Polity Agent

As he dug, Hiroshi found the head, neck and right arm of his mother, while the incinerated body of his father was only identifiable by his shoes. Something in Hiroshi’s head just shut down then as he crouched amid the ruination. That night came and went, and in the morning thirst drove him back down to the river. Upon his return he thought he smelt grilled squid and his mouth watered, but following his nose only led him to a pile of corpses — most of them human, but occasionally dogs, cats and birds and a single cow swollen up like a balloon. Back in the rubble pile he made a nest for himself and chewed through a handful of dried rice. On his subsequent return to the river he found a floating bottle—the water he brought back from the river made eating the dried rice so much easier. As another night passed mother and father began to smell, so Hiroshi wrapped the rice in a cloth, took up the water bottle, and began to walk. He saw bewilderment all around him, and plainly written on the faces of soldiers clambering down from an armoured car when they saw the raggedy people coming out of the wreckage towards them. He heard the word ‘hibakusha’ for the first time being directed at himself. He was now an ‘explosion affected person’ for no ‘survivors’ must besmirch the memory of the honoured dead.

Days passed, maybe a lot of days. There had been nights, more horror to see, a big pale foreign man giving him a large hunk of chocolate. The war was over, he heard, Japan had lost. He felt he should respond to this with shame, but could only look about him with wonder as nature responded to the cataclysm with frantic, almost desperate growth. White, heavily scented feverfew sprouted everywhere as if the Earth offered up its own medicine for this ill. Hiroshi only realized he had moved outside the bounds of the city when he witnessed a strange scene occur below a charred tree flinging out its own green defences.

The two soldiers wore headbands so smudged with soot, the rising sun emblem was only just visible. The third man, a stiff old officer in a spotless uniform, knelt on the ground. One soldier stood right behind him with his sidearm drawn and held resting by his hip; the other stood a few paces away, calmly smoking a cigarette. The officer wiped a white cloth along his gleaming blade, up and down, up and down, polishing it. He then carefully wrapped the cloth around the section of sharp steel just beyond the handle. Hiroshi thought, He is worried the blade might be dirty, and now he doesn’t want to cut his fingers…

The officer inverted the blade to his stomach and, grunting, drove it in. After a pause he pulled it sideways. He was making a strange nasal sound now and his head turned slightly. Hiroshi supposed that at this point the soldier behind should have shot him in the head. But the subordinate merely held the sidearm up, inspected it, then turned to his companion.

‘We should take the sword,’ he said. ‘The Americans pay well for swords.’

The officer keeled over on his side. His thighs and the entire front of his uniform were saturated with blood, and intestine bulged from the single wound. Shivering, he tried to bite down on his groans. The soldier stooped, tugged the sword away, cleaned the blood off with the same white cloth and placed it to one side. He then began to go through the officer’s pockets and when the dying man tried to resist, pistol-whipped him until he stopped. He tossed a pack of cigarettes he found to his companion, who then also took up the sword. The first soldier pocketed other items, then after a moment he began tugging off the officer’s boots, whereupon the second soldier kicked the officer over onto his back and pressed a foot down on his neck. Casually, almost negligently, he began using the tip of the sword to gouge out the dying man’s eyes. At that moment the first soldier spotted Hiroshi watching, stared for a moment, then abruptly stood up and aimed his sidearm.

Hiroshi stepped aside into he knew not what—but which centuries hence would be called U-space. Shifting only slightly, he stepped out on what he later found to be the island of Osaka, and walked on.

He did not stop walking for a quarter of a century.

— retroact ends -