by Victor Milán
“The coil should be ready this afternoon, Doctor,” Takai said. “Perhaps we can demonstrate it for Yoshimitsu Michiko. She’s very interested in the TOKUGAWA project, you know.”
O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “Really? I thought she’d come to visit her family.” Takai maintained his usual look of frozen geniality, but the technicians whispered among themselves around the gallery walls. Yoshimitsu Michiko had not found it necessary to visit her family for five years. Dr. O’Neill knew that as well as anyone. What does she want here? O’Neill kept asking herself, compulsively hollow-tooth probing. Has she come to stake a claim in the project her own research helped make possible? It was no coincidence that brought Yoshimitsu Michiko back from her self-imposed exile in Jakarta.
What if she wants the whole thing?
O’Neill pivoted her chair abruptly from her console. “I’m going up to my room for a nap,” she said briskly. “Have the coil ready after lunch.”
“What about Yoshimitsu Michiko?” Takai asked.
“If she wants to come and watch, that’s her business.” I don’t want that woman in my lab!
+
The acolyte walked on the bank of a river with his mentor, the Zen master Soshi. Mellow sunlight surrounded them with warmth, but the air brushed them with fingers of autumn crispness. To their right fields lay under a tawny blanket of ripe wheat. Blue-green mountains hovered in the distance beyond, their bases lost in haze. On the left shimmered the dazzling phosphene dance of sun on water. At a place where the stream went broad and shallow, they paused in the shade of a cypress tree to watch a school of small fish darting above a bottom of pebbles as smooth and perfect as if they had been chosen by a gardener’s hand. Soshi laughed. “How delightfully the fishes are enjoying themselves in the water!” he exclaimed.
The acolyte frowned. The smell of water filled his nostrils, cool and slightly rank. “You are not a fish, Master. How, then, do you know that the fishes are enjoying themselves?”
The master looked at him and laughed again. “You are not myself” he replied, “How do you know that I do not know that the fishes are enjoying themselves? Eh?”And he turned and walked on, the soles of his sandals slapping the soft grass of the river bank, leaving the bemused pupil to stay or follow as he would.
-
Slowly O’Neill’s senses returned to her body, awareness of the fluorescent light filtering in beneath the edge of the bowl-shaped hood, the sound of her breathing within the helmet, the rustlings of the lab beyond, the slightly stale smell of air circulated by the ventilation system into the depths where the lab lay. Fantastic. Utterly fantastic. She shook herself. It was real! I saw and heard, I felt and even smelled everything as TOKUGAWA did. It was almost… like being one with him. She shied away from the last thought. A major goal of the project was achieving total rapport between human and machine. Even though the successful test of the Kliemann Coil brought that objective much closer, there was no telling whether it could truly be achieved. Do I dare hope?
She was becoming aware of the smell of her own sweat. It was cool in the lab, but even sitting up for any length of time tended to make her perspire, and the excitement of being tapped into the coil—the sensory centers of her brain stimulated by induction fields even as sense-analogue data were fed into TOKUGAWA—had made her perspire freely. She’d grown more conscious of her sweat since coming to Japan; she ate more meat than the average Japanese and was uncomfortably aware that it made her smell different to them.
“Lift the hood,” she said. The coil’s Gen-5 monitor picked up the command. Servos raised the gleaming inverted bowl, returning O’Neill to the real world.
Elation died within her. “A most impressive display, Doctor,” said the diminutive woman who stood beside the coil’s thronelike chair. “I’m honored to be present.”
Beside her, Aoki Hideo bowed. “Dr. O’Neill,” he said, making heavy weather of the “l’s”. “Permit me to introduce Dr. Yoshimitsu Michiko.”
But O’Neill’s eyes were already fixed on the young woman. She was slight, a touch over five feet tall, with glossy black hair permanented into a Western wave falling across her shoulders and down her back. Her face was oval, narrow at the chin, cheekbones distinct but not obtrusive, eyes wide, long-lashed, and slanting, nose straight above small mouth. Yoshimitsu Michiko was beautiful by the highly Westernized standards of modern Japan—but that wasn’t all. The chiseled Yoshimitsu features, accented with hints of lipstick and shadow at the eyes, would have looked just as natural under a gesso of white makeup, with eyebrows plucked and painted in halfway up the forehead, a vision from an ukiyo-e painting. In black turtleneck and designer jeans that looked heat-shrunk to her athletic body, Michiko looked very much the spoiled jet-set daughter of new Japanese money.
She looked less like a scientist who in her late twenties had taken a commanding position at the cutting edge of physics and held onto it for the past five years.
“Dr. Yoshimitsu,” O’Neill rasped, and sought to mask consternation behind a polite lie. “I’m honored to meet you. I—I’ve read your papers. Fine work.”
Michiko grinned. “Why, thank you, Doctor,” she said in perfect English. “I’ve tried to keep up with your work as well, though computers aren’t precisely my field.” She shook her head. “Really, I’m quite in awe of what you’re doing here. Would you introduce me to TOKUGAWA?”
“No.”
Michiko blinked.
Hastily, O’Neill went on. “This is a very delicate time. TOKUGAWA uses up so much of his capacity during our scenarios, it takes a considerable length of time for him to readjust.” Past Michiko’s shoulder, O’Neill saw Wali Hassad frowning at her through a haze of cigarette smoke and puffing in furious consternation. She was lying through her teeth, and he knew it. “Perhaps later.”
Michiko shrugged, and O’Neill felt a flash of distaste: how Westernized she is.
“Ah, well. I’ve very much been looking forward to meeting our new arrival; I hope you’ll be able to arrange an introduction soon.”
O’Neill dropped her eyes. “Yes, that should be possible.” Dragging the words out by main force.
Michiko went to the rail and leaned on it, staring down at the gleaming hemisphere. “So this is where he lives,” she said, half aloud. O’Neill stared at her back. She wished she had the strength to reach out and shake her. How dare she speak of TOKUGAWA like that? So… familiar.
Michiko turned back. “Will you be running another scenario again today, Doctor? I came in halfway through the last one.”
“No. Sorry. Not today. This is the first test of the Kliemann apparatus. It’s highly experimental; we need to analyze our data extensively before doing any more work with it.” Michiko shrugged again. “I hope the results are what you’ve been hoping for, Doctor. For selfish reasons as well, I admit; I almost wish—” She broke off suddenly, smiled, shook her head. “But another time, perhaps.”
She half turned, laid her hand on Aoki’s arm. “Thank you for the introduction, Aoki-san. I’m sure Dr. O’Neill is very busy, so let’s let her get back to her work. Thank you very much again, Doctor. It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”
Though she knew how rude it was, O’Neill could only nod. The manager and Michiko left the lab. O’Neill let the breath out of her in a long, shuddering sigh, feeling the pressure of her assistants’ eyes upon her. Thank God she didn’t ask if she could use the Kliemann Coil. It would have been pushing matters, even for Elizabeth O’Neill, to have brusquely refused a third reasonable request from the daughter of Yoshimitsu Akaji.
But I can’t bear the thought of that woman sitting in that chair, feeling TOKUGAWA’s thoughts as her own!
* * * * *
“So that’s Dr. O’Neill,” Michiko said as she and Aoki walked down the corridor to the elevator banks. “She was lost somewhere in the United States when I was here last, just after the war. Father was sending some kind of crack commando team to rescue her. It was all very mysterious and rom
antic.” She smiled and nodded to a pair of passing technicians. “She’s a strange woman, though. Rather harsh.”
“She is under a lot of pressure, Michiko-san,” Aoki mumbled, not looking at Michiko. Though he looked like a bakemono troll from Japanese mythology—and had often acted like one, in his capacity as general manager of an embattled corporation—Aoki Hideo was in fact a sensitive man. He understood that O’Neill had hated Michiko the instant she laid eyes on her, had resented every second she spent in her lab. Whether Michiko realized that, he couldn’t say; for all the years he’d known her, even though he’d been a second father to her since she was a child, he still could not read her.
“Ah, well.” Michiko sighed. “It’s not as if I don’t know any scientists who have trouble relating to people. I just hope we’ll get along; there are a lot of things I’d like to talk to her about—and it would be good to have someone besides you I could have an intelligent conversation with in this drafty old castle.”
She squeezed the old man’s arm. “My father’s granting me the honor of having lunch with him,” she said. “I wonder if my dear brother will be there?”
CHAPTER 9
“You say we won’t have visual on this one, Emiko?” Elizabeth O’Neill asked. The stocky linguist shook her head. “Then I suppose I’d better hook to the Kliemann Coil before we begin.”
The corners of Ito’s mouth turned down. “I wouldn’t do that, Doctor.”
“Why not?”
“This is an, uh, a rough one. Very intense.”
Wali Hassad pulled his cigarette from between full lips, briefly studied the trail of smoke from its tip. “Emiko ought to know,” he said, letting smoke trail out through his nose. “She wrote it.”
O’Neill frowned. “But how will we monitor the scenario? And why isn’t there visual, anyway?”
“Dr. Ito has programmed the scenario-master to provide a text narrative as the scenario progresses,” Kim said. The lanky Korean looked like a stork in his old-fashioned long white lab coat. “In this scenario, TOKUGAWA’s alter ego does not have the use of her eyes.”
O’Neill raised an eyebrow. No eyes? She didn’t like the sound of that; on the other hand, TOKUGAWA was supposed to experience a wider range of experiences than any human did, in order that he could achieve full personhood without the years it took a real human. She didn’t miss the feminine pronoun, either. In none of the scenarios so far had TOKUGAWA portrayed a female. Maybe I should screen the scenarios more closely, she thought, and in an instant realized that that was silly. Have I been living in this male-dominated culture so long that I don’t think being a woman is a valid part of human experience?
“I’m using the coil,” she said with sudden decision and pivoted her wheelchair toward her console.
+
Being a woman is… pain.
It had all ended with a flash: her vision, the health of her body, heavy with child, her little world with what security it offered in this, the fourth summer of the war. She’d been tending the garden in front of the little wood-and-paper house near the head of the Urakami River valley that she shared with her husband when the thin and distant whine of an airplane’s engines brought her bandannaed head up. Like so many people, she loved to watch the B-jükyus, the B-29’s, despite the destruction they carried. Shading her eyes with a callused hand, she picked out the lonely silver glint of sun on wings and thrashing propellers. How beautiful it looks, she thought, sailing majestically through clouds like a great ship breasting ocean swells. Besides, she told herself, this single plane posed no danger—a straggler, perhaps, not part of the great bomber swarms that turned cities into infernos. Nor did she fear the swarms, particularly; none had ever bombed Nagasaki.
And then it had come, a purple radiance that filled the sky and pierced her eves, filling her head with heat, suffusing her body in a strange tingling glow. For a moment she had stayed there on her knees, wondering numbly what was going on. Her first coherent thought was of the tales brought by refugees from Hiroshima, where the Americans had dropped their strange new bomb three days before. The pika! she realized: the lightning of the bomb going off. A lightning that seared and killed from hundreds, even thousands of meters away.
That had seared her. Killed her.
Now she stumbled through streets unfamiliar to her feet, hopelessly altered by rubble from the rolling blast wave that had knocked her sprawling into the ruins of her little house. Now and then her bare soles trod upon a burning ember; she scarcely noticed. Her body was already numb with shock.
Her skin felt strange, alien, as though damp rice paper had been molded to her body and then allowed to dry. It crackled as she moved. She was badly burned, she knew. She could grasp nothing with the fingers of her left hand, as if they were gone, burned to stubs; she couldn’t feel the right at all. Hot, wet wind blew against her charred, naked skin, cooling on wet runlets down her cheeks where the pika’s heat had melted her eyes. She could not breathe through her nose; it had melted into an undifferentiated lump. She tore chunks of air raggedly through a mouth she could no longer close.
More than anything else she was aware of the small life within her, kicking to be free, and the powerful contractions that racked her belly at rapidly decreasing intervals. She wandered blindly, praying that the bosatsu and kami would guide her somewhere she could find help—to the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works where her husband worked, perhaps (knowing at the core of her that he was dead), or to the University Hospital on the valley’s eastern slope, so that at least the child she could never see might have a chance to live.
Around her she heard a rushing noise as of a great wind through flash-cropped ears, and screams rising up like the cries of a flock of frightened seagulls. A roaring of heat steered her away from a building in flames. It was just a matter of time until she stumbled into the river, or wildfire trapped her. Oh, Amida-Butsu, help my child, she prayed silently, moving the lips that were no longer there. That her baby would be born here and now was a greater pain than any of her body. That she would never see it, that the milk-heavy breasts that should nourish it had been burned to lumps of charcoal, these knowings pained her. But the greatest agony was the fear and the guilt of bringing her first and last child into hell. Forgive me, little unborn one—
A contraction hit her like a fist in the belly. She doubled, stumbled. Something turned beneath a clublike foot, and she went sprawling. There was wetness on her thighs, and the spasms came in waves like storm surf, like the pleasure of orgasm expanded into infinite pain. It’s coming! Forgive me, my child, this weak flesh can shield you no longer.
She scrabbled her heels futilely in the rubble, trying to brace her legs. There was no strength in her. She tried to squeeze with her belly, aid the infant on its way. Her body was so devastated she didn’t even know how much success she had. Then the peristaltic surges overtook her, overwhelmed her.
There was a time of blackness shot with red, and then release.
She lay a long time on her back with the rubble smoldering beneath her, completely drained. Somehow she knew she was bleeding to death. Why won’t the baby cry? she wondered desperately. Was it born dead? Perhaps, she thought, it was better that way—and then, no, never! Someone had to carry on. Even if my baby will live in hell, better that it has a chance to live.
With all her will, she made her left leg move inward. In a moment she felt it, a squirming softness against the blackened parchment inside her thigh. Here was life, was movements even as life ebbed out of her. Already the first fingers of agony began to probe at her, hot and avid. Soon it would feel as if she were bathed in fire.
She felt a floating, a drifting away from herself from a world beyond redemption. May Amaterasu keep you, my darling, she thought. She let herself go. There was nothing more for her here.
Pain is… being a woman.
-
Slowly the burning sensations in Elizabeth O’Neill’s extremities faded; her skin seemed to fit itself to her again, regaini
ng flexibility. Her arms and legs. Braced against the tidal onslaught of pain, relaxed. She shook herself. She felt curious, detached, as if she too had been on the verge of cutting the cord to her own ravaged body. A deep slow anger filled the scooped-out hollowness within.
At a brusque command the helmet raised. “My God,” she breathed.
Her assistants huddled around, faces distorted fish-eye caricatures of concern. “We tried to warn you, Doctor.” Kim said anxiously.
She shook her head. “Get me out of here.” They helped her up from the gleaming chrome-and-plastic throne, eased her into the comforting embrace of her wheelchair. She mustered the remnants of her strength in a glare. “Emiko, what in God’s name made you create that—that horror?”
“It was a way of condensing a great deal of human experience.”
“But it was horrible! Not just the physical pain, The sense of loss—of hopelessness. How could you subject TOKUGAWA to that?” She felt an echo of the guilt she’d known in dream-doppelgang.
Wali Hassad started to lay a hand on her arm. Then thought better of it, remembering that she found human contact disturbing rather than comforting. “It was very terrible, Doctor. But please consider: even if none of us has had exactly that experience, who hasn’t known loss and horror, in our world today? Two of Kim’s brothers were killed by South Korean troops before the war. Takai’s whole family was lost when Tokyo was bombed. And I—” He looked away. With a pang O’Neill remembered that his own family had been killed in an Israeli bombing of a refugee camp in Lebanon when he was a child, and a Red Cross relief worker had brought him back to the States.
“But, Emiko,” she said, unwilling to let her anger go, “whatever possessed you to write such a scenario? You didn’t lose anyone in the war.”
“No.” Harsh lines etched the corners of Ito’s eyes, her smooth, wide forehead. “But that’s how my mother was born, Oniyaru-san. We never knew her family name, nor who her father was; my grandmother was burnt beyond recognition by the thermal flash of the Nagasaki bomb.”
