Floating Worlds

“It will work,” she said. She ate the potato.

“This settlement won’t be popular on Mars,” Newrose said. He had a scarf wrapped around his head, like an egg-cozy.

“How is General Hanse?” Paula said.

“He’s terribly ill.”

“He had a heart attack while they were questioning him. The Styths don’t know much about medicine.”

She was facing the clear wall of the space port waiting room. Out on the flat crater floor a hundred feet away two ships stood in the first two wells of the launching dock. While she watched, the accordion cover of the third well folded back, and another ship rose through it to the surface. That was Ybicket, Ybix’s new sidecraft. A man in a pressure suit jogged across the gray dust to the ship and disappeared inside the hatch. Paula turned toward Newrose again. Her pressure suit held her arms out away from her sides, like a gingerbread man.

“Just keep watch on Dr. Savenia,” she said.

“I thought you said that was settled?”

“I trust Tanuojin about three inches to the mile.” She trusted him least when he appeared to give in. He had accepted the Martian Treaty more readily than Leno. It was impossible to surprise him. Maybe he had learned not to waste his time on things he could not control.

“Do you trust the Prima?” Newrose said.

“Under the circumstances I’d rather be hung for a lamb than a sheep.”

“Clear the launch area,” said the speaker in the corner of the ceiling. In the naked waiting room it boomed. A moment later the same voice repeated the words in the Common Speech. Newrose’s eyebrows drew close over his nose.

“I do wish you’d stay here,” he said to her.

“What do you mean?” Ybicket’s hatch opened and the man in the black pressure suit dropped lightly to the ground. He came at a lope across the launch area toward the waiting room.

“You seem to think I can just pull down a few levers and push the right buttons and make what you want happen,” Newrose said. “I can’t do that. I can’t explain it as well as you can.” He looked at her bitterly. “I’m not a diplomat, Mendoza, I’m a garden variety—”

She laughed at him. “Don’t worry. You’ll do very well.” She watched the man in the pressure suit enter the airlock to the waiting room. “Better than Dr. Savenia. Do you know my son?” Pulling off his helmet, David came into the room with them.

“We have to go,” he said to her.

He was flying her to Ybix. She introduced him to Newrose and went to take her helmet from the shelf along the back wall. Newrose and her son stood silently side by side, not looking at each other; neither spoke the other’s language. She shook Newrose’s hand and David took her out to Ybicket.

YBIX Watch logs H21, 969–H22, 336

She opened the hatch to the Beak and rose up into the pyramidal room in Ybix’s nose. Tanuojin was there. The shutter was open. Paula turned around in mid-air, so that the spread of the stars was above her. The Milky Way cut the corner of the window; she could barely pick Uranus out of the thickness of stars below it. The Planet was just entering the constellation Capricorn, sacred to Matuko and Saba’s family, the House of Exile. Tanuojin was too long for the Beak room, and his body curved to fit and left almost no space for her. She turned to the stars again. Near the top of the window were two familiar patches of light, like pieces of the Milky Way that had drifted: the Magellanic Clouds. Between them a brilliant star shone. She could not remember seeing it before. But it must have been there; stars did not change.

“That one did,” Tanuojin said. “It went supernova during the War.”

The star flashed white and green and orange. Out there something was happening greater than ten thousand systemic wars, but she had no way of knowing what it was. Like the events of atoms, the lives of mesons lasting trillionths of trillionths of seconds, the nova happened beyond her range. She was hung between them, her clocks too slow or fast, her rulers too long or short, so that these things that must all be part of one thing seemed to be unrelated.

Tanuojin said, “Saba always tells me how direct your mind is.”

“Who asked you to listen?” She faced him, the nova of his race. “What do you think about?”

“I don’t think any more. I just watch.” The while he talked to her he was writing on a tablet.

“It must be boring,” she said. “Always knowing what people will do next.”

“I don’t. And it’s never boring.”

He was making notes on the supernova. The hot star sparkled like a jewel, now orange, now white again. Below it was Uranus. A memory of the dark cities of the Styths crossed her mind, and she thought with longing of the sunlit Earth. She thought painfully of Richard Bunker. Tanuojin was watching her.

“I keep going in circles,” she said. She pulled the hatch open and swam out to the corridor.

David’s claws were growing in. Saba had stopped shaving his head, and when his hair grew long enough to tie, David would be clubbed. When Paula went to her cabin, her son and his father were there. She went past them to the end of the room where the bed hung on the wall.

“The order of the command is the father’s order,” David said. “Law lives in the father, generation on generation.” His voice was singsong; he was reciting from memory.

“Give me the formula for the oath,” Saba said.

There were three hundred formulas, which David had to memorize before he was clubbed. He gave Paula a cutting look and began, “When you tell—”

Saba said, “Not when I do it. Say it right.”

“But—”

“Don’t change the formula.”

Paula was taking her clothes off. David’s voice rose. “What are you doing in here? You aren’t supposed to listen.”

She took her sleepdress out of the bin on the wall. “Then don’t say it in my bedroom.”

“She isn’t supposed to hear it,” David said to his father.

Saba said to him, “Go feed yourself. We’re on watch pretty soon.”

David flew out of the room. Paula doubled over in the air and pulled the robe down over her feet. It unsettled her that he was going through this education—that in a few months he would be a grown man. She opened out the folds of the bed.

“I guess he gets his temper from me.”

“It’s his age,” Saba said. “Boys get hot when their claws come in.” He went to the hatch. “You taught him to say what he thinks, Paula.”

“I didn’t teach him to think like a Styth.” She yanked the bed out straight and wrapped the wings around her.

Saba laughed. “No, you certainly didn’t.” Three bells rang, and he left.

In the three hundred and sixty-third watch of the voyage Ybix crossed the orbit of Uranus. She slowed, falling into a course around the white Planet, the rest of the fleet behind her. Paula stayed in the wetroom. When she came out there was a note from Saba stuck in the hatch commanding her to the library. Her stomach and the muscles of her arms and legs were cramped so that moving was painful. She dressed and went down to the galley.

Junna was eating protein strips just outside the hatch. He said, “You’re supposed to be putting your head together with Gemini.”