Jefferson chortled. Her face was papery white and looked soft, like dough. “Were you good? And here comes Richard.”
A flat papercase under one arm, Richard Bunker walked in the open door and shut it behind him. He put the case on the table. “Hello, Mendoza. Sybil.” He had a windbreaker over his shoulder and he hung it on the back of the chair beside Paula. He clicked up the lid of the papercase.
“Where have you been?” Jefferson said. “You know, I do have other things to do now and then besides wait for you.”
“I’ve been in the copying room trying to get the film transcriber to work.” He dropped a thick file onto the table in front of Paula. It was more than an inch thick, held together with plastic clips. She picked it up while Bunker and Jefferson traded jibes on the state of the machines and people of the Committee.
“You can read that later,” Jefferson said to her. “Dick, give her a brief, so we can get on with it.”
He sat down in the chair beside Paula’s, and she shut the file. Bunker said, “In the past thirty-six months there have been twenty-one reported shooting incidents between ships of the Styth Empire and ships from either the Council Fleet or the Martian Army. All these shootings have been below the asteroid Vesta. Eight have been below Mars. The Council wants us—” his voice rose to a singsong, “to negotiate a truce and any other permanent or semi-permanent arrangements necessary to maintain the peace.” He was slumped down in the chair, his head against the back. “The Council never asks us to do anything possible.”
“Shooting incidents,” Paula said. She had heard nothing about any shootings. “Is it serious?”
They both laughed, humorless, and she heard how stupid she had sounded. Jefferson put a candy into her mouth. “More serious is that we can’t seem to reach the Styths.”
“They keep to themselves,” Paula said. Most of the mutant race lived in Uranus, billions of miles away.
“Not any more,” Bunker said. “Do you have any idea why they might be coming here now?”
She shook her head. The Styths had always seemed in a different Universe from the Middle Planets, living in their floating cities far from the Sun. Bunker said, “Do you know what an Akellar is?”
“The chief officer of a Styth city. They have a central council called the rAkellaron. That’s just the plural of Akellar.”
“Yes. We’ve been trying to make contact with the Prima Akellar, a man named Machou.”
“Machou,” she said. “The Vribulo Akellar.”
“You’ve heard of him.”
“One of my teachers was from Vribulo. Machou’s city. If it’s the same Machou.” She frowned, trying to remember everything the three Styth prisoners had said. “Has anybody been killed?”
Jefferson fingered the roll of candy. “Yes, about twenty Martians that they’re admitting. We don’t know about Styths. We don’t even know if all this action constitutes a systematic policy by the Styths or just random piracy. You said one of your Styths was from Vribulo. What about the others?”
“They were both from Saturn-Keda. The chief city of Saturn.” Saturn-Keda was usually the closest Styth city to the Middle Planets. She reached for the thick file and thumbed down the pages. “What’s in this? What do you know about them?”
“Nothing immediately useful,” Bunker said. “Nothing at all.”
“The Saturn Akellar was the Prima Akellar before Machou,” Paula said. “Apparently a very…a great man. He built six or seven new cities and reformed the fleet. Cleaned up the laws. Outlawed infant marriage, that kind of thing. Kind of a liberal. For a Styth.”
“Infant marriage,” Bunker said, in a titillated voice.
“Don’t you know who the rAkellaron are?”
Jefferson shrugged. “A few names. Did you keep notes from your prison meetings?”
“The warden took all my notebooks. Maybe there are some Styths still in the joint.”
Jefferson fed herself another candy. Her cheeks sucked in around it. “I checked when we found out about your episode. The Martians very efficiently executed them all. What was the name of this paragon?”
“The Saturn Akellar? Melleno. I don’t know if he’s still in the rAkellaron.”
“Can we reach him?” Bunker said.
“I’ll try,” Paula said.
Her new office was a bare white box with a desk and chair, another chair, and a file. The window let in no direct sunlight because of the high wall of the gulch just outside. She had already decided not to put anything on the walls since she was keeping this job only until she found other work. She sat down beside the desk and opened the file on the Styths, but before she had read more than a paragraph, two men came into the office.
“We have a case for you,” the shorter of the two said.
Paula shut the file. She looked from one man to the other. “Yes, what?” Immediately she disliked them: they were smiling. She opened the deep drawer in her desk and stuffed the file in on top of a pile of multicolored forms.
The shorter man sat down. He wore a brown sweater with the initial R in red on the right breast. “We live in a building in the south dome that’s owned by a Mister Roches, and we want something done about it.”
“We’ve been writing him letters of complaint for a year,” the other man said. “Without even the grace of a reply.”
The man in the chair crossed one leg over the other. Carefully he straightened his trousers. “We aren’t the only ones who are complaining. The place is infested with mice, it smells of mildew, the verticals are usually broken, none of our flats has been painted or refloored in more than two years, and the old fellow is a dreadful gossip. The piping is absolutely antique, you can’t get an air filter installed—”
She put her elbows on the desk. “What do you want me to do?”
Their faces slid down out of their smiles. Intense, she leaned forward, looking from one to the other. “Why the hell do you come in here with something like this? You’re supposed to be anarchists. You’re supposed to take care of yourselves. If you don’t like it, move. If nobody likes it, get everybody to move, open the gas cocks and throw in a match. Get away from me.”
The shorter man popped up out of his chair. “You’re supposed to be here to help people.”
“If you need help for something like that, go someplace where there’s a government. Like Mars.” She yanked the drawer open and put the Styth file on the desk in front of her.
“No wonder everybody hates the Committee.” The taller man rushed to the desk. She ignored him, pretending to read. He and his friend strode out of the office.
She leaned back in her chair, pleased. Outside the window the sunlight was at last reaching the ground, where a green sprinkling of grass grew near the tree. In places the claybank was yellow as lemons, in places orange. She sat thinking of the Styths in the Martian prison. The man from Vribulo had been waiting to be gassed for murder. Lonely and angry and homesick and frightened, he had shouted at her and tried to attack her and talked, when she had finally begun to understand him, talked in a desperate flood. That had been five years ago. She had not thought of him in a long while. She had liked him and his death had hurt; she had made herself go to witness it. She turned over the first page of the file.
Overwood’s Import Shop was in the Old Town of Los Angeles, between an optometrist’s and an astrologer’s. When Paula went in, a bell rang in the back of the store. It was so dark she ran into an air fern hanging from the ceiling in a bucket. The air smelled of marijuana. At the back of the shop a little man in an apron leaned on a counter.
“Help you?”
“Are you Thomas Overwood?”
“That’s right, honey. Call me Tom.”