Semper Mars (9 page)

“Looks like they have the welcome mat out for us, Dr. Alexander,” Captain Elliott called down. “The natives are friendly. A little bent out of shape, maybe, but friendly.”

Alexander hadn’t realized how nervous he’d been. With a sigh of relief he began unbuckling, eager to get outside and see this place for himself, a place he’d been dreaming of for years.

Outside, as it had for millennia, the Face stared skyward with quiet and enigmatic aplomb.

S
EVEN

Thursday, 17 May: 0315 Hours GMT

United Orient Flight 372

95,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean

1215 hours Tokyo time

Kaitlin Garroway peered out the cabin window at a sky so blue it was almost black. A smattering of stars was visible above a curved horizon. Each time she traveled on an HST she felt the same sense of mingled awe and longing. Hypersonic transports didn’t reach into space, but it looked as though they were on the edge. “Have you ever flown at this altitude?” she asked her companion.

Yukio leaned over her shoulder to share the view. “Yes, and a little higher. But still not into space. The Inaduma fighter can reach orbit only with a very large booster. So far I have only flown above thirty-five thousand meters in a simulator. Now if we’d taken the suborbital as I’d suggested…”

“My internal clock is gonna be no less scrambled from this flight than from a forty-five-minute hop, thank you very much, so what’s the advantage? Besides, you know I couldn’t afford it. Those suborbs are for businessmen on expense accounts, not for college students.”

“And you wouldn’t let me pay your way.”

“Certainly not. It’s my vacation, and I’m going to enjoy knowing that my money paid for it.”

“Independent-minded gaijin.”

She turned quickly to see if he was serious. Gaijin was the word used to refer to a foreigner, but the connotation was more that of barbarian. Nihonjin, more than any other people she knew of, divided the world into two categories: people… and outsiders. Yukio’s face was somber, but his eyes were twinkling, so she knew he was teasing her again. Still she wondered…

“Is it going to be a problem, Yukio?” she asked. “That I am my own person, that I have my own ideas and express them?”

“In other words, that you are not… a proper Japanese woman?” She nodded.

Yukio leaned back in his seat and stared at the overhead light. “We have spoken of this before, and you know how I feel. We are part of a new generation, you and I, citizens of Earth.”

“And yet there is gimu.” The word meant duty, obligation.

“Yes. I have obligations, to my family, to my country. My military duty is just one part of this. I… I am having difficulty reconciling these duties with our vision of the world, of what the world is becoming, what it must become if the human race is to survive.”

Kaitlin was silent for a while, considering her own duties. She had grown up assuming that she would enter the Marine Corps after college. After all, what better way to emulate her adored father? But during the last few years, and especially since she’d come to CMU, she’d begun seeing things in a different light. Exposed for the first time to the ideas of the Internationalist Party, she’d started to see her country as an obstacle to world peace and nationalism as an outmoded concept, notions that, understandably, horrified her father. It hurt her to realize that she was hurting him, but she couldn’t not-think just to please his old-fashioned patriotism.

Things got further complicated when she realized that her father no longer had the same devotion to duty and to the Corps that he’d had when she was young. It worried her that he seemed to be just marking time until he could retire. She’d prefer a good, loud argument to the apathy she saw in him now. Occasionally things still ticked him off, like that incident with the two archaeologists last week, but most of the time he seemed content simply to put in his time. She wondered what he thought of the Mexico business.

That news had shaken her, not so much because of what happened as because of her reaction to it. She wasn’t naive enough to believe everything she saw on Triple-N, so it hadn’t surprised her when she found that the military newsgroups had a very different slant on the embassy takeover, claiming that the Mexicans were the aggressors and that what was supposedly a spontaneous demonstration had really been orchestrated by the Mexican Army. What had surprised her was her reaction to the Internationalist newsgroups. All of a sudden the talk of American imperialist aggressors sounded raucous and hollow to her, and she found herself vigorously defending the Marines… and getting flamed for it.

Not that getting flamed was unusual for her—she seldom held back on expressing her own opinions, regardless of how unpopular they might be—but that the attacks seemed so unreasoned bothered her. She’d thought of the Internationalists as a group of rational intellectuals; now she was seeing just as much unthinking prejudice in them as in, say, those who claimed the Martian Ancients were demons.

The Ancients.

“Yukio, who do you think the Ancients really were?”

“The Ancients?” He laughed. “How can I even take a guess? We know so little about them. What does your father say? Have they turned up anything new?”

Kaitlin shrugged. “They’ve only been there five days. He seems to be getting friendly with one of the archeologists, a guy named Alexander, and he’s been filling him in on what the previous team had uncovered and where they’re starting from now, but I don’t think there’s anything new and startling.”

The thought of her latest vid from her father made her grimace. She had a job lined up for later in the summer, and she’d told him all about it without specifically saying that it didn’t start until the middle of July, so he assumed she was staying in Pittsburgh for the whole summer. If he knew she was going to Japan, he would have gotten all fatherly and protective, assuming that she couldn’t take care of herself, and she just didn’t want to have to deal with that. She always used her global.net account whenever she was outside of Pittsburgh, so he would be able to tell from her v-mail only that she was not at CMU.

“Anyway,” she continued, “from all I’ve read on archeology, it’s a long, involved, painstaking process. Alexander told Dad it might be years before they even knew the right questions to ask.”

“So why do you think I might be able to answer those questions, when we don’t even know what they are?”

“Well, of course we can’t know. But we can guess, can’t we? We can speculate. The idea of other intelligent beings, a whole other civilization, inhabiting this solar system long before modern humans even evolved… it’s mind-boggling. I want to know who they were, why they came here, where they went.”

Yukio grinned. “Then why aren’t you studying exo-paleoarchaeology instead of AI systems design?” Kaitlin shook her head. “I don’t have the patience for archaeology. I want to go out there and find them, wherever they are. Even if that particular species is extinct, just the fact that they were there proves we’re not alone. There must be others, thousands of other races throughout the galaxy. And I don’t think we’re going to find them by sitting here waiting for them to come to us. We’ve got to go to them.”

Yukio gazed out into the deep blue of not-quite-space. “We’re just on the edge of exploring the solar system. It will be quite some time before we are able to reach the stars.”

“I don’t know. If we can work the bugs out of antimatter propulsion, we could be sending a ship to Alpha Centauri in, oh, twenty years or so.

“And I want to be on that ship.”

0507 Hours GMT

Kansai International Airport

Osaka Bay, Japan

1407 hours Tokyo time

Yukio held his hands casually in his lap to keep from gripping the handrests as the Star Raker came into its approach to the huge man-made island that was Kansai International Airport. He always felt a little nervous flying when he didn’t have any electronic displays in front of him to follow course and speed and range. He didn’t know the man in the cockpit, didn’t know with certainty his competence and experience, the way he did with Taii Iijima, the Space Defense Force captain he usually flew with. For a veteran of thousands of hours of flight time, such nervousness seemed embarrassing, so he always tried to hide it. Usually he was successful.

A slight sound coming from his right made him turn his head to see Kaitlin looking at him as though she was trying hard not to laugh.

“Okay, now I really know you’re a flight officer!”

“Oh? And why is that?”

“Dad says all flyers are like that, though the actual pilots are usually worse than side-seaters like you. Can’t stand to have someone else in control.”

Yukio grinned ruefully. “You found me out. And I thought I was hiding it pretty well.”

She nodded. “You were. But don’t worry, I won’t let on I know your dreadful secret. It’s just nice to know that you have at least one flaw.”

The Star Raker came in for a textbook landing, and Yukio resumed his normal breathing pattern. The slidewalk in the International Terminal was bordered with gift shops, eating parlors, and communications stations; signs in French, English, and Nihongo welcomed visitors, and holoboard advertisements bombarded them with sights and sounds as they made their way toward the baggage area. Travelers from all over the world came through Kansai, but there was a predominance of Asian faces. As he got off the end of the slidewalk, Yukio almost gave a skip. It was good to be home.

They took the Jet Foil across Osaka Wan to the mainland and then traveled by maglev to Kyoto. One flaw, she said. How little she knows me, if she thinks I have only one. He stole a glance at the woman on the seat next to him, seeing her as though with new eyes. By American standards she was beautiful, with long auburn hair curving around a thin green-eyed face. By international standards she was stylishly and appropriately dressed for travel, in a sleeveless one-piece jumpsuit with hip belt. By Japanese standards, she was neither appropriately dressed nor beautiful.

He thought about his name. Yukio was a shortened form of Toshiyuki; the nickname meant Snow Boy and implied one who goes his own way. When, Yukio wondered, had he ever gone his own way? He’d entered the Space Defense Force to please his father. He’d enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University because he was ordered to by the SDF. He’d agreed to this trip because Kaitlin wanted it, and he’d been almost relieved when he’d thought his new orders would make it impossible. Then he’d allowed himself to be persuaded again.

Yukio considered himself quite cosmopolitan, not Westernized to the extent of rejecting his heritage, of course, but enough of an Internationalist to be open-minded about Western ideas, Western culture… even Western women. In Pittsburgh Kaitlin had seemed perfect, exotic in the way that all Western women were, and yet familiar because of her love of Japan and Japan’s culture. Now she seemed jarring, out of place… or was he the one who was out of place?

They took the subway from the maglev station and then walked the few blocks to the youth hostel where Kaitlin would be staying. She made a good impression on the clerk at the desk, bowing and addressing him in fluent and respectful Nihongo. Yukio had never stayed at a place like this, but he would guess that few Americans came here who would be able to converse with their host in the host’s language… or who would wish to.

“I’m going up to change,” she said. “I shouldn’t be more than a few minutes. Unless you’d like to come wash up also?”

“No. I am fine. Thank you.”

She gave him a strange look, then turned and walked up the stairs to her room. He mentally kicked himself. Ever since they’d landed at Kansai, he’d become more and more formal with Kaitlin. He knew that she felt it and was puzzled by it. The thing was, he was puzzled, too. He was well aware of the differences between American and Japanese customs. He was well aware that behavior that would be considered reprehensible in Kyoto was perfectly acceptable in Pittsburgh. But he’d thought of himself as a new Japanese, able to transcend his upbringing, to be a citizen of the world. He was finding that he was more tightly bound to tradition than he’d imagined possible.

He walked over to the comm station against one wall of the lobby. It was an old-fashioned one—audio only, no video, no net access—but sufficient for his purposes. He called home and arranged with Isoru Nabuko, his father’s secretary, for a car to be sent to pick them up. “Is my father at home, Hisho-san?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, Ishiwara-san,” the man replied. “Daijin Ishiwara returned from Tokyo two hours ago. He is eagerly awaiting your arrival and that of your honored guest.” Nabuko chuckled. “I’ve not seen him so excited since you received your well-deserved promotion to the rank of chu-i.”

Yukio asked that Nabuko convey his respects to his father, and then he hung up, wondering if the secretary knew that the honored guest in question was in fact a gaijin. He had not hidden the fact from his parents, but he didn’t know whether the information had been passed on. Perhaps it had. Perhaps he was worrying unnecessarily. Perhaps he was the only one who—

“Is there a problem?” It was Kaitlin.

“Oh. No, certainly not. I was just thinking.”

“Ah.”

She was conservatively dressed, he was relieved to see, and holding a large, oblong box in her hands. “Did you call home?” she asked.

He nodded. “A car will be here in…” He glanced at his wrist-top. “… about a half an hour. Perhaps we can find a place nearby to sit down and have a drink.”

“I need to get this wrapped first,” she said, gesturing with the box. “The clerk here said there was a gift shop around the corner. All of those shops at the airport seemed geared for tourists, and I want to make sure this is wrapped properly.”

Her thoughtfulness stung. Both the giving and the wrapping of gifts in Japan were high arts and were as cloaked in ritual as the tea ceremony. Kaitlin had a Western face, but her heart was Nihonjin.

Now if only his father were able to see her in the same light…

0850 Hours GMT

Ishiwara household

Outskirts of Kyoto

1750 hours Tokyo time

The limousine pulled up to the gate in front of Yukio’s house, where a uniformed guard looked inside the car, then opened the gate, waving them through. Kaitlin glanced back to see him pick up a phone in the guard shack, presumably to announce them. The security measures—necessary, Kaitlin supposed, for the household of the minister of International Trade and Industry—were so impressive, she was surprised to find that the actual house was not large and appeared quite traditional. Yukio had told her that his father was conservative in matters of custom, although he was something of a freethinker in the field of politics.