mother’s name too. Somewhere out in the compound a bell rang, and he hurried away to answer it.
Most of the time the baby slept. Boltiko sent another slave to bring Paula her high watch meal. When she had eaten and slept, she took the baby and went out to walk in the yard. The biggest building in the compound was the Manhus, on the wall opposite her house. Long and low, it ran the length of the yard, its door like a mouth and its front porch like a jaw. She had never been there, and she went in there now.
The door led her into a wide dark hallway. Sril was standing in the back, reading from a message board on the wall. When he saw her, he grinned all across his wide face.
“Mendoz’. Let me see.” He came up to look at the baby.
“You don’t live here, do you?” she said.
He was bent over the baby, cooing. “No—up the curve. Ah, he’s pretty. I like little babies.” He straightened up, his eyes on her. “Are you supposed to be in here?”
“Probably not.” Three doors opened off the hall on either side, and she went to the nearest and went through it.
It was crowded with Styths, their backs to her, so that no one noticed her. The baby slept heavily in her arms. She moved to one side to see what was happening. At the head of the room Saba walked up and down past a broad table. A lone man faced him, his hands behind him fastened together with a white plastic yoke. Paula stood back near the wall. The twenty-odd men packing the rear half of the room were watching intently, silent.
“My family has dominated Matuko for eighteen generations,” Saba was saying. “For the blood we’ve lost for this city, the least we could get is trust.” He circled the table. The men watching him were utterly silent. “I don’t care what you call it,” he said to the man on trial. “I say you started a riot.”
No one moved. The bound man said, “You can put me up for the rest of my life, Akellar, but you can’t make me believe you haven’t betrayed us.”
“I know what’s right for my own city.” Saba walked up and down before the table, his hands on his hips. “I haven’t betrayed anybody. This treaty will give us a kind of life none of you has ever dreamed of, and all you can do is squawk at me. I’m risking my back and my rank in the Chamber to make my city great, and all I get is hysteria.”
The baby stirred, flinging out his arms. Paula went back to the hall. He had opened his crystal farm again and his slaves were refusing to work. Pedasen brought her wild rumors from the street about fires and riots. She carried the baby across the yard to her house to feed him. Saba told her nothing. In fact, she had seen him little since David’s birth. He was busy. She knew he still wanted her. She fed the baby and rocked him on the swing until he fell asleep. She was strong again, and her body had healed. She knew he would come to her.
“Boltiko is much older than he is,” she said.
“The blacks do that,” Pedasen answered. He carried an empty pack on his shoulders that flapped with each step. “If a boy’s wild, they marry him to some old mare who steadies him.” They were coming to the market. In the open lot above the lake shore, Styths and slaves in white milled around bright-painted open stalls. She looked back over her shoulder. On the perpendicular wall of the city Saba’s compound was an open square, head-on. She could just make out the roof of her house.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
“I was born in Yekaka’s Manhus,” Pedasen said. “My mother came from outside the Planet.”
“Do you know where?”
“No.” He stopped and pointed through an alley. “Down there is the Varyhus. That’s the district where the plastics factory is—it’s a terrible place, full of thieves and murderers. Don’t ever go there.”
She stood looking down the alley. It dipped along a short hill. On either side were low red buildings, brick- colored, peeling posters hanging off the walls. The air smelled bitterly of resin. She trotted after the eunuch, who was going into the market.
There were many more slaves than Styths. Pedasen led her through the thick stream of people to a booth piled with fish. There was an awning spread under the table to protect them from the radiation corning from the ground. Paula reached for a fish. Its belly was slit open from head to tail; inside, the flesh was translucent pink. Pedasen smacked her hand and she put the fish down again. A slave in a blue apron came up to the far side of the booth to serve him. Fish scales glittered on his sleeves and the round sealer was stuck in his cuff.
Paula wandered away through the crowd. The next line of tables was stacked up with live chickens. Styth chickens: they had no wings, their feathers were like silky white hair. They huddled mute on the counter, their long red feet tied together. She went along the street, her hands in her sleeves to keep them warm.
The city was large enough that the ground under her feet seemed flat and the street rose and fell in little hills, but whenever she lifted her eyes she saw the vast bubble around her, closed over her head, like a tremendous cave. The slaves around her chattered in their liquid speech. The few Styth women among them were veiled to the eyes. She felt the vast drone of the city around her, oppressive. In the next lane were slaves hanging cloth from the eaves of their booths, red and white striped canvas, black silk, the heavy gray cloth Saba’s shirts were made of. In the alley beyond she found beer vendors. She turned a corner and came into a narrow street where they sold people.
She stopped in the middle of the street. Her hackles rose. On the side of the street, three women sat, their knees drawn up, and their feet yoked together with white plastic yokes. A card over their heads told their ages and use. None of them seemed to notice her. One was fair-skinned, almost Martian white. Beside them, in a little cage, a child slept curled on the ground.
“Paula!”
She turned away from the slaves. Pedasen hurried up to her. “What are you doing in here?” In one hand he held a brace of chickens by the feet. The bag on his back was stuffed with his purchases, and the string of credit around his neck was almost naked of its coins. He gripped her arm and rushed her out of the street. “This place gives me the chills.”
She went beside him back through the market. He held her arm as if she might run away. He was taller than she was, and he walked fast, so that she had to stretch her legs to keep up. The chickens swung from his free hand.
“You won’t get in trouble, will you?” she said. “For bringing me here.”
He shook his head. “All the trouble will land on you.”
She looked up ahead of them. In their passage across the city, the ground seemed to flatten away from her, and now Saba’s compound was sinking down slowly into the clutter of large buildings along that part of the wall. They were passing the head of the lake. Boats rowed over it in lines, like soldiers.
“What are they fishing for?” She saw the nets in their wake, swollen fat with the black lake water.
Pedasen shook his head. “You ask too many questions. You’re just going to have to learn not to be so curious.”
She looked up at him. He was staring at the street just ahead of his feet. His silken cheeks were darker than hers, his eyes startlingly pale. Certainly his mother had been Earthish. In the street ahead of them, between high walls, Styth children were throwing a curved stick back and forth. She followed Pedasen down the grassy lane that led along the back wall of Saba’s compound and in the little slave door.
Boltiko’s house was full of screaming children. Paula let herself in the front door to the cluttered sitting room. Down the hall the prima wife’s voice sounded, shrill: “I don’t care what he did, I’ve told you again and again—” There followed the smack of a hand on a child’s bottom. In the hall a knot of five or six children packed the kitchen door, their backs to Paula. She went unseen into Boltiko’s bedroom, where David lay asleep on the bed, and took him away out the front door.
He woke while she was changing his clothes, and she lay on her bed nose to nose with him. His arms and legs flailed aimlessly and he heaved himself onto his side, as if he were trying to roll over. She kissed his head, capped in thick black hair. After a while, she realized there was someone behind her.
Saba was in the doorway. He said, “Where did you go?”
“Out.” She slid off the bed to her feet.
“I told you what I’d do if you did that.” He took off his belt. She wet her lips. He came around the bed, took her by the scruff of the neck, and whipped her with the doubled belt, six or eight times. It hurt. When he let her go she grabbed the bed to keep from falling.
