Too Like the Lightning (6 page)

Ockham paused, and we all heard the scraaaa-thump of failed bed-moving upstairs. “Fine. Through there.” He gestured to a side door. “And I do appreciate your courtesy, Mason. But I'll feel better when I've spoken with my President myself.”

I led the way from the
Mukta
hall to a warmer room with practical chairs, neglected dishes, and an unfinished game of mahjong. As we left the front rooms' No-Doodling Zone, spirals and zigzags like those on Ockham's clothes flowed over the cushions, the wooden chair backs, even up one wall, like lichen starting to convert a bare island to soil. I think Martin did notice napping Eureka Weeksbooth, visible only as feet protruding from disordered cushions in the corner, but he made no comment, and moved only in Ockham's wake. “Your bash' has nine members, yes?” he asked. “Yourself, your spouse Lesley, Thisbe Saneer, Cato and Eureka Weeksbooth, Sidney Koons, Kat and Robin Typer, and Ojiro Sniper.”

“Nine-and-a-half counting Mycroft.”

Martin smiled. “Any other frequent guests?”

“Our regular guards and maintenance people, plus Kat or Robin bring a revolving array of dates home, Thisbe sometimes too. I'll send you a list of recents.”

We reached the fatal spot. “Here it is,
Nepos.
Untouched, just as ordered.” I showed Martin the trash bin beneath a corner cabinet, where the paper marked with kanji protruded like a flag between an ancient manikin hand and most of a plastic horse.

Martin moved carefully around the bin to let his tracker image every angle, then pulled out a pocket scanner to search for fingerprints and DNA. “Is this a household trash bin?”

“The trash mine delivery bin,” Ockham answered. “There's ten million tons of dump under the city. Aluminum and plastics mostly, nothing older than turn of the millennium. A lot was hollowed out to make space for the computers, but the city's still mining the rest, and every bash'house has a right to rent a bot to look for particular types of items if we want. Thisbe has a thing for ancient toys.”

Martin leaned close. “It's certainly the right kind of paper.”

Ockham glared at the crumpled sheet as if it were a spider he would squish if not for poison. “Do they really write their articles in pen on real paper? That must take forever.”

“Actually, Members,” I ventured, “as I understand, they just do it for the notes for the most important article each week.” It felt warm, being among men who knew me well enough that I could safely share my newspaper geekery.

“What for?”

“It's
Black Sakura
's titular tradition,” I answered. “The folklore is that the
sakura
cherry tree blooms pink because its roots drink the blood of the dead, so the premise is that a dedicated reporter is so steeped in ink their veins would stain the blossoms black.”

Ockham gave an approving nod.

Martin did not, and I caught his eyes straying from the alien characters on the envelope to me. Martin does not acknowledge Machiavelli. When a wrong action will yield a good result, even so small a wrong as breaking the taboo on translating another Hive's language, he halts like a parent unwilling to admit to a child that its favorite toy is lost. It is not that he fears dirtying his hands, nor even that the wrong itself deters him. Rather, I think he hates admitting that this world contains such shades of gray.

Ockham doesn't mind gray. “Earn your supper, Mycroft. What's it say?”

Reconciled to the practicality, Martin scanned the paper's internal contents and brought the Japanese before my eyes. “Don't translate everything, just enough to verify that it is a Seven-Ten list.” He hesitated. “And tell me the last three names. The motive may lie in them.”

Ockham cocked his head. “I thought the big money was people betting on the order of the big seven.”

“That's the bulk of the money, yes, but the three unpredictable names at the bottom, numbers eight, nine, and ten, are about to skyrocket in celebrity, so if investments can be made, interviews or contracts set up in advance, five million is nothing against the potential profit.”

“Yes, Cardie does get a rush of calls whenever their name makes a list.”

Martin frowned. “Cardie?”

“Sniper,” Ockham answered. “Ojiro Cardigan Sniper.”

I don't know that I'd ever seen Martin snicker before, but everyone snickers the first time they learn that the legendary Sniper answers to ‘Cardigan' at home.

“Read it, Mycroft.”

I cannot unlearn the skills of my youth. I may let them rot, as a retired boxer sets aside his gloves, but I cannot unsee the words couched in the strokes of languages I have no right to know. I feel guilt, if that consoles you, reader, when I eavesdrop unwillingly on Masons, or Humanists, or Japanese Mitsubishi chatting in their private tongues. I can at least do some penance by sharing my skills on those occasions when translation is a benefit to all.

“It is a Seven-Ten list,” I confirmed. “Just names, no notes. The top seven are the standard seven. The final three are”—I wrestled with the less familiar transliterations—“Darcy Sok, Crown Prince Leonor of Spain, and Deputy Censor Jung Su-Hyeon Ancelet-Kosala.”

“Crown Prince Leonor?” Ockham repeated. “Not the king? That'll ruffle feathers.”

Martin was still leaning close. “This has been crumpled around something, but there's nothing inside.”

His scan was at work, re-creating the paper fiber by fiber on our screens, but whatever beginning of a shape the crumpled paper might have traced was erased for me by the scream, three voices at once, which came through my earpiece at the same moment that it echoed up the stairs from the lower floor. “Mycroft!”

I knew those voices. I would have charged headlong across a battlefield to answer them.

Now comes my confession, reader: in the crisis with Carlyle and Bridger I forgot Martin completely, and did not think to check in with him until I was already in the car soaring my way across the broad Pacific toward Tōgenkyō. My pretend affair with Thisbe was the only thing which saved me from questions I could not have answered. Martin was still at the house, combing the room for every hair and flake of skin that might identify the intruder, but finding nothing. After apologies I asked Martin for fresh orders. I had not felt fear yet, reader, not upstairs, not when I found the suspicious stolen paper, not when Martin came. Now, though, the command he gave made two vaguenesses congeal into one threat, distant, amorphous, but unmistakable, as when, against a background of city dawn and back alley clatter, one click and one clack come together into the telltale click-clack of a ready gun, and echo won't tell you whether the enemy's perch is left, or right, or high, or low, only that it is near. “Go to Tōgenkyō.”

 

C
HAPTER THE
FOURTH

A Thing Long Thought Extinct

The Simile of the Three Insects was originally about knowledge, not wealth. Our age's founding hero, Gordian Chairman Thomas Carlyle, stole the simile from Sir Francis Bacon, the founding hero of another age five hundred years before. In Bacon's 1620 version the ant was not yet the corporation, stripping land and people to hoard wealth within its vaults, but the encyclopedist, heaping knowledge into useless piles, adding nothing new. The spider was not yet the geographic nation, snaring wealth and helpless citizens within the net of its self-spun borders, but the dogmatist spinning webs of philosophy out of the stuff of his own mind, without examining empirical reality. Bacon's ideal, his scientist, was then the honeybee, which harvests the fruits of nature and, processing them with its inborn powers, produces something good and useful for the world. Our Thomas Carlyle, genius thief, co-opted the simile in 2130 when he named the Hive, our modern union, its members united, not by any accident of birth, but by shared culture, philosophy, and, most of all, by choice. Pundits may whine that Hives were birthed by technology rather than Carlyle, an inevitable change ever since 2073 when
Mukta
circled the globe in four-point-two hours, bringing the whole planet within comfortable commuting range and sounding the death knell of that old spider, the geographic nation. There is some truth to their claims, since it does not take a firebrand leader to make someone who lives in Maui, works in Myanmar, and lunches in Syracuse realize the absurdity of owing allegiance to the patch of dirt where babe first parted from placenta. But there is also a kind of truth the heart knows, and that is why our Age of Hives will not strip Thomas Carlyle of the founder's crown. Nor do I mean him any dishonor by calling him a thief. Hive is a stolen name, born from a stolen simile, but the Three Insects which Carlyle stole from Bacon, Bacon had in turn stolen from Petrarch, Petrarch from Seneca, and Seneca perhaps from some more ancient ancient swallowed since by time. There is no more shame in reusing such a rich inheritance than in knowing other kings' hands held this sword before you drew it from the stone.

Night overtook me on my flight from Chile's coast to Indonesia, or rather I overtook the night, racing in two hours so far around the planet's curve that I half caught up with tomorrow. Tōgenkyō's lights skitter far across the night-locked ocean, boats like sparks schooling among the lines of reflected brightness which calligraph the waves for a kilometer around the island. Here seven perfect lotus blossoms rise against the sea, glowing from within with clean, warm light like happy ghosts and dusting the ground around their roots with shimmer. Only as the car curves down to land does the eye realize each petal is a skyscraper blazing with commerce's neon fire, while the shimmer around their roots is the pulsing streetscape of a metropolis. It is a double compromise, this Mitsubishi capital: a compromise between the twin aesthetic loves of Eastern Asia, towers of glass and steel and tranquil nature; and a compromise among the Hive's three dominant nation-strats, since China, Japan, and Korea all feared to let another host the capital, so the three agreed on neutral Indonesia as the Hive's heart.

The summons gave my car clearance to touch down on the eastmost tower of the westmost blossom, where the Mitsubishi Executive Directorate enjoys the best view of city and sea. My drab Servicer uniform felt drabber in these hallways. As March became ever more a lamb, the Mitsubishi were showing their spring colors, time-sensitive dyes within the fabrics of suits,
haori, cheogori,
and
sherwani
changing, so winter's deep hues brightened to cyans and yellows, while leaves and floral patterns bloomed through simple stripes like morning glories through their trellises. Perhaps you too have felt the itch of rebirth and festivity the Mitsubishi carry to every corner of the earth. Even in islands without seasons, or in Cielo de Pájaros, where March means summer's end, still we all liven with anticipation as the Eastern cherries bloom. And why not? Maybe Earth's oldest living poetic tradition, the Asian cycle of plants and seasons, cannot be truly translated, but the cunning of fashion surpasses even language. It is spring in China, Korea, and Japan, so spring everywhere.

“Not the Executive Chamber, Mycroft. This way.”

I followed a soft-footed clerk, feeling fear's prickle on my neck as we passed the meeting rooms and the computer lab where I was sometimes put to work, entering instead a bash'apartment which sat above the chambers like the control room above a factory.

“The Servicer you summoned has arrived, Director.”

“Send them in.”

I removed my hat as I entered, which fear of recognition forced me to keep on even in the corridor.

「
We expect promptness when we call.
」
Before the door had closed behind me, Chief Director Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi lashed me with harsh Japanese which made my greeting bow into a cringe.

「
Apologies, Chief Director. I should have fought harder to break away.
」
I answered him in Japanese, and bowed anew with my apology, but dared raise my eyes enough to count the pairs of legs around me. There were five in the room, but four wore the familiar deep green of Mitsubishi guards, so, for an audience with the Chief Director, we were practically alone.

「
Black Sakura
. You know what's happened?
」

「
Partly yes, Chief Director. I've been assigned to the case.
」

I straightened now, and verified my fears. Directorate Guards wear whatever cuts of Mitsubishi suit jacket match their nation-strats: Chinese closed at the front with braided frogs, Korean tied across the chest like
cheogori,
Indian long and buttoned like
sherwani,
sometimes Western blazers, or the Japanese style, crossing at the front like kimono. Today there was no such variety: all Japanese suits with Japanese faces, several familiar, children of executives who held high office in the Hive through Andō's patronage. This was an inner circle, then, gathered for that special kind of meeting where, if there are bruises afterward, no one will dare ask why. The Chief Director himself stood in the center, Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi, to use the customary English ordering of his names. Today's suit was blue-black with a pattern of plain reeds appearing for spring, fine cloth but no finer than his guards', while his simple shoes and plain short haircut proclaimed the supreme confidence of a ruler so secure he can afford to dress no better than his subjects. He was not always so. In our kind age no face (beside the Major's) is truly battle-hardened, but Chief Director Andō's is at least conflict-hardened, with a handsome severity earned over decades battling to break the Chinese factions' hold on the Chief Director's chair. Even our anti-aging drugs, which keep the strength of thirty alive in him as he approaches sixty, have not kept stress from silvering his temples.

He addressed me in Japanese, but for you, good master, I shall render what I can in common English.
「
The thief used the Canner Device.
」