by Patty Jansen
“I don’t think she should be able to sell it at all. What if some foreigner buys it, or Li Wei? Then its stories are lost to us forever.” Grandma.
“But then we have to raise the money and lend it to her, and you know how she is with debt . . .”
“Still, I’d rather have that than that she sells the table.”
Uncle stood in the hall stirring in a pot over a burner. Through the doorway behind him, Melati could see Grandma, Auntie Dewi and Auntie Gema, both ancient, wrinkled and stooped over, another uncle and three young cousins. They sat on the mismatched collection of seats around the living room’s walls. All were regular visitors, neighbours, members of the block association. By the sound of things they were discussing Utami and her debts, which had all too frequently been covered and paid for by the association.
Uncle was already in the same grease-stained shirt he’d been wearing last night in the kitchen, and flicked his eyebrows when he saw Melati, wiping sweat off his face with his sleeve. The pan bubbled clouds of steam.
“You’re late.”
“Slept in.” She looked around. “Rina been here?”
He shook his head. “She never came in to eat.” And that was the stick by which he measured life. If you didn’t come to eat, you had to be forcefully restrained somewhere, because no one would ever fail to turn up for Uncle’s food.
Someone in the living room said, “But still, this is our history we’re talking about, no matter how much money she can get for it.”
Melati said to Uncle in a low voice, “When I saw Rina on my way home, she said she’d already eaten.”
“She would not eat anywhere else.”
Not in the B sector, not in JeJe, no, but she had probably gone with the pilot. Not even Ari brought his friends in for Uncle and Grandma’s scrutiny, let alone his shady business contacts. “She went with friends, she said. Uncle—have there been any problems with Rina recently?”
“She was in the kitchen at breakfast yesterday morning,” Grandma said, coming to the door while the discussion was still going on in the living room. “She didn’t tell me about any problems.”
“But sure you must have seen how she’s been behaving oddly recently?”
“That girl has bad blood,” Auntie Dewi said in the living room, where it had gone quiet. “You can tell by the way the lights flicker when she walks past. Either she performs sorcery or she consorts with people who do.”
Grandma turned around and glared at her. “There is no sorcery. Rina has always been stubborn. She got that from me.”
“I don’t know why you can’t feel it, cousin. The sorcery is in her blood, because the air in that place where she works is bad. Have you ever smelled the place?”
Melati had, and she agreed that the smell and the thought of not-dead bodies of real people stored in the labs gave her the creeps.
Auntie Gema said, “Yes, and have you noticed how Hermann flees back into his door when she walks down JeJe?”
Grandma sniffed. Her mouth twitched. “Hermann is a ghost, of course he flees when people come.”
Auntie Dewi shook a finger at her. “You unbelieving cousin of mine. You should be made to carry a lamp into that dreadful place where that girl works, the flame would flicker each time you’d walk past those boxes where they put the people. That is from the people’s trapped souls trying to reach for the light. And if you were to cast a handful of nails in the air, they would—poof—vanish before they hit the ground.”
“Rubbish.”
“Have you tried?”
Grandma snorted and glared. “So what now, cousin? Are you the dukun, knowing everything about sorcery and all that? Are you going to sell your quackery to those stupid enough to believe it?”
Grandma had conveniently forgotten that she regularly warned Melati not to sit with her back to the door or the non-existent ghost of Hermann would “foul” her so that no man wanted her.
Auntie Dewi raised her hands. “Why always pick on me, cousin? I’m only helping. You want to know what is wrong with that girl, and I tell you she has bad blood. And you don’t need to be a dukun to see that.”
Grandma rolled her eyes. “Either you’re a dukun, or you’re not, and plenty of people say that you are. They say that you cursed poor Farida’s boy and that’s why he had that accident.”
“He had the accident because he is stupid, and because they live right above Hermann’s shop and that place has more bad air than any.”
“Still, you predicted it. You better watch your mouth, cousin, because dukuns have a habit of dying by the hand of magic.”
While they argued, Uncle gave Melati an intense look that told her that her question about Rina had hit home. There had been trouble between them, caused by sorcery or no.
Then he averted his eyes and frantically stirred the pot. The content was rice porridge and it smelled like there was enough sweetener in it to make her entire construct cohort hyper for a year.
“I don’t like the men she goes out with,” Uncle said, vigorously scraping the bottom. “We have enough good men. I don’t see why she should choose whiteshirts.”
Istel pilots. By God. There was more than one.
“Staying out all night?”
Uncle nodded. “Can’t tell her to watch out. She won’t listen to me, lo. I’m boring. She doesn’t want to be a miner, she won’t work for me, she is not happy where she works. She is crawling on the floor for these men. They might take her out of here, but they’ll ditch her at the next station when they grow tired of her. And then how will she get home with no money and nothing but her used body to sell?”
That happened, too. Istel pilots bought wives, and often discarded them on some space station when the novelty wore off after as little as one trip. Space travel was really boring and a year was a long time to be stuck with someone in a ship. Often, also, transport ships didn’t have enough antigrav couches for extra crew, and the girls were never heard from again. They either died on the trip or became too brain-damaged to remember who they were and then died from neglect at their destination.
Frustration clawed at Melati’s mind. She fought so hard to make sure none of the younger girls fell in the same trap she had, and they did it anyway. Why, when they knew what had happened to her?
“It is time someone listened to our concerns and something is done.” This was a male voice from the living room that Melati didn’t immediately recognise. She peeked into the room.
In the corner that had been hidden from view sat Harto, from two doors down. He rose when he saw Melati and came to the door. He cut a prim figure, with round glasses and a thin beard in a neatly-cut goatee. He wore neat, dark-grey pants and a crisp shirt of the same colour, with Pertahanan Sipil, hansip, printed on the chest in yellow, plus a couple of stars on his chest which indicated his position as the civil guard’s leader, self-appointed and, as he loved to point out, self-funded. He’d made his money selling small shuttle parts and maintenance.
He went on. “It is important that StatOp abandon this stupid system of accrued family debt. Either that, or they must give us jobs that pay enough to reduce our debt.”
What was he on about? “We weren’t talking about the accrued family debts,” Melati said.
“But we were, and you’d have to agree that it’s a big issue for many families. No one should have to sell family heirlooms to pay for their children to get medical treatment.”
“As long as they sell within the barang-barang, it’s all right,” Grandma said. “It’s not family heirlooms they’re selling, but our ties with the homeland.”
Auntie Dewi said, “She’s right. How else are people going to save money, lo? If we keep it in credits and leave it in the StatOp computers, they will take it off us to pay for our family debts before we can spend it on important things, like weddings. Selling is all right, as long as no one sells to whiteshirts, because then we lose our culture, because they never sell it back to us.”
Harto puffed out his chest a
nd said, “Anyway, I will argue for abolition of the accrued debt system.”
Ah—right. Harto was slated to take the spot on the StatOp council when Wahid retired. There was to be an election, but there was usually only one candidate, who was elected or re-elected unopposed.
“Bah, StatOp will never agree to that,” Uncle said. “How are they going to replace the income they get from charging us interest on our family debts?”
More accurately, how was StatOp going to justify writing off millions in debt and make that work in their accounting, and justify it to their off-station bosses? Still, it was an interesting idea. Melati liked and respected Wahid, but he was old and had grown gentle and complacent. Maybe with someone new on the StatOp council things would improve.
She said, “I’d be interested in what you intend to do about the New Hyderabad mafia.”
Harto fixed her with his beady eyes, as if for the first time really seeing her. “What about them? Far more New Hyderabad merchants are honest than are con men, and they bring us things we need. If they do illegal things, that’s what the enforcers are for.”
“The illegal things they do affect our people more than anyone else on the station, especially our girls.”
A flicker of distaste went over his face. Ah, so he was one of the girls bringing it on themselves variety. “As I said, the enforcers will deal with any illegalities. I can’t see—”
“I can prove what they do, and I can prove that there are more than just a few doing illegal things.”
“The enforcers will—”
“The enforcers aren’t doing anything. They don’t care about tier 2 problems as long as they stay in the B sector. That’s the problem! They are the ones who are supposed to stop these smugglers operating here. And if they’re not doing their job, we need to take that to StatOp. We need to get rid of this shame that’s stopping us reporting these things. You want proof? They bribed me with money. I was raped, twice, fell pregnant, twice.” It went very quiet in the apartment. Uncle was suddenly very busy with his porridge, and Auntie Dewi and Grandma pretended to be somewhere else. “The first time, they took my baby at five months. The second time, they had vanished when I came at five months. Because I was ashamed, I ran away, and I begged and did all kinds of vile things to survive. You know how big istel pilots are. I would have died giving birth to that child if it hadn’t been for Dr Chee. I was so damaged that he had no choice but to take out my womb. No matter how much you’d all like me to get married and have a normal family and ignore what has happened, I can never have children. And I was lucky!”
She had to stop to catch her breath. The only sound in the room was the hissing of air out the ceiling vent and the sputtering of porridge.
She continued in a lower voice, “We need to band together and stand up to these criminals.”
Harto huffed. “You’ll just end up upsetting the many honest ones, and they won’t bring their goods—”
“We grow our own food. What do they bring that we can’t do without for a short period?”
“They’re our main suppliers of electronics and technology.”
“So? We don’t upgrade for a bit until we learn to make our own, or buy elsewhere.”
“But—”
“But what? But they’ve bribed everyone in our administration lower than Wahid? They’ve bought our shops and keep increasing rents and make threats to those who can’t pay? Why don’t you do anything with the hansip? Last time I heard, you had plenty of volunteers who wanted to join up so that they could parade around in their pretty uniforms. Why don’t you actually do something? Don’t you care about the struggling business owners? Are the lives of these girls worth nothing to you? Don’t you—”
Uncle raised his hands. “Whoa, whoa, can you leave the politics in the corridor?”
But Melati was too angry to care. “Politics does not stay in the corridor when crimes are committed. It doesn’t matter if you change leaders if the new leader is more of the same, only more likely to tread on the toes of people we should keep as friends.” People like tier 1, whose only crime was ignorance.
While the young cousins looked on with wide eyes, and Auntie Dewi muttered that no tier 1 person was a friend of hers, Harto managed to look disturbed. “So is that what you think, lo? That our main problem is not family debts but the New Hyderabad mafia?”
“I think the main problem is that we always want to blame someone else for our failure. Family debts are a problem, I agree, but the problem is not that we have them—because StatOp would find another way of getting money out of us—but that we think, and tell our children, that we have the debt because StatOp imposes their evil rules on us. In reality, we have large debts because we’ve done stupid things, not just one or two, and we continue to do stupid things, sometimes for no good reason and sometimes because we can’t see what we need to do to get out of our situation.”
“And what is that?”
“Get an education, learn to speak more than a few words of Standard. By its own laws, ISF has a program that requires bases to accept and train a certain number of local people. Why am I the only one who has signed up for it?”
He shrugged. “That’s up to the young people to decide.”
Melati turned her back, anger burning inside. Words, words, words. No one ever did anything. They just made promises. Harto didn’t care about girls dying. Uncle didn’t care about girls dying as long as they were not his family, and since Melati was still alive, he’d long since forgotten what had happened to her. And Auntie Dewi blamed it all on sorcery.
She put her mug on the table.
Auntie Gema looked over her shoulder. “What, Melati, not staying here?”
“I have to go or I’ll be late for work,” she said.
And there was no time to go and see Rina as she had promised yesterday.
“But you didn’t even have any breakfast,” Uncle said.
“No time.” In all honesty, she wasn’t hungry anymore.
By God, her family infuriated her sometimes.
Chapter 10
* * *
MELATI RAN THROUGH the corridors, and held her arm out for the enforcers at the checkpoint under the watchful eyes of a couple of men from Harto’s hansip. A bunch of returning miners were queued up on the other side. At least she didn’t have to wait in that line.
Three New Hyderabad merchants sat in the café looking bored. They weren’t even using their infopads. An enforcer stood with his back to the wall watching them. The merchants watched him back.
Melati sprinted across the hall and arrived at the entrance of the lift to the base puffing.
“Late, huh?” said the single construct soldier at the entry to the base as he punched his security code to call the lift.
“Yeah.”
They waited.
“Don’t you get bored standing here all day?”
The light above the lift doors zoomed along the slide showing the progress of the cabin.
“No, it’s been entertaining today.”
“How?”
“A couple of merchants staged a sit-in protest to be allowed to leave the station—”
“Leave the station? Why can’t they leave?”
“Station Operations discovered some sort of crime racket and has slapped a level 1 alert onto civilian departures, and now they need to open their entire inventory to inspection prior to departure. The merchants said that would take too much time and they didn’t have the authority to do it, so they protested.”
That explained the mood of the merchants in the café.
“Anyway, after they had been dragged off, we had our weekly visit from Jocar Bassanti.”
“Jocar Bassanti? What did he want?”
“I don’t know. The usual. We are the fault of everything that goes wrong in the station. I think it was the computers this time. I picked a number for whose turn it is to deal with him and shipped him off.” He laughed. “He’s still inside.”
Yes, eve
ryone laughed at him, but one day, when something serious happened and Jocar Bassanti had a real reason to complain, no one was going to listen to him.
The lift doors opened and let Melati into the clean, airy ISF base with its modern fittings, soft muted lighting and decorating that was both tasteful and simple.
Auntie Dewi, who always talked about bad air, would love it here.
In the change room, she took off her civilian clothes and got into her uniform. She went to the door, pulling up the zipper of her uniform, as the clock jumped from C6:59:59 to CA00:00 . . . 01 . . . 02 . . . 03. Her tag flashed. Just in time.
She hurried through the white corridors of the base with the tail end of the shift change, coders scurrying into the coding lab, nurses and other teachers readying themselves for a day of learning.
But before she could reach the dining hall, a siren rang and wall screens flashed All staff to the assembly hall for a briefing by Base Commander Cocaro.
What now?
Melati stopped. A couple of people behind her made surprised noises, turned around and made for the assembly hall, which Melati had just passed. The screen said all staff, not all military staff so this announcement applied to her as well.
Such announcements were usually for meetings well in advance. This had never happened since she started working here.
* * *
When Melati entered the base’s large assembly hall, it was already a sea of people, with more streaming in through the doors at the back and sides.
There were many other teachers or staff in the civilian uniform similar to Melati’s, some construct, some not. Some combat staff in grey. A couple of construct cohorts who had finished training and were waiting for transfers off-station. Maintenance staff in blue overalls. The crew of a warship, in dark grey with the ship’s emblem on their chest. Two of them, a man and a woman, sat directly behind her.
Melati looked over her shoulder. The woman met her eyes. She was of slight build. Her hair was short, spiked-up and black with flecks of grey. Her tag said Lt. J. Hasegawa, from SS Felicity, which was the largest of the destroyer class ships in the system.
