Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

“The Mendoz’! Here she is—”

“Take her,” Marus roared, from the house. “She’s under arrest too.”

Paula went back around the house. Before she reached the backyard she smelled smoke. When she ran around the corner of the building, a fire was burning up the vine screen over Ketac’s bedroom window. Men shouted in the room behind it. They were trying to push the blazing trellis away with poles. Ketac was climbing over the wall. In the street a watchman yelled. Everybody chased Ketac. Paula went over the wall and ran the other way.

She took the shortest way back toward the House, cutting through the fields of blue grass along the lake shore. The grass was full of snakes and stinging beetles and she watched her feet. She trotted past a row of little boats drawn up on the shore. A bell began to ring.

When she reached the street again, people filled it, standing in tight groups, although it was deep in the low watch. Several more bells were ringing, all over the city, out of time. A woman leaned out of a tenement window over Paula’s head.

“What’s going on?”

“The Akellar is dead!”

All around her people screamed and cried, their voices drowning the bells. Which Akellar? They thought it was Machou. Paula slowed to a walk, her hand pressed to a stitch in her ribs. The bells clanged steadily from one end of Vribulo to the other. She turned into the street that ran past Colorado’s. People flooded out of a shop. Each carried a crystal lamp. The last to emerge was the shopman, who shut his door and locked it and rolled the shutter down over it. In spite of her fatigue she began to run again. She reached the steps of the House and climbed them, panting. As she reached the plain she noticed that the light was fading. She stopped and looked out across the city. All over Vribulo dark was falling.

She shivered in the deepening cold. If she stayed here she would die, but there was no place to go. The House was deserted. On the stairs she saw no other person, no trace of other people, not even a slave. By the time she reached the Prima Suite, she could see nothing at all. Black night had come. She groped her way to the door. Her memory took her down the hall to her room.

From her window, she could see flecks of light: fires, and the pinpricks of crystal lamps. The bells rang in a clamor, hundreds of bells. Far away a siren screamed, and a mob let up its many-throated roar. The war had reached Vribulo.

Behind her the door opened. She sprang away from the window into the concealing dark. “Mendoz’,” Leno said. “You’re under arrest.”

“What for?”

A hand closed on her arm. “Don’t argue with us. We have to get out of here before the gate closes. Mehma—”

“I have her,” said the Saturn Akellar, on her other side.

“Wait,” Paula said.

Roughly Leno shook her arm. “Don’t argue with me.”

“I want my flute.” She wrenched her arm in his hold. He let her go, and she went back to her bed to find her flute.

The city gate was locked. She stood shivering with Mehma in the dark while Leno went off to find someone to open it. In the next street a building was burning, and cinders and glowing embers showered down around her. She wrapped her arms around herself.

“What am I under arrest for?” She could not see Mehma beside her. His mild voice came from over her head.

“I guess because Tanuojin wants you in Yekka.”

“Tanuojin,” she said. “I thought so.”

The building directly opposite them exploded into a roar of flame. The ground bucked under their feet. Leno rushed up through the dark red glow. “Come on. This is bad and getting worse.” He had a key and he struggled with the lock on the gate. The ground was pitching up and down. Paula lost her balance. Mehma caught her. They hurried into the terminal. Mehma left them in the lane between the launching tubes. She went after Leno to the last tube, where his sidecraft waited.

In Yekka the watch was high. Leno took her across the Koup Bridge to the Akopra House, standing in the fields of rellah vines, far from bilyobio trees and people. The city was bright and cold, the grass brilliant green like an Earthish spring. They went through the side door into the round building.

It was dark except for the lights above the stage in the middle. Tanuojin was drawing on the stage with chalk. Four dancers stood behind him. Paula went to the edge of the raised platform.

“Why am I under arrest?”

Tanuojin drew a circle on the floor. “Ketac was plotting to kill me. I think you had something to do with it.” He walked slowly around, his gaze on the stage floor, counting his steps, and sank down to make another series of marks.

“You know that isn’t true,” she said.

The dancers watched her covertly. In their black rehearsal clothes they were nearly invisible in the dark. The stage around him was scrawled with white markings. He said, “About you I never know anything for certain.” He waved to the dancers. “Try it like that.” He came down off the stage past her and went on into the back of the theater.

Leno had moved over to the door. She could hardly pick him out of the shadows. She followed Tanuojin up the aisle. He sat on the last bench, his hands between his knees, watching the stage. She sat on the end of the bench.

“Where is Ketac?”

“I haven’t caught him yet. I will.”

On the stage, one dancer lifted another, slow and smooth, their arms straight, their palms flat together. The man in the air curved bonelessly over onto the shoulders of the man who held him, who sank down in the same smooth slow dreamlike quiet onto one knee. She rubbed her eyes. She had slept on the way, in Leno’s ship, but she was still tired. Leno came down the aisle, his eyes on the dance. “They’re really good. It’s amazing, in a place like this.”

Tanuojin gave him an oblique glance. He raised his head, his voice pitched to reach the stage. “How does that feel?”

The stocky man who did all the lifting walked to the edge of the stage. “It would be easier if I started facing the other way. Then I could use my strong leg.”

“Try it,” Tanuojin said. He turned toward Leno. “Mehma went back to his ship?”

“Yes. I didn’t know whether you wanted him to go or not.”

“That suits me. Go back to Merkhiz. Let the thing burn out in Vribulo, there’s nothing we can do.”

Paula stood up. The dancers broke out of their pose and clapped each other on the shoulders, pleased. She went down to the aisle and out the door of the theater.

The path led between fields of water. Under the glassy surface of the fields, new pale rellah vines curled like worms. She had never seen the adults, strung up on stakes to be bled. She went on toward Tanuojin’s compound in the distance.

Ketac arrived unconscious, strapped into a sled. Paula unbuckled the straps and pulled the blanket back. The long rips in his stomach and chest were oozing with infection.

“Marus did that,” Tanuojin said. “He’s over-anxious.”

She laid her hand against Ketac’s cheek. His skin was harsh with fever. Tucking his arm back into the narrow sled, she covered him in the blanket. The sled lay on the floor next to her bed. Tanuojin was sitting across the little white room, in the big chair next to the desk.

“Shall I heal him?”

“No. He’ll die if he’s lucky.”

“Why are you bitter at me?” He thumbed down his mustaches. “The way Bokojin feels about you, I probably saved your life.”

She went to the window. At the far end of the yard, David and Junna were coming in the gate. She put her hand out to the warmth of the radiation, her eyes on the two young men, one short and burly, the other slim as a vine.