A Trickster in the Ashes Read online

  But then (the dream gave Crispin dismissively to understand, lingering on Hung’s face with fascination) he had been a madman anyway. His “priests” held mass conversions at which hundreds of villagers, herded into crowds by thugs with pikes, were saved from eternal damnation by nodding their heads and mumbling the right words at the right moment.

  That had been Hung Hsiu-chüan, leader of what had later become known as the Taiping Rebellion, an attempt to overthrow the central government of China (still in place, still tottering, held together only by inertia and its ancient iron-clawed empress; but Queen Lithrea, Tzu-Hsi’s sister in anachronism, had gone down, and the Manchurian would follow) that had failed when it too fell prey to inertia. With Beijing practically in their grasp, Hung’s followers had been distracted by squabbles over loot, and the momentum of revolution had disintegrated into the anarchy of greed. The ten or fifteen minutes the dream had shown Crispin had been dredged up from a time when the rebellion was still young, thirty or forty years ago. Crispin deduced this from costumes and mannerisms. The dreams were never explicit. He had to put two and two together with what he already knew of the foreign lands they showed him, and with historical fact gleaned from the students of the New World in the colonial government. Judiciously picking their brains enabled Crispin to situate the dreams in history, alway provided they’d happened already. This amateur-detective approach didn’t work for the high-speed montages of future events Mr. Nakunatta had been favoring recently. Technology-recognition was Crispin’s only hope of dating those, but even when the machines and gadgets looked halfway familiar, he could only hazard a guess that it would happen within a couple of decades, and that it had a 50 percent chance (or so, based on the historical dreams) of changing the world. Also the near-future dreams tended to have the color leached from them, leaving only black and white and gray, like the daguerrotypes the French Tahitian had given the Yamauchis. The far-future dreams, although they came in vivid technicolor, looked even stranger, due to the refraction effect which made everything—humans, furniture, clouds, highways full of trucks and cars—into faceted solid crystals, shedding rainbows from knife edges. Airplanes, birds, and people falling from high windows trailed multiple, fading copies of themselves. And there was the disjunction effect that chopped scenes of life up into confoundingly truncated glimpses, sometimes seen from odd angles, sometimes as if through warped glass, sometimes slowed down to underwater grace, sometimes speeded up to amphetamine absurdity. Sometimes the transitions between scenes made sense. More often they didn’t. People’s voices were the only things that sounded normal—but usually there were no voices at all, just a clashing race between heavy percussion and repetitive clips of melody that might be Mr. Nakunatta’s idea of music or his idea of a joke. And even when Crispin heard voices, he couldn’t understand them, because in his visions of the future, his dream ability to comprehend whatever language was spoken (and remember the words and idiom patterns, not in translation, but as strings of alien intonations jingling in his mind; the first few dreams, set mostly in parts of America and the British Empire, had benefited him in a way the fatester surely hadn’t intended, by aiding his studies of English; he was now working on Japanese, Mandarin, and German)—but in the future this ability didn’t apply. Instead, night after night he found himself suspended, like a fish in a waterfall, in a torrent of foreign slang, some of which sounded like English or Kirekuni, but not any dialects he knew. After a while it became unbearable. The incomprehensibility of fifty years from now (a hundred? two hundred? three?) beat at him like violence, bowed him, depressed him to the point where he longed to escape but couldn’t.

  As: the windows of a lozenge-shaped car imploded to the hacking coughs of guns

  a man in a business suit slowly closed the door of an office and took a handgun out of a safe behind a map hanging on the wall and shot himself dead

  children with the glamour of impending genius clinging about them sat gaping at flickering bright windows

  a shift in the wind wafted clouds of poison back over the breast works and trenches of the army which had deployed it (Near future, Crispin thought, horrified, it had to be, because he understood warfare conducted by infantrymen sallying and shooting at each other across no-man’s-land, he’d seen—and barraged with splinterons—similar breast works; he’d even heard rumors that in the New World they’d invented such a thing as canisters of air that made soldiers cough and choke and die horribly; and according to Mr. Nakunatta the rumors were true, and within his lifetime there was going to be another vast war that chewed up the earth and tore down forests and devoured ten thousand men at a single bite)

  and amid the feet of metal-and-glass towers that shot up into the clouds like man-made Jack’s Beanstalks, a group of boys shot a man in the stomach, but instead of stealing his money they gathered around him and recited poetry that sounded, since Crispin couldn’t understand it, like strings of numbers, and all the people scurrying by glanced at the fallen man, then away

  and a prune-faced woman in a laboratory and a young man in a scruffy hotel room scribbled identical calculations on note pads at the same time on different sides of the world,

  and a black-haired boy shut himself into a toilet cubicle and buried his face in his hands for three minutes and emerged an inch shorter and a stone thinner, with brown hair, and the bones of his face rearranged beyond recognition; no mystery there, he was a Mime, a member of that island race whose biggest secret Crispin had discovered through masquerading as one of them. But judging from the boy’s expensively bland clothing and gold jewelry, the Mimes were on the way to the top, did they only know it

  and a spot of light zoomed across a concrete plain and just as it started to slow down, the scene switched to show a tide composed partly of humans but mostly of dangerous-looking communications equipment, sweeping out of the base of a bulbous tower and down the steps of several gigantic transports that looked like airplanes but weren’t, couldn’t be, because what were those cylindrical excrescences under their wings, and where were their propellers

  and Crispin couldn’t wake up, and he feared he would go mad, and he knew that an inability to deal with the utterly bizarre was just what the arsonist wanted to induce in him. And so he tried not to understand. Just let it wash over you, it’s only a dream. But whatever he did was irrelevant anyway because the rainbow-edged sights and sounds went on and on, with him drowning in the thick of them, until whatever Mr. Nakunatta wanted him to see had happened, or until—who knew?—the fearsome fatester simply got tired of the diversion and went off to find another mouse, or catspaw, or whatever the hell it was he wanted Crispin to—

  awake—

  Tumbling backward through shattering images, he landed in his own body.

  His dizziness wore off, and he became conscious of the soft ghastly commodiousness of the bed in which he lay. He heard himself moaning, felt himself twitching and tossing, and stopped. His embarrassment was so acute, and acutely irrational, that to escape it he yearned to go back to sleep—real sleep this time, the layman’s equivalent of forgetfulness. For perhaps thirty seconds he tried. But the bed remained too big, too spongy, too empty. Drowsiness receded. The absence of hot firm arms and legs twined with his, her defection from physical companionship, was intolerable. It was all he asked of her, and it wasn’t much. He raised himself on his elbow.

  The summer night lay heavy, thick as a preemptive deployment of poison gas. It took his eyes several seconds to adjust to the darkness. She sat, as he’d half hoped, half feared, in the window nook with the armchair and the Tiffany lamp imported all the way from America’s East Coast, gifts from American visitors that just hadn’t fitted into the intrigues Jionna Yamauchi mounted daily against her home. Yleini had gladly received them as secondhand souvenirs. At twenty-three she had none of the Kirekuni woman’s sense of intrigue, less of her aesthetic perfectionism, but she knew what she liked: anything “pretty” or “nice” or “adorable”—in other words, anything that lo
oked expensive. She made an exception for romance novels, which, though cheap to buy, were all about pretty, nice, adorable things. Often when Crispin woke in the middle of the night she would be poring over one of these acquisitionist’s pornographies. But tonight she’d dispensed with subtlety. Did this mean change was in the air? She perched on the back of the armchair, cheek on fist, her body silhouetted within her chiffon negligee by the moonlight outside the window. He wanted to throw himself at her feet and win her over with kisses and apologies. He wanted to storm out of the room, out of claustrophobic respectability masquerading as the high life, out of Yamauchi’s labyrinth of payoffs and deceptions and looking the other way and looking for the moles and looking out for Yamauchi’s best interests as loyally as any of the aides on the official payroll. Organized crime had a protocol that enwebbed you just as tightly as the civil service that was its selfsame mirror image, and just like the civil service it was dreary and dangerous and stressful, but he could have coped, were it not for the personaldeceptions he was forced to propagate. Mirrors within mirrors!

  “Expanding to America was your idea. Jionna told me so,” Yleini said. “She thinks you’re brilliant. I wouldn’t be surprised if she wanted to screw you. Significant knows she’s been through practically every other married man we know. The old ones, even. It’s not because she wants them, though; it’s because Devi doesn’t love her anymore, and she wants to get her own back. She’s told me that in as many words. She knows he’s screwing around, too.” Her voice ripened with satisfaction. “But she doesn’t know with who.”

  Okimachi adored the private air service project, which They believed Yamauchi’s brainchild. A man who didn’t officially exist couldn’t claim credit in Okimachi, so Crispin’s involvement had quickly dwindled to the usual: watchdogging the foreign investors, keeping the mirrors far enough apart so they wouldn’t see reflected things they didn’t want to know existed. Yleini, once she found out, had disapproved. To her, the project was just another proof that Crispin wanted to leave her. Again, she would always add—as though his leaving her had been a precondition of their marriage, as though he’d gone back on his word.

  “Come back to bed,” he said hopelessly.

  “It’ll be morning soon enough. I’m not tired anymore. I think I’ll wake Neiila and have her brew tea. I don’t suppose you want any.” Scorn entered her voice. “Shall I have her bring a decanter?”

  Actually a drink was just what he wanted, but he shook his head. Do you know (he wanted to say) that I’m being hounded by a thing which has no name, which everyone knows about and which we have over the course of history labeled with a variety of inappropriate epithets, a thing I call “Mr. Nakunatta”—

  Yes, well, in Japanese it’s a pun, sort of—

  I can’t show you a letter from him, nor hair nor hide. Now that I’ve thought of it, he may well deluge me with letters. I wouldn’t put it past him. But so far I haven’t anything tangible to show for the interest he’s taken in me, unless you count various scars picked up along the way, like this one here from falling down a garbage chute. But he’s a real, live man. He’s not normal, not by any stretch of the imagination, because somehow, a long time ago, he discovered the secret of immortality; I’m not sure he has a body anymore, but his personality is like that of a shriveled old playboy who takes his frustration out on everyone in sight because the girls won’t stand for his nonsense anymore. If I knew where he was to be found, I’d make it my life’s mission to kill him. You say this sounds like the delusions of a paranoiac: well, my dear, as you’ve so often told me, I am paranoid, but I’m also a rational bastard, and Mr. Nakunatta is the one and only eccentricity of logic I’ve kept in my rulebook, which ought to be enough to make you at least think about what I’m saying. And if you do, you’ll understand that logic and Mr. Nakunatta are mutually exclusive propositions. They’re both limited. But no one can get away from either of them. As human beings we all choose to pride ourselves on our faith in either one or the other. In both cases our faith is founded on trust. Especially if we’ve placed our bets on Mr. Nakunatta. We treat with him and curse him all on the assumption that he’s never going to show his hand, never force himself down our throats—put himself about flagrantly maybe, because he likes doing that, but always as puppeteer, never out in the open. Well out in the open is where he’s come with me. This isn’t the first time he and I have had dealings. But I thought he’d decided to leave me alone. Wouldn’t you know it, I’ve even started seeing things during the day again, like I used to when I was in the air force. (Oh, I never told you about that did I). But no symbolic flames this time, it’s incomprehensibility made flesh, metal, sight and sound and smell, he’s force-feeding me the hard stuff nowlike Reality Stir Fry, blood sauce not optional, no more dramatic foreplay, here’s the real thing, and if you can’t handle it, no one’s stopping you from committing suicide or taking up bureaucracy—oh, sorry, I tried that already (and still hanging in there even though it hasn’t helped matters in the slightest but I suppose there’s always overseas to be considered, and maybe you ‘re right, darling, to worry about my having been the one to think of the air service, because although I told Yamauchi and myself it’s just because I hate the sea and I’d rather fly, and we might as well make money off something as long as we’re doing it and the idea appealed to the Little Governor’s instinct for beating everyone else in the internationalization game, in the back of my head there’s a voice saying, “You may not be able to run away from your devils but you can give it a bloody good try”)—

  Who am I kidding?

  A sense of futility came over him. All he had was images and concepts impossible to verbalize without flattening them into cliches.

  I considered writing a book of accurate prophecies, he imagined telling her, like that French fellow Noster-whatever-his-name-was. I bet he sold like hotcakes in his day. I’d love to make money off of old Nakunatta. But in order for my prophecies to make sense they’d have to be after the fact. Like I saw the Fire of 1212 coming, but until it actually happened I thought I was seeing the end of the world, and even now I’m not sure what I did see. So for all I know—I mean I think there’s going to be a war within the next twenty years that eats up continents, that’s worse than the Kirekune-Ferupe Problem and the Sino-Japanese War and the Crimea all combined, but for all I know it could just be a mingy little border conflict between two pinhead Black Forest states you can’t even pronounce the names of, because if you put a fly under a magnifying glass, it looks like a monster…

  Yleini…

  Crispin sank back onto the pillows. Yleini switched on the Tiffany lamp. “Look, I can’t stand it any longer,” she said with a sort of abstracted harshness, as if she didn’t really feel the desperation her words implied. “Is it Jionna or is it Michiko? Or someone else altogether? I hope you’ve at least had the sense to stay away from the lower classes. Since the foreign sailors started coming, the whores have all got this revolting new clap. I’ve seen them. Their eyes go runny and their gums bleed and they get sores in their snatches.”

  Crispin gazed blearily across the room. Every line of her body revealed hope against hope: maybe this time—if she pretended she wasn’t interested in his problems, if she got inside his guard by attacking him rather than pleading with him—maybe this time, he would tell her the secret sorrow burning in his breast! She knew there was something he wasn’t telling her. She was perceptive enough to see that. But a steady diet of romances and after-tea conversation with colonial matrons had narrowed the horizons of her imagination. Once she’d run through the names of all the women they knew who were mildly attractive, she was stumped. And he hated listening to her run through them yet again, but he couldn’t tell her that she was on the wrong track, because she would be furious to know that her suspicions weren’t as private as she thought, and he couldn’t have reassured her with a clear conscience anyway, because although he wasn’t having an affair, he wished he were.

  Moths walked a
cross the ceiling. Staring up at them, he thought of an opening salvo that might punch a few new holes in the eternally reprised, terminally boring argument, holes through which they’d maybe be able to see daylight; and fired it; when her face lit up with vindictive satisfaction, he knew he’d missed. She wriggled, then held still, waiting for him to come up with something truly inventive.

  —Grey, like…“Grey Death”? So, Rope…where‘ll I find this “death”?

  —In the machine shop, mast likely.

  —Yoshihisa Tagami

  Feel No Pain

  21 Devambar 1899 A.D.

  The Significant Empire of Kirekune: Okimachi: the old city

  Mickey glanced at his watch in the moonlight. As he shook his sleeve back over the Swiss movement, the heavy silk caressed his skin: the dry slither of a snake on rocks: a tiny explosion of sensuality, a point of light contrasting the darkness of his misery, like the cold wind ripping his hair, the hot tear forming in the corner of his left eye, the blurring of the few lights below in the city.

  He was waiting for the Englishmen to emerge from Significance. Missionaries usually got courteously chucked out by midnight. But these were investors. Significance had become Greater Significance, a veritable internationalization machine. Mickey had never been allowed farther in than this courtyard, but he didn’t need to see Hiroshi Significant on the dais to know that his most pessimistic predictions of 1213—1897, he corrected himself—had come true. Greater Significance, in its full-speed-ahead rebuilding of Okimachi as well as its expansions into the formerly private sphere, operated according to the military principle of expedience, not the noble principle of beneficence. The nobles themselves had either to play catch-up or tacitly accept obsolescence. Ordinary businessmen like Mickey had never had a chance.