Otherness by David Brin Read Free Book Online Page B

this. It will not cause much discomfort. You will have to stay for only two nights."

    Dazed, Reiko did not even think of complaining as they gave her an injection. With sudden drowsiness swarming over her, she watched the world swim as they wheeled her into an operating room. There was hushed, professional talk. Nobody spoke to her.

    " S'karaimas. Gomen nasai ," she said as the anesthetist's mask came down and a sweet, cloying odor filled her mouth and throat. "Forgive me, I am very tired."

    Reiko's shattered thoughts orbited a burning core of shame. She seemed to have forgotten the reason she was apologizing, but whatever she had done, Reiko knew it had to have been terrible.

9.

    Dreams began disturbing her sleep soon after her third homecoming. They started out as muddy, uncertain feelings of depression and fear, which did not rouse her but left her tired in the morning when it came time to prepare Tetsuo for work and Yukiko for preschool. Often she would collapse back upon the tatami after they were gone. She had no energy. This pregnancy seemed to be taking much more out of her than the first one.

    Then there was the music. There was no escaping the music.

    At first it had been rather pleasant. The tiny machine that had been implanted in her womb could barely be traced with her fingertips. Nothing extruded. It drew power from small batteries that would easily last another five months.

    And at this stage in the fetus's development, all the device ever did was play music. Endlessly, over and over again, music.

    " Minora wa, gakusei desu ," Tetsuo said. "Little Minoru is now a student. Of course his brain is not yet advanced enough to accept more complex lessons, but he can learn music even this early. He will emerge with perfect pitch, knowing his scales already, as if by instinct."

    Tetsuo smiled. " Minoru kun wa on'gaku ga suki deshoo ."

    So the harmonies repeated, over and over again, throbbing like sonar within the confined sea of her in-sides, diffracting around and through her organs, resonating at last with the beating of her heart.

    Yumi no longer visited when she thought Tetsuo might be at home. Their father had voiced his disgusted disapproval of Tetsuo and this invasion against the ways of nature. Reiko had been forced to answer loyally in Tetsuo's defense.

    "You are too Westernized," she told them, borrowing her husband's own words. "You too blindly accept the gaijin and their alien concepts about nature and guilt. There is no shame in this thing we are doing."

    "A dubious distinction," her father had replied irritably. Yumi then interjected. " Guilt consists in doing the right thing, even when nobody is watching, Reiko. Shame is making sure you don't get caught doing what others disapprove."

    "Well?" Reiko had answered. "You two are the only ones expressing disapproval. All of Tetsuo's associates and friends admire him for this! My neighbors come by to listen to the music!"

    Her sister and father had looked at each other at that moment, as if she had just proved their point. But Reiko did not understand. All she knew for certain was that she must side with her husband. No other choice was even conceivable. Yumi might be able to have a more "modern" marriage, but to Reiko such ways seemed to promise only chaos.

    "We plan to give our son the best advantages," she concluded in the end. And to that, of course, there was very little the others could reply. "We shall see," her father had concluded. Then he changed the subject to the color of the autumn leaves.

10.

    At the end of Reiko's sixth month the thing in her womb spoke its first words.

    She sat up quickly in the dark, clutching the covers. In a brief moment of terror Reiko thought that it had been a ghost, or the baby himself, mumbling dire premonitions from deep inside her. The words were indistinct, but she could feel them vibrating under her trembling fingertips.

    It took a few moments to realize that it was the machine once again, now