The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 6: Multiples: 1983-87

by Robert Silverberg

  “If I run into problems,” he said, “I might subcontract. Meanwhile, I just thought I’d let you know, in case you happened to stumble on a lead. I’ll pay finders’ fees. And you know it’ll be good money.”

  “Wu Fang-shui,” Kluge said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Me too,” said Delilah.

  “Hell,” Juanito said. “How many people are there on Valparaiso all together? Maybe nine hundred thousand? I can think of fifty right away who can’t possibly be the guy I’m looking for. That narrows the odds some. What I have to do is just go on narrowing, right? Right?”

  In fact, he didn’t feel very optimistic. He was going to do his best; but the whole system on Valparaiso was heavily weighted in favor of helping those who wanted to hide stay hidden.

  Even Farkas realized that. “The privacy laws here are very strict, aren’t they?”

  With a smile, Juanito said, “They’re just about the only laws we have, you know? The sacredness of sanctuary. It is the compassion of El Supremo that has turned Valparaiso into a place of refuge for fugitives of all sorts, and we are not supposed to interfere with the compassion of El Supremo.”

  “Which is very expensive compassion, I understand.”

  “Very. Sanctuary fees are renewable annually. Anyone who harms a permanent resident who is living here under the compassion of El Supremo is bringing about a reduction in El Supremo’s annual income, you see? Which doesn’t sit well with the generalissimo.”

  They were in the Villanueva Café, E Spoke. They had been touring Valparaiso all day long, back and forth from rim to hub, going up one spoke and down the other. Farkas said he wanted to experience as much of Valparaiso as he could. Not to see; to experience. He was insatiable, prowling around everywhere, gobbling it all up, soaking it in. Farkas had never been to one of the satellite worlds before. It amazed him, he said, that there were forests and lakes here, broad fields of wheat and rice, fruit orchards, herds of goats and cattle. Apparently he had expected the place to be nothing more than a bunch of aluminum struts and grim concrete boxes with everybody living on food pills, or something. People from Earth never seemed to comprehend that the larger satellite worlds were comfortable places with blue skies, fleecy clouds, lovely gardens, handsome buildings of steel and brick and glass.

  Farkas said, “How do you go about tracing a fugitive, then?”

  “There are always ways. Everybody knows somebody who knows something about someone. Information is bought here the same way compassion is.”

  “From the generalissimo?” Farkas said, startled.

  “From his officials, sometimes. If done with great care. Care is important, because lives are at risk. There are also couriers who have information to sell. We all know a great deal that we are not supposed to know.”

  “I suppose you know a great many fugitives by sight, yourself?”

  “Some,” Juanito said. “You see that man, sitting by the window?” He frowned. “I don’t know, can you see him? To me, he looks around sixty, bald head, thick lips, no chin?”

  “I see him, yes. He looks a little different to me.”

  “I bet he does. He ran a swindle at one of the Luna domes, sold phony stock in an offshore monopoly fund that didn’t exist, fifty million Capbloc dollars. He pays plenty to live here. This one here—you see? With the blonde woman?—an embezzler; that one, very good with computers, reamed a bank in Singapore for almost its entire capital. Him over there, he pretended to be Pope. Can you believe that? Everybody in Rio de Janeiro did.”

  “Wait a minute,” Farkas said. “How do I know you’re not making all this up?”

  “You don’t,” Juanito said amiably. “But I’m not.”

  “So we just sit here like this and you expose the identities of three fugitives to me free of charge?”

  “It wouldn’t be free,” Juanito said, “if they were people you were looking for.”

  “What if they were? And my claiming to be looking for a Wu Fang-shui was just a cover?”

  “You aren’t looking for any of them,” Juanito said.

  “No,” said Farkas. “I’m not.” He sipped his drink, something green and cloudy. “How come these men haven’t done a better job of concealing their identities?” he asked.

  “They think they have,” said Juanito.

  Getting leads was a slow business, and expensive. Juanito left Farkas to wander the spokes of Valparaiso on his own and headed off to the usual sources of information: his father’s friends, other couriers and even the headquarters of the Unity Party, El Supremo’s grass-roots organization, where it wasn’t hard to find someone who knew something and had a price for it. Juanito was cautious. Middle-aged Chinese gentleman I’m trying to locate, he said. Why? Nobody asked. Could be any reason, anything from wanting to blow him away on contract to handing him a 1,000,000-Capbloc-dollar lottery prize that he had won last year on New Yucatán. Nobody asked for reasons on Valparaiso.

  There was a man named Federigo who had been with Juanito’s father in the Costa Rica days who knew a woman who knew a man who had a freemartin neuter companion who had formerly belonged to someone high up in the census department. There were fees to pay at every step of the way, but it was Farkas’ money, what the hell; and by the end of the week Juanito had access to the immigration data stored on golden megachips somewhere in the depths of the hub. The data down there wasn’t going to provide anybody with Wu Fang-shui’s phone number. But what it could tell Juanito—and did, 800 callaghanos later—was how many ethnic Chinese were living on Valparaiso and how long ago they had arrived.

  “There are nineteen of them altogether,” he reported to Farkas. “Eleven of them are women.”

  “So? Changing sex is no big deal,” Farkas said.

  “Agreed. The women are all under fifty, though. The oldest of the men is sixty-two. The longest that any of them has been on Valparaiso is nine years.”

  “Would you say that rules them all out? Age can be altered just as easily as sex.”

  “But date of arrival can’t be, so far as I know. And you say that your Wu Fang-shui came here fifteen years back. Unless you’re wrong about that, he can’t be any of those Chinese. Your Wu Fang-shui, if he isn’t dead by now, has signed up for some other racial mix, I’d say.”

  “He isn’t dead,” Farkas said.

  “You sure of that?”

  “He was still alive three months ago and in touch with his family on Earth. He’s got a brother in Tashkent.”

  “Shit,” Juanito said. “Ask the brother what name he’s going under up here, then.”

  “We did. We couldn’t get it.”

  “Ask him harder.”

  “We asked him too hard,” said Farkas. “Now the information isn’t available any more. Not from him, anyway.”

  Juanito checked out the 19 Chinese, just to be certain. It didn’t cost much and it didn’t take much time, and there was always the chance that Dr. Wu had cooked his immigration data somehow. But the quest led nowhere. Juanito found six of them all in one shot, playing some Chinese game in a social club in the town of Havana de Cuba on Spoke B, and they went right on laughing and pushing the little porcelain counters around while he stood there kibitzing. They didn’t act like sanctuarios. They were all shorter than Juanito, too, which meant either that they weren’t Wu, who was tall for a Chinese, or that Wu had been willing to have his legs chopped down by 15 centimeters for the sake of a more efficient disguise. It was possible but it wasn’t too likely.

  The other 13 were all much too young or too convincingly female or too this or too that. Juanito crossed them all off his list. From the outset he hadn’t thought Wu would still be Chinese, anyway.

  He kept on looking. One trail went cold, and then another and then another. By now, he was starting to think Wu must have heard that a man with no eyes was looking for him and had gone even deeper underground, or off Valparaiso entirely. Juanito paid a friend at the hub spaceport to keep watch on departure manifests for him. Nothing
came of that. Then someone reminded him that there was a colony of old-time hard-core sanctuary types living in and around the town of El Mirador on Spoke D, people who had a genuine aversion to being bothered. He went there. Because he was known to be the son of a murdered fugitive himself, nobody hassled him. He of all people wouldn’t be likely to be running a trace, would he?

  The visit yielded no directly useful result. He couldn’t risk asking questions and nothing was showing on the surface. But he came away with the strong feeling that El Mirador was the answer.

  “Take me there,” Farkas said.

  “I can’t do that. It’s a low-profile town. Strangers aren’t welcome. You’ll stick out like a dinosaur.”

  “Take me,” Farkas repeated.

  “If Wu’s there and he gets even a glimpse of you, he’ll know right away that there’s a contract out for him and he’ll vanish so fast you won’t believe it.”

  “Take me to El Mirador,” said Farkas. “It’s my money, isn’t it?”

  “Right,” Juanito said. “Let’s go to El Mirador.”

  El Mirador was midway between hub and rim on its spoke. There were great glass windows punched in its shield that provided a colossal view of all the rest of Valparaiso and the stars and the sun and the moon and the Earth and everything. A solar eclipse was going on when Juanito and Farkas arrived: The Earth was plastered right over the sun, with nothing but one squidge of hot light showing down below, like a diamond blazing on a golden ring. Purple shadows engulfed the town, deep and thick, a heavy velvet curtain falling over everything.

  Juanito tried to describe what he saw. Farkas made an impatient brushing gesture.

  “I know, I know. I feel it in my teeth.” They stood on a big people-mover escalator leading down into the town plaza. “The sun is long and thin right now, like the blade of an axe. The Earth has six sides, each one glowing a different color.”

  Juanito gaped at the eyeless man.

  “Wu is here,” Farkas said. “Down there, in the plaza. I feel his presence.”

  “From five hundred meters away?”

  “Come with me.”

  “What do we do if he really is?”

  “Are you armed?”

  “I have a spike, yes.”

  “Good. Tune it to shock, and don’t use it at all if you can help it. I don’t want you to hurt him in any way.”

  “I understand. You want to kill him yourself, in your own sweet time.”

  “Just be careful not to hurt him,” Farkas said. “Come on.”

  It was an old-fashioned-looking town, cobblestone plaza, little cafés around its perimeter and a fountain in the middle. About 10,000 people lived there, and it seemed as if they were all out in the plaza, sipping drinks and watching the eclipse. Juanito was grateful for the eclipse. No one paid any attention to them as they came floating down the people-mover and strode into the plaza. Hell of a thing, he thought. You walk into town with a man with no eyes walking right behind you and nobody even notices. But when the sunshine comes back on it may be different.

  “There he is,” Farkas whispered. “To the left, maybe fifty meters, sixty.”

  Juanito peered through the purple gloom at the plaza-front café beyond the next one. A dozen or so people were sitting in small groups at curbside tables under iridescent fiberglass awnings, drinking, chatting, taking it easy. Just another casual afternoon in good old cozy El Mirador on sleepy old Valparaiso.

  Farkas stood sideways to keep his strange face partly concealed. Out of the corner of his mouth, he said, “Wu is the one sitting by himself at the front table.”

  “The only one sitting alone is a woman, maybe fifty, fifty-five years old, long reddish hair, big nose, dowdy clothes ten years out of fashion.”

  “That’s Wu.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “It’s possible to retrofit your body to make it look entirely different on the outside. You can’t change the nonvisual information, the stuff I pick up by blindsight. What Dr. Wu looked like to me, the last time I saw him, was a cubical block of black metal polished bright as a mirror, sitting on top of a pyramid-shaped copper-colored pedestal. I was nine years old then, but I promised myself I wouldn’t ever forget what he looked like, and I haven’t. That’s what the person sitting over there by herself looks like.”

  Juanito stared. He still saw a plain-looking woman in a rumpled, old-fashioned suit. They did wonders with retrofitting these days, he knew: They could make almost any sort of body grow on you, like clothing on a clothes rack, by fiddling with your DNA. But still Juanito had trouble thinking of that woman over there as a sinister Chinese gene splicer in disguise, and he had even more trouble seeing her as a polished cube sitting on top of a coppery pyramid.

  “What do you want to do now?” he asked.

  “Let’s go over and sit down alongside her. Keep that spike of yours ready. But I hope you don’t use it.”

  “If we put the arm on her and she’s not Wu,” Juanito said, “it’s going to get me in a hell of a lot of trouble, particularly if she’s paying El Supremo for sanctuary. Sanctuary people get very stuffy when their privacy is violated. You’ll be expelled and I’ll be fined a fortune and a half and I might wind up getting expelled, too, and then what?”

  “That’s Dr. Wu,” Farkas said. “Watch him react when he sees me, and then you’ll believe it.”

  “We’ll still be violating sanctuary. All he has to do is yell for the police.”

  “We need to make it clear to him right away,” said Farkas, “that that would be a foolish move. You follow?”

  “But I don’t hurt him,” Juanito said.

  “No. Not in any fashion. You simply demonstrate a willingness to hurt him if it should become necessary. Let’s go, now. You sit down first, ask politely if it’s OK for you to share the table, make some comment about the eclipse. I’ll come over maybe thirty seconds after you. All clear? Good. Go ahead, now.”

  “You have to be insane,” the red-haired woman said. But she was sweating in an astonishing way, and her fingers were knotting together like anguished snakes. “I’m not any kind of doctor and my name isn’t Wu or Fu or whatever you said, and you have exactly two seconds to get away from me.” She seemed unable to take her eyes from Farkas’ smooth, blank forehead. Farkas didn’t move. After a moment, she said in a different tone of voice, “What kind of thing are you, anyway?”

  She isn’t Wu, Juanito decided.

  The real Wu wouldn’t have asked a question like that. Besides, this was definitely a woman. She was absolutely convincing around the jaws, along the hairline, the soft flesh behind her chin. Women were different from men in all those places. Something about her wrists. The way she sat. A lot of other things. There weren’t any genetic surgeons good enough to do a retrofit this convincing. Juanito peered at her eyes, trying to see the place where the Chinese fold had been, but there wasn’t a trace of it. Her eyes were blue-gray. All Chinese had brown eyes, didn’t they?

  Farkas said, leaning in close and hard, “My name is Victor Farkas, doctor. I was born in Tashkent during the Breakup. My mother was the wife of the Hungarian consul, and you did a gene-splice job on the fetus she was carrying. That was your specialty, tectogenetic reconstruction. You don’t remember that? You deleted my eyes and gave me blindsight instead, doctor.”

  The woman looked down and away. Color came to her cheeks. Something heavy seemed to be stirring within her. Juanito began to change his mind. Maybe there really were some gene surgeons who could do a retrofit this good, he thought.

  “None of this is true,” she said. “You’re simply a lunatic. I can show you who I am. I have papers. You have no right to harass me like this.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you in any way, doctor.”

  “I am not a doctor.”

  “Could you be a doctor again? For a price?”

  Juanito swung around, astounded, to look at Farkas.

  “I will not listen to this,” the woman said. “You wi
ll go away from me this instant or I summon the patrol.”

  Farkas said, “We have a project, Dr. Wu. My engineering group, a division of a corporation whose name I’m sure you know. An experimental spacedrive, the first interstellar voyage, faster-than-light travel. We’re three years away from a launch.”

  The woman rose. “This madness does not interest me.”

  “The faster-than-light field distorts vision,” Farkas went on. He didn’t appear to notice that she was standing and looked about ready to bolt. “It disrupts vision entirely, in fact. Perception becomes totally abnormal. A crew with normal vision wouldn’t be able to function in any way. But it turns out that someone with blindsight can adapt fairly easily to the peculiar changes that the field induces.”

  “I have no interest in hearing about—”

  “It’s been tested, actually. With me as the subject. But I can’t make the voyage alone. We have a crew of five, and they’ve volunteered for tectogenetic retrofits to give them what I have. We don’t know anyone else who has your experience in that area. We’d like you to come out of retirement, Dr. Wu. We’ll set up a complete lab for you on a nearby satellite world, whatever equipment you need. And pay you very well. And insure your safety all the time you’re gone from Valparaiso. What do you say?”

  The red-haired woman was trembling and slowly backing away.

  “No,” she said. “It was such a long time ago. Whatever skills I had, I have forgotten, I have buried.”

  “You can give yourself a refresher course. I don’t think it’s possible really to forget a gift like yours, do you?” Farkas said.

  “No. Please. Let me be.”

  Juanito was amazed at how cockeyed his whole handle on the situation had been from the start.

  Farkas didn’t seem at all angry with the gene surgeon. He hadn’t come here for vengeance, Juanito realized. Just to cut a deal.

  “Where’s he going?” Farkas said suddenly. “Don’t let him get away, Juanito.”

  The woman—Wu—was moving faster now, not quite running but sidling away at a steady pace, back into the enclosed part of the café. Farkas gestured sharply and Juanito began to follow. The spike he was carrying could deliver a stun-level jolt at 15 paces. But he couldn’t just spike her down in this crowd, not if she had sanctuary protection, not in El Mirador of all places. There’d be 50 sanctuarios on top of him in a minute. They’d grab him and club him and sell his foreskin to the generalissimo’s men for two and a half callies.