Ion 417: Raiju (28 page)

I thought perhaps she was confused, "I have no idea who you are."

She didn't bother replying, merely turned on her heel to walk away rapidly. It gave me the chance to look at the other things displayed by the counter. The girl trying to work the money machine was on her fourth attempt to get an answer that she liked from it when I interrupted to ask about something on the counter that seemed very odd to me. They were colorful boxes with images of strange looking animals eating sticks. Either the box held micro sized animals that ate sticks, or these were boxes of sticks that animals came into the shop to purchase. Neither idea seemed plausible.

"What is pocky?"

"fifty yen for vanilla, and seventy-five for chocolate and strawberry."

Sakura came up beside me, "They are sweet sticks that children like."

"Then why picture animals eating them? Never mind, put six of each on the bill please."

Sakura got mildly upset, "You can't give them so much treat stuff."

"I wanted to try them myself. If Hiro and Sai like them, they must be good."

"Alright, but no more than one box for the children."

I should have known better than to confuse a woman who couldn't get a machine to agree with her, especially by tossing further confusion into the mixture. The first part was to settle on two boxes of each flavor, and the second part was to add those numbers into the total with the pills. Really simple mathematics.

She had to start the process of adding them all together once more. A quick glance was enough to know the total, and it was the amount the machine had told her twice so far. I dropped the currency with a little extra, and we departed before either her or the machine tired of the game and dismantled the other.

By the time we stepped off the street and through the gate, she was tired and the pain was evident in the creases around her eyes. The children must have been watching, because they came running before we were even halfway to the house. They stopped a few steps away to look at me as I helped her along.

"Who are you? Oh, wow. So this is what you look like without makeup."

"I uh... We can talk about that that inside. Just watch your mother. She feels pain right now."

Hiro grabbed Sakura's other arm to help her along, "What happened? We heard all about that bomb, but the reporters said it was just some chijin robophobic that blew hisself up. Was you there when it happened?"

Sai got a puzzled look on her face, "What's a robobophobic? You made that up!"

"I can tell you all about it while I fix dinner."

I couldn't let her get hurt further on my account, "Oh no. The medical person said that you needed rest. No fixing dinner, no cleaning, no close encounters, and no lifting for two weeks. I'll take care of the meal preparation."

This was the perfect chance to help out for all the trouble I had caused. I had Hiro and Sai help her sit down and keep her occupied while I figure out how to make a dinner. How hard could it be? I'd learned how to fix food in only a few minutes on the ship when I discovered the instructions. Surely food here had instructions on it too.

Hiro and Sai had seated themselves on either side of Sakura like guardians. They kept trying to fluff up the pillow she leaned on, or move something closer to her. Every time they did it jolted her a bit, and I started to shoo them away, but she said they were fine right where they were. So, I left her sitting in the living room chair with Hiro turning on the television, as I went off to the kitchen to prepare... something.

I was discovering just how different her food preparation area was than the common room of the ship. All of the cabinets held various forms of cooking dishes. Only a couple had anything resembling possible food.

All of the food I found either had multiple versions of instructions, or had no instructions at all. The packages with instructions weren't even comprehensible for my limited experience. Perhaps there was another name for re-hydration. Boiling water? One tenth kilo butter? Some of the instructions were even for things not contained within the package.

I was beginning to suspect that I would have to manually assemble food from individual ingredients, but how? I didn't dare ask her after telling her that I could do it. I decided that rice balls might be an easy one to start. That would only require a few ingredients, mostly rice. I should be able to manage that much.

I located the rice in a sizable bag that had a picture of a rice plant on the side of it. There were no instructions on the package anywhere to indicate how to prepare. The only instruction was to store it in a dry place. These grains were dried out, so it should be really simple to rehydrate them. I could try thirty seconds and see if that worked. Better yet, I'll ask. A question couldn't hurt her. She wouldn't have to know that I couldn't figure out the directions.

I stepped into the other room to ask Sakura how to prepare the rice, and she offered to come assist me, "Just stay there like the medical person said. I'll do it." I hurried back into the kitchen before she could get up. How did these dried grains become the fluffed balls we had found for lunch? I spent ten minutes trying to convince the bag of rice to tell me its secret by staring at it.

I filled a small pot with the rice and stuck it in the re-hydrator, only to have the door not close because of the handle. I had to dump it all into a bowl that did fit. This thing was completely different despite the similar look to it. Cook time, power setting, defrost..., and one that looked like it was automatic. I pressed the start button, and it worked! Yay me! It hummed louder than the one on the ship, but that wasn't a bad thing was it? I could even watch the food through the little window as it... popped? Arcs started jumping from the metal bowl to the sides. That wasn't normal was it? One more really loud pop and the whole machine went dead.

Sakura called out from the next room, "Is everything alright in there? Do I smell burning?"

Sticking my head out the door, I tried to assure her that everything was fine, "I uh... it's nothing."

Back inside the kitchen I stood staring at the smoking ruins of her re-hydrator, wondering just how I was going to manage now. There was fish in the chilled cabinet, that I had no idea on the proper method of charring. Vegetables and fruit in another cabinet that I could cut up, but no rice to go with them. Or charred fish either. Finally I got frustrated enough.

How difficult could it be to repair such a simple device? I began searching through the cabinets hoping to find some sort of tool kit. Success! In one of the drawers I found what might be considered simple manual tools. Nothing so sophisticated as the mag-torque inducer on the ship, but hopefully enough to fix Sakura's machine.

It took me only a moment to pull the fasteners, and open her machine on the counter. It truly was simple with only a few components. The biggest one seemed to be an energy modulator. Wait, looking through it I could find no way to induce water molecules into the food. The only thing this would do is to add energy, and thus heat the food.

My tracing fingers found a spot where the electricity still worked in the machine, and a bright arc melted another piece of it beyond recognition. I borrowed a word from Panzo's repertoire to express my frustration, "Gadrolef!" I had no idea what the Kanari word meant, but it suited times when things blew up in his face.

"Are you sure everything is fine in there?"

I didn't wait for a response as I headed for the front door, mumbling somewhat, "I have to go get something. I'll be right back. No! Don't get up."

The bike was in the garage, right where it had sat since I'd made Panzo walk back to the ship. Was that really only last night? So much had happened in so short of a time that I hadn't had time to think about my goal. It came to life with its quiet hum as I rolled it out into the courtyard. Feeling the soft vibration beneath me reminded me of the ship as it had traveled through high drive. I missed the subtle noise and feel that weren't noticed except by their absence.

It took only a few minutes to wind my way up the path to the old temple grounds. Everything looked a little different in the faded light with the bike's headlight reflecting off small stone shapes periodically lining the path. With a bit of power they could probably light the way.

I found Panzo sitting in the common room talking to Lafiel's holo while they searched through the connections to the internet. It had taken them only a few hours to find a way to tap into the networked communication grid of the planet, and access the information stored there. They were deep in a conversation so full of technical jargon that I had only a slight idea of what they talked about.

Lafiel called out to me, startling Panzo who hadn't noticed my return, "Captain! can you help us? We need an interpreter."

Peeking over Panzo's shoulder I caught what looked like a list of foods labeled in kanji that scrolled down the screen. Some of them I knew as varieties of fish, while others I could only guess at because of the main label for vegetables. I was beginning to realize that the years I had spent learning the language from my mother's recordings hadn't really prepared me for actually reading and speaking it well.

"It looks like you have the product page for a food market. See that? That says Hamachi, which is one of the fish I know of. If I understand correctly, it's bigger than me. That's Sake; more of a red fish. Unagi is some sort of eel, though I doubt it's any relation. Rice, Edamame, Shinko, yes, I think this must be a food market in a place called Shiboto."

"Thank you Captain. See Panzo? I thought it was about food with the little pictures of leaves. Captain! I just noticed that dress is torn and bloodstained. What happened?"

"It's nothing to worry about. I am fully healed, though a bit hungry. Speaking of which, I burned up either a rehydrator or energy cooker. I'm not sure which it is, but I have to get food for this family."

"There was a little bit of excitement when I went to see a robotics demonstration, and I got a little bit punctured."

Now I'd gotten Panzo's attention, "Just what kind of excitement did you cause? And how did you change color? And..."

"Can I tell you all about it later? I have hungry people that need food, and ooh yes. This looks good."

I began cycling packages of steamed Stilfin in long noodles through the rehydrator as I tried to think of what else would taste good with it. The aroma coming off the prepared packages really got to me, and before I knew it I'd stacked half a dozen of them on the counter. I followed those with a bunch of Moatra Berries, and Tifa. On the third package of Fafaisl, Lafiel asked just how many I was planning to feed.

"There's four of them. You think I should do a few more packages?"

"I saw the size of those two children. I think you'll end up eating half of this yourself. What about something to drink?"

"You're right. I tasted their water."

I searched through the containers in the pantry and came up with a couple that could hold water. These I filled from the supply in my cabin before lugging everything down to the bike. What hadn't seemed very much while sitting on the counter, looked like a huge pile as I strapped it all to the back of the bike. There was barely room to fit the two four-liter jugs of water.

I walked in to find Hiro showing his mother the charred remains of the controller from the cooking unit I'd damaged slightly. The agitated look on Sakura's face turned to curiosity as I brought the bundle of package through the door.

I did my best to sound cheerful, "I had a little difficulty with the food fixing, so I brought back some things I think you'll like. This one is the Stilfin that I liked so well that I brought a bunch of it on the trip. I'm sure I can fix that cooking unit."

Hiro promptly set the ruined controller aside to poke through the packages, "Where's this from? It looks like it's written in Martian or something. Wait, these are from the movie, aren't they?"

I still remembered one of the comments Sakura had said to me, and I knew I had to clear things up, "About the movie, I..."

"Sai! We're gonna eat alien food. Help me get some plates."

"You mean like bugs and junk?"

I laughed, "This is a kind of fish that comes from a planet called Reliance. That was the firs... Well, it tastes really good."

As Hiro and Sai ran off to the kitchen for the dishes, Sakura tugged at my arm and whispered, "You still need to explain a lot."

I needed to straighten this out right away. If I tried keeping the up the ruse with the kids, while Sakura had a different story, something would go wrong. Of that I was fairly certain. None of the biographies I had studied advocated keeping up multiple conflicting stories with people you were spending time around, and I was here for at least a day or two.

It felt more difficult than facing down the Selstlaks as I opened my mouth to explain, "Alright everyone, I need to explain a little bit. I know that... "

The comm unit on the wall, the house phone, interrupted my explanation with a ringing sound. Suddenly it was a race between the two children to see who could tear the phone off the wall as they struggled with the hand-piece. Between the two of them, they stretched the cord out as they vied to be the one to hand it to Sakura.

She took it and did her best to smile, "Now quiet you two, this is your father on the phone."

My explanation seemed to have been forgotten at the moment as she spoke to Akita about how I had prepared some dinner for them. It seems that I'm not the only one that gets interrupted as I try to explain things. She had to raise her voice to him as the announcer on the television talked even louder, "Yes, there will be some for you when you get home. Yes. We can heat it in the... well, we can do something."

The television announcer was fairly screaming in his excitement about obtaining new images. Everyone glanced toward the screen as the scene came on showing the front of Saikou industries. The view panned around to show the crowd from the robot demonstration, before focusing back on the stage.

"Hey, was that mom?"