Vagabonds

by Hao Jingfang

  When the simple became complicated, the simple was forgotten. It wasn’t too different from how children knew it was enough to eat and sleep to live, but adults claimed a hundred other “necessities.” To go from the complicated back to the simple required a great deal of patience and effort.

  “All we need is food,” said Mira.

  Sorin pored over the plans and diagrams spread out before him. “But we’ve taken out everything we can.”

  On sheets of e-paper, the various components were labeled in hasty scrawls. Some of the components had been x’d out. The three boys sat around these sheets, debating and analyzing. They planned to completely overhaul a small Martian shuttle fighter—removing all systems related to cargo hauling, mining, and war; reducing speed and altitude requirements to the bare minimum—until the plane could get off the ground with the least amount of equipment.

  This was the seventh day after the qualifying round of the Creativity Fair. Since Luoying had managed to get them through that first round, the team was officially recognized and their trials could be put on the agenda. Anka explained to his friends his plans for modifying his plane, and the response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic.

  Several Mercury Group members also wanted to go with Luoying to visit the crater and canyon sites that were so important to Martian history. After Runge suggested that they rent a mining ship, Chania began to organize and raise funds, and Sorin directed the secret plan along with the play. Luoying wasn’t surprised by her friends’ response. After all, after days spent cooped up in a glass box, struggling with their reports on their trip to Earth, the idea of an adventure to recover the truth of the Martian past held infinite appeal. Several core members of the group gathered daily to implement the details of their plan. Luoying’s personal quest had grown into a yearning for the sky and a critical examination of the past.

  “I think we’ve been coming at this the wrong way,” said Anka, who was leaning against a column to the side.

  “What do you mean?” asked Sorin, looking up from the plans.

  “We’ve been starting with the plane and then taking things away, with the result that we’ve been struggling with every component, thinking it’s necessary. But we can start from nothing and then only add in what must be added.”

  “Start from nothing?” Sorin furrowed his brow.

  “Well, not exactly nothing. More like starting with air.”

  Luoying sat on the steel rack opposite them. The three engineers had already spent a night discussing the matter.

  Their workshop was just a corner of the abandoned warehouse they used for rehearsals. A lone shed stood against the wall like a large mailbox, and sections of the steel racks that surrounded the warehouse lay in front of the shed diagonally, leaving a triangular area of the floor open. It was night, and the empty warehouse was dark and silent except for this lit corner. The boys sat on a few chests repurposed as furniture, and a portable projector showed images of different aircraft on the walls.

  Anka leaned against the pillar, one leg crossed in front of the other. “Ultimately, our mission is just to get up the cliffs without falling. We don’t need a traditional plane for that. All we care about are the wings. There’s no need even for the engine. This way we can maximally simplify the structure and lessen the weight.”

  “How can we do without the engine?” Sorin objected. “Even if we rely on solar power, we still have to have jets. How else are we going to move? Even if the wings can vibrate, we still need minimal airspeed to stay aloft.”

  Anka shook his head. “That’s only necessary if we have to fly against the wind and generate lift. But if we don’t particularly care about the direction we fly in, then we can go with the wind, much like some insects.”

  Mira asked, “But I thought we went through the calculations. There won’t be enough lift.”

  “Lift is directly proportional to wing area,” said Anka. “We can make the wings bigger. Though the atmosphere is very thin, it also means that the force applied against each square centimeter of the surface is small. I’ve done the math. We can make the wings several times bigger than they would be on Earth.”

  Mira looked doubtful. “Will the wings hold? Wouldn’t they bend under the weight?”

  Anka shrugged. “I’m not sure. It’s just an idea right now.”

  Sorin nodded thoughtfully. “Let’s try to work out the details. I imagine we can keep the wings straight if we buttress in the right spots. The key is the lift-drag ratio, which means we have to find the right shape for the wings and the right wind conditions. I think it’s feasible. We do have a lot of wind, despite the thin air.”

  Sketching on her notepad, Luoying listened to them but didn’t interrupt. Sorin’s eyes were spirited and intense. Mira’s messy hair draped around his round brown face. Anka was slouching and one of his shoes was off, but he still looked slender and handsome against the pillar.

  Though she didn’t follow the intricacies of the engineering discussion, she was struck by Anka’s words: an airplane was nothing more than a dance between material and wind. She had a realization: to speak of flight, it was necessary to first speak of air; to speak of action, it was necessary first to speak of the surroundings.

  In the quiet of the night, Luoying observed the boys in front of her and the moons visible through the domed roof. Like her, the boys had grown used to walking in the sky on Earth. Looking at them, she felt comforted. Though there were so many obstacles in their way, she felt that as long as they put their minds to it, there was nothing they couldn’t accomplish. She wasn’t sure where that sense of faith had come from; perhaps it was because she had grown used to drifting with them, or perhaps because she liked the way their eyes lit up with passion when they were deep in thought.

  The discussion among the boys grew more animated. They listed the conditions and equipment necessary to drift with the wind. The list seemed to Luoying to pose all kinds of problems that couldn’t be solved. But the boys persisted, and after attacking the problems one by one, they managed to come up with solutions for most of them. However, there were a few stubborn snags that refused to yield, like bits of fish bone lodged in the throat.

  “Luoying, do you remember any descriptions of the geography around the site of your great-grandfather’s crash?” asked Sorin.

  Three pairs of eyes were focused on her. Apparently they had come to an impasse in their discussion and needed her input.

  “I do,” said Luoying. “But there wasn’t much.”

  “What do you have?”

  “It was a turn in the canyon, where the walls went straight up and down. The gusting wind would send rocks and sand tumbling down from the cliffs.”

  “The wind was very strong there?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But there was a dust storm going on at the time.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about when there’s no storm?”

  “There’s nothing about that in the files.” Luoying hesitated, thinking. “Wait, I remember something about there being many wind-eroded caves on the cliffs—and gullies, also from the wind.”

  The boys looked at each other. Sorin nodded at Anka, who took more notes on the paper plans.

  “Do you know the exact location of the site and how to get there?” asked Anka gently.

  “I don’t. But I know it’s not far from the base camp at the time. There was one line in the files that I remember really well: If you send out the rescue ship now, it’ll take only half an hour to get here.”

  “The rescue ship can get there that quickly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it should be no problem to drive our mining ship there,” said Anka to Mira.

  Mira nodded. It was clear that this had resolved a big part of his worries.

  “Then what’s the point of building or retrofitting a plane?” asked Mira. “We can just drive the mining ship over.”

  Luoying shook her head. “The crater and canyon we’re looking for
are on the ground, but most of the sites and ruins we’re interested in would be up on the cliffs.”

  “On the cliffs?”

  “The camps they built before Mars City were all up on the cliffs.”

  “Really?” Mira looked taken aback. “I had no idea.”

  “You didn’t?” Now it was Luoying’s turn to be surprised. “I thought everyone knew.”

  “I didn’t.” Mira turned to the other two. “You?”

  “I didn’t know either,” said Anka.

  “I think I remember hearing something about that,” said Sorin, frowning. “It’s weird, right? We really didn’t learn much about that part of history in school. There were many details about the war, but I can’t remember ever focusing on the prewar period.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Luoying, after a moment of reflection on her own schooling.

  “Then how did you know about the camps?” asked Mira.

  “I can’t remember … maybe my parents told me about them when I was little? I really can’t be sure. But I’ve always known.”

  “Can you describe the features of the camp in more detail?” asked Anka.

  “I know it’s in a crater, and that people lived in caves on the rim of the crater. As for more details … I can’t remember.”

  “Anyway, you can find out more?”

  Luoying was about to say that, since her parents had died when she was very young, she wasn’t sure who to go to for more information, but then she remembered Reini. She had a hunch that he would be able to help. As a historian, surely he had more materials about that period. She nodded and accepted the mission.

  Anka picked up a sheet of e-paper from the ground and jotted down a few more notes. After glancing over the set of plans, he said, “I think we’ve done as much as we can today. We’ve resolved many problems, though there remain two key issues: one is the geography of the area we’re trying to get to, and the other is how to control the wings. Let’s go back and work on these problems on our own and inform the group if there’s any progress.”

  “What do you mean by ‘control the wings’?” asked Luoying.

  “It’s a technical challenge,” explained Anka. “We are trying to make the wings much bigger, right? Although that allows us to generate more lift, it also creates a new problem: it’s very hard to control such large wings due to the turbulence. Since the airflow will be unpredictable, it’ll be hard to code the control routines. The simpler we make the body of the plane, the harder it’ll be to program the wings. And unless we can control the wings, we can’t fly.”

  “Oh … that sounds bad … ,” muttered Luoying.

  She wasn’t a programmer and didn’t understand the specific difficulties, but she could tell from Anka’s tone how serious the problem was. The aircraft designs they inherited had resulted from decades of trials and experimentation, so any modification necessarily brought about new challenges. Though she wasn’t an engineer, she understood that principle.

  She saw that the boys looked solemn because of the challenges they faced, and the solemnity also made them handsome, as if the obstacles in their way energized them. As she walked with them out of the night-shrouded warehouse, she felt a warmth in her heart that she hadn’t felt in many days.

  * * *

  They met at the insect lab. This was per Luoying’s request; she explained that she wanted to understand the principles of insect flight. Reini agreed and brought her to the lab where he had once studied for three years as a young man.

  During his stint here, Reini had studied the biosensing of motion and pressure. On Mars, many machines were based on the principles of biomimicry of insects. Mining carts, for instance, extracted ore with long, segmented arms and skittered swiftly across the rubble-strewn ground. Reini’s task here was to research the coordination and motion of insect limbs, replicating them in electronics and circuitry that could be deployed in engineering design.

  The lab maintained a large hothouse in which specimens of rare plants were kept in an artificial jungle. The hothouse provided habitats for bees, dragonflies, praying mantises, spiders, and many species of beetles. The moment Luoying set foot in the hothouse, a dragonfly landed on her head. Surprised, she yelped, and the dragonfly flew away, trembling.

  She stood rooted in place, never having seen anything like the scene that greeted her. Every flower was blooming magnificently; every nook and cranny seemed to conceal an insect; every pair of vibrating wings gave off a vibrant allure. Lush growth filled her eyes, and butterflies fought for her attention. The translucent curled petals reminded her of the most elegant dresses. Not only had she never seen such beauty on Mars, she had never experienced it on Earth either. She had been to flower shops and grasslands on Earth, but never a garden of winged flowers.

  “So beautiful!” she exclaimed.

  “It is,” said Reini. “This garden was why I chose to study here.”

  “Were all these bred on Mars?”

  “Yes. About ten pairs of each species were initially brought here from Earth.”

  They stood in the middle of some blooming flowers. Reini gently picked up a butterfly from a flower and deposited it in Luoying’s palm. While the butterfly rested calmly, its slender legs trembling, Luoying examined it carefully. As she extended a finger to caress it, the butterfly took off.

  “Dr. Reini,” she asked, “how do insects fly?”

  Reini caught a nearby honeybee and showed its thorax to Luoying. “Do you see how its wings vibrate? This is the basic way all insects generate lift, though different species do it in slightly different ways. Bees twist their wings to change the angle of the air caught between them, while dragonflies vibrate their wings up and down to generate tiny vortices.”

  “Is it similar to how birds fly?”

  “Quite different,” said Reini. “Birds do not vibrate their wings, while insects rarely fan their wings the way birds do.”

  “How do insects control their wings?”

  “Typically by flexing and twisting the muscles near the roots of the wings, which are very light and thin.”

  Luoying looked at the bee struggling in Reini’s hand. It curled up until its abdomen was almost touching its thorax, kicking its tiny legs. The strange mouthparts, like components of a helmet, shifted and slid nonstop. Reini let go and the bee stumbled into the air. He held out a finger and a dragonfly landed on it.

  Gazing at the dragonfly, Reini said, “If you’ll allow me a bit of a digression: I think we’ve become too dependent on computer simulations. We no longer bother to observe. It’s the opposite from the way things used to be done.”

  Time passed quietly in the hothouse. The afternoon was almost over, and dusk was descending.

  “Dr. Reini,” Luoying asked abruptly, “was there a time when people on Mars lived in a crater?”

  Reini considered the question. He answered in his habitual even-tempered voice. “There was indeed a time when people on Mars lived on the walls of a large crater.”

  “When was that?”

  “About a century ago.”

  “How come we don’t hear much about that time?”

  “Because it was a controversial experience.”

  “Controversial? How? What was that place like?”

  Reini didn’t answer for some time. When he spoke again, his voice was slow and distant, like an ancient painting taking shape in the air. “Back then, there were no glass houses. Some people lived in colonies built from the steel hulls of spaceships, but most lived in caves and underground shelters. Although the walls of the crater were cold and lacked light, they blocked harmful cosmic radiation. For human beings, survival and security always came first.

  “You can imagine that the dwellings of the time were simple and crude, just holes in the mountainside. The yellow-earth walls were rough; the tiny caves were heated by electric stoves; and even during the day the inside was pitch-dark without lamps. But even so, such dwellings were not easy to build. All construction had to happen
on top of steep cliffs, impossible for most ground vehicles to climb. Thus, most of the work had to be done by hand with great effort. Moreover, should any of the dwellings collapse, re-excavating them required great effort. All the goods needed to sustain life also had to be shipped in from Earth.”

  “Did Terrans and Martians live together then?”

  Reini smiled at her. “Back then there weren’t any Martians yet. All humans were Terrans.”

  Luoying pondered Reini’s words, like an ancient riddle.

  “Where is this crater?”

  “The middle of Big Cliff, not far south of the equator.”

  “Are there surviving ruins from that time?”

  “I suppose so. Anything that wasn’t pulverized by the war should still be there.”

  “Can we still visit them?”

  “That’s probably difficult. No one goes there anymore.”

  “Can I go by myself?”

  “That’s even harder.”

  Luoying squeezed the yellow metallic apple she had in her pocket all this time. Carefully, she asked, “Why did the war start back then?”

  Reini looked her in the eyes. “I think you’ve already looked into the causes of the war.”

  Luoying nodded. “But I’m asking about the goals, not the causes.”

  Reini nodded with understanding. “The main goal was to build a completely new society.”

  “Like the Mars City of today?”

  “In a sense. But the goal at the time was only the prototype and core. Today’s city is the result of thirty years of development during the war, and then more years after.”

  “What was the core at the beginning?”

  “The central archive. The core of everything was the central archive; the goal was to develop a city that functioned on top of the central archive. The point wasn’t to use the archive to compute the operations of the city but only to use it for storage: storage of every citizen’s discoveries, every new exploration, to be shared freely, to defend the freedom of thought of each.”