The rubbish lining the tunnel, which he almost hadn’t noticed, has disappeared.
The halogen beam shows a doorway of carved stone framing a door of bright new steel. The stone looks ancient, water-stained and worn; it’s incised with inscriptions, illegible but probably in Latin. The walls are covered in hexagonal tile, off-white and mildew-stained—it looks like it’s from the twentieth century, perhaps of the era of the Blitz? He blinks in the light reflected from the door, whose newness reads as a warning. There must be a signal booster nearby, because he gets a text from a blocked number: Turn off the light and go through the door.
He sighs—he’s a father, or soon will be, and shouldn’t throw his life away stupidly, but, as instructed, he clicks off the light. He becomes aware of the smells of earth and moisture, of distant water trickling.
He turns the handle and the door swings open. “Hello?” he calls optimistically, stepping through with one hand outstretched, the other in his pocket holding the gun.
His hand finds a wall. He presses his back to it, and, suddenly enervated, slides down to the floor. Red shapes flare and fade on his retinas. If someone wanted to rob or kidnap him surely they could find a way to do it with less fuss. He hears motion, quiet footsteps, supposes he should get the gun out and try to take control, but he feels tired and anyway he knows it’s her.
“Philip,” she says, her voice more melodious than he remembers. “I’m so glad you came.”
“Anytime,” he says. “So. I love what you’ve done with the place.”
“I have to live down here. It minimizes my exposure.”
“To an inflated real-estate market? The aging effects of the sun?”
“You remember what Cromwell wanted? I got it. So I have to manage the little risks, the random violence and the structural failures and the bricks falling out of the sky.” Amazing that she’s right here, alive, that they’re speaking again. “Tiny risks become certain death if you give them enough time.”
“Eternal life—what a hassle.”
“It’s more like eternal youth. I won’t get sick, or old, but I’m not a vampire.” Says the woman who won’t age, living underground in the dark. “I can still get knocked on the head.”
“How about a condo in a fortified building? There are some good ones. I almost bought one in a building that has its own SWAT team.”
“The geology is good here,” she says, ignoring him. “Clay and gravel for miles. No earthquakes, and there are tunnels no one’s seen in centuries.
“Hold on a second,” she says. Rustling, and then a little penlight, shining in his eyes, blinding him. It clicks off, leaving a lingering impression of her shape there beside him.
“I just wanted to see you, before I go. Though I shouldn’t have. Even this much contact isn’t really secure, as Thales keeps reminding me.”
Who?
He says, “Go where?”
“Deeper.”
“To what possible end?”
“I need to maximize my lifespan. There are problems coming down the pike that make today’s world look like the Pax Romana. We’re trying to head them off but it’s going to take a while.”
“Damned decent of you. I suppose someone should. But why not delegate? Hire some bright young things. I’ll help you. You need a foundation, not a dungeon.”
“I can’t delegate this.”
“Okay, but you know what? Fuck it, and fuck the world. Come live with us. I’m serious. We have a spare room, it’s gorgeous, there’s a wall of windows overlooking the Bay. Ann-Elise might want her space but she can suck it. I’ll charge you a very reasonable rent. You can pitch in with the chores, remember grocery lists, what have you. Soon enough you’ll be like family. Have I mentioned our newly remodeled kitchen?”
“You shouldn’t talk about your fiancée like that.”
“Oh, well, she likes a little of that. Women, eh?”
Sound of cloth on cloth, and then she’s holding his hand.
“Don’t do this,” he says. “There must be another way. You can be the world’s genius loci without spending eternity in a tomb. I’m not Cromwell, not yet, but I’m ever less nouveau and more riche. I’ll build you a fortress if you want one.”
“Here, drink this,” she says, pressing something into his hand—it’s smooth, plastic, a water bottle, sloshing musically. “It’s easy to get dehydrated down here.” The water tastes like chemicals but he chugs it down, trying to think of the irrefutable argument that he’s sure must exist.
“Don’t go,” he says.
“It’s a hell of job,” she says, “and the hours are bad, but the health plan is incredible.”
He can’t think of anything to say.
“I have to go now,” she says, and pulls her hand from his. The air stirs around him, then stills. He sits there in the dark, motionless, until he’s quite sure she’s gone.
He puts his hand to where she was sitting, feels her residual warmth, decides to wait until it fades. If only I had your memory, he thinks. As the minutes pass his thoughts turn to the quotidian—his company, their house, Ann-Elise’s new OB/GYN—which shames and frustrates him, but can only be put off for so long, and then her heat is gone and he knows it’s time to go.
76
Continuity
Kern exhales as he brings the hammer down onto the glowing blade, sending sparks arcing up like startled fireflies. In the darkened studio, the blade’s surface seethes with heat gradients, mottled patches of incandescent carbon, fibers of burning rice straw. In the old days, he’s read, the blade’s color had been the only way to gauge its temperature; now there are optical thermometers—the one hanging on the wall looks like a hand drill without a drill bit—but he’s been teaching himself to do it by eye. The old man teases him about his apparent determination to live in the seventeenth century, but leaves it at that, allowing him the darkened forge, the shadows dancing in the steel’s luminance.
His phone rings. He bought it a month ago, in a vending machine, mostly to find his way around the city.
Number blocked, which probably means it’s Akemi, though she calls less and less these days. He picks up, hears static, or perhaps breath, and then nothing. No sound but the hiss and sigh of cars passing out on the street. He carefully sets the hammer on the workbench as the blade cools.
He goes to the window, blinks as he lifts the blind onto bright winter light. The alley where the old man parks his good car is empty.
“Are you there?” he asks, and he’s on the verge of hanging up when he hears what might be distant laughter, and then her, unmistakably her, calling, “Thales!” and she sounds as happy as he’s ever heard her. He imagines green hills, sunlight, tries to remember what the time difference is. Maybe one day he’ll go to Los Angeles, find her among the beautiful houses in the hills, or maybe he’ll even see her in a movie. He holds his breath, listening.
* * *
Hiss of tires on gravel in the alley as Kern slides the blade into its bed of burning charcoal, folds coals over the steel like he’s tucking it in.
The old man said a smith’s concentration should be unbreakable, so Kern feigns total absorption in his work as the alley door opens. The old man comes in and sits beside him, then takes Kern’s tongs and pokes at the coals.
“I’m afraid I have bad news,” the old man says in his beautiful, careful, foreigner’s English—when he was a young man he’d studied materials science at Cambridge, which is in England.
Kern is determined to show nothing. There are so many good reasons to kick him out it’s pointless to wonder what tipped the scales. It occurs to him that he’s never seen anything like favelas in Japan, and he wonders where the homeless people go. There are bare-knuckle fighting circuits here, and they’re a bigger deal than they are back home; he’s not in serious shape, not these days, but he could get it back, see how that goes.
“Kioshi left today,” the old man says. The old man’s son, whom Kern makes it a point never to criticize.
“He has a girlfriend in Osaka. He is staying with her.” He’s met the girlfriend—plump, plain, morbidly shy, obsessed with manga—in fact, much like Kioshi.
“Will he be gone long?”
“A long time indeed. His girlfriend’s father owns a car-rental franchise at the airport. He is going to give Kioshi a job.”
“What about the forge?” asks Kern, shocked that even Kioshi would treat his inheritance so cavalierly.
“It must be admitted that this work did not suit him. He had little aptitude and less perseverance. The truth of this is obvious. Do not look so appalled. I am ninety-five years old, and a living national treasure of Japan, and if my son is no good as a smith I will say so.”
“Sorry, sensei,” says Kern, and bows.
The old man snorts. “I sometimes think you learned your manners from samurai movies. If I were killed by a ronin, if there were still such a thing as ronin, I have no doubt you would avenge me in blood.” Kern smiles politely, as though it’s a joke and not, if anything, an understatement. He’s never told the old man much about where he comes from, and the old man has never asked. “But you have a good heart, and I’ve never before discouraged an apprentice from working too hard and actually meant it, so never mind.”
Kern bows again, even deeper this time, embarrassed, murmuring something about gratitude.
The old man says, “I’ve told you before, you’re more serious than necessary. You are not Japanese, however much you admire the films of Kurosawa, and I am so entirely Japanese as to be a pillar of the idea, and, in my way, to have moved past it, so we, of all people, need not stand on ceremony.”
There’s an awkward silence in which Kern tries to stifle his hope and then the old man says, “All that to one side, now that Kioshi is gone, there will be more for you to do.”
“I still don’t see how he can just leave,” Kern says, and immediately regrets it, afraid he’s hurt the old man’s feelings.
The old man pokes at the charcoal and says, “I am the nineteenth Masamune in an unbroken line. The first smith of the name invented the samurai sword, and each of his successors has carried on that spirit. But did you know that my great-great-great-grandfather was adopted? His parents died during the first war with America—having no place to go, he wandered the ruined streets of Sakai until the forge took him in, as it took in many, then. He had a gift for the work, and, as the Masamune of the time had no suitable sons, he was adopted.”
“But that doesn’t seem the same,” says Kern.
The old man raises his eyebrows. “It is an inflexible rule that the forge is passed from father to son, but there is some flexibility in what those terms mean. What matters is continuity—of the name, of the forge, of Masamune as the one out before the others, finding the way.” He stands abruptly, suddenly distant, and slaps soot from the knees of his trousers. “Yes. Well. That’s it! Get back to work.”
He leaves. Kern waits until he can trust himself to move, then picks up the tongs and draws the glowing steel from the coals with the greatest possible care.
77
Arabescato
There had been grey in his hair, he’s sure of it. Philip has always been camera-shy, but he takes out his phone, opens up his wedding pictures—there he is with Ann-Elise, his smile fairly natural, and, there, zooming in, the grey at his temples is unmistakable. He turns his head this way and that in the bathroom mirror, trying to persuade himself the solid brown of his hair is just a trick of the light.
He sits on the toilet, stares at the intricate, indecipherable patterns in the marble of the shower stall, arabescato marble, from arabesque, what they make altarpieces from, in Italy, chosen after more pains than any bathroom is worth. His daughter Reeny calls it biscuit marble. Water drops on the side of the stall. He remembers the bottle of water down under London. Chemical aftertaste. The few days of fever, attributed to whatever spores flourished in the dark. Where is she now, and how has she shaped the world.
“You mad bitch,” he says.
The skin on his knuckles is smooth, scarcely corrugates when he flexes his hands. Standing, he notices his knees don’t creak.
“Daddy, are you in there?” Reeny calls.
“I’ll be out in a minute, sweetheart,” he says, thinking twenty more years and you won’t need me anymore, and then I’ll go. Wonders where Irina is, if he can find her.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Natalie Ahn, Bronwen Abbattista, Bill Clegg, Cordelia Derhammer-Hill, Vasiliki Dimoula, Danielle Fleming, Olivia Flint, Jonathan Galassi, Laird Gallagher, Linley Hall, Cole Harkness, Amber Kerr, John Knight, Simon Levy, Phong Nguyen, Fani Papageorgiou, Aleatha Parker-Wood, Chris Richards, Shawna Yang Ryan, Taylor Schreiner and Spring Warren.
ALSO BY ZACHARY MASON
The Lost Books of the Odyssey
A Note About the Author
Zachary Mason is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey. He lives in California. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
1. Floating World
2. High Playground
3. Oculus
4. Negotiable Sense of Place
5. Working
6. What Forgetting Is
7. Discipline
8. Unreal City
9. Matches
10. Laptop
11. Theater
12. Clinic
13. Secret Book
14. Ghost
15. Future Shift
16. Circumference
17. Tunnel
18. Essential Hardness
19. No True Security
20. Fundamental Things Never Really Change
21. Someone
22. Shapes Purely
23. Finish Up
24. Stillness in Memory
25. Just Leaving the Station
26. Nonexistent Prisons
27. Venice Replicated
28. Departure
29. Bad Pattern
30. Ossuary
31. Refuge
32. Still Unformed
33. Encoded in Form
34. Final Sword
35. Persephone
36. Usually in Trouble
37. Cloudbreaker
38. Thought Purely
39. Lost Coast
40. In the Palm of Her Hand
41. Oublier
42. Tangle of Snakes and Darkness
43. Intimacy of the Mundane
44. Great Dark Forward
45. Good Thing to Own
46. Exact Enumeration of Blurred Flocks
47. Something to Cry About
48. World Is a Chessboard
49. Closely Coupled Forms of Nothing in Particular
50. Our Lady of Drones
51. Never Really Have Happened
52. Sphinx Explains Our Horror
53. A Little Beyond the Law
54. Unwieldy, Lovely, Perhaps Eighteenth Century
55. Form on the Water
56. Axis Mundi
57. Vaguely Cetacean
58. Touch Nothing
59. Telemetry Irreconcilable
60. What They Really Wanted
61. Hole in the Wall
62. Flaw in His Vision
63. Purpose, Impatience, Suffering
64. Difficult Transition
65. Babel
66. Change of Plan
67. Future Selves Forgive Her
68. Beyond Is Hidden
69. Island in the Past
70. History Lacks a Story
71. Dolos
72. Memorial
73. Masamune
74. Marmont
75. No Longer Metaphor
76. Continuity
77. Arabescato
Acknowledgments
Also by Zachary Mason
> A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2017 by Zachary Mason
All rights reserved
First edition, 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mason, Zachary, 1974– author.
Title: Void star: a novel / Zachary Mason.
Description: First edition.|New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016033247|ISBN 9780374285067 (hardcover)| ISBN 9780374709822 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Artificial intelligence—Fiction.|Memory—Fiction.| BISAC: FICTION / Literary.|GSAFD: Science fiction.|Dystopias.
Classification: LCC PS3613.A8185 V65 2017|DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033247
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This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Void Star Page 40