On My Way to Paradise (29 page)

I thought of Zavala. No one in our group had
committed suicide before. Some of our more recent maneuvers could
have fit into the category of maniacally reckless perhaps, but none
were suicidal. Yet his move made sense. Burning is the most painful
way I know of to die, and he’d chosen an easier route. Still, it
seemed wrong to give up without a fight.

I heard a roar up the trail and the Yabajin whizzed
by on their hovercraft. As I’d anticipated, they were so
preoccupied with negotiating the deadly curve they didn’t notice
me. I turned up the volume on my outside mike and listened for the
hovercraft’s engine. It roared suddenly as the Yabajin tried to
reverse before flying off the cliff.

Unfortunately, their efforts at braking succeeded.
The engines quieted to a low rumble, which grew louder as the
hovercraft returned.

I stepped out of my crevice, deciding to face the
inevitable. I didn’t have a weapon, so when the hovercraft appeared
around the bend I just raised my hands to surrender.

The hovercraft stopped and the Yabajin watched me
suspiciously. I was well aware that we fought the same five Yabajin
in the simulators in every battle. One of the laser gunners was a
squat man Mavro had named "Piglet." In the same spirit we’d named
the other laser gunner "Keg" because he had such a big chest. The
aft turret man often leaned his head to the right, so we called him
"Lazy Neck." These three hopped from the craft and approached.

They were uncertain what to do, and they stood for a
moment. Their red armor blended so perfectly with the red of the
sandstone they almost seemed part of the landscape. Lazy Neck
walked over and looked down on me and shook his head. I could hear
him laughing and chattering with his companions over his head mike.
I didn’t like his tone of voice, since he sounded as if he were
making derogatory remarks about my sexual preferences. Keg strode
on past me and checked the road up the hill, while Piglet leveled
his gun at me. I suddenly remembered that for as long as we’d been
in the simulators, no one had ever surrendered, and I got an uneasy
feeling.

When Keg returned he kicked the back of my legs so
that I fell forward, then the three of them took turns kicking me
in the ribs. I curled in a ball and covered my head.

Lazy Neck removed his helmet and yelled in Spanish,
"What is the matter with you, baca yakoo? Why don’t you fight?"

"I don’t have a chance," I said.

"You make chance!" he shouted.

He flipped off the magnetic snaps on my helmet, arm
and leg pieces, trying to strip me of my armor. I wrestled him for
every piece, but he got mad and twisted my arm behind my back and
applied pressure till I gave up. Then he undressed me anyway. "Lie
flat!" he said.

I lay on my back on a flat rock. Piglet
field-stripped his laser rifle, opening the stalk to reset the
timing on the burst regulator, turn down the power supply to the
lasers, and disconnect the targeting computer. When he was done, he
shot me experimentally on the inside of my thigh. A red weal
bubbled up on my skin and fat crackled. I curled up to protect
myself, but Piglet found other tender targets to fry—my back,
underarms, toes. The quick killing burst of a laser seemed a soft
way to die in comparison.

I was only two meters from the ledge, and I tried
crawling to it so I could throw myself over.

Piglet took the opportunity to burn the crack of my
buttocks and cook my ears, then Lazy Neck grabbed my feet and
pulled me back.

I screamed, and he forced the barrel into my mouth. I
bit down, trying to keep him from shooting my tongue. My cheeks
glowed momentarily; my teeth felt as if they burst into flame. Lazy
Neck was standing between me and the ledge. I batted at his legs,
pushing him aside, and crawled for the cliff. My fingers were
burned black, so I crawled on my elbows and knees. Keg and Lazy
Neck kicked at me, egging me on. Piglet had already fried off the
nerve endings in my tender places, so when I made it to the ledge,
they let me drop.

For a moment the cool air soothed my wounds.

I awoke hugging my knees in the corner of the battle
room where I hid between two chest plates of battle armor. Abriara
was whispering to me softly, saying "Come, Angelo, come get up. You
can do it!" I was groggy and unbalanced. She helped me to my
feet.

Zavala knelt before Master Kaigo, and Kaigo paced
back and forth while cursing him. "You shit-eating coward!" he
said. "You dishonor your comrades by your presence! You throw your
life away over a cliff when you could as easily die in battle? Who
can understand this behavior? You shit eater! You dishonor the
mother who bore you! Who can understand this?" Kaigo slapped Zavala
on the side of the head, knocking him down, but there was no
viciousness in the blow. Kaigo shook his head and looked at Zavala.
"Who can understand this?" and because Kaigo honestly didn’t
understand, he admonished, "Don’t do that again, right? You won’t
do that again! You bring shame to me as your master. You bring
shame to the company that hired you. You want to be a samurai,
don’t you?"

Zavala nodded.

"Then you must serve Motoki and seek an honorable
death in battle! What more could a samurai desire?"

Kaigo shook his head and his ponytail swayed. He
pointed at me, "And you! Did you hear them laughing at you? What is
this thing you did with your hands?" He frowned and raised his
hands in the air.

"I was surrendering," I said. "I could not win the
battle."

Then Kaigo said the most important thing I ever
learned about Baker: "On Baker, there is no surrender."

After battle practice I felt dirty with sweat, and I
headed down to level four for the showers. The shower room was hot
and steamy, and one could smell it from the ladder. The line in
front of the narrow door had only 40 people. The men in line were
subdued. They discussed the latest happenings in South America, but
there was no joy in their voices. It was as if it were old news
from many years ago.

As I waited a small, wiry man with many tattoos of
spiders and skulls on his arms came out of the showers. His eyes
were glazed with weariness, and as he passed a big Brazi in the
doorway he gave the Brazi a shove. It was a shove meant only to
push the Brazi aside, but the Brazi swung, flattening the tattooed
man. His head cracked on the floor, leaving a smear of blood. He
got up and staggered away and no one helped him.

It was a small incident, but struck me as strange:
Both men attacked, but the violence was mechanical, passionless.
There was no posturing before the skirmish, with each man making
threats. No one screamed or cursed. And the witnesses didn’t try to
calm the aggressors or help the injured, as if we simply didn’t
care.

I showered and couldn’t help thinking about what had
happened. Perhaps I’d been shocked into inaction, I wondered, but
twice in my life I’d witnessed fights, and both times I’d rushed to
aid the victims. I had always believed in serving society, yet I’d
let an injured man crawl away without a thought. Even a dog would
have done more than I had done. In the past few weeks, we had each
suffered so much pain, that the pain of others became meaningless.
Where was my compassion? I could not believe that I had sunk so
low. I had always sought to serve society—but one can only serve
society by serving one individual at a time. Even if I felt nothing
for the man, even if I could not rouse myself to feel sympathy for
him, I reasoned, I must serve him.

I got out of the shower and followed the blood trail
left by the injured man. He seemed to walk the halls at random,
without a destination. I lost his trail on level seven. I checked
with a nurse at the infirmary and verified that the man had never
sought treatment. When I’d done all I could, I headed back up the
ladder to my room. As I reached the top, the door to the airlock
above me slid open and a man in white coveralls climbed down from
module B. I’d believed there was no way to move through the
airlocks.

I was so astonished I blurted, "How did you do
that?"

"Ti?" he said in Greek and shrugged. He spoke no
Spanish and I spoke no Greek. He fingered a small transmitter in
his pocket, then the airlock closed and he descended to the lower
levels, and I now saw that if the need ever became great I could
find a way to reach Tamara, and the Alliance assassin could find
his way to reach me.

In the afternoon I accompanied Zavala and García to
the library. As we walked Zavala said, "Huy, such a fine way to
waste a morning!" as if preferring not to be bothered, yet he
nearly skipped with joy. The "library" turned out to be the size of
a broom closet and contained only one small viewing console and a
few tapes about Baker. The cost of stocking and carrying tapes must
have seemed superfluous to Motoki Corporation. We could learn all
we needed about how to wage war through the simulators.

I inserted a tape entitled "The Delicate Natural
Balance of Baker," hoping to learn of the creatures I’d seen in
simulations. The narrator showed how Motoki struggled valiantly to
introduce Earth organisms on Baker to hurry the complete
terraforming of the planet. Yet at every turn the Yabajin harried
the dedicated terraformers, bringing their efforts to naught. Honey
bees died from parasitic mites introduced by the Yabajin,
jeopardizing plants that reproduced through pollination. Fish
counts in Baker’s oceans remained low because the water was too
warm—the Yabajin had thwarted the terraforming of the great central
deserts, and these deserts introduced large amounts of dust into
the atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect that warmed the
oceans. I learned nothing about the biology of Baker. But I learned
much about the naiveté of Baker’s native propagandists. The
information presented in the films was obviously slanted. Like most
repressive government officials, Motoki’s social engineers had been
suppressing information for so long in their effort to stamp out
the remnants of Western civilization they seemed incapable of
looking at an issue from two sides.

Zavala grinned like an idiot. "Well, I saw no
children training for battle in that tape, did you?" he asked. I
shook my head and he said, "What? I didn’t hear you."

"No," I said.

The second tape, called "The Great Catastrophe," was
more helpful. It recounted an "unprovoked" attack by the Yabajin
some forty years earlier. The Yabajin had flown over Motoki’s
coastal cities and released a viral plague that killed two million.
The inhabitants of Tsumetai Oka and Kimai no Ji were so weakened by
the plague they were unable to bury their dead. Instead they threw
the ravaged corpses into a river. The bodies floated downstream,
but when the high tides came the bodies floated back upstream and
were deposited on the beaches. For days the bodies washed in and
out with the tides. When the survivors recovered, they built a
cemetery. In the cemetery they erected a cement pillar the size of
a small fence post for each fatality. The name of the plague victim
and the victim’s lineage was inscribed on each pillar and white
tassels were tied to the top.

 Once each year the 40,000 residents of Kimai no
Ji visited the vast cemetery and clustered at one end so they could
visualize just how many had died. Then they put candles on two
million paper lanterns and set the lanterns adrift on the river so
it became a river of fire. Everyone from the oldest grandmother to
the youngest child swore undying hatred for the Yabajin. Once
again, the tape taught me little.

 But the vision of Baker as a desolate planet
with buildings blasted to the foundations disappeared. There were
no cement buildings on Baker. Instead the cities were small hamlets
filled with dark wooden frame houses with cream-colored paper
walls. The city was neat and well-kept—ornate, sculpted stone
lanterns in front of each house, immaculate gardens along the
roadside—with no sign that a battle had ever been fought.

I began to suspect that this war was an accident,
that a virus had mutated and killed the inhabitants of Motoki’s
settlements and initiated a war, but the next tape, "Growing-up
Motoki," persuaded me otherwise. The tape showed how for thirty
years the Yabajin had engaged in infanticide—systematically
destroying Motoki’s children.

In the early days it had been done in the birthing
vats. A Yabajin assassin successfully poisoned amniotic fluids in
the birthing vats for three years in a row. Corporate officials
caught and beheaded the man, but not before representatives from
the Alliance completely outlawed birthing vats on Baker for "the
duration of the war."

I found the term "duration of the war" interesting,
for nowhere in the films did Motoki officials describe retaliation
for the Yabajin attacks. The film went on to show how after the
initial attack against the birthing centers, young children soon
became targets: Sixteen children were blown apart by tiny bombs
that looked like toy butterflies—when one pinched the wings
together, the butterfly exploded. Cyanide-laced rice balls strewn
about park benches killed five toddlers. A blooming chrysanthemum
became bait over a spiked pit, spearing a small girl.

The attacks were grisly and well-documented. Fearful
parents hid children indoors, and attacks moved into the homes. The
tape showed a young man standing over the corpse of a black-robed
man, describing how the assassin—the Japanese used the slang
"Farmer"—had entered the boy’s house at night. The young man slept
with his family’s ancient sword and slashed the assassin’s belly
open. I was surprised to recognize the young man as Kaigo, the
samurai master who trained us.

The film switched to an old man teaching a child
self-defense. The training consisted of teaching the child not to
look at flowers, not to eat food given by strangers, not to play
with other children in groups.