by Ginger Booth
“No!” she barked, face flashing sudden rage. “You address me as Ueno-sama!”
Clay murmured, “In Asia, the surname comes first. Family is more important than the individual.”
Ueno’s face morphed quicksilver to beam approval on him. “Clay-san, you knew Japan maybe? In your life before the stars?”
He bowed slightly, the schmooze. “I’ve admired your culture from afar. This is my first experience in person.”
“I know nothing of your culture,” Sass interrupted their warm gazes. “So I was concerned when our guide Melkor was separated from us.”
“Your guide!” Ueno giggled, her little hands pressed together. Her nail polish featured tiny cartoon characters on glittery crayon-bright colors. The dangly bits from the killer hairpins looked and functioned like wind chimes, cascading tiny triangles of perhaps gold-plated tin. “Pontiac sold you to us, like a side of those disgusting beef they grow in Canada. Melkor is not your friend. But we will be friends.”
Sass doubted that exceedingly. Ueno’s personality flip-flops gave her whiplash. But she attempted a smile. “Wouldn’t that be nice.” Would it?
Ueno huffed softly, and turned. “We skip the tea house. We rejoin your Mel-kor above the onsen, I think.” Kimono don’t include kick-pleats or a slit skirt. The tight leg-binding occasioned small mincing steps in her wooden platform flip-flops, making her feet scurry quickly to set a casual pace for Sass and Clay to follow. They soon clattered into a wooden corridor, paper sliding doors on either side.
“Perhaps we should meet tomorrow,” Sass attempted, after another turn through the maze-like wooden structure. The few people they passed wore subdued kimono, and bent nearly double in obeisance. “We’re very tired. Though I’m eager to see my people and my ship.”
Ueno ignored her conversational gambit. Sass sighed and resigned herself to continue to follow the women’s mincing little horse-clops. Until they emerged onto a glass-walled porch, with Western couches and coffee table, and a view outside.
And what a gorgeous view it was. Sass drifted to the windows to feast her eyes on Earth at its most beautiful, the scene artfully combining wild natural beauty with understated man-made embellishments. Lovely mountains opened before them to a lake beyond. The distant view vanished into misty rains. The broad covered porch overlooked a steep fall of boulders into a steaming pond, graced by small Japanese maples, their leaves brilliant scarlet in the grey day. Tasteful geometric wooden walkways led down into the natural hot baths. And a lone woman unwrapped herself from a ratty dull brown kimono, and let it drop on the wooden platform at the base of the stairs.
Apparently there were more stairs, submerged, as she gracefully stepped down them into the warm waters.
Sass blinked, then craned her neck to study the sky. The nude figure wore no breath mask. And this rocky pool was outdoors. The woman turned just before she sank into the waters, revealing saggy proof of age beyond that visible from the rear. This glimpse was quickly hidden by dark quiet waters rising to her neck. She closed her eyes and tipped her face to the sky, a euphoric expression on her face. And she slipped backward under the ripples.
“She die now,” Ueno explained. “Exquisite, isn’t it? The stragglers. So simple, their devotion to nature and beauty – kami, the nature spirits. Tea? Or bourbon?”
Sass stared at where the woman below apparently committed suicide, willing her to rise from the waters and scurry indoors. Clay caught her elbow gently and steered her to a seat. “Here and now, Sass.”
She sank to the Scandinavian-style cushion in a daze. Another two women, in festive instead of servant kimono, carried out a bright white standing screen, and erected it beside them where they faced off against Ueno, seated in a armchair across a coffee table from them. She sipped tea from a simple broken cup in earthen colors, its seams repaired with gold. The squat little tea kettle matched. The space captain opted for bourbon in a shot glass, poured by her lover.
The screen proved a small smart wall. In a move eerily reminiscent of Riu in Pontiac, a man appeared, seated in an armchair to match Ueno’s, and sized as though he sat there in person. For background, the wall displayed the rest of the porch, with suitable shadows. His regular features were handsome, of a light brown racial blend common on Mahina, like their friends Cope and Abel back home, with wavy black hair and warm brown eyes, though he looked 40 whereas Cope and Abel’s nanites arrested their appearance in their late 20’s. His clothes were pure Pontiac, like Melkor’s.
Ueno spoke to him. “She asks to see her ship. Where do you sell them?” She smirked and sipped her tea.
The figure reached and poured tea into his teacup in an odd gesture that looked more like Clay pouring bourbon into a shot glass, though the physics were obeyed. “Voronin required the ship. You required the captain.”
Sass furrowed her brow. His voice was familiar.
“Ha-ha!” Ueno clapped with glee, then abruptly sobered again. “And they think you her friend. Mel-kor.”
Was this what Melkor looked like without his fish-guise? If so, Sass mourned for the man he was meant to be. “Your AI is very good. To project him so life-like, so smoothly.”
Melkor’s hand froze halfway up with his teacup – or edited bourbon glass as Sass suspected. But he resumed his sip without comment, then made a gesture, as though to open another view on his own wall. From his stillness studying that view, and the way he subtly toyed with finger movements and cup, Sass suspected he was viewing himself as they saw him now. He swallowed.
After a long silence, Ueno growled, “AI is forbidden. And your ship is in Russia.”
Sass met her eye. “I’d be interested what you use to project an avatar like that, without artificial intelligence.”
Their hostess glared at her and flicked a quick fan of her gaudy fingernails. “Machine intelligence, programs. Fun avatars very popular in Japan. And you already know your ship not here. How does she know that, Melkor?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t tell her.”
Sass winced, and sighed. Yes, she should have acted surprised upon hearing her ship wasn’t here. “I need to return to my people. My ship needs me.”
“Your ship doesn’t need you. Your people want you. But they belong to Voronin. God help them.” Ueno’s expression switched from matter-of-fact to warm. “But we are friends now.”
“Are we?” Sass pointed to the hot pool. “What did I just witness? Melkor, a woman strolled into the water and killed herself. I do not understand.”
Melkor continued studying his self-image, if that was indeed what preoccupied him.
Ueno replied instead. “She is a straggler. The onsen waters, they are poison. And she had no air. She pass out, and drown. To rejoin the spirit of Earth.”
Sass pressed her lips together, then spotted another figure, a man this time, stepping slowly down to the pool from across the little ravine. “Why don’t you stop them?” She swallowed rage.
“Stop them? I send them. They are, mm, entertainment. Such a beautiful act. Here, Melkor, another pickup.” She flicked her fingers at the American’s screen. He turned mildly sorrowful eyes to the right. They settled in to sip their drinks and watch another suicide unfold like a silent poetry reading, Ueno twisted in her chair to see.
This one ran out of breath, unable to complete the ritual. Sass didn’t know how he had enough breath to make it down the hill. His kimono still half-on, he toppled from the platform into the water. He fought to rise again, his scarred and creamy skin an angry red from the caustic pool. After flailing a few moments, he stilled, head on his arms on the platform, body submerged, and lay there as though asleep, his tortured skin an echo to the autumn maple leaves.
Sass rarely hungered to kill someone the way she wanted to kill Ueno. “What do you want from us?”
“Simple.” Ueno turned back to face her, languid and satisfied, as Sass might loll for pillow talk after a hard romp with Clay. “Asia must take its rightful place among the stars.”
&nb
sp; 33
Earth’s space program predated the Northern League by over fifty years. But with the threat of complete biosphere collapse, the League invested heavily.
Ueno Aimi, nut case of Hakone, clapped her hands again and giggled. She did that entirely too often for Sass’s taste. “I surprise you? How fun!” She dropped her wrinkled squinty smile. “This is old technology, social engineering. Like Australia, like United States. We still have too many residual peoples. Unimproved, troublemakers, stragglers. Pontiac, Oslo, Samara, always they nitpick me. Cull, cull, cull!”
The – diplomat? – pinched both sets of fingers repeatedly, clacking her teeth. The captain took a moment to realize the word was ‘cull,’ because she pronounced it closer to ‘cool.’
Sass’s most earnest desire was to escape this meeting. And never speak with this crazy woman again. For the moment, she grimly resolved to listen and learn.
“But what do they expect?” Ueno cried bitterly. “Before Calm, Asia start with more peoples! Billions and billions of peoples! They don’t want to die. And they are Asian. Of course they are smart, resourceful. Cunning.” She leaned forward on that last with particular relish.
“But the League demand rain forest back. India, Indonesia, Vietnam. They are gone. Soil, species, climate, weather. Impossible. Get rid of peoples, forest no grow back! But always they nitpick!
“But you!” She laughed. “The Colony Corps, they trick us all! They promise to return with their great ships and take next wave to paradise. They lie. They lie vilely. “ She jabbed a finger toward Sass accusingly. “These colonies. How many are Asian?”
Sass considered a moment, but saw no harm in answering truthfully. “My people haven’t visited an Asian colony yet. There were three, I think. Nozomu, Gandhi, and Mubarak.” And this witch found out so easily what Sass worked so hard for so long to learn. For when the original Colony Corps stranded the settlers around the Aloha sun, they never divulged where any other refugee ship had gone. “Mubarak is dead.”
“India,” Ueno spat. “And Arabs. Only one world is Asian? Nozomu. That means ‘hope’ in Japanese.” For a fleeting instant, her eyes warmed. “What do you know of them?”
Sass shook her head. “Not much. Others visited, secretly, decades ago. The scouts were European descendants. They decided the culture on Nozomu wasn’t what they were looking for. So they left.”
Ueno’s eyes narrowed. “What were these searchers looking for?”
“Paradise,” Sass said sourly. “The magic world where humans thrive and don’t have to work for it. The place where the grass is always greener.”
“And Nozomu is not that place?” Ueno gathered.
“Earth is that place. Nowhere else is suited to humans. Millions of years of evolution suited us to live here.”
The Japanese snorted. “Earth not so good anymore. Used up.”
Sass nodded slowly. “Yes. I was born here. I know. But do you think we found better out in the stars? We found dead moons and struggled to bring them to life. Or built fragile dome habitats, like you did on Luna and Mars, Ganymede and the asteroid belt. The planets with previous biomes are almost worse. Because life is pernicious, determined. And their life always out-competes ours, because it’s suited to those planets, while ours is not. I don’t know much about Nozomu. But I’m sure it’s lousy compared to the beauty you have right here.”
“And your world?”
“A desert moon, one sixth gravity. We built an atmosphere. We learned a lot. Maybe we could help you repair Earth’s air. I have an atmospheric terraforming specialist on my ship. She’s young. But this is her fourth world. That makes her the most experienced expert in all of humanity.”
Melkor in his handsome human guise narrowed his eyes intently.
But Ueno flicked a wrist. “We do not fix Earth. Russia forbid it. You miss – no, you remember the ‘nuclear winter’ experiment.” Her silly fingernails supplied air quotes. “And the endless rain from that. You miss the rocks Luna threw. The seeding the clouds, the drawdown experiments. Before you born, when they nuke Antarctica. All fail. Now we wait. The slow process, Earth heal itself, equilibrate, biomes evolve. Too many people, too bad. They die. We lucky, we live in domes. The stragglers, the boat people, they refuse to die. But less people is good.”
“I’m confused,” Sass admitted. “What do you want from me?”
“The location of colonies,” Ueno replied. “So we go take them. Send extra peoples, get them off Earth. They build ships first. Mine the asteroids, make ships, and warp drive like yours. A heroic Second Diaspora. They go. They make your worlds better.” Her attitude spoke plainly that she couldn’t care less.
“You don’t believe that will succeed,” Sass noted. “And you don’t care.”
“I stay on Earth. And none of this fix squat.” Her enunciation made clear the woman was proud of her Western idiom. “How many leave? Four million? Five? Half die in space here. Half go to colonies. Solves nothing. Storms kill more than that each year. And still babies born to replace them.”
The obscenity was breathtaking. She proposed to mobilize millions to work their hearts out to build the ships again, with no hope of riding on them. Then she’d send forth settlers to overwhelm fragile colonies, even knowing that this would solve nothing on Earth, only wreck what little peace some pockets of humanity had found.
Ueno leaned forward and pointed at Melkor’s doppelganger. “I think Pontiac, they give you to me because I don’t believe. And I don’t care. And Pontiac wants nothing done. More than anyone, America want status quo. But if they give you to Samara, then we don’t know what happen. Maybe Samara want real solution. Be pain in my ass. So instead I succeed! You tell me where colonies are, and I mobilize Earth to send new wave of settlers!”
“I won’t tell you that.” Sass stood. “We’re very jet-lagged. And you’ve given me much to think about. May I speak to my crew?”
“No.” Ueno reached over and tipped Melkor’s screen to fall flat onto the porch deck. The kimono-clad women returned out of the building in their mincing steps. “They show you to your rooms. Rest well, captain. Tomorrow maybe you see Mount Fuji! Beautiful.”
And Sass and Clay did follow the clattering clogs of their escort placidly back to the gaijin hall of the aliens, where they belonged at Hakone. They eventually reached a door bracketed by samurai. One opened the door outward to reveal a bare white cubicle with a floor-mount Japanese squat toilet in the corner. The other shoved Clay into the room and locked it, while the kimono women blocked Sass from interfering.
Her own blank white hole proved to be next door. Only the two samurai and two women marched her there. Sass only had a moment to think this through. For tonight, the better part of valor was to be locked inside, and rest. So she was willing to go docilely into her cell. She’d been prisoner ever since Pontiac took her, after all.
But when the door opened, suddenly the women snatched Fidget from her. The men grabbed her arms to drag her into the room. Mink and captain alike reacted in a frenzy. Sass wheeled on the guy to her right. She yanked her arm free to seize the top of his samurai breastplate, and dragged his face down to meet her raised knee.
His partner yanked her away by the arm he still held. Sass used his greater mass to swing around, leaping to his side and dragging him along off-balance. This wasn’t a strong maneuver. He stumbled, regained control, and shoved her into the cell.
Meanwhile Fidget went berserk on the women. She clambered up one’s hair only to launch into the other’s, raking their faces with her nimble claws. The mink tried to run down a kimono-clad back to reach Sass. But the other woman dropped to her knees to grab her, pinning her to the floor. Something cracked and the mink cried out in pain.
But the woman only held the mink by her lower back. Nimble Fidget could fold herself in two, and twist. She did so and bit the woman’s hand, tearing off flesh. The woman screamed and let go. The cunning beast ran into Sass’s arms, her back legs limping, little maw bloody and sti
ll bearing a chunk of skin.
Sass pressed her pet to her stomach and curled around her into a ball, kneeling to present her back to the door in submission. She recalled this pose in humiliation, from muscle memory to the core of her soul. I am not resisting. I offer no threat. Sometimes the attackers would whale on her back, sometimes with whips or knives. But usually…
They just went away. The door slammed shut.
Sass slowly unfurled, her mink on her lap. The poor little thing’s back was broken in the tussle. Fidget could repair herself from that, but only if she had enough power. Judging from her quiet demeanor today, she could use a recharge.
The walls were bright, glow walls if not smart ones. The floor, mercifully, was tatami mat rather than something harder. The toilet was another deep-knee-bend model, though at least offered toilet paper and some kind of hand sanitizer. Another source of water might have been nice.
With her teeth, Sass managed to rip a strip of fabric from her sleeve. Her light pressure suit was utterly destroyed during her face-off with Riu yesterday – the day before? Yes, she’d crossed the international date line during this interminable day. So she wore a Pontiac-supplied outfit closer to Ivett’s than Melkor’s quality suit. She quite liked the indoor soft shoes, custom-made to her feet by a little machine. Though their flimsy soles were already worn by strolling on Hakone’s garden gravel. If she got out of here –
No. She had nowhere to go outside this compound, no transport, no breath support. She was a prisoner in an enemy stronghold. One problem at a time. She sighed and got to work, scraping a recharging port for her mink, mostly using Fidget’s claws with a human power assist. Spit rendered the rag a better conductor, salt and water in one. The little beast sighed in relief as Sass set her front paws on the damp strip to charge.
Minutes later, Fidget cried out and recoiled, as the wall came to life with Melkor, initially looking over Sass’s head. The trickle of power grew to a flood when the smart wall became active. The captain hastily unbent Fidget’s broken back and pressed her against the wall again. The little mink could adjust to charge faster. She was just startled. But Sass didn’t want the Pontiac to see her true nature.
