On My Way to Paradise (5 page)

Any legitimate surgeon would have used antimosin C,
an inhibitor which only stops the production of the suppressor
cells that attack transplanted organs. But Tamara’s antibody levels
were down all across the spectrum—which meant she’d been given one
of the more common AB inhibitors. The antibody injection I had
given her earlier had thymosins in it, which stimulated the
production of all T cells, including suppressor cells. And if the
level of thymosins I’d given her were too high, they could override
the AB inhibitors. And if her brain wasn’t perfectly compatible
with its body, Tamara’s suppressor cells would treat her brain as
an infecting organism, destroying it cell by cell. These thoughts
made my stomach ache.

I went into the living room to check on Tamara. She
looked like a tiny rag of a person, thrown on the couch, and I
could see by the brilliance of the platinum glow of her body that
she had an elevated temperature. This is one of the first signs of
organ rejection; unfortunately, it is also a sign of an ordinary
infection. To add to my confusion, the hormones I’d given her sped
up her metabolism, which would cause a low-grade fever. She had
already complained of headaches, but until she complained of
cramps, numbness, or loss of senses, I couldn’t be sure she was in
danger. This was all compounded by the fact that under the right
conditions she could go comatose or die without warning. All the
if’s began swimming in my head. I got a cool rag and sponged her
face. She woke and looked at me, "Bolt the ... charge a gun," she
said. Then her eyes cleared. "Do you have the crystal?" she asked.
I pulled the crystal out of my pocket and showed it to her. She
reached up and stroked it, then smiled and slept.

I continued sponging her and held her hand through
the night. I felt an odd desire to kiss her. At first, I smiled at
the thought. But as the night drew on I massaged her scalp and
shoulders, and I was filled with a deep longing. I wanted to cradle
her in my arms. My desire became very powerful, until I wondered at
it, and I realized that lack of sleep was making me giddy. At dawn,
comlink tones sounded in my head. I tapped my comlink switch,
opening the channel, and an image flooded into my mind: A dark man
with long black hair and wide nostrils sat on a sofa. He wore the
dark blue of the Allied Marines.

"I’m Jafari," he said. "I understand you have
something that belongs to me." His voice had a disturbing atonal
quality, lacking inflection. The over-emphasis on depth in the
scene was typical of computer-generated images.

I reached in my pocket and fondled the crystal. "I
believe you’re mistaken," I answered.

"I want the woman back," he said. The statement
startled me, left me unbalanced. "Here is what I propose: It will
cost me two hundred thousand standards to send my men to take
her—and I could take her. But it will be easier for both of us if
you bring her to me yourself and accept the two hundred thousand in
token of my gratitude."

"What will you do with her?" I asked. Jafari stared
at me and offered no reply. I felt stupid for asking. "She is very
ill," I blurted. "She cannot be moved safely for several days."

"She has led me on a goose chase for months, but it
will stop here. You have until sunset to bring her to the airport
in Colón. Do you understand?"

"Yes, I understand."

He seemed to gaze at me for a moment, as if he could
see me. "You wouldn’t try anything irrational would you? You
wouldn’t try to escape?"

"No."

"You couldn’t if you tried, you know. Running is not
an option."

"I understand."

"Good," Jafari said. "I will be kind to her. It’s for
her good. I’m not inhuman."

"I won’t run," I said.

Jafari cut the transmission. I sat by the couch,
feeling as if I were in a box. I pondered every word he’d said,
sifting for meanings only the tone could have supplied. He had
threatened to send his men for me, and I wondered if these were the
same men who had pulled off Tamara’s hand. And I wondered what kind
of men could do such a thing. Jafari’s last words hinted at
emotion, or at least an apology for emotion. The AEM couldn’t
operate legally on Earth. But I knew that wouldn’t stop Jafari. As
commander of Cyborg Intelligence he would be hooked to the military
AI’s and have the resources of crystal brains that gathered
billions of times more information than a biological brain could
handle. I wouldn’t be able to access my bank accounts, make a call,
cross a border, and pass a police monitor. I sponged Tamara’s head
until exhaustion took me.

A couple hours after dawn, Flaco came out of the
bedroom. "Ah, Angelo," he said, "should the dark angel come to take
me, I’d embrace him with open arms. Often I’ve wished my
grandfather had invented a drink that allowed one to get drunk and
not have a hangover!"

"It is a small price to pay for so much happiness," I
quoted an old song. Flaco sat on the bed, and I probed Tamara’s
scalp around her hairline and the external sensory jack at the base
of her skull, searching for scar tissue—any exterior sign that
she’d had a brain transplant. There was none, but that didn’t mean
anything; a good plastique artist wouldn’t leave such a sign. I
said, "You must watch Tamara for me," then went to fix breakfast. I
fried some gallo pinto—a dish made with brown beans and rice—opened
some nice doughnuts, and mixed the coffee.

Soon, Flaco came into the kitchen. "She sleeps with
the angels," he said.

"Good." I offered him a plate. He loaded it up and
sat at the table. We ate in silence for a long time.

"I can read your mind," he said after a while. "I was
not so drunk that I don’t remember the call I got at the
restaurant. Perhaps we should move the girl to my house."

"No. If he can call you, he knows where you
live."

"Then we will move her somewhere else. We could hide
her in the bananeros, the banana plantations."

"The plantations would be good," I said. I ate a
while more in silence, unsure if I should tell Flaco about the call
from Jafari. Flaco was a good friend, and a good man, but he was a
thief at heart. Perhaps he was even capable of selling Tamara for
the reward.

"What’s bothering you?" Flaco asked. "Are you afraid
to hide her in the banana plantations?"

I ran my finger over the worn plastic of the table
top. Tamara got up and went to the bathroom. I heard the water go
on as she washed her face. "No. I gave her an antibody treatment
yesterday that could be dangerous. She could die from it."

"What’s the probability?"

"I don’t know. Not very high."

"Then I would only worry about it slightly, and not
look so glum. One would think by the look on your face that you
were a rooster and your owner was starving." I laughed a little.
"See, things are not so bad. Flaco will fix everything. Also, when
Tamara comes in, I’m going to test her to see if she is a
refugiada." He pulled his lower eyelid as a sign for me to not say
anything.

Tamara staggered into the kitchen, her head slumped.
"I’m leaving," she announced.

"We know," Flaco said. "I am coming with you. We’ll
hide in the banana plantations with the refugiados. No one will
find you."

"You don’t know who I’m running from. You don’t know
their resources."

"Their resources don’t matter!" Flaco said. "No one
monitors the plantations—the refugiados come and go too fast.
Hundreds of thousands of people live there, yet no one even asks
for ID."

Tamara said, "I’m not sure ..."

"Ah, but you would blend in perfectly with the
refugiados," Flaco said, "you have that starved look."

Tamara stared at him a moment, as if to read some
deeper meaning into the joke, then she smiled a labored smile and
said "Okay," and began eating.

"Speaking of refugiados, guess who I saw yesterday—"
Flaco said, "Professor Bernardo Mendez!" I had heard the name, but
couldn’t remember where. I looked at Tamara and we both shrugged.
"You know, Bernardo Mendez! The great social engineer who did so
much good work in Chile—the one who promised to use genetic
engineering to breed greed out of man within three generations! I
saw him on the street in the feria. He took his idea to Colombia
and the Colombians lobotomized him and shoved him over the border
as an example to the refugiados. They didn’t like his brand of
socialism, so they cut out much of his brain, and now he wanders
the streets with pee stains on his pants, stealing food."

Tamara stopped eating and turned pale. "Perhaps it
was capitalists," I said. "Perhaps they lobotomized him."

"Ah, no," Flaco said. "It was the Colombians. I have
a friend who has a friend who knows for sure."

Tamara said, "Nobody knows anything for sure."

Flaco smiled and winked at me. "Tsk, Tsk—so much
cynicism, and it’s only breakfast time! How cynical will she be by
noon? All the same, it is a shame to see a great man in such a
state: peeing his pants that way. Now he is no smarter than an
iguana or a duck."

Tamara said, "Let’s not talk about it," and finished
eating in silence.

We packed some food and clothes, and went to the
plantations, watching to make sure we weren’t followed. Among the
plantations we would travel for a long time without seeing a tent,
and then suddenly we would find a cluster of them like a small
village. None of the tents belonged to the guerrillas; they were
still far to the east. Flaco chose a camp with only four tents next
to each other. The tents were dirty and molded, and two had white
crap on their tops where chickens roosted at night. Outside one
tent a naked baby boy sat in an aluminum washtub with only a small
amount of water. He didn’t have any teeth, and he had a rag in his
mouth, chewing it. Flies crawled all over him and the rag.

Flaco called at the tent door, and a young Chilean
woman came out. She opened her blouse, and began nursing the baby.
Flaco asked if he and Tamara could camp there, and the woman told
him that the people who owned one of the tents had disappeared a
week earlier, so he could live there. These disappearances are
common—many refugiados are found murdered for no apparent reason.
The police are too apathetic to do anything about it. Flaco and
Tamara seemed to be pretty well set up, so I went to work in the
feria.

The feria was very crowded that day, and if I had not
worried so much about whether Tamara would stay well hidden from
Jafari I would have enjoyed it. A great swarm of people— Chinese
and Korean mariners, Hindu merchants, and South American
guerrillas—descended on the area until the street in front of my
stand was packed solid with people, all of them in clashing
costumes, milling endlessly.

The smells of sweat and dust and spicy food filled
the air, while the people yelled and bartered.

I always loved the sights of the feria. When I was a
student at the university, I lived with my uncle in Mexico City.
All the sidewalks downtown were one way, and if pedestrians wanted
to walk to a store on the other side of the street, they had to
pass the store, go to the next pedestrian overpass, then walk back
to the store they wanted to get to. All those people walking in the
same direction sickened me. They kept pace with each other as if
their legs were bound together with invisible shackles. And I
remembered that when I had first come to Panamá, it was the people
milling listlessly in the feria that attracted me. I had always
thought I enjoyed the lack of order in Panamá, but after thinking
about Flaco’s words of the night before, I wondered if I didn’t
enjoy the simple freedom of being able to turn and walk against the
crowd. Perhaps this was my way of possessing me.

Flaco came at noon and bought a water jug from a
booth down the street. He stopped and talked with me. "Did you not
see the look on her face when I told her about Bernardo?"

"Sí, she looked very sick," I said.

"She is a refugiada for sure, no?"

"Sí, she looked very sick," I said. Flaco laughed and
told me to come by later and bring some fruit, and I said okay. I
gave him the computer crystal and asked him to sell it. He said
he’d try. As Flaco stepped into a crowd of pedestrians to make his
way back to the plantations, I watched the crowd behind him to see
if anyone was following. The crowd was so thick it was impossible
to watch everyone.

Business was good in the afternoon; I sold a
rejuvenation, a thing which had not happened in over a month, so I
stayed at my booth till well after dark, telling myself that I
hoped for more good fortune. But Jafari’s deadline had well passed,
and part of me was afraid.

Flaco’s camp was 114 rows south of the canal freeway,
and about three kilometers west of Colón. I walked to it in the
dark, carrying a fruit basket and mineral water I’d bought at the
feria. The banana plants and warm soil gave off enough infrared
glow to see by. No one followed.

When I got to the camp, I saw a large black man about
fifty meters from Flaco’s tent, slightly hunched over as if he were
peeing. I thought to pass him quietly so I wouldn’t frighten him,
but when I reached him I saw that he was hunched over Flaco. He was
unwrapping a garrote from around Flaco’s neck; he had strangled
Flaco.

I yelled "Stop!" and the man looked at me. He charged
as if to attack, but I jumped aside and he ran away.

I checked Flaco’s pulse; he had none. I pushed on his
chest to get fresh air in him; he gurgled and blood bubbled out of
a hole below his Adam’s apple. I stuck two fingers into the hole to
see how deep it was, and my fingers went back in his neck until
they touched the stumps where his vertebrae had been severed.

I crawled away and vomited, then yelled for help.

The Chilean woman came out of her tent, followed by
Tamara. The Chilean was very surprised and terrified to see Flaco
dead—she kept making the sign of the cross and moaning. Tamara just
stared at Flaco, her mouth wide with horror.