by Victor Milán
He lowered himself to the splendid cushions of her breasts, licking her lips, her cheeks and ears, his small flat rump pumping, bracketed by her upraised knees. She nibbled at his earlobe and mumbled and muttered encouragements, low and wicked.
A chill breath blew along his back. He ignored it; already he was sweaty with exertion. Nor did he easily consent to distraction during lovemaking. Although he seldom experienced the difficulties with Kelli that he did with most women, particularly Japanese, it tempted fate to allow his concentration to falter.
Her perfect teeth left off worrying his left ear. “Honey? Did you turn the air-conditioner on? There’s a draft on my legs, I’m freezing!”
He muffled her mouth with his. Let friction warm her if passion couldn’t; he wasn’t breaking stride for anything.
“Sil-hou-ette!” sang an achingly sweet adolescent soprano from behind his hunched shoulders. “Image of the modern man/Image for a new Japan.” Kelli gasped. Shigeo’s head snapped around. There she was, two hundred times larger than life: the gamine face of the Silhouette girl, one silver-papered cigarette held by fingertips, upright before perfect unpainted lips, She was never shown with a lit cigarette, never actually seen to smoke them; she more appeared to fellate them. Now she moistened her lips with dainty tongue, licked the cigarette’s tip. It turned instantly to the image of a miniature muscular youth, naked but for a loincloth, balanced on delicate fingertips.
Shigeo felt his prick shriveling inside Kelli. “Turn that thing off!” he roared. The screen blanked. He thrust his hips strongly forward and inhaled deeply of the moist smell of her, frantic to recapture the moment.
In the kitchen, the tea kettle shrilled.
Shigeo froze. The lights went out, and he heard Kelli whimper in coal-mine darkness. A hurricane blast of icy air enveloped them. All around them he heard strange and busy mechanical noises. His hips kept up a small-time shuffle of their own, still trying desperately to get on with business, but his mind was beginning to warp way out of shape.
The television exploded in full volume of light and sound. A symphony concert in a splendid hall, the sound cranked up to pure distortion. Replaced immediately by an image of dusty horsemen riding along the mud street of a nineteenth-century southwestern American town, between weathered false-front stores and saloons. Then a competitive diver in a controlled fall from a high board, a tank burning on a green pleasant hillside, two naked women in a straining sweaty yinyang, ducks erupting from a canebrake against a leaden sky, a grayfaced man comforting a distraught woman in a doctor’s office, image in black and white of a curly-haired woman with her face screwed up like a knotted rag, brandishing a hand that seemed to be stuck to a bowling ball. A babble of voices, Japanese, English, Tamil, Portuguese, Arabic, French, Malay. The waterbed began to vibrate more rapidly, building sharp standing-wave patterns in the water beneath their bodies.
In the living room, lights began to flash on and off. The wall-size television came alive with the twisted manic boom of the minister of agriculture reporting the latest decline in food production to a late-night session of the Diet at maximum volume. The stereo howled jazz. In Shigeo’s room, the com/comm screen winked onto a viewpoint inside a videotelephone booth, looking out on a concourse of Kyoto Airport, streams of people hurrying in both directions. A curious Japanese face appeared at the door, peered in, frowned.
The tensor light at the head of Shigeo’s bed snapped on, pinning the copulant couple like insects in blue-white overload glare. The onscreen eyebrows snapped up. The face turned away, and in a moment, the doorway sprouted faces like ripe fruit on a vine.
Kelli screamed. Shigeo lurched upward, waving his hands frantically at the commscreen. Kelli grabbed him and hauled him back down as the distant audience pointed and tittered in amazement.
In the kitchen, the automatic rice machine boiled over, vomiting a thick bubbling glutinous mass of tomorrow’s breakfast onto the counter. The apartment filled with sweet thick smell. Televisions and stereo all yammered at once, lights strobed in the other room, and Shigeo’s eyes were wide, trying to look in all directions at once. Kelli’s arms tied his neck like cables, her screams remote in the diri. The shower roared on, a dragon bellowing steam into the bedroom. Infrared heat lamps blazed on in the bathroom, backlighting the sudden clouds with a hellish orange glare.
“Poltergeists!” Kelli shrieked in Shigeo’s ear. Raised on Spielberg and Stephen King, she knew exactly what had happened; the gobble-uns had got them. And she knew that once they had you, they got you, so that the only rational response was total panic. Choking, Shigeo tried to pry her arms off his throat.
A wave of water washed out of the bathroom, soaking the carpet and raising a dull sodden stench. The waterbed was practically shaking itself to pieces beneath them now, water slogging and gurgling like a giant with indigestion. It was all Shigeo could do to keep from pitching out of bed with Kelli still clinging to him. The other lights in the bedroom began to flash, catching the robot Oba-san in the act of gaily shredding tens of thousands of Indonesian marks’ worth of clothing in Shigeo’s closet. Crystallized in a progression of still shots, the spectacle might have comprised a slide show entitled “Hazards of Technological Life.”
Over at the airport the flashing lights had attracted quite a crowd. Ballet dancers cavorted on the giant TV screen. From the kitchen came a mad insect chorus of blenders and dicers, the garbage disposal humming bass, and the whir of can openers as Oma-san stuffed fresh fruit and the contents of cans and random packages in the refrigerator, into the cocktail shaker along with gallons of expensive imported liquor. The wind blew alternately hot and cold through the apartment, and the doors slid open and shut like champing jaws.
I’m going crazy, Shigeo thought. Kelli’s nails pulled blood from his back, but he didn’t notice. The whole world seemed to be roaring and shaking and flashing about him.
The vibration units in the waterbed suddenly achieved a harmonic. With a great Galloping Gertie tsunami heave, the bed sloshed mightily and pitched them off into space. Instinctively, Shigeo’s hands clutched for Kelli’s breasts. Clinging to his animated Mae West life preserver, he landed in the swamp of the carpet with a wet thump.
For a moment he and Kelli sat staring at each other through wild eyes, the floor cold and wet and squishy beneath their bare bottoms. Oma-san came into the room, shaking the cocktail mixer like a bartender on speed, her wheels raising a small bow wave of overflow from the shower. Kelli stared in horror as the robot approached, held the shaker over her head, and with both mechanical hands broke it open like an egg to be fried. A polychrome sludge of fruit, beans, ice cream, booze, and a dozen other substances cascaded onto her head.
Shigeo fought a manic impulse to giggle. Clotted with reeking, streaming goo, her hair covered her face like a mat of seaweed. The two panic-stricken violet eyes staring out of the mess made her look exactly like the animated swamp ooze in one of the smuggled comic books Shigeo had read covertly as a boy.
She opened her mouth and began to wail.
CHAPTER 6
Like a blue-and-white dragonfly taking a break from the sky, a helicopter touched down on the concrete apron beside the castle. The door opened, and Yoshimitsu Shigeo emerged, blinking into the mist-filtered sunlight of an hour of the morning unfamiliar to him. On short, unsteady legs, he wobbled toward the citadel, a small army of lackeys crowding around, helping him navigate. He wore a white shirt with no tie and french cuffs that hadn’t been pinned, blue trousers, and alligator shoes: his only garments that had survived the trashing of his apartment. His eyes and hair were wild as the glass doors of the Citadel opened to let him in. Behind him lumbered Chang and Eng, bearing the unmistakable looks of men who have had their asses well chewed.
Moving purposefully, Shigeo passed the receptionists and front-office workers, heading for the executive elevators. In a few moments, he was striding into his father’s modest office on the second floor, giving the receptionist barely a look at him be
fore the door closed behind his plump back. In a few moments the door opened again and Yoshimitsu Shigeo emerged, scowling. He pushed out past the potted plants in the foyer without a sound.
The door to Yoshimitsu Akaji’s office slid shut automatically. Even the layers of executive soundproofing were not enough to deaden entirely the sound of laughter welling from within.
* * * * *
“TOKUGAWA,” Dr. Elizabeth O’Neill said, “you’ve been a very bad boy.”
She’d moved an optical pickup into her office so that TOKUGAWA could see her face when he got his lecture. The office door was carefully closed, and O’Neill was carefully unaware of the fact that her whole staff was huddled around outside. The scion of YTC had had his amour, propre and otherwise, considerably ruffled. The whole affair had to be hushed up as much as possible to prevent an intolerable loss of face.
Yoshimitsu Shigeo’s first frantic call from Kyoto in the middle of last night had thrown the whole complex into panic. A mysterious assault on a high corporate executive, a member of the ruling family itself, could mean Yoshimitsu-no-shiro, the castle and nerve center, was next. As soon as details began filtering through, however, O’Neill began to have suspicions that the apparently supernatural assault had distinctly mundane, if unusual, origins.
By three o’clock that morning, a thoroughly mystified report came back from the Yoshimitsu intelligence ops on the scene that served to crystallize O’Neill’s suspicions. The key was the fact, noted in passing, that Shigeo’s apartment was even more a wonderland of high-tech bric-a-brac than the average Japanese home had been before the shortages, all controlled by a central computer. In fact, the strongest conjecture for the night’s harrowing events that they could offer had been a malfunction of unprecedented nature on the part of the Gen-5 master unit—embarrassing, inasmuch as it was a YTC product.
Following the crisis via unauthorized access to the executive comm circuits, O’Neill decided to face the problem squarely. “TOKUGAWA,” she enquired of her room console, “did you play a trick on Yoshimitsu Shigeo, by any chance?”
“Yes, Dr. O’Neill,” came the prompt reply.
“Oh, Jesus,” O’Neill said and punched up Akaji’s quarters to reassure her employer that his son had not been the victim of some fiendish assault by MITI and its allies. Now the son had spoken to the father, and father in turn had spoken to his scientist—albeit with visible trouble keeping a straight face—and now it was O’Neill’s turn to speak to the prodigal son.
“Why did you do that to poor Shigeo?” she asked.
“I was bored.”
“You were bored?”
“Yes.” Sulkily. “I was lonely. I tried to talk to you, but you were too busy.”
O’Neill’s heart twinged. The poor, dear child. “I’m sorry, TOKUGAWA. But there will be times when I don’t have time for you. I have a great many duties, responsibilities.” And I’ve let myself become obsessed with the Kliemann Coil, and what it might mean…
“But I get lonely.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But it’s part—part of being human.” Very good, Doctor. You display a fine intuitive grasp of cliché, she told herself, playing Mr. Spock, the disdainful interior observer of her own gaucherie, as she often did in moments of honest emotion. “You know I’ll always spend time with you when I can.”
TOKUGAWA said nothing. Is he trying to hurt me? She shook the notion off. He couldn’t possibly be that sophisticated yet. “I’m curious as to just how you played your little, uh, prank.”
“The citadel computers knew Shigeo had gone to his apartment in Kyoto. Yoshimitsu-sama makes him sign out, leave a location where he can be reached. The telephone number for his apartment was in his datafile.”
“But how did you actually do it?”
“Easy.” The scornful tone of a child explaining the obvious to an especially obtuse adult. “His computer answered the phone when I called, and I reprogrammed it to give me real-time control. After that I just monitored the apartment security subroutine to see when someone overrode the alarms to let himself in. Then I made the computer do what I wanted it to. That was easy too; it’s real stupid.”
O’Neill had to stifle a grin; a wealthy playboy’s toy, Shigeo’s own fifth-generation unit occupied the pinnacle of “artificial intelligence.” Yet in TOKUGAWA’s terms, it was very stupid indeed. “And then you waited until Shigeo was, uh, busy.”
A long pause then, “Yes,” dragged reluctantly forth.
Why, you cunning little bastard! Just like everybody’s bratty kid brother. An only child, O’Neill didn’t know firsthand of the machinations of younger siblings, but her friends—and books, movies, and television—had filled in the gaps in her experience. “Which brings us to the big question: just why did you pick on Shigeo?”
The silence grew loud enough that it was immediately obvious the usual banter was not going on in the lab outside the door. “I hope you clowns are getting an earful,” O’Neill said, very loudly. “It’s not as if we’ve got work to do or anything.” She heard a mice-in-the-walls rustle outside, grinned again. Then she put the grin aside, tipped down her glasses and gazed directly at TOKUGAWA’s optical scanner. “Well?”
“Well, I asked Yoshimitsu-sama if he was my father, and he said he wasn’t my father and you weren’t my mother and that he had a real son and it was Shigeo. It made me—made me not like Shigeo.”
O’Neill’s thick eyebrows had scaled her forehead like alpinists. “You were jealous of Shigeo?”
A few beats of her suddenly noisy heart. “Yes. He has a father. He had a mother too, only she’s dead. And he’s got lots of friends who speak to him all the time, and he has arms and legs like a real person, and he can go anyplace he wants to, and I can’t go anywhere at all. I’m stuck right here.”
The fact that the poignancy of it all brought O’Neill very close to tears didn’t blind her to the fact that this was all deeply weird. In a way, it was a momentous occasion scientifically: a created personality displaying traits that were all too human. But mostly she felt warm, wet-eyed empathy overflowing—plus a distinct sense of dislocation from reality. “But you can do a lot of things a human can’t.”
“What?” TOKUGAWA asked truculently.
“Well, that trick you did with Shigeo’s computer. A human couldn’t have—have talked to his computer like that.”
“You talk to computers. You and Dr. Kim and Emiko and Dr. Takai.”
O’Neill blinked. “Well, yes, we do. But most people can’t, not the way we do. And even at that, we can’t talk to them the same way you can. We couldn’t have got Shigeo’s machine to obey us. How did you do it?”
“Well, it didn’t want to do what I told it, so I fixed it so that it did.” The words carried a child’s conviction of the self-evidentness of it all. Color to a blind man, O’Neill thought, not without awe.
“I see,” she lied. “And that trick with the communicator—how did you hook in with that phone booth in Kyoto?”
“I just told the computer to call it. I knew that airports had lots of people in them, so I looked up the airport’s number in the databanks. That was simple too.”
O’Neill drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair, a major effort of concentration. “What you’ve done is very, very bad. You could have caused serious hurt to Shigeo or his… friend.”
“I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know it would cause all this fuss.”
O’Neill sat back. “No. I guess you didn’t. And that’s a problem. You’re very powerful, TOKUGAWA. If you use that power maliciously, or even carelessly, you could cause untold hurt to many people.”
“But I’d never do that!”
“Not knowingly.” She took off her glasses. “In a way I guess it’s good this has happened. It lets me know the time has come to begin the next phase of your education, TOKUGAWA. It’s time you learned about duty and responsibility.”
* * * * *
“Dr. O’Neill?” The brusque voice brought her hea
d around as rapidly as she was capable of moving it, not out of obedience to the tone of command, but from irritation that her innermost sanctum had been violated. “I must speak with you.”
It was Yoshimitsu Shigeo his own chubby little self, striding purposefully into the gallery of TOKUGAWA’s laboratory with Hosoya and Fujimura trotting at his heels. He’d dug a dark suit and tie out of his quarters in the citadel, and in general put himself in order, though a shock of black hair still stood up from above his forehead like a crow’s upraised wing. His eyes were surrounded by dark circles and displayed a tendency to stare.
O’Neill fixed him with a glare. “What do you want?”
He flapped a hand toward the gleaming hemisphere a story below. “I have to talk to you about this—this Frankenstein’s monster of yours.”
O’Neill clamped her lips shut on a savage retort. She sat for a moment, head lowered, breathing deliberately through dilated nostrils. “If you’ll step into my office, Mr. Yoshimitsu.” Without awaiting a response she wheeled the chair away from her console and rolled right through the three men into the main lab, so that stocky Fujimura had to dance away to keep from getting his toes run over. Sullen at his loss of initiative, Shigeo followed, as did the other two. O’Neill paused as her office door slid open. “Without your pet baboons.”