2
It didn't matter where Kaoru's DNA came from.
Reiko didn't care. Life emerged from nothingness.
The child inside her—before the sperm fertilized the egg, it hadn't existed.
The only things that mattered, Reiko felt, were acts.
Like those passionate moments with Kaoru, stolen while her son Ryoji was off getting tested for chemotherapy, when they could use his room like a hotel—the im-pulse had been a pure one, a loving one. They hadn't acted on physical instinct alone unaccompanied by feeling. Their acts had been driven by love, and the result was that she carried new life within her womb.
But still.
It wasn't that she didn't understand the concept.
Given that the Loop life forms had DNA, she was prepared to accept that science could reconstruct them. But still...it was like being told all of a sudden that Kaoru was a cyborg or something.
She'd had intercourse with Kaoru a number of times in that hospital room, with the curtains open and the brilliant afternoon sunlight shining in. There in the bright light they had examined each other's organs, lapped each other's fluids, felt each other's pulses against their mucous membranes. She'd taken his semen into her mouth. She could remember its bitter taste, the feel of it on her tongue. It tasted like something secreted from a living body; it tasted like life.
Reiko had only a general grasp of the mechanics of one of his sperm reaching her egg and fertilizing it. If she did understand every detail, it wouldn't have changed what surfaced in her memory now, which was the act, and a recollection of the emotions of which it had been the manifestation. The new life had been created out of thoughts, out of will.
I love you.
That didn't change upon learning Kaoru's prove-nance.
Amano, meanwhile, had no way of knowing that Reiko was occupied with confirming her love for Kaoru.
As a scientist, all that was on his mind was whether she understood the process.
"I get it," she said. "Kaoru's birth did not result from the sexual union of his parents."
Her response reassured Amano somewhat. If she got that much, he would be spared the barrage of questions.
They'd just saved a lot of time. "I'm glad you do," he said.
What Reiko wanted to know was not the "why" of the beginnings of his existence, but the current progress of it. In short, where was he and what was he doing?
"Where is Kaoru now?" she asked Amano.
He gave a little sigh and shook his head. He looked at his wristwatch, assumed a thoughtful pose, then slowly stood up and ordered two cups of coffee over an intercom. Reiko thought his actions affected. She had a bad feeling about what was coming next.
At length a young woman appeared with the coffee.
Amano distractedly brought his to his lips and said, without meeting Reiko's eyes, "Please, have some coffee."
Then, haltingly, he began to tell her, not where Kaoru was, but about a scientific device called the Neutrino Scanning Capture System, NSCS or Neucap for short. It used phase shifts caused by neutrino vibrations to make a digital record of a living creature in three dimensions, down to the last detail, including the state of its proteins and electrical fields. Through neutrino irradiation, the machine also made a record of brain activity—thoughts, emotions, memories—capturing literally every piece of information and storing it as data.
Reiko was only half listening, but when Amano mentioned that the NSCS was located in North America, deep underground at the Four Corners, where the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado meet, she looked up with a start. That was where Kaoru had been headed on his quest to find out about the MHC
virus.
"That's where Kaoru is, isn't it?" She clung to the idea.
Amano merely looked uncomfortable. He dithered, unwilling to confirm or deny her guess. Reiko watched him wordlessly, commanding herself to be calm no matter what he said next.
"It was discovered that the telomerase sequence in Kaoru's DNA was not TTAGGG. What this means is that while the MHC virus produced the TTAGGG
telomerase sequence and attached it to the end of his DNA like it does to all its victims, in Kaoru's case it was unstable, breaking down almost immediately. In short, he had perfect resistance to the MHC virus."
"You mean, Kaoru won't come down with MHC?"
"That's correct. The virus doesn't cancerize his cells."
"That's wonderful..."
But the pounding in Reiko's chest would not subside. Instead, that "Neucap" had taken root in her imagination, where it was now glowing, pale and ghostly.
"I'm not sure how else to put it. It was what the whole world had been waiting for. The key to defeating the MHC virus was found in Kaoru's own body."
Reiko thought back over things Kaoru had said and done. He must have sensed, intuitively, that he was going to make a huge contribution to discovering the origin of the MHC virus, and a cure to it. He'd carried that destiny around with him since birth—he'd been on a kind of mission.
"So he's going to be able to help find a treatment."
"Absolutely. That's putting it mildly. His complete biodata has been analyzed, and we're quite close to perfecting a breakthrough treatment. It's all thanks to Kaoru."
Complete biodata.
The words caught her ear. From the course of the conversation, it wasn't hard to imagine that Kaoru had submitted himself to the NSCS. But the direction Amano was taking the discussion worried her. He hadn't volunteered any information as to what had happened to Kaoru's body in the process of providing his complete biodata. The professor was being evasive on that point.
"Did you use this NSCS on Kaoru?"
"Yes." Amano nodded.
"What happens to someone's body when the NSCS
is used on it?"
"Kaoru's body was completely sterilized and he was placed in a tank of purified water, where he floated in the center of a dome two hundred meters in diameter.
Neutrinos were shot at him from every point along the sphere's surface. They passed through his body and reached the opposite point on the sphere, in the process accumulating information about his molecular structure."
She didn't care about the mechanism. Her voice rose in frustration.
"What happened to his body?"
"In order to get his complete biodata, it was necessary to expose him to radiation intense enough to break down his cells, and as a result..."
Reiko's hair flew about as she leaned abruptly forward.
"That is, what happened was..."
Reiko nearly screamed.
Amano seemed to be trying to impress upon her that he bore no responsibility in the matter—his voice grew angry, although his anger had no particular object.
"Listen to me. As a result, his body was liquefied. It was destroyed."
"Liquefied? Destroyed?" In a daze she repeated the words. She tried and failed to imagine that happening to a body. What happened to his life? She knew the answer to that, but she couldn't accept it.
She started to speak, but bit back the words. Her mouth opened and closed helplessly; she looked like she was about to hyperventilate. Amano took pity on her and pronounced.
"Kaoru is dead to this world."
Reiko and Amano stared at each other for a long time. Amano couldn't avert his gaze from her big eyes, turned slightly down at the corners. He'd have to take her emotional explosion head-on.
Reiko was the first to look away. Tears welled up in her eyes; the next moment she'd collapsed face down on the table, heedless as some of her hair landed in the coffee.