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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