Linnear 03 - White Ninja (59 page)

Three months after coming to Zhuji, Senjin saw that the River Man's truth was not the truth. Three years after that, he discovered that the Tau-tau truth was also not the truth.

Then he thought of Shisei, whom he had not thought of in a very long time. He recalled their conversation when she had asked him, 'Why is it that you see everything inverted?' He had had no answer for her then, but he suspected that he did now. He longed to drink her in with all his senses, with his finely-attuned aura, and while thus merged with her, say to her, 'I see everything inverted because I know that in this world there is no truth, only many supposed truths. Each man has his own or appropriates another's, and this is why life is based on conflict.'

Three years and three months after Senjin began his work in Tau-tan at Zhuji, the elders cast the runes.

This was a neolithic ritual which took place over the course of a week. It was a week of constant repetitions, constant chanting; and Senjin saw in the elders' rituals the increased excitation of the membrane of kokoro, a building of energy that rang in his ears like a silent shout until sleep was out of the question and every movement, every gesture was put towards the beating of kokoro.

At the end of this time, the elders met within the centre of one of the stone temples set high up in the side of the mountains. Here a massive fire had been lit by the women, who tended it constantly. Senjin, when he was led in, could see the stars through a hole high up in the roof of the room.

Here the elders were hard at work, etching runic messages on the inside of long shards of tortoiseshell. Senjin was reminded of the River Man's story, of how So-Peng and Zhao Hsia, as boys, had stolen and eaten the tortoise eggs on the beach at Rantau Abang.

These messages were questions the tanjian elders wished answered about the future. When they had finished their etching, the week-long rite culminated with the elders throwing the shards into the fire. The chanting rose to a crescendo, then slowly subsided.

Afterwards, the women were dispatched to retrieve the tortoiseshell from the ashes of the fire, and by the way each shard had been cracked by the heat, the elders thus could read the future.

Mubao was brought his tortoiseshell, and he signalled for Senjin to join him. When Senjin had squatted down beside Mubao, the elder said, 'This is your future.'

Senjin, staring at the sooty shard-of tortoiseshell could see nothing but a fine network of cracks bisecting the etched runes. 'What is predicted?' he asked.

'A flood, a torrent, a rage of thunder, a detonation of energy,' Mubao intoned. 'And after the deluge, xin.' By xin he meant the centre or heart of things. Kokoro.

Senjin's heart beat fast. 'Is this what lies in wait for me?' Mubao nodded. 'In part.' His calloused thumb rubbed the cracked tortoiseshell. 'Death is strong. Its tone permeates the silent echoes we hear and which guide us. Death and more death.'

Mubao's thumb paused over one spot on the shard. He looked at Senjin and said, 'You must leave here. Our time of the day has passed.'

Senjin found it no hardship to leave Zhuji. In fact, he had in recent weeks grown bored with his schooling. He had absorbed everything that Mubao and the other elders had sought to teach him. Now, in his heart, in his own kokoro, he wished to teach them. They did not know the Truth, but he, Senjin, did. Then, after the casting of the runes, after Mubao had, in effect, delivered his sentence, Senjin understood that they would not understand even if they had given him a chance to tell them what he now knew: that there was no Truth.

It was not that what he had learned was either false or useless. Far from it. But the fact that both forms of Tau-tau were valid and were believed in wholeheartedly delivered the reality of life to Senjin with the force of a hammerblow.

Nothing was true; nothing was sacred. In that case, there was no Law.

Thus did Senjin return to Japan, at the age of twenty a dorokusai. And, to satisfy both his sense of yin-yang and his desire for irony, he became a policeman in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Force.

He did not return to Asama, to where he knew Haha-san and the River Man were like death, waiting for him. He did not return to Asama, where he assumed Shisei would be waiting for him. It did not matter; they met in Tokyo, on the glittering Ginza, where giant signs of snaking neon advertised the icons

of a new age: sony, matsushita, toshiba, nec and cbs/sony.

They were drawn together, amid the winking, blinking electronic jungle, by the concentric circles that had bound them as children, the dark, oiled steel and the coil of sinuous perfume.

Their reunion was a joyous one, though no one looking at them could tell. There was no expression on their faces; everything was internalized. And everything was mended, settled.

Or so Shisei thought.

Senjin moved-into his twin's apartment. It was in the most fashionable area of the city. It was huge, filled with Western furniture covered hi luxurious, snow-white fabrics. On the way to it that first night of their reunion, Senjin came across three enormous posters with Shisei's face. He saw her on television, singing before a gargantuan crowd of screaming youngsters.

'I'm a talento,' Shisei said. 'The most successful talento in Japan.'

Having been away for some time, Senjin did not know the term.

'I'm a kind of media star,' Shisei said. 'I sing a little, dance a little, a dilettante entertainer. I give concerts, I'm about to star in my own television soap opera, I do commercial endorsements for all the big companies. Anything and everything. I'm a role model, held up to the hungry public for their inspection and adoration.'

'Does it make you happy?' Senjin asked. He was riveted by her image, blue and gold, moving across the screen, caressed by the television cameras. He was certain that the director must be in love with her.

'They're all in love with me,' Shisei said. "The audience, the crew, the publicists, the corporate executives. Especially the corporate executives. That makes me very happy.' Her face clouded. 'But as wonderful as it is, I

know it can't last. A talento must be young, dewy-fresh, virginal. Time is my most vicious enemy.'

'But how did this happen?' Senjin asked.

Each wanted to know everything that had happened to the other during the three years they had been separated. In a way, since the texture and complexities of the energies they threw off had changed, they knew. In other ways, they needed to be told verbally. Oddly, they were both reluctant, just as if they were shy newly-weds come to the moment of truth: their marriage bed.

But Senjin, ever the more impatient Of the two, was eager to share with Shisei the end of the story of So-Peng that the River Man had begun so many years ago.

'I was right to travel to Zhuji,' he told her that night. 'They knew what had happened there, and they told me.'

It happened (Senjin began) that Tik Po Tak was so incensed by his rival's usurpation of his territory in Nightside that he discovered where the man went to have sex and, invading the brothel just before dawn, he singlehandedly slew the man, his three bodyguards and their lovers while they slept.

At least, this is what the Singapore police thought and, though they had had a lucrative deal with Tak, this bloody carnage he had wreaked was too much even for their avaricious stomachs. They pursued Tak with all of their resources. They were aided in this by the remnants of the slain rival's tong.

Now it must be remembered that So-Peng had a cousin, Wan, who cleaned the offices of the chief of police. Several days after the hunt for Tik Po Tak was begun, newspapermen, following an anonymous note, discovered the tong's involvement in what was a police murder investigation. The scandal rocked Singapore. The British chief of police, of course, disavowed any knowledge of the

involvement of criminals with elements of his department. But the information was too damaging, and he was forced to fire, arraign on charges of misconduct or reassign two-thirds of his force. This, naturally, left him little time to pursue Tik Po Tak, who eventually returned to Nightside, consolidating his power, and then expanding it.

Now, however, Tak was not alone. He had So-Peng behind the scenes to guide him. The tanjian elders at Zhuji say that So-Peng was behind everything. It was he who conceived a way into the closely-guarded brothel, bribing the kitchen staff, who laced the wine drunk by the rival samseng and his bodyguards with a sleeping potion.

It had been So-Peng as well who had his cousin secrete the incriminating documents in the chief of police's office. And it was So-Peng who applied for the vacancy left by the departing deputy chief of police.

It was ludicrous, on the face of it. After all, So-Peng was only a lad (no older than I am now, Senjin said). But So-Peng was aided by the nature of the emergency in which the chief of police found himself. The chief was under enormous pressure to restore not only order

- which a grand show of British soldiers could accomplish

- but confidence in his administration. And military might certainly would not do that. Already the governor had met him twice, threatening to relieve him of duty, sending him back to England in disgrace. Besides, no one else had applied for the job.

The chief of police, desperate, at his wits' end, gave So-Peng the job 6f deputy, even though So-Peng had not had even one day's experience at police work. But for So-Peng such training was superfluous. He had his extraordinary gift. And he had Tik Po Tak as his staunchest ally.

So-Peng's plan was brilliant. Using the Singapore police, he did Tak's work for him, effectively decimating

all of Tak's rival tongs. The other samseng could do nothing but acquiesce to Tak's sovereignty.

In this way, inside a week, order was restored in Nightside. Within two weeks, a suspect in the multiple brothel murders had been apprehended. The major surprise was that it wasn't the samseng Tik Po Tak at all, but an overly-ambitious member of a rival tong. The evidence against the tong member was overwhelming, and the chief of police and the governor made sure that the murderer's subsequent trial and execution were given maximum exposure. That way, the alarmed townsfolk were given a finite focus for their fear, and rage.

A month from the day So-Peng was hired, life in Singapore had returned to normal, and So-Peng, at the age of twenty, became the most celebrated man in the Colony.

He had used his gift to bury from sight the murder of his half-brother which he had committed, and the murder he was responsible for planning.

So-Peng had advised Tak to pull his money out of the poppy-growing business. He had, with Tak's money, begun to buy up acres of land just north of the Colony. He hired H. N. Ridley, the director of the Singapore Botanical Gardens, whom So-Peng had met on the tiger hunt Tak had taken him on on their way to find the tanjian who turned out to be Zhao Hsia.

So-Peng set Ridley to work planting his beloved Para trees, and within five years they had the beginning of what was to be the largest rubber plantation hi the area. So-Peng left his civil post to devote himself full-time to his business. He hired the flat-faced boy he had met in the streets near his house. They soon became friends as close as brothers. He allowed his brothers to come and work for him. His father had recently died of dysentery in Java. There was no word about his mother, although

it seemed clear that So-Peng had spent a great deal of money trying to find her.

Time passed, and while the plantation was developing, So-Peng, still using Tik Po Tak's tainted money, bought up other businesses, always at the most strategic time -times of stress for the seller.

He met and married a Chinese woman, and like a machine she began to drop a female child in his lap every year. But still, it seemed, So-Peng was not content. The tanjian elders say that friction developed between So-Peng and Tak as to how to handle the legitimate businesses. The disagreements became protracted, bitter. Tak wanted out, and apparently So-Peng obliged him.

The authorities discovered Tik Po Tak's bloated corpse floating in the bay one morning. Whatever investigation might have initially arisen was quickly terminated. Even though he had left the police force, So-Peng had maintained close ties with those who had succeeded him...

'But what of the most important part?' Shisei asked. "The tanjian emeralds?'

Ah, the tanjian emeralds (Senjin said). Well, it happens that the tanjian were not idle during the time of their enemy's consolidation of power. They sent out others after Zhao Hsia failed to return. They saw their mistake. They had assumed that the son of the traitor, Liang, would be able to persuade his mother to return the tanjian emeralds she had stolen from her father. They thought that Zhao Hsia would be able to convince his half-brother to return with him to Zhuji to begin properly his studies of Tau-tau, as was his right, privilege and duty.

Instead, only death had come of their attempt at forgiveness.

Still, they were loath to assert the full extent of their power. Both Liang and So-Peng were tanjian. Moreover, they were of the prime lineage, and the imperative to keep

them alive overrode even the most energetic arguments to the contrary.

So the tanjian elders sent emissaries to find Liang and her priceless cache of power. All efforts failed. They did not find her or the emeralds. So-Peng and the members of his family were watched to see if they had somehow acquired the gems, but there was no sign that they had. The tanjian even kept watch over So-Peng's flat-faced friend, now the foreman of the rubber plantation. They observed as So-Peng's wife died, as he courted and wed a second wife, as she began to deliver sons to him even as, one by one, his daughters died of a virulent plague sweeping the Malaysian peninsula.