by Ken Liu
The pilot grinned. “You tell ‘em Frankie Wrench says ‘hello’.”
* * *
It was many hours before they saw another soul, and then they saw a hundred of them, at the very least.
The procession walked through the forest like ghosts, eyes downcast. The dead leaves underfoot silenced their passing until they were almost upon Blake and Kenishiro as they rested at midday. Blake heard a twig snap, and within ten seconds, he and Kenishiro had climbed up a beech tree with low branches to watch the mass of refugees.
For refugees they were; or runaways; or prisoners marching themselves to a more distant prison. They were Japanese, each and every one, dressed in civilian clothing. There were children and elderly; adolescents and all ranges of adults. It was no military detachment.
No clear leader could be distinguished from the crowd. The people wandered aimlessly, or perhaps they wandered toward a clear purpose with indifference.
Blake and Kenishiro sat in crooks of the beech tree and watched the silent migration. A little girl with wide eyes looked up and saw Kenishiro. The girl was walking alone, clutching a dirty stuffed animal to her chest. Kenishiro opened his mouth to speak, but the little girl walked on. She was the only one to look up.
Soon they were all of them gone, heading south, the last few receding silhouettes swallowed by a gray fog that had descended upon the forest.
* * *
Out of a break in the thick mist, Blake and Kenishiro arrived at a narrow stream winding through the wood. The cool, clear water bubbled gently over smooth stones on its way from the mountains to the ocean.
The two drank from the water liberally, and removed their shoes and socks to soak their feet. For a few precious moments, they were boys again.
“Edward-san,” Kenishiro whispered, his voice heavy with awe.
Blake looked up from the mesmerizing water as Kenishiro nodded toward the opposite bank a short distance upstream.
In the thick fog he could see the faint outline of a woman. She wore a simple, long, white dress. The lacy hem of the dress rested over her bare feet, which she dipped into the cool water one after the other. Then she knelt at the bank, pulling back her curtain of dark hair with one hand and scooping water to her mouth with the other.
She looked up at the two soldiers, and Kenishiro breathed in sharply.
“Suzume!” he said. “We must leave this place.”
Blake could not hear him past the beating of his own heart. He clutched at his chest, feeling the crinkle of a photograph within; the image of a woman that had kept him warm on so many cold nights.
This ethereal beauty at the edge of the fog was not the one from the photograph; it was absurd to think it was her, yet Blake could not disabuse his mind of the notion. The woman by the stream was neither of the East nor West; she was of everywhere if she was of anywhere. Yet from within the liquid depths of her eyes was a voice that spoke to Blake; or rather, that seemed to speak to both of them simultaneously. It was a yearning by each of them for the other.
“Edward-san!” Kenishiro whispered harshly. [“There are devils here!”]
It was one of the only times since Blake had first met Kenishiro that he showed such obvious discomfort, and the display snapped him from his trance. When next Blake looked upstream, the fog had thickened, and the woman was gone.
The two soldiers put on their socks and boots, and stumbled north from the stream, each of them caressing the worn photographs they carried with them from another life.
* * *
The fog broke at the edge of the forest, where the land ran uninterrupted by hill and valley all the way to Aomori. The town shone with promise on the horizon; a beacon of welcoming to the tired soldiers.
The crop fields they passed in late afternoon were well-tilled when they weren’t burnt to ash. The farmers working the soil took no particular interest in the soldiers, even after they noticed that Blake carried his rifle at the ready instead of slinging it casually over his back. A few of the workers waved and smiled, displaying rotten or missing teeth.
Kenishiro brightened visibly as they approached Aomori. Once, while crossing a small wooden bridge over a shallow stream, he paused to look at a squat house on the far side of a planter’s field. An old woman sat in a rocking chair on the sagging porch, attended to by a niece or granddaughter.
After the forest mist, the sunshine over the fields seemed harsh in comparison, yet it mattered little to Blake and Kenishiro. They whistled or chatted idly as they followed best they could the worn roads to the city.
“Look,” Kenishiro said, smiling. He pointed to a large windmill standing astride the river running toward Aomori, churning the slow-moving waters below. It had been obscured by haze since last the two soldiers were on the north ridge. Many more were being constructed along the waterway, all the way into the heart of the city. “They help bring water from the mountains. The fields will always be green.”
It wasn’t until they could read the first of the large red billboards outside the city proper that their smiles faded.
Instructions in large bold Japanese characters, mirrored on the other half by the English equivalent, declared that Blake and Kenishiro were entering a ‘Reformed Zone’ under the direct control of the United States Armed Forces. Beneath the declaration, in much smaller letters, was a long list of articles and references to the appropriate civil documents put forth to substantiate such a claim.
Afternoon gave way to evening as the sun sank toward the horizon, casting a deep orange glow across the sky.
There was no whistling as the two soldiers marched toward the next billboard closer to the city. Looking ahead, there was a posting every several hundred feet leading up to a tall dirt embankment which surrounded the new complex on the western edge of town.
Kenishiro stomped past the next billboard, then the next, with Blake following close behind. The signs proclaimed similar sentiments: this was no longer hallowed Japanese soil.
The final red billboard rested atop the dirt embankment which rose up several feet, like a sharp hill, before descending into a dirt plateau atop which sat the low, square complex. Blake and Kenishiro stood at the bottom of the embankment for a long time, staring upward.
The billboard declared many things, but chief among them were these:
With regards to any person(s) of undeniable Japanese birth and/or questionable heritage, the following words are banned from audible vocalization and written manifestation forthwith:
“I”, “me”, “Japanese”, “Japan”, “emperor”, “empire”, “imperial”, “unhappy”, “disobey”…
And the list went on in such a fashion until ending with:
Any such person(s) found in violation of the previous statute must report immediately to Clinic 36 for cultural realignment, under penalty of deportation or death.
There was no stopping Kenishiro from scaling the embankment, and so Blake went with him, struggling up the soft dirt. They dropped quickly to their stomachs at the peak. Loose dirt clouded up before their faces and was pushed away with each heavy breath.
Kenishiro pulled out his binoculars and scanned the perimeter of the corrugated building below. There was nothing remarkable about its design. It was a large, stocky square with a metal roof and four large box fans in the ceiling for ventilation. A long line of Japanese civilians filed into one end of the building at a glacial crawl. Occasionally, they would pop out on the other end.
Blake was about to comment on the lack of American personnel when he noticed the two towers on the opposite embankment, between the complex and the start of Aomori’s industrial district.
The top of each tall, white tower had no windows, but it had several small black holes on the two visible sides. Apparently, foreign military control over Aomori was such that all it took to ensure cooperation were a few threatening sniper roosts.
Kenishiro breathed harder and harder. His fingers bore into the embankment, clenching at dry dirt.
He reached i
nto his inner jacket pocket with a shaking hand and withdrew a faded envelope and photograph. The photo he returned after kissing the image of his deceased wife. The letter he placed on the dirt between Blake and himself.
“Kenishiro-san,” said Blake.
Kenishiro stood up on the peak of the embankment, facing the corrugated monstrosity below.
“Watashi wa Nihonjin desu!” he screamed.
Blake noticed an almost imperceptible shift through the black holes of the towers. He caught a glint of glass through one and saw a shine of gunmetal in another. He grabbed Kenishiro’s ankle but was violently kicked away. Kenishiro turned to him, tormented, with tears streaming down his face. He whispered an apology to Blake, to his friend, then kicked him hard in the shoulder.
Blake slid down the embankment, unable to stop his own momentum by digging his hands into the loose dirt. Finally his feet met grass, and he jolted to a halt. Above him, Kenishiro was silhouetted by the setting sun, limned with a glowing light that perfectly outlined his hand as it drew his empty sidearm from its holster.
Kenishiro pounded his chest and screamed, “I AM JAPANESE!”
His words were loud enough to hide the sound of suppressed gunfire, and the only way Blake knew his friend had been shot was when a fine mist of blood coated his own upturned face.
Kenishiro stumbled at the top of the embankment, dropped his sidearm, and fell forward, out of sight.
Blake scrambled up the embankment, his hands clawing at the loose dirt, until he crested the peak. He blinked as he wiped blood and grit from his eyes, and then he looked down at the corpse of Tatsuya Kenishiro, Private First Class.
Two holes the size of grapefruits had been blown clear through Kenishiro’s chest, the first over his heart, the second over his sternum. His lifeless eyes stared up at the red billboard looming over Blake’s head.
The line of civilians marching slowly into the complex had not been disrupted. Not a single one of them so much as looked in Blake’s direction. He lowered his head and closed his eyes, and waited to be shot.
* * *
But he wasn’t shot. He wasn’t Japanese, either, and he didn’t need the papers to prove it. They marched him right into downtown Aomori and sat him in front of the commanding general himself, a man named Nermeyer.
Nermeyer, a four-star general whose battlefield tactics during the first world war had been a staple of Blake’s academy training, shook the lance corporal’s hand when he walked into the command center and offered him a cigar.
Blake declined.
The command center was originally Aomori’s central library, a glass-and-steel building of impressive architectural design that looked like an overlapping sequence of polished chevrons from the outside.
Nermeyer began by offering his grave apology for PFC Tatsuya’s death, but goddammit if he wouldn’t have pulled his sidearm…
That segment ended with a clipped promise to reevaluate the snipers’ shoot-first policy.
The proceeding monologue was a bunch of nonsense concerning a parade in Blake’s honor (and Tatsuya’s, of course!) for the brave work they undertook while stationed in the Shirakami-Sanchi forest (for which, Blake would discover later, the American military could as of yet provide no proof of tangible benefit). Blake noticed how Nermeyer would only use the word ‘stationed’ – never ‘forgotten’ or ‘left for dead’.
The general went on to praise the life’s work of a German scientist for making such tremendous strides in the field of altering brainwaves to bend to a different rhythm; to a pattern chosen by the one doing the bending. Without that Nazi kraut’s help, Nermeyer explained, none of this would have been possible.
He gestured to the world around him as he spoke, and Blake assumed he was referring to the current state of affairs in Aomori.
The general finished with Blake as eagerly as he had started, and the lance corporal was escorted from the premises, further debriefing to follow, please and thank you.
An aide-de-camp outside the command center told Blake where he could find a hot meal without paying a dime, seeing as he was a war hero and all. Afterward, he had a shower and shave at a nearby barracks, and was given a clean uniform by an eager young private who had machinations on writing a book about the war, and would PFC Edward Blake mind sitting down with him to recount his story?
Blake told him he would meet him the next day for lunch, and the private, who had never seen a day of real combat, walked away beaming.
* * *
The next morning, Blake took a walk. He walked through the city; he walked along the river; he walked down to the wide bay that led to the ocean, which was still unchanged. Everywhere he went, he was greeted by Japanese speaking English. They smiled and waved, and they used phrases like, “Howdy, partner!” and “Where’s the beef?”
They spoke not a word of Japanese, not even to each other after Blake had passed. There was only ‘we’ and ‘us’ – never ‘I’ or ‘me’. No one was unhappy. No one was unique. They had all been to Clinic 36, as declared by the red bracelets on each wrist. Some had more bracelets than others.
The crime rate was zero. The birth rate was zero. The unemployment rate was zero. The literacy rate was one-hundred percent, as was the percentage of citizens eating at least one meal on a daily basis.
Blake saw no Japanese statues in the parks of Aomori, as he knew there to be from his many conversations with Kenishiro. He had meant to visit one in particular: a bronze pear tree with a pair of sparrows on a lower branch. The sparrows were leaning toward each other, touching heads.
Gone was the pear tree. In its place was a marble monolith stamped with a circular brass plate. The words etched into the plate clearly stated the combined good will of the American, British, and Soviet governments toward the people of Aomori, and toward the former Empire of Japan.
Blake’s walk took him at long last to a narrow alley in the market district. He found there the address given to him by a Japanese girl working at an information kiosk near the command center. She had been wearing a Frisbee t-shirt and was humming Benny Goodman.
The doors in the cramped alley were poorly hand-cut to fit their respective entrances. It took Blake several minutes of standing around to match the characters on the note the girl had given him to the ones painted on the wooden slats that made up the walls of the alley. Some of the addresses had already been scratched off and replaced with English lettering.
The door he wanted was at the very end. Low-hanging plants adorned the overhanging eave that shielded the ratty doormat. A single pair of wooden sandals were placed neatly next to the mat under a small wooden house, like a miniature of the one before which Blake now stood.
He knocked on the door, and Tatsuya Kenishiro’s son answered a moment later. He read his father’s letter, and later that afternoon Blake invited him to leave Aomori and go to the forest.
Blake said he wanted to find another path, and he expected a Kenishiro would agree.
A Word from Sam Best
Speculative fiction is, to me, analogous with exploratory fiction. There are broad horizons to be ventured toward in our everyday lives, for certain, and there are heroic stories to be shared. Yet for those brave Couch Captains like myself – those astronauts whose mind is the universe into which we eagerly delve – speculative fiction opens worlds of imagination too large for one planet alone.
That’s not to say that all spec fic takes place ‘out there’. The great thing about the genre is that it encompasses so many niches, Earthbound and otherwise, that together form a whole; an identifiable collective of the weird, surreal, and unknown.
Sam Best is the author of numerous speculative fiction novels, including the apocalyptic thriller Genesis Plague. His short stories have appeared in The A.I. Chronicles and Alt.History 101. He is currently traveling the world with his wife.
http://www.amazon.com/Sam-Best/e/B0068U9EAI/
The Sun Never Sets
by Anthea Sharp
London, 1850
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SEVEN DEGREES ABOVE THE HORIZON, she spotted it—a speck of diamond in the deepening twilight. A tiny dot of light that perchance was only a trick of vision, or a wayward dust mote.
But perhaps something more…
Miss Kate Danville’s heart raced at the prospect, but she forced herself to remain still. With a deep, steadying breath, she leaned forward and gently twisted the eyepiece of her telescope, careful not to bump the instrument. The pinprick of brightness lost focus, then sharpened.
She was not mistaken. Certainty flared through her, filling her with warmth.
The image blurred again, but this time due to her own triumphant tears. Kate sat back and brushed the foolish water from her eyes. She would show them all that her little hobby as Father called it—Mother used stronger words like unsuitable and distastefully unfeminine—was more than simply dabbling in the astronomical arts.
She, Miss Kate Danville, had discovered a comet!
Oh, she was not the first woman to do so—a handful of amateur astronomers had been the first to spot celestial objects, including her idol, Maria Mitchell, who received the Danish gold medal just two years prior.
Kate closed her eyes and imagined the King of Denmark presenting her with that accolade in front of an admiring crowd. Why, she might even get to meet the esteemed Ms. Mitchell, and perhaps be inducted into the Royal Society—
“Beg pardon, miss, but her ladyship sent me up to fetch you to make ready for the ball.” The maid’s reedy voice broke through Kate’s daydream, bringing her down from the stars with a thud.
She opened her eyes, and was once again simply Miss Kate Danville, perched on the top of Danville House with her telescope and her fancies in the sooty June dusk.
