“When you go out, you’ll use the slave door, and you’ll wear slave clothes. I won’t have people thinking I’d let my wife run around in the street.” He waved his plastic hand at her. “You can go.”
Boltiko sat down, pulling her skirts smooth over her knees, and sighed. “Sometimes I think I’ll just die. I can’t eat anything any more without getting sick.” She fanned her vast face, smooth with fat. Illy’s slave poured kakine, the sweet green Matukit liquor, into three glasses on the table before her.
Paula’s chair was a sling of white shaggy fur, big enough to sleep in. She curled her legs under her. Illy’s whole house was done in white, chrome, and glass. The young wife came in from the sleeproom. Against such a background, her beauty was riveting: there was nothing else to look at. Boltiko glared at her.
“That boy of yours is incorrigible.”
Illy had three children. Paula could never pick out which of the horde they were. The young wife sat down in the chair between the other women. “I’m sure I can’t be blamed.”
Boltiko snorted. She reached for a glass of kakine. “That baby is tiny,” she said to Paula. “You aren’t feeding him enough.”
“If he were any bigger I’d have to put wheels on him to move him around.”
“He cries. That’s a sign he’s hungry.”
“I think he’s just bad-tempered,” Paula said.
“He cries all the time.”
“All you ever talk about is children,” Illy said. She sent the slave away with a wave of her hand. “He’s in a good mood now.”
All she ever talked about was Saba. Paula rubbed her hand over the long white nap of her chair. The treaty had come back, signed, and the trade contracts had been covered by a syndicate of fifty-two Martian traders.
Boltiko said, “Nobody is blowing down Matuko, that’s why. Dakkar says the city is very peaceful.”
The house slave came in again with a tray of cut fruit. Like Pedasen, he was a eunuch. In his whispery voice, he said, “Mem, Pedasen is in the back. The Akellar will see Mem Paula in the Manhus.”
“In the Manhus,” Illy and Boltiko said, in one voice.
“I wonder what he wants,” Paula said. She slid down from the chair.
Pedasen waited in the back doorway of lily’s house, David in the crook of his arm. When the baby saw her he burst into an enormous smile. She took him from the slave. With Pedasen beside her she crossed the yard to the Manhus door.
“Boltiko says it means he’s hungry when he cries,” she said to Pedasen.
He shrugged. On the steps, he reached for the baby again. “She thinks that’s all that can be wrong with people, that they’re hungry.”
Paula laughed. He loathed the Styths. She watched him take the baby back toward her house, and went herself into the Manhus.
Saba was in the maproom, staring at a green hologram of the Planet, his hands on his hips. She went into the oval room and shut the door. He turned his head; the light whitened the side of his face.
“How is Vida?”
“He’s fine. He cries a lot.”
“That’s good, that means he’s strong-minded.” He turned off the map and she could no longer see his face. “I’m going to Vribulo. Do you want to go with me?”
“Yes, of course.” She sat down in the pedestal chair, her gaze on his solid featureless shape among the maps. He sauntered around the room and came up behind her.
“I got a record slip from a bank in Luna. They’re holding a million dollars in iron at my order.” His hand rumpled through her hair.
“What about my commission?”
“That isn’t how we do things here.” His fingers worked in her hair. His voice was smooth. “I’ll take care of you and Vida. I give you everything you want, don’t I?”
“I suppose so.” She could not help but smile.
“Then what do you need money for?”
“Nothing, I guess.”
“You’re a very reasonable woman,” he said.
VRIBULO
Machou’s Akellarat
Vribulo was darker than Matuko, almost like full night, and bitterly cold. The air smelled rancid. The streets swarmed with people. They walked faster here than in Matuko, hurrying along in a continuous crowd. She stayed close by Saba. If she got lost here she would have to find her own way back. Ketac had come with them, together with Sril and Bakan. The young man walked along beside her, looking around him, his bed slung over his shoulder.
The buildings of the ancient city, the oldest city of the Empire, were blackened with time. The upper stories overhung the streets and in places closed above the street into arches. A siren started up behind her. She glanced back. The street threaded away through the dark, picked out with the blue-white of crystal lamps. There seemed to be a million people walking after her. At a run she went back among her own Styths.
The slaves here wore white, like in Matuko, which made them show up in the dark among their dark masters. She heard another siren. High above them, she could just make out the far side of the city: the square shapes of buildings, the dim sheen of water. They came into a street with a lane of thick blue grass down the center.
Sril touched her shoulder. “Look up there, Mendoz’.”
They were coming to the end of the bubble. Something covered it that she thought at first was a natural formation, some kind of Stythite rock laid down in ledges that ringed the blunt end of the bubble. Sril said, “That’s the rAkellaron House.”
Now she could see the windows, the jutting balconies, and a torrent of steps running down from the high open porch. People walked there, so small she overlooked them, her eyes taken by the building. Sril laughed at her as she stood gaping at it. He took her by the arms and lifted her up a step onto the floor of a covered arcade. Saba and the other men had gone on ahead of her along the front of the building.
“This is the Barn,” Sril said. “All the rAkellaron have offices here.” He waved in passing at a door. The arcade stretched along the long front of the building, cut with a door every fifty feet. Over some of them shone blue lights. She went to the edge of the arcade and looked up at the rAkellaron House.
“That must be heavy.”
“Heavy as the Empire,” he said: some proverb. He opened a door for her. They were nearly to the end of the Barn, only two more doorways between them and a black wall. Sril said, “The Creep isn’t here yet. That’s his office, the last.” She went past him into a room full of men.
Saba stood in the middle of everything, talking to a little ring of faces. She circled them to the window on the far wall. Ketac was there, one hip braced on the sill, his rolled bed tipped against the wall beside him. She glanced into the street outside the window, now much below them.
“Nervous?” she asked Ketac. He was staying here, on Saba’s staff.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it.”
“I said I’m fine!”
She laughed. The young man grew hot. His fingers plucked fiercely at his short mustaches. Like his face, his hands were all knobbed bones. In the street below a pack of men was passing by, wearing dark blue shirts with red chevrons on the upper sleeves. Seeing Ketac in the window, one called, “Hey, socks.”
Ketac’s head snapped around. He leaned across the window sill. “Watch what you’re saying, sitdown-sailor.” Sril elbowed him out of the way.
“What are you looking for, pouchy,” he shouted at the chevrons. “Flying lessons?”
The men in the red chevrons were crowding toward the window. Their voices rose in a chorus of insults.
