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 business.”
Kevin grinned and put the cards in his shirt pocket. “Okay. So what’s this movie about?”
Ohira waved a hand in the direction of the room they had just left. “I was thinking while I watched that movie that the kids in there are looking at, the part where you see the monsters over the trees.”
“You mean where those guys with guns are looking for them—except they don’t realize they’ve grown so much? . . . And then the slithery things come up out of the lake.”
“Yes, by the river. I was thinking, suppose those heads looking down over the trees weren’t monsters but . . . what do you call those long, thin insects that stand up on end and catch flies in arms that close like nutcrackers? Mantis, is it?”
“Oh, praying mantises.”
Ohira nodded. “Yes, that’s them. Then those hunters would really have something to hunt, wouldn’t they?”
“Oh, I see. As mecs, you mean.” Kevin pulled a face. “Their guns wouldn’t be much use, though.”
“The guns weren’t much use to them in the movie there either.” Ohira waved a hand. “But never mind the guns. You have other weapons anyway. But the point is we can add something extra to Bug Park, for the adventurous souls. Instead of just being tourists, they can go on safari too.”
Kevin’s brow furrowed for a moment. “You mean hunting bugs?”
“Sure. Why not? Think of the way that you and Taki have talked about some of your own experiences. Well, isn’t it the kind of experience that a lot of people would be willing to pay for?” Ohira thought for a second and shrugged. “All the real safari animals are protected these days, anyway. Nobody can go big-game hunting anymore. So, we let them go little-game hunting instead.”
Kevin sank onto a chair and stared at him. It seemed so obvious, now Ohira had spelled it out. How could it not have occurred to either him or Taki in all this time?
Ohira studied his face. “So what do you think?”
“I think it’s brilliant,” Kevin said. “It’s got to catch on. . . . And how long would it take before malaria mosquitoes became an endangered species?”
“They couldn’t. You’d never even make a difference.”
“I was joking.”
“And anyway, who’d care if they did?” Ohira raised his hands. “You see, every day we find more possibilities.”
“So where does the movie come in?” Kevin asked.
“I want you and Taki to organize some hunting expeditions so we can put a movie together from the monitor videos for me to show to the other Theme Worlds directors. You know the kind of thing—lots of towering monsters and gaping jaws; the kind of thing that’s making the kids scream next door there.” Ohira thought for a moment and held up both hands in front of him, thumbs level as if framing a picture. “And I’d like a good still shot, maybe you two as mecs, posing with your arms folded and a foot each on the body of a dead beetle or something—you know, the way they used to with elephants. It would look good on the title page of a proposal.”