The car settled to a stop, and the doors began to slide apart into the walls. He glanced at them and they shut again.
“Oh,” she said, “that must be useful.”
“Are you going to cooperate with me?”
She hunched up her shoulders. “I said I would.” She refused to look at him.
He opened the doors with another look and they went into a narrow gray corridor. The concrete floor was icy to her feet. A guard let them in a metal door to a wide room. The only lights were on an I-beam suspended from the center of the ceiling. The floor under her feet shone with wax. It was painted with red circles and alleys: a games floor, a gymnasium. The walls were lined with Martians. Tanuojin’s fingers closed on her wrist.
“Bring a light,” he said to the guard. He held her arm doubled in his grip. Against her will she felt the cool pleasure of his touch. With the guard carrying a light before them, Tanuojin led her along the rank of Martian prisoners against the wall.
“Who do you want?” she said to Tanuojin.
“Just look at them and let me do the thinking.”
She went on along the row of prisoners, staring into their faces. Some of them she had seen before, at Cam’s and Hanse’s meetings. At the end of the first row was Captain Rodgers, his uniform crisp, his buttons shined, his feet exactly eighteen inches apart.
Their eyes met; she remembered the things he had done to her and her cheeks went hot. His wet lips parted. Before he could speak Tanuojin let go of her and grabbed the Martian by the front of his uniform. Rodgers squealed. Tanuojin threw him flat back against the wall and his head hit the concrete with a thud. He sank down, limp, against the base of the wall. Paula went away across the gymnasium.
Tanuojin came after her. His hand gripped her again. She said, “You’re no different than he is.”
“You made me do that.” He stooped to talk into her ear. “You did that.”
“You have an excuse for everything, don’t you? Don’t talk to me. It makes me sick to talk to you.”
“Saba’s right. You’re hysterical.” He pushed her toward the next row of prisoners. “Who is that?”
Against the wall stood a line of women, medics, in white uniforms. Paula scanned their faces. The third from the end was Cam Savenia.
Tanuojin said, under his breath, “I thought so.” He nodded to the guard. “That one. There’s a room up on the sixth floor all ready for her.” He let go of Paula.
The guard took hold of Cam’s arm. Her face went dark with rage. “You swine.” She shouted at Tanuojin, her eyes flashing. “You dirty black dog. You can do what you want, but you can’t break me. You can’t break me!” The guard hauled her away bodily. Tanuojin laughed, his hands on his belt. He kicked the heel of his boot against the floor.
“It’s the same room they kept you in,” he said. Paula left.
The prisoners were gone. The barren hillside stretched down toward the lake. A haze of dust stood in the air. Three or four buildings, ruins, rose among the forest of tree stumps. The dead pan of the lake was cracked and dry as the surface of a moon. She stood there trying to remember what it had been like before the war, green and alive, a free world.
The Styths were still claiming that they fought to save the Earth from the Sunlight League, but the last anarchists were mixed in with the Martians in the slavepens, and the Earth was wasted, and the war was not over. Hanse had escaped with most of the Martian Army. Saba was in a hurry to take his base of operations to Luna, which he could defend. Paula was going with them. She could stay here. She could die with planet. She wanted to go with them; she had some vague tangled thought that she could make them feel her rage. And she was afraid to die. Bunker was somewhere in the ruined dome, maybe dead already. Unwitnessed. Her son was calling her. She went back up the barren slope toward the government building.
LUNA
Martius–Averellus 1865
“I don’t understand,” David said. “Why aren’t you living with me and Papa?”
Paula opened the rattan cabinet on the wall. Inside were two shelves of bottles. “What does Saba say?”
“He says you’re crazy.”
“I’m crazy.”
She took out a bottle of gin. Behind her, two men brought more furniture into the room. She had the whole suite to herself, three rooms, pretty as a hotel. Ketac came in, directing the workmen around. She poured gin into her glass and filled it up with limon-woda. Luna was stocked with the spoils of the Earth. It was like being in jail again.
“Paula,” Ketac called. “Come see what I found you.”
She went down the long room toward him. His attentions made her suspicious. He had spent the morning putting carpet down and now he was unpacking a large box. He set a big yellow ball on the table and held it with one hand to keep it from rolling while he fished in the carton.
“See if you can find the base.”
David had followed her. He stood with his hands behind him, his forehead grooved. Paula took a plastic foot out of the box and Ketac put the yellow ball on it.
“It’s not to scale,” he said. He took a handful of smaller balls out of the box and tossed them up into the air. They flew toward the yellow ball and swung into orbit around it. Paula murmured. It was a magnet-driven model of the Middle Planets. The Earth and Luna passed her, turning around and around each other, painted with their surface features.
Ketac said, “There’s been some kind of change in the Council. Not by force.”
“An election.”
“Whatever. Now they’re asking us for peace terms.”
Paula said, “Those bastards,” under her breath.
“The Prima will need your advice.”
She gave him a sharp glance. Then that was why he was here. His long ugly face was aimed at the model. She reached for her glass on the sideboard along the wall. “All right. Tell him I will.”
His head nodded. The men were bringing a big backless couch in the door, and he went to tell them where to put it. David came up beside her.
“I don’t understand,” he said stubbornly.
“Don’t act like a baby.”
“Don’t you love us any more?”
“David, I’m not playing this little heartbreaker game with you. If Saba is putting you to it, you’re a fool, and if not, you’re a sadist.”
His face stiffened. When he was angry he looked younger, a little boy again. “I hate you,” he said.
“At least that’s honest.”
He ran out of the room. The wrong man’s son. She looked down at the model, Mars was spinning toward her, busy in its coils of moons. She batted it across the room. Unharmed, it flew back to its orbit around the yellow Sun. Ketac had gone. The workmen banged chairs into each other. Deep in her thoughts, she watched the model turning. Suddenly she knew someone was staring at her, and raising her head she saw Tanuojin behind her.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “I thought you were planning an elegant suttee in memory of your lover.”
She turned back to the model. “Impractical.”
“Maybe you just have a short memory.”
“Oh, no, my dear. I remember everything.”
The workmen sprang to attention. Saba was coming in, trailed by a procession of men, Leno and Ymma, their aides, David, Junna, and half a dozen others. Paula moved away from Tanuojin, up to the middle of the room, where she could see them all. Leno stood before the big chair on her left, waiting for Saba to sit down. Paula leaned against the waist-high bookcase that ran the length of the wall.
“Who is Alvers Newrose?” Saba said. He sat down on the backless yellow couch, and the other men lowered themselves into their chairs.
“He’s a Martian politician,” Paula said. “He was Council First Secretary before Cam Savenia, I don’t know what he is now.”