“Oh Zara, it’s okay,” Kato said, overcome with emotion. “A million times over.” They exchanged another long hug.
“Remember when we used to have fake sword fights?” Kato said at length.
“Vaguely.”
“Well, I saw some bamboo canes on the garden decks of Dawn. I challenge you to a duel. Do you accept?”
“I do!”
They rushed like giddy children back to the other ship, uprooted two canes that were about a meter long, and battled it out. Kato parried her jabs skillfully. “You aren’t going to get one over on me in this sport, little girl. I used to do fencing in school!”
“Ah, but I can outrun you,” Zara said. “I’ve been flying up and down this atrium for years now!” Kato chased her up towards the bridge and found that she could indeed move as well as the best gymnast on Earth around the edges of a deck, keeping her momentum to propel herself all the way through the foliage. She twisted in flight and landed feet first on the outside wall of the atrium, then ran around it in the same manner that they used the curved inner walls of their ships as jogging tracks. Zara’s bare feet left footprints on the glass.
“Alright, fine. You win,” Kato conceded, struggling to regain his breath as he chased her. Zara stopped, after taking a few minutes to lose her momentum, and then came back to where he floated among the plants. She raised her hand in a high-five manner, and Kato reciprocated, grabbing her hand instead of just slapping it. They grinned at each other.
“Where do you sleep?” Kato asked.
“In the upper ring. It felt kind of weird taking one of the crew’s cabins.”
Kato nodded. “You can come and stay on the Eternity, of course,” he said.
Zara had been hoping he would invite her over and broke out into a broad grin. “I’d love to, Dad. I’ll sleep in the observation bubble. The Eternity can be our house in space.”
The next day, Zara, still rubbing the sleep from her eyes as they ate breakfast aboard the Eternity, said: “Doesn’t this seem a little bit weird to you? I mean, we’re the only two humans for forty-five billion kilometers.”
“Believe me, honey, there’s nothing normal about this at all,” Kato said. “Some days, I pinch myself to make sure I’m still here and ask myself, why I did this? I have to say, even after spending billions, and committing myself to space for the rest of my days, in some ways I still don’t really know why I’m doing it. I’m happy that I am, of course—I don’t regret it.
“Beyond the reasons I gave when I announced the mission, like being the first human to enter interstellar space, it’s just something I felt like I had to do.” He shook his head as he pondered. “One of us had to go to the stars. I knew there wouldn’t be interstellar warp drives in my lifetime. Maybe there never will. So, this is the next best thing, Seung Yi’s interference notwithstanding.”
Zara nodded. They smiled at each other. “I sure am glad you’re here,” Kato said. “It was getting awfully lonely!”
“Me, too,” Zara said. “I’m sure I could have had a great life on Earth. But, there’d always be this hole in my heart, shaped like you.”
Kato hugged her.
“I really worried about you when you were younger,” Kato said. “I saw you approach the brink several times, only to pull back at the last minute. I figured the pain of losing your mom was manifesting itself. But, there was nothing I could do. You were a young woman, and you were making your own decisions.”
There was silence for several minutes.
“You remember my friend Devyn that used to come over when I was about ten?” Zara said. “The little black girl?”
Kato smiled, looking off into the distance as he recalled. “Yes. She was a sweetie.”
“Remember how she always said, ‘Hi, Zara’s dad,’ when she saw you?”
Kato laughed. “Yes. She’d never use my name, but she always gave me a hug. Her home life was problematic. Maybe that’s why she came over so much.”
Zara nodded. “She got in touch with me shortly before I left. I think she’s a TV producer now. Married with three kids.”
“Oh, cool. She made something out of her life, then.”
“Yes.” Zara paused. “Just like us.”
Kato nodded. “I had my own crosses to bear. My parents did the best they could, but it was far from perfect. Your grandma told me about her father, about how crushed he was when the Japanese economic meltdown of the late twentieth century destroyed his business. He wasn’t there for her in the way she needed.” He shrugged. “There’s no such thing as a perfect family.”
“I agree.”
Over the next few days, more love was exchanged than in all of their lives up to that point. Kato shared embarrassing reminiscences of Zara as a little girl. She laughed, and related things that she had gotten up to in college. They watched many movies together. Zara teased him about the cramped quarters aboard the Eternity. Races from one end of the atrium to the other were abandoned only when Kato almost knocked himself unconscious on the edge of one of the decks.
“What on earth are these?” Kato asked upon searching Seung Yi’s cabin. “Cigars? In outer space?”
Zara shrugged. “The guy’s a nut. How else do you explain his initials being engraved into the glass all the way around the lower ring? Was he worried his crew would forget that he’s the master of the universe?”
“You know,” Kato said, “if he’d have just stayed at TAON, instead of pulling all the crap that he did, he’d have been nearly as rich as he is now—only without being an asshole.” Zara nodded. “We could have done the Jupiter mission, and others, together,” Kato continued. “We’d have been an unstoppable force.
“With the wealth at our disposal, we could have sent out ships full of shape-shifters to all kinds of places to pave the way for human colonization. We could have changed the course of human existence. Even more than we did through technology.”
Kato shrugged. “I guess people choose their own path. Not that we’d know anything about making bad choices, right, little girl?”
Zara grinned. “I’m thirty-three years old, Dad. I’m not a little girl.”
“You’ll always be my little girl.”
Chapter 30
“What about those million people who volunteered their DNA?” Zara asked.
“Ah, yes. Follow me,” Kato said. They moved back onto the Eternity and down into the center of the utility sphere. Kato opened a compartment, about the size of a wardrobe, opposite his cryopreservation chamber.
“This is the Museum of Humanity—the real essence of the mission of Eternity,” he said. “All across the top here are optical disks containing the collected works of humankind, right through the ages. Three zettabytes in all. And here is all the people’s DNA. Each of these little boxes is ten thousand profiles. If we open one up, like this, we can use this thing to thumb through and select one.”
Kato pulled out a thin metal wafer, about the size of a fingernail. “This is a single person. The DNA’s encoded in binary on a so-called million-year medium. All that really means is it’s physically engraved into a tiny sheet of titanium. It won’t degrade at all, unlike the optical media. It’ll probably still be here in a billion years, if the ship hasn’t been destroyed.”
He reached for a magnifying glass and looked closely at the wafer. “This is a Ms. Sumantra Gadhavi, born in 2060 in Shahpura, India. Her picture is next to it, there, see?”
Zara looked closely. “She’s pretty.”
“Yes.”
“So, if aliens somehow managed to recreate her from this, would she still have any idea who she was?” Zara asked.
Kato shook his head. “Not a jot. We can’t encode and record brain contents yet, sadly. If we could, we’d be transferring actual consciousness across the eons. That would be something else entirely.”
“Is Mom in here?”
“Yes—there.” Kato pointed to a much larger wafer, sealed in a plastic case and mounted prominently on the inside of t
he lid. “And that’s me, there.” Another wafer was beside Susan’s. “And that’s you.” He pointed to a third wafer.
“I didn’t know you brought my DNA!” Zara said, almost indignantly.
“Yup!”
After a short silence, during which she pondered this, Zara asked: “Do you think we’ll ever reach civilization?”
Kato shrugged. “I wish I knew! I figured the best chances lie towards the center of the galaxy, since there are more stars there, so that’s where we’re heading. We’ll get there in about thirty-seven million years!”
“If the food and air hold out?”
“Right.”
Chapter 31
Kato and Zara talked across the years of Susan, stars, chess, life, death, zero-gravity sports, and the meaning of existence. Universities lined up for philosophy lectures from humans with such a unique physical perspective on life. Zara watched Anna-Nicole’s and Mikayla’s children grow up, and they learned of their “space mama.”
Twelve years later, Aleksandr fell ill. Eventually, the message they had dreaded arrived, from a much-older-looking Christopher: “Guys, Aleksandr died today. Peacefully, in his sleep. The memorial service is in five days.”
After they had shed many tears, they recorded a tribute to him.
“Aleksandr represented that which is good in all of us,” Kato said to the camera. “He excelled at everything. As commander of the International Mars Explorer, he spearheaded humanity’s push in the Solar System. He worked diligently to cement the human presence there afterward and was there for our family in our time of greatest need.
“Aleksandr never stopped improving himself or trying to make things better for those around him. He was unafraid to take on great challenges, even in old age. Space was his home, and as humanity’s first emissaries to the stars, we salute him. The observation bubble and flight deck of the Eternity will henceforth be renamed the Kozlov Memorial Sphere, in his honor.”
Their message would, sadly, not be played at the service: it had taken four and a half days for Christopher’s message to arrive, and it would take the same for their reply to reach him.
Five years after that, a news headline held them rapt: HUMAN HIBERNATION INVENTED. They read the story eagerly:
The University of Wisconsin announced today that it has successfully revived a volunteer from five years of suspended animation. Dr. Claude Stiger, Professor of Human Biology, revealed the results of this experiment to a startled world. He immediately went on the defensive as ethical and religious groups condemned the use of a live human specimen…
Kato looked at Zara, open-mouthed. “Hot damn!”
“We could have used that technology here,” she said.
“We sure could. It came twenty-four years too late.”
Over the next two years, the plans for the hibernation units were leaked online. Wealthy hobbyists and tinkerers refined them. Increasing numbers of people started suspending themselves, for years at a time—for fun.
“I’m not getting any younger,” Kato said. “I’m going to be seventy this year! If only there was a way we could build one of those things.”
“You don’t think…” Zara said.
“You brought a workstation, didn’t you?”
“Yes. It’s still shrink-wrapped, in the hold of Dawn,” Zara said.
“It looks we’d need a lot of exotic materials,” Kato said. “Hydrogen, argon, iridium, gold, lithium… and lots of good old-fashioned water.”
“I brought some of all those things,” Zara said. “I was preparing for anything we might need to make in space. There are ingots of this, cylinders of that, and bottles of the other. Nearly a ton in all.”
“Hot damn! I did raise you right!”
“Ha ha.”
“No time to lose, then! Let’s go through it all.”
A few days later, Kato said, “We don’t have everything we need to make a chamber from scratch. However, I think the preservation chamber we have now can be recycled. We can make nanobots to reassemble all the materials and then construct a maker bot, like they use on Earth, to finish it.” Kato paused. “It’ll be big enough to accommodate two.”
They looked at each other in silence for a long time as the implications sunk in.
“Are you sure it’s reliable?” Zara asked.
Kato stroked his chin. “It’s worked for the people who’ve done it so far,” he said. “Then again, they’ve only hibernated for a few years. Nobody knows what would happen if one was to do it for, say, a few hundred years.”
Zara shrugged. “All we’ve got is time, and we’ll die anyway at some point. I’m willing to give it a go.”
Kato nodded as a smile spread slowly across his face. “Let’s get to work.”
The machine came together over the course of several weeks. It was successfully powered on.
They floated in the Kozlov Memorial Sphere. Kato began the recording. “This will be our last blog entry for a long time. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts to all our legions of fans on Earth and Mars, and everywhere in between, for your support over the last twenty-seven years.
“Zara and I have constructed a human hibernation chamber. We will go into suspended animation for longer than anyone has yet managed: our target is one hundred years.”
Kato paused the recording, sighed deeply, and then continued: “This is goodbye in terms of seeing and hearing us, since all but the very youngest viewers will not be alive when we wake up. However, the mission of the Eternity is alive and well, and was always meant to outlast my lifetime anyway. From deep space, we wish peace and prosperity to all people everywhere. Spaceship Eternity out.”
In the center of the utility sphere, they lay in the chamber and closed the door. “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you, too, Zara. Even if we don’t wake up, we’ll always be together. Your mom would have wanted that.” Zara nodded.
Kato took her hand. “Ready?” he asked.
Zara closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and nodded. “Ready.”
Kato pressed the button. Twenty seconds later, everything went black.
Seung Yi looked down at the vast Amazon River delta as it moved slowly by a kilometer below. The enormous gondola in his personal airship afforded him a panoramic view, including straight down beneath his feet. Tribal longhouses could be seen here and there. In the middle distance, a tribe put out from the shore on a fishing expedition. Their craft was a catamaran, powered by twenty strong oarsmen. It headed upriver, against the current, towards the point on the horizon where the steam and haze of the tropical summer enveloped both land and sky.
I’m the richest man in the world, Seung thought. My stranglehold on the world robotics market is complete. TAON is history; smashed into a million pieces. They never recovered from the debacle. And yet, somehow, breaking the company is not enough. What Kato and that girl of his took from me was more than monetary. There is now a chance that I could take it back.
“Hai?” Seung called.
“Sir?” his right-hand man replied as he walked over. He hesitated as he saw a cold fury in Seung’s eyes.
“Sit down,” Seung said. Wen Hai obliged. “Hai, those infidels on my spaceship posted this.” He played back Kato and Zara’s last blog post on his tablet. Hai rubbed his chin, not quite knowing what to say.
Seung turned to him. “I’ve come to a decision. I’ve been thinking about it for some time, but this seals it. I want to build the best hibernation chamber in existence.”
The other man looked at him, with a growing expression of alarm. “Who for, sir?”
“Myself.”
“But, sir…” Hai protested.
Seung’s expression was one of pure malice as he looked at Hai. “I’m going to let the twenty-second century solve its own problems. I’m going to sleep for as long as it takes for the technology to be developed to allow me to capture them. MX9 will be run by someone else in the meantime.”
Hai was aghast. “But, sir… they’
re traveling away from us at six billion kilometers a year! They’ll never be caught!”
Seung, slowly and deliberately, stubbed out his cigar in an ashtray to his left. Then he turned back to face Hai. “That’s where you’re wrong,” he said. “Never is a very big word. We can’t see how to get there right now, but I don’t doubt that our descendants will solve the problems of traveling those kinds of distances. I intend to be there when they do.”
Chapter 32
Commerce City rotated slowly and splendidly in the sun, like a one-kilometer-wide silver donut, almost a million kilometers from Mars. Towards the top, its width varied slightly, but it narrowed markedly near the bottom.
Through the spinning section passed a tube, 150 meters wide from top to bottom. It protruded a long way at both ends. Its protrusion at the top consisted of enormous communication antennae and an observatory. The bottom protrusion was a spaceport, at which all kinds and sizes of ships arrived and departed.
Governor Bart Federici and his chief aide, Angus Rigby, walked along the 200-meter corridor from his residence at the outside edge of the station to the Parliament Hall. Screens along the walls alternated information with advertising.
“God, what a week,” the overweight, white-haired Bart said as he walked with a slight limp. “Earth is talking about imposing import tariffs. On us!” He wagged a finger in the other man’s face. “Imagine that, Angus! A hundred tons of platinum a year and they’re going to start gouging us.”
“It’s scandalous, sir.”
Bart continued: “And then I’ve got a fractious populace on Mars who say they’re sick of being governed from orbit.”
“Technically, sir, we’re not in orbit…”
Bart dismissed Angus’s correction with a wave of his hand. “Whatever. I’m responsible for three and a half million people there, and a few thousand here. They oughta damn well be grateful. I’ve fended off more baloney from Earth than they know, such as complaints about all traffic having to go through Commerce City instead of straight to Mars.”
Zara's Flight: Book One of the Kato's War series Page 12