Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  He didn’t find much. It was partially understood, but only partially, and there was unlikely to be significant further research, since the syndrome hardly occurred anymore, thanks to higher environmental standards. Methyl mercury was absorbed quickly in the stomach and then got into the bloodstream, where it crossed the blood–brain barrier and built up in the central nervous system and the brain itself. Symptoms included muscle weakness, deafness, partial blindness, and motor-system dysfunctions, even paralysis and insanity. And it was incurable.

  By early December, Hiroshi was ready. The resort was filling up again with guests for the winter season and Christmas, and the management was beginning to wonder why he was staying quite so long. This was a problem, he knew, but he couldn’t be bothered by it just then. He was bone-tired as he walked along the beach one cold morning, just as dawn broke, and put his mercury collectors to work. He didn’t have to do much, just chuck the sugar cube he had soaked with nanites into the sea. Then he reached under his coat and pressed the button on his Wand to give them their starting signal. That was all. The nanites would take care of everything else themselves. Of course, there was nothing to see. Nevertheless, Hiroshi stood there for a while as the sun rose in lilac splendor over the mountains behind him and wondered what he should do next. He watched the waves. The tide was coming in, and with every wave that broke the water crept closer to his shoes. How the water shone as it foamed silver between the pebbles and stones. How carefully it washed every grain of sand…in that instant Hiroshi understood what that blueprint was. The branching network that had fascinated him so.

  Of course, he would have to check, run the requisite simulation, build it virtually first. Of course. But it was one of those hypotheses that he just knew would prove true. After all, the human brain was a material structure. Thoughts could be expressed in terms of patterns of neural impulses, and you could even record these if you managed to run a sufficiently fine network of implants alongside each and every neuron. And that was exactly what those branches on the blueprint could do: follow the neural pathways and place sensors at all the junctions. Coupling the nanites to a brain. It was the only conceivable way to have perfect and assured control over the almost-omnipotent tool that they were. The only way to unleash their full power and have absolute power over them.

  All at once Hiroshi knew this was the only way he could learn the last secrets of the nano-robots. The only question was whether, once set out on this road, he would ever find his way back.

  Coming out of his self-imposed isolation was like liberation. Hiroshi felt he had been frozen and then thawed out. The dining rooms were all full now, and loud, but that didn’t trouble him at all; rather, he enjoyed feeling invisible among the crowds. He watched old couples and young families, children shrieking, squabbles, and harmony. Now he was far from the only one out walking on the beach; children raced across the sand in their thick parkas, throwing stones into the water or flying kites while their parents watched, smiling. And it did him good to sit in the bar in the evening over a beer, close to the television so that its noise drowned out the chatter of the other guests, the rattling of the slot machines, and the clack of balls on the pool table in the background.

  That was where Hiroshi heard about the catastrophe.

  First, he saw a weather-beaten man with a blue watch cap on the screen, waving his arms frantically and shouting, “Everywhere! Everywhere! All the way to the horizon!” By itself, that could have meant anything, so all Hiroshi did was frown in puzzlement. His beer arrived and he took the first swallow. It tasted good. Then the picture changed to a beach covered with white objects, which men in protective clothing and face masks were shoveling into trucks. The white things were dead fish. Hiroshi put his glass down with a lurching feeling of impending disaster.

  “A catastrophe for the fishing industry,” declared a man in suit and glasses who was a professor at Tokyo University.

  The anchorman for this special bulletin explained that scientists assumed they were dealing with a hitherto unknown pandemic, which was supported above all by the distribution patterns. When they plotted the worldwide reports of huge carpets of dead fish floating on the sea, the resulting map clearly showed the epidemic had originated somewhere near the southern coast of Japan. A graphic came up on-screen to support his words. “The United Nations has convened an emergency session,” the anchorman added. Scientists were hard at work searching for the pathogen.

  Hiroshi sat there, rigid with shock, horrified. He had done something wrong. Horribly wrong.

  He paid, leaving the rest of his beer undrunk, and went back to his room, struggling to keep himself from breaking into a run. The corridor was quiet and empty, even though most of the rooms were now occupied. Hiroshi picked up his Wand and another complex of the mercury collectors, and went to the aquarium by the elevator. The fish gaped at him as though it had a dim presentiment of what was about to happen.

  “Sorry, old friend,” Hiroshi whispered sadly. “But I have to be sure.”

  He tipped the nanites into the water, activated them, and waited. Nothing. In order not to be quite so conspicuous, Hiroshi sat down on the couch in the corner by the elevator, where nobody ever sat, picked up one of the brochures and pretended to read it. The fish stared at him unwaveringly.

  Just as Hiroshi was beginning to wonder whether the nanites could find enough atoms in the aquarium to replicate themselves, it happened: the fish closed its eyes, jerked uncontrollably several times, turned tail, and floated belly-up to the surface. Hiroshi put down the brochure, got up, and went back to his room. He hadn’t thought of that. Of course, the fish living in the oceans today had accumulated methyl mercury in their bodies, just like they did all the other pollutants in the sea. The collectors he had sent out were far too small to be able to differentiate between seawater and the body tissues of a fish: they tore the mercury right out of the living bodies, and when they did that too often, they killed the body itself. And in this instance even the self-destruct signal wouldn’t help, since the radio waves wouldn’t reach the nanites underwater.

  It took Hiroshi seven days of uninterrupted work to create another complex that could hunt down and destroy the mercury collectors. During that time the mysterious fish plague spread right around the globe, causing heated public and scientific debate. Experts issued dire warnings for the future of world food security. The populations of several species of fish were already severely threatened, and the search for the pathogen remained fruitless.

  The morning after Christmas, Hiroshi put his hunter complexes into the sea and activated them. Then he paid and checked out.

  In Tokyo he didn’t find his mother at home. She was at the cemetery, he learned from a neighbor who ran into him at the door, a little old woman who recognized him even though he could have sworn he’d never seen her in his life.

  “Which cemetery?” Hiroshi asked. “And what’s she doing there?”

  “Aoyama. You can take the metro from Hiroo to Ebisu. It’s number 34.”

  Aoyama Cemetery was the most prestigious in all of Tokyo. The only people who could afford a grave there were rich, and they had to be lucky with the lottery draw for burial plots as well. What was his mother doing there?

  But there she was, tending a grave marked by a narrow, gray marble column and a flowerpot about the size of a salad bowl.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said, not stopping her work.

  Hiroshi came up beside her and read the headstone. It was Mr. Inamoto’s.

  “Last August. It was his heart. He died during the Bon festival. Strange, isn’t it?” His mother put her trowel down and stood up.

  “Is that your new job?” Hiroshi asked.

  She took off her green, rubber gardening gloves, her gaze still fixed on the headstone. “He asked me to marry him, you know. Three times. At our age! Crazy old man.” She looked at Hiroshi. Small tears had gathered in the corners of her eyes
, shining like drops of mercury. “I always said no. And now I’m sorry. Now, when it’s too late.”

  Hiroshi said nothing. The two of them stood there for a while in silence.

  “Sometimes I think that’s all there is to life,” he said at last. “Always knowing that you’ve done something wrong when it’s too late to change it.”

  His mother put her arm around him. He had the feeling she’d gotten smaller.

  “It’s good that you’re here,” she said. “A nice surprise.”

  5

  The flight to Buenos Aires tired her out more this time around. It might have had something to do with the bad air in the cabin, which gave her a headache and an unpleasant sensation of pressure behind her eyes. Charlotte was glad to see all four of them waiting at the airport: Brenda, Thomas, Jason, and Lamita.

  “You’re the Christmas present for the whole family,” Brenda said by way of greeting. “So we’ve all come.”

  Charlotte hugged each of them in turn. Even Jason didn’t resist. She felt she could cry, but she didn’t want to let it show. No crying at Christmas! Lamita was wearing a pretty dress and spoke both English and Spanish well by now. If anything, her Spanish was stronger. And Charlotte noted, as they made their way through the airport, that she no longer put up with all her brother’s teasing and tricks. When Charlotte told Brenda how much she liked Lamita’s dress and the embroidery work on it in particular, her old friends took her elbow and whispered, “She did all that herself, can you believe it. Came to me one day with some rags from the old-clothes chest and asked me if she could have them. ‘Of course,’ I said. Then she asked me for a needle and thread and sewed them onto her dress.”

  “But it looks wonderful!” Charlotte said. “Perhaps she’ll be a designer someday?”

  Brenda shrugged. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? But I really wouldn’t be surprised.”

  When they came out from the concourse into the open air, the heat was merciless. High summer, which certainly didn’t help her headache. And the ride downtown seemed to take forever.

  “How’s research?” Charlotte asked Thomas to take her mind off it.

  He laughed. “Oh man. Now that’s no question for the season of peace and goodwill.”

  “As bad as all that?”

  “You know, as soon as we get to the topic of who settled where and when, and who got there first, it all becomes political. So the government gets involved. And let’s put it this way: the Ecuadorian government is not exactly full of experts in prehistory.”

  It was Charlotte’s turn to laugh. “I can imagine.”

  “And what about you? Has Harvard sent a commission yet to rescind your degree?”

  “It’s bound to happen eventually.” By now she had realized the fundamental problem of arguing for a theory that questioned every tenet of established wisdom: the tenured academics demanded proof, and to get that, you had to do research—but you never got any funding, since you were arguing a suspect theory. If you looked long and hard enough, there was always some crackpot willing to finance even the craziest research proposal, but if you took that money you’d never get published in a journal of record, because the editors would suspect you’d allowed the donors to influence your findings. And if it wasn’t published in a journal of record, for all intents and purposes it didn’t exist—that was the vicious circle.

  They finally arrived. Her headache had subsided to a dull, rhythmic throbbing behind her temples, which she was growing used to. Surely it would pass soon. What was new, however, was the curious tingling sensation in her hips, which she chalked up to sitting for so long, first on the airplane and then in the car. How on earth could she relax when everybody was driving like lunatics, even two days before Christmas?

  The house looked just as she remembered it. So did the garden, except that everything looked dreadfully dry.

  “It takes some getting used to,” Brenda said. “Christmas in the middle of summer.”

  Charlotte peered up at the cloudless sky and the incandescent sun. “I don’t know.…Was it as hot as this at Christmas when we lived here? I can’t remember.”

  “Everything’s better when you’re a kid,” Brenda said. Then she cast a glance at her adoptive daughter. “When we were kids at least.”

  The Christmas tree in the hall looked at least as magnificent as the one in the White House—Charlotte had seen a photo of it in a newspaper on the flight down. The presents were already under the tree, wrapped enticingly in glittering paper. Both children almost started hopping up and down with impatience at the sight.

  “Let me get my suitcase,” Charlotte said to Thomas. “I want to put some things under the tree as well. Just a couple of little…”

  Throb. Throb. Throb. She was getting used to it. Perhaps she’d ask Brenda for an aspirin later. She squatted down and reached for the luggage strap.

  And then suddenly the film snapped.

  Then there’s light again, light and a smell she recognizes, but she doesn’t know where from—a nasty, sharp smell of too much hygiene. And Brenda’s there with her round face like the full moon and her curly, brown hair, and she’ll never get that hair under control as long as she lives. “Everything’s fine,” she’s saying, and, “Don’t worry.” However, when she says it she looks as though nothing is fine and she’s the one who’s worrying. But Charlotte believes her, because she’s her best friend and she’s never lied to her. “Good,” she says and falls back to sleep.

  The next time she woke up, she was alone and clearheaded enough to realize she was in a hospital. Clearheaded—something about her head; that reminded her…she had no hair left. When she put her hands to her head, she could feel her scalp shaved smooth and new growth breaking through here and there. And at the back of her head there was an enormous bandage.

  “What happened to me?” she asked the first nurse who came into the room.

  The woman raised her hands uncomprehendingly. “Lo siento, no hablo inglés.”

  “Yo quería saber lo que me pasó,” Charlotte said, asking her the same question in Spanish.

  The nurse gave a sad smile. She was a slender woman with dark skin. “I’m sorry. I’ll go and fetch the doctor.”

  The doctor came along a little later, sat down on her bed, and asked how she was feeling. He wore an old-fashioned pair of spectacles. The face behind them was furrowed by hundreds of sharp lines that spoke of a lifetime of concern. He had large bags under his eyes, and the whole effect made him look like a melancholy dog, perhaps a boxer.

  “I don’t know,” Charlotte confessed. “Somehow I don’t feel anything at all.” She put her hand to the bandage. “You operated on me?”

  “We had to.” More lines and more melancholy. “You have a tumor on the brain stem that was about this big.” He held his hands apart to show something the size of an egg. “It was pressing against the brain itself, which was what made you lose consciousness. We removed what we could, but unfortunately that wasn’t even half of it.”

  Charlotte waited for some sort of feeling to kick in—fear, panic, horror, anything like that—but there was nothing. Only a huge, indifferent emptiness.

  “That…doesn’t sound good,” she said at last.

  “It’s not good at all. By all standards of modern medicine, your tumor is inoperable. It’s probably already metastasized. The only thing we can try is a strong dose of chemotherapy.”

  “What would my chances be?”

  “Poor.”

  At last, she felt something. A soft, quiet sadness. “I’m only thirty-four,” Charlotte said quietly.

  The doctor looked at her with such pity it was as though she were his own flesh and blood. “Unfortunately, Señora, that is not to your advantage here. With cancer, the prognosis is better the older you are. This is because when you are young, the cells still divide very quickly, do you understand?”

  �
��When do we start?”

  “In a few days. As soon as the wound from your operation has healed properly.”

  The next morning her mother appeared. Her mother! Charlotte found it surreal to see her standing there at the end of the bed.

  “We’re going to take you to Paris,” she said.

  Charlotte was aghast. To Paris? Where her mother would care for her? To the apartment that was like a museum of their family history? Not even that. It was like a mausoleum. “I don’t want to go to Paris.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense. You must have the best doctors in the world, and right away.” Her mother spoke with such finality that it was as though the tumor would have to stay behind in Argentina and find another victim if only they set out fast enough. “Your father is talking to the principal consultant now.”

  “But I don’t want to go,” Charlotte said again.

  Mother looked at her incredulously. “What do you mean?”

  “I want to stay here.”

  “Here?” The way she said the word spoke volumes. Here? At the ends of the earth? With these savages?

  Brenda finally appeared a bit later. “What’s the trouble with your mother?” she asked. “I just ran into her out on the hallway. She was…I don’t know. Did you have a fight?”

  Charlotte swallowed. “Brenda?” she asked softly, feeling as though she was about to ask something indecent. “I’d like to…could I…?”

  Brenda looked startled. “What is it?”

  “Could I stay with you for a while?”