by Kali Altsoba
Takeshi got there on merit, on his native brilliance and cunning. He joined SAC and its more secret Sakura-kai offspring because it was open to all colors and castes, even outcastes, as long as you accepted Purity. Or at least, as long as you lied convincingly that you did. That openness is opposite to the ways of the fundamentalist sect that raised him, the Sword Brothers that SAC butchered with calculated and jealous zeal in the Dowager’s blood purge.
In Kaigun and Rikugun and in the General Curia, men of high talent and higher ambition, dressed in green or slate gray, watch the brooding Broderbund squirm in the Ordensstaadt. They think the Brethren are close to finding a way out of their forced exile, maybe even a path to return to power after 40 years in the wilderness. The cowls are venomous and dangerous, and they’ve got Pyotr’s ear and attention. After all, they helped him kill the Regent. The man who delivered the untraceable poison and best knows the secret of Pyotr’s matricide has served as Ordensstaadt Ambassador to the Jade Court for the past twenty years. His knowledge is power.
Of all SAC and Rikugun officers, only Takeshi knows the cowled world of the enemy. Only he knows the Brethren from the inside, from a boyhood spent on Fates. He was born there to a demented refugee mother, sired by a shuttle pilot father who was one of her regular customers. Ripped from her at age three, he was raised by corrupt old men in the most cruel and spartan of all seminaries on Fates. It was a stark and barren place for a boy to grow up, even without the constant abuse. He’ll never forget or forgive Master Kahn for that.
He never knew his father, only that he wasn’t one of the monks. Maybe he was a merchant ship captain from Nagoya? Or maybe just an ordinary sailor, one of his mother’s many one-night tricks? As a small child, he daydreamed of his father as a Kaigun flag officer sent to Fates on some critical, secret mission. When he was six, he asked Maximilian Kahn who his father really was. He was beaten and told to never ask about him again. He kept right on asking and taking the beatings, until he turned fifteen and stopped caring either way. That’s when he ran away from Fates, forever.
He doesn’t share his secret, hard won knowledge of the Broderbund with anyone. Not with Nagoyans who also have his coppery skin tone and come from his origin world, but with whom he otherwise shares nothing, and who despise him as lowborn. Not with senior officers in SAC who only stand in his way, even though some keep an eye on his career, convinced that he’s a rising and natural talent. Not with Pyotr, who notes the hatred in Takeshi’s eyes when he attends the Jade Court but doesn’t know about the shameful, secret past he has with Kahn.
Takeshi is slender and exceptionally fit. He exudes vigor in all that he does, looking like an elite long distance runner in his prime. He tends to his athletic physique with the same careful attention that he cultivates his Ikebana before the Bad Camberg mission, fine tuning and trimming each muscle just as he trims and cultivates glossy leaves. He’s 35 years old when Pyotr gives him the go ahead and he destroys his Ikebana, to say to himself “there’s no going back.” When the war starts, he’s not yet skirting even the lower edge of what some still archaically call “middle age.” It’s an odd term, given the extension of limits of natural youthspan to 90 and of socially and psychologically acceptable, and legally enforceable, Final Age to 130 or beyond. Mentally, however, it fits him. At least in signifying a maturation that marks his ripening from callow youth into confident capability and deep decadence.
He’s more mentally trim and coldly disciplined than ever, and in full control. He never acts from lust or emotive impulse anymore. Not without calculating whether action or passivity in a given moment will advance his longterm plans. He’s rising fast inside Sakura-kai, cruel vanguard of a tumultuous, aggressive and war mongering movement. Yet he, not they, sits at Pyotr’s side to plan the covert operation that launches the Krevan War. That’s far more influence than SAC’s General Curia has, and they know it.
Like Takeshi, Pyotr also cynically flatters SAC, as he seeks to curtail it. In public, he calls it “Sword of the Revolution” and “Guardian of Purity.” In private, he tells Takeshi: “I’d as soon kill the whole General Curia!”
“One day, it can be done.”
“Nonsense! They’re too strong. I have to barter, and buy them off instead. You should know that, being one of their secret, inner circle leaders.”
‘You fool. SAC’s will not be easily bought. Five years ago, you had to promise war to secure Amasia to keep from being displaced, and killed. It’s one of the few right moves you’ve made, putting your own survival ahead of peace. You’ll never be your mother’s son. Someone else will have to put the gray men in their place, and crush the reviving men in cowls, too. Then will come your turn, my lord of weakness and indecision.’
Takeshi thinks daily about vendetta, about how to use his unique position as secret principal confident of the Tennō. He even delights in petty humiliation of the High Castes. In Jade Court circles, he’s famed for his technique in bed. Almost as famous as for having a third nipple, the only flaw on his perfect body. It makes him even more arousing to some. Few realize the sheer contempt with which he receives their attentions and regards their fawning. He boasted once to Pyotr: “I can take the wives and daughters of any High Caste man in your Court into my bed whenever I want. I can take their sons, too, if I so choose.” Pyotr dared him to make a supreme conquest of a particularly beautiful and proud High Caste woman. The challenge was satisfied in a day, when Takeshi brought back the lady’s red lace undergarment to Pyotr’s chamber and tossed it cavalierly on the poster bed. The story got about, and the shamed woman left the capital for good a week later. Takeshi then bedded her first born son.
‘The High Castes have never earned their way. It’s why they worry that no one respects them or their opinions. They know that the rest of us sneer at their inadequacy and unearned positions, and incapacity for accomplishment. Even the most stupid know they’ve not achieved anything on their own merit. They are to the Great Houses born, no more. And they all know it. Lucky sperm!’
He had these thoughts the night he left to organize the covert Bad Camberg mission that started all Orion down the path to war. The night he carefully destroyed nineteen years of delicate, deliberate pruning of superbly crafted Ikebana stems, leaves and flowers. The night he left all but war and high ambition behind, in a smoky brazier under a widow open to the stars. The night he decided that all he really wants is absolute power, and set aside all the things of his past in a single minded dedication to the pursuit of power. By all and any means.
***
One of Takeshi’s spies records an odd conversation a few months into the Krevan War. It takes place between a general in SAC military intelligence and a colonel with recent field experience on Genève. It’s an interview to see if the colonel should transfer to Main HQ.
“Tell me, ummm, Colonel Yonatan Hayom, what do you know of Maximilian Kahn? Relax, we’re just talking. We’ll do the formal interview later.”
“I hear he’s devout, yet takes women and boys to his bed. The old lecher. Like all Brethren, he was born from and into lechery. And now he’s Ordensstaadt ambassador to the Jade Court.”
“What do you think about that?”
“I think we should use his lust against him, this impiety he shows to his faith.”
“You're mistaken, colonel. Chastity is not a vow the Brethren take.”
“OK, but surely he’s wandering from his vows somehow. Does he really believe the nonsense the Broderbund teaches?”
“Of course he does. He’s a High Priest of the Order.”
“I have interrogated many a priest of the Black Faith that did not believe a word of it. Some even reviled it.”
“You believed them when they told you that?”
“It was more where they told me, and what I was doing to them at the time.”
“This is no ordinary priest. To ask if Maximilian Kahn is motivated by his faith is to miss the point. Just as it is to ask if he’s a true ascetic, a true monk
.”
“But he is a monk!”
“Yes, but he’s not chaste. Brethren have always taken girls and women to their beds. Ever since they bolted from Old Earth they have bred enslaved women in clone vats to be their mother-wives. They bed down boys too, if it comes to that. They’re equal opportunity bastards.”
“It’s disgusting, that these filthy old men paw at young flesh.”
“Come now! This is the Imperium. High Castes and powerful men do what they like here. Besides, most cowls are a lot younger than you, colonel.”
“How can that be?”
“Ever since the Red Purge, they’re being bred at accelerated rates, to more quickly restore their numbers. And as men they have the same appetites as you. Or maybe not. How your door swings wasn’t in your profile.”
“It’s still disgusting. They’re supposed to be monks!”
“You sound like a prude from the provinces! This is Kestino, as I said. If you’re looking for pure asceticism, if you want abstinence, you won’t find it with Kahn or other Brethren. Besides, nothing in all the worlds is truly pure.”
“Ya, maybe all of us in Purity most of all! Ha!”
“It’s an old joke. Not that funny, and certainly not one that should be made inside these walls, even by us. Move on, colonel.”
“Sorry. Well then, General Ri Yong Gil, should I instead ask what is it that corrupts Ambassador Maximillian Kahn?”
“Hard to say. Nothing in the worlds is wholly impure either. We live inside slow moral and psychological blenders. The most self disciplined among us is a jumble even to ourselves.”
“Yes, but when it comes to…”
“Our motives, our ingredients mix over the course of our lives, confusing us as to who we truly are. Why we do what we do on some days, but not on others.”
“I agree, although I did not expect so much philosophy in this interview.”
“Philosophy is in everything we attempt and do.”
“Yeah? Maybe for you but not for me. I’m a simpler man.”
“I doubt that, colonel. But leave it aside for now. What do you know about the role of philosophy in the Broderbund?”
“Only that cowls say that their whole lives are guided by eternal principles.”
“They lie.”
“Lying I understand.”
“Even on the lip of a fresh crater on one of the ice moons of Aral, or lying waiting for the needle to descend in a Life Temple before the war, some motives are lumpier than others within us. As an analyst, you must look for those secret ways, in others as in yourself. It’s our moral lumpiness that defines us as men.”
“Ummm…”
“Yes? You have my permission to speak your mind. Your whole mind. We don’t want mere sycophants here in MI, should you make the cut.”
“Alright, I will speak forthrightly in that case. General Ri, I know that you're my superior and all, but it’s not really very helpful, what you say so vaguely. What on all the earths do you mean by ‘moral lumpiness’?”
“In intelligent people, like Maximilian Kahn, motives fit into and satisfy core psychic needs, more or less. But an ascetic’s psyche is both more simple and more complex than yours or even mine. Sometimes they seek satisfaction in honor, but most often in ritual and daily habit. Or they go after total power, to satisfy a secret lust or hidden yearning they suppress but can’t control.”
“Again, you don’t help by saying so many things at once.”
“Fine. What do you really want to know?”
“What’s Maximilian Kahn’s deepest delusion?”
“That he has devotedly surrendered everything to a higher purpose.”
“Is this a test? I could say the same about any officer with true loyalty to Rikugun or Kaigun. Even about any young man who puts on a SAC uniform. They all claim to serve more noble things. So why does this trait mark him off?”
“It’s not the same thing at all. None of our officers feels called upon by the gods to devote his whole life to serve Pyotr, or even the Imperium.”
“Some come close, especially when still young.”
“Kahn speaks out loud to his god. He does it thrice daily.”
“So do I, as do all dutiful men.”
“You talk to the gods? Daily? For hours?”
“Well no, not hours. And perhaps not daily. Alright, once on Genève, when my HQ came under a heavy barrage. Scared the shit out of me! Surprised me, too, that I prayed like a boy.”
“I’ve seen that often, before combat and after. Less often during fighting. Not a lot of time to think, let alone be praying, in combat. Folks who haven’t been there always say there are no atheists in foxholes, but it’s not true.”
“I know. After a fight is over people think your first and natural instinct is to pray, to thank your god for saving you. But it’s not. You just find some open spot and take a shit.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that, too.”
“Still, it was a helluva barrage. White plasma. Dirty shells, too, I think.”
“Understandable that you had a moment of weakness. But think, colonel. No such thing ever happened to the Devil’s Disciple.”
“OK, so the old man prays out loud and way too often. So what?”
“His god speaks back. Loudly and nearly as often.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, I’m not. Did yours talk to you, in your beleaguered HQ?”
“Not a fucking word!”
“As I suspected.”
“That’s why I hung up on him.”
“Did you ever call him back?”
“No way. What’s the point?”
“None really. It is what it is.”
“So tell me then, General Ri, is Kahn merely a devout? Or is he as insane as he looks?”
“Who’s interviewing who, colonel?”
“Why you are, sir.”
“Not insane. But he’s pious to a grievous fault.”
“What fault?”
“Excessive pride in his humility.”
“Ha! What else? If you don’t mind saying, sir.”
“In this man, this cowl, I suspect he’s influenced more by fatigue with life and by fatalism on the edge of his closing death than by the ancient theology and scriptural theory he cites, and still carries with him in tight little vid scrolls. But I could be completely wrong.”
“The other option?”
“That he is as he appears. A true devout, despite his obvious intelligence.”
“OK, that’s the man. What about as a leader of men? Is he a leader or just another wannabe politician?”
“Among cowls, he’s more the latter. He has no following to speak of, beyond a handful of novices and postulants who serve as his assistants here in Novaya Uda. He’s not High Council. He serves the High Council, here on Kestino.”
“No secret backers on Terra Deus?”
“Not that we know of, or he wouldn’t have been exiled to Kestino. That’s how he sees it, by the way. That he’s an exile, far from his refrigerated archives of cold stone and flaking texts.”
“Is there more?”
“You’re working me for info, like any good MI?”
“Just trying to understand, sir.”
“Yeah, sure. Alright listen, his recent actions suggest a growing internal imbalance in his own psyche and in the Broderbund. His own motives fractured after he spent a few years at the Jade Court.”
“How so?”
“He’s always been a compromise of contrary psychic and bodily drives, of contingency and immediacy. That didn’t matter when he stayed in the archives. But now the vibrancy of Orion swirls all around as he gazes on the stars through a cloistered window. I speak metaphorically.”
“Please don’t.”
“I mean he’s torn. Late in life, he grows fascinated by the fates of the worlds, now being decided by war. Yet, he’s confined by his vocation to the blinkered worldview of Fates.”
“He has regrets? So what? Only a fool grows
old and says he has no regrets.”
“His are profound. At Court and in Novaya Uda, with all its insistent smells and sights and sounds, he’s set apart from the world. Like all cowls, he’s outside it yet not distant from it. He smells hot and spicy lives lived by others in the city. He hears laughter, music and dancing. He envies and desires simple, raw freedom from discipline. But he’s also repelled by it.”
“Why doesn’t the old bugger just take a mistress?”
“You think a good fuck solves a man’s spiritual angst, even though he nears Final Age?”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“No, probably not. Well, it may surprise you that Kahn agrees. That’s why he has taken a mistress, though you would not believe me if I told you who.”
“Who? You can tell me, general. I’m security cleared to the Ninth Level.”
“Very clever, but alright, I’ll play. Princess Chiyoko Shaka Oetkert.”
“Her? I thought she was dead? Or locked away in a convent prison? Or deep in an oubliette somewhere at the bottom of the Waldstätte Palast.”
“No, she’s alive, Though it has been 20 years since she saw outdoor light.”
“She’s here on Kestino, with Maximilian Kahn?”
“Yes. Out on Lake Isis.”
“Does Pyotr know?”
“Of course not! Not even he would leave her there with Kahn.”
“This changes everything!”
“What are you thinking, Colonel Hayom?”
“If we need her, she could replace Friedrich and Pyotr on the Jade Throne.”
“She could, at least until she bears a son. Though it’s nearly too late. One might say, she’s overripe. But back to Kahn. What do you think this portends for how he maneuvers at Court?”