Pleasure twitched at the corners of her mouth. “Our child.”
He felt a shimmering warmth in his blood. He crossed the space between them in a few steps, sat on the mattress, and touched her arm. “You can’t know you’re pregnant already, can you?”
“No. In fact I’m reasonably certain I’m not.” Terza looked up at him, and shifted to place her head in his lap. “But I think I will be before you leave. I have a…sense of impending fertility.”
Martinez stroked the fragrant mass of her hair. Her cheek was warm against his hand.
“Four days,” he said.
She sighed. Her dark eyes sought his. “Thank you,” she said. “You’ve been very good to me.”
He was puzzled. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“The marriage wasn’t your idea. You could have taken any resentment out on me—I was the one available, after all.” She took his hand and kissed it. “But you’ve tried to make me happy. I appreciate that.”
Andareyou happy? That was the next question, but Martinez hesitated to ask it. There was an air of truth that hung in the room at the moment, and he didn’t want to tempt fate.
“I can’t imagine wanting to hurt you,” he said.
She kissed his hand again. “Four days,” she said, and smiled up at him. “We’re lucky to have so many.”
“We are.” He stroked her cheek as a warm tenderness rose in his blood. “I’m a lucky man.”
The luckiest man in the universe,he thought, remembering Sula’s words.
He wondered if Sula would say the same now.
The day after the Convocation left Zanshaa, the new Military Governor, Fleet Commander Pahn-ko, announced that, as a safety measure, martial law was to be imposed on all of Zanshaa and that the accelerator ring was to be completely evacuated within the next twenty-nine days. As the ring that circled the entire planet possessed an enormous internal volume that housed nearly eighty million citizens, this announcement created something of a logistical challenge.
It could have been worse, Sula thought. The interior spaces of the ring, enormous but lacking in charm, were the natural habitat of the poor. Yet the authorities hadn’t wanted a critical installation like the Zanshaa ring, with its port and military facilities, its administrative centers and its quantities of dangerous antimatter, to house unstable social elements, and these elements tended to lurk among the lowly. Rents had been artificially kept high and the inhabitants relentlessly middle-class, drawn to the ring by certain privileges, such as excellent educational facilities for their children and the chance to profit as middlemen on interstellar trade, or as contractors for military or civilian transport. Most of the ring was in fact empty, with no water, power, or heat available for anyone trying to live on the cheap in the uninhabited space.
Now the solid citizens of the ring were going to come down the skyhooks to the surface of Zanshaa, millions every day, each with a bag of possessions and a built-in requirement for food and shelter. If they weren’t poor and needy now, they would be soon.
The brilliant minds of the Logistics Consolidation Executive were put to work on the problem. “Nearly three million every day for a month!” cried Sula’s Lai-own boss. “Impossible!”
“Perhaps we could just chuck them off the ring and let them get down on their own,” Sula suggested.
The Lai-own glared. “I would preferuseful suggestions, if you please,” he chided.
Sula shrugged. She had found that when she began work on the problem that the evacuation actually made things simpler. The only things going up to the ring were critical personnel leaving Zanshaa, these and engineers getting ready to blow the ring apart. Once the ring was stripped of all the useful cargo and supplies, the giant cars that normally contained cargo could be converted to carry personnel. If enough acceleration couches couldn’t be manufactured in time—and it looked as if they couldn’t—the passengers could be sandwiched between narrow, heavily padded partitions.
It wouldn’t be pleasant, and they’d bounce around a bit, but it could be done.
“How are we going to find places for them once they’re here?” the Lai-own cried.
“We’ve got three billion people on the planet as it is,” Sula said. “Eighty million more is just a drop in the bucket.”
She began to work on the problem, buoyed somewhat by this evidence that the administration had adopted her plan for evacuating the government and the Fleet and then blowing the ring to bits. It would have been nice, she thought, if someone in authority had acknowledged her contribution. Another medal would have been welcome. Even “thank you” would have been nice.
No thank-you came. She wondered if Martinez, that bastard, had pinched her share of the credit.
Her self-destructive impulses had not survived the night she’d heard the derivoo. Homicidal impulses were entertained briefly, then dismissed as unworthy.
Nothing important, after all, had changed. A man Sula hated had married a woman she barely knew—and why should that matter to her? Her own position was barely altered: she had the same rank, the same distinctions, and lived with the same knowledge of her own danger as she had a month ago. Nothing fundamental had altered.
All this she argued to herself successfully, and only doubted these truths at night, alone in the giant Sevigny bed, when rage and loneliness and her own desperation stormed through her.
She was thankful for work, and delighted her chief by the long-burning hours she worked on the evacuation. She was even more thankful when a call for volunteers was broadcast through the Fleet. Hazardous duty, the announcement said, and a chance for glory and promotion while upholding the Praxis.
Sula reckoned she knew what the call was for. The plan that Martinez submitted to the Control Board called for an army to hold Zanshaa City against the Naxids. It was getting a little late to raise an army, but she supposed late was better than never.
She considered her situation—she knew that the entire Logistics Consolidation Executive was scheduled for evacuation in ten days. She could spend the rest of the war in her niche, shuttling supplies around, and let others concern themselves with victory.
That would not give Sula patronage, of course—she’d lost that chance with Martinez. She had her medals and her lieutenancy and a degree of celebrity, but that wouldn’t guarantee further promotion.
The best chance of earning her next step would be to hazard her life against the Naxids. It made sense to claw out of the war as many chances for advancement as she could.
The possibility of death was not a significant consideration. She was good at argument, but hadn’t yet managed to construct for herself a convincing reason why her own life was worth preserving.
Or anyone else’s, for that matter.
Besides, ever since she’d heard the news of Martinez’s engagement she’d felt like killing something.
Sula submitted an application, then was called for an interview before a Daimong elcap. Since some of the questions had to do with her experience with firearms and explosives, she decided that her guess as to the nature of the duty was correct. But since her answers to those questions were “basic proficiency” and “none at all,” it wasn’t clear whether she’d be suitable for the duty or not, and she returned to the Logistics Executive, where she was assigned to the problem of feeding and clothing the eighty million refugees from the ring.
It took only a brief glance at the data to assure her that feeding the strays wasn’t going to be a problem. The planet of Zanshaa, in accordance with the dictates of the Praxis, was self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs.
But it wasn’t self-sufficient inall foodstuffs. There were climactic and soil conditions, as well as economies of scale, that made Zanshaa less efficient at producing certain crops, and turned it into an importer of some and an exporter of others. Zanshaa’s old, stable, relatively flat continents produced ideal grazing for herd animals, and Zanshaa exported beef, portschen, fristigo, lamb, and dairy products. But its tropical areas lacked certain nutrients in the soil, and this made it a net importer of other foodstuffs.
High-quality cocoa came only from off-planet. So did coffee.
So did tobacco.
Shit in a bucket, Sula thought.Tobacco.
Sula loathed tobacco, but a determined minority of the human race and even some Torminel and Daimong were devoted to it. Sula remembered from school that there had once been health problems associated with the weed, but medicine had solved those, and now tobacco was merely another minor air pollutant. The Shaa had disapproved of tobacco, just as they’d disapproved of alcohol or betel nut or hashish, but they’d never actually banned any of these substances, just made certain that the products were regulated and taxed and turned to the
