Lord of All Things (63 page)

The nanites that had built his fortress had gone to work one last time. They had made him a tatami with white braid, a pot of ink, a calligraphy brush, and a few sheets of parchment. They had also converted his clothing into a white kimono.

He had seen the originals for all these items in a Japanese store in Los Angeles. On his way south to visit Rodney for the last time, he had scanned them, just in case he needed them. They were probably still there; the store didn’t strike him as a place that sold much. Hiroshi felt contact with all the nanites around drop away as the complexes dismantled one another. Then at last there was silence. Now the only remaining nanites were the ones in his body.

Not long now.

Hiroshi sat down on the mat in the
seiza
position prescribed for seppuku: heels turned outward, toes crossed, back straight. His knees were one fist’s width apart. Chest and shoulders relaxed, all the weight of his body resting in his lower belly. He thought of his father, who had taught him to sit this way, and he felt sorrow for his father, and for himself.

An honorable death is no bad thing
, he chided himself.

He reached for the parchment and the brush. Time for his
jisei no ku
, his death poem. He paused and collected his thoughts. The sum of his whole life in just a few words. Well, that was simple. He dipped the brush in the ink and wrote, first in Japanese, then the translation in English beneath. It felt like freedom. Most surprising. Suddenly, it seemed easy to shrug off the shackles of mere matter.

One more thing. He reached for the second sheet and wrote his instructions—no, his request—to those who would find him. He could do no more than ask, and realistically there was not much hope that anyone would heed his wishes. But at least he had tried. Another phrase that could sum up his life.

Then Hiroshi set this sheet aside, too, put his hands in his lap, relaxed his fingers, and breathed. Time for the last two commands. The very last command to the nanites would be to dismantle themselves down to the very last complex, to fall finally and irretrievably apart into pieces that could never again join together to make another nano-assembler. He almost regretted this. He had loved the aesthetics of these molecular machines, had spent hours on end studying the graphic representations of their structure, admiring them—the inescapable logic of the construction, once he had understood the basic principles. He had felt awe in the face of a universe that had contained these possibilities since the very beginning of time.

Over and done. He must take his leave of that, too. Hiroshi bared his torso to a hand’s width below his navel, then placed his hand upon the
tanden
.

Then he gave the command that would end it all.

With his left hand upon the “scarlet field,” he stretched out his right hand and watched a dark dot form on his palm, quickly growing larger until a blade took shape…

EPILOGUE

He had never been to Buenos Aires and had never expected to go. Particularly not first class. Not to mention with such a curious item in his hand luggage.

At the customs desk a grim-faced man pointed to his bag and gestured unmistakably that he should open it. This was when he got to use his brand-new diplomatic passport. The customs man raised his eyebrows and even managed to summon a smile as he waved him through. “Welcome! Enjoy your stay in Argentina.”

He could get used to traveling this way.

He crossed the concourse. Crowds of taxi drivers were waiting at the exit. “Do you speak English?” he asked the first driver.

“Yes, yes,” the man assured him cheerfully, hurrying over to open the car door for him.

That was probably all the English the driver knew, but it didn’t really matter. He climbed in and handed him the sheet of paper with the address. The ride took about half an hour and was mostly along broad avenues that could have been freeways. He saw a great many trees; Buenos Aires was a very green city. A lot of high-rises, too, but with exuberant palms in between them and luxurious green foliage.

The taxi finally stopped on a street lined with small, old villas, half-hidden by their flourishing gardens.

“There,” the driver said, pointing to a house.

The passenger paid what the meter said and then added another banknote. He waited till the taxi drove out of sight, then crossed the road. A doorbell with the name
R. + L. B
LANCO
. Underneath that a brass plate inscribed
C. M
ALROUX
,
TRADUCTORA
, with an arrow pointing to a low garden gate with a flagstone path beyond it.

He followed the path. It took him around the house to the rear, to a dark, overgrown garden. A woman sat on the deck at a little wooden table, writing by hand. She was wearing an airy spring dress. She was slim, almost skinny, and her dark hair was the length of matchsticks. He could see she must have once been beautiful. She looked up calmly. She must have heard him coming.

“
Buenos días
,” she said.

He cleared his throat and all of a sudden felt out of place in his suit, carrying his leather briefcase. “Good day, Miss Malroux,” he said. “My name is William Adamson. I…well, I guess you could say I’m here to execute a bequest from Hiroshi Kato.”

Hiroshi. It hurt to hear his name. She still wasn’t over it. Of course not. She only managed not to think of him for a little while occasionally.

She looked at the man standing at the foot of the deck, his hand on the wooden rail of the four steps that led up to her. He was a plump man, probably around forty, wearing a stylish pair of glasses that had doubtless cost a lot of money. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he talked.

“Adamson,” she repeated. “I’m sorry, I don’t know the name.”

He ran his fingers nervously along the rail. “We studied in Boston around the same time. You were at Harvard; Hiroshi and I were at MIT. I was a doctoral student when he was a senior.” His eyes drifted. “To be absolutely honest, Hiroshi and I had very little contact while we were there. We were more—how should I put it?—rivals. He was researching robotics just like I was—though we took very different approaches.”

Charlotte wondered where this was all leading. Had he come because he hoped Hiroshi had left some papers with her? “I hardly ever ran into people at MIT,” she said. “Anybody, really, apart from Hiroshi.”

He nodded as though that were self-evident. “Yes, I understand. I simply mention it because…well, because it was the case. As for me, I’ve worked for the American government ever since I finished my doctorate, which put me in a position to be able to follow Hiroshi’s work from time to time. You could say that over the years I’ve become his greatest admirer. Looking back, I have to say that his ideas, his methods, were absolutely groundbreaking.”

“Not that that helped him much.”

The man blinked, looking for a moment as though he had gotten lost in the past. “Yes. Yes, you might say so. Eh…well, it’s inevitable that my visit stirs up painful memories. That being the case, can I ask you straight out how much you know of the circumstances surrounding his death?”

Charlotte shrugged. “I know what was in the newspapers. And then there were all these people here asking me about the last night of his life. So I was able to piece a few things together.”

“Have you visited the Bulb?”

She shook her head. “I’m sure I will one day, but over the last few months I’ve been…in rather frail health. I couldn’t travel.” The doctors had confirmed her tumor was gone and called it a spontaneous remission. Such things occasionally happened, they told her. “All I know is that when the soldiers finally got in and found him, he was dead. And that he was wearing a white kimono. Which indicated ritual suicide; that was in all the reports.”

He nodded. “Yes, that was widely reported. What wasn’t in the reports was that he left a message.”

“A message?” She sat up straight, felt a tingle in her spine. It was electrifying.

“A message for you.”

Charlotte put her hands to her head, the habit of a lifetime, and was shaken again to find that her long hair was gone. She drew a deep breath. “Come on up,” she invited him, pointing to the chair where her clients usually sat when handing over their documents or collecting their translations.

He sat down gingerly, as though well used to chairs breaking under him. Then he lifted his briefcase to his knees and opened it.

“Our experts have told us that in Japanese culture it’s traditional for the person committing seppuku to write a last poem. The death poem.” He carefully took out a piece of parchment in a clear protective envelope. “This is what he wrote. And it’s clearly addressed to you.” He held it out to her.

She took it in her hands, which were suddenly trembling. The top half of the sheet was covered in Japanese characters, beautifully drawn, and underneath, in English:

Charlotte,

What might have been!

She put her hand to her mouth and felt very clearly how her heart stopped for a beat or two. Seeing his handwriting like this, and then the poem…

“Thank you,” she said once she could breathe again, setting the parchment aside. “Thank you very much.”

“That’s not all,” he said hurriedly and took a flat wooden box from his case. “I have to add here that the secret services insisted on minutely examining every object that Hiroshi left behind. Every object and his corpse as well, to be blunt. There was also heated discussion, of course, about how far we should even carry out his last wishes. I argued strongly that we should, but honesty compels me to admit that in the end…well, nobody found anything on either object that was of any strategic interest. That’s what tipped the balance.”

He opened the lid. Inside lay a long dagger—or short knife; she saw that either description would do—with a slightly curved blade, about thirty centimeters long.

“It’s called a
tantō
,” Adamson told her. “A Japanese sword of the kind prescribed for seppuku.”

Charlotte looked at the weapon with horrified fascination. The hilt was made of ribbed metal, and the blade shone flawlessly. “He killed himself with this?”

“Uh…no. He was holding it in his hands when they found him, but he was already dead. Not a scratch on him. In fact he suffocated.”

“Suffocated?”

Adamson sighed. “It looks like he ordered the last of the nanites to make this sword from the iron they found in his blood. Without iron, the hemoglobin in the bloodstream no longer functions, the flow of oxygen from the lungs is cut off and, well, the result is suffocation.”

She put out her hands. “May I hold it just once?”

“Of course you may. It belongs to you now.” He passed her the wooden case. “Be careful how you take it out. It’s much lighter than it looks. It only weighs about an eighth of an ounce.” He added, “That’s barely four grams metric.”

She stopped midreach. “Four grams?”

“The amount of iron in a human body. In fact, that should only just be enough to make a small nail, but this knife is an astonishing construction. We’ve scanned it, measured it, analyzed it. It’s made up primarily of hollow cells, but it’s still extremely stable. All in all, it’s an excellent example of applied nanotech within the limits of our present capabilities. Materials science, that kind of thing. Which is why a lot of people wanted to hang on to it…but here it is.”

She grasped the hilt carefully and had to shut her eyes in shock as she felt the emotions and memories that saturated the knife. Hiroshi! He was there. She could feel him. Holding this dagger made from his blood was like holding his whole life in her hands. His hopes, his desires, his dreams
…t
ears sprang to her eyes when she felt how much he had loved her. Her, and her alone.

She opened her eyes and lifted the knife out carefully. It really was as light as a feather. As though the memories it held weighed more than the iron of which it was made. When she had blinked away the tears, she saw that her visitor was looking at her with concern.

“What will you do now?” he asked.

Charlotte realized he was worried she might plunge the blade into her heart as soon as he had gone. She smiled gently. She wouldn’t, of course. Hiroshi had given her life back to her; she would treat that gift, too, with respect.

She put the featherlight knife back into its case. “Perhaps I’ll try to write our story,” she said. “His and mine. We’ll see.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

© Olivier Favre

Andreas Eschbach studied aerospace engineering at the University of Stuttgart and later founded his own IT-consulting company before becoming a full-time writer. Several of his novels, including
The Jesus Video
and
One Trillion Dollars
, became nationwide best sellers in Germany. He has been awarded both the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis, Germany’s most prestigious science-fiction award, for best science-fiction novel, and the Deutscher Science Fiction Preis, several times.
The Carpet Makers
,
his only other book translated into English so far, was listed as one of the best science-fiction books of 2005 by
www.sfsite.com
and recommended by
Locus Magazine
. In 2002, his novel
The Jesus Video
was adapted for German television. He lives with his wife in Brittany, France.