Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  An aide ushers him into the grey light of a room full of books and pinioned butterflies and the yawning skull of what’s probably an allosaur. Magda waits behind her desk, looking unhappy and somehow coiled. On the desk is an architectural model of a campus of some kind, its centerpiece a sort of huge neoclassical pyramid.

  “New project?” he asks.

  “Yes. A university, founded in James’s honor.” She touches the pyramid, suddenly tender. “This is his memorial.”

  They sit in silence as her aide leaves and when the door finally closes he says, “What happened to Irina?” in the hope his bluntness will shock her into disclosure.

  Magda leans across her desk and her rage is so close to the surface that he expects her to say Irina is dead and he’s welcome to join her, but, speaking carefully, she says, “I honor the feeling that brought you here. You must have expected a cold welcome, but here you are just the same. So that’s why I’m going to tell you what I know about her whereabouts, which is … nothing, and believe me, I’ve looked. I won’t bore you with the details, but we—I—have unusual resources. So now you know, and that’s all I can do for you. Now you should go.” As he rises she says, “Don’t come back,” her voice now hard, and he considers trying to comfort her, but she seems inconsolable, and it’s not his place, so he leaves.

  * * *

  It’s a good year for his company, and money is for spending, so he burns through ten percent of his net worth trying to find her, but learns nothing, is left wondering.

  73

  Masamune

  Kern’s laptop bleats, and in the moment of waking he is up, though it’s cold, and still dark, for to hesitate is to risk losing the day. He steps into the tiny space between his futon, the small sink and the wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and stretches as best he can, breathing in mildew, old paper and the ancient motor oil that seems to imbue the black-painted cinder-block walls, a relic of the days when his room was a supply closet and the forge a mechanic’s shop.

  He runs his fingers over his books’ cracked spines; most are on the art and history of the Japanese sword, but his reading encompasses a miscellany of zen gardening, metallurgy, the manufacture of indigo, the weaving of bamboo. Such books, he has found, can be had for very little in the basement marts of Shinjuku; in any event, books from the nineteen hundreds are rarely available in digital form, and he likes the brittle tactility of their pages. On the top shelf, above the books, is an empty black sword sheath; its lacquer, garish by day, shines like muted nebulae in the laptop’s half-light.

  Out on the street, the air suggests more snow. An orange moon has risen; according to the No Subarashi Hon Katanakaji, the great book of smiths, a blade should be heated to the color of the full moon in February, so he stands there, staring up at the sky, trying to take it in, hold onto it forever.

  The old man lets him use his work car for pickups and deliveries. In the moonlight its corroded, snow-encrusted hull is the color of the street. The backseat, its upholstery long destroyed, is full of unidentifiable bits of metal, chunks of coal, filthy tarps. As he drives through the deserted streets of Sakai, the sky lightens.

  The foundry’s parking lot is sheathed in dirty white ice, glass-slick except where coarse sand is spread before the high double doors. Its windows pulse with red light. As he steps inside the heat hits, and the snow on his shoes melts immediately. Sparks and flame gust out of the clay furnace in the center of the warehouse floor. Cone-shaped, the furnace looks like a crude, man-sized model of a volcano. Takane, the chief foundry man, squats by the furnace in his yellow hard hat and blue jumpsuit, sweating profusely, assessing the flame. The smelting has been going on for three days, and he’s been here for all of it; looking older than his fifty years, he clutches a huge cup of convenience-store coffee.

  Kern is just in time for the finale. Uniformed workmen surround the furnace, grasp its lip with hooked poles, and, with an ichi ni san, pull hard; as the walls of the furnace fall away a wave of heat wells outward and sparks roar up to dissipate among the blackened rafters.

  Where the furnace was there’s now a crumbling mass of incandescent charcoal, burning reeds, a glowing mass of livid metal. (Kern once asked Takane why he used reeds; Takane explained that commercial fuels alter the metal chemistry, that the reeds are traditional and, moreover, as they grow in a nearby vacant lot, they’re free.) Kern sits on an upturned plastic bucket watching workmen with long-handled rakes swipe away the flocculent white ash. He stifles a yawn—he could have come later to make his pickup, but he likes to see how things work. The rakes soon reveal an intricately porous metal boulder, like a meteorite, or a scholar’s rock in a Chinese garden. Takane circles it, peering close, his face dripping as he looks for the tamahagane, the pockets of high-carbon steel that are the raw material of sword blades. Kern wonders if he thinks of the hue of some dark winter moon.

  When he leaves the foundry, the stars have faded and the sky is the color of the jagged ingots clinking in the wooden box beside him. He turns one between his fingers, imagining the blade it will be.

  By the time he gets back to the forge, the boy from the restaurant has come and gone, leaving miso, pickled vegetables and broiled mackerel on the table. The old man is particular about not waking the neighbors, so he stokes the forge, lays out his tools with careful exactitude and sits there, drinking miso, awaiting the day.

  74

  Marmont

  Thales closes his eyes against the sun, listens to the branches moving in the wind.

  He feels every blade of the grass bending under his palms. More detail here, he suspects, than in the world.

  He could lie in the sun for a thousand thousand years. He’s come to pity the living, hounded by death, struggling through their brief and restive spans.

  He wonders if anyone else has ever been this happy.

  And yet, despite everything, there’s the slightest sense of absence. He could erase it, and even its memory, but doesn’t. He’s interested in this residuum of suffering, and how it draws him.

  He thinks of Lillian, who is reading at the pool by the white pile of the Chateau.

  As he walks through the woods, he notices once again how he always feels like he’s just woken up.

  Lillian is alone by the pool in her bikini, straddling a chaise longue. She was twelve when she died, and is twelve still. She’s beanpole thin, and always will be.

  He’d found her memories in the wreckage of the world and couldn’t just let her go.

  Smell of chlorine. Dragonflies dart over the wind-rippled water. The Wind in the Willows is open in her hands.

  “How is good Mr. Toad?” Thales asks.

  When she looks up he sees she’s wearing oversized movie-star sunglasses. He doesn’t know how she got them, but they’re suited to the milieu.

  “This is a very strange book,” she says. “Sometimes they’re like animals, and sometimes they’re like people. I can’t even really tell what size they are. And it’s such a sad book, and such a happy one at the same time.”

  “Isn’t it just? Let me know when you’re done with it, and I’ll find you something else.”

  “When’s my father coming?”

  Her father, the hard-charging venture capitalist, who’d pulled Ars Memoria out of bankruptcy, however briefly, to get her the next-to-last implant. She still expects her father to save her, and Thales can’t bear to tell her he already has, as best he could.

  “It might be a while,” he says. “Do you need anything?”

  “No,” she says, almost singing it, like a child, as she turns back to her book. He kisses the warmth of the top of her head.

  “Come find me later,” he says. “We’ll watch old movies—Pixar and early Disney.”

  She nods abstractedly, already immersed.

  He leaves her and walks into the woods toward where the mountain house last was. Things move around, here, and not always in accord with his will.

  In the shadows below the trees it occurs
to him to lie down in the leaves, let go of everything, let the centuries wash by, but Lillian needs him, and, in light of his work with Irina, so does the world.

  He steps into a clearing and sees the wall.

  It’s usually higher up on the mountain, but sometimes it’s in the woods, and now the gate is right before him, and there’s Akemi with her ear pressed to the keyhole.

  He makes no noise, but presently she turns and looks up at him without expression.

  “Who was it this time?” he asks.

  “The woman,” says Akemi. “Like the magician but not. The warped one. Her, I can understand. The other one sounds like music, or the wind.”

  “What does she want?”

  “She asks me to explain things, things from the real world. She says she’s too far away now to do it for herself.”

  “What else?”

  “She says it’s time we opened the gate. She’s … persuasive.” Her voice catches on the word, and he wonders what she’s not telling him. “She says she’s learned secrets, and knows how to make everything better, transformed, somehow. She says we can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like. But for it to happen we have to open the gate.”

  He finds himself clutching the key in his pocket.

  “Perhaps not yet,” he says.

  Her burgeoning frustration is in her face and she looks like she’s going to argue or maybe start screaming but then her outline wavers and Hiro is standing where she was, looking at him like he’s fitting him for a coffin, and then it’s Cromwell, peering around the wood, bemused and shaking his head, and then it’s Irina, who says, “Don’t do it, there’s no way to know who she’s become,” and then, for just a moment, it’s himself, in his threadbare shirt and cutoffs, looking more tanned and relaxed than seems natural—this other Thales raises an eyebrow, and then there’s no one there at all.

  When he’s certain she’s gone, he rattles the gate to make sure it’s still locked. It’s Victorian, ornate, slightly rusted. It worries him a little that the lock looks easy to pick. He presses his ear to the cold iron of the keyhole, hears what might be rocks clattering, maybe wind, then nothing.

  * * *

  He finds the mountain house deep in the wood, all but smothered under roots and arm-thick vines. It looks ancient, weathered, like it’s been rotting here for a thousand years.

  The monitor on the desk comes to life as he sits, and there are the folders for his and Irina’s projects. There are new files today, apparently Japan’s plans for the invasion of South Korea. He’d argued for preventing the war, but Irina said it was inevitable, that they couldn’t do more than nudge it toward a draw. Her convictions, based on fragmentary insights, are hard to articulate, but she said it has to be that way, and by now he’s learned to trust her.

  He often worries about her, though he tries to hide it when they talk.

  He stares dully at plans for the orbital bombing of Seoul, but can’t concentrate.

  He closes all the folders and sits there, tapping his fingers. Then, though he knows it’s unwise, he opens a link to the cam in his mother’s study in her beach house in Vancouver.

  He’s in luck, for there she is, the early light glowing on her face as she stares out to sea. Morning, then, in British Columbia. Her laptop is on her lap, apparently forgotten, and her phone is on the table beside her. She looks older than she did when he was alive, more drawn, and her thoughts are far away.

  Helio comes in, broader-shouldered than ever, with an absurd red streak dyed into his hair. All the microphones in the room are off, so he can’t hear what his brother is saying, but he seems to be reporting, and there’s something new in his manner—Thales has the sense he’s trying to be responsible.

  Helio leaves, and his mother’s vitality, of which she’d made a display, wilts, and her gaze turns back to the water.

  Something shifts in the cam’s software. There’s unexpected structure there. An alarm? He tries to stop it, but too late. A window appears on his mother’s laptop’s screen reading INTRUSION DETECTED.

  Suddenly intent and entirely awake, she peers at her laptop, and then looks up at the cam like she’s trying to make eye contact.

  Now she’s talking rapidly, though no one else is in the room. He turns on the cam’s audio in time to hear her say, “—you’re there, and it’s okay, please, talk to me, talk to me, say anything, please.”

  He looks back at the cam’s software, sees the trip wire. It’s artfully done. She was waiting for him, and must have hired the best. But she has no way of knowing who it was—he could be a random criminal or some curious hacker—and he could still say nothing and just disappear.

  Even so, he wants to talk to her. It would be easy to call her phone, though of course he never will.

  With abstract interest and a sense of being moved by irresistible forces he watches himself place the call.

  She snatches up her phone at the start of the first ring. “Thales,” she says.

  “Not exactly.”

  “I know. I buried him. But even so, it’s you.”

  “I won’t have you deceived. You need to understand what I am.”

  “I’ve already made an educated guess.”

  “And?”

  “At first I thought I’d dreamt you, when you called, but I looked into it, and there was a call, from the San Francisco airport. I guessed it had something to do with your implant. I brought pressure to bear against the trustees of Ars Memoria. I made them do forensics. Their archives had been violated, and your memories stolen.”

  She hesitates.

  “And it is you,” she says. “Whatever your circumstances. I knew it from the moment I heard you.”

  “I’d have thought you’d be … appalled,” he says.

  “I’ve always been open to unconventional relationships,” she says. “I love you, and I’m not giving up on you. Do you need help? Are you in trouble? Are you … comfortable? Your uncle is minister of defense now and I will compel him to do whatever is necessary.”

  “I’m okay. Better than okay.”

  “So tell me about that. Tell me all about it, and what it’s like, and where you are, and everything else. I have time. I have nowhere special to be for the rest of my life.”

  He hesitates. He’d always assumed his existence would be a secret, forever veiled from the world, but things change.

  He starts to tell her what happened.

  75

  No Longer Metaphor

  In the evening shadows of the favela’s canyons Philip feels he could be in any city, has to remind himself he’s in London’s East End. A construction drone scuttles in front him, and he resists the urge to kick it out of the way. They’re legal, now, here. Favelas once had a resonance, he thinks, but it’s fading, or has faded, and now instead of a symbol of accumulating history or how technology shapes cities they’re just another damn thing in the world.

  Favelinos—East Enders?—neither term seems right—hurry by, and he’s uncomfortably aware that his coat cost more than most of them will make in a year. He overhears snatches of conversations in a language he doesn’t recognize, wonders what’s the source of the latest spate of refugees.

  He’s come straight from Heathrow, wishes there’d been time to stop at his hotel. He’s aware of the gun in its holster over his ribs—permits are costly, but can be had—a pity the U.K. felt compelled to change its laws, a relief it caught up with reality.

  The email had come to his personal address, the one he’s long since stopped giving out (he’s sometimes wondered if the accumulation of years and money means no more particularly close friends). Come meet me where we were when the last snow fell, it said. I’ve gone underground. Sender anonymized but it was signed I.S. In a separate message were a time and date, GPS coordinates, a short sequence of numbers and a snapshot of a red palm-print on a concrete wall.

  Converging alleys, low doorways, strata of graffiti on every surface. Steep narrow stairways up and down—he’s read street
level here is rising twenty feet a year. He checks his phone—this is the place. Pirated power lines sway and spark overhead; above them, lights, balustrades.

  He starting to wonder if it’s all been a practical joke, then notices a red handprint, half-obscured by fresher graffiti, like a secret sign in a boy’s-own story.

  Under the red hand is a door with a keypad lock. Sighing, he taps in the numbers from the email, half-hoping nothing will happen, but the door unlocks.

  He takes out his halogen flashlight, steps through the doorway, finds stairs going down into darkness, balks. He’s sometimes in the news, and it’s a matter of public record that his company is doing well—has he joined the august ranks of those worth setting up? I’ll teach them to underestimate me, he thinks, by going down this dark staircase in a bad part of London by myself, having been lured here in suspicious circumstances. Back in the States his main bodyguard, actually at this point “chief of security” would be more accurate, a worrisome progression, had told him absolutely, positively not to come. He moves the gun from the underarm holster to an outer pocket, where he can keep it in his hand.

  As he descends, the street sounds vanish. A landing, more tunnels branching away, and over each is a stenciled image—a pound sign, a cell phone streaming radiance, a stylized aerial drone and, there, another red hand. As he goes deeper will the symbols get older, until it’s hunters with spears, bison and mastodon, shamans with the heads of animals?

  What he takes for a pile of rags moves. The gun is half out of his pocket. Smell of sour clothes, rotgut. Bloodshot eyes regard him from under a sort of mitre of filthy hats, then subside.

  Stairs and more stairs. Red hands show him the way. It’s getting warmer. At one point he hears the Dopplered rumbling of a distant passing train.