Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

“Oh yes indeed, I’m sure, I have one eight feet tall in my sitting room.”

“You do? I never noticed it! But listen Josephine, I ah—seem to have a problem.”

“You’ve got a problem?” I can hardly stop laughing, I know it is costing him about eight dollars a minute but my laughter is not to be contained by such a consideration. I can dimly make out what he is saying over my noisy mirth.

His bed is full of Rhinestones, he can’t understand it, he cleared them all up only the other night and took them out and gave them away to Chinese people on the street. But here, the bed is full of the damn things again, they are terribly sharp and they are ruining his hibernation.

“Send me your red scarf, I’ll hex them for you,” I say, but the distance between us seems to spoil our usual instant understanding. I cannot seem to communicate properly. And besides I am laughing so much. It is very amusing to be called like this in the middle of the night, especially as we haven’t got a phone.

The jagged edge of construction showed against the sky. It was lunch time. Thousands of workmen were squatting in the narrow noontime shadow of the wall. Wagon tracks narrowed to infinity in all directions, bringing horse-drawn loads of stone and rice to this dry grassland barren of both. Men in this country can win no living without abandoning their crops and turning to animal breeding. So the First Emperor of China, Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, built the Great Wall at this divide between the steppe and the sown: to keep the sedentary cultivator in, captive to taxation, unfree to join the horsemen of the north.

On signal the men arose and swarmed back to work. As they toiled all along the line, filling the masonry sandwich with rubble, a vibrant shape formed on the distant horizon and instantly expanded in its headlong drive to the foreground: a great white flying charger, ridden by a fierce man in black, who scourged the backs of his trembling vassals as he passed over them. The Emperor at his magic work!

Then suddenly . . . inside a Japanese house . . . people kneeling on the floor . . . bowing to each other . . . kneeling on tatami mats and bowing to each other in a stiff display of lacquered punctilios. . . .

Mane blazing in the wind, the horse landed his imperial Chinese majesty smack in the middle of the departing guests where he dismounted and took up the place of the host standing at the door, hands on his knees, bowing frantically, bowing good-bye, and the film rush flipped to the end and the projection room bloomed bright white.

“Did you see that?”

“Yes, I saw.”

“Well, what do you make of it?”

“What about the others?”

Two reports from Dr. Mochizuki’s hands and a flickering of film again darkened the screen with chiaroscuro movement along the Great Wall. Here and there the image fell apart, revealing flashing vignettes of dainty ceremony: people dressed in kimono, bowing, pouring tea, passing things to each other at forehead level with both hands. The lights came on again at the end of the rush.

“All the recent takes are like that. Ito-san doesn’t keep his mind on his work. Quite literally not!”

“Could be the effect of his removal from the hospital to your laboratory,” ventured Dr. Iwahashi.

“It could be so. I suppose that is why an anthropologist like yourself has been asked to inspect this project.”

“The human element,” explained Iwahashi.

“I’ll show you some of the earlier, good stuff,” Mochizuki offered.

His secretary, ever sensitive to the punctuation of human events, brought in fresh tea and set the cups on the tea poy between the two armchairs.

The earlier film clips poured smoothly onto the screen from the glancing light beams and Mochizuki talked.

“As you can see,” he indicated Ch’in Shih Huang Ti’s enormous, gaudy palace buildings, “there is no limit to the scale we can achieve. That’s why we decided on redoing The Great Wall for a starter.”

The palace buildings stretched out with the infinitude of the wall itself, one for each day of the year, so that the Emperor might keep his enemies guessing his whereabouts.

“Anything Ito-san can imagine we can film. But we discovered another advantage as well,” Mochizuki continued at his nervous pitch. “The human eye selects for more detail in the focus of its attention, omitting structure and even color at the periphery. But the camera lens takes in everything impartially. Tricks of soft focusing or masking with a dynamic frame don’t even begin to approximate the different degrees of visual refinement experienced by the human retina—sharpest on the fovea, loss so on the surrounding macular area, and still less on the peripheral areas.

“Look at this.” Mochizuki wagged a skinny hand at the panorama on the screen. “Photographic realism when we want it. Spectacular enough. But when our dreamer dreams with his inner eye ...”

Mochizuki waited silently until one of the marvels appeared.

“Here now, the mountain scenery. See that? Even when panning. Why, it is like the painting of Gyokudo Kawai in motion!”

“So it is,” breathed Iwahashi respectfully.

There indeed was the style of Japan’s greatest modern painter come to life. As in Kawai’s nature studies, the center of interest glowed with full richness, the rest dropping off to skeletal sketches in black and white. The foveal, macular, and peripheral areas of the dreamer’s vision passed a stand of woods in review. Trees, trunks, and branches slipped in and out of detail and color with natural ease.

“The eyes of the audience are led where our dreamer chooses to lead them,” Mochizuki concluded. Iwahashi was reminded of the offstage benshi that used to explain silent films when he was a boy.

Mochizuki stood up. “Let us please now go to my laboratory.”

“Well, there he is. That’s Ito-san,” said Dr. Mochizuki, chairman of Tokyo University’s new Department of Bionic Engineering.

Ito-san, a young catatonic lately released into Mochizuki’s custody from Tokyo Metropolitan Psychiatric Hospital after a year’s confinement, sat cross-legged in one corner of the laboratory, eating his breakfast. His personal nurse, a short dumpy creature, sat on the raised mat-covered platform with him, reading aloud from the day’s shooting script. From time to time she guided her patient’s sluggish chopsticks to his mouth.

A body servant to cook Ito-san’s rice, bathe him, change his clothes, and put him to bed at night was an added expense his family had saved by installing their housemaid in the hospital with him instead of hiring a tsukisoi there.

“They just sent her along when he went rigid,” Dr. Mochizuki said, continuing to brief his visitor. “And that’s the way my talent scouts found him. What do I care what’s wrong with him so long as he sticks to his dreaming?”

Dr. Iwahashi, professor of cultural anthropology, also of Tokyo University, stood admiring ancient Chinese armor and costumes fitted on startlingly lifelike mannequins which were ranged around the laboratory. He stopped revolving his head and cocked it at the tsukisoi.

“So she’s the only one who can get through to him?”

“Hai! The more she read to him the sicker he got.”

“Ah so,” murmured Iwahashi, slightly bowing his portly figure. “Interesting.”

“You are too kind. Sit here, please.”

Mochizuki indicated another pair of overstuffed armchairs. They clashed with the straight metallic lines of the bionic device which stood in the center of the laboratory.

“We’ve rigged up a slave screen to monitor the takes directly,” said Mochizuki.