The Nicholas Linnear Novels (214 page)

“May not have been the actual instrument,” Kansatsu had said, interrupting him. “Although it would seem that he must be implicated.”

Nicholas had an image of Dr. Hanami’s bloody face, his broken-boned body crumpled on the sidewalk.

“The surgeon who operated on me,” he had said. “He was pushed from his office window.” Then he told Kansatsu everything, from the moment Dr. Hanami pronounced his diagnosis like a sentence, to the battle with the tanjian in Dr. Hanami’s office more man six months later.

“Ah, everything is falling into place,” Kansatsu had said. He produced an anatomical text, opened it to a section titled, Hemispheres of the Brain. “Let us take this chronologically. According to what you have told me, your tumor lay along the second temporal convolution”—he pointed—“here. Now you will notice that this is just above the hippocampal fissure”—he pointed again—“here.

“Tanjian have known for centuries that the brain is a kind of computer whose myriad functions are precisely divided into well-defined sections. A certain section of the brain, for instance, is involved in the formation and maintenance of memory. This area is relatively small. It resides in what Western science has termed the hippocampus.”

“But my tumor was right above the hippocampus,” Nicholas had said. “It’s becoming increasing likely that Dr. Hanami made a mistake, a slip of the scalpel.”

“On the contrary,” Kansatsu had said. “Put such negative thoughts aside, Nicholas, and concentrate on the evidence. The hippocampus is so far beneath the area where your tumor lay, it is impossible for a qualified surgeon to reach it accidentally. No. For the hippocampus to be invaded, it must have been deliberate.”

Kansatsu had turned to another section of the text. “The hippocampus is crucial to memory, modern science has discovered, because the brain cells there are rich in a peculiar molecule, the NMDA receptor. It is called that because scientists use the chemical, N-methyl D-aspartate, to detect the receptor’s presence. The NMDA receptor accepts memories and encodes them into the cells for later recall. This can only be done if the brain’s cells—or neurons—are allowed to link up, firing neurotransmitters across synaptic bridges. If something interferes with the synaptic spark, new memories cannot be retained. But, as in your case, if something destroys these cells or interferes with the NMDA receptor, memories already residing in the brain cannot be accessed. The result is what you think of as memory loss but is actually nothing of the sort.”

“What happened to me?” Nicholas had asked.

“Here I can only hazard a guess,” Kansatsu had said, “but I believe it’s an educated one. I believe that while the surgeon was working on your tumor, someone else inserted a suitable object, say an optic fiber, coated with a chemical, an NMDA receptor-inhibitor, into your hippocampus.”

“But wouldn’t random memories be affected, not just those involving my ninja training?”

“Normally, yes,” Kansatsu-san said. “But we are talking now about not only a tanjian, but a
dorokusai.
Just as you are able to inhibit those areas where you feel pain, and not others, so the
dorokusai
was able to interfere with your deepest memories. Besides,” Kansatsu added, “your mind has been almost entirely focused on your state of
Shiro Ninja.
I think you will find it difficult, if not impossible, to dredge up certain deeply inlaid memories of your very early childhood.”

Nicholas considered this. It was true that many details of his childhood memories were unavailable to him. He knew they were there, but try as he might, he could not bring them into the light of consciousness.

Nicholas shook his head, dismayed. “But Dr. Hanami was right there beside the
dorokusai
,” he said. “He must have known what was happening.”

Kansatsu nodded. “This is true enough. But, Nicholas, if what you tell me about him is true, then we must consider the possibility of extreme coercion. Perhaps he was forced to allow this person access to your brain.”

Nicholas considered this for some time. “Could the tanjian, the
dorokusai
who attacked me, be capable of such surgical skill?”

“Yes,” Kansatsu had said. “Indeed, it is quite likely that such an individual would possess great surgical skill. As a ninja, your own knowledge of anatomy and the workings of the mind and body is quite extensive.”

“I couldn’t insert a poisoned optical fiber into a hidden area of the human brain.”

“Thankfully. You are not
dorokusai.
You do not have such reckless disregard for human life.”

Though Kansatsu had begun giving him a mix of natural powders as an antidote to the NMDA receptor-inhibitor, Nicholas was still forced to rely almost exclusively upon Akshara for his mental discipline. It was akin to learning to speak or to walk all over again—so basic, yet so painfully difficult. His brain was like an open book, blank pages ready for the script of the maker's hand. Rapidly, Akshara was filling it, creating its own subtext.

Oddly, his body—not his mind—was his greatest ally in this battle. It was so superbly trained, he found that it could do whatever Akshara asked of it—neither lightning response nor stamina were now problems, and Nicholas was heartened by this change in him from when he first began his journey to find himself.

Then, all at once, as he ascended his nemesis, the Black Gendarme, he felt himself growing heavier and lighter at the same time. He was aware of his body sinking into the rock face, seeping into the minute cracks and fissures so that even a high wind could not dislodge him. At the same time he felt his spirit soaring free. And he was in
Getsumei no michi
! Remembrance flooded him; his body and mind were once again one. Power suffused him. He was no longer
Shiro Ninja.

The feeling of elation was so overwhelming that Nicholas threw back his head, shouting into the wind, stirring the clouds. The jumble of images inside his mind concentrated, coalesced, resolved themselves into insight.

The footprints among the bulrushes: the voice of his memory. He was back in Kyoki’s castle, passing through the moon gate in his study.

What did the voice say?
Kansatsu had said.

I can’t remember,
Nicholas had said.

Was the voice my brother’s voice?

Not his, but the source was close.

How close? Akshara gave him the answer: very close. And now the voice spoke to him and he heard every word. It was his own voice saying:
Time.
Like the chiming of a grandfather’s clock, like the tolling of a bell, like a shadow emerging from out of the mist.
Time to learn, time to absorb, time to be. This is the end: of fear, of confusion, of death.

And Nicholas, the wind from the north whistling in his ears, his body charged with the newfound strength of Akshara, thought: Where are you,
dorokusai?
Wherever you are, I’ll find you now. I’m coming to get you. I’m coming.

“I
S THAT ALL YOU’RE
going to tell us?” the young girl said.

“You promised to tell us the end,” her brother said.

The
sensei
looked at them with some humor. “This is a story that has no end,” he said.

“But you promised,” the boy, Senjin, always the more impatient of the two, said.

“What happened after they went over the waterfall?” Shisei, his sister asked.

“Ah, the waterfall,” the
sensei
said, as if her words reminded him of why they were there, not just there at this moment, but
there
as in on the planet.

He was the River Man. At least that is the only name Senjin and Shisei knew him by, although to his face they always called him
sensei,
teacher. He was father to them, these waiflike twins. He was mentor and companion, tutor and friend. He was Haha-san’s brother.

He was, in essence, their universe, and they loved him above all else, even each other.

They knew him as the River Man because that was where he took them to learn, in the depths of a shadowed, leafy valley, by the bank of a wide, snaking river. He was very much at home there, living at times as much in the water as on dry land, as wholly amphibious as the frogs that sunned themselves on the hot rocks of the river, waiting to snatch unsuspecting midges out of midair with their lightning tongues.

“The waterfall was like a star in the sky,” the River Man said, “resonating with unimaginable energy, an engine of life and of destruction.

“When the two brothers, locked in mortal combat, were taken over the falls, something happened. The universe shuddered. Perhaps it shuddered at the moment when Zhao Hsia died, his lungs filled with churning water as So-Peng held him with the force of his will against the rocks at the base of the waterfall.

“Or then again, perhaps it shuddered when So-Peng emerged, dripping and gasping, upon the black muddy shore. For he had lived and Zhao Hsia, his childhood friend, had not. So-Peng had had it in his power to save his brother, but he had elected to drown him. He had been judge, jury, and executioner in the trial of Zhao Hsia.

“There was no justice here. At least, none that we can readily understand. Justice, no matter how harsh, must be admired. Anything less is to be reviled—and avenged.”

So this is how it began. Amid a sylvan river glade, leafy and green, lush in the fullness of summer’s heat. Morality imprinted upon two young, growing minds, so full of trust in a world not yet fully defined. But whose morality did they so readily absorb?

Haha-san had no one but her brother,
sensei,
the River Man. Unlike her sister, the woman who had given birth to Senjin and Shisei, Haha-san had chosen to remain unmarried. She carried with her from childhood a morbid distrust of men.

She did not understand sex, and was afraid of it. She saw in it an innate violence that apparently no one else did. Until, of course, Senjin was old enough to comprehend what he had unconsciously absorbed from her.

Perhaps in her youth Haha-san had been brutally raped. That would have explained her view of sex. However, life is rarely so neat and tidy, and the truth was perhaps far more nebulous: Haha-san had developed this belief somewhere within a childhood she could no longer clearly remember.

What she could remember disturbed her, and her reaction to these surfacing memories, chunks of stinking, rotting debris, was terror. At those times the household would be charged with menace, as if Haha-san’s fear was like a drunkard run amok, violence and chaos strewn in its erratic wake.

At other times Haha-san, as if appalled at what she had done, would take the twins to her pillowlike breast, rocking them, crooning to them lullabies in a language they could not yet understand.

This underlying unpredictability characterized the twins’ early years. Only with
sensei,
in the sinuously winding river glade, did Senjin and Shisei feel secure.

Is it any wonder that they gratefully embraced the River Man’s teachings with a fervor that he found invigorating?

It was only much later, floating free in his sensory deprivation tank in the Kan Hotel in the dingy fringes of Tokyo, using Kshira to place himself out of time, that Senjin came to understand that Haha-san was gifted in just the same way that he and Shisei were gifted.

But Haha-san was in a sense a displaced person. Her parents had been destroyed when the Americans had dropped their atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The doctors said that Haha-san herself had absorbed a lethal dose of radiation. As such, knowing that she was doomed, they contrived through a mare’s nest of paperwork to keep her in their laboratories, observing her eighteen hours a day, their chrome and fiberglass instruments monitoring all her vital signs in order to understand better how the radiation broke down the cells, platelets, and tissues of the human body.

This living experiment was not entirely the doctors’ doing. On the contrary, it was Haha-san herself who conceived of the idea as if it were a baby in her belly. Immediately following the exhaustive physical examination given to her, as it was to all refugees of Nagasaki, Haha-san approached the doctors. She had heard them in consultation, talking about her case as if the radiation had already robbed her of her hearing. She was ten at this time, in 1945, already old enough to understand her own mortality and what it meant to die, the war accelerating her knowledge in the same way atomic fission accelerated ions.

But it was life that concerned Haha-san. Although her parents and two older brothers had perished, a sister two years her junior was alive, having been out of the Nagasaki area when the sky exploded in light and in death.

Haha-san understood that she was now the head of the family, and as such she needed to take care of her sister. She could not count on the authorities, who were in chaos in the last days of the war.

She knew she needed money, and this was the way to get it. Haha-san sold herself as an exhibit, a living laboratory for the scientists who were so eager to discover the short- and long-term effects of this new radiation that had been unleashed on the world. The money they paid her she turned over to her sister, who, in turn, bought her way into a farming family. Having lost three sons to the war, the farmers were happy to have another body—no matter how small—to help them with their rice harvest.

The experiment was short-lived. After six months, when Haha-san had developed none of the expected signs of radiation poisoning, the scientists abandoned her for more fertile survivors. They believed that their initial findings were wrong, because now they could find no sign of the radiation at all inside her.

Many years later, floating in nothingness, it was clear to Senjin that this manifestation of her gift clearly terrified Haha-san. More, it had traumatized her. She had been prepared to die, and when she had not even become ill, a sickness of the spirit descended on her.

Perhaps she felt that she had deserved to die in the bomb blast. She was, she felt, no more deserving of life than her parents or her brothers had been. On the contrary, she felt inadequate to the task life was presenting her. Surely one of her older brothers would be better equipped than she to care for her younger sister.