Overnight, lighters and bumboats from Port Jehovah off-load the orbiting ships and bear groundside exotic arts and jewels and foodstuffs from far-off worlds. Much of this cornucopia makes its way to the Tarako Sarai, some of it legally; there, to be snatched up by eager, early-rising Jehovans, anxious for a taste of the foreign. Eager enough indeed to dare the very edge of the Corner to get it.
Later, ferry boats drop and off-load the travelers—the sliders, the world-hoppers, the touristas—gawking and pointing and capturing images and pawing through the merchandise for bargains and native handicrafts. They dress wrongly—for the climate, for the world, for the time of day—and their bodies throb off-synch to the tock of shipboard time and not to Jehovah’s sun. As they enter the sarai, the bustle increases, and with it the markup on the goods. Isn’t this cute, couples and triples ask each other. Those booths look like storage sheds or little garages. Is that a magician? How does he do that with the snake? Oh, I didn’t know the human body could bend like that! Is that a legtrikittar they’re playing over there? How strange! How strange!
The market speaks to them. Ah, yes, sahb, this is the True Coriander, known no-but else place! Seven ducat only, and that is that my children go hungry. See, here, come into my stall, when you see ever so fine ’shwari, look good-good on memsahb. Oho, not memsahb? Then, here you find special double-throw silk, made only on J’ovah, think how this feel on her skin…! Hutt! Hutt! No mind his silks. See here my drizzle-jewels, how they sparkle so? Genuine from Arrat Mountains.
In the center of the market, push-carts peddle, performers sing and juggle, and food vendors hawk their smoking barbecues and searing tan-doors. Is hot day, you like kulfi-kone, eye-said krim, most excellent! Pull-pork! Koofta kabob! Hoddawgs! Winnershnizzle! Pukka Terran food, you find him nowhere else!
But you, sahb, I make it five ducat fifty.
A wink, a lowered voice, a proffered discount, and Gladiola Bills and Shanghai ducats waft magically from purse to poke. And if the promise “Product of Jehovah” is no more genuine than the discount, little harm is done. Even in the ricochet ruckus of the starport sarai, some things are never said. Some of the “Jehovan” wares that leave with the tourists on the upbound ferries had arrived but a short while before on the down-bound lighters. Why pay duty for so short a stay?
“Mango kulfi-kone,” one of the thinning horde asked of the sweets vendor, who heaped a waffle-cone with two scoops of the rich iced-milk, holding it out and saying, “Half ducat, sahb.”
“For two such paltry balls? A quarter ducat would be too much.”
The vendor’s eyes lit. This sahb was no “slider” but, by his long, fringed kurta brocaded with yellow and red flowered borders and with the amber prayer beads wrapped round his wrist, a Jehovan merchant from the City. No Terran, to be sure, but he knew his manners. “It grieves me that I cannot offer it for less than forty-three. The fruit alone costs such much, and I must pay the women who cut it.”
“Thou pay’st them too much. See how small they have diced the pieces! Thirty might be generous for such slovenly knife-work.”
“Bakvas, shree merchant! The smaller the pieces, as all men know, the greater the flavor. Forty.” Their voices had risen, as if in argument, and some of the sliders looked at them askance and edged away. You never can tell about those people.
“Thirty-five!”
“Done!” the vendor cried in vehement agreement. He extended the cone with one hand and offered the other.
“There can be no handclasp with only one hand,” his customer recited, and offered the firm grip of a Jehovan, rather than the limper Terran grip. A few coins changed possession, neither man so boorish as to visibly count them. As God is One, a man who cannot count his money by the heft and feel of it should seek another work!
The vendor watched the merchant reenter the crowd, pause at the kabob-maker’s stall, and—and another customer asked for a kulfi-kone, and paid the half ducat without banter—aye, as if the vendor were but a bisti worker—and when the vendor looked again, the Jehovan merchant had vanished.
Each market day, after the sliders have gone and the dukāndars have twice tallied their accounts—once for themselves, and once for the men of the Jehovan Purse—and the shutters have rattled into place and lock-bars dropped home, the collectors of the Terran Brotherhood drift into the market. A man watching could not say at any moment, “They have come,” but suddenly they were there. Men and women, plainly dressed, mingled with the vendors and whispered a few words here and there, and a portion of the ducats and bills and Jehovan shekels were transferred to the coffers of the Terran Welfare and Benevolent Fund. The food vendors donated also such of their goods as remained at the end of the day; and these were carried off immediately to shelters and kitchens in the Corner. What happens to the hard currency no one has ever asked.
One such collector was named Yash. He had entered the market first, using a crack in the back wall of the vacant handi dukān through which a lithe man could slip. Old Nancy Verwalter had made the finest hand-phones in the Corner, but she had died two years before and the back wall of her dukān had been opened with picks and pry bars.
A few loafers squatted about the plaza, and these Yash studied with grave interest. It was not unknown for agents of the Jehovan Purse to audit the market in the hope of squeezing one more shekel from the dukāndars. Their grooming and clothing usually marked them out, but some were more clever and knew how to blend in.
A few men, disinclined to visit the charity kitchens, had begged cuts of meat or a few samosas or a sandwich from the vendors sealing their coolers and boxes and extinguishing their fires. One such man lounged against the wall of the shoe-dukān, where he nibbled on a pita. His kurta was a plain, dingy white, lacking any brocade or fringe. Satisfied that the market was unwatched, Yash spoke a few words over his handi and soon his runners emerged from a variety of waypoints to circulate among the merchants of the Tarako Sarai.
Yash did not leave his post while the runners gathered and brought him the harvest, but continued to monitor the market. At a few quick signals, his people could vanish.
The sliders thinned out, anxious to catch the next ferry up. The bum with the pita must have finished, for when Yash glanced that way again, he was gone. A hand signaclass="underline" Hutt! Hutt! If the market thinned too much, his collectors would stand out too prominently, should any Pursers be about.
Finally, the take was complete. Yash counted it quickly and inconspicuously, then divided it into four equal parts, giving the other three to Bikram, Hari, and Sandeep. “By different routes,” he reminded them. On the other side of the hole in the back wall of the handi dukān, a wonderful array of options presented itself.
Yash himself took to Jasmine Way, which wound crook-legged past the Mosque of the Third Aspect with its prominent rooftop observatory and where “the Submissives” prayed standing with their faces turned to the sky. There, a bare-chested man squatted in a ragged dhoti and Yash dropped a dinar in his cupped hands, careful to pull it from his own scrip and not from the bundle hidden under his blouse. Dividing the take into four parts ensured that all would not be lost if a courier were robbed or arrested—much of a much, in Yash’s opinion—but it also ensured against a pettier form of thievery: The four parts must still equal one another when they were delivered to the Committee of Seven.