On My Way to Paradise (62 page)

I listened to the babble as if it were of no more
import than the drone of a bee. In the desert sky simple strands of
ribbon floated high in the air where the opal kites should have
been. And along the horizon I could make out something that ran
upright like a person. I struggled to pick out details and my eyes
turned to telescopes. I saw vividly two desert ladies stumbling
over cracked red stones, their arms torn off, blood dripping from
the stumps at their shoulders. I blinked and tried to block out the
sight, and they pleaded, "Angelo, Angelo, come back and feed
us!"

I knew those voices—the child Tatiana and the woman
Tamara.

I reeled away and everything went black. Zavala began
speaking in calm, informative tones. There was much laughter in the
background, as if he were at a party. I leaned forward to hear and
arms restrained me, clasping my chest. I tried to speak but my lips
were burned by wind and sun. I realized I was wearing my helmet and
people were chattering over helmet mikes. I couldn’t see. The arms
around me were the arms of Zavala holding me as he whispered in my
ear. Zavala said, "Of course every culture appears equally evil
from the outside, but if you look inside, you’ll see that most
oranges are cancerous. This is what gives you such bad breath,
listening to people who’ve been programmed by social engineers.
But I’ve known some people who’ve been programmed on chromosome 117
at gene 21755394200001, and they’re perfectly resistant to viruses
and visitations. Stick the knife in his belly, you lucky
cabrón,
and watch his eyeballs shine!" I peered up through a
haze. Zavala wasn’t holding me. The grinning head of a purple river
dragon stared at me with tiny black eyes among folds of fat.

I blacked out again. Two eyes shone down on me from
above—one blue, one white. It was Flaco, with a slash of lightning
for a wicked, idiotic grin. He spoke in a voice of thunder, "Hola,
Angelo, where have you been? We’ve all been waiting for you here in
paradise, and now the party is about to begin. There are
duros
at the vendor in the feria, banana flavored or passion
flower."

"I’m sorry," I said. I couldn’t think where I’d been.
"I got lost. The war. Killing people."

"Hah! Too bad," Flaco said. "That’s what happens when
you serve an evil society. Now you’re a high priest to a
congregation of demons."

The accusation cut me like a scalpel. I began to
shake my head.

"Don’t deny it," Flaco said. "Inhuman socialistas,
good for nothing but fertilizing the plantations! Ah, but we have
all your favorite flavors of duros. Banana-flavored or passion
flower—which will it be?"

He demanded an answer with his gaze. His eyes
penetrated my very being. I shouted,"Banana!"

"Wrong!" Flaco cried.

I realized I was a fool. I should have opted for
passion flower, so that I could live a life filled with passion.
Even Zavala would have known the answer. "I’m sorry," I pleaded,
hoping for a second chance.

I stared up at dark cloud. Rojin and Shinju were
disappearing behind them. We were in the desert again, and had just
reached the lip of a dark canyon.

Abriara sat with me, leaning against the rail of the
hovercraft with her arms enfolding me. "Shhh," she whispered. "Be
calm." She removed her own helmet and placed it on my head. The
neck rings were too small, and I could still smell sugary turpines.
The wind gusted in a wild fit, bucking the hovercraft. Out in the
canyon a long pillar of stone pointed toward heaven, like a
solitary finger. From this rock issued a plume of ghostly blue and
silver forms, like sheets of cloth or willow wisps, that silently
climbed into the night.

Everyone was watching them. "Look at them," Mavro
said in awe, "Have you ever seen anything like it?" There was a
whispering of sand blowing over stones.

Everyone just sat and watched for a long time, and I
realized dully that it was a flock of bioluminescent
oparu no
tako
riding the thermals up out of the canyon and higher into
the air. Their underbellies shone with pale blue, and my eyes
registered their body heat as platinum. A dull red bolt of
lightning struck the distant rim of the canyon.

Mavro fired up the engine on the hovercraft. He
skirted the edge of the desert.

The wind whistled over my helmet. The canyonwas but a
crack in the world, and I kept feeling we’d slide into it. I began
breathing heavily. I closed my eyes, tried to block out sensation.
Think of other things,
I decided.
Occupy your mind.
I
held my helmet and tried to imagine my home in Panamá, the good
times in the feria. The pain was unbearable. I moaned.

"Are you awake?" Abriara asked. She leaned close to
hear my answer. The microphone on my helmet was off, so she touched
her forehead to my helmet so she could listen.

"Yes."

"What’s wrong? You’ve been passing out and shouting
at us, laughing one moment and raging the next. I think the blow to
the head made you crazy, but I don’t understand why it took you so
long to get this way?"

"Swelling of the brain," I said. "And sensory
overload. Ecoshock. There are too many strange scents and noises. I
can’t handle it."

"We had two years to get acclimated," Abriara
said.

"After six months the computer began dubbing in
background noises and smells on us."

"Yes, that is the way it should be done. Get
acquainted with the terrain slowly. "I lay there and closed my
eyes. I wanted to take off the helmet so I could rub my
temples.

"What can we do for you?" Abriara asked.

"Wrap something around this helmet. Seal out the
smells and noise. That would help. Then just talk to me, help me
keep my mind off things. "

I heard the shredding of cloth and Abriara began
wrapping my neck. "I could put a resin coat over this material and
block you out totally, but I don’t know what the fumes might do,"
she said as she worked. "What do you want to talk about?"

"I had a bad dream—" I said, "a dead man accused me
of serving an evil society."

Abriara chuckled, a lighthearted laugh. "I suppose
so. If—as the social engineers contend—every society is equally
evil, then anyone who serves a society would be serving an evil
society."

She said it with such ease I don’t believe she
understood my concern.

"Ah! Ah! But if a society is evil, then one must ask,
‘What is evil?’" I thought I sensed a way out of this—if I clouded
the issue and became hopelessly snarled in philosophical arguments,
I wouldn’t have to come to grips with the sense of guilt that
threatened to overwhelm me.

Perfecto standing at his turret said, "Violation of
another person’s territory is the root of all evil. It is the sole
definition of evil." His words surprised me, partly because my
helmet mike wasn’t on and I hadn’t realized he could hear me,
partly because his answer was so totally unexpected.

Perfecto continued. "When one person steals, he
violates another’s territory. When one person kills, he violates
another’s territory. When one person sleeps with the spouse of
another, he violates another’s territory. When someone lies about
you, he violates the good name you have attained through your
actions. With you humans, all your moral codes are ultimately based
on your territorial natures. All that is evil can be seen as
arising from violating another’s territory."

Perfecto’s answer was such a novel concept that I had
to ask, "Then what is good?"

Perfecto said, "To allow others into your own
territory; to deny your own territorialism: it is good to give your
money to the poor. It is good to give your coat to the naked. It is
good to give the homeless shelter in your own home. It is good to
perform a labor for another so that you enlarge his domain while
diminishing your own. You humans believe it is
good
to deny
your own territorialism. "

I couldn’t accept such a simplistic philosophy.
Perhaps Perfecto was just seeking to distract me with petty
arguments, I wondered, and therefore he was baiting me. Yet he’d
spoken along a similar vein when he said I’d always murdered to
defend my own territory. I’d never considered the possibility that
he’d have developed a whole moral philosophy based upon
territorialism. I considered his words. "It seems to me that there
must be goods and evils that have nothing to do with
territorialism," I said, though I could not then and cannot now
think of an act of good or evil that is not tied to the
concept.

Perfecto thought a moment. "No. Territorialism is the
sole biological medium by which you humans define good and evil.
Some moral codes have nothing to do with good and evil but simply
designate a person as a member of a culture, and because of this
you humans have sometimes imagined that good and evil are only
relative, that they have no basis in a biological or spiritual
reality. For example, a devout Jew may look at another Jew who
denies the need for circumcision and think the man evil, but
everyone outside the culture realizes that the act of denying or
accepting circumcision is not a moral question. It is simply an
act of entering into a culture. You wear the clothes that you do
and use the expressions that you do simply to associate yourself
with your culture. Yet if you were to suddenly dress in black and
take long walks after midnight, other members of your culture
would assert that you were evil and dangerous.

"You humans have always codified your rules for good
and evil based entirely upon your territorial instincts. That is
all good and evil is. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed it in the
past four thousand years. I—"

I cut him off. A thought struck me, a challenging
thought. "Then, according to your moral theories, Perfecto, since
your territorial nature has been genetically strengthened, would
you not say that you chimeras are naturally more moral than we
humans?" This question seemed very important, for some socialists
claimed they’d strengthen morality by diminishing human
territorialism. They believed true communism could only be
achieved when we no longer thought of ourselves as individuals, but
as part of a group. Other socialists claimed this would only lead
them to design a slothful race that had no motivate to increase
their productivity.

"Perhaps. On instinct we are more aware of what is
socially acceptable among our own kind. We chimeras are less
disposed to violate the territories of others, yet we are also less
disposed to give up our own territories—to be good," Perfecto
apologized. "But perhaps the degree of one’s territorialism does
not matter—what does matter is how one acts toward one’s
territories and the territories of others. When we sin against
others we pay a higher price in guilt."

"Then why do you fight this war? Why do you not
recognize and respect the territories of Motoki and the Yabajin?
Why did you kill Lucío?"

Perfecto hung his head and did not answer. Abriara
said softly, with anger, "We chimeras do not respect the
territories of humans because you have never respected ours. Always
you have feared us—because we are strange, because we are stronger
than you and smarter and more powerful. So your people took away
our homes, kicked us out of our own countries, denied us equal pay,
and tried to deny us our self-respect. Humans have lost the right’
to be treated as moral equals. You ask Perfecto why he killed
Lucío. He did it for you! So you would not—"

"Enough!" Perfecto shouted.

Abriara continued, "—so you would not bear a burden
of guilt for murdering Lucío! He saw how your guilt ravages you,
and—"

"Silence!" Perfecto yelled. A growl came from his
throat, and he began shuddering. He was weeping. I realized that
Abriara was right. Perfecto murdered Lucío so he could take my own
burden of guilt upon himself, and he’d poured himself a cup he
couldn’t drink.

I slept again, a sleep not so encumbered by evil
dreams.

I woke briefly once and we were hurtling through a
storm unlike anything I’d ever seen—dark red night was upon us and
clouds thundered. Three tornadoes were touching down upon the
desert floor just ahead, yet I felt a peculiar lack of concern.

Perfecto was driving into the storm and Abriara
huddled on the floor ahead of me, her head wrapped in a rag to
protect her from stinging sand. I considered Perfecto’s philosophy
of territorialism and looked at my own concepts of good and evil
through his eyes. Though I could see things exactly as he said and
though his philosophy has colored my thoughts ever since, I
struggled to find holes in his logic. I could not believe that
chimeras were genetically engineered to be more moral than humans.
Yet I remembered the Nicita Idealist Socialists, the
non-territorial humans they had sought to engineer, and the tales I
had heard of the inhuman murders committed by those creatures.

I thought long about the people whose territories we
violate, and those to whom we give our own territories, and
realized that most of my life I had done neither—given and taken
nothing. As a result, most people I had known were just strangers
who passed me on the street:

I woke a second time in darkness, in a still cave
while wind raged outside. I was no longer wearing Abriara’s
helmet, and the cave smelled damp and full of dust.

My dream of Flaco disturbed me. He’d accused me of
serving an evil society. If my society was evil, I considered, then
I was evil for seeking its rewards. It would be like accepting
money from a criminal. I marveled that all through my elderly years
men had called me a
caballero,
a gentleman, and I’d
considered it a compliment. But when one looks at the word
caballero,
one sees that it stems from the same root —
chivalry,
and to call a man a
caballero
is to say
that he is a gentleman, a man of fine breeding, bold and strong,
powerful in war. Only in a society of murderers could such an
epithet be considered a compliment.