by Patty Jansen
“Anyway, thanks for having me. I wanted to show you something about this gecko. Couldn’t do that with Uncle there. I don’t want everybody to know this. Watch.”
He drew his pocket screen from his shirt.
Then he took the lid off the container, flicked it upside down so that the tokay fell onto the table, and quickly pressed his pocket screen against the animal’s back. Then he let the gecko back into the container, where it ran onto the lid, tail dangling down.
Ari sat down, spending a few minutes punching furiously on the screen, which he then handed to Melati.
The screen showed a grainy image moving in a dizzying, disorienting way, as if someone had dropped a camera while it was recoding. Then movement stopped and the image sharpened to show a jumble of rounded shapes. There was a rectangle of light towards the top of the screen. Something moved across it—a person, upside down. Now the rest of the image began to make sense. Melati turned the screen around, and it made even more sense: it was an upside-down image made from the ceiling of Uncle’s rumak. A tokay’s view of the world.
She frowned at him. “You recorded this just today? The tokay did have a camera on its back?”
“Yep. Watch it.”
The round shapes were the heads of Uncle’s customers at the cramped tables. The brightly-lit rectangle from the door was interrupted when the enforcers came in, but just then the field of vision moved and the door disappeared from view. Something very bright came into view and the screen turned white.
“Oh, bugger. That’s just really bad timing. We could fix that when we can make the animals do what we want,” Ari said.
“How did you record that image?”
“Well, there’s this new very thin film that you can stick on skin. It has photo-sensitive and EM-receptive cells and storage capacity.”
“How thin?” That sounded like a lot of capacity for something you could barely see. She studied the tokay in the container, but couldn’t see anything except the orange spots on its back. Grey padded feet stuck onto the clear plastic.
“Here.” He deftly picked up the animal—again without making it drop its tail—and showed her by the blue light from his infopad screen. There was indeed a very thin transparent film over the animal’s back, cut into a gecko-shaped piece. It was so thin and flexible that it didn’t seem to hamper the animal’s movement.
“What is it? Nano-film or something?”
But he was looking at the screen again, which was changing. “Watch. There is more.”
The image became darker again.
Melati realised. “It ran past the light. That’s why it went white.” The dirty light with the cracked cover that was on the back wall next to the door into the kitchen.
The cells on the gecko’s back had adjusted to the lower light level, and she could make out one table, with in the middle, a brightly-lit screen. This was the table of the smugglers from New Hyderabad. She froze the recording and touched the screen to magnify the image. To her surprise, it enlarged to the point where she could see what was on the screen.
Photographs, not of girls but men, each staring at the photographer like those horrible ID shots. In fact, they were probably shots taken with a similar camera, to make it look like these men were Taurus Army recruiters, while in reality they were sorting out which of the sleazebags in the pictures they’d send off into the dockside motel rooms with which girls.
“Amazing resolution,” Ari said, grinning.
“Get real, Ari. These guys are the vilest criminals in all of settled space. They were sitting there, in my family’s business, eating my family’s food, and all you can do is talk about resolution? What do I care about resolution? These men are ruining girls’ lives. But no one cares about girls, huh? Because they’re only girls, and if they get in trouble, it’s their fault, huh? Because they bring it on themselves if they look like whores.”
Ari sat back, eyes widening. “Whoa, Melati, take it easy.”
“I won’t ‘take it easy’. They were in Uncle’s rumak, and he let them sit there and conduct their business. He gave them food, and got angry with me for setting the enforcers after them, because they paid their bill. And then he talks to me about crusading. I saw Rina with one of these sleazebags . . .” She gestured angrily at the screen.
Ari managed to look mildly disturbed, but shook his head. “Rina has a job. She’s too old and smart to go walking the docks. Where did you see her?”
“Near the lift foyer. With an istel pilot who looked like he’d had a few too many and spent the whole day partying in the malampaks.”
Ari looked like he wanted to protest.
“Ari, I saw her. You can say whatever you want about only young and stupid girls falling for these guys, but I saw her, and she’s had a fight with Socrates. He said that he wanted her to come to work, so I guess she handed in her resignation and is now trying to make money this way, to prove that she doesn’t need him.”
His frown deepened. “Where did you learn all that?”
“Seriously, Ari, where are your eyes? You only need to look. She says he’s disgusting. He says she’s unreliable. She misuses her position, but instead of sacking her, he enjoys watching her make out with tier 1 mindbase travellers, probably wishing it would be him. So now and then the sleazebag makes a lewd proposition and she gets angry, only to realise that no job is as clean and easy as the one he offers. I don’t understand why she’s never run out on him before.”
“All right, I’ll go and have a look for her later.”
He looked at the screen, moving his hand to the top left corner.
She stopped his hand. “Don’t erase this, Ari.”
“Why not?” He pulled his hand free. “It’s just a piece of garbage.”
“No!” She grabbed the screen. “It’s evidence. You may not want it, but I do. I’ll make a copy.”
He watched while she copied the recording and gave the pad back to him.
“It might be a good idea if you also keep a copy.”
He hesitated. “OK, to do you a favour.” He shrugged. “Now what about controlling these critters to make them go where we want?”
“And what are you going to use that for?”
“To sell to people who want to use them. Honestly, Melati. Can’t you ever let off? You’re not my mother. You promised to help me.”
“Where did you get this special film, exactly?”
He laughed at her suspicious tone. “I bet you’d like to know that. It’s nothing illegal. If I told you, everyone would be after this stuff.”
“So you stole it.” Probably he got the material from the StatOp biolab, because certainly ISF didn’t have stuff like this and she had a feeling he had a friend who worked there—a dangerous development she didn’t like. But she couldn’t see why StatOp would have this high-tech film either. They did recycling and agriculture, not cutting-edge research.
“Why do you always suspect me? I didn’t steal anything. I paid honest money for it.”
“Ari, in my experience, honest and money are a contradiction in terms when coming out of your mouth. If you don’t like my suspicions, it’s up to you to disprove them.”
They glared at each other across the table.
“Ari, please tell me.”
“So you can tell your boss? I did nothing wrong.”
“Like last time? When you tricked the StatOp security system into ditching all its log records?”
“That was an accident. We didn’t know it would happen.”
“Unexpected things always happen.” She eyed the tokay in the jar, as if t0 force some sort of secret out. The creature opened its mouth and licked its eyes with a broad tongue. The station was still suffering the consequences of his latest bungle. Melati wouldn’t be surprised if it was the real reason they’d posted security everywhere. Maybe even the reason for the raids—because they needed to replenish and crosscheck their database.
“Gitu loh, Melati, why do you care? OK, someone sold it to me,
a hypertech.”
“I care because hypertechs wouldn’t be seen dead talking to you, so something is going on.”
“Melati, if you offer someone money, anyone who’s not a completely opinionated morally superior arsehole will take it, if they need it badly enough.”
“So now I’m an opinionated morally superior arsehole, is that it?”
“Yes, actually, most of the time you are.”
“Thanks, cousin.”
He grinned.
“Well, wherever you got it, I still want to know.”
“Will you stop, Melati? I don’t know where they got it, OK?”
“I’m concerned because this is dangerous. They could use it for spying on us and selling the data, to New Hyderabad for all I know. It shouldn’t be on the market, and if you’re caught, there will be big trouble.”
He snorted. “Trouble from who? Everyone has this stuff. From StatOp down to poor little us. I can’t help that none of the whiteshirts have noticed.”
“How about you show a bit more respect for the people who protect you from war? How about you get off your backside and use your creative energy for something useful and sign up—”
“I won’t. I’ve told you that before.”
“But ISF have programs for people like you. They want more of us. You’ll get paid. You won’t have to buy dubious stuff from dubious people anymore.”
“Why don’t you understand? I don’t want a job like yours. You say you hate tier 1, but you’re just working for some other bunch of dictators, and ones we don’t know at that.”
“They’re not dictators. ISF keeps this area safe.”
“From what? Allion? What is Allion? None of those whiteshirts even knows who they are, what they do and what they stand for. They could be living peacefully in their own section of space for all I know, not in the least interested in attacking us. If tier 1 and ISF aren’t telling the truth about their stuff-ups in administration, who says that they’re going to tell the truth about the war?”
“Have you spoken to people who have fought?”
“People who fought at New Pyongyang, yes.” New Pyongyang had been having periodic unrest for years. “And that had nothing to do with Allion. It happened because the people of the station, tier 2 like us, were fed up with being treated like dirt.” You know, Melati, at times I doubt whether there’s any such thing as Allion, and if so whether they are interested in us. I mean—they’re supposed to have all this technology we can’t even understand. Why would they care about a stupid mining station like New Pyongyang, or us? Maybe ISF just makes us afraid as an excuse to control us.”
Melati glared at him. “It’s not like that. Allion is real.” She almost showed him her paper, but he wouldn’t understand it anyway. He always managed to twist everything she said and make it sound like he was right. Really, Ari could be the most infuriating person in her entire family.
That said, she’d never met anyone from Allion either, and there were times she had wondered if the threat from some nebulous enemy was a justification to keep the war machine going. Heck, there were even times she had heard those opinions in disgruntled ISF recruits. How could you fight an enemy you couldn’t see and one that hadn’t engaged in direct conflict for many years?
Major-General Cocaro said, If, in a space war, you can see your enemies, you are way too close to fight them.
Ari snorted. “You don’t know either, madame soldier. You get told what the big boss says is true, but is it?”
Melati said nothing. There was only one reason that she had joined: ISF had saved her life.
“Anyway, just be careful, will you, Ari?”
“If you help me, I can be careful.”
So she did; and he was family, so she would always help him.
She explained the basics of mindbase technology, although from the way he played with the buttons on his shirt, she suspected that not much of what she said was new to him. She asked him when he’d studied these subjects, but he didn’t answer the question. On-station, the only source of this sort of information would be the hypertechs, but when were hypertechs seen talking to any of the sekong? While most people mildly disapproved of them, the hypertechs never stopped quoting religious texts against sodomy and loose culture. So did this mean they’d changed their minds?
She asked, but Ari said nothing had changed. So then she asked about Rina’s outfit, and he was pretty sure that Rina was not in the slightest considering joining the hypertechs. “I mean—when you’re as pretty as her, would you want to hide your face?”
That wasn’t an argument, and she didn’t believe him, but she let it slide. Arguing with Ari was like running into transport webbing: you got thrown back at the same speed as you hit it.
She told him how he would need to override the tokay’s entire mindbase to control anything so basic as motion. There were some papers on experiments with this on insects, and she gave him copies of those. Then she told him how he’d need access to a BCI-X machine with a wide-range calibration scale, and that it was unlikely that anyone on-station would have this. He took this remark without comment, which didn’t inspire her with confidence. If he didn’t already know where he could use such a machine, he would ask her to use the one in the ISF sector. All the more reason to keep a close eye on him and his new, obviously hypertech, friends, and use her expertise as excuse.
But hypertechs were a sensitive point with both StatOp and ISF administration, since they frequently managed to break through firewalls, steal passwords and entry codes. ISF command would have a fit if they knew that someone in her family was close with them. Either that or they’d ask her to spy, and neither prospect filled her with happiness.
That said, if she could write Ari a working mindbase to get the gecko to do what he wanted, she could use it to spy on these New Hyderabad merchants, and could finally prove what they did. Then she would personally take the information to StatOp chief Jocar Bassanti and wouldn’t rest until he got rid of these people for once and for all.
After Ari left, Melati viewed the recording a couple of times, and enlarged the photographs as much as the resolution would allow. The smugglers’ screen had displayed six images of men, and unless she was mistaken, two of them were StatOp enforcers. She didn’t even know that StatOp had any constructs who were fertile.
The fact that these criminals were no longer using only istel crew was a worrisome development. Melati thought that they used istel crew because they, like tier 2, were natural born people. Unlike tier 2, they were said to have passed strict genetic testing for suitability to their unforgiving job, which made them genetically superior to other people. Definitely genetically superior to constructs.
Was the shortage of babies so large that any fertile man would do? Were New Hyderabad criminals now playing the role of pimps as well as baby smugglers?
Chapter 9
* * *
IT TOOK MELATI a long time to go to sleep.
She lay staring at the ceiling, listening for sounds of fighting from elsewhere in the B sector, listening for Ari to open the door and tell her that Rina was home and asleep.
Ari was right, Rina wasn’t stupid, and she was much too old to be a prime target for the smugglers. Susanti and the other sixteen-year-olds were the ones they were after. The ones for whom white, foreign men still held allure.
Still, what had Rina been doing with a man in istel uniform? Was it necessarily bad that she seemed fascinated with pilots? Rina had never shown a sign of wanting to leave the station, either alone or as a bought wife.
She tossed and turned, heard the hum of the tethers reconfiguring during the BC shift cycle, and wondered if she should give up trying to sleep and go to work early. It wasn’t as if she had nothing to do there. The poor boys were in all kinds of trouble and she only hoped that Dr Chee would be able to make a temporary fix until he could find out what was wrong with Keb.
All of a sudden an alarm was blaring in the hall, and Melati lay sweating under too m
any blankets.
She sat up with a shock, shivering and feeling sick. The lights had come on, still in their muted morning cycle, but unreasonably bright to her eyes. The clock glared C6:21 which meant she had precisely thirty-nine minutes to have breakfast, get changed and get her backside to work. The alarm was always on, but she’d never needed it; she always woke up before it could go off.
Melati pushed herself out of bed and her movement shut the infernal thing up. She stumbled to the hall on stiff legs. There had been no messages overnight. Not from Ari, nor Rina.
While trying to decide whether this was good or bad, she pulled on her clothes and set out for Uncle’s apartment, around the corner of the block in Jalan Nusatera. The passages teemed with miners on their way to work, a progression of worn and stained overalls. All locals, greeting her as she passed.
In the back of her mind, she registered that the fights she had anticipated last night had not happened. There was, however, a hansip member on the corner, standing straight with hands clasped behind his back, looking smart in his new dark grey uniform.
“All well?” she asked. She knew this man vaguely; he sometimes came into Uncle’s rumak.
“As well as can be expected.”
“No fights?”
“None major. Quiet morning, all things considering.”
Easy for him to say. Where had the hansip been yesterday when trouble was about to break out? Wasn’t that why StatOp had allowed tier 2 to organise their own civilian wardens, to stop trouble between enforcers and young people?
Uncle shared an apartment only slightly bigger than Melati’s with Grandmother, Rina and Ari and two small cousins. When Melati arrived, the door was open and voices came from inside. It sounded like a couple of members of the block association discussing some person’s debt to the association.
“. . . it’s a genuine home country table and she should get a good price for it.” This sounded like one of the aunties.
