She wore a bright green dress with her job-card pinned to her collar like a badge.

“I was stopped on the way here. They’re searching everybody.” She saw the food, the empty wrappers scattered on the bed. Her voice rose. “You’ve got food! What have you been doing—holding out on me?”

“Relax,” Paula said. She handed her a minji. “We just got back from the north.”

Jennie ripped off the wrapping. “And you ate it all. I do all the goddamn work—you people just sit around all day—”

“Shut up,” An Chu said. Bunker with a single ferret look at Jennie dropped to hands and knees and vanished out the hole in the wall.

“I’m going up in the head.” Jennie sat down on the bed. Her mouth was full of minji. “I know you all hate me because I’m working.”

“Nobody hates you.”

“You’re half-right,” Paula said. “You’re going up in the head.”

Jennie gulped food. “This is my house.”

“That’s my minji.”

“Shut up,” An Chu said to her.

Bunker forged a job-card and ration tickets for Paula, and she took them up to the public dispensa, across from the government building, stood in line, and brought back two loaves of bread, a pound of rice, a pound of dried vegetables, a gallon sack of milk, a pound of maxibeans, half a pint of oil: a week’s ration for a civilian woman. She and An Chu stowed the food away in the secret room. In the apartment, Bunker sat hunched over the table, the reading light aimed at the paper inches from his eyes. She went up behind him and watched him draw the curlicues on the upper-right-hand corner of a ration ticket.

“Don’t look over my shoulder.”

She moved away from him. An Chu was slicing bread on the counter at the kitchen end of the room. Paula went up to her.

“I have some honey,” the other woman said.

“Great.”

Bunker finished his work. He brought the sheet of blue ticket paper over to Paula. “There’s a man on the red wing who has a white card he’ll give me for twenty ration chits.” He reached for the bread. “Did you get meat?”

“They don’t have meat.”

An Chu spread a thin film of honey on a thin slice of bread. “Only the Martians get meat. The red cards and the soldiers. You need special tickets.”

The blue sheet was divided into two rows of five ration slips each. They were perfectly drawn. He used An Chu’s thick hairs for his brushes. Paula said, “You’re wasting your talent, rat, they hardly even look at them, they just tear them up and throw them in a box.”

He was biting into a slice of bread. “You’re eating, aren’t you?” His eyes were puffy, and his fingers stained with ink.

“I bought an hourly.” She took the folded sheet from her hip pocket. “Not a word in it about any fighting.” An Chu took it.

It was late in the afternoon. Paula could hear the people moving back and forth in the apartment above them. She got the paper shears from the desk and carefully separated the tickets. Bunker rubbed his eyes. “The other page is in the desk.”

Paula opened the desk drawer and took out the second sheet. Like the other, this was perfect, ten identical tickets; even the hairline flourishes on the capital letters were exact. She sat down and cut the sheet out. Stacking the tickets, she decked them neatly on the floor.

“Thanks,” he said, and took them from her and went out the door.

“He doesn’t talk much,” An Chu said. “I don’t think he likes me.”

“He never talks to me, either. It could be worse if he did, like Jennie. If she loses her job, can we stay here?”

“I don’t know.” An Chu fingered the worn mat flooring. Paula watched her Aztec profile. “There’s some dirty talk about rounding people up and sending them to work camps.”

“That’s just rumor. There aren’t enough Martians to do that.” She would not go back to jail. “What about Tony Andrea? Do you know where he is?”

An Chu raised her head. “Tony was arrested right away. They all were—all the known people like that. Especially writers. And you know Tony. He never shut up.”

“No, he wouldn’t.” She remembered him vividly, his bright blue eyes, telling her she had sold her soul. She went into the secret room, alone.

She removed her job-card from her collar. The name on it was Stella Dominac. While she stood thinking of Tony, the door behind her rasped back into the wall, and Bunker came in and sat next to her on the cot. He thrust a white card at her. The photograph had already been sliced off the surface. She ran her thumb over the raised numbers.

“The description’s not even close.” Hair: Black. Eyes: Hazel.

“I’ll fix it.” He rubbed his eyes. She put her arm around him and kissed his cheek. He turned his face toward her so that their mouths met.

“You taste like honey.”

“Try me.”

Standing up, he started to take his clothes off. She lay back on her elbow. She liked seeing him naked. An Chu looked in the door and shut it. In the gloom the light on the wall cast shadows over the floor like hiding places.

“I wish I had something left to surprise you with,” he said. He peeled off his shirt and lay down beside her, and she put her arms around him.

The cold made her shiver. She shifted from one foot to the other, her hands jammed in the pockets of An Chu’s overcoat. Above the fur collar of the coat just ahead of her was a head of hair as gray as Bunker’s, molded into sleek curls. She had been standing in line for three hours and she was still only halfway to the door. The walk was carpeted in hourlies.

The headlines jumped at her:

She rocked back and forth on her heels. Across the plaza was the government building, where she had been jailed. The white trim around the windows was freshly painted. The scaffolding before it carried a brotherhood poster, three stories high: a white hand clasping a brown hand. She wondered what they had done with Sril’s body. Thrown it on the garbage heap. Every time she came here she saw Martians she knew going in and out of the building. Once General Hanse passed within fifty yards of her. She hid behind her hourly.

LIGHT SKIRMISH IN THE ASTEROIDS

Mars Combined Forces has destroyed two Styth cruisers in a three-hour battle near Vesta.

The people around her chafed their cheeks with their hands and blew out plumes of white air. “What’s holding things up?”

“You know I had to wait five hours this week to have my hair done?”

Paula leaned against the wall behind her. The line moved sluggishly forward into the mouth of the building. Probably the dispensa clerks were checking each ticket through a scanner. That had baffled Bunker at first, until he discovered that the Martians used the same metallic ink to print hourlies. They had a connection with the hourly men. A file of soldiers marched by in their dark winter uniforms. Their white gloves swung mechanically in time.

“Halt!”

She stiffened. The soldiers had stopped ahead of her, along the line. The ringing voice of their commander was shouting something. She leaned out to see. The soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder facing the line of civilians. Their commander and another man stood between the two groups. The other man held up a piece of blue and white cloth.

“This is the flag of the Martian Republic. Now it’s also the flag of the Earth. It represents all of us—our solidarity against enemies, our faith in ourselves and the future. To salute—” The officer wheeled smartly. His right arm snapped up, palm flat, toward the flag.

“You will now salute the flag.”

Paula drew back against the wall. Her heart pounded. She looked back along the line. Above the fur collar, the silver-haired head turned. “Now, what’s this all about?”

The soldiers and the man with the blue cloth were moving slowly down the line, stopping to let each person salute. Paula gripped her hands together.

“Salute the flag!”

“Why?” a girl’s voice asked.

“She’s an anarchist. Take her in custody.”

Paula burst out of the line, running away from the soldiers down the string of waiting people. Someone shouted. She ran close to the line; they would not shoot into the crowd. A hand snatched for her and she eluded it. A man raced past her, fleeing. Her foot slipped on a loose hourly and she fell. A bullet whispered past her ear. People screamed. She leaped up, dodging between two buildings. The little metal whisper hummed by her again. She ran around the corner of a building. Something hit her like a hammer and knocked her flying. She rolled over and over, leaped up, and ran on. People shouted, somewhere behind her. Her hip began to hurt. Through the screams behind her she heard the clatter of gunfire. She limped away into the wasteland, panting.

Some while later their building was raided. She and Bunker, Willie and An Chu sat for hours in the tunnel. It was freezing cold. She laid her cheek against Bunker’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Once they heard Jennie Morrison screaming. Finally, just before dawn, they crept down into the secret room again.

Jennie was gone. The apartment was wrecked. The desk had been smashed and the cupboards and counter pulled off the kitchen wall. The wall between this and the next apartment had been broken out. The man who lived there was gone too.

An Chu leaned on Willie’s shoulder and cried. Paula took her jacket off. The healing bullet wound ached in her backside. She and Bunker went out to the hall.

All up and down the hall the doors to the apartments were broken inward. She went along the hall, looking into the rooms. In some of them even the mat flooring had been ripped up and the floors cracked open. No one was there. Paula wiped her hands on her sleeves. So they had done it, rounded everybody up and taken them away. Bunker went ahead of her toward the stairs. She turned back to Jennie’s room.

Willie paced up and down the room, his arms swinging. “This proves it. We have to get out of here.”

“Where?” Paula said. Bunker returned, and her shoulders sank an inch with relief.

“The people hidden under the floor in 73 are still here,” he said. “And the two women who live in the broom closet. I guess the police just didn’t bother to look in there.”

Willie walked past them, his strides quick as a soldier’s. “I’ll kill them. I’ll smash hell out of them, if I can just get my hands on them.” He brandished his fists.

An Chu came in from the secret room with a cup of water. “What are we going to do about Jennie?”

“We have to get out of here,” Willie said.

“We can’t leave,” Bunker said to Willie. “Not right away. They’ll be watching to see if anybody bolts.” He slid under the sink to open the secret door.

Paula and An Chu followed Bunker into the narrow room. The smell of mildew grew strong just inside the door. An Chu dropped down onto the cot she and Willie shared, her face tipped up to Paula’s.

“We have to find out where they’ve taken Jennie.”

At the end of the room, Bunker turned around. “No. There’s nothing we can do for Jennie now.”

“When we find her we can decide what to do,” Paula said. Her left buttock throbbed deep in the wound. Willie Luhan was stalking down the room, his fists still clenched tight.

“You know, I think you’re a coward,” he said to Bunker.

“I think you’re an idiot,” Bunker said. He went head-first out of the room into the ruined building.

An Chu straightened, her hand on Paula’s arm. “They took dozens of people. It won’t be that hard to find them.”

“I’ll help you,” Willie said. “I know where I can get a gun.”

Paula’s hand pressed against her bad hip. She went to the bucket for a drink of water. It was nearly morning. They would have to wait until night to look for Jennie. The pain in her hip nagged her. She was going nowhere with Willie and his gun. Of all the people she knew, the only one she needed was Bunker. He would not help her, and he was right. She hunched her shoulders.

At a lope she crossed the close-cropped lawn to the next building, An Chu behind her, and sat down in the lee of the wall. An Chu raced up beside her. Paula wiped her hand over her face.

“This is impossible.”

An Chu muttered something. There were four buildings in this complex, all above ground, rising six or eight stories above the trim lawns. Down the hill, Paula could see a section of the wire fence that separated the buildings and grass from the wasteland. A light came on in the building she was sitting against.

“We aren’t doing this right.” She got up. Her hip had stiffened and when she put her weight on it she nearly fell. She led An Chu the length of the building to the door. It was locked. She pressed her nose to the window. Inside was a hall, and along the wall a row of vending machines.

“We need an hourly.”

An Chu pushed her out of the way to look. “They won’t say where they took them in an hourly.” She rattled the door, Paula turned, casting around the lawn for loose paper.

“Listen.” An Chu clutched her arm. “Is that about us?”

Somewhere nearby a siren moaned up toward a whistling shriek. Paula moved away from the building, toward the dark. Another siren joined the first, and another, and another, and suddenly one on the roof before her, so loud she jumped a foot.

“Come on.” Limping, she started down the hill toward the fence. The grass was even as pavement under her feet.

The sirens screeched up to a high note and stuck there. An Chu beside her broke into a trot. She glanced back.

“Watch out!”

Paula wheeled. A searchlight snapped on near the building they had just left. An Chu whispered, “Run!”

“No.” Paula grabbed the other woman’s arm and held her. She faced the searchlight’s blinding eye. The sirens’ high scream needled her ears. Two indistinct figures ran down the gentle slope toward her.

“Stay where you are. Put your hands up.”

Paula raised her hands. She called, “What’s going on? We’re trying to get home.”

Two Martian soldiers reached them. One carried a heavy automatic pistol. The other slapped his hands down Paula’s sides.

“All right. Where’s home? You know you’re half an hour past curfew.”

Paula gave the address on her identification. She took the white job-card out of the collar pocket on her jacket to show the soldier. The searchlight went off; the round eye of the lamp faded slowly through yellow to brown to black. An Chu stood rigid while the soldier groped her up and down. Suddenly the sirens too were turned off. The silence rang like the aftertone of a bell. The soldier with the pistol looked up over his head at the dark dome.

“False alarm?”

The other man was reading Paula’s card, luminous in the dark. “What are you doing all the way—” He raised his head. High overhead there was a boom.

“Come with us. Run.” He grabbed Paula’s arm and dragged her across the lawn at a dead run toward the nearest building. The other man and An Chu raced after them.

Another boom sounded, nearer, like a crash of thunder. The echo rolled off around them. The sound hurt Paula’s ears. The soldier opened a sloping basement door and pushed her toward a flight of steps leading down into the underground floor. She looked back. Far down the dome, beyond the fence, there was a sudden great spark, blue-white, like a giant star, gone in an instant. The soldier thrust her down into the basement.

“Attention,” a wall speaker said. “Your attention please.”

The dark basement was crowded with people, packed together body to body. The man behind Paula directed her through the room. His hand torch flashed a narrow light ahead of her. She stepped over legs and bodies sprawled over the floor. Two people squeezed apart to make room for her.

“Paula—”

She caught An Chu’s hand and pulled her after her. There was room for only one of them to sit, and they stood, An Chu in front of Paula. The soldiers were gone.

“Attention. We are experiencing a meteorite barrage. There is no need for alarm. Please remain quiet and obey your building commandos.”

“Meteorites,” An Chu said. “What do they—”

“Sssh.” Paula slid one arm around An Chu’s waist. Her hip hurt and she shifted her balance to the other leg. In the wasteland they hardly noticed the air raids. The door was behind them, ten yards away: twenty people away. Wait. Under her feet the floor vibrated. The people around her talked in low voices. The soldier who had brought them still had her job-card. He might be checking it. The sirens began to howl again.

“Attention. Your attention please. The all-clear is sounding—”

The crowd got to their feet in a sudden relieved roar of voices, their feet loud, reaching for coats and children. Paula shoved An Chu forward.

“Hurry.”

They worked their way through the shifting mob toward the door. The ceiling lights came on, dazzling bright, drawing a gasp from most of the people in the room. Between Paula and the door a man helped another into a coat. He had been sitting on an hourly, which clung to his backside. In passing, Paula removed it. She bundled it in her fist and followed An Chu to the door. They slid out to the cool night air and ran down the gentle slope toward the fence.

“Over a thousand,” Paula said. Even allowing for official exaggeration, that meant hundreds of prisoners. There were very few places in New York large enough to keep hundreds of people. Even after the immigrations of the past months, the Martians did not have enough men here to guard hundreds of prisoners in small groups: they all had to be together. Paula swept a look around them. They were walking along the side of a hill, outside the fences of the Martians. Dawn was coming.

“How’s your butt?” An Chu stuffed her hands in her jacket pockets.

“It’s all right.”

“They don’t expect anybody to believe that was meteorites,” An Chu said.

“They do have meteor storms on Mars,” Paula said. “The air’s that thin.” She folded the hourly. A dry ridge of hillside rose up ahead of them, beyond a forest of tree stumps four feet high. She swung around the foot of the hill.

Climbing the gentler slope beyond, she smelled smoke, and when she reached the crest of the hill saw a ruin, still burning, on the level ground beyond. She stopped. An Chu caught up with her.

“What’s the matter?”

Paula was staring at the ruin. It had been bombed out long before; the old walls had sagged almost to the ground. Someone had bombed it again last night. An Chu said, “That must have happened during the raid. Then it’s the Styths, isn’t it?”

Paula went on without answering. With masers, they could bomb inside the dome, and they obviously had some way of finding buildings, although without distinguishing inhabited places from ruins. She thought nervously of Bunker in the building near the lake and went faster down the hillside.

The wound in her cheek itched. She hoped that meant it was healing. Limping after An Chu across the barren wasteland, she thought wryly of what Tanuojin had said; she wished for him now, with his doctor’s hands. An Chu ran off over the crest of a hill, out of sight.

The night was much warmer than the one before had been. The dust made her nose itch. They had spent an hour talking over the whole dome and the places where the Martians could house hundreds of prisoners. There was only one: the entry port on the northwest wall. She rounded the hillside and a dry wind brushed her face. An Chu dashed up to her.

“Look what I found.”

She had half an overripe melon, lightly peppered with coffee grounds. They ate it while they walked. The sweet juice ran down Paula’s chin and she caught it on her fingers and licked it off. They crossed a stretch of low ground that had been bulldozed flat, as if for a new building. Paula looked south. The dome stretched off below her, spotted with islands of lights. The sirens began.

“Again?” An Chu put her head back to look up.

“Come on,” Paula said. “This will make it easier—they’ll all be indoors.”

They went on side by side toward the west wall of the dome. The sirens’ hound-voices rose and fell, reached their high note, and stayed there. The first crash boomed in the peak of the dome. The thunder radiated out like a wave. Paula found herself walking at top speed in spite of her bad hip.

Another, louder bang sounded. Suddenly, just ahead of her and a hundred feet off the ground, there was a silent explosion of light, blue-white, brilliant as a sun. It was gone at once. She stopped, her breath caught in her lungs, An Chu beside her. They were near the top of a hill; to the north was another complex of buildings. The booming in the dome grew louder and the reports closer together. Another star burst at ground level between the two women and the buildings. For an instant the buildings, the land, the dead stumps of the trees were printed on Paula’s eyes like a photographic negative. The blackness that fell afterward was like being blind. Another boom echoed through the dome and a few seconds later another light shone, and one of the buildings to the north exploded into a stalk of flames.

Paula turned and ran down the hillside. Her ears rang. The thunder rolls of the attack came so fast they blended into one long crash. The light-bombs burst with every stride she took. An Chu ran beside her. The grass broke under Paula’s feet and a sharp dry stalk jabbed her in the leg. Dazzled by the bombs, her head throbbing from the racket, she ran straight into a heavy wire-mesh fence.

The attack ended. The sirens of the all-clear began to moan. Paula and An Chu climbed the fence and dropped down onto the smooth clipped grass of a Martian lawn. Limping, Paula jogged toward the dome wall, just ahead of them beyond a building. Voices sounded, and people began to spill out of the below-ground floors onto the grass. The lights in the building came on. Paula and An Chu went unnoticed in the crowd; they sneaked down into a basement to hide for the day.

An Chu found them a banquet in the garbage: soggy bread and apple cores and four containers with beans and vegetables still clinging to the bottoms. They drank from a public fountain and spent most of the day in the basement of the building, in behind the cleaning machines. After dark they started along the wall of the dome, going north, to find the entry port, the most secure place in the dome.

It bulged out of the side of the dome, taller than any building, about fifteen minutes’ walk from where they had spent the day. The wire fence surrounding it was strung on rubberized posts. Five feet inside this fence was another fence, higher, also insulated.

Paula sat down. Her backside hurt more than yesterday and she knew it was infected. “That must be where those prisoners are.”

“Is it electric?” An Chu put her hand out.

“Touch it and find out.”

“Why are you in a mood?”

Paula looked away. Now that they had found Jennie, there was nothing to do to help her. She got up and went on along the fence, limping. The blank wall of the entry port rose up beyond the second fence. She could see people walking on the ramp over her head, perhaps sentries. One leaned on the rail a moment and she saw the barrel of a gun on his shoulder.

“When the Styths raid again,” An Chu said, “we can try to get in.”

Paula rammed her hands into her pockets. Every time her left foot hit the ground her whole left side ached. She had to remember that and compensate for it. The fence curved away from them and she bent her course to follow.

“Hey! Stop where you are!”

The shout struck her like a bullet. She sprinted dead away from the fence, toward the darkness. The lawn spread out before her. An Chu passed her ten feet to one side, her arms pumping.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!”

Paula’s hip threatened to give way. She could not run. She dropped down flat on her face on the ground. An Chu kept running. A gun fired a burst of shots. An Chu fell to her knees. Other people were hurrying after them across the grass. An Chu struggled onto her feet. The gun rattled again and the woman fell and lay still.

A man with a gun ran by Paula, and she got up. People crowded toward An Chu where she lay on the grass. Paula went in among them. The anarchist was dead; the spray of bullets had cut her like an ax. A tall man behind Paula said, “Weren’t there two of them?”

Her hands in her pockets, she walked away from the clot of people. Behind her voices rose, and the gun went off again in a sudden burst. There was no place to hide. She kept herself from running, which would surely give her away, and tried not to limp. The gun rattled again, far back there. Shooting at Martians. Something huge and vague loomed up ahead of her. She put her hands out and touched cold net.

The fence. She leaned on it, her face against it, damp on her cheek. She had no strength left to climb it. Her fingers crooked into the mesh. Up. Her left leg refused to move. She flung one arm up over her head and took hold of the fence. Up. The air sang with the shrill yell of a siren. Like krines only louder. She dragged herself up the fence, her toes jammed into the meshwork. Throwing her arms over the top, she hung there, out of strength. The sirens screeched behind her. Her left leg dangled uselessly. She squirmed up and across the top of the fence. The barrage began. The lights seemed to burst inside her head, exploding in her eyes. Blinded and deafened, she struggled her body over the fence and let go and fell. It did not hurt when she fell. The ground quaked under her. She gained her feet and shuffled away into the wasteland.

She came back to the Nikoles Building in the daylight and stayed out in the park until night rolled over the dome. Her face was hot and her mouth parched and she could barely walk on her bad leg. After sunset she crept into the tunnel and slid down to the hatch into the secret room.

Willie answered her knock. “Paula!” He helped her out of the hatch. “Where have you been? Where’s Ana?”

“She’s dead.” Paula lay on the cot. Her lips were cracked with thirst and fever.

“Dead,” Willie said.

She rolled her arms around her head. Her whole body hurt. He gripped her forearms and shook her. “What happened?”

“Let me alone.”

He shook her harder, back and forth, until she moaned. “What happened? Where did you go?” She was getting sick to her stomach. Her head was spinning off her neck. She slumped into a thick dark exhaustion.

When she came back to waking, she was lying on the floor, thickly wrapped in blankets. The only light in the room was the greasy dip-lamp burning in a chink in the dirt wall. She moved, untangling herself from the blanket, and knocked over a cup of water beside her. There was a patch of tape stuck to the inside of her elbow.

“Dick?” she said.

At the end of the room, something stirred in the dark. Bunker came down toward her, past the cot where Willie was asleep. “What happened?” He picked up the overturned cup.

“Jennie’s in the entry port. You were right. There’s nothing we can do.”

“Then why did you try?”

“The debt owed to common humanity.”

“You keep saying that. What does it mean?”

“Ask Saba. It’s one of his dicta.”

“Then it’s meaningless. Give me your arm.”

She held her arm out toward him, and he ripped the tape patch away. On the pale field of skin at the crease of her elbow were several small pinpricks of blood. He took another patch out of its paper folder and stuck it to her arm.

“No,” she said. “It means something to him. To An Chu, maybe even to me. We couldn’t let Jennie go without trying.”

“It doesn’t mean much to An Chu any more.”

That was so. And what they had tried to do certainly meant nothing to Jennie Morrison. He smoothed the patch with his thumb.

“What’s on this tape? Where did you get it?”

“Antibiotic. While you were out playing cowboy with An Chu I broke into an apartment building. During a raid.”

“I’m thirsty,” she said.

“The water is where it always is.”

She went the length of the room, limping hard to show him how hurt she was, although her hip felt much stronger. The water was cold. She drank two cupfuls and went back. Willie slept like a child, the blanket snug over his neck. The dip-lamp flickered in the draft of her passing. An Chu’s blanket-coat was slung over the foot of the cot. Paula sat down with her back to the wall, beside Bunker, and folded her knees up to her chest.

The glossy mud of the lake was cracked and dry. Paula swiped at the stinging insects buzzing around her head. She was moving at a fast walk toward the ruins on the lake shore, three shells of houses half-buried in thorn bushes. There had been no rain in the dome since the coup. With the trees and animals gone and so many more people living here, the whole environment had changed. She climbed up a steep slope and went in among the walls of the ruins.

Here it was hot, even hotter than outside, and the bloodsippers and no-see-ems attacked her in clouds. She looked quickly over the snares she had set. A half-dead bird was tangled in the net trap; she killed it. Something bigger had sprung the other snares and eaten the baits and she reset them.

East of the lake the land flattened out. The grass here was full of snakes. She ran toward the north, holding the binoculars with one hand to keep them from banging her chest. The flats broke into a rising hillside. She walked up to the height, sat down on a tree stump, and focused the binoculars on the nearest of the Martian settlements, about a mile away.

The eighteen buildings of the complex were surrounded by a mesh fence over twenty feet high. The grass was jewel green. Dick, who went there all the time, said it was plastic turf. The glasses showed her children playing kickball, a woman in a sun-chair with a pad over her eyes, a dog sleeping in the shade. She looked in the windows of the building. The man on the third floor had almost finished his water color. She watched the Martians for nearly an hour. When dark fell she went back across the lake to her building.

Outside the tunnel hatch she pulled out most of the bird’s feathers, gutted it, and put the innards in her bait-jar. When she went down into the hidden room Bunker was there with three people she had never seen before. She put the bird on a spit.

“This is all of you?” Bunker said to his guests. “Just you three?”

“How many more do you want?” the strange woman said.

Paula took the bird out to Jennie Morrison’s empty flat, where she had dug out a fire pit, and lit the fire. Through the open door she could see the people in the hidden room. She pretended not to be watching. She had eaten nothing but meal for two days and had no interest in sharing the meat.

“Give me ten days to steal the car,” Bunker said. He stood. He wore no shirt and sweat glittered on his washboard chest. The other people rose.

“If there’s anything we can do,” the woman said. “Any way we can pay you for your help—”

“I’m not doing it for you, I’m just hurting Savenia.”

Paula went into the room to get a drink of water. It irritated her that he spent days helping strange people leave the dome. With a lucifer match she lit the dip-lamp in the wall.

“When you get outside,” Bunker said, “you’ll have to dodge the Styths.”

Her back to them, Paula muttered, “Tell them Paula sends her love.”

“What?”

Bunker escorted his clients out through the flat toward the stairs. Paula took her clothes off. The heat made her hair frizzy. Her skin was rough with insect bites. She washed with a towel and a pan of water.

“Have you seen Luhan?” Dick said. He came into the room and slid the door shut.

“Not in days.”

The water in the pot was murky. She threw it out and poured fresh water to wash her face with. Sitting on the cot, she combed her hair. “How many of these people do you think escape from the Martians and the Styths both?”

“Very few.”

“Maybe none.” She watched him walk the length of the room. His gray beard grew like wool along his jaws. Dropping down beside her on the cot, he scratched her back.

“We ought to move,” she said. She squirmed to bring other parts of her back under his fingernails. “I’m getting a bad feeling about staying here.”

“You’re superstitious.”

“We’ve been here too long. You bring half the population of the dome in, everybody knows where we are. You should put out a sign. I’m saving the world, apply here.”

“Savenia has a reward out for those people.”

“She probably has a reward out for us. And it wouldn’t surprise me if Saba and Tanuojin have money out for us.”

“All right.” He scratched her shoulders and down her arms. “We’ll move.”

“Good.”

“After I get these people out of the dome.”

Paula woke up with a jump. Something was crashing against the apartment door. Beside her Bunker thrust himself up on his arms.

“Raid.” He left the bed like a bird from the limb.

The door crashed open. A bright light stabbed into the room. Paula scrambled across the head end of the cot toward the darkness. Men rushed into the room, surrounding her. She lunged for the door, tripped, and fell on her face halfway across the threshold. A boot tramped on her hand. She was hauled up by the arms to her feet.

In the white glare of a hand torch, Bunker stood with his arms gripped behind him and a rifle across his neck. Three men held him. He looked frail. His muscles were strung like wires along his bones. The men around him wore no uniforms, although on their upper arms there were red armbands.

“You’re the forger?” Another man stepped between Paula and Bunker.

“Who are you?” Bunker said. His voice was hoarse.

“My name is Han Ra. I’m the chief of the Red Army. We fight the Martians. If you’re anarchists, you’ll join us.” He was taller than Bunker, and lean, with a wild yellow beard and hair like a mane hanging down over his back.

“I don’t join anybody,” Bunker said.

“You have an air car. Where is it?”

More men crowded into the room. The third man was Willie Luhan, with a rifle in his arms.

“Where is the air car?” Han Ra said. He whipped a long knife out of his belt and aimed it at Bunker’s chest. Dick took a breath; his chest swelled as if to meet the knife.

“Don’t hurt him,” Willie cried.

Han Ra laughed. He ran the tip of the knife down Bunker’s breastbone. “Where is the air car?”

Bunker said nothing. Paula was standing on tiptoe, her arms crooked painfully behind her. She glanced at Willie Luhan again, caught him looking at her, and gritted her teeth, and he brushed by the man in front of him and went to Han Ra.

“You told me you wouldn’t hurt them.”

“I want that car. What about her? Does she know?”

“Yes, but—”

Han Ra drew his arm back and drove the knife into Bunker’s belly. The slight man went down bonelessly to the floor. He made no sound. Han Ra swung to Paula, the knife bright in his hand.

“Where is it?”

Willie clutched his arm. “No. Don’t hurt her. I—I know where it is. I was lying before. Keeping it for myself.” His eyes glistened. The glare of the torch shone on his face and the wild bearded face of the Red chief. “Don’t hurt her, for god’s sake.”

“Come on,” Han Ra said. He squatted to go through the door. The man with the hand torch followed him. The darkness they left behind in the room swarmed with men.

“What about her?” someone called, behind her.

“Leave her. She’s a woman. What can she do?”

They left her. Passing by, the last to go knocked her carelessly to her knees. She went after them to the low door and shut it and crept back to Bunker lying on the floor.

“Dick.” The room was utterly dark. Her hands groped over him. He was rigid, doubled up in a knot on his side on the floor, and for a moment she could not feel him breathe and thought he was dead. Her fingers slid over the skin of his ribs and down and touched the slime of blood.

“Paula.”

“Wait.” She scurried off around the room. “Just a minute—I’ll get a light—” She banged into the end of the bed so hard that for a few steps her leg would not hold her. Feeling over the wall she reached the dip-lamp in the chink by the cupboard and lit it. The medical patches were in the old cupboard. She knelt beside him and pasted one square to each of his elbows.

“Paula.”

“Don’t talk.” She yanked the bedcovers off the bed and wrapped him in a blanket. The dip-lamp made the room stuffy in a moment.

“Get out,” he said. His voice wheezed.

“I won’t leave you.”

When he breathed in, his breath whistled. “Stupid bitch. Both of us. Get out. Luhan. Doesn’t know. Where. The air car.”

“Oh.”

He closed his eyes. His skin looked black in the feeble light. She tore pieces from the second blanket and made a bandage over the slit in his belly and fastened it with a nail. He tried to help her move him but he could not even stand. She dragged him up the tunnel. Every few yards she stopped to rest, and while she rested held him tight in her arms to keep him warm. By the time she reached the surface, he was unconscious.

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.

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.

Paula got up and kicked apart the fire. They sat side by side in the dark listening to the alarm. The barrage began, first the thunderous boom and then the silent, blinding explosions of light, coming faster and closer together until her ears and eyes were clogged and she could hear and see nothing any more, as if the whole world had vanished. Bunker put his arm around her shoulders. She pressed her face against his neck.

The gash opened like a mouth in the floor of the ravine, lipped in mossy concrete. A dead tree stood over it. She unslung the coil of rope from her shoulder and knelt down. The underground river roared in the cavern below. She put two stones into the skin bag and lowered it down through the gap in the ground.

Behind her, the sirens whined; they had been crying all morning, all the night before, the day before that, without an attack. She paid out the rope, holding it looped around her wrist to keep from losing it when the bag struck the flying water below. She squatted down and pulled the bottoms of her trousers over her half-frozen feet. Her cracked and bleeding toes were more important than the distant sirens. The rushing river caught the bag and flung it out to the limit of the rope. She held on tight. More than once she had lost the whole apparatus down the river, and they were hard to make.

Hand over hand, she reeled it in a little, to see if the bag was full, and let it down again. When the weight convinced her, she began to draw it up. The rope was soaked and bitter cold. Halfway up, it snagged. She tugged. There was nothing down there to foul it. Puzzled, she jerked on the rope, and it yanked back, flying out of her hands.

She leaped away, bounding down the ravine. At the edge of the open ground, she wheeled to look. Her hair stood on end. A huge man was dragging himself up through the cleft. He wore a heavy helmet over his head, but his arms were bare and black as tar. She turned and ran.

She went toward the lake at a steady lope. Her feet were cold and bruised and she began to limp. She glanced over her shoulder.

The Styths were swarming up out of the ground, spreading over the ravine. She turned forward again. Her feet banged on the cold ground. There was no place to hide. She swerved across the dead lake. Just as she reached the far side, an explosion burst in the ground behind her. They were widening the way in.

She went down into the gulleys and hills between the lake and the southern end of the dome, looking for Bunker. When she could not find him, she ran north, stopping every few moments to walk and catch her breath. In the middle of the dome, near the ruins of the campus, two Styths caught her.

She was too tired and footsore to be afraid, only glad they did not rape her. They made her run and laughed when she fell. Half-dragging her, they took her north to the plaza in front of the government building, where already hundreds of other prisoners were gathered. She lay down in the dirt near the steps of the dispensa and slept.

She woke and went through the mob. Most of the prisoners were Martians. They sat on the ground or stood leaning on one another. Their pale faces were stained with dust and tears. The small children screamed. No longer hunting the other anarchist, she wandered around the plaza, too frightened to sit still.

Styths ringed them. She recognized none of them. Her feet hurt. She sat down to rest, but her nerves drove her on again, around the plaza in circles. The afternoon dragged past. More people crammed into the space, until she could hardly move. Taller people surrounded her and she could see nothing.

“You will divide up by sex,” a Styth voice shouted, in the Common Speech. “The men will come this way. The women will stay here.”

All around her the people cried out, and the mob stirred. Paula sighed. She wiped her face with her hands. Maybe Bunker had not been taken. The air car was almost finished; maybe he could escape.

“Now,” the Styth voice said, “all you pigs take your clothes off.”

The women raised their voices in a yell. The men had been sifted out, and the crowd was much looser than before. Paula sat down cross-legged, her hands in her sleeves, watching them move restlessly around her. They refused to obey, and the Styths closed in around them. Catching one woman by the arms, they stripped her naked. They laughed and pulled on her breasts and jabbed her in the crotch. Paula lowered her eyes. She was afraid of being raped. Around her the other women were silent.

“Take your clothes off, or we’ll take them off.”

“But it’s cold,” a girl murmured, behind Paula. They began to shed their clothes. Their pretty white blouses fluttered to the ground. Some of them tried to keep on their underthings but the Styths made them remove those too. Paula sat still, her hands in her jacket sleeves.

“Tanuk,” a Styth called. “The dark one here isn’t stripping.”

The Martian women around her muttered in their throats. They closed in around her, stooped, and clutched her and kicked at her. Paula rolled up in a knot, her arms over her head. The women tore at her clothes. A foot thudded into her side. Blood ran into her mouth. The women cursed her, shrieking, and ripped at her heavy jacket and trousers.

“Get away!”

She curled into a ball, swallowing blood. The women backed away from her. She sobbed for breath. Her chest hurt. She was hauled up by the front of her jacket. She looked up at a blurred black face. He had something in his free hand: a photograph.

“Maybe. It could be.” He spoke to her in Styth. “Are you Paula Mendoza?”

She said nothing. She closed her eyes, stiff with the pain in her chest and side. He lifted her up. “Call the Akellar.”

He took her into a little room on the first floor of the government building, sat her down in a big leather chair, and brought her a mug of hot meat soup. While she was drinking the soup, the Lopka Akellar came into the room. His face was a patchwork of little scars.

“That’s the one,” he said. “Do you remember me, Mendoz’?”

She stared at him, unwilling to speak the other language. He glanced at the man behind him. “Send to the Prima that we have his wife.”

“The Prima.” She put the cup down, startled.

“Saba is the Prima now. Machou tried to block him on the war action.”

She looked in another direction. Ymma left her alone. She moved stiffly around the room. The door was locked and there were no windows. Her side hurt. Aimlessly she paced around the room. She drank the rest of the soup and sat thinking about Bunker and trying idly to reduce to an aphorism the fact that she was always well fed in jail and starved when she was free.

After some time Ymma came back and took her out to the verticals. “If you won’t go willingly, I’m supposed to carry you.”

Her feet hurt. The corridor was crowded with Styths. The overhead lights had been shut off. At the end of the dim busy corridor the outer doors shone pale with sunlight. She stopped, drawn like a moth, and Ymma pushed her. She had not been indoors in months and the closed spaces made her hunch her shoulders.

“We took London last watch.” He led her into the first vertical car. “So’ Bay the same watch as here. If we had more men we could have them all at once.”

“What happened to the Martian Army?”

“Since we won Luna, they have no base. We were flying them around the Sun anyway. The Creep isn’t a bad strategist, you know. Not a bad strategist at all.”

She wrapped her arms around her. The language was exotic in its inflections and order and accents. The car stopped and the doors slid apart. She stayed where she was. Ymma stood watching her from his ruined face, his black eyes like wells. She went out to the dark hall.

Half a dozen men were lined up against the far wall. She went past them into a broad, dim room. The windows were covered in black paper. Saba was sitting on the desk, talking to Ketac.

She stopped, and her hands fisted at her sides. Saba was graying. On his wrist was the iron cuff of his rank. He and Ketac turned to face her; she glanced at his son and stared at Saba, her jaw clenched with anger.

“Go on,” Saba said to Ketac. “We have to hurry this up.”

Ketac paused as he approached her, maybe to say something, changed his mind, and went out. Saba came after him, his hands on his belt, his eyes on her.

“What’s the matter with you? You should be thanking me. You’d be down there being sorted and numbered if we hadn’t gone out of our way to save you.”

“To save me!” She felt swollen with rage. She said, “You have it screwed around a little.” Wheeling, she started for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Down out of your way.”

He caught her arm. “Listen to me, damn you!”

Her breath whined in her throat, and her temper snapped. He had hold of her arm. She clawed at him with her fingernails, first his hand, and when he wrenched her around and flung his arm around her waist she lunged at his face. He picked her up, pinning her hands. He was carrying her somewhere, through a doorway. She struggled around in his grip and sank her teeth into his face. He wrenched free. Skin tore in her teeth.

“Paula—Pauliko—I’ll number you—”

She twisted hard, corkscrewing back and forth, and rammed her arm into his chest. They fell lengthwise onto a bed. Kicking and elbowing him, she fought free at last and lunged away, and his weight landed on top of her.

All her wind rushed out of her. Her head whirled. He was pulling her jacket off. His breath was hot on her face. His heavy odor filled her nose and mouth. He took his hand off her to unbuckle the belt of his leggings and she jerked one arm loose and raked at his bleeding face with her nails. His arm crooked around her throat. She tried to bite his hand and got a mouthful of thick armor-shirt. He pinned her under him again, face down.

“You’ll like it, Paula.” He was panting. “You always liked me best.” He pulled down her pants and shoved himself into her.

She yelled. His whole hot weight buried her. Every time he moved it hurt. She bit her lips, her eyes squeezed shut. Stinking and hot, he groaned in his climax.

He moved away from her, his harsh breathing loud. She turned over onto her back. Her legs and groin were stiff with pain. He was watching her. The deep moon-shaped bite on his jaw bled in a stream. She got her feet under her and attacked him again.

“Hey!” He caught her. They fell off the bed onto the floor, and she landed on top of him. He was wedged between the bed and the long chest of drawers against the wall. Snarling and crying, she scratched his eyes. He heaved himself up and threw her bodily across the room. The wall hit her. Dazed, she pushed herself up on her arms. He bolted out the door and she heard the lock turn over.

She sat on the foot of the bed, her chest heaving. A deep bleeding scratch ran across her belly. Her thighs were smeared with his slime. She cried out and scraped at the greasy skin with her nails, tearing at the only part of him she could reach.

She slept in the bed. When she woke up there was a pile of women’s clothes on the chair. She picked up a long white sleeve and the fabric snagged on her roughened fingertips. The door was still locked. She went into the little washroom connected to the bedroom and took a shower. She dried herself off and went out to the bedroom. Tanuojin was sitting on the bureau, joined at the back to his reflection in the mirror.

“Oh,” she said.

“You’re scrawny as a chicken’s neck,” he said. “I’m surprised he still wanted you.”

His eyes were pale as lamps. She put on the white dress, which hung around her like a sack, and hunted among the other clothes for a belt.

“How is Kasuk?” she asked, bent over the chair.

“My son is dead.”

Her head flew up. Her lips made a round, soundless word. She flung the clothes in her arms aside. “What was it—an honorable sacrifice? Did you kill him in your war?”

“Yes, he died in the war. There was no way to avoid it. Even you have to see that all this came out of the mouth of the past.”

She sat down on the bed. Her fingers laced together in her lap. She thought of Kasuk’s blind adoration of him.

“I need your help,” he said.

Her gaze snapped up to him. “No.” She went past him to the door.

The room beyond was crowded with a tall forest of Styths. When she came in, their talk hushed, their heads turned toward her, round-eyed. She went through them toward the door, dwarfed among them.

“Akellar,” a man said, behind her, “Pert’ is asking to surrender.”

The bedroom door clicked shut. Tanuojin said, “Call the Prima. He’s in Ybix.”

She went out the door. Leno stood in the middle of the hall, a swarm of men around him. “If I have to deal through The Creep—” She brushed past them toward the vertical. The familiar people unnerved her. She felt herself sucked into that world again, that life.

She went down the hall to the rank of verticals. No one came after her or tried to stop her. They were letting her go. The call button on the wall between the double doors of the verticals was blinking on and off and she put her back to the opposite wall to wait. A steady stream of Styths walked by in both directions. She tried not to understand their talk. It was still hard to realize that Kasuk was dead. The war ate him. The vertical doors on the right slid back and a flood of men strode out toward her. She waited for them to pass. One was still shaven. A boy. Smaller than the others. A shock ran through her to her heels. She said, “David?” His narrow brown eyes turned on her. His mouth opened. He put his arms out to her, and she rushed into his embrace.

Naked, joined by ropes from neck to neck, the Styths’ captives squatted in the cold. The air reeked of their bodies. Her skirts caught in her hands, she passed the rows of women, sorted by age, the rope wearing their shoulders raw. All but the youngest children had been taken away from them. She tried not to look at their faces. An old woman passed her, carrying a bucket of water with a ladle in it, and in the lines the prisoners’ voices rose, crying for a drink.

She reached the men and stopped, her shoulders slumped. There were thousands of them, fair heads, dark heads, bald and furry. She would never find Bunker among them, even if he were there. A Styth was coming toward her. She started along the first row of men, and the guard caught her by the arm.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

She pulled on his hand. “Send for Tanuojin.”

He grinned at her. A long scar indented his cheekbone. “Send for Tanuojin. This one is funny.” He shook her arm, lifting her half off her feet. “Who do you think you are? Where did you get these clothes?”

“I’m Paula Mendoza.”

He let go of her. “Oh. I’ll call up top.” He went off at a long-striding walk. She started along the row of captives.

They were nearly all Martians, their hair clipped short in the military fashion. They sat or lay in the dirt, their heads down, and did not look at her as she passed. Their expressions frightened her and she stopped looking at their faces. The stench was making her sick to her stomach. Halfway along the row she passed two men shoveling the waste and filth into buckets. On one round white back there were deep scratch marks like ruts. She began to hurry.

The next row was of old men. She started on to the string beyond until she remembered that Bunker was gray-headed. She knew he was not old but a Styth might think so. She went along the line. Halfway along the row a scrawny old man lay curled on the ground. His flesh was white as cheese. His open eyes were glazed and unseeing. His hands were already stiff. On either side of him other old men sat, their heads turned away. She stepped across an iridescent stream of piss. The hem of her skirt was heavy and wet and scraped her bare feet. She went along the third string, still without finding Bunker. The fourth row was of adolescent boys and she skipped over it to the fifth.

Bunker was sitting on the ground halfway along the row. His eyes were closed. He seemed to be asleep. She squatted down beside him.

“Dick.”

His head rose, his eyes opening, and to her surprise he smiled at her. “I thought it was probably a waste of time to worry about you, junior. What happened?”

“Somebody recognized me,” she said. “Dick—” She held out her hands to him. He took her wrists and pressed his face against her palms. It was so like the Styth gesture that she drew back, and he let her go.

“What will they do now?” he said.

Her ears caught the drone of an air car. She looked around the sky for it, then stood up. The air car was hovering down above them. Ten feet over her head Tanuojin swung out the door and dropped to the ground beside her. He gave a humorless yelp of laughter.

“Richard Bunker.” He put his foot on Bunker’s shoulder and knocked him on his back.

“Let him go,” Paula said.

Tanuojin looked down at her from his towering height. “Why?”

“You said you wanted my help. Well, I’ll help you, if you let him go.”

He pulled his catfish whiskers straight. “It’s no use, Paula. There’s no place to let him go to. When I’m done here, we’ll blow up the dome, and we’ll blow up all the others as soon as we can get the people out.” He kicked Bunker again, and the anarchist got up onto his feet. “If you want him,” Tanuojin said, “take him. I’ll give him to you.”

Bunker’s neck was rubbed raw by the rope. He said to her, “Come with me. What kind of a life will you have with them?”

“I can manage,” she said. “Go.”

Tanuojin made a scornful sound in his chest. He pulled the rope off the anarchist’s neck, and Bunker started down the row of prisoners. After a dozen strides he broke into a run. Paula watched him until he was out of her sight. Tanuojin stood beside her like a tree. Slowly she went back toward the buildings in the distance.

She went with Tanuojin down to the third level of the cellar. In the vertical, he took her suddenly by the hand, and the unexpected cold touch startled her and she snatched her hand away from him. The vertical car boxed her up. She felt unable to breathe.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

The car settled to a stop, and the doors began to slide apart into the walls. He glanced at them and they shut again.

“Oh,” she said, “that must be useful.”

“Are you going to cooperate with me?”

She hunched up her shoulders. “I said I would.” She refused to look at him.

He opened the doors with another look and they went into a narrow gray corridor. The concrete floor was icy to her feet. A guard let them in a metal door to a wide room. The only lights were on an I-beam suspended from the center of the ceiling. The floor under her feet shone with wax. It was painted with red circles and alleys: a games floor, a gymnasium. The walls were lined with Martians. Tanuojin’s fingers closed on her wrist.

“Bring a light,” he said to the guard. He held her arm doubled in his grip. Against her will she felt the cool pleasure of his touch. With the guard carrying a light before them, Tanuojin led her along the rank of Martian prisoners against the wall.

“Who do you want?” she said to Tanuojin.

“Just look at them and let me do the thinking.”

She went on along the row of prisoners, staring into their faces. Some of them she had seen before, at Cam’s and Hanse’s meetings. At the end of the first row was Captain Rodgers, his uniform crisp, his buttons shined, his feet exactly eighteen inches apart.

Their eyes met; she remembered the things he had done to her and her cheeks went hot. His wet lips parted. Before he could speak Tanuojin let go of her and grabbed the Martian by the front of his uniform. Rodgers squealed. Tanuojin threw him flat back against the wall and his head hit the concrete with a thud. He sank down, limp, against the base of the wall. Paula went away across the gymnasium.

Tanuojin came after her. His hand gripped her again. She said, “You’re no different than he is.”

“You made me do that.” He stooped to talk into her ear. “You did that.”

“You have an excuse for everything, don’t you? Don’t talk to me. It makes me sick to talk to you.”

“Saba’s right. You’re hysterical.” He pushed her toward the next row of prisoners. “Who is that?”

Against the wall stood a line of women, medics, in white uniforms. Paula scanned their faces. The third from the end was Cam Savenia.

Tanuojin said, under his breath, “I thought so.” He nodded to the guard. “That one. There’s a room up on the sixth floor all ready for her.” He let go of Paula.

The guard took hold of Cam’s arm. Her face went dark with rage. “You swine.” She shouted at Tanuojin, her eyes flashing. “You dirty black dog. You can do what you want, but you can’t break me. You can’t break me!” The guard hauled her away bodily. Tanuojin laughed, his hands on his belt. He kicked the heel of his boot against the floor.

“It’s the same room they kept you in,” he said. Paula left.

The prisoners were gone. The barren hillside stretched down toward the lake. A haze of dust stood in the air. Three or four buildings, ruins, rose among the forest of tree stumps. The dead pan of the lake was cracked and dry as the surface of a moon. She stood there trying to remember what it had been like before the war, green and alive, a free world.

The Styths were still claiming that they fought to save the Earth from the Sunlight League, but the last anarchists were mixed in with the Martians in the slavepens, and the Earth was wasted, and the war was not over. Hanse had escaped with most of the Martian Army. Saba was in a hurry to take his base of operations to Luna, which he could defend. Paula was going with them. She could stay here. She could die with planet. She wanted to go with them; she had some vague tangled thought that she could make them feel her rage. And she was afraid to die. Bunker was somewhere in the ruined dome, maybe dead already. Unwitnessed. Her son was calling her. She went back up the barren slope toward the government building.