On My Way to Paradise (47 page)

"If they are so perfect and we are so useless, why do
they need us?"

"Cannon fodder," Perfecto said. "They need us to
fight automated defenses at Hotoke no Za. They do not believe they
can win such a battle, so they hire someone to die for them,
someone who doesn’t matter. They want us to clear a path so the
samurai can get into Hotoke no Za and prove who’s superior."

I remembered the holo of President Motoki thanking us
for coming to fight the machines of the Yabajin. "But that’s not so
hard—not from what I’ve heard."

"Not hard for us, because we’re not technophobes,"
Perfecto said. "The defense networks unnerve the samurai. These
settlements were founded because the Japanese saw themselves losing
technological supremacy. To them, the machine symbolizes their one
great failure."

"Ah!" I asked, "have you noticed how they shun
cybernetic upgrades?"

Perfecto nodded vigorously. "They shun a thousand
other technological advances, too. The Alliance has placed some
strict offensive weapons restrictions upon us, but we could easily
design legal weapons to defeat the Yabajin defenses—rifles that
fire corrosive liquids rather than solid projectiles,
multiple-layer ceramic-based armor. But Motoki is obstinate: if
they won because of a technological advantage, they believe it
would negate the whole reason for fighting the war. They must win
because they are superior people, not because they have superior
weaponry. "

"These people are crazy!" I said.

"I agree," Perfecto said. "Still, they pay good
money. " He shuffled his feet. "Besides, every culture seems a
little crazy if you view it from outside. General Tsugio’s aides
have requested that we come to a special meeting in the morning. I
think General Tsugio will want to address us about the morale
problem. Tsugio-san is a great believer in singing company songs
and offering impassioned speeches." He looked back at the house.
"Do you want to go in and listen to some music, watch the
fights?"

There was nothing better to do. We went inside and
chatted about inconsequential things and watched simulated battles
most of the evening. Zavala fought in one. He and some others
vanquished four combat teams and entered Hotoke no Za. I was
impressed to see how skilled he’d become. Much had changed.

Yet in a world where I had to study constantly to
keep up with the advances in my own small field of medicine, I’d
become adept at change.

I could handle change, even bad changes. My friends
had taken my body and made it young again; I could accept that. It
was a common procedure.

The samurai had kept me in cryogenic suspension for
two years, and that was harder to accept. They’d cheated me of
training that would help me stay alive on Baker—and as I watched
the simulations, seeing our men battle the patrols, weasels, ANCs,
and cybertanks while trying to negotiate mine fields—I began to
realize just how dangerous my ignorance was. I had never beat the
samurai in the simulators, and could not do it now. Also, my
compañeros
had changed; I could almost accept that. But I
was terrified by what I’d seen in Abriara’s eyes: she was happy,
serene.

I searched my mind and tried to discover why this
disconcerted me, and I remembered when I was young I once went to a
strange church with my mother. In this church people pretended to
receive great spiritual manifestations. They spoke in tongues,
babbling nonsense, and rolled on the floors and praised God while
they frothed at the mouth—all to impress one another with their
feigned holiness.

Because I was young they terrified me with the same
unnamable fear I felt now, and I thought they were under the
influence of the devil. I believed Satan was in that church.

As I grew older I realized it wasn’t the devil that
had terrified me—it was the strangeness.

Now when I watched Abriara singing with the crowd or
looked upon her as she studied the battles I beheld the face of the
alien once again. She was alive inside and I was dead.

She’d witnessed great horrors and lived a life of
desperation. Like the countless refugiados I’d met, she’d been
emotionally dead inside. She’d been brutalized and broken beyond
repair, and it was
right
for her to be dead inside.

But here she was suddenly brought back to life, and
the flame inside her seemed to burn like some magic tallow candle
in the wind, obstinately refusing to extinguish no matter how
fierce the storm. No one should have the power to change that
much.

I tried to imagine what influences could have altered
her: she was a chimera. She wasn’t human, not in the way r m human.
Could her engineers have created a new being with an emotional
resiliency rivaling anything believed possible?

I doubted it. Not by design anyway. No one
understands the biochemical mechanisms that control emotional
resiliency that well. I’d read precious few articles on the topic,
and those had been written a hundred years before when sociologists
were studying those who best coped with the nuking of Europe.

Another thought came to mind: Zavala’s speech
patterns had shifted toward those of the samurai. Given his
respect for their doctrines it seemed only natural that he’d ape
them.

It signaled something I hadn’t anticipated—a cultural
shift that might have affected our entire crew. Perhaps by living
among the samurai we were becoming like them.

Certainly the way Zavala asserted that "Battle
steadies the mind" indicated he was falling into their way of
thinking. I’m sure that Motoki’s social engineers would have been
proud of the fine job they’d done of twisting Zavala’s brain.

Yet it didn’t seem probable that Abriara’s contact
with the samurai could have initiated her internal change. The
samurai tried to veil their emotions, but I’d noticed on several
occasions how they overcompensated in expressing them. It seemed
to me they feigned passion poorly because they, like the
refugiados, were emotionally emasculated. Dead inside. So the
answer had to lie elsewhere.

Inside I watched the holos, met Mavro. He’d found
someone to tattoo a new tear on his cheek and he’d shaved his
mustache; otherwise he was the same. The simulators went off early
and I wasn’t tired, but everyone else found spots on the floor and
began to sleep, a hundred people to a small building. There was
barely room to turn over.

I went outside to look at the stars and Perfecto
followed. The opal kites in the atmosphere baffled my view. Their
platinum sheen was like gauze or cobwebs reflecting sunlight. The
men in the barn continued chanting, but it now seemed muted,
deadened by the night air. I could barely distinguish the samurai
in black armor circling the barn beneath the trees. Perfecto
dropped his codpiece and let his penis hang out. I thought he’d
urinate but for several minutes nothing happened.

"What are you doing?" I asked, nodding toward his
penis.

Perfecto looked down at his member and said, "I
thought I’d let it out for a breath of fresh air, but now that it’s
out, all it wants to do is play." He waited a moment more, then
began urinating on a sapling. "Aaah, it comes—finally. "

I hadn’t peed on a bush since I was a child in
Guatemala. Somehow it made me feel nostalgic, so I joined him.

When I finished I asked, "Perfecto, was Abriara
really making soft eyes for me?"

He laughed. "Yes. She makes soft eyes whenever
talking about you—ever since you saved her from getting raped by
Lucío."

I was shocked. "I didn’t save her from getting raped!
I There was nothing I could do!"

Perfecto frowned. After a long silence he hissed
through his teeth. "I thought not. She told an improbable story,
saying you’d wrestled a rifle away from someone in the nick of time
and saved her. "

"Why would she say such a thing? How does she think
she’ll get away with it? Didn’t Lucío and his compadres spread the
truth?"

Perfecto frowned. "Two of Lucío’s com padres died
under the crush of bodies when the ship was spinning. The rest were
put in the cryotanks as punishment for breaking into the ship’s
armory, so they haven’t said anything. But I think she tells this
lie because she believes it. All one must do is look into her eyes
when she speaks. She believes she was not raped. Perhaps Abriara
was not strong enough to handle what happened to her. Maybe her
mind snapped. I’ve spoken with her about unpleasant incidents from
her childhood, and she now claims that they too never happened.
"

"The rape by the mestizos?"

"For one. She says she got the scar above her ear
from an accident while playing baseball. She doesn’t seem to
remember her three years in prison."

I felt like vomiting. I couldn’t believe what
Perfecto was telling me. All that health, all the joy I’d seen in
her eyes was just the sign of greater sickness.

"What have you done about it?" I demanded. "How can
we help her?"

"Just leave her alone. Angelo, since that day,
Abriara has changed. She seems to be at peace for the first time in
her life. Perhaps ... perhaps her only chance for happiness lies in
her ignorance. Her deeper mind knows this."

"We must confront her with the truth!" I said. "We
must help her to face it!"

"Maybe someday she’ll come to the truth on her own.
I’ve tried to confront her many times, to hint at the truth, but
she just blocks it out."

I put my hands on my hips and looked up at the sky. I
felt as impotent as when I’d witnessed Abriara’s rape. A sudden
violent resolve filled me. "Perfecto, I’m going to kill Lucío."

He was silent for a moment. "I agree. We can’t risk
going into battle with him. We should do it soon."

That night as I lay shivering on the floor in my
armor. I dreamed of Tamara in her wheelchair. Garzón had pulled her
microspeaker from the jack at the base of her skull so she couldn’t
speak. Garzón stood over her, stroking her hair and watching her
intently. His hands slowly petted her neck, her shoulders, crept
down to press firmly on the nipples of her breasts. I could tell he
was going to rape her. I could see the excitement in his eyes, the
tenseness in his arms. Tamara’s eyes were wide with hysteria.

I woke to the sound of nearby thunder that shook the
room as if it would split the building. Rain drummed on the roof. I
was shivering cold and Abriara was spreading a white kimono over
the top of me, though I don’t think it did much good. The room was
cramped with sprawling, snoring bodies. I turned to look at
her.

"Go back to sleep," she whispered. "This will keep
you warm."

"Why doesn’t someone turn up the heat?" I asked.

"There isn’t any." She began to move away, gingerly
picking her way through sleeping bodies, her battle armor clacking
softly. Never had I seen her do something unselfish before.

She
is
alive inside,
I marveled. I
wanted to thank her, but thanks did not seem enough. "Abriara," I
whispered. She turned. "I want only good for you!"

She grinned and found herself a place to lie down a
few meters away.

I wondered if I was crazy. A few weeks ago I’d
imagined I was falling in love with Tamara. My feelings for her
were still strong. Now I found my affection for Abriara growing,
and it doesn’t take a great mind to realize both women were
horribly damaged. I wondered if what I felt was love, or was it the
pity one feels for an injured animal? And if it was pity, should I
pursue a relationship with either woman?

One wouldn’t be particularly inclined to buy damaged
merchandise in the market. Certainly I’d never consider buying a
shirt that had one sleeve longer than the other. Yet I found myself
drawn to Abriara in spite of the horrible scars on her body and on
her heart. I told myself nothing but trouble could come from such
affection.

I told myself, Robles was seeking to create a perfect
breeder when he created Abriara. Combined with this, nothing is so
grasping as a Chilean woman (except perhaps a Bolivian), so if
Robles has given her a stronger desire to breed, she’ll cling to
you forever. You’d become her prisoner. You wouldn’t be able to
step from the house without her demanding where you’re going. You
won’t look across the street without her worrying if you’re
admiring another woman! Besides, as emotionally scarred as she is,
she’ll probably ax-murder you someday!

Ah, but if I could just once gaze into her silver
eyes and stroke her chocolate hair! I’d be lost forever! If I could
but once taste those honeyed lips and run my hand beneath the curve
of her breasts!

One doesn’t successfully remain a bachelor for thirty
years without developing a great capacity to fall out of love.

I dreamed of living with her in a small house, a few
chickens in the yard. If Robles truly had created a breeder,
Abriara wouldn’t be satisfied with less than a dozen children.

 
Ai ya yi!
I imagined the headaches their
screeching and fighting would cause. Then I weighed all this
against the potential for happiness and finally decided it was
better not to get involved with a probable ax-murderess.

The morning sun burned the clouds away the next
morning and I found Fernando Chin, the xenobiologist, in the front
yard collecting bodies of
oparu
no
tako
that had been
electrocuted during the night’s thunderstorm. He had perhaps fifty
different species, ranging through many different sizes and shapes,
and he was freezing samples of genetic tissues. I stood beside him
and watched the barn where Lucío was kept.

The men had quieted during the night, but with
morning they began chanting anew, "Let’s go home! Let’s go home!" I
counted sixteen samurai guards around the barn, and I couldn’t see
how to get to Lucío.