The Nicholas Linnear Novels (178 page)

The Hive Project involved constructing a computer that was based not on a single processor, like conventional computers were, but rather on an interconnecting neural network of a complexity not unlike that in the brain of a bee—hence the project name.

This computer would, in effect, be able to think. Using radar, sonar, and Loran, it and subsequent versions—so the Johnson Institute report showed—could distinguish between friend or foe; it could choose a weapon’s path and change it instantaneously to suit incoming intelligence from the field; it could recognize, and respond to, human speech. The applications seemed endless.

Douglas Howe, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was dead set against Branding’s ASCRA bill. His argument was that he did not want to foster another disaster on the order of the recent Artificial Intelligence Initiative. Four hundred million dollars had been allocated for a fever-pitch run at constructing a “cognitive artificial brain.” So much money had been dropped in the researchers’ laps at once that they did not know what to do with it, and consequently, great chunks of the funding disappeared down an unknown drain. But Branding knew that Howe’s reasoning was only skin deep.

The fight, which had long been simmering, now threatened to boil over into what many people on Capitol Hill saw as a personal vendetta, as Howe sought to destroy or, at the very least, cripple Branding’s enormous influence in the Senate. This influence was now symbolized by the ASCRA bill.

The increasingly bitter conflict had become something more than Democrat versus Republican or even liberal versus conservative. It had about it now something of a pitched battle, with the combatants dug in on both sides, armed to the teeth, and determined that only one would survive the final assault.

But Shisei had continued to surprise him, just as she had ever since they had met at Tippy North’s masque. Rather than ask questions about his work, she spoke of those subjects about which she seemed the most passionate: ecology and sex. Branding, beginning to understand Shisei’s personality, saw that she was obsessed with health: a healthy world, a healthy life. To her, a vigorous sex life was as integral to a healthy life as eating the right foods or daily exercise.

And again Branding was struck by the essentially childlike qualities lurking beneath the woman’s glowing skin. She possessed a kind of naiveté—a straightforwardness of purpose—that to Branding was as exciting as it was refreshing.

From inside the house George Shearing interpreted “Mood Indigo” in a typically lush arrangement. Branding’s eyes closed dreamily. He half heard Shisei say she was going to take a shower.

He felt her passing by him. Then he was alone on the porch with the night, the sea, and the music. He inhaled deeply of the heavy, salt air, luxuriating in its purity.

George Shearing disappeared in mid-note, and a moment later Grace Jones’s sinewy vocals were imprinting themselves on the even-tempoed surf. Branding was reminded of the long afternoon’s session of ecstatic lovemaking. Surprisingly, he felt himself stirring, becoming aroused all over again. He imagined Shisei’s body spread upon his bed, and he felt lust clotting his veins as if it were a drug.

He rose, aware that his loose white cotton trousers were already tented at the crotch. He pushed open the screen door, and Grace Jones’s voice washed over him. Memories writhed in his head.

He went past the kitchen, through the living room, down the hall. The music followed him, twisting along the corridor as if it were his companion. He could hear the sound of the water spray, and opened the door to the bathroom.

It was steamy and hot inside. Branding undid his trousers, stepped out of them. He stripped off his voile shirt. He could see Shisei’s body, a dark shape moving behind the translucent shower curtain. Her back was to him, her arms upstretched into the curving spray, her hands encircling the shower head as, before, they had encircled him.

He was very hard. He could feel the throbbing between his legs, and sucked in his breath. He felt like a sex machine. He felt twenty-five again.

As he watched Shisei washing herself, Branding smiled, remembering that she had not wanted to turn her back to him, that now he could take her from behind, coupling as animals did, as Branding had never done with his wife or with any of the women he had been intimate with before Mary.

He was trembling with desire, fired by the sight of her, hazy and indistinct behind the thin curtain, one filmy layer, a storm of painted violets swaying, rivulets of water running through them…

Branding grasped the shower curtain and, in one quick gesture, drew it aside. And stood transfixed, staring at Shisei’s back.

It was one of those moments in one’s life that did not last more than a tenth of a second but which seemed to last a lifetime—image imprinted upon the retina, burned upon the brain for all time. It was akin to the moment when Branding had learned that his daughter was dyslexic; when it had become clear to him that Mary, the woman he loved, did not particularly enjoy sex. They were infinitesimal moments in one’s life—yet charged with such power that they irrevocably changed one’s life.

And like all such moments, this one was chaotic. Branding stared at Shisei’s back, at, more properly, the perfectly hideous detailed tattoo, there, of a spider. It was gigantic, covering the entire area of her back, the obscene cluster of eight red eyes atop its small head, the two pairs of spread appendages from which venom is secreted to paralyze and liquefy its prey, its eight hairy, articulated legs stretching from one shoulder blade to the other, from the top of one buttock to the other.

And then Shisei reacted. Her head jerked around, looking back over her shoulder. Her torso moved, and with the play of her back muscles, the spider moved, dancing in nauseating cadence to the sinuous drift of Grace Jones’s vocals.

Branding screamed.

I must be going crazy, Tomi thought. With the night had come the rain, like a curtain coming down on the last tableau held by actors upon a stage. It was a red rain, or a blue rain, depending on which glowing sign one was passing.

Masses of umbrellas held at an acute angle to keep the wind from inverting them clogged Tokyo, turning the streets into fields filled with disquieting black flowers, storm-tossed, beading moisture down the stretched nylon and rice paper.

Headlights washed like klieg lights across these thick swaths of living matter, highlighting faces and hands as if they were segments of one vast millipede making its laborious way across the city.

Tomi, on her way home from work, ducked into a brilliantly lighted pachinko parlor. Her feet and legs were wet, and she was tired of being herded into puddles by the twists and turns of the ceaselessly moving millipede on the streets.

She had tried to find Nicholas Linnear’s whereabouts. She had first phoned his office at Sato International, but they had no idea where he might be. His home number went unanswered. She dialed Sato International again, asked to speak to a vice-president. This time she learned the cause of Nicholas’s absence, and on a hunch, asked for the name of his surgeon. Then she called the surgeon’s office and had a bit more luck. They informed her that he had an appointment with Dr. Hanami at ten the next morning. Tomi had decided to meet him there.

In truth, however, Nicholas Linnear was not uppermost on her mind. Senjin Omukae was. That individual was rapidly assuming dominance over the policewoman, and this fact in and of itself was disturbing to Tomi. If only that were the end of it, she felt perhaps she could, in time, handle what seemed to her a dereliction of her duty.

The fact that her individuality was asserting itself over the figure of Senjin had her really frightened. Senjin Omukae was not only her commander, and therefore forbidden, he was Senjin the individualist, the Opaque Man. This was his nickname among those outside the homicide division. He was—other than heroic—an unknown quantity. He was feared; even, it was rumored, by those who had elevated him to division commander.

That she should be drawn to this man was a source of growing unease for Tomi. Which was why, on this rainy night, she decided to go see the Scoundrel.

The Scoundrel, otherwise known as Seji Hikoko, was her best friend. They had met in school, and it had been the Scoundrel who had supported her when she had made her traumatic break with her family, with her entire way of life. In this way, he was like Senjin. He saw and appreciated her for what she was, not merely a woman to be kept in her place. In response, it had been Tomi who had tutored the Scoundrel in his advanced-level philosophy tutorials when he was in danger of failing those courses.

As a result, there was an intimate bond between the two that Tomi had never had with anyone else, even—especially!—a member of her own family.

The Scoundrel had a
usagigoya
—literally, a rabbit hutch—what Japanese called a modern Tokyo apartment: tiny, cramped, virtually airless. Still, it was a place to sleep.

The Scoundrel’s
usagigoya
was in Asakusa, where he often rubbed elbows with Kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers. It was Tomi’s favorite part of town, but it made her melancholy as well, for it reminded her of her lowly station in life. As a police sergeant she could not afford to live here, even in a place as minuscule as a rabbit hutch.

The Scoundrel was home. But then, he was always home at this hour, tinkering with his portable computer terminal, which now ran two to three times faster than it had when he had traded for it. The Scoundrel never bought anything when he could barter for it. In the privacy of his home he liked to improve upon what others did. In this way he could assert his genius without exerting ego. It was a Zen exercise, Tomi knew, a way to achieve the same kind of mind/no mind she strove for in her martial arts training. Hers was the more physical discipline, she knew, but hardly the more demanding.

She heard the careening music of Billy Idol as she went down the hall. And when the Scoundrel opened the door, the blast of rock ’n roll almost bowled her over.

“Good God, how can you think with all that sound and fury?” she yelled, putting aside her umbrella and her shoes.

“Because it signifies nothing.” The Scoundrel grinned, pulled her inside, shut the door behind her. “I can concentrate with it on.

The music boomed from a pair of three-thousand-dollar speakers the Scoundrel had souped up, and Tomi felt as if she had encountered a g-force liftoff. She had to brace herself against the kineticism. She felt trapped within a huge pachinko game.

The place was, as usual, a mess. Masses of computer hardware were strewn like corpses upon a battlefield in seemingly random piles across the floor, the chairs, the small sofa, the top of the VCR. The TV screen was filled up with the image of Harrison Ford prowling the futuristic Los Angeles cityscape, searching for murderous replicants in
Blade Runner.

The stereo glowed with a profusion of red and green pinpoints, waxing and waning with the volume of Billy Idol’s vocals. And, like Billy Idol, the Scoundrel had dyed his hair platinum. It stood up from his scalp like a bristly forest, longer on top, shorter on the sides. He was, like Tomi, in his early thirties. But while she had matured from the wispy teenager she had once been, he had retained the reedy, almost unformed shape of youth. He was like an oversized exuberant puppy, sloppy in his habits but lovable for all that.

Tomi stood making puddles on the floor, but the Scoundrel did not seem to care. There were times when Tomi needed to escape from the real world, filled with male pressure, constant fear of censure and loss of face. Here she could hide out amid the clutter and the chaos and the Scoundrel’s eternal high spirits. She would help him with whatever projects he was working on, and feel useful and appreciated. But tonight she needed to think, so she prevailed on him to take a break and come out with her for dinner.

They went where they always ended up, Koyanagi, their favorite
shitamachi,
an old-style businessman’s restaurant, where they invariably ordered
unagi,
the broiled eel, which was the house specialty.

“What were you working on at the apartment?” Tomi asked when they had settled in and had their first gulps of Sapporo beer.

“Oh, you know me.” The Scoundrel flashed his boyish grin. “Always fooling around. I’m working on a borer, a computer software program that penetrates into other programs encoded for security.”

“Don’t they already have things like that?”

“Hackers, yeah. There are some nasty ones around. And if the government finds who’s using them, they throw ’em into jail until the next world war.” He grinned again. “But the one I’m working on is different. I’ve named it MANTIS, which stands for Manmade Nondiscriminatory Tactical Integrated-circuit Smasher.”

The Scoundrel’s grin widened at the blank look on her face. “The essence of the long name is that MANTIS is
adaptable,
meaning it can, in its own way, think. Every locked program has its own individual defense, so normally if you wanted to break in, you’d have to contour a specialized program. My borer is set up to attack
any
defense, and get through.”

Tomi laughed. His genius often stunned her. “You’d better not let the government know what you’re up to.”

“Nah. There’s zip chance of that,” he said around a gulp of beer.

“I don’t get it,” Tomi said, intrigued. “You work for Nakano Industries, one of the largest electronics designing and manufacturing
keiretsu
in the country. The government must oversee Nakano the way they do all the major corporations.”

“Oh, they do. The MITI people are always over for meetings.” The Scoundrel paused as he craned his neck, peering around the restaurant. The gesture was such an outlandish parody of a spy at work that she giggled. “The fact is,” he said, returning his gaze to her, “that my boss is head of the advanced research and development department at Nakano. The stuff we’re doing is so theoretical, he tells me that the MITI people leave him alone.”

The Scoundrel finished his beer, ordered refills for them both. “My boss is a vice-president at Nakano. I’ve been working for this guy for a year and a half now. He reviewed my file, picked me out of the engineering section, interviewed me over the course of a week. I must have passed some kind of test he was putting me through. Anyway, six months ago he agreed to let me work on this borer project I dreamed up, which is anything
but
theoretical. In fact, it’s just about ready to roll now.” He grinned. “I’m not really supposed to tell anyone anything about it, but I don’t think that includes you.”