Linnear 03 - White Ninja (54 page)

He felt as if his world had been turned inside out, as if the neatly identifiable labels he had prepared for people were useless - worse than useless: false. It was as if he were a child who had been transferred to a new school, only to find that all the lessons he had so painstakingly learnt in his former school were incorrect. He felt stupid, naive, betrayed by the very city of power that had pretended to nurture him.

He knew that it was his Puritan blood that made him all too ready to condemn her, to refuse to hear her answers to his questions, knowing that his love for her would make it all but impossible for him to differentiate the truth from the lies.

He could hear his mother's words as clearly as if she were sitting beside him in the Jaguar, one of many physical manifestations of his work in Sodom: The world is Satan's playground, Cotton. Stay on the narrow path that God has ordained for you, and you will be safe.

Revolving red and blue lights in his rear-view mirror made him start. A touch of a siren and he pulled over. His mind was still full of heavy black thoughts. A Metropolitan Police patrol car, white with the familiar horizontal blue stripe, nosed in behind him. Between flashes Branding

could see two shadowed figures in the cat behind him.

For a long time, nothing happened. Then the driver's door opened and a uniformed cop stepped out. His partner remained in the car.

Branding rolled down his window, heard the cop's footsteps crunching over the asphalt of the street. The cop, all six-foot-three of him, stopped in front of the open window, peered at Branding through mirrored sunglasses. Branding wondered how he could see anything at night.

'May I see your licence and registration, please?'

'I'm sure I wasn't speeding, Officer,' Branding said.

The cop made no reply, and Branding handed the documents over. He noticed that the cop accepted them with his left hand; his right was on the walnut grips of his bolstered service revolver.

The cop signalled to his partner, then said, 'I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to open your trunk, Senator.'

Branding said, 'What?'

The cop backed up a step, said, 'Please step out of the car, Senator.'

Branding got out of the car, walked towards the rear of the Jaguar. The cop was behind him. Ahead, he could see the second cop climb out of the patrol car; he held a.12-gauge shotgun loosely in one hand.

Branding said, 'Can I at least ask what's going on?'

The cop behind him said, 'If you would be kind enough to open your trunk, Senator.'

Branding did as he was asked. He opened the trunk, then stepped back. The first cop shone a flashlight into the trunk's interior. An odd, unpleasant, sickly-sweet smell erupted into the night.

The cop said, 'Jesus.'

Branding heard the twin hammers of the second cop's shotgun being cocked as he stared into his trunk, and saw the body lying curled in the darkness. Sudden nausea gripped him. The flashlight's beam illuminated the patches

of dried blood, the crushed skull, just as it illuminated the corpse's bloodless face.

Branding's mother saying, Stray from the narrow path, and all the good that I see within you will wither and die.

God in heaven, he thought, frozen in shock, I know this man. It's David Brisling, Douglas Howe's personal assistant.

Nicholas, high up in the Hodaka, his bearded face rimed with ice, out of time, assaulted the Black Gendarme. He was living his dream in which he was searching among the bullrushes, for what he did not know. He had found footprints in the black, marshy earth: in reality clues seeded in his memory, recorded, embedded there by his senses. The voice he had heard speaking to him was that of his memory. But with his spirit entangled he had not been able to hear the voice clearly enough to understand what it was telling him.

As Kansatsu had said, it was not Shiro Ninja that was entangling his spirit - that was merely a symptom of the disease. In fact Nicholas was already ill, entangled, when the tanjian attacked him; he was already susceptible, made vulnerable to Shiro Ninja.

Nicholas, with the elementals of Akshara already absorbed, was still Shiro Ninja. That was another thing he had been taught. Neither Kansatsu nor anyone else could 'cure' him of Shiro Ninja.

In fact, there was no cure. Shiro Ninja was a delusion that must be healed from inside himself. And yet, his memory of his martial arts training was little improved.

'Shiro Ninja is one thing,' Kansatsu had said, one evening after lessons were finished for the day. He was examining the scar on the side of Nicholas's head. 'This state you find yourself in is quite another.'

'But why?' Nicholas had asked. 'The main symptom of Shiro Ninja is loss of memory.'

"That is just it,' Kansatsu had pointed out. 'Your problem is not loss of memory but, rather, an inability to get at it. Akshara has begun to disentangle your spirit, yet your memories of ninjutsu and Getsumei no michi are still unavailable to you. Therefore, I believe now that the cause has an organic component.'

'Do you mean my inability, to remember is physical?'

'Yes. Precisely. It is my belief that something was done to you during the operation.'

A chill went down Nicholas's spine. 'You mean the surgeon severed something he wasn't supposed to cut?' The thought of some part of his brain irrevocably maimed was too frightening to contemplate.

'No,' Kansatsu had said immediately, as if he had an intimation of the dread creeping through Nicholas. 'That would be random, and the chance of him damaging the precise part of your brain dealing with memory retention is so infinitesimal it is not worth talking about.' Kansatsu had sat very still. His eyes were brack specks, a pair of ravens seen from afar over an autumn wheat field. There was both melancholy and power in such an image. 'I am speaking now of something deliberate, Nicholas.'

In the stunned silence, Nicholas had heard his heart beating, the blood pounding in his ears, a deafening symphony of terror. 'But the surgeon - '

'May not have been the actual instrument,' Kansatsu had said, interrupting him. 'Although it would seem that he must be implicated.'

Nicholas had an image of Dr Hanami's bloody face, his broken-boned body crumpled on the pavement.

"The surgeon who operated on me,' he had said. 'He was pushed from his office window.' Then he told Kansatsu everything, from the moment Dr Hanami pronounced his diagnosis like a sentence, to the battle with the tanjian in Dr Hanami's office more than six months later.

'Ah, everything is falling into place,' Kansatsu had

said. He produced an anatomical text, opened it to a section entitled, Hemispheres of the Brain. 'Let us take this chronologically. According to what you have told me, your tumour lay along the second temporal convolution - ' he pointed ' - here. Now you will notice that this is just above the hippocampal fissure - ' he pointed again ' - here.

Tanjian have known for centuries that the brain is a kind of computer whose myriad functions are precisely divided into well-defined sections. A certain section of the brain, for instance, is involved in the formation and maintenance of memory. This area is relatively small. It resides in what Western science has termed the hippocampus.'

'But my tumour was right above the hippocampus,' Nicholas had said. 'It's becoming increasingly likely that Dr Hanami made a mistake, a slip of the scalpel.'

'On the contrary,' Kansatsu had said. 'Put such negative thoughts aside, Nicholas, and concentrate on the evidence. The hippocampus is so far beneath the area where your tumour lay, it is impossible for a qualified surgeon to reach it accidentally. No. For the hippocampus to be invaded it must have been deliberate.'

Kansatsu had turned to another section of the text. 'The hippocampus is crucial to memory, modern science has discovered, because the brain cells there are rich in a peculiar molecule, the NMDA receptor. It is called that because scientists use the chemical, N-methyl D-aspartate, to detect the receptor's presence. The NMDA receptor accepts memories and encodes them into the cells for later recall. This can only be done if the brain's cells - or neurons - are allowed to link up, firing neurotransmitters across synaptic bridges. If something interferes with the synaptic spark, new memories cannot be retained. But, as in your case, if something destroys these cells or interferes with the NMDA receptor, memories already residing in the

brain cannot be accessed. The result is what you think of as memory loss, but is actually nothing of the sort.'

'What happened to me?' Nicholas had asked.

'Here I can only hazard a guess,' Kansatsu had said, 'but I believe it's an educated one. I believe that while the surgeon was working on your tumour, someone else inserted a suitable object, say an optic fibre, coated with a chemical, an NMDA receptor-inhibitor, into your hippocampus.'

'But wouldn't random memories be affected, not just those involving my ninja training?'

'Normally, yes,' Kansatsu-san said. 'But we are talking now about not only a tanjian, but a dorokusai. Just as you are able to inhibit those areas where you feel pain and not others, so the dorokusai was able to interfere with your deepest memories. Besides,' Kansatsu added, 'your mind has been almost entirely focused on your state of Shiro Ninja. I think you will find it difficult, if not impossible, to dredge up certain deeply inlaid memories of your very early childhood.'

Nicholas considered this. It was true that many details of his childhood memories were unavailable to him. He knew they were there, but try as he might he could not bring them into the light of consciousness.

Nicholas shook his head, dismayed. 'But Dr Hanami was right there beside the dorokusai,' he said. 'He must have known what was happening.'

Kansatsu nodded. 'This is true enough. But, Nicholas, if what you tell me about him is true, then we must consider the possibility of extreme coercion. Perhaps he was forced to allow this person access to your brain.'

Nicholas considered this for some time. 'Could the tanjian, the dorokusai who attacked me, be capable of such surgical skill?'

'Yes,' Kansatsu had said. 'Indeed, it is quite likely that such an individual would possess great surgical skill. As a

ninja, your own knowledge of anatomy and the workings of the mind and body is quite extensive.'

'I couldn't insert a poisoned optical fibre into a hidden area of the human brain.'

'Thankfully. You are not dorokusai. You do not have such reckless disregard for human life.'

Though Kansatsu had begun giving him a mix of natural powders as an antidote to the NMDA receptor-inhibitor, Nicholas was still forced to rely almost exclusively upon Akshara for his mental discipline. It was akin to learning to speak or to walk all over again - so basic, yet so painfully difficult. His brain was like an open book, blank pages ready for the script of the maker's hand. Rapidly, Akshara was filling it, creating its own subtext.

Oddly, his body - not his mind - was his greatest ally in this battle. It was so superbly trained he found that it could do whatever Akshara asked of it: neither lightning response nor stamina were now problems, and Nicholas was heartened by this change in him from when he first began his journey to find himself.

Then, all at once, as he ascended his nemesis, the Black Gendarme, he felt himself growing heavier and lighter at the same time. He was aware of his body sinking into the rock face, seeping into the minute cracks and fissures so that even a high wind could not dislodge him. At the same time, he felt his spirit soaring free. And he was in Getsumei no michil Remembrance flooded bun; his body and mind were once again one. Power suffused him. He was no longer Shiro Ninja.

The feeling of elation was so overwhelming that Nicholas threw back his head, shouting into the wind, stirring the clouds. The jumble of images inside his mind concentrated, coalesced, resolved themselves into insight.

The footprints among the bullrushes: the voice of his memory. He was back in Kyoki's castle, passing through the moon gate in his study.

What did the voice say? Kansatsu had said.

I can't remember, Nicholas had said.

Was the voice my brother's voice?

Not his, but the source was close.

How close? Akshara gave him the answer: very close. And now the voice spoke to him and he heard every word. It was his own voice saying: Time. Like the chiming of a grandfather clock, like the tolling of a bell, like a shadow emerging from out of the mist. Time to team, time to absorb, time to be. This is the end: of fear, of confusion, of death.

And Nicholas, the wind from the north whistling in his ears, his body charged with the newfound strength of Akshara, thought: Where are you, dorokusai? Wherever you are, I'll find you now. I'm coming to get you. I'm coming.

SUMMER, 1970-WINTER, 1980

Asama, Japan/Zhuji, China/Tokyo, Japan

'Is that all you're going to tell us?' the young girl said.

'You promised to tell us the end,' her brother said.

Hie sensei looked at diem with some humour. 'This is a story that has no end,' he said.

'But you promised,' the boy, Senjin, always the more impatient of the two, said.

'What happened after they went over the waterfall?' Shisei, his sister, asked.