by Cixin Liu
Lu Hai continued in agreement. “Columbus discovered America and Cook discovered Australia, but the opportunities these new worlds offered were seized by ordinary people. Those pioneers came from the lowest rungs of European society. The opportunities space offers are no different. In our nation's five-year plan, near-Earth space has been designated a second West; a new frontier now that the industrial development of China's Western regions has been completed. For the aerospace industry, this means that the age of exploration has already come to an end. The time when space travel was an adventure for a few elites is over. Sending common people into orbit will be our first step in the industrial development of space.”
“Good! Fine! You have the right to it! Now quickly, pull us up!” The other people below shouted themselves hoarse.
Back at the elevator, the director of the cleaning company leaned in close and whispered to Lu Hai. “Director General Lu, you really got into it back there, but isn't your argument a bit too highbrow? But of course you didn't want to address the crux of the matter in front of Ah Quan and the guys.”
“Huh?” Lu Hai uttered in curiosity, turning to the director.
“Everyone knows that the China Sun project is run as a quasi-commercial operation. We all know that a gap in the funding almost led to its cancellation halfway into the project, and also that your reserves to cover the operating costs are now running low. In the commercial aerospace industry, the annual salary of a regular astronaut is more than a few million. My lads can save you a hundred million or more every year,” the director noted.
Lu Hai was now smiling enigmatically. “Do you really think that a paltry hundred million would be worth the risk? As of today, I have lowered the standards of education required of our mirror cleaners to a bare minimum. I did so very purposefully – to set a precedent. I will now be able to hire ordinary university graduates for other jobs in orbit required for the operation of the China Sun. In this way we will be able to save much more than a few tens of millions. It is like you said, we really do not have large reserves and this allows us to solve that intractable problem.”
“When I was young, going to space was such a romantic endeavor. I can clearly remember when Kennedy invited Deng Xiaoping to the Johnson Space Center I called an American astronaut a god. Now,” the director said with a bitter smile, shaking his head as he slapped Lu Hai's shoulder, “well, now I think of things in your terms.”
Lu Hai turned to look at that group of young spider-men and with a loud voice told the director, “But, sir, the salary I can offer them is eight to ten times what you pay!”
The next day, 60 spider-men, including Ah Quan, were transferred to the National Aerospace Training Center in Shijingshan. One and all they were young men who had migrated to the capital, looking for work. They had come from the farthest corners of China's vast rural hinterland. Now new lands awaited them.
CHAPTER
6
Mirror Farmers
Xichang Base: With a loud rumble, great clouds of white smoke billowed from the engines of the space shuttle Horizon as it ascended into the blue sky. Aboard the shuttle were Ah Quan and 14 other mirror cleaners. After three months of training on the ground, they had been selected from among the 60 spider-men to be the first group to be sent into space. There they would take the lead in putting what they had learned into practice.
To Ah Quan, the strain of the G-forces seemed far less terrible than people always made them out to be. In fact, he even felt somewhat comforted by them. They reminded him of his childhood and being held tightly in the loving embrace of his mother.
The sky in the porthole to his upper right slowly began to turn from blue to black. Just then the faint pop of exploding bolts reverberated from outside the ship. It was the sound of the boosters detaching. Immediately the deafening roar of the engine became a soft drone. By now, the sky had turned a deep shade of purple and a short while later it finally blackened altogether. Ah Quan could now see stars through the porthole. They did not twinkle, but shined in perfect clarity.
The drone of the engine ceased and absolute silence fell inside the spaceship. The seats stopped vibrating as all force pushing them into their backrests vanished. The spider-men had entered micro-gravity. Ah Quan immediately recalled the weightlessness training they had undergone in a huge tank of water; it really did feel like floating in water.
But Ah Quan could not yet release his seatbelt. The engine had droned back to life and the force of its acceleration pushed them all back into their chairs. What followed was a very long series of course alterations. The starry sky and the oceans rose across the tiny porthole in turns. One moment the cabin was flooded with the golden light of the Sun, while the next it was filled with the blue reflection of Earth. Seen through the small window, the curvature of the planet was growing ever more pronounced and even more of Earth's oceans and continents came into view.
In total, it took six hours to establish a full geosynchronous orbit. The rolling of stars and Earth slowly began to blend into one continuous vista, lulling Ah Quan into an unexpected sleep. But he was soon ripped back into wakefulness by their commander's voice blaring over the intercom. He told them that their flight had reached its destination.
One by one his companions floated from their seats, pressing themselves to the portholes to catch a glimpse of what lay outside. Ah Quan, too, released his seatbelt. Using a swimming movement he awkwardly floated to the porthole closest to him. It was the first time he saw the entirety of Earth with his own eyes. The majority of his fellow workers, however, were pressed to portholes on the other side of the cabin. Ah Quan quickly pushed himself off the bulkhead to join them, but he was too fast. Shooting to the other side of the cabin, he arrived head-first. A good knock against the bulkhead later, he too made it to a porthole. He discovered that the Horizon was already right under the China Sun. Its huge reflector had come to dominate most of the starlit sky and their space shuttle seemed like nothing more than a tiny gnat flying below a huge silver dome.
As the Horizon continued its approach, Ah Quan was slowly able to take in the sheer magnitude of the reflector; already its huge surface filled the entire view of the window, any trace of its curvature having all but vanished. It almost seemed as if they were flying toward a silver plain, stretching forever beyond the horizon.
As they came ever closer, the reflection of the Horizon began to appear on the silvery surface. They could now also see long seams stretching across this world of silver. They reminded Ah Quan of the graticule of latitude and longitude lines found on a map. These seams were the only things that gave them any sense of the speed at which they were traveling.
Gradually, the lines below them lost their parallelity, now visibly converging toward a center. Suddenly this convergence began to exponentially accelerate; it was just as if the Horizon was flying straight toward a “pole” of this giant “map”. And soon that pole came into view. It was a small black dot at which the lines below met. As the space shuttle began its descent toward this dot, Ah Quan realized with amazement that this small black dot was in fact a gigantic tower standing on the silver land below. He recognized it as the control center of the China Sun, a hermetically sealed cylinder standing at its very center.
For the next three months it would be their only home in the vast cold of space.
Their life as space-spider-men had begun. Every day – it took the China Sun 24 hours to complete one orbit around the Earth – they would ride machines onto the mirror surface to clean it. These machines reminded them of the two-wheeled, walk-behind tractors they had used on the field. They drove them up and down the vast expanse of the reflector, just as if they were tilling this silver land. The Western media caught on to this and ended up coining a rather more poetic name for them: “Mirror Farmers”.
The world these “farmers” inhabited was a very strange one. Below them stretched a silver plain, and even though the reflector's curvature meant that this plain slowly rose in all direction
s, it was so large that it appeared as flat as a pancake. Above, the Earth and the Sun always remained; the Sun appeared to be much smaller than the Earth, giving the impression that it was Earth's brightly glowing satellite. They could also see a bright circle of light move across the Earth. Shining on Earth's night side, it was an incredibly striking sight. This was the area illuminated by the light they reflected. The reflector could adjust its shape to change the size of this circle. When the distant slope of this silver land was relatively steep, the circle of light would be small and bright. When the slope was gentler, the light would be dimmer and its area larger.
No matter what the slant of the slope, the work of the mirror cleaners was always extremely arduous, and soon they realized that cleaning the reflector was far more tedious and exhausting than scrubbing skyscraper windows on Earth had ever been. Every day they would return to the control center utterly spent. Often they were too exhausted to even take off their spacesuits. On top of this, as the next part of the cleaning crew arrived, the control center grew rather crowded; they soon were living like sailors on a submarine. Nonetheless, they always counted their blessings when they made it back to the central tower.
The farthest one could get from the station on the reflector was about 60 miles. Often, those working at the outer rim of the mirror could not make it back “home” and instead were forced to “camp out” for the “night”. This meant liquid food from their spacesuits, followed by sleeping while suspended in space.
Along with the many discomforts, the work was also fraught with danger. Never before in the history of human space flight had spacewalks been attempted by so many. When “camping out”, the slightest fault with one's spacesuit could lead to death. Added to this were the dangers of micro-meteorites, space junk, and sun storms. Among the control center engineers the living and working conditions had lead to massive undercurrents of resentment; the Mirror Farmers, on the other hand, long accustomed to hardships, simply and silently adapted to their new circumstances.
On their fifth day in outer space, Ah Quan called his family back home. At the time he was working more than 30 miles from the control center. From there he could see his home, directly under the China Sun's circle of light.
Ah Quan's father sounded somewhat incredulous as he spoke. “Quan, my boy, are you really on that sun over our heads? It is shining above us right now. The night is bright as day!”
Ah Quan happily replied, “I am, Father, I am right above you.”
Ah Quan's mother took the phone. “Quan, is it hot up there?”
“The heat is hot and the cold, cold. When we cast a shadow up here, everything outside it is hotter than ten summer days and everything inside the shadow is colder than ten winter nights,” came Ah Quan's reply.
His mother turned to his father and noted, “I can see our Quan! There, a small black dot on the sun!”
Ah Quan knew that it was impossible, but he could not hold back his tears. Sobbing ever so slightly, he said, “Father, Mother, I can see you. Where you are I can see two black spots on Asia! Bundle up tomorrow; I can see a cold front moving in toward you from the north.”
Three months after that call, the second shift arrived and Ah Quan's team was allowed back to Earth for a three-month vacation. They had barely landed before each and every one of them went out and bought a high-powered telescope.
The three months had soon passed and they returned to the China Sun. Back on the giant reflector, they now used their breaks to watch the Earth through their telescopes. Of course they mostly turned their objectives toward their homelands, but at more than 20,000 miles, not even their telescopes allowed them to make out the villages from which they had set out. One of them used a thick marker to write a crude and simple poem on the reflector:
Up on this silver land I stare and yearn, but my home can barely be seen,
In the village, mother looks to the China Sun on high.
To her, its glaring wheel is as the image of her son's eye,
And under its gaze's wandering turn, the yellow earth is draped in green
The Mirror Farmers did remarkable work and they were gradually given more and more responsibilities far beyond the scope of their cleaning work. First they took on the task of repairing damage done by meteorite impacts. After a while they were given even more complicated work: monitoring and reinforcing over-stressed areas.
As the China Sun orbited, it constantly changed its angle. These changes were accomplished by 3,000 engines spread across the back of the mirror. The extremely thin surface of the reflector itself was connected to the whole structure by means of large, slender beams. As the reflector changed its angle or shape, areas of the reflector could be stressed beyond their capacity. When this occurred, they would have to promptly correct the engines' output or reinforce the location. Left unchecked, the excess stress could tear the mirror surface. Finding and reinforcing the stressed areas required a high degree of proficiency and a great deal of experience, making this part of their work highly technical.
Other than during re-angulation and shape adjustments, these stress points most frequently developed during so-called “orbital haircuts”. The official name of this operation was: Light pressure and solar wind-induced error compensation maneuver. In fact, light pressure and solar wind exerted a significant force on the massive surface of the reflector. Roughly six pounds of pressure pushed against every square mile of the mirror surface, constantly shifting the trajectory of the reflector. Their earthbound control center constantly monitored these changes, at all times comparing the altered tract to its intended orbit on a large screen. On this screen it looked as if long, wavy hairs were ever growing from the intended orbit, hence the odd name for the operation.
During orbital haircuts, the reflector accelerated much more rapidly than it ever did to adjust its angle or change its shape. For the Mirror Farmers this meant critical work. They would fly above the mirror, carefully observing the surface for any unusual changes. Whenever they spotted any, they would urgently take action with the necessary emergency reinforcements. Each and every time it happened they accomplished the task with flying colors. As a result their salary was increased considerably; but who benefited most from this development was the person directly in charge of the China Sun project, Lu Hai. He did not even have to hire ordinary university graduates.
Nonetheless, the Mirror Farmers all understood that they would be the first and last group of workers in space – those who had never even made it past primary education. All who followed them were at the very least university graduates. Still, they managed to complete the mission Lu Hai had quietly given them: They had conclusively proven that the ability to adapt to harsh environments was more critical to labor in space than intelligence and creativity, and that was something ordinary people were perfectly capable of doing.
Space did, however, change the Mirror Farmers’ mindset and mentality. They were without peers, each and every day standing on ground 22,000 miles above the Earth. They could take in the entire world in a glance. For them the “global village” was not a metaphor; it was a tangible reality.
As the first laborers in space, the Mirror Farmers became a global sensation. Soon, however, the industrial development of low-Earth orbit began in earnest. A series of large projects were completed, including large solar power stations that beamed microwave energy down to Earth, micro-gravity processing plants, and many others. Construction even began on an orbital city housing 100,000. With these projects, vast amounts of workers surged into space. All of these workers were ordinary folk and so the world soon forgot about the Mirror Farmers.
Several years passed. Ah Quan had bought an apartment in Beijing, married, and become a father. He spent half of every year with his family and the other half in space. Ah Quan loved his work. Making his rounds on that silver land thousands of miles above the Earth filled his heart with a sense of transcendent tranquility. He felt as if he had found the perfect life. He saw his future stretch out bef
ore him, just like the calm and smooth silver plane under his feet.
It was not to be. Something happened that shattered his serenity and forever changed his mind's course. That something was his encounter with Stephen Hawking.
No one would have expected that Professor Hawking would live past a hundred. It really was a medical miracle, but it was also a testament to the strength of his mind and spirit. After the first low-Earth orbit micro-gravity rehabilitation facility had been completed, he became its first patient. However, the G-forces of the launch had nearly killed him and so a return to Earth became unthinkable; after all, he would have been subjected to similar forces on his descent. Unless a functioning space elevator or anti-gravity capsules were to be invented he would have to stay in space. In fact, his doctor had recommended that he spend the rest of his life in orbit, as the micro-gravity environment would suit his body perfectly.
At first Professor Hawking had not been very interested in the China Sun project, and perhaps more importantly, he had no interest in enduring the acceleration forces that traveling from low-Earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit would inflict on his body, even though they were of course much less severe than what he had had to endure on his way into space. Professor Hawking did, however, become interested in a survey of micro anisotropies in the cosmic background radiation that was to be conducted on the China Sun. The observation station for this probe was to be set up on the rear side of the China Sun. The large reflector would block all sources of interference from both Earth and Sun.
After the probe had been completed, the observation station and the small group of researchers that worked on it were disbanded. Professor Hawking decided not to leave, indicating that he quite liked it there and that he intended to stay for a while longer. Something about the China Sun had caught his attention. On Earth the media produced all kinds of wild speculations, but only Ah Quan knew the real reason.
