Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (35 page)

When she’d joined the
movement, at fourteen, she’d been under my charge for a week. I had
seen her modeling the eye of a storm beside Telamón and knew that
she could be almost reckless. She was always proving her worth to
everyone. She had a brilliant mathematical mind; some jokingly
called her “Abacus,” and she had adopted that nickname as a brand
of honor.

“
What is all this,
Abacus?” I whispered angrily in her ear.

She trembled and clung to my shirt more
strongly.

Ajax placed his hand on my
back. “With her, the future is crystal clear.
Our
future!” His eyes sought mine.
“If she is part of... what we are, we’ll be together forever. She’s
like a catalyst that keeps us together over time, no matter what
happens.”

He moved her slowly away
from me and crossed his arms over her chest. He rested his chin on
her golden head and smiled again like someone who’d found Elysium.
“Do you understand? The dust of time came from our being a couple,
because our love only circulated between the two of us; but if
we’re a threesome, everything is balanced!”

Hebe’s eyes were closed,
and her face took on an expression of placidity at those
words.

A threesome?

Who was this little brat to join us, to
usurp our love?

“
No!” I shouted,
aggravated.

Ajax stiffened, truly
surprised. “But, Jedediah, what’s wrong?”

I pointed to Abacus.
“She’s a stranger! I barely know her, and you want me to love her?
Have you gone mad?”

A glimmer of sudden
understanding lit his face. “Oh, my love, sometimes I forget that
we’re two beings and that you don’t share my memories... I love you
so much!” He let go of the girl and came toward me. She clung to
his hand. I took a few steps back.

I looked at Abacus and
spat out my diatribe. “And you? Do you have such low self-respect
that you’re going to let us use you to stay together, like a
necessary evil?”

She answered softly, “I’m
in love.”

“
Oh, girl,” I said,
with a cynical laugh, “you don’t know anything. You admire Ajax,
isn’t that so? Well, he’s mine!
Mine
! And I am his, before my own
existence. You’re only a caprice of fate, a stubborn variable of
chance, nothing more!”

She continued looking at
me, challenging but sweet, with the same bravery she showed on
operations. She answered in a broken voice, “I admire Master Ajax,
yes...” Then, her voice becoming a painful whisper. “But who I love
is you, sir.”

My blood froze. A niggle of suspicion made
me doubt. In my mind, I knew very well that the future was an open
book for my lover, but I refused to accept this. I felt
manipulated.

“
Sometimes you’ve asked me
to be understanding.” Ajax had moved to my side and spoke to me
quietly, right beside my ear. I didn’t take my eyes off that
helpless blonde figure who had remained standing, alone, in the
middle of the Martian sand. “Now you understand me. I’ve seen our
future, I know that you will love her, I know that I will love her
a lot, and I know very well how much adoration she will feel for
both of us. But my life is built around you, and it is tied to you
by a strength that I don’t think you’ve ever understood. I would do
anything to keep you at my side. Anything! Even tying this young
life to our own by any possible means, even forcing you to lie with
her although you despise her.”

That morning I felt afraid
of his love, of that fathomless depth it had, as dark as Hebe’s
eyes.

“
Well, I despise her,” I
said in turn.

Ajax looked at me with eyes of melted iron,
the sun shining in the silver of his pupils. He took my head
between his hands and kissed me furiously.

All my determination dissolved upon his
tongue.

He pulled away from me a
few millimeters and said to me with a cruelty it was impossible to
associate with tenderness. “I don’t care. I care about you! You!
Today, when night falls, we will make her ours, whether you want to
or not.” He kissed me again, with something like impotence. And I
detested myself again in his mouth. “It’s that, or we eat her
alive. You decide!”

Then he pulled away from me slowly, took the
young girl by the hand, and gently led her to our house, with his
wobbly gait.

Deep within me I knew that
this couldn’t be real. That Ajax wanted to place me between the
sword and the wall, positioning himself in such a way that I had to
protect the girl from him, to thereby grow fond of her.

But I also knew that, if it were necessary,
he would carry out his threat.

At that moment I felt
disgust, not of him —that was impossible— but for myself, in the
way that I was falling into his trap with my complete
consent.

I wouldn’t have been able
to stand losing him either.

When I entered the house, Ajax was talking
quietly with Hebe. Would he have eaten her if it were necessary;
he, who had seen the three of us happy in the future and who knew
what we would come to feel for one another? Undoubtedly.

I sat down before the girl
but my words were aimed at my beloved. “Tell her everything, then.
If she must remain with us, she needs to understand fully what
she’s facing and why.”

Ajax sighed noisily and then began his long
soliloquy: the story of his life and of mine, the way she fit into
it, the way in which that role could be satisfied.

Abacus’ face didn’t show
any hint of surprise or fear, but she felt them. She could be our
lover or our dinner, but whatever it was to be, it must be decided
before tonight. Ajax left it very clear that he wouldn’t let this
opportunity pass by.

I intervened at that
point. “If you decide to go, you can do so, I promise you, you have
my word. Ajax and I will figure out how to resolve
this.”

My lover lowered his gaze. He gave in
infrequently and this was one of those times. My oath could
represent the ruin of our personal world.

After a few seconds of
tense silence, the young girl asked, “But if I go, what would
happen to your future together?”

“
Perhaps nothing, or maybe
it would become so complicated that...”

“
It would no longer
exist,” Ajax interrupted. “You are our only hope.”

She nodded, thoughtful.
“And you, Mister Jedediah, what would you do if that
happened?”

I didn’t doubt for a
second. “My life would have no meaning far from Ajax. Why prolong
such a torment?”

He gave me a relieved smile, a smile of
attachment that showed a loyalty beyond this life.

Hebe got up in silence and left the
house.

“
I’m sorry, could my
jealousy have condemned us?” I said.

“
Everything we are is in
the hands of that girl.” I wrapped myself in his arms. “I suppose
that you wouldn’t have remained at my side if I had forced her to
stay here, right?”

I laughed with my face
covered by his tentacles. “I love you without
condition.”

“
Oh, my Jedediah, love is
a great master of compassion and atrocity.”

The girl opens the door timidly. She comes
in with a bag in her hand, places it on the floor.

She’s crying, despite her
efforts to hide it.

“
It’s true that I love
you, Mister Jedediah, although you don’t love me back. I have done
so ever since I joined the militia.”

Her blonde hair falls in uneven curls over
her forehead and over her ears, the rest is cut very close. Her
small black eyes seem like two wells of still, dark water. She
wears the typical uniform of an apprentice technician.

She seems so tiny, backlit by the
afternoon.

This is the woman who will save Ajax and my
future? This is the person who, by her presence, will ensure our
love?

Hebe, the goddess of youth, the one who
poured the ambrosia, the one who enlisted Mars himself...

Suddenly I feel for this young girl such
thankfulness that it surprises me. Her disinterested love, which I
spurn, is giving me a life with Ajax. And that thankfulness only
merges with the compassion she inspires in me.

Perhaps, I recognize despite myself, one can
love in many ways. Perhaps each love might be unique and
individual: a different love for each beloved.

Ajax gets up from his chair and stands at
her side; he is so enormous beside this tiny woman, who has barely
stopped being a girl, that I shiver. And I think: how to love this
fragile creature, how to desire this subtle tadpole? She is lovely
as a gold filigree, but she is so slight and docile, so much the
opposite of what I desire in my companion.

Her idealized love for me is painful:
perhaps in the same way that my own hurt Ajax at some point?

But, why would this malleable and shy
creature love me, this nymph wrapped in the armor of her
intelligence and her laboriously constructed courage?

He crouches down and
whispers something in her ear. She represses an exclamation, I
don’t know whether of fear or of revulsion. Then she nods,
silently, and lowers her head.

There are no ceremonies for what we do; Ajax
invents them, I know, as we need them. Then Martian society adopts
them, like the laws they truly are: statutes stemming from the
vital praxis of one of its greatest heroes. From the man who began
and led the struggle for the emancipation of the planet.

I know what he asked of
her. I’m surprised that she accepted.

Could this perhaps be love, then? What other
thing would make her endure that?

She stops before us, closes her eyes and
holds out her hands.

Ajax reprimands her with undue harshness:
She must watch.

Hebe opens her eyes
bravely. By Zeus, she’s just a frightened little girl!

I have my doubts, but Ajax
forces me to kneel beside the girl’s left hand, while he does the
same at her right.

She must not see me hesitate, it is
imperative that she not know that, inside, I am begging her for
forgiveness for what I am going to do to her. I harden my eyes,
make my gaze brutal. My own right hand closes over the old
wound.

I quickly look out of the side of my eyes:
Ajax has done the same.

Hebe trembles.

I hurry through the test,
the offering, the communion. I take her pinkie finger and with a
single bite I tear off the fifth distal phalange. The second shout
confirms that my beloved has done the same a moment later. I chew
in silence, as I apply a cauterizer to the wound, as delicately as
possible. She is strong, she doesn’t faint, doesn’t cry, merely
watches as if hypnotized as our mouths chew, the trace of blood on
our lips, the slow slide of a part of her own body into
ours.

I swallow reverently; it’s
done, there’s no going back.

I hold her in my arms and gently help her to
her knees.

Tacitly, I know that I should be the first.
I extend my left hand and place the only pinky phalanges that I
have left beside her mouth. Fifteen years ago, Ajax tested this
ritual on us. She looks at me with love, with true devotion in her
eyes. Abacus was my deity a few moments ago, and now I am her god
who offers himself to her.

She kisses my finger with
veneration, then hesitates, and finally bites. Her adolescent jaw
doesn’t have strength, she tries again, jerks, sinks her teeth
until a crunch confirms the job is done. I endure the agony with my
best mask, smiling at her affectionately, offering her courage,
encouraging her to continue. She finishes, dizzy. She coughs, chews
slowly, avoids vomiting. Finally swallows.

She lifts her ashamed gaze. I kiss her
forehead pearled with sweat and caress her damp cheeks. I encourage
her to go on.

On her knees, she moves toward Ajax; she
looks at him amazed, grateful, overwhelmed. And she bites without
strength, but resolutely.

As I watch the ritual, I think of the new
Mars that is coming, of the new culture that will be forged in it.
I try to imagine hands mutilated as a sign of belonging, of
communion. How savage it will seem to earthling eyes, how sublime
it is for me; the danger of its distortion, the safety of its
obedience and symbolization as it blends over time.

Perhaps Martian culture will adopt the
triadic form of marriage as a general norm or, even better, perhaps
multiplicity will be the common currency. Where love has no limits,
nor chains; where to love a husband or wife is as universal and
full as loving a child or a brother or a friend: those one loves
without any condition, regardless of their sex or if they are one
or five or a thousand. A world in which one loves people for
themselves, not for their gender or their number...

And as the ceremony ends and Ajax helps an
Abacus who is too overwhelmed to stand again, I try to glimpse how
the myth will be that is being woven around this moment.

Abacus lay in my arms, smooth and perfumed.
That sweet smell of balsam, cinnammon and sandalwood surprised by
cardamom, kept me awake and overcome. Her skin, excessively white,
contrasted with the reddish tone of my tanned skin, and with the
olive green of Ajax, whose arms closed around my own.

I was a contained container, in the middle
of my two loves.

Our little girl, as I
liked to call her, had turned twenty two and I forty one, on the
same day. Ajax surpassed three hundred and ninety something, but
didn’t know the date of his eclosion, so he had adopted the date of
our births.