Juanito told him.
“That’s not so bad,” the blind man said.
“Two weeks minimum, payable in advance.”
“Mmm,” said the blind man again. Again that intense eyeless gaze, seeing right through him. “How old are you?” he asked suddenly.
“Seventeen,” Juanito blurted, caught off guard.
“And you’re good, are you?”
“I’m the best. I was born here. I know everybody.”
“I’m going to be needing the best. You take electronic handshake?”
“Sure,” Juanito said. This was too easy. He wondered if he should have asked three kilocallies a week, but it was too late now. He pulled his flex terminal from his tunic pocket and slipped his fingers into it. “Unity Callaghan Bank of Valparaiso. That’s code 22-44-66, and you might as well give it a default key, because it’s the only bank here. Account 1133, that’s mine.”
The blind man donned his own terminal and deftly tapped the number pad on his wrist. Then he grasped Juanito’s hand firmly in his until the sensors overlapped, and made the transfer of funds. Juanito touched for confirm and a bright green +cl. 4000 lit up on the screen in his palm. The payee’s name was Victor Farkas, out of an account in the Royal Amalgamated Bank of Liechtenstein.
“Liechtenstein,” Juanito said. “That’s an Earth country?”
“Very small one. Between Austria and Switzerland.”
“I’ve heard of Switzerland. You live on Liechtenstein?”
“No,” Farkas said. “I bank there. In Liechtenstein, is what Earth people say. Except for islands. Liechtenstein isn’t an island. Can we get out of this place now?”
“One more transfer,” Juanito said. “Pump your entry software across to me. Baggage claim, passport, visa. Make things much easier for us both, getting out of here.”
“Make it easier for you to disappear with my suitcase, yes. And I’d never find you again, would I?”
“Do you think I’d do that?”
“I’m more profitable to you if you don’t.”
“You’ve got to trust your courier, Mr. Farkas. If you can’t trust your courier, you can’t trust anybody at all on Valparaiso.”
“I know that,” Farkas said.
Collecting Farkas’ baggage and getting him clear of the customs tank took another half an hour and cost about 200 callies in miscellaneous bribes, which was about standard. Everyone from the baggage-handling androids to the cute snotty teller at the currency-exchange booth had to be bought. Juanito understood that things didn’t work that way on most worlds; but Valparaiso, he knew, was different from most worlds. In a place where the chief industry was the protection of fugitives, it made sense that the basis of the economy would be the recycling of bribes.
Farkas didn’t seem to be any sort of fugitive, though. While he was waiting for the baggage Juanito pulled a readout on the software that the blind man had pumped over to him and saw that Farkas was here on a visitor’s visa, six week limit. So he was a seeker, not a hider. Well, that was okay. It was possible to turn a profit working either side of the deal. Running traces wasn’t Juanito’s usual number, but he figured he could adapt.
The other thing that Farkas didn’t seem to be was blind. As they emerged from the customs tank he turned and pointed back at the huge portrait of El Supremo and said, “Who’s that? Your President?”
“The Defender, that’s his title. The Generalissimo. El Supremo, Don Eduardo Callaghan.” Then it sank in and Juanito said, blinking, “Pardon me. You can see that picture, Mr. Farkas?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“I don’t follow. Can you see or can’t you?”
“Yes and no.”
“Thanks a lot, Mr. Farkas.”
“We can talk more about it later,” Farkas said.
Juanito always put new dinkos in the same hotel, the San Bernardito, four kilometers out from the hub in the rim community of Cajamarca. “This way,” he told Farkas. “We have to take the elevator at C Spoke.”
Farkas didn’t seem to have any trouble following him. Every now and then Juanito glanced back, and there was the big man three or four paces behind him, marching along steadily down the corridor. No eyes, Juanito thought, but somehow he can see. He definitely can see.
The four-kilometer elevator ride down C Spoke to the rim was spectacular all the way. The elevator was a glass-walled chamber inside a glass-walled tube that ran along the outside of the spoke, and it let you see everything: the whole great complex of wheels within wheels that was the Earth-orbit artificial world of Valparaiso, the seven great structural spokes radiating from the hub to the distant wheel of the rim, each spoke bearing its seven glass-and-aluminum globes that contained the residential zones and business sectors and farmlands and recreational zones and forest reserves. As the elevator descended—the gravity rising as you went down, climbing toward an Earth-one pull in the rim towns—you had a view of the sun’s dazzling glint on the adjacent spokes, and an occasional glimpse of the great blue belly of Earth filling up the sky a hundred fifty thousand kilometers away, and the twinkling hordes of other satellite worlds in their nearby orbits, like a swarm of jellyfish dancing in a vast black ocean. That was what everybody who came up from Earth said, “Like jellyfish in the ocean.” Juanito didn’t understand how a fish could be made out of jelly, or how a satellite world with seven spokes looked anything like a fish of any kind, but that was what they all said.
Farkas didn’t say anything about jellyfish. But in some fashion or other he did indeed seem to be taking in the view. He stood close to the elevator’s glass wall in deep concentration, gripping the rail, not saying a thing. Now and then he made a little hissing sound as something particularly awesome went by outside. Juanito studied him with sidelong glances. What could he possibly see? Nothing seemed to be moving beneath those shadowy places where his eyes should have been. Yet somehow he was seeing out of that broad blank stretch of gleaming skin above his nose. It was damned disconcerting. It was downright weird.
The San Bernardito gave Farkas a rim-side room, facing the stars. Juanito paid the hotel clerks to treat his clients right. That was something his father had taught him when he was just a kid who wasn’t old enough to know a Schwarzchild singularity from an ace in the hole. “Pay for what you’re going to need,” his father kept saying. “Buy it and at least there’s a chance it’ll be there when you have to have it.” His father had been a revolutionary in Central America during the time of the Empire. He would have been Prime Minister if the revolution had come out the right way. But it hadn’t.
“You want me to help you unpack?” Juanito said.
“I can manage.”
“Sure,” Juanito said.
He stood by the window, looking at the sky. Like all the other satellite worlds, Valparaiso was shielded from cosmic ray damage and stray meteoroids by a double shell filled with a three-meter-thick layer of lunar slag. Rows of V-shaped apertures ran down the outer skin of the shield, mirror-faced to admit sunlight but not hard radiation; and the hotel had lined its rooms up so each one on this side had a view of space through the V’s. The whole town of Cajamarca was facing darkwise now, and the stars were glittering fiercely.
When Juanito turned from the window he saw that Farkas had hung his clothes neatly in the closet and was shaving—methodically, precisely—with a little hand-held laser.
“Can I ask you something personal?” Juanito said.
“You want to know how I see.”
“It’s pretty amazing, I have to say.”
“I don’t see. Not really. I’m just as blind as you think I am.”
“Then how—”