Tales of the End of the Century

It was almost dark when the jeep drove out of the old industrial area. The shadows of the cooling towers stretched longer than when they arrived, extending all the way to the gravel road outside the factory gate. Tie Niu parked the jeep at the gate and let the three men get in. The man carrying the jar sat in the middle of the back seat, clutching a rearview mirror, the mirror face down on his knee. The tall man in the old military overcoat sat to his left, the sole of his right shoe worn down to a thin heel. The woman from the brick kiln sat to his right, holding her enamel mug in her arms, the dented side facing outwards.

Bai Ye sat in the passenger seat, watching them through the rearview mirror. None of the three spoke, but their hands were all on the same thing—three enamel mugs resting side-by-side on the floor in the middle of the back seat. None of the mugs had any markings on their bottoms, and each had a small chipped piece of enamel. The taller mug was chipped at the rim, the one held by the person holding it was chipped at the bottom edge, and the woman's mug had a dented rim that had been repaired with thin wire. The three mugs were of different ages and different degrees of damage, but when placed together, they formed a perfect circle.

Bai Ye recalled the rows of jars deep in Old Wei's mine, and Old Wei's words when he handed him the enamel mug—"You're no longer just a mirror for yourself; you can help others stand firm." Now he understood what those words meant. It wasn't a metaphor; it was a fact. Your actions, your frequency, your very existence, would be perceived by someone still struggling in the cracks. No teaching, no explanation needed. You simply walk in front, and those behind will find their way by following your light. Just like Old Wei, deep in the mine, turned the enamel mug upside down and placed it in the center of the kerosene lamp—he no longer needed the mirror himself, but it was there for those who came after. Those who came later would see the engravings on the back of the mirror and know that someone had walked this way, that this path was passable. Bai Ye withdrew his hand from the rearview mirror and looked down at his enamel mug.

After the car turned onto the provincial highway, Lan Susu turned on the oscilloscope and placed it on her lap. The screen no longer displayed three signals. The three signals from the old industrial area had transformed from faint, fluctuating dots into stable waveforms, slowly moving behind the jeep towards Yushugou. Further away, several more signals appeared—one towards the border farm, two towards the abandoned transfer station, and another hidden in the background noise at the edge of the wasteland beyond the border, appearing and disappearing but never truly vanishing. She scanned the different directions several times with the antenna, then looked down and added the newly appearing coordinates to the map. The faint signal sources scattered along the edge of the old Aurora Project files were converging on Yushugou one by one from the north, west, and further beyond the border. They had no car, no map, no oscilloscope; they were simply following the reflective rope ends left by the gray-clad man and Vasily on the road, the chalk arrows drawn on the wall by white doves, and the enamel mug that Old Wei had someone take away, inching their way in the same direction. They didn't know how much longer they had to walk, but they knew someone was waiting for them.

Bai Ye saw it too. After entering the resonant realm, he could distinguish the frequency characteristics of specific signals in the background noise, and now he could perceive them without closing his eyes—those signals weren't newly appeared; they had always been there, only they were too far away before, too far for his perception to reach. Now they were getting closer and closer, not pulled towards him by him, but moving towards him on their own. Each signal had a different frequency, but each was moving in the same direction. Elm Gully. He suddenly realized that from the moment he entered the resonant realm, his consciousness frequency, like the kerosene lamp in Old Wei's cave, began to continuously radiate a kind of extremely stable fluctuation. He himself couldn't see this halo, but those still on the road could perceive it—they weren't being pulled by any external force, but simply found themselves suddenly able to see their own fingers in the darkness because a light had appeared in the distance. He remembered the sentence Sergei had written in red ink on the back of the subject list—"Phase Five. They don't need me anymore. They have learned to light each other's way."

By the time the car reached Yushugou, it was completely dark. Old Hu had hung a kerosene lamp at the gate of his yard, its shade polished to a shine. Another lamp hung among the branches of the jujube tree, its light filtering through the newly sprouted leaves and scattering across the pile of pebbles, making each pebble appear warm and lustrous. Old Hu squatted on the threshold, smoking, an enamel mug resting at his feet. He knew someone was coming today—when he watered the jujube tree that afternoon, the pebbles he had moved from the blue ink note Bai Ye had placed on the stone table had suddenly created a new space. He stood up and glanced towards the gate, just in time to hear the sound of wheels rolling over gravel coming from the direction of the poplar stump in the distance.

Tie Niu parked the jeep at the gate and turned off the engine. The man carrying the enamel mug was the first to get out. He stood at the gate and looked inside for a long time before taking the rearview mirror off his knees and placing it on the stone table. The tall man followed, getting out of the car and squatting by the threshold, taking off his old cloth shoe and emptying sand from his right foot. The woman placed the enamel mug on the stone table, glanced back at the direction of the cooling tower, then looked at the jujube tree in front of her and said, "There are lights here too." Old Hu stood up and walked into the yard, placing the enamel mug on the stone table. The stone table was already full of mugs—Zhao Zhiyuan's white porcelain cup from the supply and marketing cooperative, the young man surnamed Ji's new cup with half a ring of glue still stuck to the rim, the old mugs with chipped porcelain from the three people in the old industrial area, and Bai Ye's enamel mug. Each one was different, and each one was placed on the same stone table.

He took three new enamel mugs from the east wing and placed them on the stone table. He had bought the mugs from the town's supply and marketing cooperative a few days ago; each one had been carefully washed, the bottom spotless, without tea stains or chalk dust. He said these were for you; keep the old ones if you can't bear to throw them away, and the new ones are fine too. He paused, then added that the dates were already green, and the first batch could be picked in a little over a month. Then everyone could have a taste.

After dinner, the lights in the courtyard were still on. Lan Susu placed the oscilloscope on the stone table. All the signals on the screen were now focused in the same direction. The slow signals coming from the north, west, and even further overseas were still slowly converging towards the jujube tree. She registered the names of the three newcomers on a new page of the subject roster, drew a small circle in the direction of the old industrial area with a pencil, and then extended a dotted line towards the wasteland overseas. Those coordinates were not fixed; each one was moving extremely slowly in the same direction—not being pulled there by someone, but recognizing the direction of the road and gradually moving towards this direction.

Bai Ye took out the list of participants for Project Aurora from the house and turned to the last page. The names marked "transferred" had originally been blank, but some of those blanks had now been filled in—Old Wei had etched the years he spent deep in the mine with his fingernail; the man in gray and Vasily had brought back several sets of dates from participants scattered across the country during their numerous journeys north; and Lan Susu had written the arrival date of each newcomer to Elm Tree Gully below their corresponding name. Dozens of names were still blank, but they were no longer empty spaces with nowhere to go—some people were on their way.

He placed the list on the stone table, weighing one corner down with an enamel mug. A breeze blew in from outside the courtyard gate, causing the water in the mug to ripple gently. The moonlight had risen higher, and the shadow of the jujube tree slowly shifted from one side of the courtyard wall to the other. He looked down at the mirror on the stone table, which he had just retrieved. The engravings on the back of the mirror overlapped with the feeling he had when he first touched it in the backup vault. He suddenly remembered the enamel mugs that covered the canvas in Old Wei's mining area—each mug's bottom was covered with the same character, but the pressure applied was different: some strokes were heavy, chalk dust embedding into the enamel's pores; others were light, so light that the headlamp beam had to be shone sideways to see the outline. All the mugs were covered with the same character, but the force used to write that character on each mug was different. Those who wrote heavily no longer needed the mugs when they left; they simply left them on the canvas for later generations to see—look, someone wrote this character here. Later generations, seeing the writing, knew they were not the first, nor would they be the last.

He knew that more pebbles would be placed under this jujube tree. Not by himself, nor by Tie Niu, Lao Hu, or the man in gray—but by those still on their way. They were on the edge of the desolate borderlands, under the iron sheds of abandoned transfer stations, in old outposts deep in birch forests, walking step by step toward this courtyard. Each person carried a pebble in their pocket—some pebbles picked up from the border riverbank, some igneous debris scraped from the gravel slopes of mining areas, some cement blocks dug from the entrances of abandoned factories. Everyone was heading toward this jujube tree. Their pebbles would be placed on the same pile of pebbles at different evenings and different mornings. The gray igneous debris rock placed at the very top of the pile would be surrounded by more pebbles, washed by rain, and scorched by the sun.

He looked down at the pebble atop the pile, the one Old Wei had entrusted to him. He'd never used a pile of pebbles as a marker—but now, looking at the pebbles of varying sizes and colors huddled together, he suddenly felt they resembled the names being filled in one by one on the last blank page of the Aurora Project's roster. Every pebble seemed to be saying the same thing. Not "I'm here," but "I'm on my way."