Angel Eyes (43 page)

"Only one?" Odysseus said sardonically.

"From what you claim you experienced during the event, it would seem as if you would have returned to Earth in a kind of state of grace, in possession of a great peacefulness. Yet if I remember correctly, you have said that you are suspended between heaven and a living hell, and it's obvious you have a great deal of rage that you barely suppress. How do you explain these discrepancies?"

Odysseus turned to Tatiana. "I want to get out."

Immediately she launched herself onto the coping. Still dripping, she went off.

"Are you going to-"

''Be patient, Volkov.''

Arbat's head bobbed upon the water, looking inquisitively between the two men.

Tatiana returned with the Hero's special wheelchair. Then she bent down, lifted him out of the water. Arbat began a long series of clicks, her nose bobbing incessantly, as if she were distressed.

When Tatiana had settled the Hero in, draped the oversized towel across his loins, he said, "Wait here for a moment, comrade. Talk to Tatiana. I'm sure you can benefit from her insights." He threw the wheelchair's engine into gear, motored off across the huge room.

Mars, at the edge of the pool, crossed his arms over one another on me coping. He gazed into Tatiana's face for a long time before saying, "What do you think is going on here?"

"What you want to know," Tatiana said, "is whether or not he's mad."

"In a sense," Mars conceded. "I have to know whether or not he's telling the truth. Did he come face-to-face with an extraterrestrial or has the cosmic radiation he was exposed to affected his brain?"

''Oh, yes," Tatiana said unhelpfully, ''he could be telling the truth as he knows it, and also be quite insane."

Her tone was so like the one the Hero used that Mars was momentarily nonplussed. By the time he recovered, the Hero had returned. He stopped at the outer edge of the coping and, looking down at Mars in the water, said, "Rage and a sense of a living hell." He threw down a packet of photocopied papers. "This should answer your question."

Mars's hands were dry, and he leafed through the pages. As he did so, the icy ball in his stomach expanded. What he was looking at was a Limited Distribution Kremlin report that not only should not have been copied, it should never have been known to exist. The document was so top secret, fully two-thirds of the Politburo were ignorant of it.

Mars saw that his hands were trembling, and he immediately fought to gain control of himself. How in God's name had anyone-let alone the Hero, locked away in this fortress-gotten a copy of this document? He thought again of the Hero knowing about Tatiana and Lara and their weekly reports to him; how the Hero had known about the extent of the monitoring, and had used the pool to give himself a measure of freedom. He stared up at the Hero as if seeing him for the first time. Holy Mother, he thought, what have we let in among us?

Mars's mouth was dry, and he had to swallow several times before he was able to say, "You never should have seen this." It was futile asking the Hero where he had obtained the copy. Mars knew he wouldn't divulge his secret, just as he knew he could not force the Hero to tell him. The thing was to somehow get the ???? to tell him of his own free will.

"But I did see it," Odysseus was saying. "It's a report detailing one of the experiments done during the Odin-Galaktika II mission. Funny. Neither Menelaus nor I were ever told of it."

''No one else was, either."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better? That we weren't the only ones in the dark?" Odysseus cocked his head, as if he were listening to a voice only he could hear. "But we were the guinea pigs!" he roared so abruptly that Tatiana flinched.

Below him, Mars fought for control. He was acutely aware of how vulnerable he was floating naked in the pool while the Hero sat above him.

"You set up cosmic ray experiments," Odysseus continued. "Built into our EVA suits was a kind of filter to expose us to a minimum dosage of cosmic rays."

"No, you're wrong." Mars cleared his throat. "This plan was discussed. But it was never implemented."

"You're dissembling, comrade." Odysseus clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

"Think about it," Mars said. "Would the Americans have ever let us perform this kind of experiment? They have an almost holy reverence for their space program. Your exposure to cosmic rays was purely accidental. Something went wrong."

"I'll tell you what went wrong!" Odysseus thundered. "We were never meant to make it to Mars. The Odin-Galaktika II was meant for this cosmic ray experiment alone!"

"No, no, no!" Mars was shouting himself now, but he could not seem to stop. "We're not monsters! Why must you persist in seeing us that way? What's happened to you?"

"You know very well what's happened. I'm irradiated with cosmic rays-at your instigation." The Hero's expression was withering. At last all his pent-up rage was being played out. "You've made me into a fucking laboratory experiment. All because some of your people got the idea that minute dosages of cosmic rays could counteract the damaging long-range effects of weightlessness.''

The Hero's fists were clenched tight. "Do you have any idea what you've done to me?" He shook his head. "What's the difference? Even if you had a clue, you wouldn't care, would you? You're all heartless bastards. 'No heart, no soul,' that's what the dolphins say, did you know that?"

His right fist opened. ''Here's a little present for you.'' Something glowing dropped from his hand into the water beside Mars. "A little plutonium."

''Christ! Jesus Christ!'' Mars heaved himself out of the water. "You are mad! You're homicidal!" He began to shiver. No one made a move to hand him a towel, and he was too paralyzed with fear to move. He felt the racing of his heart. His guts had turned to water, and he was certain he had begun to involuntarily urinate before he made it out of the pool. He was only too familiar with the fearful effects of radiation poisoning.

"Relax," Odysseus said, looking at Mars's white face. "It's just a marble I coated with a harmless radium paint.'' He seemed calmer now. Arbat gave out with a short burst of clicks. The Hero smiled thinly. "Arbat says you peed into her water. Gave you quite a fright, didn't I? Now perhaps you have some sense of what you did to me."

"But we didn't-"

"Save it," Odysseus said, swiveling abruptly away, "for another day."

End of interrogation.

In the aftermath of what she had done-unleashing her rage, murdering Giin-Honno dreamed. Suspended between sleep and consciousness, she dwelled in the shining field she had been taught to search for and to make her own. And she once again walked the path of her awakening . . .

When Honno was eight years old she overheard a conversation between her parents. It was night, and she was awake, being in the midst of a fever that had left her so pain-ridden she could not sleep.

For a while she stared out her window. The moon was full. The mountains of her home, which she loved to climb, were visible, stark sentinels in the blue light. Once she saw lights in the mountains, moving as if of their own accord, and because it was said that gods lived there, she was certain that they were the source of the light. Often she would pray to these gods to release her from her curse.

It was summer, and the fusuma from her parents' room out to the garden was open. Cool moonlight slipped into their room, and through the translucence of the rice-paper shoji walls, Honno could make out her parents as silhouettes, their movements throwing shadows against the rice paper, oversized, slightly distorted, as if they were characters in a theater play illuminated by stage lights.

"I had a dream," Honno's mother was saying. "It was about our daughter."

"I do not want to hear anything more about Honno," her father, Noboru, said.

"But you must!" The hand of one silhouette reached out, grabbed the sleeve of the other. "This was a significant dream. I dreamed that it was the dead of winter. Snow covered the ground in every direction but, curiously, the trees were as black and bare as if they had been set on fire, there was no snow on them at all.

"As I said, it was winter. We lived in a desolate place, I can't say where. Honno awoke. She was ill, as she is now, and needed to defecate. I took her outside, in the snow, don't ask me why. She squatted down and I watched her, as protective as could be.

"Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement. There was a stoat staring at me with red-rimmed eyes. She was as black as the blasted trees, and as gaunt. She had never grown her white winter fur, and I could see her swollen teats hanging down from the loose skin of her underbelly.

''But it was her face that terrified me," Honno's mother went on. "Her muzzle was dripping blood, and I knew that she had slain her mate so that her cubs might eat. Now she was looking hungrily at Honno.

"I looked from the stoat to Honno and, to my horror, I saw that what was spilling out of Honno was not feces, but blood. It soaked into the pure white snow, the stain spreading farther and farther."

"Hinoeuma, the husband killer," Noboru said. "Foolish, foolish woman for not taking the proper precautions."

''We must do something,'' Honno's mother said. ''My dream was an omen, a warning of evil."

"What would you have me do?".

"Take her," Honno's mother said, "to the Man of One Tree."

The Man of One Tree was so called because he lived on an island off the southern coast of Japan. It was a singular place, rocky, bleak, lashed by wind and rain in the summer, wind and sleet in the winter. The island seemed to be built not upon bedrock, but rather the gigantic root system of the ancient pine tree that overspread nine-tenths of the island.

Having made the journey south with Honno, Noboru had hired a small boat, which had deposited them on the rock-strewn beach of the Man of One Tree's island.

The Man of One Tree was a hunchback with a head far too large for the rest of his monkeylike body, and his appearance frightened Honno. She hid behind her father's legs while he addressed the Man of One Tree.

"My daughter," Noboru said, "is hinoeuma, having had the misfortune to be born in the sixtieth cycle of the year of the horse. My wife and I fear that she is destined to murder her husband."

The Man of One Tree peered at Honno with his frightful, opaque pitch-black eyes. It was said that he was Indonesian or, in any event, had emigrated many years ago from that mysterious archipelago. Now he produced five shards of half-blackened tortoiseshell. He threw them onto the ground three times, after which he squatted down, his thick brows knit tight as he read the runes inscribed on the insides of the shells.

He looked up at Noboru, his wrists on his knees, accentuating even further his simian aspect. "You could kill her," he said in a high, quavery voice.

Honno whimpered; and Noboru put a protective arm around her, holding her tight to him. "Are you mad?" he said. "This is my flesh and blood. Whatever she may be, she is my child. I would not have her harmed.''

The Mail of One Tree nodded sagely, as if he had been presented with the correct response. "Or," he said, ''you can leave her with me."

"For how long?" Noboru asked.

The Man of One Tree stood. "When she is ready, she will come to you."

"But my wife-I must be able to tell her when she can see Honno-"

"Tell your wife," the Man of One Tree said, "to forget she has a daughter. Tell her to turn her mind to other matters. She will not survive the separation, otherwise."

Honno had cried bitterly when her father had left. She had run onto the beach, the sharp rocks slashing through her thin-soled shoes, cutting the bottoms of her feet.

"Daddy!" she had wailed. "Daddy!"

But Noboru had already turned resolutely away as the boat took him out over the gray sea toward home.

Honno collapsed at the edge of the water, weeping uncontrollably. Then she was aware of being lifted into the air, and opening her eyes, saw to her utter astonishment that the Man of One Tree had hefted her in his arms as easily as if she were a sack of rice.

"Why do you cry, little one?" he said. "This is a new beginning for you, a chance for life instead of death.''

"I want to go home!" Honno had cried.

"I understand," the Man of One Tree had said. "Home is where I am taking you.''

It took Honno less than a year to think of the island as home, but then children are so much more adaptable than adults. No-boru, for instance, would never have been able to make the adjustment.

The thing about the Man of One Tree was that he was so interesting. Even when Honno could not quite grasp everything he said, she filed it away, to ponder over late at night when she was alone, staring up at the stars glittering through the overarching branches of the One Tree.

And that was another thing that surprised her. She enjoyed being alone, having time to listen to the rhythm of the surf on the rocks, the crying of the terns and gulls, the rising and falling whisper of the sea wind through the tangle of the One Tree, the ticking of her own mind.

"Thought takes time," the Man of One Tree had told her early on in her stay. "And it takes effort, because you must decide which thoughts will improve you, which will impair you. You must think of your mind as a garden that needs constant attention. You must study and discuss your studies to feed it, you must regularly seek the silence and isolation essential for periodic weeding."

Honno used the stars as her focus. They were so far away that even her wa, which each day she and the Man of One Tree worked to expand, could never reach them. But stretching over such a distance allowed for the deepest weeding.

In the night, Honno recalled her lessons for the day, turning them over and over, as if they were jewels of great value which she must observe from every facet.

In this manner she absorbed everything she was taught. She proved to be an extraordinary pupil. Her memory was prodigious, and as long as her interest was piqued, she never grew tired or unresponsive.

The Man of One Tree instructed her in the basics of Zen and Shinto, for he felt strongly that religion was the backbone of any successful education. From there he moved outward in what he saw as concentric circles to the Tao and the philosophy of Lao-tse. Now came the warlike, more secular philosophies of the master strategist, Sun Tzu, and the master swordsman, Miya-moto Musashi. Concurrent with these mental studies were the physical exercises: tai chi, jiujutsu, aikido, karate, kenjutsu.