Too Like the Lightning Read online

  CHAPTER THE FOURTH

  A Thing Long Thought Extinct

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

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

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

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

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

  “The Servicer you summoned has arrived, Director.”

  “Send them in.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  My tracker bleeped alarm as my pulse spiked.「I don’t have it!」I cried.「I don’t have any idea where it is! I don’t know anything! It was thirteen years ago! I don’t have the remotest connection to anyone who might have ended up with it!」Only this far into my reflexive protest did I realize I was cowering, my arms over my head to stave off blows, though no guard moved.「Please believe me! I don’t know anything!」

  As Director Andō stared me down, I could read in his face the evidence against me massing, ready to draw into a phalanx: my presence at the house, my fingerprints on the paper.「Where did you hide it?」he asked.

  「It … I don’t … 」

  「Where did you hide the device?」

  「Maybe there were two?」Even I could hear the foolish desperation in my voice.

  「There were not two. There was one. Who did you give it to?」

  「No one, Chief Director! No one! It … it couldn’t have been the Canner Device!」The words were as much for myself as the Director.「The device could swap tracker signals and make someone else’s tracker register as if they were Ockham Saneer, but it couldn’t get through the rest of the security. I don’t know what security Black Sakura has, but there are systems at the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’ that noth
ing I know of could get through, certainly not the Canner Device. It was only for the tracker system, for swapping two signals, nothing else! It can’t have been—」

  「Martin sent this to you, too.」The Chief Director brought an image before my lenses, Martin’s scan of the paper I had found in the trash that morning, which I had hardly glanced at among the many messages that had chased me through my ride. The reconstruction was meticulous, rendering the paper fiber by fiber, showing how it had indeed, as Martin said, been crumpled around something. In the next instant the Director filled in that something: the unmistakable, sleek, fishlike tapered body of the infamous device which the hysterical public never should have named for me.

  「You had it last,」Andō accused.「You know who has it now.」

  「I don’t know! It was years ago. It’ll have been sold on to someone else by now.」

  「Sold? Did you sell it to someone?」

  「No. Yes! I mean, sort of. I left it … 」Plausible-seeming lies multiplied in my imagination, but as I started to voice one I could see Chief Director Andō’s face tighten. It wasn’t plausible. None of this was plausible, least of all my innocence, though innocent I was.「I really don’t know what happened to it. Please believe me. I was arrested. I don’t know what happened after that. The police say the case for the device was empty when they found it, but anyone could have it: crooked cops, organized crime, kids who stumbled on my hideout, anyone!」

  「You can’t have been that reckless with it.」

  「I was a child!」

  Andō did not need to do more than glare.

  Genuine faintness made it easy to fall to my knees before him.「Please believe me, Chief Director. I don’t know anything about what’s happened. You know I have no way to prove my innocence, but you’ve trusted me a long time and I’ve never betrayed that, I never would. Even this morning, I could have told Martin the truth about the Seven-Ten list, but I didn’t.」

  His glare changed.「What truth?」

  「That Tsuneo Sugiyama didn’t write that list.」I saw the Chief Director flinch, and I clung to the new topic like a lifeline.「Sugiyama always writes Black Sakura’s Seven-Ten list, but they think the pen should be wielded like a sword, especially the most publicized article of the year. Sugiyama would never have produced anything so uncontroversial, and, when they listed the top seven, they would never have referred to you as Hotaka Mitsubishi, they would have included your birth bash’ name.」

  Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi hissed under his breath, and my tracker finally stopped worrying about my heart rate.

  「Masami Mitsubishi wrote this list, didn’t they, Director?」I tested. I waited.「Masami is still interning with Sugiyama, yes?」

  The Chief Director scowled down at me, then turned toward the rear of the room, where a partition, patterned with a calligraphic scene of frogs and goldfish holding congress in a waterfall, separated this outer chamber from an inner one.

  A new kind of shiver touched me as the partition opened. I cannot date the beginning of the tradition wherein queens and warlords surround themselves with fawning predators: hounds, lions, serpents on silken cushions, ready to loose their savagery at the master’s whim. Chief Director Andō has chosen a more dangerous predator: adopted children, ten in all, fox-cunning and ambitious, just finished with school and ready to carve their names into the world. Six were present in the inner room then, sprawling on the floor like cats, and, as the door yawned wider, they watched me, as cats watch a twitching toy they have not yet made up their minds to chase. They all come from one bash’, a batch of ba’siblings who lost the older generation and had been scattered to distant foster bash’es before the childless Andō-Mitsubishi bash’ welcomed them all. They were just starting to cross from teens to twenties now, and the three eldest had recently passed the Adulthood Competency Exam, one donning Humanist boots, another a Mitsubishi suit, the third a Hiveless sash, but the rest had not yet chosen, so wore only minors’ sashes over soft pajamas, and the sloppy sweaters their adopted mother knitted herself.

  Masami Mitsubishi was not among the lounging ba’sibs, not today. Instead a different figure rose to join us, pausing first to set down with loving care the branch of plum blossoms she had been about to trim: Danaë Marie-Anne de la Trémoïlle Mitsubishi, Princesse de la Trémoïlle et de Talmond, sister of Humanist President Ganymede Duc de Thouars, and wife of Chief Director Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi. She wore a kimono here in her husband’s capital, not the unisex kimono one sees on Mitsubishi streets but a woman’s antique kimono, birds and blossoms in golds, peaches, and blues, the fabric thick with labor like a tapestry, the obi sparkling around her stiff waist like a puzzle box of silk. She approached with the small, shuffling steps which in Japan code feminine, her white hands nested pale against the cloth like doves. So perfectly anachronistic were her dress and poise she might have been the model for an antique woodblock print, except for her hair, which sparkled in its cage of hair pins with all the rebellious wheat-lush gold of Europe. I will not call Princesse Danaë the most beautiful woman in the world, since that title doubtless belongs to some obscure person, living happily indifferent to the doors of fame that might be opened by the blessings of anatomy. But I do know who would win a worldwide vote for the face on Earth most likely to launch a thousand ships.

  「What good luck, that we have an investigator so perceptive, and so discrete.」Danaë’s Japanese is elegant and beautifully accented, but too meticulous, the over-perfect Japanese of one who learned it in adulthood and remains self-conscious, even as the decades mount.「Surely Mycroft will protect our Masami.」

  Her words opened an aspect of this I had not seen before, the poor young intern, still a minor just whetting his eager pen, swept up in a storm of probing questions, which bitter politics would whip into a hurricane to levy at the whole bash’. Suddenly the wide eyes of the lounging siblings watching from the back room felt like fear.「Do you think this is directed against the Chief Director, Princesse?」I asked.

  「I don’t know.」Danaë came to her husband’s side. Do not chide me, reader, for using the gendered ‘husband’ when she stands so close, sheltering against him as she gazes up into his face with her brilliant, pleading blue eyes edged by maternal fear. Our age’s neutral ‘partner’ rings false when her every touch and gesture makes such intentional display of ‘wife.’「Masami was so excited by this job at the paper—their dream job. I hate to think someone would destroy that just to get at us.」

  「I’ll do everything I can to protect Masami, Princesse.」I said it almost without thinking, or with no thought beyond the desire to drive the sadness from that perfect face.

  Princesse Danaë rewarded me with a smile, warm, her right cheek framed by one stray golden curl, and I relaxed enough to slump back on my haunches.

  「Poor Masami is quite innocent, but I fear they will seem guilty when the public finds out the truth.」

  「Finds out what?」I asked.

  She sighed, brushing back the wayward curl, and the passion rising in my breast split between the impulse to leap between her and the sources of her grief like some white knight, or to freeze that moment like a portrait so I could feast my eye forever on her face. I should add, reader, that I hold no particular lust for Danaë. Rather her arts—mastery of poise and gesture—can inflict these feelings on almost any victim, and when she sighs thus in the council chamber where the Nine Directors meet, one sigh can trump a hundred thousand votes.「As I understand, Sugiyama pulled out of writing the list just a few days ago, and had Masami finish it, but the editor wanted the famous name, so was going to release Masami’s list pretending it was their teacher’s. Masami’s just a junior intern, they had no way to object.」

  「Of course not,」 I answered instantly.「Don’t worry, Princesse. I’m sure we can protect Masami. I’ll do everything I can, and Martin, too, Martin will understand. Martin understands better than anyone how important it is to keep press and public from hounding Hive leaders’ children.
We’ll keep Masami out of the limelight, I promise.」

  「Thank you, good Mycroft.」 Danaë’s smile washed over me like sunlight, and she even reached down with those pure alabaster fingers and stroked my hair, as one might stroke a faithful hound.「What did you do with the Canner Device?」

  You, distant reader, and I now thinking back on this scene with the distance of weeks, we two can see Andō looming behind his wife, watching in calculated silence as this exquisite tool extracts what he desires. But the Mycroft who kneels before her, he sees nothing but those eyes, keen as blue diamond, which slice even as they sparkle.「I … I never had the Canner Device, Princesse.」

  She cocked her head like a bird.「You never had it?」

  「No. I’ve never even seen it. I only ever had the packaging. I bought the empty box from some arms smugglers. I’d heard about the device from the news back when it was stolen from the lab, everyone did. I wanted the police to think I had the device so they’d think that was how I was sneaking around. It was just a trick to keep them from looking any deeper.」It all poured out of me, years of careful silence melted by that coaxing face. I had been close to breaking already, really, the truth brought to my tongue’s tip by the fear that being incriminated in this theft might cost me my parole, but if Andō’s intimidation was a cudgel, Danaë was that perfect scalpel touch against the artery that makes the blood flow free.

  She smiled—what sweet reward, that smile!—and chuckled like a teasing child.「Then why didn’t you just say so, you little silly?」