On My Way to Paradise

by David Farland

García’s chimera Miguel sat in my room with his back to me. Miguel was heavy with fat, with a barrel chest and immense neck. When I stepped through the door he turned his bald head sharply so he could peer at me over his back with pale blue eyes as if he were an owl, and this surprised me. With a neck as thick as his, he should have had no mobility. I knew the men in the room had been criticizing me, but I didn’t know for sure who to be mad at, except Mavro.

  "That’s our problem:" García said, turning the discussion. His voice was not slurred, though his eyes were glazed, "we always underestimate these Yabajin. When we fought socialists, they were never any better than us. They’d never fought in a real war. But these samurai must have practiced fighting their whole lives."

  I was angry at Mavro. I pointed at him. "You—you were shaying bad thingsh about me. I heard you shaying bad thingsh!"

  García turned and said, "We weren’t talking about you, don Angelo. You must have imagined it. We were talking about the Yabajin. Perfecto believes that they are monitoring our helmet to helmet communications in the simulators—even though our scramblers would make such things impossible in real life. Yet I disagreed, for even if they knew of our plans before we initiate them, it would not explain their marvelous battle skills. I was just saying that only a lifetime of practice could make them so good." His innocent tone invited me to believe him.

  I looked at him and became confused. I decided I must have been wrong when I’d thought I heard Mavro speaking evilly of me. I crossed the room and sat on Abriara’s bed. One of Hector’s men was asleep on the cot, hugging the wall, so I had plenty of room.

  Zavala started to laugh, long and hard, and everyone turned to look at him.

  "Are you laughing at me?" I asked. "Are you making fun of me?"

  "I’m laughing at all of you!" Zavala said. "You intellectuals!" he sneered. "You wonder why the samurai beat us. You say, ‘They beat us because they cheat! They beat us because they’re stronger! They beat us because they’ve practiced shooting from the time they were sucking their mothers’ tits!’ And you say these dumb things as if they had any meaning. That’s the problem with you intellectuals, you always believe that if you talk about a problem you understand things. Yet you ignore the obvious about the Yabajin: Their spirits are stronger than ours! They beat us by the power of their spirit!" He began laughing deliriously. He was very tense and appeared to be the most sober person there.

  "Ah, I’ve met your type before," García said. "You have no faith in the power of reason. I’ll bet your father was a village sorcerer."

  "Then you lose the bet!" Zavala said. "My father was a farmer, and knew no magic."

  "Then I’ll make you another bet," García said. "I’ll bet if we study the matter carefully, we’ll find a good reason why the samurai always beat us."

  Zavala leaned his head to one side, scratched his temple with his silver-framed mechanical hand, as if trying to remember what he’d been talking about. "Fine. What shall we bet? A million Colombian pesos?"

  García opened his mouth in surprise. He’d obviously only been speaking figuratively and didn’t want to bet. After consideration he said, "You have a million pesos?"

  Zavala nodded. A million pesos equaled about two thousand standard IMUs, a great deal of money for a peasant like Zavala.

  "Fine," García said. "Then I’ll bet a million pesos we will find why they beat us."

  "Not so fast," Zavala grinned as if making a shrewd proposal. I’d seen that same grin on the face of the man who owned the Chicken of God. "You seem so certain you’ll win, you must give me better than even odds."

  "What kind of odds?"

  "I want nothing from you, Señor García," Zavala said. He pointed a finger at me. "But if I win, I want payment from don Angelo. I want his antibiotics to kill the rot. I would not be forced to do this, but don Angelo refuses to give me drugs. If I had an amigo who was ill, I would give him drugs. But don Angelo won’t give me drugs. No one will."

  García listened to the accusation but didn’t react to it. "What do you say, don Angelo? How much are your antibiotics worth?"

  I made a guess. "About 50,000 peshosh."

  "Then when we win, I’ll pay you 200,000 pesos," García offered. "Is it a deal?"

  There was no chance Zavala would win. I nodded.

  "Then we have a bet, Zavala," García said. "But now I must ask, what constitutes a win to the bet?"

  Zavala sighed and his gaze wandered around the room. Like some Chaco Indians I’d met from secluded villages, he was unused to thinking by conventional logical processes. He wouldn’t know what constituted proof to an argument.

  One of Hector’s men spoke, the small man named Pío who played the guitar. "Who can shay who’sh shpirit ish better? We can’t shee them. Shpiritsh. I wish we could."

  "But the don is a dealer in morphogens and is therefore an expert in genetics," García said. "We could have him compare the gene charts of the samurai with the gene charts of the chimeras, no? Would Angelo’s expert word on the subject satisfy you, Zavala?"

  I started to object to this. I didn’t want to be thrust into the heart of their argument.

  Zavala studied me a moment. "Sí. I will trust don Angelo’s word."

  García continued. "Good. And we can possibly learn the age at which samurai begin training, right? And by this we can learn if they are trained better than us—if we can find a library. Is there a library on ship?"

  We looked at each other and shrugged. García’s chimera Miguel, the one with the acrobatic neck, was staring at me strangely, his blue eyes like pale, icy pools. The sweat gleamed off his bald head. He had a small Fu Manchu moustache. The overall effect was frightening. Ugly.

  "Sí, there’s a library downstairs!" Zavala said.

  "Alsho, the medical computersh have good bio-biographicalsh," I pointed out, "sho we can learn when the shamurai shtarted training."

  "But how will we know if we win the bet?" García asked. "You don’t believe the samurai have been training for battle their whole lives, Zavala, but at what age do you think they would begin?"

  The chimera Miguel was still staring at me. Miguel’s pupils suddenly dilated and became as large as Mexican five centavo pieces. His face went slack and his jaw dropped. He seemed totally oblivious to what was happening in the room. He looked very ill. Ugly. I wondered what was wrong with him. Too much liquor, I figured

  Zavala considered for a moment. "A boy becomes a man when he grows his first pubic hairs, no? I do not believe the samurai trained before they got their pubic hairs."

  García said, "Some men grow pubic hairs when they are ten, some when sixteen. I say we should be generous on this bet: We will give you a break-off date of fifteen. The samurai cannot have begun formal combat training before the age of fifteen, or you lose."

  Zavala stared at the far side of the room a moment and his eyes focused on nothing. He appeared to be in a trance, consulting the source of spiritual knowledge. "I will agree to that," he said distantly.

  The chimera Miguel closed his mouth and began crawling across the floor, scrabbling toward me. His pupils constricted again, and he would have looked normal if not for a bit of slobber that escaped his mouth as he crawled.

  "That leaves only one problem," García said. "We need to learn if the samurai cheat in the simulators. Does anyone here think he could break into the computer to find out?"

  We all shook our heads. No one would be able to penetrate the defenses of the ship’s AI. Miguel reached the bed and sat down on the floor next to me. He patted my foot, then nuzzled his bald head against my leg like an old dog who seeks the comfort of his master. I realized he’d bonded to me, and I’d seen the process happen. This gave me a frightening sense of power, of responsibility.

  "Then I’m afraid there’s only one thing we can do," García said. "We’ll have to attack a couple of samurai to see just how strong and fast they really are."

  "But they have shwords!" Pío pointed out.

  García ask
ed, "Do I have any volunteers?"

  Mavro had been sitting on his bunk, slumped against the wall as if asleep. His head wobbled upright and he said weakly, "I’ll disharm one, if shomeone elsh will beat him up."

  "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.<
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  "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.