Read Online The Future Is Japanese by Unknown - Free Book Online Page A

Colombine is broken.
    If Maddy’s anywhere near the war she can’t hear it. She tries putting her ear to the ground like some kind of hunting elf in one of Abby’s fantasy novels but feels stupid immediately, and stops. Now, her face turned back to the sky, she closes her eyes and hears the wind down in the valley, and somewhere a trickle of water. It would be so easy to fall asleep here. Maddy tries to remember the last time she fell asleep in the grass, and can’t.
    She’s not going to sleep here. If she does, something will come along and step on her, or the drugs in her system will run out, or the zone will find some other way to kill her. Maddy gets up.
    She follows the sound of the water up out of the cleft and across the slope, scrambles over some rocks, comes down into a space like a shallow bowl, where meltwater from the ridge has formed an oval pool about fifty yards long, ringed with gravel and gray mud.
    There is a girl there.
    She is squatting at the edge of the pool, all knees and elbows, trailing the fingers of one hand in the water. Maddy knows instantly that it’s a girl, though she can’t then say, and won’t later be able to say, how she knows; and Maddy knows instantly that it/she is not human. She is dressed from head to foot in something dark blue and mirror-glossy, so that Maddy can see the clouds above and the rippling water below reflected in it. It rises to cover her head as well, and drops to cover the hand that’s not in the water, so that only the skin of her hand and of her too-round face is uncovered; and that skin too is blue, or bluish, or maybe a pale gray made blue by the blue around it.
    The alien sees Maddy and instantly she straightens up, a quick, birdlike motion, and the glossy blue runs swiftly down her bare fingers and across her face, leaving only the eyes, not the inky black of a cartoon alien’s but large and round and bright like the eyes of a lemur. Standing, she’s even more obviously inhuman, her torso too long, her hips and shoulders too narrow, her waist nonexistent. But there’s something beautiful about her all the same, beautiful and strange, the more so as she seems to relax, and the armor or whatever it is withdraws again from her face and hands. It’s hard to read that strange face, but Maddy thinks she looks expectant, or maybe a little puzzled.
    Maddy comes down to the water, sliding a little on the loose rocky ground, and the alien stays where she is; then when Maddy stops about ten feet away she comes closer, one pale blue-gray hand extended, long fingers splayed. Maddy tugs off her right glove and raises her own hand to match the alien’s. There’s the tiniest crackle of static electricity as their fingers meet. Maddy laughs.
    And then the alien’s head clicks round to train those wide eyes on something over Maddy’s left shoulder, and she grabs Maddy’s hand in a cool, strong grip as if by reflex; and then as Maddy turns to see Tanimura, frozen at the top of the slope, the alien drops Maddy’s hand as quickly as she took it. Her attention flickers from Tanimura to Maddy and back, her strange face agitated and unhappy. And then she jumps away, that blue armor flowing over her, mounding into strange forms that disguise the thinness of her body, opening out around her head like an umbrella or the brim of an enormous round hat, so that Maddy can no longer see the bright eyes.
    Then she’s getting bigger, somehow, as she retreats, heavier, wider, taller, impossibly tall, tall as the icy ridge, so that Maddy has to tilt her head back to take the blue shape in. And as Tanimura scrambles past her down the gravel slope and out into the water, hands outstretched, crying, the alien jumps back, seeming to hang for a moment between the snow and the sky, and Maddy recognizes the shape now, from the railroad cut and from Abby’s card game, and the broad cap tilts back and Maddy recognizes the eyes and the mouth that she’d been so sure meant death; and then