“Could you do it?”
“Better than you.” Saba crowded against her, pushing her toward the other man. “Tell him.” She stared straight ahead, uncomfortable in the heat of their tempers.
The vertical door opened and they went into the black and white sitting room of their suite. David ran to meet them. Saba snarled at Tanuojin, and the little boy veered away from him. His smile wilted.
“This snappy little stud lawyer is making fools out of us because of you.”
Paula led David by the hand into the big bedroom. His hands were grimy; he said something about a green yard where he had played in water. Sril had taken him to the park. Saba tramped in behind her.
“What are you fighting about?” she said to Saba.
“He’s botching the case.” The big Styth dropped flat across the bed. “This place makes me feel crazy. Trapped.”
She had spilled something on the front of her dress at lunch. She scraped at it with her fingernail. “It’s all the people.”
“What’s that whore’s address?”
“One-one-one something. Ask Sril.” She crooked her arm up behind her to unhook the back of the dress. “I think he’s doing well. He doesn’t know the court, he has to see how much the Bench will let him get away with.” She pulled the dress down over her hips, shivering in the cold, and turned to the closet for her robe. Saba was still lying on the bed, staring at her body. She turned her back to him. In the mirror she watched him roll up to his feet and stride out of the room.
She called Sybil Jefferson, to find out about General Gordon. Jefferson looked sleepy. Paula said, “What, did I get you up again?” and the fat woman shook her head.
“I haven’t been to bed yet.”
“Oh.” Paula wondered what her business was with the Council. “I’ll keep it short. Where is General Gordon?”
“Dead,” Jefferson said. “A heart attack. Electrically inspired.”
“Hunh. When was this?”
“Just a few months ago. The information isn’t in general release. I don’t really know much about it, dear girl, why don’t you ask Wylie?”
Paula grunted. That was Richard Bunker. “Where is he—on the Earth?”
“No—he’s here. You know he has an interest in you and the Styths.”
“How can I get in touch with him?”
“Don’t try. I’ll have him call you. Is that all?”
“That’s all.” Paula turned off the videone.
She took a shower. Without General Gordon, Parine had no case. They had misjudged the Styths. It would be instructing to see how long it took the Martians to adjust their prejudices. While she was standing in the hot mist of the shower washing her hair, David climbed into the stall with her. She washed him and dried them both off with a white towel. The child’s body was round and sweet. She hugged him, and he put his arms around her neck.
In the bedroom, Tanuojin stood at the videone, talking to someone on the screen. She put on her robe and got David into his shorts, but he refused to wear a shirt. Tanuojin shut off the videone.
“That was your friend Bunker. He’s meeting us at the Committee office at twenty-one hours. He says this place is wired.”
“Probably.” She found clean clothes. “You’ve met him, haven’t you? You know who he is.”
“Yes. The man who sent that listening device inboard Ybix at Luna and started this.” He paced around the room, his hands under his belt. David was struggling with the latch of the door. Tanuojin said, “Your friends are as bad as you are.”
“Don’t call them my friends. When anarchists are friends it means they fuck each other.”
“You’re the only people in the Universe who could make ‘friend’ into an obscenity.”
Her arms roughened in the cold. She put on her clothes, shivering. David finally realized he had to turn the door latch; he darted out to the next room.
“Where did Saba go?” Tanuojin said.
“To the whorehouse.”
“Damn him.”
She put on a sweater and a jacket. In the mirror his image paced across the room, swerving to miss the lamps. His long hollow face was gnawed with bad temper. She reached for her comb.
“I’m not doing that bad. In the court,” he said.
“You’re doing fine.”
“Who’s listening in on us? Parine? Do you think he speaks Styth? Somebody there must.”
He never stopped moving; his restless pacing took him around the room. She felt the burden of the Planet around them, the pressure of its millions and millions of lives. She kept her eyes on her own face in the mirror and combed out her bush of brass hair.
“Damn him, he’s totally irresponsible,” Tanuojin said. “When I need him he goes off to an orgy.”
“Let him alone,” Paula said. She veered across the low-ceilinged street to read the markings on the corner building. Above the address, a plaque set into the wall read
WARNING: This building protected by Sentry Security—guard your home—hire a Sentry
They turned the corner. The street was empty of people. It was lined with people’s homes, what in Crosby’s Planet they called a dormitory area. Every few feet down the gray walls on either side was a door or a window, alternating, identical, except for the changing numbers.
“Let him alone,” Tanuojin said, sneering. “If I let him alone, do you know what he’d do? Do you know what he was like when I met him?” They went up a moving stairway. Through the gap between the step and the rail, she looked down into another stairway, on the next level below.
At the top of the stair was a gate, beside the gate an enclosed booth for the guards. Tanuojin passed their identification in through the little revolving door in the window. The guards were staring at him. Paula hung back by the grillwork of the gate. Tanuojin would not let her carry the little plastic card Saba had made up for her on the ship’s computer. The gate clicked, and they moved into the street beyond. They went down a trunk street, empty like all the others, reading the numbers of the doors, and crossed a white line into a sector darkened for the artificial night. The only light came from the display windows of shops in either wall, where pale-skinned mannequins showed off clothes of feathers, of green plants, and metal.
“He’s a whore,” Tanuojin said. “He’ll lie down for anybody.”
“Maybe he enjoys it.”
“You won’t be so broad-minded when he catches you with his wife.”
She swerved over to the side of the street. In the wall white letters marked the office of the Committee for the Revolution. The door was locked.
“Don’t tell him about that,” she said. Bunker was nowhere in sight.
“Then keep sweet with me. What are we supposed to do, wait outside?”
“No. Give me that card.”
He gave her his fleet card and she used it to shim the lock. She reached for the latch. His hand caught her wrist. Startled, she looked up at his face, and he flung her off into the street and dodged back.
A muffled crack sounded. The door shook. Waist-high in the middle panel a ragged hole appeared. Paula rolled over to her hands and knees. Tanuojin launched himself shoulder-first at the door and through it into the office.
The door slammed against the wall with a splintering crack. A Martian voice cried, “Watch out!” The inside ceiling lights came on bright as sunlight. Paula got up, breathing a coppery stench that made her heart gallop. Shots like sticks breaking crackled inside the office. A bloody man staggered across the threshold and fell on his face in the street. He had a gun in his hand, and she stooped and took it. His shredded Martian tunic was dark with blood. Suddenly his body flew backward feet-first into the office. She whirled.