No one spoke. I was astonished at his narrow understanding of us. His concept of the obligations imposed by honor was so alien I could barely comprehend him. I hadn’t been thinking of honor, I’d been thinking of revenge. In Panamá a man fulfills his obligations to family honor by avenging the family. Revenge and honor are one and the same. But obligations to an employer are not a matter of honor. It seemed a strange concept.
Abriara spoke my thoughts, "You don’t understand. Motoki pays us money to do a job, and we will try to do that job. That is the extent of our relationship. Our employment by Motoki corporation does not incur a debt of honor on our part."
Kaigo’s face twisted into a grimace of pain, of shock, of bewilderment, as if she’d uttered the ultimate blasphemy. He began speaking rapidly in Japanese. His microspeaker spat the translation, "You make me to stick out my tongue in surprise! How can you not owe an obligation of honor to Motoki? Your parents give you life, and you owe them a debt of honor for it, correct? But now, Motoki puts food in your bellies. Motoki gives you water in the depths of space. The clothes on your back are provided by Motoki. The very atmosphere you breathe was created by Motoki on your single moon and pumped into this ship at great expense. For every breath that you take, you owe Motoki. Take away all that Motoki has given you, and you would die in an instant! You would explode in the harsh depths of space. Motoki keeps you alive from moment to moment. Does not this incur a debt of honor? Does not this incur a debt of honor greater than the one owed to family?"
Mavro said it before any of the rest of us could form the words: "No. Motoki uses us as tools and pays for the privilege."
Kaigo was stunned into silence. He reached up and stroked the top of his head, flattening his blue-black hair. He opened his mouth as if to speak several times, then thought better of it each time. He was obviously having a hard time trying to come to grips with the concept. I couldn’t see the world as he did, from behind those surgically enhanced epicanthic folds, from beneath the ideological veil applied by the social engineers on Baker over the past century. He was completely dedicated to Motoki corporation, willing to die at the company’s request. I didn’t then realize what a monstrous gulf lay between us, that he could never really understand us.
His eyes became glazed, and he stared at the floor in increasing consternation, totally withdrawn. An expression of utter confusion replaced his normal wooden stare. He eventually waved us away, in the general direction of the simulator. We still had a few minutes of battle practice left. We jacked in.
We soared over a rolling ocean of water clear as glass. Ribbons of red seaweed twisted up from the ocean floor, buoyed by pods that floated like giant dark red olives. Flocks of Baker’s plastic birds rested atop bits of floating seaweed, wings folded like those of a butterfly, and at our approach they’d lower their wings and flutter away.
Kaigo jacked us out. He raised his head and spoke as if our conversation had never been interrupted. "I have considered your words. You say you owe no debt of honor to Motoki, and do not consider the needs of the corporation relevant. And if you owe no debt of honor to Motoki, how can I convince you to spare your enemies until the battle on Baker is won?"
We didn’t know what to answer, and said nothing.
He continued. "If you initiate a battle with the chimera Lucío and his team, I will slay you for disobeying my orders. I have spoken with Master Masae, Lucío’s trainer. And if Lucío and his men initiate a battle with you, Masae will slay them."
Abriara said, "We’ll restrain ourselves till after the war on Baker. But Lucío won’t abide by your decision, not after he’s been wounded."
Kaigo rubbed his chin. He said, "Masae has spoken with Lucío’s men. They are not unreasonable. They have agreed to a temporary truce."
Chapter 17
"Those idiots!" Abriara said as soon as she got out of the battle room. "Lucío plans to step on us, and step on us hard. He’s probably laughing behind his hand right now, thinking he’s got us fooled into believing we’ve got a truce!" She paced the hall nervously, put her hand to her mouth and chewed at it. "Angelo, how bad did you cut Lucío?"
"It was a deep cut," I said. "I sliced through one eye and his nose. He’ll be in surgery most of the night. He’ll be blind in one eye for weeks."
"Good. We’ll spend tonight making weapons. We can cut up your trunk and make some wooden daggers—something to protect ourselves."
I sighed, saddened to lose a family heirloom. She was right though. We might need weapons. We climbed up the ladder to level one, and by the time I reached the top I was exhausted.
Halfway down the hall we found the dead man, lying exactly as before. The hot air still breathed over him, bathing his hair in light, and he gazed at the ceiling, one knee raised in the air. As we walked toward him I dreaded having to lift my feet to step over the body. At 1.5 G’s it seemed someone’s infernal scheme, leaving a body in the hall so we’d have to climb over it.
Mavro was first in line, and when he reached the corpse he savagely kicked it in the middle of the back. "Who left Marcos here?" he screamed. "Why doesn’t someone take him away?" He kicked the corpse again, this time in the buttocks, and Marcos’s leg dropped. Mavro stepped over the body.
Marcos stared at the ceiling with black eyes, hardly opaqued. In his eyes I saw a similarity to Tamara’s face when she’d sat gazing zombie-eyed up at the ceiling. I felt that odd tug, the desire to find her, to learn if she was well. But it was weak and I ignored it as I stepped over the corpse. She’d been awake for several days and hadn’t contacted me. I was nothing to her. The fact that I still felt such concern for her almost seemed a joke.
We reached our room and Abriara began emptying my teak chest. She pulled out the cigars that layered the bottom and said, "Do you want this book?"
She held up a small leather-bound book with a faded red cover and ragged pages, the book I’d taken from Arish: The Holy Teachings of Twil Baraburi.
"Sure," I said, thinking I could use a little spiritual enlightenment about now.
She threw it to me. I picked up the book and read a verse at random: "Truly it is no sin for the righteous man to slay the infidel, for has not God Himself sworn to destroy the wicked? Therefore, slay the infidel and do God’s work."
I laughed and tossed the book to the floor. I’d expected the Holy Teachings to be a little more holy. It seemed like a good cosmic joke that of all the books on Earth, I should bring that one. But it made sense that Arish would have loved such a book: The Nicita Idealist Socialists have always taught that they want to engineer a society where goods as well as love are given freely. Yet to build such a society, they must kill all competitors. Such an idea is founded on the belief that a new society cannot be engineered to specification unless all competing societies are either absorbed or destroyed. It always struck me as ironic that they would try to wash themselves clean in the blood of their neighbors. Arish probably never saw that irony, just as he never saw the irony in the idea of committing holy murders.
I kept thinking of the dead man in the hall. The fact that his eyes were open bothered me. They reminded me so much of Tamara’s eyes. Of the way she’d lived in her eyes.
I wandered out into the hallway and found the corpse, then closed its eyes. The gesture was wasted. I couldn’t wipe Tamara from my mind so easily. As long as this corpse was here, I’d be annoyed by it. I considered taking it to the infirmary.
The infirmary’s disposal chute led down to the engine rooms. The body could be thrown down the chute and expelled for mass to give a little extra push to the ship, or could be recycled into food and water. But I couldn’t take the corpse to the infirmary. Lucío would still be there. I decided to pull it to the ladder and push it over. It would fall all eight levels, and whoever lived down there would have to lug it up to the infirmary.
Perfecto came out of our room to search for me. He padded up silently in his bare feet. "What are you doing out here alone?"
"I thought we should di
spose of this mess," I said.
He nodded and grabbed a foot and twisted the corpse around lengthwise. I pulled the other foot. The corpse was fluid and rubbery and tended to stick to the floor. Without Perfecto I’d have had difficulty getting it to the ladder. We pulled it close to the hole and prepared to topple it over. The ladder was much like the ladder leading to a sewer—a simple round hole with a ladder descending eight levels below us, and people could climb up and down both sides at once. At any given moment twenty people might be on the ladder. We watched the people climbing up and down and waited for them to clear so we could throw the corpse over.
Perfecto had something on his mind but seemed hesitant to say it. He worked up his nerve. "You know, Miguel would like to see you more often. He’s bonded to you."
"He hovers too close to me. I feel smothered by him," I answered.
"He has a very strong desire to see you. He craves it badly. If Lucío does go on a Quest tomorrow, Miguel will want to help you out."
I doubted that. Perfecto tended to be overly protective of me. I wondered if he was voicing his own concern. I couldn’t imagine Miguel being too thrilled at the prospect of joining us. Yet, who knows? Most people aboard ship didn’t seem to care if they got killed. Miguel could be one of those people. Would he walk through fire to save me, just because of the bonding? "What does it feel like to be bonded?" I asked.
Perfecto shrugged. "I don’t know if I can explain. Words are seldom adequate to express emotion. But, it is like—like being in the hospital room when my first son was born. I’d had two daughters, and didn’t want to get my hopes up. But when I saw my son—saw he was handsome in spite of having me for a father—I picked up that tiny infant, and all I wanted for him was good. I wanted him to experience only the good things of the world." Perfecto’s voice got husky as he spoke. He’d seldom discussed his family. "That is what I feel for you, Angelo—the desire for you to experience only good. That is what Miguel feels for you."
Intellectually I could understand such an emotion. I’d never had a child of my own, but understood the sensation even if I couldn’t share it. "It is a very pure emotion. I wish I could feel something like it." I searched inside myself and felt only hollowness. "With feelings like that, I’m surprised you were capable of leaving your family at all."
Perfecto’s eyes shone with tears, and he blinked them back. "When I found that my wife had been making love to another man, I wanted to die. I signed up to fight on Baker thinking to seek death. Since Motoki Corporation pays my wages directly to my family, I figured my children would be well provided for during the 22 years Earth time it will take to reach Baker, and they’d receive a bonus at my death. It seemed a perfect plan—until I saw you. It was as if a son was born to me in that moment. You are my family now. Miguel also feels this way about you. Will you let us protect you?" His jaw quivered with excitement as he waited for my answer. I looked at the thick hair perched on his head like some living animal, at the 3-D tattoo of the beast that shook with anticipation as his jaw muscles quivered. I marveled that he could care so much for me.
"No. I’ll fight my own battles. And if I’m killed, you and Miguel will bond to someone else next week. You’ll forget all about me."
"It’s not that easy. The bond can never be broken. If you get killed, Miguel will never forget his guilt, his loss."
I shrugged. I didn’t care about Miguel, or Perfecto, couldn’t take time to care. I couldn’t open myself to the pain of others. Over the past weeks the psychic battering of the simulators, the worry, the fear, the fatigue, the shock at my own brutality and the brutality of others had all combined into an overwhelming deluge. At first I’d thought I could handle it. But instead I’d only protected myself. I could do nothing more. I felt that if I opened the floodgates, I’d go insane. To allow myself to be touched by one concern would have caused me to be brutalized by all. So I stifled my sensitivity, knowing that I did it at the price of emotional emasculation.
At that moment I wanted only to throw this corpse down the ladder.
Perfecto’s concern for me seemed strange, incongruous with what I knew of chimeras. It was almost funny. Out of cruelty I said, "You know that only your genetic programming tells you to feel this great concern about me?"
Perfecto said, "I know."
"Compulsive love. Compassion by genetic decree. I suppose it’s better than no compassion at all." It seemed a good joke. My own compassion was slipping away. Perfecto was better than me. At least he was capable of feeling compassion for one person.
Suddenly everyone on the ladder moved off at once, and we pushed the corpse over. It fell two floors, hit the ladder, twisted in midair, then fell a couple meters and one leg tangled among the rungs. The body thudded to a halt, head down, swaying.
It had stopped near the level to the infirmary. We couldn’t have done any better job of getting the body there if we’d planned it. We watched it swing a moment, and on impulse I said, "If this were Mavro or Abriara lying here dead, would you care?"
Perfecto said, "I always get a sick feeling in my stomach when someone close to me dies, but I would not grieve."
"Why?"
"Because I’ve known from the time I got on this ship that many of us would die. Motoki guarantees us a 51% chance of survival in our battle contract, but I know that nearly half of us will die. So I refuse to become attached."
Have I been reacting to the foreknowledge of our deaths subconsciously? Is that why my compassion died? I wondered. After my mother died I’d been afraid to make close attachments. And later, when my sister Eva had been raped and strangled and left for dead by the roadside, I learned to separate myself from my family altogether, even though she lived through the attack. And for years after my wife Elena died in an accident I didn’t let myself get close to another woman—until I met Tamara. Something in her eyes, in the way she smiled and moved, had captivated me.
I tried remember what it was like to care, but I felt thin and worn, like an old pair of jeans. I couldn’t muster the feelings that had driven me to bring Tamara aboard ship. It was as if a part of me had died already. The part that cares about others. And I suddenly understood the sense of loss I’d felt for days: my compassion had died. I’d somehow left it in in Panamá, dead on the floor, next to the body of Arish.
Abriara opened the door from our room and looked down the hall. She came up to us, walking softly. I called out, "And you, Abriara, if one of us died, would you grieve?"
She seated herself next to me and looked down the ladder at the swaying corpse. "No," she said. "One cannot afford to grieve during battle. You are an old man and I fully expect you will be killed on Baker, don Angelo. But though I like you, I would not grieve for you, nor for anyone else aboard this ship."
I was feeling giddy, on the edge of hysterics. I’d always believed that all men were creatures of empathy. Now I saw that it wasn’t necessarily so. The vision threatened to destroy me. I said, thinking to toss her answer aside, to cast her view as an aberration, "I did not think you would. You are a marvelous creature, but I saw from your gene scan that you do not have a great capacity for compassion."
"You arrogant prick!" she sneered. "We chimeras have seen damned little compassion from you humans!"
She was right! She was right! We’d shown her kind exactly no compassion. I remembered the picture of the small chimera who looked like a bat, his lifeless body hanging between two Chilean peasants who’d clubbed him to death. He symbolized everything humans do to those they consider inhuman. In every bloody war, in every act of genocide, in every execution whether by a mob or under the direction of the state, the man to be destroyed is always accused of being inhuman, of being less than human. And I suddenly understood why every beastly tribe of cannibals that ever existed has chosen to call itself "The Humans" in its own tongue. We convince ourselves that our enemies are different from us before we slay them. And I saw that all the brutality and capacity for ruthlessness I’d attributed only to the derang
ed and wicked were an integral part of me. I’d killed Arish, and I’d kill again and again and again forever under the right circumstances.
There is an old saying, "Some men shake the world, and some men are shaken by the world." I’d always wondered which I was, and at this time I understood: I was a man shaken by the world—shaken by the vision of the the world as it is.
I began to laugh, a convulsive spasm that was half cry. I’d vowed when I first met Abriara that I’d try to give her a better view of humanity, but instead she’d shown me myself more perfectly—and the sight revolted me. "You’re right. I don’t have much compassion. I’ve always imagined it a trait of great importance. But now I see that I’m a killer by nature. I’ve killed before, and I’ll do it again. Perhaps my subtle capacity for viciousness is more of an asset in my quest for survival than I’ve chosen to believe."
Abriara looked at me with curiosity. What had seemed to me a revolting personal revelation didn’t disturb her at all. "I hope you have a capacity for viciousness," she said casually. "If you want to survive in my world, you need it more than food, or water, or air."
She stood up and sighed. She said, "Perfecto, go back to our room. I need to speak to the don alone for a moment."
Perfecto said, "Sí" and we watched him till he got safely behind the door.
Abriara said quietly, "don Angelo, I’ve believed we’d have trouble with Lucío from the first day aboard ship, and the attack in the simulator today shows it’s been on his mind, too. He planned this weeks ago. He must have planned it from the start, and he’s been waiting to humiliate us publicly. It’s his way of announcing the start of a Quest—if you don’t believe me, ask any chimera what this means. You can’t walk away from this. And you can’t hesitate when it comes time to use your knife."
"Of course," I answered.
"Then you’re willing to kill him?" There was a thrill in her voice, and I understood that she wanted to make a first strike at Lucío. I considered the consequences before answering.
On My Way to Paradise Page 24