Free Paradise Tales by Geoff Ryman Page A

animals. I thought that was disgusting, I don’t know why, I just hated it. What a thing to do to a chimp. And anyway, it would still need testing on people afterward.
    And anyway, I didn’t want to wait.
    So I quit the company and came to live in Brazil. João got me a job at the university. I teach Experimental Methods in very bad Portuguese. I help out explaining why Science is God.
    It’s funny seeing the Evangelicals trying to come to terms. The police have told me, watch out, there are people saying the child should not be born. The police themselves, maybe. I look into their tiny dark eyes, and they don’t look too friendly.
    João is going to take me to Eden to have the baby. It is Indian territory, and the Indians want it to be born. There is something about some story they have, about how the world began again, and keeps re-birthing.
    Agosto and Guillinho roasted the chicken. Adalberto, Kawé, Jorge and Carlos sat around in a circle shelling the dried prawns. The waiter kept coming back and asking if we wanted more beer. He was this skinny kid from Marajo with nothing to his name but shorts, flip-flops and a big grin in his dark face. Suddenly we realize that he’s dragging us. Nilson starts singing, “ Moreno , Moreno … ,” which means sexy brown man. Nilson got the kid to sit on his knee.
    This place is paradise for gays. We must be around four percent of the population. It’s the untouched natural samesex demographic, about the same as for left-handedness. It’s like being in a country where they make clothes in your size or speak your maternal language, or where you’d consider allowing the President into your house for dinner.
    It’s home.
    We got back, and all and I mean all of João’s huge family had a party for my birthday. His nine sisters, his four brothers, and their spouses and their kids. That’s something else you don’t get in our big bright world. Huge tumbling families. It’s like being in a nineteenth-century novel every day. Umberto gets a job, Maria comes off the booze, Latitia gets over fancying her cousin, João helps his nephew get into university. Hills of children roll and giggle on the carpet. You can’t sort out what niece belongs to which sister, and it doesn’t matter. They all just sleep over where they like.
    Senhora da Souza’s house was too small for them all, so we hauled the furniture out into the street and we all sat outside in a circle, drinking and dancing and telling jokes I couldn’t understand. The Senhora sat next to me and held my hand. She made this huge cupu-açu cream, because she knows I love it so much.
    People here get up at 5:00 a.m., when it’s cool, so they tend to leave early. By ten o’clock, it was all over. João’s sisters lined up to give me a kiss, all those children tumbled into cars, and suddenly it was just us. I have to be careful about sitting on the babies too much, so I decided not to drive back. I’m going to sleep out in the courtyard on a mattress with João and Nilson.
    We washed up for the Senhora, and I came out here onto this unpaved Brazilian street to do my diary.
    Mom hates that I’m here. She worries about malaria, she worries that I don’t have a good job. She’s bewildered by my being pregnant. “I don’t know, baby, if it happens, and it works, who’s to say?”
    “It means the aliens’ plot backfired, right?”
    “Aliens,” she says back real scornful. “If they wanted the planet, they could have burned off the native life forms, planted a few of their own, and come back. Even our padre thinks that’s a dumb idea now. You be careful, babe. You survive. OK?”
    OK. I’m thirty-six and still good looking. I’m thirty-six and finally I’m some kind of a rebel.
    I worry, though, about the Nilson thing.
    OK, João and I had to be apart for five years. It’s natural he’d shack up with somebody in my absence, and I do believe he loves me, and I was a little bit jealous at first … sorry, I’m only