Tssa sat down again. “You’d better be careful. My uncle is having us all watched.” He put his elbows on the table on either side of the money.
Kolinakin snapped his fingers with a crack that made Paula start. Quickly a man took a cup from the shelf and blew into it to blow away the dust and poured him beer. The giant said, “I know every man in Saba’s crew. He doesn’t even suspect I’m in this. I’m having him watched. You aristocrats.” He took the beer. “You think with your blood instead of your brains.” The cup vanished into his enormous hand.
Tssa’s eyes were half-closed. He studied Kolinakin. Paula licked her lips. Whoever the big man was, he was pushing Tssa, and not the other way; he was the master. Tssa said, “Girl.” When she looked up he tossed her a small credit. “That’s yours, for the whipping. Tell the slop-tender he can wait for his.”
She went to the door, glad to be leaving. Just as she reached it, the door flew open. Mikka stumbled into the room. She shrank back, her heart jumping into her throat. The air was suddenly charged with metallic heat. Behind Mikka came Saba.
Tssa stood. Kolinakin turned, and someone swore in a choked voice.
“Now, look who’s here,” Saba said. He faced Kolinakin. Behind him, his crew jammed the hall. “The Akellar of the Varyhus.”
Kolinakin lunged for the door. Paula reached it a step ahead of him. Saba’s men charged in. They ran her off her feet and carried her deep into the room, and the brawl broke out around her. She scrambled toward the door. Two men backed into her from opposite directions. She squeezed out of the press of bodies. On hands and knees she crawled between men thrashing and fighting and curled up underneath the table, as close to the wall as she could get, her arms over her head, while the annex rocked and the walls broke all around her.
She kept the heat in her house low, for David’s sake. While she was bathing him, Pedasen came into the steamroom behind her.
“The Akellar wants you in the Manhus.”
She glanced at him. David yawned; the inside of his mouth was pink as a cat’s. She wrapped him in a towel.
“What I’d like to know is why you let him go in there when I was still in the middle of it,” she said to Pedasen.
“I didn’t do anything. He just came. I think he was following us, on top of all the rest. Here, I’ll take him.” He reached for the baby.
Pedasen could dress David and put him to bed. She crossed the yard to the Manhus. During the brawl she had been stepped on twice and fallen on once and her ribs still hurt. Sril was standing just outside the maproom door, in the hall of the Manhus.
“Mendoz’,” he said. “You got us all blood-pay. I’ll buy you a cup sometime.” He opened the door for her.
The oval room beyond was lined with maps, set in frames along the wall like windows, green maps of Uranus and blue and white maps of the solar system. Saba sat on a pedestal chair in the middle of the room. He waved to her to stay where she was. The two men before him had their backs to her, but she recognized Tssa and Mikka.
“There is such a thing as family loyalty,” Saba said. “Honor, and regard for your own blood. Although anybody who would put his head together with a thug like Kolinakin—”
Kolinakin was dead. They had dragged him into the street and broken his neck. She put her hand to her sore ribs. Neither of the two bound men noticed her. Saba made a gesture with his left hand. A plastic glove sheathed his right to the elbow; he had broken three fingers in the fight. Sril brought him a pair of shears.
“I’m giving you a choice,” he said to Tssa. He nodded at the broad-bladed shears in the gunner’s hand.
Under his shirt Tssa’s shoulders were rigidly straight. “You never gave my father any choices. What are you trying to pay for, uncle?”
Saba nodded at her, where she stood in the doorway. “Look over there, Tssa.”
His nephew’s head turned. When he saw Paula his round eyes narrowed. Saba said, “That’s how I caught you. That slavewoman caught you for me. Your father was stupid but he would never have let a nigger trap him, and a woman at that.”
The younger man’s gaze fell. Mikka was staring at the far wall. Saba swiveled his chair back and forth in tiny rhythmic squeaks. “Take your choice. It makes no difference to me.”
Tssa’s head was bowed. The room was silent a long moment while he thought. At last he reached for the shears in Sril’s hand. He hacked off his own hair, just above the club, and dropped the knot of hair and the shears on the floor. His eyes looked blind. He came toward Paula, long-striding, and she moved out of the doorway and he brushed by her without looking at her. The door shut.
Saba tapped Sril’s arm. “Make sure he leaves Matuko.”
“Yes, Akellar.” Sril hurried out after Tssa.
Saba turned to Mikka. “Now, what about you?”
His brother took a step toward him. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. Ask her. I was just there having a jar.” He put his hand out to Paula. “Tell him. I saved your life, didn’t I?”
She looked from him to Saba. “He was Tssa’s lookout. He saw me, but he was too drunk to come upstairs.”
“I saved your life!”
Saba pushed at the hair knot on the floor with his foot. “Go get drunk in somebody else’s city.”
“I don’t have any money.” Mikka wiped his hand over his mouth. “Tssa owed everybody.” He tramped out of the room, grumbling.
Saba rotated the chair back and forth. Paula said, “I’m not a slave.”
“When you go out, you’ll use the slave door, and you’ll wear slave clothes. I won’t have people thinking I’d let my wife run around in the street.” He waved his plastic hand at her. “You can go.”
Boltiko sat down, pulling her skirts smooth over her knees, and sighed. “Sometimes I think I’ll just die. I can’t eat anything any more without getting sick.” She fanned her vast face, smooth with fat. Illy’s slave poured kakine, the sweet green Matukit liquor, into three glasses on the table before her.
Paula’s chair was a sling of white shaggy fur, big enough to sleep in. She curled her legs under her. Illy’s whole house was done in white, chrome, and glass. The young wife came in from the sleeproom. Against such a background, her beauty was riveting: there was nothing else to look at. Boltiko glared at her.
“That boy of yours is incorrigible.”
Illy had three children. Paula could never pick out which of the horde they were. The young wife sat down in the chair between the other women. “I’m sure I can’t be blamed.”
Boltiko snorted. She reached for a glass of kakine. “That baby is tiny,” she said to Paula. “You aren’t feeding him enough.”
“If he were any bigger I’d have to put wheels on him to move him around.”
“He cries. That’s a sign he’s hungry.”
“I think he’s just bad-tempered,” Paula said.
“He cries all the time.”
“All you ever talk about is children,” Illy said. She sent the slave away with a wave of her hand. “He’s in a good mood now.”
All she ever talked about was Saba. Paula rubbed her hand over the long white nap of her chair. The treaty had come back, signed, and the trade contracts had been covered by a syndicate of fifty-two Martian traders.
Boltiko said, “Nobody is blowing down Matuko, that’s why. Dakkar says the city is very peaceful.”
The house slave came in again with a tray of cut fruit. Like Pedasen, he was a eunuch. In his whispery voice, he said, “Mem, Pedasen is in the back. The Akellar will see Mem Paula in the Manhus.”
“In the Manhus,” Illy and Boltiko said, in one voice.
“I wonder what he wants,” Paula said. She slid down from the chair.
Pedasen waited in the back doorway of lily’s house, David in the crook of his arm. When the baby saw her he burst into an enormous smile. She took him from the slave. With Pedasen beside her she crossed the yard to the Manhus door.