Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction Group 3 | Page 134

Canglong
King George V School, Zhao, Ran - 13
The Canglong ’s surgical cabinet holds two prosthetics: a metal femur and a metal heart.
I’ve lost limbs to accidents, organs to time and disease, and sometimes, necessity of environment. I
don’t know when I recognized inevitability and decided to print a copy of every body part I’d conceivably
need to be replaced, and sure enough, 29 century state-of-the-art 3D printers failed to serve my cause—
but hell if I hadn’t tried to print another printer with it before it broke down.
I’m not the technological type, at least not according to the standards of my profession, but I’m happy
to say I’ve managed to figure out not to print components taller than the Canglong’s cabin ceiling. Of
course, there’s the dent in the roof to show. I guess it’s a waiting game now. Waiting for my 3D printed
heat shields to run out, waiting to see if it’ll be my body or the Canglong that gives first, breaks in a way
that can’t be replaced.
Not the heart, though. Never the heart. A thousand artificial reinforcements keep it beating, but the
only way I can face my silver rictus grin without turning my head away is in the knowledge that, beneath
the putter of gears and grind of oft-neglected joints, my heart, at least, is still a human’s heart—this heart
that wrenched and stuttered at my first sight of space and soared at my first supernova and now longs for the
days when I looked to the stars with yearning instead of bitter hate; this heart that, sentimental though it
may be, marks me irreversibly as human.
Sometimes I’ll blur my eyes and pretend that they’re electric cities, press my palms to my eyes and
watch the rathe bloom of phosphenes. I’ll tell myself that the jute strands of my lashes distort discolored
neon signs instead of cold, chatoyant stars, that I’ll blink and the world that comes into focus will be just
that, a world and not a sterile isolation chamber. That it never happened, that fateful day when I radioed Bi
An after a hundred-year cryosleep and it didn’t answer back.
And sometimes I’ll wonder why I didn’t end it there, almost delirious with panic, frantically scanning
message after message of contact not established, the acrid insinuation of last human alive hovering like a
carrion vulture waiting for a man to die. Sometimes I wonder why I turned the Canglong around with its
cargo of Bi An approved gifts and set its trajectory to the nearest star system.
So many decades, and it’s the silence that gets to me, creeping into the passionless hum of machinery
in the liminal spaces between tasks and threatening to erode the edges of my mind. It’s in those instances,
not yet spent in cryosleep, is when the memories threaten to overwhelm me.
Because you could fill encyclopedia upon encyclopedia with the things I’ve seen and never breach its
depth, aboard this battered starship loaded with memories.
I’ve seen sentient gas clouds, spindly creatures as tall as mountains, creatures living in bioluminescent
oceans with tentacles spanning continents. I’ll orbit their planets, gleaning what information I can, and then
I’ll descend. They’ll point their weapons at me, for they are no fools.
The Caolong is a nimble, catlike thing with four antennae outstretched watchfully and Bi An’s slogan,
the modern treasure voyage, spanning her width in twenty-four languages. Her exterior can retract to show
shaded transparent walls that reveal our absence of weapons.
Sometimes they’ll see it, and let me land. And if they don’t, that’s okay too. I’ll put myself into
cryosleep and set a new trajectory. Each journey takes a thousand years, but time has never been a limit.
Sometimes I arrive to barren desert cities, the elaborate structures projected to me from ancient light
now nothing more than scaffolding and dust, standing with the impervious dignity of empty snail shells.
The wind will moan through the sand-blasted formations, fluting and morose, and I’ll board my ship
again.
And sometimes it will be a meteor-cracked world I wander through, sanguine skies and dried-up
seas, the dull red embers of some long-abated conflagration still flickering at my feet.
But sometimes it’s a civilization, a group of stargazers that greet me, flocking curiously as my ship sets
down.
I show them planes and spaceships, the Hubble Telescope and the proof behind Hawking radiation.
Perhaps I’ll draw out Dante’s Inferno, and it’ll be well-worn, a copy I’ve treasured over innumerable
millennia. My fingers will wander over the translucent coffee stain marring the cover, lingering over dog-
eared pages crammed with spidering observations. But I’ll hand it over. I want to. I must.
I ask little in return—a sachet of alien earth. A photo. A piece of technology, or perhaps a story.
I fill the Canglong’s logbook with these stories, an ever-expanding tapestry, each one finding a home
amid the rambling myriad of files and classifications.
And then I board my ship.
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