Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  The arena goes dark and silent, and then string music swells as the screens show Tadao, bare to the waist, holding a katana and glowering at the camera. His stats come up: twenty-nine years old, fourth dan in kendo, a lieutenant in the Tokyo municipal police. Children in a kendo dojo, chanting metronomically as their bamboo swords rise and fall, then still images of Tokyo University, Tadao in a Self-Defense Force uniform shaking hands with an epauletted officer, a young woman in a tiny room kneeling beside a vase with a single peony.

  The second fighter is Sanzo Vola, foil fencer, thirty-two, Italian, an Olympic silver medalist. A montage shows him in a fencing club lunging acrobatically at a frantically backpedaling opponent, then images of ancient churches, of a walled town on a dusty hill, of fencing tournaments in huge conference halls.

  Neither fighter is very lean, which surprises him at first, but it’s probably because the fights rarely last a whole minute, so there’s no need for deep cardio.

  Vendors cry their beer and sake and spotlights roam the crowd as two men in white robes with tall black hats—maybe priests, certainly officials—walk into the ring, both reverently carrying a sword. They present the blades to the crowd, white cloths protecting the steel from the moisture of their hands. The crowd applauds, and both swords get little biographical clips, as though they, too, were celebrities. The Italian’s is from a Solingen forge, a straight blade with a triangular cross-section like a long spike, with a strangely windswept aluminum handle, shaped to fit the hand. Tadao’s sword is a katana, gently curved, single-edged, its point like a chisel, from the forge of Masamune, and even from the fourth row Kern can see the waver of the blade’s watermark, and how it seems to be lit with an interior fire—the cold lines of its beauty hold his eyes as a spotlight passes over him, blinding him, and the blade seems to embody the purity he’s always yearned for, and for a moment he desires it over all other things, though of course such weapons are expensive beyond reckoning, and far beyond the reach of the likes of him. As the light passes and his eyes clear he sees Akemi, in the front row, not fifteen feet away, glancing back at him.

  He tries to signal to her but it’s dark again and now the screens show a glitteringly antiseptic operating theater where Japanese doctors and nurses in blue surgical gowns bow together and belt out that thing they say when you go into this noodle place out toward Market Street, “hello” or “thank you” or whatever, and the guy who is clearly the boss proudly announces something that the subtitles render as “We are one hundred percent committed to saving the combatants’ lives, with a success rate in excess of forty percent!” and the screens’ light shines on Akemi’s hair.

  The two fighters huddle with their trainers in opposite corners of the cage. The trainers embrace them—the Italian gets a kiss on both cheeks—and then file out, ignoring each other, leaving their fighters alone with naked blades under the hard white light. They’re both in just shoes, shorts and gloves, and already sweating. They shift their feet, loosen their shoulders, make minute adjustments to their grips. One of them is probably about to die. Kern knows what it’s like to feel that alone.

  The loudspeakers say “Hajime!” and the word hangs in the air as the two come together as though magnetically drawn and Kern is on his feet as the crowd is on its feet because it’s already over, and they echo the Italian’s raw, open-throated cry as Tadao, seemingly weary, falls to his side, and Kern sees the bright thin spike of blade protruding from his back. The blood pools around him as the doctors from the video rush in with hypodermics and defibrillators and the Italian sits down with his back to the cage, emptied, done.

  35

  Persephone

  Just darkness, out the window, punctuated every few seconds by a blue flash from the wing.

  The cabin is sleekly minimal, like a five-star hotel room in a narrow metal tube. Only thirty-two percent of Americans, she’s read, will get on a plane in the course of their lives. And how many, she wonders, get on a plane like this.

  The vibration is stupefying and dawn is coming soon. She longs for sleep, but is still jittery, and the bag with her sleeping pills is in her last hotel room but one.

  In the liquor cabinet she finds Ukrainian vodkas she’s never heard of and cabernets she remembers from the wine lists of good restaurants. She hesitates to open anything because the bill will go to Mr. Iliou, and she already feels she’s imposing, but compared to the flight the liquor costs nothing.

  Fifth vodka in hand, her eyes begin to close. It feels a little like home, being on a plane, and it’s good to be safe, numb, departing.

  She hasn’t changed clothes in two days. Once standing seems like an attainable goal, she’ll go wash her underwear and socks in the bathroom sink. Ah, she thinks, the glamor of my life.

  The engines’ roar rises an octave as the plane accelerates. Alarmed, at first, she relaxes into it, and lets the g-force be a blanket. They’re probably over Utah—Deseret, now, since the fed stopped caring—and approaching the sound barrier. She imagines the jet’s sonic boom rolling over miles of dark, empty desert, echoing in the burned-out streets of Provo.

  As sleep comes she remembers going to see a shuttle launch at a military airfield in Texas, out where there was nothing for miles around; the deafening pulse of the fusion boosters, the shock waves flattening the dry grass in expanding concentric rings, how she’d narrowed her eyes against the hot wind full of grit, the poison yellow sky of the rising shuttle’s dawn.

  * * *

  When she wakes it’s morning and out the window there’s water of a remarkable Aegean blue. Silver coffee service beside her, and gold-rimmed porcelain cups—it must have been laid out by an unobtrusive drone, of which there is now no sign.

  An island appears, mostly bare rock and brown earth but still it has a promise and a mystery, and she wants to go there and walk on its beaches, but then it’s gone.

  The engines’ roar is lower now. She sees boats down on the water, and a little Cessna passes below on a perpendicular course. The day is bright and cloudless; it’s hard to feel unhappy.

  A low chime from unseen speakers. “You are now approaching … Patmos … this plane’s final destination,” says a supple and deeply relaxed female voice that could be read as either synthesized or extraordinarily stoned. “We respectfully advise that you buckle your seat belt and remain seated until the plane lands.”

  The jet is low over the water now, the unbroken waves visible as a succession of ridges, low enough for her to see the fishermen on the boats, and now the jet’s shadow racing over white beaches, vineyards, jagged cliffs.

  * * *

  There’s a motorboat waiting for her at the beach by the airstrip.

  The skipper is fiftyish, worn, obviously a local. He speaks no English. The day is beautiful, their wordless passage like something in a dream.

  He points out what must be Iliou’s villa as it comes into view on its cliff by the sea.

  She wades through ankle-deep water to the beach, shoes in hand. The villa is more fortress than chateau and looks like it’s been there for thousands of years. Sun on brown stone, smell of hot dust. It’s not yet midday but she wants to lie down in the shade and go to sleep—booze, she remembers, makes jet lag worse. She’s never flown supersonic before—what does that do to the hours lost and gained? She’ll postpone that calculation, she decides. She hears the boat’s engine behind her as it pulls away.

  A woman her own age opens the villa’s door, smiles and in lightly accented English says, “You must be Irina. How was your flight?” Irina has the sense she’s being welcomed to the woman’s own home, then recognizes her from Constantin’s borrowed memories as his sister Fabienne.

  Within are courtyards and a succession of gardens, and with the dust and the hard shadows and the fragments of sculpture she feels like she’s walked into a de Chirico painting. Fabienne seems kind, and gives her water while maintaining a sparkling flow of chatter about the island and the weather while asking nothing personal and saying nothing
of substance, and her bright eyes and firm skin tell Irina that Fabienne, too, is a patron of the Mayo, or one of its handful of equivalents.

  An approaching racket and then three children run out through an archway. She’s not good at guessing children’s ages but they might be between five and twelve, and the smallest one grabs Fabienne’s leg, grinning wildly, and clings for dear life. “My little monsters,” Fabienne says. “I’ll just disentangle myself and then I’ll take you to my father.” The children scramble off as an au pair comes through an archway remonstrating in Greek and Irina wonders what it’s like to grow up there, how villa and family would be taken for granted, as inevitable as the sea.

  * * *

  Iliou is sitting alone in a walled garden before a table with a chessboard, a book and a battered golden crown. The cyclical churring of the cicadas could be the soundtrack for a horror movie. Iliou is wearing a cardigan though the day is hot and he has a belly, which seems strange at first, but of course the physical vanity of the elderly rich is less pronounced here, and in fact outside of the U.S. generally, with the obvious exception of Brazil. The book is closed and he’s staring into space or at the stonework of the walls, and she has the sense that he’s always here, that he knows intimately how the light changes with the passing of the day, and then without haste his gaze turns to her. Fabienne comes back with little cups of aromatic coffee and he says, “Ms. Sunden, thank you for coming. I hope you’ll be my guest for as long as you’d like, and I’m sure you want to rest after your journey, but, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to talk first. The clinic told me that when my son died a lady friend was with him, and from your email I gather that was you.”

  She says that it was, and explains how she’d shared his death with him.

  “And how was it for him at the end?” He seems intent, neutral, his tone that of a scientist asking about the deep secrets of the cosmos.

  “There was no pain,” she says. “The drugs work. And he was confused … It was like a random procession through his memory. But he knew I was with him, that I was there with him completely. He couldn’t feel most of his body, in the last minutes, but he was aware of mine, and at the very end he mistook it for his own.”

  “It sounds like you bled together,” he says, which could be read two ways, both true.

  “We did,” she says. “Actually, I have some of his memories. Sometimes I remember things that happened to him, and think they happened to me. Usually I notice, but sometimes they slip by, I think. It’s like I’ve incorporated his soul in some small degree.” She falls silent, unsure if this is the best or the worst thing to have said to her dead friend’s father.

  “So in a sense you are my son.”

  It’s one of those phrases she’d never really expected to hear. She has a sudden fear that she’s been misleading him, but still she says, “Yes, to some nonzero, extremely small degree.” She knows he’s an engineer by training, and he seems like the kind of man who would enjoy hearing a mathematician’s turn of phrase from a good-looking woman. “When I look at snow on mountains I sometimes think how I’d ski them, even though I’ve barely skied. It’s the surfacing of his point of view.”

  “Does it feel like an invasion?”

  “No. I’m happy when it happens. It makes him just that little bit less gone.” She can’t bring herself to tell him about the time she found herself checking out the ass of a woman who looked like Constantin’s lost love, much to her surprise, as she’s only ever liked boys.

  “I’m happy to hear that,” he says. “Because I was never really able to let him go. I’m afraid I was never a good father to him. When I was a younger and vainer man I very much wanted a mathematically gifted son, and I’m afraid I led Constantin a sad dance of it. When he was a little boy I tried to make him learn calculus when he just wanted to be outside and play video games. When he was at university I actually threatened to disinherit him unless he would apply himself. Now I’d give my entire fortune just to see him for ten minutes. Not even to see him. It would be enough to sit here and know he was in the house. All the money in the world, and for what?”

  He seems to expect a response so she says, “Maybe it will be useful in the future.”

  “There isn’t much future. Not like there is for you. I say this in observation, not regret. You have the look of the longevity treatments. I started too late. I thought the technology was immature, and I was busy. That was a mistake. So it goes. Now I have a decade, perhaps two. I keep an eye on my business, but it mostly runs itself, and I collect antiquities, or it might better be said that I permit them to accumulate. Look at this,” he says, taking up the crown, which is crude and thin and decorated with a motif of concentric circles. “My firm is building a shopping mall in Macedonia, at what once was Pella, the capital of Alexander the Great. My workers excavated this. The legally mandated on-site archaeologist tells me that it must be given to the national museum, where it will be duly cataloged and then put in a box among thousands of boxes, never to be seen again. Or I could take it home, and the archaeologist, whose father went to school with me, might well forget to report it. So now I have a golden diadem, and no use for it. Won’t you try it on?”

  He holds it out and when she takes it it’s lighter than she’d expected and she thinks of Cromwell’s wineglass as he retakes it and places it on her head, which is a strange gesture but one she accepts out of decency or mourning or maybe apology.

  He smiles a little, takes out his phone, takes a picture. “Look,” he says, showing it to her. “Like Persephone, who was half of the living and half of the dead.” Behind her in the picture is dry stone and sand and a pomegranate tree, and she looks patient and sad and like she could sleep for a thousand years; the black hemispheres under her eyes remind her of Constantin’s last hour, and her clothes, which were chic when she put them on, look shapeless and seedy, and the gold crown shines in the sun.

  “But your implant,” he says, “is your true crown, hidden within,” and she’s listing in her seat and thinking up excuses when he says, “Why would anyone want my son’s memories, or yours, so badly? Certainly they’re interesting, but does that justify the risk entailed by the theft?”

  “I wondered about that all the way across the Atlantic,” she says, fighting to keep her eyes open. “There seems to be no good explanation. I can see why someone would want them for research, but that doesn’t seem to justify the cost.”

  “Could they be used to simulate the minds of whoever they were stolen from?”

  “No. Well, maybe, people have tried, but the problem is too hard—it would take more computer power than there is on earth, by several orders of magnitude. It’s generations away, if it’s possible at all. So I can only assume I’m missing information, or that maybe Cromwell regards digitized memory as a kind of art. He seems to have been a dedicated collector, off and on, and this is something that no one else has. Maybe he thinks it’s like collecting souls. Maybe he’s set his heart on it, and thinks he’s above consequences.”

  “Then that will be his undoing,” says Iliou, and for a moment his rage shows through.

  “But forgive me,” he says, his cordial neutrality snapping back into place. “You must be exhausted. Fabienne will show you your room. Sleep well, my daughter, and tomorrow we’ll talk of war.”

  36

  Usually in Trouble

  Vola pushes his way out of the cage past a scrum of officials and nurses running in with bags of plasma and an emcee who shoves a microphone in his face only to have it swatted away and then he’s mobbed by his elated entourage. Everyone in the audience is rising from their seats and crowding up the stairs, and the doctors have Tadao on his back now, the blood-wet sword to one side, and with the first defibrillation Tadao’s back arches but Kern sees the eyes of a lady doctor over her white surgical mask and knows it’s over.

  He jumps down the steps to the floor by the cage in time to see Akemi’s back framed in the mouth of a service tunnel as she blows past the gua
rd in his Final Sword blazer under the RESTRICTED ACCESS sign, and Vola is right behind her, yanking off his glove and throwing it blindly over his shoulder, his entourage following, and even though they’re talking in Italian Kern mostly understands them as they say, “What did I tell you—kendoka are weak against change of tempo with an indirect attack,” and “Fuck the press conference, look at him, we need to get him to the hotel,” and he remembers that Italian and Spanish are almost the same, which reminds him that the Japanese are said to think all westerners look alike, so he snatches up Vola’s glove—damp with sweat, held together with tape, speckled with Tadao’s blood—and trots after the Italians, like he’s some flunky with a small share in the team’s euphoria. The guard ignores him as he hastens into the tunnel.

  In the tunnel there’s a door open onto a surgery, the one from the video, abandoned now except for a nurse wearing latex gloves and blue scrubs standing rigidly by a tray of gleaming surgical tools. Vola shoves through the next door, his team pouring in after, and over their shoulders Kern sees a table covered with blunt-tipped practice swords, mesh fencing masks, bottles of wine and little plates of food; Vola sweeps the wine from the table, and Kern hears the bottles shattering as he walks on, alone now, trying to look like he knows where he’s going. He remembers the glove, lets it fall to the floor.

  The next door opens and Akemi comes out, now wrapped in a blue-white fur so brilliant in the light that it looks like falling snow. Angry, staccato Japanese from inside but Akemi shrugs and says, “Can’t be helped!” and it’s thrilling to hear her voice, though she sounds different, maybe younger now; also thrilling that she was lost somewhere out in the world but now is close enough to touch.