Not that getting flamed was unusual for her—she seldom held back on expressing her own opinions, regardless of how unpopular they might be—but that the attacks seemed so unreasoned bothered her. She’d thought of the Internationalists as a group of rational intellectuals; now she was seeing just as much unthinking prejudice in them as in, say, those who claimed the Martian Ancients were demons.
The Ancients.
“Yukio, who do you think the Ancients really were?”
“The Ancients?” He laughed. “How can I even take a guess? We know so little about them. What does your father say? Have they turned up anything new?”
Kaitlin shrugged. “They’ve only been there five days. He seems to be getting friendly with one of the archeologists, a guy named Alexander, and he’s been filling him in on what the previous team had uncovered and where they’re starting from now, but I don’t think there’s anything new and startling.”
The thought of her latest vid from her father made her grimace. She had a job lined up for later in the summer, and she’d told him all about it without specifically saying that it didn’t start until the middle of July, so he assumed she was staying in Pittsburgh for the whole summer. If he knew she was going to Japan, he would have gotten all fatherly and protective, assuming that she couldn’t take care of herself, and she just didn’t want to have to deal with that. She always used her global.net account whenever she was outside of Pittsburgh, so he would be able to tell from her v-mail only that she was not at CMU.
“Anyway,” she continued, “from all I’ve read on archeology, it’s a long, involved, painstaking process. Alexander told Dad it might be years before they even knew the right questions to ask.”
“So why do you think I might be able to answer those questions, when we don’t even know what they are?”
“Well, of course we can’t know. But we can guess, can’t we? We can speculate. The idea of other intelligent beings, a whole other civilization, inhabiting this solar system long before modern humans even evolved…it’s mind-boggling. I want to know who they were, why they came here, where they went.”
Yukio grinned. “Then why aren’t you studying exo-paleoarchaeology instead of AI systems design?”
Kaitlin shook her head. “I don’t have the patience for archaeology. I want to go out there and find them, wherever they are. Even if that particular species is extinct, just the fact that they were there proves we’re not alone. There must be others, thousands of other races throughout the galaxy. And I don’t think we’re going to find them by sitting here waiting for them to come to us. We’ve got to go to them.”
Yukio gazed out into the deep blue of not-quite-space. “We’re just on the edge of exploring the solar system. It will be quite some time before we are able to reach the stars.”
“I don’t know. If we can work the bugs out of antimatter propulsion, we could be sending a ship to Alpha Centauri in, oh, twenty years or so.
“And I want to be on that ship.”
0507 HOURS GMT
Kansai International Airport
Osaka Bay, Japan
1407 hours Tokyo time
Yukio held his hands casually in his lap to keep from gripping the handrests as the Star Raker came into its approach to the huge man-made island that was Kansai International Airport. He always felt a little nervous flying when he didn’t have any electronic displays in front of him to follow course and speed and range. He didn’t know the man in the cockpit, didn’t know with certainty his competence and experience, the way he did with Taii Iijima, the Space Defense Force captain he usually flew with. For a veteran of thousands of hours of flight time, such nervousness seemed embarrassing, so he always tried to hide it. Usually he was successful.
A slight sound coming from his right made him turn his head to see Kaitlin looking at him as though she was trying hard not to laugh.
“Okay, now I really know you’re a flight officer!”
“Oh? And why is that?”
“Dad says all flyers are like that, though the actual pilots are usually worse than side-seaters like you. Can’t stand to have someone else in control.”
Yukio grinned ruefully. “You found me out. And I thought I was hiding it pretty well.”
She nodded. “You were. But don’t worry, I won’t let on I know your dreadful secret. It’s just nice to know that you have at least one flaw.”
The Star Raker came in for a textbook landing, and Yukio resumed his normal breathing pattern. The slidewalk in the International Terminal was bordered with gift shops, eating parlors, and communications stations; signs in French, English, and Nihongo welcomed visitors, and holoboard advertisements bombarded them with sights and sounds as they made their way toward the baggage area. Travelers from all over the world came through Kansai, but there was a predominance of Asian faces. As he got off the end of the slidewalk, Yukio almost gave a skip. It was good to be home.