I looked at Abacus and spat out my diatribe. “And you? Do you have such low self-respect that you’re going to let us use you to stay together, like a necessary evil?”
She answered softly, “I’m in love.”
“Oh, girl,” I said, with a cynical laugh, “you don’t know anything. You admire Ajax, isn’t that so? Well, he’s mine! Mine! And I am his, before my own existence. You’re only a caprice of fate, a stubborn variable of chance, nothing more!”
She continued looking at me, challenging but sweet, with the same bravery she showed on operations. She answered in a broken voice, “I admire Master Ajax, yes...” Then, her voice becoming a painful whisper. “But who I love is you, sir.”
My blood froze. A niggle of suspicion made me doubt. In my mind, I knew very well that the future was an open book for my lover, but I refused to accept this. I felt manipulated.
“Sometimes you’ve asked me to be understanding.” Ajax had moved to my side and spoke to me quietly, right beside my ear. I didn’t take my eyes off that helpless blonde figure who had remained standing, alone, in the middle of the Martian sand. “Now you understand me. I’ve seen our future, I know that you will love her, I know that I will love her a lot, and I know very well how much adoration she will feel for both of us. But my life is built around you, and it is tied to you by a strength that I don’t think you’ve ever understood. I would do anything to keep you at my side. Anything! Even tying this young life to our own by any possible means, even forcing you to lie with her although you despise her.”
That morning I felt afraid of his love, of that fathomless depth it had, as dark as Hebe’s eyes.
“Well, I despise her,” I said in turn.
Ajax looked at me with eyes of melted iron, the sun shining in the silver of his pupils. He took my head between his hands and kissed me furiously.
All my determination dissolved upon his tongue.
He pulled away from me a few millimeters and said to me with a cruelty it was impossible to associate with tenderness. “I don’t care. I care about you! You! Today, when night falls, we will make her ours, whether you want to or not.” He kissed me again, with something like impotence. And I detested myself again in his mouth. “It’s that, or we eat her alive. You decide!”
Then he pulled away from me slowly, took the young girl by the hand, and gently led her to our house, with his wobbly gait.
Deep within me I knew that this couldn’t be real. That Ajax wanted to place me between the sword and the wall, positioning himself in such a way that I had to protect the girl from him, to thereby grow fond of her.
But I also knew that, if it were necessary, he would carry out his threat.
At that moment I felt disgust, not of him —that was impossible— but for myself, in the way that I was falling into his trap with my complete consent.
I wouldn’t have been able to stand losing him either.
When I entered the house, Ajax was talking quietly with Hebe. Would he have eaten her if it were necessary; he, who had seen the three of us happy in the future and who knew what we would come to feel for one another? Undoubtedly.
I sat down before the girl but my words were aimed at my beloved. “Tell her everything, then. If she must remain with us, she needs to understand fully what she’s facing and why.”
Ajax sighed noisily and then began his long soliloquy: the story of his life and of mine, the way she fit into it, the way in which that role could be satisfied.
Abacus’ face didn’t show any hint of surprise or fear, but she felt them. She could be our lover or our dinner, but whatever it was to be, it must be decided before tonight. Ajax left it very clear that he wouldn’t let this opportunity pass by.
I intervened at that point. “If you decide to go, you can do so, I promise you, you have my word. Ajax and I will figure out how to resolve this.”
My lover lowered his gaze. He gave in infrequently and this was one of those times. My oath could represent the ruin of our personal world.
After a few seconds of tense silence, the young girl asked, “But if I go, what would happen to your future together?”
“Perhaps nothing, or maybe it would become so complicated that...”
“It would no longer exist,” Ajax interrupted. “You are our only hope.”
She nodded, thoughtful. “And you, Mister Jedediah, what would you do if that happened?”
I didn’t doubt for a second. “My life would have no meaning far from Ajax. Why prolong such a torment?”
He gave me a relieved smile, a smile of attachment that showed a loyalty beyond this life.
Hebe got up in silence and left the house.
“I’m sorry, could my jealousy have condemned us?” I said.
“Everything we are is in the hands of that girl.” I wrapped myself in his arms. “I suppose that you wouldn’t have remained at my side if I had forced her to stay here, right?”
I laughed with my face covered by his tentacles. “I love you without condition.”
“Oh, my Jedediah, love is a great master of compassion and atrocity.”
The girl opens the door timidly. She comes in with a bag in her hand, places it on the floor.
She’s crying, despite her efforts to hide it.
“It’s true that I love you, Mister Jedediah, although you don’t love me back. I have done so ever since I joined the militia.”
Her blonde hair falls in uneven curls over her forehead and over her ears, the rest is cut very close. Her small black eyes seem like two wells of still, dark water. She wears the typical uniform of an apprentice technician.
She seems so tiny, backlit by the afternoon.
This is the woman who will save Ajax and my future? This is the person who, by her presence, will ensure our love?
Hebe, the goddess of youth, the one who poured the ambrosia, the one who enlisted Mars himself...
Suddenly I feel for this young girl such thankfulness that it surprises me. Her disinterested love, which I spurn, is giving me a life with Ajax. And that thankfulness only merges with the compassion she inspires in me.
Perhaps, I recognize despite myself, one can love in many ways. Perhaps each love might be unique and individual: a different love for each beloved.
Ajax gets up from his chair and stands at her side; he is so enormous beside this tiny woman, who has barely stopped being a girl, that I shiver. And I think: how to love this fragile creature, how to desire this subtle tadpole? She is lovely as a gold filigree, but she is so slight and docile, so much the opposite of what I desire in my companion.
Her idealized love for me is painful: perhaps in the same way that my own hurt Ajax at some point?
But, why would this malleable and shy creature love me, this nymph wrapped in the armor of her intelligence and her laboriously constructed courage?
He crouches down and whispers something in her ear. She represses an exclamation, I don’t know whether of fear or of revulsion. Then she nods, silently, and lowers her head.
There are no ceremonies for what we do; Ajax invents them, I know, as we need them. Then Martian society adopts them, like the laws they truly are: statutes stemming from the vital praxis of one of its greatest heroes. From the man who began and led the struggle for the emancipation of the planet.
I know what he asked of her. I’m surprised that she accepted.
Could this perhaps be love, then? What other thing would make her endure that?
She stops before us, closes her eyes and holds out her hands.
Ajax reprimands her with undue harshness: She must watch.
Hebe opens her eyes bravely. By Zeus, she’s just a frightened little girl!
I have my doubts, but Ajax forces me to kneel beside the girl’s left hand, while he does the same at her right.
She must not see me hesitate, it is imperative that she not know that, inside, I am begging her for forgiveness for what I am going to do to her. I harden my eyes, make my gaze brutal. My own right hand c
loses over the old wound.
I quickly look out of the side of my eyes: Ajax has done the same.
Hebe trembles.
I hurry through the test, the offering, the communion. I take her pinkie finger and with a single bite I tear off the fifth distal phalange. The second shout confirms that my beloved has done the same a moment later. I chew in silence, as I apply a cauterizer to the wound, as delicately as possible. She is strong, she doesn’t faint, doesn’t cry, merely watches as if hypnotized as our mouths chew, the trace of blood on our lips, the slow slide of a part of her own body into ours.
I swallow reverently; it’s done, there’s no going back.
I hold her in my arms and gently help her to her knees.
Tacitly, I know that I should be the first. I extend my left hand and place the only pinky phalanges that I have left beside her mouth. Fifteen years ago, Ajax tested this ritual on us. She looks at me with love, with true devotion in her eyes. Abacus was my deity a few moments ago, and now I am her god who offers himself to her.
She kisses my finger with veneration, then hesitates, and finally bites. Her adolescent jaw doesn’t have strength, she tries again, jerks, sinks her teeth until a crunch confirms the job is done. I endure the agony with my best mask, smiling at her affectionately, offering her courage, encouraging her to continue. She finishes, dizzy. She coughs, chews slowly, avoids vomiting. Finally swallows.
She lifts her ashamed gaze. I kiss her forehead pearled with sweat and caress her damp cheeks. I encourage her to go on.
On her knees, she moves toward Ajax; she looks at him amazed, grateful, overwhelmed. And she bites without strength, but resolutely.
As I watch the ritual, I think of the new Mars that is coming, of the new culture that will be forged in it. I try to imagine hands mutilated as a sign of belonging, of communion. How savage it will seem to earthling eyes, how sublime it is for me; the danger of its distortion, the safety of its obedience and symbolization as it blends over time.
Perhaps Martian culture will adopt the triadic form of marriage as a general norm or, even better, perhaps multiplicity will be the common currency. Where love has no limits, nor chains; where to love a husband or wife is as universal and full as loving a child or a brother or a friend: those one loves without any condition, regardless of their sex or if they are one or five or a thousand. A world in which one loves people for themselves, not for their gender or their number...
And as the ceremony ends and Ajax helps an Abacus who is too overwhelmed to stand again, I try to glimpse how the myth will be that is being woven around this moment.
Abacus lay in my arms, smooth and perfumed. That sweet smell of balsam, cinnammon and sandalwood surprised by cardamom, kept me awake and overcome. Her skin, excessively white, contrasted with the reddish tone of my tanned skin, and with the olive green of Ajax, whose arms closed around my own.
I was a contained container, in the middle of my two loves.
Our little girl, as I liked to call her, had turned twenty two and I forty one, on the same day. Ajax surpassed three hundred and ninety something, but didn’t know the date of his eclosion, so he had adopted the date of our births.
Our usual celebration had been eclipsed by something much more important: Mars was free.
The celebrations of independence had been humble, after so much death and destruction. Nonetheless, joy still hung in the rarified air that no human could ever breathe again (the atmospheric survival suits were a small price for our freedom).
Mars had returned to being Mars and not a cheap substitute for the Earth. The natives paraded proudly on their sleipnirs under the sky covered in white, blue, and yellow clouds; their chests filled with carbon dioxide, their smiles restored. Almost four hundred years later, Mars had become Mars again and the sky was once again a gentle pinkish orange.
That day, we had all let ourselves plan a life for the first time, to dream of a profession, to joke about Gaudí-esque cities with Chevys on their streets.
When night fell, Ajax asked us, unexpectedly, if we wanted to have a child.
I had never thought about the issue; with my two loves I had everything I could ever want. But I think that they had thought about it and I felt a bit ashamed of being ignorant of that facet of their dreams for our life. I felt selfish again.
I thought of how we would do it: Ajax had been designed to reproduce only humans, that’s why the mestizos had not a single native feature, but both he as well as Hebe could gestate in their bellies. In reality, I didn’t want a child at all. I didn’t have a good memory of my father and I had none of my mother; but I could envision a being that was the fruit of our common love, of my absolute adoration for Ajax and my grateful passion for Abacus. A being who had the genes of my lovers, of those who had given meaning to my existence.
So, cheerfully, I told them how I planned to renounce my own perpetuation in favor of their own.
But Abacus refused vehemently. “No, Jedediah, that’s not how we are. We are three. If we are to have offspring, it will be by the three of us.”
Ajax smiled proudly, embraced us to his broad chest that could easily shelter us both, and confirmed, “That’s exactly what I was thinking. But I think,” he said, seeing my face,” that it is not yet time.”
Hebe sweetly bit my lower lip and gave a playful laugh. Then, her arms full of scars wove a bundle of tentacles on Ajax’ head and placed them on her breasts. That night we enjoyed our love with a completely new peace and freedom.
When both of them were asleep, the perfume of my adored little girl kept me awake, thinking again and again about the possibility of a child.
Now, she was enclosed in my arms and I in those of Ajax. The sky had begun to clear with reddish highlights around the diminished Martian sun.
Mars was free and I had everything I had always wanted and more.
I caressed Abacus’ milky arm, carefully sliding the tip of my nails along the maze of yellowish and pearly lines that I knew so well. Those scars were paths that led me to the memories of all the wounds we had healed together and all the battles that had caused them. Our little girl trembled in my arms and sighed in her dreams. In an almost reflexive response, Ajax’s tentacles came to life and completely covered my face; they were a jungle of tendrils that sought my mouth, my nose, my ears and my ears to sink themselves into those hollows and corners. I hugged Abacus tightly in my arms, caressing her frenetically, squeezing her until she woke, until I made her respond to my desires. And she did, as sweetly and as lovingly as ever.
And I was very afraid that the world would change.
But I knew that that was unavoidable; so I clung to our love, to the only way I knew to make a single soul of three beings, and I gave myself to them, totally and completely.
The birth is difficult.
I am terrified.
The only possible way had been to use his own body as a laboratory. The pure genes of a native had never been mixed, with all its modifications intact, with those of an ordinary human; even less, with the genes of two humans.
We had considered all the possibilities over the course of that year.
My proposal had been discarded: a child of Ajax and Abacus.
Hebe had proposed a sort of combination of the genetic material from spermatozoa from both of us with her ova, but although that sounded Frankenstein like to me (not to either of them, it seemed) there was still the problem that the descendents of my beloved wouldn’t conserve his genetic modifications.
The final idea had been a sort of mixture between clonation and combination. I never understood the process, but my consorts did. Our child would be a human, with the genes of all three of us... an aberration condemned by all the laws of Earth, and a Martian triumph for our people.
Our child would be a hybrid, which would need to gestate during the first weeks inside Ajax and then be transplanted to Abacus’ womb.
Symbolically, that was perfect. In reality, it worried me.
We didn’t eve
n know how many months it would be before the child was born.
It took twelve and almost killed our little one.
Capadocia Bel, born with a set of erroneous combinations. On her lovely little green face, two sky blue eyes and one black one came to look on us for a few minutes. Then, she died.
Did she manage to know how much we loved her?
I think she recognized our voices, the ones that every night rocked her to sleep in the belly of her mother, with songs and stories.
Perhaps, she inherited Ajax’ ability, that one which had betrayed him in predicting her health. Perhaps in those minutes she saw all the possible futures beside her three parents and enjoyed not just one of them, but thousands of lives at our side, wrapped in the affection that we yearned to give her.
I don’t know if I’m fooling myself, but I still cling to that idea to be able to carry on. The pain is terrible.
Ajax blamed himself, said that it was impossible for him not to have seen this future, that his hopes had blinded his good judgment. Abacus spent nights without sleep, wrapped in her suit, sitting on the porch, as if awaiting something. I had begun to dream of my mother again, and she had Hebe’s face.
I think that, as strange as it might seem, it was the news of this tragedy that gave rise to the counterattack from Earth.
On Mars, our little girl was already a standard to stand behind, before her birth. An almost mythical personage: the child of the liberated Martian who will overcome, even, the genetic conditioning of the terraformers. When that banner was struck down by the tragedy, Earth didn’t waste their opportunity and attacked a people who were demoralized by an incomprehensibly dark sign.
I only cried for my lost little daughter.
On one of those interminable afternoons, when we prepared for the battle, Ajax took me away from commanding my troop for a few hours, and sat me in the pink Chevy that still remained parked, now inert, at the door of our house.
Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction Page 25