“No. I’m happy when it happens. It makes him just that little bit less gone.” She can’t bring herself to tell him about the time she found herself checking out the ass of a woman who looked like Constantin’s lost love, much to her surprise, as she’s only ever liked boys.
“I’m happy to hear that,” he says. “Because I was never really able to let him go. I’m afraid I was never a good father to him. When I was a younger and vainer man I very much wanted a mathematically gifted son, and I’m afraid I led Constantin a sad dance of it. When he was a little boy I tried to make him learn calculus when he just wanted to be outside and play video games. When he was at university I actually threatened to disinherit him unless he would apply himself. Now I’d give my entire fortune just to see him for ten minutes. Not even to see him. It would be enough to sit here and know he was in the house. All the money in the world, and for what?”
He seems to expect a response so she says, “Maybe it will be useful in the future.”
“There isn’t much future. Not like there is for you. I say this in observation, not regret. You have the look of the longevity treatments. I started too late. I thought the technology was immature, and I was busy. That was a mistake. So it goes. Now I have a decade, perhaps two. I keep an eye on my business, but it mostly runs itself, and I collect antiquities, or it might better be said that I permit them to accumulate. Look at this,” he says, taking up the crown, which is crude and thin and decorated with a motif of concentric circles. “My firm is building a shopping mall in Macedonia, at what once was Pella, the capital of Alexander the Great. My workers excavated this. The legally mandated on-site archaeologist tells me that it must be given to the national museum, where it will be duly cataloged and then put in a box among thousands of boxes, never to be seen again. Or I could take it home, and the archaeologist, whose father went to school with me, might well forget to report it. So now I have a golden diadem, and no use for it. Won’t you try it on?”
He holds it out and when she takes it it’s lighter than she’d expected and she thinks of Cromwell’s wineglass as he retakes it and places it on her head, which is a strange gesture but one she accepts out of decency or mourning or maybe apology.
He smiles a little, takes out his phone, takes a picture. “Look,” he says, showing it to her. “Like Persephone, who was half of the living and half of the dead.” Behind her in the picture is dry stone and sand and a pomegranate tree, and she looks patient and sad and like she could sleep for a thousand years; the black hemispheres under her eyes remind her of Constantin’s last hour, and her clothes, which were chic when she put them on, look shapeless and seedy, and the gold crown shines in the sun.
“But your implant,” he says, “is your true crown, hidden within,” and she’s listing in her seat and thinking up excuses when he says, “Why would anyone want my son’s memories, or yours, so badly? Certainly they’re interesting, but does that justify the risk entailed by the theft?”
“I wondered about that all the way across the Atlantic,” she says, fighting to keep her eyes open. “There seems to be no good explanation. I can see why someone would want them for research, but that doesn’t seem to justify the cost.”
“Could they be used to simulate the minds of whoever they were stolen from?”
“No. Well, maybe, people have tried, but the problem is too hard—it would take more computer power than there is on earth, by several orders of magnitude. It’s generations away, if it’s possible at all. So I can only assume I’m missing information, or that maybe Cromwell regards digitized memory as a kind of art. He seems to have been a dedicated collector, off and on, and this is something that no one else has. Maybe he thinks it’s like collecting souls. Maybe he’s set his heart on it, and thinks he’s above consequences.”
“Then that will be his undoing,” says Iliou, and for a moment his rage shows through.
“But forgive me,” he says, his cordial neutrality snapping back into place. “You must be exhausted. Fabienne will show you your room. Sleep well, my daughter, and tomorrow we’ll talk of war.”
36
Usually in Trouble
Vola pushes his way out of the cage past a scrum of officials and nurses running in with bags of plasma and an emcee who shoves a microphone in his face only to have it swatted away and then he’s mobbed by his elated entourage. Everyone in the audience is rising from their seats and crowding up the stairs, and the doctors have Tadao on his back now, the blood-wet sword to one side, and with the first defibrillation Tadao’s back arches but Kern sees the eyes of a lady doctor over her white surgical mask and knows it’s over.
He jumps down the steps to the floor by the cage in time to see Akemi’s back framed in the mouth of a service tunnel as she blows past the guard in his Final Sword blazer under the RESTRICTED ACCESS sign, and Vola is right behind her, yanking off his glove and throwing it blindly over his shoulder, his entourage following, and even though they’re talking in Italian Kern mostly understands them as they say, “What did I tell you—kendoka are weak against change of tempo with an indirect attack,” and “Fuck the press conference, look at him, we need to get him to the hotel,” and he remembers that Italian and Spanish are almost the same, which reminds him that the Japanese are said to think all westerners look alike, so he snatches up Vola’s glove—damp with sweat, held together with tape, speckled with Tadao’s blood—and trots after the Italians, like he’s some flunky with a small share in the team’s euphoria. The guard ignores him as he hastens into the tunnel.
In the tunnel there’s a door open onto a surgery, the one from the video, abandoned now except for a nurse wearing latex gloves and blue scrubs standing rigidly by a tray of gleaming surgical tools. Vola shoves through the next door, his team pouring in after, and over their shoulders Kern sees a table covered with blunt-tipped practice swords, mesh fencing masks, bottles of wine and little plates of food; Vola sweeps the wine from the table, and Kern hears the bottles shattering as he walks on, alone now, trying to look like he knows where he’s going. He remembers the glove, lets it fall to the floor.
The next door opens and Akemi comes out, now wrapped in a blue-white fur so brilliant in the light that it looks like falling snow. Angry, staccato Japanese from inside but Akemi shrugs and says, “Can’t be helped!” and it’s thrilling to hear her voice, though she sounds different, maybe younger now; also thrilling that she was lost somewhere out in the world but now is close enough to touch.
“Hey!” he says, as she turns and walks away.