Nobody spoke. She was holding her breath. Her temples throbbed.
“Now! Throw it on!”
Bakan shouted, “They’ve got the new seal.”
The crew thundered up a cheer. Tanuojin shouted, “Clear the bridge. Marus, put all the spare energy in the ship into the seal. Junna, take Paula to red-three.”
Junna flung his arms around Paula. “I knew he would do it.” He followed her toward the hatch. “I knew it all the time.” His voice was fresh with relief. She went back to her cabin and shut herself into the wetroom.
THE EARTH
November 1862—March 1865
“Hot Jesus Christ,” Leno said. He was leaning across the seat in front of her, his cheek flattened against the window. Paula moved into the corner of the seat. If the air bus bounced, he would land in her lap. The other Styths were plastered to the windows on either side of the bus. She stretched her neck to look down the aisle. Saba was in the cockpit, talking to the pilot. She could not see Tanuojin.
She folded one leg up before her. Out the window, thick smoke shrouded the wing of the bus. The sky split. Miles beneath them, red and ocher in the sun, gouged with canyons, the mountains spread across their path. A brown river looped through the humps of the ridges.
“What are they made of? Are they solid?”
“Rock,” she said. “Like moons.” On the far side of the mountains, the funnel-chimneys of smelters sent up plumes of red smoke. The dense air closed around them again. The bus bucked up and down. Beside her head Leno’s claws sank into the foam cushion.
Kasuk dropped into the seat next to hers, on the aisle. “This place is mad. Everything curves the wrong way.”
The bus danced through a crosswind. Paula ducked under Leno’s arm, bending closer to the window. The clouds thinned. Now they were swept away again. The bus soared over the whitened crest of a mountain. A banner of snow blew off the peak.
All around her, the Styths yelled, delighted. Kasuk said, “Does anything live here?”
Paula said, “Insects. Lichens. A few birds.” She put her hand on the window sill. She had forgotten how bright the Earth was.
“What’s that white stuff?” Leno pointed.
“Snow.” She used the word from the Common Speech. “Frozen water.”
He frowned at her. “Frozen water is ice.”
“Snow is water that freezes into crystals and falls from the—” She stared at him, startled. There was no Styth word for sky. “From the upper air,” she said, lamely.
Kasuk said, “All this is natural? No one made it?”
“The Sun made it,” Leno said. “Everything comes from the Sun.”
They were flying toward the Western Sea, red with pollution. The shore was encrusted with robot factories. Feathers of thick smoke streamed past the window. Kasuk leaned over her shoulder.
“Can you imagine flying here? This layer is so thin, and I’ll bet you couldn’t even get a ship into that layer down there.” He pointed to the ground.
Behind Leno, Tanuojin said, “Saba has flown over twenty hours in this Planet.”
Paula looked up past the Merkhiz Akellar’s thick shoulder. “Not in a Styth ship.”
“No. Your friend Jefferson is meeting us in New York. We’re staying in that same place we stayed before. That square house with the short beds.”
New Haven House was the only place where the Committee could put up eighteen people. She turned to look out the window.
Kasuk said, “Paula. Does anything live here?”
They were flying over the brown scummy water of the sea. Patches of oil-eating weeds made islands below them. She said, “That’s alive. There are sharks. Fish, gulls. Snakes.” She turned to look between the seats for Tanuojin. Junna had hauled him to a window at the back of the bus. He stood with one hand on his younger son’s shoulder, holding him away. She put her nose against the window again, looking for something else to explain to them.
Sybil Jefferson met them at the entry port. When the Styths walked out onto the broad ramp down to the ground, a swarm of people with cameras and recorders rushed to surround them. The three rAkellaron withdrew into the shell of their men. The cameras whirred. Jefferson hurried around threatening and cajoling. Paula went to the rail. No one paid any attention to her. She looked out over the city. The autumn air was bright and crisp, the grass champagne-colored, the wood toward the south sorrel and yellow and earth-brown. She put her hands on the rail. She had forgotten or never realized how life teemed here. Everything below her was moving, every leaf, every stem of grass, the birds and all the people stirring. A woman in a white coat was walking away from the building, off across the grass. Paula straightened. The woman turned a corner and disappeared.
“Mendoza,” Jefferson called. “Are you coming?”
Sybil had shooed off the picture men and voice men from the hourlies. With the Styths she was going down the ramp. Paula followed them.
Jefferson pattered along beside Saba. “You see, Akellar, you’re celebrated men.”
Paula went to the rail, searching the ground below them for the woman she had just seen. Tanuojin walked beside her, Sybil Jefferson just beyond. Paula reached across him to pluck at Jefferson’s sleeve.
“Jefferson, I saw Cam Savenia just now. What’s going on?”
“Savenia.” Saba stopped where he was. Leno was going on several feet ahead of them, gawking at the city, and did not seem to be listening. Jefferson kept on walking.
“Was it Cam?” Paula said.
“Possibly,” the old woman said. “The Council wanted to send her as an observer, but we talked them out of it.”
Tanuojin walked in between her and Paula, and his hand dropped onto Paula’s shoulder. “Who did they send?” he asked. Paula pulled his hand away.
“Caleb Fisher,” Jefferson said.
They were coming to the foot of the ramp. Saba walked on Jefferson’s far side. Tanuojin grasped Paula’s wrist, his touch cold as metal. She knew who Caleb Fisher was: a Council member for Mars, once a minister, she thought a defense minister. She said, “Is he a member of the Sunlight League?”
“Ask him.” Jefferson’s lips curled into a stiff smile, but her blue eyes looked angry. “Since you’re so full of snappy questions.”
They went into the parking lot. Tanuojin and Saba circled off into the dark behind a row of cars and stood talking. Jefferson sorted out the rest of the Styths among three Committee buses. Paula leaned against the door of a yellow three-seater car with the Committee emblem on the roof. Kasuk came over to her.
“Is this where you lived before?”
“Yes.” She watched Leno’s men line up at the steps to the biggest bus.
“It’s beautiful.”
“So is Styth,” she said.
“But in another way.”
Jefferson came around the rear end of the three-seater. “Mendoza, we were trying to ease them gently into the notion of the observer.”
“You could have warned me,” Paula said. ’I’d have known how to act.” She touched the arm of the young man beside her. “Jefferson, this is Yekka’s prima son, Kasuk.”
“Hello,” he said. He put his hand out to Jefferson, changed his mind, and drew it back. Jefferson had already reached to shake it. She lowered her hand, but Kasuk, with a Styth’s sense of protocol, stuck his out to her again. Finally they connected, Jefferson looking much amused. Kasuk stood head and shoulders over her. He said, in a
