by Hao Jingfang
“But after I remembered that recording … I couldn’t think that way anymore. Even if the organizers didn’t know how difficult things would be on Earth, that wasn’t why Grandfather sent me. One month after I saw that recording, I was placed in the Mercury Group. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“I agree with you.”
“My grandfather was afraid of having me find out more … But what was it?”
“I don’t think it’s that hard to guess. He didn’t want you to know that he was the one who sentenced your mom and dad to death.”
“No! Not death. He sentenced them to mining.”
“What’s the difference? The mining ships on Deimos have accidents all the time.”
“But I can’t be sure the recording was of my parents’ punishment. I didn’t hear what was said, and in any event I was too young to understand it. Maybe my parents’ names were mentioned.”
“They were probably worried you’d dig deeper.”
“If it was just my grandfather, I guess I wouldn’t be so shaken. But Rudy was in on it, too. He had probably known it for a long time, but he kept it from me, along with my grandfather.”
“It’s possible that your brother even knew why they had been punished.”
Luoying had asked to see Chania because she wanted her help in figuring out what kind of crime would result in her parents being sentenced to mining on a moon until they died. The two of them had been puzzling over the matter for some time already, but weren’t any closer to an answer.
They had seen few instances of criminal punishment as they were growing up. The most that they recalled was of someone getting extra work in the workshops or being denied the right to share their creations for a period of time. Life on Mars tended to be peaceful and regular, with little crime or conflict. Luoying couldn’t imagine what her parents had done. The two of them had always loved life, and there weren’t any black marks in their files. They had always garnered awards and honors—until they received their sentence. They had been mining for less than a year before the accident happened.
The only thing that seemed remotely related was the fact that her mother had refused to register with an atelier.
Looking up at the stars, she asked, “Do you think not registering is a crime?”
Chania laughed. “If so, then I think I’m going to be punished.”
“You haven’t registered either?”
“Nope.”
“Same here.”
“I don’t think anyone in our group has.”
“Really?” Luoying was amazed. “I didn’t know that … So everyone is just dragging it out?”
“Yep. Anka almost got expelled.”
“What? When?”
“He didn’t tell you?” Chania looked surprised. “The day he got back, he got into a huge fight with Captain Fitz. I heard that after the banquet his squadron was supposed to fly around the hotel where the Terran delegations are staying and put on a demonstration of force. Anka refused. How can a soldier refuse a direct command? You can imagine what happened after that.”
“So that’s what happened …”
It was odd to hear what Anka had done from someone else. To be sure, she wasn’t particularly socially active and relied on others to tell her gossip. But even so, the Anka in others’ stories wasn’t like the Anka she knew. She always thought of him as someone who didn’t let anything bother him. Now she recalled that on Earth there was a time when he had left the group after an argument. Chania always knew what was happening with everyone and kept her in the loop.
“You know, maybe not registering really is a big deal,” said Chania suddenly.
“How do you mean?”
“Let’s take regular crimes: stealing, taking advantage of someone’s mistake, things like that. Usually it’s just an isolated incident, and everyone knows it’s wrong. A simple penalty is enough. But it’s different when it’s a … matter of ideology. That represents a challenge to our way of life. If ideological rebels spread their ideas around, it would become a threat to the whole system. To reject the need to organize life around the ateliers could be viewed as an ideological revolution.”
Luoying remained silent. Chania’s words reminded her of the Reversionist friends she had met on Earth.
“I’m just guessing, mind you,” said Chania.
“I was just thinking today,” said Luoying, “that the biggest problem with our world is that you can’t think it’s not good. Everyone must pick an atelier, must live the way we’re supposed to live. The more I think about it, the more scared I become. If your guess is right and refusal to register is a capital crime, then … we don’t even have the freedom to leave the system. What a terrifying world.”
“Did you start thinking like this only after you got back?” asked Chania.
Luoying nodded.
“It’s the same with me,” said Chania. “I feel awful. After everything we’ve been through, to finally get home, only to find out that I can’t stand the place …”
“You know, if one could live only by instinct, that would be true happiness,” said Luoying.
Chania chortled. “I think we said the same thing to each other four years ago.”
Luoying smiled. “Exactly. I guess we’re both a bit too old for that kind of sentiment now.”
They had grown out of the habit of making grand summaries about life. Having seen so many perplexing and troubling things in life, it was no longer easy to summarize it. Four years earlier they had summarized the life of Terrans with the overconfidence of youth, but the mood tonight was so different.
Chania turned to regard her. “What do you want more than anything else right now?”
“To get out.”
Chania laughed. “Same here.”
Luoying looked up and touched the cold, hard glass dome overhead. “Too bad we’ll never get out again.”
The four watchtowers of Mars City were the tallest structures in the city. Like four guardian deities, they stood at the cardinal points. The two of them liked to climb up here because they could touch the glass dome that separated Mars City from the outside, could feel the border that remained intangible during their daily routines. Without a thick atmosphere, the stars appeared particularly bright and didn’t twinkle.
“That’s why we want to get out even more,” said Chania. “When you were on Earth, did you argue with them about life here being so much better? I sure did. I told them how safe it was here, how little crime we had, how everyone on Mars was a moral person. But it wasn’t until yesterday that I realized none of this had anything to do with the advanced state of Martian ethical development. No one commits crimes here because there’s nowhere to run to. We’re all stuck, and sooner or later we know we’ll be caught.” Sadness clouded her gaze. “You have to live the way you’re supposed to because there’s no getting out.”
Both fell silent. Chania’s long chestnut hair was loose and swayed gently in the air.
They hadn’t talked like this, about life, in a long while. When they first got to Earth, they loved to engage in long, deep discussions after experiencing every new job, after seeing every new thing. They tried to extract principles, to declaim about the kind of life they wished to lead. But such discussions grew rare over time. They had little control over their own lives. Regardless of the variety of possible lifestyles, the choices open to the individual were so few.
Still, they had witnessed those possibilities.
On Mars, life was a matter of tradition. Every child’s path was similar to every other child’s: go to school at age six, volunteer for public service at nine, start to think about one’s future direction at twelve, be excited with the first set of electives at thirteen. Students could choose to intern at different ateliers, and once they had accumulated enough credits, they could pick areas of interest to study in depth, write papers, assist more experienced professionals, and then decide on an atelier. They also worked in stores, workshops, mining stations—but those exper
iences were also part of the atelier internships. They were volunteers aiming to acquire experience. No one did anything useless; no one went off on their own. Everyone ended up at a permanent atelier, with a number, a file in the Registry, a straight road that one followed until death.
But on Earth, as Luoying drifted about, she saw people doing anything they wanted. Every time she settled in a new place, she found a new group of friends. They never signed long-term contracts with any employer but filled their time by sometimes waiting on tables, sometimes freelancing articles, sometimes making deliveries or running errands, sometimes volunteering for the government, sometimes buying and selling on the black market, sometimes selling their own IPs on the web. They lived from day to day, hopping from city to city, wolfing down fast food at airports, attending galas in fancy hotels, buying cigarettes with the last of their paychecks, getting into business with someone they had just met. Their professions were as fleeting as flirty glances: the moment there was a spark, they shifted their attention elsewhere.
Such a life of uncertainty entranced her. It was such a contrast to the life in the platonic garden of idealized creation that she had grown up in. The two collided like air masses in her heart, and a tempestuous storm was the result.
And so her experience on Earth was the combination of two kinds of adjustment, opposite in direction. While she had to adjust to a far more primitive mode of life filled with inconveniences, she also had to adjust to a far more complex lifestyle. Mars City was much more advanced than cities on Earth in infrastructure and operation, but the lifestyle on Mars was older and simpler.
In Luoying’s eyes, Martians had Apollonian clarity, while Terrans had Dionysian frenzy. A ten-year-old Martian child knew Aristotelian logic, Hammurabi’s code, the Jacobins and the Bourbon Restoration, as well as the rest of the development of human history and art. Everyone sat at their own desk to study or stood around a table in a coffee lounge to debate philosophy, to discuss the manifestations of the universal Will in spiritual history, to deliberate over the succession of civilizations and the role of consciousness in human history. Martians worshipped great ideas, art, and invention. Every Martian asked themselves: Why am I doing this? What value does this action contribute to the progress of civilization?
Terrans were not like that at all.
The first thing Luoying learned to do on Earth was how to party. She went drinking with the other girls of the dance troupe and their friends and ingested a hallucinogen that was not powerful enough to be illegal. She drifted in an altered state of consciousness, feeling closer to the divine. She listened to the others laugh, share jokes, sing loudly, and watched them twist and grind on the dance floor. No one asked anyone else who, what, where, why, but simply luxuriated in the collective release of their bodies. They hugged and kissed, followed their feelings and interests, and forgot as soon as they were done. They displayed the beauty of each individual body to its fullest extent, unified the self with the universe, and equated a moment of joy with cosmic eternity.
She was a quick student and soon was partying as hard as her friends. She never asked them Why are we doing this? What value do our actions contribute to the progress of human history? She understood, without asking, that such questions were meaningless in the frenzy of their passion.
There was alcohol served on Mars, but few ever got drunk. All the children of the Mercury Group had to survive the shock of encountering this new lifestyle. And they couldn’t avoid the question: Did life exist in order to create grand histories and artistic masterpieces, or was life itself all the meaning it needed? They hesitated, remained silent among the crowd, sober among the frenzied, drunk while studying; they lost all faith in a flash.
Luoying had to find out why she had been sent to Earth. She didn’t want to be a playing piece in someone else’s game. Once she would have accepted the fate she was assigned, but no longer. She had to know if there was a reason.
Oh, ye gods of Olympus, she thought, have you ever thought that one day a group of children would vacillate between your sobriety and frenzy, unable to choose?
* * *
Before she arrived at Uncle Laak’s office, Luoying tried to compose herself on the tube train. She deliberately picked the wrong destination station, twice, so that she came to the Registry by the most roundabout way possible. Otherwise, the trip would have taken only five minutes. The tube trains always picked the most optimal route, giving riders no time to think and plan.
She hesitated, trying to decide if she really wanted to pursue her inquiry.
She felt herself approaching a border, heading toward a question that did not exist in ordinary life but only appeared in the contrast of change. She was still a person who didn’t officially exist. Without registering, she had no account, no identity in the system. She was someone standing outside the system, a potential challenger.
“Refusal to register,” she whispered to herself. Was this a great crime? Was this a challenge to the existing order of the world? Was this enough reason to force Grandfather to exile Mom and Dad, to make him fear her? Why did the system care so much about a nine-digit number?
She had heard certain stories on Earth, stories about something called the Age of Machines. The faces of the tellers were full of fear as they described a world in which the machines imprisoned everyone and treated individuals as interchangeable components to be exploited and discarded. Freedom and dignity had been suppressed out of existence. They told her that Mars was the example par excellence of such a world.
The tellers of these stories had never been to Mars, but they described its ills to her as though they knew her world better than she did. Eventually she grew used to these stories, knowing that the tellers were merely ignorant, not malicious. But she began to fear that they were telling the truth. She asked herself, if she truly lived in a world created by an evil regime, what should she do?
Luoying had so many questions, but most she dared not ask. Many Terrans had told her that Hans Sloan was a dictator. They spoke with such conviction. She dared not ask him, and didn’t want to ask him. Her grandfather’s blood flowed through her veins as well, and her doubt could never be voiced in a direct confrontation.
In the memories of her childhood, Grandfather was the protector of Mars. She did not believe that he was a dictator, but some details aroused her doubt. Grandfather was a warrior, one of the last pilots to fly during the war. He was a survivor, a victor, and a man who had done his duty. After the war he became an industrial pilot and guided mining ships between the moons of Mars and Mars itself. He had flown to Jupiter to explore, to the asteroids to gather water, to the moons to build bases. He began as a test pilot and then rose through the ranks until he led a fleet and directed the technological development of the entire Flight System.
For most of his life, Hans flew alone. Only in middle age did he go into politics as a legislator, and then a system director, until finally he became consul at the age of sixty. When Luoying was a little girl, she remembered seeing Grandfather at his desk, reading and writing until late into the night, or talking with others. Even when she and her parents visited him, sometimes he had to leave because there were urgent matters that needed his attention. His personal space stored as much material as an entire school. Luoying did not believe he was a dictator because he simply worked too hard.
But she couldn’t be sure. There was evidence pointing the other way: her place in the Mercury Group, her parents’ deaths, the very operation of the central archive itself.
She had to get to the bottom of her doubts.
The tube train glided through the smooth tunnels like a drop of water. Enveloped by air, it didn’t even make any noise. When she was a child, Luoying had not realized how quiet the world she grew up on was. Mars had no high-speed elevators, no noisy crowds, no cars, and no airplanes. All she knew were refined, delicate houses, glass, gardens full of footpaths, shops with no cashiers, coffee lounges, cinemas with no ticket booths, and transparent tubes fille
d with water-drop trains. All she knew were people who studied, worked, thought, conversed. There was no marijuana; there were no screams, no naked bodies dancing in frenzy, suspended between sleep and wakefulness. No noise; only tranquility.
Around the city Luoying rode, from light into shadows, from shadows back into light. The outline of the train car grew hazy with the shifting light. Finally, she made her decision and pressed the button for the Montesquieu Registry of Files, where Uncle Laak worked.
She needed answers. Though she didn’t like facing the absurd reality, she was even more terrified of ignorance, of never knowing. To doubt one’s own life was the worst of fears. She could not go on living in suspense.
As the Registrar of Files, Uncle Laak was in charge of the heart of the Martian system of files. More than anyone else, he was more familiar with those numbers that determined one’s identity. The numbers were beehives arranged around him in a dense phalanx, a phalanx of lives in which he was the hub. In front of him was an ancient desk with a cracked top, but it was dustless and everything on it was arranged neatly.
“Please, sit.”
Laak pointed to the chair before the desk. Luoying sat down, her back straight.
“I’ve read your letter and I know what you are looking for,” he said.
Luoying said nothing, but her heart pounded. The sun was shining into the corner of her eye and she couldn’t see everything clearly.
“Are you sure about this?”
Luoying nodded.
“All right, then,” said Laak. “But let me explain something. We encounter many puzzles in life, but not every question must be pursued to the bitter end.”
“There’s a difference between knowing and not knowing.”
“Actually, there’s not much difference.”