Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (25 page)

He tells me that her brain can’t isolate
itself from the song anymore. She can’t cover her ears because
they’re inside her head, and if we operate on her, we risk losing
her, like the Big and Stupid Bob. Bob the ace with the scalpel. The
living vegetable over there, looking at me without seeing me from
the corner. Sometimes Check uses him as a flower vase or coat rack.
Other times he uses him as an altar to get in

CONTACT

with extrasensory beings.

And poor Bob, in the end, doesn’t care
either way.

“There’s only one solution, and that’s to
stop the receptive nodes of the epistemolia from continuing to
multiply in her brain,” Check says as if he were speaking about a
scientific experiment that went wrong. But that’s what Miranda has
turned out to be, in the end: A daring trick of nature that we’re
attempting to make fail. Attempting to put a dunce cap on the Great
Maker.

“
How?” I ask in a display
of originality. At least there’s no playwright nearby to throw my
cliches back at me. Point and shoot.

“
By replacing the parts of
her body that have atrophied with parts from another living,
independent being. A being that has never untied with the
epistemolia. Have you brought the suitcase with the
medicine?”

“
Yes, of course,
but...”

And he looks at me

With the most genuine expression of
ta-daaaah!

God, these double-entendres hurt, these
hidden meanings, when they’re so obvious that hiding them in the
back of your mouth is the same as shouting them at the top of your
lungs.

I am the solution, the part that Miranda
needs. That’s what Check, the crazy surgeon, proposes. And he knows
that if I love her enough, I’ll accept the sacrifice, the dance of
the scalpel, the orgy of blood.

I who made this trip to be
one with my beloved, to unite with her and keep my identity,
ours
, both of ours...
I’m going to have to disappear so that she can live.

And you know what?

I don’t care at all. The pleasure keeps
flowing through my body, falling and picking up speed down the
veins.

I am me. Always. Forever.

The only human being conscious of himself on
the face of the Earth when the eternal promise of “one day after
Calvary everyone will be brothers” is fulfilled.

Me. The guy with the snake.

4: ()

Miranda awakes. The recurrent dream has
returned. A giant tattooed eagle flew over the forest. It was huge,
too big for one person’s sanity. Its feathers consume the night and
spit fire. Its beak gleams with the gold of the Incas and the
silver of the Aztecs. Two streams of vapor emerge from the tips of
its wings, trails that follow its twists and turns between the
clouds, above and below the storm, drying itself with lightning.
The eagle is as old as the universe, as wise as the Everything that
is more than the sum of its parts. It’s so infinite that it’s hard
to understand.

Then she forgets it, forgets the eagle the
same way that all dreams that also might have meant something once
are forgotten at Dawn.

Miranda looks at herself. She’s on a cot in
a dusty room. What’s she doing there? From far away she hears a
kind of yelling, a jubilation made up of a thousand crowds that
shout together, calling her, asking her to unite with them, to take
care of them and spoil them and clean off their crap and make them
happy. And the jubilation would be unbearable if there wasn’t a
wall, a kind of barrier in her mind that shuts off the sound.

It’s as if someone were inside protecting
her from the deafening noise, making a wall with their hands.

Miranda stands up and looks at the new day.
The sun’s rays are warm. The dawn caresses her skin tenderly.

Her skin.

Then she asks out loud and no one answers,
not even the ones far away that seethe in a hell of lamentations.
Not even the one so close, whispering sweet things in her ear,
telling her that now she’s safe, and most important, that she’ll be
a single thing. A single being. A being made of two.

No voice can explain why half of her body is
tattooed with an enormous blue snake.

Original Title: Enciende una
vela solitaria

Translated by Sue Burke

1

Juanfran Jiménez has won
El Mundo newspaper’s digital edition short-short story contest
twice and has been a finalist for the Domingo Santos award on three
occasions —in 2002, 2008 and 2010. In addition, his story
“Intercambio” [“Interchange”] was a finalist for the 2004
University of the Basque Country’s Alberto Magno Prize for
Scientific Fantasy. He has published stories in several magazines
and anthologies, including
Artifex Cuarta
Época
and
Antología Z. The Best Stories of the Living Dead
3.

“Bodies” may be one of the stories that best
fulfills the plot premise which gave birth to this anthology:
stories centered on today’s human anxieties and quandaries in the
near future considered from a critical and creative perspective and
adapted to our present and its cultural references.

This futuristic thriller is set at the
beginnings of the 22nd century in a Europe that has become a
globalized pseudodemocratic bureaucracy where laws are approved
according to the interests of pressure groups and where neutrality,
anonymity and privacy in communications are a thing of the past.
Among the new opportunities that technology offers humanity is a
chemical-tourist industry for the interchange of minds. The body
market has been flooded with offers from “travel agencies” luring
potential customers by openly hawking the pleasures of sexual
tourism savored in an exotic location in a different, young,
beautiful body: an exchange in which those who temporarily rent
their bodies find a means to earn a living. Or, in the case of the
Indian Padovani, a means to escape his past.

“The international
division of work means that some countries specialize in winning
and others in losing.”

Open Veins of Latin
America
, Eduardo Galeano

I

Purgatory was a waiting
room without magazines. Padovani, “the Indian,” checked the wall
clock again. He wondered why no one published paper magazines
anymore, yet clocks like that one were still analog. In Europe,
maybe electronic books on a chain would be there to entertain
people fleeing from hell. He ground his teeth.

Three other men, all much
younger, also endured the waiting room. Two looked like they missed
a bottle, and not exactly to read the label. The third didn’t stop
staring at him. He wore a new suit generously lent to him by
someone two sizes fatter. Padovani smiled. The other man barely
blinked.
Probably dead with
fear
, he told himself,
a victim or executioner, but in any case inexperienced.
Practically a boy.

If Padovani, an
Amerindian, had raised any of his sons —in his defense, he at least
tried with two of them until their respective mothers left him— he
would have liked to teach them the art of disguise and
trickery.
The younger you start learning
something, the better.

The loudspeaker called
George Bartolomé. That was the name on his fake passport, so he
stood up and tried to walk naturally. He couldn’t avoid stumbling a
little, but that was normal: less than an hour ago they’d made a
hole in his head to install the network implant.

He left the waiting room
and walked down the hall. He still wasn’t safe. The man in the
loaned suit or any of the men he had encountered during the medical
tests could have been an assassin for Sink-Tooth, or a police
informer, or both. He hadn’t seen a single familiar face: they were
all too young. Anyway, he was glad to finally reach the security
post at Customs. Another step in the right direction, the one that
would take him out of the country and could save his
life.

“Is this the first time
you exchanged yourself with a European citizen, Señor...
Bartolomé?”

Padovani had already
filled out an infinitely long form with the appropriate lies
—starting with his age— that answered those questions. It was the
same paper that the Europol officer held with two fingers that
weren’t quite as thick as the neck of a boa. To answer
“Can’t you read?”
wasn’t
an option.

When the Indian was 20
years old, which for him was almost like prehistory, he had spent
some time in Madrid. Immigration laws were already tough back then,
but you could still enter the Old World if you had enough
money.
Who knows if I have some grandchild
kicking around the corners of Gran Vía right now,
Padovani thought.

“
The first time,” he
answered.

It was the only truth on
the form. He’d never made an exchange, not with a European or
anyone. That’s why he had a fresh scar on his head and still felt a
little dizzy. He made an effort to pay attention to the police
officer’s explanation, who had put a contract from FarmaCom on the
table and was reading the most important clauses aloud.
Now I’m the one who doesn’t know how to
read,
the Indian thought.

“
I remind you, Señor
Bartolomé, that your special visa is strictly temporary and lasts
one month. You may not leave the internment center at any time, or
else you will be detained and expelled ahead of time.” He tapped
his finger on a paragraph in the contract. “In addition, you will
not receive your payment.”

The Indian widened his eyes and tried to
pretend that one thousand five hundred euros meant a lot to him.
The officer set the papers aside and turned toward the computer
screen.

“
If you know a European
citizen, you may ask for scheduled visits in the internment center.
Do you wish to do so, Señor Bartolomé?”

The Indian had his own plans for visiting
people in Europe. Specifically, one person whose name was not
unfamiliar to the police. In any case, he would prefer to go to
meet his old friend himself and not face-to-face in jail. Padovani
pretended to be confused.

“
I don’t know anyone,
sir.”

The police officer marked
a box on the screen, then left his seat, which squeaked, possibly
in relief, to accompany him to the vacating room. It was smaller
than Padovani had imagined, and a panicky feeling grew when the
officer shut the door and pointed to a gray cloth chair that must
have been acquired in an auction at some bankrupt dump. Padovani
took a tissue from his pocket and tried to wipe off the grime
before he sat down. He wasn’t surprised to see the police pull on
some latex gloves big enough to put over his head.

“
Are you allergic to any
medicine?”

He answered no. He hadn’t
taken much medicine in his life. On the other hand, he had
experienced sporadic consumption of almost all the recreational
drugs in existence and was still alive, which could be taken as a
vote of confidence for his resistance to chemicals.

“
This is a pill for
neuronal vacating.” The officer held it out so he could study it.
“It’s a pharmaceutical authorized by the European
Commission.”

In a monotone, the officer
recited a series of legal stipulations. He must have spent years
repeating that same text out loud. He didn’t care anymore if his
listeners were paying attention. Padovani licked his lips. He was
very close, but that droning would never end. He began to get
nervous.

He tried to concentrate on
not showing his nervousness and listening to the officer’s
explanation. In spite of its name, the pill —whose components would
be the property of FarmaCom even when they had been assimilated
into his body, Clause 375.c— did not vacate the brain. They were
actually used to improve neuronal plasticity until it exceeded
human limits. The hardware and protocol of the IPv12 network did
the rest of the work: codification, secure transport of the
cerebral electrochemical map, reconfiguration of synapses. But the
blessed pill was key to letting the rest of it happen. Without it,
without the biological element, digital exchange of personalities
was not possible. It was something Padovani would pay close
attention to when he was finally in Europe.

“
Do you need a glass of
water to swallow the pill?”