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Well now, would you like to hear of a race-course, that most people fancy they can get to the end of in two or three steps, while it really consists of an infinite number of distances, each one longer than the previous one?
L. Carroll. What the Tortoise said to Achilles
1.
No matter what you do, Colonel Nicholas Wong always dies. Several dozen meters above his head, drowned out by the roar of the rotor, an assault Dominator unfolds. Its lightweight thermoplastic frame makes it easy to hold even while kneeling in the helicopter's open doorway. Rutaganda has seen this a thousand times already. Nicholas throws up the hand holding his revolver. The Japanese sniper squeezes the trigger. In a fraction of a second an ultramarine beam traces the shortest path from the muzzle to its target, followed by the polarized wave. The helicopter jolts at the last instant. The impact strikes not his head, but the right side of his chest. Had the wave landed a few centimeters farther right, at the shoulder joint, it would simply have torn off his arm. Protein flash-boiling inside his body robs him of the steady aim he has always possessed. Perhaps the last thing Nicholas feels is unbearable heat, and surprise that he has missed from only a few paces away. His brain can hardly believe that his right hand is no longer attached to his body, so until the very last moment of his life—that is, for the next second—Nicholas still considers himself whole. Then the chemical reaction reaches his spine and races off in both directions at once. Bones, muscles, and skin burst apart with such force that even the thick military uniform is ripped to shreds. This time, all that remains of the upper half of Colonel Nicholas Wong is a strip of long-haired scalp and a hand.
Rutaganda has tried everything: telling him to make a run for it before everything started; throwing himself in front of him as a shield; refusing to fly to the roof of the government complex; killing the Japanese sniper first; telling him the entire truth; lying straight to his face; maneuvering him beneath the cover of the helicopter rotor by silently edging closer... He has achieved a remarkable result.
A pair of vertebrae protruding from a charred waist.
Something went wrong much earlier—not for the first time, and by now not even for the hundredth, Rutaganda thinks as he prepares to die yet again, only to awaken once more on the outskirts of New Bangkok to the sharp whistling crack of a whip slicing through the air before leaving another welt across the body of the captured Japanese man. This time he lets the prisoner escape. What difference does it make?
2.
No matter what you do, the Rwandan mercenary Desmond Rutaganda stubbornly crawls toward the cemetery. He is killed by Kougami Shinya and the paratroopers who arrived just in time. An anti-tank missile dropped from the air slams into the armored personnel carrier he has stolen. He writhes in a fatal fever brought on by blood poisoning. He drinks himself to death within weeks and, firing at seagulls, accidentally hits the iron-clad corner of a beam—the ricocheting nine-millimeter bullet flies straight into his eye.
Having driven dozens of his subjects to death, Makishima is bewildered for the first time: he cannot achieve the opposite, though what could be simpler? Pages left open at just the right place. Underlined quotations. Reflections in mirrors. Dreams. Bird feathers. Omens in the clouds. Fragments of radio broadcasts.
Rutaganda is laughably superstitious and just as irredeemably blind—a walking cross between a man and a rhinoceros, charging through the city at maximum speed without seeing farther than his own enormous fleshy nose.
Hands clasped behind his back, the ghost of a dead man watches the madman blow himself up along with the platform meant to immobilize him and feels like Achilles, suddenly realizing his pathological inability to overtake a tiny amphibian [sic] because he had once arrogantly granted the tortoise a ten-meter head start. Humanity's greatest minds—Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, Leibniz, Mill, Russell—have all tried to refute Zeno's paradox, and only now does Makishima understand what compelled each of them to devote so much effort to solving such an awkward, crude contradiction.
Knowledge means recognition. Recognition requires prior knowledge, which itself requires recognition... that is why Achilles is doomed.
3.
No matter what you do, former Inspector Kougami Shinya will still shoot the criminal Makishima Shougo.
The law of the genre is harsh, but that's the law.
4.
Among the thousand-year-old ruins of Angkor Wat, watching a boy fail to control the recoil of a Kalashnikov and spray a burst high over the target, Kougami imagines a misfire.
5.
To do that, Kougami imagines that the solid, spatially extended, and temporally stable world doesn't exist, because it exists only so long as Kougami imagines it to.
6.
He imagines that the powder inside one of the cartridges, forgotten for twenty years in a desk drawer, has become hopelessly damp. As he fires, he already knows where the bullet is supposed to enter: the back of Makishima's head. He deliberately raises his hand a little higher, though until then he had been aiming at his back.
He remembers the story of the Gorgon who turned to stone upon seeing her own reflection, and he never wants to see that face again. Deep down, of course, he has already decided that it is too late. The silence around them is so complete, as though every vehicle in a great city has suddenly stopped. His heart skips a beat. His finger rests comfortably on the trigger. The half-kilogram revolver weighs down the sweat-slick palm of his hand. The blood-soaked gray raglan clings to shoulder blades so sharp that the cloth seems on the verge of tearing.
An instant before the shot, when his finger can no longer be stopped, Kougami realizes that he is firing at a living human being.
A deafening click echoes through the silence.
7.
Makishima flinches as though an invisible bullet really has left the barrel, and for a moment it seems he is about to fall. He sways but remains kneeling. Slowly, not yet trusting his own senses, he turns his head.
The frigid February wind throws his hair across his eyes, but the earth, the pines, the violet enamel-colored clouds somehow smell of spring.
"Suppose they gave a war," Kougami says quietly, "and no one came."