As she entered her elevator, she thought she saw a movement down the corridor. She’d better mention the wayward bot to management tomorrow. If it kept leaving the herd, it could disrupt the entire sequence for the others as well.
The elevator doors shut as soon as she entered. Its sensors would have read her chip signal, accessed her resident information, and noted that she had placed a high priority on privacy in her preferences section. She hated standing in crowded elevators while people stared at her, then pretended nonchalance when she caught their eyes.
She and Masao lived on the outer third floor in a four-room unit. Not high enough to have a view, but they were lucky to live in a Betta at all. Even if the Sam project was axed—horrible thought—she couldn’t afford to leave the company. It would mean leaving the Betta.
She kicked her sandals off in the entry to their apartment and left her bag propped against the wall. Masao was asleep in the inner room, curled happily in their futon with the air conditioner set to autumn chill. Eleanor turned it up five degrees, peeled off her clothes, and crawled in beside him.
“I’m home,” she said.
He muttered and rolled over automatically, curling the other way so she could snuggle.
She was dimly conscious that her last waking thoughts were about that damn welder.
Eleanor and Masao reached the station closest to the Tanaka family house shortly before midday. The temperature had reached thirty-eight degrees again, according to the environment monitor outside the station, and there was no shade between the station and the house except for the overhang of blocks of flats and two trees drooping brownish leaves over a temple wall. Eleanor carried a parasol.
“You know how in the movies you can hear cicadas in summer?” said Masao. “When I was a child, we couldn’t find any insects to study in our summer holiday projects. People suddenly realized that me reason they didn’t hear cicadas anymore was that the larvae were stuck under concrete.”
“What did they do?” asked Eleanor.
“There was a bit of a fuss, some people made gardens in their backyards, but the developers kept coming.” He pushed his glasses straight—they tended to slide off crookedly when he spoke about something that affected him.
After the Quake came the Seikai reforms and the Bettas, with their self-contained roof gardens. But by that time the cicadas were gone from the city. Now, enterprising tourist agencies ran summer tours for people to go to the countryside to experience the sound.
Masao gestured at the bitumen and concrete around them. The only living things were pot plants arranged carefully in some doorways. “When my father was a boy it was still a suburb. There was a creek and rice paddies. It was a lot cooler then. You could see to the mountains.”
Now vistas of tall buildings stretched into the thick air. The streams were either buried beneath the concrete or had degenerated into smelly storm water outlets, and the closest mountains had been leveled to build a Betta.
It won’t be like this when they set up a Betta here, thought Eleanor. We can stay cool all the way from our place. It’s not that I don’t like visiting, she told herself, but getting here is so exhausting.
But she said nothing to Masao, who tramped stolidly along the road that was too narrow to allow a footpath, his round face running with sweat. He regarded the visits as a necessary duty and would never dream of shirking. The outline of his undershirt showed through his shirt, pasted with sweat to his back, and Eleanor felt a surge of affection for the familiar broad curves.
“Hot, isn’t it,” she said.
“It’s the humidity. Phew.”
She hadn’t mentioned how she’d stammered in front of Inspector Ishihara. Masao worried too much, which both annoyed her and made her feel safe. Sometimes, when the annoyance grew overwhelming, she would remember how he came to her after she had the accident. It was at the end of her Ph.D. program in Boston. She stayed in the hospital for six months, then returned to her uncle’s motor repair business in small-town Iowa to spend another year trying to finish rehabilitation and thesis at the same time. A year and a half of her life gone, eaten up by hospital beds and chunks of vanished memory.
She’d only talked to Masao a couple of times before the accident, and he said he visited her once in the hospital, although she didn’t remember. One of many memories that the accident had taken away. Then he arrived one day in the town and asked her to go back to Japan with him. She’d never forgotten the feeling of the world opening up for her again. Masao had rescued her. Rescued her from more years in a town of wide, dusty streets full of abandoned shops, heat, the stink of oil and metal in the workshop, and a house permeated with sour toilet smells.
She grimaced and touched his shoulder again like a talisman.
They panted past the brick building of Masao’s old primary school, through the dusty dirt of the tiny local “park,” past the car repair workshop closed for the day, picked their way through potted plants Grandma insisted on placing on both sides of the narrow footpath, and finally turned in the gate next to the Tanaka workshop entrance. The shop’s metal shutters were closed for the holiday. Tanaka Manufacturing, the sign above the shutters said, in old-fashioned cursive characters carved into a wooden board. The small two-story house was attached to the workshop by a walkway. Before the house was built after the war, the entire family, ten people at that time, had lived in two rooms at the back of the factory.
The stone path from the gate ended in three concrete steps up to an entrance hall. Masao pushed open the sliding door.
“We’re home,” he announced, sitting on the step to unlace his sneakers. Eleanor folded the parasol and eased off her sandals. The air inside the dark hall was cooler. It smelled of herbal disinfectant overlaid with omelet. Here we go, she thought.
Masao’s sister Yoshiko, plump, round-faced, and perpetually worried, emerged from the kitchen at the far end of the hall. She had the same dark olive skin as Masao, without his wide, humorous mouth. She wore a skirt and T-shirt and was wiping her hands on a dishcloth.
“You’re late,” she said to Masao.
“We got held up,” he said blandly. “Buying cakes.”
Eleanor remembered she was carrying the present and held out the bag of sweet rice cakes. “Hello, Yoshiko-san.”
Yoshiko didn’t like Eleanor calling her the traditional “Elder Sister.” Eleanor suspected it was because although Masao was three years younger than Yoshiko, she and Eleanor were the same age. Or maybe Yoshiko didn’t want the level of intimacy that “Elder Sister” implied. So they called each other “Eleanor-san” and “Yoshiko-san,” and kept their distance.
Yoshiko tucked the towel into her apron pocket and took the rice cakes. Back in the kitchen, she placed them on a table carrying plates of food in various stages of preparation.
“It’s hot, isn’t it? Not so much the heat, as the humidity. I’m in the middle of the sushi mix.” She paused long enough for Eleanor to offer to help.
Eleanor did so, with a mental scowl at Masao, who had disappeared into the air-conditioned living room. He was happy to do more than his share of housework in their own home, but when he came back here, he regressed into a spoiled Japanese boy. It infuriated her.
“Have a glass of tea first. We don’t stand on ceremony here.” Yoshiko laughed without humor and began slicing beans.
Eleanor drank some cold barley tea and still felt hot. An old electric fan purred in the corner. The usual kitchen table mess had been pushed to one side to make way for the food. Yoshiko always complained about the table, saying she couldn’t keep it tidy because everyone else dumped their things on it. Just then it held a saltshaker, two pickle containers, rubber bands, chopsticks standing in a cup, a rolled-up newspaper, Grandma’s medicine cup, a piece of carrot on some wet cotton wool, many small plastic packs of mustard that came with ready-made dumplings, and a jar of red, squishy-looking ovals. In her more whimsical moods, Eleanor visualized the table as a symbol of the dingy chaos she’d mov
ed to the Betta to get away from.
“There’s an apron in the second drawer down,” said Yoshiko, neatly lifting the sliced beans with the flat of the cleaver to a different location.
“No, thank you.” Eleanor shuddered at the thought of more layers of cloth between herself and the fan. In the Betta and the train she’d been cold in her thin blouse; now it felt like a blanket.
“Grandma and Papa,” said Yoshiko, referring to her mother and own husband, Kazu, “have gone to do the graves. They’ll be back soon.”
During the two weeks of Bon most Japanese families cleaned up their family gravestones and presented fresh flowers and offerings to the departed, whose souls would visit at that time. Many city dwellers returned to their hometowns, or their family’s hometowns, for the festival. The post-Quake Seikai reforms tried to get each part of the country to do so at different times, to avoid traffic congestion and confusion, but it never caught on, not even at the urging of the Buddhist clergy. Some customs were too old to change.
“Can you slice this carrot? Small, please.” Yoshiko passed Eleanor pieces of cooked vegetable and peered critically over her shoulder. “You know, for someone who’s good at repairing things, you’re not very dexterous, are you?”
Eleanor half-smiled automatically. “No, not very.” Five or six years earlier she might have made a lighthearted comment about not criticizing a person holding a cleaver, or perhaps tried a joke about it being hard to repair robots with a knife. But Yoshiko never smiled.
Eleanor scraped her clumsy carrots into another bowl.
Yoshiko emptied the contents of all the little bowls one by one onto the mound of sushi rice and mixed it together. She seemed more flustered than usual—she dropped a couple of peas and didn’t notice.
“Mari-chan’s here for the day,” she said, with a quick glance at Eleanor’s face.
So that was the problem. Yoshiko had never liked the way her daughter enjoyed Eleanor’s company.
“She can’t stay, she’s got summer classes next week.”
I bet she’s working, and doesn’t want Mum and Dad to know, thought Eleanor. Mari was smart enough to pass all her courses without the need for extra classes.
Yoshiko mounded the sushi rice with unnecessary vigor. “While she’s here, Eleanor-san, I’ve got some important things to discuss with her.” She kept her eyes on the rice.
So don’t butt in, you mean, Eleanor thought. “Yoshikosan, I haven’t seen Mari-chan since last New Year. We don’t have much to talk about anymore.”
She had a swift, vivid memory of an overweight ten-year-old lying on her stomach on the fluffy pink carpet of her room, pages of her latest effort at drawing manga strewn around her. Face glowing with achievement, she read the pages aloud to Eleanor, who had been glad to listen and escape the minefield of family relationships that at holiday times extended to dozens of people. Eleanor had also solved problems with computer games for her niece, and played them with her over the years.
But Mari was now eighteen and had probably grown out of both manga and games.
The back door opened and Masao’s father came in, placing his sandals neatly facing outward on the lower step. He was a heavy man with rounded shoulders beginning to shrink with age, his face dragged down by worry and sobriety.
“Welcome, Eleanor-san,” he said with his usual careful decorum. “It’s hot, isn’t it? Grandma not back yet?” he asked Yoshiko, who brought him a glass of iced tea.
“Not yet.”
Grandpa grunted in reply and went into the living room.
Eleanor picked up the plates Yoshiko indicated and followed him. On holidays they always ate at the low table in me living room.
Grandpa Tanaka folded himself, carefully because of arthritis, into his usual seat at the head of the table under the family altar. The doors of the altar stood open, and incense burned on either side, framing Grandpa’s sagging cheeks and tufted eyebrows like some strange Buddhist deity. He held out his hand to Masao, who passed him part of the newspaper without comment. The little statue of Kannon, goddess of mercy, seemed to wink at Eleanor from deep in the altar as the light caught its peeling gold leaf.
As she arranged the plates on the table she thought how uncomfortable Grandpa’s uprightness would have made her own father, whom she had seldom seen sober. Her early memories were fragmented—she suspected because of the accident—but she could clearly remember long Sunday afternoons in Nagasaki, her mother taking Bible classes and her younger sister sleeping. Eleanor would sit outside with her father while he explained some mechanism to her—a clock, a pump, an engine. He was always patient, always willing to go over it again, a tiny tea bowl almost invisible in his thick, freckled fingers, his malty breath mingling with hers as they bent over the mechanism. In exchange for not telling mother where he kept his “stash,” Eleanor was allowed to disassemble something in the house or yard and try to put it together again. She knew the parts of an auto engine before she could write her own name. All that ended when her sister graduated from naps, for Marion could never learn to be quiet about the wee bottles dotted around the yard, and her father eventually retreated to the local Go parlor, where he could nip in peace. But by then Eleanor had taken everything in the house apart at least once anyway.
She looked up as a tall girl carried more bowls into the living room. She had the Tanaka skin and round face, but long, careless limbs.
“Aunt Eleanor. Uncle Masao. Welcome,” she said happily, and knelt at the table beside Eleanor.
Eleanor smiled broadly at Mari, something she only did in front of children or other foreigners. It just didn’t seem to fit in to normal Japanese conversation.
“Nice to see you, Mari-chan.”
Masao peered over his glasses. “You’re looking very grown-up.”
It wasn’t her clothes, which were long shorts and a tank top, or her hair cut in an unfashionable bob; she held herself very straight as she arranged the bowls. She seemed more poised, more contained within herself.
“You’re looking fatter,” retorted Mari.
Eleanor chuckled. Masao had indeed put on a couple of kilos since New Year. The university had moved his office closer to a new subway station, so he wasn’t getting as much exercise.
“It’s all muscle,” Masao managed, before retreating behind the paper.
Grandpa Tanaka was engrossed in the Politics section and gave no sign he knew they were there.
“So,” said Eleanor awkwardly. “How’s university?”
“It’s okay.” Mari crossed her legs, boy-style.
“Do you still draw comics?” said Eleanor.
Mari shook her head. “That’s kids’ stuff.”
“You think so? I named my current research project after a robot in a manga. Can you guess which one?”
Mari smoothed her hand over her hair and didn’t answer for a moment, and Eleanor wondered if she’d dismissed the question as kids’ stuff. Then she looked up and said slyly,
“Toramon?”
“Hah.” Toramon was a fat, badger-shaped robot sent from the future to help a clumsy boy get through school. It used a variety of magic tricks, thinly disguised as future technology. “No, not Toramon,” Eleanor said haughtily. “More dignified.”
Mari chuckled. “Arai-chan?”
Eleanor chortled, too. Arai was a tiny girl robot who didn’t know her own superhuman strength. The stories and characters were bizarre.
“No, definitely not.”
Mari glanced at her again. “It has to be Sam Number Five, from Journey to Life.”
Out of the thousands of robots in Japanese manga lore … “How did you know?” The main character of Journey to Life who wants desperately to become mortal had always seemed a particularly apt namesake.
“You never gave me back my copy of Volume One,” said Mari. “I lent it to you years ago. I must have been in junior high. Don’t you remember? I said it was freaky, and you said you liked it when you were little but couldn’t remember the
details.”
“Now that you mention it …” Eleanor did recall borrowing a book from her niece, but she’d been too busy at work to read anything. It must have got pushed into one of the bookcases at home and forgotten.
“I’ll have a look for it,” she said. “It’s probably at home.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got textbooks to read.” Mari didn’t sound particularly interested. “So what does your Sam Number Five look like?”
“It’s about eighty centimeters tall…”
“Mari-chan!” Yoshiko called from the kitchen. “Give me a hand in here.”
Mari sighed and unraveled her legs. “She’s having one of those days.”
Eleanor remembered Yoshiko’s injunction in the kitchen and nodded, although she could see why Yoshiko felt put out. When Mari was smaller, she’d ogled Eleanor in wide-eyed adoration and brought a succession of fascinated small girls to do the same whenever Eleanor and Masao visited. The Amazing Gaijin Aunt, Masao used to tease Eleanor. And when Mari grew older Eleanor had often unwittingly supported her in defying her parents, whether over reading manga or about buying a private phone.
So Yoshiko was probably justified. But it didn’t make their visits any more comfortable. And Eleanor was damned if she’d diminish her relationship with Mari to please Yoshiko.
Ishihara sat at his desk in West Station and read through the incident report again. He was the only detective in the big room, as the duty officer was in Homicide upstairs. Everyone wants Sunday off these days. We’re like bloody salarymen now, he thought disgustedly.
He hadn’t yet signed off on the robot accident at Kawanishi Metalworks. He’d gone over the reports at least three times, letting his eyes skim the words again and again, while his intuition prodded memory into spewing up whatever was making him uneasy.
Man gets hit by industrial robot. Man dies. Nobody else there to see what happened. No forensic evidence to indicate that anyone else was near the man when he died or that the body was touched. Security records show nobody went in after the previous shift ended.
Less Than Human Page 4
