Lord of All Things Page 13

  “You can argue about that if you like, but if he had never existed, our guys on the ground out there wouldn’t be having such a hard time.…Hey you, what are you doing?” Bennett asked, turning to Todd.

  Todd Walton looked up. He had been busy scribbling notes. “I’m writing a to-do list—topics we should revise for our exam. At least one of us ought to be doing some work.”

  Bennett was just coming up with a snappy answer when he spotted a skirt slipping between the pillars at the other end of the Reading Room. He thought he recognized the way it moved. He tipped his chair to one side to get a better look. Clinging to the table to stay on his seat, he saw he had been right. That was Terry Miller up there.

  “Excuse me, kids,” he said, getting up. “I’ve just seen someone on my own to-do list.” Then he set off to stalk his prey.

  Todd watched him go and then told Lawrence, “He means his to-bang list, of course.”

  “Really?” said the other. “I heard he’s just about to get engaged.”

  Todd raised his eyebrows. “I think that’s why he’s in such a hurry.”

  Bennett caught up with Terry Miller at the checkout desk. She had stuffed three books into her cherry-shaped bag and was just about to leave.

  “Hi, Terry,” he said, blocking her way.

  “Hi.” She looked at him skeptically, but at least she had stopped to talk.

  “Hey, say there,” he burst out, “I saw you, you know, and I wondered if you wanted to come to this really cool party I’m going to Saturday night. I got an invitation, and I can bring a guest, and I gotta say, this is kind of an insider deal, not the kind of party just anyone could go to.”

  With his best winning smile and all guns blazing, he cranked up the charm to 100 percent. “So what do you say?”

  She smiled noncommittally. “Well, it’s sweet of you to have thought of me, but Saturday I’m already going to the Phi Beta Kappa party with someone. You know, the party that just about everyone is going to.”

  She hoisted her cherry onto her shoulder. “But have fun anyway.”

  And with that she walked off, leaving him standing in her wake. Him. James Michael Bennett III, quarterback, heir to the Bennett fortune, valedictorian, twice crowned Best-Dressed Man on Campus. A girl had to know her own worth to do something like that.

  He watched her go. Her backside was apple-shaped and in that skirt he could see every line and curve. He could just imagine sinking his teeth into it. And she wore her blond hair in a ponytail. Nobody wore a ponytail these days, which was exactly what drove him so wild: the thought of taking her from behind and watching that ponytail swing back and forth in time with his thrusts.…He went back to the others.

  “So what happened?” Lawrence asked. “She turned you down?”

  Bennett looked at him, displeased. The kid didn’t have the right idea yet, not by a long way.

  “She set me a challenge,” he corrected him icily. “And I love a challenge.”

  Dusk was sinking over the city, casting its warm evening light over the scene as they cruised around Harvard campus looking for somewhere to park. A red glow lit up the roofs, recalling the centuries gone by. Up above the first stars were beginning to appear, and the air smelled intensely of summer.

  “Times like this it really does look like the Isle of the Blessed,” Rodney said unprompted.

  Hiroshi sat up with a start. “What’s that?”

  “The Isle of the Blessed. That’s what they call the Harvard campus around here.”

  Hiroshi looked out the window, blinking fast. “Really?” The name reminded him of something, but he wasn’t quite sure what.

  Harvard! Hiroshi still remembered how surprised he had been to learn that two of the world’s most famous universities, Harvard and the no-less-famous MIT, were located in the same city just a few miles from each other. Not that this had any practical consequences in his daily life—it was pretty much obligatory for the MIT students to see Harvard people as benighted, old-fashioned, and generally beyond the pale, just as Harvard folk saw MIT as vulgar, brash, and generally beyond the pale. This allowed everyone to get along nicely together. Tonight, however, he was curious about what lay in store. It wasn’t that he was looking forward to the party—he thought parties were a waste of time, and he was only going along for Rodney’s sake—but he regarded it as an adventure of sorts, like a kind of anthropological field trip. When he looked at it that way, the whole thing had a certain appeal. Besides, he had no objection to drinking beer.

  Rodney was still cruising around. By now they were on their third or maybe fourth lap around the green spaces between Old Yard, the Radcliffe Institute, and Harvard Law School, where a crowd had gathered as though for a rock concert. Snatches of music drifted across every so often. Well-dressed people were strolling across the lawns and beneath the trees, all headed for a big, brightly lit house built in the same style as most of the rest of Harvard—red tiles, tall windows, a magnificent facade—where a great throng of people was already gathered on the two rooftop terraces.

  Nobody knew for sure who had actually donated the money for the fraternity house, though it was obviously a Harvard alum who was also a Phi Beta Kappa member. Some said it was an Internet billionaire who wanted to remain anonymous. Others added that the Harvard University government had been caught flat-footed by the building work. After all, it was Harvard policy to try to keep the influence of the fraternities to a minimum—studying at Harvard was supposed to be enough of an honor in itself. And now the most influential honor society of all had built this lavish frat house practically slap in the middle of campus.

  Finally, they were directed into a parking spot. They got out of the car and joined the flood of people streaming toward the house. They passed groups of professional security guards with bulletproof vests, walkie-talkies, and stern expressions, but when they handed over their invitations at the door, it was to a freshman in a smart suit with a neatly knotted tie. He waved them right in.

  Stepping into the house was like stepping into the Tokyo metro at rush hour. The rooms, salons, staircases, and hallways were all packed with people chattering excitedly, holding glasses in their hands, full or no longer so full. There was no way to take even a single step forward without having to let someone else past or detour around them, getting an elbow in the ribs or bumping into someone else in turn. The biggest difference between this and the Tokyo subway was the music playing everywhere: In the main salon someone was tinkling away on the piano—a Gershwin tune. A three-piece blues band was out on the terrace. An old record player in the basement was playing jazz. And rock and pop generated by computer playlists could be heard from the upper floors of the house. Standing on the staircase or in the corridors, where all the different sounds mingled together in a deafening cacophony, was best avoided. Broadly speaking, the party seemed to have split itself in two: down on the first floor the older brothers were crowded into the great front hall, the library, and the dark, paneled committee room, chattering away in black tie and evening gowns; upstairs, the young people ruled the roost.

  Once they had fought their way out onto one of the terraces, Hiroshi and Rodney saw some familiar faces, fellow students from MIT who were quite astonished to see Hiroshi there.

  “Kato,” a pimply blond boy called David shouted out, loud enough to be heard over a thunderous guitar riff by U2. “If someone told you there’s a seminar here, I’m afraid they were lying.”

  “Nobody said it was a seminar,” Hiroshi answered dryly. “But I heard there was a study group meeting. Effects of alcohol abuse or something like that.”

  They looked at one another, grinning. “Oh yeah,” another voice called. “You could call it that.”

  “Are you joining?” David asked.

  Hiroshi shrugged. “We’ll see. I don’t know whether I have all the required credits.”

  There was a roar of lau
ghter. By the sound of it, he was welcome aboard.

  Hiroshi noticed for the first time they had roped off some of the lawn out back and set up white tents serving drinks and food.

  “Come on,” he told Rodney. “Let’s go look for your Prof. Bernstein.”

  On their way through the different rooms they passed a bar, where they were given a glass of champagne in exchange for the tokens that came with their tickets. They saw a host of celebrities—no US presidents, but famous writers, musicians, astronauts, football players, and so on. The only face that was missing was Prof. Bernstein.

  “Bernstein? Not that I know of,” was the answer they got from anyone who looked like Harvard faculty. A woman with a mane of silvery-gray hair asked in surprise, “Oh—was he going to come?” And a corpulent man wearing a bolo tie said with a smile, “Bernstein? Here? To be honest, I would be very surprised.”

  They said their thank-yous and carried on their search.

  “I can’t understand it,” Rodney lamented. “I heard he never misses a party, especially a Phi Beta Kappa event.”

  “We’ll just keep looking,” Hiroshi said. “We owe it to the aliens.” At least it gave them something to do. And he always felt better when he had something to do.

  The terrace rang with the sounds of a wailing harmonica and the song of a weather-beaten bluesman bemoaning how sad and lonely he felt. They did not find Prof. Bernstein there either, but somebody clamped a hand onto Hiroshi’s arm as he passed and called out, “Hey! You’re Hiroshi Kato, aren’t you?”

  “I am,” Hiroshi admitted and looked at the guy. He was a skinny young man with glasses and an Adam’s apple that went up and down like a yo-yo as he talked.

  “Bill Adamson,” he said, shaking Hiroshi’s hand. “I’m at MIT, too. Really, we should have met years ago.” He said it in a frosty tone that suggested it was Hiroshi’s fault they hadn’t.

  “Ah well,” said Hiroshi. “These things happen.”

  Of course, he knew Bill Adamson’s name; everyone at MIT did. William Hughes Adamson had caused quite a splash a few years earlier when a working group under his direction had developed a robot that could find its way inside buildings with unprecedented accuracy. He had also assiduously promoted his own part in the invention, so that by now the specialist literature simply called it the Adamson robot. It could deliver internal mail in a company or stock medical supplies on shelves in a hospital—at least in theory, since it was still too expensive for such uses.

  However, it could also hunt down and shoot terrorists who had barricaded themselves into a building. With that, Bill Adamson had entered a realm where cost was no object, and it was no surprise he was due to take up a post at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, after he had finished his doctorate at MIT. Adamson was generally seen as the coming man in robotics, a reputation he took great care to protect. Rodney reported that he felt Hiroshi threatened his position.

  “I took apart one of your Wizard’s Wands recently,” Adamson went on, jabbing Hiroshi in the chest, “and what do I find? You just picked up the spatial-orientation system from our robot and built on it.”

  A frost seemed to settle around them, there in the warm summer night.

  “That’s kind of a long way to go about it,” Hiroshi said, unruffled. “You could have just read my patent. It’s all there in black and white.”

  What was this about? Surely Adamson wasn’t dumb enough to accuse him of IP theft? There was no question that his Wizard’s Wand software was sufficiently different from the Adamson robot system to deserve its own separate patent. MIT had its own dedicated legal office to help student inventors scrupulously check this sort of thing before they submitted a patent application.

  The finger jabbed again. “We could have invented the thing just as well ourselves.”

  “True,” said Hiroshi, “but you didn’t. It was an obvious development, though. I wondered how you could have overlooked it. So I did it myself.”

  Bill Adamson grinned. The frost was beginning to thaw.

  “Okay,” he conceded. “Good point.” He shook his head. “Man! Those things are everywhere. I have a cousin who’s stationed over in Europe; he says they have them over there as well. You must be a millionaire by now, hey?”

  “I get by,” Hiroshi replied, thinking of the last quarterly statement. It had been just over seven thousand dollars, by far the lowest quarterly return to date. “Could be that the wave has peaked.”

  “I heard that the manufacturers…what are they called? Soho? Solo?”

  “Sollo Electronics.”

  “Uh-huh. I heard they’re just buying up their main competitor right now, Cook & Holland. Rumor has it, though, that they’ve overextended themselves…Yes?” A girl with a prominent overbite had taken his arm and just asked him about someone called Betty. He pointed into the crowd and said something that was drowned out by the wail of the electric guitar.

  Hiroshi and Rodney glanced at one another. Rodney didn’t say anything, but Hiroshi knew exactly what he was thinking—the same thing he had said with the arrival of every quarterly check so far. “Man, they’re ripping you off.” They probably were. For the time being, though, Hiroshi didn’t much care. He didn’t want to get rich; he just wanted to be able to do as he liked.

  “Listen, since we’re talking business here,” Adamson said when the girl with the overbite had vanished again, “I have a project in the works right now. It’s kind of a working group, but at the national level. We have people from Caltech, NASA, Carnegie Mellon, all that…Anyway, it’s called Robot 21, and we’re trying to come up with a strategic plan for the future of robot technology. Laying down the ground rules we should follow. Nothing quite as simple as Asimov’s laws, but something along those lines. Since that seems to be what you’re working on right now, do you want to join the team?”

  He was smart, this guy. Though he hadn’t come straight out and said that one day their work would be known as Adamson’s Laws of Robotics, you could be sure that’s what would happen.

  “To be honest, no,” Hiroshi replied.

  “What? Why not?”

  “I’ve heard about your group. And I’ve read the working papers you posted to the Net.” Hiroshi smiled softly. “I’m sorry, but you guys are barking up the wrong tree. What you call the future of robotics is really its past.”

  Bill Adamson couldn’t have looked more stunned if Hiroshi had punched him in the gut. “What do you mean by that?” he asked. The frost was definitely back now.

  “Just keep your eyes on me; you’ll see what I mean,” Hiroshi told him boldly. “It’s quite clear to me where things have to go next. I’ve been wondering for years why nobody else has had the same idea.” He raised his empty glass. “I have to go get another drink. Good talking to you.”

  Hiroshi turned and left. He could feel Adamson’s gaze upon him as he walked away. The man was staring daggers at him.

  “Man!” Rodney exclaimed. “What was that about? Demonstration class in how to make an enemy for life?”

  All Hiroshi said was, “If he’s as much of a hotshot as everyone believes, he should prove it.”

  If you were looking for a place to go slumming, the Epsilon Omega frat house was not a bad choice. Whenever Bennett had had enough of the luxury and unbearable good manners of the world he had been born into, he snuck off here. Epsilon Omega was not a fraternity that instilled lifelong pride in its members—it didn’t get donations from former brothers and didn’t have its own tie; it was a frat for those who had been turned down everywhere else but still needed a cheap roof over their head and somebody to copy assignments from. And their morals were just as lax as their membership standards. The things that happened at their parties would have been unimaginable anywhere else. This was still the only place where Bennett had slept with three women at once. Another time, a chemistry student had handed round some stu
ff that had totally blown his mind—Bennett had never tripped like that before.

  The frat house was a wreck out on the edge of town, incredibly far from all the faculty buildings and lecture halls, but also a good distance from any neighbors who might complain about the noise. The fraternity brothers were fond of wacky color combinations—most of the rooms were painted in black and purple—but not the least bit fond of repairs. A pane was missing in the fanlight over the front door, and as far as Bennett could remember it had been missing last year as well.

  Despite all that, his evening was not going so great. A girl had given him a blow job down in the basement to a soundtrack of Motörhead and Metallica, but she hadn’t been particularly good at it. She had taken some kind of pill and was giggling away like crazy but hadn’t let him into her panties. He hadn’t even been able to get a finger in. She had a pretty good pair of boobs, but she hadn’t let him touch those either. Well what the hell? He wasn’t going home tonight until he had dipped his wick somewhere. Which was why he was working on a new girl at the moment, although over the course of an evening the drinks they served here made it pretty hard to concentrate.

  “Where was I?” he asked, putting his arm around her neck.

  “You were just explaining why you’re studying anthropology,” she said, letting him.

  They were lying on a sofa built of sandbags behind the bar. Even when you were sober, it was pretty difficult to get up from it, and the light was suitably low over in this corner. The Epsilon Omega guys called it “the beaver trap.”

  “Ah yes. Of course. Anthropology. The study of mankind.” He looked her over. She had a wild hairdo, a kind of raging lion’s mane that was probably meant to distract from the fact she was pretty skinny and barely had any tits to speak of. But he wasn’t after tits this evening, not anymore. Whatever else she may or may not have, she had a pussy, and that was what mattered.

  “Do you know what the amazing thing is when you study anthropology?” he went on, deciding that a guy wasn’t really drunk if he could still say a word like anthropology. “How little we really know. Your average Joe just wouldn’t believe it. Sure, there are a whole load of theories. But theories is all they are. Stories. When it comes to hard facts, the kind of thing that could convince a jury—pretty near nothing.”