by Kaz Morran
In 2003, however, Japan re-shuffled its space priorities under the newly formed Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, and shifted the focus of the industry toward the rising military might of China and North Korea.
As an adult, ten years after the HOPE cancellation, Taiyo had gone back to Kakuda. He noticed few changes on first glance. A sprawling military base still dominated the area. The H-2A replica still stood outside the visitor’s center, as did the sakura trees. The vending machines in the lobby were the same.
Inside, a plastic HOPE-X scramjet model had replaced the metal one, and a series of posters strained to find optimism in its legacy. To the model’s left, where an old orbital mechanics simulator had once stood, now lied a two-meter-long object with the same metallic luster of the first HOPE-X model. In fact, it was the HOPE-X: the two-thirds scale model they’d successfully tested in Australia but later claimed had sunk—in the desert, impossibly—before it could be recovered.
Not all of the spaceplane had been put on display, however. Taiyo was looking a two-meter slice of it, tail to duckbill. The whole thing had been cut down the middle, bisecting the belly-mounted scramjet engine and leaving its guts exposed in profile like an alien artifact under autopsy.
But that wasn’t what hurt most. Taiyo had come back to Kakuda to confirm a suspicion, and he’d accomplished his goal. Recently, the Maritime Self-Defense Force had announced a new weapon to fend off China’s voyeuristic navy: a two-meter-long missile to be deployed from a supersonic jet and powered by a belly-mounted scramjet engine.
His shoulders sunk. He felt defeated, as if the weight of those wasted decades of development fell on him. He tilted his head up at the spotlight in the ceiling and basked in its heat like a reptile in an artificial environment. He drew in a breath, lifted his shoulders, and turned to walk out.
There in the lobby stood the old man in the blue hat and jumpsuit, his loyal broom at his side. He looked more than ten years older. Taiyo wondered if the man remembered him. Probably not. But the man offered a gentle bow and smiled just the same. They met eyes on the way out as the man stepped aside to let Taiyo pass. The man’s cheeks and sockets had sunken, and his back was now more stooped—perhaps from decades of sweeping already-spotless floors, or perhaps from decades of waiting for his employer to do something exciting.
“Thank you,” the man said to Taiyo’s back in the same fake and perfunctory tone used by every purveyor of customer service in the country, but then he added in a soft, husky voice as Taiyo trailed away, “Thank you for coming back to visit.” It was subtle, but not in the script. Genuine. It made Taiyo pause in the doorframe. He didn’t look back, but he smiled, indebted, warmed, and a little melancholy.
***
As the Sun slipped behind the lip of the valley wall, the candidates gathered with Dr. Wilson on the ramp heading out of the hab for a flying lesson. She pressed something on the belly of her baby, and a ring of green light appeared around its body. She held it out on her open left hand and thumbed the screen of her phone with her right. The propellers whirred to life. The Zeel-5 rose to a hover, tilted forward, and zipped off across the mud field faster than Taiyo’s visual cortex could process.
Its flight sounded like an amplified ousuzume-bachi, or “giant sparrow bee,” which was, in fact, the world’s largest hornet and killed about forty people a year in Japan.
While the Zeel-5 buzzed autonomously around in the distance, Dr. Wilson showed off the real-time topographic imagery on the screen of her phone. She zoomed in on a ravine, revealing the contour lines of individual stones and fallen branches, and then she switched to the live feed, and the AsCans watched the terrain appear in bands, first in the visual spectrum. “And here it is when I toggle to lidar.” The topography appeared in shades of green and gray. “All you do is put in the rough dimensions of the area you want surveyed and hit Deploy.”
A moment later, like Dr. Wilson had trained a falcon, the drone returned and landed in her open hand.
The speed and acceleration of the Zeel-5 impressed Taiyo far more than its mapping skills. “So, it’s not a scramjet, but it is based on one,” he said.
Dr. Wilson raised a hand as if to ward off his advances. “You know, that’s not really my place to say.” She held the device at eye level and gave it an air kiss. Naturally, she cackled. Taiyo didn’t press her, but she grimaced as though he had. “Well, there might be some relation there. Either in the original design or in future concepts.”
“For exploring Mars.”
“One might speculate as much. After all, they’ve convinced me to let a bunch of astronaut candidates give it a try in an exploration sim.” More cackles. “This version, Zeel number five, only uses the air intake to keep its own batteries charged itself.”
“What about other versions?” said Taiyo. “Any version in the works that uses the intake to generate thrust instead of relying on propellers?”
“Sounds like you’d know better than me.”
It took a while for the cackling die down, and when it did, Dr. Wilson gave them a lesson in piloting the Zeel-5. They each gave it a try, and thankfully nobody crashed it.
***
Back in the hab, Dr. Wilson returned the drone to its padded carrying case. Once the lid clicked shut, she brought her hands to her chest and let out a low sigh like she’d climbed into a hot bath.
The Aviator went over a few final things from his seat on the stool before closing with, “All right then ladies and gentlemen, if you don’t have any questions about anything, it’s early to bed, early to rise, as they say.” He closed the lid on his laptop.
“One question,” said Taiyo, raising his hand. “What’s after day three—after the checkpoint?” The rest of them nodded or made noises to indicate they too wanted to know.
“I’m so glad you asked, bro.” The Aviator laughed, and for once, Dr. Wilson did not. “Isolation, of course.” He sneered as if he’d devised the whole project.
“What kind of isolation?” said Kristen.
Ronin made a sweeping gesture at the space around them, and told Kristen, “Maybe there’s a hidden a room custom built for yoga and spiritual growth.”
Now Dr. Wilson laughed.
Taiyo circled the hab-hub with his eyes. He supposed seven days there wouldn’t be so bad. The current T3 residents would probably ship out in the helicopters, so there’d be plenty of space to keep away from Ronin, and they’d probably get to outside on simulated mission tasks.
Ethan patted Taiyo on the forearm then pointed out the bank of windows, outside into the dark. Taiyo stood up and squinted, and he could just make out a little yellow light of the shed. When he turned back to Ethan he saw enthusiasm had deflated from the Aussie’s face.
Ethan swallowed. “The isolation’s not in the hab.”
The Aviator bounced from the stool to his feet. “Out there, twenty-five meters under that ventilation duct …” Back straight and chest inflated as if delivering a royal decree, he pointed out the window into the night. “That’s where you’ll spend you’re last seven days.”
“I see,” said Taiyo flatly.
The Aviator added, “Ancient aborigine legends call the chamber the Asylum.”
“Ancient aborigines had asylums?” said Taiyo.
“It’s a translation, bro.”
Taiyo’s gut told him that getting locked underground for a week in something named after a prison for the criminally insane was maybe something he should’ve been told about beforehand. But, he hadn’t been betrayed. Of course, the agencies would try and catch the candidates off guard.
Ronin came around the table and slapped Taiyo on the back. “Don’t be scared, hafu.” He said in his deepest, coarsest voice. “I’ll protect you.”
Taiyo shifted his chair and told his limbs to relax. “I’m intrigued,” he said truthfully. “What’s this Asylum place like?”
The Aviator grinned. “I imagine the Asylum is a rather contemplative place.”
***
> Taiyo’s boot broke through the patchwork of sticks and palm fronds and landed him ankle-deep in mud. The mud burped when he pulled his foot from its hold, and with it, he freed the stench of decaying biomass. He tightened the straps of his backpack, and he smiled at the jingle made by the climbing gear. He'd need it soon enough.
The six candidates and six T3 personnel, plus Ethan, all rounded a house-sized rock on the way to the northern frontier of the mudflow. There, at the blurred edge of the mud field and surviving jungle, tantalizingly close to shade, the mud thinned, exposing chunks of raw basalt and mangled trees limbs. The terrain rose up and dipped back down into a caldera not much bigger than a sumo ring or a helipad. Taiyo and the AsCans stood at the rim a few steps of disjointed rock above the base of the bowl. The sight at the center of the crater compelled Taiyo’s gaze.
They left their packs and climbing gear and clambered down for a better look.
To the apophenic mind, the serrated rock around the collapsed opening resembled the smashed-in teeth of a blackened, bloodstained mouth.
Taiyo stepped up onto the boulders than encircled this inner rim, leaned over, and looked down into the gaping maw of the abyss.
“I feel like I’m looking into the gate to Hell,” he said.
Ronin amended: “Or into Hell’s sphincter.”
“Are you suggesting,” Taiyo replied dryly, “that we’re about to perform a geological colonoscopy?”
A damp breeze wafted up from the hole, striking Taiyo with a pungency that made him cough, and a chill that left his arms chicken-skinned and clammy. The ominous chill should have repelled his desires, but he felt drawn to the mystery. He tried to fix his gaze on something, but so complete was the dark that there were no points of reference. A special kind of blackness looked back at him, not the kind like a painted wall. It was one of multiple dimensions; liquid, immersive, palpable. And like a stormy sea, it exuded a surge that at once resisted his advance and threatened to pull him in.
The lava tubes beneath Kambi Valley may or may not have linked up with the more famous ones further south at Undara, but the two systems had spawned from a similar geological catastrophe. The remote Kambi Valley had, in past eons, been a canyon, but eruptions had spilled magma from fissures and cracks, and as the lava traced the channels of the canyon floor, the sides and roof of those flows cooled and hardened around the hotter, insulated, interior that kept flowing, leaving behind the hollowed out crust.
Ethan squeezed between Taiyo and Nel to ooh and ah at the hole in the Earth. “Me ex-missus works round the Undara caves a bit south of here doing search and rescue,” Ethan said, unprompted. “She’s one piss-elegant sheila if ya ever ask her.” Ethan stared down the void and shook his head while either talking to himself or speaking to the depths. “… crafted like an All-Black with a coit to crush a coconut, that one is. I reckon she’ll be right without me. So long as people keep getting in trouble going off-limits, the ex-missus has employment.”
“You miss her?” said Taiyo.
Ethan picked up a couple small rocks from the rubble around them on the rim. “Nah.” He chucked one in the cave. “Being here, doing this …” He chucked another one down the hole. “It does remind me of her, though.”
Ronin hoisted a boulder the size of a cinderblock over his head and heaved it down into the opening. Several seconds passed before the echo of a thundering plunge into water came back up the shaft.
“Jeepers,” said Walter. Then, together they hoisted an even bigger boulder up and down inside. Great roiling laughter and fist bumps followed.
“Those sections of Undara people stray into …” said Nel. “Are they off-limits because they’re sacred?”
Ethan shook his head and explained that some of the most alluring areas were either unstable because of past cave-ins, or filled with geothermal gasses.
Ronin graced them with his poetry: “It’s like an elevator shaft fucked a black hole, but they were siblings.”
“Sir, have you ever considered suicide?” Walter asked, and he put an arm around Ronin’s shoulders. “Now’s a good time, bro.”
Ronin jabbed Walter in the gut. “I thought suicide was a sin.” The two took a moment to wrestle, perilously close to the edge.
Ethan motioned for them to stay back. “Give ‘er respect.”
“I’ve studied this,” Kristen said to Taiyo, Nel, and Anton as they watched; their faces displayed a range of amused contortions. “It’s called natural selection.”
“You study talking rocks,” Ronin called to Kristen before letting Walter out of a headlock. The pair of overgrown children hopped off the boulders to relative safety.
“Speaking of rocks,” said Ethan, “come round here and have a lookie.” He waved everyone over to the shaded side of the rim and led them up the little escarpment. There, he pointed out an exposed slab of rock the size of a large kitchen table. “You see them?”
“Lava flow, right?” Taiyo said of the vague depression that ran like a fat tire track from one end to the other. Then he looked closer and saw chalk marks. Closer still, he saw what the chalk lines were marking. “Oh … Oh, wow.”
“Footprints,” Nel said, her voice hushed.
“Facken rights, love.”
Nel crouched down and tucked her hair behind her ears to clear her line of sight.
Several sets of preserved prints ran the length of the rock and disappeared under the mud.
“Day before, heaps of uni folks were up here poking round at them,” Ethan said, his head bobbing. “They reckon these people died here in the last eruption, maybe a thousand years back.”
There was a handprint, too. Taiyo squatted beside Nel and hovered his own palm above the tiny print. Before touching it, he looked over his shoulder to Ethan, who nodded, and then he slid his fingers into the cool, ghostly depression. The shape of the casting forced his hand to form a claw; the impression sunk deeper at the fingertips as if the person had been clutching the earth.
Taiyo’s own body felt heavy as if sinking into the ground with the handprint. Subdued, he kept his hand in the shell of his ancient brethren’s last mark on the Earth while he regarded the rest of the site. There were several sets of foot and handprints, prints from feet caught mid-stride, and from people tumbling over each other, falling …
A sense of tragedy and kinship washed over Taiyo. He closed his eyes, felt the cold stone imprint around his fingers, and imagined the fear the people must have felt as the lava chased them down the mountain. Had they been vaporized by the heat and gasses? By the shockwave? Or had they been devoured as the lava engulfed their ankles, then shins, knees, and slowly higher?
Their prints were all they left behind: the last remnants of an expedition caught off guard.
Ethan claimed a narrow ledge jutted from the wall 78 meters below the opening, and thirty meters below that was a pool of water of unknown depth and volume.
Taiyo volunteered to go first, but not to impress the evaluators. He secured his harness, runner, and carabiner; anchored himself to a boulder and did his safety checks. While Ethan groped Taiyo’s midsection, double-checking everything, Nel held out Taiyo’s gloves. In that brief moment when they both had their hands on the gloves, he searched her face for emotion, for some clue to how she felt about spending the next ten days buried inside the earth. They met eyes, and she gave him a nod. She wasn’t worried. She wasn’t scared, and neither was Taiyo.
Each candidate had come a long way in his or her quest to become an astronaut. They’d worked hard to improve their odds and reach the final round, but by no means were any of them guaranteed to see a launchpad. Taiyo had no delusions. Playing Martian-explorer in a cave might be as close as he’d ever get to the real thing. So at this moment, to Taiyo and his crewmates, the entrance of the cave was their launchpad. Repelling down that long shaft into the underworld was their launch.
And that was why Taiyo had volunteered to go first.
He tossed his lines down the shaft. Rope in hand, h
e braced his feet on the top of the muck, moss, and green slime that caked the rim. Then he trusted his anchor and swung out over the edge. The sensation tried to pull a whoop of from his lungs, but he held it in, and, with his ass hanging out over the bottomless pit, he flexed his knees to test his stability. Headlamp on, he peered down through his legs to inspect the landing for any of the obstacles he’d been trained to look out for: trees, bears, campers … But he only saw black.
Taiyo looked up to take in the blue sky and draw in one last breath of fresh air before committing.
Vibrations ran through his body. Instinct would’ve had him buckled at the knees and clasp the rope, but he knew better. “Hurry up,” Ronin called before giving the rope another pluck like a guitar string. “Are you going first, or not?” The echo made Ronin’s voice sound right in Taiyo’s ear.
But he ignored Ronin and took his time feeding the rope through the belay device until he got a feel for the gear. Ass out, he ambled down the wall.
Soon, the world above vanished, and the only light came from the headlamp.
He let the rope out faster, and descended in hops—not unlike an astronaut on the Moon—and welcomed the rush of adrenaline and dopamine.
There was fear, too, Taiyo observed in himself, but a healthy dose easy to swallow.
When his foot hit the landing, he again withheld the whoop, but since no one could see him, he pumped his fist. “Okay, I’m here,” he called up to his teammates. His voice reverberated over the fainter echoes of water plopping into the phantom pool below.
“The term ‘here’ is irrelevant as an inertial frame of reference,” Ronin called back down.
Taiyo cupped his hands around his mouth and replied, “It’s relevant in the sense that I’m here, and you’re still up there.”
“Don’t get cocky down there, hafu. Descent and landing isn’t the only chance to die.” It wouldn’t have been helpful to curse Ronin out, even in Taiyo’s own head. And Ronin was right: One small step could easily precede One quick death.
