Floating Worlds

the jug. Paula put her head down between the other woman’s legs again.

Illy balked twice more. Paula thought she liked pretending to be forced. In the end she did so well that Paula sobbed and clung to her through a pulsing climax. Illy lay on her side, shaking the empty jug.

“That’s nothing like with him. He would never do that for me.”

“You can suck him. He might learn.”

Illy called her house slave in to give him the jug. Paula covered herself in the bedclothes, her head near Illy’s knees and her feet on the pillow. The eunuch avoided looking at them. He might tell Pedasen, but he would tell no Styths.

“Could we get drunk like that?” Illy laughed. The slave brought back the jug, full. “I think I’m drunk, a little. Did I do it right? Did you like it?”

Paula smiled at her. Illy moved over and cradled her head on Paula’s thigh. “I liked it.” Paula touched the long black hair. Against Illy’s black skin her skin looked warm: red brown. She put her head down, pleased to be in bed with such a beautiful woman.

In the high watch, Paula went to the rack in her bedroom and found her clothes hacked to pieces with scissors. Pedasen was with her. He picked up a bit of a sleeve. “That low nigger,” he said, under his breath.

“Who did it?” She wheeled on him. He stooped, gathering up the shards of her dresses, the back of his head to her, and mumbled something inaudible. She squatted beside him. “Who?” she said into his face.

“I don’t know, mem.”

He took the rags away. She followed him down to the kitchen. “Why, then? I don’t even know any of the other slaves.”

Pedasen fed the scraps of cloth into the shredder. “Because you keep with the blacks. Going to her like that.” His face was guileless. She realized he was destroying the evidence before Boltiko found it. She watched a long black ribbon disappear between the lips of the shredder.

“How can they hate me when I don’t even know them?”

“You stay with the blacks against your own people.”

Angry, she went away down the hall.

“You’re pulling my hair out by the roots.”

“Everything that makes you beautiful hurts a little.” Illy brushed hard at Paula’s hair. David was in his new crib, in the room across the hall from Paula’s bedroom, and he let out a wail. Pedasen came down the hall from the kitchen to the child’s room. In the mirror Illy’s hands fluffed the bush of Paula’s hair. Illy stooped and kissed her shoulder.

“There. Doesn’t that look better, darling?”

“It looks fine. Can I get dressed now?”

“You’re impossible,” Illy said, and kissed her again. “I guess all intelligent people are a little odd in some way.”

Pedasen was singing to David, in the room across the hall. Paula strained to make out the words in the low voice. While she was dressing, Saba shouted in the front room. Illy clutched her shoulder.

“What is he doing here? You told me he didn’t come here.”

“That isn’t what I said.” Paula poked her feet into her shoes and slid off her bed. She had told Illy that Saba never slept with her. Saba came in the doorway.

“Do you have any more questions? I’m leaving in three hours.”

Dakkar appeared behind him in the hall. His prima son would rule Matuko in his absence. Illy withdrew across the room, veiling her face with one long black hand.

Paula said to Saba, “No—as long as I can use your computer I can figure everything out, I think.”

“Get the contract advances as high as you can,” he said. He ignored Illy as if she were not there. “Remember, one-tenth of it goes to me. Where is Vida?”

“He’s asleep.” She could still hear Pedasen singing to him.

Saba waved his hand at Dakkar, standing in the doorway with one hand on the frame. “I’ve told him to keep watch on you. Make it easy for him, like a good girl.” He turned and walked out of the room, and with a backward glance at her Dakkar followed him.

Illy said, “All those instructions. You must be important.” She ran her hands down Paula’s arms. Her voice turned wistful. “He never once said how pretty you look.”

The collar of Paula’s new dress itched. David lay heavy in her arms. Boltiko stood directly before her, and the mob of younger children before her, blocking Paula’s view of the yard. She knew Saba was somewhere near the bilyobio tree because the steady murmur of voices came from that direction. This ceremony was obviously important, since Ketac had come all the way from Vribulo for it.

This was her family now, these people around her. David made her belong to them, to Boltiko and Illy beside her, the little children, the older boys having part in the ceremony, and the man taking ceremonious leave of them all. She felt no kinship with them. Sometimes she wondered how else she ought to see herself, an alien intruder, a guest, or a glorified slave. Maybe, like the man who rode across Lake Constance, if she saw what she really did, she would die of fright.

Illy turned her head slightly. Her face was covered, like Boltiko’s, only her beautiful eyes showing. Through the tail of her eye she glanced at Paula, and she moved a step backward and took Paula’s hand. Paula squeezed her fingers.

Saba took Ybix away to the Asteroids. Half the rAkellaron wanted contracts to trade with the Middle Planets, and they could not understand why Paula needed more time than a watch to draw them up. She began with Melleno, thinking that he would be easier to deal with because he was Saba’s ally. She was mistaken. He refused to give her information she needed and ignored some of her questions entirely. At first it made her angry, until she realized that he was not being arbitrary. He was simply acting like a man who could recite his pedigree back fifty-three generations to a mythical hero. To get his attention she had to assure him of his family’s glory and remind him of his duty to maintain it, and to convince him that trading with the Middle Planets was the way to do that.

With five cities and four million people under his rule, Melleno could demand three times the advances Saba had gotten, but the mention of money made him very short-tempered. She guessed he was afraid of seeming to be bribed; and anyway it was ignoble to need money. The payments had to be disguised as gifts and tribute, incidental to the real purpose of the contract which was to glorify Melleno among the fifty-three generations of Mellenos.

Tanuojin’s contract was much easier. Yekka was the newest city in Uranus and the biggest bubble in Styth. Only a hundred thousand people lived there, mostly small farmers. Although Tanuojin had been married to Melleno’s daughter, he himself had no family at all. Paula worked with his pitman and the man left behind in Yekka to rule in Tanuojin’s absence and they wrote a contract in plain language and straight terms.

The politics of the rAkellaron were actually simple: they bullied the weaker and obeyed the stronger; but they went about it with the formality of an Akopra. At first she thought that, if she could only find the right key, she could talk directly to the sense; but there was no key. The Styths responded only to the forms. She had to learn their diplomatic language phrase by phrase.

Slowly she grew confident in it. Matuko no longer seemed such a strange place. She walked in the city, she talked to Boltiko and Illy and slept with Illy, and she and Pedasen took care of David. The child was her clock in the timeless city. He walked, he ran, his babbling began to sound like words. She took him around the city with her, but once three or four slaves in the market threw street shales at her and chased her halfway home, and after that she left him in the compound.

“What did you bring for Paula?” Boltiko asked.

Paula looked up; Illy stopped pulling on her new gloves. The three women faced him across the little round glass table of Illy’s sitting room. He fussed with his mustaches. “I forgot.”

“Oh, Saba.”

“I’ll get her something in the White Market.”