Free Otherness by David Brin

shoulders. She cried out. " Iye. Iye !" But she could not shrug them off. The hands pulled her from the room.

    "Reiko-san!" She heard her friend call just before the door shut with a final click. A gurney waited. Strong hands. A needle.

    Reiko wailed, but no physical resistance could overcome the insistence of those hands.

16.

    The flutterings caused by inducement drugs soon became tremors, which turned into fierce contractions. Reiko cried out for Tetsuo, knowing full well that tradition would have kept him away, even if frowning officials from the Ministry did not. Spasms came with increasing rapidity now, sending the small life within her kicking and swimming in agitation.

    New drugs were injected. Machines focused upon her womb, and she knew that these were the clever devices designed to prevent the cleansing fall of innocence that the doctors hatefully called "birth trauma." They were adamant about preventing it now. They were insisting that her baby enter the world wise.

    Oh, how they would discover, to their regret, what they had really done, what they had unleashed. But even were she able to speak, she knew they would not listen. They would have to find out for themselves.

    In her delirium Reiko's head turned left and right, trying to track voices nobody else in the operating room seemed to hear. They came at her from all sides, whispering through the hissing aspirators, humming from the lamps, murmuring from the electric sockets.

    Spirits leered and taunted her from the machines, some mere patternings of light and static, others more complex—coursing along involute electronic dissonance within the microprocessors. Ghosts floated around her—whispering kami , dressed up in raiments of software.

    How foolish of men to think they can banish the world of spirits . Reiko knew with sudden certainty that the very idea was arrogant. Of course the kami would simply adapt to whatever forms the times demanded. The spirits would find a way.

    They were loose in the grid now, biding their time. And they would have revenge.

    Ghosts of baby hamsters . . . of baby human beings . . .

    She sensed her own son thinking now, desperately, harder than any fetus had ever been forced to think before.

    Soporific numbness spread over her as the tentaclelike hands turned to other violations. The shuddering contractions made vision blur. Superimposed upon her diffracting tears were dazzling Moiré patterns and Möbius chains. How she knew the names of these things, without ever having learned them, Reiko did not bother to wonder. From her mouth came words. . . . "Transportation . . . locational translation of coordinates . . .," she whispered, licking her dry lips. ". . . nonlinear transformations . . ."

    And then there was the bottle that had not one opening, but two . . . or none at all . . . the container whose inside was outside .

    Now Reiko found herself wondering what the word "outside" really meant.

    The hands did not seem to notice or care about the ghostly forms glaring down at her from the harsh fluorescents. Those angry spirits mocked her agony, as they mocked the other one, the one struggling with a problem in geometry.

    Another spasm of savage pressure struck Reiko, almost doubling her over. And she felt overwhelmed by a sudden swimming sensation within her . . . an intensifying sense of dread . . . desperate concentration on a single task, to turn theoretical knowledge into practical skill.

    The kami in the walls and in the machines chittered derisively. The problem was too difficult! It would never be solved in time!

    A container whose inside is outside . . .

    " Desu ka ne ?" One of the technicians said, shaking and tapping his monitoring headphones. He shouted again, this time in alarm.

    Suddenly white coats flapped on all sides. There was no time for full anesthesia, so they sprayed on locals that numbed with bone-chilling rapidity. Nobody bothered to set up a modesty screen as the obstetric surgeons began