Ball Lightning

by Cixin Liu

  “That’s just how you were, Xiao Yun. Once you got something in your sights, you didn’t care about anything else.”

  “I gave him such a hard time that he said, ‘Fine, but this one’s hard to take off. I’ll shoot it for you instead.’ He shoved it back into the magazine, carried the rifle outside, and fired once at the sky. Then he pointed at the casing that bounced onto the ground and said, ‘Take it.’ Rather than picking it up, I asked with wide eyes, ‘Where did the head go?’ He said, ‘It flew away, way up high.’ And I said, ‘Was the sound right after the crack the sound of it flying?’ He said, ‘You’re really clever, Yunyun.’ Then he aimed at the sky and fired again, and again I heard the sound of a bullet whistling in flight. He said it flew fast enough to puncture thin steel plates. I rubbed the rifle’s warm barrel, and all the weapons I had fantasized about in my thought exercises instantly seemed weak and impotent. The real weapon in front of me held an irresistible attraction.”

  General Lin said, “The rough army guys thought it was adorable that a little girl loved guns, so they continued to amuse you with them. Ammunition was far less strictly supervised back then, and lots of ex-soldiers took dozens of rounds away with them, so they had plenty for you to play with. Eventually it got to the point where they let you fire, at first helping you hold the gun, and eventually letting you do it on your own. By the time the summer holiday ended, you could drop to the ground with an assault rifle and fire bursts all by yourself.”

  “I held the gun and felt the vibrations of it firing the way other girls cradled singing dolls. Later on, I watched light machine guns firing on the practice range. To me it was a song of delight, not a painful sound.... When summer was over, I no longer covered my ears for hand grenade explosions or recoilless rifles.”

  “I took you to the front-line troops for subsequent holidays, mostly with the thought that I’d be able to spend more time with you, but also because I felt that, even though the army wasn’t a place for a kid, it was at least a fairly innocent place that wouldn’t do you much harm. But I was wrong.”

  “I had more contact with weapons during those holidays, since the enlisted officers and troops liked to let me play with them. They were proud of their weapons. In their childhood memories, guns were always their favorite toys. Teaching me to shoot was a pleasure for them, so long as they kept things safe. Other kids only had toy guns to mess around with, but I was lucky enough to play with the real thing.”

  “Right. I remember this was just after the marines had been established, so there were frequent live-fire exercises, and you also got to see live firing of heavy equipment. Tanks, artillery, and ships. On that seaside hill, you watched warships shell the shore, and bombers drop column after column of bombs on sea targets....”

  “What made the deepest impression on me, Dad, was the first time I saw a flamethrower. I watched in excitement as the whooshing flame left a pool of fire on the beach. A marine colonel said, ‘Yunyun, do you know what the scariest thing on the battlefield is? Not a gun or a cannon, but this thing. On the southern front, it licked the ass of one of my buddies, and his skin fell right off and put him in a living hell. In the field hospital, when no one was paying attention, he took a gun and offed himself.’ I remembered my last sight of Mom in the hospital, all the skin on her body festering, her blackened fingers so swollen there was no way for her to turn a gun on herself.... Such an experience might turn some people off of weapons, but for others, it made them even more fascinating. I was in the latter group, for whom those fearsome machines possessed the intoxicating power of a drug.”

  “I did have a sense of the power weapons had over you, Xiao Yun, but I didn’t pay much attention. At least until that exercise on the beach range, which involved a machine-gun squadron firing on near-shore targets. It was a difficult exercise, since the targets were rocking on the water and the light machine-gun tripods were liable to sink into the sand on the beach, so the performance of the soldiers was unimpressive. Then the captain in command shouted, ‘You’re pathetic! Look at yourselves! You’re worse than a little girl! Come here, Yun, and show these rejects how it’s done.’ ”

  “And so I lay on the sand and fired two magazines, both of them to outstanding success.”

  “I watched the flashing rifle pulse steadily in the soft, pale hands of my twelve-year-old girl, the blowback from the chamber tossing your bangs on your forehead, the reflection of the muzzle fire in your child’s eyes, and the look of rapturous excitement on your face... and I was frightened, Xiao Yun, truly frightened. I didn’t know how my daughter had become like that.”

  “You dragged me away. Dragged me away amid the cheers of the marines, and furiously told all of them, ‘You are not to let my daughter touch a gun!’ That was the first time I had ever seen you so angry, Dad. From then on you stopped taking me with you to the army, and you took more time to be with me at home, even if it was detrimental to your career. You introduced me to music, art, and literature—at first just for the novelty of it, but later going deep into the classics.”

  “I wanted to find a normal aesthetic sense for you, to steer your sensibility away from those frightening tendencies.”

  “You did so, Dad. You were the only one who could. None of your colleagues back then had that ability. I’ve always admired your erudition, and I’m grateful beyond words for the amount of effort you devoted to me. But Dad, when you planted that flower in my heart, did you ever stop to look at what the soil was like? There was no way to change it. Yes, growing up, I may have had more appreciation for beauty in music, literature, and art than most girls, but the greatest significance it held for me was the deeper appreciation it gave me for the beauty of weapons. I realized that beauty for most people is characterized by fragility and powerlessness. True beauty needs to be supported by an internal strength, and develop itself through sensations like terror and brutality, from which you can both draw strength and meet your death. In weapons, this beauty is expressed to the full. From then on—it must have been around high school—my fascination with weapons reached the level of aesthetics and philosophy. You shouldn’t feel bad about this change, Dad, since you helped me accomplish it.”

  “But Xiao Yun, how did you take that step? Weapons could turn you unfeeling, but did they need to turn you mad?”

  “We spent less and less time together after I went to high school, Dad. And then after I joined the army and went to college, we had even fewer opportunities for contact. You have no idea about lots of things that happened during that time. There’s one incident having to do with Mom that I never told you about that had a huge effect on me.”

  “With your mom? But she had been dead for over a decade, then.”

  “That’s right.”

  And then, in the chilly wind of the Gobi, between the sky streaked with clouds and its reflection in the enormous mirror, Ding Yi, Colonel Xu, and General Lin listened to Lin Yun’s story:

  “You may be aware that the bees that killed Mom on the southern front weren’t indigenous. They came from a habitat at a far higher latitude. It was strange: the tropical environment of the southern front had a wealth of bee species, so why weaponize this species from the distant north? It was an ordinary bee, not one prone to swarming and stinging, and not particularly toxic. Similar attacks occurred a few more times on the southern front, causing some casualties, but the war ended quickly after that, so it didn’t attract much attention.

  “When I did my master’s, I used to hang out on an old BBS, Jane’s Defence Forum. Three years ago I met a Russian woman there—she didn’t reveal anything more about herself, but her language indicated she was no amateur weapons enthusiast, more likely a well-qualified expert. She was in bioengineering—not my field at all, but she had sharp ideas about new-concept weapons, and we got on well. We stayed in contact, often chatting online for hours. Two months later, she told me she had joined up with an international expedition to Indochina to survey the long-term effects of US chemical weapons f
rom the Vietnam War on the region, and she invited me along. I was on break, so I went. When I saw her in Hanoi, she was nothing like I’d imagined: in her forties, thin—nothing of a Russian woman’s stockiness—with that kind of timeless beauty, Eastern and deep-seated, that made me feel warm and comfortable when we were together. With the expedition team, we began an arduous survey of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where the US army had sprayed defoliants, and the Laotian jungles where traces of chemical weapons had been found. I found her highly professional, always working with a sense of mission and dedication. Her only fault was drinking: she drank to desperation. We were good friends in no time, and on several occasions, after she got drunk, she told me bits of her own experiences.

  “I learned from her that as early as the 1960s, the Soviets had established a new-concept weapons institute under the General Staff called the Long-Term Equipment Planning Commission, where she and the man she later married worked in the biochemistry department. I wanted to find out what work the department had done, but I discovered that, even when drunk, she kept a clear head and said not a word about any of it. It was obvious she had spent a long time in key military research organizations. Later, after my persistent questioning, she told me about one project: the agency had once conducted research on a large number of people with so-called psychic abilities to see if they could find NATO nuclear submarines deep in the Atlantic. But this had been declassified long ago, and was the butt of jokes in the world of serious research. Still, it showed that her agency had adopted a dynamic approach, a clear contrast to the ossified thinking of Base 3141.

  “The agency was dissolved after the end of the Cold War. Due to the poor conditions of the military in those days, researchers turned to jobs in the private sector, where they immediately ran into problems, and then their Western counterparts exploited the opportunity to trawl for talent. After her husband left the service, he accepted a high-paying position from DuPont, which promised her the same treatment if she was willing to come along, provided she brought her new-concept weapons research with her. They fought bitterly over this, and she laid it out for him: she wasn’t totally divorced from reality, and she wanted a better future, to own a comfortable detached home with a swimming pool, holiday in Scandinavia, and give a good education to their only daughter; and the superlative liberal research conditions were a definite attraction as well. If she had been on a civilian project, or even an ordinary military project, she would not have hesitated at all. But their research had been on new-concept weapons that could not be openly discussed. It was highly advanced technology nearing practical application, and the tremendous military power it held might decide the balance of power in the next century. She was dead set against seeing the fruits of half a lifetime of R&D put to use against her homeland. Her husband said she was being ridiculous. He was from Ukraine, and she was from Belarus. The homeland she had in mind had splintered into many countries, some of which were now enemies of each other.

  “In the end, her husband left, and her daughter left with him. Her life was a lonely one from then on. Many aspects of this woman’s personality and demeanor were familiar, and it occurred to me that they were there in my hazy memories of Mom.

  “In Laos, the team stayed in a village in the jungle. A strain of malaria transmitted by mosquito had already killed two children there. The team’s doctor was powerless to do anything: he said the onset of the virus was so fierce that there was no way to treat it locally. But the virus had an incubation period, and if it were possible to discover certain indications that might show up during that time, the entire village could undergo a physical exam, and those found to be infected treated.

  “When she heard that, she went out at once and came back a couple of hours later carrying a bag made of mosquito netting full of mosquitoes she had caught. She stuck an arm into the bag and tied it tight around her elbow. When she took her arm out again, it was covered in welts from mosquito bites. She had the doctor observe her for symptoms, but he saw nothing, until she came down with that strain of malaria five days later and was evacuated to a hospital in Bangkok.

  “I spent the last few days of my holiday sitting with her in the hospital. I felt even closer to her then. I told her about my mom dying in the war when I was six, and how I had lived with my mother in my memory, and how she had stayed forever young in my mind until a short while ago, when, with the realization of the passing of time, my mind began to sketch the outlines of an older image of her, but one I was unable to fully imagine. But when I saw the Russian woman, the image suddenly clarified and I became convinced that if Mom were still alive, she would be much like her.

  “When I said this, she hugged me and began to cry, and told me through her tears that six years before, her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend had overdosed and were found dead in a luxury Las Vegas hotel.

  “We parted with an added sense of worry about each other. That’s why, on my trip to Siberia to study ball lightning with Dr. Chen, I paid her a visit when we passed through Moscow.

  “You can imagine her surprise upon seeing me. She still lived alone, in a chilly retirees’ apartment, and she drank even more heavily. She seemed to spend her days in a half-inebriated state. She kept saying, ‘Let me show you something. Let me show you something.’ She brushed aside a stack of old newspapers concealing an oddly shaped sealed container, which she said was a super-cooled liquid nitrogen storage tank. A large part of her meager income was spent on periodically refilling the liquid nitrogen. That she had such a thing at home surprised me, and I asked her what it contained. She said it was the distillation of more than twenty years of efforts.

  “She told me, ‘In the early 1970s, the Soviet Union’s new-concept weapons institutes had conducted a survey, global in scope, that brought together scattered ideas and implementations for new-concept weapons projects. Ideas first, collected from a truly broad range of sources. Intelligence agencies, naturally, but personnel going abroad on business were given these tasks as well. Sometimes things got ridiculous: researchers in some departments watched James Bond films over and over, to try and glean traces of the West’s new-concept weapons from the fancy gadgets he carried. Another angle was collecting the applications of new concepts on the battlefield from regional conflicts then in progress. The Vietnam War was their first choice, of course. Bamboo traps and the like set up by the Vietnamese people were carefully observed for their effectiveness on the battlefield. The first thing my department came across were some guerrillas in the south who used bees as weapons. We learned of it from news reports, and so I took a trip to Vietnam to investigate. It was at the time that the US was planning to abandon South Vietnam: the Saigon regime was teetering, and the Vietcong’s guerrilla war in the south had evolved into a proper war that was growing larger by the day. Naturally, the peculiar ways of fighting I wanted to investigate were no longer to be found. But I made contact with lots of guerrilla groups and learned details about their combat effectiveness—which it turned out the news reports had greatly exaggerated. All of the guerrillas I spoke to who had used bees said they had practically no lethal effect as weapons. Any use they might have had was purely psychological: they heightened the American soldiers’ feeling that this land they were in was unfamiliar and eerie.

  “ ‘But I found inspiration there anyway. When I came home, we started using gene technology to modify bees. It might have been the earliest application of genetic engineering. Little was accomplished the first few years, since molecular biology was still primitive throughout the world, and also because the political suppression of genetics in the Soviet Union a short while before had caused technology of that sort to lag behind. But by the early eighties we finally made a breakthrough in breeding highly toxic, highly aggressive bees. Marshal Dmitry Yazov personally observed a test in which one attack bee stung a bull to death. The marshal was greatly impressed, and I, as director, was awarded the Order of the Red Star. Money poured into the project, and further studies were made of the possibi
lity of combat use of attack bees. Our first breakthrough came in target discrimination. New bees were bred to be highly sensitive to certain chemicals, which our forces could apply in minute amounts to their bodies to avoid accidental harm. The next development was in bee toxicity: joining the initial highly toxic variety that could kill instantly was a new breed, equally deadly, but with mortality delayed by five to ten days, so as to increase the burden on the enemy....

  “ ‘This storage tank contains one hundred thousand attack-bee embryos.’ ”

  Here Lin Yun sighed, and her voice trembled. “You can imagine how I felt when I heard this. My eyes darkened and I nearly collapsed, but, still holding out hope, I asked her if they had ever been used in combat. But I had already guessed the answer. Without noticing my expression, she told me even more excitedly that, due to the war with Cambodia and border conflicts with China, Vietnam was constantly asking the Soviets for weapons, causing headaches for the Politburo, which gave them only perfunctory replies. When Lê Duẩn visited, the general secretary promised to provide the most advanced weapons systems to Vietnam—meaning none other than the attack bees. She was sent to Vietnam with one hundred thousand attack bees. You can imagine how incensed the Vietnamese were when the advanced weapons systems they had been dreaming about turned out to be a beehive. They said that the Soviets had engaged in shameless deception toward their comrades while standing on the front lines of a bloody war against imperialism.