She quickly tapped on the screen, hiding the message in the background. “Oh, it’s just Dad,” she said, as Yukio coiled down beside her.
“Ah.”
Kaitlin folded up her PAD and tucked it back into its case. “And just what does ‘ah’ mean?” she asked.
He smiled. “It means that occasionally experiencing a lack of harmony with one’s paternal ancestor appears not to be an exclusively Japanese trait.”
“Ah.”
“Exactly.” He began twining his fingers through her hair. “Have I mentioned lately that I love you, Chicako?”
She grinned. “Not since we got out of bed this morning, Snow Boy,” she replied, using a rough translation of his name. She put her arms around his neck to greet him properly. “You’re good for me, did you know that?”
“Mmm,” he murmured as he responded warmly to her kiss. “You’ve said something about that a time or two before, I believe.”
After a long moment, she pulled back. “You know, I’m kind of glad I stopped by the Japanese Room that day.”
He nodded. “Me too. But we would have met eventually. It was fated.”
Kaitlin looked quizzically at him. “Do you believe that? Do you really believe everything will work out for us?”
He turned very serious eyes toward her. “Those are two distinct questions, Kaitlin. Ones that do not necessarily have the same answer.”
There was no response to make to that, so she made none. She knew what he meant; there was no point in going over it again. Instead she opened her belt pouch and pulled out the two quick-pak lunches she’d picked up earlier at the campus store.
“The landing is only a few days away now, isn’t it?” Yukio asked as he produced two cold-bottles out of a hip pouch. He thumbed them open and handed one to her.
Kaitlin took a sip and then another. “Mmm, kiwi, that’s good.” She pressed a button on her wrist-top to check the calendar. “Yes. Three days. They should rendezvous with the landers Saturday morning.”
“It is not a Japanese sentiment, but I…I envy them.” He tore off the lunch pack’s lid and started to eat it.
Her mouth quirked in a wry grin. “It’s funny, isn’t it. Here the two of us are, dying to go into space. And there’s my dad on his way to Mars, and he doesn’t even want to be there! He keeps complaining about being bored!” She picked a processed seabar out of her lunch and started chewing on it.
“Is that what was…bothering you?”
She swallowed and took a deep breath. Might as well talk about it. “No. It was politics again. Damn, I hate politics!”
Yukio shrugged. “Politics is nothing more than two people trying to decide if they can share a bowl of rice, or if one of them will use his sword to ensure that all the rice is his. It is as much a part of being human as breathing.”
“Well, then maybe being human ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Why can’t people just work together without all this stupid squabbling? Why can’t we take care of each other instead of fighting over who gets the scraps?”
“It is not in our heritage to be kind to others when we haven’t enough for ourselves. Altruism is not a survival trait, Kaitling.”
She grinned at his deliberate mispronunciation of her name. Yukio was proud of his English, justifiably so, and this past year had delighted in adding English puns to his repertoire.
“Well, I’m not entirely sure what the bowl of rice is, in this case, but the guys with swords seem to be two of the archeologists. Actually, the problem seems to be that they’re not using their swords but Dad thinks they should. I don’t know. I think this metaphor is getting bent all out of shape.” She finished up the seabar and started in on the edible packaging.
“There are lots more where that one came from.”
She laughed. “Maybe I should just try to tell the story straight. Dad feels strongly that Americans should not be…intimate with UN personnel. In fact, he went so far as to call it ‘consorting with the enemy.’ Can you believe that?”
Yukio was silent for so long that she wondered if he’d heard her. “Yukio?”
He started. “I am sorry. I think my father would find your father’s sentiment…not difficult to understand. There is considerable tension now concerning the possibilities of what may be discovered on Mars. I believe…I fear that it could lead to war.”
“But that’s absurd! Whatever we find there, it’s gonna take years to figure out even what it is, much less how we can use it! Why would we go to war over something like that?”