I telephoned Sanctuary from the port.
‘State your name, business and present location,’ said the cold voice. A cop. Even with the alpha quotient of a fruitfly, you could spot them a mile off. I hung up.
But this is bad. I have run out of Japan. My passport is in the possession of the Fellowship’s Foreign Office, so seeking assistance with our Russian or Korean brothers and sisters is impossible. I am running out of money. Of course I have no money of my own: after my initiation every last yen was transferred to the Fellowship. My skin family have disowned me, and would turn me in. So would my skin friends from my life of blindness. This causes me no sorrow. When the White Nights come, they shall reap what they have sown. The Fellowship are my true family.
I had one final resort. The Fellowship’s Secret Service. The media had mentioned nothing about their arrest, so perhaps they had gone to ground in time. I dialled the secret number, and gave the encoded message: ‘The dog needs to be fed.’
I kept on the line, saying nothing, as instructed during my cleansing training sessions at Sanctuary. The Secret Serviceman on the other end hung up when enough time for my call to be traced had elapsed. Help would be on its way. A levitator would be despatched, bearing a wallet of crisp ten-thousand yen notes. He will scan for my alpha signature, and find me during one of my rambles around the island, when I am alone, or asleep in a grove of palm trees. He will be there when I awake, glowing, perhaps, like Buddha or Gabriel.
Kumejima is a squalid, incestuous prison. To think, this lump of rock was once the main trading centre of the Ryuku Empire with China. Boats laden with spices, slaves, coral, ivory, silk. Swords, coconuts, hemp. The shouts of men would have filled the bustling harbour, old women would have knelt in the market place, with their scales and piles of fruit and dried fish. Girls with obedient breasts lean out of the dusky windows, over the flower boxes, promising, murmuring...
Now it’s all gone. Long gone. Okinawa became a squalid apology for a fiefdom, squabbled over by masters far beyond its curved horizons. Nobody admits it, but the islands are dying now. The young people are moving to the mainland. Without subsidies and price-fixing the agriculture would collapse. When the mainland peaceniks get the American military rapists off the islands the economy will slow, splutter and expire. The fish are all being fished out by factory trawlers. Tracks lead nowhere. Building projects have been started, but end in patches of concrete, piles of gravel and tall, thorny weeds. Such a place would be ripe for His Serendipity’s Mission! I long to awaken people, to tell people about the White Nights and the New Earth, but I daren’t risk bringing attention to myself. My last defence is my ordinariness. When that wears out, I have nothing but my novice’s alpha potential to protect me.
The island’s bewhiskered policeman spoke to me yesterday. I passed him outside a snorkel shop while he was bent over tying up his shoelaces.
‘How’s your holiday, Mr Tokunaga?’
‘Very restful, officer. Thank you.’
‘I was sorry to hear about your wife. It must have been terribly traumatic.’
‘Kind of you to say so, officer.’ I tried to focus my alpha-coercion faculty to make him go away.
‘So you’ll be off tomorrow, Mr Tokunaga? Mrs Mori at the guest house said you were staying for a couple of weeks.’
‘I’m thinking of extending, actually, just a few more days.’
‘Is that a fact? Won’t your company be missing you?’
‘Actually, I’m working on a new computer system. I can do it here just as well as in Tokyo. In fact, the peace and quiet is more conducive to inspiration.’
The policeman nodded thoughtfully. ‘I wonder... At the junior high school the youngsters have recently started up a computer club. My sister-in-law’s the headmistress there. Mrs Oe. You’ve met already, I believe, at Mrs Mori’s. I wonder... Mrs Oe is far too polite to dream of imposing upon your time herself, I know, but...’
I waited.
‘It would be a great honour for the school if you could go along some time and tell the computer class about life in a real computer company...’
I sensed a trap. But it would be safer to get out of it later than refuse now. ‘Sure.’
‘That would be very kind of you. I’ll mention it when I see my brother-in-law next...’
I met the husky dog on the beach. His Serendipity chose to address me in its barks.
‘What did you expect, Quasar? Did you think raising the curtain on the age of homo serendipitous was going to be easy?’
‘No, my Lord. But when are the yogic fliers going to be despatched to the White House and the European parliament, to demand your release?’
‘Eat eggs, my faithful one.’
‘Eggs, my Lord?’
‘Eggs are a symbol of rebirth, Quasar. And eat Orange Rocket ice lollies.’
‘What do they symbolise, Guru?’
‘Nothing. They contain vitamin C in abundance.’
‘It shall be so, my Lord. But the yogic fliers, my Father—’
My only reply was a barking dog, and a puzzled look from the two lovers, jumping up suddenly from behind a stack of rusty oil drums. The three of us looked at each other in confusion. The dog cocked its leg and pissed against a tractor tyre. The ocean boomed its indifference.
The little baby girl in the woolly cap, she had liked me. How could she have liked me? It was just some facial reflex, no doubt. She gurgled at me, smiling. Her mother looked at who she was smiling at, and she smiled at me too. Her eyes were warm. I didn’t smile back. I looked away. I wish I had smiled back. But I wish they hadn’t smiled at me. Would they have survived? Or would the gas have got them? If they hadn’t moved, it would have leaked out of the package and straight into their noses, eyes, and lungs...
Mum. Dad.
But we were only defending ourselves! There was one day, during my assignment to the Ministry of Information. One of our sister’s skin relatives, her unclean uncle, had taken court action to stop her selling their family’s farmhouse and land. He was a property lawyer. The Secret Service had brought this flesh brother in for questioning. His Serendipity instantly knew he was a spy sent by the unclean. An assassination plot was being engineered, it seemed. Laughable! All of us in Sanctuary knew how, thirty years ago, while travelling in Tibet, a being of pure consciousness named Arupadhatu transmigrated into His Serendipity, and revealed the secrets of freeing the mind from its physical shackles. This had been the beginning of His Serendipity’s path up the holy mountain. Even if the body of His Serendipity were harmed, he could leave his old body and transmigrate into another, as easily as I change hotels and islands. He could transmigrate into his own assassin.
Anyway, this lawyer was injected with truth serum and confessed to everything. His mission had been to put an odourless poison into the refectory rice cookers. His Serendipity’s wife conducted the interview herself, I heard.