“Someday when we can just sit back and collect the checks, I’ll get a Winnebago Aurora—the 40,000 cubic feet model—and we and our kids will drift around all summer in Alaska and all winter in Brazil, eating nothing but the food we catch with our own hands. You haven’t seen Alaska until you’ve seen it in an RV airship. We can go to places that not even snowmachines and seaplanes can get to, and hover over a lake that has never seen a man, not a soul around us for hundreds of miles.”
Within seconds we were gliding over the broad, slow expanse of the Yellow River. Filled with silt, the muddy water below us was already beginning to take on its namesake color, which would deepen and grow even muddier over the next few hundred miles as it traveled through the Loess Plateau and picked up the silt deposited over the eons by wind.
Below us, small sightseeing blimps floated lazily over the river. The passengers huddled in the gondolas to look through the transparent floor at the sheepskin rafts drifting on the river below the same way Caribbean tourists looked through glass-bottom boats at the fish in the coral reef.
Icke throttled up and we began to accelerate north and east, largely following the course of the Yellow River, towards Inner Mongolia.
* * *
The Millennium Clean Energy Act is one of the few acts by the “clowns down in D.C.” that Icke approved: “It gave me most of my business.”
Originally designed as a way to protect domestic manufacturers against Chinese competition and to appease the environmental lobby, the law imposed a heavy tax on goods entering the United States based on the carbon footprint of the method of transportation (since the tax was not based on the goods’ country-of-origin, it skirted the WTO rules against increased tariffs).
Combined with rising fuel costs, the law created a bonanza for zeppelin shippers. Within a few years, Chinese companies were churning out cheap zeppelins that sipped fuel and squeezed every last bit of advantage from solar power. Dongfengs became a common sight in American skies.
A long-haul zeppelin cannot compete with a 747 for lifting capacity or speed, but it wins hands down on fuel efficiency and carbon profile, and it’s far faster than surface shipping. Going from Lanzhou to Las Vegas, like Icke and I were doing, would take about three to four weeks by surface shipping at the fastest: a couple days to go from Lanzhou to Shanghai by truck or train, about two weeks to cross the Pacific by ship, another day or so to truck from California to Las Vegas, and add in a week or so for loading, unloading, and sitting in customs. A direct airplane flight would get you there in a day, but the fuel cost and carbon tax at the border would make it uneconomical for many goods.
“Every time you have to load and unload and change the mode of transport, that’s money lost to you,” Icke said. “We are trucks that don’t need highways, boats that don’t need rivers, airplanes that don’t need airports. If you can find a piece of flat land the size of a football field, that’s enough for us. We can deliver door to door from a yurt in Mongolia to your apartment in New York—assuming your building has a mooring mast on top.”
A typical zeppelin built in the last twenty years, cruising at 110 mph, can make the 6900-mile haul between Lanzhou and Las Vegas in about 63 hours. If it makes heavy use of solar power, as Icke’s Feimaotui is designed to do, it can end up using less than a fraction of a percent of the fuel that a 747 would need to carry the same weight for the same distance. Plus, it has the advantage I’d mentioned of being more accommodating of bulky, irregularly-shaped loads.
Although we were making the transpacific long haul, most of our journey would be spent flying over land. The curvature of the Earth meant that the closest flight path between any two points on the globe followed a great circle that connected the two points and bisected the globe into two equal parts. From Lanzhou to Las Vegas, this meant that we would fly north and east over Inner Mongolia, Mongolia, Siberia, across the Bering Strait, and then fly east and south over Alaska, the Pacific Ocean off the coast of British Columbia, until we hit land again with Oregon, and finally reach the deserts of Nevada.
* * *
Below us, the vast city of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, stretched out to the horizon, a megalopolis of shining steel and smooth glass, vast blocks of western-style houses and manicured gardens. The grid of new, wide streets was as empty as those in Pyongyang, and I could count the number of pedestrians on the fingers of one hand. Our height and open view made the scene take on the look of tilt-shift photographs, as though we were standing over a tabletop scale model of the city, with a few miniature cars and playing figurines scattered about the model.
Ordos is China’s Alberta. There is coal here, some of the best, cleanest coal in the world. Ordos was planned in anticipation of an energy boom, but the construction itself became the boom. The more they spent on construction, the more it looked on paper like there was need for even more construction. So now there is this Xanadu, a ghost town from birth. On paper it is the second richest place in China, per capita income just behind Shanghai.
As we flew over the center of Ordos, a panda rose up and hailed us. The panda’s vehicle was a small blimp, painted olive green and carrying the English legend: “Aerial Transport Patrol, People’s Republic of China.” Icke slowed down and sent over the cargo manifests, the maintenance records, which the panda could cross-check against the international registry of cargo airships, and his journey log. After a few minutes, someone waved at us from the window in the gondola of the blimp, and a Chinese voice told us over radio that we were free to move on.
“This is such a messed up country,” Icke said.”They have the money to build something like Ordos, but have you been to Guangxi? It’s near Vietnam, and outside the cities the people there are among the poorest in the world. They have nothing except the mud on the floor of their huts, and beautiful scenery and beautiful women.”
Icke had met Yeling there, through a mail-order bride service. It was hard to meet women when you were in the air three hundred days of the year.
On the day of Icke’s appointment, he was making a run through Nanning, the provincial capital, as part of a union crew picking up a shipment of star anise. He had the next day, a Saturday, off, and he traveled down to the introduction center a hundred kilometers outside Nanning to meet the girls whose pictures he had picked out and who had been bused in from the surrounding villages.
They had fifteen girls for him. They met in a village school house. Icke sat on a small stool at the front of the classroom with his back to the blackboard,and the girls were brought in to sit at the student desks, as though he was there to teach them.
Most of them knew some English, and he could talk to them for a little bit and mark down, on a chart, the three girls that he wanted to chat with one-on-one in private. The girls he didn’t pick would wait around for the next Westerner customer to come and see them in another half hour.
“They say that some services would even let you try the girls out for a bit, like allow you to take them to a hotel for a night, but I don’t believe that. Anyway, mine wasn’t like that. We just talked. I didn’t mark down three girls. Yeling was the only one I picked.
“I liked the way she looked. Her skin was so smooth, so young-looking, and I loved her hair, straight and black with a little curl at the end. She smelled like grass and rainwater. But I liked even more the way she acted with me: shy and very eager to please, something you don’t see much in the women back home.” He looked over at me as I took notes, and shrugged. “If you want to put a label on me and make the people who read what you write feel good about themselves, that’s your choice. It doesn’t make the label true.”
I asked him if something felt wrong about the process, like shopping for a thing.
“I paid the service two thousand dollars, and gave her family another five thousand before I married her. Some people will not like that. They’ll think something is not altogether right about the way I married her
“But I know I’m happy when I’m with her. That’s enough for me.
“By the time I met her, Yeling had already dropped out of high school. If I didn’t meet her, she would not have gone on to college. She would not have become a lawyer or banker. She would not have gone to work in an office and come home to do yoga. That’s the way the world is.
“Maybe she would have gone to Nanning to become a masseuse or bathhouse girl. Maybe she would have married an old peasant from the next village who she didn’t even know just because he could give her family some money. Maybe she would have spent the rest of her life getting parasites from toiling in the rice paddies all day and bringing up children in a mud hut at night. And she would have looked like an old woman by thirty.
“How could that have been better?”
* * *
The language of the zeppeliners on the transpacific long haul, though officially English, is a mix of images and words from America and China. Dao, knife, dough, and dollar are used as interchangeable synonyms. Ursine imagery is applied to law enforcement agents along the route: a panda is a Chinese air patrol unit, and a polar bear Russian; in Alaska they are Kodiaks, and off the coast of BC they become whales; finally in America the ships have to deal with grizzlies. The bear’s job is to make the life of the zeppeliner difficult: catching pilots who have been at the controls for more than six hours without switching off, who fly above or below regulation altitude, who mix hydrogen into the lift gas to achieve an extra edge in cargo capacity.
“Whales?” I asked Icke. How was whale a type of bear?
“Evolution,” Icke said. “Darwin said that a race of bears swimming with their mouths open for water bugs may eventually evolve into whales.” (I checked. This was true.)
* * *
Nothing changed as an electronic beep from the ship’s GPS informed us that we crossed the international border between China and Mongolia somewhere in the desolate, dry plains of the Gobi below, dotted with sparse clumps of short, brittle grass.
Yeling came into the control cab to take over. Icke locked the controls and got up. In the small space at the back of the control cab, they spoke to each other for a bit in lowered voices, kissed, while I stared at the instrument panels, trying hard not to eavesdrop.
Every marriage had its own engine, with its own rhythm and fuel, its own language and control scheme, a quiet hum that kept everything moving. But the hum was so quiet that sometimes it was more felt than heard, and you had to listen for it if you didn’t want to miss it.
Then Icke left and Yeling came forward to take the pilot’s seat.
She looked at me. “There’s a second bunk in the back if you want to park yourself a bit.” Her English was accented but good, and you could hear traces of Icke’s broad New England A’s and non-rhoticity in some of the words.
I thanked her and told her that I wasn’t sleepy yet.
She nodded and concentrated on flying the ship, her hands gripping the stick for the empennage—the elevators and rudders in the cruciform tail—and the wheel for the trim far more tightly than Icke had.
I stared at the empty, cold desert passing beneath us for a while, and then I asked her what she had been doing when I first showed up at the airport.
“Fixing the eyes of the ship. Barry likes to see the mouth all red and fierce, but the eyes are more important.
“A ship is a dragon, and dragons navigate by sight. One eye for the sky, another for the sea. A ship without eyes cannot see the coming storms and ride the changing winds. It won’t see the underwater rocks near the shore and know the direction of land. A blind ship will sink.”
An airship, she said, needed eyes even more than a ship on water. It moved so much faster and there were so many more things that could go wrong.
“Barry thinks it’s enough to have these.” She gestured towards the instrument panel before her: GPS, radar, radio, altimeter, gyroscope, compass. “But these things help Barry, not the ship. The ship itself needs to see.
“Barry thinks this is superstition, and he doesn’t want me to do it. But I tell him that the ship looks more impressive for customers if he keeps the eyes freshly painted. That he thinks make sense.”
Yeling told me that she had also crawled all over the hull of the ship and traced out a pattern of oval dragon scales on the surface of the hull with tung oil. “It looks like the way the ice cracks in spring on a lake with good fengshui. A ship with a good coat of dragon scales won’t ever be claimed by water.”
The sky darkened and night fell. Beneath us was complete darkness, northern Mongolia and the Russian Far East being some of the least densely inhabited regions of the globe. Above us, stars, denser than I had ever seen winked into existence. It felt as though we were drifting on the surface of a sea at night, the water around us filled with the glow of sea jellies, the way I remember when I used to swim at night in Long Island Sound off of the Connecticut coast.
“I think I’ll sleep now,” I said. She nodded, and then told me that I could microwave something for myself in the small galley behind the control cab, off to the side of the main corridor.
The galley was tiny, barely larger than a closet. There was a fridge, a microwave, a sink, and a small two-burner electric range. Everything was kept spotless. The pots and pans were neatly hung on the wall, and the dishes were stacked in a grid of cubbyholes and tied down with velcro straps. I ate quickly and then followed the sound of snores aft.
Icke had left the light on for me. In the windowless bedroom, the soft, warm glow and the wood-paneled walls were pleasant and induced sleep. Two bunks, one on top of another, hung against one wall of the small bedroom. Icke was asleep in the bottom one. In one corner of the room was a small vanity with a mirror, and pictures of Yeling’s family were taped around the frame of the mirror.
It struck me then that this was Icke and Yeling’s home. Icke had told me that they owned a house in western Massachusetts, but they spent only about a month out of the year there. Most of their meals were cooked and eaten in the American Dragon, and most of their dreams were dreamt here in this room, each alone in a bunk.
A poster of smiling children drawn in the style of Chinese folk art was on the wall next to the vanity, and framed pictures of Yeling and Icke together, smiling, filled the rest of the wall space. I looked through them: wedding, vacation, somewhere in a Chinese city, somewhere near a lake with snowy shores, each of them holding up a big fish.
I crawled into the top bunk, and between Icke’s snores, I could hear the faint hum of the ship’s engines, so faint that you almost missed it if you didn’t listen for it.
* * *
I was more tired than I had realized, and slept through the rest of Yeling’s shift as well as Icke’s next shift. By the time I woke up, it was just after sunrise, and Yeling was again at the helm. We were deep in Russia, flying over the endless coniferous Boreal forests of the heart of Siberia. Our course was now growing ever more easterly as we approached the tip of Siberia where it would meet Alaska across the Bering Sea.
She was listening to an audio book as I came into the control cab. She reached out to turn it off when she heard me, but I told her that it was all right.
It was a book about baseball, an explanation of the basic rules for non-fans. The particular section she was listening to dealt with the art of how to appreciate a stolen base.
Yeling stopped the book at the end of the chapter. I sipped a cup of coffee while we watched the sun rise higher and higher over the Siberian taiga, lighting up the lichen woodland dotted with bogs and pristine lakes still frozen over.
“I didn’t understand the game when I first married Barry. We do not have baseball in China, especially not where I grew up.
“Sometimes, when Barry and I aren’t working, when I stay up a bit during my shift to sit with him or on our days off, I want to talk about the games I played as a girl or a book I remember reading in school or a festival we had back home. But it’s difficult.
“Even for a simple funny memory I wanted to share about the time my cousins and I made th
ese new paper boats, I’d have to explain everything: the names of the paper boats we made, the rules for racing them, the festival that we were celebrating and what the custom for racing paper boats was about, the jobs and histories of the spirits for the festival, the names of the cousins and how we were related, and by then I’d forgotten what was the stupid little story I wanted to share.
“It was exhausting for both of us. I used to work hard to try to explain everything, but Barry would get tired, and he couldn’t keep the Chinese names straight or even hear the difference between them. So I stopped.
“But I want to be able to talk to Barry. Where there is no language, people have to build language. Barry likes baseball. So I listen to this book and then we have something to talk about. He is happy when I can listen to or watch a baseball game with him and say a few words when I can follow what’s happening.”
* * *
Icke was at the helm for the northernmost leg of our journey, where we flew parallel to the Arctic Circle and just south of it. Day and night had lost their meaning as we flew into the extreme northern latitudes. I was already getting used to the six-hour-on, six-hour-off rhythm of their routine, and slowly synching my body’s clock to theirs.
I asked Icke if he knew much about Yeling’s family or spent much time with them.
“No. She sends some money back to them every couple of months. She’s careful with the budget, and I know that anything she sends them she’s worked for as hard as I did. I’ve had to work on her to get her to be a little more generous with herself, and to spend money on things that will make us happy right now. Every time we go to Vegas now she’s willing to play some games with me and lose a little money, but she even has a budget for that.
“I don’t get involved with her family. I figure that if she wanted out of her home and village so badly that she was willing to float away with a stranger in a bag of gas, then there’s no need for me to become part of what she’s left behind.
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection Page 89