Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (36 page)

Our usual celebration had been eclipsed by
something much more important: Mars was free.

The celebrations of independence had been
humble, after so much death and destruction. Nonetheless, joy still
hung in the rarified air that no human could ever breathe again
(the atmospheric survival suits were a small price for our
freedom).

Mars had returned to being Mars and not a
cheap substitute for the Earth. The natives paraded proudly on
their sleipnirs under the sky covered in white, blue, and yellow
clouds; their chests filled with carbon dioxide, their smiles
restored. Almost four hundred years later, Mars had become Mars
again and the sky was once again a gentle pinkish orange.

That day, we had all let ourselves plan a
life for the first time, to dream of a profession, to joke about
Gaudí-esque cities with Chevys on their streets.

When night fell, Ajax asked us,
unexpectedly, if we wanted to have a child.

I had never thought about the issue; with my
two loves I had everything I could ever want. But I think that they
had thought about it and I felt a bit ashamed of being ignorant of
that facet of their dreams for our life. I felt selfish again.

I thought of how we would
do it: Ajax had been designed to reproduce only humans, that’s why
the mestizos had not a single native feature, but both he as well
as Hebe could gestate in their bellies. In reality, I didn’t want a
child at all. I didn’t have a good memory of my father and I had
none of my mother; but I could envision a being that was the fruit
of our common love, of my absolute adoration for Ajax and my
grateful passion for Abacus. A being who had the genes of my
lovers, of those who had given meaning to my existence.

So, cheerfully, I told them how I planned to
renounce my own perpetuation in favor of their own.

But Abacus refused
vehemently. “No, Jedediah, that’s not how we are. We are three. If
we are to have offspring, it will be by the three of
us.”

Ajax smiled proudly,
embraced us to his broad chest that could easily shelter us both,
and confirmed, “That’s exactly what I was thinking. But I think,”
he said, seeing my face,” that it is not yet time.”

Hebe sweetly bit my lower
lip and gave a playful laugh. Then, her arms full of scars wove a
bundle of tentacles on Ajax’ head and placed them on her breasts.
That night we enjoyed our love with a completely new peace and
freedom.

When both of them were asleep, the perfume
of my adored little girl kept me awake, thinking again and again
about the possibility of a child.

Now, she was enclosed in my arms and I in
those of Ajax. The sky had begun to clear with reddish highlights
around the diminished Martian sun.

Mars was free and I had everything I had
always wanted and more.

I caressed Abacus’ milky
arm, carefully sliding the tip of my nails along the maze of
yellowish and pearly lines that I knew so well. Those scars were
paths that led me to the memories of all the wounds we had healed
together and all the battles that had caused them. Our little girl
trembled in my arms and sighed in her dreams. In an almost
reflexive response, Ajax’s tentacles came to life and completely
covered my face; they were a jungle of tendrils that sought my
mouth, my nose, my ears and my ears to sink themselves into those
hollows and corners. I hugged Abacus tightly in my arms, caressing
her frenetically, squeezing her until she woke, until I made her
respond to my desires. And she did, as sweetly and as lovingly as
ever.

And I was very afraid that the world would
change.

But I knew that that was unavoidable; so I
clung to our love, to the only way I knew to make a single soul of
three beings, and I gave myself to them, totally and
completely.

The birth is difficult.

I am terrified.

The only possible way had been to use his
own body as a laboratory. The pure genes of a native had never been
mixed, with all its modifications intact, with those of an ordinary
human; even less, with the genes of two humans.

We had considered all the possibilities over
the course of that year.

My proposal had been discarded: a child of
Ajax and Abacus.

Hebe had proposed a sort
of combination of the genetic material from spermatozoa from both
of us with her ova, but although that sounded Frankenstein like to
me (not to either of them, it seemed) there was still the problem
that the descendents of my beloved wouldn’t conserve his genetic
modifications.

The final idea had been a sort of mixture
between clonation and combination. I never understood the process,
but my consorts did. Our child would be a human, with the genes of
all three of us... an aberration condemned by all the laws of
Earth, and a Martian triumph for our people.

Our child would be a
hybrid, which would need to gestate during the first weeks inside
Ajax and then be transplanted to Abacus’ womb.

Symbolically, that was perfect. In reality,
it worried me.

We didn’t even know how
many months it would be before the child was born.

It took twelve and almost killed our little
one.

Capadocia Bel, born with a set of erroneous
combinations. On her lovely little green face, two sky blue eyes
and one black one came to look on us for a few minutes. Then, she
died.

Did she manage to know how much we loved
her?

I think she recognized our voices, the ones
that every night rocked her to sleep in the belly of her mother,
with songs and stories.

Perhaps, she inherited
Ajax’ ability, that one which had betrayed him in predicting her
health. Perhaps in those minutes she saw all the possible futures
beside her three parents and enjoyed not just one of them, but
thousands of lives at our side, wrapped in the affection that we
yearned to give her.

I don’t know if I’m
fooling myself, but I still cling to that idea to be able to carry
on. The pain is terrible.

Ajax blamed himself, said
that it was impossible for him not to have seen this future, that
his hopes had blinded his good judgment. Abacus spent nights
without sleep, wrapped in her suit, sitting on the porch, as if
awaiting something. I had begun to dream of my mother again, and
she had Hebe’s face.

I think that, as strange as it might seem,
it was the news of this tragedy that gave rise to the counterattack
from Earth.

On Mars, our little girl
was already a standard to stand behind, before her birth. An almost
mythical personage: the child of the liberated Martian who will
overcome, even, the genetic conditioning of the terraformers. When
that banner was struck down by the tragedy, Earth didn’t waste
their opportunity and attacked a people who were demoralized by an
incomprehensibly dark sign.

I only cried for my lost little
daughter.

On one of those interminable afternoons,
when we prepared for the battle, Ajax took me away from commanding
my troop for a few hours, and sat me in the pink Chevy that still
remained parked, now inert, at the door of our house.

I noted a strange shine in his silver eyes;
even through the lens of my helmet, he had a sad quality.

“
Do you know why I began
this rebellion, my Jedediah?”

For some reason, I felt like a boy again. I
had pondered that question in my head for years. I had thought of
all the political, social, and philosophical variables. The need
for freedom, the injustice of a race created to serve and then
discarded on the completion of their mission, the terribleness of a
world which arrogantly assumed the right to convert any other place
into its image and likeness, only because it could do so.

I looked at the beauty of this restored
Mars, red, pure, authentic. I knew that it was worth preserving the
universe from those terraforming claws; but something deep within
my mind told me that Ajax had not considered any of that in his
decision to begin a Marsification movement.

So I shook my head, like when I was a boy of
eleven.

“
For you. It was the only
future in which you were at my side.”

The vanguard is under
siege, but that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Ajax is there, supporting the main
assault.

Silently, I pray to Zeus for him. Silently,
I pray to Zeus that Abacus arrives in time with the storm. Aloud, I
shout orders at my decimated squad.

Once again, I block from my thoughts the
possibility that Ajax will let Mars slip between our hands just so
we can remain together. And also the idea of winning this world at
the cost of his love.

The column of dust rises even higher than
Mount Olympus, advancing like the end of everything.

In the visors, one can see the fragments of
the Terran army scattered in all direction.

Abacus gives me the signal: a triple glimmer
of rays. I throw the honey and the snowmelt to the ground, together
with a few drops of my blood.

I dash into the charge. We
don’t have more than a handful of weapons and our sleipnirs, but we
throw ourselves against the second flank of battleships without
hesitation. We only need to give the storm a few more
minutes.

“
There are things which
are worth giving your life for”: that’s my mantra, what makes me
not hesitate, the one that stops me from being paralyzed with fear,
there in the battle, by the luck of my husband and my wife; the
same one that gives meaning to a rebellion that was placed on my
shoulders from the first instant that Ajax loved me.

Men fall around me, but
the only important thing that is that the Terrans don’t react in
time.

Something hits me in the
head, I crumble, confused. The pain is terrible, and I realize that
a part of my face has disappeared. I look at my hands, grateful to
the universe for those two missing pinky bones. If we’d only had
time, we would have tried again, and that girl we would have named
Laurel, I know.

The eye of the hurricane
takes shape above me. It’s enormous, but it has closed enough to
swallow the entire Terran fleet.

From among the rubble, what remains of my
troop, led by Oileo, collects the sleipnir and they cling to the
ground with hooks, just as I ordered. Good!

Now there is no more wind, just a curtain of
dust in the air that slowly descends upon kilometers of death and
destruction. From between the reddish clouds, Ajax runs in my
direction, Abacus is at his side. Both are red figures that
approach me like spasms of vision. Thank Zeus!

The blood keeps me from seeing clearly, red
upon red.

“
Laurel,” I repeat. I
don’t think they understand me. “Laurel...”

Laurel walked resolutely toward us with her
rolling native gait.

Her white skin and black eyes, beneath a
curtain of stiff red hair mixed with tentacles of the same
color.

She crossed her arms with a grimace I knew
well in her mother, and she cleared her throat like one of her
fathers... me.

“
So, have you
decided?”

Ajax laughed to himself. I glanced at him
and again felt the same astonishment as ever on doing so: he looked
almost the same as when I saw him for the first time in Olympic
some fifty years ago.

“
Don’t laugh, it was your
idea,” I answered, pretending to be angry.

Abacus had placed herself
behind me and wraps me in her arms. “So?” insisted the mother
now.

“
Don’t corner me, OK? And
you less than anyone, young girl!” I shook my finger at my
daughter.

Laurel reprimanded me in turn with a cackle:
a vestige of her other father.

I thought about my answer calmly, or at
least I re-examined it, I already knew what I would say and, of
course, both Laurel as well as Ajax had seen this in their future
memory. As far as Abacus, she knew me too well not to be able to
guess what my answer would be.

I think that I was the only one surprised by
her.

I passed a hand over my face and my hand
banged against the helmet. The reconstruction had removed a few
years from my looks, but even so, I continued to appear the elder
of the group, and that gave me an aura of authority in the family
and in the Social Triumvirate.

“
Well, if you want to tear
off three fingers, do it!” I said, in a very doubtful tone, even
though I couldn’t have been prouder of the family destiny of our
daughter. “But not even they are good enough for you!”

Laurel leapt for joy and took off running in
the direction of the two natives who kept a respectable distance,
beside a pretty human woman of twenty, the same age as our little
girl.

The noble daughter of the Martian
liberationists, the girl-legend who at last had broken the
Terraformist genetic conditioning, joined Telamón, one of the
mythical victorious generals; Oileo, the chief of Cavalry of my own
suicide squad; and Gloria, her own childhood friend.

The spectacle fascinated me and filled me
with pride: another Martian family that grew without restrictions,
without fear, without taboos. And our little girl was going to be a
part of it.

Ajax surprised me with his
comment, “I thought she’d stay with us, like the
Proioxis.”

The Proioxis had been the first endogamic
family of the New Order, their marriage license had taken months,
but had finally been accepted, overturning the entire process of
prohibition of incest.

The reputation we Martians
had on Earth couldn’t be worse. But far from an abhorrent
debauchery prevailing, as they had painted us, our society was
tolerant, peaceful, and tremendously well-ordered.