want some arrangements with me, talk to her.”
The Martian stood up straight off his chair. “You insufferable, arrogant barbarian.” His aides ranked themselves behind him. “I demand an apology.”
“I don’t apologize to niggers,” Saba said, and Fisher started for the door.
“Wait.” Tanuojin caught his arm. Fisher’s eyes glittered. In a sweeping gesture he threw off Tanuojin’s hand and rushed out the door. His aides followed him.
Leno grunted. “I don’t understand any of this.”
Paula dropped the toothpick on the scarred top of the table. She looked behind her at the closet. Jefferson took out her false eye and wiped it on a cloth.
“Officially, we are supposed to be negotiating for the Council.”
Saba put his hands behind his head. “I can’t see why we should maintain your fictions.” Tanuojin sauntered around the edge of the room. Leno had started up, thinking the meeting was over, but now he settled down again.
“I can see how you would consider it a fiction,” Jefferson said. The eyelid fluttered over her empty socket. Tanuojin had wandered around behind her. “We need some organization, and at present the Council serves. Don’t touch me, Yekka.”
Tanuojin’s long face narrowed. He came slowly past her toward Paula. Saba said, “You can’t be our friend and the Martians’.”
“I am nobody’s
Paula planted her elbows on the arms of her chair. “He means ally. Don’t get caught on semantics.”
“I’ll avoid it. You may lord it over Fisher, Akellar, but you still are only representative of part of the Empire— one small part.”
“The rest of them will follow me. Most of them. Just as they did with the crystal trade.”
Tanuojin stood behind Paula’s chair. His cold fingers moved down her cheek to her throat. The touch of his claws sent a shudder through her. Saba and Jefferson discussed his influence in the Empire. The old woman was well informed, and a master of such talk: she had him on the defensive within moments. Paula leaned forward, away from Tanuojin’s hand.
“Jefferson, stay on the line, will you? It’s to your advantage to make him look like the Emperor.”
“To maintain your fictions?”
“Life follows art.”
Jefferson laughed. Leno was staring at the wall, his face slack with boredom. Saba said, “You have Fisher in your sleeve. You can control what the Council hears about this.” He gave Leno an oblique look. “We’ll keep up your face in front of Fisher and talk behind him.” He pushed his chair back. Leno jumped out of a doze. “Tomorrow.”
Jefferson said, “As you wish, Akellar.” Her voice was velvet. Everybody stood.
Paula went out to the hall, and Tanuojin came after her. “What did you tell her about me?” He smacked her between the shoulder blades.
“Nothing. She guessed from the way you’ve been pawing Fisher. What’s going on?”
“You really think you can play her against us?”
She looked behind them. Saba was coming after them down the hall, giving Leno an edited version of the talk with Jefferson. Tanuojin went ahead of her out the door. She put her jacket on.
“They are my children,” Tanuojin said. “I’m sick of the way you meddle with my children.”
“Tut tut tut,” Saba said.
“Junna is still a little boy! The next he’ll be taking morphion—” His voice rose, and Paula took the tape plug out of her ear and turned the volume down. She put her feet up on the frayed arm of the couch. None of the Styths was awake yet. A flat blade of sunlight pierced the curtained window opposite her, yellow with dust motes. In her ear Tanuojin and Saba differed sharply about Junna. She picked at the threads on the worn couch cover.
“You and Paula, you both take your crumbs so seriously.”
“You’re such a hypocrite.”
She heard her conversation with them in the car going down to New York, and the meeting with Jefferson and Fisher. Something was missing. She had expected to hear something between them that would tell her where Tanuojin had gone. Glumly she realized they had talked about that before Saba put his clothes on.
“We’re just trying to get rid of the pinch-faced Martian,” Saba told Leno.
The time meter on the wall read ten minutes to noon. At four they were due in New York again. Stacks of bound hourlies cluttered the floor. She sat up and rested her feet on a bundle. In her ear the plug played back the maddening small talk of the trip from New York to New Haven. Maybe she should wire Tanuojin. Plant a homing device on him in case he went somewhere else. That was desperate. She wondered what they would do when they found out she was spying on them.
“What about Fisher?” Saba said. “Did you reach him?”
“When he’s angry he’s clear as water. He saw Savenia over the rest-days, it’s all set up. I’d love to know how much the old woman knows.”
“Paula must have told her not to let you touch her.”
“No. She figured that out for herself. Or Bunker told her.”
“Does Paula know? About the coup.”
She went taut as a wire. Tanuojin said, “No. Not yet.”
“I don’t like treating her as an enemy.”
“Part of her is everybody’s enemy. You heard her tell Jefferson that she’s only interested in what she can get for herself. The bitch. After all we’ve done for her.”
“I also heard her call me the Emperor.”
“That’s how she sells it to you. It sounds a little different when she’s talking to Jefferson.”
“Naturally. Did you check on Ybicsa?”
“Saba, we can’t go back and forth every watch between here and the ship. I hid her in a ditch. Nobody will find her. The League is planning to spring the coup the day we leave. They’ll arrest the Committee first, and then they’ll take us. All we have to do is let them destroy the Committee, and then we step in and save the Earth from the Martians. What could be simpler?”
She yanked the plug out of her ear. Everything fitted. She should have made sense of it before, when Saba was telling her she had to choose.
She sat down on the couch and made herself think about what she would do. There seemed very little choice. The League probably thought they could pull off their plot without enlarging it into a war, and Tanuojin thought he could contain everything in a counterplot. There was too much involved, too many rearrangements, too many people. The coup would spread like bursting atoms. It would stop only when it had brought everything else in the system into a balance with itself. She went down the hall to the library, where the videone was, and called the Committee office in New York.
Jefferson took a long time to answer; or Paula imagined that she did. Paula stood over the cabinet banging her fingers on the screen. The red and white holding pattern on the videone screen split apart to show her Jefferson’s face, tinged green.
“Yes, Mendoza. I—”
“I can’t chat,” Paula said. “The Sunlight League is mounting a coup against the Committee and the Styths. Saba and Tanuojin know about it and intend to use it to wipe you out and grab the Earth.”
Jefferson’s eyes popped round as a Styth’s. “The League. Who?” She leaned forward into the screen, and the green color increased in her cheeks: she looked dead. “Fisher and Savenia?”
“I don’t know anything more,” Paula said. “I’m going up to talk to them—they can help you if they want to.”
“Mendoza, wait.”
She went out to the hall and up the stairs. The house was quiet enough that she could hear the whisper of the upstairs hall curtains billowing over the open windows. The bed in her room was empty. She went back around the corner to Tanuojin’s room.
They were both there, Tanuojin before the closet putting his shirt on, and Saba lying on his back across the
