On My Way to Paradise (42 page)

I couldn’t see into her room. The smoke hazed the air
and my eyes wouldn’t focus. I rolled to my belly and began crawling
forward, finding more strength than I knew I possessed. Two bodies
sprawled in front of her door. I crawled to them and wondered how
they’d come to be there.

I looked up into the chamber. Several men were
gathered around the operating table. Two more lay dead at its base.
Blue wisps of smoke roiled near the ceiling above them. I heard
grunts. One man appeared to be struggling on the operating table,
and the others grappled with him, holding him down. He tilted his
head up and back. Overhead lights shined on his face. It was Lucío
with his horrible scar, grinning in ecstasy.

The mewing repeated, a soft, throat-wrenching cry.
Arms shifted, and I saw that Lucío wasn’t struggling on the table
at all. He’d crawled atop another person and was grinding his hips
against that person—his smile the smile of orgasm.

Abriara moaned and writhed beneath him. He laughed
and said, "Do that again."

One of the men holding her shifted, and I saw her
face—two silver eyes surrounded by a bloody, disfigured pulp, a
clump of hair ripped from her forehead. I jumped to my feet,
intending to race to her, to rescue her. But I’d lost too much
blood and with the sudden rise my head spun wildly and I
fainted.

Abriara screamed again, and I looked up and saw
another man on her—Daniel, one of Lucío’s old compadres—taking his
turn. He raised a fist and smacked Abriara.

I struggled to my knees and for several seconds was
able to remain in that position. I felt slime on my belly—a resin
bandage, still wet. Down below us someone screamed, the fighting
and riot continued on C module.

One of Lucío’s men aimed a laser rifle at me. "That
old man is awake! Should I deal with him?"

Lucío walked out from behind his men at the far end
of the table. He smiled at me and said, "No—but keep your gun on
him. I promised him I would kill him and fuck his woman. I wanted
him to see that I am a man of my word. But now that I think of it,
in a few minutes I want to fuck him, too."

I tried to stay on my knees while I scanned the floor
for a weapon. One of Abriara’s victims two meters away had bled
profusely. My crystal knife was embedded between his eyes. I
watched the barrel of my guard’s rifle. When I’d regained strength,
I vowed to grab that knife and use it. I couldn’t fight all Lucío’s
men, but I might be able to get Lucío.

Suddenly the floor wrenched beneath me and I flipped
over as if slapped by the hand of God. Half the cryotanks in the
room spilled open, and their pink fluids crashed to the floor,
drenching me in freezing liquid. I rolled over and over as
something dragged me toward the wall. I threw myself flat, but
couldn’t regain my balance, was only able to stop rolling. The
shouting of the rioters below suddenly quieted as others were
tossed around.

A man at the table shouted, "The ship, she is
moving." The table was bolted to the floor, and Lucío’s men clung
to it, their eyes wide as they peered around.

My guard had also slipped to the floor, but he
righted himself and aimed his rifle at me.

The ship had indeed begun to spin, and I imagined it
whirling wildly out of control. The constant acceleration of the
ship provided our artificial gravity, but if we continued to spin
it would add a second force—one that could crush us against the
walls as if we were caught in a giant centrifuge.

As if to be true to my deepest fears, the spin gained
momentum, and the great invisible hand dragged me past the
operating table toward the wall. Friction could no longer hold me
to the floor.

A man shouted "What’s happening?" and my guard
shouted, "Sergeant, should I fry this one?" Lucío appeared
confused.

Lucío shouted to my guard, "Not yet!" I tried to
scrabble forward, but was too weak and dizzy. I ended up pinned
against a wall, the handle of a cryotank jabbing into my back. The
dead bodies—including the one with the knife imbedded in its
skull—glided across the slippery floor like marionettes pulled by a
string. They landed nearby. On the table Daniel thrust himself into
Abriara all the harder, as if to make sure raping her would be his
final act.

My guard watched in confused indecision as I pulled
the crystal knife from the dead man’s skull and threw it at Daniel.
It whizzed past his head, bounced to the floor, and skittered back,
landing within arm’s reach. And I realized something important—if
we’d been at the center of the ship, when the force pushed us to
the outside we’d each have flown out directly away from the ship’s
center. But since we were all roughly the same distance from the
center, the force that pushed us against the wall would pin us all
to the same side of the room.

The ship spun faster. My guard inched forward and I
lunged for the knife.

Suddenly, one man at the table could hold on no
longer and he flipped away, landing a scant three meters from me.
Then nearly everyone at the operating table rolled off and tumbled
on top of their compadres until the seven of them and Abriara
became a tangle of flesh.

I was close enough to smell the sex and blood on
them, and I tried to inch towards them but I was held as if spiked
in place. They moaned and panted and tried to untangle themselves
with little success. And the ship whirled faster.

I lay exhausted on the floor, and gasped for breath
and some of the men near me moaned. I couldn’t tell how much force
was being applied—five gravities, eight, ten? Did I suddenly weigh
five hundred kilo’s, or a thousand? I couldn’t tell.

My jaw burst open under the increasing pressure, and
I didn’t have the strength to close it. My skin felt heavy and
dragged at my face. I realized this is what it would feel like to
be under water, hundreds of meters down. My skin felt as it might
tear off and I’d burst from the pressure, like a grape bursting
from ripeness. The blood pumped in my ears like the pounding of
hammers, and my saliva felt too thick to swallow.

And the ship twisted beneath us. I was suffocating. A
great invisible blanket had been laid over me, and was suffocating
me. My kimono felt as if it weighed kilos, and I worried that my
ribs might snap under the weight of the garment. I heard a
crackling noise, and blood began pulsing from my nose. I couldn’t
move my hand to wipe it away. The wound in my belly reopened.

And the ship spun faster. Something snapped in my
head. I heard a thrumming, like the beating of a fibrillating heart
and felt myself being carried forward. I’m riding the back of a
bull, I realized. I’m riding the back of a bull, and I don’t know
where it is carrying me.

I opened my eyes and a landscape of blue fog and blue
shadows seemed to move below me. I hovered near the ground. The
hooves of the bull pounded the mist.

Moving forward. A freezing wind tore at my hair and
it became night. Tamara had never breathed a darkness so black at
me, in this place where wind was ice.

I felt as if I eeled up through dark cold water and
struggled free into light. I was chilled to the bone, and I stared,
eyes unfocused, for several moments.

I recognized a room I’d glimpsed often before—a
hundred thin cots reeking of sweat, patients dressed in white
spilled upon them. A warehouse for damaged people. Some patients
were awake and jabbering. I couldn’t understand them. I couldn’t
think. My brain felt rubbery like the foot of a snail, but
otherwise a great sense of well-being suffused me—not the easy
euphoria of health, but rather a drugged numbness.

A patient with vacant eyes bumped into my cot, and
then reeled away. I wanted to follow him, make sure he wasn’t hurt.
I got up and staggered after him, bumping into cots myself, moving
past carts full of food till I found myself standing in a
restroom.

In the restroom on the wall just inside the door was
a giant strip of weathered mirror-paper. One edge had come unglued
so that it rolled halfway down .

Here, at last, was something I could fix. I spread
the mirror paper back into place and looked at my image for a long
time. The face of a young man, almost a stranger, peered back at
me. Myself as I’d appeared perhaps at age 27 or 28, except that my
hair had grown long past my shoulders and turned silver-white, the
color of thistle down.

My eyes and face were young and dead. I’d seen faces
like that in the feria—faces of beaten peasants fleeing Chile,
Ecuador, Peru" Colombia.
The face of a refugiado,
I thought.
The face of the living dead.

It did not seem to matter. Life is such a fragile
thing and people cling to it so hard with so little effect.
Physical death is unavoidable, yet the soul dies easier than the
body.

I tried moving that wooden face into a smile, but it
did not come out as a smile of joy. My lips moved in mere mimicry
of a smile. I tried a frown. An expression of sadness. Mimicry of
sadness.

There was nothing left to—all expressions were the
same. What matters the expression? Wrinkled flesh writhing upon a
skull. What does it matter?

Someone opened a door beside me, then shouted, "I
found him!"

A medic in a white uniform took my arm and tried to
guide me back out the door the way I’d come. But I just continued
gazing in the mirror.

"So, you’ve noticed!" The man said. "Some of your
friends were packing your things after the first big riot. We found
a rejuvenation packet. We thought that since you had to spend some
time in the cryotanks, you might as well use it wisely. Señor
Nunez, our morphogenic pharmacologist, was kind enough to care for
you. "

I nodded. My mind was not so sluggish that I couldn’t
follow him. For a rejuvenation to be effective a client must spend
months in cryogenic suspension while the pharmacologist restores
the body—repairing cells damaged by radiation, detoxifying and
deoxidizing the neural and muscular tissues, fine-tuning the
cellular specificity of glandular organs to make sure they secrete
the right proteins, then ultimately replacing those organs most
heavily damaged with fresh clones.

However, few clients wish to remain in suspension for
the optimum length of the operation. They’re always concerned that
financial investments will sour or their spouses will step out on
them. They prefer to rush the process and end up cheating
themselves of a few extra years.

I pointed to the white hair, a grotesque reminder of
age on a young man’s body.

"Why the white hair?" the medic asked. "I don’t know.
It has nothing to do with the quality of the rejuvenation. Perhaps
you suffered some overwhelming shock?"

I recalled where Juan Carlos had stabbed me, and
recollected the sensation of the sword entering my flesh—sharp,
heavy, cool, foreign.

I reached into my kimono and probed the wound. No
bandage covered my ribs, and my fingers slid over bare skin under
my kimono till I touched a thick scar below my sternum where one
would make an incision to remove a gall bladder.

My wounds must have been so severe that the medics
opted to keep me in a cryotank till I’d healed. So they’d made me
young again while they were at it.

The medic firmly took my arm, led me back to bed.

"Stay here," he said. "You’re still too sedated to be
walking. We off-load to Baker in a few hours. You’ll feel better
then. "

I stayed in bed for a long time before I finally
realized the significance of those words, "off-load to Baker." The
news punched me in the belly like a fist.

I’d been asleep over two years! No illness would have
required cryogenic suspension for two years. Two years aboard ship
meant twenty Earth years had passed. I felt I’d been robbed of
something immensely important and began taking mental inventory,
trying to imagine what I’d lost.

Some men were talking at nearby bunks. One
explained, "In that big riot the ship spun, remember? The samurai
spun the ship and squeezed the air from us. That’s what happened.
Then they froze all the rabble-rousers ...." The speaker, a wiry
Latin American, wore the midnight-blue kimono of a samurai.

I got up again and stumbled past the beds. Neither
the medics nor Latin Americans dressed as samurai seemed to notice
when I walked out the door.

He’d said they froze the "rabble-rousers." I’d not
been relegated to the cryotanks to be healed, but to be imprisoned.
By sheer will I sought escape. I followed a hall that circumscribed
the ship and soon found myself standing at the foot of a
ladder.

I climbed several rungs and got tired and rested. I
wasn’t thinking straight, and believed if I could keep climbing,
I’d escape into the sky. I continued up, becoming lighter and
lighter as I climbed, till I reached a spot where I weighed nothing
at all.

I was at the central tube that ran the length of the
ship, at an intersection where the old ladder still stuck up
through a hole in the floor like a ladder leading into a sewer.
Only now the sewer holes no longer led down. To my right was the
place where Perfecto and I had dropped the corpse down to the
infirmary. Because the ship was in orbit, the pull of acceleration
no longer provided our artificial gravity.

Instead the ship slowly rotated along its axis to
feign gravity, and this corridor-this sewer hole—was at the axis.
All the rooms below had been reoriented to adjust for the new
direction of what I perceived as
down.

I grabbed the old ladder and gently pulled myself
along the central corridor, floating past sewer hole after sewer
hole, alternating bands of darkness and light, free of gravity.

The mock silk of my white kimono fluttered around my
hips and at my wrist. My silver hair whipped my ears as I drifted
through the corridor like a specter.