Heaven's Mountain

Mike Dugani sat with us, hands splayed edgily on the table as he often did during a holo-link report. Both Fan and I had seen Mike like this many times. We’d worked with him over the past eight years to decipher linguistic codes, create new symbols, and develop new syntactic patterns for WSA.

 

Sharing the minimalised dining space, we played him out. I smoothed down my thermo-suit and scanned my data-screen of Greek poetry. Fan listened, black pony-tail swaying gently, to what we jokingly called his ‘space elevator’ music. Yoshi was silent, although his nostrils flared in a way that spoke volumes. Finally, he opened up. “An odd invitation, Dr. Dugani. Rushed, clandestine, unexpected. When before there’d been no money, no funding, no resources. Now this?”

 

Mike sounded almost apologetic. “There were financial restraints, Yoshi. Money was an issue.”

 

Yoshi’s hands slapped down sharply on the welded table. “Bullshit, Mike! Money’s a prescriptive commodity! A herd of cows. A string of cowrie shells. Even a promissory note written on paper. Which, contrary to popular belief, does grow on trees.”

 

“Look, Yoshi, I wanted you in from the get-go, but my hands were tied.”

 

Yoshi’s monetary references were long outdated, but everyone there understood his meaning. The Bean IV was a multinational project, and Japan’s technological expertise was well-known. Sadly, fears of its potential supremacy meant that WSA had created a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ which had effectively kept Japan out of the loop.

 

China was in, but then we were everywhere, having acquired control of most of the world’s markets. And Fan was there because, just over a century ago, Africa had bullied its way into the space race, the continent’s rationale being, “We’ve been treated like another species for so long, who better to be reaching out to Earth’s non-human friends?”