Ken looked terrific. That was Tam's first thought when he walked
through the high-security inner doors to greet her. He was square
shouldered and sturdy, with high, full cheeks, expensively trimmed dark
hair, and a small, delicate mouth. She figured him for late forties,
early fifties. Funny, but he'd always reminded her of one of those
steely eyed, expensively dressed actors you saw playing executives on
the Japanese soaps.
"Tamara!" He paused abruptly, then bowed. "_Ikaga desu
ka_?"
"_Okagesama de genki desu. Anata wa_?'
"Doing well, thanks. You never cease to amaze me. What a marvelous
surprise." A smile attempted to break through his dark eyes. "You've
surfaced again, just like the Sword."
She'd forgotten how colloquial his English was. Then she recalled he'd
told her once about doing his doctorate at MIT. Possibly because of
that he could be either Japanese or Western, chameleon-like, as the
backdrop required. He was every bit the charmer she remembered from
Kyoto.
One thing was different, though. Kenji Asano was ill at ease. He was
trying to mask it, but it was there. And that was very different from
the old days.
As they passed the usual pleasantries, he led her down a hall, then
through a room where intense young men in open shirts were now opening
a case of Asahi beer. Computer terminals were in neat rows along the
walls, beneath gleaming white "blackboards" that sparkled with
equations and quips. The place was so informal, so . . . American.
There were plenty of jeans and frazzled sneakers among the forty or so
young researchers, most of them in their late twenties or early
thirties. Plastered across the low partitions were film posters and
American counterculture bumper stickers (Radio Already Stolen, Nuke a
Commie for Christ); above a row of printers a blond pin-up was
unveiling her gynecological mysteries to the movie still of a startled
Godzilla; and a couple of rusty California vanity plates were hanging
over one long-haired staffer's terminal like big-game trophies--one read
64K-1ST, the other EZ BKS. Probably commissioned by venture capitalists
in Silicon Valley whose Porsches had since been repossessed, she
thought. The rock and roll dissonance of Siouxsie & the Banshees
sounded from a tiny stereo assembled out of computer hardware and a new
Yamaha digital tape deck. Presumably as a stunt, the high end of the
audio was being used to drive a garishly tinted computer graphics
display that had been projected against one of the windows, creating a
virtual image that seemed to dance amidst the Tokyo skyscrapers like a
Martian _son et lumiere_.
But she wasn't fooled by the frat-house trimmings. She realized these
casually dressed young researchers were the pick of Japan's technical
graduates. Making the Fifth Generation team these days was one of the
highest honors in the land. After some initial skepticism the big
corporations were now competing for the prestige of loaning their young
stars to the project for a few years, since they hoped to reap enormous
benefits down the road.
In fact, the youthful atmosphere was entirely intentional. That, she
knew, had been the legacy of Ken's predecessor, Dr. Yoshida, who had
refused to let anyone over thirty-five on the project. Furthermore,
since he believed the stuffed-shirt layout of most Japanese offices and
labs stifled creativity, he had deliberately devised an un-Japanese
workspace to try and reproduce Western research environments.
Finally they reached a closed door. Metal. When she realized it was
Ken's office, she almost remarked on this departure from what she
remembered about Dr. Yoshida's well-known attitude. He liked to be out
on the floor, with just another low partition, right there interacting
with his young staffers.
Without a word Ken inserted a magnetic card into the slot beside the
door handle and then pushed it open. Not only a door, she thought, a
locked door. Are they finally starting to worry about industrial
espionage?