Nakayama was a quiet sort of man, and he ran an inn at the far end of space, all by himself.
The inn was called Minato-sō. It sat at the very edge of an old anchorage, and right next door squatted an absurdly enormous planet. The locals called it “the Neighbor.” A friendly enough nickname; the real thing was anything but friendly.
The Neighbor pulled in every ship that passed anywhere near it. Its pull was simply too strong. They say there used to be a dozen inns lined up along this anchorage, back in the day. One by one, guests and all, they got dragged off toward the Neighbor and vanished. The only one left was Minato-sō.
“Thirty years, and still standing. Remarkable.”
The speaker was Tsuda, a young official sent out from headquarters. Once every five years, headquarters made the rounds inspecting the frontier inns. This year’s assignment was Tsuda.
“Thirty years you’ve held your ground here. Truly admirable.”
Tsuda produced a gleaming certificate from his bag. It read: SOLITARY SURVIVAL AWARD. As it happened, the wording was identical every five years, with only the name of the star corrected in by hand.
Nakayama, wiping a teacup, made a face that said: hm.
“Held my ground. Well.”
“Now, now. No need to be modest. With that monster next door, every other inn got pulled in and disappeared, didn’t they? And yours alone remained. That’s grit, that is. Devotion to the land, you might say.”
“No,” said Nakayama. “It’s just, I’ve never once called in a customer.”
Tsuda said yes, yes, of course, and did not listen.
The inside of Minato-sō, on close inspection, was odd. The shelf behind the front desk was crowded with umbrellas, hats, single gloves without their partners. Not one or two of them, either. Thirty years’ worth, packed tight.
“These are… things guests left behind?” asked Tsuda.
“They fell.”
“Fell?”
Nakayama set down the teacup and pointed at the window. Just then a ship was passing the Neighbor’s flank. It tried to go straight, had its course bent smoothly sideways, and was drawn away. And with the jolt, cargo spilled off its deck in a light scatter. One umbrella, one hat, flung out into the void, drifting slowly down — this way.
“That lands in my yard,” said Nakayama. “Every day. Each time the Neighbor swings a ship around, it rains down on us.”
Tsuda stood there blinking.
“People fall too, now and then,” Nakayama went on. “Knocked off course, they wash up here, resign themselves to a night’s stay, and leave on the next ship. So we’ve never been full, but we’ve never been empty either. Pour the tea, lay out the bedding — that’s how we lasted thirty years.”
“Then… the Neighbor has been sending you your guests?”
“Delivering them, you could say. If that thing didn’t fling ships around, this place would have folded long ago.”
Nakayama scratched his head, looking somewhat embarrassed to say the next part.
“Truth is, I did think about leaving. Several times. Packed my things and everything. But every time I tried to load them onto a ship, the Neighbor grabbed the ship and off it went somewhere else. So I walked back to the inn. Thirty years of that, more or less.”
In other words, he had not survived. He had merely failed to leave. And all the while he couldn’t leave, he had made a perfectly good living off the guests the Neighbor spilled his way. Whether the man himself considered this an achievement was very much open to question.
Tsuda looked down, vaguely, at the certificate in his hands. The words SOLITARY SURVIVAL AWARD suddenly seemed to belong to someone else.
Just then, from outside, came a dull thud.
The two of them went out to find a man they had never seen before sitting in the front yard, flat on his backside. A crushed travel bag lay a little way off. He had evidently just fallen from a ship the Neighbor had batted aside.
“Um… where is this?” the man said.
“Minato-sō,” said Nakayama. “I’ll put the tea on. Come inside.”
Nakayama accepted the certificate, returned to the front desk, and propped it up gently at the far end of the lost-and-found shelf, next to an umbrella. Then he took one more teacup down from the cupboard.
Tsuda’s connection to the next inn, incidentally, was pulled in by the Neighbor shortly after departure and badly delayed. So that night, having no alternative, Tsuda also stayed at Minato-sō.