The Spin, when it came, must have seemed like a monstrous vindication of Jason's worldview—more so because of his obsession with it Clearly, there was intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy; and, just as obviously, it was nothing like our own. It was immensely powerful, terrifyingly patient, and blankly indifferent to the terror it had inflicted on the world. Imagining the Hypotheticals, one might picture hyperintelligent robots or inscrutable energy beings; but never the touch of a hand, a kiss, a warm bed, or a consoling word.
So she had hated the Spin in a deeply personal way, and I think it was that hatred that ultimately led her to Simon Townsend and the NK movement. In NK theology the Spin became a sacred event but also a subordinate one: large but not as large as the God of Abraham; shocking but less shocking than a crucified Savior, an empty tomb.
I said some of this to Ina. She said, "Of course, I'm not a Christian. I'm not even Islamic enough to satisfy the local authorities. Corrupted by the atheistic West, that's me. But even in Islam there were such movements. People babbling about Imam Mehdi and Ad-Dajjal, Yajuj and Majuj drinking up the Sea of Galilee. Because they thought this made a better kind of sense. There. I'm finished." She had scrubbed the soles of my feet. "Have you always known these things about Diane?"
Known in what sense? Felt, suspected, intuited; but known—no, I couldn't say so.
"Then perhaps the Martian drug is living up to your expectations," Ina said as she exited with her stainless steel pan of warm water and her assortment of sponges, leaving me something to think about in the dark of the night.
* * * * *
There were three doors leading into or out of Ibu Ina's medical clinic. She walked me through the building once, after her last scheduled patient had departed with a splinted finger.
"This is what I've built in my lifetime," she said. "Little enough, you might think. But the people of this village needed something between here and the hospital in Padang— quite a distance, especially if you have to travel by bus or the roads are undependable."
One door was the front door, where her patients came and went.
One door was the back door, metal-lined and sturdy. Ina parked her little power-cell car in the pressed-earth lot behind the clinic, and she used this door when she arrived in the morning and locked it when she left at night. It was adjacent to the room where I lived and I had learned to recognize the sound of her keys jingling in it not long after the first call to prayer from the village mosque a quarter mile away.
The third door was a side door, down a little corridor that also housed the toilet and a row of supply cupboards. This was where she accepted deliveries and this was the route by which En preferred to come and go.
En was just as Ina had described him: bashful but bright, smart enough to earn the medical degree on which he had set his heart's hopes. His parents weren't rich, Ina said, but if he landed a scholarship, studied premed at the new university in Padang, excelled, found a way to finance a graduate degree— "Then, who knows? The village might have another doctor. That's how I did it."
"You think he'd come back and practice here?"
"He might. We go out, we come back." She shrugged, as if this were the natural order of things. And for the Minang, it was: rantau, the tradition of sending young men abroad, was part of the system of adat, custom and obligation. Adat, like conservative Islam, had been eroded by the last thirty years of modernization, but it pulsed under the surface of Minang life like a heartbeat.
En had been warned not to bother me, but he gradually lost his fear of me. With Ibu Ina's express permission, when I was between bouts of fever, En would hone his English vocabulary by bringing me items of food and naming them for me: silomak, sticky rice; singgang ayam, curried chicken. When I said, "Thank you," En would call out "Welcome!" and grin, displaying a set of bright white but wildly irregular teeth: Ina was trying to convince his parents to have braces installed.
Ina herself shared a small house in the village with relatives, although lately she had been sleeping in a consulting room in the clinic, a space that couldn't have been any more comfortable than my own bleak cell. Some nights, however, family duties called her away; on those nights she would note my temperature and condition, provision me with food and water, and leave me a pager in case of emergencies. And I would be alone until her key rattled in the door the next morning.
But one night I woke out of a frantic, labyrinthine dream to the sound of the side door shuddering as someone turned the knob in an attempt to open it. Not Ina. Wrong door, wrong hour. It was midnight by my watch, only the beginning of the deepest part of the night; there would still be a few villagers haunting the local warungs, cars transiting the main road, trucks trying to reach some distant desa by morning. Maybe a patient hoping she was still here. Or maybe an addict looking for drugs.
The knob-turning stopped.
Quietly, I levered myself up and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. The clinic was dark, my cell was dark, the only light was moonlight through the high window… which was suddenly eclipsed.
I looked up and saw the silhouette of En's head like a hovering planet. "Pak Tyler!" he whispered.
"En! You scared me." In fact the shock had drained the strength out of my legs. I had to lean on the wall to stay upright.
"Let me in!" En said.
So I padded barefoot to the side door and threw the latch.
The breeze that rushed in was warm and moist. En rushed in after it. "Let me talk to Ibu Ina!"
"She's not here. What's up, En?"
He was deeply disconcerted. He pushed his glasses up the bump of his nose. "But I need to talk to her!"
"She's at home tonight. You know where she lives?"
En nodded unhappily. "But she said to come here and tell her."
"What? I mean, when did she say this?"
"If a stranger asks about the clinic I have to come here and tell her."
"But she's not—" Then the significance of what he'd said pierced the fog of incipient fever. "En, is someone in town asking about Ibu Ina?"
I coaxed the story out of him. En lived with his family in a house behind a warung (a food stall) in the heart of the village, only three doors away from the office of the mayor, the kepala desa. En, on wakeful nights, was able to lie in his room and listen to the murmur of conversation from the warung's customers. Thus he had acquired an encyclopedic if poorly understood store of village gossip. After dark it was usually the men who sat talking and drinking coffee, En's father and uncles and neighbors. But tonight there had been two strangers who arrived in a sleek black car and approached the lights of the warung bold as water buffalo and asked without introducing themselves how to find the local clinic. Neither was ill. They wore city clothes and behaved rudely and carried themselves like policemen, and so the directions they received from En's father were vague and incorrect and would send them in exactly the wrong direction.
But they were looking for Ina's clinic and, inevitably, they would find it; in a village this size the misdirection was at best only a delay. So En had dressed himself and scooted out of the house unseen and come here, as instructed, to complete his bargain with Ibu Ina and to warn her of the danger.
"Very good," I told him. "Good work, En. Now you need to go to the house where she lives and tell her these things." And in the meantime I'd gather my possessions and exit the clinic. I figured I could hide myself in the adjoining rice fields until the police had been and gone. I was strong enough to do that. Probably.
But En crossed his arms and backed away from me. "She said to wait here for her."
"Right. But she won't be back till morning."
"She sleeps here most nights." He craned his head, looking past me down the darkened clinic hallway as if she might step out of the consulting room to reassure him.