by Neil Clarke
“Another corrupt official,” Zheng Dong scoffed. “Everyone is saying that he was plundering the special fund for the anti-meteor system.”
“We live in special times,” Han Dan replied, feeling a vague fury rise within her chest as she spoke. “The only way to deal with these bastards is to give ’em the old one-two. Natural disasters don’t scare me half as bad as man-made ones! You’ve seen the internal military report that’s been circulating, right? We’ve got more meteor showers coming our way—we can’t afford to make any mistakes!”
The report has been handed out to all of the top-level commanders in the armed forces. As the captain of a warship, Zheng Dong had of course been provided a copy.
“As a soldier, I’ll follow my orders, whatever they are, unconditionally. But as a civilian, I want to know what the hell they were thinking when they chose this route!”
Han Dan crouched by the edge of the field and peered into the crystal clear water of the irrigation ditch. Duckweed grew in the muddy channel bottom, and small fish played in the thick grass. Bucolic scenes like this made it hard to believe that they were on a planetship wandering the universe.
“In the vastness of the universe, technology is our one and only defense,” Zheng Dong said, suddenly recalling the favorite saying of the famous General Han Lie, passed down by the men and women of the military for millennia.
“That’s exactly right,” Han Dan said. “The universe is so big—who knows what dangers might lie in store for us? Better to invest our resources in the development of more perfect technology, rather than find ourselves unable to affect a rescue in our darkest hour of need.”
Weihan had been out all day on the old motorcycle he’d bought at the flea market, delivering food from the restaurant. He’d wasted a lot of time swapping out the old battery, so it was late when he got back. Most of the vehicles on the planetships were powered by antimatter, but spacecraft used fusion reactors. Batteries had been getting more and more expensive lately. There hardly seemed anything to them—palm-sized cylinders with powerful magnets to keep their tiny antimatter crystals trapped inside a vacuum. Even so, they still cost eight bucks—about as much as a meal in Chang’an.
When he got back, Weihan saw his dad standing in the field, talking to Han Dan.
“You two know each other?”
“Just met,” Zheng Dong lied. “Is this your girlfriend?”
“We’re more than friends, but I can’t say we’ve got that kind of relationship going on.”
Weihan was telling the truth. Han Dan was a melancholy sort. The girls he fell for tended to be more like him—full of vim and vinegar.
“Ah, well. That’s probably for the best,” Zheng Dong said, relieved. “Oh, that reminds me. Have you thought at all about going to grad school? Or military school?”
Weihan frowned. “Even if you pointed a gun at my chest I wouldn’t go! Not on my life!”
Well, at least I know where he got his stubborn streak from, Han Dan thought to herself.
VII. Seventh Avenue Square
The most exciting thoroughfare in all of Chang’an was Seventh Avenue, running from North to South. Along the northern stretch of the broad street one could find the very highest government offices: consulates, offices of the military, legislative buildings, and in the center of them all the most important structure in the entire Planetship Alliance: the mysterious “All Planetship High Command.” The southern stretch of Seventh Avenue, meanwhile was known as the “Golden Mile,” a place of endless activity and never-ending crowds. Located in the nexus of the two was the Seventh Avenue Square, said to be the largest in all the cities of the planetships. A massive statue of General Han Lie towered off to one side. Some said that he had been a cruel dictator, while others said he was a leader of great skill and intelligence. Even though more than a thousand years had passed since his death, even now he remained a controversial figure.
In the southern part of the great square was the Chang’an Municipal Theater. For reasons immediately obvious to anyone who saw it, locals called it the “steamed bun theater.” Today’s scheduled performance was the opera Wandering Earth, an adaption of Liu Cixin’s ancient science fiction tale. Thanks perhaps to the striking similarity of the real life experiences of the people of the planetships to the plot of this hoary old story, the thousand-year-old opera was as popular as ever.
Just past nightfall Weihan and Han Dan emerged from the theater and walked out into the square. Owing to the recent disaster on Phaeton there was less activity in the square than usual, which was filled with countless funeral wreaths commemorating the dead, along with collection stations where concerned citizens could donate to the ongoing relief efforts. The nearby shops seemed as busy as ever, however. Refugees and death had already become an unavoidable part of their long journey through the universe and the people of Europa had become accustomed to the presence.
Han Dan, however, seemed incredibly moved by the opera, and it was a long time after they left the theater before she stopped brushing the tears from her eyes.
“Alright already, here,” Weihan said, handing her an ice cream cone he’d just bought. “Don’t cry.”
Suddenly feeling self-conscious, Han Dan stopped crying and took a small bite of ice cream.
“Oh! It’s really good. When I was little, I wouldn’t have dreamed it could have tasted this good!”
“When you were little?” he asked, looking puzzled. “Did your parents not let you eat junk food or something?”
“They didn’t have this sort of thing on the spaceship . . . ” she said quietly.
“I’d heard that before we built the planetships all mankind lived on spaceships,” Weihan said, looking up at the imposing statue of General Han Lie. “I even visited some of the actual ships from the Age of Exile that were saved as historical relics. Twenty thousand people crammed onto a single busted down ship just over one kilometer long. Their rooms were like narrow little pigeon cages—families of four had to find a way to fit into a room that must have been, what? Twenty square meters? They say General Han Lie grew up on a ship like that . . . ”
While Han Dan waited for him in the square, Weihan went and fetched his motorcycle.
“Hop on. We should be getting back.”
As the motorcycle sped down the broad avenue, the street lights on either side of the street swept past. Chang’an at night was splendid to behold, with its myriad of lights zipping about like snakes of liquid silver or dancing fire—or shooting stars, a perfect mirror of the heavens above.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the shooting stars which had been appearing in the skies of the planetships were coming from a small but incredibly dense asteroid belt which they happened to be passing through at the moment. Whirling around a massive neutron star with truly unsettling velocity, the asteroid belt was the kind of place that few civilizations dared to tread. But humanity wasn’t just any civilization.
Han Dan held Weihan tightly around the waist, resting against his firm back, her eyes softly closed. She couldn’t remember when she last had someone like this—someone who set her mind at ease. In a dreamlike voice she said, “When I was a little girl, it was my favorite thing in the whole world to hold my dad just like this . . . He was a miner. Every day I would lie on the floor of the spaceship by one of the viewing windows and watch the mining ships moving the asteroids around, building planetships from nuclear slag, or repairing broken down spacecraft . . .
The year I turned ten, there was an accident. Dad’s ship was pulling an asteroid to install into a prototype planetship that was taking shape—the future Planetship Asia—when there was sudden movement in the molten magma on the surface . . . Later on mom remarried and found me a stepdad, but he didn’t make much of an impression. He was an engineer who always left for work before I woke up and got back after I was asleep. That’s how life was for a while, until mom got sick and died. Stepdad found a stepmom, and found me a job, too, doing odd chores in the research cent
er where he worked . . . When I finally left home my little brother was only five months old . . . ”
Han Dan would have been surprised to see that Weihan was hanging on her every word, despite the loud roar of his clunky old motorcycle and the softness of her voice. Perhaps she’d kept these secrets for too long and found herself unconsciously longing for the opportunity to share them with someone.
“The next time I saw my brother, he was already an old man, gray at the temples, with general’s epaulets on his shoulders. He had no idea I was his older sister . . . Or maybe he knew after all. I can’t say for sure . . . When I asked why he had joined the military he just said, ‘There are some things that you have to be willing to put your life on the line for.’ ”
Hearing these words, Weihan felt something twitch inside his chest.
His mother, Qin Weiyue, was a teacher in the history department of one of Chang’an’s universities. In her free time, she liked to write light-hearted short essays for current affairs websites.
It was Friday, and already quite late. Since she didn’t need to work the next day, she was sitting in front of her computer thinking about what to write on next.
When Weihan got back home, he was drunk, leaning on Han Dan. He had originally been planning to ply her with booze—the better to extract the secrets of her past. He had become convinced that there was more to this young girl than met the eye. Only, Han Dan had quickly turned the tables on him—the living incarnation of the God of Drinking, that girl!
For her part, Weihan’s mother was shocked to see the state her son was in—well, probably any mother would be shocked to see her own son bringing back some floozy from the bar with him. But she was even more shocked to see who he had come home with.
“Is it really you?”
VIII. Home
Weihan woke to find himself lying on the couch with a splitting headache from the booze.
The moon hung low in the sky outside the window, a smoldering coal ember giving off a soft red glow. Only, the clock in the kitchen said that it was already nine o’clock in the morning.
“You up? Here, hangover cure,” his mother said, handed him some pills.
Weihan suddenly realized that the “moon” was actually the extinguished artificial sun. The engineers had turned it off for an inspection. Artificial suns like this usually needed regular repairs every three years or so.
Weihan hadn’t been back in over a year, but even after all this time, the carnations that he’d given his mother for his last visit were still sitting in the imitation Kangxi vase. The flowers had been specially treated so that they’d never wilt.
“Mom, will the Earth’s sun ever go out?” He sighed. “Never mind. Who knows what the Earth is like now . . . ” In school, Weihan had been on the science and math track, so he hadn’t learned much history.
After a long pause, his mother finally said: “Many years ago, the Earth starting using robots on a massive scale. Employees were fired and a long spell of high unemployment led to an even longer crime wave. After the ‘criminals’ were exiled to space only two types of ‘people’ were left on Earth: rich people and robots. And that’s all I want to say about that.”
“In the end, though, didn’t the robots rise up—like the slaves of Sparta?” he asked. “I heard that by the time our military got there to save the day there wasn’t much of anything left to save.”
His mother blanched.
“Where did you hear about the rebellion?”
“No wall is without chinks through which the wind may pass,” Weihan said. “Just look at our planetships and you can figure it out. Even though we’ve obviously already developed advanced artificial intelligence we still use human operators for all of the most critical jobs. Even steering the planetships themselves! It’s hard to think of a more complicated job than that.”
Not having succeeded in prying anything out of Han Dan the night before, Weihan was forced to resort to plan B: stealing her notebook.
He quietly opened the door to her room and, hearing nothing in response, tiptoed inside where he discovered Han Dan deep in thought in front of the computer.
All the girls in the alliance seemed to be going nuts for the 3D mapping apps. They used them to zoom in on different locations and find where they could buy the cutest stuffed animals, or which pedestrian mall had the best snacks. Shopping destination set, off they’d go.
Han Dan was looking for a place to buy instruments—she’d lost her erhu on Phaeton.
Han Dan chose the first erhu that caught her fancy and paid via their website. After carefully typing in the address of the restaurant she closed out the purchase window and zoomed out. The bustling streets flashed by, quickly becoming a spider’s web of lanes and alleyways. Gradually, the flat plane of the map gave way to the convex outline of the planetship. Chang’an had long since disappeared from sight, leaving only the blue of the ocean, the green of the continents, the white of the North Pole, and red-hot glow of the thrusters of the South Pole, as innumerable as they were massive.
Continuing to zoom out, the planetship shrank into a tiny globe, small enough to be held in the palm of one’s hand, with a long tail of ions streaming out behind it. Some of these, charged with electricity, lingered in the atmosphere of the South Pole, forming majestic auroras of green light. As the planetship continued to shrink, now the size of a soybean, other planetships began to appear on the screen, dozens of them, all moving through space in unison with Europa. Countless spacecraft scarcely the size of sesame seeds could be seen swimming in schools, as if fish, between the planetships.
Han Dan manipulated the map with practiced ease, becoming so absorbed in the task at hand that she failed to detect Weihan’s presence behind her.
In the middle of the planetships a mass of what appeared to be a pool of mist or clouds could be seen. This was the famous “Shipyard” of the Planetship Alliance. Outfitted with its own propulsion system, the Shipyard could move through the universe along with the planetships—truly, they built nothing stationary.
Han Dan zoomed in, and the clouds gradually resolved into distinct forms: countless fragments of ice and asteroids, along with space stations, and engineering ships. A large group of spacecraft were in the process of collecting nuclear waste, garbage, and chunks of space rock which another group was forming into an object the size of a small asteroid, perhaps ten kilometers in diameter. Of course, this wasn’t the only planetship under construction in the Shipyard at the moment—others were almost halfway complete, having begun to compress under the force of their own gravitational pull. The extreme heat of these embryonic planetships gave rise to rivers of liquid magma around continents of jet black rock, with their immature atmospheres rich in sulfur and carbon dioxide.
On the more complete planetships, meanwhile, artificial suns had already been installed and seas of the deepest blue could be made out. Although their surfaces were still scalding hot, thunderstorms were already brewing in the dark clouds blocking their skies, the better to cool the nearly complete planetships. Rings of engineering ships could be made out, apparently preparing to impregnate the primordial seas with blue-green algae, origin of all life, while massive earthmovers prepared to move into action. In the distance, the badly damaged Phaeton could be seen limping back to the Shipyard to undergo repairs.
Han Dan changed locations on the map so that she was now facing outward, toward the asteroid belt. Beyond it, further asteroid belts could be made out, not to mention a handful of planets. Most star systems had more than one asteroid belt—the Solar System where they had come from had three. So broad, and so far-reaching, they seemed more like horizontal walls in the fabric of space and time itself, lacking clearly defined limits. A large number of warships could be seen stationed there, ready to destroy any asteroid that might threaten the planetships at a moment’s notice.
From the images on the screen it was doubtless that they found themselves in the wreckage of a massive supernova: in the midst of the ice-cold
interstellar dust a collapsed neutron star spun in absolute isolation. From time to time they had been known to discover the remains of alien civilizations in places like this.
It was starting to look like the meteor shower which had fallen on Planetship Phaeton several days earlier was but a drizzle before the storm. Han Dan opened her inbox where she found a new message waiting for her, addressed to her official station, “All Planetship High Command.” Just as Han Dan was about to open the email, she finally realized that someone had been standing behind her all along. She spun around, feeling a cold shock run from her toes to her fingertips.
Weihan froze, nailed to the spot.
IX. The Alliance Awakens
After the incident, it became obvious their remaining time together would not be long. In way of apology, Weihan pooled his meager savings from the previous week to buy a cheap necklace from a famous Chang’an hawker’s market.
Under the star-filled sky of Riverside Park, the waters were silent and seemingly unmoving.
“Close your eyes,” he said. Han Dan obliged him, and he fastened the necklace around her neck. Her skin was cold to the touch, practically corpse-like.
“I want to know who you are,” he said.
“If you want to know that, then you’ll need to go way back at the beginning,” Han Dan said. “When mankind first began building the planetships, the nightmares of the recent past set the planners against the idea of building high-powered robots ever again . . .
“Eventually they arrived at a compromise: they would develop an advanced cyborg operating system so that these augmented men might become the ‘brains’ of the planetships. The experiments were incredibly dangerous—in the months before they found me, I was told that over one hundred volunteers died had for the cause. When the lead scientist reached out to me though, I said, ‘Sure, why not? I’m all alone in the world anyway, so it’s not like anyone will miss me when I’m gone.’ ”
Weihan understood what she meant. Han Dan was a drifter, so for her it might not be the worst thing in the world if the experiment failed. But instead it was a success . . . To live as a young girl without companionship for over a thousand years—was this a blessing or a curse?