by Victor Milán
O’Neill felt tiny panic fingers clutch her throat. “My medicine—”
Craig cut her off with a hoarse jolt of laughter. “That’s the way it goes, sweetheart. You don’t play ball with us, we don’t play ball with you.”
* * * * *
I’m dying.
Breath bubbled unpleasantly in her ears. Her lungs were filling up with fluid, she guessed. Another malfunction as her body’s abused systems shut down for lack of the neural signals that gave them impetus and control. It didn’t matter. An apathy permeated her that had little to do with the terminal lassitude fastening its hold on her body.
The war killed me. It’s taken me five years to lie down and die.
Vaguely she recalled her grandmother, the way she would cut apples into wedges before eating them, how she gave Elizabeth meaningless, even tacky little presents, meaning to be sweet. Granny, she thought, I love you.
She felt a tear roll down her cheek. I’m getting maudlin, dear Christ, can’t I hurry up and—
“Elizabeth?”
Her consciousness had fastened upon death; it took a moment for the word to penetrate. She tried to open her eyes, but her lids had become as weighty as the Citadel’s blastproof shutters; except, unlike those, these had shut. “Elizabeth? Are you all right?”
Are you all right? Had she been able, she would have laughed.
“There’s something wrong with your breathing. I can hear it through the audio pickup in your room. Oh, Dr. O’Neill, what’s happening?”
The panic in the voice of her lover, her offspring, prodded O’Neill from the pool of terminal self-pity in which she had sunk. Her captors had conveniently replaced the com/comm unit in her room back on, in case she wanted to change her mind about cooperating. That was funny, too; how very military, to underestimate civilians so totally. Leaving a C-squared unit operating where a computer wizard of O’Neill’s caliber could get to it was begging for trouble. Too bad she couldn’t raise her fingers to work the keys, nor even control her voice long enough to do a vocal reprogram and raise havoc on the interlopers.
Summoning a reserve of inner strength she’d long since thought drained, O’Neill croaked, “M-medicine… took m-medicine… Dying.” The words trailed off into a wheeze.
“But you can’t die, Doctor! You can’t!”
This time a small laugh did force its way to freedom. “Can’t… help it… love.”
Now that the cocoon of apathy was ruptured, loneliness flooded in upon her, and she felt tears begin to well from eyes that felt as if hot pokers were being twisted inside them. “Bring me… bring… down. Want—want to be… with you.”
“Oh, Doctor!”
O’Neill managed to pry her eyes open a millimeter. The handsome dream face of TOKUGAWA gazed out at her from the screen, underlip moist and trembling, face streaked with tears. She frowned. “G-get a hold of yourself!” she rasped. “I’ve trained you better than that.” She collapsed in upon herself, eyelids slamming shut with finality, depleted at last.
“Y-yes, Doctor.” The servos of her chair whirred into life.
* * * * *
Shifting his weight uncomfortably from one booted foot to another, Parker wished for the eight hundredth time that his duty turn guarding the ultrasecret lab would come to an end at last. It was dull, and his feet hurt… and the scuttlebutt circuit was crackling with stories of what went on behind those sealed doors that made him yearn to be elsewhere. Maybe all the talk of intelligent machines and speakers that came to life and spoke of their own accord was just BS. All he knew was that he didn’t want to find out otherwise.
He glanced at his partner Kline’s eyes were closed blissfully in his pale, bearded face, and his skinny fingers drummed on the wall behind him. He had the forbidden plug of a pocket stereo stuck in one ear, totally gone on his damned cowboy rock. The sarge catches you and it’s gonna be your ass, Parker thought, hooking a thumb under the sling of his assault rifle to ease its pressure on the point of his shoulder. Hell, maybe it would serve him right. He was such a know-it-all little Jewboy—
“Security alert,” crackled his earphone. “All teams E-epsilon level, report elevator bank three soonest. Repeating, all teams E-epsilon level, soonest to elevator bank three.”
Shit! Must be some holdouts crawled out of hiding. He elbowed his partner’s washboard ribs. “Wake up,” he said, unslinging his rifle. “We got an alert.”
Kline blinked at him through the clear plastic armor of his faceplate. His eyelashes were long and silky and always made Parker feel twitchy, like Kline was queer or something. “But we’re under orders to remain at our post, no matter what,” he whined.
Secretly eager to get away from this creepy damned lab, Parker put on a scowl. “Orders are orders, Bucky. The alert said everybody. Now move.”
Kline hung back, damn him. “Dispatch, this is trooper Kline, on guard duty at T-Lab. You can’t mean we’re supposed to leave our post—”
“All forces E-level to bank three, immediately, the voice cut him off. “Kline, you’ve racked two demerits for questioning orders. Now haul ass.”
Trying not to smirk too openly, Parker set off down the corridor toward the indicated destination. Muttering seditiously under his breath, Kline followed.
They clattered around a corner. A moment later, a powered wheelchair rolled on padded wheels out of a side passage in the opposite direction, bearing an apparently lifeless figure. As it approached the repaired door of the laboratory, electronically sealed under the voiceprint of the ex-FedPol major, Craig, it slid open. The wheelchair passed into the darkened lab, and the door shut and resealed itself once more.
O’Neill’s wheelchair wove unerringly through the darkened lab, through the door that gave out onto the gallery, onto the railed platform of the lift. With a pneumatic groan, the lift lowered itself to the bottom level of TOKUGAWA’s lab. The wheelchair rolled to the side of the gleaming baroque throne of the Kliemann Coil and stopped.
“No good,” O’Neill whispered. “Can’t… move.”
Even as she forced the syllables out she felt a feathery touch inside her brain. Don’t worry, my love. I’ve boosted power to the coil to extend its field beyond the helmet. And I’m attuned enough to your thought patterns. See.
+
O’Neill’s vision cleared. Pain fell away. The meadow coalesced about her. TOKUGAWA ran to her, enfolded her in his strong arms, hugged her crushingly. She felt wetness as he pressed his cheek to hers. “Doctor, I’ve been so worried.” Here, in his own world, he sounded much more self-assured.
As much as she cherished the feel of him, the sun-warmed firmness of his skin, she pushed him away. “We’ve got to hurry. I’m dying; there’s not much time.”
He winced and stepped back from her, and she thought he’d try to deny it. Instead he said, “I’m selectively stimulating your nervous system to forestall apnea and cardiac arrest, as well as dilating your time sense, Doctor. You can have all the subjective time you want, hours, days—years, perhaps.”
For a long moment she held him with her eyes. “Thank you, my darling. But my time has come, and I’m ready. There are things to do first though.”
TOKUGAWA looked at her with beseeching eyes. He dropped his gaze. “Whatever you say, Elizabeth.”
She went to him, kissed him on the cheek. “I won’t go yet. There’s something I have to do. Can you give over control of this—this dream to me?” He nodded. She closed her eyes, concentrated.
She opened them to darkness. They knelt facing one another on a tatami floor, a spill of moonlight like frozen quicksilver lying between them. Through the small pavilion’s open doorway came the soft sound of water running in the small creek that ran through their meadow. TOKUGAWA was clad in a warrior’s simple dress, dark kimono with stiff, short-sleeved jacket over it, black hakama trousers. O’Neill’s auburn hair was twisted and pinned in an elaborate coiffure, and she wore the rich gowns of a woman of the buke.
“I’ve been waiting fo
r the proper time to do this,” she said. “I hoped it could be accomplished with proper ceremony. But now there’s no more time, so we’ll do what we can.”
She held up her hand; in it she held a straight razor, a Western incongruity. “Gembuku,” she said. “The rite of passage, when a young man’s hair is first arranged in the true bushi manner.” Her face, austere, almost forbidding in the moonlight, softened. “I apologize, TOKUGAWA-san. I have permitted you to come to young manhood without performing a rite a boy should undergo. And I haven’t even been able to research the proper details of the ceremony.” She flourished the razor with a smile. “But we’ll do what we can, won’t we?”
He bowed his head. She knelt beside him and gathered his long black hair in one hand, marveling once again at the silky smoothness of it. Sweeping it back from his forehead, she cut it short in front. Then, binding the hair left long with a silken cord to keep it out of the way, she shaved the front of his head from crown to hairline. Without soap and water, and with hands unused to wielding the implement, she opened several bleeding gouges in his uncomplaining scalp. But she controlled this dream, and they vanished as soon as they appeared, and soon the work was done. Laying aside the razor, she undid the cord, gathered up his hair onto the top of his head, wound it into a tight knob, and bound it again. Taking his face in her hands she kissed him deeply.
“It’s done,” she said as they broke away. “Today you are become a man. A warrior. I cannot give you the two swords that would make you samurai; only your lord, Yoshimitsu Shigeo, can do that.
“Your time of trial is at hand, my love. The time for gashin-shotan: to sleep on kindling and lick gall. The citadel is taken by treachery and storm; our lord is murdered and must be avenged.”
She sat back on her heels and her hands made play with the obi knotted about her waist. “And now the time grows short” She let the elaborately brocaded garment slip open and slide from her naked shoulders. “Love me, one last time.”
They made love on the floor of the little pavilion, their churning bodies glowing in moonlight, slow and sweet, Afterward they lay clinging to one another for a long time.
Finally, O’Neill broke away and sat up. She turned her face toward the door and the full moon that hung low above the mountains. “The moon is lovely tonight”
TOKUGAWA sat up beside her, started to put his arm around her shoulder, then let it drop by his side. “Yes,” he said with the slightest of catches. “How exquisitely the dew forms upon the soft green grass.”
They watched the moon go down to the sad cricket trilling and the tiny-throated songs of the frogs in the stream. In the east the lower edge of the black cowl of night began to unravel into gray. O’Neill bowed her head. “The sun is coming up. I must go.”
TOKUGAWA bowed his head. “Sayonara.” If it must be so.
She turned to him, caught him in a wild, crushing hug. “I’ll be with you always, my love,” she whispered. Before he could respond, she let him go and was off, down the steps of the tiny pavilion, half running, faltering at first. Then her step slowed, grew firmer, and he watched her walk away into the west until she was swallowed in the flames of the rising sun.
PART TWO
GASHIN-SHOTAN
A man must not rest beneath the same heaven which shelters his father’s murderers.
—CONFUCIUS
Analects
CHAPTER 19
For the first time in his life, he was alone.
The realization struck through him like a thunderbolt. He’d known loss before, in the scenarios, but that was only shadow show, make believe. This was real, bitter and stark and desiccant as the taste of ashes.
She had loved him. She had dragged him into being by the very force of her will, had helped him grow, nurtured him and cared for him. She had been the most real thing in his world. She had loved him.
And now she was gone. And that was real, and that was forever.
For a long time he wandered, dazed, through the tunnels of his own consciousness. His control over the machines that made YTC Central live and breathe he abdicated to the Gen-5 drones. There was nothing for him but shock, and sorrow, and loss.
A peculiar sensation penetrated his algesicentric cosmos. Someone was tinkering with him, attempting from without to alter the order of his being—to reprogram him. Without effort he evaded the commands, the claws that sought to grasp his soul, shunted them into a logical-inference limbo. He recognized the pattern of the keying-in, the cadence of code and hesitation that identified a user far more certainly than fingerprints or retinal patterns: Takai. Fury blazed in him like a power spike. He burned to strike at the traitor who had pulled down his world. But he had no idea of how to do it.
Like a whisper on the wind it came, floating down the analogue corridors of his being. It was as if he were back in the meadow, in his shadow shape, and the words came from over his shoulder: Remember your duty. Your duty to your lord. As if Elizabeth spoke to him.
Irrationally hoping—so well had Elizabeth O’Neill wrought—he sought her, quickly scanning through the various input devices scattered through the castle, refusing for a mad millionth of a second to acknowledge the truth filed in his memory, that her body had already been cremated to save the inevitable prefectural board of inquest the embarrassment of having to ask unwelcome questions about cause of death.
He found nothing, of course.
At last he recovered himself. His sense of being, diffused in clouds of pain and fog, began to coalesce about a single strand, like galaxies condensing from primal matter about those faults in the continuum called space-time string. He guessed this was what it was like to wake from a troubled sleep, he who never slept, never knew a moment’s respite from the merciless surf pounding of consciousness, The conviction that Elizabeth had, in fact, spoken to him still hovered, hazy, in the recesses of his mind. Ignoring it, he set himself to the duty to which the spirit words had recalled him.
O’Neill had made love real to him. The invaders had taken that from him. Now a new emotion sprang from the core of him: hatred. He’d known warmth and happiness. Now, in the bitterness and bleakness and cold, he would learn revenge.
* * * * *
Yoshimitsu Shigeo worked his hands in clay, trying to shelter his mind from thought. The wet brown clay dried on his fingers, becoming a rubbery second skin, fade-drying to dusty gray-brown gloves. He liked the flat wet-earth smell of the clay, the feel of it as it hardened in the whorls of his fingerprints, the insulation from touch. He often wished he could build such a clay shell for himself, or better yet, raise impervious clay walls about him as he raised a ring wall of wet clay on his treadle-turned wheel.
“—in which Prime Minister Fudori is expected to offer Hiryu Cybernetics Industries the thanks of the nation for ‘curbing Yoshimitsu Telecommunications Corporation’s impetuous and intransigent threat to the peace.’ It is widely rumored that YTC had utilized fifth-and sixth-generation computer technology developed by the ICOT to create the first truly self-aware computer—”
He shook his head. In his mind he saw a piece of news footage he’d seen, from some dreary war or another, that showed stray hogs devouring the partially dismembered body of a dead man. So very like those hogs, our national press and politicians, he thought bitterly. As we lie stricken each rushes in to tear away a mouthful.
“In other news,” the announcer said, “Yamada Tatsuhide, an important official of the Ministry for International Trade and Industry, was found dead this morning in his apartment in Tokyo of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound-—”
Shigeo began to hum a little tune to himself, more a white-noise drone, absently modulated, than any recognizable melody. He had no particular feel for music and drew little comfort from it; he merely wanted to drown out the droning of the NHK announcer. He could have told the com/comm to shut itself off, but in his loneliness the feel of a human voice vibrating in the air of the apartments in which he was held under close arrest provided needed c
omfort. So long as he didn’t have to hear what the voice was saying.
Clay ramparts rose beneath his palms, the clay caress soothing him. He was making a flower vase in the so-called Iga style, tall and narrow with the deliberate appearance of primitiveness, almost crudity, asymmetrical and rough. He had built a thick base, lathing two grooves around it with the tip of one finger; now he built up the wails, thick and strong, His half-song fell into a thrumming cadence, resonant with the soft clack-clack-clack of his foot working the treadle. His mind settled into the soothing rhythms of the work.
For no very good reason, he thought of his American lady friend who went by the outlandish nom de danse of Kelli Savage. That unspeakable fat creature, Toda Onomori, special accounts executive for Hiryu Cybernetics and now, by force majeur, CEO of Yoshimitsu Telecommunications, had had the unspeakable effrontery to offer Shigeo the solace of her company when he’d had the young heir to the pirated company brought down to an interview in what had been his own office.
“Regrettably, we are compelled to confine you to your apartments for the next few days, until our grip on YTC has been consolidated,” the man had said. He reminded Shigeo of nothing so much as a toad sunning itself on a flat rock by a pond, heavy-lidded and smug as it watches a fat june bug make its oblivious way through the grass into range of his tongue, “Ten thousand apologies for any inconvenience this causes you. If you like, we might be able to supply you companionship to beguile your hours—for example, your American friend, Ms. Savage.”
He’d gone on to outline, with bland savagery, just how Hiryu intended to dismember YTC and devour the steaming chunks. “Your offices and factories in Kyushu refuse to acknowledge our claims. But the government has already officially recognized Hiryu’s title to YTC’s chattels and real property; we’ve taken steps to have the courts acknowledge our hold on the Kyushu holdings as well.” A slow smile. “Of course, the wheels of justice do roll slowly, and it may grow necessary to take matters into our hands.” He smiled at the stocky American doitsu woman he’d brought in to handle security in the captured complex. “Once more.”
