Floating Worlds

YBIX Watch logs H21, 969–H22, 336

She opened the hatch to the Beak and rose up into the pyramidal room in Ybix’s nose. Tanuojin was there. The shutter was open. Paula turned around in mid-air, so that the spread of the stars was above her. The Milky Way cut the corner of the window; she could barely pick Uranus out of the thickness of stars below it. The Planet was just entering the constellation Capricorn, sacred to Matuko and Saba’s family, the House of Exile. Tanuojin was too long for the Beak room, and his body curved to fit and left almost no space for her. She turned to the stars again. Near the top of the window were two familiar patches of light, like pieces of the Milky Way that had drifted: the Magellanic Clouds. Between them a brilliant star shone. She could not remember seeing it before. But it must have been there; stars did not change.

“That one did,” Tanuojin said. “It went supernova during the War.”

The star flashed white and green and orange. Out there something was happening greater than ten thousand systemic wars, but she had no way of knowing what it was. Like the events of atoms, the lives of mesons lasting trillionths of trillionths of seconds, the nova happened beyond her range. She was hung between them, her clocks too slow or fast, her rulers too long or short, so that these things that must all be part of one thing seemed to be unrelated.

Tanuojin said, “Saba always tells me how direct your mind is.”

“Who asked you to listen?” She faced him, the nova of his race. “What do you think about?”

“I don’t think any more. I just watch.” The while he talked to her he was writing on a tablet.

“It must be boring,” she said. “Always knowing what people will do next.”

“I don’t. And it’s never boring.”

He was making notes on the supernova. The hot star sparkled like a jewel, now orange, now white again. Below it was Uranus. A memory of the dark cities of the Styths crossed her mind, and she thought with longing of the sunlit Earth. She thought painfully of Richard Bunker. Tanuojin was watching her.

“I keep going in circles,” she said. She pulled the hatch open and swam out to the corridor.

David’s claws were growing in. Saba had stopped shaving his head, and when his hair grew long enough to tie, David would be clubbed. When Paula went to her cabin, her son and his father were there. She went past them to the end of the room where the bed hung on the wall.

“The order of the command is the father’s order,” David said. “Law lives in the father, generation on generation.” His voice was singsong; he was reciting from memory.

“Give me the formula for the oath,” Saba said.

There were three hundred formulas, which David had to memorize before he was clubbed. He gave Paula a cutting look and began, “When you tell—”

Saba said, “Not when I do it. Say it right.”

“But—”

“Don’t change the formula.”

Paula was taking her clothes off. David’s voice rose. “What are you doing in here? You aren’t supposed to listen.”

She took her sleepdress out of the bin on the wall. “Then don’t say it in my bedroom.”

“She isn’t supposed to hear it,” David said to his father.

Saba said to him, “Go feed yourself. We’re on watch pretty soon.”

David flew out of the room. Paula doubled over in the air and pulled the robe down over her feet. It unsettled her that he was going through this education—that in a few months he would be a grown man. She opened out the folds of the bed.

“I guess he gets his temper from me.”

“It’s his age,” Saba said. “Boys get hot when their claws come in.” He went to the hatch. “You taught him to say what he thinks, Paula.”

“I didn’t teach him to think like a Styth.” She yanked the bed out straight and wrapped the wings around her.

Saba laughed. “No, you certainly didn’t.” Three bells rang, and he left.

In the three hundred and sixty-third watch of the voyage Ybix crossed the orbit of Uranus. She slowed, falling into a course around the white Planet, the rest of the fleet behind her. Paula stayed in the wetroom. When she came out there was a note from Saba stuck in the hatch commanding her to the library. Her stomach and the muscles of her arms and legs were cramped so that moving was painful. She dressed and went down to the galley.

Junna was eating protein strips just outside the hatch. He said, “You’re supposed to be putting your head together with Gemini.”

She punched out blue tablets. “Are you glad to be home?”

“We’re a long way from home. There are fifty ships of the Uranian Patrol stacked up around us.”

“What?”

The speaker hummed in the wall. “Paula,” Saba said, “get down here now.” Her sleeves stuffed with food, she went along the corridor to the blue tunnel, where the library was, next to Tanuojin’s cabin.

He and Saba were crowded against the lower wall of the library. A little projector threw an eight-inch cube of green light into the other end of the room. She had to go through it to reach the only open space. Yellow shovel-nosed ships floated around her like darts. In the middle of the cube was Ybix, huge among the fog of little ships.

“What is this?”

Tanuojin’s eyes were shut. Saba said, “They were waiting for us when we fell into orbit.”

“Bokojin?”

Under his breath Tanuojin muttered an oath against Bokojin. She looked from him to Saba, whose arms were stretched out relaxed along the curved wall behind him. “What about the rest of the fleet?” she said.

“The patrol has let them dock. This is our war, not theirs.” The grainy red beam of the holograph projector ran diagonally across his face.

“We can make it their war,” Tanuojin said, without opening his eyes.

“No.”

“Damn it, Saba—”

“I told them I wouldn’t ask them to fight Styths.”

Paula watched the coils of ships around Ybix. She tore open a water tube. Uranus lay below them, the crystal heart of the Empire. “What does Bokojin want?”

“It’s more than Bokojin,” Tanuojin said. “He must have a couple of the others with him.” He put his hand up to his face.

“What’s wrong with you?” Paula asked.

“I’m just tired.”

Saba was watching her, his mustaches floating back over his shoulders. He said, “Do you have any ideas?”

“That depends on what Bokojin wants,” she said.

Tanuojin reached out and turned the projector off. Ybix disappeared. Saba said, “Start talking.”