“But what use is this?” Matt asked.
“I think that the only way a small number of people can penetrate Osaka Castle is to turn the tables on them ... to disguise ourselves as reptiles,” said Setsuko.
“What? Wear lizard masks?” said Matt.
“More than just masks,” Setsuko said. “The entire body is, ideally, to be covered. Of course, we don’t have time to do that; we’ll have to do the best we can.”
“Are you telling me that just the four or five of us are going to storm an entire castle wearing Halloween costumes?” Matt said incredulously.
“It’s our only hope,” Sugihara said. “Murasaki has already left for the castle . . . something is brewing. We don’t have much time.”
“Okay,” Matt said. “I’ll buy that. But tell me one thing . . . why were they after me in the first place? I mean, why was a bunch of aliens in Japan trying to capture martial arts masters from America in the first place? They have plenty of them here, don’t they? And what would they use them for?”
“This is my theory,” Setsuko said. “You see, their position is much weaker than it seems. Sure, they’re controlling the country via their Converted puppets . . . but they’re not much in contact with their Mother Ships, if at all, right? If they’re running low on weapons, they wouldn’t be able to get that much locally; Japan’s armed forces, because of the post-Second World War treaties, are minimal. They’d have to go native all the way. But several months ago, many of the leading grand masters in this country committed mass seppuku.”
“They killed themselves?” CB said.
“No one quite knew why.”
“Among them was my own teachei; the great Sugihara,” Sugihara said. “That is why I have taken his name for my own. ...”
“And his mistress,” Setsuko said, bowing deeply. Tomoko saw how proud she was, and she felt a strange envy. She would never understand this woman.
And if Sugihara was not Sugihara, who was he?
“It seems to me,” said Setsuko, “that perhaps the aliens are involved in a mass training program. They don’t know when the Mother Ships will return, if at all. They must think they will—otherwise why all the food processing plants, thinly disguised as centers for honorable suicide? They must be, as it were, going native, learning the local martial arts
techniques as a safeguard for the day that their technology is depleted ... the grand masters of Japan, in all honor, could not participate in such a thing, and so committed hara-kiri. So they’ve been abducting them from other countries. ...”
“And they’re holding them all in the castle?” Matt said. “Probably in Conversion chambers,” CB said grimly. “You’re right,” Matt said. “If we can fool them long enough to get inside, we can probably free our friends and there’s probably some way we can sabotage the whole installation—”
“But what about the voices?” Tomoko asked, remembering with a shudder the first time she had heard their harsh tongue, when she was frozen in the plastic sack in the food lockers of the Mother Ship. “And the language—we can’t learn the language in time.”
“I have a device that may help; it’s similar to ones used by cancer patients who have had laryngectomies. They are held against the throat, and they produce a buzzy, raspy voice quality ... I’ve adapted it a bit. All the masks will be equipped with one.”
“But the language itself—” Matt said.
“We’ll just have to use the old alibi that it’s official policy to practice the terrestrial languages at all times, even out of earshot of humans,” Tomoko said, remembering her captivity.
“Seems pretty risky to me,” said Matt.
“Let me at their central computer!” CB said enthusiastically.
“I don’t know if you should even come with us,” Matt said. “You don’t need this, kid, you’ve been through so much already—”
“Hey, they ate my ‘rents. I’m gonna kill them. We’re Batman and Robin, remember?”
“Yeah,” said Matt. Tomoko saw how much love they shared, her husband and the kid, and she was glad she had found him again, glad of his newfound gentleness. Yet there was something about Sugihara too . . . she remembered her fathei; always shouting and complaining about her mother speaking Japanese in the house and about heathen ways . . . she had always fantasized about a lover who would also be a different kind of father . . . Asian like her mother . . . more forgiving.
Two men—two ways of life—Tomoko was afraid to choose.
Chapter 18
While Tomoko, Sugihara and the others slept, Matt and CB wandered down into the basement of Setsuko’s laboratory. They found Setsuko and a couple of assistants hard at work—of all things, painting a car bright orange.
“What is this?” Matt said. Looking around, he saw that he was in a garage. There was an entranceway out onto the street, heavily barred; probably an alleyway.
Setsuko looked up. “Not asleep, Matt Jones?” she said. “You have a hard day ahead of you.”
“But what are you doing?”
“Oh, camouflage, you might call it. You have to get to Osaka castle somehow, don’t you? And only the aliens are allowed to ride around in cars and to obtain gas from gas stations. Here, help me with this.”
She took out a stencil, taped it over the car door; and began to spray black paint on it. It was the hated symbol of the Visitors, so similar to the Nazi swastika. “I have to drive in this?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Spare me.”
“I have much else to do tonight. I also have to see about your wardrobe. I think it’s best for all of you to be dressed very inconspicuously, no? Ninja outfits. They’re working feverishly on all your disguises now. Do you want to see?”
She led them to a back room where an old woman was at work painting masks. The dermoplast was stretched taut
over the Styrofoam heads used in wig shops; and the old woman was carefully drawing in every scale. “My grandmother” she said, introducing them and murmuring a few words in Japanese.
The old woman looked up and uttered a long string of breathless syllables.
“She says that she thanks you for volunteering to give your lives for the sake of the future,” said Setsuko. “None too reassuring,” Matt replied.
“Can I try one on?” CB asked.
He spent the next hour or so looking like a reptile and grimacing into a mirror
“How can you be so calm?” Tomoko said to Sugihara, who was sitting in a meditative pose, his sword in front of him, his eyes closed.
Sugihara said, “I have learned much.”
“I envy you,” Tomoko said. “I—”
“You need not hold it back, Tomoko. By tomorrow night we may be dead.”
She told him the story of her life. Only to Fieh Chan, she recalled with a chill, had she ever been this candid. “What will I do if I see him again?” she said. “Fieh Chan, I mean. There was something about him . . . you have a bit of that something too.”
“Be happy, my child,” Sugihara said. “I am much farther from home than you.”
What did he mean by that? “You must have suffered a lot,” Tomoko said.
“Yes.”
She didn’t know what to say; Always he unnerved her by his directness. This directness, she suspected, must conceal great complexity. It was as though everything he said hovered on the verge of truth, and yet was not quite true. She couldn’t stand the silence, though. She had to make conversation. “Ah ... do you believe in reincarnation?” she said, picking a random cocktail party subject in her nervousness.
“I have already lived many lives, I think,” Sugihara said. “Indeed, I am not the person I have been.” “You’re such a mystery. Your sword is beautiful. Is it hundreds of years old?” She touched the carved hilt, admiring its smoothness.
“It belonged to my master To the last, he did not know my true nature,” Sugihara said.
“What is your true nature?”
“I don’t kn
ow.”
/ don’t either, she thought. “Did he mean a great deal to you? The master Sugihara I mean, the man whose name you’ve taken.”
“Yes. We were very close. He commanded me to be his second in the act of seppuku."
Tomoko trembled. She knew what that meant. The second in seppuku was always a trusted friend or comrade of the man who was committing suicide. It was his duty to decapitate his friend as soon as he had completed the act of ritual disemboweling. It was dreadful to contemplate.
“I could not follow him, Tomoko,” said Sugihara. “For he commanded me to go on living.”
“Is that so awful?”
“More than that. I had to compel myself to go on living . . . because of a memory.”
“Whose?”
“A woman.” Sugihara stared straight into her eyes. She wished so much that she could do something to comfort this strange, incomprehensible old man. Impulsively, she kissed him on the cheek. His skin was cold, deathly cold. “The woman was much like you, Tomoko Jones. How lucky your husband is.”
“Sometimes I don’t think he appreciates me.”
“He does. I see it. He is not a thinking man; he doesn’t articulate his feelings. But you’ve seen how he has changed.”
“Yes. Yes,” Tomoko said, weeping passionately.
The limousine stopped to refuel at one of the few operating gas stations on the highway, halfway between Tokyo and Osaka. It was painted orange and its doors bore the ominous Visitor sigil. Lady Murasaki stepped out for a moment, for she did not relish traveling in such primitive vehicles. Hours it had taken them to come even this far; and the roads, uncared for since the breakdown of technology, had been unpleasantly bumpy. How she longed for one of the desert hoverskimmers on the home planet! Or even the silk-smooth whisper-quiet flight of a skyfighter.
A lackey—one of the converted creatures—came out to service the vehicle.
“Gasoline situation?” She spoke harshly, as one must to lower creatures.
“Very little left, my lady,” said the attendant. “I fear there is only enough for a few more tankfuls. If in your mercy you should be able to procure more . .
“There is no more,” Lady Murasaki said petulantly. “But the masters will soon be returning.”
“Of course, my lady.”
She walked inside the building.
Within, there was a battered coin-operated Coke machine that in its better days proffered canned peach juice as well as carbonated drinks. It no longer worked. A lamp that exuded the odd odor of some kind of fish oil burned on the desk;
electricity, then, was no longer known in this rural area. Of course they had had to divert the entire production of the area’s one functional power plant to the castle; a delicate, experimental filtering device was at work there to cleanse the atmosphere within the compound of the red dust, but it was not effective enough. Fieh Chan’s confounded pressure skins were still needed even within the castle itself. What a nuisance!
Murasaki sat down at the desk and drew a small communicating device from a fold of her kimono. It was about the size of a personal stereo; a small flat screen was blinking.
“Ah, Wu Piao,” she hissed. “You’ve been trying to reach me all day?”
The face of her colleague and sometime rival appeared, tiny in the viewscreen. “Murasaki! Good. Communications have been even worse than usual. Or is it simply that you do not choose to respond to urgent calls from your colleagues?”
“I trust you are on your way to Osaka, Wu Piao? Or haven’t you left Hong Kong yet?”
“Since you have assured me that Fieh Chan is returning, I am accepting your invitation to come and inspect your facility.” Clearly he knew that his choice of words would infuriate her. “I am anxious to receive my orders from the one most qualified to give them,” he added pointedly. His voice sounded tinny on the machine’s miniature speaker; Murasaki wished heartily that it were always so small, like a buzzing fly that one could flick out of the air with one’s tongue and swallow. “I am taking our only skyfightei; Murasaki. I trust you will not allow it to be destroyed? You have been most wanton with skyfighters, and they’re not, at present, replaceable, as you well know.”
“Sabotage somewhere in America can hardly be attributable to me,” Murasaki said.
“The destruction of the skyfighters means, Murasaki, that someone knows something they’re not supposed to know! An information leak! I thought that all your servants were converts?”
“Any problem will be dealt with in my own inimitable fashion,” Murasaki said coldly.
“Yes. We all know about your human sushi bars!” said Wu Piao, chuckling. “The one thing you do well, my dear—thinking up new ways to serve dinner.”
That reminded her. She was so hungry . . . that gas attendant now, perhaps . . . no, just a snack was what she needed. She looked around. Ah, a rat. There it was, perched on the edge of the desk. She stared at it, hypnotizing it with her gaze. Then, with deft and deadly precision, she shot out her tongue, sprayed it with venom, toyed with it while it wriggled for a few moments; then popped it into her mouth.
“Must you always eat when I’m trying to have a serious discussion?” Wu Piao said.
Ignoring that remark, she continued, “I hope you will arrive in time for dinner We have a wonderful surprise planned. ”
“To see our leader will be enough,” Wu Piao said, not even bothering to camouflage his insincerity.
So he doesn’t believe me! Murasaki thought. Well! By tomorrow he won’t be around to doubt. I shall eliminate him, and with Fieh Chan out of the way, with all the processed food ready for export, with the newly trained corps of martial arts fighters firmly in control of Japan, there’s no question about who’s going to be in charge of this whole forsaken planet!
She sat at the desk, laughing uproariously to herself at the prospect of being the next great leader.
Presently, she became aware that the gas attendant had entered and was watching, waiting for an opportunity to speak.
“Well, you idiot?” she said. “What is it?”
“My lady, earlier today another Visitor limousine passed this way. A message was left for you.”
“Well, out with it!”
He pulled a piece of rice paper from his shirt pocket. On it, in delicate calligraphy, were the words:
BEWARE
THE ALIEN SWORDMASTER
IS COMING
“What is this?” she said. “Who gave you this?”
“I did not see his face, my lady. He was garbed as a ninja.”
“He came here? You gave him gasoline? But none of the other masters is scheduled to travel this road today. If you have betrayed me—”
“Oh, no, my lady! I saw his eyes. He was a master I’ve no doubt about it,” said the attendant in terror.
A sliver of doubt penetrated her thoughts. But she would not allow it to cloud her mind. After all, Osaka Castle was impregnable.
Chapter 20
The first time Matt had looked up at the mirror when they pulled out onto the road, he’d scared himself.
“Those faces are certainly convincing,” he had said. “The woman does good work.”
“She is a good woman,” Sugihara said. “It is almost a pity to leave her behind. But if we do not return . . . someone must remain to try to hold together the fragile threads of the resistance.”
They drove on.
None of the traffic lights worked. Matt drove furiously, as though possessed. In a way he was possessed. He had to prove something to Tomoko. He’d seen the soulful stares she and Sugihara had been giving each other. He wasn’t going to lose her again. No way.
“You’re supposed to drive on the left, Matt, this is Japan,” Tomoko said to him as they roared up the Shuto Expressway
“What difference does it make?” Matt had said, and continued to drive on the wrong side of the road. No one stopped him. Children and vendors ran screaming as he approached. “Now I know how Godzilla feels,” he said.
“I’m glad I’m human.”
Three lizard faces stared back at him.
Matt felt awkward. He was by far the tallest of them; CB, tall for a twelve-year-old, completedly swathed in the black
vestments of a ninja, was as imposing as the other two, but Matt felt gangly and out of place.
“I hope Professor Schwabauer’s all right,” Tomoko said. They’d left him behind at Setsuko’s house.
“Sure,” he said, wondering whether they would return to find that house, too, in ruins. “He’ll be all right.”
They drove on.
At length, after stopping to refuel at one of the few working gas stations on the highway, they had reached the environs of the Castle just before nightfall.
“It’s beautiful!” said Tomoko.
Indeed it was. It reared up at the summit of a hill, from its bed of lush vegetation, a thing of pointed eaves and walls within walls and stone staircases with carved balustrades.
“But it conceals a terrible sickness,” Sugihara said.
At the foot of the hill they reached a barricade.
A guard waved them on.
They reached a second and a third one. At the third one, someone came down to talk to Matt. It was an alien; the ridged forehead and cruel eyes were visible through the black garments.
He barked out a string of Japanese, which Matt couldn’t understand at all. “He says he doesn’t seem to know us,” he heard Tomoko whisper.
“What’ll I do?” he whispered back.
Sugihara said something back to the Visitor guard.
The guard bowed instantly and opened up the barricade.
“What did you tell him?” said Matt.
“That his superior officer would hear about this!” said Sugihara.
Within the compound, there seemed to be a lot of activity. Matt pulled into the parking lot. A number of orange cars, some of them limousines, were there. “An extraordinary amount going on,” Sugihara said, “considering what things are usually like here. ...”
“How would you know?” Matt said.
“I have been ... in captivity before.”
V 07 - The Alien Swordmaster Page 12