Floating Worlds

VRIBULO

Huge in the pressure suit, David’s arm stretched up above the seat in front of her to a switch in Ybicket’s ceiling. She tipped her head back inside the helmet. Behind her Junna was talking in a string of numbers, reading off the navigation signals. Ybicket flew down the D corridor toward Vribulo; Paula would meet Bokojin in Vribulo.

The radio crackled. “SIF-16 Ybicket, this is Vribulo mid-city gate. We will dock you.”

She turned her head. On the curved wall beside her an ax hung in brackets. Behind her, Junna said, “Vribulo, we have orders from our commander not to surrender control of the ship.”

“Stand by, Ybicket.”

“Overflying Vribulo,” David muttered.

Junna’s voice fell to a ringing whisper. “Are you sure you can fly this jog?”

“I could take Ybicket through the Sun.”

Paula swallowed. A burst of static rattled out of the radio. “Ybicket, this is Vribulo. You may dock your own ship.”

The voices of the two young men sounded softly in the helmet above her ears. They guided the ship through the maze of the entry chute. She kept her eyes straight ahead, careful not to look at the hologram. Junna gave directions in a level singsong. She realized she was hanging onto the harness of her seat. The ship banged into the side of the tunnel and she shut her eyes an instant. Junna said, “Steady, little boy.”

“Sorry,” David said.

Ybicket flew out across Vribulo. Paula sighed, relieved. She wrenched her helmet back and forth until the seal broke. The ship rolled over and descended in a long swoop toward the surface. She looked up. The roofs of houses flew past over her head. People walked upside down in the street above her. Ybicket’s secondary engines thundered; she slid forward into the harness. David settled the ship down into the dark gate of the dock. A roof clanged shut over the window. She felt the slap of the anchor hitting the hull under her feet.

David let out a whoosh of breath. He and Junna unbuckled their harnesses. Paula fought with the spring clips that held her into her seat. David came around to help her.

“I’m sorry I hit. In the tunnel.”

“I love surprises.” She climbed out of the deep broad seat toward the hatch. Junna threw an arm around him, buoyant.

“You did it. I’d never even try it. You’re like the Prima, little boy, you can fly anything.”

She stood on the dock ledge beside the ship, watching David’s face shine at Junna’s words. She should have praised him like that. Won that look from him. They came up to the ledge beside her.

When they had shed their pressure suits they went out the front of the dock into the city street. The cold and greasy air struck her; she raised her head, her heart racing. A man brushed by her without breaking stride. His hair hung down his back in the Vribulit club. A siren wailed nearby. The blackened, ancient buildings tilted out over the street. A fat woman came down the alley across from Paula, arguing. Paula looked up at the lake of Lower Vribulo, six miles across the twilit air, bounded in blue grass like surf.

“Mother—”

She went down the street, flanked by the two young men.

“Bokojin could have sent a chair to meet us,” Junna said.

“He could have.” Bokojin had refused to let either Saba or Tanuojin into Uranus. When Saba suggested sending her to negotiate with him, Tanuojin had shown enough distaste for that to make Bokojin insist. She trotted along beside David, one hand on his arm, looking around. They went through a fish market, gleaming with scales, and a chicken market, white with feathers. The street narrowed to a steep lane cut into steps.

At the top was Bokojin’s house. He kept her waiting long minutes at the door, and David fumed.

“I’m not leaving you here alone.”

“The Prima gave you orders.”

“They didn’t know what this was like. You’ll need help.”

She remembered Tanuojin’s closed eyes: he knew what was happening here. She glanced at Junna. Tanuojin’s son went down the steps that led from Bokojin’s door to the street. David lingered. His inch-long mustaches bristled. “Vida,” Junna called, and the boy said a very colorful oath and followed him.

A few moments later Bokojin’s slaves let her into his house. Bokojin, Machou, and two other rAkellaron were waiting for her in a room of blue and green lights, rippling in slow sweeps through the room. The walls were decorated with a network of knotted ropes. When she came in, the four men stared at her, moveless in their chairs, each with an aide behind him like a standard. She went inside the arc of chairs.

“Mendoz’,” Bokojin said. He sat with his feet together before him, his knees apart. “The talk was that you were dead.”

“I was visiting another life.” She looked at Machou on her left and the two men on her right. Even sitting they were taller than she was. Machou looked drunk. To Bokojin, she said, “The Prima is tired. He wants to come home and rest. Why are you putting yourself in his way?”

“We all know Saba,” Bokojin said. “He’s always had exotic ideas. We want assurances he isn’t coming back with any strange notions of walking all over us just because he’s taken the Middle Planets.”

There had to be more to it than that. She looked at the other men. “How well do you know Saba?” From the fold of her coat she took the Primit cuff and dropped it ringing on the floor.

They straightened in their chairs. Their eyes followed the cuff. Machou leaned forward, his hands sliding off the arms of his chair. Paula backed one step away from the cuff on the floor.

“The Prima says if any of you thinks he can hold that metal, let him take it.”

They all stood. Machou took a step toward the cuff. Paula tasted their scents, personal as faces. Bokojin said sharply, “Stand back, Akellar.” Machou’s head rose, his teeth showing behind his gray mustaches, and his thick shoulders set. Bokojin thrust his chest out.

“Back off!”

Machou shot a fierce look at Paula. “Don’t be a fool—you’re doing what she wants.” He bent to pick up the cuff.

“Leave it,” Bokojin said. “Leave it where it lies!”

Machou’s thick throat worked. The cuff lay at his feet. He looked from Bokojin to Paula and back to Bokojin, and when Bokojin advanced a step toward him Machou backed away. He turned and marched out of the room, his soldier behind him.

“Go,” Bokojin said to the other men. “I’ll tell you later what she says.”

Paula tucked her hands into her sleeves. The other two men began to protest, both at once, and Bokojin drove them out. The door shut behind them. Bokojin sat down again. The cuff lay on the floor between him and Paula. His handsome face was taut; his nostrils flared. Paula went up beside his chair.

“Put it on, Bokojin.” She leaned on the arm of the chair.

“What is he trying to do?” Bokojin said to himself. She watched his face. He had a thin scar down his cheek. His jaw was finely shaped, almost delicate. It was not a sensual face: sexlessly beautiful.

“Why don’t you take it?” She nodded at the cuff on the floor. That was Saba’s idea: Make him put it on. Like Nessus’s shirt. Her fingers grazed Bokojin’s knee. “Do you need help? I’ll help you.”

Bokojin left the chair like a man bolting a trap. His lip curled at her. “I don’t take other men’s wives.”

“I’m not Saba’s wife,” she said.

“Then you’re just a dirty woman, and not worth my time.”

She felt the heat flush rise through her throat and cheeks. She told herself she hadn’t really wanted him anyway. She sat down in the chair he had just left.

“What do you want, Bokojin?”

“You don’t sit down in my presence.”

“Tsk. I sit down in the presence of a Prima whose name reaches from here to the Sun.”

“My grandfather was the Prima,” he said. He stalked toward her. He wore a heavy collar of rectangles linked together: a family emblem, Gemini was sacred to his house. “Saba has been making a loud noise among people who are natural slaves. Let him come back here, where his equals are.”

“He is back. You won’t let him home.”

“Get out of my chair.”

She stretched her arms along the arms of the chair. “I like it here. I’ll stay.”

He was standing with the cuff at his feet. She watched his expression settle. The cuff defended her as if Saba still wore it. He said, “I don’t dirty my hands on niggers. Get up or I’ll call my slaves.”

“Oh, you won’t do that.” She drew her hand over the smooth arm of the chair, admiring the inlaid decoration. “Not while I’m your only line to Saba.”

“Then maybe I should open another—” He wheeled. A man in the chevron badge walked fast through the door.

“Akellar. The Prima is in Vribulo.”

Bokojin spat out the same oath David had used earlier, and Paula laughed. He said, “Then arrest him.”

The patrolman said, “I’m sorry, Akellar, we can’t—there’s such a mob around him, you can hear them cheering him all the way up to the House.”

“Get Machou—”

“Machou says to do it yourself.”

Bokojin’s face shone with heat. He wheeled toward Paula. She sat in his chair, the cuff on the floor between them. “Illini,” she said, “we are giving you half an hour to get out of Vribulo. That gives you no time to do anything to me.”

He took a step toward her. She stayed in her place, watching him. He kicked the cuff across the room and strode out. Alone in the room, she let herself relax. The cuff lay against the wall. She went over to it and picked it up, shining in the blue and green light streaming through the room. She put it on her wrist. Even over her coat sleeve it was too big. She wondered how he could wear it all the time; it weighed so much it hurt her arm. She sat down again in Bokojin’s chair, to wait for Tanuojin.

“You agreed to it in the Middle Planets,” Paula said, angry.

“That was a long way away. And a long time ago.” Leno lifted his hands off the desk. “I’ve changed my mind.” His broad hands dropped solidly to the desk.

Paula glared at him. She went off around his large, empty office, turned on the far side of the room, and glared at him again.

“Don’t you give me that look,” he said.

She marched back up to his desk, chest high to her. “Or you’ll do what?”

There was a long silence while they stared at each other. Paula laid her forearms down flat on the desk. Like everything else in Styth it was too large for her.

“Be realistic,” Leno said. Carefully he straightened his braided mustaches. “You aren’t one of us. You can’t do an Akellar’s work. There are plenty of other niggers who will be happy to go between us and the rock-worlds.”

“So you don’t need me any more.”

“You’ve done your work,” he said. “And I honor you for it.”

“Merkhiz—”

“You have a lot of enemies.”

She left.

The message from Newrose filled eight pages. She read it in the coderoom on the second floor of the rAkellaron House and read it again in her bedroom of the Prima Suite on the third floor. Rereading it made it no sweeter. Newrose was full of gloom. After months of almost Talmudic debate, even his own party had rejected the Luna Agreements, and the Council had voted to stay in session past the date when they were supposed to shut off the lights and go home. Paula balled the thick papers up and flung the wad across the room.

Boltiko had come from Matuko for three watches exactly, to get Saba settled into the Prima Suite. Paula had made her color this bedroom white. There were six ruby-laser paintings on the walls, streams of color constantly changing. She sat cross-legged on the end of the bed and watched a red line curl and curl across the wall. Just when she had felt in control, her life was breaking apart again. The flying colors on the walls made her nervous. Putting on her coat, she went out into the city, to the new White Market in the Steep Street.

She had arranged this market, the first in Vribulo, worked by free people, not Styths. Morosely she walked around the rings of stalls. This was the only practical thing she had ever done. Gradually it was doing more business. People wandered from booth to booth, and a crowd kept her away from the jewelry, the metalware.

Under a sign advertising fabric a vendor in a long apron was stacking bolts of cloth on a table. Nobody seemed to be interested. Paula stopped and put her hand out toward a shining red silk.

“Not that.” Saba pushed her hand away. “That would look terrible on you. I don’t think you have any sense of what you really look like.” He waved to the vendor, who stooped and brought up more cloth. Paula smiled up at the big Styth, pleased to have company.

“Where is Tanuojin?”

“I just saw him get on a bus to Yekka.”

“To Yekka.” She straightened, turning away from the cloth. “But aren’t you taking the Luna Agreement into the Chamber next watch?”

“I don’t need Tanuojin for that. Look at this.”

She looked down at the table again. The textured surface of a panel of black fabric drew her fingers. Woven into the material was an abstract design of gammadions, the good luck sign.

“Give her this,” Saba said. “And that.” He stretched across to reach a bolt of black cloth glinting with silver threads. He faced her again.

“This stuff is Martian fiber, dyed in Venus, shipped in Styth hulls. The Luna Agreements only say the obvious. How can they reject the obvious? There’s one system, that’s the way the system works.”

She paid the vendor and told him to send the cloth to the man who made all her clothes. Everything was twice as expensive as before the war. She clinked the coins in her fist.

“I need a demonstration for the Council. What if three or four ships turned up near Crosby’s Planet?”

“When?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Are you on some kind of schedule?”

“Some kind. I’m getting married.”

“Married. Again?” She had to laugh at him. They started on along the ring of stalls. She looked up at his profile. “Somebody told me once how handsome you were. I suppose you still are. Who is the blessed fifth wife?”

“Ymma’s daughter.”

“Oooh.”

“She’s prettier than he is.”

“I should hope so. When is this to happen?”

“In twenty-two watches.”

“In Lopka? Can I go?”

He was walking slowly so that she could keep up; he gave her a long look sideways. “Ymma asked me not to bring you. Or Tanuojin.”

“Tanuojin wouldn’t go anyway.” That rankled. She thought of Leno. “Ymma took my advice in Luna, didn’t he?”

“That was different.”

“I guess so. I just talked to Merkhiz, and he says he won’t support the Luna Agreement unless I resign.”

“Oh? Somebody must have gotten beside him.”

What Leno said in the Chamber would sway people. She wondered darkly if Saba had already sold her away. Saba stopped to look at a table of plants, each in its ball of dirt wrapped in plastic. She decided to write Newrose as nasty an answer as she could. Saba turned away from the little garden.

“I’ll hold the Agreements back out of the Chamber for a while. Come to my wedding.”

“I’m not going where—”

“I need you. Somebody has to stand forward for me. It’s supposed to be my best friend, but Tanuojin won’t do it. He hates Lopka. You do it.”

Her gaze flew up toward him. “Stand forward for you? You mean be in the ceremony with you?”

“They’ll all be there,” he said. “Leno, Bokojin, everybody.”

“Hunh.” She nodded. “Oh, yes, I will.”

Ymma’s hacked face hid whatever he thought. He spoke the rote words of the ceremony in a voice without feeling. He and Paula stood facing each other before a bilyobio tree. The wedding guests made a ring around them; beyond Ymma she could see Bokojin, looking angry, and Machou, looking drunk.

They were all men, these guests. The women would be watching from the windows of the buildings beyond, except for one, who sat inside the left-hand of the covered chairs by the bilyobio tree. Paula was terrified of forgetting her answers to Ymma’s questions. The ring of witnesses never looked at Ymma; they all stared at her. David was here, too, behind her. Her mouth felt frozen, her lips numb.

“Who are you, coming here as my guest?” Ymma recited. “Tell me your name and your purpose.”

She lifted her voice, so that none of them could say later that he had not heard her. “I am Paula Mendoza. I am the Earth Akellar. I come for the sake of peace, for the Prima’s sake, to take his wife to him.”

Nobody moved. She wondered if they had expected it. Ymma’s voice sounded choked. They exchanged another prescription, and he led her to the gorgeous covered chair, worked in filigreed metal.

His daughter looked no older than David. Pretty as a doll, she sat dressed in a robe woven with gold and gem crystal, her eyes shining with fear. Ymma said, “Daughter, go with this man—” and bit his teeth together. After a moment, he said, “With this Akellar, to live under your husband’s rule.”

The child’s name was Melly. She put her hands out, and Paula took them. At the touch the two women looked surprised at each other. Melly’s hands were icy cold.

There were three oaths, one for each of the steps to the other of the chairs. Once Melly flubbed her answer and Paula prompted her in a whisper. Except for them the place was silent. Saba was waiting in the right-hand chair. He spoke some words and the child replied, her eyes downcast, mumbling. When Saba put his hands around theirs, Melly almost would not let Paula take hers away.

The bride sat down in the chair beside her husband. Paula backed away, lighter by a burden. She had done it perfectly. For the first time, she realized that she had been frightened of botching a Styth ritual. She shut her eyes, smiling.

Finally the door shut on Saba and his bride. The wedding guests let out their breath in a gust of noisy conversation. Paula went after some of them down a strange hall in Ymma’s house.

Most of the people in the sitting room were still standing up. Slaves brought them liquor. Dakkar and Ketac were talking by the far wall. Paula avoided them. Dakkar reminded her of Pedasen.

“I think we’ve just been taken,” Bokojin said. He tramped into the room. “The Earth Akellar.”

“Cool off,” Leno said.

“I don’t care if she hears me.” Bokojin was plowing through the mass of standing men toward the banquet table. The crowd yielded to him, third-ranked in the rAkellaron. His voice boomed. “Is Ymma sure this wedding is legal?”

Paula stood just behind Leno. They had all seen her. She went over to the table for something to eat. Bokojin turned away, his back to her. Dishes covered the table: skewered meats, fruit soaked in liquor.

David had come in. She put a sliver of pala fruit into her mouth, watching him cross the room. His shoulder-length hair was too long to keep neat, and to his horror it curled at the ends. He spoke to Ketac, and Ketac bent to listen, turned, and tapped Dakkar on the arm. They followed David out of the room.

Paula ate the sweet fruit. She went through the crowd and down the hall after her son.

They led her into a darkened stretch of hallway, and she lost them. While she was going back toward the wedding party, she heard a sharp stranger’s voice through a window.

“Just like a nigger, running for help!”

The window was over her head. It seemed to look over the courtyard. She stood under it, looking up at the patch of barred light on the ceiling. Outside, David said, “They’re to watch. I’m tired of getting jumped just when I’m beating the shit out of one of you.” Paula walked away down the dark hall.

She went back into the room where the wedding guests were drinking and talking in a din. As she came in, a voice was shouting, “Suppose what would have happened if Yekka had been here,” so she knew what the main subject of talk was. At the end of the table there was a pump. She pumped a thin stream of Lopkit beer into a cup. Leno came over to her.

“Somebody brought this for you.” He gave her a folded paper.

She put the cup down to open the message. It was from Newrose, sounding desperate. With three Styth ships cruising mysteriously in their immediate space, the Council of the Middle Planets had decided to disband after all, but they still refused to ratify the Luna Agreement. That made no difference, as long as they disbanded. Leno was watching her from his advantage of height. He had read the message. She folded the paper in thirds and put it away in her sleeve.

“Of course they accepted it,” Saba said. “I told you I wouldn’t have any trouble.” They were in his office in the House, and he leaned back in his chair and spread his arms out. “Just the same, I want you to stay out of the Chamber. Unless there’s an emergency.”

“You don’t have to convince me. I have too much to do anyway, to waste my time sitting around with those politicians.”

“Good.”

She put her elbow on the broad arm of her chair. They had been back from Lopka six watches, but she had seen little of him. He spent most of his time with Melly. “How is your marriage?”

“Ah, Paula—” He smacked his stomach with one hand. “I’m getting old.”

“That bad?”

“It’s that good. I—” He looked up, beyond her, and his whole face smiled. “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you the long watch.”

Paula turned. Tanuojin was coming in the door. He had a three-cornered coat over his shoulder. She sat back into the corner of the couch. His height even now sometimes surprised her. He and Saba hugged each other in greeting.

“You’re getting fat, being married.”

“It’s good for me. I’ve just been telling Paula, you should try it.”

Tanuojin snorted with laughter. He glanced at Paula and turned back to his lyo. “You know the probe we sent to Lalande in Melleno’s Primat—”

“No.”

“Melleno 372. The planetary spectra are coming in now. Come up to Oberon with me and look at them.”

Saba went back behind his desk to his chair. “When?”

“Now.”

“I can’t—I told Melly I’d take her to the Akopra next watch.”

“I’ll go,” Paula said.

Tanuojin flung his arm out. “To the Akopra. Here? Jesus, you’ll ruin her taste, if she has any. Bring her down to Yekka. These are the first accurate composition bands we’ve ever gotten from another solar system. Why wait?”

“Go on. Take Ybicket. Vida can fly you.”

“I’ll go,” Paula said again.

Tanuojin gave her a sour look. “With you inboard, it would take a watch and a half just to get there.” He turned to Saba, across the desk. “Go to the Akopra some other time.”

“I promised her.” Saba shrugged. “Come see me when you get back. Let Paula go with you. She’s having another one of her fits.”

She left the couch and started toward the door. Tanuojin stayed to argue with Saba. The waiting room, as large as the office, was crowded with men waiting to see him. She lingered a moment, in among the Styths, and Tanuojin came out, looking sullen.

“Are we taking David?” she asked.

“I can’t fly Ybicket by myself,” he said.

Lalande was a Class M star eight light years from the Sun, with a family of twenty-six planets. Under Melleno, the rAkellaron in a rare constructive moment had sent out six probes to nearby stars. Two had failed. Three were still in course, but waves from the Lalande probe had begun to reach the radio-pans on Oberon, outermost of Uranus’ moons. Paula strapped herself into the middle of Ybicket’s three seats. Tanuojin hooked her suit into the lifeline.

“Don’t forget,” he said to the front of the cab. “She can’t take too much acceleration, even in this fancy suit that eats up all the energy in the ship.”

“Yes, I know that,” David said.

“Don’t mouth off at me, little boy, you won’t like it.”

“How long will it take?” Paula asked. She looked up at the window, covered with the dark shutter, reflecting a red light winking on a dial on Tanuojin’s radio deck. He put the dark helmet over her head.

“Six hours.” Round inside the helmet, his voice came from over her head. He and David climbed into their places.

The ship butted down five miles of the chute into the Planet. In the holograph, Vribulo was a fibrous wall to the right of the ship, streaming long threads of tunnel. They left the city and traveled off through the magma. A thick yellow wave rushed on them. Ybicket slid in a long swoop down its crest.

“Why did he get married?” Tanuojin said. “He’s making a fool out of himself with that baby.”

“Let him alone,” Paula said. “He’s having a good time.” The ship rolled from side to side, barreling through a stretch of clear green. Ahead of them lay the Vribulo Stormbank, five thousand miles of turbulence. She remembered thinking once that two hundred kilometers an hour was a breakneck speed. David drove as fast as Saba.

The ship hurtled through the edge of the storm. She clutched her harness with both hands. Her stomach churned. If she were sick inside the helmet they would be all the way to Oberon cleaning up the mess. Tanuojin, navigating, talked steadily in her ears, guiding David through the layers of the storm. His voice was quicker than usual. She changed her mind about his lethargy. He was wound up tight as a set trap. Waiting, she thought. Waiting for something to happen.

The ship bucked and swerved, and she gulped. She had been sick once and they had teased her mercilessly for three watches. Grimly she fought against her nausea all the way to the surface of the Planet, until they escaped into space.

Oberon, second biggest moon, and farthest from Uranus, kept one face always turned to the Planet, but now, with Uranus in its variant season, the Sun seemed to rise and set. They reached the observatory in early morning. David set Ybicket down on a pad in the landing field and they got out and walked through the light gravity toward the group of buildings. Paula looked around them. Beyond the buildings of the observatory complex, with their clear domed roofs, stood the ruins of ancient houses built by the first settlers of Uranus. They had been stripped down for material to make the laboratory and the spherical houses for the telescopes. Only the foundations remained.

They went into the observatory. Through the clear domed ceiling she could see the black of space, scattered with stars. She unbuckled the wrist straps of her gloves and took them off.

Three or four men in long coats converged on them. Tanuojin greeted one by name and was introduced to the others, who bowed to him. She went slowly across the huge room before her. The floor was inlaid with a schema of the solar system. She walked down a gap through the Asteroids.

The technicians took Tanuojin off to a long bench against the circular wall. A light switched on above it. He swore at what he saw. Paula went over to his side. The technicians backed away, letting her through. The bench had a light in it, and a screen for viewing: a strip of colors was running across it. The colors ran the brilliant clear range of the spectrum. The technicians pointed to different areas and talked about calcium and hydrogen and compounds of oxygen.

She leaned on the bench, her eyes on the stream of colors, the clear deep violet and snapping yellow, pictures of worlds light years away. She glanced around the spacious, circular room. A man in a long coat came in a far door and sat down at a desk on the opposite wall. Her face was stiff with cold but the pressure suit kept her body warm. She looked up through the ceiling into the stars.

“Very good,” Tanuojin said. “Good, good, good.”

The technicians, all but one, wore white coats; the one wore a green coat, and he turned to the others and dismissed them in an important voice. Bending over the spectra, he pointed to a mass of yellow. “Akellar, let me point out the sodium lines here.” His claws were clipped short. Probably they got in his way. On the wall above the bench compasses hung, in several sizes, clear plastic shapes to measure with, clippers with toothed edges. She still had her gloves in her hand and she stuffed them under the strap on her shoulder.

“Those are rho lines,” Tanuojin said.

The film stopped moving with a sharp double click. “Some malfunction in the pulse source,” the technician said. “We noticed them right away, of course—I thought they’d been removed.” He stooped and pulled down the underside of the bench, which swung outward on curved hinged arms. The film ran along it on sprockets. “The probe fixed itself—the interference is just in this series.” He shouted over his shoulder and another man came quickly toward them. Paula moved out of the way. Brimming with apologies, they brought in another piece of film and replaced the first.

“The computer reconstructed the series awfully well.” The technician pushed the film train back into the bench.

“What’s a rho line?” Paula asked.

Tanuojin’s head turned. He spread the discarded piece of film out on the bench to one side of the screen. Without the lights behind it the film looked dull. He pointed to a band of yellow. “These spectra show which elements make up the Planet—each of the elements absorbed a characteristic wavelength of the light. These—” his claw tapped a broader gray space, “that’s a rho line. Radio interference in the transmission.” He went back to the corrected film. “Have any of the photographs come in?” he asked the technician.

“Not yet.”

“What are these?” Paula asked. A row of dots ran along the edge of the film under the spectrum.

He was bent over the bright rolling film; he did not take his eyes from it. “Pulses. Rate of emission.” He and the technician talked about ferric salts. She looked down at the strip of defective film beside her hand. Those stripes of color bounded her experience. Lalande’s light fell mostly in the infra red; people there would see a world invisible to her. Perhaps inaccessible to her. The Styth astronomer was writing down a formula on a pad of paper, explaining something to Tanuojin. Tanuojin nodded. His interest in this impressed her. He was curious about everything. Her gaze fell again to the ribbons of color on the bench by her hand. The rho lines made thick breaks in the loom of colors. She counted the pulses between them.

“It’s a message,” she said.

The two men swiveled their heads toward her. “What?”

“The spaces between these rho lines,” she said. “Four, nine, forty-one, thirty-six. The number of pulses between them.” She struggled to keep her voice even; she was filled with excitement. “They’re perfect squares, see?”

“Forty-one?” the technician said. He glanced at Tanuojin. “Is she crazy?”

He shook his head. “Sixteen plus twenty-five.” Pushing her away, he stooped over the film and counted dots.

The technician said, surly, “It’s a dysfunction in the transmitting laser.” He scowled down at Paula, a round-faced, smooth-skinned man, who never fought. “What does she know about spectroscopy?”

“Nothing,” Tanuojin said. “That way she doesn’t get confused by facts.” He rolled up the film and shoved it in under the edge of the bench. “You ought to write illusion serials,” he said to her. “You have a full-round imagination.” He went back to the rolling color band.

Paula retrieved the film and spread it out again. He did not want to believe it, but she did. She counted the pulses between the nine rho lines in the spectra: 4, 9, 41, 36, 13, 16, 25, 36. So there were two rho lines missing, mistakes in the mistake. She looked up through the ceiling at the stars, wondering which was Lalande.

“Akellar, I hate to keep mentioning this, but nobody else in the Chamber takes our work seriously—”

“You need money,” Tanuojin said. They crossed the complex of buildings toward the landing field. David went ahead of them and opened the hatch into Ybicket, standing on her tail.

“We’ve had to give up some very important work because we just haven’t got the equipment.”

“I’ll talk to the Prima.”

Paula stood beside the slender ship, put her hands on the lower edge of the hatch, and hoisted herself up to the opening. In the light gravity it was easy. David helped her across the narrow aisle, now vertical, between the hatch and the middle seat. Inside her helmet she could still hear the technician’s pitch. Tanuojin filled the hatchway, blocking out the faint sunlight.

“I’ll fly back,” he said to David. “You take the kick-seat.”

David wheeled around in the drive seat ahead of her. “But—”

“Do as you’re told.”

“But—Uncle—I can’t navigate in the Planet.”

“Then this is a good time for you to learn.” Tanuojin climbed into the seat with him, and David tumbled out, giving way.

“Paula—”

“Leave me out of it,” she said. She leaned forward and groped for the lifeline to attach it to her suit. David climbed down past her to the kick-seat.

When they got back to the House, Saba was sitting in her favorite chair in the front room of the Prima Suite, writing on a workboard. Paula took her coat off. “How was the Akopra?”

“Terrible.”

David came in, still warm under the friction of Tanuojin’s pedagogical sarcasms, and Tanuojin after him. Saba put the workboard down. “What did you find out?”

“The films are perfect.” Tanuojin unslung his coat. “All twenty-six of them came through, the probe worked perfectly.”

“I’ll see them when the laboratory sends them down. Have they gotten any photographs yet?”

Tanuojin shook his head. He picked up the workboard from the floor and wound back the surface to read what Saba had written. “I told them not to send the stuff down here piecemeal, to wait until everything is together. They need more money.”

“They always need more money.”

Paula stood watching them together. She saw what she should have noticed long before. Saba was gray-headed, but Tanuojin’s hair was still jet black. He looked no older than he had when she first met him, at the Nineveh, sixteen years before. He was not aging.

“Tell him about your little pink men,” Tanuojin said to her. He threw down the workboard. “Wait until you hear this,” he told Saba. “You’ll like this one.”

Melly turned and turned at the far end of the room, dancing. She held out her skirts in her hands, her head to one side. Paula stood in the doorway watching the girl play. Abruptly the Styth girl saw her and stopped.

“Go on,” Paula said. “Dance. I like it.”

Melly watched her enter the room. Paula’s favorite chair had a little step built into the base for her use. She settled herself in the chair, her back to the window. Melly said, “I am not a toy for your amusement, Mendoz’.”

“Then don’t act like a pompous little lady,” Paula said.

The girl’s face tightened up, much older when she scowled. Paula laughed. Melly was allowed to go unveiled in the suite, but not outside; Paula wondered if she had ever been outside. She wondered if Melly were pregnant yet.

“My father says I ought to be friendly with you,” Melly said. “But I don’t see why. You aren’t friendly to me.”

“I could be.”

“You stole my wedding to make into your—coronation.”

“I’m sorry. We were a little pressed.” She was reminding herself of Jefferson. Uneasily she moved around in the oversize chair.

Melly began to speak. Something she saw in the hall stopped her, and she went to the threshold and made her extravagant bow.

“Prima.”

Paula looked out into the hall. Saba was coming into the room. To Paula, he said, “I have a headache—I’m going to lie down on your bed. Make sure nobody bothers me.” Melly stood watching him expectantly. He touched her face. “Not now, baby.” He went down the hall toward Paula’s room.

Paula climbed down from her chair and ran after him. Going ahead of him into the room, she turned the heat lower and pulled the window shade closed. “What about Tanuojin?”

“He’s sick too. Go on, leave me alone.”

She went out to the corridor and shut the door. Melly was watching her from the doorway of Saba’s room. As Paula came into the hall the bride vanished into the room. Paula went back to the sitting room.

She wrote a letter to Newrose, asking for information and giving him suggestions. They wrote back and forth every three or four watches. The situation in the Middle Planets always seemed desperate. She was beginning to think that was a standing condition of life there.

Just before one bell, she went down to her room. Saba lay on her bed with his head turned away. She walked to the side of the bed. His face was smooth, without any sign of pain. She put her hand on his forehead. He was dead. He had been dead for hours.

She sat down beside him. The room was utterly still. She touched his mouth and the inside of his wrist. With her hand on him she sat still, in the quiet. Finally she went to the door to call David.

The room was so crowded Paula could not see the bed. She backed away toward the wall. Everybody was talking at once. Melly was crying, and Ketac took her away. David stood by the bed like a guard. Paula’s face felt tight and stretched. She was still surprised by the death. Tanuojin came into the room.

His hair was down over his shoulders and his back. Sleep rumpled his face. His eyes were intent on Saba. David saw him and grabbed his shirt in both hands.

“Bring him back. Bring him back.”

Paula went toward them, elbowing a way through the gaping slaves and onwatchers. His gaze never leaving Saba, Tanuojin thrust David hard away from him, but the young man clung to him, his hands fisted in Tanuojin’s shirt.

“Bring him back, you did it before—if you’re a god you can bring him back—”

Paula took him by the arm, turning him to face her. “David, stop.”

“Bring him back.” He twisted to shout at Tanuojin, his mouth open, and she slapped him with all her strength. He ran out of voice. He stared at her, round-eyed, his mouth open and empty. Ketac appeared beside her and took him out of the room. Tanuojin sat down on the edge of the bed. There was nothing he could do; she had known that as soon as she touched Saba. She drove the other people out, to leave him alone with the dead man.

Under the sweet odor of incense she could smell the rotting body. She had been sitting here a watch and would sit here two watches more, Melly beside her shedding tears like a sweat behind her veil, and Boltiko beside Melly, her mouth thin as a seam.

The incense had a woody smell, like cedar. The smoky air and the constant drumming of the rUlugongon had her half-drugged. Her aching eyes dressed each of Saba’s sons, standing around the dead man, in a shimmering cloak of light. They were in the entry to the rAkellaron House. Beyond Ketac and Dakkar the Gold Wall rose, spangled with the names of the rePriman. The people of Vribulo were filing through the right side of the double doorway, around the body on its bier, and out the left. From talk she overheard she knew many of them had come from Matuko, and some from other cities, as far away as Ponka on the far side of the Planet.

David stood near the foot of the bier, between two of his tall brothers. He looked like an old man. His cheeks glistened. He was crying again. She looked away from him, made uncomfortable by his grief, made lonely. She had never loved Saba that much. Now that he was dead her circumstances were utterly changed. Her only assets were her influence in the Middle Planets and her relationship with Tanuojin.

Tanuojin himself had been stripped by the death. The highest ranking officer in the fleet, he had no ship, since Ybix would go to Ketac. Officially he was ranked only eleventh or twelfth in the Chamber; Leno would be Prima now, who hated him. None of that would get in his way. He had enemies, but she was his only rival.

Sometime in the next watch David went out and did not come back. She was too numb to care where he went. Probably he would be better off away from the sight of his father. Melly collapsed with much exhibition, and was carried out. Paula’s eyes throbbed. She was determined to sit there until the end. The steady stream of people passed by. They moaned, or reached out to touch Saba, or put something down by the body. The bier was covered with bits of paper and grass braided into rings, mourning symbols.

She closed her eyes a moment. When she looked Tanuojin had come in. He stood by the foot of the bier. Above the neck of his shirt, a metal chain crossed his collarbone. It was Saba’s order medal; she wondered if anyone but her knew he wore it.

One bell rang. The crowd went away. The slaves shut the doors. Boltiko rose, groaning with effort, and stood over the bier. “My boy,” she said, in a low voice. She laid her palm against Saba’s cheek. “My poor boy.” Paula was beside her. The two women turned to each other, reaching out, and took each other in an embrace.

They went up to the Prima Suite. David was not there. Paula poured three fingers of Ponkan gin into a cup and drank it all. The others of the family were wandering around, even Saba’s daughters, with their children, their faces unveiled. Ketac sat in her chair, by the window.

“That’s my chair,” she said, and he moved.

The cold air coming through the window made her feel better, her head clear. Ketac slouched against the wall beside her, one foot propped on her chair.

“Who will be the Akellar now?” she said.

“Dakkar is the heir.”

“I think you’d make a better Akellar than Dakkar.”

Ketac straightened. He put his foot on the floor. “So do I.” He looked around the room. Two of his sisters came in, chattering about children.

“Can you take him?” Paula asked.

“I can try.”

“Where? Not in Matuko, that’s his ground. You’d better do it here.”

“I’m in sack shape,” he said. Two more people came into the room, and he lowered his voice. “I’ll go to Ybix. I can turn the pressure up to double and work up my strength.”

“I’ll call you when he comes here to claim his seat in the Chamber.”

“Good.”

She held her jaws together against a yawn. Junna stood just outside the door in the hall. She wondered again where David was. The bland innocence on Ketac’s face almost made her laugh. Saba had preferred him to Dakkar anyway, and obviously he had been thinking about it. He did not come virgin to this bridal. She closed her eyes.

David had disappeared into the city. She knew better than to look for him. Leno was taking over the Prima’s offices on the second floor, and his eight wives sent a slave to ask when Paula and Melly would move out of the Prima Suite. Melly was going back to Lopka, her father’s city. Paula was busy watching Dakkar and had no place to go anyway.

Tanuojin had gone back to Yekka, but every other Akellar was in Vribulo. Leno proclaimed the first session of his Primat for the eighteenth high watch after Saba was made ash. The wives’ slave brought Paula a pointed invitation to move out of the suite. That same watch, Dakkar arrived in Vribulo to claim his father’s place in the rAkellaron.

She went down to the second floor, to talk to Leno.

She could not see the door to the Prima’s office through the thick press of men around it. She wound a way through them to the open door. The waiting room was jammed. The benches were full of men, and other people stood leaning against the walls between the maps and recognition charts. At the table in the middle, Leno’s pitman argued in a loud voice with a man in a patrol uniform. She went around him to the half-glassed door in the back and knocked.

“Who is it?” Leno called. He sounded angry. She tried the latch, which was unlocked, and went into the long room.

Tanuojin was sitting on the bench before the middle window. Leno glared at her from the middle of the room. “You could wait until you’re asked.” He pulled his belt up over his stomach. Both of them were giving off a marginal reek of bad temper. Shutting the door, she crossed the room, going in between them.

“Leno,” she said, “let me stay here. You can open up the rest of the Prima Suite—there’s plenty of room.”

His lips parted with surprise. Tanuojin laughed. The Prima flung his arms out. “Here. No.” He wheeled away, his broad back to her. A dark patch of sweat showed between his shoulder blades. “Get out. I’m busy.”

“I have to have someplace to stay.” She glanced at Tanuojin. “When did you get back? I thought you were in Yekka.”

“Last watch.”

Leno loomed over her, his hands on his hips, his blunt head forward. “I told you to leave.”

“I have nowhere to go.” She raised her eyes to his face, shining with temper. He and Tanuojin had been arguing before she came in. She put that away in her mind to think about later. Her eyes on the Prima’s angry face, she said, “I suppose you’ll want Saba’s presidency?” She turned back to Tanuojin. “I’m sending Newrose a notice of Saba’s death—what about Dr. Savenia?”

Leno said, “I’m the Prima now. Why is it neither of you will admit that? You’re both insane.” He strode off across the room. The three windows across the wall let in the city racket. “You don’t belong here, Mendoz’. And the presidency of the Middle Planets goes with the office of Prima.”

“I’ll have to look that up,” she said. She scratched her nose, staring at his back. It did not work to be subtle with him. “I could go back to the Earth, I suppose. Although without me you’d certainly lose four-fifths of the Empire.”

Leno turned. Rather than look at her he faced Tanuojin. The tall man shrugged. “Well, she is the only one of us who knows anything about the Middle Planets.”

Leno’s shoulders dropped an inch. Paula went to the door. With her hand on the latch, she looked over her shoulder at the new Prima. “You don’t have to feed me, I’ll eat by myself.”

“I’m the Prima!”

“Yes, Prima. Thank you.” She went out.

The Fleet Office was in Upper Vribulo. The broad street, patched with blue grass, was lined with drinking docks and sack-houses. She passed a swinging half-door that let out a boom of noise and a rush of odors: beer, Styth, and vomit. A man slept in the high grass in the next alley. The narrow front of the Fleet Office was indistinguishable from the docks and flops around it and she walked past it twice.

The dark, deep room inside smelled of copying ink. A handprinter was clacking behind the high barrier that cut off the back of the room from the front. A line of men in fleet uniforms slacked up against the wall beside a closed door.

“Hey, I love you, let’s go next door.”

An old man with jewels in his nose came up to the barrier. Paula’s head just cleared the top rail. She said, “I want to send a message to a ship in orbit.”

“Which ship?” He leaned on the barrier, looking down at her.

“Ybix.”

“Ybix hasn’t been answering our signals since the Prima died.” He spat past her; she smelled the rich odor of laksi. “Deep sleep to him.”

“He doesn’t have to answer,” Paula said. “Just say that his mother wants him to come home.”

The old man’s mouth curled thoughtfully. “His mother.”

“Just send that message.”

“Yes, Mendoz’.”

She walked back past the Akopra. A loudspeaker on the porch announced the theater was closed to mourn the Prima. The new Off-World Market was empty. Green paper banners, the Styth mourning color, hung from the gates of the houses. She climbed the steps to the rAkellaron House and went inside.

She went in through the slaves’ entrance to the top rung of the Chamber. Her coat made her uncomfortably warm and she opened it down the front. Half the rAkellaron stood and talked and scratched and spat and bragged on the ledges above the pit. A slave scampered past her with a tray of cups. She went down the enormous steps, her skirts and the heavy skirts of her coat bunched in her hands.

Tanuojin was in his place on the second tier, his arms out straight across the rail and his head down. No one spoke to him. His own aides stayed away from him. She stood beside him. Machou was up on the high ledge, talking to Bokojin. She sat down on the hard bench. Tanuojin did not move.

Leno came down the steps. Behind him was Dakkar, with three of his men in his track. Leno went to his place on the second tier, and Dakkar continued down the steps to the pit. He looked like Saba, a black-haired, slender Saba.

“This session is open,” Leno said. “Dakkar, you are in the pit.”

Dakkar walked across the sand. “I am Dakkar, Saba’s oldest son. I’m dominant in Matuko, and I mean to take my father’s place here. Does anybody challenge my right?”

The men on the ledges canted forward to watch him. Leno stood. His mustaches hung down heavy with braid to his chest. Paula looked around the Chamber, surprised. None of the other men were standing up.

“If nobody—”

“I challenge,” Ketac said, above her. He came down the steps past her.

She got up onto her feet, her fingers tight around the rail. Several of Ybix’s crew followed him. David was not among them. Dakkar crouched. When Ketac stepped into the pit, his brother attacked him.

The rAkellaron roared. All around the rings they leaped up, bellowing. Their hot reek made her stomach heave. Ketac fell and rolled, Dakkar hanging on his back. Even through the screams of the men watching she heard the brothers’ snarls. Her heart pounded in her throat. Tanuojin towered over her, banging his hands on the rail. The sand was splattered with blood. Dakkar jammed his knee into Ketac’s spine, his hands splayed over his brother’s face, bending him backward.

“Kill him!” someone howled. “Kill him!”

Ketac reached over his shoulders. His claws hooked in Dakkar’s shirt. Tanuojin shouted so loud she flinched. Ketac dragged his brother down into the sand. He reared up and brought his elbow like a club into Dakkar’s face.

Paula let go of the rail. Ketac leaped up, panting, his shirt crusted with sand. Dakkar doubled over, one arm across his broken face. The cheers of the rAkellaron faded, cooling. Ketac held his hands over his head.

“I am the Matuko Akellar. Does anybody challenge me?”

The whole Chamber was on its feet. They let out another buoyant cheer. She was sweating from their heat. Tanuojin sat down, and the other men began to settle. Paula shifted, her heavy coat on her shoulders. Tanuojin called, “How long did it run?”

“Fifty-two seconds,” Machou called, hoarse. “He’s no Saba.”

Dakkar’s friends were stooped over him. Ketac leaned on the pit rail. Dakkar put one foot under him and pulled himself up on his friends’ shoulders. They were both bleeding, she could not see the wounds, just the red slime on their faces. Ketac spoke to Dakkar, and the taller man nodded. He hung one arm around Ketac’s neck. The rAkellaron cheered again, pleased. Paula sat down. Ketac and Dakkar climbed the steps.

Leno stood again. Again, none of the other men stood up in respect for him. The Prima said, “If nobody else has any special business—”

Tanuojin said, “She has a question.”

Leno put his hands on his belt. His head thrust forward. “Mendoz’, what do you want now?”

Paula stood up. “I’m going to need money.”

Across the pit, Bokojin shouted, “What is she doing in here, anyway? Saba is dead. She has no place here. She had no place when he was alive.”

Paula looked down at the blood-splattered sand. Three or four men shouted back and forth at each other, and Leno made no effort to order them. She said to Tanuojin, “I thought ten dollars a watch.”

“I don’t see why we should pay you. Why don’t you tax the Middle Planets for it? If you’ll be doing their work.”

“Because they don’t need me,” she said. “And you do.”

Bokojin was leaning forward over the rail. “This makes me long for the old times when a man’s widows burned with him.”

A quarter of the round away, another voice rose, clear and mild. “It makes me long for the old times when the servants of the Empire were treated with respect.”

“Hear,” someone muttered, behind her.

“Are you challenging me, Saturn?” Bokojin roared. He and Melleno’s son Mehma traded jibes.

“Every one of you gets some revenues from the Middle Planets,” she said to Tanuojin. Down the ring, Leno was playing with his mustaches, his eyes on them. “You need me to keep the arrangements going. In fact, make it twelve dollars a watch.”

Tanuojin stood up, and all the other men rose at once to their feet. Bokojin’s voice cut off. Tanuojin said, “Give her enough to live on. Eight hundred a turn. Until someone else can take over her work with the slave-worlds.”

Leno said, “Done.” Tanuojin sat down, and the rest went back to their seats. They talked of other business. Paula slid down the bench to the steps and climbed out of the pit.

Ybix’s crew was carousing along the arcade in front of the Barn. She went through them, ducking a swinging arm. Someone shouted her name.

“Mendoz’. Have a drink.” Ketac’s helmsman poked a jar into her face. While she was pretending to drink he whirled her around again, her skirts flying out. There was a burst of thunderous laughter all around her. She reached the ground, dizzy.

“Mendoz’! Kib, pass her over here.”

Kib snatched for her. She dodged around behind him to the door into the Matuko office.

A washtub of beer stood on the desk, and two men had their faces in it. Dakkar slumped in the chair before the window. She thought of Pedasen. Dakkar’s face was striped with blood. He looked half-drunk and very gloomy. Probably he had forgotten the slave he had killed. That warmed the revenge, the years she had waited to pay Dakkar back. She went through the file room, where three men were pouring beer and minji sauce over two girls from Colorado’s.

Even through the door she could hear the men shouting in the little back room where the bed was. She let herself in among them. Half a dozen of his crew surrounded Ketac in a ring. Small as she was, she stood overlooked behind them. At the end of their rhythmic bellow of a cheer they poured a bucket of beer over the new Akellar’s head.

“Paula.” Dripping, he pulled her in among them by the arm and put a mug into her hand. “Drink to me. What did you think? It was a great fight, wasn’t it.”

“I don’t know anything about fighting.” She was standing in a puddle of beer. She moved toward the window. His hand on her arm, Ketac followed her out of the circle of men. Beer dripped from his mustaches and his shirt.

“Did you see that cross-block? Papa would have liked that.”

“Yes, I saw.” She looked out the window. In the street an old man with a shawl over his head was straining to see through the next window into the party. Ketac lifted his head and shouted to his men to leave.

“I don’t want to interrupt your good time,” she said.

He took a towel from a bin in the wall and scrubbed vigorously at his wet hair and face. “My good time? I couldn’t have done it without your help. Why did you help me?”

“I like you,” she said.

“You went to some trouble to put me in your debt.”

“I need someone to stand up for me in the Chamber,” she said.

“You need a husband,” he said. He hung the towel over his shoulder.

“Not formally.”

“Do I get what husbands get?”

She had to smile at him. She said, “Go lock the door.”

When she got back to the Prima Suite, in the low watch, David was in her sitting room. She was glad to see him, but she was used to hiding her feelings from him. She took her coat off and hung it over the arm of her chair.

“Where have you been?”

“Thinking.” He came up the room toward her. His hair hung in a wild shag around his shoulders. “Getting drunk. Getting loaded. I—” He made a little gesture with one hand. His long eyes made him look belligerent. He said, “I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry. What for?” He smelled awful. He had not been out of his clothes since the funeral.

“I’ve spent my whole life fighting over things I can’t change. Maybe I shouldn’t even have wanted them changed.” He made that same motion with his hand, palm up. Asking for something. “So I’m sorry.”

She grunted, her eyes following his gesture. To keep from touching him she slid her hands behind her back. “Did you come on this enlightenment in a junk-gun? I wish you’d told me where you were—you could have helped me.”

“Helped you. What—” He straightened up to respect, his arms at his sides, looking beyond her. Leno tramped into the room.

The new Prima strode up to her, his face knotted in a scowl. “You and Tanuojin set me up, didn’t you?” He glanced at David. “Stand off, little boy, the war is over.”

Paula said, “Did anything else happen in the session?”

“Nothing important to you. Yekka wants to see you.”

She went to her chair, before the window, watching her son. He was scraping the edge of his boot against the floor. His mustaches were beginning to droop over. She wondered what had happened to him to make him like her. Leno said sharply, “He wants to see you now.”

“I’m busy now,” she said. She leaned on the carved arm of the chair. “Jesus, Leno, aren’t you high-born for a messenger boy?”

He bristled up, his neck swelling. “To hell with you.” He marched out, and the door slammed behind him hard.

David was frowning at her. “Mother, he’s the Prima.”

“He isn’t my Prima. I’m my Prima. Come have dinner with me.”

He was already moving toward the door. “No. I have something else to do. Can I use your room to clean up?”

“You can live here. Nobody is using your room.” She smiled at him. “I’m glad you’re back, David.”

“So am I, Mother.”

While she was walking up the street toward Colorado’s, she heard her name called behind her. She stopped and looked back. Marus was jogging down the curved street after her. He veered around a pushcart and reached her, breathing hard.

“The Akellar wants you.”

“Later. I’m hungry.” She walked off up the street.

“He says it’s about David Mendoza.”

She went back to him. “What about David?”

“I don’t know. The Akellar said I should tell you that.”

She hurried back toward the end of the city. On either side of the street were buildings marked to be torn down; she heard children playing in them. They reached the Barn and she went into Tanuojin’s office.

David was not there. Tanuojin was sitting at the desk in the front office recording a book tape, a set of earphones over his head. He gestured to Marus to leave. She leaned on the desk, impatient. He turned a switch on the recorder and another on the left earcup.

“What is this about David?” she said.

“Nothing. That was the best way to get you here. I have to talk to you.”

Her shoulders sank an inch. For a moment, speechless, she could only stare at him. He took off the headset and put it on the desk. She went out of the office.

He came after her. “I have a tax I want you to arrange in the Middle Planets. Newrose will accept it if it comes from you.”

“Get away from me.” She was walking as fast as she could, even though there was no way to outrun him. She left the arcade and turned into the street past Colorado’s, and he steered her toward the drinking dock. She gave up trying to go anywhere else and went into the vast dark room.

It was all but empty. The blue lights were lit along the pipe-wall and a slave on a ladder was swabbing out a barrel with a mop. Two more slaves raked off the sand. She went into the brightest corner and sat down.

“No,” she said to Tanuojin. A slave hovered nearby; she sent him for her meal.

“It’s very simple,” he said. “Listen to me before you refuse.”

The slave brought her a split dish of beans and leaf, Colorado’s staple lunch. She broke the piece of bread in half. “No. I don’t like taxes, and I don’t work in the Middle Planets for your benefit.” She used a piece of bread to shovel up the beans.

He dropped on one knee beside her. “I need that money.”

The slave who had served her was back. “Mendoz’, Kuuba wants to know if this goes on Matuko’s bill.”

“Matuko.” She swallowed a mouthful. “Why should Ketac pay my bills?”

“Uuh—” The slave touched his upper lip with his tongue. His gaze slid toward Tanuojin.

“You put it on my bill,” she said. “You put everything I buy on my bill.” The beans were syrupy with red sauce. She ate the soaked bread. Tanuojin leaned over her.

“Don’t make me angry, Paula.”

“Tsk.”

“You don’t really think Ketac can take me.”

The salad was oily. She ate the crunchy leaf. “Are you going into the pit again? Show off your peculiar talents in front of everybody?” She looked into his face. “Saba is dead now, you’re all alone.”

His white eyes dilated, round as targets. She saw he was still afraid of the mob. When he stood up, his kneejoint cracked.

“You remember I said once I’d break you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Not in those words.” She put the dish down. Her fingers were greasy and she wiped them on the sand. Tanuojin started to speak and turned.

David was coming into the great empty drinking dock. He crossed the deep sand toward them. He had washed and changed his clothes, and his long thick hair hung untied down past his shoulders. He reached Tanuojin.

“Uncle, I apologize for what I said. I—”

“I don’t care about your diseased half-breed raving,” Tanuojin said. Fish-lean, he stood over David by sixteen inches. He said, “You’re as bad as your slut-mother. You’re white-hearted.”

The slaves leaned on their rakes watching them. The kitchen master put his head out the doorway. Tanuojin pointed at Paula. “Do you know what she’s been doing? Saba wasn’t cool ash before she was turning up her heels for Ketac at a drunken party.”

“Ketac.”

David’s jaw set tight. He flung her a nasty look. “You Creep,” he said to Tanuojin, “I’m surprised your tongue hasn’t rotted away.”

The tall man gave off a spurt of rage. Both hands hooked in David’s hair. “Club it up!” David clawed at him, and Tanuojin swung him around by the hair and dragged him to the door. “It’s not just for looks, you see, no matter what you anarchists think.” He slung David out the door.

The slaves were motionless, rapt. The man on the ladder had dropped his mop. Tanuojin walked back toward Paula, picking clumps of David’s hair off his hands. “You slut. You won’t even fight for your own cub.”

“He does well enough by himself, doesn’t he?” She circled past him toward the door. “Not so much rotted, I think, as pickled.” She laughed and went off to the door.

In the next watch, Ketac, Dakkar, and Junna ambushed David on the plain of the House and clubbed him. A crowd gathered to watch. Paula came out on the second-story balcony. David fought them. They wrestled him down on his knees and Ketac wrenched his hands in front of him to give him the oath.

Paula glanced behind her. Tanuojin had come out onto the balcony.

“Did you put them up to this?” she said.

“That’s right.”

David burst up, his hair flying, and Junna sprawled across the concrete. The crowd cheered, boisterous. Ketac and Dakkar trapped David between them. Ketac was laughing. They forced David down on the pavement.

Tanuojin said, “He’s too stupid to know when he’s beaten.”

Ketac had David’s hands stretched out before him. Junna pinned him down by the shoulders, and Dakkar leaned past him to knot David’s hair into the club. Ketac shouted the oath.

“Who is the man?”

“Styth,” the crowd roared. David made no sound.

“Which is the way?”

“The Sun!”

“Keep faith!” Ketac milled his brother across the cheek with his open hand. Paula twitched.

David bounced onto his feet. His brothers danced away from him, teasing him; Ketac clapped his hands under David’s nose. Paula went indoors.

She was sitting on her bed in her room writing to Newrose, and Tanuojin came into the room. She closed her notebook. There was a high-backed chair against the wall by the chest, which he took and turned toward her and sat on. His long legs bent like a spider’s.

“Paula,” he said. “You are letting yourself in for this. I—”

“Wait. Let me. You are about to tell me how fond you are of me, and you don’t want to hurt me or David, but for the good of the Empire…” She stood up on her bed and swung the shutter closed over the window, cutting off the noise of the city. “Not with me, Tanuojin.”

“Get me that money.”

She sat down cross-legged on the bed again. She had the feeling if she took her eyes off him he would change to another form: a poison mist.

“You’re in debt already,” he said, reasonable. “Leno wants you to leave. You’ll have to come to me sometime. Why get me angry?”

“It’s good exercise.” Ketac had just bought a house in Upper Vribulo. She could live there. She leaned against the wall behind her and folded her arms over her chest.

“You’ll regret it.” His deep voice rasped; he was beginning to lose his temper. “And you can’t live with Ketac. It’s already the ripest scandal in Vribulo. You’re twice his age.”

She laughed. “Well, I’m remarkably preserved.” There was a tap on the door, and she lifted her voice. “Yes?”

David came in behind Tanuojin. His knotted hair was already falling loose. He said, “Mother, I need money.” His slanted brown eyes flicked at Tanuojin, sitting with his back to him. “Hello, Uncle Tajin.”

“Do you want work?” Tanuojin said. But he was watching Paula.

“What?”

She said, “You can work for me.”

“What would you pay him with?” Tanuojin said. His hands slid under his belt. He never looked at David. “Vida, I need a pilot. I’m buying Ybicket.”

“Ybicket,” David said. He came two steps into the middle of the room, circling Tanuojin’s chair to face him, and she knew she had lost. “Where is she now? How much are you paying for her?”

“I still owe Ketac four million dollars of it, which I won’t have until your mother starts to cooperate. The ship’s in Matuko. Can you go get her?”

David stuck his open hand out. “I need bus money.”

“Take Junna to navigate for you.” Tanuojin gave him credit. Paula sat, watching them, silent. His hair was too fine to stay clubbed. The side of his face was bruised. Tanuojin said, “Dock her in the number 4-A slip in the mid-city gate. Report to Marus when you’re done.”

“I’ll bring you something from Matuko,” David said to her. He left.

“That’s the anarchist in him,” Tanuojin said. “No loyalty.”

“He’s Saba’s son too.” Her voice sounded rough. She coughed to disguise it. Useless.

“I warned you,” he said.

Tanuojin went to Yekka. Ketac took her to the Akopra. During the interval between the first two dances, Bokojin came into the box. Ketac had obviously expected him; they stood talking. Paula sat with her back to them, sipping kakine. They agreed to meet sometime indefinitely later and the Illini Akellar went out.

The Vribulo company performed three more short dances, two old, and one experimental. New rAkopran were rare and she watched this one with attention. It bored Ketac, who played with her hand, talked to her, and tried to get her to caress him.

“Come to my house,” he said, when they were leaving the theater.

“Not if Bokojin is going to be there.”

They went across the lobby, through little knots of people dressed splendidly in long brocaded shirts, in dresses trimmed with metal lace. Ketac took a firm grip on her arm. “How do you know Bokojin is going to be there?”

“You agreed to meet him, don’t you remember? Just two hours ago.” She went ahead of him out the door. The long blue paper banners hanging on the eave of the porch advertised the next cycle. The street was thick with the people just out of the theater.

“He won’t stay long,” Ketac said.

“I hate him. Ask him what he thinks of me. I’ll see you in the middle watch.” She pulled her arm out of his grip, and he let her go. She went down the street toward the corner.

There, in the midst of the crowd, she turned and looked back. Ketac was going off in the opposite direction, toward his house. She trotted after him through the swarming traffic and followed him across the city, staying about forty feet behind him. He was easy to keep in sight, taller than the crowd, his black hair tied sleek among the shaggier Vribulit heads of the other men. Whenever his long stride took him to the limit of her vision, she broke into a run to catch up. He led her through the edge of the slums by the lake and down the Steep Street, cut into broad steps. At the foot of the hill he went through a gate in the wall of his new house. Paula circled around the corner into the next block, ran down the alley, and climbed onto the recycling bin and dropped over the fence into the yard.

The house was built in a hollow square, one room thick all around. In front of each of the windows was a trellis covered with vines, to keep the place private. She crawled between the wall and the vine screen over Ketac’s bedroom window. The skirt of the black dress caught on a strut of the trellis and ripped.

Ketac’s room seemed empty. She reached in across the deep sill and dragged herself into the room. The torn skirt of the dress tangled in her legs. She got up, pulling the dress off; she wore a pair of overalls under it against the cold.

The bed was on a bench built out from the wall on her left. A blue curtain hung from the ceiling hid it. She looked in to make sure it was empty and tossed the ruined dress onto the pillow. Crossing to the door, she slid it open an inch.

All the rooms opened onto a circular inner yard. Ketac liked to spend his time there, and he was there now, standing at the far end beside the bilyobio tree reading a piece of paper. She pressed her eye against the crack in the door. A slave came from one of the eight rooms ringing the yard and spoke to him, and Ketac nodded. Paula watched him cross the yard toward her. He ambled, looking around him with a proprietor’s critical eye, moving a chair and stooping to fuss with a loose flag in the neat grass-seamed pavement. Bokojin came out of the house.

Paula sucked on the inside of her cheek. They met with the little greeting ceremony of their way of life, jibing, punching each other, and finally shaking hands and sitting down. Bokojin sat facing her, his feet primly together.

“Where is she?”

“I let her go back to the House.”

“You what?”

“I couldn’t very well drag her off in the middle of the street. She doesn’t like you. She said she wouldn’t—”

A slave brought them a tray with cups and a jug. Bokojin reached for one. Peevish, he said, “Damn it, I left her to you because you said you could—”

“Why are you so high?” Ketac said. He waved the slave away. “I’ll handle my mother. You handle Tanuojin.”

Paula straightened away from the door and rubbed her eye. She wondered if they were planning a gambit in the Chamber or something more direct. Bokojin said, stiff, “I wish you wouldn’t call her your mother.”

Ketac laughed. “She’ll do anything I say. Don’t worry about her.” He slung one leg over the arm of his chair. “How is Machou?”

“Drunk. How is he ever? When we’ve done this, we should get rid of him. He’s useless.” Bokojin got up, a cup in his hand, and sauntered around the yard, expansive. “The main thing is to put the rAkellaron in order, the way things are supposed to be.”

There was a crash inside the house on the far side of the yard. Paula put her face against the slit in the door to see better. Ketac stood and Bokojin’s head turned. The door of the far side of the yard flew open.

“Akellar—” A man ran two steps out toward them and pitched forward on his face. Six inches of a throw-stick thrust out of his back between his shoulder blades.

Bokojin gave a loud cry. Three men rushed into the yard. The man leading was Marus, and he had a blowgun in his hand.

Bokojin put his fingers to his mouth and whistled. Ketac took two steps sideways, into the open away from the chairs.

“What is this?”

“You’re under arrest,” Marus said. He looked from Ketac to Bokojin. Two more of his men came into the yard.

Ketac backed toward the door where Paula watched. “What for?”

Bokojin broke for the door he had entered through, and Ketac sprinted toward Paula. She backed in a rush to the window. In the yard someone shouted. Bokojin whistled again. She climbed over the window sill down into the narrow space between the house and the vinework.

Ketac’s slaves clogged the area around the front gate. She went close enough to see through the main door into the house. That room swarmed with armed men. In their midst half a dozen patrolmen stood with their belts strapping their arms down. Someone shouted, “The Akellar is dead!” The slaves around her wailed in chorus. Paula elbowed and wiggled a way through to the gate onto the street. It was shut, and two men stood guard over it, leaning against it. Behind her there was a splintering crash.

One of the gate guards saw her. He grabbed the other man and pointed at her. She slid back among the slaves.

“The Mendoz’! Here she is—”

“Take her,” Marus roared, from the house. “She’s under arrest too.”

Paula went back around the house. Before she reached the backyard she smelled smoke. When she ran around the corner of the building, a fire was burning up the vine screen over Ketac’s bedroom window. Men shouted in the room behind it. They were trying to push the blazing trellis away with poles. Ketac was climbing over the wall. In the street a watchman yelled. Everybody chased Ketac. Paula went over the wall and ran the other way.

She took the shortest way back toward the House, cutting through the fields of blue grass along the lake shore. The grass was full of snakes and stinging beetles and she watched her feet. She trotted past a row of little boats drawn up on the shore. A bell began to ring.

When she reached the street again, people filled it, standing in tight groups, although it was deep in the low watch. Several more bells were ringing, all over the city, out of time. A woman leaned out of a tenement window over Paula’s head.

“What’s going on?”

“The Akellar is dead!”

All around her people screamed and cried, their voices drowning the bells. Which Akellar? They thought it was Machou. Paula slowed to a walk, her hand pressed to a stitch in her ribs. The bells clanged steadily from one end of Vribulo to the other. She turned into the street that ran past Colorado’s. People flooded out of a shop. Each carried a crystal lamp. The last to emerge was the shopman, who shut his door and locked it and rolled the shutter down over it. In spite of her fatigue she began to run again. She reached the steps of the House and climbed them, panting. As she reached the plain she noticed that the light was fading. She stopped and looked out across the city. All over Vribulo dark was falling.

She shivered in the deepening cold. If she stayed here she would die, but there was no place to go. The House was deserted. On the stairs she saw no other person, no trace of other people, not even a slave. By the time she reached the Prima Suite, she could see nothing at all. Black night had come. She groped her way to the door. Her memory took her down the hall to her room.

From her window, she could see flecks of light: fires, and the pinpricks of crystal lamps. The bells rang in a clamor, hundreds of bells. Far away a siren screamed, and a mob let up its many-throated roar. The war had reached Vribulo.

Behind her the door opened. She sprang away from the window into the concealing dark. “Mendoz’,” Leno said. “You’re under arrest.”

“What for?”

A hand closed on her arm. “Don’t argue with us. We have to get out of here before the gate closes. Mehma—”

“I have her,” said the Saturn Akellar, on her other side.

“Wait,” Paula said.

Roughly Leno shook her arm. “Don’t argue with me.”

“I want my flute.” She wrenched her arm in his hold. He let her go, and she went back to her bed to find her flute.

The city gate was locked. She stood shivering with Mehma in the dark while Leno went off to find someone to open it. In the next street a building was burning, and cinders and glowing embers showered down around her. She wrapped her arms around herself.

“What am I under arrest for?” She could not see Mehma beside her. His mild voice came from over her head.

“I guess because Tanuojin wants you in Yekka.”

“Tanuojin,” she said. “I thought so.”

The building directly opposite them exploded into a roar of flame. The ground bucked under their feet. Leno rushed up through the dark red glow. “Come on. This is bad and getting worse.” He had a key and he struggled with the lock on the gate. The ground was pitching up and down. Paula lost her balance. Mehma caught her. They hurried into the terminal. Mehma left them in the lane between the launching tubes. She went after Leno to the last tube, where his sidecraft waited.