On My Way to Paradise (10 page)

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.