Threads in the Cosmos

Tang Fei

Xiao Yizhi (肖一之)

Author Tang Fei spins a yarn about alien sheep and intergalactic ties that bind

Quite a sense of relief. The jet of water cut a full arc through the air, landed in front of her feet, and rushed merrily down into the ground. Like a small shiny snake, it quickly burrowed into the sand, leaving only a wet mark behind.

Yah’din gave a long, comfortable sigh and felt no hurry to get up. The wind had died down. Quiet. It was a fine day—up above, a sky lucent like egg white, and down below, a land of endlessly undulating red sand. Between the sky and the sand, there was Yah’din, squatting in the shade of a sandstone cliff with her bum out. Her bum felt cold; it was as bare and natural as the rocks on the ground. She heard movement behind her, a rapid rustle, like the sound of winds rushing through the tops of bushes. Yah’din pulled up her pants and looked toward the noise—it was her sheep. A red ball of curly wool stumbled and wobbled toward her, stretching out its head, looking all focused and serious.

Yah’din laughed, ran toward the sheep, and scooped it up. The sheep was exhausted. It gave her face a rub with the wet tip of its black nose, and then just laid close to her chest, collapsing into a small mass of softness and warmth, as if there were no bones in its body. Yah’din stroked its back again and again, repeating over and over “Ah, Sheep. Ah, Sheep.” Her voice rose and fell with the heaving of the small body in her arms, or maybe it was the small body that rose and fell with the ebb and flow of her voice. Anyway, one naturally matched the other, as Yah’din’s voice traveled across the vast wilderness. Yah’din’s Ma said she pampered the sheep so much that it became too needy and could never be separated from people.

Yah’din buried her face in the sheep’s wiry wool. A hot leathery smell immediately rose to her face, and suddenly she became wide awake. “You are the last one. Be as needy as you like,” Yah’din whispered next to the sheep’s head.

There was only this one sheep left in all Longgu’er. People all said that when Great Granny was a girl, she could sit in the yurt and watch the sheep herders lead hundreds of sheep rushing by. Even when they were far away, you could already feel the ground shake beneath you and the furniture rattle like crazy. Like rumbling thunder that rolled closer and closer, thousands of hooves the size of bowls stamped across the ground, kicking up a sandstorm, as if a giant red river came rushing from the sky. Whenever Yah’din thought about that spectacle, her blood boiled with excitement, but she also ended up feeling depressed. After all, she had never witnessed it, and she had never seen a real grown sheep. As for the many children born after her, they had never even heard of such things.

Yah’din had never dreamed that one day she would have a sheep. On that day, she held the sheep in her arms the whole night, not willing to let go even when it shit and pissed. People asked her what she would call it, and she said just Sheep; it’s the only one so there are no others to mix it up with. Fifteen years flew by, and Yah’din had grown up. Yet the sheep only grew a little, just reaching people’s knees. Things told in the legend—hooves the size of bowls and a body as tall as a person—were nowhere to be found.

It wasn’t like Yah’din didn’t worry about this. She asked around for tips on keeping sheep in a world that no longer had any sheep. The old sheep herders were all gone; the paintings in all the sandstone caves, big and small, were all eroded by the wind; the yarn paintings found in peoples’ homes were too dirty to tell what they depicted.

She recalled what the man had said when he gave her the sheep: feed it pure liquid water, bathe it in the sun, and walk it. Simple as that, nothing more. Nothing could go wrong. When she worried so much that she turned and tossed in her bed, the sheep’s almond-shaped black eyes saw through it all. When she lay on her back, the sheep, front legs leading the hind legs, jumped onto her, exhuming pride and energy. Its big eyes came close to her face and there was no trace of fear in them. What a beautiful sheep! Yah’din realized her sheep was just fine. After that, she never felt worried about the sheep again.

The alarm around her neck made a beeping sound. Time to fetch water. Yah’din hurried home to get the bucket from her yurt. Since spring, fetching water meant traveling several Long’rian miles. The old well had dried up completely.

She bumped into her Ma on her way out and instinctively, she turned her shoulders to shelter the sheep.

“Slow down!“ Ma shouted.

“I can’t. I have to be back in a bit to mend the yurt and plant the blue crystals.”

“There’s no hurry. I’ll wait for you.”

“I can’t. I have a schedule. If this is late, everything later will be all wrong.” She had already run so far that her Ma didn’t even hear the last sentence she said. Yah’din gasped for breath. She had said all this for her own benefit anyway. She was the one who wanted to learn from the outsiders, doing things in order and with plans. She bought a beeper and carefully set a schedule—starting such a task at such a time and finishing such a task at such a time.

But after a whole year, she was still all fingers and thumbs. From birth to death, people who grew up in a yurt never looked at a clock or used a beeper. Every day they just did whatever they were supposed to do. Their hands and feet just kept moving, and the things that needed to be done just happened like water that flowed naturally. One after another, they all got done. The Long’rians didn’t understand time, and they didn’t understand how something that had existed as long as the world could be cut into equal parts. Yah’din was different. She had resolved to learn to do things according to a schedule so that she could one day go outside and see the world. Yet making up her mind was easy; her body and brain still had catching up to do. Every day, she felt like she was being driven from task to task and got tired without knowing why.

She hadn’t considered the extra distance she had to cover to fetch water when she had made her schedule. Yah’din told herself that she needed to hurry up. She started to run, and the sheep began to bounce in her arms. Lucky that she had four arms, two for holding the bucket and two for holding the sheep; otherwise, she could never have managed it. Luckily the sheep was behaving now, just curling up and not moving. In the past, the sheep always poked its neck out and looked around, ready to snarl at whatever annoyed it. Now it knew more about the world so it became much quieter, and its body also got a lot heavier, as if the weight of silence was placed squarely on its back.

The water level had dropped again. They had to dig new wells. Yah’din straightened her back and carefully laid down the sheep. The sheep bent its hind legs, wobbled for a step or two, and plumped down. It leaned on the wall of the well to wait for her.

First, Yah’din dropped a bag of de-solidifier into the well and waited for the water inside to liquefy. She lowered the bucket into the water, filled it, and then pulled it back up. While she pulled the bucket up, the water inside it solidified again. Yah’din put the two buckets next to each other and climbed on top of the hill next to the well. She looked west and saw a block of green shrubs standing to attention on top of the red sand. So someone had been charitable again. The Public Welfare Forest had grown much bigger since she last saw it. The outsiders were keen on fixing Longgu’er’s sandland problem.

If someone donated the money for a shrub, the tree planter would plant one here. The shrubs sucked up water like crazy, and they were aggressive. Where they grew, no other grasses could; even the sandland animals avoided them. But the outsiders didn’t know. Yah’din scratched her head and looked around. Her lower set of hands went into her pocket and then slowly came back out. Some blue powder fell out of her pocket along the way. The Long’rians called it the blue crystal, a type of sand bacteria used for making de-solidifying and decomposing agents. Since time unknown, there had been a rumor among the children that blue crystals could stop the shrubs, and so there was always some child who spread blue crystals around the border of the shrubbery when the adults turned their backs.

“You are almost twenty. Why do you still fool around?” Yah’din’s Ma had spotted the blue powder around the edge of her pocket when she got home and given her a good talking-to.

“I checked and made sure there was no surveillance drone when I spread it,” Yah’din quibbled, knowing that if people really meant business, the surveillance satellite would have recorded her little trick.

“Reckless. It’s useless. Waste of blue crystal. As if you didn’t know there aren’t enough to go around at home.”

The beeper interrupted Ma. Time to mend the yurt. Yah’din took out the two buckets of solidified water and put them into the water storage, while her two other hands were weaving thread in preparation. Ma had already started mending the yurt. As she was berating Yah’din with verbal rapid-fire, her needles and thread followed the pace of her speech, so she had already mended the largest hole while speaking. The yurt was made from the skins of hundreds of sand lyre worms. It was light, thin, sturdy, transparent, and bug-repellant. Even so, it was no match for the gravel that flew around in a storm. Every now and then, they had to check the yurt. If they found any scratch marks, they immediately sewed it up. It would be too late if you waited until there was actually a hole in it. Yah’din had been doing this since she was a little girl, and her four hands were as nimble as Ma’s—as long as she did not distract herself by stroking the sheep nearby. Yah’din pushed her needle in against one scratch mark.

“I heard that houses outside do not need to be mended every day.”

“Me and your Pa won’t stop you. But don’t expect us to clean up after you.” Ma glimpsed at the sheep. The sheep laid its head on Yah’din’s legs, sleeping again.

“Sheep leaves with me.”

Ma’s four hands stopped. “You’re taking the sheep? You probably won’t be able to board the car to the liaison station, let alone a spaceship. You don’t even know what it’s like out there and you want to bring it with you?” Ma swallowed what she meant to say after that.

Yah’din broke Ma’s heart, so she dared not look at her and just stroked the sheep with her head lowered. The sheep raised its head and snuggled her hand with its wet nose. “You don’t know that, not without trying. Besides, no rule says you can’t bring a sheep,” Yah’din mumbled.

Ma’s hands moved again. “Two more months and you’ll be twenty, then you can do whatever you want.” The sheep moved into her arms, rubbed its face on her clothes, and licked her lazily. Yah’din held it and rubbed its back. If it had not been for Sheep, she probably wouldn’t want to go. Poor Sheep. All alone by itself. Yah’din wanted it to meet other sheep. She wanted to see a world with many sheep. But none of this could be said. A tree-planting drone flew past the yurt, leaving a lingering whooshing noise in its wake.

Ma stretched out a hand to beckon the sheep. The sheep didn’t budge. Yah’din put down the sheep and gently pushed it toward Ma. The sheep wobbled for a bit, steadied itself, and then stumbled on. Ma didn’t bother to wait. Instead, she held out her arms to lift the sheep onto her knees. She measured the sheep with colored thread. “I’ve got to make a rucksack for it, so you can travel with it on your back and don’t stand out too much. Next market day you should ask around to find out if they allow sheep on cars and spaceships.”

Yah’din found it even harder to look Ma in the eye. She picked up a ball to play with the sheep. The sheep waved its legs, moved close to the ball, and lay down at Yah’din’s feet. Sheep glanced at the ball, lowered its head, and stayed put. Yah’din frowned. “What’s the matter with it? It used to pester me all the time to play catch with it. Ma—is Sheep going to have little sheep?”

Ma pricked her finger with a needle and laughed.

They had dug out the yarn painting Granny left behind again. The last time was for figuring out why the sheep didn’t grow as big as it should have. This time, it was to prove that Ma was wrong.

The grownups weren’t shy about what went on between men and women. Even a toddler knew all about that. But it was different with the sheep. None of the grownups had ever seen one for real. How could they be sure what would happen? Even though Ma laughed at her, Yah’din still thought the sheep was pregnant. The way it looked tired was just like Ma when she was pregnant with Yah’din’s little sister. Ma didn’t say anything, just watched while Yah’din rummaged through things, and even gave her a hand digging out the loom.

If it had not been for Sheep, she probably wouldn’t want to go. Poor Sheep. All alone by itself. Yah’din wanted it to meet other sheep.

Yah’din turned the yarn painting in her hands again and again, and looked at it from all angles. Like all yarn paintings on Longgu’er, it was an asymmetrical truncated cone. The yarns were woven together in a mysteriously complex way; the pattern was repeated regularly so that the warp and weft crisscrossed into vivid figures on all three sides. Even though time and sand had rubbed away much of the color, they could still make out the sheep, big and small. The sheep on each side were all different. But none of the pictures could tell Yah’din what was the matter with her sheep.

Yah’din didn’t know why she was panicking. The alarm beeped. Time to clean the blue house. Tomorrow the station chief would come to inspect it. Yah’din sulkily gathered the tools and headed out.

“Now don’t go messing around. Don’t go door to door asking to see people’s yarn paintings.” Ma guessed what was on her mind.

Without a sound, Yah’din went behind the yurt, squatted down, and dug open a section of sand. In the hole was a layer of blue crystals. She scooped up just enough, put them into a bag, and sprinkled some blue crystal spores. She covered the hole up and headed toward the blue house. The blue house was right behind the yurt. It didn’t look far away, but twenty minutes would go by before she got to it. Yah’din went ahead for a couple of steps and then doubled back to pick up the stumbling sheep that had followed her.

The first time she saw the sheep was by the blue house. It was there that the man who built the house gave the sheep to the five-year-old Yah’din. The man’s name was Li Shu, an outsider who came to Longgu’er to do maintenance and surveying jobs. Li Shu was handsome. Under his tight eyelids, his eyes were long and shiny like the edge of a knife. It was a pity that he was a cripple as he only had one pair of hands. He didn’t pity himself. Instead, he started building little blue houses. He said he would build one blue house for every family on Longgu’er. Yah’din told him that they had yurts and there was no need for these houses. He laughed, and his eyes became hook-shaped. The blue house was meant to be their outhouse, he explained to Yah’din.

It turned out that when he arrived in Longgu’er, he found no toilets anywhere. Whenever someone needed to take a dump or a leak, they just went somewhere empty and squatted down. He felt embarrassed. So he decided that he would make every Long’rian family enjoy the convenience of an outhouse. Yah’din only vaguely understood him. This outhouse was just a place for people to take a dump or take a leak. But why did you have to have a box to shut yourself in when you take a dump or a leak, and why was it embarrassing if you didn’t? The Long’rians never felt this embarrassment. It was such a huge place and as long as you didn’t splash some onto someone else, it was fine. It was only embarrassing when there was a pair of eyes on you. But who would be watching? Yah’din bit her lips. She knew she couldn’t explain this back then. Even now, she still couldn’t explain it.

Li Shu left fifteen years ago. But the outhouse he built still stood, and inside it was almost as new as it was fifteen years ago. The Long’rians didn’t make much use of it, dismissing it as a waste of water and blue crystal. Every time people up there sent someone to inspect, they grudgingly sacrificed a little bit of blue crystal and water to clean the blue house. Yah’din was quite good at cleaning it. She wiped the corners with a wet rag, sprinkled the least possible amount of blue crystals evenly, and finally sealed the door from the outside. Yah’din sat down with her back to the wall. The sheep was in her arms all this time, and now it raised its head to look at her. In the light, there was a white smudge in its eyes. On top of that smudge, there was a reflection of Yah’din. Yah’din laid her face close to the round forehead of the sheep. So warm.

Before meeting the sheep, Yah’din had barely hugged anyone or anything, and she had no idea what it was like to dive into warm breath and feel the weight of others. Ma had so much to do that she barely had time to stop for a moment, and Pa ran around following the irons in the sky, getting home perhaps only once a year. Besides, the Long’rians weren’t huggers. The sun was so hot that a body next to another only made one feel uncomfortable. Even the Long’rian animals weren’t huggers. Under the sands, millions of creatures had spikes or shells. They minded their own businesses and thrived.

“Did you hear that? What was that sound?”

“The crawlers and beasts are at it underground. Long’rian animals all live underground.” Except for the sheep, but they were all gone.

“So quiet.”

They sat shoulder to shoulder in the shadow of the blue house. Their eyes roamed and wandered over the vast and open land. There wasn’t a whiff of wind on that day either. Yah’din did not answer him. She thought she understood what Li Shu meant. Quiet meant they could hear all the soft and tiny sounds that were usually hard to capture.

“Just like the sound of blood coursing in you. When I was alone in space doing spacewalks, it was also quiet like this. So quiet that I could hear the sound of blood coursing inside my body.”

“Is it the same?”

“It’s the same.”

“Because you were alone?”

“Because the world you are facing is too big.”

***

A jet of hot air hit her face. It was the sheep breathing heavily onto her. Yah’din only opened her eyes halfway and held the sheep. “There is no hurry, we have to wait a little longer.” She was exhausted, and her eyelids felt heavy. She didn’t know whether she was dreaming or remembering, but she saw Li Shu again, sitting here with her five-year-old self. The house was only half built. In Yah’din’s memory, Li Shu was always talking. The blue house was always half-built. Yah’din fell asleep again.

She remembered Li Shu had told her water on Earth flowed around and its area was larger than land. The sky was blue, because of the refraction of atmospheric molecules. While he said all this, she tried very hard to imagine what that place was like, but she couldn’t help feeling sad for this man at the same time. He left Earth to survey “usable planets” in space all by himself, and he could not go back unless he had finished his mission or run out of fuel. What did it mean: “usable planet”? Yah’din didn’t understand that.

“You’re always alone when you are out there?” Yah’din asked him. Li Shu didn’t say anything. He just put his hand into a bulging pocket and took out a ball of curly red fur. The fur ball trembled a bit, and a pair of shiny eyes and a nose emerged. Yah’din couldn’t take her eyes off it.

“I’ve got him. This is a new species that can adapt to all kinds of gravitational conditions. It’s fine both in space and on the ground.”

“What is it?” The red fur ball suddenly stood up. Yah’din’s half-extended hand jerked back in fright. She stared at the fur ball, and the fur ball stared back at her, wagging its tail. “Is it a sheep?”

“It’s a dog. On Earth there is…”

“It’s really a sheep! It’s just like what I saw in the yarn paintings!“

“So it’s called sheep here? What are yarn paintings?”

Yah’din showed Li Shu the yarn paintings around the time he visited for the final time. She couldn’t remember how many times he came—their blue house took the longest time to build. She showed him the yarn paintings and a scale model of the loom. Ma had said that this model might be small, but it could be used to weave a yarn painting. Li Shu’s eyes lit up. He took the model in his hands and grabbed a card clasped in the model between his fingers. The card had lots of holes punctured through it, and he examined it carefully. Suddenly, he let out a cry, and his face became so bright that it was as if a spacecraft was taking off directly on it.

“The holes are so regular; they must have been created on purpose. This is a punch card! The loom controls the warp and weft as well as the movement of a third vertical thread according to the holes in the punch card. This card is where the machine stores its memory. The machine uses it to remember, to learn, to process abstract commands, and to complete complex tasks. Do you understand? This is programming. That is to say, you, the Long’rian civilization has already invented a computer.”

Li Shu’s words tore through her like a tornado. Yah’din didn’t understand, so she couldn’t remember the whole thing. Program, commands, computer, Long’rian civilization. Yah’din wanted to say that no one on Longgu’er knew what he was talking about, but she couldn’t open her mouth. She also couldn’t remember exactly what it was she had wanted to say back then. She only remembered Li Shu’s face and his eyes—even in her memory, in her dreams, she could not look directly into that blinding white light, that glare from the future.

Li Shu wanted the model. Yah’din gave it to him, and in exchange, her empty hands received a heavy, warm body. The sheep.

“For me?” Yah’din couldn’t believe it.

“Yep, you gave me your model.”

“What about you? You’re fine alone?”

“Doesn’t matter. I can re—” What did Li Shu say? Something like he would return. One day he would return. He said he would return.

Yah’din always woke up from her dreams at this precise moment.

She opened her eyes, waking up in the same patch of shadow that she shared with Li Shu in her dreams.

The blue crystal should have finished cleaning the house. One more wipe with a wet rag would be enough. Yah’din stood up and opened the door.

Yah’din should have known it would be like this.

On the morning that the chief of the liaison station showed up to inspect the blue house, Yah’din was busy planting blue crystals behind the yurt with the sheep. She was carefully scattering humus into the hole when she heard Ma complaining to the station chief that the blue house was a waste of water and quite a bother. No one ever used it, and it weighed people down. No one could migrate far because it needed to be maintained. Everyone was forced to pitch their yurt around it in a circle. Even if the groundwater was almost used up, you couldn’t move elsewhere. Why did we have to build this blue house? Why couldn’t this blue house be packed up and moved around like a yurt? The chief had heard these complaints a thousand times, so he just mumbled something in response while carefully inspecting the blue house. The chief was responsible for all external affairs. If something went wrong with the blue house, it was his job that was on the line. He found no problems during the routine inspection, so he said his goodbyes and got ready to leave.

The sheep, who had curled up under Yah’din’s feet, wanted to see him off. Its four legs struggled to support its body and then they failed. It came crashing down, making quite a noise. In Yah’din’s mind, it was like a dune had just collapsed.

Yah’din scooped up the sheep and stopped the chief in his tracks. “Give me a ride.”

“To where?”

“Your place.”

“Where?”

“The liaison station. I want to send a message.”

“Knock it off. What message? To whom? That liaison station of mine stopped working a long time ago.” The chief looked at Ma with a diffident smile on his face. Ma said nothing. “Didn’t I help you send messages before? To the guy named Li Shu, right? No answer at all. It’s not just your message; we have so many serious things that we need to discuss with them, but none of the messages we sent them got a reply. To think, they built this liaison station for us and asked us to keep the communication open. The outsiders are like that. All they know is planting trees here for fun. They build this and build that, but they never really use them.”

“Don’t you message them every time you finish inspecting the blue houses?”

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