I held my breath and thought about what that meant. I thought: Now there are two inhabited planets in the solar system. Not hypothetically, but really. These were places where people lived, where people lived on Mars.
I wanted to stare. But Jase slid the printout back into its envelope, revealing the one beneath.
"The second photo," he said, "was taken twenty-four hours later."
"I don't understand."
"Taken from the same camera on the same satellite. We have parallel images to confirm the result. It looked like a flaw in the imaging system until we juiced the contrast enough to read a little starlight."
But there was nothing in the photograph. A few stars, a fat central nothingness in the shape of a disk. "What is it?"
"A Spin membrane," Jason said. "Seen from the outside. Mars has its own now."
4X109 A.D.
We were traveling inland from Padang—that much I understood—uphill, over roads that were sometimes silken-smooth and sometimes pitted and uneven, until the car pulled up in front of what in the darkness appeared to be a concrete bunker but must have been (by the painted red crescent under a glaring tungsten bulb) some kind of medical clinic. The driver was upset when he saw where he had taken us—this was further evidence that I was sick, not just drunk—but Diane pushed more bills into his hand and sent him away mollified if not happy.
I was having trouble standing. I leaned into Diane, who took my weight gamely, and we stood in the wet night, on an empty road, moonlight cutting through tattered clouds. There was the clinic in front of us and a gas station across the pavement and nothing else but forest and flat spaces that might have been cultivated fields. There was no visible human presence until the screened door of the clinic wheezed open and a short, rotund woman wearing a long skirt and small white hat hurried out to us.
"Ibu Diane!" the woman said, excitedly but softly, as if she were afraid of being overheard, even at this lonely hour. "Welcome!"
"Ibu Ina," Diane said respectfully.
"And this must be—?"
"Pak Tyler Dupree. The one I told you about."
"Too sick to speak?"
"Too sick to say anything sensible."
"Then by all means let's get him inside."
Diane supported me on one side and the woman she had called Ibu Ina grabbed my right arm by the shoulder. She wasn't a young woman but she was remarkably strong. The hair under her white cap was gray and thinning. She smelled like cinnamon. Judging by the way she wrinkled her nose, I smelled like something much worse.
Then we were inside, past an empty waiting room furnished with rattan and cheap metal chairs, into what looked like a fairly modern consultancy, where Diane dumped me onto a padded table and Ina said, "Well, then, let's see what we can do for him," and I felt safe enough to pass out.
* * * * *
I woke to the sound of a call to prayer from a distant mosque and the smell of fresh coffee.
I was lying naked on a pallet in a small concrete room with one window, which admitted the only light, a pale premonition of dawn. There was a doorway covered with a sort of bamboo lacework, and from beyond it the noise of someone doing something energetic with cups and bowls.
The clothes I had been wearing last night had been laundered and were folded next to the pallet. I was between fevers—I had learned to recognize these little oases of well-being—and strong enough to dress myself.
I was balancing on one leg and aiming the other into my trousers when Ibu Ina peeked in through the curtain. "So you're well enough to stand!" she said.
Briefly. I fell back onto the pallet, half dressed. Ina came into the room with a bowl of white rice, a spoon, an enameled tin cup. She knelt beside me and glanced at the wooden tray: did I want any of this?
I discovered I did. For the first time in many days I was hungry. Probably a good thing. My pants were ridiculously loose, my ribs obscenely prominent. "Thank you," I said.
"We were introduced last night," she said, handing me the bowl. "Do you remember? I apologize for the crude nature of the accommodations. This room serves concealment better than comfort."
She might have been fifty or sixty years old. Her face was round and wrinkled, her features concentrated in a moon of brown flesh, an apple-doll look that was accentuated by her long black dress and white cap. If the Amish had settled in West Sumatra they might have produced something like Ibu Ina.
Her accent was lilting Indonesian but her diction was primly correct. "You speak very well," I said, the only compliment I could come up with on short notice.
"Thank you. I studied at Cambridge."
"English?"
"Medicine."
The rice was bland but good. I made a show of finishing it.
"Perhaps more, later?" Ibu Ina said.
"Yes, thank you."
Ibu was a Minangkabau term of respect used in addressing women. (The male equivalent was Pak.) Which implied that Ina was a Minangkabau doctor and that we were in the Sumatran highlands, probably within sight of Mount Merapi. Everything I knew about Ina's people I had learned from the Sumatran guidebook I had read on the plane from Singapore: there were more than five million Minangkabau living in villages and cities in the highlands; many of Padang's finest restaurants were operated by Minangkabau; they were famous for their matrilineal culture, their business savvy, and their blend of Islam and traditional adat customs.
None of which explained what I was doing in the back room of a Minang doctor's office.
I said, "Is Diane still asleep? Because I don't understand—"
"Ibu Diane has taken the bus back to Padang, I'm afraid. But you'll be safe here."
"I was hoping she'd be safe, too."
"She would be safer here than in the city, certainly. But that wouldn't get either of you out of Indonesia."
"How did you come to know Diane?"
Ina grinned. "Sheerly by luck! Or mostly luck. She was negotiating a contract with my ex-husband, Jala, who is in the import-export business, among others, when it became obvious that the New Reformasi were much too interested in her. I work a few days a month at the state hospital in Padang and I was delighted when Jala introduced me to Diane, even if he was simply looking for a place to temporarily hide a prospective client. It was so exciting to meet the sister of Pak Jason Lawton!"
This was startling in almost too many ways. "You know about Jason?"
"I know of him—unlike you, I have never had the privilege of speaking to him. Oh, but I was a great follower of the news about Jason Lawton in the early days of the Spin. And you were his personal physician! And now here you are in the back room of my clinic!"
"I'm not sure Diane should have mentioned any of that." I was certain she shouldn't have. Our only protection was our anonymity, and now it was compromised.
Ibu Ina looked crestfallen. "Of course," she said, "it would have been better not to mention that name. But foreigners with legal problems are terribly commonplace in Padang. There is an expression: a dime a dozen. Foreigners with legal and medical troubles are even more problematic. Diane must have learned that Jala and I were both great admirers of Jason Lawton—it could only have been an act of desperation for her to invoke his name. Even then, I didn't quite believe her until I sought out photographs on the Internet. I suppose one of the drawbacks of celebrity must be this constant taking of pictures. At any rate, there was a photograph of the Lawton family, taken very early in the Spin, but I recognized her: it was true! And so it must be true what she told me about her sick friend. You were a physician to Jason Lawton, and of course the other, the more famous one—"
"Yes."
"The small black wrinkled man."
"Yes."
"Whose medicine is making you sick."
"Whose medicine, I hope, is also making me better."