On My Way to Paradise (59 page)

"Continue with the grazing fire—all of you! Wait
until we get around this next bend!" Abriara shouted.

I glanced ahead: the bend ahead was wide, with a
narrow rocky shoal. She cut into the inside corner of the bend like
a racer, skirting a line of trees, plowing through a thicket of
rushes, and the Yabajin followed.

"Now!" Abriara shouted.

Perfecto dropped the bomb into the thicket, then he
and Mavro began firing into the air. I picked up the flechette.
Perfecto’s bomb exploded, and the Mexican hair spread out near the
ground and began to drift up. I opened fire on the driver of the
first Yabajin craft, even though my shot wouldn’t penetrate his
armor at that range, just to distract him.

The first two craft cut the corner and plowed into
the Mexican hair and their craft seemed to dive nose first into the
ground, splitting apart and bursting into fireballs. Two more craft
came in behind, hugging the same corner, but they cut engines and
dove while the last craft veered out over the water.

Mavro laughed and fired plasma into the air at them
and shouted, "They will not be so quick to come in for the kill,
now!"

He was right. The Yabajin slowed dramatically and for
the next ten minutes followed at a discreet distance. We sped north
till the river sharply twisted up into the mountains. It became
nothing more than a path for river dragons—the banks were pushed up
as if the creek had been dredged and every few hundred meters we’d
find a pond. The banks were covered with tall, elastic trees with
tiny blue leaves that fluttered nervously in the wind. The trees
were so large a hovercraft couldn’t easily navigate through them,
and the Yabajin were forced to follow in single file.

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.