three
■ ■ ■
Interference in native affairs is forbidden to all Offworld Port Force employees. This includes, but is not limited to, dispensing unauthorized Earth materiel, interfering with native culture, engaging in violence against native citizens, and fraternization with native citizens.
—Offworld Port Force Terms of Employment
The shuttle waited at the end of the long runway, its arching support struts extended like the legs of a glittering insect, its gut laid open to reveal its payload. It loomed above the gray-black bitumen of the landing field, great aft engines casting long shadows. The sky above burned palest blue. Gray chimeras of heat danced away across the landing field to fade to nothing against the russet of the burnt hills.
Jin-Li Chung drove up to the landing field with one finger in the steering wheel, left hand out, palm cupped to catch the breeze. The empty cart whined, racing with the others, dull gray vehicles spined with shelving and storage cubicles behind the driver’s compartment. No cart allowed another more than the narrowest of margins as they sped through the security gate.
Jin-Li’s cart whipped around the tail of the shuttle and slid under the delta wing, flashing quickly from the hot daylight into the coolness of the ship’s shadow. The spacecraft towered above, a flying warehouse. The tiny cockpit stuck to its nose like a randomly blown bubble, particle shields reflecting the harsh light in blinding flashes. A ramp extended from the aft hull, the conveyor already rotating. Rocky, the foreman, was in the cargo bay, double-checking the secured stacks of materiel as the remote arms unfolded themselves and swiveled into position.
The carts swerved to an abrupt halt near the ramp with a hissing of wide soft tires. The longshoremen parked in an untidy line and jumped out, calling to each other. They were muscular, fit, vigorous. They laughed and joked, the air hot and clean in their lungs, the star burning down on their heads. Jin-Li seized the spot closest to the ramp, just beneath the remote arm.
Longshoremen, like all Port Forcemen who moved off port grounds, were uniformed. They wore billed caps, short-sleeved shirts, and shorts, all in beige syncel. They wore wide dark glasses issued to them the moment they arrived on Irustan. Without the filter of the glasses the brilliance of the star made everything a featureless blur of light and shadow, depthless and dazzling. Only the eyes of the native-born could cope with the full force of it, and many of them wore glasses, too. The inconvenience was offset for most of Port Force by the pleasure of working with arms and legs bare, the slightest breeze tickling sweat-damp skin. At home, it was insanity to go uncovered under the sun. Here, under an intact atmosphere, Jin-Li and the others were tanned, the rounded muscles of their profession gleaming darkly against their pale uniforms. Everything, uniforms, caps, carts, bore the circled star logo of the ExtraSolar Corporation.
“Here, Johnnie!” Rocky was a massive man, with legs like the struts that steadied the shuttle. He leaned out of the open cargo bay as Jin-Li, pulling on thermal gloves, approached. “Medicines—that’s you!” Rocky had opened the controlled atmosphere compartment, a thickly lined cubicle near the front bulkhead. He directed the robot arm to lift a small vacuum barrel and bring it to the edge of the cargo bay.
Jin-Li assisted the remote as it descended, flexing its triple joints to transfer the barrel to the cart. One of these little barrels had slipped and cracked once, spoiling heinously expensive supplies, valuable drugs manufactured on Earth and made even more costly by the space they had required on the transport and the shuttle. This one was light, but its grooved metal sides were cold and slippery in the metal fingers of the robotic arm. Jin-Li popped hinged handles out of their niches to secure them with corresponding latches in the CA compartment of the cart.
Tony, a dark man with black curls showing under his cap, was new to Irustan. His cart was pulled up next to Jin-Li s, and another of the remotes was piling it with softpacks stretched taut with Earth materials the colony couldn’t manufacture. Tony grunted as he arranged the containers to fit into his cart. He looked over at Jin-Li, dark glasses gleaming. “Hey,” he said. “He gets all the light ones? Because he’s smaller, or what?”
Rocky laughed, reaching to adjust a remote as it swung the barrels, canisters, and cartons full of spaceborne cargo. He answered Tony as he ran the wand of his portable over a label, checking and cross-referencing every container. “His name is on ’em because we have to deliver ’em to the Medah. No Irustani’ll touch ’em. And Johnnie handles the medical stuff.”
“What’s the problem with medical stuff?” Tony asked. “The Irustani afraid of medicines?”
“More or less,” Jin-Li said. The cart was filling now, vacuum barrels locked into the CA compartment, smaller canisters and dry cartons strapped into the slatted shelves. The conveyor was kept full of containers for the other carts, and a steady stream of longshoremen came to meet it.
“Why him?” Tony persisted. “Don’t we go down to the Medah?”
“Yeah,” Rocky answered. “But Johnnie knows how to talk to ’em, how to deal with those medicants. It’s risky business.”
“Risky for him?” Tony asked.
“Probably not,” Rocky said. He stood still for a moment, leaning against the outer hull, portable dangling from his thick fingers. “But you can get some poor woman in big trouble if you do it wrong, Men here aren’t too forgiving about their women.”
Tony lifted his eyebrows above his glasses. “So, Johnnie—you get to meet Irustani women—lucky. Must be an expert.”
Jin-Li chuckled. “Hardly.”
“Fascinating,” Tony said. “The women, I mean. Veils, all that. But the way they live! God.”
Jin-Li nodded. “Just like they lived on Earth. But”—another carton— “we’re just as strange to them.”
“Here, Johnnie, one more,” Rocky said. He placed a softpack on the conveyor. Jin-Li caught it at the bottom of the ramp.
“That’s all, Rocky?”
“That’s it. You’re done.”
Tony waved his arm at the stacks of containers stretching off into the bay. “With all that still to go?”
“Saved it for you.” Jin-Li spread a quilted sheet of gray photoresistant plastic over the cargo, then waved one hand in the air as the little motor of the cart sputtered to life. “Have fun!” Jin-Li spun away with one finger on the wheel. The men still laboring jeered good-naturedly. Jin-Li drove the cart through the cool darkness beneath the ship and back out into the glare, moving slowly. Down the length of the shuttle, around the tail and beneath the thrust engines, then across the field to the gate, the little electric motor growling with its load.The guard at the gate gave a mock salute. “More careful now, I see, Johnnie.”
“Right. See you!”
The cart moved around the port terminal and out into the road leading away from the port. The port director, an Irustani, handled the distribution manifests for medical supplies. Jin-Li turned left, up a wide, smooth road to a sprawling two-story sandrite building.
The building was tiled and cool, bringing gooseflesh to Jin-Li’s sunwarmed skin. The entry and lobby were open to the roof, soaring to a ceiling of thick tinted glass. Jin-Li took off the dark glasses and slipped them into a breast pocket, pulling out a tiny reader with the notated list of supplies. A clerk at a desk in the entryway stood up, touching his heart with his right hand.
“Kir Chung,” he said, smiling. “I thought you’d be here today. I heard the shuttle come in.”
Jin-Li mirrored the gesture, hand to heart, and smiled back. “Kir Dinos, good to see you again. Can you take this list up to the director’s office and ask if there’s a manifest for me?”
“Right away.” Dinos signaled to an assistant to come and man the desk while he trotted across the lobby to the stairs.
Jin-Li greeted the assistant, then wandered away to make a lazy circle around the enormous abstract sculpture that rested on a whitewood platform in the center of the lobby. There was no enclosure, no impediment to the observer. The sculpture invited the hand to touch it, to caress its sandrite curves, to let the texture and shape of it guide the fingers. Jin-Li put one brown hand on an inner slope of the shape, following the path it made.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” came a deep voice.
“Oh, hello, Director,” Jin-Li said, turning, smiling.
Samir Hilel was dark-skinned, with thick brown hair. He touched his heart and then shook Jin-Lis hand with a firm, cool grip. “Kir Chung,” he said. “It gives me pleasure to know that an Earther can appreciate Irustani art.”
Jin-Li shrugged and gave a deprecating chuckle. “Well, I try, Director. Your sculptors don’t make it easy.”
Hilel put his hand to the flowing shape before them. Jin-Li saw the sensuous way he stroked it, following its path up, in and out, up again until his hand came away in the air. Hilel gave a slight sigh. In a moment he said over his shoulder, “What do you think it means, Kir Chung?”
Jin-Li said carefully, “This is a test I’ll probably fail.”
Samir Hilel chuckled. “1 wouldn’t test you! You know more of our customs than I do of yours, I’m sure. I’m only interested in how this piece strikes you.”
Jin-Li looked up at the sculpture, following the folds, the rolling waves of stone. “The stone is lovely, of course, that silvery gray sandrite. But it seems to me—perhaps—that I see the artist guiding both hand and eye to the Maker, pulling them both irresistibly to heaven.”
The port director inclined his head with a grave smile. “You honor the artist,” he said. “And I’ll tell him what you’ve said. He will be moved to know that his work spoke to you so clearly.”
“Thanks, Director. Please do tell him for me.”
Hilel regarded Jin-Li for a moment. They were almost the same height, though Jin-Li was narrower of shoulder and probably thirty years younger than Hilel. The director had an appealing grace, a poise earned through intelligence and experience.
“Johnnie Chung,” Hilel said, as if trying out the name. “You’re different from your colleagues.”
“It’s Jin-Li Chung, actually, Director. Port Forcers are fond of nicknames. And I suppose I am a bit different.”
“Yes. From time to time 1 meet other longshoremen, other Port Forcemen. But you are more like us than any of them—you even look more like us.”
“Do I?”
“A little. But perhaps it’s just that you find us interesting, and that makes you interesting to us.”
Jin-Li shrugged, smiling. “I don’t know, Director. But it’s true—your world appeals to me.”
Hilel smiled again. “On behalf of Irustan,” he said with a light laugh, “I thank you!” He gestured with one hand to the stairs. “Now, I’ve a manifest for you, and a few special requests have come in from our medicants. If you don’t mind.”
“Not a bit. Glad to be of service.”
Jin-Li followed Hilel out of the lobby, looking back once at the great stone piece. It was an illustration, a material representation of the ecstasy of religious belief, and also of the inscrutable nature of Irustan. Jin-Li doubted Earth eyes could ever fully understand it.