“I can handle it,” Carpenter said.
A few weeks of paid idleness in San Francisco? Why not? He had grown up in Los Angeles, but he had always been fond of the cooler, smaller northern city. The sea breezes, the fog, the bridges, the lovely little old buildings, the glittering blue bay—sure. Sure. He’d be glad to. Especially after Spokane. There were people he knew in Frisco, old friends, good old friends. It would be great to see them again.
An exhilarating sense of new beginnings swept through Carpenter like a cooling wind. God bless Jeannie Gabel, he thought. I owe her one, for steering me toward this gig. His first shore leave he would head off to Paris and treat her to the best dinner money could buy. Or the best he could afford, anyway.
The surge didn’t last long. Such upbeat feelings rarely did. But Carpenter relished them while they were passing through. You took what joy you could find wherever you found it. It was a tough world and getting tougher all the time.
Getting tougher all the time, yes. Ain’t it the truth.
3
“the man’s name is Wu Fang-shui,” Juanito said. “He’d be about seventy-five years old, Chinese, and that’s pretty much all I know, except there’ll be a lot of money in finding him. There can’t be that many Chinese on Valparaiso Nuevo, right?”
“He won’t still be Chinese,” Kluge said.
Delilah said, “He might not even still be a he.”
“I’ve thought of that,” said Juanito. “Even so, it ought to be possible to trace him.”
“Who you going to use for the trace?” Kluge asked.
Juanito gave him a cool steady stare. Coming from Kluge, who was a consummate pro and constantly wanted to keep everybody else aware of it, the question was virtually a slur on his capabilities as a courier.
“Going to do it myself,” Juanito said.
“You?” A quick flicker of a smile.
“Me, myself. Why the hell not?”
“You never did a trace, did you?”
“There’s always a first,” Juanito said, still staring.
He thought he knew why Kluge was poking at him. A certain quantity of the business done on Valparaiso Nuevo involved finding people who had hidden themselves here and selling them to their pursuers, but up till now Juanito had stayed away from that side of the profession. He earned his money by helping dinkos go underground on Valparaiso, not by selling people out. One reason for that was that nobody yet had happened to offer him a really profitable trace deal; but another was that he was the son of a former fugitive himself. Someone had been hired to do a trace on his own father seven years back, which was how his father had come to be assassinated. Juanito preferred to work the sanctuary side of things.
He was also a professional, though. He was in the business of providing service, period. If he didn’t find the runaway gene surgeon for this weird eyeless dinko who had hired him, this Farkas, somebody else would. And Farkas was his client. Juanito felt it was important to do things in a professional way.
“If I run into problems,” he said, “I might subcontract. In the meanwhile I just thought I’d let you know, in case you happened to stumble on a lead. I’ll pay finders’ fees. And you know it’ll be good money.”
“Wu Fang-shui,” Kluge said. “Chinese. Old. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Me too,” said Delilah.
“Hell,” Juanito said. “How many people are there on Valparaiso Nuevo altogether? Maybe nine hundred thousand? I can think of fifty right away who can’t possibly be the guy I’m looking for. That narrows the odds some. What I have to do is just go on narrowing, right? Right?”
In fact Juanito didn’t feel very optimistic. He was going to do his best, sure; but the whole system on Valparaiso Nuevo 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 Nuevo into a place of refuge for fugitives of all sorts from every world, other artificial planets as well as Earth itself, 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 very well with the Generalissimo.”
They were in the Villanueva Cafe in the town of San Martin de Porres, E Spoke. They had been touring Valparaiso Nuevo 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 Nuevo as he could. Not to see; to experience. That was the word he used. And his hunger for experience was immense. He was insatiable, prowling around everywhere, gobbling it all up, soaking it in. He never slowed down. The man’s energy was fantastic, Juanito thought. Considering that he had to be at least twice Juanito’s age, maybe more. And confident, too. The way he strutted around, you’d think he was the new Generalissimo and not just some strange deformed long-legged dinko who in fact was owned, body and soul, by the unscrupulous Kyocera-Merck combine down there on filthy Earth.
Farkas had never been to one of the satellite worlds before, he told Juanito. 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 couldn’t quite manage to comprehend that the larger habitat worlds were comfortable places with blue skies, fleecy clouds, lovely gardens, handsome buildings of steel and brick and glass. The way Earth used to be, before they ruined it.
Farkas said, “If fugitives are protected by the government, how do you go about tracing one, 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, looking 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. All of us 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 sixty, bald head, thick lips, no chin?”
“I see him, yes. He looks a little different to me.”
“I bet he does. Well, that man, he ran a swindle at one of the Luna domes, sold a lot of phony stock in an offshore monopoly fund that didn’t exist, fifty million Capbloc dollars. He pays plenty to live here. And this one here—you see? With the blond woman?—an embezzler, that one, very good with computers, reamed a big bank in Singapore for almost its entire capital. Him over there, with the mustache—you see?—he pretended to be pope. Can you believe that? Everybody in Rio de Janeiro did.”