The Empress of Japan closed her eyes as she leaned back in her chair, alone at last for the first time since waking early that morning. She was tired ... so very tired, and her heart burned with loss like she had never felt in her life. Her husband was dead. So were her sons, along with every other adult male in her family, and she wanted nothing so much is to find a private place to wail out her pain.
But she couldn’t take the time to mourn — couldn’t even take more than a few minutes to rest — because the men of her family weren’t the only ones that were dead. Women and children across Japan were mourning their own loss, and among those mourning were the families of the Prime Minister, the entire Cabinet, all but a few of the House of Councillors, and a majority of the House of Representatives, not to mention the upper managers of the government bureaucracy. In the space of a day and a night the political leadership of Japan had been gutted, and she had gone from being a symbol filling a ceremonial role to the effective head of state, tasked with the chief responsibility of seeing to it that when those families finished their mourning and moved on with their lives they would still have a nation within which to do it and a future to look toward.
But she was so very tired.
“Your Majesty, I apologize for intruding on one of your few chances to rest, but we need to talk.”
The Empress opened her eyes to find a young woman standing in front of her desk — a beautiful young woman, with long turquoise-shaded hair and a figure that made the scandalously short-skirted black and white sailor fuku she wore look good. The Empress’s eyes sharpened as she sat up. Her guest could not be older than her late twenties, but she carried an aura of power about her with an ease that the Empress had not seen equaled in all her years — and with her position, she had met the most powerful men and women in the world.
“Sailor Pluto,” she said in greeting. “Please, take a seat. Would you like some refreshments?”
Pluto carefully lowered herself into the offered chair with a sigh and shook her head as she braced the heart-shaped garnet-topped staff in her hand against another seat. “Thank you, but no. As much as I would like to, I’m afraid I don’t have the time.”
The Empress nodded, mind racing. Sailor Pluto’s youth might hide it well but she, too, was having a long day. So the Empress only asked, “To what do I owe the honor of your visit?”
Pluto was silent for a long moment as she leaned back in the chair before nodding. “I have some information and some advice. First, you made the right call when you slapped down the idiot that wanted to immediately institute an all-out effort to find those responsible for this. Your reasoning that we have more important things to focus on at the moment — liking making sure our food distribution doesn’t collapse like a house of cards — was certainly sound enough, but beyond that there’s no point. The responsible party wasn’t a hostile nation, but one bitter, deranged genius who had been shunned by our society all his life because of his gaijin blood and physical deformities. He was determined to teach us a lesson in the fallacy of racial purity.”
The Empress’s gaze sharpened. “You know a great deal about my deliberations, and found the source of the plague remarkably quickly.”
Pluto shrugged. “I can see into the past — anywhere in the past,” she replied. “So when it comes to past events the only limit to my intelligence gathering capabilities is how much information I can absorb. In this case it wasn’t difficult to figure out, the number of geneticists that are capable of creating this catastrophe are in the single digits. The low single digits. In fact, at this point it might be zero. Dr. Moreau didn’t actually intend to kill anyone, and when he woke up this morning to find that he’d killed one in five sexually mature males on the entire planet he stepped off the roof of his company’s office building.”
“So all this death and chaos is because of a genius pushed to madness by our own blindness, and a stupid mistake,” the Empress mused. She closed her eyes as she fought to control her emotions, but couldn’t stop two tears from trickling down her cheeks.
Pluto politely looked away until her hostess had recovered her composure, then replied, “I know it is cold consolation, but as it is, we were lucky. If he had intended to kill us off and had been as successful with that as he was with this, there wouldn’t be enough of us left alive to bury the dead. But I’m afraid we aren’t finished with what he did intend, he wanted to do more than just embarrass us all by sex with ‘inappropriate’ partners. He set out to have every woman affected by his bug become pregnant, and as far as I can tell he succeeded.”
The Empress froze. “Pregnant,” she repeated.
Pluto nodded.
“All of them,” the Empress added.
Pluto nodded.
The Empress forced herself to relax. “We aren’t going to have enough medical supplies in all of Japan for all the women seeking abortions.”
“And that is where my advice comes in,” Pluto said, leaning forward. “Your Majesty, while Dr. Moreau might have just intended to embarrass us and mix the races together, what he did was decapitate the leadership of every nation in the world. That isn’t too much of a problem for the republics — most of us have rules in place for elevating new leadership, and even for those of us where the catastrophe exceeds the process in place we’re accustomed to working things out through discussions and compromise. We can deal with this. The dictatorships are another matter. Between internal power struggles and young fanatics suddenly being handed more power than they have common sense striking out at hated neighbors whatever the cost, much of the world is very quickly going to become a very ugly place.”
“Such as China,” the Empress said, expression hardening.
“Such as China,” Pluto agreed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the power struggle over party leadership tears China apart — it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. There is no way that its collapse won’t involve all its neighbors, and even once that’s over the world is going to be a very different place. Your Majesty, I know that dealing with this large an influx of babies all at once will be a major undertaking, but if Japan is to continue to exist as we are for more than a generation we are going to need those children.”
“An interesting point,” the Empress mused, “but I can hardly ban abortions throughout the island.”
“No, you can’t, not if you wish to maintain your ability to lead,” Pluto agreed. “But you can ask that we accept the results of the last day and night. And you will have help in that. All of the Sailor Senshi except the youngest, Sailor Saturn, were caught up in the chaos and so are most likely pregnant. I think I can convince the others to keep our babies, and publicly say as much.” At the Empress’s lifted eyebrow, Pluto shrugged. “I know, while our fights have been fairly public, we ourselves have not. Perhaps it is time for that to change.
“As well, there are a couple changes in the laws governing marriage you might announce.” The Empress’s other eyebrow joined the first, but Pluto pushed on. “It will help convince women to keep their babies if they can legitimize them, and many of the fathers ... are not suitable. Others are not available because they are already married. If you announce that up to, say ... three women could marry the same man as did the samurai of old, that would everyone additional options. As well, a temporary lowering of the age at which people can marry to around perhaps sixteen would help, both in convincing parents to support their daughters having their babies, and helping teenagers resist parents that don’t want them to have their babies.”
“Interesting ideas, but you do know that I don’t have the authority to unilaterally change laws, don’t you?” the Empress asked, voice dry.
Pluto shrugged again. “So state that the changes will be provisional, to be ratified by the Diet once it is reconstituted. I hardly think that ... ah, august body will reject your announcements at that point. Something similar worked for President Lincoln in the early months of the American Civil War.”
Taking a deep breath, she levered herself to her feet and picked up the Garnet Staff. “And now, I need to move on — more people to meet, to salvage as much as we can from this.”
For a long second the Empress observed her guest before pushing herself to her feet. The lithe, lovely woman looked young, but for a moment it had seemed as if every year the Empress felt weighing on her shoulders were pressing down on the Senshi as well. “Thank you for the information, and the advice,” she said quietly. “I will consider both. And ... please feel free to drop in some other time when we aren’t trying to save the world, or at least as much of it as we can reach. I suspect I am going to need people around me that aren’t overly impressed with my position.”
A surprised smile lit up Pluto’s face. “Thank you, I will.” And then she was gone.
In the now empty office, in spite of the grief and responsibility still weighing on her, the Empress found herself smiling. It was good to know that she had someone to share the burden with, even if only in a small way. And perhaps even a friend. Straightening, she took a deep breath and pushed the button that would signal her secretaries, new and old, that she was again ready for them. Like Pluto, she too had her own people to meet, to salvage as much as they could and rebuild.
Pluto was still smiling as she arrived before the Time Gates — the invitation to visit had been a pleasant surprise. Surprises were rare for the Senshi of Time, and pleasant ones even more so.
Facing the massive doors, she waited a few seconds to give her future self an opportunity to pop in and make mysterious pronouncements about their future — nothing. Good, she really wasn’t in the mood to deal with her own twisted excuse for a sense of humor at the moment.
With a sigh of relief she brought up the future scan function. As the flickering images covered the paneling on the doors showing the phases of the moon, she decided to take a moment’s self-indulgence and take a quick peek at her future relationship with the Empress. The results had her smiling again — it wouldn’t be a long friendship, not as aged as the Empress was, but it would be a deeply satisfying one. Pluto was looking forward to her time with the woman that would become one of the most famous and revered rulers in Japanese history.
Okay, Setsuna, enough playing. Turning from her and the Empress she took a more general look at the immediate future and again sighed with relief. She didn’t know if the Empress had decided that her suggestions were good ones or simply to trust her, but the odds were as close to inevitability as they could get that she would follow Pluto’s lead in all particulars.
And that means it’s time for you to deliver your side of the offer. Time to face the rest of the Senshi. This time, it was not something she was looking forward to, they were going to be deeply unhappy and demanding answers. They weren’t going to like those, either.
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(Posted Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:52)
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