The aliens rushed him all at once ... he saw the glint of metal, knew he was unarmed, and taunted them: “Ten aliens with daggers can’t beat one human being with nothing!” And laid into the first one, knocking him flat and rending the sheath of plastic that he knew would cause them to be exposed to the red dust and die. He didn’t listen as the
Visitor within the disguise began to char and sizzle and fibrillate and screech in its metallic, abrasive language— “No weapons!” he heard one shouting in English. “We take him alive! Just stun him for shipping!”
He didn’t have time to react. More and more of them seemed to have popped up from behind parked cars and around the comer of the plaza. The only way he could go was backward, one agonizing step at a time, in the direction where Anne lay, blood spurting from her wound. He stepped on something ... the remains of a Visitor? He didn’t want to look.
There were just too many of them.
“What do you want to do with me?” he shouted. “Why are you so interested in capturing me?”
They didn’t speak. They just kept on advancing. . . .
He saw CB come forward out of the gash in the door of the Institute, a frail slender figure, his face frozen into a grimace of determined ferocity, his body tense. “Stay back, kid!” Matt shouted. “This isn’t any of your business— you’ll just get killed, is ail!”
At once they turned, like robots. The kid was trembling. “I gotta help you,” he screamed, his voice shrill.
One of the aliens lifted his arm. It contained another
throwing star. No, not that! Matt thought. They’re going to kill him! He propelled himself forward, trying to reach the attacker before the star flew from his fingers . . . too late!
For an eternity it seemed to spin in the air Its light hurt his eyes. . . .
Then he heard a clunk . . . he squeezed his eyes tight shut for a second, he didn’t want to see . . . then scattered cries, the swish of something thin and metallic slicing the air. . . .
A hideous dying howl from the one who had thrown the star. It had glanced off something hard and gone whizzing back on its path and had impaled the creature’s forehead, riving the protective plastic sheath and causing him to fall writhing to the ground.
What had stopped the star?
He saw.
An old man with a sword was standing in the middle of the parking lot. He wore a samurai helmet and full battle armor of a kind that Matt had only seen in Japanese movies.
The attackers—there were over a dozen of them—looked from Matt to the stranger in wild confusion. The stranger held his sword high, its hilt erect and level with his head, for a moment that seemed to last forever.
Then, uttering a terrifying bellow, he ran forward and with a single whirl had decapitated two of the attackers.
“Right on!” Matt cried, as he used the diversion to cartwheel into the huddle of perplexed lizard-men and began to flail at them with his fists and feet.
The stranger stood as if frozen, watching the whole thing with an expression half sad, half amused. Then, without warning, the sword flew out again. It sliced cleanly, mercilessly. The lizard ninjas didn’t even have time to scream. One, two, three, they fell, like dominoes, as the old man moved, seeming to take his time, with the elegance of a kabuki actor, utterly cool. Each fling of the sword seemed to take only a flick of the wrist, yet Matt knew from his training that this required the utmost concentrated strength and inner discipline.
At last they lay in heaps on the parking lot pavement . . . their flesh dissolving as the air touched them. Matt couldn’t bear to watch. He just ran forward into the arms of his wife and the kid.
The old man was silent for a long time. Then he walked over to where Anne lay. Sam from the restaurant and his wife Theresa had come out; they were standing in the doorway of the diner, wringing their hands helplessly.
The old man knelt down by Anne. Gently he touched her; listened to her heart, as Matt, CB and Tomoko gathered around. At last he said, “I am sorry.”
“She’s ...” Tomoko said.
“Yes. I am sorry.”
“Shit, I’m going to kill them,” CB whispered fiercely.
“Do not be angry, young man,” the old man said to the kid. His eyes were full of kindness. How strange, Matt thought, that he should seem to exude such compassion . . . when he’s shown himself to be such a master of violence. The old man took his helmet off. His forehead was drenched with sweat, his sparse hair matted. “Anger is not good,” he continued. “Inner peace; that is what you must have. You must feel a kind of pity—love, even—for your foe. It is not his fault that his karma has pitted him against you.”
“What are you, one of those hare krishna types?” Matt said belligerently. For he had always taught himself to discipline his angei; to turn it into raw force . . . never to eliminate it.
“Hardly,” said the swordsman.
“You’re from Japan?” CB said. Matt could see the stars of hero-worship in the boy’s eyes, and he felt strangely jealous.
“Yes. My name is Kenzo Sugihara,” he said. “I am a swordsman.”
“I can see that!” Matt said. “You’re one of the best I’ve ever seen. I wish I’d known about you before. I wonder why I’ve never heard of you?” Matt was a little suspicious. Or maybe it was his jealousy speaking. “I’ve either met or at least heard of every grand master of every major martial arts style in the world. . .
Sugihara laughed. “Who says I am a grand master?” he said. “My art is only in my heart, not in some shelf full of trophies or some certificate from an institution. ”
Again, Matt felt strangely stung by this, although he knew there was no real justification. The old man made him so uneasy. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was that was gnawing away at the back of his mind. “Why are you here?” he said.
“I have come to help you,” Sugihara said. “I have no reason to love the Visitors. I have every reason to believe that you and I can help each other. Once I was their captive; I have learned much of their ways.”
“You know what they’re up to? You know where they’re taking the grand masters?” Tomoko said. “I overheard one of them saying about Matt, not to kill him, only to ‘stun him for shipping.’ That sounded ominous.”
“I don’t know the whole story. Only that they are taking them to Japan. So to stop them, we would have to go there ourselves.”
“Can’t we call the U.S. army or something? Isn’t the Pentagon going to do something?” Matt said.
“I . . . have some small influence in these matters. I telephoned some . . . important people. They told me that the United States is not at war with Japan, and that in any case, human beings are in the government there, not Visitors. They do not want to face the fact that some Visitors may have found a way of returning, of shielding themselves from the red dust.”
“But it’s out of our hands,” said Matt. “All we can do is . . . hole up somewhere until it blows over. Right?” “You will soon stand at a karmic crossroads in your life. In one direction is the way to riches, a moderate, well-deserved reputation, a loving wife ... a comfortable retirement. But in this scenario there will be one cloud: at any moment, without warning, aliens will swoop down and devour you or enslave you. It probably won’t ever happen . . . you will probably always be happy.”
“And the other path?” Matt said. But he already knew. He just didn’t want to have to say it himself; it was too vast to contemplate right now.
“The other path ...” The old man shook his head ruefully. “You will go to Japan. You and I and perhaps your wife, who speaks Japanese, and this child—for if he stays he will surely be in grave dangen The perils you will face will be immense. But the reward will be freedom, Matthew Jones; freedom from the alien threat, for all your people.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Matt said slowly, still reluctant to face all that had happened.
“Anne’s dead,” CB said. “She was our friend. I wanna go over there and kick
ass!” He wasn’t frightened anymore,
Matt saw. His face was distorted with grief and rage; these new emotions had dispelled all his terror.
Tomoko said, “But I just escaped from there ... do I really have to go back? Is Fieh Chan still in power?”
The old man looked into her eyes. “That I cannot answer” he said. There was a long pause, each of them cocooned in his private thoughts.
“Thank you for saving my husband’s life,” Tomoko said finally. Matt felt a sudden pang of guilt at having forgotten this simplest of courtesies when he might well be dead or worse by now. . . .
The old man and Tomoko continued to look into each other’s eyes. Are my feelings tricking me? Matt thought. I could swear that they know each other . . . that there’s something between them! My family, my family, he thought ... the three of us have been together for less than twenty-four hours, and already I’m going to lose them to this bizarre old man who has come from God knows where. . . .
Later he wouldn’t know whether it was jealousy or courage that motivated him. He wouldn’t remember whether it was his desire to save the human race from whatever it was that menaced it, or some selfish yearning to be a greater hero than this old man, to really show his wife and kid what kind of stuff he was made of. It was all these things, and more: his love for his friend, lying there in a pool of her own blood; his concern for the grand masters, captured and taken who knows where; the fact that his life was going nowhere, that he was stuck in a rut. Being a hero, he was to realize later, wasn’t simple, wasn’t like in comic books or TV shows. It was damn complicated.
At the time he just stood for a while, while the others looked expectantly at him, waiting for him to say something. At the back of his mind, a childish little voice was going eeny-meeny-mino-mo, she loves me, she loves me not. . . .
“Yes,” he said. For a moment he wasn’t sure whether he’d just said yes or no.
Chapter 11
A room in a secret location: a small room, bare and sparsely furnished: a tatami floor, a sleeping area separated by screens, a low table with a few ornaments, a shoji screen that opened out to reveal a traditional stone garden . . . and on the other side of the room, a wall-sized video monitor
In front of it sat the Visitor known as Lady Murasaki, fiddling with some controls that seemed to produce nothing but static. Murasaki seemed to become more and more frustrated.
On the table next to the control console and the ornaments ... a small plate of human fingers, half nibbled, and a steaming bowl of hot green tea.
At last an image formed on the screen.
“Ah, Wu Piao,” she purred. “I have been trying to contact you for days.”
“Murasaki!” said the man in the other screen. He wore a Mao shirt, fastidiously buttoned to the top, and a beret, both of them bearing the insignia of the Visitors. “What a pleasant surprise.” From his tone, it was clear that her communication was neither a surprise nor pleasant. “I have been attempting to make contact, but ... as you well know, technology hasn’t been quite the same around this mud-eating planet since the main fleet was forced to depart. I’ve had to jury-rig this device with spare parts rifled
from—a television broadcasting station, they call it—here in Hong Kong.”
“I demand to speak to Fieh Chan!” Murasaki said. “That won’t be possible,” Wu Piao said.
“I accuse you of hiding him from us.” The interview with that weak, contemptible earthling Ogawa had upset Murasaki more than she cared to admit to herself. For one thing, he had come dangerously close to guessing the truth. It was lucky that his conditioning had kicked on just in time ... or she would have been forced to kill him. That would have been inconvenient, with things in the mess they were.
“We are not hiding him,” said Wu Piao. “We keep getting messages that purport to be from him, but we can’t locate him. Meanwhile, production of the pressure skin-thermal generators has come to a standstill.”
“Sometimes I envy these miserable apes,” Murasaki said. “They lack our deviousness. Of course Fieh Chan did not disclose the details of his invention to anyone! He wanted to use it as new clout—to block my accession to power in our hierarchy! Now he’s staged this bizarre disappearance in order to convince the high command that he’s indispensable. He’s just waiting for us to bungle so that he can inveigle himself further up the ladder.”
“Have you tried analyzing them?” Wu Piao said coldly. “We are very short of science staff, as you well know.” Murasaki saw that her colleague was searching for a chink in her defenses. She could not afford to let him see any weakness. Angrily she plucked a finger from the dish and began chomping on it. The food was the one good thing about this world, she reflected. With its extravagant, luxurious vegetation, its copious watei; its profusion of life forms, all blossoming and reproducing with reckless abandon, this planet’s lack of restraint was profoundly disturbing to her sensibilities. She thought of the deserts of her home world, the harsh extremes, the constant drought. Ah, but the home world had a severe purity that all this craziness could never match.
“You do not speak?” asked Wu Piao.
“I was thinking of Fieh Chan. I never could understand his motivations.” She chose her words carefully; it was her intention to poison Wu Piao’s mind, but also to exonerate herself from any accusation of having done so if Fieh Chan should happen to return. Her own suspicion—and hope— was that he had somehow really succumbed to the red dust, that the experimental pressure skin he had himself designed had somehow malfunctioned. How she hated him for foreseeing the possibility that the humans would use bacteriological warfare! She had advised him time and time again that the Earth creatures were far too stupid to think of such a thing . . . and yet they had somehow done it anyway. That apes should by some fluke give the appearance of acting with the intelligence of reptiles rankled her. That Fieh Chan should have made such a wild prediction, and gone ahead and designed a countermeasure without letting anyone else know the secret of it, and then be proven right! And he had actually fraternized with the humans, actually gone so far as to study this Zen philosophy, as they called it, a philosophy dangerously close to the banned preta-na-ma religion. Horrible, horrible! What a despicable person! And that she should have been passed over for the command of the Far Eastern sector in favor of that ape-loving heretic! She thought of how best to present her insinuations to her colleague Wu Piao. Together they might be able to manipulate the high command into making her leadership position official—if Fieh Chan didn’t come wandering back.
Then there was the possibility that Wu Piao knew exactly where Fieh Chan was, that they were involved in a plot against her. Perhaps they were manufacturing the thermal pressure skins in a factory in Hong Kong right now, and Wu Piao was laughing at her behind her back. Was he really so subtle?
“Tell me,” she said sweetly, daintily sucking the last shred of marrow from the finger’s bones and tossing it idly back onto the plate, “did Fieh Chan ever mention preta-na-ma to you?”
An expression of consummate horror crossed Wu Piao’s face. How well he acts! thought Murasaki, who knew, from breaking into his computer dossier; that he had once, as a young saurian, attended a secret meeting of the underground cult of peace and intraspecies brotherhood.
“1 don’t think so,” he said cautiously.
But with that single question, she knew that she had sent his mind racing. For preta-na-ma was one of the most taboo words in their language; as a result, it was one of the most powerful. He was on the defensive now; undoubtedly he knew she knew about possible subversive behavior in his youth. She said, “Find Fieh Chan. Get his secret from him. Time is short. Technology is primitive here, even more primitive since we destroyed their economies and many of their arsenals. We can’t recharge our lasers or reach the Mother Ships for fresh supplies. I am developing alternative methods. But we need more pressure skins.” These were obvious truths; she did not mind admitting them to Wu Piao. She would lose no ground here.
“Isn’t it possible that the formula you are seeking is concealed in your own computer?”
“It may well be. But if so, it is keyed to some code that we have been unable to uncover,” she said. She quickly added, “We are close to it.” Though nothing of the sort was true, and they both knew it.
“And your alternative weaponry? What sort of thing is that?” Wu Piao said. The mocking tone in his voice was unmistakable. He thinks he has me on the run! she thought. Why, what impertinence!
“It is something we are stealing from the apes themselves,” she said at last. “Something primitive, but then we should not, despite our sophistication, necessarily reject the primitive within ourselves. We should not forget the myth of the temptress ape! And just because apes invented it,” she added self-righteously, “doesn’t mean we can’t improve on it. They don’t have our technological advantages; they’re not as intelligent as us. So think of what we can do with one of their inventions.”
“Sounds nebulous to me. You are floundering, Murasaki, grasping at straws. What are you trying to learn from these humans—mystical rites? Voodoo? And,” he added, “it was you who first brought up preta-na-ma, not I. Perhaps you’d care to confess to being a practitioner? You know what the punishment is.”
“Be silent! I am still above you in the chain of command—until other orders come. I demand respect. I will not brook so heinous an accusation.”
“The chain is broken, my dear Lady Murasaki. The Mother Ships cannot reach us at present. The future depends on our individual initiative, not on paying lip service to the high command! When the ships return, they’ll look at results before the promotions are dealt out.” “When they return,” Murasaki said. “Yes, when they return. ” It was a ritual; it signified that the conversation was over
“Yes. When the Mother Ships return,” said Wu Piao, sighing, and vanished in a cloud of video static.
Chapter 12
The sun was setting over Haataja Plaza, behind the freeway overpass that arced up off of Spruce. They were sitting in Po Sam’s. “We might as well get bombed out of our minds,” Matt was saying, downing another bottle of Tsing Tao beet “I thought everything would return to normal after the Visitors left.”
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