Splashed With a Splendid Sickness, the Sickness of the Pearl

Although seppuku is still occasionally undertaken voluntarily, the practice of ordering or expecting it under any circumstances was not carried over to most of Japan’s colonies, as early colonial projects were often collaborative efforts between Christian daimyos and European missionaries. Eventually, Japan itself became sufficiently saturated with both Christian converts and Christian ethical ideas infiltrating Shinto-Buddhist discourse that compulsory suicide was outlawed empire-wide in 1746.

–Ethics and Morality in Japonic Cultures, by Albert Spitzer, PhD. McGraw Hill. New York City, 2027.

Chris sat in a country bar not far from the east Oakland site where the Don Juan had been built, and where it was now being welded back together. The dancefloor was hopping, a live band was playing a Johnny Cash song that worked shockingly well on their east Asian folk instruments, and General Earp, in his civvies of a blue collared shirt with a bolo tie and jeans with a bronze belt buckle the size of a dinner plate, was clapping along beside him. Chris was five… maybe six… no, more like eight or nine drinks deep, most of it tall glasses of Yuma Water: a cocktail with ginjo sake and silver tequila for its main ingredients, dangerous on their own and liver-destroying in tandem. His eyes were fixed on a muted television screen above the bar, the closed captions rolling by as two reporters debated whether the pilot of the Don Juan would retire in shame, or be found with a wakizashi or a Bowie in his hands and his belly slashed open.

Earp turned to follow Chris’s gaze, and his smile disappeared. “TURN THAT SHIT OFF!” he yelled over the music, and the bartender nearly fell back into his taps, before fumbling under the bar for a TV remote.

Earp stood tense and red while the TVs were switched off, then relaxed slowly. “I’m sorry, kid. I reckon we’ve both had enough to drink. Let’s get you home.”

As Earp was walking Chris out the door, Jen Higuchi was coming in with two friends, all in tight dresses. She stopped. “General Earp… Chris…?”

“Howdy, Higuchi,” Earp said, “We’ve gotta call it already. This was a bad night for drinkin’.”

“I get it. You two have a ride?”

“I was fixin’ to call a Directorate car.”

“Chris isn’t looking that great. I can get him home, make sure he’s okay. Better than having some Gendarme private do it.”

“I wouldn’t want to impose on your–”

“It’s no imposition, general. I’m supposed fix the Duelist when it’s broken, and as far as I’m concerned, that includes its pilot.”

As Earp handed Chris off to Jen, he caught her friends exchanging knowing smiles, and her glaring them down. She guided him into the passenger seat of her car, and for a moment, he was surprised to feel the car moving despite not hearing an engine rev up. Damn it, gasoline cars have been antiques since before I got my license. I passed “half in the bag” half the night ago. His head swam and twisted, and his eyes traced a tattoo on Jen’s shoulder, visible under the strap of her cocktail dress where a sleeve normally covered it. It looked like a word in some foreign script. Not Greek… Armenian? Coptic?

“Whazat?”

“Hm? Oh, it says ‘remember’.”

“Wha’ lang’j?”

“English. Old alternative script, ‘Deseret alphabet’, it’s called. An American religious sect came up with it. Second Great Awakening. Whole group came west and settled on some land Mexico and the Shogunate were fighting over. That’s how the white half of my family ended up out here. Funny, now that I think about it: I don’t think that sect ever went over to this script completely, yet I got the idea for this tat from one my dad has. This failed alphabet’s stuck with my family better than the religion that spawned it.”

“Hm, intr’stin…” His thoughts slid over one another and wouldn’t stick, but he could swear he had heard of a sect like this. If he were sober, he’d probably be able to put a name to it. It had come up in… a military history elective he’d taken at Sacramento?

Jen waved her badge at the gate to the Project Lepanto lab, then drove to the contractor and officer housing off to one side of the lot, where Chris had been assigned a trailer. She helped him up the front steps, and as soon as they were inside, he lurched for the couch, and fell into a twisted recline neither quite sitting nor laying down.

Jen flicked the lights on, found his desk, and rummaged idly through one of the top drawers. “Any meds I need to get in you, before you pass out?”

“Nah.”

She wandered over to the kitchenette, searched until she found a clean glass and an RO water spigot. “Hydrate up, flyboy, it’ll help with the hangover.” As she filled the glass and walked back to him, Chris noted her stopping to tuck a large chef’s knife into a drawer. A small morbid laugh echoed in his mind. I wasn’t contemplating it, but everyone sure thinks I ought to be.

She sat down beside him, and put a hand on his knee as he drank. When he set the cup aside, that hand was rising up his thigh, while the other played with the strap of her dress, and her face came in close.

At this stage, she wasn’t anything more than a colleague to him– an attractive colleague, sure, but he wasn’t the sort to jump into a fling quite this casually. He didn’t trust himself to slur out the sentiment without sounding self-righteous, however, so he pointed out the other complication. “Sorry, Jen, I’m in no state to please a woman.”

She sighed and sat back. “You’re right, stupid of me. Anything else I can do for you?”

“Let Otto know I won’t be able to meet with him until… I dunno, eleven, noon.”

“You should take tomorrow off completely.”

Chris shook his head. “I’ve already spent too much time wallowin’. Some people’re already writin’ me off. Well, fuck ‘em. I’m gonna kick that Peruvian tank driver’s ass next match.”

The next day, Chris and Otto took their meeting standing, watching Cristina and her team mend the mid-torso joint between the cockpit and the reactor where a missile had punched through the outer armor and separated it. The Austrian gave Chris a dumbed-down overview of what the engineers had decided on for reinforcing the joints, and Chris put forward a few ideas of his own, for both defensive and offensive capabilities…