On My Way to Paradise (43 page)

Air friction slowed me slightly, but only the tiniest
nudge with my fingertips allowed me to move forward at a good pace.
It was very much like gliding through deep water after a dive, only
freer, less restrictive. I did a tuck and banked off the airlock at
the bottom of the ship and floated back toward level one, guiding
myself as needed.

I made it a game, exercising my concentration, and
considered: for ten years I’d been saving for a rejuvenation. And
now I was an old healer reborn as a murderer. It was a good cosmic
joke, but I wasn’t inclined to laugh. After all my years of
hungering for youth I no longer wanted it.

The air in this place hung so perfectly still that
when I moved I heard my robes shiver as distinctly as if it were
the tap of a hammer against stone.

I am a ghost, I thought. I am a ghost. And in the
still darkness behind me I felt another icy presence—Flaco
fluttering at my heel. A chill shook me, and the hair prickled on
the back of my neck. I did not try to flee him. I half hoped he’d
catch me. I felt like a woman who experiences an overwhelming
desire to cry. Only I had an overwhelming ache for a release more
pure than tears—I ached for my own destruction.

For a long hour I wrestled despair. I felt that I’d
failed Abriara. I’d watched her rape and been absolutely powerless
to stop it. Perhaps ever since my mother was raped and murdered, my
greatest fear has been that I’d someday be placed in a position
where men who had no conscience would be purposely destroying
others, and I’d be powerless to stop it. Men without conscience
terrify me far more than beasts, for they emotionally brutalize
their victims, wringing every ounce of pain they can.

I knew Abriara’s rapists. I knew I must harden myself
so I could kill them. I must become a man of no conscience. The
thought repulsed me. Waves of guilt and despair washed over me and
I opened myself to them.

When I was a child my mother had often told me,
"Guilt is good. Guilt is your body’s way of telling you that you’ve
been acting like an animal." I believed her. To open myself to that
guilt, to let it destroy me if necessary, seemed the only way to
prove to myself that I wasn’t like Lucío, that I was still
human.

I was floating through the dark tunnel when suddenly
the airlocks opened above me and a hundred other ghosts in white
began flitting along the ladder toward me—patients from the
cryotanks heading down to the base of the ship.

I maneuvered from their path, down a side corridor
that radiated away, and grabbed a ladder. In front of me the tunnel
was dark, yet lights washed up from the corridor below,
illuminating me with a soft backlight.

Several people passed and I looked up into the eyes
of a chimera with thick hair like Perfecto’s, small even teeth and
a grimace like the smile of a porpoise. His eyes were dilated and
his jaw hung slack. He was bonding to me.

Both’ times when men had bonded to me before, I
realized, I’d been in this same position, standing in a darkened
room with light shining behind. Perfecto bonded to me at Sol
Station while I stood in a darkened hallway reading from the light
of the computer terminal.

Miguel bonded while I walked through the door of a
lighted hallway into a darkened room. The chimeras’ genetic memory
must have been a mere figure—a mental image of a man with a certain
build, a certain stance, backlit so that his white hair seemed
radiant.

I felt like a mere icon—like the papier-mâché saints
people parade through streets on holy days. I couldn’t have set
myself in a better strategic location if I’d wanted a chimera to
bond to me.

A minute later a second chimera floated by and
dropped his jaw, then a third.

When they’d passed I had three new friends for life.
I followed after them and we glided down to the airlock at level
eight and formed a line. When seventy-five men had pressed their
way into the airlock, it closed off. We waited for it to open
again. When the last of us crammed in, the door closed and the
airlock descended like an elevator. It opened at the shuttle
bay.

Thirty guards armed with stun rifles and the
space-blue armor of Alliance Marines were posted around the
shuttle bay. Three destroyer-class security robots, black metal
boxes with single turrets mounted on top, squatted at strategic
locations.

The marines had set up a retina scanner and sonic
detecting equipment near the shuttle gate, and they quickly checked
each mercenary for illegal cybernetic implants before allowing them
into the shuttle.

General Garzón, with his brilliant white hair, stood
with an Alliance captain, a dark little man of obvious Arab
descent, and they chatted, amicably in Spanish.

I found myself becoming unaccountably nervous and my
palms began to sweat. My mouth became, dry. The armed guards: the
entire setup, reminded me too much of my fiasco of trying to sneak
past customs at Sol Station.

A chimera that had bonded to me only moments before,
a nervous man with a broad mouth and a rough-skinned complexion
came and stood by me as our men began processing at the retina
scanners.

I’d seen him in the dining halls before and vaguely
recalled his name: Filadelfo.

"Are you ready for this?" he asked as if speaking to
an old friend, barely turning his head toward me, watching the
Alliance security team rather than me.

I didn’t answer.

"No, you’re not ready for this," Filadelfo said.
"None of us are ready for this. I hear they’ve got some kind of
prison camp set up for us down there. They want to keep us
troublemakers in one spot." He said this as if it were a brag, as
if it were secret knowledge he alone possessed.

Perfecto had spoken to me in that same bragging
fashion when we’d first met, and I felt sorry for him and all the
chimeras who accidentally bonded to me and then wasted their time
trying to impress me.

"Some of us are banding together, you know, joining
hands. We’re not going to fight for these idiots. Things have
changed too much since we trained. The weapons we used in the
simulators are forty years out of date, and I talked to a man who
was put in the cryotanks only a few months ago and he said that
when we got put in suspension after that second week our real
training had not even begun—the samurai were taking it easy on us,
letting that time be an ‘adjustment’ period!

"Now the Alliance has suddenly taken great interest
in us. Look at all of these punk Marines. Why do they need so many
guards? They have three times the force they need to subdue us in
these close quarters."

Filadelfo was right. There were too many guards here
and they were too rigid in their stance, too tense. Thirty men had
passed through the portal into the hovercraft, and I began to
worry. We were greatly outnumbered. If there was trouble, we
wouldn’t be able to fight. Even if we managed to fight them aboard
ship and win, their orbital neutron cannons could blow us from the
sky in seconds. They were all-powerful here in space.

When it came my turn to go through customs I was
sweating profusely. I looked into the retina scanner and a man read
off my name. A second man brushed the sonic probe over me and a
screen on a computer terminal on the wall listed my cybernetic
upgrades—prosthetic eyes, cranial jacks, comlink, nerve bypass,
chemo-toxin filters.

When he’d checked me he waved me through. I was about
to step into the shuttle when four guards stepped forward and threw
me on my back to the floor.

"You’re under arrest!" a guard shouted, pointing a
stunner barrel against the side of my nostril. At that distance the
stun bag would have split my skull. The Alliance guards dispersed
into the crowd, aiming rifles at my compañeros. The room became
silent.

Garzón stepped forward, standing over me, and his
amiable tone didn’t falter as he addressed the Alliance captain,
"What’s the charge?"

The Alliance captain said, "Murder."

"Of whom?"

"Three persons in the city of Colon, Panamá, on
Earth, and the murder of several persons aboard Sol Station, Sol
star system."

"You received my radio message this morning
regarding the unfortunate incidents at Sol Station, did you
not?"

The captain blinked. "Yes."

"Then you’ve a copy of the signed confession from the
man who blew the station, and you know that Señor Osic is innocent
of those charges, no?"

The captain said grudgingly, "Yes."

"And the persons in Panamá were murdered within
Panamanian jurisdiction, so you can’t detain Señor Osic unless
you’re granted extradition orders from the Board of Governors of
Motoki Corporation on Baker. He
has
been granted Baker
citizenship, you know. Have you sought extradition orders?"

The captain’s jaw tightened and the little Arab’s
face began to darken with rage.

"So you understand that extradition is denied,"
Garzón said patiently. "Osic is a citizen of Baker, within the air
space of his own planet, and you have no legal right to detain
him."

"Unless—my lawyers tell me—" the captain said, "he
murdered Alliance military personnel. Then he’d be under my
jurisdiction in any case."

Garzón smiled menacingly. "Are you willing to admit
that Arish Hustanifad was an Alliance military agent? I’m sure
people on Earth would be very eager to hear that!"

The captain gulped. Hustanifad would be listed as my
victim, but the captain was acting on scant orders sent from Earth
twenty years ago. He sensed something important was at stake here
but had no idea how high the stakes really were. He was out of his
depth and knew it.

"I wasn’t thinking of Hustanifad—I was thinking of
Tamil Jafari, an Alliance Intelligence agent."

"But she’s not dead," Garzón corrected. "She
departed this ship last week, in the body of a Tamara Maria de la
Garza. We notified your computer controller here of her identity at
that time. It’s all in the ship’s records. In fact, I brought her
aboard again today. You may question her yourself—Tamara, come here
please."

An electric motor whined. A wheelchair rolled into
view at the shuttle door; Tamara slumped like a half-empty potato
sack in the chair. Her frail limbs hung limp and her mouth drooped
open. Her eyes seemed to roll as she gazed around the room, but I
saw intelligence in those eyes, understanding.

I recognized the paralysis that comes from severe
brain damage. Tamara appeared more dead than alive—but it had been
over two years!

Even if she did have brain damage, her brain could
have been reseeded with cloned cells, neural growth stimulator
could have been applied. There was no reason for her to remain in
such deteriorated condition!

An old impulse welled up in me, the desire to save
her. Garzón went to the wheelchair and patted Tamara’s head as if
she were some great pet dog.

The captain raised an eyebrow in surprise and nodded
to the computer controller.

"We let her through, all right, sir," the computer
controller said. "No one told us to detain her."

"And you verified her identity?"

"The body we verified through retina scan. The brain
through genetic mapping."

"And you knew she was an Alliance Intelligence
agent—under contractual obligations—and you didn’t arrest her?"

"I’m a free agent—contracted by the job. I was free
to leave Earth," Tamara said, sounding irritated.

I looked at her in surprise. With a body so
deteriorated she obviously couldn’t speak, but a thin blue wire
ran from the cranial jack at the base of her skull down to the
silver disk of a microspeaker pinned to her blouse.

She was bypassing her vocal cords and speaking
directly with nerve impulses, the way one would in a dream
monitor.

"We couldn’t detain her," the computer controller
said.

The captain began chewing his lip. "If you hadn’t
been killed, why did you let everyone believe you were dead?" he
asked Tamara.

"I wanted off Earth, and didn’t want anyone to know
where I was going. My ex-husband would have tried to stop me. He’s
a very dangerous man."

The captain thought this over and waved at his
guards. "Back, back, move those men back," he said, and the guards
began pushing my compadres toward the far comer of the room, all
except Garzón. Tamara’s wheelchair rolled backward into the
shuttle.

The captain spoke very softly and urgently to Garzón.
"I have my orders on this! I’m to arrest this man. Take my advice
and walk away! Don’t push me!"

Garzón smiled and said, "Arrest? You have orders to
arrest
this man? What will you do, hold him in captivity for
several years till a relief comes, and then send him back to Earth
for trial? No, that’s such a waste of money. I know the Alliance,
you’re directed to arrange an accident. Let him suck vacuum.
No?"

The captain blinked and looked guilty. Garzón had
touched the truth. "No," Garzón continued. "I haven’t seen your
orders, but I know what they say. I also know you’re not eager to
carry them out. Such deeds catch up with one. If you obey them,
you’ll be under the thumbs of certain superiors all your life. You
don’t want to follow those orders. In your gut you know that it is
unwise."

The captain became more tense. Garzón was guessing
correctly. "So here is what I’d do: I’d send a message to Earth
informing them that Tamil Jafari is alive and well on Baker and you
could find no legal reason to detain Mr. Osic. Then I’d request
clarification on what to do with Mr. Osic. That way, when more
explicit orders arrive in forty-five years, someone else will be
stuck on this outpost and we’ll all be long gone. "

The captain was one of those stubborn persons who
fears his superiors—a real crowd pleaser. He shook his head and
looked at the floor and considered his predicament. I could tell
he wouldn’t go for Garzón’s plan.