One evening she awoke with a start because there was someone standing in front of her, a short, wiry man who seemed somehow familiar. She wasn’t frightened—nothing could scare her now—but she had woken up from the creaking of the boards when he stepped onto the deck. She recognized him then. It was Hiroshi.
“Hello, Charlotte,” he said.
She looked at him calmly, without moving. There was a silver tint to his hair. The first fine lines were showing around his eyes. “This is a dream, isn’t it?”
He shook his head and smiled. “No.”
It was a sad smile. She would often think of that later, that he had known what was going to happen.
2
“He’s in Buenos Aires?” The secretary of defense looked up from the report at the head of the CIA. The report was only one page, but he had delivered it in person. “Are you sure?”
“Sure as we can be,” the CIA man snapped back. The secretary held his gaze and said nothing. The CIA chief sighed and said, “A little while ago Argentinean customs detained some folks. Americans trying to enter the country with weapons and surveillance gear. The authorities got in touch with our embassy, and our chief of station there looked into it. All routine stuff up to that point. But then he found that one of the men—a certain Bud Miller—was carrying photos of Hiroshi Kato.”
“I see. After which he was a little more…insistent in his questioning, I would imagine.”
The CIA man cocked his head to one side, which made his bald spot more evident. “The men were hired to watch a woman named Charlotte Malroux. They seem to think sooner or later Kato is going to show up for a visit.”
“And who hired them?”
“A company based in Boston, Bennett Enterprises.” The spy chief waved his hand dismissively. “Obviously the chairman wanted get his hands on Kato and his technology. This means all kinds of unwelcome legal consequences for him, of course, and for the board members who were involved. But the real point is we are now watching the lady instead. She’s the daughter of a former French ambassador in Argentina, so we’re being very discreet about it. And you know what, Kato really did go visit.” He looked at his watch. “About an hour ago.”
“Okay.” The secretary of defense reached for his desk telephone. “Time to act. All the bells and whistles. You get your people down there moving, I’ll talk to the president.”
A car horn was honking over and over somewhere in the distance. She could hear the clatter of cooking pans as well. A plane passed overhead, its vapor trail gleaming red and gold. Charlotte got up. She had difficulty pulling herself up from the chair. She felt like an old woman, fragile. “Let’s go inside, it’s getting cold.”
“Sure thing,” Hiroshi said. She noticed the way he moved a little closer, ready to catch her should she fall, and how he tried not to let her notice he did so.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Would you like something to drink? I can make us some coffee.”
“Coffee would be great,” he replied.
Inside, he looked around as she busied herself with kettle and coffee grinder in the little kitchen nook. “Nice place you’ve got here,” he said after a while. “It all looks very…very you. I always imagined you might live somewhere that looks like this.”
“Really?” She was surprised he should say so.
“I notice you don’t have a couch either,” he added, smiling.
She remembered their conversation from so long ago. A lifetime ago, it seemed to her now. “You could grow me one.”
“Would you like me to?” He almost sounded as though he meant it.
“No,” Charlotte said. “First of all, I don’t have room for it, as you see—”
“You didn’t live in Japan long enough,” he said.
“And second, I only want things around me that were made by human hand. I like them better, even if they’re not quite so perfect. I’d like to own nothing that was machine-made.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because a machine doesn’t care whether it builds a table or kills someone.”
Hiroshi raised his eyebrows. “Ah,” she heard him say. “Yes, that’s right. Machines really don’t care.” There was a note of pain in his voice.
She put the cups down on her little table and brought over the coffee pot and sugar. “Sit,” she said, pointing to the armchair. She took the chair by the desk. “And tell me, what brings you here? Where have you been hiding? The whole world wants to shake your hand ever since that space station showed up.”
“That’s not all they want,” Hiroshi said darkly as she poured the coffee.
He sounded despondent. Yes, Charlotte thought, they probably want to pick his brain as well. Of course. But it was all so far away; she didn’t follow the news these days, didn’t read the papers or watch TV.
“It’s good to see you,” she said. “I wanted to write you a letter but somehow…well, anyway. And now here you are. I’m glad.” She found she was blinking. Why was it so hard to make these happy moments last, to make time stop? Why did time march so relentlessly forward? “I’m not in the best of health, as you may have noticed.”
“I know,” Hiroshi said. “That’s why I came.”
“To see me one last time.”
“No,” he said. “To cure you.”
“Cure me?” She shook her head, feeling a flash of anger. “Nobody can do that.”
“I can.”
She looked at him closely, studying his eyes, how seriously he looked back at her, and she remembered that, yes, when Hiroshi claimed the impossible, he really meant it. “How did you even know I was ill?” she thought to ask. “Or where I live?”
“I found out from Gary McGray.” He sipped his coffee. “I tried all the old numbers I had for you. A man picked up in Scotland who said he knows you, and he gave me this address.”
“Ah. Good. Did he have any news of himself?”
“He was a bit stressed-out, I think. There was a baby screaming its head off in the background.”
So they had a child. At least one. And they were living in Belcairn. That was odd—what about the auction house in London? Well, perhaps Gary would write to her. While there was still time.
“Not my mother this time, then,” she said.
“I’m a bit reluctant to phone up embassies at the moment,” was all he said to that. He looked around. “Let’s get started. I’d like to pull the bed out a bit so that I can sit by the head. Is that okay with you?”
Charlotte nodded, feeling rather rushed into this. “What do you actually plan to do?”
“To put it simply, I’m going to lay my hands on your head.”
“Do you believe in that sort of thing?”
“Don’t think too much about it.” He pulled the bed out into the room at an angle and put the chair at the head of it. “Just lie down there. On your back.”
She hesitated. “That’s it?”
“Perhaps you could take off your headscarf.”
Ah well. Why not. She undid the knot at the back. Her eyelashes had grown back, but there was still nothing but patchy fluff on her scalp; taking off the scarf felt like stripping naked in front of him. On the other hand, she’d already stripped naked in front of him once before. She folded the scarf carefully—it was a batik cloth she had bought from a woman at a flea market—put it on the table, and lay down on the bed.
“Now just lie there and relax,” she heard him say. He put his hands on the back of her head near the scar from the operation. “This will take a while.”
“Okay.” It felt good to be touched again, but she was unsettled nevertheless. Hiroshi had always been a man of science, a thoroughgoing rationalist; to see someone like him taking refuge in an old superstition was…disappointing.
Just then she felt a curious burning sensation that seemed to be spreading out from his hands, s
eeping into her skull, and then flowing through her whole body like a hot flush. She shuddered.
“That’ll pass in a moment,” she heard Hiroshi say. “It only feels like that at the beginning.”
Fernández Larreta, chief of police of Buenos Aires, was extremely put out by the turn his evening had taken. He was wearing his best tails, since he had been at the opera with his wife; then the interior minister’s men had found him during the intermission and hauled him out of the Teatro Colón. And now, instead of listening to the sublime finale of Don Giovanni, he was sitting in an office at the ministry listening to a couple of Americans causing an uproar in a mishmash of broken Spanish and heavily accented English.
Where were they even from? Somebody had told him, but he had been far too indignant at the sudden, shameless interruption to listen closely. He thought he recognized one of the faces—the man with olive skin and the fringe of curly, gray hair around his bald pate worked at the American embassy. Miller, or something like that. Yes. He straightened his lapels and tried to follow what they were saying. It was about some Japanese citizen, currently thought to be in Buenos Aires. Good gracious, these norteamericanos stuck their noses in everywhere. Even as he listened, however, he was thinking of his wife and the furious glance she had shot him as he left. Heavens above! There would be more drama when he got home. Better not to think about that now. He turned all his attention to the matter at hand.
“The pursuit and arrest of criminals and other dangerous persons is an internal matter for Argentina,” the minister was just saying. “You would not permit our police”—he nodded toward Larreta—“to pursue a suspect on US territory.”
“Yes,” Miller said. “But this man is so dangerous that you won’t be able to deal with him.”
“This is what’s happening,” Hiroshi explained. “I was carrying the parts for several billion specialized nano-robots in my body, which all together mass almost one gram. Once I laid my hands on you, the transporter units from my permanent colony of nano-complexes carried the parts through my skin and through yours, into your bloodstream. Then the connector units they also delivered assembled the parts and made the robots themselves. The best way to imagine it is that you now have tiny little submarines swimming through your veins, each about the size of a virus. The submarines are now hunting down every cancerous cell in your body.”
Charlotte heard herself cough, an involuntary sound. That was too much to hope for; she couldn’t let herself…but all the same she felt something. Or she thought she did. It was like a wave of pins and needles passing through her body, concentrating at the nape of her neck. She wanted to say something, but she suddenly felt so heavy. On top of which, she’d forgotten what she wanted to say. Had it been important? Was anything important now?
She woke with a start. “How do they know?” she called out.
“What?” she heard Hiroshi say, his hands still cradling her head.
She understood. “I fell asleep, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but that’s fine. Don’t worry.”
“What kind of host am I? Just dropping off like that.” But then she remembered the question that had woken her up. “Your submarines—how do they know which cells are cancerous and which aren’t?”
“Ah yes.” Hiroshi was smiling; she could hear it in his voice. “There are a great many characteristic features to cancerous cells. They are, for instance, immortal, unlike most of the other cells in your body.”
“Cancer cells are immortal?” It seemed absurd.
“Of course. That’s precisely the problem: the way they can divide indefinitely. Most normal tissue cells can’t do that; they’re worn-out after about fifty replications.”
She thought about it. It was somehow logical and paradoxical, too: she was dying of a dose of immortality. “You said most tissue cells.…Are some tissue cells immortal, too?”
“Yes. For instance, eggs and sperm. And some stem cells. But both of these classes of cell are also very distinctive. Your eggs, for instance—gamete cells—only have half their set of chromosomes.”
There was so much she didn’t know about her own body. The thought that there were now tiny machines patrolling her body, inspecting each cell in turn to decide which to remove…“What if they make a mistake?”
“They don’t make mistakes.” His hands were still on her head, warm and calming. “I’m still in contact with them.”
“In contact? Through your hands, you mean?”
“Actually, by radio. But skin contact improves reception.”
Was she supposed to understand that? She felt very strange. Something was happening in her body, but she had no idea what. “I feel feverish. Does that make sense?”
“That’s just a leukocyte reaction,” Hiroshi said calmly. “The machines don’t simply break down the cancer cells; that would be too dangerous. It would swamp your body with more toxins and waste products than it could cope with. So instead they go into the cells and trigger apoptosis. That’s the process of controlled cell self-destruction. Most of the debris gets gobbled up by your leukocytes; you’ll have a high white-blood-cell count for a while. The subs themselves will carry off everything that’s left over and deposit it either in your gut or your bladder—that takes a little longer. The total mass of tumorous material in your body is no more than a couple of hundred grams. You won’t notice anything, though your urine will change color for a while.”
“How do you know all this?” Charlotte asked, surprised.
“Before I came to you, I tried it out twice. Once on an old man, and once on a ten-year-old child. They were both supposed to have only days to live, and they’re both quite healthy now.”
Charlotte shivered. “You really can cure cancer! Hiroshi! You have to give this to humanity. It’s so much more important than your space station. My goodness.”
“It’s not as simple as you think.”
“Why not?”
“Because you have to know what I know, and you have to be ready to merge with the nanite complexes.” He sighed. “It’s the control system, do you understand? My whole brain is shot through with nanoscale conduits. I’m receiving signals from the nanites directly into my mind, and all it takes is one thought from me to send them off to do whatever I want.”
Charlotte sat up, turned around, and looked at him, appalled. “You can’t seriously mean that. Those things from the island…they’re in your head?”
“There’s no other way,” he replied and patted the bed gently. “Please lie down again. I want to be able to watch what’s going on inside you.”
She lay back down again reluctantly, trying not to think of Leon. This was all so surreal. Perhaps she was just dreaming…
“Hiroshi!” she called when next she woke up. “How does that work? These machines came from the depths of space, from who knows where. How are you able to control them with your brain?”
Hiroshi moved his hands gently around, stroking her temples. “Because you were right.”
“I was? What about?”
“There was another human race before us. They built the nanites.”
Fernández Larreta felt the moment had come to speak up. There was no way he could allow these interlopers, these foreigners, to drag the good name of the Argentine police force through the mud without at least giving them a piece of his mind.
“With all due respect, Señor,” he pronounced, “I doubt you are truly in a position to judge. To be frank, you have said nothing concrete about this perilous Japanese gentleman; you have merely made a few vague claims. I hear the word ‘dangerous’ a great deal. Why exactly do you say so? Please give us some solid proof.”
That made him sit up and look, this Miller. Ha! He hadn’t been expecting anyone to put up a fight.
“Professor?” The American turned to the man who had accompanied him, who had an imposing Roman nose. “Would you perhaps…
?”
The professor nodded, looked at his watch, and gazed straight ahead for a moment as though doing sums in his head. Then he smiled softly. He hurried across the room and looked out a window that opened onto the dark courtyard of the ministry building. “If you would be so kind as to join me, Señor Larreta,” he said, gesturing in invitation. He spoke Spanish with a Mexican accent.
Fine, then. Fernández Larreta had no idea what this was about, but he would maintain his good manners despite everything. He got up and went to stand next to the professor, who was wearing a bolo tie.
“Look up at the sky.”
Fernández Larreta looked up, following the professor’s outstretched arm. There was a pale, blurry spot of light in the night sky, which moved very slowly as he watched.
“Do you know what that is?”
Larreta shrugged. “Of course. It’s the space station. The habitat.”
“Precisely. The man we’re looking for built that station.”
“So?” The chief of police was surprised to hear this, but of course he didn’t let it show. “Good for him. I just don’t understand why that makes him so extremely dangerous, as you claim.”
“Because Mr. Kato did not build this gigantic object with his own two hands,” said the professor. “That would have taken him something like a hundred thousand years. He built it using nanotechnological robots of extraterrestrial origin that he has somehow learned to control. Are you up to date with how nano-replicators work?”
Larreta looked at him disdainfully. What was this, a classroom test? “I have read what everybody has in the newspapers. I know that they’re supposed to be able to build on the scale of individual atoms.”
“That’s right. Most importantly, they can build copies of themselves atom by atom. Those copies then make copies, and so on and so forth. The problem is they don’t just conjure these atoms out of thin air, they take them from their surroundings.” The professor turned around and began pacing the room, one hand on his back, gesticulating with the other. Larreta could vividly imagine him doing that in a lecture hall. “Now imagine that these nano-replicators get out of control. They multiply and multiply, and nobody is able to stop them. Imagine it happening here, in this office. Over there on the minister’s desk. What would happen? First, the nano-replicators would attack everything around them, taking it apart into atoms to make copies of themselves—the leather on the desktop, the wood beneath, the lamp that’s standing there. Since they’re built to be as efficient as possible, that would happen with breathtaking speed. In less time than it takes you to draw breath, the desk would be gone, changed into nano-replicators. And then? Do you believe the machines draw the line at humans? Human beings are made of atoms, too, just like animals, plants, everything in existence. Atoms they can use to build further copies of themselves. And since by now there are not simply a few of these nano-replicators but multitudes—the same as the mass of that desk—it would all happen that much faster. Before you could understand what was going on, the minister himself would be taken apart for his atoms, as would you, Señor, and all of us. The room, this building, the whole city block—it would keep on and on, faster and faster. And,” he concluded, looking at each of them in turn, “nobody would be able to stop it.”
Lord of All Things Page 61
