by Patty Jansen
Melati snapped back, “He speaks B3. I’ve heard it.”
“He sure isn’t saying anything now.”
She heard, Can I torture him now? in his voice.
By God, she shouldn’t be shocked that there were people who enjoyed inflicting injury on fellow human beings, but every time it still took her by surprise.
She pushed down her anger. “Well, maybe he is reluctant to say anything to me in the presence of the people who have injured him. I want him to be at ease. I need him relaxed for when I bring the BCI machine down.”
He laughed.
Melati waited for the sexual joke, but Lieutenant Kool was too much of a professional military man to succumb to that temptation. He’d be reported and he knew it.
When she didn’t react to his laughter, he shrugged and said, “Suit yourself. I’ll just go back to the office. You’re not carrying weapons?”
“No. And I’ll stay close to the door, not within his reach.”
“There will be surveillance and a warden will stay outside the door. You are not to come within his reach or touch him in any way.”
“I am aware of the protocol, Lieutenant.”
He left the room, and Melati waited until the door had clicked shut behind him. Part of the warden’s head came into vision in the little square of the corridor that she could see through the window.
The prisoner had followed this exchange with an emotionless expression on his face.
She said in B3, “Now you should be able to speak freely. Time is running out. If you don’t cooperate and start talking to us, my superiors and the people in charge of this facility will transfer you to the prison ship Repentance. When you’re there, they find their own way of making you tell them what they need to know. You might not like their methods. I have no say over that. They suspect that you’re an enemy spy, and you’re unlikely to ever leave that ship except as ash discarded into space. If you are not a spy, you are here to help us, or you want help and you want to stay alive, you might want to start talking to me. The others will not be as kind. They also don’t understand B3, so if you have anything to say, do it before I walk out that door. I will not be back. And not even God can help you because the only thing those people believe in is the might of the army. This is a military ship. These people do not play games.”
She pushed away from the door so that he could meet her eyes. Not too close, because she wasn’t sure if the warden was looking, and didn’t need any more trouble from these rule-pushers.
He blinked. His eyes were absolutely blacker than black. Her eyes were brown. If she looked in the mirror and the light fell sideways, you could see all the little bumps in the irises. His eyes were too dark for that. Many men of the barang-barang got pimples in their youth, leaving them with coarse, pitted skin on the fleshy part of their cheeks. His skin was smooth and unblemished. His hands were fine and clean. His middle finger and ring finger bore signs of rings that had been removed. Stolen, sold, pawned off? Plenty of shops in the B sector of the station would have taken his money.
Then he said in a low voice, husky from disuse, “I went to Mecca.”
What?
“The sky was blue and sun was hot.” He spoke B3 with a strong accented voice, carefully deliberating each word. “It was full of people . . . like us. The sun . . . it is unbelievable. It’s warm without burning. We won a lottery that came with a lot of credits. I wanted to buy investment, but my sisters wanted go to Mecca. I told them it was a waste of money, but I was wrong. It was most beautiful thing I have ever done. I’ve seen Mecca. Now I can die.”
Melati stared at him. Whatever she had expected him to say, this wasn’t it.
He looked up at the ceiling as if he saw the sunlight and the sky that Melati had been told was blue, but even the concept of unbroken sky was strange to her. He continued, “Many times in my life, I doubted: does God exist? People do such evil things to each other that surely there cannot be a God, because otherwise He would have punished those vile people. But after I saw those things, I have no more doubts.”
In the B sector of New Jakarta, people who had managed to scrape together enough money to visit Indonesia and Mecca were held in high regard. When they came back, they were rewarded with leadership positions in the community. They all shared some sort of bond.
“Are there really as many people in Mecca as they say?” she asked.
“People everywhere. More people than you have ever seen in one place.”
Wahid had spoken at length about the trip he had taken. Grandma had been one of his sponsors, and in return he had held a couple of private discussions with the family: where to put the family shrines, what the major threats to faith were and other religious things which she had long since forgotten.
Did people in New Hyderabad believe in the same god?
Did that station have ghosts and spirits that were anything like the ones at New Jakarta?
Did people have shrines?
Did the station managers look kindly on those who wanted times to pray during the day?
But she had come here to interrogate a prisoner and now that he was talking, she should not let herself get distracted. She turned on the sound recorder on her PCD.
“I’m going to ask you a few questions. What is your name?”
He stared at her.
“Your name. I’m Melati. What is your name?”
He remained silent. Shook his head. Moisture glittered in his eyes.
“You can’t remember?”
He shook his head again.
“Why?”
“Those people, they . . .”
“Which people?”
Melati waited, but he didn’t find the words to express himself. “What did those people do to you?”
“I pray to the wrong God. They said I was wrong and want to make me believe in their god. They put things on my head to make me believe in their god. But I went to Mecca and no one can tell me that God was not there.”
“Who are these people you are talking about?” ISF didn’t encourage religion. As far as she knew, Allion was strongly anti-religious.
“They wear blue.”
“Uniforms? Hospital gowns?”
He stared off into the distance. “They come for me. They always come for me.”
“What do they do with you?”
“They put machines on me to make me forget. My name, where I come from, my family. I have nothing.” A tear ran from his eye. “I went to Mecca. That’s all I remember. I went to Mecca. I don’t want to forget that. Please. Please help me remember. Please, you have to help me.” His voice cracked.
“If I can, but you’re going to have to give me some answers that my superiors will like.”
He burst into tears. “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know where ‘here’ is anyway. Stop asking me questions. I don’t know anything.” His voice rose into a desperate wail.
Melati cringed. She really hated seeing adult men cry like this. It was not part of a proud culture like hers. “You’re on board the ISF Starship Felicity. One of our patrols captured you in the restricted zone.”
He frowned.
“Do you know anything about what’s going on at New Jakarta station?”
He gave her a blank look.
“New Jakarta. Where you came from when you were intercepted.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I went to Mecca.”
“You’re a little confused. Mecca is on Earth and there is no way that the little ship you were in took you there. Your ship came from New Jakarta, which is under siege. In fact, you are the first person having escaped after the station’s occupation.”
He shook his head. “That’s wrong. I came from Mecca.”
“You said that people put things on your head to make you forget. Were these people at New Jakarta?”
He frowned. “But I said I came—”
“You said people put things on your head to make you forget.”
Melati waited until he calmed down. “The people here are trying to understand you. You asked for help. We may be able to give it, if you can tell us why, who you are and what you need.”
He blinked, frowned and blinked again.
“Where did you learn to fly?”
No response.
“Where did you live before coming to New Jakarta?”
No response.
And so it went question after question.
This was not getting her anywhere. Dr Chee would object, but she was going to get the machine. “I’m going now. I’ll be back later.”
He didn’t react.
She held her pass against the panel next to the door until it clicked and then she pushed the door open.
As she was about to go out, he asked, “How do I tell time and direction for prayer?”
She stopped, remembering how when she was little, a much younger Wahid had explained to her and a class of other children how he had decreed that the point where the communication wiring entered the section was the direction in which people had to face when praying. She remembered having asked the same question in the ISF base, and having been met with strange looks. It was the first time that she’d realised that some people really didn’t have a religion.
“You do pray every day, don’t you?”
Melati nodded, although on most days, prayer times coincided with something else important and she hadn’t the determination to inconvenience everyone for her sake nor to weather the jabbing remarks it would raise. She even kept a prayer mat under her desk, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d used it.
His question hit her right between the eyes. In the past ten months, she had allowed her culture to slip. She had been trying too hard to fit in, to obey commands and learn protocol. She should have remembered Uncle and Grandma and Auntie Dewi and Auntie Gema, and poor old Wahid.
She backed out of the room. The warden went inside as soon as she came out, probably to put him back on that horrible machine.
“I haven’t finished,” she told him. “Leave him where he is.”
She outranked him, and she was Fleet, so he nodded, mumbled ma’am and went back outside.
Lieutenant Kool sat at his desk in the tiny guard’s office. He looked up when she came to the door. “Finished already?” Why did she get the feeling that he was laughing at her?
“I haven’t even started. I’ll be back soon.”
Chapter 3
* * *
UPSTAIRS IN the research lab, Melati returned to the odd normality of the work she had been doing when she took a break to get some tea, during which she had been called away.
The lab hadn’t produced any construct cohorts for ten months. They had put cultures in storage and she and Dr Chee had been working out some kinks in the mindbase memory module that would improve the young constructs’ start to life. She had been reading up on published papers dealing with the early education of constructs.
It was all long-term research work that had no urgency behind it. Fine-tuning processes that they normally never got around to doing, because none of their normal activities were taking place.
While it was nice to get a break in the hectic schedule of production, the constant pressure to look busy was starting to get boring.
Dr Chee was happy that he had recently received the go-ahead to prepare the first cohort of constructs. They would be Browns and would have the new memory module installed.
Melati had been about to view the output from the imager, the software that rendered the memories into images that could be viewed with a VR headset, to see if the total package added up to a coherent picture that gave the construct children a solid and emotionally stable basis on which to build their new memories.
Dr Chee himself must have gone out for his break, but Jas was in the lab, on his knees in front of an open panel at one of the nine empty cots that would soon contain the nine Brown cohort children—six girls and three boys—who were still in the wet lab next door. He was instructing Zax and Tyro, crouched on either side of him, on some technical issue.
He looked up when Melati came in, and smiled.
Melati went to stand behind him, looking over their heads.
“Just calibrating the machines,” Jas said. “For when the new constructs come here.”
Melati nodded. “Actually, I need you to do something else first.”
“Oh?” He climbed to his feet.
“I want you to put the spare BCI machine on the trolley and bring it down to the Correctional Department.”
He frowned. “Do you want to use it there? It’s way down in the basement. I’ll need to recalibrate it for increased gravity.”
“I know, and it can’t be helped. Do it as quickly as you can.”
“Do you want the computers there, too?”
“Take everything that’s needed to operate the machine.”
He gave her the thumbs up. “I’m onto it. Boys!”
Simo and Esse came out of the door that provided entrance to the wet lab. Now at eleven months of age, the boys were about to go through puberty. They had grown tall and gangly, especially Esse, whose blond hair was always too long and always covered most of his forehead and one of his eyes. Some of their voices were starting to turn deep.
All nine of them seemed to consider Jas as a father and they were still young enough to listen to him unconditionally. The four of them gathered around him and he started explaining what needed to be done.
Melati was about to turn to her little office in the corner of the lab when the door opened and Dr Chee came in.
He stopped a few paces inside the room and frowned. “What is happening here?”
While Melati explained to him, his frown deepened. “That’s not really what mindbase technology is for,” he said when she finished. “The mindbase of a natural born person is a complicated thing. It changes and re-moulds all the time.”
“It’s the only chance we have. He refuses to talk to us.”
“Hmmm.” He fingered his upper lip and said again, “Hmmm. As long as you realise that the results will be quite unreliable.”
“Maybe for his reasoning and logic, yes, but I’m after his memory modules. I want to know what’s going on in the station.”
He repeated, “Hmmm. I’d come and help you, but I’ve got a meeting with Dixon soon.”
“I’m fine. Jas will help.”
He nodded. “Just don’t feel pressured to tell her what she wants to hear.” She was the captain, of course. “It’s so easy to misinterpret the results from a mindbase readout taken for the purpose of questioning.”
“She doesn’t want to hear anything. She wants him off the ship. It will be fine. No one will be doing anything with the readout except us.”
“Hmmm.” His pursed lips showed that he still didn’t like it. “This is not a construct mind.”
“I know. I want his memories. I don’t care much about the rest.”
He nodded again, spread his hands in a kind of helpless fashion and turned to his room. Melati gathered her PCD, made sure that her software and the BCI machine’s operating manual were on it, and went back downstairs.
* * *
With reluctance written all over his face, Lieutenant Kool had made a small office available for Melati. It was the first room back from the end of the corridor that wasn’t a cell, just outside the steel safety door with the control panel and the big sign that said “Authorised personnel only”.
The room looked like it might have been a cell at some point: the same size as the cells, with scuffed walls and the marks where the bed had been attached still visible. She guessed the crew were just really well-behaved lately. Or,
more likely, command had gotten less reluctant with transfers to the prison ship and death penalties. The ship operated at level 1 alert and this area had officially been declared a war zone. That was likely to affect the handling of prisoners.
The little room contained a narrow foldout table on which stood a bank of disused and dusty computers, too old for the task that she needed done. Jas had sent Tika and Shan down to prepare the area. They had disconnected the old machines and pushed them to the corner of the table.
“Did you ask if we can put this stuff somewhere else?” Melati asked.
“He said we couldn’t put it outside because it was a fire hazard.” Shan was one of the boys whose voice had recently changed. “So I just pushed it aside as much as possible. I hope that’s all right.”
“It’s not your fault, but it’s going to be crowded in here.” Of course Lieutenant Kool was not going to cooperate.
Jas came in wheeling the spare BCI machine. Esse and Zax were with him, both carrying their tool belts.
The machine had come from the base, once the free-floating ISF ring had been collected and dismantled, and because there was no fixed place for it on the ship, had stood in a corner of the lab on a trolley.
Jas stared at the danky room. “Oh my God. Are you sure you want this here?”
“I do need it here unfortunately. I also need it to be as secure as possible.”
He let his gaze roam over the scuffed walls and rickety table. His expression didn’t show disapproval, but she was sure he didn’t like this environment for the machine. “All right. The calibration should be done within half an hour.”
It was really cramped in the room with four people there, so Melati went to stand in the doorway.
Jas instructed Esse and Zax to put the machine against the wall and make it absolute level. The two young men crawled on the ground adjusting the trolley’s legs. Then they connected the power leads.
Jas turned the machine on and navigated through the setup menu.
“Use the hardwire network connection,” Jas said. “Switch off the network receiver.” He smiled and winked at Melati. “See? We’re making it all secure for you.”