by Patty Jansen
The hotel staff came to take away the plates and bring coffee and sweets.
The sky outside turned dark.
After dinner, we convened in our bathroom.
Thayu, Nicha and Veyada might not have said anything during my meeting with Lenka, but they had understood everything.
In Coldi fashion, I put the situation to them rather bluntly. “I would very much like to withdraw from this farce of a trial, but we can’t. What should we do?”
“You can’t?” Veyada said, raising his eyebrows. “They can play with us, and you can’t withdraw?”
“They paid for our travel.”
“Then pay them back.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Isn’t it? Give them the funds, tell them that they broke your trust and that of the Pengali, and leave.”
“I agree with him,” Thayu said, hugging herself while sitting on the edge of the bath. “They deserve to be sent a writ. I demand that the truth be told and that everyone in the courtroom declare their interest. I demand that the Pengali be heard. Veyada will write it up. I will gladly sign it.”
“Me, too,” Nicha said.
“It doesn’t work like that.” I spread my hands. “I can’t just . . .” I could walk out, but I’d be pestered and possibly blackmailed by the Pretoria cartel. And besides, I wanted Robert to be punished in some way for the manner in which he had treated the Pengali. I didn’t want to risk the trial being abandoned. And the Pengali needed to have their story heard. And my accounts were in a rather sad state.
I sighed, walked to the bathroom door and put my hand on the doorknob. I wished I could spend more time with Thayu. From the way she sat there, she wasn’t feeling particularly well, and I wanted to know what was going on, but there was all this stuff going on that I needed to deal with. “Why don’t I talk to the Pengali now and then to the court officials tomorrow. I have to make them understand each other. If this whole trial is a farce, the best we can do, for our group, is to make sure the Pengali get out of it what they want. If we’re still not getting anywhere by tomorrow night, then you can write your writ.”
They just stared at me, deadpan. They didn’t like it. They were Coldi and they wanted blunt, decisive action. They wanted it now.
I blew out a breath.
Well, hell, so did I, but what would Nations of Earth make of a writ? Their history with Coldi writs was not too good. Writs needed to be responded to immediately. They were a Coldi thing. I was human. No, I pretended to be human. I was a Coldi mind in a human body. Whatever the hell I was, if I used a writ I might as well leave and never again be welcome on Earth.
I had to find a satisfactory end to this farce by using my mouth. And that, according to my team, was big enough.
Heaven help me and my big mouth.
I left our room and made for the end of the hallway. The door to the Pengali apartment was closed.
I knocked, and waited.
And waited.
Seriously, what were they doing? This was supposed to be their awake time.
I knocked again. “Abri? Ynggi? Kita?”
Nothing.
Damn it.
I turned around. The hallway was empty, and quite dark, with only a few sparse lights. Where were they?
“Did you call?” Nicha poked his head out of our room.
“Do you know where the Pengali are?”
“In their room?”
“If they are, they’re hiding from us and not answering the door.”
Nicha came down the corridor and pointed his scanner at the door. Scanning through the wood made for a poor quality picture, but nowhere in the apartment did it reveal anything that remotely looked like a person.
Shit.
“Looks like they’ve gone fishing again,” Nicha said, his voice weary. He sighed.
Yes, I was starting to feel like that, too. “I suppose we better go and look for them.”
Evi wanted to come, as well as Veyada. Thayu looked tired and for once didn’t protest when I suggested she stay in our warm and comfortable room.
By now, the sky outside was almost black. It wasn’t raining anymore, but low clouds drifted through the sky while the branches on the trees in front of the hotel swayed with the wind.
Unpleasant weather.
I donned my coat.
“Take the gun,” Thayu said, while leaning back against a pile of pillows propped against the headrest.
“I’m only going out to the canal. The Pengali are probably fishing again.”
“I knew you would say that. Take. The. Gun. This is why you have it.”
I sighed. I reached into the wardrobe and retrieved it. I still shuddered at the thought of how Amarru got these things out of the Exchange enclave, but it would be fine as long as no shots were fired.
There wouldn’t be, because we were only going to find a bunch of wayward Pengali.
Nicha, Veyada, Evi and I left the hotel a bit later, a couple of dark figures going into the night. Odette at the reception desk gave us a cheerful “Goodnight!” as we walked through the foyer.
Ugh, it was dark and windy outside.
We crossed the road and the tram tracks. The black water of the canal loomed on the other side. I peered into the darkness, feeling the hope that this was going to be easy seep from me.
“Can you see anything?” Nicha asked.
Veyada panned his scanner over the water, the other side of the canal, the bridge, the tram station, then back to the quay and the tourist boat jetty.
Nothing.
Damn it. What to do?
We started walking along the canal in the direction of the tourist boats. It seemed the most likely direction for the Pengali to go.
We were almost at the jetty and the dark shapes of the boats moored alongside, when there came a faint whining sound from the canal.
“There,” Evi said.
I looked at the screen of Veyada’s scanner. A couple of small figures sat in a dinghy that was moving in the middle of the canal towards the hotel. The scan also showed the outlines of improvised fishing rods and other items that I presumed to be buckets and Abri’s net.
The fisherman yesterday had said that to catch fish, they needed to leave the city, so that was what they were doing. These Pengali were nothing if not determined.
I ran back along the quay to a place where I could see the dinghy. Ynggi sat at the engine. Give the Pengali any piece of equipment and they worked out how to use it. “Abri, Ynggi, come back here!”
Abri’s voice drifted over the water. “We catch fish. The people will be friendly with us.”
I walked quickly to keep up with the dinghy. Fortunately, it wasn’t very fast. “Please come back. I will talk to the court about telling your story.”
“No fish, no story.”
“Please Ynggi. The boat isn’t yours. You can get into a lot of trouble for stealing. You don’t have the right to use it.”
The Pengali didn’t understand the concept of stealing because they didn’t own property. But I was hoping to appeal to Ynggi’s apparent sensible attitude. At least I’d thought he was more accepting of other people’s customs than Abri.
But he probably had greater loyalty to Abri than his own opinions.
The dinghy kept going and we kept following it.
The engine whined louder when the boat disappeared into the tunnel that went under the road.
We ran up the stairs, crossed the road—fortunately there was no traffic—and waited for the boat to come out of the tunnel.
There they were, and they turned left into another tunnel. We ran back up the stairs, crossed another road. The canal on the other side went between houses.
We walked quickly along the side, following the dinghy. Ynggi steered the boat. Abri and Kita each sat on the sides trailing their fishing nets in the water. Idda held a line with a floater. How long before they’d get snagged by some piece of a broken bike or other rubbish? How long before Idda fell out?
> But the boat kept going at a steady pace, and, being a simple dinghy, was slow enough that we could keep up with it while jogging. The rain became heavier, and I had to focus on where I put my feet in the dark. I couldn’t keep track of where we were going. First, we ran along the street with old houses and then we came to a newer section with apartments along the water. Here, the quay had been turned into a recreation area, with cafes and restaurants—most now closed—and benches and little cafes in market stalls. There were garden beds and giant pots with trees and children’s play equipment. We ran up a set of narrow stairs to a much older part of the quay. Ahead, the street opened into a square, where the wet pavement and the tables and folded sun umbrellas glistened in the light of street lamps. I wondered where the Pengali thought they were going. Coldi were much better runners than I was and I was going to have to bail on this running thing soon.
And then—
“Halt!”
A man in a long raincoat with reflective stripes crossed the road. When he came into the light of a street lamp, it turned out that he was a police officer. A second man stood under the shelter of an awning.
We stopped. I was panting, but neither Veyada, Nicha nor Evi were even remotely breathing fast.
“Can I see your permit?” the policeman asked.
“I . . . wasn’t aware that we weren’t allowed to come here.” I eyed the boat with the Pengali, which puttered on in the canal, unnoticed by the police officers.
“Security, sir. Do you have a reason to be here?”
“Not really, other than going for a walk. The weather turned awful, so . . . we thought we’d take a shortcut.”
The Pengali boat had now almost disappeared. I became aware of the sound of music and voices of many people singing and talking, drifting from the square ahead.
“What’s going on there? Some sort of festival?”
“Just go back the way you came, please sir.”
We turned around. No point annoying the officers, since they appeared particularly humourless.
We needed to find out where the Pengali had gone anyway. I had no desire to create a fuss by annoying police officers, nor did I want to draw attention to who I was. To be honest, the weather was pretty awful.
But I knew what was going on in the square ahead: this was the crowd in front of the courthouse that people tried to keep us away from. Conrad Martens had even told me not to try to contact them, since he was already in contact with the organisers.
We stopped in a narrow side street, hopefully away from spying eyes.
“What now?” I asked.
Nicha was looking at a map on his reader. “The canal runs in this direction, and if they keep going, they will go in a circle and end up in front of the hotel again. We can try to catch up with them here.” He pointed.
“You’re on. Lead the way.”
Nicha set the pace and led the way through a maze of alleys and streets, most of them lined by old houses. One day, I should come here to have a proper look around. We came past cafes and eating houses where warm light radiated from the windows, past shopping precincts where evening shoppers went in and out of colourful stores.
“Whoa!” Nicha stopped suddenly.
We all scrambled into a porch niche at the entrance of a dark shop, selling, of all things, candles.
“Someone ahead,” Nicha said.
I fought to keep my breathing quiet.
A couple of dark figures stood ahead in the alley. It was impossible to tell if they were police, although they probably were.
“How far from the courthouse are we?” I asked
Veyada pulled out his reader. “It’s behind this row. Wait.”
He flicked through a couple of screens with menus and found a different image, this one a live view, which displayed a crowd of people, seen from something like the first or second floor of a building.
“Did you just hack into the safety monitoring cameras?”
“Devlin did that.”
With instructions from the Exchange, no doubt.
I studied the screen more closely. I recognised the fountain with the statue of hands holding each other that stood in front of the courthouse.
A lot of people stood in a circle surrounding something that was happening in the middle, something that involved a group of cylinders . . . drums?
My thoughts immediately went to the irrka drum, which I was sure stood safely in the Pengali room at the end of the corridor.
“Are there any other cameras in the area? Any along the canal?”
Veyada nodded, and flicked through a number of displays showing empty, dark water. No sign of the Pengali, until—
“Wait, is that the dinghy?”
There was no one in it, though. It lay alongside the canal, in deep shadow, and the camera’s resolution was too poor to enlarge it enough for us to see what the bumpy things inside the dinghy were. But they could be fishing nets. Added to that, the camera was right in front of the square at the courthouse, not far from where we had been separated.
Well, damn it. “I’m guessing, and it’s only a guess, that they heard the drum music, grew curious and went to have a look.”
“That’s not a bad guess,” Nicha said.
“Do you want to check it out?” Veyada said.
“There are likely to be police. I don’t think we should draw attention to ourselves.”
“We can do this without attracting attention,” Evi said. He didn’t speak often, and when he did, people listened.
“Is there a way?” Nicha asked.
Evi explained about an alley a bit further back, and a fence we could climb that would let us into the yard at the back of a cafe that faced the square.
I said, “You’ve been planning this for days, right?”
He grinned.
“Well, let’s go then.”
Evi led the way back. We walked in single file, keeping to the shadows. He turned left into an alley with a couple of small quaint shops and a cafe. At the end was a small courtyard with a couple of recycling bins and a parked delivery van.
Evi made for a metal fence on the other side of the courtyard. He dragged over a bin, climbed onto it and looked over the fence. “The way is clear.”
Nicha jumped up next to him and helped me up with a strong hand, while Evi jumped down on the other side. I swung my leg over the fence and dropped to the ground on the other side, awkwardly, because climbing fences was totally my day job.
Veyada simply vaulted the fence without using the bin, landing with a thud next to me.
“Show-off.”
“One has to exercise one’s muscles.”
We had come out into another dark yard with a storage container and the obligatory recycling bins. A narrow thoroughfare led to a place where I could see coloured lights and a lot of people.
Indeed we were right outside the protester’s camp at the forecourt. The fingertips of the artwork in the fountain were visible over the crowd and tents.
We sauntered into the square as if we belonged there.
On the perimeter, along the walls of the surrounding buildings, news reporters had set up their equipment. Some had even gone as far as setting up tents emblazoned with their service’s logo.
We attracted some curious looks, mostly because of Evi, who was both really tall and really black without being African.
Veyada was looking at his reader.
“There, and there, and there, and there.” He glanced at each spot: roofs, balconies, office windows. I saw nothing, but his equipment told him that there was electronic activity in these places. Cameras, listening equipment. Maybe automated, maybe with people in attendance. Tamerians or Nations of Earth special services, no one knew.
“Everyone, look out for Pengali,” I said.
It was going to be hard finding them in this crowd.
A number of tents had been set up surrounding the fountain. Some of them were of the circus-tent variety; others were household camping equipment, so
me big, some small, interlinked with tarpaulins that flapped in the wind. People had set up campfire barbecues and a smell of cooking hung over the area. The protesters had left a path open from the street past the fountain to the main entrance of the court. Various hand-painted and more professional-looking placards lined the way. The ones I could see displayed text like “Execo = Murder” or “Where is my brother?” or “Rich people take. Poor people pay.” There were also some photographs of people: a school picture of a teenage girl, a picture of a young man in a wheelchair, a picture of a scene of the utter devastation of an abandoned mining site, with poisonous yellow ponds, churned soil and not a tree in sight.
The drum band I’d seen play through the glass of the courthouse foyer had abandoned their instruments in favour of dinner.
And there, behind one of the tall African drums, I spotted an agile black-and-white banded tail. “There they are!”
Chapter 17
* * *
INDEED, THE PENGALI were studying the drums.
Ynggi tapped the tightly strung hide surface of one. It made a big hollow sound. He grinned and tapped it again.
Abri had found a set of smaller drums, and rapped the surface with her knuckles to test out the different tones of each. Kita was interested in the xylophone. She had figured that the sticks with the balls at the end were for hitting the keys. She tried out one, and laughed at the clear “ting” it made. At her feet, Idda jumped up, her arms in the air, wanting to be picked up. Kita put her daughter on her shoulder.
By this time, a lot of people had gathered around to look. They were a colourful bunch, many of them in bright clothing.
The bright colours often disguised a darker truth. Most of these people would classify as “Blue,” people who, through having the wrong background and genetics, would never qualify for any of the jobs inside the courthouse, because it was almost impossible for them to raise themselves out of poverty with the Blue tag on their ID passes that they could never shed. I hated this system. My father had seen it instated and hated it even more. I had no doubt that, had I lived on Earth, I would have been blue, too, just because my mother had died of cancer which was a stain on my genetic record.
