The trees in the canyon gave way to sheer cliffs of weathered stone where hideous ogres were sculpted in rock, pitted black eyes and granite brows, rocky chins where brown opal birds frightened by our approach dove with a screech and fluttered among the cliffs seeking escape.
The canyon came to an abrupt halt—a waterfall tumbled from a cliff a hundred meters high. Our hovercraft couldn’t make it up the incline and our path was blocked.
Abriara slowed to a stop and we faced all guns to the rear. The Yabajin in their dusty red hovercrafts floated in behind. I thumbed the chin button on my helmet for telescopic vision, and the helmet optics hummed in response. On the three remaining craft were ten battered warriors. One gunner had blood pumping out his helmet at the ear; another had been shot in the rib cage and was pressing scraps of armor against his wound seemingly to keep from bleeding to death. The hovercrafts pulled into line in the narrow canyon, creating a wall of steel and flesh. They kept just out of range at three hundred meters.
The gravel and boulders on the stream bank glistened from the spray of the falls. Perfecto jumped down from his turret and grabbed the old sword Mavro had taken off the corpse of Master Kaigo. He pulled it from its black lacquered sheath and flashed the steel blade over his head and shouted, "Come, let us fight as men of honor! The winner continues his mission. The loser returns home!" He reached up with one hand and unsnapped his helmet, dropped it to the ground.
"What are you doing?" Abriara whispered.
"I’m going to see if I can talk them into a fight, one on one," Perfecto said. "Remember? It is the ‘beautiful style of war.’ It is their custom."
The Yabajin looked at one another in confusion and held a hurried counsel. All of them wore the little wakizashi of the samurai thrust into scabbards in the armor at their hips, but only a few carried the large tachi swords for combat.
One flipped the external mike on his helmet and in halting Spanish shouted, "You do not know of our ways, Nanbeijin. What do you know of honor? You broke tradition and assaulted us with projectiles. You seek the right to continue your journey, yet plan to murder our wives and children. How can we allow this? "
Perfecto puzzled this through a moment. Then answered, "I do not wish to fight you with guns. If we match our superior weapons to your superior numbers, who can say what will happen? I wish to fight as a man, my sword with your sword. No matter what the outcome of our meaningless war, I wish to prove that I am superior."
The Yabajin were staggered with amazement. They consulted among themselves. At length, one big samurai who wore his tachi scabbard over his back dutifully pulled his sword, reached up with one hand and unsnapped his helmet, let it fall to the floor.
I gasped. The Yabajin was only barely recognizable as human. He had huge yellow eyes like those of a tiger, and the supra-orbital ridges of bone over those eyes were so large they gave a misshapen appearance, leaving a hump where his temples should have been. He was bald, and at first glance one would have thought his skin had been dyed in patterns by an artist—olive green in color, with swirling zebra stripes of yellow ochre. But one had only to look for a moment to realize the bizarre twisting pattern was not dye—the pigments somehow too closely approximated flesh tones. His skin color was obviously the work of genetic tampering. I’d known Hispanics in Miami who paid to have the skin tones of their offspring lightened so they’d better fit in with the anglos. I’d seen the blue skin proudly worn by the few self-righteous Hindus left in East Islamidad.
But the Yabajin was different. He stripped off his armor piece by piece, and he was naked beneath the armor, so that he revealed his whole body. The olive pubic hairs at his crotch converged with his tufts of yellow-orange. He was supremely muscular, with abnormally long fingers and toes. Two large brass discs engraved with Japanese characters were somehow attached to his breasts. I couldn’t conceive a purpose for these discs, either as a form of cybernetic upgrade or as a simple mechanical attachment. Then I suddenly realized they were merely decorative, and that he wore his skin as if it too were an ornament: he conceived of his entire body as a work of art. The overall effect of these changes terrified me. I’d never been terrified by chimeras, perhaps because all the ones I’d seen appeared to be nearly human. But this man terrified me on a primal level.
Perfecto stripped down to his shorts. With his barrel chest, his arms and legs appeared narrow, almost lanky, in comparison with the Yabajin. But it was all illusion. There was great strength in those limbs.
"Be careful with this one," Abriara whispered. "They’ll put their best against you first."
"Sí," Zavala added. "Even when he is dead and jerking on the end of your sword, keep away from him."
"Of course," Perfecto said. He jumped from the hovercraft to the rocky shore of the stream.
The Yabajin stepped from his craft and picked his way toward Perfecto, hopping from boulder to boulder. They met each other midway, and then bowed deeply.
They extended their swords, holding them in front with both hands, and stood a few paces apart, watching each other’s eyes. The Yabajin’s yellow tiger eyes stared unblinking. Without glancing at footholds they felt their way near each other with infinite caution, the way a mantis moves as it stalks.
Perfecto’s hands shook and from moment to moment his grip tightened. He snapped his sword forward, trying to draw out the Yabajin with a feint. But the Yabajin didn’t take the feint.
Perfecto snapped the tip of his sword forward; the Yabajin swung down in a vicious arc. Perfecto parried, turning the Yabajin’s blade, then stepped back.
Without warning, without a constriction of the eye or a visible tightening of the muscles, the Yabajin sprang forward and swung.
Perfecto achieved instantaneity. I didn’t witness his moves they were so swift, but in the next moment Perfecto’s sword plunged through the Yabajin’s heart and Perfecto reached into the air, grabbing the Yabajin’s hands so his sword wouldn’t fall. Blood spurted from the Yabajin’s chest and ran down his belly, and I thought he’d crumple, but the Yabajin grappled for the tachi. The samurai was exercising Perfect Control—stopping his heartbeat, stopping his breathing. By rights he’d be dead in ten seconds, but by stopping his heart and allowing his body to continue functioning till his oxygen depleted, he could continue fighting a moment. Yet the more energy he wasted in his struggle the quicker he’d lose consciousness. Perfecto sought to hold the Yabajin, to force him to exhaust himself in a futile struggle.
The Yabajin broke away and his right hand blurred as he reached for his wakizashi. Perfecto smashed the samurai in the chest with a knee, pushing him back.
The Yabajin leapt for Perfecto swinging his wakizashi in one hand and holding his tachi in the other. But Perfecto leapt from reach. The samurai stopped at arm’s reach and tossed his short sword, missing badly, then sprawled face forward on the ground and lay motionless.
He didn’t breathe or thrash. He lay so still it looked as if he might never have been alive.
Perfecto pulled his sword from the samurai’s belly then shoved the blade into the ground and stood with one hand on the pommel, watching the rest of the Yabajin. Perfecto said, "Was he your best? Are none of you better? Or are you willing to concede my superiority?"
The sight filled me with nervous energy. Only nine Yabajin were left, and the one with the wounded chest slumped to his seat and sat gasping as he watched Perfecto’s performance.
A second Yabajin began to undress—a black man with cinnamon patterns in bands and circles and swirls like those on the wings of a moth. His right leg was a bioprosthetic—instead of toes he had three great talons and a spur on his right leg, yet the skin pattern was the same as on his left leg, as if a skin culture had been grafted over a metal prosthesis. He had a great bushy moustache and beard, and he shouted "Kuso kurae!" as he pulled out his sword and jumped to the ground. He threw off his armor in a fit of passion, and I remembered how I’d felt after being defeated in the simulators, how I’d hoped in vain of winning
and had always come up empty. That was the expression on this man’s face.
Abriara whispered over her mike, "They’re getting angry. They won’t let this go any farther: they have to keep their numbers up. Don’t any of you twitch a muscle, but if I say the word, open fire. Angelo and Zavala, you take the gunners. Mavro, you get the drivers."
The Yabajin neglected to bow to Perfecto. Instead he charged, swinging his sword, and Perfecto concentrated on blocking his blows. The Yabajin was graceful and practiced, explosive and cunning. His rain of blows whistled through the air and with each stroke his blade twisted at the last moment, making it difficult for Perfecto to parry. This man didn’t care for life or his own defense; he sought only to kill, and it was all Perfecto could do to parry—he had no time to safely execute a counterstrike.
On perhaps his sixth swing the Yabajin twisted his blade in midair and the blade rang against Perfecto’s wrist guard. The guard snapped, and the samurai’s blade sunk deep into Perfecto’s right hand.
Perfecto kicked the Yabajin in the knee and tried in desperation to riposte the blow, to strike past the samurai’s guard.
It was a stupid move. A suicidal move. Both of them would die. Mavro saw this and fired his plasma turret into the samurai’s chest.
Abriara hit the forward thrusters and our hovercraft whined and lurched back toward the Yabajin. Perfecto dropped to the ground behind a boulder and we whizzed over him. I opened fire on the samurai gunners and blew one man off a turret and wounded his companion in the face. Then a wall of fire opened up from the Yabajin turrets, pure white streams of molten ore rushing at us. Plasma washed over my chest and head and my armor flared in warning, but I blasted two more gunners.
Zavala fired at five times my rate, and four scurrying gunners virtually exploded while I took out the Yabajin with the chest wound. Abriara jammed the thrusters in reverse as we crashed into a Yabajin craft, then Mavro shouted, "Get down!" and kicked me forward to the floor.
Zavala was still shooting three rounds per second. I didn’t even hear a time lag as he slipped in a second clip. I thought, My God, he’s a dead man! believing he’d decided to go out in a blaze of glory, ignoring his plasma hits.
Zavala’s shells were blowing through the teflex armor of the Yabajin. I could see the splinters churning in the air over the lip of the hovercrafts, as if he’d fired into dummies filled with sawdust. He shot all the samurai three and four times—even those who’d been lying dead aboard the hovercrafts for the last half hour.
I counted to fifteen while the plasma dripped off my armor. There was a hot spot on my chest like a live coal. Mavro had saved my life by kicking me forward. I’d have tried to squeeze in another two seconds of battle.
I looked up at Zavala. Pure white flames issued from cracks in his armor at the knee. A puff of oily smoke boiled at his foot. He dropped and I rushed to him, pulled off his armor. The frames of his prosthetic legs were fine, but the cords that served as muscles had melted beyond repair.
"How in the name of God did you keep from getting fried?" I shouted.
Zavala shrugged. "I ducked."
Mavro and Abriara were both down after taking plasma hits. They waited for the plasma to burn off, then sat up. Perfecto climbed over the back of the hovercraft and reached in a compartment under the floorboards and pulled out the emergency medkit and began putting a tourniquet above his wrist. His left ankle had a round black hole where plasma had burned through.
"You could have got me killed!" he shouted. He was ecstatic. "You could have got me killed but you didn’t!"
The cut on Perfecto’s hand was deep, to the bone, and I was forced to operate on him there, to splice the blood vessels, staple the wound closed, and spray it with a resin bandage. I gave him a large dose of pain killers. His arm began to swell immediately, and I knew he would not be using his right hand for a few weeks. Perfecto’s leg was a little easier to treat, since the wound was small and didn’t pierce any major blood vessels. All I had to do was cut the charred flesh away and bandage it.
Afterward we removed our helmets and rested. The air was filled with smells of smoke and burning flesh—a satisfying smell like roast pork. The alien scents of Baker’s plants nearly dropped me. I’d smelled the sugary turpines before, but never at such close range.
For the next two hours Abriara and Mavro worked on the hovercraft. They pulled out the damaged props and replaced them with parts scavenged from the Yabajin crafts. They also took fuel rods, weapons, and food from the Yabajin. The Yabajin had beer in their hovercrafts in a cooler under the floorboards. We sat in the sun on the rocks and drank beer and ate.
It felt good to be alive and eating. Mavro and Perfecto talked about how well the battle had gone, how we’d all been surprised to find Zavala alive in the end. Often I laughed with pure relief and the others did too. Zavala drank a great deal, as if he’d won the war single-handedly. He felt generous and kept saying, "You did good, Angelo. You did good in the battle. I’m sorry if I ever doubted you. We’ll turn you into a samurai yet, ne?" He’d pat my leg when I got near and say, "Such fine legs! So strong! I wish I had legs like that!" Then he’d wiggle his hip so his prosthetics would flop about pitifully and laugh. He kept offering me drinks of beer as if his were the last beer left in the world.
We were only four hours behind the army, but Abriara wanted to hurry and regroup. We propped Zavala in a corner behind Abriara. Perfecto was in no condition to stand at his turret. We let him drink several beers and take a pee, then bundled him in his armor and set him in a chair next to Zavala with a flechette. Some of his armor had taken a hit from the Yabajin plasma guns, and a glove had holes melted into it the size of tangerines, so Zavala went to work with his little repair kit plugging the holes in Perfecto’s glove. I took Perfecto’s place at the turret.
We buzzed back down the stream, out of the mountains, through thickets of trees with nervous gray rattling leaves, out into the desert. Zavala said, "Let’s not go this way. We will not be safe if we follow the army. It’s too late to follow them."
The hair rose on my neck and I had a premonition he was right. I didn’t say anything to indicate my agreement. I wish now that I could have seen Zavala’s eyes as he said it, seen that distant inward look as he consulted the source of spiritual knowledge. We thought it was only the liquor talking, and Abriara continued on. Zavala seemed to forget his own concerns immediately after voicing them. He and Perfecto sang an old song about a man who was drunk and searching for his bed in a hotel but accidentally kept crawling into bed with the strangest people. We hummed over hills and through an endless desert filled with tangled vines.
Just as twilight fell we came up a small incline in the desert—not a hill really, just a fold in the ground. Perfecto shouted, "Slow down! I think I’m going to throw up—the beer!"
Abriara stopped the hovercraft and said, "Get it over with!"
Perfecto stood up and leaned over the edge of the hovercraft and began fumbling with his helmet, unsnapping it, then straightened and scanned the horizon suspiciously. He snapped the helmet back on and his uneasiness touched us. We began watching the horizon. Perfecto sniffed and said, "Do you smell that scent? Do you smell it?"
We were all wearing our helmets, and were cut off from the sensation of smell.
"It smells like flowers. Like orchids maybe. Not like the desert." He sniffed the air in his helmet and looked back at me, then began to swing his head toward the front of the craft.
Zavala shouted, "No!" and his legs wiggled as he began trying to push himself backward. Thirty meters uphill a creature burst from a hole in the ground and sand and twigs exploded away from it. It reared in the air five meters tall, like a giant red mantis—peaked head with bulging faceted eyes, thick body with six legs spread wide, enormous forelegs poised back in the air like stingers on a scorpion. Its forelegs snapped forward and by instinct I ducked. A ball hurtled toward my head at such tremendous velocity I couldn’t escape.
The ball shattered
my helmet, knocked me to the floor. I looked up at the sky; Mavro screamed and fired his plasma turret, liquid comets burning overhead, and a rifle sounded three times. The shots splattered into the flesh of the beast, and it thudded to the ground with a grunt. My ears began ringing, and my eyes wouldn’t focus. I smelled orchids, very strong, as if entire fields of them were within my grasp.
"A desert lord!" Perfecto shouted. "It got Angelo and Zavala!"
I felt someone tugging me, pulling at my arm, dragging me backward. Tough fingers began prying the pieces of broken helmet apart, cracking it like a lobster shell, removing it from my face. I tried to find my tongue, but the words came out sluggish. "Eshtoy bien," I said. I’m fine.
"Angelo’s alive!" Perfecto said, his face swimming above me.
Someone jumped off the hovercraft; battle armor rattled. "Zavala’s not," Abriara said. "His skull is shattered."
I couldn’t believe it. I struggled to my knees. Part of the back of my helmet was still attached to my suit, and I pulled it free. Abriara was on the ground, leaning over Zavala, obscuring my view. Zavala’s armor was fine but his helmet was smashed to pieces and smeared with blood. The platinum shine was soft and muted on his chin, no hot points left. The blood was cooling in his veins. Abriara moved aside, revealing Zavala’s face, forehead dented as if squashed by a cannonball. His vacant eyes stared up. The corpse of the Desert Lord smouldered up the hill.
I leaned against the rail of the hovercraft, clinging for support, and found myself blinded by tears. My ears were still ringing, playing a single low tone, almost a buzz or the sound of a horn. Everyone was silent for a long time, and just stood there looking, unmoving.
"We should bury him," Perfecto said.
Abriara and Perfecto stared at Zavala. Mavro hopped down from the hovercraft and searched the ground, then retrieved a ball and brought it to me—a round stone globe the size of a large orange, perfectly smooth, as if it had been worked by hand.
"You should keep this!" he said. "A desert lord’s throwing stone. It must have been deflected by your helmet. You’re lucky it didn’t kill you."
On My Way to Paradise Page 44
