On My Way to Paradise (19 page)

"I know what you mean," I said. "When I was in the
army, I lost my eyes in an accident and paid the surgeon a little
extra to replace them with prosthetics. When I first got them, the
infrared was set too high, and the amount of light I received
baffled me. People glowed so much that their features became
indistinct, and it was hard to distinguish one person from another.
At first, everyone appeared to be beings of light—glowing creatures
with flames licking their skin. I’d heard that some people claim to
see auras—the human spirit shining through the flesh. And in my
youthful naiveté I pretended I was seeing something similar—a
physical manifestation that verified a spiritual hypothesis.

"For months this changed the way I thought about
people, the way I looked at them. I saw them all as potential
angels and Gods, and treated them with respect and trust. But then
several people took advantage of my trust and I realized I was only
fooling myself. So I went back to the surgeon who sold me the eyes
and had them recalibrated so I could once again look at people as
they really are and only see a little bit of infrared."

"Hmm. You should have kept the infrared calibrated
high," Abriara said. "You should have given it time. People’s
bodies heat unevenly, but each person has a characteristic pattern
to his heating, and each person has a characteristic body shape.
You can learn to tell them apart quickly." She pondered for a
moment. "Also, you still have a problem. You still basically trust
people and treat them with too much respect. One can hear it in the
tone of your voice when you speak. You need to learn to hold people
in contempt until they prove themselves, understand? I think if you
look at people objectively, you will discover that most of them are
no better than walking dung heaps. Certainly the people in Chile
were walking dung heaps. Maybe even I ..." Her voice faded into
silence; she turned away.

Her dark view of humanity saddened me. She could only
hold such a view if she had met many bad people in her life. I
wanted to say something to comfort her, to make up for all her bad
experiences, but no words seemed adequate. Yet I had also known
many good men. I thought about it much, and decided I would try to
change her mind.

Abriara’s bunk was below mine. I climbed into my
bunk, lay down, and studied the biographical files I’d got from the
medical computer. Of the 19 people on file, 16 were assigned living
quarters in module A with Garzón, whereas Mavro, Perfecto, and I
were assigned to module C. Which meant my would-be assassin was
stuck on the other side of the airlock.

But I had to wonder how secure a barrier the airlock
would prove against a determined man. I’d seen handles for opening
it, but didn’t know how it might be secured. No guard had been
stationed outside the lock. What if the airlock wasn’t secure? What
if people had only been told not to open it? Nothing would prevent
the assassin from coming through.

Also, I thought, nothing would keep you from
searching the ship to find Tamara.

I made a note to check the airlock to see if it would
open, then thumbed through the biographies: 16 people—13 men and
three women. One man was the big anglo security guard we’d taken
prisoner on ship: Lee Owen, a one-time mercenary from Quebec who’d
made it to captain fighting for India in the Chinese
Plankton-harvest War. If he fought the Chinese, he was definitely
not the kind of man who’d be a Nicita Idealist Socialist. I
temporarily discounted two women and three more men, since they
were all chimeras. Which left ten suspects.

Arish, Jafari, and the man in the gray slacks had
apparently been Moslems; and though the Moslem nations control the
Alliance, the Alliance has representatives from other nations.
Still, I believed Jafari was representing a faction within the
Alliance—perhaps an Islamic faction.

I considered it safe to bet that future attackers
would be Moslem. I searched each file, looking for anyone with
connections to the Middle East. Yet the files were almost standard:
Peasant refugees from Chile, Ecuador, Colombia; three brothers
who’d raised sheep in Peru—even a cyborg plumber from Argentina
who’d fought through half a dozen wars.

Their names were common: Perez, Reinoso, Pena, and
Tomagua. I’d met thousands of men like them in Panamá. The
biographies appeared useless. When I studied the files of these men
and women and tried to calculate who would try to kill me and who I
would have to kill, it seemed a trite and boring game.

The files were disheartening. I thought of the
airlock. I imagined the it would be open: I’d pass through and find
Tamara on module A, resting peacefully in a convalescence tube.

She would smile when she saw me, her dark eyes
flashing with laughter and her mouth curving into a easy smile the
way it had when Flaco told one of his silly jokes.

I’d reasoned that Tamara must be recovering well,
since Garzón would have no reason to protect me if she’d lost her
value, but emotionally I was unsatisfied. I wanted to see her, to
know her condition for myself: If she was recovering, I wanted to
see her smile; if she was dying, I wanted to watch her body grow
cold.

I got up and headed for the door.

Abriara asked, "Where are you going?"

"Just down the hall."

"I don’t want you to travel alone."

I held up my hands so my kimono sleeves dropped,
exposing my knives. "I’m not alone."

"Do you know how to use them?"

"A little."

"Be back in fifteen minutes. I’ll teach you a few
things."

I nodded, and went out into the hall. It was empty. I
walked down to the ladder, then looked up and inspected the
airlock. The neutral-gray door was two meters in diameter, and an
indentation in the ceiling showed that it would slide to one side
to open. The three handles spaced equidistantly around the airlock
each had a black plastic grip, but other than the handles and grips
there was no exterior equipment—no pressure gauges or warning
lights to show if the airlock was pressurized. Which hinted that
the door wasn’t meant to be manually controlled. The AI who was
piloting the ship controlled the airlock. But that didn’t mean I
couldn’t bypass the system.

I climbed to the top of the ladder and grabbed a
handle grip. It twisted slightly in my hand, but I could not push,
pull, or move it in any direction.

After I spent twenty seconds of useless tugging, a
voice from the microspeaker built into one end of the handle said,
"For your own safety, access between modules will not be granted
during flight except in case of depressurization or life-support
system failure. Thank you."

I continued tugging at each handle, and every twenty
seconds got the same message, which meant that the computer was
giving me a message based upon a simple decision-tree logic. The
computer reasoned: If someone tries to open the airlock, tell him
it won’t open. This was a bad sign; if the AI had assigned this
contingency a simple decision-tree logic, it meant he wouldn’t even
go to an amorphous logic program so that he could speak to me as
one sentient to another. He wasn’t even willing to discuss opening
the airlock with me.

I gave up trying to force the door. However, I
thought there might be a mechanism for opening the doors hidden
beneath the plastic handles on the grips, so I pulled out a knife
and cut through the plastic. But only the smooth gray metal of the
handle showed underneath. I pried off the microspeaker from one
handle; a tiny stream of light from a fiber-optics tube shined
out—there was no complex gadgetry hidden in the handle.

The only way to open the airlock would be to pry it
open, blow a hole in it, or perhaps drill through. None of them
seemed like viable options for either me or an Alliance
assassin.

I stood and stared at the ceiling till Perfecto came
up the ladder, then we went back to the room. Perfecto had a small
bottle of blue body paint, and he was very excited.

When we got to the room, he said, "Hola, Abriara,
look what I found!"

"Where did you get that?" she asked.

"From Cephas Silva!" Perfecto said. He opened the
bottle and immediately got to his knees and began painting
perfectly straight lines on the floor. His lines formed little
squares in front of each bed, and he marked these according to the
bed owner’s name. Then he painted a corridor down the middle of the
room, leading to the bathroom. This he marked "Common Area." He
carefully stayed within the common area as he painted. I thought
his actions to be very strange. I kept expecting him to tell me
what had happened with Sakura—but finally I realized he wasn’t
going to say.

"So did you reason with Sakura?" I asked.

"Ah, yes," Perfecto said.

"And?"

"And I convinced him to shut his mouth. It was a very
easy matter: I told him that if people found out that he’d been
beaten by a woman, everyone would laugh at him. He got upset and
ran away. We had many Japanese military advisors back in Chile, and
I found that even more than Mavro, they worry about machismo.
Sakura won’t make trouble."

That night, we met Mavro and Zavala in the gym, which
sprawled over the whole sixth floor of the module. Mavro acted as
if he were embarrassed to be seen with us. He held his chin up so
the light would catch the gleam of his tattooed tears, and he
stared off in any direction but towards the group, so that he
appeared to be standing close to us rather than standing with
us.

A track around the gym’s perimeter sported obstacle
courses, while the center of the gym held various hydraulic presses
with enough benches and tables that a 150 people could easily
weight lift at one time. The gym was crowded, and though the rest
of the ship smelled fresh and new, the gym already stank of sweat.
Nearly everyone in the gym was male; only one in ten were
females.

Abriara led us through rigorous exercises, and this
drew stares, since it was obvious we were commanded by a woman.
When it came time to run the track, everyone raced ahead of me
through the difficult obstacle courses. Though the bone glue had
set in my leg, my ankle quickly ballooned. I hobbled along through
the easiest obstacle course.

One course was made especially for chimeras and
required the runner to swing himself over a five-meter wall, then
run over a roof with slippery surface. Perfecto ran this course
with several chimeras, and it soon developed into a race. Mavro
didn’t want to be outdone, so he tried to run the course, but was
unable to scale the wall, and this made people laugh.

After an hour of exercises and jogging we began
lifting weights. These were not real weights, only a spring-loaded
machine that gave the desired resistance.

It soon became obvious men were joking about us.
Whenever someone laughed, Mavro would bristle and look to see what
they laughed about while the rest of us pretended we heard
nothing.

Twice I looked up and saw men laugh who weren’t
looking in our direction, but once a group of men laughed, and one
of them, a small chimera with long dark braids and pale skin,
wearing the silver and red of a sergeant, opened his kimono toward
Abriara and pulled down his underwear to expose his penis.

I looked at the eyes of my compadres: Perfecto,
Abriara and Zavala all lifted weights with their eyes closed. Only
Mavro had seen what the chimera was doing.

Mavro got mad. He sat on a bench doing sitting
presses, slowly pushing the bars over his head time and again as
his eyes glassed and he glared at everyone in the room. He pumped
up his arms. I waited for someone to make a joke we could hear, to
see what Mavro would do.

Perfecto, doing bench presses on a nearby machine,
lifted enormous amounts of weight that made even him strain. Mavro
finally leaned over to Perfecto and pointed to the small chimera
who had exposed himself.

"Perfecto," Mavro said. "See that punk over there?
The sergeant with hair like that of a woman? Tell me what he is
saying."

Sweat glistened over the entire length of Perfecto’s
body. He continued pumping weights and glanced over at the man.
"You don’t want to know what he is saying," Perfecto said.

Mavro made a low growling sound, stared straight
ahead, continued to pump weights. He tried to ignore the little
chimera. The chimera laughed loudly, then spoke in a low voice that
reached us only as a babble. Mavro demanded, "Tell me what he is
saying. It is a point of honor."

Perfecto turned his head, and his ears pricked up
just like a dog’s, nudging the thick hair of his sideburns forward.
I looked over to Abriara, doing leg presses, and though her hair
was long, I could see her ears had pricked forward too.

Perfecto listened carefully to the men across the
room. I could almost read the man’s lips as Perfecto reported the
conversation. "The little chimera, Lucío is his name, he says he
bets fifty IMUs that Zavala’s got a penis made of chrome-plated
steel. He also thinks Zavala, with his mechanical dildo, will be
Abriara’s favorite in bed."

A big dark man replied to the long-haired chimera.
Perfecto reported, "His friend says, ‘It is better than having a
penis for a brain, like you.’"

The little chimera laughed. "‘Or a penis as thin as a
noodle, like the little general there,’" he nodded his chin toward
Mavro. Several surrounding weightlifters laughed.

Perfecto finished the last line and looked at Mavro
inquisitively. Mavro’s expression remained stiff, impassive. He
didn’t react. Certainly Abriara and Zavala had heard Perfecto’s
report of the conversation, but they said nothing.

We kept lifting weights. We didn’t speak much, and I
listened to others, trying to eavesdrop on conversations across the
room as Perfecto had. But I could only hear those nearby and was
glad to hear everyone complain that they’d been beaten in the
simulators as badly as we had. One turret gunner had been thrown
off balance during a battle and had shot his own driver in the
back, and everyone enjoyed making jokes at his expense. Soon the
mood lightened.