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Fifty percent of Tachyon's races had been at Nakayama, and the other fifty had been at Hanshin. His maiden race had been Hanshin, but the height of his glory was at Nakayama. A tachyon had shot down those chutes before skipping its way out of the world. But it had existed.
Tracen and his trainer had pulled a few strings to let Tachyon pace the course after he had gotten his diagnosis. They hoped it would provide some sort of catharsis. It had been an informative experiment, one that taught him much about the impact of place upon mood. For all that emotions could push one forward, they could hold one back.
(The worst part wasn't even the finish line or the long stretch of sod he had kicked up as he raced. It was the jumping course when he meandered over to the steeplechase. He wasn't even in a state to cross over a seventy centimeter hedge. He wouldn't have done well at the Grand Jump, but he had the physical capacity. Now he didn't.)
It wasn't unusual to have these sorts of mixed feelings about a course, or so his basic surveys said. His Nakayama was…
There was a long, slow exhale above and behind his head. Nakayama had covered Tachyon in glory. It had been an embarrassment for Flight. Tachyon had watched Flight take the Derby as third favorite six months before his maiden, and he'd watched Flight's abortive attempts at a G1 in Nakayama (Tenno Sho and the Cup) in his first wheelchair.
"You remember our seats?" Tachyon asked.
"Yeah."
Tachyon could maneuver on his own, he wasn't a child; however, he wouldn't complain that Flight had developed some silly, emotional, older-brother complex regarding the matter. Well, it seemed less silly now.
Somewhere in the tunnels beneath his wheelchair, the particle accelerator that had shot Tachyon out all those years ago, there was Daiwa. His hands tightened around the edge of his armrests, and he could feel the fabric of pennants with his daughter's name on them. Almost despite himself, the scientific comparison started forming in his mind: the final test of an experiment eighteen years in the making. Would everything – diet, training, planning, an ethos that Tachyon had first seeded with bedtime stories – align and deliver the Arima Kinen into her hands?
It was, as Bouquet might have said, a stupid, doltish way to think. Daiwa was more than some experiment, infinitely greater than the mere combination of his sperm and Bouquet's ova. The him of the past would have laughed, called the use of infinite in that context hyperbolic. If you could somehow take an accounting of the chemicals buzzing around in his brain, you could get a number, but that wouldn't express how he felt.
The wild experimentation of his youth simply wasn't acceptable for Daiwa. When he first held her in his arms, Tachyon felt a sudden urge to form an ethics committee. Whose bright idea had it been to leave him in charge of a baby girl?
Flight had taken to it better. He'd never convince Tachyon otherwise. Speaking of… "Do you know where Minuet is?"
"You see that banner over there?"
It was hard not to see it, what with that color scheme. "She brought friends."
"Yeah…" Flight said.
(Friends, Tachyon supposed, were a variable you couldn't really control… at least, without terrorizing Daiwa in a way he couldn't bring himself to do. Some of her male friends tested that resolve, though…)
People muttered to each other and pointed his way as Flight pushed through the crowd. They'd gotten as close to the action as they could – Tachyon wanted unimpeded, up-close observation, and he could suffer crowds. Usually. If they interrupted his daughter's race, Tachyon would be quite cross with them, but they were here for the race. For Daiwa.
His being overshadowed by his daughter didn't stop a cloud of fans from accumulating around his seat, begging for autographs and photos. "You can handle this?" Flight whispered in his ear.
"Certainly, Flight. Who do you take me for?"
"Right. I've gotta go for a minute. Takao asked me to put fifty thousand on your daughter. You want to add anything?"
"No."
"Your loss," Flight grinned, giving a salute before he headed off. Tachyon started autographing.
Regarding the betting, Tachyon believed he could separate variables and pull disappointment (or elation) for his daughter winning away from financial gain or loss that might have accompanied it… but it just felt cheap. This was another scruple he had developed after Daiwa had entered into his life. If he had been allowed to, he would have bet a fortune on himself at every race for more research funding.
He knew Takao meant well by it – it was a statement of faith – but it seemed almost corrupting. Oh, he was aware of the lucre betting produced and how it benefitted the racetracks, but it was a distraction from pure athleticism, the perfection of the science of running. Why would you need money on the line to make racing exciting?
The fans who crowded around him were kindred spirits, in a sense. They loved Umas and what they could do, and they had high hopes for the future of the species. (Tachyon's vision of the future of Umakind, at the moment, involved them behind his daughter, eating dirt.)
The crowd had abated by the time Flight returned, letting him collapse into his seat, betting slip in hand. Wait a second…
"A hundred thousand? Did Surgeon pitch in?"
"No. That's mine."
"I was under the impression you weren't a betting man, Flight."
"Now's not a time for half measures, I don't think."
Tachyon grinned. A decade or two late was better than never.
There was Scarlet. Tachyon was trembling with nerves. At this distance she was more a smear of blue and red. Tachyon thought of those sketches of atoms in textbooks, red protons and blue neutrons. A tachyon was faster, in theory. As in, it remained safely ensconced in the realm of theory.
There were thirteen others and Tachyon had read up on each and every one, but his gaze kept drifting back to the second favorite – behind Daiwa! Gogh. Matsurida Gogh. Daiwa was favored to beat him today, sure, but empirically, Gogh had won one hundred percent of the races he had with Daiwa at the Arima Kinen. That was due to just one race, sure, but it was proven.
He'd like to tell himself it was just a matter of the training that he had guided Daiwa through this past year, but he knew that wasn't true. Racing was woefully luck based, and there just wasn't enough time or perhaps enough fan enthusiasm for two dozen Arima Kinen trials to determine the true winner. Maybe people wouldn't like the hard data, either. Too cold. Too cynical. Too likely to dampen an upset.
Was Tachyon hoping for an upset? Did the emotional part of him – the part of him that had slaved over Daiwa's training schedule for the past year – not want to believe it would be an upset? He leaned forward in his chair as the racers crept into the starting gate.
It wouldn't even take three minutes. Tachyon had spent eight minutes, eleven and one tenth seconds officially racing, over his entire career. Daiwa's entire racing career, to this point, could probably be distilled down to twenty minutes of desperate, explosive action. (But what glorious minutes they were. To let loose so completely, to feel the competition sliding away behind you… it was better than anything Tachyon had ever dosed himself with. Flight pitied him after his tendonitis diagnosis, but Tachyon pitied him back. To have held back, even knowing what happened to their mother… he'd robbed himself.)
Both he and Flight were anxious. Tachyon would assume most of it was Flight worrying about the performance of his beloved niece and not the fifty thousand yen he'd bet on her. (See what Tachyon meant?)
Some sort of prattle was in the air, the announcer and the crowd, but Tachyon couldn't bring himself to care. The extraneous fell away, or was, perhaps, purposefully obscured, like Tachyon was looking into a microscope.
The gates swung open, and immediately Daiwa slid into the lead.
She was eating up the ground. Pace looked good. Daiwa had done a two-kilometer race three point one seconds faster than Tachyon had ever had at the Tenno Sho just two months ago, but the Arima Kinen was twenty-five percent longer than any race Tachyon had ever run…
Tachyon breathed in and tried, for a few moments, to banish math from his head. Daiwa cornered beautifully. They closed, closed… that had to be less than half a length…
(Good news: Gogh and his damned shadow roll were far to the back.)
Final corner. Tachyon could almost imagine that she was running home to papa. She was peeling away! Peeling away and still in the lead!
He was shrieking something, Tachyon couldn't tell you what, and they simply couldn't catch up, Admire Monarch was sliding in from the outside but no, he didn't have the time–
Tachyon thrust himself out of his chair and nearly collapsed to the ground. It seemed like the whole world was cheering his daughter's name, just as mad for her as he was – just as mad as he'd been for eighteen years.
Tachyon could take some small comfort in that they were both crying when they met. He'd vaguely entertained the idea that he'd gotten that all out of his system in those initial moments of post-victory fanaticism, but when he heard her say Papa…
He was only an Uma.
Even after that, it was all a bit fuzzy. Minuet and her friends were making a racket, Flight had promised Daiwa a fancy dinner, Takao was shrieking through the phone, and Tachyon had gotten more texts than he'd usually get in a month… (His half-siblings, in their near-endless multitude, were all paying attention to the Arima Kinen. How could they not?)
All of that, and his focus was still on Daiwa. "Papa, I know what race I want to run next."
Her next race? They'd talked… if her health held up, she wanted to go international. The Emirates, the States, the United Kingdom. She pushed a sheet of paper into his hands, and he almost expected an itinerary for the Jebel Hatta…
What he found was a date and time for a thoroughly local, thoroughly mundane run. A ten-k that humans could participate in – in a separate division, of course. Why would she…? Oh, it was a fundraiser.
"For charity?" Tachyon asked. Daiwa had inherited her mother's heart, he'd never doubted that…
"Well, yeah, but look. Here!" She jabbed her finger at a little section of the text, next to the portions describing the Uma and human portions of the race.
Wheelchair division.
The Arima Kinen was two and a half kilometers; Daiwa had done it in two minutes and thirty-five seconds. Call that two and a half, for estimating's sake, and that's a kilometer a minute. Thousand meters a minute, that's basically nine hundred and change, sixty and forty…
About sixteen meters per second. Could Tachyon make a modified wheelchair that could hit sixteen meters a second?
(Maybe Daiwa would have to slow her pace, considering the race's length… but Tachyon had never lost his taste for speed, even if he thought he'd lost the means.)