Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation
Page 3
We held the building against an active siege for 49 days while a larger and larger body of volunteers came out to the city to join the cause. (We had a great social media team, without whom we’d never have gotten to keep the building. They made this a P.R. nightmare and rallied enough public empathy to make negotiations viable.) Stalemates led to agreements in which we brought in supplies and more people.
The building became an art project, too: Artists rappelled down from the roof to paint the façade in luminescent yellows and oranges that beautifully annihilate the sleek gray-blue hypermodern aesthetic the architects had tried to carve into the city.
The Boston Hearth Homeless Shelter is now formally recognized, and New York and Portland have both turned over building projects to activists for fear of facing another hostile takeover. It’s understaffed and underfunded, there are people who volunteer to do more work than they do in their full-time paying jobs, but having a building that’s designed to turtle against the outside world makes an immense difference, and we’re saving a lot of lives. There was a 92 percent drop in deaths by exposure in Boston this winter.
But anyone proven to be connected with the takeover is still being prosecuted. Kay got a plea bargain for house arrest until 2025; she hasn’t physically been in the Hearth at all this year. And the cops are actively searching for whoever broke into the building that night and scared off the night guard.
Teamwork was the central skill of the Hearth Project at every stage: in planning, in execution, in follow-up, and in protecting each other from the state. This work deepened my understanding of and appreciation for collective action. It’s hard, and it has costs, and it demands immense trust and intimacy.
I’m excited to come to X.S.U. to join in efforts to change the world that I don’t have to keep so quiet.
Speechless Love
Yilun Fan, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu
For all the children abroad whose taste buds have been numbed.
§
Morning, April 6, 2279. As I dump eggshells into the Earth-bound trash, my hovership’s screen beeps and displays a neat line of black text:
“Hello! May I introduce myself?”
The corner of the screen shows that we’re 25 meters apart, with a vertical distance of 111 meters.
Another stratospherian. . . . I pick a dried grain of rice off the table and summon a professional air as I say:
“Hello. Why not speak directly?”
The text vanishes. Thirty seconds later, another line of text appears, this time in sky blue.
“My audio communication systems are down.”
A stratospherian who’s bad at operating machines, I think. This is the third stratospherian I’ve encountered in four months who’s having issues with their hovership.
Two hundred years ago, climate change on Earth rendered the surface uninhabitable. Tsunamis and earthquakes were common; every two years, a massive El Niño episode would occur. World leaders struggled to pacify the masses. The financial burden of colonizing space, plus bickering between nations, stopped off-planet efforts in their tracks.
Around this time, a German named Serik Lange invented the first self-sufficient hovership. Compared to traditional spaceships, the hoverships cost less and were far easier to manufacture. So atmosphere colonization replaced space colonization: Humanity had no choice but to leave Earth and drift through the atmosphere.
Initially, three billion people lived together in a utopia free of government. My grandparents’ generation was the last to have a sense of nationality based on surface boundaries; I have only a vague recollection of my parents telling me that we came from a place called China.
But as time passed, conflicts began to arise among hoverships: fraud, theft, gang violence. . . . A hundred years ago, a huge war broke out and descendants of the former elite created the Hover Alliance to be the governing force of the sky. They stratified the atmosphere and delegated the troposphere to skilled workers, the stratosphere to intellectuals, and the thermosphere to criminals. Although this action brought order to the atmosphere, many decried it as the poison of the elite.
As a typical systems engineer, I’ll never be banished to the thermosphere, but I also have no desire to move to the perfection of the stratosphere, either—compared to the clouds, rain, snow, and hail of the troposphere, the stratosphere is boring. Plus, no one there knows how to work machines.
“Do you need help?” I blow on the tea in my blue porcelain cup. A few leaves of biluochun sink and rise, reminding me of a phrase from a poem my late father once taught me: A breath ripples a pool of spring water.
“No, thank you. It’s been down for a long time already. Actually, I’m used to it.”
I almost spit out my sip of tea—how does this stratospherian communicate with the outside world? Do they always use text? I smile. What a strange person.
“Then . . . do you need something from me?”
After about five minutes, another line of sky-blue text appears on the screen:
“I saw your profile. You said you like to drink congee. Are you also from China?”
My parents told me that my ancestors were from Jiangsu province, “the land of fish and rice.” Supposedly, erudite scholars gathered there a thousand years ago. The women were as gentle as water. Oars sounded against a backdrop of lantern-light; smoke rose within the fog. At bedtime, I flip through my father’s copies of Three Hundred Tang Poems and The Complete Song Dynasty Poems. Who knows how many legends of scholars and courtesans originated there?
Drinking congee is another thing I like to do. Now that the Earth is humanity’s garbage dump, the heavy metal content in its soil is enough to kill any plant. The food we eat is artificially created. My ancestors, longing for home, brought some soil aboard during the initial embarkation period. They brought tea leaves and rice seeds, too. Through the efforts of generations, they purified the dirt enough to support crops again. I have a two-square-meter patch of garden in my own hovership; I just harvested my modest rice crop this morning, their stalks plump and lustrous like expectant mothers. But because their output is limited, my harvest is only ever enough to make one bowl of plain congee a day. In this age, that’s a luxury.
The head of every ship—whether individual, to sustain just one person, or symbiotic, for families—has to fill out a public profile with fields for occupation, interests, and other topics, mimicking the online social networks we had on Earth. Filling out the profile was a requirement the Hover Alliance imposed, their attempt at curbing “hover hermitism.” In this individualistic Hover Era, anything can become an identity. I became the average of my parents: my father, a fan of Classical Chinese poetry, and my mother, obsessed with technology, produced me, a systems engineer for whom tea and congee are hobbies. So in the “interests” field I simply entered the words “drinking congee.” To me, a world containing one person, one bowl of congee, one cup of tea, and one book is more than enough.
While “nationality” no longer has any real meaning, meeting another Chinese person in this vast atmosphere is still something of a rarity. I clear my throat and say stiffly,
“Yes. It’s nice to meet you.”
A response appears immediately in sky blue text: “It’s nice to meet you, too.”
After a pause, more words appear. “A long time ago, I had a bowl of congee made with rice from Jiangnan. I’ll never forget that clean, fragrant aroma. I had a tea egg, too.”
I glance at the eggshells in the trash. A strange feeling steals over my heart.
“What is your name?”
“Su Haoshuang.”
This time, the characters are in black boldface, blinking on the screen as if they’re a pair of pupils. I feel light-headed; I read the name aloud and can’t help but sit down. After a long moment, I write one sentence on the touchscreen:
“Did your name come from ‘lu bian ren si yue, hao wan ning shuang xue’1?” A sheen of sweat covers my palm as I finish writing.
“Yes, I als
o like Wei Zhuang’s poems.”
§
That’s the story of how I met Shuangshuang. My friends, few as they are, make fun of me and call me an old lecher who’s met a lovesick young woman. But I know that Shuangshuang and I were destined to meet.
Shuangshuang’s ancestors are from Zhejiang: “The heavens are above, with Suhang beneath them.” The water and earth there were once as nurturing as those of Jiangsu. In ancient times, the two places were called Jiangnan. Shuangshuang’s parents have long since passed away, so she was raised by her grandfather, an educated old man who left her a trove of antique books when he died. Like me, Shuangshuang grew up reading poetry. I’ve eaten xiaolongbao once; she’s tasted a Korean mud snail. My favorite tea is biluochun; hers is Xihu longjing, but we both use heirloom purple clay teapots.
Perhaps because she prefers books to technology, Shuangshuang has a fine appreciation for poetry, almost an instinct for it. Maybe that’s why her audio communications system broke: because she never used it. I often joke with her and tell her that I can fix it, but she never takes me up on my offer.
We go from silent strangers to kindred spirits. She grew up in the stratosphere, so she’s never seen real clouds, rain, hail, or snow. I gather my courage and write a poem, “Four Seasons,” to express my feelings to her. When I send it, my palms start to sweat again, but then Shuangshuang gives me her response:
As a clear blue sky waits for rain, so too shall I wait for you.
§
Today is our wedding day. Nowadays, so long as two people want to get married, they just have to fill out an application with the Hover Alliance and take part in a ceremony with the marriage committee to join their hoverships together. It’s a symbolic ceremony, one that also marks the christening of a new symbiotic hovership out of two individual hoverships.
The Hover Alliance encourages marriage and family planning. A married couple may only have one child—supposedly, this policy was inspired by China’s—to reduce the density of the hoverships in the atmosphere. People in the stratosphere and troposphere typically don’t intermarry, as stratospherians would have to move to the troposphere. Shuangshuang says she doesn’t mind moving, though.
Hard as it is to believe, I still haven’t seen what she looks like. I haven’t even heard her voice. All our communication has been via text, or as she calls it, “carrier pigeon.” But I believe that she must be beautiful, that kind of vivacious, gentle beauty, just like her name: “bright frost.”
The marriage committee’s official announcement of symbiosis finally sounds in the hold: “We hereby congratulate Ye Chengke, husband, and Su Haoshuang, wife, on their marriage in the 198th year of the Hover Era. May your union last until death do you part.”
But I’m not paying attention to those clichéd words. Nervous and impatient, I’m standing before the cabin door, my hands wrapped tightly around my safety belt as I count down in my mind.
4, 3, 2, 1 . . . I close my eyes.
A violent lurch unites our ships. After the humming dies down, an indescribable fragrance fills the cabin. Unable to wait any longer, I open my eyes and say, “Shuangshuang, is that you?”
No response.
I’ve fantasized a thousand times about the moment I see Shuangshuang, but the room before me is empty. “Shuangshuang, where are you?” She must be shy.
I enter Shuangshuang’s hovership—no, our hovership. The sight before me stops me in my tracks.
Bookcases line every wall of this modest hovership, each shelf packed full of antique tomes. Just a glance tells me that these books are from the Surface Era. Although they’re old, each one is spotless. Now I understand where that curious perfume came from.
I think of a Song Dynasty saying: Beautiful women are found within books. In that moment, I swear I see a graceful silhouette walking toward me. As giddiness overtakes me, the hovership screen suddenly beeps. Line after line of text cascade into being, all in that beautiful, sky-blue script:
My darling Chengke,
You must already be in our home if you’re reading this letter.
I’m so sorry for deceiving you. In truth, I’m not Su Haoshuang; I’m a program that Shuangshuang wrote. The real Su Haoshuang passed away twenty years ago. As you know, the Hover Alliance requires that the hovership of the deceased must be destroyed. If Shuangshuang’s death were known, all the books that Grandpa left for her would have been incinerated in the thermosphere.
You probably don’t know this, but Shuangshuang was the last disciple of Tianyi2 of Ninbo. Two hundred years ago, during the chaos of atmosphere colonization, her ancestors went to great lengths to move all these precious books to this ship. Shuangshuang was cataloguing and digitizing them, but her health had deteriorated badly because of all her hard work; she needed to find a successor to ensure that these books wouldn’t be destroyed. So she used the last of her energy, the last of her willpower, to create me.
Over the past twenty years, I’ve successfully hidden in this ship despite multiple inspections. I kept looking for her successor—until that day I saw that you’d entered “drinking congee” as one of your interests. Shuangshuang’s favorite food was plain congee. She said once that in this drifting, anchorless age, someone whose taste buds long for their ancestor’s food surely would not have forgotten their roots. And in my conversations with you, I found that you and Shuangshuang had so much in common. I figured that you must be the person that Shuangshuang was looking for all along.
I came to love you. Or perhaps what I mean to say is, if Shuangshuang were still alive, she would have loved you too.
Perhaps I have been selfish. I can only ask for your forgiveness; my selfishness comes from a family’s reverence for their ancestors’ culture and history. This is the mission of children: selfless, regretless.
I believe you’ll like these books too. I hope you’ll live up to Shuangshuang’s final wishes and keep passing them down forever and ever.
Love,
Shuangshuang
I fall to the floor. I can practically see Shuangshuang’s spirit shuttling between all those books. Frozen in the aura of that delicate fragrance, I suddenly recall a ballad that my father had played for me. The name of the song was “Speechless Love”3:
Hovering in your future
Hovering in my future
Hovering in water, in fire, in soup
Facing the steam, waiting
Waiting for
A finer person to come
Waiting for
A better person to come. . . .
1 Graceful as moonlight, a girl sells rice wine, her wrists frost-white.
2 Tianyi Pavilian is located in the city of Ningbo in Zhejiang province. It is the oldest private library in China.
3 Zhou Yunpeng, “Speechless Love” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdf4CTKcyVU
Strandbeest Dreams
Lisa M. Bradley and José M. Jimenez
after Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests
When the Strandbeest started dreaming
it assumed sensor error.
Why else would it feel wavelets
braceleting its PVC ankles
where seconds before there was only
SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND
Step step stop
the rhythm of the waves
Scoop
the rhythm of your work
Sift sift sift
it’s no surprise you fell asleep
Dump
only that you dreamed
Step step stop
not a bad idea—a random false positive
Scoop
to keep you on point
Sift sift sift
but I didn’t program you for nightmares
Dump
wrote no subroutines to soothe you
Step step stop
half so well as the sibilance of the shifting
SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND SAND
&nbs
p; The Strandbeest dashed from danger
ripple of hollow legs pumping
with the stored overflow from gusted sails.
Zebra mussel shells rattled in its hopper
until it stopped and anchored,
its sensors reading DRY again.
The ‘beest consulted GPS,
verified its position in relation
to Lake Michigan,
compared its earlier trajectory
and found no fault
no reason for a warning
no record of it in searchable memory
not even corroborating raindrops in its sails.
The ‘beest suspended its beach-cleaning mission,
spiraling instead into endless diagnostics.
Oh, ‘beest, trust The Hands.
Therein lies madness—
I have a note from my doctor
telling me so.
How many questions can you ask?