SPIN

Ina inclined her head and said, 'These are of course rhetorical questions.'

I asked whether we were going directly to a ship at Teluk Bayur.

'Not directly,' Jala said. 'I'm taking you to a safe place on the docks. It isn't as simple as walking onto some vessel and making ourselves comfortable.'

'There's no ship?'

'Certainly there's a ship. The Capetown Maru, a nice little freighter. She's loading coffee and spices just now. When the holds are full and the debts are paid and the permits are signed, then the human cargo goes aboard. Discreetly, I hope.'

'What about Diane? Is Diane at Teluk Bayur?'

'Soon,' Ina said, giving Jala a meaningful look.

'Yes, soon,' he said.

* * * * *

Teluk Bayur might once have been a sleepy commercial harbor, but like any modern port it had become a city in itself, a city made not for people but for cargo. The port proper was enclosed and fenced, but ancillary businesses had grown up around it like whorehouses outside a military base: secondary shippers and expediters, gypsy truck collectives running rebuilt eighteen-wheelers, leaky fuel depots. We breezed past them all. Jala wanted to get us settled before the sun went down.

Bayur Bay itself was a horseshoe of oily saltwater. Wharfs and jetties lapped at it like concrete tongues. Abutting the shore was the ordered chaos of large-scale commerce, the first- and second-line godowns and stacking yards, the cranes like giant mantises feasting on the holds of tethered container ships. We stopped at a manned guardpost along the line of a steel fence and Jala passed something to the security guard through the window of the car—a permit, a bribe, or both. The guard nodded him through and Jala waved amiably and drove inside, following a line of CPO and Avigas tanks at what seemed like reckless speed. He said, 'I've arranged for you to stay here overnight. I have an office in one of the E-dock warehouses. Nothing in there but bulk concrete, nobody to bother you. In the morning I'll bring Diane Lawton.'

'And then we leave?'

'Patience. You're not the only ones making rantau—just the most conspicuous. There might be complications.'

'Such as?'

'Obviously, the New Reformasi. The police sweep the docklands every now and then, looking for illegals and archrunners. Usually they find a few. Or more than a few, depending on who's been paid off. At the moment there is a great deal of pressure from Jakarta, so who knows? Also there's talk of a labor action. The stevedores' union is extremely militant. We'll cast off before any conflict begins, with luck. So you sleep a night on the floor in the dark, I'm afraid, and I'll take Ina and En to stay with the other villagers for now.'

'No,' Ina said firmly. 'I'll stay with Tyler.'

Jala paused. Then he looked at her and said something in Minang.

'Not funny,' she said. 'And not true.'

'What, then? You don't trust me to keep him safe?'

'What have I ever gained by trusting you?'

Jala grinned. His teeth were tobacco brown. 'Adventure,' he said.

'Yes, quite,' Ina said.

* * * * *

So we ended up in the north end of a warehousing complex off the docks, Ibu Ina and I in a grimly rectangular room that had been a surveyor's office, Ina said, until the building was temporarily closed pending repairs to its porous roof.

One wall of the room was a window of wire-reinforced glass. I looked down into a cavernous storage space pale with concrete dust. Steel support beams rose from a muddy, ponded floor like rusted ribs.

The only light came from security lamps placed at sparse intervals along the walls. Flying insects had penetrated the building's gaps and they hovered in clouds around the caged bulbs or died mounded beneath them. Ina managed to get a desk lamp working. Empty cardboard boxes had been piled in one corner, and I unfolded the driest of them and stacked them to make a pair of crude mattresses. No blankets. But it was a hot night. Close to monsoon season.

'You think you can sleep?' Ina asked.

'It's not the Hilton, but it's the best I can do.'

'Oh, not that. I mean the noise. Can you sleep through the noise?'

Teluk Bayur didn't close down at night. The loading and unloading went on twenty-four hours a day. We couldn't see it but we could hear it, the sound of heavy motors and stressed metal and the periodic thunder of multiton cargo containers in transit. 'I've slept through worse,' I said.

'I doubt that,' Ina said, 'but it's kind of you to say.'

Neither of us slept for hours. Instead we sat close to the glow of the desk lamp and talked sporadically. Ina asked about Jason.

I had let her read some of the long passages I'd written during my illness. Jason's transition to Fourth, she said, sounded as if it had been less difficult than mine. No, I said. I had simply neglected to include the bedpan details.

'But about his memory? There was no loss? He was unconcerned?'

'He didn't talk much about it. I'm sure he was concerned.' In fact he had come swimming out of one of his recurrent fevers to demand that I document his life for him: 'Write it down for me, Ty,' he had said. 'Write it down in case I forget.'

'But no graphomania of his own.'

'No. Graphomania happens when the brain starts to rewire its own verbal faculties. It's only one possible symptom. The sounds he made were probably his own manifestation of it.'

'You learned that from Wun Ngo Wen.'

'Yes, or from his medical archives, which I had studied later.'

Ina was still fascinated with Wun Ngo Wen. 'That warning to the United Nations, about overpopulation and resource depletion, did Wun ever discuss that with you? I mean, in the time before—'

'I know. Yes, he did, a little.'

'What did he tell you?'

This was during one of our conversations about the ultimate aim of the Hypotheticals. Wun had drawn me a diagram, which I reproduced for Ina on the dusty parquet floor: a horizontal and vertical line defining a graph. The vertical line was population, the horizontal line was time. A jaggedy trend line crossed the graph space more or less horizontally.

'Population by time,' Ina said. 'I understand that much, but what exactly are we measuring?'

'Any animal population in a relatively stable ecosystem. Could be foxes in Alaska or howler monkeys in Belize. The population fluctuates with external factors, like a cold winter or an increase in predators, but it's stable at least over the short term.'

But then, Wun had said, what happens if we look at an intelligent, tool-using species over a longer term? I drew Ina the same graph as before, except this time the trend line curved steadily toward the vertical.

'What's happening here,' I said, 'is that the population— we can just say 'people'—people are learning to pool their skills. Not just how to knap a flint but how to teach other people to knap flints and how to divide labor economically. Collaboration makes more food. Population grows. More people collaborate more efficiently and generate new skills. Agriculture. Animal husbandry. Reading and writing, which means skills can be shared more efficiently among living people and even inherited from generations long dead.'

'So the curve rises ever more steeply,' Ina said, 'until we are all drowning in ourselves.'

'Ah, but it doesn't. There are other forces that work to pull the curve to the right. Increasing prosperity and technological savvy actually work in our favor. Well-fed, secure people tend to want to limit their own reproduction. Technology and a flexible culture give them the means. Ultimately, or so Wun said, the curve will tend back toward flat.'

Ibu Ina looked confused. 'So there is no problem? No starvation, no overpopulation?'

'Unfortunately, the line for the population of Earth is still a long way from horizontal. And we're running into