Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 111

by Neil Clarke

  “The second question: can you make a superbubble float a long way on the wind, for, say, a few thousand kilometers?”

  “Not a problem. Heat from the sun accumulates in the bubble, so the air inside expands and creates buoyancy like a hot air balloon’s. The superbubble today fell only because it was formed too low in altitude, with too weak of a breeze.”

  “The third question: can you ensure that the superbubbles burst after a specific length of time?”

  “That’s doable. We’d only need to adjust the concentration of one of the ingredients to change the solution’s rate of evaporation.”

  “The last question: given enough investment money, can you blow millions, or even billions, of superbubbles?”

  Yuanyuan’s eyes widened in surprise. “Billions? Heavens, what for?”

  “Picture this in your mind: above the faraway sea, countless superbubbles are forming. Propelled by the strong winds of the stratosphere, they’ll set sail on a long journey to ultimately arrive in the sky above northwest China, then burst in unison, scattering the humid ocean air they formed around into our dry air . . . yes, with superbubbles, we can bring in moist air from the seas to the Northwest! In other words, we can bring in rain!”

  Shock and emotion left Yuanyuan speechless for a time. She could only look at her father, stunned.

  “Yuanyuan, you gave me a glorious birthday present. Who knows, today might prove the birthday of the Northwest too!”

  The cool wind of the outside world was blowing over the city. Without the superbubble to confine it, the white dome of smog above was slowly coming apart in the breeze. In the eastern sky, an odd rainbow had appeared. When the superbubble burst, the FlySol in the membrane had scattered into the air to form it.

  8

  The enormous engineering project to aerially divert water into western China took ten years.

  In these ten years, vast sky-nets were built in China’s southern waters. The nets were constructed from thin tubes covered in tiny holes. Each eye in the net was hundreds, even thousands, of meters in diameter, similar to the hoop that had blown the superbubble ten years ago, and each net had thousands of such apertures.

  There were two types of sky-net: land-mounted and aerial. The land-mounted sky-nets were placed along the coastline, while the aerial sky-nets hung from giant tethered balloons at high altitude, several kilometers above. In the South China Sea and the Bay of Bengal, the sky-nets ran continuously for more than two thousand kilometers along the coast and above the sea, and were nicknamed “The Bubble Wall of China.”

  The day the aerial water diversion system started up for the first time, the thin tubes in the sky-net filled with FlySol, forming a membrane of fluid over each aperture. Strong, moist sea wind blew into the sky-net, forming countless superbubbles, each kilometers in diameter. The bubbles broke loose from the sky-net one after another, rising in droves to higher skies. Ascending into the atmosphere, they followed the air currents onward, even as more bubbles steadily blew forth from the sky-net. Great flocks of superbubbles glided majestically inland, wrapped around the humid air of the seas. They drifted past the Himalaya Mountains, past the Greater Southwest, into the skies of the Northwest. Between the South China Sea and Bay of Bengal, and northwest China, two rivers of bubbles thousands of kilometers long had formed!

  9

  Two days after the aerial water diversion system began full-scale operation, Yuanyuan flew from the Bay of Bengal to the capital of a Northwest province. When she stepped off the plane, she saw only a round moon suspended in the night sky: the bubbles that had set out from the ocean had yet to arrive. In the city, crowds were out under the moonlight. Yuanyuan got out of the car at the central square, squeezing her way into the crowd too, to wait fervently along with them.

  Even when midnight came, the night sky remained unchanged. The crowd began to disperse as it had the previous two days, but Yuanyuan didn’t leave. She knew the bubbles would arrive tonight for certain. She sat on a bench, at the edge of sleep and wakefulness, when she suddenly heard someone cry out.

  “Heavens, why are there so many moons?”

  Yuanyuan opened her eyes. She really did see a river of moons in the night sky! The countless moons were the reflections in countless massive bubbles. Unlike the real moon, they were all crescents, some curving up and some curving down, all of them so translucent and jewel-like that the real moon seemed plain in comparison. Only by its unchanging location could it be distinguished from the mighty current of moons crossing the sky.

  From that point on, the sky over northwest China became the sky of dreams.

  During the day, the drifting bubbles were hard to see. There were just the reflections off the membranes, everywhere in the blue sky, that made it look like the surface of a lake rippling under the sunlight. On the ground, enormous but faint shadows traced the slow passage of the bubbles. The most beautiful moments were at dawn and dusk, when the rising or setting sun on the horizon would limn the river of bubbles in the sky with radiant gold.

  But these lovely scenes didn’t last for long. The bubbles above popped one after another. More bubbles were rolling in, but clouds were beginning to gather in the sky, obscuring the bubbles.

  Next, in the season that had been driest of all in previous years, a slow, steady drizzle drifted down from the sky.

  Amid the rain, Yuanyuan arrived at the city of her birth. After ten years of evacuation, Silk Road City had become quiet and empty. Unoccupied skyscrapers stood silently in the rain.

  Yuanyuan noticed that these structures hadn’t truly been abandoned; they were well-preserved, the glass in the windows unbroken. The whole city seemed to be deep in slumber, waiting for the day of revival it knew would come.

  The rain tamped down the dust, leaving the air fresh and pleasant. Raindrops tickled deliciously cool on the face. Yuanyuan strolled along streets she knew well, streets through which her father had led her by her small hand countless times, on which countless soap bubbles she’d blown had scattered. A childhood song resounded in Yuanyuan’s heart.

  Suddenly, she realized that she really could hear the song. The sun had set now, and in the city descended into night, only one window shone with light from within. It belonged to the second floor of an ordinary apartment building, her home, and the song came from there.

  Yuanyuan stopped in front of the building. The surroundings were clean and well-kept. There was even a vegetable patch, the plants in it growing heartily. A tool cart stood to one side, fitted with a big metal bucket, clearly used to carry water from elsewhere for the plants. Despite the obscuring darkness, one could sense the breath of life here. In the dead silence of the empty city, it beckoned to Yuanyuan like an oasis in the desert.

  Yuanyuan climbed the well-swept stairs and gently pushed open the door to her home. Her father was reclining on the couch, his hair grizzled under the lamplight, contently humming the old children’s song. He held the little bottle that Yuanyuan had used to carry bubble liquid as a child, and the little plastic hoop, and he was blowing a string of multicolored bubbles.

  Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, 2004.

  Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

  About the Author

  Liu Cixin is a representative of the new generation of Chinese science fiction authors and recognized as a leading voice in Chinese science fiction. He was awarded the China Galaxy Science Fiction Award for eight consecutive years, from 1999 to 2006 and again in 2010. His representative work The Three-body Problem won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel, finished 3rd in 2015 Campbell Awards, and was a nominee for the 2015 Nebula Award.

  His works have received wide acclaim on account of their powerful atmosphere and brilliant imagination. Liu Cixin’s stories successfully combine the exceedingly ephemeral with hard reality, all the while focusing on revealing the essence and aesthetics of science. He has endeavoured to create a distinctly Chinese style of science fiction. Liu Cixin is a memb
er of the China Science Writers’ Association and the Shanxi Writers’ Association.

  Union

  Tamsyn Muir

  The wives come strapped ten to a transport, hands stamped by some Customs wonk. Their fingernails are frilled and raised freckles stipple each arm in shades of red and orange. Permit tags list their names: Mary. Moana. Ruth. Myrrh. Huia. Anna. Iridium. Coffee. Kokako.

  The Franckton crofters stand and watch from behind the barrier. They’ve knocked off midday work to come. You can practically see the pong of hot mulch and melting boot elastomeric coming off them. There’s even a man there from the New Awhitu Listener to take pictures.

  Dripping sweat, the Customs detail sign off their quarantine. The wives seem indifferent to the heat. The air from the transport ruffles the thin plaits of their hair, each strand with its own line of fine bulges like a polyp. Everyone is close enough to see.

  “If the Listener links any of those photos,” Simeon’s telling the photographer, “you’re dog tucker, mate.” Simeon’s got the gist of it already. The man knows Simeon’s reputation and is timidly pressing Delete.

  The Mayor signs the receipt of goods slowly. She’s asking questions, gesturing at the wives, but she’s not getting answers, just filework and shrugging. The Ministry men take the tablet with the signature and you can tell they just want to get the hell out of there before something happens.

  Later on when the croft pores over the paperwork, they discover the wives are lichen splices. No one’s ever heard of it.

  When the news had broken that the Ministry was awarding them wives, the relief was so great in Franckton that it was more pain than pleasure. They’d spent the last fifty years incubating on Governmental loan and mortgaging over half the harvest each time. A lot of beers got sunk during all the frantic budgeting that came subsequently. The staunchest Union crofters forgot to do anything but tab up how many generations it would take before all they’d be paying for was the foetal scan.

  Only Simeon was hostile; nobody was surprised. “It’s a disgrace,” he kept on saying. “It’s a nothing. We’re getting gypped. We’re the highest-revenue croft and they’re shutting us up, they’re paying us off, the next time we don’t say how high when they say jump we’ll get our subsidy slashed and you bastards are falling over yourselves to lick their arse . . . ”

  He got told off by the Mayor for whinging. The sentiment was that there were only twenty wives to go round and he’d been assigned one and heaps of crofters hadn’t. It wasn’t as though they were all going to receive rose-splice wives and free beer and skittles. Of course it was a sop. It was a harvest cycle, and the Ministry wanted to keep them sweet so that there wouldn’t be a tanty chucked over the price of wheat or onions or oats come the buying time. All of Franckton was going into this with their eyes open; they weren’t naive . . . But they still planned a picnic and a pohiri and someone agreed to sing for the welcome and everyone getting a wife washed their shirt.

  When the wives finally landed and they got their first eyeful, they knew there wasn’t going to be a picnic or a pohiri. They took up their tines and trudged back to the bunds without preamble. Only Simeon, by way of expressing his feelings, threw a big handful of grit at one of the whirring transports. It exploded into a cloud of dusty shrapnel. Some of the crofters cringed, but nothing happened.

  The lichen-splice wives are pale and dry. Nobody really knows what to do with them. The last batch of kids had been nine years ago, with a bunch of hardy poppy wives and their minders. They were all hard cases and laughed and made jokes during the incubation, like poppy-wives should. The Mayor was getting treated for germline trouble with her chromosomes 5 and 10, so the Ministry had made them pay through the nose for gene insurance and they’d all been sore about it, but not too sore because it was the Mayor and the croft begrudged her nothing. Simeon had squabbled and said there should be a lawsuit. Some of the crofters agreed, but then there were children to take care of and nobody did anything.

  The first thing the crofters hate is the names. Their wives have been given croft names, and that’s insult to injury, somehow. It’s ingratiating. They should have had city names and all been Florence or Hannah or Candy. So they all become “wife” by common fiat.

  They seem obliging enough, but they never speak, except sometimes “Yes” or “No.” They move slowly in the Franckton heat, but unmindingly. They are slow in general to walk or to carry. They lid their eyes heavily when they talk and keep their mouths a little open, sometimes flickering their tongues.

  Simeon holds forth in the pub almost every night about them. Most of the croft complaints are about how their wife stares or can’t cook the tea right or is stupid, or off-putting, or intractable, but Simeon goes further than that. “I don’t want to incubate with some knock-off government sack,” he says of his wife. “She looks like a spastic. She looks like a trisomy hutch.”

  Some of the croft look away but they don’t protest, because you don’t with Simeon, it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Simeon says, “I bloody well mean it. And I tell you what, if they don’t bear good kids and look after them right, I’m blowing this wide open. I’ll strike. I want our next lot to have a future, not go on cringing like mutts for crusts. If all the crofts got up off their bums and stood together we’d have the world on a plate. Look at what we get when we don’t fight for it! Christ, look.”

  Outside the pub and across the street two of the wives stand in the blue evening shade. Simeon stabs a finger in their direction. They do not chat or relax: they stare, first at each other, then at a crack in the daub house, then at a drying clag of mulch, then at each other again. Their tongues flicker in their mouths.

  “I tell you what,” Simeon says again, “they scare me to death. They’re not right. We got fobbed off with something weird, and we’re just shutting up and taking it like we always do.”

  One of the crofters has the bright idea to tell Simeon that he should have let the photographs go live, that everyone should have seen what had been done to Franckton. This crofter gets pranged with the beer mat.

  “Don’t be stupid,” snaps Simeon, settling back. “We’ve got our bloody pride.”

  Franckton has better results with the wives in the fields. The sun leaves white patches on their skin if they stay out too long in it, but the Mayor gets the children to weave them big scratchy shapeless hats. The wives have been taught to say, “Thank you, Aunty,” and for each hat a wife intones “Thank you, Aunty,” before subsiding back into silence. They’re still slow out there on the bunds, but they are just as slow heaving the stones between them as they are walking as they are everything else. It is simply how they move. They crouch down and poke back rocks into the spillways with their square, dry hands. They build back the gullies and do not care. When the children come around with the water they take one gourd together and sip miniature sips, darting their tongues inside the neck of the bottle. The other crofters take enormous gulps and dump the rest down the backs of their hot, dirty necks.

  It gets to some of the croft. Nobody dares to be as bad as Simeon, who calls his wife “you” and who swaps sharp words with the Mayor about it almost daily, but there’s loads of complaint. The wives don’t learn. They don’t settle. They’re lazy. They make everyone uneasy. Plenty of splice wives are good for doing chores and croft work—so the catalogues always promise—and do it cheerfully and well, but these ones don’t, and it’s yet another black eye for them.

  When Laura says in the pub, “I like my wife,” everyone’s surprised into silence before they bust a gut laughing. “Piss off! I don’t mind her. I wouldn’t want one that was talking my ear off all the time. And she sings sometimes . . . She’s not so bad.”

  She gets ragged for this daily, but sticks to it: “Mary’s a good girl,” she goes on saying staunchly. “She gives it heaps, just doesn’t rush. Can’t believe you’re all moaning about how they don’t have tea on the table when the clock strikes six. My God! You lot don’t know you’re born.�
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  Those with wives start noticing that, wherever they go, a fine leafy build-up appears on the walls or countertops where they work. This is easily wiped off with a damp cloth, but causes no end of alarm. The build-up is a thin crust—a substrate with miniature flakes—dusty green in some houses, shrillingly orange in others. Simeon spits the dummy entirely and makes his wife sleep in the shed, and at this point nobody blames him, he’s sent a sample to the big lab in Awhitu and it matches the wives’ DNA. Like they’re shedding, the pharmacist had said helpfully. “Like they’re moldy,” said Simeon. “Bloody hell. It’s not clean. It’s filthy. It’s not right. They oughtn’t to, it’s a decay, they’re off-cut bargain-bin splices—” And he calls them a lot worse than off-cuts or bargain bin splices.

  He sends a letter to the Ministry representative, a formal one, with a couple veiled threats chucked in. Other crofters are angry too, and they sign it. The Mayor won’t.

  “It’s harmless,” she says wearily, “it’s a nothing. Just rub a bit of ti-tree extract on the counter, the pharmacy let me have it for cheap. And if you’re making Coffee sleep in the shed you better not whinge about her cooking.”

  But Simeon won’t let his wife do any cooking now. She shouldn’t touch food, he says. Shouldn’t touch anything they’re not sure about. As per usual, some of the croft privately agrees, but also wishes he’d stop being a bit of a tosser.

  The doctor comes to give the crofters their health certificates and the Mayor her latest injections. They can’t apply for the DNA license otherwise. He frowns over the Mayor’s scans—again—and gives her some chromosome duplicant on the sly, in exchange for a feed and some cash. “I’m sorry, Barbs,” he says. “You’ll be paying the premium again for the license.”