Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

She stopped in the middle of the street. Her hackles rose. On the side of the street, three women sat, their knees drawn up, and their feet yoked together with white plastic yokes. A card over their heads told their ages and use. None of them seemed to notice her. One was fair-skinned, almost Martian white. Beside them, in a little cage, a child slept curled on the ground.

“Paula!”

She turned away from the slaves. Pedasen hurried up to her. “What are you doing in here?” In one hand he held a brace of chickens by the feet. The bag on his back was stuffed with his purchases, and the string of credit around his neck was almost naked of its coins. He gripped her arm and rushed her out of the street. “This place gives me the chills.”

She went beside him back through the market. He held her arm as if she might run away. He was taller than she was, and he walked fast, so that she had to stretch her legs to keep up. The chickens swung from his free hand.

“You won’t get in trouble, will you?” she said. “For bringing me here.”

He shook his head. “All the trouble will land on you.”

She looked up ahead of them. In their passage across the city, the ground seemed to flatten away from her, and now Saba’s compound was sinking down slowly into the clutter of large buildings along that part of the wall. They were passing the head of the lake. Boats rowed over it in lines, like soldiers.

“What are they fishing for?” She saw the nets in their wake, swollen fat with the black lake water.

Pedasen shook his head. “You ask too many questions. You’re just going to have to learn not to be so curious.”

She looked up at him. He was staring at the street just ahead of his feet. His silken cheeks were darker than hers, his eyes startlingly pale. Certainly his mother had been Earthish. In the street ahead of them, between high walls, Styth children were throwing a curved stick back and forth. She followed Pedasen down the grassy lane that led along the back wall of Saba’s compound and in the little slave door.

Boltiko’s house was full of screaming children. Paula let herself in the front door to the cluttered sitting room. Down the hall the prima wife’s voice sounded, shrill: “I don’t care what he did, I’ve told you again and again—” There followed the smack of a hand on a child’s bottom. In the hall a knot of five or six children packed the kitchen door, their backs to Paula. She went unseen into Boltiko’s bedroom, where David lay asleep on the bed, and took him away out the front door.

He woke while she was changing his clothes, and she lay on her bed nose to nose with him. His arms and legs flailed aimlessly and he heaved himself onto his side, as if he were trying to roll over. She kissed his head, capped in thick black hair. After a while, she realized there was someone behind her.

Saba was in the doorway. He said, “Where did you go?”

“Out.” She slid off the bed to her feet.

“I told you what I’d do if you did that.” He took off his belt. She wet her lips. He came around the bed, took her by the scruff of the neck, and whipped her with the doubled belt, six or eight times. It hurt. When he let her go she grabbed the bed to keep from falling.

“This isn’t the Earth,” he said. “You can’t do as you please around here. That was for your own good—if you go out in the street you’ll just be hurt.”

She sat on the bed, her hands in her lap. Standing in front of her he buckled on his belt again. He said, “I told you when you wanted to come here it wouldn’t be the kind of life you were used to.” His voice sounded above her head. She refused to look up at him. “You’d better get off your high branch. I won’t take your selfish anarchist act too long. Are you listening to me?”

“I hear you.”

“Why don’t you learn how to sew and make yourself some decent clothes? You look like a street-pig, you act like a street-pig, and I won’t take it. Understand? I have enough trouble. I won’t take any more from you.”

He walked out of the room. She put her head back and shut her eyes. She did not belong here. She had come here by mistake, by accident. The baby whimpered. She got up and took him down to the kitchen to feed him.

She put off leaving the compound again. Boltiko mixed little bowls of mush to feed David. “Just give him a little at first, in case it makes him sick.” The prima wife dipped up a bit of mashed fruit on her finger and ate it. She sighed, all her fat quaking. “I don’t know what I’m to do with Ketac. I hope he didn’t behave like this when he was in your world. Dakkar is such a perfect son.”

Pedasen came in, and the three cleaned Paula’s house. She told herself that was why she was not going out into the city again: the baby needed her, the house was dirty, Boltiko wanted to talk.

“Why don’t you use this room for a. nursery?” Pedasen said. He looked in the door to the empty room across the hall from hers. “There’s furniture over—yeow!”

She rushed after him into the room. “What’s wrong?”

“There was a kusin in here!” He pulled the window closed. She went up beside him and opened it again. Pedasen’s pale eyes were popping with excitement. He shut the window. “You can’t leave this open—it comes in through the window.”

She opened the window. “It comes in here to drink.”

“It will eat the toes off the baby.”

“It’s very shy. It won’t go near the baby.”

Pedasen muttered something. He rubbed his nose with his forefinger. She left the room, and he came after her to help her move the big cabinet in the sitting room.

The doors of the cabinet were divided into eight panels, inlaid with metal under a thick shiny glaze. “That’s the story of Capricornus,” he told her. “He was a hero—” He reached up to touch the top panel. “See? Here he is wrongfully accused and his father exiles him, and he goes on his wanderings. But he returns home in the end.”

She wiped the glossy surface of the door with her sleeve. In the panel at her eye-level a tiny man fought a lizard with a round badge on its breast. “What’s this?”

“That’s the dragon Jupiter.” His finger traced the blossom of the beast’s flaming breath. Now she recognized the planetary symbol on the disk. The figures were in low-relief under the glaze, realistic in the detail, even the little image of the man.

“I’m not keeping you from anything, am I?”

“Oh, no,” the eunuch said. “If the mem wanted me, she would ring the bell.”

“You’re hiding out,” she said.

“Not really.”

“Really.”

“You don’t mind, do you?” he said.

“No.”

“I’d work for you, if there was anything to do.”

“I know. It’s all right.”

“When the Akellar gets back,” he said, “he’ll probably put everybody to work.”

She leaned on the back of the swing couch. The chains skreed under her weight. “Where is he?” The couch swayed away from her, and she lifted her feet off the ground and swung with it.

“Half a block of the Tulan was blown down last watch. There was an awful riot.” Pedasen caught the swing. “He’s out looking it over. Next they’ll be breaking down the compound door.”

The baby cried, and they turned their heads to listen. Paula waited to see if David would quiet by himself, and after three or four yells he subsided. She leaned on the couch and swung back and forth. She felt like a ghost in this world, something these other people imagined for their own use: Pedasen to escape work, David to feed him, Saba to deal with the Committee. She had to stop leaving her life up to accident.

“The Tulan,” she said. “What’s that?”

“The rich district, across the city.”