“Quite so.” The shogun stood. “We have a very rare old black-and-white film of survivor of Hiroshima talking of what happened. It would interest you?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I guess it would.”
HISTORY WASN’T ONE of Ryan’s strongest subjects.
He knew a fair bit of what had happened in Deathlands in his own lifetime, and some of life in the old United States during the last three or four years before the enemy missiles blackened the skies all around the planet and civilization caught the last train west.
The period of the dozen years or so after skydark, during the horrendous times of the long nuke winters, was a dark age in every sense of the words. There were very few records of any kind, and it was an era of death and decay.
The Second World War in the middle of the previous, twentieth century, was a topic of some interest. A surprising number of the books and mags and vids that survived from predark days seemed to touch on the war, showing how it had to have still preoccupied everyone at the end of the millennium.
But now they were to have a unique opportunity, offered by the shogun.
They followed Mashashige through the maze of twisting passages at the heart of the sprawling ville, while he snapped out orders to a pair of sec men on duty by the double doors into the dining room, sending them scurrying to make preparations for the showing of the old film.
“I don’t know that I want to see this,” Mildred whispered to J.B.
“Why?”
“Seen documentaries about the bombing. Oppenheimer puking out his crap about becoming the destroyer of worlds. Flattened buildings. The sick and the dying. Experts with rows of gold braid all over their uniforms like flashy wreaths for the corpses. Explaining how it had been. How it had to be. I’m not saying they were wrong. I’m saying I got real gut-tired of it all.”
“This’ll be from their side. Their Hiroshima.”
“Yeah, mon amour ,” she said bitterly, and, to the Armorer, quite inexplicably.
THEY SAT IN TWO ROWS on stiff-backed chairs in a darkened room. Mashashige sat with them, the only Japanese in the room other than the bearded young man who was operating the ancient cinema projector.
A white screen had been unfolded and placed at one end of the chamber.
“We are ready,” the shogun called.
There was the clattering of machinery, and after a hesitation, a beam of sharp silver light lanced across the room, illuminating the screen with a dazzling rectangle.
“The sound is poor,” Mashashige said, “but there are words below the pictures.”
“Subtitles,” Mildred stated. “That’s what they’re called. Subtitles.”
“I am grateful to you for this interesting information,” the shogun said with a low bow.
The film began.
It was immediately obvious that there was a chunk missing from the beginning, as it started in the middle of an interview with a middle-aged woman.
The face was seamed with shock, the voice harsh, stammering, obviously still devastated by an event that had happened several months earlier. She was talking about the country’s surrender, the subtitles giving a cold, dispassionate rendering of her emotional words.
“It was all for nothing. They say we had lost the war. We should have stopped fighting sooner. The emperor was held hostage by the generals and had no power. I heard him speak about our stopping fighting and I cried. But crying makes my eyes hurt too much. The tears are like acid.”
There was no visible interviewer, just the occasional off-screen question that prompted the woman onto a different aspect of her experience.
“The sun seemed to burst. A light so bright I couldn’t see for minutes afterward and thought I had gone blind. A heat like a giant’s oven door had been swung open. The fire flashed across the city like daggers of burning death. All my clothes were scorched from my body, and then the shock wave struck me like the fist of a strong man. I was hurled against the burning wall of a shack that disintegrated with the blast.”
The voice, in Japanese, asked her about her injuries. Turning her face away from the camera, she dropped her plain kimono off her shoulders, baring her back, down to the shadowy cleft of her narrow buttocks.
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