On My Way to Paradise (57 page)

When she was finished she asked, "Is there anything
else?"

I sauntered around the yard. She’d made it perfectly,
the palms and irises in place, dark papaya seeds on the grass where
the fruit bats had spilled them the night before. I walked in my
house and found the carpet in the doorway worn just as I
remembered, and my stereo in the kitchen was still tuned to the
proper channel. There were minor problems, mostly’ tiny omissions,
but I opened my refrigerator and found my favorite brand of beer
inside, opened a can and it foamed out over my hand; it tasted
wonderful.

I looked around the dreamworld, and I couldn’t have
asked for a better job. I could fix it all with just a little
work.

But something was wrong, something I couldn’t fix. I
still felt hollow, like a stranger who didn’t belong in this house.
The ache was in me. I remembered the man in my dream, accusing me
with his words. The thing I searched for was the man I’d been. I
walked back out onto the porch, where Tamara still sat, mounted on
her bull.

"It isn’t enough," I said.

"What more do you want?" Tamara asked.

"I have always dreamed of living life with passion.
With zest. Somehow, I’ve lost that. You’ve sometimes made me feel
things inside. You did a thing I’ve never seen done by a
professional dreamer: you seemed to stimulate my hypothalamus,
stimulate emotions, directly instead of relying on the context of
the world to arouse emotions. You made me feel that passion."

Tamara nodded. "Normal dreamers aren’t allowed to use
such equipment. It’s too dangerous. I sometimes need it for my
job."

"I wanted you to make this little house so I’d feel
the way I felt in Panamá. I want to feel in love with the
world."

"In love with life," she corrected.

"Yes. That is what I want." And the desire burned in
me. I craved that feeling, had craved it since the day I’d left
Earth.

Tamara shook her head, and her eyes were soft,
thoughtful. "I’d help you if I could, but four days ago you wanted
to die inside. You don’t know what you want." She was right. I felt
that I was balancing on a narrow rope, unsure which way to fall.
"And even if I did what you ask, even if I commanded the monitor to
stimulate your emotions directly, it wouldn’t change you. You could
remain hooked up to the monitor all night, but when you took it off
you’d still feel empty and dead inside. I showed you that vision
only to let you see what you were leaving behind. You ... you’ll
have to find your own way."

I looked in her eyes and saw a wonderful thing: she
was lying. When she said I’d have to find my own way, she’d lied.
"You’re lying to me! You know more than you say. You believe you
can help me, but you are not willing to admit as much! What could
you be thinking?"

Tamara stared at the ground and considered. "No. I
cannot help you," she said. "Take your monitor and go help
yourself."

That afternoon I took my monitor into the woods, sat
with my back against a rock, and jacked into the world Tamara had
created. Many minor details needed correcting.

I began with my house, a simple white house. I put in
the plaster cracking from the walls at the foundation, a few chips
in the red tiles on the roof. I began designing it exactly as I
remembered, creating a perfect record so I’d never forget. The
homes of my neighbors, the howling of the monkeys on the south side
of the lake, the sights and smells and sounds of the feria, all
these I’d create over the next few days. And when I finished, I’d
have a world where I could spend a day in my booth in the feria
peddling my medicines. Everything would be as it had been.

I was acutely aware that this could have still been
mine if I hadn’t killed Arish. Tamara could have spilled her
secrets to the guerrillas; I had been insane to kill Arish.

I was decorating the mantelpiece in my den,
recreating the vases and lace doilies I’d inherited from my
mother, when Perfecto jacked in beside me.

He watched me. "I was worried about you. You look so,
so-preoccupied, pensive. I thought you might be afraid of our
upcoming battle. "

"Not really. The Yabajin don’t have a chance in the
open. We’ll just cut them down. Hotoke no Za will be the hard one.
I don’t know how to beat their remote defenses."

Perfecto nodded. After a time he said, "This must be
your house. A fine house."

I showed him the house and yard, explained my
plans.

I indicated where I’d make the feria. He nodded,
smiled sadly, and said, "I suppose that’s all right. I guess it’s
not too crazy."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"It’s just that—are you sure you’re not planning to
escape into the past the way all old people do? I can imagine you
just sitting here every day sucking images from these crystals
while your body wears down."

"No! I swear to you, that is not what I plan!" I
shouted. I felt stunned by the image he portrayed of me.

Perfecto licked his lips, put his hand on my
shoulder, and then jacked out.

I looked around the rooms, tried to remember it all,
drink it all in.

I let the illusion collapse as I jacked out. I left
the monitor there in the woods.

Early the next morning Garzón’s zeppelins full of
tools sped north away from the coming battle; our space shuttle
full of men and cybertanks left for Hotoke no Za; and we took the
hovercrafts out on the river toward Hotoke no Za and the
approaching Yabajin. The river made a fine road that could carry a
hundred hovercrafts abreast.

We left at full throttle and in an hour passed
mountains that would have taken weeks to negotiate if we’d gone
cross-country. The pine forests gave way to vast savannahs where
robin-egg-blue grasses sprouted leaves of feather. River dragons
thirty meters long sunned themselves on the sandy shoals of the
river and flowed into the water like snakes when we approached.

A child may see an animal or plant yet not perceive
its existence. Only after several years may he learn to distinguish
between a daisy and dandelion. In the same way I was a child in my
perception. When I say I saw a field of grass with feathers for
leaves, I describe only what I perceived on the surface. I simplify
in order to describe, yet the simple description is inaccurate. For
there were other plants—strings of dark ultraviolet tape, grasses
shaped like tiny pines, rope vines with incredibly thick bulbous
roots. Yet the mind can’t discover all these shapes at once. Just
as one doesn’t perceive the myriad variety of weeds in a wheat
field and doesn’t perceive the insects that play among the field,
my mind couldn’t individualize the things I saw. I couldn’t
individualize the opal birds or see how many species there were. My
mind revolted at the task. My eyes ached and a splitting pain
filled my head when I tried to catalog the diversity of animals and
plants. Often I didn’t know what I saw.

On the river we once came upon hairy round creatures
like coconuts with tails and no sign of head nor feet. The tails
spasmed insanely, pushing the creatures over the water like
tadpoles. I imagined them to be like muskrats back on Earth, and
jacked in a call to Fernando Chin; he said it wasn’t an animal at
all, only a seed pod with a tail to propel itself to a spot where
the acidity level would allow it to grow. A few minutes later I saw
creatures shaped like wheels with spines rolling along the river
bottom. I asked Chin what type of plant or animal they were, and he
said they were just sections of endoskeleton from some animal.

The sense of alienness was compounded by the many
whistles and clicks that came from animals in the underbrush, and
by the lavender cast to the sky, and by the bands of opal kites
twisting like rivers across that sky, and by Baker’s moons that
shot over the horizon twice a day.

Because of the pain these new perceptions gave me, my
eyes automatically riveted on familiar things—the occasional grove
of willow or oak along the riverbank, the back of Abriara’s suit,
the shape of the hovercraft before me.

In another three hours we passed a second set of
mountains, very steep. Because of the high level of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere, the rains on Baker were more acid than those on
Earth, and one could see the effect of this acidity engraved in the
old rocks. The cliffs were marvelously chewed away. Nature had
sculpted a thousand hideous faces—old men with sunken eyes and
bulbous noses, twisted monstrous limbs. Many weathered stones were
hundreds of meters high, like hunched giants.

Twice we had to skirt waterfalls. The river narrowed
considerably, and the spray raised by hovercrafts in front drenched
us. The river had eroded a deep canyon, and when we made it past
the mountains we came up out of the lip of a canyon to a desert
plateau where alien ferns sprouted from cement trunks like
barnacles. Many of Baker’s plants have developed defenses to the
high winds, and one common defense is the ability for leaves to
withdraw into sheaths in the trunks. These ferns had this ability,
and because the wind was gusting, the plants were constantly
withdrawing and then tentatively folding back out.

On the horizon was an endless desert of red dust. In
the far distance great red clouds swirled in the air, and because
of the heat dancing on the desert floor I saw a line of fire across
the horizon. Our trip had been very quiet, since none of us spoke
through our helmet mikes, but suddenly Garzón shouted through our
helmets,
"Muchachos,
you see the enemy before you! Now you
will fight the Yabajin! Now is your chance for great deeds! Set
your helmet mikes to channels A, B, and C, and let your sergeant
give you your subchannels. Fight bravely!"

Then the truth of it struck me—the line of fire on
the horizon was heat warmed by engines from the Yabajin
hovercrafts, and the dust drifting like fire-lit smoke was blown by
their passage.

I switched open the channels on my helmet mike and
the voices of the hundred men in our squadron fill my helmet with
shouts of "Yiiii—hiiii, they come! They come!" and our squadron
leader ordered us to form a triangle at the north end of the group
and assigned numbers to each sergeant so they’d know where to place
themselves in formation. At the same time Abriara shouted for me to
take my armor repair kit from my pocket and set it someplace
convenient, and I began fumbling through the compartments of my
armor looking for the things I needed and set the repair kit in
front of me, then checked my flechette to be sure it was loaded and
the safety was off and I turned on the targeting laser on my rifle
and I could see the air shimmer in front of the rifle and knew
right where the center of my spread would hit and was convinced I
could shoot from the hip. I opened a box filled with clips full of
ammunition, then looked straight ahead and waited.

My head was reeling and I felt nauseous, and wanted
only to close my eyes. Abriara increased our speed to maximum, and
the hovercraft rattled as if it would break as we bounced over the
desert. The air was so clear we’d spotted the Yabajin at 30
kilometers. With armies travelling at full speed we had six minutes
till we collided. My nostrils flared and I was suddenly terrified:
We’d already lost 4000 men to the Yabajin in space; they’d managed
to have an agent blow our defenses in Kimai no Ji. I didn’t know
much about them, but I knew better than to believe we could
surprise them, better than to under-rate them. Garzón had wanted to
bypass them altogether—yet they had managed to block our path.

And here we were flying towards them at 120 kph
trusting our ancient projectile weapons would surprise them. I
couldn’t believe we’d get away with it. I couldn’t believe the
Yabajin would wear nothing better than the thin armor meant to
baffle heat weapons. My jaws clenched, and I tried to remain
calm.

Abriara veered far to the left and took her place in
the formation. Our 1000 ships formed a great wedge with the 400
craft that had received the Houser machine guns forming our front
ranks. Those with Housers were both blessed and cursed: Their
greater firepower would let them blow away almost anyone who got
within range, yet they’d receive the brunt of the attack. I was
glad our hovercraft hadn’t received such weapons.

In a protected position at the center of our V, I
could see Garzón’s craft. Tamara’s wheelchair was there sitting
next to a turret manned by the general himself, but Tamara was not
visible. Someone must have laid her on the floor of the craft.

Over the helmet mikes the compadres in my squadron
shouted bets—"Three to two that the de Cuzco team gets the most
kills. Three to two!" De Cuzco’s team had taken the outside corner
of the whole triangle—the most dangerous spot. In answer came,
"Barzun down with a million on de Cuzco to win; Barzun for a
million!" Then a deep voice, "Mott here, I’ve got two million that
says de Cuzco will get fried. Two million says de Cuzco gets
fried!" Then de Cuzco shouts over his mike, "I’ll take that bet!"
and everyone laughed, since de Cuzco wouldn’t have to worry about
paying if he lost the bet.

All the men were laughing and betting extravagant
sums of money, fortunes that would have taken years to accumulate
back on Earth. The Yabajin formed three fronts, each 200 meters
behind the other, and their hovercrafts bunched in pairs, so we’d
be forced into a crossfire when we went between them. Garzón
ordered all craft to veer north, and we did so, then paired up
hovercrafts so we were floating side by side so we could counter
with a crossfire of our own. The Yabajin responded by shifting
north. I made some mental calculations to figure how long we’d
battle if we made our pass at top speed: Figuring a 200-meter
range, and considering that we would be passing at 240 kph over a
total distance of 800 meters, we’d be in range of their weapons for
less than twelve seconds; this whole battle would last less than
twelve seconds, even though we’d pass through three fronts.