Rocket Girls: The Last Planet

by Housuke Nojiri

  Now that’s service, Yukari thought. There was a big difference between a beauty salon in the middle of Yokohama and the dingy shack that passed for a salon back on Maltide.

  “What’s that?” Matsuri asked, looking around the shop while a hairdresser tried desperately to keep her bangs straight.

  “Oh, that’s nail art,” her hairdresser told her. “You stick those on your nails. The simpler ones are stickers. For something fancier we have imitation jewels.”

  “Ooh! Neat!”

  Matsuri’s tribe had a tradition of painting themselves for festivals with body paint made of rendered pig fat mixed with natural pigmentation, like the local red soil. Apparently, nail art scratched Matsuri’s cultural itch in a very direct way.

  “Makita, could you do her nails?” the stylist asked one of the girls standing off to the side. The store nail specialist walked over and showed Matsuri a catalog. She chose a crimson manicure with topaz rhinestones.

  “You do it too, Yukari. It’s so pretty!”

  Yukari frowned. She didn’t want to go overboard. “Maybe just a manicure.” Then she added, “But since we’re wearing sandals, we should do our toes too, don’t you think?”

  When they were done being fussed over from head to toe—literally—Yukari felt like a new woman. They hit the street and took in the downtown air, a potent mélange of Italian food, perfume, and exhaust.

  Not bad. Not bad at all.

  “Time to go shopping!”

  For their first stop, Yukari went into a CD store. “Let’s see, I wonder if ZIMA has a new song…hey! They’ve got a whole a new album out! Score! And didn’t Satsuki say she liked Hiroshi Itsuki? Might make a good present for her—you want something, Matsuri?”

  “Sure. Anything fun?”

  “Hmm. I’m guessing you’d like samba…over on that rack there.”

  “Wow. There’s so many different kinds.” Matsuri grabbed two fistfuls of samba CDs, five in each hand.

  Next was the bookstore. Yukari picked out five books from the world affairs section and a current slang and jargon dictionary—the kind that came with a CD-ROM.

  “Maybe I should read Takashi Tachibana’s book about space. He’ll probably be dropping by for an interview one of these days. Oh, right, manga! Hey! Volume 7 of Aoi and Ryoichi is out! Gotta get that one—”

  She glanced over at Matsuri to see her picking out some magazines from a large rack.

  “World Fishing? You going fishing, Matsuri?”

  “No, I like this fish!” she replied, pointing at the king salmon on the cover. “Very handsome.”

  “Um, okay,” Yukari said. When it came to Matsuri, there was such a thing as too much information. She’d only wear herself out trying to follow her half sister’s thought processes.

  For an early dinner, they went into an Italian restaurant. Yukari wolfed down a crispy pizza with a paper-thin crust and topped it off with a piece of tiramisu. It seemed like forever since she’d eaten proper food in a restaurant.

  Matsuri had ordered a plate of spaghetti, drowned it in a sea of mayonnaise, ketchup, and tabasco sauce, then proceeded to cram it into her mouth. On the side she had a glass of tomato juice into which she had also poured tabasco sauce. When it came to food, Matsuri’s taste was simple: red is good.

  When she was full, Yukari said, “Well now. Seeing as it’s seven o’clock, I think we should call an official end to our survival operations for the day.”

  “You know,” Matsuri said between mouthfuls, “I could get used to this kind of survival.”

  “You said it!”

  Piling their shopping bags and space suits into a taxi, they set off toward the quiet residential district of Nogeyama. It had been ten months since Yukari had seen her home. It looked exactly the same. The front yard was simple, just a close-cropped lawn without a garden. The house itself was a three-story affair her mother had built with her own savings from her work as an architectural designer.

  Her mother was the only resident now, but no lights were on. The front door was locked, and no one answered when Yukari pressed the doorbell intercom button.

  “Maybe she’s on a business trip?”

  There was a keypad by the door. Yukari entered her security number and the door opened. By her mother’s request, all the lighting and climate control in the house was connected to a single button in the vestibule. When Yukari pressed it, the house lit up and the air conditioning came on.

  Pulling a bottle of ginger ale out of the refrigerator, Yukari threw herself down onto the sofa in the living room. “It’s true what they say,” she said, “there’s no place like home.”

  She turned on the television. It was the news. They were showing an aerial shot of a very familiar-looking scene.

  “…It was just time for second period classes to begin at Nellis Academy when a spacecraft suddenly landed in the school’s garden pond, causing quite a disturbance. Strangely enough, the school is none other than Yukari Morita’s alma mater…”

  “Hey! We’re on!” Yukari shouted.

  The news switched to the principal, standing with the school courtyard behind him. “Yes, well, uh, I was happy to let bygones be bygones and focus our efforts on making sure everyone was okay—”

  “What a doofus. He’s sweating bullets.”

  The reporter was asking him about Akane now.

  “Yes, well, we’re still looking into reports that a student at our school assisted the astronauts, so I, er, have no comment about that at this time.”

  Yukari lifted an eyebrow. “What? He should be crowing about it to the world! A lot of taxpayer money went into that experiment she saved.”

  “Hoi… He’s using a lot of complicated words,” Matsuri said.

  “I don’t think he has any idea what he’s saying, Matsuri.”

  “Er, concerning the disfiguring of our garden, we are going to be processing a damage report and cost analysis and will be bringing that to the Solomon Space Association in hopes that proper restitution will be made—”

  Yukari shook her head. “Can you believe this guy? I mean, I feel bad for the gardening club, but boy, if we had hit anywhere else…”

  “True, true.”

  “Those Taliho curses get more frightening all the time.”

  Yukari wasn’t the only one who had started to lend more credence to the influence that the spirits of the Taliho tribe—the people living closest to the SSA base—had on their rockets and orbiters.

  Yukari’s missions had been plagued with difficulties. She wasn’t the kind to believe in bad luck, but surely the number of sheer coincidences they’d had to face was reaching a probability of zero. They might be operating at the very cutting edge of science, but with all of the things going on, Yukari couldn’t help but feel like their space program had less to do with science and more to do with the supernatural.

  “I thought they made cursing our program illegal anyway. Are those villagers still doing their ceremonies?” Yukari asked.

  “You’re wrong,” Matsuri said, shaking her head. “This wasn’t a Taliho curse, Yukari. This was your curse.”

  “Huh?”

  “You cursed that school of yours—maybe not out loud, but somewhere, deep inside your heart. You resented how they treated you. Your negative feelings summoned an evil spirit.”

  Yukari guffawed. “I don’t mean to burst your bubble, Matsuri, but I’m not the curse-throwing type.”

  Matsuri looked over at her and calmly asked, “You know someone else who would want to curse that school?”

  [ACT 9]

  AKANE FOUND HERSELF being called into the principal’s office. In all honesty, she hadn’t seen it coming. She knew that technically, she had been truant. But she firmly believed that it had been for a good cause. She wouldn’t have even been surprised if they had given her some kind of award.

  But here she was enduring this, this inquisition.

  “So,” the school counselor said for the tenth time, “Yukari Morita coerced
you into getting onto that helicopter. Isn’t that right?”

  “No, it isn’t,” Akane said once again. “She asked me if I would join them, and I went of my own free will.”

  How many times did they have to go through this? What do these people want to know?

  “You sure you weren’t coerced?”

  “All Miss Morita said was that the experiment was really important. And when I met the researcher conducting the experiment, he confirmed that. They were investigating vestibular functions in goldfish as a way of determining optimal environments for people in space—”

  “We’re not concerned with any of that. So basically, you were threatened with the failure of this very important experiment and found yourself unable to refuse. Right?”

  Not concerned? What?!

  Akane grew increasingly sure that something wasn’t right here.

  “They were so grateful to me for saving those goldfish,” Akane said, desperation creeping into her voice. “Why aren’t you?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  OF FIGS AND SWALLOWS

  [ACT 1]

  IF YOU LOOK at a globe, just to the east of New Guinea and south of the red line of the equator lies a small chain of islands stretching from the northwest to the southeast: the Solomon Islands.

  Most Japanese knew them for Guadalcanal, where lots of the heavy fighting took place during the war in the Pacific. These islands first appeared in Western history books in the sixteenth century when Spaniards discovered them, but oceanic peoples had been living there since at least one thousand BCE.

  Most tourists visiting the islands were Japanese come to see the old battlegrounds, but in recent years their numbers had dwindled. It wasn’t until four years ago that new ties were formed between Japan and the Solomon Islands with the construction of the Solomon Space Association on Maltide, a small island ringed with coral reefs and covered in jungle.

  The SSA existed entirely on the funding of the OECF, Japan’s Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund. The association’s founder was one Isao Nasuda, a relatively unknown space enthusiast at the time. How he had managed to lobby his way into a position of such power was still something of a mystery.

  “As part of our overseas development aid, we need to provide the Solomon Islands with broadcast education and a complete communications network,” he had argued. “And the best way to do that is with communication satellites.

  “Building dams and bridges is all very well and good, but if we build them and don’t provide for their upkeep properly, we get burned by the critics. Maintaining a communications satellite network is no different, and it costs a hefty amount of money.”

  Everything up to this point in Nasuda’s argument was pretty standard fare. It was the next part that upped the ante.

  “In order to pull this off at the lowest possible price point, we need to deploy a manned spaceflight support network.”

  Nasuda was nothing if not self-serving.

  Anyone with the least bit of experience in space development would have seen through his ploy in a moment. What he was suggesting was akin to building a factory in order to fix a flat tire on a bicycle. However, thanks to the uninformed officials hearing his case, the program had passed with no objections. Of course, what Nasuda really wanted was to realize low-cost manned spaceflight in order to seize a piece of the growing pie that was the global space industry.

  Due to a general lack of media interest in foreign aid efforts, construction on the base had begun without the slightest reaction from taxpayers. Development of an entirely proprietary manned spaceflight system was soon under way. Everything was going swimmingly until plans stalled during the testing phase of their large-scale booster rocket. Nasuda had just received official notice that he had six months left to realize manned flight or the entire thing would be scrapped. That was right about the time Yukari Morita visited the island.

  With a single, lightweight pilot like her in the orbiter, they might just be able to get away with the small-scale rockets they had already developed. Finding the similarly built Matsuri for a backup crew had just been icing on the cake.

  In the end, they were able to send someone into space before their deadline, and the SSA survived. Not only that, but they were able to realize such a dramatic cost improvement that Nasuda’s lie had transformed into a truth of sorts overnight. They had realized his vision of a manned space-repair service. Now the eyes of the world were on the SSA.

  It was after this that they rolled out the MOB2 series of multiple-seat orbiters. However, they were still obliged to use the smallest astronauts possible. By reducing the weight of a crewmember by a single kilogram, they could shave all of seventy from the total weight of the rockets. By limiting crew height to 155 cm, they could reduce the weight of the orbiter alone by a whole seven hundred kilograms.

  Which is how the future of the SSA came to rely on short, female pilots. Of which at present, they had only two. Two pilots to NASA’s five hundred…

  Five days after the orbiter’s emergency splashdown in Yokohama.

  The top staff were gathered in the meeting room on the third floor of the main SSA building for a roundup of the last mission.

  “…Luckily, the soy sauce and vinegar compound did little damage to the cockpit controls. All of the electronic components are shielded, of course, to resist the effects of a small amount of moisture,” chief engineer Hiroyuki Mukai reported. “As long as nothing seeps in through the outer hull.”

  “What about the momentary loss of power due to water damage? Is that something we should work on improving?” Kazuya Kinoshita asked. Kinoshita was the number two man at the SSA.

  “I doubt there’s any need. After splashdown, it doesn’t really matter what breaks.”

  “Well, as long as the fuel cells don’t explode.”

  “Which is why they jettison them before splashdown.”

  “But Yukari likes hanging on to them,” Kinoshita noted. “Fuel cells make for a lot more power once you’re on the ground. You can operate the air conditioning and use the radio without worrying about your batteries.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to train her not to expect those luxuries.”

  “That’s a possibility,” Asahikawa noted. She was the chief medical officer in charge of every aspect of the astronauts’ daily lives. “But there are limits. Actually, the problem with Yukari is she’s been trained so well, she’s starting to look for shortcuts to everything.”

  The room filled with laughter.

  “Who would’ve thought that following fashions and studying for school tests would prepare someone so well for a career as an astronaut? Memorizing an orbiter manual is nothing to a homework-hardened schoolgirl,” Nasuda said.

  “Let’s not underestimate Matsuri, either. Recall that she was somehow able to smuggle an entire durian into that capsule.”

  “How did she do that, anyway? We checked that capsule completely before liftoff,” Mukai asked. He had been responsible for the prelaunch check.

  “Apparently, she used a sort of hypnosis. By placing the inspection crew under a kind of trance, she made them unable to physically see the durian.”

  “Excuse me? Is that even possible?”

  “I can’t see any other way that she could have pulled it off. The Taliho tribe claims to have been doing this sort of thing for thousands of years, after all.”

  Satsuki had already debriefed the inspection crew. She had even tried hypnosis on them herself to get to the bottom of what had happened just before the rocket took off—but no clear answers were forthcoming.

  “But wait,” Mukai cut in. “If they can do that, why don’t the Taliho all go off and make a killing robbing banks?”

  “Let’s just be grateful that they seem to have wisdom in equal amounts to their power. Mind you, I’m going to keep Matsuri confined to quarters until we’re ready to strap her in next time.”

  “What happens if she hypnotizes the guards at her door?”

  Satsuki frowned.
>
  “We just have to trust them, both of them,” Nasuda said. “Thankfully, the durian did no real damage, and Yukari jettisoned the fuel cells as she was supposed to. If you don’t mind, I’d like to discuss the malfunction in the sequencer next.”

  “Malfunction? You make it sound like there was something wrong with the electronics.” Mukai snorted. “What happened was, Yukari left the protective cover on the activation switch open while she was dealing with the goldfish, and she accidentally bumped the switch. Yukari says so herself, and that account fits the telemetry records.”

  “So it was operator error.”

  “Not that I blame her. Everything happened with incredibly bad timing,” Kinoshita said. “What Yukari is saying is that we can’t have one person doing two jobs up there. Well, I suppose it’s two people doing two jobs, but both of them are supposed to be checking the other’s operations, so when you add an experiment to their list of duties, it’s too much. They get confused.”

  “So they need a third person?” Nasuda crossed his arms.

  Everyone in the room was aware that on the U.S. space shuttle, duties were divided between mission specialists and payload specialists.

  “How is development going on the three-person orbiter?”

  “As smoothly as could be wished for. All we’re basically doing is cramming another seat into the MOB2 transport locker space.”

  “The trick is finding a mission specialist with the same dimensions as Yukari and Matsuri.”

  “No kidding. Whoever it is, they’ll have to cram into a space barely fifty centimeters across.”

  [ACT 2]

  “YOU KNOW WHAT we really need here? A disco.”

  It was lunch break. Yukari and Matsuri were sitting in the shade of a palm tree along the beach, sipping coconut milk.

  “Hoi? What’s a disco?”

  “It’s a place for young people to get together and dance and drink and stuff like that.”

  “Sounds like a sing-sing.”