Vagabonds

by Hao Jingfang

  “Are you accusing Rudy?” muttered Gielle.

  Pierre didn’t answer but slowly turned to look at Gielle.

  “What proof do you have?” Gielle shouted. She moved to stand protectively before Rudy. “The fault lies obviously with your material—with you! How dare you throw random accusations around?”

  Pierre stared at Gielle, and his brows furrowed in confusion. He clearly had not anticipated such a reaction, and he looked as though he had been punched in the stomach.

  Luoying was so tense that she couldn’t breathe. The very air in the room felt suffocating. She gazed at Rudy, hoping he would say something. Pierre’s assertion unnerved her, not because she was being defensive about Rudy but because she knew Pierre’s accusation would turn Gielle against him. Gielle craved Rudy’s favor so much that Luoying’s heart broke for Pierre. She could see the disappointment and terror in Pierre’s eyes, and she felt sympathy for both him and Gielle. She wanted Rudy to clear the air by offering a good explanation. The injury to her leg had healed, and she didn’t care about it as much as she hoped that her brother would be honest and responsible.

  “It’s not a random accusation,” said Pierre to Gielle.

  “It certainly is!” said Gielle.

  “It’s not.”

  “It is! It is!”

  Rudy finally broke in.

  “He’s right.” He spoke slowly, keeping his eyes on Luoying, as though Gielle and Pierre didn’t exist. There was an awkward expression on his face as he continued to lean against the wall, his uniform crisp and neat. He kept his hands in his pockets and tried to purge the emotions from his face. “I’m sorry.”

  Gielle’s mouth hung open.

  “I did it without telling you. It’s my fault,” said Rudy.

  “But Rudy, when did you …” Luoying was at a loss for words.

  “I took your costume for a routine inspection before the performance. When I was done, I coated it with a membrane that operates on the same principle as the chairs in the theater. It’s only a few nanometers thick and you can’t feel it, but it can generate a bit of lift in the magnetic field.”

  He wasn’t looking at anyone else, and his voice was even more composed than usual. He struggled so hard to keep his face blank that it was as though he didn’t think this was a test of his honesty but of his control. His task wasn’t to offer an apology but to stay unemotional. After a pause, he added, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have tried to help.”

  “Tried to help?” Chania broke in. “Do you understand what you’ve done?”

  Rudy turned to her. “What do you mean?”

  Chania laughed coldly. “Are you aware that Luoying may never dance again? She almost couldn’t walk again. How can you act like it was nothing?”

  Luoying looked at Chania, who was staring at Rudy with distaste and rage. Luoying could tell that she was angrier about his composure and seeming nonchalance than about his error.

  “I just wanted to reduce the weight holding Luoying down a little,” Rudy said.

  “Reduce the weight!”

  “Yes. I admit I was wrong. I thought she would be able to do her jumps better.”

  “Are you an idiot? Dancing is not high jumping.”

  “I thought it would be better if she could jump higher.”

  “Really?”

  “I thought so, yes.”

  Chania’s lips curved up in a mocking smile, and she seemed to heave an inaudible sigh. Glancing around at others in the room, she took off her coat to reveal a light yellow top and cotton pants, her usual outfit for gymnastics exercise. She stretched to loosen her limbs, her bracelets clinking against each other.

  “From the moment you sent us to Earth, all I’ve heard is the foolish sentiment of ‘jump higher.’ So you want to know how to jump higher?” She stared at Rudy. “I’ll show you.”

  She ran a few steps and leaped into the air, spinning as she landed. “Is this high?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she took another two steps and leaped, kicking her legs up until they were horizontal. She landed and asked again. “What about this? Would you consider this high?”

  No one answered.

  “Perhaps you don’t know this,” said Chania in a calm voice. “In fact, just now the height of my jumps wasn’t even at the level of beginners, young girls here on Mars. But since they’re not here, you can’t tell. You always say, ‘Higher, higher!’ You sent us to Earth so we could jump higher. But higher than what? A frog, a mosquito, or an alien from Andromeda? Don’t pretend to be ignorant. A human being simply needs to jump at the height of a human being.”

  Rudy locked eyes with her. After a while he asked, “What are you trying to say, exactly?”

  “I simply want to point out that you’ve only wanted us to jump higher. But have you thought about Luoying’s suffering? What she’s had to endure? To achieve the height you crave, is it worth ignoring the pain of others?”

  Luoying sat on the bed, watching Chania’s face from afar, her heart pounding. Chania looked cold and sad, her feet firmly planted on the ground, her back and neck straight, like a lonely crane.

  A complex wave of emotions overwhelmed Luoying. She knew this was no longer an argument about an accident, or even about her. Indeed, even without Rudy’s manipulation, she would have had to stop dancing sooner or later. She and the others from the Mercury Group had pushed their bodies beyond their limits in trying to adjust to the gravity on Earth, and her tenosynovitis was already very advanced, a legacy of years of overexertion. At first they had been driven by a sense of mission and hope, dedicated to the goal of reaching ever greater heights so as not to disappoint those back at home. But by the time they began to question their mission, their bodies had been injured beyond recovery.

  Luoying knew that Chania wasn’t arguing with Rudy over the accident but over the repressed questions below the surface. Don’t pretend to be ignorant. A human being simply needs to jump at the height of a human being.

  The air in the room felt heavy and oppressive. Chania was suppressing her pride, Gielle her wronged heart, Rudy his sense of failure. The air held down the tension. Luoying didn’t know what to do. They were fighting over her, but she didn’t want them to fight at all.

  * * *

  Reini entered the room. He nodded and smiled at the youths. When Luoying saw him, she sensed the arrival of a dependable source of strength. Reini’s gaunt face, clean-shaven chin, strong and steady hands, and frameless round spectacles seemed to form a steadfast presence from which she could seek aid.

  “Dr. Reini, am I ready to be discharged?” she asked hurriedly.

  “Of course,” said Reini, smiling.

  “Don’t you need to examine me one more time?”

  “There’s no need. I’ve see the scans from this morning, and you’re healing well. Just come back for your periodic checkups.”

  “All right. Thank you. I guess we should go.”

  Luoying got up and put on her coat, checking the room one last time for any stray possessions. The others got up as well and helped her with the luggage. Some began to clean up the room.

  All at once, the confrontational air was replaced by purposeful busyness. Everyone had their own task. The room was filled with questions like Is this your cup? Soon everything was ready, and they filed out. Rudy was in the front, with Gielle following immediately behind. Pierre followed Gielle. The other four came after, with Luoying bringing up the rear.

  The moment they stepped out of the room, Anka moved next to Luoying and gave her shoulders a squeeze. None of the others saw it. She looked at him, but he kept his eyes forward, a smile on his face. All of a sudden Luoying felt a sense of peace drape over her.

  “This afternoon … ,” he whispered to her.

  “Two o’clock, at station three.”

  “All right.”

  They parted. Anka joined Mira and the others on one side, while Luoying went over to Rudy.

  Reini emerged from the room. He had sensed t
he awkwardness in the room from Luoying’s expression, and so he said nothing as he watched them leave. Walking up to Luoying now, he handed her an envelope.

  “This is for you.”

  The envelope was sealed with a metallic film with red markings. It was a personal identity seal, something akin to a wax seal in the age of quills, used only for the most formal and important documents, such as powers of attorney.

  Luoying looked up gratefully at him. “Thank you.”

  Reini nodded. “Be careful.” Then he stood at the top of the stairs as the friends filed away. Luoying waved at him from the bottom of the stairs, and he waved back.

  Luoying cast one last look at the room that had been her home for the last twenty-plus days, reluctant to leave. She knew that outside the hospital was a world busy with demands and activity, and she would never again experience this secluded life like a hermit’s. The days in the hospital had been so peaceful, as though the last decade had dissolved into illusions, with dust settling and the surging currents turning placid. She didn’t know what kind of fate awaited her, but she knew she would miss this place. Only after a long while did she make her way down the stairs, swaying a bit unsteadily.

  * * *

  After he watched Luoying leave, Reini returned to his study and began a new project. He was writing a history of the city, of the city itself as an idea. A city began as a city, but often it would be remembered only as a stage for history. Very few paid attention to its history as a city.

  Victor Hugo once said that, before the birth of the printing press, humankind expressed itself through edifices. Reini thought that, after the birth of the space rocket, humankind again expressed its thoughts through architecture.

  Most of the habitable surface of the Earth had already been covered by buildings multiple times, and new structures had to find footholds in the existing foundations like needles searching for openings in an overpopulated pincushion. Even if large swaths of cities were demolished to be rebuilt, history meant that the new buildings were surrounded by the ghosts of the old. Like the custom of a people being impressed upon generation after generation of newborns, the past gradually tamed the new. To start entirely anew with a blank page was impossible. Construction paid for by demolishing the past would be tainted from the start with the smell of death, and upon completion was no longer pure and fresh.

  On the other hand, architecture on Earth was growing ever more unmoored from the ground upon which it stood. New buildings were assaulted from all sides by existing edifices but became disconnected from the land. Most resources had been extracted from the ground and circulated countless times over the surface, scattered to all corners of all continents, rising and falling with currency and stock tickers, no longer reflecting the undulating forms of mountains and valleys. Most architecture on Earth tended toward one globalized style: towering skyscrapers in metropolises, carefully manicured gardens in suburbs, devoid of local character wherever you were. Buildings reflected class but not natural geography.

  But space was pure vacuum, and all construction had to start from zero. In the two and a half centuries since humans first set foot in space, countless fantastic designs had been born in the dark void of space, resulting in floating gardens unimaginable on Earth. Their multitudinous divergent forms reflected complex and ever-changing principles of operation.

  These structures were nonetheless tethered to heaven and earth. They breathed air from the sky and absorbed strength from the ground. Since the resources of space were as yet underdeveloped, buildings were like wells drilled into the depth of nature. They relied on local materials and depended on local geography, molded by their environment. Ring-shaped cities orbiting in geosynchronous orbit, spider cities on the Moon, the crystal city and crater habitats of Mars—all were as inseparable from their environment as plants adapted to their niches.

  After the religious worship of natural totems and the industrial ideal of the conquest of nature, humanity entered a third stage of the coevolution of human thought and architecture: the cosmic path of harmoniously fitting into nature. Buildings are flowers blooming from the sand. That was young Galiman’s most famous quote.

  Mars City was the product of sand. Iron, glass, and silicon chips were the most abundant yields from the planet’s red earth. The first formed the skeleton, the second formed the flesh, and the last formed the soul. The whole city was refined from sand. With the rough exterior polished away, the crystal essence stood proudly, like a tide surging deep underground, erupting through thick layers of crust, emerging as springs over the surface.

  As long as there had been human civilization, there had also been glass. The Phoenicians discovered glinting beads in sand, and the ancient Egyptians and Chinese made glass vessels millennia before the birth of Christ. In the Middle Ages, colorful stained glass was an offering to God, and the modern industrial age saw the rest of the universe through glass. Le Corbusier and the fashion of the twentieth century developed and refined various properties of glass as a construction material. Thus, rather than claiming Mars had developed a new heaven, it was more accurate to say that it continued a long tradition of human civilization.

  However, there were differences in the way Mars used glass. It exploited the environment of Mars, used its harshness and poverty. The Martian atmosphere was thin and the temperature cold, and so the construction of houses took the form of blown glass. The semiliquid material was pumped up with air, and then the bubbles were allowed to cool in the sparse atmosphere, taking shape almost instantly without need for internal support. Details were then added via carving, engraving, inlaying, or finishing. All the techniques of glassmaking could be deployed to keep air and life within and cold and vacuum without.

  The glass city was the crystallization of the ideal of humanity coexisting in harmony with nature. A house on Mars was as intimate as clothing, and the garden and the gardener were as close as water and fish. The air of each residence was mostly filtered by the plants in the garden, with the citywide air refreshing system as a supplement. The water of each dwelling was also recycled in its walls, and only a small amount of waste was piped into the centralized sewer system. Each glass bubble was a miniature ecological sphere, a unit of co-survival and cohabitation. The city began essentially as a single dwelling, and it later expanded like cellular division or crystal growth by duplicating basic but essential units.

  Mars City in its current state encompassed a great deal of variation on a single theme. Most dwellings were inspired by the ideals of classical Chinese design in which living quarters were arranged around a central garden. With the transparent bubble on top, the enclosed space felt surprisingly spacious. The natural dome-shaped ceilings, on the other hand, were often decorated in the manner of classical Rome, with murals painted on the inside, or glass rods might extend down from the ceiling, fluted like Greek columns, an allusion rather than a vulgar imitation.

  In Martian architecture, the concept of membranes was very important. The interiors of all buildings were coated, because by adding certain substances to the glass and augmenting them with different coatings, it was possible to give the walls and the ceiling different functions: the quarter-reflective membrane redirected all the infrared rays inside the rooms, keeping them warm; high-resistance wires provided heat; optical membranes served as displays; high-magnetic-moment membranes moved objects. More than practical conveniences, these membranes were a lifestyle: the furniture and the house were one, and one needed not take everything with them as they moved about the house.

  It was a modern interpretation of the pyramid, a vast edifice erected from the wasteland, pointing from the flat ground into the dark sky.

  All these were parts of Galiman’s philosophy: to exploit all that nature offered and to turn poverty into jewels. The first house had been designed by him, and after it was accepted, endless variations upon the original proliferated. Led by him, a group of designers planned the city, starting with individual houses and building them up into neigh
borhoods. The history of the whole process was only five decades long, but for many it was the entirety of history. They were born in this city and grew up in this city. From the moment they opened their eyes, the city settled into its stable form, as though it had already been in existence for a thousand years, as though Galiman’s philosophy were a law of nature.

  As the inhabitants of Mars City pondered whether to abandon it, Reini observed quietly from the sidelines, a melancholic mood taking hold of him similar to the feeling one got as curtains began to descend upon a stage. If, in the end, the people decided to abandon the city, he would not be surprised. Galiman had laid such deep foundations for the principles of architecture on Mars that those who came after simply needed to replicate his basic plan, changing unimportant details here and there. Without the need to explore, they also lacked the opportunity for breakthrough advances. This left them unsatisfied. The more they envied Galiman, they more they wanted to be like him. They also wanted to be famous, to have the citation ratings of their products rise ever higher, to carve their own names into massive stones. They thus sought new plans, wishing to demolish the old city and build a new one. This wasn’t quite the contest Hugo envisioned between the crowd and religion, between freedom and rules; rather, it was simply those who yearned to be great overturning those who were already great.

  MEDAL

  On the way to the Registry of Files, Anka told Luoying the truth about the revolution.

  They sat side by side in the tube train. Anka leaned against the side of the car, an arm on the tiny table supporting his forehead, his legs extended straight ahead of him. He looked relaxed and free, his cold blue eyes as unperturbed as lake water on winter nights.

  Luoying turned to him. “What did Chania mean earlier by starting a revolution?”

  A gentle smile appeared on his face. “Oh, that. She’s talking about a play.”