The Future Is Japanese Read online

  But this was no surprise to Yutaka; in fact, he was insulted that Ainella would bring him here as if she were pulling back the curtain to some big revelation. None of the asteroids in the asteroid belt produced enough gravity to tether anything down. That Yutaka was able to sit on the tatami mat with his legs folded was evidence enough that he was inside a rotating centrifuge.

  Shifting his gaze from the drum to Ainella, he said, “Yeah, so?”

  “It isn’t my intention to brag. I’m only trying to show that we were operating the centrifuge in the sanitarium to speed your recovery.”

  “Hmph!” Yutaka snorted indignantly. The presence of gravity did indeed help osteoblast function to heal bones. If the Kalifs had operated the sanitarium for his sake, then perhaps he owed them something.

  “Come with me,” said Ainella.

  Yutaka followed the woman into a narrow access tunnel.

  They navigated several forks until they emerged into a cavernous passage. Ainella looked expectantly at Yutaka.

  “Whoa …” he said, unable to hide his awe.

  It was a long, straight tunnel stretching as far as the eye could see, over five hundred meters perhaps. It was without a doubt the longest tunnel Yutaka had ever seen and perhaps would ever see again.

  Building an underground structure of this length would have been impossible on Yamato. And it would certainly be no mean feat to build more than one of these tunnels inside this asteroid either. The passageway likely cut clear through the center of the asteroid, in which case this must be the main tunnel that served all of Lakeview.

  But this was not what Ainella wanted him to see. The true marvel of this place were the structures built equidistantly up and down the main tunnel.

  “One-tan drums,” said Ainella.

  Numerous lidless drums about ten meters in diameter were laid on their side.

  “One tan?” Yutaka asked.

  Ainella kicked off the ground and flew away. Her white calves peeked out from the hem of her kimono. Yutaka floated after her.

  “Yes, the drums are thirty-one meters deep and nine hundred ninety-one square meters inside, which is exactly one tan, the Kalif unit of area for agricultural land. Each drum can provide a year’s rice for five people. These are our rice fields.”

  The metal drums rotated slowly on rollers on the floor, creating enough centrifugal force so that a thick layer of mud caked their interiors.

  Bright green grass sprouted out of the mud in neat rows, and light tubes supported by spokes affixed to the central axis of the drum shone in every direction. The Kalifs had seemingly devised a rather elaborate but primitive system to make the grass distinguish between up and down and to stimulate its growth.

  Countless drums lined the length of the tunnel. Ainella and Yutaka floated past tens of drums to the right and left as well as above and below. Summer-lit fields—or rather, rice paddies surrounded them.

  One villager planted seedlings, while a pint-sized contraption ran up and down the mud like a faithful dog. There were others painstakingly pulling weeds by hand. A young man pushed a horrendously rank container down the rails running along the side of the tunnel. Chattering children flew past and dove into the drum up ahead, where a couple removed their straw hats, wiped the sweat off their faces, and took the lunches that the children brought them. A ruddy-cheeked old man smoking a pipe sat on the edge of the drum and spun slowly round and round, the smoke from the pipe drawing a loose spiral like the Milky Way.

  A flight of brown birds twittered overhead and flew past Yutaka in a spiral. As he watched them disappear into the distance, a frog came twirling out of nowhere and smacked spread eagle against his cheek. An impressively sized green and black frog.

  Yutaka heard giggling from inside the drums.

  It was a far cry from the sterilized starch factories on Yamato’s Stanford Torus colonies, which prohibited human entry. A perfect plant and animal system, the likes of which Yutaka had never imagined, flourished here. At this rate, it was reasonable to assume that there was a fully functional ecology from the atmospheric and aquatic layers and to the microbial and viral levels.

  As Yutaka drifted and twirled in the air in awe, he felt a tug at his collar.

  “This way.” Ainella grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him backward until the rows of drums along the ceiling and walls of the main tunnel disappeared, the drums on the left and right receded from sight, and finally, they arrived at a dead end. Perhaps they had traversed the length of the asteroid and come to the end of the tunnel.

  That was when it struck Yutaka that this peculiar colony had a fundamental flaw.

  “How do you expand the colony?” he asked, turning around to face Ainella.

  Without a word, the woman dragged him down another narrow tunnel.

  Yutaka was taken through a thick insulated door. Unlike the well-ordered area he’d come from, this place was in utter ruins. Cinder blocks, rocks, sacks, and containers of all types lay on top of each other in heaps, which suited men in masks were trying to shovel into some order.

  Before he could ask where he was, Ainella shoved various items into his arms: a dust respirator, a jumpsuit, and Velcro shoes. Then she quickly proceeded to dress him before Yutaka had any time to protest.

  “What is all this?” he finally shouted.

  Ainella smiled and said, “You’re cleaning up the mess you made of this storeroom.” She pointed to the twisted rubble and debris ahead. “The area has been sealed off, but we haven’t touched that dangerous toy you crash-landed in case there were weapons and explosives on board. Your first job is to neutralize all that. And when you’re done with that, you can get to work fixing this place.”

  “My hand—it’s broken, remember?”

  “That’s why I asked if it was better.” But the gleam in her eye revealed that she couldn’t care less about his hand. “If you’re well enough to blather on about genes and such, you can at least show them how to work their way around your fighter. Oh, and you can take your lunch with the crew. You’ll be working here starting today. I’m sorry I’ve been such a shrew.”

  Two brawny men, pausing from their work, came behind Yutaka and grabbed him up by the arms. Although the Kalifs had attended to his wounds, it had been overly optimistic of him to assume that he was welcome here after he’d destroyed their storeroom and food supplies.

  That Ainella is one tough customer, Yutaka thought.

  Yutaka couldn’t escape. Instead, he was integrated into life in Lakeview as prison labor.

  The labor was hard work. With the storeroom sealed off by nothing more than a tarp, air pressure was constantly fluctuating, creating a dangerous environment where workers got their hands caught in the rubble and were hit by flying bits of concrete. But the meals were no heartier than the ones at the sanitarium. They were lacking in both calories and taste, and Yutaka’s stomach growled constantly.

  One incident very nearly broke Yutaka’s recently healed hand. The fighter engine came off the mount and drifted toward an unsuspecting worker, trapping his leg against the wall. Yutaka, who happened to be nearby, jammed his casted arm into the gap and twisted.

  In the same moment the man pulled his leg free, Yutaka’s cast cracked and fell away in pieces. Even after he pulled his arm back, Yutaka was so shaken he was unable to speak for several moments.

  Scowling as he rubbed his sore leg, the young man glanced over at Yutaka standing in shock, pale-faced. “Hey, you finally got your cast off,” the man deadpanned.

  “Oh, yeah …” Yutaka said, nodding. “Saved me the trouble of going to the hospital.”

  Later during lunch hour, the young man introduced himself to Yutaka as Dewey and offered him the first chocolate bar the pilot had laid eyes on in Lakeview. Yutaka took the candy bar and thanked him.

  In time, Yutaka began to talk to Dewey about this and that. Like Ainella, Dewey revealed himself to be quite talkative for a country bumpkin.

  “Tell me, Yutaka,” he sai
d one day. “Why do your people like to instigate war?”

  “We’re not instigating wars, we’re colonizing. And if we were, we wouldn’t be the only ones.”

  “Oh, so the Yamato people call riding in on someone’s planet in battle destroyers colonizing.”

  “Yamato doesn’t attack populated planets. We only move in on unsettled asteroids. Planting a flag on a planet doesn’t make it yours unless it’s been populated. The concept of territory has always gone hand in hand with actual occupation since Earthian days.”

  “The Kalif Federation has scores of people who were driven off their home planets by Yamato forces. The way I hear them tell it, your attack probes appeared out of nowhere and chased them off.”

  “Well, those people had probably just arrived at whatever planet they were driven from and built temporary bases there. In neither case could you say that they had settled the planet.”

  “So if a Kalif or another foreign vessel were to drive out the residents of a Yamato outpost, you’d be all right with that?”

  “Well, no … you have to consider that on a deeper level. The Yamato race is outward looking, such as in the way they favor meat. Other ethnic groups aren’t this way. The reason why we colonize space is because we are destined to do so.”

  “Really? I thought everyone—not just the Yamato people—have a natural predisposition toward war.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “But that’s what a certain Yamato pilot told me just now,” Dewey said, grinning.

  Yutaka looked down, unable to find the words. No one told him how quick with the tongue these country folk were. Or perhaps Yutaka wasn’t quick enough.

  Several days later, it was Yutaka who approached Dewey.

  “Listen to me, the difference between the Yamato and Kalif people is evident in the composition of the nations’ territories. I can explain to you Yamato’s inclination for expansion that way.”

  “Oh?”

  “Do you know how Yamato—er, not just Yamato, but how many nations other than Kalif expand their territory?”

  “Can’t say that I do,” said Dewey. “I was born and raised in Kalif.”

  “Spacefaring people are essentially known as spinners. Yamato is nothing more than one of many nations of spinners.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s just like it sounds.” Yutaka made his best attempt to repeat the history lessons he’d been taught. The myriad races inhabiting the solar system all had their reasons for leaving the confines of Earth, but there was only one practical method for accomplishing it. They had all been flung into space by the orbital elevator using Earth’s centrifugal force. Then the evacuees found asteroids with the requisite resources and daylight in the belt between Mars and Jupiter and built colonies.

  “So they’re called spinners because they were spun into space,” said Dewey.

  “That’s not all.”

  Early space colonists that first settled outside Earth’s orbit soon learned that humans and other organisms required a certain measure of gravity to live in relative stability. The only celestial bodies able to provide any meaningful amount of gravity were Earth and its moon, Venus, Mars, and the dwarf planet Ceres. If humans were going to settle anywhere else, they had to figure out a way to produce artificial gravity.

  The challenge was in stabilizing the rotations of space habitats. Any spinning object experiences gyroscopic precession, a wobbling on its axis like a gyroscope. Scientists also needed to devise a way to connect the rotating sections with the stationary parts of the colony.

  After various designs for rotating colonies were proposed, the model that came to be widely used was the concentric Stanford Torus.

  The CS Torus was not a megatechnology. It was nothing more than a disc-shaped colony about five hundred meters in diameter capable of housing ten thousand inhabitants at most. But the advantage of the CS Torus was not its population capacity, but in its ability to provide for the necessary numbers of people at any given point to support its construction.

  The construction of the CS Torus began with three sections: the non-rotating axis and two gravity chambers that revolved around it from suspension tethers. The central axis was typically built from the hull of the spacecraft that the first settlers arrived on. In fact, that was the method of construction that had been proposed from the start.

  Expansion was undertaken from the two opposing and tethered gravity chambers. Pieces were added to what initially resembled a humble mobile and was supported by four spokes and then eight spokes until the rotating ring called the torus was complete. Afterward more rings were added around the first; at the same time, the rotational speed was dropped to maintain optimal gravitational acceleration at the outer circumference.

  Once the inhabitants added as many rings as the spokes could support, the construction was complete.

  “The CS Torus is considerably smaller than this asteroid. Do you understand the advantage of building on that scale?” Yutaka asked.

  “No,” said Dewey, shaking his head.

  “Mass production. The CS Torus is habitable even as it’s being built. Which means as soon as the inhabitants are ready to expand, they can move on to building the next habitat. Since the habitats are small, they’re quick to build and it’s easy to pause construction if necessary. The parts and construction have been standardized from start to finish, so the design is all set. You just have to repeat the same process. Once you create an assembly line, you can build as many colonies as necessary.”

  “Mass production, eh?”

  “It was Yamato that employed this method on a large scale. Thanks to the decision to employ the CS Torus as its habitat, Yamato has expanded and grown into a major power, boasting a population of five million!”

  Yamato no Yasoshima had risen to become a superpower governing nearly four hundred CS Torus colonies in the asteroid belt. Yutaka recalled the constellation of silver-colored discs that he’d seen from the carrier vessel upon leaving Yamato and could not help speaking with some pride.

  Dewey rubbed his angular jaw and glanced at Yutaka out of the corner of his eye. “And you’re saying that the Kalifs are of no comparison.”

  “That’s right. Take this village, for example. Lakeview has virtually no way to grow.”

  “You’re right, once we dig as far as we can dig on this asteroid, that’s it. We can’t move the drums to the surface because of the cosmic radiation, which is the reason we have to live underground in the first place.”

  “Exactly. Plus you don’t have a way of moving to the next asteroid when this village reaches capacity. This is what I’m getting at.”

  While Yutaka continued to argue emphatically, Dewey listened with the same composed smile. This villager, one of a population of only five hundred, didn’t seem at all humbled by the existence of a nation of five million. Furthermore, he was not reacting out of ignorance.

  Seeing this, Yutaka grew irritated, uneasy even. How old was he anyway? he thought. He is older for sure.

  “The Yamato people are great because they’ve built a great nation, and the Kalif people aren’t because they’ve not. Is that what you’re getting at?”

  “Well … I wouldn’t say that …”

  “But you are, Yutaka.” Dewey smiled, patting Yutaka on the shoulder. “One question,” he continued, raising a finger. “Did the Yamato become outward-looking people because they built the Torus colonies? Or did they build the Torus colonies because they were outward-looking people to begin with?”

  “What?” Yutaka frowned and answered, “We chose this efficient method of expansion because it’s in our nature to think outwardly.”

  “Nature before nurture, eh? Then one more question.”

  “What is it?”

  “You have many friends back at Yamato?”

  Yutaka faltered for an answer. Upon seeing this, Dewey let out a belly laugh and returned to work.

  Even after being consigned to hard labor, Yutaka was or
dered back to the sanitarium at night.

  That evening, he was eating the bland Kalif dinner in the usual tatami-mat room, when Ainella said, “I hear you and Dewey are friends now.”

  “Did Dewey tell you that?” Yutaka said, surprised.

  Ainella chuckled. “Do you think Dewey is the type of man to say something like that?”

  After thinking for a moment, Yutaka replied, “Well, no … and I wasn’t trying to be friends with him either. In fact, I said some rude things. Someone must’ve seen us talking and assumed we were.”

  “Actually, I lied. It was Dewey who told me.” Noting Yutaka’s surprise, Ainella nodded reassuringly. “So you do know when you’re being rude. Maybe that’s what he likes about you.”

  “What’s Dewey like?”

  “No one knows. He’s a bit of a cynic, a contrarian,” Ainella said, shrugging, without any hint of irritation. “That’s why everyone’s so shocked to hear he made a friend.”

  “I never said that we were friends.”

  “So you were having a long talk with just a random person?”

  Yutaka had merely been trying to expound on the Yamato identity. But was that truly the only reason? No one back home listened to him as thoughtfully as Dewey did. As long-winded as Yutaka had been, he wasn’t necessarily expecting Dewey to agree with him. In fact, he knew the Kalif would come back at him with some clever reasoning.

  Ainella gathered the empty plates onto a tray. “Looks like the food is going down a little better,” she said, even though Yutaka had not touched the lumpy dumplings in the suiton.

  Ainella rose from the table with the tray. Yutaka watched her calves peek out of her kimono as she disappeared into the kitchen.

  Suddenly he realized how uncommonly close he was to other people and felt stifled. On Yamato, members of the same family ate their meals according to their own schedule. In that sense, dining in such close proximity to others was unthinkable.

  Standing up, Yutaka slipped on some sandals and went out into the yard. “Don’t go out past the flower bed!” Ainella called out.