How can you feel sympathetic toward a man who wants to reverse the outcome of World War II and make Japan conquer the U.S.?
I have long felt that writers should erase the word «villain» from their vocabulary. Scrub the concept out of your mind, in fact. There are no villains in the world, only people doing what they feel they must do. I’m sure that Adolph Hitler felt he was doing what was best for the German people and the entire human race, no matter how horrible the actions he authorized.
Nobody sits in a dark corner cackling with glee over the evil they have unleashed. Not in good fiction. But every good story has not only a protagonist (the «good guy» or gal), but an antagonist, a character who is in conflict with the protagonist. As a thought experiment, try to visualize a story you admire told from the point of view of the ostensible villain … oops, excuse me—the ostensible antagonist. Imagine Hamlet being told from Claudius’ point of view. (Frankly, Claudius seems to be the only sane person in the whole castle.)
Incidentally, there’s a bit of science in this story that most other writers have conveniently ignored. Time travel requires faster-than-light travel. Which explains, perhaps, why no one has yet built a time machine.
So: Did I succeed in making Saito Konda a sympathetic character? Crippled in body, brilliant in mind, warped in spirit—yes, he is all that. But do you feel sorry for him?
Konda grimaced against the pain, hoping that his three friends could not see his suffering. He did not want their sympathy. He was far beyond such futile emotions. All that was left to him was hate—and the driving will to succeed.
He was sitting in his laboratory, his home, his hospital room, his isolation chamber. They were all the same place, the same metal-skinned module floating five hundred kilometers above the Earth.
The two men and one woman having tea with him had been his friends since undergraduate days at the University of Tokyo, although they had never met Konda in the flesh. That would be the equivalent of murdering him.
They were discussing their work.
«Do you actually believe you can succeed?» asked Miyoko Toguri, her almond eyes shining with admiration. Once Konda had thought she might have loved him; once he had in fact loved her. But that was long ago, when they had been foolish romantic students.
«I have solved the equations,» Konda replied, hiding his pain. «As you know, if the mathematics have beauty, the experiment will eventually be successful.»
«Eventually,» snorted Raizo Yamashita. Like the others, he was sitting on the floor, in deference to Konda’s antiquated sense of propriety. Raizo sat cross-legged, his burly body hunched slightly over the precisely placed low lacquered table, his big fists pressed against his thighs. «Eventually could be a thousand years from now.»
«I think not,» said Konda, his eyes still on lovely Miyoko. He wondered how she would look in a traditional kimono, with her hair done properly. As it was, she was wearing a Western-style blouse and skirt, yet she still looked beautiful to him.
The two men wore the latest-mode glitter slacks and brightly colored shirts. Konda’s nostrils flared at their American ways. The weaker America becomes in real power, the more our people imitate her decadent styles. He himself was in a comfortable robe of deep burgundy, decorated with white flying cranes.
It happened that Konda reached for the teapot at the same moment that Miyoko did. Their hands met without touching. He poured tea for himself, she for herself. When they put the pots down again, her holographic image merged with the real teapot on Konda’s table. Her hand merged with his. He could not feel the warmth of her living flesh, of course. If he did, it would undoubtedly kill him.
Tomoyuki Umezi smiled, somewhat ruefully. The window behind him showed the graceful snow-capped cone of Fujiyama. He raised his tiny cup.
«To the stars,» he toasted.
The other three touched their cups to his. But they felt no physical contact. Only their eyes could register the holographic images.
«And to time,» Konda added, as usual.
Back in their university days, Tomo had laughingly suggested that they form a rock group and call it the Four Dimensions, since three of them were trying to conquer space while Konda was pouring his soul and all the energy of his wasting body into mastering time.
They had never met physically. Konda had been in isolation chambers all his life, first in an incubator in the AIDS ward of the charity hospital, later in the observation sections of medical research facilities. He had been born with no effective immune system, the genetic gift of his mother, a whore, and whoever his father might have been. They had also gifted him with a chameleon virus that was slowly, inexorably, turning his normal body cells into cancerous tumors.
The slow and increasingly painful death he was suffering could be brought to a swift end merely by exposure to the real world and its teeming viruses and bacteria. But the medical specialists prevented that. From his unwanted birth, Konda had been their laboratory animal, their prized specimen, kept alive for them to study. Isolated from all the physical contamination that his body could never cope with, Konda learned as a child that his mind could roam the universe and all of history. He became an outstanding scholar, a perverse sort of celebrity within academic circles, and was granted a full scholarship to Tokyo University, where he «met» his three lifelong friends. Now he lived in a special module of a space station, five hundred kilometers above the Earth’s surface, waited upon by gleaming antiseptic robots.
The four of them did their doctoral theses jointly, a theoretical study of faster-than-light propulsion. Their studies were handsomely supported by the corporations that funded the university. Japan drew much of its economic strength from space, beaming electrical energy to cities throughout Asia from huge power satellites. But always there was competition from others: the Europeans, the Chinese, the Arabs were all surging forward, eager to displace Japan and despoil its wealth.
The price of peaceful competition was a constant, frenetic search for some new way to stay ahead of the foreign devils. If any nation achieved a faster-than-light drive, the great shoguns of industry insisted that it must be Japan. The life of the nation depended on staying ahead of its competitors. There could be no rest as long as economic ruin lurked on the horizon.
For all the years since their university days, the three others continued to work on turning their theories into reality, on producing a workable interstellar propulsion system: a star drive. Miyoko accepted the chair of the physics department at the University of Rangoon, the first woman to be so honored. Dour Raizo became the doyen of the research laboratory at a major aerospace firm in Seattle, U.S.A., long since absorbed into the Mitsubishi Corporation. Tomo waited patiently for his turn at the mathematics chair in Tokyo.
From the beginning, Konda had been far more fascinated with the temporal aspects of spacetime than the spatial. Since childhood he had been intrigued by history, by the great men who had lived in bygone ages. While his friends labored over the star drive, Konda strove to produce a time machine.
In this he followed the intellectual path blazed by Hawking and Taylor and the AAPV group from the unlikely location of South Carolina, a backwater university in the backwater U.S.A.