“Why is he—” Childan began.
Paul said, “Pieces such as this…” He picked up the pin once more, briefly. Closing the lid, he returned the box to Childan. “… can be mass-produced. Either in base metal or plastic. From a mold. In any quantity desired.”
After a time Childan said, “What about wu? Will that remain in the pieces?”
Paul said nothing.
“You advise me to see him?” Childan said.
“Yes,” Paul said.
“Why?”
“Charms,” Paul said.
Childan stared.
“Good-luck charms. To be worn. By relatively poor people. A line of amulets to be peddled all over Latin America and the Orient. Most of the masses still believe in magic, you know. Spells. Potions. It’s a big business, I am told.” Paul’s face was wooden, his voice toneless.
“It sounds,” Childan said slowly, “as if there would be a good deal of money in it.”
Paul nodded.
“Was this your idea?” Childan said.
“No,” Paul said. He was silent, then.
Your employer, Childan thought. You showed the piece to your superior, who knows this importer. Your superior—or some influential person over your head, someone who has power over you, someone rich and big—contacted this importer.
That’s why you’re giving it back to me, Childan realized. You want no part of this. But you know what I know: that I will go to this address and see this man. I have to. I have no choice. I will lease the designs, or sell them on a percentage basis; some deal will be made between me and this party.
Clearly out of your hands. Entirely. Bad taste on your part to presume to stop me or argue with me.
“There is a chance here for you,” Paul said, “to become extremely wealthy.” He continued to gaze stoically ahead.
“The idea strikes me as bizarre,” Childan said. “Making good-luck charms out of such art objects; I can’t imagine it.”
“For it is not your natural line of business. You are devoted to the savored esoteric. Myself, I am the same. And so are those individuals who will shortly visit your store, those whom I mentioned.”
Childan said, “What would you do if you were me?”
“Don’t under-evaluate the possibility suggested by the esteemed importer. He is a shrewd personage. You and I—we have no awareness of the vast number of uneducated. They can obtain from mold-produced identical objects a joy which would be denied to us. We must suppose that we have the only one of a kind, or at least something rare, possessed by a very few. And, of course, something truly authentic. Not a model or replica.” He continued to gaze past Childan, at empty space. “Not something cast by the tens of thousands.”
Has he stumbled onto correct notion, Childan wondered, that certain of the historic objects in stores such as mine (not to mention many items in his personal collection) are imitations? There seems a trace of hint in his words. As if in ironic undertone he is telling me a message quite different from what appears. Ambiguity, as one trips over in the oracle… quality, as they say, of the Oriental mind.
Childan thought, He’s actually saying: Which are you Robert? He whom the oracle calls “the inferior man,” or that other for whom all the good advice is meant? Must decide, here. You may trot on one way or the other, but not both. Moment of choice now.
And which way will the superior man go? Robert Childan inquired of himself. At least according to Paul Kasoura. And what we have before us here isn’t a many-thousand-year-old compilation of divinely inspired wisdom; this is merely the opinion of one mortal—one young Japanese businessman.
Yet, there’s a kernel to it. Wu, as Paul would say. The wu of this situation is this: whatever our personal dislikes, there can be no doubt, the reality lies in the importer’s direction. Too bad for what we had intended; we must adapt, as the oracle states.