? ? ?
“Something has punctured the sail,” Dr. Hamilton says.
The tiny room holds only the most senior command staff—plus Mindy and me because we already know. There is no reason to cause a panic among the people.
“The hole is causing the ship to list to the side, veering off course. If the hole is not patched, the tear will grow bigger, the sail will soon collapse, and the Hopeful will be adrift in space.”
“Is there any way to fix it?” the captain asks.
Dr. Hamilton, who has been like a father to me, shakes his headful of white hair. I have never seen him so despondent.
“The tear is several hundred kilometers from the hub of the sail. It will take many days to get someone out there because you can’t move too fast along the surface of the sail—the risk of another tear is too great. And by the time we do get anyone out there, the tear will have grown too large to patch.”
And so it goes. Everything passes.
I close my eyes and picture the sail. The film is so thin that if it is touched carelessly, it will be punctured. But the membrane is supported by a complex system of folds and struts that give the sail rigidity and tension. As a child, I had watched them unfold in space like one of my mother’s origami creations.
I imagine hooking and unhooking a tether cable to the scaffolding of struts as I skim along the surface of the sail, like a dragonfly dipping across the surface of a pond.
“I can make it out there in seventy-two hours,” I say. Everyone turns to look at me. I explain my idea. “I know the patterns of the struts well because I have monitored them from afar for most of my life. I can find the quickest path.”
Dr. Hamilton is dubious. “Those struts were never designed for a maneuver like that. I never planned for this scenario.”
“Then we’ll improvise,” Mindy says. “We’re Americans, damn it. We never just give up.”
Dr. Hamilton looks up. “Thank you, Mindy.”
We plan, we debate, we shout at each other, we work throughout the night.
? ? ?
The climb up the cable from the habitat module to the solar sail is long and arduous. It takes me almost twelve hours.
Let me illustrate for you what I look like with the second character in my name:
It means “to soar.” See that radical on the left? That’s me, tethered to the cable with a pair of antennae coming out of my helmet. On my back are the wings—or, in this case, booster rockets and extra fuel tanks that push me up and up toward the great reflective dome that blocks out the whole sky, the gossamer mirror of the solar sail.
Mindy chats with me on the radio link. We tell each other jokes, share secrets, speak of things we want to do in the future. When we run out of things to say, she sings to me. The goal is to keep me awake.
“Wareware ha, hoshi no aida ni kyaku ni kite.”
? ? ?
But the climb up is really the easy part. The journey across the sail along the network of struts to the point of puncture is far more difficult.
It has been thirty-six hours since I left the ship. Mindy’s voice is now tired, flagging. She yawns.
“Sleep, baby,” I whisper into the microphone. I’m so tired that I want to close my eyes just for a moment.
I’m walking along the road on a summer evening, my father next to me.
“We live in a land of volcanoes and earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis, Hiroto. ??We have always faced a precarious existence, suspended in a thin strip on the surface of this planet between the fire underneath and the icy vacuum above.”
And I’m back in my suit again, alone. My momentary loss of concentration causes me to bang my backpack against one of the beams of the sail, almost knocking one of the fuel tanks loose. I grab it just in time. The mass of my equipment has been lightened down to the last gram so that I can move fast, and there is no margin for error. I can’t afford to lose anything.
I try to shake the dream and keep on moving.
“Yet it is this awareness of the closeness of death, of the beauty inherent in each moment, that allows us to endure. Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe. It is the soul of our nation. It has allowed us to endure Hiroshima, to endure the occupation, to endure deprivation and the prospect of annihilation without despair.”
“Hiroto, wake up!” Mindy’s voice is desperate, pleading. I jerk awake. I have not been able to sleep for how long now? Two days, three, four?
For the final fifty or so kilometers of the journey, I must let go of the sail struts and rely on my rockets alone to travel untethered, skimming over the surface of the sail while everything is moving at a fraction of the speed of light. The very idea is enough to make me dizzy.
And suddenly my father is next to me again, suspended in space below the sail. We’re playing a game of Go.
“Look in the southwest corner. Do you see how your army has been divided in half? My white stones will soon surround and capture this entire group.”
I look where he’s pointing and I see the crisis. There is a gap that I missed. What I thought was my one army is in reality two separate groups with a hole in the middle. I have to plug the gap with my next stone.
I shake away the hallucination. I have to finish this, and then I can sleep.
There is a hole in the torn sail before me. At the speed we’re traveling, even a tiny speck of dust that escaped the ion shields can cause havoc. The jagged edge of the hole flaps gently in space, propelled by solar wind and radiation pressure. While an individual photon is tiny, insignificant, without even mass, all of them together can propel a sail as big as the sky and push a thousand people along.
The universe is wondrous.
I lift a black stone and prepare to fill in the gap, to connect my armies into one.
The stone turns back into the patching kit from my backpack. I maneuver my thrusters until I’m hovering right over the gash in the sail. Through the hole I can see the stars beyond, the stars that no one on the ship has seen for many years. I look at them and imagine that around one of them, one day, the human race, fused into a new nation, will recover from near extinction, will start afresh and flourish again.
Carefully, I apply the bandage over the gash, and I turn on the heat torch. I run the torch over the gash, and I can feel the bandage melting to spread out and fuse with the hydrocarbon chains in the sail film. When that’s done I’ll vaporize and deposit silver atoms over it to form a shiny, reflective layer.
“It’s working,” I say into the microphone. And I hear the muffled sounds of celebration in the background.
“You’re a hero,” Mindy says.
I think of myself as a giant Japanese robot in a manga and smile.
The torch sputters and goes out.
“Look carefully,” Dad says. “You want to play your next stone there to plug that hole. But is that what you really want?”
I shake the fuel tank attached to the torch. Nothing. This was the tank that I banged against one of the sail beams. The collision must have caused a leak and there isn’t enough fuel left to finish the patch. The bandage flaps gently, only half attached to the gash.
“Come back now,” Dr. Hamilton says. “We’ll replenish your supplies and try again.”
I’m exhausted. No matter how hard I push, I will not be able to make it back out here as fast. And by then who knows how big the gash will have grown? Dr. Hamilton knows this as well as I do. He just wants to get me back to the warm safety of the ship.
I still have fuel in my tank, the fuel that is meant for my return trip.
My father’s face is expectant.
“I see,” I speak slowly. “If I play my next stone in this hole, I will not have a chance to get back to the small group up in the northeast. You’ll capture them.”
“One stone cannot be in both places. You have to choose, son.”
“Tell me what to do.”