The announcement repeated itself: first in the fluting language of the firija, then in Miami Spanish, then as a series of projected alien glyphs, logograms and semagrams. Then the Arabic started again.
“Fuck your mother,” said Valadez grimly.
All around Bianca, poachers were gathering weapons. In the back of the room, the firija were having what looked like an argument, arms waving, voices raised in a hooting, atonal cacophony.
“What do we do?” Fry shouted, over the wardens’ announcement.
“Get out of here,” said Valadez.
“Make fight!” said Ismaíl, turning several eyes from the firija discussion.
“Isn’t that resisting arrest?” asked Bianca.
Valadez laughed harshly. “Not shooting back isn’t going to save you,” he said. “The wardens aren’t the Phenomenological Service. They’re not civilized Caliphate cops. Killed while resisting arrest is what they’re all about. Believe me—I used to be one.”
Taking a surprisingly small gun from inside his jacket, he kicked open the door and was gone.
Around the Lupita Jeréz was a milling knot of people, human and otherwise, some hurrying to finish the loading, others simply fighting to get aboard.
Something large and dark, and fast, passed over the camp, and there was a white flash from the cargo-lifter, and screams.
In the wake of the dark thing came a sudden sensation of heaviness, as if the flank of Encantada were the deck of a ship riding a rogue wave, leaping up beneath Bianca’s feet. Her knees buckled and she was thrown to the ground, pressed into the grass by twice, three times her normal weight.
The feeling passed as quickly as the wardens’ dark vehicle, and Ismaíl, whose walker had kept its footing, helped Bianca up.
“What was that?” Bianca demanded, bruises making her wince as she tried to brush the dirt and grass from her skirts.
“Antigravity ship,” Ismaíl said. “Same principle like starship wave propagation drive.”
“Antigravity?” Bianca stared after the ship, but it was already gone, over Encantada’s dorsal ridge. “If you coños have antigravity, then why in God’s name have we been sitting here playing with catapults and balloons?”
“Make very expensive,” said Ismaíl. “Minus two suns exotic mass, same like starship.” The firija waved two of its free eyes. “Why do? Plenty got cheap way to fly.”
Bianca realized that despite the remarks Valadez had made on the poverty of Sky, she had been thinking of all extrañados and aliens— with their ships and machines, their familiar way with sciences that in Rio Pícaro were barely more than a whisper of forbidden things hidden behind the walls of the rich moros’ palaces—as wealthy, and powerful, and free. Now, feeling like a fool for not having understood sooner, she realized that between the power of the Consilium and people like Valadez there was a gap as wide as, if not wider than, the gap between those rich moros and the most petty Ali Baba in the back streets of Punta Aguila.
She glanced toward the airfield. Aerial tugs were lifting off; anemopters were blurring into motion. But as she watched, one of the tugs opened up into a ball of green fire. An anemopter made it as far as the killing ground before being hit by something that made its static fields crawl briefly with purple lightnings and then collapse, as the craft’s material body crashed down in an explosion of earth.
And all the while the wardens’ recorded voice was everywhere and nowhere, repeating its list of instructions and demands.
“Not any more, we don’t,” Bianca said to Ismaíl. “We’d better run.”
The firija raised its gun. “First got kill prisoner.”
“What?”
But Ismaíl was already moving, the mechanical legs of the walker sure-footed on the broken ground, taking long, swift strides, no longer comical but frighteningly full of purpose.
Bianca struggled after the firija, but quickly fell behind. The surface of the killing ground was rutted and scarred, torn by the earth-moving equipment used to push the offal of the gutted zaratanes over the edge. Bianca supposed grasses had covered it once, but now there was only mud and old blood. Only the certainty that going back would be as bad as going forward kept Bianca moving, slipping and stumbling in reeking muck that was sometimes ankle-deep.
By the time she got to Dinh’s bungalow, Ismaíl was already gone. The door was ajar.
Maybe the wardens rescued her, Bianca thought; but she couldn’t make herself believe it.
She went inside, moving slowly.
“Edith?”
No answer; not that Bianca had really expected any.
She found her in the kitchen, face down, feet toward the door as if she had been shot while trying to run, or hide. From three meters away Bianca could see the neat, black, fist-sized hole in the small of Dinh’s back. She felt no need to get closer.
Fry’s pocket system was on the floor in the living room, as Bianca had known it would be.
“You should have waited,” Bianca said to the empty room. “You should have trusted me.”
She found her valise in Dinh’s bedroom, and emptied the contents onto the bed. Dinh did not seem to have touched any of them.
Bianca’s eyes stung with tears. She glanced again at Fry’s system. He’d left it on purpose, Bianca realized; she’d underestimated him. Perhaps he had been a better person than she herself, all along.
She looked one more time at the body lying on the kitchen floor.
“No, you shouldn’t,” she said then. “You shouldn’t have trusted me at all.”
Then she went back to her own bungalow and took the package out from under the bed.
9. Finisterra
A hundred meters, two hundred, five hundred—Bianca falls, the wind whipping at her clothes, and the hanging vegetation that covers Encantada’s flanks is a green-brown blur, going gray as it thins, as the zaratán’s body curves away from her. She blinks away the tears brought on by the rushing wind, and tries to focus on the monitor panel of the harness. The wind speed indicator is the only one that makes sense; the others—altitude, attitude, rate of descent—are cycling through nonsense in three languages, baffled by the instruments’ inability to find solid ground anywhere below.
Then Bianca falls out of Encantada’s shadow into the sun, and before she can consciously form the thought her hand has grasped the emergency handle of the harness and pulled, convulsively; and the glassy fabric of the paraballoon is billowing out above her, rippling like water, and the harness is tugging at her, gently but firmly, smart threads reeling themselves quickly out and then slowly in again on their tiny spinnerets.
After a moment, she catches her breath. She is no longer falling, but flying.
She wipes the tears from her eyes. To the west, the slopes of Finisterra are bright and impossibly detailed in the low-angle sunlight, a million trees casting a million tiny shadows through the morning’s rapidly dissipating mist.
She looks up, out through the nearly invisible curve of the paraballoon, and sees that Encantada is burning. She watches it for a long time.
The air grows warmer, and more damp, too. With a start, Bianca realizes she is falling below Finisterra’s edge. When she designed the paraballoon, Bianca intended for Dinh to fall as far as she safely could, dropping deep into Sky’s atmosphere before firing up the reverse Maxwell pumps, to heat the air in the balloon and lift her back to Finisterra; but it does not look as if there is any danger of pursuit now, from either the poachers or the wardens. Bianca starts the pumps, and the paraballoon slows, then begins to ascend.
As the prevailing wind carries her inland, over a riot of tropical green, and in the distance Bianca sees the smoke rising from the chimneys of Ciudad Perdida, Bianca glances up again at the burning shape of Encantada, and wonders whether she’ll ever know if Valadez was telling the truth.
Abruptly the jungle below her opens up, and Bianca is flying over cultivated fields, and people are looking up at her in wonder. Without thinking, she has cut the power
to the pumps and opened the parachute valve at the top of the balloon.
She lands hard, hobbled by the scarf still tied around her ankles, and rolls, the paraballoon harness freeing itself automatically, in obedience to its original programming. She pulls the scarf loose and stands up, shaking out her torn, stained skirt. Children are already running toward her across the field.
Savages, Fry said. Refugees. Bianca wonders if all of them speak Valadez’ odd Spanish. She tries to gather her scraps of Arabic, but is suddenly unable to remember anything beyond Salaam alaikum.
The children—six, eight, ten of them—falter as they approach, stopping five or ten meters away.
Salaam alaikum, Bianca rehearses silently. Alaikum as-salaam. She takes a deep breath.
The boldest of the children, a stick-legged boy of eight or ten, takes a few steps closer. He has curly black hair and sun-browned skin, and the brightly colored shirt and shorts he is wearing were probably made by an autofactory on one of the elevator gondolas or vacuum balloon stations, six or seven owners ago. He looks like her brother Pablo, in the old days, before Jesús left.
Trying not to look too threatening, Bianca meets his dark eyes.
“Hóla,” she says.
“Hóla,” the boy answers. “¿Cómo te llamas? ¿Es este su globo?”
Bianca straightens her back.
“Yes, it’s my balloon,” she says. “And you may call me Señora Nazario.”
“If the balloon’s yours,” the boy asks, undaunted, “will you let me fly in it?”
Bianca looks out into the eastern sky, dotted with distant zaratanes. There is a vision in her mind, a vision that she thinks maybe Edith Dinh saw: the skies of Sky more crowded than the skies over Rio Pícaro, Septentrionalis Archipelago alive with the bright shapes of dirigibles and gliders, those nameless zaratanes out there no longer uncharted shoals but comforting and familiar landmarks.
She turns to look at the rapidly collapsing paraballoon, and wonders how much work it would take to inflate it again. She takes out her pocket system and checks it: the design for the hand-built dirigible is still there, and the family automation too.
This isn’t what she wanted, when she set out from home; but she is still a Nazario, and still an engineer.
She puts the system away and turns back to the boy.
“I have a better idea,” she says. “How would you like a balloon of your very own?”
The boy breaks into a smile.
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 2007.
About the Author
David Moles shares a birthday with Robert Goddard, Václav Havel, Kate Winslet, and the R.101 disaster. He has lived in seven time zones on three continents, and hopes some day to collect the whole set.
David was a finalist for the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, which he lost to Elizabeth Bear. His novelette “Finisterra” won the 2008 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and was a finalist for the 2008 Hugo Award. His fiction and poetry have been published in Polyphony, Say..., Rabid Transit, Flytrap, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Asimov’s, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as on Strange Horizons. He co-edited All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories with Jay Lake and the World Fantasy Awardnominated Twenty Epics with Susan Marie Groppi.
Gathered in Translation
Ken Liu
Since speculative fiction is about imagined worlds, one might theorize that it poses fewer problems for translators than genres of literature more tethered to the specific cultures and languages of the real world.
In a sense, the theory is right. When the global language of science is English, it is indeed easy to translate to “traveling-wave maser” because the Chinese term is simply a word-for-word borrowing from English. When high-fantasy films and games are popular the world over, it is likely that a Japanese reader would be perfectly conversant with the hackneyed stereotypes of Orcs and Goblins and Dwarves and Elves.
But these happen to be the least interesting aspects of speculative fiction in translation. Richly imagined worlds draw upon the real experiences of authors and readers. Based on my own experience as a translator of Chinese stories into English, and having had my own English stories translated into Chinese, I’ve come to appreciate the unique challenges and rewards in translating speculative fiction.
We’ll begin with translation philosophy. Yan Fu, one of the earliest Chinese-English translators, wrote the following in the introduction to his 1898 Classical Chinese translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics:
There are three difficult goals in translation: fidelity to the source, aptness of expression, and beauty of language. To render the meaning of the original faithfully is difficult enough, but if one focuses only on fidelity and ignores the need to craft the words for the benefit of readers, then such a translation might as well not exist.
Most translators probably work under some version of this mantra of “fidelity, expressiveness, and elegance,” but the simplicity of the phrase belies many complexities.
Let’s start with “fidelity,” the very definition of which is slippery. The following passage appears in Xia Jia’s fantasy/scifi story, :
When I translated this story for Clarkesworld — (“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight”), I rendered it as:
A yellow-skinned old ghost pushes a cart of masks in front of me.
“Ning, why don’t you pick a mask? I have everything: Ox-Head, Horse-Face, Black-Faced and White-Faced Wuchang, Asura, Yaksha, Rakshasa, Pixiu, and even Lei Gong, the Duke of Thunder.”
Note that this list of fantastical beings from folk Chinese mythology contains three——imported from Buddhism (or Hinduism by way of Buddhism). Some Chinese readers will recognize their non-Chinese origins, but for others, they’re as Chinese as anything else on that list because, in the long history of Buddhism in China, they have been sinicized and gradually acquired a set of legends and characteristics divergent from their non-Chinese origins.
When translating into English, is it more faithful to use the common, accepted anglicizations by way of Sanskrit (“Asura, Yaksha, Rakshasa”) or more accurate to use pinyin to represent their phonetic readings in Chinese (“Xiuluo, Yecha, Luosha”)? The former has the advantage of respecting their non-Chinese origins, but the latter has the advantage of subtly suggesting how they’re perceived by Chinese readers. Without a footnote, is it even possible to make the diverse, multi-origin nature of Chinese folk mythology known to the non-Chinese reader?
At the same time, note that the world conjured up by this story is as far from the everyday experiences of the Chinese reader (that is the point of fantastical literature, after all) as it is from the everyday experiences of the English reader. But the precise sense of the exotic and the fantastic evoked by this passage is different for the former (calling up images of dynastic China and traditional myths) and the latter (calling up images of “the mysterious Orient,” perhaps with a dash of manga). “Fidelity” is contextual and elusive.
In terms of expressiveness and elegance, there are even more difficulties. What constitutes the right expression? By what scale should we measure the beauty of the language?1
I often hear the advice that idioms, fixed expressions, and culture-specific terms that are not analyzable ought not be translated literally. Many who advocate a translation that reads as though it were written in English in the first place subscribe to this philosophy. I disagree. For me, much of the joy of reading a translation is in hearing an echo of the original, in seeing English used in a way that suggests the rhythms and worldviews of another language. Judicious translation of such terms, when done in the service of a particular literary effect, can enhance the reader’s enjoyment without sliding into exoticism.
For example, in Xia Jia’s story, I chose to translate the names of specific dates on the Chinese lunar calendar rather than giving their approximate equivalents on the common Western calendar. I could have converted these dates——
to “March 5th,” “July 23rd,” “October 8th,” and “December 21st.” For most Chinese readers, the meanings behind the names of the dates are only a faint echo, like how we might remember that “Thursday” is really “Thor’s Day.” But I decided to translate them literally as “Awakening of Insects,” “Major Heat,” “Cold Dew,” and “Winter Solstice.” This choice meant that the English reader must work harder to figure out the time of year by contextual clues, but the names also give the reader a better sense of how the Chinese calendar is tied to the cycles and movements of the natural world, to the demands and rhythms of the agricultural life. I believe the decision enhances the story’s portrayal of a (seemingly) pastoral, idealized life constructed from elements of pre-modern Chinese village traditions.2
As another example, consider the following sentence from Xia’s story:
Which I rendered as:
She says that to hide from the [Thunder] Calamity, a ghost must find a real person with a good heart to stay beside her. That way, just like how one wouldn’t throw a shoe at a mouse sitting beside an expensive vase, the Duke of Thunder will not strike the ghost.
is an idiom meaning something like “refrain from action to avoid harming the innocent” or “those who live in glass houses should not throw stones” but I felt that it was more vivid to translate it literally into a simile. Instead of using a cliché to translate another cliché, the phrase tells the English reader something about the source culture and language. A literal translation, when properly used, can defamiliarize and reinvigorate both the source image and the target language to give the reader a sense of fruitful strangeness that adds to the experience of reading.3
We accept that a translator has to make many creative choices, but is the degree of freedom unlimited? At what point do the translator’s acts become ultra vires and the translation ceases to be a translation? Yan Fu himself chose to give short shift to fidelity in his translation of Huxley, often expanding upon the original with his own observations and ideas and omitting passages that he felt did not suit his purpose of introducing (his understanding of) new Western ideas to a Chinese readership. The resulting translation was influential but was also subject to charges of being unfaithful.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 79 Page 13