Tetsuo Genji liked to watch the sunrise over Lake Yoyane.
Overpaid Kaihonjin intellectuals liked to complain that Afukoku lakes possessed too much natural extravagance, that their crystal blue waters, bubbling springs, and subaquatic pink marble lacked the humility of Kaihon lakes. These aesthetes were paid very nice salaries to regurgitate platitudes and reinforce an ever-fragile sense of Kaihonjin superiority.
Petty, menial people needed these affirmations, not the Vice President and Heir Apparent of Genji Heavy Industries. Swampy, piddling Kaihon lakes, with their sad little hermit shacks, were consolation prizes to those who couldn’t afford better views.
Tetsuo, however, could afford a very nice view: of Lake Yoyane, of the entire city of Suigen, of the plains filled with his family's factories, of the distant freight-crawlers carrying his family's goods to market, of the River Glær stretching to the horizon, and of the very curvature of the planet he could afford to buy almost any plot of.
Soil, however, was not a reliable source of power. Property: the machines, instruments, tools, and technology to build more things, was slightly more reliable. People, of course, were as often a source of instability when they got into one of their radical moods.
There was only one, true, unadulterated source of power. Energy. What was power if not the ability to move things and people wherever one wished them to be? And how did they get there? Energy. Calories. Newtons. Watts. Gold and steel, art and guns, rice and turbines, these were abstractions, mere phenomena which hid the noumena of energy.
Tetsuo Genji would harness it.
He’d hoped for an explosive surprise attack that would deliver him Sayuri Ueichi and the secrets of full-body kinkawa without alerting the other clan-conglomerates. However, the August-God Wotenha did not bestow the gift of immortal reputation cheaply or easily. All, be they high or low persons, must struggle against adversity to achieve an eternal place.
Tetsuo set his cup of tea down on the chunk of unhewn pink marble that served as his coffee table. He picked up the telephone on it and pressed the blinking red button.
From the speaker came a feminine voice peppered with honorifics and formal language. "Good Morning, Vice President. Persimmon of the Genji Heavy Industries Company Harmony Division is here to provide his report on inter-conglomerate affairs. Shall I send in one of the pillows, Vice President?"
"Yes. The young konketsujin with blue eyes."
He took another sip of tea, but the pleasure was ruined. Pleasure diminished when business was imminent. Even sex had become burdensome. His mind turned on thoughts of politics and strategy rather than pleasure. This lifestyle was close to what the Shroud felt like, he knew. But he was built for life inside it. Not everyone was.
The elevator, a transparent capsule lined with gold filament, floated up through the floor and came to a halt below the bare machinery of the elevator shaft. The naked wires, cables, and motors had an aesthetic appeal not unlike a nude portrait, where, fully laid to bear, complex machines lost their mystique and gained an asexual allure of radical completeness.
Persimmon and a young man of college age stepped off the lift. The former, as always, resembled a hairy ape. The latter had the adonic beauty that only konketsujin mixtures of Afujin and Kaihonjin possessed, with smooth, hairless skin erased by laser, bright blue eyes and soft, ruddy cheeks. His hair was chestnut-colored and he wore it in a wavy mid-part. His limbs were filled with youthful firmness and a touch of sun.
"You've bad news for me, haven't you, Persimmon?" Tetsuo asked.
"I am afraid so, Vice President."
Tetsuo exhaled slowly. He couldn't allow Persimmon to seek employment with his enemies, but someone had to face discipline for this.
"Come here, boy."
The boy stepped forward, a forced smile quivering on his face. He was beautiful beyond measure. Tetsuo struck him across the jaw and he fell to the ivory floor, staining it red. The boy rubbed his jaw before a leather shoe stomped down on his nose with a crunch and a loud cry of pain. Beside him lay a tooth.
It was unfortunate, Tetsuo thought, that there were not more parts of the head that could be harmed without the potential for death. He felt some relief, but the last inch of full and complete satisfaction was denied to him.
"You may go."
The boy pulled his bloodied face off the floor. Tears fell from those pretty, blue eyes. Tetsuo almost stopped to call the boy back, but business came first. Pleasure existed to provide the will to keep conducting business.
"Now, Persimmon, what is the bad news?"
Persimmon exhaled through his nose. The man did not approve of Tetsuo's method of stress relief, he knew. His views were militant, nationalist, and traditionalist, Tetsuo knew, and he could almost hear the words “degenerate elite” echoing out of Persimmon’s ears. But the virtue of power was that one did not need approval. Tetsuo's conduct answered only to himself and his stringent self-discipline and Persimmon could keep his cute political theories to himself.
"We were unable to stop Sayuri Ueichi from escaping by boat down the Glær River. We have dispatched a riverine flotilla and notified a Genji outpost further downriver to conduct aerial reconnaissance missions.”
Tetsuo yawned. "Oh, is that the bad news? I was already informed by Admiral Kimura."
"Yes, Vice President."
"An annoyance, as this whole affair has been, but Ueden isn’t in position to stop us. Now, onto the ICA report. Actually, a moment first."
Tetsuo strode over to his desk in the middle of the spacious hall that took up the entire top floor of the Genji Heavy Industries building. His five meter-wide, half-moon desk molded from tungsten carbide with a glowing-blue cobalt surface was one of the few things that gave him true sensorial pleasure. He pressed a button on the telephone at the desk.
"Yes, Vice President?"
"Another cup of tea. That is all."
He let go of the button.
"Now, Persimmon, how do things stand?"
"Tsukiyama Technical Instruments stands to gain more market share by siding with us, though their industries are reliant on Ueden's energy infrastructure. We expect Benka Arsenal to declare neutrality in order to sell to both sides of the conflict. Shiawase Pharmaceuticals has matrilineal ties with Ueden's second and fourth houses and will likely declare for them. Hinoki Industries Group is expected to remain neutral, but we possess the potential to obligate them through a combination of blackmail and marriage ties through our fifth house. Yumitomo Life Insurance have long been Ueden allies. Jinju Textiles is dependably a Genji vassal, but their house defense force is undisciplined and inexperienced. Hidari Consumer Products is currently neutral but may bandwagon with us on the promise of spoils. Kintoki Arms Services..."
And it proceeded like this in nauseating detail. Tetsuo already knew the distribution of power and allegiances across the entire system of bloodthirsty anarchy, but missing the slightest stitch in this tapestry of power could have cascading consequences.
The picture given to the simple worker was that the world was rational and logical, governed by ethical laws in which progress was guaranteed and bloodshed increasingly unnecessary. This was a lie. There was little difference between now and the days of proto-humans clubbing each other with bones, but now the sticks were bigger and involved millions of human bodies organized under abstract labels like “markets” and “conglomerates.”
"...Furthermore, our intelligence embedded within the Ueichi clan suggests the Enkaikyō branch of Ueichi, the second house who stands to inherit the conglomerate presidency in the event of no suitable heir from the first house, may be amenable to negotiations. They will require incontrovertible evidence that Sayuri Ueichi cannot present a threat to their succession. If we provide them with it, they will pressure the other houses into falsely attributing the act of war to another clan-conglomerate."
The last piece of information was quite interesting.
"They want to buy time," Tetsuo said, "wouldn't you agree?"
"Yes, Vice President. They hope that you will exchange the secrets of full body kinkawa for an unreliable promise of non-aggression."
"I won't. It won't do us much good to vivisect her full body kinkawa if we lack both a full body and a vivi to sect, will it?"
"No, Vice President. It will not."
"What will do us good is to keep them begging at our palm for her. And perhaps in the meantime, the second house's plan may leak to the other branch houses when the time is right. What do you think, Persimmon?"
"I think it is wise and economical of our resources."
Tetsuo leaned against his desk, feeling the cold, bracing tungsten and cobalt underneath him.
"You may go, Persimmon," Tetsuo said, accepting a new cup of tea from the boy who had returned from downstairs, gritting his teeth and crying through his broken nose and bleeding face. Female pillows were overall more pleasing to harm than males, but the konketsujin boy made such beautiful expressions.
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Laws protected the boy's right to life and limb, and Tetsuo respected the laws of life and limb as the foundation for higher rights such as those of Property. As such, he could never do more to the boy than the boy would agree to for a wage. This forced Tetsuo into a hell of unsatisfied pleasure, forever wondering what those eyes would look like in the moment before death.
Persimmon and the pillow both departed via the transparent elevator, leaving Tetsuo by himself. His phone receiver blinked red. Layers of filter lay between him and anyone who wished to get a hold of him and still he could answer calls all day and never see that red light wink out. His father, Oujigane Genji, the Patriarch of Genji Heavy Industries, possessed inexhaustible patience for the tedium of rule. This was the one virtue Tetsuo lacked.
Tetsuo would admit this. It was a fundamental lack. Thus, it would have to be written into his history that he succeeded in spite of his impatience. All heroes must have flaws, otherwise they would be a god, and there was no room for a god beside the August-God Wotenha.
A cloud rolled over the office windows.
Wotenha, in His infinite wisdom, reminded Tetsuo that even his lofty view could be obscured. Entombed in a glass cage of condensation, he thought of Sayuri. What had Ueden invented? What secrets had they brought into this world and embedded in the skin of an unimportant girl? In his regretful impatience, Tetsuo had buried the answers by ordering the assassination of President Toue Ueichi.
Once more, everything turned on power. This time the electrical signals dispersed when hot lead sundered the skull of the Ueichi Patriarch. Tetsuo should not have treated the Ueichi patriarch like a pillow. He was now paying the price of disrespecting the rights of hierarchy.
He pressed the red button on the telephone.
"Yes, Vice President?"
He rubbed his knuckles where they were tender from the boy's skull, "Send me another pillow. A girl this time. Young. Kaihonjin. Not a drop of Afujin blood. Dress her in a red and gold kimono, cut her hair in high-conglomerate style, and paint her body with gold lines."
"Yes, Vice President."
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Several kilometers out from Suigen-Kyō, the Genji Heavy Industries tower still dominated the horizon, resting atop the plateau and gazing down from icy, cloud-topped air on the smoggy miasma beneath. It would have been more magnificent if the pink marble cliffs of the plateau weren’t buried under a layer of soot.
The sun rose in the west over rolling farms enclosed in barbed-wire fencing. Stalks of barley and rye rolled gently, half the farm reaped clean, the other half awaiting combine harvesters sitting idle in the chilly morning.
In the east, trains of colossal, treaded freight-crawlers rolled along compacted earth, delivering thousands of cargo containers to logistics centers on the coast. Their distance from the river had been calculated down to the centimeter by hatsugakusha, scientists who studied the physics of seishin-hatsuden. One toe on the eastern shore put one inside the Shroud. Warning signs ran the length of the shore.
The engine of the Daisagi-Maru had been shut off for the night. The holes took on water, but she—Fukuzawa strangely referred to his boat with feminine pronouns—would make it to Aldwithy, a riverside village of little consequence. With few exceptions, the towns and villages along the river were rendered irrelevant after the routes of trade changed to overland travel with the limitless energy of seishin-hatsuden. Sayuri swelled with pride whenever she witnessed the results of her family's innovation.
Fukuzawa was boiling water with an electric kettle and slapping down four aluminum packets onto an electric grill. Both appliances, he had been eager to explain, were cleverly wired to reroute battery power from the diesel engine. She could not fathom the man's obsession with the inefficient goop. Admittedly, he was a royalist. All royalists were a bit eccentric.
The Imperial colors flying from the mast of the Daisagi-Maru looked queer, like the flags flown by restaurant franchises rather than a stately Clan-Conglomerate banner. The purple background was garishly tacky, the white egret cartoonish. Yet Fukuzawa flew it with the same pride that Sayuri waved the Ueichi flag.
Perhaps that was why royalists were peculiar. The urge to dissolve oneself in something greater was inherent to humans. Where no other avenue could be found, an abstract, figurehead Emperor and His impotent and inefficient state bureaucracy sufficed to stave off the terror of alienation.
"Ya like to think a lot, don'tcha?" Fukuzawa said, speaking Kaihongo to her.
He poured the boiled water into tin mugs with sachets of tea. The water turned a shade further brown than Sayuri liked her tea, but she desperately wanted a cup, being hitherto deprived of her preferred beverage for two days. Sayuri blew on the hot mug and, in uncharacteristic haste, scalded her mouth and tongue.
"Itete!" she yelped.
Fukuzawa chuckled. "It's tea, what'd'ya expect?"
"The tea served to my family is always 72 degrees celsius, which is the proper temperature one ought to brew green tea at. Not the temperature of the sun!"
"Well, that's the temperature I like my tea. Who's your family?"
"We are—" Sayuri stopped herself. "—The Ashimoto. From Kitamuroseki. We run a— erm— we are a fireworks manufacturer. And we own mines in many different metals. Like magnesium. Which we put in the fireworks. It changes their color, you see."
"No wonder ya like to think so much. They don't give you poor rich girls much else to do when they send ya off to boarding school, huh?"
Fukuzawa took a long sip of tea, his hands wrapped around the scorching tin mug. Sayuri had set hers on the deck to cool.
"And what is so wrong about thinking about things? Would not the world be better off if more people thought things through?"
Gulping back another sip, Fukuzawa sat his mug down on the pilot console and smoothly turned the wheel to navigate between the posts of a long collapsed bridge. He did so without looking at the river.
"Nothing wrong with thinkin'. I get up to a lot of it myself when it's just me, my boat, and the river. But thinkin's gotta be backed up by experience, don'tcha think? Otherwise you're thinkin' a lot about nothin'. No such thing as runnin' on nothin'."
"What about seishin-hatsuden?"
"Oh it's runnin' on somethin' alright, just not gas. They teach you girls physics, don't they? Thermodynamics?"
"Yes, however, seishin-hatsuden does not obey normal laws of thermodynamics. That is why it is a limitless source of energy."
Fukuzawa smirked. "You sound like an Ueden advertisement. Thing is, Ms. Ashimoto, the universe always balances her accounts, even if we don't know what she's checkin' against yet."
Sayuri’s tea did not take long to cool in the nippy morning. The cloak the konketsujin woman gave her was surprisingly effective for keeping warm, even if it was not the softest material. Having a sip, the tea was somehow both thin-tasting and wickedly astringent. Decorum took over instinct and swallowed it for her.
"What about those who act without thinking? Surely they are more dangerous than people such as myself.”
"Certainly. Especially when they think they've done enough thinking when they haven’t. I'd say we're guilty of that ourselves. By that I mean the daughters and sons of the Thalassic Emperor. I think we mighta done wrong by the Æfrians cuz we didn’t think things through."
Nonsense, she wanted to say. The colonization of Æfria had been conducted exclusively through market transaction and legal contract. The Æfrian aristocracy still lived on and drew rent from their historical lands. If they were outcompeted by the Kaihonjin merchants who leased their land and put it to more productive use, there was nothing to be done for it. No force of arms had been used in the extension of the Kaihonjin civilization.
“I wonder,” she said, giving a vague answer. Sayuri’s training in etiquette dictated she steer away from the shoals of political topics.
Royalists were a disquieting black box that ranged from constitutionalist social democrats to absolutists, all vaguely utopian. Discussing politics with them was tedious because their fundamental political coordinates were incorrect. They were only outdone by tomokoshugisha, who wished to get rid of both the Emperor and clan-conglomerates and replace them with hellish anarchy.
To her relief, Chester finally awoke to deliver her from the awkward encounter. Though he did not look good. His face was drenched with sweat, his whole body trembling. The motion woke the woman beside him.
"Guess I'll put more water on," Fukuzawa said, switching back to Afugo.
Chester cleared his throat. "Do you— do you have anything to— to drink? I mean-–"
"I know what you mean, lad."
Fukuzawa went to the plastic chest in front of the bridge and produced an evil-looking, unmarked green bottle full of liquid bearing scatological resemblance. To Sayuri's great surprise, Chester did not hesitate to uncork the bottle and sip. She shivered at the dreadful sight.
"Better?"
"Give me a bit and I should be. Food would be good too."
"Got some of that comin' up."
Chester shuffled back and forth across the deck with his hands shoved in the pockets of his grubby jacket. After a minute or two, he beelined for the side of the boat and hurled. The sound made Sayuri wince. She had seen and heard her father sick only once in her life, and from that learned there was something deeply disturbing about a grown man being ill. Only then did one notice the aura of imperviousness subconsciously appended to grown men.
When Chester was finished with his business, Fukuzawa distributed the meals along with tin utensils and plates. Opening the packet, Sayuri found food she could not quite comprehend. A pile of pale ground meat sat in the center of the foil surrounded by potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and pearl onions, all of which might have comprised an Afujin dish, were it not for the dark brown sauce with the unmistakable appearance and aroma of miso, mirin, and fish sauce.
"What is this?" Sayuri asked.
Fukuzawa's feet rested on the piloting console while his calves steered the boat so he could shovel food into his face. He swallowed a mouthful of meat and potatoes. "That's turkey."
"No, the dish."
"Boatman's dinner. Ya throw whatever ya got in some foil and let it cook."
"No but— is it Kaihonjin or Afujin?"
"It's both! Like I said, you throw whatever ya got in there. I had some ground turkey giblets, some root vegetables, and some miso sauce, so that’s what went in."
Sayuri poked the stack of ground poultry with her fork. "It is strange."
"Call it whatever ya like once you've had it."
With great trepidation, Sayuri brought the perverse synthesis to her mouth and chewed. The juices from the poultry had pooled in the bottom of the foil and created a suspension for the miso sauce's umami. The porous root vegetables took the flavor and added to it the sweetness of caramelization. She was forced to admit it was, though unnatural, quite toothsome.
Sayuri looked to the bow where the woman huddled under her blanket, her meal in her lap, and beheld with satisfaction her own triumph as the women set her food down. Unlike Sayuri, she had been unable to stomach the confluence of Afujin and Kaihonjin culinary philosophy.
"What's wrong?" Fukuzawa asked.
"I can't eat," the woman said, her voice trembling.
Chester cleared his throat. "She's never, uh… used a gun."
Fukuzawa picked up the foil, wrapped it up, and set it down on the dying grill.
"Might be a bit dry and cold, but it'll be there when you want it, miss..."
"Milly," the woman croaked.
"Should at least get some tea in ya though, Milly. It'd be good," Fukuzawa said, bringing her a tin mug.