The Future Is Japanese (28 page)

“Oh, stop with your whys! Because it’s Kalif tradition!” Ainella shouted. “This is the way the Kalifornia people have always lived. It’s always been our custom to live off of the healthy, natural foods according to the changes in seasons. These foods are our tradition and have been scientifically linked to our longevity. Meat, on the other hand, is fattening and smelly, inefficient to produce—there’s nothing good about it!”

Ainella, with her tall and sturdy frame, cut quite an imposing figure when she was angry. Despite feeling a bit intimidated by the Kalif woman, the very embodiment of the Anglo-Saxon character he’d learned about in school, Yutaka drew up one knee and said, “Since you brought up tradition, now it’s my turn. The Yamato people are a race that once gathered the world’s delicacies. Diverse foods from a hundred countries lined the streets and were cooked in oil brought in on enormous ships. We are a people that require calories. We were born to consume meat and flour and sugar, so we can build a powerful military and contribute to Yamato’s prosperity. That is our birthright, and if you knew that, you’d understand that I’m not asking for much.”

“The spite coming out of your pretty little mouth!”

“It’s basic history every Yamato kid learns in grade school. If you don’t like it, I guess you shouldn’t have saved me and taken me in.”

Ainella squeezed the chopsticks in her hand so hard they might have snapped in two. Yutaka watched a frightening smile come over her face and—

Psshh!

She struck his raised knee with three rigid fingers.

“Ouch!”

“Mind your manners! Don’t raise your knee at the table! Hold the bowl in your hand! You didn’t even say
itadakimasu
before you started eating.”

“I refuse for religious reasons. Besides, how do you expect me to hold a bowl with
this
?” said Yutaka, raising his cast-wrapped left hand.

Psshh!

A terrible pain shot through his broken hand, and Yutaka let out a groan. Ainella drew back the hand that had struck his cast, but she did not apologize.

Yutaka sat up straight, trying to ignore the pain, and went back to eating what was left of the meager meal. “The Yamato people and Kalifs are genetically different to begin with. Do you have any idea why rice tastes good to you?”

“What are you talking about? Rice tastes good because it’s rice,” said Ainella, nonplussed by the question.

Yutaka shook his head. “It’s because you secrete a specific enzyme that breaks down starches called amylase. The number of copies of the salivary amylase gene or AMY1 varies widely according to ethnic groups, and groups with traditionally grain-rich diets have more copies of the gene. If you favor the taste of rice and suiton and other starches, you probably have eight or ten copies of AMY1 in your genome. The reason I can barely stand the stuff is because I lack the gene. So you can’t force me to digest something that I can’t.”

For several minutes, Ainella said nothing. Yutaka continued to eat, satisfied at having argued the woman down.

After they finished their meal, Ainella straightened her posture and said, “Yutaka Kubuki of Yamato, it’s been fifteen days. How is your broken hand mending?”

“Huh? Oh … it’s better, I think,” answered the pilot, holding out his left hand. “It doesn’t hurt if I don’t touch it.”

“Fine, then I’ll shut down gravitational rotation.”

The room slowly moaned to a halt as if someone had slammed on friction brakes. For the first time, Yutaka realized that an artificial force had been acting upon the house the entire time.

Suddenly, the weight of his body left him and he felt as if something heavy hung inside his nostrils. The familiar sensation he experienced upon boarding the mother ship. He was weightless.

Ainella went out to the open corridor facing the azaleas in the yard and gestured for Yutaka to follow. Yutaka floated down the wooden planks of the corridor until they came to a hidden door. Once through the door, Yutaka found himself inside an enormous tunnel dug out of the gray rock.

Looking behind him, he discovered that he had come out of a massive metal drum laid on its side. Perhaps it was ten meters in diameter. The entire house was contained inside the drum, and the landscape scenery was likely a holographic image of some sort.

But this was no surprise to Yutaka; in fact, he was insulted that Ainella would bring him here as if she were pulling back the curtain to some big revelation. None of the asteroids in the asteroid belt produced enough gravity to tether anything down. That Yutaka was able to sit on the tatami mat with his legs folded was evidence enough that he was inside a rotating centrifuge.

Shifting his gaze from the drum to Ainella, he said, “Yeah, so?”

“It isn’t my intention to brag. I’m only trying to show that we were operating the centrifuge in the sanitarium to speed your recovery.”

“Hmph!” Yutaka snorted indignantly. The presence of gravity did indeed help osteoblast function to heal bones. If the Kalifs had operated the sanitarium for his sake, then perhaps he owed them something.

“Come with me,” said Ainella.

Yutaka followed the woman into a narrow access tunnel.

They navigated several forks until they emerged into a cavernous passage. Ainella looked expectantly at Yutaka.

“Whoa …” he said, unable to hide his awe.

It was a long, straight tunnel stretching as far as the eye could see, over five hundred meters perhaps. It was without a doubt the longest tunnel Yutaka had ever seen and perhaps would ever see again.

Building an underground structure of this length would have been impossible on Yamato. And it would certainly be no mean feat to build more than one of these tunnels inside this asteroid either. The passageway likely cut clear through the center of the asteroid, in which case this must be the main tunnel that served all of Lakeview.

But this was not what Ainella wanted him to see. The true marvel of this place were the structures built equidistantly up and down the main tunnel.

“One-tan drums,” said Ainella.

Numerous lidless drums about ten meters in diameter were laid on their side.

“
One tan
?” Yutaka asked.

Ainella kicked off the ground and flew away. Her white calves peeked out from the hem of her kimono. Yutaka floated after her.

“Yes, the drums are thirty-one meters deep and nine hundred ninety-one square meters inside, which is exactly
one tan
, the Kalif unit of area for agricultural land. Each drum can provide a year’s rice for five people. These are our rice fields.”

The metal drums rotated slowly on rollers on the floor, creating enough centrifugal force so that a thick layer of mud caked their interiors.

Bright green grass sprouted out of the mud in neat rows, and light tubes supported by spokes affixed to the central axis of the drum shone in every direction. The Kalifs had seemingly devised a rather elaborate but primitive system to make the grass distinguish between up and down and to stimulate its growth.

Countless drums lined the length of the tunnel. Ainella and Yutaka floated past tens of drums to the right and left as well as above and below. Summer-lit fields—or rather, rice paddies surrounded them.

One villager planted seedlings, while a pint-sized contraption ran up and down the mud like a faithful dog. There were others painstakingly pulling weeds by hand. A young man pushed a horrendously rank container down the rails running along the side of the tunnel. Chattering children flew past and dove into the drum up ahead, where a couple removed their straw hats, wiped the sweat off their faces, and took the lunches that the children brought them. A ruddy-cheeked old man smoking a pipe sat on the edge of the drum and spun slowly round and round, the smoke from the pipe drawing a loose spiral like the Milky Way.

A flight of brown birds twittered overhead and flew past Yutaka in a spiral. As he watched them disappear into the distance, a frog came twirling out of nowhere and smacked spread eagle against his cheek. An impressively sized green and black frog.

Yutaka heard giggling from inside the drums.

It was a far cry from the sterilized starch factories on Yamato’s Stanford Torus colonies, which prohibited human entry. A perfect plant and animal system, the likes of which Yutaka had never imagined, flourished here. At this rate, it was reasonable to assume that there was a fully functional ecology from the atmospheric and aquatic layers and to the microbial and viral levels.

As Yutaka drifted and twirled in the air in awe, he felt a tug at his collar.

“This way.” Ainella grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him backward until the rows of drums along the ceiling and walls of the main tunnel disappeared, the drums on the left and right receded from sight, and finally, they arrived at a dead end. Perhaps they had traversed the length of the asteroid and come to the end of the tunnel.

That was when it struck Yutaka that this peculiar colony had a fundamental flaw.

“How do you expand the colony?” he asked, turning around to face Ainella.

Without a word, the woman dragged him down another narrow tunnel.

Yutaka was taken through a thick insulated door. Unlike the well-ordered area he’d come from, this place was in utter ruins. Cinder blocks, rocks, sacks, and containers of all types lay on top of each other in heaps, which suited men in masks were trying to shovel into some order.

Before he could ask where he was, Ainella shoved various items into his arms: a dust respirator, a jumpsuit, and Velcro shoes. Then she quickly proceeded to dress him before Yutaka had any time to protest.

“What is all this?” he finally shouted.

Ainella smiled and said, “You’re cleaning up the mess you made of this storeroom.” She pointed to the twisted rubble and debris ahead. “The area has been sealed off, but we haven’t touched that dangerous toy you crash-landed in case there were weapons and explosives on board. Your first job is to neutralize all that. And when you’re done with that, you can get to work fixing this place.”

“My hand—it’s broken, remember?”

“That’s why I asked if it was better.” But the gleam in her eye revealed that she couldn’t care less about his hand. “If you’re well enough to blather on about genes and such, you can at least show them how to work their way around your fighter. Oh, and you can take your lunch with the crew. You’ll be working here starting today. I’m sorry I’ve been such a shrew.”

Two brawny men, pausing from their work, came behind Yutaka and grabbed him up by the arms. Although the Kalifs had attended to his wounds, it had been overly optimistic of him to assume that he was welcome here after he’d destroyed their storeroom and food supplies.

That Ainella is one tough customer
, Yutaka thought.

Yutaka couldn’t escape. Instead, he was integrated into life in Lakeview as prison labor.

The labor was hard work. With the storeroom sealed off by nothing more than a tarp, air pressure was constantly fluctuating, creating a dangerous environment where workers got their hands caught in the rubble and were hit by flying bits of concrete. But the meals were no heartier than the ones at the sanitarium. They were lacking in both calories and taste, and Yutaka’s stomach growled constantly.

One incident very nearly broke Yutaka’s recently healed hand. The fighter engine came off the mount and drifted toward an unsuspecting worker, trapping his leg against the wall. Yutaka, who happened to be nearby, jammed his casted arm into the gap and twisted.

In the same moment the man pulled his leg free, Yutaka’s cast cracked and fell away in pieces. Even after he pulled his arm back, Yutaka was so shaken he was unable to speak for several moments.

Scowling as he rubbed his sore leg, the young man glanced over at Yutaka standing in shock, pale-faced. “Hey, you finally got your cast off,” the man deadpanned.

“Oh, yeah …” Yutaka said, nodding. “Saved me the trouble of going to the hospital.”

Later during lunch hour, the young man introduced himself to Yutaka as Dewey and offered him the first chocolate bar the pilot had laid eyes on in Lakeview. Yutaka took the candy bar and thanked him.

In time, Yutaka began to talk to Dewey about this and that. Like Ainella, Dewey revealed himself to be quite talkative for a country bumpkin.