Marek Huberath - Nest of Worlds

At least they didn’t throw him out bodily. He waited in an empty room. He sat, he dozed, sometimes he paced. He tested the cabinets and found they were all locked.

After a few hours Anabel returned, pulling a cart packed with files. Gavein thought to himself that the proud name she had, taken from the name of the Land of her birth, would be of no use to her when she moved to Ayrrah.

“I found the records of your wife’s ship. These are all the passengers.” She pointed to the cardboard box. “And these boxes are for the ships before and after: 077-13 and 077-11. She might have been on them. There is a third possibility: she might have taken a seaplane, her courage failing her. Such persons would not be filed. But I can provide you with a full list of the women who embarked.” She was feeding Gavein’s worm.

“That was a lot of work, Anabel.”

She smiled. Before she left, she showed him again how to use the files.

It was simple: you inserted a card into the slot of the reader, and on the monitor there appeared a black-and-white photograph of the passenger when she embarked from Lavath. Photographs were taken thereafter at three-month intervals to the present. Some folders had fewer prints, ending with a memo that gave the date of death. The photographs were grainy, the image quality poor, the resolution low.

Dozens of faces went by, changing all too rapidly. They grew thin, grew fat, grew ugly; only a few did not submit to the passage of time. This gallery of women’s faces, arranged chronologically, spoke eloquently of the toll of travel in real time.

When he got to the end, the sky outside the window had turned black. There was no Ra Mahleiné.

Anabel returned and said, “Dave, the office is closing. The port is closed until dawn.”

“She’s not here.”

“Tomorrow is another day. You’ll have to spend the night somewhere. Do you have a place?”

“Not really.”

“You can stay with my parents. They have a room upstairs. For thirty packets. A clean bed, breakfast, and for another three packets, Mama will make you lunch. What do you say?”

He wondered what else was included for those thirty-three packets. But the thought came: if he left here, he would never find the way back, in this wilderness of officials, cubicles, desks. If for some reason they were trying to hide the fate of Ra Mahleiné, then, forewarned, they would misdirect him, and he would wander through this vast complex until exhaustion and despair finally defeated him.

“That’s very kind of you, Anabel, but I couldn’t sleep a wink. I have to know! It’s all the same if I stay here or go upstairs—I won’t sleep. And here I can keep looking. There are plenty of folders I haven’t gone through yet.”

“But that’s not permitted.”

He heard hesitation in her voice. She was lying, he was sure of that. He went with his intuition.

“I think I can deal with the person in charge, Anabel. Call your supervisor, let me talk to the woman. I know my rights. It’s inexcusable that finding a passenger should take so long,” he said.

“Actually… I’m the person in charge here.” Her tone showed that his bluff had worked.

Gavein gave a disarmingly helpless smile. There was a pause. He outwaited her.

“All right, then. I’ll do this for you, Dave. Let me have your ID; I need it to set up an overnight pass for you. You’ve had no trouble with the law?” She looked at him sideways. “No suspended fines, even?”

He shook his head.

“Wait here.”

In no time she was back with the ID, the pass, and a magnetic key that opened the door to a room with a dresser and a toilet. She wheeled in another cart with photographs. This was more cooperation than he had expected.

“These are ships 077-10 and 077-14. If you don’t find her there, then I don’t know.”

She was not pleased. He didn’t care. In any case, she left. He began with the registers, but found nothing. The only possibility was an error in the name. He believed, he absolutely believed that Ra Mahleiné had got on a ship, and yet the worm of doubt continued to gnaw at him. It showed him an image of a weary Ra Mahleiné striking up an acquaintance at last with the handsome pilot of a seaplane, running away with him from the ship. The marriage, after all, had not been that long. And had he ever really understood her? Her thinking would be totally different from his, and she was four years younger besides. Except that the idea of compensating travel had been hers, not his. There had to be a trace of her somewhere.

The bitch, he thought of Anabel. She spat poison in my head.

His confidence left him: the time difference, after all—he parted with his wife two weeks ago, she parted with him four years ago. Four years was four years.

At night his examination of the folders was slower. He went through all the ships, through 077-12 twice, but not once did he come upon Ra Mahleiné’s beloved face. At the very end of the file for 077-14, he made a discovery: the race was given for each passenger. Included in the column of data was always a B, R, or G. But never an NC, “no category,” for whites. The race letter was placed in a corner of the screen, easily overlooked in the flood of other information.

“I’m an idiot,” he muttered. “How could I have missed this?” He scrolled through the file of 077-12 again: not one white. They were all black, red, or gray. He sighed with relief. He would have to look in some other place. He wasn’t even angry with Anabel for lying to him—all officials lied.

It was dawn.

She woke him after three hours. He felt crumpled, crushed. No wonder, he had been lying on the floor. His bones ached, and he needed a shower. Anabel brought a few rolls, with coffee in a paper cup. This went beyond official courtesy. He told her what he had discovered last night. He observed how the satisfaction on her face faded.

“I had no idea she was white,” Anabel said. “There are no whites in the file, of course.”

Gavein remembered that he had in fact mentioned the color of his wife’s hair, but all he said was “There must be at least a list. May I see that?”

“There’s a list, yes. But it has only numbers.”

“What do you mean?”

“Once on the ship, the passengers become the property of Davabel. The formalities of changing citizenship are all taken care of the moment they leave Lavath.”

“So?”

“Her Lavath first and last names were not recorded. She is a number. Assuming she is… alive.”

Gavein rubbed his hands. He wanted to give the impression of a man rested up and eager for the next challenge, a man who would never back off or give up. “I’m positive this will work out. The coffee was excellent, the roll even better. Nothing like a good breakfast to make a person optimistic. You baked these yourself?”

“Yes, myself. That is, Mama helped me.”

An obvious lie: these rolls came ready-made from the store, the kind you browned and served. Edda made the exact same rolls.

“Mmm,” he murmured, like a cat. “First-rate.” He shook off his sleepiness. “So when can I see the white women from the transport?”

“Well, now, if you like.” She was capitulating. “They’ll be eating lunch. There are cameras in the dining room.”

She led him down a corridor.

“But if she’s among the dead, I won’t be able to find her,” Anabel said over her shoulder. “She had only an identification number.”

The word “among” sent a shiver through him.

In the guardroom were dozens of monitors. They showed different cells: some screens were empty, others had women. The women were all dressed the same: gray-blue skirts, gray shirts with Quarantine on the back.