Birthday (16 page)

She didn't care about the mechanism. Her voice rose in frustration.

"What happened to his body?"

"In order to get his complete biodata, it was necessary to expose him to radiation intense enough to break down his cells, and as a result..."

Reiko's hair flew about as she leaned abruptly forward.

"That is, what happened was..."

Reiko nearly screamed.

Amano seemed to be trying to impress upon her that he bore no responsibility in the matter—his voice grew angry, although his anger had no particular object.

"Listen to me. As a result, his body was liquefied. It was destroyed."

"Liquefied? Destroyed?" In a daze she repeated the words. She tried and failed to imagine that happening to a body. What happened to his life? She knew the answer to that, but she couldn't accept it.

She started to speak, but bit back the words. Her mouth opened and closed helplessly; she looked like she was about to hyperventilate. Amano took pity on her and pronounced.

"Kaoru is dead to this world."

Reiko and Amano stared at each other for a long time. Amano couldn't avert his gaze from her big eyes, turned slightly down at the corners. He'd have to take her emotional explosion head-on.

Reiko was the first to look away. Tears welled up in her eyes; the next moment she'd collapsed face down on the table, heedless as some of her hair landed in the coffee.

Her voice was muffled as she moaned, "I can't believe it..."

She didn't know what to say. Two years ago she'd lost her husband to MHC; two months ago her son, af-flicted with the same disease, had killed himself. And now—or rather, a month ago—her lover, the father of the child she was carrying, had also departed this world, and in a manner she couldn't even begin to describe. What a catastrophe—she could feel her will to live withering away.

I can't take it anymore.

She'd already been sick of life before coming to the research center. Now that Amano had informed her of Kaoru's death, she could feel her helplessness metamor-phosing into a distinct death wish. She had to staunch this sadness at its root, and the only way to do that was to destroy the body from which her emotions sprang.

It didn't matter that Kaoru's biodata could cure her own condition. She could take no more. She might overcome her cancer and live several decades more, but her sorrow would stay with her forever. She didn't want to live in such a state. This she could say with perfect certainty.

No more.

She stood up. As she did, she knocked over her cup and spilled coffee on her lap, but she didn't seem to care as she whirled around and headed for the door.

"Where are you going?"

Amano pursued her, grabbing her by the wrist.

"That's enough."

"No, it's not. I have more to tell you."

"I know all I need to know."

"You don't know anything yet."

Reiko reached for the doorknob, ignoring him. But Amano held her arm. In pain, she yelled, "Leave me alone!" Anger was unusual for her.

Amano couldn't back down. Kaoru had had his mission; Amano now had his. He had promises to keep—to Dr. Eliot, but more importantly to Kaoru.

"Won't you please calm down and listen? I promised Kaoru I'd do this."

Reiko held still. She stopped resisting and waited for Amano's next words. The line about promising Kaoru seemed to have worked.

"A promise..."

"Yes. It's my task to bring you and Kaoru face to face. Before he left on his journey, Kaoru made me and Dr. Eliot promise. I have a duty to follow his instructions. It's my way of repaying him for what he's done—

save humanity, no less. What I'm going to do is call up the appropriate moment and bring you and Kaoru face to face."

"Face to face? You mean...I can meet him?"

"Yes, yes, of course. He's alive and well on the other side."

Reiko half turned around, coffee dripping from her hair. She looked pale, haggard.

"Please, sit down." Amano indicated the sofa.

It took a little while for Reiko to suppress her emotions and return to normal. She paused for a moment, slowly fixing her hair and face, then followed Amano's suggestion and sank onto the sofa.

Amano kept looking at his watch. It bothered Reiko.

"Are we alright for time?" she asked.

"What? Oh, it's just that we've got an appointment in ten minutes."

"Who's your appointment with?"

"Kaoru."

Reiko started to feel confused again. What validity was there to an appointment with someone who'd been dead for a month?

Amano tried, gently, to clear up any misunderstand-ings.

"First of all, I'd like you to know that Kaoru freely chose to undergo NSCS."

"Did he know it would kill him?"

"He did. The NSCS digitizes the emotions of the subject at the precise moment of scanning. It wouldn't work if we tied someone up and forced them to undergo neutrino irradiation. When someone is full of fear and hatred, or denial, the body stiffens and we can't get a reading of their natural biodata. So I must ask you to fully accept the fact that Kaoru went in of his own free will. He welcomed death with a serene heart and an un-ruffled state of mind so that we could get an accurate scan of his biodata. He had the most exalted of motiva-tions. He was sacrificing himself to save the human race.

And let me be more specific. Kaoru particularly wanted to save you, and the child you carry, and his parents."

Amano's words weighed on her. If Kaoru had died for her and her child, suddenly her life became a much more important thing. She felt more valuable in her own eyes.

Amano continued:

"Kaoru's death meant two things. First, as I keep re-iterating, it enabled us to utilize his biodata to find a cure for MHC. Second, digitizing his molecular information allowed us to bring him back to life within the Loop world.

"The cancerization of the Loop world and the cancerization of the real world relate to each other in subtle, intimate ways that you expressed through the metaphor of the mother and the fetus. Restoring biodiversity is the only real solution to the problems of both biospheres.

Kaoru died in this world and left us his biodata, and we'll make the fullest use of it. We needed him to come back to life in the Loop and to bear the burden of returning that world, too, to its normal state of biodiversity. In short, he needed to carry out the duties of a god. His death was simultaneously a departure into the Loop world. When he arrived, the Loop project—which had been frozen for twenty years—was reactivated. It got a new start, from a point just this side of extinction."

"Can't you bring him back to life in this world, then?"

"We can't restore him just as he was. It's possible to create a new life with Kaoru's DNA using cloning technology, which developed at the end of the last century.

I'm sure I don't have to explain to you that while such a being would have Kaoru's DNA, he would have different life experiences—he'd be a different person. However, the Kaoru that was brought back to life within the Loop is exactly the same as the Kaoru who lived here—the same thought patterns, the same emotions, and the same memories."

"So you're saying he remembers me."

"Of course he does."

It finally sank in that Kaoru was alive in the other world. But that still didn't change the fact that he'd died.

As long as he was in the virtual world, they couldn't in-teract physically. They couldn't communicate—or at least, she couldn't see how. All she'd be able to do was watch him on a screen, as though he were some character in a television show. Wasn't it worse to have her loved one so close at hand and be unable to touch him?

"Can the Loop beings see us?"

It was the next logical question. She knew, because she had experienced it twice now, that she could observe the Loop world. But even as a layperson she could surmise that the reverse might not be so easily accomplished.

"No, they can't. Just like we can't peek into the world of the gods."

But the image that came into Reiko's mind was not of god and man.

A few days ago Reiko had gone to see her obstetrician, and the doctor had shown her the fetus. She'd lain down on a bed and hiked up her blouse to expose her belly, and the doctor had applied the ultrasound to her skin, summoning an image of the fetus on the monitor.

The doctor had talked to her about the baby's development. Reiko had been struck by how easily the echo machine showed her the inside of her womb. Here, too, the comparison of the Loop to a womb proved helpful to her.

A mother could see the fetus in her womb, but the fetus could not be conscious of its mother in her entirety. Perception in this case was a one-way street.

And so Reiko had no trouble accepting the fact that while the real world could look in on the Loop, the reverse was impossible.

"I understand. Now let me meet him."

She intentionally used an expression that implied they'd be in the same space even though she knew that she'd see him and not the reverse. She wanted to feel like they'd be together, even temporarily. If only she could recapture the feeling of his skin touching hers...

"Alright. It's about time we left this room. I think Kaoru has things he wants to tell you. He was evidently quite insistent that Dr. Eliot promise him this meeting.

He didn't want to leave you a message by holographic memory. I think he just wanted to feel for an instant that you and he were in the same place at the same time, to feel that you were there before his eyes."

They went into a laboratory divided down the middle by a standing screen. Amano went to a computer and input a time and a place. Reiko sat where she was told.

He asked if she wanted to use a helmet display and data gloves.

"What happens if I use them?"

"The experience will be three-dimensional. Alto-gether more realistic. The data gloves will allow you to touch Kaoru's body."

Without a moment's hesitation, she chose to use them.

She put on the equipment and waited for the time to come. Two minutes to go. She steadied her breathing and wiped the coffee from her hair with a handkerchief, arranging it behind her head. She knew he wouldn't be able to see her, but her feminine instincts insisted.

It had been two months since she'd last seen his face. Now he was dead—seeing him would feel like they'd put TV cameras in heaven or something. Her anticipation mounted. She wanted to see him calm and at peace. She thought it might reassure her, to a degree.

In Loop time, it was nearly two pm on June 27, 1991. The latitude and longitude coordinates were aligned precisely as they should be. Reiko was about to experience the Loop world in three dimensions, sight and sound.

As the system started, she could feel that she was being taken to another place. Her surroundings were blurry white, and countless droplets of moisture floated all around her. Her body was thrust between them. She seemed to be floating in clouds and her body felt light.

She was not afraid. In fact, she felt quite comfortable, as if she'd obtained a new, freer body.

It didn't take her long to realize that those were actual clouds obscuring her field of vision. She made her way forward until she passed through a rent in the clouds to the other side. She found herself looking down at a coastline, a peninsula extending out into the sea.

Her point of view descended until the intricate coastline became so clear she felt she could reach out and touch it.

The land sloped steeply down to the ocean, leaving precious little space for the seaside pines and only a thin strip of beach.

A paved road wound its way through the hills, shining up at her grayly. The Loop world's sun seemed to be at her back; she couldn't see it, but she could see the reflection of its rays on the road, and on the waves, glitter-ing. She was able to sense that the sun was there behind her.

She saw a human figure on an animal track that veered off the road toward the ocean. At first she couldn't tell what it was looking for as it wandered back and forth along the pine-covered hillside. Was it trying to find a clear field of vision? Or someplace where it could bask in the rays of the sun as they broke through the clouds?

Finally the figure sat down in a grassy clearing on the slope. It then looked straight up at where Reiko's

"eyes" should be.

All was silent, except for the surf in the distance and the wind that surrounded her. As her vantage point lowered and the ground rose to meet her she got a curious sense of spatial relationships. It wasn't like landing in an airplane; it was slower than that. She'd never para-chuted, but she imagined this was what it felt like.

The figure sitting there holding his knees was known in her world by the name Kaoru Futami, while in the Loop he was called Ryuji Takayama. Time in the Loop moved six times faster than in the real world; the month Reiko had spent since last talking with him corresponded to six months there. But that wasn't important. What mattered right now was that Kaoru, too, was aware that Reiko was right in front of him.

She looked down on him from a height of several meters, gazing at his forehead, his nose, the strong-willed set of his mouth. He smiled up as if searching for Reiko's face floating there in the sky. He knew, he had to know, that she was looking at him.

Reiko stayed where she was for a while and allowed memories of Kaoru to pass through her mind. They'd spent so little time together, shared so few spaces. The hospital was practically the only place where they'd voiced their love for each other, but Reiko's son had committed suicide there. Pleasant memories of the place coexisted with sorrowful ones.

Reiko searched for recollections that were purely of Kaoru, fleshing them out, comparing them with the face she was now seeing. Kaoru was right there in front of her, but she closed her eyes.

An image of herself and Kaoru replayed in her mind.

He was walking along the hospital corridor. When he saw her, his face lit up with a joy he didn't even try to conceal. She missed that innocence of his. She could recall the warmth of his skin as he hesitantly touched her—as he picked her up with ease and carried her to the bed. She recalled how they had stood looking over the city from the top floor of the hospital, talking about what they'd do if they could conquer the illness, losing themselves in unrealizable dreams.