On My Way to Paradise

by David Farland

  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  I whiled away the afternoon by disposing of outdated medicines from my bags while corporate minds determined their next move.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 d
ecided 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.

  "Angelo, after the first riot, things really calmed down for a long time.

  "The Japanese put all those they held responsible into the cryotanks and never mentioned the riot again. They imagined it was a few individual acts of cowardice, and that most of us would be humiliated if we were reminded of the deed.

  "But now the cowards are all locked up and Motoki still can’t figure out why we won’t fight. So they’re grasping at straws. Maybe they invited us to their homes because they realize that they’ve offended us. They treat us as if we’re as low as the eta, the lowest of their people. Now, I think, maybe they’ve decided foreign samurai should be given a slightly higher status—that of a low-level corporate worker.

  "That’s the only reason I can imagine that they’d invite us to their homes—unless they just want to burden us with another debt of on."

  She mused, "And if that’s what they’re after, it just might work. "

  I looked at her in surprise. "What do you mean? Who’d care about that?"

  "Zavala, for one. Didn’t you see his eyes glow? Dinner and a bath with the samurai! He was in heaven. It’s something he’s wanted for two years. Mavro and Perfecto wanted it, too. That’s why they’re at the baths now. Hell, even I wanted it."

  "I don’t understand? What did you want?"

  Abriara sighed and looked at the ground. "I want ... respect. I want to feel like I belong. You know, all the time we were on the ship the samurai avoided us. They’re arrogant. Even when some of us began to acquire the rank of samurai, they still didn’t fraternize: it’s part of the cultural engineering program, you understand. For their social engineering program to work they must isolate themselves from any society that would contaminate them. It’s the first law of social engineering. I’m surprised they let us into their homes tonight. It means they’re desperate, they’re willing to risk all they’ve accomplished in the hope that we’ll help them."

  "So you think some of us will join them just because we want respect?" I asked. "I was afraid you’d say something worse. I was afraid you’d say some of us would join them because we’re becoming like them."

  "Cultural pollution works both ways," Abriara said. "You’ve got a point: for a long time the samurai have been training us to ‘live as one already dead.’ It’s a mystic phrase, and they apply the philosophy to more than just battle. It doesn’t mean simply to be willing to give up one’s life for a cause—It means that one should be dead to one’s own will, to one’s own desires.

  "In some ways, the inhabitants of Motoki have learned to be like sheep, to act without thought simply because it is the will of their leaders.

  "Angelo, I’ve seen that type of passivity growing in some of our compadres. Some of our men may fight simply because they don’t give a damn about their own welfare."

  We were walking back to camp, past a house with an immaculate lawn decorated with large, odd-shaped rocks.

  Three men were walking toward us—all Latin Americans wearing white kimonos, laughing about some private joke. I stepped off the walk to let them pass, and I suddenly realized the rioters had been released from their barn. The man closest to me was Daniel Sosa, one of the men who’d raped Abriara.

  The recognition of Daniel and his death seemed instantaneous.

  My body knew where to find the hilt of my machete even if my mind did not. I ripped the machete from its scabbard and swung down into his neck and through his rib cage. Such was the quality of the steel that it sliced cleanly through his vertebrae. Daniel was human and didn’t have infravision. I think in the darkness he didn’t recognize me, never saw it coming.

  I grabbed a man he’d been speaking to, a short man with the wide nostrils of an Indian, and held the machete to his throat. "Where is Lucío?"

  He’d died so many times in the simulator he didn’t fear my blade. He regarded me coolly. "Daniel’s sergeant? I haven’t seen him for half an hour, not since dinner. He was going to go to the bathhouse with the others."

  Abriara drew her machete and stood by me.

  The city was full of public bath houses. I demanded, "Which one?"

  He shrugged.

  "Where did you dine?"

  "At Master Tanaka’s, up the street, third house on the left."

  I shoved him away, and he didn’t seem inclined to fight. He was no one I’d ever seen before. I jacked in a call to Perfecto and warned him the Lucío was free and was heading for a bathhouse. He thanked me and promised to join the hunt immediately.

  I looked at Daniel lying in a bloody heap on the ground. I felt ecstatic that he was dead. I charged up the street toward the business district—a cluster of simple wood buildings with no garish signs denoting the nature of business inside.

  Kimai ‘no Ji was small enough that one could learn the nature of a business by word of mouth. One could discern the bathhouses by the loud laughter that came from within, by the steam that fogged the windows and boiled out when a door opened.

  I could tell one simply by glancing at it with my artificial eyes, for the steamy air inside radiated a platinum glow.

  I rushed toward the first bathhouse I saw and Abriara shouted, "Wait! Wait for the others!"

  I ran in. My teeth began chattering. Lucío wasn’t there.

  Four doors down the street was a larger, more ornate establishment. I lunged through the brightly lit genkan, the entrance where clothes and shoes were stored. Several white kimonos hung on pegs along with the fine silk kimonos of the samurai.

  Voices and the smells of warm water and cedar issued from a darkened doorway. I stepped through and looked into the bathhouse. The only light came from a series of large aquariums that circled the room, where giant white carp drifted among lilies. Perhaps forty naked men sat in a huge, brimful tub of cut stone and cedar. Hot water from an artificial spring in one wall poured down over igneous rocks to land in the tub. I didn’t see Lucío at first. His hair had been cut and was no longer arranged in the snake-dance style. The scar on his face had nearly disappeared.

  And he didn’t see me, standing in the lighted doorway, my white hair shining brightly. He had never witnessed me back-lighted before, and so he saw only a silhouette, an icon.

  He recognized the ghost of General Torres.

  Lucío’s face collapsed into expressionless putty, and his jaw dropped. His pupils dilated as wide as coins. He didn’t move.

  I stood waiting for the bonding to complete. Abriara rushed into the genkan behind me.

  A samurai looked at my dripping machete and said in flawless Spanish, "Take your fight into the street. Don’t bloody our bathwater."

  Lucío’s arms began to twitch and he began to shake. His pupils constricted and he became cognizant of where he was. Even then he did not recognize me.

  "Get out of the tub!" I commanded. He gasped in horror, "Angelo?"

  "Get out of the tub!"

  He stood up and climbed over the lip of the tub.

  "Angelo, what do you want with me? What will you do with me?" he asked in confusion. He was naked, skin dark as an Indian. He tensed as if to strike, then looked at my feet; his face filled with sorrow, as if he couldn’t bear the guilt of his own thoughts. "You plan to kill me," he said, more statement than question. He reluctantly raised his fists and cocked his knees, taking a defensive stance.

  I stepped forward carefully, searching for an opening.

  "Angelo, no!" Abriara shouted. She lurched through the doorway and grabbed a
t my elbow, holding me back.

  All the Japanese modestly ducked down into the tub. They became heads floating on the water.

  "Don’t you see? He’s not Lucío anymore! He doesn’t have a personality of his own. He’s like Perfecto and Miguel and all the rest. He becomes what he thinks you want him to be!"

  "I know! I don’t want him. He’s hurt you too much. I want him dead!"

  Lucío’s mouth became a little 0 of grief, the grief of a would-be saint rejected by God. "I can never please you?"

  I watched him closely. I didn’t answer.

  He leapt forward, grabbed my machete by the blade, ripped it from my hand and turned it on me. "Look," he said, nostrils flaring, "Look! We don’t have to fight! I don’t have to kill you, and you don’t have to kill me! They’ve already done it to us—" He nodded toward the samurai in the tub. "We go fight their battle, and we don’t have a chance!" Lucío licked his lips and watched me nervously, trembling.

  He pressed the machete forward so its tip pressed my throat. His hand shook uncontrollably. He could have hacked me to pieces.

  I reached up and pushed the blade aside, and he didn’t resist.

  He just stood trembling. I wanted to kill him. I drove my knee up into his groin. He plummeted backward without a sound and slammed into the floor on his back. I’d planned to let him go at that, but my anger did not subside. The punishment was not enough.

  "Indio!" I screamed, and kicked him in the ribs. He did not resist. I kicked his face, then dropped to my knees and slugged him in the ribs, trying to break bones that felt as hard as rock. I found myself screaming at the top of my voice and I ran to the corner and grabbed my machete and yelled, "Get up! Defend yourself so I can kill you!"

  There was a commotion in the genkan as Perfecto ran into the room.

  Lucío lay on the floor and sobbed.

  I raised my hand to ram the machete into his belly. "No!" Perfecto shouted, and I looked up. He leapt across the room and in one swift move grabbed my arm and kicked, striking Lucío’s face with his foot, snapping his neck.

  Lucío began to twitch. Perfecto’s face was a mask of pain. "I will do it," he said softly. He pulled his own machete and hacked off Lucío’s head.