Chapter 5
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 bankcard. 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.
The computer used a point system to weigh my qualifications, and the screen showed a breakdown. The computer had docked me for being at the upper age limit, but I regained many points because of my medical background and good health. I needed 80 points to qualify for the job; I had 82.
I was still shaken from killing Arish. My head ached and I felt nauseous. I knew I couldn’t be a mercenary, couldn’t kill again, and I knew someone would be waiting for me to try to board the ship, so I prepared to walk away.
“What luck!” a man said, startling me.
I turned to look at him. He was tall and broad, with amazingly thick black hair that perched on his head like an animal. His broad nose and high cheekbones were those of an Indian. He was barefoot, and his pants were made of faded blue flour sacks, and he wore a blood-red woolen jacket with white llamas printed on it. He carried a military duffel bag on his back. All in all he appeared to be a yokel from Peru. You wouldn’t have looked at him twice in the market in Panamá, but he was out of place at Sol Station.
He pointed at the screen and with a faint Castilian accent said, “I’m sorry if I startled you, Señor, but only yesterday they required 120 points. See how fortunate you are? An old caballero like you could never have gotten on yesterday. They must have many positions to fill. I suppose they’re desperate.”
Yes, desperate, I thought. I also am desperate. By buying the rejuvenation and requesting this information, I’d alerted Jafari’s men to my position. I had to get off the station, fast, and even though some of Jafari’s men were on the station, it was a good sign: It meant Jafari’s friends may have decided to handle the situation themselves, without alerting the police. I still had a decent chance of getting off planet.
Because I had no other choice, I typed in the command, “Position accepted.”
“You should hurry,” the Indian said. “They will have to take medical tests, give you vaccinations. And you’ll have to sign a work contract.”
I began to walk down the outbound corridor, and the huge, broad-chested man padded alongside in his bare feet, talking. I thought, Jafari could have sent this man. I watched him. He had a small green bruise on his chin and a cut above one eye. His eyes were intelligent, alert, which seemed incongruous for a man who was obviously so poor. On his neck was a 3-D tattoo of a strange beast: A creature with the heads of both a lion and a goat, the body and claws of a lion, and the wings of a dragon. I was gazing at it when he suddenly glanced at me; I turned away so I wouldn’t appear to be staring.
“Pardon me, Señor, but you are a lucky man! I can feel it,” he said, licking his lips. He was nervous. “My name is Perfecto, and I can feel things like that: Luck.” He watched me, calculatingly, as if to beg for money. “You don’t believe me, but I score pretty high on the psi tests. I can feel luck. I feel it on you. Everyone is born with a certain amount of luck, like a bucket filled with water, and some men squander it, pour it on the ground. But others live by their wits and their skill and never dip into their luck. That is the way you do it, right? But today you have found your luck. Am I not right? Just look at how this day has gone and ask yourself, ‘Has not this been my lucky day?’”
I looked at him and laughed a laugh that was half cry and would have sounded demonic.
“Well, perhaps not,” he said, “since we will both die on Baker.” He smiled at me as if it were a melancholy joke. Then he became quiet and his bare feet slapped on the black floor.
The concourses were long dark tunnels, and our steps echoed loudly. I watched the shadows for the man with the gray slacks, but saw nothing. On the walls between each docking portal were murals. The first mural portrayed the Moors being driven from Europe by the Christians: A dead man with a back that had been shredded by the Padres’ tortures was being dragged toward a ship by two women. In his stiff hands he tenderly held the Koran, and his children marched behind the grisly procession and cast fearful glances back at a bone-white chapel that bore the sign of the cross. Priests dressed in black dotted the chapel’s yard like crows. A second mural showed the North American Nez Perce Indians dressed in furs, marching through the snow as they tried to escape the cavalry by fleeing into Canada. The cut feet of women and children left a bloody trail in the snow. A third mural showed Jews caught in the act of fleeing Jerusalem by car. The lanes of traffic were all snarled and the procession had ground to a halt. All the faces, frozen in terror, were lit with a brilliant surrealistic light as they glanced back to see the first scarlet, nuclear mushroom clouds blossom over the Dome of the Rock.
I wondered if someone would someday paint a mural of people like me, desperadoes who streaked away from a darkening Earth in starships. The thought sickened me.
And the sweat began to creep down my armpits again and my mouth became dry. At any minute the man who called himself “Perfecto” could turn and attack me. His arms were very thick, obviously strong. And my attention was divided between watching him and the halls.
“Will any other Latin Americans be coming?” I asked.
“Ah, yes! Many! Mostly Chileans and Ecuadorans, but lots from other places as well. It’s a requirement for all the people to be Latin Americans. The company wants people who know something of guerrilla warfare, and the only place they can get us is South America, since civilized people settle their differences with neutron cannons and atomics,” he laughed and looked to see if I was smiling.
I pointed out the empty hall, “From the looks of it, just you and me will have to fight this war.”
Perfecto smiled, “Ah, no! Everyone is being processed in Independent Brazil so they can get their weapons cleared through customs faster and get a free ride up. Didn’t you read the advertisement?”
“No,” I said.
Perfecto looked at me strangely. “We’re all leaving, jumping off like fleas from a drowning dog. The ad said we could bring eight kilo’s of personal items—favorite weapons or armor included. Did you bring a weapon?”
I didn’t want him to know I was armed. “No,” I said. “Are we going the right way?”
He said, “It’s just a little farther, as you will see.” He stepped ahead to lead the way. “The reason I have pointed this out to you, about the luck, is that I have wasted mine, used it all up. Understand?” He looked back at me and his teeth flashed; they seemed strange—too even, as if they’d been filed off to the same height. He licked his lips. “You see, when I fight, I always want at least two compadres—a lucky one and a skillful one. Three people make a good team: a lucky one, a skillful one, and an intelligent one—that’s me: The intelligent one. I make good decisions fast. I have the second sight, and get hunches about what to do.” He turned and smiled his strange smile, making the heads of the beasts on his tattoo twist as if to gaze back at me.
His eyes seemed to be asking if we could be friends, but because of his Indian blood he didn’t dare ask the question openly to me, a man of obvious European heritage. If this were Jafari’s man, he’d be talking like this to get me off guard, I realized. He would feign instant friendship, like a Haitian with a basket to sell. I didn’t say anything.
We turned into the side portal that was out-concourse-three and pulled the cart down a huge hallway lined with empty benches, past a couple of robots that polished the dusty floor till the onyx tiles shined. I expected to see the man with the gray slacks, but didn’t. At the end of the corridor was a door with a sign: Allied Earth Customs Office. Processing for Destination Baker.
I unloaded my luggage from the cart and dragged it to the customs office door. At least one of Jafari’s men was in that office, and I knew I didn’t have a chance of getting past customs. I toyed with the idea of leaving, just dropping the chest with Tamara in it for someone to discover. Perhaps I can still walk away from this, I thought. But the idea was absurd.
Perfecto grabbed one end of the teak chest and began dragging it through the door. I didn’t follow, and he smiled up at me as if begging permission to help. I grabbed the other end of the chest and carried it into the office.
The customs office was lined with comfortable chairs and could have seated a hundred people, but only twenty ragged men and three women were present, all dark-skinned Latin Americans who carried all their possessions in sacks. I looked around the room for someone, anyone, who appeared out of place. Each gray face was the same. All the mercenaries looked dejected, ragged and dirty. A couple had lost limbs, and it was common to see black plastic fingers or silver arms. One tall, thin cyborg wore a silver face that looked like Buddha; a green star was set in his forehead, and rays spread out from it across his brow and down his cheeks. An Indian with crooked teeth was singing a sad song and playing a blue-plastic guitar, while half a dozen men with lowered heads sang along.
One of the singers wore gray pants and black combat boots.
He lifted his head and looked at me, his dark eyes smoldering, but didn’t miss a note in the song as he lowered his head again. He couldn’t attack me with twenty witnesses in the room.
I considered walking out, but knew he’d follow. Besides, I knew who he was—and if I attacked at the right moment, I’d have the element of surprise. And all I had to do was see who he communicated with, and I’d know the identity of his accomplice. I decided to play the hand fate had dealt me.
An anglo woman behind a desk waved me forward, then glanced down at her computer terminal. I left Tamara by the door and stepped up to the desk.
The anglo woman didn’t even look at me or bother to ask if I spoke English. “You should have been processed in Independent Brazil and boarded a shuttle,” she said, nodding toward a monitor screen on the wall: The monitor showed an interior port of the Chaeron crammed with thousands of Latin Americans as they unloaded from a shuttle. I was surprised to see so many people, to know that they had already escaped Earth. Though I was only separated from them by a thin wall, I felt unsure that I would ever make it to the ship. “You’ve only got a few minutes. We’ll need tissue samples for a gene scan. Roll up your sleeve and step over here.” She got up from her desk and went to an x-ray microscope in a corner of the room.
“My genome is on record,” I said, rolling up my sleeve. My hands shook. “I don’t have any illegal genetic structures.” Getting a full gene scan takes hours; it would never be done in time.
She looked at my shaking hands and said mechanically, “This won’t hurt. It’s standard procedure for the Baker run. We have to verify the natures of all your upgrades.”
She took a plastic tissue sampler with a dozen small needles on it and stuck it in my wrist, then pulled the sampler out and put it in a compartment of the microscope and flipped a switch. The microscope made some grinding noises, then began reading my genome, flashing pictures of my DNA on several monitors. I was relieved to see that each screen read a separate chromosome instead of cross checking for accuracy. It saved a lot of time.
Over by the wall a pleasantly drunken man said to a compadre, “I don’t understand—Now who … who are we going to fight?”
“The Japanese.”
“But I thought we worked for the Japanese?” the drunk said.
“Sí. We work for Motoki, and they are Japanese. But we are going to fight the Yabajin, and they are Japanese, too.”
“Oh. Yaba …Yaba—what kind of a name is that?”
“It means barbarians.”
“But I don’t want to fight barbarians—” the drunk said, genuinely hurt, “some of my best friends are barbarians!”
“Don’t tell anyone, or we might not get the job!” a third man warned.
Once the lady behind the desk saw that the microscope was working, she asked for my ID; I gave it to her and submitted to a retina scan, then she said, “When the shuttles from Independent Brazil have unloaded their passengers, we’ll open the doors and begin final processing. Your immunizations will be given on ship. Until then, have a seat and relax, Mr. Osic.”
I took a seat near the door, away from everyone else, and pulled the chest with Tamara in it near me. The man with the gray slacks kept singing. He didn’t speak to anyone or make any overt signals. I wondered what people would think when they opened my trunk in customs. All they’d find was a zombie-eyed—Flaco would have loved that, would have called her “Zombie Eyes”—emaciated, little witch with a skull full of nightmares. Yet I clung to her.
A man just a few seats away was telling a joke: “I had a friend in Argentina who was awakened one night by someone pounding on the door: He thought it must be the Nicita Idealist Socialist Secret Police, so he ran and hid in his closet. The pounding continued, till finally the visitor broke down the door and forced his way into the house, then opened the closet: Before my friend’s eyes stood Death, all dressed in black.
“My friend shouted, ‘Praise God! I thought it was the secret police!”
“Death opened his mouth in surprise and said, ‘They’re not here yet? I must be early!’”
The joke brought only a few chuckles. Yet as I thought of it, I realized that the man in gray slacks was one of them: One of the secret police in the joke. It was not a comforting thought.
Perfecto went through the same procedure I had, then came and sat next to me.
The customs agent fed my ID into her computer, and began punching in commands. This made me nervous. Sweat began breaking out on my brow and upper lip. If Arish’s death had been reported, she would know in a matter of minutes. On the far side of the room, five men sat along one wall. One small man with a pencil-bar moustache and long hair, smoked a thin cigar. He was positioned so he could see the computer terminal, and he stared at it intently. He was different from the others, abnormally attentive. His white shirt was bright and clean. Not rumpled and dirty, as was the attire of most of the rest of us. He stared at the monitor, then glanced up at me. Abruptly, the customs agent switched off her computer and rose from her chair. She didn’t look at me as she left the room.
“Gringa pubic hair,” a big mestizo muttered as the customs officer walked out the door. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and laughed because we had all been made nervous by the domineering gringa’s presence.
“Perhaps our smell finally drove her out,” one of the Indians joked, and everyone laughed.
One heavy-set man across the room said, “So, Perfecto, you have decided to come with us after all?”
“I did not decide; the people of my village decided for me,” answered Perfecto.
“I’d have thought you’d be alcalde of that dirty little village by now,” the heavy-set man said.
“Ah, no. My wife gave birth to our eighth child three months ago. And just last week we found that she was pregnant again. When people heard of it, they became outraged and blamed me. Even the dogs snap at me.”
Everyone laughed, but some of them gave him knowing glances, begging him with their eyes to say more.
“Unfortunately,” Perfecto said, “I have not made love with my wife since the last baby!”
Among friends, such an admission would have brought loud laughs. But only a few people chuckled, while Perfecto laughed hard, painfully.
Across the room, the man with the clean white shirt and pencil moustache got up from his chair, stretched, and went over to the customs officer’s computer. The hair rose on the back of my neck, and I fidgeted. He inserted one of my ID cards, and switched the computer on.
“Eight children!” a woman exclaimed, “You’re lucky they didn’t kill you!” Perfecto laughed again, almost maniacally. I looked again at the cut above his eye and a bruise on his jaw, just above the tattoo. Perhaps someone had tried to kill him, or at least tried to hurt him badly.
The man at the computer seemed to read my files with interest. My stomach churned; I couldn’t decide what to do with my hands. Then he began punching many buttons, accessing files that had nothing to do with me. His actions caught the attention of the men he’d been sitting with. I wondered what he found that so interested him, and would have stopped him if I could have done so without attracting attention.
Jafari could have sent this man, I thought. Then I realized he could be making calls over the computer, notifying Jafari’s men that he’d found me. I became very frightened but pretended to ignore him and reached up and wiped the sweat from my brow.
“Señor, are you all right?” Perfecto asked.
I glanced over at him. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“You don’t look well,” Perfecto said.
“I don’t feel well,” I answered truthfully.
“Malaria?”
“What?”
“You have malaria,” Perfecto said. “I have seen it many times! People who have malaria turn pale and shake and sweat, just as you are doing.”
“Yes, I have malaria,” I said, glad that he did not see my fear.
“Shall I get you a doctor?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” I said, “I am a doctor.” Across the room, one of the singers chuckled, and I wondered if he chuckled because he could read my body language and knew I was afraid. My fear would give me away if I didn’t do something quick. I would have reached for my medical bag and taken a tranquilizer, but I’d left my bag in the trunk to be a pillow for Tamara, and couldn’t risk opening it. My fear cramped my chest, and made my breathing ragged. I remembered the “conquistador cocktails” I’d taken from Arish. I didn’t know the strength of the prescription, but I was close to Arish’s body weight, so I took a capsule and broke it between my teeth. It tasted like garlic, so sweet, so strong and heady. Like warm whiskey, it burned my lips and gums for a moment, then as the cocktail began to take effect my face went numb.
Perfecto nodded, apparently satisfied that I had taken care of myself. He looked across the room to the computer where the man with the pencil-bar moustache was smiling, enjoying himself.
I felt my head swing forward as if it were a weight on a pendulum that traveled in a wide arc, and at the same moment I felt as if I were pushed into another world where I experienced heightened lucidity. Even though everything was blurred around the edges, if I looked at something straight on I saw it’s every crisp detail. I could read Perfecto’s entire life story in his appearance: The veins in his neck throbbed, and the movement made the little lion’s head on his tattoo lash back and forth, and I suddenly understood what the tattoo represented, and what Perfecto was—a chimera, one of the genetically upgraded men Torres had created to fight the wars in Chile. Yet because his ears weren’t deformed, as were the ears of chimeras who had sonar, and because he was in his thirties, he must have been one of the early models, a truly upgraded human rather than a humanoid species. His eyes were wide-set, for greater depth perception; his thick hair concealed an enlarged skull, for greater intelligence; his neck and backbone were massive so that his frame could support the huge muscles of his body.
Most people considered it taboo to marry such a creation, or even to carry its child full term. A chimera is even lower than an Indian. When he had fathered eight children, his community would truly have risen in an uproar. I saw all this in the throb of a heartbeat, while the cocktail slid down my throat, burning and numbing my neck and esophagus.
I looked at the other people in the room, and saw that most of them were lost in reflection. Their eyes had the dulled quality I associated with the refugiados: burned-out, lifeless, empty of hope. They had fought many wars in South America, and lost them all. All of them were poor; their dirty clothing attested to the fact that they lived in houses without floors. Only the man in the silver face was unreadable. And across the room was the man in gray slacks. He sat rigid, ready for action, and he purposely avoided looking at me.
I gauged the tension levels of the others in the room. Three men and two women were of the same age and build as Perfecto—they were chimeras, and I realized they were banding together, perhaps to settle in a new world where they could form a community so they would not be outcasts. On the ship would be many chimeras; knowledge of mercenary jobs would have spread through their community by word of mouth. I could read this in their faces as easily as reading the stories that Brazilian woodcarvers etch into the handles of their machetes. Only the man with the moustache and cigar seemed out of place. Different. His eyes glittered as if he stared into candlelight. He was aware. He was quieter than others, more dangerous. He was looking at me.
It all seemed fascinating. Even the gray walls and a wad of paper beneath one chair fascinated me. My hands stopped shaking and my breathing felt less restricted, but my chest was thudding as if a rabbit were kicking against my ribs. I imagined I felt the cocktail slide into my belly and sit, burning like a live coal. Everyone was looking at the man behind the computer console. He was fascinating. He wore a fascinating clean white shirt, and when he moved his arm it left a fascinating white afterimage in the air behind it. His pencil-bar moustache and narrow face were fascinating. Like the face of a rat or a whorehouse owner. He was a leader here. He was a whorehouse rat, and he was hitting the buttons on the computer and laughing loudly in a fascinating manner.
His voice slurred. I heard him in slow motion. “My friends,” he said, “I have interesting news:” Fascinating. “Among us is a dangerous murderer!” Fascinating.
“No!” someone said. Oh, yes, I mouthed.
“It’s true!” Whorehouse Rat said. Fascinating. “Even today, in Panamá,” Panamá … Panamá … Panamá … “this murderer slit a man’s throat!” Each word was like a fruit, like a ripe avocado. I could see his mouth forming the words, and when each syllable had grown and ripened on his tongue, he let it roll past his lips and plop to the floor. Fascinating. I knew something was terribly wrong: I couldn’t think straight, and I wondered if it was because of the pill I’d taken, and yet I didn’t connect the problem to the morphine levels in the cocktail.
I did not like what Whorehouse Rat was saying. The cocktail burned in my stomach like a glowing ember, giving off waves of heat. I could feel the heat winding its way up my entrails, and I knew that if I kept my mouth closed, it would envelope my brain, consume me. So I opened my mouth and purposely spit the heat at Whorehouse Rat.
A yellow ripple in the air, like a fiery wheel, floated across the room as I blew the heat toward Whorehouse Rat. But just before the shimmering yellow ring reached him, Whorehouse Rat’s skin turned blue and cold, so that when the ring enveloped him it only managed to bring his body heat up to normal. I swore under my breath because he had defeated my magical attack, so I blew wheels of fire at him in rapid succession and watched them float across the room as the syllables plopped from his mouth, one by one: “Pan a má, has, just, learned, where, the, kil ler, is. E ven, now, sta tion, se cur i ty, comes, to, take, the, vi cious, a ni mal, back, for, a, quick, ex e cu tion.”
So, they are on their way to get me, I realized. And now I will die. This should be fascinating. The wheels of fire enveloped the Whorehouse Rat, but instead of burning, he moved his hand in the air and formed a mystic symbol. The fire closed around him like a womb, and he stood protected in a burning halo. He had defeated my attack, but I knew that all I had to do was hold my breath and the fire in me would build, would grow to a critical point until I could no longer contain it and I would blow apart like a fission bomb, killing us all. But before I did that, part of me realized I should try to escape.
I stood up and staggered around, smiling at the people in the room. Behind me were only empty corridors—no place to hide. I looked at the door that led to the airlock and beyond that to the ship. It was locked. I blew a ring of fire at it, to see if it would melt. It didn’t. The faces of the people around me expressed various degrees of surprise, shock, and amusement at my predicament.
Whorehouse Rat laughed, and instead of plopping like avocados to the ground, his next words rushed like water churning through rocks. “Not even have I told you the good part! This fellow’s victim, the man so brutally executed, was known to some of you: Arish Muhammad Hustanifad!”
A stream of water exuded from Whorehouse Rat’s mouth, splashed against the walls, filled the room, knocked me to my knees and drowned the coal of fire in my belly, leaving me cold and naked. Several people gasped.
The chimera Perfecto jumped up and grabbed my shirt. “Truth? Is it true?” he shouted, and several other people yelled, “Is it true?” His hands were like iron, and I thought he would shake me and snap my neck. I could no longer breathe fire at him. I was too cold. My skin was turning blue and purple from the cold. I looked around the room; no one came to help me.
I became enraged because this chimera was touching me without permission. He dared to touch me! He dared to invade my privacy. He was bigger than me, and I’d heard rumors of his super-human strength, and though he could kill me, I realized the cold in me was power, too—a magic power stronger than the flames I’d been breathing.
It looks as if you’ll have to beat these insolent curs, keep them in line,
“Of course I killed him, puto,” I shouted at Perfecto. I stood up. “And because you’ve touched me, I’ll kill you, too!”
I brought my cold heavy leg up into his groin and at the same time clubbed him in the nose with a fist of ice. Drops of blood sprayed out of his nose in slow motion. Fascinating.
He let go of me and sagged partway to the floor, gasping more from shock than from the cold. I kicked at his face, ready to sacrifice my leg, to let it shatter against his skull so that shards of ice would spray out and puncture his flesh. But his hand came up in slow motion and grabbed my foot and twisted it and I heard the bones of ice in my ankle snap as he threw me. I rose in the air so that for a moment I seemed to be standing in the air a meter off ground, and I imagined I looked just like Christ ascending into heaven as I slammed against the wall.
Everyone in the room stared up at me with their mouths shaped in little O’s of surprise. Fascinating.
The air whooshed out of me from the blow, and I sagged onto the chairs and fell to the floor.
Now I will have to kill them all, and I’ll have to do it with my ankle broken. I got up and screamed in rage and threw myself at a chimera woman. I became tons of ice flying at her, an unstoppable glacier. She stared at me, frightened, clutching the handles of her chair, then leaned back and brought up a leg made of stone; her boot smashed my face, splintering the ice in me. Fascinating.
I should have eaten more reptiles, I thought as a wave of red washed before my eyes and the world faded to a cold, distant, black pinpoint.
Red and white clouds swirled and resolved into a shape. Whorehouse Rat was smoking his cigar, breathing smoke into my face. He was the one who was out of place here! He had come to kill me! I knew it as surely as I knew my own name. I screamed and tried to swing, but my arms were pinned behind my back.
“Overdose … Overdose … Overdose. Cocktails,” he said, moving his cigar with his tongue so the glowing end tipped down at an angle. It left a fiery afterimage in the air. Fascinating.
“But he only took one,” someone said.
Yes, I thought, but what dosage? I screamed in rage at the Whorehouse Rat.
He slapped my face. “What day is it?”
I tried to answer, but couldn’t remember. It seemed very important. The act of trying to think made my head ache. I began to laugh. In the snap of a finger, everything became very lucid again. And the lucidity was funny. I kept laughing.
“You’ve had an overdose of cocktails,” Whorehouse Rat yelled. “Calm down!”
I looked at his face. He had two, thin, silver tears tattooed beneath his eyes. I had seen such marks before, in the ghettoes of Colón and Panamá City. Gang leaders wore them to advertise how many rivals they’d executed: one tear for each killing. They were very funny tattoos. I began laughing and weeping at the joke implicit in the tattoos.
Outside the customs office, a gringo shouted “Angelo Osic, come out with your hands on your head!” I couldn’t stop laughing.
“We’re trying to help you!” Rat Face explained. “See!” Someone twisted my head around so I could see everyone in the room. Some people sprawled on the floor, aiming long-barreled plasma rifles at the door. Others were suited in body armor painted in jungle shades of nonreflective green and dull red, waiting to fight anyone who came in. Perfecto wore only armored gloves. The man who’d played the guitar wore laser-targeting goggles and aimed a rocket launcher with four minirockets at the door.
The man with gray slacks stood weaponless and armorless against the wall, frowning, obviously upset by the turn of events, nervously watching me. He was very funny, and I laughed harder. All the duffle bags were dumped on the floor. Clothes, ammunition, and grenades spilled from every bag. “See!” Rat said. “We will help you. Perfecto says you are lucky, and you fight like a jaguar—a stupid, weak jaguar, but full of fury at least. Besides, you have avenged General Tapia today when you killed Arish. You have heard of Tapia?”
I tried to remember. My head ached. “Chile,” I said, but the single word sounded so funny I just smiled and could remember nothing more.
“Yes, that’s right,” Rat Face said. “He was murdered in Chile by that cabrón you killed today! We had Arish on trial, but someone poisoned his guards and he escaped. Remember?”
I didn’t remember. “Cabrón,” goat fucker, that was a funny word. I said it over and over. “Cabrón, cabrón, cabrón.”
Whorehouse Rat continued, “We will tie you up now, because we cannot trust you while the drugs are still working in your blood. Okay?”
“Wait!” I said, remembering the man in gray slacks. Someone stuck a gag in my mouth and tied my hands behind my back. Because my ankle was broken, I couldn’t get up. My muscles strained at the cords, but it was no use, and I watched the man in gray slacks and laughed.
The man who’d tied my hands whispered, “You’ll be fine. I’ll take good care of you.” He stood behind me, so I couldn’t see his face, but he tapped my arm with the barrel of a fifty-caliber Rivas bush rifle to show me he was armed.
Out in the corridor, the gringo yelled over a loudspeaker, “Angelo Osic, come out with your hands on your head.”
Of course, I was tied up and couldn’t come out. This seemed like a very poignant observation, and I would have notified the man who held the loudspeaker about my predicament, but I couldn’t because I was gagged. I just laughed at the irony of my situation.
Everyone in the room waited anxiously for something to happen, but no one broke through the door. Some people began to stretch, and one young man yawned as if bored. Some others saw him, and they began yawning too, as if to see who could feign the most boredom. Finally, in an effort to lure the security team into the ambush, a woman with a plasma rifle yelled, “Help! Help! He’s got a gun. He says he’ll kill us all!”
Several people in the room snickered. And I agreed that her ploy was among the funniest things I’d ever heard. I began crying and laughing and became afraid I would choke to death on my gag because I couldn’t breathe and laugh at the same time.
One young man from the yawning team smiled and shot a flechette into the ceiling. “Get back in line, you,” he yelled, and several men screamed as if in terror or pain while one of the youths made animal noises like pigs and monkeys. Little pieces of plastic fell from the ceiling as if it were wounded. This caused terrible spasms of laughter in me, and I began choking; every time I caught my breath a little I would laugh again. Some men looked at me and pointed and chuckled, and they were still trying to stifle their laughter when the station’s security guards ran into the room to rescue the “hostages.”
There were six security guards wearing pretty space-blue armor and carrying stunners, and they didn’t have a chance.
When the first man came through the door, Perfecto slugged him in the chest so hard that the guard’s armor split, sending shards of enamel to skitter across the floor. The sound of Perfecto’s fist crashing into the armor startled me, and I realized it wasn’t funny. The second man in line shot Perfecto with a stunner, and Perfecto went down, but four mercenaries immediately jumped the guard. He was huge, and he slugged two of them and sent them flying, and one of them hit the wall and vanished, and I screamed as I realized it was a hallucination even though it looked so real.
The boys from the yawning team showed terror on their faces. Every time the big guard hit someone, two more people jumped him. A young man popped the snaps on the guard’s helmet and pulled it off, so the chimeras could slug the man in the face. Someone slammed the door behind the security guards, blocking their escape. There were two armored mercenaries to every guard, and the mercenaries just held the guards and beat the hell out of them, stripped off their armor, dragged them to a wall, and stuffed them under the chairs, where they moaned, naked.
There were several moments of silence, and the mercenaries used the lull to get six more men in armor. The man with the gray slacks had moved closer. He was inching toward me. I began laughing again, but this time out of nervousness, and my arms seemed to strain of their own volition at the cords that held me. Perfecto clawed the air as he struggled to regain consciousness, and someone pulled him away from the door. A chimera went and stood in front of the door and stared as if he were trying to see through it. His ears swung out from the side and pricked up, like the ears of a dog. This frightened me because I had never seen such a thing and I thought it was a hallucination, but as I watched, his ears remained rigid and I knew it was real.
“Someone’s coming!” the chimera said, smiling. “I hear a remote! Or maybe a robot!”
The guitarist with the rocket launcher ran up to the door, and everyone held their breath. The man with the gray slacks was moving closer to me, was only an arms’ length away, and I saw that he held a knife in his palm. I tried to nudge my guard to get his attention, and I was not aware of any sound, but suddenly all the chimeras in the room yelled “Now!” as the man with the rockets kicked open the door and fired.
An armored remote the size of a small tank hunched behind the door. One missile hit the power plant to the remote’s chemical lasers. A tongue of fire lashed into our room and I felt I knew what it would be like to stare down the throat of a dragon. People screamed. The concussion peeled back the metal walls of the customs office, denting it out of shape, and flung me against the wall. The man with the missile launcher flew through the air and hit the wall above me, then slid down on top of me. Shrapnel and pieces of remote shot into the walls, and dark smoke billowed from the remote’s metal innards. A distant fire alarm shrilled. Tons of debris drifted down from a hole that opened in the ceiling.
One man staggered across the room, holding his eyes, choking in the smoke. Another woman writhed on the floor and screamed, a piece of metal the size of a crowbar lodged in her arm. Others were bleeding from various wounds. Blood had splattered my shirt, and I thought I’d taken a hit. I tried to scream, and looked around for help, and saw the man in gray slacks lying crumpled beside me. A pipe as thick as my arm was lodged in his hip, and a large piece of metal had caved-in the right side of his face. The blood was from him. His hands still twitched. And I realized I still didn’t know who his accomplice was.
Through the smoke I could see that a crowd of station workers had gathered a hundred meters down the corridor to watch the fight. The concussion had thrown them to the floor. Some of them lay screaming. Blood was smeared on the corridor walls.
All the mercenaries who wore armor untangled themselves from the floor and began cheering as they charged down the corridor and shot into the ceiling. They ran to the fallen and wounded station technicians and began rounding up hostages. I looked at the others in the room: Three armorless mercenaries were wounded but conscious, including the man with the silver face; two others were dead. Perfecto had been sheltered from the blast, and he sat against the dented wall, rubbing his head. Several naked guards had shrapnel wounds; two guards were dead.
Perfecto looked around the room for a moment, then said, “I need a drink,” and picked his way among the bodies and wreckage and headed down the corridor.
My head ached and my mind felt numb. But I noticed something strange: As the mercenaries moved among their hostages, they moved with vigor. They seemed a great contrast to the haggard men I’d seen earlier. Their steps seemed almost choreographed, a dance of joy.
Within a few minutes Perfecto returned with a keg of Aguila beer. He sat beside me, gave me a drink, and talked. I was too stunned to answer his questions, so he carried on a rambling monologue, telling me how it was obvious I was a man with great luck. “Just look at all the friends you’ve found in your hour of need! Think of all the good things we’ll be able to loot from the station. Is there anything you want? Drugs? Liquor? Anything at all?”
Soon others began filing in with food and rum. They sprayed bandages on the wounded and filled their bellies with food. A couple mercenaries forced rum down the throats of captured guards, and several mercenaries gathered around the big guard who’d caused so much trouble. They praised him for his strength and courage and told him he should leave the punks in the security team and come fight on Baker, and when he was drunk enough he agreed it was a good idea. Everyone sang and ate and drank, and I became very tired and all my muscles ached and my head ached, so I stretched my muscles until they relaxed. The singing and the wails of people and sirens and the sputtering of small fires became a distant rushing in my ears that lulled me to sleep.
***