by Scott Sibary
“I think so.”
“Without the WEA’s independent analyses, the Council might be just another highly political international agency. But this Electronic Analyst must demonstrate neutrality between peoples and nations.”
“Yes. It must.”
Solveig examined the face of the other, but could detect nothing else than what she hoped to see: one who thought the way she did. “Of course you and I think so, since our role is to ensure that those capacities, once achieved, cannot be corrupted.”
Her wandering gaze stopped at the pipe that brought hot water through the wall and to a valve control box. A nipple connecting the feed side of the box to the union on the pipe appeared of a different metal than the union, and was deeply corroded. That’s what happens, she thought, when you don’t make proper connections.
“Yes, and?” Mishuang asked.
“Sometimes our problems are accidental, maybe caused by negligence or a hurried attempt to get a task done.” She turned again to Mishuang, softening her gaze to that of a concerned friend. “But do you worry about corruption? About someone trying to unlock our Protection Lock, subvert its efficacy, or prevent it from being accepted by the Great Wall? They could be working with that purpose even now, as we sit here.”
Mishuang’s jaw moved from side to side. Then her deer-eyes sought those examining her. “Maybe we’ll complete our project too soon for that—make it work before anyone can crack the Lock.” She presented a tight smile. “If the dove moves soon enough, the hawk will not catch it.”
Wonderful: some do get eaten. “I believe we must make the Lock secure. But you understand the problem?”
“Close-minded systems are more secure at first, but they don’t learn as fast: it’s not easy for them to know when to trust their informant. You’ve said our system needs to demonstrate wisdom.”
“Exactly, or it won’t be trusted either. Then you don’t worry . . . ,” Solveig noticed a key phrase repeating itself in the shakuhachi music—the music with a spy-ridden history.
“About our success?”
“No,” Solveig said, dropping her inquiry. She thought instead about the purpose of their outing. She used her palms to wipe the moisture back along the sides of her face: a face not kissed in more than half a year. She sensed it reforming pink and youthful. “Right. It’s better to keep a good face. Like we’re doing today.”
They joined in a laugh.
It already felt better, at least on the surface. The appearance would be better, covering up what’s underneath. Deceptive and luring. And when she got a fish, she might keep him or just play catch and release. Lots of fish in the sea: bad and beautiful. Yet I float alone, she thought, rather than be tied to one who might drown me.
Mishuang gripped the slippery edge of the tub with both hands and pulled herself up to face Solveig. “I want to say, I think our group is working very well under your leadership. We’re making progress because we all work together very well.”
“Thank you. We each do . . . our part.”
AnDe tore up the steepest part of the trail in Badachu Park, badgered by the comments.
“Don’t seek to be idealistic,” Liu had warned him the previous day. “Nor too optimistic. Together they will inflate your ego, like a balloon ready to be popped.”
“It keeps me going,” he had replied.
He stopped at an overlook with a view of the sprawling city and faced the counterarguments: the slowly poisoning smog, a concession forced on the current and future inhabitants; and the hodgepodge development, a concession to the realities of economic swings, the uncertainties of demographic forecasting, and the greed of influential developers. He could not deny there were hurdles. Governments would govern, power disparities would continue, and he should work obediently within the realities of the secular world.
He walked on.
Realities? he asked himself.
Beads of sweat ran down his face.
Wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, he knew there were some things that couldn’t be wiped away. Who or what should I be obedient to? Can I see through their artifices, their deceptions, without removing my own?
He embraced the simple virtues: study, learn, work, cooperate, and obey. They had brought China to where it was. Not ideal, not all-powerful, but in the strongest position to lead. If the country would emphasize the twentieth-century value that society and government should work for all the people rather than for an emperor or some government system they might lead. And we’ll need, he concluded, to cooperate.
Or am I fooled?
“You’re a dreamer!” The frequent refrain from his past had not bothered him until he realized the colleagues who said it would move to isolate him, and the girlfriends who said it would not accept future invitations.
He glanced in the direction his parents lived. They might echo Liu’s comments when he saw them after his late afternoon walk. They’d drilled him the last time he was there.
“You’re getting too old to be fussy,” his father had said. “Girls these days don’t want old men.”
His mother, twelve years younger than her husband, had added, “You take what you can get, but you still have to go after it.”
Argh! Why should I seek only what most others seek? Why not be myself?
He came to a massive boulder standing alone at the side of the trail. He leaned against its inertia and lifted one foot to remove a sharp pebble from inside his shoe. He could hear his parents asking whether he was seeing anyone. They’d be happier if he shocked them by saying he’d been careless, that the woman was going through with it and so they were getting married. He’d shocked them before, when he brought Tara by.
She was his first long-term relationship, lasting all of ten months. They’d met at the university dining commons, where he was eating lunch with a cousin who studied philosophy. Tara was carrying a loaded tray of food, her long, curly, dark brown hair draping her shoulders. As she scanned for a seat, AnDe’s cousin stuck up his hand and beckoned to her. He explained to AnDe that the woman approaching, with piercing, olive-shaped eyes and dark chestnut complexion, was a graduate student in philosophy. She was in Beijing for the year, coming from the University of Cape Town.
Tara van Gelder, she introduced herself. AnDe took it from there, slowly, as her Mandarin was not fluent. Her answers to his questions drew him in. He learned that she focused on the philosophy of aesthetics and worked on the thesis that aesthetics provide the strongest argument for a meaning to life. He recalled feeling elated when she had asserted this. It was reminiscent of certain Buddhist scripture, and it sounded logically defensible.
Over the course of their intimate relationship, he explored this idea with her, intrigued by her focused sense of purpose. She told him that expression and communication, whether through writing, drama, music, dance, or visual arts, provided the most rewarding activities beyond those minimally necessary to sustain life. These aesthetic activities were exactly what made humans essentially different from the more efficient but nearly brainless eusocial insects. She reasoned that once the basic needs of food, shelter, security, reproduction, and freedom from physical pain were satisfied at a minimal level, the human psyche most wanted to create and share, express and communicate; and aesthetic arts were both an inspiration and an outlet for these.
The young African philosopher maintained that most of the world’s problems arise from attempts to increase what are perceived as material needs, but what satisfies one day becomes insufficient the next. Acquiring more becomes life’s goal, and destructive competition the inevitable result. She insisted that a society oriented towards participation in artistic or aesthetic endeavors would be more peaceful and less resource-consumptive, and foster greater development of human potential.
It became his own fantasy, listening to her expound on her unabashedly utopian ideas. For his part, he touched the art of her moving lips and cheeks, softly rubbing against his, while his fingers expressed themselves into the curls
that protected an entrancing mind. Accepting her argument required accepting her assumptions, some of which he felt unsure of. But he did not feel unsure of her. In a serious tease, he dubbed her a valiant “knight” on a noble crusade.
Tara did not fully reciprocate. She had no enthusiasm for his work. She argued that AI was connected more with what had gone wrong for the human race than what might turn out right. Instead, she worked on him, telling him it all started in Africa, nick-naming him “Bokkie AnDe” and taking him to a southern African dance ensemble. She gave him a printed copy of Cry, the Beloved Country in Chinese and told him he should find it short and easy. Her face had never looked so disappointed as when he said he couldn’t finish it. He wouldn’t explain that it had made him cry too hard.
She seemed to take it as a sign that she’d failed to dissuade him from wasting his intuitive genius—and his spontaneous creativity—on machines.
Her cause and mission were clear: return to South Africa and initiate the kind of intentional communities she proposed as a model for human living. Her valiant determination had not kept her out of his arms while she was in Beijing. Yet when she kissed him goodbye at the airport, it was as if she wore armor, with her visor lowered. An hour later he watched his bright Knight, sun reflecting off the metal of the aircraft as it climbed the sky to the west, diminish to a glimmer, then to a speck like a distant star.
Recalling the image, AnDe paused to observe a crescent moon emerging in the dimming light above the setting sun. The vision filled him with tingling and his body shivered.
Chapter Sixteen
“What?!”
Her exploding word sent a swig of green tea spraying over her kitchen counter. Solveig bounced a fist on the countertop. “No message before this? Not even a hint?”
Don’t my feelings mean anything to him? He only considers his own. It’s just like him to be impulsive.
The text message from Erik had come in during the night. She’d waited to read it until she’d begun her first cup of tea. She had to wipe some of the bitter spray off her phone as she re-read.
Hi, Solveig. I hope you are well. I got used to not hearing from you. I know you’re used to silence. Well, I have no hard feelings about it anymore. Really. But I thought it only fair to contact you. I think you deserve that much. The point is, I’m engaged! It happened really fast. We met at the Seventeenth of May festivities, and now, three weeks later, we’re engaged. It’s awesome! It should be like that, you know, when things are right, when you find what really clicks. Then the decision is really easy. I hope you can feel happy for me.
It wasn’t that way between us. I guess you knew it all along. We were just going along for a good ride, as long as it lasted. Then you left, and I wandered. Now I’ve been really lucky.
I hope you will be too. I hope you’ve been productive. I hope your mission will be a success.
Erik.
Yeah, OK. She forced a sardonic nod. That’s the way it was, as Rolv likes to say (easy for him).
She wiped up the tea, flicked the sponge into the sink, then turned and leaned back against it, fingers playing loosely on the edge of the countertop.
Maybe Erik’s right.
She turned around slowly and poured herself another cup, hesitating over the green liquid before taking another swallow.
I guess I am happy for him, if he’s found the right fit. Maybe it is easy when things click.
She picked up her phone and began to peruse a list of items, all related to the mission.
Yeah, it ought to be easy when things click, like a key in a lock.
The tracks for the rail line to the Great Wall appeared from darkness and disappeared back into it, with only a brief stretch in the light. With her thoughts running along them, Solveig wondered how much one can choose. Risk taking, she said to herself, is impossible to avoid.
Her colleague and guide stood beside her in the underground metro station.
“I questioned taking the train this morning, after hearing about that accident three days ago,” she said.
“Really? You?” AnDe said. “Well, this isn’t the same train line.”
A sign and a loudspeaker announced their train would arrive in one minute and thirty seconds.
“I heard,” she said, “a malfunction in the switching mechanism put the arriving train on the wrong track, and a sensor failed to indicate that track was already occupied. Two people killed and more than forty injured! Makes you doubt the safety.”
“It was lucky the woman overseeing operations was able to redirect the train.”
“What? She killed two people! Those two in the little maintenance car had no time to react; they couldn’t see it coming.”
“If she’d done nothing, it would have crashed into another train already in the station.”
“Who knows? It might’ve slowed down. Maybe nobody would’ve been killed.” She kept her eyes on the dimly lit tunnel.
“Maybe not. It was the overseer’s decision, with little time to think. She had to do what seemed best.”
“Not a decision I’d want to make.” Solveig shuddered.
AnDe stared at her. “Really? Hmm. Ironic.”
Slowly she turned her whole body to face him. “Would you?”
“I do my job.” He surveyed the few people holding back from gathering along the track. “I try to take care of anything that crosses my path.”
An expansive and uncluttered section of white-tiled wall faced them directly across the tracks. Solveig took a step backwards. A gentle rush of wind brought dank odors of earth and industry from the tunnel.
As the train slowed to a stop, people thronged together at the points where doors would open. An assembly of faces presented themselves behind glass to stare back at them, and in routine choreography, the throngs jiggled and vibrated to create an escape passage for those exiting.
Solveig watched from several paces away, a silent giggle rustling through her frame.
“I should have asked if you’d wanted me to reserve a car and driver,” AnDe said, “and maybe a guide for us . . . But you said you hadn’t taken the subway yet, and wanted to.”
“Right. At least once.”
“I hope you’re not claustrophobic.”
“Being ferried around in crowds like I was a prize cow that might wander off: that’s what I can’t stand.”
“Pig.”
“What?”
“Pigs are more traditional in this country.” He showed her a goofy face as he added, “Oink-oink?”
She assessed him, then jutted her head towards him with wide eyes and emitted a low, “Mooo!”
The doors cleared, and she sprang ahead, then paused at the platform edge until AnDe caught up. They stepped aboard the train together, and the doors closed.
Almost no seats remained empty in the car. AnDe found one facing forward and motioned Solveig to take it.
In the seat beside her sat an older woman with two ready-to-burst shopping bags. By her patient, detached demeanor, she seemed indifferent to her surroundings. Her clothes and posture showed signs of heavy use. It all suggested a life spent on repetitive routines: a toiler for her family, slowly wearing down. Although the shops may have changed, and maybe she’d taken the bus when young; a woman on errands providing for her household appeared to be her purpose from marriage until death.
Nothing like my life, Solveig thought. But who knows? She might have surprising stories, if only I could peek behind the mask.
AnDe took a rear-facing seat almost across from Solveig. In his simple weekend clothes, devoid of any flare, and with his floppy side bag with water and snack food, he was her image of a man who might escort his elderly mother on an outing. His face showed no desire to converse; mother might start telling him things he’d heard before or ask questions he wouldn’t want to answer.
Just like AnDe to make it comfortable, she thought. She relaxed back into her seat.
She wriggled, not so comfortable after all. You can’t have it b
oth ways, Solveig, she reminded herself, and turned towards the window.
What looked like a family on an outing—a small child being pulled along by her mother while the father carried a flowery shopping bag with a thermos protruding above the top—arrived at the platform as the train began to move. Exasperation seemed to flash across the parents’ faces. Solveig leaned forward to continue watching, but her view was cut off disturbingly fast. As the train sped up, new faces appeared and more quickly passed away. Like life, she thought.
AnDe’s eyes focused on something behind her. His cheeks moved with slow undulations, as if he were running a mind experiment or viewing something sweet behind her. Yes, he seemed to be suppressing the urge to smile. What’s he looking at now, she wondered.
AnDe leaned forward. “Solveig, does it bother you that there are agents following us all the time?”
“No, I just assume they’re there, and I don’t think about them. Makes me feel comfortable, more secure.”
“Ah, good,” he said, leaning back against the plastic cushion.
The train came to a stop. As the woman with the groceries stood up to leave, AnDe glided over and into her seat with one turning step.
“Do you see agents around us?” Solveig asked.
“There is one I recognize four rows behind us. I imagine they’re supposed to remain incognito, but they’ll send the same agent a number of times. He looks like a nice young man. I start to imagine the private lives of these guys, you know, where they live, what they do for fun, how they talk.”
She chuckled, then became serious. “Are they a privileged, better off than most?”
“I don’t know. I’d think it’s not a well-paid job, at least at entry levels. But people who are paid to spy on their colleagues can enjoy the extra pay—in any country, right?” He paused to look sideways at her, and she gave him a piercing glance. “There’s at least one guy on my team who’s paid extra to report on us, I’m pretty sure. That would enable him to enjoy a more comfortable, even ostentatious lifestyle.”