Linnear 03 - White Ninja (43 page)

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 link-up - 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 of 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 Research and Development 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 massage parlour, not a gym. It was a sensory deprivation tank.

The tank was one-third the size of the Kan's coffin-like 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 dishonour 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, armour-like 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 obh'ged 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.

Hie Tau-tau training of his childhood and adolescence had not been enough for Senjin. In teaching him what they knew, his sensei had inadvertently exposed to his restless mind the limitations of their magic. In being made aware of the limitations, he had automatically taken a leap of faith, going beyond the boundaries of Tau-tau. And he had found another world.

It was based upon the ancient principles into which Tau-tau tapped, but it used them in a wholly new way, a way of which only Senjin could possibly conceive.

Senjin had come to his tanjian sensei through Haha-san who, thinking that she understood the nature of his melancholy, had done her best to discover some way in which to motivate her 'son'. She had, in fact, correctly recognized the scope and depth of his intellect, and was certain that only Tau-tau would be a strong enough discipline to challenge him, sustain him, and, ultimately, contain him.

Being tanjian was a matter of bloodlines. One could not learn Tau-tau without being of the blood, and tanjian blood was passed down through the mother.

This was another reason why Senjin hated his mother. She had had the effrontery to bequeath him a legacy even though she had abandoned him. It had taken all of Senjin's skill not to master Tau-tau (which had come easily to him),

but to mould it into something he could find useful.

Senjin had grown up with dogs, or so it seemed to him, and that, too, he laid at his mother's feet. If only she had lived, if only she had not abandoned him, casting aside her sacred duty to keep him safe from harm.

But she had been weak; she had allowed her life to come to an end, cowardly wriggling out of her responsibilities to him. From the day he became aware of her sin against him, of how wickedly she had robbed him, Senjin had, like a tireless stoker, fed his hatred with the singular obsession of someone fearful that without constant attention it would in time fade like memories.

Haha-san had been a tanjian miko, an adept at a certain kind of magic. But she had been bound up in obedience. Often, Senjin wished only one thing in life: to cut her free of her moorings, to beat out of her the obedience that defined her life. To make of her something she was not and never could imagine being.

The first time this happened was when he came upon her fresh and dewy after her bath. She had turned her back to him, demurely slipping a cotton kimono around her shoulders. But not before he had had a glimpse of her naked torso.

Senjin was twelve when this occurred. He had not seen her naked since he was six when he still took baths with her and, sometimes, when he was frightened or was awakened by a nightmare, was allowed into her bed where he fell back to sleep with his arms around her.

He was aroused not only by Haha-san's naked torso, but by how she had deftly turned her back on him in a gesture that was as coy as a coquette's. He burned then to press himself against the suffocating pillows of her white breasts, to expel his breath into her, to slide into her warmth, to be intoxicated by her intimate scent.

But this was all fantasy on Senjin's part. It could never occur because of Haha-san's chasteness, which came not

from any philosophical, religious or sociological strictures, but simply because she was following the dictates set down for her by her mother. As far as Haha-san was concerned, these laws were carved in stone, so inviolate that Senjin could never even know whether in her heart she wished to join with him in sexual congress.