SEPTEMBER 5. GULF OF ADEN.
The Saint John’s docked at Ma’habre at 11:42, local time.
Jumping ship was much easier than Aubry would have expected: the customs agents met him at the bottom of the gangplank, and gave his papers only a cursory examination. Afterward he simply shouldered his rucksack, walked into the crowd thronging the pier, and disappeared.
His first impression of Ma’habre utterly destroyed his mental picture of Africa. Near the docks, low buildings of steel and concrete shimmered in the awesome heat. Farther into the city international conglomerates were creating a corporate forest: office towers sprouted toward the sky like beanstalks of silvered ice. Black and brown and white men and women in native garb or Western business suits bustled about, obsessed by the same daily business prerogatives as their cousins in New York, or London, or Moscow.
The Scavenger part of his mind immediately began to study the building techniques, wondering whether he could do the job better, or as well, or cheaper.
Rucksack over his shoulder, he closed his eyes for a moment.
A series of hypnotically implanted images, hologram-sharp, flashed against the darkness. He opened his eyes, and began to follow the implanted map.
The tang of fresh fruit and roasting meat led him to a native marketplace reminiscent of the Maze’s Free Market. His inoculation record was current, and his digestive system adjusted to cope with the local viruses, but there were dangerous local parasites—so don’t eat anything that you can’t cook. Much of the fruit was fertilized with human waste.
Treated waste, certainly—that was part of Swarna’s land-reclamation program, a program successful enough to migrate north. But there were always problems—if no one was watching, how could they be sure that the compost/cesspools were properly treated?
So, bacterial and parasitic levels in the fruit stands were regulated in a series of spot checks. The results were not always appetizing.
A red and black flag hung suspended from a pole at one of the buildings. It immediately clicked with his mental image. Contact point.
It was dark and a little close inside the building, perhaps ten degrees cooler than the street. Men and women moved quietly, as if striving to conserve their strength and body fluids in the incredible heat.
They drank coffee from small cups, and talked in low voices, mouths mere inches away from each other, as if a breath away from passion.
Aubry sat back, trying to shrink. A dozen different languages burbled in the air. The combination of microprocessor and hypnotic implantations translated them into two dozen different conversations. His lips moved clumsily. His words sounded like English to him, but his lips twisted to construct alien combinations of consonants and vowels.
At length a stranger sat at the table opposite him. The man wore a light half-burnoose, belted at the waist, over American-style denims. He was dark-skinned and Semitic, and stood perhaps five and a half feet tall. His left index finger tapped the table, three times. “I am Hafid. You seek?”
“Food,” Aubry said, remembering the identification sequence. “I have had influenza.”
“You should boil your water.”
“I heard the water was good.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear.” The flicker of a smile crossed the man’s face. “Come to my home,” he said. “I think that the selection will be more to your liking.”
And, it was unspoken, there will be greater privacy.
Aubry shouldered his rucksack and followed the little man out into the street, past the hawkers and the myriad craftsmen, past the sailors of a dozen nations, and deeper into the heart of an alien land.