On My Way to Paradise (71 page)

The mercenary nodded, mystified. He pulled off his
shirt and laid it over her endlessly staring eyes. He mouthed the
words that the refugiados always spoke over their dead, "Free at
last."

I ran to the infirmary to help with the wounded.

That night I took Abriara on a walk and told her how
Tamara had reprogrammed us. I spoke her of her rape aboard the ship
and what I remembered of it, and showed how it differed from her
own memories.

Abriara pulled my face toward her and looked in my
eyes. "Is this some hoax?" She laughed nervously. "Are you trying
to get rid of me? I’m not being too pushy, am I? We can take things
slow if you want. I know you have not given yourself to a woman for
many years."

I was tempted to chuckle. I didn’t think that her
squeezing my hand had been too forward. "I am not trying to get rid
of you. Come to the general’s lab, and I’ll show you."

She was silent for a long time, carrying on an
internal argument. "Let’s go," she said at last, and her tone
betrayed her own concerns.

When we reached the hospital, one of Garzón’s
technicians was dissecting Tamara. Though I’ve seen many
dissections, this one sickened me more than I could imagine. He’d
removed the temporal and parietal regions of the brain and was
pulling platinum wires from her head. Hundreds of tiny
neurosynaptic adapters were plugged into every center of her
brain—neural, visual, tactile, emotive—they ran to a small
processor just above her cranial jack.

"Pretty fancy equipment, no?" the technician said as
casually as if he were carving lettuce for a salad instead of
dissecting an acquaintance. "I’ve known professional dreamers—the
kind who create settings and act for the dream networks. None of
them had equipment like this. None of them!"

Abriara stood away from the operating table,
horrified. I hadn’t wanted her to see the truth in this ugly
fashion. The expression on her face pained me. It betrayed the
horror chimeras always feel when they’ve been brutally
violated.

"What will you do with the equipment?" I asked,
trying to distract Abriara, to keep her mind off her problem.

"Sell it! Someone is going to want to start a
dreamer’s network around here sooner or later. I could make three
good hookups out of this!"

Even though I was sickened by what was happening, I
looked at the gray matter of Tamara’s brain and part of me marveled
at her mind. She had known us so intimately—had understood our
fears and desires so well.

She was an unrivaled cartographer of thought, a
dreamer of dreams. She’d been too talented for our puny world. I
was saddened to see her treated this way.

I took Abriara outside and she collapsed in my arms
and wept, then suddenly staggered up and began running, as if to
escape. I grabbed her arm and slowed her and we walked together for
a while. Abriara wept for, a long time, then said, "Perfecto used
to question me about my past—just after the riots. He insinuated
that bad things had happened to me. I did not believe him."Her
chest began to heave and she breathed heavily, as if she’d
vomit.

"People I’d known all my life told me I’d changed,
that I’d become happy for the first time!" She stopped and stared
straight ahead, as if viewing something I could not see in the
darkness.

"I think perhaps they told the truth," I said.

"You say this woman destroyed you. But she tried to
save
me!"

"Perhaps. We will never know the truth of it."

Abriara stared at me. In the darkness I don’t know
what her silver eyes could see. I could read little of her
expression. "Even if your story is true, even if this woman stole
my pain or planted some false memories, it changes nothing about
how I feel. I have feelings for you because of a thousand little
things that
you’ve
done: the way you treated me as an equal,
the way you suffered when you did wrong, the little kindnesses you
committed."

"I looked away from her. "You may tell yourself that
now, but it will never change the truth. Do you not feel cheated,
that I couldn’t save you from Lucío?"

"Yes, I feel cheated. Yes, I feel cheated—but not by
you!" Abriara said. "All the things I remember you doing are things
you’d have done if you could. At heart you are the man she imagined
you to be."

It rained heavily that night, and the next day
Abriara came to the hospital at noon. She’d made a special lunch
and she asked if I’d accompany her on a picnic.

I agreed and she led me to a hovercraft. We flew
south out of the city, and we wore no armor. Abriara had found a
dress with a bright pattern of flowers in many colors. I wore my
white kimono. I was very uncomfortable, going outside the city
without armor. My clothes were so thin even sunlight could pierce
them.

We spoke of inconsequential things and Abriara asked
me to relate everything I could about my family. She took me to a
long peninsula with several dunes on it forty kilometers south of
the city, and we stopped at the north end of the peninsula and ate
lunch.

When we finished, Abriara said, "Come with me over
the dunes. I have a surprise to show you."

We began walking over white dunes, taking it slow.
The sand was heavy and wet after the rain, and the walking was
easy. The sea smelled crisp, less of decay and dying than the
oceans of Earth, and Abriara took my hand.

I fantasized that she planned to throw me on the
ground and make passionate love, and the thought made me
uneasy.

"You’re thinking painful thoughts again," Abriara
said. "What are you thinking?"

"I’ve decided to leave Baker on the
Chaeron,"
I said, "so that I can search for my family. The ship leaves in
three weeks. I will miss you."

Abriara clasped my hand fiercely. "You can’t go back!
You don’t know how much things will have changed. You have no
future there. What can you be thinking?"

"I cannot see a future here," I said. "There are too
many bad memories."

"We can make good ones," Abriara said; she held my
hand roughly. I remembered the night I’d had an intimation of what
life would be like with a grasping Chilena who was a chimera to
boot.

"It is more than the memories, more even than my
family," I said. "I have always sought to serve society, but now I
find that my society is not as good as I believed it to be. I do
not think Baker will be a nice place to live. Once the Japanese men
have been deported, our men will mate with their wives. It may not
happen today, but in a few years. When this happens, our two
societies will become hopelessly mingled. Our love for murder, with
their love of suicide. I do not think it will make a good mix. I do
not think I can serve a society I so strongly disapprove of."

"But ... but," Abriara gasped. "But you can change
society, make it better. In fact, it is your moral obligation!
Remember San Miguel de Madrid?"

I said, "I am not familiar with the pantheon of
Catholic saints. "

"He lived in the twenty-first century. He was a
survivor of the bombing of Madrid. After the nuclear bombs dropped,
he crawled from the rubble and his hands were burned to a crisp.
All around him people were giving up; people were dying because
they were convinced it was the end of the world.

"But Saint Miguel believed it was his moral
obligation to make sure that he lived, to make sure he built a
world where such a thing could never happen again. He only lived a
few weeks, but his courage saved many people. He too saw an evil
society, but he did not serve society, he served the future."

The conviction in her words struck home. If I
followed don José Mirada’s teachings I’d be serving society for the
rewards it offered. All my morality would be a sham. But if I
served a society that didn’t yet exist, what rewards could I hope
to gain?

My only possible reward would be that possibly
someday the society I hoped to create would spring into being. Her
choice was the only right choice.

"Ah, now I see you are smiling. You like my
idea?"

"
Sí," I said.

"Then you will stay? We will need someone like you.
We will need someone with silver hair for Perfecto’s children to
bond to. We will have our own home, a mansion, and you will be a
great influence on people ..."

 She talked on and on, making her plans for
me.

No, you are a morphogenic pharmacologist, I thought,
and you can find the gene that controls the bonding in chimeras. In
a week this land will be swept with a virus to destroy that gene.
And you can create a virus to wipe out the chimera’s sociopathic
bent and give them a greater chance for peace.

Since you live on a world distant from other worlds,
you are free to create a society of your own choosing through
social engineering.

I did not know who I was—the Angelo of Tamara’s
dreams, the Angelo who killed Arish.

I still do not know if I can ever become the man I
desire to be. But I believed that whether the sources of evil were
genetically linked to territorialism, or whether they were defects
in the chemical thought processes, or whether they were perpetuated
and flourished within our society because of deep programs built up
as we learned to think, I had the tools to destroy them.

Yet I had to wonder at the morality even of that. To
use the tools of social engineering to twist the minds of others as
the engineers of Baker had done—the idea repulsed me on a basic
level. I wondered why, and connected it immediately to Perfecto’s
theories of the nature of evil: To try to twist the ideals of
another is a violation of the territories of the mind.

Yet no one consulted you before they created your
deformed world. I thought. And you cannot consult the unborn as to
their desires. You must do what you feel is right.

We came over the last sand dune and peered out over
the jungle. There was a white mountain in the distance, as if it
had been carved of salt, and behind it was a row of purple
mountains.

"Abriara, when I was leaving Earth, I saw a picture
of that white mountain! I was so insane with fear and shock I was
jabbering. I told Tamara I’d take her there, and I believed we were
going to paradise!"

Abriara said, "All the travel posters show that
mountain on their advertisements. It is the mountain Hotoke no Z,
the Throne of Buddha. If you like it, we can go to the land office
and stake a claim for it. You’re entitled to much land, and it’s
still early enough that you can get whatever you want.

The sight of that mountain thrilled me. I felt that I
really was standing at the gateway to paradise. And suddenly a
voice inside me said, "Remember, remember: whatever good things
have happened to you, the best is yet to come." My hair raised on
end, and I felt an overwhelming excitement.

My heart began to race and in that moment I achieved
Instantaneity, that state of mind where one can live a lifetime in
a moment, and I saw all my plans and all my dreams and the twisted
path I would walk as I sought to live a life of passion, to change
the world. At the end of the path was the old Angelo, the man I
could become again. Someday there would be peace. Someday I would
forgive myself.

We stood on the hilltop, and Abriara pointed down to
the bottom of the dunes. A river entered the ocean there and the
tide was out. There were many rocks, and on the rocks was thick
blue moss, and among the moss were thousands of giant midnight blue
crabs a meter across the back at the carapace.

I recognized them as
manesuru onna,
mimicking
women.

Abriara laughed and said, "Let me speak the first
word."

We ran down the sand dune toward the mimicking women,
swooping upon them. They began clacking their carapaces as they
picked up shreds of seaweed and held them in front of them as if to
hide.

Abriara shouted, "Happy!"

And a thousand mimicking women whispered, "Happy!
Happy! Happy!" as they clacked and rattled and retreated into the
sea.

__________

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