On My Way to Paradise

by David Farland

  I tried the same procedure with my right hand, but I must have slackened for a moment, for Juan Carlos became frenzied. He let go of my right wrist and tried to grab the obi.

  I pulled tighter and he caught hold of my knee and tried to yank me down. The effort of the struggle depleted the oxygen from his lungs, and he went limp.

  My God, I realized, This will work. I can really strangle him! My teeth began chattering. Beads of sweat dripped from my armpits and ran down my arms. Sweat dripped from the back of my hands, drenching the obi. I felt myself losing my grip on it. It began to slip.

  I became unreasonably frightened and shouted, "Abriara, come help me! Quick! Come help me!"

  I put both knees on Juan Carlos’s back and wrapped the ends of the obi around my hands and pulled tighter and screamed for Abriara. I suddenly realized I didn’t know how long I’d been strangling him. He’d gone limp, but that was no guarantee he wouldn’t regain consciousness if I let go. I realized that this is what other stranglers must go through—they become excited and lose track of time and let go too soon, so I held on and began counting the seconds, vowing to myself that I wouldn’t release my strangle hold until three minutes had passed. One ... two ... three ... four ... five ...

  My stomach ached where the sword had punched through. I felt its point sticking through my back. I thought I should quit and get some medical attention. The transmitter to open the airlock lay on the floor two meters away. I screamed for Abriara, begging her to come help. I watched her door. She didn’t open it. I kept strangling Juan Carlos.

  Juan Carlos began kicking again and flailing his arms again, and I thought, The son of a whore was faking, just pretending to be dead!

  I jerked at the obi, trying to snap his neck. Juan Carlos clawed at the floor and went limp. I held onto the obi. I looked back at the door,

  "Abriara, I have been stabbed," I explained. "I do not feel well! I’m kind of dizzy! Come help me, you whore!"

  Pinpoints of light began to flash behind my eyes. "Flaco!" I yelled, "Flaco, come help me!"

  Juan Carlos remained limp. I readjusted my grip again and pulled tighter. The muscles in his back began bunching and jumping in little spasms. I held my grip until the spasms passed, then wiped the sweat from my brow.

  I felt very tired, and quit strangling him, and he didn’t move. My head ached, and the tiny pinpoints of light behind my eyes dazzled me. Bile had risen into my throat. I carefully turned Juan Carlos onto his stomach and watched his chest, to see if he’d breathe. His chest didn’t rise or fall. His fingers twitched in minor spasms, and I took his wrist and felt for a pulse. I felt nothing.

  I bent my head to his chest and listened for a heartbeat. My own heart pounded in my ears, and I panted so badly that with the distant stamping of feet and the chanting and the screams I couldn’t hear if Juan Carlos’s heart beat.

  "Listen, listen, become fluent in the gentle language of the heart." Tamara’s words came to mind.

  I knew that this was not what she’d had in mind. My face was turned toward Juan Carlos’s feet, and as I watched, his muscles relax. His kimono was pulled up so I could see his underwear, and urine began yellowing his crotch as his bladder emptied. I lurched forward and vomited, and blood was mixed in the vomit. The floor rose to greet me.

  Someone flipped me on my back. I heard distant pounding and voices chanting. A strange man with a blotched face whispered, "He looks almost finished."

  Behind him a man said, "Take his sword, he won’t miss it!" I saw that the airlock door above me was open. Someone else had broken through.

  The man above me said, "Forgive me, señor," and pulled the sword from my belly. He wiped the bloody blade on my kimono, then held the sword up to the light, inspecting it.

  I grunted and everything went black.

  I woke to the smell of fear. I felt rough hands on my body. Someone furtively searched the pockets inside my kimono. I opened one eye. A dark-skinned woman turned her face away and slinked up the ladder. I thought I smelled smoke. The lights were dim.

  Whispering.

  A foot caught me in the ribs, startling me awake. I dimly distinguished the shape of a man. "Answer me! Answer me!" he shouted. I opened my eyes wider, and a horrible face bent near me, a face with a slash that ran from one eye, across the nose, to the mouth. Lucío kicked me and turned away. There were many men behind him, some holding laser rifles. Where did they obtain rifles? I wondered. "Retrieve some medical supplies from that room. Plug the holes in the fucker and put some blood into him. I want him to know ... "

  A shout arose from many voices, distant, like the surf within a seashell. The air held the scent of smoke and the tang of ozone. The riot has begun on module C, I reasoned, and I was comforted. Now the samurai would turn the ship around and we’d go home.

  A woman shrieked nearby—a high thin sound, almost a moan or the mewing of a kitten.

  I opened my eyes and lolled my head to the side. The door to Abriara’s room was open. Smoke roiled off the door, and it hung askew. In places it glowed the pale orange of molten ore. Someone had cut open her door with a laser, I realized. The woman shrieked again, and I wondered if it were Abriara even though she’d never uttered a sound so plaintive, even though I couldn’t imagine her uttering a cry like that.

  I couldn’t see into her room. The smoke hazed the air and my eyes wouldn’t focus. I rolled to my belly and began crawling forward, finding more strength than I knew I possessed. Two bodies sprawled in front of her door. I crawled to them and wondered how they’d come to be there.

  I looked up into the chamber. Several men were gathered around the operating table. Two more lay dead at its base. Blue wisps of smoke roiled near the ceiling above them. I heard grunts. One man appeared to be struggling on the operating table, and the others grappled with him, holding him down. He tilted his head up and back. Overhead lights shined on his face. It was Lucío with his horrible scar, grinning in ecstasy.

  The mewing repeated, a soft, throat-wrenching cry. Arms shifted, and I saw that Lucío wasn’t struggling on the table at all. He’d crawled atop another person and was grinding his hips against that person—his smile the smile of orgasm.

  Abriara moaned and writhed beneath him. He laughed and said, "Do that again."

  One of the men holding her shifted, and I saw her face—two silver eyes surrounded by a bloody, disfigured pulp, a clump of hair ripped from her forehead. I jumped to my feet, intending to race to her, to rescue her. But I’d lost too much blood and with the sudden rise my head spun wildly and I fainted.

  Abriara screamed again, and I looked up and saw another man on her—Daniel, one of Lucío’s old compadres—taking his turn. He raised a fist and smacked Abriara.

  I struggled to my knees and for several seconds was able to remain in that position. I felt slime on my belly—a resin bandage, still wet. Down below us someone screamed, the fighting and riot continued on C module.

  One of Lucío’s men aimed a laser rifle at me. "That old man is awake! Should I deal with him?"

  Lucío walked out from behind his men at the far end of the table. He smiled at me and said, "No—but keep your gun on him. I promised him I would kill him and fuck his woman. I wanted him to see that I am a man of my word. But now that I think of it, in a few minutes I want to fuck him, too."

  I tried to stay on my knees while I scanned the floor for a weapon. One of Abriara’s victims two meters away had bled profusely. My crystal knife was embedded between his eyes. I watched the barrel of my guard’s rifle. When I’d regained strength, I vowed to grab that knife and use it. I couldn’t fight all Lucío’s men, but I might be able to get Lucío.

  Suddenly the floor wrenched beneath me and I flipped over as if slapped by the hand of God. Half the cryotanks in the room spilled open, and their pink fluids crashed to the floor, drenching me in freezing liquid. I rolled over and over as something dragged me toward the wall. I threw myself flat, but couldn’t regain my balance, was only able to stop rolling.
The shouting of the rioters below suddenly quieted as others were tossed around.

  A man at the table shouted, "The ship, she is moving." The table was bolted to the floor, and Lucío’s men clung to it, their eyes wide as they peered around.

  My guard had also slipped to the floor, but he righted himself and aimed his rifle at me.

  The ship had indeed begun to spin, and I imagined it whirling wildly out of control. The constant acceleration of the ship provided our artificial gravity, but if we continued to spin it would add a second force—one that could crush us against the walls as if we were caught in a giant centrifuge.

  As if to be true to my deepest fears, the spin gained momentum, and the great invisible hand dragged me past the operating table toward the wall. Friction could no longer hold me to the floor.

  A man shouted "What’s happening?" and my guard shouted, "Sergeant, should I fry this one?" Lucío appeared confused.

  Lucío shouted to my guard, "Not yet!" I tried to scrabble forward, but was too weak and dizzy. I ended up pinned against a wall, the handle of a cryotank jabbing into my back. The dead bodies—including the one with the knife imbedded in its skull—glided across the slippery floor like marionettes pulled by a string. They landed nearby. On the table Daniel thrust himself into Abriara all the harder, as if to make sure raping her would be his final act.

  My guard watched in confused indecision as I pulled the crystal knife from the dead man’s skull and threw it at Daniel. It whizzed past his head, bounced to the floor, and skittered back, landing within arm’s reach. And I realized something important—if we’d been at the center of the ship, when the force pushed us to the outside we’d each have flown out directly away from the ship’s center. But since we were all roughly the same distance from the center, the force that pushed us against the wall would pin us all to the same side of the room.

  The ship spun faster. My guard inched forward and I lunged for the knife.

  Suddenly, one man at the table could hold on no longer and he flipped away, landing a scant three meters from me. Then nearly everyone at the operating table rolled off and tumbled on top of their compadres until the seven of them and Abriara became a tangle of flesh.

  I was close enough to smell the sex and blood on them, and I tried to inch towards them but I was held as if spiked in place. They moaned and panted and tried to untangle themselves with little success. And the ship whirled faster.

  I lay exhausted on the floor, and gasped for breath and some of the men near me moaned. I couldn’t tell how much force was being applied—five gravities, eight, ten? Did I suddenly weigh five hundred kilo’s, or a thousand? I couldn’t tell.

  My jaw burst open under the increasing pressure, and I didn’t have the strength to close it. My skin felt heavy and dragged at my face. I realized this is what it would feel like to be under water, hundreds of meters down. My skin felt as it might tear off and I’d burst from the pressure, like a grape bursting from ripeness. The blood pumped in my ears like the pounding of hammers, and my saliva felt too thick to swallow.

  And the ship twisted beneath us. I was suffocating. A great invisible blanket had been laid over me, and was suffocating me. My kimono felt as if it weighed kilos, and I worried that my ribs might snap under the weight of the garment. I heard a crackling noise, and blood began pulsing from my nose. I couldn’t move my hand to wipe it away. The wound in my belly reopened.

  And the ship spun faster. Something snapped in my head. I heard a thrumming, like the beating of a fibrillating heart and felt myself being carried forward. I’m riding the back of a bull, I realized. I’m riding the back of a bull, and I don’t know where it is carrying me.

  I opened my eyes and a landscape of blue fog and blue shadows seemed to move below me. I hovered near the ground. The hooves of the bull pounded the mist.

  Moving forward. A freezing wind tore at my hair and it became night. Tamara had never breathed a darkness so black at me, in this place where wind was ice.

  Part Three:

  Baker

  Chapter 22

  I felt as if I eeled up through dark cold water and struggled free into light. I was chilled to the bone, and I stared, eyes unfocused, for several moments.

  I recognized a room I’d glimpsed often before—a hundred thin cots reeking of sweat, patients dressed in white spilled upon them. A warehouse for damaged people. Some patients were awake and jabbering. I couldn’t understand them. I couldn’t think. My brain felt rubbery like the foot of a snail, but otherwise a great sense of well-being suffused me—not the easy euphoria of health, but rather a drugged numbness.

  A patient with vacant eyes bumped into my cot, and then reeled away. I wanted to follow him, make sure he wasn’t hurt. I got up and staggered after him, bumping into cots myself, moving past carts full of food till I found myself standing in a restroom.

  In the restroom on the wall just inside the door was a giant strip of weathered mirror-paper. One edge had come unglued so that it rolled halfway down .

  Here, at last, was something I could fix. I spread the mirror paper back into place and looked at my image for a long time. The face of a young man, almost a stranger, peered back at me. Myself as I’d appeared perhaps at age 27 or 28, except that my hair had grown long past my shoulders and turned silver-white, the color of thistle down.

  My eyes and face were young and dead. I’d seen faces like that in the feria—faces of beaten peasants fleeing Chile, Ecuador, Peru" Colombia. The face of a refugiado, I thought. The face of the living dead.

  It did not seem to matter. Life is such a fragile thing and people cling to it so hard with so little effect. Physical death is unavoidable, yet the soul dies easier than the body.

  I tried moving that wooden face into a smile, but it did not come out as a smile of joy. My lips moved in mere mimicry of a smile. I tried a frown. An expression of sadness. Mimicry of sadness.

  There was nothing left to—all expressions were the same. What matters the expression? Wrinkled flesh writhing upon a skull. What does it matter?

  Someone opened a door beside me, then shouted, "I found him!"

  A medic in a white uniform took my arm and tried to guide me back out the door the way I’d come. But I just continued gazing in the mirror.

  "So, you’ve noticed!" The man said. "Some of your friends were packing your things after the first big riot. We found a rejuvenation packet. We thought that since you had to spend some time in the cryotanks, you might as well use it wisely. Señor Nunez, our morphogenic pharmacologist, was kind enough to care for you. "

  I nodded. My mind was not so sluggish that I couldn’t follow him. For a rejuvenation to be effective a client must spend months in cryogenic suspension while the pharmacologist restores the body—repairing cells damaged by radiation, detoxifying and deoxidizing the neural and muscular tissues, fine-tuning the cellular specificity of glandular organs to make sure they secrete the right proteins, then ultimately replacing those organs most heavily damaged with fresh clones.

  However, few clients wish to remain in suspension for the optimum length of the operation. They’re always concerned that financial investments will sour or their spouses will step out on them. They prefer to rush the process and end up cheating themselves of a few extra years.

  I pointed to the white hair, a grotesque reminder of age on a young man’s body.

  "Why the white hair?" the medic asked. "I don’t know. It has nothing to do with the quality of the rejuvenation. Perhaps you suffered some overwhelming shock?"

  I recalled where Juan Carlos had stabbed me, and recollected the sensation of the sword entering my flesh—sharp, heavy, cool, foreign.

  I reached into my kimono and probed the wound. No bandage covered my ribs, and my fingers slid over bare skin under my kimono till I touched a thick scar below my sternum where one would make an incision to remove a gall bladder.

  My wounds must have been so severe that the medics opted to keep me in a cryotank till I’d healed. So t
hey’d made me young again while they were at it.

  The medic firmly took my arm, led me back to bed.

  "Stay here," he said. "You’re still too sedated to be walking. We off-load to Baker in a few hours. You’ll feel better then. "

  I stayed in bed for a long time before I finally realized the significance of those words, "off-load to Baker." The news punched me in the belly like a fist.

  I’d been asleep over two years! No illness would have required cryogenic suspension for two years. Two years aboard ship meant twenty Earth years had passed. I felt I’d been robbed of something immensely important and began taking mental inventory, trying to imagine what I’d lost.

  Some men were talking at nearby bunks. One explained, "In that big riot the ship spun, remember? The samurai spun the ship and squeezed the air from us. That’s what happened. Then they froze all the rabble-rousers ...." The speaker, a wiry Latin American, wore the midnight-blue kimono of a samurai.

  I got up again and stumbled past the beds. Neither the medics nor Latin Americans dressed as samurai seemed to notice when I walked out the door.

  He’d said they froze the "rabble-rousers." I’d not been relegated to the cryotanks to be healed, but to be imprisoned. By sheer will I sought escape. I followed a hall that circumscribed the ship and soon found myself standing at the foot of a ladder.

  I climbed several rungs and got tired and rested. I wasn’t thinking straight, and believed if I could keep climbing, I’d escape into the sky. I continued up, becoming lighter and lighter as I climbed, till I reached a spot where I weighed nothing at all.