Floating Worlds

THE EARTH

Red sand blasted the window. Paula glanced down at the holograph, in which Ybicket was flying through a blizzard of green lights. She tipped her head up again toward the window. Junna said, in the drive seat, “Do you have a temperature for the geosphere?”

“About 30 degrees at the bottom margin. There’s a change in density up ahead in the gas that looks like a clearing. Bearing course plus 72.” Tanuojin pushed the radio deck up and pulled out the scan on its hinge from the wall.

Ybicket swooped into a shallow gliding descent. They flew out of the dust storm. Paula stood up in her seat to see. The sand was rippled like a washboard into red dunes. Against it the hard blue sky blazed with sunlight. The light glared on a lake ahead of them.

“We’re about three thousand feet above the geosphere,” Tanuojin said. He was in the kick-seat navigating. “Where are you leveling off?”

“Pretty soon. You should feel the ship. She’s really hoopy, but the gravity’s like the deep Planet.”

“Saba used to say flying in the Earth was more risky than fighting.”

“Over there.” Paula pressed her nose against the window. “Down over the lake.” Ahead, the sun caught on a jagged glassine edge at the shore. They flew low over the choppy water and passed the broken shell of a dome, rising a thousand feet above them. Sand was drifted like a tide along its sheer flank. Sand was filling the lake.

“Alm’ata,” Paula said.

Junna took the ship up steeply over the ring of mountains. They flew on above ridges of high rock, bleak as iron bones. The window was cold against her cheek. The two Styths complained of the bright sun and put their helmets on. They passed the ruin of another dome. Night covered them. Paula sat back. She looked up at Luna like a silver mask in the sky.

“Go around to the light side again,” Tanuojin said. “Paula, put your helmet on.”

They climbed and raced around the Planet into the day. Junna took them along a northerly coastline. Paula looked out over the shore, deeply embayed, into the hills in the distance. The air along the horizon was brown with dust. Below the ocean laid an edge of foam along the narrow beach.

“Junna, take her down,” Tanuojin said. “At the water’s edge. Do you see that lump of mineral down there? Sit down, Paula.”

The needle ship dropped its nose toward the ground. She sat down, craning her neck to see over the bottom edge of the window. Below, the water foamed along a strip of beach. A boulder broke the surf, weed streaming green along its base. The ship upended smoothly and settled down on her tail, so that Paula was lying on her back in the deep seat. Tanuojin climbed up next to her in the vertical lane between the seat and the wall.

“Watch out for the radiation,” he said to Junna.

Paula got to her knees on the flat back of her seat. Junna swung the hatch out, and a burst of cool fresh air swept in over her face. A bird shrieked just outside. The sunlight was brilliant. Tanuojin took her by the arm and helped her to the hatch and lowered her down to the sand of the beach.

The air smelled of salt. It was warm, and she pulled open her pressure suit. Two brown gulls were floating in the air above the ship. Junna ran off along the line of the breakers, away down the beach.

“Here.” Tanuojin handed her flute to her in its case.

She pulled off the sleeves of the suit. “Why is the air fresh here?”

“All this grass is making the oxygen.” He waved his hand toward the inland. On the dunes blades of sawgrass sprouted out of the loose sand. “But it’s only this stretch. Twenty miles that way the air’s foul again.” He nodded down the beach after his son. “Ten or twelve miles the other. Three miles inland.” He stood over her while she tugged her feet up out of the boots of the space suit. “There’s sweet water, and if you work, you can find enough food to live. But you don’t get off this beach until you realize where your place is.”

She stepped out of the pressure suit. “You’d better call your son before he swims to China.”

Tanuojin looked up. Junna’s head bobbed in the ocean, forty feet beyond the breakers. His pressure suit and uniform lay in a heap on the wet sand. Paula took her flute and walked away along the beach. She stopped once and looked back. Tanuojin stood there staring down at the sand at his feet. He would not look at her. Perhaps he could not. She turned and went on her way.