The Raft: A Novel (19 page)

The vehicle lifted—I could feel it in my gut before I could see it—and as the ceiling of the room slid apart I saw rays of light.

I tilted my head. I had never seen it or felt it before, but I knew what I was feeling and seeing.

The sun. Rays of natural light. The powerful, incomparable sun blessed my face and I ascended slowly into it. This was the real sun, the one that had lassoed the planets, wrenched trees from the dust, man from the oceans. It felt like the real sun. The tower engineers had designed and constructed the sun-orb to generate heat and light, but this sun did something more than all that.
It
had designed and constructed
us,
and inexplicably, I knew the difference.

Soon, the pod had emerged entirely from under the ground. I could see the boundless expanse of brown and orange desert sand. The sky was bluer than I had dreamed. The two peaks I had been able to see through my bedroom window were revealed as being two anonymous tips on a horizon of distant peaks … but the sand! The kilometres of flat sand! There was nothing out there. The desert stretched in every direction except one: directly behind me. There the glass and steel monolith that was Huang-345 sprang from the dirt, cementing itself just as firmly somewhere up in the clouds.

The pod stopped rising and was now only humming and hovering. I had risen like Lazarus but had not gone anywhere yet.

Yet.

Without warning, the pod accelerated from its spot, racing at full tilt across the sand. It blasted off horizontally, low to the ground, whipping the fine sands into clouds. Nonetheless, not a hair on my head moved; the internal atmosphere of the pod was perfect. Looking down, the world flashed by in a formless blur. Twisting back over my seat, I watched as the tower shrank in the rapidly increasing distance. In a mere minute that “glittering megalith of human ingenuity,” that “city in the sky,” had become a needle pulled back into the earth.

And I was alone.

I still had no clue where I was being taken, though. I had been so ready to leave that I’d given my destination almost no thought.

After a while I saw something else in that desert, far in the distance. At first I thought it was another mountain. It was an enormous machine of some kind. A machine or a ship, simply sitting in the desert as if it had crashed from the sky. I’d heard about such a thing. I’d overheard people in the tower talk about it. My father had mentioned it the moment I’d run from the office.

Only much later in my life, looking back and puzzling together small pieces of information, did I come to know what it was: Chang’e 11, a spaceship my father’s company had once built.

The small screen on the panel in front of me lit up. I took my eyes off Chang’e 11 and sat back in my seat. The screen bleeped once and an image appeared. It was my mother, looking young and beautiful. No hanging skin. No untidy, entangled hair.

Hello Jai-Li
, she said. For a moment I thought it was actually her, that she was alive and able to see me, but then she said,
I have made this recording for you. I hope, for the moment, that it will be enough. You may have some questions. I cannot guarantee I will be able to answer all of them, but perhaps you will find some of the answers to your questions in the same way as we all try to do: through experience, over time, and with unfailing hope.

This pod was created for an emergency, a kind of life raft in the event that we ever had to make a quick escape from the tower. But by now I’m sure you know your father will never abandon his tower. Like the captain of a sinking ship, he will go down with it, if necessary.

And so, now, this vehicle is yours. Your life raft. Your quick escape. And if you are watching this, it is serving its precise purpose. This is the Silver Whisper, my dear. May it serve you well and take you far …

The voice continued as the vessel sped across the surface of the sand. The range of mountains rose high ahead of me. The sun beat down from a blue infinity. Time and space warped, boom by sonic boom.

Her words trickled out: …
you are probably wondering where this pod is taking you. Well, my child, there is a place, a very safe and special place, where you can stay as long as you need to. This destination has been programmed into the vessel. In this place, are people who can take care of you. It is a place I know well, and have known since I was a young child. It means a lot to me, has changed me in ways I could not hope to expect. It has remained in my dreams for as long as I can remember. Some may try to convince you otherwise, say it is a mythical, imaginary place, but I can assure you—it is real. It may even be the last real place on earth. It is a place to which I have been indebted my entire life.You know this place. I have told you about it. For certain reasons I feel I should not record its exact location. That is a chance I cannot afford to take. But I am sure, if you think hard enough, you will remember it.

As soon as my mother said this, I was disappointed. I did not remember it immediately. As the vessel raced across the land, I trawled my memories for something my mother might once have mentioned. I forced myself to relax, take a deep breath, and all at once it came to me. A story. It was utterly obvious. Not only a story, but the
one
story. The story she had told me a few times, not onlybecause it was my favourite, but, as she often reminded me, because it was true.

It was the story of something that had happened to my mother when she was young. As I watched the world outside roll itself out, the details of her story fell into place like a puzzle I had done many times.

I remembered my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, pulling my duvet up to my shoulders. I saw myself snuggling into the warmth, listening …

It always began in the same way: with my mother reminding me that, unlike my father, she had been born into a very poor family, nothing like the tower in which I was born. Her concept of luxury was having more than a single meal a day. Her concept of power was watching her father—my grandfather—labour continuously for the Chao-Bren Glass Factory. Sometimes he’d get no more than three or four hours of sleep a night. Her family lived in a shanty house in the village of Yihezhuang, deep in the mountains between Hebei province and the city of Beijing. She remembered the streets smelling like dust and burning metal, how putrid the village was, drab and dilapidated, but it was her home, and she knew no other. Her father worked long and senseless hours for a meagre income. He would often come home early in the morning, having walked a great distance from the factory, and sometimes, she said, she’d lie awake listening to him as he sat in the dark room, dry-coughing and mending the soles of his shoes with wire thread. She never wanted to let him know she was awake, it would upset him, she thought. The time he worked—nineteen hours a day was his sacrifice to her and her mother. He wanted to know that they were well rested, strong, as healthy as he could never be.

It was around this time, she said, that people were becoming agitated about a particular problem. Old men talked about it in the streets, she read it on the communal news board. Later she learned that the problem was widespread, not restricted to their village alone. Scientists and doctors were noticing a sudden increase in cancers and nervous disorders. They all had different theories about the cause, but most surmised that the launch of a series of experimental military x-ray grid-satellites was generating dangerous levels of radiation. More than a thousand of these interlinked satellites were bombarding the earth with rays powerful enough to look through the rooftops of buildings and down into underground bunkers. This was all taking its toll on the earth’s atmosphere. Babies were being born undeveloped or deformed. Tumours were sprouting in people’s bodies like mushrooms on wet forest floors. The air was being poisoned, not only by chemical pollution, but electronic pollution too. Devastating physical effects were becoming more and more prevalent.

Around this time, my mother became sick. She wasn’t sure whether it was connected to these rays, but her symptoms did present themselves as the stories began to go around. She awoke one morning with a headache, which became a migraine, which led to her having a violent seizure. Soon afterwards, she slipped into the first of a series of short comas. Her parents were, of course, devastated. It needn’t be said that they could afford no treatment, no hospitalisation. Her father continued to work, her mother took care of her at home, but each day her condition worsened. She was young, she said, but not too young to understand that it would not be long before she died. It was something she now knew for certain. The imminence of death is felt deep within one long before it occurs, just as someone who has been long at sea smells land before she sees it.

Then, one cold and rainy night, her father came home with a man she had never seen before. She was burning up, shivering in her bed, and the strange man standing over her in his sopping hooded raincoat seemed like a hallucination induced by her raging fever.

Her father stood behind him, holding his hat in his hands, twisting it round and round as if he was trying to open a tight jar. Her mother stepped aside and the man leaned over her. He put his hands under her thin body and lifted her into his arms easily.

It was a hazy memory—she said—being carried out of the house by that strange man. All she could recall was seeing her parents standing in the doorway, watching as she was taken away. She was placed gently on the back seat of a vehicle, a needle was plunged into her arm, the door was shut, and she passed out. She had terrible dreams that night, and she remembered waking intermittently only to realise she was still in the vehicle. Night turned to morning, and then to night, and then to morning again … and still she lay there in her sweat-drenched blanket.

On the third day, the vehicle stopped and the door opened. The large man leaned in and lifted her out. He carried her away from the vehicle, and though she could see little, she could smell the most incredible things. The air was clean, cold and fresh, teeming with the sweet fragrances of flowers, trees and soil. She heard water running over rocks and through crevices. She heard birds cheeping and insects twittering. The man carried her up a large number of steps. At last, he stopped and laid her down on a patch of the greenest and softest grass she had ever seen or felt. He stood, blocking the sun, and said,
You must be hungry.
That was all. Then he walked away.

She sat up and looked around—her curiosity superseded her physical pain and discomfort—and what she saw stunned her as she had never been stunned since.

A ragged sweep of enormous, snow-tipped mountains stretched below and ahead of her, like the resting place of old, forgotten gods. The green lawn was on the edge of a mountaintop of its own, the steep precipice rolling down to a deep, shadowy valley. On either side of her, trees lined the lawn, powdering the ground with light pink petals. Behind her, a grey temple sat firmly beneath the large rocks.

It was a paradise, she said. A beautiful shelter from the storm of clutter and chaos that had battered the rest of the world into diseased oblivion. And it was to be her new home for just under a year.

The stranger who had collected her from her parents’ house was a man named Sun Zhang. He’d built the place himself and lived there with his three daughters, tall and slender women who welcomed her eagerly, gently stroking her soft hair, handling her as tenderly as a fragile doll that might shatter at any minute. When she had rested they took her on a tour of the temple. The inside of the temple was lit by a myriad of crooked candles. The halls were lined with stone pillars, and each of the few rooms contained nothing more than a mattress on the floor and a small table carrying several slim candles. She was given a room of her own, ate dinner with Sun Zhang and his bowed, respectful daughters each evening, and was encouraged to read various books during the day.

Mr. Zhang was a hard and unruffled man. In the evenings after dinner, he smoked a long wooden pipe by himself. During the day he did little but work in his garden and practice a form of t’ai chi ch’uan she did not recognise. At first she thought he was treating her with an almost resentful aloofness, but soon she realised that he treated her precisely as he did his own daughters, entertaining no idle conversation, with little humour, and demanding utter paternal respect.

He said nothing about her father and mother, or why he had come to collect her from her house inYihezhuang—and she didn’t ask.

Most importantly, and strangely, every day that she stayed there, a bit of her strength returned, a morsel of her energy. She spent her mornings and evenings sitting on the lawn where he had first laid her down. She watched the clouds weave in and about the abundant peaks. She watched the sun move across the sky and thought about her parents, but never asked him to take her back. She couldn’t say why, except that she knew the place was healing her and she trusted Mr. Zhang to return her if he thought it the right thing to do. But, she told me, this was no mere temple on the mountains. There was something else about the place that she only learned much later—something that transcended its beauty and purity.

She learned that Mr. Zhang had once been a very rich businessman. When his wife had died because of a brain tumour many years earlier, he’d left his business and had the temple built on top of the mountain using a special material that, ironically, had provided his wealth in the world of money and men. The temple and the foundation had been built out of a synthetic substance used to counter the negative effects of electromagnetic radiation near power plants, radio towers and pylons. It had once been bought and distributed around the world but funding was low, and most companies abandoned using it altogether, preferring to believe, or even disseminate data that said the harmful effects of electromagnetic frequency pollution had been proved to be negligible.

The result of this, Mr. Zhang explained to her, was that the true benefits of his material had been severely undermined and underutilised. He discovered that the material had other properties: it caused plants and vegetables to grow at alarming rates, to incredible sizes. His mountaintop garden bore the largest and most delicious plums, the reddest, juiciest tomatoes. His new substance could purify water, slow the ageing process, speed up self-healing. Increased altitude, where the air was pure and free, accentuated all of these properties.