“Boltiko knows.”
“She won’t tell him.”
“Maybe we should—” Paula tried to judge what he would do if he found out about them. Unpredictable. She would not risk it. “Now that he’s back, we should break it off.”
Illy lurched around to face her. “No. You’re staying with me.” She flung the gloves down on the table.
Paula emptied her cup and put it down. She scrambled forward off the chair. Illy grabbed her sleeve.
“You can’t leave me.”
“You’re worse than a man.”
“If you leave me, I’ll tell him.” Illy gripped her arms. “I’ll tell him, and he’ll take your boy away.”
Paula wrenched loose. She brushed past her to the door and went out to the yard. Behind her Illy screamed her name. She ran back to her own house.
Saba gave David a robot that talked in pidgin Styth when it was wound up. After two watches of its screechy little voice Paula broke off the key. None of the women was talking to any of the others. Saba noticed it and made several remarks to Paula he obviously thought were the fine edge of wit. Everything he said convinced her that he knew about her and Illy. Whenever Paula was in sight, Illy hung on him. Paula could barely eat. Finally he went down to Yekka, and she went limp with relief, and the next watch woke up with a piercing pain in her belly.
The cramps bound her guts so that she could not straighten. She sent David for Pedasen. Certainly Illy had poisoned her. But the eunuch poked at her stomach and shook his head.
“No, it’s just slave-gripe.” He went down to the kitchen and came back with a pot of boiling water and the box of tea.
David climbed onto the bed. “Mama, I help you.” He pulled on her arm. Pedasen steeped the tea in a cup.
“I’m surprised you haven’t had it before,” he said. “Maybe because you spend all your time with the blacks. They never get it.”
“Pedasen,” she said, “don’t lecture me.” She doubled up, groaning.
“Here.” He pulled David away and gave her the strong bitter tea to drink. “You’ll feel better when you have the shits.”
She gulped the tea. Her forehead burst with sweat. David scrambled up beside her. “Mama, get up.” Pedasen lifted him away.
Feet hurried down the hallway, and Boltiko and Illy rushed into the room. They consulted with the eunuch. Paula lay on her side, breathing with pain. Illy sat down beside her.
“It’s all right, my darling, I’m here.”
Pedasen was right. Her guts loosened in a stinking, burning flux. The relief lasted only a few moments. Her body knotted up again. All the rest of the watch she went between her bed and the washroom. Pedasen and Boltiko left, but Illy stayed the whole time. She held Paula’s hand and talked to her, even while she squatted over the hole in the steamroom and gave up her insides in a flood.
She began to feel better. Illy washed her face with scented water. Paula moaned in the new luxury of being free of pain. She felt guilty for suspecting Illy of causing it. She took Illy’s hand and kissed it, and Illy hugged her.
Boltiko watched her hands in her lap. She was weaving a shawl. She sat on the swing in Paula’s sitting room; she had claimed as she walked in the door that she wanted to get away from the children. Paula stood by the window, her back to the window, and folded her arms over her chest.
“All right. You want to talk about Illy.”
The prima wife’s gaze remained on her hands. “I’m very disappointed in you. You know you’re betraying Saba?”
“Saba has other women all the time.”
“He’s taken you into our home.”
“That’s because he needs me. We have work together.”
“I know that,” Boltiko said. “You’ve changed him, you’ve made him think differently about almost everything. I admit I’m jealous of you.” She turned the work in her hands, smoothing the intricate design between her weaving needles. “We all have our lot in life.” She nodded down the hallway. “You are the only person I’ve ever known to tame a kusin.”
The little animal was coming out of the baby’s room. It ran down the hall in the opposite direction, to the kitchen to drink. Paula’s eyes followed it. She had done nothing to tame it.
“That’s a compliment, Tiko. It won’t come in when Illy is here.”
“I still think you’re betraying him,” Boltiko said. “He’ll forgive you, because you’re his friend. Illy he will not forgive.”
YEKKA
Tanuojin’s Akellarat. The Black Season
The bus stopped in Yekka’s city gate, and she and Sril got off with the other passengers in the public section. The little open platform outside the docking tube was loud with their footsteps and voices and the people come to meet them. She unfastened the veil and pushed her hood back. Most of the people around her were farmers who had taken their produce to sell in Vribulo and Matuko. They went off, carrying their baskets. She went to the edge of the platform, blinking in the unexpected bright light.
The gate stood in a green field. The grass was knee-high, like a meadow, and the air rang with the thin voices of insects. The men and women who had just left the bus were walking away along a narrow path. The bubble was so big she could not make out the far ends; she had a sudden feeling of being released into its vast space. Sril came up behind her and shouted, and on the path leading to the gate two men broke into a run toward them.
One was Marus. The other was a boy, a neophyte, his shaggy hair unclubbed, who gave Paula a strange, piercing look. Sril handed Marus her satchel, and the third watch helmsman passed it on to the young man.
“This is Kasuk, Mendoz’. The Akellar’s son.”
“Hello,” Paula said.
“Hello.” The boy stared over her head, avoiding her eyes. Sril went back into the closed part of the gate, to take the bus back to Matuko, and Marus and Tanuojin’s son led her off into a pathway that crunched under her feet.
The city seemed wild, without people. The meadows were fields, cut into long furrows and planted with green. Insects soared from leaf to leaf. They passed through an orchard of little trees. The naked branches were thin and knobbed like arthritic fingers.
“Pala trees,” Marus said to her. “More pala trees in Yekka than people.”
“What are those insects?”
“Krines. You should hear them during the hot time, they really shout.” They were coming to a bridge, humped over a stream, and he took her arm. “Be careful. It’s slippery.” There was no rail.
The green city curled around her, bright as an afternoon. She wished she had brought David. Kasuk was watching her. When she saw him, he jerked his gaze away. They went through a high white wall into a compound yard. The low white buildings on either side were trimmed with red under the eaves and around the windows and doors. Marus took her into the house on her right and along a narrow dark hallway to a room in the back.
Saba and Tanuojin were bent over a long table on the far side, under a window. Their backs were to her. Marus left. She went across the room to the table, whose slanted surface was papered with sheets of clear plastic held fast by clips. Each of the pages was a line drawing of a spaceship. The two men ignored her. She stood on her toes, her arms on the edge of the table, to see the sketches.
“Here.” Tanuojin thrust a folded paper at her. “What is this?”
Her heart quickened. She opened out the paper in her hands. “This must be a first. It’s a subpoena to the Universal Court.” At the head of the clear computer stock was the Court’s wing-and-balance insignia.
“What does that nigger treaty say we have to do about it?”
She was reading through it, delighted. The list of charges ran half the page: two counts of grand piracy, one count of theft, one count of harassment, six counts of refusing a directive, three counts of contempt of authority. She said, “I don’t think they expect you to do anything, or they wouldn’t have thrown in all these bogus charges.”