“This isn’t the Earth,” he said. “You can’t do as you please around here. That was for your own good—if you go out in the street you’ll just be hurt.”
She sat on the bed, her hands in her lap. Standing in front of her he buckled on his belt again. He said, “I told you when you wanted to come here it wouldn’t be the kind of life you were used to.” His voice sounded above her head. She refused to look up at him. “You’d better get off your high branch. I won’t take your selfish anarchist act too long. Are you listening to me?”
“I hear you.”
“Why don’t you learn how to sew and make yourself some decent clothes? You look like a street-pig, you act like a street-pig, and I won’t take it. Understand? I have enough trouble. I won’t take any more from you.”
He walked out of the room. She put her head back and shut her eyes. She did not belong here. She had come here by mistake, by accident. The baby whimpered. She got up and took him down to the kitchen to feed him.
She put off leaving the compound again. Boltiko mixed little bowls of mush to feed David. “Just give him a little at first, in case it makes him sick.” The prima wife dipped up a bit of mashed fruit on her finger and ate it. She sighed, all her fat quaking. “I don’t know what I’m to do with Ketac. I hope he didn’t behave like this when he was in your world. Dakkar is such a perfect son.”
Pedasen came in, and the three cleaned Paula’s house. She told herself that was why she was not going out into the city again: the baby needed her, the house was dirty, Boltiko wanted to talk.
“Why don’t you use this room for a. nursery?” Pedasen said. He looked in the door to the empty room across the hall from hers. “There’s furniture over—yeow!”
She rushed after him into the room. “What’s wrong?”
“There was a kusin in here!” He pulled the window closed. She went up beside him and opened it again. Pedasen’s pale eyes were popping with excitement. He shut the window. “You can’t leave this open—it comes in through the window.”
She opened the window. “It comes in here to drink.”
“It will eat the toes off the baby.”
“It’s very shy. It won’t go near the baby.”
Pedasen muttered something. He rubbed his nose with his forefinger. She left the room, and he came after her to help her move the big cabinet in the sitting room.
The doors of the cabinet were divided into eight panels, inlaid with metal under a thick shiny glaze. “That’s the story of Capricornus,” he told her. “He was a hero—” He reached up to touch the top panel. “See? Here he is wrongfully accused and his father exiles him, and he goes on his wanderings. But he returns home in the end.”
She wiped the glossy surface of the door with her sleeve. In the panel at her eye-level a tiny man fought a lizard with a round badge on its breast. “What’s this?”
“That’s the dragon Jupiter.” His finger traced the blossom of the beast’s flaming breath. Now she recognized the planetary symbol on the disk. The figures were in low-relief under the glaze, realistic in the detail, even the little image of the man.
“I’m not keeping you from anything, am I?”
“Oh, no,” the eunuch said. “If the mem wanted me, she would ring the bell.”
“You’re hiding out,” she said.
“Not really.”
“Really.”
“You don’t mind, do you?” he said.
“No.”
“I’d work for you, if there was anything to do.”
“I know. It’s all right.”
“When the Akellar gets back,” he said, “he’ll probably put everybody to work.”
She leaned on the back of the swing couch. The chains skreed under her weight. “Where is he?” The couch swayed away from her, and she lifted her feet off the ground and swung with it.
“Half a block of the Tulan was blown down last watch. There was an awful riot.” Pedasen caught the swing. “He’s out looking it over. Next they’ll be breaking down the compound door.”
The baby cried, and they turned their heads to listen. Paula waited to see if David would quiet by himself, and after three or four yells he subsided. She leaned on the couch and swung back and forth. She felt like a ghost in this world, something these other people imagined for their own use: Pedasen to escape work, David to feed him, Saba to deal with the Committee. She had to stop leaving her life up to accident.
“The Tulan,” she said. “What’s that?”
“The rich district, across the city.”
“Take me there.”
Pedasen found her slave’s clothes: baggy white trousers and a white quilted tunic. They walked down to the lake and along the street that followed the shore. The watch was high. Lines of boats rowed across the black water, drawing their nets after them. Three oars to a side they crawled on the still lake surface. The street was busy with slaves going to and from the market on the city wall to her right. Pedasen led her down a steep lane between rows of tall old houses, smelling of fish.
“You’re asking for worse than a whipping,” he said once.
They cut through a part of the Varyhus, along a stretch of the factory fence, and came to the Tulan. Here it was quiet. Banks of white grass grew on either side of the path and in the lanes between the walled houses. She saw no one else, not even children, until they turned a corner and came to a broad stretch of rubble.
For two or three acres, broken concrete and plastic covered the ground. A cart stood in the street, half-full of debris. Two slaves were shoveling in the mess that littered the street. Other white slaves stooped and picked through the ruins. A bilyobio tree grew up at the edge of the street. Paula went over to it, watching a single file of Styths on the far side of the blown-up place. The rubble crackled when she stepped on it, gave way, and nearly dropped her. Pedasen grabbed her elbow.
“Paula.” He nodded at the Styths two hundred feet away. “That’s him.”
She stepped carefully over a broken wall, high as her knees. There was a puddle of melted plastic on the far side, still warm. The sharp edges of the trash cut her shoes. She saw something bright in the blackened crumbled concrete and picked up a metal buckle.
“Paula!” Pedasen hissed, behind her.
She showed him the buckle. The etched design was laid in with soot. “I’ll bet you this I can walk right up to him and he won’t even see me.”
“You’ll get your back peeled off.” His lips were pressed together, like Boltiko’s when somebody swore. She rolled the buckle into the cuff of her sleeve. Watching for things she could salvage from the junk, she crossed the ruin. A sweetish stench of acetone came from the burned ground. Pedasen followed her. At a big two-headed bilyobio tree in the middle of the place, three slaves had gathered to pass a jug of water around. She stopped near them.
“Give that over here,” Pedasen said, and the strange slaves handed him the jug. They were all watching the Styths.
“Find anything?” one said, low.
Pedasen shook his head. He jabbed his chin at Saba and his men, who were cutting across the rubble toward the next street. “How long has he been here?”
“Since the half-watch,” another slave said. They were all talking in murmurs. Paula looked up at the bilyobio. One stubby upper branch was split, but otherwise it seemed untouched by the explosion. The jug came around to her and she sipped the cool water. Saba was scanning the ground, his hands on his hips, and his face gripped with bad temper.
“Have they found anything?” she said.
“Two bomb casings,” a strange slave told her.
Another man took the jug from her. “They’d have found plenty, but Tssa’s men were here last watch cleaning up.” He grinned; he had no teeth in his upper jaw.
“Who is Tssa?” she asked.
