I was ready to forgive them. I had to.
They had sold me to a Colossaur. They were worse than rats, but they were my rats. The only real family I had—much more family than my alcoholic Abuela. Ettu, in spite of his tolerant generosity, was nothing but a strange xenoid who was up to something weird with all the interest he showed in me…
For Dingo and the rest of the gang, my return was a total surprise. Alive, happy, and loaded with marvels. When the cybertaxi let me off in front of them, they stopped playing soccer and just stared at me. As if they didn’t believe it, as if I were just a ghost. As if I had to be dead.
“Hey, guys,” I said, happy. “Did you miss me?”
Then, without a word, without Dingo giving them any sort of signal, they all ran at me. I thought they were going to hug me, to congratulate me for my cleverness and my good luck. But, too late, I saw the anger twisting their faces.
They fell on me. Kicking me, biting me, spitting on me, shouting at me. Ripping everything I had so happily brought to share with them out of my hands. I felt their hatred, their envy, and their simple need to destroy me so they could keep on being themselves. And those feelings were like a monstrous shell that turned them into something very different from the gang, my gang.
I wasn’t one of them anymore, and this was their way of showing me. In a way they had killed me by selling me to that xenoid. They had thrown me out of their world, which up until five days earlier had also been mine. I should have at least had the decency to stay dead. Not to remind them of what they hadn’t had any choice but to do.
We children are capable of endless cruelty. Because we don’t have anything to tell us, deep down inside, “That’s enough, stop.” And in Barrio 13, grownups tend not to get involved in kids’ business. If they kill one? Okay… one less mouth to feed. One less who’ll end up with the Triads or the Yakuza when he grows up.
At first, greed made Dingo and the others restrain their rancor. They controlled themselves to keep from breaking any of the “riches” that I had so naïvely brought them. Perhaps if I had shown complete submission it would have appeased them—I now know that this is how it works in the group rituals of lower primates such as baboons. But when Babo tried to rip the clothes off of me, when I kept my platinum card in my pocket, and I resisted, they forgot everything else and turned into bloodthirsty rats.
Surrounded by the smells of broken perfume bottles, trampled chocolates, caviar dumped on the ground, and wine spilling from smashed bottles, thirty hands and thirty feet went at my body. I fought like mad, like the girl accustomed to Barrio 13 gang fights that I was. But when I tasted my own blood running from my broken lips and split nose, and I realized that they would never stop, I was terrified like never before in my life. I screamed, begging for the help I feared would never come.
I screamed and shouted for my Abuela, for my mother, for the neighbors, for Planetary Security, for anyone who would help me, for mercy.
I screamed for Ettu, when I couldn’t take the pain any more.
It was killing me.
Then he showed up.
He was swift, brutal, and effective. Two swipes of the tail, one blow of the hand, two kicks, and one snap, and the gang fled in terror. My Colossaur angel, without a word, led me by the hand like a father leads his daughter, and practically dragged me out of there.
I was bleeding, had a dislocated shoulder, and felt dazed by the pain and the shock, but I’ll never forget the spectacle of two of the triplets twisted into unnatural, broken positions on the asphalt, and the body of Dingo, headless.
Dingo, the leader of my gang.
The same gang that had attacked me…
It couldn’t be. If it had all been a dream before, this had to be a nightmare.
When I got back to the suite, I slept almost fifteen hours straight. Maybe they gave me some drug, but I needed it. I have a vague memory of Ettu and the three hotel doctors caring for me, the sharp jab of pain when they snapped my arm back in place. Afterwards, through a fog, being moved and lifted somewhere.
When I woke up, I was in another almost identical suite, but half a world away. According to the brochure, it was also the Galaxy—but in Tokyo. I dug into my pocket, looking for the blessed card… and it wasn’t there.
I remembered that Babo and the others hadn’t managed to snatch it from me. So it had been him. The Lord gave it to me, the Lord took it away… Cursed be the Lord. Cursed be the xenoid Lord, who saves my life and takes from me the possibility of enjoying it.
That was the end of my buying frenzy. And the ice floes that had almost completely melted loomed up once more between us.
Ettu continued to pay unflinchingly for every meal, every item I needed—or that he realized or thought I needed—though I never asked him for anything again. I felt that when he took away the platinum card, he took away his trust, so why should I give him mine? He was a xenoid, I was a human. No trust was possible…
The silent, roving period had begun.
After Tokyo there was no more rest. We traveled as if we were pursuing something, or fleeing something. Ettu talked and talked, revealing the world to me, the Earth I had never known. I just followed him everywhere, quiet, but like an affectionate puppy that follows in its master’s footsteps. Though it was less affection than fear. Fear of losing him, too, after he had taken my gang away from me.
Fear because I knew how useless I was, since Ettu could manage on his own perfectly well. He didn’t need anyone’s help to rid himself of the moochers who crowded around in every city, or the people offering him a “pretty girl, real cheap, will do everything,” or a “good room with antigrav and holonet connection, good price,” or “traditional food, satisfaction guaranteed, cooked naturally, organic ingredients.” He didn’t even pay attention to the ones who came up to him pretending to be old friends or to have a predilection for his race, much less to those who talked about terrestrial hospitality and then wanted at all costs to invite him to their house. None of the vultures who always circle round the xenos, all the same in every city on Earth, could faze him.
We never slept two nights in the same hotel. After the Tokyo Galaxy he preferred simpler, more anonymous hostels. Maybe he wanted to go unnoticed… or he might have had some other reason. He never consulted with me about his decision. It couldn’t have been to save money, because he kept spending it hand over fist.
In any case, even the grubbiest hotel (and we never spent the night in one that was actually grubby) would have been much better than my tiny apartment in Barrio 13. Ninety-seven square feet, including bath and kitchen, filled with the smell of my Abuela’s alcohol, vomit, and old age, day and night…
Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, New Bombay, Beijing, Florence, Berlin, Stockholm, New Paris, Barcelona, New York, Havana, New Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires… In less than a month, we tied a bow around the world.
The key question was still the same: what did Ettu need me for? It wasn’t to be a guide for him: at the age of nine, I’d never left New Cali, hardly even the microworld of Barrio 13. He knew how to get around better than me in every city we passed through.
In each city we repeated the same routine. Arrive, find a hotel, eat, drop off the luggage… and wander. We walked around looking at everything, for hours at a time, snubbing the taxis and aerobuses. Until my legs started to ache, when he, always perceptive, would carry me on his armored shoulder, though I never complained. Or thanked him.
He was never interested in the nightclubs where his people hung out, or the shows for tourists, or any part of the well-planned spider’s web for emptying xenoid bank accounts that the Planetary Tourism Agency had woven around the planet.
His thing was the past. And of the past, art.