The trees had dark globules, like grapes, growing directly on their bark. Zhen looped her wire around one of the trees, securing a sure path back to the complex, and plucked one of the strange fruits. Was it edible? She described it to an interpreter on her return and asked if locals ate the fruit, but he shook his head. No one had any exchange with the local Guianese, he said, except the armed soldiers outside the Effort perimeter. He looked so sad as he said it.
Every forty hours, Zhen followed her line of wire out into the woods. She was born and raised in Chongqing, one of China’s megacities, and was used to concrete, signage, crowds of people, and the maps on her cellphone. She wasn’t used to navigating her way through nature where every direction looked the same. But even at night with the moon tucked behind clouds, Zhen could find her way by keeping one hand on the wire and the other stretched out in front until it felt the bark of those trees with its bulbous fruit.
“To meet with me in private,” she had told Amy, after hailing down her jeep on a road in the middle of the night, “you only have to follow my wire on a forty-hour schedule.”
Zhen had pinned her hopes on so many risky unknowns because she had no other choice. This Amy, with the cyberpunk hair and tattoo on her arm, had to convince the leaders of the Effort to meet with Zhen in secret. Amy wasn’t an engineer, military, or a government operative. Zhen wasn’t sure of her official purpose, only that she didn’t seem to answer to any authority. Others answered to hers.
There were other unknowns, ones that made Zhen’s throat tighten, blocking speech and oxygen. Was the Chinese Y-20 plane still parked at the airport in Cayenne? Was the secret cargo still guarded by their soldiers? Zhen had checked the airtight containers after they landed in French Guiana. Her fingers were ever so gentle as she handled her own newborn, one that had taken three years of her life to gestate. All the containers were intact then, but what if they had been compromised since?
Zhen had to stop thinking. Terror kills the appetite. On top of that, Zhen found her bag lunch—two slices of bread with jelly and a paste of something that smelled like peanuts and looked like excrement—nearly inedible. Her stomach often shrank during the long work sessions, and filling it was uncomfortable. She would have to eat the rest when she woke.
Zhen took off her lab coat and folded it into a square. Not that she minded the formality of it. Zhen appreciated anything that camouflaged her physical form into something no one would question or even notice. But alone, outside of the air-conditioning, the coat was too hot and served better as a pillow. She placed it in the shade of a thick shrub and lay down.
Such a brilliant blue sky! Zhen was used to the low-hanging, gray mass of smog that plagued urban China, but here there was clean air with no taste, no smell, and no grit. She breathed deeply with her diaphragm and watched the pure white clouds drift and form strange shapes with both crisp and wispy outlines. Zhen closed her eyes and tried to sleep. She tried not to think about her family. They were probably dead, but…
Zhen came from a long line of mathematicians who had learned to survive against the odds—and this fact was her only reassurance. Zhen herself was a lucky product of her time as the second child born before the one-child policy was introduced. She was a pigtailed five-year-old with red scars on her upper lip when Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978 and brought reform that opened China’s borders and economy.
Zhen’s family pooled their money to send Zhen’s older brother, Kuo, to Cambridge, England. Zhen never expected to be a “sea turtle” who left China to study abroad, even if her family could have afforded such an extravagance twice. Her mother wanted her to apply to Peking University, and her father wanted her to apply to Tsinghua University, but Zhen couldn’t imagine not coming home to her parents. She was more than happy to enroll in Chongqing University as the youngest pupil on record.
In 1989, Zhen turned sixteen and prepared to graduate with honors when student protesters gathered at Tiananmen Square and refused to leave. The Liu family read about the occupation in the People’s Daily while other state newspapers turned a blind eye. The protestors drew sympathy and hope in readers and triggered buried memories in others. When an announcement came over the radio in May that the Chinese government would impose martial law in Beijing, Zhen’s mother became frantic.
“It is happening again,” she whispered to the walls. “They will disappear. They are too young to know.”
The horrors under Chairman Mao and his Workers and Peasants’ Red Army surfaced in her mind.
“Leeches,” she told Zhen one night, pacing in her bedroom. “There were leeches in the rice fields.”
She slapped at her shins as explanation. Zhen’s newly orphaned mother had joined the millions of youth sent to farming communes in rural China.
“I can still see them,” she confided to her daughter.
The memory of looking down in freezing water crusted with ice and seeing her bare legs standing covered in the dark parasites and dripping red blood from their bites was so vivid, it bordered on hallucination.
“I can’t go back,” Zhen’s mother promised herself. “They will have to drag me out of this apartment in a wooden box.”
Zhen’s father was more lucid and direct.
“If you fall on the wrong side of a revolution, Zhen, you will be crushed. And all our hopes for the future will die with you. Our family will be shunned. I will lose my job, and we will be beggars.”
He could see that Zhen’s ears and mind were open to the promise of democracy, but she did not understand the dangers. He had to appeal to her reason and duty. Whether people were ruled by the greed of the few or the idiocy of the masses, Zhen’s father explained, it wasn’t worth the destruction of their family. He spoke calmly, but Zhen could still hear fear in his voice along with her mother’s footfalls as she turned in tight circles.
Zhen owed her family everything. Instead of joining the democracy movement of 1989, she stayed home while soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army sprayed bullets into their people. Purges soon followed. Zhen was allowed to graduate from university at the head of her class while several other students and professors disappeared from the public eye. Life was allowed to move on for those who stayed silent and afraid. And so it moved on for Zhen.
Many of her friends got married in the years after university, but Zhen had no suitors. If one looked past the scars, she was within the normal range of plain to pretty. But no one looked past the scars. Zhen’s parents could afford to be kind about it. After all, their son would continue the family line. Zhen was their lucky number two. They encouraged her to continue her education. Female PhDs were called di san xing, or the third sex. But Zhen was already unmarriageable and had little to risk.
By twenty-eight, she was considered one of the sheg nu, or “leftover women,” like the pieces of gristle and soggy vegetables that get pushed aside and left on a dinner plate. Everyone assumed Zhen would remain in academia, but the government recruited her, like her cryptographer grandfather, shortly after she earned her doctorate. Party leadership wanted a stronger space program, one befitting a major world power and one that would be a source of national pride.
In order to enter the program, Zhen had to pledge her loyalty to the legacy of Mao Zedong and join the Communist Party. She did this while handing over her passport and dreams of traveling around the world. There was no other way but to keep her head down, watch after her family, and meet the expectations of others. Zhen survived but made a promise that when the time came, when there was more to gain and less to lose, she would rise and stand honorably with the righteous. It was her destiny.
TWENTY-THREE
The Meeting
Kourou, French Guiana
January 14
T-minus 18 days to launch
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND a good enema,” the Professor announced.
“So noted,” Ben said, pushing the old man’s wheelchair toward the Janus lobby.
He let the Professor prattle on, loopy with
painkillers. Amy offered to take over, but he ignored her. Ben was leaning down on the handles of the wheelchair as much as he was pushing forward.
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” the Professor was quick to add. “Codeine was a comfort. And now morphine is an absolute godsend—but they clog the pipes something awful.”
Now that the Professor had graduated to morphine, he needed to receive his doses in person at the infirmary. Suicide was becoming a particular threat among many at the Effort, such as psychological trauma, disease outbreak, air attack, internal sabotage, and raiding from local French Guianese who had managed to cooperate in storming the outer perimeter and overwhelm enough guards to seize their weapons and break through. With each new threat came a new set of rules strictly enforced.
When Ben, the Professor, and Amy reached the lobby doors, a jeep was waiting outside. Walking into the heat and humidity of French Guiana was like walking into a soft wall. Ben crouched down beside the Professor until he could see his own likeness reflected in the thick glass of the old man’s spectacles.
“You sure you won’t come?” Ben asked the Professor.
Sweat gathered on the old man’s clammy skin.
“I’ll head back to the nuclear team,” the Professor said. “Physics, I can handle. Jungle humidity is another matter. Not kind to electronics or old men.”
Two peacekeepers got out of the jeep and approached. One lifted the Professor up as if he weighed no more than a child while the other folded his wheelchair to stow in the back. Ben and Amy watched the jeep drive away.
“He looks awful,” Ben said.
“So do you,” said a voice behind them.
Ben and Amy startled and turned to see Love, standing in front of the lobby door in her military jumpsuit with her arms crossed.
“What are you doing?” Ben stuttered. “You need to stay with the nuclear team.”
“Fuck you, Ben. I may not be the genius you are, but I’m not stupid. I know something’s up.”
Love would have said more, but another jeep pulled up to the Janus building.
“Oh shit!” Ben cursed. “It’s the Disasters.”
Two women stepped out of the back seat wearing red vests with Red Cross emblems. One was a psychiatrist from a Presbyterian family in Vermont. She had a tall, wiry body and prominent chin and nose, like a Halloween witch. The ER surgeon, on the other hand, was from Houston. She was small and round in stature but demanded the respect one was owed for doing the Lord’s work. Both were veteran volunteers with Red Cross Disaster Response. When they appeared like gray-haired banshees, it meant you were ready to be pulled back from the brink of self-destruction and spirited away for medical treatment. The women immediately walked up and introduced themselves.
“Hang on, did the Russians put you up to this?” Ben interrupted. “Oleg thinks shrinks are hilarious.”
“That may explain their high suicide rate,” the tall psychiatrist countered. “But no. A concerned colleague asked that we reach out to you—”
“No time,” Ben said, “and I’m stealing your taxi.”
He darted between them and got into the back seat of their jeep. Amy got in beside him, but before she could shut the door, Love stepped inside.
“Move your skinny asses over,” she barked. “I’m coming, too.”
Amy nudged Ben in the ribs with her elbow until he scooted left. Ben told the driver to head for the payload prep facilities.
“Why payload prep?” Love asked, as she buckled up.
“That’s what we hope to find out,” Amy admitted.
* * *
BEN LOST TIME in the jeep. He must have fallen asleep, because he opened his eyes and saw everyone staring at him. They were idling in the back parking lot of the payload prep facilities. Ben fumbled with his seat belt and tried not to fall as he stepped out. Old cigarette butts littered the asphalt. Reps from the logistics team had already doled out the last of the cigarettes. Food, medication, and supplies were being rationed, which likely meant the rest of the world was starving. The Effort had become a greedy organ that sucked up the remaining blood of civilization as it dissolved.
Ben stepped over and around sleeping engineers dressed in fatigues and curled up on their sides.
“Like downtown Tokyo without the suits and ties,” he muttered.
And just like businessmen working to exhaustion in downtown Tokyo, the Effort engineers had their share of collapses, breakdowns, and heart attacks from fatigue and chronic stress.
Ben, Amy, and Love scaled the chain-link fence surrounding the parking lot. Ben was slower and clumsier in his weakened state.
“Could this be a trap?” Love whispered, as the forest closed in around them.
Ben gave a humorless laugh and shrugged.
“But, then why risk it?” Love insisted.
“Because there’s nothing to risk,” he blurted. “We’re all dead. Dead as doornails. Unless this…She”—he motioned ahead—“knows something the rest of us don’t.”
Love halted. Her legs buckled, and she crumpled to the ground. There was some type of fetal position she was supposed to assume; the Disasters demonstrated it during a mandatory seminar on psychological trauma, but Ben wasn’t paying attention at the time.
Amy moved to hold Love as Ben walked away. Love would have to get up and keep going, just like he did. And if she didn’t…One had to let go eventually, he surmised. Much as he deeply loved it all—the planet, his life in the new millennium, Amy, his parents, sister, nephew and niece, memories of Southern California, Love, and the rest of the Effort—he had to let them all go. Ben’s internal caring mechanism was beyond its breaking point, and his synapses were flooded with antidepressants. Every time he tried to cry into those Effort pillows, it was like trying to squeeze tears from driftwood.
Ben walked ahead until he spotted a strange cluster of trees. At first sight, the branches looked as if they were covered in black, globular spots, like plump parasites.
“The plane is still there?”
Ben jumped and turned in a full circle. The voice was close. He spotted an Asian woman in the shade of a large bush, struggling to rise. She wore a tank top and shorts but quickly unfolded a white lab coat and pushed her arms through the sleeves.
His curious eyes scanned her face and latched on to her scars. Zhen caught his stare.
“Double cleft palate—”
“Yes,” Ben interrupted, and still felt human enough to look away.
“Where is Amy?” Zhen asked.
As if on cue, there was keening noise from the distance behind Ben.
“She’s helping a friend,” Ben said quietly. “Look, you wanted me, you got me. So let’s start with who the fuck are you, and why the fuck should I care?”
This gave her pause.
“Zhen,” she replied.
“Zhen, I’m Ben Schwartz.”
The engineer blinked and remembered to bow with respect.
“The plane is still there?” she asked again.
Ben nodded. The woman put a hand on her heart and took a deep breath. Ben didn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t this. When Amy first told him about an engineer claiming to have a solution, he thought Zhen was either a liar or a shit mathematician with bad calculations. He could sniff out a bad actor from across a room. So, shitty at math, then.
“Let’s get on with it,” Ben prodded. “What’s your solution?”
He had already exhausted all possibilities as far as his mind could stretch. He was prepared to shatter Zhen’s hopes for a solution just as he had shattered Love’s hopes for a future. They give you a job to do, you might as well do it.
Zhen started to tremble and breathe quickly. She had to will the words up from deep inside.
“The Tianlong!” she said in a rush.
If this woman was expecting lightning bolts, they didn’t come.
“A spacecraft,” she explained. “The next generation of Hayabusa.”
“Hayabusa?” Ben as
ked, shaking his head. “You mean JAXA’s Hayabusa?”
“Yes,” Zhen said, expecting the question, but still angered by it. “The Japanese space agency built the Hayabusa and Hayabusa 2—”
Of course Ben knew this, just as he knew that the Hayabusa 2 was currently navigating deep space toward a C-type asteroid thought to contain organic and hydrated minerals from the primordial universe.
“But the Tianlong is Chinese,” Zhen insisted. “The word is Mandarin for Heavenly Dragon. We built it in secret. I built it. With many improvements.”
Ben tried to form a question. The garbled word he managed was a mix of what and how.
“Our network hackers are…most impressive”—Zhen’s admission was not without shame—“and unconcerned with the intellectual property rights of foreigners.”
“You stole the technology.”
“It’s here,” she said.
“You…you have a duplicated Hayabusa 2 spacecraft—”
“Not just duplicated,” Zhen said, gritting her teeth, “duplicated and improved. The next generation—”
“Where?” he shouted.
“Here,” Zhen repeated. “Packaged up in pieces on that plane in Cayenne.”
Ben’s mouth opened and closed, gasping for air. He sank to the ground but felt suddenly weightless. If this was all true, Zhen really was a god lowered onto the stage in the second act to deliver her grace. Ben was light. He was a helium balloon floating in that beautiful blue sky above.
He must have lost time again. When he opened his eyes, Amy was kneeling over him with red-rimmed eyes. Ben turned his head to see Zhen and Love standing next to each other.
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