Equations of Life

35

He reached the top, with barely enough strength to fall through the door and lie on the gravel path. The door swung shut behind him; disguised by a bamboo screen, it blended into its surroundings so completely that when he next looked up, he couldn’t work out how he’d got there.

Stones stuck to his face, his hands, and he barely noticed apart from the rattle they made as they fell from him one by one.

Madeleine hadn’t reappeared, despite her assurance that she would. He’d almost turned back half a dozen times, only to imagine the tongue-lashing he’d get for not keeping his mind on the job.

So he’d kept on going and, now he was there, he was without her. Failure was written all over the venture. He couldn’t even stand.

He rolled over onto his back and let the light from the artificial sky shine down on him. The air was as warm as a bright spring day, yet he was cold, cold to the core.

Feet crunched down the path toward him. He heard a metallic snap, and a shadow covered him.

“Petrovitch?”

He squinted into the glare. “Konnichiwa, Hijo-san.”

“You… what are you doing here?” Hijo pointed his gun at Petrovitch’s heaving chest.

“I’ve come for Sonja. I just didn’t know it was you who had her. What did you do with Chain?”

“He will not be bothering us again.” Hijo took a couple of steadying breaths and sighted down his arm. “Neither will you, Petrovitch. You are still that loose thread.”

“Yeah, not so much anymore. I’m the thread that’s holding everything together. Pull it and the whole sorry garment falls apart, leaving you naked.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that come dawn, there’ll be two suns in the sky.” Petrovitch let the cultural resonance of that phrase sink in, then added. “You killed your boss because you wanted for free everything he’d built up the hard way. You wanted to be the big man, the—what is it?—taishou. And everything you’ve done since then has just made it worse. Now you have nothing and in the morning you’ll have even that taken away.”

“A filthy Russian street-dog does not have the authority to call down a nuclear strike.” Hijo ground his teeth and his hand shook. “You are bluffing.”

“But you don’t dismiss the idea completely, do you? You’re wondering what you’d trade if it meant you’d salvage something out of this, whether you can get to keep the tower, the company, the syndicate, the girl… ah. She was right.” Petrovitch smiled and snorted. He noticed for the first time that Hijo wasn’t his usual immaculate self: jacket torn, shirt dirty, trousers ragged. His polished shoes were encrusted with filth. “You thought that when Oshicora-san came to see me, he was giving me his blessing. And you couldn’t take losing her to an unworthy gaijin, so you killed him, but Sonja saw you, and so on and so on. Oshicora-san liked me, but he wanted her to marry some Japanese pureblood. He warned me off. I said I’d stay clear of her. We parted on good terms.”

Hijo had gone pale. Sweat trickled down his forehead. “So why are you here?”

“I’ve come to talk to Oshicora-san. What about you?”

“He is dead,” he hissed. “I killed him myself.”

“And yet, when Sonja told you he was still alive, you had to come and find out for yourself.”

“You put these thoughts in her head. You told her she would find him here. Why did you do that?”

Petrovitch cackled. “You ignorant govnosos. You’ve no idea, have you? Even though she’s tried to explain it to you, over and over again, you wouldn’t believe her. Why should I waste what little time I have left on you?”

Hijo reached down and filled his fist with Petrovitch’s collar, hauling him half off the ground. He pressed the barrel of his gun at Petrovitch’s throat. “He is not a machine!”

“Trust you to get it zhopu-backward. The machine thinks it’s Oshicora, not the other way around. It’s not a resurrection—it’s reincarnation. A bit Shinto, in its way, really.” Petrovitch taunted Hijo, even though he knew the man could pull the trigger at any moment.

Hijo’s face went through several grotesque contortions. “How can this be?”

“I could tell you, but that’s dependent on you not killing me. In fact, it seems rather a lot depends on you not killing me. You can’t stop the New Machine Jihad, because you killed its creator. Sonja won’t, because she sees it as the last link to her father. Only I can do this. Only I can make sure you have something left by tomorrow morning.”

Petrovitch was released, and he fell back down to the ground in a crumpled heap. Hijo walked around him, agitated, uncertain, raising and lowering his pistol as he debated with himself as to whether to finish his prisoner off.

“You,” he finally said. “Get up.”

“That might be a problem,” said Petrovitch.

“Get. Up.” He punctuated the order with jabs of his shoes.

“Since you asked nicely, I’ll have to see what I can do.” He rolled onto his side and dragged his leaden legs up. He levered himself onto his knees and used a nearby maple to get him the rest of the way.

“Walk.”

“Yeah. If I could see where you were pointing, that’d be good. I’m waiting for the blood to get back to my brain.” He held onto the smooth-skinned trunk and waited for the grayness to resolve itself.

“Now.”

Petrovitch pushed himself away and managed a couple of steps. A bamboo screen banged open and Harry Chain stumbled through as if thrown. Madeleine, with Chain’s police special in her hand, stood in the doorway.

Hijo moved fast. He wrapped his arm around Petrovitch’s throat and held a gun to his temple.

“I can take him,” said Madeleine, advancing over Chain’s shuddering and retching form. “Sorry I’m late, by the way. This lard-ass has a concussion as well as being even more unfit than you.”

“Stop. Stop where you are, woman. Or I kill Petrovitch.” Hijo tightened his grip, and there was nothing Petrovitch could do about it.

“Head shot. By the time your neurones decide to tell your finger to move, you’ll be dead. And I am that accurate.” But she stayed where she was, on the border between the path and a moss-covered rockery.

“Put down your gun.”

“Put down yours.”

“Yobany stos, one of you give in. I’m struggling to stay conscious.”

Hijo started to pull Petrovitch backward, then decided that he could win after all. He aimed at Madeleine and fired in one fluid movement, and she ducked, rolled and came up on her feet; closer, meaner, and unscathed.

The gun flicked back to Petrovitch’s head.

“No further.”

“You’re just going to try and shoot me again.” Madeleine started to move in a wide circle, forcing Hijo to spin with her.

Then she stopped and sighed, and held up her gun hand. “Okay. We’re done here.” She stooped and placed the special on the ground between her feet.

Petrovitch felt the muscles constricting his throat to relax and heard a grunt of satisfaction. He was pushed away and, as he turned to look back at Hijo, he saw Sonja lope silently up behind him. She danced lightly on the balls of her feet and swung her father’s katana at Hijo’s exposed neck.

The blade cut deep, coming to rest part way through his Adam’s apple. She twisted away, a spray of blood leaping from the tip of the sword, droplets spinning darkly in the air.

Hijo, with a look of immense surprise on his face, folded up onto the path. His half-severed head hung loosely from his body, and a lake of deep red formed under him, soaking away into the pale gravel.

“So ends the life of Hijo Masazumi,” said Sonja. The bright edge of the sword dripped as she hung it downward. “Always looking for threats, and never seeing the one that would kill him.”

Madeleine picked Petrovitch up, and held him to her like a rag doll. “Are you all right?”

“I thought you weren’t coming.”

“Chain. I had a mind to kick him all the way down the stairs to the cesspit that’s ground level. He used the wound on his head to appeal to my better nature.”

“Yeah, Okay. Sonja? Thanks.”

“I did it for me. I did it for my father. I did it because a world without Hijo is a better place.”

“Nice as this is,” said Petrovitch, untangling himself from Madeleine’s arms, “we still have something to do, and only a limited time to do it.”

“Follow me,” said Sonja, and didn’t look back once.

“I’ll get Chain,” said Madeleine, crouching to collect his gun. “It sounds like he’s finished coughing his guts up.”

Sonja led them over the wooden bridge and eventually to the temple. She hesitated at the steps. “Sam, what will you do?”

Petrovitch rested against one of the stone lions that guarded the entrance. “I don’t know,” he answered. “It depends on what’s possible.”

“You said you’d save the Jihad.”

“Funny,” said Chain, wiping red-flecked phlegm from his mouth, “he told us it had to go.”

There was a moment where it was equally likely that Sonja would raise her sword and Madeleine raise her gun. Petrovitch stood in the middle and bowed his head, wondering at the stupidity of people and realizing why he avoided them so much.

“I can do both,” he said.

“That makes no sense,” said Chain.

“This,” said Petrovitch, “coming from a man who had an armored car and Sonja, and still managed to screw up.”

Chain put his hand to his matted hair and showed Petrovitch the blood. “You didn’t have Godzilla chasing you half the night.”

He wasn’t impressed. “We’ve more important things to deal with than your lame excuses. Mainly, a nuclear missile is going to hit this building at dawn. It will vaporize it, and excavate a hole deep enough to destroy the quantum computer below. That will be the end of the New Machine Jihad.”

Chain wasn’t the only one to gape. “How? How do you know this?”

“I have every confidence that my university colleagues will get the message through to the EDF. They might decide not to wait that long, of course, and order an immediate strike. In which case, it’s a race between a bunch of electronics students with soldering irons and me. We can stand here and talk about how I’m a bad person for what I’ve done, or we can get on with trying to prevent disaster. What do you want to do?”

Sonja flexed her fingers around the katana’s hilt. “Can you save it?”

“Yeah.”

“Promise?”

“Have I ever let you down?”

She looked puzzled. “No. No, you haven’t.”

Chain looked up at Madeleine, who asked. “Can you stop it?”

“Yeah.”

“And I have to trust you, don’t I?”

“Not if you don’t want to. If you think I’m going to betray you—now or at any point in the future—it’s probably best that you kill me now. It’ll save a lot of heartbreak.”

“Faith is a decision,” she said. “Not a feeling. Go and do it. Go and do the impossible.”

“There’s something you can do for me, too.” He reached into his inside pocket for the envelope Pif had given him. “Chain, have you still got my rat?”

“I… I lost it when Hijo jumped me.”

“You balvan. Really.” Petrovitch pressed the papers on Madeleine. “Look after this for me.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“The secrets of the universe laid bare. That’s all.” He watched her hold the envelope open and peer curiously inside, then went with Sonja onto the temple platform.

There was the table, and the screen, and the keyboard.

“This isn’t what you’re looking for,” said Sonja, and she walked through the temple to the other side. She laid her hand on one of the lions heads, and part of the wooden platform in front of Petrovitch popped up. “But this is.”

The square of wood rose into the air, and underneath it grew a tight spiral staircase. Petrovitch leaned over the gap and looked down. It was dark inside, and cool air rose from it, making his skin prickle.

Sonja pointed her sword to the floor and started down the metal steps. “Hijo never came down here. If he had, he’d have known.”

“Known what?”

She was already below the temple. Lights tripped on, and Petrovitch descended, clinging on to the narrow handrail. When his head dipped beneath the level of the ceiling, the meaning of Sonja’s words became clear.

The room was Oshicora’s shrine to everything he’d lost, and to everything he hoped to regain. Books, scrolls, statuary, a hand-painted silk screen. Lacquerware, sandals, a kimono, a flag. A skin drum. A full set of samurai armor displayed on a mannequin. A black stone bowl containing faded pink blossom. A hanger on the wall, displaying a short sword and an empty scabbard.

“So,” she said, “Hijo didn’t know. He thought I was doing what he wanted. Instead, I’d tricked him into doing what I wanted.”

Petrovitch ran his hand over the cold stone, bright metal, smooth wood. He touched the thin pages and the soft silk. He caught fibers in the rough skin at the ends of his fingers.

“Where’s the interface?” he asked.

Sonja wiped Hijo’s blood off on her sleeve and resheathed the katana. “Through here.”

There was another, smaller room, shielded by the folding screen. Petrovitch saw a clinically white room with cupboards all around. In the center was a dentist’s chair and a coil of cable that ended in something like a modified network connector.

His eyes narrowed, then went wide. “Oh. You’re joking. So that’s what your father needed Sorenson for.”

“I know what to do,” said Sonja, “if that helps.”

“Not much.”

She busied herself with the stainless steel cylinder that was the length of a shock-stick and had the bore of drainpipe. She plugged it into the wall to let it charge, and opened a drawer. It was full of sealed plastic bags, each containing a T-shaped device, a disc with a spike like a giant drawing pin.

Petrovitch picked up one of the bags and turned it in his hand: he knew where that spike was going.

“Do you have…?” he asked.

“No. My father would not allow me one until he’d tested it thoroughly.”

“And did he?”

“You’ll have to ask him when you get there.” She washed her hands up to her elbows, then tore a bag open and slotted its contents into the steel dispenser. She closed the access slot, and a light winked from red to green.

“In the chair, right?” Petrovitch could feel his courage failing. His legs were buckling, his fingers numb, his insides cold.

He shucked his coat off and climbed into the chair before he could collapse to the floor. The headrest had been altered: there was a gap which exposed the nape of his neck.

Something cold touched the back of his head. It trickled down his back.

“Iodine,” she said.

“It’s a little late for that.” He shook with fear, and his teeth chattered as he spoke. “It’s a little late for everything.”

Sonja hefted the dispenser, and walked around behind him. The cold open mouth pressed against the back of his skull. “Ready?”

“No.”

“Just don’t flinch.”

“Yobany stos, Sonja! Just do it before I change my mind.”

The whine started high and got higher. As it reached the limit of his hearing, he heard the b of bang. Everything went black.