Floating Worlds

like a toy. They went down a huge step in the street. She took Saba’s hand to negotiate it. In the twilight, the street ran straight off before her to the curve of the bubble in the distance, ran up the side, and turned and came back over her head. When she looked straight up she could see the busy streets and buildings of the other side of Saturn-Keda, two or three miles over her head, upside down. A strong odor of fish reached her nose. She looked around at the sheets of nets hanging from the eaves of the houses they passed. The street glistened with fish scales. A furry brown beast, cat-sized, was eating something in the gutter.

They went through an open gate into a yard. Three children were chasing each other around at the far end. Their heads were bald as onions. Paula’s arms and legs ached with fatigue. Her face sagged. Saba took her hand and helped her up three high steps. They went into a blue hall.

“Here.” Saba planted her firmly in the middle of the room. “Stay here. Melleno, let me use your photo- relay.”

Melleno took him out of the room. Paula looked around her. The blue light rippled through the room, constantly changing color. It was like being under water. This was what Matuko would be like, dark and cold. There was no ceiling: she looked up across Saturn-Keda, into the distant web of streets. Tanuojin was at the far end of the room, ignoring her. Melleno came back.

“Well? Tell me about the Middle Planets.”

“You’re right,” Tanuojin said. “It’s a lot more complicated than we thought.”

“Tajin. Tell me something new.”

She went to the table against the wall. It was strange to walk. Even the crepe dress felt heavy. The table was Styth-sized and her chin just cleared the top. A bowl stood on it heaped up with little red beans, or perhaps fruit.

“The Martians have the guns and the money,” Tanuojin was saying, “but the anarchists do all the thinking.”

“Where did he get her?”

“On the Earth.”

“Is she an anarchist?”

“Melleno, she is a pig. You know how he is about women.”

Her back was to them. She pulled the veil aside. He had been enraged, in Ybicsa, because he had had to help her. She took a handful of the beans out of the bowl and put one in her mouth. It was soft and sweet with a hard pip in the center.

“What do you think of Saba’s treaty?”

“I like the economics. That’s a lot of money. What about this truce?”

“It’s just with the Council, not with the Martians.”

“Is there a difference?”

She went along the wall to a window. The sill was a foot wide. She stood eating the fruit. The Styth children were playing before her in the yard. They were bigger than she was. They looked very young, their cheeks still round, like babies’. Now the air in the room was green. She took a seed out of her mouth and flicked it out to the courtyard. Maybe it would grow: her mark on Saturn-Keda.

“Can we take them?” Melleno asked.

“Yes, we can take them. We have to think of how, that’s all, but there’s a way. You used to tell me we could take anybody. Don’t you believe it any more?”

“Well, an old man sees short. What do you want to drink?”

“Nothing. Water.”

Melleno’s voice softened with amusement, even affection. “You know, Tajin, if you allowed yourself the occasional vice, you might find life more pleasant.”

“Why is it such a crime not to get drunk?”

Paula leaned on the window sill. A woman had come out of a door nearby. Her hair was piled up on her head; her fringed sleeves hung down almost to the ground. She called angrily to the children to stop screaming.

Behind Paula Saba came into the room. She yanked the veil across her face again. He went up to the other men, and Tanuojin slung one arm around his neck.

“I feel as if I’m going to put my foot through the floor.”

“What was the Earth like?” Melleno said.

Saba raised his head. “Beautiful. Even the natural parts, outside the cities. Every place you look there’s something you’ve never seen before. They don’t just have two or three kinds of trees, they have hundreds. They have insects there that look like flowers and flowers as high as your head. And the strangest people I’ve ever met.”

Several small pale men in white coats brought a little wagon into the room. They were the first people of her own race she had seen in six weeks. Swiftly and silently they opened the lid of the cart and took out cups. Her spine prickled up. They were slaves. One was obviously part-Styth, like her baby.

“I’ve never done so many strange things in my life,” Saba said. “Maybe it was just being so far from home.”

“It was hot and bright,” Tanuojin said. “And every time I went through a door I cracked my head.”

The slaves went among them, bringing cups and a platter. The three rAkellaron ignored them, probably did not notice them, would notice them only if the slaves made mistakes. Paula turned back to the window. Across the courtyard the children were throwing sticks at each other.

A trickle of feeling ran quickly down her side. She straightened, astonished, and put her hand on the fat hump of the baby. She had never felt him move before.

“They have no standards, Earthish people,” Saba was saying. “Except themselves.”

She turned to watch them. Melleno’s sleeve glittered. He raised his cup. “The Earth is the only place outside Styth I’ve ever wanted to see.”

She watched his hands. He wore a thick bracelet around each wrist. He had been the Prima, a great Prima. His strong action against piracy had forced the Styth Fleet to raid down below Jupiter, into the Middle Planets, since they could no longer rob their own people. He was an old man, his claws whitening, and his mustaches hanging down over his embroidered shirt.

Tanuojin came in again. Paula turned away from them. In the window, looking out at the city, she tried to judge how much energy they needed to maintain all this, to make life possible here. Of course they had Saturn itself, an inexhaustible supply of energy, yielding up radiation like a little sun. People like her had come here to take that energy, and the Planet had made them into Styths. Home is where the heart is, she thought, and laughed.

Ybix flew on through the dark, away from the Sun. After the journey to Saturn, the ship closed around Paula like a shell. The baby moved inside her body, energetic. His kicking woke her up sometimes. Her stretching skin itched intolerably. She scratched herself until she bled. Saba threatened to tie her hands behind her. All her overalls were too tight and he changed the settings in the computer and made her new ones.

One of the fish died in a tank in the transverse corridor. She scooped it out of the water and took it off to Saba. The number four engine was missing timing, and he paid no attention to the fish. His hands already shining with grease, he plunged head-first down a hatch into the engine room. She took the fish to the computer room and sealed it into a plastic folder for the technician to analyze.

In the high watch, while Saba was on duty, she worked in the library, writing out a master contract to allow off-worlders to trade in Matuko. The sketches clipped to the wall were parts of Saba’s new ship, Ybicket: the more he worked out the designs, the more he nagged her to finish the contract. While she was busy with this work, Tanuojin’s voice said, behind her, “If you want to see how that fish died, go look now.”

She wheeled; he was gone. She switched off the file projector and went down the blue tunnel to the black- white corridor. The hatch was open. Cold air streamed down on the fish. She put her head through the hatch into the dark.

In the back of the storage compartment, beyond a row of oxygen tanks, a blue light shone. She went toward it. A man was curled over the glow of a small lamp, heating a bottle of Saba’s Scotch. It was Uhama, the greaser on