Floating Worlds

On the left was a plush stuffed couch and on the right a desk. She went straight between them to a window and stood staring out over the garden, one story below her. She could see nothing of Newrose; she might as well have been blind again.

She needed to hear. She reached out, struggling to hear. Newrose’s voice sounded faintly somewhere behind her, and she snatched for it. It was a bait. She was thrown back. Like a knife the black fell across her sight. The sound was gone. She was locked tight in her mind again.

He was in here with her. It was her body. She had done it wrong, the first time, stupidly attacking the dominant, most disciplined sense. She had to move fast. Collecting her will and her concentration, she flung herself out along all her nerves.

Feeling sprang alive in her hands and feet and along her back, spread over her face and her belly, running hot like blood under her skin. She shut her blind eyes and doubled up, falling. Her cheek and hip hit the yielding floor. Her stomach clenched in a cramp. Something clawed at her, deep in her body. She almost weakened. She nearly yielded. Gasping for breath, she struggled to hear, and sound burst alive in her ears.

“Miss Mendoza—” Newrose squeaked. “I’ll get help.”

“No! Leave me alone.”

She blinked, panting. Her guts and belly were knotted, like the fierce cramps of labor. The light hurt her eyes. She forced herself to see. The floor stretched away shiny past a pair of modish two-tone shoes. Over there was the couch. She pushed herself up to her knees and the claws ripped her as if he were trying to tear a way out through her stomach. She could not straighten. Newrose held his pink hands down to her. His eyes were round as a Styth’s. She shook her head at him.

He spoke to her. She paid no attention. Putting her feet under her, she lurched up and staggered to the couch. Her muscles fluttered with weakness. Her mouth tasted of copper. The jagged edge slashed her stomach. She wiped her drooling mouth on her hand.

“Shall I bring you something?” Newrose danced around her. “Water? A little brandy?”

“No.” Her strength was ebbing. A long pain stabbed into her lungs. She pressed her arms against her body, where her prisoner gnawed her.

“Please,” Newrose said.

She got up onto her feet and started toward the door. Her lungs were burning. She wondered if he could save himself by killing her. Newrose came into her way, and she brushed by him to the door.

“You have to help me.” Newrose pursued her across the anteroom beyond, past his startled aides rising like puppets off their chairs. “I need your help.”

She threw him a wild look. Her throat was closed; she could not speak even if she had wanted to tell him anything. Her breath burned going down. She went out to the hall.

“Miss Mendoza!”

Her knees were buckling. For a moment her lungs froze and she could not breathe, and she nearly panicked. She leaned against the glass wall of the corridor and made herself calm and insisted on breathing and the air crept down her swollen throat. The glass before her was fogged with the breath leaving her. Out there lay the gardens. She started down the hall toward the stairs.

Twice on the steps she fell, and the second time she rolled all the way to the bottom. She nearly lost consciousness. Lying in a knot at the foot of the stairs, her face against the floor, she felt him rising through her, ready to seize her as soon as she weakened, and she throttled him down again. This time it was easy. He was tiring. She got to her knees and pushed herself up to her feet and went across the corridor to the door.

The gardens spread off toward the thick fence of the trees along the golf course. The colors of the flowers were drowned in the blue domelight. The air chilled her cheeks. The pain seemed to be gone, or she was numb to it, but her body felt as if it were melting away. She could not lift her feet, she dragged them along, plowing through the beds of poppies, the peonies and wildflowers.

No, he said, in her mind; not a voice but a thought. Go back. Take me back.

She blundered on through the heavy branches of the deodars to the edge of the sweeping lawns of the golf course. Behind her someone shouted her name: she thought it was Ketac. She let her body down to the ground, her dense flesh like mud, all the feeling gone, and shut her eyes. If she died, he would die.

No. Don’t. No.

Her will had kept her alive, and she could will her death. Freed of her nature she would reach across the Universe, she would instantly be home.

Tajin, she thought, you made a mistake. He still needed her for shelter. He was her child, her beast, the unimaginable future, which she had nurtured and protected until he was strong and his course was inevitable. She thought, We are finished with each other.

Please, he said. I’ll do anything you want.

Ketac shouted again, closer. She turned her head to answer.

“I’m getting rid of her.”

She raised her head, coming awake in a start. She was lying on her bed, alone, with her clothes on. She could not remember anything beyond the moment when Ketac found her lying on the grass. The door to the next room was open and voices came through it: Junna’s now.

“You can’t kill her, Pop.”

Sliding off the bed, she went to the open door and stood on the threshold. The back of her neck hummed. Ketac was directly in front of her, his broad shoulders blocking her view of the room. He said, “I don’t see how you can even think of killing her.”

“She’s malicious,” Tanuojin said. “And she’s perverse. Whatever I think she believes the opposite, to spite me.”

Paula went by Ketac and stood between him and the wall. Junna faced Tanuojin, who was sitting on the couch. Tanuojin was excited; the measure of it was that he did not notice her.

“She’s your friend,” Junna said.

“She has never been my friend. We have always hated each other.”

Ketac was staring at her. She said, “I’m thirsty. Bring me a glass of water.” Tanuojin had seen her. He was unexcited. He was simply refusing to look at her.

Junna said, “You can’t kill her, Papa, she hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“I said I would get rid of her. I didn’t say I’d kill her.”

Paula looked down at his head. Studiously he avoided her glance. He could not help but see her in his mind. Ketac came back with a cup of cold water. She went back into her bedroom to change her clothes.

THE EARTH

Red sand blasted the window. Paula glanced down at the holograph, in which Ybicket was flying through a blizzard of green lights. She tipped her head up again toward the window. Junna said, in the drive seat, “Do you have a temperature for the geosphere?”

“About 30 degrees at the bottom margin. There’s a change in density up ahead in the gas that looks like a clearing. Bearing course plus 72.” Tanuojin pushed the radio deck up and pulled out the scan on its hinge from the wall.

Ybicket swooped into a shallow gliding descent. They flew out of the dust storm. Paula stood up in her seat to see. The sand was rippled like a washboard into red dunes. Against it the hard blue sky blazed with sunlight. The light glared on a lake ahead of them.

“We’re about three thousand feet above the geosphere,” Tanuojin said. He was in the kick-seat navigating. “Where are you leveling off?”

“Pretty soon. You should feel the ship. She’s really hoopy, but the gravity’s like the deep Planet.”

“Saba used to say flying in the Earth was more risky than fighting.”

“Over there.” Paula pressed her nose against the window. “Down over the lake.” Ahead, the sun caught on a