The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (11 page)

Eat or fuck? Eat or fuck?

Fuck.

I might be killed. Go fuck. I’m so hungry. Go fuck. No, no, not out in the open. Anything can see me. I want to go deep into the bamboo and hide and eat quietly.

No, Gabby. Go fuck.

I go fuck.

My head is raised and calling out. I am making noise. This is
insanity. I want to shut my mouth, stop announcing my presence, but I can’t. (I literally can’t. Mission control—i.e. Xiadon and Deeprashad—partially operates the bear, making it call out and urinate as I walk. I can feel liquid trickling down my legs, but I can’t stop it.)

Bears. They’re coming. They’re converging on me. I know them by their odors.

I stop, sit. I’m still peeing uncontrollably; my bear-ass is getting wet.

This isn’t much of a clearing, but it’ll do. And if I need to run away, the bamboo forest is right here, ready to envelop me, hide me.

I can hear one of the boars now. I don’t see him. He’s sliding through the bamboo, slow and deliberate. I can hear the shape of his body as he pushes stalks aside and comes for me.

He’s grunting, low and repetitive. Each grunt sends a thrill racing over my skin. I can barely remember I am me.

There’s another boar. He’s farther away, but his smell is more intense. Something deep within me groans. My need flowers.

A third approaches, but I don’t care. The second bear, his smell. I’m intoxicated. I want him.

That’s not Avalon
, human me, barely audible, thinks.
Where is Cooper?

On-cue, Deeprashad’s voice enters my head. “Sorry about this, Gabby, but we’re going to have to pull the plug. We located the second terrorist. Ken’s en-route to help capture him. So we won’t be able to continue. We’re going to move the robot to a safe space and shut you
down.”

I know she said this to me, because I heard the recorded transcript earlier. But here, now, inside Funicello, I have no idea. All I know is that’s a big, glorious, scary-ass bear coming for me. I can hear his massive ursine body parting the forest.

The first suitor moves to intercept the big bear. I hear them meet. There are growls and yelps, and what sounds like a brief chase. Then the first suitor runs off, yelping and crying.

Apparently Deeprashad’s been trying to talk to me all this time. “Can you hear me, Gabby? Gabrielle Reál, are you there?”

Something in my voice gives both of them pause.

“She’s there,” says Xiadon. “But she’s a bear.”

“I need to override Funicello and extract Gabby ASAP. Just waiting for your order, Mei.”

I’m not following this conversation very well, but I know they’re about to separate me from the bear that is juggernauting through the bamboo forest to find me. I don’t think this in words, but in whatever way a languageless mammalian brain constructs thoughts, I think to myself, over and over,
I want to stay. Please don’t take me.

“Gui Gui is moving in quickly,” Xiadon says. “He subdued Wei Wei. He might be ready, Anita.”

“Oh Jesus. Not now.”

I’m punchy and dizzy and scared and happy and I don’t have a clue what I’m saying or hearing. All I know is that big bear is trudging toward me again. And every step makes my flesh horripilate.

“All Gabby has to do,” says Xiadon, “is stick her ass in the air and present. If Gui Gui does nothing, no harm, no foul. But if he’s interested—”

“You can’t be serious,” says Deeprashad.

I face the direction of the incoming boar. He’s still just a jumble of rustling sounds and a pheromone bouquet, but both are getting stronger. I call out to him, this time because I want to. Inside the helmet I call out; I sound congested and tongue-tied thanks to the tongue-sleeve and the tubes up my nose. But at the same time I call, I hear the robot bleat like a panda sow at the height of estrus. I might burst before he gets here.

But here he is, his moon-sized head peaking through the bamboo. My god he’s massive. His mouth is open; he is flehmening me like a heavy-breather. I have never been so scared, so ready. He is so beautiful.

“We’ve got to stop this, Mei,” says Deeprashad.

“Too late,” says Xiadon, not the least bit unhappy. “Gabby, can you hear me? Gabby, you’re going to have to go through with this. Don’t worry. We’ll help control you from here. Just relax, no sudden moves.”

It takes all of my intellectual power, but I am able to produce two words: “Okay. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes. Okay.”

Gui Gui comes into the clearing, approaching neither slow nor fast. I rise. We touch noses; his lip rises, and he takes my odor in his mouth, eats it. He licks my face a few times. I lick his, my human tongue sliding back and forth in the helmet’s sleeve.

“Jesus,” says Deeprashad. “You sure you haven’t done this before, Gabby?”

The boar moves behind me, smells me from behind. He jams in his nose, machine-gun sniffs my most sensitive parts. He nuzzles and licks. I turn to sniff him. We make a yin-yang of ourselves, inhaling each other’s backsides. This is his musk at full strength. I’m drunk, terrified, ready.

Somewhere off in the distance I hear Xiadon saying over and over, “Now, Gabby! Present! Face on the ground, butt in the air!”

The front of me drops to the ground; I raise my rear up. I briefly wonder if the other bears can see us. But to be honest, I don’t really care. This is for me.

Gui Gui mounts me. He mostly supports his own weight. I adjust to make us fit together better, then press my backside into him. And he presses forward.

The suit doesn’t stimulate my human genitals, or any part of my brain in charge of sexual satisfaction. I don’t orgasm, not even close. What I receive instead is communion. The event horizon that constitutes my sense of self grows outward. I breathe in the ground beneath me through my nose, and it becomes me; I inhale the stalks of bamboo that surround us, and I am they; I am the boar who mates with me, and I am all the death in the forest. But I am the life, too. Two other boars are in trees nearby—yes, I’ve smelled them out—watching, learning. I snort them into me, snort up more and more of the forest, the world, until it’s no longer useful or desirable to think of
myself as a me.

The last thing APM wanted was to put an amateur like me in a real mating situation. But as accidents go, this was a very happy one for APM. My mate, Gui Gui, was seen by APM as the next in line as a possible panda suitor, as APM’s other boars were still a little young and uneducated in matters of love. Gui Gui had been observing Avalon mounting sows for two seasons. It seems he learned all he needed, since he successfully deposited a healthy payload of sperm into Funicello.

Gui Gui will now join that elite group of boars whose sexual exploits are recorded in
The International Studbook of the Giant Panda
, a registry of every boar whose sperm has been used in procreation attempts. His sample will be divided into test tubes of 100,000 cells and sent to breeding facilities all over the world.

Moreover, three of APM’s five sows will enter estrus within the next few weeks. This could be the beginning of a wonderful career for him as a professional stud.

My helmet is unfastened screw by screw. I’m still panting, dazed. Suddenly my panda-head is halved, removed, and all that’s left of my mind is my own mind. In front of my face is Cooper, smiling like a dumbass.

“You did great,” he says. “You were perfect.”

“Always am,” I say sleepily. I’m not ready to lose my dream of being a panda yet. I’m resisting returning to the world. “And you missed it.”

“I was busy,” he says. And then, with mock modesty: “I got her.”

“Who?” I ask, blinking.

“The second terrorist. I caught her. And I didn’t even break anything on this one.”

“Good for you,” I say. But I don’t give two shits. Talking to Cooper is shrinking me. Sentence by sentence, noun by noun, he’s turning me back into Gabrielle Reál. But I don’t want to be Reál. Not yet. I want my body to be as large as my imagination for a while longer.

And now Deeprashad is kneeling next to me. “You were glorious!” she says. But then she takes a paw in her hand. “But we need to talk seriously about your security. Unfortunately, you will now be on 22:19’s list. Since in their eyes you’ve … had relations with a real bear, that makes you a sinner. And therefore a target. But APM will—”

“Anita?” says Xiadon. Cooper and Deeprashad part a little so I can see her behind them. “We can discuss that later, maybe?”

Anita wrangles the words back into her mouth. Then, tight-lipped, she says, “Sure thing, Mei,” pats my paw, backs off.

“You too, Ken.”

“What’d I do?” asks Cooper. He was trying to be funny, but it comes off a little strained. I notice his finger is ringless now. Does he take it off to jockey bears? Probably. God, I hope so.

When he delays, Xiadon gives him the take-a-hike thumb.
Reluctantly, he winks at me and leaves my side. That just leaves me and the good doctor looking at each other.

“It’s beautiful, right?” Xiadon asks. “It’s hard to come back, I know. But it’s okay. Take all the time you need.”

And I’m giggling. Out of nowhere. And then crying, too: my patented giggle-cry, confusing and disturbing to watch, I’ve been told since I was a kid. But I can’t help it. I wasn’t just alive when I was a panda; I was in life, indistinguishable from life. Now I feel manacled by thought, self-awareness, words. Especially words. Language is the knothole in the fence: you’re grateful to be able to see through to the other side, sure, but wouldn’t it be better just to jump the fence?

Xiadon raises a hand as if she is going to wave hello, but instead she wiggles her panda thumb at me.

That little gesture snaps my crying jag. Now I’m just laughing. I lift the suit’s right paw and wiggle my own sesamoid bone at her. At least I’m still that much a panda.

My asiMom was okay. She was like a pillow, a walking talking pillow. But she gave good hugs and smelled right. They did a good job with her: sometimes when she hugged me and I closed my eyes it felt like it’s supposed to feel and I forgot that she’s not my real mom.

I saw her in the shower a few times. She didn’t care. She took showers every day exactly at 5:45 PM, even if I messed up every clock in the house, because her inside clock was always right. She didn’t even need to shower because she was just a robot, but she did anyway. My dad said that that made her more realistic. But if they cared about that, why didn’t they give her nipples? Or any hair, except on her head? She didn’t even have a butt crack. Sometimes, just when I was forgetting that she wasn’t my real mom, I’d remember that she didn’t have a butt crack and I’d get a little freaked out.

My dad’s one of the head honchos on the station. He’s the lead scientist on the Macrobe Conservation Project. He said that he was the one who wrote all the grants and traveled all the way back to Earth to shake hands with all the jerks in Washington, and so now he was the one in charge, and if Malloy or Grisget or any of those other pieces of skrak thought they were going to hone in on his dream, they had another thing coming. He went to work at 6:00 and got home at 6:00, but they always called him back at night with some big macrobe problem. Sometimes on the speaker I’d hear Dr. Malloy or Dr. Grisget or
one of those other pieces of skrat saying, “Don’t worry, Lance, this is no big deal. We just wanted you to know. You just have a good time with your kid tonight. We’ll handle this.” That drove my dad nuts. He waited until they hung up, and then he cussed like crazy at them while he tied his tie back on, and told my asiMom to clean up dinner and make up a plate for him to eat later. Mostly he didn’t come back though. Just stayed in the lab all night.