The Next Continent

by Issui Ogawa

  “Mr. Ringstone, we need time to confer,” said Tae.

  “I understand. I hope you’ll hurry.” Ringstone’s and Caroline’s faces were replaced with the caption on hold.

  “Well then,” said Gotoba. “First question: can we actually help them? What do you think, Aomine?”

  Sohya returned to the present. He had been preoccupied with Caroline’s steely expression.

  “Um…yes. As far as I can tell from Cadbury’s explanation, I think it’s possible. The multidozers’ power cables can easily extend two hundred meters. They have a macro for shaking our soft panels. With a little reprogramming, we could use it.”

  “Their panels are built from different materials. Are you sure you can dislodge the regolith just by shaking them?”

  “If it doesn’t work, we can clean it off.”

  “With what—a cloth or something?” asked Ryuichi.

  “We could blow it off. The regolith contains titanium. That’s a very hard metal. Wiping the panels free of regolith would damage them. We have a small spray module for cleaning the dozer video lenses. It’s a metal container with a heating element, like a teakettle. We can generate as much vapor as we need by charging it with permafrost. We’d have to program the dozers to manipulate the module to reach the panels—that’s a lot of area to cover. Tricky, but not impossible.”

  “I see,” said Gotoba. “It’s just a question of whether we want to spend the time.”

  “Basically, yes,” said Sohya.

  “So which benefits us most: investing time and resources to help NASA or leaving them to their own devices, cold as that might seem.”

  Ryuichi didn’t wait for Gotoba to finish. “Let’s help them.” Gotoba looked intrigued.

  “Your reason?”

  “Number one: publicity. If we help NASA, it will be as effective as airing ten commercials. Two: we’ll put them in our debt. We have no way of knowing what kind of problem we might run into at some point. It would be good to have them in our corner.”

  “Are you sure they’ll be willing to repay the favor? What we really need is for them to slow the pace of construction on Liberty Island. They’re certainly not going to do that.”

  “Fine,” said Ryuichi. “It would be better for them to do well—even if they are competitors—than dump cold water on this space boom. NASA’s success will have a halo effect on Sixth Continent.”

  “I’m not sure I share your optimism,” said Gotoba.

  “Then why did we let the rest of the world get a peek at TROPHY? I bet NASA will be building their own version soon, though it will take them a while to figure out the details. I welcome that.”

  Gotoba chuckled. “You make it sound very appealing. Ms. Toenji, what’s your take on this?”

  “I agree with Mr. Yaenami. As Sixth Continent’s publicity director, helping NASA wouldn’t be worth ten commercials—it’d be worth a hundred. I’m thinking of having footage of our multidozers working on Liberty Island intercut with video of Ringstone thanking us for our help.”

  Sohya couldn’t keep silent. Tae’s triumphant expression was too much for him. “Excuse me, everyone. Have you forgotten what NASA did for Apple 3? Are we going to repay them by turning their misfortune into an ad campaign?”

  “Aomine, this is not your issue.” Gotoba gave him a sharp look. Sohya felt a stab of fear. Naturally he was just on the call to render a technical opinion, not to participate in high-level decision making. But he couldn’t help himself.

  “You saw Cadbury’s face. She was in agony having to ask us for help. No wonder, when you consider NASA’s legacy. It’s like having to ask for help from a child who’s just learning to walk. I think we should be satisfied with putting them in our debt, not running around telling—”

  “Aomine—” Gotoba began to reprimand him, but Tae cut in.

  “Sohya.” She spoke coldly, with narrowed eyes. “Don’t you understand? If they win, Sixth Continent will be in a real predicament.” Sohya couldn’t think of an answer. He opened a two-way channel to Tae.

  “Tae, please. I’m in the same position as Cadbury. I know what she’s going through. We’re not senior people. We’re on the front line, putting heart and soul into our work. We don’t want political agendas to destroy what we’re doing. If we go public with this, the media will crucify her.”

  “Sohya…” Her image on the wearcom display was tiny, but Sohya saw the change that came over her. “So gentle, as always.”

  “You mean ‘weak,’ right? But still.”

  “If only everyone were like you,” murmured Tae. Then she sighed. “All right. Just this once.” She returned to conference mode.

  “Sorry for the interruption. After some thought, I think we should avoid publicity at this time.”

  “Really?” said Gotoba. “And help them for nothing?”

  “Help, yes. But I don’t think it will be for nothing. Sixth Continent is facing problems of its own. When the time comes for those problems to be addressed, this incident may prove important.”

  Gotoba’s and Ryuichi’s expressions suggested they understood what Tae meant. Sohya had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Is everyone okay then?” Tae spoke as if she were closing the conference.

  “I’m fine.”

  “All right then.”

  With that response from Ryuichi and Gotoba, Tae reopened the line to NASA.

  “Mr. Ringstone, we’ve made a decision.”

  “And that is?”

  “Sixth Continent will assist Liberty Island. In addition, please rest assured that we will not publicize this matter.”

  “Well…we’re grateful for that,” said Ringstone with evident surprise. Caroline’s eyes opened wide with astonishment. “It will save us some face,” continued Ringstone. “But are you sure you want to do this? It involves some risk of damage to your modules.”

  “We’re aware of that. In that case, we’ll take responsibility.”

  “That’s very gallant of you. Is this bushido, by any chance?”

  Tae smiled. “That’s what you Americans always say. There haven’t been any samurai in Japan for 160 years.” Then she seemed to recall something. “Ms. Cadbury?”

  “Yes?”

  “I have a message from our unmanned operations director: ‘Let’s give it our best shot.’”

  “…I understand.”

  “Well, that’s all. We can take up the details in a separate call.”

  “Thanks again, Ms. Toenji,” said Ringstone. He gave a two-finger salute and rang off, followed by Gotoba and Ryuichi.

  “I owe you one, Tae.” Sohya dipped his head in thanks.

  “You certainly do.”

  “I’ll take you to dinner next time. But I hope NASA and Sixth Continent can keep supporting each other.”

  “I said, ‘Just this once.’”

  “Tae?” She didn’t answer at first. Then she looked away and murmured hoarsely, “You have to choose me.”

  “What?”

  She hung up.

  If Tae were reaching out to him, the timing was certainly strange. Sohya shook his head and began reading a news flash streaming across his wearcom.

  THE NIGHT AIR, heavy with the smell of the desert, parted before Caroline’s speeding Chevy. The speedometer already showed eighty, but she gunned it harder. She half expected to see the highway patrol in her mirror, but she didn’t care. What she needed now was a stiff drink.

  “How dare he say, ‘Let’s give it our best shot’!”

  Tae’s “message” from Sohya was the last thing Caroline wanted to hear from someone Japanese. When she was a child, her father, a biologist, had been selected to fly aboard one of the original space shuttles. Entry into the elite corps of astronauts was a rare distinction and a source of tremendous pride for her father. But he was bumped from the crew just before his flight—by a Japanese astronaut. NASA was gearing up for its exploration of Mars and was eager to generate income from the shuttle. Japan had no manned sp
acecraft of its own. The agendas of both countries dovetailed.

  Caroline’s father waited patiently for his next opportunity, but luck was not with him. The transition from the original shuttle to the supershuttle began soon after that, and NASA’s launch schedule was focused on shakedown and testing missions for the new spacecraft. Test pilots were given priority, and in the process of waiting, her father had lost his qualification to fly. A slight arrhythmia, undetected before, had worsened.

  So he went back to his old job as a university scientist, where he was still making solid research contributions. But Caroline would never forget the night he had taken the call from the chief of the astronaut office, and how old and defeated he had looked afterward. The careers of father and daughter had both been buffeted by powers beyond their reach.

  “These people bumped my father off the shuttle. Now I have to bow down to them?”

  As she muttered to herself, she suddenly saw the gleam from a pair of eyes in the beam of her headlights. With a shock of fear, she hit the brake hard. She was doing over ninety. The car instantly went into a spin. She had a brief vision of the landscape spinning around in her headlights before she was off the highway and flying through the air over a ditch that paralleled the road. By some miracle the Chevy refused to flip over. It came to a halt in the scrub.

  Caroline looked shakily around her. The highway stretched away into the California wilderness, deserted. There were no cars. She hadn’t hit anything. The Chevy seemed undamaged. She sat in the driver’s seat, shivering and wiping cold sweat from her forehead.

  When she had collected herself, she looked up to see a number of animals the size of puppies in her headlights. They were standing on their hind legs, staring at her. Prairie dogs.

  Perhaps they were blinded by the light or just curious. Caroline couldn’t tell. Their calm gazes brought to mind Lambach of all people.

  Wolf, the Japanese, Caroline and her people—they were all on the same quest.

  “Come to your senses, girl!” she said out loud.

  She honked the horn to scatter the prairie dogs, then stamped on the accelerator. The Chevy’s rear wheels whined as they hit the road.

  [3]

  ON AUGUST I, 2030, the United Nations International Court of Justice in The Hague issued a temporary injunction ordering Japan’s government to freeze Tenryu Galaxy Transport’s operations. TGT was operating under the administrative authority of JAXA, Japan’s space agency.

  The day before, Tae and Sennosuke had departed for Canada, as much to escape the summer heat of Nagoya as to conduct PR for Sixth Continent. Ryuichi was in Taiwan, negotiating expedited delivery of vital microchips. The first person to get word of the injunction was the president of Gotoba Engineering & Construction, during a visit to TGT’s Nagoya headquarters.

  “So you see, if we could develop an Earth–moon tugboat, it could operate with fuel produced on the moon. That would reduce the mass we have to carry up from Earth by even more.”

  “He’s right. And taking passengers to the moon would only require one Eve launch vehicle, instead of two.”

  Shinji and Reika were tag teaming their presentation to Gotoba in one of TGT’s conference rooms. They were an unlikely pair, but when Shinji had come up with the tugboat concept as a way of reducing costs, Reika had seen the potential and jumped on it. Both had been given a fairly free hand by their bosses, which made it easier to coordinate cross-company on ideas like this. All they needed was Gotoba’s buy-in, so Shinji collared Gotoba during his visit to TGT’s Nagoya plant. Reika hurried over from ELE to seize the opportunity.

  Gotoba was cautious at first but began to warm to the idea. “Well, you two, I think that’s an excellent plan. Of course, you’ll have to figure out how to shoehorn tugboat production into the current manufacturing queue. It’s already tight as a drum.”

  Gotoba’s wearcom rang. “Excuse me,” he said, and took the call. The exchange was short and he mostly listened, but his expression changed quickly. He hung up and seemed deep in thought. Shinji and Reika sat waiting for his signal to return to the discussion. Instead, Gotoba looked up and said, “The International Court of Justice wants to put Sixth Continent on hold.”

  “That’s impossible!” said Reika.

  “This is a serious problem. I’d like to talk to Yaenami and Chairman Toenji. Can you contact them for me?”

  Reika and Shinji immediately began trying to contact their respective bosses, but both came up empty-handed.

  “I’m sorry,” said Shinji. “Yaenami is in the middle of a meeting with his chip supplier to see if we can get them to bump Intel and move our order up. I’ll have to deal with this problem until he can tear himself away.”

  “Same problem,” said Reika. “Our chairman and Ms. Toenji are in the middle of a presentation at the Ottawa City Hotel.”

  “It can’t be helped, then. The three of us will have to coordinate an immediate response. I don’t think we have time to spare.”

  Shinji and Reika nodded. Gotoba forwarded the documents he’d received to their wearcoms. For the next few minutes, they read through the documents carefully.

  Finally Gotoba said, “According to this, the plaintiff is the U.S. government. Japan is the defendant. The basis for the complaint is the Moon Treaty, specifically the clause that prohibits exploitation of the moon for commercial purposes. There are a few things here I don’t understand. Ms. Hozumi, do you have any legal background?”

  “Some.” Reika immediately began sourcing information on her wearcom. In a few moments, she downloaded data on international laws and treaties, the Court of Justice, and the Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, also known as the Moon Treaty. “I’m ready,” she said.

  Gotoba smiled. Faster than my legal eagles, he thought. “All right, I have a question. Why is the complaint directed at Japan and not the project partners?”

  “The International Court of Justice only handles disputes between nations. Also, Article 14 of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 makes national governments responsible for the activities of private companies in space. Japan’s government is responsible if a Japanese company violates some aspect of the agreement.”

  “We should’ve followed Ms. Toenji’s suggestion and put a private flag on the moon, instead of a Japanese flag. Maybe we could’ve avoided this.”

  “Unfortunately, we’re still taking suggestions for Sixth Continent’s logo,” said Reika. The three of them chuckled. Japan’s government had pointedly requested that the nation’s flag be placed on the moon. When the flag was being packed at ELE for launch, Tae had nearly ripped it to pieces in a fit of pique. The story was legend among Sixth Continent insiders.

  “Hmm…so the target is really us, and the government is named in the complaint as a matter of form. What about the Moon Treaty?”

  “It’s an international treaty from 1979, prohibiting any commercial exploitation of the moon or other celestial bodies by any government, corporation, or individual. We’re harvesting ice in Eden Crater for the purpose of building a commercial installation. That clearly puts us in violation of the treaty.”

  “Hey, hold it a second.” Shinji looked at his wearcom. “I’m pretty sure almost nobody, maybe fewer than ten countries, signed that treaty. Let’s see…America…Japan…Yes, neither one signed it.”

  “Now I remember,” said Gotoba. “We looked into this when we started the design process. Any kind of construction activity involves getting dozens of permits approved, or you can’t proceed. But Japan never signed the Moon Treaty. We decided it wasn’t an issue.”

  “I’m afraid that was a hasty judgment,” said Reika. “Laws concerning outer space are based on treaties and customary law. Customary law can be very tricky. International customary law is based on the concept that a customary practice becomes law if it continues long enough, even if the practice belongs to a culture without a well-developed legal system. The Moon Treaty itself can be considered as having
the nature of customary law. Nations that never even signed the treaty may have a responsibility to abide by it.”

  “So customary law would make it illegal to drain the Pacific Ocean? Not that there’s actually a law against it,” said Shinji.

  “Basically, yes.”

  “So the court is saying the treaty applies to Japan,” said Gotoba.

  “What happens if we just ignore the injunction?”

  “The International Court of Justice has no enforcement capacity, so we don’t need to worry about being arrested. But…under Article 94 of the UN charter, if we ignore the injunction, the plaintiff can take the matter to the UN Security Council.”

  “The Security Council?” Gotoba looked appalled.

  Shinji gulped. “Would they send peacekeeping troops?”

  “No, of course not,” said Reika. “They might threaten to, but that’s all. But it would still be terrible for our corporate image.”

  “Well, we can’t have that.” Gotoba folded his arms.

  “Mr. Gotoba, we still have some options,” said Reika. “The court’s injunction is temporary. We can recover from this.”

  “Yes, I’d forgotten that.” Gotoba breathed a bit easier. “All right, I think I have the picture. We can’t ignore this, but it’s not insoluble. Our three companies should mount a counterresponse. I’d like to leave the details to the experts. Who’s going to take this on?”

  “ELE’s legal team will handle this,” said Reika. “If we need support, we’ll call on Gotoba’s legal department for help.”

  “Our opponents are the court and the U.S. government, but the Japanese government is going to put pressure on us not to embarrass them.”

  “Mr. Gotoba, can we look to you to handle them?”

  “Leave it to me. I hope I’ll be able to call on your chairman’s influence.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, there you are. Let’s make sure they know we’re not going to roll over for NASA.”