Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

“What are you doing?”

He gestured at the half-destroyed stump. His eyes slid away from her. “My father—the bilyobios disturb him.” He picked up the hammer again and hit the stump a terrific whack that broke it off at the base.

“Where are they?”

“Gemini? They’re down by the Akopra.” He kept his back to her. She went around in front of him, irritated, and he turned away.

“What do you have against me, anyway?”

He pulled at his shaggy hair. “I’m not supposed—my father—my father says you’ll corrupt me.” Shyly he looked at her.

She let out a peal of laughter. He straightened, leaning on the hammer. His eyes were black, like an ordinary Styth’s. She said, “I’ll do my best. Where is the Akopra?”

“Just across Koup Bridge. It isn’t built yet.” He swung the hammer up over his shoulder and led her toward the gate in the wall. Dust streamed out of his clothes. In the gateway, he stood pointing across the fields. “There’s Koup Bridge, on the curve. The market used to be there but he moved it so he could put the Akopra there.” Just beyond the humped bridge, half a mile from her, was a circle laid out on the ground in scaffolding.

“Maybe someone should go with you,” he said.

“No, thank you.” She started away down the path.

The whole of the bubble was laid out in long narrow fields, what the Styths called cold-farms to distinguish them from the hot-farms where they made crystal. She passed an old woman coming the other way with a basket on her back. She wondered how much Tanuojin knew, and how he would use it, and when. Before, she had disliked him; now she was frightened of him. She stepped out of the path to let a flock of chickens pass, herded by a little boy with a stick.

At first the Koup Bridge seemed to be on the perpendicular wall before her, but as she walked the ground flattened out, and she saw the bridge and the round wall beyond it not from above in Egyptian perspective but sideways, straight ahead of her. The fields on this side of the stream were flooded. Dark gray tentacles sprouted up out of the water. She went to the edge of a paddy. The water was only four inches deep. Under it the soil was covered in layers of dark cloth. The vines were leafless, mottled gray.

She went over the bridge. The slats of the round scaffolding reached higher than her head. The grass around it was trampled flat. The yellow roots showed. She walked around the circular building, searching for a way in. A pile of dark gray plastiment bricks and long strips lay in the grass on the side of the building away from the stream, before a gap in the circular wall. She went into the round building.

Saba and Tanuojin were walking along the inside of the curve. Tanuojin was pointing off across the building and talking, but Saba saw her, elbowed him to be quiet, and they turned and watched her come up to them. Saba waved one hand at the building.

“Look at this theater he’s building with the money you got for him. He hasn’t even thanked you, has he?”

“She’s getting what she wants.” Tanuojin slid his hands under his belt, looking down at her. Uneasily she wondered again how much he knew of her conversation in the White Market with Dick Bunker.

“He says you have some idea we can use this subpoena against Machou.” Saba’s hand on her shoulder steered her across the hard-packed dirt toward the opening in the curved wall. Tanuojin went ahead of them through the gap. He looked back over his shoulder at her, his eyes yellow as bile. He knew everything. Saba shook her. “Tell me.”

She shrugged against his grip, and he let her go. They went out of the theater. Tanuojin was some way ahead of them. She said, “They have no case against you on any of those counts except the one. You’ll make them look very stupid, if you go down there and prove it.”

“How does that help me against Machou?”

“Machou can’t deal with the Middle Planets. Show you can, and who will the others listen to, you or Machou?”

On the far side of the bridge, Tanuojin stopped beside a paddy, sank down on his heels, and thrust his hand into the water. She slowed her walk. Saba was staring at the ground in front of him. He fell to her pace.

“Jesus, you talk well.” He thrust his head up, toward Tanuojin, on the far side of the bridge. “He wants to do it. Not for your reasons. He’s afraid of losing that money. Did you guess that, too? I don’t trust you, Paula, you’re running me again, like at the Nineveh.”

She led him onto the bridge. If Tanuojin wanted to go, he could talk Saba into it. “What are those vines?”

“Rellah vines.” He went down the slope of the bridge to the paddy. Kneeling, he pulled the end of a vine out of the water. He pierced the thick dark skin with one claw and pressed his thumbs on either side of the wound. A trace of pale sap oozed out. “When they mature, they’re transplanted into a dry bed and staked up, and a tube is grafted into the body to tap off the gul. The milk. Most of the plastic in Styth is made out of rellah gul.”

“What’s the cloth for?” She pointed through the standing water.

“They’re tender babies. They have to be in the shade or the radiation burns them.”

The rellah vine sank back into the water. Tanuojin’s reflection floated on the still surface. “Was he finished? My son?”

“Yes.” She stood up. They went along the path toward his compound. Saba cast a sharp look at his lyo.

“Are you going to try it again?”

Tanuojin nodded.

“Let her watch it,” Saba said. Paula raised her head.

“It will frighten her,” Tanuojin said.

“Just the same, let her watch.”

“Let me watch what?” Paula asked. “What are you doing?”

Tanuojin shrugged his shoulders. His gaze was directed straight ahead. “If you want. Maybe she’ll learn something.”

They reached the compound. In the front hall of his main house, his younger son came up to him with a message, and she and Saba went on down a side corridor to Tanuojin’s room. Paula opened her coat. She had seen no other woman in Tanuojin’s compound, even among the few slaves.

“What was his wife like?”

He dropped onto the bed and reached for a pad of sketchpaper covered with drawings of ships. “She wasn’t very pretty. Kasuk looks like her.” The pages turned under his hand. “She had an opinion of everything, Diamo.”

“Did he love her?”

“She wanted him, I think, more than he wanted her.”

Paula sat on a box against the wall. Out the window she could see the green wall of the city in the distance. “How did she die?”

“Bearing the younger boy. We were in space, we couldn’t get back in time. The midwives hacked her to pieces.”

“Oh.” Her hands made fists. That would not have been here; Yekka had not been made then. She remembered Tanuojin’s pleasant touch. He had drugged her. He had touched her. He came into the room, shutting the door behind him.

Saba was bent over the sketchpad, a stylus in his hand. Tanuojin said, “Do you think you can leave that miracle ship alone for ten minutes?” He leaned past Saba and drew the window screen down.

Paula crossed her legs under her. Putting down the sketchpad, Saba stood up beside the bed, and Tanuojin lay down on his back on it. Saba glanced at her.

“You’re sure of this?” he said to his lyo.

“Yes. The tree is gone now, we can do it now.”

Saba’s head turned toward her again. “Watch.” He brushed his mustaches back, put one knee on the edge of the bed, and stooped to kiss Tanuojin on the mouth.

She started. Her scalp prickled up unpleasantly. Tanuojin’s hand slipped off the cot and hung limp over the edge. Saba rose. He staggered a step and flung out his arms to balance himself. His eyes looked strange, like a pale reflection in the wide black pupils. His face was gaunt. She glanced at the man on the cot, asleep, dead, gone. She bit her fingers.