And so they arrived at Znark Vasun, facing the empty Noir Gulf, Akira the most brilliant star in a sky forlorn of stars. Eight of the Misubisi jumped ship for passage in a freighter headed across the Gulf. It was the way they chose to reach the Akiran system alive to taste the final triumph of their millennia-long quest. One slender Misubisi woman, filled with a romantic longing for an imagined Akiran paradise, unwilling to die while she was so near to heaven, seduced Jotar and begged him to take her with him in slow-time. He knew the source of her devotion but didn't mind; he liked her company and her body. Another young girl stowed herself away in his cabin, unwilling to grow old and die without building a real ship. He found her nearly starving long after they had left Znark Vasun. She was too afraid of his wrath to come out of hiding.
The remaining Misubisi continued in fast-time across the Noir Gulf as they always had and died there breeding new generations. The very last generation defied "the god beyond the barrier" by birthing a rash of "love children" who took the ship's population past seventy. They knew they were close to home.
Jotar weathered it all. Later he laughed and called himself the longest surviving Japanese Emperor in human history. Halfway across the Gulf they entered the peninsula called The Finger Pointing Solward. No one was happier than Jotar when their goal star showed as a disk.
Akira blazed on the portside.
They were adrift, the kalmakovian velocity reconverted to rest mass. Photon rockets blazed to life, changing their velocity by fourteen kilometers per second so that they could go into orbit around the planet Ohonshu.
They were greeted with incredulous enthusiasm. Akirani wept openly in the streets and on the farms. Two honor shuttles were sent to bring them down and, of course, they were landed at Tsumeshumo Beach where the first two shiploads of colonists had touched down.
Each of the Misubisi were given a torch and they knew what to do. Wild with joy they ran along the beach to the Shrine on the Jodai Hill where they embraced and cried and gave their thanks. Jotar marveled. Now he could build his ship! He went into the Demon's Dance with all of his old Engineering Power. And when he was finished he did a flourish of twenty rapid handsprings.
Panting, he saw that all Misubisis had frozen to watch him. For a second after he finished they stood still, then they bowed. Takenaga's lords were there. They too bowed. The son of the governor of the Rokakubutsu system bowed. Other lords of the outworld systems around Akira bowed.
The first person to move was a graceful child, not yet a woman, who came forward with flowers. She kneeled and offered them, her eyes cast down, as she delivered a prepared speech thanking him for bringing them home. Strange how these people of his called this planet home.
He tipped up her face and kissed her cheek and gave her the smile he had often given to women back on Lager when he wanted to encourage their attention. That was his first meeting with Misubisi Koriru. They became friends. When she was older, she became his mistress.
And so here he was, too old to fight much anymore, philosophical about his last lost battle, going to a celebration that Koriru wanted him to go to when all he wanted to do was get drunk. Why was he starting to do whatever Koriru said?
Ah, those Misubisi. Those scoundrels that Kasumi had planted and he had nourished. They listened with alertness to everything said by the great Jotar Plaek. They hopped to attention and instantly obeyed his every command. But they always came back and, so sorry, they could not do what he requested, and please would he allow them the honor of disemboweling themselves or some such rot. When he refused they humbly offered a second inferior course of action, which, it always turned out, they had already implemented.
The ship had arrived to find a shockingly primitive technology on Akira—
that
was the trouble. Well, not primitive. One's choice of words could not be too strong. Incongruous was the word. Jotar fully expected to find a computer-guided wooden plow one of these days.
Koriru drove him to the outskirts of Temputo, where they entered the procession that snaked through the city to the Imperial Palace grounds of the Takenagas. Happy people watched. Vendors scurried around selling hot delicacies to the crowd. Children watched from trees. Clowns wearing waldo leggings jumped about the procession to make the crowd laugh. Elaborate paper animals, some of them forty meters long, slithered among the noble daimyo. Computer-implanted birds of paradise added punctuation marks of color to the procession, flying back and forth, resting on the heads of children. Everybody waved paper accordion models of the
Massaki Maru
on the end of sticks.
At the Palace, lesser daimyo were separated from greater daimyo for the feasting. Jotar was pillowed with the greatest, the nobles of the Akiran tributary systems: red Rokakubutsu, Hodo Reishitsu, desolate Iki Ta, and beautiful Butsudo. All of these men stood to gain enormous wealth from an Akiran shipbuilding industry. Wily old Takenaga himself—the man who had ended Akiran democracy and money wars between the merchant lords—even put in an appearance.
They liked the ship. The talk was all about
Imperial
Akira. Now they could expand down The Finger. At the knuckle end of The Finger was the whole of the Remeden Drift. Power, commerce, glory.
The moment came when the
Massaki Maru
was tugged from its assembly cocoon in space, already crewed for its maiden voyage to Butsudo. The Captain was in direct communication with Takenaga at the Palace.
"Heika, we await your orders!"
"Do us honor. Launch it!"
"Hai! Suiginitsu! Generate the field!"
"Hai!" came Suiginitsu's reply.
The first starship built on the farside of the Noir Gulf faded from the screen.
Jotar was not pleased. He was ashamed. Even in ancient times, had such an inferior ship ever come out of the shipyards at Lager? The acceleration of the
Massaki Maru
was shockingly sluggish. Its top velocity was ninety light speeds. Too many compromises had been made with reliability. Fast-time ruthlessly destroyed unreliable systems. He doubted that the ship would last more than five kilodays in service.
The Misubisi collective decision had been that it was more economical to build such a ship than to import a better one from across the Noir Gulf. They were right if they manufactured at least twenty of them. Still he was ashamed. He would not have come to the rim of civilization for that.
Later, as the confusion of the feast brought forth a new course of food, one of the Misubisi women came to him.
"Hanano! You're as nervous as that day I found you starving in my closet! What is it? I know. You're afraid that load of junk will shed its skin all along the route to Butsudo! No matter. Eat! Sit with us! We'll spend an hour here together and afterwards rub pot bellies!"
She fingered his hair affectionately. "If I had only known what a monster you were, I'd have chosen to die in the Gulf rather than throw myself at your mercy. Come." She tugged at him. "I beg of you to come with Koriru and me."
"You will please come," said Koriru.
They took him to one of the Palace gardens where some thirty of the Misubisi clan had gathered. More of them weren't there only because they had vowed the whole clan would never meet in one place at the same time. The handsome hulk of Misubisi Jihoku confronted them.
"Hanano! You found him, the Disapproving One! Welcome. Koriru, you've kept him sober! How do we honor such self-sacrifice!"
"I'm not sober, you pile of shit!" he retorted.
"In my unworthy opinion, Plaek-san, when you can still walk, you are sober!"
There was laughter, but nervous laughter. They knew he despised their ship, had not wanted it built.
"If that junk heap just gets back here, I'll give all gold stars!" Jotar roared drunkenly. "Not for your engineering abilities, but for your monumental good luck!"
Jihoku laughed. "Water on a frog's face! We have a millennia-long tradition of your insight into our inconsequential efforts, threads holding together a history longer than many planets, longer than Akira's, and throughout it all we have learned the joy and profit to ourselves of carrying you, oh noble bag of complaints, on our backs. Complain away!"
The Misubisi cheered Jihoku good-naturedly. They were happy. They were celebrating. It was their day.
Koriru stepped forward. "If I may be allowed to intrude, I have a poem from that tradition. Misubisi Kigyoshin of the twenty-third generation wrote it when the plans of his life's work were cut to pieces by Plaek-san. We were at Kinemon and they had met face to face.
Built of my sinews
Flowing over nebula
My crafted starbridge
Pleases not our tortoise god
Whose dreams are swift as wishes.
"He's been slashing at us since the mists of our time and his criticism has made us great!"
"Hai!" yelled thirty voices.
Hanano stepped forward, trembling. She had desperately wanted to build ships and had spent her time with him in the Gulf picking his brain. She was his top engineer. "We wish to give our tortoise god a gift tonight from our hearts and from the hearts of all our ancestors. It will not be good enough but it is our best."
Jotar was sobering. They were afraid of him, really afraid of his disapproval. And yet . . . somehow . . . they were about to give him something . . . if he disapproved . . . they would be destroyed.
It was a wooden box the size of a coffin and he opened it. The model of a starship floated out, glowing bluely. The name on the bow, printed not in their chicken-track script but in Anglish, was
The Jotar Plaek.
It was his ship. But it wasn't.
"The field fins are wrong," he said.
"I am so sorry to disagree," said Hanano, "but they are a solution to the field equations subject to the fabrication constraints we have assumed."
The robed shipwrights were tense.
"You're telling me that you're building this ship?" He stared about the garden crazily.
"Hai!" said Hanano fiercely. "I have personally checked the entire critical path analysis. We know every problem that will arise, when it will arise, and how to solve that problem.
The Plaek
is to be a fifth-generation ship. We are to build ships of the Massaki Maru class for two more kilodays, at which time the Akiran craftsmen will be ready to build the next generation's prototype. Our fourth generation will be the first significant departure in starship design since Lager produced the Hammond variation. The fifth generation will be your ships."
Jotar stared at her. "And how long is this going to take?"
Jihoku spoke up. "I am very displeased to inform you that you will be dead by then." He bowed to express sorrow.
"I guessed there was a catch."
"We respectfully remind you," lashed out Koriru, "that you have asked thousands of us to die in this adventure. Only a handful of us survive!" She swept her arm about the room. "It does not matter that we die before the summit is reach. Banzai!" Ten thousand years. "It matters only that it is reached!"
"Do you think you can do it?"
"Hai!"
"Why didn't you tell me that this was going on?"
"We wanted to be sure. It was a gift we could not offer lightly. Our honor as shipwrights!"
Jotar Plaek held the model in his hands, turning it about, the tears running down his aging cheeks. He stared at the name printed on the bow.
"Look at that. A fat lot of good that's going to do me! Have you ever met an Akiran who could pronounce my name! Have you?" he challenged them all.
Then he was hugging his Misubisi people, each of them, one at a time.
Professor Richard Pipes of Harvard University reminds us that "One of the salient features of the Russian historical experience has been a propensity for imperialism." In fact, the Soviet Union is the last large colonial empire on Earth. It is not always recognized as such, because unlike the British and French empires, the Russian empire is territorially contiguous, and most Westerners don't realize that much of it was acquired in the last century, long after the age of European colonization had effectively ended. Pipes continues:
"The second distinguishing characteristic of Russian imperialism is its military character: unlike Western colonial powers, which supplemented and reinforced their military activities with economic and cultural penetration, Russia has had to rely mainly on force of arms. . . . Expansionism of such persistence and an imperialism that maintains such a tenacious hold on its conquests raises the question of causes.
"One can dismiss the explanation most offered by amateur Russian 'experts' (although hardly ever by the Russians themselves), that Russia expands because of anxieties aroused by relentless foreign invasions of its national territory by neighboring countries. Those who make this point usually have but the scantiest familiarity with Russian history. Their knowledge of Russia's external relations is confined to three or four invasions, made familiar by novels or moving pictures—the conquest of Russia in the early thirteenth century by the Mongols (who are sometimes confused with the Chinese); Napoleon's invasion of 1812; the Allied 'Intervention' during the Russian Civil War; and the Nazi onslaught of 1941. With such light baggage one can readily conclude that, having been uniquely victimized, Russia strikes out to protect itself.
"Common sense, of course, might suggest even to those who lack knowledge of the facts that a country can no more become the world's most spacious as a result of suffering constant invasions than an individual can gain wealth from being repeatedly robbed. But common sense aside, there is the record of history. It shows that, far from being the victim of recurrent acts of aggression, Russia has been engaged for the past three hundred years with single-minded determination in aggressive wars, and that if anyone has reason for paranoia, it would have to be its neighbors. In the 1890s, the Russian General Staff carried out a comprehensive study of the history of Russian warfare since the foundations of the state. In the summary volume, the editor told his readers that they could take pride in their country's military record and face the future with confidence—between 1700 and 1870, Russia had spent 106 years fighting 38 military campaigns, of which 36 had been 'offensive' and a mere two defensive. This authoritative tabulation should dispose of the facile theory that Russian aggression is a defensive reflex."—Richard Pipes,
Survival Is Not Enough
(Simon & Schuster,
Touchstone Books, 1984)