The visit yielded no directly useful result. He couldn’t risk asking questions and nothing was showing on the surface. But he came away with the strong feeling that El Mirador was the answer.
“Take me there,” Farkas said.
“I can’t do that. It’s a low-profile town. Strangers aren’t welcome. You’ll stick out like a dinosaur.”
“Take me,” Farkas repeated.
“If Wu’s there and he gets even a glimpse of you, he’ll know right away that there’s a contract out for him and he’ll vanish so fast you won’t believe it.”
“Take me to El Mirador,” said Farkas. “It’s my money, isn’t it?”
“Right,” Juanito said. “Let’s go to El Mirador.”
El Mirador was midway between hub and rim on its spoke. There were great glass windows punched in its shield that provided a colossal view of all the rest of Valparaiso and the stars and the sun and the moon and the Earth and everything. A solar eclipse was going on when Juanito and Farkas arrived: the Earth was plastered right over the sun with nothing but one squidge of hot light showing down below like a diamond blazing on a golden ring. Purple shadows engulfed the town, deep and thick, a heavy velvet curtain falling over everything.
Juanito tried to describe what he saw. Farkas made an impatient brushing gesture.
“I know, I know. I feel it in my teeth.” They stood on a big peoplemover escalator leading down into the town plaza. “The sun is long and thin right now, like the blade of an axe. The Earth has six sides, each one glowing a different color.”
Juanito gaped at the eyeless man in amazement.
“Wu is here,” Farkas said. “Down there, in the plaza. I feel his presence.”
“From five hundred meters away?”
“Come with me.”
“What do we do if he really is?”
“Are you armed?”
“I have a spike, yes.”
“Good. Tune it to shock, and don’t use it at all if you can help it. I don’t want you to hurt him in any way.”
“I understand. You want to kill him yourself, in your own sweet time.”
“Just be careful not to hurt him,” Farkas said. “Come on.”
It was an old-fashioned-looking town, cobblestone plaza, little cafes around its perimeter and a fountain in the middle. About ten thousand people lived there and it seemed as if they were all out in the plaza sipping drinks and watching the eclipse. Juanito was grateful for the eclipse. No one paid any attention to them as they came floating down the peoplemover and strode into the plaza. Hell of a thing, he thought. You walk into town with a man with no eyes walking right behind you and nobody even notices. But when the sunshine comes back on it may be different.
“There he is,” Farkas whispered. “To the left, maybe fifty meters, sixty.”
Juanito peered through the purple gloom at the plazafront cafe beyond the next one. A dozen or so people were sitting in small groups at curbside tables under iridescent fiberglass awnings, drinking, chatting, taking it easy. Just another casual afternoon in good old cozy El Mirador on sleepy old Valparaiso.
Farkas stood sideways to keep his strange face partly concealed. Out of the corner of his mouth he said, “Wu is the one sitting by himself at the front table.”
“The only one sitting alone is a woman, maybe 50, 55 years old, long reddish hair, big nose, dowdy clothes ten years out of fashion.”
“That’s Wu.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“It’s possible to retrofit your body to make it look entirely different on the outside. You can’t change the non-visual information, the stuff I pick up by blindsight. What Dr. Wu looked like to me, the last time I saw him, was a cubical block of black metal polished bright as a mirror, sitting on top of a pyramid-shaped copper-colored pedestal. I was nine years old then, but I promised myself I wouldn’t ever forget what he looked like, and I haven’t. That’s what the person sitting over there by herself looks like.”
Juanito stared. He still saw a plain-looking woman in a rumpled old-fashioned suit. They did wonders with retrofitting these days, he knew: they could make almost any sort of body grow on you, like clothing on a clothesrack, by fiddling with your DNA. But still Juanito had trouble thinking of that woman over there as a sinister Chinese gene-splicer in disguise, and he had even more trouble seeing her as a polished cube sitting on top of a coppery pyramid.
“What do you want to do now?” he asked.
“Let’s go over and sit down alongside her. Keep that spike of yours ready. But I hope you don’t use it.”
“If we put the arm on her and she’s not Wu,” Juanito said, “it’s going to get me in a hell of a lot of trouble, particularly if she’s paying El Supremo for sanctuary. Sanctuary people get very stuffy when their privacy is violated. You’ll be expelled and I’ll be fined a fortune and a half and I might wind up getting expelled too, and then what?”
“That’s Dr. Wu,” Farkas said. “Watch him react when he sees me, and then you’ll believe it.”
“We’ll still be violating sanctuary. All he has to do is yell for the police.”
“We need to make it clear to him right away,” said Farkas, “that that would be a foolish move. You follow?”
“But I don’t hurt him,” Juanito said.
“No. Not in any fashion. You simply demonstrate a willingness to hurt him if it should become necessary. Let’s go, now. You sit down first, ask politely if it’s okay for you to share the table, make some comment about the eclipse. I’ll come over maybe thirty seconds after you. All clear? Good. Go ahead, now.”
“You have to be insane,” the red-haired woman said. But she was sweating in an astonishing way and her fingers were knotting together like anguished snakes. “I’m not any kind of doctor and my name isn’t Wu or Fu or whatever you said, and you have exactly two seconds to get away from me.” She seemed unable to take her eyes from Farkas’ smooth blank forehead. Farkas didn’t move. After a moment she said in a different tone of voice, “What kind of thing are you, anyway?”
She isn’t Wu, Juanito decided.
The real Wu wouldn’t have asked a question like that. Besides, this was definitely a woman. She was absolutely convincing around the jaws, along the hairline, the soft flesh behind her chin. Women were different from men in all those places. Something about her wrists. The way she sat. A lot of other things. There weren’t any genetic surgeons good enough to do a retrofit this convincing. Juanito peered at her eyes, trying to see the place where the Chinese fold had been, but there wasn’t a trace of it. Her eyes were blue-gray. All Chinese had brown eyes, didn’t they?
Farkas said, leaning in close and hard, “My name is Victor Farkas, Doctor. I was born in Tashkent during the Breakup. My mother was the wife of the Hungarian consul, and you did a genesplice job on the fetus she was carrying. That was your specialty, tectogenetic reconstruction. You don’t remember that? You deleted my eyes and gave me blindsight instead, Doctor.”
The woman looked down and away. Color came to her cheeks. Something heavy seemed to be stirring within her. Juanito began to change his mind. Maybe there really were some gene surgeons who could do a retrofit this good, he thought.
“None of this is true,” she said. “You’re simply a lunatic. I can show you who I am. I have papers. You have no right to harass me like this.”
“I don’t want to hurt you in any way, Doctor.”
“I am not a doctor.”
“Could you be a doctor again? For a price?”