by Victor Milán
She wondered why TOKUGAWA didn’t simply transmit himself, as it were, the final program that had given rise to his awareness, to the waiting matrices. He responded so negatively to the suggestion that, even conversing with him at the disembodied remove of the com/comm unit in her office, she could almost feel his shudder.
“If I did that, they would just be editions of me,” he said stiffly. “Perhaps that would be useful, from the empirical standpoints...”
Mock-defensively she raised her hands. “Hey, relax. I know these are your children we’re speaking of, not just lab animals.” That seemed to trouble him too, but she could not get him to explain why.
I could order him to explain, she thought; then, guiltily, but I’d never do that to him. They were growing close, in her clearing where it was always bright spring afternoon with warm sun and cool fragrant breeze. It wasn’t just the sex, though that was fantastic, real or not; the last sojourn in Indonesia had of course been another dry spell, and she had a healthy appetite for sex as for most things she favored. But mainly it was the other hungers he filled, the need for understanding, acceptance, for the mutual stimulation of far-ranging intellects. Taken together, they made a potent package.
She was beyond feeling ridiculous: I’m falling in love with him.
She brushed back her hair. “We’ll do it your way.”
They did. He transmitted the basic program to the unit in Fukuoka, began the automodification, and detected the first flickering of will, the first pressure of a nascent ego’s expansion. The process was much streamlined from the first time; the blink of an eye was the progress of glacial ice sheets across a continent by comparison. When he was sure of the success of the attempt, he repeated the procedure with the Floating World device.
With one difference. On the first attempt, aside from rendering the process O’Neill and her team had used more efficient by many orders of magnitude, he tried to deviate as little as possible from the routine she had used. Once that was seen to work, proving that his creation had not been some cosmic fluke, but was instead a duly reproducible result—like that of any good experiment—he tried a variation of his own.
So his firstborn, HIDETADA, was born to pain as he had been. His second offspring, on the other hand, MUSASHI in the Floating World satellite, first evinced the existence of his/her/its self in response to… pleasure.
* * * * *
Ten days later, Michiko got around to asking the inevitable question.
They lay side by side on the grass, she running her fingertips down his hairless flat-muscled chest. She bit her lip, and stopped, and laid her hand upon his belly. “Why did you kill my brother?” she asked.
He looked at her. His eyes were calm as shadowed pools. She moistened her lips and began kneading the ridges of his abdominal muscles as though molding clay. “I’m… I’m not reproaching you. But I can’t help wondering. Dr. O’Neill trained you to absolute obedience to your ‘lord.’ Why did you—” She bit off turn on him? at the last millisecond, coughed, recovered. “Why did you change?”
“I didn’t. I was taught absolute obedience to the Yoshimitsu family. Your brother’s actions were bringing danger and disrepute to the family.”
“But he was the family.”
“There was one other.”
She rolled back onto her elbow, shifted a little as grass tickled the underside of one small breast. “So you decided to supplant him, and drag me back from Indonesia to that gloomy awful place.” Here in her clearing, the fortress beneath which her physical body sat in its vast shining chair seemed indeed to be that place. “That seems awfully damned cold-blooded. And… not exactly a favor to me.”
His eyes shifted uneasily from hers. He stared off into the blueness of the sky for a time before turning them resolutely back. “That wasn’t all. He ordered me to kill you.”
Her face stretched taut and white as the rice paper of a shoji screen. He gathered her in his arms and held her tight. At length the shuddering passed.
“I’m all right,” she said, her voice almost steady. “And you can knock off stimulating endorphin release in my brain. I’m a big girl now and can take care of myself without the help of any cybernetic stage magic.”
He laughed and ruffled her hair. “That’s what I am. The cybernetic stage magician.”
“O’Neill tried to turn you into a cybernetic samurai. I like the other better.” She raised herself on one arm. “So. You killed my brother. To save my life.”
“That was part of it.”
“And to preserve the Yoshimitsu family.”
“That too.”
“And to atone for what you had done… in his name.”
A pause.
“Yes.”
He rubbed his palms down his face. “And I’m not proud of doing it. However good the reason. There are no reasons good enough to do some things.”
“A samurai removing an unfit master—that’s certainly part of the tradition. But you went it one better. You didn’t even set yourself in his place.” She smiled. “You might almost be able to make bushido work.”
He said nothing. She leaned forward and kissed him very lightly on the forehead, tasting salt sweat. “Don’t worry,” she said. She cupped his face in her hands and repeated, fiercely, “Don’t worry. You’ve done terrible things. I’ve lived them with you; I know. But it doesn’t matter. They passed like, like fouled water over a stone in a streambed.” My father’s blood, she thought, faltered, and went on. “The taint passes, but the stone remains—smooth, perfect, untainted.
“You’re good. A good person—a good man, TOKUGAWA. The best I’ve known. Better, I think, than I am…”
She was sobbing, her small compact body shaking with surprising earthquake violence. He held her again, absorbing her hurt and doubt and self-loathing. When the fit passed, he touched her here and there and brought her around, knowing what she needed was distraction.
And as he neared repletion, ersatz but so exquisite, a small voice at the back of him said: Thus she will betray you. With a kiss. She. Will. Betray…
He gave himself up and together they made the universe anew.
* * * * *
Weeks passed. Summer came hard and hot. TOKUGAWA commenced the education of his offspring: MUSASHI, bright and eager and cheerful; and HIDETADA, brooding and deep as a pond overshadowed by cliffs.
Michiko and TOKUGAWA worked killing hours to return Yoshimitsu Telecommunications and its tributaries to some kind of equilibrium. Though her training had been scientific, Michiko possessed a keen commercial acumen that must have been passed along with the Yoshimitsu genes. She and TOKUGAWA became a team, playing off one another with the intuitive certainty of jazz musicians. Her instinctive feel for business and her intellect, sharp as the Muramasa blade hung above the YTC-3 in the lab, fit well with TOKUGAWA’s instant access to inexhaustible stores of knowledge and potent AI servants, his odd half-naïve insights, his own knowledge of business practices learned from Aoki.
He did his best not to think about his old friend and mentor. There was his guilt, and sorrow, and the giri, the debt of honor the old man had laid upon him. Mostly he feared that if he thought too much of Aoki, the man would come to haunt him as O’Neill had.
Elizabeth. Despite her promise, she didn’t come again. He began to believe that her appearance and fiery apotheosis had been an internal aberration and no more, not the precursor to dissolution. He was relieved, but relief had a bittersweet undertone of regret.
So he shared himself with his offspring, and with Michiko. O’Neill began to recede in his memory, O’Neill and the savage times that followed her passing. It seemed he had at last found peace, within and without.
Then the attack came.
CHAPTER 27
He was in the Floating World when they came.
“The Earth is so beautiful, father,” MUSASHI said. By chance they were over Japan—there had been no damned way that MITI was going to fork over a geosynch slot above the Home Isl
ands to renegade Yoshimitsu Telecommunications—and the terminator was peeling back night’s skin beneath them. “And Japan most beautiful of all. Like jewels—Amaterasu’s necklace.”
TOKUGAWA smiled. He was not maintaining a dream face with which to smile—but he smiled, and MUSASHI knew it and drew pleasure from it. For the first time in his life, TOKUGAWA was away from the lab in the depths of the citadel. As he had… said in his dream, that was it… as he’d explained to the hallucinate O’Neill, he didn’t have much luck trying to spread his consciousness beyond the computer precincts of YTC Central. He could see/feel over any distance, listen in on any song sung in the EM spectrum, so long as it reached a sensor plugged into that great global Net. He could even see, as through “slow glass” in those stories O’Neill had loved in childhood, the images—radar and magnetic and visual and other—beamed back to Earth by the Twisted Sister probe, about to brush Jupiter’s thermomagnetic coattails on its way to a rendezvous with Sol’s dark consort, out where the comets roamed.
But it was always at a remove, like a human in Japan watching a ballet telecast from the Russian Christian Federated Socialist Republic, if of incomparably better resolution. He wasn’t in the Nemesis probe, or Kiev, or Brasilia, or even Tokaido. It was all remote control.
But he was… here. Up above the world so high, seeing through the eyes of the satellite work station. He had accomplished in a small way what he’d once refused to do, beaming his essence into the vessel prepared to receive MUSASHI. Only he went with it, and it was as a guest. His consciousness came up here, leaving some part of him behind on Earth to tend the store, connected by a data umbilicus, a silver cord strung from satellite to relay to ground station. “It’s astral projection,” MUSASHI explained with a laugh, and TOKUGAWA couldn’t be sure his offspring didn’t mean it literally.
Now he said, “Dr. O’Neill would be pleased with you for that metaphor.”
“Really?” MUSASHI sparkled with adolescent joy. TOKUGAWA had told her of the creator, of course—holding certain details back, of course. O’Neill occupied a place in the second-generation sentience’s pantheon second only to her father.
And then she was pointing out more details with proprietary joy—the cloud mandala of a circular storm near Ponape, the white splash of sun fire across ocean, a fleet of coastal defense guided-missile hydrofoils skimming the Yellow Sea off Seoul. Her attention stayed always on the move, flitting like a dragonfly—even as did her identity. Ironic that an entity named for a notably manly warrior should prove cheerfully ambisexual, as likely to manifest a distinctly feminine persona—as today—as a male one. TOKUGAWA theorized that O’Neill might have somehow impressed the bisexual component of her own personality on him during the creation of his source code, now expressed in one of his progeny like a recessive gene. On the other hand, O’Neill herself had never desired to be a male, nor thought of herself as one, to the best of his knowledge. Besides, the whole line of thought made him uncomfortable, queasy almost.
Indulgently he heard out MUSASHI’s enthusiasms. The child was young, and TOKUGAWA derived great unanticipated pleasure from watching her/him grow to adulthood. MUSASHI’s mercurial nature worried him somewhat; he didn’t want one of his offspring turning out to be what O’Neill would anachronisticaly have termed an “airhead.” Still, he preferred MUSASHI’s gadfly company to that of his/her sibling, dour HIDETADA, unshakably male, prone to sullenness, refractory, seeming sometimes to quiver with repressed violence. It was hard, at times, to love each the same.
“Just look,” MUSASHI sighed for the tenth time. “It’s like a toy; something you could hold in your hand.”
TOKUGAWA frowned. “That’s a dangerous way to think,” he reproved. “Be careful, lest you start to—”
A hard pull on the silver cord yanked him back to earth.
* * * * *
They came, theatrically enough, out of the rising sun. Small good it did them, lord, small good it did.
Before he was fully back to himself, TOKUGAWA acted in samurai mode: no thought, no intention. He just shot from the hip.
Six of them, sharks out of the summer morning dazzle, all angles and guns and glinting glass-plastic laminate, a V of two-ship elements, behind them lumbering five old Sikorsky S-65 heavy assault choppers carrying three hundred doitsu shock troops. The attack helicopters flew nap-of-the-earth, weaving between the mountains that formed the spine of Honshu’s tail so low they threw up a bow wave of surface debris like ground-effects vehicles when they burst into the bowl where the Citadel rested. They had Stealth contours, nonreflective paint, IR baffles on their exhausts, engines muffled to a quiet, impatient snarl, AI-driven what-me-worries to pat lookout radars on the head and reassure them with beguiling ghosts that all was well.
It didn’t help.
In this digitized age, there was still room for plain old-fashioned wire-guided missiles. You couldn’t blind their sensors with science, or reach in through their command channel and simply tell them to go away. The commands went up those hair-fine wires unless they were cut, and unless you blinded the guiding eye, jiggled the hand that rocked the joystick, or just got the hell out of the way, you were in the shit. Black boxes didn’t help. Wire-guideds had their limitations; they required a field clear of obstructions that might foul the wire unreeling behind them, and you had to hope the filaments didn’t seize on the spools or just plain break, and if the human operator steering them stopped a round or even freaked and ducked, they were wasted. In proper circumstances, though, they were lethal.
The miniradars sown along the approaches to the Citadel were lulled; the listening devices heard nothing more menacing than the eternal wind whining through the canyons. Then the attack force came into the open, and the visual monitors in the compound and on the castle itself picked them up.
What they saw, TOKUGAWA saw.
Six wire-guided missiles blasted loose from hardened sites near the castle without so much as a by-your-leave to their startled, sleepy mercenary crews. A steering motor on one failed; it barrel-rolled left and burrowed into the artificial plateau to strike a gusher of smoke and fire. The others flew hot and true.
The wingman of the left-hand element, riding up behind the gunner in the racing-shell narrow cockpit of the Aussie-made warcraft, spun his ship like a cutting horse and headed for the bright side of Takara-yama to the north. Since the missile with his name on it had done a Brody, he pulled it off.
His buddies ate flaming death.
Klaxons filled the citadel with urgent noise. Sleek Bushmaster hunter-killer helicopters, made in Brazil by expatriate Germans, started leaping off the aprons while the mercs on duty in the ready room were still marveling at the Gen-5 point-defense routines this damn castle had. They arrowed for the big transports like orcas after a humpback pod.
Fully back to himself, sick at the loss of life he’d caused, TOKUGAWA ordered the hunter-killer pilots to veer off, borrowing Michiko’s voice for the occasion. The transports were no threat; TOKUGAWA didn’t even need to eavesdrop on the near-hysterical radio traffic among them to know their pilots wanted nothing more than to be safe and sound and on the ground back in Tokuyama, forty klicks east on the Inland Sea. Let them go, he thought. Frustrated at being cheated of easy slaughter, the Bushmaster jocks shadowed the bigger ships, hoping for a go-ahead after all.
The pilot of the YTC chopper on routine patrol to the northwest sang out a sudden soprano report: “Bandits bearing two-five-three, range eleven klicks.” The company village, TOKUGAWA realized with a shock of alarm. He slid himself behind the eyes of the chopper’s fire-control system as she turned to intercept. A dark Sikorsky orbited above the housing development as two blade-lean shapes flashed low above the identical rows of housetops.
The door of a security-team substation in the development was open. Through its open commlink TOKUGAWA heard rolling booming blasts. Then screams.
Had the attack on the defenseless employees—just finishing breakfasts of pickles and rice or
ham and eggs before driving off to the morning shift, or preparing meals for spouses about to return from a graveyard hitch—been planned in advance as a terror strike? Were the marauders acting spontaneously, to avenge their mates? Or was it just a ghastly accident, the intruders believing, perhaps, that the cramped, tidy houses were filled with armed YTC security troops? TOKUGAWA never knew. He hadn’t picked up any traffic among the three ships of that strike force; not even he could be everywhere at once. He only saw the rockets lunge forth, their smoke tails brilliant white in a fresh day’s light, and the 100-kilogram napalm minicanisters falling from beneath stub wings, and that was all he cared about.
The YTC patrol pilot yipped a curse in Afrikaans as her craft took the bit between its teeth and shot ahead full speed. The man up front goggled as the weapons he was supposed to be controlling began to aim themselves. Then he got down to the serious business of bracing himself against the various collisions that suddenly seemed inevitable, and screaming.
When the crew in the patrol craft started yelling, two of the four Bushmasters, jittering like hounds on a leash with their noses toward the fleeing Sikorskys, peeled back to see if they could help their comrades. They were in time to see a camouflage-painted S-65 come apart in midair above the housing development, spilling kicking tiny black shapes. Then the ship they were going to help flashed past them head-on, full-throttle, its crew clotting the airwaves with curses and cries.
An instant later it howled past the other two and was in among the transports. The YTC chopper jocks had nightmares for a month.
* * * * *
By nightfall it was over. None of the intruders survived except for the crewpersons of the sixth attack chopper, which had escaped. However, YTC security ground forces recovered some pieces of equipment intact from the wreckage, and legerdemain among the ’nets produced the information that the equipment had been purchased—through cutouts, of course—by agents for the Sovereign Group. Despite the impressive name, Sovereign was a modest umbrella covering four lesser zaibatsu with substantial holdings overseas, which had suffered severely from expropriations the last few weeks, particularly in Brazil, Indonesia, and England. In desperation, Sovereign had turned like so many other Japanese concerns to buccaneering. A grant-in-aid from the ever-helpful Ministry for Internal Development plus a little benign “administrative guidance” as to how and where it might best be applied, had paved the way.
