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
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.”
“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?”
“But you aren’t looking for any of them,” Juanito said, with scorn in his voice. “Come on. I would know it.”
“Right,” said Farkas. “I’m not.” He sipped his drink, something green and cloudy and sweet. “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 roam the spokes of Valparaiso Nuevo 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 do you want to find him? Nobody asked that. Nobody would. Could be any reason, anywhere 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. Everybody understood the rules: your business was strictly your business.
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’s money, what the hell, or, even better, Kyocera-Merck’s, 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 Nuevo 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 fifty, though. The oldest of the men is sixty-two. The longest that any of them has been on Valparaiso Nuevo is nine years.”
Farkas didn’t seem bothered. “Would you say that rules them out? I wouldn’t. 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.”
