Reunited – Chapter 5

I am the coldest I have ever been. In my lifetime, Nishikyō never dropped below fifteen degrees Celsius, and the day that it hit sixteen degrees, it was as if the apocalypse was beginning. People talked about the low temperature for weeks.

Yūsei is a balmy seven degrees, raining, and overcast. We have just arrived, and I already want to get on the shuttle and go back up to orbit. My whole body is made of lead and moving is an intense workout. Putting one foot in front of the other is a chore and making my heart beat so fast I feel like I’m back in the dōjō, not inching myself along a brick path.

Jiro wasn’t kidding about our recovery being difficult. I can already tell it will be painful and long. The ground is wet and yet I still want to lie down right here. Yes, right here. A patch of green grass one meter to my left looks soft and inviting. Sigh. Keep moving, Sanaa.

I’m thankful the sky is cloudy, though. If I keep my head low, I can pretend the cloud deck is a dome, dark like dawn back home.

Back home.

It’s going to be a long time before I think of this strange place as home.

“Whoever thought to pack real umbrellas was a genius, Mark.”

“I don’t know who thought of it, but we were all glad for the extra work back on Earth. Gave another three hundred people jobs in Ku 10.”

Anyone who has been to the surface and adapted to the gravity is here to escort people to their new homes. I’ve clutched onto Sakai’s arm, and when I turn, I can hardly believe Helena is slowly walking along with a cane behind Usagi. Shuffle, step, shuffle, step. Her pace is slow but faster than mine. She can lift her foot off the ground. To think she may be better adapted than any of us is astounding.

Despite the umbrella over me, my feet are damp, and I’m shivering, my teeth chattering again, in my thin Nishikyō grays. The wind picks up, blows straight through me, and I come to a complete stop. Someone turn up the heat! I will never make it through a winter here.

“Let’s go,” Sakai says, giving me a hug and rubbing my back. “It’s just a little farther.”

Sakai leads us all to an estate he found on his first day here. A real, ancient-style Japanese estate, abandoned, and in need of repair. I’m dying to see this place for myself, and I crane my neck to peer over the hill.

My aunts, Mariko, Beni, Oyama, Yoichi, and Miko and her parents came down three days ago with Lucy and are waiting for us. Today, I’m arriving with Jiro, Sakai, Usagi, Helena, and Kentaro. I told Minamoto that I still need Kentaro as an advisor and he didn’t hesitate to let Kentaro come with me. Either he’s happy to see Kentaro go or isn’t but doesn’t want to show it.

“Here we are.” Sakai opens a small wooden gate in front of me.

I catch my breath, jerking the umbrella off my head so I can see everything. The estate, my new home, is a single-story, Japanese-style country house, with wide wooden porches all along the front, dark roofs, and cream-colored walls in between shōji, white paper doors. The front is a long, wide building with two other buildings jutting out towards us surrounding a courtyard.

“This is only the first wing.” Sakai replaces the umbrella over my head and directs me to the entrance. “Two more wings surround a garden out back. This place has over twelve bedrooms, ten bathrooms, storage areas, another adjacent house off the back, and has to be over four-hundred and fifty square meters. There’s even a dōjō.”

The courtyard is covered in white loose gravel and the small square garden in the center is overgrown and unruly. Mariko stands on the wooden porch, wrapped in a blanket, a shōji door slid open behind her on a bare room with tattered tatami mats all over the floors. A wider room beyond is stacked high with boxes. The house is run down and in need of serious maintenance. I’m knocked back by a dank and musty smell which must be why the doors are open even though it’s freezing and wet outside.

“Welcome home, Sanaa,” Mariko says, bowing to me.

This is my new home.

She angles past me and smiles at Jiro. “Jiro-kun, let me help you up.”

I glance back at Jiro who frowns watching his mother come forward for him, bypassing me. I turn from them both and try not to sigh. Mariko did not wake up from her seven years of sleep any more forgiving.

Usagi and Helena step onto the porch next to me. I’m still not used to Usagi with hair, and now I know why he always shaved his head. He is completely gray at twenty-six years old and was completely gray from eighteen on he told me on the shuttle ride down. I fully expect to run across him one day and find it all gone. He doesn’t look like Usagi.

“Just wait till you sit in the outdoor baths, Sanaa. They are the best part of the house.” Helena taps her cane on the wooden floor, leans on the handle, and pulls back the hood of her parka with her good right hand. “We saved the end room for you and Jiro.” The humidity doesn’t agree with Helena’s hair. A halo of blond fuzzy curls circle around her face. She pokes at them with her fingers.

“You didn’t have to do that. We would have been fine with a small room. This place is enormous, especially in comparison to our old apartments.”

“It is a small room, unfortunately. Most of them are,” Sakai says, removing my shoes and helping me into slippers. “The room we chose for you is at the end of a long hallway and the floorboards creak on all sides. You’ll always be able to tell when people are coming.”

I raise my eyebrows at Jiro around Mariko, and he smiles back at me. The night he taught me how to stealth walk he mentioned some houses in Old Japan were built like this to protect wealthy warlords. I wonder who used to live here.

“Sanaa, you’re freezing! Come in right now,” Aunt Lomo directs, walking slowly to meet us at the door.

I’m whisked in, and Aunt Lomo opens another shōji door to a living room area piled high with boxes on one side. We’re helped to sit down at a low, round table that seats six in the middle of the room. Aunt Lomo drapes a blanket over me and a delicious warmth flows over my legs.

“Oh! What is this?” I ask, peering under the table.

“It’s a kotatsu,” Aunt Lomo says with a laugh. “I had to look it up. We have no use for these things in Nishikyō. There’s an electric heater underneath. The house is not very insulated. The newer homes being built on the town’s outskirts will be more comfortable than this place will ever be.”

Beni enters the room carrying a steaming tray of tea and miso soup. She’s dressed in a heavy, dark green silk kimono with socks, and I’m suddenly pining for my wardrobe. I was only ever able to wear my silk kimono in the dead of winter. Maybe here I can wear them for many more months.

“Sanaa, it’s so good to see you on the ground now. I hate zero gravity. I hope we never go back up there again.”

I lean forward and give Beni a kiss on the cheek, and she smiles and serves me tea and soup.

“There’s no coffee yet,” she says, her tone apologetic. “Lucy is going nuts trying to locate her stash.”

“I loved zero gravity. I didn’t get nearly enough time to play pranks on people,” Kentaro says, leaning back with the tea in his hands.

“I enjoyed it as well… for other reasons.” Jiro covers up his smile by lifting the tea cup to his lips.

I bet he did.

Beni shakes her head at Jiro, her long hair swishing around her shoulders. I’m sure she can read our minds, so I put on my passive face before I can blush.

“Well, it will take several days for you to adjust to the gravity here. I’m on day three and already feeling much better though this is the first day I can reliably hold a tray of food. I keep losing my balance if I turn my head too fast.”

“I had to clutch onto Mark the whole way up here so I wouldn’t fall over.” My legs are jelly, and the world spins if I don’t look straight forward.

“Yes, the dizziness is strange at first. In the meantime, I have prepared the next few days for you. The adjustment is easier if you take a lot of baths so we’ve been heating the water for an hour now. I’m sure you’ll want to clean up.”

“Yes, definitely. A bath sounds heavenly.” I wiped myself down with hot towels on the ship, but with all of my, ahem, activities, I’m pretty disgusting right now.

“Then you should rest and eat. Oyama has soft foods prepared. I have asked one of the village barbers to come by tomorrow and take care of everyone’s hair. It was smart to include a wide variety of professions in the first wave.” She nods her head, her hair falling into her face before she pushes it back. I’m not used to this Beni with her long wavy locks and rounder face. Everyone is soft around the edges.

“Are you cutting your hair, Beni?”

“Yes, I like it short. What about you?”

“For now, I’m just going to leave it.”

Kentaro, Usagi, and Jiro will all look different again in a few days so I commit their appearance now to memory. I don’t want to forget anything about this journey we’ve all made together. Sakai comes back into the room, changed into a heavy kimono, and sits with us, taking a cup of tea and using it to warm his hands.

“The men here on Yūsei wear their hair short, nothing longer than chin length. I’m certain this estate we’re staying in belonged to someone influential. We’re up on the hill, and, on the other side of the house is a garden with a small pond, and then the land drops off with a view of the whole town and ocean when it’s not all fogged in. Hopefully you’ll be able to see it later.”

“We’ll see.” I peer down into my tea cup. I still don’t like tea. “I much prefer the rain and clouds though I’ve gotten used to the blue sky in my head. Maybe just thinking about it all the time has helped me.”

Kentaro’s eyebrows knit together, and he tilts his head at me. “What? I don’t get it.”

“Sanaa has agoraphobia, though it’s not as bad as the first time she was ever outside.” Jiro chuckles, and I kick him under the table. “She went down so fast I couldn’t believe it.”

“Is that why you look at the ground while you walk?” Kentaro asks, and I nod my head at him. “You should look up and around. This place is amazing.”

“I know.” My voice is small, and I take the chopsticks placed next to my bowl and rearrange them in two or three different layouts before Jiro’s hand lands on my arm and stops me.

“It’s okay. One step at a time. And considering I now feel like I weigh one thousand kilos, one step at a time is the best each of us can do.”

Beni rises up from seiza slowly. Everyone is so slow. “Jiro is right, of course. I’m sure within a day or two you won’t even notice it anymore. I will go and prepare the ladies’ bath now. You, Helena, Miko, Mariko, and I will bathe first. Oyama has offered to prepare the men’s bath for when we’re through.”

Beni opens the door, and Lucy is on the other side with her arms full of tablets. “Good news! Yamato Tech just delivered your updated tablets.”

“Yamato Tech?” Jiro asks, reaching for his tablet.

“Yamato is what we’ve decided to call our little coastal town. It’s an ancient name for Japan, and this place feels ancient in many ways. Anyway, the tech people are all set up down in the city center and have been updating tablets night and day since landing.” Lucy hands me mine, and I power it on and enter my password. Instead of the NishikyōNet icon in the upper left corner, it now reads YūseiSat.

“YūseiSat? Satellite?”

“Yes.” Lucy rubs her hands together. “When we entered orbit, we launched a series of four satellites in orbit over the continent. You can access the GDB and the rest of the internet from almost anywhere on Yūsei. You might have trouble in stone buildings or the mountains or way out at sea, though. Messaging and mail work the same as they always did. Everything is keyed to our citizen IDs just like in Nishikyō. Try it out.”

I open a message to Jiro and type, “You’re looking pretty hot today.”

Ping!

He opens the message I sent and types one back to me. “Meet you in bed later?”

I type, “If you’re lucky.”

He bursts into a big laugh and I blush. “It works,” he says, smiling at me and resting his head on his hand.

Lucy rolls her eyes at us. “Sanaa, you have the same level of access you had before. No surveillance obviously. Not yet, at least.”

I navigate back to the home screen, and find the date, March 3, 3111.

“Whoa! Look at the date! How old am I? I’m so confused.”

“We decided to set the date at 3111 because the ship took seven years to get here. March third is the date on the calendar here in the town north of us. The clock and calendar are set to local. We don’t know if the towns on the East Coast are in a different time zone. As for your age, every Yūsei settler now has an ‘Hibernation Age Qualifier’ in their profile. Everyone who slept the entire trip has a negative three year lag next to their name. So your age would be twenty-seven, but minus three years, means you are now twenty-four. It’s confusing, but from here on out, just use your age. Doctors will want to know your HAQ. No one else.”

“Okay, I think I get it. How old is Helena?”

“She was woken up a year early so hers is negative two. She’ll turn twenty-five in April. Jiro and Kentaro, you’re twenty-six. Mazel Tov!”

“I always knew that conversation was going to be confusing, and I’m glad I was right.” Jiro turns off his tablet and raises his cup of tea. “Happy birthday, everyone.”

Happy twenty-first, twenty-second, twenty-third, and twenty-fourth birthday to me. I hope there’s saké in my future soon.