by Ian McDonald
“Mas. How long has Luka been here?”
He offers me one from his pack of Tiger Tails.
“She was held up in Tokyo. She came down here the day before yesterday. We were to meet her in Yawatahama.”
I breathe in the smoke from the cañabarillo, let it fry my head, just a little, let it knock me loose from the things that have been closing around me so inexorably. If you are going to sin, henro, then sin big, so that grace may all the more abound.
“It was her you were talking to, those long-distance calls. No wonder you switched the picture off.”
On the television, sumo wrestlers bump and grind silently in the sacred clay ring.
“It was planned long before Temple One. Back to that time you met in Capetown, when you told her you were thinking seriously of taking up my suggestion of the pilgrimage.”
“My God. A cozy little conspiracy. Where did you dream all this up, in bed together in some capsule hotel with a bottle of sake and pornographic comics?”
Though I know the depth of anger of which Mas is capable, the sudden nova-flare of it is still frightening.
“Do not ever, ever, talk about her that way. Ever, you bastard. Maier-Mikoyan commissioned a virtuality from her, up in Sapporo for the Ice Fest. We met there. She thought that the pilgrimage might be a way for you to break free. Save yourself, save your soul.”
“Well hallelujah for little Miss Salvation Army. So you knew about me all along. Was all that stuff, back at Muroto, made up for me too?”
For a moment I am certain, certain, that if there were anything sharper than a disposable chopstick to hand, Mas would have buried it in my throat.
“I don’t know what she sees in you. You are selfish, ungrateful, vicious, cowardly. You’re a child, Eth. She didn’t give away any of your fucking state secrets. You did that. You can’t even be trusted not to betray your country. She just said you were in trouble. Powerful trouble, and the pilgrimage might give you the space and strength to break free; that was all. And for some reason, I agreed to help her.
“She loves you. She has never loved anyone else and will never love anyone else and you hurt her. You have hurt her, you hurt her now, you will go on hurting her.”
“Oh, Christ, Mas.”
Voices, in the lobby. Mr. Tanazaki, and two others. Loud voices. Strong voices. Dangerous voices. I half rise, half turn in my seat, and they burst in through the door. Meat. Heavies. Akiras, two of. Camouflage parkas undecided between sickly neon and midnight black. Hair scraped back and thonged into oily pigtails. Wraparound visors streaked with alphanumerals; raster lines closing around my image.
I am on my feet, hands curled into loose fists in an instant of primal reaction. Laser sights paint red caste marks on my forehead and heart. Airborne dust traces them back to the Fiuzzi automatic pistols.
“You. You.” One red thread dances away to rest on the bridge of Mas’s nose. “With us.”
Shouting protest, Mr. Tanazaki tries to snatch a weapon. The red beam weaves over booths, ceiling, floor, then with the frightening casualness of chemically enhanced strength, the akira slams him against the cooler cabinet, smashes him with the butt of his weapon, smashes him, smashes him, smashes him. There is screaming in the lobby.
And I open my left hand.
Keter sends the akira—spasming, jerking, shivering—into the wall. In a flicker of violence, I am on top of him. All I know, all I understand, all I feel, is the anger, the years of anger, burning along my arm, drawing into a knot of white heat at the center of my left hand. I imagine my left hand pressed over his eyes and unholy joy blazes through me.
“Ethan! Leave him!” Mas. The second akira sends the searching finger of his targeting laser after me; I roll away, come into a crouch, left hand ready.
“No, Eth. Not this way.”
No. This is not the way. It was the way of Ethan Ring. It is not your way. My way. My hand opens like a lotus blooming. My right hand.
“Put the gun down.” The voice of absolute authority does not need to shout. Click of ceramics and steel on the floorboards. The laser sight draws a strict red terminator across the polished wood. “Squat down. On your heels. Hands on head. Stay that way until I tell you otherwise.”
He obeys. He cannot but. His camouflage parka turns cold neon blue.
“Who sent you?”
“Tosa Securities Aki Section Manager, on the instructions of the Chief Security Executive. Our Chapter are subcontractees.”
The classic pattern, divide and recruit your enemies. If even akiras serve and find it no dishonor, this land is more firmly in Tosa Securities’ fist than I had imagined. We cannot afford to remain even one hour more. Mrs. Tanazaki, Mariko, and eldest son are kneeling beside Mr. Tanazaki. There is a lot of blood and he does not move. Mrs. Tanazaki is rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Younger son is making a call on the lobby desk phone.
“No!” I shout. “Leave it!” His fingers hesitate over the touch buttons, then decide. “Look at me,” I order, right hand upheld. In the dark lobby, his pupils dilate. “Leave it.” The voicepiece clicks into its cradle.
“It was only an ambulance,” he says. Mariko looks at me with such hatred it is like a rod of frozen iron thrust up my spine. My Healing and Tranquillity fracters could help Mr. Tanazaki until we are gone and it is safe to call an ambulance but Mariko would not accept my gift and anyway I cannot spare the few minutes it would take to print them out.
The pilgrimage is over. Destroyed. It was destroyed the first time I typed the words what I tell you three times is true in that dark room in the Morikawa farmhouse.
“Mas, we must go.”
“No, Ethan.” The refusal strikes like a bullet. “It’s always been shit and walk away, hasn’t it? Cycle into peoples lives, do your tricks, and cycle out again. These are the people who get left behind. Everything they have is here. They can’t leave when it all starts to slide. You come into their world, in one evening destroy it, and the next morning when the ToSec investigators come to find out what happened to their akiras, you are on your knees in some temple sanctuary praying for the Daishi to shrive your sins and enlighten your spirit. You don’t understand, you Europeans cannot understand; there is no higher principle, no unalienable human right to which they can appeal. No noble Western notion of fairness and justice and innocence until proved guilty. Tosa Securities is the law here.”
A bullet. A slow bullet chewing through bone and flesh and gristle into the heart of me with the cold, precipitous knowledge that those unshakable foundations of absolute law and the incorruptibility of its agents upon which my society rests complacently do not exist here. For most of human history; and now again, in this time of the fading of Western Industrial Democracy, law has been—is now—the province of power.
Once Mother Emma—the sandwich Empress—showed me how to catch shrews in a glass bottle. Enticed by catfood, they were lured into the neck (so far, so good) and down into the belly (so far, so better). Only after gorging themselves on liver-and-kidney Whiskas did they realize that they could not climb the smooth, sloping glass shoulders to the neck. Trapped. I had thought myself free, but it had been the illusion of smooth, transparent walls. History: my own, that of the land through which I have been pursuing my own enlightenment, drew me onward, downward, to the thrill of playing with demons from which there is no return. Trapped.
My fists hammer melamine tabletop.
“There has to be an end to it, don’t you see, Mas? There has to be a way to live that doesn’t have violence as the solution to every question. I know what you’re asking, Mas. This is life. This isn’t a Kurosawa movie, this isn’t Anime. I said it at Turtle Beach, I say it again here, I am not fucking Kabukiman. We’re not paint or pixels or whatever the hell you use, we’re flesh, we’re blood. We die.”
Even as I speak I see the Tanazakis and behind them in the lobby, unseen, unpaying, guests. Mr. Morikawa killed by his naive belief in the inviolability of authority. The dispossessed of Tokushi
ma, of all Japan, victims of misplaced faith in the chaotic gods of economics, and the akiras, the kids who hadn’t sold themselves to their enemies because they still believed in a mythic, perfect past. A nameless wind-cured head on a stick by a Kochi wayside shrine. Mas’s lover in her kneepads, elbow guards, and tight, cute volleyball shorts, killed by a dream of California. Others. Hundreds upon hundreds of others. Nameless, faceless, historyless, the payers of tolls and tithes and taxes, the buyers of permits and licenses and visas, the ones who bleed for a law that does not protect them.
I see a saint handing me a shot at redemption, a chance to pit my power not against the abstract, utilitarian pseudo-evils of planetary economics and welt-political expediency, but against actual, tangible, pragmatic, mundane tyranny. Evil. Simple. Straight. Undisguised and unambiguous. And with the chance to leave the world a different—better—place after from before. It always was heroes and angels, Luka. And I look away. I look away and so see him, reflected in the back bar mirror. Death dwells in mirrors; with every look, it grows a little, every day. Death, change, time. He is a tall man in his early thirties with wild red hair tied back. From the far side of the silvered glass where I banished him so he could never hurt me again, Ethan Ring beckons. He is me. I must embrace him. Accept him. What other way could it be? Dogyo Ninin. We Two, Pilgrims Together.
SCISSORS CUT, SNIP, SNIP. The red hair falls in long red coils to the flagstones of the courtyard garden. I lift a lock, the clean, bright scissors cut, it falls. Preparations for battle matter. Medieval knights-errant spent the night before their elevation at the altar in prayer.
I had Mr. Tanazaki installed in his bedroom with the angels of Tranquillity and Healing set at his head and feet to watch over him. Son Nobuo is watching over the comatose akira in a guestroom in an unused wing; in the next room I have put the second akira and set the angel Binah, the fracter that annihilates chrono-consciousness, on the back of the door to hold him frozen in time.
Every demon was at some time an angel. The half-life built into the unstable paper will keep the world safe from demons, or angels.
Built-in decay. Indeed.
Snip. Another piece of me falls. The garden may be no more than a handful of square meters of courtyard between two residential wings but all the world is here. A pool for ocean, rocks rising from fine, raked gravel mountains in the desert; a forest of bamboo, a stone lantern filled with bioluminescents for moon and the shrine to the generations of dead Tanazakis the spiritual focus. Early jasmine, late magnolia perfumes the air; the rain has ended, the night is supernaturally warm and still. What am I going to tell Luka if you get killed? Masahiko had asked.
See you in another life, Luka.
I run my fingers over the ragged stubble of my scalp. My preparations are almost complete. All I need now is one final piece of memory, the keystone, lowered into position and the bridge between what I was and what I am will be complete.
THE THEORY WAS THAT at any instant in political history there are two, and only two major power blocs. NATO vs. the SovBloc; (briefly) America vs. the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere; latterly (in these times when the bell-shaped curve of economic empire is at maximum forty years wide) Europe, her client states in the old Eastern Bloc and the shaky democracy of Suid-Afrika vs. the emergent, vigorous culture of a Pan-Islam that had unified Arabia with North Africa, was ratifying probationary membership status from the Dardanelles to Srinagar, and was whistling political come-hithers to Sub-Saharan Africa and the new Confederation of Black American States. Saracens and Crusaders faced off across the Straits of Gibraltar.
“With me playing Charlton Heston strapped onto his horse?”
As ever, my filmic allusions were lost on the blind woman from Ghent “Ideologically, we have no quarrel with Pan-Islam,” she said. “It’s our major trading partner; the new North African bourgeoisie keep most of France and Spain in work. We can’t even accuse them of religious fundamentalism anymore: Sidi Ali in Riyadh brew the best lager beer in the world, probably. It’s pure, old-fashioned imperialism. They want ours, we want theirs, and God or Allah help the nonaligned.”
Meaning: violent guest-worker labor disputes in Spain, Portugal, and southern France had been traced to the Islamic-Socialist Al Haq group that Pan-Islam, eager to rapproche with its neighbor, had offered to terminate as a gesture of good faith. As Strasbourg’s political strategists opined that détente might swing the nonaligned Beninian states into Cairo’s fold, Al Haq must be eliminated by Europa, thus heightening diplomatic tension and counter-swinging the Benin States back to Europe and with them most of Tropical Black Africa. Thus, hazed out with free-gee tranqs and Chaotic Social Dynamics Theory, I fell on a suborbital parabola toward Marrakech and the vital cultural heart of the new Islam.
The red city between the desert and the snows had always seduced Westerners; now with the brilliance and sophistication of the lost Imperial days restored, it had joined the line of new Bohemias: Paris, Berlin, Swinging London, Greenwich Village, Kathmandu. Little surprise, therefore, to find flyposted to a wall in the old city that had stood since the days of the Cid the name, face, and floppy Mohican of Luka Casipriadin. A cartel of European industrials with taxes to avoid and North African markets to placate had culturally exchanged her via the Pan-Islam Arts Directorate and commissioned a room at some undisclosed site in the old city. She had rented a house there: Intelligence supplied address/phone/fax/e-mail and gave me a suitable rendezvous: the Mermaid Café, the place for expatriate Europeans, which I took to mean Intelligence Division Junior Staffers. I left messages on all available media. She came to the Mermaid Café as the trees were filling with migratory birds and the streets with Marrakech’s loud, confident, beautiful young people. She wore black, with lots of silver.
“You do know, Ethan, that this place is so noncredible it’s death to my street-cool to be seen even walking past?” The year and a half between Mermaid Café and San Francisco executive suite might never have existed. The tap behind her ear obliged with the Arabic for a bottle of wine. “Fucking muck, but I’ll say this for them, they have the best jukebox in the city, if you’re into unfettered schmaltz and masochistic nostalgia in strict 4/4 time.” We tried both. She was right on both. We danced at pupil-dilation distance until the place filled up with drunk Finns roaring Suooooomi! at the tops of their voices. (“Proves my point, Eth”), whereupon she whirled me into the neon-and-laser-lit labyrinth of the old city (“I’ve got a mind-map hardjiggered into my medulla, otherwise I’d never find my way home at night”) between the street-sleepers and the knife-sharp jeunesse in Italian leathers on fluorescent biopower Vespa mopeds (“I always envied my mother hitting puberty in the Swinging Sixties with all that monochrome and PVC; here, I think I can understand what it felt like”) through corridors splattered with the still-dripping scars of spray-bomb rumbles between rival political/theological/artistic/philosophical/scientific groups (“Here, youth matters; they really believe they have the power to change the world, make it better, fairer, more civilized, more beautiful, more wild”) past ranks of fast-food booths and stalls selling bootleg CDs and Dutch meatware and better-than-original ersatz Cartier accessories and Chanel smell (“What makes it so appealing, so exciting to a Euro stegosaur like me is that the media of expression haven’t yet been usurped by accountants. The Almighty Ecu isn’t the be-all and end-all; whatever your voice: music, poetry, flat-art, 3-D, time-base, VR, art-narcs, writing, drama, you can get heard”) into the sweat and heat and firelight of the Square of Souls (“It’s all one big underground, Eth. Everybody’s free. Come on and I’ll show you this crazy-priest, some kind of sufi, he can look right into people’s souls and slay them in the spirit; they just keel right over backward. Fucking amazing. When did you last see that down at the Pompidou Center, or Covent fucking Garden?”). And the fires burned and the jugglers juggled and the crazy-priests preached and slew men’s souls while still in their bodies, but she did not sleep with me.
In the morning I went to des
troy Al Haq. My contact was a member of the Islamic University Political Science department, into which Al Haq’s cell structure was known to be linked. As an ex-pat, Dr. Prawal was wont to lunch daily at the same Bangladeshi restaurant; there I waited, at the farthest, darkest table, and watched him pick fastidiously at chick peas and lobia beans and tap his feet to Politically Correct Delta dhangra. I let him work his way through to coffee before sending him the note I had printed out in a cubicle in the men’s toilet. It read: Go to the red-haired man with the silk tie with Curtiss C3 biplanes on it. Printed, of course, in Malkhut.
“Excuse me, do I know you?” They never understand why they do what the fracter makes them do. Some strange compulsion.
“You don’t,” I said, and pushed a second note across the table to him. The Malkhut Arabic read: Tell me everything you know about Al Haq. When he had finished, I thanked him civilly and with the Hokhmah, the Angel of Forgetting, took away everything after his departure from the Politics and Social Studies Unit that afternoon. Then I went to wait with the bad wine and the blue music in the Mermaid for Luka. That was the night she took me to the dog pit and in the blood and meat and shit and death I refused to see any analogy to what I had done in the name of political expediency to fifty people in as many countries.
Now that I had been given his name and face, I studied Mohammed Bedawi, Al Haq’s instigator and leader, as closely as a red-haired man in a russet city may. On Friday he left the city in a red Séat Albeñiz and I followed in a hire-company Peugeot along dirt roads lined with billboards extolling Islamic Unity and advertising French cañabarillos through well-watered truck farms into the foothills of the Atlas. The road threw itself in loops and hairpin bends across the mountainsides. He stopped at a mountain village unchanged but for the satellite dishes, solar generators, and Toyota pickups in a thousand years. After exultantly greeting his family, he went with the men to prayer while the women prepared a meal. A hologram of a local sidi, pale in the sharp mountain air, hovered above the square tower of the village mosque. A farmer I asked told me Bedawi came here to pray with his family every Friday. I thanked him, and took away his memory of ever having met a red-haired Euro.