Reunited – Chapter 1

My new home already has residents. How is this even possible? How did we travel across space and time to find Yūsei occupied?

Everything is black and silent, vacant, until a hum starts in my toes and moves up my body, creeping along nerve-endings, twitching my fingers and chin. Jiro, Sakai, Lucy, and Cathy, my hibernation tech, all float next to me as I shake off a brief panic attack.

“I think Ms. Itami has had quite enough excitement for one day, everyone.” Cathy has my wrist in her hands, checking my pulse, and she’s peering into my face.

“No! No, I’m fine. Just…”

I wave them all away. I need to look at the lights again.

Cathy, Sakai, and Lucy all shrink backwards, but Jiro pulls me back to the window.

“Hold on.” He slips into the footholds, pulls me around, and hugs me with my back to him. Leaning forward into my ear, he whispers, “You won’t even believe who’s down there.”

The planet is dark now but for the twinkling of lights along the eastern shore of my new home. I let my eyes sweep over the mainland and find three concentrations, whole cities, and smaller ones heading west into the mountain area. Coastal cities. I need a telescope. Are there streets? Houses? Boats in the water? Of all the things I thought to expect on Yūsei, this was not one of them.

Jiro rests his chin on my shoulder, and we watch the world turn slowly below us.

“You see the small towns in the center of the continent, right?” he asks. “We’re coming up on the West Coast now, and there are places here we can live.”

“Live? You mean, we’re going to stay?”

My hands begin to shake and the trembling makes its way up my arms to my body and knocks tears loose from my eyes. Jiro squeezes me even harder and kisses me under my ear.

“Yes, we’re going to stay. Mark’s been awake now for six weeks. He’s been down to see our new home and met some of the people in a village not far from our own.”

I turn to Sakai, and he nods.

“Okay, so it’s not aliens? Because that was the first thing I feared. I thought dealing with the clans would be hard enough. I barely speak their language.”

“No, Sanaa,” Sakai assures me. “They most certainly are not aliens.”

“My gods,” a deep voice bellows from behind me. Yoshinori Minamoto floats into the room, his eyes wide and mouth open, with Kentaro right behind him. Minamoto is skinny compared to his Earth body. With the extra weight gone, the skin on his cheeks and arms wobbles in the low gravity. Both he and Kentaro have long hair now, tied up at the back of their heads.

Kentaro doesn’t recognize me at first glance, but his face lights up as his head whips around again. I missed him. Though it feels like we just went to sleep an hour or two ago, we didn’t see each other before we left. His father narrows his eyes at him, and Kentaro’s smile fades swiftly.

“It’s true. We’re really here.” Minamoto pushes off the opposite wall as best he can, and Kentaro is right behind him. They float towards us, and Jiro reaches out to grab them both before they slam into the glass.

Minamoto’s face splits into a smile I’ve never seen before. In all our previous meetings, he was stone, like Sakai, never smiling, never laughing, never any emotion but disdain. He closes his eyes and shakes his head while chuckling, and my insides frost, racking my shoulders in a chill I can’t hide. His reaction is one of triumph not fear. Jiro’s jaw is set and rigid, his eyebrows pulled in at the center.

“Talk now, Minamoto, or I’m calling for my sword,” I warn him.

“Miss Itami,” he says and coughs to halt a full-on laugh from breaking through his hard exterior. “I just woke up an hour ago.”

Minamoto and Sakai exchange a glance, and Sakai’s is withering. He’s pissed, though he’s doing his best to hold all his emotions in check.

“Speak, Father. This is ridiculous.” Even Kentaro is angry staring at the lights twinkling on the dark planet below us. His high forehead is scrunched up and his mouth is open. I’ve never heard him talk to his father in such a strict tone.

Minamoto sighs and stares out the window for a moment, rubbing his chin. “They are our brothers and sisters, left during the Exodus right before the Decline. According to records kept by my family, two contingents from Old Japan left Earth between 2400 and 2550, Hikoboshi and Orihime.”

“Like Tanabata?” The story of Tanabata, of Hikoboshi and Orihime, is in reference to two famous stars in Earth’s sky. Jiro and I celebrated the day by getting married, but astronomers used to study these two stars as cosmic benchmarks. They were as important to astronomy as our own sun. “Wait, that’s Altair and Vega, right? What star does this planet circle?”

Jiro smiles at me. “Vega. You know more about astronomy than I thought.”

I twitch my lips up at him. I wish we were alone right now. I’d tell him about the nights I spent alone in Nishikyō researching the stars because I liked to understand what made him happy.

“All of the changes made,” I whisper, remembering my time at my old job before I met Sakai. “You put Emiko Matsuda up to this.”

Minamoto turns his serious, passive face on me, and fear tickles the back of my mind. I’ve never cared for him much, and now I don’t trust him at all. Not even a little bit. “We were going to an uninhabited planet, and I couldn’t let that happen, not when we had a chance to be reunited with our kin. We had to come here.”

“This means that…” I turn back to the window and stretch my hand to it. Below my spread-out fingers is a planet full of people, but not just people… “The people down there are Japanese, too?”

Sakai’s answering nod is slow.

“There’s no point in hiding anything now.” Minamoto rubs his face, and Kentaro closes his eyes. Uh oh. I get the distinct feeling everyone is keeping secrets to be used against me. Minamoto’s expression, eyes laughing and eyebrows raised, tells me I’m insignificant. I’m nothing but a little girl. I’m a morsel to be chewed up and spit out at the earliest possible convenience.

I listen as he tell us that his family has been holding onto this information for centuries. During the wars that destroyed most of the Earth and its inhabitants, before the Environmental Decline that forced us all to Nishikyō, historical data was scarce. Individual families kept their own records and passed them down to their children and their children’s children. I know nothing of the Exodus. It’s not in the GDB, not taught in school. We only have historical records up to the wars and then events pick up on the other side when Nishikyō was being built. Almost seven hundred years worth of knowledge gone, but not gone for good.

“All of the major nations at the time sent contingents out to the stars, not just Old Japan. Humanity is everywhere.” Minamoto throws his arms wide and laughs again.

“How could you keep this information from everyone?” Lucy leans forward, her cheeks reddened and flushed with anger.

Minamoto shrugs. “I found the journals two years ago. I was under no obligation to tell anyone.” He folds his arms over his chest, and Kentaro is the only one in the room to groan, though I’m sure we all want to. Minamoto is a spoiled child, used to getting his own way.

“Well, spill it now. We’ve got some time,” Lucy demands.

The ships that left Old Japan were Orihime, which was coming here to Vega, and the other was Hikoboshi and was on its way to Altair. They were both generation ships and expected to arrive at their destinations and live on with the population they grew aboard.

The family journals Minamoto found were filled with observations from living close to where the ships’ parts were built, and the author wrote down conversations he had with factory workers and executives who came to his restaurant in the same town. All the information gathered in the journal gave Minamoto the ammunition he needed to poison our original Chief of Colonization, Kenji Yamada, put Emiko in charge, and change the destination planet.

Looking back now, it’s clear how it all happened.

I stare out into space when the room grows quiet. What does this mean for me? What does this mean for all of our plans? All of the people that are here orbiting Yūsei? All the people on their way here?

“Sanaa, you’re awfully quiet,” Sakai whispers, and I bring myself back to focus on him across the table from me. They’re all watching me. What I want to do is break out into tears, climb back into the hibernation pod, and demand to go back. Back to Earth. Back to Nishikyō.

But instead I put on my passive face, smooth out my features as if I’m asleep, and calm my breathing and heart rate, and even in this state, I have no idea what to say or do. I want to talk with Sakai but not with Minamoto. Kentaro and I make eye contact. He’s pale and the area around his eyes is dark and tinged with green. He was unprepared for what came out of his father’s mouth. We all were. Everyone is mute and still.

“I think it’s time you and Kentaro were shown to your short-stay quarters,” I tell Minamoto. “I will want to talk to you again later, but for now, I need time to process this information.”

Minamoto draws back, but I turn my face from him, dismissing him. He and Kentaro unstrap themselves from their seats. Lucy pulls in a flight technician from the hall and gets him to take Minamoto and Kentaro away.

—-

Once the door is closed, I groan and rub my face with my hands.

“I’m starving. Can we talk to someone about getting some food? Purees, right?”

No one moves or speaks to me, just stares. Fine.

“Mark, Lucy, what’s happening? Talk to me, please, and make some sense. Stupid, Minamoto. What was he thinking?”

“I wish I knew, but what’s done is done,” Lucy says. “We can’t go back, can’t go on from here to a different planet. These ships have to return to Earth to continue the colonization. We’re about to make a planet full of people either very happy or very angry.”

I hope very happy. I do not want to deal with a planet full of unhappy people.

“You’ve been awake for six weeks already? What about you, Lucy?” I slip my feet in the footholds and face Lucy sitting in a chair.

“Mark woke me up a few days after him, and I’ve been down to the surface too. I agree with him. I think we can live here. I think we can integrate with the population and make this our home.”

“All six million of us from Earth? How many people do you think are down there right now?”

Sakai shrugs his shoulders. “It’s a small population. They arrived with about two thousand people and now only have about eighty thousand more or less. There should be more, but I don’t know what’s happened.”

“What about a different continent on the planet?” Earth had seven continents and enough room for twelve billion before the wars.

“That’s the only continent. The rest is ocean. So much water…” Lucy’s voice quietens. The opposite of the Earth we left behind. Are we prepared to deal with this magnitude of water? Boats, storms, and fishing? I shake my head and press my fingers to my eyes, but it doesn’t help the stress headache spreading across my forehead.

“I think,” Lucy continues, “they had a plague or a war within the last thirty years because the fishing town we’ve chosen to settle has been deserted for at least ten years. It can easily hold first and second wave.” Lucy reaches back to her hair and twists it around from floating into her face.

“There’s already a place for us to live?” I reach for Jiro’s hand and his warm fingers interlace with my cold ones. All I’ve ever wanted was to live a peaceful life with him and have our family. Can I do that now? Jiro squeezes my hand and tries to smile, but his face falls.

Lucy nods her head at me. “This fishing village, well it’s more of a town, covers about forty square kilometers on the West Coast. Once Mark was awake for a week and traveled down with the engineers, we woke up the first teams to start retrofitting the town for us. They found a hydropower plant in the mountains nearby and the whole town has electricity now. Crews are building more homes, but the town already had many places to live. Even the sewage system works now. But it’s, well, a bit strange.”

“A whole town deserted and waiting for us. Yeah, that is strange.” How will I ever live there wondering what happened to the people who left?

Sakai pushes off and floats over to Lucy. “Yūsei is like stepping back in time. After my body had adjusted to gravity, I shuttled to a town about twenty kilometers north of where we’ll settle. I disguised myself and mixed amongst the people for a few days. They speak a mix of English and Japanese, and their dialect reminds me of what I heard from people who settled Nishikyō from Hiroshima. So it may be difficult to translate in your head at first. But here’s the big thing, they live almost like feudal Japan with the barest minimum of technology. Just basic terminals and other devices they keep hidden away. Besides the use of electricity, they show hardly any signs of technological advancement.”

“We’re going to be quite a shock to them,” I say.

“Well, there’s more you should know about.”

Sakai glances over at Jiro, and Jiro’s chin quivers slightly before his pained eyes meet mine. I try to swallow, but my throat is closed up.

“Sanaa, their ship wasn’t any old ship filled with ordinary citizens. Sure, there were commoners, but…” His voice trails off, and he stares out the window for a moment. “I was walking past a gift shop on my way out the last day I was visiting the neighboring town, and, in the window, I saw the recent calendar. The months and dates were all familiar, but the top half was all political. From what I can tell, the whole world is run by one man, and the current leader is Daisuke Fujiwara.”

Now I understand why everyone is so unhappy. The Fujiwaras settled here. The biggest, most prosperous clan closest to the Emperor in all of history is here.

And they will most likely want to know me very, very badly.