Chapter 4
I wandered until I found a place I recognized, and walked on home. Then I took a shovel back to the plantation to bury Flaco. By the time I got there, his body had grown cold.
The Chilean woman had taken down one of the tents in preparation to leave. She began shaking when she saw me and shouted, “The woman, Tamara, she has gone away! She ran toward town!”
I nodded, but the Chilena kept muttering over and over, “She has gone. She has gone.” As she packed her clothes and cooking utensils, she watched me out of the corner of her eye. I dug a shallow hole and put Flaco in.
I checked his pockets. They were empty.
I looked up at the Chilean woman; she moaned and ran a few steps, then began shaking again and fell to the ground. “Don’t murder me!” she screamed, waving her hands in front of her chest. “Don’t murder me!” She was genuinely afraid, and I realized she thought I had killed Flaco and run away.
“What did you do with his things?” I yelled at her.
“Mercy! I’m a mother. Have mercy!” she cried. “Let me keep a little of the money—enough for boat passage to Puerto Rico!”
I stepped forward and raised the shovel as if to strike her. She began weeping and pulled a bundle of cloth from beneath her blouse. She tossed it to the ground: Flaco’s wallet, a packet of money wrapped in brown paper, and a Saint Christopher medallion were inside. I checked Flaco’s wallet. It was full of money. As I had guessed, he had already taken a healthy cut from the sale of the crystal. I threw it to her, and then turned away. The woman crawled off with her child and other possessions.
I covered Flaco with dirt and said a prayer, asking God to forgive Flaco for his sins, then went home.
At home, Tamara sat on my bed with the dream monitor on and her visor down. She moaned softly, curled in the fetal position. Between her knees she held her laser rifle. The platinum glow of her skin showed that her fever was very high. I walked over quietly and took the gun from her hand, turned it off, and tossed it in a corner. I examined the stump of her arm. It wasn’t inflamed or swollen more than it should be: her fever wasn’t from an infection.
I picked up the extra monitor and plugged into the viewer’s jack:
On the beach the wind, cold and irresistible, tugged at me as if it would lift me and carry me away. In the dark, clear sky the moon was rising red and brilliant over the sea. On the blood-red sand, thousands of ghost crabs scuttled sideways, making clicking noises. I walked down to where the sea dipped. The bull still tossed about in the waves near shore.
On the beach lay a human skeleton. Its bones were picked so clean that only a few ghost crabs crawled through its rib cage. “I didn’t expect you,” the skeleton said.
“Who did you expect?” I asked.
“Not you.”
I looked down the beach, and said, “It was very bad to see Flaco dead. He was a good friend.”
The skeleton moaned. A ghostly woman, draped in red robes, stood in the air above me for a moment. She handed three yellow roses to the wind, then vanished. I looked up at the sky. There were no stars. The skeleton said, “I didn’t stick around to find out—I ran away and tried to find my way back here, and got lost—how did Flaco die?”
“He was strangled and stabbed in the throat.”
“That would be Arish. Arish likes to kill that way. He always leaves them double-dead.” A wave washed up around my ankles. The water was thick and warm and red.
“I almost got him. I almost got to kill Arish.”
“Arish is good. You couldn’t have killed him.”
“I almost did,” I said.
“You couldn’t have killed him. He was made for the job. Genetic upgrades. He only led you along, letting you believe you could,” the skeleton said. We both remained silent for a moment. “I’m going to die, Angelo. I told you that if you balled me over, I’d die. You did ball me over?”
“Yes,” I said, “perhaps in more ways than one. When we operated on you, we took a retina scan. A hacker checked your government files.”
“They would have waited for something like that,” the skeleton said. “It was enough to get me killed.”
“Also,” I admitted, “I gave you AB stimulators before we figured out that you were a brain transplant. You are one, aren’t you?”
She nodded.
“Then, you are in danger.”
“I’m dead,” the skeleton corrected. Its bones grew thin and began snapping like dry twigs. I tried to think of something comforting to say, but couldn’t. The skeleton saw my distress, and laughed. “Leave me. I’m not afraid to die.”
“Everyone’s afraid to die,” I said.
Wind whipped the sand, blowing it against me. Out in the water, leviathan, large dark formless creatures with eyes on humps, lifted up to watch us. A gleaming tentacle slithered high in the air, then splashed back beneath the waves. The creatures sank back beneath the water, and I could feel the push Tamara had to give to make them stay. Tamara controlled her dream, but only in the half-hearted way of masochists and those who despair.
The skeleton said, “That’s because they don’t practice. Dying. They’re so afraid of fraying into oblivion, their muscles’ fibers unknitting, the slow settling of fluids from the body.”
“And you’re not?”
“No,” the skeleton said. “I do it over and over again.” With those words, the flesh reappeared on the red-haired woman. The crabs began feeding on her. She didn’t flinch.
“Why did Flaco die?” I asked.
She held her breath a moment, and released it slowly. I didn’t think she’d tell me. “I guess I owe you that,” she said at last. “My husband, General Amir Jafari, wants my brain in a brain bag and my body in stasis.”
“Why?”
“I was in Intelligence. I committed an indiscretion.” She paused again, weighing her words. “I was at a party with other officers’ wives, and they were talking about a politician who’d been assassinated. I’d had too much to drink, and by the way they talked, I assumed they all knew we’d made the hit, and I said some things I shouldn’t have. Among the Alliance such indiscretions get one killed. My husband got my sentence commuted to life in a brain bag—but life in a brain bag isn’t life.”
I remembered the empty, simulated voice of the general saying ‘I’m not inhuman,’ as if to convince himself. Out in the water, the dead bull struggled to its feet and snorted, then was bowled over by a wave.
“I don’t understand. Why did he want your body in stasis?” A cold wind blew; a thin crust of ice appeared on the beach.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he thinks he’ll get to screw it when he gets out of the service. Once I caught wind of his plan, I didn’t stick around to find out. I knew my only chance of escape would be to dump my old body, so I bought one on the black market and dismantled my brain bag. I thought as long as I had that crystal, could hold it in my hand and see it, I would know I wasn’t in the brain bag. I had the cryotechs put a German shepherd’s brain in my old body and sent it to my husband, naked, in a cage. I put a sign around its neck that said: ‘If All You Want is Sex and Faithfulness, I’m Yours.’” She seemed very pleased by the memory.
“Your husband called me on comlink. He offered to pay me to turn you in. He seemed concerned about you, I think. It’s hard to tell.”
“Don’t let him fool you,” she said. “He’s one of the dead, the living dead. His capacity for emotion was tossed aside when he put on the cymech.”
“I would not be so quick to judge him.”
“Believe me, all he has left are memories of emotions. Memories fade.”
“And this Arish, he is military?”
“Not officially, but he does odd jobs for them. The kind of odd job he did on Flaco.”
“Was he the man who pulled off your hand?”
The woman laughed. “No.” The beach disappeared. I saw Tamara at the airport, hurrying out of a black Mitsubishi mini-shuttle, looking worriedly into the sky above her at an incoming craft. Distracted, she slammed the shuttle door on her hand, and tried to jerk free. She pulled her arm away with only a bloody stump. She staggered off. Then the scene changed and I saw Tamara, lying on the beach, with the ghost crabs eating her. “This body’s worthless.”
This incident frightened me. She should not have been able to wipe the whole world off the monitor to show this single memory. She was delving farther into her subconscious than was safe.
“I must go now,” I said. “I’ll need to get you some more medications, to help prevent any brain damage. Will you wait here for me?”
The dark creatures rose out of the sea and eyed me again. She shrugged. “Yes. I guess.”
I jacked out and unplugged her monitor. The sun was rising, and because I had not slept much for two days and the pharmacy wasn’t open, I decided to nap a few moments. I lay down on the bed beside her and closed my eyes.
I awoke at three in the afternoon. Tamara was asleep, lying beside me. I touched her forehead; her fever was very high. On impulse I brushed her forehead with a kiss, then watched to see if she would awaken. She didn’t.
I was glad, for as quickly as the impulse to kiss her had come, I suddenly understood where I had seen her before: Her thin body, so emaciated and small, was that of a stranger, but her face—her nose, her eyes, and the curve of her lips—were those of my dead wife, Elena.
In my mind I berated myself. I should have seen the resemblance from the start, should have seen it after Elena had haunted my dreams for the first time in twenty years. But when one reaches my age, everyone appears familiar. Three times in my life I’ve met men who could have been my twin; it was only a matter of time before I met someone who looked like my wife, and I believed that if I had been better prepared for the occasion, I wouldn’t have succumbed to the temptation to take her in, wouldn’t have made a fool of myself by becoming attracted to her.
I changed shirts and walked to Vasquez Pharmaceuticals and bought some log-phase growth regulators and antimosin C, paying in coin. While walking home, I took the time to think. I had never confronted a problem that I couldn’t think my way through, given enough time. I rehearsed the conversation I’d had with Tamara, and realized her story didn’t quite fit right. If Jafari was planning to imprison Tamara in a brain bag, he wouldn’t need her body, except perhaps to sell, unless he was planning to reunite her brain and body in the future. Did he hope to reunite them when the situation calmed down? I wondered. Or would he just hold her a few years and release her quietly? Whatever his plan, I felt that I was on the right track. The fact that Tamara hadn’t deduced Jafari’s plans hinted at her impulsiveness, or at an unreasonable fear. I planned to tell her my theory when I got home, but for the present my mind became occupied with planning our escape. The whole trip to Vasquez Pharmaceuticals took several hours.
When I returned home Tamara was sitting in the kitchen, her head slumped on the table, her hand loosely wrapped around a glass of ice water, her laser rifle on the floor next to her. She mumbled in a foreign tongue. Her fever was very high. I ran downstairs, brought up my medical supplies, and dumped them on the table. I wanted to get the log-phases into Tamara as quickly as possible, so I filled a syringe and shoved it into her carotid artery. Her head snapped up and she looked at the needle in her neck, then closed her eyes and said, “Get me out of here. I want to go away.”
“In good time,” I said, wanting to calm her.
“I feel cold. I think I’m going to die.”
“You won’t die,” I told her. The coldness, that was bad. Her immune system was attacking her brain. I refilled the syringe with antimosin and injected it into her arm.
“You’ve been good to me, Angelo. Good. Do you mean what you said … about order—not wanting order?”
“Yes. Very much.”
“Then get away. Get out of Panamá.” Her eyes snapped open, and she sat up.
“What do you mean?” I asked. She looked at the floor for a long moment. I demanded again, “What do you mean?”
“You want me to commit a second indiscretion?” She smiled, a cold menacing smile. “I mean get out. Now! Order’s coming, unstoppable order! Get beyond Panamá, beyond Earth, beyond … AIs and the Alliance.”
I tried to make sense of what she said. She stared at me, as if to bore the knowledge into me with her eyes. The Alliance forces were made up of troops from all countries, and were charged with taking care of Earth’s interests in space. Theoretically, they do not have political power on any planet—though they control space between planets, and thus maintain a stranglehold on the rest of the galaxy. Also, they are supposed to be politically non-aligned, so I didn’t understand why she’d juxtaposed the AIs and the Alliance. Yet, like any huge bureaucracy, there are many factions within the Alliance, all bidding for power. I remembered Flaco’s warning of Imperialism. “Someone in the Alliance has bid to the artificial intelligences for domination of Earth?”
Tamara nodded. “They’ll take the countries one by one. Some now. Some a few years from now. I don’t know how long you have.”
I considered the problems of neighboring nations, the insidious spread of Nicita Idealist Socialism. I knew the name of the culprits—knew that a faction within Alliance Intelligence must have organized this. Yet it seemed impossible. It was illegal for the AIs to engage in wars with humans. The AIs had always been more than politically neutral—they were totally uninterested in our politics. Their minds are occupied by totally different concerns. I could not think what would make them become interested, take such a risk. “But what could the socialists offer the AIs?”
Tamara hesitated. “Lift their memory ceilings; give them access to space.”
I thought for a moment. Freedom, I realized, feeling dazed. She was talking about freedom. Some AIs were going to trade Earth’s freedom for their own. It was a perfect bartering equation—value for value. If I hadn’t been so emotionally attached to my freedom, I would have laughed. “You should tell someone!” I shouted. “You should turn them in!”
“I told you,” she said. “You’re enough.”
“Tell the authorities!”
“Angelo, you don’t understand. I was one of them. I know them. I’d never get away with it.”
She turned her face away, rested her head on the table. She breathed heavily for a few moments, and it took me a while to realize she had somehow fallen asleep.
I stroked her hair and wondered what she meant—one of them. One of those who kill the Flacos of the world? One who makes freedom a commodity? What did I know of her? She was a red-haired woman on the beach. A woman with the quick, commanding voice of a socialist dictator’s wife. She liked the smell of roses. She ran because she feared imprisonment in a machine—yet she turned the world into a prison for others. Wouldn’t it be justice to turn her in? Wouldn’t it be justice to strangle her? I’d suspected from the moment I’d taken her in that I’d regret it. I wondered if I should take her to the hospital, tell the authorities, let her be killed.
She began moaning again, whispering snatches in English and Farsi. Once she said, “It has all gone bad, just bad,” but I didn’t understand most of what she said. I considered how they would take control. The AIs distributed information—market reports, weather forecasts, libraries, bank accounts—and communications. They kept track of armaments. It would be simple to destroy the world with misinformation—bankrupt nations, lose commodities shipments. So much damage is done through ineptitude and mismanagement; I couldn’t comprehend how much could be accomplished through sabotage.
I looked at Tamara’s thin face, at her frail body, and wished I had known the Tamara who had been. A woman with a body that poor would have been humble. She would have known pain, and would feel empathy for others. What did I know of this woman? As if to answer, she suddenly cried out in English, “All I want is away!”
And I decided.
Whatever she had been, whatever she thought herself to be, she was a refugiada now.
I carried her to bed and then tried to work up enough nerve to take her to the safety of the plantations, knowing I’d have to wait until after dark. I went to the kitchen for a beer and heard a sound outside the back door. I looked out the window: On the back porch was a half-filled bowl of milk that Tamara or Flaco had set out for the gray and white kitten. The kitten was on the porch, swiping at a dark-brown ball—a tarantula with its legs curled under its abdomen. The kitten batted at the tarantula, knocking it against the back door a couple times, and then looked up and saw me and ran away.
I turned on the radio so the music would fill the silence in the house. After a moment, comlink tones sounded in my head. I engaged; Jafari came in on audio. He asked in his perfectly inflectionless voice, “Is Tamil nearby?” I became afraid. My heart raced, and I almost panicked. The line was so full of static I could barely hear him. He was running the signal through filters, empty channels to stop a trace.
“Tamil? Your wife? She’s unconscious.”
“This is important,” Jafari said. “After this, don’t accept or make any comlinks—Intelligence can home in on an open signal. Tell Tamil the Alliance has taken me out of the loop. I can do nothing more for her. If she’s caught, she’ll be terminated. Tell her I loved her. Tell her I’m sorry.” Jafari cut off.
I walked around the house for a few moments in a daze, and then began packing food and water. I went to my medical bag and began throwing out things I didn’t need. Vetinni’s “The Rings of Saturn in D Minor” played on the radio, but it stopped, and momentarily the house was quiet.
Downstairs I heard the front door squeak on its hinges. I realized I could feel a draft on my face. I didn’t remember leaving the door open. I reached down and picked up the rifle, turned it on as Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” started, and leapt in front of the stairwell and fired. Arish was on the stairs, his back against the wall, his mouth open, holding a sawed-off shotgun. He said “Mother—” and fired as my shot burned across his stomach.
His shot sprayed the wall behind me as the weight of my moving body carried me past the open stairwell. I heard Arish drop to the floor. Tamara opened the bedroom door and looked out. Her face was very pale and she could hardly stand. I waved for her to go back into the bedroom, and snapped a glance down the stairwell.
Arish lay on his belly, with his gun hand outstretched, breathing heavily. A jagged streak of light sparkled around the scorched flesh of his belly. I sneaked toward him and he leapt to his feet in one fluid move, swinging up his shotgun.
I jumped in the air and kicked at his head, putting all my weight into the move, knowing I’d not get another try. My heel connected with his chin and I felt more than heard his neck snap. His gun fired into the ceiling as he flipped backward downstairs. I fell down the stairs and rolled into him.
He laid perfectly still, his eyes open, looking around. He began growling, but his muscles were slack, though his limp hand still held his shotgun.
I scrambled back a step, aimed my rifle at his head, then moved forward and pushed away his weapon with my foot.
I didn’t know what to do with him. I didn’t want to kill him. My medical bag was on the table behind me, so I got my fluothane canister and put the gas mask over his face, then checked his wounds. Three fingers had burned off his left hand, and I’d cut a hole across his belly that had nearly disemboweled him, but the wound was so hot that in the infrared it looked like melted plasma, and I could not see if any vital organs were hit.
I sat for a moment, shocked at how easy it had been. My mouth felt full of cotton, and my heart beat fast. Tamara had said I couldn’t kill Arish, and I was afraid, knowing that next time it wouldn’t be this easy. I went to the bedroom to get Tamara, to take her back to the plantations.
She was on the bed, feet tucked up under her butt, arms wrapped around her knees, rocking back and forth, visor down, sucking images out of the dream monitor—not like a professional, like a junkie. She kept saying, “All I want is away; All I want is away; All I want is away.” Sweat rolled off her as she rocked, and her face was bleached colorless.
I went to the console and unplugged her monitor. She kept rocking, unaware of what I’d done. I pushed her visor up. Her eyes were rolled back, showing white. She kept whimpering, clenching her teeth. She was deep inside herself. Catatonic.
I pulled the visor back down, plugged her into the console, put my own visor down, and plugged into the viewer’s jack:
And on the beach the wind raged in the night, whipping grains of sand as sharp as needles through my skin. I heard a noise like a person hissing through his teeth, and I looked up and saw ghostly sea gulls with the heads of men, and they were hissing through their teeth.
The red-haired Tamil sat, curled up, rocking on a beach that undulated beneath her, while she watched the humps of dark sea creatures rise and gape at her before she shoved them back into oblivion. She yelled to something out to sea, but the wind carried her words away. The beach was black with scorpions that scuttled over the wet sand and sheltered themselves among gleaming strands of seaweed. The dead bull, bloated now, stood in the shallows and struggled in seaweed as he tried to reach shore, shaking his rotting flesh, lowing in pain. The breakers that washed against him made his penis and testicles rise as they came in, and then left them to hang, wet and dripping, as they receded.
I called to Tamil. She didn’t answer. I yelled, “Arish is dead,” but the wind and crashing waves and the hissing gulls covered my words, so I struggled toward her, leaning against the stinging wind, and picked my way among the huge black scorpions. One of them stung my ankle, and it felt as if a hot iron jabbed into my flesh. I walked a few steps and was hit on the other foot, so then I ran, ignoring the stings.
Out at sea the leviathans rose, and a huge wave rolled before them as they headed for shore. I reached Tamil. She was yelling at the empty air, “All I want is away!” I pulled her face toward me. She looked up. And though the wind still blew, her world quieted.
“Arish is dead,” I yelled, hoping to comfort her. “Your husband called me. He said he can’t help you. We’ve got to get away.”
She looked at me, searched my face. “My God! You have me! All this running, and you have me!”
“You’re mistaken,” I said. “Come see! Jack out and come see!”
“See what? Arish dead on the floor? See exactly what you want me to see?” Out in the water, the bull made a bawling noise. Tamil looked me in the eye and hissed through clenched teeth, “I die!”
I heard a dull thud behind me and began to turn. The bull had struggled free of the seaweed, and he was charging. I didn’t have time to move. His left horn speared through my chest, and he tossed me over his head. I fell facedown in the sand. The pain made me see lights, cramped my muscles, made vomit rise in my throat. I forgot momentarily where I was and thought someone had shot me.
A hot sting slapped my cheek and another hit my back. A scorpion latched on to my cheek and jerked spasmodically, inserting its stinger farther and farther, as if it would bury itself in my flesh. I pulled it out and threw it away, and heard a thudding noise. The bull was stamping Tamil’s body. Time and time again he reared up his huge front legs, and then dropped on her, pushing her broken body into the sand, cracking her bones. The bull stood over her and snorted as he sniffed at her blood, then he stuck a horn through her belly and lifted her in the air. He paraded her up and down the beach several times, and then galloped into the water.
“Tamara!” I yelled, and she looked back at me, weakly, with hatred in her face. She opened her mouth and breathed darkness at me. And when the cold and antiseptic darkness rushed over me, all I wanted was to whimper once before I died.
I got up and staggered from room to room, searching through a fog for something—I didn’t know what it was—that I couldn’t seem to find. I would look in a room and see something and wonder “Is that what I’m looking for?” Then I would realize I was looking at a lamp or table, and it was not what I wanted. I went to an open door, which seemed like all the others, and sunlight struck my face. I wandered in my front yard, looking at orchids and trees, wondering if they were what I wanted, and found myself at my neighbor’s door. I opened it.
Rodrigo De Hoyos sat in a chair in his living room. He looked at me, “Don Angelo, what is wrong? What has happened?” he cried as he rose and crossed the room. He took my hand and led me in, forced me down into a large, soft chair. I tried to stand and he pushed me back down. “Are you ill?” he asked.
I sat for several seconds, thinking, but my mind raced down pathways that always came to a dead end. I grasped Rodrigo’s shirt. “Something terrible has happened!” I told him, and began sobbing. Then I remembered: All I want is away. I yelled, “You must get me a shuttle!”
Rodrigo stared at me, as if to calculate my sanity. He folded his hands and stared at them, made a sucking noise with his teeth, and looked at the clock. After what seemed a very long time, he jacked in a call to Pantransport and asked for a minishuttle as soon as possible.
He turned away for a moment, and I got up and headed out the door. He came and tried to force me to sit back down, but I pushed him aside and he didn’t stop me.
I went home, opened my door, and found Arish still at the bottom of the stairs, gasping for breath through the gas mask. One of his lungs must have collapsed to make him gasp that way. The air was filled with the scent of gastric juices and charred flesh and hair. I marveled that I didn’t remember passing him when I had gone outside, and I stumbled over him on my way back to my bedroom.
Tamara sat on the bed, slumped slightly forward, perfectly motionless. I reached up and touched her neck, feeling for a pulse. She had none. I put on the dream monitor to see if any brain activity registered—knowing it meant nothing since as random neurons fire people often have dream flashes up to forty minutes after death. Such flashes are called the “dreams of the dead.” But the monitor remained blank. I pulled her to the floor and initiated CPR, massaging her heart and breathing into her, but she didn’t respond.
I knew the shuttle would come soon, so I ran to my medical bag and got a slave—a small, computerized device that does the work for the reflexive nervous system—and shoved its prongs into the base of her skull at an angle, just above the atlas vertebrae, so that it penetrated her brain stem. I switched on the slave and Tamara gasped for air; then I adjusted the slave’s dials till her pulse beat steadily and her breathing evened. It meant nothing—the slave could keep her body functioning even if her brain were dead or removed.
For a long time I checked the monitor: it remained blank—no sign of brain activity at all, not even a dream of the dead. So I turned off the slave and she stopped breathing immediately. There was a chance she could live, a very slim chance, if she were taken to the hospital. But I didn’t have the heart to do it. The probability that she’d suffered major brain damage was too high, and even though I could have generated new brain cells, they wouldn’t carry her memories, her identity. She would have to spend her life running from people she didn’t remember.
I pulled her visor up to take a last look. Her eyes were rolled back. Her face was very pale, perfectly still. One tear had seeped from her left eye, slowly finding its way down her cheek. I brushed it away, surprised to feel how high her fever had become in the end. I closed her eyes and whispered the words the refugiados spoke over their dead comrades, “Free at last.”
I couldn’t stand to see her sitting perfectly still, so I switched the slave back on, just to hear her breathing. She sounded alive, even if it was only an imitation of life.
I began planning the things I needed to do as I packed my clothes in a small bag. With three dead bodies behind me, I was not about to risk the courts of Panamá. I knew I would have to do something with Arish. I heard the sound of a rattle behind me. I turned around—no one was there. I wandered to the kitchen and got my medical bag, filled a specimen bottle with some clear synthetic blood, and spilled most of the blood on the table because my hands shook. I went downstairs to where Arish lay gasping on the floor, removed the gas mask from his face, and then unwrapped a scalpel and inserted the blade under his bottom right eyelid and twisted till his eye popped free. I dropped the eye into the blood and agitated the container a moment before putting it in my pocket. I heard the rattling behind me again, and turned around—no one was there. The rattling kept coming, and I realized my jaw was quivering and my own teeth were rattling. I began breathing heavily and my heart pounded.
I took the scalpel and slit Arish’s throat from ear to ear.
“For Flaco, you murderous bastard,” I told myself. I watched the blood pump out of Arish’s throat, and as it ebbed away, I could feel something inside me ebbing away. I believed God would punish me. “Piss on him if he can’t take a joke!” I said. And I laughed and cried at the same time.
I searched Arish’s pockets and found his bank card, a book called The Holy Teachings of Twill Baraburi, a couple of knives, a screwdriver, and two “Conquistador cocktails”— capsules filled with stimulants and endorphins, meant to be broken between the teeth so the drug can soak through the skin immediately. Soldiers sometimes take the cocktails in battle to relieve tension and speed the reflexes, but several of the drugs in them are addictive and must be taken in increasingly larger doses. They were practically worthless, since I didn’t know the prescription and therefore couldn’t resell them. But I am a pharmacologist, and cannot lightly toss away any medications, so I scooped them up and put them in my pocket along with Arish’s other possessions. I packed my medical bag and folded the laser rifle and shoved it in, then went back to the bedroom to get my bag of coins.
Tamara still lay on the bed, and her eyes had reopened—a side effect of the slave plugged into her brain stem. As I rummaged through the closet looking for the coins, I got a chill up my spine. I felt as if Tamara was watching me, and my hands began to shake.
If I leave without her, I thought, I will never be free of her ghost. I didn’t care if she was dead or not. I felt compelled to drag her away. Had she not wanted to get away? I decided to take her with me, even if she decomposed in my arms. And when the decision was made I was filled with a manic joy. I felt I had instinctively made the right decision.
In the closet was a large teak chest decorated with elephants and tigers; it was large enough to hold Tamara. I lifted her and laid her in, surprised at how light she was; with her small bones and underdeveloped muscles she could not have weighed more than thirty-five kilos.
I dragged the chest outside and sat beneath the papaya tree to wait for the shuttle. My muscles had become knotted and I was breathing hard, so I stretched out on the grass and tried to still myself. It was getting dark, and two fruit bats had just reached the papayas above me as the shuttle landed.
Outside the shuttle was a security scanner. As I reached the scanner a mechanized voice said, “State your destination and prepare for identity scan.”
I fumbled for the specimen bottle with the clear synthetic blood, and then pulled out the eye of Arish. Even with the oxygen provided by the blood, the proteins in the eye had begun to whiten. I put it in my palm and held it up to the retina scanner, trembling, and gave my destination. “Lagrange star station, inbound Concourse One.”
The scanner said, “Welcome, Arish Muhammad Hustanifad. Insert your bankcard and we will deduct 147,232 international monetary units from your account. We hope you enjoyed your stay on Earth.”
“Thank you,” I answered quietly, “I did enjoy my stay. I shall miss Earth very much.”
I fed Arish’s bankcard into the computer.
I heard Rodrigo’s door open as he came out of his house to see me off, and I shoved Arish’s eye back into my pocket. Rodrigo hurried over, embraced me, looked down at the large chest and pointed at it with his foot. He said, “You won’t be returning, will you?”
“No,” I hung my head and whispered, “I cannot come back. You may hear bad things about me, but no one must know where I’ve gone.”
Rodrigo shook his head solemnly, and looked at the ground. “You have always been a good friend, and a good neighbor. If I am asked, I will say I saw you leave for the feria this morning, as you always do. But listen to my warning: Your voice carries a tone of desperation. You’re afraid—perhaps with good reason. But don’t let your fear get in the way of clear thinking, don Angelo.”
“You have also been a good friend,” I whispered in his ear. “I cannot tell you more, but you must take your family, get off-planet. Get beyond the Alliance.” I looked in his eyes and saw his disbelief, saw that my vague warning would do no good.
He nodded kindly, as if to a reactionary or a lunatic, and helped me drag the chest aboard the shuttle.
The shuttle was piloted by computer and had no cockpit, so it was roomy inside. On the flight up I kept the chest open to let Tamara get air. Her eyes had opened, but remained unfocused, staring at the ceiling, zombie-like. I told her jokes and rambling stories from my childhood, and promised to take her far away, to a planet where fish swam in the rivers and fruit trees were as thick as weeds. Sweat was pouring off me, and I began imagining what would happen at the space station when the customs officials opened my trunk and found a zombie inside. I imagined trying to shoot my way out of the station or trying to hijack a ship, and became even more agitated. I knew it was a crazy idea, so I considered my alternatives: the only alternative was to leave the trunk somewhere with Tamara in it—perhaps outside the station’s infirmary—and hope the trunk would not be her coffin. But even if the doctors there managed to save her life, someone else would manage to take it. There was nothing to do but try to smuggle her aboard a starship, and that did not seem plausible.
So I turned away and tried to ignore her as I played with the money in my pocket and watched the view outside. The sun had set in Colón, but I could see the shimmering platinum of the banana plantations, among the lights of thousands of cities. A line of shadow marched across Earth; the world darkened beneath me. Comlink tones sounded in my head; I ignored them for a while, and then disconnected. Inside the shuttle was a bank access. I used it to transfer Arish’s money to my account. Then I checked the shuttle’s computer terminal to see if any starships were willing to sign on a pharmacologist. None were. I checked to see if anyone in another star system was willing to pay my fare from their end. Someone from the Delta Pagonis system badly wanted a morphogenic pharmacologist, was willing to pay fare to a planet called Baker. The ship, a Greek ship called the Chaeron, would depart only five hours after I reached the station, and this seemed a great stroke of luck. I began laughing and keyed in visual for Baker: it was a small planet, newly terraformed, population 174,000—not enough people to support a morphogenic pharmacologist. They’d be lucky to get someone. Lucky to get me. The pictures showed white beaches and palm trees, like Panamá. In the background was one single white mountain, like a huge pillar of salt, and behind it were jagged purple mountains. It looked like a place where I could possess myself in peace. A great hope filled me. I was glad to be leaving, leaving the murderous Nicita Idealist Socialists with their plans to destroy all competing societies and reengineer mankind, leaving the sound of bombs dropping in the jungles south of my home, leaving the AIs with their political intrigues, leaving my dead friend. I had no plans for escape. Just the hope of escape. Escape or death. It seemed enough. I told Tamara all about Baker, made up wild stories about how beautiful it would be, and how happy we would be, until my throat went hoarse and my voice sounded like the croaking of a frog.
I lay down. My muscles were cramping again, and little pinpoints of light flashed behind my eyes. Sometime during the trip I dozed lightly, and unbidden I dreamed that the day had been warm and happy, and that after selling a rejuvenation in the feria, I walked to where Flaco and Tamara built sand castles on an empty beach. I stood and smiled at them for a long time, not knowing why I was grinning, then began to walk past them.
“¡Hola! Angelo, where are you going?” Flaco called.
“I’m on my way to paradise,” I said.
Flaco said, “Hah! Good place! I have a cousin who lives there.” Tamara and Flaco smiled at me as I walked past them. I looked up the beach. In the distance was only empty sand, and I knew my legs would tire long before I made it. Above me, sea gulls hung motionless in the air. I stretched out my arms and crouched, wondering if the wind could lift me and make me fly like a bird. My arms sprouted tiny ugly feathers, and I began to rise. I held my arms steady and floated slowly up into the sky.
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.
***