In fact he didn’t feel very optimistic. He was going to do his best; but the whole system on Valparaiso was heavily weighted in favor of helping those who wanted to hide stay hidden.
Even Farkas realized that. “The privacy laws here are very strict, aren’t they?”
With a smile Juanito said, “They’re just about the only laws we have, you know? The sacredness of sanctuary. It is the compassion of El Supremo that has turned Valparaiso into a place of refuge for fugitives of all sorts, and we are not supposed to interfere with the compassion of El Supremo.”
“Which is very expensive compassion, I understand.”
“Very. Sanctuary fees are renewable annually. Anyone who harms a permanent resident who is living here under the compassion of El Supremo is bringing about a reduction in El Supremo’s annual income, you see? Which doesn’t sit well with the Generalissimo.”
They were in the Villanueva Cafe, E Spoke. They had been touring Valparaiso all day long, back and forth from rim to hub, going up one spoke and down the other. Farkas said he wanted to experience as much of Valparaiso as he could. Not to see; to experience. He was insatiable, prowling around everywhere, gobbling it all up, soaking it in. Farkas had never been to one of the satellite worlds before. It amazed him, he said, that there were forests and lakes here, broad fields of wheat and rice, fruit orchards, herds of goats and cattle. Apparently he had expected the place to be nothing more than a bunch of aluminum struts and grim concrete boxes with everybody living on food pills, or something. People from Earth never seemed to comprehend that the larger satellite worlds were comfortable places with blue skies, fleecy clouds, lovely gardens, handsome buildings of steel and brick and glass.
Farkas said, “How do you go about tracing a fugitive, then?”
“There are always ways. Everybody knows somebody who knows something about someone. Information is bought here the same way compassion is.”
“From the Generalissimo?” Farkas said, startled.
“From his officials, sometimes. If done with great care. Care is important, because lives are at risk. There are also couriers who have information to sell. We all know a great deal that we are not supposed to know.”
“I suppose you know a great many fugitives by sight, yourself?”
“Some,” Juanito said. “You see that man, sitting by the window?” He frowned. “I don’t know, can you see him? To me he looks around 60, bald head, thick lips, no chin?”
“I see him, yes. He looks a little different to me.”
“I bet he does. He ran a swindle at one of the Luna domes, sold phony stock in an offshore monopoly fund that didn’t exist, fifty million Capbloc dollars. He pays plenty to live here. This one here—you see? With the blonde woman?—an embezzler, that one, very good with computers, reamed a bank in Singapore for almost its entire capital. Him over there, he pretended to be Pope. Can you believe that? Everybody in Rio de Janeiro did.”
“Wait a minute,” Farkas said. “How do I know you’re not making all this up?”
“You don’t,” Juanito said amiably. “But I’m not.”
“So we just sit here like this and you expose the identities of three fugitives to me free of charge?”
“It wouldn’t be free,” Juanito said, “if they were people you were looking for.”
“What if they were? And my claiming to be looking for a Wu Fang-shui just a cover?”
“You aren’t looking for any of them,” Juanito said.
“No,” said Farkas. “I’m not.” He sipped his drink, something green and cloudy. “How come these men haven’t done a better job of concealing their identities?” he asked.
“They think they have,” said Juanito.
Getting leads was a slow business, and expensive. Juanito left Farkas to wander the spokes of Valparaiso on his own, and headed off to the usual sources of information: his father’s friends, other couriers, and even the headquarters of the Unity Party, El Supremo’s grass-roots organization, where it wasn’t hard to find someone who knew something and had a price for it. Juanito was cautious. Middle-aged Chinese gentleman I’m trying to locate, he said. Why? Nobody asked. Could be any reason, anything from wanting to blow him away on contract to handing him a million Capbloc-dollar lottery prize that he had won last year on New Yucatan. Nobody asked for reasons on Valparaiso.
There was a man named Federigo who had been with Juanito’s father in the Costa Rica days who knew a woman who knew a man who had a freemartin neuter companion who had formerly belonged to someone high up in the Census Department. There were fees to pay at every step of the way, but it was Farkas’ money, what the hell, and by the end of the week Juanito had access to the immigration data stored on golden megachips somewhere in the depths of the hub. The data down there wasn’t going to provide anybody with Wu Fang-shui’s phone number. But what it could tell Juanito, and did, eight hundred callaghanos later, was how many ethnic Chinese were living on Valparaiso and how long ago they had arrived.
“There are nineteen of them altogether,” he reported to Farkas. “Eleven of them are women.”
“So? Changing sex is no big deal,” Farkas said.
“Agreed. The women are all under 50, though. The oldest of the men is 62. The longest that any of them has been on Valparaiso is nine years.”
“Would you say that rules them all out? Age can be altered just as easily as sex.”
“But date of arrival can’t be, so far as I know. And you say that your Wu Fang-shui came here fifteen years back. Unless you’re wrong about that, he can’t be any of those Chinese. Your Wu Fang-shui, if he isn’t dead by now, has signed up for some other racial mix, I’d say.”
“He isn’t dead,” Farkas said.
“You sure of that?”
“He was still alive three months ago, and in touch with his family on Earth. He’s got a brother in Tashkent.”
“Shit,” Juanito said. “Ask the brother what name he’s going under up here, then.”
“We did. We couldn’t get it.”
“Ask him harder.”
“We asked him too hard,” said Farkas. “Now the information isn’t available any more. Not from him, anyway.”
Juanito checked out the nineteen Chinese, just to be certain. It didn’t cost much and it didn’t take much time, and there was always the chance that Dr. Wu had cooked his immigration data somehow. But the quest led nowhere. Juanito found six of them all in one shot, playing some Chinese game in a social club in the town of Havana de Cuba on Spoke B, and they went right on laughing and pushing the little porcelain counters around while he stood there kibitzing. They didn’t act like sanctuarios. They were all shorter than Juanito, too, which meant either that they weren’t Dr. Wu, who was tall for a Chinese, or that Dr. Wu had been willing to have his legs chopped down by fifteen centimeters for the sake of a more efficient disguise. It was possible but it wasn’t too likely.
The other thirteen were all much too young or too convincingly female or too this or too that. Juanito crossed them all off his list. From the outset he hadn’t thought Wu would still be Chinese, anyway.
He kept on looking. One trail went cold, and then another, and then another. By now he was starting to think Dr. Wu must have heard that a man with no eyes was looking for him, and had gone even deeper underground, or off Valparaiso entirely. Juanito paid a friend at the hub spaceport to keep watch on departure manifests for him. Nothing came of that. Then someone reminded him that there was a colony of old-time hard-core sanctuary types living in and around the town of El Mirador on Spoke D, people who had a genuine aversion to being bothered. He went there. Because he was known to be the son of a murdered fugitive himself, nobody hassled him: he of all people wouldn’t be likely to be running a trace, would he?