Vegetable Roots of Ganymed

On a mining asteroid, one of the last members of the human race decides how to carry on in the shadow of his older sister, a famous philosopher

Jan Chu is a digital native, who first published via Telnet in the 1990s. Based in Hong Kong, Jan writes science fiction and political allegory.

“If you are retiring, the time to go is at the peak of your success. As to your station, the place to be is where you are the only one left.” 

Writings of Hong Zicheng, the “Caigentan”
(Vegetable Roots Discourse) 1:155, written ca. A.D. 1590 

“Meng Jia asked: ‘What is solitude?’ 

“Wen Di responded: ‘To be solitary, not only in a human-defined group, but in the very history of all humanity, is freedom. It is the most transcendent of all states. Yet in our glorious solitude, instead of reveling, we grasp at the remnant stems and leaves of a past society as if that were the thing of value.” 

Vegetable Roots Discourse of 1036 Ganymed, Siu Man Wong, 2:12, written ca. A.D. 2101 

Siu Man Wong was my older sister. Her great work was the product of a frantic, feverish three-and-a-half-month writing spree conducted as she lay dying of radiation sickness. No one else on 1036 Ganymed was writing, no one was creating anything, not on the whole asteroid. And she, in those last, desperate months of her life, composed something many consider to be the most profound philosophy in a generation. 

What put it into the category of genius, however, was her youth. She was only emerging from late adolescence — alive for just a little over four orbits. She had already allied with a close friend from her cohort, and the two girls were setting their sights on a likely candidate to secure their future. Her friend, Ala, was social, athletic, outgoing. Erik was a young man, sensitive, handsome — tall and willowy, as we all are in this gravity — and he perished with them. 

I am told that the effects of exposure to a proton storm, the kind that follows a solar flare, were once beautiful for those on Earth. Here on an asteroid without an atmosphere, they are deadly. But it does not happen instantly. You have up to three or four months before you succumb. Siu Man, Ala, Erik, and their friend Wendy exposed themselves deliberately. People say that their act was more than a suicide of existential despair; it was meant to force themselves into action with a deadline that could not be extended. Siu Man met her deadline with her great work. 

I was a baby, then; I am now older than they were at the time. I have done nothing great. I believe the name Barry Wong will never be known. 

Siu Man organized her chapters around vegetables, something she had very little practical experience with but was fascinated by. Her book was based on the Caigentan 菜根譚 "Vegetable Roots Discourse," written in the late sixteenth century on Earth, an eclectic compilation of philosophical aphorisms that combine elements from Confucianism, Daoism, and Chan Buddhism. 

As an agronomist, one of the few in our dying colony, I know more than she did about the vegetable world; indeed, I know as much as any living human — a small and diminishing group. 

Siu Man’s “Vegetable Roots” is written as a conversation between two philosophers. One, Meng Jia, is a loosely-disguised stand-in for Siu Man herself. The other, Wen Di, is named after the agronomist Siu Man befriended shortly before the proton storm and who fixed her fate together with the other three. The two characters in the book discuss the importance of biological things and of sensory experience, of memory and diversity of taste. In all instances, Meng Jia and Wen Di find that our little world comes up short: already crumbling during the time Siu Man wrote her Discourse, human society on the asteroid 1036 Ganymed is now almost gone. All of the things that make humanity worth persisting have fizzled out, or will soon; among the few thousand of us that remain, there is little art, no culinary delight (only the barest, sour yeast cakes and stews keep us alive, but without satisfaction or pleasure), no music but the dull rumble of the solar smelters, the clanging of airlocks on steel tunnels. No beauty, only the gray, rusty, dripping walls of our stifling enclosures. 

When the end approached on Earth, our ancestors, in their haste, did not envision how the rot would set in, not only in the colony’s built infrastructure, but in food stores and seed vaults, in the soil itself, and in the spirits of the second and third generation. With iron ore, magnesium, and other minerals in usable quantities, the asteroid’s original purpose as a mining colony was not lost, and our material wealth in metal has been sustained. But the softer, “vegetable” matter of our lives cannot be smelted from rock. I myself lack softness and subtlety. I am not flexible and slender like a willow wand, but stretched, thin, tense and brittle. 

A few optimists remain, but only a few. My father, now incredibly wrinkled and frail, still thinks there will be a time when we can return to Earth. He was born there, and even remembers some scattered, hazy images. Once, I asked him about it. 

“In the spring, things became amazingly green. I remember planting broccoli in the garden in the back of our house, but the shoots were eaten by deer. I used to play in the dirt with my favorite little truck. 

“I brought it with me when we left: your grandmother was crying, and she tucked it into my pocket, and it made me sad to see her cry, but I didn’t know at the time that I wouldn’t see her again.” 

“What happened to the truck?” 

“At some point — it would have been within the first orbit after we arrived — they realized how valuable plastic had become, and they collected it all, every last bit, even toys. There was no way to make more: a lifeless asteroid obviously has no oil reserves, and there was no way to build a cracker to break down biological oils, even if we had had the know-how. We had metallurgists in the group but precious few chemical engineers, and it was too risky. 

“I was old enough to understand the discussions, and I was willing to give up my truck, even though it was almost the only thing that still connected me to my mother and her garden. I believed we would get through, and if I could help by handing over my truck, I was ready to do it.” 

“Do you still believe we’ll make it?”

He smiled. “You may think I’m old and senile, but yes, I do. No matter how many people read your sister’s depressing book and decide to give up, there will still be some who are determined. I’ve seen what the team over in Admiralty are doing.” 

“In Sector 5? Yes, I’ve heard about it, too. But there’s more to getting back to Earth than building a space-worthy ship. You need… I don’t know, you need to calculate trajectories, you need an experienced captain, you need computing power. You need food.” 

“Hmph. If only there were an agronomist willing to put some effort into tackling that last challenge.” 

I laughed, but acted as if I didn’t take it seriously. He smiled again, and hugged me weakly. 

I’d never known either of my mothers, though Siu Man had known both. I cannot understand how my father carries on through the years. Many men of his age succumbed to the kind of wasting depression they used to refer to as “the syndrome”, which was so pervasive that it rewrote societal norms. Others have died violently in useless fist fights and even duels, a practice that refuses to wane. Yet he still knows how to smile. 

The last few members of my own cohort plod forward mostly through blind habit. I tend to the yeast fermenters and the planting rows daily, growing the few crops that have not yet gone extinct. I do very little of the work that I was trained for as a youngster, which was developing new hybrids, cross-pollinating to find something fast-growing, hardy, and productive enough to add to our rotation. Some of the species, like tomatoes, are already extinct because of decades of haphazard care. Some simply could not survive the long-term depletion of the soil. Although our human waste is collected and re-used, and although the rats, our only remaining mammals beside ourselves, leave behind their scraps and pellets, the more delicate plants simply could not survive the conditions we forced upon them. 

“Meng Jia asked: ‘What is a vegetable? What defines a person? Why should their fates be so intertwined?’ 

“Wen Di replied: ‘What drives our living condition is the pursuit of the sublime. For a carrot shoot, straining against the richness of the soil and the darkness of the seed, is it not sublime to feel air and light, the most extraordinary moment of its transformation? For a person, the sublime can be more profound but need not be more complex. Without anticipation, can the sublime exist?’”

Vegetable Roots Discourse of 1036 Ganymed, Siu Man Wong, 4:36 

My father’s gentle chiding had an effect. I have created, in a deserted part of Sector 3 at the distant edge of our enclosure, a large vegetable patch of my own. I have managed to nurture and regrow several crops there for the past two orbits. Lacking genetic diversity and unsuited to this harsh life, carrots were already on the way out when Siu Man was writing, and had mainly ceased to be a viable food crop for the colony. But by selectively exposing germinating shoots to unshielded cosmic radiation, one after another, for months after month, I have been attempting to generate mutations through the crudest possible form of genetic modification. There is no way that this should have resulted in anything other than dead shoots. And yet: one or two of them stayed alive out of spite, and grew vigorously, and have become the ancestors to a great brood. 

The most exciting thing, the most frightening thing, is that this has now evolved beyond an idle pursuit. If I can cosset the field through a few more growing cycles, and if I can do something with the barley, and if we just have a little more time, I might be on the way to building up a strategic reserve. 

At last, I decide to visit the Admiralty pod. 

Sector 5 is almost as far away from my growing chambers as it is possible to be on our asteroid without going outside of the warren. I walk through dull, gray tunnel after dull, gray tunnel, opening and closing airlocks behind me. Their lighting fixtures have almost all broken down. I thank the designer who installed natural light windows in each segment; without them, many of the tunnels would be cast into darkness not just twice a day, but eternally. It is well past first sunrise when I arrive at the last airlock. 

There, in a vast chamber, four middle-aged engineers and a teenage apprentice are welding large pieces of curved metal together. One of the engineers pulls up her face shield to reveal a narrow, worried countenance. “Well, a visitor! Come to see the Great Folly, have you?” she cries. 

I can hear the capital letters; they are born of prolonged defiance. I like her already. 

I nod and introduce myself — she knows who I am — and my project — which she does not. The defiant leader of the Admiralty group is named Carmen, and she has short, wavy, dull black hair with wisps of bangs that constantly stick to her forehead in the heat of the workshop. 

She explains, “We’ve been working on this project for about two full orbits already” — a third of my lifetime — “and we’ve made quite a bit of progress. One big issue is timing. If we want to take the shortest path to Earth and still have enough power to navigate the final atmospheric entry when we arrive, we need to launch around one and a half orbits from now.” 

“But what will we find when we arrive?” 

“Nobody knows for sure. The map will have changed, that’s certain. Bacteria can survive just about anything. We also have detected a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere, so photosynthesis is going on. But we can’t know for sure what is growing. When it comes to edible plants, we’ll need to bring as much as we can with us.” 

“Do you have the space?” 

“We’re building big. This whole asteroid is nothing but iron and magnesium. And as long as we manage to reach escape velocity, which is not that hard here, we can accelerate slowly and steadily over time. No, the biggest problem is convincing enough people to join us. People feel that it is, so-to-speak, safe here, and nobody wants to risk certain hardship and possible death, even for a chance of new life on Earth.” 

“They want to face certain death and certain hardship here, where everything they’ve ever known is collapsing,” I comment. 

“You don’t remember it, but there was a time, maybe in my parents’ generation, when this asteroid represented hope, and freedom, and a chance at life, despite everything. It’s not so easy to let go of that idea. And that damn book hasn’t helped, no offense to your late sister. People just shake their heads, and say, ‘I will die facing the sun!’ as if they think she made that phrase up.” 

“She didn’t?” 

“No. It’s a quote from some revolutionary on Earth.” 

“Meng Jia asked: ‘What is bravery?’

“Wen Di replied: ‘Bravery is not to wish for a new life or run from the few orbits of life given to us. Bravery is to stand one’s ground, to endure suffering. Others may flee to uncertain, dark fates, but as for me, I will die facing the sun.’”

Vegetable Roots Discourse of 1036 Ganymed, Siu Man Wong, 10:14 

It is nearly second sunset when I open the airlock into the central communal dining hall. The light is fading; we are nearly at aphelion and if I take time to walk all the way back to Sector 3 I risk eating in the dark. The hall is huge, grimy, rusted, and full of the hostile glares of hopeless people. Sometimes arguments break out for no reason. I see one beginning now, and the proximate cause is a scuffle over a book, one of the physical copies printed on linen paper when the flax crops were temporarily thriving. The book is, of course, Siu Man’s Discourse. But after a few shouts and feints, the would-be combatants sigh and return to silently scraping food into their mouths, metal spoons clinking on metal bowls. 

I finish my meal quickly and return to Sector 3 to tend my carrots and barley. I have now dedicated one entire abandoned growing chamber, shielded but now uninsulated and depressurized, as the freeze-drying and storage area. I have preserved several tons already. Although it is not strictly secret, who is watching? Who cares for a vegetable root in reality when they are comforted by the vapid vegetable inspiration of an emotional teenager from a generation ago? I spend the next hours preparing a new seedbed, working by starlight. 

“The disorder of bad habits can be cured, but it is hard to cure the disorder of addiction to principles. Circumstantial and material obstacles can be shifted, but it is hard to shift righteous morality.”

Writings of Hong Zicheng, the “Caigentan” (Vegetable Roots Discourse) 1:190 

Almost half an orbit has passed, and two crop cycles have made it clear that the new variants are doing more than surviving: they are thriving. I have added to the reserves significantly. Tubers work best, due to their nutritional density, and their leaves can sometimes be preserved as well: when freeze-drying capacity is plentiful, storage is simple. Some is canned and processed in the steam heat of the smelters - to be consumed after we arrive. 

By now I have the blessing of the governing Council and have been assigned three apprentices of my own. The project is still seen mainly as a distraction from the continuous gloom that pervades the colony. But I possess a borrowed celebrity status that affords me a certain level of indulgent protection from criticism.

Less than one orbit remains until the launch window, and the Admiralty team thinks we will be ready. They have determined a flight path that will allow us to spend a little time in a holding pattern above Earth’s atmosphere, taking measurements and determining where to land. We will not know until we are closer where the flat, fertile soil might be. Our glimpses of Earth from here are fuzzy and obscured by clouds and ash. 

“How is the recruiting going?” I ask Carmen. 

“A little better, nominally, but most of those who have signed up are just treating it as a mild, temporary fantasy. We can’t count on them to show up for launch day.” 

“That’s not very promising.” 

“We need inspiration. We need some kind of big, compelling call to action to get people excited about this. A celebrity appearance. That kind of thing.” 

“Well, the food stores are progressing well — better than I had hoped.” 

“Will your new seed vault be enough to get us through the first few seasons?” 

“I hope so. But I’ve never experienced winter. None of us have. We don’t know what it will do to us.” 

“We’re not even sure the seasons will even be the same as in our ancestors’ time.”

“I know my father will be happy just to see spring again. It’s one of the only things he remembers from his early childhood on Earth.” 

“Your father?” 

“Yes, if you can believe it — he still remembers! He’s first-generation, just barely, one of the last ones left.”

“How old is he now?” 

“He was 22 orbits on his last birthday,” I reply proudly.

“And he’s planning to come on the journey?” 

“Of course!” 

Carmen pauses, begins to say something, stops, coughs, and pauses again, brushing her damp bangs from her forehead. “Your father,” she says finally, “he’s more than 22 orbits old.” 

“Yes!” 

“Barry, a man of that age, no matter how much he wants to see Earth again, you realize —” 

“What?” I ask, staring stupidly. 

“The landing is going to be very rough. And once we land, it will be worse. Healthy, young men like you will barely be able to stand in that gravity. A middle-aged woman like myself will have trouble even sitting up straight. A man your father’s age” she shakes her head. 

“What do you mean?” I ask again, although what she has said is perfectly clear. 

“He can’t fly. He won’t make it.”

My voice rises. “We can’t leave him here. You know that. He’s my only family -” 

“I know, but —” 

“He’s going to be the sage of our journey! He's our guiding star, he’s going to be the only one who knows what to do when we arrive!” 

Carmen finally snaps. “He must have been a tiny child when he left. What use are his memories? They are very far from reality today. And anyway, he won’t be any good to us if he’s dead!” 

“Oh, you just want breeders, then! Why didn’t you say so?” I shout back. “Well, he can take another wife — you know we still have more women than men.” 

“Barry.” She is suddenly quiet, and no longer gentle. I can see the years of struggle and opposition in her dark eyes, and hear the disappointment in her voice. “Let’s talk after first sunrise tomorrow. You know where I’ll be.” 

Her apprentices are looking at her, at each other, anywhere but at me. They know how long she has worked with the hardest metals, bending them to her will. They also know that there is a moment when metal, put under too much strain, will buckle, and may snap in an unexpected direction. 

I back away and slam the airlock door behind me. I retreat to the central dining hall in a fuming rage, with wild fantasies of destroying my stockpiles, of opening airlocks. I shovel food into my mouth without knowing what I am eating. 

When someone complains about the sourness of the yeast cakes, I take it personally and I start a fist fight of my own. Whatever I was thinking about is driven from my head by the smashing right hook of a burly miner, who is glad for a temporary release from boredom, restlessness, and despair. The punch is harder and more painful than anything I have imagined. I don’t fight back, but collapse to the floor, sobbing, and lie there almost motionless, until he shrugs and leaves. 

I cautiously feel around and find a cold, steel soup plate. I hold it against my aching cheek. After a long time, I struggle to my feet and find my way home. 

My father is surprised to see my black eye and bruised cheek, but treats me as tenderly and professionally as he would any patient who came to him in the clinic before he retired. My tears are spent, but I shudder and hold him, carefully, afraid I will break his fragile bones if I squeeze too hard. 

I wake up long before first sunrise, and brood, and nurse my aching cheek. 

“Meng Jia asked: ‘What is the nature of adversity?’ 

“Wen Di replied: ‘There will always be adversity, for the tiny particle of stardust that traveled from the center of our universe to create you, for the cabbage ripped from its shallow root just as it reaches its flowering. But we have the power to choose how we act.’”

Vegetable Roots Discourse of 1036 Ganymed, Siu Man Wong, 14:12 

When he wakes up and offers me hot broth, my father is ready to hear whatever I have to say. 

“I want to ask you something, Daddy, and I don’t know how to start.” 

He puts down his cup of broth — the metal makes it too hot to hold, anyway — and sighs. 

I finally speak. “What was Siu Man really like?”

He has been waiting a long time for this question. “She took herself very seriously. Part of that was the self-indulgence of kids that age, but she had a wicked delight in creating little jokes that only she would understand.” 

“Really? Her book seems so stern.” 

“Well, it’s actually full of puns and references. Look at the name, Meng Jia. It’s supposed to be a play on the name of Meng Ji, an apprentice of Confucius. But it also sounds just like ‘Mangia!’ It means, ‘Eat up!’ - I used to tell her that when she wouldn’t finish her vegetables as a little girl. 

“Not to mention, ‘I will die facing the sun.’ It’s a reference to a song I used to sing to her when she was small.”

“It’s not a quote from a revolutionary on Earth?”

“Well, maybe it’s that, too. But after she died, I was comforted to read those messages to me, sent through her book.” 

“I thought you didn’t like her book!” 

“Not like it! When she was my only daughter? When I’m the one who encouraged her to write? Well, for something by a kid her age it was a very good piece of work, and I was very impressed. But of course it’s immature, and over-dramatic, and deliberately opaque, and a bit pretentious. 

“No, I’ve been saddened beyond anything to see how people have treated it as an excuse to give up hope. Everyone who reads it is certain their interpretation is the correct one. They forget that it was by a kid who was herself facing death, and regretting every moment the decision she’d made on the spur of the moment after the solar flare warning alarm had sounded.” 

“She regretted it?” 

“All four of them did. Siu Man in particular, because she took the other three with her. Ala was headstrong, flighty, but I think she would have stayed in the shelter if Siu Man hadn’t been holding her hand. Erik, well, Erik might not have made it, since he was already well along in the syndrome. But Wendy! Well, she was just caught up in the moment. And she never spoke to Siu Man again after that day. She was the first to die, after just a few weeks, while Siu Man lasted for almost four months. All of the dialogues with Wendy’s voice show the pain and guilt Siu Man was facing during those last months.” 

I had never dared ask so much about my celebrated sister; she was an icon, a mythical hero, a rebel whose silhouette was stenciled or scratched onto tunnel walls by vandals late at night. But as an impulsive girl caught in a trap of her own making, as a member of my own family, she was a stranger to me. 

My father continued, “I blamed myself in every way a father can: for marrying Mommy, for marrying Ma, for not teaching Siu Man more clearly about what would happen after proton exposure, for not physically restraining her during the alarm when I had the chance — and then for letting the book be published instead of keeping her thoughts private. 

“Wendy’s brother came to me, later, very angry. He said Siu Man had no right to ascribe all of those thoughts to Wendy’s fictional alter-ego, when it was nothing like the real person. He told me I’d secured my own daughter’s legacy at the cost of destroying his sister’s. He accused me of profiting from his grief.” 

I remember something: a heated argument with a strange man, late at night, my father flustered and upset, never mentioned again. 

Finally, I ask the real question, the one my father has been expecting for more than two orbits. 

“Daddy, should I go?” 

“Oh, Barry.”

“I can’t do it without you!” 

My father looks directly at me. “When you were a baby, Barry, Siu Man used to get very gloomy about your future. In the months before she died, she told me often how she hoped you would read her book, understand her disappointment, and find some other path. Ultimately, I do believe she wrote that book for you.” 

“Daddy. I would have to leave you here. And you would die,” my voice cracks as I say the word, “and no one would be here for you.” 

“Go.” 

I hold him as close as I dare, as long as I can. 

The next day, before second sunset, I go to the central dining hall and I beat on a soup plate with a metal spoon, loud and long, until the room is quiet. 

I struggle to stand up on a table, my face and arm still throbbing, and I see people wondering at my black eye. “My name is Barry Wong,” I begin, trembling at first, and then with growing confidence. “My sister was Siu Man Wong.” They are listening. 

“Today I am asking you, in her name, to join me in a project which is the only viable option to save our human society. We need you. Siu Man would want you. And I want you.” 

“Meng Jia asked: ‘Who is a member of society?’

“Wen Di replied: ‘A member of society is one who takes bold steps, but remembers the group; who is afraid, but helps others overcome fear; who, like the leaf of a white radish, takes sustenance from the very sun, but holds strength in one’s roots. Yet a member of society is one who knows that the roots must be cut, that the sacrifice must be made. Even a small child knows he must give up a favorite toy if society demands it; how much more must we sacrifice to hold on to what is precious?”

Vegetable Roots Discourse of 1036 Ganymed, Siu Man Wong, 1:12