“One stone cannot be in both places. You have to choose, son.”
“Tell me what to do.”
I look into my father’s face for an answer.
“Look around you,” Dad says. And I see Mom, Mrs. Maeda, the Prime Minister, all our neighbors from Kurume, and all the people who waited with us in Kagoshima, in Kyushu, in all the Four Islands, all over Earth and on the Hopeful. They look expectantly at me, for me to do something.
Dad’s voice is quiet:
“The stars shine and blink.
We are all guests passing through,
A smile and a name.”
“I have a solution,” I tell Dr. Hamilton over the radio.
“I knew you’d come up with something,” Mindy says, her voice proud and happy.
Dr. Hamilton is silent for a while. He knows what I’m thinking. And then: “Hiroto, thank you.”
I unhook the torch from its useless fuel tank and connect it to the tank on my back. I turn it on. The flame is bright, sharp, a blade of light. I marshal photons and atoms before me, transforming them into a web of strength and light.
The stars on the other side have been sealed away again. The mirrored surface of the sail is perfect.
“Correct your course,” I speak into the microphone. “It’s done.”
“Acknowledged,” Dr. Hamilton says. His voice is that of a sad man trying not to sound sad.
“You have to come back first,” Mindy says. “If we correct course now, you’ll have nowhere to tether yourself.”
“It’s okay, baby,” I whisper into the microphone. “I’m not coming back. There’s not enough fuel left.”
“We’ll come for you!”
“You can’t navigate the struts as quickly as I did,” I tell her, gently. “No one knows their pattern as well as I do. By the time you get here, I will have run out of air.”
I wait until she’s quiet again. “Let us not speak of sad things. I love you.”
Then I turn off the radio and push off into space so that they aren’t tempted to mount a useless rescue mission. And I fall down, far, far below the canopy of the sail.
I watch as the sail turns away, unveiling the stars in their full glory. The sun, so faint now, is only one star among many, neither rising nor setting. I am cast adrift among them, alone and also at one with them.
A kitten’s tongue tickles the inside of my heart.
***
I play the next stone in the gap.
Dad plays as I thought he would, and my stones in the northeast corner are gone, cast adrift.
But my main group is safe. They may even flourish in the future.
“Maybe there are heroes in Go,” Bobby’s voice says.
Mindy called me a hero. But I was simply a man in the right place at the right time. Dr. Hamilton is also a hero because he designed the Hopeful. Mindy is also a hero because she kept me awake. My mother is also a hero because she was willing to give me up so that I could survive. My father is also a hero because he showed me the right thing to do.
We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.
I pull my gaze back from the Go board until the stones fuse into larger patterns of shifting life and pulsing breath. “Individual stones are not heroes, but all the stones together are heroic.”
“It is a beautiful day for a walk, isn’t it?” Dad says.
And we walk together down the street, so that we can remember every passing blade of grass, every dewdrop, every fading ray of the dying sun, infinitely beautiful.
© 2012 by Ken Liu.
Originally published in The Future is Japanese,
edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington.
Reprinted by permission of the author.