On My Way to Paradise (60 page)

"You could have got me killed!" he shouted. He was
ecstatic. "You could have got me killed but you didn’t!"

The cut on Perfecto’s hand was deep, to the bone, and
I was forced to operate on him there, to splice the blood vessels,
staple the wound closed, and spray it with a resin bandage. I gave
him a large dose of pain killers. His arm began to swell
immediately, and I knew he would not be using his right hand for a
few weeks. Perfecto’s leg was a little easier to treat, since the
wound was small and didn’t pierce any major blood vessels. All I
had to do was cut the charred flesh away and bandage it.

Afterward we removed our helmets and rested. The air
was filled with smells of smoke and burning flesh—a satisfying
smell like roast pork. The alien scents of Baker’s plants nearly
dropped me. I’d smelled the sugary turpines before, but never at
such close range.

For the next two hours Abriara and Mavro worked on
the hovercraft. They pulled out the damaged props and replaced them
with parts scavenged from the Yabajin crafts. They also took fuel
rods, weapons, and food from the Yabajin. The Yabajin had beer in
their hovercrafts in a cooler under the floorboards. We sat in the
sun on the rocks and drank beer and ate.

It felt good to be alive and eating. Mavro and
Perfecto talked about how well the battle had gone, how we’d all
been surprised to find Zavala alive in the end. Often I laughed
with pure relief and the others did too. Zavala drank a great deal,
as if he’d won the war single-handedly. He felt generous and kept
saying, "You did good, Angelo. You did good in the battle. I’m
sorry if I ever doubted you. We’ll turn you into a samurai yet,
ne?" He’d pat my leg when I got near and say, "Such fine legs! So
strong! I wish I had legs like that!" Then he’d wiggle his hip so
his prosthetics would flop about pitifully and laugh. He kept
offering me drinks of beer as if his were the last beer left in the
world.

We were only four hours behind the army, but Abriara
wanted to hurry and regroup. We propped Zavala in a corner behind
Abriara. Perfecto was in no condition to stand at his turret. We
let him drink several beers and take a pee, then bundled him in his
armor and set him in a chair next to Zavala with a flechette. Some
of his armor had taken a hit from the Yabajin plasma guns, and a
glove had holes melted into it the size of tangerines, so Zavala
went to work with his little repair kit plugging the holes in
Perfecto’s glove. I took Perfecto’s place at the turret.

We buzzed back down the stream, out of the mountains,
through thickets of trees with nervous gray rattling leaves, out
into the desert. Zavala said, "Let’s not go this way. We will not
be safe if we follow the army. It’s too late to follow them."

The hair rose on my neck and I had a premonition he
was right. I didn’t say anything to indicate my agreement. I wish
now that I could have seen Zavala’s eyes as he said it, seen that
distant inward look as he consulted the source of spiritual
knowledge. We thought it was only the liquor talking, and Abriara
continued on. Zavala seemed to forget his own concerns immediately
after voicing them. He and Perfecto sang an old song about a man
who was drunk and searching for his bed in a hotel but accidentally
kept crawling into bed with the strangest people. We hummed over
hills and through an endless desert filled with tangled vines.

Just as twilight fell we came up a small incline in
the desert—not a hill really, just a fold in the ground. Perfecto
shouted, "Slow down! I think I’m going to throw up—the beer!"

Abriara stopped the hovercraft and said, "Get it over
with!"

Perfecto stood up and leaned over the edge of the
hovercraft and began fumbling with his helmet, unsnapping it, then
straightened and scanned the horizon suspiciously. He snapped the
helmet back on and his uneasiness touched us. We began watching the
horizon. Perfecto sniffed and said, "Do you smell that scent? Do
you smell it?"

We were all wearing our helmets, and were cut off
from the sensation of smell.

"It smells like flowers. Like orchids maybe. Not like
the desert." He sniffed the air in his helmet and looked back at
me, then began to swing his head toward the front of the craft.

Zavala shouted, "No!" and his legs wiggled as he
began trying to push himself backward. Thirty meters uphill a
creature burst from a hole in the ground and sand and twigs
exploded away from it. It reared in the air five meters tall, like
a giant red mantis—peaked head with bulging faceted eyes, thick
body with six legs spread wide, enormous forelegs poised back in
the air like stingers on a scorpion. Its forelegs snapped forward
and by instinct I ducked. A ball hurtled toward my head at such
tremendous velocity I couldn’t escape.

The ball shattered my helmet, knocked me to the
floor. I looked up at the sky; Mavro screamed and fired his plasma
turret, liquid comets burning overhead, and a rifle sounded three
times. The shots splattered into the flesh of the beast, and it
thudded to the ground with a grunt. My ears began ringing, and my
eyes wouldn’t focus. I smelled orchids, very strong, as if entire
fields of them were within my grasp.

"A desert lord!" Perfecto shouted. "It got Angelo and
Zavala!"

I felt someone tugging me, pulling at my arm,
dragging me backward. Tough fingers began prying the pieces of
broken helmet apart, cracking it like a lobster shell, removing it
from my face. I tried to find my tongue, but the words came out
sluggish. "Eshtoy bien," I said. I’m fine.

"Angelo’s alive!" Perfecto said, his face swimming
above me.

Someone jumped off the hovercraft; battle armor
rattled. "Zavala’s not," Abriara said. "His skull is
shattered."

I couldn’t believe it. I struggled to my knees. Part
of the back of my helmet was still attached to my suit, and I
pulled it free. Abriara was on the ground, leaning over Zavala,
obscuring my view. Zavala’s armor was fine but his helmet was
smashed to pieces and smeared with blood. The platinum shine was
soft and muted on his chin, no hot points left. The blood was
cooling in his veins. Abriara moved aside, revealing Zavala’s face,
forehead dented as if squashed by a cannonball. His vacant eyes
stared up. The corpse of the Desert Lord smouldered up the
hill.

I leaned against the rail of the hovercraft, clinging
for support, and found myself blinded by tears. My ears were still
ringing, playing a single low tone, almost a buzz or the sound of a
horn. Everyone was silent for a long time, and just stood there
looking, unmoving.

"We should bury him," Perfecto said.

Abriara and Perfecto stared at Zavala. Mavro hopped
down from the hovercraft and searched the ground, then retrieved a
ball and brought it to me—a round stone globe the size of a large
orange, perfectly smooth, as if it had been worked by hand.

"You should keep this!" he said. "A desert lord’s
throwing stone. It must have been deflected by your helmet. You’re
lucky it didn’t kill you."

Something rattled up the rise, the sound of battle
armor, and the dead desert lord’s abdomen started heaving upward.
Another creature was struggling from the hole, pushing the desert
lord aside.

"Look!" I said, as a second desert lord stuck its
head from the ground.

"It’s just one of the females, a desert lady,"
Abriara said without turning to look. The creature crawled from its
burrow and stared at us. It had a thick abdomen serving as
counterweight to an upright torso, a head on a thin stalk. But the
female had no front legs to throw stones. The sockets at its upper
shoulders were empty, as if the forearms had been pulled free. Our
helmets were designed to look exactly like the face of this
creature.

The desert lady watched us forlornly, glancing from
us to the dead male and back again. A second female pulled herself
from the burrow, and a third. Everyone but me ignored the
creatures.

"We can’t bury Zavala here," Abriara said. "The
females will eat him. Let’s load him on the hovercraft."

Abriara and Perfecto grunted and lifted Zavala up to
the rail on the hovercraft, then heaved him over like a sack of
stones. Mavro wandered around the hill and went up and looked at
the big dead desert lord, then went and stared into its lair. The
females barked and snorted and leapt back from Mavro as he
approached, yet seemed more curious than afraid.

"These creatures know how to treat their women,"
Mavro said, eyeing the females. "Pull off their arms so they can’t
resist your advances!"

"The males don’t do it," Abriara said. "Their mothers
pull them off when they’re born, making them dependent on the
males." I wondered how she knew this, then remembered Perfecto’s
first rule of battle: know your enemy. Abriara knew we had more
enemies on Baker than the Yabajin.

"Hah! You should see this hole!" Mavro shouted. "It’s
a perfect circle inside. It’s got cement all around, like a
swimming pool. And they’ve covered it so you can’t see it from
above." He kicked some dirt into the hole, then walked over and
pulled himself back up on the hovercraft.

My limbs felt heavy and my head was numb, yet
curiosity drove me to ask, "They make cement? Are they
intelligent?"

Abriara shook her head. "Desert lords? No. They mix
dung with gravel and vines for cement—it’s an inherited memory.
They’re no smarter than monkeys—just more bloodthirsty."

I felt guilty for speaking, for asking inane
questions when Zavala was lying dead. I was unaccountably angry at
the samurai for not teaching me about these animals earlier, though
even if I’d known of them it wouldn’t have saved Zavala.

Everyone hopped aboard the hovercraft and Abriara
fired up the engines. She said, "What shall we do with the females?
They’ll starve without the male."

"Leave them," Mavro said. "Maybe they’ll find another
mate."

We drove off. The desert ladies raised their heads
and a trumpeting whistle issued over the prairie. They began
chasing after our craft like dogs tailing the vehicle of their
masters. Darkness fell behind us as the sun dropped beneath the
horizon.

Abriara drove for an hour under the light of Shinju,
the pearl, Baker’s smaller moon, till we hit stony ground, then we
got out to build a cairn for Zavala. My knees were weak and wobbly
and I couldn’t carry rocks for the cairn. I let the others perform
the labor.

I felt so down and empty I wondered if others felt
the same. I kept expecting Abriara to break down and weep, or one
of the others, but they just dutifully carried rocks to the pile.
Abriara once promised she wouldn’t mourn if one of us died. Now
that Zavala was dead she seemed to be living up to her promise. And
I wondered if I’d been right. Was she really alive inside? Or had
she too died to emotion?

We buried Zavala under the stones and Abriara had us
kneel as she said a prayer. She wept in spite of her promise.

We prepared to leave and Abriara stopped and looked
off in the distance behind. "Those three females have followed us,"
she said. "They’re running toward us, about five kilometers away."
My infrared vision wasn’t good enough to discern such details at
that distance. "When a male desert lord kills another," she said,
"the females mate the victor. Those females will want to come live
with us. We’d better not leave them—they might dig up Zavala."

We loaded into the hovercraft and turned back. We met
the females only a kilometer away, and Mavro sprayed them with
plasma. The plasma burned through their exoskeletons and lighted
them from inside, and the pale blue of veins and organs stood out
perfectly. Their exoskeletons were remarkably clear, like yellowed
plastic, and I marveled how much that clear exoskeleton reminded me
of the flesh of other of Baker’s animals.

After killing the desert ladies we turned the
hovercraft back, and for the next several hours, intermixed with
the sweet sugary turpines of desert plants I could still smell
orchids.

Abriara drove zigzag through the desert all night,
seeking the trail of our army. The ringing in my ears lessened, but
my head ached and I couldn’t focus my eyes long, so I took
painkillers. The night sounds and smells on Baker were
intriguing—the whirring wings of opal birds, the whistles and cries
of unseen animals singing a strange chorus, the music of a universe
where I didn’t belong.

The scents were even more amazing—many of Baker’s
animals communicate chemically, and residues of chemical markers
along with turpines of plants became a constant barrage. Often
scents were pleasant, like the orchid analog of the desert lords;
often the odors were offensive, like the bitter musky tang where
Baker’s five-meter-Iong armadillos left their slime trails.

I could feel a madness coming on, the madness of
ecoshock, of exposure to the alien. I recalled the problems faced
by those who gained eyesight in adulthood after having lived entire
lives in darkness—a man fell from a four-story building as he
leaned out his window to pick roses he imagined to be only a meter
from his hand, men driven to fear when trying to negotiate crowds
they could easily handle when blind. The burden of sight was often
too much for such people. Those who couldn’t cope often resorted to
having their optic nerves severed so they could return to the
comfortable world of the blind. Those who were impatient sometimes
pulled their own eyes from their sockets. Such is the pain of
ecoshock.

The night sounds and smells on Baker were
intriguing, yet only the afternoon before I’d been buffeted by
prolonged contact with the alien. I’d felt relieved that my armor
insulated me from the sights and smells and sounds of this
world.

But now my helmet was shattered, and I was naked and
exposed.

I’d thrown away my dream monitor and had no way to
escape the sensory overload to come. Darkness was my friend. By
closing my eyes I could cut down on the overload. The desert was my
friend, for it was nearly free of strange sights and sounds.