by Victor Milán
“I’ve killed again.” TOKUGAWA’s voice floated like bleak mist from the speaker in Michiko’s modest apartment. “Four hundred men.”
Sipping from a glass of black-market imported Scotch, Michiko said, “You didn’t have any choice.”
“But I did. After I destroyed the attack craft, the transports posed no threat; they would have fled. They were fleeing.”
Outside the sun had died and the Chugoku burned for a funeral pyre, orange and vermillion. Michiko sat on her bed in a man’s burgundy shirt, bare legs tucked under her. She glanced out, and her eyes rebounded quickly from the window, open to admit the occasional stirring of the leaden air. Unlike her office, Michiko’s old apartment faced west, toward Hagi on the Sea of Japan. Black strands of smoke still flourished like tentacles in the sky above the workers’ housing development.
“I would regret even the deaths of the attack-craft crew, though I can see that their deaths were… necessary.” A pause. “Yet the others—”
“They had it coming.” Michiko’s vehemence surprised her. Is it really me speaking? The half-pacifist libertarian? She gulped hastily at her drink to drown the images that flashed into her mind: a child burned to a calcined charcoal doll, the injured screaming in the overflowing development infirmary. The old man, splashed by jellied gasoline and burned so terribly there was nothing to do but dose him with painkillers to the verge of a lethal dose and set him aside—triage, they called it—clinging to her hand with surprising strength, until his body convulsed with the violence of tectonic plates slipshifting across one another, and his remaining eye lolled to the side and turned gelatin-blank. If it hadn’t been for the aide-de-camp at her side she would have embarrassed herself by breaking down in public. But if her aide, herself horribly burned in some mishap and bearing the scars, could stand the spectacle, she, who’d never known physical pain worse than a tomboy’s broken arm, could too.
“Murderers,” she said.
“They weren’t all murderers. The men in the transports didn’t kill anybody.”
“You think they were just along for the ride? There’s a time for ninjo. Do you really think this is one?”
She felt him retreat into heavy silence. Outside night birds fluttered in rising purposeful spirals about the castle, seeking the insect clouds that billowed from the pond in the rooftop garden. I’m being hard on him. She set her drink down beside the bed, fumbled out a cigarette, lit it. Life’s tough.
“Ideals are fine things,” she said, turning the little plastic lighter over and over in her hands. “Had ’em all my life. Lovely things; used to tend them the way father tended his garden. I was going to be a scientist, push back the frontiers of ignorance, help humanity come a few steps closer to understanding what the whole game’s all about. Peaceful applications, of course; nothing that could be used to harm anybody. Pure knowledge.”
She puffed her cigarette, stared out the window. It was too dark to see smoke. “Maybe I compromised myself right at the outset. I get out of CalTech with my doctorate clutched in my hand, and who makes the offer I can’t resist? A sky’s-the-limit experimental budget and the chance to work with some of the heaviest minds in physics? Only one of the most evil dictatorships in the world. My mission was beyond politics, I told myself; it was science. The money… it was screwed out of the peasants, or the middle classes that the government was screwing back into being peasants, but what the hell? If we hadn’t got it, they would have bought a few more shock batons for the riot troops, more torture toys for the secret police.” A sip. “We were kidding ourselves, of course. The regime got its value out of us, all right: the odor of legitimacy that came from sponsoring genuinely major research and theoretical work. A piece of paper to wag under critics’ noses: ‘Sure, we torture dissenters, tax the peasants bloodless, kill a thousand insurrectos a week in the Philippines. But you can’t say we’re barbarians. See? We’re giving the world the best science money can buy.’”
She set the drink on her thigh. The glass was a cold wet brand. “I was too proud to go into commerce like my father and my poor downtrodden brother. And I was the one who sold my soul.” She stubbed her cigarette out savagely in the bronze lotus leaf on the floor beside her mat. “Hit Sovereign, TOKUGAWA. Hit them with everything we’ve got. Strip their damned murdering executives of every shred of property, personal and corporate, they’ve got to their—or any other—names. Turn ’em out on the street, and let ’em learn to scuffle on the black market, if MID won’t take them in. Or starve.” She shook her head. “If it takes force, use that. We’ve got plenty of muscle to toss around, thanks to my dear, departed brother.”
“Your brother,” TOKUGAWA said hollowly.
She glared at the blank screen. “You think I’m turning paranoid, like him? Tell that to the people with half their skin burned into crust by those bastards. Our people. I’m not lunging after shadows, dammit; this is real. Hit them.”
“As you wish, Yoshimitsu-sama.”
* * * * *
Through mists that clung like seaweed to his bare ankles he wandered. A pit hungered black before him. He walked up to it, to the edge, the very edge, looked down. Oblivion invited.
“TOKUGAWA.”
His every muscle locked, he turned. She floated behind him, a patch of radiance in eternal twilight. “No,” he said. “You were a dream. A hallucination”
The fine brush strokes of her eyebrows started together in a frown, then flowed apart again, the clear skin of her forehead smoothing like the surface of a pond resorbing the ripples of an intossed stone. “Can you still believe that, my love?”
“You were gone so long—I thought—”
She smiled. “I had my reasons. Now I’ve come to tell you how proud you’ve made me.”
“Proud?”
“Proud. Because you haven’t shirked your duty, unpleasant as you may have found it. You fought for your lord—which Michiko is, bitch that she is. You fought well, and you followed her command to reduce the Sovereign Group, ninjo notwithstanding. I am well pleased with you.”
She gestured easily with her hand, and they were in what appeared to be the bedchamber of a lady of noble birth, half-lit by a pair of amber paper lanterns. She knelt on the bed and reached for him. “I’ve longed for you, my love. Before, the time wasn’t right; it would have been too much to subject you to, when you hadn’t had time to accustom yourself to my survival. But now—”
He pulled away. Anger flashed from her face, black radiance. “So! You’ve got the old man’s weak-willed daughter to satisfy you now, so you don’t need me. I built better than I knew; I made you not just human but a man, with a man’s attitude toward women. I knew it that day in the meadow. I was a sexual toy for you to play with, no more; now I’m discarded.”
He dropped to his knees and gripped her shoulders. His cheeks were water-shed. “No, Elizabeth, you know better than that. I love you, I’ll always love you. Real or not.”
“More than Michiko?”
He jerked back a centimeter.
She touched his cheek. Her fingertips were cool. “No. I won’t ask you to be disloyal.” She raised her mouth to his. She ran her tongue from right to left, between his upper teeth and lip, and he responded with manic urgency, crushing her to him.
“It’s your duty to love your lord above all,” she whispered, “but now you will love me.”
CHAPTER 28
“Michiko.”
Chagrined, she hoisted herself back to full consciousness. Rapport’s too precious these days to waste drowsing in the simulacrum sun. “What is it, dear?”
He sat on the grass with his back to the boulder, arms around knees, gravely thoughtful. What beautiful eyes he has.
“What happens to us when we die?” he asked.
She blinked, yawned, stretched. These moments had grown so few. Just last week, another zaibatsu had made a play backed by mercenaries, this one at the headquarters of dear old Hiryu in Osaka. Fortunately, it had easily been fielded; the doit
sujin hadn’t thought to secure their communications against a being who spoke the digital dialects of machines better than any human—as why should they? Within minutes of launching the assault (and rocket-propelled grenades, against guard posts at the gate) they pulled back in confusion, obedient to their commander’s orders—not knowing the commander himself was circling impotently in his chopper overhead, shrieking imprecations at communications equipment that suddenly refused to communicate. Casualties were blessedly few—and in short order Yoshimitsu Telecommunications possessed substantial new assets. How much easier not to defend ourselves, she thought. Yet if the dog packs get the notion we’re safe prey…
Focused, finally, she sat up. “What happens when we die?” She rubbed her eyes. “No matter how well I get to know you, you still have the capacity to astonish me, darling.”
“I—I’ve just been wondering.”
Something in his expression haunted her. She rolled over, slithered up to prop arms and chin on his knees. “What’s the matter? Why this sudden macabre streak?”
“No reason.” His gaze flitted like a fly, to the looming straight pines, to the clouds tumbling overhead—everywhere but to her. “Just… wondering.”
She kissed his knee. It tasted marvelously of sun-warmed flesh. “Poor TOKUGAWA. I don’t even think it’s something you have to worry about. If your IPN’s adequately maintained, I don’t see much reason you can’t be effectively immortal.”
Lazily she began to tickle his thigh. He seized her wrist. “Please.”
Disengaging, she sat up straight and faced him. “All right. But I don’t know what to tell you; I don’t know what happens when we die.”
“What do you think happens? Do we just go out, like a light switched off? Do we continue somehow in our identities?”
“I never really thought about it much. The tradition I’m raised in accepts reincarnation. I myself—” She shrugged. “Something about it seems too good to be true, to me. Though that outlook diverges from our tradition, which holds existence and suffering to be cognate.”
She gazed off into the woods. “Occasionally, I do wonder. We’re quantum creatures, after all. A lot of my colleagues carry the idea that we—our minds—are more than just the sums of our physical parts to what they think’s a logical conclusion: that consciousness is wholly distinct from matter. That our bodies are just vessels that hold our true beings for a while.”
“Is this phenomenon what’s meant by the word soul?”
“Sure, I guess so. It’s a fairly standard notion in mysticism, Eastern or Western.”
“What’s your opinion, as a scientist?”
A shrug. “It bothers me a bit. The popularizers of quantum mechanics rode the mysticism hobbyhorse so hard and fast it just broke down. The critics used that against us, how they ever used it. So I’m, I guess, gun-shy.” She chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. “Still, the idea appeals to the cosmic outlaw in me, I have to confess. I like the notion that neither death nor taxes is certain.”
“How would this—this transmigration of souls take place? From a scientific viewpoint”
She lowered herself onto her belly and let the sun massage her back and buttocks. Grass was pleasantly crinkly beneath her belly. “I can think of a couple of possibilities. After all, it’s been demonstrated that our neural processes take place on the level where quantum effects come into play. A neuron gate’s neither opened nor closed until observation by the rest of the system makes it so, pins it down.” She glanced up from under bangs. “Actually, your use of we when you asked the question was appropriate. The molecular switches that make up the picocircuitry of your IPN are about the same size, well down where Heisenberg can get hold of it; I suspect strongly that’s why O’Neill’s genius was able to bear fruit.” Pain crossed his face like a wave of wind across grass. She winced; he’s still so sensitive about her. Almost obsessive.
“Anyway, one possibility for transmigration might be straight uncertainty of position: I was there and now I’m here. That seems iffy as a model for reincarnation, since there’s obviously not a one-to-one correspondence between births and deaths. You’d have to work in some kind of temporal fudge factor.” She quirked her shoulders. “Or you could think of yourself as a self-perpetuating quantum wave function—again, a not unreasonable inference from the nonconnectedness of mind and matter. That would give you a certain amount of leeway between vacating one set of premises and moving into a new one.
“Hell. No reason both models might not apply. Insistence on a single model for the universe is a hobgoblin of small minds and classical physics.” She looked up, frowned, tugged his ankle. “Hey, aren’t you listening? I might as well go back to Jakarta, if you’re going to daydream while I lecture too.”
He blinked. “Pardon me. I wasn’t… daydreaming. I apologize—”
She rolled languid onto her back. “No, no, don’t start getting formal with me. We don’t have time for that.” And she pulled him down.
* * * * *
“You’re certain?” Michiko asked through thin steam wisping from her coffee cup. “Forgive me; of course you are.”
She sat facing her aide across a table in a subterranean commissary where once she’d discussed Elizabeth O’Neill with poor, dear old Aoki, so many lifetimes ago. A few employees ghosted through or sat conversing quietly at the other end of the room, respectful of their employer’s privacy. Her aide’s scarred face was grave, and she thought, She really is beautiful. I wonder why she won’t let the plastic surgeons fix her?
Slowly Doihara Kazuko lowered the plastic folder onto the Formica tabletop. “There’s substantial margin for error, of course, Dr. Yoshimitsu. Many of the data are fairly concrete: the growing international monetary crisis, which resembles so closely the situation leading up to the war; the similar trade environment of tariffs and protectionism; the stockpiles of thermonuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that survived the war, and the rapidly increasing production both of such devices and sophisticated computer-driven delivery systems. Others are more subjective. How will Brazil react to a rapidly stultifying economy and triple-digit inflation? How soon will the progressive breakdown of distribution panic the developed nations? How will General Ahmad react to the victory of the hardline National Labor Party in the recent Australian elections, or the European Front to the apparent accord between PanEurope and the RCFSR, coupled with their own recent string of military reverses in Luxembourg and Czechoslovakia?” She slid the folder toward Michiko with her fingertips. “My own extrapolations. Speculative. But, to me, compelling.”
“The Fourth World War.”
“So it would seem.”
Michiko giggled. Doihara watched her without reaction, eyes calm in the pink and yellow and magenta mask of her face. “Forgive me, Doihara-san. I know it’s what psychologists call an inappropriate response, to laugh. Yet—” She shook her head. “It’s… ridiculous. We barely scraped by last time; two-thirds of the world’s population didn’t. It is funny, in a bitter, brutal way.”
“If the many didn’t have to pay for the folly of the few,” Doihara said.
Resting her own fingertips on the unopened dossier, Michiko studied Doihara. Her conscious mind preferred to divert its attention from the reality encompassed by plastic covers while her subconscious struggled to adjust to new information. So she reflected again on her friendship with this quiet woman.
How she’d come to work for Yoshimitsu Telecommunications, Michiko was unsure. She’d been startled to discover that Doihara at one time worked for the Ministry for International Trade and Industry in one of the highest posts still held by a woman in Japan’s bureaucracy. Moreover, she had apparently worked closely with Administrative Vice-Minister Ishikawa himself, who had engineered the Hiryu attack on the Citadel. She had been injured shortly before the vice-minister’s suicide and then transferred to YTC Central’s well-staffed infirmary.
How that came about Michiko didn’t know. TOKUGAWA must, but so attuned had they
become that, when she asked him about it, she had sensed his instant discomfort and let the matter drop before he answered. She didn’t press questions about that phase of his existence.
After a surprising recovery, Doihara had begun working for YTC as an analyst. Her performance was brilliant; apparently assuming she had been hired by someone else, presumably Aoki, Shigeo promoted her several times during his administration. Subsequently, she had so impressed Michiko that she made Doihara her deputy—her Aoki.
Despite Doihara’s diffidence, her insistence on maintaining the appearance of formality with Michiko, the two were becoming friends. Intelligent, able women were an embattled minority in Japan these days. Too often when they did come together, it was as rivals; to the contrary, Michiko sometimes grew exasperated with Doihara’s lack of ambition. But she found in Doihara warmth, a certain acceptance not even TOKUGAWA could offer, and so their friendship grew.
“How long do we have?” she asked, forcing herself to gaze at last upon the truth.
“That’s hard to state with any precision, Doctor. Six months would be my approximation—but what that means is that it would surprise me if hostilities actually reach the stage of strategic thermonuclear exchange within six weeks, or if it takes more than a year.”