She entered the grandiose gloom of the Hall itself. This was a true monument of socialist architecture, all of a thousand feet long, room enough to seat five thousand banqueting guests. And today, under the glare of TV lights, the focus of all this immense volume was the wizened body of a very old man, which lay draped in a Chinese flag, under a crystal sarcophagus. There was a sea of Party leaders, almost all of them men, lapping in orderly waves in their dark Mao suits around the glittering coffin. Jiang took her place in line, alongside her mentor Xu Shiyou.
Sandwiched between two octogenarian Party stalwarts from the provinces, they filed forward slowly towards the coffin. On a small stage a senior official was intoning a long, lugubrious eulogy over Chen Tong — a celebration of his glorious career, which stretched back to service with Mao himself before 1949 — and the Party grandees, one by one, reached the sarcophagus and bowed three times, and then each of them passed on to Chen’s widow and shook her withered old hand. Thus Jiang Ling found herself adrift in the sea of old men.
Many of them were wearing elaborate hearing aids and softscreen spectacles. Some of them were relatively spry, but others were supported by younger people — secretaries, or perhaps nurses — and they shuffled their feet, hardly able to walk. A few of them were even in wheelchairs, laden with oxygen bottles. And yet many had bizarre marks of youth: thick black hair, smoothed skin, sparkling new eyes. One of them — a few places ahead of her in the line — walked stiffly, and with a whir of servomotors, as some rudimentary exoskeleton beneath his Mao suit propelled him forward.
Jiang was startled and repelled. She had had much contact with the leadership since her flight, but always in meetings with one or two officials at a time; never had she witnessed the leadership en masse in this fashion. She wondered what tonnage of transplanted organs, bones, body fluids — manufactured, or excavated from youthful cadavers — had been installed in this crumbling leadership, to maintain its semblance of forward motion and life. Surely, she thought, nowhere in the world was there a government leadership so visibly tired and aged as the one arrayed around Chen’s corpse this morning.
At last she reached the corpse, and she stared, with little understanding, at the smooth, embalmed face of Chen Tong.
Now the eulogy was done. The vacated platform was taken by a fat middle-aged man in an off-white Mao suit, fitted with the elaborate collar of an imperial-era Confucian scholar. He was Gao Feng, a singer who had been popular two decades ago.
Xu Shiyou leaned close to her and whispered, his skin smelling of Western cosmetics: “Perhaps Chen Tong was a fan of Gao.”
The singer began to croon: We all have a family whose name is China…
There was a sharp, cloying smell, unwelcome in the stuffy air.
Jiang turned. The elderly Party leader behind her, his face imploded, was leaning on the arm of his aide and staring down at his trousers, from which leaked a slow rivulet of yellow fluid.
Now that the ceremonial was over, the leaders lingered, talking in small groups, their various attendants standing by impassively. It was an occasion without parallel in the West; there were no refreshments — no drinks, even — and no real focus to the gathering. But she could see, from the intensity of body language, the fierceness of expressions, that much business was being transacted here, between these rulers of the far-flung provinces of China.
Xu Shiyou drew Jiang Ling aside. “The Helmsman wishes to meet you, shortly. Now listen to me, Jiang Ling.”
She grimaced. “I always do, Xu.”
He snorted through his fleshy nose. “If only that were true. But listen now, Jiang, if never again; for this could be the most important moment of your life.”
“You say that,” she said, “to a woman who has flown in space?”
“I do,” he said seriously.
Xu continued to rise in the leadership, in part — she knew — thanks to the connection with herself, which he had been assiduous in maintaining and exploiting, and in part thanks to his own untiring efforts on his own behalf.
Xu had joined the Communist Party in his teens. He had been an electrical engineer, and had worked as a factory administrator for fifteen years, before starting to work his way through the ranks in various economic and diplomatic agencies. He was cultivated, able to chat freely in any of his three languages — Russian, Romanian and English — and, Jiang had observed for herself, he was able to charm and surprise many of those he encountered with his education and facility. He could recite lines from the U.S. Declaration of Independence as easily as verses of T’ang dynasty poetry.
Jiang would not admit to liking Xu Shiyou. Still less did she regard him as worthy of her trust. But she had come to understand, with a cynical analysis that surprised herself, that as long as she did nothing to tarnish her image as a new demi-god, his interests were identical to hers. Therefore, she decided, he was an ally…
So she said, “Give me your advice, Xu Shiyou.”
“Whatever the Helmsman says to you, you must endeavor to see the world through his eyes. You must suffer with him, sense his fears.”
“His fears?”
“Remember this: the Helmsman was born in 1904. Eleven decades ago: think of all he has seen, and suffered, in those years, his long and hard life matching the tortured history of our country. When the Helmsman came of age, China was a mere dish of loose sand, as Sun Yat-sen said: hopelessly divided by warlordism and chronic social disorder. There is, embedded deep in the bones of these, our senior leaders, a fear of falling back into such a state of humiliation and disunity.
“And now, in the twilight of his long life, the Helmsman faces chaos once more,” Xu said solemnly. “It is no secret that our losses in the attempt to liberate Taiwan were monstrous… And it is, of course, the peasants in the hinterland who suffered most. It is said that every family in China lost a son or daughter on the beaches of Taiwan. True or not, that has become a symbol, provoking unrest in the provinces.
“The answer to all this, of course,” said Xu, “is economic growth. Expansion. But we are contained, by the Americans and their allies. Our technology cannot match theirs. The puppet allies ring us, their satellites watch over us. And hence any conflict in the future like the Taiwan war must, inevitably, end in defeat for us.
“We must face stark facts. Every effort has been made to maintain ample food and decent housing. But the peasants have little spare income, little choice. The farmers see their cousins in the city acquiring private phone lines, houses, cars, softscreens, image-tattoos… And meanwhile, all the forecasts predict a worsening of the lot of the peasants, as new diseases spread, as even the water supplies shrivel…
“We are becoming desperate.”
“And it is the fault of the West.”
“Yes,” he said. “The West remains corrupt, increasingly decadent, and must ultimately rot from within…”
“Yes,” she said. In fact she did agree; based on her own observation, she believed this to be true.
“But when we face the West, Jiang, we face a lunatic; a lunatic more powerful than we are, who cripples us with his threat. What we must do is strike at him — hard, a single blow, which will remove his dominance — perhaps for all time.”
That confused her. “What do you mean?”
“We must seek a single hammer blow, which might change the shape of human destiny for ten thousand years… And that is what the Helmsman will say to you.”
An attendant came to call them forward. The Great Helmsman was ready to receive them.
“Be ready, Jiang Ling,” Xu said softly. “Be open.”
She approached, fear and fascination mixed in equal part.
He was a wisp of a man, she thought, a dried-out husk of a man, overwhelmed by the bulky technology of his wheelchair. She saw medical equipment, discreet, unlabelled black boxes, tucked into the frame of the chair, pipes and tubes snaking up into the Helmsman’s clothing. And she thought she could detect the liquid bulk of a colostomy bag under his jacket.
A middle-aged woman, dumpy and plain — perhaps one of his daughters — stood at his side, her plump hand protectively on his thin shoulder. Occasionally, as the leaders paid their obeisance, he would react — nod, shake his head, stare — and the companion would lean, bringing her face closer to his, evidently attempting to decipher his meaning.
Jiang was called to approach. She did so, feeling still more nervous than the day she had been called to enter the first space capsule.
He lifted his head. The eyes in that battered face seemed to fix on her. His mouth worked, wordless.
The daughter began to intone, as if resuming a speech suspended halfway through. Without addressing Jiang directly, she spoke of the crimes of the United States, of atrocities committed during the recent conflict against hapless Chinese servicemen on the beaches of Taiwan. The people of the United States were foreign devils, of the type who had raped China repeatedly in the past. And they did not act alone, but in cooperation with their allies — even with their old foe Russia, even with the new young states which had budded off the corpse of the U.S., and which competed with it in other arenas. The world, it seemed, was polarized: China stood alone, ringed by her enemies, and it was ever thus…
Now the Helmsman tipped forward, as if rocking. He spoke, and his voice was faint, as if coming from far away.
“Jiang Ling. I dream I am at home, in my villa here in Beijing, with my family and associates. News arrives. On the fringe of the city, there is an odd outbreak of a respiratory disease. Hundreds of citizens present themselves to the hospitals gasping for breath. The first symptoms include vomiting, fever, a choking cough and labored breathing. Antibiotics appear to contain the disease. Without antibiotics, death from hemorrhage, respiratory failure or toxic shock follows in a few days. It kills more than ninety percent of its victims. The doctors struggle to diagnose this bizarre, unusual illness.
“People start to die, in large numbers.
“At last the doctors understand. The disease is spread by spores — spores polluting the air of the city, thousands of them entering the lungs with every breath — and the spores cross the lining of the lungs and travel to the lymph nodes, where they germinate, multiply and spread to other tissues, releasing toxins as they go.
“Public health officials try to understand where the spores come from and which direction they are spreading. But this takes time; and we have no more time. Rumors begin to spread that supplies of antibiotics have run out.
“Other rumors state that only some racial groups are affected by the disease: specifically, Han.
“I appear on softscreens, in Beijing and across the nation, and I caution against panic. But then news is brought to me that even my family has been exposed, even myself…”
He seemed to be looking at her, but his eyes were so vague and discolored she could not be certain. “Jiang Ling, I am describing an attack by the anthrax bacillus — or rather, a strain of it genetically engineered to strike at specific population groups. My advisers inform me that it would take a mere two hundred pounds of spores to destroy three million people in a city like this. And, my advisers say, such gruesome weapons are even now under preparation for use against us in secret laboratories in the United States…”
Jiang, horrified, thought of the America she had glimpsed: large, complex, confused, fragmenting, frightened. And she thought of some of the Western leaders she had met, for instance the chilling General Hartle: a grisly mirror image of the Helmsman, another old man clinging to the levers of power, continually reenacting the paranoia of his youth.
Was such scheming possible there?
Yes, she decided.
“But,” she asked, “what is my assignment, sir?”
The Great Helmsman lifted his hand, his bony wrist protruding from the soft fabric of his Mao suit, his fingers thin as dried twigs, and he beckoned to her.
She stepped forward and, encouraged by the Helmsman’s daughter, she leaned down and placed her face close to his. Close up, his skin did not have the alien texture she had perceived from a greater distance; it was clearly human, but brown with age, as brown as the earth, and riven with wrinkles and cracks, distended pores like the craters of the Moon. She had an impulse to reach out and touch it, to feel the faint warmth which must still pump beneath that battered surface.
His eyes, embedded in their black sockets, were like pearls, grey, moist, formless. His breath smelt, oddly, of milk.
“Yingzhen zhike,” he said. “Poisonous wine. We must drink poisonous wine to slake our thirst. That is your assignment, Jiang Ling. You must sip the wine, now, for all of us…”
His voice was as dry, she thought, as the scratch of a leaf along the bed of an ancient Martian canal.
* * *
Benacerraf was standing on a shallow, undulating beach. Overhead, grey-brown methane cumulus clouds crowded the sky.
The black meniscus of Clear Lake, flat and still, swept all the way to a horizon that was nearby and sharply curving, dimly obscured by the continuous, burnt-orange drizzle of organic sediment. To left and right, Benacerraf could make out the mountainous walls of the enclosing crater, like lines of steep, irregular hillocks, their erosion channels stained by gumbo streaks, their profiles softened by the slow relaxation of the bedrock ice. Under the uniform orange glow which suffused everything, the lake’s liquid ethane sat like a basinful of crude oil, thirty miles across.
The lighting — orange above, black below — and the sharp curvature of this small world were disconcerting. It was as if she was looking through a fish-eye lens, like the Apollo periscope, which made the ground bulge upwards towards her, distorted by a rendering in false colors.
She wondered how long it would take for the lack of blue and green in this landscape to drive her crazy.
Rosenberg had been hoping that they might find the tholin washed away, exposing a rim of bedrock water ice, reasonably accessible. It hadn’t worked out that way. These ancient, frozen coastlines were eroded by the slow action of waves — in fact Benacerraf could see some evidence of wave action; at the very edge of the liquid there were parallel streaks of crusty, foamy deposit, like the debris of some industrial pollutant, washed up over the raw tholin — but the drizzle of tholins from the air evidently fell more thickly than the waves could wash them away.
This was really just a down-sloping extension of the sludgy gumbo-coated icescape she’d become used to, the purple-brown sheen of tholin continuing all the way to the edge of the ethane lake and beyond.
And yet this was, nevertheless, a beach: one in its morphology with that other beach at Canaveral, a billion miles away, from which she had launched. And there was the same air of disjointedness she had noticed at beaches on Earth — at the interface between two different media, the sea and the land, where erosion and decay worked to reduce mountains and cliffs to a uniform, muddy mediocrity.
And besides, she thought, maybe this wasn’t so unearthly after all. A few billion years back — give or take a couple of hundred degrees — it mightn’t have been so different to stand on the beaches of primeval Earth, to look out on a similar ocean of sludgy, prebiotic organic soup. It was on a beach like this, she thought, that some proto-amphibian ancestor of mine first crawled out. She had come full circle.
Rosenberg touched her shoulder; she could barely feel the weight of his hand through the layers of her suit. “Weather forecast for all you nautical types,” he said. “Haze.”
“Funny, Rosenberg.”
“So. You ready to go?”
Ready, she thought, to go sailing: on a horseshoe-shaped lake of paraffin, for all the world like a character in an Edward Lear poem. I want to be back in Seattle.
She padded back up the shallow slope of the beach to the boat. She was wearing snowshoes, as they called them: big curving plates of Command Module hull metal, strapped to her blue boots. The snowshoes kept her pretty much on top of the sticky gumbo. She had worked out a way of walking that involved sliding the snowshoes forward first, as if s
craping mud off the soles, to free them of the clinging gumbo.
The “boat” was simply the base of Mott’s Command Module, Jitterbug. Benacerraf and Rosenberg had cut away the external shell of the double-skinned Module a couple of feet above the rounded lip of the heatshield. What they ended up with was a round, shallow bowl with a turned-up rim, something like a big dog-food dish, thirteen feet across. The orifices which had once contained the nozzles of reaction control engines were round, gaping wounds in the shallow walls. Rosenberg had plugged all but one of these; to the last he had fixed a steel cable. Atmospheric entry scorch marks still spread from the heatshield lip up and over the low walls of the boat. The wall had been etched with a scale, gradations inches apart, so they could measure the draft of the boat in Clear Lake. Its interior was cluttered up with the equipment Benacerraf was going to need, out on the ethane.
Building the boat — designing it in the relative warmth of the hab module, cutting and shaping the base of Jitterbug — had actually been fun, in a home-workshop kind of way. Working those hours with Rosenberg, most of them in a companionable silence, had been among the happiest Benacerraf had known since leaving Earth. For once in this mission they’d had a finite, well-defined goal, and the means to achieve it.
But now, that they’d hauled the thing down here to the lake, it looked absurd, flimsy, a lashed-up improvisation. Which, of course, it was.
Benacerraf lined up with Rosenberg behind the boat. In her multilayer suit it was difficult to bend, and she struggled to close her thick gloves around the half-inch-thick rim of the boat’s wall. But when they overcame the friction of the gumbo and got up a little momentum, the boat coasted easily down the beach.
The boat slid into the ethane without a splash, and came to rest a couple of feet from the edge of the beach. It bobbed, eerily slowly, and concentric oily swells rippled away from its circumference, fat and massive.
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