Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  The physician stops the video, says, “Explain what’s going on here.” This test, like all the tests, seems arbitrary, and has nothing to do with anything, but despite his exasperation he still he can’t bring himself to draw the gun. There’s always irony, though, the preferred weapon of the weak, so he says, “They’re lovers, having a spat. What does this have to do with me?”

  “Very good,” says the physician. “Now there’s just one more test, and it counts for all.”

  “Wait,” Thales says, unable to keep his helplessness and strain out of his voice. “Please. Just one second. Could you please just explain to me exactly what’s going on.”

  “Look,” says the surgeon, pointing to the tablet, where another video is playing.

  It’s the old man from the last video, in a tiny room like a monastic cell with white walls and no windows. He’s lighting candles on a table where dozens of candles are already burning.

  His woman enters the frame, stands watching.

  “I’m lighting candles for my dead,” he says.

  “Family?”

  “Victims. One hundred and thirty-eight, as of today. I have their names by heart.”

  She searches for a response. “You did what you had to do.”

  “What I had to do was kill innocent people, or cause them to be killed, in pursuit of selfish ends. I’m a murderer.”

  “No you’re not. Shhh.” She kisses the back of his neck.

  “But I am a murderer. I must be honest. It’s the only way to stay intact.” He lights another candle. “Or such is my theory. It’s hard not to think they’d all be dead in half a century anyway, but this is a sociopath’s reasoning, or evolution’s. I’m really trying, but morality looks different on long timescales, and I can’t find a way around that fact.”

  “It’ll be worth it,” she says. “You’ll do so much good. Like you said, the world needs a steward, and no one else is positioned to take the job.”

  “One day I’ll have islands,” he says, “and on the islands, villas, where I’ll put my enemies, so they can read and garden, raise children, keep mistresses. My exiled adversaries’ memoirs will become an enduring literary genre. For now, I light candles, though it’s already an empty gesture—I no longer much care what I did to them, but I remain scrupulous about going through the motions. I feel all my years today. Oh my god. One hundred thirty-eight names.”

  “What about Ms. Sunden?” asks the woman, trying for lightness, her bitterness showing through.

  “They said they don’t need her memories anymore. They. The strangers. The others. The shadows, I think, suits them best. Not quite there, never really substantial. I’d very much like to know why they changed their minds. It happened just after she graced my servers with her presence. Now they say they’re ready to proceed. My people are loading the fabs onto a ship as we speak.”

  “You’re just letting her go?”

  “Ah. No. I’d prefer to, but the shadows are fickle, and I may still need her, so I told Hiro to track her down.”

  “And the shadows?”

  The old man pauses, a long match burning slowly in his hand. “When I was a young man, I wanted to explore the world, but that faded, as the years passed, and I understood its systems, and for decades now the world has been as legible as a chessboard. But the shadows … I never thought I’d find anything like them. Part of me still thinks this must be self-delusion, like I’m like some sun-dazed early Christian hearing voices in the wind. They’re a wonder.”

  “They’re frightening.”

  “I hate to say it but I agree. It’s crossed my mind to keep my word and let them be, but it just won’t do. Moreover, Andy insists they’ve developed computer hardware more than a billion times faster than anything on the market, which would be hard to believe if I hadn’t seen their other efforts. I guess we’ll see when we harvest the nodes, or finally get that phone.”

  “My love?” says the woman.

  “Yes?”

  “What will you do when I’m gone?”

  “Après toi, le déluge,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine making plans.”

  The surgeon stops the video, leans in across his desk. Thales is aware of the room’s darkness, its stillness. The surgeon asks, “Will he honor his agreement?”

  Go fuck yourself, Thales thinks as he says, “Absolutely.”

  The physician stands and heads for the door.

  “Wait,” says Thales, standing in turn, aware that this is his moment, and that it’s about to slip away. His voice is hard, not recognizably his own. “We’re not done.”

  The physician stops and stares at him, his face unreadable.

  Thales’ resentment and confusion coalesce into a singularity of purpose that permits him to reach into his jacket and put his hand on the gun. He says, “Give me the tablet. Do it now,” and he’s ready to draw, even to fire a warning shot, but the physician, unperturbed, offers the tablet, saying, “Here.”

  Thales says, “If there’s a password, security, if you’ve somehow locked me out—”

  “There’s no reason for me to do that,” the surgeon says. “Everything is now open to you. Goodbye.”

  He leaves, closing the door behind him.

  Thales wakes the tablet. It has many folders, one with his name.

  He opens it. There are his memories.

  49

  Closely Coupled Forms of Nothing in Particular

  The mirrors reflect a stranger wearing a suit of an elegance that has nothing to do with him. The tailor, taciturn and somehow goblin-like, crouches at his feet with his mouth full of pins, marking the cuffs of his trousers with chalk. Kern lifts an arm, half in jest, to see if his image will do the same; the sleeve of the jacket droops over his wrist, making him a child as well as an impostor.

  Hiro sprawls in an overstuffed leather chair, practically sitting on his spine, drinking amber liquor from a heavy crystal tumbler. On the walls are paintings of horses in dreary landscapes, some with riders in red coats and black hats, like the doormen at that hotel in San Francisco. He hopes he won’t be getting one of the riders’ outfits, and he doesn’t see what horses have to do with tailoring, but it seems to be part of the shop’s look.

  “You know, I appreciate this, but I don’t really need it,” he says as the tailor grunts and starts pinning cloth.

  From a glazed calm Hiro says, “You’d prefer the double-breasted?”

  Kern doesn’t know what that is, which is probably the point of the joke. He says, “I just mean it doesn’t look like me.”

  “Clothes are the soul,” Hiro says. “They’ll change how you think about yourself, which is fitting, as you have a new place in the world.” Switching to Spanish, presumably so that the Chinese tailor can’t follow, Hiro says, “I have plenty of human assets I scraped off the street, and they look it. You’re different. You’re my new weapon, and a good one you’ll be, but you need an aura, to pass in certain circles, and this is a step on the way.” He downs his drink, reaches for the faceted decanter with a self-consciously steady hand. “Besides, how many people get to wear a Mr. Li suit? All too few even know that they should want to. I know because my late employer came here twice a year, rain or shine. Mostly rain, here. I might add that just what you’ve got on your back is, beyond question, worth more than everything else you’ve ever owned.”

  Kern looks back at the mirror, tries to accept what he sees as his own reflection. He might look good, he decides, if the sleeves fit, and they let him put shoes on, and if somehow he could manage to relax. He remembers a photo of a young Mike Tyson in a tailor’s shop, dapper and self-satisfied in a new suit, taken, as he recalls, around the time of the start of his decline.

  Hiro shakes his head. “It’s like giving caviar to children.”

  * * *

  No windows, outside the shop—he hasn’t seen weather since they scuttled off the helipad atop the tower in downtown Hong Kong—just buzzing fluorescents over thin, torn carpeting with decades’ worth
of accumulated stains. The shop had a specific feeling, something about club chairs and mirrors and cigars—Hiro had called it “a bastion of vaguely traditional male privilege”—but out here it’s different, and somehow draining, less like a place than a somewhere-in-between, and he remembers looking down through the jet’s window at the city’s aqueous light glowing through the churning clouds, how he’d had to will himself into passivity as the plane fell into the grey and the glow became the glittering lights of towers.

  “You look like you stole your suit,” says Hiro as they walk toward the elevator bank. “You should walk tall, like you’re used to this, like the wretched peones must jump to do your bidding. Such an attitude will be of value when you need to sneak up on rich people and shoot them in the head. Or, hell, beat them to death with your elbows, if you have to do everything the hard way, though I beg you to consider of the cost of the dry cleaning.”

  Ten elevators in a row, their bronze doors embossed with stylized clouds and dragons. Hiro hunts for the button for floor 214, where their suites are.

  “Take this,” Hiro says, handing him a wad of colorfully foreign money as an elevator chimes and its bronze doors open. “I have to talk with the big boss. Why don’t you go off to the mall, take the suit for a spin, try dipping a toe in the consumer economy. Anyway, the New Tian Shang Ta is remarkable, really something to see.”

  * * *

  Heaven is, he supposes, desirable, but it has no form, or at least none he’s heard of, and he wonders if its form is this, as he stands there on the lowest floor of the New Tian Shang Ta’s atrium, staring up into eighty stories of perfectly empty space. It’s full of quiet echoes, like the muted distillation of a thousand conversations. The ascending succession of the mall’s balconies lends scale to this image of the gleaming infinite that would otherwise be ungraspable, and across from the balconies is the seamless vertical pane of the tower’s outer shell, and beyond it the grey of storm. The rain hits the glass in a million tiny concussions, the channels of water branching and merging and branching again, but neither wind nor rain make the slightest sound, and at first he thinks they’re a recording.

  There are elevators, but to take them would separate him from the essence of the place. There are stairs, which are better, but his legs would be spent by the time he got to the top, so he settles for the escalators which make diagonals between the balconies.

  Off the balconies are floors full of shops selling more things than he’d known existed. The first two floors are dedicated entirely to watches, and he wanders among the brightly lit storefronts dazzled by the massed evidence of time passing and the prices for minor variations on the same essential thing.

  Even with the escalators he’s tiring by the twentieth floor, but he’s made it his business to explore, because the mall is a condensation and summary of the world, or at least the world of the buyable, so he moves swiftly past the countless racks of magazines in alphabets he’s never seen, and it’s a little like coming home when he finds the floor with media in English.

  Next is a floor dedicated to furs, some of them apparently not from vats, but flayed off of real animals, with bits of animals still attached, and the inert, flopping heads and leathery paws seem shamanic, or perhaps barbaric, though most of the shoppers here are stick-thin, rich-looking women, and his heart lurches at the sight of a fur so brilliantly blue-white that it looks like falling snow. I’m sorry, he thinks, remembering Akemi’s limp helplessness, her blood staining the pillowcase, and he wonders if she’s still alive, if she missed him, if there was ever a moment when he could actually have helped. She’s just a woman, he tells himself, and as such replaceable, and she hasn’t spoken to him in a long time, and he’s a soldier now, or nearly, and above caring. Maybe one day he’ll ask Hiro but for now he should just forget her.

  He tries a jab-jab-elbow combination in the mirror in a luggage store to see how his moves look in the suit, and it looks good, really good, like something in a movie, and when he really snaps the punches the sleeves make a noise like a whip cracking, and he starts shadowboxing, getting into it, dancing a little like the early Ali until a Chinese dad leading his pink-frocked little girl by the hand pumps his fist and says, “Jai-yow!” at which Kern strides away with his hands in his pockets.

  He’d intended to spend money if only just to see what it felt like but the sheer profusion of things leaves him drained of all desire and he wanders dazedly past the storefronts wanting nothing but to make it to the top, and it occurs to him that, in the same way that heaven lacks a shape, the lives of the blessed dead lack any apparent purpose, not counting the singing of hymns, which would get old in about a minute, but then it’s obvious—what you do in heaven is keep on going up.

  The atrium culminates in a disc of translucent blue glass, high overhead and as wide as an ordinary rooftop, and as he gets closer he sees that the pale blue is marred by the shadows of people standing on the other side, and he wants to stand there with them, feel what they’re feeling, but the last escalator brings him to a sort of abandoned plaza, and there’s a doorman by doors of frosted white glass through which he sees stairs, and the sign on the door reads Club Cielo in an intricate curlicued script.

  With the suit it’s worth trying to bluster his way in but the doorman moves just perceptibly into his way and says, “Pardon me, sir, are you a member?” but so politely, like he doesn’t already know. Kern could lie but can see it’s useless so he just says, “No,” and the doorman says, “I’m very sorry, sir, but the Club Cielo is members-only, so, for now, our doors are closed.”

  * * *

  In his suite he finds a bottle of brandy sealed with wax and an ice bucket with two black bottles of champagne called Cristal and there’s a black plastic briefcase inside of which is a foam bed holding what looks like a compact machine-gun from the future and a note in Hiro’s crabbed handwriting reads, For you. The latest Heckler-Koch Bullpup, for when you absolutely, positively have to kill every motherfucker in the room. Technically a capital crime to have this in the New Territories so be discreet, please. He’s always been a street fighter rather than a gunman but as he brandishes the weapon in the mirror he feels a rush of pleasure and a sense of power so intense that it shames him, and then he hears voices from the behind the closed bedroom door.

  As he eases the door open it occurs to him that he doesn’t know if the gun is loaded, or how to turn off the safety, but in fact there are no assassins, just two naked Chinese girls sitting on his bed, one clipping the other’s nails as they gabble away, having a good heart-to-heart about something, and they look up in shock as he puts the gun down on the floor and when he looks up again they’re smiling as they come toward him.

  * * *

  Flowers of orange flame bloom from the barrel of the machine-gun on the widescreen, the color staining Hiro’s face and the fluid in his glass and Kern’s own hands. The suite’s blinds are closed though they’re up so high that only aircraft could see in. Hiro doesn’t look away from the movie as he raises a brandy bottle and says, “Drink?”

  “No, thank you,” says Kern, annoyed at his own formality but unable to control it. “It kills endurance.”

  “I honor your scruple, but that will pass. Either that or you’re the king hell number one zen motherfucker of all time, which is, I grant, a possibility, but, generally speaking, the life requires outlets.”

  Kern sips ice water, says nothing, though he badly wants to know what happens next, if there’s initiation, training, gearing up, what they’re actually going to do, because everything else in his life is gone, and until he finds out he’s nothing much at all, but Hiro seems to want only to drink his way through the minibar and watch movies.

  In the movie the Yakuza are holed up in a beach house doing nothing but wasting time, having fake sumo matches on the sand and shooting soda cans off of logs. Kern’s eyes start to close.

  He jumps when Hiro says, “They never wore suits like that,” and he sounds like he’s speaking from th
e bottom of a well, and for the first time Kern registers the Yakuza’s outfits, striking Cold War period pieces, though all of them except for the protagonist look like a nickel’s worth of gangster in ten dollars’ worth of suit. “Real Yakuza looked like shit,” Hiro says. “The kind of people who chain-smoke for exercise. They could always spot the undercovers because they weren’t hacking up a lung. More Bugs Bunny tracksuits than bespoke Armani. It’s a twentieth-century comedian slash auteur’s dream of what a gangster ought to be.”

  “So what should a gangster be, these days?”

  “Ah. Well. That’s the question, and one that has no answer, because the truth is that gangsters have no essence. The movies are always about the code, but there is no code, no tradition, no honor, no anything—really it’s just random thugs scrabbling after fleeting advantages. Organized crime is like a vacuum, filling the gaps in the legitimate markets, and it arises spontaneously, everywhere, all the time. Wherever two or more of you dumb punks are gathered together in my name …

  “The irony is, they try to figure out who they are by watching movies. In the cartel, some of them copy westerns, bosses’ sons who went to the London School of Economics priding themselves on having cow shit on their boots. Even I’m prone to that, and I know better.

  “The deeper irony is that, just as gangsters copy movies, movies copy gangsters. Two closely coupled forms of nothing in particular.” Hiro pauses, then says, “Ever seen an Antonio Loera movie? Sweeping cartel epics. Mexico’s own not-quite Takeshi Kitano. He was born upper class, went to art school, learned about the narcos from books and movies.

  “I guess he must have wanted to see the real thing, because one night he showed up uninvited at the gates of my late employer’s ranch. It’s an incautious move, by any standard, though less outright crazy than it might at first appear—they both traveled in political circles, and I think they’d met socially. If Loera thought his fame would be his shield, well, that’s where he was right, and in fact Don Victor turned out to be a fan, welcomed him graciously and sat him at his right hand at the table.