Linnear 03 - White Ninja Read Free Page B

sweat-soaked, and cannot return to sleep. Night after night bolting awake, licking his salty lips, staring at the ceiling, at the vapour curling.
    Nicholas had come to Japan with Justine's father to merge their computer chip manufacturing arm with that of Sato International's. Now, in desperation, Nicholas throws himself into his new work, the reason he has stayed on in Japan after Akiko's death. The hellishly complex merger has been consummated, and the business of the chip manufacturing has to be coordinated with Sato International. Nicholas and Tanzan Nangi, the vast conglomerate's head, have become friends.
    Together, they are manufacturing a revolutionary computer chip, known as a Sphynx t-pram, a totally programmable random access memory chip. The ramifications in the computer industry of such a discovery are staggering - and so have been the profits. IBM has tried to deal itself in, offering the services of its infinitely expandable research and development department in exchange for the chip's secret; similarly, Motorola has offered them a lucrative partnership. But the chip's design is strictly proprietary, and, to Nicholas's and Nangi's surprise, no one has come near to duplicating the amazing chip.
    Nicholas and Nangi have decided to go it alone.
    With Justine so withdrawn, Nicholas spends more and more time with Nangi, and, he supposes, it would have continued that way for a very long time, had it not been
    for his headaches. Not the headaches, really, so much as their cause: the tumour.
    It is benign but, because it is growing, it needs to be removed. This cause for alarm is what breaks their dead daughter's spell over Justine. Finding she is still needed, Justine returns to life. Waiting for the results of the tests, the operation, the two of them find a new intimacy. But, Justine tells him, she is taking precautions. She is not yet ready to return to the psychic ordeal of pregnancy.
    The anaesthesia is like a carpet upon which Nicholas walks in slippered feet, in a direction unknown to him. In that sense, it is like life, and unlike michi, the path, also the journey, which are known.
    Nicholas, gazing upon the angelic face of his daughter, who lives again and forever in the theatre of his mind, for the first time openly wishes to abandon michi, his path, his journey. He wishes to change his karma. In the past, he has bent his fate as if it were an alder staff. But now he wishes to break it in two, turning it into an instrument of his own will.
    This is what he longs for as, with an open heart, he tries to capture the spirit of his dead daughter, to observe her in the same manner hi which he monitored her slowly beating heart. To gather to him like tender blossoms the pitifully few days of her life in order to know what made her strong, what made her cry, what caused her to laugh.
    But it is impossible. Even floating god-b'ke in othertime, otherplace, the essence of her passes through his trembling fingers like grains of sand disappearing into the heart of the desert. And here, in front of only one witness - himself - he does what he could not do for two years.
    He weeps bitter tears for her...
    He awoke to a whiteness so pure' that for a moment his blood seemed to congeal, thinking of vapour curling, falling without end, dropping like a stone down a well.
    His scream brought the nurses running, their rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the polished linoleum floor. It brought, Justine awake with a start, her heart lurching because she had not even been aware that she had fallen asleep at his side, holding his hand. She had done that unconsciously, the pad of her thumb against the branched blue vein on the back of his hand, feeling the slow pulse of blood there as, three years before, she had listened for the slow pulse of her doomed daughter's heartbeat.
    The nurses brushed Justine away, not with any animosity, but with the cool indifference born of efficiency that was so much more difficult to bear, since they were