by Victor Milán
With an arthritic’s stiff deliberation Michiko set down her coffee cup.
“What will you do, Doctor?”
Michiko put her elbows on the table and pressed her face into her hands. “What’s our status, after that Sovereign thing? How big a piece of the pie do we have?”
“Slightly over 10 percent of privately held assets in the Home Islands are under YTC control, directly or through subsidiaries. That doesn’t take into account government-held assets, or foreign holdings—which, as you know, have been minuscule since the anti-foreign-ownership regulations were promulgated during the trade war with the United States. For a more accurate figure, you’d have to consult TOKUGAWA, of course, but that’s a good approximation.”
“Not enough.” She raised her face. Tears glazed her eyes. “As things stand, we can’t possibly pull the country together before it’s too late. But we have the means to turn that around. And God, how I hate it, but we’re going to have to use it.”
* * * * *
“I can’t do it,” TOKUGAWA said, standing in the sun of her clearing on the side of Takara-yama’s doppelganger.
“Don’t you see? It’s—it’s for the greater good.” She spun, folded her arms, hugged herself tightly, and shook her head. “Oh, God, I never thought I’d hear myself saying that. But this situation is special, it’s unique. People will suffer if you do what I ask you to, I can’t deny that.”
She turned back. “But how many more will suffer if we fail to act?”
“You’re asking that I help you seize control over most of the zaibatsu. How will that stop people from suffering?”
“First of all, it’ll stop this useless internecine fighting. The big ‘family concerns’ got the government to squeeze out their smaller competitors, and now they’re not content to compete at all anymore, even with one another. If we intervene the bloodshed ends.”
He didn’t respond. She sighed. “All right. Review the files Doihara put together. The Fourth World War’s coming down on us like a flash flood. When it hits we’re looking at attacks from half the developed nations of the world, and probable invasion by Indonesia. While we waste our energies fighting one another” She took his arm. “The country’s helpless. Someone’s got to act. We’re the only ones in a position to.”
“You want us to gather power to ourselves.”
“To—to yourself. I’m competent to act as an adviser, no more.”
He grimaced, turned his back. “You were the one who told me führerprinzip was no answer. That power was best left unexercised.”
“I know.” Barefoot on fallen needles she came to him. He refused to face her. “I still believe that, I do. But sometimes… sometimes those answers just aren’t adequate. There are times, I see now, when one has to act.”
He shook his head. “What happened to the Michiko I knew when… when I was young? The one who warned me against governments? Against power? Against the notion that any one person or party was or could be wise enough to decide the destinies of others.”
She dropped his arm and turned away, shoulders slumping. “I told you before, ideals are fine things. I wasn’t being cynical—not entirely, anyway. And my—my main ideals remain. I believe in freedom, in liberty. In the abstract; as goals to work for.
“But someone’s got to be alive to work for them. There are times when the lovely ethical considerations break down under the bombardment of reality. When we have to put aside what we want things to be like and deal with things as they are.”
“What about our choices? You’ve taught me the exercise of the observer’s will overrode externalities; you told me that was a truth of your science.”
She spun him, seized both arms. “War’s coming,” she almost shouted. “That’s a pretty overwhelming externality. We can’t stop it. So we’ve got to do every goddam thing in our power to save what we can.”
“You are my master,” TOKUGAWA said stiffly. “Mistress? The connotations are confusing. But I am bound to follow you.”
Again she felt ghostly fingers brush her face: O’Neill again. Damn her. “Don’t be that way. I need your help, your strength. Don’t go rigid on me now.” He said nothing. She climbed up the gray basalt outcrop and sat on its top. “You didn’t live through the last war. Those of us who did… it left a mark. Like the Great Depression did on the grandparents of the kids I went to school with in the States, like the Pacific War—World War Two—here. Something that it’s unthinkable to ever have happen again. No matter what the cost.”
“Are you saying we can prevent this new war?”
“No. I wish we could. We can’t. What we can do is what we can to make sure our people—the Japanese people—pull through.” She swept her hair back with both hands. “Yes, we have to gather power to ourselves. And trust that, given our insight and your unique capabilities, we can wield it wisely, for just as long as is necessary.”
He looked down at the grass between his bare feet. “Somehow I think that’s been said before.” He looked up, and tears blazed bright trails down his cheeks in the sun. “But I’ll do what you ask.”
She jumped down, ran to him, hugged him. “Don’t take it this way. I need you, need your strength. I love you, TOKUGAWA. I’ve never loved anyone before. Not as I love you.”
He laid an absent arm about her shoulders. “I love you, Michiko.” But the tears kept coming.
* * * * *
Again a pattern was set. One by one, subtly, the warring zaibatsu of Japan were brought to Yoshimitsu’s heel. The Japanese economy was an edifice built on a database foundation. In most cases all that was required was for TOKUGAWA to exert his will, and a corporate database turned into a hand, with the corporation resting in its palm—TOKUGAWA’s hand. Rarely did anyone in the target company suspect anything was wrong, never exactly what. Little violence was involved, at least at first; it was a gentle process, comparatively. To the employees of the corporations thus captured scarce difference was made in the daily round of life. Even corporate officers were retained, if they weren’t too locked in to their own visions of corporate imperialism to learn accommodation.
Nor was it always requisite to take over a company. A number of the lesser concerns recognized that zaibatsu who stood adamant against YTC domination tended to meet the fate of sand castles in an incoming tide. They preferred to adopt the strategy of willows in the wind, and bend.
Not all did. Attacks on YTC facilities increased. The leadership of certain expropriated companies refused to acknowledge the reality map, which indicated that their concerns no longer belonged to them, though it was the map used by the legal authorities. Instead they chose to defend their own versions of reality with all the means at their disposal. Their head offices had to be stormed—no easy task since, like Yoshimitsu Telecommunications, most zaibatsu had long since hardened their installations against terrorist attack. One particularly destructive affair, involving the holdout management of Niigata Electric on the west coast of Honshu, provoked a storm of protest over destruction of noncombatant lives and property in face of TOKUGAWA’s mastery of the ’nets and the near-total power over the media that gave him.
With control of the zaibatsu came substantial political control of the country as a whole. Politicians of Left and Right had tied themselves too intimately with the various factions; each soon found the dog he backed answered to a new master. By and large, the Japanese public, as in all the developed nations, had been fed so long on a diet of the welfare-warfare state, fortified by media approbation and enthusiasm, that they had small appetite to kick against this latest turn of events. At least the corporate warfare, small-scale but widespread, was ending. Dissenters—the Free Market Party, a few hardline splinters of Komeito, and so on—simply found themselves denied access to the public ear, unless they wanted to crank out broadsheets on old-fashioned mimeos by hand, or photocopy them sheet by sheet. Only with the greatest regret did TOKUGAWA stifle their voices, but debate that might interfere with making the country ready to survive was a luxury th
at could not be afforded.
* * * * *
Busy though she was, Michiko took rapport each night like a drug.
In TOKUGAWA’s arms she sobbed like bottles breaking under tractor treads. “We’re doing what we have to,” she said. Niigata rode her like a demon. “It’s for the greater good. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
He held her with arms and being, so tight the clearing blurred about them. What he did not do was answer. He couldn’t trust himself. The effort of keeping his own doubts from osmosing through rapport drained him more than his attempts to comfort.
The fit passed. The trees came back, the lichen-grown boulder looming like a guardian above them; bird song and wood smoke, light of setting sun stabbing through clouds to impale the clearing on auburn radiance. Michiko disengaged herself, sat up to stare the sun in the eye.
“’You’re humoring me,” she said unturning. “If only I could make you see the necessity of what we do.”
TOKUGAWA sat dreamy, listening to the soothing datahum of the ’nets. “I see my duty to you as my lord,” he said at last, measured.
Pain rippled across her features. “That’s not important. I don’t want that. I want you as an ally, not a vassal.” She massaged her temples. “Oh, damn Elizabeth O’Neill for inculcating that shit in you. Damn her.”
Shame blossomed in her. TOKUGAWA’s face had gone skull-bleak. “Forgive me,” she said, clutching at his hands. “I know what she was to you, what she is to you. But I can’t bear this—this subservient talk.”
But he didn’t respond. His eyes were fixed beyond, to a dream behind his dream.
I hear my name taken in vain, said Elizabeth O’Neill, smiling madonna afloat in blue-white nimbus.
“Yürei,” TOKUGAWA breathed. Ghost; ghosts.
Michiko’s own breath clogged in her throat like ashes. She lowered her head as if it weighed tons. “Yes, ghosts. I have mine too, my love.” The tears came hot and free.
Quarry eyes darted from one to another. She cannot hear me, O’Neill said, unless I bid it.
“What do you want?”
Startled, Michiko blinked. “Why, I’ve told you. Your cooperation. Of your own free will.”
Unhearing, his being focused on O’Neill, TOKUGAWA murmured, “An illusion. No more.”
“Free will? You can’t believe that.”
Desperately he told her, “No, no. You’ve taught me choice determines reality. Only I think we should choose a different path. Not the same wrong answers of millennia.”
Illusion? Half taunting. If I am, two possibilities exist. I am an artifact, a loop, a self-perpetuating subroutine like Tokugawa Ieyasu in that perversion Michiko subjected you to. Or you are mad. Her smile reached out to enfold him. I have come to reassure you, my only love. You are not mad. And I am not illusion.
“I—I’d like to,” Michiko slowly said. “But I—we—how can we oppose our judgment to the wisdom of centuries?”
“Isn’t that what quantum theory did, upset accumulated wisdom? What happened to your contempt for rules?”
“Lives are at stake here. For the first time in my life, my decisions affect more than just me and my selfish concerns. I… am afraid.”
“I too.”
You need not fear me, TOKUGAWA, O’Neill said. Never. Her gown was white. Color of death.
“Gaki,” he said.
Michiko’s eyes had drifted off. “Hungry ghosts, then? Us? Driven by needs unfulfilled on death.” A tear fell, weighted a blade of autumn grass. “Sometimes I feel that way, yes. You’ve poetry in you, love. And a touch of the mordant.”
Demon fingers plucked at TOKUGAWA’s consciousness. He had tried to keep his words to O’Neill from coming across to Michiko, could not. Now he sought words that spoke with double tongue. “How can… I help?”
Michiko clutched his arm. “You’ve done so much. Everything we’ve accomplished, everything real, has been through you. If you could only tell me you approved.”
I’ve come to help you, dear, O’Neill said. It’s time you saw truth. Honor hinds you to the Yoshimitsu as your lord. But not as your woman. Put her aside, before she brings more pain.
Pain confronted on every side. “I can’t.”
Michiko winced as if he’d slapped her. She’s weak, O’Neill said. She lacks courage in her convictions. Is such truly worthy of you, who are as a god?
“I’m not a god!” he screamed. He seized Michiko with bruising fingers. “That’s the problem. Whatever power we possess, we are not gods. We can’t decide for others.”
“But we try,” slipped from her. His vehemence shocked her. “We’re not doing this for ourselves. We’re doing it for the people.”
What of her fine words to you before, when she was trying to seduce you from me, to steal my force? Her song sounds different now, somehow.
“What are you saying?” he asked through his own tears. “Didn’t you teach me that’s always the excuse, when power’s used to grind, to kill and enslave? Didn’t you teach me it wasn’t enough to be the good guys?”
Though they tried to veer like particles similarly charged she forced her eyes to his. “That was then. That was—before. I still believe those things. In a perfect world, we can follow our ideals. Now we do what we have to.”
Listen to her. How she vacillates. She doesn’t deserve you.
“The people need us, TOKUGAWA. We have the power to help them. Isn’t our duty to use it?”
Mute, he hung his head. Though his eyes were lowered O’Neill’s image burned through the lids like the pika. She advanced in glory, poised above Michiko, descended. TOKUGAWA stared in horror as O’Neill became one with Michiko. Blue fire danced about her, blue flames her eyes.
“We have the power, my love,” Michiko said, in a voice hers and not hers. “We must wield it.”
Dread flared in him, bright as O’Neill/Michiko’s actinic aura. “You are my one, my only love,” that mixed voice sang. “As you love me, give me your heart on this.” She held forth a glowing hand.
Coiling to a fetal knot he wrapped hands over his head and shook. He felt a touch on his shoulder, flinched away as if it burned him. It persisted.
With fear crystallized on every nerve like ice on the limbs of a winter garden, he turned. The savage luminance had left Michiko, leaving only concern. “I don’t know what came over me. I felt so strange, for a moment there.”
I still am, TOKUGAWA dear, came from all around. In the fullness of time, you will be wholly mine.
“Did you hear something?” Michiko asked urgently. “Your face—TOKUGAWA, are you all right?”
He grasped her, drew her to him, sought to lose himself in her. Gasping as one who drowns, she responded.
Later they sat drinking tea from cups Shigeo might have made. “You are right,” TOKUGAWA said. “We must do what we can.”
The cup flew from her hand, spilling a rain of tea that vanished before it could scald. She crushed him to her and wept into hair that smelt of sun and warm grass.
In time she pulled away, held him at arm’s extent. “Thank you, my love,” she said, mouth mobile, moist. “You’ve given me the strength to do what I must.”
He inclined his head. “You are my lord.”
She pulled back the reins of tears. “I thought we’d put that aside,” she said. He said no more. “Sometimes it seems I’m still haunted by the ghost of Elizabeth O’Neill.”
* * * * *
TOKUGAWA rolled on like the tide. Japan grew more peaceful while without the world burned like a fuse. By autumn only two holdouts of consequence remained: Miyagi, a concern heavily involved in avionics and Gen-5 military-applications systems, and the far-flung holding company Dai-Nihon. Their computer security resisted TOKUGAWA’s best efforts at invasion, and the military strength of their physical plant ensured that outright invasion would prove expensive, probably prohibitively so.
Exhausted emotionally and mentally, Michiko opted to negotiate. For the time her rivals seemed content with th
e status quo, making no serious counterattacks, though former Self-Defense Force General Ushijima Gogen, Dai-Nihon’s CEO, kept probing with nuisance raids by commandos of deniable mercenaries. He and Miyagi Taro parried Michiko’s attempts to parley, brusquely in one case, diffidently in the other. With all YTC’s formidable assets geared toward preparing Japan for the inevitable conflict, Michiko was ready to let things continue as they were.
Until Brisbane was bombed.
CHAPTER 29
“Who did it?” Michiko asked, sitting in her office gazing bleary-eyed out at the stars. She had been in bed for less than an hour when the call from Doihara roused her. That was a little over an hour ago; it was now 4:I7 in the morning.
“No one knows for sure, yet. The news nets have already interviewed a number of survivors, and there’s enough satellite data to piece together a rough picture of what happened.” Michiko sipped coffee laced with brandy. “Give it to me.”
“Three surface-level blasts, heavy ones, about two megatons each. Spaced a few klicks apart. Command-detonated.”
“How do they figure that?”
“The setup, I gather, was calculated to derive optimum destructive power from ground-level—water-level, in this case—explosions, which are inherently less efficient than air bursts. The devices seem to have been placed to achieve optimum reflection of dynamic overpressure and thermal effects off that tail end of the D’Aguilar range north and east of the city; apparently whoever planted them waited for a solid overcast to reflect heat back downward.” Michiko repressed a shudder; her aide was discussing this all so calmly. She herself had to fight to keep from screaming. It’s happened again, yammered over and over in her head, and they’re coming!
“What are the Australians doing?” she asked with counterfeit calm.
“Not much so far, though of course they’re spoiling to. The devices apparently were concealed in the hulls of vessels anchored in the Brisbane River ship channel. The Australians operate on a launch-on-warning principle like everyone else, Doctor, but in this instance they had no warning and haven’t identified a target for retaliation. A General Wideman in Sydney has declared martial law nationwide; pretty much the whole national government appears to have gone up with the city, including Prime Minister Welch, his cabinet and most of Parliament”
