by Ian Watson
“It isn’t stupidity, Ruthy. Her brain’s like a house in the process of being built. Where does she live till it’s built? That’s the hell of it. She’s got to live in it—but most of it’s still in the blueprint stage on the drawing board. So she’s got to inhabit a mental plan—a sort of intuition of the house-to-be. She can sense what’s coming; but she can’t make use of what she’s still making. It must be hellishly frustrating. No wonder babies cry.”
He slumped with his back to the pitted chrome bumper, accepting the baby from Ruth and gazing into Alice’s eyes, wondering what the baby’s mind made of his image reflected in them.
The miniature face with tousled black hair and knotty woollen eyebrows thrusting out over rimless tinted spectacles—effectively rimming the lenses, furry caterpillars roosting on them. The snub nose, constantly wrinkling the glasses back up itself towards the knotty fuzz—a quizzical, rabbity habit ingrained in him by now.
Outside the clear mirror of the pupil, the iris imposed a blue filter; finally, the nacre of the cornea sheathed his features behind mother-of-pearl glaze. The reflection gradients were enchanting.
“I keep on wondering,” he remarked to Ruth, “what other sorts of houses could be built from the same material. Trouble is, it’s only when we’ve built our house that we can really use it to look out of the windows at the world. And the placement of windows dictates the view. That’s really why I like thinking about the whales. The possibility of other houses, other views. Not that nonsense I said earlier.”
Ruth had squirmed back against the bumper beside him. Seeing her thus in conjunction with the car, in classic ad-mag style, he felt that maybe whales were more reliable than people as an emotional focus. For him at any rate. The whale was a fine symbol of the emotionally spontaneous communicative existence…
Basically, Paul’s bleak new cosmology appealed to the resigned streak in him, he decided.
• • •
Finally, Hammond ambled over, satisfied with his calculations, and they finished the other three cans of Nochebuena beer.
As they left, the old Indian stuck a finger in his mouth and whistled.
“Whale come ashore?” Ruth said hopefully.
“Doubt it,” shrugged Richard. “Us leaving, more like. Road safety. They like to keep tabs on us.”
He talked some more about whales and whistle codes, then, still vainly trying to upgrade his preoccupation in Paul’s eyes.
“Whistling’s also a magical ritual for encouraging the maize to grow, did you know? The Mezapico believe humans used to be able to talk to plants in whistle speech. Gods and spirits used whistle speech too, to talk to sacred plants like the peyotl cactus. And to the stars in the sky! If the Indians only knew we were listening to clicks and whistles from beyond the stars! If they only knew how whales whistle to each other in the sea!”
They passed through San Pedro in a flurry of dust and started climbing steeply—Ruth clutching hold of Alice while Paul wrenched the Sierra round the bends.
“Whales whistling at the stars!” Paul laughed heartily, deliberately mixing up what Richard said. “If they could only hear the Footsteps of God, as we have. Now, that might be something.”
“Those bangs and whimpers,” recalled Ruth, as though it was something trivial that had slipped her mind.
“We’ve been analysing all the whimpers following on the Big Bang, Ruth. The original fireball must have been ten billion degrees—it’s cooled now to three degrees absolute, everywhere we look in the sky…”
“Uh? Everywhere? It must have been in one direction or another, your starter’s pistol.”
“No, no,” Paul snorted, hardly realizing he was being goaded. “All space and time as we know them are products of the fireball. So we’re still inside it. Only, it’s vastly spread out by now and congealed into stars and galaxies, which we’re part of, don’t you see? Yet for this very reason it oughtn’t to be possible to talk in terms of ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the fireball. Of a shell, if you like, which we’re inside of, and something else outside. Right?”
“Shells need a mommy hen, to lay them,” she smiled sweetly, as they scattered the chickens of Ciudad Juarez.
“We’ve detected discrepancies in the background radiation. They’re like little pinpricks we can listen through. Only, they’re so far off they’re really huge rips in the fabric of our reality. I guess you could call them windows on—”
“God tiptoeing round the heavens like a great big hen leaving claw marks in it… it’s hilarious,” she giggled, a heckler in the heart of his audience.
“Yes, damn it, God!” he snarled. “Out there—on the outside.”
Ruth must have been holding Alice painfully tight. The baby cried aloud and her face suffused with blood. Her head became a beetroot registering infinite, however, temporary, grief.
As they passed through Mezapico itself, the same priest was still standing in his church doorway, a thin black silent figure. He couldn’t have been standing there all this time gazing up glumly at the telescope, thought Richard. It was a coincidence.
Seven
“A six-year-old defector, did you say? Six?”
Orville Parr swivelled his chair round and stared out at the cityscape of Tokyo. Beyond the few sad grey pines grouped round the Embassy annex was one stream of traffic on ground level and a second stream flowing along above the first one on the overhead expressway which straddled the under-street on massive, squat legs. Both streams were dense with delivery trucks and neon-striped taxis weaving between them with crazy bobsled bursts of speel. Taxis bright as butterflies: streaked with dayglo yellow, red and orange. Almost as erratic as butterflies too!
Japan’s a neon-painted taxi, reflected Parr. A metal butterfly chasing the pollen of a fare twenty-four hours a day. Without pollen it sickens and dies. Without honey it starves. So ever more frantically it flutters in desperation as it senses the long winter approaching…
Red and white checked balloons hung out in the grey haze—beachballs bobbing on the smog surf. The neon ads that usually ran up and down their long tethers night and day, processions of Japanese characters streaming into the sky and back again, had been switched off; the absence of these bright streamers, and eclipse of the great roof signs, had a depressing effect on him. Grey polluted days craved their gaiety.. A spectre of abandoned beaches—sadness of childhood winters around Cape Cod—overwhelmed him. Those balloons—drifting blindly on a sea of gas—were paraphernalia left outside locked chalets at the end of a season, for winter storms to wash away… Sad.
“He’s called Nilin,” offered Gerry Mercer, as though Parr ought to know the name. Was this child, found adrift in a fishing boat off Hokkaido, the northern island, supposed to be the son of somebody important? That didn’t make him a defector. Perhaps the surly, moronic attendant accompanying him was the real defector. Perhaps he’d kidnapped the kid to pay for his passage to the States?
Obviously the boy would have to be handed back.
Orville Parr was rotund and balding, with a pasty complexion. His face sagged, a mass of unbaked dough in which features had been roughly punched—they slid downhill under the tug of gravity, and a small gritty moustache failed to stem the rout of flesh towards a bulging neck.
Gerry Mercer exemplified the archetypal Agency blunder for a “cultural secretary”: crewcut athlete dressed in a severe charcoal suit with lapels thin as bootstraps, bright vulgar blue tie knotted impeccably tight. The knot—tiny head of a sapphire viper—nudged against his prominent Adam’s apple, about to bury fangs in it. His voice bobbed eagerly:
“We already flew them down from Wakkanai. They’re at Tachi now. The Japanese are amenable—so long as they have access and a casting vote. But dammit, Orville, the kid’s asking for asylum with us, not the Japanese.”
Parr made a gesture of disgust.
“How can he be? What a mess. So you’ve pushed all the panic buttons on account of some half-wit hijacking a kid. Why not leave them in Hokkaido? Let the Japane
se handle it?”
“But it’s Nilin,” insisted Gerry. “At least it seems to be—”
Parr’s attention was distracted by a mini-truck scooting along the overhead road in a blue fume cloud. Garish wreaths of plastic flowers on tripods three metres high bestrode it: plastic conservatory on wheels, hurrying to the opening of some pinball parlour or demise of some company chief. Hugely swollen, lavishly bright flowers—the appropriate blooms for a poison gas environment. Any flowers had to be overbright to compensate for the poor visibility; their plastic had been spun out of the same petrochemicals that hung combusted in the atmosphere…
On the roof of a highrise, of the same dusty colour as chewing gum, a huge Nikon camera loomed—broad as the building it rested on. Generally the giant model rotated on a turntable. It had been switched off too. Its lens pointed monotonously in their direction now, as though keeping the American Embassy under surveillance.
Tokyo’s red and white striped version of the Eiffel Tower pushed up its absurdly thin etiolated spike beyond, lit by a red aircraft warning beacon: a solitary candle left burning in the sky. He could just barely trace its thin candy limbs in the smog from this marker downwards.
They were having to burn low-grade high-sulphur fuel oil in the factories mostly, these days, or else close them down.
“Surely you mean Nilin’s son?” A faint light dawned. A Soviet cosmonaut who’d vanished some years before, presumed killed in a launch pad explosion at Tyuratam. He’d been called Nilin, hadn’t he? But what use would the six-year-old son of a dead cosmonaut be, except to harm Soviet-American relations? Was some plot brewing in the inner circles of the Agency, that Gerry was privy to, and not Parr? But the logic broke down. A boy adrift with a dimwit in the waters between Sakhalin and Hokkaido… no one could possibly attach any importance to it, except as a routine case of air-sea rescue. Probably the boy’s mother worked on Sakhalin now, in one of the Far East Centre research stations…
“Nilin never married,” Gerry said briskly, as though reading Parr’s thoughts. “He had no kids. It’s Nilin himself, I think.”
“What do you mean? It’s nonsense. Nilin was this cosmonaut who got killed at Tyuratam, right? Or is there some other Nilin?”
“It’s the same one. Georgi Knipovitch Nilin. Only presumed killed, Orville. He just never appeared in any more cosmonaut group photos after the accident. No specific announcement about him though.”
“Is there ever? So this boy is the same Nilin? You must have taken up reincarnation, Gerry! Say, why don’t you apply for an assignment with the Dalai Lama? Then if he dies you can liberate Tibet single-handed in search of his new body. Mystical espionage, how’s that grab you?”
As Parr swung his chair round again to survey Gerry irritably, the adam’s apple hobbled up and down in embarrassment—or discreet fury.
“Okay, Orville, I admit the boy’s in a confused state. He acts schizophrenic part of the time, and plain autistic the rest, not communicating at all, just making bits of nonsense apparatus out of any scraps of wire or screws or lightbulbs he can find lying around. But during the communicative phases he comes out of himself enough to put something across—even if it is like a pair of Siamese twins fighting over who gets to speak. He’s said these incredible things—in broken English, as well as Russian. That he’s Nilin. That he’s a spaceman—”
“Any kid’s fantasy. If he’s autistic, he wants to escape. Where better than into a space capsule? Presumably he’s been kidnapped from a mental hospital by one of the attendants. What has the attendant got to say about it? He stole the boat—!”
“He doesn’t know much except he loves the boy like any dumb stalwart in a Russian novel. He’s a great strapping muzhik of a peasant. He carries the boy round like some little prince he’s protecting—”
“Perhaps it’s a great grandson of the Romanofs?” Parr enquired sarcastically. “So the man says the boy wants to go to America—meaning that he does himself? It’s so obvious.”
“No—the boy says he wants to go there! We’ve interrogated him in Russian and English. He’s dejecting to us, he knows the English word. He says he has Nilin’s mind. It’s a terrible effort for him framing sentences, getting his thoughts straight. A few rocks are pushing up, but the tide keeps on washing back over them. He gave details to the base commander at Wakkanai that a kid just couldn’t know—about the Soviet space programme. About rocket engines. Six years out of date, of course—and only fragments—and it exhausted him so much he went into withdrawal again—but it was totally convincing.”
“The attendant could be a KGB agent for all you know. Told the boy what to say. We could be walking into a trap. Though why it’s being set eludes me.”
“It smells real, Orville. You don’t get a six-year-old behaving the way Nilin does.”
“The pseudo-Nilin… Well, what’s the explanation?”
“The attendant said someone was printing babies’ minds. He used the word ‘printing’, same as you print a book or print currency. But he doesn’t know how to explain properly. He’s a dumb hick.”
“With a heart of gold. I’ll believe it when I see it,” Parr groaned.
“What do you do to normalize a mentally-deranged six-year-old? Take him to the zoo for a treat,” suggested Bob Pasko, the base psychiatrist at Tachikawa—a hairy man with a head as curly as a black lambs-wool beret, a perpetual five o’clock shadow and stray curls even pushing their way through his shirt front by way of the buttonholes. Let him see other kids behaving naturally, enjoying themselves. His own self might emerge from the fog it’s in.
The three days that had passed since the boy’s arrival saw little real clarification of the dilemma he posed; but enough hints to exonerate Gerry Mercer, to Parr’s annoyance. Parr still felt suspicious of the pseudo-Nilin, as he insisted on calling him, as a novel gambit in the intelligence game. If this was the case, however, it was far from clear why he had been planted—hints of experiments in brainwashing babies could hardly redound to the Russians’ credit.
Pasko had seen many damaged minds during a service career stretching back to the early days of the Vietnam build-up. He surmised that the child showed all the signs of a major psychological trauma brought on by some prolonged effort using hallucinogens, to persuade him that he was someone other than who he was. Not a boy of six, but an adult named Georgi Nilin. His periods of communicativeness were dominated by the false information he’d been fed—misunderstood and served up in a garbled version. His periods of withdrawal, when he created strange “machines” out of whatever was to hand, constituted a typical autistic defence mechanism, in Pasko’s diagnosis. The boy had been treated like a machine, so he surrounded himself with pseudo-machines to achieve a robotic salvation.
Physically, the boy’s skull showed no signs of recent surgery—though it carried traces suggesting he’d been through operations shortly after birth, followed by stereotaxic probing, possibly lasting as late as his third year.
But what was the reason for it all? A sincerely meant, if brutal—and reprehensible—new therapy? That he came to be in their custody now, by this reading, was all the fault of the attendant Mikhail, who had plainly misunderstood everything he witnessed at the hospital on Sakhalin.
Yet the boy certainly asked for asylum during his communicative moments—plaintively and obsessively, in a reedy voice… A plea for the security of the hospital he must have come from? But no, he begged in broken English—not a mental asylum, political.
“I am failure?” the boy proclaimed with absurd solemnity, struggling to master the shapes of the English sounds.
So to cheer him up, Pasko, Parr and Mercer drove him and the inseparable Mikhail from the airbase to Tama Zoo nearby, taking along the Embassy’s naval attaché Tom Winterburn as Russian interpreter.
• • •
Already by ten in the morning schoolchildren crowded the wooden acres of the zoo. Sturdy little fellows in yellow plastic road-safety bonnets pursuing their flag-bearing te
achers in dense streams. The children gazed at Georgi Nilin and the Americans and the great loutish Russian with such nonstop cheeky curiosity that Parr could only wonder whether Pasko was out of his mind, bringing the boy here. Was this his version of shock treatment? Total immersion therapy? In at the deep end!
“Haro, haro!” one after another of the seemingly endless stream of Japanese kids called out. And if you bumped into them! Kids they might be to look at—but they must be built of some sort of superflesh weighing heavier than American flesh. Mobile tree stumps marching along on their roots: knock into one, and it instantly locked to the ground. And so many of them, such a lopped-off forest on the move!
Definitely a mistake to come here. Parr glanced at the Russian child, being led along by his gangly muzhik attired in the same long flapping coat and felt boots as he’d arrived in, wondering if the boy felt the same panic as he did. At least Mikhail was making good headway through the flood of foreign children, keeping Nilin sheltered safe in the lee of his body as he paced evenly along.
But what a thin sallow slip of a lad, with his close-cropped spiky fair hair, amongst all these Japanese supertots! Nilin’s features had a faintly mongolian cast to them. Occasional flurries of effort passed over a bland blankness, like pond ripples. To Japanese eyes, the combination of fair hair and faintly Asiatic features must have made him seem a half-caste, no doubt accounting for the children’s continuing amusement.
“Haro, Amerikajin!” they cried.
All the six- to nine-year-olds in the Greater Tokyo area must be here today. Parr felt he was stuck in some crowded elevator between floors.
This couldn’t be real! Just round the corner some magician must be stamping all these kids out of rice-cake or reinforced paper, patting them on the head, setting them in motion. Yes—working overtime too, with some heavy-gravity paper imported direct from Jupiter, that could knock a grown man off his feet!
Caught in an eddy between twin streams of the yellow bonnets, their group gravitated towards a cement hillside walled off by a deep dry moat, where brown bears were prowling.
