Floating Worlds

YBIX Watch logs H11, 523—L11, 674

The hatch clanged open over her head. Paula reached up and drew herself through into a long silver tunnel. She bumped into the soft wall. The light was dim as twilight. She floated in the cold air, helpless. The Akellar shot up through the hatch. In mid-air he twisted around head-first like a fish and went the other way along the corridor.

“Come on.”

She followed him, pushing herself along the yielding wall. On one wall was a double-barreled black arrow pointing the way she had come, and on the other a white arrow pointing the way she was going. In the free fall, without gravity to help her, she could hardly move. They passed a round hatchway marked with a black symbol. The corridor veered upward. They came to another tube, twisting away like a soft metallic hose, marked with double red stripes. The Akellar stopped and she bumped into him and knocked him down the corridor.

He came back toward her; he moved so fast she could not see how he did it. “You’ll learn. There’s a kind of a knack, it’s nothing like walking.” He went into the red corridor.

She struggled after him, banging into the walls. The surface was slippery. She began to shiver in the cold. Ahead, Saba had stopped to open a hatch. She flung her arms out, trying to stop, and ran into him again.

“You’ll learn.” He pushed her head-first through the hatch. “Just keep trying.”

The room beyond was oval. Two lines of bulbous monitor screens dimpled the wall below her. She drifted to the side of the room. A handle stuck out of the wall. When she pulled on it she pulled herself into the wall. The Akellar turned over in mid-air. He flicked up a switch below a round screen near the monitors. She saw that he braced himself with the other hand.

“Bridge,” he said.

“Yes, Akellar,” a voice said through the screen. She thought it was Sril’s.

“I’m inboard. What’s our course?”

“Orbiting Luna at thirteen hundred miles, belt plus 2 ellipse, making ninety-three leagues. Our attitude is 0-0-2. Perimeter clear. The whole crew is inboard.” It was Sril. She put her feet against the soft wall and pulled on the handle.

“Turn it,” Saba said.

She turned herself slowly around by the handle. He said, “What’s the watch?”

“High watch, Akellar,” Sril said.

With one hand she held her body still against the wall. The handle was stiff and took all her strength to open. It clicked.

“Ah.” She pushed herself back from the wall, and a long hatchway opened up before her. The space was covered in heavy white rubber, like a membrane. The Akellar was talking to Sril. She stuck her arm into the pleated rubber. It gave way and fit around her arm. Suddenly it gushed cold water over her hand and wrist. She lunged away, startled.

“That’s a wetroom,” he said. “That’s where you wash.”

Her sleeve was sodden. She turned around, drifting, and he came up to her. They were face to face; she was eye-level with him. She pulled his floating mustaches down.

“Are you cold?”

He went smoothly away past the hatch. In the double row of monitors on the wall, the other Styths floated in other silvery rooms, like fish in tanks. She watched him pull open a door in the wall. He used his foot to brace himself; when he put his hand on the wall to hold the door open, he dug his claws into the fabric. In the compartment in the wall her satchel floated above her suitcase. Straps held them fast. She took the satchel out.

She struggled with the buckles, and he started to help her. “No. I’ll do it.” She held the satchel between her knees. He went off. The half-light bothered her eyes. She opened the satchel and took out her jacket.

“I’ll teach you to speak Styth,” he said. He peeled off his clothes and stuffed them into a hole in the wall.

“I speak it better than you think. I understand everything you say.” To prove it she spoke Styth. He was pulling on a suit of heavy gray overalls; he turned toward her, surprise on his face. She closed the satchel again and tried to take it back to the compartment. It was easier to move herself around by holding on to the satchel than to move the satchel. The speaker in the wall clicked.

“Yes,” Saba said.

“Akellar, there are three Lunar Army hammerheads coming up on our perimeter.”

“I’ll be right there. Call Tanuojin. Saba.”

She maneuvered the satchel into the compartment and strapped it down. Below her suitcase was the box of toys and the foam shell of the illusion helmet. If the trip turned boring she could always take that out. Saba came up behind her.

“Why did you lie to me?”

“I didn’t lie to you.”

“You told me you couldn’t speak Styth.” He was getting angry. She moved away from him, one hand on the wall.

“I didn’t tell you that, you decided that.”

He fastened up the front of his overalls. On the forearms of his sleeves were five diagonal stripes. He turned away from her; there was a black three-pointed star on his back. It was a uniform. Her hackles rose.

He said, “Did you hear what he just said? About the Lunar Army?”

“Yes.”

“What do you know about that?”

“Nothing.”

“If you’re lying to me again—”

“I’m not. I don’t know what’s—” She sucked in her breath, thinking of Dick Bunker’s scan. “Or maybe I do.”

“What?” He lunged at her, his arms spread. She floundered in the air. The cold half-light confused her. He shouted at her, “What are you trying to do to me?”

“Not me, Dick Bunker. He tried to get me to bring a sensor in with me.” She put her hand out to him. “Why else would the Lunar ships show up now? We must have brought something in with us.”

His face clenched tight. “What? Where is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You lie.”

“I don’t know.” She fought to keep her voice steady. He wheeled away to the wall speaker; now it was over their heads.

“Bridge.”

“Yes, Akellar.”

“Send Tanuojin to my trap. Where are the hammerheads?”

“One on either wing and one behind us, Akellar. They’re matching our course and speed.”

She rubbed her hands together. Bunker could have hidden something in her bag during that uncharacteristic apology. If she had brought it on, the Styths would probably kill her. She went back to the compartment and took the satchel out again.

“If you’re lying to me, so help me, I’ll break everything in your body.”

Behind the satchel was the illusion helmet in its protective coat of foam. She pushed the bag out of the way and took out the helmet. She looked around for a knife or clipper to cut the foam. He took the white ball from her. His claws sank into the foam and he tore it in half. Something sealed into the casing broke with a ping.

Saba growled in his chest. He ripped at the shard of foam, pulling out yards of thin plastic wire. The crumbs of foam sailed off thick as snow. The hatch burst open. Tanuojin came in, sinuous as rope in the free fall. On the sleeves of his overalls he wore one less stripe than Saba.

“Look at this,” Saba said. He thrust a handful of looped wire at her. “What is it?” Tanuojin snatched it away from him.

“It’s a sensor.” His yellow eyes aimed at her. “I told you she’s a spy.”

She scrambled back away from them. The slick soft walls glinted in the low light. Her heart banged in the pit of her throat. She looked at Saba.

“Where did you have that wrapped up?”

“At the Committee office.”

Tanuojin’s head snapped around. “You said she didn’t speak Styth.”

“I don’t think she had anything to do with this.”

Paula slid along the wall. Tanuojin’s lips pulled back from his teeth. “I do.” He struck at her, backhanded. When she tried awkwardly to avoid him she ran herself into his stroke.

She gasped. Saba thrust in between them. Her jacket was in ribbons from sleeve to sleeve. She saw a cloud of fine red bubbles floating out before her. Her chest began to burn. She clenched her teeth at the swelling hot pain. Saba pulled her into the curve of his arm.

“Look what you did to her.”

“I didn’t hit her that hard.”

“She’s not Styth. She’ll die. Heal her.”

“Saba, she’s just a nigger.”

“Heal her!”

She panted. The long gashes down her breast hurt when she breathed. Tanuojin came toward her. She backed away from him. Numb, she fought to stay conscious.

“Hold her hands, or she’ll scratch my eyes out.”

Saba caught her wrists. He said, “Be good, Paula.” The pain made her sob.

“This won’t hurt,” Tanuojin said. He put his hands flat to her torn skin.

At his touch she felt nothing, not even the cold. She gulped a deep breath. Saba held her tight against him. Tanuojin moved away from them. His hands left her. Her breast began to throb. Saba let go of her. She curled forward. Four long scabbed wounds ran like seams across her left breast and her stomach. They looked days old. She touched the scabs and they peeled off, the wounds healed in pale new flesh.

“Let me see.” Saba’s fingers slid through the shredded jacket. Tanuojin went out. She flinched from the touch on her skin. “He did it,” he said to himself.

She pulled his hand out of her clothes. “What did he do?”

“Don’t tell anybody.” He took her by the arms and looked her in the face. “Don’t talk about it to anybody, do you hear me?”

She nodded. Her numbed mind refused to work. What had he done? She was cold; her teeth began to chatter.

“I have to go to the bridge.” He took her by the chin. “Don’t ever lie to me again.” Taking the sensor wire with him, he went out the hatch.

She hung suspended in the air. The blood and scraps of foam drifted around her in clouds. Slowly they were sucked into the filters in the wall and the air cleared. As the evidence disappeared her belief in what had happened disappeared. The Creep. She had paid no attention to that. The cold drove her to the effort of moving. She wrestled her suitcase out of the compartment and pulled out a shirt and a heavy sweater.

In the back of the compartment was the square box of toys for Saba’s children. She took it out and used a nail file from her bag to hack open the foam wrapper. There were two more wires strung through the white plastic. One had a cube on the end the size of her thumb. She floundered around the room to the little wire mesh speaker and pushed the lever beside it and ran herself head-first into the wall.

She recoiled. Tears of frustration filled her eyes. She felt as if she were stuck in a pocket, in a prison. Her mind was jammed. She forced herself to relax. This place was strange because she did not know it; when she knew it she would understand. She put one hand on the wall and the other hand on the speaker lever and pushed it up.

“Bridge,” she said.

A startled Styth voice said, “Who’s this?”

“Tell Saba I found another one and a transmitter.” She pulled the lever down again.

She did not know how to change her clothes without gravity. Her arms were too short. While she stuffed her legs into trousers she floated around the room. Every motion pushed her in a new direction. She put the shirt on over her head and fought with the sleeves. The hatch wheel clicked over.

She turned her head, and her whole body turned. Saba came feet-first into the hatch, coiled around in mid-air, and came down beside her. She pointed to the compartment door. She had tied the wires to the handle. He untangled them. She put another pair of trousers on, struggling with the legs.

Tanuojin came through the hatch. She stopped what she was doing. He pretended not to see her and went to his lyo. Floating over their heads, she straightened the legs of her trousers.

“Look at this,” Saba said. “Have you ever seen anything like this? This wire in here must be some kind of recorder.”

“We have to get it off the ship.”

“We have to get the ship away from here.”

Tanuojin wrapped the wire around his hands and tried to break it. “Do you think it’s talking to those hammerheads?” He yanked the wire so hard the plastic hummed.

“She said—” Saba looked up over his head at her. “You said there was a transmitter.”

She scrambled down toward him and took hold of the cube on the end of the wire. “This.”

He turned the cube over in his claws. His head rose, and his body drifted up past her, following. “What about our supplies?” he said to Tanuojin.

“The package is ready, it’s on the lighter, the lighter is on the far side of the Planet.”

“Shit.”

“We need the package. We’re red-lined on oxygen and water.” Tanuojin glanced at her. His mustaches curved back over his shoulders. “The lighter isn’t due in this sector for six hours.”

Saba rubbed his jaw. He was studying the little transmitter. “Call them and see it we can pick it up.”

“I did. They’ll put the package on a towsled, we can pick it up any time.”

“Good. I’ll take Ybicsa. You stay here and keep Gordon busy and those ships away from us.” Saba took the other man by the arm. They turned together in a circle, orbiting each other. “Convert him.”

Tanuojin produced a nasty thin fish-smile. “If you say so. What about her?”

Saba went to the hatch. “Leave her alone.” He cranked the wheel over. Paula struggled after him. She banged into the wall and rolled helplessly over. When she dragged herself out the hatch to the corridor, he was disappearing around the bend.

“Saba, wait.”

He turned back toward her, his arms spread out, sculling. She pushed herself along the wall to him.

“Where are you going?”

He towed her by the arm around the curve. “I’m taking the sidecraft to pick up our supplies. What’s the matter—are you afraid of him? Think you’re a little out of your range?” They went out to the corridor of the black and white arrows and down it a few yards to another tunnel. This was banded in blue stripes. He pushed her ahead of him down to a closed hatchway and banged on it with his fist, holding himself still against the wall with his free hand. “Ketac!”

Inside the hatch, a voice called, “Not here.”

“Go find him, send him to the docking chamber.” The Akellar shoved her ahead of him back to the arrow tunnel and they went down along the black arrow. She fisted her hand in his sleeve.

“I didn’t know about that—the sensors.”

“I believe you.” He wheeled around her, stopping them both, and reached up over his head to a hatch. “You see this light?” He tapped a bulb in the oblong rim of the port. “When that flashes, this hatch has to be sealed, or the dark will come in faster than we can stop it.” His free hand was flexed in the soft wall by his head. He pulled the hatch down.

She rose into a long chamber. A small needle-nosed spaceship filled it from wall to wall, anchored by struts in a wheel around its waist. She went along its pale metal side. On the nose cone was a three-pointed star and four rows of Styth lettering. She put her hand on the cold hull. Saba was folding back the accordion door of a locker in the wall. The space within was hung with limp black headless bodies. She went up to him.

“Are you going alone?”

“Ketac is coming with me.” He took a suit out of the rack. She picked up the sleeve in her hand. The fabric was slightly greasy. Five yellow stripes decorated the forearm of the sleeve. The suit opened down the front. He doubled up to put his feet into the legs. The hatch banged open. Ketac came in, his hair streaming behind him.

“Put your suit on,” Saba told him. “We’re taking Ybicsa over to the dark side of this rock, and we might run into the Lunar Army on the way.”

“Yes, sir.” Ketac gave off a burst of hot copper. She watched him reach into the rack of suits. Saba was poking his arms into the sleeves of the suit.

“We’ll launch hard, run toward the Earth to pick up some speed, and swing back on the polar axial. All right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Paula turned toward the hatch. Her face was cold.

“Do you remember how to get back to my trap?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

“Stay there. If Tanuojin gives you an order, do it.”

“Why?”

“Because I told you to.” Foreshortened below her, he looked all head and shoulders. He thrust a pair of gloves under a strap on his sleeve. She went out the hatch. When she shut it, the bulb on the rim began to flash red. She turned the wheel as far as it would go. The corridor was warmer and darker than the chamber she had just left. She wandered along, kicking and flapping her arms around and crashing into the wall. Somewhere behind her a bodyless voice said, “Kobboz, to the bridge.” A round hatch popped open and a Styth in overalls dove out. He rolled over.

“Mendoz’.” It was Sril. He came up to her, smiling wide. In the Common Speech, he said, “Now you come to our world.”

“I speak Styth.” She looked into the room he had just left. “What’s this?”

“The galley. Are you hungry? I’ll show you.” He took her by the arm and pushed her into the narrow little room. The walls were covered with ring-pulls and levers. There was just enough room for the two of them, side by side. He flipped down a lever in front of her nose and the slot below it tongued out a clear packet with a big red tablet inside.

“Not like your food,” he said. “They say I should have gone to the Earth instead of Mars, the food was even better.” He pulled down another lever and a tube of water came out of the wall. She put the red tablet into her mouth. It tasted like raw starch. He ripped the top off the tube of water for her, solicitous. “Do you like Ybix?”

“I haven’t seen very much. Is there much to see?” The water tasted gluey. Tanuojin had said they were low on water. “Maybe I shouldn’t drink it all.”

“There’s no way to put it back. You speak good Styth. I thought you probably did, back on Mars, you always knew what I was talking about. I—”

A voice came out of the wall over their heads. “Sril, to the bridge.”

“Later.” He touched her arm and went out. She drank the rest of the water. He had been friendly, and she liked him; she began to feel better. The rings in the wall pulled out flat drawers of knives and tools. She went out to the corridor again. Two men passed her, giving her curious sideways looks. Each of the hatches she passed was marked with a symbol in red. The living space was fitted into the crevices between the giant crystal systems that ran the ship, and every few feet the corridor twisted like a rabbit hole. Like a Mylar wormhole. She was learning to move, but she still could not stop very well, and she ran into a man coming the other way along the tunnel.

He lunged at her. She did not know him; she dodged out of his way, but he got her by the sleeve and towed her into a branch corridor. She looked around for a way to escape. He spun a wheel over and stuffed her in through a hatch.

She tumbled into a huge hollow ball. The bridge. The curved wall was solid with the glass faces of instruments and decks strung with wires. Sril caught her by the arm. He was sitting on a strut sticking out from the wall. When he turned, his stool revolved with him.

“Akellar, here she is.”

Upside down over her head, Tanuojin sat in a cage footed against the wall. He dove out of it. “Come here.” His hand closed on her wrist.

Over a loudspeaker, General Gordon’s voice said, “Ybix, your time is running out.”

Tanuojin pulled her around to the cage. She turned over, her feet toward the wall. He thrust her at a screen in front of the cage. “There she is, General.”

Paula took hold of one rib of the cage. On the screen was General Gordon. She said, “Hello, General. Doing the lord’s work?” She could smell a strange bitter scent, maybe Tanuojin.

Gordon said, “Miss Mendoza, are you there of your own free will?”

“Are you?”

“Don’t duel with me, young woman. Tell them I want to talk to the Akellar Saba.”

Tanuojin pushed her out of the way. “He’s asleep.”

“Then wake him up.”

The wall beside her was covered with dials. All the needles were swinging, twitching, at random. Besides Sril, two other men sat on stools along the curved wall. The scarred man, Bakan, headphones over his ears, was directly above her.

Tanuojin said, “Why am I to wake up the third-ranking Akellar of the Styth Empire just because you tell me?” He spoke much slower in the Common Speech than in Styth.

“Akellar,” Bakan said, “Ybicsa is launching.”

On the far side of the cage from her was a holograph. She let go of the cage and scrambled through the air toward the green cube of light. Someone above her laughed at her. In the hologram, an image of Ybix sailed along through clear green space. Two smaller ships flanked her and a third flew after her, an inch from her long whip-tail. Paula recognized the T-shapes of the Lunar Army’s patrol craft. A small green image streaked out of Ybix’s side and flew off the map.

“I want to see your captain,” Gordon was saying.

“Ybicsa is launched, Akellar,” Bakan said.

Paula lifted her head. Gordon’s pinched face looked tired. Tanuojin leaned over the screen. “You don’t talk to Saba. You take your ships away, or I start to shoot.”

An arm moved over the screen before Gordon. He glanced down and up again. “Ybix, you have launched another ship. We have regulations—”

Tanuojin turned his head. “Where is Saba?”

“Halfway back to the Earth,” Bakan said, “and going like hell.”

Paula looked up. She was drifting. Now Sril was above her on the curved wall, and Bakan was off to her right. The hatch opened and two men came in.

“What’s going on?”

Gordon was saying, “I want to talk to your captain. If you don’t produce him in five minutes, I’ll assume he’s on the ship you just launched and proceed accordingly.”

Paula looked down at the holograph. Ybix, manta-flat, was the size of her hand, the Lunar hammerheads the size of her thumb. Other ships sailed along in orbits below and ahead of her. The patrol ship behind Ybix seemed to draw up on her. Tanuojin and Gordon were arguing. Suddenly an alarm shrieked in her ears.

She started all over, her skin cold. The warning horn whooped again. Tanuojin jumped out of the cage. “Sril!”

“I have him on one, Akellar.”

The hammerhead slid back, away from them, and the alarm rang silent. Paula was shivering. She glanced up at the men massed in the bridge above her. Sril had his hands on a lever in the wall beside his stool. He was watching Tanuojin.

He wheeled back to General Gordon. “God damn you, if you break my perimeter again, I’ll shoot.”

Gordon never blinked. “Even the devil knows the name of the lord. I’ll give you ten minutes to leave before I blow you to hadrons.” The screen went dark.

Paula rubbed her finger over her cheek. They were just playing with each other, and they both knew it. The hatch was directly above her. She rose toward it.

“Where are you going?” Tanuojin said. “You stay here.”

“You don’t need me here.”

“Akellar, that hammerhead is drifting up again,” Bakan said.

He flew down to the cage. “Bring her along thirty leagues.”

“Mendoz’,” Sril said. He leaned down, his hand stretched toward her. “Catch on.” She took hold of his hand. The ship was gaining speed. Paula was falling toward the wall. She held on to Sril with both hands. In the holograph, Ybix moved out ahead of the three hammerheads. Her arms ached. Slowly she grew lighter again.

“Making one hundred twenty-six leagues, Akellar.”

“The patrol ship is speeding up, Akellar,” Bakan said. In the hologram another vessel showed, ahead of Ybix: the next ship in orbit.

“Good. Brake her down thirty leagues.”

Sril said, in her ear, “Hold on.” She put her arm around his waist. The ship slowed. She was dragged in the other direction, stretched out like a flag in the wind.

“Meet her, Marus,” Tanuojin said. “You’re dropping her.”

The siren whooped. The hammerhead behind them was running up on them.

“Sril!”

“Ready to fire, Akellar.”

“Fire.”

“Fire one.”

The scream of the alarm made her ears hurt. Her weight lessened. She was floating again. Ybix flew backward through the green map into the following wedge of the hammerheads. A light flashed just behind the tailend ship, and the Styths groaned. A miss. The hammerhead bent its course, rising up over Ybix’s broad back. The siren stopped. Paula’s ears rang like brass.

“Take us back to station,” Tanuojin said. “Keep Gordon happy.”

The helmsman said, “Braking ten leagues.”

Paula slid gently against Sril’s side. Ybix drifted backward through the map cube. The hammerheads were scattered across the space, out of order.

“Akellar, Luna is signaling.”

“Didn’t I say the little man was bluffing? What’s our course?”

“We’re on station, Akellar.”

She let go of Sril and floated free in the air. The hatch was below her now, and Tanuojin inside the cage was above her again. The videone lit up: General Gordon.

“You can count yourselves lucky that maneuver failed. Your ten minutes is almost up. I’m warning you, I’m not a generous man.”

Tanuojin put one arm through the cage bars. Paula glanced at the holograph. The hammerheads were again flying on either of Ybix’s wings and just behind her. The Styths around her were utterly still.

“I’m not taking this ship anywhere until my commanding officer gives me an order,” Tanuojin said, “and he’s asleep.” He was waggling the hand outside the bars. Beside Paula, Sril bent over a deck of wires.

“Yes, Akellar.” He pushed the deck like a drawer back into the wall.

Tanuojin waved at him. His arm withdrew into the cage. He and Gordon debated waking up Saba. She looked up at the hatch. There was no reason to stay here. Sril was turning slowly away from her, his hand on the lever on the wall, and his eyes on Tanuojin.

“You don’t have to shake your superstitions in my face,” Tanuojin was saying to Gordon. He thrust his arm out of the cage and waved at Sril. “I’ve already noticed that you’re ignorant.”

General Gordon’s face thinned. Paula could not see his hands, only his shoulders and head. Was he signaling too? She drifted down toward the hologram. Bright green, Ybix sailed on her even course. The three smaller ships skirted her. The hammerhead on Ybix’s tail was flying higher than the Styth ship. She supposed they were creeping in to try to catch the transmission of the sensor wire. Tanuojin raised his hand.

“As long as you’re here, you’re subject to our law,” Gordon said.

“I don’t need your laws, I have my own.”

“If you—”

The alarm wailed up so hard in Paula’s ear she flinched. Tanuojin held up one finger. Sril pulled the lever down. “Shoot one.” He glanced at Tanuojin and reached for the next lever. “Shoot two.”

On either side of Ybix points of light sparkled, like firecrackers. The hammerhead off the left wing tumbled over like a wheel. Part of the hull broke off. The Styths roared a cheer that thundered off the curved bridge wall. The men around him reached out and clapped Sril on the shoulders.

Tanuojin shouted, “Quiet!” Paula grabbed hold of the strut of Sril’s perch. Now certainly Gordon would shoot back. Her sweating hands slipped on the plastic strut.

“Akellar, Saba is calling on the ship-to-ship!”

They thundered up another cheer. The bridge stank of their excitement.

“Break this contact with Luna. Where is Saba?”

Bakan read off a series of numbers. The videone went dark. Sril pulled the wire deck out of the wall and leaned over it. Paula looked up at the holograph. A hammerhead sailed along on Ybix’s off wingtip, another behind her tail. Suddenly they sheered away.

“Akellar, the surface has launched a missile.”

Paula turned; she bumped her head on the strut. Tanuojin said, “Clear the bridge. Secure to speed.” He charged out of the cage and went up to Bakan’s post. The men gathered to watch crowded toward the hatchways. They were leaving the bridge. Paula pushed herself after them. Tanuojin shot toward her.

“You stay here, where I can keep an eye on you.” His fingers closed on her arm. Her spine shivered at his touch. He thrust her at Sril. “Hold on to her.”

“Akellar, she can’t—”

“Akellar,” the helmsman called. “I have a course to intercept Ybicsa.”

Over his shoulder, Tanuojin called, “Ready to break orbit.” He leveled his pale eyes at Sril. “You keep your mouth shut, bang-boy.” He dropped away toward the cage. The hatch was just over her head, and she reached for it. Sril pulled her by the arm against his side.

“Hold on, Mendoz’.”

“Launch on point.” Tanuojin was climbing into the cage. Behind the voices of the other men, talking in numbers, ran the beep and mutter of the machines along the wall. A red light came on near her face. Sril turned her around, her back to his chest.

“Akellar, the missile is firing a cluster. Make it five minutes behind us. Heat-chasers. Four minutes thirty-one seconds.”

The sound level rose to a low mechanical rumble that made her ears itch. She moved against Sril’s chest. The ship was sliding away from her. She sank back against the man behind her. He spoke to her. The roar drowned his voice. The pressure hurt her eyes. She could not move, wedged against Sril’s side. Painfully she strained for breath. Like footsteps her pulse beat louder and louder in his ears.

“Ybix, Ybix,” Saba’s voice shouted, above the racket.

She turned her head. Her mouth was sticky. Through a pink blur she saw the Styths sitting on their perches, doing their work. They bore the pressure without effort. It hurt her to breathe. She closed her eyes.

“Saba, hold your course. We’ll run over you. Can you dock at this speed?”

“I’ve got this sled in tow.” Saba’s voice was coming from inside the cage.

Bakan said, “Akellar, four rockets are still tracking us.”

“What rockets?” Saba cried, alarmed.

“Akellar,” Sril said loudly, “she can’t breathe.”

She could breathe. Her eyes hurt, and her ears ached as if needles were run through them. Saba said, “What’s your pressure?”

“Eight plus,” Tanuojin said.

“Compensate. What missiles?”

She fought for air. Her chest lightened. She felt her lips pulled back from her teeth, and her hands rose. She blinked her pink blurred eyes clear.

“Akellar, there’s a hammerhead coming up fast on Ybicsa.”

Paula moved around to Sril’s back, her arms around him. If she fell she would land on the cage. She wiped her eyes on his shoulder.

“Two rockets still tracking, two minutes back. I read fission warheads.”

When she leaned her head on Sril’s back she left a smear of blood across his shirt. She touched her mouth. Down past her feet, Ybix sailed through the green map. At the edge of the hologram another image was forming, a needle-shape: Ybicsa. The smaller ship fell back into the green field around Ybix. Now she saw a third ship, T-shaped, flying up toward Ybicsa from the bottom of the hologram. The three flights converged. Ybix flew over Ybicsa, covering her with her flat shape. The hammerhead veered to chase them, seconds behind them.

“Rockets closing—ten—nine—” In the green glow of the hologram the hammerhead exploded.

The men roared. Tanuojin said, “See, General Gordon, it’s all god’s will.” Against her face Sril’s back bounced in a soundless laugh.

“Saba. Can you dock?”

Ketac’s voice came through the cage, high and rapid with excitement. “Akellar, we’ll dock. We’ll need three men in the chamber to inboard this sled.”

Paula was floating. She let go of Sril and put her hands to her face. The holograph light glowed on her rumpled trouser legs. Sril said, “If Ketac is flying, I’ll wait back at Luna.” He twisted toward her. “How do you feel?”

The hatch was over her head. She stretched her arms up toward it and went out to the corridor.

She stayed in the wetroom while the ship accelerated to cruising speed. That took fifteen hours. She woke up once, in the dark in a roar of noise. She could not move at all. The wetroom held her in its supporting membranes. She was afraid but there was nothing she could do. The weight of the air against her face hurt her nose. Her eyes were shut and she could not raise the lids. The metallic ring in her ears went on and on like something heard in a seashell. She was losing consciousness. She passed into a noisy dream.

The next time she woke she could move her head, open her eyes, and turn over. She was back in free fall. Someone was banging on the door below her feet. That had wakened her.

“Who is it?” Her stomach was clenched with hunger.

“Paula,” Ketac said. “You can come out now.”

She tried to push herself backward, fumbling with her bare feet for the door. “No,” he called, “go forward, go through the dryer. Do you have any clothes on?”

“No.” She crawled head-first through the dark.

“I’ll be out in the corridor.”

Her head poked up into the open air. With a click a blower fired a gust of warm wind into her face. She drew herself out of the wetroom into a closed dark space. Her arms and legs were painfully cramped and her back had kinked up like a rope. She turned over, working her stiff muscles. Below her a disk of light showed pale in the dark. She dove through it into the cabin.

After the wetroom the oval cabin was huge. She tumbled across it, somersaulting, rolling in the air, her arms and legs flung out. She crashed into the soft wall and rebounded. It was wonderful to move. Her skin tingled in the cold air.

“Paula,” Ketac called.

“Yes.” She brought herself up against the wall, dizzy. “What is it?”

“Are you dressed yet? Can I come in?”

“Wait.” She went around the room, looking for the compartment with her clothes. She put on two pairs of trousers and a shirt and a jacket and two pairs of socks. The cold air was delicious. She opened the hatch and went into the corridor.

Ketac’s hair floated like an aureole around his face. “Why didn’t you talk to me in Styth, before? All that time I could have been talking to you.”

“I don’t speak it very well.” She reached the corridor of the arrows. She could not remember which way the galley was. Ketac came up beside her. Below her a man dove out of a hatchway, and she went in that direction.

“Pop says I’m supposed to show you around the ship.” He came after her into the narrow galley. The rows of levers on the wall were tagged in neat handwritten Styth labels. She pulled one and ran herself straight up into the ceiling. Ketac jeered at her. One hand on the wall and the other on the tab, she pushed in opposite directions. Out the slit-mouth below came a water tube.

“Where is Saba?”

“In the bridge. He’s on watch.”

She stowed the water tube in mid-air and worked another lever, which produced a strip of protein. The dim light strained her eyes. Her hands and face were cold.

“All right.” She drank the water and took a bite of protein bar. “Show me around the ship.”

“Actually, I think The Creep is right, for once. This is a warship. You ought to stay in my father’s cabin.”

She went along the tunnel. Ketac glided along beside her. They turned into the blue corridor. “What’s this, for instance?” She put her head into a big open hatchway. Inside was the largest room she had seen, including the bridge. The round wall was plastered with posters, most of them of naked women. There was no one in the room. The lights were out at the far end. She went in. The lights rose.

Ketac followed her. “You shouldn’t be in here.” He cast a look of horror around at the beaver shots on the wall. “This isn’t any place for a woman.”

“Don’t be silly.” She went back to the hatchway. “What’s up there that you think I haven’t seen? Where do you sleep?”

He led her on down the curving tunnel. He traveled effortlessly beside her; she had to struggle to keep up with him. He brushed his thick hair back with his hand. “That’s the Tank—where we just were. The off-duty room.” Scooting off ahead of her, he spun the wheel on the next hatch and pulled the cover open. “This is the library.”

The deep narrow room was dark. The light from the corridor reached in across the round honeycomb wall of books. Ketac was already scooting off, and she followed him.

“This is the aft bridge hatch—” He struck in passing at a doorway. Beside it was a bank of meter faces like clocks. “And that’s the aft engine hatch.” Paula went after him in short energetic dashes.

“How many watches are there?”

“Pop’s, Tanuojin’s, and Kobboz’s. You don’t know anything, do you?”

They went down the black and white corridor again. “No,” she said. “Not a thing.”

“There are five men in each watch—the watch officer, the helm, the gunner, the sparks—you know, communications—and the greaser. That’s me. I just do what everybody else says.” He scooped his wild hair back with his hands. His feet milled steadily to keep him upright. “Pop’s is the high watch, The Creep is the middle watch, Kobboz is the low watch.”

“Where is Tanuojin now?”

“Asleep, I guess. He has the cabin up beside the library.” He dropped away from her into the twilight. “Ask me anything. Go on, ask me something.”

“How fast are we going?” She was learning how to move, and she kept up with him all the way down to the next hatch. He looked at her sideways, as if it were a trick question.

“About one and a half miles an hour.”

“I mean the ship, Ketac.”

“Oh. Thirty-two hundred leagues above course point. Plus six acceleration. That’s not very much, we were up to plus 185 in the low watch. Uniform hyperbolic course. Ask me something else.”

“I didn’t understand the first one.” They went into another tunnel, marked with yellow stripes, so there were three: red, blue, and yellow, curved, meeting the black and white corridor at each end. Ahead, the metal tube jogged, and in the dim light someone moved. She started violently all over. A strange Styth raced around the bend and brushed between her and Ketac.

“Ask me something.”

“How long will it take us to reach Uranus?”

He stopped at a hatchway. “This is the crew’s quarters. The Hole. We’re going to Saturn first.”

“Let me see.” She pulled on the wheel in the hatch. He opened it, and she put her head inside, into a long dim room in which the Styths slept wrapped in their bedrugs like bats in their wings, attached by their feet to the wall.

“When we get there,” Ketac said, “we use the Planet’s fields to brake and fall into orbit, so we can supply up.” He pushed the hatch closed. She turned toward him. “Then we use the fields to boost back to cruising speed and head for Uranus. My father calls that a counter-inertial equivalency system.”

“Oh.”

“My father is the best engineer in the fleet. Ask me something else.”

She led him along the corridor. “Ketac, I don’t understand anything you’re saying. I wouldn’t understand it in the Common Speech.” They came to another hatch: the supply room, lined with computers, their checkerboard faces blinking in three colors. He refused to take her into the men’s toilet. While she was still hunting for arguments, a bell rang somewhere down the corridor.

“That’s the end of my watch,” Ketac said. His hair floated on end around his head. “You’d better go back to Pop’s cabin now.”

She backed away from him. Backing up was easier than moving forward. “Go on, do as you please. I’ll be all right.”

“Paula, this is a warship. You can’t wander around—”

“Thank you.” Head-first, she went into the black-white corridor, twisted to change direction, and flew down through the cool dim tunnel.

Ketac had not shown her all the ship. There was a tiny observation room in the nose of the ship, just big enough for two people. Saba took her there, shut the hatch, and pushed a button in the wall. The black wall over her head split down the middle and folded back on either side, and she was looking into the depthless black of space.

“Oh.” She put her hand out. Her fingertips grazed the cold plastic of the window.

He stretched his legs out past her, along the foot of the window. His shoulders packed the end of the little pyramidal room. She looked out at the clouds of stars. With difficulty she made out the rectangular constellation Gemini.

“Can I see Uranus?”

“Uranus is on the other side of the ship. Scorpio sector.” For navigating the sphere of the stars was divided up into sectors according to the major constellations. He pointed with his little finger at a bright white spark in the long box of Gemini. “That’s Jupiter.” His claw ticked on the plastic. “Castor and Pollux.” He pointed out the two bright stars at one end of the rectangle and the fainter pair at the other end, butting against the Milky Way. “The Star Gate. The Mouth of Hell. Gemini is called the House of Hell. Half the time Uranus’s pole axis points to the Sun, but when the Sun enters Gemini the pole slips and starts to wander.”

On Uranus the polar axis lay close to the plane of the ecliptic. The star shell was the same, but their astrology would be totally unlike hers.

“I used to dream about space,” he said. “Before 1 ever saw it. I dreamt I crawled up and up through the Planet, until I came to the surface, outside of everything, and I floated away.”

“A nightmare?”

“No.” He said a word she did not know. “It was a good dream. It was a good feeling. My father was space-drunk. He used to say he could bring his body back to Matuko but his heart stayed in deep space.”

The starlight shone on his face. She took hold of his sleeve, fingering the thick material. There were thin dark gray stripes in the light gray ground. “What do these mean?” She ran her thumb down the diagonal stripes sewn on his forearm cuff.

“Rating stripes. Subtenant, lieutenant, commander, master commander, master.” He put his hand on her stomach. “Then there’s general and master general, which nobody ever gets.”

Directly below her Tanuojin’s voice said, “Saba, call the bridge.”

She rolled out of the way. He reached for the speaker tab in the wall. “Bridge.”

“Akellar, Ketac is tearing up Uhama in the Tank.”

“Damn him.” He left. Paula shut the hatch to keep out the light. She lay in the air staring out at the black fields of space. The stars eased her mood, scattered thick past counting over the window, unimaginably distant. After a while she found the switch that hooded the window again. She went out to the ship’s glossy tunnels.

There was another place Ketac had not shown her: the brig, off in a corridor of its own above the number six engine, in the tip of one wing. Saba threw his son into this jail for fighting with Uhama. Two bells rang: the beginning of the middle watch. She wrapped herself in a blanket and Saba rolled them both in the thick rug of his bed, and they slept, attached to the wall by a ring near their feet. The shag fur made her nose feel dusty. The big Styth slept with his arms around her. She wondered what Matuko would be like and shut off her curiosity. If she went with expectations she would only confuse herself. She put her face against the sleeping man’s bare shoulder.

At three bells he went to the bridge. The Tank was crowded and she did not go in. She went to the library, but Tanuojin was there. She wandered around the halls, bored. At the end of the black and white corridor, under a storage hatch, she found three little fish swimming behind a round window in the hall.

She searched around the ship and found five more fish bowls. The little fish were dull gray, with spines on their backs. She went into the blue corridor and down the short wing tunnel to the brig.

The pounding of the engine below vibrated the air. The heat was terrific. At the blind end of the tunnel, Ketac hung upside down, his eyes closed. His skin was oily with sweat. She went back out to the arrow tunnel and down to the galley.

Two men crowded it. One was Marus, Tanuojin’s helmsman. She watched outside for them to leave.

“One thing about Sril,” Marus said. “He does all his fighting in the ship, where it doesn’t matter he isn’t big enough to see over his old woman’s ass.” He came out past her, ignoring her, as all Tanuojin’s men did. She got a tube of water from the galley wall and went back to the brig.

Ketac was staring at the wall. The side of his face was deeply scratched. There were rings set into the wall, but he did not seem to be tied.

“Here,” she said.

He jumped, his hands flying up. “Paula.” His voice croaked. He tore open the tube and sucked out the water. Soaked dark with sweat, his overalls were open down to his crotch. The racket jangled her; she felt gritty.

“Thanks, Paula.” He squeezed the last of the water into his mouth.

“I’ll bring you another.”

He followed her around the bend to the hatch. “Stay here—don’t leave me alone here.”

“The hatch isn’t locked. You can leave.”

He scrubbed his face with his hands. “I promised my father I’d stay here.” His voice was raw. “He’d tie me if I left.”

“I’ll bring you something to eat.” She went out to the cool, quiet tunnel beyond.

When she came back, he was floating in the blind end again. He beamed at her, relieved to see her, and grabbed the tube of water.

“Thanks. Nobody else has even come in here.”

The vibration set her teeth on edge. The boy hung sidewise in the air. The tip of his forefinger was bloody and scabbed over, the claw broken off deep in the quick.

“What are those fish for?”

His teeth mashed through a mouthful of food tablets. “They’re scouts. If the hatches leak they die.” He drank the rest of the water. Bits of plastic wrapping floated around him.

“How long will you be here?”

“Until he lets me out.” He kicked, knocking himself back into the wall. “Nobody cares about me—I’m going crazy—” He banged around the end of the tunnel. She moved away from him, wary.

“Paula, don’t go—”

“I can’t even hear you.” The heat made her face itch. “I’ll come back later.”

“Paula! Stay here—please—”

“Ketac—” A bell sounded, muffled. “I’ll come later.” She left him alone.

She went to the bridge, to meet Saba coming off watch. He had already gone. Kobboz was sitting down in the cage. She looked in the Tank and in the library, and turned on the monitors in her room and hunted through them. He was nowhere. Neither was Tanuojin; they were together. She stopped looking.

She went to bed. The rug folded around her like a great loose skin. Drowsily she wondered why they fastened up the foot instead of the head. It was pleasant to float free in the air. She yawned.

The hatch opening woke her. Saba swung himself in through the oval doorway. She started to call to him but she heard Tanuojin’s voice.

“Come down to the library. I’ll show you.”

“I’m tired.” Saba was stripping off his overalls. “Next watch.”

“Jesus.” The deep voice rasped. “All your off-time now you spend with her.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

The hatch slammed. Tanuojin went away. She heard Saba give a low laugh.

Halfway through the middle watch, she thought of Ketac again and took him a dozen food tablets and two tubes of water. When he saw her his face split in a broad smile. “Paula.”

She wiped her face on her sleeve. He ripped open a water tube.

“Talk to me. Stay here and talk to me.”

“Ketac, it’s hot in here.”

“Nobody else has even come to see me—all my so-called friends—” He ran himself into the wall. “Nobody but a nigger squaw. Oh, Jesus, I have to get out of here.”

“Do you know who Jesus was?”

He stroked his hair back. His sprouting mustaches were pointed, like feathers. “I don’t know. It’s just a curse. It sounds like a curse. It feels good to say it.” His eyes glinted. “Like fuck.”

The corridor was littered with bits of white wrapping. She gathered them up. Around the bend, the hatch banged open. She spun. Saba came feet-first toward them. “Paula. What are you doing in here?” He took her by the arm. “Hot, isn’t it?” he said to Ketac.

“Pop, let me out—please—”

“You sound pretty lively yet to me.” He pulled her off along the tunnel. “One more watch, Ketac.”

“I’ll die!”

“I’ll miss your company.”

In the corridor, the cool air bathed her face; her shirt was stuck to her arms and she pulled her sleeves free. Saba pushed her along ahead of him.

“Stay away from him.”

“He was hungry.”

“He’s supposed to suffer. He isn’t your crumb.”

The computer in the supply room made her several sets of overalls, like the uniforms of the men, with the black three-pointed star on the back but no rating stripes. She wore two sets at a time to keep warm. In the dim light she learned to use her other senses more than before. Quickly she lost track of time. The high watch, the low watch, the middle watch ran after each other like clock gears. The time didn’t seem to change at all, any more than the ship seemed to move, suspended in the dark, the stars unchanging before the window. In the Asteroids near Pallas three Martian ships ambushed them, but Ybix outran them in fifteen minutes. Paula was starved for real food. The chewy protein strips sometimes satisfied her need to eat but she dreamt of gingerbread and whipped cream and sugar candy. As if she were gorging herself, her stomach began to bulge.

Sril played a ulugong, a sheet of metallic plastic that he held on his lap and struck with his knuckles, like a drum with bell tones. She brought her flute to the Tank and they played together. The other men threw darts and made models and argued the various merits of the posters on the wall. Occasionally they got into a fight over the paper women spreading their legs on the curved wall. She read, and she worked on the first draft of the trade contract, but the music kept her mood light. The low mellow voice of the ulugong went well with the flute. They made up songs, she and Sril, by the hour.

They clubbed Ketac. All the crew but two men left to mind the bridge packed into the Tank. Ketac knelt down in the air before Saba, who took his hands and stretched his arms out before him. Behind him Tanuojin pulled the young man’s hair back.

“Who is the man?” Saba asked.

“Styth,” Ketac answered. His voice trembled, passionate.

“Which is the way?”

“To the Sun.”

“Keep faith.” Saba slapped him hard across the cheek.

The other men cheered. His face glowing, his hair fastened neatly down, Ketac whooped in their midst. Behind them all, Paula tucked her hands into her sleeve. It was such a simple ritual. She wondered uneasily why they could not do without it altogether. Saba brought out a bottle of Scotch. Ketac tried to drink out of it, while the other men laughed and pounded him on the back. She picked up her flute and withdrew into the music.

Saba steered her down the arrow corridor, past the mouth of the blue tunnel. After 121 watches she moved as easily as he did, faster sometimes, but he still maneuvered her around whenever he could. They went into the Beak, the room in the nose of the ship. The window was shut. While she felt around the rim for the switch, Saba came in beside her and closed the hatch. She pressed the switch, and the window cracked and light spilled through the widening gap into the little room. In half-phase, banded in cream and gold, wrapped in the curved blades of its rings, Saturn filled the window.

Paula lay back in the air. The brilliant golden light dazzled her. The rings were tilted down away from her, like thin dust veils.

“The first time I ever came here,” he said, “it was my third voyage into space. Tanuojin’s first. My father brought the ship down on the trade lane and we stopped everything that came by. Melleno was the Prima then. After we’d held up about a dozen freight ships going to Saturn, he sent his Saturn Fleet out and chased us off. My father howled so hard, you could hear him all over the ship.”

“Why?”

“The Prima wasn’t supposed to have any rights in deep space. My father didn’t approve of other people breaking the law. Just him. Jesus, that was an awful voyage. My father took such a hate to Tanuojin—Tajin had worked for Melleno. Then when we got back to Uranus, Tajin went to Melleno and they mended their quarrel and he wrote a law for Melleno putting a 100 per cent tax on goods stolen from Styth hulls and sold in Styth markets. They took all the profit out of piracy. It almost ruined the fleet.”

She looked out the window at the ringed Planet. The shadow of one of its moons lay on the golden surface of the clouds. “What was your father’s name?”

“Yekaka. It fitted him, too.” The name meant loudmouth. “Do you want to go down to Saturn-Keda?”

“Oh. Yes. Can I? Will you take me?”

“If you promise to keep quiet.”

She looked out at the Planet. The surface was patterned in whorls and streamers of clouds, changing shape while she watched, changing hue. “I promise.”

“Good. It’ll give you an idea what Matuko is like.”

The yellow light shone over the side of his face. She put her hand on his legs, lying beside her. “I want to name the baby David.”

“David. What kind of a name is that? It sounds like a girl’s name. Call him Vida. It’s the same thing. Vida—David.”

“Then you call him Vida, and I’ll call him David.”

He played with her fingers. His claws tapped her palm. “What else?”

“Does there have to be more?”

“Most shirt-names are a little more elaborate. Nobody ever uses it.” He manipulated her fingers.

“What’s a shirt-name? Ouch.”

He pulled her hand up and kissed her palm and rubbed his cheek over the flat of her hand. Her palm stung where the claw had pricked her.

“When the baby is born I wrap him up in my shirt and take him outdoors, so that people can see I accept him as mine, and I give him his name.”

“What’s your shirt-name?”

“Takoret-aSaba. ‘He knows the right way.’ My father liked righteous names. He was always telling me to live up to my name.” He laughed, his hand up to his chin, his face painted in Saturn’s yellow light. “I knew all the wrong ways.”

“Does the name have to mean something?”

“No.”

“Good. Then David Mendoza.” She put her hand on her rounding body. “What’s Tanuojin’s shirt-name?”

“He hasn’t got one. He’s an orphan. The people who brought him up found him in the street when he was barely old enough to walk. They already had eight boys, so they named him ‘the ninth boy.’” His voice broadened with pride. “He started from point. He had nothing.”

“He still has very little.”

Someone banged on the hatch below her. She moved out of the way. He opened the hatch, and Tanuojin’s head and shoulders rose through the round entry. He gave Saturn a glance and ignored Paula.

“Here.” He thrust a watchboard and a stylus at Saba. “Did you call Melleno?”

“I will now.” Saba wrote on the board. He took a slide calculator out of his sleeve. “She is going with us.”

Paula moved back against the wall, out of their way. Tanuojin took the board again. “Why?”

“Make sure you clear that orbit with Titan. You’re in my way.”

Tanuojin backed out of the hatch. Saba went out. Paula started after him and the other man blocked the hatch.

“No, Saba, let me talk to her.”

Paula withdrew into the darkness, her back to the giant Planet. Through the hatch came a short laugh. “Talk all you want.”

Tanuojin came into the cramped space after her. She stayed as far away from him as she could. Her fingers went to her breast. “What do you want?”

“I’ll ask the questions. Look over there.” He gestured to one side and put out his other hand. She recoiled.

“Don’t touch me.”

The Planet glared over his long face, his catfish jaw. The hatch was below him. She could not escape. He said, “Do as I say. Look over there. I’m just going to touch you.”

“No.”

He lowered his hand. “What are you afraid of?” His voice was unsettlingly deep. “Are you afraid of me?”

“Yes.”

He spun over the hatch wheel and pushed the cover away into the corridor. “Get out. You stink like pig.”

She went out the hatch and down the corridor; she did not stop until she was in the red tunnel, two hatches from her room.

She spent ten minutes in the wetroom, scrubbing herself on the walls. Washing her face was fun, although the soap stung her eyes. Thinking about Tanuojin made her uncomfortable. When he had healed her she had been so groggy she could hardly remember what had happened. She rubbed soap into her hair and rinsed it in the water streaming along the wall.

“Are you in there?” A fist banged on the watch below her feet.

“Yes.”

“Come out and get dressed, if you want to go to Saturn-Keda.”

She crawled into the gusty warmth of the dryer and went out to the room. The cold roughened her skin. She took out a fresh pair of overalls.

“Put on something fancy. You can’t go like that.”

She got her suitcase out of the long compartment in the wall. “Why are you taking me, anyway?”

“I told you. I’m civilizing you.” He was stripping off his uniform.

It would be cold in Saturn-Keda. She put on overalls and the long black dress An Chu had made for her, which had a coat that went with it. The layers of skirts floated around her, glinting with silver threads.

“How do I look?” She turned around, and the many layers of the dress swirled around her. She put the coat on.

“You look fine. One more thing.” He floated in front of her, standing up the collar of the coat. “Decent women don’t go out in public in Styth with their faces uncovered.”

She slid back away from him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you go veiled.”

“No.”

“Do you want to go or not?”

She watched him, angry, while he opened a bin and got out a length of black cloth. He wrapped it around her head and draped it over her face, tucking the excess down under the collar of the coat.

“Good,” he said. “That will do fine.”

She turned away, humiliated.

They went through the tunnels to the docking chamber. He let her take the veil off while they flew to Saturn-Keda. Tanuojin was already in the chamber, pulling on a black pressure suit. Saba led her to the rack in the wall. He helped her put on a space suit. It was Sril’s, who overstood her by fourteen inches. She pulled the thick leggings up until her feet reached the bottom, and he tied the slack around her knees.

“I did some tuning on this suit, and we’ll launch soft. You ought to be comfortable most of the time.” He showed her the helmet, a smoky plastic cylinder. “You wear this until I say you can take it off.”

She took the helmet in her arms. He gave her a pair of gloves. “Tanuojin! Plug her in.”

Ybicso’s hatch was wide open. Paula poked her head through into the narrow cockpit of the ship. Three tandem seats took up most of the space. Tanuojin came around the last, took the helmet away from her, and pushed her into the middle seat. He reached past her and pulled a shoulder harness around her. Floating sideways, he uncoiled a white tube from under the seat and fixed it to a socket in the suit leg behind her knee.

“Put the gloves on.”

She put her hands into the enormous gloves. Saba came into the ship, massive in his suit. He dropped into the front seat. Its high back hid him from her. Tanuojin tugged the gloves down over her wrists and strapped them tight. She looked him in the face. His yellow eyes were notched with brown. He put the helmet over her head. The smoked plastic darkened her sight.

Saba said, “I’ll take her down the A-39 chute at a 28-degree attitude, level off at minus 100M, and underfly Saturn-Keda. All right?”

“Fine,” Tanuojin said.

She floated in the huge padded seat. When she turned her face up, the helmet struck the back. There was an ax strapped to the wall beside her, and below it a long tube that looked like a gun. The cab lights went off. She sat in the dark, in the mid-air, the harness holding her six inches above the seat.

“Bridge,” Saba said.

“Yes, Akellar.” The voices came through the helmet above her ears.

“Start a count from twenty-five.”

Her seat had no arms. She put her hands under the harness and pulled herself down to make contact with the seat. In the top of the helmet an uninflected voice was counting backward. She put one hand on the wall. Even through the glove she could feel it tremble. A green light shone in front of the cab; Saba had turned on the holograph beside his knee. Leaning forward, she could see it and the side of his head.

“Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen—”

The two men talked in a litany of orders and replies. Paula slid her hand under the harness, down to the round bulge of the baby. This might hurt him. He’s a Styth, he can do anything.

“Five, four, three, two, one, point.”

There was a roar that hurt her ears. She was slammed back into the seat. Her eyes streamed. The pressure suit had failed. Her chest felt caved in. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. She lost consciousness.

“Paula.”

“Uuh.” She opened her eyes. She was floating. Something bounced off the top of her helmet, and it lifted away. The green light of the holograph shone brilliantly in her face. Saba stooped beside her, wedged between the seat and the wall.

“How do you feel?”

She put her hand up to her head. “That’s a jolt.”

He laughed. He looked beyond her, at Tanuojin, who did not laugh. Her left hand, still thrust under the harness, smarted rhythmically. She pulled her gloves off. The harness straps had imprinted the backs of her hands in deep purple welts. He took her fingers.

“Don’t do that.” He pointed up over her head and went back to his seat.

She raised her eyes. The ceiling was clear, a wide window. The stars shone in a broad swath above her. Near the edge of the window two crescent moons shone, one the size of an orange, the other the size of a pea. Her helmet was fastened to a clamp in the ceiling, obscuring the middle of the sky.

“That was a damned dead perfect launch,” Saba said, ahead of her. “We’re plus or minus one for the chute.”

She could hear the cluck of a radio in the back with Tanuojin. She leaned around her seat to look. Twisted in his seat, he was bent over a deck of instruments, earphones over his head. A red light on the panel flashed on his cheek.

“Get me some temperature readings,” Saba said. She turned straight. Enormous, splendid, Saturn was rising into the window, spilling its light into the cab. In the holograph’s green cube Ybicsa like a pin dropped into a thickening yellow radiance.

“About this new ship,” Saba said. “Maybe if I tuck her in a little at the waist, she won’t tail up so much at launch.”

Tanuojin said, “You have that ship half-built already, and you don’t even have the money to buy the model plastic.”

Saba reached awkwardly around the back of his seat and patted Paula on the knee. “I’ve got it right here. I just haven’t converted it yet.”

The cab was filled with the Planet’s light. At the edge of the holograph the green thickened to a yellow like cheese. Ybicsa shot toward it. They were passing over the rings, now resolved into a flood of particles, sparkling in the sunlight. She could see only the innermost stream. The curve of the Planet showed through it.

“Temperature readings. Rim: 300. Thermolayer 1137. Ten M, 350. Twenty M, 152.”

The Planet glared in the window. Red and yellow plumes of gas ran past them. They thickened to a light-filled cloud. The ship plunged through a yellow fog. The holograph showed Ybicsa nosing into a pale stream that backed and curled like a river through the Planet’s substance. Ahead, a darker loop bulged into the stream, pressing it out on either side.

“Braking,” Saba said. “Paula, put your helmet on.”

She stretched her hands up over her head toward the ceiling. The helmet was beyond her reach. She wrestled with the harness. She was heavy; she weighed enough to hold herself down in the seat, and the clamps on the harness were too stiff to open. She pulled at the straps holding her down.

Tanuojin leaned across the back of her seat, took the helmet off the ceiling, and rammed it down over her head. “Put your gloves on!” he shouted.

She found her gloves and fitted her hands into them. Her mouth was dry. The ship rocked violently and she slid forward into the harness.

“Reef,” Tanuojin said. “Coming fast.”

“I see it.”

A thick dark stream wound along the holograph. The ship bucked down, lurched to the left as if she were sliding down a wave, and heaved herself straight again. The suit was rigid. Paula could move her fingers inside the fat gloves but the gloves were immovable. The light was fading. They passed into a deep dusk, into a midnight darkness. The pressure suit had hardened like a shell around her. She looked up overhead. The darkness was complete. Suddenly a fragment of coherent light appeared, a long streak that melted away while she watched.

“What’s that?”

“False image,” Saba said. “Döppelganger.”

There was a scream of noise like an alarm going off. A mechanical voice said loudly, “A-39, A-39. This is Saturn-Keda, identify.”

Ybicsa bucked upward again and fell off sheer to the left. Paula gulped down the nausea in her throat. Dizzy, she fixed her eyes on the seat before her. Tanuojin was saying, “SIF 16 Ybicsa, armed scout from SIF 6 Ybix. Barkus-rating H. Check white records. Automatic clearance rAkellaron confirmed.”

Paula moved her fingers. The suit was beginning to soften. Ybicsa sailed into a long curve, and she fell against the harness. She braced herself on her arms. The ship swung around again, faster than Paula’s stomach.

“Ybicsa, this is Saturn-Keda, we read an unregistered person in your craft.”

“No registry. Female mixed blood.”

“Status.”

“No status. Saba’s property.”

“Paula,” Saba said, under his breath in her ear, “Look up.”

She raised her head. Over them, in the dark, was a vast slimy roof, festooned with scum and feathery crystalline growth. The underside of Saturn-Keda. She straightened to see the holograph. The scale had changed; Ybicsa was four times as large as before. She was flying along below a glob like an Idaho potato, trailing long strings like roots down into the magma. The bubble was too large for the map, and only a patch of it showed.

“Ybicsa, this is Saturn-Keda, we will dock you from here. At point you will lock your control system into—”

“Stop,” Saba said. “I dock my own ship.”

“We do not allow—”

“Stop. Call Melleno. This damned dumb computer.”

She looked up again at the encrusted skin above her. They were passing a root trailing down into the dark. Spidery outgrowths sprouted like hairs from it, barely visible.

“There’s a lot of radiation, Saba,” Tanuojin said. “All the dials are white.”

“It’s always hot around here this part of the spin.” Saba wheeled out of his chair. He pulled off his helmet and turned to help Paula. He stood with one foot braced on the sloping side of the ship.

“I thought you said she’s smart,” Tanuojin said. “She couldn’t reach the helmet, back at the brake. She’s too stupid to ask for help.”

The helmet lifted off her shoulders. Stiffly she said, “Thank you.”

“You stupid pig.”

She started up. Saba pushed her down into the seat again. He said, “The suits are all on one line, if one isn’t sealed, none of them seals.”

“Oh.” She glanced at Tanuojin. “Then I take it back.” She sat straight in the curved seat.

“Ybicsa,” a live voice said, in the radio speaker, “this is Saturn-Keda. You may dock under manual power. Use XM-7. Please do not race. If you stall in the tunnel, remain where you are and we will guide you in.”

Tanuojin got up. He stood in the narrow aisle beside Saba’s seat, one long arm braced on its back. She leaned to one side to see the hologram. Ybicsa floated in a green soup. The ship’s wake showed clearly in the shifting light of the map. She nosed forward into the mass of the bubble. Its skin, overgrown with rough crystalline, seemed to thicken out of the magma around it. Ybicsa’s needle-snout disappeared into it, and a new hologram wiped diagonally onto the map. Ybicsa flew into a narrow tunnel. Light flashed blinding through the window. Tanuojin raised one arm to shield his eyes.

“What was that?” she asked.

“The dock is leaking,” Saba said. “Read off the speed, will you?” His voice deepened; he was talking to his lyo.

“One-two,” Tanuojin said. “One-two. You’re going too fast. Three-four. Three-four.”

“Ybicsa,” the radio said urgently, “you’re coming in too fast. Please do not race. You’ll stall—”

“Turn that off,” Saba said, and Tanuojin leaned back and shut the volume down; she could still hear the tiny voice complaining behind her.

Ybicsa glided smoothly as a dream through the series of short jogs. Paula held herself in place, her hands on the harness. After the free fall she felt heavy and dull in the gravity.

“One-four,” Tanuojin read. “Three-sixteen. Saba, you could fly a piece of silk. One-eight, one-eight.”

She raised her heavy head like a bulb on her neck. Ybicsa crept through the utter dark. Paula blotted out Tanuojin’s voice reading their speed. They hardly seemed to move. Then light flashed on ice, and Ybicsa burst up through the surface of the water and shot through the city, and Paula jumped, startled.

Tanuojin sat down again behind her. The ship settled, turning a slow corkscrew. Saturn-Keda flew past the window, striped with bushy green foliage. It was dark, like twilight. She looked down through the window over her head into streets lined with little square buildings. She was too high above them to make out the people save as a coiling swarm in the street. Ybicsa rolled slowly over, and the city curled around her, covering the inside surface of the bubble. They passed beneath an inky river stitched over with bridges. Abruptly Ybicsa was swallowed.

Paula gave a violent start. But they had only flown into a dock. The engines roared. She was sliding forward into the harness. The ship slowed around a curve. A string of other ships was parked along the inside wall of the dock. Saba eased the ship up to an empty platform. Something thudded against the outside of the hull under her feet: maybe an anchor. She pulled off her gloves. Tanuojin climbed past her and thrust the hatch up and out. The ship rocked slightly under his step. She struggled with the clips of her harness. Saba leaned down to help her.

“Remember, no talk.” He unplugged her suit and fastened the veil across her face. She clambered after him out the hatch. The suit was heavy as chain over her shoulders. She could barely stand upright.

The platform was bare and cold. The wall was papered over with torn posters. The veil closed off her side vision. Tanuojin stood talking to a big graying man. The sleeves and front of his shirt were embroidered in metallic thread. He swung around, looking over her head.

“Saba, why do I spend a fortune training pilots?” They shook hands.

“Your pilots don’t fly my ships.”

Another man brought a board and a stylus up to him. “Akellar, I need your full engine rates—” Saba took him off to the stern of his ship.

The old man looked down at Paula. “Who is she?”

“Saba’s latest moral aberration,” Tanuojin said.

She glanced up at him, and the old man laughed. He smacked Tanuojin on the back with his open hand. “Tajin, you’ve made yet another enemy. Let’s go, it’s cold.”

They took off the black pressure suits in a locker room near the platform and went down a stair to the inner surface of the bubble. The three men talked about people she had never heard of. They walked along a street crowded with Styths. She had to trot to keep up with Saba. The buildings on either side were one and two stories, plain stone houses. Strips of green separated them: the grass that helped circulate the air. It even grew on the roofs of some houses. The buildings, the people around her, everything dwarfed her. She felt shrunk to miniature, like a toy. They went down a huge step in the street. She took Saba’s hand to negotiate it. In the twilight, the street ran straight off before her to the curve of the bubble in the distance, ran up the side, and turned and came back over her head. When she looked straight up she could see the busy streets and buildings of the other side of Saturn-Keda, two or three miles over her head, upside down. A strong odor of fish reached her nose. She looked around at the sheets of nets hanging from the eaves of the houses they passed. The street glistened with fish scales. A furry brown beast, cat-sized, was eating something in the gutter.

They went through an open gate into a yard. Three children were chasing each other around at the far end. Their heads were bald as onions. Paula’s arms and legs ached with fatigue. Her face sagged. Saba took her hand and helped her up three high steps. They went into a blue hall.

“Here.” Saba planted her firmly in the middle of the room. “Stay here. Melleno, let me use your photo-relay.”

Melleno took him out of the room. Paula looked around her. The blue light rippled through the room, constantly changing color. It was like being under water. This was what Matuko would be like, dark and cold. There was no ceiling: she looked up across Saturn-Keda, into the distant web of streets. Tanuojin was at the far end of the room, ignoring her. Melleno came back.

“Well? Tell me about the Middle Planets.”

“You’re right,” Tanuojin said. “It’s a lot more complicated than we thought.”

“Tajin. Tell me something new.”

She went to the table against the wall. It was strange to walk. Even the crepe dress felt heavy. The table was Styth-sized and her chin just cleared the top. A bowl stood on it heaped up with little red beans, or perhaps fruit.

“The Martians have the guns and the money,” Tanuojin was saying, “but the anarchists do all the thinking.”

“Where did he get her?”

“On the Earth.”

“Is she an anarchist?”

“Melleno, she is a pig. You know how he is about women.”

Her back was to them. She pulled the veil aside. He had been enraged, in Ybicsa, because he had had to help her. She took a handful of the beans out of the bowl and put one in her mouth. It was soft and sweet with a hard pip in the center.

“What do you think of Saba’s treaty?”

“I like the economics. That’s a lot of money. What about this truce?”

“It’s just with the Council, not with the Martians.”

“Is there a difference?”

She went along the wall to a window. The sill was a foot wide. She stood eating the fruit. The Styth children were playing before her in the yard. They were bigger than she was. They looked very young, their cheeks still round, like babies’. Now the air in the room was green. She took a seed out of her mouth and flicked it out to the courtyard. Maybe it would grow: her mark on Saturn-Keda.

“Can we take them?” Melleno asked.

“Yes, we can take them. We have to think of how, that’s all, but there’s a way. You used to tell me we could take anybody. Don’t you believe it any more?”

“Well, an old man sees short. What do you want to drink?”

“Nothing. Water.”

Melleno’s voice softened with amusement, even affection. “You know, Tajin, if you allowed yourself the occasional vice, you might find life more pleasant.”

“Why is it such a crime not to get drunk?”

Paula leaned on the window sill. A woman had come out of a door nearby. Her hair was piled up on her head; her fringed sleeves hung down almost to the ground. She called angrily to the children to stop screaming.

Behind Paula Saba came into the room. She yanked the veil across her face again. He went up to the other men, and Tanuojin slung one arm around his neck.

“I feel as if I’m going to put my foot through the floor.”

“What was the Earth like?” Melleno said.

Saba raised his head. “Beautiful. Even the natural parts, outside the cities. Every place you look there’s something you’ve never seen before. They don’t just have two or three kinds of trees, they have hundreds. They have insects there that look like flowers and flowers as high as your head. And the strangest people I’ve ever met.”

Several small pale men in white coats brought a little wagon into the room. They were the first people of her own race she had seen in six weeks. Swiftly and silently they opened the lid of the cart and took out cups. Her spine prickled up. They were slaves. One was obviously part-Styth, like her baby.

“I’ve never done so many strange things in my life,” Saba said. “Maybe it was just being so far from home.”

“It was hot and bright,” Tanuojin said. “And every time I went through a door I cracked my head.”

The slaves went among them, bringing cups and a platter. The three rAkellaron ignored them, probably did not notice them, would notice them only if the slaves made mistakes. Paula turned back to the window. Across the courtyard the children were throwing sticks at each other.

A trickle of feeling ran quickly down her side. She straightened, astonished, and put her hand on the fat hump of the baby. She had never felt him move before.

“They have no standards, Earthish people,” Saba was saying. “Except themselves.”

She turned to watch them. Melleno’s sleeve glittered. He raised his cup. “The Earth is the only place outside Styth I’ve ever wanted to see.”

She watched his hands. He wore a thick bracelet around each wrist. He had been the Prima, a great Prima. His strong action against piracy had forced the Styth Fleet to raid down below Jupiter, into the Middle Planets, since they could no longer rob their own people. He was an old man, his claws whitening, and his mustaches hanging down over his embroidered shirt.

Tanuojin came in again. Paula turned away from them. In the window, looking out at the city, she tried to judge how much energy they needed to maintain all this, to make life possible here. Of course they had Saturn itself, an inexhaustible supply of energy, yielding up radiation like a little sun. People like her had come here to take that energy, and the Planet had made them into Styths. Home is where the heart is, she thought, and laughed.

Ybix flew on through the dark, away from the Sun. After the journey to Saturn, the ship closed around Paula like a shell. The baby moved inside her body, energetic. His kicking woke her up sometimes. Her stretching skin itched intolerably. She scratched herself until she bled. Saba threatened to tie her hands behind her. All her overalls were too tight and he changed the settings in the computer and made her new ones.

One of the fish died in a tank in the transverse corridor. She scooped it out of the water and took it off to Saba. The number four engine was missing timing, and he paid no attention to the fish. His hands already shining with grease, he plunged head-first down a hatch into the engine room. She took the fish to the computer room and sealed it into a plastic folder for the technician to analyze.

In the high watch, while Saba was on duty, she worked in the library, writing out a master contract to allow off-worlders to trade in Matuko. The sketches clipped to the wall were parts of Saba’s new ship, Ybicket: the more he worked out the designs, the more he nagged her to finish the contract. While she was busy with this work, Tanuojin’s voice said, behind her, “If you want to see how that fish died, go look now.”

She wheeled; he was gone. She switched off the file projector and went down the blue tunnel to the black-white corridor. The hatch was open. Cold air streamed down on the fish. She put her head through the hatch into the dark.

In the back of the storage compartment, beyond a row of oxygen tanks, a blue light shone. She went toward it. A man was curled over the glow of a small lamp, heating a bottle of Saba’s Scotch. It was Uhama, the greaser on Kobboz’s watch.

She spun toward the way out. He had seen her. She lunged away but he caught her by the ankle.

Twisting, she broke free. The big man moved between her and the hatch. She was already shivering in the cold. She said, “Uhama, listen to me.” Her lips were stiff.

“If you tell him, he’ll lock me in the hot closet,” he said, and came toward her.

“He’ll do worse than that if you hurt me—” She backed away, banging into the tanks. His arms spread to corral her, the big man followed her into the back of the compartment, into the dark.

“Nobody knows but you.”

“Tanuojin knows—”

His hands closed around her throat. She clutched his wrists. A white light burst in her eyes.

“Paula!”

Uhama thrust her away, wheeling around, and she bumped into the wall. She gagged for breath. Locked together with someone else, Uhama banged into the tanks along the wall and caromed toward her. The other man was Ketac. She slipped past them toward the shaft of light coming through the hatch. Her throat hurt so much she could hardly breathe. In the corridor she flew down to the nearest call screen and pressed the lever up.

“Bridge.” Her voice wheezed.

“Yes—who’s this?” Bakan said.

“Ketac and Uhama are fighting in the number four storage bin.” She looked back that way. The hatch flew wide open and Uhama tumbled out. He started in her direction, saw her, and whipped around to go the other way. Ketac shot out to meet him. He caught the fleeing man by the shoulders and slammed both feet into Uhama’s back. Uhama clawed at him, grunting with effort, his eyes white-ringed. Saba raced around the bend in the corridor. Ketac sprang back. Uhama hung still in the air, half-conscious.

“What’s going on?” Saba asked.

Ketac’s chest heaved. He pointed to Paula, ten feet down the corridor. “I was coming around here, and I saw the hatch open, and he was in there strangling her.”

Saba raised one arm across his body and struck Uhama. The other man hit the wall face-first. “Take him to the brig.”

“Yes, sir.” Ketac towed Uhama away by one foot.

Paula touched her throat. She was alive by seconds. Her bruised muscles refused to swallow. Saba lunged at her, bad-tempered.

“What were you doing in there with him?”

In a croaking voice she told him about the fish, Tanuojin, the bottle of whiskey. He went into the compartment and came out again, the lamp in one hand, and shut the hatch.

“That son of a bitch,” he said. “He knew you’d go in there alone.” He herded her down the tunnel. One bell rang: the end of his watch. He pushed her into his cabin. She felt of her throat. In a rising temper, Saba circled once around the little room. He stopped at the call screen.

“Bridge.”

“Yes, Akellar.”

“Call my watch into the Tank.” He wheeled around and pushed her, hard. “I warned you. You stay with me from now on. Or in here with the hatch locked.” He flew to the hatch. His wake was heated with his rage. She gave a quick glance around the room and followed him.

They went through the warren of the ship into the yellow corridor. One of the men from Tanuojin’s watch was coming the other way, and Saba attacked him. The other man never tried to fight back. He rolled to one side, his arms up to protect his face, and Saba slashed at him. Tanuojin’s man dodged behind the blow and raced away. Saba let him go. Paula went after him through the curtain of their scents. He swerved up into the Tank.

Sril and Bakan were at the far end of the long dim room. Near the hatch, Saba’s helmsman was talking to Marus, Tanuojin’s helm. Without a word, Saba flew at Marus. All three of the men of his watch charged at the man they had just been tolerating and clawed at him. Paula flinched back to the wall. Marus burst free and fled out the hatch, leaving a smoky trail of blood behind him in the air.

Sril came up to her. The gold wire winked in his nose. “Mendoz’, this is how innocent sailors die in space.”

Saba circled in the middle of the room, below the posters of naked women. Ketac had come in; he floated over beside Paula.

“Thank you,” she said, low.

“You helped me,” he said. “I pay my debts.”

“Listen to me.” Saba looked around at his men. “My lyo thinks he can run around me in my own ship. I’m going to kick him into shape, so stay away from him, unless you want some extra stripes.” He lunged at Ketac and got him by the shirtfront. “That means you, clothead.” He pushed his son backward away from him.

Paula sidled down the wall. Bubbles of Marus’s blood bobbed in the air around the hatch. It was the low watch, when Saba and Tanuojin were both off-duty. She looked both ways into the tunnel. A few yards away on either side, its kinks took it out of sight. She went out the hatch.

There was nowhere she could go to hide from them. The ship was like a maze. She flew down toward the red corridor. A sound ahead of her made her stop sharp. Tanuojin came around the next bend.

He flew at her, and she raced back the way she had come, into the S-curves below the Tank. Just out of his sight, she flattened herself against the wall. He sailed past her. She went back the other way. He struck at her and missed her by inches, his claws like knives. She was faster than he was. At the mouth of the red corridor she paused and looked back and saw him stopped ten feet up the tube, watching her. She went down to her cabin and locked herself in.

She was too jittery to play her flute. She prowled around and around the room. The cold and dark closed over her. The Styths on watch swam through the monitor screens. Her throat was still sore. She was tired. Her eyes burned in their sockets. Taking out the bedrug, she clipped the ring to the wall and wrapped herself up in the thick shag.

Saba woke her, banging on the door. She let him in. He came past her into the room. When he turned she saw four deep scratches down the side of his jaw.

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

The wounds were marked in dried blood. She put one hand on his shoulder, holding her blanket around her with the other. “What happened to your face?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.” He brushed her off. Unbuckling his belt, he peeled his overalls off. She backed away from him.

“Was that Tanuojin?”

“No. I can’t find him.”

They rolled the bed around them. The wings overlapped and clung to one another. She squirmed until she was comfortable. He ground the heel of his hand into his eyes.

“I’d like to wrap his damned dirty tongue around his neck.”

They lay quiet a moment. The floating bed rocked slightly back and forth. His fingers moved in her hair. Usually he was asleep before she was even settled enough to close her eyes.

“Why does he do this to me?” he said.

“How long have you known him?”

“Since we were neophytes.”

“Then you know what he’s like.”

He barked a flat laugh. “Yes. He knows what I’m like, too, which is why he’s staying out.”

“How did you meet him?”

“I don’t remember.” He squirmed around in the bedrug. “It was while I was loading. He was always around, being creepy. I couldn’t stand him. He’s nobody, and he has that nasty mouth—Anyhow, I got sick, and my friends decided I was dying and left me in an alley. He found me and took me to his trap. When I had the fits, he put his hands on me and I stopped kicking. He kept me alive all the time I was shedding my joe. As soon as I could stand up, we swore the irelyon.”

He yawned. The wounds down his face were ridged with dried blood. Grouchy, he said, “Now he thinks I’m his sole property.” She watched him fall asleep. For a long while, she lay in the air beside him, thinking of Tanuojin.

At three bells she went after him down the winding tunnel to the bridge. The rest of his watch was gathered around the hatch. Saba pushed the hatch open, and she followed him into the hollow bridge.

The other men streamed in behind them. On the perches along the wall, Tanuojin’s watchmen started up, intent. Saba dropped feet-first toward the cage. Tanuojin circled around it. His yellow eyes were fixed on his lyo. Saba ignored him. Tanuojin shot up to the hatch and plunged out. His watch followed him.

Paula settled down to the space of clear wall before the holograph. Ybix sailed thin as a blade through the green void. Saba was in the cage. He sat unmoving, his shoulders bowed. She watched him through the bars. He rubbed his hands; at the tips of his fingers the claws clicked together. Sril brought him a watchboard and hung there holding it out for half a minute before Saba noticed him. Paula fixed her eyes on the holograph.

The watch dragged along. Saba would not let her leave the bridge. She went around to the other stations to watch what the crew did. Bakan let her wear his headphones while he made up his log. His little finger stuck out crooked from his hand, swollen like a sausage. All she could hear in the headset were beeps and squeaks, half-animal noises.

Finally she said, “I’m hungry.”

“Wait.” Saba was writing on a watchboard. He did not look up.

“I’m starving.”

“Ay. Sril. Go with her.”

She thrust herself up through the bubble of the bridge toward the hatch, not waiting for Sril. He met her in the corridor just beyond, and they went side by side down to the black-white tunnel.

“How long will this last?” she said.

“Until it stops.”

The tunnels were empty. They flew along looking over their shoulders, furtive. In the slot of the galley, she breathed a trace of a scent, like a feather from a peacock’s tail. Peeling off the wrapper, she ate a food tablet. Sril was braced in the hatch, keeping guard.

“Does this happen often?” she asked.

“Depends on the ship. On the ship’s master. Yekaka used to start watch wars just to keep his crew in shape.”

“Did you serve under Yekaka too?”

He shook his head. “My father was his prima gunner. My grandfather was gunner under Yekaka’s father. Hurry up and eat.”

She took a protein strip and a tube of water and followed him out along the corridor. A head popped through a hatch before them and ducked back out of sight. Sril grabbed her arm.

“Move!”

He pushed her along through a bend in the tunnel. Just in front of her she smelled someone coming, and she pulled back out of his grip. Marus shot toward her. Sril lunged between them. The two men tangled together, their claws fixed in each other’s faces, their legs milling. One of them whistled. She ducked away from them. Beyond Marus, another of Tanuojin’s men appeared. He and Marus flung themselves on Sril. Their locked bodies packed the tunnel. Sril’s face was ripped. She wanted to help him but she could not think how.

Ketac raced around the bend past her. He pulled Marus off Sril’s back. Paula started forward and shrank back again. Tanuojin was coming. He cut through the tangle of men like a knife, the other men giving way to him, all but Ketac. The young man wheeled to meet him. Tanuojin hit him shoulder first and knocked him down the corridor.

Ketac bounced off the wall. Dazed, he swung around, and Tanuojin went at him again. Paula pushed away from the wall. Abruptly Saba raced in between his son and his lyo.

Tanuojin backed off. Paula was behind him; she saw his raised hands, the fingers spread, and the hooks arched. He and Saba faced each other a moment. Saba lunged forward and Tanuojin flinched back away from him. She moved, giving them room. They paused again, face to face. Saba feinted, and Tanuojin yielded to him again, his arms up to protect himself.

“This is my ship,” Saba said.

“Please,” Tanuojin said, so low she could hardly hear him.

“This is my ship.”

Tanuojin’s back was still to her. The other men were watching, their faces rapt. Slowly Tanuojin dropped his hands, leaving himself open. He closed his yellow eyes. Saba lifted his head.

“Get out of here.” He gestured to his crew, and the men turned and flew away. Paula floated quiet in the tunnel, watching. Saba put his hand out, and Tanuojin took it and they embraced. Tanuojin put his head down against Saba’s shoulder. Paula went away up the tunnel.

She had taught Ketac the rules of Go, but she could not teach him the art. They played in the Tank, on a grid floating between them, with little magnets. He always tried to control the entire board, winding up with nothing.

“Tanuojin is an Akellar, isn’t he?” she said.

The young man’s head bobbed. “He was Melleno’s pitman. You met Melleno, didn’t you? In Saturn-Keda.”

“Yes. What’s a pitman?”

“He’s the man who does an Akellar’s work for him in the House when he’s not there. The rAkellaron House, in Vribulo. The pitman goes around and talks about the laws and makes deals. Like that. Tanuojin was that for Melleno. Then when Melleno built Yekka, he made Tanuojin its Akellar.”

She shook a handful of magnets, watching him play a white one onto the grid. Sril and Bakan were throwing darts at the end of the Tank. In eighteen watches they would reach Uranus. She played, and Ketac ignored her move and put a white magnet down in another corner. He refused to defend himself. But he never actually lost: he had developed a technique for avoiding that. Now he glanced at the other men and lowered his voice to keep them from hearing what he said.

“I could whip Tanuojin. If—”

“If you could only get your face off the floor.”

“He can’t fight. He’s a coward. Everybody knows that. Didn’t he come after you?”

Sril called, “You’re talking about the only known saint in the Styth Fleet, boy. Be reverent.” He sailed a dart through the air toward the target.

Paula set another pebble on the grid and gathered up six of Ketac’s stones. His neck swelled.

“Hey!”

“I keep telling you—”

“You can’t do that.” He sucked in his breath, glaring at the board. He struck it with his fist and knocked it flying, bringing the game to its usual end. A magnet tapped her in the mouth and rebounded.

“Hey, boy,” Sril said. He and Bakan glided down the room toward Ketac. “You’re out of hand again, boy, you know what the Man said about that.”

Ketac rolled over backward and made for the hatch. Sril and Bakan plunged through the litter of pebbles after him. She gave them room. Ketac sprayed a warning scent at them.

“Stay away from me—”

The two men were maneuvering him between them. Sril’s face was wide with his grin. Ketac charged for the hatch and they chased him out. In the corridor a high yelp of pain sounded. Paula went around the Tank gathering up the magnets. Saba had told her that they would break the air filters if they got into the screens. Sril came in again, beaming.

“Don’t believe Ketac. Whatever The Creep is or isn’t, he can fight like a red snake when he has to.” Sril went to the wall, where the darts stuck up in a clump like feathers. “Come here. I’ll teach you to hit.”