KILLER PLANET

A graviboat sailed on the flow of cold magna of the Iron river, bordered by wide esplanades of green sand.

“It happened near the Temple of Saint Judas Thaddeus,” Martha continued, “in the Iron River. They were in a white boat. Cleopatra was with her sister on the deck of the boat, surrounded by magna, in a ship crowded by strangers.”

The firmament was cobalt blue, an optical result of Jupiter’s immense dimensions after its conditioning for human life by the scientists of Orions. Ruins of 27th-century saints’ temples, and monumental statues of the terranean civilization lay half-buried before the line of the unobtrusive horizon. 4-year old Cleopatra remained standing, clinging to the railing of the bow, contemplating the landscape. 5-year old Anaximandra was holding her hand. Nearby, Cancerbero, with a wholesome 25-year-old face, spoke to young Doctor Caicedo as he glanced around him with expressions of concern. 30-year-old former Lady Gloucester, Cecile, was talking to her right with Guillermina, then 43, who was waving her hands animatedly as she smiled pointing at the horizon. For a moment, both Lady Gloucester and Guillermina turned their backs on the girls to stare ecstatically at the stunning scenery. It was then, just as Cleopatra was leaning over the flow of liquid iron that Cancerbero saw Cleopatra’s body fall face down on the liquid magna. Her panicked scream echoed faintly across the landscape. Anaximandra, standing on the deck, remained calm, watching her sister’s face emerging from the frozen lava. Former Lady Gloucester and Guillermina, meanwhile, continued to talk, unaware of the evolving tragedy. Other passengers stopped walking, already resigned to the worst—judging by their resigned faces. It was then that Cancerbero ran, stripping off his jacket, toward the deck bar.

“She will freeze!“ shouted young Doctor Caicedo behind her.

Cancerbero saw Cleopatra struggling against the icy rush from the Iron River. Without considering it twice, he threw himself from the boat until he fell into the glacial flow. Doctor Caicedo cried out for help, throwing at the magna an orange buoy, from which it hung an organic rope.

“Mister Cancerbero rescued her,” Martha said. “Unfortunately, a block of glacial magna adhered to Mister Cancerbero’s cheek.”

Gasping for breath, Cleopatra clung to the buoy and was greeted by the sailors, who covered her immediately with a sheet of virgin wool. Above the great frigid stream, Cancerbero floated, meanwhile, with her face increasingly inflamed. Faced with the immobility of the crew members, Doctor Caicedo jumped into the water, dragging two buoys with him.

“Doctor Caicedo saved her life,” Martha concluded.

“The serial killer?” Fabio asked, imagining the young doctor hugging Cancerbero over the flow of iron frost.

Doctor Caicedo was then one of the former Lady Gloucester’s closest friends. Even though he had almost passed out, he had the strength to accommodate Mister Cancerbero into the buoy. But the blood flow from Mister Cancerbero’s face had already stopped. His survival was a miracle. A week later, Jupiterian doctors removed half of his face to insert a synthetic prosthesis.

“Now that I recall it,” said Fabio, amazed, “it was indeed an extraordinary fact,” “Do you think that ...?”

“Mister Cancerbero became an outcast,” Martha went on. “He lost his wife and developed a resentment against all humanity. He became one of the founders of a conspicuous Martian Deprogenetization Society: Eleutheria.”

Anaximandra stared at her own reflection in the Magna of the Iron River. Behind him the sailors tried to revive mister Cancerbero. Former Lady Gloucester then approached her. Anaximandra looked at her with dark, almost scary eyes.

“On the other hand,” continued Martha, “former Lady Gloucester died of indigestion a couple of weeks later. Her last words were a judgment of blame against Anaximandra for pushing Cleopatra off the deck.”

“I knew vaguely about that,” said Fabio. “Somehow, Lord Gloucester was prevented against Anaximandra.”

“Did he tell you?”

“Somehow,” Fabio agreed. “When I proved Cleopatra’s innocence, all the suspicions fell on his oldest daughter. I really had a hard time proving her innocence as well. I see a gravimotor is coming down”

Guillermina said goodbye hastily and ascended to the gravimotor. Fabio and Martha smiled and entered into their gravitaxi.

“Where does Lord Saint-André and Lady Saint-André want to go?” asked the robotaxi.

“Home,” said Fabio. “To what do I owe such a royal treatment?”

“We deserve the best conduct from our robots,” Martha said, her eyes narrowing.

The robotaxi raised the gravitaxi some fifty meters up and sped up under the gray sky.

“I just hope the robotaxi doesn’t mention it in front of Martian royalty.”

“Oh no!” Martha smiled.

“We should watch Guillermina,” said Fabio.

Martha nodded, looking at the wooded landscape below her window.

“I’d rather watch her sister’s movements,” Martha replied. “I called Mrs. Agatha Grave yesterday and she gave me a good-bye with evasions.”

“Don’t you think that her reluctance to talk about this incident is mainly due to her nationalism?” Fabio asked.

“She doesn’t miss an opportunity to remind us we are not from Mars,” Martha said, waving her hands.

“She claims we are inferior.”

“Such generalization is not only absurd. It’s a clear manifestation of racism. And you already know that racism is worse than nationalism.”

“It’s the legacy of the greatness of the colonization era, when just five thousand colonists got adapted in their survival capsules, three centuries before the providential arrival of the Orions. I have also observed this attitude in the lunatics who colonized Phobos.”

“Racism survives on every planet,” Martha replied. “It’s quite pronounced on Neptune, as a result of our prosperity over all the other planets in the solar system. Why? I wonder.”

“Because of intellectual laziness.”

“You mean,” Martha nodded, “out of laziness to study the particular?”

“Have you studied Gestalt theory?”

“Of course,” Martha agreed. “You know I read psychology books in my spare time. It consists of apprehending the whole by the parts.”

“Exactly! Our mind apprehends the reality of Mars by what two or three Martians represent, or the reality of Mercury by two or three Mercurians. Only a mind educated in freedom, in the desire to dream, in intelligence or beauty, can apprehend the varied diversity of the universe.”

“That’s why I love you,” Martha sighed. “They, who sanctified their routines, don’t understand the peace and freedom that I share with you. ¡Oh, dear! Why don’t you recite to me the poem of that today forgotten poet from Earth.

“Raúl Gómez Jattín’s?”

“Yes! Sadly, as you told me, one of the cursed poets of 20th-century South America.

Fabio declaimed in a tremulous voice:

Hell are the others

When they know you lived among them

Even if you didn’t have their guts

And if your time was transcendent and beautiful

They wonder what did you have on your chest

So quiet

So serious

So truthful

When you seemed not to exist for life

Those books disturb them

They besiege them

Why do you name them so darkly?

Why are they not mentioned as heroes?

When they know you lived among them

Maybe they wonder: why don’t we kill him

When he wasn’t yet known?

Why?

They may say: what does your misery do

Your sadness

As a symbol of a people?

It’s never too late to talk about them

To remind them that you weren’t the fool

To revive something that art has always

Been afraid from the brute life:

Hate.

“I must confess to you, dear,” Martha said, “that Severus wants to seduce me.”

“What a coincidence,” said Fabio. “Guillermina also wants me to visit her at home.”

And they kissed each other in their complicity of shared frankness.

Next morning, Fabio was seen walking down a street in Nickel Port, checking a house address. He stopped in front of a small building where there was a gold plaque on the wall, on which was written the inscription: “Wagnall Consulting Company.” Fabio entered the place and found Mister Cancerbero typing a document on his computer. He cleared his throat. Cancerbero looked at him without stopping writing.

“Monsieur Saint-André,” he said. “I know you were looking for me. Please take a seat.”

Fabio sat on a Louis-XV chair. He studied the decoration of the office: a conglomerate of portraits, statues, cartoons and photographs of cats. A huge white feline lay lying on a mercurian carpet over the ground. Fabio fixed his eyes on a nearby bookshelf.

“Do you like cats or dogs?” Cancerbero asked.

“Dogs,” Fabio replied.

“I find them a little bit silly,” Cancerbero raised his right eyebrow. “They run after the same ball without getting bored all day.”

“I really like cats too,” said Fabio. “I believe, as Swedenborg prescribes, and as Kant repeats, that animals live in the grace of God.”

“I see we have something in common, Monsieur!” Said Cancerbero, rising from his seat and taking a red tome from his library. “For many years it was believed that the author of evolutionary theory was Darwin, until the Orians transmitted to us their admiration for Emanuel Kant. Let me read the passage where the Earth philosopher conjectures that both animals and us come from the same line. Here It’s! I listened! “So many genres of animals share a certain common scheme, on which not only their bone structure, but also the arrangement of their other parts, seems to be based; the basic design is admirably simple, but it was able to produce this great diversity of species, shortening some parts and lengthening others, by the involution of some, and the evolution of others. Despite all the variety between these forms, it would seem that they have been produced according to a common archetype, and this analogy between them reinforces our suspicion that they are actually similar, begotten by a common original Mother. ” And isn’t that so, my friend? Doesn’t a little creature like this cat have a liver like mine, a pancreas like mine, red blood as ours?

“It’s true,” Fabio agreed, moved by Mister Cancerbero’s passion.

“I am very fond of cats,” Cancerbero sighed. “Despite their self-sufficiency, they are an easy catch for birds of prey. If the Orians had not populated Mars with all the terrestrial fauna!”

“They actually saved the cats,” Fabio objected. “The nuclear hecatombs of our Earth ancestors would have killed them.”

“Don’t forget that we descend from the 25th-century pioneers,” said Cancerbero. “We had nothing to do with the hecatomb unleashed by the 30th-century fascists.

“Right,” Fabio pretended.

He gathered this was not the time to dispute Mars’s acute nationalism. In most of the galaxy, historians published books where Mars was exclusively blamed for Petreo’s intrigues. Petreo was a renowned hypnotist and fascist leader, previously a child molester and an assassin, who believed that by destroying the Earthlings, Martians could recolonize the entire planet. His plans were cut short when, instead of using the biological weapons he had designed, the Terran leaders, no doubt sensing his ruse, launched their arsenal of nuclear weapons. Had it not been for Orion’s intervention, the entire Earth population would have perished. Petreo’s mysterious death by a lighting bolt was still a taboo avoided by Martian scholars.

“Humans are cruel,” Cancerbero snorted, putting Kant’s book back in his library. “When I was thirty-three years old, my wife abandoned me because my face had become deformed. I was rejected as Quasimodo by his precious Spanish nymph.”

Fabio got up and looked at a shelf full of books by 18th-century Terran authors. Among them he distinguished several copies of the same volume: «New Arabian Nights», by Robert Louis Stevenson.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but one of us knows that love always accompanies pain, as our Venusian poet Fray Gregory wrote in the 32nd century.”

“You are absolutely right,” Cancerbero agreed. I know by heart one of his poems:

Love is woven with pain

Pain is forgotten with love

It’s so vain to live of love

As it’s vain to shun pain

For we breathe love

We have to exhale pain

“Excellent translation,” Fabio agreed, “but never as beautiful as the original.”

Mister Cancerbero shrugged.

“Maybe it was because of the need for love that I started adopting kittens. I believe, like Sigismundo, the character of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, that man’s worst sin is to be born.

Cancerbero picked up the huge white cat in his arms and settled it on his desk. The cat purred and Cancerbero whispered loving phrases. Fabio took advantage of those moments of affection between the owner and his pet to peruse through one of the copies of Stevenson’s book.

“I am proud to be the savior of more than thirty of these noble creatures,” said Mister Cancerbero. “Once I was promoted as manager of this company, they allowed me to bring Jigs to my office.”

Cancerbero repeatedly kissed his cat.

“Your little one!”

“Who allowed it?” Fabio asked.

He found amidst the book’s pages a porn photo from the 3870s: a bisexual orgy and a newspaper. He also discovered a photograph of a girl with the title:

TEENAGER CUTS HER EMBRYO IN A BATHTUB

“What are you looking for in my books?” Mister Cancerbero asked in a tight voice.

Fabio closed the book and put it back in the library.

“I mean, who allowed you to bring Jigs to your office?”

“Oh!” Mister Cancerbero said more quietly. “The Board of Directors. Lord Gloucester, our President, to be specific. He is a very correct man.”

“Of course,” Fabio agreed. I” also worked for him: a very honest gentleman.”

“I’ve known him for many years,” Cancerbero sighed. “I‘ve been your accountant and your financial consultant. Poor Cleopatra! What grief she’s caused to her family!

Mister Cancerbero took a photo frame from his desk and handed it to Fabio: a photo of the Gloucester family. In it Guillermina and Cancerbero, holding hands, were smiling along with former Lady Gloucester, Lord Gloucester, 4-year old Cleopatra and 5-year old Anaximandra.

“Thank you, Monsieur. My deep sorrow has only been compensated by the happiness of seeing Anaximandra happily married. Can you believe that I was the only guest who caught her red-handed just as she was escaping with her husband to their honeymoon?”

“How lucky you are!”

“I had to leave the party in the middle of the celebration. You know how committed I’m to my cats! I only saw her for a brief moment just outside the mansion.”

“How strange that nobody else noticed that,” Fabio ventured to say. “I mean, in that white wedding dress anyone shines in the night.”

“Oh! The bride and the groom were cunning enough to get dressed in black before their departure.”

“There is something that strikes me,” Fabio commented, returning the frame to Cancerbero.

“Yes?”

“I see several copies of the same book by Robert Louis Stevenson.”

“Oh!” Mister Cancerbero blushed. “Since my childhood, you see, I have been a fan of The strange case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.”

“A very good novel,” Fabio agreed. “But the one I like the most is The Suicide Club, one of your best stories, don’t you think?”

Cancerbero looked at him suspiciously.

“I didn’t know you were also interested in 19th century English literature.”

Fabio pointed the book several times to the shelf.

“I’ll be honest with you,” said Cancerbero.

“Yes?” Fabio asked, waiting for a confession.

“I prefer Treasure Island.

“A well-known tale among teenagers,” Fabio said with a hint of disappointment. “Do you remember Doctor Caicedo?”

Cancerbero smiled as he picked up his cat in his arms.

“Caicedo?” My best friend and my worst enemy.

“How is that?”

“He saved my life once,” Cancerbero said with amazing good humor. “On the Iron River, in Jupiter.”

“I heard that,” Fabio agreed.

“How’s that?”

“She saved my life once,” Cancerbero said, displaying unexpected good humor. “On the Iron River, in the middle of the green sands of Jupiter.”

“I heard that,” Fabio agreed.

“But then he seduced my wife.”

Fabio’s eyes blinked.

“Didn’t they tell you too?” Cancerbero asked. “Guillermina was unfaithful to me.”

“While you were faithful to her?”

“Does it matter now?”

“Are you one of those who can throw stones at adulterers without remorse?”

Cancerbero’s face became reddish. A siren was heard crossing the air.

“I’ve never allowed my private life to be confused with my social life.”

“As Guillermina has done,” Fabio agreed.

“Marriage is a lifelong commitment of love,” Cancerbero continued, “and it must resist the ravages of the deadly sins: anger, pride, greed, gluttony, envy, vanity, laziness, or lust. If you analyze a divorced person, you’ll find that your main motivation for betraying your spouse is based on one of these unfortunate temptations. My wife could not resist the onslaught of lust, and not even my offer of forgiveness was able to redeem her.”

“Excellent answer,” Fabio nodded.

Cancerbero relaxed his muscles and mumbled in a sign of appreciation.

“Do you hate Guillermina?” Fabio asked.

“Not at all,” said Mister Cancerbero.

“I thought so,” Fabio commented distractedly. “You both are members of various local societies, right?”

“That’s correct,” said Cancerbero. “What reason is there to hate those we have loved? This is a city inhabited by old folks, Monsieur. Every day someone dies of a stroke or a heart attack. Besides that, Guillermina learned it the hard way. After a scandalous idyll, Doctor Caicedo left her three months later for one of his students. My only hatred in this life is for that doctor.”

“Or was ...” Fabio said.

“There you see how he ended: badly.”

“Have you enjoyed his fall?”

“To a certain extent,” Cancerbero smiled. “I admit that I am a bitter person, Monsieur. As a Dante character damned in hell by envy, I really enjoy the misfortunes of others.”

“Do you think Doctor Caicedo is guilty?”

“Of course he is,” Cancerbero laughed heartily. “Caicedo was a seducer. When he was not assaulting his friends’ wives, he was dating his younger students and his wealthiest patients. Nothing more dangerous than playing the roles of the saint and the villain a the same time.”

“As the scriptures say,” Fabio agreed, “you cannot serve two masters. What do you know about Monsieur Philippe?”

“Oh,” Cancerbero scratched his head. He’s back in France, I think. A very efficient man. I asked him to continue working with us, at least until December. But to say it plain and simple, he disappeared.

Cancerbero looked at Fabio with a funny smile, expecting a word of approval, a blink or a knowing gesture. Fabio got withdrawn with embarrassment and turned his gaze to the window with a severe air.

“Is he the subject of your investigation, Monsieur?” Cancerbero asked.

“Do you have his contact code on Neptune?”

Cancerbero reviewed the documents on his desk.

“I’m afraid not,” he said after a minute of unsuccessful searching on his desk. “He lived alone. However, I did receive his letter of resignation. It must be around here.”

Cancerbero pulled an envelope out of a drawer. He took out a letter and read it:

“They offered me a new position in a hospital. I will contact you later to inform you of my last payment. Best wishes, Philippe.”

Fabio studied another open letter over Cancerbero’s desk.

“Oh,” Cancerbero explained, taking it in his hands and folding it. “It’s unrelated to Monsieur Philippe.”

“It’s signed by Mrs. Grave,” Fabio agreed.

“A charming lady,” sighed Mister Cancerbero, “with a wonderful disposition and a keen sense of humor. She never says no to a gentleman.”

“As long as that gentleman is not a foreigner…,” said Fabio.

“I guess she’s not a suspect, is she?”

Fabio shook his head, smiling.

“Would you be so kind as to allow me to scan this document?”

“Sure,” Cancerbero shrugged. “I don’t see why not?”

Fabio stood up and scanned it with his holographic ring. The cat approached Fabio, who stroked him gently.

“I see you like Jigs,” said Mister Cancerbero. “Thus my cat tells me that you are a good person, Monsieur.”

The little creature purred.

“Do you know, Mister Cancerbero, what Julius Caesar said about those who love their pets so much?”

“Oh yeah!” said Cancerbero, getting up. “That killer of thousands of human beings wrote that nature gave us tenderness for children, not for pets.”

Fabio’s cheeks reddened as he smiled.

“I agree with you again,” he said.

“As Schopenhauer prescribed,” said Mister Cancerbero, “the man who is cruel to animals is a bad man.”