On My Way to Paradise (25 page)

The liquor had almost blinded me, and I found it
difficult to read the comlink codes. As each man answered, I
listened to their voice and then hung up. Two men bad deep gravelly
voices so similar I couldn’t distinguish one from the other:
Alphonso Pena. and Juan Carlos Vasquez. 1 hunched over the
biographies and laboriously studied the files of each man. The
files appeared as if written on a billboard barely visible through
a deep fog. Once I read something I had to hold it in my mind for a
long time to make any sense of it.

Alphonso was a large man with a long list of
credentials in targeting-system repair for particle-beam
weapons.

How would one repair a targeting system on a
particle-beam weapon? I wondered in my drunken stupor. What did he
really do for a living? I didn’t know, nor could I deduce if he was
any good at repairing targeting systems for particle beams. Juan
Carlos was the plumber who’d defected from Argentina, the cyborg
who’d worn the silver face at Sol Station. I liked his job. A
plumber was something easy, something you could hold in your mind
and say with certainty, "This man’s a plumber."

 I knew exactly what it meant. In fact, if
someone had walked down the hall, I’d have told him, "Juan Carlos
is a plumber."

I remembered trying to read his body language at Sol
Station, and he’d seemed perfectly at ease.
But then,
I
thought,
maybe this
dog
feels at ease when planning
murder.
He was Argentine. That was bad Argentina is where the
Nicita Idealist Socialists first took over.

Also, he was a cyborg, though not a military model.
Jafari had been in charge of Cyborg Intelligence for the Alliance.
So it made sense: Juan Carlos was a cyborg, and an Argentinean, and
a socialist assassin. And a plumber.

I set out down the hall to find him and stab him. But
after I’d walked twenty meters I saw the ladder going up to the air
lock and remembered I couldn’t get to him. I thought I should tell
my compadres what I’d learned, but first I wanted another drink, so
sat down to rest my wobbly legs looked around for my bottle of
wine, then realized I’d left it in my room. I curled up in the hall
and fell asleep.

A short while later Sakura woke me. He bent over me
and shook my shoulders. Down the corridor two squat maintenance
robots scoured the floor.

"Come now, are you ill?" Sakura asked. "Can you sing
the company song for me, from the heart!
‘Motoki Sha Ka’?
Show your gratitude to Motoki!"

He sang the company song line by line at the top of
his voice. He’d caught me alone and helpless, so I followed his
lead. When he was done, I sat on the floor and watched him climb
down the ladder, searching for another victim.

The hallway was silent except for the whirring motors
of the maintenance robots. I suddenly felt cold, and something
strange happened: I felt the presence of someone else in the hall,
an invisible being. The ghost of Flaco.

Even though I couldn’t see him I was certain he was
there. I felt him walk down the hall toward me, then go to the
ladder. He stood and looked up at the air lock, as if indicating he
wanted to go find Juan Carlos.

I felt that he bore me no malice for letting him get
strangled, but that he still wanted vengeance against his
murderers—the death of Jafari’s employers.

The hair raised on the back of my neck. I’d felt a
similar thing when I planned to leave Tamara—the fear of her ghost,
of being haunted—but this time it was much stronger.

Logically I knew there was no ghost. Psychologists
have proved that people see ghosts in reaction to unbearable
stress—the death of a loved one, a terrible accident. Certainly I’d
felt such stress in the past few days. But the sense of Flaco’s
presence was more persuasive than logic. I staggered up and ran for
my room.

When I got to the door, I tried to compose myself.
I’d feel silly if everyone saw my fear. I remembered a night in a
small resort town in the Sierra Madres in Mexico. The night had
been very cool and the air perfectly still. I’d taken a walk, and
as I was coming around the comer to my hotel I’d seen a silvery
human shape standing in the doorway outside the hotel. For a moment
I’d been terrified, thinking it was a ghost, but the apparition
quickly dissipated and I saw the truth of it: someone had been
standing in the doorway only a second before, and the air had
heated around his body, and as he stepped into the doorway the warm
air stayed behind.

My prosthetic eyes had then detected a vaguely
human-shaped apparition. It was a very strange occurrence, one
never to be repeated. But this thing with Flaco, it was different.
I’d not seen Flaco, only felt him.

I heard someone speaking behind the door: "You ...
you can’t ekshpect too much from him—" one of the chimeras said—I
think it was Nero, "he’ sh an old man."

"You mean an old handicap," Mavro said. "We always
lose because of him. "

"Yesh," one of Hector’s men said. "Maybe if Angelo
would have shlugged that lasht shamurai—just pushed him away, that
plashma would have, would have ... eaten right through. Eaten right
through the leg. Then what? We would have won!"

I jerked open the door. Those still sober enough to
be awake turned to look at me, heads tottering.

García’s chimera Miguel sat in my room with his back
to me. Miguel was heavy with fat, with a barrel chest and immense
neck. When I stepped through the door he turned his bald head
sharply so he could peer at me over his back with pale blue eyes as
if he were an owl, and this surprised me. With a neck as thick as
his, he should have had no mobility. I knew the men in the room had
been criticizing me, but I didn’t know for sure who to be mad at,
except Mavro.

"That’s our problem:" García said, turning the
discussion. His voice was not slurred, though his eyes were glazed,
"we always underestimate these Yabajin. When we fought socialists,
they were never any better than us. They’d never fought in a real
war. But these samurai must have practiced fighting their whole
lives."

I was angry at Mavro. I pointed at him. "You—you were
shaying bad thingsh about me. I heard you shaying bad thingsh!"

García turned and said, "We weren’t talking about
you, don Angelo. You must have imagined it. We were talking about
the Yabajin. Perfecto believes that they are monitoring our helmet
to helmet communications in the simulators—even though our
scramblers would make such things impossible in real life. Yet I
disagreed, for even if they knew of our plans before we initiate
them, it would not explain their marvelous battle skills. I was
just saying that only a lifetime of practice could make them so
good." His innocent tone invited me to believe him.

I looked at him and became confused. I decided I must
have been wrong when I’d thought I heard Mavro speaking evilly of
me. I crossed the room and sat on Abriara’s bed. One of Hector’s
men was asleep on the cot, hugging the wall, so I had plenty of
room.

Zavala started to laugh, long and hard, and everyone
turned to look at him.

"Are you laughing at me?" I asked. "Are you making
fun of me?"

"I’m laughing at all of you!" Zavala said. "You
intellectuals!" he sneered. "You wonder why the samurai beat us.
You say, ‘They beat us because they cheat! They beat us because
they’re stronger! They beat us because they’ve practiced shooting
from the time they were sucking their mothers’ tits!’ And you say
these dumb things as if they had any meaning. That’s the problem
with you intellectuals, you always believe that if you talk about a
problem you understand things. Yet you ignore the obvious about the
Yabajin: Their spirits are stronger than ours! They beat us by the
power of their spirit!" He began laughing deliriously. He was very
tense and appeared to be the most sober person there.

"Ah, I’ve met your type before," García said. "You
have no faith in the power of reason. I’ll bet your father was a
village sorcerer."

"Then you lose the bet!" Zavala said. "My father was
a farmer, and knew no magic."

"Then I’ll make you another bet," García said. "I’ll
bet if we study the matter carefully, we’ll find a good reason why
the samurai always beat us."

Zavala leaned his head to one side, scratched his
temple with his silver-framed mechanical hand, as if trying to
remember what he’d been talking about. "Fine. What shall we bet? A
million Colombian pesos?"

García opened his mouth in surprise. He’d obviously
only been speaking figuratively and didn’t want to bet. After
consideration he said, "You have a million pesos?"

Zavala nodded. A million pesos equaled about two
thousand standard IMUs, a great deal of money for a peasant like
Zavala.

"Fine," García said. "Then I’ll bet a million pesos
we will find why they beat us."

"Not so fast," Zavala grinned as if making a shrewd
proposal. I’d seen that same grin on the face of the man who owned
the Chicken of God. "You seem so certain you’ll win, you must give
me better than even odds."

"What kind of odds?"

"I want nothing from you, Señor García," Zavala said.
He pointed a finger at me. "But if I win, I want payment from don
Angelo. I want his antibiotics to kill the rot. I would not be
forced to do this, but don Angelo refuses to give me drugs. If I
had an amigo who was ill, I would give him drugs. But don Angelo
won’t give me drugs. No one will."

García listened to the accusation but didn’t react to
it. "What do you say, don Angelo? How much are your antibiotics
worth?"

I made a guess. "About 50,000 peshosh."

"Then when we win, I’ll pay you 200,000 pesos,"
García offered. "Is it a deal?"

There was no chance Zavala would win. I nodded.

"Then we have a bet, Zavala," García said. "But now I
must ask, what constitutes a win to the bet?"

Zavala sighed and his gaze wandered around the room.
Like some Chaco Indians I’d met from secluded villages, he was
unused to thinking by conventional logical processes. He wouldn’t
know what constituted proof to an argument.

One of Hector’s men spoke, the small man named Pío
who played the guitar. "Who can shay who’sh shpirit ish better? We
can’t shee them. Shpiritsh. I wish we could."

"But the don is a dealer in morphogens and is
therefore an expert in genetics," García said. "We could have him
compare the gene charts of the samurai with the gene charts of the
chimeras, no? Would Angelo’s expert word on the subject satisfy
you, Zavala?"

I started to object to this. I didn’t want to be
thrust into the heart of their argument.

Zavala studied me a moment. "Sí. I will trust don
Angelo’s word."

García continued. "Good. And we can possibly learn
the age at which samurai begin training, right? And by this we can
learn if they are trained better than us—if we can find a library.
Is there a library on ship?"

We looked at each other and shrugged. García’s
chimera Miguel, the one with the acrobatic neck, was staring at me
strangely, his blue eyes like pale, icy pools. The sweat gleamed
off his bald head. He had a small Fu Manchu moustache. The overall
effect was frightening. Ugly.

"Sí, there’s a library downstairs!" Zavala said.

"Alsho, the medical computersh have good
bio-biographicalsh," I pointed out, "sho we can learn when the
shamurai shtarted training."

"But how will we know if we win the bet?" García
asked. "You don’t believe the samurai have been training for battle
their whole lives, Zavala, but at what age do you think they would
begin?"

The chimera Miguel was still staring at me. Miguel’s
pupils suddenly dilated and became as large as Mexican five centavo
pieces. His face went slack and his jaw dropped. He seemed totally
oblivious to what was happening in the room. He looked very ill.
Ugly. I wondered what was wrong with him. Too much liquor, I
figured

Zavala considered for a moment. "A boy becomes a man
when he grows his first pubic hairs, no? I do not believe the
samurai trained before they got their pubic hairs."

García said, "Some men grow pubic hairs when they are
ten, some when sixteen. I say we should be generous on this bet: We
will give you a break-off date of fifteen. The samurai cannot have
begun formal combat training before the age of fifteen, or you
lose."

Zavala stared at the far side of the room a moment
and his eyes focused on nothing. He appeared to be in a trance,
consulting the source of spiritual knowledge. "I will agree to
that," he said distantly.

The chimera Miguel closed his mouth and began
crawling across the floor, scrabbling toward me. His pupils
constricted again, and he would have looked normal if not for a bit
of slobber that escaped his mouth as he crawled.

"That leaves only one problem," García said. "We need
to learn if the samurai cheat in the simulators. Does anyone here
think he could break into the computer to find out?"

We all shook our heads. No one would be able to
penetrate the defenses of the ship’s AI. Miguel reached the bed and
sat down on the floor next to me. He patted my foot, then nuzzled
his bald head against my leg like an old dog who seeks the comfort
of his master. I realized he’d bonded to me, and I’d seen the
process happen. This gave me a frightening sense of power, of
responsibility.

"Then I’m afraid there’s only one thing we can do,"
García said. "We’ll have to attack a couple of samurai to see just
how strong and fast they really are."

"But they have shwords!" Pío pointed out.

García asked, "Do I have any volunteers?"

Mavro had been sitting on his bunk, slumped against
the wall as if asleep. His head wobbled upright and he said weakly,
"I’ll disharm one, if shomeone elsh will beat him up."