Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (37 page)

Luckily, the pious and virtuous Earth had
desisted and, finally, two years ago, had wound up officially
recognizing our independence: with no more wars, boycotts, or
attacks with biological weapons. All that they now reserved for
themselves alone.

Something tickled my
entrails. I couldn’t see Laurel like that, yet I couldn’t I blame
my companion. In some future, Ajax had seen... No, I didn’t even
want to think about that.

“
They will be a marvelous
family,” he added.

I watched the four of them
draw slowly away. The wobbly gaits of the two hundred-year-old
natives, the same wobble in Laurel’s hybrid body, and the young
girl’s trot as she tried to keep pace with the three giants, from
now on, her husbands and wife.

I thought of our family, of how it was
flourishing; of how Mars was bearing Martian fruits.

I sighed, calmly, feeling that everything
had been worthwhile.

When Oileo comes out of
the sand room, he bore the baby in his arms. He has just given
birth but he is strong and completely recovered. He holds the boy
in his hand and proudly shows their new son to the child’s other
progenitors.

Ajax lets out a whoop that was once a
rallying cry in war and which now greeted a new life. Everyone
imitates him. Abacus hugs me, excited.

Laurel’s family is large
and generous with life. They already have four children, ten
grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and since a few months ago,
a new husband: Diomedes, therefore making up a quintet, the most
usual family structure on Mars.

I let my mind wander back
to memories of the battles, when this native being saved Ajax’s
life in the heat of battle, in Noctis Labyrinthus.

Now I see him cry with
happiness at the birth of his little son, who unquestionably has
Laurel and Gloria’s eyes —at the same time.

The hybrids are unpredictable, their bodies
and minds are constantly further away from the primordial human;
they are increasingly more Martian, because Martianness is
something that they themselves define as they evolve.

Telamón picks the baby up
again and shows him to the rest of the family, to Gloria’s parents,
to his cousins, to us.

My grandson is in my arms now: four little
hands, four little eyes, a tiny slit for a mouth, gills flapping on
his cheeks, and skin the color of Mount Olympus... he has my hair:
red on red.

For me, as for any inhabitant of Mars, this
child is beautiful, a jewel without price.

“
Capadocia,” Oileo
whispers to me, “that will be his name. It’s fitting that it be
so.”

I get a knot in my throat.
Mister Capadocia’s wrinkled face appears in my memory, calling me
to play with Borzoi. I guess that I should see myself very like him
at my two hundred and something years.

“
Then the Bel Air will be
yours, eh?” I joke with the baby.

The infant smiles with his
tiny mouth. Perhaps he’s already contemplating his
future.

The foreman shouts at him and hits him
again.

The native falls, drags itself, and when it
moves to get up, feels the whip on its back again. Thick drops of
blood fall on the Martian sand: red on red.

The native, barely a child
of nine, looks out of the corner of its eye and hunches its head.
There is no resentment in its look. Its nature forces it to obey
the Terran: that’s what it was created for together with its four
siblings, to obey and to work.

“
Come on, you dogs! Test
tube bastards! Think of the long life we’ve given you and stop
lazing.”

Perhaps that’s where the
foreman’s hate comes from, the hundreds and hundreds of years of
life that the Earth gives them as payment for their un-asked-for
existence.

All the children are the
same age, they’re all males although with wombs; their green bodies
fold flexibly under the sonic whips of their foremen, even though
they’re already larger than the foremen. Their legs with inverse
double articulations endure days of racing, their lungs breathe the
Martian atmosphere semi-transformed by oxygen plants, their color
makes them easily locatable in the field to the eyes of the
terraforming engineers under whose orders they’ll be for the next
years. Their strength lets them work hard, even during the dust
storms. Their design didn’t neglect to give them a privileged
brain, able to perform unique strategies that let them resolve
difficulties without seeking assistance from their human
superiors.

They’re the only forty
that exist, and their genes will die with them. That’s how it was
planned by the Earth: they are a race in itself, a condemned race
that was born extinct.

If at any point they were able to fecundate
between themselves or with other human beings, they would only be
able to breed their own jailers: pure humans.

Wasn’t that the worst of
slaveries, the most ingenious ever designed?

The training camp was hard. I think of my
own childhood in Olympic and I feel fortunate.

The child turns to receive
a blow from the whip but this time it doesn’t fall, merely looks at
the horizon. Its silvered eyes, which see even in the thickest
duststorm or the darkest night, are looking beyond, I could even
swear they are looking at me.

I recognize him with a
tremor: By Zeus! It’s Ajax,
my
Ajax! A new blow is aimed at his back, now he
does, finally, fall... He falls or do I fall?

The blow has brought me back to reality, to
my being, my existence. I am not Jedediah although I have been him
for two hundred years... No! For mere seconds!

How can this be?

“
Come on, you worm, get up
and run! What are you looking at?”

I get up, groggy. I still
don’t quite know who I am: the terraforming operative Ajax or that
Jedediah?

I run with all my strength, soon I leave
behind the foreman shouting that I slow down. I ignore him. I enter
the showers.

Telamón and Oileo are waiting for me. Their
looks are strange.

They have seen something as well, I could
swear it.

We eat in silence, as always. Diomedes
approaches us for the nightly exercises.

That night it’s terrain
recognition in the Phlegra Mountains.

Huddled in the inclement cold, I remember
part of those experiences that I lived today, an entire life in a
few seconds; feelings that overwhelm me. In this mountain we
spoke... or will speak of love, in this place... Love? A pure
human?

A few meters to my right, Diomedes trembles.
Twenty meters above, upon a cornice, Telamón and Oileo have sat
close to one another.

What is happening?

Sometimes we’ve spoken
amongst ourselves, in the barracks, in half-whispers and secret
codes, about visions of the future. We know that we can see what
will happen within a few minutes or hours... Alcinous says he’s
managed to see up to three days ahead... but what happened this
afternoon... An entire life in barely a few seconds!

I focus on what I lived
this afternoon. For a few minutes, even, I hadn’t known who I was.
In the vision, I had seen myself in the eyes of this man. I had
heard his voice recounting events as they happened, as if they were
my own. And, above all, I had felt what he felt. And that was
disturbing because, what he felt for me was love.

“
Love,” I whisper, “how
can a human come to love me and with such intensity?”

I read the orders clearly in the dance of
lights in the distance: I should climb down on the side the sun
sets, while the other group should do the same on the rising
side.

I get up and begin to descend the slope.

But there is a strange
feeling of emptiness within me. A trembling in my hearts, as if I
was about to lose everything, although how could I lose, I who have
nothing, who doesn’t even have ten honors?

“
Jedediah....?
Jedediah!”

I stop. The clamoring in
my viscera stops. It’s a vibration.

I take another step. I am losing him, and
that hurts me, but not in my body.

What to do? They have
given me an order, I can’t disobey it. That is
impossible!

But there is someone who could come to love
me...

“
Ajax!”

The shout comes from high up on the spur
behind me.

I turn. Telamón and Oileo are standing,
holding hands. Diomedes is at their side.

In my memory, that makes sense.

I get up slowly, everything within me is
guilt and desperation: I am disobeying an order. But there is
something more beyond that curtain of opprobrium, something that
shines warm and gives me strength to overcome the conditioning.

On arriving, my eyes get
tangled in that knot of hands between Telamón and Oileo. It is
something strange, promising. I look at Diomedes and whisper, “Some
day...”

“
In Noctis Labyrinthus,”
he finishes.

“
Thank you!”

He bows his head in a subtle bow, a greeting
of honor between warriors.

Then they have also seen it! They have seen
the future.

I begin to understand, if I pull away from
them and follow the order, my future, our future, will no longer be
that one. But if I disobey and go down the mountain on this side,
everything I saw will be real. Or, at least, it will start to be
so.

As if he had read my mind,
Telamón says to me, “It will be a difficult path. We will have to
destroy this world and build it again.”

I know.

“
Please, Ajax, you know
who we are waiting for!”

Oileo’s voice is a
childish plea. But he is thinking of my daughter, my daughter who
won’t be born for a hundred years.

I look at my companions.

Slowly, others approach: Alcinous, Reenor,
Laodamante.

They are full of yearnings for freedom,
dignity, justice; but in me, there is just that desire for love,
for recognition, for shelter. However, I find no discrepancies
between those desires.

“
Jedediah,” I whisper, and
begin to climb down on the rising side.

There, under the reflectors of the oxygen
plant, shines the pink car of the new conditioning genetic
engineer. He is a young man who greets us with joy. He is
different: his voice holds no hate.

I know that he will be essential for our
cause.

“
Well, who do we have
here? Seven, eh? I had asked for four but...,” he places his
breathing mask and scratches his head. “You want to be together,
no? I understand, when I was your age, no one could separate me
from my friends.”

He took our hands and
placed the mark on our pinkies: (“group 5, class 2, neofauna
—Capadocia”).

“
Come on, then. You can
call me Capadocia. No, not in the truck, here! I’m going to carry
you in a vehicle worthy of Mars. What do you think?”

The pink Chevy is
enormous, anachronous and lovely.

“
A ‘56 Bel Air.
Turbo-fire V8 motor, obviously converted for a
CO
₂
atmosphere. 250 horsepower”

None of us understand what he says, but he
seems excited. We settle ourselves as we can.

“
Good,” he says,
satisfied, as he revs the motor, “now I’m going to bring you so you
can see what we’ll be working with from now on, until you grow. I
call them sleipnir, like Odin’s horse, get it?” He looks at us in
the rear window, shakes his head. “The terraformers didn’t care
much about your education, did they? Oh well, it doesn’t matter,
I’ll teach you mythology. I have books to lend you. In fact, I have
books about everything imaginable,” he pats the electronic reader
in his pocket. “Yes, sir, we’re going to have fun together on the
farm,” and he taps the horn.

At first, we’re
frightened, but then we begin to laugh.

Capadocia laughs in turn and then sounds the
horn again.

I realize that this is the
first time I’ve ever laughed.

In my mind a familiar voice, a beloved
voice, takes shape:

“Ever since I can
remember, I’ve lived in Olympic.

Although my father says I
wasn’t born here, and that we arrived here when I was very little;
some ten years ago, I guess.

Here my sister died at
birth. He never speaks about my mother.”

I smile at the landscape of the Peridier
crater, as we approach it. The sun rises dusty, but not my future.
Red on red.

“
I’m going to meet you
now, my love,” I whisper into the night, wrapped in clouds of dust
and the scent of vinyl. “I’m going to meet you now.”

Original Title: Memoria

Translated by Lawrence Schimel