Unpopular Science

Chapter 5

Nightmares are usually the stuff of fantasy, conjured to help the subconscious face its fears. In nightmares, one can live through the worst possible events and it makes the trials of real life seem less awful.

But Remo Williams was dreaming of the past, of events that had actually happened, and it was worse than anything his mind could have imagined.

First came the horror of Kali. Kali confronting them. Kali, the Devourer, alive inside the body of Jilda, mother of Freya.

Almost as soon as he saw her confronting him, Remo saw her dead, killed by an Asian man so small, so old, he looked too feeble to brush a spider from the kitchen table. Horror and self-condemnation dawned on the face of the little Asian man as he realized who he had just killed.

Then came the horror of Kali, the Devourer, alive inside the body of Freya herself. Remo’s daughter. His little girl.

“Red One, remember me,” his little girl said to him in the voice of something ageless and evil.

Then came the collapse of brick and stone, and the hours of digging in the rubble, the flash of golden hair. He extracted her little body from the ruin, a limp thing that wasn’t dead—Remo would not let her be dead. Almost through his own force of will he breathed life back into her.

So it was a dream that ended well enough, as in reality. Freya survived, and she still lived, but in his dream there was a nameless dread.

The dream shifted abruptly. Now there were no great events. No four-armed inhuman beings, no speaking gods. There was just Remo and a friendly woman, who was not an enemy, in a narrow room. Somehow every item in the room clashed in color and design with every other item in the room.

The woman was a seer, and when she started laying out her cards, it looked like a bad late-night television commercial for phone-in psychics, but this woman was one of the few who could truly see.

This was when the dream became, once again, a nightmare.

“I see you,” said the seeress. “I see your fathers and your daughters and your sons, battling one another…”

“I have one son. I have one daughter. That’s all.” Remo was trying to convince himself more than the seeress.

“I did not say soon,” the seeress reminded him. “I did not say when….”

“When,” breathed the Sonoran Desert as he awoke. It was after two in the morning and the village of Sun On Jo was silent. Remo counted the steady heartbeats in the house and felt reassured. He stood at the window and watched the desert, feeling sorry for himself.

He came to Sun On Jo more often now and found it a place where he felt peace and a sense of belonging, but this time there was foreboding. He felt like a fisherman standing on the rail on a perfectly calm sea, with no sign of heavy weather in any direction, but knowing a killer storm was moving in. The weather reports wouldn’t tell him how soon or from which direction the storm would come.

He didn’t know how to steer around it.

He heard a slight snuff from the pit where Freya’s wolf was having its own nightmares, or maybe it was hunting in its sleep. Better not be hunting, Remo thought with a wry smile. Freya didn’t approve of hunting animals for food, even by natural carnivores. She didn’t eat meat and she had poor Sunny Joe packing in more vegetables than he ever ate in all his life. Remo had heard some Sun On Jos complaining that Freya was again stealing ammunition so they couldn’t go out after game.

Freya, Remo decided happily, simply did not have a killer instinct.

As if that revelation wasn’t enough, Remo had another. Without even being aware of it, he’d been evaluating Freya as a potential heir.

Freya, his heir? His trainee? Freya, an assassin?

“What was I thinking?”

Freya embracing the dangerous, bloody existence that was the life of a Sinanju Master? Freya, placed in harm’s way, by her own father? Remo could never do such a thing.

“Well?”

Remo wasn’t alone. It was the man himself, Sunny Joe, who was Remo’s own biological father, who had placed Remo on the doorstep of an orphanage in New Jersey so many years ago. This was also the man who had become the father to Remo’s children, taking them in when they were in distress and in need of the comfort and care of a true home.

“Didn’t mean to wake you,” Remo said, turning away from the desert.

“Why were you breathing so loud, then?” Sunny Joe gave Remo a tight smile that said it was a joke— they both knew Remo was probably the most skilled inhaler/exhaler on the planet. “Let’s go,” Joe said, “before you huff and puff and wake the whole town.”

Sunny Joe Roam had once been a famous movie star, more or less. Using the professional name William S. Roam he appeared in cinematic gems like Muck Man. He even starred in the Muck Man sequels, but those were uninspired efforts that lacked the passion of the original. Roam’s most important role was as the symbolic leader of the village, the Sunny Joe.

They were out in the desert, walking on the rocky earth under the brilliance of the stars, and in the sandy places they left no footprints.

“You were thinking about Freya, but I guess I’m still not so sure what you meant when you said, ‘What was I thinking?’”

Remo felt the night around him, and he felt comfortable in it. Sun On Jo wasn’t a rich place, but it was beautiful. What some saw as a stark wasteland, Remo saw as a magnificent landscape of nature, active and vibrant. He felt at home here. He felt unpressured being here, and unpressured by Sunny Joe. The question was a probing, sensitive one, but Joe wouldn’t be offended if Remo never answered it. Joe—unlike some fathers Remo could mention—wasn’t the harping, nagging, complaining type.

“I’m supposed to take an heir,” Remo said, without really meaning to.

“This I know.”

Remo wondered how much Sunny Joe did know about him, about Sinanju traditions. The Native American tribe was descended from Sinanju, from one of the twin brothers who were Sinanju Masters centuries ago. Two Masters was a violation of tradition, so one twin, Kojong, left behind his village on the rocky coast of Korea and vanished. His fate was unknown in Sinanju until discovered by Remo and Remo’s adopted father, Chiun, Master of Sinanju Emeritus. They learned that Kojong had journeyed to the North American continent and become the spiritual leader of a small tribe, who called him Ko Jong Oh.

The series of events that had occurred over the centuries to intertwine Remo Williams by blood and by training with this ancient Arizona tribe and the Korean art of Sinanju was so intricate that there was no way to rationalize it, no way to name it coincidence. The implications of it not being coincidence were mind-boggling. Remo preferred to not think about it and to stay blissfully unboggled.

“I didn’t even know it myself, that I had it in the back of my head. You know, that maybe Freya would be the right choice to be my heir. Then it occurred to me that she was all wrong for the job, and that’s when it hit me that I’d been sizing her up.”

“Is that why you came here this time?” Roam asked.

“No. Just came to visit.” They walked a few more paces. “Maybe. Maybe that’s why I came.”

“What reason do you need to have an heir now?”

“No reason. I mean, Chiun’s harping on me occasionally to find somebody, but I think he just uses that as filler when he’s got nothing else to complain about.”

“But something makes you seek an heir now?”

They walked a long way under the stars before Remo answered. “Something makes me seek out Freya now.” He smiled. “I think I wanted to rule her out. See, she was a candidate. Now she’s not. She’s safe.”

Sunny Joe nodded. “Safe from your life?”

“Yes.”

“Is your life so bad?”

“My life fits me. I was meant to be who I am. But I wouldn’t wish it on Freya.”

“What of Winston?”

“What about him?”

“But he is your son, in blood. Is he a possible heir?” Remo suddenly experienced a flood of new questions. If he had come to the village with the subconscious intention of evaluating Freya, had he meant to evaluate Winner, too? If not, why not? If so, why had he decided at some level already that his son, an experienced commando with battlefield kills, would be unfit?

“I don’t know, he’s kind of a jerk,” Remo said finally. “Plus he’s like Freya—he’s a Sun On Jo now. He’s not a killer anymore.”

“Huh.” This ancient Sun On Jo word translated into “bullshit”.

“He’s a child,” Remo added. “He’s immature. He’s an egotistical brat. Most Sinanju Masters do begin training when they’re young, but they grow up with their training. I’d be pushing the envelope enough by taking a trainee who’s already grown up. But one who’s grown up and still acts like he’s in junior high school? Now that would be asking for trouble.”

“I think that is good thinking,” Sunny Joe Roam said. “But I think one day Winner will knock your socks off. Boys have a way of surprising their fathers.”

“I guess so.”

They were miles away and gazing down on the village, peaceful and dark.

“Don’t look like too much when you look at it from all the way up here,” Roam observed.

“Looks like the whole world to me,” Remo said.

“Yep.”

Remo squinted. There was a flicker of tight on the horizon. Car headlights, coming toward the village. Sun On Jo didn’t often get visitors, let alone in the dead of night. Who would that be?

“My son.”

The familiar words, said in that gruff Native American voice, caught Remo off guard and he looked at Sunny Joe Roam.

“Yes?”

“You were saying true words, that you’re satisfied with the life you lead. You believe that.”

“Yes, I believe that.” Remo said.

“There could come a day, maybe, when you won’t feel that way.”

“I guess it’s possible, sure.”

Sunny Joe looked out at the village.

“Remember what I told those people when I showed you off to them the first time?”

Remo thought about that, trying to remember.

“That’d be the prince,” Roam said, starting back toward the village as the headlights burst over a rise in the road.

“Huh? Prince Junior?”

“Said he’d get here by midnight,” Roam said. “It’s almost three. Thought I gave him pretty good directions.”

Remo caught up and they paced quickly back to the village. “You talked to him?”

“He’s been calling since ’bout an hour after you got here. You told us to hold your calls, remember?”

“Sure.”

“So he finally said he’d come to talk to you in person.”

“Dammit. Why can’t they leave me alone?”