Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

His hands were tied, and a yard of rope connected his ankles together. He ignored her. The policeman beside him said, “We caught him at the excursion boat terminal—he’d sabotaged all the boats.”

Bunker said to Cam, “You told me if I delivered Mendoza you’d let me go.”

“A promise to an anarchist,” Cam said, smiling. Before the ragged man she stood spotlessly white and clean. “Especially to you.” She looked at the police. “Was he alone?”

“Yes.”

Paula licked chocolate off her fingers. Then Kasuk was gone. She thought of Sril again. If he was dead Bakan was surely dead. As she would soon be dead.

Bunker was looking at the floor. He shot a murderous sideways glance at Cam. His trouser legs were wet to the knees. Cam swaggered around him toward Paula.

“He’ll talk. He’ll tell us where they all are, from Jefferson on down. Mendoza is mine. We made an agreement. I handle the civilians and you handle the military.”

“Exactly,” Hanse said, genially. He sat down again, his knees spread to accommodate his great melon of stomach. “She’s necessary for military intelligence. She probably knows half their general staff.”

Savenia’s cheeks were patched with red. “She’s a criminal. She—”

“I’m not exactly letting her loose,” Hanse said.

“Neither am I.”

A man in a brown uniform brushed through the crowd, stopped before Hanse, and stuck out one arm in salute. “General, the Styth Manta is maneuvering very close to the dome.” Hanse went at top speed out the door.

Paula sank down into the yielding chair. Now that she saw a way out of it, she began to be frightened of dying. Cam bent over her.

“Don’t get your hopes up, baby. You’re done.”

Behind her, Bunker murmured, “The Bearded Lady of the Sunlight Freak Show.”

Cam turned around and slapped his face. Paula blinked. “I thought that went out with girdles.” Bunker had not moved; the only sign he had been hit was the faint mark on his dark cheek.

“Shut up,” Cam said, and went away down the room.

“Why did you listen to her?” Paula said to him. “She’ll kill you.”

General Hanse came back down the room, trailing a little plume of cigar smoke. “They’ve made another rendezvous. If Luna would cooperate we could gun down the bastard when he stops dead in the air like that.” He huffed at Cam, whose back was to him. He pointed at Paula with the cigar between his fingers. “You speak Styth?”

“Like a Styth,” she said. She could not resist robbing Cam. She stuck her chin out at Bunker. “So does he. If you need corroboration.”

Hanse swung around, interested. “Oh?”

Cam hurried down the room. “I’m serious, General. I need these two for propaganda purposes.”

“Do you need the Army?” Hanse said. He planted the cigar between his teeth. Cam’s face settled. He nodded to Paula. “Lock them both up.”

The Martians gave her pills, weighed her, bandaged her arms, bathed her like a baby, and locked her into a small room on the sixth floor of the same building. She slept. She dreamt of Sril and woke up crying. She paced around the room, thinking of David. He was safest in Matuko. She would never see him again.

The room was equipped with a bed, a desk and chair, and a little washroom, so she expected to stay there awhile. The window was of triplex glass and did not open. Down below, many floors below, crowds moved along, ropes of people, like one animal, never stopping. When night fell the glow of fires lit the dome with brilliant rippling orange light, fading to black and shooting up again, fiery, like an aurora.

The following day and for days and days thereafter, from early morning until well after dark, men in uniforms brought her lists of questions and taped her answers. Most of the questions were military: they wanted to know where the Styth cities were, how they could be attacked, how Ybix was laid out inside, what her crew was. Sometimes she had no idea what they were talking about. She told them the truth, except when they asked about Saba’s assassination; then she said they had shot the wrong man. Her door was locked and a guard posted outside. The men who sat on the far side of the desk reading questions at her never spoke to her personally—never even said hello to her. The woman who brought her meals didn’t talk at all. Once the guard outside her door made some careless remark to her while an interrogator was leaving. The next hour he was gone and a stranger there who would not look at her.

At night the dome was a great display of light, flickering here and there, red to yellow. The room was sound-proof. She could see the crowd churning below the window, but she could make no sense of what they did, she couldn’t even see if they were anarchists or Martians. Whenever the interrogators left her alone, she looked out the window, trying to see what was happening.

One morning while she was drinking her coffee, General Hanse came in. She turned her back to the window and put her cup on the sill. The fat man settled himself in the chair by the desk.

“Well, you look a lot better than you did.”

She went around her chair and sat down, the desk between them. His wide cheeks rolled down to his chin. When he leaned back the chair creaked. He said, “You’ve been very forthcoming. I guess it hasn’t been easy on you, the last week, but you’ve passed the test. Bunker corroborates practically everything you say.” He took a flat leather case from his jacket. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Yes.”

With the cigar halfway out of the case, he paused, his moist eyes unblinking. Finally, he took out the cigar and got a clipper from his pocket. “That’s too bad,” he said, with genuine regret in his voice.

“What do you want?”

He said, “I want to know what the enemy is going to do. That’s simple enough.” He lit the cigar, puffing his cheeks full.

Paula rocked her chair back on its hindlegs. She knew who her enemy was.

“Are you married to him?”

“To who?” she said, startled. “To Saba? God, no.”

“But you did bear him a child.”

She stared at his pear-shaped face. “He gave me my son. That was ten years ago.”

“Dr. Savenia says he’s the motive force behind the Styths, but you and Bunker both seem to think it’s this—Tan-you-gin—”

“Tanuojin,” she said. “Four syllables. Accent on the antepenultimate. They’re a matched pair. Tanuojin does the long-range thinking.”

“That isn’t what Dr. Savenia thinks.”

Paula lifted one shoulder in a shrug. She didn’t care if he believed her. His questions baffled her. They had nothing to do with what she knew would be happening in Styth. Maybe he did not know what to ask.

“Well,” he said, “we have the psychological advantage, at any rate—they have to come to us.”

Sharp in her memory, Tanuojin’s voice sounded, denouncing psychological tactics. She moved her chair back and forth. “Can I get out of this room? Walk somewhere—in the park?”

“No.”

“I’m—I hate being cooped in.”

“We’re afraid someone might try to do you some damage.”

“Damage,” she said. “Who?”

His round body bulged his uniform out in tires of fat. “Another anarchist, perhaps. There’s been a certain bitterness. Although you people are submitting pretty tamely.” He took out his cigar case and removed a thick brown finger from it. “You know—” He wagged the cigar at her. “You screwed yourselves. You made such a fetish out of peace, and then when the bite came, you couldn’t even defend yourselves.” He peeled the plastic wrapper off the cigar and licked it all over. With almost no effort she saw it as a thin brown penis. He stuck it in his mouth. “I can see being shy of irrational force, but rational force is what holds a community together.” He lit the end of the cock in his mouth.