Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (12 page)

Tuamotu had two seasons, wet and dry. The wet was beginning, and the weeds outside the Mountain Gate grew a lusty thirty centimeters a day. So a week later, another party set out to cut them—ten cons to do the work, with Sneak and Stink to supervise. The guards stood in the shade at the edge of the jungle, watching them labor in the sun, and the lasers on the watchtowers turned back and forth, guided by biosensors, like spectators at a very slow tennis match. Andy went rhythmically about his task, mesmerized by the heat, the roar of the little engines, the steamy odor of fresh-cut greenstuff. He felt like a Whirling Dervish at his dance, for once totally mindless and at one with the universe.

Then during lunch break the intense yellow sunlight abruptly faded. Gomez stopped shoveling kidney beans into his mouth, nudged him, and nodded to the west, where a Himalayan sky—mountainous purple clouds, peaks of shining white—had silently taken form. A cool damp gust whipped by, driving a locust swarm of cuttings before it. Andy shivered, met Gomez's gaze, and shivered again for a different reason. He knew that they were about to run, lasers or no lasers, drone or no drone, and all he could think of was the old New England motto
Live Free or Die.

Sneak shouted, "Okay, scum, fall in!" and just then the squall arrived. First came a barrage of fat droplets, and then a gray wall of rain bellying out like the spinnaker of a racing yacht off Nantucket, only thousands of meters high. In an instant, guards and cons alike turned from men to shadow-puppets. The world darkened, the noise of the storm rose to a drumroll, and when a violet-white flash of lightning split the sky, distracting the lasers, Gomez clamped a big hard hand on Andy's upper arm and yanked him headlong into the jungle.

After three steps, Tuamotu Penal Colony and everyone in it ceased to exist. The tangle blinded them, vines clutched at their legs, branches lashed them as they ran, and orchid-wrapped boles rushed at them like tacklers on a gridiron. They were both gasping for air when Gomez called a halt in a clearing, and they slumped side by side on a log cushioned with red fungi and emerald moss.

Here the rain beat down with buckshot force. A siren wailed distantly, and Andy blinked at the rags of gray sky beyond the threshing leaves, awaiting the drone, the missile, and death. Gomez had picked up a papaya downed by the storm and begun to eat, when something like a silvery fish flashed overhead. An eternal moment passed and the missile exploded in the distance with the deep, expansive note of a bass drum.

It missed us,
thought Andy, and turned with a smile of incredulous joy. Gomez handed him a chunk of the sweet mealy fruit, spat out a barrage of round black seeds, gave a gap-toothed grin, patted him on the back, and finally told him the whole secret.

"Dat guy you shot at, Sol? He don't want you dead. Dis escape, it's wired, it's fixed. Stink set it up. All we hadda do was make it look good. Now dey gonna say da drone got us, and we gonna go in da records as dead. So how it feels, hah? What's it like to be alive and dead at the same time?"

He threw back his head and laughed, gulped a mouthful of cold rain and let it wash the pulp from the gaps between his teeth and go sluicing down his throat.

Here in the Pentagon corridor, recalling that sweetest of moments, Gomez smiled wolfishly. He'd never forget Andy's expression, as his lower jaw fell halfway to his chest.
Muy dulce,
Gomez thought,
muy dulce.
After all, Li'l Brudda wasn't the only one who was full of surprises.

Andy couldn't imagine what in
hell
he had to grin about. Personally, he felt merely ridiculous, an assassin without a weapon and nobody to shoot if he had one. When white-jacketed stewards set up a coffee machine, he nodded at Gomez and they joined the line for simple lack of anything better to do. They filled Styrofoam cups and strolled down the corridor, sipping and looking for anything that might give a hint of how to proceed. Pentagon décor didn't help—blank walls, a metal trapdoor covering a trash chute,
To Serve All Humanity
here and there and everywhere. Gomez opened the trapdoor, listened for a moment to the distant roar of an incinerator, and shrugged.

They moved on, turned an obtuse angle, and halted. The connecting corridor was blocked by the usual bank of sensors and lasers, but—two heartbeats suddenly quickened—
this
barrier bore a sign saying X.

Behind the gadgetry stood a massive, red-bereted guy with a concrete jaw and either a head too small for his neck, or a neck too wide for his head. His badge also said X, and an impact pistol filled his holster. Beyond the
Spetsnaz
the corridor stretched away between blank mahogany-paneled walls, like a study in perspective. Andy was eyeing the scene, while trying not to eye it too obviously, when a general officer brushed past him. Ignoring the enlisted men as if they were furniture, he passed between the lasers, stepped to a paneled wall, and pressed his palm against a sensor pad set in a recess. A concealed door opened, he walked through like an actor going backstage, and the door closed and vanished into the woodwork.

Huh,
thought Andy. He suddenly realized the importance of where they were—A Ring, where the brass worked—and the significance of the paneling. To rate mahogany in the Pentagon, you had to, well,
rate
. There were more invisible doors here, and behind one of them worked somebody important.

A glance passed between him and Gomez. This was something they needed to check out. Andy was wondering exactly how to manage it, when he became aware that Gomez had left him, returned to the coffeemaker, and was filling the biggest available cup, a half-liter monster. He returned holding it with both hands, raised it to the
Spetsnaz
, and said, "Figgered you might need it, Brudda."

The guard managed a smile, or at any rate a slight elongation of the lips, reached past the lasers, and took the cup. "Effin A," he said, adding with an effort, "Thanks."

Contact established, Gomez asked, "Where dey keep da shithouse at, round here? I gotta go."

"Thataway," said the guard, pointing, and returned to his post, noisily gulping coffee.

Inside the enlisted men's head, Gomez first took a wad of toilet paper, wet it in a basin, and glued it over the lens of a security camera on the wall. "Prob'ly," he muttered, "all dis brass aroun', nobody be watchin' da peons piss. But who knows?"

He took Andy into a stall, flushed the john repeatedly, and under cover of the little Niagara explained his plan. In any security system, said Gomez, the weak point was the human. In his days as a burglar, he'd seen big shots pile a fortune in gadgets onto a warehouse, then hire a minimum-wage
cretino
to watch the monitors. Maybe the plan he'd formed wouldn't work, but at least it was simple and wouldn't hurt anything if it failed. "We can't get da bugga dis time, we get im da next," he promised, and sent Andy out of the stall while he lingered inside.

During the next forty minutes, Andy bellied up to a urinal at least six times when other enlisted men—always the wrong ones—visited the head. Fortunately, the Chief of Security must have been verbose, for at last the guy with the red beret ran in, gasping, "Gimme room, I'm about to bust."

He'd hardly opened his fly when Gomez stepped out of the stall and rabbit-punched him with a sound like a football being kicked. The guard's forehead whacked the wall and he rebounded, fell on his back, and lay there imitating a whale.

His beret had fallen off, so Andy scooped it up before helping Gomez drag him into a stall. They propped him on the commode and Gomez pulled his pants down, while Andy took his pistol and ID, both of which he donned along with the beret. He noticed that their victim was wearing an earbud, so he took that too. Finally, he pressed a thumb against the guard's columnar neck and felt the carotid artery throbbing deep inside.
Probably a concussion
, he thought. But the guy had a hard, thick skull—he'd live.

They left the stall, closing the door behind them. From the outside, two large feet in combat boots were visible, trousers bunched around the ankles—not likely anyone would barge in
there.

"Good luck, L'il Brudda," said Gomez when they were back at the barrier. "You find 'im, give 'im one for me."

"I will," said Andy.

He took a deep breath, put up one hand as if to adjust the beret, and with face momentarily obscured, silently said good-bye to Esperanza, to Gomez, to everybody he knew and loved. Like a suicide stepping from a high ledge into midair with no hope of ever going back, he walked between the lasers.

 
GOMEZ, TOO, FELT a painful tug at his heart,
atormentado por la pena,
as he watched Andy press his hand to the sensor pad in the paneled wall and pass through the hidden door.

Gomez's home was gone, the first real one he'd ever had. His woman was gone. And now Li'l Brudda was gone, too, and might not come back. Life was hard, Gomez had always known that, and the demands of honor and vengeance were harder, yet had to be obeyed, for without honor a man was nothing. How many had he killed because of some insult to his honor? And now he could only wait helplessly and curse the cold witch Destiny for granting him happiness, then snatching it away again.

The good part of both their lives had begun on the slopes of Mount Tuamotu, at the moment when the missile detonated. For days afterward they trekked through the jungle. They climbed into open woods swept by chilly breezes off the snowcap, then descended into the familiar green tangle on the other side. Fallen fruit sustained them, flights of noisy green parakeets kept them company, birdlets peeped from the leaves and spoke to them in tiny voices. Wild pigs were enjoying the feast the storm had brought down, and boars with orange tusks and sows with broods of piglets gave them warning glances from small red eyes, but kept on eating.

On the third morning, Gomez stopped and sniffed the air, smelling woodsmoke. Half a kilometer farther, and they emerged into a clearing with a village where dark-skinned people turned to stare at them. He and Andy did not yet know that the place was called Hilo, or that two of the women in the little crowd that soon gathered to view the newcomers were Esperanza Aqui�o and her confidante and adopted aunt, one-eyed Susan Kapingamarangi.

Susan was the most accomplished gossip in the village, and later, when Gomez settled down with her, she told him everything about everybody, whether he wanted to know it or not. So he learned that a shark had killed Esperanza's husband, and that she had lived the last year with only her infant daughter Corazon for company. She'd spent a lot of time saying No to bachelors who were trying to nudge her into choosing a new mate and starting her life over. But she wanted something new, something—well, she didn't know exactly what. Maybe a man who wasn't totally
Hilo.

She told Susan that she felt like a spider on a twig, letting threads of gossamer drift out and hoping one would catch. But everything was at the mercy of the wind, or chance, or
Destino
, and a year passed while whoever she was waiting for failed to appear. Then one day when she and Susan were tending the baby and exchanging gossip, people came running past her little house. Susan needed only a minute to learn that two guys had escaped from the prison and that George Satawan, the town's Big Man, was deciding whether to let them stay or drive them back into the jungle. So Esperanza hefted Corazon onto one hip and they hurried to join the gathering crowd, because when would anything this exciting happen again in dull little Hilo?

When they arrived, George—a Samoan, a short, weighty man wearing a scarlet lava-lava—had already made the decision to let the newcomers stay. Without asking her permission, he pointed at Susan and said, "You will take this one," meaning Gomez, then at Esperanza and said, "You will take the other."

Susan had learned long ago not to quarrel with Destiny, and merely looked at Gomez with interest, while he looked at her and wondered what it would be like to wake up next to a one-eyed woman. Esperanza was young enough to resent being ordered around, yet didn't protest because—well, because, speaking of eyes, Andy's were gray, something unknown in dark-eyed Hilo. The eyes proclaimed him an outsider, maybe the one she'd been waiting for.

"You will work for these ladies," said George Satawan to Andy and Gomez. "They need a man around. They will cook for you. What will happen between you, only God knows, but if you use force on them, I will kill you. Welcome to our town."

That night Gomez and Susan made love, for they knew by long experience that time is the only kind of wealth which, if you fail to spend it, spends itself. In the next house but one, Andy didn't try anything, and Esperanza—as she told Susan next day—wasn't sure whether she liked that or not. Yet it was nice to have a man snoring under her roof again. He slept in an old hammock, while she slept with Corazon on her marriage bed of wide boards. Heavy rain fell in the darkness, veritably the sound of silence, and all three rested well.

Next morning, George put Gomez and Andy to work in the town's communal garden. Except for the absence of guards, they might have been back in jail, hoeing weeds among a mixed botany of string beans, muskmelons, casabas, pineapples, and growths resembling alien beings that turned out to be adolescent artichokes. That afternoon, Esperanza visited the garden to gather a few things for dinner, and Andy walked her home. Once again nothing happened, and yet everything happened, too, for while waiting for his dinner, he took the baby on his lap and let her wrestle his fingers with her tiny hands. That was when Esperanza decided to keep him.

Susan repeated this story to everyone in town, leaving only Andy in the dark about his future. On Sunday she joined him and Esperanza in church, a large thatched house with pews of split coconut logs. Gomez stayed home, but heard what happened from his usual source. The Kahuna was a Fijian, an ebony statue except for a mane of coarse white hair, and Andy understood not a single word of his sermon except Jesus, amen, and "numba five," which turned out to be a hymn. There were no hymn books (Esperanza explained that they'd been eaten by ants) but everybody knew the words by heart and sang very loud, accompanied by gourd drums and a four-string ukulele strummed by a young woman in a gaudy skirt and much-mended bustier.