On My Way to Paradise

by David Farland

  We climbed the ladder. At the 0-hundred level we stepped off. The ladder continued up, but was chopped off at the airlock. I glanced at the airlock—Tamara was somewhere beyond it, and I longed to find her, but I continued following Abriara.

  The halls on this level were a bit wider than those downstairs, the rooms farther apart. When we got to our room it didn’t look so good. It was a simple cube with a low ceiling; cushions on top of plastic lockers doubled as couches and lined all three walls. My teak chest sat atop one such trunk, its lid open, overflowing with boxes of cigars and bottles of liquor. A small doorless restroom with a toilet bordered the hall on the right as we entered, a water spigot and computer-jack outlet bordered the door on the left. Five small bunks were suspended from bolts in the ceiling, and pictures of the popes covered the walls. Abriara climbed to a top bunk, and lay with her eyes closed. I ducked around the corner of the bathroom and raised my knife, poised to strike anyone who might enter the room to attack Abriara.

  Abriara opened one eye.

  "Are you just going to lie there?" I asked, angered that she was unwilling to save herself.

  "I think so," she said.

  I leaned my head against the wall, listening for pursuit.

  She watched me a moment. "Angelo, put that knife away," she said with concern. "You’re scaring me."

  "And if Sakura comes back with help?" I asked, wiping sweat from my forehead.

  "He won’t," she said, sitting up. She watched me a moment longer. "Besides, I can handle myself. I’m not in danger."

  When she said she wasn’t in danger, something strange happened. I felt a great sense of relief. It was as if something in my arm had sprung, allowing me to release the weapon.

  "I ... I thought I was protecting you. I made a fool of myself. I’m sorry."

  She closed her eyes and turned away. "Thank you. No one has ever tried to do that before. No one has ever protected me."

  There was such pain in her voice that I wanted to apologize for all the men who had never protected her. I wondered what kind of life she had led, being the lowest of the low, less than an Indian even. I imagined how she had been ravaged by that, how she had been forced to assert herself and become strong. I remembered news reports showing how chimeras were mistreated in Chile, Ecuador, and Peru even before the socialists took over: In places where Indians were paid a starvation wage of 50 pesos for a hard day’s labor, a chimera would be paid 25. Police would often shoot or beat chimeras that stayed out after dark. But these were only minor inconveniences compared to what happened after each of those countries became absorbed into the Estados Unidos Socialistas Del Sur: chimeras lost all their rights, since the socialists claimed chimeras were not human and were therefore not entitled to legal protection. It was legal to kill chimeras, to enslave them if one dared try. It is even said that after Argentina’s General Espinoza conquered Chile, he bragged that he dined on the liver of a chimera and claimed it was better than the finest Argentine calves’ liver. These were only a portion of the things Abriara must have endured at the hands of humans.

  "What was it like, in Chile, when the people began killing chimeras, began hunting you?" I asked. It was a personal question, perhaps too personal. I put the knife back in my wrist-sheath and sat on the floor, watching Abriara.

  She didn’t answer for a moment. "Angelo, in the simulators everything looked strange. The colors were all washed out, and nothing gave off warmth. It was like the whole world had gone cold. There were clouds in the sky, and I couldn’t see the sun through them. It was as if they were a barrier to light. Is that the way humans see things?"

  It was a trite observation, an attempt to steer our conversation to safe ground. But it seemed obvious that she had very strong vision in the infrared and ultraviolets. With my prosthetics I could see some of that, but it was translated into normal colors. To her each color had its own value. "Sí. The clouds and fog, they can be a perfect barrier to sight," I said. "Humans cannot see the stars blazing in the sky on a cloudy night."

  "Hmmm. I knew their eyes were poor, but I never guessed how bad their vision is. This is a weakness we can exploit when we get to Baker."

  "Have you never coupled with a human on a dream monitor, or jacked into an educational tape made by humans?"

  "No. In Chile, educational tapes are shown in full spectrum. I’ve seen exact duplicates of old paintings in museums—Da Vinci, Rembrandt. All the whites in their portraits are tinged with ultraviolet, making it look as if the subjects bathed in sunscreen lotion. I understood human’s visual limitations on an intellectual level. But I didn’t really know till today."

  "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.

  Ari
sh, 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.