But that was ten years ago. More recently, in his dealings with Epiphyte Corp., he’s been better dressed, better behaved, but studiously informal: first names only, please. Dr. Pragasu likes to be addressed as Prag. All of their meetings have started with an uninhibited exchange of the latest jokes. Then Prag inquires about his old school buddies, most of whom are working in Silicon Valley now. He delves for tips on the latest and hottest high-tech stocks, reminisces for a few minutes about the wild times he enjoyed back in California, and then gets down to business.
None of them has ever seen Prag in his true element until now. It’s a bit hard to keep a straight face—as if some old school chum of theirs had rented a suit, forged an ID card, and was now staging a prank at a stuffy business meeting. But there is a solemnity about Dr. Pragasu’s bearing today that is impressive, verging on oppressive.
Those Chinese guys across the table look like the Maoist Mt. Rushmore; it is impossible to imagine that any of them has ever smiled in his life. They are getting a live translation of the proceedings through earpieces, connected through the mysterious table to a boiler room full of interpreters.
Randy’s attention wanders. Prag’s talk is dull because it is covering technical ground with which Randy is already painfully familiar, couched in simple analogies designed to make some kind of sense even after being translated with Mandarin, Cantonese, Nipponese, or what-have-you. Randy begins looking around the table.
There is a delegation of Filipinos. One of them, a fat man in his fifties, looks awfully familiar. As usual, Randy cannot remember his name. And there’s another guy who shows up late, all by himself, and is ushered to a solitary chair down at the far end: he might be a Filipino with lots of Spanish blood, but he’s more likely Latin American or Southern European or just an American whose forebears came from those places. In any case, he has scarcely settled into his seat before he’s pulled out a cellphone and punched in a very long phone number and begun a hushed, tense conversation. He keeps sneaking glances up the table, checking out each delegation in turn, then blurting capsule descriptions into his cellphone. He seems startled to be here. No one who sees him can avoid noticing his furtiveness. No one who notices it can avoid speculating on how he acquired it. But at the same time, the man has a sullen glowering air about him that Randy doesn’t notice until his black eyes turn to stare into Randy’s like the twin barrels of a derringer. Randy stares back, too startled and stupid to avert his gaze, and some kind of strange information passes from the cellphone man to him, down the twin shafts of black light coming out of the man’s eyes.
Randy realizes that he and the rest of Epiphyte(2) Corp. have fallen in among thieves.
SKIPPING
* * *
IT’S A HOT CLOUDY DAY IN THE BISMARCK SEA WHEN Goto Dengo loses the war. The American bombers come in low and level. Goto Dengo happens to be abovedecks on a fresh-air-and-calisthenics drill. To breathe air that does not smell of shit and vomit makes him feel euphoric and invulnerable. Everyone else must be feeling the same way, because he watches the airplanes for a long time before he begins to hear warning klaxons.
The emperor’s soldiers are supposed to feel euphoric and invulnerable all the time, because their indomitable spirit makes them so. That Goto Dengo only feels that way when abovedecks, breathing clean air, makes him ashamed. The other soldiers never doubt, or at least never show it. He wonders where he went astray. Perhaps it was his time in Shanghai, where he was polluted with foreign ideas. Or maybe he was polluted from the very beginning—the ancient family curse.
The troop transports are slow—there is no pretence that they are anything other than boxes of air. They have only the most pathetic armaments. The destroyers escorting them are sounding general quarters. Goto Dengo stands at the rail and watches the crews of the destroyers scrambling to their positions. Black smoke and blue light sputter from the barrels of their weapons, and much later he hears them opening fire.
The American bombers must be in some kind of distress. He speculates that they are low on fuel, or desperately lost, or have been chased down below the cloud cover by Zeros. Whatever the reason, he knows they have not come here to attack the convoy because American bombers attack by flying overhead at a great altitude, raining down bombs. The bombs always miss because the Americans’ bombsights are so poor and the crews so inept. No, the arrival of American planes here is just one of those bizarre accidents of war; the convoy has been shielded under heavy clouds since early yesterday.
The troops all around Goto Dengo are cheering. What good fortune that these lost Americans have blundered straight into the gunsights of their destroyer escort! And it is a good omen for the village of Kulu too, because half of the town’s young men just happen to be abovedecks to enjoy the spectacle. They grew up together, went to school together, at the age of twenty took the military physical together, joined the army together, and trained together. Now they are on their way to New Guinea together. Together they were mustered up onto the deck of the transport only five minutes ago. Together they will enjoy the sight of the American planes softening into cartwheels of flame.
Goto Dengo, at twenty-six, is one of the old hands here—he came back from Shanghai to be a leader and an example to them—and he watches their faces, these faces he has known since he was a child, never happier than at this moment, glowing like cherry petals in the grey world of cloud, ocean, and painted steel.
Fresh delight ripples across their faces. He turns to look. One of the bombers has apparently decided to lighten its load by dropping a bomb straight into the ocean. The boys of Kulu break into a jeering chant. The American plane, having shed half a ton of useless explosives, peels sharply upward, self-neutered, good for nothing but target practice. The Kulu boys howl at its pilot in contempt. A Nipponese pilot would have crashed his plane into that destroyer at the very least!
Goto Dengo, for some reason, watches the bomb instead of the airplane. It does not tumble from the plane’s belly but traces a smooth flat parabola above the waves, like an aerial torpedo. He catches his breath for a moment, afraid that it will never drop into the ocean, that it will skim across the water until it hits the destroyer that stands directly across its path. But once again the fortunes of war smile upon the emperor’s forces; the bomb loses its struggle with gravity and splashes into the water. Goto Dengo looks away.
Then he looks back again, chasing a phantom that haunts the edge of his vision. The wings of foam that were thrown up by the bomb are still collapsing into the water, but beyond them, a black mote is speeding away—perhaps it was a second bomb dropped by the same airplane. This time Goto Dengo watches it carefully. It seems to be rising, rather than falling—a mirage perhaps. No, no, he’s wrong, it is losing altitude slowly now, and it plows into the water and throws up another pair of wings all right.
And then the bomb rises up out of the water again. Goto Dengo, a student of engineering, implores the laws of physics to take hold of this thing and make it fall and sink, which is what big dumb pieces of metal are supposed to do. Eventually it does fall again—but then it rises up again.
It is skipping across the water like the flat rocks that the boys of Kulu used to throw across the fish pond near the village. Goto Dengo watches it skip several more times, utterly fascinated. Once again, the fortunes of war have provided a bizarre spectacle, seemingly for no other reason than to entertain him. He savors it as if it were a cigarette discovered in the bottom of a pocket. Skip, skip, skip.
Right into the flank of one of the escorting destroyers. A gun turret flies straight up into the air, tumbling over and over. Just as it slows to its apogee, it is completely enveloped in a geyser of flame spurting out of the ship’s engine room.
The Kulu boys are still chanting, refusing to accept the evidence of their own eyes. Something flashes in Goto Dengo’s peripheral vision; he turns to watch another destroyer being snapped in half like a dry twig as its magazines detonate. Tiny black things are skip, skip, skipping all ove
r the ocean now, like fleas across the rumpled bedsheets of a Shanghai whorehouse. The chant falters. Everyone watches silently.
The Americans have invented a totally new bombing tactic in the middle of a war and implemented it flawlessly. His mind staggers like a drunk in the aisle of a careening train. They saw that they were wrong, they admitted their mistake, they came up with a new idea. The new idea was accepted and embraced all the way up the chain of command. Now they are using it to kill their enemies.
No warrior with any concept of honor would have been so craven. So flexible. What a loss of face it must have been for the officers who had trained their men to bomb from high altitudes. What has become of those men? They must have all killed themselves, or perhaps been thrown into prison.
The American Marines in Shanghai weren’t proper warriors either. Constantly changing their ways. Like Shaftoe. Shaftoe tried to fight Nipponese soldiers in the street and failed. Having failed, he decided to learn new tactics—from Goto Dengo. “The Americans are not warriors,” everyone kept saying. “Businessmen perhaps. Not warriors.”
Belowdecks, the soldiers are cheering and chanting. They have not the faintest idea what is really going on. For just a moment, Goto Dengo tears his eyes away from the sea full of exploding and sinking destroyers. He gets a bearing on a locker full of life preservers.
The airplanes all seem to be gone now. He scans the convoy and finds no destroyers in working order.
“Put on the life jackets!” he shouts. None of the men seem to hear him and so he makes for the locker. “Hey! Put on the life jackets!” He pulls one out and holds it up, in case they can’t hear him.
They can hear him just fine. They look at him as if what he’s doing is more shocking than anything they’ve witnessed in the last five minutes. What possible use are life jackets?
“Just in case!” he shouts. “So we can fight for the emperor another day.” He says this last part weakly.
One of the men, a boy who lived a few doors away from him when they were children, walks up to him, tears the life jacket out of his hands, and throws it into the ocean. He looks Goto up and down, contemptuously, then turns around and walks away.
Another man shouts and points: the second wave of planes is coming in. Goto Dengo goes to the rail to stand among his comrades, but they sidle away. The American planes charge in unopposed and veer away, leaving behind nothing but more skipping bombs.
Goto Dengo watches a bomb come directly toward him for a few bounces, until he can make out the message painted on its nose: BEND OVER, TOJO!
“This way!” he shouts. He turns his back to the bomb and walks back across the deck to the locker full of life preservers. This time a few of the men follow him. The ones who don’t—perhaps five percent of the population of the village of Kulu—are catapulted into the ocean when the bomb explodes beneath their feet. The wooden deck buckles upwards. One of the Kulu boys falls with a four-foot-long splinter driven straight up through his viscera. Goto Dengo and perhaps a dozen others make it to the locker on hands and knees and grab life preservers.
He would not be doing this if he had not already lost the war in his soul. A warrior would stand his ground and die. His men are only following him because he has told them to do it.
Two more bombs burst while they are getting the life preservers on and struggling to the rail. Most of the men below must be dead now. Goto Dengo nearly doesn’t make it to the railing because it is rising sharply into the air; he ends up doing a chin-up on it and throwing one leg over the side, which is now nearly horizontal. The ship is rolling over! Four others get a grip on the rail, the rest slide helplessly down the deck and vanish into a pit of smoke. Goto Dengo ignores what his eyes are telling him and tries to listen to his inner ear. He is standing up on the side of the ship now, and looking toward the stern he can see one of the propellers spinning uselessly in the air. He begins running uphill. The four others follow him. An American fighter plane comes over. He doesn’t even realize they are being strafed until he turns around and sees that the bullets have essentially cut one man in half and crippled another by exploding his knee, so that the lower leg and foot dangle by a few shreds of gristle. Goto Dengo throws the man over his shoulders like a sack of rice and turns to resume the uphill race, but finds that there is no more uphill to race towards.
He and the other two are standing on the summit of the ship now, a steel bulge that rises for no more than a man’s height out of the water. He turns around once, then twice, looking for a place to run and sees nothing but water all around. The water bloops and fizzes angrily as air and smoke jet from the interior of the wrecked hull. Sea rushes in towards them. Goto Dengo looks down at the steel bubble supporting his feet and realizes that he is still, just for a moment, perfectly dry. Then the Bismarck Sea converges on his feet from all directions at once and begins to climb up his legs. A moment later the steel plate, which has been pressing so solidly against the soles of his boots, drops away. The weight of the wounded man on his shoulders shoves him straight down into the ocean. He gulps fuel oil into his sinuses, struggles out from beneath the wounded man, and comes to the surface screaming. His nose, and the cavities of his skull, are filled with oil. He swallows some of it and goes into convulsions as his body tries to eject it from every orifice at once: sneezing, vomiting, hawking it up out of his lungs. Reaching up to his face with one hand he feels the oil coating his skin thickly and knows that he dare not open his eyes. He tries to wipe the oil from his face with his sleeve, but the fabric is saturated with it.
He has to get down in the water and wipe himself clean so that he can see again, but the oil in his clothing makes him float. His lungs are finally clear now and he begins to gasp in air. It smells of oil but at least it’s breathable. But the volatile chemicals in the oil have gotten into his blood now and he feels them spread through his body like fire. It feels as though a hot spatula is being shoved between his scalp and his skull. The other men are howling and he realizes that he is too. Some of the Chinese workers in Shanghai used to breathe gasoline to get high, and this was the noise that they made.
One of the men near him screams. He hears a noise approaching, like a sheet being torn in half to make bandages. Radiant heat strikes him in the face like a hot frying pan, just before Goto Dengo dives and kicks downwards. The motion exposes a band of flesh around his calf, between his boot and his trouser leg, and in the moment that it’s poking straight up out of the water, it gets seared to a crisp.
He swims blind through an ocean of fuel oil. Then there is a change in the temperature and the viscosity of the fluid streaming over his face. Suddenly the life preserver begins to tug him upwards; he must be in water now. He swims for a few more kicks and begins to wipe at his eyes. The pressure on his ears tells him he’s not that deep, maybe a couple of meters beneath the surface. Finally he risks opening his eyes. Ghostly, flickering light is illuminating his hands, making them glow a bright green; the sun must have come out. He rolls over on his back and looks straight up. Above him is a lake of rolling fire.
He rips the life preserver off over his head and lets it go. It shoots straight up and bursts out of the surface, burning like a comet. His oil-soaked clothing is tugging him relentlessly upwards, so he rips his shirt off and lets it tumble up towards the surface. His boots pull down, his oily pants push up, and he reaches some sort of equilibrium.
He grew up in the mines.
Kulu is near the north coast of Hokkaido, on the shore of a freshwater lake where rivers converge from the inland hills and commingle their waters before draining to the Sea of Okhotsk. The hills rise sharply from one end of that lake, looming over a cold silver creek that rushes down out of forest inhabited only by apes and demons. There are small islands in that part of the lake. If you dig down into the islands, or the hills, you will find veins of copper ore, and sometimes you will find zinc and lead and even silver. That is what the men of Kulu have done for many generations. Their monument is a maze of tunnels that
snake through the hills, not following straight lines but tracking the richest veins.
Sometimes the tunnels dip below the level of the lake. When the mines were working these tunnels were pumped out, but now that they are exhausted, the water has been allowed to seek its level and has formed sumps. There are cavities and tunnels back in the hills that can only be reached by boys who are brave enough to dive into the cold black water and swim through the darkness for ten, twenty, thirty meters.
Goto Dengo went to all of those places when he was a boy. He even discovered some of them. Big, fat, and buoyant, he was a pretty good swimmer. He was not the best swimmer, or the best at holding his breath. He was not even the bravest (the bravest did not put on life preservers, and went to their deaths like warriors).
He went where the others wouldn’t because he, alone among all the boys of Kulu, was not afraid of the demons. When he was a boy, his father, a mining engineer, would take him hiking up into the places in the mountains where demons were said to live. They would sleep out under the stars and wake up to find their blankets covered with frost, and sometimes their food stolen by bears. But no demons.
The other boys believed that demons lived in some of those underwater tunnels, and that this explained why some of the boys who swam back there never returned. But Goto Dengo did not fear the demons and so he went back there fearing only the cold and the dark and the water. Which was plenty to fear.
Now he need only pretend that the fire is a stone ceiling. He swims some more. But he did not breathe properly before diving, and he is close to panic now. He looks up again and sees that the water is burning only in patches.
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