“Marus,” Tanuojin said. “Bring her up to zero-eight.”
Paula’s eyes hurt from trying to follow the chaos in the holograph. Ebelos seemed to be rolling over onto her back. Tanuojin gave Marus a stream of orders in a voice without inflection. The incoherent light that seemed to be Ybix settled toward one of the images of Ebelos. She wondered how he knew which was which.
“It’s no use,” a strange voice murmured, over her shoulder. “He can’t do this.”
Paula was leaning on Sril, her hand fisted in his sleeve. He gave her a slight hug. He heard them. The low voices whispered behind her.
“Ybix can’t support this many men too much longer.”
“What’s her capacity—eighteen?”
“Look how he’s wasting energy.”
Junna flung his head back. He and Paula were within arm’s distance of each other. His eyes shone. With one hand he raked aside his thick floating hair. The blue and orange fields lapped and made a whorl of space that intersected the map cube. There were eight things that looked like Ebelos. Three of them fell through the whorl and went on with no change, but the fourth hit the shifting helix of the fields and rebounded. Sril let out a hoarse gasp.
“Marus!” Tanuojin cried. “Reverse—eight-zero. Now! Pick her up, damn it, if you drop her I’ll kill you.”
“He’ll kill us all,” the strange murmur said behind her. “We have to grab this ship.”
Paula got hold of Junna’s hand. He gave her another desperate look and turned his face back toward his father in the cage.
The schema of the fields, drawn by the computer inside the ship, was the only steady image in the map. Ebelos was a long blur that filled half the cube, and Ybix was in many parts, sparkling like a star. Tanuojin was staring at the cube. He gave Marus orders and faithfully Marus obeyed him. A piece of Ybix moved down through the orange toward Ebelos. The colors of the fields deepened as the Planet’s gravity compressed the space around it. Ebelos’s blurred mass passed across the intersection between the orange and the blue. Her many images rolled head over tail. Paula’s eyes burned from trying to make sense out of the map. She rubbed them with her free hand. Junna’s fingers were clamped around hers so tightly she could feel the papery new growth of his claws. She thought of the tumbling men in Ebelos.
Ybix reached the intersection. There was a thump like something hitting the padded wall. Paula’s ears stopped up. She felt a sharp deep pain in her diaphragm.
“Marus,” Tanuojin said. “Now hold her. Hold her. Let the field bring her to us.”
The map was a streaming blur of colors. Sril muttered, “I can’t see a thing.” Paula’s nose was bleeding; she went cross-eyed at the fog of blood in the air before her.
“Bakan,” Tanuojin said. “Tell the docking crew to be ready with the new seal.”
Nobody spoke. She was holding her breath. Her temples throbbed.
“Now! Throw it on!”
Bakan shouted, “They’ve got the new seal.”
The crew thundered up a cheer. Tanuojin shouted, “Clear the bridge. Marus, put all the spare energy in the ship into the seal. Junna, take Paula to red-three.”
Junna flung his arms around Paula. “I knew he would do it.” He followed her toward the hatch. “I knew it all the time.” His voice was fresh with relief. She went back to her cabin and shut herself into the wetroom.
THE EARTH
November 1862—March 1865
“Hot Jesus Christ,” Leno said. He was leaning across the seat in front of her, his cheek flattened against the window. Paula moved into the corner of the seat. If the air bus bounced, he would land in her lap. The other Styths were plastered to the windows on either side of the bus. She stretched her neck to look down the aisle. Saba was in the cockpit, talking to the pilot. She could not see Tanuojin.
She folded one leg up before her. Out the window, thick smoke shrouded the wing of the bus. The sky split. Miles beneath them, red and ocher in the sun, gouged with canyons, the mountains spread across their path. A brown river looped through the humps of the ridges.
“What are they made of? Are they solid?”
“Rock,” she said. “Like moons.” On the far side of the mountains, the funnel-chimneys of smelters sent up plumes of red smoke. The dense air closed around them again. The bus bucked up and down. Beside her head Leno’s claws sank into the foam cushion.
Kasuk dropped into the seat next to hers, on the aisle. “This place is mad. Everything curves the wrong way.”
The bus danced through a crosswind. Paula ducked under Leno’s arm, bending closer to the window. The clouds thinned. Now they were swept away again. The bus soared over the whitened crest of a mountain. A banner of snow blew off the peak.
All around her, the Styths yelled, delighted. Kasuk said, “Does anything live here?”
Paula said, “Insects. Lichens. A few birds.” She put her hand on the window sill. She had forgotten how bright the Earth was.
“What’s that white stuff?” Leno pointed.
“Snow.” She used the word from the Common Speech. “Frozen water.”
He frowned at her. “Frozen water is ice.”
“Snow is water that freezes into crystals and falls from the—” She stared at him, startled. There was no Styth word for sky. “From the upper air,” she said, lamely.
Kasuk said, “All this is natural? No one made it?”
“The Sun made it,” Leno said. “Everything comes from the Sun.”
They were flying toward the Western Sea, red with pollution. The shore was encrusted with robot factories. Feathers of thick smoke streamed past the window. Kasuk leaned over her shoulder.
“Can you imagine flying here? This layer is so thin, and I’ll bet you couldn’t even get a ship into that layer down there.” He pointed to the ground.
Behind Leno, Tanuojin said, “Saba has flown over twenty hours in this Planet.”
Paula looked up past the Merkhiz Akellar’s thick shoulder. “Not in a Styth ship.”
“No. Your friend Jefferson is meeting us in New York. We’re staying in that same place we stayed before. That square house with the short beds.”
New Haven House was the only place where the Committee could put up eighteen people. She turned to look out the window.
Kasuk said, “Paula. Does anything live here?”
They were flying over the brown scummy water of the sea. Patches of oil-eating weeds made islands below them. She said, “That’s alive. There are sharks. Fish, gulls. Snakes.” She turned to look between the seats for Tanuojin. Junna had hauled him to a window at the back of the bus. He stood with one hand on his younger son’s shoulder, holding him away. She put her nose against the window again, looking for something else to explain to them.
Sybil Jefferson met them at the entry port. When the Styths walked out onto the broad ramp down to the ground, a swarm of people with cameras and recorders rushed to surround them. The three rAkellaron withdrew into the shell of their men. The cameras whirred. Jefferson hurried around threatening and cajoling. Paula went to the rail. No one paid any attention to her. She looked out over the city. The autumn air was bright and crisp, the grass champagne-colored, the wood toward the south sorrel and yellow and earth-brown. She put her hands on the rail. She had forgotten or never realized how life teemed here. Everything below her was moving, every leaf, every stem of grass, the birds and all the people stirring. A woman in a white coat was walking away from the building, off across the grass. Paula straightened. The woman turned a corner and disappeared.