“Buenos días,” she said.
He cleared his throat and all of a sudden felt out of place in his suit, carrying his leather briefcase. “Good day, Miss Malroux,” he said. “My name is William Adamson. I…well, I guess you could say I’m here to execute a bequest from Hiroshi Kato.”
Hiroshi. It hurt to hear his name. She still wasn’t over it. Of course not. She only managed not to think of him for a little while occasionally.
She looked at the man standing at the foot of the deck, his hand on the wooden rail of the four steps that led up to her. He was a plump man, probably around forty, wearing a stylish pair of glasses that had doubtless cost a lot of money. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he talked.
“Adamson,” she repeated. “I’m sorry, I don’t know the name.”
He ran his fingers nervously along the rail. “We studied in Boston around the same time. You were at Harvard; Hiroshi and I were at MIT. I was a doctoral student when he was a senior.” His eyes drifted. “To be absolutely honest, Hiroshi and I had very little contact while we were there. We were more—how should I put it?—rivals. He was researching robotics just like I was—though we took very different approaches.”
Charlotte wondered where this was all leading. Had he come because he hoped Hiroshi had left some papers with her? “I hardly ever ran into people at MIT,” she said. “Anybody, really, apart from Hiroshi.”
He nodded as though that were self-evident. “Yes, I understand. I simply mention it because…well, because it was the case. As for me, I’ve worked for the American government ever since I finished my doctorate, which put me in a position to be able to follow Hiroshi’s work from time to time. You could say that over the years I’ve become his greatest admirer. Looking back, I have to say that his ideas, his methods, were absolutely groundbreaking.”
“Not that that helped him much.”
The man blinked, looking for a moment as though he had gotten lost in the past. “Yes. Yes, you might say so. Eh…well, it’s inevitable that my visit stirs up painful memories. That being the case, can I ask you straight out how much you know of the circumstances surrounding his death?”
Charlotte shrugged. “I know what was in the newspapers. And then there were all these people here asking me about the last night of his life. So I was able to piece a few things together.”
“Have you visited the Bulb?”
She shook her head. “I’m sure I will one day, but over the last few months I’ve been…in rather frail health. I couldn’t travel.” The doctors had confirmed her tumor was gone and called it a spontaneous remission. Such things occasionally happened, they told her. “All I know is that when the soldiers finally got in and found him, he was dead. And that he was wearing a white kimono. Which indicated ritual suicide; that was in all the reports.”
He nodded. “Yes, that was widely reported. What wasn’t in the reports was that he left a message.”
“A message?” She sat up straight, felt a tingle in her spine. It was electrifying.
“A message for you.”
Charlotte put her hands to her head, the habit of a lifetime, and was shaken again to find that her long hair was gone. She drew a deep breath. “Come on up,” she invited him, pointing to the chair where her clients usually sat when handing over their documents or collecting their translations.
He sat down gingerly, as though well used to chairs breaking under him. Then he lifted his briefcase to his knees and opened it.
“Our experts have told us that in Japanese culture it’s traditional for the person committing seppuku to write a last poem. The death poem.” He carefully took out a piece of parchment in a clear protective envelope. “This is what he wrote. And it’s clearly addressed to you.” He held it out to her.
She took it in her hands, which were suddenly trembling. The top half of the sheet was covered in Japanese characters, beautifully drawn, and underneath, in English:
Charlotte,
What might have been!
She put her hand to her mouth and felt very clearly how her heart stopped for a beat or two. Seeing his handwriting like this, and then the poem…
“Thank you,” she said once she could breathe again, setting the parchment aside. “Thank you very much.”
“That’s not all,” he said hurriedly and took a flat wooden box from his case. “I have to add here that the secret services insisted on minutely examining every object that Hiroshi left behind. Every object and his corpse as well, to be blunt. There was also heated discussion, of course, about how far we should even carry out his last wishes. I argued strongly that we should, but honesty compels me to admit that in the end…well, nobody found anything on either object that was of any strategic interest. That’s what tipped the balance.”
He opened the lid. Inside lay a long dagger—or short knife; she saw that either description would do—with a slightly curved blade, about thirty centimeters long.
“It’s called a tantō,” Adamson told her. “A Japanese sword of the kind prescribed for seppuku.”
Charlotte looked at the weapon with horrified fascination. The hilt was made of ribbed metal, and the blade shone flawlessly. “He killed himself with this?”
“Uh…no. He was holding it in his hands when they found him, but he was already dead. Not a scratch on him. In fact he suffocated.”
“Suffocated?”
Adamson sighed. “It looks like he ordered the last of the nanites to make this sword from the iron they found in his blood. Without iron, the hemoglobin in the bloodstream no longer functions, the flow of oxygen from the lungs is cut off and, well, the result is suffocation.”
She put out her hands. “May I hold it just once?”
“Of course you may. It belongs to you now.” He passed her the wooden case. “Be careful how you take it out. It’s much lighter than it looks. It only weighs about an eighth of an ounce.” He added, “That’s barely four grams metric.”
She stopped midreach. “Four grams?”
“The amount of iron in a human body. In fact, that should only just be enough to make a small nail, but this knife is an astonishing construction. We’ve scanned it, measured it, analyzed it. It’s made up primarily of hollow cells, but it’s still extremely stable. All in all, it’s an excellent example of applied nanotech within the limits of our present capabilities. Materials science, that kind of thing. Which is why a lot of people wanted to hang on to it…but here it is.”
She grasped the hilt carefully and had to shut her eyes in shock as she felt the emotions and memories that saturated the knife. Hiroshi! He was there. She could feel him. Holding this dagger made from his blood was like holding his whole life in her hands. His hopes, his desires, his dreams…tears sprang to her eyes when she felt how much he had loved her. Her, and her alone.
She opened her eyes and lifted the knife out carefully. It really was as light as a feather. As though the memories it held weighed more than the iron of which it was made. When she had blinked away the tears, she saw that her visitor was looking at her with concern.
“What will you do now?” he asked.
Charlotte realized he was worried she might plunge the blade into her heart as soon as he had gone. She smiled gently. She wouldn’t, of course. Hiroshi had given her life back to her; she would treat that gift, too, with respect.
She put the featherlight knife back into its case. “Perhaps I’ll try to write our story,” she said. “His and mine. We’ll see.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© Olivier Favre
Andreas Eschbach studied aerospace engineering at the University of Stuttgart and later founded his own IT-consulting company before becoming a full-time writer. Several of his novels, including The Jesus Video and One Trillion Dollars, became nationwide best sellers in Germany. He has been awarded both the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis, Germany’s most prestigious sc
ience-fiction award, for best science-fiction novel, and the Deutscher Science Fiction Preis, several times. The Carpet Makers, his only other book translated into English so far, was listed as one of the best science-fiction books of 2005 by www.sfsite.com and recommended by Locus Magazine. In 2002, his novel The Jesus Video was adapted for German television. He lives with his wife in Brittany, France.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
© Maria Pakucs 2013
Samuel Willcocks is originally from Brighton, on the south coast of England, but now lives with his family in Transylvania, Romania, in the historic city of Cluj, where he spends as much time in the cafés as he does in the libraries. A keen reader in many genres, including science fiction and historical novels, he studied languages and literature in Britain, Berlin, and Philadelphia, before winning the German Embassy Award (London) for translation in 2010. He has been a full-time literary translator ever since and translates from Czech, German, Romanian, and Slovene. When not overindulging in cakes or dictionaries, he can be found at book festivals, sharing his enthusiasm for Central European books and writers with fellow readers, editors, and literary agents.
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