Otherness (8 page)

Reiko blinked, and the spirit within her writhed in tempo to her sudden breath.
No, it cannot be true
, she thought.
I feel my baby
's kami.
For all he has been through, he is still human
!

Footsteps echoed in the hallway. Voices approached the door.

"At birth," Mrs. Sukimura said in a husky voice filled with horrible resignation. "At birth they . . . their souls were sucked away into . . . into
software
."

The door opened. Reiko heard rough masculine tones. Felt hands upon her shoulders. She cried out. "
Iye. Iye
!" But she could not shrug them off. The hands pulled her from the room.

"Reiko-san!" She heard her friend call just before the door shut with a final click. A gurney waited. Strong hands. A needle.

Reiko wailed, but no physical resistance could overcome the insistence of those hands.

16.

The flutterings caused by inducement drugs soon became tremors, which turned into fierce contractions. Reiko cried out for Tetsuo, knowing full well that tradition would have kept him away, even if frowning officials from the Ministry did not. Spasms came with increasing rapidity now, sending the small life within her kicking and swimming in agitation.

New drugs were injected. Machines focused upon her womb, and she knew that these were the clever devices designed to prevent the cleansing fall of innocence that the doctors hatefully called "birth trauma." They were adamant about preventing it now. They were insisting that her baby enter the world wise.

Oh, how they would discover, to their regret, what they had really done, what they had unleashed. But even were she able to speak, she knew they would not listen. They would have to find out for themselves.

In her delirium Reiko's head turned left and right, trying to track voices nobody else in the operating room seemed to hear. They came at her from all sides, whispering through the hissing aspirators, humming from the lamps, murmuring from the electric sockets.

Spirits
leered and taunted her from the machines, some mere patternings of light and static, others more complex—coursing along involute electronic dissonance within the microprocessors. Ghosts floated around her—whispering
kami
, dressed up in raiments of software.

How foolish of men to think they can banish the world of spirits
. Reiko knew with sudden certainty that the very idea was arrogant. Of course the
kami
would simply adapt to whatever forms the times demanded. The spirits would find a way.

They were loose in the grid now, biding their time. And they would have revenge.

Ghosts of baby hamsters . . . of baby human beings . . .

She sensed her own son thinking now, desperately, harder than any fetus had ever been forced to think before.

Soporific numbness spread over her as the tentaclelike hands turned to other violations. The shuddering contractions made vision blur. Superimposed upon her diffracting tears were dazzling Moiré patterns and Möbius chains. How she knew the names of these things, without ever having learned them, Reiko did not bother to wonder. From her mouth came words. . . . "Transportation . . . locational translation of coordinates . . .," she whispered, licking her dry lips. ". . . nonlinear transformations . . ."

And then there was the bottle that had not one opening, but two . . . or none at all . . . the container whose inside was
outside
.

Now Reiko found herself wondering what the word "outside" really meant.

The hands did not seem to notice or care about the ghostly forms glaring down at her from the harsh fluorescents. Those angry spirits mocked her agony, as they mocked the other one, the one struggling with a problem in geometry.

Another spasm of savage pressure struck Reiko, almost doubling her over. And she felt overwhelmed by a sudden swimming sensation within her . . . an intensifying sense of dread . . . desperate concentration on a single task, to turn theoretical knowledge into practical skill.

The
kami
in the walls and in the machines chittered derisively. The problem was too difficult! It would never be solved in time!

A container whose inside is outside . . .

"
Desu ka ne
?" One of the technicians said, shaking and tapping his monitoring headphones. He shouted again, this time in alarm.

Suddenly white coats flapped on all sides. There was no time for full anesthesia, so they sprayed on locals that numbed with bone-chilling rapidity. Nobody bothered to set up a modesty screen as the obstetric surgeons began an emergency cesarean section.

Reiko felt it happen then, suddenly, as a burst of pure light seemed to explode within her. For that moment she shared an overwhelming sense of wonder and elation—the joy and beauty of pure mathematics. It was the only language possible in that narrow instant of triumph. And yet it also carried love.

The surgeon cut. There came a loud pop, as if a balloon had suddenly burst. Her distended belly collapsed abruptly, like a tent all at once deprived of its supports.

The technicians stared, blinking. Trembling, the stunned surgeon reached in. Reiko felt him grope under the flaccid layers of her empty womb, seeking in bewilderment what was no longer there.

Applied Topology
. She remembered the name of a text, one of the courses they had given her son, and Reiko knew it stood for shapes and their relationships. It had to do with
space
and
time
. And it could be applied to problems in transportation.

The hands did more things to her, but they could not harm her anymore. Reiko ignored them.

"He has escaped you," she told them softly, and the angry, envious, mad
kami
as well. "He learned his lessons well and has made his mother proud."

Frustrated voices filled the room, rebounding off the walls. But Reiko had already followed her heart, beyond the constraints of any chamber or any nation, far beyond the knowledge of living men, where there are no obstacles to love.

Detritus Affected

Physicians swear a Hippocratic oath whose central vow is "Do no harm." I wonder—how many other professions might do well to set that goal above all others?

Schliemann, uncovering Troy, gave birth to modern archaeology, begetting it in sin. His clumsy pits tore through the gates and temples of forty levels—three thousand years—callously scattering what might have been sifted, deciphered, all to prove a fact that wasn't going anywhere. Patience would have revealed the same truth, in time.

The next wave of diggers learned from Schliemann's wrongs. They went about "restoring" ancient sites, sweeping dust from Disney-prim aisles of artfully restacked columns. Such conceit.

Today we
save
dust, sampling pollen grains to tell what blossoms once grew on the hills surrounding Karakorum, or Harappa, or fabled Nineveh.

In truth, we have conceits all our own.

FRIDAY

Look, see this broken plastic wheel? Part of a cheap toy, circa 1970. Giveaway prize in some fast-food outlet's promotional kiddie meal. Seventy grams of carboniferous petroleum cooked under limestone sediments for two hundred million years, only to be sucked up, refined, press-molded, passed across a counter, squealed over, then tossed in next week's trash.

And here's a flattened cardboard box bearing the logo of a long-defunct stereo store, stained on one side by a mass of nondescript organic matter, which we'll analyze later in lab, sampling and correlating what garbage once flew between these hills. Hills overlooking fabulous L.A.

Science, and especially archaeology, is never ideal
Professor Paul used to tell us.
In the present, as well as the past, real life is all about compromises
. Not as lofty a slogan as a Hippocratic oath, I'll admit, but what do you expect from a profession based on rooting through the cellars, garbage heaps, and vanities of bygone days?

We managed to dig down past the thirty-meter level this week, into rich veins of profligacy from a time that knew no limits. It is a smorgasbord feast of information, and I want to analyze everything. Each gum wrapper. Each crushed Styrofoam peanut and brown ketchup stain. I fantasize computers potent enough to work backward from the positions I find each of these wonders in, tracing how they came to be jammed next to each other under this great pile. I dream of reversing their tumble from grunting, stinking dump trucks, reenveloping them in wrappers of shiny black plastic, and following each bundle back to its source—the effluent of a single twentieth-century home.

It can't be done. Not today. It would be like asking Schliemann to sift for pollen instead of ripping through ancestral walls in search of gold. Perhaps future researchers will dissolve ancient cities, atom by atom, recording the location and orientation of each
molecule
so that the dust of pharaoh, slave, and temple cat might be tagged, trajectoried, and finally reassembled on a chip like God's own jigsaw puzzle, resurrecting the dead in simulated splendor, if not the hoped-for afterlife.

My techniques are crude in comparison to what may come. Only a minuscule portion of the raw data we dig up is captured on photos, slides, and these journal entries. "Slash-and-burn archaeology," Keoki called it last week, in black humor.

Yet each evening, when the day's work is done, I climb out of our trench to look across the vast expanse that is Hyperion, and am consoled. Our trench is just fifty meters by fourteen, while the landfill stretches far away in all directions.

Mile after mile of garbage. The largest midden—the largest single
thing
—ever built by human civilization. Bigger, by volume, than even China's Great Wall.

There'll be plenty left over, after we are through digging here. Plenty of data for others to plumb through later, with fine future sieves.

I'm no Schliemann. I do little harm.

MONDAY

Sometimes an object strikes me in a certain way, and I wonder—could this have once been
mine
?

I am bemused by how different that makes this research from any other I've done. My own father or mother might have thrown out this box, that sofa or old turntable, back when I was very young. The thought makes me sensitive to toys. Pathetic, broken bits of plastic and metal. They grow less electronic and more sturdy with each meter we descend into the past, affecting me with something between deja vu and a poignant sense of lost innocence.

Then my beeping pager interrupts, and I must climb back to the present world, dealing with the latest crisis.

Never have I faced so much political aggravation on a dig! Each day some old fart bureaucrat comes on-site, scratching his head and muttering confused objections. Even the infamous red tape of India pales in comparison. There, or in Egypt, you could smooth things over with a little honest baksheesh. Here a bribe would just land me in jail without ever discovering what it is these people want!

One learns to be resourceful. Always, in every government department, one can find some bright youngster who is off the formal chain of command. The idea boy. Trouble-shooter gal. This techie plays no office games, but simply makes things run. Boss is usually terrified of Wunder-Kid, so I invite them up together. All moon-wrapped in full breathing gear against the occasional methane blurp, they get a full cook's tour. Nearly always the young guy goes crazy over something we've found, leaves with an armload of gamma-sanitized "memorabilia" . . . and makes damn sure we get our permit, license, whatever.

Works every time.

It's been much the same with the press. One curmudgeon city editor had it in for us from the moment our department got this grant. Tried angling stories about disease germs, festering in the dump along with five billion ancient disposable diapers. Radio DJs and Net Jockeys came to our rescue . . . so effectively the cops had to cordon off Sanitation Road, keeping out hordes of young amateurs who flocked up to "help out."

Los Angeles. Who can figure? Some old-time rocker once said—"No place is ever weirder than your own native land." Maybe that's why, after years exploring the past far away, I finally came back home to dig.

WEDNESDAY

Inch by inch we descend, uncovering mundane wonders. For example, we keep finding newspapers so well preserved they could even be ready by moonlight. So much for biodegradability. No archaeologist ever had better help dating strata.

Household mail is a rich font of information. Charge slips and bank records found their way into the trash, along with old tax files and all kinds of revealing junk mail. When my student Joyce Barnes released some wonderful stats on TwenCen credit-slavery, a retiree group in Laguna filed suit under some old privacy laws in an effort to stop the dig. That storm blew over for lack of public support. Today's kids hardly know what an envelope is. If it's not in the Net, what do they care?

Meanwhile Leslie surveys dietary patterns of Angelenos past. When we penetrated beyond the era of microwave ovens, he found a sudden shift in the packaging poisons found in ready-to-heat food residue. The Department of Urban Pathology at UCLA has expressed keen interest in this work.

Zola chose to study the "replacement threshold" . . . at which point it used to be more price effective to throw out a machine than repair it. Nothing better typifies the subject era than the sight of countless appliances—from TVs to dishwashers to stereos—all tossed because newer, better models cost less than a technician might charge to find a burned transistor.

Keoki pays the freight, testing rich veins of complex organics and heavy metals for our industrial sponsor. It's a long shot, but if the assay proves out, Fabrique Chang may bid to come mine Hyperion. One generation's junk can be the next's mother lode.

So much for all that talk earlier, about setting fields aside for future archaeologists. Maybe it's human nature to spoil what we strive to comprehend. Maybe we're all Schliemann, under the skin.