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 ta
ble 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."
I asked, "Do you think they’ll swallow such a tale."
"We don’t know. All the men you saw in Motoki’s office are dead, so there won’t be any nay-sayers to rebut us. Our real problem is that Garzón is only a military leader, so the Japanese don’t see him as having equal status with a corporate official. But we’re building Garzón’s image—giving him royal ancestry, making him a direct descendant of Cortes; on his mother’s side he comes from a family of industrial barons. We’re also boosting the image of pre-industrial Spain—giving it steel swords that rivaled those of the Japanese, making the Italian artists honorary Spaniards."
I snorted at the idea.
"I know, it sounds stupid," Tamara said, "and the whole idea disgusts me. But these people have absolutely no idea what’s happened on Earth over the last 2000 years, so they’re ripe for just about anything we want to tell them. We’ll start airing these tapes in the morning. It may not work, but I’ll bet it smothers a few fires."
Tamara’s co-worker rose and crossed the room, leaving Tamara alone. She asked, "What can I do for you?"
I told Tamara, "You said once that you’d build a dreamworld for me. I’ve been stacking dead bodies into piles all day. I want to sleep in peace. I want—" I suddenly realized I had no idea exactly what I wanted. Escape. Peace of mind. No—release. I thought of how I’d been sickened by stacking dead bodies all day, how I felt soiled after the dirty business with Lucío. I needed the internal fortitude to look upon such ugliness dispassionately. I held my breath and resolved to take a step into the darkness. "Once you stimulated my emotions directly. I know such technology exists. You can do it again; you can program what you want into the computer on my monitor. I want you to record an emotional state that will let me learn to kill without remorse. "
The next tape came on, another meeting of Motoki with his officials. Tamara didn’t move for several seconds. "The streets are full of people who can do that already," she said sadly, "Why would you want that?"
"Until I gain their power, I am at their mercy!"
Tamara considered my answer. "I won’t."
It was late and I was tired. I didn’t have the will to argue. I raised my laser rifle level to her nose. She looked down the barrel. "You’d be surprised at how close I’ve come to feeling such callousness already," I whispered quietly. "Perhaps I don’t need your help. Perhaps all I must do is wait. Perhaps even now I could pull the trigger on you and I’d feel nothing. Shall we see if I can?"
Sweat broke out on her forehead. She stared into my eyes, afraid. She feared her own powerlessness. She said, "You’ve been practicing violence when I told you to practice compassion."
"When? When did you tell me that?"
"In the simulator," she said. "When I told you to become fluent in the language of the heart. Yet you continue to practice violence."
I hadn’t understood her words. Perhaps because of my training in medicine I’m predisposed to view the human animal as a complex set of biochemical reactions. I tend to think of people as reacting toward situations only on the basis of genetic programming.
Tamara had been telling me to practice compassion as one would practice kicking a soccer ball, and I hadn’t understood. I was predisposed to be deaf to such advice. And I saw that she was afraid because she saw that practicing violence and compassion were mutually exclusive. As you enhance your capacity for one, you diminish the capacity for the other. She was afraid I really would pull the trigger. I confirmed her fears with my words, "That’s right," I said. "I think I will pull this trigger."
Tamara laughed calmly. "If you w
ere past feeling, you wouldn’t ask for dreams to make you evil. When I first came to you, I told you that I’d die if you balled me over. I threatened you with guilt. I tell you again, old man, if you hurt me: guilt!"
She stared at the gun, and I knew she was right. I wanted to pull the trigger. I wanted to slap her. I did nothing.
"I’ll build you a world of my choosing, old man. Jack me in," she said. I unplugged the computer cord from her cranial jack, and then shoved the plug from my monitor into her socket. It took her thirty seconds to build a world.
"Thank you," I said when she was done, wondering just what she’d chosen. I went down to the street where some forty compadres, including Captain Esteves and my own combat team, camped behind a barricade of dirt.
There I jacked into the dream monitor, and at first was lulled by the waves lapping the hull of a tiny sailboat that rode through an endless sea.
It seemed a relaxing place, a fine place. I set the little dream monitor on automatic so that it would immediately flip on when it registered the REM associated with the beginning of a dream. I wanted to be lulled by this dream, to live in the dream only.
But as I slept, Tamara’s dreamworld changed. I remained on the boat, but I entered a nightmare world where I was filled with a love for all men. I was on a tiny boat still, but I knew that on in the ocean on the horizon many were in need.
Chapter 26
Two hours later I was awakened by screams and flechette fire. I’d heard reports of samurai raids in diverse parts of town. I was so bone weary I wanted to sleep again. But I looked around at my compadres and saw everyone awake, tense, talking softly without helmet mikes. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep while they were in danger. I erased the program Tamara had given me.
After several moments, Captain Esteves said, "We just lost another thirty-two amigos up by the temple. Samurai with laser rifles came out of a false wall and surprised a whole bunker.
On My Way to Paradise Page 38