The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  “You must be very frightened, Hiroto,” he said.

  “They won’t try to build more escape ships?”

  Dad did not answer. The late summer wind carried the sound of cicadas to us: chirr, chirr, chirrrrrr.

  “Nothing in the cry

  Of cicadas suggests they

  Are about to die.”

  “Dad?”

  “That is a poem by Bashō. Do you understand it?”

  I shook my head. I did not like poems much.

  Dad sighed and smiled at me. He looked at the setting sun and spoke again:

  “The fading sunlight holds infinite beauty

  Though it is so close to the day’s end.”

  I recited the lines to myself. Something in them moved me. I tried to put the feeling into words: “It is like a gentle kitten is licking the inside of my heart.”

  Instead of laughing at me, Dad nodded solemnly.

  “That is a poem by the classical Tang poet Li Shangyin. Though he was Chinese, the sentiment is very much Japanese.”

  We walked on, and I stopped by the yellow flower of a dandelion. The angle at which the flower was tilted struck me as very beautiful. I got the kitten-tongue-tickling sensation in my heart again.

  “The flower . . .” I hesitated. I could not find the right words.

  Dad spoke,

  “The drooping flower

  As yellow as the moonbeam

  So slender tonight.”

  I nodded. The image seemed to me at once so fleeting and so permanent, like the way I had experienced time as a young child. It made me a little sad and glad at the same time.

  “Everything passes, Hiroto,” Dad said. “That feeling in your heart: it’s called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: we are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon.”

  I looked around at the clean streets, the slow-moving people, the grass, and the evening light, and I knew that everything had its place; everything was all right. Dad and I went on walking, our shadows touching.

  Even though the Hammer hung right overhead, I was not afraid.

  My job involves staring at the grid of indicator lights in front of me. It is a bit like a giant Go board.

  It is very boring most of the time. The lights, indicating tension on various spots of the solar sail, course through the same pattern every few minutes as the sail gently flexes in the fading light of the distant sun. The cycling pattern of the lights is as familiar to me as Mindy’s breathing when she’s asleep.

  We’re already moving at a good fraction of the speed of light. Some years hence, when we’re moving fast enough, we’ll change our course for 61 Virginis and its pristine planets, and we’ll leave the sun that gave birth to us behind like a forgotten memory.

  But today, the pattern of the lights feels off. One of the lights in the southwest corner seems to be blinking a fraction of a second too fast.

  “Navigation,” I say into the microphone, “this is Sail Monitor Station Alpha, can you confirm that we’re on course?”

  A minute later Mindy’s voice comes through my earpiece, tinged slightly with surprise. “I hadn’t noticed, but there was a slight drift off course. What happened?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” I stare at the grid before me, at the one stubborn light that is out of sync, out of harmony.

  Mom took me to Fukuoka without Dad. “We’ll be shopping for Christmas,” she said. “We want to surprise you.” Dad smiled and shook his head.

  We made our way through the busy streets. Since this might be the last Christmas on Earth, there was an extra sense of gaiety in the air.

  On the subway I glanced at the newspaper held up by the man sitting next to us. USA STRIKES BACK! was the headline. The big photograph showed the American president smiling triumphantly. Below that was a series of other pictures, some I had seen before: the first experimental American evacuation ship from years ago exploding on its test flight; the leader of some rogue nation claiming responsibility on TV; American soldiers marching into a foreign capital.

  Below the fold was a smaller article: AMERICAN SCIENTISTS SKEPTICAL OF DOOMSDAY SCENARIO. Dad had said that some people preferred to believe that a disaster was unreal rather than accept that nothing could be done.

  I looked forward to picking out a present for Dad. But instead of going to the electronics district, where I had expected Mom to take me to buy him a gift, we went to a section of the city I had never been to before. Mom took out her phone and made a brief call, speaking in English. I looked up at her, surprised.

  Then we were standing in front of a building with a great American flag flying over it. We went inside and sat down in an office. An American man came in. His face was sad, but he was working hard not to look sad.

  “Rin.” The man called my mother’s name and stopped. In that one syllable I heard regret and longing and a complicated story.

  “This is Dr. Hamilton,” Mom said to me. I nodded and offered to shake his hand, as I had seen Americans do on TV.

  Dr. Hamilton and Mom spoke for a while. She began to cry, and Dr. Hamilton stood awkwardly, as though he wanted to hug her but dared not.

  “You’ll be staying with Dr. Hamilton,” Mom said to me.

  “What?”

  She held my shoulders, bent down, and looked into my eyes. “The Americans have a secret ship in orbit. It is the only ship they managed to launch into space before they got into this war. Dr. Hamilton designed the ship. He’s my . . . old friend, and he can bring one person aboard with him. It’s your only chance.”

  “No, I’m not leaving.”

  Eventually, Mom opened the door to leave. Dr. Hamilton held me tightly as I kicked and screamed.

  We were all surprised to see Dad standing there.

  Mom burst into tears.

  Dad hugged her, which I’d never seen him do. It seemed a very American gesture.

  “I’m sorry,” Mom said. She kept saying “I’m sorry” as she cried.

  “It’s okay,” Dad said. “I understand.”

  Dr. Hamilton let me go, and I ran up to my parents, holding on to both of them tightly.

  Mom looked at Dad, and in that look she said nothing and everything.

  Dad’s face softened like a wax figure coming to life. He sighed and looked at me.

  “You’re not afraid, are you?” Dad asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Then it is okay for you to go,” he said. He looked into Dr. Hamilton’s eyes. “Thank you for taking care of my son.”

  Mom and I both looked at him, surprised.

  “A dandelion

  In late autumn’s cooling breeze

  Spreads seeds far and wide.”

  I nodded, pretending to understand.

  Dad hugged me, fiercely, quickly.

  “Remember that you’re Japanese.”

  And they were gone.

  “Something has punctured the sail,” Dr. Hamilton says.

  The tiny room holds only the most senior command staff—plus Mindy and me because we already know. There is no reason to cause a panic among the people.

  “The hole is causing the ship to list to the side, veering off course. If the hole is not patched, the tear will grow bigger, the sail will soon collapse, and the Hopeful will be adrift in space.”

  “Is there any way to fix it?” the captain asks.

  Dr. Hamilton, who has been like a father to me, shakes his headful of white hair. I have never seen him so despondent.

  “The tear is several hundred kilometers from the hub of the sail. It will take many days to get someone out there because you can’t move too fast along the surface of the sail—the risk of another tear is too great. And by the time we do get anyone out there, the tear will have grown too large to patch.”

  And so it goes. Everything passes.

  I clo
se my eyes and picture the sail. The film is so thin that if it is touched carelessly, it will be punctured. But the membrane is supported by a complex system of folds and struts that give the sail rigidity and tension. As a child, I had watched them unfold in space like one of my mother’s origami creations.

  I imagine hooking and unhooking a tether cable to the scaffolding of struts as I skim along the surface of the sail, like a dragonfly dipping across the surface of a pond.

  “I can make it out there in seventy-two hours,” I say. Everyone turns to look at me. I explain my idea. “I know the patterns of the struts well because I have monitored them from afar for most of my life. I can find the quickest path.”

  Dr. Hamilton is dubious. “Those struts were never designed for a maneuver like that. I never planned for this scenario.”

  “Then we’ll improvise,” Mindy says. “We’re Americans, damn it. We never just give up.”

  Dr. Hamilton looks up. “Thank you, Mindy.”

  We plan, we debate, we shout at each other, we work throughout the night.

  The climb up the cable from the habitat module to the solar sail is long and arduous. It takes me almost twelve hours.

  Let me illustrate for you what I look like with the second character in my name:

  It means “to soar.” See that radical on the left? That’s me, tethered to the cable with a pair of antennae coming out of my helmet. On my back are the wings—or, in this case, booster rockets and extra fuel tanks that push me up and up toward the great reflective dome that blocks out the whole sky, the gossamer mirror of the solar sail.

  Mindy chats with me on the radio link. We tell each other jokes, share secrets, speak of things we want to do in the future. When we run out of things to say, she sings to me. The goal is to keep me awake.

  “Wareware ha, hoshi no aida ni kyaku ni kite.”

  But the climb up is really the easy part. The journey across the sail along the network of struts to the point of puncture is far more difficult.

  It has been thirty-six hours since I left the ship. Mindy’s voice is now tired, flagging. She yawns.

  “Sleep, baby,” I whisper into the microphone. I’m so tired that I want to close my eyes just for a moment.

  I’m walking along the road on a summer evening, my father next to me.

  “We live in a land of volcanoes and earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis, Hiroto. We have always faced a precarious existence, suspended in a thin strip on the surface of this planet between the fire underneath and the icy vacuum above.”

  And I’m back in my suit again, alone. My momentary loss of concentration causes me to bang my backpack against one of the beams of the sail, almost knocking one of the fuel tanks loose. I grab it just in time. The mass of my equipment has been lightened down to the last gram so that I can move fast, and there is no margin for error. I can’t afford to lose anything.

  I try to shake the dream and keep on moving.

  “Yet it is this awareness of the closeness of death, of the beauty inherent in each moment, that allows us to endure. Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe. It is the soul of our nation. It has allowed us to endure Hiroshima, to endure the occupation, to endure deprivation and the prospect of annihilation without despair.”

  “Hiroto, wake up!” Mindy’s voice is desperate, pleading. I jerk awake. I have not been able to sleep for how long now? Two days, three, four?

  For the final fifty or so kilometers of the journey, I must let go of the sail struts and rely on my rockets alone to travel untethered, skimming over the surface of the sail while everything is moving at a fraction of the speed of light. The very idea is enough to make me dizzy.

  And suddenly my father is next to me again, suspended in space below the sail. We’re playing a game of Go.

  “Look in the southwest corner. Do you see how your army has been divided in half? My white stones will soon surround and capture this entire group.”

  I look where he’s pointing and I see the crisis. There is a gap that I missed. What I thought was my one army is in reality two separate groups with a hole in the middle. I have to plug the gap with my next stone.

  I shake away the hallucination. I have to finish this, and then I can sleep.

  There is a hole in the torn sail before me. At the speed we’re traveling, even a tiny speck of dust that escaped the ion shields can cause havoc. The jagged edge of the hole flaps gently in space, propelled by solar wind and radiation pressure. While an individual photon is tiny, insignificant, without even mass, all of them together can propel a sail as big as the sky and push a thousand people along.

  The universe is wondrous.

  I lift a black stone and prepare to fill in the gap, to connect my armies into one.

  The stone turns back into the patching kit from my backpack. I maneuver my thrusters until I’m hovering right over the gash in the sail. Through the hole I can see the stars beyond, the stars that no one on the ship has seen for many years. I look at them and imagine that around one of them, one day, the human race, fused into a new nation, will recover from near extinction, will start afresh and flourish again.

  Carefully, I apply the bandage over the gash, and I turn on the heat torch. I run the torch over the gash, and I can feel the bandage melting to spread out and fuse with the hydrocarbon chains in the sail film. When that’s done I’ll vaporize and deposit silver atoms over it to form a shiny, reflective layer.

  “It’s working,” I say into the microphone. And I hear the muffled sounds of celebration in the background.

  “You’re a hero,” Mindy says.

  I think of myself as a giant Japanese robot in a manga and smile.

  The torch sputters and goes out.

  “Look carefully,” Dad says. “You want to play your next stone there to plug that hole. But is that what you really want?”

  I shake the fuel tank attached to the torch. Nothing. This was the tank that I banged against one of the sail beams. The collision must have caused a leak and there isn’t enough fuel left to finish the patch. The bandage flaps gently, only half attached to the gash.

  “Come back now,” Dr. Hamilton says. “We’ll replenish your supplies and try again.”

  I’m exhausted. No matter how hard I push, I will not be able to make it back out here as fast. And by then who knows how big the gash will have grown? Dr. Hamilton knows this as well as I do. He just wants to get me back to the warm safety of the ship.

  I still have fuel in my tank, the fuel that is meant for my return trip.

  My father’s face is expectant.

  “I see,” I speak slowly. “If I play my next stone in this hole, I will not have a chance to get back to the small group up in the northeast. You’ll capture them.”

  “One stone cannot be in both places. You have to choose, son.”

  “Tell me what to do.”

  I look into my father’s face for an answer.

  “Look around you,” Dad says. And I see Mom, Mrs. Maeda, the prime minister, all our neighbors from Kurume, and all the people who waited with us in Kagoshima, in Kyushu, in all the Four Islands, all over Earth, and on the Hopeful. They look expectantly at me, for me to do something.

  Dad’s voice is quiet:

  “The stars shine and blink.

  We are all guests passing through,

  A smile and a name.”

  “I have a solution,” I tell Dr. Hamilton over the radio.

  “I knew you’d come up with something,” Mindy says, her voice proud and happy.

  Dr. Hamilton is silent for a while. He knows what I’m thinking. And then: “Hiroto, thank you.”

  I unhook the torch from its useless fuel tank and connect it to the tank on my back. I turn it on. The flame is bright, sharp, a blade of light. I marshal photons and atoms before me, transforming them into a web of strength and light.

  The stars on the other side have been sealed away again. The mirrored surface of the sail is perfect.

  “Correct y
our course,” I speak into the microphone. “It’s done.”

  “Acknowledged,” Dr. Hamilton says. His voice is that of a sad man trying not to sound sad.

  “You have to come back first,” Mindy says. “If we correct course now, you’ll have nowhere to tether yourself.”

  “It’s okay, baby,” I whisper into the microphone. “I’m not coming back. There’s not enough fuel left.”

  “We’ll come for you!”

  “You can’t navigate the struts as quickly as I did,” I tell her gently. “No one knows their patterns as well as I do. By the time you get here, I will have run out of air.”

  I wait until she’s quiet again. “Let us not speak of sad things. I love you.”

  Then I turn off the radio and push off into space so that they aren’t tempted to mount a useless rescue mission. And I fall down, far, far below the canopy of the sail.

  I watch as the sail turns away, unveiling the stars in their full glory. The sun, so faint now, is only one star among many, neither rising nor setting. I am cast adrift among them, alone and also at one with them.

  A kitten’s tongue tickles the inside of my heart.

  I play the next stone in the gap.

  Dad plays as I thought he would, and my stones in the northeast corner are gone, cast adrift.

  But my main group is safe. They may even flourish in the future.

  “Maybe there are heroes in Go,” Bobby’s voice says.

  Mindy called me a hero. But I was simply a man in the right place at the right time. Dr. Hamilton is also a hero because he designed the Hopeful. Mindy is also a hero because she kept me awake. My mother is also a hero because she was willing to give me up so that I could survive. My father is also a hero because he showed me the right thing to do.

  We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.

  I pull my gaze back from the Go board until the stones fuse into larger patterns of shifting life and pulsing breath. “Individual stones are not heroes, but all the stones together are heroic.”