by Patty Jansen
Because, clearly, she didn’t.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
WE WALKED HOME over the leafy boulevards of the gamra island. The night air was warm, not as humid as it would be later on, and filled with the squawks of meili in the trees and the rattling of ringgit that had taken up residence in the planter boxes, especially where there were fountains or ponds.
It was quite odd for the nightlife to be so prevalent here, and a sign of how quiet the island was when the assembly was not in sitting.
The question of what it was that made me human, and whether or not you could transition from being human to being Coldi or something else, and if so, whether I had already done this, was one that bothered me at times. Most of the time, I simply made my decisions and acted as I thought was right, and as was right for the situation and the people around me.
Then someone would accuse me of being a Coldi pawn, or would say, “But you’re one of them now.” These remarks could be made in jest, but often there was a passive-aggressive sentiment to them that belied the speaker’s deeper intentions, which seemed to be to shame me into acting my part, or to express jealousy about my interactions with a type of successful people they realised they would never understand.
And sometimes, when that happened, I lay staring at the ceiling at night, wondering if I was human and if so, should there be any loyalty to my fellow humans associated with that fact, because I had to admit I didn’t feel any whatsoever.
Of course I loved my father, but I was no longer in contact with any of my cousins, had very few human friends on Earth, and when I visited, I referred to Amarru at the Exchange. I no longer took orders from Nations of Earth politicians, and considered even Margarethe Ollund a foreign head of state in need of advice and protection from the, for her, strange customs at gamra.
On the other hand, I was the only non-Coldi person to have visited Asto, I belonged to the Domiri clan—and Asha kept telling me that we should have an official induction ceremony, which would require me to travel to Asto again—and Ezhya had made it clear that he would use his special powers to free a spot for me to live on Asto, if that proved necessary. Several times, I had chosen my loyalty to him over my position.
Did all this make me less human?
We came home to the unusual sight of Deyu and Reida standing at the door. During our camping trip, Evi and Telaris had indeed gone to visit their family. Apparently their mother had reached an auspicious milestone, although no one was quite sure whether “Freedom of Care” simply meant that Evi and Telaris’ much younger brother had left home, or whether it referred to those horrible “life debts” that bound poorer Indrahui people to their financial masters.
I went to the bedroom to change out of my formal gear, and to take off the gun, and rejoined Thayu in the living room, where Nicha had also turned up. Thayu had filled him in on my discussion with Melissa, of which she had followed a good deal through the feeder. Her increasing knowledge of Isla scared me sometimes.
Nicha was saying, “So he wants to go and visit all these people? Isn’t that what Melissa is for? Don’t we have better things to do?”
“It’s not her task,” I said, sitting down on the couch. “When I held that job, they explicitly told me so. I was not to render services for the benefit of individuals, even with regards to their safety.”
“And you broke that rule straight away.”
“I did, but they broke their promises to me, too. Anyway, this is not relevant. Melissa has far fewer resources than we do, and what is the harm in visiting these people and just asking them if anyone they know is missing?”
“With you, it’s never just asking,” Thayu said.
“I’ve got some time. Neither of you need to get involved if you don’t want to.”
“You wish. Those projects of yours in which you don’t want us involved are the most dangerous of all.”
“Then do get involved. I don’t care. I don’t want later accusations that I should have done something instead of letting someone else sort it out. That’s not my style.”
And that, I realised as soon as the words were out of my mouth, was a very Coldi leader thing to say.
Screw this. Why did it even matter what boxes I ticked?
I sat back and looked out the window. Out there, over the marshlands beyond the horizon was the ocean. A big bank of clouds was silhouetted against the last rays of daylight, and the occasional flash of lightning flickered inside the billowing masses.
The wet season was coming. If anyone was in trouble out there, we had mere days to mount a search. And I was going to find out if that was necessary.
* * *
I told my association at breakfast that I planned to go into town that morning. Thayu and Nicha looked at each other, knew what I was doing, and as one insisted on coming. I guess I should have known that would happen and, to be honest, I was secretly glad that they wanted to. They didn’t always understand why I wanted to do things, but they always came around to accepting that some things were important to me.
They also promised to honour my request that they stay outside while I visited the people, even if both felt it necessary to remind me that Earth people had such strange habits.
We travelled to town in the train, and even it was much less busy than usual.
Huang Le’s restaurant was in one of the new buildings in the market square these days, although he had moved a few times since I had come to Barresh. He had obtained a permit to grow Chinese vegetables in a special closed-system glasshouse at the back of his shop that was approved by quarantine. The glasshouse was a novelty in town, seeing as Barresh had a tropical climate and glasshouses were rarely a necessity. When you walked past, you would often see people looking over the wall at Huang Le’s wife pottering between the rows of tables. Someone had even put a crate next to the wall so that little children could see over the top.
The restaurant part of his business was small, with the tables crowded together to fit in as many paying customers as possible.
The shop was still dark, and a young keihu woman was mopping the floor. We greeted her and went to the counter at the back, where there was light and where Huang Le and his wife were cutting up vegetables.
Huang Le glanced up at me. “We don’t open until midday.” There was no Good Morning, Delegate and definitely no formal Coldi pronouns.
“I’m not here for lunch. I’d like to ask a question.”
“Yeah. Ask away.” His keihu was almost flawless. He was one of the few people I knew to manage the noun inflections well enough to be inseparable from a local. My keihu wasn’t half as good, so I switched to Coldi. “My question is kind of long.”
“Is it?” He gathered a bunch of heads of bok choi and chopped the bottoms off with a vicious thwack of his giant knife. “I got food to cook, dishes to put out, plants to water. I don’t have all day to be answering your questions.” His Coldi wasn’t bad either, although not quite up there with his keihu.
“I understand that, but it’s important, and it won’t take terribly long.”
He snorted and dropped his knife, pushed aside part of the counter and came into the shop. “Make it quick, then.”
He was a much shorter man than I, who appeared to have taken to the local habit of long lunches and looked the part. He wore a loose kaftan with the sleeves tied up above his elbows and an apron. He’d been sweating so much that the moisture seeped through the fabric.
He yelled something in Chinese to his wife, and she responded.
He led me to a table at the edge of the terrace area separated from the restaurant next door by a row of planter boxes.
We sat down, and his wife brought us two glasses of chilled juice. Huang Le downed half of his, wiping sweat off his face. Was he more affected by the heat than most of us, or did he neglect to take adaptation medicine?
A couple of boys in their early teenage years peeked over the shop counter. Two were keihu, but the third had straight dark hair and Asian
eyes. They giggled and left again.
“Your son?” I asked.
“Now, what are you here for?”
Straight to business. Shut up, Delegate, stop wasting my time.
I took the jar out of the carry case that also contained my reader, and put it on the middle of the table. I told him where we’d found it. I unclipped the lid and showed him the piece of waxed paper.
He turned it over, raised his eyebrows at the timetable and snorted. “I guess someone’s ferry took a long time arriving, so he took a ringgit jar and a timetable, because that was all he had, and sent a message in a bottle, but he neglected to write where he actually was, because he didn’t have a pencil. This seems like a child’s trick to me. I think you’ve been had.”
“I wish I could laugh at it, but I have to discount all possibilities. Do your children play with these . . . ringgit jars?”
“They’re for the kitchen, to stop the damn pests coming in and eating stuff. Like the beans, they love the beans, and the flour, too, but we keep it in the cooler. But the herbs, yes, we’ll use the ringgit jars for the herbs.”
His wife called out something in Chinese from the back of the shop, holding up a glass jar similar to the one I had found, containing ochre-red powder.
“See, there you go. Ringgit jars. Doesn’t your fancy kitchen use any?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure.” I didn’t think they did. Ringgit infestation didn’t seem to be as much of a problem at the gamra island as it was in town. I’d heard people say that it was because of the lack of drainage tunnels where the crustacean-like creatures liked to breed.
“But to get back to your question, if I catch my children playing with stuff from the shop, I’ll teach them a lesson they won’t forget in a hurry. Not saying that they wouldn’t find a jar somewhere. It’s amazing the rubbish people leave everywhere.”
“Yeah.” Where there were people, there was rubbish. Sad truth.
“Anyway, my children couldn’t have done this.”
“Could I ask them?”
I could see that he was starting to refuse, but then he snorted. He yelled something in Chinese to his wife, who walked out the shop’s back door, and yelled something in Chinese that echoed through the house.
A bit later, two children came into the shop. The boy, Peris, was the one I’d seen before. The girl Matara looked much younger. Despite having Asian faces, both looked more keihu than human. They wore keihu clothing and had keihu hairstyles, especially the girl, who sported a typical keihu stepwise haircut with big chunks of hair in different lengths and thin plaits at the front.
Huang Le said in keihu, “This is Mr Wilson from gamra. He wants to show you something.”
The children looked at me with wide eyes.
I asked, “Do you speak Isla?”
No reaction.
“Coldi?”
No reaction.
“They only speak the language of their home,” Huang Le said.
Which, clearly, was keihu. There was nothing for it: I had to tell my story in halting keihu, no doubt committing crimes against grammar along the way.
The children listened to my story, with their faces impassive, their dark eyes going over the piece of waxed paper on the table between us.
The boy shook his head when I finished speaking. He said in perfect keihu, “We wouldn’t do that sort of thing. Daddy would get very angry with us.”
Huang Le gave a self-satisfied smile.
The girl squinted at the paper. “What does it say, anyway?”
The realisation sunk in: these kids could never have written this, because they didn’t speak, write or read Isla.
“Thank you for letting me ask them,” I said to Huang Le. “They can go now.”
“Go help your mother,” he said in keihu. The children scurried off.
“No one else in town has children?”
“None that would write in Isla on a ferry timetable, put it in a jar and throw it in the water.”
“You haven’t done this?”
He snorted. “What do you take me for? Do I look like I need help?”
“Do you know anyone who might have gone out there?”
“Who writes Isla? No.”
“Anyone who has visitors?”
“No, you’re at the wrong address here. I don’t know of anyone who goes out there. I buy my fish from the Pengali.”
“You’re not missing anyone? Do you know of anyone who went fishing, or—”
“I don’t know anyone else from Earth except those people you already mentioned. I’m sorry, but I really can’t help you. I try to stay away from Earth.” He laughed, not in an amused way. “I came out here to get away from other people and their silly rules. Do you want me to spell out for you all the rules that we need to follow to have a menu in most of the cities on Earth that are worth living in? We need to cater to all diets. We can’t include foods that can lead to allergic reactions. We can’t use prawns, peanuts or peanut oil, certain spices, eggs—” He counted on his fingers. “If we want to serve those, we need approval and accreditation. That’s all very well if you’re a big business and have lots of restaurants, but for a single family, it’s ridiculous. They killed the best restaurants, that’s what.”
* * *
I rejoined Thayu and Nicha around the corner not much later. They appeared to have had a much more relaxing and enjoyable chat with a Barresh town guard about the subject of guns. Nicha clapped the man on the shoulder as the guard announced that he was going to continue with his work.
“Find out anything?” Thayu asked, although she must have known from my feeder input that I hadn’t.
“Not really.” If we’d been on Earth, I might have thought Huang Le brusque and uncooperative, but he hadn’t said anything that warranted that harsh a judgement. It had been his . . . attitude that disturbed me most. He was probably just busy, and I had never shown any interest in him, so that probably explained why he was reluctant to cooperate with me as if he were my best friend. Maybe he’d had an illegal visitor or two. Who knew?
The next person on my list was Benton Leck.
Out of all the people from Earth in the city of Barresh, I was most familiar with him.
When he wasn’t working for the History Centre, which was part of the Barresh Council and with which he was affiliated as an academic, he had his own history investigation business. This type of activity was a keihu thing where one could pay someone to investigate into the history of a family of interest, most commonly for the purpose of marriage or business.
The keihu families preferred to use non-keihu for this type of research, lest their competitors find out any juicy bits that came up, so there were a couple of these “Family Historians” in town, some Damarcian, some Kedrasi.
Leck sometimes came to the gamra island. He had been a historian for universities on Earth before coming to Barresh on a research project funded by Nations of Earth. He had never left.
Unfortunately, Benton Leck was away on business. His assistant, a middle-aged keihu woman, met us in his office, which was reminiscent of the old-style historic libraries on Earth, with shelves of musty documents, archives and a few documentation screens along the walls.
“He has gone to Miran to consult the library,” she told us. “But do come back when he returns.”
I asked her if her boss had any visitors from Earth, and she said he did not. Visitors were rare, she said, because it was so expensive.
I guess I knew about that. As far as I knew, Benton Leck was the one who most frequently visited Earth. I presumed his work paid for it.
After having assured that I’d come back when her boss returned, I left again.
Thayu and Nicha were waiting in the downstairs foyer.
“Let’s go to the Exchange while we’re here,” I said before Thayu could ask me anything. I was sure she already knew that this visit hadn’t delivered any useful information either.
I was fast getting grumpy about this goose
chase and, yes, it was my idea and, no, I hadn’t expected information to just be waiting for me. I had expected . . . I don’t know . . . a little more solidarity, a bit of help?
Not only did these people not know anything, I felt they were fundamentally uninterested in me and my jar.
We traversed the building complex through the maze of passages and courtyards until we came out at the front entrance’s foyer, where the broad marble staircase led up to the front part of the building that housed the Exchange.
Up there, at the counter, a friendly woman told me that they had no records of any people from Earth visiting in the past few weeks. Benton Leck had indeed gone to Miran, they showed me. The list of offworld visits by Earth people this year was very short—even shorter when you took me and my association off—and the list of Earth people visiting Barresh was even shorter.
Huang Le’s brother was on it, Melissa’s sister, and even Margarethe Ollund’s visit was still on the front page. How long ago was that?
So I’d drawn another blank.
CHAPTER 5
* * *
THE VISIT TO CLOVIS and Juanita took us along the northeastern tram loop. The tramline split off from the northwestern—hospital—line and described an M-shaped path along the northeastern shore of the island. It was a part of the train network that I very rarely used, a section of town that had been rebuilt not long before I came to Barresh. The houses were modern, the streets quiet, and the business premises that were dotted throughout the residential areas of the rest of the city were virtually absent. This was the height of modern Barresh suburbia.
New rich, they called this area, because any of the old rich families lived in the mansions behind the council buildings. Many people who lived in this area had made their wealth off their contracts providing services to gamra or the rapidly growing city as a result of gamra’s presence.
A short walk from the station brought us to Clovis and Juanita’s house, a low, single-storey, fairly simple-looking building with wide verandas, a sloping roof—as opposed to the flat roofs with glass domes of most of the established families’ houses—and a neatly-maintained garden that featured a lawn—that had to be a local novelty!—and clipped hedges. When we entered the gate, I half expected a dog to come bounding towards us, but quarantine would make that impossible.