Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (32 page)

Maybe life was giving him another
opportunity to bring up children.

Original Title: Cuerpos

Translated by Sue Burke

1

Teresa Pilar Mira de
Echeverría, from Buenos Aires, holds a doctorate and is a
university professor and director of the Center for Science Fiction
and Philosophy in the Research Department of the Human Vocation
Foundation. She studies and investigates the relationships between
philosophy, mythology and science fiction, and has written a thesis
with several sections dedicated to science fiction. She has
published articles and stories in
Cuásar
,
Próxima, NM
and
Axxón
, among other periodicals, and
is one of the most interesting voices that has emerged in
Argentinean science fiction during this century.

“Memory” tells the story
of a boy on Mars in the relatively near future. Its beginnings
echo
The Martian Chronicles
by Ray Bradbury, although it quickly moves on to
ideas much more risky and radical involving personal relationships
and sex roles, using the gigantic process of the terraforming of
Mars as a backdrop.

Ever since I can remember,
I’ve lived in Olympic.

Although my father says I
wasn’t born here, that we arrived here when I was very little; some
ten years ago, I guess.

Here my sister died at birth. He never
speaks about my mother.

In truth, my father
doesn’t speak about hardly anything at all.

It’s not that I speak a
lot, but sometimes I feel the need to prove that I can.

My neighbor is Mister Capadocia.

Mister Capadocia is an old
man, very old. He has a pink Bel Air Chevy convertible that has
never left his yard, and a dog he calls Borzoi, but which isn’t a
borzoi, but something undefined, largish and gray.

Mister Capadocia is my
friend. Well, all the friend that a man who’s over a hundred can be
to a boy who’s almost eleven.

Every day he calls me and lets me play with
Borzoi.

My father doesn’t want me
to have a dog.

That morning there was a little breeze, just
enough to keep you from sweating, and letting you feel like you
could move again, and since classes were over, almost as soon as we
left Sunday Mass I was at loose ends. I let the other kids rush
outside running and shouting to the playground, while they ignored
me as always, and I went to wander through the 10 or 12 streets
that make up Olympic.

Mount Olympus dominates
the mind of all who live on Mars, as it dominates everything for
several hundred kilometers around it. But we found ourselves
elsewhere, in Isidis Planitia, almost in the antipodes. I still
don’t know why the colonists thought to give the name Olympic to a
town where we can’t see Mount Olympus.

I was wearing my best
pants, the black ones with suspenders, which fit me like a bag over
my skinny legs; and the boots that I’d always had, the old and worn
flexogrands that had stretched out as I grew (although they hadn’t
grown as much as I would’ve liked). My wide-brimmed hat (the only
gift from my father that I remember) had fallen to my eyebrows and
I wandered without paying much attention to anything, dreaming of
the day when I could leave this place and trying to resign myself
to the fact that, in reality, I never would.

I was thinking about these
things when something astonishing happened. Mister Capadocia’s pink
Bel Air Chevy convertible came to a stop, right beside me, on the
street.

“
Jedediah!” he shouted
with his sandpapery voice. “Come on, look!”

My eyes leaped out of
their sockets when I saw that incredible magenta heap, which was
over three hundred years old, in working order. The stylized silver
eagle shone impatiently on the car’s hood.

But something more caught my attention.

In the driver’s seat was a
native.

I had never seen a native in my life. I had
only read about them in my books or had seen them on holos.

Miss Lombroscia had also told us about them:
the genetically altered men sent to terraform Mars hundreds of
years ago.

The natives made up something like a special
caste, a strange one. Officially hated and segregated from a world
which no longer belonged to them and in which they were no longer
needed, they were, deep down, secretly admired for their bravery
and their freedom. And that made people even more jealous of
them.

Some natives lived in the outskirts of
Olympic, in the Peridier crater reserve. But the majority of them
were mestizos as Marsified as myself or any other colonist, who
made souvenirs and played the Indian for tourists.

But this man was something else.

He was maybe twenty-eight or thirty years
old, and he wore his fine cranial tentacles pulled back in two
ponytails on either side of his strong, olive-colored face. His
silvered eyes looked straight ahead with assurance and without the
impediment of any sort of nose, and the blue claws of his hands
clung to the steering wheel delicately.

I imagined that the seat of the Chevy would
be uncomfortable for his inverse articulations, but a quick look
told me they were double jointed and he could sit on the seat as
well as I or any other human.

Mister Capadocia gestured
at me with one hand and I approached. Borzoi was loose in the back
seat, a little nervous from all the jolting and the red dust raised
in the car’s wake. As always, as a collar, he wore an old cord
around his neck that had been cut and re-tied a hundred thousand
times.

“
Want to help me with the
dog?” Mister Capadocia asked me, smiling, his dentures shining
metallic in the light of the distant tiny sun.

I looked, instinctively,
in the direction of our house. My father wouldn’t even notice that
I wasn’t there. I responded with an enthusiastic nod, and my face
was lit up with an enormous smile. I barely felt the hard vinyl of
the seat under my rear.

I took Borzoi’s leash, as
he licked my face effusively in welcome, and we took
off.

The Chevy kicked up clouds of fine dust as
we traveled, like a wake of spume on a red sea.

I couldn’t take my eyes
off the native. Wow!

He was... I don’t know, he
had an aura of dignity, of strength. He seemed like a prince in
rags. After journeying for a few kilometers I admired him greatly.
By the time we’d finished the trip, I had decided that, when I grew
up, I wanted to be like him.

The truth is that
everything was based on his image and on that sort-of-atmosphere
that emanated from him, because in all the time the trip lasted, he
didn’t open his mouth a single time.

On the other hand, Mister
Capadocia hadn’t stopped talking, thereby reducing the silence of
our chauffeur and my own, which was, by the way, already legendary
in Olympic: “That quiet boy, Amos’ son? He’s simple, isn’t
he?”

And no, no I wasn’t, not
at all. But it was better this way. They left me alone. Enough for
me to be able to devour my books, of adventures and science, of
history and fantasy, my comics and my science fiction
sagas.

We stopped at the reserve.

Mister Capadocia got out of the automobile
with a bit of effort and headed to a clearing on a promontory.
There, two boys of around eighteen, both of them mestizos, waited
for us.

They wore their hair braided in an attempt
to imitate the tentacles, and their tanned skin was marked with
sinuous lines of bright colors.

They were mounted on two sleipnirs as
nervous as they were.

Mister Capadocia
introduced them to the native and they got down from their mounts
and made a deep and respectful bow. Then, they all drew a little
bit away from me, and talked about something which I could only
catch the occasional phrase, like: “It must be done,” “It’s
imperative,” “Now, or later it will be worse.” And things like
that.

The native spoke a few times and I could
feel a deep and low voice that seemed to shake my bones.

I felt a tickle within me when, for a
moment, his silver eyes locked with my own from afar.

After a while, the two young men nodded in
silence, nervously, and mounted their sleipnirs just like in the
holos, with a leap, to then ride off at a gallop through the
Martian sand in the direction of Utopia Planitia.

Mister Capadocia made a signal for me to
remain where I was, and he went to the red adobe houses, where a
group of people as old as he was bid him welcome.

The native remained outside, balanced on his
leg-feet, resting.

I squatted down beside Borzoi and gave him a
bit of water from my canteen.

I studied the native from the corner of my
eye, afraid to offend him with a direct scrutiny.

His skin, the color of olives, was totally
covered with tiny, tight silver spirals, whose very pale shine made
his skin adopt different tonalities as the light fell upon it from
different angles.

I knew that, at night, those spirals gave
him an extraordinary mimetic ability, making him almost
invisible.

When I lifted my gaze again, he was watching
me fixedly.

I shuddered, but not from fear. It was
something... strange.

His voice resounded smooth
and velvety, but very deep: “You’re Jedediah, no?”

I was left speechless.

He smiled with tenderness
and something of compassion for me. “My name is Ajax.”

I nodded, with my eyes half-hid by my
hat.

He breathed deeply of the
Martian air, closed his eyes satisfiedly and, then, with a smile as
fierce as any I’d ever seen in my entire life, said, “The hunting
has begun.”

Only many years later did I know that what
the slits in his mouth had smelled at that moment was the blood of
the massacre.

He sat on a rock, watching me. In
silence.

My heart began to beat
wildly, just as when you know that you’ve got something important
to say, but your sense of shame is so huge that it stops you; and
then an internal struggle begins that lasts long enough for the
moment to pass and you remain silent, with something important to
say forever blocked in your throat, and that sensation of being a
useless coward who will never do anything meaningful.

My cheeks burned with suppressed
courage.

Time passed and if I
didn’t speak I would regret it, as I always did.

Without raising my eyes, I
spat out as fast as I could, “When I’m older, I want to be like
you.”

My cheeks burned even more.

A smooth laugh emerged,
like a feline purr, from the native’s throat.

“
Like me? But I don’t have
even ten honors.”

Ten honors! Wow, I thought. Ten honors were
a fortune. In my mind, the ten shining gold coins paraded before
me.

I had barely four nickels, saved over the
course of various years of fences painted, dogs walked, and errands
of all sorts.

I knew that all my
father’s treasure consisted of eight silver coins or, as they were
called, eight “forgivenesses.”

Ten honors were, for me, a
treasure, and it used to mean that in miner’s slang.

Then I did something that
even today, after everything that happened, I remember with
astonishment. Without knowing why nor where those words came from,
I said: “I could be your ten honors.”

Where had that come from?

I blushed more than ever, I thought my
freckles would fall off my face. I thought that even my sky blue
eyes must have turned as red as my skin, like the sand of Mars.

I felt his hand on my cheek, large and
rough.

He had approached so
silently that I hadn’t heard anything.

I trembled at the idea of his stealth.

“
And you will
be.”

I lifted my eyes, confused. What could that
mean?

He made a grimace with his
brown mouth and added with a sad and somewhat glassy look, “And
that will bring you many problems.”

I felt as if he knew
everything about my life, as if he’d known me for
centuries.

That inner tickle returned, but it was
pleasant.

He placed his hand on my head and patted it
heavily, like someone who wants to be good with a kid but even so
keep a distance.

His wolf-like legs took two steps back and
he sat again, watching the valley spread some seventy meters below
us and rising until it became a utopia.