Virus: The Day of Resurrection (6 page)

“How about that,” Major Taguchi said, impressed. “So you’re going to be living in a glued-together house when the temperature’s forty below outside and a blizzard is hitting you with fifty-meter-per-second winds?”

“Next year, definitely come to the base,” Yoshizumi said. He took one more pull on the pipe, though it had already gone out. “You won’t believe how nice it is. There’s a little theater, a bar. The only thing missing is some ladies. When I read stuff like the records of Nishibori’s first winter there, I really feel sorry for them. Now they’re finally getting ready to start test runs on a thousand-kilowatt portable reactor.”

“Speaking of feeling sorry for someone,” Major Taguchi murmured, glancing toward the rear of the sleek nuclear icebreaker
Shiretoko
, “after riding in this boat, I feel pretty bad for anyone who’s had to ride on
Souya
. That ship’s been ferrying polar teams down here since the very start. It’s terribly out of date now and was never all that well made to begin with. I hear it can’t break more than a meter and a half of ice.”

“The record says it’s been rescued time and again by the Soviets’
Ob’
and the Americans’
Hudson Island
.”

“Yeah,” Major Taguchi agreed. “It was like a dream for me when I first rode this boat. Cruising speed of twenty-eight knots, only needs fueling once every four years, and a steam gun to use in tandem with the power crusher. Breaks more than eight meters.”

On top of that,
Yoshizumi thought,
this time out, she’s got a brace of big cargo helicopters and three Samsons that can fly dangling a five-ton container underneath.

He watched a V-shaped Bristol as it landed at the base heliport five kilometers away.
Japan has really been interested in Antarctica these past two or three years. I don’t know; maybe it’s because they don’t want to get left behind by the big countries, but when I think of how it used to be, something seems a little funny.

Major Taguchi put his pipe away in a pocket and smiled at Yoshizumi. “It looks like this Antarctic boom is going to last for a while,” he said. “You all are on the cutting edge of your generation, as it were.”

“Even so, why are they so excited about it? You’d think a festival was going on from the uproar,” Yoshizumi said. “To us, it can’t help looking a little suspicious. They originally started this because of the IGY. We’re here to carry on the original goal, as it were: scholarly research about Antarctica. But lately the research teams have been getting shoved off to the sidelines, and all the interest seems to be in resource exploration—cold endurance tests related to those reactors—that kind of thing. That said, though, they’re not really going far enough in terms of investment if they’re planning to, say, build a polar city or get serious about developing resources here. I do wish they’d make our objective a little clearer, though, even if it’s nothing flashy like the Americans going all out and building a space station at the South Pole.”

“Maybe they’re just being good bureaucrats and calling ‘dibs’ while they can,” Taguchi murmured with a frown. “Considering politics these days, there’s also the fact that our politicians will be viewed as incompetent unless they keep coming up with new symbolic accomplishments and hammering out new goals one after another. They need to lead and pull the world along behind them. They’ve got to find ways to show people that Japan ranks high on the world stage. That’s why we’re finally launching a tiny little satellite with a tiny little rocket more than a dozen years after the Soviets launched Sputnik. This time, you all get to be the flag they wave around.”

“That’s a pretty cynical way of looking at it,” Yoshizumi said with a laugh. When he smiled, he had dimples in his snow-tanned cheeks, and white teeth peeked out from between his lips. He looked much younger than his thirty years when he laughed. “But really,” he said, “we should be grateful for this boom, don’t you think? We should be smart and take whatever we can get while we can get it—save it for when this boom is over.”

“Well, that’s true after all.” Major Taguchi took out the pipe he had just put away but didn’t put it in his mouth. He just played with it, enjoying the feel of its bowl in the palm of his hand. “Booms have their good side too. They can be much ado about nothing, but they do leave us with substantial benefits, and with that we can progress little by little. Even this ship”—he clapped his hand against her rails lovingly—“she’s the offspring of the second atomic power boom. This may have been before your time, but in 1966, around Showa 30, Japan had its first boom in atomic power for peaceful purposes.”

“Yes, I remember.” Yoshizumi nodded. “I was still in junior high.”

“And two or three years later, the flame had completely fizzled out. But still, during that time, nuclear energy really soaked into the world of industry. Then, from the year after the Tokyo Olympics—around 1965—the second boom started. After the Olympics, the politicians wheeled out space development and nuclear energy as their latest symbols for Japan. And thanks to our climbing aboard that bandwagon, the nuclear ships they said we’d never have until at least the ’70s we had in almost no time. The Maritime Safety Agency announced the plan in 1964, which included a new polar research ship—”

Suddenly the
Shiretoko
’s siren began to wail, and they could feel the reverberations in their stomachs. Twenty-two hundred hours: the signal that one hour remained until departure. From New Showa Station, another siren sounded as if in answer. A group of adelie penguins, inured to the noise of helicopter rotors though they were, took off waddling as though surprised by the sirens. One by one, they awkwardly jumped into the water through the tracks of the icebreaker. At the sight of their excited flapping about, the two men burst out laughing in spite of themselves.

“The nuclear energy boom probably had something to do with the reductions in weapons production, and the US and Soviet Union unloading their excess enriched uranium on the market.” Yoshizumi waited for the siren to stop wailing before he continued. “Lately, there’s a tendency for a lot of booms to stick. Even in Antarctica, there’s a huge nuclear energy boom. Leaving aside the old hands at it like McMurdo and Mirny Stations, there’s not a country represented here that doesn’t have a small nuclear power plant set up somewhere.”

“And now the space boom is starting to stick,” said Major Taguchi. “Is there anything to that story about NASA bringing a rocket down here?”

“Apparently so. They’ll be ready to start serious testing later this year, after they finish the gantry foundation and do a little terrestrial testing of the Centaur engines.”

They watched as the queer form of the Samson helicopter, resembling a crane fly on stilts, took off from the station and began to come nearer. To Yoshizumi, the helicopter looked like nothing so much as a tall, four-legged table flying through the air as it lifted off. The Samson pulled the five-ton container it was carrying into the sky like a bee with a grain of pollen.

“Well, then,” said Major Taguchi. “It’s just about time to say goodbye.”

“Hey, Taguchi …” Yoshizumi murmured unexpectedly. His voice was oddly hushed. His expression had grown more serious as he stared off into the distant polar mountains. When he made that kind of face, he looked as unworldly as a young boy.

That’s a look peculiar to the people of this generation,
Major Taguchi thought. In other words, it was the face of one unharmed by the great upheavals of the world.

“What do you think will happen to the world from here on out?”

“Who know?” said Taguchi, a bit at a loss for words at the unexpected question. “What’ll happen? Things won’t change much at all, right? Already, the wars and the panics aren’t—”

In sudden surprise, he left his sentence unfinished.
That was it!
Already, a fairly long period of time had passed without anything much really happening. So many times, the alarms had been raised for impending crises, and so many times, disaster had been averted at the very last moment. There had even been a moment when it was feared that the economic bankruptcy of the great nations would overturn the world marketplace, but in the end, that had been dodged in the form of a rather long period of recession. This was only a rumor, but there was even a story going around that the Soviet Union had—behind the scenes of the world economic stage—bailed America out of its economic crisis. To put it in nautical terms, “restorability” was the thing that was growing stronger and stronger in the world now. And from now on …

“Well, even with a few oscillations,” Taguchi said, “civilization as a whole will keep on slowly inching forward, eh? Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no reason, really,” Yoshizumi said with a bashful little smile. “Do you think that war is … a thing of the past now?”

“Not hardly,” said Major Taguchi. “Across the board disarmament will take a long time, and NATO is like a car manufacturer that keeps putting out a new model every year—new armaments, new positioning, and new strategy, all standard. File that question under ‘Not hardly.’ The strategic nuclear framework between the East and the West will take shape within the next three or four years. The American president and the Soviet premier will meet this summer, and that’s when things will become more definite, right?”

“So even though one part of the world keeps on changing steadily,” Yoshizumi said vacantly, “there’s another part that’s hardly changed at all. Disarmament. A lot of time has passed since the first voices calling for it started to be heard.”

“But the part that’s changing a lot and the part that’s been so gridlocked are both changing now, don’t you think?” said Taguchi in a somewhat ambiguous tone. “The world today is still riding on a lot of inertia from the 1950s. Making it change direction is incredibly difficult. Hey, it’s about time for you to go …”

Yoshizumi continued slowly pulling at the Meerschaum pipe, however. The thin smoke rose slowly up into the whitish night sky of the Antarctic summer. The wind was blowing from the east. Way over on the other side of the Prince Olav coast, the area around Hinode Cape had grown dark. After he had smoked the very last of the tobacco, Yoshizumi tapped the pipe lightly against the top of his palm.

Yoshizumi held the pipe out for Major Taguchi to take back, to which Taguchi replied, “You can have it.”

Yoshizumi’s face lit up instantly. “You don’t mind?” he asked. “In that case, lend it to me until you come later. I’ll take good care of it.”

“No,” Taguchi said. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t mind. I’m not coming next year.”

“Why not?”

“When I get back to Japan, I’ll be assigned new duties right away. Training courses,” Major Taguchi said, sounding a little forlorn. “I’m to be placed aboard a foreign ship for one year. I’ll probably never ride on
Shiretoko
again.”

“Then … this really is goodbye, isn’t it?” said Yoshizumi regretfully. The two men, ten years apart in age, had first gotten to know one another thanks to a pipe. From the start, they had gotten on unusually well and had been as inseparable as brothers throughout the sea voyage. “But we may meet again in Japan,” he added. “I go back home once every four years.”

Taguchi extended his hand. “If we can’t meet then, let’s meet in an old folks’ home in the twenty-first century. I heard on the morning news that they’re close to a new wonder drug for cancer. Sounds like I’ll live to be a hundred after I retire.”

“Well then,” Yoshizumi said with a smile as he put out his hand. “Until the twenty-first century …”

They gripped one another’s hands firmly. Then Yoshizumi turned away and hurried off toward a helicopter that was lifting a container to its underbelly, its rear wheels already starting to rise off the ground a little. When its four wheels separated from the deck, Major Taguchi caught a glimpse of something white in its window. Yoshizumi was waving, that Meerschaum pipe in his hand. Taguchi waved back at him and then walked off toward his cabin, crossing the rear deck, which was as crowded as it had been during the preparation for departure.

Clouds were roiling up far beyond the Prince Olav coast. He could feel in his skin the start of a sudden drop in pressure as the cold became more severe. Before he entered his cabin, he looked back across the icy plain and saw above the station the brilliant flag of the Rising Sun flapping in strong beams of light from its lamps. From the cluster of white bubble-domes, he could see three snowmobiles approaching—burdened heavily with people who had come to see them off—going over puddle after puddle. When he listened closely to the voices barking and reverberating from the speakers on top of the vehicles, he could make out the melody of “Auld Lang Syne.” Major Taguchi grimaced slightly and returned to his cabin.

Shiretoko
’s steam whistle roared again, this time signaling the thirty-minute mark before she would put out to sea again.

3. Seven Degrees, Twenty-four Minutes East

It happened around the time that
Shiretoko
was setting out from the waters of Ongul Island, heading back through the packed ice along the trail it had broken earlier.

A night train emerged into Italy, having departed from France and traveled through the Mont Cenis Tunnel beneath the snow-ravaged Alps. The assistant driver saw the bright flash of an explosion in the northern mountains on the near side of Torino. Immediately, he used the onboard telephone to report it to the Torino police.