Lord of All Things (22 page)

“I see.” Rodney nodded and tapped the picture on the cover. “I had one almost like that. Long time ago.” He looked around. “On the other hand, what is a Master of the Universe? Master of All the Stuff—now that would be a real superhero.”

“Master of All the Stuff?” Hiroshi echoed.

Rodney grinned and turned to the door. “I think I’ll let you get on with it.” He scooted out.

Hiroshi looked down at his old notebook. That had been a stupid overreaction; Rodney wouldn’t have been able to read a word of it anyway, since it was all in Japanese. He opened it up and looked at the columns of hiragana, some hastily scribbled, some written with care. Master of All the Stuff. A silly joke, but for some reason it stuck in his mind. The trick was to be able to master stuff. At the moment his stuff had mastered him, made him clean it, look after it, haul it all over the place. He had bought all these things, but instead of them belonging to him, he belonged to them. And what nonsense it was to feel nostalgic about the days when he had crossed continents with nothing more than a suitcase. Whose fault was it he couldn’t do that today? His, and his alone. He could choose to change it anytime. He could become the master, the lord of all things, simply by deciding to be.

His moment had come.

He swept everything from his bed onto the floor. The space he had cleared was roughly enough for two suitcases. More than back then, but it would do. He waded through the sea of possessions cluttering his room and fished out what he would pack into those two cases. It wasn’t easy. He had to make some tough decisions, sometimes downright brutal.

At last, a small heap of clothes lay on the bed—just what was really worth wearing, and a few books. A few mementos, his computer of course, and one or two other things. Everything else could go. Without stopping for second thoughts, Hiroshi unrolled all the trash bags he had and shoved everything that still lay on his floor inside. He tied them tight. Since there weren’t enough of them, he used the cardboard boxes as well. Then he fetched the cart from the basement, hauled all the bags and boxes downstairs, and threw it all into the trash in the courtyard.

Cleaning his room would be easy now.

Around noon, when everything was in place and tidied up and the house looked almost livable, Brenda conjured up a pot of something she had prepared earlier. As it heated up on the stove, the kitchen began to smell appetizingly of mulligatawny soup. Bowls were hastily unpacked, washed, and put on the table. Spoons clattered. Gwen called out, “Mmm, what’s in this?” and Juanita said, “Not bad.” Brenda and Dr. Wickersham, it turned out, had stopped for fresh bread on the way over. Charlotte’s mouth was watering as well. She hadn’t eaten mulligatawny for ages. The soup was thick and yellow, full of vegetables, chicken, rough-chopped cashews, and rice, and it tasted delicious.

Inevitably, conversation turned to their childhood days in Delhi. Wickersham was astonished to learn they had both lived in India when they were young. Charlotte was a diplomat’s daughter, of course, so that made sense, but Brenda? Brenda launched into a series of anecdotes, such as the one about the old man who watched the entrance to her parents’ compound. He spent his days sitting in a tiny wooden guard hut, like a cage, and at night he would light a fire in there, building it in a rusty old hubcap. Brenda had worried for years that the house would burn down.

Charlotte told the story about the monkey that had come into her bedroom to steal the math book. “I watched him climb back up into the tree to have a closer look at what he’d gotten. The other monkeys found out, though, and did all they could to get the book off him. In the end there was nothing left but confetti.” She laughed as she remembered. “I went out to the garden to gather up the scraps so that I could show them to my teacher the next day. I was worried she wouldn’t believe me otherwise.”

She could see the big villa again in her mind’s eye, with its enormous garden.…Oh yes, and the dozens of servants always scurrying around. Not that any of them had worked very hard. She remembered groups of women who spent their days sweeping the paths, bent over with simple brooms made of bundles of twigs. All it did was stir up the dust; the flagstones were never actually any cleaner.

“What did you do all day?” Wickersham asked curiously.

Brenda glanced at Charlotte. “Once we’d finished our homework, we were usually over at your place at the pool, weren’t we?”

Charlotte no longer remembered. “Didn’t we spend all our time in the courtyard? The one with the broken stone wall?”

“Oh yes! That was where your peacock sometimes attacked us. He was an evil-tempered bird.”

“He was indeed. What was his name again? Gerôme. Oh yes, he was one to steer clear of.”

She felt lighthearted just thinking of Delhi, telling the old stories. How simple life had been back then.

After lunch it was time for phase two: emptying Brenda’s room in Warren Towers. They had let the Office of Parking Services know about the move and had special permission to use the parking garage that took up the first two floors of the enormous dorm complex. The janitor came and freed up an elevator for them so they could go back and forth between Brenda’s floor and the truck. It could have been an easy job. Should have been. If Juanita had been able to simply take the books off the shelves and pack them in boxes without stopping to look at every single one. If she didn’t know a book, she read its jacket text from start to finish, and if she did, she would give a little lecture on it.

“Ju!” Brenda finally yelled. “The girl who’s taking over the room is due next week, already! We have to hurry things along a little.”

Juanita was deep in contemplation of a paperback edition of Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
. “Did you know that Africans hate this book?” she asked.

There was a constant bustle in the hall as neighbors came by to bid Brenda a tearful farewell. They acted as though she were about to emigrate, although in fact they would all see one another on campus on Monday. Charlotte was glad Brenda was finally moving out of Towers. The concrete hallways had all the charm of a subway station, and it always smelled nasty. Today the omnipresent odor of unwashed socks predominated.

“It’s pretty lively here,” Wickersham commented to Brenda. “Don’t you like that?”

“Oh I do,” Brenda replied, piling a cushion on top of the box of books he already held in his arms. “But I have these funny old-fashioned notions of privacy. Up here you can come home beat dead from the day and find there’s a party happening in your room and someone’s reading aloud from your diary. Not my idea of fun.”

Unpacking back at Brenda’s new house was much calmer. Charlotte took her time putting towels on the shelves in the bathroom, enjoying the peace and quiet after the chaos of Warren Towers. She had the feeling that peace and quiet was allowed here.

“Charley?” Brenda stuck her head round the door. “Here you are. Hey.” She came in and shut the door behind her. “You seem a little down today. Is everything all right with you and James? Did you two have an argument?”

Charlotte took a deep breath. “No,” she said and shook her head. “No, we didn’t argue.”

James hadn’t been able to get over that bout of impotence. On Friday he had turned up unexpectedly and thrown himself at her. This time the sex worked. It had been a little quick—too quick for her—but at least it had happened.

“But?” Brenda looked at her in concern.

“Everything’s all right with me and James,” Charlotte declared with the strangest feeling she was an oyster just starting to cover some inner hurt with mother-of-pearl. “Really, it couldn’t be better. I’m happy. Yes. We’ve been talking about setting dates, you know? We’ll announce the engagement in the fall and then get married the following summer.” She had to take a deep breath; there was a tightness in her chest. “Then I’ll be Mrs. James Bennett. That bothers me a little. I’ll get used to it, but…it’s a lot to take in.”

Right at that moment she even believed what she was saying.

Rasmussen wasn’t in the least like how Hiroshi expected an investor to look. The word suggested a guy like Gordon Gecko from
Wall Street
—somebody in an expensive suit smelling of expensive cologne. Gelled hair and an arrogant attitude. Rasmussen, however, was wearing linen pants, a polo shirt, and a summer-weight jacket. He had brought along chocolate doughnuts and coffee.

“Just in case,” he announced. “I happen to really like doughnuts in the afternoon.” Then he looked around and added, “Wow. This is the neatest student room I’ve ever seen. It’s practically Zen. I’m impressed.”

Hiroshi offered him a seat, which was much easier to do now with all his stuff gone, and said, “I have some cold drinks, too, if you’d like.”

Rasmussen declined. “Let’s get to work on these doughnuts, then we’ll see.”

As they ate, he began to talk. He told Hiroshi how he had watched Sollo Electronics try to take over its rival Cook & Holland, a company at least ten times its size. “They used the old trick—take out a bank loan to buy the shares and then pay off the loan afterward with Cook & Holland assets. Unfortunately, there was some competition, and the share price shot up. The sensible thing would have been to forget the whole thing, unload the shares they had, and cash in the profit, but no, the management at Sollo just said ‘full steam ahead.’ They took out loans all over the place and bought up more and more Cook & Holland shares, ran up these crazy debts—and then it all blew up in their faces. First, they couldn’t pay their suppliers—that’s when my alarm bells really started ringing, since two of my companies happen to be among the suppliers—then they couldn’t make payroll. After that the cat was out of the bag, and Sollo’s share price nose-dived.”

Hiroshi had listened attentively, albeit without really understanding what the man was talking about. It was hard to say how old Rasmussen was. He had a weather-beaten look, as though he spent most of his time outside, and his hair was cut so short there was no telling what color it was. Probably gray. He had ice-blue eyes and a steady gaze.

“So what does all that mean?” Hiroshi asked. “Won’t there be any more Wizard’s Wands?” The idea that his invention might go off the market even before he got his degree depressed him.

Rasmussen raised his hands. “Slow down. That’s just the point in the story where I took a closer look at the company. I made a guess at its true value, not the market value; stock prices have nothing to do with reality. I saw a company with amazing prospects but completely incompetent management. Megalomaniac idiots. So I bought Sollo Electronics—for a bargain price, if you disregard their outstanding debts—and I fired the lot of them. Now that I’ve paid off the debt, I have to turn those prospects I saw into reality.” He pointed at Hiroshi. “You, Mr. Kato, are one of those prospects.”

Hiroshi shrugged. “I just invented one little gizmo.”

“I have a nose for these things,” Rasmussen said. “It tells me you’ll invent more.”

Hiroshi hesitated. “I don’t know. Could be.”

“I’ve been talking to tradesmen. Lots of them. I haven’t met one who owns a Wizard’s Wand and doesn’t think it’s the bee’s knees.”

“Well, that’s nice.” But what good did it do him?

Rasmussen wiped a few crumbs of chocolate from his fingers with a napkin. “I looked at the numbers. Am I right that you weren’t particularly pleased with the money you earned from your invention?”

Hiroshi shrugged again. “Well, pleased…it covered my tuition, so that was okay. I really just did it because I wanted to learn how that whole thing works. Patents, licensing, all of that.”

“Did you know the Wizard’s Wand is on sale practically worldwide?”

“I heard something of the kind.”

“And weren’t you bothered that so little of that money was reaching you?”

“Thirty, forty thousand dollars a year—is that really so little?” Hiroshi asked, though even as he uttered the words, he thought for a man like Rasmussen it probably was.

The investor leaned forward and folded his hands. “Listen, this brings us back to the matter I mentioned on the phone: it has to be an exchange. A tree can’t just pump out oxygen; it has to take in its own nutrients. There has to be a proper balance of give and take if these things are to work. You never paid attention to this. You just put your invention out there in the world and let it look after itself. Pardon me for saying so, but that was irresponsible. It harmed you, and I believe that it harmed everyone else.”

“But what should I have—”

“What actually happened,” Rasmussen went on, with a curious gleam in his eye, “was the bosses at Sollo ripped off their patent holders first when they needed money for the takeover bid. The forty thousand dollars they paid you in the first year was all well and good, but please remember the Wizard’s Wand only came on the market in September, that the customers had to get to know it, and so forth. Your take should have been greater the following year. Instead, it was less. At least, in the balance sheet they showed you.” He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and took out a piece of paper, which he handed to Hiroshi. “This is the amount you are actually due. Including the interest for late payment.”

Hiroshi stared at the sheet of paper in his hands and felt his heart suddenly start hammering. It was a check for more than three million dollars.

“I did wonder,” he heard a voice say, at first not even realizing it was his own, “whether we could integrate a laser pointer into the Wand to shoot out a coded light pulse. The cameras would pick it up and calculate the coordinates, then you could draw in partition walls or whatever directly in real space. Then, if we added a set of data goggles, the operator could see the new additions in the room right then and there in a virtual image. He could even move new elements around in 3-D.”

“You see?” Rasmussen beamed. “No sooner do we get the balance right than your ideas begin to flow. That’s how it’s supposed to work.”

Hiroshi raised the check in his hand. “Three million? That’s really something.”

He felt dizzy. He had been expecting almost anything, but not this. Three million. That meant he was rich. Not filthy rich, not stinking rich, but rich all the same.