I. The Square
Berlin. A square.
“Douglas is an English aristocrat. He is paranoid, conservative, and dictatorial. He is an unforgivable extreme terrorist and ethnic terrorist.”
A large crowd gathered on the square. The speaker stood on a temporary stage, wearing a dark blue suit, his tie tied tightly. His voice, amplified by loudspeakers, bounced back and forth between the buildings around the square.
“Byrne is his lackey. His sidekick. His executioner.”
Someone in the audience whistled. Someone held up a sign that read “Judge Douglas.”
“Claude is an extreme scientist. A thorough scientific fraud. His team was a bunch of scum. His alma mater—Virdo Institute of Technology—likewise produces academic trash. The Claude Engine was widely used without any testing, causing several deaths.”
The speaker was named Hubery Phillip. A famous historian. A graduate of Humboldt University, specializing in the history of racial relations in the Alliance. His right hand was missing two fingers—frozen off when he was picking garbage in Douglas’s neighborhood as a child.
No one knew about this. They only knew Hubery was a historian whose words carried weight.
“Society progresses; it does not remain stuck in old ways. We should encourage talents like Geoffrey Bray and Bruce Sinclair. They drove social progress, improving the Claude Engine—oh no, it should be called the Bray Engine. Humanity has initially mastered inter-galaxy navigation.”
Applause. Cheers. Someone threw a hat into the air.
II. The Garden
London. The backyard of Douglas’s home.
A hypersignal radio sat on the stone table in the garden. The signal crossed half the Milky Way, traveling from Berlin to London with a latency of less than a second. Hubery’s voice flowed out of the loudspeaker, mingling with the birdsong in the garden.
“Hubery Phillip is just a jumping clown who trims his sails to the wind. Always spouting these clichés under the protection of the Infernals. Claude is indeed unforgivable, but the hypersignal he invented benefited trillions of people. And Hubery Phillip? He has no idea about any of it. His cerebellum is soaked in water.”
Douglas muttered, turning the radio’s volume up a little. He sat in a rattan chair, a blanket draped over his knees. His hair was entirely white. The wrinkles on his face looked like dried riverbeds.
Louise brought over a pot of tea.
“Father, you’ve been retired for thirty years, and you still care about these things.”
Douglas did not answer. He took the teacup, lowered his head, and sniffed.
The porcelain brought by Louise was covered in patterns, blue and intricate, climbing over the cup’s surface like vines. Inside the pot were tea leaves shipped from East Asia. A delicate fragrance refreshed the mind.
Douglas savored the flavor from the East.
This was his favorite afternoon tea. He had been drinking it like this for nearly twenty years.
Louise was an orphan adopted by Douglas.
At the time, he had just returned to London. On his way, he saw a notice on a poster—the London Orphanage had to cut expenses due to government budget tightening. With an attitude of just taking a look, he walked in, and at a single glance, he saw Louise.
A girl sitting on the window sill, her hair very short, freckles on her face; seeing him walk in, she smiled.
Douglas was past the age for adopting children at the time. But to help him emerge from the grief of losing his son, the Alliance processed the paperwork swiftly. Rumor had it that Aie Koichi had helped quite a bit as well.
No one knew that poster had been deliberately pasted along the road Douglas was bound to take.
Nor did anyone know that “taking a look” had actually been arranged in advance.
Later, after Louise grew up, she heard the full story of the matter from an old acquaintance. She did not tell Douglas.
The person who had arranged all of this was Byrne. He wanted his superior to emerge from his grief.
III. Byrne
“If your Uncle Byrne were still around, he could have taken you to Paris to play.”
Douglas sighed. The teacup rested on the stone table, emitting white steam.
“A pity, he has been gone for over a year now.”
Byrne died of a tumor.
The tumor grew on his spine. With the medical standards of the time, a single surgery could have removed it, followed by a three-month recovery period and a ninety-seven percent survival rate.
Byrne refused treatment.
No one knew why he did so. Was living not good?
Louise had asked him. Byrne had sat under the grape trellis in that small Paris courtyard, holding a glass of lemonade in his left hand, and said: “A minor illness, nothing serious.”
Three months later he died in the hospital. Not because the tumor had metastasized—the tumor pressed against the spinal nerve; he refused surgery, the nerve severed, his lower body became paralyzed, and then came organ failure. The entire process was slow.
By the time Louise rushed to Paris, Byrne had already closed his eyes. On the nightstand in the ward lay a worn book, inside of which were three pressed, dried roses.
Louise loved going to Uncle Byrne’s small courtyard to water the flowers most. Every school vacation, she traveled alone to Paris. The moment she stepped off the plane, she would see a one-handed middle-aged man receiving her. The sleeve of his right arm was empty, pinned with a safety pin.
“Uncle Byrne, how did your hand break?”
She asked every time. Byrne smiled every time, saying it was blown off in the war.
When Louise grew up, she stopped asking. She knew it had not been blown off in war. But she did not know how it had broken. And there was no one left to ask.
Byrne had no children and never married. He had always treated Louise as his own niece—even though this niece shared no blood relation with his superior, Douglas. Douglas adopted Louise, and Byrne looked after Louise. The two men had never discussed it, as if it were a division of labor that required no words.
IV. The Last Drink
Douglas could not hold his liquor as well as Byrne.
Every time they drank, by the third glass, Douglas would start talking about his two sons. Byrne sat opposite him, saying nothing, looking at him like an old comrade-in-arms.
“You know? Eden won runner-up in the Virdo Youth Boxing Championship when he was in high school. He was just a step away from champion.” Douglas tapped his glass with a chopstick. “It’s just a pity a genius appeared. I don’t know the name anyway, only that he was an Infernal. He took away the honor that belonged to my son.”
Byrne poured him wine. He did not pick up the conversation.
“Thomas was a mathematical genius. He admired Claude deeply, even saying that one day he wanted to join Claude’s scientific team.”
Douglas gulped down his drink in one shot.
“But after that day, I never saw Thomas again.”
He set down his glass. The glass clinked against the tabletop.
“Others said he was killed by the Fire Fiends. I don’t believe it. Brown Star was so secure; if Fire Fiends came near Brown Star airspace, they would be discovered. How could it be Fire Fiends?”
Holding the wine bottle, tears flowed down Douglas’s face involuntarily.
Byrne said nothing.
Byrne was no longer afraid of Douglas. Though he would also resent him—resent what, no one could say—pain always dissipated in time.
A long silence ensued.
“Actually, I think Claude was the true genius.”
Douglas said suddenly.
Byrne raised his head.
“When he showed me the engine, I realized it. And he told me that this technology could not be used on living people.”
He paused. The wine bottle swayed in his hand.
“Yet I… did not…”
His voice grew smaller and smaller.
“It was I who harmed him.”
Douglas slammed his fist heavily against the wall.
The eyes in the tavern turned toward them in unison.
“My brother drank too much, don’t mind him.” Byrne smiled to smooth things over, then stood up, helped Douglas up from his chair, and carried him out of the tavern on his back.
That was the last time Douglas and Byrne drank together.
V. Three Roses
Byrne went to California every spring.
He flew to Los Angeles, rented a car, drove for two hours to a small town cemetery. The tombstone was small, gray granite, inscribed with:
Marjorie Chen 2501–2522
Byrne squatted in front of the tombstone, inserting three roses into the dirt before it. Red roses.
Then he would sit for a while. Sometimes ten minutes, sometimes an hour. Not speaking. Not looking at his phone. Just sitting.
Having done all this, he stood up, patted the dust from his knees, drove back to Los Angeles, and flew back to Paris.
He bought round-trip tickets. He knew he would come every year.
The origin of this matter was a diary.
When Byrne “handled” Marjorie at the Quilla base—using that ice-cold word “handled”—he knocked her unconscious first. Before she lost consciousness, he pulled the diary out of her backpack.
Flipped to the latest page.
“This is a strange day. General Byrne and I discovered there were no living people inside the Fire Fiend base. I don’t know why General Byrne wants me to write the battlefield record like this. But at least there are still roses to keep me company; I love roses best.”
Immature penmanship. A 19-year-old girl, accompanying the military for the first time, taking the battlefield for a school social practice.
Byrne looked at this passage. Looked for a long time.
Then he tore out the page and put it in his pocket. Knocked her unconscious. Completed the task handed down by Douglas.
When Marjorie woke up, she found herself lying in a hospital bed.
Unable to move.
The doctor told her she had been hit by a car. Compound fractures all over her body. She would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.
The first thing she did upon waking was to look for her diary.
The diary was still there. Turning to the latest page, one page was missing.
She guessed something.
No one told her the truth. Nor did anyone need to tell her. A 19-year-old girl wrote what shouldn’t have been written on the battlefield, then lost a page of her diary and her legs. The causal relationship between these needed no explanation from anyone.
And so, in full understanding, she spent the remainder of her life.
Epilogue · All That Remains
Byrne was dead.
Marjorie was dead.
Claude was dead too.
All that remained was Douglas.
He sat in the garden’s rattan chair, a blanket draped over his knees, a pot of tea from East Asia beside his hand. The hypersignal radio was still broadcasting Hubery’s speech, but he could no longer hear it.
Louise stood behind him, refilling his tea.
The garden was very quiet. A bird let out a call. The steam from the teacup rose straight up, then scattered.
Louise went to Paris every winter to sweep Byrne’s grave. Douglas sometimes wanted to go too, but now he was old and could no longer walk.
Douglas doted on Louise most. From the first moment he saw her, it felt like destiny.
Only that first glance had been arranged by someone else.
—End of Chapter Six.