On My Way to Paradise (48 page)

Fernando Chin kept looking up at me, and he began to
explain how he was going to determine the ages of the species
through means developed by genetic paleontologists.

I didn’t really listen to him. The task of getting to
Lucío occupied my mind. I pretended to help Fernando and watched
the barn. There was no way to sneak in. I casually sauntered toward
the barn to see how the samurai reacted. Two detached themselves
from the shadows under a tree and walked toward me. I stooped as if
to examine a shiny rock and picked it up—an irregular white crystal
sprouted a small cauliflower head of brilliant red. One samurai
studied the crystal a moment.

"Ruby," he said. "Very common in hills. Look for them
there. Stay away from here!"

I put the ruby in a pocket, then exercised most of
the day, practicing various spins and crab walks that would be
useful when hit by laser and plasma fire. I felt strong, and with
my nerve bypass and young muscles I was quicker than ever.

But it didn’t seem enough. Abriara introduced me to a
medic who gave me several doses of Motoki battle drugs. I asked him
for the chemical formula but the patent was still the sole property
of Motoki Corporation.

He described how to take them and warned me of
dangers. "You won’t have time to train yourself to reach
Instantaneity, but you may find that if you become excited then
Instantaneity will find you. You may recall a moment in your life
when time has slowed, and you may have even noticed this effect
when using our old battle drugs. The effect will become much more
pronounced with this. You must use great care when the moment of
Instantaneity comes: time will stop and you’ll be tempted to do
many things at once. However, your metabolic rate will not increase
enough for you to do much, understand? If you try to run forward a
few steps, you’ll use all the oxygen in your system and you’ll
stop. You’ll feel as if you hit a wall, and you could pass out if
you overexert yourself. You must take care during Instantaneity to
use economic motions, to move as little as possible to achieve your
desired goals, understand?"

I understood perfectly.

"One more thing," the medic added. "Once you take
this drug, the effects will remain with you for life. Once you
begin to achieve Instantaneity, you must learn to control it for
your own sake, understand?"

I nodded and took the drug.

Twice that day a truck came from town and dropped off
food—tubs of cold rice and seaweed, barrels of pickled eggs and
vegetables, fresh raw fish. Sickening things.

Worst of all the coffee tasted weak and musty, as if
it had grown in a swamp. The inhabitants of Motoki had a saying,
"Luxury is our greatest enemy."

What they considered self-denial, however, I
considered self-torture.

Toward evening the men in the barn began shouting and
screaming in a frenzied pitch. Their guards sent emissaries to town
and soon General Tsugio, a small frowning bald man, showed up and
demanded that Garzón quiet the men. Tsugio announced that everyone
would be docked wages if the demonstrators didn’t calm down. Being
raised in a culture where each individual is a slave to the whims
of his society, he couldn’t understand that we had no control over
the demonstrators, that they wouldn’t be quiet simply because we
were being punished with them.

He believed that we secretly sympathized with them,
that we were spurring them on. Perhaps he was right.

No truck came with dinner and Garzón quoted one of
Tsugio’s aides as saying we’d have to go without food till we
"learn that we live by the beneficence of Motoki." Some men
grumbled a bit. Some hunted in the fields by the city’s defensive
perimeter but brought back only a few rabbits and quail.

Garzón called a meeting with his leaders at sunset,
ostensibly to discuss the morale problem, and they closeted
themselves away for hours.

When they returned a captain came to our barracks and
said, "Things were worse than we’d hoped. A shipload of mercenaries
hired by the Yabajin is due to arrive from Earth within five days.
Most are homeless Colombians who left Earth three months after
us."

"But they couldn’t get here so soon!" One of our
company exclaimed.

"Not if they kept their ship’s acceleration rate down
to the legal limits," the captain objected. "But of course they
elected to pay a fine rather than lose the war. Nearly all of them
are refugiados who hired on after kicking the socialists out of
their homeland. The chimeras wouldn’t come, not with the war in
South America going so well. The Colombians didn’t have samurai to
train them, but it’s safe to bet they know what they’re up against.
Since they outnumber us two to one, they’ll make good
reinforcements for Hotoke no Za.

"Our employers at Motoki demand we move our attack
ahead of schedule. We’re to leave in three days so we can assault
the Yabajin before the Colombians shuttle down. Also, they demand
that all of our men take places at the front lines—even those who
missed training. They say it is not their job to fight the
machines."

The news didn’t settle well. Men who were sitting
beside the holograph, gambling on the outcomes of simulated
battles, abruptly quit. Grumbling conversations rose around the
room, but there was no argument—only a consensus of opinion.

We’d been snubbed, poorly fed, and treated with
disrespect.

Motoki Corporation was in violation of its contract
since computer simulations revealed that we’d still have a
sixty-two percent death rate if we attacked Hotoke no Za—far higher
than initial projections.

Beyond this, no one was willing to force the
demonstrators into battle, nor did they desire to go to battle
against Colombians—men they’d fought beside only months before.

Within an hour we’d made up our minds, and our
captain went back to General Tsugio with our response: "Tell Motoki
Corporation to go to hell."

Garzón relayed our message to General Tsugio, and he
apparently received it with great equanimity.

No more samurai surrounded our camp, no reprisals
were made.

At dawn a truck delivered food, and we practiced and
exercised as usual. Tsugio and his aides drove into camp shortly
after breakfast. They were smiling and quite pleased, but after
conferring with Garzón, Tsugio left in distress, frowning and
scratching his bald head.

Garzón announced over a loudspeaker that we should
quit practicing, since "We want them to realize we’re not willing
to fight for them." Apparently the concept of "going on strike"
didn’t translate to the Japanese.

They’d somehow concluded that we planned to fight but
that we’d refuse the aid and advice offered by their military.

On Motoki when a man goes on strike he continues to
work, redoubling his effort so that more is accomplished. This
causes upper management to lose face, since the worker proves he
doesn’t need the manager.

Motoki had never met with passive resistance.

I whiled away the afternoon by disposing of outdated
medicines from my bags while corporate minds determined their next
move. We expected retaliation, more threats and abuse.

At dusk, Kimai no Ji emptied. We watched in surprise
as everyone in the entire city marched up the road, raising dust. I
imagined them bringing clubs to beat us, but 44,000 Japanese
dressed in their finest attire walked up the road and stood on the
low hills encircling our valley—grandmothers, fathers, infants.

The young men carried giant Motoki corporate flags, a
crane flying past a yellow sun on a green field, and they waved
them back and forth furiously, swaying their entire bodies. General
Tsugio led the city in singing
"Motoki Sha Ka
" three times
while children accompanied the chorus on flutes and drums.

It was perhaps the single strangest moment of my
life, a life that sometimes seems an endless succession of strange
moments.

It was an obvious appeal for help.

When the singers finished, individuals and families
descended into the valley, and took us by the hand and began to
lead us to town.

Apparently the general was afraid that his people had
insulted us, and that the only way to get us to fight was to show
us honor.

I saw Master Kaigo walking with an old woman, and our
whole combat team went up to meet him.

He shook our hands, bowing repeatedly. "This is
Sumako, my wife," he indicated the ancient woman. She had blue-gray
hair, wide-set eyes, and a flat face. Her wrinkles showed she’d
lived a life of hardship. She wore a kimono of peach silk that had
the quality of beauty the Japanese call
hade,
the beauty of
bright colors. It was the kind of thing a young woman would
wear.

"She is very beautiful," Abriara said.

"Oh, she is just a stupid woman," Kaigo said, trying
to show modesty by demeaning his family.

I hadn’t really considered till then what his trip to
Earth had cost him. He’d returned to Baker to find his wife
decrepit with age and his other family members apparently dead.

He continued, "We would be grateful if you would
consent to partake of dinner with us."

We agreed, and he led us to town, pointing out the
beauty of the plum and cherry trees, the Buddhist temple on the
hill.

Sumako hurried home to prepare the meal while Kaigo
delayed our arrival by showing us the National Terrarium, a giant
dome that enclosed a portion of land that had never been
terraformed. Thousands of ultraviolet trees, like reeds of seaweed
lived there, along with rare mosses and Baker’s own equivalent of
fungi. Native insects and giant land crabs crept beneath the
bushes.

All the while Kaigo kept up a continuous monologue
describing the natural beauty, the wonders, of Baker, telling how
the Yabajin sought to destroy everything they’d dreamed of
building, the greatest society in the universe, a Japan restored to
the era of light.

He showed us the corporate executive headquarters, a
small five-story building of steel and concrete that seemed
imposing to him because it was the only building in town that
stood more than two stories.

Then he took us down to the river, to Old Town—the
"mammoth" industrial park beneath a second glass dome where they
manufactured everything they needed from ceramic teacups to cloned
children to bio-mining equipment and detergent. Kaigo told how his
great-grandfathers had built the dome at great personal cost,
suffering ecoshock due to prolonged exposure to an alien
environment.

I understood what Kaigo was trying to do. We wouldn’t
fight for enemies, but he hoped we’d fight for friends. He was
showing us his national treasures, trying to instill in us a love
for his little home, trying to sell us a dream.

Yet an insistent undertone to his words indicated
that he wanted something even more—he desperately wanted us to
admire all that Motoki had done, to admire him and his people. It
was all rather shabby and pitiful.

He took us home. We went into a little foyer and took
off our shoes, donned silk slippers. Kaigo called for his wife, and
Sumako opened the door leading to the main house, kneeling on the
black lacquered floor and bowing as she slid the door back to let
us in.

The house was open, with a roof of timbers. Lines of
dark tile on white floors executed peaceful rectangles. To another
it might have been peaceful, beautiful.

But nature abhors a rectangle. I disliked the sense
of order imposed upon the house. Kaigo demeaned the timbers his
house was built from, spoke of nothing but the dilapidated state it
was in, apologized for all his failings and lack of graciousness,
then showed us his
tokonama,
an alcove in one room decorated
with plants and stones.

At first I thrilled to see his tiny thousand-year
pine—a natural curve of gray trunk, a sprawl of green needles
falling into entropy. But it was not real nature, not real
entropy—only a painstakingly manipulated counterfeit.

Kaigo’s people had no real love for nature. They only
loved to imitate nature.

I listened to Kaigo recite his failings. In his own
eyes he was being humble, a fine host. But after a time I wondered
if it was not his own way of fishing for compliments.

More likely, I decided, it was his way of getting us
to recognize the value of what his people were creating.

We were forced by convention to deny his
shortcomings.

"Ah, what a beautiful garden, Kaigo-san!" Zavala
said. "Nothing of its exquisite symmetry existed in my village in
Colombia."

He took the lead and we parroted variations of his
remarks.

Kaigo had a beautiful home and we ate an excellent
dinner. Kaigo belittled Sumako’s talents as a cook, and she happily
agreed with all his pronouncements while we rebutted their
appraisals of her taste and skill.

Then Sumako continued to deny she had any culinary
skills at all. Though all her self-deprecation annoyed me, I
thought Sumako was quite charming. I felt sorry for her. I kept
thinking that she should have been rejuvenated instead of me.

After dinner Kaigo took Mavro, Perfecto, and Zavala
to the
sento,
the public baths, while Abriara and I walked
among the cherry trees by the river. Many other Latin Americans
strolled along smelling blossoms and gazing at the lights shining
through the paper walls of the houses, getting their first look at
Kimai no Ji.

"So, what do you think will happen?" I asked. "About
tonight?" Abriara said. "Nice place. Maybe they’d even be nice
people if we ever really got to know them. I’m not sure I want to
die for them."

"I agree. But I can’t understand why they’ve decided
to like
us
all of a sudden."

"They don’t. Not most of them. I’m not sure they ever
will. Did you see the terror on the faces of the children when they
came to sing to us?" I’d been so stunned I hadn’t seen it. "I think
we’ve got them confused. They see it as being only right that we
should want to continue to fight for Motoki. The way they see it,
our contractual obligations and fear of death should only be minor
considerations in deciding whether to continue this war. We should
continue to fight because, from their point of view, it is the only
way for us to save face.