Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

In the bedroom, Tanuojin stood at the videone, talking to someone on the screen. She put on her robe and got David into his shorts, but he refused to wear a shirt. Tanuojin shut off the videone.

“That was your friend Bunker. He’s meeting us at the Committee office at twenty-one hours. He says this place is wired.”

“Probably.” She found clean clothes. “You’ve met him, haven’t you? You know who he is.”

“Yes. The man who sent that listening device inboard Ybix at Luna and started this.” He paced around the room, his hands under his belt. David was struggling with the latch of the door. Tanuojin said, “Your friends are as bad as you are.”

“Don’t call them my friends. When anarchists are friends it means they fuck each other.”

“You’re the only people in the Universe who could make ‘friend’ into an obscenity.”

Her arms roughened in the cold. She put on her clothes, shivering. David finally realized he had to turn the door latch; he darted out to the next room.

“Where did Saba go?” Tanuojin said.

“To the whorehouse.”

“Damn him.”

She put on a sweater and a jacket. In the mirror his image paced across the room, swerving to miss the lamps. His long hollow face was gnawed with bad temper. She reached for her comb.

“I’m not doing that bad. In the court,” he said.

“You’re doing fine.”

“Who’s listening in on us? Parine? Do you think he speaks Styth? Somebody there must.”

He never stopped moving; his restless pacing took him around the room. She felt the burden of the Planet around them, the pressure of its millions and millions of lives. She kept her eyes on her own face in the mirror and combed out her bush of brass hair.

“Damn him, he’s totally irresponsible,” Tanuojin said. “When I need him he goes off to an orgy.”

“Let him alone,” Paula said. She veered across the low-ceilinged street to read the markings on the corner building. Above the address, a plaque set into the wall read

WARNING: This building protected by Sentry Security—guard your home—hire a Sentry

They turned the corner. The street was empty of people. It was lined with people’s homes, what in Crosby’s Planet they called a dormitory area. Every few feet down the gray walls on either side was a door or a window, alternating, identical, except for the changing numbers.

“ Let him alone ,” Tanuojin said, sneering. “If I let him alone, do you know what he’d do? Do you know what he was like when I met him?” They went up a moving stairway. Through the gap between the step and the rail, she looked down into another stairway, on the next level below.

At the top of the stair was a gate, beside the gate an enclosed booth for the guards. Tanuojin passed their identification in through the little revolving door in the window. The guards were staring at him. Paula hung back by the grillwork of the gate. Tanuojin would not let her carry the little plastic card Saba had made up for her on the ship’s computer. The gate clicked, and they moved into the street beyond. They went down a trunk street, empty like all the others, reading the numbers of the doors, and crossed a white line into a sector darkened for the artificial night. The only light came from the display windows of shops in either wall, where pale-skinned mannequins showed off clothes of feathers, of green plants, and metal.

“He’s a whore,” Tanuojin said. “He’ll lie down for anybody.”

“Maybe he enjoys it.”

“You won’t be so broad-minded when he catches you with his wife.”

She swerved over to the side of the street. In the wall white letters marked the office of the Committee for the Revolution. The door was locked.

“Don’t tell him about that,” she said. Bunker was nowhere in sight.

“Then keep sweet with me. What are we supposed to do, wait outside?”

“No. Give me that card.”

He gave her his fleet card and she used it to shim the lock. She reached for the latch. His hand caught her wrist. Startled, she looked up at his face, and he flung her off into the street and dodged back.

A muffled crack sounded. The door shook. Waist-high in the middle panel a ragged hole appeared. Paula rolled over to her hands and knees. Tanuojin launched himself shoulder-first at the door and through it into the office.

The door slammed against the wall with a splintering crack. A Martian voice cried, “Watch out!” The inside ceiling lights came on bright as sunlight. Paula got up, breathing a coppery stench that made her heart gallop. Shots like sticks breaking crackled inside the office. A bloody man staggered across the threshold and fell on his face in the street. He had a gun in his hand, and she stooped and took it. His shredded Martian tunic was dark with blood. Suddenly his body flew backward feet-first into the office. She whirled.

“Come in here,” Tanuojin said. “Turn these lights down.”

She went into the waiting room of the Committee office. Under a glaring ceiling, three other men lay on the tawny carpet. Tanuojin’s hands and the forearms of his sleeves shone with blood. She found the light switch and turned off all the lights but one.

“There’s one more,” Tanuojin said, shutting the door. “Down the hall. He has your friend Bunker, but he’ll probably shoot at me first. Are you all right?”

She nodded. Bent double, she went from one Martian to the next; they were all dead, all their eyes were open wide. When Tanuojin faced her, she saw a ragged hole in his shirt over his chest.

“You were hit.”

“I’m fixing it.” He went to the door behind the desk and opened it.

She watched him go into the corridor beyond. She knew what would happen. Three shots banged out from the end of the hall. Tanuojin went toward the gun, his hands at his sides. Paula went into the hallway behind him. The Martian crouched in the doorway at the end of the hall let out a screech and shot once more, and the Styth reached him.

Behind him, on the floor, Dick Bunker lay tied up like a market hen. Paula brushed by Tanuojin, who let the Martian drop.

“Richard.” She knelt by the bound man. “I didn’t think you fell into things like this.”

She picked out the knot with her fingers and teeth. Tanuojin said, behind her, “Is he hurt?” His voice was thick, as if with pain. Still on one knee, she twisted to face him. The door beside her was open and the light spilled out, glittering on the side of his face. His cheek was laid open down to the white bone. The wound was healing so fast she could see the meat growing. There was no blood.

“No.” she said. She glanced at Bunker. “He’s sound.”

Bunker was untangling himself from the rope. His eyes never left Tanuojin. The stink of blood was heavy over the fading coppery taint. Tanuojin’s face had healed to a thin gray scar. His eye above it looked swollen and he pawed at it with his hand. He was splattered with blood. None of it was his.

“We have to get out of here,” she said. “You can’t walk around the streets like that, there must be a washroom.”

They found a washroom at the end of the hall. The ceiling lights came up.

“He’s going with us,” Tanuojin said. Just inside the door, Paula stopped to dim the lights. Bunker walked in a circle around the blind end of the washroom, his hands in his hip pockets.

“Where?”

“To Uranus,” Tanuojin said. He unbuckled his belt and stripped off his shirt and gave them to Paula. Leaning on his arms on the washbasin, he slumped a moment, his head hanging. She realized he was tired. She turned his shirt inside out, to hide the blood. Bunker was watching from the dim back of the room.

“I’m not going to Uranus.”

“You’re her friend.” The water pounded into the basin. Tanuojin scrubbed his hands. “Otherwise I’d kill you.”