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.
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 abo
ut 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.
"But—" he began to say.
"But in the meantime," Garzón added, "Baker is a very dangerous planet. You know why we’re here.
"Within a few weeks—one way or another—the government here on Baker will be globally consolidated and you’ll be free to end this peacekeeping mission and fly home. But many people will get killed in the battles to come. Who knows? Maybe even Mr. Osic will be one of the unfortunates?
"If that were to happen, you could then send back a message to your superiors saying ‘Mission accomplished’ before you desert this dust ball."
Garzón’s tone held promise, promise that I’d die in battle. The little captain nodded pensively, relieved, then motioned to his troops. They let me up.
Garzón looked at me, reached up and stroked my silver hair. I flinched involuntarily.
He spoke to a samurai. "Put him in the rear of the shuttle. Security risk C."
I hurried toward the shuttle and a samurai followed at my elbow. Tamara’s wheelchair blocked the hallway and I looked at her dark eyes, her dark hair. She’d filled out a little and didn’t appear so emaciated as before. Her hand had grown back perfectly. So much of her appearance was unchanged. Without moving a muscle she began backing the wheelchair down the hall, as if to let us pass.
The electric motor whirred softly. In her eyes was fear, a plea.
I asked, "What has happened to you?"
The samurai tapped me on the elbow and spoke in Japanese; his translator spat, "No talking. You will speak to no one aboard this shuttle."
I looked in Tamara’s eyes. She was afraid to speak in the open. The samurai led me past Tamara to the front of the ship, to a small room with plush chairs and a bar. Two men dressed like
myself sat there under the eye of a samurai guard.
I took a seat. The shuttle held perhaps three hundred passengers. Out the window I saw one of Baker’s small moons—flat, blue, and pitted with ten thousand craters. A worthless little rock. The stars shining steadily were piercing. I was shaking and wanted to kill the Alliance captain and his superiors and I wanted to help Tamara in spite of the fact that I didn’t know how.
Garzón himself entered our room a moment later. He patted me on the shoulder like an old friend. He was smoking a cigarette. "I’m sorry to put you up here, don Angelo. I hope you don’t feel too uncomfortable, but you see—God, you look like old General Torres. I almost feel I should salute you! I’d prefer to keep you away from the chimeras."
"I understand," I said.
He gauged me with his eyes. "How many of them have bonded to you now?"
"Five," I said.
He looked relieved. "So few? We can spare five. We’ll consider it repayment. I owe you a great deal for rescuing Tamara. Her information was invaluable in helping the resistance defeat Argentina."
He must have seen my surprise.
"Oh yes, we got the details several months ago. The last of the Nicita Socialists were wiped out of Latin America only two years after we left. And much of the credit goes to Tamara." He spoke as if he were praising an idiot child. "She’s quite a talented lady. She’s become-indispensable to the future of my Intelligence organization. "
Tamara seemed to have a gift for becoming indispensable. I remembered how Jafari had tried to imprison her in a brain bag. Garzón was doing the same; in fact, he’d succeeded where Jafari had failed. Tamara was sitting in a nice little prison—a body she couldn’t manipulate. Oh, her speech was no longer impaired when she talked through her simulator. Garzón had obviously reseeded part of her brain with cloned neurons, had administered neural growth agents—but only to a portion of her brain, only to sections that controlled her higher functions.
"Why do you keep her imprisoned?"
On My Way to Paradise Page 32
