"I don't care how safe it is, I've never liked the idea. There are a hell of a lot of things we don't know." Henderson stood by the edge of the sleep-field, rubbing his forehead with a thick-fingered hand. "I'm not sure what happened to him, but the attendant cube would have detected him if he'd done anything similar before."
"You touched it six years ago," Nestor said.
"Under social duress, yes."
"You know what happens. Why did he behave differently?"
He shook his head and ordered the physics cube to leave the cabin. "Anna, you're not dealing with an inhabitant of the twenty-fourth century. He's probably never even looked at his phosphene patterns, much less the backside of his skull. We're used to complex intoxication—to us, it's a safe and reasonable science. But in his day, if it occurred at all, it was regarded as a religious experience."
"I understand that. I joked about him seeing the face of God."
"Whatever he saw, it pushed him over into a temporary seizure. Not that he's epileptic; he just locked his doors and decided to retreat for a few minutes. Do you understand what happens when we touch the hole?"
Anna shook her head. "Not completely."
"I won't chide you for your ignorance. But if you're going to play with something so powerful, at least try to know what's going on. That's common sense, right?"
Anna nodded.
"When we touch it, we come in contact with a weak outer field of probability, which dictates that our nervous system will behave with greater efficiency than normal. The result is a kind of superstimulus—we become sensitive to everything. Blake called it opening the doors of perception. It's not unlike what happens when we pass through warp."
"I think he was asleep when we entered warp the first time."
"He didn't talk about it?"
"No. He was on the inducer that evening. He was too keyed up to sleep naturally."
"Next time, let him get used to our fun and games through easy introductions. Can you explain all this to him?"
"I think so," Anna said meekly.
" 'Can you explain why he should never touch the hole again?"
"No."
"It's simple. Next time the field will behave exactly in reverse. His nervous system will suffer reduced efficiency. All his vital functions will stop. He'll be dead before a medical cube can reach him." Henderson looked down at Kawashita. "I've always wondered what somebody who's never lived in our society would think of us. They'd probably decide we're still children. We still do silly, dangerous things for ridiculous reasons. Right?" He looked sternly at Nestor.
She shivered. "Right," she said.
"Like children. We never really grow up."
"That's enough, Henderson," she said. "I've got your point. No need to grind it in."
"As you wish. Is the hole off limits, even for initiations?"
She nodded.
"He'll come out of it soon. I can stay with him, if you have other things to do, but he needs to have someone around him for a while."
"I'll stay."
The doctor left Kawashita's cabin. Nestor pulled her robes out around her knees and sat on the chair, looking at Kawashita's face, still touched by a slight inclination of the eyebrows, a squinting of the eyes, but quiet now and almost peaceful.
"It creeps up on us, and we don't even suspect," she whispered to his sleeping form. "It takes someone like you to trip us up and show our flaws. We owe a great deal to the innocents."
She sat by the bed for an hour, watching the rhythmic motion of his chest, the taps of pulse in his wrist and in a vein near his temple. "You're not a tame monkey any more," she said. "You're not my toy." Then she felt a rise of heat in her throat, and she hated herself more intensely than she had in years.
Yoshio stirred on the sleep-field and murmured something in Japanese. His eyes opened and he stiffened, then relaxed.
"You were dreaming," Anna said, smiling down on him.
"I went to visit a friend," he said.
"Who was that?"
"A man who tutored my daughter."
"Tutored Masa?"
"Yes, a wise gentleman who tried to warn me about her, that she was not going to behave the way I wished her to behave. Before she married Yoritomo."
"What happened?"
"It was only a dream," Kawashita said.
"Dreams are important."
"He said I was free now, I did not have to search."
"For what?"
"A reason why I did the things I did."
"Why shouldn't you search anymore?"
"Because there is no one to demand satisfactory answers. When I put my finger on the black hole, I saw things clear, and all the complexity behind them. But there was no spirit waiting to ask questions."
"You didn't see the face of God. Don't be disappointed—it really isn't that sort of thing."
"You do not understand. I saw the face, but it wasn't asking questions. It was waiting."
"For what?"
"I don't know." He turned his head away and closed his eyes. "When I was a child, I saw a demon. It scared me so badly I never went into that room again, not willingly. It was the room where my grandmother slept. But she had died recently, and without my knowing it, my parents changed all the furniture. I woke up from a nap, dreaming about grandmother, and went to her room to tell her about it. I forgot she wasn't with us anymore. When I opened the door and walked in, everything was different, and I couldn't understand why. I looked at the different furniture, the new prints on the wall, and became frightened. I had never seen the room before. It was like I had opened a door into another world, a nightmare place. I accepted that so completely that I looked into a corner and saw a demon squatting there, staring at me. He looked like a frog with horns and had a man's legs, and his eyes were huge and white, like a blind fish's. He stood up—he was half as tall as I—and came at me with sharp claws. I screamed and ran away. When I stopped running, I was in the kitchen, alone, with nothing chasing me. Now I know where the frog-demon is." He tapped his chest. "Me. I am the one who has crossed over into the wrong world, not a little boy. Divine spirits abducted me, tested me, and found me wanting. So now there is no reason to look for answers."
"I don't follow you," Anna said.
"Since no one wants to know why I did such things, I only have to satisfy myself. That makes me happier."
"Are you feeling all right?"
Kawashita smiled. "A little confused, weak. But much better, yes."
"You scared me. You still scare me. All this talk about demons and divine spirits. I thought we were joking about seeing God's face."
"Yes," Kawashita said flatly. "It was a joke."
"I'll never understand the punch line, then."
"When East meets West—even so extended a West as you are—it's like different species meeting, no?" Kawashita held out his hand and patted her cheek gently. "We are what you call unknowable?"
"Inscrutable," Nestor supplied.
"But don't worry. Show me Earth, let me learn, let me find my own way."
"I won't stop you," she said. "I'm too curious."