On My Way to Paradise (66 page)

I did not find the internal strength to drop my
weapon, as I’d tried so hard to do while killing Lucío. I simply
lost the strength to carry it any farther.

I ran to the woman I’d shot. She was lying on the
ground, gasping for breath, but she was breathing. She was
breathing!

I can save her, I thought. I can save her!

A fleeting realization shot through my mind: from the
moment I’d killed Arish, I’d been searching for someone to
save.

I’d dragged Tamara’s half-dead corpse to Sol Station.
I’d tried my best during the plague to save at least one man. Even
when Lucío killed Bruto, something inside me cried out, "There is
someone to save!"

At every turn my resolve had been defeated.

I thought, If I can save on person for every one that
I have killed, somehow the score will be even! Perhaps then I’ll be
free.

I ripped a rag off the Yabajin woman’s skinsuit and
used it to cover her wound. Her skin was pale, for she was in
shock. I placed my laser rifle under her feet, raising them.

I surveyed the streets. I needed my medical bag—resin
for a bandage, painkillers, vasoconstrictors, antibiotics. I
searched the streets in desperation, as if the supplies might just
be sitting there in a bag on the pavement.

Perhaps a hospital is nearby, I thought. But all of
the buildings were marked only with kanji characters. A hovercraft
was slowing descending the hill, coming toward me. I raised my
hands and shouted, ran up to meet my compadres.

"I need a medical bag," I shouted.

A turret gunner spoke, the speakers on his helmet
growling. "What are you doing without your armor on?"

"I don’t need armor. The Yabajin aren’t putting up a
fight!" I said, as if that explained everything. A gunner dug under
the floorboards of his hovercraft, pulled out a medkit and threw it
to me.

"Gracias," I shouted. I grabbed it and ran.

I found the Yabajin woman exactly as I had left her.
I probed her wounds and found a slow leak in one lung, along with
damage to blood vessels beneath her sternum. The flesh was
blackened.

I plugged the small holes to her lung with a tube of
pneumatic foam, and then simply spliced the blood vessel. I sprayed
her over with a resin bandage and injected her with DAP to bring
her out of shock and sedate her.

Abriara raced up to my back as I was finishing. She
shouted, "What are you doing?"

"Saving people!" I shouted. "Help me. Get another
medkit!"

She hesitated for only a heartbeat, then threw down
her rifle and sprinted back the way she’d come.

I raced along the streets and found an old man with
his eyes glassed over, a girl of twelve who was past saving. I
finally discovered a plump woman whose hips were so wide that
looked as if she’d mothered many children.

She huddled in the street with a leg filled with
jagged knives from a flechette. Her left kneecap was blown away.
Blood was pumping from the wound in a steady stream. She was
panting like a wounded animal and clawing at the pavement in an
attempt to escape me.

I held her down and applied a tourniquet to her leg,
injected her with a painkiller. She looked at me in resignation and
let me do the work. There was not much that could be repaired on
her leg, not in a short amount of time. It would be better to
stabilize her and keep the tourniquet on, I reasoned, even if it
meant we’d later have to take off the leg. She could always grow a
new limb.

Abriara came with a new medical bag, and shouted,
"Down there! There’s a whole crowd of people down there!" She
pointed toward the shore.

We ran toward the beach and found thirty people in
one knot on a street corner. Perhaps ten of them were still alive.
I began working feverishly, and case ran into case—a boy child with
his hips blown away, an old man with flechette wounds in his back,
a teenage girl who took a plasma hit to the breasts and had the
wits to dive forward and let the plasma drip off.

I and worked quickly and guns exploded all around but
no one fired on me. It seemed miraculous that we could be engaged
in medical work in the middle of the battle, but no Yabajin
assailed us and none of our compadres hit us by mistake.

Time seemed to slow. A moment lasted forever. I
worked and Abriara ran from hovercraft to hovercraft, bringing
supplies. I once lifted my head and realized that not many people
were shooting, I could have been working for minutes or an hour, I
wasn’t sure. I calculated that I’d administered to perhaps twenty
people, at an average of two minutes per person. I couldn’t imagine
that I’d only been working for part of an hour. I was rocked by a
large boom as a building exploded nearby.

Each time I raised my head to gasp for breath,
Abriara pointed to someone else in need and I bundled my things and
hurried on. We eventually found ourselves near some warehouses,
and there were a dozen wounded in one little pile. I began working
on a young girl and heard a scraping sound, looked up.

Someone in a green bug suit was dragging a wounded
woman to the corner. The mercenary left the woman, ran off
searching for more wounded. Another compadre came and threw off his
helmet, a chimera with deformed ears, and dipped into my medical
bags. His name was Faustino, and he explained quickly that he’d
worked as a nurse in a field unit in Peru. He was very good. His
hands were quick and clever.

Two more compadres, anonymous in battle armor,
dragged in wounded. I was very surprised by this. I realized that
suddenly we had the beginnings of a field station, and soon we’d
have many wounded.

I heard a steady, insistent
boom-boom-boom
in
a large dome just three doors up the road. It seemed to be the only
sound of gunfire nearby. Abriara was up the street, carrying an old
man on her shoulders. I realized that whoever was shooting was
making a great deal of unnecessary work for us and this filled me
with wrath.

I stalked up toward the building where the gunfire
sounded. Abriara was walking under the arch of a large industrial
building, and suddenly the whole building was shaken by an
explosion. It lifted a decimeter in the air then the walls
collapsed. Abriara looked up and an entire brick arch fell upon her
in a jumble of stone and twisted steel girders.

I ran to her. There was no sign of Abriara beneath
the stones. I stood in shock, looking at the mess, and began
pulling off bricks. I figured that they covered her to the depth of
a meter, and I heaved them away as quickly as I could. But I heard
the continued sound of gunfire nearby.

When you uncover her, she will be crushed, I
thought.

There are people to save. Everywhere a million
people to save.
And I knew it was true. There’d be nothing left
of Abriara beneath that rubble.

I ran to the great dome where I could hear the
gunshots; from the door made out the shrieks of women.

I raced in. The dome was a theater. Light shone in
from round windows that encircled the dome near the top, and there
was a stage down front. A hundred women had taken refuge in the
building, and a man in armor stood at the entrance with a flechette
and fired upon women who scurried between seats to escape him. As I
watched, one woman got up to lunge for a second exit, and the man
spun and fired on her. He was a spectacle of precision and balance,
grace and speed, immersed in the state of
munen,
striking
with the speed of Instantaneity, moving with the practiced
eloquence of Perfect Control. He epitomized all that the samurai
had taught us to be. All the women screamed.

I shouted,
"Muchacho!"
and ran up behind the
man.

He spun and saw I was Latin, then turned to fire upon
the Yabajin women again. I knocked his rifle from his hands and
yelled, "There is no need!" He looked at me, then looked down at
the rifle as if to pick it up.

I ripped at the latches of his helmet, shouting,
"There is no need!" and pulled it free to see if I recognized him.
He was a dark-eyed man of middle age. He was nameless to me. His
face could have belonged to any of a thousand refugiados I knew.
His eyes shone with an inner light, and he had the sweat of
mugga
upon him.

He stared at me, stunned, not quite aware of why I
was yelling at him, like a dreamer being awakened from his revelry.
His face shone with rapture. Suddenly his eyes focused and he
became cognizant of me.

"Que glorioso!"
What glory! he said in
amazement.

Outside, the sound of gunfire ceased. A muted cheer
was rising from the city as our men finally realized victory was
ours, finally realized the magnitude of what they’d won. Even
though I was sickened by the petty creatures we’d become, I too
felt a thrill as I realized that we’d won a planet.

I went outside and watched the others. Happiness
seemed to course down their bodies like sweat. I saw a
compañero
with his helmet off, and joy seemed to stream from
his hair.

I turned and ran to help the wounded.

Throughout an endless day we pulled in hundreds of
wounded and stabilized them. Later we moved them to the hospital.
It became a great labor, requiring the industry of over eighty
people. The city was ours and the Yabajin were set up in a prison
camp well before noon; Garzón pronounced himself president of
Baker.

The Marine command floating in orbit gladly accepted
our petition for membership in the Alliance of Nations as a
consolidated planet, and the continued approval of our occupation
of the planet was confirmed. The Alliance preferred a stable world
government over any other arrangement, regardless of the cost in
human suffering, and by taking both capitols we gained recognition
as the sole legal government. The Alliance was happy to have us
clean up the mess on Baker, delighted to sanction our victory.

I learned that the Yabajin were unable to match us in
projectile weapons that morning because their armory and industrial
centers had been destroyed: several hours after the Yabajin
zeppelins had made it into the city, a mercenary named Ovidio
Cardosa had some amigos help him fill Motoki’s shuttle with rocks
and boulders. He then went out to sea and came in on Hotoke no Za
at 1500 kph and crashed into the Ro Industrial Complex, killing
himself and several hundred samurai who’d been feverishly upgrading
weapons.

The name of Ovidio was upon the lips of everyone, and
many thought we should honor his heroism by renaming the city after
him.
Ovidio
sounded like a good name to me.

Garzón came and parked Tamara in the hospital in the
afternoon. I could feel her watching my back like a raven as I put
the Yabajin back together.

I filled her intravenous water bag once. She
commended me on my work, but otherwise we didn’t speak. In the
afternoon I was working and suddenly realized I was still carrying
my laser rifle strapped to my back. I took out the tissue sample
from Perfecto and refrigerated it, then worked long into the night.
At midnight Garzón came back and took Tamara, treating her once
again as if she were his dog on his leash.

He spoke with her softly, making plans for the
immediate detention and deportation of all male Japanese. I worked
until I was emotionally and physically exhausted, then walked out
in the street to look for a place to sleep.

I wandered up by the theater where I’d last seen
Abriara alive. The street was well lighted, and this surprised me,
since so much of the city had been destroyed. No one had removed
the stones from on top of Abriara, and I thought it was something
that should be done by her amigo. I didn’t know what had become of
Mavro. My back ached and my eyes were tired, but I began lifting
the green pumice stone myself.

Each stone was huge, weighing perhaps fifty kilos
even in the light gravity. I was afraid to look upon Abriara,
afraid she’d be mangled beyond recognition. But when I’d pulled
most of the bricks off, I found the old Yabajin man she’d been
carrying, crushed and broken, and Abriara’s hand was poking from
beneath his corpse. It glowed platinum with warmth and her veins
stood out hot and clear.

I tossed several more bricks away and suddenly the
whole pile moved. Abriara pushed aside the bricks and looked up at
me. Her face was battered and bloody and there did not appear to be
a place on her body that wasn’t badly bruised. She tottered to her
feet and I helped pull her from the wreckage. She staggered forward
and fell to her knees.

"I ... I thought you were dead!" I said.

Abriara looked back at the collapsed building with
contempt, as if the stones were puny things, toys for children. Her
voice held a note of surprise as she said, "I may be human, but I’m
not
that
human!"

I laughed in relief and took her to the hospital.

Abriara nursed her wounds in the hospital for two
days. Miraculously she had only two cracked ribs. Apparently the
upgrades in her collagens made her bones more than pliable. I’d
have sworn that nothing could have survived such a battering. I
questioned her about it; she said the Yabajin man she’d been
carrying on her back took most of the beating, and the bricks just
"looked heavier than they were."

Mavro and I met in the morning. We retrieved
Perfecto’s body and buried it in the cemetery. Afterward I worked
in the hospital like a dog, welcoming the forgetfulness that came
with work.

Garzón spent a great deal of time getting the
defenses to the city back in order. A large contingent was sent to
clear out the smaller settlements in Motoki, loading refugees
aboard zeppelins to take to a remote island prison while we
arranged their shipment back to Earth. Our men were still afraid of
reprisals—sniper attacks, bombs in the buildings.