by Hao Jingfang
The afternoon sunlight slanted to the other side of the dance school, and the long blades of grass cast shadows against the glass wall. Luoying was finished with her practice. She sat down, untied the ribbons from around her ankles, slipped off the pointe shoes, and packed them away. Smiling, she said goodbye to the teacher at the other end of the studio.
Eko was pacing back and forth some distance from the studio, trying to figure out a way to introduce himself to Luoying. At that moment a boy about Luoying’s age approached the dance school along the footpath. He was tall and slender, with broad shoulders holding up a long uniform jacket, topped by a handsome face. Eko hid himself behind a tree.
The boy peeked inside the dance school, glanced at the time on his button, and waited on the lane outside. A few minutes later Luoying emerged with her backpack. The boy smiled and took the bag from her. The pair walked away together, side by side, without speaking.
The scene aroused Eko’s curiosity. He saw between them a kind of simple tranquility, but he couldn’t tell if they were a couple. They didn’t kiss or hug, but he also didn’t sense any polite distance. The way they had smiled at each other spoke of some shared understanding. The overall impression was one of being completely at ease, rather like the mood of Mars City itself. There was no sense of rush, of desperate need; rather, everything was without guile, artless.
It was such a stark contrast to the world Eko came from. He lived in a city whose prosperity was based on the entertainment industry. People rushed everywhere like fluttering birds and obsessed over their riddle-like relationships and statuses. He was used to the desperate need to be alluring and the harried sense of insecurity. But here, where everyone strolled around and paused to chat in the streets as though they had all the time in the world, he felt out of place.
Watching the two figures walking away, Eko tried to imagine Luoying’s childhood, tried to imagine how one built a web of friendships and other relationships in this serene city. The idea of interviewing Luoying felt hollow. He turned and headed back toward the station.
On the tube train, Eko recalled the exhibition hall inside the archive. Crystal cubes of different sizes were scattered around the hall. Inside, he could see various scenes: three-dimensional figures moving about a miniature, vivid, living world. Next to each cube was a metal plaque explaining the film the scene was taken from. A sense of absurdity seized Eko. He realized that he was just like the tiny people inside those cubes. He also lived inside a crystal box—not just now, but since long before he had come to Mars.
THE STUDY
Side by side, Luoying and Anka walked along the glass-enclosed road. They had decided not to take the tube train from near the dance school. Instead, they’d walk directly to one of the hub stations. Both of them enjoyed walking.
The pedestrian tube was parallel to and below the tube for the train, narrow and winding. To walk through the glass tube was like walking through trouble, which naturally pushed the two closer together and forced them into the same direction. The tube was about three meters in diameter, and the bottom was suspended about half a meter above the ground. Through the transparent floor it was possible to see the red planet’s surface.
The road itself was just wide enough to allow the two of them to squeeze together, shoulder to shoulder, without touching. Irises were planted along both sides. Both put their hands in their pockets, and their steps were synced. Luoying wore the dance team’s uniform jacket, while Anka wore the uniform of his aerospace force squadron. The top of Luoying’s head reached Anka’s chin, and when she turned, she could see his firm neck and feel the rise and fall of his strong shoulders. Anka, on the other hand, could see her slender neck and smell the faint fragrance in her hair.
Luoying told Anka what was troubling her. For the first time she confessed her doubt to someone not part of her family. She had hoped to keep the secret from her friends in the Mercury Group—the very idea that she had been made one of them due to the intervention of some authority rather than because she deserved to be picked was humiliating. Since she was a little girl, she hated to be given special treatment because of who she was related to.
“Will everyone laugh at me?” she asked Anka.
Anka smiled. “Do you really think the rest of us are geniuses?”
“But you were selected because of your scores.”
“It was just a test.”
“Don’t you think I unfairly benefited from my grandfather’s power?”
“Don’t be silly,” said Anka. “You’re still you.”
Luoying felt better. Anka always had the special power to make anything that bothered her seem like not such a big deal. He wasn’t talkative and disliked making grand, abstract arguments. Any problem, big or small, turned into no problem at all after he looked at it. As they talked, she began to think she was making too much of it as well. Anka simply listened as she talked, without asking many questions. This was their habit: if either had something to say, he or she said it; but if either chose to remain silent, the other didn’t pry.
“Chania told me that you fainted after the banquet last night,” said Anka. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I was just too tired after the trip on Maearth.”
“Then you shouldn’t have come to practice today.”
“But the recital is in twenty days! I still haven’t even adjusted to the gravity.”
It was the truth. Luoying had virtually no confidence in her ability to perform in twenty days. Yesterday afternoon she had tried to practice, and then she had fainted after the banquet. To adjust to the sudden change in gravity was much harder than she had anticipated.
Her solo dance was one of the headline acts at the world’s fair. As a native of Mars, she was endowed with thinner bones and a strong sense of balance. Her training on Earth, on the other hand, forced her to become stronger than she would have been on Mars. A dance full of leaps and lightness under these conditions was the perfect opportunity to explore the limits of the human body. Researchers were thus very interested in her as a specimen. Terrans viewed her as an embodiment of the ancient tradition of dance developed on Earth, while the children of Mars were curious to see how a girl returning from another world had changed. She saw all these gazes—whether it was in the middle of the Boule Chamber, when she walked into the dance school, or when her image appeared on the giant screens at street corners—she saw those expectant gazes: intense, curious, judging, disapproving.
She didn’t want to let Anka know how terrible the practice today had gone. Not only did she have trouble controlling her body in the air, but she couldn’t even hit her takeoff or landing spots. She felt so light, and all the weight she had grown used to on Earth was gone. Her knees and ankles were sore and tired, like stories that had been retold so many times that they had lost all tension. A new gravity environment was not easy to adjust to: all the Terran visitors were wearing heavy metal shoes to help. But she had been forced to start to dance right away, before she had even relearned how to walk on this familiar-unfamiliar planet.
“Are you all finished with your training today?” she asked, trying to change the subject.
“No.”
“Then won’t you get in trouble for coming to meet me?”
“I just got back. I’ll be fine.”
“But you told me Captain Fitz is super strict.”
Anka chuckled. “Don’t worry about it. What’s the worst that he can do? Expel me. It’s no big deal. Anyway, we just had an argument.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. It was just an argument.”
Luoying sensed there was more. “I thought everything was going smoothly. You even got a new uniform.”
“It wasn’t just for me. I just came back at the right time. All eleven squadrons of the aerospace force are getting new uniforms.”
“Why? Are you planning some show?”
“No. The whole
Flight System’s budget got a fifty percent boost, so the budget for the aerospace force went up, too.”
“But why?”
“I heard it has something to do with Ceres.”
Luoying was silent for a while. “Do you think it also has to do with Earth?”
Anka was also silent for a while. Then he nodded. “I think so, actually.”
He didn’t elaborate, and the two continued on in silence. However, Luoying’s concerns only grew. This wasn’t the first time she had heard news like this. Anka belonged to the fifth squadron, whose duties normally involved industrial missions like transporting satellites and civil patrols. But in the event of a conflict, the squadron’s aircraft could quickly be reconfigured as fighters. When she was seven, Luoying had once witnessed a cargo carrier rapidly transform into a fighter within five minutes. She was so astonished that she couldn’t close her mouth, having been given a glimpse of the underbelly of her peaceful, ordinary life.
She couldn’t tell how much Anka’s information presaged the dangers of war. She didn’t want war. Earth was where she had spent one of the most important periods of her life, no less important than her childhood on Mars. Regardless of who would win or lose, she didn’t wish to see either world invaded by the flames of interplanetary violence.
After they got on the tube train at the hub station, it took only a few minutes to arrive at her home. Anka got off the train with her and said goodbye to her at the gate to her yard. Luoying gazed at Anka. His blue eyes often seemed a bit distracted. Seeing a tiny leaf had somehow fallen on the bridge of his nose, Luoying reached up to brush it off. He touched his nose and grinned at her.
“Get some rest,” Anka said.
“I will.”
“Don’t trouble yourself with things that don’t matter,” he added. “You’re still you.”
He turned and got back on the train. Luoying remained alone in the garden and watched the train depart.
She knew he disliked drama. If he wanted to do something, he just did it instead of talking about it. He despised exaggerations. An “argument” with Captain Fitz was likely, in truth, an intense confrontation. What happened? She tried to imagine it and couldn’t.
There were some words that she had never spoken to Anka, nor he to her.
She recalled what it was like five years ago when she had first emerged from the airport terminal on Earth. A tidal wave of engine noises assaulted her ears, and she was so frightened and shocked that she literally backed up several steps. The sky was filled with private aircraft of all sizes. Shuttling back and forth, the planes swept past each other, almost brushing the skyscrapers, seemingly avoiding disaster only at the last minute. She wrapped her arms around her luggage like a drowning girl clinging to a rock in the middle of a stormy sea. The sky was gray instead of the familiar dark blue of her home, nor the orange-red of a sandstorm. Everywhere was noise: rumbling, booming, buzzing, droning. Advertisements flashed no matter where she looked. Thousands of people rushed by her, as fast as flickering images on a screen. The other children had left her behind. Her friends shouted for her to keep up, as did the Terran official assigned to chaperone them, but she couldn’t move. She was stuck where she was, hugging her luggage, drowning in the noise. Someone bumped into her, and her suitcase fell to the ground as though a mountain had collapsed.
Just then, a hand reached out and picked up her suitcase. His other hand grabbed hers and pulled her forward. He didn’t demand to know why she was frozen in place. We have to keep up, he said, and pulled her along. He guided her through the crowd, parsing signs and jumping up from time to time to see where their official had gone. He looked so calm, so focused, his eyes roaming in every direction as he muttered decisively now and then. Soon they were reunited with the rest of their group. The entire process had taken no more than two minutes.
He had safely brought her into the new world.
He had smiled at her once on that day, but from then on, his was the only smile that took up space in her heart. She had never told him how she felt, and she didn’t know how he felt about her.
The flowers of the garden bloomed in vibrant silence. The Barberton daisies, in particular, had grown so lush that the broad leaves practically covered the path through the garden.
* * *
As soon as Luoying opened the door to the house, she heard loud, arguing voices. She paused for a minute to listen. The voices were coming from the living room; there seemed to be a large gathering in there.
She caught a few snippets of the conversation, and her heart began to beat faster. Quietly, she tiptoed up to the door of the living room and listened as she held her breath. Eavesdropping did not come naturally to her, and shame and the fear of being discovered made her stand still, not daring to touch anything.
Most of the voices she recognized. Ever since her grandfather had moved in with her and Rudy, these men—she called all of them uncles out of respect—became regular guests. The loudest voice belonged to Uncle Roowak, Archon of the Water System. He was deaf in one ear and always shouted with his good ear turned to the interlocutor, though he disliked people drawing attention to his condition. The one who spoke the fastest was Uncle Laak, the Registrar of Files, who always spoke seriously and in long paragraphs filled with dense citations. He knew so much that it was sometimes hard to understand him. The croaking voice belonged to Uncle Lanrang, Archon of the Land System, whose speech, though apparently in the common tongue, was virtually incomprehensible to Luoying, as it was filled with acronyms and numbers, sounding like a broken robot. And of course there was the booming voice of Uncle Juan, Archon of the Flight System. He was always present for these debates.
“I’ve told you a million times,” said Juan, “what matters isn’t the present but the future!”
“And I’ve told you just as often that the possibility they would achieve such capability within fifty years is well outside of five sigmas.” That was Lanrang.
“So you’re saying it is possible,” said Juan.
“I can only say that it’s not impossible,” said Lanrang.
Roowak shouted, “By the laws of probability, nothing is entirely impossible. Given enough time, a monkey can produce Shakespeare. We can’t just sit by and do nothing because of such a remote possibility!”
“It depends on what that possibility is!” Juan didn’t back down an inch. “Even if there’s only a one-in-a-million chance that they’ll develop a controlled nuclear fusion engine, we can’t give them the technology. Don’t tell me you accept the responsibility—you can’t handle it! Do you really think they come in friendship? Let me tell you, if we give them fusion tech today, tomorrow they’ll be back in warships.”
“Then what do you suggest?” Roowak was growing agitated. “They won’t give us the plans for the hydraulic engineering hub. Without it, we can’t do anything with Ceres. What’s the point of devoting so much effort to get the asteroid here if we’re just going to park it in space? Without water, we’re doomed.”
“It’s simple.” Juan’s voice softened. “We can’t get what we want without a credible threat.”
Laak, who hadn’t spoken for a while, broke in.
“Roowak, are you sure we have to have the plans for the hub? They’ve already agreed to give us the electrical control systems, right? What if we … figure out how to build the dams ourselves?”
“Figure it out?” Roowak, who was still shouting, also made an effort to control himself. “How exactly do you propose we do that? Where am I going to get the data to run the simulations? Where do I find a lab to experiment with river-flow characteristics? Do we even have a river? I must have real turbulence impact data. I can’t even run a Monte Carlo simulation without it. This is engineering, not a game. Without data, I can’t promise anything.”
Three seconds of silence. Three long seconds during which it seemed that the tension was going to explode like an overfilled balloon. Finally, Luoying heard the voice of her grandfather.
“Juan,
nonviolence is a fundamental principle,” said Hans Sloan in his deep voice. “We haven’t reached a crisis point. They never mentioned fusion technology as a nonnegotiable term, and there’s no reason for us to bring it up first. Let’s pretend it isn’t an issue and see how far we get in the negotiations.”
Juan’s tone seemed to relax just a bit. “Fine, but we have to reach a consensus among ourselves on where to draw the line.”
“The consensus is nonviolence.” After a pause, Hans continued. “Of course you are still free to voice your opinion.”
A moment later Luoying heard the squeaking of chairs and shoes and the rustling of clothing, indicating that everyone was getting up. She tiptoed her way back to the entrance of the house and pretended to have just come in. Looking in the mirror, she changed out of her dance clothes and fussed with her hair.
The adults emerged from the living room. First was Roowak, followed by Laak and Lanrang, side by side. Roowak was the tallest, like a coat-tree, and the contrast with the tiny figure of Lanrang behind him made the latter seem even more shriveled. Lanrang’s beard was sparse and unkempt, but his lively eyes gave him an efficient air. Laak had the kindest face of all three. He reminded Luoying of a thoughtful professor with drooping eyes and sharp lines at the corners of his mouth, indicating long hours spent contemplating difficult dilemmas.
Rudy had told Luoying that Roowak was an engineer turned military commander, Lanrang was a math genius, and Laak was a master linguist. All three were key figures in the Martian rebuilding effort after the war.
She smiled and greeted them as though she had just come in. Her heart raced, and she was worried that her trembling voice would betray what she had done. Luckily, they were so full of their own worries that none paid any attention. They walked by her seriatim, smiled at her, patted her on the shoulder to welcome her back to Mars. Then they put on their jackets and left.