Jefferson ate the sugar-nut. “But instead you learned Styth. Why?”
“I couldn’t very well pass up the chance. Styth is the only other language still being spoken.” She stopped; that seemed enough, but they all stared at her as if they expected more. She said, “The warden was driving me crazy.”
“You don’t really expect us to hire you, do you?” Jefferson said.
“I’m not sure I want the job.”
“Well,” Bunker said, “we are offering you a job. The Interplanetary Council wants us to negotiate a truce between the Middle Planets and the Styth Empire. Unfortunately, none of us speaks any Styth.”
“Oh,” Paula said. “Well, get some tapes. It’s not hard. Lots of little rules and things. Genders.”
Jefferson was eating the last of the sugar-nuts. Paula saw why she was so fat. “Take the job, Mendoza. We don’t have time to scour the system looking for an anarchist who speaks Styth.”
“All right,” she said. Meanwhile she would find something else.
Tony said, “You’re selling your soul.”
“I don’t have a soul. And if I did, they’re paying me a fortune for it. Eight hundred dollars a month.” That was more than he made.
“You are an inveterate materialist.” He picked up a black pebble. On the grid between them, broken lines of black and white stones faced each other, shaping the space of the game. Tony’s hand hovered over the board. “You can always come here and live with me.” He put the black pebble down, watching her face.
“It’s educational.”
“Working for the Committee? Being a cop?”
Most people played Go in silence. Tony had developed the tactic of distracting conversation to the point where he could not play without talking. On the grid between them, she could close two positions with a single crucial play. Tony had to keep forcing her to play elsewhere, which he was doing. She sat back, taking a deep breath. Tony put his head forward.
“Look at what the Committee does. They leech off the anarchy. It’s in their best interests that people fail. Are you going to play or not?”
She played. “Aha,” he said, and with a click put a stone down on the grid, rescuing his men. “You just don’t have the stamina. I’m way ahead of you, you know.”
“Is wanting to win so much that you pant, a sign of materialism?”
His apartment was on the ground floor of an old stone building near the edge of the wood. The five rooms were stacked with books and manuscripts: he taught Style. They made dinner in his kitchen, arguing about the Committee, and went to bed, where he also attempted to teach.
A crash woke her up. She sat straight, the hair on her neck standing on end, and nearly fell out of the bed. They were sleeping on the porch of his apartment, and the bed sloped. Tony scrambled across her, reaching for his trousers.
They went down the hall to the bedroom, where there was a convenient window. She heard no more loud noises, but voices rose in the stairwell of the building, and someone shouted outside. Wrapped in a robe of Tony’s, she climbed after him out the bedroom window to the ground.
Between his building and the wood a meadow stretched flat and open in the domelight. Several people were running across it toward the trees. By the time she and Tony reached the wood, a small crowd had gathered. The night bus was parked on the flat ground at the edge of the trees and its few passengers were standing around outside it. A little two-seated car had crashed into the top of a tree and turned over. It rested like a strange hat in the branches. Paula went forward to see and Tony caught her arm.
“It might fall.”
The people around her milled about. One man was walking up and down saying, “I don’t even have insurance.” She looked up at the car. It was wrecked. A big branch had run through the side window and come out the top, and the front end was pushed in.
“Was anybody hurt?”
“That one doesn’t look too good to me. He was the passenger.”
She looked where these people were looking. A man sat under a tree, his head in his arms, a coat thrown over him, or a blanket. Paula wondered if she could do anything to help. Her feet were cold and she picked them one at a time off the ground.
“Watch out!”
Two men were pulling the air car down by ropes. The bigger man wore a jacket with
“The car ran into the bus’s air buffer,” he said. “The driver must have been drunk or something.”
The car’s driver was bent over the wreckage, moaning that he had no insurance. Tony and a woman bystander got into an argument about how fast the car had been going. Paula looked around for the car’s passenger. He was still sitting under the tree. Someone was offering him a drink from a half-liter bottle of whiskey. He ignored it, and when the other person pushed it at him, he raised his head and shouted, “Go away!”
The busman tramped around the car, coiling a rope. “Somebody ought to come down tomorrow and prune the tree.” He walked up face to face with the car driver. “Is he hurt?” He gestured toward the passenger.
“I don’t know.” The driver had half a papercase in his hand. He looked at it and threw it back into the wreck.
“What are you going to do?” the busman asked. “I have to leave. I have my run to finish.”
Tony called, “Take him to the hospital. Take him in the bus.”
The driver made a little gesture with one hand, his gaze on his passenger. “I don’t have any insurance.”
“I can run you by the Asclepius,” the busman said. He and the driver went to the hurt man under the tree and helped him to his feet.
“Hey—that’s my coat.” A tall woman trotted out of the crowd and retrieved the coat wrapped around the hurt man. He walked stiffly between the other two men toward the bus. The reflector strips on the sleeves of the busman’s jacket gleamed red and white. None of the other people moved to get back on the bus. The inside lights came on, shining across the grass. Through the big windows, Paula could see the lines of empty benches, the driver of the wrecked car and his passenger slumped together on the last seat. The horn tooted sharply three times. No one in the crowd paid any attention. The bus’s engines hummed and the long machine rose into the air and sailed away.
On Paula’s left, the tall woman folded her coat over her arm. With the rest of the crowd she moved down toward the wreck. A man climbed over the smashed front end.
“Here’s a radio—I’ll share it with anybody who helps me get it out.”
Paula and Tony went back across the grass toward his place. She turned to look back. There was a whoop of triumph from the crowd clustered around the car. Two men dragged a seat out of the ruin.
“Vultures,” Tony said.
Paula hurried on her cold feet toward the light of his hall. “What’s wrong with salvage?”
“That’s a euphemism. The word is theft.”
“If nobody took anything, the dome would be littered with junk.” She pushed the window in and slung one leg across the sill. By morning every relic of the car would be gone, even the plastic, which brought 1.5 cents a pound at the recycling plant. She and Tony went onto the porch.
Her first meeting in the matter of the Styth Empire was in the same room where she had had her oral examination. When she let herself in, Jefferson sat at the table rummaging through a handbag like a satchel. “Mendoza,” she said. “Richard is late, as you can see. How do you like your office?”
“It’s terrible. The window looks right out on the gulley bank.” She pulled out a chair and sat across the table from the fat old woman. “I have a terrific view of roots and yellow clay.” That was not entirely true, since a spindling tree grew between the window and the bank. So far it had no leaves. She hoped it was dead. Jefferson was peeling the wrap off a roll of mint candy.
“What did you do for Dr. Savenia?”
