Chapter 26
Chapter 26: Lords for Eighteen Hours
Outside the museum.
Wind lifted white sand; in every direction, an endless scrubbed wasteland.
“Qian-ge, you ever seen a place like this?” Zhao Meiyou said.
“No.” Qian Duoduo studied the horizon. “This looks… like desert.”
“Qian-ge, I’m a bit of a philistine. Astronomy’s not my thing,” Zhao Meiyou said. “But I think we might not be on Earth.”
He pointed to the skyline.
There were two moons.
“Not impossible,” Qian Duoduo said, staring at the twin moons. Given that a ruin could cough up something like a rum tunnel, being off Earth wasn’t that strange. “But in certain cases you can get two moons on Earth, too.”
Before Zhao Meiyou could ask what cases, a screaming roar came from high overhead. Like a meteor, a long-tailed blaze dropped from the heavens. Only when it hit the ground not far away did Zhao Meiyou realize it wasn’t a meteor at all but an aircraft.
Qian Duoduo thought for a moment, took out a cigarette, lit it, and said softly, “Hide.”
The figure in front of him vanished. A warm, solid pressure touched Zhao Meiyou’s lips; tobacco bloomed on his tongue. Both of them slipped out of sight.
Qian Duoduo tugged him. “Let’s go look.”
They still didn’t know how much Ruin 000 interfered with an archaeologist’s abilities and didn’t dare push their luck. They ghosted up to the craft, were still debating how to get in when—bang—the hull split like a clamshell and someone came out.
They heard bells.
Something about the chime tugged at Zhao Meiyou’s memory. Then the figure in the doorway took his attention completely. Judging by size he looked like a teenage boy. Lotus pins and gilt ornaments were stacked in layers on his topknot; his cheeks were white as porcelain with painted patterns. The bells were on him: he was barefoot, gold-red anklets chiming at every step.
Zhao Meiyou glanced at Qian Duoduo and kept his voice low. “Qian-ge, is that a person?”
No wonder he asked. The boy only had the lower half of a face. The upper half was a huge implanted goggle—a black external box latched from nasal bridge to hairline, green code skittering across it. He was naked; there wasn’t even a hint of sex. The body itself looked ceramic-sanded, a hazy suggestion rather than anatomy.
Qian Duoduo considered. “That should be an artificial human, manufactured in the 2130s.”
“Twenty-second century?” Zhao Meiyou immediately thought: the incandescent peak of human tech.
“Only the twenty-second century had this kind of tech. Bionic bodies had become so advanced there was a retro fad—deliberately flaunting an artificial human’s ‘nonhuman’ look. It was the rage.” Qian Duoduo watched the boy climb down. “Judging by the finish, he wasn’t cheap.”
They watched him, waiting for his next move, both of them wound tight.
The boy walked out into the desert, looked around, and suddenly sprang into the air, limbs flung wide like a star. He roared, “Motherf—, what the hell happened to this dump—!”
Zhao Meiyou and Qian Duoduo: “…?”
Whatever he was, his emotional system was top-shelf; even at a distance you could hear the temper in his voice. “—holy heavenly hell, I haul my ass a thousand miles home and it’s trashed?! Who did this? Where’s the United Government? The United Government finally went belly-up, didn’t it?!”
He rattled off names by the handful, curses in some ancient dialect salted through it. Even Zhao Meiyou couldn’t catch it all. “Qian-ge, what’s this United Government?”
“A world union humanity once had. Founded in the twentieth century, dissolved mid–twenty-second,” Qian Duoduo said. “If he’s an artificial-human surveyor sent to explore deep space, his departure would have to be before 2149. The World United Government dissolved on January 1, 2149.”
“Artificial-human surveyor? Outbound exploration?”
“I have a guess.” Qian Duoduo watched the naked boy bellowing and streaking around. “There was a decades-long space craze in the twenty-second century. Humanity’s colonization pushed to the edge of Orion; every year a flood of ships went deeper for scientific surveys. Most of those teams were artificial humans.”
“So?”
“So,” Qian Duoduo said quietly, “what if some of those teams, because of force majeure or because the mission lasted too long, came home to find a hundred years had gone by?”
From the desert came another roar—
“Earth! Oh, my dear mother—how did you end up like this!”
“Humans? Did humans manage to wipe themselves out yet again?!”
“…”
Apparently, even from an artificial human’s perspective, humanity is either trying to die or on the way to it.
Once they were reasonably sure the boy meant no harm, Qian Duoduo tried to make contact, only to find his own hand was a ghost—he went right through the boy’s body. He thought at first it was some elite shielding, but when Zhao Meiyou tested the craft he got the same result: they could enter, but they couldn’t touch anything.
Likewise, the artificial human couldn’t see them.
“This is quantum residue,” Qian Duoduo said. He’d seen it before. “Some ruins sit too long without an archaeologist. The quantum state stays Schrödingered; it aggregates its own set pieces, untouchable to outsiders.”
As always, Zhao Meiyou’s philistinism performed beautifully; he didn’t get the theory at all, but he latched on to the practical: for now, they could only watch the boy glitch out like he’d caught a virus. No interfering.
They learned a few things quickly. The vehicle the boy landed in was only an advance shuttle. In orbit above hung a much larger ship—which was why they could see two moons.
Inside the ship was a full ecological loop, a vast gene bank, and a scientific team that had slept for fifty years.
Lucky or unlucky, the spec on this dispatch was high enough that, besides the artificial human, there was a whole survey team of pure, baseline humans. Qian Duoduo found a way to access the ship’s log and figured out why the return took so long. The loop failed. All the humans had to go into cryo. Only an artificial-human navigator was left to pilot home on one percent thrust.
The boy had not anticipated coming home to this. By now it should be the twenty-third century. The Orion War and the Great Cataclysm had only just ended. Whether anyone, or anything, could survive on Earth was an open question. To be safe, he didn’t wake them all. He followed the sequence and woke only one.
Investigator 000. Codename: Grandmother’s Bridge.
Watching her sit up in the cryo pod, Zhao Meiyou said, curious, “Qian-ge, did the United Government hire child labor?”
She wore a skintight sleep suit, material like gel, outlining an improbably soft figure—she was a girl.
Unless humans had evolved into immortal children over the centuries, she was at most in her teens.
“In the twenty-second century, humanity developed the brain to an unimaginable degree. Geniuses were common,” Qian Duoduo said, unsurprised. “Archaeologists have seen ‘brainwave prenatal education’ in ruins. No idea how it worked, but the children came out extremely intelligent.”
Zhao Meiyou studied the girl. There was a blade to her gaze—an edge you only saw in people decades older. But she was still a girl, so the sharpness stayed clear, almost translucent.
He hesitated. “Can you really take what you see in a ruin at face value?”
“Reality in a ruin is Schrödingered reality,” Qian Duoduo said. “Humanity loses things in time. From here, the tech of centuries past looks about as plausible as magic, alchemy, myth.”
“But the artificial human’s choice is sound.” He watched them link data at speed. “Judging from apparent ages, they share a few traits. Easier to talk.”
Boy and girl stood before a giant display. Species, resources, ecological figures—endless graphs and images flipped past. Zhao Meiyou and Qian Duoduo stood at a polite distance, two useless adults listening to a stream of jargon pour off children’s tongues. Finally Zhao Meiyou gave up and sat, tugging at Qian Duoduo’s pant leg. “Qian-ge, my legs ache. Let’s take five.”
Qian Duoduo sat too. “We may be here longer than we predicted.”
“Yeah. Long enough to save the world,” Zhao Meiyou said, watching the girl marshal the ship’s stores. He couldn’t quite grasp what the two of them were plotting, but one thing seemed clear: they meant to rehabilitate this post–Great Cataclysm Earth, empty of humans.
“Let the kids worry about the survival of the species.”
He stretched out, slung an arm across Qian Duoduo’s shoulders, and smiled, lazy as summer.
“A mature adult should kiss at a moment like this.”
So the mature adults trailed the competent kids, shuttling between ship and planet. Grandmother’s Bridge didn’t wake anyone else. She and the artificial-human boy explored the surface on their own. Sometimes Zhao Meiyou couldn’t tell if they were saving the world or playing a game. “Haul me up!” he yelled to the girl on the ground. She’d just jumped from a few hundred meters and was shouting up at the hovercraft. There was both command and a little madness in it. “I want to jump again!”
“Your Ladyship!” the boy yelled back in some obscure dialect. “We’re low on fuel and this is our only hovercraft. Please collect the damn surface data!”
“Haul me up!” the girl shouted from below. “Or I’ll tear you apart when we get back!”
“That’d be great.” The boy was unmoved. He sat in the hatch and picked his toes. “Tear me down and give me a new body. I want an eight-pack.”
“This is a United Government ruin—” the girl bellowed. “If you jump down, it’s the same as raving on those bastards’ graves—”
The boy leaped without a second thought.
Watching the two maniacs rampage through the wreckage, Zhao Meiyou muttered, half to himself, that they seemed to have complicated feelings about the United Government.
“In those days a chunk of colonization and exploration was compulsory. It verged on an arms race. Popular resentment isn’t surprising,” Qian Duoduo said. “It might be why Grandmother’s Bridge refuses to wake more humans. For all she knows, her superiors are in there waiting to bind her with policy.”
“Humans are already extinct. Policy, my ass,” Zhao Meiyou said, fully committed now to slacking.
“Even relics in a ruin,” Qian Duoduo said, “are still human.”
“Something just occurred to me,” Zhao Meiyou said. “They both jumped down. Who’s flying this hovercraft? How do they get back to the ship?”
Qian Duoduo blinked. “There should be an autopilot.”
“Autopilot?” Zhao Meiyou was dubious. “Can it land itself and parallel park?”
As it turned out, the autopilot could do neither. Zhao Meiyou and Qian Duoduo could only watch, unable to intervene, worried the kids would splatter and thereby end humanity in one fell swoop. Qian Duoduo studied the controls and came to a conclusion: the hovercraft would auto-land when fuel dropped to a set threshold. There were eighteen hours to go.
In those eighteen hours out of the world, saving it did not concern them.
The two on the ground knew it, too. Grandmother’s Bridge finished her soil collection and handed the canister to the artificial human. “We’ve done what we can. Rest.”
Her voice was hoarse from shouting. She stripped the heavy suit and breathed the air, fouled by the Great Cataclysm. The boy watched. “That’ll shorten your lifespan.”
“I’ve lived a long time—longer than most people,” Grandmother’s Bridge said, lying down amid the ruins and looking up at the twin moons. “It’s been nearly a century since the ship launched.”
Perhaps from sleeping too long, her sense of self was split. Sometimes she was the decisive prodigy; sometimes a maniac of a girl; sometimes an old woman back from exile. Under the moons she spread her arms and legs. Every breath lopped off a slice of life; the years lost to sleep got shorter, too. She looked at a sky without a single star and said, “The first time I came to the United Government, you could still see the Morning Star from here.”
“It was a good time,” said the old woman inside the girl.
“City nights were packed with stars—you could barely tell planets from satellites. In the sky-streets the traffic streamed by. If you got a red light you could stop and watch a burst of fireworks. I went to the biggest Chinatown, and the tallest restaurant was built on a nuclear airship. So many artificial-human courtesans danced on the deck. There was a singing storyteller in a blue mask. I didn’t understand what he said, but the voice was beautiful.”
She paused. “I was born for long voyages. Literature wasn’t on my syllabus. It wasn’t until long after we set out that I found the song he sang in the database.”
“What was it?” the boy asked.
She lifted a hand; her fingertips were as pale as the moon. She turned her wrist and sang, slow:
“Thinking and thinking—the smoke and waves stretch a thousand miles—”
A rush of green code trembled across the optic on the artificial human’s face, and then the characters themselves bloomed in the air.
Gone, gone— a thousand li of misty waves. At dusk, the heavy twilight deepens, beneath the vast skies of Chu.
“This is by an ancient Eastern poet, about twelve hundred years ago,” the artificial human said. “Back then, poets wrote lines of varying lengths, made to be sung. Do you like his poems?”
“It’s not that I like his poems; I don’t truly understand what he means,” Grandmother’s Bridge said quietly. “It’s that there are twelve hundred years inside them.”
Which makes her decades of sleep feel absurdly brief.
When I wake from wine tonight, where shall I be? By the willow-lined shore, in the morning breeze, beneath the fading moon.
“Since we’re idle anyway,” the boy said as code flickered again, “I found a melody that fits. Want to hear it?”
“You can sing?” Grandmother’s Bridge stared, surprised he’d caught her mood that precisely. “Isn’t your intelligence level a bit high?”
“You hold the ship’s highest level of control. You can lower my parameters or shut me down,” the artificial human said. “Shall I restart and refresh?”
She considered. “Forget it. What can you sing? Sing.”
The boy correlated her language and emotional values, stood, and tried her line: “Thinking and thinking—the smoke and waves stretch a thousand miles; the dusk lies heavy and the Chu sky’s wide.”
“Too bright,” Grandmother’s Bridge said. “Drop an octave.”
He cleared his throat and tried another line. “Since ancient times, tenderness takes the hurt of parting—”
“Now you’re too low. I’ll sing it once.” She sat up, drew breath, tightened her abdomen, and gave him a pitch. “Try again?”
It was, indeed, a challenge. The artificial human did his best to mirror her expression. His core spun up; torrents of data stripped and reassembled; a model took shape—an attempt to reproduce something singular about the girl’s bones and bearing.
He lifted his hand a fraction. Moonlight poured down like new silk over white porcelain.
As male actors once mimed the feminine centuries ago: whatever the body’s hardware, as soon as it takes on that jeweled hue, it slips the cage of gender.
In that moment he truly was a poet from a thousand years past, singing a slow farewell at a wayside pavilion, murmuring:
“From this parting on,
the best days and brightest scenes will come to nothing.
A thousand feelings in my heart—who will hear them?”
Grandmother’s Bridge stared, then slapped her thigh. “Yes! That’s the lilt!”
She clapped like a hand drum, a bird-bright delight in her eyes. “Come on, keep going. I still remember a few—The wind is high, the apes wail with grief, and look, a red apricot branch has thrust over the wall!”
So they traded lines, one for one, almost always off-key. The boy’s and the girl’s voices floated beneath the moons—sometimes solemn and joyful, sometimes touched with ache. They sang of five-flower horses, and furs worth a thousand in gold; of traveling down to Yangzhou in the smoky blossoms of March; of phoenixes rising on Phoenix Terrace; of the Dipper turning and the Big Bear hanging over the western tower; of a lone sail’s shadow vanishing into blue, the world a single sand-gull.
At the height of it, their singing turned into a kind of hysteria. The girl stripped off all her protection and frog-jumped in the moonlight, a dance out of nowhere. They seemed, for that instant, to be mad. And since the world held only the two of them, the world was whatever they were. When the only two people are lunatics, they become the measure of all things. They get to define normal.
So in that instant they were the most normal and the most crazed, the most pained and the most glad—the happiest and the most wretched. They were the oldest thing from the beginning of time to the end of forever, and of course they were lords over all poetry.
I’m a copper pea you can’t steam soft, can’t boil down, can’t pound flat, can’t pop in hot oil; I go clang, clang, clang—
And which young buck taught you to poke your head into this thousand-layered brocade hood—can’t be hoed through, chopped, untied, jerked free—slow as slow can be?
I play by the moon at Liang Garden, drink in the Eastern Capital, admire Luoyang’s flowers, climb the willows on Zhangtai Street.
I can play go and kick a ball, ride to hounds, crack wise, dance and sing, pipe and strum, swallow tricks and chant verse, roll the dice and take the board.
Even if I lost my teeth, my mouth went crooked, my leg went lame, my arm broke—Heaven could saddle me with every sorry ailment—and I still wouldn’t quit!
By the time they were done, Grandmother’s Bridge’s voice was gone. She flopped onto her back, panting, rolled once, and called up to the boy in the moonlight, “There. You sound almost like the singer I heard a hundred years ago.”
“Not that hard,” he said, cocky.
She spat. “That’s because I’m a good teacher.”
“Please. Look at you.”
“Look at me how?”
“You’re a sorry excuse of a human.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” Grandmother’s Bridge lay under the moons and made a grave declaration. “Let me tell you—humans are exactly like this.”
What are humans like?
He suddenly turned his head. The optic flashed green code. “Hey, Grandmother’s Bridge—watch closely.”
A white cube bloomed in his palm, swelling and brightening. The girl felt the light and sat up. “You’re packing a full holo rig?”
Before the words were out, vermilion towers sprang from the ruin. She found herself in a blossom of fireworks; courtesans in rich dress danced under the moon; heaven or earth, it was only lanternlight and dim alleys.
The boy put on a blue mask, robed himself wide-sleeved, and sat behind a table. He slapped the clapper. His voice was as beautiful as it had been a century ago—song, then chant, then a long, savage cry.
Red candles burned high. He sang:
Rock, rock,
rock to Grandmother’s Bridge.
Author’s note:
Guan Hanqing, “A Sprig of Flowers: Not Yielding to Age.”
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