The Terrorists of Irustan

by Louise Marley

Asa sat on Zahra’s chair. “I told the chief director that you had a delivery, and you were putting it away. The chief director seems a bit distracted this morning.”

  “Indeed.”

  Cook had provided coffee and fresh bread with a tiny saucer of oil. Black olives and green grapes, still on their stems, were tossed together in a bowl. There were only two cups, but Asa grinned and produced another one from a deep pocket.

  Jin-Li brought another chair from the dispensary. They all sat, and Asa poured out coffee. Zahra reached for a sprig of olives and lifted her verge to take one to her mouth. Then, exasperated, she unbuttoned it.

  Asa lifted one eyebrow. “Just tell me if you hear someone coming,” she said to him. Her eyes met Jin-Li’s and she smiled. She held out the dish of fruit to their guest. “Tell us about your home, Jin-Li. About Earth.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes elapsed before they heard Lili come through the inner door of the clinic. When she appeared in the doorway to Zahra’s office, Zahra’s veil was properly fastened and Jin-Li Chung was handing a paper manifest to Asa, who transferred it to Zahra. The extra coffee cup had disappeared. Moments later, Asa escorted the longshoreman out through the dispensary.

  “I didn’t know you were expecting another delivery,” Lili said to Zahra. “Kir Chung forgot something,” Zahra said offhandedly. “He found it in his cart. Has Diya called for a car?”

  Lili said, “The chief director will drive you to the Doma himself. He’s not going to the office, not until after you’re finished with . . . finished doing the ...” Her voice trailed away.

  Zahra snapped, “By the Maker, Lili, you’re as bad as Qadir!”

  Primly, Lili smoothed her drape over her meager bosom. “I prefer not to be diverted when I can avoid it, Medicant.”

  “I see,” Zahra said. “But I don’t have that choice, do I?”

  The outer door of the dispensary closed, and Asa limped back into the office. “Shall I go with you to the Doma, Medicant?”

  “Thank you, Asa, that would be best. I’ll assemble the things I need. We’ll leave Ishi here.”

  “I’ll go and get ready.”

  “Medicant,” Lili said. “What do you want Ishi to do today?”

  Zahra considered the manifest in her hand for a long moment. “We have very few patients today, Lili, and they’re all routine. Let Ishi handle the clinic.

  If anything difficult comes up, she can postpone it until the afternoon. I should be back by then.”

  “I’ll get Diya,” Lili said.

  “Yes,” Zahra said. “And send Ishi to me. I’ll go over the schedule with her before I go.”

  Lili followed Asa through the inner door to the house, and Zahra returned to her desk with the manifest Jin-Li had left. It was an old one, its ink faded from exposure. Every delivery on it had been long since checked off. In the bottom margin, in small, delicate script, was written a wavephone number. Jin-Li Chung’s number. Zahra smoothed it with one long finger, wondering if Jin-Li understood. She could never use it. For a woman to use a wavephone was punishable, like almost every other criminal act, by being sent to the cells.

  twenty-one

  * * *

  The man who lives a righteous life has nothing to fear when his life is over.

  —Seventeenth Homily, The Book of the Second Prophet

  The Simah of the Doma was an old man, fervent in his beliefs, rigid in his observance of the Second Prophet’s rulings. He met Qadir, Asa, and Zahra on the steps of the Doma. At first it seemed he would not even allow Zahra to enter.

  “This is outrageous,” he proclaimed. White hair flew about his heavily wrinkled face. He was a heavy man, ponderous in body and speech. His eyes disdained Zahra, and after one glance at Asa’s foot, Asa as well.

  “The medicant should not even be here,” the Simah declared. “Women’s practices taint the very air of this sacred place! My own wife never sets foot in the Doma except for funerals and cessions, and yours should have the same respect!”

  Zahra clenched her jaw beneath her verge.

  “Simah,” Qadir answered, “the directorate is facing a crisis. Nothing in the Second Prophet’s teaching addresses this. The epidemic didn’t start until he was safely on his sacred journey. But we must satisfy the ESC in this matter! Not even the Doma will survive without their patronage.”

  “Heresy!” the Simah protested in a tone too shrill for so large a man. “Irustan was carried here by the will of the One, and is kept safe by the same! So the Second Prophet assures us!”

  “Simah, I mean no disrespect,” Qadir said. “But we have little choice in this matter.” He took a step closer to the Simah, using his imposing height, every inch the chief director. He quoted, “The One sends disease as a warning to follow His laws; and He sends the remedy as a reward for obedience. It falls to us to find the remedy for this warning.”

  The Simah scowled at Qadir, and at Zahra’s veiled figure. “Not in the mortuarium,” he repeated.

  “Where, then?” Qadir asked. He took a brisk step forward, assuming victory. The Simah was no match for Qadir.

  The Simah led the way, with heavy tread, to a basement room. Zahra followed slowly, waiting for Asa, who had to drag his foot from stair to stair. Qadir stayed on the main floor, making arrangements with the undertakers to transfer Leman’s body. It had been brought to the Doma by the houseboy and an aide from City Power. The undertakers had accepted the body before they knew what it was. Now Qadir had to bribe them to move it again, with many assurances that they couldn’t contract the disease.

  The little basement room was rarely used except as a storage space, and it was chilly and dim. Zahra and Asa spread sterile sheets over every surface, and laid out their equipment on the floor and on top of old boxes and stacks of unused furniture.

  Zahra hurried her exam, knowing exactly what she was looking for and where. Asa handed her equipment as she called for it, and she took remote samples and did visual assessments as best she could in the dim light. She avoided looking at Leman’s face, keeping it covered. When she did pull back the sheet, the face was unrecognizable, a mask the color of unbaked bread. The skin had pulled tight against the bones, smoothing the lines, lightening the deep furrows around his mouth. Zahra spread the sheet back over it as soon as possible.

  Theirs was a foul task. The undertakers had been afraid to clean the body. They had hastily covered it, put it on a gurney, and retreated as far away as they were allowed. Zahra had no sympathy for them. They, at least, could converse with their Simah. Poor Asa, laboring without complaint at her side, might have been utterly invisible to every member of the Doma staff.

  Zahra and Asa washed the body and laid it out, wrapped and covered, when their work was done. They scrubbed the room thoroughly, then washed and washed again with disinfectant. They put their used clothes into a sealed bag, and put on fresh ones they had brought with them, then wearily climbed the stairs.

  Emerging into the light of the main floor, Zahra was too exhausted to be angry anymore. The undertakers were hesitating on the steps leading down to the basement as Zahra, Qadir, and Asa left the building. The Simah was nowhere to be seen.

  “They were right, Qadir,” she murmured as they walked to his car. “Leman had the leptokis disease.” She noticed Qadir kept a cautious distance from her. They were all the same, the men of Irustan. Their fear was their weakness.

  “I’ve already had a call from Onani,” Qadir said. He was pale, but his voice was level, his eyes steady. He was in charge. “It was put through from my office to the Simah’s. He hasn’t asked to see you this time, but his Dr. Sullivan has requested the postmortem report.”

  “I’ll have it ready in a few hours,” Zahra said. Qadir held the car door for her. As she stepped in to the passenger compartment, her fingers brushed his hand. He flinched away as if her touch could burn. Asa was reaching for the door into the front of the car, but he saw Qadir’s movement. He pulled back his hand, and got into the back opposite
Zahra.

  Through her fatigue, Zahra’s temper rose again. “Qadir,” she said tightly. “Asa and I are washed, our clothes discarded—gloves, masks, everything. You have nothing to fear from us.”

  He closed her door, and got into the drivers seat. “I’m going to take you home,” he said without apology. “And then I’m going to my office. Diya can call me when your report is ready.”

  Zahra drawled, “Yes. Good. That should be safe.”

  She was veiled, but Asa was not. His stricken eyes slid toward her, toward Qadir’s suddenly rigid neck, and away again. An angry flush crept over Qadir’s scalp, and he drove slightly too fast, braking hard when they reached their curving drive.

  Zahra and Asa went around the house and into the clinic through the street door. They found Lili presiding over an empty dispensary. “Ishi’s in the small surgery, Medicant.” Lili’s veiled countenance was blank as a wall. “With a patient?” Zahra asked.

  “No. Cleaning.”

  “Thank you, Lili.” Zahra went through the dispensary, turning left to her office, signaling to Asa to follow. When they were inside, she closed the door. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “1 shouldn’t have goaded Qadir like that.”

  “Probably not, Medicant,” Asa said. His tone was equable, but his face was grim.

  “I need to thank you,” Zahra said. She sat down behind her desk. “It was an awful morning. You were a great help.”“You know, Medicant, I like the work,” Asa told her. “I’m a man, but, well, I suppose you could say that this”—he gestured to his ruined foot—“has already diverted me. Whatever the reason, I like working in the clinic, and in the surgery.”

  Zahra unbuttoned her veil and pulled it away from her face. She smiled at Asa with affection and a weary gratitude. “I hardly know how to thank you for that. For saying that.” She put a hand to her neck, rubbing the tight muscles. “We’re in a strange spot, my friend. I’ve lifted the lid off a boiling pot, and I’m not sure I can put it back.”

  “Camilla took matters into her own hands, Medicant. You can’t take responsibility for that.”

  “I can and I must, Asa.” Zahra leaned her head against the high back of her chair. “She undoubtedly got some of the serum from Kalen. And I made the serum.”

  “I had a hand in that, too,” Asa said quietly.

  “It’s true. I couldn’t have accomplished it without you. Where does that leave us now?”

  Asa sat down on the small chair across from Zahra’s. “It leaves us with secrets. Necessary secrets.”

  She closed her eyes. “You’re very sensitive, Asa.”

  “You mean, for a man?”

  Her eyes opened and she laughed a little, looking at him. “Of course! All we women are sensitive, aren’t we?”

  Asa chuckled. “So says the Second Prophet.”

  “You must have suffered terribly when you were young, Asa.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I suffered. But I learned.”

  Zahra’s eyes closed again. “Asa,” she said. “Whatever happens—wherever this all leads—you are not to be implicated. You work for me, you assist me. You have fewer choices than most. None of this was your doing.”

  “I know, Medicant.”

  They sat in companionable silence for a time, and then Zahra stirred. “I’d better see Ishi now,” she said. “Find out how things went this morning.”

  “It won’t be long until Ishi’s a fully qualified medicant herself,” Asa said. “With her own clinic to run.”

  Zahra nodded. “All too soon, Asa. All too soon.”

  Asa rose, leaning heavily on his cane, and hobbled out of the office in search of Ishi. Zahra shuffled through some papers, tidying her desk. Next to her reader lay the fading manifest with the wavephone number written in the bottom margin.

  Zahra folded the manifest and slipped it into her pocket. Odd, how it made her feel. She had acquired an offworld friend—a friend outside her circle. It made her world seem infinitely wider than it had been. And if Jin-Li knew the truth about her, about what she had done? She didn’t want to think about that.

  * * *

  Kalen, Camilla, and Zahra knelt with shoulders touching among the ranks of ululating, scarlet-veiled women. Idora and Laila knelt behind them. Leman Bezay’s coffin rested on the dais in the center of the Doma, with hundreds of Irustani crowding the tiled floor around it. The men of Leman’s office and of Delta Team, dressed in white shirts and trousers and the scarlet rosettes of mourning, stood stiffly, faces immobile, as if they couldn’t hear the shrill surge of women’s voices. The six strong miners who had carried the coffin in and would carry it out again to its resting place were white-faced with fear, but they stood their ground. Zahra pitied them. They were more afraid of the scorn of their fellows than of the leptokis disease; but they were deathly afraid of the leptokis disease.

  Qadir’s tall figure wended its way toward the dais through the crowd. Camilla seized Zahra’s hand beneath her drape and squeezed it. “I’m sorry,” she hissed, her voice almost inaudible through the rise and fall of voices. “But I had to do it.”

  Kalen leaned close on the other side, the sharp bones of her shoulder digging into Zahra’s arm. She kept her head bowed as she spoke. “I gave her what was left. It was right there, on my dressing table—and I couldn’t bear to see Alekos suffer.”

  Zahra, her own head bent, cast a sidelong glance from one veiled friend to the other. It fell to her once again. Absolution, forgiveness . . . who was she to mete out those graces? The weight of responsibility lay on her, heavy as the whitewood coffin displaying Leman Bezay’s pallid-faced corpse.

  “I want you to know,” Camilla whispered, “I asked him one more time, begged him to allow Alekos to go offworld. I pleaded with him on my knees! He wouldn’t even answer me. Zahra, he had his houseman remove me from the room, drag me out by the arm as if I were a servant being punished!”

  Alekos, narrow-shouldered in his formal whites, stood at the head of the coffin, the bereaved son saying farewell to his father. His lips trembled and his face reddened and then paled, over and over. He hardly looked strong enough to stand throughout the funeral.

  Someone initiated a fresh wail of simulated grief, and the lines of women swayed. Zahra lifted her head to scan the scarlet-shrouded figures. For these women, this was their moment, and it was little enough. Weeks on end, they might see no one but the members of their own households. Day after day, they could relax only when they were alone, when they were just women together, and then not completely. Someone might come upon them doing or saying something forbidden, carry the tale to their husbands, to their Simahs. Only at these cathartic ceremonies could they let themselves go. They filled the Doma with their high-pitched laments, pent-up emotions pouring out to swirl over the heads of their husbands and brothers, to fill the Doma right to its arching roof. Even Ishi and Rabi, swaying side by side, gave themselves up to the general hysteria. And none of it, not one single mournful cry, was inspired by Leman Bezay.

  Kalen’s fierce grin was visible even through her verge. “We’ve saved two children, Zahra! What else matters? We’ve saved our children!”

  Qadir climbed the steps of the podium and began to speak, looking over the heads of the women, seeking the eyes of the men. Zahra’s chest burned with a strong emotion she hadn’t yet named. She returned the pressure of Camilla’s hand, and Kalen’s. “I know,” she murmured. “I know.”

  When the ceremony was over, the women followed the coffin out, wailing, moving as one body that swayed with their steps, right, left, right, drifting shades of scarlet. The men came behind in stiff rows. Beyond the doors, once the bearers had placed the coffin in a cart for the trip to the cemetery, the veiled women fell silent. They dropped out of line, going to the sides of the wide steps, silk skirts trailing on stone. Except for Camilla, who would follow the coffin to the cemetery, each waited now in silence, her eyes cast down and her hands folded. Husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles found their women and herded them
into cars, onto cycles, or on foot toward the Medah.

  The circle of friends stood close together on the steps. There would be a farewell after the interment, the families joining one last time at the Bezay house. Zahra, Laila, Kalen, and Idora waited in silence to be collected by their escorts.

  Rabi and Ishi joined them on the steps, and they all watched the funeral cortege wind away from the Doma, Alekos at its head. He was seventeen, considered a man. A frightened, weak man, Zahra knew. Would Camilla win?

  Would Alekos be allowed to study offworld? She was not sure who was responsible for Camilla now, although she thought there might be an uncle. Perhaps Alekos himself, at seventeen, could have his mother under his protection—but he was supposed to go to Delta Team.

  Qadir emerged from the Doma with the Simah. The Simah stopped, folding his hands, watching his flock disperse. One or two men approached him, touching their hearts, murmuring to him. He bent his head to answer their questions.

  Asa stepped forward from the shadows and followed Qadir along one wide step to where Zahra and Ishi waited with Kalen. Knots of men lingered on the stairs and on the sidewalk, talking in subdued tones, relieved the ordeal was over. They pulled back when Asa passed, stepped out of his way, turned their heads. Asa kept his eyes forward, giving no sign that he noticed.

  Below, at the curb, Laila was being helped into her car by Samir. Idora’s car was next in line. Qadir had offered to escort Kalen and Rabi to the farewell. He reached the women, and with Asa behind them, they all started down the steps.

  A sudden high-pitched wail made Zahra think for a moment the keening had begun again. She was halfway down the stairs. She looked back, casting about for the source of the sound.

  She caught only a glimpse of the woman kneeling before the Simah before a group of hurrying men cut off her view. The woman wore a brown veil that was bedraggled but intact. It was she who had cried out, was still crying out. Zahra thought she heard the words, “Please! Simah, please!”