On My Way to Paradise (35 page)

Mavro said, "I get the next one, no?" glancing around
to see if anyone objected to him claiming the next kill. No one
did.
"Ai, ya, yi,"
he said nervously, "I hope someone here
does silver-blue tattoos." He was already thinking of adding a
third tear to his cheek.

Perfecto snapped his head back for the seventh
time.

He gave us an "I knew it" look and began counting,
giving them time to get high on the ladder. Someone opened a door
in the corridor between us, and some men laughed. Perfecto stopped
counting. Lucío’s men would be on the ladders watching the open
door. They’d slow in their progress.

Perfecto began counting again, nodding his head
silently, and suddenly pushed off against the wall, making a
whuff
as he exhaled. Mavro jumped out to follow, with me
behind. Perfecto was already halfway down the hall, running
silently on bare feet.

Three men in white kimonos had stepped from their
dormitory room. They were still laughing as Perfecto rushed past
them. One said,
"Huy!"
and lurched back in time for me to
glimpse the ladder.

One man perched on the ladder—a chimera nicknamed
Bruto. He held an aluminum pipe in his left hand. Six corridors
radiated away from the ladder, and he was trying to peer down them
all at once. His head was twisted around at an unnatural angle so
that he could see over his back. Bruto spotted Perfecto and jumped
off the ladder, spinning to face the attack.

Lucío was ascending the ladder just behind Bruto. He
couldn’t climb up in time to join the melee. He saw this and slid
back down the ladder.

Perfecto met Bruto and both stopped just out of arm’s
reach of one another. Bruto’s stance wasn’t good. He held his club
up threateningly and had his right arm cocked to swing. This put
him off balance. Perfecto danced forward in a feint, trying to draw
Bruto out, get him to swing, then stepped back. Bruto jerked his
club hand, saw the feint, then thought better of swinging. In that
moment when Bruto was undecided, Perfecto lurched in and his knife
blurred.

It appeared Perfecto had missed Bruto completely, for
Bruto just stood there. But then Bruto stopped and stared straight
ahead and a little up toward the lights. He appeared confused,
surprised, then a little blood spurted from his carotid artery. It
was like water gushing from a hose that has air in it. The blood
pumped up and out of the artery and spattered the wall, and Bruto
turned his neck to the right and gazed at it in wonderment.

A second gout of blood spurted farther to the right,
for Bruto had twisted his head in that direction. Bruto leaned his
head back and tried to step forward, as if to catch the drops of
blood on his tongue as they fell. But when he raised his leg he
lifted it very high in an incredibly graceful gesture, as if
performing ballet while climbing a great stair. His eyes already
had the glassy look an animal gets when it dies. No blood was
reaching the brain, and it distorted his perceptions.

A few drops spattered my face and I stopped cold. I
didn’t realize it, but I’d been running to the scene. Bruto began a
strange and graceful dance, moving as if in slow motion. The blood
would spurt from his neck and he’d step forward half a step and
turn in the air in a pirouette. Then his blood would rain in bright
red droplets.

The infirmary was just down corridor six, not forty
paces from him, and I thought,
If we get him to the infirmary
quickly, we can fix that artery.

But I didn’t move. It was a thought I had, not a
thought I’d act upon. Perfecto stepped in and slashed with his
knife, dealing a blow that gutted Bruto. Before the body could fall
he pierced Bruto’s brain with his metal stake, leaving him more
than dead, fulfilling the code of the Quest.

I felt strange—like an observer, totally
dispassionate.

Two weeks earlier this scene would have revolted me.
I felt nothing.

"Did you see the look on his face when Perfecto
stabbed him?" Mavro said, too loud. "It was cartoon shock-the face
of a caricature when it runs over the cliff and stands in midair
before it realizes it will fall." He laughed heartily, and I found
myself giggling as if it were a very funny joke.

"The rest of them are on level four," Perfecto said,
pointing down the ladder. He was panting, and steaming hot blood
was spattered on his face. When blood is that hot, my eyes see it
as if it were molten ore the color of cinnabar. The room suddenly
seemed chilly. "I’d hoped two of them would step off the ladder. It
would have been a better fight."

I chuckled nervously and looked down the ladder.

"We got one of their best fighters already!" I said.
"I’m glad." We were down one man, they were down one. The battle
was even.

Perfecto stuck his bloody weapon in his belt.

Abriara gazed longingly down the ladder. "They’ll be
waiting to ambush us down there," she whispered. "We can’t go down.
They won’t dare come back up, at least for a couple of hours. Let’s
go get breakfast. We’ll fight better on full stomachs."

Perfecto left his bloody weapons in his belt, and we
drew stares at breakfast. Word spread quickly, and some of the men
shouted things like "Hola, muchachos! How goes the Quest?"

Mavro waved and grinned. "Perfecto here stepped on
that monkey Bruto. You should have seen!"

We picked a table in the corner and ate breakfast
rolls—made from ground algae and baked with a thin syrup over the
top.

Mavro ate them with exclamations of "How delicious!
They taste even better than my fiancée’s famous liver loaf!"

My hands shook as I tried to eat. It felt strange.
Everyone knew that we had just committed a murder, and no one did
anything about it. There was no shouting, no recriminations, no
appeal for help to the police.

But then I realized that we were all murders at this
table. I’d killed Arish. Abriara admitted to killing three men in
Peru. Mavro’s tattoos proclaimed him a killer from Cartagena.
Perfecto had killed Bruto as easily as a man might step on a
cockroach. And these were only the people in my combat team.

If every combat team was made up of such people, then
eighty percent of us were cold-blooded killers.

I had thought when I signed up for my team that I
would be serving society—a few people united against the pains of
the world. But how does one serve a society of murderers?

When I was small, don Jose Mirada had told me that
one serves a society by serving the individuals within the society.
But how does one serve a society of murderers?

It soon became evident we were mistaken to sit in
public. Across the room Lucío’s friends were dining, and we weren’t
seated two minutes before one of them slinked off to inform Lucío
of our location. Kaigo had left it to us to punish Lucío and his
men, but the fact that he’d given his blessing didn’t mean we’d
necessarily be victorious.

Since it was breakfast time for a third of the ship,
the room soon filled up. Fernando Chin, the genocidal
xenobiologist, came and sat on the bench next to me. He said, "Hey,
do any of you know why communications have been cut between here
and module B? What’s going on over there? Is it true they got
bombed?"

"Jesus Christ," Mavro said. "What are you talking
about?"

Lucío and his three living teammates walked through
the door.

I watched them and thought, Bombs? This is too much
to handle! You could handle one situation at a time. But you’ll go
crazy if you try to do too much! Don’t think right now! Relax!

Lucío looked ghastly, with a tremendous scar down his
face where I’d cut him. The bandage sprayed over it was roughly
flesh-toned, but looked like glue, so he appeared to have some huge
deformity rather than just a cut. He and his men didn’t even glance
at our side of the room. They knew exactly where we were.

"I don’t know if they got bombed or not, but
communications are out," Chin said, "Try making a comlink with
someone on module B, and you’ll see what I mean."

Lucío and his men stepped into the chow line at the
far side of the room and filled their plates, then sat at a table
and began eating. I looked at Mavro. He was staring at them, his
lips curled in a gloating smile. He was waiting for one of them to
make eye contact so he could stare the man down.

Mavro shouted, "Hey, has anyone seen Bruto
lately?"

Lucío and his men did not respond to the taunt.

Abriara said, "We’d better get to battle practice.
It’s 10:25." I looked at her in surprise, thinking the Quest would
take precedence over such matters.

Abriara stared across the room and said to no one in
particular, "They’ll have to go to battle practice, too." Lucío’s
team worked in the same time slot as we did. They’d be busy for the
next two hours.

We got up, deposited our trays at the scullery line,
and carefully retreated out the door.

When we got to battle practice, Kaigo was sitting on
his dais, waiting. He watched us come in, but didn’t speak. I was
very self-conscious. Our white kimonos were spattered with Bruto’s
blood. It was obvious we’d been killing people. Kaigo didn’t ask us
about it. He seemed preoccupied. For once I wanted to jack into the
simulator. For once I saw the battle as a cleansing thing,
something that could serve as an escape. We suited up into our
battle armor, climbed aboard the model hovercraft, armed
ourselves, and jacked smoothly into the world of illusion.

We skimmed over a salt marsh on a thin layer of
water. Dark mangroves surrounded us, thrust their twisted roots
into the brackish pools. Insects played on the beer-colored water,
dancing among shafts of sunlight tainted the color of rose. Tiny
fish jumped at the insects and darted into the shadows under the
mangrove roots at our approach.

I was instantly wary. Something was different, but I
couldn’t put my finger on it. An intangible nag. I tried to watch
all directions at once. The warning siren screamed the approach of
the Yabajin. Instead of dueling with the samurai, Abriara chose to
veer right, shooting straight between the boles of two mangroves
and into the darker woods beyond. We barreled through the
underbrush, knocking aside thick green leaves, dodging trees. A
small anaconda dangling from a limb fell at my feet and I looked
down. We hit a rise and the hovercraft bounced in the air; at the
same moment I glanced up from the snake just in time for the thick
limb of a mangrove to swat my face.

I flipped over the back of the hovercraft and bounced
once. My helmet speakers buzzed, warning of the approach of the
Yabajin. I retrieved my laser and tried to clear my thoughts. My
helmet was cracked across my cheekbones in a line that followed the
contours of the air filters imbedded in the armor. I pulled at the
magnetic latch at the side of the helmet, and the whole helmet
split in two, fell to the ground. Fresh air filled my lungs.

Fresh air! Not air from the simulator, which always
smelled as if six dirty peasants had wedged themselves into your
suit with you. This air smelled of grass and sea and carried the
stifling scent of rotting fruit. And beneath it was an odor of
sugar and strange turpines, a sweet alien fragrance. I could see
full-spectrum, and Baker appeared far less drab than the simulator
had shown it to be: a patch of sky bore the same cinnamon-rose hue
as always, but clouds of yellow and green
oparu no tako
floating high up in the atmosphere were colored differently.
Wherever they flew, a platinum shimmer shone with them. Among the
mangroves of the salt marsh were native grasses of irregular shape,
like some type of seaweed-not the purple the simulator showed, but
an ultraviolet so dark my prosthetic eyes registered them as almost
black.

I left my helmet lying on the ground, the warning
buzzer screaming insistently, and walked down to the water’s edge,
into the open. A cool breeze whipped my face. Thousands of Baker’s
avians, thin waffles of plastic with small tails, hovered over the
marsh grass. Some danced before my face—insubstantial creatures the
size of tiny moths with taut wings fully extended.

Almost immediately a robin-sized avian feeding upon
the small moths shot into view and hovered before my face with its
tail pointed toward me. It hummed like a hummingbird. I’ve
described most of these creatures as being shaped like mantas or
skates, but this is only vaguely accurate. Its front half appeared
to be a triangular body, clear as glass, with two large rigid
wings held stiffly to the side, unmoving. Its tiny flat tail
floated out behind it, as if just resting on the wind, but as I
watched closely the rigid wings trembled ever so slightly, and the
tail bent to help the creature turn. As it hovered it slowly turned
to face me. It had two pale yellow eyes, a tiny mouth shaped like a
sparrow’s beak trailing a pair of tendrils at each side, and just
behind the eyes was an organ I can describe only as a forewing-a
thin transparent membrane that vibrated rapidly, blowing air over
the fixed wing. From this vibrating membrane came the humming
sound.

Birds on Earth use their muscular wings to club the
wind, to literally climb into the air on fingers of feather. The
same wing provides both the lift and the forward momentum. But with
Baker’s fragile-looking "bird" the thin forewing blew wind over the
fixed wing, allowing the creature to lift. I imagined that with a
strong wind the avian could relax the vibrating forewing and just
hover in the air, much as a seagull does.

I wanted to view the creature closely. Tiny lines
seemed to delineate segments to an exoskeleton, other lines
appeared to be translucent muscle, and blue and yellow threads
within the transparent body appeared to be veins and intestines,
but I could see none of these clearly. I quickly reached for the
creature, as if to catch a fly in my hand, but it dipped in its
flight and sped away over the marsh with a buzz.