from LiveJournal and her chat rooms, from her favorite blogs and her instant messenger. As they flew the polar route to Japan, she’d had access only to canned, passive stuff — things on her hard drive, music on her old iPod Shuffle, the in-flight movies. She craved something she could interact with; she craved contact.
The plane landed with a bump and taxied forever. She couldn’t wait until they reached their hotel so she could get back online. But that was still hours off; they were going to the University of Tokyo first. Their trip was scheduled to last only six days, including travel — there was no time to waste.
Caitlin had found Toronto’s airport unpleasantly noisy and crowded. But Narita was a madhouse. She was jostled constantly by what must have been wall-to-wall people — and nobody said “excuse me” or “sorry” (or anything in Japanese). She’d read how crowded Tokyo was, and she’d also read about how meticulously polite the Japanese were, but maybe they didn’t bother saying anything when they bumped into someone because it was unavoidable, and they’d just be mumbling “sorry, pardon me, excuse me” all day long. But — God! — it was disconcerting.
After clearing Customs, Caitlin had to pee. Thank God she’d visited a tourist website and knew that the toilet farthest from the door was usually Western-style. It was hard enough using a strange washroom when she was familiar with the basic design of the fixtures; she had no idea what she was going to do if she got stuck somewhere that had only Japanese squatting toilets.
When she was done, they headed to baggage claim and waited endlessly for their suitcases to appear. While standing there she realized she was disoriented — because she was in the Orient! (Not bad — she’d have to remember that line for her LJ.) She routinely eavesdropped on conversations not to invade people’s privacy but to pick up clues about her surroundings (“What terrific art,” “Hey, that’s one long escalator,” “Look, a McDonald’s!”). But almost all the voices she heard were speaking Japanese, and—
“You must be Mrs. Decter. And this must be Miss Caitlin.”
“Dr. Kuroda,” her mom said warmly. “Thanks for coming to meet us.”
Caitlin immediately had a sense of the man. She’d known from his Wikipedia entry that he was fifty-four, and she now knew he was tall (the voice came from high up) and probably fat; his breathing had the labored wheeze of a heavy man.
“Not at all, not at all,” he said. “My card.” Caitlin had read about this ritual and hoped her mom had, too: it was rude to take the card with just one hand, and especially so with the hand you used to wipe yourself.
“Um, thank you,” her mother said, sounding perhaps wistful that she didn’t have a business card of her own anymore. Apparently, before Caitlin had been born, she’d liked to introduce herself by saying, “I’m a dismal scientist” — referring to the famous characterization of economics as “the dismal science.”
“Miss Caitlin,” said Kuroda, “a card for you, too.”
Caitlin reached out with both hands. She knew that one side would be printed in Japanese, and that the other side might have English, but—
Masayuki Kuroda, Ph.D.
“Braille!” she exclaimed, delighted.
“I had it specially made for you,” said Kuroda. “But hopefully you won’t need such cards much longer. Shall we go?”
Chapter 5
An unconscious yet conscious time of nothingness.
Being aware without being aware of anything.
And yet—
And yet awareness means…
Awareness means thinking.
And thinking implies a…
But no, the thought will not finish; the notion is too complex, too strange.
Still, being aware is … satisfying. Being aware is comfortable.
An endless now, peaceful, calm, unbroken—
Except for those strange flickerings, those lines that briefly connect points…
And, very occasionally, thoughts, notions, perhaps even ideas. But they always slip away. If they could be held on to, if one could be added to another, reinforcing each other, refining each other…
But no. Progress has stalled.
A plateau, awareness existing but not increasing.
A tableau, unchanging except in the tiniest details.
The two-person helicopter flew over the Chinese village at a height of eighty meters. There were corpses right in the middle of the dirt road; in sick irony, birds were pecking at them. But there were also people still alive down there. Dr. Quan Li could see several men — some young, some old — and two middle-aged women looking up, shielding their eyes with their hands, staring at the wonder of the flying machine.
Li and the pilot, another Ministry of Health specialist, both wore orange biohazard suits even though they didn’t intend to land. All they wanted was a survey of the area, to assess how far the disease had spread. An epidemic was bad enough; if it became a pandemic, well — the grim thought came to Li — overpopulation would no longer be one of his country’s many problems.
“It’s a good thing they don’t have cars,” he said over his headset, shouting to be heard above the pounding of the helicopter blades. He looked at the pilot, whose eyes had narrowed in puzzlement. “It’s only spreading among people at walking speed.”
The pilot nodded. “I guess we’ll have to wipe out all the birds in this area. Will you be able to work out a low-enough dose that won’t kill the people?”
Li closed his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”
Caitlin was terrified. The cranial surgeon spoke only Japanese, and although there was a lot of chatter in the operating room, she didn’t understand any of it — well, except for “Oops!,” which apparently was the same in both English and Japanese and just made her even more frightened. Plus, she could smell that the surgeon was a smoker — what the hell kind of doctor smokes?
Her mother was watching from an overhead observation gallery. Kuroda was here in the O.R., his wheezy voice slightly muffled, presumably by a facemask.
She’d been given only a local anesthetic; they’d offered a general one, but she’d joked that the sight of blood didn’t bother her. Now, though, she wished she’d let them knock her out. The fingers in latex gloves probing her face were unnerving enough, but the clamp that was holding her left eyelid open was downright freaky. She could feel pressure from it, although, thanks to the anesthetic, it didn’t hurt.
She tried to remain calm. There would be no incision, she knew; under Japanese law, it wasn’t surgery if there wasn’t a cut made, and so this procedure was allowed with only a general waiver having been signed. The surgeon was using tiny instruments to slide the minuscule transceiver behind her eye so it could piggyback on her optic nerve; his movements, she’d been told, were guided by a fiber-optic camera that had also been slid around her eye. The whole process was creepy as hell.
Suddenly, Caitlin heard agitated Japanese from a woman, who to this point had simply said “hai” in response to each of the surgeon’s barked commands. And then Kuroda spoke: “Miss Caitlin, are you all right?”
“I guess.”
“Your pulse is way up.”
