Floating Worlds

MATUKO Saba’s Akellarat. The White Season

She woke up surrounded by Styth children. She lifted her head, and they burst into giggles and disappeared out the door. A small lamp burned on the table beside the bed, giving off a gentle warmth. She swung her feet over the edge of the bed and slid off. The drop to the floor jarred her. She looked around at a huge room. The bed was eight feet long and so high off the floor she doubted she could climb back up without help.

The room was dim and except for the little lamp’s heat it was cold. She took the lamp and went off to explore. A sliding door covered a rack in the wall full of her clothes, all neatly hung on arms and hooks attached to the wall at arm’s length above her head. Her shoes were on a shelf completely out of reach. Her flute was on the floor next to her valise and the big suitcase. She had slept a long time, while all this was going on around her. She could remember being in Ybix orbiting Uranus; she could remember being in Ybicsa and starting down to the Planet, but nothing more.

Outside this room was a short hall. She crossed it to another room, bare of furniture. When she went in, a brown furry animal raced to the window, jumped to the sill, and dove out. She put the lamp up on the sill of the window and tried to pull herself up to see out but even when she stood on tiptoe she could see no more than the wall of a building across the way. She went back to the room where she had wakened and dragged a chair across the hall to stand on.

Kneeling on the seat of the big chair, she looked out the window to a wide, open yard, ringed around with white one-story houses. A few feet away from her stood a strange kind of post, silvery gray, with several short stumps like branches coming out of the top. At its foot the small brown animal crouched. Its long tail twitched and one ear swiveled to listen to her. The window swung open wide at her touch. She leaned out, looking up, and saw Matuko.

The city closed over her head three or more miles away, veined with crooked streets. It was dark, like an Earthish middle twilight, almost colorless, brown and dark brown and gray. Above her, nearly hidden behind the roof, she could see part of the black ribbon of a lake. Streaks of white lay here and there. In the dull brown it looked like frost on a wintery field.

Children giggled again. She looked about in time to see half a dozen round heads sticking out past the corner of the house. They shrieked and hid. The brown animal raced away. It paused halfway along the wall of the house to turn a pop-eyed monstrous face to her and ran on.

Somewhere inside the house a door slammed. “Paula?”

“I’m in here.” She turned around. Saba came in from the hall.

“What are you doing, running around like this?” He picked her up and put her on her feet on the floor. “You should stay in bed until you get used to the gravity.” He patted her belly. She had to look up at him again. He fit this vast room, the huge furniture. She turned back to the window, uneasy.

“What’s that white stuff?”

He looked out where she was pointing. “That’s grass.”

“White grass? What’s that?” She pointed to the post.

“That’s a bilyobio tree.”

“It’s not really a tree.”

“No. It’s not organic. Nobody knows what they are, they grow all over Styth, everywhere there are Styths. Except the moons. They’re good luck. They say if you live near a bilyobio tree, you’ll live to die of old age.”

“What’s little and brown and has a long tail and pop-eyes?”

“Why don’t you stop asking questions and come over and meet my wives? As long as you’re up. I—” He raised his head. Someone was walking down the hall. “Hup!”

“It’s me, Pop.”

A tall young man appeared in the doorway. Older than Ketac, he was in Saba’s image, slenderly built. Red jewels glittered in the furls of his ears. He said, “I have to talk to you. I didn’t want to do it in front of Mother. There’s been a lot of trouble about this treaty.”

They looked at her, and she turned away from them and went to the window and pretended to be watching out. She guessed this was his prima son, whose name she had forgotten. The young man said, “There’s been a lot of dirty talk, and some fighting and a bomb went off in the Lake market—”

“How did the news get around?” Saba asked.

“I don’t know. We had to close the Peak Farm, there was a threat to bomb it, too.”

Saba let out a string of swearwords. “Who’s behind it?”

“I can’t find out. Nobody, I think—it’s just streetwork, you know—spontaneous.”

“Dakkar,” his father said, “nothing like this is ever spontaneous. Somebody is back of it.”

An edge crept into Dakkar’s voice. “I think I’m looking at him. Sir.”

“Oh, you do?”

“Everybody is saying you sold us out. This treaty—”

“Sir.”

“I’m serious about—”

“Sir.”

Paula frowned at the wall. If the treaty failed, she was finished.

“Yes, sir,” Dakkar said, behind her.

“That’s right,” his father said. “And you don’t close my crystal farm.”

Raising her eyes, she looked around the barren room. The gravity dragged at her, drawing the burden of her pregnancy down, so that she had to stand with her hips thrown forward to support it. She put her hands on the small of her back.

“Yes, sir,” Dakkar was saying stiffly.

“Go find out who’s trying to knock us. You can leave.”

His son left. Saba said, “Paula, let’s go.”

She went after him up the hall. They passed through a formal room, massed with huge furniture. A swing couch hung from the ceiling by chains. She felt too small to be noticed, a mouse in a rat world.

They crossed the yard toward the next house, cat-corner on the wall on the compound. On the eave of its roof, the brown animal sat washing its face with its forepaws.

“What’s that?”

“A kusin.” He still sounded angry. “They’re harmless, except to the dog-mice and snakes.”

“It was in my house.”

“It won’t come back, now that somebody is living there. They don’t like people.” His hand dropped to her shoulder and aimed her at the door into the house ahead of them. “Go in there. I have something to do. Boltiko knows who you are. I’ll see you later.” He walked off across the yard toward the biggest building in the compound, against the wall opposite her little house. She stopped and looked back the way she had come, to see what the house looked like. A white box. She thought of going back there. But she had to face his wives sometime. She went on toward Boltiko’s house.

His prima wife was years older than he was. Her body was lost in rolls of fat. Necklace creases indented the column of her throat. Paula sat uncomfortably in a chair in Boltiko’s kitchen while children dashed in and out screeching and the wife cut bread and cooked meal.

“Were you married in the Earth?” Boltiko asked.

“We aren’t married.”

“Oh.” Boltiko turned and swatted a passing child on the backside. “Didn’t I tell you not to run in the house?” She smacked him again. The little boy scurried out the door, his spread hands protecting his rump. Paula knew he was a boy because his head was shaven; the girls all wore their hair in braids. Boltiko looked Paula over covertly while she stirred the meal.

“Will you be married here?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

Another woman came in, this one very young, tall, and extravagantly beautiful, like an advertisement. The sleeves of her dress were of silver lace.

“Illy,” Boltiko said, “this is Paula.”

“Hello,” Paula said.

Illy stared at her, unfriendly. “Hello,” she said, after a moment. Her voice had the same musical quality as Tanuojin’s. She sank into a chair down the table from Paula.

“Where is he?” she asked Boltiko.

“He went somewhere with Dakkar, into the city.”

“What did he bring you?”

“A timepiece, the same as usual. Quaint.”

“He gave me skin-color. Gold, can you imagine?” Illy turned toward Paula. Her hair was gathered on the crown of her head in an aureole of perfect curls. She was the most beautiful woman Paula had ever seen, Styth or other. “Where did he meet you?”

“On Mars,” Paula said.

“Mars,” Illy said, astonished, and Boltiko said, “Mars,” as disapproving as her reaction to the news that Paula and Saba were not married. Illy said, “I thought you were Earthish.”

“I am. But we met on Mars.” She looked from one black face to the other. “At a very fancy sex park.”

Illy’s lips parted. Boltiko said, “I don’t know what manners are in the Earth, but in my house we don’t use words like that around the children.” She poured something liquid into the meal and set the covered pan on the back of the counter.

“I don’t understand,” Illy said. “What were you doing there? Were you alone?”

“Yes. I was talking to him. Politics.”

“Oh.” Boltiko wiped the already spotless table. “Was that how you got the baby? Talking?”

“That was where. How was the usual way.”

To her surprise, Boltiko laughed. The back door burst open. Saba came in, with his son Dakkar, and behind them Ketac. Paula glanced startled from Ketac to Boltiko; under all that fat, her face was shaped like his. Illy raised one hand delicately over her mouth, veiling herself before the young men. To Boltiko, Saba said, “I’ll eat in the Manhus. Hurry up, I’m starving.” He went out again, trailing his sons, without looking at the other women. Illy lowered her hand.

“I’ll show you the timepiece he gave me,” Boltiko said.

They went down a hall, past rooms full of children and children’s things, to a large dim room. The furniture was packed into it like hoardings under a ceiling painted with an abstract design. The chairs and hanging lamps were shielded in clear plastic bags. The three women made a winding course through the clutter to a corner cabinet. On the shelves were several little clocks. The sandglass Saba had bought on the Earth stood among them.

“Oh,” Illy said. “Isn’t that clever.”

“This cabinet is so pretty,” Boltiko said to Paula. “I had nothing to put here, so I asked Saba to bring me something when he goes on his trips.”

Paula reached for a watch with a clamshell case. She found the spring catch and opened it. Boltiko said, blankly, “Why—it has an inside.”

Paula showed her the open watch. In one half was a picture of a white baby, with wisps of fair hair and a stupid babyish smile, and in the other half a fancy scrolled initial T. Boltiko took it.

“Illy, look.”

The other woman glanced at the watch. “Ugh. What an ugly baby.”

Paula backed away from them. She realized Boltiko had no notion what Saba did on his trips. She went around the room looking at the heavy furniture, protected in its wrap of plastic.

On the far side of the room, Illy said, “She’s a slave! He didn’t marry her!”

Paula raised her head. The furniture hid her from the other women.

“No,” Boltiko said. “But he says we’re supposed to treat her like a wife.”

“She’s ugly. He’ll get tired of her. He’ll sell her.”

“Sssh, she’ll hear you.”

Paula was behind a chair. She leaned against it, staying out of their sight. Illy said, “She’s gone.”

“If you ask me,” Boltiko said, “he’s already tired of her—he just feels responsible for getting her that way.” Her skirts swished. She and Illy went to the door into the hall. “That’s all the more reason to be nice to her.”

“At least he didn’t marry her.”

They left, and Paula let them get down the hall before she followed. The baby rolled up in her body anchored her down. Her back hurt. Slowly she waddled back toward the kitchen.

Boltiko was putting covered dishes on a tray. Illy sat in one of the big chairs inspecting her beautiful hands. Paula lowered her eyes. For a moment she hated them both; she burned to say something to wither them. She climbed up into the chair beside Illy’s.

“Pedasen,” Boltiko called, out the back door.

A dark man came in from the yard. He wore a loose white quilted tunic. For an instant he and Paula stared at each other. He was of her race, with Tony’s coloring, and he had pale eyes like Tony’s. Boltiko tapped the tray.

“Take this to the Akellar. See I get all the dishes back this very watch.”

“Yes, mem.” His voice was satiny. He kept his eyes away from Paula and took the tray out. Paula watched him go.

“Pedasen will help you fix your house,” Boltiko said.

“He isn’t—” Paula wet her lips. “I don’t want him.”

Illy giggled. “He is an it.”

The nerves crawled in the backs of Paula’s hands. She sat rigid in the chair that did not fit her, that held her far away from the table. That was why Pedasen’s voice was so smooth: he had been gelded. The two women talked about things she did not understand, in words she did not know. She closed her eyes.

When she had been there long enough to have her walking strength back, she told Saba she wanted to go out, to look at the city. He refused. They were sitting on the swing couch in her front room, reading through the trade contract, and she let him go on two or three paragraphs before she said, “When can I go out?”

“The street is no place for a woman. If you want something, send a slave for it. On this bond, here—” he tapped the page, “I wanted you to make that forfeit if they break the law, remember?”

“That’s the next paragraph.”

He read the next paragraph. She watched his face. The baby was kicking her hard up under the ribs. The baby’s father sat back, holding out the page to her.

“You’ve spelled it out too much—I want it vague, so I can get rid of somebody I don’t like.”

Their eyes met. She said, “Do you think I’m going to stay locked up in here the whole ten years?”

“Boltiko and Illy never go out.” He put the contract on her lap. “Finish the contracts and I’ll talk to you about things like that.”

Paula grunted at him. She reached for the thirty close-printed pages of the contract. “I’m getting bored. Sril could go with me.”

“I just told you. I won’t discuss it until you finish the contract. And if you try to sneak out, I’ll use my belt on you.”

She threw the contract onto his lap, slid off the couch, and went down the hall to her bedroom. She heard him go out of the house through the front door.

When she went into labor, Boltiko called the midwives. Paula lay in her bed, wrapped in a heavy blanket. The women held her hands and stroked her hair back. There were three of them, all very old: one was slave, but the other two were Styth. The pain made her whimper and bite her lips. She clung to the slavewoman’s hands, afraid.

Saba came in. He had been away in the city. The woman moved back and he sat on the bed beside her and put his hands on her body.

“Does it hurt?”

She nodded; she could not talk.

“It’s supposed to hurt. Don’t be frightened. I’ll be in the next room.” He left.

She shut her eyes. The women moistened her lips with a sponge. They murmured to her, crooning, and sang her songs and said little charms. When she curled up they made her lie straight. A bell rang. The low watch had begun. She panted, trying to catch her breath. Her body knotted around the baby. She screamed, and Saba came in again.

“Akellar,” a woman said. “She is too small. We have to open her.”

He leaned over her, one hand on her belly. “No. It’s moving. Let her kick. She’ll get it out.” He stroked her face. “Don’t worry, Paula. They think every birth is the first.”

She closed her eyes, terrified. She clutched his fingers but he disengaged himself and went out of the room. She lay in a web of pain. The baby was tearing her apart. She heard two bells ring. Her throat was raw from screeching, she was so tired she could only moan.

“She is too small. She’ll die if we don’t cut her open and take it that way. The baby will die.”

Saba had come in again. Dopey with pain, she had not noticed him, and she could not care. He handled her. “No. Give her time. It’s a big baby. She’s getting it out.”

The pain was blinding. She lay in its grip for two watches more. At last David was born. The women took the howling baby away. Paula lay in a dazed feverish half-dream, blood pooling under her hips.

“You can’t bring a strange man in here,” Boltiko said.

Saba lifted the blankets off Paula’s body. “She trusts me. I have to do something.”

“It’s disgusting. Hasn’t she suffered enough?”

“Get out if you don’t like it.”

Paula’s mouth and throat were papery dry. Her strength was gone. She could barely turn her head. She wondered where the baby was. A man she had never seen before sat down on the bed beside her.

“There,” Saba said. “Over her womb.” He threw the blankets back. She whimpered in the cold.

“Saba—” The stranger bit his lip. “I—”

“Damn you, she’s bleeding to death,” Saba got the man’s hand by the wrist and slapped his palm down on Paula’s belly. She shut her eyes. She was cold. Saba pulled her legs out flat on the bed, her feet apart.

“Mikka. Let off, let me see what happens.”

The hand left her belly. Saba said, “She’s bleeding like a river. Here.” The cool hand fell on her body again. Saba was bending over her, between her legs. She saw him in a mist. She could not breathe deep enough to fill her lungs.

“Massage her. Rub her, hard.” He stooped over her and rammed his fist up through the torn channel of her body into her womb and put his free hand over the other man’s.

She cried out. The deep pain burned like salt. He squeezed her into another hard contraction.

“Good girl. That’s a good girl. One more.”

He massaged her, his arm buried in her halfway to the elbow. “Come on, girl, damn it, break the law and live.” She whined. Her body clenched. He drew his hand out of her. “Good. Good.” Her womb tightened again of itself, and she whimpered.

“I’m cold.”

“A little longer,” he said. “Just a little longer and you can rest.” He was sitting on the bed between her spread legs. In his hand was a tool with jaws, like a staple gun. “Don’t worry. I’ve clipped together men with wounds a lot worse than this. Mikka, stay there.”

The stranger stared off in the opposite direction. His hand was spread over the soft empty hill of her belly. She shivered in spasms, in fits. Distinctly she felt the grip of the stapler in her skin. The tool clicked steadily. She was too tired to cry. Finally he put her legs together.

“Let off, Mikka.”

The hand left her. Saba murmured, “Good. Stay in the next room, in case she starts to bleed again.” He lifted her up and wrapped her in a clean dry blanket. Her groin throbbed, zippered up with plastic teeth. “You’re a good little lawbreaking bitch.” He kissed her forehead. She yawned, sinking into sleep.

“Mikka is my brother,” Saba said. “He’s a blood-stauncher. His one gift, aside from getting thrown out of drinking docks.”

“Like Tanuojin.” Paula braced her shoulders up on her elbows, watching him take the clips out of her crotch. He bent over her, his head and shoulders framed between her raised knees. One by one the clips dropped into a bucket on the floor.

“Tanuojin is a little more than a blood-stauncher. I told you not to talk about that.” Another clip rang into the pail. “If I ever lose my call, I think I’ll take up midwifery. That’s not a bad job.”

“How is David?”

“Vida is fine. Boltiko has him. I shirted him the watch after he was born. He looks like me.” He sat back and put the pliers down. “Thirty-four clips. Those were three long wounds, sweet.”

She moved painfully over to the edge of the bed. When she sat up her head felt swollen. “Have you heard anything from the Committee?”

“Nothing. Stay in bed for a while.” He went over to the door. “I’ll tell you if anything happens.”

“I want my baby.” Carefully she raised herself up on her feet, gratified by her strength. She went toad-legged to the clothes rack on the wall.

“Boltiko knows all about babies. Let her take care of him.”

“I want him.”

“You aren’t the mothering type.”

“How do you know what I am?” She took a pair of her Ybix overalls, to keep her warm, and a long dress.

“I know you. He’s my son too. I won’t let you mistreat him.”

She glanced at him, standing by the door with his hand on the latch, and pulled the overalls up over her shoulders. “What do you think I’m going to do to him, whip him?”

“I won’t let you turn him into some freak anarchist.”

She put the dress on. Her body was still thick, sway-backed from the baby. Saba went out; she heard the front door slam.

The baby’s eyes were not round, like a Styth’s, and not black. They were long and slanted, brown like hers, set far apart in his round chinless face. Boltiko gave her heaps of clothes for him, showed her how to mix his food and how to feed him, and called in the slave Pedasen to carry everything over to her house for her. “He’s a fine, strong baby,” the prima wife said, “although he’s so small. Saba doesn’t breed weaklings. If you need help, send for me.” She put the baby into Paula’s arms. He was heavy. Paula shifted his weight against her shoulder. Looking down at him, she felt a sudden wild surge of love.

Pedasen carried the basket of clothes and food after her out to the yard. She slowed down so that he could catch up with her, and he stopped behind her. She went back to his side. His face was smooth, like a child’s; he had never shaved his beardless cheeks.

“Is that your whole name?” she said.

“Mem,” he said, blank.

“Don’t you have another name?”

She had been speaking Styth. Now he turned his gaze on her, his arms wrapped around the basket, and said, “Why did you come here?” in a slurred, liquid version of the Common Speech. “Why didn’t you stay where you belong?”

“Come on,” she said. “Standing up makes me dizzy.” She went off toward her house. He followed her, and she stopped, irritated, and said with force, “Come on,” and made him walk beside her. They went into her house.

He spoke only enough Styth to take orders. While they put away the baby’s things, she talked to him in the Common Speech, and he answered in the dialect. He had no other name, just Pedasen, which had been his mother’s name too. Somewhere out in the compound a bell rang, and he hurried away to answer it.

Most of the time the baby slept. Boltiko sent another slave to bring Paula her high watch meal. When she had eaten and slept, she took the baby and went out to walk in the yard. The biggest building in the compound was the Manhus, on the wall opposite her house. Long and low, it ran the length of the yard, its door like a mouth and its front porch like a jaw. She had never been there, and she went in there now.

The door led her into a wide dark hallway. Sril was standing in the back, reading from a message board on the wall. When he saw her, he grinned all across his wide face.

“Mendoz’. Let me see.” He came up to look at the baby.

“You don’t live here, do you?” she said.

He was bent over the baby, cooing. “No—up the curve. Ah, he’s pretty. I like little babies.” He straightened up, his eyes on her. “Are you supposed to be in here?”

“Probably not.” Three doors opened off the hall on either side, and she went to the nearest and went through it.

It was crowded with Styths, their backs to her, so that no one noticed her. The baby slept heavily in her arms. She moved to one side to see what was happening. At the head of the room Saba walked up and down past a broad table. A lone man faced him, his hands behind him fastened together with a white plastic yoke. Paula stood back near the wall. The twenty-odd men packing the rear half of the room were watching intently, silent.

“My family has dominated Matuko for eighteen generations,” Saba was saying. “For the blood we’ve lost for this city, the least we could get is trust.” He circled the table. The men watching him were utterly silent. “I don’t care what you call it,” he said to the man on trial. “I say you started a riot.”

No one moved. The bound man said, “You can put me up for the rest of my life, Akellar, but you can’t make me believe you haven’t betrayed us.”

“I know what’s right for my own city.” Saba walked up and down before the table, his hands on his hips. “I haven’t betrayed anybody. This treaty will give us a kind of life none of you has ever dreamed of, and all you can do is squawk at me. I’m risking my back and my rank in the Chamber to make my city great, and all I get is hysteria.”

The baby stirred, flinging out his arms. Paula went back to the hall. He had opened his crystal farm again and his slaves were refusing to work. Pedasen brought her wild rumors from the street about fires and riots. She carried the baby across the yard to her house to feed him. Saba told her nothing. In fact, she had seen him little since David’s birth. He was busy. She knew he still wanted her. She fed the baby and rocked him on the swing until he fell asleep. She was strong again, and her body had healed. She knew he would come to her.

“Boltiko is much older than he is,” she said.

“The blacks do that,” Pedasen answered. He carried an empty pack on his shoulders that flapped with each step. “If a boy’s wild, they marry him to some old mare who steadies him.” They were coming to the market. In the open lot above the lake shore, Styths and slaves in white milled around bright-painted open stalls. She looked back over her shoulder. On the perpendicular wall of the city Saba’s compound was an open square, head-on. She could just make out the roof of her house.

“How long have you been here?” she asked.

“I was born in Yekaka’s Manhus,” Pedasen said. “My mother came from outside the Planet.”

“Do you know where?”

“No.” He stopped and pointed through an alley. “Down there is the Varyhus. That’s the district where the plastics factory is—it’s a terrible place, full of thieves and murderers. Don’t ever go there.”

She stood looking down the alley. It dipped along a short hill. On either side were low red buildings, brick-colored, peeling posters hanging off the walls. The air smelled bitterly of resin. She trotted after the eunuch, who was going into the market.

There were many more slaves than Styths. Pedasen led her through the thick stream of people to a booth piled with fish. There was an awning spread under the table to protect them from the radiation corning from the ground. Paula reached for a fish. Its belly was slit open from head to tail; inside, the flesh was translucent pink. Pedasen smacked her hand and she put the fish down again. A slave in a blue apron came up to the far side of the booth to serve him. Fish scales glittered on his sleeves and the round sealer was stuck in his cuff.

Paula wandered away through the crowd. The next line of tables was stacked up with live chickens. Styth chickens: they had no wings, their feathers were like silky white hair. They huddled mute on the counter, their long red feet tied together. She went along the street, her hands in her sleeves to keep them warm.

The city was large enough that the ground under her feet seemed flat and the street rose and fell in little hills, but whenever she lifted her eyes she saw the vast bubble around her, closed over her head, like a tremendous cave. The slaves around her chattered in their liquid speech. The few Styth women among them were veiled to the eyes. She felt the vast drone of the city around her, oppressive. In the next lane were slaves hanging cloth from the eaves of their booths, red and white striped canvas, black silk, the heavy gray cloth Saba’s shirts were made of. In the alley beyond she found beer vendors. She turned a corner and came into a narrow street where they sold people.

She stopped in the middle of the street. Her hackles rose. On the side of the street, three women sat, their knees drawn up, and their feet yoked together with white plastic yokes. A card over their heads told their ages and use. None of them seemed to notice her. One was fair-skinned, almost Martian white. Beside them, in a little cage, a child slept curled on the ground.

“Paula!”

She turned away from the slaves. Pedasen hurried up to her. “What are you doing in here?” In one hand he held a brace of chickens by the feet. The bag on his back was stuffed with his purchases, and the string of credit around his neck was almost naked of its coins. He gripped her arm and rushed her out of the street. “This place gives me the chills.”

She went beside him back through the market. He held her arm as if she might run away. He was taller than she was, and he walked fast, so that she had to stretch her legs to keep up. The chickens swung from his free hand.

“You won’t get in trouble, will you?” she said. “For bringing me here.”

He shook his head. “All the trouble will land on you.”

She looked up ahead of them. In their passage across the city, the ground seemed to flatten away from her, and now Saba’s compound was sinking down slowly into the clutter of large buildings along that part of the wall. They were passing the head of the lake. Boats rowed over it in lines, like soldiers.

“What are they fishing for?” She saw the nets in their wake, swollen fat with the black lake water.

Pedasen shook his head. “You ask too many questions. You’re just going to have to learn not to be so curious.”

She looked up at him. He was staring at the street just ahead of his feet. His silken cheeks were darker than hers, his eyes startlingly pale. Certainly his mother had been Earthish. In the street ahead of them, between high walls, Styth children were throwing a curved stick back and forth. She followed Pedasen down the grassy lane that led along the back wall of Saba’s compound and in the little slave door.

Boltiko’s house was full of screaming children. Paula let herself in the front door to the cluttered sitting room. Down the hall the prima wife’s voice sounded, shrill: “I don’t care what he did, I’ve told you again and again—” There followed the smack of a hand on a child’s bottom. In the hall a knot of five or six children packed the kitchen door, their backs to Paula. She went unseen into Boltiko’s bedroom, where David lay asleep on the bed, and took him away out the front door.

He woke while she was changing his clothes, and she lay on her bed nose to nose with him. His arms and legs flailed aimlessly and he heaved himself onto his side, as if he were trying to roll over. She kissed his head, capped in thick black hair. After a while, she realized there was someone behind her.

Saba was in the doorway. He said, “Where did you go?”

“Out.” She slid off the bed to her feet.

“I told you what I’d do if you did that.” He took off his belt. She wet her lips. He came around the bed, took her by the scruff of the neck, and whipped her with the doubled belt, six or eight times. It hurt. When he let her go she grabbed the bed to keep from falling.

“This isn’t the Earth,” he said. “You can’t do as you please around here. That was for your own good—if you go out in the street you’ll just be hurt.”

She sat on the bed, her hands in her lap. Standing in front of her he buckled on his belt again. He said, “I told you when you wanted to come here it wouldn’t be the kind of life you were used to.” His voice sounded above her head. She refused to look up at him. “You’d better get off your high branch. I won’t take your selfish anarchist act too long. Are you listening to me?”

“I hear you.”

“Why don’t you learn how to sew and make yourself some decent clothes? You look like a street-pig, you act like a street-pig, and I won’t take it. Understand? I have enough trouble. I won’t take any more from you.”

He walked out of the room. She put her head back and shut her eyes. She did not belong here. She had come here by mistake, by accident. The baby whimpered. She got up and took him down to the kitchen to feed him.

She put off leaving the compound again. Boltiko mixed little bowls of mush to feed David. “Just give him a little at first, in case it makes him sick.” The prima wife dipped up a bit of mashed fruit on her finger and ate it. She sighed, all her fat quaking. “I don’t know what I’m to do with Ketac. I hope he didn’t behave like this when he was in your world. Dakkar is such a perfect son.”

Pedasen came in, and the three cleaned Paula’s house. She told herself that was why she was not going out into the city again: the baby needed her, the house was dirty, Boltiko wanted to talk.

“Why don’t you use this room for a. nursery?” Pedasen said. He looked in the door to the empty room across the hall from hers. “There’s furniture over—yeow!”

She rushed after him into the room. “What’s wrong?”

“There was a kusin in here!” He pulled the window closed. She went up beside him and opened it again. Pedasen’s pale eyes were popping with excitement. He shut the window. “You can’t leave this open—it comes in through the window.”

She opened the window. “It comes in here to drink.”

“It will eat the toes off the baby.”

“It’s very shy. It won’t go near the baby.”

Pedasen muttered something. He rubbed his nose with his forefinger. She left the room, and he came after her to help her move the big cabinet in the sitting room.

The doors of the cabinet were divided into eight panels, inlaid with metal under a thick shiny glaze. “That’s the story of Capricornus,” he told her. “He was a hero—” He reached up to touch the top panel. “See? Here he is wrongfully accused and his father exiles him, and he goes on his wanderings. But he returns home in the end.”

She wiped the glossy surface of the door with her sleeve. In the panel at her eye-level a tiny man fought a lizard with a round badge on its breast. “What’s this?”

“That’s the dragon Jupiter.” His finger traced the blossom of the beast’s flaming breath. Now she recognized the planetary symbol on the disk. The figures were in low-relief under the glaze, realistic in the detail, even the little image of the man.

“I’m not keeping you from anything, am I?”

“Oh, no,” the eunuch said. “If the mem wanted me, she would ring the bell.”

“You’re hiding out,” she said.

“Not really.”

“Really.”

“You don’t mind, do you?” he said.

“No.”

“I’d work for you, if there was anything to do.”

“I know. It’s all right.”

“When the Akellar gets back,” he said, “he’ll probably put everybody to work.”

She leaned on the back of the swing couch. The chains skreed under her weight. “Where is he?” The couch swayed away from her, and she lifted her feet off the ground and swung with it.

“Half a block of the Tulan was blown down last watch. There was an awful riot.” Pedasen caught the swing. “He’s out looking it over. Next they’ll be breaking down the compound door.”

The baby cried, and they turned their heads to listen. Paula waited to see if David would quiet by himself, and after three or four yells he subsided. She leaned on the couch and swung back and forth. She felt like a ghost in this world, something these other people imagined for their own use: Pedasen to escape work, David to feed him, Saba to deal with the Committee. She had to stop leaving her life up to accident.

“The Tulan,” she said. “What’s that?”

“The rich district, across the city.”

“Take me there.”

Pedasen found her slave’s clothes: baggy white trousers and a white quilted tunic. They walked down to the lake and along the street that followed the shore. The watch was high. Lines of boats rowed across the black water, drawing their nets after them. Three oars to a side they crawled on the still lake surface. The street was busy with slaves going to and from the market on the city wall to her right. Pedasen led her down a steep lane between rows of tall old houses, smelling of fish.

“You’re asking for worse than a whipping,” he said once.

They cut through a part of the Varyhus, along a stretch of the factory fence, and came to the Tulan. Here it was quiet. Banks of white grass grew on either side of the path and in the lanes between the walled houses. She saw no one else, not even children, until they turned a corner and came to a broad stretch of rubble.

For two or three acres, broken concrete and plastic covered the ground. A cart stood in the street, half-full of debris. Two slaves were shoveling in the mess that littered the street. Other white slaves stooped and picked through the ruins. A bilyobio tree grew up at the edge of the street. Paula went over to it, watching a single file of Styths on the far side of the blown-up place. The rubble crackled when she stepped on it, gave way, and nearly dropped her. Pedasen grabbed her elbow.

“Paula.” He nodded at the Styths two hundred feet away. “That’s him.”

She stepped carefully over a broken wall, high as her knees. There was a puddle of melted plastic on the far side, still warm. The sharp edges of the trash cut her shoes. She saw something bright in the blackened crumbled concrete and picked up a metal buckle.

“Paula!” Pedasen hissed, behind her.

She showed him the buckle. The etched design was laid in with soot. “I’ll bet you this I can walk right up to him and he won’t even see me.”

“You’ll get your back peeled off.” His lips were pressed together, like Boltiko’s when somebody swore. She rolled the buckle into the cuff of her sleeve. Watching for things she could salvage from the junk, she crossed the ruin. A sweetish stench of acetone came from the burned ground. Pedasen followed her. At a big two-headed bilyobio tree in the middle of the place, three slaves had gathered to pass a jug of water around. She stopped near them.

“Give that over here,” Pedasen said, and the strange slaves handed him the jug. They were all watching the Styths.

“Find anything?” one said, low.

Pedasen shook his head. He jabbed his chin at Saba and his men, who were cutting across the rubble toward the next street. “How long has he been here?”

“Since the half-watch,” another slave said. They were all talking in murmurs. Paula looked up at the bilyobio. One stubby upper branch was split, but otherwise it seemed untouched by the explosion. The jug came around to her and she sipped the cool water. Saba was scanning the ground, his hands on his hips, and his face gripped with bad temper.

“Have they found anything?” she said.

“Two bomb casings,” a strange slave told her.

Another man took the jug from her. “They’d have found plenty, but Tssa’s men were here last watch cleaning up.” He grinned; he had no teeth in his upper jaw.

“Who is Tssa?” she asked.

Pedasen’s elbow slammed into her ribs. “Don’t ask questions.” To the others, he said, “She’s fresh, she still talks too much.”

Saba was coming closer, his men strung out behind him. His son Dakkar was among them. The slaves moved away from the bilyobio tree, hurrying in their quick stride, bending to search in the trash. Paula drifted over toward the Styths. She circled them once, coming within five feet of Saba. He kicked at the ground and black char flew in a spray. He looked straight at her without seeing her. She went slowly back toward the street, casting around on the ground for salvage, met Pedasen, and they started home.

She reached the compound, left her slave clothes with Pedasen in the slaves’ room of the Manhus, and retrieved David from Boltiko. When she went in the kitchen door of her house she could hear the sawing of the swing chains in the front room. She went down the hall to the archway. Saba was sprawled on the couch, her flute in his hands. He was trying to play it, but as hard as he blew over the mouthpiece he could not draw a note from it. Seeing her, he put the flute down.

“You’re lucky I don’t lose my temper easily.”

She laid the baby on the floor by the Capricornus cabinet and tucked his blanket around him. “This seems to be the only way I can get your attention.”

“I’ve been busy.” He took a strip of green recording tape out of his sleeve, and she went to the foot of the swing. “This came from the Earth while you were out running around like a whore.”

She took the tape and sat down on the swing with it in her hand. “Have you had it transcribed?”

“I’ve listened to it. There are about fifty questions on details and they’re complaining about something in the bond clause.”

She wound the tape into a coil. That was why he was keeping his belt on. She said, “You never come near me any more.”

He stirred. His eyes shifted away from her. “I don’t want to get you pregnant again.” He fussed with his mustaches. In her imagination she heard something stop, like a song stopping. She made herself admit that she had lost him. She looked quickly away before he saw it in her face.

“What are you going to do about that?” he said.

She put the tape on the couch. “I can’t tell until I read it. There’s no sense in worrying about it anyway before you stifle this street action against the treaty.”

“That’s not your business.”

“It is my business. If you can’t put this treaty over here, I might as well go back to the Earth. Do you know who’s doing it?”

He scowled at her. She faced him, expressionless. “Is it Tssa?”

On the floor by the cabinet the baby squealed. She went to look. He had wakened; he seemed happy enough staring at the shining cabinet door.

“What do you know about Tssa?” his father said.

“Not me. The slaves. The slaves see everything that happens. None of you ever notices them, but they’re everywhere.”

“What do they say about Tssa?”

“His men were there in the Tulan, before you saw the ruin. Is this attack on you or just the treaty?”

“Me. Do you know how I received my call?”

She shook her head. He stood. Relieved of his weight the couch swayed off in a parabola. She went to catch her flute before it fell.

“I had two older brothers. They murdered my father. I and Tanuojin came after them and killed them.” His back was to her. Soot powdered his sleeves. “It was the hardest time in my life. We were outlaws here, nobody could help us. For forty watches, whenever one of us slept, the other had to be standing guard. That was when I knew I was called to follow my father. To be the Akellar.”

“Why did they kill him?”

“With Yekaka there was always some reason.”

She looked down at the flute in her hands.

“Anyway, my oldest brother left two sons, both young, very young, and like a fool I let them stay in Matuko. Tssa is the elder. I’m almost sure he’s engineering the trouble, but if I take him on suspicion and I’m wrong, it will only make the thing worse, and I can’t get a grip on him. He’s too cautious.” He made an impatient gesture. “Or he’s innocent.”

She took the flute apart. The box was on the table under the window. “I look like a slave. I could go right into Tssa’s house. Find out whatever you have to know.”

“Don’t be a fool. I need you for this other work, and he’d catch you. He’s not stupid.”

She took the buckle out of her sleeve and held it out to him. “I saw you there, last watch, in the Tulan. Did you see me?”

His mouth opened. He took the buckle and turned it over. She snapped the lid of the flute’s box closed. Finally he tossed the buckle down on the couch.

“Not his house. You’ll have to follow him.”

“I’ll need Pedasen,” she said.

Tssa lived in the Tulan. For six watches she and Pedasen followed him wherever he went. He went nowhere interesting. Saba had set Bakan to spy on his nephew as well; Bakan stayed away from Paula. In the seventh watch, the low watch, Tssa came out of his rambling walled house, started off along the street, and lost all three of them.

Paula circled through the narrow grassy lanes of the Tulan and found him again, with three other men, in an alleyway watching the street. She guessed he was looking out for Bakan, who was there to be dodged. When Bakan did not appear, Tssa and his men went away at top speed into the Varyhus District.

Paula and the eunuch stayed about a hundred yards behind them. They took her around the factory, squat and stinking behind its high mesh fence, to a long house blackened with grime. The building was one story for most of its length but a narrow second-story annex was stacked up along the right side, with a stair running up the outer wall to its door. rUlugongon and drums pounded inside the windows of the ground floor. From the corner of the lane Paula watched the last of Tssa’s men go into the upper annex.

“Stay here,” she said to Pedasen. She went down the street to the stairs and climbed them. The stairs were worn sway-backed in the middle. On the landing at the door, a black and white kusin hissed at her, its long whiskers bristling, and jumped to the roof and ran away over the peak. She looked behind her. Pedasen was sitting on the ground at the corner watching her. She went into the building.

In the dark hallway she was blind a moment. The music boomed up from below, making the floor vibrate. She struggled with her fear. In the white slave clothes she felt conspicuous. Her eyes began to see in the gloom and she went down the hallway. Through an open door on the right she saw an empty room, a table, a window scummed opaque with dirt. The next door was shut. She put her ear against it but heard nothing except the pounding tuneless music. Under the banging another sound reached her, growing louder: feet coming up the stairs. She went into the empty room.

The footsteps passed her and stopped before the next door, and a knock rattled on it. She went across the little room to listen. The music drowned the words of the two voices. The plank wall between the room was so thin that it yielded when she touched it, but she could hear nothing but a loud laugh in the room beyond.

She had found Tssa’s meeting place, or one such, and she tried to convince herself that was enough. Saba would not think it was worth very much. She searched along the wall for a chink or a hole she could see through.

A voice bellowed in the hall. “Is there a nigger up here?”

She ran out the door. A big man leaned out of the next room: Tssa’s man. “Bring us a tank, and hop.” He ducked back inside and slammed the door.

She dashed down the outer stairs to the street. Pedasen stood up when he saw her, but she waved him down again and ran around to the front of the building and in the door.

The whole long ground floor was one room. In a corner six men played the deafening music. A few others sat around on the floor. Apparently it was the off-watch. There were no tables or chairs. On one side wall, beside a flight of stairs, was a big barrel with a tap faucet in the bottom and a row of jugs on a shelf beside it. The floor was deep in sand. She crossed to the barrel and took down the biggest jug on the shelf. Opening the tap, she filled the jug with the thick yellow beer.

“Hey!”

She nearly dropped the tank. A fat man in a smock blocked her way. He held out one huge hand. “Pay.”

“It’s for Tssa,” she said. “Upstairs.”

“Just the same, you pay now.”

She gave him the jug to hold and took the string of credit from her neck. The fat man said, “So now he’s bringing his own slaves. He won’t escape paying me that way.” The jug tucked under his arm, he snatched the string away from her. “He can pay what he owes me, too.” The credit jangled. He counted off more than half. Paula glanced around. A man near the door was watching and she looked hastily away from him. It was Mikka, Saba’s blood-stauncher brother. She took the jug and the raped credit string and hurried up the stairs.

Mikka had recognized her. She wondered if he worked for Tssa. The stair took her out at the end of the annex. She knocked on the closed door and it sprang open.

Tssa sat at a table under the window, counting out credit into stacks. Of her age, he was slightly built, with Saba’s marked sensual features. She put the jug down on the table. The room was crowded with men. She backed up to the wall, trying to memorize their faces. They ignored her. She was trembling, not from cold.

“Here comes Kolinakin,” said a man by the window. He nodded down into the street.

Tssa was drinking beer. He put the cup down and beckoned to another man. “Go make sure nobody is following him.” The man left. Saba’s nephew frowned at Paula. “What’s that doing here?”

“I’m supposed—” Her dry voice squeaked, and she coughed. “I’m supposed to ask to be paid.”

“Paid!” Tssa looked around at his men. “He thinks I’m a street vendor. Or that this slop is worth money; which is it?” The other men laughed. There were cups on the shelf beside the door, and the Styths took them down and passed the tank around. Tssa stretched his back, his hands behind his head. “Go,” he said to her.

“Please. He’ll beat me.” She was ruining her usefulness; he would certainly recognize her after this, but she wanted to see the man he was here to meet: Kolinakin.

“Maybe he likes beating you,” Tssa said, amiably.

The door banged open. A huge man stamped into the room. He walked flat-footed, his toes out, his knees bent; he was the tallest Styth she had ever seen, inches taller than Tanuojin. Tssa stood and they shook hands.

“That’s what I came for,” the giant said. He flicked one finger at the credit piled on the table.

Tssa sat down again. “You’d better be careful. My uncle is having us all watched.” He put his elbows on the table on either side of the money.

Kolinakin snapped his fingers with a crack that made Paula start. Quickly a man took a cup from the shelf and blew into it to blow away the dust and poured him beer. The giant said, “I know every man in Saba’s crew. He doesn’t even suspect I’m in this. I’m having him watched. You aristocrats.” He took the beer. “You think with your blood instead of your brains.” The cup vanished into his enormous hand.

Tssa’s eyes were half-closed. He studied Kolinakin. Paula licked her lips. Whoever the big man was, he was pushing Tssa, and not the other way; he was the master. Tssa said, “Girl.” When she looked up he tossed her a small credit. “That’s yours, for the whipping. Tell the slop-tender he can wait for his.”

She went to the door, glad to be leaving. Just as she reached it, the door flew open. Mikka stumbled into the room. She shrank back, her heart jumping into her throat. The air was suddenly charged with metallic heat. Behind Mikka came Saba.

Tssa stood. Kolinakin turned, and someone swore in a choked voice.

“Now, look who’s here,” Saba said. He faced Kolinakin. Behind him, his crew jammed the hall. “The Akellar of the Varyhus.”

Kolinakin lunged for the door. Paula reached it a step ahead of him. Saba’s men charged in. They ran her off her feet and carried her deep into the room, and the brawl broke out around her. She scrambled toward the door. Two men backed into her from opposite directions. She squeezed out of the press of bodies. On hands and knees she crawled between men thrashing and fighting and curled up underneath the table, as close to the wall as she could get, her arms over her head, while the annex rocked and the walls broke all around her.

She kept the heat in her house low, for David’s sake. While she was bathing him, Pedasen came into the steamroom behind her.

“The Akellar wants you in the Manhus.”

She glanced at him. David yawned; the inside of his mouth was pink as a cat’s. She wrapped him in a towel.

“What I’d like to know is why you let him go in there when I was still in the middle of it,” she said to Pedasen.

“I didn’t do anything. He just came. I think he was following us, on top of all the rest. Here, I’ll take him.” He reached for the baby.

Pedasen could dress David and put him to bed. She crossed the yard to the Manhus. During the brawl she had been stepped on twice and fallen on once and her ribs still hurt. Sril was standing just outside the maproom door, in the hall of the Manhus.

“Mendoz’,” he said. “You got us all blood-pay. I’ll buy you a cup sometime.” He opened the door for her.

The oval room beyond was lined with maps, set in frames along the wall like windows, green maps of Uranus and blue and white maps of the solar system. Saba sat on a pedestal chair in the middle of the room. He waved to her to stay where she was. The two men before him had their backs to her, but she recognized Tssa and Mikka.

“There is such a thing as family loyalty,” Saba said. “Honor, and regard for your own blood. Although anybody who would put his head together with a thug like Kolinakin—”

Kolinakin was dead. They had dragged him into the street and broken his neck. She put her hand to her sore ribs. Neither of the two bound men noticed her. Saba made a gesture with his left hand. A plastic glove sheathed his right to the elbow; he had broken three fingers in the fight. Sril brought him a pair of shears.

“I’m giving you a choice,” he said to Tssa. He nodded at the broad-bladed shears in the gunner’s hand.

Under his shirt Tssa’s shoulders were rigidly straight. “You never gave my father any choices. What are you trying to pay for, uncle?”

Saba nodded at her, where she stood in the doorway. “Look over there, Tssa.”

His nephew’s head turned. When he saw Paula his round eyes narrowed. Saba said, “That’s how I caught you. That slavewoman caught you for me. Your father was stupid but he would never have let a nigger trap him, and a woman at that.”

The younger man’s gaze fell. Mikka was staring at the far wall. Saba swiveled his chair back and forth in tiny rhythmic squeaks. “Take your choice. It makes no difference to me.”

Tssa’s head was bowed. The room was silent a long moment while he thought. At last he reached for the shears in Sril’s hand. He hacked off his own hair, just above the club, and dropped the knot of hair and the shears on the floor. His eyes looked blind. He came toward Paula, long-striding, and she moved out of the doorway and he brushed by her without looking at her. The door shut.

Saba tapped Sril’s arm. “Make sure he leaves Matuko.”

“Yes, Akellar.” Sril hurried out after Tssa.

Saba turned to Mikka. “Now, what about you?”

His brother took a step toward him. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. Ask her. I was just there having a jar.” He put his hand out to Paula. “Tell him. I saved your life, didn’t I?”

She looked from him to Saba. “He was Tssa’s lookout. He saw me, but he was too drunk to come upstairs.”

“I saved your life!”

Saba pushed at the hair knot on the floor with his foot. “Go get drunk in somebody else’s city.”

“I don’t have any money.” Mikka wiped his hand over his mouth. “Tssa owed everybody.” He tramped out of the room, grumbling.

Saba rotated the chair back and forth. Paula said, “I’m not a slave.”

“When you go out, you’ll use the slave door, and you’ll wear slave clothes. I won’t have people thinking I’d let my wife run around in the street.” He waved his plastic hand at her. “You can go.”

Boltiko sat down, pulling her skirts smooth over her knees, and sighed. “Sometimes I think I’ll just die. I can’t eat anything any more without getting sick.” She fanned her vast face, smooth with fat. Illy’s slave poured kakine, the sweet green Matukit liquor, into three glasses on the table before her.

Paula’s chair was a sling of white shaggy fur, big enough to sleep in. She curled her legs under her. Illy’s whole house was done in white, chrome, and glass. The young wife came in from the sleeproom. Against such a background, her beauty was riveting: there was nothing else to look at. Boltiko glared at her.

“That boy of yours is incorrigible.”

Illy had three children. Paula could never pick out which of the horde they were. The young wife sat down in the chair between the other women. “I’m sure I can’t be blamed.”

Boltiko snorted. She reached for a glass of kakine. “That baby is tiny,” she said to Paula. “You aren’t feeding him enough.”

“If he were any bigger I’d have to put wheels on him to move him around.”

“He cries. That’s a sign he’s hungry.”

“I think he’s just bad-tempered,” Paula said.

“He cries all the time.”

“All you ever talk about is children,” Illy said. She sent the slave away with a wave of her hand. “He’s in a good mood now.”

All she ever talked about was Saba. Paula rubbed her hand over the long white nap of her chair. The treaty had come back, signed, and the trade contracts had been covered by a syndicate of fifty-two Martian traders.

Boltiko said, “Nobody is blowing down Matuko, that’s why. Dakkar says the city is very peaceful.”

The house slave came in again with a tray of cut fruit. Like Pedasen, he was a eunuch. In his whispery voice, he said, “Mem, Pedasen is in the back. The Akellar will see Mem Paula in the Manhus.”

“In the Manhus,” Illy and Boltiko said, in one voice.

“I wonder what he wants,” Paula said. She slid down from the chair.

Pedasen waited in the back doorway of lily’s house, David in the crook of his arm. When the baby saw her he burst into an enormous smile. She took him from the slave. With Pedasen beside her she crossed the yard to the Manhus door.

“Boltiko says it means he’s hungry when he cries,” she said to Pedasen.

He shrugged. On the steps, he reached for the baby again. “She thinks that’s all that can be wrong with people, that they’re hungry.”

Paula laughed. He loathed the Styths. She watched him take the baby back toward her house, and went herself into the Manhus.

Saba was in the maproom, staring at a green hologram of the Planet, his hands on his hips. She went into the oval room and shut the door. He turned his head; the light whitened the side of his face.

“How is Vida?”

“He’s fine. He cries a lot.”

“That’s good, that means he’s strong-minded.” He turned off the map and she could no longer see his face. “I’m going to Vribulo. Do you want to go with me?”

“Yes, of course.” She sat down in the pedestal chair, her gaze on his solid featureless shape among the maps. He sauntered around the room and came up behind her.

“I got a record slip from a bank in Luna. They’re holding a million dollars in iron at my order.” His hand rumpled through her hair.

“What about my commission?”

“That isn’t how we do things here.” His fingers worked in her hair. His voice was smooth. “I’ll take care of you and Vida. I give you everything you want, don’t I?”

“I suppose so.” She could not help but smile.

“Then what do you need money for?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

“You’re a very reasonable woman,” he said.