She said, "So. You don’t need to kill me. You have your vengeance."
"I have my vengeance." I nodded. "From the time I met you, you’ve always believed that death was the answer to all life’s problems. How pitiful!"
"You don’t know what Garzón can do to me! You don’t know what cyborging will do to me!" Tamara cried.
"I’ve known Body Purists before. Your fears are unjustified. You will only be put in a cage where you can harm no one!" I turned to go.
"You’ve never sifted through another person’s memories. You’ve never been intimate with their thoughts. You live under the delusion that everyone thinks like you. But I’ve been into many minds, I have witnessed thought patterns that would horrify you. Twice I’ve been within the minds of military cyborgs. The surgeons cut out parts of the hypothalamus, chemically block certain hormonal secretions, cut them off from the world of emotion. Because they cannot feel, ‘cannot empathize; they lose all semblance of a conscience."
I turned. I’d been living too close to sociopathy for too long not to be disturbed. I suddenly understood why she was so horrified by the thought of imprisonment in a cymech, why she’d run from Jafari, why she’d made paranoid accusations about me being a cyborg.
"It’s true," Tamara said. "The military prefers them that way. It makes it so much easier for them to get on with their jobs. When you delivered me to Garzón he promised me freedom. He promised to let me go if I’d helped him for just a while. But you’ve seen the way he clings to me. He’ll never let me go. And he’s constantly complaining about my annoying tatters of morality. I’ve turned him down on too many jobs. If he puts me in a cymech, he’ll make me a military model. I’ll learn not to care. I’ll see human minds and emotions only as something to manipulate. I’ll become infinitely more evil and powerful than you believe me to be now."
I considered her words. Motoki’s military training had struck at my own fragile morality. Two weeks of it and I’d felt as if I’d forever lost the ability to feel. What would happen if that capacity were surgically removed? How long would Tamara or anyone last?
"Then," I said, "I must find a way to free you if I can.
"And if you can’t," Tamara begged, "I would rather die."
"I understand," I said, knowing that I would have to be the one to kill her. "How many people know of your role in Intelligence?"
Tamara gave me six names, Garzón’s closest advisers. I walked to the door. A final thought struck me. I realized that someone else had fallen under her knife: "But in payment you must give Abriara Sifuentes back her memories!"
Tamara blinked in surprise but made no other sign that she understood me.
I thought that she’d deny removing anything from Abriara.
"Why?" Tamara asked.
I shouted, "Who do you think you are to steal her past?"
"I took only her pain," Tamara objected. "If you had a patient with cancer, you’d cut out the cancer. No one should suffer what she suffered!"
"You and Garzón are not so different. Give you a little power, and you set yourself up to be gods!"
Tamara said, "If I set myself up to be god, let me be a gentle god. You want me to give her back her pain? You want to watch her die inside?"
The thought revolted me.
I backed out the door and wandered the streets. Was Tamara right? I wondered. I wanted Abriara to be whole, but it was too cruel to contemplate.
The sky was hazy, reddened by clouds of dust. I needed a plan to free Tamara. I wanted to be certain that it would work. The most direct solution would be to kill Garzón and the technicians who knew of Tamara’s gifts.
But I did not want more blood on my hands.
I had seen the general’s fear of what Tamara could do, and that suggested a more moderate approach. Why not immobilize the men and let Tamara carve away their memories of her?
I checked a clock. The quickness with which Tamara had operated on me suggested that it could be done in only a few hours. Afterward, Tamara would be free to live on Baker like anyone else.
I went back to the hospital and phoned the Chaeron, checked its medical records. As I suspected, they had mysteriously appeared only recently. Her genotype was listed in her records, an index to her cell structure. I went to the hospital’s engineering section and fed the data into a gene synthesizer, and thus began to create her clone. I’d need to seed her brain with cells from a cloned embryonic cortex if I was going to get her to walk. I’d need some neural growth stimulator re repair her brain. It would take several weeks.
Calling up the medical records of those who knew of Tamara’s situation, I familiarized myself with their faces.
I made up a mild neurotoxin that would knock out anyone who got it in their bloodstream.
I knew that I’d need help—powerful men who could be trusted. Four chimeras had bonded to me. I knew how to induce the bonding if I needed more.
That afternoon I spent in the lab with a cell specimen from Perfecto. I opened up some cells, created a dozen fertilized eggs, put them in a broth, and began replicating them.
That night I went up the hill to a bonfire where some mercenaries camped. They sat around the campfire and told jokes and sang songs. I found Mavro, sat next to him.
"I never made it to captain," he said. "Now the war is over. What will I do?"
"I don’t know," I admitted.
Garzón put in his appearance that night, dragging Tamara in a wheelchair. He knew the value of sitting in the dark, the firelight playing on his hair while he waited for a chimera to bond. He appeared very much at ease with this. I tried not to stare.
Abriara brought some good beer that she’d found up to the campfire and sat beside me. I listened to the singing. She’d washed her hair, and it smelled sweet.
"I didn’t see you much today," she said.
"I was down in the gene lab, making clones of Perfecto."
"All day? Are you going to build an army? How many copies do you need?"
I laughed. "I just wanted to watch the zygotes grow, be certain they formed properly. I think two. I think I’ll make twins."
"You know there’s a whole wing of the hospital filled with incubation chambers. It’s been sealed off for eighty years, but the equipment has been maintained."
"I know," I said.
"If you want any help raising the children, I’ll be available," she said. She was sitting very close, leaning into my body space. I understood what that must mean for a chimera to share something so personal. I reached down and took her hand and she squeezed mine.
That night I met with Miguel and two of the chimeras who’d bonded to me, and I didn’t talk of my plans for Garzón. Instead we talked about their pasts and made friends.
I didn’t feel good about plotting Tamara’s escape. I felt unsure about why I’d saved that Yabajin woman, why I’d tried to save them all.
If I’d done it because of Tamara’s programming, then my morality was a sham. But I wasn’t so certain Tamara’s programming had caused me to act as I did. When I killed Arish, I’d done it for Flaco. In my mind I was avenging Flaco, not saving Tamara.
And when I’d killed Juan Carlos I’d done it only for myself.
When I stopped trying to kill the Yabajin woman, I believed that I’d quit because I felt kinship to her as a human, a factor outside Tamara’s programming. I’d only tried once to kill for a woman, and that was when I tried to kill Lucío for Abriara.
I saw that something more had affected my basic decisions: Tamara’s radical programming convinced me that to some extent we do program ourselves. We do build up patterns of thought over a lifetime.
I’d only stopped practicing violence when I realized how it was destroying me.
I vowed to create a deep program that would affect the entire way I related to others. I vowed to do it by my actions—just as a little fifty-kilogram weakling can exercise his muscles to become the strongest man in the world.
From Abriara’s example, from the way
she tried to nurture me in secret, I recognized that it didn’t matter if one were not strong in that capacity by nature. It could still be trained.
I felt as if I were at the top of a hill staring down at a golden path, and upon the path, in my mind’s eye, I could see the man I would someday become.
Our society in Panamá glorified the man of contradictions—men of steel and silk. I’ve known men who try to be both. In my experience they fail.
I’ll always believe that if I’d continued training with the samurai, I would have trained away my capacity for compassion. The way of the warrior is the way of death. I’d have become as empty as the refugiados, as Mavro, as the samurai themselves. And so if by myself I’ve attained any level of morality, then perhaps it is a matter of fortunate circumstance as much as of choice. I was fortunate to have been put in the cryotanks after the riot, fortunate to have friends who tried to help me become something better. Tamara believed I’d run according to her program, and to some degree it was true. But her view seemed too simple to explain everything.
I spent the day thinking upon these things and cataloging my memories of my family. I wrote them down as much as possible to make sure that I’d never forget again.
I checked with the ships in orbit and found that I could get passage back to Earth on the crew’s quarters of the Chaeron, thus minimizing the risk of contact with the Japanese.
I decided to leave Baker forever.
I felt drawn to Tatiana and Victoriano, my sister and father. I could not bear the thought of staying on Baker—It was more than the evil memories of the place, it was the evil future of the place.
The society my compañeros were forming was brutal and corrupt. They’d seized the planet because of greed and were murdering its inhabitants at every turn. I couldn’t see a future for the place. After four days we had done nearly nothing. The city was in rubble and no one was cleaning up. No one was rebuilding.
The mercenaries strutted around and patted each other on the back all day, then huddled around bonfires and gambled and drank beer all night.
All afternoon I thought depressing thoughts. I made my plans for Garzón. That night I went to the bonfire and drank and sang and acted like an idiot, the same as everyone else. When Garzón left the camp for the night, pushing Tamara along in her wheelchair, I got up and followed, hoping to learn where I could waylay him. A good dozen chimeras followed him, the same way that my chimeras followed me.
It would not be easy to subdue Garzón. Everywhere he went, the eyes of his chimeras were upon him.
We were walking back toward a large home that Garzón had taken as his own when a hovercraft came roaring over the hill from the jungles. It was obviously one of ours, since the automatic defenses let it into the city.
Four ragged mercenaries were on the hovercraft, and as they came into town one shouted anxiously, "Garzón!" They were obviously frightened.
I wondered what had happened, if they had spotted Yabajin in the jungle.
Garzón shouted, "Here!"
The hovercraft veered toward him and stopped just a few meters away. The chimeras that followed Garzón began jogging forward, eager to hear the news. A turret gunner on the hovercraft unsnapped his helmet and pulled it off: he was Japanese.
He shouted, "I am Motoki Hotayo!"
His men opened fire with plasma turrets and flechettes. Garzón was still pushing Tamara in the wheelchair, and the samurai fired through her. Plasma set her afire like a blazing torch; a shot from a flechette nearly took her head off.
I dropped to the ground. Around me the chimeras unstrapped their rifles. The hovercraft engines whined, and the vehicle soared back toward the jungles.
Everywhere the chimeras were shouting in fury. The samurai kept firing as they retreated, creating a rain of death.
Someone managed to fire two shots at the samurai with a flechette, but the bullets bounced off their armor. Within seconds the samurai’s hovercraft retreated beyond the city wall, and was gone.
I got up. A dozen chimeras that had been close to Garzón were dead or wounded. Someone was shouting, "They killed Garzón! It was Motoki Hotayo, the president’s son!"
Everywhere people ran from houses with their armor and weapons.
Several chimeras grabbed the remains of Garzón—a charred corpse full of glowing worm holes where plasma had eaten through, shredded by metal bullets—and rushed it down to the infirmary.
Others saw that it would do no good.
The chimeras who were bonded to him, who loved him most, threw themselves on the ground and wept.
I went to Tamara, slowly.
There was nothing left of her—a charred body without hair, wearing ashes for clothing, too horrible to describe.
I stood by and waited till her body cooled, laid her on the grass.
Tamara’s eyes stared up into the night sky, as if watching stars.
The eyeballs were blackened. She had no eyelids left. People were shouting and carrying the wounded to the infirmary, and I realized dimly that I should go down to help. A mercenary in bedclothes raced up with nothing but a rifle in his hand.
"Was she a friend of yours?" he asked.
I had to think. "No, I suppose not. She was my destroyer."
The mercenary nodded, mystified. He pulled off his shirt and laid it over her endlessly staring eyes. He mouthed the words that the refugiados always spoke over their dead, "Free at last."
I ran to the infirmary to help with the wounded.
That night I took Abriara on a walk and told her how Tamara had reprogrammed us. I spoke her of her rape aboard the ship and what I remembered of it, and showed how it differed from her own memories.
Abriara pulled my face toward her and looked in my eyes. "Is this some hoax?" She laughed nervously. "Are you trying to get rid of me? I’m not being too pushy, am I? We can take things slow if you want. I know you have not given yourself to a woman for many years."
I was tempted to chuckle. I didn’t think that her squeezing my hand had been too forward. "I am not trying to get rid of you. Come to the general’s lab, and I’ll show you."
She was silent for a long time, carrying on an internal argument. "Let’s go," she said at last, and her tone betrayed her own concerns.
When we reached the hospital, one of Garzón’s technicians was dissecting Tamara. Though I’ve seen many dissections, this one sickened me more than I could imagine. He’d removed the temporal and parietal regions of the brain and was pulling platinum wires from her head. Hundreds of tiny neurosynaptic adapters were plugged into every center of her brain—neural, visual, tactile, emotive—they ran to a small processor just above her cranial jack.
"Pretty fancy equipment, no?" the technician said as casually as if he were carving lettuce for a salad instead of dissecting an acquaintance. "I’ve known professional dreamers—the kind who create settings and act for the dream networks. None of them had equipment like this. None of them!"
Abriara stood away from the operating table, horrified. I hadn’t wanted her to see the truth in this ugly fashion. The expression on her face pained me. It betrayed the horror chimeras always feel when they’ve been brutally violated.
"What will you do with the equipment?" I asked, trying to distract Abriara, to keep her mind off her problem.
"Sell it! Someone is going to want to start a dreamer’s network around here sooner or later. I could make three good hookups out of this!"
Even though I was sickened by what was happening, I looked at the gray matter of Tamara’s brain and part of me marveled at her mind. She had known us so intimately—had understood our fears and desires so well.
She was an unrivaled cartographer of thought, a dreamer of dreams. She’d been too talented for our puny world. I was saddened to see her treated this way.
I took Abriara outside and she collapsed in my arms and wept, then suddenly staggered up and began running, as if to escape. I grabbed her arm and slowed her and we walked together for a while. Abriar
a wept for, a long time, then said, "Perfecto used to question me about my past—just after the riots. He insinuated that bad things had happened to me. I did not believe him."Her chest began to heave and she breathed heavily, as if she’d vomit.
"People I’d known all my life told me I’d changed, that I’d become happy for the first time!" She stopped and stared straight ahead, as if viewing something I could not see in the darkness.
"I think perhaps they told the truth," I said.
"You say this woman destroyed you. But she tried to save me!"
"Perhaps. We will never know the truth of it."
Abriara stared at me. In the darkness I don’t know what her silver eyes could see. I could read little of her expression. "Even if your story is true, even if this woman stole my pain or planted some false memories, it changes nothing about how I feel. I have feelings for you because of a thousand little things that you’ve done: the way you treated me as an equal, the way you suffered when you did wrong, the little kindnesses you committed."
"I looked away from her. "You may tell yourself that now, but it will never change the truth. Do you not feel cheated, that I couldn’t save you from Lucío?"
"Yes, I feel cheated. Yes, I feel cheated—but not by you!" Abriara said. "All the things I remember you doing are things you’d have done if you could. At heart you are the man she imagined you to be."
It rained heavily that night, and the next day Abriara came to the hospital at noon. She’d made a special lunch and she asked if I’d accompany her on a picnic.
I agreed and she led me to a hovercraft. We flew south out of the city, and we wore no armor. Abriara had found a dress with a bright pattern of flowers in many colors. I wore my white kimono. I was very uncomfortable, going outside the city without armor. My clothes were so thin even sunlight could pierce them.
We spoke of inconsequential things and Abriara asked me to relate everything I could about my family. She took me to a long peninsula with several dunes on it forty kilometers south of the city, and we stopped at the north end of the peninsula and ate lunch.
On My Way to Paradise Page 52