The old man displayed a stained and profoundly incomplete set of teeth. “Sure, sure, I’m speak of English. I name is Sumadi. Hey, bro’, where your coming from?”
“Pakis.”
“No, no, brudda. I mean where your from for real?”
“America.”
“Yah. Thought so. And where your going?”
A new voice spoke from the railing of the top deck of the pilot house. “He’s going over the side.” The English was almost completely unaccented.
The people who had gathered around Caine shrank back from him, opening a path to the unusually tall Indonesian looking down into the afterdeck, his face fully shaded by one of the ubiquitous rural kaping wicker hats that reminded Caine of a pointy upended wok.
The old man raised an imploring hand. “Now, Captain—”
“Do you know what you have there, old man?”
“No, but—”
“That’s your death, standing right beside you. Trust me, those aircraft that just went overhead are looking for him.”
“What? How you know that?”
“I just know. Haven’t seen that kind of activity since they found smugglers working out of Toboali from the other side of the fifty-kilometer limit. My guess is if they even suspect that this bule’s dockside friends smuggled him on board this hull in a basket of fish, it could be the death of us. So over he goes.”
The old man was about to renew his protest. Caine put a hand on his arm, scanned the horizon, saw a number of irregular green bumps scattered in the west. “No, Pak Sumadi: just put me over with one of the wooden cargo plats. If it floats, I’ll make my own way.”
But this only doubled Sumadi’s entreaties to the “captain.” “See? Such a polite bule. How can you do this?”
But the moment Caine had spoken in English, the man at the railing evidently stopped listening to the old man. He leaned forward, very still for five seconds. “Pak Sumadi, that bule may be polite, but he is also a magnet for death. For sure, the exos are trying to find him—and we’d better not be around when they do.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because I know him,” He called over his shoulder. “Syarwan, ’Ranto.”
Two men came out of the rear door of the pilot house, both wearing broad kapings and carrying AKs. The captain’s height became more, rather than less, peculiar as Caine noted that all three of them were equally tall. And of very similar build. Indeed, they might be brothers, or even—
—Damn it. Clones. The realization must have shown on his face. The “captain” reached out for and received an AK from his comrades, started down the stairs to the afterdeck. “Oh, yes, I know him. Don’t you, Pak Sumadi? Imagine that face without the beard, all scrubbed clean, in nice clothes that don’t stink of fish. Don’t you recognize him?”
Apparently the denizens of the afterdeck didn’t make the connection to the pictures of Caine that had surfaced some months after Parthenon. Then again, they didn’t look like they had much of an opportunity to follow the news too closely. Tattered clothes, frayed kapings, not a one of them who couldn’t desperately use another five kilos of body mass. They were refugees, subsistence fisher-folk, deckhands who worked for food and a safe place to spread their straw mats. The Arat Kur invasion and its near-famine aftermath had already created close to a third of a million of these maritime itinerants and was generating more all the time. Living and working on decaying pinisi two-masters and rusted-out trawlers, they were the workforce for a strange amalgam of patriots and black marketeers who rendezvoused with small craft that dared to cross the fifty-kilometer no-sail zone, or to pick up cargoes that had been covertly deposited on the dozens of small islands that nearly straddled the blockade line.
They backed away from the man approaching with the AK. “Strange you don’t recognize him,” the captain continued. “Then again, you never saw him as closely as I did.” He pushed his kaping farther back on his head. The smile it revealed was not pleasant.
A needle-sharp icicle sprinted from Caine’s hindbrain down to his coccyx, but even so, he couldn’t keep from smiling at the fatal irony of the moment. To have come so far, only to die at the hands of someone who—by all the odds in the universe—he should never have encountered again. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you since I was on Mars. You were bodyguarding for the corporate rep who came to Nolan Corcoran’s memorial.”
“That wasn’t me,” explained the smooth-faced clone. “That was one of my genetic brothers.”
“So you were the one at the meeting right before the Parthenon Dialogs. With Ruap and Astor-Smath.”
“That’s right.”
Caine looked at the muzzle of the AK. It suddenly looked a lot wider than 7.62 millimeters. “And are you still working for Ruap?”
“I wasn’t really working for him then. I’m from CoDevCo’s Optigene division.”
“So you were working for Astor-Smath.”
The barrel lowered a centimeter. “When you’re a clone, you don’t ‘work for’ anyone. You’re just a slave with no place to run to.”
“What do you mean, no place to run to?”
“I mean no country or colony will have us. We’re not immigrants, because we’re not nationals anywhere else. We don’t have our own records, and the megacorporations won’t disclose anything about any genetic manipulation or viral latencies that might make us different from naturally conceived humans. Which has every nation convinced that we’re either monsters, murderers, or Typhoid Marys.”
Caine looked around the boat: stained deck planking, weather-and-brine-bleached fixtures, oily plumes of incompletely combusted biodiesel chugging out of the engine-access deck-hatch. “And so you live on the margins.”
“That’s our only choice when we go ‘rogue,’ as CoDevCo likes to call it. And in the past week, a lot of us have started doing just that: sneaking out of the corporate compounds. By the hundreds, maybe by the thousands. But we’ve got to run away. Why the hell are you here?”
“The invaders brought me to Jakarta. From orbit.”
“And they just let you go? To hide in a basket of fish?”
The whole story was too long. “I escaped. Had I stayed, I think they were preparing to do to me what it looks like you’re preparing to do to me.”
“Which is what?”
“Punch my ticket.” Caine looked at the AK.
The clone seemed surprised by the frank statement. “You look like you’re used to guns, bule.”
“Ought to be. When I escaped, I joined up with the resistance.”
“You—?” The clone looked more closely at Caine. “Yeah, you had to escape, didn’t you—after you kicked Ruap’s tooth out? You’re The Dentist, aren’t you?”
How does he know—?
“Don’t look so surprised. Not a lot of bules fighting with the resistance, although there are plenty of you in-country.” The AK sagged, half-forgotten. “One of them gave me these rifles. A Russian, I think. In some kinda uniform, but no patches.”
Because, like the other elusive foreigners I’ve heard rumors about, they want to stay invisible. “Yeah, I’ve heard there are some unusual tourists hiding in Java’s jungles, these days.”
The clone just nodded, then glanced over the gunwale to the northwest. “But Dentist or no, bule, you still have to go over the side.”