V 07 - The Alien Swordmaster

by Somtow Sucharitkul (UC) (epub)

  “I’m American,” she went on in slow Japanese. “I need to get to Tokyo. I’m not a Visitor”

  “Madam,” said the old man, “it is clear you are not one. You have not succumbed to the red dust.”

  Water on her face ... a gentle drizzle ... the raindrops looked like blood, for they had formed around particles of the toxin scattered in the atmosphere.

  “Are we truly free now?” she whispered. “Truly?” The old man said, “An alien craft crashed about two kilometers from here. Two parachutes were seen.” “Where is the other one?” Tomoko said, remembering how Fieh Chan had looked as he fell, his look of almost Zen-like peace. Was he dead already? Somehow she knew that he wasn’t. There was something remarkable about that reptile commander.

  “The other parachute has not been traced. If it was a Bijitaa, it has doubtless perished.”

  “Please help me. I have to go to Tokyo. I have to go ho me I”

  Presently the two strangers, convinced that she was not an alien, took her to a small house on the other side of the paddy field and gave her water The wind had carried her fairly far out of the city. It had seemed such a tiny distance from high up in the sky, but now it seemed insurmountable. But she couldn’t stay. Thanking her helpers profusely, she staggered over to the side of the road. She walked a couple of kilometers, found a phone booth, and realized that she had, of course, no money. She didn’t know whether it was acceptable to hitchhike. After spending all those months in an Ainu village, she wasn’t all that acquainted with how the “civilized” people lived. I’ll have to try it, she thought in desperation, and stood in the shoulder sticking out her thumb. Surely they’d seen enough Hollywood movies to understand that hand signal! Not many cars came by; most were going away from the city. She decided to keep walking ... by nightfall she’d reached the outer suburbs. A side street; a sign leading to the labyrinthine Tokyo subway system.

  But I don’t have any money! she told herself again. However, people were rushing past, ignoring the ticket-vending machines. She rode the escalator down to the lower level and discovered that there was no one collecting tickets. She stood dubiously for a moment, and then someone shouted at her to go through. “Kyo wa saabisu" she heard him say.

  “Today it’s free?”

  “No one cares today. Today we celebrate!”

  She merged with the stream of people; she had to wait almost an hour for a train. They must not be running regularly today. Where am I going? she thought as she waited, remembering suddenly that she was still only dressed in a muddy yukata and that it was only the extreme politeness of these people that prevented them from staring or commenting.

  There was a festive mood on the train. People were actually passing around bottles of sake and toasting each other; embracing each other in tears. It must be true after all—they must really be liberated. By the time they pulled into Meguro station, she was feeling properly drunk and singing along with them, even though she didn’t know the words of any of the songs.

  As she emerged into the neon-bright night, she saw crowds thronging in the pachinko arcades. Vendors were hawking noodles and skewers of chicken in the streets. No one was paying for anything. You could hardly get through the alleys, they were so congested. Here and there were tremendous bonfires where they were burning lizards in effigy and people danced wildly about.

  She turned down a little lane that led into the Kamiosaki sector She was making her way to the Tokyo office of the anthropology exchange program she had been involved with.

  She found it, knocked on the door, was let in by a night watchman, who was clearly high on life and booze, was ushered her into a little hallway, and—

  "Mein Gotti” A squeaky tenor voice said from the top of the staircase. She recognized it instantly. “We thought you were dead. You’ve been gone for months.”

  “Dr. Schwabauer!” At last, someone she knew. She started weeping with relief. “My God, 1 thought you might still be on the ship, in that terrible terrible food locker.” The professor hobbled down the stairs. She looked at him; he beamed and came to give her a hug.

  “Professor, this sounds weird, but I’ve never seen you without a tie before!” she said. It was silly, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  He was a lanky man, bald, wearing a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. He’d always been so fastidious—anal-retentive she used to call him—but today he actually had his shirt on inside out. “I thought you were dead, I was sure you were,” she said.

  “No, the German consulate bargained for my release,” he replied. “But as for the Ainu village, well, nobody much seems to give a damn about the Ainu. No one but a few anthropologists. And you, Tomoko, I had long given you up for dead. The Americans haven’t had any luck getting their people out of the Visitor strongholds here because of reprisals against the resistance movement in the States. They freed you anyway, though?”

  “Oh, Professor, I’ve had such a narrow escape! I almost died. I woke up hanging in some kind of amniotic sack, and they took me to see Fieh Chan, and they wanted me to make love to him or they were going to have me for dinner.” “You saw Fieh Chan himself?” Dr. Schwabauer said. “According to the latest news reports, he is presumed dead. They’ve no proof, but apparently the toxin renders the bodies pretty much unrecognizable. The Visitor mission on the Ginza is in flames.” He looked at her gravely. “But you haven’t even eaten, have you?”

  “Nothing but saline solution or whatever they pumped into me for months on end. Has it really been that long?” “Yes. But it’s all over now.” The sounds of the crowd came bursting in from outside, shouts and cheering and the thunder of thousands of feet in the square outside Meguro station. “It’s all over”

  “I can hardly believe it.” And deep inside she couldn’t believe it. There was something not quite right, something missing. Call it intuition, call it whatever, she thought, but I can’t believe they’ve gone for good.

  “Relax. Soon you will be going home.”

  Home, she thought. It seemed infinitely far away, that sunny house in southern California and her handsome husband and the freeways and the Jacuzzis and the idle chatter of the neighbors. “Home, home, home,” she said. She couldn’t stop weeping.

  Later she lay down to sleep in a European-style bed under an electric fan. She could hear the professor tapping away at his typewriter from a room next door It was a familiar sound, one she’d heard every single day of their fieldwork. She used to try to count the rat-tat-tats; it was her way of getting to sleep. But in spite of the exhaustion of the day's events—she was sure she’d lived through more than one lifetime in a single day, that day—she couldn’t get to sleep for a long time. She kept seeing visions of southern California.

  To go home. It was what she longed for. Wasn’t it? But now and then the image of the alien’s face would steal into her consciousness.

  “He’s dead,” she said aloud, trying to force the fact on herself. “They said so on the news, didn’t they?”

  But she would remember that she had been about to kiss him, to make love to him—and that she had felt no revulsion at all.

  Chapter 5

  Haataja, California: a tiny township sticking out of one end of Santa Ana, a few minutes down the freeway from Disneyland. An eminent Finnish Emigre had given his name to the town, as a result of which no one could pronounce it. Almost as though in compensation for this, its streets had some of the most whitebread names in southern California. They were all called Spruce and Maple and Walnut. It was at the triune intersection of those particular streets that the one shopping plaza in town was to be found. Once it had been a favorite hanging-out spot for the local teenagers, but ever since the opening of Orange Mall down the road, it had tended to be rather deserted. Only a couple of places in it still did good business. One was Po Sam’s Dinei;—American and Chinese cuisine, whose food was as splendid as its decor was dingy. The other was the Matt Jones Institute of Martial Arts.

  Late afternoon: in
the lull before the adult evening classes, Matt Jones strolled across the plaza into Po Sam’s.

  “Hey!” he said, easing himself onto a counter stool. “What’s for dinner, Sam?”

  The man at the wok said, “Lizard stew, Matt! Wanna taste?”

  “What? Still on lizard jokes after four months?” Matt sighed. He looked around. A projection TV, overhead, blared forth a beer commercial. In the comer a twelve-year-

  old kid was purposefully banging away on a video game. It was a scene of idyllic suburban bliss. It was hard to imagine that only a few short months ago they’d lived in utter terror of being captured by Visitors and herded onto the ships as slaves—or food. “Just make me anything you want,” he said to Sam.

  “Lizard lo mein? Lizard a la king?”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  He turned to watch the kid on the video game. In between screens, the boy waved and said, “Hi, Matt.”

  Matt replied, “Hi, CB. Done your homework?”

  “Hey, don’t talk to me, dude. I’m checking something out on this ‘Galaga’ game.”

  “What?” But the kid had gone back to the game. He’s really a lot better than he was a year ago, Matt thought. He cast his mind back, as he so often did, to the day he had first met the boy. How could he ever forget that day? It was the day Tomoko had walked out on him.

  She had just stalked away. He stood dumbly staring after her. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. “If that’s what you want,” he hollered, “fine!” The plaza was pretty much empty, but some of the regulars from Po Sam’s had turned to stare. “Get out of my life. Go to goddamn Japan or wherever it is, I don’t care!”

  Then he’d gone back into the martial arts school and slammed the door of his office.

  A little kid looked up at him: nicely dressed, very WASP, blond hair and blue eyes. At the moment, sheepish. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Ei; my name’s Chris Baet sir. My friends call me CB. I’m registering for k-k-karate class?”

  “Sorry 1 took out my stuff on you.”

  “Your wife just left you?” said the kid with the appalling tactlessness of childhood. “I understand,” he went on. “My ’rents just got a divorce. We used to live in the Valley. Made me feel like shit.”

  He didn’t know what to say, whether to get angry or cry. He just stared at the kid like a department store dummy, and then broke out laughing. It was just so awful, he couldn’t stop.

  A few months after that the Visitors came.

  One evening, after closing time, he went back to his office to get something and heard someone sniffling in there. A burglar? Rodents? He turned on the light. The kid was sitting all scrunched up in the big office chair. He’d obviously been crying his guts out. “Hey,” Matt said softly, “what’s wrong?”

  CB said, “I didn’t have anywhere left to go—nowhere.” “Okay, tell me about it. I mean, you were there when I had my crisis, right? So I owe you a favor” And he sai the kid down on the sofa, fixed him a cup of hot chocolate, and listened. In the back of his mind he wondered what Tomoko would have made of this. Tomoko was always telling him how narcissistically macho he was, how he’d sooner stand around flexing his muscles than listen to anyone’s problems. Was it the fact that she was gone that was making him take greater care not to tread on people’s egos? He tried not to think about her at all and turned his attention to CB’s story.

  “They’re dead,” CB said. “They’re history, they’re like totally dead.”

  “Relax. Who’s dead?”

  “My goddamn ’rents, that’s who! I didn’t have anywhere to go. I just hitched a ride here.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that. You never know—” “Why should I be scared of people? I mean we got man-eating lizards hanging over our heads. I saw them—I saw them—I’m gonna kill them!”

  “It’s all right.” Diffidently he patted the boy on the shoulder He wasn’t a very affectionate person, and it made him feel awkward. The kid was shaking something fierce.

  “Well, we went back to our old neighborhood, see? My mom and I. I mean, to see Dad. I mean, they thought they might get together again. I saw this kid I used to know real well, Sean Donovan? His dad’s a TV journalist. We used to be on the same little league team, but, like, he’s all weird now. He didn’t talk about baseball or nothing, he just kept telling me what cool dudes the Visitors are. He was on board their Mother Ship! Some other guy told me they’d kept Sean in a meat locker and ran him through some c-c-conversion chamber and that’s what made him turn out weird.”

  “Donovan, Donovan. . . . Yeah, didn’t he have something to do with that expose, showing how the Visitors are really reptiles? A lot of people still don’t believe that.”

  “I saw it, man! I found out my dad was in the resistance. They came and raided our old house. I hid in the hall closet, there’s this top shelf you can’t see that well where I kept all my action figures, and there’s like this knothole you can look out of and see the living room. I saw them come down the street in their uniforms and their guns. They were banging on the door and Dad said, ‘Don’t go, Judy, don’t go. I think it’s them,' but it was too late, she’d already opened the door and was standing there just being nice, just you know smiling at them, and then this tall Visitor, I saw it through the hole, man, this Visitor he reaches out and grabs her and throws her across the hall and she slams against the wall, and I see that her neck’s on wrong, it’s dangling at an angle, I know it can’t be happening. Then they started laughing and laughing and one of them grabbed my dad and held him still and forced him to watch while they . . . they ... oh, Jesus, they . . . they ate my mother!”

  “Christ.”

  “Then they killed my dad. Clubbed him on the head with one of those laser rifles. But before he died, he grabbed the face of the one that was holding on to him, you know, and it came off in his hand. I mean the face tore off like one of those special-effects masks. It was all rubbery and gooey and slimy, and underneath it were scales, snake scales, and his eyes were . . . his eyes . . . Oh, I’m scared, Mr

  Jones, I got nowhere to go, you’re the only grown-up I know around here.”

  Matt had always been a loner; things rarely touched him. But he had to help. Not only because they were both human beings and the enemy was an alien . . . but also because he suddenly realized that the kid would fulfill a need he never knew had before. “God,” he said, never thinking he would ever say it aloud, “God, I miss my wife. I wish she hadn’t gone away. I wish she’d have stayed and we could have had a baby and . . . but how could I wish such a terrible thing? How could I wish to bring new life into this world, knowing that the rulers are . . . evil, horrifying reptiles?” But there was a gaping void in his life. Oh, it wasn’t sex ... he could get that anytime, looking the way he did—there was no use pretending he wasn’t attractive to women—and playing all those state and national tournaments. It was something else.

  He said, “Look, kid, what’re you going to do?” “How should 1 know?”

  “You can’t go home.”

  “1 got relatives in Tempe, Arizona. The Kameys.” “How’re you going to get there?”

  “I know where Mom kept her petty cash.”

  “But—” Matt knew what he was going to say; he could have swom the kid knew too. “Look, I ... I got a big house here in Haataja. I got a pool. I got ... 1 mean, I live alone.”

  CB smiled wanly. “Hey, thanks, dude.”

  That was how CB had come to live at Matt’s house. And Matt had started to teach him—not just the stuff they taught in the martial arts school, but the secrets he had learned from his master. Not just the standard moves people see on TV. Most people who signed up for the course, they were women who wanted to fend off rapists (though sometimes you’d wonder what these particular women had to worry about) or guys who wanted to impress their friends. He’d never have thought to teach them any real martial arts. But

  CB was so anxious to learn. He was afflicted with a
profound melancholy; only working out again and again seemed to drive the demons from his small, lithe body. He seemed to have a fantasy about combating the Visitors somehow, about singlehandedly destroying them. And he adored Matt; he thought of them as a team, like Batman and Robin.

  Theirs was a strange family, thrown together from necessity; but somehow they got along.

  “Your kid much, much better now,” Sam said, plunking a vast plate of steaming noodles and meat on the table.

  “What is this?” Matt said.

  “Lizard ho fan,” Sam said. “Giant rice noodles with diced Visitor”

  “Oh, come on!” said Matt, deftly manipulating his chopsticks. It was so delicious he decided not to ask Sam what it was.

  “But seriously, your kid much better. I remember first time he came here. Very sad, always crying. Now happy, play video games.”

  “Yeah,” Matt said, regarding his adoptee with pride. “I was just thinking about how we met.”

  There was a long lull; CB was just standing there, not firing, and Matt couldn’t hear the usual beeping noises that the “Galaga” machine always emitted. “Need a quarter?” he said, fumbling in his pocket.

  “No. I just learned this great way to beat the machine.”

  “What do you mean?” Matt said, going over to the video game and looking over the boy’s shoulder Two of the enemy ships were left, and CB’s ship had retreated into one comer and wasn’t firing at all.

  “My friend Mia Alvarez told me about it. You see, like on the first screen, you know, you kill everything but the two bees on the farthest left. Then you wait down in this comer for ten minutes, not firing or nothing. You just wait.”

  “For ten minutes?” Matt said. “That’s hard to believe.”

  “No. I don’t know how it works. It’s something to do with the algorithm used to figure out the number of enemy bullets, but—”