“Yes, very much,” I say.
We share her sandwiches and his mushrooms, and later have fruit and more tea. We hardly speak a word. In the absence of talk, the cry of the empty earth pours into the room and fills our silence.
“You never leave the Woods?” I ask the Caretaker.
“Never,” he replies, with a shake of his head. “That is decided. I am to stay here always and man the Power Station.… Always, until someone comes to replace me. When, I do not know. Only then can I leave the Woods and return to Town.… But now is always, and I cannot. I must wait for the wind that comes every three days.”
I drink the last of my tea. How long has it been since the wind-cry started? Listening to its droning wail, one is pulled in that direction. It must be lonely to pass the winter here in the Woods.
“But you have come here to look at the Power Station?” the young Caretaker remembers.
“We have come looking for musical instruments,” I say. “I was told you would know where to find them.”
He regards the knife and fork crossed on his plate.
“Yes, I have musical instruments here. They are old, I cannot say whether they will play … That is, you are welcome to them. I myself cannot play. My pleasure is to look at their shapes. Will you see them?”
“Please,” I say.
He rises from his chair and we follow.
“This way. I have them in my room,” he says.
“I will stay here and clean up,” she says.
The Caretaker opens a door, turns on the light, and invites me in. “Over here,” he says.
Arranged along the wall are various musical instruments. All are old. Most of them are string instruments, the strings hopelessly rusted, broken or missing. Some I am sure I once knew, but do not remember the names; others are totally unknown to me. A wooden instrument resembling a washboard that sprouts a row of metallic prongs. I try to play it, but can make no song. Another, a set of small drums, even has its own sticks, yet this clearly will not yield a melody. There is a large tubular instrument, one obviously meant to be blown from the end, but how do I give breath to it?
The Caretaker sits on the edge of his cot, its coverlet neatly tucked, and watches me examine the instruments.
“Are any of these of use to you?” he speaks up.
“I don’t know,” I hesitate. “They’re all so old.”
He walks over to shut the door, then returns. There is no window, so with the door closed, the wind-cry is less intrusive.
“Do you want to know why I collected these things?” the Caretaker asks. “No one in the Town takes any interest in them. No one in the Town has the least interest. Everyone has the things they need for living. Pots and pans, shirts and coats, yes … It is enough that their needs are met. No one wants for anything more. Not me, however. I am very interested in these things. I do not know why. I feel drawn to them. Their forms, their beauty.”
He rests one hand on the pillow and puts his other hand in his pocket.
“If you wish to know the truth, I like this Power Station,” he continues. “I like the fan, the meters, the transformer. Perhaps I liked these things before, so they sent me here. But it was so long ago. I have forgotten the before … Sometimes I think I will never be allowed to return to Town. They would never accept me as I am now.”
I reach for a wooden instrument. It is hollow and sandglass-shaped, with only two strings remaining. I pluck them. A dry twang issues.
“Where did you find these instruments?” I ask.
“From all over,” he says. “The man who delivers my provisions brings them to me. In the Town, old musical instruments sometimes lie buried in closets and sheds. Often they were burned for firewood. It is a pity.… That is, musical instruments are wonderful things. I do not know how to use them, I may not want to use them, I enjoy their beauty. It is enough for me. Is that strange?”
“Musical instruments are very beautiful,” I answer. “There is nothing strange about that.”
My eyes light upon a box hinged with leather folds lying among the instruments. The bellows is stiff and cracked in a few places, but it holds air. The box has buttons for the fingers.
“May I try it?” I ask.
“Please, go ahead,” the young Caretaker says.
I slip my hands into the straps on either end and compress. It is difficult to pump, but I can learn. I finger the buttons in ascending order, forcing the bellows in and out. Some buttons yield only faint tones, but there is a progression. I work the buttons again, this time descending.
“What sounds!” smiles the fascinated Caretaker. “As if they change colors!”
“It seems each button makes a note,” I explain. “Each one is different. Some sounds belong together and some do not.”
“What do you mean?”
I press several buttons at once. The intervals are awry, but the combined effect is not unpleasing. Yet I can recall no songs, only chords.
“Those sounds belong together?”
“Yes.”
“I do not understand,” he says. “It seems I am hearing something for the first time. It is different from the sound of the wind and different from the voices of the birds.”
He rests his hands on his lap, as he looks back and forth between my face and the bellows box.
“I will give you the instrument. Please have any others you want. They belong with someone who can use them,” he says, then turns his ear attentively to the wind. “I must check the machinery now. I must see that the fan and the transformer are working. Please wait for me in the other room.”
The young Caretaker hurries away, and I return to where the Librarian waits.
“Is that a musical instrument?” she asks.
“One kind of musical instrument,” I say.
“May I touch it?”
“Of course,” I say, handing her the bellows box. She receives it with both hands, as if cradling a baby animal. I look on in anticipation.
“What a funny thing!” she exclaims with an uneasy smile. “Do you feel better that you have it?”
“It was worth coming here.”
“The Caretaker, they did not rid him of his shadow well. He still has a part of a shadow left,” she whispers to me. “That is why he is here, in the Woods. I feel sorry for him.”
“Sorry?”
“Perhaps he is not strong enough to go deeper into the Woods, but he cannot return to Town.”
“Do you think your mother is in the Woods?”
“I do not really know,” she says. “The thought occurred to me.”
The Caretaker comes not long thereafter. I open the valise and take out the gifts we have brought for him. A small clock and a cigarette lighter found in a trunk in the Collection Room.
“Please accept these. They are a token of my gratitude for the instrument,” I say.
The young Caretaker refuses at first, but eventually gives in. He studies the objects.
“You know how to use them?” I ask.
“No, but there is no need. I will be fine,” he says. “They are beautiful in themselves. In time, I may find a use for them. I have too much time.”
At that, I tell him we will be leaving.
“Are you in a hurry?” he asks sadly.
“I must return to town before sundown, then go to work,” I say.
“I understand. I wish I could accompany you to the entrance to the Woods, but I cannot leave the Power Station.”
We part outside the small house.
“Please come back. Let me hear you play the instrument,” he says.
“Thank you.”
Gradually, the wail of the wind weakens as we walk farther from the Power Station. At the entrance to the Woods, we do not hear it at all.
29
Lake, Masatomi Kondo, Panty Hose
THE girl and I wrapped up our belongings in spare shirts, and I balanced the bundles on our heads. We looked funny, but we had no time to laugh. We left behind the rations
and whiskey, so our loads were not too bulky.
“Take care,” said the Professor. In the scant light, he looked much older than when I first met him. His skin sagging, his hair going to seed like a scraggly shrub, his face blotched with liver spots. He looked like a tired old man. Genius scientist or not, everyone grows old, everyone dies.
“Good-bye,” I said.
We descended by rope to the water’s surface. I went down first, signaled with my light when I reached bottom, then she followed. Plunging into water in total darkness was bound to be therapeutic. Not that I had a choice. The water was cold catharthis. It was plain, ordinary water, the usual aqueous specific gravity. Everything was still. Not air, not water, not darkness moved a quiver. Only our own splashing echoed back. Once in the water, it struck me that I’d forgotten to ask the Professor to treat my wound.
“Don’t tell me those clawed fish are swimming around in here,” I called back in her general direction.
“Don’t be silly. They’re just a myth,” she said. “I think.”
Some reassurance. I imagined some giant fish suddenly surfacing and biting off a leg or two. Well, let ’em come.
We swam a slow one-handed breaststroke, roped together, bundles on our head. We aimed for where the Professor trained his light like a beacon on the surface of the water. I swam in the lead. Our arms thrashed the water alternately. I stopped from time to time to check our progress and realign our course.
“Make sure your bundle stays dry,” she shouted this way. “The repel device won’t be worth a thing if it gets wet.”
“No problem,” I said. But in fact, it was a great struggle.
I was swimming. Orpheus ferried across the Styx to the Land of the Dead. All the varieties of religious experience in the world, yet when it comes to death, it all boils down to the same thing. At least Orpheus didn’t have to balance laundry on his head. The ancient Greeks had style.
“You aren’t really mad at Grandfather, are you?” asked the girl. An echo in the dark, it was hard to tell where the question was coming from.
“I don’t know, but does it matter?” I said, shouting, my voice coming back from an impossible direction. “The more I listened to your grandfather, the less I cared.”
“How can you say that?”
“Wasn’t much of a life anyway. Wasn’t much of a brain.”
“But didn’t you say you were satisfied with your life?”
“Word games,” I dismissed. “Every army needs a flag.”
She didn’t respond. We swam on in silence.
Where were those fish? Those claws were no figment of even a nonhuman imagination. I worried, after all, that they were cruising our way. I expected a slimy, clawed fin to be grabbing hold of my ankle any second. Okay, I may have been destined to disintegrate in the very near future, but I wasn’t prepared to be pâté for some creature from the black lagoon. I wanted to die under the sun.
“But you’re such a nice guy,” she said, sounding like she’d just stepped fresh out of a bath. “At least I think so.”
“You’re one of the very few,” I said.
“Well, I do.”
I looked back over my shoulder as I swam. I saw the Professor’s light retreating into the distance, but my hand had yet to touch solid rock. How could it be so far? Decent of him to keep us guessing.
“I’m not trying to defend Grandfather,” the girl started in again, “but he’s not evil. He gets so wrapped up in his work, he can’t see anything else. He had the best of intentions. He wanted to save you before the System got to you. In his own way, Grandfather is ashamed of what he’s done.”
Saying it was wrong did a hell of a lot of good.
“So forgive Grandfather,” she said.
“What’s forgiveness going to do?” I answered. “If he really felt responsible, he wouldn’t create a monster and run off when it got ugly. He doesn’t like working for big organizations, fine, but he’s got lives hanging on his line of research.”
“Grandfather simply couldn’t trust the System,” she pleaded. “The Calcutecs and Semiotecs are two sides of the same coin.”
“Tech-wise, maybe, but like I said before, one protects information while the other steals.”
“But what if the System and Factory were both run by the same person?” she said. “What if the left hand stole and the right hand protected?”
Hard to believe, but not inconceivable. The whole time I worked for the System, I never heard anything about what went on inside System Central. We received directives; we carried them out. We terminal devices never got access to the CPU.
“True, it’d be one hell of a lucrative business,” I agreed. “One side pitted against the other; you can raise your stakes as high as you like. No bottom dropping out of the market either.”
“That’s what struck Grandfather while he was in the System. After all, the System is really just private enterprise that enlisted state interests. And private enterprise is always after profit. Grandfather realized that if he went ahead with his research, he’d only make things worse.”
So the System hangs out a sign: In Business to Protect Information. But it’s all a front. If the old man hands over technologies to reconfigure the brain, he seals the fate of humanity. To save the world, he steps down. Too bad about the defunct Calcutecs—and me, who gets stuck in the End of the World.
“Were you in on this all along?” I asked her.
“Well, yes, I knew,” she confessed after slight hesitation.
“Then why didn’t you tell me? What was the point? You could have saved me blood and time.”
“I wanted you to see things through Grandfather’s eyes,” she answered. “You wouldn’t have believed me anyway.”
“I suppose not,” I said. Third circuit, immortality—who’d believe that straight out, cold?
The next few breaststrokes brought my hand in contact with a stone wall. Somehow we’d managed to swim across this subterranean lake.
“We’ve made it,” I announced.
She pulled up next to me. We looked back to the tiny light in the distance and adjusted our position ten meters to the right.
“Should be about here,” she said. “An opening just above the waterline.”
I carefully undid the bundle on my head and removed the pocket-sized flashlight, then shined it up the wall.
“I don’t see a hole,” I said.
“Try a little more to the right,” she suggested.
I swept the flashlight beam over the wall, but still no hole.
“To the right? Are you sure?”
“A little further right.”
I inched to the right, my whole body shaking. Feeling my way along the wall, my hand touched a shield-like surface. It was the size of an LP record, with carvings. I shined my light on it.
“A relief,” she said.
Maybe so, but it was the same two evil-clawed fishes. The sculpted disk was a third submerged in the water.
“This is the way out,” she said with authority. “The INKlings must have placed these as markers at all exits. Look up.”
Shining my flashlight higher, I could barely make out a shadowy recession. I handed her the light and went to investigate. I couldn’t really see the hole, but I felt a damp, mildewy air.
“I found it,” I shouted down.
“Thank goodness!” she exclaimed.
I pulled her up. We paused there at the mouth of the passage, drenched and shivering. Undoing our bundles, we changed into dry tops. I gave her my sweater and threw away my wet shirt and jacket. This left me still sopping wet from the waist down, but I didn’t have a change of slacks.
While she checked the INKling repel device, I flashed a signal to the Professor that we’d arrived safely. The yellow point of light blinked two times, three times, then went out. All was pitch black again.
“Let’s go,” she prompted. I looked at my watch. Seven-eighteen. Above ground, morning news on every TV channel. People eating breakfast, cr
amming their half-asleep heads with the weather, headache remedies, car export trade problems with America. Who’d know that I’d spent the whole night in the colon of the world? Did they care that I’d been swimming in stinking water and had leeches feeding on my neck, that I’d nearly keeled over from the pain in my gut? Did it matter to anybody that my reality would end in another twenty-eight hours and forty-two minutes? It’d never make the news.
The passage was smaller than anything we had come through this far. We had to crawl on all fours. It led us through intestinal twists and turns, sometimes angling up near vertically, dropping back straight down or looping over like a roller coaster. Progress was hard. This was nothing the INKlings had bored out. Nobody, not even INKlings, would make a passage this convoluted.
After thirty minutes, we exchanged INKling-repel portapacks, then another ten minutes later the narrow passage suddenly opened up into a place with a high ceiling. Dead silent, it was dark and musty. The path split left and right, air was blowing from right to left. She trained her light on the divide. Each way led straight off into blackness.
“Which way?” I asked.
“To the right,” she said. “Grandfather’s instructions put us at Sendagaya, so a right turn should take us toward Jingu Stadium.”
I pictured the world above ground. We were directly under the Kawade Bookshop, the Victor Recording Studio, and those two landmark ramen shops—Hope-ken and Copain.
“We’re close to my barber shop, too,” I said.
“Oh?” she said without much interest.
I thought about getting a haircut before the end of the world. It wasn’t, after all, like I had lots of better things to do with twenty-four hours left. Taking a bath, getting dressed, and going to the barber shop were about all I could hope for.
“Careful now,” she warned. “We’re getting close to the INKling nest. There’s their voices and that awful stench. Stay with me.”
I sniffed the air. I couldn’t smell anything. I couldn’t hear anything either.
We shortened the rope linking us to fifteen centimeters.
“Watch out, the wall’s missing here,” she spoke sharply, shining her light to the left. She was right: no wall, only a dark expanse. The beam shot off like an arrow and disappeared into thick black space, which seemed almost to be breathing, quivering, a disgustingly gelatinous consistency.