On My Way to Paradise (27 page)

I asked the computer for a scan of behavioral
modifiers, and found several. Seven modifiers were labeled by
patent number. I had no idea what their effects might be, since
this was outside my field of expertise. But I did find one patent
for a family of genes that was not created by Robles; it was made
by Bernardo Mendez, and since I knew of his work in engineering
biogenic territorialism I was able to guess by the early date of
his patent the nature of the modification: The chimeras’ biogenic
territorialism was strengthened so they’d be more competitive. It
explained why Perfecto found it necessary to paint lines on the
floor in our room so no one would trespass into his area. I
remembered Abriara telling me the chimeras weren’t dangerous to the
Argentines as long as they stayed in their own country, and it made
perfect sense: If the chimeras felt their territory to be violated,
they’d indeed go berserk. And because of their sociopathic bent,
the chimeras wouldn’t hesitate to destroy the invaders. I hadn’t
paid heeded Perfecto’s blue lines in the past. I made a mental note
to avoid his territory, lest he decide to break my legs. It struck
me as odd that these chimeras were the antitheses to the beings the
socialists were trying to engineer—instead of rooting out human
territorialism, Torres had chosen to strengthen it. I wondered if
Torres had designed the chimeras specifically to resist the
possibility of the viral wars that rumor said the socialist would
someday initiate. Yet that seemed implausible. Torres had started
his work a decade before the socialist’s began engineering their
own people. At least, I had heard about Torres’ work that much
earlier.

I began to wonder, Was Robles trying to create
perfect humans, or perfect warriors?

I exhausted the behavioral modifications and went
back to studying physical upgrades. The list seemed endless.
Several people came to the infirmary for medications, and I had to
get up from the computer to serve them. This made me uneasy. Sooner
or later someone would think to question our presence.

After nearly two hours I asked the computer to print
Abriara’s files, then told my compadres. "I’d like to take these
gene charts home for study. But we have surely lost this part of
our bet. The chimeras are genetically superior to the samurai. Our
chimeras should be stronger, faster, and more intelligent than the
samurai."

Zavala smiled. "Then I have beaten you on two counts:
The samurai are not better trained than we are, and they are not
genetically superior."

"Perhaps they aren’t genetically superior, but I am
not so sure about the other," García said. "We’ll have to go to the
library tomorrow to study their early training better. If their
classes in self-defense include simulated battles like those we go
through, then I will have to take your money." García stretched and
yawned, for it was getting late.

Everyone agreed that García was right, and they began
filing from the room. Miguel hung back, standing too near, as
Perfecto often did. He clearly wanted to stay with me.

I patted him on the back. "Go with García, my
friend," I said. "Serve him well." It was a command spoken
softly.

Miguel looked at me with his sad brown eyes, and left
without speaking a word. I could tell he felt rejected.

Mavro, Perfecto, and Abriara stayed behind. I saw
Perfecto staring at me. He obviously knew Miguel had bonded to me.
He appeared sad that I’d sent Miguel away.

When the others had left, Abriara bent over my
shoulder, her chocolate-brown hair brushing my neck, and said, "I
have a question, Angelo: Am I human?"

I considered. At first it seemed she obviously
wasn’t. No one with so many upgrades could be human. It was as if
her outer form were a cloak to hide the engineering that had gone
on beneath. And as I looked into the silver webs of light in her
eyes I reminded myself that I must never think of her as human,
never make the mistake of thinking of her as a comrade, but as an
animal as different from me as a rat is from a dog.

But if her question were revised to ‘Can I mate with
a human to produce viable offspring?’ which would be the ultimate
test of whether she was a member of our species, I couldn’t be
sure. Most of the upgrades Robles had made were minor and had
historical precedent, meaning they’d been found in rare
individuals, and those traits could certainly be passed to humans.
But considering the structure of her muscles and eyes, I wasn’t
sure. I asked the computer to cross-check the results of a mating
between Abriara and García to see if it would work.

To my astonishment, the results were positive—her
offspring would physically express an amazing 98% of her
upgrades.

"Yes," I told her.

"Oh," she said. "I thought not. I thought not." She
sounded very sad, and I wondered if she was disappointed to be
human when she was so close to being something better.

"Ah, don’t take it so hard," Mavro said. "Think of
all the great humans there have been—people like Jesus Christ and
Simon Bolivar."

That night I lay awake for a long time, thinking of
the battles we’d fought, how each had brought us defeat. I was
still trembling from the evening in the simulators, and the images
from the day’s battles—flashes of plasma fire arcing into the
night, a dead body falling at my feet—would not let me sleep. Yet
it seemed strange: Though I was shaken, I hadn’t noticed the
feeling while reading the gene charts. It was as if my body had
saved the aches until I had time to deal with them. I listened to
the uneven breathing of the others, and realized they were all
awake, going through the same thing as I. Eventually the breathing
of Zavala and Mavro evened out, and they began to snore softly.

In one form or another, Tamara had invaded my dreams
each night on the ship. I wondered if I’d dream of her tonight. If
it would be a peaceful dream. I longed to dream a peaceful dream of
her. I wondered where she was, if she were recovering. I told
myself she’d be all right. Garzón would take care of her. But then
I realized I didn’t care anymore. What if she lived? What if she
died? Why should she mean anything to me? I had enough concerns of
my own. Why did I still want to find her, to caress her as if she
were my child?

I began to drift into an uneasy slumber, marred by a
rumbling, droning noise. I woke and thought the rumbling noise was
Perfecto talking in his sleep. But as I listened I realized he
wasn’t speaking in his sleep. He spoke very softly, in a slurred
tone without inflection, so that if anyone overheard they’d think
he was mumbling in his sleep.

He said, "I remember when you were six and sneaked
out of the compound to play with the Nito Diez and his brother. I
remember how they pushed a pile of lumber on you, and left you
screaming. They thought you’d die, and they thought it was funny.
And when we found you that night, you were bloody all over."

"They were children," Abriara mumbled in return. I’d
not heard them speak like this before. The only sound I’d ever
heard at night was Zavala’s snoring or when Perfecto occasionally
cried out to his wife in his sleep. I wondered how many late-night
conversations I’d missed.

"And when you were twelve and tried to go to Mass,
and the priest threw you out, was he a child?"

"It was his church," Abriara said.

"It was God’s church," Perfecto corrected. "I’d
rather not remind you of other things that have happened," he
mumbled. "But I saw on the news how you murdered three mestizo
boys."

"Three rapists. The police do not care what mestizos
do to a chimera."

"Yet you mutilated their bodies. That speaks of more
than mere vengeance. It speaks of hatred. A Quest. Why do you deny
that you hate humans? It gains you nothing. I don’t ask you to curb
your hatred for them—that you not hate yourself for being one of
them."

Abriara made a choking noise, as if she were sobbing,
and I wondered at this: She’d always seemed strong, oblivious to
emotion. "I am not human," she said. "They have never allowed me to
be one of them. I will not be one of them now."

"So, you admit that you hate them?"

"Yes. Sometimes."

"Then do you hate me?" Perfecto asked. "I have
fathered eight children to a human wife. I am human, too."

"Don’t try to trick me with arguments over semantics.
If you were born in the vats on the compound, you are chimera—that
is the only criterion the Chileans used when they hunted us after
the revolution. If you took your eight children back to Chile, the
Chileans would kill you and your children with you."

"That’s true," Perfecto said. "But I point out these
things only so you’ll know: the dividing line between human and
chimera is sometimes thin. You straddle the line and say you will
be chimera, not human. But that choice was made by your engineers;
you cannot make that choice yourself."

Perfecto quit speaking and I waited for Abriara to
argue with him some more. I considered what I’d learned: When I’d
tried speaking to Abriara privately, she talked about places she
had lived and people she had known with a curious dispassion—she
never talked about old loves, old hates. She was emotionally
distanced, like a person encased in amber, unable to touch, unable
to feel. And—as on the day I first met her when she used the
animated gestures so typical of Chileans—I soon found that when she
appeared to show emotion, it was only practiced emotion.
Meaningless smiles over stupid jokes. Almost as if she were trying
to placate us, trying to convince us that everything was okay in
her world. I’d instinctively been revolted by her behavior, since
it made her seem so false. Now I realized her emotion was false
because she was so brutalized by her past she couldn’t afford to
let us see her as she was.

I marveled once again that she was so human—that 98%
of her traits would be expressed in her offspring. And like a
lightning bolt, the truth struck me. Abriara had said chimera women
hadn’t been created to be warriors, that they’d never fought in
battle. And I realized that when Robles created Abriara he hadn’t
been trying to create either a perfect human or a perfect warrior.
He’d been trying to create a perfect breeder—a machine to spread
the genetic traits he’d engineered among the general
population.

I listened for a long time, but Abriara made no
answer to Perfecto. Perhaps they’d heard my uneven breathing,
learned I was awake, and quit speaking. I do not know.

That night I dreamed I struggled to hold on to a
child who clung to a rocky ledge high above an immense ocean of
brass-colored water. In the sea were dead seagulls, floating on
their backs, their wing tips bobbing up and down in time with
undulating waves. The small girl I’d dreamed of so often lately
clutched my wrist as she tried to pull herself up to the ledge, her
eyes wide with terror. Huge drops of her blood spattered from
scratches on her hand into the sea, forming red circles. And from
each circle a Yabajin samurai would burst forth, wearing his red
armor and shooting plasma and streams of light at me.

The small girl said to me, "Grandfather, hold tight.
Stay low!"

I looked into her eyes. "Who are you?" I shouted to
the girl, "What is your name?"

"You don’t know!" she said accusingly.

A plasma blast flashed in the air over my head, and I
grabbed the child and crouched low, afraid to move.

 "Angelo, Mavro, everyone—wake up!" Perfecto
enthused. I looked up. He was crying. His thick hair was ruffled,
unruly. The lights were low, and the 3-D tattoo of the beast on his
neck seemed to glow in the shadows. The ship trembled with
vibrations caused by people screaming and cheering. Perfecto
grinned. "Come hear the good news!"

Perfecto went to the lights and turned them up.
Abriara was jacked into the wall monitor, listening to music piped
in over the radio. Her whole body was shuddering from sobs, and
tears streamed down her cheeks. I sat up, and Perfecto grabbed my
hand, pulled me over to the spare monitor. Mavro was just rousing
and Zavala hadn’t yet moved at all. Perfecto plugged the wall jack
into the socket at the base of my skull.

". . . are still shut down. Meanwhile, Independent
Brazil has launched an air strike against 4000 disabled cybernet
tanks stranded in a caravan 30 kilometers north of Lima."

 Lima? I wondered. Independent Brazil’s military
front is hundreds of kilometers from Lima.

"The tanks were on their way to the Estados Unidos
Socialistas del Sur front in Panamá under the direction of the
artificial intelligence Brainstormer 911 when saboteurs bombed the
AI’s housing complex. Brainstormer 911 is one of 14 artificial
intelligences in South and Central America to have been destroyed
within the past six hours. Seven other artificial intelligences in
Europe, and two in space have also been killed. So far, only two
allied nations have lodged formal protest to the bombings, which
violate the Inter-sentient Accord of 2087 that grants AI’s
political neutrality from humans, protecting them from the ravages
of war. This is the first time in over a century that AI’s have
become military targets.

"In Colombia, freedom fighters from Panamá now claim
they’ve secured Bogotá—which means both Bogotá and Cartagena have
been recaptured—and socialist generals in Colombia have ordered
their soldiers to lay down their weapons. However, because of
reports of rampant executions, most EUSS soldiers have refused, and
fighting still continues heavy in Medellin.

"An unconfirmed report from Porto Allegre in
socialist-occupied Brazil indicates that hundreds of marines there
revolted against superior officers this morning. General Ricardo
Mueller, known as the Serpent of Montevideo, was reportedly killed
along with many other officers. Marines from that base boast that
they will attack Buenos Aires by ..."