Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [184]
The ancient Japanese greeted their visitors as old and valued friends. The Sabishii issei dressed in copper jumpsuits, went barefoot, and wore long ponytails, and many earrings and necklaces. One of them, bald, with a wispy white beard and a deeply wrinkled face, took the visitors on a walk, to stretch their legs after their long drives. His name was Kenji, and he had been the first Japanese to step on Mars, though no one remembered that anymore.
At the city wall they looked out at enormous boulders balancing on nearby hilltops, carved into one fantastic shape after another.
“Have you ever been to the Medusae Fossae?”
Kenji only smiled and shook his head. The kami stones on the hills were honeycombed with rooms and storage spaces, he told them, and along with the mohole mound maze they now could house a very great number of people, as many as twenty thousand, for as long as a year. The visitors nodded. It seemed possible it might become necessary.
Kenji took them back to the oldest part of town, where the visitors had been given rooms in the original compound. The rooms were smaller and more spare than most of the town’s student apartments, and had a patina of age and use that made them more like nests than rooms. The issei still slept in some of them.
As the visitors walked through these rooms, they did not look at each other. The contrast between their history and those of the Sabishiians was too stark. They stared at the furniture, disturbed, distracted, withdrawn. And after that evening’s meal, after a lot of sake had gone down the hatches, one said, “If only we had done something like this.”
Nanao began to play a bamboo flute.
“It was easier for us,” Kenji said. “We were all Japanese together. We had a model.”
“It doesn’t seem much like the Japan I remember.”
“No. But that isn’t the true Japan.”
They took their cups and a few bottles, and climbed up stairs to a pavilion on top of a wooden tower next to their compound. Up there they could see the trees and rooftops of the city, and the jagged array of boulders standing on the black skysill. It was the last hour of twilight, and except for a wedge of lavender in the west the sky was a rich midnight blue, liberally flecked with stars. A string of paper lanterns hung in a grove of fire maples below.
“We are the true Japanese. What you see in Tokyo today is transnational. There is another Japan. We can never go back to that, of course. It was a feudal culture in any case, and had features we cannot accept. But what we do here has its roots in that culture. We are trying to find a new way, a way which rediscovers the old one, or reinvents it, for this new place.”
“Kasei Nippon.”
“Yes, but not just for Mars! For Japan also. As a model for them, you see? An example of what they can become.”
And so they drank rice wine under the stars. Nanao played his flute, and down in the park under the paper lanterns someone laughed. The visitors sat leaning against each other, thinking. They talked for a while about all the sanctuaries, how different they were and yet how much they had in common.
“This congress is a good idea.”
The visitors nodded, in various degrees of assent.
“It’s just what we need. I mean, we have been getting together to celebrate John’s festival for how many years now? And it’s been good. Very pleasant. Very important. We have needed it, for our own sakes. But now things are changing fast. We can’t pretend to be a cabal. We have to deal with the rest of them.”
They talked specifics for a while: attendants at the congress, security measures, problem issues.
“Who attacked the egg— the egg?”
“A security team from Burroughs. Subarashii and Armscor have organized what they call a sabotage investigation unit, and they’ve gotten the Transitional Authority to bless the operation. They’ll be coming south again, no doubt of that. We have almost waited too long.”
“They got the institution— the information— from me?”
A snort. “You should resist thinking you are so important.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s the return of the elevator driving all this.