He thought about what it might be like to work for another company.
Certainly he was stymied at Samurai by his own ambivalences and hesitations. Just as he was, also, in his relationship with Isabelle. Only a little while ago he had been thinking about the need for change in his life, and all that came roaring back through him now, the great surge of vague resentments, something turbulent, almost explosive, stirring inside him. It hadn’t been very long ago that he had told Paul Carpenter how deeply he feared giving Samurai Industries a monopoly over human adapto technology. And Paul had come right back at him with the solution to that.
Was he being handed a chance to do just that?
Then he should grab it, he thought.
“Get me Mr. Nakamura, at East Bay Realty,” Rhodes told the annunciator giddily.
It was like making a date, he thought, that could lead to some kind of adulterous romance.
It took quite a while to get through. You would think realty agents would be eager to talk with potential customers, but evidently returning a call to Mr. Nakamura wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. Then finally lights began to flash and a Japanese face looked back at him from the visor. The standard inscrutability: flat inexpressive gaze, androidal smile. Somehow the face looked Japanese rather than Japanese-American, Rhodes thought, on no evidence at all. That was interesting.
“I am Mr. Kurashiki,” the face said. “Mr. Nakamura is deeply grateful for your response to his call. He is available to see you at any of the following times today or tomorrow.”
A menu appeared on the visor: noon, two P.M., four P.M., nine or eleven in the morning tomorrow.
Rhodes felt a faint chill. He wondered if he ever actually would meet Mr. Nakamura, whether there was a real Mr. Nakamura at all, even whether there was a real Mr. Kurashiki. Mr. Kurashiki looked and sounded more like a simulation than a person.
But then Rhodes told himself that he was being silly. Kurashiki was the appointments secretary, that was all; and he was real, all right, as real as any of these Japs ever could be. Svoboda had called it correctly: this was serious business, an actual job offer coming from an actual rival megacorp.
“Noon today,” Rhodes said. He would have to leave almost at once. But that was one way to keep his legendary unpunctualily from fouling things up. It was probably wisest to be on.time for this one. “If you’ll give me the driving directions—”
“You will be coming from Berkeley? The Santachiara Technologies tower?”
“Yes.”
“The trip will take you fourteen minutes and thirty seconds. As you enter Highway 24, instruct your car that the route module code is H112.03/accessWR52.”
Rhodes tapped for thirty seconds’ worth of data recall and the number came rolling out of the annunciator’s printout slot. He thanked Kurashiki and broke the contact.
“Cancel my afternoon appointments,” Rhodes told the annunicator. “I’m going out.”
The Diablos were still blowing when his car came up from the garage: a tangible wind, a palpable wind, hard and knife-sharp and maybe fifty miles an hour, and he would be driving right into it. You actually could
Rhodes hated to let his car brain do the thinking. But in this case he didn’t know where the hell he was going, only that the route module code was H112.03/accessWR52, somewhere out in the vicinity of Walnut Creek.
“Take me to H112.03/accessWR52,” Rhodes told the car.
The car obediently repeated the numbers.
“And, by the way, where is that, exactly?” Rhodes asked.
But all the car could do was give him the route module code all over again. For the car brain, the location of H112.03/ accessWR52 was a place known as H112.03/accessWR52, period.
The vehicle held the road very nicely, considering the velocity of the oncoming wind. It took Rhodes with barely a wobble through the ancient Caldecott Tunnel and into the bleached, torched-looking countryside east of the hills, where the temperature was always twenty degrees warmer because the cool breeze off the Pacific was unable to make it that far inland, even on days when the Diablos weren’t roaring. Today, with the hot east wind blowing, the temperature differential was probably much greater: true desert heat out there, Rhodes thought, hot as a furnace, fry you like an omelet in half a minute. But he was secure inside the cozy sealed bubble of his car, which was taking him swiftly down the freeway, on past the venerable high-rise towers of the old quiet suburban towns, Orinda, Lafayette, Pleasant Valley, toward the sprawling ramshackle metropolis of Walnut Creek—and then, just before the Walnut Creek interchange, a zig and a zag and a departure from the trunk road, the car swinging now up into the hills. It was absolutely empty country up there, amazingly empty, dotted with the occasional gnarly form of an oak tree standing in the midst of sun-scorched grass. The car went onward through a security gate and then another, and then past a checkpoint that made the first two gates look like barriers made of cheesecloth.
Brilliant green sky-glo letters, floating in the air about forty feet up, announced:
KYOCERA-MERCK, LTD.
WALNUT CREEK RESEARCH CENTER
So there was his answer, not that he really had any doubts left by this time.
The car, in the grasp of some invisible Kyocera-programmed highway brain, moved through the checkpoint, past a series of Babylonian-looking brick buildings, and into a reception dome.
Mr. Kurashiki was waiting for him there, no simulation at all, a real Japanese human person with a certain reptilian grace. Mr. Kurashiki bowed formally in the Japanese manner, a quick robotic click of his head. A quick robotic smile, too. Rhodes smiled back but did not return the bow. The formalities were done with; Mr. Kurashiki led Rhodes into a transport shaft that conveyed him upward and deposited him in an office that, from its ad hoc furnishings and general appearance of improvisation and barrenness, was obviously used only for just such impromptu conferences as these.
It was exactly noon.
Mr. Kurashiki vanished silently. Rhodes stepped forward. A surprisingly tall Japanese was standing at the precise center of the room, waiting for him. A different kind entirely, this one. He looked like something carved out of yellow-green obsidian: sharp features, shining skin texture, glossy wide-set jet-black eyes with a single dense unbroken eyebrow line above them. Powerful cheekbones, sharp as blades.
No bow from this one. A smile that seemed almost human, though.
“Good afternoon, Dr. Rhodes. I am so extremely glad that you were able to advantage us of your presence here today,” he said. “You will forgive me, I am sure, for our little subterfuge, our pretense of real-estate business. Such things are necessary sometimes, as of course I am certain you know.” His voice was deep and resonant and his accent was perceptibly alien: International Modern Japanese English, the purring accent of the exile race that in its various far-flung places of refuge had begun to develop its own new and characteristic way of speaking the world language. “But I have not introduced myself. I am Nakamura. Level Three Executive.” A business card jumped into his hand as if by a conjuring trick, elegant laminated parchment with gold trim, and he
