1
The second time, he was not startled. He watched the light withdraw upward from his feet. The brightness went out of his palm and the leather of the bag became ordinary leather. The smell changed: not coffee and cigars but tobacco tar, damp paper, oiled paper.
A chair went over. Papers went up. A military policeman standing inside the door put his hand to his holster and then stopped moving, because no service regulation in this country covered the question of whether to draw. Fourteen men were looking at him. An elderly admiral rose and bowed deeply.
"We take this to be the advent of a god of war."
Ah, he thought. So this is how this country takes it.
Four years ago — four years ago for him, four years ago in a world that does not exist here — in the Cabinet Room in Washington, one man had knelt and prayed and one had shouted for ventilation. Faith and science had received the same light in two different ways.
Here the split ran differently. Beside the admiral who had bowed, a man in uniform spoke with his hand still on his holster.
"Sorcery. Some conjuring trick got up by the navy. On this night, in this room. It is altogether too convenient."
It was not a question of accepting or doubting. Two services had begun to fight over whose light it was.
His right pocket rang.
2
He took out the phone. This time his hand did not shake.
ATLAS Your decisions will change this world. Choose what you wish to take with you. After that, do as you please.
A list came up.
Elite Battleship Squadron Available War Economy Available Campaign Chronicle Unlocked Grand Carrier Force Requirements not met …… Admiral's Record Room Campaigns completed 1 Nations completed 1 ―――――――――――――――― Next Theatre Modern Fleet Requirements not met
Two to three elite battleships, with heavy cruisers and destroyers in escort. Eight hulls or so. When you next begin, you may bring this formation with you.
He read it twice and did not take it. The reason was simple: asked where the ships had come from, he could not answer. That a man comes down in a column of light is something the fourteen in this room have seen. But eight warships lying in a bay — how does one explain that? A miracle nobody witnessed is not a miracle. It is a suspicion.
He took the second one.
War Economy Additional resources at the start.
Slightly larger stockpiles. Nothing more. Nobody notices. Nobody asks to have it explained. What needs no explaining is the strongest thing there is. He thought that, and then noticed that he was reasoning on the assumption of a next time.
He put the phone away and raised his head. Fourteen men had watched in silence while a man touched something that was not there.
"Where is the Prime Minister?"
"Here, sir."
"May I ask your name?"
A white-haired civil official answered, uncertainly.
"Arima. Arima Yasuo."
He nodded. It was not a name he knew, and that was as it should be. The check was done. Not the past. A different world, closely resembling it. What he knew stood here as hypothesis, not as fact. The second time round, he had learned to establish that in the first thirty seconds.
"In eighteen days, on the morning of the eighth of December, this country will go to war with the United States."
3
It took less than a minute to convince them. The men at the top did not doubt: fourteen of them had watched the light come down at the same moment, and that was enough. Before the night was out he could reach into almost every decision this country made.
The problem was outside the room. In Washington it had still gone through — that country's army was one where orders flow downward. Here it was different, and he would learn that in his body over the next eighteen days.
4
Three questions were put to him, in the order of land, sea, and the nation.
Land. Hori'uchi, the Chief of the General Staff, laced his fingers on the table.
"The divisions pinned to the northern frontier since the special manoeuvres cannot yet be moved. The outcome in the west is not clear either. If the northern border is struck while the southern operation is under way, which do we abandon — south or north?"
"The north will not come. Not for the whole of next year, at least."
"Your grounds."
"They have their hands full in the west. They are already drawing divisions out of the Far East and sending them west. What is drawn out does not come back."
"How do you know this?"
"I know it. In the world I come from."
Hori'uchi frowned at the phrasing. Then, for the first time, he sat down. Sitting down was the signal that the discussion would continue.
Sea. Hashiguchi, Chief of the Naval General Staff, tapped the blank northern margin of the chart with the back of one finger. The old admiral who had bowed earlier.
"The striking force is assembled at Hitokappu Bay. It sails in six days. Once it sails it goes to radio silence. If it is to be stopped, tonight is the last night."
He was struck by that sentence. Not will it succeed but shall we stop it — and this old man was asking it of a man who had come down out of the air an hour ago, whose name he did not know.
It was then that he understood, for the first time, where he was standing. That morning, the man on the other side had been him. He had put carriers in the northeast, widened the patrol fan to the north, brought the air defences to a war footing. Six carriers had gone into that trap and could not go home in the shape they arrived in. Those six carriers were now assembled in a bay off Etorofu. Not the same ships. Six closely similar ships, in another world. Even so, at the name of the bay, his throat closed.
"Stop it."
The room went silent.
"We take only the southern resource area. The Indies and the British possessions. We do not lay a finger on American territory."
"And the Americans will accept that quietly?"
"They will not," he said. "But a country that has not been fired upon needs procedure in order to declare war. A country that has been fired upon does not."
Hashiguchi looked at him for a long while. Then he said:
"Adviser. That is the kind of correctness this country hates most."
"I am aware of it."
"If you say it knowing that" — the old admiral lowered his eyes — "then I shall follow."
The nation. Morishita of the Cabinet Planning Board had not once looked surprised, from the beginning. He spoke without stopping his hands on the papers.
"From the morning of the war, requisitioned shipping begins to sink. Do losses and new construction balance?"
"They do not."
"In what year does it break?"
"In the summer of the third year, what can be carried from the south to the home islands falls below what the home islands require."
"If it does not balance, then by what year, and by what means, do we come to terms?"
"By the second year, having made the shape of a negotiated peace."
"Not after we have won?"
"After we have won is too late."
Morishita looked up for the first time.
That night, in the end, this was the one man he had made an ally.
5
Every decision was taken that night, and then it could not be taken back.
Eighteen days remained. Not time for thinking. Time for watching the result.
He had lived through these eighteen days once already, in Washington. That time they had been eighteen days of setting a trap and waiting. This time was different. This time they were eighteen days of defending, hour by hour, a decision to do nothing.
On the twenty-sixth of November the note arrived from the United States, demanding withdrawal from China and Indochina.
The Foreign Ministry read it as an ultimatum. The General Staff was up in arms and said that negotiation had been pointless after all.
He had seen this paper four years earlier, as a draft, the day before it was sent. In a room in Washington he had been able to stop it. He had not stopped it, because stopping it would have broken the eighteen-day trap.
Now that paper lay on the table in front of him.
"Adviser. What is to be done?"
He ran a finger along the edge of it. Concede and you are refused. Do not concede and the same paper arrives on the same day. Whichever you choose, this paper comes on the twenty-sixth of November. The only thing he could change was where they were standing when it arrived.
"We take the south only. The policy does not change."
6
The eighth of December. The landings began at Kota Bharu. At Pearl Harbor nothing happened at all.
That morning he was in the same room beneath the residence. Nobody was looking at him; everyone was looking at signals. Reports came in from every quarter of the southern theatre and the positions of the units moving on the oil fields of the Indies crept across the chart.
Shortly before noon a different signal came.
COMMANDER — SUBMARINE SQUADRON PROCEEDING TOWARD HAWAII ON OWN AUTHORITY.
He read the line three times. He had stopped it. He had reversed it. The order had gone down, been received, been acknowledged. And still some commanders were going east on their own judgement.
Hashiguchi came to him. In two weeks the old admiral's face had aged ten years.
"Adviser. This is difficult to say."
"Go on."
"Your orders have been taken for faint-heartedness."
"…"
"Those at the top have seen you. Those who have seen do not doubt. But to those who have not, your orders are simply cowardly orders. Withdraw, hold back, avoid. Those are precisely the orders this army does not obey. It has been that kind of army for thirty years."
It was then that he learned the shape of the weapon he was holding. In Washington orders flowed. Here they jammed. The same knowledge, the same light, the same eighteen days — and yet with a different country, correctness travels differently.
Then he noticed the worst of it. The more careful the move, the more it is a move made because one knows what ruin looks like, the less this army will obey it. The very correctness of the knowledge generates resistance.
By that evening the units that had gone on their own authority had been brought back. To bring them back, Hashiguchi spent every year of his forty-year face. Pearl Harbor was not struck. That night, for the first time, he doubted whether this country could be made to win.
7
The connection was thin here too. In the first month he went back over the radar design to check it. The reply took three days. The content was almost exactly what he had received in Washington four years earlier.
But here it did not go the same way. The yield on vacuum tubes was different. Components built to the same specification came out at different values from different factories. There was not enough insulating material. There was no manual to teach a maintenance rating how to repair it.
"We can make it," the engineer said. "If ten a month will do."
There he learned the true shape of this war. What is lacking is not knowledge. It is the speed at which knowledge turns into objects. So he did four things. Four, and no more.
One. He told them the codes were broken. He could not say who was breaking them or where. So he only said: work on the assumption that they are broken; if the assumption makes the pattern fit, they are broken. Three months later a room in the General Staff went pale.
Two. He brought the radar down to a form that could be built now. There are no semiconductors; it must be vacuum tubes. What he possessed was not a design but an order of priority — what to give up in order to have it now. Range is enough. Bearing can be coarse. It must work at night. In eighteen months it was small enough to go aboard ship.
Three. He gave them the position of Daqing. Under the Manchurian snow. Drill and there is oil. Drill deep. They told him they could not reach it. If you cannot reach it, buy machinery that can, he answered; there is still one country that will sell. Slower than the south. But one day it becomes your own oil.
Four. He had the convoys reorganised. Do not mix fast ships with slow. Put the escorts not ahead of the convoy but behind and abeam. The submarine does not come from ahead. It overtakes, and lies in wait.
That last was not technology but the nature of the sea, and it does not change however far history slips. The fourth was the most effective. The fourth was also the most resented.
"The Adviser has not once spoken of winning," a young staff officer said.
He did not answer. To answer would have made one more telegram.
8
In the spring of 1943 a technical officer from signals intelligence came to see him.
"Adviser. An odd report has come up."
"Go on."
"American anti-aircraft fire is hitting too well."
He did not raise his head. He could not.
"Hitting too well — meaning?"
"The shells burst without striking. Merely from passing nearby. No country has such a fuze in service."
He looked at the teacup on the desk. The proximity fuze. He knew such a fuze was possible. The principle, the essentials of doing it with vacuum tubes — all of it was in his head. It was a thing he had given to nobody in this world.
The young officer went on.
"And this may be my own error. In a fragment of decrypt there is a word that makes no sense."
He was handed the slip of paper.
He knew the word. It was a word that did not yet exist in this period.
"You are mistaken," he said. There was nothing else he could say.
After the officer had gone he sat without moving for a long time.
They had come down on the other side too.
And the thought that came after that was the heavier one.
He had called them himself.
Fight quietly and it comes late. Fight spectacularly and it comes early. In this world he had believed he was fighting as quietly as he could — not striking Pearl Harbor, avoiding the decisive battle, guarding the convoys, thinking of nothing but the shape of a negotiated peace.
But he had not been quiet.
He had put radar to sea two years early. He had made them suspect their codes. He had made them drill under the Manchurian snow. He had changed how convoys were formed. What is changed can be seen from the other side.
By as much as it was visible, the scales of this world tipped; and by as much as they tipped, one more person came down on the other side.
It was then that he felt, for the first time, that he could see the logic of the arrangement. How large he moves is something he decides. When the other side arrives is decided by how he decides it.
Next time, he could do it better.
Catching himself thinking that, he laughed a little. Of the five worlds, that night was probably the first time he laughed.
9
The war ended in the spring of 1944.
Not won. Ended.
The southern resource area was held, the convoys still ran, the fleet still moved. But there was nothing beyond that anywhere. American yards put out ships faster than his memory of them, and Morishita updated in red pencil, every month, the day on which that curve would cross the curve of this country's tonnage.
Four months before the crossing, a peace table was set.
Much was lost. Almost everything taken was given back. Even so the ships were in harbour, and the men came home.
On the day of the signing, Hashiguchi said to him:
"Adviser. You did not let us win."
"No."
"I thank you for not letting us win. An odd way to put it."
"Not at all."
"May I ask one thing?"
"Please."
"Where do you go next?"
He could not answer. He had never put that question to himself.
10
In the summer of 1945, it came.
The war was over. This country was no longer fighting. It came regardless — cloud rising over a distant atoll, in the month he knew, in the place he knew, the thing he knew.
There was a great deal he had moved. Pearl Harbor unstruck. Radar at sea two years early. Derricks standing under the Manchurian snow. Convoys that did not sink. A peace made eighteen months early.
But that summer had not moved by a single day.
Two worlds, twice. The same month, the same place.
He began to think about what that meant. He began, and stopped partway. He was afraid of the rest of the thought.
11
That autumn there was nothing that could be called a celebration of the peace. Instead there was a small gathering at the residence.
When it was over, in the corridor back to his office, his right pocket rang.
He did not stop. He took out the phone as he walked. The second time.
ATLAS Operations in this world are complete. Your decisions have changed this world. Choose what you wish to take to the next one.
Complete, it said.
He had not won. He had only ended it by negotiation. It said complete regardless. Who is marking this, he thought — and then felt that he had asked that question once before.
He opened the app. Two lines had turned black.
Opening Diplomatic Mission Unlocked Research Head Start Unlocked …… Admiral's Record Room Campaigns completed 2 Nations completed 2 ―――――――――――――――― Next Theatre Modern Fleet Requirements not met Remain in this world Requirements not met
He read the description of the first.
Relations with the major powers begin better at the outbreak of war.
So this came out because he had ended it by negotiation.
Understanding that, he stood a while in the middle of the corridor.
The lines do not turn black because you win. What comes out depends on how you ended it.
The two lines below the rule were still grey. One cannot remain. Not here either.
He closed the screen.
After he closed it, the light came up around his feet.
"Again," he said aloud.
The smell changed. Not tobacco tar: scorched earth, tung oil, and the river. Under his soles, the give of a plank floor.
It was humid. Outside the window there was fog.
Around a long table, thin men were getting to their feet. Their uniforms had faded and some of the shoulder boards had been mended.
The oldest of them spoke in a shaking voice.
"The Mandate of Heaven."