Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

Appreciative laughter issued from the class at this, and the secretary reached out and touched the pages of the book possessively.

“We Japanese do not try to understand. We don’t want to know why , we want to know what. We don’t care about reasons, about motivations. Those are unclean matters. Concern for them is bad for the character.

“Our Japanese society is much more wholesome. Everybody’s role in our society is fixed and identified like a piece on the chessboard. When we encounter another Japanese we have only to guess what his next move will be. Who cares why he makes it? To guess why is to get involved in the sticky threads of another’s inner life. We in our formal society are free individuals undefiled by contact with the motivations of others.”

The classroom was quiet. The secretary, now that he had the class with him, smoked his Golden Bat with pride

“It is still the mission of the Japanese people to improve the character of the inferior races of the world. Allow me to quote the words of our late departed General Sadao Araki: ‘The spirit of the Japanese nation is, by its nature, a thing that must be propagated over the seven seas and extended over the five continents.’ “

Dr. Iwahashi scuffed his way through the fallen leaves of the great ginkgo trees that dominated the Hongo campus. Neighborhood people were moving about, bent over, picking up the last of the ginkgo nuts for roasting.

Only one structure rose above the trees, the new engineering building, the first of the new constructions over eight stories put up by the university after the new earthquake regulations were put into effect.

The building was faced with glazed tiles; inside, it sported a pair of automatic stainless steel elevators. Iwahashi rode up to the twelfth floor and walked down halls of modern beauty and lighting. How unlike the halls of anthropology, with its cramped quarters, crammed with loose stacks of wooden drawers at the top of a walkup of unimproved cinderblock construction.

Inside the engineer’s office a dented aluminum pot boiled on a gas heater. Mochizuki extended the hospitality. He tipped the spout into a strainer packed with damp leaves of green tea and the bubbling hot water went steaming into the porcelain cup.

Iwahashi stepped across the snaky red gas tubing and received the cup in both hands in an act at once of polite formality and of self-seeking warmth.

After a long moment there in the grey twilight of a late afternoon in winter, Iwahashi said:

“I’ve arranged for Ito-san to be taken home. Come with me and I’ll treat you at your favorite seafood restaurant.”

The two of them jostled comfortably, not speaking, in the rush-hour crowds of the Marunouchi line and got off at Shinjuku station. They waited in line to enter Kikumasa, where tired businessmen took it easy on the way home with a little beer and raw fish. Finally, when their turn came, they sat facing each other at long stone benches, surrounded on high by great ornate platters that once had served the feasting tables of the Tokugawa barons. Surrounded by the clatter and delighted sounds of eating and enthusiastic talk on all sides of them, the two professors wiped faces and hands with the warm, wet towels set before them and prepared to order.

When the waiter had placed the food and poured out the beer, Iwahashi raised his glass, pronounced “ kampai ,” and the informal evening’s relationship formally got under way.

“Why can’t he finish The Great Wall?”

Iwahashi savored the tangled softness of raw jellyfish on his tongue. He might have taken this morsel as his text and said something to the effect that, while men can find satisfaction in eating raw food, they cannot abide one another in the raw, unclothed by ritual and protective custom. But he took instead the title of the film.

“Ito-san has built his own wall, one enclosing private space around himself, and he is cured.”

Mochizuki nodded convulsively, saying, “How true! How true!” thus indicating, without exposing, his need for explanation.

“Ito-san’s working with you on the film was its own therapy. He was in bondage to that woman, dreaming mind to mind with her. Evidently she got some kind of telepathic feedback from reading to him, some interior visualization from his mind of what she was reading. In time they evolved a symbiotic relationship: he trapped in it, she dependent on it. A disgusting, inhuman relationship of total involvement!”

Mochizuki shuddered. But he quickly came back to the question uppermost in his mind.

“What about the project, perhaps?”

Iwahashi poured his guest another glassful of Sapporo beer. “Ito-san is enjoying a vacation at home.”

“He is not coming back?”

“Yes.” One must always say “yes” even when the answer is “no” in order to avoid insincerity. Negation is offensively straightforward and rude. It is not sincere to hurt a personal relationship by sharp encounters with unpleasant facts. “Yes, he is not coming back.”

“But the machine . . .”

“You worked a miraculous cure,” replied Iwahashi with tactful but irrelevant praise.

Mochizuki rose slightly forward on his stool and gasped in a self-deprecating drag of air through his teeth: an imploded voiceless dental spirant.

“His secret fantasy was of normal social life, is it not so?”

“Hai! ” It was a reflexive response in deference to authoritative opinion.

“It is so. In working with your machine, Ito-san found his chance to escape playing the insufflator to that mental succubus. Broadcasting his pictures through your machine, he robbed his tsukisoi of their reception.”

“She went off to the movies, then?”

“Yes.”

Now the yeses were hitting true, and Iwahashi continued with ease and under less pressure to guide and control the conversation.

“Once Ito-san learned to externalize his fantasy into your machine, he gradually reacquired the protective habits of formal human ties. His family has him back. Is this not good?”

“Hai!” affirmed Mochizuki, and he rose and bowed again. Iwahashi called for the check, thus signaling to Mochizuki, by doing the thing expected of the host, that he was to be held blameless for telling the truth.

They stepped out into the chill night air.

“The more communication, the less community,” muttered Iwahashi, offering his ultimate reflection on the matter.

Mochizuki did not understand that. Flags of the Rising Sun blazed in a long row in the powerful floodlights atop Keio department store to the front of them across the open square. Iwahashi looked up.

“The flags fly more these days, do they not?”

“Hai!”

Mochizuki understood that.

Lobthar, the all-knowing, opened his eyes to the expected universe. The blue sun was at the horizon, and there were many colors in the sky. He watched the colors.

The air tasted of the scents the air should taste of.

This watching and tasting, as it always did, went on for an endless time. Lobthar found the universe good.

Then, roused by the awareness of food worms beyond the nest, Lobthar shook himself and stood up, preening his feathers. He turned his head from one horizon to the other and willed that later there would be rain from the storm clouds above. Already, in response to his will, he could feel the air change and bear the promise of moisture.

From the nest, in the shelter of his cave, Lobthar flew down to the forest, where there were feeding birds, as he wished there to be. He waited on the ground, trying to decide where the first food worm should be found. At length he approached the spot, heard the almost inaudible sound of earth movement below. Down went the beak. The worm was there.