The Future Is Japanese (29 page)

“Tell me, Yutaka,” he said one day. “Why do your people like to instigate war?”

“We’re not instigating wars, we’re colonizing. And if we were, we wouldn’t be the only ones.”

“Oh, so the Yamato people call riding in on someone’s planet in battle destroyers
colonizing
.”

“Yamato doesn’t attack populated planets. We only move in on unsettled asteroids. Planting a flag on a planet doesn’t make it yours unless it’s been populated. The concept of territory has always gone hand in hand with actual occupation since Earthian days.”

“The Kalif Federation has scores of people who were driven off their home planets by Yamato forces. The way I hear them tell it, your attack probes appeared out of nowhere and chased them off.”

“Well, those people had probably just arrived at whatever planet they were driven from and built temporary bases there. In neither case could you say that they had settled the planet.”

“So if a Kalif or another foreign vessel were to drive out the residents of a Yamato outpost, you’d be all right with that?”

“Well, no … you have to consider that on a deeper level. The Yamato race is outward looking, such as in the way they favor meat. Other ethnic groups aren’t this way. The reason why we colonize space is because we are destined to do so.”

“Really? I thought everyone—not just the Yamato people—have a natural predisposition toward war.”

“You’re wrong.”

“But that’s what a certain Yamato pilot told me just now,” Dewey said, grinning.

Yutaka looked down, unable to find the words. No one told him how quick with the tongue these country folk were. Or perhaps Yutaka wasn’t quick enough.

Several days later, it was Yutaka who approached Dewey.

“Listen to me, the difference between the Yamato and Kalif people is evident in the composition of the nations’ territories. I can explain to you Yamato’s inclination for expansion that way.”

“Oh?”

“Do you know how Yamato—er, not just Yamato, but how many nations other than Kalif expand their territory?”

“Can’t say that I do,” said Dewey. “I was born and raised in Kalif.”

“Spacefaring people are essentially known as
spinners
. Yamato is nothing more than one of many nations of spinners.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s just like it sounds.” Yutaka made his best attempt to repeat the history lessons he’d been taught. The myriad races inhabiting the solar system all had their reasons for leaving the confines of Earth, but there was only one practical method for accomplishing it. They had all been flung into space by the orbital elevator using Earth’s centrifugal force. Then the evacuees found asteroids with the requisite resources and daylight in the belt between Mars and Jupiter and built colonies.

“So they’re called spinners because they were spun into space,” said Dewey.

“That’s not all.”

Early space colonists that first settled outside Earth’s orbit soon learned that humans and other organisms required a certain measure of gravity to live in relative stability. The only celestial bodies able to provide any meaningful amount of gravity were Earth and its moon, Venus, Mars, and the dwarf planet Ceres. If humans were going to settle anywhere else, they had to figure out a way to produce artificial gravity.

The challenge was in stabilizing the rotations of space habitats. Any spinning object experiences gyroscopic precession, a wobbling on its axis like a gyroscope. Scientists also needed to devise a way to connect the rotating sections with the stationary parts of the colony.

After various designs for rotating colonies were proposed, the model that came to be widely used was the concentric Stanford Torus.

The CS Torus was not a megatechnology. It was nothing more than a disc-shaped colony about five hundred meters in diameter capable of housing ten thousand inhabitants at most. But the advantage of the CS Torus was not its population capacity, but in its ability to provide for the necessary numbers of people at any given point to support its construction.

The construction of the CS Torus began with three sections: the non-rotating axis and two gravity chambers that revolved around it from suspension tethers. The central axis was typically built from the hull of the spacecraft that the first settlers arrived on. In fact, that was the method of construction that had been proposed from the start.

Expansion was undertaken from the two opposing and tethered gravity chambers. Pieces were added to what initially resembled a humble mobile and was supported by four spokes and then eight spokes until the rotating ring called the torus was complete. Afterward more rings were added around the first; at the same time, the rotational speed was dropped to maintain optimal gravitational acceleration at the outer circumference.

Once the inhabitants added as many rings as the spokes could support, the construction was complete.

“The CS Torus is considerably smaller than this asteroid. Do you understand the advantage of building on that scale?” Yutaka asked.

“No,” said Dewey, shaking his head.

“Mass production. The CS Torus is habitable even as it’s being built. Which means as soon as the inhabitants are ready to expand, they can move on to building the next habitat. Since the habitats are small, they’re quick to build and it’s easy to pause construction if necessary. The parts and construction have been standardized from start to finish, so the design is all set. You just have to repeat the same process. Once you create an assembly line, you can build as many colonies as necessary.”

“Mass production, eh?”

“It was Yamato that employed this method on a large scale. Thanks to the decision to employ the CS Torus as its habitat, Yamato has expanded and grown into a major power, boasting a population of five million!”

Yamato no Yasoshima had risen to become a superpower governing nearly four hundred CS Torus colonies in the asteroid belt. Yutaka recalled the constellation of silver-colored discs that he’d seen from the carrier vessel upon leaving Yamato and could not help speaking with some pride.

Dewey rubbed his angular jaw and glanced at Yutaka out of the corner of his eye. “And you’re saying that the Kalifs are of no comparison.”

“That’s right. Take this village, for example. Lakeview has virtually no way to grow.”

“You’re right, once we dig as far as we can dig on this asteroid, that’s it. We can’t move the drums to the surface because of the cosmic radiation, which is the reason we have to live underground in the first place.”

“Exactly. Plus you don’t have a way of moving to the next asteroid when this village reaches capacity. This is what I’m getting at.”

While Yutaka continued to argue emphatically, Dewey listened with the same composed smile. This villager, one of a population of only five hundred, didn’t seem at all humbled by the existence of a nation of five million. Furthermore, he was not reacting out of ignorance.

Seeing this, Yutaka grew irritated, uneasy even.
How old was he anyway?
he thought.
He is older for sure.

“The Yamato people are great because they’ve built a great nation, and the Kalif people aren’t because they’ve not. Is that what you’re getting at?”

“Well … I wouldn’t say that …”

“But you are, Yutaka.” Dewey smiled, patting Yutaka on the shoulder. “One question,” he continued, raising a finger. “Did the Yamato become outward-looking people because they built the Torus colonies? Or did they build the Torus colonies because they were outward-looking people to begin with?”

“What?” Yutaka frowned and answered, “We chose this efficient method of expansion because it’s in our nature to think outwardly.”

“Nature before nurture, eh? Then one more question.”

“What is it?”

“You have many friends back at Yamato?”

Yutaka faltered for an answer. Upon seeing this, Dewey let out a belly laugh and returned to work.

Even after being consigned to hard labor, Yutaka was ordered back to the sanitarium at night.

That evening, he was eating the bland Kalif dinner in the usual tatami-mat room, when Ainella said, “I hear you and Dewey are friends now.”

“Did Dewey tell you that?” Yutaka said, surprised.

Ainella chuckled. “Do you think Dewey is the type of man to say something like that?”

After thinking for a moment, Yutaka replied, “Well, no … and I wasn’t trying to be friends with him either. In fact, I said some rude things. Someone must’ve seen us talking and assumed we were.”

“Actually, I lied. It was
Dewey who told me.” Noting Yutaka’s surprise, Ainella nodded reassuringly. “So you
do
know when you’re being rude. Maybe that’s what he likes about you.”

“What’s Dewey like?”

“No one knows. He’s a bit of a cynic, a contrarian,” Ainella said, shrugging, without any hint of irritation. “That’s why everyone’s so shocked to hear he made a friend.”

“I never said that we were friends.”

“So you were having a long talk with just a random person?”

Yutaka had merely been trying to expound on the Yamato identity. But was that truly the only reason? No one back home listened to him as thoughtfully as Dewey did. As long-winded as Yutaka had been, he wasn’t necessarily expecting Dewey to agree with him. In fact, he knew the Kalif would come back at him with some clever reasoning.

Ainella gathered the empty plates onto a tray. “Looks like the food is going down a little better,” she said, even though Yutaka had not touched the lumpy dumplings in the suiton.

Ainella rose from the table with the tray. Yutaka watched her calves peek out of her kimono as she disappeared into the kitchen.

Suddenly he realized how uncommonly close he was to other people and felt stifled. On Yamato, members of the same family ate their meals according to their own schedule. In that sense, dining in such close proximity to others was unthinkable.

Standing up, Yutaka slipped on some sandals and went out into the yard. “Don’t go out past the flower bed!” Ainella called out.

An old atmospheric image of a pastoral landscape spread out before him. Looking up, he found a familiar satellite: Earth’s moon.

Sticking his hands inside the
samue
sleeves, Yutaka stared up at the moon without knowing why.

The cleanup of the demolished storeroom was completed in ten days, after which rebuilding began. When the bulk of the labor was finished, Yutaka was sent to the fields for weeding.

Inside the rows of one-tan drums spinning in the main tunnel, the fields had grown darker and greener with grass, and a small-seeded plant had also emerged from the soil. Though this species of millet was edible, it was considered a weed since it robbed the rice crop of nutrients. While it was standard to kill the weeds with chemicals on Yamato, spraying chemicals was prohibited on Lakeview in order to avoid atmospheric contamination.

The weeding took place with the aid of what was called a belly plank, a kind of scaffolding laid across the length of the thirty-one-meter drum. When Yutaka and the villagers lay flat on their bellies on top of the plank, their hands could just reach the bottom of the paddies. Since the drum rotated as the plank stayed in place, the weeds appeared before them, ready for plucking. As Yutaka and the villagers pulled weeds out of the soil one after the next, their hands and faces were spattered with mud.

In some of the drums, the villagers released ducks that fed only on the weeds. Their manure also made for good fertilizer, and once they served their purpose, the ducks could be eaten. Upon hearing this from Dewey, Yutaka had to concede their usefulness.

“I have to admit, the ducks are a good idea. Are you going to raise more of them and put them to work in all of the drums?”

Shaking his head, Dewey said, “Too much manure can overnitrogenize the mud. Ruins the flavor of the rice. There aren’t plans to use any more of those noisy birds. Besides, they smell horrible.”

“So you’re going to get rid of them?”

“Not exactly.”

Dewey explained that he wasn’t about to propose either raising more ducks or ending their use. Despite being bothered by this ambiguous response, Yutaka decided to let it go, knowing that any discussion with Dewey would escalate into an ugly debate.