On My Way to Paradise (65 page)

One tank lurched up a steep incline too swiftly, then
flipped on its back. Another putted out of the jungle and spread
deadly laser fire, cutting down twenty men in less than a
second.

On this vast battlefield lay hundreds of our dead. A
great light exploded from town and streamers shot into the air like
fireworks, a thousand of them branching at once.

Perfecto shouted, "A tree of death!"

As each streamer neared ground it exploded, sending
shrapnel in every direction. Men fell by the hundreds. The Yabajin
had upgraded their defenses, and we had no Colombians inside the
city to fight for us.

We began to run for our lives, racing to the base of
the hill, which was covered in rice paddies, hoping to cross the
open ground before another tree of death exploded.

We were still a hundred kilometers from the wall when
Perfecto looked to the left. He ducked.

A piercing whine filled the air as five
weasels—missiles the length of my arm—sped from the brush to the
north. Perfecto let loose with several shots in rapid succession,
blowing them apart. But the final weasel exploded only meters from
his chest.

Shrapnel plowed into him, demolishing his armor in a
shower of green fibers.

He shouted in surprise and staggered, his chest an
open wound, and fell.

I rushed to him. He gasped, and air bubbles rose from
holes in his lungs. Mavro stooped and grabbed the flechette from
Perfecto’s hand, and stood guard over him, watching for more
weasels.

"Did you notice," Perfecto said through his helmet,
and the feedback made his voice sound like the growling of a dog,
"something strange? No mosquitoes. In this whole big jungle, there
are no mosquitoes!"

He reached up, pawed my face as if in a caress, then
fell back and died.

Uphill people were shrieking, Yabajin yelping and
dying in the streets of Hotoke no Za to the explosions of our guns.
I looked up and the sun was climbing bitter yellow in the sky.

A terrible wrath filled me. The Yabajin had taken
away my friend. I wanted to rush uphill and lay it bare, but I
looked down at the mess in Perfecto’s chest and knew I couldn’t
leave him, couldn’t bear his nonexistence.

He had given me his life. And I hoped to give it
back.

I looked at my hands. They held only a gun. I should
have had my medical bag. I studied his wounds. I needed only a
pulmonary bag to plug the hole in his lungs, a liter of artificial
blood, a resin bandage to cover his chest, and a slave to keep his
heart beating.

That is all it would have taken to keep him alive. I
could have saved him if I’d had my medical bag. I pulled out my
machete and slit the foam insulation on the barrel of my laser
around the frozen tubes that held the nitrogen coolant, then cut
the pinky finger from Perfecto’s left hand and shoved it near the
nitrogen tubes.

I slit off a shred of his bloody kimono and wrapped
the barrel of the laser rifle, hoping it would. insulate the
specimen of Perfecto’s flesh, keep it from spoiling.

"Ah, look at the doctor," Mavro said, glancing back
at me. The sweat of
mugga
was on his face and he watched the
ground. "The old man is turning into a: ghoul."

I made no comment. I’m sure he understood what I was
doing, but in the ghettos of Cartagena no one took tissue samples
of the dead for cloning. In a world teeming with people waiting to
be born, each with something unique to add to the gene pool,
cloning can only be justified for those whose genetic makeup can be
classified as an "irreplaceable treasure."

Few people are genetically worthy of the honor.
Perfecto and the other chimeras were perhaps the only people I’d
ever met whom I considered worthy to be cloned.

Abriara’s voice was husky. "You’re going to make a
copy of him, aren’t you? I think that’s wonderful of you. I love
you for that. "

"Fine," I said, and looked uphill. I remembered
Perfecto’s words from the first time we’d met: You and I will both
die on Baker. His prophecy was becoming fulfilled. He was dead, and
I could feel myself dying to compassion, dying to joy, dying to
hope.

When all those things are gone, nothing of value is
really left.

We were at the bottom of the rice paddies and above
us on the plateaus were banana fields. A few hovercrafts had
overturned while trying to climb the steep slopes. I could see no
sign of defenses. A few cybertanks were putting uphill on our
flanks, far away. There may have been more weasels, but most had
been taken out by those who went before us. Half a dozen ANC
turrets were smoking on the cliffs at the base of the city. There
was nothing to stop us from entering Hotoke no Za. The Yabajin
wouldn’t have mined the banana fields.

I jumped up and shouted.

I slogged through the fields toward the city, and
Abriara shouted, "Wait! It’s still dangerous." She rushed to take a
place in front of me.

Mavro’s eyes glinted dangerously. The sun shone
brilliantly on the tattoos of his pale blue tears, making them look
as if they were etched in light.

I pumped my legs and slogged through rice paddies and
tried to be the first of our trio to make it into the city. But
Abriara was stronger and quicker than me, and Mavro seemed to just
dance through mounds of mud that held me fast.

I stripped off my armor as I ran, not willing any
longer to be encumbered by it.

We left the paddies and it was an easy race through
some fields. The hill only rose half a kilometer, but the climb was
steep. We mounted the hilltop and rushed through the breach,
entering Hotoke no Za.

Dead bodies lay everywhere; the sound of flechette
fire suddenly became a roar. Abriara directed us to run between two
houses, giant igloos cut of pale yellow stone, and there were three
Yabajin samurai in red bug suits lying dead on the ground between
the houses.

I did not want to ruin my tissue sample, so I slung
my laser over my back and took the rifle from a dead Yabajin. Down
below us the city stretched two kilometers in a narrow and orderly
band, down to the sea, and the city was a wreck: a long black
furrow had been raised through the center of town by the crash of
an air vehicle, and whole buildings were leveled because of this
terrible wreck.

Only a shuttle crashing at high speeds could have
wrought such devastation, I realized. A hundred of our hovercrafts
wove through the streets, spraying death from plasma turrets,
jagged knives of steel from the flechettes. The view was obscured
by great clouds of smoke.

We crossed a street, running for our front down by
the ocean shore, and there were Yabajin everywhere—little old
Yabajin men in white kimonos with skins of leopard spots gutted by
flechettes, little old ladies with green tiger stripes scorched by
lasers, a toddler with his head bashed in. I saw only one dead
mercenary in the city streets. We rushed toward a wall of smoke,
and the smoke dyed the whole landscape in shades of old-lace
yellow.

I felt the wind on my body, and the sun shined in my
face, and heard the booming of our guns nearby, and I was wild with
glee.

This is the way it should be, I thought. Fighting
without armor. Fighting when every part of you feels alive. This is
the way it should be.

Everywhere the houses and buildings were of the same
dome design; now and then some large building would sprout
buttresses like unwieldy arms. Smoke rose from many domes, and some
Yabajin lay in the doorways, their charred remains attesting to the
popularity of self-immolation as the preferred form of seppuku.

Make it painful, ladies, I thought. Make it
painful.

We scurried up the street where the sounds of battle
were particularly fierce, but the strange acoustics of the city
played tricks on us. Always the sounds of battle seemed just ahead,
just ahead, just a few meters ahead.

A laser flashed platinum in the air before me. I
dodged and rolled and shouted with glee. We were only a kilometer
from the sea. I jumped up and looked at my attacker—a compadre in a
green bug suit who shrugged in apology. Yet I knew I’d reached the
outskirts of the battle. There were many large buildings here,
domes in earth shades. I was in a business district.

I heard cries directly ahead, the mewling shriek of a
woman in pain, and I rushed under a buttress and through a cloud of
smoke. Ahead, Mavro was firing his flechette into a dome. I heard a
startled cry to my right, checked the doorway. Smoke was pouring
out the doorway, and I could see nothing. I fired once, lancing my
beam through the doorway at waist height. Someone shrieked and
fell.

I turned. Abriara was watching the street, her pulse
laser at ready. Mavro dodged into his dome, still firing. Downhill
our men advanced; the dead Yabajin were stacked so thick that in
places one would almost have to wade through the corpses. The
Yabajin seemed to have no defenses, no three thousand Samurai. They
seemed not to have been prepared for us at all!

I couldn’t understand this. I saw three domes
downhill explode and collapse as one. The Yabajin were blowing
their city.

I was too far behind the others. I was too far
behind.

There were no living targets before me. I had to rush
forward to find my targets. None of the Yabajin were wearing armor.
I fumbled with the burst regulator on my laser, turning it off.

I ran past Abriara and past the building Mavro had
entered. Abriara shouted and gave chase.

I raced down the streets past a dozen compadres in
green armor who were methodically assaulting two burnt-out
businesses, as if the Yabajin would be hiding in there, past a
hovercraft full of mercenaries that were firing plasma in an arc so
it would rain down on the city half a kilometer away.

I sprinted two blocks, running over the pavement,
scraping the skin off my bare feet. Three youths in yellow
skinsuits rushed from a building and I strafed them across the back
and turned to see where my compadres were.

Suddenly I realized that none of my compadres were
before me—I’d reached our front lines alone, with plasma raining in
the streets before me.

I could kill all of the Yabajin.

I shouted and looked uphill; suddenly a Yabajin woman
ran out the doorway of a dome. She wore a light-blue skinsuit, the
color an executive might wear, and her skin was pale yellow with
red flowering dots, deep blue under the eyes.

Her epicanthic folds were greatly exaggerated and her
dark hair was pulled back. She lowered her eyes and looked down at
a laser rifle in her hands. She was fumbling with it, trying to get
the safety off and point it at me.

I pulled up my laser and raked silver fire across her
rib cage. She opened her mouth in surprise and stared at me, and
she knew she was dead.

She fainted, kicking backward as if to get out of my
way, sprawling on the street.

In that moment I felt a tinge of vertigo. My heart
hammered and I achieved Instantaneity.

She was falling—eyes rolling back for the last time,
tossing her rifle in the air in fright. The smoke was blowing up
the streets, twisting around the domes as it felt its way up the
hill. The sky was nearly free of
oparu
no
tako,
washed clean by thunderstorms and. buffeting wind. I could make out
only a single yellow-green strand of them, flowing through the
heavens; and across the morning horizon were millions upon millions
of individual
oparu
no
tako,
flashing golden and
white in the sunlight, like bits of mica. And nothing else was
alien.

The orchids on the tiny lawns, the squat palms and
giant ferns in the yards—I’d seen them all my life. The domes, like
women’s breasts jutting in the air, were simple houses. And the
dying woman, falling to the ground with a grimace on her face and
her pale yellow skin with rose-colored blotches, she was a simple
woman, not unlike a million women I’d seen. And somehow she fit
with the landscape.

It was as if the smoke rolling up these streets, the
curling about the earth-toned huts, the sky glittering with golden
mica, the woman with golden skin and rose highlights—they were all
part of a giant canvas, a perfectly conceived landscape painted by
a master artist. I felt what can only be described as a sense of
convergence.
This woman, this planet, was nothing like
Earth. Yet I suddenly felt able to accept the differences. I became
part of Baker.

This Yabajin I’d just fried was a person who loved,
who felt concern for people I knew nothing about. She was not
Yabajin. She was human. She was human not because of her
similarities to me, but in spite of her differences from me.

I looked around, startled by the realization, and saw
that everything was strange, stranger than I had imagined. Yet
everything belonged.

I wasn’t in Panamá anymore. I looked up the streets,
along the hills. My compadres were running among the Yabajin,
firing into them.

The Yabajin weren’t putting up much resistance. There
were not three thousand samurai as we’d been warned. Their
zeppelins may never have landed more than a few hundred to defend
the city. All of the defenders appeared to be dead.

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.