John Adams - Other Worlds Than These

In fact, there were probably far more human beings alive than anyone had ever imagined might be possible. No human had ever left the solar system, and only a handful lived anywhere but Earth. One of the Earths, anyway—one of the angles of Earth. In the past five hundred years, millions had passed through benders to colonize versions of Earth where humanity had never evolved, and now a world seemed full with only a billion people or so.

Of the trillions of people that were known to exist, the one that Hakira was going to see lived in a two-hundred-year-old house perched on the southern coast of this island, where in ancient times artillery had been placed to command the harbor. Back when the Atlantic reached this far inland. Back when invaders had to come by ship.

Hakira set his flivver down in the meadow where the homing signal indicated, switched off the engine, and slipped out into the bracing air of a summer morning only a few miles from the face of the nearest glacier. He was expected—there was no challenge from the security system, and lights showed him the path to follow through the shadowy woods.

Because his host was something of a show-off, a pair of sabertooth tigers were soon padding along beside him. They might have been computer simulations, but knowing Moshe’s reputation, they were probably genetic back-forms, very expensive and undoubtedly chipped up to keep them from behaving aggressively except, perhaps, on command. And Moshe had no reason to wish Hakira ill. They were, after all, kindred spirits.

The path suddenly opened up onto a meadow, and after only a few steps he realized that the meadow was the roof of a house, for here and there steep-pitched skylights rose above the grass and flowers. And now, with a turn, the path took him down a curving ramp along the face of the butte overlooking the Hudson plain. And now he stood before a door.

It opened.

A beaming Moshe stood before him, dressed in, of all things, a kimono. “Come in, Hakira! You certainly took your time!”

“We set our appointment by the calendar, not the clock.”

“Whenever you arrive is a good time. I merely noted that my security system showed you taking the grand tour on the way.”

“Manhattan. A sad place, like a sweet dream you can never return to.”

“A poet’s soul, that’s what you have.”

“I’ve never been accused of that, before.”

“Only because you’re Japanese,” said Moshe.

They sat down before an open fire that seemed real, but gave off no smoke. Heat it had, however, so that Hakira felt a little scorched when he leaned forward. “There are Japanese poets.”

“I know. But is that what anyone thinks of, when they think of the wandering Japanese?”

Hakira smiled. “But you do have money.”

“Not from money-changing,” said Moshe. “And what I don’t have, which you also don’t have, is a home.”

Hakira looked around at the luxurious parlor. “I suppose that technically this is a cave.”

“A homeland,” said Moshe. “For nine and a half centuries, my friend, your people have been able to go almost anywhere in the world but one, an archipelago of islands once called Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu—”

Hakira, suddenly overcome by emotion, raised his hand to stop the cruel list. “I know that your people, too, have been driven from their homeland—”

“Repeatedly,” said Moshe.

“I hope you will forgive me, sir, but it is impossible to imagine yearning for a desert beside a dead sea the way one yearns for the lush islands strangled for nearly a thousand years by the Chinese dragon.”

“Dry or wet, flat or mountainous, the home to which you are forbidden to return is beautiful in dreams.”

“Who has the soul of a poet now?”

“Your organization will fail, you know.”

“I know nothing of the kind, sir.”

“It will fail. China will never relent, because to do so would be to admit wrongdoing, and that they cannot do. To them you are the interlopers. The toothless Peace Council can issue as many edicts as it likes, but the Chinese will continue to bar those of known Japanese ancestry from even visiting the islands. And they will use as their excuse the perfectly valid argument that if you want so much to see Japan, you have only to bend yourself to a different slant. There is bound to be some angle where your tourist dollars will be welcome.”

“No,” said Hakira. “Those other angles are not this world.”

“And yet they are.”

“And yet they are not.”

“Well, now, there is our dilemma. Either we will do business or we will not, and it all hinges on that question. What is it about that archipelago that you want. Is it the land itself? You can already visit that very land—and we are told that because of inanimate incoherency it is the same land, no matter what angle you dwell in. Or is your desire really not simply to go there, but to go there in defiance of the Chinese? Is it hate, then, that drives you?”

“No, I reject both interpretations,” said Hakira. “I care nothing for the Chinese. And now that you put the question in these terms, I realize that I myself have not thought clearly enough, for while I speak of the beautiful land of the rising sun, in fact what I yearn for is the Japanese nation, on those islands, unmolested by any other, governing ourselves as we have from the beginning of our existence as a people.”

“Ah,” said Moshe. “Now I see that we perhaps can do business. For it may be possible to grant you your heart’s desire.”

“Me and all the people of the Kotoshi.”

“Ah, the eternally optimistic Kotoshi. It means ‘this year,’ doesn’t it? As in, ‘this year we return’?”

“As your people say, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’”

“A Japan where only the Japanese have ruled for all these past thousand years. In a world where the Japanese are not rootless wanderers, legendary toymakers-for-hire, but rather are a nation among the nations of the world, and one of the greatest of them. Is that not the home you wish to return to?”

“Yes,” said Hakira.

“But that Japan does not exist in this world, not even now, when the Chinese no longer need even half the land of the original Han China. So you do not want the Japan of this world at all, do you? The Japan you want is a fantasy, a dream.”

“A hope.”

“A wish.”

“A plan .”

“And it hasn’t occurred to you that in all the angles of the world, there might not be such a Japan?”

“It isn’t like the huge library in that story, where it is believed that among all the books containing all the combinations of all the letters that could fit in all those pages, there is bound to be a book that tells the true history of all the world. There are many angles, yes, but our ability to differentiate them is not infinite, and in many of them life never evolved and so the air is not breathable. It is an experiment not lightly undertaken.”

“Oh, of course. To find a world so nearly like our own that a nation called Japan—or, I suppose, Nippon—exists at all, where a language like Japanese is even spoken—you do speak Japanese yourself, don’t you?”

“My parents spoke nothing else at home until I was five and had to enter school.”

“Yes, well, to find such a world would be a miracle.”

“And to search for it would be a fool’s errand.”

“And yet it has been searched for.”

Hakira waited. Moshe did not go on.

“Has it been found?”

“What would it be worth to you, if it had?”

“You’re a scientist,” said Leonard. “This is beneath you.”

“I have continuous video,” said Bêto. “With a mechanical clock in it, so you can see the flow of time. The chair moves.”