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younger sister, Reiko, and a half dozen other small members of the innumerable
relatives watching in total immersion from the couch, the floor, and other
seats around the room. Nakisha, in one of the armchairs, stared unblinking,
but managed a restrained silence becoming to her sixteen years that showed she
was above that kind of thing.
 Hey, look at all the arms on that guy. It s like a mechanical spider.
 It s like some of those miniature robots of Taki s. Is that what it was like,
Nakisha? Did it feel like being one of those?
 Did Taki really put you down next to a slug?

Ooooh, yuck
! . . .
 Shut up. It was horrible. I don t want to talk about it.
Kevin sat on a chair by the wall near the glass-paned doors behind them, half
watching while he idly practiced materializing a playing card in one hand,
then vanishing it again. Doug Corfe had gone for a drive into Seattle to
reconnoiter Garsten s office from the outside. Taki had been called away for
the moment to give his mother a hand with something. Ohira was on a stool at
the back of the room, arms akimbo, hands planted solidly on his knees,
watching the movie with a raptness that was unusual. It seemed to have
triggered some distant line of thought.
Kevin rather took to the monsters, he decided. It wasn t their fault if they
blundered around sinking ships and knocking gaps in city skylines, any more
than foxes could help being partial to chickens. It was just the way they were
made. He identified with them, he supposed, as another form of life that was
misunderstood and looked down on in the monsters
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case, metaphorically by grownups. There were days when he was sure that he too
could find it a great reliever of stresses and tensions to go on a rampage of
pulverizing a few downtown high-rises or picking up automobiles filled with
the irritating kinds of people who played bullhorn radios in parks and left
trash everywhere, and throw them into the harbor.
Maybe grownups went out and dropped bombs on each others cities for the same
kind of reason. If that were true, it didn t seem fair that kids should have
to be in them too.
Then the thought struck him that perhaps they could build miniature cities for
stressed-out adults to crash around in and flatten, using monster-mec bodies
designed specially for the purpose. They could even have other people perhaps
kids who liked being scared by monsters in smaller mecs to run around and
provide crowds of panicking inhabitants, making it all the more realistic, and
presumably more satisfying. Then, perhaps, there wouldn t be any need for
wars.
He was still musing over the thought as surely a touch of genius when Ohira
got up from the stool and came over, at the same time making a sign to catch
Kevin s attention. Kevin looked up. Ohira motioned with his head to indicate
the doors.
 I have been thinking. There is something I would like you and Taki to do for
me, he said. Kevin held out the card deck that he was still holding in one
hand and fanned it in an unspoken invitation. Ohira selected a card and
returned it. Kevin shuffled it into the deck, gave the deck to Ohira, and then
plucked the card he had chosen out of the air. He made it d i s a p p e a r a
g a i n , s h o w e d h i s h a n d t o b e e m p t y , a n d p r o d
uced the card from the other one.  Very good, Ohira complimented.  It seems
that everything young people do these days has to have screens and be
connected to a nuclear power plant. You don t even need batteries. He waved
again toward the door. Kevin got up and followed him out of the room.
The living room outside was bright and spacious, with a floor of gray and
white marble squares with fleece rugs. Ohira turned and sat on the arm of a
sectional divan filling one of the corners.  How would you like to be a movie
director? he said.  I want you and Taki to make a movie for me.
 So you re the producer? Kevin said.
 If you like, yes.
It was a typical Ohira approach. He would get to the point eventually in his
own time. Kevin, meanwhile, played along in
his own typical way.  Aren t we going to talk about percentages, director s
fees, contracts, bonuses? . . .
Ohira s mouth turned upward at the corners briefly, but the rest of his craggy
features stayed the same.  You see, always in too much of a hurry. You have
all of your lives still before you, and always young people are in a hurry. We
have most of ours behind us, yet we don t have to hurry and the things that
need to, get done.
 I thought it was supposed to be good business. I was just going by what
Hiroyuki says.
 Good business is getting paid what you are worth. A director is paid for his
experience. First you get the experience;
then you have something to sell. Being paid more than you are worth is bad
business. Your customers don t come back again, and then you have no
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