Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

Bunker brought the boat’s air tanks up and filled them. Night was coming. Paula made a fire to cook the four little green crabs. Bunker’s pump chugged; it ran on fusion cells he stole from the Martians and broke nearly every time he used it. Little waves slapped on the pond shore, mimicking the great ocean just beyond the dome wall. She split the red backs of the crabs with her knife.

They ate in silence. She sucked the meat from a crab’s spidery leg. Bent over the fire out of the cold, his beard ruddy in the light, he ate crabmeat and wiped his fingers on his sleeves. There was an aftertaste in the back of her mouth. Probably tomorrow she would be sick to her stomach. Far up the dome, a siren began to whistle.

Paula got up and kicked apart the fire. They sat side by side in the dark listening to the alarm. The barrage began, first the thunderous boom and then the silent, blinding explosions of light, coming faster and closer together until her ears and eyes were clogged and she could hear and see nothing any more, as if the whole world had vanished. Bunker put his arm around her shoulders. She pressed her face against his neck.

The gash opened like a mouth in the floor of the ravine, lipped in mossy concrete. A dead tree stood over it. She unslung the coil of rope from her shoulder and knelt down. The underground river roared in the cavern below. She put two stones into the skin bag and lowered it down through the gap in the ground.

Behind her, the sirens whined; they had been crying all morning, all the night before, the day before that, without an attack. She paid out the rope, holding it looped around her wrist to keep from losing it when the bag struck the flying water below. She squatted down and pulled the bottoms of her trousers over her half-frozen feet. Her cracked and bleeding toes were more important than the distant sirens. The rushing river caught the bag and flung it out to the limit of the rope. She held on tight. More than once she had lost the whole apparatus down the river, and they were hard to make.

Hand over hand, she reeled it in a little, to see if the bag was full, and let it down again. When the weight convinced her, she began to draw it up. The rope was soaked and bitter cold. Halfway up, it snagged. She tugged. There was nothing down there to foul it. Puzzled, she jerked on the rope, and it yanked back, flying out of her hands.

She leaped away, bounding down the ravine. At the edge of the open ground, she wheeled to look. Her hair stood on end. A huge man was dragging himself up through the cleft. He wore a heavy helmet over his head, but his arms were bare and black as tar. She turned and ran.

She went toward the lake at a steady lope. Her feet were cold and bruised and she began to limp. She glanced over her shoulder.

The Styths were swarming up out of the ground, spreading over the ravine. She turned forward again. Her feet banged on the cold ground. There was no place to hide. She swerved across the dead lake. Just as she reached the far side, an explosion burst in the ground behind her. They were widening the way in.

She went down into the gulleys and hills between the lake and the southern end of the dome, looking for Bunker. When she could not find him, she ran north, stopping every few moments to walk and catch her breath. In the middle of the dome, near the ruins of the campus, two Styths caught her.

She was too tired and footsore to be afraid, only glad they did not rape her. They made her run and laughed when she fell. Half-dragging her, they took her north to the plaza in front of the government building, where already hundreds of other prisoners were gathered. She lay down in the dirt near the steps of the dispensa and slept.

She woke and went through the mob. Most of the prisoners were Martians. They sat on the ground or stood leaning on one another. Their pale faces were stained with dust and tears. The small children screamed. No longer hunting the other anarchist, she wandered around the plaza, too frightened to sit still.

Styths ringed them. She recognized none of them. Her feet hurt. She sat down to rest, but her nerves drove her on again, around the plaza in circles. The afternoon dragged past. More people crammed into the space, until she could hardly move. Taller people surrounded her and she could see nothing.

“You will divide up by sex,” a Styth voice shouted, in the Common Speech. “The men will come this way. The women will stay here.”

All around her the people cried out, and the mob stirred. Paula sighed. She wiped her face with her hands. Maybe Bunker had not been taken. The air car was almost finished; maybe he could escape.

“Now,” the Styth voice said, “all you pigs take your clothes off.”

The women raised their voices in a yell. The men had been sifted out, and the crowd was much looser than before. Paula sat down cross-legged, her hands in her sleeves, watching them move restlessly around her. They refused to obey, and the Styths closed in around them. Catching one woman by the arms, they stripped her naked. They laughed and pulled on her breasts and jabbed her in the crotch. Paula lowered her eyes. She was afraid of being raped. Around her the other women were silent.

“Take your clothes off, or we’ll take them off.”

“But it’s cold,” a girl murmured, behind Paula. They began to shed their clothes. Their pretty white blouses fluttered to the ground. Some of them tried to keep on their underthings but the Styths made them remove those too. Paula sat still, her hands in her jacket sleeves.

“Tanuk,” a Styth called. “The dark one here isn’t stripping.”

The Martian women around her muttered in their throats. They closed in around her, stooped, and clutched her and kicked at her. Paula rolled up in a knot, her arms over her head. The women tore at her clothes. A foot thudded into her side. Blood ran into her mouth. The women cursed her, shrieking, and ripped at her heavy jacket and trousers.

“Get away!”

She curled into a ball, swallowing blood. The women backed away from her. She sobbed for breath. Her chest hurt. She was hauled up by the front of her jacket. She looked up at a blurred black face. He had something in his free hand: a photograph.

“Maybe. It could be.” He spoke to her in Styth. “Are you Paula Mendoza?”

She said nothing. She closed her eyes, stiff with the pain in her chest and side. He lifted her up. “Call the Akellar.”

He took her into a little room on the first floor of the government building, sat her down in a big leather chair, and brought her a mug of hot meat soup. While she was drinking the soup, the Lopka Akellar came into the room. His face was a patchwork of little scars.

“That’s the one,” he said. “Do you remember me, Mendoz’?”

She stared at him, unwilling to speak the other language. He glanced at the man behind him. “Send to the Prima that we have his wife.”

“The Prima.” She put the cup down, startled.

“Saba is the Prima now. Machou tried to block him on the war action.”

She looked in another direction. Ymma left her alone. She moved stiffly around the room. The door was locked and there were no windows. Her side hurt. Aimlessly she paced around the room. She drank the rest of the soup and sat thinking about Bunker and trying idly to reduce to an aphorism the fact that she was always well fed in jail and starved when she was free.

After some time Ymma came back and took her out to the verticals. “If you won’t go willingly, I’m supposed to carry you.”

Her feet hurt. The corridor was crowded with Styths. The overhead lights had been shut off. At the end of the dim busy corridor the outer doors shone pale with sunlight. She stopped, drawn like a moth, and Ymma pushed her. She had not been indoors in months and the closed spaces made her hunch her shoulders.