Shifting Infinity

Chapter 2-2

Melati realised what was happening. “Hey, switch the machine off first.”

The warden gave her a what? look.

“With each lead that you take off, the current increases. You might give him a heart attack.”

He snorted, but did as she said.

Between the two men, the prisoner’s brown eyes met hers. His face glistened with sweat.

Through all this, Lieutenant Kool remained at the door, his arms crossed over his chest.

Melati glared at him.

The utter d**k. He might be twice her size but if he thought that she was going to be intimidated by him, he’d better think again.

Having completed their task, the two wardens left, one wheeling the trolley with the unused chair.

She turned her back to the Lieutenant and addressed the prisoner in B3. “I believe you can understand me.” These days, she spoke her native language only with Ari but he worked on the flight deck and she didn’t see him very often.

The prisoner’s eyes continued meeting her, intense.

“What is your name?” she asked again. She spoke clearly, willing him to respond.

The prisoner looked at Lieutenant Kool, whose face twitched in an I told you so way.

And Melati very much wanted to prove him wrong.

She tried again. “I’m Melati. Me-la-ti. I’m from New Jakarta.”

He continued staring. His eyes blinked. They were not barang-barang eyes. They were not New Pyongyang eyes. But they were dark and clear. The lashes were long and dark, the eyebrows bushy. A thick beard covered his chin. His nose was straight and looked classic, as was more typical for constructs, but he wasn’t a construct. She guessed him to be in his thirties, with a few white hairs creeping into his temples. Underneath the injuries, he was not unattractive.

“Please, it’s important that you respond. I’ve heard you speak my language on the tape. You said you came for help. Tell me what sort of help you want. You came from New Jakarta. Our news from the station has been limited. Give us some information and we may help you.”

But whatever questions she asked him, he didn’t reply. He kept looking at the badge on her uniform as if it carried some sort of message. As if he didn’t trust people in uniform. Given how the dear Lieutenant Kool and his cronies had treated him, that was no great surprise. The Lieutenant himself still stood at the door, arms crossed, chin in the air, like a giant watchdog ready to pounce.

Frustration ate away at her. “You see him there at the door? He and his mates believe that if they beat you often and hard enough, you will start speaking Standard. I’m thinking that maybe they’re right.”

The Lieutenant raised a bemused eyebrow at her. “I told you that he speaks only garbage.”

Melati snapped back, “He speaks B3. I’ve heard it.”

“He sure isn’t saying anything now.”

She heard, Can I torture him now? in his voice.

By God, she shouldn’t be shocked that there were people who enjoyed inflicting injury on fellow human beings, but every time it still took her by surprise.

She pushed down her anger. “Well, maybe he is reluctant to say anything to me in the presence of the people who have injured him. I want him to be at ease. I need him relaxed for when I bring the BCI machine down.”

He laughed.

Melati waited for the s****l joke, but Lieutenant Kool was too much of a professional military man to succumb to that temptation. He’d be reported and he knew it.

When she didn’t react to his laughter, he shrugged and said, “Suit yourself. I’ll just go back to the office. You’re not carrying weapons?”

“No. And I’ll stay close to the door, not within his reach.”

“There will be surveillance and a warden will stay outside the door. You are not to come within his reach or touch him in any way.”

“I am aware of the protocol, Lieutenant.”

He left the room, and Melati waited until the door had clicked shut behind him. Part of the warden’s head came into vision in the little square of the corridor that she could see through the window.

The prisoner had followed this exchange with an emotionless expression on his face.

She said in B3, “Now you should be able to speak freely. Time is running out. If you don’t cooperate and start talking to us, my superiors and the people in charge of this facility will transfer you to the prison ship Repentance. When you’re there, they find their own way of making you tell them what they need to know. You might not like their methods. I have no say over that. They suspect that you’re an enemy spy, and you’re unlikely to ever leave that ship except as ash discarded into space. If you are not a spy, you are here to help us, or you want help and you want to stay alive, you might want to start talking to me. The others will not be as kind. They also don’t understand B3, so if you have anything to say, do it before I walk out that door. I will not be back. And not even God can help you because the only thing those people believe in is the might of the army. This is a military ship. These people do not play games.”

She pushed away from the door so that he could meet her eyes. Not too close, because she wasn’t sure if the warden was looking, and didn’t need any more trouble from these rule-pushers.

He blinked. His eyes were absolutely blacker than black. Her eyes were brown. If she looked in the mirror and the light fell sideways, you could see all the little bumps in the irises. His eyes were too dark for that. Many men of the barang-barang got pimples in their youth, leaving them with coarse, pitted skin on the fleshy part of their cheeks. His skin was smooth and unblemished. His hands were fine and clean. His middle finger and ring finger bore signs of rings that had been removed. Stolen, sold, pawned off? Plenty of shops in the B sector of the station would have taken his money.

Then he said in a low voice, husky from disuse, “I went to Mecca.”

What?

“The sky was blue and sun was hot.” He spoke B3 with a strong accented voice, carefully deliberating each word. “It was full of people . . . like us. The sun . . . it is unbelievable. It’s warm without burning. We won a lottery that came with a lot of credits. I wanted to buy investment, but my sisters wanted go to Mecca. I told them it was a waste of money, but I was wrong. It was most beautiful thing I have ever done. I’ve seen Mecca. Now I can die.”

Melati stared at him. Whatever she had expected him to say, this wasn’t it.

He looked up at the ceiling as if he saw the sunlight and the sky that Melati had been told was blue, but even the concept of unbroken sky was strange to her. He continued, “Many times in my life, I doubted: does God exist? People do such evil things to each other that surely there cannot be a God, because otherwise He would have punished those vile people. But after I saw those things, I have no more doubts.”

In the B sector of New Jakarta, people who had managed to scrape together enough money to visit Indonesia and Mecca were held in high regard. When they came back, they were rewarded with leadership positions in the community. They all shared some sort of bond.

“Are there really as many people in Mecca as they say?” she asked.

“People everywhere. More people than you have ever seen in one place.”

Wahid had spoken at length about the trip he had taken. Grandma had been one of his sponsors, and in return he had held a couple of private discussions with the family: where to put the family shrines, what the major threats to faith were and other religious things which she had long since forgotten.

Did people in New Hyderabad believe in the same god?

Did that station have ghosts and spirits that were anything like the ones at New Jakarta?

Did people have shrines?

Did the station managers look kindly on those who wanted times to pray during the day?

But she had come here to interrogate a prisoner and now that he was talking, she should not let herself get distracted. She turned on the sound recorder on her PCD.

“I’m going to ask you a few questions. What is your name?”

He stared at her.

“Your name. I’m Melati. What is your name?”

He remained silent. Shook his head. Moisture glittered in his eyes.

“You can’t remember?”

He shook his head again.

“Why?”

“Those people, they . . .”

“Which people?”

Melati waited, but he didn’t find the words to express himself. “What did those people do to you?”

“I pray to the wrong God. They said I was wrong and want to make me believe in their god. They put things on my head to make me believe in their god. But I went to Mecca and no one can tell me that God was not there.”

“Who are these people you are talking about?” ISF didn’t encourage religion. As far as she knew, Allion was strongly anti-religious.

“They wear blue.”

“Uniforms? Hospital gowns?”

He stared off into the distance. “They come for me. They always come for me.”

“What do they do with you?”

“They put machines on me to make me forget. My name, where I come from, my family. I have nothing.” A tear ran from his eye. “I went to Mecca. That’s all I remember. I went to Mecca. I don’t want to forget that. Please. Please help me remember. Please, you have to help me.” His voice cracked.

“If I can, but you’re going to have to give me some answers that my superiors will like.”

He burst into tears. “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know where ‘here’ is anyway. Stop asking me questions. I don’t know anything.” His voice rose into a desperate wail.

Melati cringed. She really hated seeing adult men cry like this. It was not part of a proud culture like hers. “You’re on board the ISF Starship Felicity. One of our patrols captured you in the restricted zone.”

He frowned.

“Do you know anything about what’s going on at New Jakarta station?”

He gave her a blank look.

“New Jakarta. Where you came from when you were intercepted.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I went to Mecca.”

“You’re a little confused. Mecca is on Earth and there is no way that the little ship you were in took you there. Your ship came from New Jakarta, which is under siege. In fact, you are the first person having escaped after the station’s occupation.”

He shook his head. “That’s wrong. I came from Mecca.”

“You said that people put things on your head to make you forget. Were these people at New Jakarta?”

He frowned. “But I said I came—”

“You said people put things on your head to make you forget.”

“You can see that they did.” He tried to lift his hand, straining against the strap that held him. His hands were slender and bore no marks of manual work. He strained his muscles in his forearms. Cried out in frustration. Drops of sweat rolled down his neck, increasing the wet patch around his collar.

Melati waited until he calmed down. “The people here are trying to understand you. You asked for help. We may be able to give it, if you can tell us why, who you are and what you need.”

He blinked, frowned and blinked again.

“Where did you learn to fly?”

No response.

“Where did you live before coming to New Jakarta?”

No response.

And so it went question after question.

This was not getting her anywhere. Dr Chee would object, but she was going to get the machine. “I’m going now. I’ll be back later.”

He didn’t react.

She held her pass against the panel next to the door until it clicked and then she pushed the door open.

As she was about to go out, he asked, “How do I tell time and direction for prayer?”

She stopped, remembering how when she was little, a much younger Wahid had explained to her and a class of other children how he had decreed that the point where the communication wiring entered the section was the direction in which people had to face when praying. She remembered having asked the same question in the ISF base, and having been met with strange looks. It was the first time that she’d realised that some people really didn’t have a religion.

“You do pray every day, don’t you?”

Melati nodded, although on most days, prayer times coincided with something else important and she hadn’t the determination to inconvenience everyone for her sake nor to weather the jabbing remarks it would raise. She even kept a prayer mat under her desk, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d used it.

His question hit her right between the eyes. In the past ten months, she had allowed her culture to slip. She had been trying too hard to fit in, to obey commands and learn protocol. She should have remembered Uncle and Grandma and Auntie Dewi and Auntie Gema, and poor old Wahid.

She backed out of the room. The warden went inside as soon as she came out, probably to put him back on that horrible machine.

“I haven’t finished,” she told him. “Leave him where he is.”

She outranked him, and she was Fleet, so he nodded, mumbled ma’am and went back outside.

Lieutenant Kool sat at his desk in the tiny guard’s office. He looked up when she came to the door. “Finished already?” Why did she get the feeling that he was laughing at her?

“I haven’t even started. I’ll be back soon.”