Protegée, the third of the Forest series of hard Science Fiction novels, shows Eleanian Society dealing with the evil when a small part of the rest of the human race re-invents slavery and the rest of the human race looks the other way. At the same time, Eleanian Society begins to rediscover its own values and direction, becoming once more outward-looking and pioneering, without, of course, jeopardising the world they have built to suit themselves. Interested publishers can contact the author by e-mail.
Protegée is Copyright (c) M.K. Spencer 2007
Chapter 1, Sentinels
Amanda reminded herself, not for the first time, that it was because of her promotion that she was stuck out on the periphery of the system in an interceptor, trying to frighten passing traffic into respecting Eleanian jurisdiction. An image floated before her eyes, of a nice, big, white, trans-atmospheric “Swallow.” The vision was flying in honest air, soaring, banking, gliding and rolling down a runway to let its pilot get her body under a shower and into bed, there to lay her face to rest against her lover’s breasts.
The big and white theme of the daydream continued: June’s body was incredible, deliciously curvy and yet firm and pneumatic. Apart from the obvious delights of a body built like an adventure playground, June was beautiful of face and voice, highly intelligent and, as Director of the University Department of Stellar Science, interested in space and spacecrew. Her one fault was that she wasn’t in the Space Corps and, more specifically, she wasn’t in the interceptor or anywhere else within several billion miles. Amanda returned to unpleasant reality and wriggled out of the minimal sleeping berth at the back of the control cabin.
Her fellow crewmember was strapped into one of two acceleration couches, which more-or-less filled the cabin. The other girl, Harriet, was junior in terms of rank and length of service. However, the young sub-lieutenant had served more time on this particular type of craft and duty than Amanda. “I’ll relieve you now if you like, Harry.” “I’m afraid not, Captain; that berth hasn’t got the room and, besides, I’ve been saving up my sexual tension for my next leave. Apparently, my kid sister has been passing my holo round at her school and I have a healthy fan club of sixteen year-olds. I’ve told her that if any of them want to visit the Capital this summer, I’ll put them up in my flat.”
Amanda sighed. Sub-lieutenants had changed neither their sense of humour nor their tendency to plan their lives around hopeful fantasies since, well, since she’d been the old-fashioned equivalent of one herself. “Unless you’re really into crisp thighs and innocence, young lady, I’d advise you to stick to older women; they have more stamina and, at your age, well: you’re still learning. I expect that you’ve read Susan Appleby’s ‘A Young Lady’s Guide to her Best Friend’s Body?’” “As a matter of fact, I haven’t. Is it a required text?” “It is, if you’re planning team games with schoolgirls.”
As she strapped in, Amanda reflected that the fan club might very well have gawped at the book themselves; it was part of teenage culture these days, apparently. She decided to keep quiet about the fact that she knew the author: people in the Corps might draw the wrong assumptions about the relationship. “Okay, Lieutenant, let’s go to work. What’s the intelligence about our slot for the next ten hours?”
“One freighter contact, expected to traverse our sector in four hours time. It isn’t anything scheduled as inbound to our system and there’s no obvious reason why it’s going through our space to get to anywhere else. We see this kind of thing hardly ever, if at all.
“Passenger Starships not calling at our system sometimes route themselves past it on the way to other colonies, so that they aren’t too far from help at the midpoint of their journey. We’re informed about all of those and all official inbound traffic is cleared long in advance. Casual visits have been the province of wandering Terran military craft up to now, apart from past instances of covert entry by the Sirurians.” Amanda knew far more about that than Harriet probably did, but she let her lieutenant finish telling her about the job.
“The Terrans don’t intrude as a matter of policy. It’s just that some commanders don’t realize that the rule actually matters here and that we’re capable of enforcing it. I daresay that it’s only that capability of ours that causes the Terrans to publish such a rule in the first place; they’ve developed a depressing tendency towards imperiousness.”
“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To educate the commanders about the rules and, through them, the Terran Government. Right! This contact, classified as a freighter by whoever tracked it last, has a right of transit, provided that it’s carrying no contraband et cetera. But since it didn’t bother to obtain clearance, or even notify us, we’ll harass it to the limits of our legal rights. We can’t let people sneak past just because they can’t be bothered to get themselves cleared!
“This also gives us a chance to do a practice interception. As the contact is unregistered, we’ll treat it as potentially dangerous and pretend that it’s a military craft. Programme the combat computer for running analysis; I want to know immediately if it really does start behaving like a military craft, or shows signs of detecting us before we hail it. It might really be hostile; there are supposedly such things as pirates in some systems, though I think that’s a fairy tale myself. There really is such a place as Siruria, however. Just between you and me, I’ve been there and they weren’t friendly.”
“Where do you want to intercept it from?” “Point two steradians away from dead astern. I don’t want to run over anything that it jettisons and accelerates away from, but I don’t want to overshoot if it evades. Not that we can’t correct and come round faster than they’ll ever believe, but I want them to be overawed by the effortless manner with which we match vectors with one fluid movement. That way, we look impressive without even giving them an inkling of how manoeuvrable we really are. Then, if they fail to slow to sublight speed when transiting our controlled space, we’re in a safe position to launch a faster-than-light attack.”
Harriet was impressed: it seemed that Amanda had at least done the reading for this job. Few trans-atmospheric pilots, slung out here for deep space command experience, sounded so confident on their first patrol in charge. She set up the vectors to take them to a position where they could approach the contact from Amanda’s preferred aspect, before unstrapping and trying to get a couple of hour’s sleep in the berth which Amanda had vacated.
When Harriet’s alarm woke her up with an hour to spare before they started serious interception manoeuvres, she realized the full import of Amanda’s aside. If Amanda hadn’t done this before, she had done something other than fly Swallows around. Not that flying those huge things in and out of a turbulent atmosphere wasn’t a skilled occupation; Harriet preferred vacuum herself: there was no windshear there. It was just that Siruria meant an interstellar mission, something that the Space Corps didn’t generally do, except for training or scientific purposes. Her people didn’t have any great reason for going to any of the other colonies: the Terrans carried most of the interstellar trade and the all-female Eleanian society was culturally incompatible with the others.
Again, Terran diplomats came to them, rather than vice versa, and what little Harriet knew of Siruria led her to believe that nobody sane would ever wish to go there. But Amanda had said that they weren’t friendly. Just possibly, her captain wasn’t here by chance: what if the intruder really was Sirurian?
Junior officers don’t believe that their superiors ever do anything in a straightforward manner, they come to suspect that everything contains a hidden factor designed either to test or unfairly hazard poor hard-working sub-lieutenants. Harriet strapped herself in and began checking for combat in deadly earnest.
This far from the system’s primary, the blacked-out interceptor wasn’t visible to the unaided eye. Had there been anything much in the way of light, an observer would have seen a spire-nosed cylinder, some sixty feet long by eighteen in diameter. The control cabin was in the centre, behind the weapons bay and in front of the drives.
Because of the role of mass, both in the distortion caused by faster-than-light travel and in gravitational sensors, the interceptor wasn’t heavy. Around a fifth of its current mass consisted of offensive and passive decoys and actual missiles. An offensive decoy being one that refuses to be ignored by trying very hard to ram the sensor system which it is trying to distract. The passive decoys were useful primarily when the consequences of an offensive decoy going all the way home couldn’t be tolerated.
The difference between an offensive decoy and a missile was that the latter was designed for near-zero detectability and carried either a number of independently-manoeuvring kinetic kill projectiles, or an X-ray lasing warhead. In addition to all these, there were a number of faster-than-light drones. These could be used for many purposes, including communication, surveillance, FTL target tracking, FTL attack -and one or two other tricks. Where two objects under FTL drive were concerned, warheads were mostly superfluous.
The interceptor also carried a couple of fast-tracking multi-purpose lasers. Most of the remaining mass was shielding and the FTL and reaction drives. The electronic warfare and communications suites, despite their sophistication and power, didn’t take up very much room, which left the designers just enough scope for a highly durable and damage-tolerant life-support system.
The interceptor wasn’t designed for long patrols, nor was it really meant to travel between the stars. It was purely the most cost-effective means of providing cover for the Eleanian star system. It, and many others like it, operated from a number of space stations in various orbits around the system primary. There were also countless robot weapons systems, particularly in areas where the interceptors would have trouble providing an immediate presence.
These last, however, were only trusted with fire authority during actual hostilities, when any unidentified contact could be engaged. It was a constant preoccupation of Space Corps pilots that nobody in Planetary Defence was ever given sufficient excuse to turn any of this arsenal of automata loose, at least not while they were in the way.
The big and white theme of the daydream continued: June’s body was incredible, deliciously curvy and yet firm and pneumatic. Apart from the obvious delights of a body built like an adventure playground, June was beautiful of face and voice, highly intelligent and, as Director of the University Department of Stellar Science, interested in space and spacecrew. Her one fault was that she wasn’t in the Space Corps and, more specifically, she wasn’t in the interceptor or anywhere else within several billion miles. Amanda returned to unpleasant reality and wriggled out of the minimal sleeping berth at the back of the control cabin.
Her fellow crewmember was strapped into one of two acceleration couches, which more-or-less filled the cabin. The other girl, Harriet, was junior in terms of rank and length of service. However, the young sub-lieutenant had served more time on this particular type of craft and duty than Amanda. “I’ll relieve you now if you like, Harry.” “I’m afraid not, Captain; that berth hasn’t got the room and, besides, I’ve been saving up my sexual tension for my next leave. Apparently, my kid sister has been passing my holo round at her school and I have a healthy fan club of sixteen year-olds. I’ve told her that if any of them want to visit the Capital this summer, I’ll put them up in my flat.”
Amanda sighed. Sub-lieutenants had changed neither their sense of humour nor their tendency to plan their lives around hopeful fantasies since, well, since she’d been the old-fashioned equivalent of one herself. “Unless you’re really into crisp thighs and innocence, young lady, I’d advise you to stick to older women; they have more stamina and, at your age, well: you’re still learning. I expect that you’ve read Susan Appleby’s ‘A Young Lady’s Guide to her Best Friend’s Body?’” “As a matter of fact, I haven’t. Is it a required text?” “It is, if you’re planning team games with schoolgirls.”
As she strapped in, Amanda reflected that the fan club might very well have gawped at the book themselves; it was part of teenage culture these days, apparently. She decided to keep quiet about the fact that she knew the author: people in the Corps might draw the wrong assumptions about the relationship. “Okay, Lieutenant, let’s go to work. What’s the intelligence about our slot for the next ten hours?”
“One freighter contact, expected to traverse our sector in four hours time. It isn’t anything scheduled as inbound to our system and there’s no obvious reason why it’s going through our space to get to anywhere else. We see this kind of thing hardly ever, if at all.
“Passenger Starships not calling at our system sometimes route themselves past it on the way to other colonies, so that they aren’t too far from help at the midpoint of their journey. We’re informed about all of those and all official inbound traffic is cleared long in advance. Casual visits have been the province of wandering Terran military craft up to now, apart from past instances of covert entry by the Sirurians.” Amanda knew far more about that than Harriet probably did, but she let her lieutenant finish telling her about the job.
“The Terrans don’t intrude as a matter of policy. It’s just that some commanders don’t realize that the rule actually matters here and that we’re capable of enforcing it. I daresay that it’s only that capability of ours that causes the Terrans to publish such a rule in the first place; they’ve developed a depressing tendency towards imperiousness.”
“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To educate the commanders about the rules and, through them, the Terran Government. Right! This contact, classified as a freighter by whoever tracked it last, has a right of transit, provided that it’s carrying no contraband et cetera. But since it didn’t bother to obtain clearance, or even notify us, we’ll harass it to the limits of our legal rights. We can’t let people sneak past just because they can’t be bothered to get themselves cleared!
“This also gives us a chance to do a practice interception. As the contact is unregistered, we’ll treat it as potentially dangerous and pretend that it’s a military craft. Programme the combat computer for running analysis; I want to know immediately if it really does start behaving like a military craft, or shows signs of detecting us before we hail it. It might really be hostile; there are supposedly such things as pirates in some systems, though I think that’s a fairy tale myself. There really is such a place as Siruria, however. Just between you and me, I’ve been there and they weren’t friendly.”
“Where do you want to intercept it from?” “Point two steradians away from dead astern. I don’t want to run over anything that it jettisons and accelerates away from, but I don’t want to overshoot if it evades. Not that we can’t correct and come round faster than they’ll ever believe, but I want them to be overawed by the effortless manner with which we match vectors with one fluid movement. That way, we look impressive without even giving them an inkling of how manoeuvrable we really are. Then, if they fail to slow to sublight speed when transiting our controlled space, we’re in a safe position to launch a faster-than-light attack.”
Harriet was impressed: it seemed that Amanda had at least done the reading for this job. Few trans-atmospheric pilots, slung out here for deep space command experience, sounded so confident on their first patrol in charge. She set up the vectors to take them to a position where they could approach the contact from Amanda’s preferred aspect, before unstrapping and trying to get a couple of hour’s sleep in the berth which Amanda had vacated.
When Harriet’s alarm woke her up with an hour to spare before they started serious interception manoeuvres, she realized the full import of Amanda’s aside. If Amanda hadn’t done this before, she had done something other than fly Swallows around. Not that flying those huge things in and out of a turbulent atmosphere wasn’t a skilled occupation; Harriet preferred vacuum herself: there was no windshear there. It was just that Siruria meant an interstellar mission, something that the Space Corps didn’t generally do, except for training or scientific purposes. Her people didn’t have any great reason for going to any of the other colonies: the Terrans carried most of the interstellar trade and the all-female Eleanian society was culturally incompatible with the others.
Again, Terran diplomats came to them, rather than vice versa, and what little Harriet knew of Siruria led her to believe that nobody sane would ever wish to go there. But Amanda had said that they weren’t friendly. Just possibly, her captain wasn’t here by chance: what if the intruder really was Sirurian?
Junior officers don’t believe that their superiors ever do anything in a straightforward manner, they come to suspect that everything contains a hidden factor designed either to test or unfairly hazard poor hard-working sub-lieutenants. Harriet strapped herself in and began checking for combat in deadly earnest.
This far from the system’s primary, the blacked-out interceptor wasn’t visible to the unaided eye. Had there been anything much in the way of light, an observer would have seen a spire-nosed cylinder, some sixty feet long by eighteen in diameter. The control cabin was in the centre, behind the weapons bay and in front of the drives.
Because of the role of mass, both in the distortion caused by faster-than-light travel and in gravitational sensors, the interceptor wasn’t heavy. Around a fifth of its current mass consisted of offensive and passive decoys and actual missiles. An offensive decoy being one that refuses to be ignored by trying very hard to ram the sensor system which it is trying to distract. The passive decoys were useful primarily when the consequences of an offensive decoy going all the way home couldn’t be tolerated.
The difference between an offensive decoy and a missile was that the latter was designed for near-zero detectability and carried either a number of independently-manoeuvring kinetic kill projectiles, or an X-ray lasing warhead. In addition to all these, there were a number of faster-than-light drones. These could be used for many purposes, including communication, surveillance, FTL target tracking, FTL attack -and one or two other tricks. Where two objects under FTL drive were concerned, warheads were mostly superfluous.
The interceptor also carried a couple of fast-tracking multi-purpose lasers. Most of the remaining mass was shielding and the FTL and reaction drives. The electronic warfare and communications suites, despite their sophistication and power, didn’t take up very much room, which left the designers just enough scope for a highly durable and damage-tolerant life-support system.
The interceptor wasn’t designed for long patrols, nor was it really meant to travel between the stars. It was purely the most cost-effective means of providing cover for the Eleanian star system. It, and many others like it, operated from a number of space stations in various orbits around the system primary. There were also countless robot weapons systems, particularly in areas where the interceptors would have trouble providing an immediate presence.
These last, however, were only trusted with fire authority during actual hostilities, when any unidentified contact could be engaged. It was a constant preoccupation of Space Corps pilots that nobody in Planetary Defence was ever given sufficient excuse to turn any of this arsenal of automata loose, at least not while they were in the way.
****
As they commenced their interception run, Harriet obtained Amanda’s permission to dispatch the customary pair of drones, one to report what they were planning to do, the other to loiter recording events, returning either to them or to their station, depending on how well things went.
This being done, Harriet monitored the output of the computers as they searched for signs of the contact. She was just about to draw her captain’s attention to the data, when Amanda made it clear she’d already noticed.
“Okay, Harry. The contact has passed our jurisdiction marker beacon and it hasn’t slowed to sublight speed for recognition. Curiosity as to why is the only reason we have for not zapping them without further warning. We’ll try to apprehend them, but we won’t be gentle! Programme a drone for FTL drive-field modulation and let’s go after them. Oh, and drop a drone direct to Planetary Defence with a message, but for Eleanor’s sake reiterate the fact that it is going past, not in, and we’re still here dealing with it!”
This being done, Harriet monitored the output of the computers as they searched for signs of the contact. She was just about to draw her captain’s attention to the data, when Amanda made it clear she’d already noticed.
“Okay, Harry. The contact has passed our jurisdiction marker beacon and it hasn’t slowed to sublight speed for recognition. Curiosity as to why is the only reason we have for not zapping them without further warning. We’ll try to apprehend them, but we won’t be gentle! Programme a drone for FTL drive-field modulation and let’s go after them. Oh, and drop a drone direct to Planetary Defence with a message, but for Eleanor’s sake reiterate the fact that it is going past, not in, and we’re still here dealing with it!”
Chapter 2, The Challenge
The freighter first became aware of the pursuit when navigation and guidance computers began to sound alarms and warn of a drive-field incursion. The control room crew enjoyed something like ten seconds of dumb incomprehension before their universe came apart. Instead of the roller-coaster ride of local gravity effects normally experienced when the field brushed some significant mass, there was a shrieking roar ascending into a deafening whistle. The noise seemed to come from everywhere at once as the whole fabric of the freighter -and its crew- was stretched and compressed by pulses emanating from the drive of a small object that elbowed its way into their own field. Feeling like fleas on a loudspeaker cone, the crew weren’t in any position to develop an understanding of what was happening; they just tried to endure.
The noise suddenly dropped in pitch to a barely audible hum, though it was still overpowering in amplitude. The captain, who’d been resting in his cabin, stared with horror at the way visible vibration patterns ran across the alloy bulkheads and even the flesh of his hands. He could feel, all too easily, that the vibration extended to his whole body, inside and out. He made a tremendous effort to think some coherent thought, but the only idea which would come, was that this was the start of a drive field malfunction that would leave him scattered throughout space and history in the form of residual gravity waves.
The noise changed again and, suddenly, the crew could hear a woman’s voice all around them. Save for masculine cultural conditioning, her voice was godlike. “Drop your drive-field and attempt no further manoeuvre beyond attitude control. You will find this conversation much less traumatic if you allow us the courtesy of continuing it by microwave link at sublight velocity.”
The captain was already making for the control room when the power system failsafes made up their own minds about the weird load they were carrying, dumping the drive and internal gravity fields -and the lights. The captain grabbed a stanchion and peered through the darkness, searching for a tritium-powered sign. There was one nearby, on an emergency locker, and he gratefully unclipped one of the torches he found inside. The torch felt almost too hot to handle, but it still worked.
A few emergency lights were on in the control room and, after the terrible noise, it seemed as silent as the grave. As he made his way to the communications panel, the captain’s shattered hearing recovered enough to tell him that the control room crew were breathing. Some were even groaning, but they weren’t doing much else. He wasn’t inclined to spare them much attention: he had other priorities!
It was imperative to start talking back to whomever it was out there, before they did something even more drastic than they had managed already. Whilst the captain was confident that he could justify his cargo in purely legal -if not moral- terms, to Terran-controlled colonial authorities, he knew quite well that Eleanian mores and legislation differed markedly. First priority, therefore, was avoiding summary destruction, closely followed by a need to get back under way without being boarded and searched. A more distant concern was to avoid having to justify what he was doing to the local authorities in terms of recent Terran legislation, which might be repealed if the Eleanians or some other colonists brought enough diplomatic pressure to bear. There were all too many meddling bureaucrats in the Federal Terran Government who refused to view things in a purely commercial light, and they’d fought a determined rearguard action against legalisation in the first place. He was making too much profit from legalisation to give them fresh ammunition! His hands automatically went through the routine for establishing a microwave link with a nearby spacecraft. This involved a millimetre-wave radar guiding the communications band beam-shaper onto the craft in question. Once power circuits began to cut back in, he had no trouble getting the system up and running, but there was nothing at all within detection range. He tried using low-gain omnidirectional antennae to broadcast a systems handshaking code, expecting a lag before the obviously-distant whoever it was responded, but there was no appreciable delay at all before the monitor screen displayed a “Channel Opened” message.
“There’s no need for you to bother locking the beam onto us. We don’t have any trouble hearing you, wherever it’s pointed, and there’s no problem with our transmitters tracking your vessel.” The captain couldn’t detect any trace of irony in the oddly accented (to his ears) woman’s voice, but he didn’t doubt that there was more than just a communications link tracking his ship as it wallowed around at some unknown sublight velocity.
“I’m sure that we can dispense with the preliminaries. They’d never have let you run an FTL freighter without teaching you about interplanetary law and suchlike, so you know that you passed an Eleanian jurisdiction marker without slowing down to sublight speed to allow identification. Neither do you have any sort of registration with us, or clearance from us. In recent years, we have experienced a hostile penetration of our controlled space and it is general policy to classify craft that behave as you did as hostile. You cannot now be under any illusions that any craft so classified will be allowed to proceed unhindered. Had you not been tracked long before you committed the violation, you would have been destroyed.
“As it is, we extended you the unusual courtesy of arresting your FTL progress in order to enquire of your sanity and intentions, because we are kind even to the wicked and the ungrateful. This does not mean that we are indulgent. We do require explanations and we will be naming you in a formal protest to the Terran Government, which appears to have granted you a callsign and, we assume, pending prompt confirmation by yourselves, a legal registration.”
The captain transmitted the registration file quickly and without any trouble, there was a standard function button to do that on every commercial communications console. This didn’t give him much time to think, though it did seem as though he was going to be thoroughly bullied pour encourager les autres. The Eleanian craft, whatever and wherever it was, seemed to be indignant rather than suspicious. Perhaps if he played on the indignation, they would move him on in disgust and content themselves with trying to get the Terran authorities to revoke his registration. He did know that now they’d successfully stopped him -and while he wasn’t sure how, exactly, the laws of physics had facilitated their doing that- they couldn’t legally blast him in cold blood. On the other hand, persistent refusal to obey lawful commands might justify anything and there weren’t any witnesses.
All around him, the captain could sense the control room crew stirring, either struggling to their stations or staggering off for treatment. He ignored them, sure that none of them would do anything precipitate while he was visibly on the bridge and capable. He was reasonably certain that they would deal with damage-control without being told; they were trained to do so and it ought to be obvious that their first concern should be to get everything vital working!
He was subjected to a series of questions over the microwave link -noticing in the meantime that his communications computer was making absolutely no progress in trying to obtain a bearing on the transmissions. He found himself sweating profusely as he struggled to answer the questions, which followed no identifiable theme or train of thought. This made it very difficult to concentrate on a line of deception, because the conversation kept changing subject and then returning suddenly to a particular point after his mind had moved on to inventing answers to other questions.
The interrogation was interrupted when the female voice brusquely told him to expect a series of strong magnetic pulses. These duly came, to the accompaniment of curses from people trying to get sensitive equipment back on line. When the interrogation resumed, the woman’s tone was noticeably more irritated than suspicious and he was questioned in somewhat less excruciating detail about his destination, a mining colony and free economic zone on the non Terra-formable world, “New Basingstoke.”
“You’ll be accompanied to your destination by an automatic drone, which will deliver a message to the authorities there, explaining that you have committed a gross violation of transit rules. They will be advised that you are probably a criminal in terms of Terran law; you’re certainly one in our eyes. We won’t, however, rely on them to discipline you: we are perfectly aware of just how responsible the administrations of “free economic zones” tend to be. A formal complaint will be in the hands of the Federal Government on Terra by the time you return there. The drone will ensure that you proceed to the stated destination; your safety can’t even be remotely guaranteed if you go anywhere else or attempt to interfere with the drone.” Resistance was useless, but he was welcome to try.
“If you enter our controlled space again, and we advise you to err on the side of extreme caution in deciding what qualifies as our space, you will be arrested -or quite possibly destroyed.
“For the sake of your crew’s safety, we won’t detain you while we make further enquiries about you with the Terran authorities, but we might still prefer charges against you through the Terran courts or demand your extradition. You are being allowed to proceed solely because your safety cannot be guaranteed -out here in a recently over-stressed vessel- while decisions are reached about you, and we reserve the right to pursue the matter further.”
The communications console then received a data file, which turned out to contain the information required to re-orientate the freighter’s navigation system after a total shutdown and memory wipe. There was no further communication, but the captain was certain that he hadn’t been left alone and he was in a hurry to proceed.
“Damage control! How much did they break?” There was a pause while they worked out who was responsible for giving the report, the capable officers having been too busy with their own departments to notice that the watch officer had been carried off. The captain restrained himself; it wasn’t going to help if he got cross with people who were still half-silly from shock, though the medical orderlies weren’t supposed to remove watch officers from the control room unless a replacement was on hand. The thought came to him that they probably hadn’t known which of the groaning idiots was the watch officer; he’d have to introduce an armband system or something.
“Nothing very much seems to have actually broken, Boss, but a lot of things went into emergency shutdown and a lot of software and immediate data was wiped.
“Everything got over-stressed, as the lady said, and a lot of things are going to fail much earlier than they would otherwise have done. The owners are going to have to cough-up for a total teardown inspection, or hire a new crew, because we’re getting off at the next suitable planetfall until it’s done. The external cargo modules dropped their environmental conditioning systems and there are three that aren’t coldstarting themselves or responding to control via the ship’s databus. Somebody will have to go and reset them manually, or rig emergency controls, or the cargo in them is going to be wasted.”
“Well! The cargo is going to be wasted. We can’t move while someone’s prancing around out there and I’m not wasting the time, or men who could be keeping this ship going from the inside. The cargo isn’t going to know anything about it, as if you care anyway. Dump any module that hasn’t started to restore conditioning by the time we’re ready to move; there’s no point in delivering dead ones.”
The subordinate, the third officer as it turned out, still had a meaningless objection to raise. “But, Boss, external cargo modules aren’t as well insulated as the ship, which is why you wanted to take a short cut through here. The cargo will be wasted anyway if the conditioning doesn’t start in the next few minutes, let alone by the time we’re ready to go.”
“There you are, then. Dump those three modules, now! Then do something useful towards getting us going and keeping the ship in one piece.”
The third officer shrugged and turned to arm the jettison systems for three of the twenty-five cargo modules. He didn’t seem at all put out at being told to dump them; he’d probably just been getting the captain to publicly take the initiative about dumping part of the cargo. Only a couple of the crew paused at the three muffled thuds; it was only someone else’s money, plus a little bit of their bonus, which they’d gladly swap for safety and a rest.
Chapter 9, Revival
Kemala had been made to go to sleep by the people who bought her contract, in a strange room that always felt as if it were moving. Sometimes there was a feeling like falling out of a tree, only this went on for ages and she cringed in anticipation of a fearful bump when the room hit the ground, which it never did. As she drifted off, uncomfortably, due to a drug that made her feel as if she was trapped in mud, she tried to remember who she was and where she’d come from, before everything in her life became horrible and frightening. All she could remember was a name; perhaps it was her own.
Paralysed but still conscious, she felt herself being put in a bag. She had no clothes on, but that was just one of the things that happened to her now: nobody cared if she was embarrassed, or even if she was hurt or hungry. The world she knew zipped away, leaving her in blackness, which grew cold before she ceased to feel anything at all. Before her thoughts faded away altogether, she wondered why the people had bought her contract, just to kill her in this way? She knew that she was dying, because she’d never gone to sleep like this before! She seemed almost to wake for a while; there was pain and cold but no thoughts, then there was merciful oblivion.
When she found herself waking up again, her first reaction was one of dismay and outrage, couldn’t they at least leave her dead? She’d wanted to die ever since she’d become the subject of a contract, so her parents could borrow to buy a plot of land for her brothers. It wasn’t just the indignities and ill treatment she’d suffered as a result; it was the betrayal: being traded away by her parents like she was a goose! One of the older girls had made Kemala understand -with difficulty, because she came from a different village and spoke so strangely she’d had to use gestures and graphic noises- that their contracts would be fulfilled in a certain way. This terrified Kemala, because she’d heard dire stories about the circumstances of such things outside the village -and it had been a relief to die first. It was with dread, therefore, that Kemala realized that she was alive again.
There were voices, but she couldn’t even begin to understand what they said, perhaps they were devils and she was still dead? She was afraid to open her eyes, or move, in case someone noticed her. The voices around her became soft, encouraging, but she still couldn’t understand what they said.
Kemala was trying not to breath very deeply, lying as still as possible so that nobody would take any notice of her. Even so, her chest hurt with each breath. A hand touched her face, ever so softly, but Kemala’s heart still turned somersaults. The hand stroked her face gently until Kemala fearfully opened her eyes. For a moment horror seized her: the face which confronted her was white like a ghost or demon! It was a woman’s face, though -and Kemala realized that it was the white face of a tourist, not a demon. This didn’t help much; the dire stories that Kemala had heard, involved tourists and the things they came to do, although those were men tourists, of course.
As her eyes began to focus better, Kemala saw that the tourist woman was dressed a bit like the health workers who visited the clinic in one of the villages near her home. Could she be a doctor? Why would a tourist doctor bother with a girl whose contract had been sold by her parents? Perhaps she was going to examine her to see if she had any diseases; Kemala had heard that tourists preferred girls who’d been checked by doctors.
The tourist woman raised Kemala up and held a beaker to her lips to drink. As she sipped the nice-tasting liquid -she didn’t know what it was called- she noticed that there was some sort of tube going into her arm and there were pads on her chest with wires coming out of them. She didn’t dare interfere with any of that, so she looked around her.
She was in a completely different room to the one she’d died in; this one was somehow cleaner and brighter than any room she’d seen before. There was a window opposite the bed Kemala was lying in: she could see tall, white-capped mountains in the distance and, closer at hand, there were hills with some buildings on. There were lots of trees and short green grass between the buildings, but Kemala couldn’t see any fields, except perhaps in the very far distance. It was strange; it wasn’t crowded and dirty like a city, but if there weren’t any rice paddies, sugar-cane plantations, oxen, geese, shacks, mills, dumps, gas wells or refineries, it couldn’t be countryside, either.
The tourist woman gently removed the tube and pads and, seeing that Kemala was fascinated by the view, lifted her out of the bed and helped her into a funny sort of sarong, before supporting her as she stood at the window. Her legs ached and her head swam, but it seemed that the place outside the window was full of hope for Kemala. She couldn’t say why, but it was so peaceful and clean, with lots of coloured plants just below the window.
When her knees began to wobble, the tourist woman helped her back onto the bed and made her lie down. Kemala assumed a comfortable position for the first time -there seemed to be aches and pains everywhere- and, despite her fears and curiosity, she fell asleep. The nurse carefully covered her and tidied away the equipment.
The doctors had been certain of the girl’s condition long before she’d been allowed to regain consciousness. When all was well, they’d left her to wake up naturally with just a nurse to watch her, although they were ready to help a few footsteps away. Once she was awake, the nurse’s brief had been to reassure and let her have a nourishing drink before sending her off to sleep again. It was thought best to let reality intrude in gentle stages and allow the bruises and frostbite to heal a bit before the girl spent long periods awake.
The next time Kemala awoke, it was night outside and the room was lit only by a dim glow near the door. The curtains weren’t drawn and Kemala could see the stars above and behind the mountains. She gasped because there were so many of them, so bright and clear. The sky behind them was black and didn’t glow orange at the horizon -and the stars were so different! They made shapes she’d never seen in the sky before. She lay gazing at them in wonder until the moon moved into her field of view. Her startled exclamation brought the tourist woman into the room in a flood of artificial light.
The woman was puzzled for a moment; Kemala looked astonished but there was nothing strange in the room. Seeing that the curtains weren’t drawn, the woman switched the light off to see what was outside the window. Kemala realized that the woman couldn’t see anything strange, perhaps the moon had started to look like that since she’d been dead! Suddenly fearful that she’d attracted attention without good enough cause, Kemala started to pretend that nothing had happened, trying to curl up to go to sleep again. She didn’t know if she was allowed to sleep, though, and she shivered with fright.
The tourist woman sighed sympathetically, switching the light back on and drawing the curtains shut. With encouraging noises and a few gentle strokes of the neck, she persuaded Kemala to uncurl and get up. Opening a door in the wall, she revealed something like the lavatory at the clinic, or the one Kemala had used at the place she and the other girls had been before she’d died. Satisifed that she at least recognised it, the woman helped Kemala to the cubicle and showed her how to work the taps, before closing the cubicle door nearly shut.
Kemala was glad to use the lavatory, she’d been wondering about it for a while. She was terrified of making a mess, because one of the girls who had -through sheer fright- was beaten so badly in front of the others that she’d been taken away and not seen again. She knew she was supposed to wash, because she’d been shown the taps, so she washed her hands and face as carefully as she could.
When she’d finished, and the woman had shown her that she could use the towels (clean ones, all to herself!) the woman helped her back to the bed, made her sit up and clipped a sort of board across in front of her. Another white-faced woman, dressed the same as the first, came in with a tray, which she set in front of Kemala.
There were several small dishes of food on the tray, the sort of thing she’d seen visiting officials and traders eat. There was a dish of very fine fluffy white rice with strips of fried spicy chicken, one full of chopped vegetables, another with white things like clouds, a beaker of drink and a dish filled with red fruits dusted with white powder and a little, well, was it cream? There were some sticks on the tray, like the ones some traders she’d once seen, yellow men, used. It was important to yellow men to use the sticks very precisely and they didn’t even touch their lips with the food! She didn’t know how, so she tentatively picked up a spoon and looked at the women to be sure that this really was for her. They smiled kindly and Kemala tasted the first classical oriental cuisine of her life.
There were no hard bits or specks of millgrit in the rice, which wasn’t in the least bit stodgy or sticky. The strips of chicken weren’t chewy or tough and they had a complicated taste.
Kemala had been given a bit of chicken occasionally before, when there’d been weddings in the village, although not every wedding party had chicken; most had to make do with fish or dog, some had to have soya curd even for weddings. Girls like Kemala were seldom given any form of salable protein; insects, snails, even frogs, could be had for nothing when the family’s geese could be sold.
Chickens had to be bought; they died easily in the village for some reason, which surprised nobody because so did children. Soya curd was cheaper than chicken, but it still had to be purchased by the villagers, even though the beans were grown nearby. The soya fields didn’t belong to any of the villagers and thieves could expect little sympathy and some very rough justice if they ever got past the white posts that whistled and hurt.
Trying the vegetables, Kemala found them to be somehow nicer than she’d imagined vegetables could be. She discovered that it was impractical to use the spoon on the white cloud things, so she carefully laid the spoon on the rice dish and picked one up between thumb and forefinger. Looking to see if the women approved of her eating it that way, she bit a corner of it experimentally. It was crisp and crunchy, but melted in her mouth, leaving a taste a bit like fish. Perhaps it was made from fish, or, could it be? Grasshoppers!
Kemela ate carefully; she’d never had food like this before and she didn’t want to make herself ill. When she came to the red fruits, she was surprised: they had much more flavour than she expected! She ate them one at a time so as not to spoil things. The drink was very refreshing; it tasted of fresh fruit, though it fizzed with bubbles like the Cola that her brothers sometimes bought. When she’d finished, one of the women gave her a piece of soft paper and mimed for her to wipe her lips, then she took the empty dishes away on the tray.
The first woman folded the board away and then did a few things to Kemala’s arm with a band, which squeezed it and hissed. She looked into each of Kemala’s eyes using a tube with a light in it and then put something square and black against her forehead for a few moments. When she took the black thing away, she glanced at some glowing red writing that appeared on it and wrote on papers attached to a board hanging at the end of the bed. She indicated for Kemala to lie down, miming the act of snuggling into a comfortable position. Then she touched her arm and Kemala fell asleep again.
The next time she awoke it was daytime and the weather had changed; clouds left sweeping shadows on the hills and moving shafts of sunlight illuminated grass and trees wet from showery rain.
Rain pattered against the window in large drops for a few minutes; then it was sunny again. As the drips ran down the window and the glass cleared, Kemala noticed how clean it was! She’d been used to raindrops leaving smears and streaks on windows. Often the rain itself came down dirty: sometimes it stung and made dead spots on plants. She couldn’t see the mountains at all today: the clouds kept her field of view so low that she could see no further than the second row of small hills. Concentrating on what was nearer at hand, she noticed four long paths of shiny metal between two fences. There was a row of trees in front of the paths, which was why she hadn’t noticed them before, but sparkling water drops on the metal drew her attention.
The paths went from one side of her field of view to the other and, as she was watching, something like the Jakarta train went past, only it floated silently above the metal path without any lurching or sparks. Kemala couldn’t see any wheels. The train seemed almost too clean and perfect to be real, but she could clearly see people sitting in it through its windows, which were as magically clean as her own.
The people weren’t crowded together, they were talking or reading and, in one special part of the train, they even seemed to be eating. Kemala got up, in her funny sarong, and managed to reach the window, leaning against the sill for a better view. Another train went past in the opposite direction, going much more slowly. This train was shorter than the first and it seemed a bit more crowded: people were standing up as it went past, as if there was a stopping place nearby. Nobody seemed to be riding on the outside, though; perhaps everybody could afford a third-class ticket?
Without any warning, though not frighteningly so, a longer train than either of the other two skimmed past on one of the middle paths. It was going quickly enough to make the grass between the paths swirl as it went past, but after it had gone there was no sign of its passing, just four unobtrusive paths of metal gleaming between the trees.
Kemala gathered her strength and made for the door in the wall, holding onto a rail which ran round the room for support. It was difficult and she was glad when a tourist woman came into the room and took her arm to help her. It wasn’t the same one who’d helped her before, perhaps she didn’t stay there all the time? When she’d finished and washed, the woman helped her back to bed and went out again.
She came back with a tray. There was a cup next to a transparent pot full of amber liquid, a bowl of something that looked a bit like goose feed mixed with milk, a little jug with more milk in it, and a plate with two slices of scorched bread; one spread with butter and some sticky clear orange stuff with rinds in, the other spread with butter and something brown. Kemala expected that girls like herself would have to eat things like goose feed most of the time here: it was kind of them to put milk on it, though. She picked up a spoon.
It didn’t actually taste at all like goose feed. There were all sorts of things in it; something like dried fruit, nuts -and grains and meal. The woman poured some of the milk into the cup and topped it up with the amber liquid from the pot. The liquid was hot and fragrant, Kemala realized with a shock that she was actually being given tea!
She didn’t understand about the little shaker of sugar the woman offered and, picking the tea up, she sipped it carefully because it was hot and tea was something she hadn’t had all that often before, certainly never with milk in it!
The brown stuff on the scorched bread tasted salty-savoury -she’d half expected that it might be chocolate- and she found that it was best to eat the scrunchy scorched bread between sips of tea. The orange stuff was sharp but sweet, she found that she liked it a lot. She was allowed to finish the pot of tea, a level of indulgence that amazed her.
When she’d finished and the woman had taken the tray away, Kemala heard her having a discussion outside the door of the room. The words were unintelligible, but Kemala guessed that they were talking about her. She began to worry again; she knew that a contract meant that she had to work for the person who owned it, to pay back what her parents had borrowed, and this usually went on for ever, or as long as the person who’d been sold, lived. There was always money left to pay back (that was why it was best to sell someone else to the contract people if you needed money) and the things you ate were added to this money. She’d been given expensive food, which she’d never even tasted before, and tea, and yet nobody had made her do any work to begin to pay for it! The only explanation was that she was indeed destined to fulfil her contract in a certain way. Even so, she was surprised by the wonderful food and by the fact that the women didn’t even make her carry her own tray or anything like that.
As the woman from the night before came into the room, Kemala looked pleadingly at her, wishing that someone would at least tell her what she was going to have to do to pay for all this! The woman put a reassuring hand on Kemala’s shoulder, then she once more did things to her arm, looked at her eyes and used the black thing to produce red writing about Kemala, which she copied onto the papers from the end of the bed. When she’d finished with that, she sat on the edge of the bed and began to read out strange words from a list, pronouncing each word very carefully and looking at Kemala after each one. Kemala stared back blankly until the word “Jakarta” made her wince: the woman was checking where she’d been sold!
The woman stopped, spoke very softly to Kemala, words she didn’t understand but which sounded friendly and, with a parting touch to Kemala’s worried brow, she left.
Paralysed but still conscious, she felt herself being put in a bag. She had no clothes on, but that was just one of the things that happened to her now: nobody cared if she was embarrassed, or even if she was hurt or hungry. The world she knew zipped away, leaving her in blackness, which grew cold before she ceased to feel anything at all. Before her thoughts faded away altogether, she wondered why the people had bought her contract, just to kill her in this way? She knew that she was dying, because she’d never gone to sleep like this before! She seemed almost to wake for a while; there was pain and cold but no thoughts, then there was merciful oblivion.
When she found herself waking up again, her first reaction was one of dismay and outrage, couldn’t they at least leave her dead? She’d wanted to die ever since she’d become the subject of a contract, so her parents could borrow to buy a plot of land for her brothers. It wasn’t just the indignities and ill treatment she’d suffered as a result; it was the betrayal: being traded away by her parents like she was a goose! One of the older girls had made Kemala understand -with difficulty, because she came from a different village and spoke so strangely she’d had to use gestures and graphic noises- that their contracts would be fulfilled in a certain way. This terrified Kemala, because she’d heard dire stories about the circumstances of such things outside the village -and it had been a relief to die first. It was with dread, therefore, that Kemala realized that she was alive again.
There were voices, but she couldn’t even begin to understand what they said, perhaps they were devils and she was still dead? She was afraid to open her eyes, or move, in case someone noticed her. The voices around her became soft, encouraging, but she still couldn’t understand what they said.
Kemala was trying not to breath very deeply, lying as still as possible so that nobody would take any notice of her. Even so, her chest hurt with each breath. A hand touched her face, ever so softly, but Kemala’s heart still turned somersaults. The hand stroked her face gently until Kemala fearfully opened her eyes. For a moment horror seized her: the face which confronted her was white like a ghost or demon! It was a woman’s face, though -and Kemala realized that it was the white face of a tourist, not a demon. This didn’t help much; the dire stories that Kemala had heard, involved tourists and the things they came to do, although those were men tourists, of course.
As her eyes began to focus better, Kemala saw that the tourist woman was dressed a bit like the health workers who visited the clinic in one of the villages near her home. Could she be a doctor? Why would a tourist doctor bother with a girl whose contract had been sold by her parents? Perhaps she was going to examine her to see if she had any diseases; Kemala had heard that tourists preferred girls who’d been checked by doctors.
The tourist woman raised Kemala up and held a beaker to her lips to drink. As she sipped the nice-tasting liquid -she didn’t know what it was called- she noticed that there was some sort of tube going into her arm and there were pads on her chest with wires coming out of them. She didn’t dare interfere with any of that, so she looked around her.
She was in a completely different room to the one she’d died in; this one was somehow cleaner and brighter than any room she’d seen before. There was a window opposite the bed Kemala was lying in: she could see tall, white-capped mountains in the distance and, closer at hand, there were hills with some buildings on. There were lots of trees and short green grass between the buildings, but Kemala couldn’t see any fields, except perhaps in the very far distance. It was strange; it wasn’t crowded and dirty like a city, but if there weren’t any rice paddies, sugar-cane plantations, oxen, geese, shacks, mills, dumps, gas wells or refineries, it couldn’t be countryside, either.
The tourist woman gently removed the tube and pads and, seeing that Kemala was fascinated by the view, lifted her out of the bed and helped her into a funny sort of sarong, before supporting her as she stood at the window. Her legs ached and her head swam, but it seemed that the place outside the window was full of hope for Kemala. She couldn’t say why, but it was so peaceful and clean, with lots of coloured plants just below the window.
When her knees began to wobble, the tourist woman helped her back onto the bed and made her lie down. Kemala assumed a comfortable position for the first time -there seemed to be aches and pains everywhere- and, despite her fears and curiosity, she fell asleep. The nurse carefully covered her and tidied away the equipment.
The doctors had been certain of the girl’s condition long before she’d been allowed to regain consciousness. When all was well, they’d left her to wake up naturally with just a nurse to watch her, although they were ready to help a few footsteps away. Once she was awake, the nurse’s brief had been to reassure and let her have a nourishing drink before sending her off to sleep again. It was thought best to let reality intrude in gentle stages and allow the bruises and frostbite to heal a bit before the girl spent long periods awake.
The next time Kemala awoke, it was night outside and the room was lit only by a dim glow near the door. The curtains weren’t drawn and Kemala could see the stars above and behind the mountains. She gasped because there were so many of them, so bright and clear. The sky behind them was black and didn’t glow orange at the horizon -and the stars were so different! They made shapes she’d never seen in the sky before. She lay gazing at them in wonder until the moon moved into her field of view. Her startled exclamation brought the tourist woman into the room in a flood of artificial light.
The woman was puzzled for a moment; Kemala looked astonished but there was nothing strange in the room. Seeing that the curtains weren’t drawn, the woman switched the light off to see what was outside the window. Kemala realized that the woman couldn’t see anything strange, perhaps the moon had started to look like that since she’d been dead! Suddenly fearful that she’d attracted attention without good enough cause, Kemala started to pretend that nothing had happened, trying to curl up to go to sleep again. She didn’t know if she was allowed to sleep, though, and she shivered with fright.
The tourist woman sighed sympathetically, switching the light back on and drawing the curtains shut. With encouraging noises and a few gentle strokes of the neck, she persuaded Kemala to uncurl and get up. Opening a door in the wall, she revealed something like the lavatory at the clinic, or the one Kemala had used at the place she and the other girls had been before she’d died. Satisifed that she at least recognised it, the woman helped Kemala to the cubicle and showed her how to work the taps, before closing the cubicle door nearly shut.
Kemala was glad to use the lavatory, she’d been wondering about it for a while. She was terrified of making a mess, because one of the girls who had -through sheer fright- was beaten so badly in front of the others that she’d been taken away and not seen again. She knew she was supposed to wash, because she’d been shown the taps, so she washed her hands and face as carefully as she could.
When she’d finished, and the woman had shown her that she could use the towels (clean ones, all to herself!) the woman helped her back to the bed, made her sit up and clipped a sort of board across in front of her. Another white-faced woman, dressed the same as the first, came in with a tray, which she set in front of Kemala.
There were several small dishes of food on the tray, the sort of thing she’d seen visiting officials and traders eat. There was a dish of very fine fluffy white rice with strips of fried spicy chicken, one full of chopped vegetables, another with white things like clouds, a beaker of drink and a dish filled with red fruits dusted with white powder and a little, well, was it cream? There were some sticks on the tray, like the ones some traders she’d once seen, yellow men, used. It was important to yellow men to use the sticks very precisely and they didn’t even touch their lips with the food! She didn’t know how, so she tentatively picked up a spoon and looked at the women to be sure that this really was for her. They smiled kindly and Kemala tasted the first classical oriental cuisine of her life.
There were no hard bits or specks of millgrit in the rice, which wasn’t in the least bit stodgy or sticky. The strips of chicken weren’t chewy or tough and they had a complicated taste.
Kemala had been given a bit of chicken occasionally before, when there’d been weddings in the village, although not every wedding party had chicken; most had to make do with fish or dog, some had to have soya curd even for weddings. Girls like Kemala were seldom given any form of salable protein; insects, snails, even frogs, could be had for nothing when the family’s geese could be sold.
Chickens had to be bought; they died easily in the village for some reason, which surprised nobody because so did children. Soya curd was cheaper than chicken, but it still had to be purchased by the villagers, even though the beans were grown nearby. The soya fields didn’t belong to any of the villagers and thieves could expect little sympathy and some very rough justice if they ever got past the white posts that whistled and hurt.
Trying the vegetables, Kemala found them to be somehow nicer than she’d imagined vegetables could be. She discovered that it was impractical to use the spoon on the white cloud things, so she carefully laid the spoon on the rice dish and picked one up between thumb and forefinger. Looking to see if the women approved of her eating it that way, she bit a corner of it experimentally. It was crisp and crunchy, but melted in her mouth, leaving a taste a bit like fish. Perhaps it was made from fish, or, could it be? Grasshoppers!
Kemela ate carefully; she’d never had food like this before and she didn’t want to make herself ill. When she came to the red fruits, she was surprised: they had much more flavour than she expected! She ate them one at a time so as not to spoil things. The drink was very refreshing; it tasted of fresh fruit, though it fizzed with bubbles like the Cola that her brothers sometimes bought. When she’d finished, one of the women gave her a piece of soft paper and mimed for her to wipe her lips, then she took the empty dishes away on the tray.
The first woman folded the board away and then did a few things to Kemala’s arm with a band, which squeezed it and hissed. She looked into each of Kemala’s eyes using a tube with a light in it and then put something square and black against her forehead for a few moments. When she took the black thing away, she glanced at some glowing red writing that appeared on it and wrote on papers attached to a board hanging at the end of the bed. She indicated for Kemala to lie down, miming the act of snuggling into a comfortable position. Then she touched her arm and Kemala fell asleep again.
The next time she awoke it was daytime and the weather had changed; clouds left sweeping shadows on the hills and moving shafts of sunlight illuminated grass and trees wet from showery rain.
Rain pattered against the window in large drops for a few minutes; then it was sunny again. As the drips ran down the window and the glass cleared, Kemala noticed how clean it was! She’d been used to raindrops leaving smears and streaks on windows. Often the rain itself came down dirty: sometimes it stung and made dead spots on plants. She couldn’t see the mountains at all today: the clouds kept her field of view so low that she could see no further than the second row of small hills. Concentrating on what was nearer at hand, she noticed four long paths of shiny metal between two fences. There was a row of trees in front of the paths, which was why she hadn’t noticed them before, but sparkling water drops on the metal drew her attention.
The paths went from one side of her field of view to the other and, as she was watching, something like the Jakarta train went past, only it floated silently above the metal path without any lurching or sparks. Kemala couldn’t see any wheels. The train seemed almost too clean and perfect to be real, but she could clearly see people sitting in it through its windows, which were as magically clean as her own.
The people weren’t crowded together, they were talking or reading and, in one special part of the train, they even seemed to be eating. Kemala got up, in her funny sarong, and managed to reach the window, leaning against the sill for a better view. Another train went past in the opposite direction, going much more slowly. This train was shorter than the first and it seemed a bit more crowded: people were standing up as it went past, as if there was a stopping place nearby. Nobody seemed to be riding on the outside, though; perhaps everybody could afford a third-class ticket?
Without any warning, though not frighteningly so, a longer train than either of the other two skimmed past on one of the middle paths. It was going quickly enough to make the grass between the paths swirl as it went past, but after it had gone there was no sign of its passing, just four unobtrusive paths of metal gleaming between the trees.
Kemala gathered her strength and made for the door in the wall, holding onto a rail which ran round the room for support. It was difficult and she was glad when a tourist woman came into the room and took her arm to help her. It wasn’t the same one who’d helped her before, perhaps she didn’t stay there all the time? When she’d finished and washed, the woman helped her back to bed and went out again.
She came back with a tray. There was a cup next to a transparent pot full of amber liquid, a bowl of something that looked a bit like goose feed mixed with milk, a little jug with more milk in it, and a plate with two slices of scorched bread; one spread with butter and some sticky clear orange stuff with rinds in, the other spread with butter and something brown. Kemala expected that girls like herself would have to eat things like goose feed most of the time here: it was kind of them to put milk on it, though. She picked up a spoon.
It didn’t actually taste at all like goose feed. There were all sorts of things in it; something like dried fruit, nuts -and grains and meal. The woman poured some of the milk into the cup and topped it up with the amber liquid from the pot. The liquid was hot and fragrant, Kemala realized with a shock that she was actually being given tea!
She didn’t understand about the little shaker of sugar the woman offered and, picking the tea up, she sipped it carefully because it was hot and tea was something she hadn’t had all that often before, certainly never with milk in it!
The brown stuff on the scorched bread tasted salty-savoury -she’d half expected that it might be chocolate- and she found that it was best to eat the scrunchy scorched bread between sips of tea. The orange stuff was sharp but sweet, she found that she liked it a lot. She was allowed to finish the pot of tea, a level of indulgence that amazed her.
When she’d finished and the woman had taken the tray away, Kemala heard her having a discussion outside the door of the room. The words were unintelligible, but Kemala guessed that they were talking about her. She began to worry again; she knew that a contract meant that she had to work for the person who owned it, to pay back what her parents had borrowed, and this usually went on for ever, or as long as the person who’d been sold, lived. There was always money left to pay back (that was why it was best to sell someone else to the contract people if you needed money) and the things you ate were added to this money. She’d been given expensive food, which she’d never even tasted before, and tea, and yet nobody had made her do any work to begin to pay for it! The only explanation was that she was indeed destined to fulfil her contract in a certain way. Even so, she was surprised by the wonderful food and by the fact that the women didn’t even make her carry her own tray or anything like that.
As the woman from the night before came into the room, Kemala looked pleadingly at her, wishing that someone would at least tell her what she was going to have to do to pay for all this! The woman put a reassuring hand on Kemala’s shoulder, then she once more did things to her arm, looked at her eyes and used the black thing to produce red writing about Kemala, which she copied onto the papers from the end of the bed. When she’d finished with that, she sat on the edge of the bed and began to read out strange words from a list, pronouncing each word very carefully and looking at Kemala after each one. Kemala stared back blankly until the word “Jakarta” made her wince: the woman was checking where she’d been sold!
The woman stopped, spoke very softly to Kemala, words she didn’t understand but which sounded friendly and, with a parting touch to Kemala’s worried brow, she left.
