On My Way to Paradise (67 page)

Fifty hovercrafts full of Motoki and Yabajin samurai
were caught on our borders within the first two days; all the
samurai were out for Garzón’s blood, and they’d crossed the desert
in terrible storms to get it.

One could see the general fear in the way people
tended to huddle in groups around the campfires at night and wear
armor even when off duty. As fast as we stabilized our Japanese
patients, Garzón transported them south.

"Let the Yabajin care for their own," he said. "It
will give them something constructive to do." He said this in spite
of the fact that many Yabajin women treated us as if we were
supermen, their biological and cultural superiors.

Our own losses were as bad as predicted. Garzón had
lost several hundred men in terrible sandstorms while crossing the
desert. Another forty percent of our men died in the final assault
on Hotoke no Za. Twenty-five hundred were left. Not enough to hold
the planet if the Japanese revolted.

Yet our men would never think of leaving.

I saw Abriara one morning outside the hospital; she
was sitting on the ground, holding a handful of dirt from a garden,
just gazing at it.

I watched her for several minutes, and I knew she
could never leave. One way or another, she would die on Baker.

Garzón struck a deal with the Colombians, offered
them a share of the planet; very few were willing to lose the
opportunity to become wealthy landowners. We began oflloading them
from their ship almost immediately—a task that would take well
over a week.

At night I still dreamed of Tamara struggling for her
freedom. I still dreamed of the child Tatiana, a girl whose name I
remembered and nothing else. And I wondered what had ever happened
to my father, why I could remember precisely nothing about him. I
performed a brain scan upon myself to see if I had any dark holes
where cells had died,

I could find nothing clinically wrong. I’d expected
to find nothing. Memories do not each reside in one part of the
brain as if sitting on the head of a pin. They are scattered and
repeated all throughout. Minor brain damage should not have robbed
me so totally of a memory. So I threw myself into my work all the
harder, hoping that as I healed others, I’d heal myself. In moments
of solitude I sat in a comer and chewed the skin from my
knuckles.

The third day, Abriara decided to try to take a short
walk. She had many deep bruises and was badly swollen; though she
wanted to help in the hospital, it appeared the work was too much
for her. I put her arm over my shoulder, and helped her walk.

She breathed heavily, and her breath stirred my
hair.

The scent of her, the touch of her, was
exhilarating.

She abruptly turned to me and said, "You look better
now. I’m glad you’re doing better."

"What do you mean?"

"Just better. You look better." Abriara considered
for a long moment. "You once told me I’d shown you your dark face.
You said you’d learned of your capacity for viciousness, and this
disturbed you. I spoke with Perfecto about it often while you were
asleep. Perfecto was afraid that the revelation would destroy
you.

"Yet he said, ‘It is too early to tell. If he is not
destroyed, he will destroy his own capacity for viciousness. Now
that he has unmasked the beast, he must slay it or be devoured.’ He
often wondered if you’d win this battle. When you fought Lucío, I
thought you’d been destroyed. But now I look at you and see that
you have won.

"Everything worked out all right. You were not
destroyed. You remained true to your compassion."

I reflected upon her words. I’d felt totally alone in
my struggle. I’d felt that Abriara and Perfecto had been speaking
of my problems only to gain my confidence. Yet others had been
helping secretly all along, Abriara with her selflessness, Perfecto
with his wisdom.

Yet I felt Abriara was praising me unjustly. If I’d
won a victory, where was my feeling of triumph?

All that I felt was sorrow and emptiness. My
nightmares still condemned me.

"Nothing has worked out all right," I said. "For a
time, I felt as I lost myself. Now, I feel I’ve found myself again.
I killed people, and the fact that I changed my mind and remained
true to my compassion does not undo my wrongs.

"Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t wait to remain true
to compassion until it was convenient, until that very last moment
when I was no longer in danger. Nothing has worked out all
right."

It didn’t really matter to me anymore whether things
worked out well or not. I only hoped to remain true to myself in
the future

An hour later a man wearing the battle armor of a
mercenary came to the hospital, pushing his way through the crowded
room. He saw me and raised a rifle to fire.

In that moment I achieved Instantaneity and dodged to
the right. The shot slammed into the wall beside me.

I watched the barrel of the rifle, and it did not
move toward me. The man seemed unbearably slow, as if he were sick
and feeble; I felt I could have dodged his shots all day. I had
never fought while in this mental state before, and I marveled at
the difference.

An orderly who’d been standing around for the past
two days jumped over a bed and kicked the mercenary in the head. He
crumpled.

Several people pulled off the mercenary’s helmet and
revealed a dark-skinned man of obvious Arab ancestry.

Another Alliance assassin.

The orderly jacked in a call to Garzón, then they
hauled the assassin away. I was surprised and saddened by the
event.

Garzón’s personal aid came to the hospital moments
later and held a whispered conversation with Abriara.

She frowned at him, then he looked at me and left.
She seemed disturbed, and for the next hour I watched her but
didn’t ask any questions.

Finally, she waved me over and said, "Angelo, let’s
go for a walk outside."

I put my arm around her and slid her off the bed. She
didn’t speak as I guided her out the door. The sun was unbearably
bright; the wind warm and humid.

The smell of ashes filled the air and the breeze
whipped tiny white ashes along the street.

Abriara steered me to a large beige dome, and outside
the dome on a table lay a set of battle armor and a flechette
rifle. Abriara nodded toward the armor and said, "Put it on."

I did. There was no helmet.

When I’d dressed she looked in my eyes and said,
"Garzón’s inside. He has a job for you. He says it’s dangerous."
She embraced me.

I remembered Garzón’s hint that I should take a job
as an assassin. I didn’t relish the idea of speaking with him. I
picked up the flechette and walked into the dome, down a wide
hallway of paneled wood. Garzón’s aide was sitting outside a
door.

"Garzón will see you inside," the aide said, nodding
toward the door.

I opened the door and saw a room full of people,
technicians working with holographic imaging equipment, a trio of
cameras aimed at the door. I could not imagine what was going on. I
thought they were making a movie of me entering the room. I swung
the door wide, a little embarrassed to be on camera, stepped in,
and saw a man standing ten paces away wearing the armor of a
mercenary.

He raised a bolt pistol to chest height and I
achieved Instantaneity. I shouted, "No!" and tried to dodge,
thinking even as I rolled to the left that no one can dodge a bolt
pistol.

Nothing happened. No blue ball of electricity shot
across the room. A dozen people were seated behind the mercenary,
including Tamara and Garzón. Tamara was hunched at a desk, a
cranial jack rammed into the back of her skull.

She said, "Santos, play back the tape." On the table
before her, a tiny image of me staggered back in surprise, shouted,
"No!"

"I’d say the reaction shot looks very nice, very
convincing, wouldn’t you?" Garzón asked her.

"Yes," Tamara agreed.

Garzón turned to me. "It seems we have a problem.

Captain Farouki is dismantling the Allied Marine
base, preparing to return to Earth, and he is, loath to leave
unfinished business." Garzón waved his hand: in the corner of the
room, nearly obscured by machinery, the Arab assassin slept in a
chair.

He wore a metal band around his head, a thin crown of
platinum. The band was connected to a cranial jack. He was
obviously drugged.

"For once," Garzón said, "
I
caught the
assassin. The Idealist Socialist contingent in the Alliance blames
you for their great failure in South America, and they know how to
hold a grudge.

"We thought it best here in Intelligence to simulate
your death, throw them off your trail. Tamara asked that you be
brought in to see how we accomplish this. I thought that it might
add to the realism of the moment if you believed that you were
going to die.

"You will have to assume a new identity after this,
understand?"

General Garzón turned to Tamara and nodded,
indicating that it was her turn to speak.

Tamara didn’t turn her wheelchair to look at me. She
simply told one of her aides, "Give me a neural map on the
assassin."

An image appeared on the holo in front of Tamara, a
ghostly rendition of the human brain. Within it, thousands of
tendons of light curved like glowing worms through his parietal
lobes, flashing across the cerebrum and dipping down into the
limbic system, each light throbbing in intensity or dying.

I’d seen some brain maps. I knew that our assassin
was a man focused on a plan. Garzón guided me nearer to the
holograph.

"You’re familiar with neural mapping?" he said. "We
monitor the electromagnetic fluctuations in the brain and pinpoint
the firing of individual synapses. We’ve been playing with your
killer for the past hour. We’ve hooked him up to a dream monitor
and through associations we’ve been able to elicit the memories of
his capture—the sights, sounds, smells, emotions.

"Here," he suggested, "let’s put it all up on the
holograph."

He flipped a switch, and the memory played
through.

The assassin himself was a blank space, a vacuum in
an otherwise inhabited world. He was stalking toward the hospital,
past mercenaries in green bug suits. He made no move to attack
them, and had little to fear, for he was similarly attired. He
reached the hospital and opened the door and fired, heard a noise,
and whirled just as a blur struck him in the side of the head.

Garzón said, "The map you see here reveals the
assassin’s exact memory of his capture. Tamara will stimulate the
memory to keep it repeating. Now, watch:"

Garzón nodded. A technician stepped forward with a
syringe and injected a small amount of opaque yellow fluid into the
assassin’s carotid artery. After a period of two minutes, the
pinpoints of light on the holograph all disappeared.

The assassin’s memory of his capture was completely
erased.

The general said in a businesslike voice, "You no
doubt know of omega-puromycin and a few other drugs used for mind
wipes. Most are effective only in helping the target forget a
recent memory, since they simply inhibit electrochemical activity
in the brain. Yet the military has found even these crude tools
useful in some situations.

"Yet other drugs can affect long-term memories—those
that are chemically stored—by disrupting neuronal pathways between
axons and dendrites in the cerebral cortex, thus turning a man’s
mind into a
tabula rasa
, a clean slate. These too have been
in use for centuries, but of course a complete mind-wipe is so ...
conspicuous. These drugs are also clumsy, clumsy tools.

"But the drug that you’re seeing here is new. It’s
effective at erasing select long-term memories—and therein resides
its power." The general hesitated, clasped me on the shoulder, and
chortled, "I won’t dare tell you the name of the drug. You might go
home and figure out how to mix up a batch.

"But let’s just say that we have figured out how to
take any man, any mind, and wipe exactly what we desire from
it.

"Afterward, Tamara here can insert a new memory. We
can make him recall, make him believe, almost anything that we
want. We can program the human mind!"

The holograph in front of Tamara went clean, and she
began to insert new memories, simple fantasies like one might watch
for entertainment. But Tamara was a professional, an artistic
genius.

She made her world seem perfect by controlling even
the smallest detail. One would remember the dreams that she
recorded as truth.

She began to fabricate the attack on me. Everything
happened just as the killer had remembered—except that he caught me
in a room alone. He fired his bolt pistol, and a blue ball of
energy erupted from its barrel as I shouted and raised my hand, as
if trying to ward off a blow.

The assassin then went to my corpse and inserted a
needle, withdrawing a tissue sample, and quietly withdrew from the
room.

At that moment, one of the general’s aides came and
inserted a needle in my arm, withdrawing some blood so that he
could plant it on the assassin as evidence of my demise.

I suddenly felt warm and very uncomfortable.

The general waved, and the technicians began to
withdraw. They wheeled the assassin out, and I knew that the
general was no telling me all of this simply to intrigue me.

He said, "When your killer awakens, he will be only
momentarily confused, disoriented. But he will never know what
happened."

Garzón watched me, his eyes glimmering with
anticipation. There was an expression on his face of sadness,
pity.

Suddenly I recalled being back home in Panamá,
jacking out of my dream monitor, stumbling around the room, unable
to recall the names of common household objects—a blank spot where
recollections of my father memory should have been.