I noted a strange shine in his silver eyes; even through the lens of my helmet, he had a sad quality.
“Do you know why I began this rebellion, my Jedediah?”
For some reason, I felt like a boy again. I had pondered that question in my head for years. I had thought of all the political, social, and philosophical variables. The need for freedom, the injustice of a race created to serve and then discarded on the completion of their mission, the terribleness of a world which arrogantly assumed the right to convert any other place into its image and likeness, only because it could do so.
I looked at the beauty of this restored Mars, red, pure, authentic. I knew that it was worth preserving the universe from those terraforming claws; but something deep within my mind told me that Ajax had not considered any of that in his decision to begin a Marsification movement.
So I shook my head, like when I was a boy of eleven.
“For you. It was the only future in which you were at my side.”
The vanguard is under siege, but that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Ajax is there, supporting the main assault.
Silently, I pray to Zeus for him. Silently, I pray to Zeus that Abacus arrives in time with the storm. Aloud, I shout orders at my decimated squad.
Once again, I block from my thoughts the possibility that Ajax will let Mars slip between our hands just so we can remain together. And also the idea of winning this world at the cost of his love.
The column of dust rises even higher than Mount Olympus, advancing like the end of everything.
In the visors, one can see the fragments of the Terran army scattered in all direction.
Abacus gives me the signal: a triple glimmer of rays. I throw the honey and the snowmelt to the ground, together with a few drops of my blood.
I dash into the charge. We don’t have more than a handful of weapons and our sleipnirs, but we throw ourselves against the second flank of battleships without hesitation. We only need to give the storm a few more minutes.
“There are things which are worth giving your life for”: that’s my mantra, what makes me not hesitate, the one that stops me from being paralyzed with fear, there in the battle, by the luck of my husband and my wife; the same one that gives meaning to a rebellion that was placed on my shoulders from the first instant that Ajax loved me.
Men fall around me, but the only important thing that is that the Terrans don’t react in time.
Something hits me in the head, I crumble, confused. The pain is terrible, and I realize that a part of my face has disappeared. I look at my hands, grateful to the universe for those two missing pinky bones. If we’d only had time, we would have tried again, and that girl we would have named Laurel, I know.
The eye of the hurricane takes shape above me. It’s enormous, but it has closed enough to swallow the entire Terran fleet.
From among the rubble, what remains of my troop, led by Oileo, collects the sleipnir and they cling to the ground with hooks, just as I ordered. Good!
Now there is no more wind, just a curtain of dust in the air that slowly descends upon kilometers of death and destruction. From between the reddish clouds, Ajax runs in my direction, Abacus is at his side. Both are red figures that approach me like spasms of vision. Thank Zeus!
The blood keeps me from seeing clearly, red upon red.
“Laurel,” I repeat. I don’t think they understand me. “Laurel...”
Laurel walked resolutely toward us with her rolling native gait.
Her white skin and black eyes, beneath a curtain of stiff red hair mixed with tentacles of the same color.
She crossed her arms with a grimace I knew well in her mother, and she cleared her throat like one of her fathers... me.
“So, have you decided?”
Ajax laughed to himself. I glanced at him and again felt the same astonishment as ever on doing so: he looked almost the same as when I saw him for the first time in Olympic some fifty years ago.
“Don’t laugh, it was your idea,” I answered, pretending to be angry.
Abacus had placed herself behind me and wraps me in her arms. “So?” insisted the mother now.
“Don’t corner me, OK? And you less than anyone, young girl!” I shook my finger at my daughter.
Laurel reprimanded me in turn with a cackle: a vestige of her other father.
I thought about my answer calmly, or at least I re-examined it, I already knew what I would say and, of course, both Laurel as well as Ajax had seen this in their future memory. As far as Abacus, she knew me too well not to be able to guess what my answer would be.
I think that I was the only one surprised by her.
I passed a hand over my face and my hand banged against the helmet. The reconstruction had removed a few years from my looks, but even so, I continued to appear the elder of the group, and that gave me an aura of authority in the family and in the Social Triumvirate.
“Well, if you want to tear off three fingers, do it!” I said, in a very doubtful tone, even though I couldn’t have been prouder of the family destiny of our daughter. “But not even they are good enough for you!”
Laurel leapt for joy and took off running in the direction of the two natives who kept a respectable distance, beside a pretty human woman of twenty, the same age as our little girl.
The noble daughter of the Martian liberationists, the girl-legend who at last had broken the Terraformist genetic conditioning, joined Telamón, one of the mythical victorious generals; Oileo, the chief of Cavalry of my own suicide squad; and Gloria, her own childhood friend.
The spectacle fascinated me and filled me with pride: another Martian family that grew without restrictions, without fear, without taboos. And our little girl was going to be a part of it.
Ajax surprised me with his comment, “I thought she’d stay with us, like the Proioxis.”
The Proioxis had been the first endogamic family of the New Order, their marriage license had taken months, but had finally been accepted, overturning the entire process of prohibition of incest.
The reputation we Martians had on Earth couldn’t be worse. But far from an abhorrent debauchery prevailing, as they had painted us, our society was tolerant, peaceful, and tremendously well-ordered.
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 CO2 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.”
Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction Page 26
