“Whom did you meet from the Committee?”
She turned by the bed. He was taking his belt off. Her skin crept with alarm. “What are you doing?”
“You have to learn,” he said. He held her by the back of the neck and whipped her half a dozen times with the doubled belt. Through the layers of her coat and dress and overalls she hardly felt the blows. He put his belt back on. She stood with her back to him, her jaw clenched. She hated him so much she could have wept.
He sat down on the bed, watching her. “I think there’s hope for you,” he said. “When you can still get that angry.”
“Do I have to sleep here?”
“Yes.”
“There isn’t enough room.”
“Everybody here thinks you’re my wife. It would look strange.”
She knelt on the bed and pushed the liquor bottles out of the way so she could see out the window. Green and unpeopled, Yekka stretched away from her, hazy with distance. She could revenge herself on him. She knew all his weaknesses. She folded her arms on the broad sill of the window. She could not risk the indulgence. She depended on him; he was her weakness. The wafting breeze smelled of dry grass. She put her head down on her arms.
They slept together in the bed, side by side, not touching. When she woke up, she was alone. The hammer clanged and clanged in the courtyard outside the window. She put on a pair of overalls and the long green dress Boltiko had made for her. Two bells rang.
She went out through the hall. Marus, Kany, and the rest of Tanuojin’s watch were gathered beside the door to read a paper posted on the wall.
“Mendoz’.” Kany grabbed her arm and hauled her into their midst. “What’s this about another trip to the Middle Planets?”
She pried up his fingers, releasing herself. “You gentlemen have been touring the galaxy lately.”
“Now, Mendoz’.” They crowded around her, bumping into her, pulling her hair and breathing down her neck. “You can tell us.” She maneuvered through them and went out the door to the yard. In the doorway the crew moaned and hissed at her.
At the opposite end of the yard, Kasuk was swinging the hammer hard, his body twisting from the heels with each stroke. His hair flew. She went up behind him to see what he was doing. The hammer was pounding at the base of a little bilyobio tree. Every time he hit it the short stump threw off a cloud of silvery dust. She liked the bilyobio trees; she felt as if he were hurting it. Her nose began to itch and she sneezed.
Kasuk wheeled around. “Oh. I didn’t see you.”
“What are you doing?”
He gestured at the half-destroyed stump. His eyes slid away from her. “My father—the bilyobios disturb him.” He picked up the hammer again and hit the stump a terrific whack that broke it off at the base.
“Where are they?”
“Gemini? They’re down by the Akopra.” He kept his back to her. She went around in front of him, irritated, and he turned away.
“What do you have against me, anyway?”
He pulled at his shaggy hair. “I’m not supposed—my father—my father says you’ll corrupt me.” Shyly he looked at her.
She let out a peal of laughter. He straightened, leaning on the hammer. His eyes were black, like an ordinary Styth’s. She said, “I’ll do my best. Where is the Akopra?”
“Just across Koup Bridge. It isn’t built yet.” He swung the hammer up over his shoulder and led her toward the gate in the wall. Dust streamed out of his clothes. In the gateway, he stood pointing across the fields. “There’s Koup Bridge, on the curve. The market used to be there but he moved it so he could put the Akopra there.” Just beyond the humped bridge, half a mile from her, was a circle laid out on the ground in scaffolding.
“Maybe someone should go with you,” he said.
“No, thank you.” She started away down the path.
The whole of the bubble was laid out in long narrow fields, what the Styths called cold-farms to distinguish them from the hot-farms where they made crystal. She passed an old woman coming the other way with a basket on her back. She wondered how much Tanuojin knew, and how he would use it, and when. Before, she had disliked him; now she was frightened of him. She stepped out of the path to let a flock of chickens pass, herded by a little boy with a stick.
At first the Koup Bridge seemed to be on the perpendicular wall before her, but as she walked the ground flattened out, and she saw the bridge and the round wall beyond it not from above in Egyptian perspective but sideways, straight ahead of her. The fields on this side of the stream were flooded. Dark gray tentacles sprouted up out of the water. She went to the edge of a paddy. The water was only four inches deep. Under it the soil was covered in layers of dark cloth. The vines were leafless, mottled gray.
She went over the bridge. The slats of the round scaffolding reached higher than her head. The grass around it was trampled flat. The yellow roots showed. She walked around the circular building, searching for a way in. A pile of dark gray plastiment bricks and long strips lay in the grass on the side of the building away from the stream, before a gap in the circular wall. She went into the round building.
Saba and Tanuojin were walking along the inside of the curve. Tanuojin was pointing off across the building and talking, but Saba saw her, elbowed him to be quiet, and they turned and watched her come up to them. Saba waved one hand at the building.
“Look at this theater he’s building with the money you got for him. He hasn’t even thanked you, has he?”
“She’s getting what she wants.” Tanuojin slid his hands under his belt, looking down at her. Uneasily she wondered again how much he knew of her conversation in the White Market with Dick Bunker.
“He says you have some idea we can use this subpoena against Machou.” Saba’s hand on her shoulder steered her across the hard-packed dirt toward the opening in the curved wall. Tanuojin went ahead of them through the gap. He looked back over his shoulder at her, his eyes yellow as bile. He knew everything. Saba shook her. “Tell me.”
She shrugged against his grip, and he let her go. They went out of the theater. Tanuojin was some way ahead of them. She said, “They have no case against you on any of those counts except the one. You’ll make them look very stupid, if you go down there and prove it.”
“How does that help me against Machou?”
“Machou can’t deal with the Middle Planets. Show you can, and who will the others listen to, you or Machou?”
On the far side of the bridge, Tanuojin stopped beside a paddy, sank down on his heels, and thrust his hand into the water. She slowed her walk. Saba was staring at the ground in front of him. He fell to her pace.
“Jesus, you talk well.” He thrust his head up, toward Tanuojin, on the far side of the bridge. “He wants to do it. Not for your reasons. He’s afraid of losing that money. Did you guess that, too? I don’t trust you, Paula, you’re running me again, like at the Nineveh.”
She led him onto the bridge. If Tanuojin wanted to go, he could talk Saba into it. “What are those vines?”
“Rellah vines.” He went down the slope of the bridge to the paddy. Kneeling, he pulled the end of a vine out of the water. He pierced the thick dark skin with one claw and pressed his thumbs on either side of the wound. A trace of pale sap oozed out. “When they mature, they’re transplanted into a dry bed and staked up, and a tube is grafted into the body to tap off the gul. The milk. Most of the plastic in Styth is made out of rellah gul.”
“What’s the cloth for?” She pointed through the standing water.