Vagabonds

by Hao Jingfang

  “What made you come to visit?” Anka asked as his hands remained busy.

  “I have … two questions,” Luoying said. “The first is: What kind of person is Uncle Juan? I mean, how do people see him in the Flight System?”

  Anka’s hands stopped. “Why do you want to know?”

  Luoying described the recording she had seen. Then she added, “I don’t know how to describe it. But … every time I see him, I get a different impression. Sometimes he seems so kind, but at other times he seems terrifying. I don’t know what happened in the scene I told you about.”

  “I haven’t heard anything like that either.”

  “So what’s his reputation in the Flight System?”

  “Hmm.” Anka paused to think. “He’s a man with ideas. But … he seems like an anti-moralist.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s just an impression.” After a beat Anka added, “He doesn’t give many speeches, and I don’t see him often.”

  Luoying nodded. Then she asked, “Can the Flight System deploy troops?”

  “Yes. It has that power.”

  “But why? I thought the Flight System normally has authority only over transportation and civil missions.”

  “Theoretically, that’s true. But the design of the Flight System has always been highly militarized, and resources can be shifted over to military deployment at any time.” Anka paused to think. “Do you remember the base we saw when we came out of the crater?”

  Luoying tried to remember. “You mean the one we saw when you and I were flying like kites? The one that’s not too far from Angela Bluff?”

  “Yes. I found out that it’s a secret military research station after I got back.”

  “Military?”

  “That’s right. And it’s administered by the Flight System. I heard it was set up by Juan personally, as the archon.”

  “I’ve never even heard of it. I can’t imagine my grandfather would have approved.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  Luoying was quiet. Lately she had found out so much more about the world, things she had never known before, that she didn’t have time to process it all. All she knew was that the world seemed far too complicated to be seen clearly. Anka also stopped his work and stared at the floor, his gaze unfocused as he pondered something.

  “Are you coming this Sunday?” Luoying asked.

  “What’s happening on Sunday?”

  “It’s our protest rally.”

  “What protest rally?”

  “The one that Chania wanted to start: the march for the free flow of housing and identities. We’ve been talking about it over electronic group messaging. I thought you were part of the thread.”

  Anka looked unconcerned. “Oh, I’ve been getting the messages. I just haven’t paid much attention.”

  “So are you going?”

  “Don’t know yet. I guess we’ll see.”

  Anka looked absent-minded as his slender fingers busied themselves again. Luoying suddenly felt that he was very far away. She had come today to find him, hoping to talk about her anxiety and confusion, hoping for some comfort, not just to talk about some abstract grand ideas about the world that neither of them really understood. But now she didn’t know how to continue. Anka was sitting right across from her, but she couldn’t tell him of her perplexity and unease.

  She wanted to return to that warm night in the cold cave, but it seemed so distant that it was unreal. After their return, they were each in isolation for a month, and then they were too busy to exchange more than a few words. Luoying had the sudden sense that there was nothing special between the two of them, and the warmth that she had felt with him was just a momentary emotional surge. She recalled the words of Chania, her pessimism toward all lasting attachment.

  “Do you care about what I do?” she asked impulsively.

  Anka looked up, a bit confused. “What do you mean? The march on Sunday?”

  “No. I don’t care about that.”

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “Nothing specific or concrete. I’m just asking if you care. About me.”

  Anka looked at her, a trace of anguish flickering through his eyes. Then he looked distant again. “What do you want me to say?”

  Luoying choked on a lump in her throat. “What do I want you to say? What can I have you say?”

  Anka said nothing.

  “Do you believe in lasting love?” she asked.

  “No,” said Anka. “I’ve never believed in anything like that.”

  Luoying got up and said that she needed to be on her way. Anka nodded and told her to take care of herself. He was on duty and couldn’t walk her out. She hoped that he would ask her to stay longer, or say something comforting, but he didn’t. Quietly she left, walking straight out of the vast circular hall without looking back.

  GIELLE

  What does Rudy have in mind?

  Gielle’s emotions had been in turmoil for the last few days. Rudy’s behavior was so strange. She thought he was giving her hints, or even confessing his feelings, but other things he did seemed to contradict these guesses. There’s nothing so complicated as love in the world, is there? she thought. She wanted to believe in her instincts, but she also feared that she was too emotional, too likely to make mountains out of molehills.

  “Most people can’t tell how pessimistic I am,” she muttered to herself. She craved happiness, but the instant that the possibility of happiness approached her, she was too scared to believe it.

  She tried to sort through her tangled thoughts.

  There had been no warning for what happened. Rudy simply walked over and invited her to visit his lab the next day. Gielle’s heart raced. He asked her right in front of everyone, just as books described it. She and her friends were sitting on the edge of the raised flower bed while he and his friends were coming out of the tube train station. He saw her, walked over, said hi to her friends, and then asked her if she would like to come to see the work on the new hydraulic engineering plan. He was polite and confident, smiling brightly. She almost couldn’t believe her own ears.

  Gielle didn’t know if she had blushed at the time, but she certainly felt the heat in her cheeks now. Though she was alone in her room, she covered her face with her hands and bit down on her lip to prevent the grin from being seen.

  He asked me to see him! Even if it’s not a date, it has to show he likes me. As to why he didn’t ask me to go to a concert … maybe he wants me to understand his work better. But why did he look so aloof when I asked him how I should dress for the visit? And he was looking at Lily … I wonder if he likes Lily instead, and was asking me to make her jealous? … No, my Rudy isn’t that kind of boy. But when I looked at him, he really did look a bit awkward … I wonder why he’s never had a girlfriend.

  Gielle sighed.

  What can I do? I can’t help being so sensitive and noticing details others would have missed. She sighed again and looked at herself in the mirror. The girl facing her looked disconsolate, her round face evincing a melancholy no one else could understand.

  Growing up with Luoying, Gielle was familiar with Rudy’s habits, and Rudy had taken care of her like he had his little sister. She often thought the seeds for her feelings for Rudy had been planted back then. Later, after Luoying left, she didn’t have as many chances to see him, and so the seeds did not sprout and grow but remained buried and dormant. In her heart she concealed a dream like a secret garden, always believing that someday a man would come and brighten her life.

  The moment she was waiting for arrived when she was sixteen. At a community ball, she saw Rudy dance. It was a celebration in honor of all the twenty-year-olds in the community for achieving formal adulthood. Rudy was in the middle of the crowd, the center of all attention. His smile wasn’t just confident; it was arrogant. In his half-open shirt, he looked powerful and elegant. She became obsessed with him from then on, her mood dependent on his attitude, wil
lingly changing herself for him.

  Gielle wanted to know what sort of girl Rudy liked: someone poised and quiet, or someone vivacious and outgoing. She showed Rudy her sketches and designs. If he even offered one bit of praise, she spent the rest of the day floating on a cloud, feeling herself clever and original. Since he liked the costume she had made for Luoying, Gielle had been focusing on dance costumes and formal wear.

  Because Rudy was so exceptional, she wanted to be exceptional herself. As a new designer, she had little name recognition. The citation rate for her designs was low and few ordered her clothes, and she worked extra hard to change the situation. Fashion was unlike most other arts; it was as competitive as the restaurant industry. Unlike the production of some metallic membrane or precision probes, which involved competing for the budget through engineering, clothing was all about the click rate. There was no fudging the click rate. Whatever design the customer chose was the design that got made, and the production rate directly reflected the designer’s success and appeal. So far, Gielle had not been able to distinguish herself from the competition, and she felt rather discouraged. Her lack of exceptional accomplishments made her worry that she wasn’t good enough for Rudy. To stave off the fear, she worked even harder, changing her posted designs constantly.

  Gielle often tried to guess why Rudy never showed particular interest in any girls. She figured that he had very high standards; or maybe he was focused on his career; or maybe he wasn’t as superficial as most boys and didn’t know how to express his deep feelings. Every one of these possibilities attracted Gielle even more to him. She thought Rudy must have stayed alone for so long because he valued romantic attachment more than others.

  * * *

  There wasn’t a lot of time for her to be alone with her thoughts. Today was the scheduled day for the trial run of the hydrology model of the crater. As an active volunteer, Gielle was supposed to participate. She was already very interested in the project, and now, buoyed by the thought of the date tomorrow, she was even more energized. Humming happily, she fairly skipped her way out of her house. The sun seemed even brighter than usual, and the flowers more colorful in their bloom.

  The trial was to take place on Golden Light Avenue, in front of the history museum. As Gielle headed to the site, she thought of the name of the street as a good omen for her date the next day. By the time she arrived, many people were already at work. Everyone was dressed in a white vest with a cartoonish logo, busily preparing the site for the trial.

  “Hi, Warren!” Gielle waved.

  “Gielle.” The boy greeted her with a nod of the head, his hands occupied as he was carrying a box.

  “What are you working on?”

  “Assembling the model waterwheels. We’re almost ready.”

  “Can I help with anything?”

  The boy pointed at the history museum with his chin. “Mr. Holly is in charge of assignments. You should go before everything is done.”

  Gielle rushed in the direction he pointed. Outside the front door of the history museum, a crowd of people gathered on the steps. Mr. Holly, standing in the middle with his e-notebook, was shouting out the jobs that still needed to be done and how many volunteers were needed for each. Even with so many people, the scene was orderly. Every large event on Mars required many volunteers to help out at the last minute, and they were all used to it. Each time Mr. Holly called out a new assignment, a group volunteered and walked up. An adult researcher then came to take them to where the work had to be done. Gielle joined the jostling crowd at the back, hoping she wasn’t too late to get an assignment.

  A model crater had been built in the sunken plaza in the middle of Golden Light Avenue. Surrounded by statues of generals, the sandstone construction replicated the slopes of the crater, studded with caves like a beehive. Every detail of the real crater was reproduced in miniature, and the yellow rocky cliffs seemed as glorious as the real thing. Carved channels wound down the mountainsides from rim to floor, with ramifying branches and tributaries winding past every cave dwelling, until all the streambeds congregated at the very bottom of the crater. Above the crater hung a giant spherical bulb like an unlit sun.

  “Monitoring the sluice gates!” Mr. Holly called out.

  A few youths raised their hands and pushed through the crowd. Gielle moved closer. Standing on her tiptoes, she shifted between paying attention to Mr. Holly and looking at the crater model. The roughness of the mountainsides in the model terrified her a little, but she was nonetheless moved by the grand scale of the endeavor.

  She began to imagine life in the crater in the future, what the cave houses would look like, how to go out on dates, how to browse and shop. Her thoughts, like a drifting cloud, soon stopped over Rudy. She had always had a fantasy of picking out the house she would share with Rudy. It was her most secret wish, something she had never shared with anyone. She didn’t know much about architecture, but she felt that she had good aesthetic taste and an eye for details. She had always been able to discover some neat idea in common objects that no one else paid attention to. Her favorite pastime was to stroll along while pondering the beauty of a perfect garden, imagining the discussions she would have with Rudy about how to arrange and decorate their home.

  Galiman was the inventor she most admired. He had come up with the design of the Martian house, as well as the mini-makers that were so convenient to use. He must have invented these things so that lovers could work together to make a beautiful home. What a sweet process this was: to create a nest for love where the pair would always be together.

  “Laying out agricultural models!” Mr. Holly shouted.

  Shaking herself out of her fantasies, Gielle saw that there weren’t many people left. She waved her hand high in the air and shouted, “Me! Me!” Mr. Holly picked her, and along with the other volunteers she followed a woman in her thirties in a white lab coat to the side of the crater model. The woman kindly handed each of them a bag of model trees and flower bushes and directed them to plant them along a mountainside. Excitedly, Gielle dug through the soil, carefully planting each model.

  “We’ll need the help of more volunteers in the coming days,” Mr. Holly shouted over the crowd. “One important duty will be to monitor the test fields and farmwork. If anyone is interested, please see Ms. Mathews.”

  He was pointing at the woman in the lab coat. Gielle stood up, brushed off the dirt on her dress, and told her, “I volunteer!”

  Ms. Mathews laughed. “Thank you, dear. But we’re looking for adults.”

  “I’m eighteen!”

  “Really? All right. Why don’t you leave your name on the sign-up sheet later? We’ll do the interviews in a few days.”

  “Interviews?” Gielle looked at her pleadingly. “Won’t you let me in right now, please?”

  “Young lady, this is hard work that requires a lot of dedication. Some parts of the experiment require around-the-clock monitoring.”

  “That’s no problem!” she said. Then, after a moment, she added, “I’ll definitely give it my all.”

  Ms. Mathews chuckled and talked with her some more. Gielle asked a ton of questions, and Ms. Mathews responded patiently. Gielle wanted to know what sort of experimental field it was, and Ms. Mathews told her it was possibly the first field on Mars that would be exposed instead of enclosed in a glass dome. Gielle cried out in excitement, certain that she would be part of history for participating in such a glorious step forward.

  All the volunteers worked hard as the sun rose to its highest point and then began its descent. The mountainside was now looking like a living community, full of fields, electrical stations, neighborhoods, and gardens. A few models of animals were scattered in the woods and fields, peeking out from between the trees. Tiny models of people in the crater echoed the real people laboring outside the crater, a scene of creation in which the myth and the reality were each other’s ideals.

  At three in the afternoon, as all the volunteers stepped back to watch, a heavy water
cart arrived at the scene like a lofty titan of old whose monstrous steel body held the sweet nectar of life. The massive storage tank tilted slowly, and the clear water flooded into the model crater like a blessing from the gods, turning the bottom of the crater into a roiling lake. The water level rose slowly while the bulb suspended above the crater finally came alight. Directed by a lampshade, the yellow rays of light slanted toward one side of the crater, lighting up part of the lake and the mountainside. The whole process was carried out slowly and ceremoniously, transcending the limits of the model’s scale.

  “My dear friends,” declared Mr. Holly from the top of the steps, “we are truly fortunate to witness one of the most memorable and bright inflection points in the history of humanity. For the first time humans, utilizing their intelligence, will remake nature at a planetary scale in a single stroke. The melding of the strength of humankind and nature is the glory of Mars, the first step we take toward our future as an independent people, a most important step! To be able to participate in and to contribute to such a campaign is the greatest honor of all who live in this age!”

  As Gielle listened to the rousing speech, joy and fervor filled her heart. Watching the newborn lake and the magnificent ring of mountains, watching the mist already gathering over the lake and the sunbathed slopes, she seemed to already feel the refreshing breeze on her face, smell the fragrant flowers, and hear the chirping birds. The corners of her eyes became moist.

  The lake was now fairly deep. Simulated algae floated in the waves, giving the water a teal hue. Under the powerful lamp, the lit and shaded parts of the model soon achieved a temperature differential. The water turned into vapor, rose and flowed, and coalesced into clouds. As the clouds grew more distinct, the astonished onlookers whispered to one another. After some time passed with the clouds drifting about, tiny dust particles in the air finally attracted enough vapor to form water drops. A gentle rain fell upon the sloping mountains, bathing the verdant patches. Everyone clapped in celebration.