Less Than Human (5 page)

The damn stammer. That long string bean of a man, the detective, Ishihara, noticed although he didn’t say anything. All it
meant was that she was overtired, but he wasn’t to know that. It made her sound like such a fool. And she didn’t want to appear
a fool before that man, who obviously didn’t believe a woman could do her job. He didn’t look like her image of a detective,
which was based on the young, dashing actors of popular vid shows. Ishihara’s stoop, his crumpled short-sleeved shirt and
shiny-kneed trousers, and lined, dour face could have been that of many aging engineers she knew, passed over for promotion
and relegated to administrative tasks. He’d looked at home in the dingy factory.

She shrugged off the memory. The Kawanishi incident was closed as far as the police were concerned, and it was unlikely she’d
meet Assistant Inspector Ishihara again.

Cleanbots scuttled out of her way on wheels and jointed legs as their infrared and movement sensors told them she was approaching.
Then they returned to their tasks, skimming the corridor for rubbish like the insects they were modeled upon. Anticockroaches,
she thought sleepily, admiring their clustering behavior. Tomita produced a smaller, down-market version of Spick and Scram,
as the cleanbots were properly known, although she hadn’t been directly involved in its development.

She turned right where the corridor branched, then stopped. One of those cleanbots seemed out of synch. She peered back around
the corner and saw it approaching purposefully, away from the herd. Immediately it sensed her, it swung around and zoomed
back to the others. Almost as if it had been…following her?

She laughed at herself and kept walking. It would be a glitch in the recognition function. The bot probably thought she was
one of its herd.

As she entered her elevator, she thought she saw a movement down the corridor. She’d better mention the wayward bot to management
tomorrow. If it kept leaving the herd, it could disrupt the entire sequence for the others as well.

The elevator doors shut as soon as she entered. Its sensors would have read her chip signal, accessed her resident information,
and noted that she had placed a high priority on privacy in her preferences section. She hated standing in crowded elevators
while people stared at her, then pretended nonchalance when she caught their eyes.

She and Masao lived on the outer third floor in a four-room unit. Not high enough to have a view, but they were lucky to live
in a Betta at all. Even if the Sam project was axed—horrible thought—she couldn’t afford to leave the company. It would mean
leaving the Betta.

She kicked her sandals off in the entry to their apartment and left her bag propped against the wall. Masao was asleep in
the inner room, curled happily in their futon with the air conditioner set to autumn chill. Eleanor turned it up five degrees,
peeled off her clothes, and crawled in beside him.

“I’m home,” she said.

He muttered and rolled over automatically, curling the other way so she could snuggle.

She was dimly conscious that her last waking thoughts were about that damn welder.

Eleanor and Masao reached the station closest to the Tanaka family house shortly before midday. The temperature had reached
thirty-eight degrees again, according to the environment monitor outside the station, and there was no shade between the station
and the house except for the overhang of blocks of flats and two trees drooping brownish leaves over a temple wall. Eleanor
carried a parasol.

“You know how in the movies you can hear cicadas in summer?” said Masao. “When I was a child, we couldn’t find any insects
to study in our summer holiday projects. People suddenly realized that me reason they didn’t hear cicadas anymore was that
the larvae were stuck under concrete.”

“What did they do?” asked Eleanor.

“There was a bit of a fuss, some people made gardens in their backyards, but the developers kept coming.” He pushed his glasses
straight—they tended to slide off crookedly when he spoke about something that affected him.

After the Quake came the Seikai reforms and the Bettas, with their self-contained roof gardens. But by that time the cicadas
were gone from the city. Now, enterprising tourist agencies ran summer tours for people to go to the countryside to experience
the sound.

Masao gestured at the bitumen and concrete around them. The only living things were pot plants arranged carefully in some
doorways. “When my father was a boy it was still a suburb. There was a creek and rice paddies. It was a lot cooler then. You
could see to the mountains.”

Now vistas of tall buildings stretched into the thick air. The streams were either buried beneath the concrete or had degenerated
into smelly storm water outlets, and the closest mountains had been leveled to build a Betta.

It won’t be like this when they set up a Betta here, thought Eleanor. We can stay cool all the way from our place. It’s not
that I don’t like visiting, she told herself, but getting here is so exhausting.

But she said nothing to Masao, who tramped stolidly along the road that was too narrow to allow a footpath, his round face
running with sweat. He regarded the visits as a necessary duty and would never dream of shirking. The outline of his undershirt
showed through his shirt, pasted with sweat to his back, and Eleanor felt a surge of affection for the familiar broad curves.

“Hot, isn’t it,” she said.

“It’s the humidity. Phew.”

She hadn’t mentioned how she’d stammered in front of Inspector Ishihara. Masao worried too much, which both annoyed her and
made her feel safe. Sometimes, when the annoyance grew overwhelming, she would remember how he came to her after she had the
accident. It was at the end of her Ph.D. program in Boston. She stayed in the hospital for six months, then returned to her
uncle’s motor repair business in small-town Iowa to spend another year trying to finish rehabilitation and thesis at the same
time. A year and a half of her life gone, eaten up by hospital beds and chunks of vanished memory.

She’d only talked to Masao a couple of times before the accident, and he said he visited her once in the hospital, although
she didn’t remember. One of many memories that the accident had taken away. Then he arrived one day in the town and asked
her to go back to Japan with him. She’d never forgotten the feeling of the world opening up for her again. Masao had rescued
her. Rescued her from more years in a town of wide, dusty streets full of abandoned shops, heat, the stink of oil and metal
in the workshop, and a house permeated with sour toilet smells.

She grimaced and touched his shoulder again like a talisman.

They panted past the brick building of Masao’s old primary school, through the dusty dirt of the tiny local “park,” past the
car repair workshop closed for the day, picked their way through potted plants Grandma insisted on placing on both sides of
the narrow footpath, and finally turned in the gate next to the Tanaka workshop entrance. The shop’s metal shutters were closed
for the holiday. Tanaka Manufacturing, the sign above the shutters said, in old-fashioned cursive characters carved into a
wooden board. The small two-story house was attached to the workshop by a walkway. Before the house was built after the war,
the entire family, ten people at that time, had lived in two rooms at the back of the factory.

The stone path from the gate ended in three concrete steps up to an entrance hall. Masao pushed open the sliding door.

“We’re home,” he announced, sitting on the step to unlace his sneakers. Eleanor folded the parasol and eased off her sandals.
The air inside the dark hall was cooler. It smelled of herbal disinfectant overlaid with omelet. Here we go, she thought.

Masao’s sister Yoshiko, plump, round-faced, and perpetually worried, emerged from the kitchen at the far end of the hall.
She had the same dark olive skin as Masao, without his wide, humorous mouth. She wore a skirt and T-shirt and was wiping her
hands on a dishcloth.

“You’re late,” she said to Masao.

“We got held up,” he said blandly. “Buying cakes.”

Eleanor remembered she was carrying the present and held out the bag of sweet rice cakes. “Hello, Yoshiko-san.”

Yoshiko didn’t like Eleanor calling her the traditional “Elder Sister.” Eleanor suspected it was because although Masao was
three years younger than Yoshiko, she and Eleanor were the same age. Or maybe Yoshiko didn’t want the level of intimacy that
“Elder Sister” implied. So they called each other “Eleanor-san” and “Yoshiko-san,” and kept their distance.

Yoshiko tucked the towel into her apron pocket and took the rice cakes. Back in the kitchen, she placed them on a table carrying
plates of food in various stages of preparation.

“It’s hot, isn’t it? Not so much the heat, as the humidity. I’m in the middle of the sushi mix.” She paused long enough for
Eleanor to offer to help.

Eleanor did so, with a mental scowl at Masao, who had disappeared into the air-conditioned living room. He was happy to do
more than his share of housework in their own home, but when he came back here, he regressed into a spoiled Japanese boy.
It infuriated her.

“Have a glass of tea first. We don’t stand on ceremony here.” Yoshiko laughed without humor and began slicing beans.

Eleanor drank some cold barley tea and still felt hot. An old electric fan purred in the corner. The usual kitchen table mess
had been pushed to one side to make way for the food. Yoshiko always complained about the table, saying she couldn’t keep
it tidy because everyone else dumped their things on it. Just then it held a saltshaker, two pickle containers, rubber bands,
chopsticks standing in a cup, a rolled-up newspaper, Grandma’s medicine cup, a piece of carrot on some wet cotton wool, many
small plastic packs of mustard that came with ready-made dumplings, and a jar of red, squishy-looking ovals. In her more whimsical
moods, Eleanor visualized the table as a symbol of the dingy chaos she’d moved to the Betta to get away from.

“There’s an apron in the second drawer down,” said Yoshiko, neatly lifting the sliced beans with the flat of the cleaver to
a different location.

“No, thank you.” Eleanor shuddered at the thought of more layers of cloth between herself and the fan. In the Betta and the
train she’d been cold in her thin blouse; now it felt like a blanket.

“Grandma and Papa,” said Yoshiko, referring to her mother and own husband, Kazu, “have gone to do the graves. They’ll be back
soon.”

During the two weeks of Bon most Japanese families cleaned up their family gravestones and presented fresh flowers and offerings
to the departed, whose souls would visit at that time. Many city dwellers returned to their hometowns, or their family’s hometowns,
for the festival. The post-Quake Seikai reforms tried to get each part of the country to do so at different times, to avoid
traffic congestion and confusion, but it never caught on, not even at the urging of the Buddhist clergy. Some customs were
too old to change.

“Can you slice this carrot? Small, please.” Yoshiko passed Eleanor pieces of cooked vegetable and peered critically over her
shoulder. “You know, for someone who’s good at repairing things, you’re not very dexterous, are you?”

Eleanor half-smiled automatically. “No, not very.” Five or six years earlier she might have made a lighthearted comment about
not criticizing a person holding a cleaver, or perhaps tried a joke about it being hard to repair robots with a knife. But
Yoshiko never smiled.

Eleanor scraped her clumsy carrots into another bowl.

Yoshiko emptied the contents of all the little bowls one by one onto the mound of sushi rice and mixed it together. She seemed
more flustered than usual—she dropped a couple of peas and didn’t notice.

“Mari-chan’s here for the day,” she said, with a quick glance at Eleanor’s face.

So that was the problem. Yoshiko had never liked the way her daughter enjoyed Eleanor’s company.

“She can’t stay, she’s got summer classes next week.”

I bet she’s working, and doesn’t want Mum and Dad to know, thought Eleanor. Mari was smart enough to pass all her courses
without the need for extra classes.

Yoshiko mounded the sushi rice with unnecessary vigor. “While she’s here, Eleanor-san, I’ve got some important things to discuss
with her.” She kept her eyes on the rice.

So don’t butt in, you mean, Eleanor thought. “Yoshikosan, I haven’t seen Mari-chan since last New Year. We don’t have much
to talk about anymore.”

She had a swift, vivid memory of an overweight ten-year-old lying on her stomach on the fluffy pink carpet of her room, pages
of her latest effort at drawing manga strewn around her. Face glowing with achievement, she read the pages aloud to Eleanor,
who had been glad to listen and escape the minefield of family relationships that at holiday times extended to dozens of people.
Eleanor had also solved problems with computer games for her niece, and played them with her over the years.

But Mari was now eighteen and had probably grown out of both manga and games.

The back door opened and Masao’s father came in, placing his sandals neatly facing outward on the lower step. He was a heavy
man with rounded shoulders beginning to shrink with age, his face dragged down by worry and sobriety.

“Welcome, Eleanor-san,” he said with his usual careful decorum. “It’s hot, isn’t it? Grandma not back yet?” he asked Yoshiko,
who brought him a glass of iced tea.

“Not yet.”

Grandpa grunted in reply and went into the living room.

Eleanor picked up the plates Yoshiko indicated and followed him. On holidays they always ate at the low table in me living
room.

Grandpa Tanaka folded himself, carefully because of arthritis, into his usual seat at the head of the table under the family
altar. The doors of the altar stood open, and incense burned on either side, framing Grandpa’s sagging cheeks and tufted eyebrows
like some strange Buddhist deity. He held out his hand to Masao, who passed him part of the newspaper without comment. The
little statue of Kannon, goddess of mercy, seemed to wink at Eleanor from deep in the altar as the light caught its peeling
gold leaf.