A gust of wind kicked up over a field of yellow cotton, sending fluff balls to scatter in the air with the stench of ether. Their pollens swelled my sinuses shut. An in that field a pack of creatures that could have been yellow wolves with hairless faces triumphantly whistled thier joy as they fed from the carcass of an overturned armadillo.
At sunset a gnarled gray tree sprouted flowers so white that the last dying light reflected from them like torches. All these things magnified the ache in my head. I wanted to claw my eyes and puncture my eardrums.
Ribbons of yellow and green and purple and blue Oparu no tako filled the evening sky—like veins, the veins of the living womb enclosing an embryo.
I realized that this planet was a living thing, with an ecology, a biosphere of its very own. I felt a mystical sense of discovery. What will grow in this womb? I wondered. The air was itchy with electricity. Huge thunderheads loomed on the horizon, like the residue of dozens of mushroom clouds after a nuclear attack.
All my instincts screamed for me to hide. I wept and cursed and found myself digging up the floorboards as I searched for a medkit with painkillers.
Then my body must have closed off my senses, for l lost consciousness. My subconscious sent me terrible dreams where images of Baker were superimposed over images of Earth. We were bouncing over the desert at twilight. Voices jabbered in my ears, nonsensical conversations carried on by people long dead. "Did you see Señora Cardosa?" my mother was saying. "She’s gotten so fat. Such a shame."
My father shouted at her, "I don’t care about that! How will we live if they raise our taxes again?"
I listened to the babble as if it were of no more import than the drone of a bee. In the desert sky simple strands of ribbon floated high in the air where the opal kites should have been. And along the horizon I could make out something that ran upright like a person. I struggled to pick out details and my eyes turned to telescopes. I saw vividly two desert ladies stumbling over cracked red stones, their arms torn off, blood dripping from the stumps at their shoulders. I blinked and tried to block out the sight, and they pleaded, "Angelo, Angelo, come back and feed us!"
I knew those voices—the child Tatiana and the woman Tamara.
I reeled away and everything went black. Zavala began speaking in calm, informative tones. There was much laughter in the background, as if he were at a party. I leaned forward to hear and arms restrained me, clasping my chest. I tried to speak but my lips were burned by wind and sun. I realized I was wearing my helmet and people were chattering over helmet mikes. I couldn’t see. The arms around me were the arms of Zavala holding me as he whispered in my ear. Zavala said, "Of course every culture appears equally evil from the outside, but if you look inside, you’ll see that most oranges are cancerous. This is what gives you such bad breath, listening to people who’ve been programmed by social engineers. But I’ve known some people who’ve been programmed on chromosome 117 at gene 21755394200001, and they’re perfectly resistant to viruses and visitations. Stick the knife in his belly, you lucky cabrón, and watch his eyeballs shine!" I peered up through a haze. Zavala wasn’t holding me. The grinning head of a purple river dragon stared at me with tiny black eyes among folds of fat.
I blacked out again. Two eyes shone down on me from above—one blue, one white. It was Flaco, with a slash of lightning for a wicked, idiotic grin. He spoke in a voice of thunder, "Hola, Angelo, where have you been? We’ve all been waiting for you here in paradise, and now the party is about to begin. There are duros at the vendor in the feria, banana flavored or passion flower."
"I’m sorry," I said. I couldn’t think where I’d been. "I got lost. The war. Killing people."
"Hah! Too bad," Flaco said. "That’s what happens when you serve an evil society. Now you’re a high priest to a congregation of demons."
The accusation cut me like a scalpel. I began to shake my head.
"Don’t deny it," Flaco said. "Inhuman socialistas, good for nothing but fertilizing the plantations! Ah, but we have all your favorite flavors of duros. Banana-flavored or passion flower—which will it be?"
He demanded an answer with his gaze. His eyes penetrated my very being. I shouted,"Banana!"
"Wrong!" Flaco cried.
I realized I was a fool. I should have opted for passion flower, so that I could live a life filled with passion. Even Zavala would have known the answer. "I’m sorry," I pleaded, hoping for a second chance.
I stared up at dark cloud. Rojin and Shinju were disappearing behind them. We were in the desert again, and had just reached the lip of a dark canyon.
Abriara sat with me, leaning against the rail of the hovercraft with her arms enfolding me. "Shhh," she whispered. "Be calm." She removed her own helmet and placed it on my head. The neck rings were too small, and I could still smell sugary turpines. The wind gusted in a wild fit, bucking the hovercraft. Out in the canyon a long pillar of stone pointed toward heaven, like a solitary finger. From this rock issued a plume of ghostly blue and silver forms, like sheets of cloth or willow wisps, that silently climbed into the night.
Everyone was watching them. "Look at them," Mavro said in awe, "Have you ever seen anything like it?" There was a whispering of sand blowing over stones.
Everyone just sat and watched for a long time, and I realized dully that it was a flock of bioluminescent oparu no tako riding the thermals up out of the canyon and higher into the air. Their underbellies shone with pale blue, and my eyes registered their body heat as platinum. A dull red bolt of lightning struck the distant rim of the canyon.
Mavro fired up the engine on the hovercraft. He skirted the edge of the desert.
The wind whistled over my helmet. The canyonwas but a crack in the world, and I kept feeling we’d slide into it. I began breathing heavily. I closed my eyes, tried to block out sensation. Think of other things, I decided. Occupy your mind. I held my helmet and tried to imagine my home in Panamá, the good times in the feria. The pain was unbearable. I moaned.
"Are you awake?" Abriara asked. She leaned close to hear my answer. The microphone on my helmet was off, so she touched her forehead to my helmet so she could listen.
"Yes."
"What’s wrong? You’ve been passing out and shouting at us, laughing one moment and raging the next. I think the blow to the head made you crazy, but I don’t understand why it took you so long to get this way?"
"Swelling of the brain," I said. "And sensory overload. Ecoshock. There are too many strange scents and noises. I can’t handle it."
"We had two years to get acclimated," Abriara said.
"After six months the computer began dubbing in background noises and smells on us."
"Yes, that is the way it should be done. Get acquainted with the terrain slowly. "I lay there and closed my eyes. I wanted to take off the helmet so I could rub my temples.
"What can we do for you?" Abriara asked.
"Wrap something around this helmet. Seal out the smells and noise. That would help. Then just talk to me, help me keep my mind off things. "
I heard the shredding of cloth and Abriara began wrapping my neck. "I could put a resin coat over this material and block you out totally, but I don’t know what the fumes might do," she said as she worked. "What do you want to talk about?"
"I had a bad dream—" I said, "a dead man accused me of serving an evil society."
Abriara chuckled, a lighthearted laugh. "I suppose so. If—as the social engineers contend—every society is equally evil, then anyone who serves a society would be serving an evil society."
She said it with such ease I don’t believe she understood my concern.
"Ah! Ah! But if a society is evil, then one must ask, ‘What is evil?’" I thought I sensed a way out of this—if I clouded the issue and became hopelessly snarled in philosophical arguments, I wouldn’t have to come to grips with the sense of guilt that threatened to overwhelm me.
Perfecto standing at his turret said, "Violation of another person’s territory is the r
oot of all evil. It is the sole definition of evil." His words surprised me, partly because my helmet mike wasn’t on and I hadn’t realized he could hear me, partly because his answer was so totally unexpected.
Perfecto continued. "When one person steals, he violates another’s territory. When one person kills, he violates another’s territory. When one person sleeps with the spouse of another, he violates another’s territory. When someone lies about you, he violates the good name you have attained through your actions. With you humans, all your moral codes are ultimately based on your territorial natures. All that is evil can be seen as arising from violating another’s territory."
Perfecto’s answer was such a novel concept that I had to ask, "Then what is good?"
Perfecto said, "To allow others into your own territory; to deny your own territorialism: it is good to give your money to the poor. It is good to give your coat to the naked. It is good to give the homeless shelter in your own home. It is good to perform a labor for another so that you enlarge his domain while diminishing your own. You humans believe it is good to deny your own territorialism. "
I couldn’t accept such a simplistic philosophy. Perhaps Perfecto was just seeking to distract me with petty arguments, I wondered, and therefore he was baiting me. Yet he’d spoken along a similar vein when he said I’d always murdered to defend my own territory. I’d never considered the possibility that he’d have developed a whole moral philosophy based upon territorialism. I considered his words. "It seems to me that there must be goods and evils that have nothing to do with territorialism," I said, though I could not then and cannot now think of an act of good or evil that is not tied to the concept.
Perfecto thought a moment. "No. Territorialism is the sole biological medium by which you humans define good and evil. Some moral codes have nothing to do with good and evil but simply designate a person as a member of a culture, and because of this you humans have sometimes imagined that good and evil are only relative, that they have no basis in a biological or spiritual reality. For example, a devout Jew may look at another Jew who denies the need for circumcision and think the man evil, but everyone outside the culture realizes that the act of denying or accepting circumcision is not a moral question. It is simply an act of entering into a culture. You wear the clothes that you do and use the expressions that you do simply to associate yourself with your culture. Yet if you were to suddenly dress in black and take long walks after midnight, other members of your culture would assert that you were evil and dangerous.
"You humans have always codified your rules for good and evil based entirely upon your territorial instincts. That is all good and evil is. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed it in the past four thousand years. I—"
I cut him off. A thought struck me, a challenging thought. "Then, according to your moral theories, Perfecto, since your territorial nature has been genetically strengthened, would you not say that you chimeras are naturally more moral than we humans?" This question seemed very important, for some socialists claimed they’d strengthen morality by diminishing human territorialism. They believed true communism could only be achieved when we no longer thought of ourselves as individuals, but as part of a group. Other socialists claimed this would only lead them to design a slothful race that had no motivate to increase their productivity.
"Perhaps. On instinct we are more aware of what is socially acceptable among our own kind. We chimeras are less disposed to violate the territories of others, yet we are also less disposed to give up our own territories—to be good," Perfecto apologized. "But perhaps the degree of one’s territorialism does not matter—what does matter is how one acts toward one’s territories and the territories of others. When we sin against others we pay a higher price in guilt."
"Then why do you fight this war? Why do you not recognize and respect the territories of Motoki and the Yabajin? Why did you kill Lucío?"
Perfecto hung his head and did not answer. Abriara said softly, with anger, "We chimeras do not respect the territories of humans because you have never respected ours. Always you have feared us—because we are strange, because we are stronger than you and smarter and more powerful. So your people took away our homes, kicked us out of our own countries, denied us equal pay, and tried to deny us our self-respect. Humans have lost the right’ to be treated as moral equals. You ask Perfecto why he killed Lucío. He did it for you! So you would not—"
"Enough!" Perfecto shouted.
Abriara continued, "—so you would not bear a burden of guilt for murdering Lucío! He saw how your guilt ravages you, and—"
"Silence!" Perfecto yelled. A growl came from his throat, and he began shuddering. He was weeping. I realized that Abriara was right. Perfecto murdered Lucío so he could take my own burden of guilt upon himself, and he’d poured himself a cup he couldn’t drink.
I slept again, a sleep not so encumbered by evil dreams.
I woke briefly once and we were hurtling through a storm unlike anything I’d ever seen—dark red night was upon us and clouds thundered. Three tornadoes were touching down upon the desert floor just ahead, yet I felt a peculiar lack of concern.
Perfecto was driving into the storm and Abriara huddled on the floor ahead of me, her head wrapped in a rag to protect her from stinging sand. I considered Perfecto’s philosophy of territorialism and looked at my own concepts of good and evil through his eyes. Though I could see things exactly as he said and though his philosophy has colored my thoughts ever since, I struggled to find holes in his logic. I could not believe that chimeras were genetically engineered to be more moral than humans. Yet I remembered the Nicita Idealist Socialists, the non-territorial humans they had sought to engineer, and the tales I had heard of the inhuman murders committed by those creatures.
I thought long about the people whose territories we violate, and those to whom we give our own territories, and realized that most of my life I had done neither—given and taken nothing. As a result, most people I had known were just strangers who passed me on the street:
I woke a second time in darkness, in a still cave while wind raged outside. I was no longer wearing Abriara’s helmet, and the cave smelled damp and full of dust.
My dream of Flaco disturbed me. He’d accused me of serving an evil society. If my society was evil, I considered, then I was evil for seeking its rewards. It would be like accepting money from a criminal. I marveled that all through my elderly years men had called me a caballero, a gentleman, and I’d considered it a compliment. But when one looks at the word caballero, one sees that it stems from the same root — chivalry, and to call a man a caballero is to say that he is a gentleman, a man of fine breeding, bold and strong, powerful in war. Only in a society of murderers could such an epithet be considered a compliment.
The social engineers contend that all societies are equally evil. This belief allows them to create any world they want, regardless of the suffering it will cause. I decided that their philosophy is a ruse, meant only to fool themselves.
I could not live in a society engineered by such people. Yet the only vehicle I’d ever seen for enacting a change in a society was the one used by the Idealist Socialists. Their techniques always sickened me on a gut level. The first creed of the
Idealist Socialists begins: "We believe that in order to achieve a harmonious relationship among men, we form a new society with nobler ideals that exalt mankind above the individual man."
Those are fine-sounding words. They simply say that they believe the society more important than the individual, and I’ve never been certain of the virtue of arguing the point.
However, they believe that for a program of social engineering to have the desired effect, the community to be engineered must exist in cultural isolation. Thus a fundamental creed of the Idealist Socialists is that for their "noble experiment" to succeed they must destroy competing cultures either by infiltration or genocide. This may seem a fine solution to a person who believes in Nicita Idealist Socialism, but for those
of us who are not so inclined the idea stinks.
As I pondered, I realized the Idealist Socialists pollute their own society as they create it. They pee in their own drinking water, so to speak, for they pretend that their ideals can flourish in society while individuals become corrupt—pretend it’s possible to set dedicated socialists to undermining the freedom of others and murdering innocent civilians without having their own people lose the love of humanity that Nicita Idealist Socialism purports to engender.
This is why those of us who view Idealist Socialism from outside the culture are so easily persuaded that the entire system is evil. We see the murders, the treachery, the destroyed lives and lack of respect for humanity the Nicita Idealist Socialist outlook engenders, and we are revolted by the whole system. As Abriara had said, every society appears evil to those outside it. I could easily see the evil in Idealist Socialism. But I’d taken longer to see evil in my own society.
I determined to never again serve an evil society. I’d never serve my society. I began to look into my heart, examine my beliefs and consider how to root them out.
But how can a man free himself from his subconscious beliefs? I wondered.
As Abriara had pointed out, we each have thousands of expectations thrust upon us by our culture. I expect people to wear shoes and comb their hair. I couldn’t root out even such minor expectations. So how would I root out attitudes ingrained over a lifetime, attitudes I wasn’t even aware of?
It would be easier for a fish to exist outside water. I began to see that I’d have to leave my society. To stay would pollute me. Among all the petty utopias floating between the stars, I reasoned, there must be a place where I could find peace.
I slept again and woke in searing sunlight and the wind was whistling through pale trees that waved as if they’d break. Bright clouds raced across the sky and the ground was wet. A storm had just passed.
On My Way to Paradise Page 46
