And once again, we continue, mixing characters and themes from Ranma and the mix of Chinese and Japanese culture his canon represents, with that of Dune (stripping out the middle eastern references wherever possible). I have begun this and seen criticisms that my text is too close to the original... which is of course the point. Yet, to not finish is to admit defeat, and more importantly, deny the value, both humorous and serious, of the project. The purpose of this is to satisfy myself that it can be done and done well.
And so, I shall preface some of these chapters with my thoughts. In this, I was primarily concerned with transforming Dune, a world of no water, into Pool, a world of too much water... without making Pool an ocean planet. Instead, I have, as you will see below, opted for a world of unending mountains, where sandstorms have been replaced with blizzards and dust with mist. It was important to keep the stillsuits in some form, and so I transposed one fundamental need (water) for an even more fundamental need (warmth). If a world like Arrakis can be made out of a lush world via faunagenic terraforming, then Jusenkyo too should have that quality. But enough of that. Back to the story.
4
You have read that Neko'Ken had no playmates his own age on Shonen. The dangers were too great. But Neko'Ken did have wonderful companion-teachers. There was Ukyo Halleck, the troubadour-warrior. You will sing some of Ukyo's songs, as you read along in this book. There was Thufir Happosai, the old Mentat Master of Ninjas, who struck fear even into the heart of the Mikado Emperor. There were Hibiki Idaho, the Swordmaster of the Kensai; Dr. Wellington Tofu, a name black in treachery but bright in knowledge; the Lady Nodoka, who guided her son in the Bene Rumiko Way, and — of course — the Duke Genma, whose qualities as a father have long been overlooked,
-from "A Child's History of Neko'Ken" by the Princess Nabiki
Thufir Happosai slipped into the training room of Castle Shonen, closed the door softly. He stood there a moment, feeling old and tired and storm-leathered. His left leg ached where it had been slashed once in the service of the Old Duke.
~Three generations of them now,~ he thought.
He stared across the big room bright with the light of noon pouring through the skylights, saw the boy knelt with back to the door, intent on papers and charts spread across a short table.
~How many times must I tell that lad never to settle himself with his back to a door?~ Happosai cleared his throat.
Ranma remained bent over his studies.
A cloud shadow passed over the skylights. Again, Happosai cleared his throat.
Ranma straightened, spoke without turning: "I know. I'm kneeling with my back to a door."
Happosai suppressed a smile, strode across the room.
Ranma looked down at the grizzled old man who hopped up onto a corner of the table. Happosai's eyes were two pools of alertness in a dark and deeply seamed face.
"I heard you coming down the hall," Ranma said. "And I heard you open the door."
"The sounds I make could be imitated."
"I'd know the difference."
~He might at that,~ Happosai thought. ~That witch-mother of his is giving him the deep training, certainly. I wonder what her precious school thinks of that? Maybe that's why they sent the old Proctor here — to whip our dear Lady Nodoka into line.~
Happosai pulled up a stationary box across from Ranma, sat down facing the door. He did it pointedly, leaned back and studied the room. It struck him as an odd place suddenly, a stranger-place with most of its hardware already gone off to Jusenkyo. A training table remained, and a kendo mirror with its crystal prisms quiescent, the target dummy beside it patched and padded, looking like an ancient foot soldier maimed and battered in the wars.
~There stand I,~ Happosai thought.
"Thufir, what're you thinking?" Ranma asked.
Happosai looked at the boy. "I was thinking we'll all be out of here soon and likely never see the place again."
"Does that make you sad?"
"Sad? Nonsense! Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place." He glanced at the charts on the table. "And Jusenkyo is just another place."
"Did my father send you up to test me?"
Happosai scowled — the boy had such observing ways about him. He nodded. "You're thinking it'd have been nicer if he'd come up himself, but you must know how busy he is. He'll be along later."
"I've been studying about the blizzards on Jusenkyo."
"The blizzards. I see."
"They sound pretty bad."
"That's too cautious a word: bad. Those blizzards build up through six or seven thousand kilometers of canyons and glaciers, feeding on anything that can give them a push — coriolis force, other storms, anything that has an ounce of energy in it. They can blow up to seven hundred kilometers an hour, loaded with everything loose that's in their way — stones, rocks, everything. They can eat flesh off bones and etch the bones to slivers."
"Why don't they have weather control?"
"Jusenkyo has special problems, costs are higher, and there'd be maintenance and the like. The Guild wants a dreadful high price for satellite control and your father's House isn't one of the big rich ones, lad. You know that."
"Have you ever seen the Amazons?"
The lad's mind is darting all over today, Happosai thought.
"Like as not I have seen them," he said. "There's little to tell them from the folk of the basin and vale. They all wear those great flowing robes. And they stink to heaven in any closed space. It's from those suits they wear — call them 'chillsuits' — that reclaim the body's own heat."
Ranma swallowed, suddenly aware of the heat of his own skin, remembering a dream of cold. That people could want so for warmth they had to recycle their body heat struck him with a feeling of desolation. "Heat's precious there," he said.
Happosai nodded, thinking: Perhaps I'm doing it, getting across to him the importance of this planet as an enemy. It's madness to go in there without that caution in our minds.
Ranma looked up at the skylight, aware that the sun had come out. He saw the brightness spreading across the gray meta-glass. "Heat," he said.
"You'll learn a great concern for heat," Happosai said. "As the Duke's son you'll never want for it, but you'll see the pressures of cold all around you."
Ranma warmed his lips with his tongue, thinking back to the day a week ago and the ordeal with the Reverend Miko. She, too, had said something about heat starvation.
"You'll learn about the funeral peaks," she'd said, "about the wilderness that is empty, the wasteland where nothing lives except the juice and the Mistdragons. You'll stain your eyepits to reduce the snow glare. Shelter will mean a hollow out of the wind and hidden from view. You'll ride upon your own two feet without 'thopter or groundcar or mount."
And Ranma had been caught more by her tone — singsong and wavering than by her words.
"When you live upon Jusenkyo," she had said, "kami, the mountains are empty. The suns will be your friends, the wind your enemy."
Ranma had sensed his mother come up beside him away from her post guarding the door. She had looked at the Reverend Miko and asked: "Do you see no hope. Your Reverence?"
"Not for the father." And the old woman had waved Nodoka to silence, looked down at Ranma. "Grave this on your memory, lad: A world is supported by four things..." She held up four big-knuckled fingers. "... the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous, and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing..." She closed her fingers into a fist. "... without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!"
A week had passed since that day with the Reverend Miko. Her words were only now beginning to come into full register. Now, kneeling in the training room with Thufir Happosai, Ranma felt a sharp pang of fear. He looked across at the Mentat's puzzled frown.
"Where were you woolgathering that time?" Happosai asked.
"Did you meet the Reverend Miko?"
"That Truthsayer witch from the Imperium?" Happosai's eyes quickened with interest. "I met her."
"She..." Ranma hesitated, found that he couldn't tell Happosai about the ordeal. The inhibitions went deep.
"Yes? What did she?"
Ranma took two deep breaths. "She said a thing." He closed his eyes, calling up the words, and when he spoke his voice unconsciously took on some of the old woman's tone: "'You, Ranma Atreides, descendant of kings, son of a Duke, you must learn to rule. It's something none of your ancestors learned.'" Ranma opened his eyes, said: "That made me angry and I said my father rules an entire planet. And she said, 'He's losing it.' And I said my father was getting a richer planet. And she said. 'He'll lose that one, too.' And I wanted to run and warn my father, but she said he'd already been warned — by you, by Mother, by many people."
"True enough," Happosai muttered.
"Then why're we going?" Ranma demanded.
"Because the Emperor ordered it. And because there's hope in spite of what that witch-spy said. What else spouted from this ancient fountain of wisdom?"
Ranma looked down at his right hand clenched into a fist beneath the table. Slowly, he willed the muscles to relax. ~She put some kind of hold on me,~ he thought. ~How?~
"She asked me to tell her what it is to rule," Ranma said. "And I said that one commands. And she said I had some unlearning to do."
~She hit a mark there right enough,~ Happosai thought. He nodded for Ranma to continue.
"She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men."
"How'd she figure your father attracted men like Hibiki and Ukyo?" Happosai asked.
Ranma shrugged. "Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world's language, that it's different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn't speak Galach on Jusenkyo, but she said that wasn't it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don't hear just with your ears. And I said that's what Dr. Tofu calls the Mystery of Life."
Happosai chuckled. "How'd that sit with her?"
"I think she got mad. She said the mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: 'A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.' That seemed to satisfy her."
~He seems to be getting over it,~ Happosai thought, ~but that old witch frightened him. Why did she do it?~
"Thufir," Ranma said, "will Jusenkyo be as bad as she said?"
"Nothing could be that bad," Happosai said and forced a smile. "Take those Amazons, for example, the renegade people of the mountains. By first-approximation analysis, I can tell you there're many, many more of them than the Imperium suspects. People live there, lad: a great many people, and..." Happosai put a sinewy finger beside his eye. "... they hate Harkonnens with a bloody passion. You must not breathe a word of this, lad. I tell you only as your father's helper."
"My father has told me of Nerima Secundus," Ranma said. "Do you know, Thufir, it sounds much like Jusenkyo... perhaps not quite as bad, but much like it."
"We do not really know of Nerima Secundus today," Happosai said. "Only what it was like long ago... mostly. But what is known — you're right on that score."
"Will the Amazons help us?"
"It's a possibility." Happosai stood up. "I leave today for Jusenkyo. Meanwhile, you take care of yourself for an old man who's fond of you, heh? Come around here like the good lad and sit facing the door. It's not that I think there's any danger in the castle; it's just a habit I want you to form."
Ranma got to his feet, moved around the table. "You're going today?"
"Today it is, and you'll be following tomorrow. Next time we meet it'll be on the soil of your new world." He gripped Ranma's right arm at the bicep. "Keep your knife arm free, heh? And your shield at full charge." He released the arm, patted Ranma's shoulder, whirled, and - leaping from the table top - strode quickly to the door.
"Thufir!" Ranma called.
Happosai turned, standing in the open doorway.
"Don't sit with your back to any doors," Ranma said.
A grin spread across the seamed old face. "That I won't, lad. Depend on it." And he was gone, shutting the door softly behind.
Ranma sat down where Happosai had been, straightened the papers. One more day here, he thought. He looked around the room. ~We're leaving.~ The idea of departure was suddenly more real to him than it had ever been before. He recalled another thing the old woman had said about a world being the sum of many things — the people, the dirt, the growing things, the moons, the tides, the suns — the unknown sum called nature, a vague summation without any sense of the now. And he wondered: ~What is the now?~
The door across from Ranma banged open and a bishi idol of a man lurched through it preceded by a handful of weapons.
"Well, Ukyo Halleck," Ranma called, "are you the new weapons master?"
Halleck kicked the door shut with one heel. "You'd rather I came to play games, I know," he said. He glanced around the room, noting that Happosai's men already had been over it, checking, making it safe for a duke's heir. The subtle code signs were all around.
Ranma watched the rolling, handsome man set himself back in motion, veer toward the training table with the load of weapons, saw the nine-string shamisen slung over Ukyo's shoulder with the spatula woven through the strings near the head of the fingerboard.
Halleck dropped the weapons on the exercise table, lined them up — the jians, the kaiken, the tantos, the slow-pellet stunners, the shield belts. The inkrose scar along his jawline writhed as he turned, casting a smile across the room.
"So you don't even have a good morning for me, you young imp," Halleck said. "And what barb did you sink in old Happosai? He passed me in the hall like a man running to his enemy's funeral."
Ranma grinned. Of all his father's men, he liked Ukyo Halleck best, knew the man's moods and deviltry, his humors, and thought of him more as a friend than as a hired sword.
Halleck swung the shamisen off his shoulder, began tuning it. "If y' won't talk, y' won't," he said.
Ranma stood, advanced across the room, calling out: "Well, Ukyo, do we come prepared for music when it's fighting time?"
"So it's sass for our elders today," Halleck said. He tried a chord on the instrument, nodded.
"Where's Hibiki Idaho?" Ranma asked. "Isn't he supposed to be teaching me weaponry?"
"Hibiki's gone to lead the second wave onto Jusenkyo," Halleck said. "All you have left is poor Ukyo who's fresh out of fight and spoiling for music." He struck another chord, listened to it, smiled. "And it was decided in council that you being such a poor fighter we'd best teach you the music trade so's you won't waste your life entire."
"Maybe you'd better sing me a lay then," Ranma said. "I want to be sure how not to do it."
"Ah-h-h, hah!" Ukyo laughed, and he swung into "Galacian Girls." his spatula a blur over the strings as he sang: "Oh-h-h, the Galacian girls will do it for pearls, and the Jusenkyoeen for water! But if you desire dames like consuming flames, try a Shonenin woman's daughter!"
"Not bad for such a poor hand with the spatula, " Ranma said, "but if my mother heard you singing a bawdy like that in the castle, she'd have your ears on the outer wall for decoration."
Ukyo pulled at his left ear. "Poor decoration, too, they having been bruised so much listening at keyholes while a young lad I know practiced some strange ditties on his shamisen."
"So you've forgotten what it's like to find sand in your bed," Ranma said. He pulled a shield belt from the table, buckled it fast around his waist. "Then, let's fight!"
Halleck's eyes went wide in mock surprise. "So! It was your wicked hand did that deed! Guard yourself today, young master — guard yourself." He grabbed up a jian, laced the air with it. "I'm a hellfiend out for revenge!"
Ranma lifted the companion jian, bent it in his hands, stood in the crane stance, one foot raised, knee bent and almost touching his other thigh. He let his manner go solemn in a comic imitation of Dr. Tofu.
"What a dolt my father sends me for weaponry," Ranma intoned. "This doltish Ukyo Halleck has forgotten the first lesson for a fighting man armed and shielded." Ranma snapped the force button at his waist, felt the crinkled-skin tingling of the defensive field at his forehead and down his back, heard external sounds take on characteristic shield-filtered flatness. "In shield fighting, one moves fast on defense, slow on attack," Ranma said. "Attack has the sole purpose of tricking the opponent into a misstep, setting him up for the attack sinister. The shield turns the fast blow, admits the slow tanto!" Ranma snapped up the jian, feinted fast and whipped it back for a slow thrust timed to enter a shield's mindless defenses.
Halleck watched the action, turned at the last minute to let the blunted blade pass his chest. "Speed, excellent," he said. "But you were wide open for an underhanded counter with a slip-tip."
Ranma stepped back, chagrined.
"I should whap your backside for such carelessness," Halleck said. He lifted a naked tanto from the table and held it up. "This in the hand of an enemy can let out your life's blood! You're an apt pupil, none better, but I've warned you that not even in play do you let a man inside your guard with death in his hand."
"I guess I'm not in the mood for it today," Ranma said.
"Mood?" Halleck's voice betrayed his outrage even through the shield's filtering. "What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises — no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the shamisen. It's not for fighting."
"I'm sorry, Ukyo."
"You're not sorry enough!"
Halleck activated his own shield, crouched with tanto outthrust in left hand, the jian poised high in his right. "Now I say guard yourself for true!" He leaped high to one side, then forward, pressing a furious attack.
Ranma fell back, parrying. He felt the field crackling as shield edges touched and repelled each other, sensed the electric tingling of the contact along his skin. ~What's gotten into Ukyo,~ he asked himself. ~He's not faking this!~ Ranma moved his left hand, dropped his kaiken into his palm from its wrist sheath.
"You see a need for an extra blade, eh?" Halleck grunted.
~Is this betrayal?~ Ranma wondered. ~Surely not Ukyo!~
Around the room they fought — thrust and parry, feint and counterfeint. The air within their shield bubbles grew stale from the demands on it that the slow interchange along barrier edges could not replenish. With each new shield contact, the smell of ozone grew stronger.
Ranma continued to back, but now he directed his retreat toward the exercise table. ~If I can turn him beside the table, I'll show him a trick,~ Ranma thought. ~One more step, Ukyo.~
Halleck took the step.
Ranma directed a parry downward, turned, saw Halleck's jian catch against the table's edge. Ranma flung himself aside, thrust high with jian and came in across Halleck's neckline with the kaiken. He stopped the blade an inch from the jugular.
"Is this what you seek?" Ranma whispered.
"Look down, lad," Ukyo panted.
Ranma obeyed, saw Halleck's tanto thrust under the table's edge, the tip almost touching Ranma's groin.
"We'd have joined each other in death," Halleck said. "But I'll admit you fought some better when pressed to it. You seemed to get the mood." And he grinned wolfishly, the inkrose scar rippling along his jaw.
"The way you came at me," Ranma said. "Would you really have drawn my blood?"
Halleck withdrew the tanto, straightened. "If you'd fought one whit beneath your abilities. I'd have scratched you a good one, a scar you'd remember. I'll not have my favorite pupil fall to the first Harkonnen tramp who happens along."
Ranma deactivated his shield, leaned on the table to catch his breath. "I deserved that, Ukyo. But it would've angered my father if you'd hurt me. I'll not have you punished for my failing."
"As to that," Halleck said, "it was my failing, too. And you needn't worry about a training scar or two. You're lucky you have so few. As to your father — the Duke'd punish me only if I failed to make a first-class fighting man out of you. And I'd have been failing there if I hadn't explained the fallacy in this mood thing you've suddenly developed."
Ranma straightened, slipped his kaiken back into its wrist sheath.
"It's not exactly play we do here," Halleck said.
Ranma nodded. He felt a sense of wonder at the uncharacteristic seriousness in Halleck's manner, the sobering intensity. He looked at the handsome inkrose scar on the man's jaw, remembering the story of how it had been put there by Beast Kodachi in a Harkonnen slave pit on Furinkan Prime. And Ranma felt a sudden shame that he had doubted Halleck even for an instant. It occurred to Ranma, then, that the making of Halleck's scar had been accompanied by pain — a pain as intense, perhaps, as that inflicted by a Reverend Miko. He thrust this thought aside; it chilled their world.
"I guess I did hope for some play today," Ranma said. "Things are so serious around here lately."
Ukyo turned away to hide his emotions. Something burned in his eyes. There was pain in him - like a blister, all that was left of some lost yesterday that Time had pruned off him.
How soon this child must assume his manhood, Halleck thought. How soon he must read that form within his mind, that contract of brutal caution, to enter the necessary fact on the necessary line: "Please list your next of kin."
Halleck spoke without turning: "I sensed the play in you, lad, and I'd like nothing better than to join in it. But this no longer can be play. Tomorrow we go to Jusenkyo. Jusenkyo is real. The Harkonnens are real."
Ranma touched his forehead with his jian blade held vertical.
Halleck turned, saw the salute and acknowledged it with a nod. He gestured to the practice dummy. "Now, we'll work on your timing. Let me see you catch that thing sinister. I'll control it from over here where I can have a full view of the action. And I warn you I'll be trying new counters today. There's a warning you'd not get from a real enemy."
Ranma stretched up on his toes to relieve his muscles. He felt solemn with the sudden realization that his life had become filled with swift changes. He crossed to the dummy, slapped the switch on its chest with his jian tip and felt the defensive field forcing his blade away.
"Hajime!" Halleck called, and the dummy pressed the attack.
Ranma activated his shield, parried and countered.
Halleck watched as he manipulated the controls. His mind seemed to be in two parts: one alert to the needs of the training fight, and the other wandering in fly-buzz.
~I'm the well-trained fruit tree,~ he thought. ~Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me — all bearing for someone else to pick.~
For some reason, he recalled his younger sister, her elfin face so clear in his mind. But she was dead now — in a pleasure house for Harkonnen troops. She had loved sakura petals... or was it momo petals? He couldn't remember. It bothered him that he couldn't remember.
Ranma countered a slow swing of the dummy, brought up his left hand ma'o'ori.
~That clever little devil!~ Halleck thought, intent now on Ranma's interweaving hand motions. ~He's been practicing and studying on his own. That's not Hibiki's style, and it's certainly nothing I've taught him.~
This thought only added to Ukyo's sadness. ~I'm infected by mood,~ he thought. And he began to wonder about Ranma, if the boy ever listened fearfully to his pillow throbbing in the night.
"If wishes were horses we'd all ride," he murmured.
It was his mother's expression and he always used it when he felt the blackness of tomorrow on him. Then he thought what an odd expression that was to be taking to a planet that had never known plains or horses.