by Neil Clarke
Clarkesworld Magazine
Issue 111
Table of Contents
Yuanyuan's Bubbles
by Liu Cixin
Union
by Tamsyn Muir
Morrigan in Shadow
by Seth Dickinson
When We Die on Mars
by Cassandra Khaw
Technarion
by Sean McMullen
Daddy's World
by Walter Jon Williams
A Dance with Futuristic Dragons: The Science-Fantasy Glamour of Marc Bolan and T. Rex
by Jason Heller
The Humble Swashbuckling Grandmaster: A Conversation with Gene Wolfe
by Kate Baker
Another Word: On Reading, Writing, and the Classics
by Cat Rambo
Editor's Desk: Hibernation Mode Activated
by Neil Clarke
Kokabiel, Angel of the Stars
Art by Peter Mohrbacher
© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2015
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com
Yuanyuan’s Bubbles
Liu Cixin, translated by Carmen Yiling Yan
1
Many people become enraptured by something or other from the moment of their births, as if they came into the world just for the delight of its company. In this way did Yuanyuan become enraptured by soap bubbles.
Yuanyuan was born with an apathetic expression on her face. She even seemed to cry as if she were discharging an obligation. The world was disappointing her greatly, it appeared.
Until, at five months old, she saw soap bubbles for the first time.
Immediately, she began to wave and kick in her mama’s lap, her little eyes alight with a radiance that outshone the sun and stars, as if this was the first time she had truly seen the world.
It was noon in the northwest of China, many months since the last rain. Outside the window, the sun-scorched city billowed with dust. In this world of abnormal drought, the gorgeous apparitions of water drifting through the air were truly creatures of utmost beauty. That his little daughter could recognize their beauty gladdened Baba, who’d blown the bubbles for her. Mama, who was holding her, was very happy too. She had waived her remaining month of maternity leave; the next day, she would return to her lab for work.
2
Time passed. Yuanyuan entered the big kid class of preschool, and she still loved bubbles.
This Sunday, she was on an outing with Baba. She had a little bottle of bubble fluid in her pocket: Baba promised he’d have Mama take her up on her airplane to blow bubbles. This wasn’t play-pretend; they really did go to the crude airfield on the city outskirts. The plane Mama used for her aerial seeding research was parked there.
Yuanyuan was quite disappointed. It was a battered agricultural biplane, probably from the Soviet days. Yuanyuan thought it must have been built out of old wood planks, like the hunter’s hut in the forest from fairy tales. She doubted it could fly at all. But even so, this shabby plane was off limits to Yuanyuan, according to Mama.
“Today’s her birthday!” said Baba. “You’re already working overtime here instead of at home with her. At least let her ride on the plane. Give her some fun and excitement!”
“What fun and excitement? She weighs so much already. How many tree seeds will I have to leave on the ground?” Mama said, hauling another heavy plastic sack into the cargo hold.
Yuanyuan didn’t think she was all that heavy. She screwed her face up and wailed. Mama hurried over to comfort her daughter, taking a strange object out of one of the big plastic tarp sacks on the ground. It was about the same size and shape as a carrot, pointy-headed and streamlined behind it, with a pair of cardboard tail fins stuck on its butt. It looked like a little airplane bomb, only transparent.
This might be fun. Yuanyuan reached out and touched it, only to immediately draw back: it was made of ice.
Mama pointed to a black speck at the center of the little bomb. She told Yuanyuan that it was a tree seed. “The plane drops these ice bombs from way high up, and when they fall to the ground, they stick into the soil. When spring comes, the ice melts. The water it forms helps the seed sprout and grow. If we drop lots and lots of these ice bombs, the desert will become green, and the sand won’t blow into Yuanyuan’s face anymore when she plays outside. Mama’s research project will double the aerial afforestation survival rate in the Northwest drought areas—”
“What does a kid know about survival rates? Sheesh. Yuanyuan, let’s go!” Baba picked Yuanyuan up and marched off. Mama didn’t try to keep them, only quickly cupped her daughter’s face in her hands one quick last time.
Yuanyuan could feel that Mama’s hands were much rougher than Baba’s.
From Baba’s shoulder, Yuanyuan saw the “hunter’s hut” take to the air with a rumble of engines. She blew a string of bubbles toward the plane and watched it disappear into the sandy ether.
Baba carried Yuanyuan out of the airfield to the roadside bus station. As they waited for a bus back into the city, she suddenly felt Baba shiver.
“Baba, are you cold?”
“No . . . Yuanyuan, didn’t you hear something just then?”
“Hmm . . . I don’t think so.”
But Baba had heard it. There had been a low explosion, far off in the direction the plane had been flying, so distant that perhaps he registered it with a sixth sense. He jerked his head around to look back the way they’d come. In front of him and his daughter, the drought lands of the Northwest stared pitilessly toward the vault of heaven above.
3
Time flew onward. Yuanyuan entered elementary school, and she still loved bubbles.
She and Baba visited Mama’s grave on Qingming Festival. Like always, she’d brought along her bottle of bubble fluid. As Baba set his flowers in front of the plain tombstone, Yuanyuan blew out a string of bubbles. Baba would have erupted, but her next words left his eyes wet with tears.
“Mama will see them!” Yuanyuan said, pointing at the bubbles floating past the gravestone.
“Child,” Baba said as he hugged Yuanyuan, “you have to grow up to be like your mother, with her sense of duty and mission, with a high-minded purpose like hers!”
“I already have a high-minded purpose!” Yuanyuan yelled.
“Tell it to Baba?”
“Blow—” Yuanyuan pointed at her bubbles, already flown far into the distance—“big—biiiig—bubbles!”
Baba smiled sadly, shaking his head, and led his daughter away. They weren’t far from where the plane had crashed a few years ago. That year, the seeds in the ice bombs dropped from the sky really did survive, growing into saplings, but the final victor had still been the endless drought. The aerially seeded forest had died to the last tree in the dry, rainless second year. Desertification marched inexorably onward.
Baba turned to look back. The setting sun stretched a long shadow behind the gravestone. The bubbles Yuanyuan had blown were all gone now, like the dreams of the woman in the grave, like the beautiful delusion of the Western Development Project.
4
Time flew onward. Yuanyuan entered middle school, and she still loved bubbles.
Today, Yuanyuan’s young homeroom teacher had come for a home visit. She handed Baba a flashy, novel-looking toy gun. The physics teacher had confiscated it from Yuanyuan for playing during class, she explained. The gun had a fat barrel and a ring like an antenna loop attached to the muzzle. Baba turned it over in his hands, puzzled as to its appeal.
“It’s a bubble gun,” said the homeroom teacher, taking it and pulling the trigger. With a low whirr, a long string of soap bubbles shot from the small ring on the muzzle.
The teacher told Baba that
Yuanyuan’s grades were always the best in her year. Her biggest strength was her robust sense of creativity; the teacher had never seen such a lively-minded student before. He should cherish this seedling, she told him.
“Don’t you feel that the child is a bit . . . how do I say this, a bit effervescent?” Baba asked, hefting the bubble gun.
“Hey, all the kids today are like that. Quite honestly, in this new era, being on the light and airy side isn’t necessarily a flaw.”
Baba sighed, cutting off the conversation with a wave of the bubble gun. He didn’t think he and the homeroom teacher had much to say to each other. She was barely more than a child herself.
Once he saw the homeroom teacher off, leaving just the two of them, Baba decided to have a talk with Yuanyuan about the bubble gun. But immediately he encountered a new source of displeasure.
“You bought another one?” he said, pointing to the cell phone hanging from Yuanyuan’s neck. “But you already got a new one this year!”
“No I didn’t, Baba, I only changed the case! See, it keeps things fresh for me.” Yuanyuan took out a flat box as she spoke. Baba opened it, revealing a row of colorful rectangles. At first glance, he thought they were a set of paints. Only upon further examination did he discover that they were twelve cell phone cases in twelve different colors.
Baba shook his head and set the box aside. “I wanted to talk to you about this . . . tendency.”
Yuanyuan spotted the bubble gun in his hand and snatched it over. “Baba, I promise I won’t bring it to school again!” She shot a string of bubbles at him.
“That’s not what I wanted to talk about. The problem goes far deeper than that. Yuanyuan, look, you’re a big girl now, and yet you still like to blow soap bubbles—”
“Is that wrong?”
“Oh, no, there’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself. It’s just that, like I said, your fondness reflects a certain, hmm, mental tendency.”
Yuanyuan stared blankly at her father.
“It demonstrates your tendency to chase after pretty, novel, superficial things. You easily lose yourself in mirages. Being so ungrounded in reality will lead you in the wrong direction in life.”
Yuanyuan looked at the soap bubbles filling the room, seeming even more puzzled. The bubbles swam tranquilly in the air like a school of transparent goldfish.
“Baba, let’s talk about something more interesting!” Yuanyuan leaned against Baba’s shoulder and adopted a confidential tone of voice. “Do you think our homeroom teacher is pretty?”
“I didn’t notice . . . Yuanyuan, what I was saying was—”
“She’s totally gorgeous!”
“I guess . . . I was about to say that—”
“Baba, you have to have noticed the way she looked at you just then, when you were talking. She was really into you!”
“Child, I swear, can’t you leave off thinking about these silly things?” Baba irritably peeled his daughter’s hand off his shoulder.
Yuanyuan sighed dramatically. “Oh, Baba, you’ve turned into one of those people who are grumpy about everything. What’s the point of living if you never have anything new or interesting or exciting? You should be embarrassed, trying to be a life coach for other people.”
A soap bubble drifted in front of Baba’s face, then burst. He felt a puff of moist air, almost impossibly faint, and yet the ephemeral little misty drizzle granted him a moment of bliss. It made him think of his distant southern homeland, of all things. He sighed imperceptibly.
“When I was young, I chased after fantasies too. Your mother and I came here from Shanghai, so naive as to think that the Northwest would be a place where we could show the world our worth. In an unimaginably short time, we architects raised an entire, brand-new city out of the wasteland. We thought it would be our life’s achievement. After we left this world, this city would stand as proof that we didn’t live our lives in vain. Who could have imagined that we’d devoted our best years, and even our very lives, to nothing more than a soap bubble?
Yuanyuan was astonished. “What do you mean, Silk Road City is a soap bubble? It’s right here, rock solid. There’s no way it’s going to vanish with a pop, right?”
“It’s about to disappear. The central government has approved the province’s report and suspended all new projects to divert water to Silk Road City.”
“Do they want us to die of thirst? The taps only work once every two days already, an hour and a half each time!”
“They’re working out a ten-year evacuation plan right now. The entire city will be dismantled and relocated. Silk Road City will be the first city in today’s world to disappear due to water shortages, a modern Loulan . . . In truth, the entire Western Development Project that once had us aflame with passion has already devolved into a nightmarish Western Mining Project. Who knows, that might be an ever bigger soap bubble.”
“Wow, that’s great!” Yuanyuan cheered. “We should have left this place ages ago! It’s so boring here, I really can’t stand it! Let’s move! Move to a brand new place and start a brand new life! It’s going to be amazing, Baba!”
Baba looked at his daughter silently, then stood and walked to the window. He gazed dumbly outside at the city amid yellow sand. His drooping shoulders made his silhouette suddenly appear much older.
“Baba,” Yuanyuan called softly, but her father didn’t respond.
Two days later, Yuanyuan’s father took office as the last mayor of the fading city.
5
Yuanyuan got second place in science on her province’s college entry examinations. Baba, truly overjoyed in a way that he rarely was, magnanimously asked his daughter if she had anything she wanted as a reward, even something absurd. Yuanyuan stuck her open hand, fingers spread, in his direction.
“Five . . . five of what?”
“Five bars of Diao brand clear soap.” She stuck out her other hand. “Ten bags of Tide laundry powder.” She flipped her hands over. “Twenty bottles of White Cat dish detergent.” Last, she took out a piece of paper. “Most importantly, I need these chemicals. Buy them in the amounts I listed.”
Getting the chemicals took work on her father’s part. He had to ask a bureau deputy director going on a business trip to Beijing, who spent a whole day finding them all.
Once she had everything, Yuanyuan holed herself up in the bathroom for three busy days, filling a big washtub with some sort of liquid whose smell permeated into every room in the house. The fourth day, two classmates came over to deliver a custom-made hoop object more than a meter in diameter, shaped from a long piece of metal pipe pricked with small holes.
The fifth day started with a group of visitors. There were two cameramen from different news stations, and the mayor recognized an attractive lady as the hostess of an entertainment program on the provincial channel. There were also two garishly dressed fellows calling themselves adjudicators from the China branch of Guinness World Records, flown in from Shanghai the previous day. One of them said in a hoarse voice, “Mr. Mayor, your daughter—” he broke off, coughing. “The air’s awfully dry here. Your daughter is about to set a world record!”
The mayor followed the others onto the apartment building’s flat rooftop, where he found his daughter and several of her classmates already there. Yuanyuan was carrying the big hoop. The washtub stood in front of them, filled with the liquid she’d mixed. The two adjudicators went to work erecting two posts with unit markings along their length. Only later did the mayor learn that they were used for measuring the diameter of soap bubbles.
Once the preparations were done, Yuanyuan dipped the hoop into the washtub. When she lifted it out, it was filmed with bubble fluid. She carefully fastened the hoop to the end of a long pole, walked to the building’s edge, and waved the pole so that the hoop drew a wide circle in the air, blowing an enormous soap bubble. The bubble shimmered and undulated in midair as if it were dancing. Later, he learned that it was an incredible 4.6 meters in diameter, breaking the Gu
inness world record of 3.9 meters previously held by Kaj Loos of Belgium.
“The composition of the bubble mixture is important, but the real trick is in this hoop,” Yuanyuan said in response to the TV hostess’s questions. “The guy from Belgium used an ordinary hoop to blow his bubble, while mine was made by drilling holes along the length of a piece of metal pipe, then bending it into a circle. The pipe is filled with bubble fluid, and as the big bubble forms, the fluid continuously seeps from the little holes, so that as much fluid is available to the bubble as possible. That naturally allows me to blow bigger bubbles.”
“Then, do you think you can blow even bigger bubbles in the future?” asked the hostess.
“Of course! It would take research into several important factors in bubble formation, including viscosity, malleability, rate of evaporation, and surface tension. For forming super-big bubbles, the last two need the most work. Rate of evaporation needs to be lowered, since evaporation is the main reason why bubbles burst. As for surface tension . . . do you know why you can’t blow bubbles with pure water?”
“Because the surface tension is too small?”
“It’s actually the opposite. The surface tension of pure water is too high to trap air. For my next question, what’s the relationship between a bubble’s surface tension and its diameter?”
“Well, from what you’ve said, the smaller the surface tension, the larger the bubble?”
“Nope! Once the bubble is formed, as the bubble increases in size, it actually needs higher surface tension to maintain its walls. You can see the problem here: the surface tension of a fluid is fixed. In that case, if we want to blow really big bubbles, what problem do we need to solve?”
The hostess shook her head, lost. She was the type hired more for charisma and ease with words than for deeper comprehension. Yuanyuan seemed to realize this. “Never mind, let’s blow some more big bubbles for our audience!”
And thus, several more four- and five-meter bubbles drifted in the wind high above the city. In this dry, dust-suffused world, they seemed terribly surreal, like mirages of another world.