On My Way to Paradise Read online

  Chapter 2

  "So, what happened?" Flaco asked as soon as I got the monitor off.

  "Nothing," I said, not wishing to compromise Tamara’s privacy any further. I pulled her plug from the console, terminating her self-torture. Tamara straightened and stretched.

  "Is it time to eat?" she asked. She stared at the floor and would not look at me.

  "Yes." Flaco helped her stand. It had begun to rain outside, so Flaco went to the closet for an umbrella.

  Tamara stared at the floor and said, "Stay out of my dreams."

  "I’m sorry," I said. "You looked as if you were in pain."

  "I only had a headache. You invaded me. You don’t have that right!"

  "You’re my patient," I said. "I’m obligated to care for you."

  Flaco came back with the umbrella, and we walked to La Arboleda. .

  When we got to the restaurant, only a few late eaters and drunks were there. We all ordered fish dinners. Flaco convinced Tamara to order a Rum Sunset—a drink his grandfather had invented that is made of rum and lemon wine, spiced with cinnamon. Flaco tried to get me to drink one too, but I refused. Flaco bragged that his family still owned the company that made the lemon wine, and I pointed out that both his grandfather’s company and his grandfather’s bad taste were still in the family. Tamara laughed slightly and stared at the stub on her arm. A drunk staggered to our table, looked at our drinks, and said, "Ah, a Rum Sunset. That’s my favorite God damned drink in the world. In fact, it’s the only good drink!"

  "Then you should sit and have a Rum Sunset with the grandson of the man who invented it!" Flaco said, and he ordered a Rum Sunset for the drunk.

  I was very sorry about this, for the drunk smelled of sour sweat, and he sat next to me. He fell asleep after guzzling his drink, but his smell ruined my dinner. We ate and talked; Flaco told many peculiarly bad jokes, which Tamara laughed at shyly at first, but later she laughed horrendously at the slightest provocation. One of my customers that day, a refugiado from Cartagena, had paid me in mixed foreign coins, so I’d carried a large bag of coins tied to my belt all day. I opened the bag and began stacking the coins according to country and denomination. When Tamara finished her first Rum Sunset, Flaco ordered her another, then another, and I realized Flaco was trying to get her drunk, and Tamara must have realized this too, since she excused herself from the third drink, claiming she had a headache.

  Flaco kept drinking and got drunk himself. He told a long story about how his father did well in the wine business, until one day when he went to Mass and fell asleep. In a dream, the statue of the Virgin began weeping. Flaco’s father asked the Virgin why she wept, and she told him it was because he sold wine when he should be selling hats to the Indians in the Amazon. Flaco’s father became convinced he would make a great deal of money selling hats because, after all, the Virgin Mary had told him to do it. Then he sailed up the Amazon and was killed by a poisonous toad before he could sell a single hat. This incident greatly diminished the faith of everyone in Flaco’s village—so much so that the villagers broke the offending statue with hammers.

  "Sho, what about your family?" Flaco asked Tamara, his head wobbling back and forth as if it would topple off. She straightened up, and her face took on a closed look. She hadn’t drunk much, but she pretended to be out of control so we’d excuse her bad manners. "Family? Want to know about my family? I’ll tell you—my father, he was just like Angelo there. He only wanted two things: order and immortality." I had just finished stacking my coins in neat little staggered rows, like banana trees. Tamara lashed out with her stump and knocked all the coins down.

  "That’s not—" I started to say.

  "What? You going to say you don’t want immortality?" Tamara asked.

  Like most morphogenic pharmacologists, the hope of obtaining a discount on rejuvenations until man solved the problem of mortality or learned to download brains into crystals was a major factor in determining my career. I concluded, "I don’t want order."

  Tamara peered at me as if I’d said something very strange, and shook her head. "You bastards are all the same. Your bodies may live, but your souls die."

  "Who’s a bashtard?" Flaco asked.

  "Angelo. He’s just like a cyborg—the assholes want to live forever, but they make their living denying other people that opportunity." I suddenly felt as if I’d jacked back into her dreamworld. As far as I could see, her strange accusations against cyborgs and me made no sense.

  "You’re full of guano," Flaco said. "Don Angelo Oshic here, he’sh nice. He’s a gentleman."

  Tamara looked at us, and her head wobbled. She reached for a glass of water and missed. The water spilled on the table. "Maybe he is a cyborg," she said, ducking her head a little.

  "We’re not shyborgs," Flaco said in an easy tone. "See, no shyborgs are in thish room." He handed her his Rum Sunset.

  "You got a comlink in your head?" Tamara asked. Flaco nodded. "Then you’re a cyborg." She acted as if she’d made her point. I remembered a news clip I’d once seen of Surinamese Body Purists. Upon conversion to their cult, new members pulled out their comlinks and their cranial jacks, their prosthetic kidneys or whatever they had, and lived totally without mechanical aid. I wondered if she were a Body Purist, and I suddenly knew why she wanted a regenerated hand instead of a prosthetic—the thought of her body being welded to a machine terrified her; it desecrated the temple of her spirit.

  "A comlink doeshn’t make you a shyborg," Flaco said.

  "That’s where it starts. First a comlink. Then an arm. Then a lung. One piece at a time."

  "What about you?" Flaco asked. "You shaid you were going to tell about your family."

  "My mother and father are cyborgs," she answered with that closed look. "I never met them. I’m just the interest paid by the sperm bank. If my parents ever saw me, they probably got pissed off because I didn’t look enough like a washing machine."

  "Hah! There musht be a shtory in that!" Flaco said. "Tell ush the shtory."

  "There’s no story," Tamara said. And I wondered what her point was, why she bothered to lie at all.

  The waiter brought Flaco another drink, which he downed on the spot. Tamara ordered some aspirin. Flaco was nodding off, so I pulled away his plate and glasses before his head landed on the table. Tamara just sat and gazed at her plate. I decided to drag away the smelly drunk who sat beside me and order dessert.

  I put all my coins in my bag and moved the drunk back to his previous stall. As I finished setting him upright, comlink tones sounded in my head. I tapped the comlink switch behind my ear and a man with a heavy Arab accent said, "Señor Osic?"

  "Yes," I answered.

  "Tell the woman across the table from you to go to the telephone."

  The caller had to have been in the room at some time in the evening to know I’d been sitting with Tamara, but since he didn’t know I’d moved away, he’d obviously left. "She’s drunk. She’s unconscious," I lied, hurrying to the door to see if I was being called from outside.

  I opened the door and looked out. The avenue was dark and empty, but far down the street I could see the shining heat of a man’s body outside a minishuttle. The caller clicked off, and the man jumped in the minishuttle. The tail lights glowed red momentarily and the shuttle blossomed into a ball of light as the engine turned on. It shot up into the night sky and streaked away.

  I went back into the restaurant, and Tamara looked at me curiously, as if to ask why I’d run out. Flaco struggled to lift his head from the table. He turned toward Tamara and said, "I got a messhage for you on comlink: Arish shays he h-has your hand. And now he has y-you."

  Tamara turned pale and drank another Rum Sunset.

  Chapter 3

  On the way home, Tamara and Flaco were so drunk they had to lean on me for support. Tamara kept swearing and mumbling that she wanted a gun, and Flaco kept saying "What?" When we reached the house, I laid Tamara on the couch and Flaco on the hall floor in front of the bathroom do
or and went to bed.

  After a couple hours I was awakened by Flaco vomiting and Tamara murmuring, but I just went back to sleep. I dreamed of an old Zeller Cymech advertisement that portrayed a group of people in a lunar gambling casino, all of them cyborgs wearing designer cymechs. I had seen this holo once before, and admired it. All the cyborgs were laughing, and drinking Rum Sunsets. Several of them wore feminine bodies, complete with metal breasts studded with small jewels. One female cyborg was talking to a companion, and she giggled in a quaint manner. I suddenly realized she was my wife, Elena, who had been hit by a truck thirty years earlier. But it seemed irrational to believe she had died. I had merely forgotten that she had bought a cymech and we had somehow scraped her pieces together and put her in it, and now she was here on the moon, drinking Rum Sunsets and laughing. I planned to go embrace her, tell her how happy I was to see her, when the cyborg closest to me caught my attention. He had only one arm that was still flesh, and he wore it as if it were a badge of his humanity. He wore a head of electrically dyed, red tungsten that looked like a handsome man around the face and eyes, but his jaw curved abruptly into something skeletal. He had gleaming blue zirconium eyes, and his huge smile hinted at perpetual mirth. But suddenly it seemed this man’s smile held something malicious, that he was plotting the deaths of the others in the room, and only I could discern his intent. Then I thought: This is not my dream. This is Tamara’s dream. And I was awakened by someone shaking me.

  "Angelo! Angelo!" Flaco said.

  "Sí. ¿Qué pasa?"

  "¡Huy! What do you think? That woman, she is a bitch when she drinks, no?"

  "Yes, she is a bitch," I said.

  "I like that. I like a woman with a fierce spirit!" Flaco talked very slowly and deliberately. "Move over. I want to get in bed with you." I moved and Flaco climbed in and accidentally kicked me with his shoes. "Ah, this is a good bed. Very comfortable. Just right for two. You should have invited me in earlier. Did I ever tell you that you have nice breasts? For a man, that is. They are very flaccid. You have more breast than some women."

  Flaco’s words disturbed me, till I realized he was joking. "Yes, flaccid breasts run in my family. You should have seen my mother: she had five of them."

  Flaco laughed. "No more jokes! I think I will vomit again if I have to laugh at your sick jokes. Angelo, do you think Tamara is in danger?"

  "Yes."

  "I held her hand today," he said. "It was very delicate, like a child’s hand. We will have to take good care of her. Tell me, what do you think she is running from?"

  "What does anyone run from? She runs from her past."

  "Ah, philosophical poop. Do you always poop philosophy at night? If so, we should sleep together often. But I have been thinking—perhaps she is a notorious refugiada. Perhaps she is looking for political asylum, and would be happy to marry a Panamánian like the handsome Flaco just so she can live in a neutral country, eh? Welcome to Flaco; welcome to freedom! What do you think? You still think she is a thief?"

  "Yes."

  "I don’t," Flaco said. "Believe me, oh great philosopher, I know thieves. She is too alive to be a thief. Understand?"

  "No."

  "Ah, it is very simple. You see, man is a territorial creature. He needs to possess things—houses, land, body space. And if he possesses something, he is happy; and he is happy to let others possess something. But thieves violate their very nature by violating the territories of others. They are never at peace with themselves. And because of this, they die inside. This is something an educated, philosophical man like you should know."

  "Are you not a socialist?" I asked. "What you say sounds anti-socialist." It was a cruel to question—meant it only as a joke. Traditionally, socialists believe in using social engineering to eradicate outdated ideas, ethics, and ways of thought—and according to the first rule of social engineering, a society cannot be engineered to specification unless the engineering takes place in cultural isolation. So, to avoid cultural pollution, the socialists believed they needed to either absorb or destroy all nearby capitalists while they engineered their own communal society. To accuse Flaco of being one of them was bad enough, yet the Nicita Idealist Socialists had gone a step farther—rumor said they were trying to engineer a non-territorial human—a man they believed would be unselfish and full of empathy, willing to give everything he owned to others. Rumor also said that the creatures they had engineered in Argentina had been alien, murderous.

  This news terrified the peasants, for it was said that once the Socialists perfected the genetic structure for a non-territorial man, they would release a vector virus that would infect everyone on Earth. Through viral warfare mankind would be changed, become a creature incapable of adopting ideals outside those touted by the socialists, and I think the peasants feared death less than they feared undergoing such a change. I was unsure whether to believe such stories. Yet Flaco was speaking much like a socialist, and it thought it funny to accuse him of being one.

  He asked, "Why would you think me a socialist?"

  "You live in Panamá, between the hammer of Colombia and the anvil of Costa Rica, and don’t run away. Also, you’re skinny and sneaky-looking, like a socialist."

  "Oh, I am not a socialist," Flaco said. "I don’t believe socialism can work with man today—we are too territorial. And I don’t think we should engineer the trait away. I believe a man must possess himself and be his own man. But these Nicita Idealist Socialists will not let a man possess himself. It is not enough that they enslave the artificial intelligences; they must also dominate humans too, grind down their opposition. Always they blame the capitalists for their economic failure.

  "According to the socialists, if a socialist buys a car it is a sign of progress, but if a capitalist buys a car, it is a sign of decadence. They refuse to see that because they take away men’s will to work, their countries collapse into economic ruin.

  "I met a man from Budapest who said his father had worked in a factory that kept closing because the workers wanted to sit and play cards. The government sent the military to force the workers to go back to work, and some still refused. They sat and played cards with machine guns at their backs. Finally, the military shot them all, and the radio proclaimed these men traitors.

  "This man told me that his father, even though he had been murdered, had won against the socialists because he refused to be dominated by them. And I believe this is a second way to submit to inner death—to live under the domination of others, to deny your need to possess yourself."

  Flaco fancied himself a great political thinker, but I had spent so much time studying medicine I was out of touch with politics. I remained respectfully silent for a moment, as if contemplating his words. "So, did you not say that you don’t believe this woman is a thief?"

  "No, I believe she is a brain transplant."

  This made me sit up and think. Intuitively I felt he was right. "Why do you say that?"

  "I saw a documentary once. Back when they were drafting people into the cyborg units, the military would put the soldiers’ bodies in stasis until their terms were up, and if a soldier wanted to enlist afterward, he could opt to sell his body for parts. But there was a big scandal, because sometimes a soldier would end his term or want to sell his body and find that it had already been sold on the black market by the cryotechs. All this talk about cyborgs made me remember this, and I realized that this was how Tamara could be listed as being on active duty a light-year away and still be here."

  "Do you mean someone has stolen her body?"

  "I have been thinking: would anyone steal a useless body like that? No, I think Tamara de la Garza enlisted and sold her body. And now this woman is wearing it."

  I remembered the beautiful red-haired woman in Tamara’s dream, so different from the scrawny, black-haired thing that slept on the couch, and I realized that a brain transplant could explain why she dreamed of herself looking so differently. And I remembered the way she had fumbled after the wate
r at dinner—a sign that her brain had not yet accustomed itself to a change in body size. "Perhaps," I said.

  "‘Perhaps’? What do you mean ‘perhaps’? It is a great solution to our question. If my theory isn’t true, it should be!"

  "We are being paid much money. She is paying a little for her treatment, and much for our silence. If she must suffer a brain transplant to escape her pursuers, perhaps our questions jeopardize her."

  "You did not tell me earlier she was in danger," Flaco said.

  Out in the living room, Tamara stirred in her sleep and moaned.

  "I did not know if I believed it earlier."

  I lay in bed for a long time, thinking. If this woman had had a brain transplant and the transplant were recent, it would explain why her antibody levels hadn’t shot up when her hand was pulled off—she could still be on antibody inhibitors. But I wasn’t sure.

  Any legitimate surgeon would have used antimosin C, an inhibitor which only stops the production of the suppressor cells that attack transplanted organs. But Tamara’s antibody levels were down all across the spectrum—which meant she’d been given one of the more common AB inhibitors. The antibody injection I had given her earlier had thymosins in it, which stimulated the production of all T cells, including suppressor cells. And if the level of thymosins I’d given her were too high, they could override the AB inhibitors. And if her brain wasn’t perfectly compatible with its body, Tamara’s suppressor cells would treat her brain as an infecting organism, destroying it cell by cell. These thoughts made my stomach ache.

  I went into the living room to check on Tamara. She looked like a tiny rag of a person, thrown on the couch, and I could see by the brilliance of the platinum glow of her body that she had an elevated temperature. This is one of the first signs of organ rejection; unfortunately, it is also a sign of an ordinary infection. To add to my confusion, the hormones I’d given her sped up her metabolism, which would cause a low-grade fever. She had already complained of headaches, but until she complained of cramps, numbness, or loss of senses, I couldn’t be sure she was in danger. This was all compounded by the fact that under the right conditions she could go comatose or die without warning. All the if’s began swimming in my head. I got a cool rag and sponged her face. She woke and looked at me, "Bolt the ... charge a gun," she said. Then her eyes cleared. "Do you have the crystal?" she asked. I pulled the crystal out of my pocket and showed it to her. She reached up and stroked it, then smiled and slept.