我的家人和其他进化中的动物们
It all started with my mom.
The previous Spring Festival, she’d brought an extra twenty pounds of fish mint aboard, planning ahead for the next year’s big dinners. In the twelfth month, she’d quietly taken a bag of the rhizomes out of cold storage, proud of her own cleverness. Unfortunately, the night before New Year’s Eve, my older sister got a craving and snuck into the pantry. The swarm of fruit flies flew right into her face. Three minutes later, they’d vanished without a trace. Dispersing in a rapid and orderly fashion, they smoothly established themselves throughout the two-million-inhabitant sealed space. After that, Mom was truly infamous throughout the Shangri-La Space Station.
What kind of insect would eat fish mint? It had evolved its pungency for the sole purpose of deterring pests. Thousands of species of fruit flies, across millions of years of evolution, had failed to eat fish mint. Yet my ol’ mom had gotten them to change their ways.
They’d evolved.
The animal center looked into the business, and decided it wasn’t a big deal. The space station council levied some fines and called it a day. So Mom regarded the matter with pride instead of shame, declaring that delicious fish mint should be enjoyed by insects as well as humans. We had a few words for her attitude, but we did like that pungent fishy flavor. The first New Year’s Eve dinner we held in the space station was unusually abundant; the feasting drove all other thoughts out of the heads of our family of five. But no one could have guessed that it was none other than my mom who set off the evolutionary journey of the species of Yunnan Province.
I was proud.
Because my dream was to become a naturalist.
I should start from the beginning.
“The future is just not evenly distributed. It’s impossible for technology to spread time flat on every geological layer. In some areas the concentration is high; in others the concentration is low. Humans pass in between them. Shangri-La Space Station is naturally a high-concentration zone.”
—Wang Chang, Summer 2119, from Beijing
My mom wasn’t my birth mother. My dad wasn’t my birth father either. My older brother and sister were their biological children. All of them were from northern China.
Not me and my little sister. I was the only Yunnanese born and bred, born on the border between China and Burma, while Dad passed away before he got used to the rice noodles. He’d bought my little sister out from the hands of a human trafficker out of desperation. Mom thought she was also from somewhere in the southwest—Yunnan, Guizhou, or Sichuan Province. My dad uploaded her genetic data, but three years passed, and we never got a ping. So my mother officially declared: she’s my daughter now. My origins weren’t that mysterious; the last several dozen generations of my family had lived in the same district. Apparently, when my birth father had been younger, drug traffickers had coerced him into running goods at gunpoint. My family wound up dying unnatural deaths. Back then, my father was working with a program to bring education to the rural areas on the border. Long-distance learning might be effective, but it still required some number of educators to go to the villages and calibrate the hologram equipment, help out the local teachers, gather detailed research data, and ultimately deliver feedback to the central command for high-level adjustments to the educational framework. Dad was sent from Beijing to Yunnan and stayed. Two years later, Mom came with my older brother and sister to stay in Kunming.
Dad always said that Mom was no education expert like him: she might be an elementary school teacher, but her heart was in food and gardening. Yunnan suited her. I thought Dad was wrong. Mom enjoyed rearing us as much as anything, cluck-cluck-clucking and shielding us under her wings. For years, Dad spent his time out in the villages away from home, but she took it all in stride. If Dad hadn’t overworked himself and died so young of cancer, he would’ve brought home more children in need and expanded Mom’s husbandry operations. It’s fortunate that Mom found an entirely new set of rearing goals. Ol’ Dad’s spirit in heaven would find comfort in that for sure.
My love for animals and plants came from a set of books titled My Family and Other Animals, also known as the Corfu trilogy. The author was a famous English naturalist from the century before the last, named Gerald Durrell, and he’d had a family that was at once endearing and exasperating. Dad would read it to me as soon as he came home, as a bedtime story. By the time he’d finished the first book bit by bit, I’d learned my characters and no longer needed him, and I read the second and third books on my own. Only after he’d passed did I realize that I’d left him a little crestfallen. He hadn’t wanted me to grow up so quickly; he’d wanted to continue reading for me. Afterward, he adopted my little sister, but unfortunately she didn’t enjoy listening to his mutterings. She preferred my mother’s singing.
I’ll never forget my father reading the preface: “A world without birds, without forests, without animals of every shape and size, would be one that I, personally, would not care to live in . . . ”
“People from the borderlands of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan have a distinct borderlander personality, and those who chose voluntarily to live in the borderlands even more so. The task of selecting residents for Shangri-La is not a difficult one. Some people are inclined by nature to leave Earth and make their homes in the outer solar system.”
—Wang Chang, Winter 2120, from Banna Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan
Durrell wrote of Greece and the Mediterranean. I’m more fortunate than him; Yunnan is more interesting. Mom would take me to the enormous museum run by the Kunming Institute of Zoology and take me to explore the natural world of Yunnan. To the south was tropical Banna, to the west were the Hengduan Mountains, to the north was the Jinsha River, to the east were dense primeval forests. During summer vacations our whole family would go to pester Dad, spending the first month in the rainforest eating steamed egg with moss, the next month drinking thermos after thermos of yak milk tea.
That was why, when Mom announced that we were leaving Yunnan, leaving China, leaving Earth, to settle in the neighborhood of Titan, I tried to obstruct her in every way I could think of, until the whole family had no peace. I dreaded the dreariness of a space station and the over-disinfected inside of a spaceship. Ultimately, my older brother finished reading the detailed rules and premises of Shangri-La Space Station and told me that the space station was jointly designed and managed by the Institute of Zoology and the Tourism Office. The goal was to create a space base containing every ecological niche in the province; once it reached the orbit of Saturn, it would operate there for the long-term.
He pushed up his thin-rimmed glasses. “—Which means, Shangri-La will be able to grow banyans as well as fir trees and raise elephants and Tibetan antelopes at the same time.”
I asked, “When do we head out?”
My mom whirled into action.
My brother thought my mom wanted to move house in order to leave a place she now associated with grief. My older sister said, be real, she couldn’t afford to raise the four of us on Earth. The space station would have top-notch educational facilities, and it needed young people to live and multiply in it. Voluntary relocation was a win-win.
My little sister was more on the nose. She hugged her beloved macaw and said in her childish voice, “Mom isn’t one to stay in place.”
“The composition of the personnel is a problem. We need not just experts, but more people who can become experts. Ideally, they wouldn’t be experts in anything at this time. Without those blinkers on their mindsets, they’ll be able to occupy multiple roles in the future.”
—Wang Chang, Spring 2121, from Kunming, Yunnan
On the last round of the space station assessments, everyone was called in for the interview. The gaze of the man in charge, Director Wang, swept from my mom to my little sister, taking in my older sister’s tattoos, my brother’s tablet, and my little sister’s macaw, before affixing itself to my jam jar.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Caterpillar.” I lifted the jar.
My brother shook his head. My mother looked somewhat stressed.
“You like bugs?”
“That’s right. Out of all the squishy bugs, my favorites are still the fuzzy caterpillars from Kunming. When my dad took me to Beijing, the dangly ones there were all green and bald. They were super ugly, and really tiny too. Jiangxi was okay. I saw a moth caterpillar that had bright blue and orange patterns all over. It looked really weird, but it couldn’t scare me away. Caterpillars are sooo cute.”
My older sister put an arm over my shoulders and lifted her chin, looking down her nose at Director Wang.
“I’m guessing your mother picked out that glass jam jar for you. And she must have made the air holes in the lid for you too.”
“That’s right.”
“And she helps you feed the bugs?”
“I feed the bugs all by myself.” I emphasized, “I’m the one who finds all the leaves.”
Director Wang said to Mom, “Ms. Zhou, I’ll adjust your access level. Once we reach the orbit of Saturn, you’ll still be employed full time in elementary school education for the Saturn living communities. But at the moment, the educational duties in Shangri-La Space Station are light, and by my observation, you also have considerable talent for animal husbandry. It just so happens that Professor Fang of the Zoology Institute is short on staff. You can report there to start.”
“Animal husbandry?” my brother couldn’t resist asking.
“It’s written in the records that you two are biological children, while the two of them are adopted.”
“Just what are you getting at?” My older sister’s temper rose.
“Miss, don’t get the wrong idea. I, for one, am not a nurturing man. Just bringing up one single daughter drove me to exhaustion. Looking at people who can rear cats and dogs and flowers and plants gives me a headache. At first, I couldn’t understand how anyone could raise a whole brood of children. With age, people want peace and quiet. Then I went into the Institute of Zoology, and after twenty years, I’ve reevaluated that opinion. People’s hearts come in different volume capacities. I can fit in a daughter and a cat, and that’s it. Others have room for a pile of children and a pile of grandchildren, and often they can raise mammals, reptiles, and amphibians with just as much innate understanding. Your mother is a broad-hearted woman. In an enclosed space station, raising you few wouldn’t nearly satisfy her capacity.”
The macaw loudly squawked his approval, “That’s right! That’s right!”
“Life originates like blossoms on the same tree, dispersed by the wind, some caressing the hanging curtains and falling upon the bed, others running into fences and dropping into the dung pit.”
—Wang Chang, Spring 2122, from Tengchong, Yunnan
Auntie Fang worked in fruit fly molecular biology and genetics. Tall, boisterous, and plump, she made a striking contrast with Mom. They became bosom buddies at first sight.
Auntie Fang’s son and husband had already gone ahead to Titan. She hadn’t seen them for three years, and she’d have to wait another six to see them again. Nevertheless, she was full of vim and vigor. The first time Mom went on an outing with Auntie Fang, to learn to collect live fruit flies for use on the space station, they brought me along. I saw Auntie Fang lift a corner of her shirt and inject a shot of insulin into her belly, all the while glued to her screen and furiously messaging a friend group.
“My son liked my post!” she whooped. Her son worked as a laborer in outer space, frequently outside the range of civilian communications.
Compared to holing up in a laboratory, Auntie Fang preferred the outdoors. She’d read the Corfu trilogy too; her dream had also been to become a naturalist. Sadly, Earth had no opportunities left for discovering new species. She’d chosen Yunnan and fruit flies.
“This area was fairly isolated during the Ice Age, serving as a refuge for many ancient species, and it has some very complex ecosystems. Just be patient, and you’ll always find some exciting little critters.” The first time we’d met, she’d taken out a white object the size of the box for a deck of cards. She ran her finger along the bottom, and it quickly unfolded. A round frame sprang from the opening, from which hung a thin white nanofiber cotton mesh. The box shell quickly contracted into a cylindrical handle. A high-tech bug net.
She then took me to the insect capture location where she’d planted bait beforehand. Yunnan summers were broiling in the middle of the day, but we still wore protective leather boots and leg wrappings. She used the net to scout ahead, shooing away small critters and snakes. When we arrived in the damp, cool habitat, she stomped amongst the leaves to startle insects, making them fly up, before scooping around with the net, folding it, and closing up the opening with her hand. The small flying insects were thus trapped inside.
“See,” she said, crouching down. “These are fruit flies.”
In the eyes of others, fruit flies were no better than miniature houseflies. In my eyes, they were lively and adorable.
Auntie Fang took a glass straw from who knew where. One end of the straw was fitted with rubber tubing, with a piece of mesh in between, and on the other end of the rubber tubing was a glass mouthpiece. She held the glass mouthpiece between her lips and poked the straw into the gathered opening of the net, sucking the fruit flies she’d identified into the straw one by one. Then she shook out the net, blew the fruit flies gathered against the gauze into a test tube, and capped it with a sponge plug, her sequence of movements well-practiced and fluid. She stuck on a label: Shangri-La Space Station.
She asked me if I wanted to try. In my excitement, I stepped on a snake that hadn’t gotten out of the way in time. It wrapped around my calf and bit me.
Fortunately my leg wrappings were tough, and the snake was small. Its teeth couldn’t find purchase. Auntie Fang seized it speedily at the seven-inch weak spot and dropped it into the transparent lunch box that we’d thoroughly cleared out earlier.
I goggled at her, thinking that not even a wizard could be more impressive. And she imparted her arcane wisdom, saying, space stations could use snake wine too. I told her, my mother knows how to make it. And then I asked her, when we went to space, could I be her student? We struck palms to seal the promise. That year I was ten.
“—I don’t know whether you, who are reading this, have read any of my other books, but if you have, or if you have only read this one with pleasure, it is the animals that have made it enjoyable for you.” Thank you, Professor Fang, for gifting me this book. Durrell will be a companion to pass the time and remember Earth with.”
—Wang Chang, Winter 2123 by Earth reckoning, from Shangri-La
A month before boarding, we passed our last New Year’s Eve on Earth. Auntie Fang, slightly tipsy, announced that Director Wang, who was in charge of Shangri-La’s biosphere, had agreed: she could deliver forty jars of snake wine into the heavens. My mother had also chosen her allotted portion of vegetables and fungi for human and animal consumption: pea shoots, Yunnan zucchini, taro, macrolepiota mushroom, fish mint. What she didn’t say was that she was bringing an extra twenty pounds of fish mint and thirty pounds of macrolepiota packed in oil. She’d secretly shaved off a little from the Napa cabbage cultivation and used the room for pea shoots. By the time she was discovered, it was too late. We’d already passed the orbit of the moon.
It was ten years from Shangri-La Space Station powering up to taking off. When my mom signed up, the ship was already built, and the ecology adjustments inside were reaching their end. We moved out from Kunming one year ahead of time, staying inside the space station, moored near Tengchong, to get used to the environment inside. The closer we came to the launch date, the longer our periods of stay. When we left Earth, I only felt a little sense of loss.
My older sister called it being slow boiled like a frog. She and my brother were the few to grieve. Most of the migrants were too busy with the schedule and the hardships of breaking new ground to sigh at the parting. That went for me too.
As Auntie Fang’s apprentice, I took over the feeding work that should’ve been Mom’s, while she focused on raising plants. I quickly grew familiar with the ecology setup in the space station. Shangri-La had arranged everything based on the distance to the engine and the temperature of the compartment, the propulsion method and level of centrifugal force of each zone. The area close to the engine was designated as rainforest, while the outer centrifugal area was high-altitude plateau climate. Everything else was laid out in steps in between, keeping the species and ecological niches widely spaced apart. It really was like a gigantic sealed terrarium. Other than nuclear and solar power, no energy entered the system, and very little waste was released. Under ideal conditions, it would form a complete suite of Yunnan’s ecology. Inorganic material, organic material, plants, animals—they’d form a closed cycle of creation and consumption.
Like a work of art, like a crystal sphere drifting through outer space, like Shambhala.
Yet in less than three months, Auntie Fang’s snake wine grew bugs. My older brother was right at the age for songwriting and poetry, and his latest creation-in-progress had him craving wine. He’d been eying Auntie Fang’s stash from the beginning; he couldn’t resist stooping to theft. He went to the distillery, threading his way past the fermentation and distillation equipment and into the darkness of the wine cellar. Too guilty to bring a light, he tripped over a jar, and a flock of fruit flies billowed up. Terrified, he’d pulled the alarm. He didn’t know that fruit flies also drank snake wine.
Auntie Fang was equally alarmed when she rushed onto the scene. She’d expected to attract insects, but not this soon, or this many.
She talked things over with Director Wang, and they reached the decision to let Shangri-La’s ecology self-adjust on its own, without human interference. I helped her capture quite a few live specimens; my lips hurt from all the sucking on the glass mouthpiece. As for my brother, the experience scarred him for life. He never drank again.
“Low-probability events happen with inevitable frequency. In outer space, we must carefully remember this law.”
—Wang Chang, Spring 2124 by Earth reckoning, from Shangri-La
The fish mint fruit flies appeared on the first Spring Festival on Shangri-La Space Station. Their Latin name was a pain to say; only my mom and little sister could pronounce it with a cadence that made it sound lovely.
Auntie Fang was careful; she spent two weeks confirming that it was a new species before naming it: fish mint fruit fly. From its genetics and morphology, she determined that they’d mutated from the snake wine fruit flies.
Mom grew even prouder. She’d brewed the snake wine. She’d picked out the fish mint. My older brother thought that Director Wang’s prediction had come true. Mom was more than just animal husbandry staff—she’d spurred the arrival of new species of animals.
The fish mint fruit flies quickly accustomed themselves to the ecology of the space station. They made themselves at home on the veins of the fish mint in the farms, laying eggs and reproducing, doing no real harm to the food chain. The Shangri-La Institute of Zoology couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. There were nearly a hundred space megastations in the solar system, and countless medium- and small-scale ecosystems. Few new species had been developed, and even fewer had spontaneously arisen. The fish mint fruit flies were a rare exception. A few months later, Auntie Fang’s paper appeared in eLife magazine. She summed up the various factors, such as space radiation, the space station environment, and the gene pool of Yunnan wildlife, which implied the logical possibility of a new species arising. My name was listed on the paper. I felt like I’d become a real naturalist.
A new species had appeared due to uncertain factors—to prevent further surprises, the space station began a series of investigations and contingency plans that, after much hassle, didn’t go anywhere. Ultimately, Director Wang made his peace. He announced, “As long as I don’t have to take care of them, the more new species, the better. The plans of men and machines don’t amount to much next to the plans of Heaven. Mother Nature has the broadest of hearts, the greatest capacity for tolerance. You can’t go wrong with following nature’s example.”
“Often one must be free of wants to observe the deepest mysteries.”
—Wang Chang, Spring 2126 by Earth reckoning, from Shangri-La
With the second Spring Festival on Shangri-La Space Station, several new species flew in on the pea shoots Mom had so carefully nurtured. The oyster mushrooms and cordyceps had also nurtured new bugs. Auntie Fang had her hands full. I started helping her perform lab tests, dissections, and gene analysis. The pea shoot fruit flies had mutated from the snake wine fruit flies. The cordyceps fruit flies had mutated from the high-altitude graminivorous fruit flies. They didn’t eat the fruiting body part of the cordyceps—they ate the bug part it grew parasitically out of. I considered them carnivorous insects. The oyster mushroom fruit flies were even more complicated. Auntie Fang had to contact the nematode research team to confirm that the nematodes in the soil had mutated earlier than the fruit flies. Afterward, the mutated population had gotten caught and embedded in the mycelium of the oyster mushrooms, which absorbed their nitrogen compounds. As a result, the oyster mushrooms had begun to secrete new chemicals, attracting a fruit fly population that was previously fond of eucalyptus secretions.
“The entire ecosystem may end up mutating top to bottom,” Auntie Fang warned Director Wang, not without a hint of delight.
Director Wang was a lot more even keeled. “That’s perfectly fine. Species have gone extinct because of human pollution. Today, nature is evolving to make up for past losses. We’ll go with the flow, go with the flow.”
The ecological policy of Shangri-La Space Station was thus decided without a ripple.
I was there that day, carrying a pot containing a small taro plant just starting to flower. I was so fixated on the taro flower that I’d forgotten all about Director Wang and Auntie Fang. I wanted to tell my older sister and brother right away: the taro bud fruit flies and the taro flower fruit flies were mating.
My brother liked reading and literature, loved everything ancient. In Shangri-La, under the supervision of specialists, he’d turned to learning the languages and mythology of minority ethnic groups. My older sister was the opposite. She liked video games, tinkering with machinery, loved everything modern. Upon entering high school, she’d fast-tracked into studying engineering while taking a role at the maintenance department. Due to the tidal wave of mutations among the insects, Mom’s animal husbandry work had become increasingly complicated, and my brother and sister were roped in to help. My brother took care of text classification and recording observations while my sister upgraded the cultivation equipment. They participated profoundly in the evolution of species.
The taro flower fruit flies were a common point of contention. The petals and stamens of the taro nourished one kind of fruit fly; the buds and calyx secretions nourished another. Not only were the two kinds reproductively isolated, but they also looked pretty different. Like Shangri-La’s ecosystems, my brother said. BS, my older sister said, it was just that their reproductive organs didn’t fit together. At that point, my brother would start talking about cultural constructs, my older sister would start talking about natural morphology, I’d be squeezed in between them talking rubbish, my mom would carry my little sister off to somewhere else to eat. She understood us, she said. Confined in the space station, we needed weird topics of conversation to relieve the psychological pressure.
I maintained a strict scientific attitude; I didn’t immediately tell Auntie Fang about the historical moment I’d so briefly witnessed alone. I carried the pot home. I couldn’t find my brother or older sister, only Mom. I told her to grow a few extra plants of the same kind of taro, so I could observe, document, and study the next generation’s inheritance. Mom refused. I only had Auntie Fang’s access level and wasn’t authorized to do experiments in the cultivation area. “This is scientific discovery!” I yelled. “The sort of discovery that can make it into Science Magazine.”
Mom naturally didn’t believe me, but she gave it some serious thought. “Can you borrow some petri dishes from Auntie Fang?” I told her yes. She said, “Then how about you do the observations at home? I’ll make some taro nutrient medium that the fruit flies can eat.”
Mom separately ground up the stamens and buds, creating two types of nutrient medium. I reared the two kinds of fruit fly separately, waited for them to produce offspring, and then, when the offspring were mature, placed the males and females of different species together, had them mate, and placed the larvae into different nutrient media. Something interesting happened. Not only could they mate, but they could also produce fertile offspring. The offspring’s food preferences were determined by the species of the mother. I wrote up a report and turned it in to Auntie Fang. Seeing her surprise and delight was the best reward in Shangri-La. A year later, the paper came out in Nature magazine. Auntie Fang listed me as one of the authors.
But we didn’t have time to celebrate. A meteor in the asteroid belt hit Shangri-La.
“We imposed excessively strict standards on the internal environment of Shangri-La but overlooked the potential for catastrophic disaster coming from the great universe. I should reevaluate my understanding of human adaptability. We must exhibit more tolerance toward the companions around us if we want to venture far into deep space, to adapt ourselves to the universe.”
—Wang Chang, Winter 2127 by Earth reckoning, from Shangri-La
At that time, we were about to welcome our fourth Spring Festival on Shangri-La. We’d received ample resupply at Mars; a new ring of storage compartments surrounded the exterior of the space station. My mom’s cultivation center produced continuous bumper crops, greatly improving the diets of animals and humans alike.
It was as we approached what would’ve been the twelfth month on Earth. Just as people arrived at their posts, something shook the entire station. Every light went out in the living and research areas.
My little sister was trapped in the avian rearing house for two full hours, crying until she was hoarse. By the time my older brother pulled her out, she was shaking all over. I had a bad fright myself, clinging to Auntie Fang. My older sister immediately rushed to the repair frontlines. My mom rerouted the cultivation center’s temperature maintenance resources to make up for the heating shortfall in the living area. By the time normal function was restored, eighty-five percent of the edible plants had been frostbitten into mush.
The hard core of the meteorite had punctured multiple protective layers, obstructing the engine transmission. The one blessing among all the misfortunes was that the ship’s engine core had survived undamaged. Many were injured, though no one died.
After forty-eight hours of repair and inspection, the initial determination was that Shangri-La could still make it to Jupiter for repairs and resupply, then travel to Saturn to resume its role as a space station. The most urgent matter was the lack of food. The emergency rations could barely feed the humans, let alone the animals. This could be the end of Shangri-La’s food web. Our whole family holed up in the living room. What worried me the most wasn’t the fate of the household, but my dreams of becoming a naturalist.
At the all-hands meeting, my mom asked to speak. After two days of discussion with Auntie Fang, with input from my older brother and sister, she’d produced a letter of apology and an emergency food supply report.
At the meeting, Mom unabashedly finished reading out the letter of apology. Silence reigned beneath the stage. The gist of it was, after the last Spring Festival, she’d picked up ecological modeling, and discovered that the cultivation center had more plants and insects than the humans and larger animals could consume. She hadn’t followed proper warehousing procedures; she hadn’t wanted to put in any preservatives or additives.
The Mars resupply had provided several empty bulk storage containers, hanging off the outer rim of the space station. She’d taken all the feed that could’ve been processed into ration reserves and made them into nutrient medium. She’d even registered them as a project, claiming them to be experimental samples for improving nutrient medium. At this time, all this “food” remained completely untouched, in cold storage at the edges of the ecological zones.
Director Wang asked, “What kind of nutrient medium?”
“Mostly for feeding insects, such as fish mint nutrient medium, pea shoot nutrient medium, and taro bud and calyx medium. They’re all edible for humans too. There’s also meat culture medium. Toward the end of last year, our looper caterpillars evolved into something like the ones on Hawaii—they can extend their mouthparts and eat other insects—so I started feeding them meat. Anyway, all of this is edible. I didn’t add preservatives, but I did add yeast, agar, some corn meal, and potato starch. They’ve got proteins and vegetables, all the amino acids. There’s enough to feed everyone until we reach Jupiter. We won’t even need other ships to give us emergency resupply.”
Director Wang asked a further question: “So, for the next half year, we’ll all have to eat nutrient medium?”
Auntie Fang answered that question. “No, we’ll also have to eat the compressed emergency rations. To tell the truth, the defrosted nutrient medium is too good to give it all to humans to eat. We’ve made a plan to input certain portions of the nutrient medium into the various ecosystems all over the space station, to ensure the animals have enough to eat until the plants mature and do what we can for the continued growth of the ecosystems. We had an accident; we can’t just ask for help from the outside world the moment we run into an accident. It goes against the founding principles of the Shangri-La ecosphere.”
Everyone nodded. Auntie Fang’s plan passed unanimously.
So, on New Year’s Eve, the dining table was covered in petri dishes large and small, tall and squat, alternately flat and skinny. We took up ice cream scoops, dipped them into the petri dishes, and dug up nutrient medium of various colors to eat. We’d been eating three weeks of compressed rations and nutrient medium, so we all knew that the nutrient medium tasted better. This was probably the last meal of entirely nutrient medium we were going to have this half year.
After the new year, I discovered several bluebottle butterflies with wings turning from brown to blue on their upper surfaces. An expert from the lepidopteran team confirmed that the wings of butterflies and moths were all turning increasingly colorful and splendid.
In August, we arrived in the orbit of Jupiter. The Jupiter Space Research System placed great importance on Shangri-La’s ecosystems and gave us considerable help. My mom was summoned by the center to take a concentration in animal nutrition. My older brother completed college, receiving his diploma at the Europa Institute. My older sister received her advanced skilled worker certification without having yet graduated. While everyone was gone, and Auntie Fang was busy with the rendezvous, I took my little sister wandering around Shangri-La. For the first time, my sister displayed her incredible talent. She tugged at me, saying, “The birds’ singing changed. They found better things to eat.”
I took her to the ornithology lab. Everyone working there recognized my sister. They told me she’d discovered the change in the birds’ behavior early on. After the incident with the meteorite, plants were short, whereas more insects could feed on the nutrient medium. The green pigeons and weaver finches had therefore begun to turn carnivorous in their diet. Nowadays, the plants were recovering in the ecosystems, but the birds had gained a fondness for new tastes, developing a series of cries to communicate how to catch insects.
The next day, I found Auntie Fang and told her that the birds were mutating. Her eyes left the microscope; her hands set down the dissection pins. She was silent for a moment, then said, “I thought before that yeast, looper caterpillars, and fruit flies evolve quickly because they go through generations quickly, while larger animals would be slower. Looks like things aren’t that simple. Adaptability is a wonderful thing. Maybe it won’t take future generations for mammals to change.”
“Will we change too?” I asked.
“After this year, you’ll be taller than your mother.”
“—The great voiceless and voteless majority who can only survive with our help.” I wish Durrell could’ve lived longer and built his zoo in space. His later years would have been happier that way. Without them, we couldn’t live. In space, not only do they have a vote, but they are also the leaders of nature, while we are only the marginal electorate.”
—Wang Chang, Spring 2129 by Earth reckoning, Shangri-La
The fifth Spring Festival on Shangri-La Space Station went off without a hitch. Director Wang gave a speech: it had been a difficult year, he said; may our ecosystem return to the way it used to be by the next Spring Festival. After his speech, he came down from the stage, but then went back up to add, “Correction, our ecosystem won’t return to the way it used to be. We need to take more care. The meteorite went through the ventilation and contaminated the ecological niches on multiple levels. We need to mentally fortify ourselves in preparation for more complex mutations and evolutions.”
Director Wang was once again prophetic. Fifteen days later, when my older sister went to the zero-gravity area for equipment testing, she discovered two small insects. She recognized them as vine-eating fruit flies. The equipment area wasn’t sterile, but organisms rarely showed up there. By the time she returned to the living area, it was late at night. She stole my bug net and suction equipment, picked up two spare vials, and returned to the zero-gravity area. Early the next morning, she tossed the occupied vials onto the sofa, flopped down, and fell right asleep.
My little sister got up first. She saw the fruit flies, mindlessly banging around and struggling to fly, but couldn’t wake up my older sister or me. Mom happened to be out. She woke up my brother. He saw the label—zero-gravity equipment area—and, taking only my little sister, headed out for the zero-gravity recreational park.
She released the fruit flies from one vial, then removed the sponge plug from the other vial, telling my brother, “See, they look much better when they’re flying, like birds doing a mating dance.” After many years of osmosis, my brother had at last gained some instinct for animal evolution. He forced back the sponge plug and hurriedly used his glasses to scan and record the scattered flight trails of the fruit flies in the zero-gravity environment. Auntie Fang once again received a firsthand report.
In April, springtime on Earth, she made a special trip to our home to perform a 3D holographic presentation. “Insects are divided into three segments, the head, thorax, and abdomen. Adult insects generally have two pairs of wings and six legs. Fruit flies belong to the order Diptera; the hind wings have dwindled to club-like halteres, which normally don’t serve any purpose. But look at the way they move in zero gravity. The halteres are visibly rotating, because in the absence of gravity, or when the direction of gravity is unstable, they need a stronger sense of space and location. Their halteres have evolved. When they fly, their body and limbs rotate with the halteres. I tested every type of fruit fly in the space station—all of their halteres have evolved. We already had the zero-gravity public park, and after the incident with the meteorite, the divides between the zero-gravity zone, the reduced-gravity zone, and the Earth-gravity zone have weakened. The evolution of the fruit flies wasn’t interrupted by the damage the meteorite did to the ecosystems; actually, we sped up the timeline. I have a thought to submit a proposal to Director Wang.
“I trust you all. These five years, you’ve known my work and supported me better than those two in my family—you’re all like my family. I need your advice—”
“Just a sec!” My mom straightened and patted my brother on his slouching back. She had us all sit up tall. “All right. Go ahead.”
“I want to eliminate the sharp divides in gravity between areas and turn the entire space station into a gradient of gravity, similar to how it would be to traverse latitude and altitude, from the Banna Basin to the Tibetan Plateau, only with a much steeper range of change. Right now, in order to imitate the different ecosystems on Earth, the divisions between ecological niches are too fixed and unnatural, or, in other words, unbefitting the environment of outer space, the ‘natural’ state of the space station. I believe that only a smooth transition of gravity can create a space that allows everything organic and inorganic to freely exchange resources, grow, and evolve.”
Having spoken, she seemed apprehensive.
We expressed our approval raucously.
Auntie Fang’s proposal gave Director Wang a terrible shock. For several days he shrank away, before recognizing that an individual’s policy decision was wholly unable to resist nature’s demonstrated history of radicalism. He surrendered. He forwarded the proposal to his higher-ups and received enthusiastic approval. After the meteorite incident and the evolution of the animals on board, the higher-ups already considered Shangri-La an enormous experimental ecosphere. The Zoology Institute and the Engineering Department spent half a year completing the gravity gradient demonstration.
On the first day of the year, by lunar calendar reckoning, the gravitational sluices of Shangri-La were to open. The entire station was full of restlessness and excitement. The engineering department dismantled the barrier that separated the outer area of the southwest wing from the inner area, converting it into an enormous rectangular open space. Director Wang pressed two buttons, dark blue and dark green.
The entire station sank into silence. Everyone was watching the numerical distributions change, the black-to-white range of different gravitational zones ticking constantly until the once-clear demarcations between them blurred away.
Thirty minutes later, the insects began to find their bearings and migrate. Mom pointed at the banyan trees in the low-gravity areas. The supple aerial prop roots, which had yet to plant themselves into the soil and become sturdy, woody trunks, started to drift in all directions. “They’ll become lighter and airier,” Mom muttered to herself, beginning to consider her new workload. The others eagerly went to explore the gravitational transition areas between floating and falling.
My brother summed it up: “Really, it’s humans who are the most adaptable of all.”
In the next two years, the ecological systems of Shangri-La experienced unprecedented growth. The incident with the meteorite had accelerated the renewal, thinning the messy tangle of existing ecological relationships, so that afterward, as flora and fauna sought survival, they developed behaviors to adapt to the steep-gravitational-gradient environment.
“At night, Saturn comes, and holds out its hand.”
—Wang Chang, Winter 2132 by Earth reckoning, Spring by Saturn reckoning, from Shangri-La
In the twelfth month of the eighth year, we finally arrived at Saturn.
The space station gradually entered orbit. The enormous gas giant cast a long shadow, shading ring after orbiting ring. Right then, I suddenly remembered Dad, and a story he’d read to me. The explorer in the story had lived during the twentieth century. Arriving at the North Pole, he’d sat on the just-melting broken ice of late spring to early summer: the sea stretched as far as the eye could see, covered all over in broken ice. He said he’d thought of the rings of Saturn.
The rings of Saturn were also made of icy debris, several kilometers broad. If you sat on the broken ice and gazed as far as you could, beside the endless dark vault of space above your head and below your feet, the brightest source of light would be that line of endless broken ice. Dad had said that, out of all the solar system, he’d most wanted to go to Saturn. After eight years, I finally discovered what my father had wished for.
When the space station followed its trajectory to graze past the rings of Saturn, I had the fortune of seeing the astronomical-scale ice glide past in front of my eyes, while behind me, the plants and animals of Shangri-La grew riotously. Vines freely extended tendrils. Long-armed apes clung on to the vines, swinging upward, and upward again.
In that moment, I knew that I would venture deeper into the universe.
That was my ninth Spring Festival on Shangri-La.
The space station didn’t immediately merge with Saturn’s ecological assembly. Due to the evolution and changes in animal behavior inside the station, we underwent strict quarantine. Saturn central command specially built a small-scale space station as a point of interaction.
Auntie Fang was part of the first batch there; she’d gained a sweetly smiling little granddaughter. They spoke to each other through a glass wall through the intercom. Our family was the last batch to leave the space station. The five of us pressed against the glass, looking at the bustling Saturn natives on the other side.
Mom said, “We’re finally here.”
My thoughts had drifted elsewhere.
She noticed. She had to lift her arm to reach my hair.
She went on tiptoes and gave my hair a ruffle. Quietly, she said, “If you leave ahead of time toward Pluto, you’ll be spared most of the quarantine procedure here.”
“—It is up to everyone to try to prevent the awful desecration of the world we live in, which is now taking place, and everybody can help in this in however a humble capacity. I am doing what I can in the only way that I know, and I would like your support.” The Zhous’ youngest son is preparing to leave the solar system. He’s been a fan of Durrell since he was a kid. I believe the voyage of Shangri-La simultaneously served as a reminder to him and me. To bring nature to other corners of the universe, to live and multiply, is another way to resist the desecration. I’m grateful for his continued support.”
—Wang Chang, Spring 2133 by Earth reckoning, Spring by Saturn reckoning, from Shangri-La
Five years later, in spring by Earth reckoning, I arrived at the Kuiper belt. I opened up a frozen, meticulously concocted nutrient medium feast, celebrating the first Spring Festival I would spend alone. After defrosting, a little fruit fly came crawling beside the fish mint nutrient medium, wagging its halteres. I decided to share my meal with it.
I received a video message. My brother wrote the script, my older sister filmed, my younger sister provided a rich symphony of birdsong, and my mother gave a rambling account of their New Year celebration.
The Shangri-La Gravity Gradient Ecological Park had officially opened. Director Wang had come over to be the park manager. He continued to emphasize the narrowness of his heart; he only knew how to govern through inaction, while Auntie Fang was the real executive power. She’d made it a real grand opening. Flocks of birds flew from high gravity to low gravity, their flying posture and paths of motion fluidly changing. Golden-banded and silver-banded kraits snaked and swayed their bodies in zero gravity, forming helixes like DNA chains. Herds of elephants lightly came out of the bush; a baby elephant trumpeted water into the air, playing with the spheres of water with its nose. The Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys’ radiantly golden-furred offspring had already learned to somersault backward. A South China tiger leaped into the air, waving its tail like a rudder to balance itself. It slid its scapulae, extending its torso like flowing water, returning from the weightless zone back to its kingdom of gravity. It was truly beautiful.
My younger sister had just graduated and gone straight into the Ornithology Foundation. My mother had become the park’s mammal-feeding manager. In my brother’s words, she’d finished the work of rearing humans, and gone on to the grand project of rearing animals. He, in the end, had inherited Dad’s work, becoming an educator. My older sister had already arrived on Uranus to help build a new ecology base.
“I want to go too,” Mom said at the end. “That planet rotates on its side, so you see the ring flat on, like a halo around it. By the time you’re back, that place is going to be a lot more interesting.”
A glistening tree frog hopped onto her shoulder, extended its tongue, and ate the giant firebug she’d helped Auntie Fang culture.
“It evolved again!” she complained.
I held back a laugh.
The transmission ended. Once again, I faced the dark universe on my own.
But I still had my little companion.
The animals would continue to evolve. One might travel far, but home was where the heart was. I would be forever grateful to the family and animals that nature had bequeathed me.
Originally published in Chinese in Non-exist, February 15th, 2019 as part of the “2019 Science Fiction Spring Festival Gala.”