The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  Nagata hadn’t expected Calvino’s response anymore than Calvino had expected his. He saw the error of his first reaction.

  “Do the police know who committed this terrible act?”

  Calvino followed him to a lacquered teak table at one end of the room. Nagata gracefully eased himself down on a floor mat, tucking his legs into a lotus position as Calvino examined a set of glass shelves built into a mirrored niche in the wall.

  “No, they don’t know who killed them or why,” he said.

  As Nagata poured tea, Calvino picked up one of the two-faced figurines and turned it around in his hand. Putting it back on the shelf, he removed a second, bronze one, of Janus.

  “Janus and Agni,” Calvino said, glancing at Nagata. “I’ve been reading about them.”

  Nagata matched his smile.

  “I wouldn’t have thought you possessed such an exotic interest, Mr. Calvino.”

  “The gods of beginnings and passages. One head looks at the past, the other at the future. Two heads are better than one. Now I know the inspiration for that old saying.”

  Calvino placed the Janus icon back on the shelf to the left of Agni. To the right of Janus stood another icon, a golden Buddha-like figure that was a bit taller than the other two. Calvino picked it up and admired it.

  “It’s a Buddha,” Calvino said.

  Nagata slowly shook his head like a patient teacher with a benevolent smile.

  “It’s not Buddha. It’s a Hindu god called Ishvara. The god who created all there is and entered his creation. He became the negative and the positive, right and wrong, good and the bad, light and dark, false and true. He is the god of contradiction. Ishvara is in motion and still as he infinitely contradicts and confirms his existence and non-existence.”

  Calvino put the Ishvara icon back on the shelf and positioned the three figurines together in a row.

  Stepping back, he pointed at each one and said, “That’s J. Here’s A. And finally, I.”

  Nagata applauded softly.

  “Excellent. But what possible meaning are you hinting at?”

  “I’d like you to explain why Ploy would have had ‘JAI’ tattooed on her ankle?”

  “Mr. Calvino, you look surprised and disappointed at the same time. The look reminds me of my father many years ago when he discovered that I was gay. He said the know-ledge of my sexual orientation was more painful than the four years he spent in a relocation camp in Alberta. Inside the camp what kept him going was the knowledge that the war would end sooner or later and we’d go back home. But with a gay son, that war would never come to an end. Despite his reaction, over time he came to accept me as his son. He encouraged me to study and learn from the Hindu gods and the Buddha, whom he saw as an extension of the Hindu tradition. The first step was to acquire vast knowledge, understand it and then seek release from meaning. To be redeemed from redemption was my father’s wish.”

  An athletic-looking mem-farang appeared at the opposite end of the room. Medium height, thick blonde hair, in her late thirties or early forties. White silk blouse, dark pants, barefoot.

  “There you are, Marley,” said Nagata. “Come in. I’d like you to meet Mr. Calvino. We were speaking of you earlier, Mr. Calvino.”

  Marley approached like a dancer striding into an audition room. She held out her hand for Calvino to shake. He tried to stop his jaw from falling and banging against the hard wooden floor. She had the sort of face that men dreamt of, coveted, fought for, died for and killed for. The line of her cheek, the shape of her nose, her long neck and full lips created the perfect symmetry. Her clear blue eyes never blinked as she stared at him.

  “I’ve been hearing a lot about you,” said Marley.

  Calvino gripped her hand. The skin was soft like an unused tissue. She had the hands of someone who sat before a computer all day.

  “That’s strange. I’ve heard nothing about you.”

  “We couldn’t tell you until we were sure, Mr. Calvino. I hope that you understand. It was nothing personal.”

  Calvino met Marley’s eyes and was the first to break free of the gaze, as if he knew that to look too long into them would end in his being lost. He turned to Nagata with a harder, more troubled look.

  “Sure about what?”

  Calvino still felt the power of her blue eyes. He closed his own, asking himself if this was another of his spontaneous hallucinations. When he opened his eyes again, he slowly pivoted a quarter turn. She hadn’t vanished into the shadows or passed through furniture, windows or walls. She watched him with her easy, confident smile, the expression of a woman who’d never known a fear that she couldn’t coax into a cage and lock the door on.

  Marley and Nagata exchanged a look.

  “It’s okay,” said Nagata.

  She turned to Calvino and said, “I needed to be sure we could trust you. We needed to know whether you were part of their network. They are quite powerful and have people in many walks of life.”

  “A network we are quite sure we could never close down,” said Nagata. “But if we’re careful, we can use it to help people like Ploy.”

  “That didn’t quite work out for Ploy, did it?” Turning back to Marley, he added, “I didn’t see you at the funeral.”

  She bagged the winning smile as she glanced at Nagata.

  “I was in the South.”

  “Right. Something to do with that network you’re talking about?”

  “A number of Rohingya escaped from cages on Koh Tarutao. Let’s say I gave them a ride. I wasn’t in Bangkok then. I regret missing Ploy’s funeral, but it was unavoidable.”

  He looked at Nagata and then Marley again.

  “You’re involved with illegal migrants?” asked Calvino.

  “Yes, we provide assistance. I asked Professor Nagata if he was clear about your loyalties,” Marley said.

  Calvino looked at Nagata.

  “And you’ve cleared me?”

  Yoshi Nagata smiled and gave a slight tilt of his head as a gesture of confirmation.

  Marley pressed her tongue into the side of cheek.

  “You know the problem,” she said. “Let’s start with the smuggling of Rohingya to work on rubber plantations, on fishing boats in the South or in locked door brothels. That’s running illegals. There is a loose but well-connected network that coordinates every stage of the sale, and after the sale, the servicing.”

  “Their after-sale servicing is the network’s selling point,” said Nagata.

  Calvino laughed.

  “They sound like a car manufacturer. I don’t know who these guys are, and I suspect you don’t either, but I’d appreciate it if you’d enlighten me about your own little network. Who are you and why it is your business to worry about trafficking in Thailand?”

  “You are right. We are a little, insignificant group that works off the grid,” said Marley. “We keep our heads down. And we wish to stay invisible.”

  Nagata raised his hand and said, “I think we’d better sit down. We have a lot to discuss.”

  He filled a third cup of tea for Marley.

  “Dr. Marley Solberg was my most talented post-doc student at UBC. I was her thesis adviser, though I think I learnt as much from her as she did from me. She wrote a thesis entitled Multi-Dimensional Forms for Constructing a Quantum Nanotube Communication Network Human Interface.

  Marley saw that Calvino was lost.

  “You’re wondering what that means?” she said.

  “It’s not pulp fiction. I’m an American. I don’t know enough mathematics to keep my office petty cash balanced. I have trouble in three dimensions, but four? That’s where I fall asleep. I’m only good at finding people who’ve gone missing. Or at least I used to be, until too many dead people began turning up in my life.”

  “Dead people. You mean ghosts?” asked Marley.

  “I don’t know what to call them. All of them were murdered. I’ve asked myself, what are the chan
ces of that happening to one individual?”

  Her smiled widened. She paused for a moment and drank tea.

  “Missing people is why I’m in Bangkok. It’s an interest that I share with Professor Nagata,” she said. “My professor tells the story much better than I can.”

  Nagata explained that Marley’s work combined an instinct that few software developers could match with a rare math wizardry, conjuring algorithmic magic like rabbits out of a magician’s hat.

  “Marley’s family name, Solberg, is Norwegian. It means sun and mountain. Women weren’t supposed to be capable of working at the highest levels in our field. I predicted that one day Dr. Marley Solberg would plant her flag on top of the mathematical Everest.”

  A quarter of a billion dollars later, she had cashed out. Marley had sold a dozen patents to a company that specialized in lock-and-key, staying one step ahead of information-gathering systems, with self-learning mega-data-mining protocols, running her 2Work, 4Geo analysis matrix. Why had Yoshi Nagata left teaching? He’d become weary of training the greatest math minds to work for the military and intelligence communities, which were spread across thousands of agencies and private companies. When she’d been his post-doc student, he’d thought he’d spotted a star, one who would escape the pull of the money. Several years before, Dr. Solberg had made her fortune from selling her patents to a company controlled by nominees of the NSA. In an email from Nagata, she learnt that the professor happened to be holidaying in Vancouver. She chartered a private plane to fly her there. Over dinner she offered to write him a check for two million dollars.

  “Atonement money,” said Marley. “But he refused.”

  “We talked until three in the morning. She can be very persuasive,” said Nagata. “At last she conceded defeat. She asked what she could do if not give me money. I told her I had been living in Bangkok for five years. To pass the time, I’d started a small group of yoga students. I taught them the basics. We discussed the brutality of the refugee camps and the terrible problems faced by the Rohingya fleeing for their lives from Burma. She asked what she could do to help.”

  At the time of their meeting Nagata had made a summer trip back to Vancouver to visit a colleague and some neighbors who had known his parents, and to walk along English Bay in the early morning.

  “Professor Nagata was born in a Canadian-Japanese relocation camp,” said Marley.

  “He told me about it,” said Calvino. “My mother’s side of the family lost a dozen relatives in Nazi concentration camps.”

  “Then you’ve experienced the loss, but not the direct suffering,” she said. “From the moment of his birth he was a prisoner because of his name and ethnic background.”

  Nagata poured more tea into the cups.

  “Those were old-world camps and are now gone,” he said. “The underlying thinking has changed. Race, ethnicity, religious belief are still the raw calculus, the formula the authorities everywhere use to determine the probability of a person’s loyalty, their rights and destiny. But we’ve gone from barbed wire to surveillance cameras, and now to Dr. Marley’s nanotechnology tracking system.”

  “I was naïve, idealistic,” said Marley. “I’d lived in a world of pure mathematics, and my friends were all mathemati-cians. Nothing had quite prepared me for the non-mathematical world outside the university and its twisted way of thinking, and how these people used our equations in ways we had never imagined. I developed a system to help parents and the authorities find missing children. Millions go missing every year. With my technology, every parent could know at any moment of the day the location, heart rate, hormonal levels and rate of movement of their child. They would know whether they were walking, running, cycling or riding a car, bus or motorcycle. It was very advanced. Of course, it was never used for that purpose. It was sold to the government and classified as top secret. I had three separate visits from members of the intelligence community. Each of them, in their own way, told me that I should never discuss my work with others. If I talked about my work to anyone, I would endanger lives and national security. I was asked to sign documents. I refused. They said that was a mistake. I said, how so?”

  Her face clouded, lips tightened. Yoshi Nagata reached over and patted her hand. The Norwegian face of a goddess hadn’t worked on the people who’d been sent around to convince her to sign a new round of confidentiality agreements.

  “The agreements I’d signed for the transfer of the patents hadn’t given sufficient protection, they said.”

  “You came to Bangkok to get away from them?”

  Nagata intervened.

  “No, that’s not why she came. I invited her to come.”

  “I invited myself, Professor Nagata.”

  Nagata replied with his signature little bow of the head.

  “I said that if you wanted to do something positive for children who went missing, you could come to Thailand. I asked you to help with some creative ideas to deal with those locked up for years in the refugee camps.”

  Turning his attention back to Calvino, he added, “I showed her the evidence of how the Rohingya were being exploited, trafficked and sold. Men, women and children. No one who could be sold was left out.”

  “Frankly, I was appalled by what I learned,” said Marley. “I saw a chance to use one of my software programs for the purpose I’d intended. I arrived in Thailand two years ago.”

  “Marley understood the basic idea that if we accept the existence of long-term detention camps for refugees and their children, we are returning to a time of great darkness. We like to tell ourselves that because the authorities don’t gas refugees these days, they and we are more civilized and humane than our parents and grandparents.”

  When Nagata had told her that he wanted something other than money, he’d told her he wanted only one thing—to liberate refugees, especially the children, from slavery and trafficking.

  “Not long after I met Ploy,” Nagata continued, “she asked if I could help her family. I introduced her to Marley. Ploy idolized Marley. She had plastic surgery to make herself look like Marley. She wanted to be Marley, free and beautiful and talented, admired, rich, and happy.”

  Marley flinched as Nagata used the term “idolized.” Clearly it was true, though she’d done all she could to prevent it from happening.

  Marley picked up the story: “Ploy couldn’t shed the pain she felt for her family. The way they suffered. She regularly sent them money and they lived better than the other refugees. That didn’t matter to her. Ploy couldn’t stop thinking about how to get them out of the camp.”

  “You told her you could help,” said Calvino.

  She paused to drink her tea.

  “Yes, but also that she would have to be patient.”

  “Whose idea was it for the tattoo? The JAI on her ankle?” asked Calvino.

  “JAI was Professor Nagata’s idea,” said Marley. “The Thai word ‘jai’ means heart. But JAI wasn’t just heart. It was East meets West—the frontier where Agni joins Janus. Professor Nagata taught that they meet in Ishvara—the world creator—the place of boundaries and no boundaries, matter and anti-matter, the wave that is a particle, and the particle that is a wave.”

  “Make it simple for me. Why a tattoo?” asked Calvino.

  “So that we could use the tattoo, something we see so often that we don’t notice them anymore, to embed a new technology in plain sight,” said Marley. “I used nanotechnology to create a tracking device inserted as part of an ordinary tattoo. Who would ever think of a tattoo as a telecommunication channel plugged into the World Wide Web, accessible on hundreds of monitors?”

  Professor and former student exchanged a glance, a smile that signaled a solemn pact they’d made—to set free the illegals from the brothels, fishing boats, factories and mines.

  “Who else knows about this device?” asked Calvino.

  “Professor Nagata and now you.”

  “How about Ploy and her family? Were they in on the operation?”<
br />
  “There was no need for them to know.”

  “Because Ploy looked up to you, she went along,” said Calvino.

  “We were helping her,” Marley said. “But Ploy felt I was taking too long. She couldn’t bear having her family in the camp another day. So she made her own arrangements.”

  “She ran without telling you.”

  Marley nodded.

  “We had an underground network for the Rohingya but not for illegal Burmese,” said Nagata, refilling Marley’s cup with tea.

  “Time was needed to test the new technology,” said Marley.

  “We have Rohingya waiting to help them. They escaped from a detention center in the South,” said Nagata.

  “It’s messy,” said Marley.

  “Using tattoos to track people gives me a bad feeling,” said Calvino. “It might be okay if you and Nagata are running the world. But you’re not. Think about the implications of what you’re doing.”

  It was after midnight and they’d been talking for a couple of hours. Despite his age, Nagata showed no sign of tiredness.

  “We have,” said Nagata. “Tattoos are a different cultural artifact in Burma and Thailand. They are common. No one imposes them on people. But the Rohingya are Muslim and tattoos are forbidden. It wasn’t easy to ask them to go against their religion. Marley solved the problem by making the tattoo invisible and calling it a vaccination. With what little free choice the refugees have in life, getting a vaccination was hardly one that raised an official eyebrow.”

  The influence of being born in a camp had structured Nagata’s thinking about values, choices and karma. The tattoos would function as part of an official record-keeping system. The focus wasn’t on the person but on the person’s number and the details sketched alongside it. Nagata was right that the Thai and Burmese poor often displayed tattoos anyway. But he couldn’t help feel there was something reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the idea of tattoos to ID refugees in detention. On Calvino’s mother’s side, his relatives had been tattooed and murdered in concentration camps. What Yoshi Nagata explained about these new tattoos suggested that, once equipped with long-range transmitting capability, the software could monitor location, emotional state and bio data as well as recording name, age, gender, DOB, place of birth, if known, and name of camp or detention center.