On My Way to Paradise (4 page)

"That’s not—" I started to say.

"What? You going to say you don’t want immortality?"
Tamara asked.

Like most morphogenic pharmacologists, the hope of
obtaining a discount on rejuvenations until man solved the problem
of mortality or learned to download brains into crystals was a
major factor in determining my career. I concluded, "I don’t want
order."

Tamara peered at me as if I’d said something very
strange, and shook her head. "You bastards are all the same. Your
bodies may live, but your souls die."

"Who’s a bashtard?" Flaco asked.

"Angelo. He’s just like a cyborg—the assholes want to
live forever, but they make their living denying other people that
opportunity." I suddenly felt as if I’d jacked back into her
dreamworld. As far as I could see, her strange accusations against
cyborgs and me made no sense.

"You’re full of guano," Flaco said. "Don Angelo Oshic
here, he’sh nice. He’s a gentleman."

Tamara looked at us, and her head wobbled. She
reached for a glass of water and missed. The water spilled on the
table. "Maybe he is a cyborg," she said, ducking her head a
little.

"We’re not shyborgs," Flaco said in an easy tone.
"See, no shyborgs are in thish room." He handed her his Rum
Sunset.

"You got a comlink in your head?" Tamara asked. Flaco
nodded. "Then you’re a cyborg." She acted as if she’d made her
point. I remembered a news clip I’d once seen of Surinamese Body
Purists. Upon conversion to their cult, new members pulled out
their comlinks and their cranial jacks, their prosthetic kidneys or
whatever they had, and lived totally without mechanical aid. I
wondered if she were a Body Purist, and I suddenly knew why she
wanted a regenerated hand instead of a prosthetic—the thought of
her body being welded to a machine terrified her; it desecrated the
temple of her spirit.

"A comlink doeshn’t make you a shyborg," Flaco
said.

"That’s where it starts. First a comlink. Then an
arm. Then a lung. One piece at a time."

"What about you?" Flaco asked. "You shaid you were
going to tell about your family."

"My mother and father are cyborgs," she answered with
that closed look. "I never met them. I’m just the interest paid by
the sperm bank. If my parents ever saw me, they probably got pissed
off because I didn’t look enough like a washing machine."

"Hah! There musht be a shtory in that!" Flaco said.
"Tell ush the shtory."

"There’s no story," Tamara said. And I wondered what
her point was, why she bothered to lie at all.

The waiter brought Flaco another drink, which he
downed on the spot. Tamara ordered some aspirin. Flaco was nodding
off, so I pulled away his plate and glasses before his head landed
on the table. Tamara just sat and gazed at her plate. I decided to
drag away the smelly drunk who sat beside me and order dessert.

I put all my coins in my bag and moved the drunk back
to his previous stall. As I finished setting him upright, comlink
tones sounded in my head. I tapped the comlink switch behind my ear
and a man with a heavy Arab accent said, "Señor Osic?"

"Yes," I answered.

"Tell the woman across the table from you to go to
the telephone."

The caller had to have been in the room at some time
in the evening to know I’d been sitting with Tamara, but since he
didn’t know I’d moved away, he’d obviously left. "She’s drunk.
She’s unconscious," I lied, hurrying to the door to see if I was
being called from outside.

I opened the door and looked out. The avenue was dark
and empty, but far down the street I could see the shining heat of
a man’s body outside a minishuttle. The caller clicked off, and the
man jumped in the minishuttle. The tail lights glowed red
momentarily and the shuttle blossomed into a ball of light as the
engine turned on. It shot up into the night sky and streaked
away.

I went back into the restaurant, and Tamara looked at
me curiously, as if to ask why I’d run out. Flaco struggled to lift
his head from the table. He turned toward Tamara and said, "I got a
messhage for you on comlink: Arish shays he h-has your hand. And
now he has y-you."

Tamara turned pale and drank another Rum Sunset.

On the way home, Tamara and Flaco were so drunk they
had to lean on me for support. Tamara kept swearing and mumbling
that she wanted a gun, and Flaco kept saying "What?" When we
reached the house, I laid Tamara on the couch and Flaco on the hall
floor in front of the bathroom door and went to bed.

After a couple hours I was awakened by Flaco vomiting
and Tamara murmuring, but I just went back to sleep. I dreamed of
an old Zeller Cymech advertisement that portrayed a group of people
in a lunar gambling casino, all of them cyborgs wearing designer
cymechs. I had seen this holo once before, and admired it. All the
cyborgs were laughing, and drinking Rum Sunsets. Several of them
wore feminine bodies, complete with metal breasts studded with
small jewels. One female cyborg was talking to a companion, and she
giggled in a quaint manner. I suddenly realized she was my wife,
Elena, who had been hit by a truck thirty years earlier. But it
seemed irrational to believe she had died. I had merely forgotten
that she had bought a cymech and we had somehow scraped her pieces
together and put her in it, and now she was here on the moon,
drinking Rum Sunsets and laughing. I planned to go embrace her,
tell her how happy I was to see her, when the cyborg closest to me
caught my attention. He had only one arm that was still flesh, and
he wore it as if it were a badge of his humanity. He wore a head of
electrically dyed, red tungsten that looked like a handsome man
around the face and eyes, but his jaw curved abruptly into
something skeletal. He had gleaming blue zirconium eyes, and his
huge smile hinted at perpetual mirth. But suddenly it seemed this
man’s smile held something malicious, that he was plotting the
deaths of the others in the room, and only I could discern his
intent. Then I thought: This is not my dream. This is Tamara’s
dream. And I was awakened by someone shaking me.

"Angelo! Angelo!" Flaco said.

"Sí. ¿Qué pasa?"

"¡Huy! What do you think? That woman, she is a bitch
when she drinks, no?"

"Yes, she is a bitch," I said.

"I like that. I like a woman with a
fierce
spirit!" Flaco talked very slowly and deliberately. "Move over. I
want to get in bed with you." I moved and Flaco climbed in and
accidentally kicked me with his shoes. "Ah, this is a good bed.
Very comfortable. Just right for two. You should have invited me in
earlier. Did I ever tell you that you have nice breasts? For a man,
that is. They are very flaccid. You have more breast than some
women."

Flaco’s words disturbed me, till I realized he was
joking. "Yes, flaccid breasts run in my family. You should have
seen my mother: she had five of them."

Flaco laughed. "No more jokes! I think I will vomit
again if I have to laugh at your sick jokes. Angelo, do you think
Tamara is in danger?"

"Yes."

"I held her hand today," he said. "It was very
delicate, like a child’s hand. We will have to take good care of
her. Tell me, what do you think she is running from?"

"What does anyone run from? She runs from her
past."

"Ah, philosophical poop. Do you always poop
philosophy at night? If so, we should sleep together often. But I
have been thinking—perhaps she is a notorious refugiada. Perhaps
she is looking for political asylum, and would be happy to marry a
Panamánian like the handsome Flaco just so she can live in a
neutral country, eh? Welcome to Flaco; welcome to freedom! What do
you think? You still think she is a thief?"

"Yes."

"I don’t," Flaco said. "Believe me, oh great
philosopher, I know thieves. She is too
alive
to be a thief.
Understand?"

"No."

"Ah, it is very simple. You see, man is a territorial
creature. He needs to possess things—houses, land, body space. And
if he possesses something, he is happy; and he is happy to let
others possess something. But thieves violate their very nature by
violating the territories of others. They are never at peace with
themselves. And because of this, they die inside. This is something
an educated, philosophical man like you should know."

"Are you not a socialist?" I asked. "What you say
sounds anti-socialist." It was a cruel to question—meant it only as
a joke. Traditionally, socialists believe in using social
engineering to eradicate outdated ideas, ethics, and ways of
thought—and according to the first rule of social engineering, a
society cannot be engineered to specification unless the
engineering takes place in cultural isolation. So, to avoid
cultural pollution, the socialists believed they needed to either
absorb or destroy all nearby capitalists while they engineered
their own communal society. To accuse Flaco of being one of them
was bad enough, yet the Nicita Idealist Socialists had gone a step
farther—rumor said they were trying to engineer a non-territorial
human—a man they believed would be unselfish and full of empathy,
willing to give everything he owned to others. Rumor also said that
the creatures they had engineered in Argentina had been alien,
murderous.

This news terrified the peasants, for it was said
that once the Socialists perfected the genetic structure for a
non-territorial man, they would release a vector virus that would
infect everyone on Earth. Through viral warfare mankind would be
changed, become a creature incapable of adopting ideals outside
those touted by the socialists, and I think the peasants feared
death less than they feared undergoing such a change. I was unsure
whether to believe such stories. Yet Flaco was speaking much like a
socialist, and it thought it funny to accuse him of being one.

He asked, "Why would you think me a socialist?"

"You live in Panamá, between the hammer of Colombia
and the anvil of Costa Rica, and don’t run away. Also, you’re
skinny and sneaky-looking, like a socialist."

"Oh, I am not a socialist," Flaco said. "I don’t
believe socialism can work with man today—we are too territorial.
And I don’t think we should engineer the trait away. I believe a
man must possess himself and be his own man. But these Nicita
Idealist Socialists will not let a man possess himself. It is not
enough that they enslave the artificial intelligences; they must
also dominate humans too, grind down their opposition. Always they
blame the capitalists for their economic failure.

"According to the socialists, if a socialist buys a
car it is a sign of progress, but if a capitalist buys a car, it is
a sign of decadence. They refuse to see that because they take away
men’s will to work, their countries collapse into economic
ruin.

"I met a man from Budapest who said his father had
worked in a factory that kept closing because the workers wanted to
sit and play cards. The government sent the military to force the
workers to go back to work, and some still refused. They sat and
played cards with machine guns at their backs. Finally, the
military shot them all, and the radio proclaimed these men
traitors.

"This man told me that his father, even though he had
been murdered, had won against the socialists because he refused to
be dominated by them. And I believe this is a second way to submit
to inner death—to live under the domination of others, to deny your
need to possess yourself."

Flaco fancied himself a great political thinker, but
I had spent so much time studying medicine I was out of touch with
politics. I remained respectfully silent for a moment, as if
contemplating his words. "So, did you not say that you don’t
believe this woman is a thief?"

"No, I believe she is a brain transplant."

This made me sit up and think. Intuitively I felt he
was right. "Why do you say that?"

"I saw a documentary once. Back when they were
drafting people into the cyborg units, the military would put the
soldiers’ bodies in stasis until their terms were up, and if a
soldier wanted to enlist afterward, he could opt to sell his body
for parts. But there was a big scandal, because sometimes a soldier
would end his term or want to sell his body and find that it had
already been sold on the black market by the cryotechs. All this
talk about cyborgs made me remember this, and I realized that this
was how Tamara could be listed as being on active duty a light-year
away and still be here."

"Do you mean someone has stolen her body?"

"I have been thinking: would anyone steal a useless
body like that? No, I think Tamara de la Garza enlisted and sold
her body. And now this woman is wearing it."

I remembered the beautiful red-haired woman in
Tamara’s dream, so different from the scrawny, black-haired thing
that slept on the couch, and I realized that a brain transplant
could explain why she dreamed of herself looking so differently.
And I remembered the way she had fumbled after the water at
dinner—a sign that her brain had not yet accustomed itself to a
change in body size. "Perhaps," I said.

"‘Perhaps’? What do you mean ‘perhaps’? It is a great
solution to our question. If my theory isn’t true, it should
be!"

"We are being paid much money. She is paying a little
for her treatment, and much for our silence. If she must suffer a
brain transplant to escape her pursuers, perhaps our questions
jeopardize her."

"You did not tell me earlier she was in danger,"
Flaco said.

Out in the living room, Tamara stirred in her sleep
and moaned.

"I did not know if I believed it earlier."

I lay in bed for a long time, thinking. If this woman
had had a brain transplant and the transplant were recent, it would
explain why her antibody levels hadn’t shot up when her hand was
pulled off—she could still be on antibody inhibitors. But I wasn’t
sure.