Oh, so that’s all it was.
“Fine with me,” he said.
The Belows was confusing for first-timers. Hell, it was confusing for people who lived here. Over successive generations, settlements built on the surface of Ceres had gradually sunk into the crust. Due to the low density of this icy sludge, anything hotter than the surrounding atmosphere literally melted its way down at a rate of a few meters a year. Rather than fight the inevitable, people had built new habs on top—and continued to live in the ones below, while also digging sideways. 160 years after the first colonists set foot on Ceres, the Belows had expanded into underground labyrinths. There were cave-ins sometimes. The Belowsers maintained pressurization with a combination of interior walls and cryocrete—a material patented on Ceres, made of ice mixed with minuscule bamboo chips. It dripped in the corridors, and refroze, making the floors very slick.
Kiyoshi knew where he was going. With Molly trailing behind him, he navigated the maze of public and semi-private caverns. They cut through market gardens ablaze with UV light, dark fabberies churning out printed goods, and tunnels packed with inflatable homes stacked three deep. They heard languages other than English. Ceres hosted countless minority communities—emigrants from Earth, who’d tried and failed to make it on their own in the Belt. Here, they all tended to blend together, united by their common purpose of staying alive in the Belows.
Kiyoshi noticed an unusual number of people openly carrying weapons. He also noticed a new logo on people’s coats and on holographic displays: a yellow circle on a white background. It was the same logo the customs officials at Occator had worn.
At last they entered a long corridor that struck out sideways from the central Belows. This one did not have puddles on the floor. It had tidy duckboards, and signs saying Please watch your feet! Clean air blew into their faces.
After 100 meters, the corridor ended in a star-shaped crossroads with a high ceiling. Each of the other tunnels forking off from the crossroads was brightly lit by UV tubes, and featured a central divider of saplings in planters.
Sakura cherry trees would not grow in these near-freezing temperatures, so the Galapajin had fallen back on dwarf cryptomeria, a cash crop.
Directly across the crossroads from the entrance, people streamed out of double doors sculpted from Cerean clay and fixed with splart.
Molly looked at Kiyoshi.
She looked at the people coming out of church.
She looked back at Kiyoshi.
“Yep.”
“I didn’t know you were Chinese.”
Sigh. “It’s a common mistake.”
He waited until it seemed like everyone had come out. He was so tense, he could hardly breathe. Even with his gaze averted from the church-goers, he could sense their glances. He prayed no one recognized him. They were looking at Molly. Few non-Japanese people ever ventured in here.
“Should I stay here?” she said as he started towards the doors.
“No, come with me.”
They stepped through the double doors, into a sensorial whammy of space and ethereal light. The church was an ice cavern soaring 60 meters high at its apex. That was why the Galapajin had tunneled so far away from the central shaft of the Belows. Apart from their natural desire for independence, they’d needed room to dig up, to build this.
Freestanding ice pillars supported the arched roof of the nave. Far away, a blue-tinged spotlight illuminated the giant crucifix behind the altar. It was silent, and the smell of incense lingered in the air. The pews were just made of aerogel, but all the ornamentation was sculpted from cryocrete—you could work it like stone—and fixed with splart.
The Galapajin loved splart.
To ensure that none of the fine detail melted, the church was not heated inside at all. Their breath misted in the sub-zero air, and Molly’s nose turned pink.
“It’s beautiful,” she said in a hushed voice.
Kiyoshi smirked with undeserved pride. He hadn’t helped to build this. “Yeah.”
After another moment, he led her around the back of the pews, to a small door. The corridor beyond measured the thickness of the church wall—a full three meters.
They stepped into a room full of warmth, cigarette vapor, and Japanese-language chatter.
Which ceased right on cue as they walked in.
About 28,000 Galapajin lived here in the Kirnis Belows. Kiyoshi didn’t know all of them by sight. But somehow, they all seemed to know him.
A priest walked quickly towards them. “Ara, o-hisashiburi. Yoku kimashita.”
“What?” Molly said.
“Father …” shit, what was his name? Quick BCI check— “Father Matsuda, this is Molly Kent from Callisto,” Kiyoshi said reluctantly. “She doesn’t speak Japanese.”
“Aha. It is a pleasure to meet you, Molly-san. I hope you will find help and comfort here at Yasuragi-no-Ie.”
“What is this place?”
Kiyoshi sighed. “It’s a halfway house.”
★
Kiyoshi knelt in the confessional, on a polyfoam kneeler. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been, um, seven months since my last confession.”
The treatment program at the halfway house hinged on the sacrament of confession.
“I, um, I need anti-addiction meds.”
The urge to get fucked up was sapping too much of his mental energy. Just walking through the Belows, he’d felt that tingle, knowing he could easily score here. He didn’t need this shit. He needed to focus singlemindedly on … other things.
“Just ask Sister Fujimori,” the priest on the other side of the grille said. “She’ll calculate the right dosage for your needs. But I’m afraid we can only issue one day’s dose at a time. It’s important for you to come here every day, for fellowship and support.”
“Understood, Father.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Is there anything else you want to confess, my son?”
It wasn’t a loaded question. The priest definitely knew who Kiyoshi was. But inside the confessional, he was just another flawed human being. Kiyoshi had heard from other priests—from Father Lynch, actually—that after hearing confessions, the details seemed to be mysteriously wiped from their memories, as if by the hand of God.
And a priest would never record a confession on his BCI.
Absolutely never, under any circumstances.
Still, the habit of paranoia would not go away. He shook his head, gazing down at his locked hands. “That’s all, Father.”
“Then say an act of contrition.”
Kiyoshi said it.
“By the power vested in me by our Lord Jesus Christ, I absolve you of your sins. Go and sin no more.”
★
Later, with a first dose of methatrexone inside him, he led Molly into one of the residential districts behind the church. The Galapajin had taken apart the rigid modular habs they were first issued as refugees. They had trucked the pieces underground—this was what everyone did—and then used them to shore up their newly dug caves, creating thousands of family homes in groups of four. These compounds lined the cedar avenues. Pressure doors, capable of sealing off the homes in an emergency, opened off courtyards packed with hydroponic tanks.
Children wriggled out from under the tanks of Morishita 14-2 to gape at Kiyoshi and Molly. Kiyoshi smiled tentatively at them..
A man came out— “Hey kids, chow’s up!” Seeing Kiyoshi, he froze. “Oh my God.”
The man was a lot shorter than Kiyoshi. He was younger: thirty-three. He had heavy black eyebrows and a deep-chested, scrawny-legged build.
He looked so much like Jun that Kiyoshi’s lips shook and his voice came out unsteady.
“Hey, bro. Just got in. Are Mom and Dad around?”
Teita, Kiyoshi’s middle brother, glared. He took a quick step forward. His fists balled. Kiyoshi held his ground.
Two of the children rushed to Teita and clung to his waist.
Teita rested his
hands on his children’s heads. He probably still wanted to punch Kiyoshi. But he was Japanese. He forced a smile. “Sure. We were just about to eat. C’mon in. Bring your … friend,” he added, with a distrustful glance at Molly.
★
Shizuka Yonezawa, Kiyoshi’s mother, had been uprooted four years ago from the asteroid colony where she’d been born. She’d arrived on Ceres with the clothes on her back, just like the other 28,000 Galapajin who’d made the voyage. Her beautiful stone house was dust. All her mementoes of old Japan had been lost. She now lived in a glorified cargo container 500 meters beneath the surface of Ceres.
But she still cooked perfect tempura, without resorting to the use of a Meal Wizard.
And the extended family was still together.
Twenty-two people sat around low tables on bamboo-fibre imitation tatami mats. The children had a table to themselves. Teita’s wife, Haruka, and Kiyoshi’s middle sister, Miho, sat with the kids, helping the youngest ones get their food into their mouths. Teita himself, and Kiyoshi’s younger sister, Saori, sat at the adults’ table with Kiyoshi, their parents, Molly, and Saori’s new husband, Paul. Obviously not a Galapajin, this ebony-skinned seven-footer came from a Nigerian background. Kiyoshi was assured that he’d converted to Catholicism. The guy presumably had a Japanese translation program running on his retinal implants. Hard to tell, because he wasn’t saying anything.
Nor was anyone else.
Kiyoshi felt pretty sure that his family did not usually eat supper in complete silence.
He helped himself to another piece of sweet potato tempura and dunked it in the sauce. His chopsticks clinked against the bowl, loud in the silence. He was Japanese, too. He could deal with this.
Molly was not, and could not.
“So,” she said, “what’s the story behind the new logo?”
“The new logo?” Teita said eventually.
“Yes, the yellow circle on a white background that everyone’s wearing. I wonder if it represents the sun, or something else?”
“It’s the Customs and Resources logo.”
“Oh,” Molly said. “Silly me. I thought maybe Ceres was rebranding. Incorporating as the solar system’s biggest holding company? Declaring independence from Earth? Something like that?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Teita said. “I’m just an engineer.”
“You don’t work for Customs and Resources?”
“Nope.”
Kiyoshi’s mother rose to clear away the plates. Saori got up to help her. To Kiyoshi’s surprise, Molly did, too.
Paul escaped to the children’s table.
That left the Yonezawa men staring at each other across the cups and the shochu decanter.
Teita, as he’d said, worked as a freelance spaceship engineer. Most of the Galapajin who worked outside the community were engineers. Like their cousins who’d stayed with the Monster, they could fix anything, troubleshoot anything, build life-support machinery with a printer and a bag of splart. Those skills were increasingly valuable, as the UN had commandeered all the advanced robots in the solar system for the war effort. So, on the whole, the Galapajin had prospered on Ceres.
There were exceptions.
One of them was Kiyoshi’s father.
On 11073 Galapagos, Hiroshi Yonezawa had worked as a watchman. A simple job, but he’d had an indefinably high status in the community. Everyone knew him. Everyone had trusted him to sort out quarrels—a crucial job, since their lives had literally depended on community cohesion. On 11073 Galapagos, Hiroshi Yonezawa had been somebody.
Now he was just a drunk.
Slumped on his cushion, he reached out and tapped on the table in front of Kiyoshi. “So what’ve you done with them?”
Kiyoshi’s back stiffened. “Who?” he said, knowing full well who.
“That gang. The extremists. Father Tanabe and his lot. The ones who left with you.”
“They’re safe.” It could’ve been true, could’ve been a lie, could’ve been wishful thinking. He didn’t know. Had to find them. Had to save them.
“They’re with that mad bastard, I suppose. The Shogun.”
The Shogun was what the Galapajin used to call the boss-man, in the days when the boss sold them consumables in exchange for Kiyoshi’s labor. That mad bastard was what Hiroshi Yonezawa had always called him, from the very beginning, and it irritated Kiyoshi beyond bearing that his father’s judgment turned out to have been correct.
“Why don’t you ask me where Jun is?” he suddenly roared, twisting on his knees to face his father.
The children, who’d been giggling, fell silent.
In the doorway, Kiyoshi’s mother dropped a plate of strawberries.
“Yeah! I said Jun! Your youngest son! Why don’t you ask me about him?”
Strawberries bounced through the room, falling as slowly as cherry blossoms in Ceres’s low gravity.
Hiroshi Yonezawa propped himself against the wall. He growled: “Jun is dead.”
That’s what the family thought. They knew Jun had died during their escape from 11073 Galapagos. They also knew he’d come back to life in the Monster. Jun used to talk to them occasionally. Vid calls. They had no way of knowing his projection wasn’t a flesh-and-blood human being, although neither Jun nor Kiyoshi had ever claimed it was. So they knew the truth, and didn’t know it, and the whole situation was fraught with ambiguity, and complicated by Hiroshi and Shizuka’s undying love for Jun. He’d been their youngest son. Pious, passionate, a born leader. Out of all five siblings, he’d been the one who was going to go on to great things. Instead he’d died saving their people. His picture stood on the shrine in the corner, flanked by electric votive candles and watched over by a two-foot statue of the Virgin Mary.
Their father wanted Jun to be dead, Kiyoshi thought, so he could go on wallowing in his loss forever.
“Jun is not dead.” This time it wasn’t wishful thinking. It was a fervent prayer to Mary in the corner. “He’s in trouble. But don’t worry. I’m going to rescue him, and I don’t need your help to do it!”
For the first time in their lives, Hiroshi Yonezawa flinched from his eldest son’s rage. Teita saw it, and made a disgusted face.
“Very fucking likely,” the old man muttered. There were no four-letter words in Japanese, but his tone made his contempt clear. “You, save our Jun? You aren’t even saved yourself.” In Japanese the words for ‘rescue’ and ‘save’ were the same. “May the Lord have mercy on you.” He grabbed the neck of Kiyoshi’s t-shirt and pulled it down. “Just as I thought. The cross your mother gave you; gone. Did you sell it to buy drugs?”
Kiyoshi’s brain was a buzzing white blank. He jerked his t-shirt out of Hiroshi Yonezawa’s hand so savagely that it tore. He knew he’d be sorry for the rest of his life if he struck his father. He picked up a strawberry that had fallen on the table, just to do something else with his hands. The family’s stares weighed on him like gee-forces.
He ate the strawberry, and faked a smile. “Delicious.” He looked across the room at his sister Miho, who’d always been an ally. “Did you grow them yourselves?”
Miho nodded silently.
Teita interjected, “You’d better go.”
Poor old Teita. It wasn’t easy being the middle son, stuck between an AI and a lowlife loser. All he could do was defend his territory, so that’s what he was doing.
“I’m going, I’m going.” Kiyoshi got up.
An alarm trilled, shattering the tension. Hiroshi Yonezawa pushed back his sleeve. The alarm came from a wrist tablet he wore halfway up his scrawny arm. “Just work,” he grunted.
“Papa, please set that thing to vibrate,” Miho said with a nervous laugh.
Hiroshi Yonezawa drank a last swig of shochu and stood up. He clipped a plastic nametag onto his shirt pocket. “It’s an automated system,” he explained to Kiyoshi, with more energy in his voice than before. “Backscatter X-ray scanner at the entrance to town.”
“What,
so I went through it, too?”
“Yup. Someone monitors it. Faces’re mosaiced out. If they find anything suspicious, they call us.”
“Guess they didn’t find this,” Kiyoshi said. He lifted his dagger halfway out of the quick-release shoulder holster he’d made on board the Unsaved Changes. A project to pass the time.
“Hey, that’s one of the Asada family’s blades. They would have seen that, thought you lived here. That’s why you didn’t get flagged.”
And obviously their system hadn’t recognized the Kiloeraser in Kiyoshi’s rucksack, either.
“So you’re still working as a watchman, Dad?”
Hiroshi Yonezawa glared. “Back home, I worked as a watchman. Here, I’m just the backup for a stupid goddamn machine. It’s probably a false alarm.”
He grumbled under his breath when Kiyoshi followed him to the door.
“I was leaving anyway,” Kiyoshi reminded him. He stood on one foot and then the other to put his boots on.
Molly put her head out of the kitchen, holding a plate and a wet wipe. Seeing Kiyoshi getting ready to go, she ducked back around the folding door.
Kiyoshi’s mother came out of the kitchen. She seized his sleeve. Her hair was streaked with gray, her body fragile. “Where is he?” she whispered.
He couldn’t lie to his mother. “On Pallas.”
“Bring him home,” she whispered.
She believed Jun was alive. She had faith. He nodded, too choked up to speak.
Molly hurried into her boots and coat. Everyone crowded to the door to chorus goodbyes. It was the Japanese formula.
Kiyoshi and Molly walked behind Hiroshi Yonezawa as he stomped towards the crossroads. At the first cross-street, other men joined him. This ‘false alarm’ was bringing the entire old coot brigade out of doors.
There was already a small crowd at the crossroads.
Kiyoshi jumped—easy, in less than 3% of one gee—for a better view.
A portcullis had descended to close off the mouth of the entrance tunnel. It was a mesh screen reinforced with solid steel bars. A group of outsiders stood behind the portcullis, yelling angrily in English.
Kiyoshi gathered from their shouts that another portcullis had descended from the tunnel roof behind them, so they could neither advance nor retreat.
The Callisto Gambit Page 24
