A War Most Modest (JNC Edition)

by Hiroyuki Morioka

  “You eat yet?”

  “No.”

  “Guess I’ll be making breakfast for you and lunch for me, then.” Jinto stretched. “What do you feel like eating?”

  “I won’t find anything palatable,” she said, not testily but rather matter-of-factly.

  “All right, leave it to me.” Jinto stood in front of the auto-cooker in the corner. He retrieved a can from the pouch at his feet. The label read, BOLKOS-STYLE RED EGGPLANT SOUP WITH BEEF AND KIDNEY BEANS... NEEDS COOKING... FEEDS TWO. He hadn’t the foggiest what was “Bolkos-style” about it, or even what that meant to begin with, but the picture was appetizing enough.

  He pushed the can into the auto-cooker’s insertion hole, set the flavor concentration level to “medium,” placed a bowl on the food arrangement tray, and activated the machine.

  It was Day 3 since they’d started staying at this inn, “The Rimzale.” They’d searched on foot for a place to stay after ditching the car. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before they’d stumbled on this inn, and they’d forked over enough cash for a ten-day stay.

  It was a two-room: a living room, and a bedroom. It also had a bathroom and a washroom. There was no kitchen, but this auto-cooker took up a corner, making a simple meal no trouble to cook up. The living room contained comfy chairs, and a holovision set.

  Right after getting settled into their accommodations, he went to buy changes of clothing, as well as food for the interim... and they hadn’t left the place since. Lafier obviously couldn’t leave at all, but Jinto knew he couldn’t afford to leave much, either.

  What’ll they think? he thought anxiously.

  The names on the inn register were “Sye Jinto” and “Sye Lina.” He planned to claim they were siblings if asked, but the person at reception hadn’t pried. If early marriage was common on Clasbule, he might have thought the two a young couple. However they were perceived, not signing out after three days must have come off as strange.

  On Delktu, at least, they’d be arousing curiosity. Delktunians were comparatively nosy people; if someone stood out in any sense, the average Delktunian would want to snoop around for a reason.

  He wondered what Clasbulians were like. Was that person at the desk absolutely burning with curiosity, speculating wildly as to their identities? Or did they not care a jot, and would only concern themselves with the two of them once the question of whether they’d pay for Day 11 rolled around?

  If he was curious, Jinto would have liked it if they came to question them directly. Even though he didn’t have the utmost confidence he’d be able to lie convincingly, he could perhaps keep the situation manageable.

  The worst-case scenario involved that guy telling somebody about them. “A young couple hasn’t left their room in three days. What are they doing in there?” It was no doubt a great mystery to kill time trying to puzzle out. That mystery would only grow more and more attention-grabbing as the time whiled from Day 3, to 4, to 5...

  They could even become famous in the area before they realized it.

  The guy at the desk seemed like the talkative sort, too.

  Jinto sighed. I probably need to be going outside from time to time. It’d certainly help him retain his sanity. This caged-in feeling was getting to him.

  They’d decided to sleep according to different schedules for two reasons, to keep lookout, and also because there was only one bed. There was, in fact, a third, secret reason to boot. If they spent whole days in each other’s faces, they’d have trouble breathing, and not because they were breathlessly in love, but rather because they needed their space to keep from snapping.

  And recently, Lafier was very frustrated indeed. She spent a third of each day sleeping, a third enjoying solitude, and a third with him. But even though she had some ostensive alone-time, if this “schedule” kept up, they could start fighting over trifling matters.

  Worryingly, they were also both armed. In these dark doldrums, the royal princess of the Abh and the noble prince of Hyde killing each other was not outside the realm of possibility.

  The auto-cooker beeped.

  Jinto took out the bowl that was now full of Bolkos-style red eggplant soup, and then placed another bowl on the machine’s tray, setting it to the thinnest flavor concentration available before activating it a second time.

  What a pain. If he could make both bowls with just one flavor, he could have finished cooking in one go.

  That’s what he’d done the first time he used the thing. And while Jinto had enjoyed his first salty-tasting meal in a while, it had been too salty for Lafier, who didn’t eat any past the first bite.

  That’s why he’d started differentiating their portions by flavor from then on out, but even the lowest setting seemed too strong for the royal princess’s tongue.

  The auto-cooker beeped once more.

  Jinto placed the two bowls onto a serving tray, and fetched some cool peppermint tea to go with them.

  The dining table was also the holovision set. Perhaps on Clasbule, it was unthinkably poor form to watch a broadcast during mealtimes.

  “I’m setting it down,” he said, while Lafier had her eyes fixed on the hologram, which had changed from the woman from earlier to a small doll without clean-cut facial features, with a bach (orbital city) rotating above its head.

  “What the?” he said, setting down the tray.

  With the tray in the way, the hologram grew intermittently blurry and jumbled, but the audio continued as normal.

  “...The purpose, to explore deep space. It was thought that as ‘organic machines,’ they were better suited to the task than pure, metal machines were. Thinking that was justified by the technological limitations of the time...”

  “It’s our origins,” she muttered.

  “You mean, of the Abh?”

  “Yes.”

  “...THAT is the truth behind the Abh!” A scary DUN DUN played over the soundbite of a woman screaming. “As such, Abhs are not human. They are merely organic machines...”

  “How could they say that?” Jinto reached for the holovision set’s controls. “I’m turning this off. Let’s eat.”

  “Sure.”

  “...Free men and women, we ought to revert the Abh to their rightful place. Which is to say, their place as organic machines who live to serve humans! That’s the only thing that would make them truly happy, too...” But both the audio and the video suddenly cut off.

  Jinto poured the peppermint tea into two cups and took his own bowl of soup off the tray. Lafier followed suit and began to partake.

  “About that broadcast...” Lafier broached in the middle of eating.

  “You mean that pack of lies from earlier?”

  “They weren’t lies.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s true. Our ancestors were created as organic droids. Did you not know?”

  Jinto batted his eyes. He honestly hadn’t known.

  Abh history spanning before the creation of the Empire was shrouded in legend, and the reason why was clear. Around the year 120 P.H. (Pre-Imperial History), an accident on the city-ship Abliar destroyed its old navigation log, and with it, the entire history of the Abh. The only accurate extant records started from that point on.

  Of course, it was difficult to imagine the Abh would forget their origins entirely. Yet the Abh, who were not much inclined to talk about themselves, avoided shedding light on this subject as well. That, or they felt no need to. In either case, this left surface peoples to exercise their own imaginations, and weave their own mythologies.

  And now that the topic had come up, Jinto seemed to recall reading something similar on Delktu. It was just that that information had been buried amongst tabloid gossip, so it hadn’t left much of an impression on him.

  “Yeah, no, I didn’t really know,” he confessed.

  “We aren’t particularly keeping our origins a secret. It isn’t, however, something that we like to boast about. It’s no credit to our race, and can’t be found in any archive. It�
��s simply passed down from parent to child.”

  “Looks like my parent didn’t know.”

  “That can’t be. Lonh-Dreur Haïder must have heard about it during his peerage ceremony. Every Abh knows.”

  “Huh... But he didn’t tell me.” Jinto supposed his father considered it to be of no importance.

  “I see. Then I’ll be the one to tell you...” Lafier sat straight up and regaled him.

  On Earth, there existed a volcanic, arch-shaped archipelago. Due to the geography of the land, the civilization that developed there could pick and choose from other lands and peoples while cultivating their own unique culture.

  Yet soon, advances in transportation and the expansion of the economic sphere hit the islands like a great wave. In this period’s early days, the people of the archipelago enjoyed its blessings, and prospered in no small measure. Eventually, however, global-scale cultural intermixture came to pass, leaving their individual language and culture on the verge of total assimilation. And there existed a faction that couldn’t stomach that.

  That faction decided to leave Earth, as by then orbital cities were already commonplace, and they sought a realm to call their own in the asteroid belt. Less than one one-thousandth of the archipelago’s populace departed Earth this way, but that proved more than enough to preserve its culture.

  Deeming their own culture as “contaminated by foreign influences,” they worked to reproduce its seminal, ancient form. The language was deliberately reconstituted using only the vocabulary found in its basest layer; as for high technology that didn’t exist then, they expanded the meanings of extant words and repurposed archaic words, as well as coining new terms based on the language’s ideophones.

  When the existence of closed gates was discovered, and with it the potential to plumb the reaches of the universe, this faction joined much of humanity in wondering whether they ought to head for an unclaimed star. Their population having swollen, the people started thinking they’d like to live their lives on land, even if that land was outside the Solar System.

  Despite that, their isolationist attitude would get the better of them, as they proceeded independently of humanity’s joint plan to settle outer space. They saw no choice but to undertake space exploration according to their own plan. But they had no access to any closed gates they could use to achieve relativistic-speed travel, possessing instead only low-speed nuclear-fusion ships.

  In order to make fulfilling their objective using low-speed ships feasible, and to facilitate fatigue duty in space, they turned their hands to a forbidden technology — the creation of superior crew via human genetic modification.

  Naturally gifted citizens were gathered, and thirty organisms engineered using their genes. Those life forms were considered non-human, and so they were given a trait which would never appear in “real” humans — blue hair — as a distinguishing mark.

  “Our hair color...” said Lafier, pointing to her own locks before suddenly realizing they were dyed. She frowned. “That is to say, blue hair, is a brand of slavery.”

  Jinto shook his head: “Then I don’t get it. Why do you like your hair blue so much?”

  “Because it represents our genesis, and our original sin.”

  “Original sin?”

  “Yes — the sin that marks our race...”

  Though one was lost in the training process, the rest of the Abh’s foundational ancestors were placed on low-speed ships as planned. The ships could only cruise toward their destination at a sluggish pace, their pitiful speed the result of very brief acceleration bursts. In the event they couldn’t resupply their hydrogen stores at the destination, even a return trip was likely an implausible proposition. The sound of mind would refuse to embark on such a voyage. But the original Abhs, in their non-humanity, had no scope to enact their wills.

  In their navigations, they spotted a closed gate. To seize it, they spent almost all of the deceleration-fuel at their disposal. And though the stakes were perilous, they got their due recompense. These Founding Abhs, having succeeded in securing the gate, employed their limited resources and technological know-how to convert the mothership into a closed-gate-propelled model, thereby obtaining unprecedented high velocities.

  The Founders, who yearned for self-determination, had had to muster their resolve to part ways with their birth city once they deviated from their predetermined course, and when they declared their independence, it was in a sector of deep space with no one to witness the event.

  “That’s your race’s sin? Betraying your birth city?”

  “No. That alone wouldn’t weigh on our consciences. There’s more to it than that.”

  The Founding Abhs piloted their ship to a nearby star-system, and used its abundance of resources to build a larger ship, as necessitated by their burgeoning numbers. The ship they’d been piloting to that point was simple exploratory vessel, but the new one was fitted with so many functionalities as to be worthy of the name “city-ship.”

  They did not hate their birth city. The mission tasked to them was certainly cold and self-serving, but in the end, it was their progenitors who had granted them life, as well as the ability to perceive the universe around them (frocragh).

  There was, however, fear. The fear that they might cross paths with a unit sent by the birth city to punish them. In hindsight, those misgivings were irrational, even delusional. After all, what power had the birth city to dispatch such a punitive force?

  And yet, the shadow of the city loomed large over their psyches, akin to omnipotent gods.

  As such, they pulled information from the mother brain, and produced weaponry. Every adult among the fold banded into a military corps, and trained.

  Incidentally, the ones who’d overseen those training efforts were the navigation officers, who happened to be Lafier’s distant ancestors. In any case, everyday tasks aboard a city-ship were a multi-faceted and complex affair, and their population was quite low. Unable to establish a school for each vocation or work duty, education was conducted via an apprenticeship system, which, in turn, didn’t take long to shift to a hereditary system. This hereditary transmission wasn’t limited to navigation officers; all crew positions became fundamentally hereditary in nature. And that bloodline had been passed down, unbroken to the old nobles of the Empire... but that is another story.

  When the Founders had finished their preparations, they pre-empted their imagined aggressors. That is, they opted to destroy their birth city.

  “Talk about short-sighted,” said Jinto.

  “I had the same thought, so I asked my father about it.”

  “And?”

  “He told me the Founders were in a state of unrelenting, unbearable fear, and that they shuddered at the idea they could never lay hold to any peace of mind. Their only true goal in all of this was to put an end to that otherwise endless spell of anxiety.”

  “I get where they were coming from, but still...”

  “To be honest, I don’t know what to think, either. It’s not as though my father could be certain that was true; he wasn’t present then. In any event, our ancestors turned back to the Solar System...”

  When the curtain fell, it did so all too soon.

  They would learn after the fact that the birth city hadn’t been idling in wait for the Abhs whom they thought would never return. In fact, they’d constructed several closed-gate-propelled ships of their own, and sent out multiple waves of emigrants. As a result, their power had waned considerably.

  Had they been made aware of those details beforehand, the Founding Abhs likely wouldn’t have attacked, as they communicated very clearly that the birth city lacked both the intention and the capacity to deploy some punitive force.

  Regardless, the birth city tried playing political games with them. Its leaders saw much potential in the information and ship technology of the Founding Abhs, and consequently attempted to bring them back under their control. The Founders immediately ended negotiations and marshalled everything th
ey had to assault the birth city.

  Though their numbers were meager, the Founders were all warriors, and the weaponry under their command quite ample. The people of the birth city, on the other hand, had long since relegated the concept of war to a relic of the past.

  The birth-city that was supposed to be a behemoth was in actuality almost entirely bereft of military power, and utterly defenseless in the face of a city-ship that had been fashioned into an interstellar mobile fortress.

  Other nations existed in the Solar System, but none interfered, and even if they tried, things had developed quickly and the space between the various other polities and that asteroid-belt city was wide.

  They couldn’t meddle if they wanted to. There wasn’t enough strength of arms in the whole of the Solar System to hold the Founding Abhs back.

  The conflagration engulfed the million-strong population of the birth city, and, flung into the vacuum of space, they expired.

  “Our ancestors fulfilled their sole objective. It was only after they witnessed the wreckage scattered throughout space that they realized how deep their affection for the birth city ran.”

  “Their affection?”

  “Yep. It was their home city. They loved its culture. The city had been created for that culture, and our ancestors born for that culture. But now the city didn’t exist anymore. The city’s emigrants couldn’t be counted on to preserve that culture, either. As such, it fell on our ancestors to pass it down the generations. The preservation of the culture and its language became their new goal in life.”

  “And that’s the Abhs’ life goal to this day?”

  “Correct. That’s also when they decided to call themselves the ‘Abh.’ Up to that point, they’d simply called themselves the ‘Carsarh’ (Kindred). In ancient Baronh, the language of the birth city, the word ‘Abh’ meant the ‘race of the cosmos,’ or the ‘race of the seas.’ No other turn of phrase was more suited to us, a race that drifts through space. Though the pronunciation of the language did change a fair amount.”