The Nicholas Linnear Novels (203 page)

“Would that be a good thing?”

“Of course it would!”

“Have you so quickly forgotten that your spirit is entangled, that you cannot distinguish good from evil?”

It was then that Nicholas noticed that Kansatsu was wearing nothing more than his light cotton
gi.
“Aren’t you cold,
sensei
?”

“Is it cold out?” Kansatsu said unconcernedly. He gestured to indicate that Nicholas should take the lead. “I hadn’t noticed.”

The icy wind whipped through the canyons, ravines, the sheer, glassy walls of the Black Gendarme. Drifts of dry snow crunched beneath their feet as they followed a narrow winding path up the nearly sheer rock face. Now there was nothing at all but the rock face, vertical, glasslike, supremely forbidding. Nicholas began to climb, digging his fingertips into barely seen fissures, hauling himself up. He grunted with the effort, his breath coming in animal pants.

“When I dream of the Black Gendarme rising like a specter from the center of my spirit,” Nicholas said, resting for a moment as he clung precariously to the rock face, “I awake full of anxiety and fear.”

Kansatsu did not answer, and Nicholas turned his head to find that he was alone on the Black Gendarme.

Shisei lived in a brownstone just off Foxhall Road in Georgetown. It belonged to one of the main benefactors of her environmental lobby, but she was rarely in it, preferring St. Moritz in the winters and Cap Ferrat in the summers. She had sumptuous villas in both, caring more for Europe than her native Washington.

Shisei lived in the house alone. Every Wednesday a couple came in to clean and, if she wished, cook food for the week, as they had for the past eighteen years.

The downstairs was all carved paneled walls, painted
boiserie,
ornate marble mantels upon which rested eighteenth century French bronzes, ormolu-mounted Chinese porcelain, among other priceless knickknacks. But upstairs, the bedroom Shisei had chosen was relatively simple. It overlooked a small but exquisite garden overseen by a Japanese gardener who loved his charges as he did his children. Sunlight filtered through the tall honey locusts rimming in gold the peonies and azaleas.

Coming out from the bathroom barefoot, Shisei went to her closet, rummaged behind the boxes of shoes she had piled up, pulled out her equipment. She set her portable computer on the small French desk, plugged it in, set up the telephone modem. She sat down, inserted a specially modified RCA jack into the back of the computer, wrapped the featherweight headset around her head.

She began the access procedure not by using the keyboard but by speaking into the microphone of the headset. The powerful computer hummed along to her complex instructions. As it did, the screen went dark, then began to brighten as streams of characters began to fill it. At last she downloaded the MANTIS program from hard disk memory. There it sat in the center of her screen, pulsing like a dark, dangerous jewel.

Shisei took a deep breath, spoke into the mike. The computer accessed the phone line and she gave it a number. A female voice answered on the second ring.

“Johnson Institute. How may I help you?”

Shisei hit the
ENTER
key on her computer. The Institute operator heard only a dial tone; but Shisei was inside, connected to the Institute’s phone lines via her computer, its modem, and the program activated in the small cylinder she had secreted beneath the desk where the Hive brain sat. The cylinder was her link, via the phone lines, to the Hive computer.

Shisei wiped a drop of sweat from her forehead. Her shoulders were hunched, her eyes staring at the screen as she checked and rechecked. It was time.

She spoke a code into her mike, then hit the
ENTER
key again. The version of the MANTIS virus program she had been given was released, transmitted instantaneously through her linkup to the Hive brain.

She could see on her screen the two interfaces—the honeycomb gridwork of the Hive brain and the spirals of the MANTIS virus—beginning to merge. She saw the spirals breaking down the gridwork, sector by sector, as the virus began to mutate, feeding on the Hive security program, and she began to exult, thinking, It’s working. It’s going to work.

Then something happened. The honeycomb gridwork began to phase in and out of focus. At first Shisei thought that there was a malfunction in the linkup—a phone man working on the lines in the area would do it—but her computer told her otherwise. Everything was secure. She stared at the screen. Now the gridwork seemed to have quadrupled, sextupled, on and on, until it filled up the screen, and the virus, overwhelmed, self-destructed as per its built-in instructions. In an instant there was no sign it had ever existed. A heartbeat later the Hive gridwork was back to normal. Shisei dissolved the link. What had happened?

Then she remembered what Dr. Rudolph had said about the construction of the Hive brain. Not only was its design radically different, but its components, its transistors, were unique, perhaps a thousand times faster than the standard silicon chips. That’s how the Hive overcame the virus. Its security program ran at such hyperspeed, it overwhelmed even a virus that could feed off it.

Shisei sat back for a moment, digesting the entire event, reviewing every instant in her mind. Then she shut down the computer and picked up the phone. She had some calls to make.

Nangi waited until the last minute, risking being late, waiting for the Pack Rat to call or to walk through the door to his office. When neither happened, Nangi put on his hat and walked out the door. His lawyer was waiting for him. When they got to the street, the lawyer opened an umbrella.

It’s always raining lately, Nangi thought. He was unconcerned by the Pack Rat’s failure to get back to him. It would have been nice to go into the meeting with some ammunition, but it was hardly a requisite. Nangi lifted his head up to the rain and laughed silently.

His car took them the half mile to the Nippon Keio Building. Before he got out he called Tomi, set up a time that evening for them to meet at The Silk Road, when everyone they would need to interview would be there. He sat still for several moments, hoping that the Pack Rat would catch up with him. Perhaps he prayed. He spoke with his lawyer about several last-minute matters, then they emerged from the car, went up to Nami’s offices.

Kusunda Ikusa had suggested his offices as a neutral site for the merger signing. They were all waiting for him in the big conference room: Ken Oroshi, Ikusa, the lawyers.

The deal was, on the surface, simple, but in fact it was extremely complex. It had to accommodate clauses that Ikusa insisted on; it had to include the clauses Nangi needed to complete his subsidized takeover of Nakano Industries and their priceless R&D department.

Everything was in order. Nangi, Ikusa, and Ken Oroshi chatted informally like the best of friends while the lawyers pored over their arcane wordings, nit-picking each other to death.

Tea was served on an enormous silver tray, out of English silver cups. Ikusa led the conversation, discussing green fees at his golf club. This is all nonsense, Nangi thought, but it is worthwhile nonsense. Like being in the dentist’s chair, the pain is a necessary evil.

In fact, his mind was not fully focused on the signing. He was thinking of Tomi and of Mariko, the dancer who had been raped and flayed at the
tokudashi
club, The Silk Road. What was the connection between Mariko’s and Dr. Hanami’s deaths? Was he Mariko’s last lover, the man for whom the message “This Could Be Your Wife” was meant? If so, if the
dorokusai
had also murdered Mariko, then it was clear that he had coerced Dr. Hanami into doing what to Nicholas? What had happened to Nicholas that Nangi did not know about? He burned to find out the answer; he worried about Nicholas as if the younger man were his son.

At length the lawyers called to their respective clients, who looked over the contracts one last time.

Then the two principals, Nangi and Ken Oroshi, signed the merger papers. Kusunda Ikusa, looking smug, bowed to both of them, presented them with small gifts. The Sphynx computer-chip-manufacturing
kobun
and Nakano Industries were now one.

The Kan, the businessman’s hotel on the seedy outskirts of Tokyo with which Senjin was so familiar, had a health service that hotels in the better districts did not provide. It was not a spa, not a masseuse, not a gym. It was a sensory-deprivation tank.

The tank was one third the size of the Kan’s coffinlike rooms. It was filled with water at blood-heat temperature. Slipping naked into its depths, Senjin felt nothing. Nothing at all.

A net suspended him at a level so that only his nose and lips were above the water. When the lid came down, he heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing. Neither was there anything for him to smell or to taste. His mind was cut off, set adrift—inasmuch as modern-day man can be—from his body.

Without a shell to bind him, Senjin floated in the Void. His childhood
sensei
would have been appalled at his practice of sensory deprivation, which no doubt they would have viewed as an artificial stimulus, a path but not the Path, and therefore strictly forbidden.

But for Senjin nothing was forbidden. He had passed beyond such delusory boundaries the moment he had outgrown the pedantic philosophies of his teachers, the moment he had begun to formulate his own philosophy, his own Way. He had been pursuing this singular Path for years now, and in so doing, his power had been growing.

Once he had the nine mystic emeralds in his possession, he would become unstoppable. Even those tanjian masters from whom he had learned the last esoteric nuances of Tau-tau would not be able to defy him.

They had believed that their lessons would irrevocably bind him to them. This had been the way of Tau-tau for centuries, part of the reason for its continued survival, a clever mechanism embedded in the very heart of the basic twenty-four principles.

Others, before Senjin, had defied the code of Tau-tau. All had suffered greatly for their transgression—Senjin knew this because their sorrows had been told to him and to his sister when they were young. It had become part of their training, a subtle warning, as if even then their tanjian
sensei
might have suspected that they would seek to follow in those foolish footsteps.

And Senjin had. Not without terrible suffering, of course, bitter years of struggle, but this had been expected. Yet he knew that with the emeralds in his possession, the suffering would cease. He would be the first to have broken with the traditions of Tau-tau and been truly free.

For it would be he, now, who would rule the tanjian elders, dictating his own law to them as they had once inflicted their antiquated canon on him.

Freed of this weight, floating in nothingness, Senjin could now think about his mother—his true mother—whom he had never known, and whom he hated. Into his mind swam the directive of a poster put up in the subway station near his Metropolitan Police office,
MARRIAGE IS DUTY,
screamed the headline.
THE ULTIMATE ACT OF FILIAL PIETY.
To disobey this imperative, the poster implied, was to dishonor one’s parents, who still, in one family out of two, chose the mates for their children.

Senjin had never married. He had always felt it was a slap in the face of his mother—the mother he never knew. That it had broken the heart of Haha-san, his aunt who had raised him, was of no interest to him. Haha-san was of no moment; his mother was.

Floating in the nothingness that was water at blood-heat, Senjin remembered the photograph of his mother Haha-san had once given him as a keepsake; “a method,” she had said, “of keeping your mother alive.”

Senjin had stared at the black-and-white image for some time, trying to find even a minute speck of himself in that plain, expressionless face. Finding none, he had taken a knife and had carefully cut the image into ribbons. Where his mother’s lips pressed together in a tight, unrelenting line, he had left intact a central core the size of a dime. He had placed the photo in the bottom of his dresser drawer beneath a meticulous stack of snowy white undershorts, which he wore once and then threw away.

Senjin had never loved anyone—certainly not his mother. Love had about it a certain morality that even marriage did not, a morality that he despised.

But he did not need love; he had had something else far more precious.

Once, Senjin had regularly merged with his sister. (Oh, how painful it was to think of her!) They inhabited each other’s spirit, closer than two human beings had ever been. Now she was gone, and there was an emptiness in Senjin’s spirit he was driven to fill. To try and try again—and to fail. But try he must, for it was an emptiness so terrible that its dark heart had inured him to loneliness even while it was turning his heart to stone.

And why not? Everything else in what humans laughingly called society was monstrous: grotesque, pointless, suffocating.

He recalled Haha-san taking him to a movie in which he saw a white-faced, expressionless young woman being prepared for the marriage ceremony in very much the same way as the Christian knights of medieval England had been dressed by their squires for battle.

Trussed tightly into restricting layers of cloth before the heavy, armorlike wedding kimono was wrapped around her, the young woman stoically endured the ceremony and its aftermath with a bravery Senjin found as admirable as it was foolish. Why didn’t she kill her lout of a husband, he wondered, at the moment of painful penetration? Why had she allowed herself to be violated by desire and custom?

Senjin, too, had been trussed tightly into restricting layers—the strata of Japanese society. He despised those restrictions because they represented both the definition of his world and the limitation of his power. All that Senjin had needed to create his Path was a starting point. His
sensei
had obliged him, unwittingly giving him this and more, a foundation from which to work. His extraordinary mind had accomplished the rest, grasping what they had not, plumbing the unknown depths, forging a new spirit, reshaping himself into an image cast in his mind at the moment of his birth, his consciousness bursting into the world like the blazing trail of a comet.