“Aren’t you going to take that?” he said.
“It’s just my boss.”
“What would he do if he knew we were here like this?” His hand slipped over her thigh.
“Not he, she. Sybil Jefferson.”
“How many men have you had?”
“You aren’t a personal friend.”
His fingers pressed and stroked over the inside of her thigh. His claws grazed her. “Which means what?”
“That I won’t answer a personal question.”
“A lot.” Patterns of light from the aquarium lay across his face like a mask. “How did I do?”
“You didn’t talk,” she said, “which I liked.”
He turned his face toward the aquarium. He was cooling off, and she swung her legs across his body and sat beside him. His cock had drawn back inside the sheath of his foreskin. With her fingers she traced the heavy muscles of his chest. He had no hair on his chest. He wasn’t perfect after all. He put his hand on her hand and pressed her palm against him.
“So it’s not personal, this—” He caressed himself with her hand. “Then it’s business? Are you trying to sell me something?”
“Sell you something?”
“I’ve heard an anarchist can sell anything to anybody.”
“What do you want?”
“The only thing you have that interests me is that whiskey.” He folded his arms behind his head. His scent had disappeared.
“Good,” she said. “I’ll send you a case every aphelion for the rest of your life. Courtesy of the Committee.”
His teeth flashed in a white smile. “Are you serious?”
“I’ll make it two cases.”
“Do it.”
She touched his stomach. His skin was velvet black. “Do you believe in god?”
“I believe in Planck’s Constant and the speed of light. Truth at 186,000 miles per second. What else are you going to sell me? A little philosophy?”
“The Council wants to establish permanent embassies with the Empire.”
“We don’t treat with other governments. The only law in the system is Styth, the rest of you are all outlaws. There’s nothing you can offer us except to submit to us.”
“You didn’t listen to me.”
He pushed her hand away from him. “I don’t have to listen to you—you listen to me.”
“I said that was what the Council wants, not what I want.”
Between his round black eyes two short vertical lines appeared. He rolled smoothly onto his feet. “You think you can talk around me.” His clothes were scattered about the room, and he collected them. Paula sat watching the fish. He sat on the couch and pulled his leggings on. Instead of underwear he wore a kind of cup to protect his organs. He hung a medal on a chain around his neck. The marking in the heavy disk was the sign of the fish.
She said, “Actually, what I want is to make you rich.”
He was putting his shirt on. His head emerged through the neck, and he stood up and tugged the shirt down over his body. He sat back down on the couch. She turned her gaze away from him, back to the red stream of fish in the wall.
“How are you going to do that?” he said.
“There’s no trade now between the Middle Planets and your city, is there?”
“No. You have nothing I want.”
“But there is a lot of smuggling.”
“Not much.”
“Whatever you say.” She watched the fish reverse direction, perfectly aligned. “I could get you a report on it. We estimate about forty to fifty thousand dollars’ worth of goods come and go between Matuko and the Earth every Earthish month.”
“That’s exaggerated.”
“Suppose you brought the smuggling inside the law and controlled it yourself, you’d make that money, instead of the smugglers getting it all.”
He said nothing. She turned around to face him. He had his belt in his hands; after a moment he seemed to remember it was there and rose and slung it around his waist.
“You’re brave,” he said, “offering me a bribe.”
“That’s your word.”
“Why would I sell my people for a couple of thousand nigger dollars?”
She leaned on the couch. “We can negotiate you a contract that would guarantee you one million dollars the first year, a caesium year, climbing to ten million a year by the fifth year.”
There was a long silence. She drew with her fingernail in the yellow plush of the couch. He sat down again to put on his boots.
“It’s still a bribe.”
“Whatever you want to call it. Why don’t you go think about it?”
“I don’t have to think about it,” he said, and walked out. In his wake the door slammed shut, rebounded, and bounced off its track. She tried to shut it but it was stuck halfway open. She took a shower, wrapped herself up in her robe, and went out to the front room again. Jefferson had worked him out, sight unseen: his key was money. She turned out the lights, barricaded the bedroom door with chairs, and went to sleep.
Tanuojin’s bassoon voice said, “You mean she seduced you?”
“I wouldn’t have thought of it myself, looking at her—she’s nothing to look at, is she? What do you think they’re trying to do?”
“They’re trying to buy you.”
Paula was washing her hair in the bathroom sink. The soap smelled of egg. The Akellar’s voice came up from the recorder on the floor by her feet. “How long is a caesium year?”
“It’s a lie. She’s lying. Why do you go soft-headed over any woman who sleeps with you?”
“Ah, shut up.”
“Can you keep her out of her room long enough for me to search it?”
Paula rinsed her hair and turned on the dryer in the ceiling. The Akellar said, “I can think of something to do with her. And she doesn’t cost me fifty dollars an hour, either.”
A strange voice said, “Jesus, it’s hot.” “Jesus” was their favorite expletive. They pronounced the J like a hard g.
“You think it’s hot in here, stud, stand out there in the radiation.” That was Sril, the small one with the wire in his nose. His voice grew louder. “Akellar, I see you get along better with that Earthish woman now.” Several men laughed.
“No,” the Akellar said. “She gets along better with me.”
She took the recorder into the sitting room and listened to it while she collected everything she did not want Tanuojin to find: the wires from the recorder, the devices Savenia had left. The men talked about their ship and the Martian food, which they loved.
“How long is a caesium year?”
“Saba, don’t listen to her!”
“I asked you a question.”
Sulky: “Around twelve hundred watches.”
The Akellar and Tanuojin puzzled her. They talked like equals, intimately, not the way the Akellar talked to the other men, but now and then he leaned over Tanuojin, and Tanuojin always yielded. Now the deep, surging voice said, “I called the ship, while you were down there letting that woman make use of you.”
“Ah?”
“Kobboz says they—”
The wire ran out. She loaded the recorder again, packed everything she was removing from the suite into her satchel, and took it down to the lobby.
“My door is broken,” she said to the clerk.
He was bent over the desk doing the anagram in the ten o’clock hourly. He did not look up. “Did it involve a Styth?”
“Unh—”
“We’ll have to move you to another room.” He circled an answer in red ink. “We’re leaving all that damage for the underwriters’ inspector.”
“Never mind.” She put the satchel on the desk. “I want this kept in the vault.”