by Hao Jingfang
Looking around, he thought his room wasn’t too different from his cabin on Maearth: transparent desk, transparent dresser, transparent bedposts. It was a transparent shade of blue, though lighter in some places and darker in others. Even the chair he sat in was transparent, as though made from inflated glass fabric that changed shape as his body shifted. The walls facing outside were also transparent, and from his chair he could see all the way to the horizon. Only the wall next to the hallway was an opaque white that gave him privacy from the other guests. The whole room reminded him of a crystal box—even the ceiling was translucent, like an azure sheet of frosted glass. Through it he could see the blurred sun, like a white lamp.
What does all this transparency mean? The word “transparent” was politically significant. A room that should be one’s own made transparent suggested surveillance. When all the rooms were transparent, it suggested mass surveillance. He could take this as a symbol of the conquest of individual privacy by the collective and turn it into a bit of political commentary, a critique.
That sort of approach would be exactly what mainstream Earth opinion expected. His documentary would naturally be well received. The proponents of individualism on Earth had been waiting for just this kind of evidence, incontrovertible proof of the accusations leveled against the “hell in heaven.” It would also provide the hawks with yet more support for an attack against Mars.
But Eko didn’t want to go down that route—at least, he wasn’t willing to abandon himself to received wisdom so easily. He refused to believe that a place so spiritually oppressive could be where his teacher had willingly devoted eight years of his life.
He never told anyone his real purpose for agreeing to come to Mars. Maybe someone could guess it; he wasn’t sure.
It wasn’t a secret that he had studied filmmaking with Arthur Davosky. Ostensibly the award he had won a year earlier was why he had been chosen as a member of the Terran delegation, but he knew that Theon had recommended him in large measure because of his friendship with Arthur. He accepted the offer to join the delegation without probing deeply into the reasons, and Theon never offered an explanation. At Arthur’s funeral, he had seen Theon’s bald head and sunglasses, bowed from start to finish.
Gently, he retrieved the chip nestled in his shirt pocket and admired it in his palm. His teacher’s memories from near the end of his life were stored on it—supposedly in the form of neural activity converted into ones and zeros. Rationally he didn’t believe in the practicality of this technology, but emotionally he wanted to believe. After a man died, if his memories could be kept alive—if he could still decide where the memories would find eternal rest—then the dissolution of death represented no absolute victory.
* * *
Feeling his stomach growl, Eko got up and walked to the wall to activate the room-service menu. Most of the dishes were unfamiliar, so he picked a few items at random. It took but a few minutes for the delivery light to come on, and a tray rose up from within a tunnel behind the glass wall like a dumbwaiter. The tray stopped, and the glass door slid open.
He picked up the tray and examined the food with interest: his first encounter with authentic Martian cuisine. On Maearth, the Terran delegation’s supplies had all come from Earth, and for the duration of the trip they had no opportunity to sample Martian food. He had heard rumors about what the Martians ate, stories tinged with the bloodthirsty imagination of pirate tales. Some said that Martians ate worms grown in sand dunes, and others claimed that they ate plastic and metal debris. It was always the habit of people who had never gone anywhere to invent outrageous stories about faraway places, to gain the self-satisfaction of an imaginary civilized person through manufactured fantasies of barbarism.
Staring at the tray in his hand, Eko wasn’t sure if he should film some aesthetically pleasing scenes of Martian haute cuisine. Such footage would add a hint of romance and, when spread through the fashion media channels, would convert fancied barbarity into fancy for the exotic. He knew that process was easy to initiate and had occurred countless times.
The dying words of Arthur Davosky came unbidden to his mind: To be interesting, rely on your head; to be faithful, rely on your heart and eyes. He didn’t know what he was supposed to have faith in. But the image of his teacher floated before his eyes: thinning hair, curled up in the high-backed armchair like a shriveled shrimp.
* * *
By then, speaking was a struggle for Arthur Davosky, and so he sketched out what he meant with his trembling hands in the air as he whispered.
To be interesting—he pointed to his head—to be faithful—he pointed to his eyes and heart.
Eko wasn’t concentrating on listening; instead, he was staring at the old man’s slender fingers as though looking at the vanes of a windmill that had stopped turning. Fifty isn’t so old, he thought, but he looks like a starving child, wrapped up in that thick blanket. Realizing that a lifetime’s worth of courage had been reduced to such helplessness emptied his heart of all feeling.
Language is the mirror of the Light, his teacher said slowly.
Eko nodded, uncertain what was meant.
Don’t forget the Light by focusing on the mirror.
“I understand.”
Listen. Don’t be in a rush.
“What am I listening for?”
Instead of answering, his teacher stared at the air, as though lost in thought. His eyes glazed over. Eko was just about to panic at the thought that Davosky had died, when the old man’s fingers moved again in the dying sunlight like the jagged fringe of an iceberg.
If you ever get to go to Mars, take this with you.
Eko looked where he was pointing and saw the button-like chip on the desk. An icy dagger plunged into his heart as he understood that his teacher was trying to dispose of his remains after death. He was pointing at his true self, saying goodbye to his memories with his decaying flesh. His words were muddled but calm, and that made Eko’s eyes swell with hot tears.
That night Davosky sank into a coma, and he died two days later. During those last two days he recovered consciousness only once, at which point he tried to write to Eko on a notepad. The only mark he managed to make before he fell back into his coma was the letter B. Eko waited by his bedside until he was declared dead.
* * *
Silently, Eko ate his breakfast, so absorbed in the past that he forgot to taste the food. By the time he had returned from reminiscence to the present, most of the tray was empty, save for two small biscuits and a side dish that resembled mashed potatoes. He picked up one of the biscuits and bit into it, but it was as though he had lost his sense of taste. He couldn’t say whether it was delicious or bland.
He tried to focus on the documentary he was supposed to make to shake off the feeling of helplessness. Perhaps he should make it into a visual feast, a baroque dance. After all, everything here was already so baroque, so fluid. He caressed the table, and the table caressed him back. Some details that had seemed insignificant at first became, upon closer examination, fresh and interesting. The edge of the glass table, for instance, was decorated with the curves of a spraying fountain. The frame of the mirror mounted on the wall resembled rising flames, and the borders of the breakfast tray were filled with carved flowers. The decorations weren’t too ostentatious, but together they endowed the room with a baroque-style sense of motion: a fluidity in the edges and a transcendence in the details. Most of the furniture was connected to the walls, so that the desk, bed, and dresser were like turns taken by a surging stream through the mountains, forming a coherent whole in which the curve of the desk was like the crest of a furled wave. Eko found the aesthetic interesting. He had always thought that on Mars a precise, clean mechanical aesthetic would reign supreme, but the reality turned out to be humane and natural, as though he had walked into a distant vale far from urban bustle.
He took out his camera glasses and put them on. He toured the room again with his gaze to save the footage. Then he retrieved
various instruments from his luggage and set them up around the room: temperature distribution recorder, air analyzer, solar chronometer, and so on. The tiny gizmos whirred like dinosaur eggs about to hatch.
Eko knew that focusing on the unique Martian aesthetic represented a shortcut. Each tiny ornamental difference from Earth would give audiences at home a sense of the exotic, mysterious, and distant. This was a way to distance the scene from the observer psychologically, to reduce reality to an image in order to avoid confronting the new.
But he didn’t want to shoot that way. That kind of film would no doubt please the Martian authorities. From the moment he had arrived, Martian officials had cocooned him in a kind of impenetrable friendliness, telling him in enthusiastic bureaucratese that they were absolutely delighted to have him here and couldn’t wait for him to show the real Mars to Earth, hoping his art would contribute to the growing friendship and trust between the two planets. Eko had smiled and nodded, parroting back the sentiment that he was confident that Mars was full of beauty. In the hallway of the shuttle port, they shook hands, perfectly relaxed, and Eko even directed his drone to capture the scene for posterity.
Eko didn’t consider his polite response a lie, though he certainly didn’t take the official solicitousness at face value. He simply preferred to not express an opinion based on too little observation. He mistrusted officials, but he believed that it was absolutely vital to conserve opportunities for expressing opinions. His profession required him to travel widely, and so he understood that occasions when one had to speak one’s mind and defend it were few and far between. Most of the time it was far more important to watch and listen while saying nothing.
Several other delegates from Earth had already given him their opinion of what he should shoot and how. The American delegate, Professor Jacques, gently hinted to him that it was impossible for visitors to observe the true conditions of a place under authoritarian rule. The German delegate, Colonel Hopman, was much more direct. He told Eko that he was too young to get involved in matters that he didn’t fully understand. Eko understood that the colonel was referring to politics. He knew that he was only a filmmaker, too junior among the delegates to be “involved”—not just in politics, but perhaps not even in filmmaking. Film was evidence, and any recording reduced, to some extent, the potential range of explanations the future could offer for historical events.
No one had given him any suggestions that he found useful. In the little bar on Maearth, passersby often slapped him on the shoulders and wished him luck before turning away and lowering their voices a few decibels.
Only Theon had given him suggestion after suggestion, apparently treating the trip as just another commercial opportunity.
Drama! I tell you, the key is drama!
Theon had offered this with a dramatic expression on his face. He was a businessman, and even if he acted and dressed like he was on a beach vacation, the instinct for commerce, deeply embedded in his bones, came through. For him, the greatest failure of any art was to fall short of capturing a market. As long as the plot was exciting, he didn’t care if the story valorized freedom or authoritarianism. He couldn’t have cared less if the point of the film was to mock him.
Thinking about everyone who had spoken with him about his film, Eko felt like a pedestrian standing still on a median, surrounded by busy lanes of rushing traffic. He didn’t care about the opinions of the other delegates, because they were like arrows aimed at the wrong target. The useless suggestions formed a constricting lasso around him, but his interest was like a soap bubble caught by the lasso, expanding in a different dimension even as the lasso tightened. He nodded as though accepting the advice of everyone because he hadn’t found a theme he cared about. When he found it, he was certain that he would stand his ground.
He had not crossed ninety million kilometers to produce some clichéd drivel. He was looking for medicine—medicine that would cure what he saw as the terminal disease plaguing Earth.
Eko wasn’t ready to reach any conclusions until he had gathered more information. He wanted to shoot a script that had not yet been written; he needed the future to ascertain the present. He had no ending in mind, because he still couldn’t name the beginning.
* * *
After breakfast, Eko felt drowsy. Being around the delegates twenty-four seven had kept him on edge. Now that he was away from their constant feints and tests, an irresistible sense of exhaustion overwhelmed him.
He stretched out on the bed and fell asleep. He dreamed a long dream. In his dreams he often saw his teacher from the back, in that tall-backed chair, muttering to him incomprehensibly. He always tried to walk around the chair so that he could hear him better, but he never succeeded. In his dreams he would run as fast as he could, climb over mountains and hike through valleys, but no matter how much he tried, he could never get to the front of the chair.
By the time he woke up, it was four in the afternoon. Outside, the setting sun sketched out long, sharp shadows. He knew that a day on Mars was almost as long as a day on Earth, and so the welcome reception was about to begin. He didn’t want to get up, so he closed his eyes and allowed the dreamscape to linger.
Will I stay here, just like him? he thought. He couldn’t think of any reasons why he would, but that was the case for Arthur Davosky as well. Eighteen years earlier, when the first representatives from each planet visited the other, Arthur had come to Mars to study new filming technology. But instead of going back to Earth, he sent back the new hardware, software, and operating instructions on Maearth. The media on Earth was filled with speculation about his reasons and goals. Arthur was thirty-seven, at the peak of his career, winning award after award for his productions. He was well-liked by everyone and could do whatever he wanted. There was absolutely no reason for him to run or to defect. Some reports claimed that the Martian authorities had detained him because he had stumbled upon sensitive information; other reports said that he wanted to stay to learn more valuable technology.
Eko was only seven at the time, but he remembered the interminable rounds of analyses and arguments. The speculation never ceased, and in fact exploded the year Arthur finally returned to Earth, leading to daily mobs of reporters who followed him and demanded that he submit to an interview. Arthur, however, maintained his silence, even unto death.
His teacher’s experience had taught Eko to be cautious about speculating and jumping to conclusions. He knew that it was impossible for outsiders to know one’s true motivations, even if they knew every other fact. He refused to even predict his own actions, because he understood that reasons changed with circumstances.
* * *
The vacuum cleaner crawled along the foot of the wall like a turtle. The room, bathed in the light of the setting sun, felt peaceful. The sun wasn’t orange but a pale white. Its slanting rays limned everything in a glowing border, so very different from the light at noon through the roof.
He got up and sat at the edge of the bed, placing a hand gently against the still-life painting on the wall. The picture disappeared, replaced by a screen. A girl appeared on the screen: a red plaid skirt, a white belt with floral edging, a straw hat, a sweet smile. She was the virtual concierge doll.
“Good afternoon! The weather is perfect, isn’t it? I’m Vera. What can I do for you?”
“Good afternoon. I’m Eko. I’d like to know about my transportation options—public transportation, that is. Also, how do I buy tickets and look up routes?”
The girl on the screen blinked to show that she was processing. The animation was lifelike and graceful. A few seconds later she smiled and curtsied, her skirt flaring like an opening umbrella.
“The most common way for people to get around on Mars is through the tube trains. There are no tickets to buy. Every residence is located near a community station, with a train passing through every ten minutes. You can ride the train to the nearest hub station, where you can transfer to an interdistrict express train to take you to the hub nearest you
r destination. Every station has smart maps that can help you plan your trip. A circumnavigation of all of Mars City takes one hundred and fifty minutes.”
“Thank you. That’s very helpful.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with? For example, I can provide you information on city services, museums, and shopping guides.”
“Is it possible … to look up information about a person?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“How to contact a particular individual.”
“Of course. Please tell me the name or the associated atelier.”
“Brook. Janet Brook.”
“Ms. Janet Brook is a researcher at the Third Atelier of Tarkovsky Film Archive. Her residential address is Apartment #1, coordinate seven-by-sixteen, Russell District. You may leave a message in Ms. Brook’s personal space or connect with her at her atelier.”
“All right. Thank you.”
“I have copied the above information to your room’s memory. Would you like to connect with her now?”
“No, not now.”
“Would you like to conduct another search?”
“Let me think … oh, yes, there is someone else. I believe her name is Luoying Sloan. She’s one of the students who studied on Earth.”
“Ms. Luoying Sloan is a student at Dance School #1, Duncan Troupe. Her residential address is Apartment #4, coordinate eleven-by-two, Russell District. Ms. Sloan’s personal space has been temporarily suspended.”
“Thank you, Vera. That will be all.”
“It’s been a pleasure assisting you.”
The girl twirled, bowed to him, and skipped away.
Eko sat on the bed and copied the information he had just gathered into his personal notepad. Having specific goals to pursue for the next few days excited him, though he wasn’t sure what to expect. He sat still for a while, trying to sort through his questions and anxieties.