Half an hour after touching down in San Francisco, Philip is in a cab on his way to W&P.
On the freeway he reads the coverage on Water and Power’s wholly unexpected paramilitary assault on Biotechnica’s Bay Area research facility. According to a W&P spokesman, founder James Cromwell’s adverse reaction to an experimental longevity drug sent him into the intense manic state that led to the tragic events at Biotechnica and finally his suicide; in the spokesman’s view, this doesn’t diminish Mr. Cromwell’s enduring legacy as a humanitarian and an entrepreneur, nor does it reflect on the principles of good citizenship and ardent but ethical capitalism on which Water and Power Capital Management was founded. Skimming the press releases, the rhetorical posturing and the webs of pending litigation, Philip has the sense that Biotechnica is getting the worst of it. Senator Willem H. Lugh (R., North California) praises Cromwell for his philanthropy and calls for more rigorous vetting of certain classes of neuroactive drugs. Editorials bemoan the erosion of the state’s monopoly on force, draw comparisons with the last days of the Roman Republic and call for change, but that will soon pass, and then it will be back to business as usual, world without end.
An aide ushers him into the grey light of a room full of books and pinioned butterflies and the yawning skull of what’s probably an allosaur. Magda waits behind her desk, looking unhappy and somehow coiled. On the desk is an architectural model of a campus of some kind, its centerpiece a sort of huge neoclassical pyramid.
“New project?” he asks.
“Yes. A university, founded in James’s honor.” She touches the pyramid, suddenly tender. “This is his memorial.”
They sit in silence as her aide leaves and when the door finally closes he says, “What happened to Irina?” in the hope his bluntness will shock her into disclosure.
Magda leans across her desk and her rage is so close to the surface that he expects her to say Irina is dead and he’s welcome to join her, but, speaking carefully, she says, “I honor the feeling that brought you here. You must have expected a cold welcome, but here you are just the same. So that’s why I’m going to tell you what I know about her whereabouts, which is … nothing, and believe me, I’ve looked. I won’t bore you with the details, but we—I—have unusual resources. So now you know, and that’s all I can do for you. Now you should go.” As he rises she says, “Don’t come back,” her voice now hard, and he considers trying to comfort her, but she seems inconsolable, and it’s not his place, so he leaves.
*
It’s a good year for his company, and money is for spending, so he burns through ten percent of his net worth trying to find her, but learns nothing, is left wondering.
73
Masamune
Kern’s laptop bleats, and in the moment of waking he is up, though it’s cold, and still dark, for to hesitate is to risk losing the day. He steps into the tiny space between his futon, the small sink and the wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and stretches as best he can, breathing in mildew, old paper and the ancient motor oil that seems to imbue the black-painted cinder-block walls, a relic of the days when his room was a supply closet and the forge a mechanic’s shop.
He runs his fingers over his books’ cracked spines; most are on the art and history of the Japanese sword, but his reading encompasses a miscellany of zen gardening, metallurgy, the manufacture of indigo, the weaving of bamboo. Such books, he has found, can be had for very little in the basement marts of Shinjuku; in any event, books from the nineteen hundreds are rarely available in digital form, and he likes the brittle tactility of their pages. On the top shelf, above the books, is an empty black sword sheath; its lacquer, garish by day, shines like muted nebulae in the laptop’s half-light.
Out on the street, the air suggests more snow. An orange moon has risen; according to the No Subarashi Hon Katanakaji, the great book of smiths, a blade should be heated to the color of the full moon in February, so he stands there, staring up at the sky, trying to take it in, hold onto it forever.
The old man lets him use his work car for pickups and deliveries. In the moonlight its corroded, snow-encrusted hull is the color of the street. The backseat, its upholstery long destroyed, is full of unidentifiable bits of metal, chunks of coal, filthy tarps. As he drives through the deserted streets of Sakai, the sky lightens.
The foundry’s parking lot is sheathed in dirty white ice, glass-slick except where coarse sand is spread before the high double doors. Its windows pulse with red light. As he steps inside the heat hits, and the snow on his shoes melts immediately. Sparks and flame gust out of the clay furnace in the center of the warehouse floor. Cone-shaped, the furnace looks like a crude, man-sized model of a volcano. Takane, the chief foundry man, squats by the furnace in his yellow hard hat and blue jumpsuit, sweating profusely, assessing the flame. The smelting has been going on for three days, and he’s been here for all of it; looking older than his fifty years, he clutches a huge cup of convenience-store coffee.
Kern is just in time for the finale. Uniformed workmen surround the furnace, grasp its lip with hooked poles, and, with an ichi ni san, pull hard; as the walls of the furnace fall away a wave of heat wells outward and sparks roar up to dissipate among the blackened rafters.
Where the furnace was there’s now a crumbling mass of incandescent charcoal, burning reeds, a glowing mass of livid metal. (Kern once asked Takane why he used reeds; Takane explained that commercial fuels alter the metal chemistry, that the reeds are traditional and, moreover, as they grow in a nearby vacant lot, they’re free.) Kern sits on an upturned plastic bucket watching workmen with long-handled rakes swipe away the flocculent white ash. He stifles a yawn—he could have come later to make his pickup, but he likes to see how things work. The rakes soon reveal an intricately porous metal boulder, like a meteorite, or a scholar’s rock in a Chinese garden. Takane circles it, peering close, his face dripping as he looks for the tamahagane, the pockets of high-carbon steel that are the raw material of sword blades. Kern wonders if he thinks of the hue of some dark winter moon.
When he leaves the foundry, the stars have faded and the sky is the color of the jagged ingots clinking in the wooden box beside him. He turns one between his fingers, imagining the blade it will be.
By the time he gets back to the forge, the boy from the restaurant has come and gone, leaving miso, pickled vegetables and broiled mackerel on the table. The old man is particular about not waking the neighbors, so he stokes the forge, lays out his tools with careful exactitude and sits there, drinking miso, awaiting the day.
74
Marmont