Ambition (34 page)

Yang’s reaction had been spectacularly childish.

“Why do I and that jerkwad Trünicht”—here he realized he was shouting and modulated his tone—“and
Chairman
Trünicht have to shake hands with each other?”

Yang had considered it a grave misfortune when Trünicht had crawled out unscathed from his subterranean hideaway. Naturally, he took no joy in the fact that his presentiment had been right on the mark. A dazzlingly colorful curtain was just about to fall on a full program’s worth of hideous farces.

No, actually. If the curtain fell, this would all be over in a theater; in reality, there was no guarantee that an encore wouldn’t follow.

Yang felt disgusted from the bottom of his heart when he thought of Trünicht’s monstrous ego. Things had gotten so bad that a coup d’état
had actually broken out, yet instead of taking a good, hard look at his own political positions, here he was using political stunts and manipulating the masses in order to maintain his grip on power. To shake hands with that man on a stage in front of a crowd was no different to Yang than selling off his soul.

Yet going forward, the more battles he won, the higher he rose in position—in short, the more politically useful he became—the more he would find himself in this kind of situation. What could he do to keep that from happening?

Well, for one thing, he could lose. Charge into battle and lose miserably. If he did that, his reputation would come crashing back down to earth, and the voices lauding him now would become his harshest critics overnight. The perfectly appropriate evaluation of “Murderer!” would be applied to him, and everyone would think it only natural that he should tender his resignation. Very few people, if anyone, would try to stop him.

Thus would Yang be rescued from the hell of public service. A quiet life, secluded from public view in some little corner of society, wouldn’t be bad at all. He could live in a little cottage among the rice paddies, where he would tilt back a glass of brandy on cold nights as he listened to the wind blowing outside. On rainy days, he would sip wine as he waxed nostalgic, thinking of the epic journey of water through the atmosphere.

“Just listen to me … All I’d do is drink.”

Yang smiled wryly, and drove those quiet musings from his mind. Losing would certainly save him, but how many tens of thousands would be lost as a result? Losing would mean the deaths of a lot of people, with wives bereft of husbands, mothers bereft of sons, and children bereft of fathers.

If he was going to fight, he had to win. And what would victory mean? It would mean killing a lot of enemy soldiers, ravaging the fabric of the enemy’s society, and ruining a lot of enemy families. The direction was different but the vector the same.

So ultimately, is it wrong to do either?

Almost exactly ten years had passed since Yang had graduated Officers’ Academy and become a soldier, but this problem he still couldn’t solve. It wasn’t beginner-level arithmetic, so no clear-cut answer was forthcoming, even when he grappled seriously with it. And even though he knew that trying to crack that question would get him lost in a labyrinth of thought, he couldn’t help thinking about it.

All that aside, though, the very idea that he had to shake hands with Job Trünicht … !

He was not afraid of any payback that might follow if he refused. But since the point of this rally was to show the cooperation between the government and the military, he couldn’t just take a wrecking ball to that spirit of harmony, either. Yang believed that the military should be subservient to the government—and by extension, the people. That was why he had fought against the coup d’état faction to begin with.

The ceremony was held outdoors.

It was a beautiful day, with the gentle sunlight of early autumn enfolding the attendees, adding a film of gold to the leaves on the trees. Yang’s heart was nothing like the clear sky overhead, though.

I’m not shaking hands with Trünicht—I’m shaking hands with the chairman of the High Council in his role as head of state.

By thinking of it that way, Yang was somehow able to wrestle his emotions to the ground. That line of reasoning was just a way of avoiding the truth, of course, and Yang’s awareness of that only made his irritation mount.

It was because he had to put up with this kind of thing that promotions just weren’t worth it. “You’re getting ahead of the pack now” and “Oh, you’re moving up in a world” envious people would say, but the thing about pyramids was that the closer you got to the top, the narrower and more treacherous the footing became. To Yang, it was a strange breed indeed that could be so fixated on elevating their status without ever considering their precarious footing.

All that aside, he couldn’t get over how awkward he felt sitting in the VIP seats. Last year, at the memorial service following the Battle of Astarte, Yang’s place had still been in the general-attendance section. Compared to now, his status at the time had been so much easier to deal with …

Trünicht was speaking now. It was the empty eloquence of a second-rate agitator. He lauded the dead, he praised sacrifices made for the state, he told the people not to insist on their freedoms and their rights, because they were in the midst of a holy war to bring down the Galactic Empire. He’d been repeating the same thing for years.

People die,
Yang thought.
Stars have life spans too. Even the universe itself is gonna cease to exist someday. There’s no way any state is going to be the only thing to survive forever. So if a state can’t survive without making gigantic sacrifices, why should I care in the slightest if it falls tomorrow?

A voice called out to Yang as he was thinking about these things.

“Admiral Yang …”

A friendly smile was brimming on the handsome face of Chairman Trünicht, who had returned to the VIP seats. It was a smile that had long bewitched an electorate of billions. It was sometimes said that his supporters cast their precious vote not for policies and ideas, but for that smile. Yang, of course, had never once been in that number since he had come of voting age.

“Admiral Yang,” Trünicht said, “I’m sure there are lots of things you’d like to say to me, but today is a happy day—the fatherland is commemorating liberation from militaristic dictatorship. I don’t think we should show our common enemies that the civil government and military don’t see eye to eye. They’ll use that against us.”

Yang didn’t answer.

“So just for today, let’s both of us keep smiles on our faces and do our best not to upset our sovereigns—the people.”

Yang certainly admired a man who was able to make a sound argument. But what about someone who made a sound argument while not believing in it for a minute? That doubt nagged at Yang every time he saw Trünicht.

“And now, everyone, there are two fighters here today—two warriors who battle every day for democracy, for our nation’s independence, and for your freedom … and we’re about to see them shake hands right here. Let’s have a big round of applause for our civilian leader Mr. Trünicht, and for Mr. Yang, representing our men and women in uniform!”

The one shouting these words was Aron Doumeck, who was emceeing the event. Doumeck had started out as a literary scholar, transformed himself into a political commentator, and then finally molted into a career politician. He was in Trünicht’s inner circle and had discovered his raison d’être in attacking and slandering his boss’s political enemies, as well as all media organs that were critical of him.

Trünicht got up from his seat, waved to the crowd, and extended his hand toward Yang. Yang managed to stand up as well, but he was only barely controlling the urge to run from the stage and never look back.

When the two of them clasped hands, the cheers of the crowd swelled even louder, and the sound of their applause overwhelmed the open sky. Yang didn’t want to hold that hand for even a second longer than he had to, but when he was freed at last from that bloodless torture, a totally unexpected thing occurred to him.

Had he been underestimating Trünicht all along?

That thought came shining into Yang’s mind like a sunbeam through a break in the clouds. Struck by surprise so great that he actually stopped breathing for a second, he took another look at what he was thinking. Unsure himself why he had thought such a thing, he began to reexamine past events.

During the coup d’état, Trünicht hadn’t done a thing. Sheltered by members of the Church of Terra, he had simply lain low underground.

It had been Yang Wen-li who had led the fleet and fought the battle, and it had been Jessica Edwards who had stood up for the people and fought back with speech and assemblies. Trünicht had not contributed so much as a gram to the eventual resolution. Yet here he was, alive and being showered with the crowd’s adulation, while Jessica, brutally murdered, now lay in her grave.

And what about the ignominious Battle of Amritsar? Up until then, Trünicht could never help inserting his prowar rhetoric into every little thing, yet when the time came to vote on invading the empire, he had done an about-face and voted against the deployment. And the result of that thorough drubbing they had taken? Prowar apologists had lost the trust of the people, and their cause had lost ground. Meanwhile, Trünicht’s popularity has risen relative to them, and now the former Defense Committee chairman had become chairman of the High Council and the alliance’s head of state.

And then, there was the recent coup d’état …

Nothing ever damaged Trünicht. Whenever something blew up, the ones who were damaged—the ones who fell—were always people other than Trünicht. Although he was the one who called for the storm, he was always hunkered down somewhere safe by the time it actually hit. Then, when the sky was clear, out he would come again.

Every time there was a crisis, he always seemed to be the last man standing without having lifted a finger, and without a finger being laid on him.

Yang shuddered. He had never yet feared being assassinated. He had never yet flinched in the face of enemy forces multiple times larger than his own. But now, in broad daylight with the sun shining down, Yang was seized by a sense of deep-seated terror.

Trünicht spoke to Yang again. He wore a perfectly controlled smile that had not a sliver of sincerity.

“Admiral Yang, the crowd is calling for you. Can’t you give them what they want?”

Waves of adulation swelled high and low all around Yang. Mechanically, Yang waved back at these people who couldn’t stop praising his virtual image.

Maybe this time he was overestimating Trünicht. Yang would’ve liked to think so. Still, it looked to him like it would be just a temporary escape if he did. Yang had gone and smelled a rat. Its stench had suffused the atmosphere and was becoming so thick he could hardly breathe.

When Yang got back to his house, he made a beeline for the washroom and washed his hands repeatedly with disinfectant. In that he was trying to wash off the filth of having clasped Trünicht’s hand, Yang’s mentality was on that point no different from a child’s.

While Yang was holed up in the washroom, Julian was dealing with an uninvited guest in the foyer—an acquisitions editor from such-and-such publisher who had come to suggest that Yang write his memoirs.

“We’re planning on a first printing of five million copies,” he said.

If Yang were the sort of garden-variety historian he wanted to be, any book he published wouldn’t move even a thousandth of that number.

“The admiral doesn’t accept guests on private business at his official residence. Please leave him be.”

Julian drove the editor away with appeals for formality, though the gun holstered on the boy’s hip might have been more persuasive than his resolute attitude. While it clearly pained him to do so, leave the editor ultimately did.

Julian returned to the living room and put on some tea. Yang emerged from the washroom. The reason he was blowing on the backs of his hands was that he had scrubbed too hard and made his skin burn.

Yang put brandy, and Julian milk, into their tea and drank. Both of them were oddly quiet today, and for a while the only sound that filled the room was that of an antique clock counting off the seconds.

The two of them finished their first cups at almost exactly the same time. When Julian started to pour refills, Yang finally opened his mouth.

“It was dangerous out there today,” he said.

Did something nearly hurt him?
the boy wondered. Filled with surprise and a shade of nervousness, he stared at his guardian.

“No, it wasn’t that,” Yang said, wiping away the boy’s anxiety. He spoke again while twirling his empty teacup around and around. “When I was with Trünicht, I kept feeling more and more disgusted, and then something just hit me from out of the blue. It was like, what’s democracy worth when it gives legal authority to a man like that? And what are the people worth when they keep supporting him?”

He exhaled softly.

“And then I came to myself and felt terrified. Because I’d be willing to bet that a long time ago, Rudolf von Goldenbaum—and more recently, that bunch who staged the coup—thought exactly the same thing and arrived at exactly the same conclusion:
Only I can stop this
. It’s utterly paradoxical, but the thing that turned Rudolf into a cruel dictator was his sense of responsibility and duty toward the whole human race.”