we’ll enjoy ourselves. Tomorrow I’ll seek the truth.”
“Right. Tomorrow. And where will you look? Down in the Java Sea? In those rock carvings at Belahan?”
Jin stopped trying to grab me and fell back laughing. “In California, actually.” He tapped his forehead. “Your friend, Judith Merida. She’s promised me a little neurosurgery. To enhance my brain. For an appropriate fee of course.”
I blinked my eyes in disbelief. “Dr. M.?” Then I whispered, “Don’t go.”
“Why not? It might be interesting.”
For once, I bit my tongue. Who was I to say how a rich actor should spend his time and money? Sail, what Jin said spooked me to the core. He started pawing me again. I hadn’t noticed before how much beer he’d consumed. He was soused. I grabbed his square shoulders and tried to shake him sober. “Don’t go,” I whispered over and over. But Jin Airlangga Sura was beyond listening to me.
4 Later Than I Thought
4
Later Than I Thought
WE PARTED ON ambiguous terms, and I didn’t see him again for a year. In retrospect, I remember that year, 2126, as one perpetual sunset—smoky crimson clouds viewed through my lawyer’s skylight in Paris. It was the last year of peace.
Our adventure on Puncak Jaya really shook up the bodybuilder couple from Nome.Com. They filed a complaint with Uncle Org, the World Trade Organization, and it came to light that I had never formally applied for a commercial tour guide license. That year, I spent more days in court than on the surface. I did take time to download Jin’s movies, all sixteen of them. Frankly, I was curious. Jin played romantic leads with a lazy grace, and the cameras loved him. I watched his scenes over and over, memorizing the shape of his lips.
I even searched the archives of scandal ezines. Jin was there all right, but not for the usual celebrity crimes. I’d had a feeling he wasn’t the bar-brawl type. It seems Jin liked to produce independent political movies slamming his Commie cousins. He staged them as film noir parables with lots of special effects. Way dismal. But lots of stormy political weather followed each release. One of his movies even got banned from the Net, which I didn’t think was possible in this day and age. It must have been a real shocker.
I found out about that movie because Jin got into a public shouting match with his father over it. I watched the archived video of their argument three times—and I observed something really strange. Jin’s words had actually been censored! Some of the things he said about the movie didn’t come through on the sound track. Preter-weird. This intrigued me, so next I searched every Jin Sura fan site, ezine archive and chat thread I could think of to discover what that banned movie was all about. Rien. Nothing. Not a single reference. I couldn’t even find the title. Jin’s father must have deployed a mega-slick creepy-crawler program to censor the Net that pervasively. It made me wonder.
Most of Jin’s archived interviews were typical ezine trash—dippy hosts asking cliché questions and Jin answering with glib one-liners. But one segment I liked. The dim-witted host asked Jin about the meaning of life, and instead of playing it smug, Jin answered in that precise, animated tone that reminded me of a professor.
“I’ve been reading about corals,” he said. “Centuries ago, small delicate animals lived in colonies under the sea. The young corals budded from the deposits of the old, and though each individual grew only a few millimeters long, the living and dead together built vast, intricate reefs of staggering beauty. Over time, their structures grew so large they created whole islands where many other creatures could live.”
“Meta-cool,” the host prattled. “Sounds like the mold in my refrigerator.”
Jin ignored that remark and continued evenly. “In a way, the corals achieved immortality. Their dead bodies fed their living ones, transforming death into life, and
“Right. Tomorrow. And where will you look? Down in the Java Sea? In those rock carvings at Belahan?”
Jin stopped trying to grab me and fell back laughing. “In California, actually.” He tapped his forehead. “Your friend, Judith Merida. She’s promised me a little neurosurgery. To enhance my brain. For an appropriate fee of course.”
I blinked my eyes in disbelief. “Dr. M.?” Then I whispered, “Don’t go.”
“Why not? It might be interesting.”
For once, I bit my tongue. Who was I to say how a rich actor should spend his time and money? Sail, what Jin said spooked me to the core. He started pawing me again. I hadn’t noticed before how much beer he’d consumed. He was soused. I grabbed his square shoulders and tried to shake him sober. “Don’t go,” I whispered over and over. But Jin Airlangga Sura was beyond listening to me.
4 Later Than I Thought
4
Later Than I Thought
WE PARTED ON ambiguous terms, and I didn’t see him again for a year. In retrospect, I remember that year, 2126, as one perpetual sunset—smoky crimson clouds viewed through my lawyer’s skylight in Paris. It was the last year of peace.
Our adventure on Puncak Jaya really shook up the bodybuilder couple from Nome.Com. They filed a complaint with Uncle Org, the World Trade Organization, and it came to light that I had never formally applied for a commercial tour guide license. That year, I spent more days in court than on the surface. I did take time to download Jin’s movies, all sixteen of them. Frankly, I was curious. Jin played romantic leads with a lazy grace, and the cameras loved him. I watched his scenes over and over, memorizing the shape of his lips.
I even searched the archives of scandal ezines. Jin was there all right, but not for the usual celebrity crimes. I’d had a feeling he wasn’t the bar-brawl type. It seems Jin liked to produce independent political movies slamming his Commie cousins. He staged them as film noir parables with lots of special effects. Way dismal. But lots of stormy political weather followed each release. One of his movies even got banned from the Net, which I didn’t think was possible in this day and age. It must have been a real shocker.
I found out about that movie because Jin got into a public shouting match with his father over it. I watched the archived video of their argument three times—and I observed something really strange. Jin’s words had actually been censored! Some of the things he said about the movie didn’t come through on the sound track. Preter-weird. This intrigued me, so next I searched every Jin Sura fan site, ezine archive and chat thread I could think of to discover what that banned movie was all about. Rien. Nothing. Not a single reference. I couldn’t even find the title. Jin’s father must have deployed a mega-slick creepy-crawler program to censor the Net that pervasively. It made me wonder.
Most of Jin’s archived interviews were typical ezine trash—dippy hosts asking cliché questions and Jin answering with glib one-liners. But one segment I liked. The dim-witted host asked Jin about the meaning of life, and instead of playing it smug, Jin answered in that precise, animated tone that reminded me of a professor.
“I’ve been reading about corals,” he said. “Centuries ago, small delicate animals lived in colonies under the sea. The young corals budded from the deposits of the old, and though each individual grew only a few millimeters long, the living and dead together built vast, intricate reefs of staggering beauty. Over time, their structures grew so large they created whole islands where many other creatures could live.”
“Meta-cool,” the host prattled. “Sounds like the mold in my refrigerator.”
Jin ignored that remark and continued evenly. “In a way, the corals achieved immortality. Their dead bodies fed their living ones, transforming death into life, and
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