Loop (19 page)

At the very highest point of the ridge the warrior dismounted from his beast. They walked to a waterfall and climbed up it. A black cave gaped at the top of the waterfall, and inside the cave lived the Ancient One. The Ancient One told the brothers about the creation of heaven and earth. He knew much about the past, as if he had experienced it all himself, so the older brother asked the Ancient One his age. This was his answer.

"Look at me and decide for yourselves. Tell me what you think."

But the answer came to neither brother, so they could not tell him.

Instead of telling them his age, the Ancient One said, "I have been here since the birth of all things."

The brothers asked him to take away the eyes on the older brother's waist and the younger brother's back. He answered, "Very well. But from this day you must keep watch here instead of me."

Then the Ancient One disappeared. At the same time, the "eyes" fell from their bodies, rolled over the stone floor, and turned into black rocks. The brothers became immortal, and watched over that land. With its rivers flowing into the sea east and west, it was a good land for keeping watch.

As soon as she saw he'd finished reading, Machiko spoke. "You understand what this means, right?"

Kaoru didn't much care for this kind of story. He wasn't a great reader of fiction to begin with, and he found folktales and myths in particular to be too incoherent, too lacking in reality. He had a hard time grasping them even when he did read them.

This one was like that. It developed too fast- what was it trying to say, exactly? The words sounded like they had significance, but they could be interpreted to mean anything. Kaoru felt that, no, he didn't exactly "understand what this means".

"Are the other stories pretty much like this, too?" he asked.

"Sort of."

"This 'Ancient One'. Are we to understand him literally as an old man?"

He imagined the Ancient One was a metaphor for something, along with the Multitude of Watching Eyes. Did the Ancient One represent a longevity zone? What did that make the Watching Eyes? It didn't make sense to him.

"Here's the problem,’ Machiko said, taking out the map included at the end of the book and unfolding it before Kaoru. It was a map of North America, showing the names of the major Indian peoples.

"Folktales and myths: are they completely made-up? According to some scholars, myths are based on historical facts from early in a people's existence. They contain that race's deepest wishes. Traces of the Great Flood, for instance, we find all over the world, and it's common knowledge now that the legend of the ark was at least somewhat based on fact.

"So let's assume that the story you just read, Kaoru, has some element of fact in it. Okay? Now the Talikeet were part of the Okewah people of western Oklahoma." She pointed with her pinky to a point on the map representing the current residence of the Talikeet tribe.

"It says in the story that the brothers went due west from here." She began to move her finger to the left of the page, but then stopped. "Where were they heading? According to the story the hilltop they stood on was at a southern gap in a great mountain range, at the source of two rivers, one flowing to the great western sea and one flowing to the great eastern sea. Geographically, those mountains have to be the Rockies."

She moved her finger along a north-south line, stopping at a point where the Rockies ended their long march down from Canada. The point was directly west from the Talikeet homeland, and just to the south of it stood a mountain of some twelve thousand feet. Which meant that the spot Machiko was pointing to was a huge valley supporting a bow-shaped strip of land. In the desert.

She traced an X over the bow-shaped rise with her finger. Just to the left of that spot could be seen the thin line of the Little Colorado River, which fed into the Colorado River, which flowed into the Gulf of California-the Pacific Ocean. Just to the right of that spot could be seen the uppermost reaches of the Rio Grande, which flowed into the Gulf of Mexico-the Atlantic Ocean. The sources of these two rivers flowing into the world's two great oceans came together at this point, divided by this ridge, part of the Continental Divide.

It was the Four Corners region, where the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado met. Site of the negative gravitational anomaly, where a longevity zone might, conjecturally, be located. Not far from the research labs at Los Alamos. Near where the deformed and swollen trees had been found. Right where Kaoru had drawn an X on his gravitational anomaly map ten years ago.

Kaoru felt dizzy. If he stood on that hill and looked west, he'd see water bubbling up from the side of the mountain that would eventually reach the Pacific Ocean; if he looked east he'd see a similar sight. Glittering water slicing its way through a desert wasteland.

The landscape presented itself before his mind's eye. He was standing unsteadily with one foot on either side of that ridge. He'd never been there, but from the contour lines on the map he could imagine it with clarity. But what shook him wasn't that. It was his own guesswork… The longevity zone he'd speculated about was now taking on the air of reality. Something was waiting for him there. The thought struck him with awe. Kaoru no longer cared whether the myth was just a made-up story. What was important was how much of his own hope and desire he could pack into the myth he himself was making. His father wanted it. Reiko wanted it. And now his mother did, too.

Machiko put her hand on Kaoru's knee and spoke to him. Her voice was a whisper, but it was full of assurance.

"You'll go there for me, won't you?"

But there were things he still wasn't sure of.

"You're positive this is where Franz Boer went, are you, Mom?"

"This story, 'Watched by a Multitude of Eyes,' exists in many variations, and the one included in this book is just the most basic. In one version, it's an older brother and a younger sister who meet the Ancient One and are granted immortality. In another version, Rainier has trouble recovering from childbirth, so Talikeet visits the Ancient One and brings back spring water which heals her. Some of the stories have different titles, too. But the description of the place is always the same. Right here. This place has the power to heal illness."

Machiko tapped the point on the map several times. "That's why Franz Boer went there."

"That place…"

"Kaoru, didn't you once show me a map of gravitational anomalies? You'd made a mark in the desert in Arizona or someplace. Can you show me that map again?"

Kaoru wanted to make sure himself. He knew without looking that it was the same place, but still he wanted to check. "Wait a minute," he said, and went to his room.

He hadn't looked at that map for years, so he imagined it would take him a long time to find it. He searched his bookshelves and desk drawers with no luck. It was just a scrap of paper-the proverbial needle in a haystack. But it wasn't a problem. All he had to do was access the same database that he had ten years ago and call up the same information.

He turned on his computer, realizing what an old model it was now. It was on this very screen ten years earlier that the gravitational anomaly map had been displayed.

Kaoru searched his memory for the exact paths he'd taken that night. First, he'd accessed the database on-line. But how had he searched it? First, the category: scientific and technical information. Then, gravity. Under that, gravitational anomalies. Under "area" he chose "worldwide".

Next it asked for a date: what year's gravitational anomalies did he want? He wanted the same map he'd seen ten years before, so he searched for the appropriate year.

Finally, a map appeared on the display. He enlarged the area he'd checked before, the North American desert.

His jaw dropped. The contour lines showed no anomalies in that area whatsoever. Ten years ago, when he'd looked, the negative numbers had gotten larger the closer they'd gotten to that point on the map. The gravitational anomalies had zeroed in on that very spot.

But the map before him now showed no such characteristic. His mother and father had both seen it, he was sure. All three of them had held the maps up to the living room light and seen for themselves that the low-gravity areas contained longevity zones.

Kaoru started again, repeating the same procedure as ten years ago. He did it over and over, but each resulting map held only an unremarkable arrangement of contour lines, a meaningless array of numbers.

He couldn't have misread the map ten years ago. That was impossible. His father's and mother's memories could not be doubted, never mind his own. Looking at that map had led his father promise them a trip to the desert. Kaoru still had the signed agreement in his desk drawer.

So where had that information come from ten years ago?

Kaoru got a pain behind his temples. What had his computer been connected to ten years ago? The thought made the blood rush from his head.

He turned off the computer and closed his eyes. His long-held vague image of the longevity zone in the desert began to rise again before his eyes.

It has to exist. I know it.

The world's outlines were fragile: one poke and it would all crumble into nothingness. But in the face of that fragility Kaoru found assurance. If he'd been able to call up the same information he'd found ten years ago, perhaps he wouldn't have felt this way-perhaps he wouldn't have been able to make up his mind.

He saw a bow-shaped hillock, and rivers swallowed up by the gentle rise of the land. In his imagination he could command the perspective of hawks circling overhead. The deep-carved valleys, the cool green of the trees cradled within them. Maybe the Ancient One still kept watch over the world, flanked by springs that fed into the Pacific and the Atlantic, water that circulated throughout the world like blood or lymph through the body. Incurable illness and ageless immortality; the rising and falling of the tides caused by fluctuations in gravity; life and death. All the contradictions fused into one and rose out of the desert sands. Everything suggested it. Everything whispered to him that he should go there.

Suddenly Machiko was standing behind him. Kaoru turned to look at her, and said, "I'll go, Mom."

"How will you go?"

"I'll have Dad's motorcycle flown to L.A., and then I'll ride out into the desert."

She nodded over and over.

Darkness filled his rear-view mirror. The eastern horizon was gradually brightening, but night still ruled the sky as a whole. At the moment, Kaoru was nothing but a figure making its way through darkness toward the dawn. The few clues he'd found had led him to this mission, this burden, to search out a way to combat the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus. All around was blackness, and he had to chase the faintest hint of light.

There were few cars on the interstate highway crossing the Mojave Desert at night, so for a long while he didn't need to glance in the rear-view mirror. But as signs of dawn began to press in upon him from the front, he checked it more frequently. The sky was definitely escaping night's dominion now, embracing the dawn. The landscape's transformation was beautiful to Kaoru's eyes. The brown earth received the corroding rays of the morning and in turn stained the darkness behind him red. On either side of the highway mountain ridges began to appear in silhouette.

Both hands gripping the handlebars of the XLR, the 600CC off-road bike his father had bought ten years ago, Kaoru turned his head to see his surroundings. He wanted to savour the landscape racing by with his own eyes, not through a mirror.

He'd been dreaming of this desert wasteland since he was ten. And now he'd come all the way to America and ridden six hours straight to see it.

It had been late yesterday afternoon when he'd picked up the XLR. He'd shipped it to America air freight. Then he'd had to pack for this race across the desert. It had been nearly ten when he'd finally left L.A. He'd considered getting a good night's rest in a hotel and departing the next morning, but when he contemplated the vast desert to the east of him he couldn't contain himself. He simply had to set off immediately.

But it was dark when he left, and had been dark ever since. Though he'd known he was traversing the Mojave desert, he might as well have been riding through mountain meadows for all he could see. But all he had to do was point the bike down the highway leading straight into the darkness and keep the handlebars steady. Now the sun was rising, giving him his first glimpse of the land.

Kaoru was glad he'd set off when he had, and glad he'd kept going. This change in the landscape was not to be missed. That, and he'd avoided wasting a day. There wasn't much time left. Today was the first of September: he had to come up with some sort of conclusion within these two months, or it might mean the life of not only Reiko, but her newly-conceived child.

For six hours straight he'd been submerged within the thick hum and vibrations of the four stroke OHC two-cylinder engine. The road was nicely sealed, but still he maintained perfect riding form, never loosening his knee grip. His father had drilled proper biking technique into him. Whenever he'd lapsed into an unsightly splay-kneed pose, his father would slap his knees and yell at him.
Keep your knees tight around the tank, kiddo.

And he had, all the way. Shoulders relaxed, weight nicely balanced on the footrests. Kaoru's father had taken him riding even after his diagnosis, and on those trips especially his father's words of instruction had sunk deep into his heart. He tried hard to ride with precision.

The trip meter showed he'd come three hundred miles. The XLR's huge gas tank held thirty litres, good for three hundred and fifty miles of highway driving. Which meant it was about time to fill up: much farther and he'd risk running out of fuel. This highway had stretches of two hundred or more miles with no gas station, so he had to be careful. The luggage rack held a spare polyurethane gas can, but it was empty. He'd meant to stop at a hotel somewhere and lie down on a bed; now he might have come too far.