She turned her head. “Ask me what?”
“I want you to do something with me,” Tanuojin said.
“What?”
“That—what Saba and I did, in Yekka.”
When she shook her head, her whole body turned from side to side. “No. I told you before. Do it with Saba.”
“I want to try it with somebody else. To see if I can do it with somebody else.”
“You can’t. Not me.”
Saba got her by the arm and pulled her around in front of him. “You want us to do some strange things, sometimes. It’s not dangerous for you, it’s dangerous for him.”
She made a sound in her throat. Now she was between them. Saba’s hands cupped her shoulders. Tanuojin said, “Besides, I have to know about this court. It would take you hours to tell me everything, and then you might garble it, knowing you.”
That made sense to her. She wondered why she was afraid, anyway, perhaps just of the novelty. She looked over her shoulder at Saba.
“You stay here.”
“I will. Look, there’s nothing to it. I’ve done it six or eight times.”
Tanuojin’s long hands reached for her. She flinched from his touch. He put one hand on the back of her neck and fit their mouths together. There was no sensual interest in the pressure of his open mouth. She tasted copper on her tongue. Her throat numbed downward. She went blind.
“Saba!”
She flung her hands out. Her arm struck something floating in the air. Saba seized hold of her. She said his name again, but no sound came from her mouth. She could hear nothing. Saba held her tight. His arms around her. His breath against her cheek. Then she felt nothing at alclass="underline" her sense of touch, her body was gone, he was gone; she was alone.
Her mind stuck. A brilliant passage of colors rolled through her imagination. Orange and green stretched in rays infinitely away. She struggled to feel. She had forgotten how. The colors began to spin.
“Paula.”
A very small voice somewhere in her mind. She fought to see. She could not think without some sense to feed on, someplace to start from. The colors wheeled faster, in streamers. She was exploding. Not me: I am not here. Something was here. What? What is I? False. False. The colors pinwheeled brighter and brighter. False.
“Paula!”
Confused, she stopped struggling. The colors faded to black, like space, like a Styth.
“Good, that’s better.”
It was Tanuojin’s voice. She waited for him to say something else. Where is he? In here with me. Abruptly Saba stood in front of her. In an instant he was gone. She had imagined him. Gone. Stray music came into her mind. Flecks of color, odd smells. My wool-gathering imagination. Saw hands plucking fat apples of wool from trees.
She thought of Mella Square in Havana, blue twilight, walking home. The pavement was checked with seams. Step on a crack and break your mother’s back. She stepped on all the cracks. Years of no result made it no less satisfying. Reciting Yeats and Fu Sheng at the top of her lungs. Toil and grow rich—
I wish I had an ice cream.
May I buy you an ice cream?
O thank you.
She ate ice cream, changing the flavor with each bite. Plum. Vanilla. Mint chocolate. Chocolate made her skin break out. When she was a little girl, afraid no one would ever want her. She rode a horse bareback along a country road. The sun was bright and the horse stretched out, it hurtled along the road like a rocket. The trees streamed past in a blur. The triple beat of the hoofs pattered faster. The horse stumbled and threw her. She flew in a tremendous arc through the blazing blue sky and fell softly (it is only a dream) into the grass.
She sat up. She was bored, and slightly disoriented: where was she? Wherever you want to be. In rising panic she blundered through a series of random images until she remembered that she was in Ybix, in the Beak, and Tanuojin possessed her. She thought, I don’t like this.
She strained to see. Saba was able to see when he did this, hear and even talk to the other creature in his mind. She concentrated on what she knew was out there: the Beak, Saba, and the stars. Her skin burst with feeling. She was kissing Tanuojin again. She began to hear again, the constant low throb of the ship sprang into her ears. A coppery taste flooded her mouth. She saw Tanuojin as if through gauze, and then clearly, and he moved away from her, his eyes turned away.
She stroked her hands down her sleeves. Her body was vigorous with sensation. Saba took her by the chin.
“You looked so different. You looked like him. It didn’t hurt, did it? You weren’t afraid?”
“I’m going to find David.” She opened the hatch and went out to the corridor.
CROSBY’S PLANET
Maye—Juine 1857
Saba announced he would take six of his crew down to Crosby’s Planet. The crew drew lots. Then the high-ranking losers fought the low-ranking winners in the corridors and the Tank and the galley, until the four men of Saba’s watch and Marus and Kany from Tanuojin’s watch wound up with the red tickets, strictly in order of their rank.
“Why hold a lottery at all?” Paula asked, when they were on the space bus.
“Because then nobody can say I keep pets.”
Beneath the window, the cone-shaped mechanical Planet rolled its pitted surface into the sunlight. Its silver skin was a solar battery, gleaning energy for the interior. Saba moved around on the seat beside her, David on his lap. She knew the bench was too narrow for him. The gravity bound her down. She wondered how David felt.
The men behind her were arguing loudly about the conical Planet ahead of them. Sril insisted a gunshot would pierce the skin. Paula sat back, her hands in her lap. She had heard that a solid missile would dissolve in the Planet’s fields long before it reached the surface. They were the only passengers on the bus. David stared open-mouthed out the window. She glanced over her shoulder at Tanuojin, two benches back and across the aisle. He sat with his arms folded, a book tape in his ear, his eyes on the floor. She turned straight again. She was sick with anticipation; Crosby’s Planet was the first terrestrial Planet she had seen in nearly four years.
“Mama!” He stood up in Saba’s lap, pointing out the window. Saba dropped him down again.
“Sit still for once. You have the manners of a white anarchist.” Paula laughed.
The mouth of the entry port opened round and dark before them, marked with red lights like a wreath. The interior lights in the bus came on. Paula set the edge of her hand on the window to shade the glass. The entry port was a shaft running down the Planet’s axis. On the curved metallic walls, a red arrow flashed. Although she could see nothing she pressed her forehead against the sour-smelling plastic-window. The bus slowed, turned, and ran into a slip against the wall.
“Please remain seated until the spacecraft is anchored.”
Paula took David by the hand. His crew moved up around them. The driver opened the hatch. They filed out through an inflated tunnel. At the far end they came into a brilliantly lit white room.
Saba flinched from the light. David wheeled and hid his face against Paula’s body. The other men stopped around her.
“Jesus, it’s like a furnace.”
A phalanx of people approached them, small, light-skinned people. Licking their smiles. They introduced themselves to Saba: a welcoming party from the Politburo of Crosby’s Planet. Hands pumped. Tanuojin went up beside his lyo, and everybody began talking insincerely in the Common Speech. They were in a cell along the edge of a vast white terminal. Paula went up to the rope that cordoned them off from the rest of the place. A crowd was gathering to stare at the Styths.
“What are they? Are they real?”
“That one must be almost eight feet high.”