The Miko - 02 (92 page)

Nicholas had come to Japan with Justine’s father to merge their computer-chip manufacturing arm with that of Sato International. Now, in desperation, Nicholas throws himself into his new work, the reason he has stayed on in Japan after Akiko’s death. The hellishly complex merger has been consummated, and the business of the chip manufacturing has to be coordinated with Sato International. Nicholas and Tanzan Nangi, the vast conglomerate’s head, have become friends.

Together they are manufacturing a revolutionary computer chip, known as a Sphynx T-PRAM, a totally programmable random-access memory chip. The ramifications in the computer industry of such a discovery are staggering—and so have been the profits. IBM has tried to deal itself in, offering the services of its infinitely expandable research and development department in exchange for the chip’s secret; similarly, Motorola has offered them a lucrative partnership. But the chip’s design is strictly proprietary, and, to Nicholas’s and Nangi’s surprise, no one has come near to duplicating the amazing chip.

Nicholas and Nangi have decided to go it alone.

With Justine so withdrawn, Nicholas spends more and more time with Nangi, and he supposes it would have continued that way for a very long time had it not been for his headaches. Not the headaches, really, so much as their cause: the tumor.

It is benign, but because it is growing, it needs to be removed. This cause for alarm is what breaks their dead daughter’s spell over Justine. Finding she is still needed, Justine returns to life. Waiting for the results of the tests, the operation, the two of them find a new intimacy. But, Justine tells him, she is taking precautions. She is not yet ready to return to the psychic ordeal of pregnancy.

The anesthesia is like a carpet upon which Nicholas walks in slippered feet, in a direction unknown to him. In that sense it is like life, and unlike
michi,
the path, also the journey, which are known.

Nicholas, gazing upon the angelic face of his daughter, who lives again and forever in the theater of his mind, for the first time openly wishes to abandon
michi,
his path, his journey. He wishes to change his karma. In the past, he has bent his fate as if it were an alder staff. But now he wishes to break it in two, turning it into an instrument of his own will.

This is what he longs for as, with an open heart, he tries to capture the spirit of his dead daughter, to observe her in the same manner in which he monitored her slowly beating heart. To gather to him like tender blossoms the pitifully few days of her life in order to know what made her strong, what made her cry, what caused her to laugh.

But it is impossible. Even floating godlike in othertime, otherplace, the essence of her passes through his trembling fingers like grains of sand disappearing into the heart of the desert. And here, in front of only one witness—himself—he does what he could not do for three years.

He weeps bitter tears for her…

He awoke to a whiteness so pure that for a moment his blood seemed to congeal, thinking of vapor curling, falling without end, dropping like a stone down a well.

His scream brought the nurses running, their rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the polished linoleum floor. It brought Justine awake with a start, her heart lurching because she had not even been aware that she had fallen asleep at his side, holding his hand. She had done that unconsciously, the pad of her thumb against the branched blue vein on the back of his hand, feeling the slow pulse of blood there as, three years before, she had listened for the slow pulse of her doomed daughter’s heartbeat.

The nurses brushed Justine away, not with any animosity, but with the cool indifference born of efficiency which was so much more difficult to bear, since they were making it perfectly clear to her how useless she was now.

Nicholas, in the frantic thrashing of new consciousness, had torn out both the IV drip and the catheter. The nurses clucked over him, whispering to him in Japanese, which, in three years, Justine had only managed to learn on a rudimentary level. She found herself resenting the added intimacy of these young Japanese women who bathed him, shaved him, and took care of his bowel movements.

She stood in a corner, a larger figure than any of the nurses, trying to peer over their shoulders, terrified that something untoward had happened to Nicholas, angry that she was reduced to standing helplessly aside.

What if he should die? She clutched at her throat as her heart turned to ice. It was winter; there was snow on the ground. She had not taken off her coat, even though it was warm in the room. Justine was always chilled now.

Dear God, save him, she prayed. She was not religious, did not even now know whether she actually believed in God. But for now she could do nothing more than pray, which at least held a measure of solace because it was something only she could do for Nicholas, and she held that knowledge close to her as a child does her teddy bear when night brings moving shadows close to her bed.

“Is my husband all right?” she asked in halting Japanese.

“There is no cause for alarm,” the woman Justine identified as the head nurse said.

Hospitalese was the same the world over, Justine thought. No one offered an opinion on anything, ever.

As she watched the nurses go about their arcane ministrations, she wondered what she was doing in Japan anyway. In the beginning she had readily agreed to staying on here. It was, after all, what Nick really wanted, and in any event, her boss, Rick Millar, had wanted to open a Tokyo branch of his advertising agency. It seemed perfect, like the happy ending of a novel.

Reality had turned out to be something quite different. For one thing, she was a foreigner, and opening a business—any business—that was not wholly Japanese-owned was a formidable task. In fact, looking back on it, Justine recognized that she would not have been able to open the agency in the first place had it not been for the influence of Tanzan Nangi and Nick.

She was amazed at how much power Nick had here. After all, he was a foreigner as well. Except that the Japanese she had met treated him with the deference they reserved only for their own kind. It was partly Nick himself, of course, but the respect also came because he was the Colonel’s son.

Colonel Denis Linnear had commanded a section of the British forces in Singapore during World War II. It was there that he had met Nicholas’s mother, Cheong. After the war he was assigned to General MacArthur’s SCAP occupation headquarters staff in Tokyo because of his expertise in understanding the Japanese mind.

The Colonel had been an extraordinary man, and the Japanese had recognized this quality in him. Their ministers had gravitated to him as moons will to a planet. When he died, his funeral was as well-attended as that of a Japanese emperor.

For another thing, she was a female, and no matter how much was written concerning the strides women were making in Japan, they were still treated as second-class citizens. They were tolerated in the workplace, but advancement was all but unheard of. The fact that she, a woman, was heading up a company made hiring all but impossible. No Japanese man of any talent would apply for a job, because he couldn’t take the venture seriously, and she quickly found out that when she hired all women, she got no clients. No one would take the agency’s products seriously. Within eighteen months she was out of business.

“Sorry, kid,” Rick Millar had told her over the phone. “I know you did your best. Not to worry. Anytime you want to come home, you’ve got your old job back. Good V.P.’s are hard to find.”

Home.

Staring into Nick’s pale face—what she could see of it through the mysterious and intimidating swaths of bandages—Justine knew that she wanted to go home.

USUAKARI

Through the shutters it came,

autumn’s own shape:

the warp of the candle flame.

—Raizan

T
ANZAN NAGI, CHAIRMAN OF
Sato International, could pinpoint the onset of the attack almost to the second.

In his offices at the summit of the striking, triangular Shinjuku Suiryu Building, fifty-two stories above the thrumming hive of downtown Tokyo, Nangi stared out at the concrete and glass skyrises. His gaze also took in the potted plant on his windowsill, with its deep green leaves and its tiny purple buds: a dwarf purple-gem rhododendron. The first blooms of summer. He had noticed their budding this morning just at the moment of attack.

As it happened, Nangi had been accessing data from his computer terminal when the virus began to unspool. Somehow it had been injected into his company’s mainframe, entwining itself throughout the software systems until a prearranged trigger released it and it began to eat Sato’s core data.

Even as he dialed his computer technicians on the intercom, Nangi watched in horror as the data that had been coming up on his screen began to unravel, turning into some alien gibberish that was useless to him or, as it turned out, anyone else in the company.

The technicians were at a loss as to how to combat the virus. “It’s a nondiscriminatory borer,” they told him, “which means that it constantly mutates. Even if we pinpointed its weakness at any one moment in time, by the time we could implement a formulaic antidote, the virus would already have mutated into something else.”

“How did it get into the system?” Nangi asked. “I thought we had a foolproof, state-of-the-art antivirus security lock on the system.”

“We do,” the technicians informed him. They shrugged. “But hackers have an infinite amount of time and a seemingly inexhaustible hunger to crack security locks.”

Nangi was about to make a caustic remark concerning the technicians’ hunger, when the data he had been accessing began creeping back onto his screen. Quickly he scrolled through it, verifying that it was intact. Then he began accessing other data at random.

After that, he let the technicians take over. To everyone’s relief, it was soon determined that the software programs were back on line. The virus had disintegrated. Nangi counted them lucky on that score. On the other hand, their core data had been penetrated. Nothing had been accessed, so a professional data raid was discounted; the hacker theory was probably the right one. Still, Nangi had been disquieted. Even now the computer security system was being overhauled. Nangi could not risk the network being compromised again.

The virus attack had occurred first thing this morning. The day had gone downhill after that.

Now Nangi curled his gnarled hands around the jade dragon head of his walking stick until the flesh went white. Blue veins like ropes filled with sailor’s knots pushed the tissue-thin skin outward.

Behind him the weekly meeting of Sato International’s senior management continued with its agenda. Suggested by Nicholas, this meeting was concerned first with synopsizing the division-heads meeting that had taken place the day before, and second, with aligning the division successes, failures, and needs in with the
keiretsu’s
—the conglomerate’s—overall goals, which had changed drastically ever since they had won the right to manufacture key components for the production model of Hyrotech-inc’s so-called Hive computer, which was now only in prototype. The prospect of burgeoning profits was not the only benefit of this deal; it was the enormous face Sato International gained—the only Japanese company to be involved in the Hive Project.

Nicholas, Nangi thought. It had been Nicholas who had negotiated the deal with the American firm, Hyrotech-inc, designated by the federal government to manufacture the revolutionary new computer.

But Nicholas’s contributions went far beyond the Hyrotech-inc deal. Before Nicholas’s involvement in Sato International, Nangi had been aware of the need to integrate all of Sato’s
konzern—
that is, the conglomerate’s individual companies—into a smoothly working whole. But it had been Nicholas who had pointed out that this could and should be taken a step further, integrating division schedules at the home office in Tokyo.

In a way, Nangi had realized, this had been a very Japanese idea, because it gave each division a heightened sense of being integral to the whole. Within three months of inaugurating the new meetings, Nangi had been gratified to see a twenty-percent increase in productivity among his division heads. He had been well pleased, and in an extraordinary gesture, had shared this pleasure with Nicholas.

He had taken Nicholas out to his favorite restaurant, a place so expensive that it was virtually a private club for the highest echelons of the industrial sector—no minister of Japan’s omnipresent bureaucracy could afford its prices. But food was not the reason one went to this restaurant—it was the atmosphere: discreet, exclusive, confidential, perfect for long, drunken evenings.

For a Japanese to allow a Westerner to get drunk with him was a rare privilege indeed. For a people so studiously rigid in their social behavior, going on drunks was almost the sole source of release. It was felt that when drunk, a Japanese could say anything—express feelings normally taboo, become maudlin, sentimental, even cry—it was the liquor, after all. Everything was acceptable, and all lapses were forgiven.

It had been in the middle of his drunk with Nicholas that Nangi had begun to understand the qualities that men older than he had seen in Colonel Denis Linnear, why Nicholas’s father had not been considered an
iteki—a
barbarian—like all the other men in the American occupation forces. Colonel Linnear had been special—and this quality of being attuned to the Japanese psyche, while still being Western, was present in Nicholas as well, never mind that he was half Oriental, half English.

Tanzan Nangi, hero of the war, until ten years ago vice-minister of the all-powerful MITI, Ministry of International Trade and Industry, then founder and chairman of the Daimyo Development Bank, which ultimately owned Sato, and now head of Sato International, never thought that he would love a Westerner. Frankly, he had not thought such a thing was possible. But he saw during that long night that, without quite knowing it, he had come to love Nicholas as one normally only loves a son.