by Patty Jansen
“Wow,” Thayu said.
“Yes,” Nicha agreed. “This is different.” He glanced at the neighbouring house, a blocky structure with two floors and extensive metal latticework and coloured glass windows that characterised the keihu building style.
Clovis’ house looked, I realised, like something out of old movies in which people from various countries in Europe moved to countries in Africa to become landowners. Colonial, that was the word.
“Hello?” a woman called from the veranda, in Isla. “Why, Mr Wilson, is that you? Welcome to our house. Come up here.”
“We’ll wait here,” Thayu said, nodding at a garden bench with an overhanging trellis heavy with a creeping plant with trumpet-like, pink flowers.
They sat down in the shade, and I went up to the house.
As soon as I stepped onto the veranda, I understood why the house had no second floor: Juanita sat in a wheelchair.
She was probably in her early seventies, Earth years, had long grey hair that hung loose over her broad, fleshy shoulders. She wore a wide dress with bright patterns in purple, pink and mustard that didn’t fully disguise the fact that she enjoyed her food. Both her legs stopped at the knee.
I did my utmost best not to stare, and felt deeply ashamed for never seeking these people out. They could have used some help.
She held out a fleshy hand and I shook it, Earth style. Her eyes glittered with mirth.
“And what is the lofty occasion that you come off the island to visit us?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you. I have a question for both of you.”
“Oh—it’s all right. Don’t bother with the formalities. Let’s go inside.”
She waved her hand and a young Pengali woman resolved from the shadows. I hadn’t noticed her before because she wore no shirt and the skin on her shoulders and arms was marked with big pigment blotches, a bit like the markings on a giraffe. This made her well camouflaged against the background of the shelf next to the door, which contained pots and hats and boots and gardening things. Her patterns were very unusual. I was only familiar with the stripes and the spots. I wasn’t aware there were other varieties.
The Pengali woman wheeled Juanita’s chair into the house, negotiating a screen door without any trouble. I followed them, looking at the Pengali’s black-and-white banded tail.
“We got visitors,” Juanita announced when we entered the kitchen.
An elderly man sat at the kitchen table, writing by hand in a thick book. His hair was white and his face red, tanned but blotched with darker and lighter pigment patches. I guessed he was half his wife’s width, his arms protruding like sticks from the too-wide sleeves of a locally made felt kaftan.
He closed the book and pushed it aside. “Oh. Mr Wilson. What an honour to have you here. Would you like some tea?”
I said I would, and we made some small talk while the Pengali woman drew hot water from the inlet and busied herself with the teapot. I asked him how business was going and he talked a bit about the storm and how one of his businesses was a building company which had received several calls for help to replace broken sheds and leaking roofs.
“And all your ferries that washed out into the marshland,” Juanita said.
“Oh, that wasn’t so bad,” Clovis said.
“Not bad? With all the damage we had, and two whole days of reduced services? And all the people you had to pay to get them back into the channels?”
Clovis shrugged. “It happens.”
Juanita spread her fleshy hands and rolled her eyes at me. “ ‘It happens,’ he says. Mr Wilson, you should have heard him when it happened. It was the end of the world. He spent a whole day out there himself and got himself covered in bites of all those horrible little creatures. I told him to leave it to the young guys, but no, the customer always comes first and we have to be seen to serve the customer—”
“Darling, please, I’m sure Mr Wilson is not here to talk about that.”
No, apparently Mr Wilson was not.
The Pengali woman put the teapot on the kitchen table.
Clovis turned to her and said something. He spoke Pengali. I had never heard a non-Pengali person speak Pengali. It was a complicated, intricate language with many nuances. It sounded . . . odd to hear him speak it. Quite well, too.
The woman picked the teapot back up and carried it out the other door into the kitchen. Clovis pushed his partner’s wheelchair, and I followed to the back veranda, where a set of benches and chairs surrounded a low table.
The back of the yard sloped down to the edge of the island. Being close to midday, and dry season, a good section of beach and adjacent reed beds were exposed, but behind the reed beds was the channel that took a lot of the water that came off the Mirani highlands to the ocean. It was the same channel where we had been fishing and where, around the corner on the beach, I had found the jar.
We sat down.
The Pengali woman poured us tea, and then left after Juanita said something to her, also in Pengali.
“She’s a good girl,” Clovis said when the screen door had fallen shut after her black and white banded tail. “I don’t care much that you think this is all very colonial.”
“I don’t think—”
“Oh, yes, you do, I can see it in your face. We’re like the white plantation owners in Africa, teaching the natives manners, bringing religion to them, by God.” He sighed and shook his head.
“We’re providing a service, Mr Wilson,” Juanita said. “These young people come here from the tribes and they want to work in town, but they don’t have the slightest clue about all the shenanigans that unscrupulous city employers and apartment owners try to pull on them. They get ripped off left, right and centre, and get forced to work for starvation wages, or for food and accommodation only. So we offer them a job when they first arrive, so that we can teach them to avoid those traps.”
Hmm . . . as far as I knew the patronage system was alive and well in Barresh. The large keihu households brought their entire extended family and staff, Pengali included, into those huge mansions, and they all lived there like a mini-village. This part of Barresh still had a large barter economy. Not only was it crass to advertise too much, it was considered tacky to charge fellow keihu. People had “accounts”, but few transactions ever saw anything that could be described as money.
But I left the subject. I was not an expert on Barresh society, and it was indeed not why I had come here.
I took the jar from my bag put it on the table and took the piece of paper out.
Clovis had to go and get his glasses to look at it. While we waited, and Juanita chatted about the Pengali youngsters and where they’d gone on to find jobs—because she didn’t seem to be able to shut up—I couldn’t stop glancing at the fast-churning water that flowed past the house. One only needed to throw a jar in there and it would float all the way to the ocean at a steady clip.
Clovis came back with a pair of white-framed glasses on his nose. Wow, I hadn’t seen any of those for ages. Those were fashionable on Earth when I was a teenager.
He studied the jar. “This is not old,” was the first thing he said. He knew how fast mould could grow inside a warm bottle.
“No, it isn’t.” I went on to explain where I had found it.
“All the way out on the sand bar?”
“It could have been washed out of the city with the storm.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Surfing, fishing.”
“Fishing? It’s Thousand Islands tribe territory. You need a permit to fish.”
“Not on the sand bar.” That was what Veyada said. “I know the islands, for sure, are Thousand Islands territory.”
Smart one, Mr Wilson; the name kind of gave it away.
“Did you pass the yellow buoy on the way out?”
“There’s a flight beacon just before you get to the sand bar. It’s a big yellow thing.”
“That’s it. That’s the tribal land boundary.”
“It’s a flight beacon.”
“It’s that, too, but it is in that position to indicate the boundary.”
I stared at him. Well, there you go, Mr Wilson. Surprises lurk in the smallest corners.
“Did you come here to learn something about the Pengali?”
I said, “No, I wanted to ask a question. Do you get any visitors from Earth?”
“Who wants to visit us?” Clovis said, snorting. “We got no friends left, and if we die, none of our money will be worth anything on Earth, so the relatives don’t come either.”
Juanita shook her head. “And if they do, they’re not getting anything. I’ll tell them that after I deducted contributions normal people would have given their wheelchair-bound relatives, there wasn’t much left of their inheritance, so I’ve given it to people who will appreciate it more than they do. I wish I could see their faces when they’re all gathered in the solicitor’s office.”
“Would either of you have any clue about how that piece of paper got where I found it?”
Clovis pulled a face and shook his head.
Juanita spread her hands. “Someone trying to play a practical joke?”
“I could believe that if it was left on my doorstep or found on the gamra island, but no one knew that I was going to visit that beach. We didn’t even know ourselves. There is no one out there.”
“That’s what you say, but as soon as you go past that buoy, you’re being watched. Mark my word.”
“You’re suggesting that the Pengali would play a practical joke?”
“I’m not. I’m just disputing that there is no one there.”
“But who has written this? That is what I’m interested to hear.”
“I truly have no idea, Mr Wilson.”
“No,” Juanita said. “It’s no one we know from here. But sometimes people have illegal visitors.”
“Which of the people have illegal visitors? Do you know any cases?”
Her cheeks flushed. “Oh, people. It happens a lot. I mean people from all over. I know that the Tamerians came in that way, and I’ve heard of other cases.”
“I don’t think that’s relevant, dear,” Clovis said, his voice sharp.
“Mr Wilson wanted to know how it could happen. That’s how. That’s all. I don’t actually know of any cases where people from Earth came in that way. What would I know, sitting here in a wheelchair all day—”
“Dear, Mr Wilson wants to know about this particular case.”
Juanita’s face grew even redder. She looked down.
“I’m sorry, my partner gets a bit carried away sometimes. We don’t have any concrete evidence.”
“But you do have suspicions?”
“One always has to have suspicions, but that’s more to do with business.”
“Benton Leck?”
“God, no. That man is a saint.”
“Huang Le?”
“He’s too busy with his food. He might get the occasional illegal cook, but nothing major.”
“Jasper Carlson?”
He said nothing. His mouth twitched. Eventually, he said, “I don’t like that man. That’s all I’ll say about it. It’s not relevant to your question. I don’t know who has written this. I truly have no idea and that’s the truth.”
I left the house not much later, feeling queasy with the tea. I went down the veranda and through the meticulously kept garden to where Thayu and Nicha sat on two garden benches that faced each other. Well, Thayu sat reading. Nicha lay on his back, with his feet on the armrest and his hands behind his head. He was asleep.
“Hmm, you took your time,” Thayu said.
Nicha gasped and sat up.
His sister laughed.
“Don’t laugh. Babies are exhausting.”
“How did it go?” Thayu asked me.
“Don’t ask. I’ve had enough tea to last me a lifetime. Not the best quality either.”
While we made our way back to the station, I filled them in on my visit and how Clovis and Juanita firmly believed they were why the Pengali didn’t get exploited more often.
“They mean well,” I said. “But I honestly don’t think they understand how Pengali society works. They’re trying to push it into human boxes with human descriptors.”
It was as Melissa had said: all these people had broken with their former lives on Earth in a way I had not. It was disturbing, Huang Le trying to be keihu, Clovis and Juanita trying to “help” the Pengali—who truly did not need help, but that aside. Did they look at me in the same way, as trying to be Coldi?
I pushed that uncomfortable thought away.
I was learning lots, but none of the things I wanted to learn.
The last person on my list was Jasper Carlson, the man everyone professed to hate.
Visiting him required getting back to the station, catching the tram into town and then changing to the southern train line that zoomed over the water along the much more densely populated suburbs where the stations were at the water’s edge.
In the older parts of the city, business premises were always mixed with residential ones. In any one street, you could find eating-houses, warehouses, shops and offices.
I had learned that Jasper Carlson lived in the caretaker’s apartment attached to a warehouse which he used for his business.
The door to the warehouse was shut and when I knocked, it was opened by a male keihu assistant of middle age.
Yes, his boss was there, but he was busy and about to go out. Could I please come back later? I spotted Jasper at the back of the warehouse, on the steps that led into the office: a tall man with long black hair which he wore in a ponytail. Melissa had not made any concessions to local styles in her appearance. Clovis had dressed very much like my grandfather had done in New Zealand. Huang Le acted keihu but had made no great effort in changing his appearance, either. But this man looked . . . Damarcian perhaps. Not from Earth at any rate.
I spoke up so that he could hear us. “Tell your boss that if he has a moment I would like to know if he’s had any visitors from Earth.”
A voice called from the back of the shed, “Tell Mr Wilson that it’s none of his business.”
I yelled back at him, “Good afternoon to you, too, Mr Carlson.”
There was the sound of footsteps down the stairs and the shuffling as Jasper Carlson came to the door. Scratch the Damarcian; he could have passed for a keihu man, with sleek dark hair and olive skin, if it weren’t for his nose, which was narrow and grooveless. He was probably on the slight side of normal for a keihu man, too.
“What do you want?” He stuck his chin in the air.
He glared at me as I explained the situation, which, with all the practice I’d had today, I could do in a couple of sentences. I showed him the jar.
He didn’t reply immediately. He frowned at the jar. His mouth worked.
Eventually he said, “Am I supposed to know who the sender of this . . . thing is?”
“No. I’m only wondering if anyone you know has gone missing?”
“If I knew that someone had gone missing, sending us messages in a bottle, the first thing I would do is to tell the guards about it, wouldn’t I?”
* * *
“I suggest you forget about it,” Thayu said on the way back in the train. “Someone played a prank. No one wants to talk to you about it, even if they may know what happened—”
“They don’t know what happened.”
“Well, that’s pretty much the same. They don’t want your help or your involvement. And they don’t want you to know who did it.”
“That’s not the same thing. They may not want my help or involvement, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be told. If any of them played a prank, and got a bunch of Pengali to carry this message out there to keep me busy, then why not fess up and apologise?” I spread my hands.
Thayu sighed. “These people make you grumpy. I hate it when you’re grumpy.”
“Yeah,” Nicha said. “Whatever th
ey’re up to, it’s not worth it. We’ve got stuff to do. You’ve done what you can. It’s not your job.”
I turned the jar over in my hands.
They were right, but I didn’t like unsolved mysteries.
CHAPTER 6
* * *
ON THE WAY home in the train, I tried very hard to forget about the note in the jar.
But I wasn’t quite ready to discount it completely, so I set the jar on the corner of my desk in my office, just in case I needed it, or I got some inspiration, or a visitor saw it and remembered having seen it before, and went on with the rest of my work.
After lunch, I went to find Devlin in the hub. He had sent me a long list of documents and directories that I needed to check, to decide what level of security they needed.
The prospect of spending the whole afternoon doing this annoyed me, and after the morning’s waste of time, I was easy to annoy. I asked him, “Why don’t we just hire storage space and put all of it in the highest security? This sort of thing keeps happening, and we keep wasting time on it.”
“You have just answered your own question, Muri. This keeps happening. It keeps happening because people make mistakes or become smarter at cracking secure processes. Or they get access through some loyalty chain. These things change all the time. People slip up, people get smarter. If we put everything under one level, no matter how high, they’d crack that and have access to everything. Nothing is unbreakable. And working with highly encrypted information is extremely laborious. You would quickly find it annoying.”
As in: You have no patience, Muri. Right. I got the message.
Someone order an emergency truckload of fucking patience for me.
I guess he was right, but these constant security breaches were an annoying side effect of having one foot in a society that operated with levels of security and needs-to-know and one in a society that relied on openness of all records.