On My Way to Paradise (51 page)

Outside some mercenaries dragged President Motoki
from the offices and led him into the street. Garzón was there in a
hovercraft, floating in the middle of the boulevard. Motoki waved
his hands and shouted in Japanese. A microspeaker pinned to
Garzón’s lapel translated, "Wait! Wait! Perhaps I’ve handled this
affair poorly!"

Garzón put a revolver to President Motoki’s head and
it exploded. Motoki fell gracefully to the street.

I looked at the faces of the men in the camera crew
and knew I didn’t need to shoot them. They were already
destroyed.

The symbol of all the gifts Motoki offered them was
just a heap of quivering flesh. The shock of what they’d witnessed
staggered them like a physical blow. There was rage in their eyes
and hopelessness and determination.

Zavala had been right all along. We’d been fighting a
war of spirit and didn’t even know how to win.

The death of President Motoki had immediate effects.
Our coup had been relatively bloodless, but the four cameramen
suddenly spun and saw me. There was death in their eyes.

I opened fire and fried them where they stood, then
rushed to the window. For the next half hour I stood watch: All
across the city the Japanese were running from their houses
shouting and pointing toward the armory. It seemed every samurai in
town quickly dressed in battle armor. They attacked without benefit
of battle plan or weapons. Several thousand samurai along with many
women and old people joined in suicidal charges on the armory. They
were no match for a thousand of our heavily-armed soldiers.

The Bertonelli lasers boiled through their armor as
if it were made of paper, and YCB flechettes cut them to ribbons.
In some places the charred bodies of the Japanese became stacked in
piles two meters high.

In twenty minutes thousands of the Japanese died.
Those women most distressed by the initial failure to dislodge us
set their homes aflame with themselves and children inside, and the
flames swept through the south end of town.

Whole families committed seppuku. Most citizens were
content to simply throw themselves to the ground and weep in shame
and ineffectual rage.

It seemed incredible Motoki hadn’t seen it coming,
hadn’t set up internal defenses, but in over 2000 years the
Japanese had never had a revolution. In a society that catered to
every whim of its corporate leaders, people couldn’t conceive of a
man disobeying an order from above. They couldn’t imagine us
striking down superiors.

Our men barricaded streets and dug in, while squads
searched homes for weapons and armor. Those of us still fresh from
the cryotanks were given menial tasks.

I spent the day with two others heaving corpses onto
a lifter so they could be taken to the airfield, identified, and
left for next of kin. There seemed to be an endless line of
corpses, gray-headed men with twisted legs and grimaces of pain,
toddlers with faces blown off, housewives with pinpoint burns in
the backs of their heads.

I lost count of the dead at two thousand. Three times
within the first hour I came upon corpses so hideously brutalized
... I soon became weak and dizzy from the task.

We cleaned the streets in front of the armory first,
then began working through town. But every time we got a street
cleaned, some old woman would run from a house with a knife and
throw herself at our mercenaries. I witnessed it a dozen times.

Each time, the mercenaries would begin to chatter
over their helmet mikes, saying "Here she comes! Here she comes!
Watch out for her knife!" and let the old woman get within two
meters before they fried her. It became a sadistic game.

I kept remembering the suicides of the young girls
dressed in white.

The ceremony itself had been beautiful, like a
wedding. I’d seen the eagerness, the anticipation in the eyes of
the crowd as they watched the seppuku.

They had a vicarious love of suicide. At first it
seemed proof of their moral sickness, but as I thought about it, I
began to see the beauty of it: in a land where everyone is
subservient to the whims of society, to kill one’s self in an
effort to secure a good name in that society becomes an act of
ultimate selflessness. It’s a supreme example of the individual
giving up his identity in an effort to fit into society.

Yet, at the same time, he escapes his society and its
oppressive dictates: for while the suicide is guaranteeing himself
a place of honor with his peers, he simultaneously cuts himself off
from them forever, ultimately asserting his own individuality.

I could understand the actions of the people of
Motoki. But though they acted according to the dictates of their
culture, it seemed to me that the dictates of their culture were
oppressive, unnatural, and morally repugnant.

I felt it was their duty to step outside their
society and act on their own, to forget the stupid whims of
society.

But then, I remembered don José Mirada teaching me
that a man who does that will lose the rewards his society offers.
I’d done exactly that, and I was suffering the consequences of my
recklessness. If I hadn’t killed Arish, I’d still be on Earth. I
wasn’t sure I’d be willing to take such a risk again.

I realized if I were an old woman of Motoki, I’d have
thrown my life away by running into the guns of the
mercenaries.

By noon the city was quiet except for the sounds of
weeping; the streets were empty except for an occasional Japanese
who furtively scurried from work to home or the wisps of smoke that
curled along the sidewalks and over the corpses like snakes. Garzón
announced over our helmet mikes that our revolution had been
accomplished within the bounds of Interstellar Alliance law.

He applied to the Alliance Ambassador aboard the
orbiting Marine base Orion Four and received admission to the
Allied Nations. This cleared the way for our seizure of all
Motoki’s financial assets on Baker so that we could buy passage
back home.

All we had to do was hold Kimai no Ji for 23 days,
till the Chaeron could be re&hy;outfitted for the trip, and we
could return home.

I had no time to think about his promise. I was too
busy stacking corpses onto the lifter.

At sunset five thousand men, many of Motoki’s best
samurai, charged from their homes and overtook seventeen outposts
on the north end of town. They captured eighty rifles and lost
two-thirds of their force.

By then they weren’t strong enough to secure a
defensive front, so they retreated to their houses.

Garzón let them play their game, but after midnight
he sent several hundred chimeras to the north end of town with
electronic sniffers. They recaptured all the weapons.

Thirty-four hundred men, all in prime fighting
condition, were then dragged from their homes in one’s and two’s
and executed in reprisal for our own losses. It seemed a sound
military decision—depleting the fighting forces of the enemy at no
cost to ourselves—making the Japanese victims of our reptile
logic.

We on burial detail followed like scavengers and
threw bodies onto trucks. At many homes wives and mothers and
children of the men to be executed put up a struggle and were
liquidated. Family members clung to the dead, and we forced them
away before disposing of the corpses.

One old man attacked us with a knife and we chopped
him up.

Thereafter, we kept one man on guard while the others
worked. Long after midnight we came upon a heap of bodies.

One woman was so warm she still glowed silver in the
dark. Her hand flopped as we neared and I had a sudden unreasonable
hope she was still alive, that I could save her. I ran to her and
laid her on her back, began checking her wounds. She’d been shot
through the belly with a pulse laser.

Her face and hands had the mottled glow I attribute
to dead people—the lack of hotpoints where blood surfaces near the
skin. But I’d seen her move! I knew she was alive!

I yelled to my compadres to get me some bandages, to
help save her. I began pushing on her chest, trying to force air
into her lungs. A compadre pointed out that she was dead and pulled
me away. I looked at her a long time, and slowly realized they were
right. They told me to go get some sleep, and I stumbled away.

It had been an incredibly long day, and visions of
horror swam before my eyes—I bumped into a wall and realized I’d
fallen asleep on my feet. I knew I wouldn’t be able to take any
real rest.

I needed relief, and I remembered Tamara’s promise to
build a dreamworld for me, a place to retreat. Several times during
the day I’d seen her in her wheelchair, buzzing outside the
corporate headquarters.

I wandered through the dark streets past row after
row of mercenaries who hid behind piles of dirt, down to a retail
electronics outlet by the industrial complex.

I broke the front window to the building, climbed in,
and helped myself to a power pack and a dream monitor—an industrial
model like those used to run teaching programs for schools—and then
returned to corporate headquarters and climbed the marble
stairs.

The halls were no longer choked with bodies and an
army of small maintenance robots was buffing the blood and broken
glass off the floor.

I found Tamara and three others in the communications
room playing old tapes of corporate officials at work, then subtly
altering the images. Tamara was jacked into a computer outlet at a
table full of equipment, interfacing with the holographic cameras
alongside a man at an instrument panel.

Another woman at a sound board was translating
phrases into Japanese, then feeding them into the computer so it
could synthesize new voice prints to dub over the voices of the
speakers.

An Indian was hurriedly viewing boxes of old wire
tapes, looking for things to alter.

I came in behind Tamara and touched her on the
shoulder, moved around so she could see me.

"Hello, Señor Osic," the little speaker pinned to her
kimono said. She sounded busy, harassed. She remained slumped in
her chair, incapable of voluntary physical action. Her eyes didn’t
even blink.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Making propaganda tapes."

I looked at the holo they were running. President
Motoki was sitting at a table with several men, General Tsugio and
some high-level corporate types. A tiny crystal screen on the table
down by Tamara’s hand flashed a written message:

Angelo, what are you doing here? Leave! I’m being
monitored. You can’t help me!

I nodded to let her know I’d received the message. I
wanted to promise her help, to warn her of what Garzón was
planning—a cymech prison little better than a brain bag. I wanted
to apologize for her current predicament.

Instead I sat heavily in a chair. The tape of the
corporate officials played through a conversation for two minutes
then the gentlemen got up, bowed to one another, and everyone but
Motoki left the room.

When it was done, the girl with the voice equipment
shouted, "Voice over!" and played a new soundtrack, one where
Motoki told a few jokes that, by tone of voice, sounded bawdy, then
the gentlemen at the table responded with guffaws of laughter.

"Rewind and take," the girl called. A tone sounded
from the holo, and the tape played again. But as the Japanese
spoke, Tamara and her friends changed the scene.

President Motoki grinned halfway through the
conversation and related a bawdy joke. The austere countenances of
the corporate officials gave way to chiseled smiles, encouraging
Motoki to tell jokes that eventually brought snorts and guffaws.
Then the corporate officers got up and left the room in good
spirits, leaving Motoki alone in his chair. Motoki swiveled away
from the table, and for a moment faced the camera. The scene cut
with an image of Motoki rising from the chair, his face a devilish
leer.

Tamara and the man beside her reviewed the tape
repeatedly, smoothing over rough spots, glossing it till one could
never prove it had been altered. I’d heard of people altering tapes
using computers to generate graphics; I’d never seen it done this
way, with a dreamer creating entire images from her head. It vastly
quickened the process.

When Tamara was done I nodded toward the holo. My
brains felt scrambled. I closed my eyes and leaned back in my
chair. "What was that all about?"

Tamara said, "We’re trying to invent a plausible
excuse for Garzón to have shot Motoki."

Tamara’s compadre spoke without raising his head from
the console, "We’ve been monitoring communications around town and
found that most Japanese are outraged. When reduced to its basic
elements the babble comes down to, ‘Motoki gives us food. Motoki
gives us clothing. Now the tengu general shoots him as if he were a
common eta!’"

 "So what’s our excuse?" I asked.

The man snorted a laugh, "Motoki told bad jokes about
Garzón, criticizing his character, and Garzón heard about it and in
a fit of rage decided to avenge his honor."

"Why don’t you just tell the truth, let them know we
don’t think their precious corporate deities are worth guano? Let
them know we killed him to prevent an uprising after the
takeover."

The gentleman working at the computer said, "If you
want to know the secret of life, don’t ask Military
Intelligence."

Tamara’s microspeaker said, "We have to give them a
story they can understand. We can’t tell them we don’t believe
Motoki was a superhuman. They’ve seen indications of class
superiority all their lives. If someone is born a little awkward,
it only proves he’s a throwback to some eta, an inferior class. If
someone excels, it’s because he carries the superior genes of
corporate executives. All the predictions become
self-fulfilling.

"So, we tell them what they want to hear. We tell
them we respect them, we admire them, we even love them—but we are
a great and proud people, their cultural equals, and thought it
only just to kill Motoki when he offended Garzón."