I remembered my mother in the years after I went to Mexico to study morphogenic pharmacology. I knew now that my mother hadn’t been raped and murdered. She’d lived pleasantly with my father in a suburb for many years, and I recalled snatches of conversations we’d held over the phone, a bright recollection of nostalgic joy I’d felt once while visiting her for Christmas.
I recalled riding north on a maglev through a jungle and seeing some young men by the tracks wrestling to pull an enormous anaconda out to its full length. The smell of cigar smoke was strong. I wondered as I lived the memory why this Christmas had been important, and I recalled that my mother had been Catholic most of her life, but when she was sixty-eight she’d suddenly converted to Baptist.
She’d insisted on being re-baptized by immersion, and had sent money so I could take the maglev up to Guatemala for the ceremony.
My sister Eva had snubbed her on the occasion and my mother was deeply hurt. I remember being on my mother’s back terrace on a sunny day and seeing a stack of comic books by her hammock: the comics were all Christian comics about bad people going good, gangster kids in the ghettos finding Jesus—Pablo Little Frog Meets Christ, The Stiletto and the Bible.
My father sat with me, drinking coffee for breakfast and laughing about my mother’s conversion. "She lies in her hammock all day and reads those comics," my father had said, thinking it a good joke.
"Noooo—" I countered.
"Sure!" my father said, waving his hand. "She even sleeps with them out in that hammock all night, instead of sleeping with me!"
I worried for her health if she slept out at night, and remembered thinking that instead of growing old, my mother was growing strange.
She began to phone me regularly, and at every call she’d tell me of some evangelist who would be speaking in Colón in the near future, urging me to go see them. Several times she broke down and cried as she told me of how she feared for my spiritual welfare. My mother died suddenly from an aneurysm two years later, and my father blamed the sudden death on her habit of sleeping out-of-doors.
Even though my wife and I had been separated for seven years, we went to my mother’s funeral together, and thus the memory of my mother recalled my time with Elena. The Elena in the dreams looked nothing like the Elena of my memory.
She had no facial semblance to Tamara that I could see, and I realized that Tamara had planted that memory so that I’d feel bound to her.
Elena was plump and short with light brown hair, and she wasn’t too bright. When I married her she seemed to have strength of character, a drive about her, that made me love her.
She would talk about her sex life as openly as she would offer her opinion on a local politician, and I confused this openness with basic honesty. I’d met her in college. Like me, she’d spent part of her youth in a village in Guatemala, and she lacked the social sense of one raised in the city. Our ineptitude at handling social affairs made us cling to one other.
We married soon out of college, and she tried to drive me toward earning a fortune. She got pregnant on our honeymoon and, when we got home, she announced that I should go to Miami and set up a practice and earn lots of money selling rejuvenations for la nina. She felt convinced the child would be a girl from the moment she learned she was pregnant.
My wife had often seen holos chronicling the wealth and decadence of families in Miami, and in each show the wealthy seemed to have a morphogenic pharmacologist on hand, someone to make sure that their youth never faded. I found more decadence than wealth in Miami.
Elena gave birth to a son, and when I returned to Guatemala I saw Victoriano for the first time. The joy and sense of mystery that washed over me upon seeing Victoriano ... . In that moment, it was as if my son had been born to me.
Elena clung to me for seven years, and I soon decided a lark to set up practice in Panamá, but always she nagged about our dilapidated little home, the roaches under the sink, my general lack of ambition.
I came home early from work in the feria one day and began shaping the fern beds behind the house, digging at the roots of the ferns so they wouldn’t grow into the lawn.
I sat in a chair in the shade and was drinking a beer when a young Rodrigo sporting a beer belly rushed around the back of the house shouting, "I think Elena is leaving you! She has Victoriano and she’s taking everything!"
I raced to the front of the house and found Elena setting all of her things on the curb. "This family rots from poverty!" she shrieked.
She took my son, and I never saw him again. I got letters from doctors, statements of monies owed for services due. My beloved son was taken from me, and I was left with nothing but a financial drain.
Then I went to my mother’s funeral and not only did Elena come, but I met Victoriano. He was twelve at the time, tall and broad of chest, much like his mother. He wore his shirt open so that he could advertise his manly features. He was quick of wit and I thought that he was charming and funny.
After the funeral, he began to answer my letters. When he was twenty three he married a fine Spanish girl far above his station. He moved to Gatun and bought a house just three blocks from me.
The knowledge that I’d had a son who lived just down the street came as a shock to me and filled me with awe. I wondered where he was now, and wondered what he’d thought of the news reports that proclaimed his father to be a desperado.
Victoriano had had me over for dinner every Sunday, and we had many good times. After three years his wife gave birth to a daughter named Tatiana, and I loved her as if she were my own child.
Elena had robbed me of the enjoyment of seeing Victoriano grow up, so I took all the joy I could in helping to raise Tatiana. The memories Tamara restored to me of the girl were exact. The young child with the fine chiseled features and dark shining hair was the same child I still held in my fragments of memory, and I knew that my memory was true.
Tatiana was a child of quick intellect, as first children often are, and from the time she was three weeks old I held great hopes that she’d develop a fine mind. She was a very loving child, and her embraces when I left her home were always fierce, passionate, and prolonged. Her hair always smelled clean, and often I envied the man who would someday marry such an intelligent, passionate woman with clean hair.
It seemed to me to be the best combination of attributes a woman could attain.
Often Flaco would come and visit me at my booth in the feria. He was a friend of Victoriano as much as of me and he’d always bring a small gift of candy or a flower for Tatiana. Flaco always worried for her future and would speak about the encroachments of the socialists on our borders and murmur about bad things to come.
I recalled a neighborhood cat, a street cat with no name, a gray female that lived off canaries and garbage. The cat had given birth to kittens just a few weeks before I fled Earth, and Flaco and Tatiana and I had gone to great lengths to capture a kitten from a local drainage pipe. I remembered the snatch of the dream, of Tatiana asking me to keep the kitten for a few days while we schemed on how to get her parents to let her raise it, and I understood why that kitten had bothered me so, why I had such a strong emotional attachment to it in my dreams.
I remembered coming home that day I first brought Tamara to my house; and as Flaco and I sat on the porch and drank beer waiting for the spider monkey to walk up our street, Flaco had spoken of the socialistas and their encroachments and wept bitterly at our prospects for the future.
Tamara had given me memories of pain and hate to make me violent, to make me kill Arish.
Then she’d cut me off from all my memories of my family, of my loved ones and close friends, because she wanted someone to take her off planet. She couldn’t afford to leave me with any emotional ties, any moral obligations that would lead me to stay.
So she’d severed all the memories of my family, and nearly all the memories of my friendship with Flaco, and had left me lying on the bedroom floor.
I’d wondered how a bowl of
milk had appeared on the back porch for the kitten, and I remembered placing it there myself. But Tamara couldn’t even leave me that, couldn’t even let me have an attachment to a dumb animal.
The memories began to twist, and I felt uneasy. The memories revealed next were not associated at all with people I felt close to—rather they were memories of small things I’d done, of moral choices made.
I recalled an old woman I helped make young; a dona Yolanda, a woman who was something of a bruja, a reputed witch, down in Colombia. People from many villages came and offered me small sums of money to buy her a rejuvenation. At first I’d declined, for it sounded to me as if she were robbing the poor by claiming to have mysterious powers. But by chance I learned from a compadre something of her methods: she went from village to village and cared for the sick without price. She’d been trained as a nurse, but she often used local herbs to heal because her patients were too poor to buy medications. Because of her use of herbs, the locals proclaimed her a bruja even though she didn’t claim magical powers.
If the woman had been Catholic, she’d have been sainted. The more I learned of her, the more impressed I became, until finally I mixed the meager offerings of the peasants with my own savings and purchased a rejuvenation.
I did it for life. I did it because she was a woman who knew how precious and fragile human life was.
And I remembered the times I wept and prayed and struggled in an effort to help my patients. A young couple from Costa Rica once came to me with a child that had been born without arms. The parents couldn’t afford to keep buying prosthetics to fit the child as it grew, but the young boy was unable to grow arms because of a seemingly noncomplex reversal in one sequence of genes. Usually one can simply take a cell sample, repair the damaged cell, clone the child, and get the arm buds from a developing embryo to graft into the damaged flesh. It is no great matter after that to grow the arms.
However, this child had no tolerance for the grafted buds, and we failed twice to heal him. I finally had to resort to preparing a virus to repair the damage to the specific gene, then I had to keep the child in a viral isolation chamber in my home for two months while I made sure the infection was complete.
After that it was no great thing to generate some arms. However, while we had the child in the house, Elena and I let his mother live with us. Elena gave me hell for it, nagging me night and day, accusing me of lusting after the child’s mother. She remained convinced that my deed was motivated by sexual attraction for the child’s mother. I couldn’t deter her from thinking this, and since I felt that regaining the child’s health was more important than the anguish I received from Elena’s wagging tongue, I ignored my wife. This incident seemed pivotal in leading to my eventual divorce.
The list of moral choices went on. I’d done similar things many times, and the Angelo Osic that Tamara showed me was not the man I felt myself to be. He seemed too kind, too generous, too giving. I could understand why Tamara had threatened me with guilt, why she’d told me that "if you ball me over, I die." The Angelo she showed me couldn’t have resisted such a threat. But I was not that man anymore.
Last of all I recalled my very first moral choice of import—the incident that seemed to guide my later career. It was the incident from my childhood in Guatemala when I witnessed the slaying of the Batistas Sangrientos, the vicious family that murdered people for their organ parts. One of the boys who got executed was my age, a young man named Salomon Batista. He was a great jokester with a somewhat crude mind, yet among the children he’d always been a leader.
He was always getting us into trouble with the old people in town. Salomon was a young man with tremendous energy and physical strength, and always he was the best among us in sports and wrestling. I’d been terrified when the captain made the young children form a line, terrified when I watched Salomon plead for mercy and claw at his father and beg to be killed with his father. I watched Salomon pee his pants in terror, watched as the captain told his men to lower their guns, to aim and fire.
When the shooting was done and the Batista family was lying dead on the ground, I walked over to Salomon and looked in his eyes.
His face was bloody, as if someone had just smeared it with a bloody rag, and it was splotched with blood that had spattered from his brothers. I looked into Salomon’s eyes and saw them staring out, already glassy.
His hands were still twitching. He hadn’t been dead for three minutes, yet his eyes were as glassy as if he’d been dead for hours. The smell of blood was strong in the air. I looked at him and realized that as I’d watched a miracle had occurred: a vigorous young man had been unmade. The spirit had left his body while I watched.
It seemed a miracle that he had died. Yet I realized it was a greater miracle that he had lived at all. I vowed at that moment, at the age of twelve, that I’d spend my life fighting death.
The images quit coming. The smell of blood stayed with me. Tamara watched me, sitting cross-legged in the dust of the plain.
Seagulls wheeled overhead. She asked, "Is the tape done so soon?"
Anger settled over me, hot and thick. I felt violated at the deepest core of my being. I wanted to see my family, to know the end of their stories, to see how their lives played out. She’d not shown me much. She’d said she had only forty-percent memory loss, yet she’d not given me back sixty percent of my life.
She’d given just enough to let me know how much I’d lost.
I ached. "What of my father, and my sister?" I asked. "You gave so little of them!"
Tamara snorted. "Tough luck, old man. My brains are fried. I don’t have any idea what more I took. It didn’t seem important."
I couldn’t believe her reaction. I could see no reason for such callousness. I had once observed that we always dehumanize those we are about to kill. I wondered if somehow she had come to hate me, had learned to see me as less than human in order to justify what she’d done to me.
I wanted to return to Earth, to find my family.
The ships were being prepared for the return trip, but they’d be filled with Japanese men, angry at what we’d done. I suspected that I’d never make it home alive.
Even if I did, what guarantee would I have that I could ever find my family?
My father would no longer be alive. Victoriano would be an old man. Even Tatiana would be nearly sixty. If she recalled me at all, she’d have very little emotional attachment to me.
Panamá would not be the same. I could never go back.
Tamara didn’t care. She’d used me like a rag and then thrown me away.
"You whore!" I shouted. "You whore!" I saw her through a haze of red. My teeth chattered and I jacked out of the dream monitor.
I leapt from my chair and rushed Tamara. I was free! She’d freed me from the ompulsion that kept me from attacking her. Never had I felt such rage. I could kill her now!
Yet I’d dedicated my life to fighting death. I stood before her, glaring at her. I struck her face—once, twice, a third time. I hit her hard enough so that her wheelchair spun around.
Blood droplets spattered from her nose. I wanted to kill her, but even that didn’t seem enough.
A Quest: I took her by the throat. I was soft and warm and slender in my hands. I felt strong enough to snap it, but I just squeezed.
It takes a long time to strangle a person.
Her head lolled up at me and her face reddened. She watched. I felt cold, distant—as if someone else’s hands were strangling her. A single tear welled up in the corner of her eye as her face darkened.
I suddenly recalled the other Tamara, the one who had let me taste her undying compassion in the simulator, saying, "Listen, listen. Become fluent in the gentle language of the heart."
I remembered how her dark eyes had watched me in the simulator, the way she considered me as if I were some rag doll torn apart, full of pity and condescension.
She’d known that I was destroyed because she was the one who had destroyed me.
&
nbsp; Even now, I realized, she was manipulating me.
She wanted me to be her killer, even though she knew what it would cost me.
I gasped and pulled away. She’d wanted to die in Panamá. She’d never wanted to be placed in a brain bag. She was too weak to kill herself, and so she wanted me to do it.
"Finish it!" Tamara spat from her microspeaker even as she gasped for breath. "You hate me! How could you feel anything but contempt for me?"
She was right. I no longer felt any attraction to her. I was poised on the head of a pin.
I stepped back and laid down my weapons forever.
"You know of Garzón’s plans for you," I said. "We both know what kind of prison he will make for you. You shall be his tool, as I was your tool."
"Kill me," she pleased. "Garzón will make me hurt others—an endless parade of them!"
"I am dedicated to life," I said softly.
Tamara broke. Tears streamed down her face. She laughed in pain and self-derision. "You’re with Garzón, aren’t you? When we were in Panamá I needed someone to save me. You were the only chunk of meat available. When you jacked in that last time, I really thought you were Arish trying to manipulate me. So I attacked, knocked you out. When I got up and found you on the floor, I found Arish alive."
I nodded, recalling how it had been.
"I was sick. So sick and weary. I wanted to escape. I wanted Arish dead. You wouldn’t have taken me away. You wouldn’t have killed him for me." She choked back a sob. "I was sick. Feverish at the time ... so crazy. I gave you a deep program. I wanted you to take me to the Garden of Eden. And look where you brought me!" A noise came from her microspeaker that could have only been a snort of derision.
She sat in her wheelchair, imprisoned in a wasted body, destroyed. In a few days, Garzón would imprison her in a cymech, bring about her greatest fear. All her scheming had brought her to nothing.
On My Way to Paradise Page 51
