On My Way to Paradise (9 page)

Flaco yelled to Tamara, "Watch out, or that big sea
gull will crap on you!" I looked down. Flaco was pointing up at me,
laughing. I beckoned for Tamara to come with me, and strained down
to reach her. She just turned away.

Flaco pulled a red ball from one pant pocket and a
kitten from the other. And as I rose in the air, Flaco and Tamara
ran along, playing ball with a gray and white kitten on an empty
beach beneath a purple sun that never set.

The shuttle’s door ground against the metal of the
airlock, waking me, and the soft rumble of the shuttle’s rockets
died. Metal in the rocket engines wailed momentarily as it cooled
from a near molten state to far below freezing. I waited. Arish had
been dead five hours—plenty of time for his body to have cooled.
Plenty of time for his death to have been discovered.

Anyone who checked his body would notice the eye
missing, would know why I’d taken it. I cursed myself for not
having mutilated Arish so the eye wouldn’t be missed. I feared that
when I opened the shuttle door I’d meet Arish’s protégé or, even
worse, security forces that would drag me back to Panamá. I kept
the shuttle locked, waited to see if anyone would demand
entrance.

Tamara lay in the chest, staring at the ceiling,
blinking. The antimosin I’d injected was taking full effect,
reducing her fever, and the log-phases had begun repairing some
neural damage, but it was too early to see much improvement. I
tried to rouse her, rubbing her skin and saying "Please, Tamara,
you have to wake up! I can’t take you any farther. You must stand
up and walk for yourself!" My mouth dried from pleading. I resorted
to slapping her and yelling, "Wake up! The cyborgs are coming!
Cyborgs will put you in a brain bag!" but threats had no effect on
her. She had urinated sometime during the trip; her pants were
wet.

It would have been less dangerous to leave Tamara.
But the manic joy I’d felt upon deciding to bring her at any cost
still held me. Besides, it seemed the brave thing to do. Killing
Arish had been cowardly. I tried to salve my conscience by calling
it a vendetta, but I’d killed him for the same reason a man kills a
rattlesnake in a vast desert: to insure that our paths didn’t cross
again. I hoped an act of courage could erase an act of cowardice,
so I decided to stick by Tamara as long as possible, to dump her as
a last resort. I got out my rifle and prepared to shoot anyone who
tried to ambush me in the airlock.

I hit the release and the door hissed open. The only
thing in the airlock was a baggage cart that looked like a large
wagon. At the end of the airlock was a windowless door. I closed
the lid to the chest, and in a small way was thankful Tamara’s
vacant eyes could no longer stare at me. I loaded her on the
baggage cart and prepared to lose myself in the bustling crowd of
the station.

But behind the second door was only an enormous hall,
quiet as a mausoleum. I panicked. The station should have been full
of people preparing to board ship for Baker, but only the smells of
sweat and flaking skin—the residue of humanity—remained. I wondered
if I’d missed my ship.

I dabbed sweat from the back of my neck and pulled my
baggage cart down the long, empty corridor, watching to make sure
my baggage didn’t jiggle or tumble off. The squeak of the cart’s
wheels echoed like the squeak of innumerable mice.

I had an idea where my ship lay. Sol station was
shaped like a huge, gray rolling pin that turned slowly, providing
artificial gravity; the roller was the station, while the handles
of the rolling pin were docks for the big ships. The
Chaeron
would be hooked to the dock, snuggling against it like a lamprey
nuzzling a shark.

The station was on night cycle; the lights were low.
Along each side of the corridor was a line of round doorways, and a
dim phosphorescent glow encircled each doorway so that one appeared
to be viewing luminous rosettes on the sides of an enormous eel.
The station had a cloying, subterranean atmosphere.

I followed the corridor till it opened into a larger
hall lit by shop windows as if it were a market street in a city.
Webs of light wound from the neon signs down to the floor. Here and
there someone sat at a restaurant, but most shops were either
bolted shut or operated by automatic tellers. At the far end of the
street a sign over a doorway announced that the
Chaeron
would leave for Baker in three hours.

I pulled my baggage cart to the public restroom just
inside the concourse that led to my ship, dropped my luggage in a
stall, and tried to think of what to do. The Alliance could not
arrest me here—Sol Station was considered to be in Earth air space,
and was therefore under international civil jurisdiction. The
Alliance Military officials could not take me directly, but they
could notify the authorities in Panamá that I had committed murder.
And if Cyborg Intelligence checked the records under Arish’s name,
they would not have difficulty tracking the shuttle I’d rented. The
Alliance could notify Panamá of my whereabouts, and the civilian
authorities in Panamá could obtain my extradition. Therefore, I
could only hope that Cyborg Intelligence would not discover the
murder before I left—or if they did discover it, I hoped they
wouldn’t be able to track me before I escaped the Solar System. I
needed to board the ship at the last minute, making it difficult
for Panamá to fill out an extradition order if the authorities
learned my location. I didn’t want them to know my whereabouts
until I was beyond reach. Yet even that plan was flawed. I didn’t
really believe that Jafari’s men would go to so much trouble. If
Jafari was a Nicita Idealist Socialist, then he was one of those
men who desired to engineer a truly communal society—a society free
of the commercialism, a society where people would share goods
without thought. Yet, to build this utopia, he was willing to
destroy all competing societies. He was willing to murder without
thought. And I knew he wouldn’t extradite me. It would be easier to
kill me. Easier to get rid of me without legal entanglements. I
could only wait, and hope.

The bathroom stalls were large enough for a Mexican
to do a hat dance in, and the doors were fitted so that one could
not see between the cracks, allowing a great deal of privacy. Only
a small slit at the top and bottom of each stall would allow
someone to see in—and then only if that person went to great
pains.

Signs in several languages, accompanied by diagrams,
revealed the proper uses of the toilet articles for the
uninitiated. These were truly international toilets, built to suit
the needs of the most modest traveler. It seemed a good place to
hide.

Tamara’s fever had lowered, and her muscles seemed
less rigid. I kept her trunk on the toilet, and each time someone
came into the restroom, I stood on the toilet with her, making the
stall appear empty. But after a while I realized this was
stupid—even Arish wouldn’t have gone into a restroom and randomly
assassinated anyone who happened to be sitting on a toilet; I began
to just stand with my pants down whenever someone came in, letting
people think I was using the facilities. Tamara was still wet with
urine; I undressed her, washed her, made a diaper of toilet paper,
and dressed her in an extra pair of my pants.

The tediousness of the task had a calming effect, and
I had enough time to wonder why someone would want to pay my fare
to Baker. The fare would be enormous, and my benefactor would want
much in return. The shuttle’s computer had given me insufficient
information to answer such a question, and I had not radioed an
inquiry about the job to the station for fear of alerting Jafari’s
men to my escape route. The thought struck me that someone on Baker
wanted a rejuvenation and would want me to administer it. Only a
morphogenic pharmacologist is licensed to administer rejuvenations.
Frankly it is the only skill I had that I deemed valuable enough to
justify someone paying my fare.

The thought totally carried me away. Manufacturing
the hundreds of component drugs and engineering the vector viruses
could take years, would be terribly difficult to carry off. But
with the money from Tamara’s crystal and the money I’d taken from
Arish, I had enough to buy a rejuvenation already manufactured, and
though the station was empty now, once a week it swelled with
thousands of people, mostly rich people, who were leaving to places
where rejuvenations are not readily available—the pharmacy would
surely keep a rejuvenation in stock.

Even if I was wrong, even if no one wanted a rejuv on
Baker, I’d have a great treasure, something more valuable than any
other treasure the planet had to offer, and I’d be a rich man.

An hour before the ship was to leave I was imagining
how rich I would be when a man cracked the door to the restroom and
said, "Wait out here," as he entered. He walked softly, and I knew
something was wrong. I quietly pulled my gun from my medical bag.
He walked down the row of toilet stalls, opening each door. He came
to my stall and gave the door a slight push. When it didn’t open,
he entered the next stall and urinated.

When he was done he washed his hands and waited by
the sinks. I could hear the rustle of his clothes.

I stood by the toilet and controlled my breathing
while sweat trickled down my face. For every minute I waited, the
moment of the ship’s departure drew nearer. Arish’s replacement
would lose nothing by waiting till the ship left. He began
whistling, then walked back to my stall and knocked on the door.
Through the crack in the bottom of the stall I could see black
combat boots and gray pants.

"Gomez, are you in there?" he asked in Spanish.

During my stay in Miami I’d learned to speak English
without much accent. "I’m sorry, I don’t speak Spanish," I told
him.

The man was quick to switch to English; unlike his
Spanish, which was flawless, his English betrayed a slight Arabic
accent. "Perhaps you have seen my friend Gomez? He is an older man,
perhaps sixty, with graying hair. He’s from Panamá."

He was describing me.

"I haven’t seen him. I just got off duty, and I’ve
been on the loading dock," I said, mispronouncing the j in
just
so it sounded like
chust
. I cringed a
little.

"Ah, thank you," he said, and began to walk off. He
stopped. "You have been very helpful. I should commend you to your
superiors. What did you say your name was?"

It was an impolite question, and I thought a true
gringo would have told him to go to hell, but I gave the first name
I could think of that started with a
j
. "Jonathan. Jonathan
Langford." It was the name of an insane philosopher I’d met in
Miami who claimed that most of man’s ills could be traced to
inadequate amounts of reptiles in the diet. This time, I pronounced
the
j
sound right.

The man seemed to hesitate. "Thank you, Jonathan," he
said, and he hurried from the bathroom.

I used a piece of toilet paper to wipe the sweat from
my face, and realized what a mistake I’d made: Arish had at least
two replacements, and I’d missed the opportunity to kill them. All
they had to do was watch the outbound ship and wait for me to fall
into their hands. In fact, they were probably on their way to the
ship now. I packed Tamara back into the trunk, using my medical bag
to cushion her head. I took my luggage to the door, checked the
corridor and hurried away from the docks, away from where Jafari’s
men would congregate, back to the pharmacy in the market.

A few people were in the market, enough to make me
feel safe. I watched their faces and feet. No one in the market was
wearing gray slacks. No one was paying attention to me.

An automatic teller ran the pharmacy, so I fed it my
request and shoved in my coins, bills, and bank card. It took
nearly everything I had, but I got the rejuvenation. I stopped at a
computer terminal and accessed the information for jobs on Baker.
The terminal listed my prospective employer as
Motoki
Corporation,
a good Japanese company, and listed the place of
employment as Kimai no Ji, on Baker. I fed in my ID number and
requested the pharmacologist’s job. The computer took a few minutes
to review my life and work history, then flashed a message: "The
position you desire is filled; your qualifications are adequate for
a secondary position. Would you like more information?"

I was stunned. Who else would have taken a job as a
morphogenic pharmacologist on a planet that had nothing to offer?
Yet I knew I’d betrayed my position to anyone who cared to learn
it. It was imperative that I leave on that ship. I punched in the
command: "Name secondary position."

The computer responded with an advertisement:
"Mercenary. Army private, second class: Motoki corporation seeks
mercenaries to aid in Alliance-approved, limited military action.
No offensive weapons will be permitted. Applicants must be human
(genetic upgrading cannot exceed levels necessary for propagation
within the species), with minimal cyborging (23.1% on the Bell
Scale, no armoring or inbuilt weaponry)."

I was too surprised to think straight. I punched in a
question: "How am I qualified for this position?" The computer
responded by showing a breakdown of my military qualifications:
When I was young, every male Guatemalan was required to serve in
the military for three years. While there, I had trained as a
specialist in neutralizing attackers by interfacing with remote
defense systems. But, since it was peacetime, after training I was
transferred to a commissary where I purchased fruits and vegetables
for salads. The computer provided excerpts from commendations I’d
received for excellence in performance in combat training.

Of course, this was outrageous. I had been trained
forty years earlier, under peaceful conditions. Even when we’d
fought remotes in training, we’d worn light armor and shot them
with harmless scoring lasers that were weighted to feel like heavy
assault rifles. It had all been an extravagant game of tag in which
the losers played at being dead. I’d long forgotten anything that
would be useful in a real battle. Any qualifications I had didn’t
justify their job offer; it was almost as if they knew I was in a
position where I couldn’t refuse.