Otherness

by David Brin

  At one point all of the women were picked up by limousines and taken downtown to MITI, the all-powerful Ministry of Trade and Industry, on Sakurada-Dor Avenue. In a great hall, technicians attached mesh girdles and gently, tenderly wheeled them close to mammoth, chilled machines.

  Computers, Reiko thought. They were using powerful computers to talk to the fetuses!

  When the Minister himself appeared, Reiko blinked in astonishment. His eminence shook Tetsuo's hand. Reiko felt faint.

  12.

  They were pledged to secrecy, of course. If the gaijin newspapers got hold of this too soon, there would be hell to pay. Worldwide media attention before the right preparations had been made would shame the nation, even though it was really none of the business of outsiders.

  Others were already jealous of Japan in so many ways. And Westerners tended to insist that theirs was the only morality. So Tetsuo and Reiko signed their chops to a document. There was talk of a leave of absence from Tetsuo's company, and an important post when he returned. He spoke to her of buying a larger house in a better neighborhood.

  "One of our problems has been in the field of software," he explained one evening, though Reiko knew he was talking mostly to himself. "Our engineers have been very clever in practical technology, leaving most of the world far behind in many areas. But computer programming has turned out to be very hard. There seems to be no conventional way of catching up with the Americans there. Your father used to claim that it had to do with our system of education."

  Tetsuo laughed derisively. "Japanese education is the finest in all the world. The toughest. The most demanding!"

  "What . . .?" she asked. "What does this have to do with the babies?"

  "They are geniuses at programming!" Tetsuo cried. "Already they have cracked problems that have stymied hundreds of our best software designers. Of course they do not understand what they are doing, but that does not seem to matter. It is all a matter of asking questions in just the right ways and letting them innovate.

  "For instance, the unborn have yet no concept of distance or motion. But that turns out to be an advantage, you see, for they have no preconceptions. They bring fresh insight, without being burdened by our worldly assumptions. So one of our young engineers solved a vexing problem for the Ministry of Trade, while another has developed an entirely new model of traffic control that should reduce downtown congestion by five percent!"

  Tetsuo's eyes held a glow, a wild flicker that gave Reiko a chill. "Zuibun joozo desu, ne?" he said, in admiration of that accomplishment by an unborn child. "As for our son," Tetsuo went on, "he is being asked even more challenging questions about transportation systems. And I am certain he will make us proud."

  So, Reiko thought. It was even worse than she had imagined. This was more than juku, more than just another form of cram-education. Her child was being put to work before he was born. And there was nothing at all she could do about it.

  Guiltily, Reiko wasn't even sure she should try.

  13.

  A Klein bottle . . . she knew the name in a dream.

  It was what one called that bizarre thing—a container with two openings and none at all . . . whose inside was its outside.

  14.

  When Mrs. Sukimura's time came, they knew of it only by the fact that she did not join the others at the computer center. Ah, well, Reiko thought. At least the respite was coming soon.

  Traditionally, childbirth in many parts of Japan was done by appointment, during business hours. A woman scheduled a day with her obstetrician, when she would check into the hospital and receive the drugs to induce labor. It was all very civilized and much more predictable than the way it apparently was done in the West.

  But for the women of the test group, matters were different. So important was the work the fetuses were doing that it was decided to wait as long as possible, to let the babies come as late as they wanted.

  The reason given was "birth trauma." Apparently, emerging into the outer world robbed even the most talented fetuses of their small but potent psychic powers. After that they would lapse to being babies again. Talented, well-tutored babies, but babies nonetheless.

  The MITI technicians regretted this, but it would certainly be no "trauma" to her. To Reiko this coming return to ignorance would be a gift from the blessed Buddha himself.

  Oh, it would be strange to have a genius son. But they had promised her that he would still be a little boy. She would tickle him and make him laugh. She would hold him when he tripped and cried. She would bathe in his sweet smile and he would love her. She would see to that.

  Genius did not have to mean soullessness. She knew that from having met a few of her father's students over the years. There had been one boy . . . her father had wanted Reiko to go out with him instead of Tetsuo, years ago. Everyone said he was brilliant, and he had a nice smile and personality.

  If only he had not also had the habit of eating red meat too often. It made him smell bad, like an American.

  And anyway, by then she had already fallen in love with Tetsuo.

  One by one other women dropped out of their group, to be replaced by newcomers who looked to Reiko now for advice and reassurance. Her own time would be very soon, of course. In fact, she was already more than a week overdue when she went to the hospital for another examination, and one of the doctors left his clipboard on the counter when he went to answer a telephone call.

  Reiko suddenly felt daring. She reached out and turned the clipboard, hoping to see her own chart. But it was only a list of patients on the doctor's other ward.

  Then she frowned. Mrs. Sukimura's name was on the list! Three weeks after her delivery, which they'd been told had been uneventful.

  Reiko recognized other names. In fact, nearly all of the women who had gone into labor before her were under care on the next floor.

  The baby churned in response to her racing heart. Footsteps told of the doctor's return, so Reiko put back the clipboard and sat down again with an effort to remain outwardly calm.

  "If you don't begin labor by the end of the month, we will induce it," he told her upon completing his tests. "The delay was approved by your husband, of course. There is nothing to worry about."

  Reiko barely heard his words. What concerned her was the plan beginning to form in her mind. For her it would call for daring to the point of recklessness.

  Fortunately, she had worn Western dress for her visit to the hospital. A kimono would have been too conspicuous. At first she had considered trying to borrow a doctor's white coat to wear over her street clothes. After all, there were some female physicians here. She had seen a few.

  But her protruding belly and slow waddle would have made the imposture absurd, even if she did encounter a white coat just lying around to be taken.

  She did still have the gray gown they had given her to wear during the examination. This she kept balled inside her purse. In the ladies' room she put the loose garment on over her street clothes. People tended to look right past patients on a ward. The uniform was a partial cloak of invisibility.

  First she tried the lifts. But the elevator operator looked at her when she asked to be taken to floor eight. "May I please see your pass?" the young woman asked Reiko politely.

  "I misspoke, forgive me," Reiko said, bowing to hide her fluster. "I mean to say floor nine."

  On exiting the lift she rested against the wall for a while to catch her breath. The extra weight she carried every moment of every hour was a burden on her overstrained back, sheer torture if she did not maintain just the right erect posture. Soon it would be time to spill her child into the world. And yet she was beginning to dread the idea with a sick, mortal fear.

  A nurse asked if she needed help.

  "Iye, Kekko desu," Reiko answered quickly. "Gomen nasal Ikimashoo."

  Giving her a doubtful glance, the nurse turned away. Reiko waddled slowly toward the clearly marked fire exit, looked around to make sure she wasn't being observed, and pushed
her way into the stairwell.

  Her shoes made soft scraping sounds on the rough, high-traction surface of the steps. Under her left hand her womb was a center of furious activity as the baby kicked and turned. By the time she reached the eighth-floor landing, the guard stationed there had already risen from his little stool.

  "May I help you?" he asked perplexedly.

  Certainly, honorable sir, Reiko thought sarcastically. Please be so kind as to open the door for me, and then forget that I ever came this way.

  The guard frowned. Twice he began to speak, then stopped. His confused expression was soon matched by Reiko's own amazement as he blinked several times, then reached back to turn the knob and pull the portal aside for her.

  "Doozo . . . ohairi kudasai . . ."

  "Ee, itachakimasu," Reiko answered breathlessly. She rocked through the opening in a daze until the door was closed behind her again. Then she sagged back and sighed.

  For a few moments, there in the stairwell, she had felt something fey radiating from her womb. Her child had reached out in her time of need, and helped Reiko . . . probably without having any idea exactly what he was doing. Nevertheless, he had helped her.

  Love. She had always believed it had power transcending all the cold metal tools men were so proud of. All the more so the love between a mother and her child.

  I must find out what is going on here, she knew. I must.

  Fortunately, security in the hospital seemed to have only one layer, as if the owners of this place expected a mere ribbon of courtesy to suffice. And under normal circumstances it would have been more than enough.

  Reiko did not have to show great agility or dodge quickly from room to room. The halls were nearly empty, and the few people on duty at the nurses' station were turned away in a technical discussion as she hurried out of sight.

  She came to a large window facing the hallway. Within were the familiar shapes of a neonatal unit—rows of tiny white cots, monitoring instruments, a bored male nurse reading a newspaper.

  Babies.

  They look healthy enough, she thought, nurturing a slender shoot of a smile. There appeared to be no monsters here, just pink newborn little boys, each of them looking very much like a tiny, chubby Buddha . . . or that English prime minister, Churchill.

  Reiko's nascent smile faded, however, when she realized that the children were moving hardly at all. And then she saw that every one of them was connected by taped electrodes to a cluster of cables. The cables led to a bank of tall machines by the far wall.

  Computers. And the babies, staring with open eyes, hardly moved at all.

  "Wakarimasen," Reiko moaned, shaking her head. "I don't understand!"

  15.

  The plate by the door read "Sukimura." Reiko listened and, hearing no voices, slipped inside.

  "Reiko-san!"

  The woman in the chair looked healthy, fully recovered. She stood up and hurried over to take Reiko's hand. "Reiko-san, what are you doing here? They told us—"

  "Us? They have all of the others? Will they keep me here, too, when my time comes?"

  Mrs. Sukimura nodded and looked away. "They are kind. We . . . we are allowed to nurse our babies while they work."

  "Work," Reiko measured the word. "But the birth trauma . . . it should return the children to innocence! They promised. . . ."

  "They found a technique to prevent it, Reiko-san. Our babies were all born wise. They are engineers, doing great work for the good of the realm. It is even said that the palace may take notice, it is so important."

  Reiko was aghast. "Do they plan to leave them hooked up to wires forever?"

  "Oh, no, no. The doctors say this will not harm our sons. They say they will still be all right." And yet a hollow tone in her voice betrayed Mrs. Sukimura's true feelings.

  "But then, Izumi-san," Reiko said, "what is wrong?"

  "They are mistaken!" the older woman cried. "The men say we are silly, superstitious women. They say that the babies are all healthy . . . that they will lead normal lives. But oh, Reiko-San, they have no kami! They have no souls!"

  Reiko blinked, and the spirit within her writhed in tempo to her sudden breath. No, it cannot be true, she thought. I feel my baby's kami. For all he has been through, he is still human!

  Footsteps echoed in the hallway. Voices approached the door.

  "At birth," Mrs. Sukimura said in a husky voice filled with horrible resignation. "At birth they . . . their souls were sucked away into . . . into software."

  The door opened. Reiko heard rough masculine tones. Felt hands upon her shoulders. She cried out. "Iye. Iye!" But she could not shrug them off. The hands pulled her from the room.

  "Reiko-san!" She heard her friend call just before the door shut with a final click. A gurney waited. Strong hands. A needle.

  Reiko wailed, but no physical resistance could overcome the insistence of those hands.

  16.

  The flutterings caused by inducement drugs soon became tremors, which turned into fierce contractions. Reiko cried out for Tetsuo, knowing full well that tradition would have kept him away, even if frowning officials from the Ministry did not. Spasms came with increasing rapidity now, sending the small life within her kicking and swimming in agitation.

  New drugs were injected. Machines focused upon her womb, and she knew that these were the clever devices designed to prevent the cleansing fall of innocence that the doctors hatefully called "birth trauma." They were adamant about preventing it now. They were insisting that her baby enter the world wise.

  Oh, how they would discover, to their regret, what they had really done, what they had unleashed. But even were she able to speak, she knew they would not listen. They would have to find out for themselves.

  In her delirium Reiko's head turned left and right, trying to track voices nobody else in the operating room seemed to hear. They came at her from all sides, whispering through the hissing aspirators, humming from the lamps, murmuring from the electric sockets.

  Spirits leered and taunted her from the machines, some mere patternings of light and static, others more complex—coursing along involute electronic dissonance within the microprocessors. Ghosts floated around her—whispering kami, dressed up in raiments of software.

  How foolish of men to think they can banish the world of spirits. Reiko knew with sudden certainty that the very idea was arrogant. Of course the kami would simply adapt to whatever forms the times demanded. The spirits would find a way.

  They were loose in the grid now, biding their time. And they would have revenge.

  Ghosts of baby hamsters . . . of baby human beings . . .

  She sensed her own son thinking now, desperately, harder than any fetus had ever been forced to think before.

  Soporific numbness spread over her as the tentaclelike hands turned to other violations. The shuddering contractions made vision blur. Superimposed upon her diffracting tears were dazzling Moiré patterns and Möbius chains. How she knew the names of these things, without ever having learned them, Reiko did not bother to wonder. From her mouth came words. . . . "Transportation . . . locational translation of coordinates . . .," she whispered, licking her dry lips. ". . . nonlinear transformations . . ."

  And then there was the bottle that had not one opening, but two . . . or none at all . . . the container whose inside was outside.

  Now Reiko found herself wondering what the word "outside" really meant.

  The hands did not seem to notice or care about the ghostly forms glaring down at her from the harsh fluorescents. Those angry spirits mocked her agony, as they mocked the other one, the one struggling with a problem in geometry.

  Another spasm of savage pressure struck Reiko, almost doubling her over. And she felt overwhelmed by a sudden swimming sensation within her . . . an intensifying sense of dread . . . desperate concentration on a single task, to turn theoretical knowledge into practical skill.

  The kami in the walls and in the machines chittered derisively. The problem
was too difficult! It would never be solved in time!

  A container whose inside is outside . . .

  "Desu ka ne?" One of the technicians said, shaking and tapping his monitoring headphones. He shouted again, this time in alarm.

  Suddenly white coats flapped on all sides. There was no time for full anesthesia, so they sprayed on locals that numbed with bone-chilling rapidity. Nobody bothered to set up a modesty screen as the obstetric surgeons began an emergency cesarean section.

  Reiko felt it happen then, suddenly, as a burst of pure light seemed to explode within her. For that moment she shared an overwhelming sense of wonder and elation—the joy and beauty of pure mathematics. It was the only language possible in that narrow instant of triumph. And yet it also carried love.