“Sure.”
Paula gulped the rest of her beer. “If Saba comes in again, hold him for me.” She went out the front door to the yard, spread with the pale blue light. Around the three buildings of the Halstead complex the grass was clipped short, but a hundred feet away the high straw sprang up, crackling dry. She walked slowly out past the barn and the guesthouse. The wind was cold. On the high ground behind the bar, she came on Saba, Junna, and two girls sitting on the ground passing a little bone pipe around.
“I thought I saw you go in,” Saba said. “Where have you been?” He was not wearing the belt with the wire; he was not even wearing a shirt.
“I forgot that it gets dark here.” She sat down beside him. The girls were much nearer Junna’s age than Saba’s. One handed her the pipe. “Which car did you bring?” Relieved, she saw the rest of his clothes on the ground beside him.
“The three-seat.”
“Give me the keys,” she said, “so Kasuk can drive me home.” She sucked on the pipe. The fire was out. She passed the pipe to Junna.
“I’ll take you.” Saba got up, stooping for his shirt and belt.
One girl had struck a match. Junna bent to light the hashish. His heavy hair hung over his shoulders. The two girls were watching him, solemn. Their youth made them all similar. Saba went off through the high grass, slinging his belt around his waist. Paula ran to catch up with him.
“Uncle Saba,” Junna shouted, and Saba wheeled; he kept walking, backward now. Junna cried, “Will you come get us?”
“Walk,” Saba shouted.
“Hey!”
Saba laughed. He turned front again. Paula jammed her hands in her pockets. She wished she knew where Tanuojin was. There was a ladder up the side of the tavern, and she went around the corner of the building to it.
“I take it you feel better?”
He climbed up the ladder after her to the parking lot on the roof. “I feel top.”
The yellow Dutch car was parked in the center of the roof. The door was locked. She watched him try the keys; he was in a very high mood, and she guessed he had smoked a lot of the bhang.
“Where is Tanuojin, while you’re out educating his sucklings?”
“He took one of the other cars out.”
It was a bad lie, since she could see the only other car available to him from where she stood. He swung the door up and she slid across the three seats to the far side. Saba got in next to her, behind the steering grips.
“You never told me your father killed himself.”
“No, I never did.”
“How did he do it?”
Slumped in the seat, she put her head back and looked out the clear roof. He started the car. They rose in a looping spiral into the air.
“Are you cold?” he said.
“I’m hungry.”
“Why did your father kill himself?”
“Oh, Christ. He left me a letter. I kept it for years, I finally burned it. He said he was afraid of losing his mind. He was afraid of being helpless. He left the dome, and the pollution killed him. I wish Tanuojin had kept quiet about it. I didn’t know he knew.”
“How old were you?”
“Junna’s age.”
The car was settling down over the tops of trees. She sat up, thinking about what she could have to eat. She put her father and his flight out of her mind easily; she had been doing it for years. He landed the car and they went into the darkened kitchen, smelling of roast pork.
“Give me something to eat.” He sat down at the table and propped his feet on the other chair. “It must have been hard for you, what your father did.”
She opened the cold drawer and took out a sack of milk, a bowl of apples, and a cheese. “Don’t be fatuous.”
“I’m making a point.”
She put the food down on the table between them. He straightened to reach the apples, taking his feet off the chair, and she sat. The room was too dark for her to see his face. He said, “I’ve been thinking about this all watch. He was an intelligent man, your father, you’ve told me that, but being intelligent didn’t save him, or you. That’s what drove him crazy.”
“He wasn’t really crazy.”
He drank milk. The domelight threw an elongated reproduction of the window onto the floor.
“There’s only one thing in life,” he said. “To do whatever comes to you as well as you can. That’s what honor is, the perfect image, the ideal life. Anarchists have no sense of honor. That’s why they can kill themselves like that.”
She ate cheese. “Your father was murdered.”
“He didn’t desert me. Your father abandoned you.”
The hallway door creaked, and Leno came in, his feet scraping on the floor. He and Saba made half-worded noises at each other. Paula reached for the sack of milk. Everybody with any intelligence sometimes was afraid of going crazy. Leno took another piece of cheese and a loaf of bread and went out the back door into the yard.
“My father did not desert me.”
“Maybe it doesn’t look like that to you, but that’s what I’m getting to. These people here can live like this, without wars and feuds and governments, because they give up the most important things in life. There are debts people owe each other out of the fact of nature. Just common humanity. The anarchists refuse them. They’re not real people, they’re just shells of people.”
She poured milk into a glass. She was the only anarchist he knew well.
“You have to make a choice,” he said. “Actually you made it a long while ago but you have to face it now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Jefferson and the Committee have never done anything for you. You and I and Tanuojin, we belong to each other. Fate, Karma, whatever you want to call it, something brought us all together because we need each other.”
“What if I call it chance?”
“Nothing happens by chance.”
She wiped her mouth on her hand. “Everything is by chance. The readiness is all.” He gave an exasperated shake of his head. She took an apple out of the bowl in the middle of the table. What he had said burned in her mind and made her angry. He was always trying to steer her into something. She took another apple and left her chair.
“I’m going to bed.”
“Stay here and keep me company,” he said.
“Go find Tanuojin,” she said. “Talk to him.” She went down the hallway to the stairs.
She woke late Sunday afternoon. Saba lay asleep beside her, naked. She found his belt and pried the wire loose and went down to the kitchen, where she had hidden the plug half of the device.
The recording was flawless. The voices were precise and there was no background noise at all. Sitting in the meadow, she listened to Saba collect his nephews to go to the roadhouse.
“Where’s Paula?”
“I don’t know,” Kasuk said. “I haven’t seen her. Do you suppose she’s all right?”
“If you do see her, remember, she isn’t to know about Tanuojin.”
Then he had already left, before she put the wire on Saba’s belt. She tore up a handful of dry grass. The cook’s old white cat was creeping around the side of the barn. The daws shrieked and fought in the spread branches of the elm tree. She listened to Saba and a strange girl pick each other up at Halstead’s. They hardly spoke; they never even exchanged names. It was the girl who suggested they go outside. Hollow people. Another strange female voice said, “Want to smoke some hash?”
“Sure,” Saba said.
Junna said, in a whisper, “My father will find out.”
“Do you want to look like a baby to those girls?”
She listened to him talk about the debt owed to common humanity. Lying down in the grass, she spread herself out to the late sun. The birds scrapped in the elm tree. On the far side of the house someone shouted. She thought about David. She could call him on the Committee’s photo-relay. He would like that, a message all the way from the Earth just for him. The tone of the birds’ racket changed. She raised her head. Tanuojin was walking under the tree toward the back door.