The wickedest city in the Far East.

–  Leila Hadley

Minute by minute they live:

The stone’s in the midst of all.

– Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’

        Macao has long been known as a city of strangers. It’s been known as many things besides. The appellation ‘City of the Name of God’ has always seemed curiously ambiguous. Whose God or gods (?), one might ask. But the crossing of cultures has always begged questions. People lose their way in a place like Macao. They come for a purpose but that’s quickly forgotten. The forgetting of purposes is often for the best. They were unrealistic, too grim or too hopeful; had to be lived down. There are those too who’ve come for just such a paradoxical end as forgetting their purposes. You’ll find among them the richest or the happiest people in the town, though these traits as you know are rarely combined.

        Because Macao is in most senses a place between (China and the West, the old world and the new, the living, the otherworldly) it’s been traditional for almost everyone coming here to feel himself or herself a foreigner and so to try to understand the place from a foreigner’s point of view, or rather from what he or she imagined a foreigner’s point of view to be. Portuguese always thought they were in China, Chinese thought they were in Lisbon. Everyone was wrong and on the other hand everyone was almost right. It would be a commonplace to say they were jointly constructing a fantasy world out of a reality as mundane here as anywhere. Or that’s one version of events. Another way of looking at Macao is to acknowledge that fantasy and reality are not so easily separated, that each is productive of the other. A world inhabited is a world thought. The real has always to be imagined, not first or last, but all the time, just so as to be. It’s along these lines one could say that the town, built on a kind of self-misunderstanding, really doesn’t know where it’s going, doesn’t know its own shape or direction. Call that idle personification if you like, the consequences of this mindset (if that’s what it is) are serious enough.

Many have wondered why they cannot for love or money purchase or even peruse a decent map of this place. The answer is simple, there is none because none can be made. Many have also found it puzzling that it is so easy to get lost in Macao streets, and that yet sometimes after hours of fruitless searching, suddenly one finds oneself back at the place where one’s meanderings had begun. One might take the advice of the poet Auden who suggested none of this should be taken too seriously. But this is to evade the issue.

Streets are haunted with voices here, of the stairs coming down, hoarse voices of engines uphill. Under hammering lies the mid-afternoon rest, the nagging of the ancestors as high pitched as any TV soap. Streets are strewn with sunlight and shadow and swept with the said and the unsaid equally, with revelations, likewise with the unutterable, all their permutations and intersections. Streets cross where you cannot remember them meeting. Those who walk notice streets that are never the same. Only those who take the trouble to go on foot will notice themselves elsewhere than they imagined, run out of hunches as to which way to go…

        It’s easy to slate it all down to the weather, to mists and to haze. And it is true there may be weeks when Macao never appears, for instance if one is looking from the island of Taipa. But these effects are an added complication, even a cover, for the underlying events (or perhaps as they go unnoticed, we had better call them non-events).

Glimpses of the truth have from time to time surfaced in some braver publications on the mainland and even in the English language China Daily there have been odd tales of a street that showed up in Chongqing, a street thought to have come from Macao. A curious claim?  But nowhere else fitted the bill. Of course such reports have lacked detail, been scant in evidence, have been traced back to unreliable witnesses and generally been dismissed as superstition. But these stories are as close as the populous at large has come to knowing what’s what in Macao and out of here.

The fact is you won’t buy a proper map of this place anywhere. And this is, I repeat, because the town cannot be mapped. It’s not a question of detail though there would always be that to contend with. Rather it’s that such a map would require constantly to be superseded – seasonally, daily, hourly... even in the twinkling of an eye. Not to put too fine a point upon things, the claim is simply this: the process of the landscape’s – the place’s – alteration is more rapid than – and so must necessarily outstrip – any effort to depict what structural anthropologists of Saussurean bent would have called its synchronic state: the snapshot of the lot. Note too that the snapshot in the literal sense remains possible, here as elsewhere. The place is well enough behaved for that, nor are its secrets so easily yielded. A map is more than a photograph of what the eye takes in at a glance. No, mapping Macao would require an altogether different order of perception and knowledge than those at our present disposal. To map an island the land mass of which consists entirely of an erupting volcano would be by contrast a simple task, one that could for instance be accomplished with a video camera. There are no such tricks that suffice in the case of Macao. And while it is always premature to declare what human ingenuity is and is not capable of, shall we say there are those who have tried. The methods they’ve used have been many and varied but the result has been in this wise identical: what they came up with was always somehow in their own image.

Forgive my tautology in asserting that only foreigners have made such efforts. Any who made the attempt must naturally consider his or herself in that light. And the foreigners have tried all kinds of methods. Some you might think of yourself. Follow a man hauling water on a pole over shoulders, a woman pushing a trolley uphill. Surely they must go directly where they are going? If one could follow them faithfully, keep inconspicuously behind them then would one not know where the streets led, how a hill was shaped.

It sounds easy. But the unwitting subjects in such ‘experiments’ have had an uncanny knack of vanishing, one might say in the blinking of an eye. Perhaps a lizard or some other eye-lidless animal might follow them? These creatures, whose humanity can be no less than ours, fade as suddenly as the streets that bear them. Round a blind corner, through a doorway, in an alley’s dark end, they’re gone. It appears no human observer has thus far been up to the task of determining the common paths feet have trod in this place. Yet few have reconciled themselves to facts so unpalatable to the rational mind.

There are those among the inquisitive who, smelling a rat, have approached the issue as if testing the threshold of sentience. Follow a dog that seems to know a way home. Surely a dog could not be part of the conspiracy? Surely it knows its way and is led, without thought of subterfuge, in the direction it must take? Surely, and yet all that such researches have shown is that if there indeed is any conspiracy then those carrying it out are guileless victims.

Perhaps it’s easy to take from all I’ve said the implication that the participants in the landscape – able to vanish, appear, re-appear at will (theirs or that of some other power) – were as good as ghosts. But that would be entirely to ignore the fact that from their point of view – and there can be no denying they had one – it was the foreigners observing them who had earned the title of ghost. What is a gweilo after all? Is it not the foreigners who appear unexpectedly and who just as suddenly vanish from the place?                 

However one approaches the problem, no matter which hypothesis one invests with truth’s aura, mysteries are bound to remain. Yet there are provisional conclusions to be drawn. I am certain only that the ground here is a palimpsest of spent streets the physical reality of which equates better with the disjunctive ramblings of a dog than with any past human hopes or intentions. I am certain too that the streets run differently at night. The streets in their shifting are individual as human souls. Each is itself an uneven declivity fashioned of old footfalls. You’ll think that I have contradicted myself to say that the streets are different at night when I’ve claimed already that they are, moment to moment, in changes. I do not resile for a moment from what seems the only plausible interpretation of the facts. What I mean is that the process or the pattern or the ‘rules’ by which the town alters is in some way itself subject to a diurnal shift. One is tempted to say ‘by which the town alters itself’, but one hesitates to attribute mind or soul to place on such scale.

        If the diurnal shift in the town’s consciousness is to be placed though then a facile observation suffices to describe that part of the puzzle. Dusk and dawn are the keys; the town sleeps and it wakes. Perhaps it is in the un-concertedness of these states we may account for the town’s unconscious and apparently random alterations?

        A note on the issue of consciousness before we go further. One may assert with some confidence that the spell which binds the town depends for its success on its not being widely suspected. Perhaps this is unremarkable. It’s true that coercive realities often function through just such lacks in awareness. It’s through lacking awareness – by choice or otherwise – the citizen is made first pliant, then complicit. Of which place would this not be true? But where else have the gaps in awareness been made literal in quite this manner?

        Macao’s Museum of Corruption is a case in point of the literalising phenomenon to which I refer. Inside there are no objects at all, the walls are completely blank, and yet citizen and tourist alike nod appreciatively as they pass by the stages where in a ‘normal’ museum one would expect to find exhibits. Nor is this a case of ‘emperor’s new clothes’. Fallen under the spell of the town, the appreciation of blank nothingness is for these people genuine. If tourist and local are equally susceptible then to whom shall we look for a clear view of the place?

        Pace – the pace at which life is lived, the pace of sensation – is the key. We all know that birds and insects live a faster life than humans. The town changes in the blinking of an eye. The problem of observation then concerns this particular observer’s paradox: eyes seeing and seen are always in sync. A tortoise would know what was what, if a tortoise could see or communicate, or find the interest for either of these. There is, you see, a threshold of interest as well as consciousness.

Among humans though, who might be best equipped to observe? As people age it’s well known the world spins faster and so the odds are slim that the aged will ever discover themselves mired in a plot on the scale I venture to suggest here.

As in Andersen’s fairytale it’s children and pedestrians, unmotivated tourists, penny gamblers despondent with their lot, priests nearly asleep in their pulpits: these are the people nearest the truth of the place. It’s they, rather than the teachers and the engineers, the bankers and the entrepreneurs… it’s they, rather than the furrowed brows of enterprise, best represent the town.

        Best symbol of the paradox in stasis borne of ceaseless motion is the annual – in fact perpetual – event known as the Grand Prix. These drivers think they’re crossing deserts, skirting swamps. They don’t realize the narrow scope of their treadmill, that they are a mere half dozen mosquitoes doomed to buzz around the same ghastly veil of smog they have themselves generated, doomed to tread thus until oblivion. More generally, the man in the car has no chance of discovering the grim realities of space and time here. His awareness or lack thereof brings him a state of perfect airconditioned bliss, something akin to that which was induced by opium in a previous century.

For the pedestrian, lying under the blanket of smog his brother has thrown him, the human condition seems far otherwise, and yet each of these, like the would-be mapmaker, lies under the one thick spell. That which will not and must not be mapped has likewise protected itself from all sorts of scrutiny. One could say that there was a bureaucracy in and at the service of the place’s secret heart. When anyone gets suspicious there are always statistics at the ready. The most pertinent here are to do with growth, growth in the most audacious, most physical sense of the word. Macao is twice as big as it was before reclamation began in the nineteenth century. This ‘fact’ I would argue is all but irrelevant to the phenomenon which interests us here. It wouldn’t matter how big or small Macao was.

To return to the prior personification, indeed it does appear that the town conspires. Truth is, as far as this author can ascertain, the locals are neither concealing nor plotting anything. The bureaucrats do their business in good faith. Truth is they lie under the spell of the town as if persons hypnotized. They have the instincts to find their old homes in new streets each night. How much less challenging for the tourist to find a monument on the scale of a hotel! The locals – humble and exalted – carry on as if nothing were untoward in the seasonal and diurnal growths and sheddings of the town. And of course for them – as it must be admitted, for most tourists – there is nothing untoward here.

        Just once in a while someone comes here or is born here who sees the truth of the place. God grant them the wisdom never to reveal their painful knowledge! But knowledge where there is otherwise none is like an itch for some. There are those who can resist and there are those who find themselves scratching despite themselves, despite what they know.

There was a professor at the university who went mad studying the phenomena we are considering. (I won’t mention his name because he’s still teaching there today.)

The man was beset with inklings, presentiments. He knew that his flat was not on the same floor today as it had been yesterday. He knew and yet he knew to find his way. Was it the key that had led him? But he knew that the key too was different. What to do with this kind of knowledge?

The crazy idea he came up with was this: if it wasn’t possible to map the ‘place’ in the sense of the geographical space comprising Macao, then shouldn’t it be possible to map the motion of time in the place, to map the hours and the days and the seasons? It was along these lines he commenced on what would have been a lifelong work – no, really a work of generations – had he seen it through. The fragments of what he did accomplish still exist today in unpublished form in a manuscript with the strange title A Map of the Seasons. The problem with this project was, you’ll recognize, that to which I have already alluded. The active volcano would be an infinitely easier subject. The best a flat map in two dimensions can reveal is a trace of past motion or a prediction of limits.

There are today varied technologies for simulating or reproducing motions with temporal extent, but our professor wasn’t trying anything like that.

His efforts ended up as poetry and he has remained in a delusional state ever since. You see he had no trouble ascertaining that there were certain kinds of event endlessly repeated by the inhabitants and by visitors alike, events the repetition of which fell below the threshold of their attention. I don’t mean events of the brushing your teeth or blowing your nose variety, those events which fall below conscious attention everywhere. What our professor discovered was that people were repeating parts of days, months, whole seasons, without recognizing the fact. It was as if the kinds of unwitting imitation one generation makes of that which preceded it were being lived out by individuals day to day and year to year. Our man discovered that there were cycles of different duration involved, these cycles defined in their extent precisely by the fact that they were walled off from each other in the memory of the subject experiencing them. Perhaps they were never exactly the same, an observer would however see them that way.

There were many different temporal cycles involved, and structured by these our researcher recognised that sensation and memory were interacting here in a curious way, in a manner never heretofore observed or recorded. Yes, it was impossible to say when the streets changed, appeared, disappeared. It wasn’t as if there singular moments of mass delusion, rather there appeared to be an ongoing state of delusional reality in which the continuum of time and space was only temporarily secured by… what should he call them (?)…seams or zips, buttons, something more like Velcro… An inveterate and involuntary punster, he’d joked with himself that his was dirty work, that he was getting into the very knickers of time.

You can in any case see how necessary metaphors were for this kind of research. It’s a truism that we can only understand time at all by representing it to ourselves as if it were space, but the problem was more acute for our man. As he saw it things were zipped together and unzipped in ways people weren’t quite aware of but had learned to avoid the need of predicting. They’d learned the instincts necessary for the peculiar world they found themselves inhabiting and so through no fault of their own they regarded their place and their ways as the most natural thing in the world. Occasionally there’d be a glimmer in the form of some déjà vu but this was unusual and in the main those experiencing it found it easiest to put it from their minds. You can imagine how the findings at which our researcher arrived were of the kind generally not well received. Scholars are among those least likely to appreciate being told that they’ve missed something obvious. It’s only natural when ignored or scorned to wonder whether one might not be on a wrong track. True wisdom comes with the intellectual bravery required in assuming such risks.

Our scholar worried at first that he was suffering from an ‘all orientals look alike’ syndrome. In other words he thought that he was probably seeing different people who seemed to be the same doing the same things over and over. His own experience with the key and his own apartment door might have contradicted this notion, but perhaps he was just an absent minded professor? He wished to resist a ‘me and them’ approach to the problem he faced. Why should it be the case that either he or the subjects he was studying – that is to say, everyone around him – had to be deluded? Might it not be rather that each was as far off the beam as the other? To put a more positive spin on things, could it not be that he and those in his ever burgeoning sample were as well adjusted to their objective conditions as he himself in his position was? And yet he grew more and more uneasy as the data piled up around him. The instrument of his research was Macao, and so in another sense was the subject of his investigation. Stressed by this recognition of unconscionable coincidence, our man joined a yoga class. His hope was that flexibility (of body, of mind of spirit?) might help him to gain an adequate view of the font (that is to say orifice) of knowledge appropriate in his condition.

I suppose you can guess how it ended? The professor began to see the time seams and zips and to recognize that things here were not as he imagined that things should, indeed must, be everywhere. Could a categorical imperative apply in a universe bent in the manner he was now discovering? World and mind were beginning to unhinge; in such circumstances who could resist the temptation and the comfort of poetry? Of course our professor did all the things one would normally expect in such circumstances. He went to the airport and took a ‘flight’, went through all the usual charades: got on the jetfoil, helicopter, had his passport stamped, walked into Zhuhai. But it wasn’t long before he found that he couldn’t pretend to himself anymore that there was such a thing as Hong Kong or China or any kind of world or universe outside of Macao. To believe that the truth was out there and not here with him, here where he was, he now recognized would be like believing in Santa Claus.

The professor had been instrumental in establishing the Museum of Corruption. Although he had been its first director that facility had not eventuated as he had conceived it. Moving around in that echoing space, he saw what others couldn’t, and this  had alerted him to a danger. When he found himself nodding and smiling with the rest on his rounds he decided to withdraw to his office on campus. And there he has remained – uncertain and fallible as he acknowledges himself to be – doing what little he can to help students see what’s in front of their noses.

        From this man’s experience I think we may safely draw the conclusion that the kind of phenomenon I have attempted to describe in these pages is best studied – most safely studied – from an amateur rather than a professional point of view. Saying so, I point out again the sketchy nature of my observations, and that they are made solely for my own benefit and reference, as aide memoire, no more, no less.

        Among the papers which accompanied the incomplete researches to which I have referred, now abandoned to the university library, we find the following fragments:

A man loses his wallet in, shall we say, a certain kind of hotel. The scene is in black and white. You can see him, agitated on the balcony, calling out that he’s been robbed. His pants are gone. Everyday it’s the same, but every time in a different part of the town. Every morning the man has his pants again. The same big bulge leads him to narrower and narrower motives until – we’ll leave out what takes so little imagination – we find him on the balcony again, the same plaintive beast, and sated or not, wronged the same way. He never recognises that he has been in this situation before. The girl in question is always anonymous, invisible. It is as if none of the motions in the story are hers. But she too must have crossed the border and every month the border is in a different place. In principle it could be in any street. Returning, it could bring her to any city in China. Only the dynasty or the reign will have changed. But one sees in such observations the disappearance of another border, that between fact and supposition.

There’s the village tough guy. At home in the alleys of the place. The wide streets trouble him. Like in Zhuhai, approaching the border. He doesn’t know where to hide…. It’s not that he doesn’t know how to lose himself in a crowd. Quite the contrary …once here the darkness of alleys gets into him. The village has saved to send him here. He’s here to make his fortune. He’s squandering it on whores and on the primitive forms of gambling he recognizes. He thinks he’s smart but he’s easily taken in. He’s a village boy a mile off, easy prey for the survivors in this place, themselves village boys from the mainland. The tough guy’s puffed up with all kinds of threats and bluster. In the process, he has forgotten where he came from. Wakes up one morning and there is nowhere else. Macao is all of his world.

***

        One sees in these hasty observations stages by which the observer was led to certain conclusions which in turn became the premises on which the notional map of seasons would be based. The last of the case studies is particularly instructive in this light. It consists of notes for an unfinished poem, which would have been titled ‘Last two tourists’:

Who can say when they were nabbed? It must have been at the jetfoil or were there slower boats then? Watch and you’ll see them on San Ma Lo, pass Leal Senado, now borne in the perpetual trishaw, sunhats and ruddy unshaven jaw. They climb the hills weightlessly, broad brims overhead lest the sun melt the wax. This is the last pedicab – the drivers take turns for the privilege, but these two, these passengers, fallen under its spell, have grown old in the trance which carries them. Neither has ever been bored.

***

        This passage is followed by a short polemic, as follows:

All that guff about regional cooperation, world trade, national priorities: you might as well believe in evolution of mammals or the speed of light. Yes, it’s true that as a screen I commenced writing this piece as if such things could be true, as if there were an elsewhere. On this point however I shall let you judge for yourself whether there is anything special about ‘Macao’ or whether in fact what we think of as ‘the world’ (or even one among many) is circumscribed by the reality we know in and as this city. Now it is not my contention that there never was or could never be world outside or time beside that which we know as Macao; how could I be privileged with the certain knowledge that would allow me to make such a claim? My claim is rather in a negative style, it is a claim over a kind of negativity: simply this, that it cannot be possible for us to know space or time beyond Macao. It is simply beyond our collective capacity. Such is the claim which I know I will go on to scrutinize, to doubt, perhaps to adjust for the rest of my days. The work is as doubtful and inconclusive as it is important to our self-knowledge. It is for this reason duty bids me leave this document where others might, but I fear will not, think on it.

        The manuscript ends here and while there appear to have been some pencil notes subsequently erased, these strange signs, indecipherable in the original, are necessarily omitted from the present text.

***

        This note was found among various personal effects, dated to the mid-noughties of the present century. The envelope in which it was contained was marked ‘to be burned upon the death of the author’. This wish has now been complied with. The envelope is no more. The fanciful scribblings contained therein have been filed in accord with the relevant protocols as prescribed by the various government offices concerned in such cases.

Leontes: No settled senses of the world can match

The pleasure of that madness. …

Paulina: Music, awake her, strike!

–  The Winter’s Tale (V, iii)

       High above the swampy inlet between the two rocks that made up the island of Taipa in the Chinese territory of Macao, down through the uncrowded centuries, hidden under its jungle mantle…there lay a mysterious figure, human in form, graceful yet determined, keen eyes bent on the slowly unfolding future. Stoic in the blazing sun, resplendent silver in the moonlight.

He had been found when the University of Macau was first carved from the jungle and the rock beneath it. Stark naked he was. People like to think that he was found as they knew him later, that finding him was a sign the university had to be built here, had to be built around him. Others – mainly undergraduates – believe that the university came first, that he was created to ornament it. He? To be honest the bronze figure was rather androgynous before it was clad. The robes and the mortar board came after the university was planned, along with certain of the subtle but more definite facial characteristics of manhood. Naturally the statue was kept well concealed during the building of the university, until it and he could be unveiled.

        The facts as above are perhaps less important than the fact that mystery and intrigue surrounded the statue, especially as far as the student body was concerned. The unknown graduate quickly became an object of veneration for undergraduate students, who looked on him as a kind of older sibling, someone who’d been there and done that, but only just recently. This boy on the brink of manhood – eternally youthful – mortarboard up top and scroll in hand, represented to them their very raison d’être. He was someone who’d made it, someone to look up to, quite literally. This was exactly what the university authorities had had in mind when they’d dressed him up the way they had. Here was someone perpetually in the process of graduating, someone with nothing more to learn, someone who’s hair never needed cutting.

        What the authorities hadn’t bargained on was the lengths to which some students – and especially female students would go – in order to express their admiration.

        Things began innocently enough. On graduation days – as you’d expect – graduating students who wished to be photographed having achieved what he had, were of course keen to be photographed with him. They’d gather in knots around the statue. Of course he stood out head and shoulders above the crowd. Being pictured with the unknown graduate quickly became a tradition.

        From this innocent beginning though things escalated. Certain students – especially among the women – would come to him to share their troubles. They’d never met such a good listener before. He never contradicted or gainsaid them. Before exams particularly they’d come. It was as if he knew, not the answers, but how they felt and what they needed to know. His look was knowing. Not all of them would look into his soothing eyes though. The meeker ones would lurk behind him where no one on the road below could see them. Just to be near him was enough for them. They didn’t necessarily want their boyfriends finding out where they’d been or whom they’d been talking to. What was they loved in him? His stoicism in the face of the elements? The only man in modern Macao who didn’t need air conditioning. That alone suggested his origins in another era.

Nostalgia and tradition cast him in a golden light and yet each generation of girls remade him as their own. Over the years the unknown graduate had many rivals in the form of jealous boyfriends. This would have been the story of one such case except that the girl in question didn’t have a boyfriend at the time she became besotted. Nor had she eyes for any man else after.

Sarah had participated with her classmates in the burgeoning cult of the unknown graduate. Yes, she had with the others thrown garlands of flowers around his neck, thrown a cloak over his shoulders in the depths of winter, let off fireworks for his benefit at Chinese New Year. She had sought his advice, and basked in his sage smile. When she erred he never judged. That was more important to her than it might have been to some other girls. Sarah had had boy troubles, her first attempts at dating had not gone well. Boys always seemed to want more than she was prepared to give. She hated it when they wanted to slobber on her. Love was something pure for Sarah, it wasn’t about the exchange of bodily fluids. Boys were impatient with her… but not this boy. He kept his hands to himself.

        Sarah’s background was complex. She was a guilt wracked girl, she’d been through a lot. Her father had died when she was very young and for some reason no one could explain, she had vague feelings that she was somehow to blame. Her mother was often sick after her father died and so from that time until she finished school she’d grown up mainly with her aunt and uncle, but they had two of their own children and so they didn’t have limitless time for Sarah. Still they loved her and did all they could for her. It was because of their support Sarah had made it into the university when so many of her school friends had taken jobs which were, well… not much of a challenge.

Sarah’s family had been worried about her for a long time. She’d been a healthy teenager, but now in her early twenties she was wasting badly, the irrational guilty feelings with which she’d battled through her schooldays seemed to be getting the better of her. She’d been diagnosed as mildly anorexic but this syndrome was so common in Macao at that time that only the life threatening cases were taken seriously by the medical authorities. Nor were the counselors terribly worried about a girl spending time with the unknown graduate. It was well known many young women had fallen prey to that ineffable smile.

        In Sarah’s case as I’ve suggested, there wasn’t a jealous boyfriend in the background of her devotions; rather it was her girlfriends who resented the time she was apparently spending on her studies. They weren’t the unknown graduate’s type, nor did it occur to them to begin with that Sarah might be. She was getting a reputation as a real swot, when in fact she was just getting an impressive daily dose of counseling from a man who always listened. In fact she was getting further and further behind in her studies. It wasn’t just Sarah’s own girlfriends who were jealous. Every other girl who wanted to spend time with the golden boy resented her. That was because Sarah was always there with him. If another girl did come, lurking in the background, waiting her turn, Sarah would be instinctively aware of her, would stay with him as long as it took, until the rival was out of the way. If, as eventually happened, she would come in the morning or after class to find another girl already there, she would fume all day, be distracted in her classes and come back at every opportunity to see if her boy was free yet.  

        The unknown student was such a good listener, no one could tell very easily which way his affections tended. It would be easy to think of him as heartless, as unfeeling. But you should know that under the steely folds of his gown there beat a heart of gold. There always had. Wise men had built the university here because they’d sensed his benevolent influence. No one lacking in affection could ever express benevolence.

        Sarah knew that he only had eyes for her, the problem was that every other besotted girl had the same idea. All of them were waiting for a sign. It had to be said that were there a sign Sarah would be much more likely to notice it than anyone else, simply because she was there with him so much more than anyone else. What if she were to see a sign in another girl’s favour? Would her heart be broken forever?

        Sarah was a patient girl, but her lonely vigils took their toll. As time went by it became more and more difficult for her to tear herself away. It was more difficult to tear herself away, and more important that he show that he was hers. Who knows, she might be gone just for a minute when the sign of love came. What if another girl were there at the time. What if the other girl thought that the sign for Sarah were meant for her? Perhaps it would be a sign that only Sarah could read? Lovers, after all, have a secret language only they can understand.

        Sarah’s love language may have been incomprehensible to others, but over time it became unmistakably hers. We’re not privileged to know how she expressed herself privately in words but as this one-sided seeming romance blossomed, everyone at the university could see Sarah’s love gaudily displayed quite clearly from the bus stop. At first she garlanded her love with flowers, then with origami, then she started on the soft toys. A few weeks after she’d started the unknown graduate was so festooned with miffy and hello kitty paraphernalia, he could barely be seen beneath. To those who knew the secret of his origins this new incarnation seemed a cruel parody of the human form beneath. Not to Sarah though. She’d always dreamed of a boy like this. She’d had trouble persuading a boy to hang a soft toy from a car’s rear vision mirror. Now she was turning a hard edged male into a soft toy! Becoming hers she knew would breathe life into him. Yes, on rainy nights she’d clear the padding from his shoulders. That was her chance to take it off up the hill to the laundry and get it all washed and spun dry. When the sun shone he’d be more resplendent than ever. What girl would dare come near him now, knowing that he lived for her. There was no ‘sign’ as yet but surely it was only a matter of time.

        This train of though had long been in her mind when Sarah finally determined upon an irreversible course, purposed to knit their loves forever. Marriage! Naturally the ceremony would take place in situ as it were. This was make or break, and as you can imagine, there having been no sign so far, many of Sarah’s friends thought she was crazy, some of her older and bolder acquaintances had no hesitation in saying so. This madness had gone on long enough. This was the limit. Her wits and her waist seemed to be disappearing at the same time. Sarah’s family – with the exception of her mother – thought the same thoughts, but were more reluctant to speak.

        And so they went along with the wedding preparations… the dress and the cake…the veils and the icing. When the bridesmaids – cousins – arrived on the scene they were genuinely shocked. They’d thought the university would be a nice setting for a wedding, but they’d had no idea that the groom was... all they knew was the fact that he was a graduate, that his name was Roger, that he wasn’t at all pushy, that he was understanding.

        How understated their cousins’ description had seemed now that they saw her love was not flesh but bronze. And yet they were to witness…well, as it happened the sign when it came was a quite pedestrian but clear proof of life.

        Anyone watching Sarah’s movements over the twenty four hours before the big event would have been surprised. Naturally on the morning of their wedding day Sarah hadn’t risked the bad luck of seeing her husband to be. But on the previous day she had left him alone in the wind and the rain. Months earlier, her leaving him like that would have opened a window of opportunity for some other hopeful girl. Now everyone knew he was hers so there was no risk of an interloper. Anyone at the bus stop would have thought she was sheltering behind her tower of strength in the inclement weather. In fact Sarah had been praying all day and all night, praying to Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy, praying for a sign.

        And now the clouds had cleared. It was one of those crisp winter days when you could see from Taipa past the old one hump bridge to Macao and over the green ridge lines of Zhuhai. One of those days on which the mountains of Guangdong seem part of Macao, like the carefully angled backdrop of an ornate garden. It was in this direction Roger’s gaze was permanently fixed.

        You’ll readily imagine the bemused expression on the face of the marriage celebrant. Of course he’d been warned – known more than the cousins – and of course his palm had been suitably greased for the unusual proceedings. Still, nothing could quite prepare him for the wedding of a flesh and blood girl and a steely cold statue.

        It was a mainly western ceremony that had been ordered and though the religious element was mainly lacking, the couple were appropriately attired. Usually in a wedding ceremony, all eyes are fixed on the happy couple when the fateful performative ‘I do’ is pronounced. In this case though, bridesmaids and celebrant, family and friends, all in attendance, had their eyes firmly planted on bridge and the water, on the Zhuhai peaks beyond. They would keep their eyes averted for as long as it took for Sarah to come to her senses, to break down, to be led weeping away, hopefully by someone else.

        As a result, none of those assembled witnessed noticed the first twinkle in the eye or the pucker of Roger’s lips or his shallow mouthing of those words, ‘I do’. This truly was Sarah’s moment of truth… Guan Yin had spoken to her in the day’s first light. Sarah’s prayers had been answered. She had only to stand on a small step ladder brought along for the occasion, level her lips next to Roger’s. She had only to offer her lips close to his, then he would kiss her. Then she would be his and he hers forever, their hearts would be one. And then he would live, come down from his pedestal, they would be man and wife…All these thoughts crowded Sarah’s mind as she mounted near Roger’s pedestal. The passage of nine moons might bring them…? Who could say what their child would be like? Sarah’s head was racing. And now her head was nearly level with his. All eyes that might have witnessed were however still averted, far in the distance or down at their feet. So no one but Sarah saw those bronze lips atremble. No one saw Roger’s hands begin to stir. No one but Sarah saw his first tentative step, the step which might have brought him down from the pedestal.  

        Of course Roger couldn’t quite be expected to speak yet… perhaps an oil can would be necessary? But then it was not for his opinions he had been so long the captive of every girl’s affections. No, they’d loved him for not having any. And now the folds of Roger’s gown had already begun to rustle. The light breeze was catching at something half bronze and half cloth. What Sarah was painfully aware of at that moment was the fact that although Guan Yin had answered her prayer, Roger was about to ruin everything.

        No one saw Sarah put her finger to his lips or urge his creaking limbs back into their former place. No one saw the moment when the lovers’ eyes locked together. None saw lips mouth those fateful words, ‘love you forever’. When the silence had drowned out every suspicion, when all hope of Sarah’s saving face was lost, what the wedding party saw was two statues, not one. Her half of the podium was raised slightly higher than his so that their eyes were on a level, each fixed on the others’. Each body frozen as his had been before. None present suspected what might have been. All understood the nature of Sarah’s transformation.

        Earlier that morning, Guan Yin had offered Sarah two alternatives. One was a lifetime of happiness with a man, the other was eternal bliss. The goddess’ words had at first been mysterious, but when Roger had taken his first creaking step into her here-and-now world, Sarah had understood the choice she faced. Sarah had chosen eternity.

        Centuries have passed since then and though the sea rose long ago so that everything reclaimed was abandoned long before the leaving, and though the jungle has grown over most of the old university ruins, still there are devotees who, visiting earth, will take the time to tend these ‘originals’, whose forms are faithfully reproduced on the asteroid campus Umac has long since occupied. It wasn’t long after the wedding that the gown and veil disintegrated. Rather than leave the girl in her underwear on top of a hill like that, the university authorities decided she should be clad in the same fashion as her mate. The bridal outfit had been seen as appropriate to begin with, it demonstrated to everyone that Roger’s marital status had altered. Now, every girl understood that he was taken. And though a few had hoped to tempt him with something on the side, it soon became clearly that Roger’s affections were not to be swayed. It was with much pomp and ceremony that Sarah was awarded her honorary degree. She’d not yet completed her final exams so it had to be honoris causa. Still, everyone knew she deserved the letters after her name, the funny hat on her head, and of course, Roger.

        Mosquitoes are different. I don’t merely mean that they’re different from other creatures or more particularly from other insects; obviously that’s true. I mean that they’re different from each other. Most people – if they could name a mosquito at all – have only heard of the anopheles, the mosquito associated with malaria. But there’s culex fatigans, a mosquito that plays a role in the dissemination of elephantitis. Culicine mosquitoes have long been known for their role in a range of ailments, including avian malaria, filariasis, dengue. Mosquitoes are implicated in many other diseases and could even be involved today in the spread of HIV/AIDS. Had SARS lasted long enough, who knows but a crafty mosquito might have bought into the action.

One common mosquito is the aegyptus, originally noticed in Egypt I suppose, and associated with the spread of yellow fever. This name gives us the hint. The fact is… though little research funding has yet been directed to the idea…the fact is that mosquitoes – like the rest of us – have national characteristics.

I first observed the national distinctiveness of mosquitoes on a trip to New Zealand in 1977. At that time I had been long accustomed to the habits of the Eastern Australian mosquito, the Hexham grey being a particularly conspicuous example. (A five metre high replica adorns the Pacific Highway just north of Newcastle, N.S.W., in the town named after the mosquito.) Imagine yourself in a room with two or three Hexham greys. You’re trying to get to sleep. The Hexham grey knows its duty. To descend upon your sleeping skin and gorge itself – vampire like – on your vital essence? Too simple. No, the Hexham grey must first get into your ear, just as you have nodded off. It must be intimate with you, must wake you through the dream, not merely from it. Then later, when the fluids are exchanged, you are already in its power, feel nothing. Fortunately this species is not at present known as a disease vector. Now contrast the Hexham grey with a typical New Zealand South Island mossie. Their war cry is worse than their bite. It was my misfortune at the tender age of eighteen to spend a night in a tent at an infamous place known as Haast Pass. It was a tent with no fly screen (foolish economy!) and the mosquitoes – swift of wing – could come and go more freely than I. There was no point leaving the tent though, because the bloodsucking tribe would have followed me wherever I went. Counting a sample of the ceiling I calculated that there were at least two thousand mosquitoes in there with me. They weren’t in the tent because they liked the canvas, they wanted to be with me. And here’s the point: they didn’t all attack at once. They weren’t all in my ears. They came down in squadrons. Few ever landed on me. Yes, there were bites, but a dozen Australian mosquitoes might have done the same damage. It’s true I buried my head in my sleeping bag and sobbed myself to sleep, but in subsequent nights, head out, I woke with no more than an itchy nose and a lump or two to demonstrate my bravery. Pass the night in a tent with two thousand Hexham greys and one would require a full eight pints of blood for breakfast.

So you see already that even across the Tasman Sea – a narrow cultural gulf if there is one in the world – the difference in the inclinations of the mosquito population can be enormous. Things are no different elsewhere. The Finnish mosquito loves nothing better than to lurk in a sauna. Across the border, the Russian, accustomed by the local blood, breeds in piles of potato peelings. Vodka vats must be specially protected.

In this part of the world, the local differences between mosquitoes are no less marked. The Hong Kong mosquito is, as you might expect, a little officious and even tending to the self-righteous, if in a friendly sort of way. This is convenient for the traveler of course, because one has to fill out a few forms in order to be bitten. It’s true they’re all a little groggy from the smog over there. They’d hoped to keep SARS going but the seasonal conditions weren’t right, so that never got off the ground. The Macao mosquito is more …laid back. How many humans need to be bitten? Why bite more than are absolutely necessary? It’s not that the Aomen blue is indolent exactly. Perhaps it’s the weather or the general industrial climate, but they never glut themselves, they get by on what others would consider a minimal ration. And why would you bite the wary locals when you could target, for instance a gambler from Hong Kong or the Mainland, someone bent on making a donation, and possibly too drunk or too determined to wave an insect off.

But enough of these idle generalizations. The brief encounter below – between the newcomer and the old Macao ‘hand’ (long term expatriate resident) – should bear out the basic hypothesis.

***

        ‘Any sign of that mosquito repellant? These mossies are vicious you know. I think they know that I’m new blood.’

        ‘Yeah, yeah… I’ll find it. Robert Morrison was the missionary who translated the Bible into Chinese. He got this burying ground going in the first place. The reason was – and you’ve got to remember that pre Hong Kong this was whitey’s only foothold in China… Hong Kong and the Treaty Ports I’d call more of a stranglehold…’

        Graham has by now taken to yawning slightly at each of Bruce’s didactic asides. Sometimes it even brings Bruce back to the question at hand.

        ‘Thing was… Morrison couldn’t bury his wife… ah, Mary I think it was, anywhere…’

        Graham is playfully aghast.

        ‘She was dead at the time… Anyway the Catholics wouldn’t let him bury her in their cemetery. The Chinese didn’t want him to re-open their son’s grave outside the town walls… and so he managed to get this little dank hollow of a cemetery going. Morrison himself is one of the more prominent residents of this place. I’m sure some of the most interesting tombstones have disappeared over the years. But you’ve still got a great-great grand uncle of Winston Churchill’s here…You want to know what they all died of?’

No response is required to elicit this kind of information from Bruce Cotton. ‘There was plague from time to time as there had been very regularly in Europe since the Black Death in the Middle Ages. But the big killer here was diarrhea. Most common reported cause of death here at the turn of the last century. You won’t read it on anyone’s tombstone though: “Died rectum down, still squirting,” too undignified for lapidary letters.’

        Graham looks slightly disgusted, although he’s consciously trying not to.

        ‘Of course medical care was dodgy here in those days. Still pretty dodgy from the stories one hears. You know what they say about the hospitals here, I mean about the choice you’ve got?

        ‘No.’

        ‘Your money or your life, that’s what they say.’ But now – in his peripatetic way – Bruce has distracted himself.

‘There’s George Chinnery, Macao’s most famous expatriate painter. Mainly though the place is full of sea captains and cabin boys, lost adventurers who died of the shits or causes unknown and whose names are now fading into stone, into air.’

         Bruce has only a moment to look pleased with himself for his poetic flourish.

        ‘The mosquito stuff? Any prospect.’

        ‘Oh yeah.’ And now some serious rummaging, taking things out, laying them on the stone to get to what’s beneath. Finally…‘Look I’m sorry but the lid’s come off and it’s leaked everywhere… so… look I don’t think there’s anything in the bottle at all… It still smells like mosquito repellant though. Maybe if we wave the bottle around, it’ll keep ‘em away?’

        ‘It’s all right I don’t think there’s any blood left in me anyway.’

        ‘Oh, you mustn’t say that. You’re still worried about the malaria? There isn’t any, hasn’t been for a long time. And anyway malaria’s only caused by night time mosquitoes. It’s common knowledge.’

        ‘Can we go now?’

        ‘So who was this Camoens character anyway?’

        ‘He’s Portugal’s national poet. He’s a kind of hero of the age of exploration. Basically he borrowed great slabs of the Aeneid but kept insisting throughout that Portuguese did it better, went further… Gets you all misty eyed for the good old days if you read it in Portuguese I’m told. But I can’t… and so I’m always left with the perhaps unfair impression that the devotees are well… unreconstructed imperialists, racists, all that stuff…’

        ‘Can we skip the politics? Did he live in Macao?’

        ‘He might have.’

        ‘Did he even come here?

        ‘It’s possible.’

        ‘Can we go now…I’m feeling hot. I’ve got a few aches from all this walking.’

        ‘A premonition? OK, let’s go.’

***

        …three weeks later…the lesson continues…

        ‘You’re right you know… otherwise you’d have to be practicing your Cantonese, and that I can tell you from experience, is a lost cause… Checked up on the Internet… you know what they used to call this little affliction we’re just getting over now?

        ‘No Bruce, you tell me.’

        ‘Bone breaker fever, that’s what they called it. Bone breaker. Apt, don’t you think. It’s been around for a long time. “You feel like you’re going to die, but you don’t.” Such are the words of the nineteenth century diarist…’

        ‘Spare me.’

        ‘Pardon me. I thought you were interested…Once you see the bill, you’ll probably wish you were dead.’

        ‘Thanks for that cheering thought.’

        On the ends of their beds, identical labels in Chinese, English, Portuguese. The English will do for our purposes here: ‘Dengue Fever. Maintain hydration.’

        ‘When it was recognized that Earth had to be left for a time to allow it to recover from the excesses of its too many inhabitants, it was agreed that each country should have its home on a small planet or asteroid. The asteroid belt – between Mars and Jupiter – was selected as the ideal place for this kind of settlement. The technology for producing a biosphere had been first developed on a small scale, experimenting originally on Phobos and Deimos, the irregular moons of Mars. It had so far proved difficult to make the red planet itself biologically sustainable. But the methods developed thus far could easily be replicated on asteroids. It was thought that quarrels between nations would be avoided through the expedient of allocating such clearly demarcated territories. The only borders now were between artificial atmosphere and its lack. So numerous are the asteroids that it was possible for many of the larger nations to be assigned several.

        ‘China, because of its population, was naturally given Ceres, by far the largest of the asteroids. Roughly a thousand kilometers in diameter, Planet China, as Ceres was renamed, was – from first to last – far too crowded. Still, this was an important temporary home for the descendants of the dragon.

‘Now many of the more average sized of the minor planets had been assigned by lot. Once the big lottery was over, thousands of smaller planetoids remained, some fell into the spheres of influence of larger nations, some were taken over by corporate or sectional interests. Hong Kong and Macao had originally shared a small body, which had been artificially brought into an orbit around Ceres. Taiwan – only recently reunited with the motherland at the time of the leaving – had occupied a similar, slightly larger ‘space rock’. Hong Kong, its fifty years guaranteed autonomy only recently passed, had argued strongly on the basis that if it didn’t have its own rock then there would be nothing for immigration officials to do. The Hong Kong asteroid was adorned with a long solar scaled dragon tail, at once auspicious, a source of power generation and a tourist draw card. Once Hong Kong was to get its own chunk of the cosmos, Planet Lisboa began to make representations. 

        ‘But before those negotiations could bear fruit, it had been necessary for the evacuees from Macao to share Hong Kong’s asteroid. Most found it quite maddening. Anybody would interrupt any conversation with anybody else, just because the phone in her or his pocket was vibrating. Macao people are known to be more relaxed than that, to be one-thing-at-a-time people, and so the difficulty in finishing a conversation came as a blow to them. And then there were the motions. Asteroids are well known to be less steady in their movements than planets. But Hong Kong seemed to be running round in circles alternately wagging and chasing its tail. Things went from bad to worse with the phones. The Macao people – the only ones without phones – realized that nobody knew where they were anymore. The final straw was when it was recognized that everyone on the entire asteroid was on hold, waiting for someone else to get back to them. On Earth, although Hong Kong and Macao had been separated by a mere hour of water, now that they were lumped onto the one asteroid the Macao people felt as if they were on a different planet. It didn’t take a very big mind leap for them to insist on putting that into practice.

‘By the time the split came a casino asteroid had already been made available. After some high powered negotiations the Macao we know became a reality. Today all of these things are a matter of historical record.’

***

The lecture is the standard fare of Professor Ping, Socio-Astro-Dean at the New University of Macau and renowned specialist in Leaving Research. Today, the lecture’s not going down as well or as smoothly as it usually does. That’s because today’s audience is a little different from Ping’s usual customers. He’s giving his lecture to a class of youngsters who’ve been brought by their teacher, Miss Vong, from the University’s affiliated primary school. The reason they’ve come for the lecture is that quite a number of teachers at the university have become concerned at the declining quality of undergraduates. Ping is one of the chief grumblers. One of his stock lines at faculty meetings of late has been, ‘Teenagers don’t know a thing these days.’

You can imagine how difficult it must be to explain to schoolchildren how Planet Macao came about, to explain to them where they’re from and where they’re going in the cosmos. Such is the work of one Emily Vong, teacher of third class pupils at the affiliated school. None of the children in her care have ever been to Earth and to them many of its ways seem truly mysterious. All were born long after the leaving. Miss Vong herself had only been a girl when the leaving had happened. After the evacuation of the Earth the intention first had been that everything should be new, that the old world and its wicked ways would be left behind. Things never go to plan where humans are involved though. Incredibly the Americans went on measuring the distances in their system in miles and the temperature in and outside of their atmostphere in Fahrenheit.

When the pupils ask Miss Vong about the Hong Kong system, the questions usually come like this:

‘But, miss, why is Hong Kong over there? Why do we have to catch the sunfoil or the starcat…Why isn’t there a bridge or a tube?’ One whole Earth-hour is like a lifetime to these kids…although they love to catch the starcat in a meteor shower because it’s  always so much bumpier. Here’s how Miss Vong responds:

‘It’s true that after the leaving Hong Kong and Macao had been all one rock to begin with… But the Hong Kong people were so bossy and in such a hurry that all the people who’d come from Macao on Earth decided that they had to protect their more reasonable and more relaxed lifestyle. Now, you should know children that if you’d just had this lesson on Planet Hong Kong, at the end of it the teacher would have said “I taught you that fairytale in three minutes and forty five seconds and now you have ten seconds to answer each of the following questions. If you can’t answer you have to listen again, but in your own time from the tape.” Nobody wants to go to a school like that, now do they?’ On cue, all the children grimace with fear at the grisly prospect just described.

Before she’d brought them to the university Observatory for the lesson, Miss Vong had primed them for the kinds of questions the kindly old professor was thought likely to ask. She was new on the job but her colleagues had told her all about him and what he was likely to say. She started with the easy questions:

‘What’s the planet between Mars and Venus? That’s right. Earth. And why is it special to us?’ and so on. The kids had been through this before.

‘Earth, Earth, Earth! Why do we always have to learn about Earth?… Nobody goes there, it’s dead …

‘Yes but, but…’ this was hard. Miss Vong resorted to her old tactics, ‘But Earth is our home, Earth is real, was … everything on Earth was real… And one day (here she’s choking back a tear), one day we will go back, or maybe your children will…We’ll take better care of Earth then. (She regains her composure and goes definitive.) Earth is important to us because it’s where we’re from and we’ll be going back there... it’s just a matter of time.’

‘When can we go, miss?’ Of course they would ask this. It was so hard being a teacher.

‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’ And Miss Vong wipes a tear from her eye.

***

        ‘Any questions at this point,’ Professor Ping intoned in his usual harsh manner, knowing full well that there would be none. To his and Miss Vong’s surprise, a voice from the second row piped up powerfully. ‘Tell us the story of the boy who cried “meteor”.’

Audience response! This had never happened before. Professor Ping was slightly aghast and in the moment he equivocated things quickly got out of hand. ‘Meteor boy, meteor boy,’ the children were all soon chanting. The professor’s usual class calming gestures (arms raised parallel then lowered rhythmically, one or two seconds) had no effect whatsoever.

Miss Vong was wondering if she’d made the right decision, to teach at this school, to teach at all. These kids were just terrible. Had she been such a horror when she was their age?  Why, only this morning, on the way to the Observatory she had had to confiscate an intellipet from one of the pupils. 

‘What’s under your jumper, Sophie?…Hmm?… You’ve been told a thousand times not to bring your intellipets to school. It doesn’t matter how quiet or how intelligent they are…’

Sophie whispered ‘Oh no.’ … She had hidden her kitten Cosmos under her jumper because she simply couldn’t bear the thought of being away from her for a day.

‘On Earth, children, we had real pets – until the SARS and other plagues anyway – real dogs, they used to even… well, sometimes they’d make a mess.’  They whole class made concerted yuk faces. ‘And they didn’t do anyone’s homework either!’

The worst intelipets to have in the classroom were those with the Chamelechip; although they were programmed so that they couldn’t physically hurt anyone, they could give you a hell of a shock. Recently a spate of heart attacks had been associated with them. The latest range of intellipets were fully telepathic. They could respond instantly to a demand or an idea, even to a half formed image in a child’s head. The ones with Chamelechips could instantly transform themselves into well… just about anything… head of a camel, moose antlers, shark’s teeth in whale jaws…The shapes were limited only by imagination. One of these in a classroom might not be a problem, but if everyone had one under their jumper things could quickly get out of hand. Pupils like to dare each other and some of them have very fertile imaginations.

From the official point of view, the main problem with intellipets was that they could – if carefully cultivated by a bright child – do all of your homework and even schoolwork for you. Naturally education authorities had intervened to short-circuit that little lurk, but the smart kids always seemed to be a step ahead of any safeguard or legislation. The danger was that kids might come to school and learn nothing – not even how to read and write – while their intellipets became more and more… intelligent…

        Sophie’s Cosmos had been sent home. (She was certainly smart enough to make her own way.) But now she was rioting with the rest of them, ‘Meteor boy! Meteor boy!’

Miss Vong was dreadfully embarrassed but she managed to calm them down quite quickly. When order was restored she gave the old scholar an empathic glance. They were in the same boat just now. Professor Ping was taken aback but happy to comply with the demand of these young enquiring minds. He adjusted his spectacles so that he could peer over them to catch any potential miscreants. And now he went on in full-blown story mode.

***

        ‘The story of the shepherd, eh? Well, let’s see if I can remember it.’ In fact it was no problem for Professor Ping to remember the story. It was part of his standard undergraduate fare, something to liven up a lecture. But would it work with the youngsters? That was the question.

        ‘Where to begin. Let me see…There being no natural atmosphere or magnetic field on an asteroid – even on Ceres – certain falls of stars were as dangerous as they were spectacular. And so they had to be guarded against. The star shepherd’s duty was an onerous one. But it was vital. A system like Macao had all sorts of vulnerable points. Originally consisting of five space rocks of varying sizes, linked together by ‘bridges’ and shuttle tubes, festooned with solar collectors and sails, there were many points at which Macao could be hit and possibly suffer irreparable damage. So the shepherd’s job was vital… Oh, I should explain to the younger members of the audience that this was before the cosmic shields. The cosmic shield today – as you know – is perfectly transparent. Nobody thinks of it much except when it breaks down. A direct hit is impressive, true, but in those days a direct hit was usually also deadly. They do know about the cosmic shield, do they not, Miss Vong?’

        And here Professor Ping looked slightly accusingly at the rather harried teacher. Ping was deeply concerned about the decline in educational standards, not to mention the growing insubordination of youth… Why, only last week his daughter’s intellipet had caught him looking for some socks in his late wife’s wardrobe and informed him that cross dresser rhymed with professor. Mrs Ping had only recently passed on and though he knew he had to empty her wardrobe eventually, for the time being he took comfort in being with her things, wearing her socks for instance. He didn’t need some smartypants computer on four legs to tell him how to behave. Intellipets get their ideas from somewhere surely? During this train of thought Professor Ping had rolled his eyes from the floor to the ceiling and back again. This little antic never failed to arrest the attention of undergraduates but seemed to have no effect at all on these primary school pupils. Miss Vong was however nodding vigorously, if a little guiltily. The professor went on.

‘Now, there had in the early days been several places from which the shepherds had kept watch, but the university’s rock, located in the middle of the system in an area nostalgically known as Taipa, was the ideal observation point. From here the bridges and tubes to the long rock could easily be watched. For this reason the observatory was built here on university rock, just above the statues of the graduates. It was a lonely job watching during the long vacation and even when classes were out every ‘day’ for what was called a terrestrial diurnal (In those days Earth cycles were strictly maintained by the older members of the community, who claimed that if society were not run on Earth time they couldn’t get any sleep.)

‘Earth is visible from Planet Macao with the naked eye but not very distinctly and so – as on every asteroid – large arrows had been erected, pointing in the direction of Home, so that the new generations (Professor Ping looked from face to face in his audience) growing up would retain a sense of their origins. Shepherds often had the work of tending the signs as well as of warning of impending meteor showers.

        ‘Now it just so happened that our particular shepherd, the shepherd of our story – his name was P. Ram – was in love with a girl who was the chief of the peninsula umbrella crew. Her name was Dizzy. An odd name in her case because in fact she was very level headed. Having her head screwed on well was how at her tender age she had got herself in charge of the most hands-on and perhaps the most important of the Macao Protection Agencies. It was her job to rush to the site of a meteor shower with the big umbrella in order to protect any threatened part of the system. She was on-call “24-7”. Miss Vong will explain that quaint expression to you later.

‘These were early days and at that time the Main or Peninsula Rock and the Taipa Zone had to share the one umbrella. The umbrella would be brought across the bridge to Taipa if necessary, but on calm ‘days’ was garaged on the Main Rock. Bringing the umbrella to Taipa was always a risk because it left Main Rock exposed to danger. The Main Macao Rock was where most of the people lived. 

‘P. Ram was the same age as Dizzy, but hadn’t been such an achiever at school. Still, she loved him and he her, although these salient facts may not have been at first apparent to the unaided observer. The difference between them was that he would profess his love for Dizzy anywhere and to anyone, whereas Dizzy had, since their schooldays together, being playing hard to get. The casual onlooker might have thought she didn’t care for him at all. Over time P. Ram himself had come to wonder if that might not be the case. It wasn’t that there were any other boys in her life. She was just too busy with work. Work was her life. Still, had she merely been a little coy, she would have been able to maintain a normal kind of boyfriend-girlfriend relationship with P. Ram. The problem was that her father had an astounding antipathy for the boy. No one, including Dizzy could understand what that was about.

‘The father watched his daughter like a hawk. She’d known since a child she could keep no secrets from him. She learned to make full and frank disclosures ever since the time he’d had her faithful pet Confido’s chips downloaded to find out what had happened to a certain missing gravity pad that had belonged to her younger sister.

‘If P. Ram knew something about why it was he was held in such ill repute in certain quarters, he wasn’t letting on. In fact, all he knew was that his dad and Dizzy’s had gone to school together and that they had had a strong and continuing dislike for each other since those days. It wasn’t wise to mention the boy’s name in the company of Dizzy’s dad. If the father had known or suspected that his daughter was seeing P.Ram, all hell would have broken lose. But there wasn’t much danger of that. Dizzy was a dutiful daughter, though terribly torn. Her answer to her romantic-familial problem was to bury her head in the task at hand, to always put work first. Surely the other stuff would look after itself in time, if only people were prepared to be reasonable. Sometimes Dizzy was too level headed for her own good. 

‘If things weren’t bad enough for their love, now P. Ram had been assigned this dreadful job as a rock shepherd on Taipa. He suspected that Dizzy’s dad might have had something to do with that too. But there was nothing he could prove and even if he could have proved anything there would have been nothing he could do about it. While other couples of their cohort were gadding about in their own space buggies or borrowing their fathers’ bubbles, Ram was stuck on Taipa and Dizzy on the Main Rock.

 ‘Dizzy’s father was a powerful man in the community. He was Director of Macao Telepathy Services, so you might say that he had his finger on the pulse. He certainly knew what people were thinking. P. Ram’s dad was just a computer technician, that’s how the boy had got his strange name. Now that Dizzy was in charge of the Main Rock’s umbrella, how would he ever see her? Their relationship was doomed or so it seemed to P. Ram.

‘The most frustrating thing for Ram was that the Observatory was such a romantic place. The sight of the lovers parked around the statue made him pine even more. With the statue of the graduates set against the backdrop of the blazing heavens, couples would come and park themselves below the two immortal lovers. If they could tear their eyes off of each other for a moment, they’d really have a terrific view of the brave o’er hanging firmament. But you know what people in love are like. (Blank stares from the audience before Professor Ping’s eyes rest for a moment on the rather attractive Miss Vong. Ping shakes his head slightly, as if there were something in his ear, goes on.) The lovers in those days had to bring their own little umbrellas to huddle under. More romantic still! But very practical because without a ‘rock brolly’ a couple busy attending to each other could easily find themselves launched into… space or eternity. The most sturdy of space bubbles wouldn’t protect a girl and boy from a powerful shower of space junk. The umbrella was essential for protection.

        ‘Dizzy was in charge of a rock brolly on a slightly larger scale. She was such a dedicated worker though there seemed to be no chance of her ever coming to Taipa to see P. Ram. She never had ‘days’ off.  She even slept under her umbrella. Ram had no way of reaching her at all. He couldn’t send her text messages or space mails because her father’s spies would intercept them. Telepathy was definitely out of the question. Ram found himself being careful of his private thoughts too; no one knew how far the Telepathy Service could go, legally or otherwise.

        ‘What to do? What to do? Well, boys and girls, you know what he did, don’t you? He invented a meteor shower that would bring Dizzy over with her umbrella. When she got there and there was no shower, he made all kinds of excuses about how the shower had just ended and how he’d tried to tell her but she was already on the way…this was all pretty lame though because a quick look at the instruments and the log book would have shown that there wasn’t a star out of place and that no communication attempts had been made. Dizzy didn’t bother about any of that though, but fell promptly into the arms of her beau who had judiciously turned off all tele-screens prior to her arrival…(Knowing looks are exchanged between Professor Ping and Miss Vong.) Their bliss was short-lived however because in no time at all, all manner of telepathic beepers were sounding off in Miss Vong’s head.

        ‘She went, leaving Ram feeling like a starving man who’d had the buffet removed before he could put a bread roll on his plate. But now he knew that she really loved him. Now he knew that things were mutual. And now it was only a matter of time till there was a second time. He had to be with her and he could think of no other way to bring this about.

‘The second time was far more serious. He knew that she’d be expecting him to try again and he knew that, though she wanted to be with him, she was a true professional and nothing could deflect her from her duty. He thought hard and together with some carefully chosen friends at the university – experts in mind control who wouldn’t leak a word or an image – he managed to arrange a simulation. It wasn’t so difficult really, just a matter of ‘borrowing’ certain ‘fireworks’ that had gone unused in the last Chinese New Year Celebrations. (Nobody called it ‘Lunar New Year’ anymore, but people were still keen to keep up Earth traditions in those days.) Ram’s plan worked and this time they had a little longer before their banquet was interrupted. (Professor Ping catches himself in the beginnings of what he recognizes as a lascivious wink. An embarrassed Miss Vong looks away.) They were well into the soup before her father buzzed them in his private space bubble. After that event Dizzy’s father – knowing full well whose son Ram was – had suggested replacing the boy with a remote sensor. Much cheaper, much more reliable, much less trouble…But the university was trying to build up the Observatory at that time, so there was strong resistance to the idea of automating the whole operation.  

‘Now Ram was on his best behaviour. And so of course was Dizzy. Both of them were asteridden (or grounded as people used to say on Earth), there seemed to be no chance of them seeing each other – or even communicating – again any time soon. What to do? What to do?

‘Well, as most of you already know, tragic events were to overtake them before they could do anything at all. When Dizzy was called the third time, she had been tempted to go, even though she’d thought it probably was just another of Ram’s tricks. But she never got to worry about the question for long because immediately after the call had come the Main Rock was itself being bombarded and the umbrella had to be kept where it was to protect the bulk of the population. In history we know this event as the First Great Bombardment. After it, the building of the first cosmic shields was accelerated. But I’m afraid not quite fast enough to be of much use to Dizzy and Ram. As soon as she’d got the Main Rock properly protected – and knowing that her boyfriend wasn’t fooling – Dizzy had rushed through the tubes to Taipa carrying with her just her own personal umbrella. When she arrived she’d found him, more dead than alive. He’d been hit by a serious chunk of space debris. Everyone else was in the university shelters, but he’d been on look-out and wouldn’t leave his post. As she cradled the dying man in her arms – the rocks falling hard about her – she put down her umbrella and dared the cosmos to do its worst. She wouldn’t go on without him.

The cosmos obligingly did the rest. Today there’s a little crater where they lay, which of course you wouldn’t notice were it not for the fact that the devotees of these two legendary lovers still place fresh flowers there to remember them.

        ‘So that’s the story of P.Ram and Dizzy, or as you call it ‘The Boy who cried “meteor”. Now, let’s test your knowledge of the cosmos. Hmm, let’s see…What’s the planet between Mars and Venus?

        ‘Earth! Earth!’ Every hand went up, but there was no time to choose anyone because they were all shouting at the same time.

‘That’s right. Earth! And why is it special to us?’

        ‘Earth is our home,’ the children chorused.

        ‘That’s right, children. Earth is our home and one day we’ll go back, or our children will, or your children perhaps. But who can tell me why we had to leave Earth in the first place?’

        ‘Because the air was bad?

        ‘That’s true but it’s not the real reason we had to leave.’

        ‘Because of the hole where the sun shone too hard?’

        ‘Well, there was that, but they were fixing it…’

        ‘The seas getting higher and higher?’

        ‘Yes, they did, and the old Macao was getting smaller and smaller, it’s true, at the time of the leaving. But it wasn’t the sea or the air… not really, that meant we had to leave…

        ‘It was too hot.’

        ‘That’s right, it was much too hot in the last days.’ This was something Miss Vong could remember very distinctly. She wiped imaginary sweat from her brow to illustrate for the class. In the last days before the leaving things had been unbearably hot…’

        ‘Poison, my mum said everything was poison.’

        ‘Well that is more or less true.’

***

On the way back to the school, one of the pupils keeps tugging at Miss Vong’s sleeve and asking her, ‘What was money, miss? What was money?’

‘Money… well, yes I remember it as a child. Before cosmocards and astrocreds, down on earth people used this paper stuff and there was metal two, little round pieces called coins, but you couldn’t buy much with them. Their main function seemed to be making everyone’s handbag very heavy. The children still looked confused and so Miss Vong started again, ‘Money was a kind of paper.’

        ‘My mum said money was the poison. ‘Cause of money we had to leave the Earth.’

        Miss Vong screwed up her face to concentrate. ‘Your mum could be right about money, you know.’

***

Just to bring you up-to-date on the rest of the story. It wasn’t long before Miss Vong became the new Mrs Ping.

Once the core of Jupiter was lit, its moons made an infinitely better (and warmer) home for humanity. The Macao System was offered a place on Ganymede when China Proper moved there. But retaining its SAR/RAE independent spirit – and frankly tired of moving by this stage – the New Macao residents decided to stay put. They preferred the atmosphere there, which was only natural, as they’d created it themselves. There was the hope too that once the route back to Earth was re-opened, there’d might be a brisk trade for the casinos. As it was there were plenty of plastic laden tourists passing through the asteroid belt. Of course they don’t play for ‘money’ or to win or lose anymore. It’s all for the greater good. 

The Pings’ son, following in a few of his father’s footsteps, went on to major – and then lecture – in Space Mythology. He mainly teaches undergraduates but he agrees to take time out of his busy schedule to address the school groups, because he’s very concerned about falling standards. Kids seem to know nothing these days. He likes to talk to a school group outside under the stars. He has them all sit around the statues. He tells the pupils that these statues represent the characters in an old story called ‘The Boy who cried “meteor”’. As soon as he mentions P. Ram and Dizzy, for some unknown reason, the strange and changing creature at his feet begins tugging on his trouser leg.