Loop

1

He opened the sliding glass door, and the smell of the sea poured into the room. There was hardly any wind-the humid night air rose straight up from the black water of the bay to envelop his body, fresh from the bath. The resulting immediacy of the ocean was a not-unpleasant feeling for Kaoru.

He made a habit of going out onto the balcony after dinner to observe the movements of the stars and the waxing and waning of the moon. The moon's expression was constantly, subtly changing for him, and watching it gave him a mystical sort of feeling. Often it would give him ideas.

Gazing up into the night sky was part of his daily routine. He'd slide open the door, feel around in the darkness below until he found his sandals, and step into them. Kaoru liked it up here on the twenty-ninth floor of the apartment tower, on this balcony thrust into the darkness. It was where he felt most at home.

September was mostly gone, but not the heat of summer. The tropical evenings had arrived in June, and while the calendar now said it was autumn, they showed no sign of faltering yet.

He didn't know when the summers had started getting longer. All he knew was that coming out onto the balcony like this every evening never cooled him off. It just brought him face to face with the heat.

But then the stars rushed right down to him, so close that he felt like he could touch them if he only stretched out his hand, and he forgot the heat.

The residential part of Odaiba, facing Tokyo Bay, boasted an overgrowth of condominium towers, but not many residents. The banks of windows only gave off a limited amount of light, little enough in fact to allow a clear view of the stars.

An occasional fresh breeze took the sea out of the air some, and his hair, just washed and still clinging to the back of his neck, began to dry.

"Kaoru, close the door! You'll catch cold!" His mother's voice, from behind the kitchen counter. The movement of the air must have told her that the door was open. She couldn't see the balcony from where she was, though, so Kaoru doubted she realized that he was outside, fully exposed to the night air.

How could anybody catch cold in this heat, he wondered, exasperated at his mother's over-protectiveness. Not that it was anything new. He had no doubt that if she knew he was out on the balcony, she'd literally drag him back inside. He shut the door behind him so he couldn't hear her anymore.

Now he was the sole possessor of this sliver of space jutting into the sky a hundred yards above the ground. He turned around and looked through the glass door into the apartment. He couldn't see his mother directly. But he could read her presence in the milky band of fluorescent light that shone from the kitchen onto the sofa in the living room. As she stood in front of the sink, cleaning up after the meal, her movements caused slight disturbances in the rays of light.

Kaoru returned his gaze to the darkness and thought the same thoughts he always did. He dreamed of being able to elucidate, somehow, the workings of the world that surrounded and contained him. It wasn't that he hoped to solve a mystery or two on the cutting edge of a particular field. What he desired was to discover a unifying theory, something to explain all phenomena in the natural world. His father, an information-engineering researcher, had basically the same dream.

When they were together, father and son discussed nothing but the natural sciences.

But it wasn't quite right to call them discussions. Basically, Kaoru, who had just turned ten, shot questions at his father, and his father answered them. Kaoru's father, Hideyuki, had started out as part of a team working on an artificial life project. Then he'd elected to move his research into a university setting, becoming a professor. Hideyuki never blew off Kaoru's questions. In fact, he maintained that his son's bold thinking, unrestrained as it was by common sense, sometimes even gave him hints he could use in his research. Their conversations were always deadly serious.

Whenever Hideyuki managed to get a Sunday afternoon off, he and Kaoru would spend it in heated discussions, the progress of which Machiko, Hideyuki's wife and Kaoru's mother, would watch with a satisfied look on her face. Her husband had a tendency to get so involved in what he was saying that he would forget his surroundings; her son, on the other hand, never neglected to be mindful that his mother was probably feeling left out because she was unable to join in the debates. He'd explain the issues they were discussing, breaking them down into bite-size chunks, in an effort to allow her to participate. It was a kind of consideration Hideyuki would never be able to imitate.

She always wore the same look of satisfaction as she watched her son, full of gratitude for his effortless kindness and pride that at age ten he could already discuss the natural sciences at a level so far beyond her own understanding.

Headlights flowed along on Rainbow Bridge far below. Kaoru wondered expectantly if his father's motorbike was in that belt of light. As always, he couldn't wait for his father to get home.

It was ten years ago that Hideyuki had gone from mere team member on the artificial life project to university professor; ten years ago that he'd moved from the Tokyo suburbs to this condo in Odaiba. The living environment here-the tall apartment buildings on the water's edge suited his family's tastes. Kaoru never got tired of looking down from on high, and then when night came, he'd pull the stars down close, using them to bolster his imagination concerning the world whose ways he couldn't yet fully grasp.

A living space high above the ground: the kind of thing to foster a bird's eye. Kaoru fell to wondering. If birds represented an evolutionary advance from reptiles, it meant that living spaces had gradually progressed skyward. What effect did that have on human evolution? Kaoru realized that it had been a month since he'd set foot on soil.

As he placed his hands on the balcony railing, about his own height, and stretched, he felt it. And not for the first time, either. He'd felt it from time to time for as long as he could remember. Only never, oddly enough, had the feeling come over him when he was with his family.

He was used to it by now. So he didn't turn around, even though he could feel someone watching him from behind. He knew what would be there if he did: the same living room, the dining room beyond it, the kitchen next to it, all unchanged. And in the kitchen, his mother Machiko washing dishes just like always.

Kaoru shook his head to chase away the feeling that he was being watched. And the sensation seemed to take a step back, blending into the darkness and disappearing into the sky.

Once he was sure it was gone, Kaoru turned around and pressed his back against the railing. Everything was just as it had been. His mother's shadow, flickering in the band of light from the kitchen doorway. Where had they gone, those countless eyes watching him from behind? Kaoru had felt them, unmistakably. Innumerable gazes, fastened on him.

He should have felt those inky stares on his back when he was like this, staring into the apartment, his back to the night. But now those eyes had disappeared, assimilated into the darkness.

Just what was it that was watching him? Kaoru had never thrown this question out at his father. He doubted even his father would be able to give him an answer.

Now he felt a chill, in spite of the heat. He no longer felt like being on the balcony.

Kaoru went back into the living room and peeked into the kitchen at his mother. She'd finished washing the dishes and was now wiping the edge of the sink with a dishcloth. Her back was to him, and she was humming. He stared at her thin, elegant shoulders, willing her to notice his gaze. But she just kept humming, unmoved.

Kaoru came up behind her and spoke.

"Hey, Mom, when's Dad getting home?"

He hadn't intended to startle her, but there was no denying that his approach had been a little too silent, and his voice when he spoke a little too loud. Machiko jumped, her arms jerked, and she knocked over a dish that she'd placed at the edge of the sink.

"Hey, don't scare me like that!"

She caught her breath and turned around, hands to her breast.

"Sorry," Kaoru said. He often accidentally took his mother unawares like this.

"How long have you been standing there, Kaoru?"

"Just a few seconds."

"You know Mom's jumpy. You shouldn't startle me like that," she scolded.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do it."

"Really? Well, you did it all the same."

"Didn't you notice? I was staring at your back, just for a few seconds."

"Now, why should I notice that? I don't have eyes in the back of my head, you know."

"I know, but, I…" He trailed off. What he wanted to say was, People can feel someone staring at them even if they don't turn around. But he knew that would scare his mother even more.

So he went back to his original question. "When's Dad getting home?" Of course, he knew it was pointless to ask: not once had his mother ever known when his father was coming home.

"He'll probably be late again today, I imagine." She gave her usual vague answer, glancing at the clock in the living room.

"Late again?"

Kaoru sounded disappointed, and Machiko said, "You know your dad's really busy at work these days. He's just getting started on a new project, remember?" She tried to take his side. He got home late every night, but never did she betray the slightest hint of discontent.

"Maybe I'll wait up for him."

After she'd finished putting away the dishes, Machiko went over to her son, wiping her hands with the dishcloth.

"Do you have something you want to ask him again?"

"Yeah."

"About his work?"

"Unh-uh."

"How about I ask him for you?"

"Huh?" Kaoru couldn't stop himself from laughing.

"Knock that off! You know, I'm not as dumb as you think I am. I did go to grad school, you know."

"I know that. But… you studied English lit, right?"

Machiko had indeed belonged to a department of English language and literature at the university, but to be exact her focus had been on American culture, rather than English literature. She'd been particularly knowledgeable about Native American traditions; even now she kept up on it, reading in her free time.

"Never mind that, just tell me. I want to hear what you have to say."

Still holding the dishcloth, Machiko ushered her son into the living room. Kaoru thought it was a little odd: why should she suddenly take an interest tonight, of all nights? Why was she reacting differently?

"Wait a minute, then." Kaoru went to his bedroom and came back with two pieces of paper. He sat down on the sofa next to his mother.

As she glanced at the pages in Kaoru's hand, Machiko said, "What's this? I hope these aren't full of difficult figures again!" When it came to mathematical questions, she knew it was time for her to admit defeat.

"It's nothing hard like that this time."

He handed her the two pages, face up, and she looked at them in turn. A map of the world was printed on each one.

"Well, this is a change. You're studying geography now?"

Geography was one of her strong suits, particularly North American. She was confident that in this field, at least, she knew more than her son.

"Nope. Gravitational anomalies."

"What?" It looked like she'd be out of her league after all. A faint look of despair crept into her eyes.

Kaoru leaned forward and began to explain how these maps showed in one glance the earth's gravitational anomalies.

"Okay, there's a small difference between the values you get from the gravity equation and those you get by correcting gravitation acceleration for the surface of the geoid. Here we have those differences written on maps in terms of positive or negative numbers."

The pages were numbered, "1" and "2". On the first map were drawn what seemed like an endless series of contour lines representing gravitational anomalies, and each line was labelled with a number accompanied by a plus sign or a minus sign. The contour lines looked just like the ones found in any normal atlas, where positive numbers equalled heights above sea level and negative numbers depths below sea level.

But in this case, the lines showed the distribution of gravitational anomalies. In this case, the greater the positive number, the stronger the gravitational force, and the greater the negative number, the weaker the gravitational force at that particular location. The unit was the milligal (mgal). The map was shaded, too: the whiter areas corresponded to positive gravitational anomalies, while the darker areas corresponded to negative ones. It was set up so that everything could be understood at a glance.

Machiko stared long and hard at the gravitational anomaly distribution map she held in her hands, and then looked up and said, "Alright, I give up. What is a gravitational anomaly?" She'd long since given up trying to fake knowledge in front of her son.

"Mom, surely you don't think that the earth's gravity is the same everywhere, do you?"

"I haven't thought about it once since the day I was born, to be honest."

"Well, it's not. It varies from place to place."

"So what you're saying is that on this map, the bigger the positive number, the stronger the force of gravity, and the bigger the negative number, the weaker, right?"

"Uh-huh, that's right. See, the matter that makes up the earth's interior doesn't have a uniform mass. Think of it like this: if a place has a negative gravitational anomaly, it means that the geological material below it has less mass. In general, the higher the latitude, the stronger the force of gravity."

"And what's that piece of paper?"

Machiko pointed to the page marked "2". This, too, was a map of the world, but without the complex contour lines: instead it was marked with dozens of black dots.

"These are longevity zones."

"Longevity zones? You mean places where people tend to live longer?"

First a map of gravitational anomalies, and now a map of longevity zones-she was growing more confused by the minute.

"Right. Places whose residents clearly live longer than people living in other areas. This map shows how many of these spots there are in the world," Kaoru said, indicating the black dots on the map. Four of them were actually marked with double circles. The Caucasus region on the shores of the Black Sea, the Samejima Islands of Japan, the area of Kashmir at the foot of the Karakoram Mountains, and the southern part of Ecuador. All had areas famous for the longevity of their inhabitants.

Kaoru seemed to think the second map needed no further explanation. Machiko, though, was looking at it for the first time. She urged him on.

"So?" The real question now was, of course, what the two maps had to do with each other.

"Put one on top of the other."

Machiko obeyed. They were the same size, so it was easily done.

"Now hold them up to the light." Kaoru pointed to the living room chandelier.

Machiko raised them slowly, trying to keep the pages aligned. Now the black dots of the one were showing up in the midst of the contour lines of the other.

"Get it?"

Machiko didn't know what she was supposed to get.

"Stop putting on airs. Tell me what I'm supposed to see."

"Well, look-the longevity zones correspond perfectly to the low-gravity areas, don't they?"

Machiko stood up and brought the pages closer to the light. It was true: the black dots representing longevity zones only showed up in places demarcated on the first map by low-gravity lines. Very low gravity.

"You're right," she said, not bothering to disguise her astonishment. But she still cocked her head as if not entirely convinced. As if to say she still wasn't sure what it was all supposed to mean.

"Well, maybe there's a relationship between longevity and gravity."

"And that's what you want to ask your father about?"

"Well, yeah. By the way, Mom, what do you think the odds were of life arising on earth naturally?"

"Like winning the lottery."

Kaoru laughed out loud. "Come on! Way smaller. You can't even compare the two. We're talking a miracle."

"But someone always wins the lottery."

"You're talking about a lottery with, like, a hundred tickets and one winner, where a hundred people buy tickets. I'm talking about rolling dice a hundred times and having them come up sixes every time. What would you think if that happened?"

"I'd think the game was rigged."

"Rigged?"

"Sure. If someone rolled the same number a hundred times in a row, it'd have to mean the dice were loaded, wouldn't it?" As she said this, she poked a finger into Kaoru's forehead affectionately, as if to say, Silly.

"Loaded, huh?"

Kaoru thought for a while, mouth hanging open. "Of course. Loaded dice. It had to be rigged. It doesn't make sense otherwise."

"Right?"

"And humanity just hasn't noticed that it's rigged. But, Mom-what if dice that aren't loaded come up with the same number a hundred times in a row?"

"Well, then we're talking about God, right? He's the only one who could do something like that."

Kaoru couldn't tell if his mother really believed that or not.

He decided to move on. "By the way, do you remember what happened on TV yesterday?" Kaoru was referring to his favourite afternoon soap opera. He loved the soaps so much that he even had his mother tape them for him sometimes.

"I forgot to watch."

"Well, remember how Sayuri and Daizo met again on the Cape?"

Kaoru proceeded to recount the plot of yesterday's episode almost as if it involved people he knew personally. Sayuri and Daizo were a young couple in their first year of marriage, and a series of misunderstandings had brought them to the brink of divorce. They were still in love, but coincidence had piled on coincidence until they were hopelessly tangled in the cords that bind men and women: now they were in a morass they couldn't find their way out of. So they'd separated. And then, one day, by pure chance, they'd run into each other on a certain point of land on the Japan Sea coast. The place was special to them-it was where they'd first met. And as they began to remember all the wonderful times they'd had together there, their old feelings for each other had been reawakened. They cleared up their misunderstandings one by one, until they were sure of each other's love again.

Of course, a heart warming twist lay behind this trite tale. Both of them were under the impression that it was purely by chance that they'd run into each other on this sentimental promontory, but they were wrong. They had friends who were desperate to see them make up, and those friends had colluded, taking it upon themselves to arrange it so that each would be there at that moment.

"Get it, Mom? What are the chances of a separated couple running into each other like that- being in the same place at the same time on the same day? Not exactly zero. Coincidental meetings do happen. But in some cases, when the chances of something happening are really small, and then it actually happens, you tend to think that there's somebody in the shadows pulling strings. In this case, it was Sayuri and Daizo's nosy friends."

"I think I see where you're going with this. You're trying to say that even though there was almost zero chance of it happening, life actually did arise. After all, we exist. In which case, there must be something somewhere pulling the strings. Right?"

Kaoru felt that way constantly. There were times when the idea that he was being watched, manipulated, insinuated itself into his brain for no apparent reason. Whether this was a phenomenon unique to himself, or whether it was in fact universal, was something he hadn't yet figured out.

Suddenly he got chills. He shivered. He looked at the sliding-glass door and found that it was open a crack. Still seated on the sofa, he twisted his body until he could close the door.

2

Kaoru just couldn't get to sleep. It was already thirty minutes since he'd crawled into his futon after having given up on waiting for his father to get home.

It was customary in the Futami household for both parents and their son to sleep in the same Japanese-style room. With its three Western-style rooms, one Japanese-style room, and good-sized living room, plus dining room and kitchen, their apartment was more than large enough for the three of them. They each had their own room. But for some reason, when it came time to sleep, they'd all gather in the Japanese-style room and lie down together. They'd spread out their futons with Machiko in the middle, flanked by Hideyuki and Kaoru. It had been like that ever since Kaoru was born.

Staring at the ceiling, Kaoru spoke softly to his mother, lying next to him.

"Mom?"

No reply. Machiko tended to fall asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

Kaoru wasn't what you'd exactly call agitated, but there was a faint pounding of excitement in his chest. He was sure he'd discovered something in the relative positions of gravitational anomalies and longevity zones. It couldn't be just a coincidence. The simple interpretation was that gravity was somehow related to human longevity- perhaps even to the secret of life itself.

He'd discovered the correlation purely by chance. There'd been a documentary on TV about villages where people lived to extraordinary ages, and it just so happened that at that moment his computer screen had been displaying a map of world gravitational anomalies. Lately he'd come across a lot of information about gravitational anomalies while fooling around on the computer; he'd gotten interested in gravity. Between the TV screen and the computer screen, something triggered his sixth sense, and he'd overlaid the two maps. It was the kind of inspiration only given to humankind.

No matter how prodigious its ability to process information, no matter how fast its calculation speed, a computer has no "inspiration" function, reflected Kaoru. It was impossible for a machine to bring together two utterly disparate phenomena and consider them as one. Were such an ability to arise, it would be because human brain cells had somehow been incorporated into the hardware. Human-computer intercourse.

Which actually sounded pretty intriguing to Kaoru. There was no telling what sort of sentient life form that would bring into the world. Endlessly fascinating.

Kaoru's desire to understand the workings of the world manifested itself in a lot of different questions, but at the root of all of them was one basic unknown: the source of life.

How did life begin? Or, alternatively: Why am I here?

Evolutionary theory and genetics both piqued his curiosity, but his biological inquiries always centred on that one point.

He wasn't a single-minded believer in the variation on the co-acervate theory which held that an inorganic world developed gradually until RNA and DNA appeared. He understood that the more one inquired into life the more the idea of self-replication became a big factor. It was DNA that governed self-replication; under the direction of the genetic information it carried came the formation of proteins, the stuff of life. Proteins were made of alignments of hundreds of amino acids, in twenty varieties. The code locked away within DNA was in fact the language that defined the way those acids aligned.

Until those amino acids lined up in a certain predetermined way, they wouldn't form a protein meaningful to life. The primordial sea was often likened to a soup thick with the prerequisites for life. Then some power stirred that thick soup up, until it so happened that things lined up in a meaningful way. But what were the odds of that?

To make it easier to comprehend, Kaoru decided to think in terms of a much smaller, neater number. Take a line of a hundred amino acids in twenty varieties, with one of them turning into a protein, the stuff of life. The probability then would be twenty to the hundredth power. Twenty to the hundredth power was a number far greater than all the hydrogen atoms in the universe. In terms of odds, it was like playing several times in a row a lottery in which the winning ticket was one particular hydrogen atom out of a whole universe full of them, and winning every time.

In short, the probability was infinitesimal. Essentially impossible. In spite of which, life had arisen. Therefore, the game had to have been rigged. Kaoru wanted to know just how the wall of improbability had been surmounted. His uttermost desire was to understand the nature of that dice-loading- without resorting to the concept of God.

On the other hand, sometimes there arose the suspicion that maybe everything was an illusion. There was no way to actually confirm that his body existed as a body. His cognitive abilities may have convinced him that it did, but there was always the possibility that reality was empty.

As he lay there in the dim room, illuminated by only a night light, the stillness was such that he could hear his heart beat. So it would seem that right now, at this very moment, it was no mistake to think that he was alive. He wanted to believe in the sound of his heart.

The roar of a motorcycle sounded in Kaoru's inner ear. A sound he shouldn't have been able to hear. A sound that shouldn't in reality have been able to reach his ears.

"Dad's home."

In his mind's eye Kaoru could see his father on his off-road bike skidding into the underground parking area a hundred yards below. He'd bought that bike new less than two months ago. Now his father got off the bike and looked at it with satisfaction. He used it to commute to work, probably because otherwise he'd have no time to ride it. And now he was home. The signs of it communicated themselves to Kaoru intensely. There was no mistaking them. Separated though they were, Kaoru's sixth sense enabled him to follow his father's movements tonight.

Kaoru imagined his father's every little movement, tracing each one in his mind. Now he was turning off the ignition, now he was standing in the hall in front of the elevator with his helmet tucked under his arm, now he was looking up at the floor indicator lights.

Kaoru counted to see how long it took him to get to the twenty-ninth floor. The elevator door opened and his father strode quickly down the carpeted corridor. He stood in front of the door to apartment 2916. He fished his card-key from his pocket and inserted it…

Imagined motions and sounds were replaced by real ones starting with the click of the front door opening. He felt a palpable moment of precariousness, caught between imagination and reality, and a cry rose within his breast.

It was Dad after all!

Kaoru wanted to jump up and go to greet his father, but he forced himself to hold back. He wanted to try and forecast what his father would do now.

Hideyuki seemed to be walking down the hall in the apartment with no care for who might be trying to sleep. The helmet under his arm banged loudly against the wall. His humming was nothing short of its normal volume. At the best of times, Hideyuki seemed to make more than the usual amount of noise when he moved. Maybe it was because he radiated so much energy.

Suddenly Kaoru found himself unable to read what his father would do next. All sound stopped, and he had no idea where his father was. His mind was a blank, but then the sliding door to the room where he slept was flung roughly open. Without warning, light from the hall flooded the room. Not that it was that bright, but still Kaoru had to narrow his eyes against it. He hadn't foreseen this. Hideyuki walked onto the tatami mats until he was right next to Kaoru's futon. Then he knelt and brought his mouth close to his son's ear.

"Hey, kiddo, wake up."

Kaoru pretended he'd just this minute woken up, saying, "Oh, Dad. What time is it?"

"One in the morning."

"Huh."

"C'mon, wake up."

This happened a lot to Kaoru-getting dragged out of bed in the middle of the night so he could keep his dad company over beer, conversing till dawn. Kaoru would always end up missing school the next day, sleeping the whole morning away.

Last week he'd been late for school twice on account of his father. Hideyuki evidently didn't think much of what his son was studying in elementary school. Kaoru often found himself exasperated at his father's lack of common sense: to a kid, school wasn't just a place to study, it was also a place to play. His dad didn't seem to get that.

"I want to go to school tomorrow."

Kaoru whispered so as not to wake his mother, sleeping next to him. He didn't mind getting up to talk-in fact, he'd like nothing better-but he wanted to make it plain that it shouldn't go too late.

"Pretty responsible for a kid. Who do you take after, anyway?" With a devil-may-care tone in his voice, he ignored Kaoru's efforts to keep the noise down. Frustrated, Kaoru leapt out of his futon. If he didn't get Dad out of the room now, he'd wake Mom up.

Yeah, who did he take after? In terms of facial features, Kaoru and his father sure didn't have much in common. In terms of personality, too, Kaoru was a lot more sensitive-high-strung, even-than his rough-and-tumble father. Of course, he was still a child, but still, Kaoru was sometimes puzzled by how little he and his father resembled each other, outwardly or inwardly.

Kaoru put his hands on his father's back and pushed him across the room into the hall. Then he kept pushing him until they'd made it to the living room, at which point he sighed and said, "Boy, you're heavy," and stopped.

If his son was going to push, Hideyuki was going to lean back, which he did, putting up a playful resistance which he supplemented with a forceful fart and a vulgar laugh. Then he noticed that where Kaoru had shoved him to was right next to the kitchen counter: as if he'd just remembered something, he walked over to the refrigerator and opened it.

He took out a beer, poured some in a glass, and held it out to the still-panting Kaoru.

"You want some too?"

Hideyuki hadn't stopped for a drink on the way home. He was stone-cold sober. This was the first alcohol he'd seen today.

"No thanks. Mom'll get mad at you again."

"Stop being so responsible."

Hideyuki took a showy swig and wiped his mouth. "I guess when a kid's got a dad like me, he's got to have his shit together, huh?"

With an audible gulp Hideyuki drained his second glass, and in no time he'd finished the bottle.

"I'll tell you, this stuff tastes best when I'm looking at you, kiddo."

For his part, Kaoru didn't mind keeping his father company when he was drinking. His father took such obvious pleasure in his alcohol that Kaoru had fun just watching him. As the fatigue of the day's work left his father, Kaoru's mood, too, lightened.

Kaoru went to the fridge, got another bottle, and filled his father's glass.

But instead of saying "thanks," Hideyuki issued his son an order.

"Hey, kiddo, go wake up Machi."

Hideyuki was referring, of course, to Kaoru's mother.

"No way. Mom's asleep. She's tired."

"So am I, but do you see me sleeping?"

"But you're up 'cause you want to be."

"Never mind that, just go wake her up."

"Do you need her for something?"

"Yeah. I need her to drink beer."

"Maybe she doesn't want to drink."

"Alright. Tell her I want her and she'll come running."

"We don't need her. We're okay, just the two of us, aren't we? Besides, there's something I want to ask you."

"Gimme a break. I'm asking you here. We don't want Machi to feel left out, do we?"

"This always happens…"

Kaoru headed for the bedroom, dragging his feet. For some reason it always fell to Kaoru to wake his mother. Supposedly his father had tried it once a few years ago, and she'd reacted very badly; now he was gun-shy.

In the Futami household, Dad always got his way in the end. Not because Hideyuki exercised his patriarchal authority, but rather because, of the three of them, he was the most juvenile.

Kaoru respected his father's talent as a scientist. But he couldn't help noticing that he was distinctly lacking as a grown-up. Kaoru wasn't sure exactly what his father was missing, but his child's mind figured that if growing up was a process of eliminating childishness in favour of adult wisdom, then it was precisely that function that his father lacked.

3

He hated to disturb his mother's peaceful slumber. Kaoru went to the bedroom door and hesitantly slid it open. But Machiko was already sitting up in her futon, running her fingers through her hair. Kaoru didn't need to wake her up-his father's noisy homecoming had taken care of that.

"Oh, Mom. Sorry." He was apologizing for his father.

"That's alright." The expression in her eyes was as gentle as ever.

Kaoru's mother almost never scolded him. Probably because he never asked for anything unreasonable, she'd always given him what he wanted. Though he was still a child, he could tell from her words and actions how absolutely she relied on him; it made him happy, but also gave him a feeling of grave responsibility.

The Futami Family Three-Way Deadlock, was how Kaoru thought of his and his parents' relationship. It was just like a game of rock-scissors-paper-each of them had someone they could always beat, and someone they'd always lose to.

Kaoru was strong against his mother, but weak when it came to his father. So he'd always end up going along with his father's unreasonable courses of action, doing whatever he was told. Hideyuki was strong enough vis-a-vis his son that he could treat him high-handedly, but somehow he couldn't manage such a firm front with his wife. When his wife was in a bad mood, he seemed to pale and shrink.

So he had to fob the task of waking his sleeping wife off on his son. Kaoru's mother, meanwhile, was lenient with her son's demands, but could at times respond severely to her husband's impossible behaviour, scolding him as she would a child.

His father would sometimes boast about how this marvellous balance of power maintained harmony in the family. He'd joke about their relationship pseudo-scentifically, calling their family a "self-sustaining structuralization of chaos". The peculiar situation wasn't the result of intent on anybody's part-it had arisen naturally through the interaction and altercations of the three parties involved.

"What's Hide doing?" Machiko scratched her neck and ran her fingers slowly through her hair.

"Drinking beer."

"At this late hour? He's hopeless."

"He wants to know if you'll join him."

Machiko stood up, laughing through her nose.

"I wonder if he's hungry."

"I don't know. Probably he just wants to see you, don't you think?"

Kaoru said it with a straight face, but Machiko just laughed, as if to say, You don't know what you're talking about.

But Kaoru was already quite aware of his parents' erotic side.

One night three months ago-a night in mid-June, a rare dry night in the middle of the rainy season, hot enough to forebode the tropical nights to come-Kaoru had been shocked to run into his father in the kitchen in an unexpected state.

That night Kaoru had been shut in his room using his computer, when his thirst finally became too great to ignore. He'd gone to the kitchen to get some mineral water. His parents had apparently shut themselves in their separate rooms, saying they had work to do, and the apartment was quiet. His parents often went to their rooms to work and fell asleep like that. Kaoru had expected it to be the same that night. He didn't realize they'd been in the same room after all.

He didn't turn on the light. He stood there in the darkness and poured some mineral water into a glass, and then popped a piece of ice into his mouth.

Then he opened the refrigerator door again to put the plastic bottle back in, and that was when he found himself facing Hideyuki, who had suddenly entered the kitchen. The light from the refrigerator shone on his father's naked body.

Hideyuki jumped, but in surprise, not embarrassment.

"I didn't know you were there," he said, and with no thought for his nakedness he grabbed Kaoru's glass from him and gulped down its contents.

What surprised Kaoru was not only that his father was completely unclothed, but that his genitalia was larger than it normally was. It was covered with some sort of thin bodily fluid, and it gleamed slickly. It always hung limply when Kaoru and his father were in the bath together. But now it arched and pulsed, exuding the confidence of having fulfilled its role as a part of its owner's body.

The whole time his father was drinking the mineral water, Kaoru couldn't tear his gaze from it.

"What're you looking at? Jealous?"

"Unh-uh."

Kaoru's reply was blunt. Hideyuki bent over a bit and placed the tip of his right index finger on the tip of his member. With it he took up a single drop of semen and held it out before Kaoru's eyes.

"Look, kiddo, it's your ancestors," he remarked, with mock seriousness. Then he wiped his fingertip on the edge of the sink against which Kaoru was leaning.

"Eww," said Kaoru, twisting away, but he kept staring at the white droplet on the edge of the sink.

He didn't know how he should react. Hideyuki turned his back on him and disappeared into the bathroom. After a while, from the open door came the sound of urination, forced, irregular bursts.

Sometimes Kaoru didn't know if his father was stupid or clever. Sure, he was an excellent computer scientist, but sometimes he did things that were worse than childish. Kaoru respected his father alright, but watching him made him nervous. He could understand his mother's sufferings.

So ran his thoughts as he stared at what his father had called his "ancestors".

The sperm swimming in the tiny droplet gradually died as the stainless steel stole heat from them. They were, of course, invisible to the naked eye, but Kaoru found himself quite aware of the actions of the herd-he could quite easily imagine the faces of each one of them as it died and contributed its corpse to the growing layer of dead.

These sperm, born of meiosis inside his father, held, as did his mother's eggs, half the number of chromosomes contained within the cells of his body. Together they made a fertilized egg, only then supplying the total number of chromosomes necessary for a cell. But it didn't follow that a sperm was merely half a person. Depending on how you looked at it, the sperm and the egg were the body's basic structural units. Only reproductive cells could be said to have continued uninterrupted since the inception of life-it wasn't too much of a stretch to say they possessed a kind of immortality.

All that aside, to have a chance to leisurely observe his father's sperm was something he'd never dreamed of. Right here in front of him was the source of the life form that he knew as himself.

Was I really born from something this tiny?

He stood there mystified and mute. These sperm hadn't existed anywhere until they'd been made within his father's body. Created from nothingness by means of that mysterious power only life possessed.

So caught up was he in his examination that Kaoru didn't notice when his father finished urinating and rejoined him.

"What are you doing, kiddo?" He seemed to have already forgotten his own prank.

"Observing your… things," said Kaoru, not looking up. Hideyuki finally realized what his son was looking at and gave a curt laugh.

"What kind of idiot would stare at a thing like that? Shame on you."

Hideyuki grabbed a dishtowel, wiped up the semen, and then dropped the dishtowel in the sink. As he did so, the image of life that Kaoru had been constructing fled with its tail between its legs.

He suddenly had an awful premonition, as he imagined his own body being wiped up with a rag and tossed away.

So his parents' secret life, something not for him to come in contact with, became, under the influence of his father's attitude, something subject to no taboo whatsoever. Kaoru remembered that incident three months ago as if it were last night.

Of course, Machiko had no way of knowing what mischief her husband had worked on her son as he went about opening the refrigerator and using the bathroom. Had she known, her embarrassment would no doubt have lit a bonfire of anger within her; no doubt she would have refused to speak to her husband for some time. Probably tonight she would have been in no mood to get up and fix him a snack.

"What am I going to do with him?" she muttered again and again; still, she fixed her hair with a will, and refastened her misaligned pyjama buttons. Kaoru found it a pleasant, warm sight.

4

Kaoru's mother put on slippers and headed for the living room, and he followed her.

"Sorry to get you out of bed," Hideyuki said to Machiko.

"That's okay. I'll bet you're hungry, aren't you?"

"A little."

"Why don't I make something?"

Machiko was already heading for the kitchen, but Hideyuki stopped her, holding out a glass of beer.

"Have a drink first."

Machiko accepted the glass and took a few sips. She didn't like carbonated beverages, so it was impossible for her to down a beer in one gulp. That didn't mean she wasn't a drinker, though- she was above average when it came to holding her liquor.

When he'd seen that his wife had settled down with her beer, Hideyuki finally loosened his necktie.

As a researcher, he was under no special requirement to wear a tie to work. Still, every day he put on a suit and buttoned the top button of his shirt before getting on his motorcycle to go to the lab. No doubt the sight of him in a suit riding an off-road bike struck people as peculiar, but that didn't bother Hideyuki in the least.

Kaoru's mother poured some oil into a frying pan and started warming up some sausages, and his father stood next to her and began reporting to her on his day in the lab. Oblivious to the fact that she hadn't asked him, he recounted the day's events with brio, mentioning co-workers by name, sometimes with a disparaging comment. Kaoru began to feel bored as his parents receded into their own world, seeming to forget his presence beside them.

Then Machiko noticed him, and in her considerate way changed the subject. "By the way, Kaoru, why don't you show your father what you showed me?"

"Huh? What?" He'd been taken by surprise.

"You know, those gravitational anomaly thingies."

"Oh, those." Kaoru took the two pages out of the dish cupboard where he'd put them away and handed them to Hideyuki.

"You'll be amazed at what he's discovered," his mother said, but Kaoru didn't feel it was that great a discovery.

"What's this?" said Hideyuki, holding the print-outs up to his face. He gazed at the first one, with its contour lines and their positive and negative numbers, and within a few seconds had grasped its meaning.

"I get it, this is a map of the earth's gravitational anomalies."

He turned his gaze to the second page, and this time he didn't have such an easy time figuring it out. He frowned. Hideyuki already had a geological map of the earth stored in his brain, but try as he might he couldn't figure out what the black marks on this map meant. He tried several guesses connected with gravitational anomalies, such as subterranean mineral deposits, before giving up and turning to his son.

"Alright, you got me. What is this?"

"The earth's longevity zones."

"Longevity zones?" No sooner had he heard the words than Hideyuki placed the maps over one another and looked at them anew.

"Would you look at that. The longevity zones are only found in places with high negative gravitational anomalies."

Kaoru was impressed, as usual. His father's mental quickness was one of the reasons why he enjoyed their discussions so much. "That's right!" he said, his excitement lending his words added emphasis.

"I wonder why that is," Hideyuki asked himself, raising his eyes from the maps.

"Is this, like, common knowledge?" It had worried Kaoru to think that people had already noticed this correspondence, that it was only he who'd been ignorant of it.

"Well, I for one wasn't aware of it."

"Really?"

"So, what? Does this mean that perhaps there's some sort of relationship between people's life-spans and gravity? The data's so clear and specific, it's hard to think it's just a coincidence. By the way, kiddo, how do you define a 'longevity zone'?"

It was only natural for Hideyuki to stick at that point. Kaoru felt the same way. How exactly should he define a longevity zone? Was it an area with lots of long-lived people in it? Perhaps an area where the average lifespan was longer than in other areas? If that was what he meant, there was nothing to prevent him from seeing all of Japan as one big longevity zone.

He had to use a more limiting definition. It would be more exact, at least, to stipulate that a longevity zone was an area clearly delineated from the surrounding territory, a high percentage of the inhabitants of which were a hundred or more years in age.

But in reality, no such mathematical definition existed. The villages that he'd seen talked about on TV were simply places that had been found, statistically and experientially, to have lots of long-lived people in them, and they were known for it.

"I'm not sure there is a mathematical definition."

He found it more and more curious that the villages mentioned on TV, defined as impressionistically and sentimentally as they were, should match up so nicely with gravitational anomalies, so clearly visible as numerical values. Kaoru and Hideyuki both were impressed by this.

"Too vague. Still, I wonder why it came out like this?" Hideyuki said this under his breath, as if bothered.

"Have you heard anything about the relationship between gravity and life, Dad?"

"Well, they did an experiment where they had a chicken lay eggs in a zero gravity environment, and they turned out to be unfertilized eggs."

"I've heard about that. That was ages ago."

Somewhere in the corner of his mind he recalled the sight of his father's sperm three months ago. He remembered reading an article about the chickens, which had laid unfertilized eggs in spite of the fact that they had copulated. He'd forgotten exactly what the experiment had been trying to prove. He'd read about it in a mass-market weekly, which had seized on the results of what was actually an old experiment in order to make some point about modern sexuality.

His imagination started to run away with him. Suppose an egg started to undergo cellular division without fertilization, growing through birth to maturity-what kind of human being would result? Kaoru got a mental image of a woman with a smooth, egg-shaped face. He shivered. He tried to banish the image, but the woman's slippery face wouldn't leave him.

"Well, nobody's made a logical connection yet, I don't think. But anyway, why did you think to compare gravitational anomalies and longevity?"

"Huh?" Sometimes the images taking shape in his brain undermined Kaoru's ability to think, and he couldn't hear what was being said to him.

"Stop making me repeat myself." Few things annoyed the impatient Hideyuki more.

"Sorry."

"What gave you the idea, in other words?"

Kaoru explained how a TV special on longevity villages had been playing in the background while on the computer he'd been looking at a map of gravitational anomalies, and how he'd had a flash of intuition.

"I think it was just a coincidence."

"Meaningless coincidences produce nothing. Take jinxes, for instance."

"Jinxes?"

Kaoru actually had something of an idea why his father would bring up something unscientific like that now. He was trying to give Machiko an entry into the conversation.

Having pretty much finished fixing snacks to go with the beer, Machiko had joined them at the dining room table, where she sat listening to the conversation without offering up a word. Not that she'd looked particularly bored, but she did lean forward just a bit when her husband mentioned jinxes.

Her reaction didn't escape Hideyuki's notice.

"Hey, Machi. Know of any interesting jinxes?"

"Why ask me?"

"You like that kind of thing, don't you? Fortune-telling, charms, stuff like that. Don't think I haven't noticed you reading the horoscopes every week. Plus, you know a lot about folk-tales from around the world."

"Okay, jinxes. How about the one that says if you give a handkerchief to your lover as a present you'll break up?"

"Everybody knows that one. Don't you know anything, you know, weirder?"

Kaoru thought he could guess what kind of thing his father was looking for. He was probably trying to find an example of a belief that connected, seemingly at random, two disparate phenomena.

"Something weirder? Okay, how about this? If you see a black cat swimming in a river, someone close to you will die."

Kaoru immediately pursed his lips. "Really?"

"That's what they say. You've heard it, haven't you, dear?" She looked at Hideyuki for support. But he just laughed and cocked his head.

"Don't you have any that are just way out there?"

"How about the one that says, when you leave the house, if a chair has its back to the window, you'll drop your wallet?"

Hideyuki clapped his hands.

"Okay, we'll go with that one. Now, it may be true or it may be false, but let's just take it as a given that such a superstition exists."

"It does!" Machiko frowned.

"Alright, alright!" Hideyuki said, putting his palms together. "Now, we have two phenomena brought together. A chair having its back to the window when you leave the house, and dropping your wallet. Scientifically, these two phenomena have no relation to each other. There are lots of superstitions in the world, and no doubt different kinds come about for different reasons. But what I find fascinating is when you have the exact same superstition existing in two distant places, isolated from each other. If this crazy superstition that Machi just told us about happened to exist in different places on the globe, it'd make you wonder, wouldn't it? Of course it would."

"So, are there superstitions like that? That exist in different places in the world?" Kaoru looked back and forth between Machiko and Hideyuki.

Hideyuki prompted his wife. "How about it, Machi?"

"Of course there are. The jinx I just told you about is one. It exists in Europe and in the Americas, too."

Kaoru and Hideyuki exchanged sceptical looks.

"By the way, Machi, have you ever thought about why superstitions arise?"

"No," she said, curtly.

"What about you, kiddo?"

"I guess it has something to do with human psychology. I'm not real sure, though."

By this point there were five empty beer bottles sitting in front of Hideyuki. His conversational engine was finally getting warmed up.

"Ask yourself: what is a superstition? It's an oral tradition that if you see something or experience something, a certain thing will happen. With a jinx it's something bad, but of course a superstition can involve something good, or even something that can't necessarily be categorized as good or bad. To cut to the chase, a superstition is something that connects one phenomenon with another phenomenon. Sometimes science can explain the connection. For example, the superstition that when clouds move from east to west it means it'll rain can be explained very easily by modern meteorology. There are others that you can understand intuitively, like the one that says being photographed takes years off your life. Or ones about breaking chopsticks or sandal thongs, or seeing black cats or snakes, those aren't too hard to understand. Those things are just eerie somehow. There's something about black cats and snakes that makes people the world over uneasy.

"The problem is superstitions that aren't reasonable. The ones that strike you as totally arbitrary, like, 'Why in the world do people believe that?' The jinx Machi told us about is a good example. What could having a chair back toward the window when you leave the house possibly have to do with dropping your wallet?"

Hideyuki stopped and looked Kaoru in the eye.

"Maybe it's based on experience."

"No doubt it is. Maybe people found out through experience that the chances of dropping your wallet are greater if a chair's back is to the window when you leave your house."

"But there's no statistical necessity that it has to be that way."

"We're not talking strict accuracy here. Let's say when you drop your wallet, it just so happens that the chair's back is to the window. And let's say that the next time you drop your wallet, the chair's back is toward the window again. So you tell someone about it, suggesting that the two phenomena are related somehow. Now the important thing is whether or not the person you tell about it has had a similar experience-whether or not they can nod and say, 'yeah, you're right'. If the idea is dismissed by a third party, then chances are it won't be handed down. But once it becomes established as a jinx, then by the mere fact of people's being aware of it, it can influence their actions, and so it stands a good chance of surviving. Once the relationship is established between the two things, the fact that people are aware of the relationship strengthens the bond even more, see. Reality and imagination begin to correspond to one another."

"So you're saying that the phenomenon of a chair having its back to the window when you leave the room and the phenomenon of dropping your wallet exert some kind of invisible influence on each other?"

"You can't rule out the possibility that they're connected on some level, deep down."

What was his father trying to say, using the superstition as an example? Kaoru had the feeling that he could substitute "life" for "superstition" and the argument would still stand up.

"Life," Kaoru muttered. As if that word were a cue, the three exchanged glances.

"It reminds me of the Loop."

It was Machiko who brought up the subject. It seemed she felt it was a natural progression from the word "life".

Hideyuki had started his college career in pre-med. He'd switched fields, to logic, in graduate school, studying the concepts of meta-mathematics, but one thing led to another and he found his old abandoned interest in the world of living things rekindled. He decided it would be interesting to see if the language of mathematics could explain life. His original interest in biology was reanimated as it found expression in numbers.

Thus it was that when he'd finished his doctorate and received an offer to join a joint Japanese-American research project on artificial life, he'd accepted without a second thought. To create life within a computer? Hideyuki couldn't think of anything he wanted to do more.

He was still young, in his late twenties, married but childless. Five years after he took the appointment, the project was brought to a halt in an entirely unforeseen way. It wasn't a failure, having achieved a certain manner of success. But it never felt like success to Hideyuki because the way it all ended stuck in his throat.

This project into which he'd poured all his youthful passion, only to see it miscarry, was known as the Loop.

5

Hideyuki presented a new question to Kaoru, forcefully steering the conversation away from the Loop.

"So do you think life emerged by chance or by necessity? Which side are you on?"

"The only answer I can give to that question is, 'I don't know'."

It was all he could say. He couldn't affirm the necessity argument just because he himself existed. In the absence of confirmed life anywhere else, it was possible that life on earth was an utterly random gift, unique in the universe.

"I'm asking you what you think."

"But Dad, aren't you always saying that it's important to recognize what modern science doesn't know? To be willing to say 'I don't know'?"

Hideyuki chuckled at the question. A look at his face revealed the alcohol taking effect. The number of empties was up to six.

"You don't have to tell me that. Think of this as a game if you have to. We're in the world of play. I want to know what your gut tells you, that's all."

Machiko had gone into the kitchen to fry up some noodles; now she stopped what she was doing and fixed her gaze on Kaoru, a gleam in her eye.

Kaoru thought about himself. Things like the emergence of life and the universe were beyond the reach of his imagination, when he got right down to it. It was better to take the emergence of one individual as an example, and work up from there.

First and foremost, what about the inception of his own life? When was that? When he'd crawled out of his mother's womb and had his umbilical cord cut? Or when the egg, after insemination in the fallopian tube, had been safely embedded in the wall of the womb?

If he was going to talk about inception, then he figured he should probably take insemination as the first step. His nervous system had taken shape by around three weeks from insemination.

Now, he thought, just suppose that a foetus of that age had consciousness, the ability to think. To that foetus, the mother's womb would be the whole universe. Why am I here, the foetus asks. Immersed in amniotic fluid, he begins to wonder about the mechanism of conception. But as he knows nothing of the world outside the womb, he can't even imagine that his own conception was preceded by reproductive acts. All he can do is make guesses based on evidence he finds within the womb.

So he begins to think of the amniotic fluid itself as his parent-a natural conclusion. He begins to think of the amniotic fluid as the primordial soup covering the primeval earth, churning until twenty kinds of amino acid join hands in brotherhood to make life enabling proteins; these then begin to replicate themselves… The probability of which is, of course, the same as the monkey at the typewriter, banging keys at random, coming up with a passage from Shakespeare.

A probability so low that even with trillions of monkeys banging away for trillions of years, it was still virtually nil. And if a passage from Shakespeare should appear anyway? Would people still call it a coincidence? Of course not- they'd suspect some kind of fix. A man in a monkey suit sitting at one of the typewriters, or an intelligent monkey…

But the foetus immersed in amniotic fluid thinks his conception was by chance-he can't make his imagination comprehend the mechanism behind it. And that's because he doesn't know about the world outside.

Only when he crawls out of the birth canal after roughly thirty-six weeks in the womb does he for the first time see the outside of the mother who bore him. Only after growing and increasing in knowledge yet further does he come to understand with exactness why and how he was conceived and born. As long as we're inside the womb-inside the universe-we can't understand the way it works. Our powers of apprehension are blacked out on that point. They have to be.

Kaoru decided to apply the example of the foetus in its universe-the womb-to the question of life on earth and the universe it occupied.

In most cases, the womb comes pre-equipped with everything necessary to nurture a foetus after insemination. But does it always host a foetus? Of course not. The phenomenon of insemination itself is controlled largely by chance. And many women choose not to have children.

And even if a woman has a couple of children, the length of time in which her womb holds a foetus is still less than two years total. In other words, equipped for a foetus though it may be, the womb is usually unoccupied.

Kaoru decided to take a step back and think about the universe again. Given that we are actually existing within it, it seems reasonable to say that the universe is equipped with what is necessary to sustain life. In which case, life arose out of necessity, right? But, no, remember the womb: it may be capable of sustaining the life of a foetus, but it's usually without one. So life arose by chance, then? The universe is not constantly filled with life, indeed, a universe that does not beget life may indeed be more natural.

In the end, Kaoru couldn't come up with an answer after all.

But there was Hideyuki, drinking his beer and expecting a reply.

"Maybe we're the only life in the universe after all," said Kaoru.

Hideyuki grunted. "That's what your gut tells you?"

Hideyuki stared at his son fascinatedly, then shifted his gaze to his wife.

Machiko was sleeping peacefully, her head pillowed on her hands on the table.

"Hey, go get a blanket for Machi, will ya?"

"Okay." He immediately went to the bedroom and brought back a blanket, which he handed to Hideyuki. Hideyuki draped it over Machiko's shoulders and smiled at her sleeping face before turning back to his son.

The eastern sky had begun to whiten without them noticing, and the temperature of the room had dropped. Night in the Futami household was over, and it was just about time to sleep.

Hideyuki's eyes as he drank the last of the stale beer were hollow.

Kaoru waited until his father was finished drinking, then said, "Hey, Dad. Can I ask you a favour?"

"What?"

Kaoru lay the gravitational anomaly map in front of his father again. "What do you think of this?"

Kaoru's pinky was pointing at a particular spot on the map, a desert region, the so-called Four Corners area of the western North American continent, where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado met.

"What about it?" Hideyuki brought his eyes close to the map, blinking.

"Look closely at it. Now take another look at the gravitational anomaly figures for this area."

Hideyuki rubbed his eyes again and again, as the numbers swam in his tired eyes.

"Hmm."

"See, the space between the contour lines gets smaller and smaller the closer they get to this point."

"That's what it looks like."

"That means an extreme gravitational anomaly."

"I see. The negative values are quite large here."

"I think there has to be something there, geologically speaking. It's like there's something deep under the earth's surface there with extremely little mass."

Kaoru took a ballpoint pen and made an X where the four states met. He didn't have a gravitational figure for that exact point, but the contour lines surrounding it certainly pointed to a spot with particularly low gravity.

For a while, Kaoru and Hideyuki looked at the map in silence. Then Machiko raised her head a little and broke in, drowsily, "I'm sure there's nothing there, dear."

Evidently she'd been listening to their conversation the whole time, only pretending to be asleep.

"I didn't think you were awake."

His mother's words were provocative. Kaoru tried to imagine a space filled with nothingness deep beneath the desert. If the earth there concealed a huge cavity, it could easily explain the extreme gravitational anomaly.

And in that huge limestone cavern lived an ancient tribe of people… Kaoru could see it now, a close-up look at an extreme longevity zone.

Even more than before, Kaoru wanted to go there.

Machiko yawned and mumbled, "That sounds strange though-if it's nothing, how can it be there?" She got up from her chair.

"See, Mom, you're interested in the place, too. If low gravity and longevity are connected, then maybe there's a city of ancient people there, cut off from civilization. It's at least possible, right?"

Kaoru was fishing for a response, based on his knowledge of Machiko's interest in North American folk tales, especially Native American myths. He figured that he stood a better chance of getting what he wanted if he got Machiko to go to bat for him than if he just blurted it out himself.

Just as he'd hoped, Machiko's interest seemed to grow suddenly. "Well, it is close to a Navajo reservation."

"See?"

Kaoru knew-Machiko had told him-that there were tribes who had made their homes in the wildest deserts and ravines, and whose lives today were not all that different from the way they'd lived in ancient times. He hadn't heard of any noted for their longevity, but he knew that if he suggested it without really suggesting it, he could pique Machiko's curiosity.

"Hey, kiddo, what are you trying to pull here?"

Hideyuki had evidently guessed what Kaoru was going for. Kaoru shot a meaningful glance at his mother.

"It'd be interesting to go there," Machiko said.

She sounded less like she was pleading Kaoru's case than like she'd become interested herself.

"Yeah, let's go!" Kaoru said, expectantly.

"Four Corners, eh? Talk about coincidences."

"Huh?" Kaoru looked at his father. "Well, in a little while-next summer, maybe, or the summer after that-it looks like my work is going to take me there."

Kaoru yelped in delight. "Really?"

"Yeah, I'll have to be at some laboratories in New Mexico, in Los Alamos and Santa Fe."

Kaoru clapped his palms together as if in prayer. "Take me! Please?"

"Want to come too, Machi?"

"Of course."

"Well, then I guess we'll all go."

"That's a promise, okay?" Kaoru held out paper and pen. If he was bound by a contract, Hideyuki couldn't turn around someday and pretend he'd never said it. This was just a little insurance. Kaoru knew from experience that his father's promises stood more chance of being kept if they were backed up by writing.

Hideyuki filled out the contract in his sloppy handwriting and waved it in Kaoru's face. "There, see? It's a promise."

Kaoru took it and examined it. He felt satisfied. Now he could sleep soundly.

Dawn was breaking and September was ending, but still the sun as it climbed was brighter than at midsummer. A few stars still shone evanescently in the western sky, looking now as if they would disappear at any moment. There was no line dividing light from dark-Kaoru couldn't say just where night ended and morning began. He loved with all his heart this moment when the passage of time manifested itself in changing colours.

Kaoru remained standing by the window after his parents disappeared into the bedroom.

The city was starting to move, its vibrations reverberating in the reclaimed land like a foetus kicking in the womb. Before his gaze a huge flock of birds was circling over Tokyo Bay. Their cries, like the mewling of newborns, asserted their vitality under the dying stars.

At times like this, staring at the blackness of the sea and the subtly changing colours of the sky, Kaoru's desire to understand the workings of the world only increased. Taking in scenery from on high stimulated the imagination.

The sun rose above the eastern horizon, pushing the night aside; Kaoru went into the bedroom and curled up in his futon.

Hideyuki and Machiko were already asleep in their different positions, Hideyuki with arms and legs akimbo and no blanket atop him, Machiko curled into a ball hugging the rumpled blanket.

Kaoru lay down beside them, hugging his pillow and clutching the paper holding the promise that they'd go to the desert. Curled up like that, he looked something like a foetus.