The other places he’d held unchanged in childhood memory were simply gone.
Fifteen years of Fleet service-and at least a decade since he’d spent leave in the bustling commercial capital stretching east and south of this quiet peninsula-had seen his old neighborhood leveled. His parents’ single-story house with the green tin roof and white-painted walls was gone. The entire street-ancient cobblestones and crumbling asphalt and peeling advertisements on the garden gates-had vanished. No more little single-door shops, tucked in between the warehouses and old factories, selling tea and cakes and hot noodles. Even the narrow park along Deception Creek-which marked the southern edge of downtown-had been replaced. Ancient rows of cherry and mulberry trees sawn down, replaced by a modern promenade of expensive shops and brisk, gleaming cafes catering to the young and rich.
Civilians. Merchants, he thought, dully angered by the wall of gleaming sea-green-glass apartment towers burying his boyhood memories beneath sixty stories of luxury flats and their attendant hovercar garages. Even a dirty industrial neighborhood should be allowed to putter along… without improvements, without renovations.
But Shinedo of the Nisei had grown enormously while he’d been gone among the stars. A new high-speed maglev cargo railway now ran day and night to the far eastern coast, moving millions of tons of Asiatic goods from Shinedo’s deepwater port to the grimy coastal cities of Oswego and New Canarsie in the Iroquois Protectorate. And from there, onward to Europe and Afriqa. The sprawling spaceport in the wetlands south of the city benefited as well. Though there were larger Fleet installations planet-side, Shinedo uchumon handled a constant and lucrative passenger service. The industrial districts Mitsuharu prowled in his youth had moved south to sprawl around uchu in a thick belt of newly built factories, smokestacks, and office parks.
But little of that ugliness was visible within the quiet solitude of the preserve. Here-and only here within greater Shinedo metro, still protected by the edict of an Emperor long dead when the first human spacecraft lumbered into orbit from the Nanchao testing range-towering groves of old coastal redwoods remained. The entire park, save for the serpentine meadows containing the cemetery, was filled with the same nearly impenetrable rain forest which had greeted the first Nisei to set foot upon Gumshan- the Golden Mountain.
Beneath their broad eaves, heavy with snow, there was a deep sense of quiet.
As befits the honored dead, Hadeishi thought as he turned onto a side path-this one set with wooden steps and a railing-which climbed the westernmost hill in the park. Let them rest, distant from the garish, uncaring noise of those who still live.
His Fleet discharge pay had evaporated once he’d stepped off the shuttle. Shinedo was not cheap. Food, lodging, bus tickets… everything was expensive. Even the most wretched grade of sake was a full quill the jar. Two ceramic bottles clinked in his jacket pocket, rubbing a handful of wilted flowers to pale yellow dust. There was a dole for the indigent, but Mitsuharu had prided himself on having useful skills. His comp, waiting messages ignored, and other things reminding him of the Fleet, he sold. So his old life had been eaten away by the new.
Solving a four-dimensional puzzle with seventy-six vectors in less than a second has no value in the civilian world. Knowing the little tricks of command, of gaining men’s loyalty, of making them work harder, faster, more accurately as a team under fire… who needs that here? There is no war in the city.
Very near the shuttle port, in the maze of narrow alleys and bars and tea houses making up the district called Water Lantern, he had managed to secure employment. He played the samisen in a tea house on the evenings, while the off-duty Fleet and merchanter ratings wasted their money on girls and rice beer and gambling at patolli or dice or cards. His father-who had been very good with almost any stringed instrument-would have been appalled to see his so-promising son picking away at the kind of cheap lute a tea house teishu could afford.
No vinegar left, he thought, passing beneath a wooden arch wound with heavy snow-dusted vines. All spilled out of me at Jagan with the Cornuelle burning up in the atmosphere. With all the dead…
Beyond the arch was a small clearing laid with fitted stones-swept clean even on such a cold day-surrounding a temple-house of red enamel and dark, polished wood. The smell of incense hung in the frigid air, tapers twining long loops of smoke through the rafters. Hadeishi’s Fleet boots made a tapping sound as he walked and his careful eye could make out ideograms cut into each of the paving stones. Ever here, in the Western Chapel, where at winter’s end the Emperor came to witness the sun of the vernal equinox settle into the distant sea, surrounded by the great nobles and the deep, throaty roll of massed drums, the dead lay close at hand.
Mitsuharu knelt in the temple, bending his head against the floor in obeisance to the gilded idol. The altar was crowded with candle stubs, pools of melted wax, and drifts of fallen ash. Coins, gewgaws, trinkets, little toys, chicle-prizes, letters, twists of paper folded with prayers covered every flat surface in the shrine.
“The city is expensive,” he said aloud, shaking his head in dismay. “I’ve little to leave you, mother, father.” Hadeishi dug in his pockets, found the sake, the flowers, the hard plastic shape of his Fleet comm. “But what I have, I will send to you, beyond the sea.”
Beyond the walls of the temple-house, a late afternoon wind guttered among the stones. The first Nisei to be laid to rest in the Western Paradise had been interred within days of the Landing. The fleet had breached upon this shore out of exhaustion. The rough passage between the outer bulwark of Mowichat Island and the rocky, forest-shrouded coastline had taken the last burst of energy the refugees could muster. Thirty-six days had passed while the gray vastness of the sea hammered at their boats. Few of the Japanese vessels had been fitted for such a voyage, though in the mad panic to evacuate Edo and Osaka, no mind had been paid to their seaworthiness. More than half of those who fled dying Nippon had perished. But the Emperor himself had survived, carried forth from the wreck of his ancient realm in a massive Chinese hai-po taken in a raid off Taiwan. That enormous ship had run aground in Deception Creek, or so the children said, and the last true Emperor to be born in the Immortal Islands had splashed ashore with katana in hand and rusted armor upon his breast. Though the shore he faced was crowded with an impossibly thick forest, and his people were sick and weak, there was nowhere else to run.
Mitsuharu made a little space among the grave goods with his fingers and set both sake bottles among the debris left by other mourners. He considered his comm for a long time. The metal surface was chipped and worn, discolored by plasma backwash, and a sixteen-glyph was blinking on the display surface. Messages of sympathy from fellow officers, he thought, entirely devoid of curiosity, I will never view.
Hadeishi placed the flowers atop the comm and bent his head over clasped hands.
“One leaf lets go,” he whispered, eyes squeezed tight, “and another follows on the wind.”
I am sorry, mother, father; that I did not come home. News of your illness, your death, reached me by courier off Kodon, when vital repairs were already underway. I am late to bring you these things, to pray for you, to bid you a speedy journey home to the Blessed Isles. I am sorry. I am not a good son. I was not a good captain. Now I am a wretched player in a disreputable tavern. So the wheel turns.
The foundation of the temple-house was laid upon the grave of that first man-a lesser courtier of the Imperial House; a kugyo born in Echizen-to die upon gumshan. He was not the last. Fell beasts roamed the primordial forest and the natives were quick and sly, slipping unseen through deep shadows with knives of knapped stone. The weather was far fiercer than the nobles of Nara and Kyoto expected, and the refugees accounted barely a handful of men experienced in hunting, fishing, carpentry, blacksmithing… by winter’s end, another quarter of the survivors were crudely interred around the temple-house. The great cemetery had begun its millennia-long sprawl.