“They’re tender babies. They have to be in the shade or the radiation burns them.”
The rellah vine sank back into the water. Tanuojin’s reflection floated on the still surface. “Was he finished? My son?”
“Yes.” She stood up. They went along the path toward his compound. Saba cast a sharp look at his lyo.
“Are you going to try it again?”
Tanuojin nodded.
“Let her watch it,” Saba said. Paula raised her head.
“It will frighten her,” Tanuojin said.
“Just the same, let her watch.”
“Let me watch what?” Paula asked. “What are you doing?”
Tanuojin shrugged his shoulders. His gaze was directed straight ahead. “If you want. Maybe she’ll learn something.”
They reached the compound. In the front hall of his main house, his younger son came up to him with a message, and she and Saba went on down a side corridor to Tanuojin’s room. Paula opened her coat. She had seen no other woman in Tanuojin’s compound, even among the few slaves.
“What was his wife like?”
He dropped onto the bed and reached for a pad of sketchpaper covered with drawings of ships. “She wasn’t very pretty. Kasuk looks like her.” The pages turned under his hand. “She had an opinion of everything, Diamo.”
“Did he love her?”
“She wanted him, I think, more than he wanted her.”
Paula sat on a box against the wall. Out the window she could see the green wall of the city in the distance. “How did she die?”
“Bearing the younger boy. We were in space, we couldn’t get back in time. The midwives hacked her to pieces.”
“Oh.” Her hands made fists. That would not have been here; Yekka had not been made then. She remembered Tanuojin’s pleasant touch. He had drugged her. He had touched her. He came into the room, shutting the door behind him.
Saba was bent over the sketchpad, a stylus in his hand. Tanuojin said, “Do you think you can leave that miracle ship alone for ten minutes?” He leaned past Saba and drew the window screen down.
Paula crossed her legs under her. Putting down the sketchpad, Saba stood up beside the bed, and Tanuojin lay down on his back on it. Saba glanced at her.
“You’re sure of this?” he said to his lyo.
“Yes. The tree is gone now, we can do it now.”
Saba’s head turned toward her again. “Watch.” He brushed his mustaches back, put one knee on the edge of the bed, and stooped to kiss Tanuojin on the mouth.
She started. Her scalp prickled up unpleasantly. Tanuojin’s hand slipped off the cot and hung limp over the edge. Saba rose. He staggered a step and flung out his arms to balance himself. His eyes looked strange, like a pale reflection in the wide black pupils. His face was gaunt. She glanced at the man on the cot, asleep, dead, gone. She bit her fingers.
“You and I have something to talk about,” he said, in a voice deeper than Saba’s.
He crossed the room toward her, Saba’s body, Saba’s face: not Saba. She pressed against the wall behind her. He came between her and the door.
“Tanuojin, stay away from me.”
He crouched over her, his breath in her face, and caught her wrist tight. His touch made her wince. “You gave us to the Martians.”
She could say nothing. Tanuojin’s expression floated in Saba’s face like an image in water. His voice sounded in Saba’s voice. He wrenched her arm, and blood filled her mouth: she had bitten her tongue.
“I ought to tear out your witch-heart.”
The pain and the threat stiffened her. She ducked her shoulder, trying to ease her arm in his fingers. “If I wanted to hurt you I would have done it a long time ago.”
“You couldn’t hurt me.”
“If the wrong people found out about you, they’d give you to the Planet. Wouldn’t they?”
His grip loosened on her arm, and he raised her wrist up between them, letting the pressure off her elbow. “You’re going to talk yourself into being killed.”
“You won’t do that.”
He stared at her, Saba’s eyes, Tanuojin’s look. She turned her head and spat blood onto the floor. Her tongue hurt in pulses. She said, “You’ve tried before, a couple of times, but I’ve never tried to pay you back, have I?”
“That’s a woman’s argument. ‘Don’t hurt me, I’m harmless.’”
“That isn’t what I said.”
Out of the haunted face before her a different voice spoke. “Let her alone.” It was Saba.
Every porpentine hair on her head stood on end. He rose and walked away from her, slouching like a tall man in the short man’s body. She spat out more blood and wiped her mouth on her hand. He prowled around the room. Now his way of moving was Saba’s: the straight back, the solid step. On the bed the empty body looked like a corpse. She should fix in her mind everything that she was seeing. The inhabited body stood by the window, and she could hear their low voices talking back and forth.
He sat down on the bed and put his mouth on Tanuojin’s mouth. Tanuojin’s long hand rose. For a moment Saba stayed bent over him, his hands on the bed on either side of the other man, protective. They spoke. She could not hear the words. Saba stood erect, turning toward her. Her shoulders slumped with relief. He gestured at her.
“We’re going to Crosby’s Planet—the three of us. You call the Committee.”
“We won’t need the Committee,” she said.
YBIX
Watch logs M15, 432—L15, 434
They went to Crosby’s Planet. From a feeling she did not analyze, she insisted that David come with them. He loved Ybix, the free fall and flying, and got into everything and into everybody’s way. He sneaked onto the bridge, where he was not allowed, and nearly blew up the ship. Unfortunately he chose Tanuojin’s watch for this experiment, and Tanuojin took him into the cage, where there was gravity, and spanked him until David’s throat and backside were raw.
For the next several watches he stayed within arm’s length of Paula. Whenever he saw Tanuojin, he hid behind her, which made the men laugh. She took him to the Beak, the little pyramidal room in the nose of the ship, while she talked to Saba about the court.
Tanuojin was going to argue the case for Ybix. Saba was not convinced of it. She said, “He was there. His memory is perfect, and he knows more law than any three other people.” She looked beyond him at the field of stars in the window.
“Styth law.”
“Law is law.”
David pressed his nose to the window. Saba drew his floating mustaches down. “Who argues against us? The—what did you call him?—the adversary.”
“I don’t know.”
“Somebody from the Committee?”
“I doubt it. I don’t think anybody from the Committee would get involved in this dubious a case.”
“You think they’ll fake the evidence?”
“They have to. I have three computer graphs to prove Ybix never fired at the second ship. They’ll have General Gordon to swear to their version, and we have you and Tanuojin.”
David flattened his cheek against the window, trying to see behind the stars. The blazing Sun in the lower corner of the glass streamed its fiery hair. The hatch opened, and Tanuojin squeezed up into the little room. David shrank back, circled behind Paula, and dove head-first out the hatch.
Paula nodded at Tanuojin. “The problem will be to break Gordon. That’s why he’s the best defenser. He was there, it’s first-hand for him.”
Tanuojin spread himself out horizontally in the cramped space, his back to the stars. “Can we bribe the judge?”
Paula laughed. She moved around Saba, trying to give them all enough room. “Maybe. If we can, so can the adversary.”
“Hunh.”
Saba said, “Ask her.”