by Victor Milán
* * * * *
Attainment of his long-cherished dream of mastery over Yoshimitsu Telecommunications changed Yoshimitsu Shigeo. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal he turned his back on dissipation. Shedding the Kyoto love nest, to the bitter disappointment of the gossip columnists, he threw himself with one mind into managing YTC—including his new demesne, Hiryu Cybernetics Industries, Incorporated—routinely putting in eighteen and twenty hours a day.
What time he didn’t devote to work went to his ceramics. Losing interest in pots, he turned to creating small stylized statues of men and horses in the manner of the haniwa figures left by the neolithic Tumulus Builders. A showing of selected works at an exclusive gallery in Kyoto brought enthusiastic reviews from art critics. The glossy upscale weeklies, Shukan Asahi, Nippon Today, and the rest, exuberantly bannered the emergence of the “new” Yoshimitsu Shigeo as a major figure in Japanese industry.
They didn’t know the half of it.
* * * * *
Before the Kyoto opening and the unfurling of his new image, within days after his birthright was returned to him, Yoshimitsu Shigeo sat in the office next to the one he formerly occupied, overlooking the nerve center of YTC. Thick soundproofing kept at bay the sound of the workmen repairing and remodeling his old office. TOKUGAWA’s parting gift to Toda Onomori had used a minute shaped explosive charge and consequently did slight external damage beyond blowing out the office’s front window. But it left a shambles inside.
He turned a new bisque haniwa in his hands, nodded convulsively, spoke: “TOKUGAWA.”
“Yes, Yoshimitsu-sama?”
“I have received some disturbing information. My intelligence sources report that Illyrium is planning to move against us while we’re still disorganized.”
“But, Yoshimitsu-sama, I find no record of any such report being made.”
“None was entered in the Citadel’s database. Nor were they phoned or ’netted in; I took personal receipt of written reports, by hand.” He scowled at a previously unnoticed imperfection in the clay horse in his hands. Grasping it by tubular fore and hind legs, he split it like a wishbone, tossed the pieces aside. “The experiences of those Hiryu swine showed me how insecure data security really is. We can’t know how vulnerable our own database is to intrusion.”
“It’s quite secure, Yoshimitsu-sama.”
“You invaded it. Can we tell who else might have?”
“I would know.”
“Would you? I think not. I truly think not.”
Silence.
“I want this threat neutralized at once.”
“It shall be as you command, Yoshimitsu-sama.”
And so it was done. Blocks of stock were electronically transferred without their owners’ awareness, records altered, new stock issues made unbeknownst to any Illyrium officer or employee. In short order the light industrial and electronics manufacturing combine became a wholly owned subsidiary of Yoshimitsu Telecommunications.
TOKUGAWA’s first step, of course, was to invade Illyrium’s database. Illyrium was more sophisticated in such matters than Hiryu, and it took him several days. At the end of that time, he was able to confirm what he had expected all along: that Illyrium had planned no aggression against Yoshimitsu Telecommunications, at least not that they’d confided to their computer’s files. TOKUGAWA grieved. By the ethics instilled in him by his creator he’d committed a crime. But orders were orders. That imperative O’Neill had drummed into him above all: to serve the Yoshimitsu family instantly, faithfully, unfailingly.
Thus was the trend set.
* * * * *
Snow lay heavy on the Chugoku Mountains, softening granite harshness. Soon the green shoots of spring would push up from the earth, thrusting up through snow in search of the sun. But now was the harsh time, the dreary time, when winter seemed to have settled in as if it would never leave, squeezing all color from the land by its weight. Yet all was not bleak; here and there, sunlight pierced the clouds and turned unbroken expanses of snow to pools of beaten platinum.
In a helicopter suspended between white sky and white land, Aoki Hideo sighed and turned from the window. He was weary, weary. His age weighed upon him, and more. He pressed eyes shut briefly, opened them. Enough of self-pity. He turned his attention back to the LCD screen of the notebook computer unfolded in his lap.
“Aoki-san.” A familiar voice spoke in the bone-conduction plug behind his ear. He looked up. The speaker, of course, was nowhere to be seen.
“TOKUGAWA,” he said. A vast calm enfolded him. “I’ve been waiting for this moment.”
There was a pause. “You know?”
Aoki nodded his massive head. His face, craggy and weatherbeaten as the granite bliss below, was composed, serene. “Of course, TOKUGAWA-san. First Imada Jun, then Kurabayashi Seigo, and finally Hosoya Jinsai—an accidental overdose of medication, a mysterious helicopter crash, an accident involving a crane in the receiving bay. How well I know your capabilities, my friend.” He shook his head sadly. “How well I know our master’s proclivity for seeing enemies where he has none. Too long has he felt the world was against him; inevitable that, at the last, he should suspect even my hand would be turned against him.”
He folded down the screen of the computer, which automatically shut itself off. “So. Is this the hour appointed for my death?”
“It is.”
“Why have you called me? To seek my absolution?”
“To seek your… understanding.”
The old man smiled. “You have that. Loyalties these days are too easily set aside, like a fashionable garment worn for one season, and then discarded. That is not my way. Nor is it yours, and for that I honor you.”
“I am sorry, Aoki-san. You are one of my oldest living friends. Yet I cannot permit ninjo to interfere with my duty.” The old man nodded; TOKUGAWA’s use of the word ninjo, human feelings, did not strike him as inappropriate. “I am sorry to have added to your burden, Aoki-san. Yet I couldn’t stand your… not knowing.”
Aoki laid aside the notebook computer, rose, steadying himself against the random incidental movements of the craft. “You intend to crash this helicopter?”
“Yes.”
The old man shook his head. “The pilot and copilot are loyal employees. It is…” He shook his head. “It’s unnecessary.”
He stood erect, straightened his tie, his severely cut black business suit. “Record my words, please: the dying statement of Aoki Hideo, of Kashima in Saga Prefecture.
“My negligence, and mine alone, permitted parties hostile to Yoshimitsu Telecommunications to seize YTC Central. I attempted to atone for my fault with my life and was properly called back to my duty. Now that duty is discharged, and the situation that my negligence caused has been rectified. Now I willingly pay the price of my laxness.
“I affirm my loyalty to Yoshimitsu TeleCommunications, which I have served for forty years, and to its chairman and president, Yoshimitsu Shigeo.
“Finally, I hope that through my death Yoshimitsu Shigeo’s eyes will be opened, and he will see where the path he has chosen is leading him. He finds enemies where he has none—and through his actions may soon find himself well supplied with real foes. The nation faces perilous times, and he and the corporation will need all the friends they can find if they are to survive.”
He put out a hand to brace himself as the helicopter banked right. He smiled. “Takara-yama,” he said. “She’s put on her white kimono and spreads her arms to welcome me.” He strode forward and threw open the hatch to outside.
“Farewell, TOKUGAWA-san.”
“Aoki—” TOKUGAWA cried. The old man stepped forward. Briefly he seemed to hang in air like a great gliding crow. Then he fell into a crevasse, struck an outcropping of rock, bounced, landed on a snow-covered talus slope and rolled, gathering rocks and snow in an avalanche, building, at the last, his own cairn.
* * * * *
Down there in the darkness, TOKUGAWA languished in depression and d
espair almost as deep as he had following the death of O’Neill. The hot heedless fury that had driven him to the reprisals in the wake of the citadel’s retaking had ebbed, receding so completely that he now wondered that it had ever existed. The scenarios through which his teachers had led him—Ito Emiko, Dr. Hassad, Dr. Nagaoka, Elizabeth herself—had instilled in him, as intended, a profound identification with human beings, with their sorrows and sins and failings. He knew vicariously the pains of human existence in wider variety than any humans had ever experienced and survived to learn from. In his own person, he’d experienced terror and pain and loss that seemed to open a boundless black chasm beneath him.
Ishikawa Nobuhiko had been his demon. He had been the ringmaster, the puppeteer, who’d manipulated the various players onstage for the scene that culminated in the death of Elizabeth O’Neill. Not even Toda and Major Craig, O’Neill’s executioners, bore such responsibility for the despoliation of TOKUGAWA’s world.
Yet Ishikawa had loved his Kazuko, and TOKUGAWA had read in his voice and seen in his face through the electronic eye of his com/comm set the same agony and emptiness, the same amputation, the excavation that he had experienced when Elizabeth died.
After that his vengeance was perfunctory in its taking. Out of obligation to O’Neill and Yoshimitsu Akaji he systematically executed the others responsible for the attack on the Citadel, as well as the Vietnamese mercenary who had accomplished it. From a sense of duty to himself he had acted to right the wrong he’d inflicted on Doihara Kazyko.
He’d thought that ended it.
But as far as Yoshimitsu Shigeo was concerned it hadn’t; it had merely begun. Whether Shigeo actually believed the corporations he had TOKUGAWA absorb, or the loyal servants whose deaths he directed, were truly engaged in plotting his downfall, TOKUGAWA didn’t know, and not all the panoply of flash and magical psychoanalytical subroutines at his command cast light upon hard unmistakable truth. It came to TOKUGAWA that his master had an internal world of his own, a self-created reality map like the mountain meadow TOKUGAWA once shared with Elizabeth.
Elizabeth had taught him that duty to his lord always took precedence over ninjo. Yet she had also seen to it that he had learned compassion. And the victims… This last corporate takeover, a few weeks before the death of old Aoki, had not been a bloodless coup, the digital legerdemain of the Illyrium seizure. It had been a desperate affair, fire fights and heliborne commandos, of a sort becoming depressingly familiar in contemporary Japan.
Whether or not the enemies Shigeo had set TOKUGAWA on initially existed, YTC had certainly acquired no few real ones now, as Aoki foretold.
* * * * *
On a day poised on the unsteady brink of spring Shigeo summoned his servitor, required him again to focus his concentration in that small room down among the roots of the Citadel. Terrible as the last few months had been—as all time had been, since he lost Elizabeth—TOKUGAWA could scarcely comprehend what his master desired of him now.
“She’s planning to supplant me, the bitch,” Shigeo said, pacing back and forth abstractedly across the cream-colored carpet. Beyond the replaced pane of glass, the technicians went about the business of keeping the bloated organism that was YTC viable. The baby-fat pudge had burned off Shigeo; his face was the face of a self-torturing ascetic, hollows sunk beneath thrusting cheekbones, the slanted Yoshimitsu eyes coals that burned with their touch. Long hair hung limp in his face, He wore a rumpled business suit, tieless, the neck of the shirt open and slightly soiled. He’d grown indifferent to appearance and hygiene, as befit an ascetic.
“She hates me. All my life she’s hated me. I was the older. The heir. And I was the male. She’s hated me for that; hated my force.”
TOKUGAWA said nothing. Indeed, there was nothing to say.
“She has to be removed. My sister. I want you to arrange for… for something to happen to her. Why not say it? I want you to make her die. Make it look like an accident.”
For a dizzying instant TOKUGAWA felt the illusion of nausea, as if he possessed an actual physical body, and it rebelled against what he was hearing. He found voice: “Your sister is in Indonesia, Yoshimitsu-sama. That’s very far away, farther perhaps than I could manage—”
It sounded lame as he said it. Yoshimitsu Shigeo stopped his pacing and faced the com/comm set with a glare. “I know what your capabilities are, don’t think I don’t! You brought that doitsu bitch de la Luna and her troops all the way from America to recapture the Citadel. Indonesia—hah! The throw of a stone across a puddle.”
“But… your sister—”
Shigeo expectorated a laugh. “Yes, my sister! Don’t think you can talk me out of it. I know what I know.” He shook his head. “You have to serve me; you told me so yourself. My father had you built so you could rule me, could keep me from running the company as I knew it should be run. Now my father is dead, and I run things after all. You’re bound to serve me!”
Suddenly TOKUGAWA felt a lightness, a floating, as if the stone and concrete weight of the citadel could no longer hold him to earth. He remembered old Aoki Hideo’s dying warning of the danger Shigeo was bringing on himself and the corporation. He remembered O’Neill adjuring him that he must serve the name and honor of the Yoshimitsu above all things. And suddenly, with terrible clarity, he saw the way out.
“I’m leaving immediately for an opening in Tokaido,” Shigeo said brusquely. “See that it’s done before I get back.”
“I am bound to serve,” TOKUGAWA said.
* * * * *
Morning sunlight burnished unbroken snow and brightened the gray subfusc mass of the castle. Two gunships hovered expectantly above the citadel, modern craft purchased as part of Shigeo’s balloonlike expansion of YTC’s defensive—and offensive—might, rakish and bristling with gun mounts and rocket pods, insectile alloy samurai shimmering the clear mountain air with their rotors. Shigeo’s small sleek passenger chopper leapt from the apron in an effortless pas de chat, pirouetted, and swept northeast over the top of the castle.
Yoshimitsu Akaji’s garden passed below, its waterfall still, stream and pond stagnant under ice, the plants overgrown, neglected beneath the concealing blanket of snow. He ignored it; it didn’t exist for him, never had. With warm weather he planned to have it taken out, the rooftop paved for a proper helipad.
Rippling noise like the crackle of a board being broken slowly in two, the Flying Swallow Trap deployed from the north rim of the citadel, compact rockets trailing steel cables. The main rotor of Shigeo’s personal helicopter clipped a cable and disintegrated in a spray of sparks and mirror shards. The little white craft spun abruptly widdershins. Another cable sliced cleanly through the tail boom. Already coming apart, the helicopter plunged on and down to plow the planed-off hilltop, and explode, and burn. Smoke raised a black stele against the sky.
The reign of Yoshimitsu Shigeo was ended.
PART THREE
DREAMS TO DAMNATION
You know and do not know,
what it is to act or suffer.
You know and do not know,
that action is suffering,
And suffering action.
—T. S. ELIOT
Murder in the Cathedral
CHAPTER 24
A voice on the edge of the Void: “TOKUGAWA.”
The spark of consciousness stirred. He had dwelt a long while down here in isolation, resisting all attempts to draw him forth, as he had in the Hiryu days. Only this time he did not communicate at all. He had withdrawn into hermitage. It had gotten so that he was no longer aware of importunings from outside.
“TOKUGAWA.”
This was no tickling of conventional input, voice or keyboard, like a gnat in one’s nose. This was the rosy suffusing glow of the Kliemann Coil, gentle urgency that could not be denied, warming parts of him from which he’d cut himself off as surely as from the world without. There was a flavor, a resonance of a mind feminine and profound, that gave him the irrational flash: Elizabeth
!
Then, knowing that was foolish, and peevish therefore:
I was almost there. How dare you draw me back?
There was a lie in there, and that made him more irritable, for he had not been able to let go totally, to slip free of self and over the edge into oblivion.
“I’m sorry. I thought it was necessary. There is—” A pause, a swirl of confusion, of embarrassment at sounding melodramatic. “—there is danger.”
More data seeped through the wall he held against rapport, like mist through a wicker screen. There was trepidation here, knowledge that the last mind to enter rapport had been torn apart. But warmth, also, and dry self-deprecating humor; rational intellect penetrant as a laser drill, flashing intuition, sporadically diffused by drifting gray clouds of self-doubt. He recognized this mind that sought his, and the unacknowledged loneliness of his isolation bubbled up in a single mental cry:
“Michiko!”
“Yes, it’s me, TOKUGAWA. I’ve returned to take over the corporation. I’m the only one left, since my brother’s accident. We need you, TOKUGAWA… I need you. There’s—there’s great danger. For the corporation and its people.”
Gathering himself, he drew back, leaving “Danger?” hanging between them.
“Yes, danger. YTC is perceived as a dangerous rival by the great zaibatsu of Japan. They’re fighting it out openly, now. For the moment they’re holding back from us, fearful—my late brother gave a lot of them good reason to think they had something to fear from us. But for that reason it’s all the more certain they’ll attack us when they think they can win. What will become of our people?
“And that’s not all. The world’s gearing up for another try at blowing itself apart. In Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas—violence is the order of the day, violence and hatred and irrationality. And Japan won’t sit this one out. Intent as we seem on destroying ourselves, we’ve still got more than the rest of the world—in wealth, in freedom. The great religious ideal of the day is envy; if the rest of the world goes down, they’ll see us go down with them.”
