Ghostwritten

Okinawa

Who was blowing on the nape of my neck?

I swung around. The tinted glass doors hissed shut. The light was bright. Synthetic ferns swayed, very gently, up and down the empty lobby. Nothing moved in the sun-smacked car park. Beyond, a row of palm trees and the deep sky.

‘Sir?’

I swung around. The receptionist was still waiting, offering me her pen, her smile as ironed as her uniform. I saw the pores beneath her make-up, and heard the silence beneath the muzak, and the rushing beneath the silence.

‘Kobayashi. I called from the airport, a while ago. To reserve a room.’ Pinpricking in the palms of my hands. Little thorns.

‘Ah, yes, Mr Kobayashi...’ So what if she didn’t believe me? The unclean check into hotels under false names all the time. To fornicate, with strangers. ‘If I could just ask you to fill in your name and address here, sir... and your profession?’

I showed her my bandaged hand. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to fill the form in for me.’

‘Certainly... My, how did that happen?’

‘A door closed on it.’

She winced sympathetically, and turned the form around. ‘Your profession, Mr Kobayashi?’

‘I’m a software engineer. I develop products for different companies, on a contract-by-contract basis.’

She frowned. I wasn’t fitting her form. ‘I see, no company as such, then...’

‘Let’s use the company I’m working with at the moment.’ Easy. The Fellowship’s technology division will arrange corroboration.

‘Fine, Mr Kobayashi... Welcome to the Okinawa Garden Hotel.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Are you visiting Okinawa for business or for sightseeing, Mr Kobayashi?’

Was there something quizzical in her smile? Suspicion in her face?

‘Partly business, partly sightseeing.’ I deployed my alpha control voice.

‘We hope you have a pleasant stay. Here’s your key, sir. Room 307. If we can assist you in any way, please don’t hesitate to ask.’

You? Assist me? ‘Thank you.’

Unclean, unclean. These Okinawans never were pure-blooded Japanese. Different, weaker ancestors. As I turned away and walked towards the elevator, my ESP told me she was smirking to herself. She wouldn’t be smirking if she knew the calibre of mind she was dealing with. Her time will come, like all the others.

Not a soul was stirring in the giant hotel. Hushed corridors stretched into the noontime distance, empty as catacombs.

There’s no air in my room. Use of air-conditioning is prohibited in Sanctuary because it impairs alpha waves. To show solidarity with my brothers and sisters, I switched it off and opened the windows. The curtains I keep drawn. You never know whose telephoto lens might be looking in.

I looked out into the eye of the sun. Naha is a cheap, ugly city. But for the background band of Pacific aquamarine this city could be any tentacle of Tokyo. The usual red-and-white TV transmitter, broadcasting the government’s subliminal command frequencies. The usual department stores rising like windowless temples, dazzling the unclean into compliance. The urban districts, the factories pumping out poison into the air and water supplies. Fridges abandoned in wastegrounds of lesser trash. What grafted-on pieces of ugliness are their cities! I imagine the New Earth sweeping this festering mess away like a mighty broom, returning the land to its virginal state. Then the Fellowship will create something we deserve, which the survivors will cherish for eternity.

I cleaned myself and examined my face in the bathroom mirror. You are one such survivor, Quasar. Strong features, highlighting my samurai legacy. Ridged eyebrows. A hawkish nose. Quasar, the harbinger. His Serendipity had chosen my name prophetically. My role was to pulse at the edge of the universe of the faithful, alone in the darkness. An outrider. A herald.

The extractor fan droned. Somewhere beyond its drone I could hear a little girl, sobbing. So much sadness in this twisted world. I began shaving.

I awoke early, not remembering where I was for the first few moments. Jigsaw pieces of my dream lay dropped around. There had been Mr Ikeda, my home-room teacher from high school, and two or three of the worst bullies. My biological father had appeared too. I remembered that day when the bullies had got everyone in the class to pretend that I was dead. By afternoon it had spread through the whole school. Everyone pretended they couldn’t see me. When I spoke they pretended they couldn’t hear me. Mr Ikeda got to hear about it, and as a society-appointed guardian of young minds what did he take it upon himself to do? The bastard conducted a funeral service for me during the final home-room hour. He’d even lit some incense, and led the chanting, and everything.

Before His Serendipity lit my life I was defenceless. I sobbed and screamed at them to stop, but nobody saw me. I was dead.

After awakening, I found I was tormented with an erection. Too much gamma wave interference. I meditated under my picture of His Serendipity until it had subsided.

If it’s funerals the unclean want, they shall have them aplenty, during the White Nights, before His Serendipity rises to claim his kingdom. Funerals with no mourners.

I walked down the Kokusai Dori, the main street of the city, doubling back and weaving off to lose anybody who was trailing me. Unfortunately my alpha potential is still too weak to achieve invisibility, so I have to shake trailers the old-fashioned way. When I was sure nobody was following me I ducked into a games centre and placed a call from a telephone booth. Public call boxes are much less likely to be bugged.

‘Brother, this is Quasar. Please connect me with the Minister of Defence.’

‘Certainly, brother. The Minister is expecting you. Permit me to congratulate you on the success of our recent mission.’

I was put on hold for a couple of moments. The Minister of Defence is a favourite of His Serendipity’s. He graduated from the Imperial University. He was a judge, before hearing the call of His Serendipity. He is a born leader. ‘Ah, Quasar. Excellent. You are in good health?’

‘On His Serendipity’s service, Minister. I always enjoy good health. I have overcome my allergies, and for nine months I haven’t suffered from—’

‘We are delighted with you. His Serendipity is mightily impressed with the depth of your faith. Mightily impressed. He is meditating on your anima now, in his retreat. On yours alone, for fortification and enrichment.’

‘Minister! I beg you to convey my deepest thanks.’

‘Gladly. You’ve earned it. This is a war against the unclean myriad, and in this war acts of courage do not go unacknowledged, nor unrewarded. Now. You’ll be wondering how long you are to remain away from your family. The Cabinet believes seven days will suffice.’

‘I understand, Minister.’ I bowed deeply.

‘Have you seen the television reports?’

‘I avoid the lies of the unclean state, Minister. For what snake would willingly heed the voice of the snakecharmer? Even though I am away from Sanctuary, His Serendipity’s instructions are inscribed in my heart. I imagine we have caused a stir amongst the hornets.’

‘Indeed. They are talking about terrorism, showing the unclean foaming at the mouth. The poor animals are almost to be pitied — almost. As His Serendipity predicted, they are missing the point that it is their sins being visited on their heads. Be proud, Quasar, that you were one of the chosen ministers of justice! The 39th Sacred Revelation: Pride in one’s sacrifice is not a sin but self-respect. Keep a low profile, none the less. Blend in. Do a little sightseeing. I trust your expense account will suffice?’

‘The treasurer was most generous, and my needs are simple.’

‘Very good. Contact us again in seven days. The Fellowship looks forward to welcoming our beloved brother home.’

I returned to the hotel for my midday cleaning and meditation. I ate some crackers, seaweed snacks and cashew nuts, and drank green tea from a vending machine outside my room. When I went out again after lunch the unclean receptionist gave me a map, and I chose a tourist spot to visit.

The Japanese naval headquarters was set in a scrubby park at the top of a hill overlooking Naha, to the north. During the war it had been so well hidden that it took the invading Americans three weeks after they had seized Okinawa to stumble across it. The Americans are not a very bright race. They miss the obvious. Their embassy had the effrontery to deny His Serendipity a residence visa ten years ago. Now, of course, His Serendipity can come and go where he pleases using sub-space conversion techniques. He has visited the White House several times, unhindered.

I paid for my ticket and went down the steps. The dim coolness welcomed me. A pipe somewhere was dripping. There was one more surprise waiting for the American invaders. In order to die an honourable death, the full contingent of four thousand men had taken their own lives. Twenty days previously.

Honour. What does this frothy, idol-riddled world of the unclean know of honour? Walking through the tunnels I stroked the walls with my fingertips. I stroked the scars on the wall, made by the grenade blasts and the picks that the soldiers had used to dig their stronghold, and I felt true kinship with them. The same kinship I feel at Sanctuary. With my enhanced alpha quotient, I was picking up on their anima residue. I wandered the tunnels until I lost track of the time.

As I left that memorial to nobility a coachload of tourists arrived. I took one look at them, with their cameras and potato-chip packets and their stupid Kansai expressions and their limbless minds with less alpha capacity than a housefly, and I wished that I had one more phial of the cleansing fluid left, so that I could lob it down the stairs after them and lock them in. They would be cleansed in the same way that the money-blinded of Tokyo had been cleansed. It would have appeased the souls of the young soldiers who had died for their beliefs decades ago, as I had been ready to do only seventy-two hours ago. They were betrayed by the puppet governments that despoiled our land after the war. As have we all been betrayed by a society evolving into markets for Disney and McDonald’s. All that sacrifice, to build what? To build an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the United States.

But I had no phials left, and so I had to endure those unclean, chattering, defecating, spawning, defiling, cretins. Literally, they made me gasp for air.

I walked back down the hill under the palm trees.

In the palm of the left hand there is an alpha receptor point. When His Serendipity first granted me a personal audience He held my hand open and gently pressed this receptor point with his index finger. I felt a peculiar buzz, like a pleasant electric shock, and I was later to discover that my concentrative powers had quadrupled.

It was raining on that most precious day, three and a half years ago. Clouds marched down from Mt Fuji, an eastern wind blew across the undulating farmland around Sanctuary. I’d enlisted on the Fellowship Welcome Programme twelve weeks before, and on this morning I had completed some business with one of the under-secretaries of the Fellowship Treasury. I had signed the papers releasing me from the prison of materialism. Now the Fellowship owned my house and its contents, my savings, pension funds, my golf membership, and my car. I felt freer than I had ever believed possible. My family — my unclean, biological family, my skin family — predictably failed to understand. All my life, they had measured every last millimetre of failure and success, and here I was snapping their rule across my knee. The last letter I ever received from my mother informed me that my father had written me out of his will. But as His Serendipity writes in the 71st Sacred Revelation, The fury of the damned is as impotent as a rat gnawing a holy mountain.

They never loved me, anyway. They wouldn’t know of the word’s existence if they hadn’t seen it on the TV.

His Serendipity came down the stairs, accompanied by the Minister of Security. The light whitened as he neared the office. I saw his sandalled feet and his purple robes first, then the rest of his beloved form came into view. He smiled at me, knowing telepathically who I was and what I had done. ‘I am the Guru.’ And he permitted me to kiss his holy ruby ring as I knelt. I could feel his alpha emantions, like a compass feels magnetic north.

‘Master,’ I replied. ‘I have come home.’

His Serendipity spoke cleanly and beautifully, and the words came from His very eyes. ‘You have freed yourself from the asylum of the unclean. Little brother. Today you have joined a new family. You have transcended your old family of the skin, and you have joined a new family of the spirit. From this day, you have ten thousand brothers and sisters. This family will grow into millions by the end of the world. And it will grow, and grow, with roots in all nations. We are finding fertile soil in foreign lands. Our family will grow until the world without is the world within. This is not a prophecy. This is inevitable, future reality. How do you feel, newest child of our nation without borders, without suffering?’

‘Lucky, Your Serendipity. So very lucky to be able to drink from the fountain of truth, while still in my twenties.’

‘My little brother, we both know that it was not luck which brought you here. Love brought you to us.’ Then He kissed me, and I kissed the mouth of eternal life. ‘Who knows,’ said my Master, ‘if you continue your alpha self-amplification as rapidly as the Minister of Education reports, you may be entrusted with a very special mission in the future...’ My heart leapt still higher. I had been discussed! Only a novice, but I had been discussed!

In the coffee bars, in shops and offices and schools, on the giant screen in the shopping mall, in every rabbit-hutch apartment, people watched news of the cleansing. The maid who came to clean my room wouldn’t shut up about it. I let her babble. She asked me what I thought. I said that I was only a computer-systems engineer from Nagoya and knew nothing about such matters. Indifference was not enough for her: outrage has become compulsory. To avert suspicion, a little play-acting will be necessary. The maid mentioned the Fellowship. It seems that the leprous fingers of our country’s detestable media are being pointed, despite our past warnings.

I went out in the middle of the afternoon to buy some more shampoo and soap. The receptionist was sitting with her back to the lobby, glued to the set. Television is unclean lies, and it damages your alpha cortex. However, I thought just a few minutes wouldn’t hurt me, so I watched it with her. Twenty-one cleansed, and many hundreds semi-cleansed. An unequivocal warning to the state of the unclean.

‘I can’t believe it happened in Japan,’ said the receptionist. ‘In America, yes. But here?’

A panel of ‘experts’ was discussing the ‘atrocity’. The experts included a nineteen-year-old pop star and a sociology professor from Tokyo University. Why do Japanese only listen to pop stars and professors? They kept playing the same footage over and over again, a scene of the uncleansed running out of the metro station, handkerchiefs smothering their mouths, retching, scratching furiously at their eyes. As His Serendipity writes in the 32nd Sacred Revelation, If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. Pictures of the cleansed, lying still where their cleansing had freed them. Their skin families, sobbing in their ignorance. Cut to the Prime Minister, the bushiest fool of them all, swearing that he wouldn’t rest until ‘the perpetrators of this monstrosity were brought to justice’.

Is this hypocrisy not blinding? Can’t they see that the real atrocity is the modern world’s systematic slaughter of man’s oneness with his anima? The act of the Fellowship was merely one counterattack against the true monster of our age. The first skirmish in a long war that evolution destines us to win.

And why can people not see the futility? A mere politician, one more bribe-taking, back-stabbing, under-the-table cockroach whose mind cannot even conceive of the cesspit it flounders in: How could such unclean lowlives ever hope to coerce His Serendipity into doing anything? A boddhisatva who can make himself invisible at will, a yogic flier, a divine being who can breathe underwater. Bring Him and His servants to ‘justice’? We are the floating ministers of justice! Of course I still lack the alpha quotient to shield myself with telepathy or telekinesis, but I am many hundreds of kilometres away from the scene of the cleansing. They’ll never think of looking for me here.

I slipped out of the cool lobby.

I kept a low profile all week, but invisibility might attract attention. I invented business meetings to attend, and from Monday to Friday walked past the receptionist with a curt ‘Good morning’ promptly at 8.30 a.m. Time dragged its heels. Naha’s just another small city. The Americans from the military bases that plague these islands strut up and down the main streets, many of them with our females draped off their arms, Japanese females clad in nothing but little wraps of cloth. The Okinawan males ape the foreigners. I walked through the department stores, watching the endless chain of wanting and buying. I walked until my feet ached. I sat in shady coffee shops, where shelves sagged under the weight of magazines of mindtrash. I eavesdropped on businessmen, buying and selling what wasn’t theirs. I carried on walking. Workaday idiots gaped in the rattling vacuity of pachinko machines, as I had once done in the days before His Serendipity opened my inner eyes. Tourists from the mainland toured the souvenir shops, buying boxes of tat that nobody ever really wants. The usual foreigners selling watches and cheap jewellery on the pavements, without licences. I walked through the games arcades where the poisoned children congregate after school, gazing at screens where evil cyborgs, phantoms and zombies do battle. The same shops as anywhere else... Burger King, Benetton, Nike... High streets are becoming the same all over the world, I suppose. I walked through backstreets, where housewives put out futons to air, living the same year sixty times. I watched a potter with a pocked face, bent over a wheel. A dying man, coughing without removing his cigarette, repaired a child’s tricycle on a bottom step. A woman without any teeth put fresh flowers in a vase beneath a family shrine. I went to the old Ryukyu palace one afternoon. There were drinks machines in the courtyard, and a shop called The Holy Swordsman that sold nothing but key rings and camera film. The ancient ramparts were swarming with high school kids from Tokyo. The boys look like girls, with long hair and pierced ears and plucked eyebrows. The girls laugh like spider monkeys into their pocket phones. Hate them and you have to hate the world, Quasar.

Very well, Quasar. Let us hate the world.

The only peaceful place in Naha was the port. I watched boats, islanders, tourists, and mighty cargo ships. I’ve always enjoyed the sea. My biological uncle used to take me to the harbour at Yokohama. We used to take a pocket atlas to look up the ships’ ports and countries of origin.

Of course, that was a lifetime ago. Before my true father called me home.

Coming out of an alpha trance one day after my noon cleansing, a spoked shadow congealed into a spider. I was going to flush it down the toilet when, to my amazement, it transmitted an alpha message! Of course, His Serendipity was using it to speak with me. The Guru has an impish sense of humour.

‘Courage, Quasar, my chosen. Courage, and strength. This is your destiny.’

I knelt before the spider. ‘I knew you wouldn’t forget me, Lord,’ I answered, and let the spider wander over my body. Then I put him in a little jar. I resolved to buy some flypaper to catch flies, so I could feed my little brother. We are both His Serendipity’s messengers.

Speculation about the ‘doomsday cult’ continues. How it annoys me! The Fellowship stands for life, not for doom. The Fellowship is not a ‘cult’. Cults enslave. The Fellowship liberates. Leaders of cults are fork-tongued swindlers with private harems of whores and fleets of Rolls-Royces behind the stage set. I have been privileged to glimpse life in the Guru’s inner circle — not one girl in sight! His Serendipity is free of the sticky web of sex. His Serendipity’s wife was chosen merely to bear his children. The younger sons of Cabinet members and favoured disciples are permitted to attend to the Guru’s modest domestic needs. These fortunates are clad only in meditation loincloths so they are ready to assume zazen alpha positioning whenever the Master condescends to bestow his blessing. And in the whole of Sanctuary there are only three Cadillacs — His Serendipity well knows when to exorcise the demons of materialism that possess the unclean, and when to exploit this obsession as a Trojan Horse, to penetrate the mire of the world outside.

To deflect suspicion from the Fellowship, His Serendipity allowed some journalists into Sanctuary to film brothers and sisters during alpha enrichment. Our chemical facilities were also inspected. The Minister of Science explained that we were making fertiliser. Being vegetarians, he joked, the Fellowship needs to grow a lot of cucumbers! I recognised my brothers and sisters. They gave me telepathic messages of encouragement to their Brother Quasar through their screen images. I laughed aloud. The unclean TV news hyenas were trying to incriminate the Fellowship, not noticing how the Fellowship was using them to transmit messages to me. The Minister of Security allowed himself to be interviewed. Brilliantly, he defended the Fellowship from any involvement in the cleansing. One can only outwit demons, His Serendipity teaches in the 13th Sacred Revelation, if one is as cunning as the lord of Hell.

More disturbing were the television interviews with the blind unclean. The apostates. People who are welcomed into the Fellowship’s love, but who reject it and fall again into the world of shit outside Sanctuary. In his infinite mercy His Serendipity permits these maggots to live, if ‘living’ it can be called, on condition that they do not defame the Fellowship. If they ignore this law and sow lies about Sanctuary in the press, the Minister of Security has to license the cleansing of them and their families.

On television the faces of the blind unclean were digitalised out, but no image-doctoring can fool a mind of my alpha quotient. One was Mayumi Aoi, who joined the Fellowship in my Welcome Programme. She paid lip-service to His Serendipity, but one morning, eight weeks into the Programme, we awoke to find her gone. We all suspected her of being a police agent. Hearing the lies she told about life in Sanctuary, I switched the television off and resolved never to watch it again.

A week after my first call I telephoned Sanctuary. I was answered by a voice I didn’t know.

‘Good morning. This is Quasar.’

‘Ah, Quasar. The Minister of Information is busy this morning. I am his under-secretary. We’ve been expecting your call. Have you seen the growing hysteria?’

‘Indeed, sir.’

‘Yes. Your cleansing operation was almost too successful, it might appear. His Serendipity has ordered me to tell you to lie low for a couple more weeks.’

‘I obey His Serendipity in all things.’

‘In addition, you are ordered to proceed to a more remote location. Purely as a precaution. Our brothers in the unclean police have told us your details are being circulated. We must act with stealth, and guile. Officially, we are denying complicity in your gas attack. This will win us more time to strengthen the Fellowship with new brothers and sisters. This tactic worked for our cleansing experiment in Nagano Prefecture last year. How easily misled are these dung-beetles!’

‘Indeed, sir.’

‘In the event that you are arrested, you are to assume full responsibility for your attack, and claim that you had acted entirely on your own volition, after being expelled from the Fellowship for insanity. You would then be teleported out of custody by His Serendipity.’

‘Naturally, sir. I obey His Serendipity in all things.’

‘You are a great asset to the Fellowship, Quasar. Any questions?’

‘I was wondering if phase two of the great cleansing has begun yet, sir? Have our yogic fliers been despatched to the parliament building to demand the integration of His Serendipity’s teachings into the national curriculum? If we leave it too long, then the unclean might—’

‘Quasar, you forget yourself! When was it decreed that your responsibilities included advocating Fellowship foreign policy?’

‘I understand my error, sir. Forgive me, sir. I beg you.’

‘You are already forgiven, dear son of His Serendipity! No doubt you are lonely, away from your family?’

‘Yes, sir. But I received the alpha-wave messages sent from my brothers and sisters through the news broadcasts. And His Serendipity speaks to me words of comfort in my exile as I meditate.’

‘Excellent. Two more weeks should be sufficient, Quasar. If your funds run low, you may contact the Fellowship’s Secret Service using the usual code. Otherwise maintain silence.’

‘One more thing, sir. The apostate Mayumi Aoi—’

‘The Minister of Information has noticed. The sewers of the blind unclean shall for ever be sealed. The Minister of Security will act, when the present scrutiny subsides. Perhaps we have shown too much mercy in the past. We are now at war.’

I walked to the port in the stellar heat of mid-afternoon, and collected boat schedules from a rack. I pulled open my map. I have always preferred maps to books. They don’t answer you back. Never throw a map away. The islands beckoned, imperial emeralds in a sky-blue sea. I chose one labelled Kumejima. Half a day away to the west, but not so small that a visitor would stand out. There was only one boat per day, departing at 6.45 a.m. I bought a ticket for the next day’s sailing.

I spent the rest of the day sitting on the quay. I recited all of His Serendipity’s Sacred Revelations, oblivious to the flow of lost souls passing by.

Eventually the sun sank, crimson and wobbling. I hadn’t noticed it grow dark. I walked back to my hotel, where I told the receptionist that my business was concluded and I would depart for Osaka early the next morning.

The subway train in Tokyo was as crammed as a cattle-wagon. Crammed with organs, wrapped in meat, wrapped in clothes. Silent and sweaty. I was half-afraid some fool would crush the phials prematurely. Our Minister of Science had explained to me exactly how the package worked. When I ripped open the seal and pressed the three buttons simultaneously, I would have one minute to get clear before the solenoids shattered the phials, and the great cleansing of the world would begin.

I put the package on the baggage rack and waited for the appointed minute. I focused my alpha telepathy, and sent messages of encouragement to my co-cleansers in various metro trains throughout Tokyo.

I studied the people around me. The honoured unclean, the first to be cleansed. Dumb. Sorry. Tired. Mind-rotted. Mules, in a never-ending whirpool of lies, pain, and ignorance. I was a few inches away from a baby, in a woolly cap, strapped to its mother’s back. It was asleep and dribbling and smelt of toddlers’ marshiness. A girl, I guessed from the pink Minnie Mouse sewn onto the cap. Pensioners who had nothing to look forward to but senility and wheelchairs in lonely magnolia ‘homes’. Young salarymen, supposedly in their prime, their minds conditioned for greed and bullying.

I had the life and death of those lowlives in my hands! What would they say? How would they try to dissuade me? How would they justify their insectoid existences? Where could they start? How could a tadpole address a god?

The carriage swayed, jarred and the lights dipped for a moment into brown.

Not well enough.

I remembered His Serendipity’s words that morning. ‘I have seen the comet, far beyond the farthest orbit of the mundane mind. The New Earth is approaching. The judgement of the vermin is coming. By helping it along a little, we are putting them out of their misery. Sons, you are the chosen agents of the Divine.’

In those last few moments, as we pulled into the station, His Serendipity fortified me with a vision of the future. Within three short years His Serendipity is going to enter Jerusalem. In the same year Mecca is going to bow down, and the Pope and the Dalai Lama will seek conversion. The Presidents of Russia and the US petition for His Serendipity’s patronage.

Then, in July of that year, the comet is detected by observatories all over the world. Narrowly missing Neptune, it approaches Earth, eclipsing the Moon, blazing even in the midday sky over the airfields and mountain ranges and cities of the world. The unclean rush out and welcome this latest novelty. And that will be their undoing! The Earth is bathed in microwaves from the comet, and only those with high alpha quotients will be able to insulate themselves. The unclean die, retching, scratching out their eyes, stinking of their own flesh as it cooks on their bones. The survivors begin the creation of Paradise. His Serendipity will reveal himself as His Divinity. A butterfly emerging from the chrysalis of his body.

I feel into the perforated sports bag, and I rip open the seal. I have to flick the switches, and hold them down for three seconds to set the timer. One. Two. Three. The New Earth is coming. History is ticking. I zip the bag shut, let it fall to my feet, and shunt it surreptitiously under a seat with the back of my heel. The compartment is so crammed that none of the zombies notices.

The will of His Serendipity.

The train pulls into the station, and—

I hear the noises under the manhole cover, but I dared not, dared not listen to its words.

If the noises ever become words — not now, not yet. Not ever. Where would it end?

I entered the current that flowed to the escalators, and away from there.

Over my shoulder, the train accelerated into the fumey darkness.

The palms of my hands were pricking and sweaty. A seagull strutted along the window ledge and peered in. It had a cruel face.

‘And your name, sir?’ The old lady who ran the inn grinned the grimace of a temple god. Why was she grinning? To make me nervous? She had more black gaps than stained teeth.

‘My name’s Tokunaga. Buntaro Tokunaga.’

‘Tokunaga... lovely name. It has a regal air.’

‘I’ve never thought about it.’

‘And what business are you in, Mr Tokunaga?’

Questions and questions. Do the unclean never stop?

‘I’m just an ordinary salaryman. I don’t work for a famous company. I’m the department head of a small computer business in the suburbs of Tokyo.’

‘Tokyo? Is that so? I’ve never been to the mainland. We get a lot of holidaymakers from Tokyo. Though not off-season, like now. You can see for yourself, we’re almost empty. I only go to the main island once a year, to visit my grandchildren. I have fourteen grandchildren, you know. Of course, when I say “main island”, I mean the main island of Okinawa, not mainland Japan. I’d never dream of going there!’

‘Really.’

‘They tell me Tokyo’s very big. Bigger even than Naha. A department head? Your mother and father must be so proud! My, that’s grand. I’ve got to ask you to fill out these dratted forms, you know. I wouldn’t bother with it myself but my daughter makes me do it. It’s all to do with licences and tax. It’s a real nuisance. Still. And how long will you be with us on Kumejima, Mr Tokunaga?’

‘I intend to stay a couple of weeks.’

‘Is that so? My, I hope you’ll find enough to do. We’re not a very big island, you know. You can go fishing, or go surfing, or go snorkelling, or scuba-diving... but apart from that, life is very quiet, here. Very slow. Not like Tokyo, I imagine. Won’t your wife be missing you?’

‘No.’ Time to shut her up. ‘The truth is, I’m here on compassionate leave. My wife passed away last month. Cancer.’

The old crone’s face fell, and her hand covered her mouth. Her voice fell to a whisper. ‘Oh, my. Is that so? Oh, my. There I go, putting my foot in it again. My daughter would be so ashamed. I don’t know what to say—’ She kept wheezing apologetically, which was doubly irksome as her breath reeked of prawns.

‘Not to worry. When she passed away, she was finally released from the pain. It was a cruel release, but it was a release. Please don’t be embarrassed. I am a little tired, though. Would you show me to my room?’

‘Yes, of course... Here are your slippers, and I’ll just show you the bathroom... This is the dining room. Come this way, you poor, poor, man... Oh my, what you must have been through... But you’ve come to the right island. Kumejima is wonderful place for healing. I’ve always believed so...’

After my evening cleansing I felt fatigue that no amount of alpha refocusing could dispel. Cursing my weakness, I went to bed and sank into a sleep that was almost bottomless.

The bottom was in a tunnel. A deserted metro tunnel, with rails and service pipes. My job was to patrol it, and guard it from the evil that lived down there. A superior officer walked up to me. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.

‘Obeying orders, sir.’

‘Which are?’

‘Patrolling this tunnel, sir.’

He whistled between his teeth. ‘As usual, a muddle at Sanctuary. There’s a new threat down here. The evil can only consume you when it knows about you. If you maintain your anonymity, all will be well. Now, officer. Give me your name.’

‘Quasar, sir.’

‘And your name from your old life? Your real name?’

‘Tanaka. Keisuke Tanaka.’

‘What is your alpha quotient, Keisuke Tanaka?’

‘16.9.’

‘Place of birth?’

Suddenly, I realise that I have walked into a trap! The evil is my superior officer, ploughing me with questions so it can consume me. My last defence is not to let it know that I have caught on. I am still floundering when a new character walks down the tunnel towards us. She is carrying a viola case and some flowers, and I’ve seen her before somewhere. Someone from my uncleansed days. The evil that is in the guise of my superior officer turns to her and starts the same ruse. ‘Haven’t you heard about the evil? Who authorised your presence here? Give me your name, address, occupation — immediately!’

I want to save her. Lacking a plan, I grab her arm and we run, faster than air currents.

‘Why are we running?’

A foreign woman on a hill, watching a wooden pole sinking into the ground.

‘I’m sorry! I didn’t have time to explain! That officer wasn’t a real officer. It was a disguise. It was the evil that lives in these tunnels!’

‘You must be mistaken!’

‘Yeah? And how would you know?’

As we run, our fingers lock together, I look at her face for the first time. Sidelong, she is smiling, waiting for me to get this most grisly of jokes. I am looking into the real face of evil.

I set off early the next morning to walk around the island. The sea was milky turquoise. The sand was white, hot and yielding. I saw birds I’d never seen before, and salmon-pink butterflies. I saw two lovers and a husky dog walking down the beach. The boy kept whispering things to the girl, and she kept laughing. The dog wanted them to throw the stick, but was too stupid to realise that first he’d have to give the stick back to one of them. As they passed I noticed neither of them wore wedding rings. I bought a couple of riceballs for lunch in a little flyblown shop, and a can of cold tea. I ate them sitting on a grave, wondering when it was that I last belonged anywhere. I mean apart from Sanctuary. I passed an ancient camphor tree, and a field where a goat was tethered. Fieldworkers’ radios played tinny pop music that drifted down to the road. They sweltered under wide, woven hats. Cars rusted away in lay-bys, vegetation growing up out of the radiators. There was a lighthouse on a lonely headland. I walked to it. It was padlocked.

A sugar-cane farmer pulled up by the roadside and offered me a lift. I was footsore, so I accepted. His dialect was so heavy I could barely make out what he was trying to say. He started off talking about the weather, to which I made all the right noises. Then he started talking about me. He knew which inn I was staying at, and how long I was staying, my false name, my job. He even gave his condolences for my dead wife. Every time he used the word ‘computer’ he sealed it in inverted commas.

Back at the inn, the gossip shop was open for business. The television flashed and blinked silently on the counter. On the coffee table five cups of green tea steamed. Seated around on low chairs were a man who I guessed was a fisherman, a woman in dungarees who sat like a man, a thin woman with thin lips, and a man with a huge wart wobbling from one eyebrow like a bunch of grapes.

The old woman who ran the inn was clearly holding court. ‘I still remember the television pictures on the day it happened. All those poor, poor people stumbling out, holding handkerchiefs to their mouths... a nightmare! Welcome back, Mr Tokunaga. Were you in Tokyo during the attack?’

‘No. I was in Yokohama on business.’

I scanned their minds for suspicion. I was safe.

The fisherman lit a cigarette. ‘What was it like the day after?’

‘It certainly took a lot of people by surprise.’

Dungaree-woman nodded and folded her arms. ‘Looks like it’s the beginning of the end for that bunch of lunatics, however.’

‘How do you mean?’ Keeping my voice steady.

The fisherman looked surprised. ‘You haven’t heard? The police have raided them. About time, too. The Fellowship’s assets have been frozen. Their so-called Minister of Defence is being charged with murder of ex-cult members, and five people have been arrested in connection with the gas. Two of those five hanged themselves in their detention cells. Their suicide notes provided enough evidence for a new round of arrests. Would you like to see my newspaper?’

I flinched from the shuffling sheets of lies. ‘No, it’s all right. But how about the Guru?’ The branches may burn in the forest fire, but new growth sprouts from the pure heart.

‘The who?’ Wartman blubbulled his rubbery nose. I wanted to kneel on his neck and cut that abomination off with a sharp pair of scissors.

‘The Leader of the Fellowship.’

‘Oh, that maggot! He’s hiding, like the coward he is!’ Wartman choked on the hatred in his voice! What a sick zoo the world has become, where angels are despised. ‘He’s a true devil, is that one. A devil from hell.’

‘Walking evil, he is! Here you are, Mr Tokunaga.’ The old woman poured me a cup of green tea. I needed to escape to my room to think, but I wanted more news. ‘He fleeces the poor fools who run along to him. Then he acts their father, orders them to do his dirty work, plays out his wicked dreams, then scurries away from the consequences.’

Their ignorance makes me gasp! If only I could make these vermin understand!

‘It’s beyond my comprehension,’ said Dungaree-woman, ‘how such things can happen. It wasn’t just him, was it? There were bright people in the Fellowship, from good universities and good families. Policemen, scientists, teachers, and lawyers. Respectable people. How could they go along with that alpha Fellowship nonsense, and choose to become killers? Is there so much evil in the world?’

‘Brainwashing,’ said Wartman, pointing to everybody. ‘Brainwashing.’

The thin woman examined the dragon curled around her cup. ‘They did not specifically choose to become killers. They had chosen to abdicate their inner selves.’ I didn’t like her. Her voice seemed to come not from her, but from a nearby room.

‘I don’t altogether follow you,’ said Dungaree-woman.

‘Society,’ and from the way the thin woman said the word I knew she was a teacher, ‘is an outer abdication. We abdicate certain freedoms, and in return we get civilisation. We get protection from death by starvation, bandits and cholera. It’s a fair deal. Signed on our behalf by our educational system on the day we are born. However, we all have an inner self, that decides to what degree we honour this contract. This inner self is our own responsibility. I fear that many of the young men and women in the Fellowship handed this inner responsibility to their Guru, to do with as he pleased. And that,’ she flicked the newspaper, ‘is what he did with it.’

‘You sound like you have fairly entrenched opinions,’ I remarked.

The thin woman looked at me straight in the eye. I looked straight back. Our sisters at Sanctuary are taught humility.

‘But why?’ The fisherman lit his pipe and bulged his cheeks in and out. ‘Why did his followers want to give him their will?’

The thin woman looked at me as she spoke. ‘You’d have to ask them yourself. Maybe there are many answers. Some get a kick out of self-abasement and servitude. Some are afraid or lonely. Some crave the camaraderie of the persecuted. Some want to be big fish in a small pond. Some want magic. Some want revenge on teachers and parents who promised success would deliver all. They need shinier myths that will never be soiled by becoming true. The handing over of one’s will is a small price to pay, for the believers. They aren’t going to need a will in their New Earth.’

I couldn’t listen to this any more. ‘Maybe you’re reading too much into it. Maybe they just did it because they loved him.’ I downed my tea in one gulp. It burned my tongue and it was too bitter. ‘Could I have my key now, please?’

The old woman idly passed me the key. ‘You must be exhausted after your long walk. My nephew’s wife saw you out by the lighthouse!’

Secrets on islands are hidden from mainlanders, but never from the islanders.

I lay on my bed, and wept.

My brothers and sisters, committing self-slaughter! Which of my co-cleansers had fallen at this last hurdle, and why? We were heroes! Just a few months before the end of the unclean world! Paradise had been so near for them! I was further surprised at the Minister of Defence allowing himself to be captured. He has a high enough alpha quotient to displace molecules and walk through walls.

The spider in the jar had died. Why? Why, why, why?

After my evening cleansing I walked around this fishing village. Squealing children were playing some incomprehensible game. Teenagers hung around on street corners in their trendiest gear, doubtless imitating the Tokyo teenagers they see in their magazines. Mothers stood gossiping outside the supermarket. I want to shout at them, The world is going to end soon, you are all going to fry in the White Nights! Okinawan music blared out of a bar, all twinky-twanky and jangling... And at the end of the street I reached the mountains, the sea and the night.

I walked along the pebbly beach. Plastic buoys. A sea coconut, shaped like a woman’s loins. Junk, washed up with the driftwood. Cans, bottles, rubber gloves, detergent containers. I heard grunts and squeals from under a peeling boat, never to float again. In the distance a shadow lit a fire.

His Serendipity speaks to me in the crashing of the waves, and the sucking of the shingle. Why telephone when telepathy is possible? His Serendipity told me that his trusted cleanser Quasar had the greatest role to play. The Days of Persecution had begun, as prophesied in the 143rd Sacred Revelation. My Master told me I shall be a shepherd for the faithful during the White Nights. And after the comet ushers in the New Earth, I shall be at the right hand of His Serendipity, administering justice and wisdom in His name. I replied to His Serendipity that I was ready to die for Him. That I loved Him as a son does his father and would protect Him as a father does a son. His Serendipity, hundreds of miles away, smiled. The comet will be here by Christmas. The New Earth is not far away now. The Fellowship of Humanity will gather together on a purer island, and the survivors will call me ‘Father Quasar’. There will be no bullying. No victimising. All the selfish, petty, unbelieving unclean, they will fry in the fat of their ignorance. We will eat papayas, cashew nuts and mangos, and learn how to make traditional instruments and beautiful pottery. His Serendipity will select our mates according to our alpha quotients, and teach us advanced alpha techniques, and we will travel astrally, visiting other stars.

I knelt, and thanked my Lord for his encouragement. The moon rose over the open bay, and those same stars came on, one by one.

The baby in the woolly cap, strapped to her mother’s back, opened her eyes. They were my eyes. A disembodied voice was singing a chorus over and over again. And reflected in my eyes was her face. She knew what I was going to do. And she asked me not to. But she was fated to die anyway, Quasar, when the comet comes! You shortened her suffering in the land of the unclean! The innocents, surely, will be reborn into the Fellowship of the New Earth! Cleanse yourself, and anchor your faith, deep and fast!

The radio alarm clock glowed 1.30 a.m. Bad karaoke throbbed through the walls. I was wide awake, straitjacketed by my sweaty sheets. A headache dug its thumbs into my temples. My gut pulsed with gamma interference: I lurched to the toilet. My shit was a slurry of black crude oil. I kept thinking of the thin teacher, and what I should have said to her to put her in her place. My eyes wandered around the labyrinth on the worn lino. I took a shower, as hot as the flesh could bear.

For the first time since my initiation ceremony into the Fellowship I bought some cigarettes, from a machine in the deserted lobby. I lit one, walking back up to my room. I was going to be up for a while.

My palms have become blotchy. I clean myself eight or nine times a day, but something is wrong with my skin. I have taken to watching the television every morning. Proceedings are under way to disband the Fellowship, and make membership illegal. I have been named, and my photograph shown, ransacked from Fellowship archives. Luckily it was taken with my scalp shaved and an alpha energiser on my head, so the likeness isn’t close. I am the last of the Tokyo cleansers to evade capture. I saw my skin father and mother being chased into my skin sister’s car by a baying pack of reporters. The whole scene was lit by flashbulbs. His Serendipity has been caught and charged with conspiracy to commit genocide, and with fraud, kidnapping and possession of Category 1 nerve agents. The news showed the same clip of His Serendipity being bundled into a car by agents of the unclean and driven through a mob shouting for His blood. They showed it over and over again, to a sinister soundtrack, to tell the mindless that He is a villain, like Darth Vader, to be loathed and feared. The rest of the Cabinet have also been arrested. They are falling over themselves to denounce each other, hoping their death sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment. I myself was denounced by the Minister of Education. Even His Serendipity’s wife has denounced our Master, saying that she didn’t know anything about the production of the gas. She, who was so zealous about the cleansing! One television news station flew their jackals to Los Angeles, to film the elite school in Beverly Hills where His Serendipity’s sons were boarded.

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.

You see! We were only defending ourselves.

My fingernails are coming loose.

I spent the afternoon walking to the lighthouse. I sat on a rock and watched the waves and the birds. A typhoon was moving up the coast of China, skirting Taiwan, and looming over the Okinawan horizon. Clouds were piling up in the west, winds were unravelling. I was being discussed, and decisions were being taken. What had gone wrong? A few more months, and my alpha quotient would have been 25, putting me in the top two hundred on Earth — His Serendipity had assured me, in person. I had ingested some of His Serendipity’s eyelashes. After winning converts on the Welcome Programme I was rewarded with a test tube of the Guru’s sperm to imbibe. It boosted my gamma resistance. I had been taken off the lavatory docket and been made a cleanser. For the first time in my life, I was becoming a name.

The corrugated iron roof of an abandoned shed clattered to and fro in the wind.

Nothing has gone wrong. Nothing has gone wrong, Quasar. It was your faith that brought you to His Serendipity’s notice. It is your faith that will guide you through the Days of Persecution, through the terrible days of the White Night to the New Earth. It is your faith that will nourish you now.

Everything around me on this godforsaken island is crumbling. I should have stayed in Naha. I should have hidden in snow country, or deep-frozen Hokkaido, or lost myself amid a metropolis of my own kind. What happened, I wonder, to Mr Ikeda? Where do people who drop off the edge of your world end up?

Typhoon weather.

The curtains I keep drawn. Our Minister of Defence received some reports that the government of the unclean had developed micro-cameras which they implanted in the craniums of seagulls, which were then trained to spy. Not to mention the Americans’ secret satellites, scrolling over the globe, scanning for the Fellowship at the behest of the politicians and the Jews, who long ago had set up the Freemasons, and funded Chinese to pollute the well of history.

I was sitting with my back to the lighthouse on the lonely headland. Headlights approached, seeking me out. I looked for a place to hide. There was none. A seagull watched me. It had a cruel face. A blue and white car pulled up. Too late, I looked for a place to hide. A door opened, and a dim light lit up the interior.

They’ve found me! The rest of for ever in a cell...

And then, so strangely, I’m relieved it’s all over. At least I can stop running.

A hand was already clearing stuff from the front seat. Its owner leant forwards. ‘Mr Tokunaga, I presume?’

Grimly, I nodded, and walked towards my captor.

‘I’ve been searching for you. The name’s Ota. I’m the harbourmaster. You spoke with my brother just the other day, about giving a lecture at my wife’s school. How about a lift back to town? You must be tired, after walking all the way out here, all on your own?’

I obeyed, and still trembling I climbed in and put on my seatbelt.

‘Lucky I was passing... there’s a typhoon warning, you know. I saw a figure, all hunched like it was the end of the world, and I thought to myself, I wonder if that’s Mr Tokunaga? Not feeling too chipper, this evening?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe you’ve been overdoing it. The island air is good for clearing the head, but at the rate you’ve been tramping around... Terribly sorry to hear about your wife.’

‘Death is a part of life.’

‘That’s a sound philosophy, but it can’t be easy to keep your thoughts focused.’

‘I can. I’m a good focuser.’

He braked and beeped a couple of times at a goat standing in the middle of the road. Magisterially, the goat sniffed at us, and wandered into a field.

‘Must tell Mrs Bessho that Caligula’s escaped again. You name it, goats eat it! So, you’re a good focuser, you were saying. Splendid, splendid. It would be a crime not to try diving while you’re here, you know. We have the finest Pacific reefs north of the equator, I’m told. By the way, the youngsters are delighted at the prospect of a real computer man coming to talk to them. No great scholars, I’m afraid, but they’re keen. My wife would like you to join us for dinner tomorrow, if you’re free. So, Mr Tokunaga. Tell me a little about yourself...’

The road looped back around to the port, as all the roads on this island eventually do.

Clouds began to ink out the stars, one by one.