by Неизвестный
“One stone cannot be in both places. You have to choose, son.”
“Tell me what to do.”
I look into my father’s face for an answer.
“Look around you,” Dad says. And I see Mom, Mrs. Maeda, the Prime Minister, all our neighbors from Kurume, and all the people who waited with us in Kagoshima, in Kyushu, in all the Four Islands, all over the earth and on the Hopeful. They look expectantly at me, for me to do something.
Dad’s voice is quiet:
“The stars shine and blink.
We are all guests passing through,
A smile and a name.”
“I have a solution,” I tell Dr. Hamilton over the radio.
“I knew you’d come up with something,” Mindy says, her voice proud and happy.
Dr. Hamilton is silent for a while. He knows what I’m thinking. And then: “Hiroto, thank you.”
I unhook the torch from its useless fuel tank and connect it to the tank on my back. I turn it on. The flame is bright, sharp, a blade of light. I marshal photons and atoms before me, transforming them into a web of strength and light.
The stars on the other side have been sealed away again. The mirrored surface of the sail is perfect.
“Correct your course,” I speak into the microphone. “It’s done.”
“Acknowledged,” Dr. Hamilton says. His voice is that of a sad man trying not to sound sad.
“You have to come back first,” Mindy says. “If we correct course now, you’ll have nowhere to tether yourself.”
“It’s okay, baby,” I whisper into the microphone. “I’m not coming back. There’s not enough fuel left.”
“We’ll come for you!”
“You can’t navigate the struts as quickly as I did,” I tell her gently. “No one knows their pattern as well as I do. By the time you get here, I will have run out of air.”
I wait until she’s quiet again. “Let us not speak of sad things. I love you.”
Then I turn off the radio and push off into space so that they aren’t tempted to mount a useless rescue mission. And I fall down, far, far below the canopy of the sail.
I watch as the sail turns away, unveiling the stars in their full glory. The sun, so faint now, is only one star among many, neither rising nor setting. I am cast adrift among them, alone and also at one with them.
A kitten’s tongue tickles the inside of my heart.
I play the next stone in the gap.
Dad plays as I thought he would, and my stones in the northeast corner are gone, cast adrift.
But my main group is safe. They may even flourish in the future.
“Maybe there are heroes in Go,” Bobby’s voice says.
Mindy called me a hero. But I was simply a man in the right place at the right time. Dr. Hamilton is also a hero because he designed the Hopeful. Mindy is also a hero because she kept me awake. My mother is also a hero because she was willing to give me up so that I could survive. My father is also a hero because he showed me the right thing to do.
We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.
I pull my gaze back from the Go board until the stones fuse into larger patterns of shifting life and pulsing breath. “Individual stones are not heroes, but all the stones together are heroic.”
“It is a beautiful day for a walk, isn’t it?” Dad says.
And we walk together down the street so that we can remember every passing blade of grass, every dewdrop, every fading ray of the dying sun, infinitely beautiful.
The last time I’d eaten at Yasukuni Bar de Café, I’d ordered the sweet potato Mont Blanc. This time I picked the castella with natto ice cream. The waitress took our order and glided away over the Pacific, chiming softly. Overhead, a Zero fighter strafed a swarm of UFOs.
My target had made a big effort with his appearance—false eyelashes, decals on his toenails, the works—but nothing could disguise the scared look in his eyes.
I felt sorry for him. Now that we were face to face I could see he was physically harmless, biceps like chopsticks. We could have done this at his place, where he would be more comfortable. It had been mean to drag him out. But we were here now, so I might as well get it over with.
“This is goodbye,” I said. “It’s better to end the relationship before anybody else gets hurt. Sorry.”
“I understand,” he said to the horizon.
I had to make sure he really did understand. “She doesn’t ever want to see you again. She’s divorcing you today. She’s also unfanning you and canceling your access to her WORLD. And I know you wouldn’t do this, but don’t try and stalk her under a false identity, because she’s got your ID from the time you killed her.”
He flinched. He wasn’t eating anything, just cradling a durian soy frappulatte. I used my OPU toolsuite to check for incoming packets. He was streaming a slasher-kei opera while we talked. He and his wife were both into slasher-kei, only he hadn’t known where to draw the line.
He watched me chasing my ice cream around my plate. “When I was little,” he said suddenly, “natto had a smell. It doesn’t anymore. I wonder why?”
“Maybe people didn’t like it,” I said, shrugging. I seemed to remember that too, now he mentioned it. A dollop of natto on rice fresh out of the cooker before school. A smell of fermentation.
A big gray battleship chugged past our island. A caption popped up against the sunset to identify it as the Yamato, Marshal Isoroku Yamamoto’s flagship, on its way to Midway. Wherever. I just liked it here for the sea. They did a great job with the waves lapping on the beach. You could fool yourself that if you went down to the waterline, you’d really get wet.
I finished my dessert—I might as well, since I wasn’t paying for it—and we deboxed. The waitress zipped down the aisle, bowed from her thoracic hinge, and debited the bill from his Life Support account. I also got her to log the visit on my reward card. I knew I’d be back. We walked toward the exit between the rows of boxes. From outside they looked grotty, covered with printscreens for assisted-suicide services and meds for noncompliant personality disorder, which had been the hot disease at least six months ago. Clearly, the Yasukuni Bar de Café had problems attracting advertisers.
Outside, segway cops patrolled the asphalt in front of the main attraction, a building with red pillars and curly-edged roofs encased in a transparent polythene tent. We put our masks on. There’d been a fallout warning today.
He stopped beneath the giant torii gate on the way back to Kudanshita station. “What about the kids?” he said. “What’s going to happen to them?”
My client had specifically instructed me to tell him the truth about this, if he asked. I’d been hoping he wouldn’t. “They’ve been liquidated,” I said. “Sorry.”
“No. No! Ayumi’s about to start first grade. Tomitake’s only three. You can’t just snatch their lives away from them like that!”
“She’s their mother. It’s her right.” He was crying, his mascara dripping onto the pink-skull-patterned fabric of his mask. I didn’t feel sorry for him anymore. “Anyway, you should have thought of that before you killed her,” I said.
“But she asked me to,” he whispered.
I called my client while I was on the train. She wanted to know if he’d asked about the kids, and I said he had. “Good,” she said vindictively. “I want the asshole to suffer.”
“He started crying when I told him.”
“What a loser,” she said, echoing my own thought from earlier. “Who cries over virtual kids?”
More people than you’d think, actually. But I only said, “I’ll expect my fee to show up in my account today. That’s not a problem, I hope?” As always, I got a tiny low-down thrill when I mentioned getting paid for my services.
“It’s already there,” she said. “I really appreciate your hard work. I’ll be sure to recommend you to my fans if anyone needs a proxy.”
I was still thinking about her husband’s last words—but she asked me to
kill her! Breakups are always more complicated than they look from the outside. I wondered which of them was telling the truth and felt something complicated—disappointment and relief mixed up—at the thought that I’d never know.
“By the way, what does he look like?” she said before we hung up. “I’ve never met him.”
I’m a professional proxy. To get my license, I had to pass the National Examination in Compassion and Warmheartedness (Level 1). Most of my coursework was obvious stuff dressed up in jargon, but a few parts really struck me, such as the module about meiwaku. It said, “The Japanese dislike causing other people meiwaku. Such is our reluctance to inconvenience others that many of us prefer to suffer in silence …” blah blah blah, and then there was this bit: “The comparatively low divorce rate (80 percent of Japanese physical marriages and 27 percent of virtual marriages last more than one year) is often attributed to this national trait.”
When I screened that, I knew I was going to specialize in proxy breakups.
It’s bullshit about meiwaku, of course. But check out those statistics. Forty-six point five percent of all marriages last less than one year! And the beautiful thing about divorce is that you still need the other person’s signature and stamp, even if the marriage was virtual. So there’s a lot of demand for what I do. In fact, I make almost as much money as I could claim from National Life Support for sitting on my ass all day. And I kind of enjoy the frugal lifestyle, actually.
I had a few hours to kill before my next appointment, so I stopped off in Shinjuku for a makeover. There’s this one place I really like, on the forty-second floor of the You-Vie building, that has a little zoo in the lobby. Sometimes I just sit and watch the butterflies and birds and things. But I’d been up all night engineering contacts, and I was looking grotty, so I went straight into surgery.
I like to look different for each appointment, when possible. Some guys will photograph you on the sly and run an ID search using facial-recognition tools. I’m a jump ahead of them. This time through I had my lips plumped, my cheeks lifted, and some new hair extensions put in. As I got back on the train, the numbness was fading into that tingly phase.
There are more faces on the street at night, fewer full-body masks. People want to be seen, especially in Roppongi. You can feel that old-time glamour in the air. Neon, smiles, the smell of shwarma. But I wasn’t going to get to eat a fancy meal at someone else’s expense, not tonight. I was breaking one of my own rules: I was going to meet a target at his place. This guy lived on the 244th floor of the Roppongi Space Needle, so I figured it was all right.
“I’m here on behalf of your wife,” I said. “Sorry to have deceived you.” I’d made contact with him by pretending to have a skinship fetish, operating off a tip from my client—his wife—that he liked that kind of thing. As a matter of fact, that was why she was divorcing him. It had taken a couple of weeks before he revealed interest and agreed to meet me, so I’d thought maybe she was wrong. Uh-uh. He’d met me at the door stark naked. I stood in the genkan without taking my shoes off and said, “She’s through with you, and she’s not interested in discussing it. I just need your signature and stamp here, please.” I usually tried to soften the blow for them, but his nudity was so disrespectful I couldn’t be bothered to be Compassionate or Warmhearted at all.
“Ah-huh,” he said. “I see. Did she say why?”
“Yeah, because you’re a pervert.” I gestured at his crotch. His penis hung in a clump of black hair like a little brown mochi-iri kinchaku.
He looked down sadly at himself. “I never tried to have sex with her,” he said. “I’m not one of those.”
“No, you’re even sadder than that.”
“I guess I am.” He sighed and climbed into a pair of sweatpants. He said over his shoulder, “Come in for a drink. I want to hear her side of the story, then I’ll sign your paperwork.”
Well, you hear about girls getting attacked by sex maniacs. And it now occurred to me that maybe the line between skinship and sex wasn’t as bright as I’d assumed. On the other hand, I had my professional pride: I hate failing a client. And I was curious to see inside his apartment. I could see from the door that it had at least two rooms.
Three, it turned out. I started to wonder what his scam was. National Life Support pays out the national average income, which would not cover so much as a unit bath in the Roppongi Space Needle.
He gave me a can of blueberry juice from the fridge. “So, do you do this for a living?”
“Yeah,” I said, a bit defensively.
“Not many people bother to work for a living nowadays.”
“There aren’t many jobs that need doing.”
“By people.”
“No.”
“Still. You could just claim Life Support. Why don’t you?”
“Look, I know I’m weird, okay? I just happen to like doing a job and getting paid for it. Same as you like getting naked and rubbing yourself against other people. Everyone’s weird in their own way.”
“That’s not true.” He looked at me in a way I didn’t like, as if he were seeing through my makeover habit to whatever I would have looked like without all the surgery. “Not rubbing, actually. For your information. Just sort of … holding.”
“Ugh,” I said, and a burst of music played. He grabbed a gadget off the table. A phone. Wow. I hadn’t seen one of those in years.
“Yeah. No. That’s not good … Yeah? On my way now.”
He disappeared into the bedroom.
“I’ve been called out. Sorry. Can we finish this on the way?”
“To where?”
He came back out tying a necktie around the collar of a Y-shirt. He was wearing a suit. I hadn’t seen one of those in … God, since I was a kid. My dad used to wear a suit to go to … the office. That was what we called it, the office.
“Hey,” I said. “You work for a living too, don’t you? Asshole.”
“We weren’t talking about me.”
I followed him down to the building’s carpark. A Tata Buzz glided out of the darkness, making a throaty engine noise. We got in. The car rolled up the ramp and straight onto the elevated highway. Tokyo stretched to the horizon, a dim grid of energy-saving LED streetlumes, dotted with a few sparkling islands. My guy switched on the interior light and flipped through the divorce paperwork. “I’m not signing this,” he said.
“You have to.”
“I don’t have to do anything. Neither do you.”
The car exited at Kokkaigijidomae. We passed the Diet building and pulled up outside a nondescript office block on Sotobori Dori. My guy worked for the government. He was a civil servant. I remembered my father saying that civil servants had the best jobs of anyone. That was in the days before National Life Support started and suddenly there was no reason for anyone to have a job at all. Most of my teachers quit. My father stopped going to the office. We were happy at first, but then my mother broke up with us and went to be a biobot developer in China. She died in the Rongcheng nuclear accident. A while after that, my father hanged himself in the bathroom. He left a note saying that he wasn’t worried about leaving me because he knew National Life Support would take good care of me.
As we walked toward the doors, my guy squirted me a security code via my public inbox. The guards scanned us through. Inside the building, men in suits were running. Some of them had guns. I thought nothing of it, probably because I’d seen so many guns in people’s WORLDs … and then we plunged through another set of doors, big wooden ones with rosettes on them, and we were in someone’s WORLD. Had been all along, perhaps. The seamless intro had fooled me.
“Well, this is kind of pathetic.” Hands on hips, I surveyed the twilit countryside spread out below. We seemed to be standing on the parapet of a castle built on a craggy outcropping. Flat farmland stretched to a line of distant hills. I could just make out the familiar triangle of Fuji-san, the sun still bright on its snowcap. “Are we actually still in your car? Or still in your apartme
nt?”
A cold, fresh wind licked at my face.
“This isn’t a virtuality,” my guy said. “It’s 2417 AD.”
“Oh yeah? Because it looks like an out-of-the-box WORLD set in the Warring States Era.”
“Have another look.” He pointed toward the hills. I saw motion along a distant crease in the fields, too fast to be a column of horses. The tops of trucks zooming along a sunken road. Farther away, something flickered brightly, burning.
“They ambushed Supply Convoy Number 313 thirty minutes ago.” Another suit was briefing my guy. “We’ve secured the area and are evaccing casualties.”
“Retaliatory measures?”
“Not yet. We’re waiting for a decision.”
“I’d better take a look at the damage. Do we have control of the local airspace?”
“Yes sir, we do. They do not appear to have surface-to-air missiles at this time.”
“Right, right. That comes earlier.” My guy frowned at the distant flames. “Get a chopper ready then.”
“Can I come?”
“No.” He was different now, distant. Working. “Stay here.”
“He cares about me,” I explained to the people who were left on top of the gatehouse. “He wouldn’t want me to get hurt.” I’d analyzed the security code he sent me, using the basic suite of tools in my onboard processing unit. It identified me as his “secretary.” Whatever. I didn’t know what a secretary was supposed to do, but complaining seemed like a good start. “Why is my OPU running so slow? I’m only getting, like, gigabits per second.”
They exchanged glances. “Limited bandwidth on this side, miss.”
I rubbed my fingers over the top of the parapet. Gritty yellow stone. Licked them. Taste of dust. In the west, the sun was slowly sinking. I love sunsets, all the yellows and the reds, like an oil painting by Mother Nature. But this one looked like an amateur effort, just a few lemony veils of cloud drifting above an orb too bright to look at. “What’s with the sky?”
“It’s the air, miss. No pollution out here.”