Gwyneth Jones - Life(2005)

by Anonymous Author

  "My God, Anna. How do you keep so calm?"

  "I don't know; maybe because I'm British."

  * * *

  Before he got out of the Straits Times building, where Dream On's editorial staff was housed, Spence had heard the news people yelling that there was a mob attack on the IVF clinic. His grasp of the language was good enough for that. In the glaring heat—they were still in the monsoon but it was eleven o'clock, not raining yet— he was quickly soaked with sweat. He got turned back by an adamant police cordon and ran around and around the Parentis block, trapped by panic, unable to think what to do. He reached an intersection where a car had been overturned and pieces of concrete lay about. The air was choking with partly dissipated tear gas. There were a few people passing, young men carrying loot: a box of electronic hardware, an armful of bright-colored clothes. He thought he was at The Plaza, but he couldn't recognize anything in the smoke. The yell of sirens was everywhere, and a roar that must be power hoses. He saw someone lying on the pavement, covered in grey dust. Her face was upwards. It was Unusual Girl from the group in the old schoolhouse.

  "What are you doing here?" he demanded, dropping to his knees.

  "I don't. . .know. I was going home. I've hurt my leg."

  He couldn't remember her name, what the fuck was her name? Sunita. There was blood all over, under the grime of the blast. He took one good look at the leg and knew he wasn't going any further. Had to stay here, until someone qualified arrived. Oh, Anna—

  "Sunita, what happened?"

  "They blew up the rally. They blew up the baby-making clinic. I don't know what else."

  "What the fuck for? What's Parentis got to do with democracy?"

  "Sungai people are very superstitious, they think the AI was stealing their babies. The Penangalang. She steals the souls of poor people's babies and gives them to artificial children. That's what people think. Am I going to be all right?"

  "I think so, soon as we can get you to the hospital."

  "I'm sorry Spence, it's where your wife works isn't it."

  "Yah. But I'm sure she's okay."

  "It wasn't us, Spence. It wasn't anyone we know. It was the crazy people."

  Sunita went on talking. Spence went on answering, only letting go of her hand to release the pressure occasionally on his amateur tourniquet. (Amateurs should never do a tourniquet, but in this case. . .) He was amazed at the way she kept talking. He stopped being able to follow her, in English or Malay: he kept saying Yes, okay, I know, don't worry, in an agony of frustration and terror. He might have been kneeling by her for half an hour before he noticed that the thing beside them on the pavement, which he'd taken for a jagged chunk of concrete, was a naked, scorched, human arm and shoulder, minus the hand, lying there by itself. He was glad he had something definite to do. He'd have been lost otherwise.

  He went with her to the hospital. The ambulance team seemed to expect it, taking him for a brother or a boyfriend maybe. Spence realized that his best chance was to get to somewhere that had news feed. The hospital turned out not to be such a good bet. The casualty department was full of staggering bloody walking-wounded from the Government House car bomb. He was told first that there were no survivors from the Parentis explosion, and then that there had been no serious injuries there, but the patients had been diverted to St Joseph's, another hospital on the north side of town. No one could tell him how to get to the north side at present, in fact it could not be done. He was being severely warned, by an understandably ratty policewoman, to go home and stay indoors! when his wife appeared. She was wearing that brick-colored dress with the yellow splashes and the sexy little Audrey Hepburn belt. It was filthy and her feet were bare, her arms were black with smoke or bruises. She came up to him and leaned her forehead against his shoulder.

  "Hi Spence. How did you know I'd be here?"

  They sat on a bench in the casualty waiting area, sharing a cup of lukewarm coffee from the machine. "It was Asian," explained Anna. "He had an angina attack, he was stuck in his office. Thank God I heard him calling, the stupid bugger wasn't wearing his tag for some unknown reason, and Philip had counted him out. I walked him down the back stairs. I'd have been in shit if he'd collapsed. He's not fat exactly but he's a big lad. But he kept trucking, so we were okay. I came to the hospital with him, but I'm all right. Spence, Suri's dead."

  Spence put aside the plastic cup and held her. So far, the massive car bomb that had exploded at Government House had a toll of thirty-seven dead and twenty-three seriously hurt, plus uncounted numbers of relatively non-serious flying glass injuries. The bomb at Parentis had killed no one, but the mob had wrecked the building. No wonder Anna was in shock.

  "They got Suri? That's okay babe, she isn't dead. You have her offsite backing."

  "No. . . It was in Government House. Don't you remember? Parentis had to agree to that, it was the only way they'd let us have her running. It's gone."

  "You'll have a snapshot, they can't have trashed her so completely—"

  "They did. They trashed her, she is gone. I was going to grab my disc copy of her TY extrapolation from my desk, but then I heard Asian calling. It doesn't matter."

  The double doors at the end of the hall opened for a further influx. A nurse zoomed across, probably to tell them they should go to St Joseph's, because these casualties looked in reasonable shape. She bounced back, and the group resolved itself into two parties, the second of which was newshounds, pointing cameras and sound booms. The political ritual of visiting the victims had begun. Senior hospital staff appeared, to meet and greet. Anna and Spence watched the circus go by, but one of the women detached herself and came over to them. It was Daz.

  "Hi." She sat down on the bench. "I'm glad you're safe Anna."

  "Don't let us keep you," said Spence, with totally unjustified hostility.

  Daz shook her head. "They won't miss me."

  "So, what happened to the peaceful Equality and Democracy rally?"

  "It was side-tracked. Look, has either of you seen Ramone?"

  "No—"

  "Shit. We have to find her. Someone saw her being put into a police van, possibly. Anna, do you know anyone who might help us?"

  "No," said Anna, bewildered by the idea. "I don't know anyone."

  Anna and Spence were at first mystified that Daz was taking the absence of the rabid one so seriously. When Ramone failed to turn up the next day, they started to be afraid that she might have been killed. Sungai was full of rumors that the true body count would never be known... But no, Daz was right. Ramone had been arrested. She was being held in Kota Baru women's prison, down on the estuary, and likely to be charged with serious offences.

  Spence was disgusted. Sunita's shattered leg had been amputated above the knee. He'd visited her in hospital. She was heartbreakingly cheerful—sure this episode would be over soon and she could get back to her normal life. If Ramone thought it was cool to fool around pretending to be involved with terrorists (she'd made a highly damaging statement at the time of her arrest), then let her pay the price.

  He knew, all the same, that she couldn't be abandoned.

  It took Daz ten days to track Ramone down, it took another week to get permission to visit the prisoner. She and Anna drove together to Kota Baru. There were roadblocks all the way. It reminded Anna of Nigeria, but African for-profit roadblocks had been like a good-humored institution, except for the guns. You hardly felt that you were in danger. On this journey Anna was terrified. Several times they were pulled over and questioned. Once they were made to get out of the car and their passports and papers were taken away while it was searched. Daz had to answer a lot of questions. Her status with the EU Mission should have been a safeguard, but you couldn't rely on that. At Kota Baru they were back in the old Third World. Smokestack chemical plants muddied the air, the market square was beaten earth awash after the rains. The main street ran between broad margins of mud and rotting garbage.

  They were an hour early for their appointment.
"Let's go for a walk," said Daz.

  They walked between the estuary and Kota Baru's bus station, on a concrete promenade. "Spence was letting your email address be used as an anonymous mail drop."

  Anna swallowed hard. "What makes you think that?"

  "The fact that I was there when he told me. Please, Anna, don't be dumber than you can help. This is difficult enough. He's afraid he might have got the two of you into bad trouble, because apparently Ramone knows. Now I'm going to repeat to you a list of names, and you have to tell me if you recognize any of them. I've tried this on Spence, but you speak better Malaysian than he does, and you spent more time with Ramone."

  None of the names, most of which sounded Chinese, meant a thing to Anna. She shook her head, hands clenched in the pockets of her modest calf-length skirt to hide their trembling. She couldn't believe that she and Spence were in trouble. But they could not get out of Sungai in a hurry now, leaving Ramone in jail. No use wondering how long it would take to pack... They stood and looked over the parapet. A ribbon of bright green weed drifted by, heading out to sea on the falling tide. Across the wide water, palm oil plantations gave the horizon a uniform spiky fringe.

  "I don't know if you realize this, Anna, but it was no accident that the mob attacked Parentis. That was Ramone's friends, and it was deliberate."

  "But why would feminists attack an IVF clinic? Government House I can understand— "

  Daz stared at the muddy river. "If you don't understand, I don't think I can tell you. Anna, where you and I live, women's rights is old news. Intelligent women want to be judged on their own merits and find the whole feminist thing embarrassing and whiney. But here, where I live... it's a can of worms. If you start applying the concept of 'human rights' to women, in Asia and Africa, you uncover a holocaust. It's getting worse, not better. You think it's weird and backward to be asked to wear the hejab. You're wrong, this is the future. Everywhere, women have reverted to traditional dress, adopted traditional behaviors, accepted draconian laws. It's the only way they can hang onto their jobs, to their lives. It's a deadly polarization: where 'human rights' and 'women's rights' end up in one camp, and all the power is in the other. That's the mess Ramone's got herself into."

  "She didn't do anything!"

  "I'm not going to give her a chance to tell me any different," snapped Daz, and then sighed. "Seriously, I don't think she knew about the bombs. I don't think she did anything bad, any more than Spence was doing anything bad. That's not going to help."

  "The British Consulate certainly isn't going to help," said Anna bitterly.

  "They never do. Let's go, it's time."

  The Kota Baru prison was a collection of sour white buildings inside a big wire fence. They had to wait, first in the governor's office and then alone in a small room with a guard. Finally Ramone was brought to them. She was wearing the same tee-shirt she'd been wearing at the Riverrun, and a grubby blue and white checkered man's sarong. She looked dirty and thin, and cowed as a wet kitten. She sat opposite them across a little table, a woman in uniform standing on either side. When she found out she wasn't going to be released she began to cry. She said she was eating all right. She was in a shared cell, a kind of dormitory with other women who were all right, except that none of them spoke English. She hadn't seen anyone from the rally since they were split up at the first police station. She said that she could often hear screaming, and she was very, very frightened. Anna looked at Daz when Ramone said this, hoping for reassurance. Daz was keeping a straight face. So were the guards.

  "I haven't told them anything," boasted the rabid one. "Not a word."

  "You haven't anything to tell," said Daz. "You signed something when you were arrested, when you were frightened and didn't understand what was going on. You're going to retract that statement."

  "I understand more than you think!" Ramone bristled, "I'm not a terrorist, but I will not condemn my sisters' actions. The issues in Sungai are issues of sexual politics."

  Daz clasped her hands, either praying for patience, or possibly to stop herself from thumping the prisoner. Anna was afraid to speak, fearing that anything she could say might plunge Ramone into worse idiocy.

  "At least you're in one piece," said Daz. "Don't worry, we'll get you out."

  They were allowed to give her cigarettes, for currency, and a food parcel. The food was taken away for examination, and Daz and Anna were escorted to the prison gates.

  "This is a tough one," said Daz.

  * * *

  Anna went to see Wolfgang. He lived in a tower block overlooking the Taman Burung. It was a nice location, but the flats were small. Anna, who had been sensitive to such things since the bomb blast, started thinking at once how choking it would be in these small rooms if the air conditioning cut out. And such a long way from the ground. You wouldn't escape easily. She was surprised at the perfunctory furnishing. His little kitchen was full of gadgets—they stood in there, while he made coffee in a fancy machine—but his living room held nothing beyond the most standard typically-tropical fittings: a cheap rattan couch, table and chairs, a pallid shag-pile rug. An empty bookcase stood against one wall, next to a mass-market Pacrim home-entertainment stack. Perhaps he did not spend much time at this address. He was wearing his usual bright shirt and tight jeans, but his blond hair was scraped back harshly and his face, without makeup, looked gaunt and strange.

  "Ginger syrup? Yes you do, it will perk you up. I'm sorry I have no booze in the house."

  Anna stirred her coffee. "Wolfgang, do you remember once you offered me some 'get-out-of-jail-free tokens'? Did you mean anything by that?"

  "Ah."

  It was three weeks since Equality and Democracy day. Some activists had been arrested, others had gone to ground. The blast area was still cordoned off, but so far there had been no more trouble. Wolfgang placed his cup and saucer carefully on a paper coaster, on the glass-topped coffee table. He stood and went to look out of the window over the park, arms folded. "This is for your friend, isn't it. The little friend with whom you went missing from the Riverrun."

  "Yes."

  "She's been a bad, stupid girl I hear. And the more stupid she is, the better you like her. I am right?"

  Anna thought of the wet kitten, and without warning tears came brimming. She nodded.

  He walked up and down by his window, looking different, looking like someone older, harder, that she didn't know—until he turned, tossing his head, with a roguish, twinkling smile. "Oh Anna, you know what fairies are like. I'm afraid you may have said the magic word, that makes me give my last boon and disappear."

  "I don't want you to get into trouble."

  "But we don't want your little friend to 'disappear' in the technical sense?"

  "She isn't going to disappear. They're going to hang her. Daz says they'll do it."

  "Well, that is also something to avoid. Don't worry, it's no sacrifice. My credit was running low. I may as well spend it all at once, and then I simply take a plane and find a new banker."

  There were wild rumors, fostered by Wolfgang of course, but no one knew for sure what lay behind the jealously preserved mystery of his private life. At the end of this short interview, Anna still wasn't sure that he could or would do anything for Ramone. Wolfgang liked to be valued. He made you pay for his office efficiency with lots of strokes and coaxing and cajoling. Maybe he just enjoyed the game of being asked for cloak-and-dagger help. It was a part for Dietrich: the femme fatale with a heart of gold.

  She never did find out for sure. But a few days later Ramone Holyrod was on a plane home, and Wolfgang had vanished. Anna never saw him again.

  * * *

  The day the police declared the building safe, Anna went in to start closing the clinic down. Parentis, while denying rumors that they were pulling out, wanted the withdrawal implemented at speed. Contract workers would finish their time elsewhere.

  It was not her job to assess the damage to SURISWATI, but she couldn't resist the tug of the se
cret room. If human genetics expert systems were going to be terrorist targets, the hardware would have to have better protection. The mob had smashed its way in without much difficulty in the end. She stood looking round, touching nothing, wondering in her ignorance where in these broken fragments Suri herself had lived. She had been haunted, since the blast, by the terrible conviction that Suri had been real. . . A child had been killed here: a lively, adventurous, brilliant little girl, who had spent her short life in a cage, and died alone in terror. An unexpected sound made her jump. Asian was standing in the doorway, holding a big bouquet of white specimen chrysanthemums.

  "This wasn't necessary," he said, in distaste. "A few passes with a strong magnet would have sufficed."

  "I suppose. Aren't modern machines shielded? I don't know enough about it. What are those for? A funeral wreath?"

  He held out the bouquet, embarrassed. "They're for you. I asked your husband which were your favorite. It's inadequate, I know. You saved my life."

  "De nada." She wondered how long he'd been suffering angina, that ominous and painful symptom, and telling no one at the office. So now she had another good friend, like KM Nirmal. It was like being a battered wife. They do you harm, then they're your humble servants; they can't do enough to make up: until next time. But she knew it was irrational to blame him. The mob had gone through the three floors of Parentis like a grass fire. Anna could have done nothing, even if she hadn't been helping Asian.

  She had found the TY disks, undamaged: not that they meant very much, without SURISWATI to back them up. Not that they meant much anyway. Those findings were unpublishable.

  "What does Penangalang mean?" he asked. "I've heard it in the coverage, but I seem to have missed the point. They thought our AI was some kind of vampire?"

  The word was spray-paint scrawled over every wall. "Sort of a vampire. A woman, possibly dead after a miscarriage or stillbirth or possibly still alive, I'm not sure. Her spirit goes about at night sucking blood from newborn infants and women in labor."