The room was quiet elegance, rice-paper walls, polished lacquer, low tables, and the faint perfume of hinoki wood drifting in from the inner garden.
Ten of Japan’s most powerful corporate figures sat in a broad semicircle facing Matthew Marmaduke.
Matt remained standing.
The black kimono with emerald trim had been chosen carefully. So had the two daggers at his waist, House Th’ron and House T’all, unmistakably V’ren against an otherwise Japanese silhouette.
Several of the executives had noticed both.
Matt was certain all ten had.
“Before we begin,” he said in fluid Japanese, “I have something for you.”
A page stepped forward carrying a compact black case and placed it on the lacquered table.
Matt opened it.
Inside were twelve identical devices.
“Our third-generation translator.”
The chairman of Sony leaned slightly forward.
Matt picked one up.
“Universal cable support, full wireless charging, substantially improved dialect recognition, technical terminology, idioms, and better handling when several people are speaking in the same room.”
He set it back into the case.
“You will each receive several hundred. Distribute them however you think they will be most useful.”
There was a brief silence.
The Sony chairman looked from the case to Matt.
“Several hundred each?”
“Yes.”
“These are gifts?”
“Yes.”
No qualification followed.
The chairman gave a formal inclination of his head.
“That is extraordinarily generous, Lord Marmaduke.”
“You came to my house.”
Matt sat.
“I would be a poor host if I made you leave empty-handed.”
Tea was poured.
For several minutes the conversation remained safely technical. Battery life. Charging standards. Industrial vocabulary. How well the translators handled technical Japanese. Whether they could mediate conversations involving several languages simultaneously.
Matt answered what he knew and said when he did not know.
Eventually the chairman of Sony reached the question Matt had known would come.
“When will our people be permitted direct engagement with V’ren technical specialists?”
Matt set down his tea.
“Permitted is the wrong word.”
The chairman waited.
“The V’ren aren’t mine to distribute. The problem right now is organization. During the first month almost everything happened because somebody knew somebody who knew me, or K’rem, or one of the captains, or happened to be standing in the right place when a problem needed solving.”
He shook his head.
“That is a terrible way to run anything.”
A few smiles appeared.
“We are building institutional channels. Technical consulting, education, licensing, manufacturing partnerships, research. All of it needs somewhere to go besides my telephone.”
The president of Hitachi leaned forward.
“So direct corporate access is coming?”
“Structured access is coming.”
“That sounds carefully worded.”
“It is.”
That drew another small laugh.
Matt took a drink of tea.
“You will be able to work with V’ren expertise. What I will not promise is that every company that wants a V’ren engineer gets one delivered to its research department.”
“Even ours?” the younger Mitsubishi-Rakuten executive asked.
“Especially yours. There are too many of you.”
That one got an actual laugh.
The executive smiled despite himself.
“And what will such access cost?”
Matt looked at him.
“Today?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing.”
The room became noticeably quieter.
The executive waited for the rest.
Matt picked up his tea again.
There was no rest.
The Panasonic chairman, oldest among them, watched Matt for several seconds.
“You have brought ten of us here, men accustomed to being asked for something, and you want nothing?”
“I invited you to meet me.”
“You could have done that in a conference room.”
“I have conference rooms.”
Matt gestured toward the house around them.
“This is nicer.”
The Sony chairman smiled faintly.
“You are making yourself difficult to categorize.”
“I’ve survived the experience.”
“What should we understand from today, then?”
“That we’re going to be doing business.”
Matt’s answer was casual.
“I don’t know exactly what that business looks like yet. Neither do you. Anyone who tells you he already has a complete plan for integrating forty thousand years of V’ren technological development into human industry after one month is either lying or needs medical attention.”
Several heads nodded.
“So today,” Matt continued, “you get translators. You use them. Give them to engineers. Give them to factory managers. Give them to the irritating person in research who keeps finding problems everyone else hoped would go away.”
That earned knowing smiles around the room.
“Let your people break them. Find out what they’re good at. Find out what they’re bad at. Send us the results.”
The Hitachi president lifted one of the translators from the case.
“You are giving away several thousand units so that we can test them for you.”
“Among other reasons.”
“And still no contract.”
“No.”
“Exclusivity?”
“No.”
“Preferred access?”
“Not today.”
The younger Mitsubishi-Rakuten executive studied him.
“You really are giving us something for nothing.”
Matt smiled.
“I didn’t say there would never be business between us. I said I didn’t invite you here today to collect payment.”
The distinction settled across the room.
Tea gave way to a considerably more relaxed conversation.
They talked about manufacturing without negotiating it.
Sony discussed precision electronics.
Hitachi talked about industrial control systems.
Panasonic’s chairman asked what surprised Matt most about V’ren manufacturing.
Matt admitted that half the time the difficult part was discovering which V’ren technology was genuinely revolutionary and which was merely so old and ordinary to them that nobody had thought to mention it.
That produced twenty minutes of questions.
Matt answered some.
On others he simply said, “I don’t know yet.”
Nobody seemed disappointed by that answer.
T’mari joined part of the discussion when questions crossed into V’ren institutions. T’monn listened more than she spoke. L’tani T’all became animated when one executive asked about technical education and then had to stop herself from turning the answer into a lecture.
Matt enjoyed watching her try.
Eventually tea was refreshed for the last time.
The Panasonic chairman looked toward Matt.
“I think the Sony chairman was wrong earlier.”
Sony’s chairman raised an eyebrow.
“You are not a gatekeeper,” Panasonic continued. “But neither are you simply a broker.”
Matt waited.
“You are behaving more like a steward.”
The Sony chairman considered that.
“A daimyo?”
Matt laughed softly.
“I see someone did more than just search my name.”
“I have people for that.”
“Good people, apparently.”
Matt did not reach for Tokugawa Yoshinobu.
He did not need to.
There was another reason he had invited them to his house.
The meeting had ended before several of the executives realized it.
A page entered carrying the first of the presentation boxes.
Then another.
Ten boxes were placed before the ten guests.
They were dark wood, beautifully made and deliberately unmarked.
The Mitsubishi-Rakuten executive looked down at his.
“There is more?”
“A going-away present,” Matt said.
The lid opened.
Nobody spoke for several seconds.
The Sony chairman recognized the bottle first.
So did Panasonic.
The others followed quickly.
Dukes.
One hundred years.
The bottle carried no auction number.
That made the Panasonic chairman look at it a second time.
“Founder’s Gift?”
Matt nodded.
“Drink it with somebody you like.”
The old man looked genuinely startled.
The younger Mitsubishi-Rakuten executive picked up his bottle carefully.
“You are giving each of us one?”
“Yes.”
“Lord Marmaduke, these do not normally enter the market.”
“I know.”
The Sony chairman turned the bottle until he found the identifier.
He scanned it.
The provenance record appeared on his device.
Dukes quality control.
Founder’s Gift release.
Then the custody chain.
Dukes.
Matthew Marmaduke.
Sony.
His expression changed slightly.
Not because the bottle was worth money.
Everyone in the room could afford expensive bourbon.
A numbered century-old Dukes bottle might open at one hundred thousand fiat, commonly finish around one hundred seventy thousand, and occasionally pass a quarter million when two wealthy collectors became stupid at the same time.
They all knew that.
This was different.
You could buy a numbered bottle.
Founder’s Gift stock went where the people behind Dukes chose to send it.
And the record showed that this one had come from Matthew Marmaduke’s private holdings.
The Hitachi president scanned his.
The same pattern.
Marmaduke.
Then him.
Panasonic did not bother scanning his immediately.
He simply looked at Matt.
“You have a remarkable relationship with Dukes.”
Matt smiled.
“They’ve been good to my family.”
Entirely true.
“You prefer the eighty-year, don’t you?” Sony asked.
Matt’s eyebrows rose.
“You did your homework.”
“I have people for that too.”
“The hundred is too much barrel for me. Excellent whiskey, but by then it’s become more about what it is than how I want my bourbon to taste.”
Several men looked down at bottles that routinely sold for the price of houses in poorer parts of the world.
Matt took another drink of tea.
“The eighty is better.”
Panasonic laughed first.
Sony followed.
The tension finally broke around the room.
The younger Mitsubishi-Rakuten executive still looked suspicious.
“I feel compelled to ask one more time.”
Matt waited.
“What do you want?”
“Today?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing.”
The man stared at him.
Matt smiled.
“Take the translators. Drink the bourbon. Call me when you have something interesting to talk about.”
That was all.
No memorandum of understanding appeared.
No contract was slipped onto the table.
No request for political support followed them toward the door.
Matt stood and bowed to each man as they departed.
Ten of Japan’s most powerful corporate figures left the house carrying cases of V’ren-derived translators and century-old Founder’s Gift Dukes Bourbon.
Behind them, the doors slid closed.
For several seconds nobody in the sitting room said anything.
T’mari looked toward Matt.
“You enjoyed that.”
“Very much.”
“You gave them all extremely expensive alcohol and asked for nothing.”
Matt shrugged.
“I don’t particularly like the hundred-year.”
L’tani T’all stared at him.
“That is your explanation?”
“It seems relevant.”
T’monn looked toward the closed doors.
“They are going to spend the rest of the day trying to determine what you want.”
Matt picked up his tea.
“I know.”
T’mari studied him for another moment.
“You already know what you want.”
Matt smiled into the cup.
“Not today.”
