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almondinflowerHe and You
Characters: Sakaki, Atobe, several original characters
Wordcount: 6300 words
Warnings: Mild slash, mostly implied. Also, more than any of the other Shin Tokyo sidefics so far, it is completely not standalone; the events in this interlude pertain to the main SoN plot - so in reading you should treat it as an SoN chapter, albeit in flashback.
Summary: Nine years before the events in SoN, Sakaki meets the child Keigo.
Senescence is an odd thing.
The night I first heard of you it was raining in New Kantou – thunderstorming, really, with floods in the provinces and aerial traffic at a standstill everywhere in the city. Ten thousand people had been rendered homeless in Nuevo Hokkaido, ninety-eight hospitals had gone on bypass, and all over the the Net themes of sedition, samizdat, and reform were trending. Internal Security personnel were pulling all-nighters.
I went to see him and thought I would find him writing press releases, or floating online, watching everything unfold from a virtual reality chair, or else preparing to go out himself, to defy lightning and precipitation and darkness, fighting the fabric of nature as he was so fond of doing.
I found him lounging on a chenille throw blanket in a locked parlour, a titanium notepad propped against his thighs, a stylus held like a cigarette between his fingers. Juniper and cherrywood burned in the fireplace.
I kissed him and his lips tasted of wine.
“Your people are dying,” I said, by way of reproach.
“All of us are dying,” he answered, drawing circular paths on the notepad. “Come and see what I am planning. Would you like me with blue eyes?”
He asked this coquettish question with a restrained air; I could not tell whether the next moment would turn to sensuality or politics.
“You are the emperor,” I told him. Dyed irises are cheap and reversible, lenses even more so.
“I shall take that as a no.” The stylus skimmed the surface of the notepad. “What about blond hair?”
It is not his way to be frivolous, and therefore I was confused. “I do not think this is the time—“ I began. He caught my hand and held it to his chest.
“I am dying.” His heartbeat, slow and steady, pulsed beneath my palm. An autologous transplant, inserted thirty years back. “I wish to be dying.”
I lay beside him and traced the lines in his neck. He had been twenty-five for two hundred years.
#
You were born of woman, in-vivo. The designing of you was slow, the conception quick. I was there when he spilled the seed that became your life. You are more natural than I expected, and less natural than you would like to be.
I told him I did not wish him to die.
“Then should I live forever?” he asked. “If I could, I would!”
I stroked his black hair and he leaned into my touch, measuredly, finitely. He has never accepted strength from anyone.
“This one,” he said, referring to you, “It is the sixth time. I tire of this.” He did not include his three daughters, full-grown, in the numbering of his attempts.
“There are other ways,” I murmured. Fleetingly I fancied I could see silver strands in his dark fringe. But it was a trick of the light.
He smiled crookedly. “I have not had much success with democracy.”
You will never have success, I wanted to tell him, in areas that require compromise. But I could tell him nothing about himself that he did not already know. For as long as I knew him, he had been old and wise and full of self-knowledge; I had never seen him otherwise.
The distance between his age and mine is twice the distance between my age and yours. My understanding of him is surface, discrete, a long half-century of unexplicated memories; my knowledge of you, child, is the knowledge of my own heart.
I know the scars on his skin and the breath in his voice and the darkness of his grafted eyes. I know him in his crest and signature and the lives he has destroyed, in the hard glitter of skyscrapers and the curve of blackened seashores.
I know him in my fear and desire.
I know your skinned knees, your papercuts, your irrationality and your love. I know the eyes he gave you and the eyes I gave you. I know your fear that became my fear, your hope that became my hope. I know everything you were too young to hide.
As he knows me, so I know you. But I have already surprised him at least twice.
#
And yet it was years before I met you.
I went into space again, as had become my habit. There was always work to be done, on other planets and moons and asteroids: rocks to be terraformed, governments to be appeased, and money, money, in the giving and taking and borrowing. And I did his work as often as I did mine.
There were other reasons to travel. It was painful being near him and yet at a distance. We were no longer lovers, if indeed we ever were. And even in the early days he had never confided in me. But it was difficult to cease hoping.
I heard nothing more about you. His letters were always witty and informative – and more regular than I expected. They spoke of his grandchildren, of his disputes with his ministers, of intragalactic trade, of the autumn foliage outside his rooms. I interpreted silence as failure and assumed you were dead.
By the time I returned he had changed. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was the same, but laid bare, the old veil of charm stripped away. His despotism had not increased – if anything, he was more laissez-faire than he had been. But he no longer ruled as a ruler who expects to live with the consequences of his actions.
It was rumoured that he was dying. Such rumours had always persisted, and I saw nothing to give credence to the tales. His physical perfection remained unmarred. His surgeries and medications did not deviate from their usual pattern. And yet I was anxious.
He summoned me one evening and threw a dossier in my face as I entered his office. The holographic data came to life all around me, streaming.
“Illegal drug imports, Sakaki?” he said. “At least have the skill to go undiscovered.”
I remained unperturbed. “They’re monoclonals, and the Shiraishi monopoly on them is killing hundreds of citizens each year.”
“Are you suggesting I turn a blind eye?”
“I’ll provide you with incentives equivalent to the evaded tax.”
“What if,” he lifted his chin, “I overthrew the Shiraishi patents?”
I was silent in my surprise. He had always been pragmatic rather than idealistic; this suggestion from him was unprecedented.
“It would not be enough to change the lives of the people,” I answered finally.
“Ah, so you invoke justice when it helps your cause, but balk at the thought of true reform. You are truly a child of this country.” While I struggled for a reply he stood and came towards me, draped his arm across my shoulders. “Come, I have someone I want you to meet.”
He steered me through metallic corridors and lush summer gardens, deep into the heart of the palace complex. The night was warm; the familiar scent of his cologne filled my nostrils, ambergris and bergamot and indigenous spices.
I was ushered into a minor, hidden palace, so discrete I had not known it existed, and there he brought me to you.
You were tucked away in an inner courtyard garden, lying prone across a marble bench. A holographic screen of text hovered before your intent eyes. Your concentration was absolute. You did not even notice our presence until he reached out and touched your arm.
Your eyes met his. And I saw that his gaze was not gentle, and yours was not happy.
He told you to greet me. You offered your small hand obediently, indifferently. Your hair was fair, sun-streaked, curling. Your eyes – azure, angular – barely gave me the time of the day. It was worse than when I first met your father.
“What do you think?” he asked me afterwards. There was a warning note in his voice; not all answers would be acceptable.
“He resembles a child Eros.”
“More beautiful than me?”
“That would be impossible,” I told him, honestly, earnestly. He laughed and showed me all the books you read, the things you had already learned. It was the first time I suspected him of exaggeration. But I had known him for half a century; I should not have been surprised.
“He is augmented, of course,” I said, scrolling through the curriculum he had designed for you. Language and algebra, archery and swords.
“He’ll live a longer life than mine, and with less effort.”
“What about psionics?”
“Only the gifts he will need to lead. As for the rest, beyond pure cosmetics, I chose his mother and let nature take its course.” He had not come from a womb, I knew that, although even the best historians had failed to locate his parent lab. But his genetics were impeccable.
“Why only one?” I asked. “Surely multiple heirs would be preferable.”
“Because,” he said, “incubating them is the easy part.”
And if I am honest with myself; the reason I dared, the reason I took you and ran, is his face in that moment.
“I terminated the first and the fourth,” he told me, looking straight in my eyes. “The first, because he was too weak to survive. The fourth, because he would have murdered me. It is why I waited so long to try again.” He saw my minute shiver and ordered the servants to bring wine. “This one,” he continued matter-of-factly, “he can kill me if he wishes.”
#
At first I neither avoided you nor sought you out – which meant that I did not encounter you. There was little reason for our paths to cross. At best I was an intermittent resident to the imperial residence, and even when I was there, I had no reason to visit the small corner of it that was your home.
Still, I could not forget how you had dismissed me with your childish gaze. It was that recollection that sent me, piqued, to seek you out.
I passed through leaf-strewn walkways and red maple groves and found you in your small palace. You were seated at a grand piano, struggling to play the displayed music. It was plain that you could not read the notes well. Unlike most children, however, you were calm and persistent, sounding each bar painstakingly. As before, your concentration was total.
“The Anna Magdalena Notebook,” I spoke out loud, when I had watched you fumble long enough. “A good choice of repertoire for elementary players, but not when your basic skills are lacking.”
You regarded me with annoyance. A moment later, however, your eyes turned speculative. “Can you teach me?” you asked.
It was too good an opportunity to let by. You made space for me on the bench; I played Brahms from memory. Before the last notes of the waltz had faded you were tugging at my sleeve.
“Again,” you said. ‘Something else.”
“I thought the point was to instruct you, not to entertain you.”
“My father won’t arrange lessons for me.” You were suddenly shy, your gaze indirect. “He says there’s no time to fit in music among all the other lessons I have. But he’s wrong; I do have free time.”
“Your father does not believe anything should be done unless it is done well. Perhaps he wants you to focus on your other studies.”
“I’m doing well in my other studies.” You were. I had seen it in the files he showed me. You were, beyond a doubt, the most educated eight-year-old on the planet.
“I can teach you,” I said, finally. Secretly I was pleased that I had something you wanted. And I came to give you lessons the next night, and then the next.
“Are you always alone?” I asked, the fourth time I came to see you. “Even your father keeps his servants in his quarters.”
You told me that you sent your servants away when you had no need of them. “My father chooses all of them,” you said. “It’s better if they aren’t around.”
“He’s your father .” I had to resist the instinct to touch your golden hair. “It’s natural for him to screen carefully the people who are close to you.”
“But he shouldn’t do it by murdering them,” you said.
#
You are not your father – you feel too deeply, gaze too far, relent too willingly. But you are, I think, what he would have wanted.
Not that it would please you to hear this.
I began to ask the courtiers about you. Surprisingly few knew anything beyond the fact that you existed. The best-informed was your eldest sister, Aya, who lightly raked my coat with her polymeric fingernails when I mentioned your name.
“So you have seen the child,” she said. “I have not.”
Her eyes are green, but their shape resembles yours and his. “Then there must be a reason for it.”
Keeping her head close to my chest, she tilted her chin upwards. “He is being old-fashioned. He did not need a son.”
“Neither did you.” Sometime after your conception she had designed herself a child, born of an incubator. I had seen him walking at her side, small and beautifully-dressed; he had the exotic perfection of an artificial baby. “He is the emperor,” I reminded her, “and the primogeniture is male.”
“A primogeniture that he created. You will outlive him,” she warned, her breath on my collar, “and so will I.”
We had grown up together, she and I. I touched my lips to her forehead, then pushed her away.
A few days later he sent word that I was not to meet with you again.
I had not realised you were so against his musical education, I messaged.
The reply came almost immediately. I would not get too close to Aya if I were you.
I had known him too well and too long for me to hope, even dimly, that there was jealousy in his warning.
I typed back, Her ambition outmatches her capacity. It was true; but I also felt ashamed at how easily I always conceded to his authority, to his way of looking at the world.
She is fortunate that she is precious to me, came his final answer. I did not analyse his words too deeply, and I did not visit you again.
#
But you came to me.
The e-mail was anonymous, although a quick verification confirmed that it was from the imperial household. Its body was brief, containing a date, a time, and the location of a popular, privacy-protected virtual reality hub.
My first thought was that it was from him, except that he always signed his letters. My second consideration was the possibility of it being a trap. But I was not important enough to have enemies in the palace.
The proposed timing was not inconvenient, and with appropriate precautions a VR meeting is the safest of all assignations. On the designated afternoon, from the guarded privacy of my home, I neural-linked my self to the internet, and entered the location.
You were already waiting. You had created a viewing pavilion for us to stand on, overlooking a shallow, serene sea, kissed by the light of sunset. You had chosen to appear as your own physical self, as had I.
I checked your identity verification, warily, but you were completely anonymous. “Is it really you?” I asked.
“Our last lesson,” you said, “you taught me about chromatic scales. I had a papercut on my index finger from art class, and you were wearing a green tie.”
“Why did you call me here?” I realised not without concern that you were better at manipulating electronic reality than I was. It would have been a core part of your training, your preparation for rulership; it was the key to his control of the nation.
“My father won’t let me see you. I wanted to keep up with my lessons.” Your command was not explicit, but it was unmistakeable; like him, you expected to have your way.
In this respect, at least, you have never failed to resemble him.
“You’re risking my life,” I warned you. “Possibly your own.”
“I don’t think so. He likes you. He’d punish you, but he wouldn’t kill you.” You bit your lip, and despite knowing the lie of the avatar I was entranced by the bare hint of fear in your eyes. “Do you think he would kill me?”
“I do not know,” I admitted. Even for someone of his lifespan, nine years was a long effort to squander. “But I don’t think we should risk it.”
I began to retreat, calling the logoff sequence, but you froze it, caught me in your space. “I need information from you. Things that my father won’t tell me. Why did he ask you to stop coming?”
I thought of the situation and chose to simplify. “He believed I posed a security risk.”
“You would never hurt me.”
“Your naivete is remarkable.
“I’m not my father,” you said fiercely. “I can read your thoughts. I know.” The world bent around us; the sea turned blood-red.
I will never match your ability, but I had some skill of my own; I reached out and halted the transformations you were effecting. “You will respect my privacy or I will cease all cooperation and report this to the emperor.”
You appeared genuinely alarmed at this threat. You were a child. And you were not abusing your telepathic gifts; if you had, you would have seen how difficult it is for me to say no to you. But you acquired that knowledge much later and by less magical means.
“I’ll give up on the piano classes,” you said. “Will you let me see you again?”
“I’ll think about it. How did you manage to get here without your father knowing?”
You hesitated. “I have – a friend. Who helped me.”
So, you had friends. I wondered what sort of people made it through the emperor’s obsessive filtering – filtering that was inadequate, given your presence here today. “If you send me a time and a date, I will come. We should change the online location each time.”
You frowned at me. “I know to do that.” A brief lapse into childishness. I smiled at you. You turned the sky dazzling, sun-filled; the sea transformed to glitter.
I had never defied him before. I wondered what it meant.
#
We fell into a rhythm of fortnightly visits. Each time I was struck by how adroit you were in virtual spaces, how precise and lifelike the online manifestation of your body was – each golden ringlet in all its variation of shade, the black circumscribed mole below your right eye. In cyberspace you came across as much older than your usual self; I could not help wondering where your else avatar wandered, what dark electronic corners you sought out, when you were not with me.
I wondered who had taught you to use the neural links.
“He trains me himself,” you informed me when I asked. “There’s a private neural network in one of the galleries where I live. There are classes three times a week. I practice for an hour every day. But he won’t allow me to go online.”
“Your friend--”
“Kabaji. His parents are part of the imperial household agency. They have access to the neural-link chairs in the palace.”
“What you are doing is very dangerous.”
You were silent for some moments, then said, “If it gets too dangerous, I'll leave home.”
Seized by the impulse, I asked, “Is that a request?”
The pause was longer this time. “Not yet,” you said. And it was just as well. For I was not yet ready either.
I went about my business that autumn and winter, and ignored the murmurs of unrest surrounding the palace. Your sisters fought your father and among themselves. That was usual. But your existence was new, or at least not very old. And he was ill, or at least believed that he was.
Whatever the reasons, the embers of dissent in the emperor’s family had been fanned into flame. And I was not immune to the fire’s path.
At her behest I met your eldest sister Aya again, reluctantly. She was not a woman I could afford to insult. I had been avoiding her, for reasons she guessed easily; when she saw me she mocked me for what she perceived as my cowardice. She has always seen me as a weak man. I am not.
I asked her what she wanted from me.
“You are known,” she said, “to have ties with Hyoutei. Is the organisation open to outside investment?”
My blood ran chill. Hyoutei belonged to me and me alone; not even he had ever interfered in its operations. And I had been careful to keep it out of the usual politics.
“In general, no,” I told her. “It is self-sufficient; it has no interest in sponsorship from outside parties.”
“Then persuade it to be interested.” She did not take kindly to my attempt at deflection. “You know my resources; I can make it worth their while.”
I attempted a gentler route of rejection. “Syndicates are a risky and unpleasant business. You would be better off exploring legal routes of financial gain.”
She shook her head. “You must have heard the news. Minako’s nephew has been working in Seigaku.” She was referring to your second sister. “I cannot let her be the only one with influence in the underground. You know how ambitious she is.”
Minako was no more ambitious than Aya was herself. “I am sorry,” I said, “my answer is final.”
She was angry, then, and I had one more thing to be careful of. For she knew, and I knew, that she was more valuable to the emperor than I was.
#
You did not take much interest in your sisters, and since I had nothing pleasant to report, I saw no reason to broach the subject with you. It was obvious that you were a lonely child; your need to confide was evident, all-consuming; once you were no longer wary around me we spent most of our meetings in conversations wherein I listened and you chattered about your history classes, your tennis games with Kabaji, the books you read and the servants you spied on.
Even these days, now that you have grown more self-possessed, I still think of you as gregarious.
Shortly before Christmas you asked me to fight you.
I had trained as a fencer for ten years, once upon a lifetime, whereas you had been taking classes since you were four. I was considerably out of practice, but in person it would have been a blatantly unequal match, my weight and height easily making a joke of your skill.
In virtual reality it was quite a different matter. You outclassed me, a small blue-eyed boy with a child-sized rapier. With size and strength nullified, only skill and affinity for the neural connection counted, and I will never match you in those things.
You defeated me, and I thought how like your father you were.
You cast off your sword and let it disappear. “My sister is dead.”
It must have been very fresh news; I had not heard it. “Which one?”
“Minako.”
I breathed slowly, deeply. “How do you feel?” Your avatar remained expressionless; I could not guess at the emotions behind.
“I’m not sad. I’ve only seen her twice. I don’t think she likes me – liked me, that is.” I discarded my sword and we sat on the ground together. “Do you think my father did it?” you asked.
“No, he would not, he would never--” Then I realised it was the wrong thing to say, that I had acknowledged that your sisters were not expendable, that to him they were daughters, whereas you – you could not be more than an heir, and you were not permitted to be less.
If you noticed the implication, you did not show it. “Then who?”
I hesitated. “Perhaps your sister Aya,” I admitted finally. You did not say anything to that. After a little while your avatar leaned its head against the shoulder of mine, and I held you. I thought of the decades I had known your family and the things I had accepted. And I was ashamed.
#
He summoned me online.
As long as I have known him he has never used avatars. He merely roams the internet, as a virus would, as an artificial intelligence would. Virtual reality is the seat of his power, from which he observes markets and weather and trends, deploys missiles, devalues currencies.
He does not permit his electronic signature to be traced; I know his presence only when he speaks.
You will have heard what happened, he said, as I logged onto his private virtual hub. I trust you were not involved.
He had placed me in pure, undefined grey; he had done so before, but it was still disconcerting. “You’re overestimating my courage considerably if you think I was involved.”
Untrue. There’s nothing lacking in your courage. But you love me. I know you were not involved. The space shifted to allow spatial orientation; there was a flatness at my feet representing the ground, and overhead, a white expanse that I took for a ceiling. How do you think I should punish her?
I dared a shrug. “She’s your daughter. It’s not for me to say.”
Data whirled around me; walls appeared, then colours. You’re right, she is my daughter. I cannot do anything. To her.
#
You came to both funerals.
Minako's cremation was held with the usual ostentation. She had been the best-loved of the imperial princesses, and the one least like her father - where he was aloof, she was sympathetic (even to her detractors); where he was classically, sensuously handsome, she was plain, although appealing in her petite, domestic femininity. Her in-laws, the Yamato family, had adored her unreservedly.
I saw you from a distance, holding the emperor's hand. Your hair had grown in the intervening months, the curls gathering pale and glossy around your collar. When I caught your eye you ignored me, staring out into the crowd of mourners Despite knowing that it was necessary to hide our familiarity from your father, I felt a flash of hurt.
Aya came with her son, and arrived late; they were both dry-eyed as they paid their respects. Her child was black-haired, and exquisite in face and feature; that, and the precocious intelligence in his sapphire eyes, advertised the human intervention in his genome.
I offered my incense and stopped to talk to Aya.
“You have gone too far,” I said. More than anger, it was fear that I felt for her.
“I can't imagine what you might be talking about,” she said, turning away.
Thereafter whenever I saw her she refused to speak to me. But when she called a fortnight later, weeping, I went to her immediately.
#
The poison was a neurotoxin, said the intensive care doctors, known for its sublethal but incapacititating effects. Personality, memory, and judgment remained intact; movement and sensation was deranged.
Would he recover? asked Aya. I looked at her child, lying on white sheets, tangled in plastic tubing. Your size, your age. The machine by the pillow made sighing sounds as it controlled his breathing.
The prognosis was not good, they told her. He would get a little better with treatment. Not enough to walk or talk.
It took her no more than a second to digest the news.
Take him off the ventilator, she ordered.
The attending physician hesitated. I could arrange a counselling session for you, first--, he suggested.
He is already useless for my purposes, she said.
She was her father's daughter.
#
The second funeral: the wind heavy, the pine trees laden with fresh-fallen snow. The venue was a churchyard; the Yukimuras were Japanese-European, more French than they were Asian, and although Aya had kept custody of both her children when she separated from her husband four years ago, she acquiesced to her in-laws' demands for a Christian burial.
You sat in the front pew with your father. I watched the back of your head with a practiced numbness. The service was subdued, the eulogies perfunctory. At the end your father brought you over to greet me.
I forced myself to meet his stare.
“I am fair to my daughters,” he said, daring me to speak. I remained silent, and he leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. I reciprocated the gesture, casting a glance at your face as I did so. Your eyes were emotionless.
Later he called me to him and I went, yielding as ever. I touched him and felt the fading perfection of his body, the fragility of his skin, the arthritis in his hands. But there was a coiled strength in his limbs.
“You went too far,” I told him afterwards, my head on his pillow.
“A child for a child,” he answered. As always, I delighted in his touch. His capacity for affection is not great, but inasmuch as he was able, he cared for me. I had grown to believe that.
So it was with you: inasmuch as he was able, he loved you. But there are many times when trying our best is not enough.
#
Winter passed, spring came, and quietly I continued to make preparations. Since that first time you had not voiced any wish to escape the palace, but by now I had begun to experience, slightly but uneasily, the desire that you leave the circumference of his control.
You were too much like him; I did not want you to be like him. I had accepted his shortcomings for fifty years – had not even considered them shortcomings, but rather, imperial traits, necessary for Shinnihon, necessary to my admiration of him. Part of me had always been drawn to his hints of inhumanity.
But Shinnihon now was no longer what Shinnihon had been when I met him, and I was no longer twenty, and in knowing you I began to wonder what he might have been before the burden of rule was laid upon him.
We continued to meet online, and I taught you arpeggios, minuets, sonatinas; I fought you with lightsabers and lost; we talked, or rather you talked and I listened. Your days were as busy as ever. You acquired facts, new languages, martial skills. Your capacity for retaining information was extraordinary.
Unsurprisingly, you did not miss your deceased relatives, mentioning them only in terms of your father's caprice. You barely knew your aunts, and had seen your nephew only in death.
“It is a pity you do not have more friends,” I said.
You looked surprised. Unlike your father's, your avatar was lifelike, wired to the emotional centers in your brain; the face of your virtual representation truly demonstrated your emotions. I wondered if you were similarly frank in the flesh.
“I have Kabaji. I have you.” A little frown appeared on your forehead. “I don't think I need anyone else right now. The old man would notice.”
You were so old, so young! I felt an immense sadness that so few people could see you, could love you. So it had been with him; I had always wondered why more people did not love him. But of course he had never allowed it. If he had ever possessed any innocence, it was long gone by the first time I met him.
You have your innocence still and fate willing, I will preserve it in you.
#
What you also still retain: your capacity for love, greater than mine, greater than his. Love led you away from him; love brought you to me.
At the beginning of spring (fine rains across Shin Tokyo, ubiquitous pale blossoms, allergic rhinitis) I logged into one of our usual designated meeting places only to find that you were not there. That was unusual. We had made the appointment recently, and you were always punctual; in fact you had a tendency to arrive early.
I waited. After some time had passed, I worried.
An hour after the agreed meeting time, I called Hyoutei. It is yours now; but in those days it was mine. I told my runners to look for unusual news from the palace, and I told them to prepare for the possibility of battle. And I told them to prepare a route that would smuggle a child out of Nippon, out of this planet, and into space. Away from me, but also away from him.
Then I went out to search for you. But you have always been better at this sort of thing than I am.
I flew to the palace in an unregistered vehicle, the rain misting up my windshields; but there was no chance of my entering the palace undiscovered. I saw no signs of commotion. I circled the palace complex once, temporarily helpless. If you were within, you were beyond my reach. If you were without – there was no means of tracking you. The ordinary, digital methods of tracing people in this country did not apply to you; officially, you did not even exist among the Shinnihon citizenry.
If I had stopped to consider it, the only person you knew, the only place you could have come to, was to me. But it is hard for me to believe that even now.
You do not need me; some part of me believes that you never did, not even then, in that moment, when you were more helpless than you had ever been in your controlled, protected life. Perhaps that thought arises more from your resemblance to your father than from who I know you to be. It is by your choice that you remain vulnerable; it is by choice that you allow me to love you.
When I came home that evening and found your small drenched figure by my front door, your sneakers staining the verandah with mud, perhaps it was sheer desperation and inevitability. But I like to think that you chose to come to me.
You had a dark, smaller child huddled beside you on the porch, bleeding from beneath his clavicle. “This is Kabaji,” you introduced swiftly. “He needs sutures. I had to cut his tracking device out of him.”
The rain had darkened your hair to a deep gold. As I looked you over anxiously, checking for injury, for some sign of what had happened – you threw yourself into my arms.
The hug was fleeting, and you did not cry. I have never seen you weep or hesitate while there is still work to be done.
I took you to Hyoutei; and while the medics saw to your friend you told me the story. “The old man killed his parents,” you said. “He found out that I had been online. Kabaji's parents didn't even know I'd been using the chairs.”
“They won't be the first persons to die for your sake. You should get used to the idea.”
You shook your head. “I don't want to get used to it. That's why I'm here.” Then, with a certain amount of disingenuity, as if you'd been thinking about it for sometime, “You won't die for me, will you?”
I said drily, “That rather depends. Does he know that you've been meeting me?”
“That's impossible. I made sure.”
“You are remarkable,” I told you, “but you're not yet what he is.”
“I'm good enough,” you said, smiling at me. Your smile is heartbreaking.
Your friend returned; you inspected his repaired wound and pronounced it satisfactory.
“There isn't much time,” I warned.
“The old man moves pretty quick,” you agreed. You proffered your hand and I took it, my thumb brushing against the creases of your palm. “You'll come and join us soon, right?”
“As soon as I think it safe." I could not have stayed away; in any case, I am constitutionally incapable of refusing you anything.
“All right, then. That's okay, right, Kabaji?” Even back then you were protective, careful; it was then that I knew you would not be your father.
But you were the only piece of him that I could keep; and I had you, now.
We went up to the flyers and I buckled the two of you into your seats. You stared out the window, at the streets below; and I remembered that this was your first time in the world.
“Where is this place?” you asked.
“Hyoutei,” I said. “It belongs to me.”
I nodded at the runner who was piloting your departure from the country; the engine rumbled to life, and I kissed you, not goodbye, but au revoir. It seemed like a long time before I saw you again. But it was not.
On to Chapter 9
Characters: Sakaki, Atobe, several original characters
Wordcount: 6300 words
Warnings: Mild slash, mostly implied. Also, more than any of the other Shin Tokyo sidefics so far, it is completely not standalone; the events in this interlude pertain to the main SoN plot - so in reading you should treat it as an SoN chapter, albeit in flashback.
Summary: Nine years before the events in SoN, Sakaki meets the child Keigo.
Senescence is an odd thing.
The night I first heard of you it was raining in New Kantou – thunderstorming, really, with floods in the provinces and aerial traffic at a standstill everywhere in the city. Ten thousand people had been rendered homeless in Nuevo Hokkaido, ninety-eight hospitals had gone on bypass, and all over the the Net themes of sedition, samizdat, and reform were trending. Internal Security personnel were pulling all-nighters.
I went to see him and thought I would find him writing press releases, or floating online, watching everything unfold from a virtual reality chair, or else preparing to go out himself, to defy lightning and precipitation and darkness, fighting the fabric of nature as he was so fond of doing.
I found him lounging on a chenille throw blanket in a locked parlour, a titanium notepad propped against his thighs, a stylus held like a cigarette between his fingers. Juniper and cherrywood burned in the fireplace.
I kissed him and his lips tasted of wine.
“Your people are dying,” I said, by way of reproach.
“All of us are dying,” he answered, drawing circular paths on the notepad. “Come and see what I am planning. Would you like me with blue eyes?”
He asked this coquettish question with a restrained air; I could not tell whether the next moment would turn to sensuality or politics.
“You are the emperor,” I told him. Dyed irises are cheap and reversible, lenses even more so.
“I shall take that as a no.” The stylus skimmed the surface of the notepad. “What about blond hair?”
It is not his way to be frivolous, and therefore I was confused. “I do not think this is the time—“ I began. He caught my hand and held it to his chest.
“I am dying.” His heartbeat, slow and steady, pulsed beneath my palm. An autologous transplant, inserted thirty years back. “I wish to be dying.”
I lay beside him and traced the lines in his neck. He had been twenty-five for two hundred years.
You were born of woman, in-vivo. The designing of you was slow, the conception quick. I was there when he spilled the seed that became your life. You are more natural than I expected, and less natural than you would like to be.
I told him I did not wish him to die.
“Then should I live forever?” he asked. “If I could, I would!”
I stroked his black hair and he leaned into my touch, measuredly, finitely. He has never accepted strength from anyone.
“This one,” he said, referring to you, “It is the sixth time. I tire of this.” He did not include his three daughters, full-grown, in the numbering of his attempts.
“There are other ways,” I murmured. Fleetingly I fancied I could see silver strands in his dark fringe. But it was a trick of the light.
He smiled crookedly. “I have not had much success with democracy.”
You will never have success, I wanted to tell him, in areas that require compromise. But I could tell him nothing about himself that he did not already know. For as long as I knew him, he had been old and wise and full of self-knowledge; I had never seen him otherwise.
The distance between his age and mine is twice the distance between my age and yours. My understanding of him is surface, discrete, a long half-century of unexplicated memories; my knowledge of you, child, is the knowledge of my own heart.
I know the scars on his skin and the breath in his voice and the darkness of his grafted eyes. I know him in his crest and signature and the lives he has destroyed, in the hard glitter of skyscrapers and the curve of blackened seashores.
I know him in my fear and desire.
I know your skinned knees, your papercuts, your irrationality and your love. I know the eyes he gave you and the eyes I gave you. I know your fear that became my fear, your hope that became my hope. I know everything you were too young to hide.
As he knows me, so I know you. But I have already surprised him at least twice.
And yet it was years before I met you.
I went into space again, as had become my habit. There was always work to be done, on other planets and moons and asteroids: rocks to be terraformed, governments to be appeased, and money, money, in the giving and taking and borrowing. And I did his work as often as I did mine.
There were other reasons to travel. It was painful being near him and yet at a distance. We were no longer lovers, if indeed we ever were. And even in the early days he had never confided in me. But it was difficult to cease hoping.
I heard nothing more about you. His letters were always witty and informative – and more regular than I expected. They spoke of his grandchildren, of his disputes with his ministers, of intragalactic trade, of the autumn foliage outside his rooms. I interpreted silence as failure and assumed you were dead.
By the time I returned he had changed. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was the same, but laid bare, the old veil of charm stripped away. His despotism had not increased – if anything, he was more laissez-faire than he had been. But he no longer ruled as a ruler who expects to live with the consequences of his actions.
It was rumoured that he was dying. Such rumours had always persisted, and I saw nothing to give credence to the tales. His physical perfection remained unmarred. His surgeries and medications did not deviate from their usual pattern. And yet I was anxious.
He summoned me one evening and threw a dossier in my face as I entered his office. The holographic data came to life all around me, streaming.
“Illegal drug imports, Sakaki?” he said. “At least have the skill to go undiscovered.”
I remained unperturbed. “They’re monoclonals, and the Shiraishi monopoly on them is killing hundreds of citizens each year.”
“Are you suggesting I turn a blind eye?”
“I’ll provide you with incentives equivalent to the evaded tax.”
“What if,” he lifted his chin, “I overthrew the Shiraishi patents?”
I was silent in my surprise. He had always been pragmatic rather than idealistic; this suggestion from him was unprecedented.
“It would not be enough to change the lives of the people,” I answered finally.
“Ah, so you invoke justice when it helps your cause, but balk at the thought of true reform. You are truly a child of this country.” While I struggled for a reply he stood and came towards me, draped his arm across my shoulders. “Come, I have someone I want you to meet.”
He steered me through metallic corridors and lush summer gardens, deep into the heart of the palace complex. The night was warm; the familiar scent of his cologne filled my nostrils, ambergris and bergamot and indigenous spices.
I was ushered into a minor, hidden palace, so discrete I had not known it existed, and there he brought me to you.
You were tucked away in an inner courtyard garden, lying prone across a marble bench. A holographic screen of text hovered before your intent eyes. Your concentration was absolute. You did not even notice our presence until he reached out and touched your arm.
Your eyes met his. And I saw that his gaze was not gentle, and yours was not happy.
He told you to greet me. You offered your small hand obediently, indifferently. Your hair was fair, sun-streaked, curling. Your eyes – azure, angular – barely gave me the time of the day. It was worse than when I first met your father.
“What do you think?” he asked me afterwards. There was a warning note in his voice; not all answers would be acceptable.
“He resembles a child Eros.”
“More beautiful than me?”
“That would be impossible,” I told him, honestly, earnestly. He laughed and showed me all the books you read, the things you had already learned. It was the first time I suspected him of exaggeration. But I had known him for half a century; I should not have been surprised.
“He is augmented, of course,” I said, scrolling through the curriculum he had designed for you. Language and algebra, archery and swords.
“He’ll live a longer life than mine, and with less effort.”
“What about psionics?”
“Only the gifts he will need to lead. As for the rest, beyond pure cosmetics, I chose his mother and let nature take its course.” He had not come from a womb, I knew that, although even the best historians had failed to locate his parent lab. But his genetics were impeccable.
“Why only one?” I asked. “Surely multiple heirs would be preferable.”
“Because,” he said, “incubating them is the easy part.”
And if I am honest with myself; the reason I dared, the reason I took you and ran, is his face in that moment.
“I terminated the first and the fourth,” he told me, looking straight in my eyes. “The first, because he was too weak to survive. The fourth, because he would have murdered me. It is why I waited so long to try again.” He saw my minute shiver and ordered the servants to bring wine. “This one,” he continued matter-of-factly, “he can kill me if he wishes.”
At first I neither avoided you nor sought you out – which meant that I did not encounter you. There was little reason for our paths to cross. At best I was an intermittent resident to the imperial residence, and even when I was there, I had no reason to visit the small corner of it that was your home.
Still, I could not forget how you had dismissed me with your childish gaze. It was that recollection that sent me, piqued, to seek you out.
I passed through leaf-strewn walkways and red maple groves and found you in your small palace. You were seated at a grand piano, struggling to play the displayed music. It was plain that you could not read the notes well. Unlike most children, however, you were calm and persistent, sounding each bar painstakingly. As before, your concentration was total.
“The Anna Magdalena Notebook,” I spoke out loud, when I had watched you fumble long enough. “A good choice of repertoire for elementary players, but not when your basic skills are lacking.”
You regarded me with annoyance. A moment later, however, your eyes turned speculative. “Can you teach me?” you asked.
It was too good an opportunity to let by. You made space for me on the bench; I played Brahms from memory. Before the last notes of the waltz had faded you were tugging at my sleeve.
“Again,” you said. ‘Something else.”
“I thought the point was to instruct you, not to entertain you.”
“My father won’t arrange lessons for me.” You were suddenly shy, your gaze indirect. “He says there’s no time to fit in music among all the other lessons I have. But he’s wrong; I do have free time.”
“Your father does not believe anything should be done unless it is done well. Perhaps he wants you to focus on your other studies.”
“I’m doing well in my other studies.” You were. I had seen it in the files he showed me. You were, beyond a doubt, the most educated eight-year-old on the planet.
“I can teach you,” I said, finally. Secretly I was pleased that I had something you wanted. And I came to give you lessons the next night, and then the next.
“Are you always alone?” I asked, the fourth time I came to see you. “Even your father keeps his servants in his quarters.”
You told me that you sent your servants away when you had no need of them. “My father chooses all of them,” you said. “It’s better if they aren’t around.”
“He’s your father .” I had to resist the instinct to touch your golden hair. “It’s natural for him to screen carefully the people who are close to you.”
“But he shouldn’t do it by murdering them,” you said.
You are not your father – you feel too deeply, gaze too far, relent too willingly. But you are, I think, what he would have wanted.
Not that it would please you to hear this.
I began to ask the courtiers about you. Surprisingly few knew anything beyond the fact that you existed. The best-informed was your eldest sister, Aya, who lightly raked my coat with her polymeric fingernails when I mentioned your name.
“So you have seen the child,” she said. “I have not.”
Her eyes are green, but their shape resembles yours and his. “Then there must be a reason for it.”
Keeping her head close to my chest, she tilted her chin upwards. “He is being old-fashioned. He did not need a son.”
“Neither did you.” Sometime after your conception she had designed herself a child, born of an incubator. I had seen him walking at her side, small and beautifully-dressed; he had the exotic perfection of an artificial baby. “He is the emperor,” I reminded her, “and the primogeniture is male.”
“A primogeniture that he created. You will outlive him,” she warned, her breath on my collar, “and so will I.”
We had grown up together, she and I. I touched my lips to her forehead, then pushed her away.
A few days later he sent word that I was not to meet with you again.
I had not realised you were so against his musical education, I messaged.
The reply came almost immediately. I would not get too close to Aya if I were you.
I had known him too well and too long for me to hope, even dimly, that there was jealousy in his warning.
I typed back, Her ambition outmatches her capacity. It was true; but I also felt ashamed at how easily I always conceded to his authority, to his way of looking at the world.
She is fortunate that she is precious to me, came his final answer. I did not analyse his words too deeply, and I did not visit you again.
But you came to me.
The e-mail was anonymous, although a quick verification confirmed that it was from the imperial household. Its body was brief, containing a date, a time, and the location of a popular, privacy-protected virtual reality hub.
My first thought was that it was from him, except that he always signed his letters. My second consideration was the possibility of it being a trap. But I was not important enough to have enemies in the palace.
The proposed timing was not inconvenient, and with appropriate precautions a VR meeting is the safest of all assignations. On the designated afternoon, from the guarded privacy of my home, I neural-linked my self to the internet, and entered the location.
You were already waiting. You had created a viewing pavilion for us to stand on, overlooking a shallow, serene sea, kissed by the light of sunset. You had chosen to appear as your own physical self, as had I.
I checked your identity verification, warily, but you were completely anonymous. “Is it really you?” I asked.
“Our last lesson,” you said, “you taught me about chromatic scales. I had a papercut on my index finger from art class, and you were wearing a green tie.”
“Why did you call me here?” I realised not without concern that you were better at manipulating electronic reality than I was. It would have been a core part of your training, your preparation for rulership; it was the key to his control of the nation.
“My father won’t let me see you. I wanted to keep up with my lessons.” Your command was not explicit, but it was unmistakeable; like him, you expected to have your way.
In this respect, at least, you have never failed to resemble him.
“You’re risking my life,” I warned you. “Possibly your own.”
“I don’t think so. He likes you. He’d punish you, but he wouldn’t kill you.” You bit your lip, and despite knowing the lie of the avatar I was entranced by the bare hint of fear in your eyes. “Do you think he would kill me?”
“I do not know,” I admitted. Even for someone of his lifespan, nine years was a long effort to squander. “But I don’t think we should risk it.”
I began to retreat, calling the logoff sequence, but you froze it, caught me in your space. “I need information from you. Things that my father won’t tell me. Why did he ask you to stop coming?”
I thought of the situation and chose to simplify. “He believed I posed a security risk.”
“You would never hurt me.”
“Your naivete is remarkable.
“I’m not my father,” you said fiercely. “I can read your thoughts. I know.” The world bent around us; the sea turned blood-red.
I will never match your ability, but I had some skill of my own; I reached out and halted the transformations you were effecting. “You will respect my privacy or I will cease all cooperation and report this to the emperor.”
You appeared genuinely alarmed at this threat. You were a child. And you were not abusing your telepathic gifts; if you had, you would have seen how difficult it is for me to say no to you. But you acquired that knowledge much later and by less magical means.
“I’ll give up on the piano classes,” you said. “Will you let me see you again?”
“I’ll think about it. How did you manage to get here without your father knowing?”
You hesitated. “I have – a friend. Who helped me.”
So, you had friends. I wondered what sort of people made it through the emperor’s obsessive filtering – filtering that was inadequate, given your presence here today. “If you send me a time and a date, I will come. We should change the online location each time.”
You frowned at me. “I know to do that.” A brief lapse into childishness. I smiled at you. You turned the sky dazzling, sun-filled; the sea transformed to glitter.
I had never defied him before. I wondered what it meant.
We fell into a rhythm of fortnightly visits. Each time I was struck by how adroit you were in virtual spaces, how precise and lifelike the online manifestation of your body was – each golden ringlet in all its variation of shade, the black circumscribed mole below your right eye. In cyberspace you came across as much older than your usual self; I could not help wondering where your else avatar wandered, what dark electronic corners you sought out, when you were not with me.
I wondered who had taught you to use the neural links.
“He trains me himself,” you informed me when I asked. “There’s a private neural network in one of the galleries where I live. There are classes three times a week. I practice for an hour every day. But he won’t allow me to go online.”
“Your friend--”
“Kabaji. His parents are part of the imperial household agency. They have access to the neural-link chairs in the palace.”
“What you are doing is very dangerous.”
You were silent for some moments, then said, “If it gets too dangerous, I'll leave home.”
Seized by the impulse, I asked, “Is that a request?”
The pause was longer this time. “Not yet,” you said. And it was just as well. For I was not yet ready either.
I went about my business that autumn and winter, and ignored the murmurs of unrest surrounding the palace. Your sisters fought your father and among themselves. That was usual. But your existence was new, or at least not very old. And he was ill, or at least believed that he was.
Whatever the reasons, the embers of dissent in the emperor’s family had been fanned into flame. And I was not immune to the fire’s path.
At her behest I met your eldest sister Aya again, reluctantly. She was not a woman I could afford to insult. I had been avoiding her, for reasons she guessed easily; when she saw me she mocked me for what she perceived as my cowardice. She has always seen me as a weak man. I am not.
I asked her what she wanted from me.
“You are known,” she said, “to have ties with Hyoutei. Is the organisation open to outside investment?”
My blood ran chill. Hyoutei belonged to me and me alone; not even he had ever interfered in its operations. And I had been careful to keep it out of the usual politics.
“In general, no,” I told her. “It is self-sufficient; it has no interest in sponsorship from outside parties.”
“Then persuade it to be interested.” She did not take kindly to my attempt at deflection. “You know my resources; I can make it worth their while.”
I attempted a gentler route of rejection. “Syndicates are a risky and unpleasant business. You would be better off exploring legal routes of financial gain.”
She shook her head. “You must have heard the news. Minako’s nephew has been working in Seigaku.” She was referring to your second sister. “I cannot let her be the only one with influence in the underground. You know how ambitious she is.”
Minako was no more ambitious than Aya was herself. “I am sorry,” I said, “my answer is final.”
She was angry, then, and I had one more thing to be careful of. For she knew, and I knew, that she was more valuable to the emperor than I was.
You did not take much interest in your sisters, and since I had nothing pleasant to report, I saw no reason to broach the subject with you. It was obvious that you were a lonely child; your need to confide was evident, all-consuming; once you were no longer wary around me we spent most of our meetings in conversations wherein I listened and you chattered about your history classes, your tennis games with Kabaji, the books you read and the servants you spied on.
Even these days, now that you have grown more self-possessed, I still think of you as gregarious.
Shortly before Christmas you asked me to fight you.
I had trained as a fencer for ten years, once upon a lifetime, whereas you had been taking classes since you were four. I was considerably out of practice, but in person it would have been a blatantly unequal match, my weight and height easily making a joke of your skill.
In virtual reality it was quite a different matter. You outclassed me, a small blue-eyed boy with a child-sized rapier. With size and strength nullified, only skill and affinity for the neural connection counted, and I will never match you in those things.
You defeated me, and I thought how like your father you were.
You cast off your sword and let it disappear. “My sister is dead.”
It must have been very fresh news; I had not heard it. “Which one?”
“Minako.”
I breathed slowly, deeply. “How do you feel?” Your avatar remained expressionless; I could not guess at the emotions behind.
“I’m not sad. I’ve only seen her twice. I don’t think she likes me – liked me, that is.” I discarded my sword and we sat on the ground together. “Do you think my father did it?” you asked.
“No, he would not, he would never--” Then I realised it was the wrong thing to say, that I had acknowledged that your sisters were not expendable, that to him they were daughters, whereas you – you could not be more than an heir, and you were not permitted to be less.
If you noticed the implication, you did not show it. “Then who?”
I hesitated. “Perhaps your sister Aya,” I admitted finally. You did not say anything to that. After a little while your avatar leaned its head against the shoulder of mine, and I held you. I thought of the decades I had known your family and the things I had accepted. And I was ashamed.
He summoned me online.
As long as I have known him he has never used avatars. He merely roams the internet, as a virus would, as an artificial intelligence would. Virtual reality is the seat of his power, from which he observes markets and weather and trends, deploys missiles, devalues currencies.
He does not permit his electronic signature to be traced; I know his presence only when he speaks.
You will have heard what happened, he said, as I logged onto his private virtual hub. I trust you were not involved.
He had placed me in pure, undefined grey; he had done so before, but it was still disconcerting. “You’re overestimating my courage considerably if you think I was involved.”
Untrue. There’s nothing lacking in your courage. But you love me. I know you were not involved. The space shifted to allow spatial orientation; there was a flatness at my feet representing the ground, and overhead, a white expanse that I took for a ceiling. How do you think I should punish her?
I dared a shrug. “She’s your daughter. It’s not for me to say.”
Data whirled around me; walls appeared, then colours. You’re right, she is my daughter. I cannot do anything. To her.
You came to both funerals.
Minako's cremation was held with the usual ostentation. She had been the best-loved of the imperial princesses, and the one least like her father - where he was aloof, she was sympathetic (even to her detractors); where he was classically, sensuously handsome, she was plain, although appealing in her petite, domestic femininity. Her in-laws, the Yamato family, had adored her unreservedly.
I saw you from a distance, holding the emperor's hand. Your hair had grown in the intervening months, the curls gathering pale and glossy around your collar. When I caught your eye you ignored me, staring out into the crowd of mourners Despite knowing that it was necessary to hide our familiarity from your father, I felt a flash of hurt.
Aya came with her son, and arrived late; they were both dry-eyed as they paid their respects. Her child was black-haired, and exquisite in face and feature; that, and the precocious intelligence in his sapphire eyes, advertised the human intervention in his genome.
I offered my incense and stopped to talk to Aya.
“You have gone too far,” I said. More than anger, it was fear that I felt for her.
“I can't imagine what you might be talking about,” she said, turning away.
Thereafter whenever I saw her she refused to speak to me. But when she called a fortnight later, weeping, I went to her immediately.
The poison was a neurotoxin, said the intensive care doctors, known for its sublethal but incapacititating effects. Personality, memory, and judgment remained intact; movement and sensation was deranged.
Would he recover? asked Aya. I looked at her child, lying on white sheets, tangled in plastic tubing. Your size, your age. The machine by the pillow made sighing sounds as it controlled his breathing.
The prognosis was not good, they told her. He would get a little better with treatment. Not enough to walk or talk.
It took her no more than a second to digest the news.
Take him off the ventilator, she ordered.
The attending physician hesitated. I could arrange a counselling session for you, first--, he suggested.
He is already useless for my purposes, she said.
She was her father's daughter.
The second funeral: the wind heavy, the pine trees laden with fresh-fallen snow. The venue was a churchyard; the Yukimuras were Japanese-European, more French than they were Asian, and although Aya had kept custody of both her children when she separated from her husband four years ago, she acquiesced to her in-laws' demands for a Christian burial.
You sat in the front pew with your father. I watched the back of your head with a practiced numbness. The service was subdued, the eulogies perfunctory. At the end your father brought you over to greet me.
I forced myself to meet his stare.
“I am fair to my daughters,” he said, daring me to speak. I remained silent, and he leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. I reciprocated the gesture, casting a glance at your face as I did so. Your eyes were emotionless.
Later he called me to him and I went, yielding as ever. I touched him and felt the fading perfection of his body, the fragility of his skin, the arthritis in his hands. But there was a coiled strength in his limbs.
“You went too far,” I told him afterwards, my head on his pillow.
“A child for a child,” he answered. As always, I delighted in his touch. His capacity for affection is not great, but inasmuch as he was able, he cared for me. I had grown to believe that.
So it was with you: inasmuch as he was able, he loved you. But there are many times when trying our best is not enough.
Winter passed, spring came, and quietly I continued to make preparations. Since that first time you had not voiced any wish to escape the palace, but by now I had begun to experience, slightly but uneasily, the desire that you leave the circumference of his control.
You were too much like him; I did not want you to be like him. I had accepted his shortcomings for fifty years – had not even considered them shortcomings, but rather, imperial traits, necessary for Shinnihon, necessary to my admiration of him. Part of me had always been drawn to his hints of inhumanity.
But Shinnihon now was no longer what Shinnihon had been when I met him, and I was no longer twenty, and in knowing you I began to wonder what he might have been before the burden of rule was laid upon him.
We continued to meet online, and I taught you arpeggios, minuets, sonatinas; I fought you with lightsabers and lost; we talked, or rather you talked and I listened. Your days were as busy as ever. You acquired facts, new languages, martial skills. Your capacity for retaining information was extraordinary.
Unsurprisingly, you did not miss your deceased relatives, mentioning them only in terms of your father's caprice. You barely knew your aunts, and had seen your nephew only in death.
“It is a pity you do not have more friends,” I said.
You looked surprised. Unlike your father's, your avatar was lifelike, wired to the emotional centers in your brain; the face of your virtual representation truly demonstrated your emotions. I wondered if you were similarly frank in the flesh.
“I have Kabaji. I have you.” A little frown appeared on your forehead. “I don't think I need anyone else right now. The old man would notice.”
You were so old, so young! I felt an immense sadness that so few people could see you, could love you. So it had been with him; I had always wondered why more people did not love him. But of course he had never allowed it. If he had ever possessed any innocence, it was long gone by the first time I met him.
You have your innocence still and fate willing, I will preserve it in you.
What you also still retain: your capacity for love, greater than mine, greater than his. Love led you away from him; love brought you to me.
At the beginning of spring (fine rains across Shin Tokyo, ubiquitous pale blossoms, allergic rhinitis) I logged into one of our usual designated meeting places only to find that you were not there. That was unusual. We had made the appointment recently, and you were always punctual; in fact you had a tendency to arrive early.
I waited. After some time had passed, I worried.
An hour after the agreed meeting time, I called Hyoutei. It is yours now; but in those days it was mine. I told my runners to look for unusual news from the palace, and I told them to prepare for the possibility of battle. And I told them to prepare a route that would smuggle a child out of Nippon, out of this planet, and into space. Away from me, but also away from him.
Then I went out to search for you. But you have always been better at this sort of thing than I am.
I flew to the palace in an unregistered vehicle, the rain misting up my windshields; but there was no chance of my entering the palace undiscovered. I saw no signs of commotion. I circled the palace complex once, temporarily helpless. If you were within, you were beyond my reach. If you were without – there was no means of tracking you. The ordinary, digital methods of tracing people in this country did not apply to you; officially, you did not even exist among the Shinnihon citizenry.
If I had stopped to consider it, the only person you knew, the only place you could have come to, was to me. But it is hard for me to believe that even now.
You do not need me; some part of me believes that you never did, not even then, in that moment, when you were more helpless than you had ever been in your controlled, protected life. Perhaps that thought arises more from your resemblance to your father than from who I know you to be. It is by your choice that you remain vulnerable; it is by choice that you allow me to love you.
When I came home that evening and found your small drenched figure by my front door, your sneakers staining the verandah with mud, perhaps it was sheer desperation and inevitability. But I like to think that you chose to come to me.
You had a dark, smaller child huddled beside you on the porch, bleeding from beneath his clavicle. “This is Kabaji,” you introduced swiftly. “He needs sutures. I had to cut his tracking device out of him.”
The rain had darkened your hair to a deep gold. As I looked you over anxiously, checking for injury, for some sign of what had happened – you threw yourself into my arms.
The hug was fleeting, and you did not cry. I have never seen you weep or hesitate while there is still work to be done.
I took you to Hyoutei; and while the medics saw to your friend you told me the story. “The old man killed his parents,” you said. “He found out that I had been online. Kabaji's parents didn't even know I'd been using the chairs.”
“They won't be the first persons to die for your sake. You should get used to the idea.”
You shook your head. “I don't want to get used to it. That's why I'm here.” Then, with a certain amount of disingenuity, as if you'd been thinking about it for sometime, “You won't die for me, will you?”
I said drily, “That rather depends. Does he know that you've been meeting me?”
“That's impossible. I made sure.”
“You are remarkable,” I told you, “but you're not yet what he is.”
“I'm good enough,” you said, smiling at me. Your smile is heartbreaking.
Your friend returned; you inspected his repaired wound and pronounced it satisfactory.
“There isn't much time,” I warned.
“The old man moves pretty quick,” you agreed. You proffered your hand and I took it, my thumb brushing against the creases of your palm. “You'll come and join us soon, right?”
“As soon as I think it safe." I could not have stayed away; in any case, I am constitutionally incapable of refusing you anything.
“All right, then. That's okay, right, Kabaji?” Even back then you were protective, careful; it was then that I knew you would not be your father.
But you were the only piece of him that I could keep; and I had you, now.
We went up to the flyers and I buckled the two of you into your seats. You stared out the window, at the streets below; and I remembered that this was your first time in the world.
“Where is this place?” you asked.
“Hyoutei,” I said. “It belongs to me.”
I nodded at the runner who was piloting your departure from the country; the engine rumbled to life, and I kissed you, not goodbye, but au revoir. It seemed like a long time before I saw you again. But it was not.
On to Chapter 9
