On My Way to Paradise (26 page)

"Bravo," García said. "Do I have any volunteers?" I
thought of how big the samurai were, most were two meters tall and
weighed as much as 140 kilos. The thought of attacking one of those
monsters was not appealing.

As one the four chimeras still awake said, "Me!"

"Such a project should wait until we are all sober,"
García said, and everyone agreed. "Then let’s do it tonight, after
our last battle practice."

Those guests who were able to stagger to their own
rooms did so, but most spent the day with us sleeping off the
effects of the booze. I had dinner alone in the common dining room
down on level four, and sat next to Fernando Chin, a xenobiologist
from Bogotá. He was speaking with some others about the avians I’d
seen flying high in the atmosphere in the simulators. Chin said the
large avians were called
oparu no tako,
opal kites, while
the small ones were called oparu no tori, opal birds. And I could
understand such names—when the evening sky was full of dust, though
it was purple in the west, in the east the sky was dark blue-brown,
and the shimmering sunlight playing on the wings of the oparu no
tako against the darker sky made it appear as if streaks of opal
spanned the horizon.

The kites that lived high in the atmosphere
interested me most, and Chin described to me how they collected
dust and water from the air and directed them with cilia down an
orifice into a gut where the elements entered a tiny pouch and
nourished a bacteria culture which the opal kite then periodically
ingested as food. Because of this you could usually classify the
species of opal kite by its color, since different species of kite
relied upon different types of bacteria for food.

"They are very beautiful," I said, "at sunset."

"And useful, too," Chin said. "Without them, Baker
would be uninhabitable. There are so many of them in the sky, that
they form a thermal layer, creating a greenhouse effect, warming
the planet. And every seven years, Baker’s sun jumps in magnitude,
heating the planet even more. When this happens there are great
storms—storms like you’ve never seen on Earth— and the
oparu no
tako
are ripped apart and fall from the skies. And while the
sun is hot, they do not breed. If it were not for them, the
temperature variations would be so great that the weather patterns
would never stabilize. Except for some narrow bands around the
coastal belts, Baker would become desolate in a matter of
decades."

"Ah, interesting. Does it not seem strange to you
that the Japanese call the planet ‘Baker’? An English word."

Chin laughed. "I think it is ironic. An English probe
discovered the planet on flyby, and when they saw it, they saw it
just after a global dust storm—after the sun had jumped in
magnitude. Their sensors registered the planet as being lifeless,
and they thought it must be such a hell, that they named it Baker.
Later, the Japanese rediscovered the planet, and found it to be
habitable. Yet they kept the name, since there is no word for
baker
in Japanese. Yet I find it fascinating that the
inhabitants of Baker so resist Western thoughts and ideals—yet they
keep a borrowed English name for their planet."

I smiled at this. Over the past several days it
seemed that everyone on the ship feigned expertise on the topic of
the geography, inhabitants, and animal life of Baker, and though
everyone spoke about such things frequently, I didn’t trust their
information. But I found Chin to be refreshingly enlightened. I
hadn’t really made friends with any of my teammates—Perfecto obeyed
me as if I were his owner, and this distressed me; while Abriara
preferred to remain aloof.

Several times I’d tried to engage her in conversation
about her past, and I found that though Abriara had lived in
different places and had known different people, she never spoke
about them with passion. She’d
inhabited
places, but she’d
never
lived
in them. She never showed an honest emotion.
Such people frighten me, and I decided to avoid her. I hadn’t met
anyone else I could envision as a prospective friend.

So when I met Chin and found that he was intelligent
and interesting, I thought he might be the kind of person I’d want
as a friend, and I said, "It must make you very happy to be able to
go to Baker—as a xenobiologist it is the ultimate opportunity!"

"Ah, yes," Chin said, "It is the dream of my life! I
received my doctorate for studies on the combination
endo-exo-skeleton common to Baker’s animals. I never believed I’d
be able to afford passage to the planet, but then I heard about
this job."

I said, "But does it not bother you that Motoki
Corporation wants you to commit genocide as a condition of
employment?"

He shrugged and waved his hand down, "Not at all! By
getting rid of the Yabajin I’ll be cleaning up the environment,
helping restore the natural ecosystem of the planet. What does it
matter if a few people die?"

Such thinking left me queasy in my stomach, and I
left him.

In the evening we rallied enough strength for battle
practice and headed for the simulators. My ears were ringing and I
felt dizzy. I’d eaten too soon after getting drunk, and I paid for
it. During the first scenario the motion of the hovercraft bouncing
along a rocky path caused me to vomit in my helmet. We got
butchered twice in the first ten minutes of practice, and in the
next four simulations we were too sick and exhausted to even try to
avoid the Yabajin. The continual waves of pain made my face numb
and tightened my stomach into knots. It became the worst battle
session ever, and we left shaken.

Hector, García, and six of their men showed up at our
room later in the evening. Miguel seemed overjoyed to see me, he
kept patting my back and saying, "Is there anything I can do for
you, sir?" forgetting I had no rank.

I was happy to learn they hadn’t fared any better in
battle practice than we had: They were so pale they looked like
walking corpses. All thirteen of us went downstairs to the
infirmary to get some pills for our hangovers and settle Zavala’s
bet.

The nurse on duty at the infirmary was a small, wiry
man with long hair and a scraggly beard. He had the top half of the
infirmary door open, and he watched the entrance as if it led to a
bank vault. Mavro tried to sweet talk him, offering him a cigar and
explaining our bet with Zavala, telling him how desperately we
needed to use the computer to get "just a tiny bit of information."
But the nurse was one of those belligerent types who start shaking
their heads as soon as they even think you’re going to ask a
favor.

Miguel questioned me with a gaze. I was in a bad mood
and didn’t want to concern myself with trivialities. I nodded, and
Miguel grabbed the nurse’s throat, lifted him in the air, and we
forced our way into the infirmary. Then Miguel carried the nurse to
the nearest convalescence tube and began stuffing him in.

We were afraid the nurse might make a comlink call to
security, so I went to the operating table where a retractable gas
mask hung from an outlet near the ceiling, and I hooked him to the
gas mask and anesthetized him with a little harmless nitrous oxide.
I gave the mask to Hector and showed him how to knock out the nurse
every few minutes, should he begin to come around.

Then we settled down at the computer and called up
information on the Japanese. There were 1200 aboard ship, and
nearly all were listed as samurai. We asked which samurai were
currently jacked into the simulators, and the computer listed a
couple hundred names. We picked two samurai at random—Anchi Akisada
and Kunimoto Hideo—and called up their gene charts. I asked the
computer to scan for genetic upgrades, and sat back. The upgrades
came slowly: chromosome 4, cistron 1729, had a vascular tissue
upgrade to strengthen walls of blood vessels; chromosomes 6 and 14
had several messages to delay stop for production of growth
hormones. Chromosome 19, cistron 27, had an intricate upgrade for
fat tissue that vastly facilitated metabolism of fat cells, letting
the samurai function more effectively on an empty belly than a
normal human. We found 50 minor upgrades in all, none very
innovative, and most so old that their creator’s patent had
expired. I had the computer print the biographies of the two
samurai, then gave them to García to study.

"Who wants to see his gene scan?" I asked the
chimeras. I was curious to inspect their charts. Engineering on
humans was banned on Earth except for use in eradicating
genetically transmittable illnesses, so information on the work in
Chile had never been published.

"I want to see mine," Abriara said.

I called up her charts and was amazed: The first
artificially inserted gene I found was 48,000 nucleotides long—a
thousand times longer than any artificially produced nucleotide I’d
ever known to have been inserted into a human. The gene encoded
instructions for Abriara’s striated muscular tissue to form a
myofilament significantly different from myosin, the protein used
in human striated muscle; the new protein was very complex, and
didn’t have a name. The computer simply listed it by its patent
number, citing the team of Robles and Company as creators, and
alongside the credits gave a visual representation of the new
myofilament: Rather than the long, column-shaped myofilament
typical to humans, it had a column with a helix-shaped ridge
running around its outside. It was as if someone had wrapped a
spring around a pencil. The introduction into the body of a new
protein as the basis for human muscular tissue would seem to
initiate myriad problems: How much stimulation would be needed for
the muscle to initiate contraction? What chemical would you use to
stimulate contraction? How would the muscle relax? What does the
muscle metabolize so it can turn chemical energy into physical
energy?

The questions seemed overwhelming, but as I studied
on I found the solutions to be simpler than expected. The muscles
metabolized ATP, just as human muscles do, and upon closer scrutiny
the gene proved to be closely modeled on the gene for myosin, with
only a few thousand added nucleotides. The outside ridges on the
myofilament released abundant amounts of a new enzyme to catalyze
ATP, ensuring that muscle contractions would be stimulated more
easily and more quickly than in humans. And when the muscle
contracted, it contracted more fully.

The whole thought of redesigning a muscle cell for
greater efficiently seemed mind-boggling. How could Robles and
Company juggle 48,000 variables just to produce that one effect?
How could they even conceive what the outcome of their actions
might be? Yet it was only the beginning of Abriara’s upgrades.

The charts showed hundreds more—a redesign of the
vascular network in the brain provided better circulation to a
cerebrum enlarged by 200 grams. Redesign of the teeth got rid of
her canines, giving her a closer-fitting bite that allowed her to
chew food more quickly and thoroughly than a human could. Longer
intestines and better absorption of nutrients through the
intestinal wall made Abriara capable of sustaining life on half the
food a human needed. Her cartilage was more elastic than normal,
making it easier for her pelvis to widen when giving birth, while
at the same time providing the added benefit that she would never
get a broken nose. One didn’t need to look at her genes to guess
the kinds of upgrades Robles had made on her eyes, but I was
surprised to find that the design for her ears was only slightly
different from normal.

Many upgrades required changing only one or two pairs
of nucleotides in a gene, often calling for modifications of organ
size and function, and some changes were seemingly minor, almost
superfluous, while other upgrades required the assemblage of
hundreds of thousands of nucleotides within entire families of
genes. Yet each upgrade had been carried out in a thoughtful manner
that took all considerations into account. Each was an act of
genius. And when you looked at the whole it was obvious that Robles
had specified the changes for one simple reason—he sought to create
a
perfect
human. The best genetic engineer I’d ever seen was
but a tinkerer compared to Robles. Even if man were to live for
another two million years, he’d never evolve into something so
perfect as Abriara. My respect for her as an organism grew with
each upgrade I discovered. I felt as if I were witnessing a
symphony, not a symphony of music, but a symphony played out on
human genes, but only I in our little group could comprehend the
beauty of it.

I remembered a joke about chimeras I’d once read in a
medical journal back when people were much afraid of the work
General Torres’s engineers were doing in Chile. The joke said,
"When God created man, he made him good. When General Torres
creates a man, he makes him better." Ironically, the joke was truer
than the comic would ever know.

García and Zavala had been studying the samurais’
biographies in a corner. They began bickering. Apparently, both
samurai began attending Kontani Academy at age 16, and it was
probably a military academy. García argued that he’d won that part
of the bet, since the samurai hadn’t begun formal military training
until they were 16. But Zavala pointed out that each samurai had
been tutored as a child—both by a human and by the company AI—and
many of their classes provided them a strong military background,
though they were not specifically military in nature. For example,
their training in gymnastics, and self-defense was helpful in
combat situations. Everyone became embroiled in the argument, and
Zavala finally lost, since he had to concede that almost every
child in the world was trained in gymnastics and self-defense to
some degree.

As they argued I found something that made me uneasy
about Robles’ work: chromosome 4, cistron 2229, gave an instruction
for the neuroglia cells in the cerebral cortex to produce a protein
simply labeled: Behavioral Modifier 26. In structure this protein
was closely allied to the neural transmission blocker responsible
for biogenic sociopathy. In fact, Robles needed only remove two
amino acids to get the transmission blocker. Clearly, Robles wanted
to somehow dampen Abriara’s ability to feel empathy for others, yet
empathy is a trait necessary for survival of the species. A mother
must care about her children for them to survive to adulthood. And
Robles obviously knew he couldn’t completely remove that trait. I
resented the fact that he’d tried to suppress it at all.