Floating Worlds

YEKKA Tanuojin’s Akellarat. The Black Season

The bus stopped in Yekka’s city gate, and she and Sril got off with the other passengers in the public section. The little open platform outside the docking tube was loud with their footsteps and voices and the people come to meet them. She unfastened the veil and pushed her hood back. Most of the people around her were farmers who had taken their produce to sell in Vribulo and Matuko. They went off, carrying their baskets. She went to the edge of the platform, blinking in the unexpected bright light.

The gate stood in a green field. The grass was knee-high, like a meadow, and the air rang with the thin voices of insects. The men and women who had just left the bus were walking away along a narrow path. The bubble was so big she could not make out the far ends; she had a sudden feeling of being released into its vast space. Sril came up behind her and shouted, and on the path leading to the gate two men broke into a run toward them.

One was Marus. The other was a boy, a neophyte, his shaggy hair unclubbed, who gave Paula a strange, piercing look. Sril handed Marus her satchel, and the third watch helmsman passed it on to the young man.

“This is Kasuk, Mendoz’. The Akellar’s son.”

“Hello,” Paula said.

“Hello.” The boy stared over her head, avoiding her eyes. Sril went back into the closed part of the gate, to take the bus back to Matuko, and Marus and Tanuojin’s son led her off into a pathway that crunched under her feet.

The city seemed wild, without people. The meadows were fields, cut into long furrows and planted with green. Insects soared from leaf to leaf. They passed through an orchard of little trees. The naked branches were thin and knobbed like arthritic fingers.

“Pala trees,” Marus said to her. “More pala trees in Yekka than people.”

“What are those insects?”

“Krines. You should hear them during the hot time, they really shout.” They were coming to a bridge, humped over a stream, and he took her arm. “Be careful. It’s slippery.” There was no rail.

The green city curled around her, bright as an afternoon. She wished she had brought David. Kasuk was watching her. When she saw him, he jerked his gaze away. They went through a high white wall into a compound yard. The low white buildings on either side were trimmed with red under the eaves and around the windows and doors. Marus took her into the house on her right and along a narrow dark hallway to a room in the back.

Saba and Tanuojin were bent over a long table on the far side, under a window. Their backs were to her. Marus left. She went across the room to the table, whose slanted surface was papered with sheets of clear plastic held fast by clips. Each of the pages was a line drawing of a spaceship. The two men ignored her. She stood on her toes, her arms on the edge of the table, to see the sketches.

“Here.” Tanuojin thrust a folded paper at her. “What is this?”

Her heart quickened. She opened out the paper in her hands. “This must be a first. It’s a subpoena to the Universal Court.” At the head of the clear computer stock was the Court’s wing-and-balance insignia.

“What does that nigger treaty say we have to do about it?”

She was reading through it, delighted. The list of charges ran half the page: two counts of grand piracy, one count of theft, one count of harassment, six counts of refusing a directive, three counts of contempt of authority. She said, “I don’t think they expect you to do anything, or they wouldn’t have thrown in all these bogus charges.”

“Forget it,” Saba said. He straightened, his arms braced on the drafting table on either side of the sketch, and bent and gave her a fast kiss on the forehead. “That was almost before the treaty, anyway.”

Tanuojin came around him and took the paper from her. “This is a lie.” He sounded outraged. He shook the subpoena under her nose. “It’s a biased, prejudiced frame-up. The whole print job is a fraud.”

Paula looked away from him. The walls were chambered with bookracks. Charts and black and white recognition posters of spaceships hung above them. Saba stuck his pen in his hair.

“I like the scoopnose better.”

“That damned Machou. How did he get this?” Tanuojin read through the subpoena again. “They blew up their own ship and they’re hanging it on me. And what’s this theft charge? We should have stolen everything they had. What’s contempt of authority?”

“Do you remember telling General Gordon he was ignorant and superstitious?” Paula said.

“He is.”

“Contempt of authority.” She tapped the paper. “That’s a sieve, those charges. You can’t be held for that, it’s only a crime on Luna.”

“So the damned treaty only works one way, you see? They keep us in line, but they do whatever they please.”

Saba tore the top sheet of his drawing off the pad. “Forget it. Report the kill, maybe the fleet will vote you your fifth stripe.” He bent over the sketchpad. “They can’t do anything to us.”

“Call you nasty names,” she said. “Stop payments on your contracts.”

Tanuojin went to the window. Paula watched him through the corner of her eye. Through the window came the rhythmic ringing strokes of an ax, or maybe a hammer.

“How was the bus ride?” Saba asked.

“Not bad.”

Tanuojin said, “Where is this nickel-dime court?”

“In Crosby’s Planet. The man-made planet at Venus’s aft lagrangian.”

He put his hands on the red window frame, his eyes aimed out toward the sound of the hammer. Beside her, Saba said, “What did you have in mind?”

“I’d like to shove the thing down Machou’s throat.” He turned. “Come on.”

They followed him out to the hall. Paula skipped every few strides to keep up with them. Saba said, “Are you thinking of going down there?”

“Why not?” Tanuojin opened a door, and they went out to the yard. “You said yourself we could use another reconnaissance. Here they are sending us an invitation. And that’s deeper than we’ve ever been, that’s as far down as they go.”

They walked across to another white building. At the far end of the yard, his son was striking at something on the ground with great full strokes of a sledgehammer. Paula went after the two men into the house. They turned a corner and led her into a room stacked around with boxes. Against the wall, under a window, was a bed covered with a gray blanket, the only piece of furniture there.

“Look at this place,” Saba said to her. He flung his hand out at the piles of crates. “Do you know how long he’s been living here? It looks as if he’s still moving in. Even you unpacked your clothes. He’s lived in this room since he entered the rAkellaron.”

Tanuojin sprawled across the bed. Saba went around the small, barren room. He took a bottle of his Scotch out of the box at the foot of the bed and pulled the stopper out.

“He used to fire it up,” Tanuojin said. “Now he just drinks it.” He twisted around to shout out the window. “Kasuk!”

The hammer stopped. His son’s shaggy head appeared in the open square of the window. Tanuojin said, “Stop for a while. You’re driving me crazy.”

“I’m almost done.”

“Stop for a while.”

Kasuk slung the hammer over his shoulder and went away. Paula sat down on a box. The walls of the room were bare. He had lived here more than five years without making one personal impression on the place.

“Tell me about this court,” Saba said.

“It’s very simple. There’s one judge, drawn by lot out of a pool of three hundred, most of whom for one reason or another are anarchists.”

“Why?” Tanuojin said.

She shrugged her shoulders. “Most of the people in the pool are so anarchistic they don’t even call themselves anarchists. Sybil Jefferson is a judge of the court.”

He was staring at her, his yellow eyes unblinking. His hard look put her nerves on end. He said, “Let me touch her.”

Saba turned, on the opposite side of the little room, and Paula backed up a few feet. “Touch me?”

“Do you want to do that?” Saba said.

“She already knows enough about me to get me killed.”

“Touch me how?” she said.

“Come here.” Saba sat down on the bed’s foot, his hands out. She faced them both, wary.

“What are you going to do?”

“Do you have something to hide?” Tanuojin said. “I won’t hurt you.”

Saba got her by the skirt and drew her over against his knees. “Don’t be afraid.” He put his arm around her waist. She had no way to escape. Tanuojin sat up and took her by the wrists.

“Look over my shoulder.”

She stared into his face, her arms stiff in his grasp. Saba held her uncomfortably tight. Tanuojin said, “Look over my shoulder, damn you, you’re distracting me.” She turned her head, aiming her eyes past him, at the blank white wall. Her arms were warm. She felt a warmth and a pleasant lassitude climbing through the muscles of her arms, across her shoulders, and into her back. Her neck felt hot. He let her go; Saba let her go.

“She had the Committee send that paper to Machou,” Tanuojin said. He lay down on his elbows again. “She’s been meeting somebody from the Committee behind your back.”

She went cold down to her heels. “How did you know that?”

“I know everything you know.”

Saba gripped her shoulder. Her mind refused to work. She stared stupidly at Tanuojin, who had read her mind. He said, “I told you she was a spy.”

“How often has she met him?” Saba asked. His hand clutched her painfully hard.

“Only once. She’ll do it again.”

She said, “If you know—everything, you know I told him not to come back.”

Tanuojin’s yellow eyes gave her a flickering glance. He said, “Lock her up.”

“She’s useless if she’s locked up.” Saba’s free hand landed on her other shoulder. He stood up, holding her fast.

“Then kill her.”

“She wouldn’t be much good then, either, would she?” He held her between them, his hands so tight she bit her lower lip, resisting the pain. “She’s not like us. She doesn’t know better. You can’t expect her to change all at once.”

“You have to do something with her, she’s dangerous.”

“Is it true? Did she tell him not to come back?”

Reluctantly Tanuojin said, “Yes, she did. But just to keep out of trouble.”

Saba pushed her away toward the door. “She’ll learn.”

“She works on the worst things in you,” Tanuojin said. “All your vices.”

“We can’t all be pure and holy like you. Throw that paper away.” He steered Paula out to the hall.

“What is that—how did he do that?” She looked up at him while they walked. “Did he read my mind? What did he do?”

His hand slipped off her shoulder. They went along the corridor at his speed. She jogged beside him. “He has a gift—he healed you, that time, remember? It’s a gift he has, an influence.”

They turned a corner and he stopped and opened a door. Paula went ahead of him into a room like Tanuojin’s. This one was flooded with signs that Saba lived here. His dirty clothes lay piled on the floor and three empty whiskey bottles ranged along the window sill. At the foot of the long narrow bed was her valise.

“Whom did you meet from the Committee?”

She turned by the bed. He was taking his belt off. Her skin crept with alarm. “What are you doing?”

“You have to learn,” he said. He held her by the back of the neck and whipped her half a dozen times with the doubled belt. Through the layers of her coat and dress and overalls she hardly felt the blows. He put his belt back on. She stood with her back to him, her jaw clenched. She hated him so much she could have wept.

He sat down on the bed, watching her. “I think there’s hope for you,” he said. “When you can still get that angry.”

“Do I have to sleep here?”

“Yes.”

“There isn’t enough room.”

“Everybody here thinks you’re my wife. It would look strange.”

She knelt on the bed and pushed the liquor bottles out of the way so she could see out the window. Green and unpeopled, Yekka stretched away from her, hazy with distance. She could revenge herself on him. She knew all his weaknesses. She folded her arms on the broad sill of the window. She could not risk the indulgence. She depended on him; he was her weakness. The wafting breeze smelled of dry grass. She put her head down on her arms.

They slept together in the bed, side by side, not touching. When she woke up, she was alone. The hammer clanged and clanged in the courtyard outside the window. She put on a pair of overalls and the long green dress Boltiko had made for her. Two bells rang.

She went out through the hall. Marus, Kany, and the rest of Tanuojin’s watch were gathered beside the door to read a paper posted on the wall.

“Mendoz’.” Kany grabbed her arm and hauled her into their midst. “What’s this about another trip to the Middle Planets?”

She pried up his fingers, releasing herself. “You gentlemen have been touring the galaxy lately.”

“Now, Mendoz’.” They crowded around her, bumping into her, pulling her hair and breathing down her neck. “You can tell us.” She maneuvered through them and went out the door to the yard. In the doorway the crew moaned and hissed at her.

At the opposite end of the yard, Kasuk was swinging the hammer hard, his body twisting from the heels with each stroke. His hair flew. She went up behind him to see what he was doing. The hammer was pounding at the base of a little bilyobio tree. Every time he hit it the short stump threw off a cloud of silvery dust. She liked the bilyobio trees; she felt as if he were hurting it. Her nose began to itch and she sneezed.

Kasuk wheeled around. “Oh. I didn’t see you.”

“What are you doing?”

He gestured at the half-destroyed stump. His eyes slid away from her. “My father—the bilyobios disturb him.” He picked up the hammer again and hit the stump a terrific whack that broke it off at the base.

“Where are they?”

“Gemini? They’re down by the Akopra.” He kept his back to her. She went around in front of him, irritated, and he turned away.

“What do you have against me, anyway?”

He pulled at his shaggy hair. “I’m not supposed—my father—my father says you’ll corrupt me.” Shyly he looked at her.

She let out a peal of laughter. He straightened, leaning on the hammer. His eyes were black, like an ordinary Styth’s. She said, “I’ll do my best. Where is the Akopra?”

“Just across Koup Bridge. It isn’t built yet.” He swung the hammer up over his shoulder and led her toward the gate in the wall. Dust streamed out of his clothes. In the gateway, he stood pointing across the fields. “There’s Koup Bridge, on the curve. The market used to be there but he moved it so he could put the Akopra there.” Just beyond the humped bridge, half a mile from her, was a circle laid out on the ground in scaffolding.

“Maybe someone should go with you,” he said.

“No, thank you.” She started away down the path.

The whole of the bubble was laid out in long narrow fields, what the Styths called cold-farms to distinguish them from the hot-farms where they made crystal. She passed an old woman coming the other way with a basket on her back. She wondered how much Tanuojin knew, and how he would use it, and when. Before, she had disliked him; now she was frightened of him. She stepped out of the path to let a flock of chickens pass, herded by a little boy with a stick.

At first the Koup Bridge seemed to be on the perpendicular wall before her, but as she walked the ground flattened out, and she saw the bridge and the round wall beyond it not from above in Egyptian perspective but sideways, straight ahead of her. The fields on this side of the stream were flooded. Dark gray tentacles sprouted up out of the water. She went to the edge of a paddy. The water was only four inches deep. Under it the soil was covered in layers of dark cloth. The vines were leafless, mottled gray.

She went over the bridge. The slats of the round scaffolding reached higher than her head. The grass around it was trampled flat. The yellow roots showed. She walked around the circular building, searching for a way in. A pile of dark gray plastiment bricks and long strips lay in the grass on the side of the building away from the stream, before a gap in the circular wall. She went into the round building.

Saba and Tanuojin were walking along the inside of the curve. Tanuojin was pointing off across the building and talking, but Saba saw her, elbowed him to be quiet, and they turned and watched her come up to them. Saba waved one hand at the building.

“Look at this theater he’s building with the money you got for him. He hasn’t even thanked you, has he?”

“She’s getting what she wants.” Tanuojin slid his hands under his belt, looking down at her. Uneasily she wondered again how much he knew of her conversation in the White Market with Dick Bunker.

“He says you have some idea we can use this subpoena against Machou.” Saba’s hand on her shoulder steered her across the hard-packed dirt toward the opening in the curved wall. Tanuojin went ahead of them through the gap. He looked back over his shoulder at her, his eyes yellow as bile. He knew everything. Saba shook her. “Tell me.”

She shrugged against his grip, and he let her go. They went out of the theater. Tanuojin was some way ahead of them. She said, “They have no case against you on any of those counts except the one. You’ll make them look very stupid, if you go down there and prove it.”

“How does that help me against Machou?”

“Machou can’t deal with the Middle Planets. Show you can, and who will the others listen to, you or Machou?”

On the far side of the bridge, Tanuojin stopped beside a paddy, sank down on his heels, and thrust his hand into the water. She slowed her walk. Saba was staring at the ground in front of him. He fell to her pace.

“Jesus, you talk well.” He thrust his head up, toward Tanuojin, on the far side of the bridge. “He wants to do it. Not for your reasons. He’s afraid of losing that money. Did you guess that, too? I don’t trust you, Paula, you’re running me again, like at the Nineveh.”

She led him onto the bridge. If Tanuojin wanted to go, he could talk Saba into it. “What are those vines?”

“Rellah vines.” He went down the slope of the bridge to the paddy. Kneeling, he pulled the end of a vine out of the water. He pierced the thick dark skin with one claw and pressed his thumbs on either side of the wound. A trace of pale sap oozed out. “When they mature, they’re transplanted into a dry bed and staked up, and a tube is grafted into the body to tap off the gul. The milk. Most of the plastic in Styth is made out of rellah gul.”

“What’s the cloth for?” She pointed through the standing water.

“They’re tender babies. They have to be in the shade or the radiation burns them.”

The rellah vine sank back into the water. Tanuojin’s reflection floated on the still surface. “Was he finished? My son?”

“Yes.” She stood up. They went along the path toward his compound. Saba cast a sharp look at his lyo.

“Are you going to try it again?”

Tanuojin nodded.

“Let her watch it,” Saba said. Paula raised her head.

“It will frighten her,” Tanuojin said.

“Just the same, let her watch.”

“Let me watch what?” Paula asked. “What are you doing?”

Tanuojin shrugged his shoulders. His gaze was directed straight ahead. “If you want. Maybe she’ll learn something.”

They reached the compound. In the front hall of his main house, his younger son came up to him with a message, and she and Saba went on down a side corridor to Tanuojin’s room. Paula opened her coat. She had seen no other woman in Tanuojin’s compound, even among the few slaves.

“What was his wife like?”

He dropped onto the bed and reached for a pad of sketchpaper covered with drawings of ships. “She wasn’t very pretty. Kasuk looks like her.” The pages turned under his hand. “She had an opinion of everything, Diamo.”

“Did he love her?”

“She wanted him, I think, more than he wanted her.”

Paula sat on a box against the wall. Out the window she could see the green wall of the city in the distance. “How did she die?”

“Bearing the younger boy. We were in space, we couldn’t get back in time. The midwives hacked her to pieces.”

“Oh.” Her hands made fists. That would not have been here; Yekka had not been made then. She remembered Tanuojin’s pleasant touch. He had drugged her. He had touched her. He came into the room, shutting the door behind him.

Saba was bent over the sketchpad, a stylus in his hand. Tanuojin said, “Do you think you can leave that miracle ship alone for ten minutes?” He leaned past Saba and drew the window screen down.

Paula crossed her legs under her. Putting down the sketchpad, Saba stood up beside the bed, and Tanuojin lay down on his back on it. Saba glanced at her.

“You’re sure of this?” he said to his lyo.

“Yes. The tree is gone now, we can do it now.”

Saba’s head turned toward her again. “Watch.” He brushed his mustaches back, put one knee on the edge of the bed, and stooped to kiss Tanuojin on the mouth.

She started. Her scalp prickled up unpleasantly. Tanuojin’s hand slipped off the cot and hung limp over the edge. Saba rose. He staggered a step and flung out his arms to balance himself. His eyes looked strange, like a pale reflection in the wide black pupils. His face was gaunt. She glanced at the man on the cot, asleep, dead, gone. She bit her fingers.

“You and I have something to talk about,” he said, in a voice deeper than Saba’s.

He crossed the room toward her, Saba’s body, Saba’s face: not Saba. She pressed against the wall behind her. He came between her and the door.

“Tanuojin, stay away from me.”

He crouched over her, his breath in her face, and caught her wrist tight. His touch made her wince. “You gave us to the Martians.”

She could say nothing. Tanuojin’s expression floated in Saba’s face like an image in water. His voice sounded in Saba’s voice. He wrenched her arm, and blood filled her mouth: she had bitten her tongue.

“I ought to tear out your witch-heart.”

The pain and the threat stiffened her. She ducked her shoulder, trying to ease her arm in his fingers. “If I wanted to hurt you I would have done it a long time ago.”

“You couldn’t hurt me.”

“If the wrong people found out about you, they’d give you to the Planet. Wouldn’t they?”

His grip loosened on her arm, and he raised her wrist up between them, letting the pressure off her elbow. “You’re going to talk yourself into being killed.”

“You won’t do that.”

He stared at her, Saba’s eyes, Tanuojin’s look. She turned her head and spat blood onto the floor. Her tongue hurt in pulses. She said, “You’ve tried before, a couple of times, but I’ve never tried to pay you back, have I?”

“That’s a woman’s argument. ‘Don’t hurt me, I’m harmless.’”

“That isn’t what I said.”

Out of the haunted face before her a different voice spoke. “Let her alone.” It was Saba.

Every porpentine hair on her head stood on end. He rose and walked away from her, slouching like a tall man in the short man’s body. She spat out more blood and wiped her mouth on her hand. He prowled around the room. Now his way of moving was Saba’s: the straight back, the solid step. On the bed the empty body looked like a corpse. She should fix in her mind everything that she was seeing. The inhabited body stood by the window, and she could hear their low voices talking back and forth.

He sat down on the bed and put his mouth on Tanuojin’s mouth. Tanuojin’s long hand rose. For a moment Saba stayed bent over him, his hands on the bed on either side of the other man, protective. They spoke. She could not hear the words. Saba stood erect, turning toward her. Her shoulders slumped with relief. He gestured at her.

“We’re going to Crosby’s Planet—the three of us. You call the Committee.”

“We won’t need the Committee,” she said.