Beyond Heaven's River (11 page)

“I wouldn’t want to try.”

“Nor I. So let me run this through its course. We won’t lose anything we really need.”

“What are you going to do about the Ring Stars?”

Anna pointed to the screen. “I’m keeping my eye on them. Looks like the supernova has dusted the whole area with superheavy elements. We might stake a few claims.”

“No word from the Aighors, and no word on whether the disrupters are still operating.”

“Keep me informed. I’m not beyond the pale, Jason. I’m still interested and aware.”

“Glad to hear it. Follow your wyrd, Anna, but keep my heart and arteries in mind, all right?”

“I’ll try, Jason.”

“Thank you.” He looked very worn, and Nestor felt a twinge of guilt. Her slightest whims could take years off a good man’s working life.

“Jason, you have my love and respect. If anything goes critical, pull me up no matter what I say. And Yoshio too, of course.”

“I’ll do my damnedest. Out.”

“Out.”

A faint haze hung in the air where DiNova’s image had been. The voice spoke up. “Where may I send your commodities, madam?”

“Kodiak, Alaska, and book us right behind them. Voice, you’ve done well by us so far. Can you get us an agent who’ll be discreet and too set in his ways to care about world news?”

“I’ve anticipated madam. One is waiting your instructions at this moment.”

“Good. Voice, have one of your programs charged to the ASNWSPeloros . You’re a first-class design.”

“My children thank you.”

|Go to Contents |

Beyond Heavens River

Twenty

“I laid a false trail,” Anna said. “We have two days left on Earth before thePeloros can take advantage of a conjunction. Where do you want to go?”

“I heard Nakamura say we had an appointment in Kyushu.”

“It’s been canceled.”

“Then let’s keep it.”

Anna smiled. “I know why you’re doing so well. You’ve got a devious mind.”

He shook his head. “I have two places to visit there. I have read of a man I would like to meet, and a museum I would like to visit.”

The surface effect ship, rented just hours before, made its leisurely hundred-knot passage with almost no sound but the whoosh of spray and music coming through speakers in the bulkhead. They sat on an upper deck, letting the sun shine on them between the shadows of high, woolen clouds, watching the blue-gray sea and the distant haze of the Japanese coast. Just an hour before, they had passed a maritime city farm, like a giant snowflake laid gently on the sea, surrounded by thousands of submarine pens marked with brilliant orange buoys.

Now the air was cooling, and it looked like a storm was coming. Nestor handed Kawashita a pair of polarized glasses and told him to look through them. He peered up and saw a distant curtain of shimmering light marching across the sea ahead.

“Weather controls,” she explained. “We’re entering a planned low-pressure disturbance. I’ll tell the pilot where to take us, so he can chart his course and skirt the weather.

When she returned, he said, “This ship is old. Can it stand the strain?”

“Easily. They’ll sling a tarp across the upper decks, warn us we’ll get wet, then go below. About the worse that can happen is we’ll blow a little off course. Do you want to stay up here or go below?”

“What are you going to do?”

“I haven’t felt a big blow in fifteen years. I’d like to stay.”

“Then I will stay.”

“Why?” Nestor asked.

Kawashita patted her hand. “In case you go overboard, I will throw a life ring.”

“I mean it,” she said, her face straight and serious. “We’ve been around each other for a long time now. Everything has gone smoothly, we always stick together, we never complain. We joke and laugh and sympathize. Why do you want to stay around me?”

“Not because you remind me of Mother, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Kawashita said. “I could find someone else to guide me. But I’m curious about you.”

“Why, because I’m famous?”

He shook his head.

“Rich and powerful?”

“Oh?” He smiled. “I didn’t know that.”

“I said I’m serious. Why?”

Kawashita looked uncomfortable. He took off the glasses and folded them, then swiveled back and forth in his seat, tapping the railing with one foot. “I haven’t used any of the devices in the laboratories,” he said. “And I haven’t accepted any requests for shared quarters.”

“So?”

“I think things would go badly between myself and someone from the future — my future. I’d seem childish, a savage. Japanese men are not by nature discreet. But I’m not really from the past now, am I? I’ve been too many people, lived too long.”

Kawashita stopped swiveling his chair. “I’m curious about you because you’re so hard, but you worry what happens to others. You behave like a man —”

Anna cleared her throat.

“— tough and capable, but when you cause pain, you hurt yourself. You cannot be very happy.”

“I don’t know about that. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because you never know why a man loves you. Or if he loves you at all. You must look very hard, search carefully. Have you found anyone yet?”

“No,” Nestor said. “Sometimes I think I have, but then … nothing. I have to break it off.”

“I am afraid to mix, and you are afraid to trust.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“I haven’t been to bed — is that an obsolete phrase? — I haven’t conjoined with a woman in over three years — with a real woman in more than four centuries. For a while I thought it didn’t matter anymore. But around you it does matter.”

Nestor winced as a drop of rain hit her face. The crew unrolled tarps and plastic roofing behind them. The first rush of cool wind made the ship’s stabilizers complain. “Usually, when I’m curious, I explore. But I’ve been shy for some reason. Perhaps I think you’re too delicate.”

Kawashita laughed. “I’ve survived battles at sea, air crashes, sinking ships, the rise and fall of dynasties, the viciousness of an ambitious daughter and ashogun , not to mention four hundred years. Delicate? I don’t see that.”

“Then I shouldn’t be afraid of you.”

“Hell, no!” Kawashita almost roared. “I am still young, and there are better things to do than get blown around and soaked. Madam, you who are so much younger and more delicate than I, will you accompany me below? We have much to catch up on.”

Nestor shook his hand. “I’ve heard that Japanese men were —”

“A base and slanderous rumor,” Kawashita interrupted.

“Now you don’t even know what I was going to say!”

The ship lurched as it hit the squall line, and the sudden scream of wind drowned out their laughter as they wobbled down the steps to their cabin.

Kawashita was neither as strong nor as exotic as some she had had, but there was a hint of his years in his lovemaking, a perfection of nuances which she found disarming. She relaxed with him, something she couldn’t remember ever doing before. Her back and neck became almost fluid, and her jaw muscles felt so good she was afraid to talk. They held each other for an hour after, then lay apart on the old-fashioned fluid-filled bed, talking. Kawashita told her about his parents and grandparents, his brothers and sisters and cousins and what they had done in old Japan.

“I don’t talk about my family much,” Nestor said. “I’m not ashamed of them, or anything, but it just doesn’t occur to me. After what you’ve gone through — battles between Taira and Minamoto, and all that — we’d probably be pretty humdrum.”

“I’d like to hear,” he said.

“With you, I don’t mind,” she said. “But you may have to prod me. I’m not used to confessions.”

“I’ll prod.”

She looked up at the ceiling and tapped her fingers on his arm. “My grandfather pioneered fifty planets and sold their contracts to United Stars. Then he pioneered sixty more and soldtheir contracts to Hafkan Bestmerit. Hafkan Bestmerit wasn’t quite the same then as it is now, because it allowed a small group of humans on its ‘board,’ or what served the same function. Otherwise, even then it was a consortium of alien species. It took some bloody-minded bastards to stay sane among the Crocerians and Aighors and Danvelters — and they didn’t stick it out long anyway. They splintered and formed Dallat Enterprises — and that may explain why Dallat’s been so long achieving respect and decorum.

“But my grandfather — Traicom Nestor — stayed away from most of the politics until he was older. He married when he was fifty, after a long freelance career. Some people thought my grandmother, Joyaness, was a novabaiter — in old terms, an incorrigible bitch. But that was still a time when strong women were looked on as perverse, something against nature.

“I knew her better. Joyaness took over Traicom’s disorganized finances and suggested he offer himself to high office in aneconomische  — which is another word, now obsolete, for consolidation. At the time, United Stars was strongly socialist and wouldn’t have anything to do with entrepreneurs like Traicom, except to buy worlds from him. So Joyaness took a look at new-formed Dallat, saw great possibilities, and suggested he go with them. Dallat was more to his style.

“He was accepted into the original group of nine men and two women who had founded and splintered the consolidation. And he promptly took a second wife, Diana. He had Joyaness’s full approval. If anything, Diana was more sanguine than Joyaness. He had a financial seraglio in the making. The three of them got along famously. Joyaness and Diana were sisters by persuasion if not flesh; and besides, Diana owned a great deal of Dallat’s exploratory branch.

“Traicom became head of exploration. Joyaness became adviser to contract maintenance, and Diana oversaw the design and construction of the ships. Both women had daughters, one of whom died on a difficult colony world at age ten. Both had sons. Traicom, his two wives and three children — my father included — were nearly killed during the Dallat purge years. They became leery of that and put their assets into cultural data on a folio of developing worlds. They stored the data in two exploration ships and vanished for twenty years. Their two ships were among the first to reach the Greater Magellan. My father, Donatien, married a cultural biologist four years into the journey. She was Juanita Sigrid, my mother. I was born a year and a half later.

“When we came back from the Greater Magellan, our cultural data had grown in value, just as Traicom had predicted. We were very, very rich — and we had information on things found in the Magellan, too —”

“What things?”

“Maybe I’ll tell you sometime,” she said, smiling, “but for the moment, let it stay a delicious mystery. United Stars was less socialist and more willing to deal, so my family established ties with them. Some day I may exercise a joining option and get support from USC — but I’m still having too much fun on my own. The family stayed independent, selling information when our funds ran low, reinvesting in data from freelance expeditions to the Horsehead and Lesser Magellan. We doubled our assets in less than a year. Then, when we were just about ready to deal with Dallat and USC as equals, everybody went off on their own. After a tour of Earth, Traicom boarded me at the Centrum Astry’s best schools. I was fifteen. I quit them when I was nineteen, on my own. We weren’t nearly as rich then. Everything had gone downhill. So I took my share of the remains and formed an independent consolidation.

“By the time I was twenty-one, I had found and explored four worlds. Good ones, too. I sold their contracts to USC, since I didn’t have sufficient assets to develop them on my own. Two others I sold to my grandmother, Joyaness. Hereconomische died with her — just two years ago. Father still runs an independent consolidation. We compete with each other now and then. But I haven’t seen him in a long time. And so, here I am.”

“How did you become rich? I mean, as rich as everybody says you are … it doesn’t seem a few handsful of worlds would be enough.”

“Two years ago I inherited Joyaness’s share of the family lode. When Grandfather died the same year, I got that, too. I put a lot of it into improving thePeloros . Since then I’ve been very busy. Most of it has come in the last year. Then some auspiseers and journalists decided I was news — to be so rich so young. They set out to make me a legend. I guess they succeeded. News travels fast — even trivial stuff, as if there weren’t enough important information to spread around. That’s it, on a chip.”

“It makes me more curious than I was,” he said. “I will lay traps for you — lead you into more details.”

“You can only try.”

They lay quiet and listened to the noises of the ship and the high seas outside. Rain skittered on the deck above their bunk.

“I read that some Japanese study the past very closely,” Kawashita said. “But I had to laugh when I saw some of their reconstructions. I can’t return to that time, so I might as well leave Earth. But this man — he seems to be more thorough than the others. I will ask him a few questions, see if he fulfills the purpose his kind used to be good at.”

“What is he?” Anna asked.

“A priest. After that, we will visit a museum.”

|Go to Contents |