Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

“This is impossible.”

An Chu muttered something. There were four buildings in this complex, all above ground, rising six or eight stories above the trim lawns. Down the hill, Paula could see a section of the wire fence that separated the buildings and grass from the wasteland. A light came on in the building she was sitting against.

“We aren’t doing this right.” She got up. Her hip had stiffened and when she put her weight on it she nearly fell. She led An Chu the length of the building to the door. It was locked. She pressed her nose to the window. Inside was a hall, and along the wall a row of vending machines.

“We need an hourly.”

An Chu pushed her out of the way to look. “They won’t say where they took them in an hourly.” She rattled the door, Paula turned, casting around the lawn for loose paper.

“Listen.” An Chu clutched her arm. “Is that about us?”

Somewhere nearby a siren moaned up toward a whistling shriek. Paula moved away from the building, toward the dark. Another siren joined the first, and another, and another, and suddenly one on the roof before her, so loud she jumped a foot.

“Come on.” Limping, she started down the hill toward the fence. The grass was even as pavement under her feet.

The sirens screeched up to a high note and stuck there. An Chu beside her broke into a trot. She glanced back.

“Watch out!”

Paula wheeled. A searchlight snapped on near the building they had just left. An Chu whispered, “Run!”

“No.” Paula grabbed the other woman’s arm and held her. She faced the searchlight’s blinding eye. The sirens’ high scream needled her ears. Two indistinct figures ran down the gentle slope toward her.

“Stay where you are. Put your hands up.”

Paula raised her hands. She called, “What’s going on? We’re trying to get home.”

Two Martian soldiers reached them. One carried a heavy automatic pistol. The other slapped his hands down Paula’s sides.

“All right. Where’s home? You know you’re half an hour past curfew.”

Paula gave the address on her identification. She took the white job-card out of the collar pocket on her jacket to show the soldier. The searchlight went off; the round eye of the lamp faded slowly through yellow to brown to black. An Chu stood rigid while the soldier groped her up and down. Suddenly the sirens too were turned off. The silence rang like the aftertone of a bell. The soldier with the pistol looked up over his head at the dark dome.

“False alarm?”

The other man was reading Paula’s card, luminous in the dark. “What are you doing all the way—” He raised his head. High overhead there was a boom.

“Come with us. Run.” He grabbed Paula’s arm and dragged her across the lawn at a dead run toward the nearest building. The other man and An Chu raced after them.

Another boom sounded, nearer, like a crash of thunder. The echo rolled off around them. The sound hurt Paula’s ears. The soldier opened a sloping basement door and pushed her toward a flight of steps leading down into the underground floor. She looked back. Far down the dome, beyond the fence, there was a sudden great spark, blue-white, like a giant star, gone in an instant. The soldier thrust her down into the basement.

“Attention,” a wall speaker said. “Your attention please.”

The dark basement was crowded with people, packed together body to body. The man behind Paula directed her through the room. His hand torch flashed a narrow light ahead of her. She stepped over legs and bodies sprawled over the floor. Two people squeezed apart to make room for her.

“Paula—”

She caught An Chu’s hand and pulled her after her. There was room for only one of them to sit, and they stood, An Chu in front of Paula. The soldiers were gone.

“Attention. We are experiencing a meteorite barrage. There is no need for alarm. Please remain quiet and obey your building commandos.”

“Meteorites,” An Chu said. “What do they—”

“Sssh.” Paula slid one arm around An Chu’s waist. Her hip hurt and she shifted her balance to the other leg. In the wasteland they hardly noticed the air raids. The door was behind them, ten yards away: twenty people away. Wait. Under her feet the floor vibrated. The people around her talked in low voices. The soldier who had brought them still had her job-card. He might be checking it. The sirens began to howl again.

“Attention. Your attention please. The all-clear is sounding—”

The crowd got to their feet in a sudden relieved roar of voices, their feet loud, reaching for coats and children. Paula shoved An Chu forward.

“Hurry.”

They worked their way through the shifting mob toward the door. The ceiling lights came on, dazzling bright, drawing a gasp from most of the people in the room. Between Paula and the door a man helped another into a coat. He had been sitting on an hourly, which clung to his backside. In passing, Paula removed it. She bundled it in her fist and followed An Chu to the door. They slid out to the cool night air and ran down the gentle slope toward the fence.

Government Police have arrested over a thousand anarchist terrorists in raids that broke the back of a dome-wide subversive organization.

“Over a thousand,” Paula said. Even allowing for official exaggeration, that meant hundreds of prisoners. There were very few places in New York large enough to keep hundreds of people. Even after the immigrations of the past months, the Martians did not have enough men here to guard hundreds of prisoners in small groups: they all had to be together. Paula swept a look around them. They were walking along the side of a hill, outside the fences of the Martians. Dawn was coming.

“How’s your butt?” An Chu stuffed her hands in her jacket pockets.

“It’s all right.”

“They don’t expect anybody to believe that was meteorites,” An Chu said.

“They do have meteor storms on Mars,” Paula said. “The air’s that thin.” She folded the hourly. A dry ridge of hillside rose up ahead of them, beyond a forest of tree stumps four feet high. She swung around the foot of the hill.

Climbing the gentler slope beyond, she smelled smoke, and when she reached the crest of the hill saw a ruin, still burning, on the level ground beyond. She stopped. An Chu caught up with her.

“What’s the matter?”

Paula was staring at the ruin. It had been bombed out long before; the old walls had sagged almost to the ground. Someone had bombed it again last night. An Chu said, “That must have happened during the raid. Then it’s the Styths, isn’t it?”

Paula went on without answering. With masers, they could bomb inside the dome, and they obviously had some way of finding buildings, although without distinguishing inhabited places from ruins. She thought nervously of Bunker in the building near the lake and went faster down the hillside.

The wound in her cheek itched. She hoped that meant it was healing. Limping after An Chu across the barren wasteland, she thought wryly of what Tanuojin had said; she wished for him now, with his doctor’s hands. An Chu ran off over the crest of a hill, out of sight.

The night was much warmer than the one before had been. The dust made her nose itch. They had spent an hour talking over the whole dome and the places where the Martians could house hundreds of prisoners. There was only one: the entry port on the northwest wall. She rounded the hillside and a dry wind brushed her face. An Chu dashed up to her.

“Look what I found.”

She had half an overripe melon, lightly peppered with coffee grounds. They ate it while they walked. The sweet juice ran down Paula’s chin and she caught it on her fingers and licked it off. They crossed a stretch of low ground that had been bulldozed flat, as if for a new building. Paula looked south. The dome stretched off below her, spotted with islands of lights. The sirens began.