Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (34 page)

After collecting the tin
plate and the utensils, and as I cleaned the floor, it occurred to
me to ask him: “What is it you do?”

Ajax allowed himself a
broad smile. “I make Mars Martian.”

I must have remained very
quiet and with a perplexed look on my face because a cloud darkened
his own. He probably thought that a boy like me, raised in a Terran
mining colony, would be one of those recalcitrant defenders of
“Mars by and for the Earth.”

My only response was a
not-too-intelligent “Wow!”

He weighed the expression
for a few seconds and seemed to understand or remember something
that calmed him. “You’re in agreement, then?”

Obviously, I said “yes.” A
prompt and faltering yes, but not less firm for that.

An acceptance that had
—both by the childish ignorance of that time, as well as by the
light of my current awareness— a preternatural bias, almost like a
marriage vow.

I didn’t know what I was
getting into. Of course, I didn’t understand even a tenth part of
the scope of the task that the natives and some very few humans
were facing. And yes, I had no idea of how difficult, dangerous,
and marvelous it would turn out to be for me, on a personal level.
I was at the threshold of something so huge it would absorb my
life, my mind, and my ideals; and which, nonetheless, was worth
every moment of anxiety.

I, of course, was just
dazzled by him: by my hero. A person who awoke my most-fanatic
admiration and about whom I knew almost nothing. Someone in whom I
had placed my complete trust with my eyes so closed that, for the
last five years, I’ve only been able to think of one thing:
Why?

A thick fog spreads, very low, at the foot
of the mountains.

The color of the mist, in the dawn light, is
a purplish tone that curls around the feet of the sleipnirs in
phantasmal spirals.

While the rest of the landscape is part of
that monotonous darkened rust red, the sky barely sketches a
celestial blue similar to the eyes that the water showed me when I
looked into it.

Phobos runs like a soul in pain toward his
encounter with the rising sun.

I am cold and I am afraid.

Ajax approaches me with
the stealth belonging to the hours before an incursion. He stands
beside me and makes a gesture. It’s hard to distinguish him in his
“almost” invisibility; the camouflage of the iridescent drawings on
his skin both hid and revealed him at the same time.

He pulls out the white canteen and offers a
libation: Caraldo honey mixed with water from the snows of Mount
Olympus. He passed the flask to me and I do the same. Then both of
us spill a little of our own blood on the Martian sand: red upon
red.

The hour approaches, I’m
trembling.

Ajax runs his hand over my
head and musses my hair, like when I was a boy. I smile and at the
same time I get angry: when will he understand that I’m not a
child? While I continue to be one in his mind, what chance do I
have?

As if he were reading my
thoughts, he whispers to me, “Be patient.”

I stared back at him,
indignantly: how much more patience?”I don’t have your kind of
memory,” I retort in a harsh murmur, “I can’t live in advance. I
need...”

He gives me a kiss, short and smooth.

“
Soon, Jedediah,” he
whispers again, beside my mouth, “very soon.”

The raid was a success: all of us who went
came back.

There were some bruises and a few
considerable wounds, but all were alive and euphoric.

I, on the other hand, had
my head in the clouds for the entire day. I could only ask myself,
“Would today finally be the day?” time after time.

That almost cost me my
life on more than one occasion; plus a few warnings from Telamón
and Ainitz, the superiors of my squad. There can be no distractions
when you’re fighting in a dust storm.

When we reached the city, I went straight to
the showers and threw myself on the floor as the water cleaned my
body and mind.

Today I turned twenty.

Ten of those years revolved around Ajax.
Five years I had been waiting for him, five years I had accompanied
him.

The water seemed to clear my ideas along
with my skin. The red of Mars washed away to the recycling plants,
and my thoughts drifted to the depths of my desires.

Exactly when had my devotion transformed
into desire? When had my admiration become love?

I couldn’t answer that.
With an imperceptible slowness and familiarity, my world had tilted
its axis to his presence and had matched itself to his
rhythm.

I let the warmth of the recycled water wash
over me again and again, until the pads of my fingers were
wrinkled.

Yes, I remembered perfectly the day when,
finally, I had recognized what had always been there.

That morning, in the
outskirts of Tyndall, Ajax had spoken to me calmly, while he walked
with that rocking gait due to his double articulations of what
would have been the knees on an unmodified man: “Do you remember
how I admired you in silence when we saw one another for the first
time, Jedediah?”

Our subject of conversation had revolved
around the probable storm forming, beyond Cerberus, and how we
could take advantage of it, re-channeling it, just like a river;
just as we normally did.

The comment took me by surprise.

I nodded slightly, as I did whenever I was
confused.

“
For me, that day was very
special. I already knew you, but it was the first time I saw
you.”

I stared at him, astonished and completely
confused.

Ajax took pity on me and
continued, “I’ve
always
known you. You appeared on my horizon from the
day you were born.”

Then he began to tell me
the story of his life, the story of his species artificially
created to terraform Mars. And the way in which I fit into that
history. “One part of my memory works
forwards
. I suppose that I remember
my possible future. This is useful when you can avoid those things
that are potentially harmful for a mission. It wasn’t something
planned for by our creators, it simply happened. Then, at some
moment of my infancy, you came in. You were an old man and a child,
you were as you are now and as you were and as you will be.
Glimmerings of you have always accompanied me.

“
During my very
brief childhood, you woke my curiosity. Little by little I
understood that, depending on my actions, on my choices, you would
become the center of the future memory or you would fade from
it.
To focus on you
would require a balance between what I wanted, what I had to
do and what you brought me.

“
At first it was a game,
then a need.”

I tried to imagine it,
hundreds of years of the life of a native dominated by memories of
possible events. The idea of being present in his mind for so long,
when I didn’t even exist yet, gave me a sort of meaning, a purpose.
In some way, I had been “called.”

Now the water continued to drench me. Its
warmth wrapped me in a comforting caress that allowed me to face
the chiaroscuro of recollection.

That night, as we rested under the folds of
the western slope of the crater, I knew what I felt for the first
time. And I told him.

Tears still come to my
eyes on remembering his bittersweet reply. “I know, I’ve always
known. That feeling honors me, and it is not far from my own. But
it is not yet time.”

And time had become an obsession.

I dried myself roughly, to not lose the heat
of the bath and to quench my frustration.

He had often spoke to me of the right time,
of that which would allow our futures to converge into a single
future. But for me, it was just time that the present was stealing
from me.

I randomly picked one of the clean worksuits
and got dressed. I wrapped myself in a thermal coat and went out
onto the street.

Ajax was waiting for me outside.

He approached slowly, with
his wobbly gait. His pained face told me that the answer was still
“no.” I turned on my heels, furious, and climbed into the Chevy. I
drove as far as possible.

It’s never pretty to be
rejected, even if it is for love.

He followed me at some distance, I knew
it.

I got down from the car almost in the
foothills of the Phlegra, near the caves where we raised the
spores.

“
Understand me!” he
shouted desperately.

But that didn’t calm me,
it only inflamed me even more. I couldn’t be rational, not with so
much pain and so much broken hope.

“
And when will it be
the moment?” I said angrily. “You have our memories, I don’t have
anything!” Ajax lowered his head, as if he’d received a blow to the
face. “What happens if a storm changes its course? What if the
Earth sends new strain of oleagins that kill our crops with their
pollen? Or if there’s a new attack against the native population?
The future always changes, you should know that now. And each
variant influences your memories of me, your memories of
us
,” I emphasized the
word, I wanted him to taste it, for an instance, the injustice he
put me through and, at the same time, it hurt me to my soul to make
him suffer. But I had to fight for our love. “Can it be that you,
having always been with me in your memories, don’t understand me at
all?”

“
Sometimes a sacrifice is
necessary to...”

“
No sacrifices!” I
interrupted him. “You’ve already made all of them.” I gentled my
tone and approached him; I’d never seen him tremble before. “I know
you still do it, I know how you try to lead the flow of our
actions, striving for the best possible future. Only Zeus could
understand how much suffering you must have borne seeing how a
simple variable, beyond your reach, destroyed years of elaborate
construction. How a brilliant future for both of us evaporated like
a sandstone castle in a storm.” I took his face between my hands; I
had to stand on tiptoe to do so. “The agony of seeing us separated
or dead because of a twist of events. Of course I understand you!
But now let me decide for myself. Treasure our best future
memories, whether possible or already lost, and
live this moment with me
.”

As if a seal had broken, Ajax emitted a
barbaric sound, a release of centuries of battling against
time.

Then he embraced me as no one had ever done,
with the overwhelming force and the sweet delicacy that only love
can achieve in a single movement. And he loved me, there, in the
cold of the Martian foothills, amid the dust and the fear, not
listening to his memories and hearing only the whispers of my
gratitude.

Ajax tells me that the
future was never “dustier”. He uses that word when he compares it
to a Martian dust storm, one of those that affect the entire globe
and last over three hundred days.

In a week I’ll be
thirty-five years old. This has been the most glorious decade of my
existence: I work side by side with the man I love, I learn from
him, I sleep in his arms every night. And our mission could not be
more glorious.

Right now I hear his measured breathing at
my side, the two hearts fighting to emerge from his chest, echoing
under his olive-tinted skin.

Even asleep, the tentacles
of his head touch my face, as if reassuring himself that I’m me,
that I’m still here, that I haven’t faded from his side as I’ve
done so often in his memory. Those dismal nights when he wakes up
shouting, and which are followed by days of frenetic action,
restructuring decisions, reshaping plans, only to keep me by his
side.

He murmurs something in his voice of
strangled thunder. I caress his forehead. He quiets.

I couldn’t understand it.
I was completely unsettled. But he smiled, happier than ever, and
that’s what hurt me.

The young girl was thin
and blond, and had sad, deep black eyes with deep bags under them.
I knew that she worked in Telamón’s new group.

Ajax brought her, almost
pushing her along, with an arm over her shoulder. When I noticed
that she looked at him with the same admiring eyes that I’d had at
her age, I felt a chill.

“
Jedediah,” he told me,
exultantly, “she’s our anchor. Look how lovely she is!”

And he kissed her.

He kissed her on the mouth in the middle of
the dusty street, in front of me, with a passion that tore the life
from my heart, stopping it for a second.

Then he took my lax hands
and placed them around the young woman’s waist, pushing her gently
against my chest.

I easily raised my eyes over the head of the
girl and looked at him with alarm.

He watched me expectantly. What did he
expect me to do? What madness was all this?

The sun barely rose in the early morning.
She smelled of sweet perfume, mixed with sweat and dust.

“
Her name is Hebe,” he
said of the girl as if she weren’t there and as if I understood
something of what he was saying. “She is the key.”

I lowered my gaze and looked at her closely.
She was around sixteen and was very frightened of me. Her head
barely reached my chin. She held on to me, reluctant but
submissive, curling herself against my chest.