Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear

by Baoshu, translated by Ken Liu

Wild Honey

by Paul McAuley

In the Stillness Between the Stars

by Mercurio D. Rivera

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to our February 2021 issue!

I continue to live my life as a science fiction drama. The last thing you want to hear in the ER is that you have an asteroid field of debris and stone material in your kidney. Courtesy of my heart condition, they had to hold of on doing anything about it until I was off my medications for a few days. If the story didn’t provide enough drama, add that I’m immune to most pain medications and that it ended up requiring two separate procedures before they could treat me like a normal kidney stone patient. (I’m still not done.) If that’s still not enough, add in the global pandemic we’re having and the thought of having to go to, or spend, any significant time in the hospital. Yeah, that’s my life. The good thing? I’m not in pain anymore and all my medical issues qualify me for the first round of the COVID vaccine, which I’m getting in a few hours. I look forward to a day of side effects, simply because I wouldn’t be me if I could get through this unscathed. And yet, both issue of the magazines are on schedule for the month. Miracles never cease.

Hoping that you are living a much more boring existence.

Until next time,

-Neil

What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear

Baoshu, translated by Ken Liu

1.

My parents named me Xie Baosheng, hoping I would live a life full of precious memories. I was born on the day the world was supposed to end.

Mom and Dad told me how strange flashing lights appeared in the sky all over the globe, accompanied by thunder and lightning, as though the heavens had turned into a terrifying battlefield. Scientists could not agree on an explanation: some said extraterrestrials had arrived; some suggested the Earth was passing through the galactic plane; still others claimed that the universe was starting to collapse. The apocalyptic atmosphere drove many into church pews while the rest shivered in their beds.

In the end, nothing happened. As soon as the clock struck midnight, the world returned to normality. The crowds, teary-eyed, embraced each other and kissed, thankful for God’s gift. Many petitioned for that day to be declared the world’s new birthday as a reminder for humanity to live more honestly and purely, and to treasure our existence.

The grateful mood didn’t last long, and people pretty much went on living as before. The Arab Spring happened, followed by the global financial crisis. Life had to go on, and we needed to resolve troubles both big and small. Everyone was so busy that the awkward joke about the end of the world never came up again. Of course, I had no memory of any of this: I was born on that day. I had no impressions of the next few years, either.

My earliest memory was of the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics. I was only four then, but nonetheless caught up in the excitement all around me.

Mom and Dad told me, China is going to host the Olympics!

I had no idea what the “Olympics” were, just that it was an occasion worth celebrating. That night, Mom took me out. The streets were packed and she held me up so that I could see, overhead, immense footprints formed by fireworks. One after another, they appeared in the night sky, as if some giant were walking above us. I was amazed.

The neighborhood park had a large projection screen, and Mom brought me there to see the live broadcast. I remembered there were many, many people and it was like a big party. I looked around and saw Qiqi. She was wearing a pink skirt and a pair of shoes that lit up; two braids stuck out from the top of her head like the horns of a goat. Smiling sweetly, she called out: “Bao gege!”

Qiqi’s mother and Mom were good friends from way back, before they both got married. I was only a month older than Qiqi and had almost certainly seen her lots of times before that night, but I couldn’t remember any of those occasions. The Opening Ceremony of the Olympics was the first memory I could really recall with Qiqi in it—it was the first time I understood what pretty meant. After we ran into Qiqi and her parents, our two families watched the live broadcast together. While the adults conversed, Qiqi and I sat next to a bed of flowers and had our own chat. Later, an oval-shaped, shiny gigantic basket appeared on the screen.

What’s that? I asked.

It’s called the Bird’s Nest, Qiqi said.

There were no birds inside the Nest, but there was an enormous scroll with flickering animated images that were very pretty. Qiqi and I were entranced.

How do they make those pictures? Qiqi asked.

It’s all done with computers, I said. My dad knows how to do it. Someday, I’ll make a big picture, too, just for you.

Qiqi looked at me, her eyes full of admiration. Later, a little girl about our age sang on the screen, and I thought Qiqi was prettier than her.

That was one of the loveliest, most magical nights of my life. Later, I kept on hoping China would host the Olympics again, but it never happened. After I became a father, I told my son about that night, and he refused to believe China had once been so prosperous.

I had no clear memories of kindergarten, either. Qiqi and I went to the same English-immersion kindergarten, in which half the classes were conducted in English, but I couldn’t recall any of it—I certainly didn’t learn any English.

I did remember watching Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf with Qiqi. I told her that I thought she was like Beauty, the cute lamb in the cartoon. She said I was like Grey Wolf.

If I’m Grey Wolf, I said, you must be Red Wolf. Red Wolf was Grey Wolf’s wife.

She pinched me, and we fought. Qiqi was always ready to hit me to get her way, but she also cried easily. I only pushed back a little bit and she started sobbing. I was terrified she might tattle on me and rushed to the fridge to get some red-bean-flavored shaved ice for her, and she broke into a smile. We went on watching Chibi Maruko Chan and The Adventures of Red Cat and Blue Rabbit while sharing a bowl of shaved ice.

We played and fought, fought and played, and before we knew it, our childhood had escaped us.

Back then, I thought Qiqi and I were so close that we’d never be apart. However, before we started elementary school, Qiqi’s father got a promotion at work and the whole family had to move to Shanghai. Mom took me to say goodbye. While the adults became all misty-eyed, Qiqi and I ran around, laughing like it was just some regular playdate. Then Qiqi got on the train and waved at me through the window like her parents were doing, and I waved back. The train left and took Qiqi away.

The next day, I asked Mom, “When’s Qiqi coming back? How about we all go to Tiananmen Square next Sunday?”

But Qiqi wasn’t back the next Sunday, or the one after that. She disappeared from my life. I didn’t get to see her again for many years, until my memories of her had blurred and sunk into the depths of my heart.

In elementary school, I made a good friend—everyone called him “Heizi” because he was dark and skinny. Heizi and I lived in the same neighborhood, and his family was in business—supposedly his dad had made his fortune by flipping real estate. Heizi wasn’t a good student and often asked to copy my homework; to show his gratitude, he invited me over to his house to play. His family owned a very cool computer hooked up to an ultra-high-def LCD screen that took up half a wall—fantastic for racing or fighting games, though the adults didn’t let us play for long. But when we were in the third grade, SARS was going around and some kid in the neighborhood got sick, so we all had to be taken out of school and quarantined at home. We ended up playing games the whole day, every day. Good times.

During those months in the shadow of SARS, the adults had gloomy expressions and sighed all the time. Everyone hoarded food and other consumables at home and seldom went out—when they did, they wore face masks. They also forced me to drink some kind of bitter Chinese medicine soup that supposedly provided immunity against SARS. I was old enough to understand that something terrible was going on in China and the rest of the world, and felt scared. That was my first experience of the dread and panic of a world nearing doom. One time, I overheard Mom and Dad discussing some rumor that tens of thousands of people had died from SARS, and I ended up suffering a nightmare. I dreamed that everyone around me had died so that I was the only one left, and the United States was taking advantage of the SARS crisis to attack China, dropping bombs everywhere . . . I woke up in a cold sweat.

Of course, nothing bad really happened. The SARS crisis ended up not being a big deal at all.

But it was a start. In the days still to come, my generation would experience events far more terrifying than SARS. We knew nothing of the future that awaited us.

2.

During the SARS crisis, I dreamed of an American attack on China because the US had just conquered Iraq and Afghanistan, and managed to catch Saddam. They were also looking for a man named bin Laden, and it was all over the news. I watched the news during dinnertime and I remember being annoyed at America: Why are the Americans always invading other countries? I felt especially bad for Saddam: a pitiable old man captured by the Americans and put on trial. And they said he was going to be executed. How terrible! I kept hoping the Americans would lose.

Amazingly, my wish came true. Not long after SARS, the news reports said that something called the Iraqi Republican Guard had mobilized and rescued Saddam. Saddam led the resistance against the American invasion and somehow managed to chase the US out of Iraq. In Afghanistan, a group called Tali-something also started an uprising and waged guerrilla war against the American troops in the mountains. Bin Laden even succeeded in planning a shocking attack that brought down two American skyscrapers using airliners. The Americans got scared and retreated in defeat.

Two years later, I started middle school. Heizi and I were in the same school but different classes.

My first year coincided with another apocalypse predicted by an ancient calendar—I had no idea back then why there were so many apocalyptic legends; maybe everyone felt living in this world wasn’t safe. Those were also the years when the world economy was in a depression and lots of places had difficulties: Russia, a new country called Yugoslavia, Somalia . . . The desperate Americans even decided to bomb our embassy in Belgrade. People were so angry that college students marched to the American embassy and threw rocks at the windows.

However, the life of middle-school students was very different. The costume drama Princess Pearl was really popular and they showed it all the time on TV. Everyone in my class became addicted, and all we could talk about was the fate of Princess Xiaoyanzi. We didn’t understand politics and paid very little attention to those world events.

Gradually, though, the effects of the worldwide depression became apparent in daily life. Real estate prices kept crashing; Heizi’s father lost money in his property deals and turned to day-trading stocks, but he was still losing money. Although prices for everything were falling, wages dropped even faster. Since no one was buying the high-tech gadgets, they stopped making them. The huge LCD screen in Heizi’s home broke, but they couldn’t find anything similar in the market and had to make do with a clumsy CRT monitor: the screen was tiny and convex, which just looked weird. My father’s notebook computer was gone, replaced by a big tower that had much worse specs—supposedly this was all due to the depressed American economy. Over time, web sites failed one after another, and the new computer games were so bad that it was no longer fun to mess around on the computer. Street arcades became popular, and kids our age went to hang out at those places while the adults began to practice traditional Chinese meditation.

There was one benefit to all this “progress”: the sky over Beijing became clear and blue. I remembered that, when I was little, every day was filled with smog and it was difficult to breathe. Now, however, other than during sandstorm season, you could see blue sky and white clouds all the time.

In the summer of my second year in middle school, Qiqi returned to Beijing for a visit and stayed with my family. She was tall and slender, almost 5’3”, and wore a pair of glasses. With her graceful manners and big eyes, she was closer to a young woman than a girl and I still thought she was pretty. When she saw me, she smiled shyly, and instead of calling me “Bao gege” like a kid, she addressed me by my given name: “Baosheng.” She had lost all traces of her Beijing accent and spoke in the gentle tones of southern China, which I found pleasing. I tried to reminisce with her about the Olympics and watching Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf. Disappointingly, she told me she couldn’t remember much.

I overheard Mom and Dad saying that Qiqi’s parents were in the middle of a bitter divorce and were fighting over every bit of property and Qiqi’s custody. They had sent Qiqi away to Beijing to avoid hurting her while they tore into each other. I could tell that Qiqi was unhappy because I heard her cry in her room the night she arrived. I didn’t know how to help her except to take her around to eat good food and see interesting sights, and to distract her with silly stories. Although Qiqi had been born in Beijing, she was so young when she left that she might as well have been a first-time visitor. That whole summer, she rode behind me on my bicycle, and we toured every major avenue and narrow hutong in the city.

We grew close again, but it wasn’t the same as our childhood friendship; rather, our budding adolescence colored everything. It wasn’t love, of course, but it was more than just friendship. Qiqi got to know my good friends, too. Heizi, in particular, came over to my home much more frequently now that a young woman was living there. One time, Heizi and I took Qiqi to hike the Fragrant Hills. Heizi paid a lot of attention to Qiqi: helping her up and down the rocky steps and telling her jokes. While Qiqi and Heizi chatted happily, I felt annoyed. That was when I first noticed I didn’t like others intruding between Qiqi and me, not even Heizi.

Near the end of summer break, Qiqi had to go back to Shanghai. Since neither of my parents was free that day, I took her to the train station. The two of us squeezed onto the train half an hour before departure time, and I made up my mind and took from my backpack a gift-wrapped parcel I had prepared ahead of time.

Hesitantly, I said, “Um, this . . . is a . . . present for . . . for you.”

Qiqi was surprised. “What is it?”

“Um . . . why don’t you . . . open it . . . um . . . later? No!—”

But it was too late. Qiqi had torn open the package and was staring wide-eyed at the copy of High-Difficulty Mathematical Questions from the High School Entrance Examination with Solutions and Explanations.

“Well, you told me you had trouble with math . . . ” I struggled to explain. “I like this book . . . I figured . . . um . . . you might find it helpful . . . ”

Qiqi was laughing so hard that tears were coming out of her eyes. I felt like the world’s biggest idiot.

“Whoever heard of giving a girl a test-prep manual as a gift?” Still laughing, Qiqi opened the book to the title page. Her face froze as she read the Pushkin poem I had copied out:

Life’s deceit may Fortune’s fawning

Turn to scorn, yet, as you grieve,

Do not anger, but believe

In tomorrow’s merry dawning.

When your heart is rid at last

Of regret, despair, and fear,

In the future, what has passed

Shall in kinder light appear.1

After the poem, I had written two lines:

To my friend Zhao Qi: May you forget the unhappy parts of life and live each day in joy. Love life and embrace ideals!

I felt very foolish.

Qiqi held the book to her chest and gave me a bright smile, but tears were spilling out of the corners of her eyes.

3.

Qiqi left and my life returned to its familiar routines. But my heart would not calm down.

When Qiqi visited, she brought a book called Season of Bloom, Season of Rain, which was popular among middle school girls back then. She had wrapped the book’s cover carefully in poster paper and written the title on it in her neat, elegant handwriting. Curious, I had flipped through it but didn’t find it interesting. Qiqi left the book behind when she returned to Shanghai, and I hid it in the deepest recess of my desk because I was afraid Mom would take it away. The book still held Qiqi’s scent, and I pulled it out from time to time to read until I finished it. Afterward, I couldn’t help but compare myself and Qiqi to the high school students involved in the novel’s complicated love triangles: Was I more like this guy or that one? Was Qiqi more like this girl or that girl? One time, I brought up the topic with Heizi and he almost died from laughing.

Just because boys weren’t into romance novels didn’t mean we weren’t interested in the mysterious emotions portrayed in them. Anything having to do with love was popular among my classmates: everyone copied love poems, sang romantic ballads, and watched Divine Eagle, Gallant Lovers, imagining we were also star-crossed martial arts heroes and heroines. “Matchmaking” by astrology became a popular game. Once, one of the girls in my class, Shen Qian, and I were assigned classroom cleanup duty together, and somehow that inspired everyone to think of us as a couple. I vociferously denied this, not realizing that this only made the game even more fun for others. I resorted to ignoring Shen Qian altogether, but this only led all our classmates to postulate that we were having a “lovers’ spat.” I didn’t know what to do.

In the end, Shen Qian came to my rescue. She made no secret of her interest in a high school boy known for his wit and generated a ton of juicy gossip—as a result, rumors about Shen Qian and me naturally died out.

Shen Qian’s early attempt at romance soon ended when parents and teachers intervened, alarmed by this distraction from our academic development. Afterward, she acted aloof and cold to all of us, but spent her time reading books that appeared profound and abstruse: contemplative essays about Chinese culture, collected works of obscure philosophy, and the like. Everyone now said that Shen Qian was going to become a famous writer. However, her class compositions often took original and rebellious points of view that led to criticism from the teachers.

Despite the rumors about us, I didn’t grow closer to Shen Qian; instead, I became even more convinced of the depth of my feelings for Qiqi. I thought: She might not be the prettiest girl and she’s far away in Shanghai, but I like her, and I’m going to be good to her. Unfortunately, with thousands of kilometers dividing us, I only heard news about her from occasional phone calls between our mothers. After the divorce, Qiqi lived with her mother, and though they were poor, Qiqi did well academically and managed to place into one of the best high schools in the city.

Oh, one more thing: During my middle school years, a short man named Deng Xiaoping rose to prominence and became a member of the Central Committee. Although Jiang Zemin was still the General Secretary, Deng held all the real power. Deng started a series of reforms aimed at nationalizing industry, and he justified his policies with many novel theories: “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”; “it doesn’t matter whether it is a white cat or a black cat; a cat that catches mice is a good cat”; and so on. Lots of people became rich by taking advantage of the new opportunities, but many others sank into poverty. Because the economy was doing so poorly, the small company Dad worked for had to shut down, but with the Deng-initiated reforms, he got a job with a state-owned enterprise that guaranteed we’d at least have the basic necessities. Honestly, compared to the rest of the world, China wasn’t doing too badly. For example, I heard there was a financial crisis in Southeast Asia that affected the world; Russia’s economy collapsed and even college students had to become streetwalkers; there was a civil war in Yugoslavia and a genocide in Africa; the United States had pulled out of Iraq but maintained a blockade and sanctions . . .

None of this had much to do with my life, of course. The most important things in my life were studying, cramming for the college entrance examination, and sometimes thinking about Qiqi.

During my first year in high school, many people had “pen pals,” strangers they corresponded with. This wasn’t all that different from the web-based chats we used to have when we were little, but the practice seemed a bit more literary. I missed Qiqi so much that I decided to write her a letter in English—full of grammatical errors, as you might imagine—with the excuse that I was doing so to improve my English skills. Email would have been easier, but computers had disappeared from daily life, and so I had no choice but to write an actual letter. As soon as I dropped it into the mailbox I regretted my rash act, but it was too late. The following two weeks crept by so slowly they felt like years.

Qiqi answered! She’d certainly made more of that English-immersion kindergarten experience than I had: her letter was much better. Leaving aside the content, even her handwriting was pretty, like a series of notes on a musical score. I had to read that letter with a dictionary by my side, and I ended up practically memorizing it. I did feel my English improved a great deal as a result.

Qiqi’s letter was pretty short, just over a page. She mentioned that the math book I had given her more than a year earlier had been helpful, and she was grateful. She also recommended New Concept English to me, and told me some simple facts about her school. But I was most pleased by her last paragraph, in which she asked about my school, Heizi, and so on. Her meaning couldn’t be clearer: she was looking forward to another letter from me.

We corresponded in English regularly after that. We never said anything all that interesting: school, ideals in life, things like that. But the very fact that we were writing to each other made me incredibly happy. Just knowing that someone far away, practically on the other side of the world, was thinking about you and cared about you was an indescribably wonderful feeling. Qiqi told me that her mother had gotten married again. Her stepfather had a child of his own and was rather cold to her. She didn’t feel that her home was her home anymore, and wanted to leave for college as soon as possible so that she could be independent.

I finished high school without much trouble and did really well on my college entrance examination, so I could pick from several schools. Summoning my courage, I called Qiqi and asked her what schools she was picking. She said she didn’t want to stay in Shanghai, and filled out Nanjing University with a major in English as her first choice.

I wanted to go to Nanjing as well: one, I wanted to be with Qiqi; and two, I wanted to be away from my parents and try to make it on my own. But my parents absolutely would not allow it and insisted that I stay in Beijing. We had a huge fight, but in the end I gave in and filled out Peking University with a major in Chinese as my top choice. Heizi never made it into a good high school and couldn’t get into college at all, so he joined a department store as a sales clerk. Still, all of us believed that we had bright futures ahead of us.

4.

Compared to the close supervision we were under back in high school, college was practically total freedom. Although the school administrators, in loco parentis, weren’t keen on the idea of students dating, they basically looked the other way. Boys and girls paired up quickly, and the Chinese Department was known as a hotbed of romance. Several of my roommates soon had beautiful girlfriends, and I was very envious.

Shen Qian also got into Peking University, majoring in Politics. Our high school classmates all predicted we would end up together, but Shen Qian soon published some outrageous poems and articles in the school paper and became part of the artsy, literary, avant-garde crowd. Other than occasionally seeing each other at gatherings of old high school friends, she and I ran in completely different circles.

Qiqi and I continued our correspondence, but we no longer needed writing in English as an excuse. We wrote to each other every week and our letters ran on for dozens of pages, covering everything silly, interesting, or even boring in our lives. Sometimes I had to use extra stamps. I really wanted to make our relationship formal, but just couldn’t get up the courage.

By the time we were second-years, the name of some boy began to appear in Qiqi’s letters. She mentioned him so casually—without even explaining who he was—as though he was already a natural part of her life. I asked her about him, and Qiqi wrote back saying he was the class president: handsome, fluent in English, and also in the Drama Club with her.

Reading her response, I was not happy. I tried writing a reply but couldn’t find the words. I would have pulled out my cell phone to call her, but by then no one used cell phones anymore. China Mobile had long since gone out of business, and the cell phone in my desk—a birthday present from my father when I turned ten—was just a useless piece of antique junk.

I went downstairs to use the public phone. Every residential hall had only one phone, and the woman who picked up on the other end was the matron for Qiqi’s residential hall. She interrogated me for a long while before she agreed to go get Qiqi. I waited and waited. One of Qiqi’s roommates eventually picked up.

“Qiqi is out with her boyfriend.”

I dropped the phone and ran to the train station to buy a ticket to Nanjing. I was at the door of her residential hall at noon the next day.

Qiqi came down the stairs like a graceful bird in a white pleated skirt, her hair tied back in neat braids. She appeared to be glowing with the warm sunlight. Other than a few pictures through the mail, we hadn’t seen each other since that summer in middle school. She was no longer a girl, but a tall, vivacious young woman. She didn’t look too surprised to see me; instead, she lowered her eyes and chuckled, as though she knew I would be here.

That afternoon, she took me to the famous No-Sorrow Lake, where we rented a boat and rowed it to the center of the jade-green water. She asked me whether I had seen a popular Japanese TV drama called Tokyo Love Story.

I had heard about the show, but since my roommates and I didn’t own a TV, I had only seen some clips when I visited my parents and read some summaries in the TV guide. But I didn’t want to show my ignorance.

“Yes,” I said.

“So . . . who do you like?” Qiqi asked, very interested.

“I . . . I like Satomi.” Honestly, I wasn’t even sure who the characters were.

Qiqi was surprised. “Satomi? I can’t stand her. Why do you like her?”

My heart skipped a beat. “Uh . . . Satomi is the female lead, right? She has such a pretty smile.”

“What are you talking about? The female lead is Rika Akana!”

“Wait! I read the synopsis, and they said that Satomi grew up with the male lead, and then the two of them ended up together . . . doesn’t that make her the female lead?”

“That’s ludicrous.” Qiqi laughed. I loved the way she wrinkled her nose. “Why would you think such a thing?”

“Because . . . because I feel that people who knew each other when they were young ought to end up together. For example . . . uh . . . ” I couldn’t continue.

“For example?” She grinned.

“You and me,” I blurted out.

Qiqi tilted her head and looked at me for a while. “What a silly idea.” She slapped me.

It wasn’t a real slap, of course—it was so light it was more like a caress. Her slender fingers slid across my face and I shivered as though they were charged with electricity. My heart leapt wildly and I grabbed her hand. Qiqi didn’t pull away. I stood up and wanted to pull her into an embrace, except I had forgotten we were on a boat, and so—

The boat capsized, and as Qiqi screamed, we tumbled into the water.

We giggled like fools as we climbed back into the boat. Qiqi was now my girlfriend. Later, she told me that the class president really was interested in her, but she had never cared for him. She wrote about him in her letters to me on purpose to see if she could finally get me to express myself clearly. She didn’t quite anticipate that I would be so worried I’d come all the way to Nanjing—as she said this, I could tell how pleased she was.

We held hands and visited all the big tourist attractions of Nanjing that day: Xuanwu Lake, Qinhuai River, Confucian Temple, Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum . . . I spent the day in a honey-flavored daze.

For the remainder of our time in college, we only got to see each other occasionally during breaks, but we wrote to each other even more often and were completely in love. My parents, after finding out about Qiqi and me, were pleased because of the friendship between our families. Mom spoke of Qiqi as her future daughter-in-law and joked that she and Qiqi’s mother had arranged for our marriage before we were even born. We planned to find jobs in the same city after graduation and then get married.

5.

Just as happiness appeared to be within reach, it shattered into a million pieces.

The economies of Russia, Ukraine, and some other countries collapsed so completely that the unimaginable happened: a man named Gorbachev emerged as a powerful leader and convinced more than a dozen independent states to join together to form a new country called the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” dedicated to the implementation of socialism. The new country became very powerful very quickly and thwarted the Americans at every turn, instantly adding tension to the international situation. The Soviet Union then encouraged revolutions in Eastern Europe—and even Germany, whose eastern and western halves weren’t at the same level of economic development, split into two countries, with East Germany joining the Soviet bloc.

In China, Deng’s planned economic reforms weren’t successful and the economy continued to deteriorate. More and more people grew unhappy with the government. The machinery of the state was corrupt, ossified, authoritarian, and full of misadministration. College students still remembered how prosperous and strong the country had been when they were children, and comparing the past to the present filled them with rage. Rumors were full of tales of corrupt officials, of misappropriation of state funds for private gain, of attempts to fill public administration posts with family members and loyal minions—although few could explain clearly the root causes of the problems, everyone appeared to agree on the solution in debates and discussions: the country was in trouble and the political system had to be fundamentally reformed to implement real democracy. The incompetent leaders had to go! A political manifesto composed some twenty years earlier, simply called “Charter ’08,” began to spread secretly among college students.

Right before my graduation, the factional struggles within the Communist Party grew even more intense. It was said that the leader of the reformists, Zhao Ziyang, had been relieved of his duties and placed under house arrest. The news was like the spark that set off a powder keg, and the long-repressed rage among the population erupted in a way that shocked everyone. Students at all the major universities in Beijing went into the streets to march and protest, and with the support of Beijing’s citizens they occupied Tiananmen Square, which drew the attention of the world. A city of tents sprouted in the square, and some protestors even erected a statue of the Goddess of Liberty in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace itself.

The drafter of Charter ’08, Liu Xiaobo, returned to China from overseas. He made a speech at the square vowing to go on a hunger strike until there was true reform. The whole nation was inspired. Young people began to arrive from everywhere in China and the mass movement gained momentum. Even ordinary citizens in Beijing mobilized to support the students. Heizi, for example, often came by on his tricycle to bring us food and water.

“Eat and drink!” he shouted. “You need your strength to fight those fucking bums sitting in Zhongnanhai.”

Shen Qian had published some provocative essays in the past and she was a fan of Liu Xiaobo. Her influence among the students made her one of the leaders in the movement. She came by to discuss with me how to motivate the students in the Chinese Department to play a more active role. Stimulated by her fervor, I felt I had to do something for the country, and in the famous triangular plaza at the heart of Peking University’s campus, I made a speech denouncing the corrupt, bureaucratic student council and calling for all students to free themselves from government control and to form a democratic, independent, self-governing body. Amazingly, many professors and students applauded my speech, and a few days later the Students’ Autonomous Federation came into existence. Shen Qian was elected one of the standing committee members, and because she felt I had some talent, she asked me to join the Federation’s publicity department. Thus I became a core member of the movement. I felt as though my talent had finally been properly recognized.

We created a command center in the square where our daily routines resembled those of a mini-government: receiving student representatives from all across the country, announcing various proclamations and programs, issuing open letters, and engaging in vigorous debate over everything as though the future of the entire nation depended on us. News that our compatriots in Hong Kong and Taiwan were also supporting us and donating funds filled us with even more zeal. We laughed, we cried, we screamed, we sang, all the while dreaming of forging a brand-new future for China with our youth and passion.

One day, at the beginning of June, I was in a crude tent at the edge of the command center writing a new program for the movement. The weather was humid and hot, and I was drenched in sweat. Suddenly, I heard Shen Qian call out, “Baosheng, look who’s here to see you!”

I emerged from the tent. Qiqi was standing there in a sky-blue dress, carrying a small pack on her back and looking tired from her journey. Overcome by joy and surprise, I couldn’t speak, and Shen Qian made fun of us.

Since Shen Qian had never met Qiqi before, she gave her a careful once-over and said, “So this is Baosheng’s mysterious girlfriend . . . ”

Qiqi blushed.

Finally, after getting rid of Shen Qian, I peppered Qiqi with questions: “How did you get here? Did you come with other students from Nanjing University? That’s great! I heard about the protests in Nanjing, too. Who’s in charge of your group? I’ve just drafted a new program for the movement and it would be useful to get some feedback—”

“Is this all you have to say to me after all this time?” Qiqi interrupted.

“Of course not! I’ve really missed you.” I hugged her, laughing, but soon turned serious again. “But the movement is running out of steam and the students are splitting into factions . . . The hunger strike isn’t sustainable, and I’ve been discussing with Liu Xiaobo how to develop the movement and extend it . . . Come, take a look at my draft—”

“Baosheng,” Qiqi interrupted again. “I stopped by your home. Your mother asked me to come and talk to you.”

A bucket of cold water had been poured onto the fire in me. “Oh,” I said, and nothing more.

“Your mother is really worried about you . . . ” Qiqi’s voice was gentle. “It’s almost time for you to receive your post-graduation job assignment. You know how important that is. Stop messing around with these people. Come home with me.”

“Qiqi, how can you say such a thing?” I was disappointed as well as angry. “‘Messing around’? Look at the tens of thousands of students assembled in this square! Look at the millions of citizens beyond them! All of Beijing—no, all of China—has boiled over. Everyone is fighting for the future of our country. How can we go back to studying in a classroom?”

“What can you possibly accomplish? You’ll never overcome the government. They have the army! Also, some of your proposals are too radical; they’re impossible—”

“What do you mean, impossible?” I was very unhappy with her. “The army serves the people. The soldiers will never point their guns at us. Some of the students are talking to them already. Don’t worry. I’ve heard that the bureaucrats in the central leadership are terrified. They’ll soon be willing to compromise.”

Qiqi sighed and sat down, looking miserably at me.

We talked and talked, but there was no resolution. In the end, I refused to leave the square, and Qiqi stayed with me. That night, we slept in the same tent. We talked about the national and international situation and the movement’s prospects, but we couldn’t agree on anything and started to argue. Eventually, we stopped talking about these matters and simply held each other.

We reminisced about our childhood together, and then I could no longer hold back. I kissed her, first her face, then her lips. That was the first time we really kissed. Her lips were soft and chapped, which broke my heart. I kissed her deeply and would not let go . . .

In the dark, it happened naturally. With so many young people in the square, our lovemaking was an open secret. Normally I despised such behavior, and felt that couples who engaged in it tarnished the sacred nature of our protest. But now that it was happening to me, I couldn’t resist, and felt our actions were a natural part of the movement itself. Maybe some nameless anxiety about the future also made us want to seize this last moment of total freedom. Every motion, every gesture was infused with awkwardness and embarrassment. We were clumsy and raw, but passion, the irresistible power of youthful passion, eventually brought that fumbling, ridiculous process to a conclusion of sweet intimacy that surpassed understanding.

6.

The next day, we heard the news that troops had arrived just outside Beijing to enforce martial law. A vanguard had already entered the city, preparing to clear the square.

Should we retreat? The command center held a meeting and opinions were divided. Liu Xiaobo advocated retreat to prevent the loss of lives. Due to Qiqi’s influence, I also supported Liu’s suggestion. But the commander in chief, Chai Ling, was indignant and refused to budge. She even called us cowards and said that we must resist to the utmost, even with our lives. Her words inspired all the other attendees and those advocating retreat were silenced. In the end, most of the students stayed to follow Chai Ling’s orders.

That night was especially hot. Qiqi and I couldn’t fall asleep, and so we lay outside the tent, whispering to each other. “You were right,” I said. “Chai Ling is too stubborn. I don’t think any good will come of this. I’ll tell Liu Xiaobo tomorrow that we’re going home.”

“All right.” She leaned her head against my shoulder and fell asleep. I followed soon after.

I startled awake with the noise of the crowd all around me. The stars in the summer sky overhead were eerily bright. It took me a moment to realize that all the lamps on the square were extinguished and darkness engulfed us, which was why the stars shined so bright and clear. People were shouting all around us and loudspeakers squawked. I couldn’t understand what was going on.

“Baosheng!” Someone ran at us with a flashlight and the glare made me squint. A blurry figure came closer: Shen Qian. She was sobbing as she said, “Hurry! You have to leave! The army is clearing the square.”

“What? Where’s Chai Ling? She’s supposed to be in charge!”

“That bitch was the first to run away! Go, go! I still have to find Liu Xiaobo.”

Later, I found out that a large number of armed police had come into the square with batons to break down the tents, beating any students who resisted. But we couldn’t see anything at the time and everything around us was utter chaos. I didn’t know what to do, so I grabbed Qiqi by the hand and tried to follow the flow of the crowd.

A few students from the provinces ran past us, screaming, “Tanks! Tanks! Someone got crushed by the tanks!” They collided into us and separated Qiqi from me.

I heard Qiqi calling my name and ran toward her, shouting her name. But I tripped over a tent and couldn’t get up for some seconds while others ran over me, kicking me back down. By the time I finally struggled up, I could no longer hear Qiqi and didn’t know where she was. Helpless, I tried to continue in the same direction I’d been headed. A chaotic crowd surrounded me, but there was no Qiqi. I screamed her name. Then someone started singing “The Internationale” and everyone joined in. I couldn’t even hear my own voice.

Caught up in the tumultuous crowd, I left Tiananmen Square.

In this manner, we were forcefully removed from the square—at least no shots were fired. However, elsewhere in the city, there were more violent encounters between the army and the protestors, and gunshots were heard from time to time. I returned home, hoping against hope, but Qiqi had not been there. Ignoring the objections of my parents, I ran back toward the city center.

By then it was dawn, and scattered tanks and soldiers could be seen in the streets. Bloody corpses lined the roads, many of them young students. I felt as though I was in the middle of a battlefield and terror seized me. But the idea that something had happened to Qiqi terrified me even more. Like a crazy man, I looked everywhere for her.

At noon, I ran into one of my friends from the command center. He brought me to a secret gathering, where I found Shen Qian and Liu Xiaobo. Many were wounded, and Shen Qian, her face drained of blood, shivered as Liu held her. I asked them if they had seen Qiqi.

Shen Qian started to sob. My heart sank into an icy abyss.

Tearfully, Shen Qian explained that Qiqi had found them as the square was being cleared, and they retreated together. They encountered a column of soldiers at an intersection, and, not fully understanding the situation, they denounced the soldiers. The soldiers responded by firing upon them and a few of the students fell. They turned to run again, only realizing after a while that Qiqi was no longer with them. Shen retraced their steps and found Qiqi lying in a pool of blood, not moving. They had wanted to save Qiqi, but the soldiers were chasing them and they had no choice but to keep running.

She was sobbing so hard by now that she could no longer speak.

I demanded that Shen Qian tell me the exact location and then dashed madly toward the address. At the intersection, I saw the smoking, burnt remnant of an army truck. Inside was the charred corpse of a soldier. In a pool of blood next to the intersection lay a few more bodies, but I didn’t see Qiqi. Forcing down my nausea, I searched all around, though I was hoping to find nothing.

But then I saw Qiqi’s sky-blue dress under one of the wheels of the army truck. Blood had stained it purple, and protruding from the skirt was a section of her perfect calf, ending in a bloody mess.

Shivering, I approached. An overwhelming stench of blood filled my nose. I felt the sky and the earth spin around me and could no longer stand up. Everything was speeding away from me, leaving only an endless darkness that descended over me, extinguishing my last spark of consciousness.

By the time I woke up, it was dark again. I heard the sound of occasional gunshots in the distance. A column of soldiers passed no more than two meters from me, but they ignored me, probably thinking I was just another corpse. I lay still, stunned, and for a moment I forgot what had happened—until the terrifying memory returned and crushed me with despair.

I couldn’t blame Chai Ling, or the students who had run into Qiqi and me and separated us from each other, or even the soldiers. I knew that the real culprit responsible for Qiqi’s death was me, because I didn’t listen to her.

That night, I became a walking corpse. I dared not look at Qiqi’s body again. Wandering the city on my own, I paid no attention to the fearsome soldiers or the criminals who took advantage of the chaos to loot and rob. Several times I saw people fall down near me and die, but somehow, miraculously, I was spared. The world had turned into a nightmare from which I could not awaken.

The next day, as a long column of tanks rolled down the Avenue of Eternal Peace, I stepped in front of them. Passersby watched, stunned. I wanted the tanks to crush me beneath their treads . . .

But I didn’t die. Plainclothes officers grabbed me and pulled me off the street. I was thrown into a dark room and interrogated for a few days. By then I had recovered some of my senses and managed to tell them what had happened. I was certain I would be sentenced to death or at least be locked away for years. My heart had already died, and I didn’t care.

Unexpectedly, after a few months of detention, I was released without even a trial. My punishment was quite light: expulsion from Peking University.

7.

By the time I was released, order had been restored. After the violent crackdown that ended the protests, the government became unexpectedly magnanimous. General Secretary Jiang stepped down, and although Deng Xiaoping retained power, the reformist Zhao Ziyang became the new General Secretary, and another reformist leader with a good reputation, Hu Yaobang, also took up an important political post. Most of the participants in the protests were not punished. Even Liu Xiaobo was allowed to continue teaching at a university, though he would no longer be permitted to leave the country. The government’s final summary of the protests was this: the university students made legitimate demands; however, international forces took advantage of them.

Supposedly, the international forces were working against the entire socialist camp, not just China. They stirred up trouble in Eastern Europe, too, hoping to encircle and contain the Soviet Union. In the end, the Western powers failed utterly in this plan. The Soviet Union not only survived, but also installed socialist governments in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and several other Eastern European countries. These satellites formed the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union to counteract the power of NATO. The US and the USSR thus began a “Cold War.”

After my release from prison, Qiqi’s mother came to our home and demanded to know where her daughter was. During the interim months, she had almost gone mad with the lack of any news about Qiqi. She came to Beijing only to find that I had been locked up as well.

I fell to my knees in front of her and tearfully confessed that I was responsible for Qiqi’s death. At first she refused to believe me, but then she kicked and beat me until my parents pulled her off. She collapsed to the ground and sobbed inconsolably.

Qiqi’s mother never forgave me, and she broke off all contact with my family. Later, I went to Shanghai a few times, but she refused to see me. I heard that she had fallen on hard times and I tried to send her some money and necessities, but she always returned my packages unopened.

On the day of Qiqi’s death, my mental state had broken down so completely that I didn’t even remember to collect her body. Now it was too late even to give her a decent burial. No doubt she had been cremated en masse with the other unclaimed corpses. A spirited young woman in the spring of her life had disappeared from the world, and it was as if she had never existed.

No, that was not quite true. I did find a purple hairclip in my pocket. I remembered Qiqi taking it off the night when we were in the tent together, and I had pocketed it without thinking. This was my last memento of her.

I found everything in my home that held memories of Qiqi and put them together on the desk: the hairclip, bundles of letters, little presents we had given each other, a few photographs of the two of us, and that copy of Season of Bloom, Season of Rain . . . Every day, I sat in front of this shrine and tried to relive all the moments we had shared, as though she was still by my side. I spent half a year like this—maybe I had gone a bit mad.

At the Spring Festival, as the family gathered for New Year’s dinner, my mother broke down in tears. She said she couldn’t bear to see me like this. She wanted me to stop living in the past and go on with my life. I sat at the table dully for a long while.

I steeled myself and carefully packed up all the objects on my desk and placed them at the bottom of my trunk. I kept the bundle with me always but seldom looked at those mementos again. Life had to go on, and I did not want to experience that heart-rending pain and sense of guilt anew.

Though I was expelled from school, General Secretary Zhao indicated that he was interested in a more enlightened administration that would let bygones be bygones, and the professors in my department who sympathized with my plight managed to give me my diploma through back channels. I couldn’t find a job, though. When I was younger, companies recruited on campus for graduates, but after the reforms, all jobs were assigned by the state. Since my record was stained by my participation in the protests, I was no longer part of the system and no job would be assigned to me.

Heizi had also lost his job because of his support for the students. The two of us got together and figured we’d try our luck at starting a business. Back then, Zhao Ziyang was pushing through price reforms aimed at addressing the transition from market economy to planned economy, and prices for everything had skyrocketed. Everybody around the country was hoarding and life was becoming harder for the average person. Since many everyday goods were in short supply, the government started to issue ration tickets for food, clothing, and so on, to limit the amount anyone could purchase. If we were clever and bought and sold goods at the right times, we stood to make a good profit.

Heizi and I planned to go to Guangdong in the south, which was more developed than the rest of China. Although my parents didn’t want me to be so far away from home, they were glad to see me trying to get my life back on track and gave us their life savings as starting capital. There were many opportunities in those days, and Heizi and I quickly brought some T-shirts back to Beijing, which we sold at a significant markup. Not only did we recoup all our capital, we even managed to make tens of thousands in profit. And thus we became two so-called “profiteers” who traveled all over China, searching for opportunities. Sometimes Heizi and I struck gold, but other times we were so poor we didn’t know where our next meal would come from.

After spending a few years traveling around and interacting with all segments of society, I realized how immature we had been back at Tiananmen. China was an overladen freight train burdened with the weight of the past as well as the present. A few students fervently shouting slogans could not change the complicated conditions of the country. But how might things be improved? I had no answers. All I knew was that although China had recovered its tranquility and the people appeared to be focused only on the concerns of daily life, there were strong currents and countercurrents of competing social interests. Together, they formed a powerful hidden whirlpool that might pull the nation into an abyss that no one wanted to see. Yet the process wasn’t something that could be controlled by anyone or any authority. No one could control history. We were all simply parts of a great vortex that was greater than any individual.

Two years after Heizi and I started our business, I bumped into Shen Qian while searching for something to buy in Guangzhou. After the protests, I stayed away from the literary elites and rarely got to see her, although I had heard that she became Liu Xiaobo’s lover. Although Liu was married, Shen Qian was willing to be his mistress because she truly loved him. Later, the rumors said Liu had divorced his wife and I thought he would marry Shen Qian. I certainly didn’t expect to find her so far from Beijing.

Meeting an old friend a long way from home always made me emotional. Reminded of Qiqi, I felt my eyes grow wet. Shen Qian told me that she had arrived in Guangzhou hoping to stay with an old friend and get back on her feet, but the friend was nowhere to be found and she didn’t know what to do. I promised I’d help her.

I took Shen Qian to a restaurant to welcome her to Guangzhou. We talked about the old times, but both of us avoided any mention of Tiananmen. After a few rounds of drinks, Shen Qian’s lips loosened and she told me tearfully about how Liu Xiaobo had taken advantage of her trust. He had promised to divorce his wife and marry her, but she caught him with another student. They had a fight and broke up . . . As she told her story, she kept on drinking, straight from the bottle, and I couldn’t stop her. Later, she began to sing loudly, and everybody in the restaurant stared at us. I quickly paid the bill and hurried her out of there.

Shen Qian was so drunk that I had to hold her up. Since she had nowhere else to stay, I brought her back to my room. I left her to recover in my bed while I slept on the floor.

The next morning, I needed to get out early to browse the markets, and so I left without waking up Shen Qian. By the time I got back, I expected she would be gone. However, when I came in the door, I saw that my messy room had been cleaned up and everything was neatly and logically arranged. There was a new cloth on the small kitchen table, and Shen Qian, in an apron, was carrying a plate of steaming scrambled eggs with tomatoes out of the kitchen.

We looked at each other; she smiled shyly.

I knew that my life was about to start a new chapter.

8.

Shen Qian continued to stay in my rental unit. She made the place feel like home, a feeling I had long missed. And so the two of us, both with pasts that we wanted to forget, leaned against each other for warmth. Heizi had just gotten married, and after finding out that Shen Qian and I were together, he was very happy for us. He treated Shen Qian as though we were already married.

Since Shen Qian couldn’t find a job, she helped us with our business. She was nothing like the young radical student rebel she had been. After all she had gone through, she had abandoned her dreams of revolutions and literary fame and turned all her attention to family. Who was to say this wasn’t a self as true as her former image?

Half a year later, my mother came to Guangzhou for a visit and my relationship with Shen Qian could no longer be kept a secret. My mother didn’t like Shen Qian at first, but after living with us for a while, she began to accept this future daughter-in-law and urged us to get married. Society was turning more conservative by then, and since we were no longer so young, we returned to Beijing to apply for a marriage license. At our wedding, a few old classmates joked that they always knew we would end up together.

After a year, Shen Qian gave birth to our son, Xiaobao. The wounds of the past were gradually healing. Though I couldn’t say we were happy or that everything was perfect, our life wasn’t without warmth or simple pleasures.

The leadership in Beijing was now deepening the economic reforms and gradually pushing planned economy to displace the market. One of the policies was a dual-price system, which involved one price for goods set by the economic planning authorities and another price set by the market. Many officials with the right connections could become “official profiteers” by buying goods at the low planned economy price and selling them on the market at an enormous profit. Low-level peddlers like Heizi and me, on the other hand, suffered due to our lack of connections. Business became harder and harder. One time, we managed to acquire a bunch of color televisions, but the official profiteers were a step ahead of us and cornered the market. We had no choice but to sell at a loss. We ended up owing a bunch of money and had to close up shop and head back to Beijing.

One of Heizi’s uncles was a shift foreman at a factory, and he managed to get Heizi a job as a driver there. By carrying private goods for people on official trips, Heizi made good money. I couldn’t find any such opportunity, and I was exhausted after years spent struggling in business. I decided to return to university, and began to prepare to take the examination for graduate school.

As a graduate of Peking University, I thought the exam would be a piece of cake. But after being away from a classroom for so many years, it wasn’t easy to get back into the right mind-set. I took the exam two years in a row and couldn’t pass. Since Xiaobao was getting older and our savings were nearing depletion, we relied on help from my parents. Shen Qian finally managed to get a job at a newspaper, which at least guaranteed us a base salary and benefits like housing and healthcare.

Then she began to complain about my lack of accomplishments.

“Look at you! When we got together, I thought you had some business savvy and might make it big. But in the end, you’re just a bookworm who can’t even manage to get into grad school. The Chinese Women’s Volleyball Team has won the world championship three times, which is as many as you’ve failed!”

Faced with this nagging tirade, I felt lost. What had happened to that passionate, idealistic, revolutionary leader I once knew?

Of course I knew that wasn’t Shen Qian’s fault. This was what happened after life subjected us to its endless grind. The world wasn’t a fairy tale or the setting for an adventure—even if it were, we would not be the protagonists. No matter what ideals and hopes we once harbored, the most we could hope to accomplish, in the end, was to survive.

Since I was feeling low during that time, I sought refuge in fiction and got into wuxia fantasies. The remake of Legend of the Condor Heroes, produced in Hong Kong, was very popular on TV. I had seen an older version when I was little but thought the remake was better, even though the budget clearly wasn’t as big. I borrowed wuxia books by Jin Yong, Gu Long, Liang Yusheng—I would have read Huang Yi’s books, too, but I couldn’t find them anywhere.2 Xiaobao was now old enough that he spent every day practicing “Eighteen Stages to Subdue a Dragon” along with the heroes on TV. Shen Qian got mad and told me that I was rotting our child’s mind. I had to switch to reading something else.

Science fiction was also popular. Ye Yonglie’s Little Know-it-All Roams the Future sold millions of copies, and Zheng Wenguang’s Toward Sagittarius was flying off the shelves. I gradually became a fan—only science fiction could liberate me from the weight of daily life and allow me to enjoy a little pleasure. It was too bad that there were so few Chinese science fiction books, and not many foreign works were being translated. I soon finished all the ones I could find.

Inspired by my reading, I tried my hand at writing and ended up with a book called Little Know-it-All Roams the Universe, which was a sequel to Ye Yonglie’s famous work. At first, I passed the draft among friends, but then I got to know a young man named Yao Haijun who helped me obtain Mr. Ye’s permission and found me a publisher. The story gained me a bit of fame and I was called a “rising star of science fiction.” Encouraged, I wrote another book called Little Know-it-All Roams the Body, which was meant to teach readers some interesting facts about the human body. Unfortunately, this book caused a lot of controversy: some argued that I was stealing too much from Ye Yonglie; some suggested I was tarnishing Chinese science fiction with portrayals that encouraged lascivious thoughts; still others claimed that my work was an example of capitalist liberalism and contained metaphors criticizing the Communist Party . . .3

I was writing at a fairly turbulent time when ideological debates were on the rise. There were even sporadic student movements again. The central leadership probably wanted to create the opportunity for another purge, so they initiated an effort to cleanse society of “spiritual pollution.” I became a target and was severely criticized. Luckily, the government wasn’t interested in having the “pollution-cleaning” spin out of control, and I wasn’t punished much. However, it was impossible for me to be published anymore. I had to go back to the textbooks and prepare for the graduate school examination again.

It was only later that I understood how fortunate I had been. The country was also undergoing a movement of “intensive crackdown.” This involved every aspect of life: purse-snatchers were handed death sentences, while public dancing carried a charge of indecency. Liu Xiaobo found himself in trouble because he had several lovers and was executed by firing squad. When she heard the news, Shen Qian was depressed for a long time.

After the intensive crackdown, society grew even more conservative. Many things that used to be common became crimes: cohabitating without being married, kissing in public, wearing revealing clothes, and so forth. Given the shift in mainstream culture, I dared not write about sensitive areas again. Thus did my career as an author come to an end.

9.

Just as weal can lead to woe, misfortune can also lead to lucky breaks. A prominent professor turned out to be a fan of my novels and specifically requested me during the admission process. As a result, I became his graduate student and returned to school the next year.

At my mentor and advisor’s suggestion, I chose Sartre’s existentialism as my topic. Although many people had been studying it, most explanations were half-baked. After so many years wasted drifting in society, I treasured the opportunity to study in depth. I read many foreign books in the original languages—taught myself French—and published a few papers that were well received. Eventually, with my advisor’s recommendation, I was given the precious opportunity to study overseas at a famous university in America at the government’s expense.

 This was the first and last time in my life I lived outside China. Visiting this country on the other side of the Pacific that people both loved and hated was quite an experience. The university was in New York, the greatest city on Earth. When I was little, I saw a ton of TV shows and movies set in New York: Beijinger in New York, Godzilla  . . . and I had long wanted to visit. The sights and sounds of the city— skyscrapers, overpasses, highways, subways—were overwhelming.

I remembered the Beijing of my childhood as a prosperous city comparable to New York, but for some reason, after a few decades, New York remained a modern metropolis while Beijing had declined precipitously. I saw in America many goods that had long ceased to be findable in China: Coca-Cola, KFC, Nescafé . . . These were the brands I grew up with and I indulged in a bit of nostalgia. I finally understood why so many people preferred to leave China for the US and not return.

However, I could also see signs that America was on the decline. At the time of my visit, a new blockbuster had just been released: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. I remembered seeing Episodes I through III when I was little and had always wanted to find out what would happen next. To re-experience the wonder of my childhood memories, I bought an expensive ticket. But Episode IV turned out to be far less spectacular than the previous three, and the special effects were so bad that you could almost see the strings on the spaceships. I was really disappointed. Apparently the Cold War had drained America’s resources into the arms race and the economy wasn’t doing so well.

Unlike in the past, opportunities for exchanges between America and China were growing scarce. It was almost impossible to visit America on your own, and even government-sponsored trips were rare. There were only a handful of Chinese from the mainland in the entire university. To celebrate my arrival, they held a party for me, and as we enjoyed our french fries, they asked me how things were in China. Since it took almost a full month for international mail to reach the recipient and phone calls were extremely inconvenient, they got most of their information about China from English-language news reports, which tended to be so narrow in scope that it was like trying to understand a beach by observing a few pebbles. We reminisced about how when we were little we could chat with friends on the other side of the globe just by opening a window over the web, and it felt like another age, another world.

While we were discussing rumors about the transition of power from Deng Xiaoping to Hua Guofeng, a dark horse about whom little was known, the doorbell rang. A woman stood up and said, Oh, it must be so-and-so—but I didn’t catch the name. She went and opened the door and a woman came in, limping with the aid of a cane. I gave her a curious glance, and when I saw her face, I froze.

She looked at me, unable to speak.

It was a dream. A dream.

Qiqi, my Qiqi.

In a moment, everything around me—no, the entire universe—disappeared. Only Qiqi and I remained between heaven and earth. We gazed at each other, our eyes saying what our lips could not. Fate had played a cruel game with us. After the trials and tribulations of more than ten years, we had found each other again on the other side of the Pacific.

Trembling, we came together and held on to each other for dear life. Tears poured from our eyes as sobs wracked our bodies. The others realized that something extraordinary was happening and left so that we could be alone together.

Qiqi told me that when she was shot that night, she lost consciousness. When she woke up, she saw a car passing by and screamed for help. A few foreigners from the car came to her aid, but she passed out again . . . The car turned out to belong to an American news crew who had planned to film a live report, but the danger of the situation had forced them to retreat, which was when they saw Qiqi. They brought her back to the American embassy, where the embassy doctors dressed her wounds.

Later, Qiqi met Chai Ling and the others hiding in the embassy. They told her that I had died. Chai Ling and the rest were wanted by the authorities and, while Qiqi was still recovering, their request for political asylum was approved. Under the protection of the embassy, Qiqi left Beijing, a city of sorrow, and came with the others to New York.

At first, Qiqi didn’t know what conditions were like in China, and she dared not make contact with anyone in the country lest they suffer as a result. After a few years, Qiqi managed to return to Shanghai once to visit her mother, who told her that I had gotten married in Guangzhou. Not wanting to disturb my life, she told her mother not to let me know that she was still alive.

The bullets had left her with a permanent handicap and deprived her of the ability to become a mother. Helpless in this country, she married an old man who abused her. After her divorce, she managed to apply for and win a scholarship and came to study in this university.

We spent the whole night recounting to each other our experiences during the intervening years, and we held each other and cried. What should have been the most wonderful decade of our lives had been lost to the vicissitudes of fate. I said, “I’m so sorry,” countless times, but what was the use? I vowed to devote the rest of my life to making it up to her, to giving her the happiness that should have been hers.

Naturally, ignoring the gossip, we moved in together. We barely spent any time apart, trying to make up for our lost youth. Qiqi had her green card. As long as I stayed with her, I should be able to remain in the United States. Since conditions in China had deteriorated further and China was now engaged in a war with Vietnam, Qiqi told me not to go back. But I couldn’t just forget about Shen Qian and my son. Ever since I started grad school, Shen Qian had been living like a single mother, struggling to keep the whole family afloat, pinning her hopes on my success. To simply abandon her felt to me an unforgivable betrayal.

Although Qiqi and I had recovered some measure of our happiness, my heart was conflicted. But I was a coward. All I cared about was the joy of the present, and I dared not think about the choice I had to make.

10.

I stayed for more than a year in New York. After our lives had settled down somewhat, I threw myself into my work. I read many books of literary theory, politics, and philosophy, and felt my understanding grow by leaps and bounds. Often, I pushed Qiqi’s wheelchair and took walks with her in Battery Park, where we both gazed at the distant figure of the Statue of Liberty and debated the fate of China and the future of the world.

My American advisor thought highly of my paper. He told me there was a teaching position open to those with a literary background that might be a good fit for me. If I got the job, I could stay and finish my PhD. Excited, I handed in my application right away. But then I received the letter from Shen Qian.

There isn’t a wall in the world that doesn’t have a crack. Even divided by the Pacific, rumors about Qiqi and me had managed to make their way back to China. Shen Qian was polite but firm in her letter, demanding an explanation. I finally decided to make a short trip back to China to clarify the situation with her.

Qiqi originally wanted to accompany me, but I asked her to stay put for now. Having her show up at the door with me might be too much for Shen Qian, and I wanted to talk to her alone. We said goodbye at the airport, and Qiqi, in a bright green jacket, leaned against the railing with her cane and watched me go through border control. I turned back to look at her.

Even decades later, the sight of her watching me—like the woman from that old legend who turned to stone waiting for her husband by the sea—would remain with me like a brand burned into my heart.

Back in China, Shen Qian was happy to see me. She made no mention of the question she’d asked me in her letter. Wearing her apron, she busied herself about the kitchen preparing my favorite dishes, many of which were not available in the US: sautéed shredded pork with soybean paste, pork with bamboo shoots, steamed chicken with mushrooms . . . At dinner, she didn’t ask me about my life in the US and only talked about the domestic news: ration tickets were now required for most goods; farmers were no longer allotted individual plots of land, but had to work collectively in communes; her newspaper was in the middle of a debate about the proper authority for Marxist philosophy . . . Xiaobao was playing at my feet, absolutely delighted with the toy robot I had brought him. Faced with my innocent son and tender wife, I just couldn’t bring myself to say the word “divorce.”

That night, as we lay in bed, Shen Qian held me and passionately kissed me. I could feel her body trembling. Steeling myself, I gently pushed her away. “Qian, I need to tell you something.”

“What’s the rush?” Her arms went around my neck again as she murmured, “The night is still young. Why don’t we first—”

“I want a divorce,” I blurted out before I lost my nerve.

Her body stiffened. “Stop it. That’s not funny.”

“I’m not kidding. Qiqi is in America, and we . . . ” I couldn’t continue, but Shen Qian understood.

“You’ve decided?” She sat up.

“Yes.”

“I understand.” As she continued, her eyes flared with anger and her voice gradually grew harsh. “I know you were living with Zhao Qi. I know you used to be a couple. I knew that ten years ago! But what about me? What about all the years I’ve put into this marriage? Without me slaving away to take care of you and your son, do you think you could have gotten the chance to leave China? To see your old lover? Now that you’ve finally made it, do you think you can discard me like a pair of old shoes?”

“No! Listen . . . I will make it up to you . . . I will pay . . . ” I had planned a whole pretty speech but couldn’t remember any of the words. What I did say sounded so cold, so heartless. I was disgusted by my own hypocrisy and clumsiness.

Shen Qian laughed mirthlessly. She slid off the bed and, without even putting on her shoes, headed out.

“Where are you going? It’s the middle of the night.” Afraid that she might leave the apartment, I got up as well.

She went onto the balcony and locked the door behind her. She stood facing me with her hands behind her. Her white nightgown trembled with her breath and she looked like a ghost in the night. I was terrified that she was going to jump.

“Don’t, please!” I begged. “Let’s talk about this.”

“What are you afraid of?” Shen Qian said mockingly. “If I died, wouldn’t that be perfect for you and Zhao Qi? Don’t worry, I’m not going to grant your wish.”

She raised her arms and tossed something over the edge of the balcony. I saw pieces of paper drifting in the wind, falling like snowflakes.

My passport, and other documents.

Behind me, Xiaobao, who had been awakened by our argument, started to cry.

Shen Qian left with Xiaobao and went to her parents’ home. The next day, her parents and uncle came to our place to scream at me, and I had no choice but to hide in my room. It was impossible to keep something like this secret, and soon all my neighbors and colleagues at the university had heard the news. The rumors mutated as they spread: some were saying that I had found a wealthy, powerful woman overseas, and I was going to abandon my wife and child like one of those villains in the old folk operas. The denunciations were so oppressive that I couldn’t even leave home without feeling fingers pointed at me behind my back. Even my mentor, for whom I held deep respect and affection, gave me a tongue-lashing, and I could say nothing in my defense. My father fell ill because of what was happening.

This was how life made you helpless. If you tried to swim against its currents, you’d feel resistance at every step. I regretted coming back—it would have been easier if I’d had the strength to stay overseas. But now it was impossible to leave. To replace my passport would require a great deal of paperwork, and now that my reputation was ruined, I couldn’t even get a recommendation letter from my department. I was stuck: I lacked the strength to continue the struggle, yet I was unwilling to give up.

It took half a year before the situation changed. In the end, as much as Shen Qian hated me, she wasn’t going to shackle us together for the rest of our lives. She agreed to a divorce but demanded full custody of our son. I agreed, and also promised her monetary compensation. Finally, after everything was resolved, I placed a long-distance call to Qiqi, and she was overjoyed by the news. Since I still couldn’t leave the country for the time being, she said she would come back the next month so that we could get married in China and then leave together.

I waited and waited for her flight, but it never arrived.

The next month, the era of Mao Zedong began.

11.

For years, the government had been following a policy of “buy rather than build.” This created the false appearance of prosperity in the economy but hollowed out China’s industrial infrastructure. The gap between the wealthy and the poor grew, and anger at the government grew along with it. Everywhere, a specter-like name haunted China, a name that grew gradually in prominence. People said, This man will bring China fresh hope.

He was called Mao Zedong. A few years earlier, he had held the post of Secretary of the Sichuan Provincial Committee in the provincial capital of Chongqing, and his various policies—known by the slogan “Sing Red Songs, Strike Black Forces” and involving public displays of Communist zeal and intensive government intervention—had made Chongqing into a prosperous city. Many ordinary citizens, especially poor peasants in the rural areas, supported him. The paramount leader of China, Hua Guofeng, was deeply influenced by Mao Zedong, and once Hua had gotten into power, he initiated the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, which sought to mobilize the people to bring down the capitalist roaders within the Communist Party. The mass movements swept the entire country, and political power within China was redistributed overnight. Deng Xiaoping, Ye Jianying, Hu Yaobang, and others in their faction all fell from prominence, and with the entire country behind him, Mao Zedong was elected Chairman of the Communist Party.

After he became the Chairman, Mao continued the Cultural Revolution, focusing on criticizing Deng and opposing rightist tendencies, especially Deng’s “foreigners’ slave” political philosophy. He abolished Deng’s policy of keeping China open to outside influences and essentially cut China off from the rest of the world. Soon after, the United States terminated all diplomatic relations with China. I could no longer go to America, and Qiqi could not come to China.

And so, once again, history divided us.

During the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, the personality cult of Mao was extreme, but the movement itself wasn’t too violent. With my mentor’s recommendation, I became an instructor at the university after grad school. Although colleges were no longer admitting students and the social status of intellectuals had declined, it was at least possible to make a living by writing theory papers on Marxism–Leninism, criticizing traditional Confucian philosophy, and reinterpreting Chinese history through a Communist lens as directed by the central leadership. The Cultural Revolution also interrupted the divorce proceedings, and so Shen Qian and I ended up living together again, doing our best to get along.

Year after year, we went to work, we came home, and we studied the required political readings. The Revolution was going well, as was proclaimed in public at every opportunity, but life itself had become as still as a pool of dead water. During those years, even bright-colored clothing was forbidden. No forms of culture or entertainment were permitted—since they were all corrupted by feudal, American-capitalist, or Soviet-revisionist influences—except for the eight model revolutionary operas. One time, I found a dirty, ragged copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone abandoned in a public bathroom and tears filled my eyes. I took it home and read it in secret several times. But, in the end, terrified of being accused of harboring contraband, I burned it.

Sometimes, as I studied the latest directives from the paramount leader, I would think: What happened to all the eras I have lived through? When I was a young man, the streets were packed with bellbottoms and “profiteers”; when I was a teenager, TV dramas from Hong Kong and Taiwan filled the airwaves; when I was a child, it was possible to play games on the web, to go and see the latest movies from Hollywood, and there were the Olympics and 3D films . . . Did those times really exist? Where did they come from, and where have they gone? Or was all this just a dream?

Maybe everything was simply a game played by time. What was time? What was there besides nothingness? Before us had been nothingness, and after us will be nothingness.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I thought of the woman I loved on the other shore of the Pacific and pain wracked my body. Those days when I was half-mad with love, when I was a stranger in a strange land—they felt so real and yet so much like a fantasy. What would have happened if I had listened to Qiqi and stayed in America? Would I be happier than now? Or would I simply be mired in an even deeper illusion?

At least I would then be with the person I loved.

In reality, America was no paradise, either. The People’s Daily explained that because the United States was addicted to militarism, it had sunk into the quagmire of the Vietnam War. Racial conflicts within America were intensifying and the crisis in the Middle East was causing an oil shortage. The capitalists were likely not going to last much longer, and American radical leftist movements were gaining momentum.

The Soviet camp, meanwhile, was growing stronger every day. The Cold War grew heated, and on almost every continent proxy wars were fought between the two superpowers. Ballistic nuclear submarines patrolled the sea depths, and every warhead they carried was capable of destroying an entire city. Even more missiles rested in their silos, awaiting the order that would launch them soaring though the air to rain destruction upon us. Death itself roamed overhead, poised to send all of humanity into hell. Regardless of whether you were Chinese or American, you were headed for the same place.

Sometimes, I recalled the rumors about the end of the world from my childhood. Maybe the prophecy had been true—except that perhaps the apocalypse didn’t arrive in a single instant, but took decades or even centuries to descend. Or perhaps the world had already been destroyed by the time I was born, and all that I had experienced was nothing but a shadow of a fantasy that was slowly dissipating. Who knew what the truth was?

In the fourth year of the Cultural Revolution, I received a letter from the US. The very sight of the American stamps on it frightened me—corresponding with foreigners was an activity subject to intense scrutiny. However, the letter’s contents seemed harmless enough, consisting of a few words of greeting cobbled together with some revolutionary language in an unnatural manner.

Comrade Xie Baosheng:

First, let us express together our fondest wish that the brightest, reddest sun in our hearts, Chairman Mao, live ten thousand years! As the Chairman wrote in his poem, “The seas roil with rage, and the continents shake in fury!” In America, under the leadership of Mao Zedong Thought, the civil rights movement and leftist revolutionaries have made the capitalists of Wall Street tremble before the awakened power of the people! Chairman Mao was absolutely correct when he wrote that the revolutionary conditions are not just good, but great!

All right, then, how are you doing? . . .

Of course the letter came from Qiqi. It had been delivered to my department, where the head of the workers’ propaganda team4 intercepted it. This man read the letter suspiciously and then looked up at me, glaring.

He slammed his hand down on the desk. “Xie Baosheng, the people’s eyes can see everything! Now, confess the number of foreign contacts you have! What kind of secrets exist between you and the woman who wrote this letter?”

I laughed. “That’s enough of that. You know everything there is to know about Qiqi and me. Now hand me the letter.”

By an incredible stroke of luck, I was talking to my old friend Heizi. Formerly just an ordinary factory worker, the Cultural Revolution had turned him into a member of the workers’ propaganda team that, pursuant to directives issued by the Chairman, came to supervise my university. In this manner, a man who had never even gone to college became the most important person in one of China’s most prestigious universities. Without him, the letter would have gotten me into deep trouble.

Heizi handed the letter to me and told me to burn it after reading. I read Qiqi’s words over and over until I figured out what she was trying to say between the lines. First, she explained that she had obtained her degree and was now teaching Chinese literature at an American college. Second, she was still unmarried and wanted to come visit me in China. I sighed and wiped my eyes. It had been five years since my parting from Qiqi, and she still wanted me. But what could I do? Even if she returned, the most we could hope for was to be like the hero and heroine in The Second Handshake, an underground novel we passed around in handwritten copies, who could only gaze at each other, knowing that they could never be together.

In the end, it didn’t matter what I thought. I had no way of sending a letter to Qiqi.

I hid her letter in a stack of documents I took home. I didn’t want Shen Qian to find it, but I also couldn’t bear to burn it. Finally, I decided to conceal it between the pages of the copy of Season of Bloom, Season of Rain that had once belonged to Qiqi. Although the book itself was also an example of feudal, capitalist, and revisionist thinking, I just couldn’t imagine getting rid of it. I wrapped the book in a bundle of old clothes and kept it at the bottom of the trunk.

12.

Rationally, I knew that Qiqi shouldn’t come back, but a corner of my selfish heart continued to harbor the hope that she would. Around that time, President Nixon visited China, hoping to form an alliance with China against the Soviet Union. As the Sino–American relationship improved, hope reignited within me. However, somehow Nixon and Mao couldn’t come to an agreement, and the Americans were so angry that they took revenge by manipulating the UN Security Council to expel the People’s Republic of China and hand its seat at the UN to Taiwan as the “legitimate” representative for all of China. What little connection had existed between the US and China was completely cut off.

Qiqi didn’t return, and I received no more news about her.

In the sixth year of the Cultural Revolution, my father passed away. A few days before his death, China launched the satellite The East Is Red. It had been many years since China had sent an artificial satellite into orbit, and the occasion was marked with a great celebration. As my father lay dying, he held my hand and muttered, “When I was young, China had so many satellites in space I lost count. We even had manned spaceships and a space station. But this single little satellite is now seen as some remarkable achievement. What has happened to the world?”

I had no response. That world of my childhood, a world that had once existed, now felt even more impossible than science fiction. My father closed his eyes and let out his last breath.

To be fair, there were some advances in technology. The next year, the Americans managed to land on the moon with the Apollo mission—an unprecedented achievement—and the Stars and Stripes flew on lunar soil, shocking the world. This was not good news for China. Chairman Mao had come up with the proposal that China should lead the revolution of the Third World against the developed nations and the Soviet Union. As a result, bilateral relations between China and the US and China and the Soviet Union were tense. China was also in a border conflict with the Soviet Union over Zhenbao Island and was completely isolated internationally. I only heard about the American moon landing by secretly listening to banned American radio broadcasts.

Two years later, my son was old enough to be called a young man. His generation was different from mine. They had no memory of the relative openness of Deng’s reformist years and grew up under a barrage of propaganda centered on Mao Zedong Thought. They had little exposure to Western culture, and no knowledge of China’s traditional culture, either. They worshipped Chairman Mao with true zeal and believed it was their duty to die to protect his revolutionary path. They passionately declared that they would fight until they broke through the walls of the Kremlin, until they leveled the White House, until they liberated all of humankind.

My son disliked the name Xiaobao, which meant “Precious,” because it wasn’t revolutionary enough. He renamed himself Weidong, which meant “Defend the East.” He became a Red Guard, and before he had even graduated from high school, he wanted to quit school and go on revolutionary tours around the country with his friends, sharing the experience of rebelling against authority with other Red Guards. Shen Qian and I did not like the idea at all, but this was something promoted by the leadership in Beijing. As soon as we started to object, our son brought out the Little Red Book and denounced us as though we were class enemies. We had no choice but to let him go.

None of us knew that a more violent storm lay in waiting.

The Red Guard movement grew, and young men and women turned on their teachers as “reactionary academic authorities.” At every school, Red Guards held mass rallies called “struggle sessions” to torture and denounce these enemies of the revolution. My mentor, a famous professor who had studied overseas, naturally became a target, and I was brought along to the struggle sessions as a secondary target. Half of the hair on our heads were shaved off; tall, conical hats were stuck on top; and then our arms were pulled back and held up to force us to bow down to the revolutionary masses who hurled abuse at us. My mentor was beaten and tortured until he collapsed and lost consciousness. Only then did the mass rally end.

I held my old teacher and called his name, but he didn’t wake up. Heizi helped me bring him to the hospital, but it was too late. He died a few days later.

The Red Guards were not satisfied with having murdered my mentor. They imprisoned me and demanded that I confess to all my past sins—what they really had in mind was my participation in the Tiananmen protests twenty years ago. I debated them by putting my academic skills to good use: “I was protesting against the dark path Deng Xiaoping wanted for China. We spoke loudly, wrote openly, and demanded true revolutionary democracy. This was absolutely in line with Mao Zedong Thought. We were supported by the masses of Beijing, the ordinary workers and laborers who also participated in the movement. How could you call such protests counterrevolutionary?”

The Red Guards lacked sufficient experience in this style of argument to win against me. They couldn’t get me for having foreign contacts, either, because I had burned or buried anything having to do with America, and there was now no proof of my relationship with Qiqi. But ultimately, I was probably saved because of my friendship with Heizi.

After I was finally released and allowed to go home, I found out that Shen Qian had been taken away by the revolutionary rebels who had taken over her newspaper.

Someone at the newspaper, it turned out, had revealed Shen Qian’s long-ago affair with Liu Xiaobo in a big character poster. Liu Xiaobo was without a doubt one of the worst counterrevolutionary rightists—he had once claimed that China could only be saved by three centuries of Western colonization; had drafted the capitalist legalistic screed “Charter ’08”; and had been utterly corrupt in his sexual relationships. Although he was dead, his influence continued to linger. Since Shen Qian had been his lover for several years, she must have known many of his secrets. The revolutionary rebels salivated at the prospect of interrogating one of Liu’s mistresses. They held her in a “cowshed”—a prison set up at the newspaper—and demanded that she write her confession.

Shen Qian was locked away for a whole week and I was not allowed to see her. By the time she returned, her hair had all been shaven off and her face and arms were littered with scars. She stared at me dully, as though she no longer recognized me. Finally, she recovered and sobbed uncontrollably as I held her.

She never told me what she suffered during her interrogation and I never asked. However, not long after, many people who had once known Liu Xiaobo were imprisoned and interrogated, and the rumor was that Shen Qian’s confession had been used as the foundation for accusations against them. I knew it was wrong to blame Shen Qian. In this age, survival was the only goal, and conscience was a luxury few could afford.

In this manner, both Shen Qian and I were stamped with the label of counterrevolutionaries. By the time our son returned from his revolutionary tour, he found his parents to be bona fide, irredeemable class enemies. This meant that he was also considered impure. To remedy the situation, he went to the school and hung big character posters denouncing Shen Qian and me, and revealed some so-called “sins” that he knew we had committed. While others watched, he slapped me in the face and declared that he was no longer my son. He turned around and walked away, proud of his steadfast revolutionary ardor. I almost fainted from rage.

After our son left, we were angry for a few days, but then began to worry. We asked around for news about him but heard nothing for a couple of months. Then Heizi’s son, Xiaohei, came to visit.

“Um, Uncle Xie . . . I have to tell you something. Please sit down.”

Xiaohei and my son were good friends. I realized something was wrong. I took a deep breath and said, “Go ahead.”

“Weidong . . . he . . . ”

My heart sank and the world seemed to wobble around me. But I insisted that he continue.

My son and Xiaohei had joined a faction of Red Guards called the “April 14th Brigade.” He had been promoted to squad leader, but because of my status and his mother’s, he was demoted and almost expelled. To show that he had completely cast us away and was a dedicated revolutionary, my son decided to take on the most dangerous tasks and always led every charge. A few days ago, his faction fought a battle against another faction at the university; my son rushed ahead with an iron bar, but the other side had obtained rifles from the army, and with a bang, my son’s chest exploded and he collapsed to the ground . . .

The world blacked out around me before Xiaohei could finish.

13.

The death of our son destroyed the only hope left for Shen Qian and me. Our hair turned white almost overnight. My mother died from the shock and grief. Although Shen Qian and I weren’t even fifty, we looked much older. We sat in our home with nothing to say to each other.

I didn’t know how we survived those dark years. I didn’t really want to recall the time. Like two fish tossed ashore, Shen Qian and I lay gasping, trying to keep each other’s gills wet with the foam from our mouths. But eventual suffocation was our certain fate.

One year later, the Cultural Revolution ended.

Mao decided to retire behind the scenes and Liu Shaoqi became the President of China. Working with Premier Zhou Enlai, Liu tried to lead an economic recovery by instituting limited free markets and allocating land to individual families instead of collective farming by communes. Slowly, the country recovered, and colleges opened their doors again to new students. Intellectuals were treated better, and after a few years, Shen Qian and I were rehabilitated and no longer labeled rightists.

The ten years of the Cultural Revolution had decimated academia and my department lacked qualified faculty. I had the respect of my colleagues and years of experience, but since I wasn’t a member of the Communist Party (due to my political history), I was passed over for promotions. Summoning my courage, I wrote a letter to the authorities demanding the country make better use of the few intellectuals it had left, but I heard nothing.

A year later, when I had already given up all hope, my fortunes took an abrupt turn: I was promoted to full professor and given membership in the Communist Party. Even more amazingly, I was elected the department chair by a landslide.

In my new position of power, I began to get to know some elite intellectuals. One time, I met Guo Moruo, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He told me in confidence that Premier Zhou Enlai had read my letter and given the directive to promote me despite my flawed background. Guo told me to work hard and not disappoint the Premier. Sometime later, the Premier visited our school and asked specifically to meet me. Anxiously, I expressed my gratitude to him, and the Premier laughed. “Comrade Baosheng, I know you’re a talented man. The country is trying to get back on her feet and we have to focus on science and technology. Didn’t you once write science fiction? Why not write more and get our young people interested in science again?”

Since the Premier and Guo Moruo had both given the green light, the novels I had written were reissued in new editions. Readers had not had access to such books in a long time and the response was overwhelming. Magazines began to approach me and commission new stories, and eventually I published a few collections. Fans began to call me a “famous writer.”

I knew very well that these new stories were nowhere near as good as my old ones. I no longer dared to write about politically sensitive subjects, and these new offerings were affected works that praised the regime without articulating anything new. But who said the world was fair? I knew I was unlikely to accomplish anything great during what remained of my career. I decided I would use the little bit of influence I had to try to help talented young people, and to that end, I began to actively participate in social functions.

The good times didn’t last. Soon, the country hit another rough patch. China conducted another nuclear test, and once again, both the Soviet Union and the United States imposed sanctions. Food shortages became rampant and everyone’s rations were reduced. The streets were full of hungry people, and it was said that even Chairman Mao had stopped eating meat.

But even so, those of us in the big cities were lucky. Heizi told me that people were starving to death in the countryside. But since no news of this kind could be published, no one knew the truth. We didn’t dare to speculate or say much, either. Although the Cultural Revolution was over, the political climate was still very severe. Rumor had it that when Marshal Peng Dehuai dared to offer some opinions critical of official policy at the Lushan Conference, he was severely punished.

The next year, Shen Qian died. No, not from starvation. She had liver cancer. As the wife of a high-status intellectual, she could have received treatment that would have prolonged her life, but she refused it.

“We stuck with each other . . . all these years . . . Life has been so exhausting, hasn’t it? We are like those two fish . . . in that Daoist parable . . . rather than struggling to keep each other alive on land, wouldn’t it have been better . . . if we had never known each other at all, but lived free in the rivers and lakes? Don’t be sad . . . I’m not sad to go . . . ”

I held her hand, and tears made it impossible to speak. I remembered something from our youth: back then, everyone in middle school said we were a pair because we had classroom cleanup duty, but I didn’t like her, and she didn’t like me. When we worked together, it was very awkward because we refused to talk to each other. One time, I was standing on a chair to wash the windows and started to fall. She rushed over to help and I ended up falling on her. As we both limped to see the school nurse, the absurdity of the situation struck us and we laughed as we blamed each other . . . That faded memory now felt like a preview of our time together.

“I really want to . . . hear that old song again.” Shen Qian’s voice was fading. “I haven’t heard it in such a long time. Can you . . . sing for me?”

I knew the song she was talking about: “Rain, Hail, or Shine,” by the Taiwanese singer Wakin Chau. We used to sing it all the time when we were in high school. I had forgotten most of the lyrics, and the best I could do was to recall a few fragments about love, about the pain and pleasure that dreams brought us, about regrets. I sang, my voice trembling, tears flowing down my face, and my cracked voice not sounding musical at all.

But Shen Qian moved her lips along with mine. She could no longer make any noise, but she was lost in the silent music of yesteryear. The rays of the setting sun shone through the window and fell upon her, covering her gaunt face with a golden glow.

We sang together like that for a long, long time.

14.

The years of starvation finally came to an end. The Soviet Union and China repaired their broken bond and trade began to grow. The Soviet Union provided us with a great deal of assistance and the domestic economy slowly recovered. But I was now almost sixty and felt much older. I resigned from the position of department chair, thinking I’d use what little time was left to write a few books. But I was nominated assistant dean of the university and became a standing committee member for the China Writers Association. In addition, I was picked as a delegate to the National People’s Congress. I was too busy to write.

One day, I received a call from Mao Dun, the Minister of Culture.

“The Premier has asked you to attend a diplomatic function. There’s a group of avant-garde Western writers visiting and he thinks you know one of them.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know the details. I’ll send a car for you.”

That evening, a car took me to the Beijing Hotel, which had one of the country’s best Western-style restaurants. Many important people were in attendance, including the Premier himself, who gave a welcome address. As I surveyed the foreign visitors, I recognized the writer I was supposed to know right away. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

After a series of boring speeches and a formal dinner, finally the time came to mingle and converse. I walked up to that man and said, in my terrible French, “Bonsoir, Monsieur Sartre.”

He gazed at me curiously through his thick glasses and gave me a friendly smile.

I switched to English and introduced myself. Then I told him how much I admired L’Être et le néant and how I had written papers on it. I had never expected to see him in China.

“Well.” Sartre quirked an eyebrow at me. “I never expected anyone in China to be interested in my work.”

I lowered my voice. “Before the Cultural Revolution, your work was very popular in China. Many people were utterly entranced by your words, though they—myself included—could not claim to truly understand your philosophy. However, I’ve always tried to understand the world through it.”

“I’m honored to hear that. But you shouldn’t think so highly of my words. Your own thoughts about the world are the most precious thing—really, thinking itself is the only thing that is important. I must admit I’m surprised. I would have expected you to be a socialist.”

I smiled bitterly. “Socialism is our life, but this form of life has turned me and many others into existentialists. Perhaps in that way the two are connected.”

“What is your thought on existentialism?”

“To quote you, ‘L’existence précède l’essence.’ The world appears out of an essenceless abyss. Other than time, it depends on nothing, and it has no meaning. All meaning comes after the world itself, and it is fundamentally absurd. I agree with this. The existence of the world is . . . absurd.”

I paused, and then, gaining courage, continued with the puzzle that had plagued me for years. “Look at our world! Where does it come from? Where is it headed? When I was born, the Internet had connected all parts of the globe, and high-speed railways crisscrossed the country. The store shelves were full of anything one might desire, and there were countless novels, films, TV shows . . . Everyone dreamed of a more wonderful future. But now? The web and mobile phones have long disappeared, and so has television. We appear to live in a world that is moving backwards. Is this not absurd? Perhaps it is because our existence has no essence at all.”

“Sir,” said a smiling Sartre, “I think I understand what is troubling you. But I don’t understand why you think this state is absurd.”

“If the existence of the world has meaning, the world must advance, don’t you think? Otherwise what is the point of generation struggling after generation? The world appears to be a twisted shadow of some reality.”

Sartre shook his head. “I know that the Chinese once had a philosopher named Zhuangzi. He told this story: if you give a monkey three nuts in the morning and four nuts in the evening, the monkey will be unhappy. But if you give the monkey four nuts in the morning and only three in the evening, the monkey will be ecstatic. In your view, is the monkey foolish?”

“Uh . . . yes. Zhuangzi’s monkey is a byword for foolishness among the Chinese.”

A mocking glint came into Sartre’s eyes. “But how are we different from the monkey in that story? Are we in pursuit of some ‘correct’ order of history? If you switch happiness and misfortune around in time, will everything appear ‘normal’ to you? If evil exists in history, does it disappear merely by switching the order of events around?”

I felt like I was on the verge of understanding something, but I couldn’t articulate it.

Sartre continued, “Progress is not a constant. It is merely a temporary phase of this universe. I’m no scientist, but the physicists tell us that the universe expands and then collapses and then expands again, not unlike the cosmic cycles envisioned by your Daoist philosophers. Time could easily flow in another direction . . . or in one of countless directions. Perhaps events can be arranged in any of a number of different sequences, because time may choose from an infinite set of options. Remember the aphorism of Heraclitus: ‘Time is a child playing dice; the kingly power is a child’s.’

“But so what? Whichever direction time takes, what meaning does all this have? The world exists. Its existence precedes essence because its very existence is steeped in nothingness. It is absurd regardless of the order of the events within it. Perhaps you’re right—had time picked another direction, the universe would be very different: humanity would progress from darkness to light, from sorrow to joy, but such a universe would not be any better. In the end, joy belongs to those who are born in times of joy, and suffering belongs to those born in times of suffering. In the eyes of God, it makes no difference.

“Some say that if war were to break out between the Soviet Union and the United States, the world would end. But I say the apocalypse has long since arrived. It has been with us since the birth of the world, but we have become inured to it by familiarity. The end of the world comes not with the destruction of everything, but with the fact that nothing that happens around us has any meaning. The world has returned to primordial chaos, and we have nothing.”

Sartre stopped, as though expecting me to say something. My mind was utterly confused, and after a long while, I said, “What, then, is the hope for humanity?”

“Hope has always existed and always will,” he said solemnly. “But hope is not the future because time does not have an inevitable direction. Hope is now: in existence itself, in nothingness. The truth of nothingness is freedom. Man has always had the freedom to choose, and this is the only comfort and grace offered to humanity.”

“I understand that’s your theory. But do you really think the freedom to choose belongs to humanity?” My voice grew sharper. “Thirty years ago, I was separated from the woman I loved on the other side of an ocean. Then I returned here. I do not know where she is or whether she is still alive. Can I choose to go find her? A few years back, tens of millions of people died from starvation in this country. If possible, they would all have chosen to survive. But could they have survived? Let me tell you something: many honorable and great men and women chose Communism, believing it would save humanity from suffering, but have you seen the results of their choice? Have you seen what has happened to China? The freedom of mankind is but a fantasy, a cheap consolation. Our state is despair.”

Sartre was silent for a while. Then he said, “Perhaps you’re right. But the meaning of freedom is that you can always choose, though there is no promise that your choice will become reality. Maybe this is a cheap consolation, but other than this, we have nothing.”

I don’t know if I really understood Sartre, or maybe even he couldn’t express himself clearly. He stayed in China for more than a month and we saw each other often. He said he would try to think about what I said and write a new book, but then he left China and I never saw him again.

15.

The next few years were a golden age for the People’s Republic. The Cultural Revolution was a distant memory and the later anti-rightist movements were also deemed historical errors. As the cultural sphere grew more animated and open, dissent was tolerated and many different opinions could be voiced. The central leadership adjusted the socialist economic model through new democratic reforms that permitted some measure of private enterprise. The Soviet Union and China entered a honeymoon period, and with Soviet aid, China announced a new five-year plan of full-scale development. Everywhere people were excited and threw themselves into their work with passion. Once again, we began to hope for a better future.

But hope did not last. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War heated up again. An American plot overthrew Cuba’s Castro and the dictator Batista came into power. The Communist forces were driven from the Americas, and then the Korean Peninsula became a new flashpoint. Along the 38th parallel, both sides amassed forces, and war broke out without anybody knowing who had fired the first shot. China could not help but become involved, and young men from China had to go to Korea to fight for the survival of the Republic.

This was the first time in living memory that China and the United States fought directly. The Americans had picked a moment in China’s history when China was at her weakest, when she needed peace and recovery the most. Every sign indicated that China was going to lose. Incredibly, however, the Chinese Volunteers, who possessed nothing except courage, pushed back the American assault and forced the American army to a standstill along the 38th parallel. This was not achieved without great cost. It was said that hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, gave their lives. I didn’t know the exact figure, but considering that even Chairman Mao’s son died in battle, one could imagine how desperate and fierce the fighting was.

The war caused the economy to collapse. Prices soared and more hardships were added to people’s lives. Dissatisfaction with the government grew and a name long forbidden began to surface in conversations: Chiang Kai-shek.

He was a hardened anti-Communist. Although the situation across the Taiwan Strait had long been tense due to the mainland’s overwhelming advantage over the island, Taiwan’s leaders had always pursued a policy of de facto independence, only passively resisting any mainland advances. But twenty years ago, after Chiang Kai-shek came to power, he declared that he would reclaim the mainland. Since the war in Korea had reached a stalemate, the Americans encouraged Chiang to join the conflict. He thus declared his intention to carry out his old promise.

With American support, Taiwan’s fighters and warships encroached upon the mainland coast and pamphlets were dropped in Guangzhou, Shanghai, and other cities. Taiwan’s army entered Burma and harassed the border with China. It was said that parts of Yunnan Province had already fallen to Chiang’s forces. Tibet declared independence and would no longer heed orders from Beijing. Bandits under the flag of the “Nationalist Army” killed and looted the rural countryside. Spies in various cities began to put up anti-Communist posters.

The government responded by cracking down on counterrevolutionaries, but the effects appeared slight. Rumors were rampant and the population grew restless. The central leadership signed a cease-fire with the Americans and pulled the army back into China in an attempt to stabilize the domestic situation.

Chiang Kai-shek then launched an all-out assault, and the peace across the Taiwan Strait that had lasted my entire lifetime ended as the Chinese Civil War began.

With the help of the American Seventh Fleet, the Nationalist Army landed in Guangdong. They headed north and conquered Nanjing. The central leadership pulled the troops that had returned from Korea to the southern front, but the troops were tired of fighting and surrendered to the Nationalists en masse, raising the flag of the Republic of China, a blue sky with a white sun. In little more than a year, all territories south of the Yangtze had fallen to the Nationalists, and even the north appeared to be teetering on the precipice.

During that time, through my connections in the Soviet Union, I unexpectedly received a copy of Sartre’s new book, which recorded his impressions of China. Sartre also sent me a long letter in which he discussed some further thoughts about our conversations. It was highly technical and rather hard to read. However, near the end, an almost casually tossed-off line shocked me:

“Recently, a Chinese-American scholar came to Paris to visit me. Her name is Zhao Qi, and she has been away from China for many decades . . . ”

Qiqi! My Qiqi! The world spun around me. I forced myself to be calm and continued to read.

“She is an excellent scholar, and she wishes to return to her homeland to do what she can to help. I mentioned you to her, and she said she would like to visit you in Beijing.”

The letter went on to discuss other matters I did not care about.

For a long while, my mind was utter chaos. When I finally calmed down, I figured out what Sartre really meant. During the month we spent together, I told him about Qiqi and asked for his help to find out news about her if he ever visited the United States. The reason he had crafted his letter to make it sound as if Qiqi and I were strangers was an attempt to protect us in the event the letter was read by others.

The important news was that Qiqi was going to return to Beijing to find me. This was actually a consequence of the present crisis. The reason that Qiqi couldn’t return to China before was because of the Cold War, but if the political situation changed, the barrier between us would be lifted.

Sartre’s real message to me was simple: If you want to see Qiqi again, find a way to stay in Beijing!

16.

While I waited excitedly in Beijing, another piece of shocking news arrived: Chiang Kai-shek proclaimed that the Republic of China was reasserting its sovereignty over the entire country. The capital would be returned to Nanjing, and Beijing renamed Beiping. He vowed to cross the Yangtze and slaughter every last Communist until China was unified.

The next day, Heizi came to find me, holding a pamphlet in his hand. “What is wrong with you? Why are you still here?”

“Where am I supposed to go?” I was baffled.

“Don’t you know?” Heizi handed the pamphlet to me. “A Nationalist airplane dropped this earlier today.”

I read the pamphlet. Basically, it said that the Nationalists were winning victory after victory in their advance north and they would soon conquer Beiping. Everyone would be pardoned, with the exception of a list of major war criminals. The pamphlet went on to urge Communist officers and soldiers to surrender.

“What does this have to do with me?” I asked.

“Look at the back.”

I flipped the sheet of paper over. It was a list of “Major Communist War Criminals.” I glanced through the names: Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi . . . There were at least a hundred names, and most were important figures in the Party or the government. The penultimate name was Guo Moruo, my old friend. The last name on the list was even more familiar: Xie Baosheng.

“What . . . is my name doing here?”

“Of course you’re on there,” said Heizi. “Have you forgotten who you are? You’ve been the dean of the university, the Secretary-General of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, standing committee member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and you are always showing up at state banquets. As far as the cultural sphere is concerned, you and Guo Moruo are the two biggest fish.”

“Those are just honorary titles. I’ve never done anything.”

“It really doesn’t matter. They need a name on there to show they mean business, and it might as well be yours.” Heizi sighed. “I heard that Chiang Kai-shek has started purges in the south. Anybody connected with the Communists is executed, and he’s killed enough people to make the rivers to flow red. He hung many of the bodies from lampposts to instill terror. Since you’re on the list, if Beijing were to fall . . . You’d better get out.”

I smiled bitterly. “I think it’s too late for that. What are your plans?”

“My wife and I will follow our son, of course. Xiaohei is still in the army. In fact, he’s a member of the guard for the central leadership. He’s already arranged for us to go to the Northeast. We leave in two days. Old friend, I really think you need to plan for this.”

A few days later, the Nationalists were almost at the city. Artillery shells were already exploding in Beijing. Someone passed me a copy of an article published in a newspaper in Nanjing, which was supposed to describe the “Crimes of Communist Bandit Leaders.” The section on me claimed I had betrayed Liu Xiaobo after my arrest post-Tiananmen; that I had served as a tool of the regime during the Cultural Revolution; that after coming into power, I had abused my authority to suppress anyone who disagreed with me; that I had written science fiction novels spreading propaganda about Communism and advocating corrupt sexual practices; that I had emboldened and invigorated the totalitarian system . . . In a word, I must be executed to pacify the people’s anger.

I had to laugh at this. Here was I, thinking I had accomplished nothing in my life, but in this article I was an amazing villain with extraordinary powers.

That night, a squad of fully armed soldiers woke me by banging on the door. They were members of the guard for the central leadership and the officer in charge was Xiaohei.

“Uncle Xie, we are here with orders to escort you out of the city.”

“Where are you going?”

“The commander of Beijing’s peripheral defenses has betrayed us,” Xiaohei said. “That bastard surrendered and the Nationalists are now attacking the city. To avoid the destruction of the city’s cultural artifacts and ancient buildings, the central leadership has decided to retreat. We’ve got to go now.”

“No. I’m too old to run. I’ll wait here. Whatever happens is fate.”

“Uncle Xie, you’re on the list of war criminals. If you stay here, you’ll die for sure.”

He continued trying to change my mind, but I refused to budge. One of his soldiers got impatient and pointed his gun at me. “Xie Baosheng, if you don’t leave, then you’re trying to betray the revolution and surrender to the enemy. I’ll kill you right now.”

Xiaohei pushed the gun barrel down. “Uncle Xie, I’m sorry, but we’re under strict orders. You must leave with us. If you don’t come willingly, we’ll have to resort to cruder measures.”

I sighed. “Fine. Give me a few minutes to pack some things.”

An hour later, deep in the night, the soldiers and I got into a jeep and drove west. Many buildings along the way had already collapsed from artillery fire and the road was filled with pits. Electricity had been shut off and all the streetlights were dark. Other than columns of soldiers, I saw almost no pedestrians. Tanks passed by from time to time and I could hear the distant rumble of cannons.

I was reminded of another bloody night forty years ago.

The car drove past Tiananmen along the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Under the cold light of the moon, I saw that on this square that had once held tens of thousands of idealistic young hearts, the Great Hall of the People and the Monument to the People’s Heroes had both been reduced to heaps of rubble. A bare flagstaff stood in the middle of the square, but the red flag with five golden stars was no longer flying from it; instead, it lay crumpled on the ground. A few soldiers were working on the Gate of Heavenly Peace itself, taking down the portrait of Chairman Mao so that it could be carried away. I still couldn’t believe I was witnessing the end of the country in which I was born.

I thought I had been through too much ever to be moved by the shifting vicissitudes of fortune. But I was wrong. In that moment, my eyes grew blurry. Tiananmen became an old watercolor painting, dissolving in my hot tears. One time, the entire country celebrated the founding of the People’s Republic with a parade through this very square; one time, students from around the country gathered here to demand democracy; one time, Chairman Mao stood here and surveyed the Red Guards—where were they now? Had it all been a dream?

Equally broken lay the dream of reuniting with Qiqi. I had waited so long in this city for her, but by the time she managed to return to her homeland, in which corner of China would I find myself? Perhaps we would never meet again until death . . .

No one spoke. The car bumped along and left war-torn Beijing, heading for the Western Hills.

17.

A lamp is lit on the mountain in the east,

The light falls on the mountain in the west.

The plain between them is smooth and vast,

But I can’t seem to find you . . .

The Loess Plateau of central China lay before us. The yellow earth, deposited by dust storms over the eons, stretched to the horizon. Thousands of years of erosion had carved countless canyons and channels in it, like the wrinkles left by time on our faces. The barren terraced fields bore silent testimony to the hardships endured by the people eking out a living on this ancient land. Baota Mountain, the symbol of the town of Yan’an, stood not far from us, and the Yellow River flowed past the foot of it. The folk song echoed between the canyons, lingering for a long time.

“People enjoy love songs, even in a place like this,” said Heizi. “Oh, do you remember that popular song about the Loess Plateau from when we were young? Back then, I was so curious what the place really looked like. I never got to see it until now, when it’s become my home. Fate is really funny sometimes.”

For the last few years, as the civil war raged on, I had followed the People’s Liberation Army first to Hebei, and then to the liberated regions in the center of the country, and finally here, to Yan’an, where I unexpectedly bumped into my old friend. Heizi had been in the Northeast until he followed his son here, but his wife had died during the Siege of Changchun.

Although the PLA had begun the civil war with a series of crushing defeats, under the leadership of Lin Biao, Peng Dehuai, and Liu Bocheng, the PLA soon rallied and pushed back. Chiang Kai-shek became the President of the Republic of China in Nanjing, but his dream of unifying China couldn’t be realized. The more he tried to “exterminate” the Communists, the more his own hold on power appeared to waver. The Communists managed to hold on to some liberated zones in northern China, and the two sides settled into a seesawing stalemate. Since both factions were tired of the fighting, they declared a cease-fire and began negotiations in Chongqing, hoping to form a new coalition government. But since neither side was willing to compromise, the talks went nowhere.

While China was embroiled in this civil war, extreme militarists came to power in Japan and launched an invasion of China. They advanced quickly and forced Chiang Kai-shek to leave Nanjing and move the capital temporarily to Chongqing. The Japanese then invaded the Philippines and opened a new Pacific front against the American forces stationed there. The Americans were completely unprepared and fled before the might of Japan. In distant Europe, a madman named Hitler rose to prominence in Germany with the support of the army and instantly declared war on the Soviet Union. The German forces reclaimed East Germany and invaded France. The whole world had descended into the first truly global war in history.

The Cold War dissolved before this new threat. The Americans and the Soviets, erstwhile enemies, formed an alliance against the new Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Meanwhile, in China, the Nationalists and the Communists had to put aside their differences to fight together for the survival of the Chinese people against the Japanese slaughter. Thus did history turn over a new page.

After arriving in Yan’an, I didn’t want anything more to do with administration or politics. I dedicated myself to collecting folk songs and preserving traditional arts, which I enjoyed. Although my life was no longer comfortable—I lived in a traditional cave dwelling and subsisted on coarse grains just like all the local peasants—I counted myself lucky. It was a time of war, after all.

While Heizi and I reminisced, a young student ran up the mountainous path toward us.

“Teacher! Someone is here looking for you!” He struggled to catch his breath.

“Who?” I didn’t even get up. I was too old to be excited.

“An old lady. I think she’s from America.”

I jumped up and grabbed him. “An old lady? What’s her name? How old is she?”

“Um . . . I’m not sure. I guess over sixty? She’s talking with the dean of the Arts Academy. The dean said you know her.”

From America . . . over sixty . . . an old lady . . . my Qiqi. She’s here. She’s finally here!

I started to run. But I was too old; I couldn’t catch my breath and I felt dizzy. I had to slow down and Heizi caught up to me.

“Do you really think it’s Qiqi?” he asked.

“Of course it is. Heizi, slap me! I want to be sure I’m not dreaming.”

Like a true friend, Heizi slapped me in the face, hard. I put my hand against my cheek, savoring the pain, and laughed.

“Don’t get too excited,” said Heizi. “Zhao Qi is your age, isn’t she? She’s not a pretty young lady any more. It’s been decades since you’ve seen her. You might be disappointed.”

“That’s ridiculous. Look at all of us. We’re like candle stubs sputtering in our last moments of glory. Seeing her one more time before I die would be more than enough.”

Heizi chuckled. “You might be old, but you’re still in good health—I bet the parts of your body that matter still work pretty well. How about this? If you two are going to get married, I want to be the witness.”

I laughed and felt calmer. We chatted as we descended the mountain, and then my heart began to leap wildly again as I approached the Arts Academy.

18.

I didn’t recognize her.

She was Caucasian. Although her hair was turning white, I could tell it had once been blonde. Blue eyes stared at me thoughtfully out of an angled, distinctive face. Although she was not young, she was still beautiful.

I was deeply disappointed. That foolish student hadn’t even clarified whether he was talking about a Chinese or a foreigner.

“Hello,” the woman said. Her Chinese was excellent. “Are you Mr. Xie Baosheng?”

“I am. May I ask your name?”

“I’m Anna Louise Strong, a writer.”

I recognized the name. She was a leftist American author who had lived in Beijing and written several books about the China of the Mao era. She was friends with both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Though I knew who she was, I had never met her. I heard she had moved back to the US around the time Shen Qian died. Why was she looking for me?

Anna looked uncomfortable and I felt uneasy. She hesitated, and then said, “I have something important to tell you, but perhaps it’s best to speak in private.”

I led her to my cave. Anna retrieved a bundle from her suitcase, which she carefully unwrapped. Anxiously, I watched as she set a crude brown ceramic jar down on the table.

Solemnly, she said, “This holds the ashes of Miss Zhao Qi.”

I stared at the jar, unable to connect this strange artifact with the lovely, graceful Qiqi of my memory.

“What are you saying?” I asked. I simply could not make sense of what she was telling me.

“I’m sorry, but . . . she’s dead.”

The air in the cave seemed to solidify. I stood rooted in place, unable to speak.

“Are you all right?” Anna asked.

After a while, I nodded. “I’m fine. Oh, would you like a cup of water?” I was surprised I could think about such irrelevant details at that moment.

I had imagined the scene of our reunion countless times, and of course I had imagined the possibility that Qiqi was already dead. I always thought I would howl, scream, fall to the ground, or even faint. But I was wrong. I was amazed by how calmly I accepted the news. Maybe I had always known there would be no happily-ever-after in my life.

“When?” I asked.

“Three days ago, in Luochuan.”

Anna told me that Qiqi had been looking for me for years. Although I had some notoriety as a war criminal, because I was part of the Communist army and always on the march, it was impossible to locate me. Once war broke out with Japan, the Nationalists and the Communists both became American allies and it was no longer difficult to travel to China. Qiqi finally heard that I was in Yan’an and bought a ticket on the boat crossing the Pacific. On the voyage, she met Anna and the two became friends. On the long ride across the ocean, she told Anna our story.

Anna and Qiqi arrived in Hong Kong, but as most of eastern China had fallen to Japanese occupation, they had to get on another boat to Guangxi, from whence they passed through Guizhou and Sichuan, and then continued north through Shaanxi to arrive finally in Yan’an.

“But Zhao Qi was no longer a young woman,” Anna said, “and with her handicap, the journey was very tough on her. By the time she arrived in Xi’an, she fell ill, and yet she forced herself to go on so that she wouldn’t slow us down. In Luochuan, her condition deteriorated . . . Because of the war, we couldn’t get the medicine she needed . . . We tried everything, but we couldn’t save her.” Anna stopped, unable to continue.

“Don’t blame yourself. You did your best.” I tried to console her.

Anna looked at me strangely, as if unable to comprehend my calmness.

“Why don’t you tell me what her life in America was like following our separation?” I asked.

Anna told me that after I left, Qiqi continued her studies in the US, waiting for me. She wrote to me several times but never received any replies. Once she was awarded her PhD, she taught in college and then remarried. Ten years ago, after her husband died, she wanted to return to China, but the civil war put those plans on hold. Finally, only days from Yan’an, she died. Since they couldn’t carry her body through the mountains, they had to cremate her. Thus I was deprived of the chance to see her one last time—

“No,” I interrupted. I picked up the jar of ashes. “Qiqi and I are together now, and we’ll never be apart again. Thank you.”

I ignored Anna’s stare as I held the jar against my chest and muttered to myself. Tears flowed down my face, the tears of happiness.

Coda

The setting sun, red as blood, floated next to the ancient pagoda on Baota Mountain. It cast its remaining light over northern China, veiling everything in a golden-red hue. The Yan River sparkled in the distance, and I could see a few young soldiers, barely more than boys, playing in the water.

I sat under a tree; Qiqi sat next to me, resting her head on my shoulder.

The pendulum of life appeared to have returned to the origin. After all we had witnessed and endured, she and I had traversed countless moments, both bitter and sweet, and once again leaned against each other. It didn’t matter how much time had passed us by. It didn’t matter if we were alive or dead. It was enough that we were together.

“I’m not sure if you know this,” I said. “After your mother died during the Cultural Revolution, I helped to arrange her funeral. She had suffered some because of her relationship to you, but she died relatively peacefully. In her last moments, she asked me to tell you to stay away from China and try to live a good life. But I always knew you would return . . .

“Do you remember Heizi? He’s in Yan’an, too. Even at his age, he’s as goofy as when he was a boy. Last month, he told me that if you came back, we’d all go climb Baota Mountain together, just like when we were kids. Don’t worry, the mountain is not very high. I can carry you if you have trouble with your leg . . .

“It’s been twenty years since my mother’s death. There used to be two jade bracelets that had been in my family for generations. My mother planned to give one each to you and me. Later, she gave one to Shen Qian, but the Red Guards broke it because it was a feudal relic . . . I hid the other, hoping to give it to you. Have a look. I hope you like it.”

I opened the bundle that had been on my back and took out a smooth jade bracelet. In the sun’s last rays, it glowed brightly.

“You want to know what else is in the bundle?” I chuckled. “Lots of good things. I’ve been carrying them around for years. It hasn’t been easy to keep them safe. Look.”

I took out the treasures of my memory one by one: the English letters Qiqi had written to me in high school; the New Concept English cassette tapes she gave me; the posters for Tokyo Love Story; a lock of hair I begged from her after we started dating; the purple hairclip she wore to Tiananmen Square; a few photographs of us taken in New York; the “revolutionese” letter she sent me during the Cultural Revolution . . .

I examined each object carefully, remembering. It was like gazing through a time telescope at moments as far away as galaxies, or perhaps like diving into the sea of history in search of forgotten treasures in sunken ships. The distant years had settled deep into the strata of time, turning into indistinct fossils. But perhaps they were also like seeds that would germinate after years of quiescence and poke through the crust of our souls . . .

Finally, at the bottom of the bundle, I found the copy of Season of Bloom, Season of Rain. She left it in my home after visiting my family during middle school, but I hadn’t read it in years. More than fifty years later, the pages had turned yellow and brittle. I held it in my hand and caressed the cover wrap Qiqi had made, admiring her handwriting. The smooth texture of the poster paper felt strangely familiar, as though I was opening a tunnel into the past.

I opened the book, thinking I would read a few pages. But my hand felt something strange. I looked closely: there was something trapped between the poster paper wrap and the original cover of the book.

Carefully, I unwrapped the poster paper, but I had underestimated the fragility of the book. The cover was torn off and a rectangular card fell out like a colorful butterfly. It fluttered to the ground after a brief dance in the sunlight.

I picked it up.

It was a high-definition photograph, probably taken with a digital camera. Fireworks exploded in the night sky, and in the distant background was a glowing screen on which you could make out the shape of some magnificent stadium. I recognized it: the Bird’s Nest. In the foreground were many people dressed in colorful clothes holding balloons and Chinese flags and cotton candy and popcorn. Everyone was laughing, pointing, strolling . . .

In the middle of the photograph were two children about four years old. One was a boy in a gray jacket, the other a girl in a pink dress. They stood together, holding hands. Illuminated by the fireworks exploding overhead, the smiles on their flushed faces were pure and innocent.

I stared at the photograph for a long time and then flipped it over. I saw a graceful line of handwritten characters:

Beauty is about to go home. Take care, my Grey Wolf. J

More than fifty years earlier, Qiqi had hidden this present to me in a book she had “forgotten.” I had never unwrapped it.

I remembered the last conversation I had with Anna.

“What did she say before she died?”

“She was delirious . . . but she said she would return to the past you two shared, to the place where she met you for the first time, and wait for you. I don’t know what she meant.”

“Maybe all of us will return there someday.”

“Where?”

“To the origin of the universe, of life, of time . . . To the time before the world began. Perhaps we could choose another direction and live another life.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t, either. Maybe our lives are lived in order to comprehend this mystery, and we’ll understand only at the end.”

“It’s time, isn’t it?” I asked Qiqi. “We’ll go back together. Would you like that?”

Qiqi said nothing.

I closed my eyes. The world dissolved around me. Layer after layer peeled back, and era after era emerged and returned to nothingness. Strings of shining names fell from the empyrean of history, as though they had never existed. We were thirty, twenty, fifteen, five . . . not just me and Qiqi, but also Shen Qian, Heizi, and everyone else. We returned to the origin of our lives, turned into babies, into fetuses. In the deepest abyss of the world, the beginning of consciousness stirred, ready to choose new worlds, new time lines, new possibilities . . .

The sun had fallen beneath the horizon in the east, and the long day was about to end. But tomorrow, the sun would rise in the west again, bathing the world in a kinder light. On the terraced fields along the slope of the mountain, millions of poppy flowers trembled, blooming, burning incomparably bright in the last light of dusk.

Author’s Postscript:

Many interesting works have been written about the arrow of time. This one is perhaps a bit distinct: while each person lives their life forward, the sociopolitical conditions regress backward.

This absurd story has a fairly realist origin. One time, on an Internet discussion board, someone made the comment that if a certain prominent figure in contemporary Chinese politics came to power, the Cultural Revolution would happen again. I didn’t agree with him at the time, but I did think: What would it be like if my generation has to experience the conditions of the Cultural Revolution again in our forties or fifties? More broadly, I wondered what life would be like if society moved backward in history.

The frame of this story might be seen as a reversed arrow of time, but strictly speaking, what has been reversed isn’t time, only the trends of history.

This story was written as a work of entertainment, and so it should not be read as some kind of political manifesto. If one must attribute a political message to it, it is simply this: I hope that all the historical tragedies our nation has experienced will not repeat in the future.

Footnotes:

1 - Translator’s Note: English translation courtesy of Anatoly Belilovsky, © 2014. Used here with permission.

2 - Translator’s Note: In our timeline, Jin Yong, Gu Long, and Liang Yusheng are three of the acknowledged masters of wuxia fantasy, and most of their best works were written before 1980. Huang Yi’s works rose to prominence later, in the 1990s.

3 - Translator’s Note: This is a bit of an inside joke for Chinese SF fans. In our timeline, Yao Haijun is the assistant chief editor for Science Fiction World, China’s most prominent sci-fi magazine. Bao Shu, the author of this story, began his career as a fanfic author in the universe of Liu Cixin’s “Three Body” series.

4 - Translator’s Note: In our timeline, “workers’ Mao Zedong Thought propaganda teams” were a unique creation of the Cultural Revolution. They consisted of teams of ordinary workers installed at colleges and high schools to take over the administrative functions and to put a stop to the bloody Red Guard factional wars. For the most part, they stabilized the chaos introduced by the early stages of the Cultural Revolution.

Originally published in English in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2015.

Wild Honey

Paul McAuley

Mel was in the warm dim crawlspace under the hive’s chimneys and stalactite combs, installing new harvesting frames, when the bees began to signal the presence of intruders. Irregular pulses of alarm code flashing through the net, older workers hustling toward the entrances to augment the guards, an urgent bass drone building.

Mel’s blood thrummed in sympathy. She went outside and with field glasses scanned the dun grassland. A witchy old woman in a faded patched sundress standing in the shade of the nest’s spires, a few ride-along bees clinging in her long white hair. It was late in the afternoon, very hot. Sunlight lanced low out of a flawless blue sky. Trees and stubs of broken wall cast long shadows, and something twinkled in the far distance, a star of reflected light moving out on the old highway.

After a minute or so, the star resolved into Odd Sanders’s battered pickup, driving in a caul of dust ahead of an old army truck and a pod of trikes. Odd sometimes brought petitioners out into the city wilds, charging them for an introduction to the crazy old bee queen whose balm could cure all kinds of sickness. But petitioners usually didn’t ride trikes, and as the little convoy drew closer Mel glimpsed bandoleers across the chests of the trike riders, and rifles and ballistas strapped to their backs.

Foragers were already out, shuttling between the hive and a stand of black locust trees half a mile to the north. Mel could see in her mind’s eye the shape of their traffic laid across the landscape, could see a frail spike of scouts bending toward the highway, and yet again wished that she could use the hive’s network to send the bees where she wanted, and peer through their faceted eyes. She watched as the convoy stopped about a mile away, near the fieldstone chimney that marked where the house of an abandoned homestead had once stood. Almost at once, something lofted from the army truck and curved toward Mel, gathering a smoky comet tail of bees as it approached.

It was a drone, the kind printed from fungal mycelium and coated in bacterial cellulose and wasp-spit proteins. Mel had once tried to use bigger versions to dispatch balm and honey liquor to Hangtown, but had given up after bandits had started to shoot them down. It looked like a pale cowpat, hovering on four red props just beyond the edge of the roof. A speaker whistled and Odd Sanders’s voice said, “You’d better come over. Someone needs your help.”

Odd Sanders had started helping out after Mel’s apprentice had been killed by a bear last fall. Rasia had been with Mel for eight years, a sweet-natured, dutiful young woman with a natural talent for reading the mood of the hive. Mel had been certain that when she joined the queens below she would leave the hive in good hands, but then Rasia had gone to collect windfalls in a stand of wild pear, and a lone male black bear had killed and half eaten her. Mel had tracked and dispatched him, but the effort and the grievous loss had almost undone her. She was old and tired, she had lost her successor, and for the first time feared for the future of the hive. Without a keeper it would go feral, like its daughter hives, or die out, or be ransacked and destroyed by bears or bandits.

Odd had turned up a couple of months later. A smooth-shaven plausible young man who told Mel that people in Hangtown had been missing her good stuff, and he’d be honored to do business with her. Mel had traded small batches of honey, honey liquor, wax, and balm for copper and germanium dust and a few personal necessaries, and he’d sometimes brought out people who needed her healing touch.

These visitors were some kind of outlaw gang, but Odd claimed that one of them was bad sick, and Mel was bound by the customs and conventions of a sect that no longer existed to treat all those who needed her help. They’d started smudge fires around their little encampment to keep away bees. Leaning on her staff at every other step, Mel hobbled through the haze of smoke, skirted a smoldering pyre of green branches and uprooted bushes, and discovered Odd waiting for her amongst a small group of desperados dressed in the usual leathers and denim and tattoos. One had a sword sheathed on his hip; another toted an ancient semi-automatic rifle.

Odd was uncharacteristically subdued and looked horrified when Mel told him outright he’d fallen amongst thieves and brigands.

“They’re travelers is all,” he said. He was tall and angular, with a mop of black hair that hung over his eyes. He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “One of them needs your good stuff.”

“I know what they are, and they know it, too,” Mel said, looking around at the half dozen grim, grimy men.

When she asked who needed her help, a piping voice behind her said, “Good of you to come, grandmother. Saved us the trouble of smoking you out.”

A small, fat, ruined child stood in the open flap of the army truck’s covered loadbed, dressed in baggy camo shorts and a cut-down, red leather jacket, a cigar cocked in his mouth. After a moment, Mel realized that he was a neo. They’d been designed for space travel, neos. Tweaked so that they stopped growing at around four years old. The idea had been that they would need fewer resources and could live in smaller craft than base humans, and although the Collapse had ended the old dreams of making new homes beyond Earth, they’d survived and thrived. Long-lived and clever, most preferred to live by their wits on the outskirts of civilization.

This one was called Demetrius Ten, telling Mel, “My man July needs your help. Let’s see if you deserve your reputation.”

The patient was shivering under blankets in the back of the truck, slick with sweat and unconscious. When the young woman who’d been dabbing his brow with a wet cloth moved aside, Mel caught a faint whiff of stale milk.

“He got himself shot,” Demetrius Ten said. “The wound went bad, we tried to burn the badness out, but it got into his blood.”

Although he looked like an overgrown toddler dressed up as a gangster, there was a malicious glint in the neo’s gaze and he had a commanding swagger. He could be any age from ten to a hundred. Maybe even older.

He watched as Mel stuck a temperature strip on July’s forehead and unpacked the stand from her leather doctor’s bag. The strip showed a temperature of a little over a hundred degrees, the man’s breathing was shallow and rapid, and his pulse quick and thready: he was suffering from severe sepsis.

The wound was in his shoulder, a neat, charred hole with a little clear fluid oozing from the black crust, no pus or stink of infection. Mel fixed a balm compress over it just to be sure, hooked a bag of balm over the tee of the stand, and asked the young woman if her patient had been given any medicine.

“Tell her what she wants to know,” Demetrius said, when the young woman looked at him.

“He had some whiskey when they burnt out the infection,” the young woman told Mel. She was sixteen or seventeen, with red hair and luminously pale skin. “He was drinking on and off for a couple of days? But then he got a fever.”

“What’s your name, dear?”

The young woman glanced at Demetrius again, then said, “Hannah.”

“She’s my little milk momma,” Demetrius said.

Hannah blushed prettily. Mel suddenly understood, saw Demetrius plugged into Hannah’s breast, pausing occasionally to suck on his cigar instead.

She said, “When exactly did July pass out?”

“Last night. I’ve been bathing him with water to keep him cool. We don’t have any of your magic stuff.” The young woman was watching Mel tighten a cord around the sick man’s arm to make the veins stand up.

“It isn’t magic.” Mel slid a needle into a vein and taped it down and opened the drip regulator. “A century ago I would have used antibiotics. But bacteria became resistant to all of them, so we must find other ways of fighting infection now. My bees have been tweaked so that they enhance the antimicrobial properties of honey made from the nectar of certain plants. I refine that honey, and that’s what balm is.”

Demetrius, puffing on his foul cigar, asked how long it would take.

“If the fever breaks he’ll probably live,” Mel said.

“He better. Hannah can look after him for now. We need to talk business.”

“I don’t charge for treating people,” Mel said.

Demetrius gave her a roguish smile. “We need to talk about my business, not yours.”

As they walked toward the hive, Odd Sanders told Mel a complicated story about people in Hangtown who resented his charm and success and tried to sabotage him at every turn, and a girl who, through no fault of his own, had fallen in love with him.

“And you got her pregnant,” Mel said, wanting to cut through the young man’s self-justifying bullshit. She had never entirely trusted him, but hadn’t realized until now just how little there was beneath the mask he wore to fool the world.

“So she says. I chucked her because she was so tiresomely clingy, and she came up with this story. And when I told her it didn’t change anything, because I frankly didn’t believe her, she went to her father,” Odd said. “He happens to be one of the people who have it in for me, and also happens to be a friend of the mayor. Well, her brother, actually. So I had to get out. All because some silly bitch wanted to get back at me.”

“And I suppose you seduced her because you wanted to get back at her father.”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Still does in a way, you know? Now he can deal with her, and her brat,” Odd said, with a grimace of a smile behind the visor of his hood.

Odd and the outlaw escorting him and Mel were sealed inside in yellow biohazard suits much patched with duct tape. Neither the suits nor the pistol holstered at the outlaw’s hip would be much protection against the bees, but Demetrius had told Mel that if she didn’t come back with the goods, he’d load Odd’s pickup with brushwood, tie down the accelerator and the steering wheel, and set it on fire and aim it at the hive. Telling Odd, when he protested, that losing his pickup was the least he had to worry about.

Now, Odd told Mel that he’d made the outlaw boss promise she wouldn’t be hurt, that all they wanted were some trade goods and they’d be on their way.

“I hate to do it to you, but I need to put some distance between me and Hangtown as fast as possible,” he said. “And I need a stake to start over. That’s all it is. We get the goods, and we get out of here and leave you in peace. You have my word.”

“It isn’t your word I’m worried about,” Mel said, glancing at the drone wobbling through the air above them.

“Demetrius doesn’t want trouble. He knows your reputation. What the bees are. What they can do. I told him all that. It’s just like our usual trade, but this time I’m going to have to owe you. But when I get it together somewhere else, I swear I’ll try to find a way of making it up to you.”

The hive reared above them. Rooted in the ruin of a brick single-story house, its peaks soared fifteen feet into the air, built of grains of dirt excavated and emplaced by workers over the course of more than a century. Mel was its third keeper, having inherited it some forty-two years ago when the woman to whom she had been apprenticed had transitioned into one of the queens below. The exterior had been weatherproofed with a sheen of wax that shone black as oil in the sunlight. Bees shimmered around it like smoke: foragers heading out along airy highways toward the black locusts or returning laden with pollen and nectar. The outlaw swiped at a bee that landed on the visor of his suit, swiped at another that landed on his arm.

“If you keep that up,” Mel told him, “they’ll swarm you.”

“Listen to her,” Odd said. “These aren’t ordinary bees. They’re smart. All linked up into like one mind.”

He was quivering with nerves. Behind the visor of his hood his face shone with sweat; his hair was pasted to his forehead. He’d never before come so close to the hive.

Demetrius’s voice piped up overhead, from the drone. “Just get in there and get it done and get the fuck out.”

Mel lived and worked in what had once been a lean-to garage, its walls partly subsumed by the hive’s bulwark flanges and patched with fieldstones and corrugated iron. Odd was more confident once they were inside, and quickly found the cool box and started to pack the bags of balm into one of the knapsacks he’d brought.

“Every bag you take is a life lost,” Mel said.

She could trace the trajectories of the scouts that spiraled around the two men, could feel the intricate seethe of bees beyond the wall of the lean-to, see the queens and their retinues in the brood combs at the heart of the hive.

“They’ll save lives,” Odd said. “Just not here. And you always can make more.”

“You know that takes time.”

“Then let the sick buy balm from the market.”

“And if they cannot afford it?”

“That’s their problem. Why don’t you start decanting the liquor? Sooner you do it, sooner we’ll be gone.”

“I doubt that,” Mel said, but she cracked valves in the stainless steel reservoir of the still and began to fill plastic bottles. A heady scent like a distillation of summer filled the air. Bees clustered around the rims of the bottles, hummed at the reservoir’s spout, landed on Mel. One stung her on the web between her thumb and forefinger. She hardly noticed.

The outlaw stood in the doorway watching her. The drone hovered at his shoulder. She hoped that they hadn’t seen that she’d opened the little reservoir inside the still before she’d started draining it.

Odd packed the bottles in another knapsack. When the still was empty, he rooted inside Mel’s ancient maker and took out the precious tubes of copper and germanium dust that the machine used to print the network dots that the bees inserted in every larva.

“Half of this won’t be enough for what I need,” Odd said as he cinched the knapsack, “but it’ll have to do.”

Mel said nothing. She felt calm but hollow. A high note hummed in her head in counterpoint to the hive’s drone. She wasn’t even startled when the outlaw aimed his pistol at her.

“Don’t,” Odd said.

“Why not?”

It was the drone that had spoken, not the outlaw.

“Because if you kill her, the hive will swarm,” Odd said. “Millions of angry bees. The smoke won’t keep them all off.”

Mel supposed that she should feel grateful for the intervention, but she didn’t. Odd had thrown her into this trouble; she had to do what she had to do to get out of it.

“Bring her back,” the drone said, after a long moment. “We can talk about that maker of hers.”

He had another plan, Demetrius told Mel when she’d been returned to the outlaws’ camp. “We’re low on ammo. When we get hold of some high-density plastic and the necessaries for gunpowder, you can run off a big batch of bullets and shotgun shells on that maker of yours. And while you’re at it you can make some more of that liquor and your healing shit, too.”

“I’m out of honey,” Mel said.

“Bullshit,” Demetrius declared. He was looking up at her with his fists on his hips. “There must be a ton of the sweet stuff inside that nest.”

“It’s a hive. And the bees need a store of honey to tide them through the winter. If I dip into that the hive could die.”

“Either you help us or we’ll find a way of taking what we need,” Demetrius said. “And if we have to do that, they’ll die anyway. You too.”

“It seems I don’t have any choice.”

“Yes, you do. But your best choice is to help me out, like you would any other traveler who asks you for a favor. I’ll send Odd here back to Hangtown for ammo makings, and you can fire up that still.” Demetrius grinned and rubbed his hands together. “Drugs and drink and ammo: three of the best kinds of currency out here. Do right by me, grandmother, I might even cut you in.”

When Odd Sanders started to say that he couldn’t go back to Hangtown, there were people who wanted to nail his hide to the jailhouse wall, Demetrius held up a finger. One of his men stepped up behind the trader and punched him in the back of his head and knocked him to the ground. A couple of the other outlaws laughed. They were sitting around a campfire, passing bottles of Mel’s liquor between them. One spat a mouthful in the fire: blue flames flared.

Demetrius looked down at the dazed young man and said, “You’re afraid of the wrong people.”

“I’m not afraid of them,” Odd said, summoning up the shreds of his plausible manner. “They won’t trade with me, is what I was going to say.”

“Who said anything about trade? You can find where they keep their shit. We’ll go in and take it. But not tonight. Tonight we celebrate. Not you though,” Demetrius told Mel. “You go see to July. He’s still out cold.”

In the dim cave under the truck’s canvas cover, Hannah said that July’s fever had gone down, and he seemed more restful. Mel wasn’t surprised: she’d given the man a bag of balm doped with ketamine, the stuff she reserved for troublesome patients and to ease the passing of those too far gone for treatment. After half a bag he wasn’t so much asleep as catatonic.

Mel asked Hannah how he’d got himself shot; the young woman said that he’d gotten into an argument with another man over the price of a hat.

“So this other man shot him?”

“No, July stabbed the man wanted to sell him the hat, and the man’s friend shot July.”

“It must have been a good hat.”

Outside, someone shrieked in pain and outrage. Mel twitched back the flap of the cover, saw Odd Sanders writhing as two men held him down while a third poured liquor into his mouth. Hannah said, “They’re getting a real drunk on with your stuff Are you hoping they’ll pass out?”

“Not exactly.”

“They get mean when they drink. Especially D.”

“Does he hurt you, dear?”

Hannah shook her head. “He gets one of his boys to do it.”

“Because he’d have to stand on a chair to slap you,” Mel said, which won a quick smile from the young woman. “Does he give you injections to make you lactate?”

Mel had to explain what lactate meant; Hannah said that she didn’t see how it was any of her business.

“People think that keepers like me are hermits and holy healers who don’t live in the real world,” Mel said. “As if there is some other world beyond the one we all share. But I talk to people who pass by the hive, or stop and ask for help. And when I was much younger, when I was an apprentice, I went into the market of Hangtown every month and sold balm and honey and bought supplies. You need a quick mind and have to know about people to get a good deal. I got to know the market pretty well. There was a house in one of the little streets behind it. I’m sure you know the kind I mean. It specialized in the needs of neos.”

“I was bought, all right?” Hannah said with sudden quick anger. “The owner of the house got into debt and she sold me to D.”

“Was this in Hangtown?”

“No. Over near Detroit.”

“Is that where you come from?”

“I was born in Wisconsin. My father sold me to a place there after our farm went under, and a bit later they sold me on to a guy who took to me to Detroit. He was the one had me fixed up by a tinker, if you must know,” Hannah said.

“My mother couldn’t keep me either,” Mel said. “But I was lucky. She gave me to the Keeper sect.”

“And now you’re queen of that big old hive,” Hannah said.

“I’m the keeper. I serve the bees; they don’t serve me. But I’ve had a lucky life.”

“They had bees in Wisconsin. The hives were much smaller though. They fertilized apple trees. What do your bees do, out here?”

Mel liked her for that question. Hannah had had a hard life, no doubt, but she was smart and still had a spark in her.

“The bees do what they need to do,” Mel said. “There were homesteads here, once upon a time. Part of a big plan to rewild a city no one needed any more. The hive fertilized some of the crops. Medical tobacco, okra and soy, sunflowers and mustard. . . . Then there were summer droughts and killer winters, and the homesteaders gave up and moved away. But I stayed on. I protect the bees as best I can, and try to do my best by people who need my help.”

“You love them,” Hannah said.

“Of course,” Mel said.

But the bees didn’t love her back. Every keeper had to accept that. Some outsiders believed that because they were tweaked and networked the bees had somehow acquired sentience. They hadn’t. And even if they had, it was doubtful that they would have acquired any concept of love or hate, or free will. They knew only loyalty and the chains of duty: their life paths were engraved in their genes. The organization of the hive was as pure and pitiless as mathematics. Individuals were no more than integers in the calculus of its survival.

Hannah said, “I saw your hive. It looks like a fairytale castle.”

“The bees have been tweaked with termite behavior to build hives that are air-conditioned. It helps them survive the hot summers and cold winters.”

Wild bees and baseline domestic honeybees had all died out at the beginning of the Collapse. There were only tweaked swarms now, in hives tended by keepers or in wild daughter hives.

Hannah said, “I heard they can kill people. Bees.”

“One sting can do it if you’re sensitive.”

More shouts outside; more laughter.

“I mean you can use them as weapons,” Hannah said, with a flat direct look.

Mel knew then that Hannah was hoping that she could help her, and felt a flutter of relief. Things would go much easier with the young woman on her side, and there was the frail hope that afterward, if things came out right, that she might stay on as her apprentice.

She said, “The bees defend the hive, if they have to.”

“So do they defend you, too?”

“Of course. When I’m in the hive.”

“But can you make them attack anyone you want?”

“Is that what you’d like me to do?”

Hannah leaned across July and whispered, “When he doesn’t have any more use for you, D will kill you.”

“I know.”

“But you came over here anyway. You didn’t stay in your hive, where the bees could protect you.”

“I came to save a life. And because otherwise Demetrius would have come to me. The bees can’t protect me against people like him, Hannah. But maybe I can protect them. You too, if you want me to.”

“Maybe we can help each other,” Hannah said.

“I hope we can.” Mel opened her doctor’s bag and took out a little tube of liquid honey and told Hannah she should drink it.

“It will protect you against my bees. Give you the smell of the hive.”

Hannah uncapped the tube, sniffed its contents, then downed it in one gulp. She said, “I thought you couldn’t use your bees against people.”

“I can’t. This is for afterward.”

“After what?”

Hannah was all eyes in the dimness.

“After we deal with Demetrius and his boys.”

Mel unpacked her doctor’s bag. One of her patients had given it to her years back. It was very old, with cracked horsehide leather and brass fittings and a capacious maw. Mel lifted out the false bottom and took out the little pistol crossbow stowed there.

“People think I use the bees as weapons,” she told Hannah, “so they generally don’t think to look at what I carry.”

“Are you going to shoot them?”

“Would you have a problem with that?”

Hannah shook her head. She said, “What do you want me to do?”

“First, we wait.”

“While they get drunk?”

“While they get a lot more than drunk.”

The voices outside grew louder. Someone started to laugh and it rose in pitch and turned into raw sobbing. Someone else began to scream. And then someone shouted, “I see them! I see them in the trees!” and there was a gunshot. Someone was laughing hysterically and someone else said, “Look there! I see them! I see them too!” and there were more gunshots. Mel told Hannah to wait there and stay low, and peeked through the flap of the canvas cover.

The sun had set and everywhere was blue with shadows. A man lay unconscious near the dying campfire; he was naked and had carved up his chest with a knife before he’d passed out. Mel clambered out, froze when gunfire rattled hard and loud nearby. In the sudden silence, she saw a man just a hundred yards away, raising his rifle to take aim at the moon’s low crescent. Mel’s quarrel took him in the throat and he grunted and dropped bonelessly.

Her pistol crossbow clicked quietly as it drew its wire taut again. After years of practice, she could take down a sparrow in flight.

She shot a man howling and staggering with his hands pressed over his eyes. She found a dead man without a mark on him and bloody froth on his lips. Killed by a seizure. She heard someone scream in the trees beyond the campsite, suddenly silenced by the pop of a pistol. She found drag marks in long grass and followed them to where Odd Sanders lay on his back, eyes crossed as if trying to focus on the neat hole oozing in his forehead.

“Fucking bitch,” someone said, and Mel turned and she and Demetrius fired at the same moment.

Something punched her shoulder and she was on her back looking up at the dark blue sky. She tried to push up and everything hurt. Her breath was tight and she spat a mouthful of blood.

Demetrius came around the campfire with a waddling walk, kicked her crossbow away, looked down at her. She had forgotten he was a neo, and had aimed too high.

The eye of his pistol wove, now pointing in her face, now pointing away. He leered drunkenly behind it.

“What did you do to us?”

Mel’s breath whistled in her chest. She spat more blood, said weakly, “Mad honey.”

Foragers from daughter nests near the river browsed on the swathes of rhododendrons that grew there, harvesting nectar that contained a potent neurotoxin that caused nausea and numbness, seizures and hallucinations. Mel had drained a portion into the still before she’d decanted the liquor that Demetrius and his men had guzzled down.

The neo was weaving, cross-eyed, but still lucid. “Fucking bee magic,” he said. “I’m going to kill you, and then I’m going to burn that fucking hive.”

A shadow rose up behind him, there was a hard hollow crunch, and Demetrius fell down. Hannah dropped the rock she’d hit him with, snatched up his pistol and shot him and shot him again, kept shooting until the pistol clicked on an empty chamber.

The old woman was tough. Demetrius’s shot had taken her high in the chest, clipping a lung, but she survived for more than three weeks and was lucid to the end. She told Hannah how to dress her wound, refused Hannah’s offer to head for Hangtown and get help. Her time had come, she said. She was ready to join the queens below.

She subsisted on a diet of water and honey. A light clover honey first, then a heavy dark molasses made from goldenrod nectar. She showed Hannah how to set up a drip that fed an infusion of balm and natural sugars directly into her bloodstream, and Hannah massaged her with an emulsion of honey and walnut oil every day.

Her skin acquired a golden sheen, and her sweat and breath smelled of honey. Her eyes turned gold, her fingernails translucent amber. Every cell was becoming permeated with the honey’s dehydrated sugars, preserving her body against corruption.

Meanwhile, she told Hannah about the bees and the hive, and the secrets of the vanished sect to which she had once belonged. It came tumbling out in no particular order, and she often repeated herself—the only sign that she was dying. “Bees know,” she said, over and again. “The secret is to let them work. They know what to do.”

Hannah learned how to harvest different types of honey from different parts of the hive, how to refine honey from the nursery combs to make balm, how to use the still to make honey liquor, how to use the wax extractor, how to program the maker to manufacture the quantum dots that every bee carried. The old woman told Hannah that she should begin to drink an infusion of dots too, so that they would cross the blood-brain barrier and connect her with the bees’ network by the magic of old-time technology, but Hannah wasn’t ready for that. Not yet, not yet.

The survivors of Demetrius’s gang hadn’t caused any trouble. Hannah had collected every weapon she could find before driving Mel to the hive in the trader’s pickup. By the next day, July had recovered enough to stagger about and shout threats, but he was unarmed and didn’t dare get too close to the hive. After Hannah fired a couple of warning shots he eventually drove off on his trike. Demetrius was dead; so were four of his men. The other two had run off into the city wilds while seized by the hallucinatory fever of the mad honey, and Hannah never saw them again.

Still, she waited for three days before she dared leave the safety of the hive and deal with the bodies. By then, they were bloated by heat and had been mauled by wild dogs, and stank worse than her family’s hog farm after the virus had swept through it. She used one of the trikes to drag what was left of them into a heap and piled brushwood over them and soaked everything in fuel alcohol drained from the truck and set it on fire. She drove the truck and all but one of the trikes into a draw near the river and, apart from the charred spot, she reckoned that no one could tell what had gone down there.

One day, she woke to find that the old woman was covered with a thin blanket of bees and knew that she was dead. The body was as light as a child’s and seemed to shine with an inner light. Hannah carried it down into the warm, dim cellar under the hive and laid it in the seamless plastic sarcophagus the old woman had had printed in Hangtown a couple of years back. The coffins of her predecessors stood close by. The shapes of their bodies visible in the dark gold matrices. The quantum dots in their brains formed the server architecture for the bees’ network, and now the old woman would augment it. Hannah wondered, as she filled the sarcophagus to the brim with honey, if anything of the dead women lived on in the bees. Ghosts in the busy machinery that filled the cellar with a deep drone like an engine steadily driving it to some distant shore.

Hannah had promised the old woman that she would make sure the hive was kept safe, but she believed that it could look after itself, like the smaller daughter hives scattered around about. They didn’t need quantum dots or a network, they lacked any kind of human care, and they were doing just fine. Hannah wasn’t ready to become a witchy fairytale hermit, a queen of the bees with spooky magical abilities. She knew enough now to know it wasn’t really magic, just some old tech and the bees. Mostly the bees.

“They know what to do,” the old woman had said, not realizing that she was telling Hannah that they didn’t need anyone’s help. The world now wasn’t the world as it had been when the old woman had been young. Like the daughter colonies, it had grown wild and strange.

So Hannah had no qualms when she rode off on one of the trikes toward Hangtown. When she’d gathered up the weapons, she’d also looted the little stash of hard cash that Demetrius had thought she didn’t know about. Her breasts ached all the time and she had to express milk four times a day, and every time she’d think of Demetrius wiping his chin and sticking his cigar back into his mouth. She was going to find a tinker who could reverse the tweak, put an end to that. And after that she’d figure out what to do next.

Hannah was followed by a floating finger of bees as she drove away. It stretched thinner and thinner until at last it was gone, and Hannah rode on alone through the hot afternoon. When she stopped a few hours later to make camp, she found that several bees had tangled in her hair. As she carefully combed them out, one stung her. She crushed it.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2015.

In the Stillness Between the Stars

Mercurio D. Rivera

Emilio sat up inside the REMpod, discombobulated, and took deep breaths. He thought he heard Tomás shout “Dad!” from a distance before the cobwebs cleared and he regained his bearings.

The Seed. He was aboard the Seed.

Tomás had been dead for centuries.

His shortness of breath gave way to a sob. He covered his face with his hands.

Rows of REMpods, like pale-blue neon-lit coffins, surrounded him in the darkness. The steadiness of the blue glow signaled that all the sleepers on the cavernous deck remained in stasis. The cityship was still en route to Proxima b.

“Sorry to wake you prematurely, Dr. Garcia,” LEE3 whispered into his earpiece.

“Pre—prematurely?” he said, teeth chattering. His throat felt dry.

“Afraid so.”

“How long . . . ?”

“Two hundred fifty-one days. We need your help with a medical issue.”

Only eight months? Tomás was still alive then, still a child. He clutched the locket around his neck and felt an enormous wave of relief as he strained to stop his shivering.

“Dr. Lo?” Emilio said. “Dr. Srinivasan?”

“Still in stasis. Only your services are required right now.”

His services? Someone on the skeleton crew needed a psychotherapist? He was about to ask why an AI therapist hadn’t been activated when LEE3 added, “My algo concluded you’re the best suited for the problem at hand, Doc.”

“Understood,” he said. If the alien algorithm had selected him for the job, that settled the matter.

He stretched his arms over his head and took a few minutes to allow the lightheadedness to pass before standing. Then he stepped out onto the ladder leading past the stacked rows of REMpods to the deck below.

As he exited the shower stalls, the dressing room remained veiled in darkness, lit only by the indigo glow of the phosphor strips lining the edges of the ceiling.

“LEE3. Can you do anything about the lighting?” The ship’s AI presented now as an androgynous hologram, bald, with high cheekbones and pouty lips. It appeared to sit on one of the benches in the dressing area.

“We’ve gotta watch our energy consumption, Doc. In-transit travel protocols,” LEE3 said, shrugging apologetically. Its mannerisms and colloquial speech patterns were designed to make listeners feel more comfortable, no doubt, but they struck Emilio as odd. “But you do have local power sources.”

“Oh?” Emilio flicked on a mirror light and powered up the holomonitor. The shower had done him good. He felt fully awake, at least.

A few seconds later, a star-map projected overhead, revealing the Seed’s location. They had cleared Neptune and were just a week away from a layover on Pluto where a thousand colonists would board the Seed and enter stasis.

The trip to New Earth would take three centuries. After a hundred years—the maximum amount of time the human body could tolerate stasis without permanent brain damage-—the passengers would all awaken to life aboard the cityship. And upon arrival at their destination, the Seed would serve as a ready-made home base while their descendants studied and terraformed their new world.

“So, what’s the nature of the medical issue?” he said, applying shaving gel to his face.

“Three days ago there was an incident. Angela Velasquez, an engineer.” LEE3 pointed at the star-map hovering next to Emilio and the image faded, replaced by vid of a REMpod. A brown-skinned woman with long curly hair lay inside, her body twitching, eyelids fluttering. “As you can see,” LEE3 said, “she was dreaming.” The AI’s voice dropped to a whisper, as if afraid the sleeping woman might be wakened.

“Dreaming?”

“Experiencing intense nightmares, actually. Her blood pressure spiked, and when the heart palpitations started, I woke her.”

The vid faded, the star-map reappearing.

“How is that possible?” Emilio asked. REMpods suppressed all neurological activity while a traveler slept—including the rapid eye movement associated with dreaming, which was how the pods got their name. REMpods were alien tech. Library Tech. And Library Tech never malfunctioned.

“No clue. One of the members of the skeleton crew is examining Ms. Velasquez’s REMpod right now, looking for some defect—as improbable as that may be—but in the meantime, she’s still tormented by nightmares. She barely sleeps, and when my algo suggested she see a therapist—you, specifically—she finally agreed.”

“Where is she?” Emilio buttoned his shirt, staring at himself in the mirror. His hair had more gray in it than he remembered.

“Aft District 7. Want me to connect you?”

“No, it’s best I handle this in person. Can you give me directions? And let her know I’m coming.”

Emilio stood at the dimly lit station and pressed the Tram button. He strode to the front of the platform and with each step, the phosphor strip lining the floor lit the area ten feet ahead of him. With the citylights and holo-sun turned off, it felt as if he was navigating a dark dream. He’d seen the cityship from this vantage point when he first boarded the Seed, and had felt overwhelmed by its immensity. The towering hullscrapers and verdant parks, the wide streets jammed with transport vehicles, the central lake with ferries skimming the surface of still waters. The sprawling city—larger than Beijing—seemed infinite, the ship’s curves creating the illusion of an endless blue horizon. But now as he stood alone on the silent platform and stared into the distance, all he could see was darkness.

In two minutes the empty tram pulled into the station. The doors slid open and he took a seat in the vacant car, lit faintly in the violet phosphor glow.

“LEE3,” he said, as the tram accelerated into the abyss, “please show me a copy of Ms. Velasquez’s full biofile, including medical records.”

“Sure thing, Doc,” the AI spoke into his earpiece.

He expected the text to appear instantly in mid-air, but nothing happened. After a few seconds, he repeated his request.

“Heard you the first time,” LEE3 said. “Interesting. I can’t access it. There seems to be some corruption of the biofile.”

“Corruption?” he said. “How is that possible?” The AI, the datafiles—in fact, most of the tech that allowed for construction of the Seed—originated in the Library. And the alien Cataloguers weren’t known for defective tech. Sure, maintenance was required, but with a hundred thousand passengers all in stasis, the Seed’s tech had barely been used.

“First Ms. Velasquez’s REMpod, now her datafile,” LEE3 said. “Weird. I’m currently discussing this with a member of the skeleton crew at Stern District 33.”

Although capable of maintaining simultaneous conversations, LEE3 showed him the courtesy of fading out.

Thirty minutes later, the tram pulled into the Aft 3 stop. Emilio exited onto the desolate station platform and stared ahead into the darkness. High above, a faint light shone in a window. He headed toward it, the pathway lighting up in front of him with each step. His footsteps echoed in the stillness, creating the impression of someone following him.

Eventually he reached the sliding glass doors of the medical facility. He crossed the cavernous lobby and rode the elevator to the seventy-sixth floor, then walked to the suite number LEE3 had given him.

“Dr. Garcia?” the young woman said, extending her hand. “Angie Velasquez. I’m sorry to wake you.” She wore an engineer’s bomber jacket, her hair swept back into a ponytail. Dark creases underlined her deep-brown eyes.

“Eight months sleep is plenty. I feel refreshed,” he said.

As he shook her hand, she directed him to the cushioned sofa. “Sorry about the lighting in here.”

“I’m getting used to it.”

She made small talk about the cityship and the upcoming layover in orbit around Charon before he gently redirected the conversation. She raised an eyebrow when he explained the difficulties accessing her biofile.

“It’s hard to describe my problem in a way that doesn’t make me sound . . . ” She smiled as the words trailed off, pain etched on her face. Her eyes filled with tears.

“You recognize you need help,” he said. “That’s a good sign, Angie. It suggests things aren’t as bad as you might think.”

“I do need help,” she said, wiping her nose with her sleeve. She had a constant, nervous sniffle. “I’m just not sure what kind.”

“Tell me what’s troubling you.”

She hesitated. “During prep for boarding the Seed . . . ” She shook her head, took a breath, and started over. “I worked for EncelaCorp out of Mexico City for the past five years. My husband Marc and I studied Library Tech, specifically engineering, and worked on a number of high-profile projects: the NAM-European Air Rail, Polar Solar, the Antarctic MegaWell, a few others. But when we learned about the Seed, about the project to terraform New Earth, we knew we’d found our mission. Our mission in life, I mean.”

“I understand,” he said, thinking about his own passion for the Seed project, his own sacrifices.

“Ever since our postgrad days, Marc and I had studied the plans in development to travel to Proxima b—this was back before it had been christened New Earth. We even dipped our toes into the ion sail research, developed some expertise so we could add value beyond ordinary Library engineering.”

He smiled at the phrase “ordinary Library engineering.” Humanity had left “ordinary” far behind after discovery of the alien Library hidden in the ripples of a gravity wave, an entire database transmitted through microscopic rips in the fabric of spacetime.

“We applied to join the crew,” she said. “You can imagine our excitement when we both made the cut. A dream come true. But there was a complication.” She lowered her eyes. “Our four-year-old, Sofia. We weren’t just making a choice about our own lives, but about her future as well. An irrevocable one.”

“No doubt,” he said. He thought of the life he’d left behind. His son Tomás. His family. His friends. But the thrill, the wonder, of the mission to New Earth had overridden his guilt.

“Initially, Marc and I were on the same page. Then he started to have doubts. We were sentencing Sofia to a lifetime aboard this ship, he said, and punching a one-way ticket for her children to a dangerous—potentially deadly—environment. I understood that, believe me. But the way I saw it, isn’t the entire expedition premised on the notion that we have the right to determine the future of our descendants? That we have the right to decide that our children, and their children, will serve as the pioneers of New Earth? That they’ll have a chance to begin all over again, and get it right this time?” She stared at him pleadingly, and her expression softened when he nodded.

“It’s a difficult decision for everyone on the mission,” he said.

She stood and paced across the room.

“Are you sure you don’t want to sit?” he said.

“There’s something else. Something I need to get off my chest.” She sat down in a chair facing him, then averted her eyes.

“Go ahead,” he said.

A long pause followed.

“I was cheating on Marc.”

“Go on.”

“Marc and I had our share of arguments, but I loved my husband, Doctor. Really, I did. The fling . . . I can’t explain it.” Now the words poured out of her. “I met Stefan at a local coffee shop. He was a college kid, a German expat. I can’t say we had much in common—he was ten years younger than me. It started out as a harmless flirtation and then became a one-time mistake. Everyone’s entitled to one mistake, right? And after the first mistake, what’s one more? And then one more after that?” She smiled ruefully. “We began seeing each other.” She stopped suddenly, clearly expecting him to make some judgment about her extramarital activities, but when he stayed quiet she continued.

“I eventually won the argument with Marc. About our future. About our daughter’s future. He agreed we’d join the Seed’s crew, just as we’d always planned, and that Sofia’s life would be dedicated to ‘a greater purpose.’ Good for me, right?” she said bitterly. “We made our arrangements, said our final goodbyes to family and friends, and tied up all the loose ends of our lives in anticipation of leaving Earth for good. One happy family, sailing off into the cosmos.” She stood up and began pacing again. “Marc never found out about Stefan.”

“Is this something you feel you need to confess to him?” Emilio imagined the poor fool asleep in his REMpod, oblivious to his wife’s deception, being shaken awake, told the bad news, then placed back into stasis.

She sniffled and shook her head almost imperceptibly. “N-no.”

“You’ve been having nightmares,” he prompted.

“There’s this song. Marc used to sing it to Sofia at bedtime.” She cleared her throat. “‘When the wolf’s in town, it gobbles you down, down . . .’” She bared her teeth, made a snapping sound. “ . . . down!”

He flinched. This was a kid’s song?

“Since I woke up I’ve started hearing it, coming out of the Seed’s ventilators. A high note, a lower one, then another. The other day I swore I heard it in the elevator—except the elevators on the Seed don’t play music. Crazy, huh?” She caught herself, clearly unhappy with the word she’d chosen.

He’d heard of psychological priming—a past stimulus coloring a person’s future response to similar experiences, making them see numbers or patterns that didn’t really exist—but not manifested in this way, with music.

“That’s not all,” she said. “I’d been dreaming of something . . . twisted, dirty. A shadow. A shadow that follows me wherever I go, just out of sight. And the past two days I—I’ve sensed it even when I’m awake. I’m afraid it’s been . . . freed. From my mind. Set loose on the Seed. It’s after me. It wants to punish me.”

“I see,” he said. “And what exactly is this ‘thing’ that’s after you?”

She bit her lip. “A monster. That’s all I know. It hides in the dark, but if I pay attention, I can see movement, black within black, out of the corner of my eye. I saw it clearly—just once—for a second. If I stare directly at it, it disappears.”

He removed his scribbler from his pocket and handed it to her. “Can you draw what you saw?”

She stared at the hexagonal device. “Is this Library Tech?”

He nodded.

“Good, ’cause I’m a lousy artist.” She dragged her index finger along the surface for a few seconds until the device read her intentions and made adjustments to the image on its own. She handed it back to him.

“At first, I caught a glimpse of it crouching behind the REMpod stacks,” she said. “Then I spotted the shadow at the far end of a corridor. Distant enough that I wasn’t sure it was real. About eight feet tall, shrouded in a black mist. It has this . . . stench of rotting flesh. But what scared me—what truly scared me—was when it spoke. It whispered profanities. Promised to skin me alive.

“I know how this sounds, doctor. I’m not an idiot. I know what you’re thinking—the same thing I’m thinking. That I’m hallucinating, that it’s not real, that it’s just my guilt getting the better of me. I woke you, in fact, to convince me of this. To prove I’m imagining it, that it’s all in my head. Because the alternative . . . ” Her lower lip twitched. “I’m afraid that the hallucination—if that’s what it is—is taking over.” She leaned forward, her face inches away from his. “The monster’s creeping closer and closer every time I see it. And in the end, if I believe it’s real—if I believe strongly enough—it doesn’t much matter whether it’s actually real, right? That’s why I need you to make me stop believing.”

He stared at the sketch on the scribbler. The image resembled a diseased black bird, a huge shroud with a tattered outline. Only it bore a human head. And a face that looked just like Angie’s.

Emilio prescribed an anxiolytic to help her with her nerves and insomnia, and LEE3 directed them to the dispensary on the third floor to retrieve the meds. They walked the long darkened corridors together, and though he didn’t admit it, he couldn’t shake the feeling they were being watched. Her story, fantastic as it was, had unnerved him.

“Let’s talk again tomorrow,” he said upon their return from the dispensary, leaving her at the door to the entrance to the patients’ suite. “The meds will help.”

He took residence in the corner suite a few doors down from hers. The space had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Aft 3 District, which normally would have provided a spectacular vista. Now the view consisted of a thick, daunting darkness. After staring at the image on his scribbler for some time, he asked LEE3 to forward it to the Library Liaison on Pluto for further study. He’d have to provide an opinion on Angie Velasquez’s mental state when they entered orbit around Charon next week. While this might require him to violate doctor-patient confidentiality, the privileged nature of their communications had to take a backseat to mission safety prerogatives. And having a mentally troubled passenger aboard the Seed was inconsistent with those prerogatives. After hearing her story, however, he wanted to see if he could find a way to avoid forcing her off the ship, especially since her husband and daughter were still in stasis.

He opened the locket around his neck and stared at the picture of Tomás. It was seven p.m. in Puerto Rico. From the moment he’d woken up, he knew he had to do this. He’d never said goodbye, but now he had one last chance to make things right.

“LEE3, connect me to Earth.” He gave the AI the number of his ex and waited for the q-comm link to be established. Before Library Tech, the four-hour lag time in transmissions from the outer Solar System to Earth and back made holding a live conversation impossible, but instantaneous quantum communications had changed all that.

A dining room blinked into view. His ex-wife frowned into the camera.

“Jesucristo. You,” Nina said.

“Nice to see you, too. Is Tomás there?”

“What is wrong with you?” She clenched her fists, as if to punch him from across the Solar System. “No. Just, no. I’m not going to have you do this to him again. You made your choice.”

As she spoke, Tomás popped onto the screen beside his mother.

“Dad?” He wore a baseball jersey, a smear of guava jelly across his face. In just nine months, he must have grown three or four inches.

“Tomás!” Emilio said. “How are you, m’ijito? Are you still in Little League?”

“Where have you been? I needed your help learning to hit a curveball. Are you coming to my birthday party next week? I really want you to come.”

A pang of guilt stabbed his gut. Nina was right; he shouldn’t have called.

“I’m sorry, I can’t be there,” he said, his throat closing up.

“Dad?” Tomás said. “I can’t hear you. Are you coming?”

“Hello?” Emilio shouted. “Hello?”

“Dad?”

The image faded.

“LEE3? I’ve been disconnected.” He felt partly relieved, partly sick to his stomach.

“Hmm. That’s odd,” LEE3 said. “We’ve lost all communications with Earth. I’ll alert the skeleton crew.”

The REMpod, the biofile, and now communications.

“LEE3?” he said. “Is Angie Velasquez’s biofile still inaccessible?”

“Yeah, Doc.”

“What about her husband’s?”

Before LEE3 could answer he heard footsteps scampering outside the entrance to his suite. “Angie?” He pulled open the door and peered out into the corridor. At the far end, he thought he saw a shadow move, black within black. He blinked, and it was gone. “Angie?”

LEE3 walked beside him, matching his gait. “You okay? You seem a little preoccupied.”

“I wouldn’t have asked you to activate your psychotherapy program otherwise,” Emilio said. Like most shrinks, he’d been consulting a therapist off and on for years. The consults became more regular after his divorce a year and a half prior to launch of the Seed. Now he was forced to commiserate with LEE3’s psychotherapy subroutine.

They made their way through the skyweb, dark crisscrossing corridors—some stretching kilometers—connecting one hullscraper to another. He needed exercise to help clear his head. When they reached the top floor of an accompanying ’scraper, a door opened to a gymnasium steeped in darkness. Above them, a massive skylight framed the dusty constellations, his own private Starry Night, the Universe itself as art.

“I would say we’re dealing with straightforward projection on her part, guilt manifesting as an imaginary monster that now stalks her,” Emilio said. “It’s interesting she’s self-aware enough to have considered that possibility herself. And she doesn’t seem the type to react in that manner. If the human psyche worked this way, half the population would be haunted by monsters.”

“Aren’t they?” LEE3 smirked. “Are you decommissioning her when we arrive at Pluto?”

“I don’t know yet. I want to find a way to help her.” He stepped onto the treadmill. “Power Off” displayed on the monitor and he slapped at the handlebars in frustration. “She hasn’t been entirely forthcoming with me. Still, I’m impressed she sought help.”

“After some arm-twisting by me.”

“She did listen to you, though.”

“My, you’re giving her every benefit of the doubt, aren’t you?”

“Am I? What are you driving at?” He wondered if LEE3’s psych subroutine required it to duel him with cryptic platitudes.

“Ever consider that you’re acting this way because of her child?”

“I don’t see that her daughter has anything to do with—”

LEE3 sighed loudly. “From one therapist to another: give me a break.”

Emilio gave up on the treadmill and made his way to the track, starting a light jog. The circular pathway was bathed in the faint indigo, making it easy to stay on course. His mind wrangled with LEE3’s question.

“Okay. As a parent, I empathize with her.”

“And why is that?”

“She chose to keep her family together,” he said. “Either they all went or they all stayed. There was no other option for her.”

In his case, the family court judge had cut through all the accusations and recriminations in the custody dispute by sitting down with Tomás and asking him to choose. The boy had picked his mother. The court order had limited Emilio’s visits to alternate weekends, and after a few months even those visits had tapered off as he became immersed in preparations for the Seed mission. Once he’d committed to joining the crew, the question of appealing the custody decision—or of any contact whatsoever with Tomás, for that matter—became a moot point.

He circled the track, LEE3 jogging beside him.

“Emilio?”

“Yes?”

“There’s an incoming q-call. From Pluto.”

He slowed down and made his way to a wall monitor. LEE3 stood next to him, mimicking the movements of an exhausted runner, a towel around the neck, hands on knees. The AI must have decided Emilio needed the company of a workout buddy.

He tapped the screen and a wide face beamed at him. “Dr. Garcia. I’m Aulani Kahanahuni, Pluto’s Head Librarian. I’m responding to your query. I wanted to let you know there’s a Library match.”

“There is?” While he’d forwarded Angie’s sketch to Pluto on a hunch after she’d mentioned studying Library engineering with her husband, a match was a long shot, at best. Pluto’s orbital grav-wave detectors and deciphering team provided the finest Library access in the Solar System.

“The Ancient Cataloguers’ wisdom knows no bounds!” Aulani said, looking skyward. Plutonians had a reputation for their devotion to Library knowledge, a devotion that veered toward mysticism. Given the miracles of Library Tech, he couldn’t say he blamed them. The problem was the difficulty in distinguishing between Library entries on science versus belief systems, history versus mythology.

“You’ve drawn an illustration of an anomaly known to manifest on Cataloguer ships, often right before an accident.”

“You mean like a gremlin?” he asked. “Or a poltergeist?” He sounded more condescending than he intended.

She stopped smiling. “The Cataloguers did have some scientific theories on the cause of these anomalies, but my staff is still conducting its research. And I wanted to answer your emergency query as quickly as possible. There’s also an entire mythology developed around these apparitions. Most notably, that they target and torment those persons guilty of terrible sins.”

Typical, he thought. A mishmash of fact, fiction, and superstition. “Would someone studying Library engineering come across information on this anomaly?” he asked.

“Oh, absolutely. It’s cross-referenced quite often in entries on spaceship engineering.”

So, Angie would have seen this image before. Adding her face to it, however, spoke to . . . deeper issues.

“You haven’t actually encountered this phenomenon,” Aulani said.

He hesitated. “No.”

“I should be able to present you with additional information when you arrive at Charon.” She waited as if expecting him to say more, but when he volunteered nothing else, she lifted an arm and looked skyward again. “Well, let’s thank the Ancient Cataloguers for their wisdom.”

A girl appeared on the viewscreen and yanked at Aulani’s blouse. She leaned down. “Not now. Mommy’s busy.”

“When the wolf’s in town, it gobbles you down, down . . . down!” the child sang, staring directly into the screen at Emilio.

His heart skipped a beat. “What was that?” he said.

“I’m sorry, Doctor. Just a silly nursery rhyme. Very popular these days. Is there anything else I can assist you with?”

He shook his head.

“We’re all looking forward to the Seed’s arrival.”

After the communication link clicked off, he turned to find that LEE3 had vanished. The gymnasium seemed darker than before.

LEE3 had pinpointed Angie’s location at the recreation center several blocks from the medical facility. Emilio decided to meet up with her outside the entranceway to the closed casino, where slot machines and roulette wheels hibernated in the shadows. For someone who feared she was being stalked, she didn’t seem to mind navigating the vast ship on her own. He found her on a bench by the casino.

“Doctor,” she said, nodding hello.

“Angie.” He sat next to her.

“Isn’t it interesting that the designers of the Seed, a ship created to transport the best and brightest of humanity, included a casino?”

He shrugged. “Even the best and brightest enjoy a game of chance now and then.”

“I suppose.”

“Angie,” he said gently. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

LEE3 had finally accessed her husband’s biofile.

Her smile faded, and she lowered her eyes.

“I know it’s not easy,” he said.

“If you already know . . . ”

“To be able to help, I need to hear it from you.”

She took a deep breath. “Marc and Sofia took a morning shuttle to Luna-1 for the boarding of the Seed. I told him I’d join them the next day, that I needed to see my sister—we hadn’t spoken in over three years—to find some closure.” She shook her head, smiled sadly. “Total lie, of course. That wasn’t the closure I was looking for. I met up with Stefan and we spent the entire day making love, saying our final goodbyes. I went off-grid, so I didn’t hear the news. I didn’t know . . . about Shuttle Flight 10.”

Flight 10. The shuttle had disintegrated on lift-off. The fifty-five fatalities had delayed the Seed’s departure for two weeks.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“The thing is, they wouldn’t have been aboard that flight if I hadn’t won that argument with Marc, if I hadn’t convinced him to go forward with the mission,” she said, her voice hoarse. She put her hands over her face. “And I—I should’ve been with them.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s just . . . terrible luck.”

“Now . . . now that thing wants to even the score. Because I wasn’t where I was supposed to be.”

“Look, your illustration of the ‘monster’ is an image you would have come across during your studies of Library engineering.”

“You consulted the Library?” Panic swept across her face. “Why did you do that?”

“Calm down.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she said. “The monster. It came to me last night. It spoke to me, told me that you’d contacted Pluto to access the Library. And it warned me there’d be horrible consequences. I’d hoped it was just a dream.”

“I understand.” He’d have been more impressed with her revelation if he hadn’t just told her about his communications with Pluto.

“No, you don’t! Now it has its sights set on you. You’ve put yourself in grave danger.” She put her hands on her head. “It told me it’s moved inside some of the other sleepers now. We need to deactivate those REMpods.”

“Wake more passengers?”

“No,” she said, avoiding eye contact. “Not wake them.”

“I see. Angie, didn’t you ask me to prove that whatever you’re seeing isn’t real?”

“Yes, and instead you’re telling me the monster is catalogued in the Library. That it is real.”

“The Cataloguers have been known to maintain myths alongside history, fiction alongside science. This is no different,” he said. “I want you to use this.” He removed a streamlight from his pocket and handed it to her.

“Ocular therapy?”

“Flash the light in your eyes every two hours. It’ll calm you down, make you think more clearly.”

“Doctor . . . ”

“Angie? Listen to me. The monster isn’t real. Your dreams aren’t real. Continue with the sleep meds I prescribed, and supplement them with the streamlight. In the meantime, let’s keep meeting, and talking. Okay?”

She stared at him and then at the streamlight in her hand before nodding. “I’m sorry I got you involved in this. Be careful, okay?” She turned, her shoulders slumped as if defeated, and headed down the corridor in the direction of the medical facility. He was tempted to accompany her, but he had an urgent question for LEE3 that couldn’t wait.

“LEE3,” he said, when she was no longer in sight.

“Yeah, Doc?”

“Has Angie Velasquez been near this District’s REMpods since waking up?”

“Yes. She asked me to deactivate several, but doesn’t have the authority to give me that command.”

“She did?” Why the hell hadn’t LEE3 informed him of this? “I have no choice then.”

“You’ll be decommissioning her at Pluto?”

“It’s not safe to wait that long. Can you wake up two security guards? She needs to be confined to quarters immediately and kept away from the sleepers.”

“Understood.”

Movement. A blur shot across his peripheral vision.

He turned back in the direction Angie had headed and thought he saw a figure dart out of the corridor and into the casino entrance. “Angie?” Wonderful. The last thing he needed was for an anxious, troubled crewmember to overhear the order decommissioning her. He walked to the casino’s arched entranceway, which was festooned with gargoyles and cherubs. “Hello?”

The silhouettes of gaming tables and slot machines stood out in the dim blue lighting like the skyline of a miniature city.

“LEE3?”

“Yes, Doctor?” The AI had abandoned its physical projection and whispered into his earpiece.

“Is Angie in the casino?”

“Negative. She’s walking the Seed’s skyweb at the moment.”

With only one passenger awake in each of the twelve districts—all maintenance engineers—and with each district extending more than a square mile, it’d be unlikely to bump into a member of the skeleton crew.

He sensed it before seeing it. Pressed against the wall like a human-sized cockroach, oozing along so slowly that the movement was barely discernible. He pretended not to see it, pretended he didn’t feel the invisible claw of terror clamping down on his heart.

He needed light. He bent and grabbed one of the power cords extending from a slot machine and plugged it into an outlet. The machine lit up with a loud clang, and music played. The reels had a picture of a wolf’s head, fangs bared, and the familiar ditty played: “When the wolf’s in town, it gobbles you down, down . . . down.” He considered kicking out the cord, shutting it down, but he didn’t want to lose the light.

Out of the corner of his eye something—an obsidian ribbon—sped by so quickly he barely saw it.

“LEE3?”

“What now, Doc?”

“Someone just exited the casino. Who was it?”

“I’m not detecting anyone but you.” A pause. “I was just about to buzz you. I wanted to let you know there’s been another REMpod glitch. I’ve been unable to wake up the security guards you requested.”

“Try another doctor, then.”

“That’s the thing. None of the REMpods are responding. I can’t seem to wake up anyone.”

Emilio searched for Angie for over an hour along the cityship’s skyweb of interlocking catwalks. LEE3 reported she could no longer be detected—either another glitch in the systems or she’d done something to mask her lifesigns. He didn’t think she’d exhibited any suicidal tendencies, but now began to doubt himself. He leaned over the edge of the handrails staring down into Central Lake, its dark waters swooshing against the ship’s artificial shore. Normally, the Seed would have simulated the moon in the sky, but while the REMpods remained on, the moon stayed off. Even the dim phosphor lighting had now stopped functioning, so he used a pocket streamlight to brighten the catwalk a few steps ahead of him.

He remembered the day Tomás fell off the pier at Lake Redondo while baiting his fishing line. Emilio had dived in and pulled him out. While Tomás coughed up water, Nina had lit into him for failing to watch the boy more closely.

“LEE3?” he said.

No response.

“LEE3?”

The holo materialized beside him on the catwalk. “You okay, Doc?”

“No, not really.” The words came slowly at first then burst forth in a torrent. He told LEE3 about the shadow in the casino, the music he’d heard. With all the technical problems—communications down, REMpods malfunctioning—maybe Angie was right. Maybe something was sabotaging the ship. Maybe the Library wasn’t describing myth, but something real and perilous. “The Seed is in danger,” he said. “I feel it.”

“You ‘feel it’? Really?” LEE3 said, head shaking. “Listen to yourself. You’re all alone on a massive cityship, living in darkness. Surely you must realize your perspective is being skewed by Angie’s delusions.”

Had LEE3 been corporeal he would’ve grabbed the AI by the collar and shaken it. “I repeat: Datafiles have been corrupted. Communications are down. And now we can’t wake anyone up! You didn’t see the monster—I did.”

“While we’ve been speaking I again reviewed vid of your movement through the casino. This time in infrared and with x-rays—even on a molecular level. Nothing was detectible in there but you.”

“It was . . . in the stillness, in the shadows . . . ”

“Have you considered anxiolytic meds? Ocular therapy?”

He glared at the AI.

“Listen, the ship problems you’re describing are rooted in the physical. These are simple engineering glitches.”

“Engineering glitches,” Emilio repeated. He snapped his fingers. “You’re right; I need to follow up with an engineer, one of the skeleton crew. Connect me.”

“I can’t do that.” A faint smile appeared on LEE3’s face, as if Emilio had taken the bait by making the request.

“Communications problems?”

The holo shook its head.

“Then what?”

“They’re all quite dead, I’m afraid.”

Emilio stepped backward, his heart in his throat.

The AI cleared its throat, licked its lips and sang: “When the wolf’s in town, it gobbles you down, down, DOWN!” It stood there smiling at him, then took a bow.

“Why did you do that?” he said.

“Do what?”

“N-nothing.” Emilio edged backward before turning and running down the catwalk toward the interior of the nearest hullscraper. He peeked over his shoulder to see LEE3 staring at him, hands on hips.

The alarm sounded after several hours of fitful sleep. Emilio didn’t remember setting it. Instead of the familiar soothing tones, it made a different sound; a high note followed by a lower one, then another. “Down, down, down.”

He slammed his fist against the wall monitor to shut off the braying music.

Sitting up in bed, he took deep breaths and wiped the sweat from his face. Since returning from the skyweb, he’d tried connecting with members of the skeleton crew throughout the ship with no success. He’d also attempted to contact the Charon moonbase, but couldn’t establish a link even though the Seed now had to be in closer proximity to Pluto. He’d also expected Angie to contact him, but there’d been only silence.

Then the smell hit him. The stench of decay made him cover his face with his hands.

It lurked in the far corner of his room, hidden in the shadows, hunched over. A human head perched obscenely atop a slimy shroud.

What are you? he wanted to say, but fear choked him into silence.

“Emilio?” The thing cawed like a vulture as it spoke.

It edged closer to him. He was paralyzed. Closer. It stood at the foot of his bed. Now it bent at the waist—although he couldn’t make out any sort of torso behind the shadow that enveloped it. Closer still.

It began to hum. When the wolf’s in town, it gobbles you down, down, down . . .

As it lurched forward, its face came into view.

The monster’s eyes were black, pupil-less, its mouth black, toothless, but its face . . .

Dear God, the face was his.

He shut his eyes tight and tried to scream, but couldn’t. He covered his ears to avoid hearing the song. Tomás. The monster knew about Tomás. Knew he’d left his boy behind without saying goodbye. Knew he’d blamed a ten-year-old child for choosing his mother over his father. He was so ashamed. He’d abandoned his son, and the creature knew his shame. It knew.

When he opened his eyes, the monster was gone.

Dreaming. Had he been dreaming? With every fiber of his being he hoped so.

But the stench lingered.

A few hours later, as he studied the protocols for initiating a manual wake-up of the sleepers, hoping to find a way to do so without inflicting any permanent damage, the door to his quarters chimed. The sound started with a note, followed by two higher ones, then a lower one. When the wolf’s . . . He shook his head. Stop it.

The door slid open and Angie stood there. “Hello, Dr. Garcia,” she said. “I’m sorry to bother you in your quarters.”

Her eyes seemed clear; she smiled confidently.

He stared behind her into the emptiness of the corridor.

“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me,” she said. “The meds and ocular treatment have done the trick. I’m better. Much better.”

“Y-you are?”

“I have—had—a lot of guilt. But the meds and speaking to someone about it has made me realize I can’t keep reliving the past. I need to look forward. In any event, the hallucinations and nightmares are gone. I don’t hear that song anymore.”

“That’s good.” He swallowed. “But the communication grid is down. We can’t transmit any messages to Earth, or to Pluto for that matter. The Seed is having all sorts of systems problems.”

“I know. I consulted with one of the engineers from Aft 8.”

“You did?” He said this too loudly.

She raised an eyebrow. “We sailed through a gravitational wave—unlike anything we’ve ever encountered before—after we passed Neptune. Normally, it’d be undetectable, but Library Tech is especially sensitive to it, which explains the malfunctions. The Seed rode it out. Everything’s back to normal. And I’ve been mulling over what you said about the anomaly. I think it’s the Cataloguers’ way to describe—in metaphorical terms—an actual physical phenomenon, in this case a grav-wave.” She smiled. “I feel like an idiot.”

Her interpretation made sense except . . . he’d seen the monster with his own eyes. He had smelled it. He had felt it drawing ever nearer. He exhaled. “I’m glad I could be of assistance.”

“I’m grateful. I’d been running away from my issues, denying they even existed. But I realize now that’s no way to live your life.”

Is she putting on a show for me? he thought. With the Seed approaching Pluto she had every incentive to convince him she was fine, to avoid being decommissioned.

She turned to leave, but stopped at the doorway. “Are you sure everything is okay, Doctor?”

He nodded. “Prepare to go back into spacesleep when we enter orbit around Charon. I’ll check you into your REMpod.”

As her form faded down the corridor, LEE3 materialized outside the door to Emilio’s quarters, leaning against the wall.

“Why’d you lock me out, Doc? You’ve been holed up in that room way too long. Did I do something to offend? Is it my breath?” The holo breathed into its cupped hands.

“What you said to me about the skeleton crew . . . ”

LEE3 stared blankly. “I’m not following.”

He paused. “Can you access the conversation we had on the skyweb?”

“Hmm,” LEE3 said. “There’s a gap in my memory.”

“Angie says the ship’s engineering issues are due to a gravitational wave the Seed sailed through.”

“Interesting theory.” LEE3 didn’t appear at all interested. “And Angie?”

“Fully recovered apparently.”

“‘Apparently.’” LEE3 smiled. “But you can sense a faker a mile away.”

“Where is she heading now?”

“A level below us. Moving toward the energy flux station that powers the REMpods.”

Emilio raced to the end of the corridor. Leaning over the handrails, he stared intensely into the gray until he spotted Angie on the skyweb a few levels below, the pathway lighting up ahead of her. She took a few steps, stopped, and looked back over her shoulder.

“Angie!” he shouted, waving.

She froze and stared up. Her posture changed immediately when she saw him, standing straighter, as if feigning confidence.

A smudge in the shadows moved behind her, then a black wave rose.

“No! Look out!” he screamed.

She turned, her face twisting into a grimace as the creature swallowed her upper torso. It lifted her high in the air and her body disappeared, legs kicking, down its gullet, bit by bit.

Down, down, down.

The monster turned toward him, its black-smudge form elongating. Its oil-slick head blurred and morphed into familiar features.

A boy’s face, grinning at him, something smeared across his lips.

Emilio turned and ran full-tilt into an adjoining tower, where he jumped into an elevator. When the door opened on the deck level, he expected the creature to be waiting for him, but instead there was darkness, only darkness. But in that blackness he sensed movement.

He needed to reach the nearest skeleton crewmember, the one Angie had spoken to in Aft District 8, on the other side of the bay. Without going up into the skyweb, a ferry was the only way across.

He sprung out the front entrance and ran down empty streets, his heart banging against his sternum as he pushed his endurance to its limits, slowing down only when he arrived at the pier. With his sides aching, he jogged down faux-wooden planks and hopped aboard the ferry. “Depart!” he commanded.

As the ship skimmed into the thick darkness, he leaned over the deck and stared back at the pier, straining to see any signs of the creature. The waters were still and silent, the ferry’s movement creating a cool, sterile breeze. His thoughts turned to Tomás pleading with him to come to his birthday party. Then he imagined the creature standing an inch away from him in the pitch darkness, its exhalation the breeze against his face.

No! Clear your mind.

He had to contact Pluto, learn if the additional Library research had turned up more information on the creature.

After some time, he made out the massive silhouette of the Aft District 8 hullscrapers looming larger and larger, black against gray.

When the ferry reached the pier, he jumped out, glancing over his shoulder. Behind him, the floorboards on the ferry creaked.

“LEE3,” he whispered.

Nothing.

“Goddammit, LEE3!”

He leapt into the maze of dark streets until he found himself at the end of an alleyway with no exit. And before he even turned around, he knew what awaited him.

The towering shadow blocked his path, humming a familiar tune.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the streamlight, activating it. The narrow beam of light sliced through the creature, splitting it in half.

He lunged past it and out of the alleyway.

When he turned around, the shadow had reconstituted itself.

He held up the streamlight again, and an ebon tendril shot out of the monster’s midsection, swatting the device out of his hand.

It hovered toward him. It would never stop stalking him, he realized.

His instincts screamed for him to run, but his professional training, his life experience, told him how foolish he’d been to try to escape from it. He clutched the locket around his neck. He’d spent so much time running, trying to flee from feelings that threatened to consume him. He had made his choices, as had everyone else aboard the cityship. Now he needed to find a way to live with those choices.

He took a few steps toward the obscene bird-shaped shadow. The child’s visage glared at him, and its mouth opened, stretching impossibly wide to reveal a bottomless abyss.

Emilio drew nearer.

“I’m not running from you anymore.”

His breath—perhaps the words themselves—rippled the creature’s outline. Up close, it seemed as insubstantial as the mist of memory.

“No more running,” he repeated, moving closer still.

The creature froze in place, then drifted backward, away from him.

A siren blasted, and the shiplights suddenly flared on.

“ARRIVAL. CHARON,” the ship’s speakers blared. “ARRIVAL. CHARON.”

As the shiplights intensified, through squinting eyes, he saw the creature slither to the end of the alleyway, where it cowered, shrinking until it faded into the disappearing shadows.

Emilio managed to fit the most important of his personal belongings into a single carry-case, which he rolled onto the docking bay. The arriving passengers greeted him as they disembarked from the shuttle in single file. The Seed’s skeleton crew—twelve engineers from each district, all alive and healthy—welcomed the Pluto colonists and directed them to their respective REMpod stations. The Plutonians were already dressed in white sleeping suits made of Library-inspired fabrics specially designed for decades-long stasis.

He was surprised to find Aulani Kahanahuni, the Library Liaison, among the arriving passengers. He hadn’t realized she was scheduled to join the Seed’s crew.

“Dr. Garcia,” she said, smiling broadly when she spotted him. “I’m glad to see you.” She introduced him to a stocky man with a warm smile she identified as her husband.

“I’m glad to see you, too. Where’s your daughter?” Emilio said, looking among the throng of arriving Plutonians for the girl he’d seen on the q-call.

The smile on the Librarian’s face vanished. “We decided to leave her behind on Charon. With my sister’s family.”

After an awkward pause, he said, “I . . . I understand.”

“Do you have a moment?” she said. She pulled Emilio to one side while her husband rejoined the other white-clad passengers who were being guided now by LEE3.

“The additional research you requested on the anomaly has been completed and is being forwarded to you.”

“Oh?” He was about to tell her it was moot at this point, but she continued speaking.

“The prevailing theory among the Cataloguers is that the anomaly is the product of gravitational waves on a scale heretofore unknown to us. Grav-waves of this sort aren’t generated by the collision of two black holes or other high-density objects, as is typically the case. No, these are unleashed when the branes of two universes brush up against each other.”

“Multiple universe theory?”

“Indeed, Dr. Garcia. Indeed! The Cataloguers theorized grav-waves on such a scale produced micro-tears in the fabric of spacetime—much like the ones that allowed transmission of the Library itself—only these allowed pieces of another universe to leak over into ours, drawn to spaceships powered by q-tech. In fact, as I mentioned, there’s an entire Library mythology built around this phenomenon, the concept of actual living creatures drawn into this universe by a person’s guilt.”

“Are these ‘micro-tears’ transitory?”

“Oh yes, though Library lore tells of rare instances where something crosses over and stays, finding continued sustenance in the guilt of its prey,” she said. “The Cataloguers have blessed us with their great knowledge—and their great storytelling,” she said, smiling and raising her arms skyward. “Tell me, Doctor. Why are you so curious about this subject?”

He hesitated. “I had a patient with some interest in the matter.”

She noticed his carry-case. “You’re leaving?”

“Yes, this is my last stop, I’m afraid.”

“Is this related to the . . . unfortunate incident with that poor woman?”

He hadn’t realized word had already spread to Pluto of Angie’s death. LEE3 must have logged it. The official cause was suicide. They’d assumed she’d been heading to the energy flux station to damage the REMpods, but LEE3 said she’d leapt into an energy beam, incinerating herself. He’d asked LEE3 to show him the vid-feed of the incident, but the recording was unavailable due to the ship disruptions at the time. Emilio considered confessing to LEE3 what he’d seen—what he thought he’d seen—but realized this would only focus attention on his own mental state, his own failure to properly treat Angie Velasquez’s condition. Best to leave the Seed quietly. He had opted instead to set forth a full record of his experiences in the medical logs should the Seed’s crew encounter a similar problem with another sleeper in the future.

“I’m leaving for personal reasons,” he said.

“We all must follow our own paths,” Aulani said.

He accompanied her to the REMpod next to her husband’s and allowed them to speak privately for a minute before setting down his case to help them step inside their respective pods.

The plexi lowered, and calmness fell over Aulani’s face as she drifted into spacesleep. Emilio thought of Angie. Whatever her psychological issues, were they much different than the guilt faced by every single person aboard the Seed? Guilt borne of leaving loved ones behind? Or guilt borne of bringing them along, sentencing them to a lifetime aboard a spaceship and their descendants to a dangerous and an uncertain future?

“Dr. Garcia!” LEE3 waved at him. “The shuttle’s departing to Charon. If you’re leaving the Seed . . . ”

He jogged twenty steps before he realized he’d left his case next to the REMpod. When he returned and bent to retrieve it, he noticed a slight twitch on Aulani’s lips, rapid movement behind her eyelids. He looked at the sleepers around her.

The twitching seemed to glide like a wave across the sea of REMpods.

“Dr. Garcia! The shuttle’s going to leave without you.”

He hesitated, looked back and forth between the shuttle and the REMpods. A stillness had fallen across the sleepers. He touched the locket around his neck, then turned and raced across the docking bay.

He entered the shuttle and another person, an engineer, followed behind him and took the seat across from him. They were the only two passengers aboard the AI-piloted shuttle returning to Charon. He sat down, buckled up, and put on headphones to drown out the sound of the engines. Outside his window, Charon’s bustling moonbase drew closer, and behind it, ghostly Pluto with its heart-shaped ice-plains beckoned. It could take months, but eventually he’d find transportation back home. He’d call Nina as soon as he reached Earth and arrange a visit with Tomás.

He thought about the mission he was leaving behind, the adventure of settling New Earth, and felt a twinge of regret. And then he thought about the twitching faces of the sleepers. A pulsing wave of something—something alive, yet foul—seemed to be moving through them, infecting them all. Was it real? Should he have done something? He shook his head and pushed away the thought. And as music began to pipe over the headphones, he thought he heard a note followed by two higher notes, then a lower one. Down, down, down.

He ripped off the headphones and threw them to the floor.

“Is everything all right?” said the engineer sitting across from him.

Emilio nodded, took a deep breath.

He had made his choice. Now he needed to find a way to live with it.

He shifted his thoughts to Tomás, and trained his eyes on Pluto, the ice-white sphere growing larger and larger until the darkness of space had disappeared.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September/October 2019.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Baoshu

Baoshu is a science fiction and fantasy writer. He has published five novels and dozens of shorter works since 2010, including Three Body X: Redemption of Time, Ruins of Time (winner of the 2014 Chinese Nebula Award for Best Novel), Seven States of the Galaxy: Phantom From an Ancient Empire, and “Everybody Loves Charles” (winner of the 2015 Galaxy Award for Best Novella). He lives in Xi’an, China.

Paul McAuley

Paul McAuley was born in Gloucestershire on St George’s Day, 1955. He has a Ph.D in Botany and worked as a researcher in biology at various universities, including Oxford and UCLA, and for six years was a lecturer in botany at St Andrews University, before leaving academia to write full time. He started publishing science fiction with the short story “Wagon, Passing” for Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1984. His first novel, 400 Billion Stars won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988, and 1995’s Fairyland won the Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Awards. He has also won the British Fantasy, Sidewise, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. He lives in London.

Mercurio D. Rivera

“In the Stillness Between the Stars” was the winner of the Asimov’s Readers Award in the novelette category for 2019. Mercurio D. Rivera’s short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and has appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, Interzone, Lightspeed, Black Static, Nature, and numerous anthologies and “best of” collections. Tor.com called his collection, Across the Event Horizon (Newcon Press) “weird and wonderful” with “dizzying switchbacks.” His short stories have been translated and published in Italy, Spain, China, Poland, and the Czech Republic. You can find him online at mercuriorivera.com.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and an eight-time Hugo Award Finalist for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, The Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His most recent anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 5, was published by Night Shade Books in October. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.