by Hao Jingfang
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PART ONE
STAR DANCE
PROLOGUE
Once, a group of children was born on one world and grew up on another.
The world they were born into was a tower of rigid rules; the world they grew up on was a garden of rambling disorder. One was a magnificent, austere blueprint; the other was a wild bacchanalia. The two worlds shaped the children’s lives one after the other, without seeking their consent, without consideration for their feelings, like two links in the chain of fate, sweeping them up in cold, irresistible tides.
What had been put together in the tower was smashed to bits in the garden; what had been forgotten in drunken revelry was still memorialized in the blueprint. Those who lived only in the tower never suffered the loss of faith; those who lived only for the pursuit of pleasure had no vision to strive for. Only those who had wandered through both worlds could experience that particular stormy night in which distant mirages faded away and countless strange flowers blossomed in the wasteland.
As a result of their experience, they suffered in silence and became the target of every criticism.
Who these children were and how they came to live such lives are questions that could be fully answered only with the help of two hundred years of complicated history. Even the children themselves couldn’t offer a lucid explanation. They were perhaps among the youngest in the millennia-long history of the exiled. Before they even understood what fate was, they had been tossed into its vortex; while still ignorant of the existence of other worlds, another world had snatched them away. Their exile began at home, and they had no vote in history’s direction.
Our story begins at the moment when the children were returning home. The body’s journey was coming to an end, but the heart’s exile was only about to begin.
This is the tale of the fall of the last utopia.
THE SHIP
The ship was about to dock. Time to turn out the lights.
The ship swayed in space like a drop of water gently flowing into the arc-shaped port. The ship was very old and glowed dimly like a badge that had been polished by time until the sharp angles and edges had worn away. Against the darkness of space, the ship seemed minuscule, and the vacuum accentuated its loneliness. The ship, the sun, and Mars formed a straight line, with the sun at the far end, Mars close at hand, and in the middle, the ship whose course was straight as a sword, its edge fading into obscurity.
Surrounded by darkness, the silvery drop of water approached the shore, very much alone.
This was Maearth, the only link between Earth and Mars.
The ship was unaware that, a hundred years before its birth, this port had been filled with transports shuttling back and forth like barges along a busy river. It was the second half of the twenty-first century, when humanity had finally broken through the triple barriers of gravity, the atmosphere, and psychology, and, full of anxiety and excitement, they sent cargo of every description to the distant red planet of their dreams. Competition extended from low Earth orbit all the way to the surface of Mars as men and women serving different governments in different uniforms speaking different languages, completed different missions pursuant to different development plans. The transports back then had been clumsy, like metal elephants wrapped in thick gray-green steel skin, stepping across the gulf of space, slow and steady, thumping into the dusty surface of Mars, yawning open their cargo bay doors to disgorge heavy machinery, boxes of food, and eager minds full of passion.
The ship was also unaware that, seventy years before its birth, government transports were gradually replaced by private commercial development vessels. For thirty years Martian bases were all the rage, and the sensitive feelers of merchants, like magic beanstalks, rose inch by inch into the sky, and Jacks climbed up with bills of lading and lines of credit, ready to explore this wonderland of sandstorms. Initially businesses focused on physical goods, and an alliance between big business and big government connected the two worlds with a web woven from land easements, sourcing licenses, and space product development rights, all gilded with stirring lines of poetry. Eventually attention shifted to knowledge itself, following the same path traced by the historical development of economies on Earth, except that a process that had taken two centuries in the past was compressed into twenty years. Intangible assets dominated business deals, and those who loved money plucked the brains of scientists like ripe fruits until virtual fences rose up between Martian bases. Back then the ships that plied the dark sea of space had carried spinning restaurants filled with cocktail parties and talk of contracts, an attempt to replicate the hubbub on Earth.
The ship was also unaware that, forty years before its birth, warships appeared along its current route. Once the war for Martian independence erupted—there were many causes—the adventurers and engineers of the various Martian bases united to resist their Earth-based overseers. With astronautics and prospecting technology, they sought to overcome money and political power. Warships linked together like Themistocles’s wooden wall to repel the invaders, a force as magnificent as the swelling tide, and which retreated just as quickly. Nimble, speedy warplanes then rushed in, propelled across the gulf of space by the rage of betrayal, at once wild and dispassionate, dropped their bombs so that bloody flowers bloomed silently in the dust.
The ship knew none of these things, because by the time it was born, a cease-fire had been in place for ten years. The night sky was once again silent, and the once-busy shipping route deserted. It was born in all-consuming darkness. Assembled from metallic fragments drifting in space, it faced the starry sea alone, shuttling back and forth between two planets, plying an ancient trade route that had witnessed both the glory of commerce and the devastation of war.
The ship sailed noiselessly across empty space, a single silvery drop traversing distance, traversing vacuum, traversing invisible ramparts, traversing a history deliberately forgotten.
Thirty years had passed since the ship’s birth, and time’s lasting tracks adorned its worn shell.
* * *
The inside of the ship was a maze. Except for the captain, no one understood its true layout.
It was a huge ship. Stairways connected multiple decks filled with twisting passages and honeycombed cabins. Large storage compartments scattered around the ship resembled palaces fallen into ruin, their spacious interiors piled with goods and equipment, their dusty corners confessing to an absence of visitors. Narrow passageways connected these palaces with bedrooms and dining halls, and the knotty structure resembled the plot of some particularly complicated novel.
Passengers walked on the inside of the cylindrical hull, held there by centrifugal force as the hull spun. The thick central axis was the s
ky. The ship was full of outdated decorative elements: columns with relief carvings, tiled floors, old-fashioned mirrors hanging on walls, ceilings covered by murals. This was how the ship paid respect to time, commemorated the fact that there had once been a time when humanity was not divided from itself.
On this particular journey the ship carried three separate groups of passengers: one was a fifty-member delegation from Earth, the second a fifty-member delegation from Mars, and the last twenty students from Mars who had been studying on Earth.
The two official delegations were putting on two world’s fairs on two planets. After the successful conclusion of the Martian world’s fair on Earth, the first ever Terran world’s fair was about to open on Mars. The two delegations brought all kinds of interesting goods to show Earth the wonders of Mars, and vice versa, so that each side could be reminded of the presence of the other. After a long period of mutual isolation, this was how they would get to know each other again.
The students, all aged eighteen, were called the Mercury Group. Having spent the last five years living on Earth, they were now on their way home. Mercury was the messenger of the gods and also a planet outside the dyad of Earth and Mars; it represented the desire to communicate.
* * *
The war had concluded forty years earlier, and the ship had been the only link between Earth and Mars for thirty.
The ship had witnessed multiple rounds of negotiations, concluded deals, signed treaties, and table-pounding, chair-scraping, door-slamming conflicts. But other than these, it spent most of its time in idleness. The spacious holds were without cargo, the cabins passengers, the dining rooms food and music, and the pilots duties.
The pilots consisted of the captain and the co-captain, who was also the captain’s wife. Both of them had wrinkled faces and silvery hair. They had worked on the ship for thirty years and grown old in its maze. The ship was their home, their life, their world.
A pretty girl stood outside the captains’ quarters.
“Have you never gone down to the surface, then?” she asked.
“We did go down a few times early on,” the co-captain replied with a smile. Silvery curls piled atop her head, and two crescent-shaped creases radiated from the corners of her mouth. Her pose was graceful, like a tree in winter. “But then we got old and stopped.”
“Why?”
“Frequent changes in gravity can be tough on old bones.”
“Then why didn’t you retire?”
“Garcia doesn’t want to. He’d like to die on the ship.”
“Are there many people on the ship?”
“When there’s a mission, we have a crew of about twenty. Most of the time it’s just the two of us.”
“How often do you get missions?”
“It’s a bit unpredictable. Sometimes the gap between flights is only four months, but it can be as long as more than a year.”
“Don’t you get lonely then?”
“Not at all. We’re used to it.”
The girl was quiet for a while. Her long lashes drooped and then lifted again.
“My grandfather mentions you often. He misses you.”
“We think of him often as well. On Garcia’s desk there’s a photograph of the four of them, and he looks at it every day. When you get back, bring him our good wishes.”
The girl smiled, warm but with a trace of sorrow.
“I’ll come back and visit you again, Granny Ellie,” she said. Her smile was warm because she liked the old woman. It was sad because she didn’t think she would return, at least not for a long time.
“I look forward to it,” the co-captain said, also smiling. She reached out and gently brushed the hair off the girl’s shoulders. “You look as beautiful as your mother.”
* * *
The captains’ quarters were at the bow of the ship, right next to the cockpit and the weightless gym. The door to the set of cabins was located at the intersection of two hallways, and it was easy to walk past it without noticing. A blue spherical lamp hung above the door, illuminating the old woman and the youth as gently as the moon. The lamp was identical to the lamps found in front of homes on Mars, and each time a Martian passed by, the blue glow reminded them of home. The door itself was frosted glass, blending into the white walls on each side, and only the small decorative sculpture hanging on the door like a knocker showed that this panel was different from the others. The sculpture was a small, silvery spaceship, nose tilted up, with a string of silver bells hanging from the tail fins. Below was a line in flowery script: Ellie, Garcia, and Maearth.
The door usually stayed closed, and the two hallways, both empty, extended into the distance until the ends were lost to sight.
Garcia, the captain, was a lifelong friend of the girl’s grandfather, Hans. In their youth the two had been pilots in the same squadron and had fought and flown side by side for more than a decade. After the war they both became pillars of the newborn Martian Republic. While Hans stayed on the planet, Garcia moved into the sky.
For a long period after the end of the war, the Martians had to endure unprecedented hardships. The poor soil, the thin air, the perpetual lack of water, the dangerous level of radiation—each one could have been fatal, and all were obstacles in the way of bare survival. Before the war, all development on Mars had been sustained by supplies from Earth, and most of the food had to be shipped in. Mars was like an unborn child, still tethered to the mother world by an umbilical cord. Independence was like the pain of labor, and the baby, with its cord cut, had to learn to breathe and eat on its own. There were things that could not be obtained except from Earth, things that even brilliant minds could not create out of nothing, things like animals, beneficial microbes, macromolecules derived from petroleum. Without these, life could barely sustain itself, let alone thrive.
That was when Garcia decided to come aboard Maearth.
It was the tenth year after the end of the war, and most Martians were still opposed to begging from Earth. But Garcia persisted. His was the first attempt at diplomacy by Mars, and he fought doggedly and alone at the border of Earth. More than anyone else, he had a clear understanding of prevailing attitudes on Earth: the shame of defeat turning into the pleasure of seeing the rebels suffer, of vengeance. But he refused to back down. To retreat was to accept that his newborn home would be forever stunted in its growth.
The second half of Garcia’s life thus became entwined with the ship. He lived on the ship, sending message after message to Earth. He pleaded, insisted, threatened, enticed. He offered technologies invented on Mars for the necessities of life. For thirty years he did not return to the surface of his home planet. He was the entirety of the Martian diplomatic corps. He was responsible for the first deal between the two worlds, the first interchange delegations, the first world’s fairs, the first interplanetary students. “Garcia” and “the Captain” became synonyms. His name and his position could no longer be distinguished, like flesh and blood.
Ellie, Garcia, and Maearth.
After saying their goodbyes, the girl turned away and was about to head off, when Ellie called to her.
“Oh, I almost forgot. Garcia would like you to bring a message to your grandfather.”
The girl waited.
“ ‘Sometimes the fight over the treasure is more important than the treasure itself.’ ”
The girl pondered the cryptic message. Her lips parted, as though she wanted to ask a question, but she stopped herself. She knew that the captain’s message had to do with diplomacy, but she wasn’t likely to understand the meaning behind such sensitive political matters. She nodded, assured Ellie that she would pass the message on, and left. She kept her legs straight, the tips of her toes pointing slightly outward, and glided away, as light and graceful as a striding crane, a dragonfly dipping over a pond, or a dustless breeze.
Ellie watched until the girl had disappeared before entering her quarters and shutting the door, the tinkling of the bells on the door lingering in
the empty corridors.
She looked around the dark cabin and sighed. Garcia was already asleep. He was growing more frail with each passing day, and he had been so exhausted from the earlier conversation that he had to climb into bed right after. She didn’t know how many more days he would last at his post, nor, for that matter, how many more days she herself would last. She knew only that at the long-ago moment when the two of them had set foot on this ship, she had already foreseen this day. The two of them had always been prepared to grow old here and die here. As long as they breathed, they would ply the space between Earth and Mars.
The girl who had just left was called Luoying. She was a member of the Mercury Group, and her specialty was dance.
* * *
“Maearth” was cobbled together from the names of the ship’s two ports and indicative of its mission. The name showed the yearning to communicate and the spirit of compromise, but it was also a classic instance of pragmatism in action, lacking euphony.
The ship’s technology wasn’t sophisticated. Both the structure and the engines were based on traditional designs dating back to the prewar era. Solar panels generated electricity, and the spinning hull simulated gravity. The design was strong, time-tested, but it was also clumsy and slow. Both Earth and Mars had experienced leaps in technology driven by the needs of war and could now produce far more advanced ships capable of completing the interplanetary trip in much less time. Still, after thirty years, no other ship had taken Maearth’s place. Its clumsiness and bulk also meant that it presented no threat, a perfect platform on which to compromise and achieve balance. Its ungainly appearance was better than sleek outlines; its lethargic pace better than nimbleness; its ineptitude better than capability. In a cold vacuum still suffused with suspicion and fear, it was like a giant whale that slowly carved out its own trail. Better than anyone, it understood that, for old foes, the hardest hurdle to cross wasn’t physical distance. The most antiquated choice was also sometimes the most suitable.
