by Неизвестный
The nurse raised her eyebrows. “Hmph. Pretty good.”
Pretty Good—Pretty Howitzer’s overachieving cousin, the one she could never live up to; the thought blew through his mind, a scrap of absurdity. Konstantin had talked about sometimes feeling a sense of unreality or surreality. He’d never been quite sure what she meant, but now he thought he had an inkling.
“Too simple, of course,” the nurse went on. “If it really were that basic, they might have made some progress with her. But as an analogy, it’s pretty good. Better, though, for the neuros to accept that a person is more than a mind driving a body.”
“Greater than the sum of her parts?” He suppressed the urge to mutter something sarcastic about platitudes.
She made a disgusted noise. “Oh, don’t give me that.”
“Excuse me?” Goku stared at her.
“People who say that think they know all the parts. What they are, how many.”
He shook his head, baffled.
“People are a lot more complex. Can you trace the exact shape of the hole she left when she fell out of her life?” The nurse looked at him with grim amusement. “Work on that, maybe you’ll be getting somewhere.” She went over to the framework holding Konstantin and peeled back the right sleeve of the suit, exposing a pasty but still firm-looking forearm. She bared Konstantin’s hand as well and Goku started to turn toward the door, thinking the nurse was going to bathe her.
“No need to go,” the woman said. “You came to visit, stick around.” She laid her own arm along Konstantin’s, intertwining their fingers, and gently moved Konstantin’s hand back and forth as if trying to retrain her movements. Next to the nurse’s dark brown skin, Konstantin’s looked as white as paper, but it wasn’t the contrast that struck him.
After a couple of minutes, the nurse switched the position of her arm so that it was now on the outside of Konstantin’s. It didn’t look like any physical therapy he had ever seen, but he resisted the temptation to say as much. Instead, he asked, “Does that help?”
The nurse smiled. “Can’t hurt.”
“Do you ever try that with both her arms at once?”
“Takes two people. If you’re volunteering—” she tilted her head toward Konstantin’s other arm.
“Actually, I was thinking five more people at least. There’s a form of Japanese theatre called bunraku—”
“I know what bunraku is. Those big puppets. It’s not a bad idea,” she said, still manipulating Konstantin’s arm. “But now it’s getting complicated.”
“So? You just said people are complex.”
“I mean legally—permissions. Which would be all right, but … ” She gave him a Look. “The lieutenant told me you were in from England. You want to help with this, you can’t phone it in. We don’t do AR or AR+. You planning to stick around?”
He nodded and immediately there was another flicker on the left. Definitely right on cue, too perfectly timed to be more than that fancy footwork all human brains were so partial to, even his. In this case, especially his.
But what the hell, he thought. He didn’t have to believe one way or the other. In which case, he would stipulate for the record—whatever record that was—that yes, he wanted to see Konstantin. And he would come here and see her tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, for as many days as he could wheedle out of I3.
If he saw her every day, the odds were good that sooner or later she might catch a glimpse of him.
A tray was set next to the futon where Yutaka lay.
There was an earthenware bowl filled with a hearty soup. But what was in the soup left little to be desired. The broth was an inky brown color he’d never seen before, and floating in it were oddly shaped brown balls and white pasty-looking lumps, and even what appeared to be tentacles of some kind.
This was clearly the staple food of an uncharted, uncivilized territory, a far cry from the beef stew, borscht, and pot-au-feu to which Yutaka was accustomed.
Yutaka sat up on the futon and cast a wary eye on the blonde-haired woman in the kimono who had brought him the tray. The woman knelt down on the tatami mat, flaring her nostrils as she looked down at him. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties and had sharp features, which, at the moment, made her look all the more intimidating. About ten local kids peered in from the shadow of the sliding fusuma door. All of them had bright blond or red hair and green or blue eyes that seemed otherworldly to Yutaka. They all stared curiously at the black-haired, black-eyed visitor.
He didn’t sense any hostility in his captors. It was clear that the meal set before him wasn’t a barbaric attempt at murder or execution, or even human experimentation. At the same time, he wasn’t sure what to make of their food hygiene awareness. To put it bluntly, the soup was liable to give him food poisoning.
Nevertheless, Yutaka was a prisoner here. His priority was to heal his wounds and keep up his strength so he could return to his squadron.
He leaned over the bowl, mindful of the cast on his left hand, and with the right hand, shoveled the soup into his mouth with the strange wooden sticks.
The soup had a rustic flavor and tasted like seawater in his mouth. The potatolike balls were slimy, forming sticky threads when he bit them in half, and the white pasty lumps stuck to his teeth as he chewed. There was no way he could bring himself to eat the tentacles.
So horrid was the soup that he covered his mouth with the back of his hand, beginning to feel as if he were being subjected to some absurd method of torture. With tears in his eyes, he fought back his gag reflex and swallowed what was in his mouth, but could eat no more.
“What is this?” Yutaka muttered to himself. “Is this what you call soup?”
“How’s that for gratitude?” said the woman. “I made that soup!”
Yutaka stared in shock. It was the first time anyone had spoken to him since the crash.
“You … understand what I’m saying?” he asked.
“What do you think?” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “We bumpkins may not know how to build starfighters, but we do talk.”
“No, I meant that you understand my English. I didn’t expect it to be spoken in the backwoods of Kalif.”
“Ahem! This is the language we’ve always spoken in these backwoods.”
Yutaka watched the woman look away. She pouted like a child.
“You wouldn’t have something more … real to eat?” he asked.
“I doubt you’ll find much better than that potato and squid suiton. Eat up because that’s all there is.”
“Doesn’t this colony abide by the laws?” The Interstellar Laws of Warfare dictated the humane treatment of prisoners of war.
Hearing this, the woman sneered. “Why do you think I’m sharing what little we have to feed you? Or did you forget what you’ve done?”
Yutaka flinched and shook his head. “I don’t remember.”
“Don’t play innocent with—”
“No, really,” he interrupted. “I lost consciousness soon after I bailed out. I really don’t remember.”
The woman fell silent for a moment. “Well, that’s too bad,” she mumbled. “Your fighter crashed into the storeroom, sending all of the rice flying out into space. All that’s left to feed the village are the vegetables in the fields and some nonperishables. Although I guess I can’t blame you if you’re saying that it was an accident.”
“That sounds … serious.”
“The will of Andromeda. There are four hundred ninety-seven of us in this village, and for a while, we thought half of us would have to go hungry. But after poring over the books, checking the drums, and counting every last provision in the vacu-room for three days and nights, we calculated that the village should hold out until autumn. That was just this morning. Consider yourself lucky! If you had come to yesterday and some of the others heard you talking like that, they would have tossed you into the composter!”
The words flooded from the woman’s mouth in a torrent. When she wa
s done, she was breathless and red-faced. Her blue eyes glowed like jet burners; sparks danced around her blonde hair that was tied back in a bun.
Although he recognized that it was the spring rays spilling in through the shoji screen that cast her in this light, Yutaka could not help but admire her beauty even as he was overwhelmed by her fierce tongue. Yutaka was from Yamato, an aggressive nation that valued advancement and expansion, where assertiveness was a respected trait.
As far as Yutaka could gather, he was at fault. The young pilot had only happened to engage an enemy fighter near Kalif territory. The Kalif Federation was a neutral nation and not an enemy of Yamato.
Yutaka decided it was best to apologize. He sat upright with his legs folded beneath him like the woman before him, pressed his hands firmly against his waist, and bowed his head deeply. “I regret the damage I’ve caused. I’m sorry.”
When he raised his head, the woman was staring at him dumbstruck, and then her cheeks ballooned until she burst into laughter.
The pilot would later learn that the proper prostrate gesture in Kalif was one where you pressed your head against both hands brought together in front of you on the floor. However, Yutaka had unwittingly bowed down having combined the attention and sitting positions. Such a gesture did not exist in Kalif culture. It was no surprise the woman had laughed.
“What’s so funny?” shouted Yutaka.
“You are.” The woman smiled and wiped the tears from her eyes. Yutaka was taken aback by the kind expression that came over her face. “I wondered if you had any manners when you started eating without saying anything. But maybe you aren’t a completely bad seed. My name is Ainella Burbanks. I’ll be looking after you until a rescue comes for you. What’s yours?”
“Second Lieutenant Yutaka Kubuki of the Yamato no Yasoshima Interstellar Expeditionary Fleet, 3rd Carrier Strike Group, 34th Fighter Squadron.”
“That’s a mouthful. How old are you? You look awfully young.”
“Eighteen in Earthian years.”
“You’re just a young pup,” said Ainella, blinking.
It was the villagers of Lakeview, which was located on a tiny unnamed asteroid, who had saved Yutaka and taken him in. After thanking them, he took the necessary course of action that any stranded starfighter pilot would take and contacted the mother ship.
Lakeview had an interplanetary communicator. Despite the difficulty of hailing a military vessel through civilian channels, Yutaka succeeded in making contact by devising an encryption code. But what he learned was grim. After several days, the mother ship had determined there was no chance of his survival and had departed the sector.
Most interplanetary spacecraft traveling inside the solar system were incapable of changing course due to the current limitations in orbital science and nuclear fusion engines. Once a spacecraft passed a certain point, it was unable to turn around unless it refueled at the next port.
It had taken the carrier group three months to reach this sector. Even if the mother ship were to turn right around after reaching Yamato, it would take over six months to return for him.
Not that the military was going to mobilize a carrier vessel to retrieve a lone pilot in the first place. In other words, Yutaka would not be able to rejoin his squadron as quickly as he’d hoped.
The Yamato military drilled its striker pilots with the standards of conduct and skills for just this type of situation. The first survival protocol, as far as Yutaka could remember, was “Don’t panic.” The second was “Return to the fleet by any means necessary.”
Yutaka attempted to carry out the second protocol.
But before long, he realized that it was easier said than done. Lakeview was a subsistence village on a tiny asteroid off the beaten path. A shuttlecraft arrived from a heavily populated planetary hub once a month, but it was run by the very enemy nation that Yutaka had been deployed to attack.
Relying on an enemy vessel to get off this asteroid was out of the question. In fact, he had to assume that the enemy was looking for him.
Yutaka had no choice but to follow the first protocol of survival.
He would have to lie low until he saw his chance to escape.
“Anything but this!”
Day fifteen since Yutaka had come to live in the Kalif-style wooden house. Scowling, he shoved as much of the vegetable stew called suiton into his mouth as he could. The peculiar taste of fermented soybean along with the pasty lumps that stuck to his teeth made his skin crawl, and it was all he could do to force the stuff down his throat.
“Have some ohitashi.”
Ainella, sitting across from Yutaka with her legs folded, coldly slid the dish of boiled greens across the tea table. There was also some smoked fish and pickled red berries of some kind. As meager as the portions were, Yutaka tried to pack away as many calories as he could. And yet, he couldn’t help but ask, “Do you have any meat?”
A rump steak twice as thick as your palm? Some bread and milk, potatoes, ice cream, pork and beans? Pasta?
“We slaughter the livestock in autumn,” Ainella said curtly, bringing a small fry up to her mouth. She was frightfully dexterous with chopsticks. “You fatten them up during summer and autumn when there’s plenty to graze on and slaughter them before winter—everyone knows that. Just how do you people live on Yamato?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” said Yutaka, clumsily trying to pick up a small fry with his chopsticks. When the fish fell into pieces on the table, he tried to pick it up until he remembered the cast on his left hand. “I don’t understand why you people have to grow grass during the summer and suffer the cold in winter. That kind of thinking is from an era when we were still constrained by Earth’s axial tilt. Your asteroid doesn’t experience seasonal changes. Why haven’t you standardized your energy resources year-round? Why haven’t you industrialized your meat production?”
“Oh, stop with your whys! Because it’s Kalif tradition!” Ainella shouted. “This is the way the Kalifornia people have always lived. It’s always been our custom to live off of the healthy, natural foods according to the changes in seasons. These foods are our tradition and have been scientifically linked to our longevity. Meat, on the other hand, is fattening and smelly, inefficient to produce—there’s nothing good about it!”
Ainella, with her tall and sturdy frame, cut quite an imposing figure when she was angry. Despite feeling a bit intimidated by the Kalif woman, the very embodiment of the Anglo-Saxon character he’d learned about in school, Yutaka drew up one knee and said, “Since you brought up tradition, now it’s my turn. The Yamato people are a race that once gathered the world’s delicacies. Diverse foods from a hundred countries lined the streets and were cooked in oil brought in on enormous ships. We are a people that require calories. We were born to consume meat and flour and sugar, so we can build a powerful military and contribute to Yamato’s prosperity. That is our birthright, and if you knew that, you’d understand that I’m not asking for much.”
“The spite coming out of your pretty little mouth!”
“It’s basic history every Yamato kid learns in grade school. If you don’t like it, I guess you shouldn’t have saved me and taken me in.”
Ainella squeezed the chopsticks in her hand so hard they might have snapped in two. Yutaka watched a frightening smile come over her face and—
Psshh!
She struck his raised knee with three rigid fingers.
“Ouch!”
“Mind your manners! Don’t raise your knee at the table! Hold the bowl in your hand! You didn’t even say itadakimasu before you started eating.”
“I refuse for religious reasons. Besides, how do you expect me to hold a bowl with this?” said Yutaka, raising his cast-wrapped left hand.
Psshh!
A terrible pain shot through his broken hand, and Yutaka let out a groan. Ainella drew back the hand that had struck his cast, but she did not apologize.
Yutaka sat up straight, trying to ignore the pain, and wen
t back to eating what was left of the meager meal. “The Yamato people and Kalifs are genetically different to begin with. Do you have any idea why rice tastes good to you?”
“What are you talking about? Rice tastes good because it’s rice,” said Ainella, nonplussed by the question.
Yutaka shook his head. “It’s because you secrete a specific enzyme that breaks down starches called amylase. The number of copies of the salivary amylase gene or AMY1 varies widely according to ethnic groups, and groups with traditionally grain-rich diets have more copies of the gene. If you favor the taste of rice and suiton and other starches, you probably have eight or ten copies of AMY1 in your genome. The reason I can barely stand the stuff is because I lack the gene. So you can’t force me to digest something that I can’t.”
For several minutes, Ainella said nothing. Yutaka continued to eat, satisfied at having argued the woman down.
After they finished their meal, Ainella straightened her posture and said, “Yutaka Kubuki of Yamato, it’s been fifteen days. How is your broken hand mending?”
“Huh? Oh … it’s better, I think,” answered the pilot, holding out his left hand. “It doesn’t hurt if I don’t touch it.”
“Fine, then I’ll shut down gravitational rotation.”
The room slowly moaned to a halt as if someone had slammed on friction brakes. For the first time, Yutaka realized that an artificial force had been acting upon the house the entire time.
Suddenly, the weight of his body left him and he felt as if something heavy hung inside his nostrils. The familiar sensation he experienced upon boarding the mother ship. He was weightless.
Ainella went out to the open corridor facing the azaleas in the yard and gestured for Yutaka to follow. Yutaka floated down the wooden planks of the corridor until they came to a hidden door. Once through the door, Yutaka found himself inside an enormous tunnel dug out of the gray rock.
Looking behind him, he discovered that he had come out of a massive metal drum laid on its side. Perhaps it was ten meters in diameter. The entire house was contained inside the drum, and the landscape scenery was likely a holographic image of some sort.