Loop (23 page)

Here and there they stood, looking around them carefully. Kaoru counted the people climbing the slope of the mountain. Three in front of him, four behind: eight, including himself. The four behind were all women, with his wife and daughter among them. The three in front were all children, and his son was among them, suddenly eager to prove his worth. Only his mother was absent. She was down in the main encampment.

The child who said he'd seen water had spoken truly. There it was, a thin line of water on the face of a boulder sticking out of the mountainside. It was so weak a trickle that they'd have trouble filling their vessels.

As they were debating climbing higher to search for a place where the water flowed more vigorously, the underbrush behind them rustled.

The men who appeared all of a sudden looked different. Many of them wore dishevelled blue uniforms. Some wore white shirts with torn jackets tied around their waists, some wore black shirts with hide trousers. At a quick count the enemy numbered over a dozen. An organized platoon it was not. Several of the men held canteens, suggesting that they, too, had simply wandered onto the mountain looking for water. Others held firearms. Blood stained several of the white shirts.

A whisper arose among the band of strangers. The air crackled with tension. There was no time to wonder what to do. With women and children along there was no way to fight. If the strangers wanted a battle, Kaoru's group would have to flee. But it was best to make no sudden moves, in case their intentions weren't hostile.

The strangers exchanged words and worried expressions, but Kaoru couldn't understand what they said. His sense of time was going crazy again. It had only been two or three seconds since he'd seen the strangers, but he felt like several minutes had passed.

Suddenly the three boys started half-running, half-rolling down the mountain, yelling. Rifles had been pointed at their backs, but others brushed these aside, and as if on cue the men surrounded the boys and blocked their way.

The men didn't seem to want to shoot. The noise would alert the main encampment below, in which case they had next to no chance of surviving. They probably meant to silence every one of Kaoru's group.

Reaching that conclusion, Kaoru started to turn to face his wife. Then he saw his son's head split open by a rock as the men held him down.

Mouths covered by thick hands, the children were unable to raise a cry as their brains splattered onto the ground. The blood against the gray of the rock looked like the momentary blooming of a computer-generated rose. Behind him Kaoru could hear men's boots kicking at stone.

Violent pain shot through his Achilles tendon. It wasn't that it had been slashed-the bone itself had been crushed. He lost his balance and sprawled onto the boulder. He'd twisted as he fell, so he hit the stone with his side, but he no longer registered pain.

He reached out to try and touch his wife. But before he could, the men began lifting up the women and flinging them into the underbrush.

Kaoru summoned all his strength in an effort to raise himself, but the men held him down.

They even grabbed his hair and pressed his head back against the rock so that he couldn't move.

He heard the dull sound of something being crushed beside his head. He knew he shouldn't look, but his eyes rolled to the side anyway, following the sound of tearing flesh.

He saw that adorable little body he'd embraced so many times dashed on the stone from the height of a man's head. All his thoughts focused on his dying daughter, but his body wouldn't obey him. It wasn't pain he felt so much as a burning sensation. It was impossible even to know all the places he was injured. The pain was beside the point. He was prepared to die, and fear was a luxury he couldn't afford at this point. What he found unbearable was the violence being visited on those close to him, their unforeseen extinction.

He watched as once again his daughter's body was raised up to the same height and then slammed to the ground. She must be dead by now. And so her pliant, lifeless body was abandoned among the rocks.

The man who'd been tossing his daughter's body about had evidently found something else to entertain him, because he tramped across the grass into the trees.

Kaoru was able to follow his leisurely movements with his eyes. As he walked, the man was rubbing the backs of his hands on his shirttails, which hung down over his trousers. What was he doing? Blood streaked his once-white shirt. Not just blood: bits of flesh clung to the fabric. Was that his daughter's blood, her flesh? The man kept wiping his hands on his shirt as if shaking off something filthy; finally he rubbed them on his trousers.

He could hear his wife's voice, faintly. He could tell she was somewhere nearby. But no matter which way he turned his gaze, he couldn't find her. Perhaps she was sunk down in the underbrush. All Kaoru could see were the men standing or half-kneeling around her.

The hand holding his hair shifted its grip. It forced his head back even more powerfully, so that his throat was fully exposed to the sun directly overhead. He could see another sharp flash of light, not from the sun. This light moved quickly from right to left.

There was a gurgling in his throat, and then a whistling sound. He felt a hot liquid on his chest. His head seemed to have fallen even father back.

The sun's rays changed hue, gradually growing in intensity, until the background faded into monochrome and the darkness increased. The red sun gradually blackened, and his retinas were steeped in darkness. His hearing alone still seemed to be functioning.

He could hear his wife's cries. It sounded less like she was wailing in misery than that she was laughing weakly. His ears picked up her voice until the moment his consciousness disappeared. The woman he'd shared his time with, at least in this world.

His own death and the deaths of his loved ones had come at the same time.

Kaoru sat for a while slumped in the chair, immersed in darkness. To an innocent bystander he would have looked simply tired. But what Kaoru had experienced was death itself: his body was now just his soul's empty husk.

The sensations he'd experienced at the moment of death were not the same as losing consciousness. Even when a person has fainted, the brain continues to function. What Kaoru had known for a brief instant was the stopping of his heart, and the gentle sensation of time and space flickering out as his brain died.

He heard a voice beyond the darkness.

'Time to wake up."

It was a man's voice, powerful yet restrained.

"Come here," the voice ordered, before disappearing along with its echoes.

Kaoru shuddered, and then jumped up out of the chair. He sucked in great gulps of air, and unconsciously his body extended itself. He was like a drowning man seeking air, trying to force his head above water.

He tore the helmet display from his head and flung it onto the desk. He ripped off the data gloves and threw them down beside it.

He felt like his heart was being squeezed. He lowered his body into the chair again and tried to bring his breathing under control. The more his body reaccustomed itself to a real environment, the more violently his heart beat. The memories were still fresh and clear.

He realized he had tears streaming from his eyes. Waves of inexpressible emotion, not quite sadness and not quite pain, washed over him.

He collapsed onto the desk and wept. Telling himself it wasn't real didn't help to calm his roiling feelings. Looking at his wristwatch and calculating that he'd spent less than an hour and a half in the helmet was no comfort, either. When a minute corresponded to a year, time weighed heavily.

Kaoru had no idea who had made the virtual reality he'd just experienced, or how, but his feelings told him he'd lived a whole life in the other world. He'd loved a woman, had a child, fought for his people, and died, all in the other world. He'd lost his loved ones at the same time as he'd died-they'd been close enough to touch if only he'd been able to reach out his hand, but he'd been unable to save them.

"Laiche," he was calling. It was a name, his wife's name; he'd called her by it who knew how many times. He could remember them washing each other's bodies in the river, touching each other's skin. The sensations were still fresh.

"Cochise!" That was his daughter's name. How many mountains had he crossed with her on his back or at his chest before she'd learned to walk?

He could remember their names. But when it came to his own name, his memory was vague. He could remember their faces, but his own was hazy. The pain of the moment of death was now mostly gone from his memory, too. What remained were recollections of his loved ones-and those overwhelmed him.

Kaoru got up shakily, went to the wall, and rammed his shoulder against it. Pain shot through him. He wanted that physical pain, to help him forget the ache in his heart.

I must analyze what this means,
he told himself, hoping reason would help drive away the sadness.

The experience Kaoru had gone through was nothing like watching a movie. The only way he could describe it to himself was this: he had been inserted bodily into a virtual space. And that virtual space reproduced reality exactly. How was that possible? The questions were only beginning.

The Loop.

The first idea he had was that this virtual space might be part of the artificial life project.

He knew that it was possible to be present for any moment in the history of the Loop simply by donning a helmet display like the one he'd just used and setting the time and space coordinates. One could be as a god to the Loop life forms, watching them from on high, or one could use the sight and hearing of a particular individual and live a virtual life.

The patterns of the birth and history of the Loop life forms were all saved in a huge store of holographic memory. It was possible to witness any moment in its history.

Which was what made Kaoru guess that the world he'd just visited was part of the Loop. What he'd experienced was a physical expression light years beyond computer graphics, possible only because the Loop contained beings evolved from the program's initial RNA life forms.

The bodies he'd touched, that he'd thereby grown to love, were real, not constructed. Just thinking back on them, Kaoru was moved.

The death and partings he'd undergone in the virtual world only strengthened his resolve. He couldn't lose any more loved ones. How much more painful would parting be in the real world? He didn't want to go through that again. He simply had to unlock the riddle of the MHC. He had to find a way to treat it.

The cancerization of the Loop is affecting the real world.

He was more convinced of that than ever. Just glimpsing a corner of the virtual world had shattered his emotions. The virtual world had affected him: why should it be strange that it was affecting the whole real world?

What did this room mean? Somebody had foreseen Kaoru's coming and left behind this elaborate system to greet him. He figured that it had to be Rothman, but he couldn't guess why.

But there had to be a reason. He couldn't shake the feeling that he'd been led here. And if he was being led, there was nothing else to do but follow whatever guidance was yet to come.

Maybe it was showing me where I should go.

His mother had shared with him that Native American folktale about a warrior guiding people westward. The tribe he'd belonged to in the virtual world had also believed in a place at the southern edge of the Rocky Mountains where they could live forever under the protection of the Great Spirit, and that belief had led them to move ever westward. The course they'd followed was still etched in Kaoru's brain.

Death had come unexpectedly upon them only two peaks from their destination, but he could clearly remember the path up to that point. Though they'd camped for months at a time, still the journey, that path, had been their life.

Kaoru grasped what he was to do.
I'm supposed to go the way the tribe went.

But there was something he needed to do first.

He had to make contact with Amano in Japan. Connecting then and there with Amano's computer via satellite, he made a single request.
Send visuals of Takayama and Asakawa ASAP.
It was a request he'd already made once, before leaving Japan.

The Loop functioned on essentially the same scale as the real world. Billions of intelligent life forms living their lives, creating the histories of their ethnic groups. The amount of memory involved must be staggering. Amidst all that, Amano was trying to find the exact moments when the cancerization of the world began. No small task.

But if Amano could isolate that sequence, Kaoru would be able to use the helmet display and data gloves to conduct an investigation in real time. He'd first lock in on an individual in the Loop, searching for a clue as to why the cancer started. Who knew? Maybe that information would open everything up for him.

While waiting for Amano's response, Kaoru was assailed by an irresistible desire to hear Reiko's voice. What time was it in Japan right now? With seven hours' time difference, it should be nine in the morning there. Was Reiko up yet? After experiencing the death of someone he loved in the virtual world, Kaoru really wanted to feel Reiko's presence close to him. At the very least, he wanted to know how she was doing.

He dialled her number on his satellite phone.

It rang seven times before a drowsy voice said, "Hello?"

So evidently the real world was still there. Kaoru felt indescribable relief just to hear Reiko say "hello". It was like emerging from a treacherous swamp and finding oneself on firm ground again.

"It's me."

A pause, while she collected herself. When she spoke again, the drowsiness was gone from her voice.

"Is that really you? Where are you? How are you?" She fired questions at him, all her worry for him coming to the fore. Kaoru was gratified to hear it.