Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

The buildings of the ancient city, the oldest city of the Empire, were blackened with time. The upper stories overhung the streets and in places closed above the street into arches. A siren started up behind her. She glanced back. The street threaded away through the dark, picked out with the blue-white of crystal lamps. There seemed to be a million people walking after her. At a run she went back among her own Styths.

The slaves here wore white, like in Matuko, which made them show up in the dark among their dark masters. She heard another siren. High above them, she could just make out the far side of the city: the square shapes of buildings, the dim sheen of water. They came into a street with a lane of thick blue grass down the center.

Sril touched her shoulder. “Look up there, Mendoz’.”

They were coming to the end of the bubble. Something covered it that she thought at first was a natural formation, some kind of Stythite rock laid down in ledges that ringed the blunt end of the bubble. Sril said, “That’s the rAkellaron House.”

Now she could see the windows, the jutting balconies, and a torrent of steps running down from the high open porch. People walked there, so small she overlooked them, her eyes taken by the building. Sril laughed at her as she stood gaping at it. He took her by the arms and lifted her up a step onto the floor of a covered arcade. Saba and the other men had gone on ahead of her along the front of the building.

“This is the Barn,” Sril said. “All the rAkellaron have offices here.” He waved in passing at a door. The arcade stretched along the long front of the building, cut with a door every fifty feet. Over some of them shone blue lights. She went to the edge of the arcade and looked up at the rAkellaron House.

“That must be heavy.”

“Heavy as the Empire,” he said: some proverb. He opened a door for her. They were nearly to the end of the Barn, only two more doorways between them and a black wall. Sril said, “The Creep isn’t here yet. That’s his office, the last.” She went past him into a room full of men.

Saba stood in the middle of everything, talking to a little ring of faces. She circled them to the window on the far wall. Ketac was there, one hip braced on the sill, his rolled bed tipped against the wall beside him. She glanced into the street outside the window, now much below them.

“Nervous?” she asked Ketac. He was staying here, on Saba’s staff.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it.”

“I said I’m fine!”

She laughed. The young man grew hot. His fingers plucked fiercely at his short mustaches. Like his face, his hands were all knobbed bones. In the street below a pack of men was passing by, wearing dark blue shirts with red chevrons on the upper sleeves. Seeing Ketac in the window, one called, “Hey, socks.”

Ketac’s head snapped around. He leaned across the window sill. “Watch what you’re saying, sitdown-sailor.” Sril elbowed him out of the way.

“What are you looking for, pouchy,” he shouted at the chevrons. “Flying lessons?”

The men in the red chevrons were crowding toward the window. Their voices rose in a chorus of insults. Inside the room, Saba called, “Sril, front up.” The little gunner went out from between Paula and Ketac. The men in the street were drifting away.

“Uranian Patrol,” Ketac said. “The first thing they learn is deep breathing. That’s so if their ship’s wrecked they can hold their breath until they get home.” He scratched his nose, not looking at her.

A big desk took up one side of the office; a square paper flag hanging on the wall behind it was marked with Saba’s kite-shaped emblem. Behind the desk was a door. She went through it, through a narrow room lined with analog decks that chuckled and flashed lights, and through another door into a smaller room. Her satchel lay on the low bed along the wall. She sat down in a chair by the window and kicked her shoes off. Through the window came the mechanical roar of the great dark city. She began to shiver. There was a blanket folded on the bed; she wrapped it around herself, over her head and under her feet, and sat in the chair with her knees drawn up and her arms around them, watching the people going by in the street.

After a while Saba came in, looked all around, and started out. He saw her and stopped. “There you are.” He sat down on the bed, opened her satchel, and took out a bottle of whiskey. “You don’t like it, do you?”

“It isn’t very pretty.”

“We’ll go eat in a few minutes, you can see a little more.” He drank deeply of the dark red liquor. At the rate he was drinking it two cases would not last him an Earthish year. She would have to arrange for more. He said, “We’re going to the Akopra, too.”

“Oh.” The Akopra was the Styth theater. “You never go to the one in Matuko.”

“Matuko is a third-rate Akopra. The Vribulo company is the best in Uranus.”

“Where do I sleep?”

“Here. With me.” He lay back on his elbow across the bed, smiling. “You can seduce me, like the first time. I liked that.”

She pushed back the hood of her blanket. “I’ll sleep in the chair.”

He frowned at her. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. I just like things the way they are.”

The whiskey sloshed in the bottle. In a crabbed voice, he said, “I don’t care, you know. I’m—I was just trying to do you a favor, that’s all.”

“I appreciate it.” She leaned forward, reaching for the bottle, and he gave it to her.

He said, “I mean, it’s been a long time for you.”

She drank a small warming mouthful out of the bottle and stretched to give it back to him. “When are we going to eat?”

“You’d better not be taking on someone else behind my back.”

“I’m hungry. Let’s go eat.”

He stoppered the bottle and put it on the floor under the bed. She could tell by the way he moved that he was angry. There was a narrow rack in the wall opposite the window, and he took out a clean shirt and stripped himself, all in the same hard, short gestures, his back to her.

“Come on,” he said, and yanked the door open.

They went a short way down the street to a drinking dock called Colorado’s, after a Vribulit Akellar who had been Prima some long while past. Paula’s coat had a veil attached to the hood, which she kept fastened across her face under the eyes. The place was huge, the floor deep in sand, and gloomy as an old church. There was nowhere to sit except on the floor. The Styths stood in clumps drinking and talking. The face-cloth narrowed her vision and as soon as Saba had gone off somewhere she lowered it.

There were plenty of other women, and none of them was veiled. Their faces were painted in figures of red and white, yellow, green, as concealing as veils. Their clothes were spectacular. A woman passed her in a dress of ribbons that fluttered around her while she walked. Paula watched them all, fascinated.

“He did bring you,” Tanuojin said.

Paula looked up; she had not seen him come in. “I think he’s still trying to civilize me.” He stood with his hands flat under his belt, his gaze moving slowly over the room. She had forgotten how tall he was. She said, “He’s over there someplace.”

“I know where he is,” he said, as if she had insulted him. He crossed his arms over his thin chest. She moved away from him. She was hungry; she cast around for something to eat. Saba was coming toward her, a woman beside him. Her eyes and mouth were traced in three colors. He and Tanuojin met like lovers, their arms around each other. Paula went in among them.

“I told you to wear that veil,” Saba said.

“I can’t see. And I’m hungry.”