“A poet’s soul, that’s what you have.”
“I’ve never been accused of that, before.”
“Only because you’re Japanese,” said Moshe.
They sat down before an open fire that seemed real, but gave off no smoke. Heat it had, however, so that Hakira felt a little scorched when he leaned forward. “There are Japanese poets.”
“I know. But is that what anyone thinks of, when they think of the wandering Japanese?”
Hakira smiled. “But you do have money.”
“Not from money-changing,” said Moshe. “And what I don’t have, which you also don’t have, is a home.”
Hakira looked around at the luxurious parlor. “I suppose that technically this is a cave.”
“A homeland,” said Moshe. “For nine and a half centuries, my friend, your people have been able to go almost anywhere in the world but one, an archipelago of islands once called Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu—”
Hakira, suddenly overcome by emotion, raised his hand to stop the cruel list. “I know that your people, too, have been driven from their homeland—”
“Repeatedly,” said Moshe.
“I hope you will forgive me, sir, but it is impossible to imagine yearning for a desert beside a dead sea the way one yearns for the lush islands strangled for nearly a thousand years by the Chinese dragon.”
“Dry or wet, flat or mountainous, the home to which you are forbidden to return is beautiful in dreams.”
“Who has the soul of a poet now?”
“Your organization will fail, you know.”
“I know nothing of the kind, sir.”
“It will fail. China will never relent, because to do so would be to admit wrongdoing, and that they cannot do. To them you are the interlopers. The toothless Peace Council can issue as many edicts as it likes, but the Chinese will continue to bar those of known Japanese ancestry from even visiting the islands. And they will use as their excuse the perfectly valid argument that if you want so much to see Japan, you have only to bend yourself to a different slant. There is bound to be some angle where your tourist dollars will be welcome.”
“No,” said Hakira. “Those other angles are not this world.”
“And yet they are.”
“And yet they are not.”
“Well, now, there is our dilemma. Either we will do business or we will not, and it all hinges on that question. What is it about that archipelago that you want. Is it the land itself? You can already visit that very land—and we are told that because of inanimate incoherency it is the same land, no matter what angle you dwell in. Or is your desire really not simply to go there, but to go there in defiance of the Chinese? Is it hate, then, that drives you?”
“No, I reject both interpretations,” said Hakira. “I care nothing for the Chinese. And now that you put the question in these terms, I realize that I myself have not thought clearly enough, for while I speak of the beautiful land of the rising sun, in fact what I yearn for is the Japanese nation, on those islands, unmolested by any other, governing ourselves as we have from the beginning of our existence as a people.”
“Ah,” said Moshe. “Now I see that we perhaps can do business. For it may be possible to grant you your heart’s desire.”
“Me and all the people of the Kotoshi.”
“Ah, the eternally optimistic Kotoshi. It means ‘this year,’ doesn’t it? As in, ‘this year we return’?”
“As your people say, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’”
“A Japan where only the Japanese have ruled for all these past thousand years. In a world where the Japanese are not rootless wanderers, legendary toymakers-for-hire, but rather are a nation among the nations of the world, and one of the greatest of them. Is that not the home you wish to return to?”
“Yes,” said Hakira.
“But that Japan does not exist in this world, not even now, when the Chinese no longer need even half the land of the original Han China. So you do not want the Japan of this world at all, do you? The Japan you want is a fantasy, a dream.”
“A hope.”
“A wish.”
“A plan.”
“And it hasn’t occurred to you that in all the angles of the world, there might not be such a Japan?”
“It isn’t like the huge library in that story, where it is believed that among all the books containing all the combinations of all the letters that could fit in all those pages, there is bound to be a book that tells the true history of all the world. There are many angles, yes, but our ability to differentiate them is not infinite, and in many of them life never evolved and so the air is not breathable. It is an experiment not lightly undertaken.”
“Oh, of course. To find a world so nearly like our own that a nation called Japan—or, I suppose, Nippon—exists at all, where a language like Japanese is even spoken—you do speak Japanese yourself, don’t you?”
“My parents spoke nothing else at home until I was five and had to enter school.”
“Yes, well, to find such a world would be a miracle.”
“And to search for it would be a fool’s errand.”
“And yet it has been searched for.”
Hakira waited. Moshe did not go on.
“Has it been found?”
“What would it be worth to you, if it had?”
2024—Angle Θ
“You’re a scientist,” said Leonard. “This is beneath you.”
“I have continuous video,” said Bêto. “With a mechanical clock in it, so you can see the flow of time. The chair moves.”
“There is nothing you can do that hasn’t been faked by somebody, sometime.”
“But why would I fake it? To publish this is the end of my career.”
“Exactly my point, Bêto. You are a geologist, of all things. Geologists don’t have poltergeists.”
“Stay with me, Leonard. Watch this.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes it’s immediate. Sometimes it takes days.”
“I don’t have days.”
“Play cards with me. As we used to in Faculdade. Look at the chair first, though. Nothing attached to it. A normal chair in every way.”
“You sound like a magician on the stage.”
“But it is normal.”
“So it seems.”
“Seems? All right, don’t trust me. You move it. Put it where you want.”
“All right. Upside down?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“On top of the door?”
“I don’t care.”
“And we play cards?”
“You deal.”
2090
It is the problem of memory. We have mapped the entire brain. We can track the activity of every neuron, of every synapse. We have analyzed the chemical contents of the cells. We can find, in the living brain, without surgery, exactly where each muscle is controlled, where perceptions are rooted. We can even stimulate the brain to track and recall memory. But that is all. We cannot account for how memory is stored, and we cannot find where.
I know that in your textbooks in secondary school and perhaps in your early undergraduate classes you have read that memory was the first problem solved, but that was a misunderstanding. We discovered that after mapping a particular memory, if that exact portion of the brain was destroyed—and this was in the early days, with clumsy equipment that killed thousands of cells at a time, an incredibly wasteful procedure and potentially devastating to the subject—if that exact spot was destroyed, the memory was not lost. It could resurface somewhere else.