The Terrorists of Irustan (10 page)

nine

*   *   *

Violation of Port Force policy will result in immediate dismissal and retransfer to Earth.

—
Offworld Port Force Terms of Employment

J
in-Li Chung
stepped onto the tiny balcony of the Port Force quarters and breathed in the hot morning. The air tasted sharp and sweet, a tonic stronger than any stimulant. The morning breeze carried the tang of the met-olive groves growing north of the city. Jin-Li began morning exercises with a will.

A sleep-rough voice complained from the next apartment. “Johnnie!” Tony groaned. “Up so early!”

“Special orders,” Jin-Li said, arms stretched wide, almost side to side across the little balcony, then down to each bare foot, right, left, right again. No fighting stances until hamstrings and ankles were thoroughly warmed up. “Off to the Akros this morning.”

“The Akros? For what?” Tony’s black curls appeared from his door, his eyes squinting against the glare. “God. Bright.”

Jin-Li chuckled, straightening, stretching to touch the floor of the matching balcony above. “Back to bed, Tony.”

Tony groaned. “God. Energy. Makes me tired.” His head disappeared, the sliding door clicking neatly shut after him.

Jin-Li did two more stretches, twisting and bending, then swiveled into a kick stance. Ten front kicks, ten side, ten back, the minimum to stay in shape. Easy perspiration popped out in the morning heat. Jin-Li could have stayed at the practice, but time was short today. With a bow to the rising sun, Jin-Li went back through the sliding glass door. It was almost chilly in the apartment, the cooler buzzing incessantly.

The Port Force apartments were compact arrangements of bedroom, closet, and miniature bath. They were all alike, scaled-down and kitchenless. They were small, but every Port Force employee was allotted one, which meant that most of them had more privacy than they had ever enjoyed on Earth.

Jin-Li’s rooms were tidy, bed made and folded into its slot in the wall, all possessions stowed, all uniforms and off-duty clothes—an eclectic mix of gym clothes and bits of Irustani clothing picked up in the Medah—neatly hung in the slender closet. A handful of flowers bloomed in a pottery vase beneath a framed piece of calligraphy. Another frame held an ancient fragment of elegant embroidery, outlawed centuries ago because its makers lost their sight over its tiny stitches. This piece Jin-Li had angled so it blocked the built-in comm panel with its miniature camera. Stacks of discs and readers filled the shelves that lined the tiny living room.

Jin-Li snatched cap and keys from the table and spoke to the door. It opened, and Jin-Li trotted down the four flights of stairs to the grounds, scorning the lift, enjoying the flex of muscles and joints. The cart waited in the covered parking area beside the building, its cable extended and inserted into the voltaic feed. The driver’s compartment was breathlessly hot when Jin-Li climbed in and retracted the cable.

Port Force longshoremen worked hard when the shuttles came in. Turnaround time for the spacecraft was short, and the payloads were heavy. Offloading a shipment could easily take fourteen or fifteen hours. But in between shuttle arrivals, free time was generous, and diversions, at least for longshoremen, abounded. The few women employed by Port Force on Irustan were forced to entertain themselves on port grounds only; but other workers had both time and the means to explore the desert around the city, fish in the reservoir, shop in the Medah. Liberal time off was an added inducement to Port Forcemen to sever all ties to family and friends, say farewell to Earth, and take the long, long trip to the colony planets. The pay was generous, too, assuring a comfortable, if lonely, Earth retirement.

Jin-Li’s reasons for coming to Irustan were a bit different. Home life in the crowded urban sprawl of Kowloon Province had been bleak. Jin-Li had yearned to be an archivist, one of the historians who studied and recorded histories of the colony worlds, but that required education, and education was expensive. No one in the Chung family had ever attended university, nor was ever likely to, and Jin-Li Chung had been driven in search of an outlet, a channel for a rampant curiosity and abundant energy. Port Force wave ads reached even into the Chinese suburbs, and Jin-Li had an application on file long before reaching the minimum age of twenty-two. When the acceptance came, Jin-Li had already been living four years in the squalid hostels of downtown Hong Kong, eking out a living by teaching in a dojo, impatient with the crowded, dangerous streets. Space, freedom, and curiosity attracted Jin-Li to Port Force.

The empty cart, light alloy bed rattling in the wind, wheeled easily over the road from the port to the city. Traffic was sparse, and Jin-Li drove quickly, occasionally calling out greetings to other Port Force employees. The morning light beat down on a craggy woman with tattoos up and down her arms, tending the odd shrubs called mock roses. A man with a case in his hand crossed the street in front of Jin-Li’s cart, on his way to the control tower. Everyone wore the wide glasses and arbitrary bits of the rest of the uniform. A supply cart passed, coming up from the Medah with produce to provision the meal hall.

Jin-Li pulled out the reader with the medicant’s address. Ah, Zahra IbSada again—the beautiful Zahra IbSada. Jin-Li had caught one clear glimpse of her behind the gauzy curtain of her clinic, her face unveiled, her skin smooth, her eyes the deep blue of the waters of the reservoir. No doubt the longshoremen who fantasized about Irustani women would be disappointed by most of the faces hidden by rill and verge. But not by Medicant IbSada’s. Hers was a face to remember.

It was a puzzle—surely everything on that list had already been delivered? Well, no matter—any excuse to move among the Irustani suited Jin-Li.

Medicant Zahra IbSada was the wife of the chief director of the mines, and her clinic easy to remember. Chief Director IbSada had the biggest house in the Akros, one that many Port Force guests visited. It was a classic Irustani construction, long and low, squandering space in a way few Earth houses could afford to do. The street was clean and smooth, and beds of mock roses splashed subtle colors of gray-green leaves and dark red blooms against the sparkling sandrite of the walls.

Jin-Li left the cart in the narrow lane behind the house, leaping out and trotting up the walk to the clinic door. The door opened immediately. Asa, one of the IbSada servants, stood in the shaft of brilliant light. He gestured to Jin-Li to enter, and then closed the door on the blazing heat. The clinic was cool and shadowed, and except for Asa, the dispensary was empty.

*   *   *

Asa remembered this Port Forceman’s elegant manners from the first time he had appeared at the clinic. Chung removed his dark glasses and pushed them into his breast pocket. He touched his heart with his right hand, just above the circled star, and opened the fingers gracefully. “Good morning, Kir IbSada.”

Asa touched his own heart to the longshoreman. “Kir Chung,” he said. “The medicant thanks you for coming so promptly.”

Chung’s narrow eyes with their sleepy eyelids swept the dispensary. The doors to the two surgeries stood open. “The medicant?” he asked. “She needs something?”

Asa waved his hand toward the tiny office to the left of the reception desk. “The medicant is in her office. She asked me to speak for her.”

Disappointment flickered across Chung’s face and disappeared. He said only, “Of course.”

His voice was light and pleasant, without inflection. Asa thought he was much easier to understand than some of the longshoremen, his vowels more open, his consonants less rushed. There had been Port Forcemen whose speech had been almost unintelligible to Asa, even with Zahra’s help. But then, Johnnie Chung was different, and that was why they had asked for him.

Asa picked up a reader from the desk. “The medicant needs regen catalyst,” he said quickly.

Chung frowned. “You’re sure?” He glanced at the smaller, more compact reader in his own hand. “Could check, but I’m sure—eighteen days ago, I stocked re-cat, oxygen, plasma . . .”

Asa felt his cheeks redden, but he persevered. It had been decided, and he couldn’t fail now. “Kir,” he said softly “The medicant asked us to borrow some. From Medicant Iris B’Hallet.”

Iris B’Hallet’s clinic was not close by. It was not even in the Akros. Asa showed the Port Forceman the address and held his breath, watching Chung’s eyes flash around the empty dispensary, over to Zahra’s closed office door, back to his own face. The longshoreman’s chin tilted slightly, and he met Asa’s eyes.

“You’re Asa, aren’t you?”

Asa nodded, leaning on his cane to take the pressure off his twisted foot.

Chung suddenly grinned, looking instantly younger, showing white teeth in a smooth brown face. “They call me Johnnie.” He tapped the address of Medicant Iris into his tiny reader and thrust it into his pocket, exchanging it again for his dark glasses. “Better be on our way, Asa. Wouldn’t want Kira IbSada running out of re-cat!” He put on the glasses and stepped to the door. He smiled as he held it open for Asa to make his slow way through, and his eyes didn’t shy away from Asa’s foot.

It was not unusual for Port Force to be called in to shift pharmaceuticals from one clinic to another. Only Port Force carts were outfitted with CA compartments for transport. There was no point in putting such equipment in an Irustani car. Irustani women were forbidden to drive, and no Irustani man would agree to transport medical materiel.
Except me, of course,
Asa thought. As he maneuvered himself into the front compartment of Chung’s cart with a wrench of his good leg, he saw sympathy on Johnnie’s face. He averted his own gaze, then chided himself. What did it matter, after all these years? At least Chung didn’t act as if the very sight of him were a curse from the Maker!

Chung clipped his reader into place on the dash of the cart and started the little motor. He checked the address one more time, put one finger on the wheel, and pulled away from the clinic in the direction of the Medah.

“Kir—I mean Johnnie,” Asa said. “Do you need directions?”

Chung shook his head. “No. 1 know my way.” He grinned at Asa with a mouth that was wide and generous beneath the dark mask of his glasses. “Other side of the city. Almost all the way to the reservoir.”

Asa gazed out the lowered window of the compartment, watching the elegant residences of the Akros spin by. Johnnie Chung was no fool. He had to suspect there was a special reason, an invented reason, for this trip to Iris B’Hallet. Yet he asked no questions, cooperated as if he knew the importance of their errand. No offworlder in Asa’s narrow experience had ever behaved in such a way.

In a short time, the cart left the Akros and slowed as it motored into the narrower, rougher streets of the Medah. Chung avoided the press of cycles and cars around the market, swinging wide of the center to get through the city. When the streets grew broader, smooth again, he sped up. Asa, watching, saw a glimmer of blue ahead, between the gray buildings. They were almost to the edge of the Medah, where the houses, though not so spacious as those in the Akros, were more generous than the single-story homes of those who lived in the center of the city. Some of the upper class chose to live near the reservoir, where the scent of fresh water blew into their gardens, and the vista of blue gave an illusion of coolness on the hottest days.

Chung checked his reader once more before swinging the cart up to the house of Assistant Director B’Hallet, and then around it, looking for the entrance to Medicant Iris B’Hallet’s clinic. The house was perhaps two-thirds the size of the chief director’s, and the clinic was set in a small wing extending to the west, away from the view of the water. Asa spotted it first. “There,” he said, feeling a tightness in his throat at the daring of his mission. “There it is, Johnnie.”

It was an undistinguished portal with curtained windows to either side. There was no sign or number. A cycle was parked on the street nearby.

Asa swung his legs around and put his good foot on the pavement, then his cane, and finally, his bad foot. Chung waited with no sign of impatience.

“Are we expected?” he asked when Asa hobbled around the cart.

Asa looked up at the clinic. No one looked back, and there was nothing visible from the street. “I called Medicant B’Hallet’s houseboy,” he said. “They know we’re coming.”

Asa reached into the pocket of his loose trousers for the portable Zahra had given him. The trickiest part was to get the portable into Iris’s hands without being seen. There was real risk, Zahra having to trust Iris, Asa having to trust this sympathetic Port Forceman. The stakes were high. Asa found his life difficult at times, but he had no wish to end it in one of the cells on the hill overlooking the Medah.

*   *   *

Jin-Li saw Asa put his hand in his pocket, and knew immediately that something was up. Medicant IbSada had something to say to Medicant B’Hallet, or something to ask, but the two women had no way of talking to each other.

R-waves were as efficient at reaching from the Akros to the Medah as they were at reaching from Earth to Irustan. R-waves, or hyperwaves, the super frequency unaffected by weather or vacuum, obstacle or distance, had revolutionized communications. Without rhodium, r-waves were intransmissible. Without rhodium, the ExtraSolar Corporation would collapse. Nearly immediate communication held the farflung branches of the business together. Irustan would always be allowed to manage itself so long as the mines were productive.

No one in Port Force gave the wavephone a thought. But r-waves and their instruments—or cars, cycles, mining equipment, even money—were forbidden to Irustani women, including the medicants. Jin-Li knew the homily:

Should a man dream of flying while he labors through stone? Should a woman long for the emptiness of space when her home is full of children? Let us name it a sin to tempt an Irustani from his duty Destiny is decided by the One. Duty is to discover its meaning.

—Twenty-first Homily,
The Book of the Second Prophet