Back to Myan

Regina Kanyu Wang

(translated by Shaoyan Hu)

The flyer stops its engine thirty meters above the ice and curves gently around under the combined effect of inertia and gravity, braking at the last moment to float one meter above the surface. The landing gears push out from the bottom of the flyer, securing a steady touchdown on the frozen water.

Kaya leaps out of the pilot’s module and checks the underside of The Flying Fish. The three landing pads, shaped like discs, have fixed themselves tightly on the surface of the ice. As she lightly pats the body of the ship, her lips curl into a smile. She has prepared those gears specifically for this journey. Made by Kaya, safe and reliable.

I’m back, Myan, she thinks silently.

Kaya was brought up in a state college of the Union. Although the Union waived the education charges for the interplanetary refugees and offered medical insurance with attractive discounts, the expenses of livelihood and maintenance were never low. Not until last year did Kaya manage to pay off the low-interest loans and acquire the license for jobs in outer space, the frontier of the Union’s expansion, a place for future colonials. The work there was usually tough and hazardous but not without profits. Kaya needed money, but that was not the only reason she had submitted her resume to the committee of Project Saion.

She wanted to go back and see Myan. Eleven planets orbited Saion, and one of them had given birth to sentient beings. In other words, in Saion’s solar system, only her native planet Myan had had sentient inhabitants.

Myan is covered with ice. After tightening the ties of her blade shoes, Kaya kicks back with her right foot and begins to skate.

The two blades of her shoes glide through the ice one after another, while Kaya enjoys the pleasure that comes with speed. As she moves through the wind, it stings her face a little, but that does not matter. She plunges on even faster.

The icy surface of Myan is as smooth as mirror, without even a small bump. The gravity, eighty-five percent of the Union’s, and the low friction grant her the feeling of freedom and swiftness that has been missing for too long. For the moment, she is the queen on the ice. Every inch of her exposed skin senses the air flow. She lightly touches the ice with the tip of her right blade, and springs up with a push supported by the rear inside of her left blade. After spinning twice in the air, she drops down and slides on.

When Kaya started to practice skating, she was already in her adulthood. Having missed the best age to learn, she had to step onto the rink with the younglings. Tumbles and injuries were familiar to her, but it was a real agony to see the younger ones master the tricks faster than she did. When all the others were asleep, she went to the rink alone to practice at midnight. She jumped and spun, jumped and spun, repeating the movements again and again, seeking perfection. At the time, she was not even sure if she would have a chance to set foot on the frosty coat of Myan.

Kaya barely remember the time before leaving Myan because she had been too young. Her only memory of her native planet was water. Her people had once lived and grown in the sea that covered the entire world, swimming joyfully, worrying about nothing, until a flaming tongue of Saion swept by too closely. The water temperature rose. Those who survived herded the fishes to the deeper sea on the opposite side of the sun. However, they could not escape the scalding heat from above. The Union noticed the anomaly in Saion and found signs of intelligent life on Myan by chance when the planet moved to the perihelion. They sent an emergency rescue fleet from the nearest location. But it was too late. When they arrived, only three out of every thousand Myan natives were still alive to be evacuated. Kaya’s parents died in the disaster.

The Union brought her and a few hundred of her kin to a fully-developed colony, where they were educated and re-engineered to blend into the communities in the Union. Having learned Myan’s history in school, Kaya tried to recall the discomfort and terror of being surrounded by hot water, but nothing came up. Biology told her that Myanese would not develop full sensations until they were four years old. She had left Myan at the age of three, and the cool blue water was the only thing that left an impression on her mind.

Now, skating on the ice reminds her of the pleasant feeling of swimming, an experience she cannot find in walking or running. It makes her feel buoyant, as if lifting to the sky. With a thrust using the front outside of her left blade, she jumps, rotating anticlockwise once, twice, thrice. She has done it! A kind of clarity settles in her mind, as fresh as the Myan air, cleansed of any darkness, and with that clarity, she descends. However, when the blades come down to the surface, she feels a stabbing pain in her right knee and stumbles to the ground.

That again. Kaya sits on the ice and rubs her knee. The relapse comes sooner than expected, probably due to the planet’s coldness. She had had her pair of bioprostheses checked before the journey. The medic suggested replacing the parts as soon as possible, and that she should keep regular maintenance and avoid strenuous exercise before the upgrades. But she could not afford the replacement and has to wait due to a shortage of money. Besides, her new job could not be postponed. This is her only chance to go back to Myan and she would not miss it.

Her pair of bioprostheses is more than ten years old, with minor malfunctions from time to time. She barely keeps them in working condition on her medical insurance, but upgrading them is beyond her income. The bioprostheses were gifts from the Union government, given to her when she left Myan. In order to help the Myanese refugees adapt to life on land and settle down in the Union, the Refugee Agency funded the bioprostheses to replace their fishtails. Kaya did not remember the surgery except for a prolonged dream. She woke up as a citizen of the Union, with two legs below her. Learning to walk was as difficult as learning the common language of the Union. Her first few years on land were burdened with physical pain and mental frustration. Myanese use very few phonetic elements for conversations above the water surface. Most of the time, they communicate in the water, using body language. Kaya had long forgotten how to use Myanese languages, but from the short footage shown in her class, it looked like elegant dancing, the kind for stage performance.

She gently strokes her gills, which are in a degenerated state. That she has not been locked in a zoo or sold to a circus is enough to make her feel lucky. The Union has given her legs and citizenship, along with the opportunities for education and a career. She has nothing to complain about. She just wants to visit her native world again.

In recent months, Myan appeared in her dreams with increasing frequency. In those dreams, she had a fishtail again, swimming in the endless planet water of Myan. She hunted the untamed fish with knives made of shells, enjoyed her share of delicious fish meat, and then came up to the surface. There, in the phosphorus light of the Algae Moon, she prayed to the Goddess of Myan, thanking Her for the gifts.

Later, as Kaya twisted around to dive again, she was attracted by a fuzzy glow in the shadow of the Slate Moon. There should not be any light there. She quietly swam toward the glow, taking care not to disturb the currents too much. Closer still, she could now see a figure inside the brightness, slowly turning around as if it had sensed her. However, just before Kaya could make out the details, she woke up.

The dream first came to her three years ago, and she did not think much of it. However, the same scene played out in her dream again a year ago.

Last year, she got a job with Project Saion. She would use a spaceship to tug the membranes around the last opening of the sphere and complete the envelopment of the sun. Started in the second year of the disaster, the project was to prevent Saion’s sudden bursts from destroying everything in the system and to collect energy effectively. The plan was to encompass the sun with a certain type of membranes, which could capture most of the Saion power output and convert it to electricity for storage while the rest of the energy spilled out from where the membranes were absent. The surface temperature of Myan dropped drastically, and the water became ice. The surviving native people had been evacuated, but other organisms remained underwater as the ice cover expanded and encased them in an enormous ice coffin. The night that Kaya received the letter of appointment, she again dreamed of Myan and again woke up before making out the figure in the glowing light. Since then, the dream visited her repeatedly. She decided to look for an answer on Myan.

The preparation was easy. As a pre-eminent pilot and mechanic, she did not have to struggle to make the necessary modifications to The Flying Fish so it could land on ice. The base camp of Project Saion was only three standard hours away from Myan. The day after she arrived at the camp, Kaya took off with the excuse of flight practice and surveying the surrounding areas. She headed for Myan right away. After all, who would stop a refugee from paying her respects to a devastated home world.

Who would have known that she has to sit helplessly on the ice all alone? Now that skating is no longer an option, Kaya removes the blades from her boots. Fortunately, she has geared up with dual-purpose ice boots. The tiny barbs embedded in the soles can prevent slips over the ice. She stands up and limps forward. Since she is not moving as fast as before, Kaya can observe the environment more closely. Myan has no solid land. Once, it was a planet full of water, now completely covered in ice. There are no mountains or ravines or rivers. When the surface temperature dropped years ago, even the most violent waves calmed down despite the tidal force of the two moons. Afterwards, everything fell into silence.

Kaya has no idea where to go. She believes she will find something on her native planet. She looks down through the translucent ice cover and notices a dark shadow. Shifting her weight to the left, she crouches down carefully and inspects. The shadow is shorter than her palm, a small fish with a rather plump body. Its two short pectoral fins splay out ridiculously, as if swimming was very hard. The poor little thing was trying to escape the coldness even in the last moments of its life. Kaya rises to her feet, walking awkwardly.

A dozen steps away, there are more shadows, a school of fish or something similar to fish. They are as long as half her fingers. They look like fish but covered with dark grey carapace. There are about forty to fifty of them, and they seemed to share the same urgency as the plump fish to hurry forward. They were heading in the fish’s direction too. Why such a fuss in the last moments? Was it a coincidence that they were all going to the same place? Kaya adjusts her course and follows the group of fish.

Along the way, she encounters various creatures trapped beneath the ice cover: a fish with caudal fins spreading like rainbows, a cluster of organisms resembling algae, and jellyfish with a dense collection of oral arms shaped like hooks. Without any exception, they were all trying tenaciously to reach the same location before all the water was frozen. What were they looking for? Or escaping from?

Darkness closes in. Saion hangs in the sky like a dull amber disk. If Kaya does not look carefully, Saion’s blurred edge makes it difficult to tell the sun from the background. In the feeble light of Saion, Kaya’s body casts a faint and elongated shadow over the ice. It is becoming more and more difficult to observe the creatures beneath the ice cover.

A large dark patch catches her attention and she finds a bigger shadow near the surface. She advances a few steps, coming to the top of the shadow. Compared to where she saw the other creatures, the ice here feels thicker. Kaya is standing over a tail, which is wider than the distance between her fingertips when she opens her arms to the sides. While Kaya walks on, the shadow becomes narrower where the tail meets the body and widens again after that point. She moves to the middle of the enormous form where its width reaches the maximum. Her own long shadow is obscured by the darkness below. Her heart feels cold and pained, as if pierced by an icy blade. She squats down before kneeling on both knees. Slowly, she leans forward, her forearms touching the ice and the left side of her face pressing against the surface. Coldness seeps into her heart through the fabrics of her clothes and her exposed skin, but it is not capable of freezing her tears. In the remaining Saion light, Kaya cries.

Before leaving the project base, Kaya had applied for thirty hours off, of which one third has already passed. As Saion is now below the horizon, the temperature drops quickly. The light of the Algae Moon is weaker than it was in her dream, but the ice reflects more light than the water would have done. Guided by that phosphorus glow, Kaya moves faster. Whatever those creatures had sought, their lives were doomed. Once, Kaya tries to deviate from the course, but she finds other creatures moving along a diverted route that undoubtedly led to the same destination. It feels as if there was a hole in that place and everything in the water was flushed toward it, albeit they were gradually frozen in the process. The shadows under the water become denser. Although the Algae Moon is not bright enough to illuminate their details, Kaya knows clearly where she is treading. The answer is close.

The Slate Moon represents the extremity of darkness. Kaya remembers the views of Myan described in her textbook. That chapter was meant for the descendants of Myanese natives and not in the scope of general exams. Nevertheless, Kaya had read it many times. Apart from the water body that covers the entire planet, having two moons is another important Myan feature. The natives had dubbed the two natural satellites as Algae Moon and Slate Moon. The Algae Moon is larger and selectively reflects green light while absorbing all other frequencies of visible light. The reflected light reaching Myan is a phosphorous green. The Slate Moon is smaller but denser, absorbing all colours of the visible spectrum. These descriptions match what she saw in her recurring dreams.

So far, the light of the Algae Moon has been with her all along and now it is time for the Slate Moon. As the Slate Moon blocks the Algae Moon, she breathes deeply and steps forward, as if crossing the boundary between light and shadow. Once she is in the darkness, Kaya no longer looks for the creatures below. Instead, she follows a route that has already been determined.

The blackness of night blinded her sight, but her other senses become more acute. Kaya simply closes her eyes. In the distance, she hears booming waves, clashes of weapons, and curt syllables of Myanese Verbal. There is a faint smell of blood, of gunpowder, of something burnt. It is the smell of war. Kaya opens her eyes abruptly.

Not far away, there is the glowing light from her dreams. While walking toward it, Kaya feels a strange eagerness accompanied by great serenity. Coming close, she finds no figure inside the glow. There is nothing but an icy blue light, pulsing slowly, its intensity changing slightly. It is taller than a human and undulates gently with the pulse. Kaya puts her left hand into the light, and to her surprise, finds warmth in there. She reaches further, sending in her forearm and elbow. Finally, her entire body falls in.

She drops into the water, the blue light still pulsing regularly above the surface. The water is not cold; its temperature suggests the Warm-Stream Season.

The Warm-Stream Season? Why does she remember that now?

Because you are a daughter of Myan. A voice comes into her mind.

Who is this? Kaya is puzzled, but the voice sounds soft and firm. Her alarm and anxiety ease up.

Look at this. It is not answering her question.

Kaya senses the currents are trying to guide her downward. She swings her tail, diving into its depth. Since when does she have a fishtail again? This must be a dream, one that feels especially real.

For some inestimable time, she swims along, until a fluorescent presence appears ahead. It is a temple of luminescent corals. Kaya draws closer, pushing aside the seaweeds in front of the door and entering the temple. The interior walls are brighter than the ones outside, illuminating the hall. A swarm of tiny shrimps swims past her, heading outside through the gaps in the coral walls. Creatures still live here.

The warmth here will not last for long, but the little creatures are oblivious to it. The voice is helpless and sad.

Kaya gazes around the place. It is a room with seven walls. A rack stands against each of the walls except the one with the door. The racks reach the ceiling. Each rack holds glittering, translucent balls of various sizes.

These are the memories of Myan, from the first glacial, Natalesian, to the last, Tribalenan, and to the interglacial after that, which is the present time, an age of long and gracious summer, even spurring the birth of intelligent life. The fourth glacial should not have come so early. The voice sounds a bit unfocused as if lost in its endless memories.

Kaya moves to the right-most rack and takes down the last sphere. It is very light, its gravity probably mitigated by buoyancy. Kaya prods the surface of the ball lightly with her nose and it gives way a little, like a bubble in the water. She plunges into the sphere.

She is looking at a floating ice above the water. The Myanese had gone, and the remaining creatures had sensed the unusual change in the climate. Light and heat from Saion was declining. Ice covers formed all over the surface, gradually expanding downwards. There was only one place in this planet still holding warmth, to which all living things were migrating. They might exhaust themselves on the way. They might get caught within the frozen ice and turn into ornaments that would never decompose. The few who were lucky enough to arrive still had to go deeper to seek more heat. Some could not bear the heavy weight of water and gave up, submitting themselves to a frigid death.

Kaya emerges from the bubble, tears in her eyes. She puts back the memory sphere and holds up the second last one.

The Union had proposed generous offers. The extraction of rare particles from the sun Saion would change the Myan ecology. In exchange, the native people of Myan would migrate to other planets. However, the natives refused to leave their birthplace and even more unwilling to have their planet become a frozen world forever. So the war between the Union and the Myanese began. The outcome should have been obvious. The Union had well-trained troops, equipped with advanced weapons and warships, while the children of Myan could only muster weapons made of stones and shells and rely on water for shelter.

The Union had not meant to kill in the beginning. Not wanting to take any lives, the Union soldiers simply tried to disperse the natives with gunshots when they attacked. But the Union gave up passive defence after one violent night, during which three Union soldiers were killed by the natives in a raid. They did not care for the lives of the natives anymore and the war heated up. Even at this stage, the Union still restricted themselves to personal combat. Again, the familiar noises: clashes of weapons, shouting in Myanese language. The familiar smells of blood and gunpowder. Union warships retrieved their fallen soldiers, and the perished natives sunk into the water.

Finally, on a night when the two moons overlapped and all electronic devices blacked out, a team of natives approached a Union warship from below and coerced dozens of acid squids to spray their corrosive ink over the bottom of the ship. The warship went down, together with all the soldiers aboard, sinking to their watery death.

The next day, all the Union ships floating on the water withdrew. Before the natives could celebrate their victory, sudden explosions blew them into pieces. The Union carrier in orbit opened fire with a weapon of mass destruction. Almost all the adult natives were killed. The elders came up from the deep water with the younglings to surrender. After extracting a promise from the Union to keep the young ones safe, the elders killed themselves with the shell knives on their belts. The Union fleet left with the last native people of Myan.

Kaya is trapped in the bloody memories, her heart torn. She puts down the sphere and curls up, retching. So that was the disaster. That was the truth about the Myanese refugees rescued by the Union. But why? She screams silently.

For the fortunes of Saion they craved, Myan was merely a sacrifice. The voice speaks again.

Couldn’t they just look for another target? There are many other stars like Saion in the universe, aren’t there? Kaya still cannot understand.

There is only one Saion, just like there is only one Myan. The children of Myan would not relinquish their native planet, but the Union did not wish to give up their hard-won treasure either. There is immense sorrow in that voice.

Kaya bites down on her lower lip and picks up the third sphere, which is the smallest but the most iridescent.

It was a clear day. In the golden light of Saion, several natives relaxed on the surface. A female adult was carrying a youngling and softly humming some simple tunes. The youngling’s eyes glistened, and its tail swung with the rhythm of the song. The water nearby rippled. A male adult emerged. He moved closer to the female, holding up a freshly captured fish. She reached out her left arm in response to his embrace. After taking over the fish with her left hand, she tore out meat with her teeth and fed the child. He watched them fondly, and she met his eyes, their entwined tails stirring up waves below the water.

Some of Kaya’s memories come back. They are—

Your parents. They loved each other deeply, and they loved you as much. The voice is full of tenderness now.

Kaya is crying again, her tears dissipating into the water. May I take away these memories?

They have been in your heart all the time. No one can take away the memories from the children of Myan. And always, Myan remembers. Kaya’s grief subsides in the steadiness of the voice.

“You are—Goddess of Myan,” Kaya suddenly realizes.

Many address me this way, but I am no goddess. I am Myan, the planet. The voice peters out, and Kaya falls into the blue light again.

When she awakens, Kaya finds herself lying on the ice, bathing in the faint light of Saion. She is cushioned on sundried seaweeds. The pain in her right knee has receded as she rises to her feet. Blades mounted onto the shoes again, Kaya skates toward The Flying Fish.

She greedily breathes in the Myan air, remembering its smell. She dreams of diving into the Myan water, to let the brine wash through her mouth and out from her gills. No chance now. She has to go back to The Flying Fish and, subsequently, the project base.

Three standard days later, she takes off as scheduled, flying to Saion with the membranes meant to close the last opening. But instead of carrying them to the designated position, she wrecks the framework, pushing it toward Saion, making the broken membranes drape down and point to the blazing star. Before the base realizes what is happening, she flies the ship into Saion. She knows that her ship alone will not cause enough turbulence, but fuelled by the chain reactions, the fiery tongues of Saion will consume the membranes and framework gradually. Eventually, enough light and heat will return to Myan. Ice will melt, releasing frozen creatures. Waves will surge again and the gravity of the two moons will cause tides to rise and fall. Planet Myan, her homeland, will come back to life again.