Everyone who knew him just called him Dr. Blue-Eyes. This was because he was a doctor who possessed a very rare characteristic, among Insiders at least—blue eyes. They were a sign that he had gaijin blood.
Gaijin was a word that meant “outside person,” so, in its literal sense, you would imagine it referred to people born outside of Yokohama Station. Dr. Blue-Eyes himself had thought as much up to a certain point in his life. But in truth, the term had a connotation that predated the life of Yokohama Station. It was a word reserved for people beyond a “national border” determined by geographic features or otherwise agreed upon by two groups.
Out of all the gaijin, his eponymous blue eyes were apparently a feature particularly associated with a group called Caucasians.
“Caucasians. Where did the people by this name live, I wonder?” pondered Nijo, the young man with bulging eyes. It was just after the fellow showed up in Gunma.
“I’ve heard it was far to the north.”
“Perhaps it was Aomori. That means ‘Blue Forest,’ after all. Or perhaps from outside the station. In Hokkaido?”
“I don’t know. Farther north, though,” Dr. Blue-Eyes replied. He’d had this conversation dozens of times before in his life, but he wasn’t especially interested in this part of his personal background.
“There are places beyond Hokkaido? What a world we live in! Perhaps there are red-eyed people found to the south, then. What do you think, Doctor?” Nijo pressed.
Blue-Eyes shook his head. “The reason people have black eyes to begin with is that they evolved under solar light.”
He pulled a book of anatomy off the shelf and showed Nijo a cross section of an eyeball. Most of his collection was made of printed volumes. Few people Inside had such things. Printed books like these hardly existed within the station. He’d inherited the collection from his father.
“This is the structure of the eyeball. Nearly all people’s irises—the colored part here—are black. This is what shuts out the light.”
“Eyeballs shut out light? Wouldn’t that be completely backward, Doctor?”
“That’s how strong sunlight was. People who lived under the sun all the time developed dark eyes to limit the power of the light. Caucasians lived farther to the north, so the sunlight was weaker, and their eyes turned blue.”
“Do you suppose Insiders will eventually gain blue eyes like yours, Doctor?”
“It’s possible.”
“In that case, you are an example of an evolved Insider. That’s very special, Doctor!” Nijo declared, and he clapped his hands.
“Pipe down. You’ll bother the neighbors.” Dr. Blue-Eyes glanced toward the hallway.
Nijo lowered his tone of voice, but only a little. “Oops, my apologies. If I keep this up, you’re going to evolve your ears to block out sound, too.”
“That will not happen. Evolution comes about as the generations change. Individuals who are poorly adapted die earlier, and the stronger survive longer. This is how we evolve over time.”
The doctor lifted his cup of coffee, his blue eyes peering somewhere into the distance. He couldn’t see very far, of course; the closest object in that direction was the wall of the room past the bookcases.
His so-called Caucasian blood was from several generations ago, and the genetic traces were almost entirely gone. If he simply closed his distinctive blue eyes, his face was utterly Japanese in appearance.
His hair was still thick after sixty, but it had not a drop of melanin left and was as white as the station structure while it was forming. There were deep wrinkles in his face that spoke to the troubles of the life he’d led, but beyond that, his features were pleasing, and it was clear that he’d been handsome in his prime. This was why the striking color of his eyes seemed to disrupt the harmony of his appearance so fiercely.
People called him Dr. Blue-Eyes as a respectful nickname these days, because of his social status as a practitioner of medicine. When he was a boy, however, the name Blue-Eyes seemed like a stain, a foreign impurity that had invaded his genes. In fact, he did have vague memories of being discriminated against.
At that time, Yokohama Station did not yet cover all of Honshu; the northern boundary line was around Iwate. People debated what would happen when it reached the strait. Would it make landfall in Hokkaido? How would JR North Japan react? He recalled that there had been a scholar who spoke about genetic homogeneity due to geographic isolation.
If the station stopped human beings from moving about as much, there would be reduced genetic exchange. Local communities would lose diversity over time, until they were all homogenized, apparently.
Hearing that discussion made him feel as though his blue eyes were merely pollution, a bit of grit in the flattening of the genetic background.
“As generations change, eh?” Nijo repeated.
“Yes. Not that I’ll have any part in that. I used to be married, though, until about a decade ago.” Dr. Blue-Eyes pointed at a plastic photo stand on the farthest bookcase. The faded photograph was of a woman aged around forty.
“Ahh. I have a daughter back home, about seven,” said Nijo, which almost caused the doctor to spit out the coffee he lifted to his lips. “What’s the matter, Doctor?” he questioned. “When I said seven, I meant seven years old, not seven daughters. I don’t have that kind of Suika money.”
“I know that. You left a seven-year-old daughter behind to come to this forsaken place?”
“Now, you don’t really mean that, Doctor. You’ve said that this is a tranquil and pleasant place to live.”
“What exactly do you think a father’s responsibility is?”
“What do you think it is, Doctor?”
He didn’t have an answer for that.
“I fulfilled my primary parental obligation, which was arranging for her Suika implant. There is a saying back in Kyoto. Um, ‘A child doesn’t need a parent, something-something-something.’ ”
“You mean, ‘A child doesn’t need a parent to grow, but a Suika’?”
“Oh, so they say that one here, too? I suppose Yokohama Station does have a homogenous culture!” Nijo exclaimed, his large eyes rolling with wonder.
Dr. Blue-Eyes exhaled. It was rare for him to get so tired from speaking with a person. The man had come here from a city named Kyoto, far to the west, and it suddenly occurred to the doctor that while people raised in distant areas might speak the same language, they could possibly approach conversations in an entirely different way.
At any rate, Nijo’s ability to interface with Suikanet was unquestionable.
Because Suikanet expanded automatically and organically as the station did, very little was known about its finer workings. It was all people could do to use the devices that grew from the station to contact one another. Until recently, Dr. Blue-Eyes had to walk to a kiosk several minutes away from his home to correspond with patients.
But then Nijo had come along and said, “If you just register with Suika, you could access Suikanet from your home computer, Doctor!”
Nijo set it all up himself. It made Dr. Blue-Eyes’s work dramatically more efficient.
Because of that, the doctor trusted the young man (in terms of technology, not personality). That was why, when he brought his findings about Suikanet and suspected the mountain was moving, the doctor took him at his word and presumed it was the prelude to an eruption.