SPIN

It was an old idea. Allied Jewish extremists believed the sacrifice of a red calf on the Temple Mount would mark the coming of the Messiah. There had been several "red calf" attacks on the Dome of the Rock in prior years, one of which had damaged the Al-Aqsa Mosque and nearly precipitated a regional war. The Israeli government had been doing its best to quash the movement but had only succeeded in driving it underground.

According to the news there were several WftW-sponsored dairy farms across the American Midwest and Southwest all quietly devoted to the business of hastening Armageddon. They had been attempting to breed a pure blood-red calf, presumably superior to the numerous disappointing heifers that had been presented as candidates over the last forty years.

These farms had systematically evaded federal inspections and feed protocols, to the point of concealing an outbreak of bovine CVWS that had crossed the border from Nogales. The infected ova produced breeding stock with plentiful genes for red-tinged coats, but when the calves themselves were born (at a WftW-linked dairy farm in the Negev) most died of respiratory distress at an early age. The corpses were quietly buried, but too late. The infection had spread to mature stock and a number of human farmhands.

It was an embarrassment for the U.S. administration. The FDA had already a

The news reader cited a few examples by name.

One of them was Jordan Tabernacle.

4X109 A. D.

Outside Padang we transferred from Nijon's ambulance to a private car with a Minang driver, who dropped us off—me, Ibu Ina, En—at a cartage compound on the coast highway. Five huge tin-roofed warehouses sat in a black gravel plain between conical piles of bulk cement under tarps and a corroded rail tanker idle on a siding. The main office was a low wooden building under a sign that read 'Bayur Forwarding' in English.

Bayur Forwarding, Ina said, was one of her ex-husband Jala's businesses, and it was Jala who met us in the reception room. He was a beefy, apple-cheeked man in a canary yellow business suit—he looked like a Toby jug dressed for the tropics. He and Ina embraced in the ma

Teluk Bayur—the big deepwater harbor south of the city of Padang—was where Jala had made all his money. Thirty years ago, he said, Teluk Bayur had been a sleepy Sumatran sand-mud basin with modest port services and a predictable trade in coal, crude palm oil, and fertilizer. Today, thanks to the economic boom of the nagari restoration and the population explosion of the Archway era, Teluk Bayur was a fully improved port basin with world-class quays and mooring, a huge storage complex, and so many modern conveniences that even Jala eventually lost interest in tallying up all the tugs, sheds, cranes and loaders by to

"Nobody higher than General Affairs," Jala corrected her.

"You're too modest."

"Is there something wrong with making money? Am I too successful? Is it a crime to make something of myself?"

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 ru

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 ma

"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 archru

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

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

"Not fu

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

"What have I ever gained by trusting you?"

Jala gri

"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."