Linnear 03 - White Ninja (55 page)

'Ah, the waterfall,' the sensei said, as if her words reminded him of why they were there, not just there at this moment, but there on the planet.

He was the River Man. At least that is the only name Senjin and Shisei knew him by, although to his face they always called him sensei, teacher. He was father to them, these waif-like twins. He was mentor and companion, tutor and friend. He was Haha-san's brother.

He was, in essence, their universe, and they loved him above all else, even each other.

They knew him as the River Man because that was where he took them to learn, in the depths of a shadowed, leafy valley, by the bank of a wide, snaking river. He was very much at home there, living at times as much in the water as on dry land, as wholly amphibious as the frogs that sunned themselves on the hot rocks of the river, waiting to snatch unsuspecting midges out of mid-air with their lightning tongues.

'The waterfall was like a star in the sky,' the River Man

said, 'resonating with unimaginable energy, an engine of life and of destruction.

'When the two brothers, locked in mortal combat, were taken over the falls, something happened. The universe shuddered. Perhaps it shuddered at the moment when Zhao Hsia died, his lungs filled with churning water as So-Peng held him with the force of his will against the rocks at the base of the waterfall.

'Or then again-perhaps it shuddered when So-Peng emerged, dripping and gasping, upon the black muddy shore. For he had lived and Zhao Hsia, his childhood friend, had not. So-Peng had had it in his power to save his brother, but he had elected to drown him. He had been judge, jury and executioner in the trial of Zhao Hsia.

"There was no justice here. At least, none that we can readily understand. Justice, no matter how harsh, must be admired. Anything less is to be reviled - and avenged.'

So this is how it began. Amid a sylvan river glade, leafy and green, lush in the fullness of summer's heat. Morality imprinted upon two young, growing minds, so full of trust in a world not yet fully defined. But whose morality did they so readily absorb?

Haha-san had no one but her brother, sensei, the River Man. Unlike her sister, the woman who had given birth to Senjin and Shisei, Haha-san had chosen to remain unmarried. She carried with her from childhood a morbid distrust of men.

She did not understand sex, and was afraid of it. She saw in it an innate violence that apparently no one else did. Until, of course, Senjin was old enough to comprehend what he had unconsciously absorbed from her.

Perhaps in her youth Haha-san had been brutally raped.' That would have explained her view of sex. However, life is rarely so neat and tidy, and the truth was perhaps

far more nebulous: Haha-san had developed this belief somewhere within.a childhood she could no longer clearly remember.

What she could remember disturbed her, and her reaction to these surfacing memories, chunks of stinking, rotting debris, was terror. At those times, the household would be charged with menace, as if Haha-san's fear was like a drunkard run amok, violence and chaos strewn in its erratic wake.

At other times, Haha-san, as if appalled at what she had done, would take the twins to her pillow-like breast, rocking them, crooning to them lullabies in a language they could not yet understand.

This underlying unpredictability characterized the twins' early years. Only with sensei, in the sinuously winding river glade, did Senjin and Shisei feel secure.

Is it any wonder that they gratefully embraced the River Man's teachings with a fervour that he found invigorating?

It was only much later, floating free in his sensory deprivation tank in the Kan Hotel in the dingy fringes of Tokyo, using Kshira to place himself out of time, that Senjin came to understand that Haha-san was gifted in just the same way that he and Shisei were gifted.

But Haha-san was in a sense a displaced person. Her parents had been destroyed when the Americans had dropped their atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The doctors said that Haha-san herself had absorbed a lethal dose of radiation. As such, knowing that she was doomed, they contrived through a mare's nest of paperwork to keep her in their laboratories, observing her eighteen hours a day, their chrome and fibreglass instruments monitoring all her vital signs in order to understand better how the radiation broke down the cells, platelets and tissues of the human body.

This living experiment was not entirely the doctors'

doing. On the contrary, it was Haha-san herself who conceived of the idea as if it were a baby in her belly. Immediately following the exhaustive physical examination given to her as it was to all refugees of Nagasaki, Haha-san approached the doctors. She had heard them in consultation, talking about her case as if the radiation had already robbed her of her hearing. She was ten at this time, in 1945, already old enough to understand her own mortality and what it meant to die, the war accelerating her knowledge in the same way atomic fissure accelerated ions.

But it was life that concerned Haha-san. Although her parents and two older brothers had perished, a sister two years her junior was alive, having been out of the Nagasaki area when the sky exploded hi light and in death.

Haha-san understood that she was now the head of the family and, as such, she needed to take care of her sister. She could not count on the authorities who were in chaos in the last days of the war.

She knew she needed money, and this was the way to get it. Haha-san sold herself as an exhibit, a living laboratory for the scientists who were so eager to discover the short-and long-term effects of this new radiation that had been unleashed on the world. The money they paid her she turned over to her sister who, in turn, bought her way into a farming family. Having lost three sons to the war, the farmers were happy to have another body - no matter how small - to help them with their rice harvest.

The experiment was short-lived. After six months, when Haha-san had developed none of the expected signs of radiation poisoning, the scientists abandoned her for more fertile survivors. They believed that their initial findings were wrong, because now they could find no sign of the radiation at all inside her.

Many years later, floating in nothingness, it was clear

to Senjin that this manifestation of her gift clearly terrified Haha-san. More, it had traumatized her. She had been prepared to die and, when she had not even become ill, a sickness of the spirit descended on her.

Perhaps she felt that she had deserved to die in the.bomb blast. She was, she felt, no more deserving of life than her parents or her brothers had been. On the contrary, she felt inadequate to the task life was presenting her. Surely one of her older brothers would be better equipped than she to care for her younger sister.

And yet she was the one who had survived - oh, no, not merely survived, flourished. For Haha-san emerged from the radiation laboratory rosy-cheeked, strong, with lustrous hair and perfect teeth, and was never ill a day in her life.

That was the course her gift took; her sister's took another path entirely. In fact, Senjin believed that his mother never even knew she carried the gift inside her. It was not her karma to possess it at all, merely to pass it on to her children: her twins, Senjin and Shisei.

It was Haha-san who named them, just as it was Haha-san who cared for them. Their mother had no interest or she was too ill to be bothered with them. It was as if her life had a single purpose: to give birth to them. After that occurred she, like many insect mothers, perished; in a sense, consumed by her offspring.

If Haha-san had two brothers and both had died, who was sensei, her brother? Senjin asked this of Haha-san as soon as he was old enough to grasp the contradiction.

Haha-san laughed. 'Sensei is my brother,' she said. 'He appeared on your mother's doorstep a year to the day that she was married. She was already pregnant with you and Shisei. He claimed to have survived the bombing of Nagasaki. He said that he stood at ground zero and was unharmed, that he did it to test himself and the strength of his gift, that if he had not survived, that would have been

all right, because it would have meant that his gift was too weak, and he could never have endured the thought that he was inferior among his own kind.

'He said that once he survived, he went to China, to a place known as Zhuji, to study mental disciplines. In Zhuji, he said, he earned the title sensei.'

Senjin, feeling warm and full of food, for it was near to bedtime, had looked up into her face. 'Is it true, what sensei told you?'

Haha-san had smiled at him. She smelt of milk and of sugar, a unique scent which was to haunt Senjin for all of his life. 'Well, it's not polite to doubt the word of sensei,' she said. 'But I did not believe what he said about the bomb.' She shrugged. 'Perhaps he hid out in the mountains or he was given concussion by the shockwave of the blast. I doubt that anyone could have survived at ground zero, but I don't know what the truth is. The other part is true, however. Sensei did go to Zhuji to study. That's why it was many years, and your mother and I were in our twenties before we saw him. By then a great deal had happened to him.'

What had Haha-san meant by that? What had happened to sensei in Zhuji? Senjin tried by various ways to get Haha-san to tell him (it was inconceivable to ask such a question of sensei, who was so secretive about his life), but each time she managed to avoid answering him.

It was then that Senjin learned that he could not depend on any one person to answer all the questions crowding his brain. Haha-san could answer some, sensei could answer some others. But, increasingly, Senjin discovered that neither of them could - or would - answer the questions that were most crucial to him.

He told only Shisei what he planned to do - journey to Zhuji. Of course she cried. They had always been together, even, especially, in the womb; the thought of a separation terrified her.

'You're weak!' Senjin yelled at her. 'What did sensei tell you about such weakness?'

'I don't remember,' Shisei said through her tears.

Which made Senjin hit her. He did not mean to or anyway had not planned to, which was the same to him. It was the first time he hit her, but certainly not the last. Only later, far away from her, across the South China Sea, did he hear in her response an echo of Haha-san's obfuscations. He could not punish Haha-san - well, not yet, anyway - so he had punished her.

Shisei, his twin; his other half. She.

Senjin was haunted by she: a maddeningly diffuse femaleness that dominated his dreams, which he pushed from his conscious mind during waking hours. At first, he was convinced that this femaleness was the essence of his weak and hated mother, absorbed with her nutrients through the umbilical cord. Later, he suspected that it was that part of Haha-san's gift she found frightening and repulsive, that she had cast off from her. Still later, he thought that perhaps this femaleness contained something of both.

It had nothing to do with Shisei; it had everything to do with Shisei.

Shisei had absorbed everything he had, in the womb. Like a member of the underground searching for a traitor, he suspected her of inheriting their mother's fatal weakness. This was because he could not bear to suspect himself of such a sin, remembering what Haha-san had said about sensei: If he had not survived, that would have been all right, because it would have meant that his gift was too weak, and he could never have endured the thought that he was inferior among his own kind. Senjin knew that she could just as well have been talking about him.

He was as vigilant against any sign that he had absorbed his mother's propensity for weakness as the scientists had

been with Haha-san in their search for radiation poisoning. In so doing, his attention was elsewhere when he incorporated into himself the River Man's moral universe.

He did not, of course, know that he was doing this; no child ever does. But it happened just the same, because in the end Senjin was as needy as any child is, and he took what he needed where he found it, mindless of the consequences.

Perhaps it is too easy to say that this happened mainly as a consequence of his having no father, but what other explanation is there? It is true that both Senjin and Shisei looked like their father. Their mother had been a pleasant-looking woman but nothing more. Their father, on the other hand, was, like them, filled with a luminous beauty.

All Senjin had left of him was a photograph. It was now frayed at the edges; it had a centre crease, and the lower left hand corner bad been torn away. But it was still his prized possession. It showed a sum, magnetic man in a knife-creased army uniform, the tunic of which was so studded with medals it was possible for the young Senjin to believe it was made out of metal.

What had happened to the twins' father? No one knew. He had been a career military man, had survived the many harrowing battles of the war in the Pacific, as the Japanese termed World War II. His bravery in battle was unquestioned, as was his leadership. He had become invisible to the American war crimes tribunal, which convened just after the war, so it was clear that he had many friends in high places.

He began flying planes, experimental jets at Mitsubishi and Kodai, gaining a reputation for nerve that nearly eclipsed his wartime climb to glory. He rode at the edge of the earth's atmospheric canopy, nearer to the sun than anyone save Chuck Yeager. Then the American astronauts burst on the world stage, and everything turned to dust.