Robert Charles Wilson - SPIN

He said, "Tyler? Tyler Dupree? Is that you?"

I had taken enough emergency calls to recognize the anxiety in his voice. I said, "It's me, Simon. What's wrong?"

"I shouldn't be talking to you. But I don't know who else to call. I don't know any local doctors. And she's so sick. She's just so sick, Tyler! I don't think she's getting better. I think she needs—"

And then the flicker cut us off and there was nothing but noise on the line.

4X109 A. D.

Behind Diane came En and two dozen of his cousins and an equal number of strangers, all bound for the new world. Jala herded them inside, then slid shut the corrugated steel door of the warehouse. The light dimmed. Diane put her arm around me and I walked her to a relatively clean space under one of the high halide lamps. Ibu Ina unrolled an empty jute bag for her to lie on.

"The noise," Ina said.

Diane closed her eyes as soon as she was horizontal, awake but obviously exhausted. I unbuttoned her blouse and began, gently, to peel it away from the wound.

I said, "My medical case—"

"Yes, of course." Ina summoned En and sent him up the warehouse stairs to bring both bags, mine and hers "The noise—"

Diane winced when I began to pull the matted cloth from the caked blood of the wound, but I didn't want to medicate her until I'd seen the extent of the injury. "What noise?"

"Exactly!" Ina said. "The docks should be noisy this time of the morning. But it's quiet. There is no noise."

I raised my head. She was right. No noise, except the nervous talk of the Minang villagers and a distant drumming that was the sound of rain on the high metal roof.

But this wasn't the time to worry about it. "Go ask Jala," I said. "Find out what's happening."

Then I turned back to Diane.

* * * * *

"It's superficial," Diane said. She took a deep breath. Her eyes were clenched shut against the pain. "At least I think it's superficial."

"It looks like a bullet wound."

"Yes. The Reformasi found Jala's safe house in Padang. Fortunately we were just leaving. Uh!"

She was right. The wound itself was superficial, though it would need suturing. The bullet had passed through fatty tissue just above the hipbone. But the impact had bruised her badly where the skin wasn't torn and I worried that the bruising might be deep, that the concussion might have torn something inside her. But there had been no blood in her urine, she said, and her blood pressure and pulse were at reasonable numbers under the circumstances.

"I want to give you something for the pain, and we need to stitch this up."

"Stitch it if you have to, but I don't want any drugs. We have to get out of here."

"You don't want me suturing you without an anesthetic."

"Something local, then."

"This isn't a hospital. I don't have anything local."

"Then just sew it, Tyler. I can deal with the pain."

Yes, but could I? I looked at my hands. Clean—there was running water in the warehouse washroom, and Ina had helped me wrestle into latex gloves before I attended Diane. Clean and skilled. But not steady.

I had never been squeamish about my work. Even as a med student, even doing dissections, I'd always been able to switch off the loop of sympathy that makes us feel another's pain as if it were our own. To pretend that the torn artery demanding my attention was unconnected with a living human being. To pretend and for the necessary few minutes to really believe it.

But now my hand was shaking, and the idea of passing a needle through these bloody lips of flesh seemed brutal, cruel beyond countenance.

Diane put her hand on my wrist to steady it. "It's a Fourth thing," she said.

"What?"

"You feel like the bullet went through you instead of me. Right?"

I nodded, astonished.

"It's a Fourth thing. I think it's supposed to make us better people. But you're still a doctor. You just have to work through it."

"If I can't," I said, "I'll turn it over to Ina."

But I could. Somehow. I did.

* * * * *

Ina came back from her conference with Jala. "Today there was to be a labor action," she said. "The police and the Reformasi are at the gates and they mean to take control of the port. Conflict is anticipated." She looked at Diane. "How are you, my dear?"

"In good hands," Diane whispered. Her voice was ragged.

Ina inspected my work. "Competent," she pronounced.

"Thank you," I said.

"Under the circumstances. But listen to me, listen. We need very urgently to leave. Right now the only thing between us and prison is a labor riot. We have to board the Capetown Maru immediately."

"The police are looking for us?"

"I think not you, not specifically. Jakarta has entered into some sort of agreement with the Americans to suppress the emigration trade in general. The docks are being swept here and elsewhere, very publicly, in order to impress the people at the U.S. consulate. Of course it won't last. Too much money changes hands for the trade to be truly eliminated. But for cosmetic effect there's nothing like uniformed police dragging people out of the holds of cargo ships."

"They came to Jala's safe house," Diane said.

"Yes, they're aware of you and Dr. Dupree, ideally they would like to take you into custody, but that isn't why the police are forming ranks at the gates. Ships are still leaving the harbor but that won't last long. The union movement is powerful at Teluk Bayur. They mean to fight."

Jala shouted from the doorway, words I didn't understand.

"Now we really must leave," Ina said.

"Help me make a litter for Diane."

Diane tried to sit up. "I can walk."

"No," Ina said. "In this I believe Tyler is correct. Try not to move."

We doubled up more lengths of stitched jute and made a sort of hammock for her. I took one end and Ina called over one of the huskier Minang men to grab the other.

"Hurry now!" Jala shouted, waving us out into the rain.

* * * * *

Monsoon season. Was this a monsoon? The morning looked like dusk. Clouds like sodden bolts of wool came across the gray water of Teluk Bayur, clipping the towers and radars of the big double-hulled tankers. The air was hot and rank. Rain soaked us even as we loaded Diane into a waiting car. Jala had arranged a little convoy for his group of emigres: three cars and a couple of little open-top cargo-haulers with hard rubber wheels.

The Capetown Maru was docked at the end of a high concrete pier a quarter mile away. Along the wharves in the opposite direction, past rows of warehouses and industrial godowns and fat red-and-white Avigas holding tanks, a dense crowd of dockworkers had gathered by the gates. Under the drumming of the rain I could hear someone shouting through a bullhorn. Then a sound that might or might not have been shots fired.

"Get in," Jala said, urging me into the backseat of the car where Diane bent over her wounds as if she were praying. "Hurry, hurry." He climbed into the driver's seat.

I took a final look back at the rain-obscured mob. Something the size of a football lofted high over the crowd, trailing spirals of white smoke behind it. A tear gas canister.

The car jolted forward.

* * * * *

"This is more than police," Jala said as we wheeled out along the finger of the quay. "Police would not be so foolish. This is New Reformasi. Street thugs hired out of the slums of Jakarta and dressed in government uniforms."

Uniforms and guns. And more tear gas now, roiling clouds of it that blurred into the rainy mist. The crowd began to unravel at its edges.

There was a distant whoomp, and a ball of flame rose a few yards into the sky.

Jala saw it in his mirror. "Dear God! How idiotic! Someone must have fired on a barrel of oil. The docks—"

Sirens bellowed over the water as we followed the quay. Now the crowd was genuinely panicked. For the first time I was able to see a line of police pushing through the gated entrance to the port. Those in the vanguard carried heavy weapons and wore black-snouted masks.