Days of Infamy

by Harry Turtledove

  “Sayonara,” he echoed, and left. A military policeman in the hallway pointed him towards another set of stairs at the far end. Down the hall he went, trying to ignore the noises from the numbered cubicles on either side. A minute earlier, he’d been making noises like that. He felt a strange mixture of afterglow and disgust.

  These stairs led out to an alley behind the Senator Hotel. It smelled of piss and vomit. A military policeman standing near the exit said, “Move along, soldier.”

  “Please, Sergeant-san, I came here with friends, and I’d like to wait for them,” Shimizu said. He was a corporal himself, not a miserable common soldier, and he spoke politely. The military policeman grudged him a nod.

  Over the next five or ten minutes, the soldiers from Shimizu’s squad came out. Some of them came happy, others revolted, others both at once like Shimizu himself. “I don’t think I’ll do that again any time soon,” Shiro Wakuzawa said.

  “Of course you won’t—you won’t be able to afford it,” somebody else told him, adding, “The only thing worse than a lousy lay is no lay at all.” The whole squad laughed at that. It explained why they’d stood in line better than anything else could have done.

  “Move along,” the military policeman said again, this time in a voice that brooked no argument.

  “Salute!” Shimizu told his men, and they did. Some of them were clumsy, but the military policeman didn’t complain. When they got to the end of the alley, they turned left to go back up to Hotel Street. “You all still have money?” Shimizu asked. Their heads bobbed up and down. “Good,” he said. “In that case, let’s drink some more.” Nobody said no.

  WHEN OSCAR VAN der Kirk paused at the water’s edge on Waikiki Beach to assemble his contraption, the men fishing in the surf paused to stare at him. One of them said, “That’s the goddamnedest thing I ever set eyes on.”

  “I never saw anything like it,” another agreed.

  “Glad you like it,” Oscar said. Because he was a happy-go-lucky fellow, he made them smile instead of getting them angry. It did look as if his surfboard’s mother had been unfaithful with a small sailboat.

  He’d had to find a Jap to do the work. That made him queasy in a way it wouldn’t have before the war started. He’d paid that Doi character twenty-five bucks—which happened to be all the cash he had—plus a promise of fish when he went out to sea. Doi didn’t speak a hell of a lot of English, but he had no trouble at all with numbers.

  What if I stiff him? Oscar wondered, not for the first time, as he fit the small mast and sail to the surfboard. Only a Jap, after all . . . But a Jap wasn’t only a Jap, not these days. If the handyman had any kind of connections with the occupiers . . . Well, that might not be a whole lot of fun.

  And besides, Doi had giggled like a third-grade girl when he finally figured out what the deuce Oscar was driving at. “Ichi-ban!” he’d said. Oscar knew what that meant, as any kamaaina would. How could you stiff a guy who got so fired up about your brainstorm? Oh, you could, but how would you look at yourself in the mirror afterwards?

  Into the Pacific went the—whatever the dickens it was. Oscar didn’t know what to call it any more. It wasn’t exactly a surfboard, not now. But it wasn’t quite a boat, either. Neither fish nor fowl, Oscar thought. It would be pretty foul, though, if he couldn’t get any fish. Wincing to himself, he went into the Pacific.

  Till he got out past the breakers, he lay on his belly and paddled as he would have with a wahine on the surfboard instead of a mast (he didn’t—he wouldn’t—think about Susie Higgins). But once he made it out to calm water . . . Everything changed then.

  He stood up on the surfboard. He could do that riding a wave as tall as a three-story building. It would have been child’s play for him here even without the mast, but the tall pole did make it easier. And then he unfurled the sail.

  “Wow!” he said.

  The breeze came off the mainland, as it usually did in the morning. The sail filled with wind. Oscar had had an argument with Eizo Doi about how big to make it. He’d wanted it bigger. The handyman had kept shaking his head and flapping his hands. “No good. No good,” he’d said, and he’d pantomimed a capsizing. He’d been right, too. Oscar tipped the hat he wasn’t wearing to the Jap.

  Even the small spread of canvas Doi had put on the mast was plenty to make the surfboard scoot along like a live thing. And the breeze was none too strong. A real wind would have made the board buck like a bronco. Oscar wouldn’t have wanted to try to control it. This, though, this was as right as Baby Bear’s porridge.

  An hour with the surfboard—sailboard? Oscar wondered—took him farther out to sea than he could have gone paddling half the day. The northern horizon started to swallow Diamond Head and the hills behind Honolulu. Fishing sampans rarely bothered putting out lines or nets where they could still see the shore, but nobody without one could come even this far. With luck, that meant Oscar had found a pretty good spot. He furled the sail and glided to a stop.

  The Japs who went out in sampans used minnows for bait. Oscar didn’t know where to get his hands on those. Next best choice would have been meat scraps. But meat scraps were worth their weight in gold these days. People were eating dog food and cat food. They’d be eating dogs and cats pretty damn quick, too. For all Oscar knew, they already were.

  He couldn’t even cast bread upon the waters. Bread was as extinct as the mamo birds that had given Hawaiian kings yellow feathers for their cloaks. Oscar had to make do with grains of rice. With luck, they would lure small fish, and the small fish would lure bigger ones—although nobody turned up his nose at even small fish these days.

  “Come on, fish,” Oscar said, scattering the grains. “Pretend it’s a wedding. Eat it up. You know you want to.”

  He had the net he’d used when he went out with Charlie Kaapu. And he had a length of line with a motley assortment of hooks on it that Eizo Doi had thrown in with the mast and sail. What he didn’t have was any bait for the hooks. I should have swatted flies or dug up worms or something, he thought. Next time. I’m making it up as I go along.

  Glints of silver and blue in the water said the rice was luring fish of some sort, anyhow. He started swiping with the wide-mouthed net. Sure as hell, he caught flying fish and other fish he had more trouble naming and some squid that stared reproachfully at him. He wasn’t wild for squid himself—it was like chewing on a tire—but he knew plenty of people weren’t so fussy.

  When he drew in the line, he felt like shouting. It had four or five mackerel on it, and a couple of dogfish, too. He wouldn’t have eaten shark before he came to Hawaii, either, but he knew better now. Besides, flesh was flesh these days. He wasn’t about to throw anything back.

  He hadn’t seen any bigger sharks sliding through the sea. These days, their streamlined deadliness put him in mind of Jap fighter planes, a comparison that never would have crossed his mind before December 7. Any surf-rider had to be alert for them. A surf-rider with a crate full of fish had to be a lot more than alert. Now he had to get the fish back to Oahu.

  That might also turn into an adventure. The breeze was still blowing from the north. If he kept on running before it, the next stop was Tahiti, a hell of a long way away. He felt like Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia. Had he started something he didn’t know how to finish?

  “Making it up as I go along,” he said again, this time out loud. The sampans went out and came back. He ought to be able to do the same . . . but how? He tried to dredge up memories of high-school trig and physics. Triangles of forces, that’s what they were called. What to do with them, though?

  Memory didn’t help much. Maybe experiment would. If he set the sail so he ran before the wind, he was screwed. That meant he had to set it at some different angle. His first effort got him moving parallel to the shore. That didn’t hurt, but it didn’t help, either. If he swung the sail a little more . . .

  Bit by bit, he figured out how to tack. He didn’t have the seafaring lingo to des
cribe what he was doing, even to himself. That made things harder. But his confidence grew as each successive reach brought him closer to land.

  Beginner’s luck carried him back almost exactly to the point from which he’d set out. There were the waves rolling up onto Waikiki Beach. He started to take down the sail and mast and ride in on his belly.

  He started to—but he didn’t. He’d thought of surfsailing to let him get farther out to sea than he could with an ordinary surfboard. A slow grin spread over his face. That was why he’d thought of it, yeah, but did anything in the rules say he couldn’t have some fun with it, too?

  “You don’t want to lose the fish,” he reminded himself, and lashed the crate to the mast with a length of his fishing line. He stood by the mast, too, holding on to it with one hand, adjusting the sail so it kept on pushing him shoreward.

  People on the beach were pointing to him. They had to wonder what the hell kind of contraption that was out there on the Pacific and what he was doing with it. I’ll show ’em, he thought, and rode in on the crest of a breaker, skimming along as graceful as a fairy tern. He didn’t even think about what would happen if things went wrong, and they didn’t. He came up onto the soft white sand feeling like Jesus—hadn’t he just walked on water?

  The surf fishermen actually gave him a hand. “That’s the goddamnedest thing I ever saw,” one of them said, nothing but admiration in his voice.

  Oscar grinned again. “It is, isn’t it?”

  COMMANDER MITSUO FUCHIDA muttered to himself as he walked up to Iolani Palace. Commander Minoru Genda sent him a quizzical look. Fuchida’s mutters—and his misgivings—coalesced into words: “I don’t like getting dragged into politics. I’m an airman, not a diplomat in striped trousers.”

  “I don’t like it, either,” Genda said. “But would you rather leave the political choices to the Army?”

  That question had only one possible answer. “No,” Fuchida said. The Army had the political sense of a water buffalo. The unending strife in China proved that. Half of Japan’s resources, manpower and manufacturing that could have been used against the United States, were tied down in the quagmire on the Asian mainland, a quagmire of the Army’s making. Maybe Japanese rule here wouldn’t mean antagonizing everybody in sight. Maybe. Fuchida dared hope.

  Japanese soldiers had replaced the American honor guard at the palace. They presented arms as Fuchida and Genda came up the stairs. Once inside, the two Navy officers climbed the magnificent inner staircase—Fuchida had learned it was of koa wood—and into King Kalakaua’s Library, which adjoined the King’s Bedroom. The Army officers waited for them there. Fuchida had trouble telling Lieutenant Colonel Minami from Lieutenant Colonel Murakami. One of them had a mustache; the other didn’t. He thought Minami was the one with it, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe Minami and Murakami had trouble telling him and Genda apart, too. He hoped so.

  The Library was another fine specimen of late-Victorian splendor. The chairs featured elaborately turned wood, leather upholstery, and brass tacks polished till they gleamed like gold. There were book stands of walnut and of koa wood, all full of leather-bound volumes. Along with those of officials from the Kingdom of Hawaii, the walls boasted photographs of Prime Ministers Gladstone and Disraeli and the British House of Commons.

  “Busy,” was Genda’s one-word verdict.

  “I like it,” Fuchida said. “It knows what it wants to be.”

  Murakami and Minami just sat at the heavy green-topped desk in the center of the room. For all they had to say about the decor, they might have been part of it themselves. Army boors, Fuchida thought as he sat down, too.

  Two minutes later, precisely at ten o’clock, a large, impressive-looking woman of about sixty with heavy features and light brown skin strode into the room. In a long floral-print dress and a big flowered hat, she made a parade of one—in fact, of slightly more than one, because Izumi Shirakawa, the local Japanese who’d interpreted for the Americans at the surrender ceremony, skittered in behind her. He might have been a skiff following a man-of-war with all sails set.

  Fuchida and Genda rose. Half a second slower than they should have, so did Minami and Murakami. All four Japanese officers bowed in unison. The impressive-looking woman regally inclined her head to them. Fuchida spoke to the interpreter: “Please tell her Highness we are pleased to greet her here.”

  Shirakawa murmured in English. Princess Abigail Kawananakoa replied loudly and clearly in the same language. Shirakawa hesitated before turning it into Japanese. The woman spoke again, even more sharply than before. Shirakawa licked his lips and said, “She, ah, thanks you for the generosity of welcoming her to the palace her family built.”

  “She has her nerve,” Lieutenant Colonel Murakami said indignantly.

  “Yes, she does,” Fuchida said, but he was smiling. He found himself liking the Hawaiian (actually, half-Hawaiian, as her father had been an American businessman) princess. She was the widow of Prince David Kawananakoa, who was Queen Kapiolani’s nephew. Fuchida looked back to the interpreter. “Tell her we appreciate her very kind greeting.”

  Through Shirakawa, the princess said, “I suppose you asked me—no, you told me—to come here because you want something from me.”

  That made both Minami and Murakami splutter. This time, Fuchida had all he could do not to laugh out loud. He did like her. She had a great sense of her own importance, and wasn’t about to let anyone get the better of her. The Army officers didn’t know what to make of that. They thought she should have been groveling at their feet, and didn’t see that her sturdy independence might make her all the more useful to Japan.

  Minoru Genda did. He said, “Tell me, your Highness, do you remember the days when the Americans put an end to the Kingdom of Hawaii and annexed these islands?”

  “I do,” Princess Abigail Kawananakoa replied at once. “I was only a girl, but I remember those days very well.”

  “How do you feel about them?” Genda asked.

  For the first time, the princess hesitated. “Things are not always simple,” she said at last. “Look at me if you do not believe that. I have both bloods in me. That is what Hawaii is like these days. And what I thought then and what I think now looking back are two different things.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Minami opened his mouth. Fuchida was sure what he would say and how he would say it. He was also sure Minami could not do worse if he tried for a week. Forestalling the Army officer, he said, “And yet you still have your disagreements with the American government.”

  “With this American government, certainly.” Princess Abigail Kawananakoa let out a disdainful sniff. “How anyone could agree with that man in the White House has always been beyond me, though many people seem to.”

  “You were Republican National Committeewoman for Hawaii,” Fuchida said after checking his notes. The title translated only awkwardly into Japanese. He had no idea what a committeewoman might do, especially when Hawaii was only an external territory of the USA, not a province—no, a state: that’s why they call it the United States, he reminded himself.

  “I was,” she agreed. “And I have stayed a Republican even though my party is no longer in the majority. I do not abandon causes once I undertake them.”

  There was the opening Fuchida had hoped for. “And have you abandoned the cause of the Hawaiians, your Highness?”

  Again, Princess Abigail Kawananakoa hesitated. At last, she shook her head. “No, I have not abandoned it. How could I? I am one of them, after all.”

  Now Fuchida could ask the question Lieutenant Colonel Minami would have tried too soon: “Since things have changed here, do you not think you could do most for them as Queen of a restored Kingdom of Hawaii?”

  She looked at him. She looked through him—he got the feeling she could see the wall behind him through the back of his head. She said, “If I were to be Queen of Hawaii, I would rule; I would not just reign. I am no one’s figurehead, sir: not the Americans’, and not yours, either. Could
I be anything more than a figurehead?”

  The only possible answer to that was no. Japan wanted pliable puppets like the Emperor of Manchukuo. The Japanese told him what to do, and he told his people. That caused less friction than if a Japanese governor gave orders in his own name. A Queen of Hawaii would serve the the same function. Even the whites would be happier about orders from her than from General Yamashita.

  A Queen of Hawaii, yes, but plainly not this Queen of Hawaii. Still, Fuchida did his best: “You would serve the interests of your people, your Highness, and the interests of all the people of Hawaii, if you accepted.”

  When Abigail Kawananakoa shook her head, her jowls wobbled. Oddly, that made her seem more impressive, not less. She said, “If I accepted, I would serve the interests of the Empire of Japan. I do not doubt that you make the offer in a spirit of good will, but I must decline. Good morning, gentlemen.” She rose from her chair and sailed out of the King’s Library, Izumi Shirakawa again drifting along in her wake.

  “She is a widow, neh?” Lieutenant Colonel Murakami said.

  “Hai. For many years,” Fuchida answered.

  “I can see why,” the Army man said with a shudder. “I would rather die than live with a woman like that, too.” Fuchida and Genda both laughed; Fuchida wouldn’t have guessed Murakami had a joke in him.

  Lieutenant Colonel Minami said, “What do we do now? We’ve got orders to start up the Kingdom of Hawaii again. How can we do that if we have no royal backside to plop down on the throne?”

  “We’ll manage.” Genda sounded confident. “This woman isn’t the only person with connections to the old royal family, just the one with the best connections. Sooner or later, one of the others will say yes, and we’ll have the backside we need.”

  “This princess would have been a nuisance even if she did say yes,” Fuchida said. “We’re better off without her.” None of the other Japanese officers told him he was wrong.