Vagabonds

by Hao Jingfang

  This contrasted sharply with her own life for the last two weeks. She wasn’t advancing anywhere, but she wasn’t happy where she was. She was dissatisfied with reality but wasn’t sure what was lacking. The world was like a cloud that surrounded her but evaded her gaze. There were hints of something extraordinary, but she couldn’t see through the haze. Like a fish in a bowl, she swam around, eyes wide-open, but had nowhere to go.

  She missed Maearth. It traversed the darkness like a raindrop on glass. Though its only companions were the unreachable stars, it was never distracted, never directionless. She and her friends had once called the ship Charon, ferryman of Hades, but now it seemed to her the most lively place in the universe.

  She waited for Dr. Reini to return, hoping he could answer her questions.

  * * *

  After dinner, Reini went to the club. His habit was to go on Wednesdays and Sundays, a rare opportunity for him to converse with others.

  There were few on Mars who followed the old religions, and a life of science or creative endeavors didn’t require strict adherence to the clock. Nonetheless, the ancestral practice of counting time in seven-day cycles and resting on the weekend persisted. Sunday was reserved for family and friends, and everyone had their own favored practices. Parents, for instance, enjoyed getting together to make treats for their children, while others went to various clubs to play some sport or to share news and other gossip of interest. While Mars lacked swimming pools or golf courses, other sporting venues were abundant.

  On Sundays the club was always filled with familiar faces and new conversations. Some boasted of their accomplishments and regaled listeners with blow-by-blow accounts; others let their rivalries play out in sardonic commentary; still others complained about their work. The atmosphere was not, in fact, all that different from some aristocrat’s salon in old Paris, a teahouse full of patrons in old Peking, or a bar catering to those who wanted a few drinks after work in old Hokkaido.

  After club members greeted one another, they gravitated toward certain age-old topics: rumors of someone getting a promotion; reports of some senior group leader being particularly impressed by a new member; hearsay of an upcoming big change or an opportunity for the ambitious.

  “I heard that Martin just got made lab director.”

  “Oh, he got a much better position than that! He was made the executive director for one of the three research centers at his atelier, which means he’s in charge of five labs!”

  “How did he rise so fast?”

  “It’s all because he picked the right mentor. I think the mentor was just promoted to be a system director recently, and his project has ironclad funding for the future. He really likes Martin and asked him to be in charge of several key simulations. Martin’s citation rate skyrocketed, which allowed him to be promoted over several researchers with much more seniority.”

  “No wonder! I thought he looked particularly happy last week.”

  “That’s why it’s so key to pick the right project to work on …”

  The two men were having coffee as they watched a pool game in progress. One of them was balding, while the other wore bushy sideburns. The small table between them held coffee and pastries. Both acted relaxed and casual, feigning little interest in the conversation. Elegantly dressed, they smiled as though sharing a secret.

  Reini had known both since they were kids. He sat next to them, holding a cue planted against the ground as he listened to the other two talk without interrupting. Since he so rarely spoke, neither of the other two men found it odd to have him listen in.

  “Do you think you’ll do well this round?” Balding asked.

  “Hard to say. I hope so, but hard to say,” said Sideburns.

  “Your lab signed up for one of the plans?”

  “Yes. We are Climbers, and we were assigned to assess the viability of the planned electric cable layout inside the cliffs. What about you?”

  “We are Waders. Personally, I like the Climbers more, but my lab director is very stubborn and has no faith in an artificial open atmosphere. So we ended up getting the project of optimizing the transportation tube network under the ring river. I’m not excited about it, but there should be a lot of funding.”

  Climbers and Waders were terms most Martians used to refer to supporters of the migration plan and the continuation plan, respectively. The Climbers intended to make the crater that had been inhabited before the war an open-air ecosystem, while the Waders wanted to build a river around the existing Mars City.

  “Aha, so we’re on opposite teams.” Sideburns laughed.

  “That’s right. May fortune smile on the winner.”

  “It really is a matter of fortune. If we get the project funded, the rest of my life is basically all set. But it’s really hard to tell which way it will go.”

  “Maybe we’ll both be lucky.”

  “That’s the one outcome ruled out for sure.” Sideburns laughed once more. “Shall we play again?”

  They stood up and took over the pool table that had just been vacated by two other players. After one of them racked the balls into position, the other leaned over the edge of the table and concentrated. The crisp strike of the cue ball sounded like the popping of a champagne cork.

  The two players who had just finished sat down where Balding and Sideburns had sat and began to talk. They loosened their collars, got their coffee, and greeted Reini with smiles. One of the two was an old man wearing glasses. He had a kind and honest face. The other was a lanky man about Reini’s age with a broad forehead and an animated, joyful face.

  “How’s the leak in your house?” asked the young man. “Did you get it fixed?”

  “I did,” said the old man. His voice was very soft. “I had to disassemble the backs of the cabinets.”

  “Good thing you got the kind that could be disassembled,” said the young man. “I should have done the same. My baby loves to throw things into the corners as he crawls around. That’s all I do at home now, pick up after him.”

  “How many months old is he now?”

  “He just turned one. He’s toddling a bit.”

  “A year already. How time passes.”

  “It really is amazing. My oldest is up to my waist now, and Nana can already read.”

  “I can imagine how busy you must be.”

  The young man laughed. “You must feel pretty liberated. Does your son visit often?”

  “No. After he had his baby, he doesn’t come visit much.”

  “If the migration plan goes through, you should move somewhere close to your son. Otherwise you might get lonely all by yourself.”

  “I’m used to it.”

  The voices merged with the other murmured conversations, forming an invisible haze in the air of the club. Reini watched them, thinking of Hans’s plea. He felt guilty about his mission. What could he hope to learn through conversations such as these? To Hans, Mars City was the crystallization of an ideal, but for most of its residents it was merely the backdrop of life. To them, the dilemma that troubled Hans dissolved into opportunities for more funding for their ateliers, opportunities to pick new houses, opportunities to be promoted and recognized, opportunities that could be seized and used. The city was no longer one coherent unit but fragmented into thousands upon thousands of competing desires. A single project became a million tiny projects, and each benefited someone. The crystal city had shattered so that it was impossible to discern the trend from the pieces.

  Reini had a premonition that Hans’s worries were turning into a directionless, dull thunder. The contest between two competing principles was no more. No matter what the ultimate decision turned out to be, the images of Galiman on Hans’s wall would vanish in the fragments of daily life.

  Reini was used to the types of conversations around him: atelier budgets and developments; spousal conflicts and parental concerns; the maintenance and remodeling of homes. These were fulfilling, practical lives. Work, family, house—these conversations encom
passed most of a person’s life. The ambitious could pursue either the pinnacle of their art or a post in the Boule, while those uninterested in politics could simply enjoy a life between their atelier, home, and club. Many people took up gardening as a hobby or spent their free time building swing sets for their children and tinkering with the circuits in their houses. It was not terribly different from life in a small town on Earth two centuries ago. As they aged, the living stipend also increased. Though the amount would never be considered luxurious, it was more than enough to meet their needs, and the gradual increase provided a sense of hope against senescence.

  But Reini wasn’t part of these conversations. He had no project with public funding, no family, and no house. Since he didn’t live a so-called normal life, he lacked the material to join a normal conversation. His state was the consequence of a clear chain of causes and effects, and each lack had resulted in another, link by link.

  More than a decade ago, after he joined his first atelier, he had been punished due to an accident. For five years he wasn’t allowed to apply for research or production funding. A year after the accident, his girlfriend parted ways with him. On Mars, singles were assigned single-occupancy dorm units but could never get the chance to choose a house with a yard.

  His mistake long in the past, Reini could have applied himself and made up for lost time. However, the experience of being punished changed him and made him lose interest in pursuing what others desired. Though the restrictions on him had expired, he found the idea of organizing a project team to compete with other teams for funding tedious. He would rather perform some simple experiments by himself, using readily available materials.

  He also could have found another girlfriend. However, the experience with his ex had left him baffled. Two people became involved with each other, competed to take the initiative, and then grew tired of each other. With this understanding of the process in place, to then repeat it felt to him like a deliberate performance. Two individuals, each with complicated, private thoughts, neither understanding the other, were supposed to sit together and profess their mutual love—the whole script felt inauthentic and therefore intolerable. He hoped to meet someone who began by acknowledging the unbridgeable distance between them and their mutual strangeness, but he never met anyone like that.

  He disdained games of pursuit and being pursued, just as he disliked the annual competition for a piece of the overall budget among the ateliers. Motivation was the key. For someone with no interest in the game, all the techniques for winning the competition felt like useless tricks.

  From a very young age Reini showed such passive tendencies. He was never a model student, but he also wasn’t a rebel. As a child, he spent most of his time alone, spoke little, and didn’t distinguish himself in extracurricular activities. While he got along with the other children just fine, he was never a leader. When he got into occasional fights with other children, he never allowed those fights to fester into lasting hatreds. On the playground’s tiny artificial hills and rivers, he quietly went from one piece of equipment to another, like a gray comet streaking across the yellow sand and the colorful metal structures. He spoke so little that he was often forgotten, and few asked if he also led a complicated inner life full of emotions. This was a risk facing all children who disliked talking: even after years in his company, most didn’t know him, not so much because understanding him was impossible but because they thought there was no need to understand.

  Reini’s reserved demeanor wasn’t the result of some developmental problem. Rather, like many intellectually advanced children who preferred silence, he was extraordinarily sensitive to the distinction between words that were spoken and words that were swallowed. It was, in fact, another legacy of that set of word-imprinted toy blocks. Because he had constructed within himself a full city, external expression became for him an eternal reminder of the inability of speech to truly capture thoughts. He would rather stay within himself.

  Reini was no longer that child who had difficulty communicating. He had learned how to live with others, to come to the club, to share leisure time unobtrusively with acquaintances as they conversed about their regular lives. He didn’t require the company of others, but he didn’t want to isolate himself so much that he no longer understood people.

  He sat alone among the crowd, thinking about the history of Hans and Galiman and the fate of his country.

  * * *

  It was late by the time Reini returned to the hospital. He came by to pick up a few books, thinking everyone had already gone to sleep and the offices would be deserted. He was surprised, therefore, to find Luoying waiting for him in the small lounge outside his office, reading by herself.

  She looked up and smiled at him. The ceiling light was off, and the vase on the table, which was also a lamp, provided the only illumination in the room. The green leaves in the vase softened the light against the page. Luoying’s face was lit up in profile, which slimmed her nose and made her eyes appear extra bright.

  “Were you waiting for me?” Reini asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” Luoying hesitated. “I … just had a few questions.”

  “Go ahead,” said Reini, curious.

  “Why do the people around us work?”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “Everyone. Regular people. People in the ateliers. The parents. The children.”

  Reini thought about the people at the club. He thought about their excitement, their rage, their calculation, their joys and sorrows, their strivings and disappointments. He thought about their Sunday club gatherings, their conversations at each gathering, the children and positions and promotions discussed in each conversation. He thought about their eyes, brows, voices, gestures, their reasons and emotions. He thought and thought about the lives of the families around him.

  “I think,” he spoke slowly, “they work because they want a fulfilling life.”

  “Do all the people want to work? Or … maybe what I mean is: Are they all working for ideals?”

  “I doubt it. A world like that doesn’t exist.”

  “Then why? Take those boring, repetitive jobs. Since people aren’t working for more money the way they do on Earth, how do we find people to do them?”

  Reini pondered the question. After a while he answered very cautiously. “First of all, we don’t have too many dull jobs left. Most manufacturing is automated, and we have no real service sector.” Reini went to the screen and brought up the interface to a database and began to type. “The amount of repetitive, unavoidable labor makes up only … nine percent of total jobs, and most of these are part-time.

  “As for what motivates people to do them: it’s mainly due to the competition among the ateliers for a share of the budget. Each atelier is responsible for assigning the jobs within the atelier, including the dull ones. Someone must sit there and monitor the automated workshop; someone must follow up on routine maintenance of finished products. Most of the time, people in an atelier take turns doing these boring jobs, but sometimes they have to be assigned to a dedicated person. A project’s degree of success influences the share of the budget it will be allocated next year, and if there are accidents or complaints, the project may no longer get any funding. Since this affects the fate of everyone in the group, carelessness or shirking of dull tasks isn’t tolerated.”

  “Is the competition for the budget intense?”

  “ ‘Intense’ is an understatement,” said Reini. “At the end of each year, the competition for the next year’s budget is a critical moment for each atelier. Starting months earlier, everyone plans, prepares, persuades, organizes. Compared to Earth, the resources available on Mars are extremely limited. In a sense, you can view all of Mars as a carefully managed enterprise in which the return on every investment and the potential for loss in every eventuality are calculated to three decimal places. Most of our research, including in the creative fields, is motivated in this manner. Nothing is entirely driven by pure inter
est.”

  As he spoke, he thought of Balding Wader and Sideburns Climber at the pool club. They lived such natural lives, plotting and scheming at the club and in their backyards, organizing groups and ateliers in preparation for the end of the year.

  Luoying listened to him, and her eyes widened in confusion as though listening to some fantastic tale.

  Reini wasn’t surprised by her reaction. Luoying’s parents had died early, and she had spent most of her teens on Earth. It wasn’t remarkable that she didn’t have any understanding of the competition for the budget, the most important part of adult professional life.

  “But why must they compete for the budget?”

  “To get to be on a bigger project; to bask in the attention of everyone around them.”

  “Is that so important? To attract the attention of others?”

  “Important?” Reini laughed. “I can only say that if it weren’t important, many events in human history would never have happened.”

  “So what you’re saying is … our world isn’t built completely on deception and blind obedience?”

  Reini considered Luoying’s question carefully.

  “No world can be built completely on the foundation of deception and blind obedience.” His tone was even and controlled. “For a world to function, it must be built upon desire.”

  Luoying nodded. She looked out the window as if thinking over what he had said.

  At length she got up to leave. Reini walked her back to her room. Silently they paced through the corridor, each lost in their own thoughts. The glass walls reflected the moonlight and cast hazy shadows. Their walking figures looked like time itself: without end, without sound, without companion, except for the inseparable shadow. They walked slowly, listening to the sound of their feet striking the ground, unwilling to break the silence.