On My Way to Paradise (61 page)

So as we traveled I closed my eyes and tried not to
mention my predicament to others. In the battle to come, I
reasoned, I could find a corpse that had a helmet that would fit
me.

Twice Baker’s huge blue moon, Rojin the old man, and
once its small white moon, Shinju the pearl, shot overhead. I had
difficulty focusing. My vision blurred. At dawn Shinju rose with
the sun; for a few minutes the world was in partial eclipse and
long purple shadows shot over the desert while a red nimbus circled
the moon, as if fields of fire burned along its edge.

We still saw no sign of the army, and so I just
closed my eyes.

Abriara said to herself more than to us, "They must
have driven through the night without camping. Perhaps they are
afraid the Yabajin will turn back on us. Or maybe they learned
something of importance, and decided that they had to forge
ahead."

If she was right, we would be delayed in reaching our
compadres by at least a day. Already the sun shining on the wings
of multicolored oparu no tako assaulted my sensibilities. I
massaged my temples and stifled a moan. We had larger matters to
worry about. Without the help of Garzón we didn’t know exactly what
route to take to Hotoke no Za. We couldn’t hope to find our
compadres if they’d traveled too far ahead. Their hovercrafts
wouldn’t leave a discernible track on the hard desert.

With the zigzag pattern we resorted to in our search,
we were getting farther behind all of the time.

The ground was covered with many white growths, a
whole tiny forest only a meter tall, like hundreds of fungi that
had baked and shriveled down to a hard cement. Our army could have
raced over this unpromising terrain and still left no trace.

Our compasses were inadequate guides over a long
distance. Thee continent Kani is shaped something like a crab, with
its face pointing north. Hotoke no Za is situated by the sea on the
southeast while Kimai no Ji is situated on the northwest edge of
the continent. We could try making a straight line southeast, but
there were endless jungles, great canyons, and mountains between us
and Hotoke no Za. We could easily waste time trying to find passes
over mountains or become hopelessly stranded in impenetrable
jungles. However, to the northeast the maps showed great plains and
broad inland seas with only a few small hills and mountain ranges.
It was a land that often froze during the winter, and not many
plants had adapted to this harsh environment.

Perfecto believed we should go north till we reached
the sea, then follow the coast down to Hotoke no Za. If we didn’t
camp, we might arrive in Hotoke no Za with our
compañeros.

Mavro violently disagreed. "We must try to follow the
route of our compadres," he said. "It would be cowardly to do
otherwise." For once, I applauded Mavro’s macho thinking. I hoped
to find the army as soon as possible, but felt too exhausted to
speak. Abriara reluctantly agreed with Mavro and began making a
broad sweep to the south.

At noon we began to find occasional ribbons of dark
ultraviolet grass protruding from the white cement, and in the
distance we discerned entire fields of tangled orange vine, a vast
savannah of native plants. The thought of traversing that area
repulsed me.

The sun brightened, as if over seconds someone turned
up a dimmer switch on the lights. I was watching the savannah at
the time and thought only that a cloud had parted about our head
and the sun was finally shining full on us. I’d have thought
nothing more if it except that Abriara said, "Ah, damn, did anyone
else see that?"

There was such anxiety in her voice that I
immediately looked up. There were no clouds above us.

"Yes, I saw it," Mavro shouted nervously. "The sun
just jumped in magnitude!"

Abriara said, "Yes, that is why Garzón raced through
the night. He must have gotten word from a Motoki communications
satellite and took the others to safety!"

I had never heard of such a thing. I tried to wrap my
mind around it, but my thoughts came slow. I asked, "What? What ...
will happen?"

"The sun does this here," Abriara said. "The land is
going to heat up! This whole planet will heat up by eight degrees
Celsius over the next twenty-two hours. We’re in for storms like
you’ve never seen—the wind will rage across this desert at 150kph
and the sand will cut you apart. The sky will turn dark with dust
from the desert. The Japanese call the brown skies the
chairo no
suunarashi,
the tea winds. We have to get out of this
desert!"

Abriara turned to see the reaction on my face and
asked, "My god, what is wrong with your eyes?"

"They hurt," I said. Everyone stared at me.

"They’re crossed," Mavro said, kneeling before me.
"Watch my finger. Concentrate." He tracked his finger back and
forth. I couldn’t follow it.

"Your eyes hold a little bit straighter when you
concentrate," Mavro said, shaking his head.

"We should have checked you over better after you got
hit," Abriara said. "I’m sorry." She sighed. "You’re the doctor. Is
there anything we can do for you?"

The news put me in shock. I knew that I had a
concussion, but I could not think how to treat it. Perfecto laid me
down, gave me some water. He searched the medkit and found an oral
anticoagulant and an anti-inflammatory. They were better than
nothing. I didn’t have the energy to direct him further.

Abriara desperately plowed east for an hour until we
were well into the grasslands, then swept around straight north.
The terror of my compadres surprised me. The sky remained clear and
no great winds arose for the next hour or so. The heat soon
aggravated my condition, making me vomit. If not for my concussion,
it would have seemed a simple drive through the country. I was
tempted to believe that my friends’ anxiety was exaggerated.

Yet as we crossed the savannah, I couldn’t fail to
recognize my own danger. The light-orange creepers with dusty red
leaves like thin tongues assaulted me with their acidic odor.
Yellow fruits on trees begged to be eaten with a scent like taffy.
A lizard with a single eye on the front of its head and another on
the back spit an oniony spray at our hovercraft. Tiny eight-legged
grubs the size of mice raced along tree branches and emitted a
stench that had no earthly analog. I was in ecoshock.

We followed a northerly course for an hour and
discovered a broad plain where the grass had been blown flat and
crushed by thousands of hovercrafts. We were a day behind our
compadres.

"Shall we follow them?" Abriara said, defeat in her
eyes. She was worried about the storms.

"It might be safer to go back to Kimai no Ji," Mavro
suggested. "It’s only half a day back."

He was speaking in vain. We didn’t dare go back, not
after what we’d done.

"Let’s head northeast," Abriara suggested. "There is
an inland sea in that direction—Aruki Umi. Once we reach it, we
veer straight east for the coast. Mavro, you drive. I need a
break."

I didn’t dare speak of my rising sense of panic. We
needed to outrun the storm, and I knew that if I told them of my
concerns, it would be a factor in her decision. I was convinced
that I was being selfless and gallant, and such people should be
rewarded with miraculous abilities to endure pain and recuperate
from illness.

As Mavro drove I tried to sleep.

I opened my eyes several times to a bleak
landscape—rolling hills of red sand with nothing but the tiniest of
white starflower plants. The sun was so bright that every shadow
was perfectly defined. That which was in light was revealed in
crisp detail, and that which was in shadow seemed to have all light
sucked from it.

Mavro woke us all once to show us a herd of small red
land crabs that stretched for miles in every direction. They were
marching northward over a plain of pea gravel, apparently migrating
from nowhere to nowhere.

I thought upon Garzón’s plan for conquering the
Yabajin. All had gone well so far, but I couldn’t believe that our
luck would continue. The plan depended upon too many factors. We’d
beat a path through the Yabajin and cowed them from battle. With
luck they would take their frustrations out on Kimai no Ji.

We couldn’t worry about the outcome of that
battle.

We’d blown up all the fuel in the city, along with
Motoki’s zeppelins and industrial parks.

The Yabajin wouldn’t capture much in the way of
vehicles. In a few days they might be able to rebuild some
zeppelins, but even if they came at us, Garzón felt confident that
his shuttle full of men and cybertanks could keep them from
entering the city.

But the key was the Colombians. Garzón was counting
on them to revolt from the Yabajin and form an alliance with us. He
believed that they had no sense of honor. I suspected that his plan
would backfire.

We traveled all day and entered a forest of live
mizu hakobinin
, huge animals shaped like water barrels. We
had seen their bones in simulators on our first day and had naively
called them "coralwood trees," thinking the mere skeleton to be a
live plant.

I tried to cope with my environment by comparing
plant and animals to familiar things from Earth. The parasitic
yellow vines that hung from the mizu hakobinin like guts dripping
from the belly of a wounded jackal were really not so different
from epiphytes and parasitic vines in the Jungles of South America.
Musky armadillos were everywhere, plodding over foliage on tiny
feet, leaving trails of stench and half-eaten plants. They were
basic herbivores—deer in function, but more like giant potato bugs
in form.

We passed bushes where sweet kidney-shaped fruits
rotted in the sun and thousands of opal birds and tiny rodents fed
on the fruit. No different from a field of mangoes being eaten by
opossums and birds back on Earth.

We spent hours crossing the great sea, Aruki Umi,
then came to a forest of tall, spindly, pepper-scented blue-gray
trees that each had dozens of red bladders attached to them, filled
with gas, so that the bladders lifted the branches into the
air.

These were no different, I told myself, from forests
of kelp that live underwater back home.

These trees were sparse, and we had no trouble
negotiating the woods.

But my associations didn’t hold. They didn’t relieve
the pain, and in my weakened state I found myself breaking up.

We passed a mizu habokinin and Mavro said that he
wanted a drink. We stopped, and he shot into the exoskeleton of the
huge barrel-like tree. The exoskeleton cracked and thousands of
liters of water gushed out. In the water was myriads of
creatures—translucent frogs with no front feet, mantas the color of
syrup, armored eels with vicious teeth, insects of every
description. The tree had within it an entire sea, filled with its
own alien ecosystem.

As we watched the mizu habokinin, large platelets of
chitin floated to the open hole and blocked the water from
draining, like leaves in a gutter.

Instantly the water shut off. The creature had
repaired itself.

Yet the animals from its belly writhed on the hot
ground and died. The mizu habokinin was not a simple analog of the
barrel cactus, and the difference seemed profound.

Mavro refused to drink after seeing all of the bugs.
We hovered away and I closed my eyes, shut out the sights; I held
my breath to stifle the scents. I sang to myself to drown out the
sounds. It was not enough.

From time to time some sight or sound intruded, so
that I involuntarily opened my eyes. Everywhere was life: spiders
the size of cats sitting in a crevasse of a fragmented rock,
whirring bits of chitin together like locusts
, cats growling
love songs
in
the dark,
I told myself. An evil-smelling
opal kite wrapped its plastic green wings around a hanging red
bladder like a chrysalis, presumably to gorge itself on some
fruit—bats
in my papaya tree back home.
In a pond of
stagnant brown water blue eels swam in circles near the surface,
chasing their tails and moaning—
the song of a catfish.

A gust of wind kicked up over a field of yellow
cotton, sending fluff balls to scatter in the air with the stench
of ether. Their pollens swelled my sinuses shut. An in that field a
pack of creatures that could have been yellow wolves with hairless
faces triumphantly whistled thier joy as they fed from the carcass
of an overturned armadillo.

At sunset a gnarled gray tree sprouted flowers so
white that the last dying light reflected from them like torches.
All these things magnified the ache in my head. I wanted to claw my
eyes and puncture my eardrums.

Ribbons of yellow and green and purple and blue
Oparu no
tako
filled the evening sky—like veins, the
veins of the living womb enclosing an embryo.

I realized that this planet was a living thing, with
an ecology, a biosphere of its very own. I felt a mystical sense of
discovery.
What will grow in this womb?
I wondered. The air
was itchy with electricity. Huge thunderheads loomed on the
horizon, like the residue of dozens of mushroom clouds after a
nuclear attack.

All my instincts screamed for me to hide. I wept and
cursed and found myself digging up the floorboards as I searched
for a medkit with painkillers.

Then my body must have closed off my senses, for l
lost consciousness. My subconscious sent me terrible dreams where
images of Baker were superimposed over images of Earth. We were
bouncing over the desert at twilight. Voices jabbered in my ears,
nonsensical conversations carried on by people long dead. "Did you
see Señora Cardosa?" my mother was saying. "She’s gotten so fat.
Such a shame."

My father shouted at her, "I don’t care about that!
How will we live if they raise our taxes again?"