The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  As we flew over the center of Ordos, a panda rose up and hailed us. The panda’s vehicle was a small blimp, painted olive green and carrying the English legend: “Aerial Transport Patrol, People’s Republic of China.” Icke slowed down and sent over the cargo manifests, the maintenance records, which the panda could cross-check against the international registry of cargo airships, and his journey log. After a few minutes, someone waved at us from the window in the gondola of the blimp, and a Chinese voice told us over radio that we were free to move on.

  “This is such a messed up country,” Icke said. “They have the money to build something like Ordos, but have you been to Guangxi? It’s near Vietnam, and outside the cities the people there are among the poorest in the world. They have nothing except the mud on the floor of their huts, and beautiful scenery and beautiful women.”

  Icke had met Yeling there, through a mail-order bride service. It was hard to meet women when you were in the air three hundred days of the year.

  On the day of Icke’s appointment, he was making a run through Nanning, the provincial capital, as part of a union crew picking up a shipment of star anise. He had the next day, a Saturday, off, and he traveled down to the introduction center a hundred kilometers outside Nanning to meet the girls whose pictures he had picked out and who had been bused in from the surrounding villages.

  They had fifteen girls for him. They met in a village school house. Icke sat on a small stool at the front of the classroom with his back to the blackboard, and the girls were brought in to sit at the student desks, as though he was there to teach them.

  Most of them knew some English, and he could talk to them for a little bit and mark down, on a chart, the three girls that he wanted to chat with one-on-one in private. The girls he didn’t pick would wait around for the next Westerner customer to come and see them in another half hour.

  “They say that some services would even let you try the girls out for a bit, like allow you to take them to a hotel for a night, but I don’t believe that. Anyway, mine wasn’t like that. We just talked. I didn’t mark down three girls. Yeling was the only one I picked.

  “I liked the way she looked. Her skin was so smooth, so young-looking, and I loved her hair, straight and black with a little curl at the end. She smelled like grass and rainwater. But I liked even more the way she acted with me: shy and very eager to please, something you don’t see much in the women back home.” He looked over at me as I took notes and shrugged. “If you want to put a label on me and make the people who read what you write feel good about themselves, that’s your choice. It doesn’t make the label true.”

  I asked him if something felt wrong about the process, like shopping for a thing.

  “I paid the service two thousand dollars and gave her family another five thousand before I married her. Some people will not like that. They’ll think something is not altogether right about the way I married her

  “But I know I’m happy when I’m with her. That’s enough for me.

  “By the time I met her, Yeling had already dropped out of high school. If I didn’t meet her, she would not have gone on to college. She would not have become a lawyer or banker. She would not have gone to work in an office and come home to do yoga. That’s the way the world is.

  “Maybe she would have gone to Nanning to become a masseuse or bathhouse girl. Maybe she would have married an old peasant from the next village who she didn’t even know just because he could give her family some money. Maybe she would have spent the rest of her life getting parasites from toiling in the rice paddies all day and bringing up children in a mud hut at night. And she would have looked like an old woman by thirty.

  “How could that have been better?”

  * * *

  The language of the zeppeliners on the transpacific long haul, though officially English, is a mix of images and words from America and China. Dao, knife, dough, and dollar are used as interchangeable synonyms. Ursine imagery is applied to law enforcement agents along the route: a panda is a Chinese air patrol unit, and a polar bear Russian; in Alaska they are Kodiaks, and off the coast of BC they become whales; finally in America the ships have to deal with grizzlies. The bear’s job is to make the life of the zeppeliner difficult: catching pilots who have been at the controls for more than six hours without switching off, who fly above or below regulation altitude, who mix hydrogen into the lift gas to achieve an extra edge in cargo capacity.

  “Whales?” I asked Icke. How was whale a type of bear?

  “Evolution,” Icke said. “Darwin said that a race of bears swimming with their mouths open for water bugs may eventually evolve into whales.” (I checked. This was true.)

  * * *

  Nothing changed as an electronic beep from the ship’s GPS informed us that we had crossed the international border between China and Mongolia somewhere in the desolate, dry plains of the Gobi below, dotted with sparse clumps of short, brittle grass.

  Yeling came into the control cab to take over. Icke locked the controls and got up. In the small space at the back of the control cab, they spoke to each other for a bit in lowered voices, kissed, while I stared at the instrument panels, trying hard not to eavesdrop.

  Every marriage had its own engine, with its own rhythm and fuel, its own language and control scheme, a quiet hum that kept everything moving. But the hum was so quiet that sometimes it was more felt than heard, and you had to listen for it if you didn’t want to miss it.

  Then Icke left and Yeling came forward to take the pilot’s seat.

  She looked at me. “There’s a second bunk in the back if you want to park yourself a bit.” Her English was accented but good, and you could hear traces of Icke’s broad New England A’s and non-rhoticity in some of the words.

  I thanked her and told her that I wasn’t sleepy yet.

  She nodded and concentrated on flying the ship, her hands gripping the stick for the empennage—the elevators and rudders in the cruciform tail—and the wheel for the trim far more tightly than Icke had.

  I stared at the empty, cold desert passing beneath us for a while, and then I asked her what she had been doing when I first showed up at the airport.

  “Fixing the eyes of the ship. Barry likes to see the mouth all red and fierce, but the eyes are more important.

  “A ship is a dragon, and dragons navigate by sight. One eye for the sky, another for the sea. A ship without eyes cannot see the coming storms and ride the changing winds. It won’t see the underwater rocks near the shore and know the direction of land. A blind ship will sink.”

  An airship, she said, needed eyes even more than a ship on water. It moved so much faster and there were so many more things that could go wrong.

  “Barry thinks it’s enough to have these.” She gestured towards the instrument panel before her: GPS, radar, radio, altimeter, gyroscope, compass. “But these things help Barry, not the ship. The ship itself needs to see.

  “Barry thinks this is superstition, and he doesn’t want me to do it. But I tell him that the ship looks more impressive for customers if he keeps the eyes freshly painted. That he thinks make sense.”

  Yeling told me that she had also crawled all over the hull of the ship and traced out a pattern of oval dragon scales on the surface of the hull with tung oil. “It looks like the way the ice cracks in spring on a lake with good fengshui. A ship with a good coat of dragon scales won’t ever be claimed by water.”

  The sky darkened and night fell. Beneath us was complete darkness, northern Mongolia and the Russian Far East being some of the least densely inhabited regions of the globe. Above us, stars denser than I had ever seen winked into existence. It felt as though we were drifting on the surface of a sea at night, the water around us filled with the glow of sea jellies, the way I remember when I used to swim at night in Long Island Sound off the Connecticut coast.

  “I think I’ll sleep now,” I said. She nodded, and then told me that I could microwave something for myself in the small galley behind the c
ontrol cab, off to the side of the main corridor.

  The galley was tiny, barely larger than a closet. There was a fridge, a microwave, a sink, and a small two-burner electric range. Everything was kept spotless. The pots and pans were neatly hung on the wall, and the dishes were stacked in a grid of cubbyholes and tied down with velcro straps. I ate quickly and then followed the sound of snores aft.

  Icke had left the light on for me. In the windowless bedroom, the soft, warm glow and the wood-paneled walls were pleasant and induced sleep. Two bunks, one on top of the other, hung against one wall of the small bedroom. Icke was asleep in the bottom one. In one corner of the room was a small vanity with a mirror, and pictures of Yeling’s family were taped around the frame of the mirror.

  It struck me then that this was Icke and Yeling’s home. Icke had told me that they owned a house in western Massachusetts, but they spent only about a month out of the year there. Most of their meals were cooked and eaten in the American Dragon, and most of their dreams were dreamt here in this room, each alone in a bunk.

  A poster of smiling children drawn in the style of Chinese folk art was on the wall next to the vanity, and framed pictures of Yeling and Icke together, smiling, filled the rest of the wall space. I looked through them: wedding, vacation, somewhere in a Chinese city, somewhere near a lake with snowy shores, each of them holding up a big fish.

  I crawled into the top bunk, and between Icke’s snores, I could hear the faint hum of the ship’s engines, so faint that you almost missed it if you didn’t listen for it.

  * * *

  I was more tired than I had realized, and slept through the rest of Yeling’s shift as well as Icke’s next shift. By the time I woke up, it was just after sunrise, and Yeling was again at the helm. We were deep in Russia, flying over the endless coniferous Boreal forests of the heart of Siberia. Our course was now growing ever more easterly as we approached the tip of Siberia where it would meet Alaska across the Bering Sea.

  She was listening to an audiobook as I came into the control cab. She reached out to turn it off when she heard me, but I told her that it was all right.

  It was a book about baseball, an explanation of the basic rules for non-fans. The particular section she was listening to dealt with the art of how to appreciate a stolen base.

  Yeling stopped the book at the end of the chapter. I sipped a cup of coffee while we watched the sun rise higher and higher over the Siberian taiga, lighting up the lichen woodland dotted with bogs and pristine lakes still frozen over.

  “I didn’t understand the game when I first married Barry. We do not have baseball in China, especially not where I grew up.

  “Sometimes, when Barry and I aren’t working, when I stay up a bit during my shift to sit with him or on our days off, I want to talk about the games I played as a girl or a book I remember reading in school or a festival we had back home. But it’s difficult.

  “Even for a simple funny memory I wanted to share about the time my cousins and I made these new paper boats, I’d have to explain everything: the names of the paper boats we made, the rules for racing them, the festival that we were celebrating and what the custom for racing paper boats was about, the jobs and histories of the spirits for the festival, the names of the cousins and how we were related, and by then I’d forgotten what was the stupid little story I wanted to share.

  “It was exhausting for both of us. I used to work hard to try to explain everything, but Barry would get tired, and he couldn’t keep the Chinese names straight or even hear the difference between them. So I stopped.

  “But I want to be able to talk to Barry. Where there is no language, people have to build language. Barry likes baseball. So I listen to this book and then we have something to talk about. He is happy when I can listen to or watch a baseball game with him and say a few words when I can follow what’s happening.”

  * * *

  Icke was at the helm for the northernmost leg of our journey, where we flew parallel to the Arctic Circle and just south of it. Day and night had lost their meaning as we flew into the extreme northern latitudes. I was already getting used to the six-hour-on, six-hour-off rhythm of their routine, and slowly synching my body’s clock to theirs.

  I asked Icke if he knew much about Yeling’s family or spent much time with them.

  “No. She sends some money back to them every couple of months. She’s careful with the budget, and I know that anything she sends them she’s worked for as hard as I did. I’ve had to work on her to get her to be a little more generous with herself, and to spend money on things that will make us happy right now. Every time we go to Vegas now she’s willing to play some games with me and lose a little money, but she even has a budget for that.

  “I don’t get involved with her family. I figure that if she wanted out of her home and village so badly that she was willing to float away with a stranger in a bag of gas, then there’s no need for me to become part of what she’s left behind.

  “I’m sure she also misses her family. How can she not? That’s the way we all are, as far as I can see: we want that closeness from piling in all together and knowing everything about everyone and talking all in one breath, but we also want to run away by ourselves and be alone. Sometimes we want both at the same time. My mom wasn’t much of a mom, and I haven’t been home since I was sixteen. But even I can’t say that I don’t miss her sometimes.

  “I give her space. If there’s one thing the Chinese don’t have, it’s space. Yeling lived in a hut so full of people that she never even had her own blanket, and she couldn’t remember a single hour when she was alone. Now we see each other for a few minutes every six hours, and she’s learned how to fill up that space, all that free time, by herself. She’s grown to like it. It’s what she never had, growing up.”

  There is a lot of space in a zeppelin, I thought, idly. That space, filled with lighter-than-air helium, keeps the zeppelin afloat. A marriage also has a lot of space. What fills it to keep it afloat?

  We watched the display of the aurora borealis outside the window in the northern skies as the ship raced towards Alaska.

  * * *

  I don’t know how much time passed before I was jolted awake by a violent jerk. Before I knew what was going on, another sudden tilt of the ship threw me out of my bunk onto the floor. I rolled over, stumbled up, and made my way forward into the control cab by holding on to the walls.

  “It’s common to have storms in spring over the Bering Sea,” Icke, who was supposed to be off shift and sleeping, was standing and holding on to the back of the pilot’s chair. Yeling didn’t bother to acknowledge me. Her knuckles were white from gripping the controls.

  It was daytime, but other than the fact that there was some faint and murky light coming through the windows, it might as well have been the middle of the night. The wind, slamming freezing rain into the windows, made it impossible to see even the bottom of the hull as it curved up from the control cab to the nose cone. Billowing fog and clouds roiled around the ship, whipping past us faster than cars on the autobahns.

  A sudden gust slammed into the side of the ship, and I was thrown onto the floor of the cab. Icke didn’t even look over as he shouted at me, “Tie yourself down or get back to the bunk.”

  I got up and stood in the back right corner of the control cab and used the webbing I found there to lash myself in place and out of the way.

  Smoothly, as though they had practiced it, Yeling slipped out of the pilot chair and Icke slipped in. Yeling strapped herself into the passenger stool on the right. The line on one of the electronic screens that showed the ship’s course by GPS indicated that we had been zigzagging around crazily. In fact, it was clear that although the throttle was on full and we were burning fuel as fast as an airplane, the wind was pushing us backwards relative to the ground.

  It was all Icke could do to keep us pointed into the wind and minimize the cross-section we presented to the front of the storm. If we were pointed slightly at an angle to the
wind, the wind would have grabbed us around the ship’s peripatetic pivot point and spun us like an egg on its side, yawing out of control. The pivot point, the center of momentum around which a ship would move when an external force is applied, shifts and moves about an airship depending on the ship’s configuration, mass, hull shape, speed, acceleration, wind direction, and angular momentum, among other factors, and a pilot kept a zeppelin straight in a storm like this by feel and instinct more than anything else.

  Lightning flashed close by, so close that I was blinded for a moment. The thunder rumbled the ship and made my teeth rattle, as though the floor of the ship was the diaphragm of a subwoofer.

  “She feels heavy,” Icke said. “Ice must be building up on the hull. It actually doesn’t feel nearly as heavy as I would have expected. The hull ought to be covered by a solid layer of ice now if the outside thermometer reading is right. But we are still losing altitude, and we can’t go any lower. The waves are going to hit the ship. We can’t duck under this storm. We’ll have to climb over it.”

  Icke dropped more water ballast to lighten the ship and tilted the elevators up. We shot straight up like a rocket. The American Dragon’s elongated teardrop shape acted as a crude airfoil, and as the brutal Arctic wind rushed at us, we flew like an experimental model wing design in a wind tunnel.

  Another bolt of lightning flashed, even closer and brighter than before. The rumble from the thunder hurt my ear drums, and for a while I could hear nothing.

  Icke and Yeling shouted at each other, and Yeling shook her head and yelled again. Icke looked at her for a moment, nodded, and lifted his hands off the controls for a second. The ship jerked itself and twisted to the side as the wind took hold of it and began to turn it. Icke reached back to grab the controls as another bolt of lightning flashed. The interior lights went out as the lightning erased all shadows and lines and perspective, and the sound of the thunder knocked me off my feet and punched me hard in the ears. And I passed into complete darkness.