Maybe it’s a classic or, what’s just the same, a clunker with pretensions of eternity.
I’m very nervous. By Zeus, I’m so nervous!
I know that it’s very unlikely that Ajax is here, that he remembers me or that he’s even interested in seeing me. And even less in giving me a job.
But that’s why I’m there, yes.
I know, I know, five years and this is the best plan I’ve come up with: to go and ask him for a job.
But the truth is that I’m only going for that.
And perhaps to reassure myself that all that wasn’t a dream.
I knew that the natives aged so slowly that they could live five or six times longer than an ordinary human. But nothing prepared me for seeing him just as he was on that remote day of my childhood when my life changed.
There were no visible boundaries to cross into the Schismatic Zone, but as soon as I crossed that imaginary line, eight natives on sleipnirs surrounded the Chevy.
I shut off the engine and got out of the car slowly. I shook off the dust, which fell in torrents from my clothes and hair, and I waited quietly, as people did in the holos, with my hands raised.
One of the men, who came from the rear, suddenly spurred his eight-legged steed and stopped a few meters from the car. He leaped down and ran toward me with the lightness of a predator and such elegance that it inspired both admiration and fear just to see him.
When he reached my side, he pounced on me and hugged me until my ribs hurt. With superhuman strength, he lifted me in the air and began to laugh. Then I recognized his deep, warm voice.
“Ajax?”
The native let my feet touch the ground once more and ruffled my dusty, reddened hair, like that time five years earlier.
“You’ve come back to me, Jedediah!”
Then his eyes found the necklace I wore at my neck.
He smiled proudly.
“You didn’t forget me,” I said, in a shaky voice. I had the same knot in my throat as when I was a sprat. A strange emotion that made me think that at last I was home.
“Forget you?” Something crossed his face, as if an unstoppable force had impelled him to do something, and he would have had to use all his force of will to stop himself. “That’s impossible!”
The rest of the troop left at a hand signal from him. He freed his sleipnir, who began to follow close behind us like an affectionate dog, while we returned in the Chevy.
Ajax laughed heartily at all my insipid stories, and he marveled at anecdotes about the town, as if I were recounting the Odyssey for him.
He was exactly as I remembered him, but different: more human, more a friend.
I think that I was never so filled with happiness in my entire life.
When we reached the city, I was astonished by the grandeur of native architecture. The buildings were spectacular and organic. As if Gaudí had been resurrected, and he was a Martian.
Ajax led me straight to his house and we sat down to eat. Well, I did. He studied me, ignoring the time that had passed and picking up his observation that had been interrupted five years ago.
“What do you want to do as a job?”
I hurriedly swallowed the enormous spoonful of chickpea and sausage soup I had in my mouth, and Ajax muffled a laugh.
“Anything I can be useful at.”
The native was thoughtful, pondering that. I feared that his pause meant that I wouldn’t be useful at anything. But suddenly he lifted his head and asked me, “Would you be interested in being my field assistant?”
I jumped to my feet and shouted such a vociferous “yes!” that I spilled what remained of the stew onto the floor.
After collecting the tin plate and the utensils, and as I cleaned the floor, it occurred to me to ask him: “What is it you do?”
Ajax allowed himself a broad smile. “I make Mars Martian.”
I must have remained very quiet and with a perplexed look on my face because a cloud darkened his own. He probably thought that a boy like me, raised in a Terran mining colony, would be one of those recalcitrant defenders of “Mars by and for the Earth.”
My only response was a not-too-intelligent “Wow!”
He weighed the expression for a few seconds and seemed to understand or remember something that calmed him. “You’re in agreement, then?”
Obviously, I said “yes.” A prompt and faltering yes, but not less firm for that.
An acceptance that had —both by the childish ignorance of that time, as well as by the light of my current awareness— a preternatural bias, almost like a marriage vow.
I didn’t know what I was getting into. Of course, I didn’t understand even a tenth part of the scope of the task that the natives and some very few humans were facing. And yes, I had no idea of how difficult, dangerous, and marvelous it would turn out to be for me, on a personal level. I was at the threshold of something so huge it would absorb my life, my mind, and my ideals; and which, nonetheless, was worth every moment of anxiety.
I, of course, was just dazzled by him: by my hero. A person who awoke my most-fanatic admiration and about whom I knew almost nothing. Someone in whom I had placed my complete trust with my eyes so closed that, for the last five years, I’ve only been able to think of one thing: Why?
A thick fog spreads, very low, at the foot of the mountains.
The color of the mist, in the dawn light, is a purplish tone that curls around the feet of the sleipnirs in phantasmal spirals.
While the rest of the landscape is part of that monotonous darkened rust red, the sky barely sketches a celestial blue similar to the eyes that the water showed me when I looked into it.
Phobos runs like a soul in pain toward his encounter with the rising sun.
I am cold and I am afraid.
Ajax approaches me with the stealth belonging to the hours before an incursion. He stands beside me and makes a gesture. It’s hard to distinguish him in his “almost” invisibility; the camouflage of the iridescent drawings on his skin both hid and revealed him at the same time.
He pulls out the white canteen and offers a libation: Caraldo honey mixed with water from the snows of Mount Olympus. He passed the flask to me and I do the same. Then both of us spill a little of our own blood on the Martian sand: red upon red.
The hour approaches, I’m trembling.
Ajax runs his hand over my head and musses my hair, like when I was a boy. I smile and at the same time I get angry: when will he understand that I’m not a child? While I continue to be one in his mind, what chance do I have?
As if he were reading my thoughts, he whispers to me, “Be patient.”
I stared back at him, indignantly: how much more patience?”I don’t have your kind of memory,” I retort in a harsh murmur, “I can’t live in advance. I need...”
He gives me a kiss, short and smooth.
“Soon, Jedediah,” he whispers again, beside my mouth, “very soon.”
The raid was a success: all of us who went came back.
There were some bruises and a few considerable wounds, but all were alive and euphoric.
I, on the other hand, had my head in the clouds for the entire day. I could only ask myself, “Would today finally be the day?” time after time.
That almost cost me my life on more than one occasion; plus a few warnings from Telamón and Ainitz, the superiors of my squad. There can be no distractions when you’re fighting in a dust storm.
When we reached the city, I went straight to the showers and threw myself on the floor as the water cleaned my body and mind.
Today I turned twenty.
Ten of those years revolved around Ajax. Five years I had been waiting for him, five years I had accompanied him.
The water seemed to clear my ideas along with my skin. The red of Mars washed away to the recycling plants, and my thoughts drifted to the depths of my desires.
Exactly when had my devotion transformed into desire? When had my admiration become love?
I
couldn’t answer that. With an imperceptible slowness and familiarity, my world had tilted its axis to his presence and had matched itself to his rhythm.
I let the warmth of the recycled water wash over me again and again, until the pads of my fingers were wrinkled.
Yes, I remembered perfectly the day when, finally, I had recognized what had always been there.
That morning, in the outskirts of Tyndall, Ajax had spoken to me calmly, while he walked with that rocking gait due to his double articulations of what would have been the knees on an unmodified man: “Do you remember how I admired you in silence when we saw one another for the first time, Jedediah?”
Our subject of conversation had revolved around the probable storm forming, beyond Cerberus, and how we could take advantage of it, re-channeling it, just like a river; just as we normally did.
The comment took me by surprise.
I nodded slightly, as I did whenever I was confused.
“For me, that day was very special. I already knew you, but it was the first time I saw you.”
I stared at him, astonished and completely confused.
Ajax took pity on me and continued, “I’ve always known you. You appeared on my horizon from the day you were born.”
Then he began to tell me the story of his life, the story of his species artificially created to terraform Mars. And the way in which I fit into that history. “One part of my memory works forwards. I suppose that I remember my possible future. This is useful when you can avoid those things that are potentially harmful for a mission. It wasn’t something planned for by our creators, it simply happened. Then, at some moment of my infancy, you came in. You were an old man and a child, you were as you are now and as you were and as you will be. Glimmerings of you have always accompanied me.
“During my very brief childhood, you woke my curiosity. Little by little I understood that, depending on my actions, on my choices, you would become the center of the future memory or you would fade from it. To focus on you would require a balance between what I wanted, what I had to do and what you brought me.
“At first it was a game, then a need.”
I tried to imagine it, hundreds of years of the life of a native dominated by memories of possible events. The idea of being present in his mind for so long, when I didn’t even exist yet, gave me a sort of meaning, a purpose. In some way, I had been “called.”
Now the water continued to drench me. Its warmth wrapped me in a comforting caress that allowed me to face the chiaroscuro of recollection.
That night, as we rested under the folds of the western slope of the crater, I knew what I felt for the first time. And I told him.
Tears still come to my eyes on remembering his bittersweet reply. “I know, I’ve always known. That feeling honors me, and it is not far from my own. But it is not yet time.”
And time had become an obsession.
I dried myself roughly, to not lose the heat of the bath and to quench my frustration.
He had often spoke to me of the right time, of that which would allow our futures to converge into a single future. But for me, it was just time that the present was stealing from me.
I randomly picked one of the clean worksuits and got dressed. I wrapped myself in a thermal coat and went out onto the street.
Ajax was waiting for me outside.
He approached slowly, with his wobbly gait. His pained face told me that the answer was still “no.” I turned on my heels, furious, and climbed into the Chevy. I drove as far as possible.
It’s never pretty to be rejected, even if it is for love.
He followed me at some distance, I knew it.
I got down from the car almost in the foothills of the Phlegra, near the caves where we raised the spores.
“Understand me!” he shouted desperately.
But that didn’t calm me, it only inflamed me even more. I couldn’t be rational, not with so much pain and so much broken hope.
“And when will it be the moment?” I said angrily. “You have our memories, I don’t have anything!” Ajax lowered his head, as if he’d received a blow to the face. “What happens if a storm changes its course? What if the Earth sends new strain of oleagins that kill our crops with their pollen? Or if there’s a new attack against the native population? The future always changes, you should know that now. And each variant influences your memories of me, your memories of us,” I emphasized the word, I wanted him to taste it, for an instance, the injustice he put me through and, at the same time, it hurt me to my soul to make him suffer. But I had to fight for our love. “Can it be that you, having always been with me in your memories, don’t understand me at all?”
“Sometimes a sacrifice is necessary to...”
“No sacrifices!” I interrupted him. “You’ve already made all of them.” I gentled my tone and approached him; I’d never seen him tremble before. “I know you still do it, I know how you try to lead the flow of our actions, striving for the best possible future. Only Zeus could understand how much suffering you must have borne seeing how a simple variable, beyond your reach, destroyed years of elaborate construction. How a brilliant future for both of us evaporated like a sandstone castle in a storm.” I took his face between my hands; I had to stand on tiptoe to do so. “The agony of seeing us separated or dead because of a twist of events. Of course I understand you! But now let me decide for myself. Treasure our best future memories, whether possible or already lost, and live this moment with me.”
As if a seal had broken, Ajax emitted a barbaric sound, a release of centuries of battling against time.
Then he embraced me as no one had ever done, with the overwhelming force and the sweet delicacy that only love can achieve in a single movement. And he loved me, there, in the cold of the Martian foothills, amid the dust and the fear, not listening to his memories and hearing only the whispers of my gratitude.
Ajax tells me that the future was never “dustier”. He uses that word when he compares it to a Martian dust storm, one of those that affect the entire globe and last over three hundred days.
In a week I’ll be thirty-five years old. This has been the most glorious decade of my existence: I work side by side with the man I love, I learn from him, I sleep in his arms every night. And our mission could not be more glorious.
Right now I hear his measured breathing at my side, the two hearts fighting to emerge from his chest, echoing under his olive-tinted skin.
Even asleep, the tentacles of his head touch my face, as if reassuring himself that I’m me, that I’m still here, that I haven’t faded from his side as I’ve done so often in his memory. Those dismal nights when he wakes up shouting, and which are followed by days of frenetic action, restructuring decisions, reshaping plans, only to keep me by his side.
He murmurs something in his voice of strangled thunder. I caress his forehead. He quiets.
I couldn’t understand it. I was completely unsettled. But he smiled, happier than ever, and that’s what hurt me.
The young girl was thin and blond, and had sad, deep black eyes with deep bags under them. I knew that she worked in Telamón’s new group.
Ajax brought her, almost pushing her along, with an arm over her shoulder. When I noticed that she looked at him with the same admiring eyes that I’d had at her age, I felt a chill.
“Jedediah,” he told me, exultantly, “she’s our anchor. Look how lovely she is!”
And he kissed her.
He kissed her on the mouth in the middle of the dusty street, in front of me, with a passion that tore the life from my heart, stopping it for a second.
Then he took my lax hands and placed them around the young woman’s waist, pushing her gently against my chest.
I easily raised my eyes over the head of the girl and looked at him with alarm.
He watched me expectantly. What did he expect me to do? What madness was all this?
The sun barely rose in the early morning. She smelled of sweet perfume, mixed with sweat
and dust.
“Her name is Hebe,” he said of the girl as if she weren’t there and as if I understood something of what he was saying. “She is the key.”
I lowered my gaze and looked at her closely. She was around sixteen and was very frightened of me. Her head barely reached my chin. She held on to me, reluctant but submissive, curling herself against my chest.
When she’d joined the movement, at fourteen, she’d been under my charge for a week. I had seen her modeling the eye of a storm beside Telamón and knew that she could be almost reckless. She was always proving her worth to everyone. She had a brilliant mathematical mind; some jokingly called her “Abacus,” and she had adopted that nickname as a brand of honor.
“What is all this, Abacus?” I whispered angrily in her ear.
She trembled and clung to my shirt more strongly.
Ajax placed his hand on my back. “With her, the future is crystal clear. Our future!” His eyes sought mine. “If she is part of... what we are, we’ll be together forever. She’s like a catalyst that keeps us together over time, no matter what happens.”
He moved her slowly away from me and crossed his arms over her chest. He rested his chin on her golden head and smiled again like someone who’d found Elysium. “Do you understand? The dust of time came from our being a couple, because our love only circulated between the two of us; but if we’re a threesome, everything is balanced!”
Hebe’s eyes were closed, and her face took on an expression of placidity at those words.
A threesome?
Who was this little brat to join us, to usurp our love?
“No!” I shouted, aggravated.
Ajax stiffened, truly surprised. “But, Jedediah, what’s wrong?”
I pointed to Abacus. “She’s a stranger! I barely know her, and you want me to love her? Have you gone mad?”
A glimmer of sudden understanding lit his face. “Oh, my love, sometimes I forget that we’re two beings and that you don’t share my memories... I love you so much!” He let go of the girl and came toward me. She clung to his hand. I took a few steps back.
Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction Page 24
