Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

Paula snorted. She climbed up into the chair David brought her. Saba picked over the remnants of his meal, nudged the plate away, and twisted around in the chair. “You have those orders,” he said to Ketac.

“Yes, Prima.” Ketac went down the room to the door.

When he was gone, she said, “Ketac has done very well.”

“I can depend on him. Vida, sometimes, but Vida talks back to me.” David was bending past him to pour water into his cup, and Saba swatted him on the backside. “He even talks back to Tanuojin.”

“Sometimes he’s wrong,” David said.

“He’s your son,” Saba told her. “Down to his bootsoles.”

“What happened to General Hanse?” she said. David put a cup down before her. He held the fat-bellied jug in his other hand.

“It’s just water,” he said.

“I’ll suffer.”

The boy poured her cup full. Saba was toying with the white cloth on the table. “Hanse. Tanuojin tried to take him, the way he took Dr. Savenia, but Hanse fought, and his heart stopped with Tajin in him.”

David put the jug on the table. He seemed uninterested in what his father was saying. She guessed he had been there: Saba took him everywhere.

“It was hell,” Saba said to her. “I thought he was gone.”

She drew the Earth-sign in the frost of her cup. That was safe. Even if Hanse got well enough to talk, the Martians would think he was crazy.

“This deal you made with Newrose,” he said. “You want the rAkellaron to take the place of the Council. That won’t work. You know that, don’t you?”

“It isn’t meant to work,” she said. “It’s meant to look good, that’s all.”

“Then who does the real job?”

“I will.”

He slapped the table. His cup jumped. “What about Tanuojin? He doesn’t like this arrangement at all.”

“He’s going back to Uranus, isn’t he?” She crossed her legs on the seat of her chair. “Then he’ll use Dr. Savenia. You and I can handle him. Newrose can handle her.”

He got up and walked toward the door. Paula reached across the table for his dish. He had eaten all the meat. Cubes of vegetables stood in the pool of red sauce.

“You’ll have to go up front for me in the Chamber,” she said.

“That’s who I am, isn’t it? I’m pretty, I smile, I’m everybody’s best face.”

She used a scrap of potato to soak up the sauce. “What’s wrong with you? I thought you liked being the front.”

“Sometimes Tanuojin treats me as if that’s all I am.” He came back to his chair. “You’re the only one of us who knows enough about the Middle Planets to make this work.”

“It will work,” she said. She ate the potato.

“This settlement won’t be popular on Mars,” Newrose said. He had a scarf wrapped around his head, like an egg-cozy.

“How is General Hanse?” Paula said.

“He’s terribly ill.”

“He had a heart attack while they were questioning him. The Styths don’t know much about medicine.”

She was facing the clear wall of the space port waiting room. Out on the flat crater floor a hundred feet away two ships stood in the first two wells of the launching dock. While she watched, the accordion cover of the third well folded back, and another ship rose through it to the surface. That was Ybicket, Ybix ’s new sidecraft. A man in a pressure suit jogged across the gray dust to the ship and disappeared inside the hatch. Paula turned toward Newrose again. Her pressure suit held her arms out away from her sides, like a gingerbread man.

“Just keep watch on Dr. Savenia,” she said.

“I thought you said that was settled?”

“I trust Tanuojin about three inches to the mile.” She trusted him least when he appeared to give in. He had accepted the Martian Treaty more readily than Leno. It was impossible to surprise him. Maybe he had learned not to waste his time on things he could not control.

“Do you trust the Prima?” Newrose said.

“Under the circumstances I’d rather be hung for a lamb than a sheep.”

“Clear the launch area,” said the speaker in the corner of the ceiling. In the naked waiting room it boomed. A moment later the same voice repeated the words in the Common Speech. Newrose’s eyebrows drew close over his nose.

“I do wish you’d stay here,” he said to her.

“What do you mean?” Ybicket ’s hatch opened and the man in the black pressure suit dropped lightly to the ground. He came at a lope across the launch area toward the waiting room.

“You seem to think I can just pull down a few levers and push the right buttons and make what you want happen,” Newrose said. “I can’t do that. I can’t explain it as well as you can.” He looked at her bitterly. “I’m not a diplomat, Mendoza, I’m a garden variety—”

She laughed at him. “Don’t worry. You’ll do very well.” She watched the man in the pressure suit enter the airlock to the waiting room. “Better than Dr. Savenia. Do you know my son?” Pulling off his helmet, David came into the room with them.

“We have to go,” he said to her.

He was flying her to Ybix . She introduced him to Newrose and went to take her helmet from the shelf along the back wall. Newrose and her son stood silently side by side, not looking at each other; neither spoke the other’s language. She shook Newrose’s hand and David took her out to Ybicket .

She opened the hatch to the Beak and rose up into the pyramidal room in Ybix ’s nose. Tanuojin was there. The shutter was open. Paula turned around in mid-air, so that the spread of the stars was above her. The Milky Way cut the corner of the window; she could barely pick Uranus out of the thickness of stars below it. The Planet was just entering the constellation Capricorn, sacred to Matuko and Saba’s family, the House of Exile. Tanuojin was too long for the Beak room, and his body curved to fit and left almost no space for her. She turned to the stars again. Near the top of the window were two familiar patches of light, like pieces of the Milky Way that had drifted: the Magellanic Clouds. Between them a brilliant star shone. She could not remember seeing it before. But it must have been there; stars did not change.

“That one did,” Tanuojin said. “It went supernova during the War.”

The star flashed white and green and orange. Out there something was happening greater than ten thousand systemic wars, but she had no way of knowing what it was. Like the events of atoms, the lives of mesons lasting trillionths of trillionths of seconds, the nova happened beyond her range. She was hung between them, her clocks too slow or fast, her rulers too long or short, so that these things that must all be part of one thing seemed to be unrelated.

Tanuojin said, “Saba always tells me how direct your mind is.”

“Who asked you to listen?” She faced him, the nova of his race. “What do you think about?”

“I don’t think any more. I just watch.” The while he talked to her he was writing on a tablet.

“It must be boring,” she said. “Always knowing what people will do next.”

“I don’t. And it’s never boring.”

He was making notes on the supernova. The hot star sparkled like a jewel, now orange, now white again. Below it was Uranus. A memory of the dark cities of the Styths crossed her mind, and she thought with longing of the sunlit Earth. She thought painfully of Richard Bunker. Tanuojin was watching her.

“I keep going in circles,” she said. She pulled the hatch open and swam out to the corridor.

David’s claws were growing in. Saba had stopped shaving his head, and when his hair grew long enough to tie, David would be clubbed. When Paula went to her cabin, her son and his father were there. She went past them to the end of the room where the bed hung on the wall.