Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

He started to-but he didn’t. He’d thought of surfsailing to let him get farther out to sea than he could with an ordinary surfboard. A slow grin spread over his face. That was why he’d thought of it, yeah, but did anything in the rules say he couldn’t have some fun with it, too?

“You don’t want to lose the fish,” he reminded himself, and lashed the crate to the mast with a length of his fishing line. He stood by the mast, too, holding on to it with one hand, adjusting the sail so it kept on pushing him shoreward.

People on the beach were pointing to him. They had to wonder what the hell kind of contraption that was out there on the Pacific and what he was doing with it. I’ll show ’em, he thought, and rode in on the crest of a breaker, skimming along as graceful as a fairy tern. He didn’t even think about what would happen if things went wrong, and they didn’t. He came up onto the soft white sand feeling like Jesus-hadn’t he just walked on water?

The surf fishermen actually gave him a hand. “That’s the goddamnedest thing I ever saw,” one of them said, nothing but admiration in his voice.

Oscar grinned again. “It is, isn’t it?”

COMMANDER MITSUO FUCHIDA muttered to himself as he walked up to Iolani Palace. Commander Minoru Genda sent him a quizzical look. Fuchida’s mutters-and his misgivings-coalesced into words: “I don’t like getting dragged into politics. I’m an airman, not a diplomat in striped trousers.”

“I don’t like it, either,” Genda said. “But would you rather leave the political choices to the Army?”

That question had only one possible answer. “No,” Fuchida said. The Army had the political sense of a water buffalo. The unending strife in China proved that. Half of Japan’s resources, manpower and manufacturing that could have been used against the United States, were tied down in the quagmire on the Asian mainland, a quagmire of the Army’s making. Maybe Japanese rule here wouldn’t mean antagonizing everybody in sight. Maybe. Fuchida dared hope.

Japanese soldiers had replaced the American honor guard at the palace. They presented arms as Fuchida and Genda came up the stairs. Once inside, the two Navy officers climbed the magnificent inner staircase-Fuchida had learned it was of koa wood-and into King Kalakaua’s Library, which adjoined the King’s Bedroom. The Army officers waited for them there. Fuchida had trouble telling Lieutenant Colonel Minami from Lieutenant Colonel Murakami. One of them had a mustache; the other didn’t. He thought Minami was the one with it, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe Minami and Murakami had trouble telling him and Genda apart, too. He hoped so.

The Library was another fine specimen of late-Victorian splendor. The chairs featured elaborately turned wood, leather upholstery, and brass tacks polished till they gleamed like gold. There were book stands of walnut and of koa wood, all full of leather-bound volumes. Along with those of officials from the Kingdom of Hawaii, the walls boasted photographs of Prime Ministers Gladstone and Disraeli and the British House of Commons.

“Busy,” was Genda’s one-word verdict.

“I like it,” Fuchida said. “It knows what it wants to be.”

Murakami and Minami just sat at the heavy green-topped desk in the center of the room. For all they had to say about the decor, they might have been part of it themselves. Army boors, Fuchida thought as he sat down, too.

Two minutes later, precisely at ten o’clock, a large, impressive-looking woman of about sixty with heavy features and light brown skin strode into the room. In a long floral-print dress and a big flowered hat, she made a parade of one-in fact, of slightly more than one, because Izumi Shirakawa, the local Japanese who’d interpreted for the Americans at the surrender ceremony, skittered in behind her. He might have been a skiff following a man-of-war with all sails set.

Fuchida and Genda rose. Half a second slower than they should have, so did Minami and Murakami. All four Japanese officers bowed in unison. The impressive-looking woman regally inclined her head to them. Fuchida spoke to the interpreter: “Please tell her Highness we are pleased to greet her here.”

Shirakawa murmured in English. Princess Abigail Kawananakoa replied loudly and clearly in the same language. Shirakawa hesitated before turning it into Japanese. The woman spoke again, even more sharply than before. Shirakawa licked his lips and said, “She, ah, thanks you for the generosity of welcoming her to the palace her family built.”

“She has her nerve,” Lieutenant Colonel Murakami said indignantly.

“Yes, she does,” Fuchida said, but he was smiling. He found himself liking the Hawaiian (actually, half-Hawaiian, as her father had been an American businessman) princess. She was the widow of Prince David Kawananakoa, who was Queen Kapiolani’s nephew. Fuchida looked back to the interpreter. “Tell her we appreciate her very kind greeting.”

Through Shirakawa, the princess said, “I suppose you asked me-no, you told me-to come here because you want something from me.”

That made both Minami and Murakami splutter. This time, Fuchida had all he could do not to laugh out loud. He did like her. She had a great sense of her own importance, and wasn’t about to let anyone get the better of her. The Army officers didn’t know what to make of that. They thought she should have been groveling at their feet, and didn’t see that her sturdy independence might make her all the more useful to Japan.

Minoru Genda did. He said, “Tell me, your Highness, do you remember the days when the Americans put an end to the Kingdom of Hawaii and annexed these islands?”

“I do,” Princess Abigail Kawananakoa replied at once. “I was only a girl, but I remember those days very well.”

“How do you feel about them?” Genda asked.

For the first time, the princess hesitated. “Things are not always simple,” she said at last. “Look at me if you do not believe that. I have both bloods in me. That is what Hawaii is like these days. And what I thought then and what I think now looking back are two different things.”

Lieutenant Colonel Minami opened his mouth. Fuchida was sure what he would say and how he would say it. He was also sure Minami could not do worse if he tried for a week. Forestalling the Army officer, he said, “And yet you still have your disagreements with the American government.”

“With this American government, certainly.” Princess Abigail Kawananakoa let out a disdainful sniff. “How anyone could agree with that man in the White House has always been beyond me, though many people seem to.”

“You were Republican National Committeewoman for Hawaii,” Fuchida said after checking his notes. The title translated only awkwardly into Japanese. He had no idea what a committeewoman might do, especially when Hawaii was only an external territory of the USA, not a province- no, a state: that’s why they call it the United States, he reminded himself.

“I was,” she agreed. “And I have stayed a Republican even though my party is no longer in the majority. I do not abandon causes once I undertake them.”

There was the opening Fuchida had hoped for. “And have you abandoned the cause of the Hawaiians, your Highness?”

Again, Princess Abigail Kawananakoa hesitated. At last, she shook her head. “No, I have not abandoned it. How could I? I am one of them, after all.”

Now Fuchida could ask the question Lieutenant Colonel Minami would have tried too soon: “Since things have changed here, do you not think you could do most for them as Queen of a restored Kingdom of Hawaii?”

She looked at him. She looked through him-he got the feeling she could see the wall behind him through the back of his head. She said, “If I were to be Queen of Hawaii, I would rule; I would not just reign. I am no one’s figurehead, sir: not the Americans’, and not yours, either. Could I be anything more than a figurehead?”