On My Way to Paradise (2 page)

"According to the registration code on the crystal,
it belongs to a Señor Amir Jafari. He lives at one of the Lagrange
orbits. He hasn’t applied for citizenship with any nation, so he
may prefer to live outside the law. It would be illegal for him to
have this program; he won’t report it stolen."

"Is he a doctor?" I asked.

Flaco shrugged.

"Why would he be interested in brain storage?"

Flaco shrugged again, pulled the crystal from his
pocket, and said "If you want to sell it, we could get 572,000
standard IMUs."

I calculated: barring complications, the thin woman’s
medication would cost about twenty-six thousand international
monetary units, which would leave a great deal of profit, almost
enough to buy a rejuvenation. All I would have to do was invest the
money for a year or two. However, I decided to ask the thin woman
if she had a receipt for the crystal, hoping she hadn’t stolen it.
I asked Flaco to hold the crystal a few days.

When we got to the basement, the thin woman sat
propped in a corner with her knees against her chin. Three yellow
roses rested on her knees, and she was asleep. I opened the
limb-regeneration kit and spread packets of salves, washes, and
medical instruments on a clean cloth on the floor.

Flaco read aloud the directions on the fluothane and
practiced putting the gas mask over his face. When he’d done it
enough so he could put it on the thin woman, I touched her
shoulder, waking her. She crawled to the center of the floor and
lay on her back.

The roses had fallen off her knees, and Flaco handed
them to her. She inhaled their fragrance and said, "You know, when
you try to smell them too long, you lose their scent. You can’t
hold it."

Flaco and I nodded.

"By the way," Flaco asked, "what should we call
you?"

The thin woman didn’t answer. Flaco kept talking in a
conversational tone. "Angelo says we should call you Spider Legs.
He thinks that is very funny. But I told him it isn’t proper to
call a woman that. You must forgive him—he has a peasant mentality
and doesn’t know better."

"Call me Tamara," she said.

"Ah, Tamara. A fitting name, very beautiful," Flaco
said.

"Do you still have the crystal?" Tamara asked.

"Yes," I answered.

"May I touch it? Hold it until you’re done?"

I nodded, and Flaco wrapped her left hand around the
crystal, put the gas mask over her face, and flipped on the
canister. She sniffed the acrid scent of the fluothane and tried to
wiggle out from beneath the mask for a moment, and then fell
asleep.

I put a tourniquet above her wrist and peeled off her
bandage. A bit of clear, oily synovial fluid from breached joints
had gathered inside the bandage, along with a little pus. The wound
began bleeding, so I opened a package of plastic AV clips and
pinched off the radial artery. In these cases, you’re supposed to
seal any split bones and regenerate them separately. Molecules in
the regenerative wash read the genetic codes of the cells they
infiltrate and begin replicating them in an orderly fashion—in
effect, following the pattern of growth ordered in birth. But
skeletal tissue doesn’t regenerate by the same chemical formula as
other tissues, and no tissue except skin regenerates on a limb
unless both formulae are used simultaneously.

I took a disposable scalpel and began peeling the
flesh from the radius and ulna. Because of the small diameter of
the bones, I thought they’d been severed just below the joint. But
to my surprise the pale-blue articular cartilages, which fit like a
cap over the joints, were whole and unbreached. Only the ligament,
the fibrous cover that holds the joints together, was severed.
Apparently her hand had been pulled off instead of sliced or blown
off. My neighbor once set a leg-trap for a mean dog that had
snapped at his children. The dog got caught in the trap and
wrenched off his foot in exactly the way this woman had wrenched
off her hand. All her bones from the carpals on down were missing,
though a long ragged piece of flesh from her palm was still
attached. This made my job very easy. I set the bloody scalpel back
in its cellophane wrapper, cocked her arm at a right angle so most
of the muscular tissue pulled away from the exposed bone, and
applied the skeletal regeneration wash.

Flaco had been watching me, but he got bored and
picked up the thin woman’s left arm and watched it flop to the
floor as he dropped it.

"Don’t do that," I said.

"Why?"

"Her bones might break. I don’t think she was born on
Earth. She’s very fragile."

"I had a friend who once slugged an off-worlder and
accidentally killed him," Flaco said. He began searching the thin
woman’s bags, removing clothing, a jar of pills that looked like
vitamins. He pulled out a folding, chemical-laser rifle. "Hah! What
do you think, she hunts anteaters with this?"

I grunted my surprise at the rifle. Flaco put it back
and left the room a moment. I administered the regeneration wash to
the muscles, tendons, and skin, and used Doering clamps to anchor
some torn flexors and brachioradials to their proper places; then I
painted a resin bandage over the whole stump and called it good. Of
course, these regeneration kits never work exactly as they’re
supposed to, and in a few weeks I’d have to reclamp some tendons
and splice some of the new nerve tissue to the old.

While the resin bandage was wet, I opened the
osteoporosis rehab packet and inserted the catheter of a hormone
fusion pump into her flesh about five centimeters above the wrist
and began pumping in calcitonin, collagenates, SGH, and mineral
supplements. When the resin bandage dried it would seal around the
catheter, preventing any chance of infection.

Meanwhile, Flaco had brought in the retina scanner
and had been fiddling with it by the electrical outlet. I looked up
at him. I expected him to have one of the little hand-held models
policemen sometimes carry, but he had a large industrial model. Its
corners were dented where he’d pried it free from someone’s wall,
and the screws that were supposed to hold it to the wall dangled in
their sockets; little bits of white paint and plaster still clung
to the screws. Flaco had cut the electric cord to get the scanner
free, so now he was splicing on a plug.

"Where did you get the scanner?" I asked.

"I stole it from the checkout desk at the public
library," Flaco answered.

"Why didn’t you just rent one?"

"I don’t know. I thought you wanted to keep this
private—no records."

"It’s not that important," I said.

"If it will make you feel better, I’ll take it back
tomorrow."

"Good," I said.

Flaco finished splicing the wires and plugged the
scanner in, then I turned off the fluothane and pried open one of
Tamara’s eyes. Flaco aimed the scanner at her eye, but it rolled
back and we couldn’t see her retina, so Flaco started calling to
her, saying "Oh, Spider Legs! Oh, Spider Legs. Wake up! We have
nice flies to eat!" and things like that. I patted her cheek a
little. After a few minutes her eyeball rolled forward and Flaco
scanned it. For all practical purposes she was still asleep, but I
turned the fluothane back on to put her under, just to be sure she
wouldn’t remember we’d scanned her. Then Flaco jacked in a call to
his hacker and read off her ID number: AK-483-VO-992-RAF.

I cleaned up the room and gave the thin woman an
injection to make her sleep for the night. Flaco went to the
bathroom. Five minutes later he came out and said, "I’ve got my
hacker on line. Are you sure we got her ID right?"

The scanner was still on, so I read the number to him
again.

Flaco stood in the corner, listening to the comlink
in his head. "According to records," he said, "she’s Tamara Maria
de la Garza. Born 2-24-2267 on Bacchus 4 in the Ceti star system.
She left at age eight, and spent seventeen years in-flight back to
Earth. Two years ago, she joined the Allied Earth Marines and went
with a peace-keeping force to the Epsilon Eridani system." Flaco’s
eyes remained unfocused as he listened to the voice in his head,
and he laughed at something the hacker said. "According to her
military records, she’s been in-flight two years. Expected to reach
Epsilon Eridani in 2313."

"Oh," I said. I flipped off the fluothane on her gas
mask. According to Flaco, this woman was nearly a light-year from
Earth. Apparently, she had either jumped ship or never left—but
then if that were true she would be listed as AWOL. Obviously, the
military had falsified her files. I started thinking of reasons the
military would falsify her files, and came up with many, but I
realized it would be just like them to falsify her records for the
hell of it.

Flaco stood in the corner for a moment. "Also," he
said. "My friend didn’t bother to mention earlier that two months
ago the man who owned the crystal, Amir Jafari, was made a Class D
General in the Federated Earth Marines—he’s in charge of Cyborg
Intelligence." Flaco smiled; he was still on line.

At first I thought that explained Jafari’s interest
in brain storage. The cyborg command was once notorious for
shanghaiing draftees, placing their brains in brain bags, and
jacking them into reality programs—convincing them they were just
living through their daily affairs until they could be transferred
to mechanical bodies. But why would the computer crystal be
registered to Jafari, not the Alliance? He wouldn’t be holding it
as a commodities investment—the price of crystals drops daily as
better crystals come onto the market.

Flaco tapped the subdural comlink switch behind his
left ear; his eyes suddenly focused as he went offline. "My hacker
says he doesn’t want to know me anymore. He just got tagged. He’s
going on vacation."

"Did they trace to us?"

Flaco tried to sound confident. "No, I don’t think
so. I’d called him. They won’t trace back to us." He sat on the
floor and sighed. I knew he was wrong. I knew that if they took the
initiative, they could check the hacker for incoming calls and get
back to us. But it would take time, perhaps days. "So, what do you
think?" Flaco asked.

I knew he wanted me to venture a guess about who had
tapped in. I phrased my words carefully, trying to turn the subject
of the conversation. "I think this woman is not Jafari, so perhaps
she stole the crystal."

"Do you know what I think?" Flaco said. "I watched
you treat that girl. I think you wasted your money going to school
to study morphogenic pharmacology. All you did was read the
directions on those boxes. Anybody could have done that. A monkey
could have done that!"

"Yes," I said. "Flaco could have done that."

"I did fine with the fluothane, no? I’m a fine
anesthesiologist."

"Yes, you’re a fine anesthesiologist," I told
him.

"I am also tired," Flaco said, yawning.

"Me too."

"Can I sleep here?" he asked.

"We should put this woman on the couch, and I have no
other bed."

"I will sleep on the floor—" he said, "a fine floor,
very soft, very practical."

"Good," I said, "you can make sure this thief doesn’t
run off with my valuables."

"I will guard your valuables with my life," Flaco
promised. We moved Tamara to the couch; then Flaco lay down on the
floor and closed his eyes.

Although it was late and I had many things on my
mind, I went to my room, turned on my computer, phoned Informer
261—the artificial intelligence who services me—and requested a
readout of all scholarly articles on morphogenic pharmacology
published within the past three days. The AI bartered with me,
trying to restructure my payment schedule for the information. He
started out asking far too much money; at times it seemed his
bartering equations went totally off kilter. He didn’t understand
the emotional attachment I had to my money. I talked him down to a
reasonable fee, and then he granted access to the information. I
studied long into the night.

In the morning Tamara gave the computer crystal back
to me, and I refilled the hormone pump on her arm, told her to eat
and drink as much as she could, and left "Doctor" Flaco to watch
her.

I took her dirty bandage to Uppanishadi-Smith for a
blood analysis. Tamara’s blood had very low levels of leukocytes
and other antibodies, and this seemed very strange. With such a
severe injury, her antibody levels should have rocketed. However,
people raised in artificial atmospheres often have unresponsive
immune systems, so I did not worry so much. But with the high
humidity in Panamá and the resultant risk of infections, I thought
it necessary to buy a wide-spectrum antibody treatment. Then I went
back to my booth at the feria. The day was slow: I sold two lipid
and cholesterol flushes to old people and had one soccer player who
wanted to get his nerves myelinated so he could speed his reflexes.
His was an unworkable plan, and I told him how much better a nerve
bypass was, since silver wire conducts electrical impulses much
faster than a myelinated nerve, and recommended the doctor who had
bypassed my sympathetic and peripheral nervous systems for me. The
day was cool, so I walked home before sundown.

When I got home a gray kitten with white feet was on
the roof and Flaco and Tamara were in the front yard throwing a red
plastic ball up to the kitten. It would hide on the other side of
the roof, and when Flaco threw the ball up it would clatter on the
roof’s red tiles, and the kitten would hear it and run over the
top, swiping and biting at the ball and chasing it till it rolled
off the roof. Then the kitten would hiss and raise the hairs on its
back as if surprised to see Flaco and Tamara, and would run back
over the rooftop to hide. Tamara enjoyed this as much as the kitten
did. She giggled when the kitten attacked the ball and acted very
excited, often putting her hand over her mouth. I suddenly desired
to kiss her; the thought of taking her in my arms and kissing her
seemed totally natural. I would have done it, yet I knew that it
was inappropriate. After thinking about it, I had a strange
realization: the beauty I had seen in Tamara when she showed terror
was in her when she laughed. The way emotions played over her face
gave her an unusually expressive quality that made her different
from the dead-eyed, emotionless refugiadas and merchant women I
often met. Flaco must have seen it too, for when he spoke with her
his voice took on a mellow, respectful tone.