Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

“My father did not desert me.”

“Maybe it doesn’t look like that to you, but that’s what I’m getting to. These people here can live like this, without wars and feuds and governments, because they give up the most important things in life. There are debts people owe each other out of the fact of nature. Just common humanity. The anarchists refuse them. They’re not real people, they’re just shells of people.”

She poured milk into a glass. She was the only anarchist he knew well.

“You have to make a choice,” he said. “Actually you made it a long while ago but you have to face it now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Jefferson and the Committee have never done anything for you. You and I and Tanuojin, we belong to each other. Fate, Karma, whatever you want to call it, something brought us all together because we need each other.”

“What if I call it chance?”

“Nothing happens by chance.”

She wiped her mouth on her hand. “Everything is by chance. The readiness is all.” He gave an exasperated shake of his head. She took an apple out of the bowl in the middle of the table. What he had said burned in her mind and made her angry. He was always trying to steer her into something. She took another apple and left her chair.

“I’m going to bed.”

“Stay here and keep me company,” he said.

“Go find Tanuojin,” she said. “Talk to him.” She went down the hallway to the stairs.

She woke late Sunday afternoon. Saba lay asleep beside her, naked. She found his belt and pried the wire loose and went down to the kitchen, where she had hidden the plug half of the device.

The recording was flawless. The voices were precise and there was no background noise at all. Sitting in the meadow, she listened to Saba collect his nephews to go to the roadhouse.

“Where’s Paula?”

“I don’t know,” Kasuk said. “I haven’t seen her. Do you suppose she’s all right?”

“If you do see her, remember, she isn’t to know about Tanuojin.”

Then he had already left, before she put the wire on Saba’s belt. She tore up a handful of dry grass. The cook’s old white cat was creeping around the side of the barn. The daws shrieked and fought in the spread branches of the elm tree. She listened to Saba and a strange girl pick each other up at Halstead’s. They hardly spoke; they never even exchanged names. It was the girl who suggested they go outside. Hollow people. Another strange female voice said, “Want to smoke some hash?”

“Sure,” Saba said.

Junna said, in a whisper, “My father will find out.”

“Do you want to look like a baby to those girls?”

She listened to him talk about the debt owed to common humanity. Lying down in the grass, she spread herself out to the late sun. The birds scrapped in the elm tree. On the far side of the house someone shouted. She thought about David. She could call him on the Committee’s photo-relay. He would like that, a message all the way from the Earth just for him. The tone of the birds’ racket changed. She raised her head. Tanuojin was walking under the tree toward the back door.

Sitting up, she scanned the last few centimeters of the wire and put it through the plug to erase it. He vanished into the house. She went after him, left the plug in a kitchen drawer, and caught up with him on the stairs.

“Where have you been?” Carefully she stayed out of his reach.

He was fighting the will to yawn. His eyelids drooped half-closed. “I got lost in the trees.” At the top of the stairs he turned left to his room and she went right, to go back to Saba and replace the wire on his belt.

Paula sat sideways in her chair, cleaning her fingernails with a toothpick. She had stopped listening to Fisher a long time before. He had brought two other Martians with him and the room was stuffy from too many people. Beside her, Tanuojin pulled himself up straight in his chair and slung his right leg over his left, jittery in the close quarters.

“I keep telling you,” Saba said to Fisher. “I’m not here to talk to you. I’m here to talk to her.” He nodded toward Jefferson. “Now, you can shut—”

Fisher’s nostrils flared, yellowish. He turned to the old woman at the end of the table. “Do I have to put up with this?”

Saba said, “Shut your mouth, or we will talk where you can’t hear us, and you won’t know anything.” The big Styth’s hands thumped the arms of his chair. He wagged his head at Paula. “She does my advance work. If you want some arrangements with me, talk to her.”

The Martian stood up straight off his chair. “You insufferable, arrogant barbarian.” His aides ranked themselves behind him. “I demand an apology.”

“I don’t apologize to niggers,” Saba said, and Fisher started for the door.

“Wait.” Tanuojin caught his arm. Fisher’s eyes glittered. In a sweeping gesture he threw off Tanuojin’s hand and rushed out the door. His aides followed him.

Leno grunted. “I don’t understand any of this.”

Paula dropped the toothpick on the scarred top of the table. She looked behind her at the closet. Jefferson took out her false eye and wiped it on a cloth.

“Officially, we are supposed to be negotiating for the Council.”

Saba put his hands behind his head. “I can’t see why we should maintain your fictions.” Tanuojin sauntered around the edge of the room. Leno had started up, thinking the meeting was over, but now he settled down again.

“I can see how you would consider it a fiction,” Jefferson said. The eyelid fluttered over her empty socket. Tanuojin had wandered around behind her. “We need some organization, and at present the Council serves. Don’t touch me, Yekka.”

Tanuojin’s long face narrowed. He came slowly past her toward Paula. Saba said, “You can’t be our friend and the Martians’.”

“I am nobody’s friend .” Jefferson slipped the eye back into her face. “I am certainly not your friend .”

Paula planted her elbows on the arms of her chair. “He means ally. Don’t get caught on semantics.”

“I’ll avoid it. You may lord it over Fisher, Akellar, but you still are only representative of part of the Empire—one small part.”

“The rest of them will follow me. Most of them. Just as they did with the crystal trade.”

Tanuojin stood behind Paula’s chair. His cold fingers moved down her cheek to her throat. The touch of his claws sent a shudder through her. Saba and Jefferson discussed his influence in the Empire. The old woman was well informed, and a master of such talk: she had him on the defensive within moments. Paula leaned forward, away from Tanuojin’s hand.

“Jefferson, stay on the line, will you? It’s to your advantage to make him look like the Emperor.”

“To maintain your fictions?”

“Life follows art.”

Jefferson laughed. Leno was staring at the wall, his face slack with boredom. Saba said, “You have Fisher in your sleeve. You can control what the Council hears about this.” He gave Leno an oblique look. “We’ll keep up your face in front of Fisher and talk behind him.” He pushed his chair back. Leno jumped out of a doze. “Tomorrow.”

Jefferson said, “As you wish, Akellar.” Her voice was velvet. Everybody stood.

Paula went out to the hall, and Tanuojin came after her. “What did you tell her about me?” He smacked her between the shoulder blades.

“Nothing. She guessed from the way you’ve been pawing Fisher. What’s going on?”

“You really think you can play her against us?”

She looked behind them. Saba was coming after them down the hall, giving Leno an edited version of the talk with Jefferson. Tanuojin went ahead of her out the door. She put her jacket on.