Loups-Garous (11 page)

“Looks like some kind of clam.”

“Clam? You mean like seafood?”

“Well, yeah. Tsuzuki, you've never seen it before?”

“I don't know. I've seen turtles, but I have no interest in nature.”

Mio pierced the bit of food with her fork and inspected it up close. She wondered aloud how it was cultivated, then popped the whole thing into her mouth.

“It's pretty good. Even though I don't know what it is.”

“You're weird.”

“You think so? I think that's pretty normal,” Mio said and placed her fork back down on the table. It looked like she'd just played with the food.

It wasn't like she'd simply tasted the food, nor was it like she savored the whole meal. Plus she said it was
delicious
like someone much older might have.

“Food is important.”

“Well, sure.”

“I think our ancestors must have been really weak,” Mio said conversationally.

“Weak?”

“Sure. They were the ones being eaten. I'm sure of it. That's why they took such pains to get out of the food chain. We've all collectively stopped killing animals, right? No one in this country eats animal meat anymore.”

“You mean it's wrong to kill.”

“But we used to kill. We'd kill animals and then eat them.”

“You can make food without killing it.”

“Of course you can.”

“You can even make vegetables,” Hazuki said. “People have been making vegetables since a long time ago.”

“Make. You mean grow them. Grass is a living thing too. It's different from being made.
Making
things from scratch is only a recent thing.”

Oh…

“But since we started replacing everything from grass to beasts, humans have extracted themselves from the food chain. It took us millions of years, but we've done it. We've been able to improvise edible food out of nonliving things. Not so long ago, synthetic food was talked about like it was a bad thing, but it's no different from what we use to make food now. People lacked the proper technology in the past, making the first synthetic foods toxic, but that was stupidity on their part. Still…”

“Still?”

“If you don't eat or aren't eaten, you are not an animal.”

“Animal…”

“Beast. Even in the sanctuaries, beasts eat beasts. They survive this way. Humans are the only ones that don't do this.”

Is that a bad thing?

“There are animals that have gone extinct because of humans' killing them.”

“You're talking about tigers and stuff, right? But humans stopped killing whales, and now they're rampant. They eat every living thing in the ocean.”

“Whales don't eat every single thing.”

“Don't they eat clams?” Mio said. Despite being a genius, Mio seemed to be lacking much knowledge of animal biology. Hazuki liked animals for some reason. She'd hardly seen any in her life, but she liked looking at old pictures and had even filed some of them.

Like wolves.

One night ago, she'd been researching a file on extinct animals and came across one that from the picture looked like a dog. Like a dog she'd seen as a very small child.

A dog…

Where was that?

She couldn't remember.

“Animals. That's derived from
anima
, which means life, breath. To be animated.” Mio wiped her mouth with the thick fabric of the sleeve of her maintenance uniform. “We aren't very animated, are we? I think we're trying to stop moving altogether.”

The chair squeaked as Mio got up and went back to the monitor.

“We sit here for hours on end. And yet we continue to live. Anything else would die.”

The sound of keys being punched.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm about to copy the next ten minutes of yesterday into today. I have to go now. If I'm found walking around too late in the evening the police will give me trouble. They have more guys on the street now with this killer and everything.”

“Tsuzuki, you going somewhere else now?”

“Somewhere else? I'm gonna go return this stone, of course. I'm going to Kono's house.”

Ayumi's house…

“This time it'll be a real payback. All right, it's as though I was never here.”

Never here. So this was all a lie.

“It was all a dream?”

Mio turned back and laughed.

CHAPTER
006

SHIZUE SMELLED SYNTHETIC
resin. She smelled a cheap synthetic leather sheet.

No, wait, that wasn't all. She smelled something medicinal. It was mixed with a volatile astringent.

People who were bothered by potent smells once liked this kind of smell, but at the end of the day, this wasn't pleasant to the human olfactory sense. To be frank it was a noxious odor.

Research on pleasant smells was thriving, and a perfume boom was spreading through the younger generation. Some of Shizue's kids had taken up a hobby of perfuming but unfortunately had never experienced a delicate fragrance. If they knew a fragrant odor it was smelled in passing.

It was no wonder, with odor-deficient people suddenly increasing in number.

Shizue opened a window.

It wasn't as though it smelled better outside. The air wasn't invigorating by any means, but the mere presence of the breeze made her feel better. The atmosphere and landscape ran without end throughout the residential quarter like an ancient scroll of parchment.

“Is it stuffy?” Kunugi asked. “I might be a, uh,
germophile
, but the person usually riding this car is a clean freak of a woman. She's always sterilizing everything. I figured you'd be okay in here.”

“She probably has anosmia.”

“Oh yeah?” Kunugi sniffed the air a couple times.

“More importantly, are we all right? It's already almost five.”

“We're fine. I told them if they waited around it was pointless. We couldn't get our finished work in during business hours. I made the call directly to the prefectural police headquarters through the center's terminal and not my portable one, so they won't suspect anything. I'm ostensibly on my way home. That said, I'm going to stop by headquarters on my way to your office tomorrow. Though that means you can't start working till I get there.”

“That's fine.”

“More importantly…is that girl who didn't show up to the group one of your kids without a guardian?” Kunugi asked.

“No. However, her parents have been gone for three days.”

“Gone?”

“They're traveling.”

“Well, isn't that nice?”

“It's not private. It's a public matter.”

“
Ohh
,” Kunugi let out in neither a sigh nor a word. “They're one of these couples that are both employed by the same people, eh?”

“Yes. It's one of those awful ‘partnership' systems. Supervising and protecting children under sixteen is obviously mandated of guardians, but this partnership system exempts those guardians who have applied for paired status. It's a matter of work productivity, apparently. When the child is thirteen they're allowed to be left home alone. Minors between the ages of fourteen and sixteen have the right to be under guardianship, but that right can't be enforced.”

“Wherever there is a law there is a loophole.”

“Our system is riddled with loopholes,” Shizue said. “It ends up being the center's responsibility to protect children during those years. However, there aren't enough people designated to do that there. Counselors end up having to be extra careful. But even when careful, we can't watch over one child the whole time. We can't actually take over their guardianship either. The center forbids us from infringing on their individual freedom. We can only initiate communication with them via monitor. Fortunately, most kids these days aren't without a portable monitor, so we've not had any problems communicating, but—”

“Have you contacted her parents?” Kunugi asked.

“I approached them immediately. They're
en route
right now but are supposed to be back home tonight.”

“I know they're working, but do parents not contact their kid themselves?”

“I guess they must not. There's nothing to talk about.”

“I don't have a family, so I wouldn't know. Come to think of it, I come from what would be described as a broken home.”

“That's a play on words. Family is a concept and not a thing, after all, so it can't be broken.”

“I guess not.”

“No. It just means the concept has changed meaning in your case, Mr. Kunugi. The concept of home or blood relations were defined differently in your youth, and back then as now, a family was a living arrangement in which you cohabited with blood relatives or else assigned relatives, so it's not that the ‘family' was broken. The model family is structured according to each era, obviously, and right now this is just what happens to be your definition of a home. That it differs from the past does not mean it is broken. What do you think?”

I actually think that's stupid
, Shizue wanted to add.

They were from different times.

“You just called me by my name for the first time,” Kunugi said out of nowhere.

Shizue turned her head, regretting she didn't go with the more appropriate “officer.” Kunugi looked ahead and smiled.

“Well, maybe. But when I was young, these bureaucrats would come and talk down to my family, talk down to me, and it made me feel out of place. Stupid phrases like ‘self-discovery' and ‘broken homes' were probably all coined during that time.”

“It's a given that in every age there will be stupid words.”

“Well, probably. But I thought I didn't understand them because I was young at the time, and you'd think I'd know now that I'm old, but I don't.

“It's not like I gave up or gave in,” Kunugi said as he switched something in the navigator. “It just means that before I felt out of place with the gap between me and the older generation, and now it's a gap between me and your younger generation.”

“Humans are protective. It'd be difficult for them to change internally. Younger generations will always be viewed as being dumber, more frivolous, and useless. But of course it's that dumber more frivolous person who creates the next generation.”

“You are one well-argued woman,” Kunugi said. As Shizue turned her face, the middle-aged man let his line of vision shift over to the passenger seat ever so briefly.

“I'm allowed to say something like that since we're just talking privately, right?”

“Technically, but…”

“Yeah, so, for me…I'm just wondering if parents don't worry, that's all.”

“That's something we're responsible for at the center.”

“I see.”

That was a rote answer, no doubt. It felt empty. This middle-aged man probably detected that Shizue did not speak from her heart, and responded accordingly.

Who would trust the center or the counselors anyway?

“So…she's supposed to live somewhere around here.”

“Okay.”

Shizue looked at her monitor. Her current location was marked.

The solar car slowed down to a stop. Kunugi ran his personal ID card through the side of the navigator.

“This is a police vehicle and all, so anything I do with it after hours is on my personal record.”

“Then should I file an applica—”

“Hurry up and go,” Kunugi said upon pulling up his own monitor.

Shizue pushed open her door and stepped into the dark city.

Normally, no one from the center would go directly to a child's home. In extreme situations there might be a shut-in that required counseling, or a special circumstance that required a counselor to examine the home to determine whether the home environment was a safe one. Otherwise, visits were once-annual affairs.

Shizue had only been to Yuko Yabe's home once.

She was not a child with problems.

Still…

Shizue didn't remember any of this.

The assigned living quarters were identical from the outside throughout the country. Remembering it would have been impossible.

Inside the house…

She remembered the inside of Yabe's house being a shambles.

It was full of deformée character toys from the twentieth century.

No, that was…

That was something she remembered from the database.

Most of the personal data on the kids she had was in her head. She'd memorized their habits and proclivities. This information on them, the preconceptions about the kids, formed imaginary memories in Shizue's mind. These detailed pieces of information could take on a life of their own. And on the whole they'd not be far off and would occasionally jibe with reality.

This was the worst kind of profiling, and she hated it.

You couldn't measure or understand a human being that way, Shizue believed.

She'd always believed this when it came to her work. Subjectively profiling people was a kind of personality analysis, no different from the mantic arts.

That was the right thing.

Subjectively speaking such an analysis was necessary in any given situation. Curbing that analysis at the level of reference was the appropriate thing to do.

That went without saying
, Shizue thought.

Still, even today there remained those adherents to profiling. Idiots who believed it was the only way to distinguish people. All of it…

They believed it because sometimes they ended up being right.

This was obviously not because the profiling technique was so advanced.

No matter how minute the survey or how exacting the analogy, that analogy was never the reality. And if the analogy kept hitting the bull'seye, it was not because of advanced technology.

If the assumption were true, it was because people were able to visualize the prototype having parsed him or her self. It was because so many people grew up in this environment. It should be assumed there were simply more people who were able to self-regulate according to the stereotypes they might match.