On My Way to Paradise

by David Farland

  Most buildings were burned and gutted. Only a few Yabajin had elected to live and fight. Like the inhabitants of Motoki, the Yabajin were suicides who believed they couldn’t defeat us. Few fought at all, and none had weapons to pierce our armor. None were firing projectiles. They were doomed. Yet my compañeros didn’t seem cognizant of this fact.

  Uphill a young girl dodged out of a building. Two mercenaries turned and fired automatically. She crumpled, skidded in a pool of her own blood. The same two mercenaries slowly advanced on the building she’d fled, as if it housed a dozen samurai. They were completely unaware that the battle was over, that the war had been won.

  I did not find the internal strength to drop my weapon, as I’d tried so hard to do while killing Lucío. I simply lost the strength to carry it any farther.

  I ran to the woman I’d shot. She was lying on the ground, gasping for breath, but she was breathing. She was breathing!

  I can save her, I thought. I can save her!

  A fleeting realization shot through my mind: from the moment I’d killed Arish, I’d been searching for someone to save.

  I’d dragged Tamara’s half-dead corpse to Sol Station. I’d tried my best during the plague to save at least one man. Even when Lucío killed Bruto, something inside me cried out, "There is someone to save!"

  At every turn my resolve had been defeated.

  I thought, If I can save on person for every one that I have killed, somehow the score will be even! Perhaps then I’ll be free.

  I ripped a rag off the Yabajin woman’s skinsuit and used it to cover her wound. Her skin was pale, for she was in shock. I placed my laser rifle under her feet, raising them.

  I surveyed the streets. I needed my medical bag—resin for a bandage, painkillers, vasoconstrictors, antibiotics. I searched the streets in desperation, as if the supplies might just be sitting there in a bag on the pavement.

  Perhaps a hospital is nearby, I thought. But all of the buildings were marked only with kanji characters. A hovercraft was slowing descending the hill, coming toward me. I raised my hands and shouted, ran up to meet my compadres.

  "I need a medical bag," I shouted.

  A turret gunner spoke, the speakers on his helmet growling. "What are you doing without your armor on?"

  "I don’t need armor. The Yabajin aren’t putting up a fight!" I said, as if that explained everything. A gunner dug under the floorboards of his hovercraft, pulled out a medkit and threw it to me.

  "Gracias," I shouted. I grabbed it and ran.

  I found the Yabajin woman exactly as I had left her. I probed her wounds and found a slow leak in one lung, along with damage to blood vessels beneath her sternum. The flesh was blackened.

  I plugged the small holes to her lung with a tube of pneumatic foam, and then simply spliced the blood vessel. I sprayed her over with a resin bandage and injected her with DAP to bring her out of shock and sedate her.

  Abriara raced up to my back as I was finishing. She shouted, "What are you doing?"

  "Saving people!" I shouted. "Help me. Get another medkit!"

  She hesitated for only a heartbeat, then threw down her rifle and sprinted back the way she’d come.

  I raced along the streets and found an old man with his eyes glassed over, a girl of twelve who was past saving. I finally discovered a plump woman whose hips were so wide that looked as if she’d mothered many children.

  She huddled in the street with a leg filled with jagged knives from a flechette. Her left kneecap was blown away. Blood was pumping from the wound in a steady stream. She was panting like a wounded animal and clawing at the pavement in an attempt to escape me.

  I held her down and applied a tourniquet to her leg, injected her with a painkiller. She looked at me in resignation and let me do the work. There was not much that could be repaired on her leg, not in a short amount of time. It would be better to stabilize her and keep the tourniquet on, I reasoned, even if it meant we’d later have to take off the leg. She could always grow a new limb.

  Abriara came with a new medical bag, and shouted, "Down there! There’s a whole crowd of people down there!" She pointed toward the shore.

  We ran toward the beach and found thirty people in one knot on a street corner. Perhaps ten of them were still alive. I began working feverishly, and case ran into case—a boy child with his hips blown away, an old man with flechette wounds in his back, a teenage girl who took a plasma hit to the breasts and had the wits to dive forward and let the plasma drip off.

  I and worked quickly and guns exploded all around but no one fired on me. It seemed miraculous that we could be engaged in medical work in the middle of the battle, but no Yabajin assailed us and none of our compadres hit us by mistake.

  Time seemed to slow. A moment lasted forever. I worked and Abriara ran from hovercraft to hovercraft, bringing supplies. I once lifted my head and realized that not many people were shooting, I could have been working for minutes or an hour, I wasn’t sure. I calculated that I’d administered to perhaps twenty people, at an average of two minutes per person. I couldn’t imagine that I’d only been working for part of an hour. I was rocked by a large boom as a building exploded nearby.

  Each time I raised my head to gasp for breath, Abriara pointed to someone else in need and I bundled my things and hurried on. We eventually found ourselves near some warehouses, and there were a dozen wounded in one little pile. I began working on a young girl and heard a scraping sound, looked up.

  Someone in a green bug suit was dragging a wounded woman to the corner. The mercenary left the woman, ran off searching for more wounded. Another compadre came and threw off his helmet, a chimera with deformed ears, and dipped into my medical bags. His name was Faustino, and he explained quickly that he’d worked as a nurse in a field unit in Peru. He was very good. His hands were quick and clever.

  Two more compadres, anonymous in battle armor, dragged in wounded. I was very surprised by this. I realized that suddenly we had the beginnings of a field station, and soon we’d have many wounded.

  I heard a steady, insistent boom-boom-boom in a large dome just three doors up the road. It seemed to be the only sound of gunfire nearby. Abriara was up the street, carrying an old man on her shoulders. I realized that whoever was shooting was making a great deal of unnecessary work for us and this filled me with wrath.

  I stalked up toward the building where the gunfire sounded. Abriara was walking under the arch of a large industrial building, and suddenly the whole building was shaken by an explosion. It lifted a decimeter in the air then the walls collapsed. Abriara looked up and an entire brick arch fell upon her in a jumble of stone and twisted steel girders.

  I ran to her. There was no sign of Abriara beneath the stones. I stood in shock, looking at the mess, and began pulling off bricks. I figured that they covered her to the depth of a meter, and I heaved them away as quickly as I could. But I heard the continued sound of gunfire nearby.

  When you uncover her, she will be crushed, I thought.

  There are people to save. Everywhere a million people to save. And I knew it was true. There’d be nothing left of Abriara beneath that rubble.

  I ran to the great dome where I could hear the gunshots; from the door made out the shrieks of women.

  I raced in. The dome was a theater. Light shone in from round windows that encircled the dome near the top, and there was a stage down front. A hundred women had taken refuge in the building, and a man in armor stood at the entrance with a flechette and fired upon women who scurried between seats to escape him. As I watched, one woman got up to lunge for a second exit, and the man spun and fired on her. He was a spectacle of precision and balance, grace and speed, immersed in the state of munen, striking with the speed of Instantaneity, moving with the practiced eloquence of Perfect Control. He epitomized all that the samurai had taught us to be. All the women screamed.

  I shouted, "Muchacho!" and ran up behind the man.

  He spun and saw I was Latin, then turned to fi
re upon the Yabajin women again. I knocked his rifle from his hands and yelled, "There is no need!" He looked at me, then looked down at the rifle as if to pick it up.

  I ripped at the latches of his helmet, shouting, "There is no need!" and pulled it free to see if I recognized him. He was a dark-eyed man of middle age. He was nameless to me. His face could have belonged to any of a thousand refugiados I knew. His eyes shone with an inner light, and he had the sweat of mugga upon him.

  He stared at me, stunned, not quite aware of why I was yelling at him, like a dreamer being awakened from his revelry. His face shone with rapture. Suddenly his eyes focused and he became cognizant of me.

  "Que glorioso!" What glory! he said in amazement.

  Outside, the sound of gunfire ceased. A muted cheer was rising from the city as our men finally realized victory was ours, finally realized the magnitude of what they’d won. Even though I was sickened by the petty creatures we’d become, I too felt a thrill as I realized that we’d won a planet.

  I went outside and watched the others. Happiness seemed to course down their bodies like sweat. I saw a compañero with his helmet off, and joy seemed to stream from his hair.

  I turned and ran to help the wounded.

  Chapter 35

  Throughout an endless day we pulled in hundreds of wounded and stabilized them. Later we moved them to the hospital. It became a great labor, requiring the industry of over eighty people. The city was ours and the Yabajin were set up in a prison camp well before noon; Garzón pronounced himself president of Baker.

  The Marine command floating in orbit gladly accepted our petition for membership in the Alliance of Nations as a consolidated planet, and the continued approval of our occupation of the planet was confirmed. The Alliance preferred a stable world government over any other arrangement, regardless of the cost in human suffering, and by taking both capitols we gained recognition as the sole legal government. The Alliance was happy to have us clean up the mess on Baker, delighted to sanction our victory.

  I learned that the Yabajin were unable to match us in projectile weapons that morning because their armory and industrial centers had been destroyed: several hours after the Yabajin zeppelins had made it into the city, a mercenary named Ovidio Cardosa had some amigos help him fill Motoki’s shuttle with rocks and boulders. He then went out to sea and came in on Hotoke no Za at 1500 kph and crashed into the Ro Industrial Complex, killing himself and several hundred samurai who’d been feverishly upgrading weapons.

  The name of Ovidio was upon the lips of everyone, and many thought we should honor his heroism by renaming the city after him. Ovidio sounded like a good name to me.

  Garzón came and parked Tamara in the hospital in the afternoon. I could feel her watching my back like a raven as I put the Yabajin back together.

  I filled her intravenous water bag once. She commended me on my work, but otherwise we didn’t speak. In the afternoon I was working and suddenly realized I was still carrying my laser rifle strapped to my back. I took out the tissue sample from Perfecto and refrigerated it, then worked long into the night. At midnight Garzón came back and took Tamara, treating her once again as if she were his dog on his leash.

  He spoke with her softly, making plans for the immediate detention and deportation of all male Japanese. I worked until I was emotionally and physically exhausted, then walked out in the street to look for a place to sleep.

  I wandered up by the theater where I’d last seen Abriara alive. The street was well lighted, and this surprised me, since so much of the city had been destroyed. No one had removed the stones from on top of Abriara, and I thought it was something that should be done by her amigo. I didn’t know what had become of Mavro. My back ached and my eyes were tired, but I began lifting the green pumice stone myself.

  Each stone was huge, weighing perhaps fifty kilos even in the light gravity. I was afraid to look upon Abriara, afraid she’d be mangled beyond recognition. But when I’d pulled most of the bricks off, I found the old Yabajin man she’d been carrying, crushed and broken, and Abriara’s hand was poking from beneath his corpse. It glowed platinum with warmth and her veins stood out hot and clear.

  I tossed several more bricks away and suddenly the whole pile moved. Abriara pushed aside the bricks and looked up at me. Her face was battered and bloody and there did not appear to be a place on her body that wasn’t badly bruised. She tottered to her feet and I helped pull her from the wreckage. She staggered forward and fell to her knees.

  "I ... I thought you were dead!" I said.

  Abriara looked back at the collapsed building with contempt, as if the stones were puny things, toys for children. Her voice held a note of surprise as she said, "I may be human, but I’m not that human!"

  I laughed in relief and took her to the hospital.

  Abriara nursed her wounds in the hospital for two days. Miraculously she had only two cracked ribs. Apparently the upgrades in her collagens made her bones more than pliable. I’d have sworn that nothing could have survived such a battering. I questioned her about it; she said the Yabajin man she’d been carrying on her back took most of the beating, and the bricks just "looked heavier than they were."

  Mavro and I met in the morning. We retrieved Perfecto’s body and buried it in the cemetery. Afterward I worked in the hospital like a dog, welcoming the forgetfulness that came with work.

  Garzón spent a great deal of time getting the defenses to the city back in order. A large contingent was sent to clear out the smaller settlements in Motoki, loading refugees aboard zeppelins to take to a remote island prison while we arranged their shipment back to Earth. Our men were still afraid of reprisals—sniper attacks, bombs in the buildings.

  Fifty hovercrafts full of Motoki and Yabajin samurai were caught on our borders within the first two days; all the samurai were out for Garzón’s blood, and they’d crossed the desert in terrible storms to get it.

  One could see the general fear in the way people tended to huddle in groups around the campfires at night and wear armor even when off duty. As fast as we stabilized our Japanese patients, Garzón transported them south.

  "Let the Yabajin care for their own," he said. "It will give them something constructive to do." He said this in spite of the fact that many Yabajin women treated us as if we were supermen, their biological and cultural superiors.

  Our own losses were as bad as predicted. Garzón had lost several hundred men in terrible sandstorms while crossing the desert. Another forty percent of our men died in the final assault on Hotoke no Za. Twenty-five hundred were left. Not enough to hold the planet if the Japanese revolted.

  Yet our men would never think of leaving.

  I saw Abriara one morning outside the hospital; she was sitting on the ground, holding a handful of dirt from a garden, just gazing at it.

  I watched her for several minutes, and I knew she could never leave. One way or another, she would die on Baker.

  Garzón struck a deal with the Colombians, offered them a share of the planet; very few were willing to lose the opportunity to become wealthy landowners. We began oflloading them from their ship almost immediately—a task that would take well over a week.

  At night I still dreamed of Tamara struggling for her freedom. I still dreamed of the child Tatiana, a girl whose name I remembered and nothing else. And I wondered what had ever happened to my father, why I could remember precisely nothing about him. I performed a brain scan upon myself to see if I had any dark holes where cells had died,

  I could find nothing clinically wrong. I’d expected to find nothing. Memories do not each reside in one part of the brain as if sitting on the head of a pin. They are scattered and repeated all throughout. Minor brain damage should not have robbed me so totally of a memory. So I threw myself into my work all the harder, hoping that as I healed others, I’d heal myself. In moments of solitude I sat in a comer and chewed the skin from my knuckles.

  The third day, Abriara decided to try to take a short walk. She h
ad many deep bruises and was badly swollen; though she wanted to help in the hospital, it appeared the work was too much for her. I put her arm over my shoulder, and helped her walk.

  She breathed heavily, and her breath stirred my hair.

  The scent of her, the touch of her, was exhilarating.

  She abruptly turned to me and said, "You look better now. I’m glad you’re doing better."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Just better. You look better." Abriara considered for a long moment. "You once told me I’d shown you your dark face. You said you’d learned of your capacity for viciousness, and this disturbed you. I spoke with Perfecto about it often while you were asleep. Perfecto was afraid that the revelation would destroy you.

  "Yet he said, ‘It is too early to tell. If he is not destroyed, he will destroy his own capacity for viciousness. Now that he has unmasked the beast, he must slay it or be devoured.’ He often wondered if you’d win this battle. When you fought Lucío, I thought you’d been destroyed. But now I look at you and see that you have won.

  "Everything worked out all right. You were not destroyed. You remained true to your compassion."

  I reflected upon her words. I’d felt totally alone in my struggle. I’d felt that Abriara and Perfecto had been speaking of my problems only to gain my confidence. Yet others had been helping secretly all along, Abriara with her selflessness, Perfecto with his wisdom.

  Yet I felt Abriara was praising me unjustly. If I’d won a victory, where was my feeling of triumph?

  All that I felt was sorrow and emptiness. My nightmares still condemned me.

  "Nothing has worked out all right," I said. "For a time, I felt as I lost myself. Now, I feel I’ve found myself again. I killed people, and the fact that I changed my mind and remained true to my compassion does not undo my wrongs.

  "Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t wait to remain true to compassion until it was convenient, until that very last moment when I was no longer in danger. Nothing has worked out all right."