On My Way to Paradise (69 page)

I raced to the front of the house and found Elena
setting all of her things on the curb. "This family rots from
poverty!" she shrieked.

She took my son, and I never saw him again. I got
letters from doctors, statements of monies owed for services due.
My beloved son was taken from me, and I was left with nothing but a
financial drain.

Then I went to my mother’s funeral and not only did
Elena come, but I met Victoriano. He was twelve at the time, tall
and broad of chest, much like his mother. He wore his shirt open so
that he could advertise his manly features. He was quick of wit and
I thought that he was charming and funny.

After the funeral, he began to answer my letters.
When he was twenty three he married a fine Spanish girl far above
his station. He moved to Gatun and bought a house just three blocks
from me.

The knowledge that I’d had a son who lived just down
the street came as a shock to me and filled me with awe. I
wondered where he was now, and wondered what he’d thought of the
news reports that proclaimed his father to be a desperado.

Victoriano had had me over for dinner every Sunday,
and we had many good times. After three years his wife gave birth
to a daughter named Tatiana, and I loved her as if she were my own
child.

Elena had robbed me of the enjoyment of seeing
Victoriano grow up, so I took all the joy I could in helping to
raise Tatiana. The memories Tamara restored to me of the girl were
exact. The young child with the fine chiseled features and dark
shining hair was the same child I still held in my fragments of
memory, and I knew that my memory was true.

Tatiana was a child of quick intellect, as first
children often are, and from the time she was three weeks old I
held great hopes that she’d develop a fine mind. She was a very
loving child, and her embraces when I left her home were always
fierce, passionate, and prolonged. Her hair always smelled clean,
and often I envied the man who would someday marry such an
intelligent, passionate woman with clean hair.

It seemed to me to be the best combination of
attributes a woman could attain.

Often Flaco would come and visit me at my booth in
the feria. He was a friend of Victoriano as much as of me and he’d
always bring a small gift of candy or a flower for Tatiana. Flaco
always worried for her future and would speak about the
encroachments of the socialists on our borders and murmur about bad
things to come.

I recalled a neighborhood cat, a street cat with no
name, a gray female that lived off canaries and garbage. The cat
had given birth to kittens just a few weeks before I fled Earth,
and Flaco and Tatiana and I had gone to great lengths to capture a
kitten from a local drainage pipe. I remembered the snatch of the
dream, of Tatiana asking me to keep the kitten for a few days while
we schemed on how to get her parents to let her raise it, and I
understood why that kitten had bothered me so, why I had such a
strong emotional attachment to it in my dreams.

I remembered coming home that day I first brought
Tamara to my house; and as Flaco and I sat on the porch and drank
beer waiting for the spider monkey to walk up our street, Flaco had
spoken of the socialistas and their encroachments and wept bitterly
at our prospects for the future.

Tamara had given me memories of pain and hate to make
me violent, to make me kill Arish.

Then she’d cut me off from all my memories of my
family, of my loved ones and close friends, because she wanted
someone to take her off planet. She couldn’t afford to leave me
with any emotional ties, any moral obligations that would lead me
to stay.

So she’d severed all the memories of my family, and
nearly all the memories of my friendship with Flaco, and had left
me lying on the bedroom floor.

I’d wondered how a bowl of milk had appeared on the
back porch for the kitten, and I remembered placing it there
myself. But Tamara couldn’t even leave me that, couldn’t even let
me have an attachment to a dumb animal.

The memories began to twist, and I felt uneasy. The
memories revealed next were not associated at all with people I
felt close to—rather they were memories of small things I’d done,
of moral choices made.

I recalled an old woman I helped make young; a dona
Yolanda, a woman who was something of a
bruja,
a reputed
witch, down in Colombia. People from many villages came and offered
me small sums of money to buy her a rejuvenation. At first I’d
declined, for it sounded to me as if she were robbing the poor by
claiming to have mysterious powers. But by chance I learned from a
compadre something of her methods: she went from village to village
and cared for the sick without price. She’d been trained as a
nurse, but she often used local herbs to heal because her patients
were too poor to buy medications. Because of her use of herbs, the
locals proclaimed her a
bruja
even though she didn’t claim
magical powers.

If the woman had been Catholic, she’d have been
sainted. The more I learned of her, the more impressed I became,
until finally I mixed the meager offerings of the peasants with my
own savings and purchased a rejuvenation.

I did it for
life.
I did it because she was a
woman who knew how precious and fragile human life was.

And I remembered the times I wept and prayed and
struggled in an effort to help my patients. A young couple from
Costa Rica once came to me with a child that had been born without
arms. The parents couldn’t afford to keep buying prosthetics to fit
the child as it grew, but the young boy was unable to grow arms
because of a seemingly noncomplex reversal in one sequence of
genes. Usually one can simply take a cell sample, repair the
damaged cell, clone the child, and get the arm buds from a
developing embryo to graft into the damaged flesh. It is no great
matter after that to grow the arms.

However, this child had no tolerance for the grafted
buds, and we failed twice to heal him. I finally had to resort to
preparing a virus to repair the damage to the specific gene, then I
had to keep the child in a viral isolation chamber in my home for
two months while I made sure the infection was complete.

After that it was no great thing to generate some
arms. However, while we had the child in the house, Elena and I let
his mother live with us. Elena gave me hell for it, nagging me
night and day, accusing me of lusting after the child’s mother. She
remained convinced that my deed was motivated by sexual attraction
for the child’s mother. I couldn’t deter her from thinking this,
and since I felt that regaining the child’s health was more
important than the anguish I received from Elena’s wagging tongue,
I ignored my wife. This incident seemed pivotal in leading to my
eventual divorce.

The list of moral choices went on. I’d done similar
things many times, and the Angelo Osic that Tamara showed me was
not the man I felt myself to be. He seemed too kind, too generous,
too giving. I could understand why Tamara had threatened me with
guilt, why she’d told me that "if you ball me over, I die." The
Angelo she showed me couldn’t have resisted such a threat. But I
was not that man anymore.

Last of all I recalled my very first moral choice of
import—the incident that seemed to guide my later career. It was
the incident from my childhood in Guatemala when I witnessed the
slaying of the Batistas Sangrientos, the vicious family that
murdered people for their organ parts. One of the boys who got
executed was my age, a young man named Salomon Batista. He was a
great jokester with a somewhat crude mind, yet among the children
he’d always been a leader.

He was always getting us into trouble with the old
people in town. Salomon was a young man with tremendous energy and
physical strength, and always he was the best among us in sports
and wrestling. I’d been terrified when the captain made the young
children form a line, terrified when I watched Salomon plead for
mercy and claw at his father and beg to be killed with his father.
I watched Salomon pee his pants in terror, watched as the captain
told his men to lower their guns, to aim and fire.

When the shooting was done and the Batista family was
lying dead on the ground, I walked over to Salomon and looked in
his eyes.

His face was bloody, as if someone had just smeared
it with a bloody rag, and it was splotched with blood that had
spattered from his brothers. I looked into Salomon’s eyes and saw
them staring out, already glassy.

His hands were still twitching. He hadn’t been dead
for three minutes, yet his eyes were as glassy as if he’d been dead
for hours. The smell of blood was strong in the air. I looked at
him and realized that as I’d watched a miracle had occurred: a
vigorous young man had been unmade. The spirit had left his body
while I watched.

It seemed a miracle that he had died. Yet I realized
it was a greater miracle that he had lived at all. I vowed at that
moment, at the age of twelve, that I’d spend my life fighting
death.

The images quit coming. The smell of blood stayed
with me. Tamara watched me, sitting cross-legged in the dust of the
plain.

Seagulls wheeled overhead. She asked, "Is the tape
done so soon?"

Anger settled over me, hot and thick. I felt violated
at the deepest core of my being. I wanted to see my family, to know
the end of their stories, to see how their lives played out. She’d
not shown me much. She’d said she had only forty-percent memory
loss, yet she’d not given me back sixty percent of my life.

She’d given just enough to let me know how much I’d
lost.

I ached. "What of my father, and my sister?" I asked.
"You gave so little of them!"

Tamara snorted. "Tough luck, old man. My brains are
fried. I don’t have any idea what more I took. It didn’t seem
important."

I couldn’t believe her reaction. I could see no
reason for such callousness. I had once observed that we always
dehumanize those we are about to kill. I wondered if somehow she
had come to hate me, had learned to see me as less than human in
order to justify what she’d done to me.

I wanted to return to Earth, to find my family.

The ships were being prepared for the return trip,
but they’d be filled with Japanese men, angry at what we’d done. I
suspected that I’d never make it home alive.

Even if I did, what guarantee would I have that I
could ever find my family?

My father would no longer be alive. Victoriano would
be an old man. Even Tatiana would be nearly sixty. If she recalled
me at all, she’d have very little emotional attachment to me.

Panamá would not be the same. I could never go
back.

Tamara didn’t care. She’d used me like a rag and then
thrown me away.

"You whore!" I shouted. "You whore!" I saw her
through a haze of red. My teeth chattered and I jacked out of the
dream monitor.

I leapt from my chair and rushed Tamara.
I was
free
! She’d freed me from the ompulsion that kept me from
attacking her. Never had I felt such rage.
I could kill her
now
!

Yet I’d dedicated my life to fighting death. I stood
before her, glaring at her. I struck her face—once, twice, a third
time. I hit her hard enough so that her wheelchair spun around.

Blood droplets spattered from her nose. I wanted to
kill her, but even that didn’t seem enough.

A Quest: I took her by the throat. I was soft and
warm and slender in my hands. I felt strong enough to snap it, but
I just squeezed.

It takes a long time to strangle a person.

Her head lolled up at me and her face reddened. She
watched. I felt cold, distant—as if someone else’s hands were
strangling her. A single tear welled up in the corner of her eye as
her face darkened.

I suddenly recalled the other Tamara, the one who had
let me taste her undying compassion in the simulator, saying,
"Listen, listen. Become fluent in the gentle language of the
heart."

I remembered how her dark eyes had watched me in the
simulator, the way she considered me as if I were some rag doll
torn apart, full of pity and condescension.

She’d known that I was destroyed because she was the
one who had destroyed me.

Even now, I realized, she was manipulating me.

She wanted me to be her killer, even though she knew
what it would cost me.

I gasped and pulled away. She’d wanted to die in
Panamá. She’d never wanted to be placed in a brain bag. She was too
weak to kill herself, and so she wanted me to do it.

"Finish it!" Tamara spat from her microspeaker even
as she gasped for breath. "You hate me! How could you feel anything
but contempt for me?"

She was right. I no longer felt any attraction to
her. I was poised on the head of a pin.

I stepped back and laid down my weapons forever.

"You know of Garzón’s plans for you," I said. "We
both know what kind of prison he will make for you. You shall be
his tool, as I was your tool."

"Kill me," she pleased. "Garzón will make me hurt
others—an endless parade of them!"

"I am dedicated to life," I said softly.

Tamara broke. Tears streamed down her face. She
laughed in pain and self-derision. "You’re with Garzón, aren’t you?
When we were in Panamá I needed someone to save me. You were the
only chunk of meat available. When you jacked in that last time, I
really thought you were Arish trying to manipulate me. So I
attacked, knocked you out. When I got up and found you on the
floor, I found Arish alive."

I nodded, recalling how it had been.

"I was sick. So sick and weary. I wanted to escape. I
wanted Arish dead. You wouldn’t have taken me away. You wouldn’t
have killed him for me." She choked back a sob. "I was sick.
Feverish at the time ... so crazy. I gave you a deep program. I
wanted you to take me to the Garden of Eden. And look where you
brought me!" A noise came from her microspeaker that could have
only been a snort of derision.