Seek the full text of Luo Longxiang's "In a Foreign Land" (the award-winning article of the sci-fi Galaxy)

I. Xinjinshan City

Starship Phaeton, Xinjin Mountain City, sunny.

A young man with a crew cut and earrings was sitting in the police station in Chinatown, and the director, Lao Zhao, was sitting in front of the young man. Lao Zhao has seen many teenagers who are in a rebellious period and have no courage to commit crimes. "Don't look at me like a prisoner," said the young man. "I'm here to report that my motorcycle was stolen."

Lao Zhao logged into the police network system, entered the license plate number, and soon got the whereabouts of the motorcycle. "I said zheng, your motorcycle is too shabby. This is the second time that sanitation workers have picked it up as garbage and left it on the roadside. Remember to hang a sign next time: This is not garbage, okay? "

Zheng smiled and then began to shoot the breeze: "I heard that you are free these days?" The city of Xinjinshan is not too big. From Ren Xia Street, Merchant Street and Zhouren Street to Chinatown and Songren Street, you can count several streets with ten fingers, and the law and order is never bad.

Lao Zhao said, "It's not too idle. There was a small car accident in the commercial street ahead, and two bicycles collided. This is the only "big case" this month ... did you quarrel with your father again last night? "

Zheng said: "The old guy panicked at the Europa Starship, so he came over and forced me to go to the military school for postgraduate study." He didn't want to go to military school at first, so he went to Xinjinshan City to take refuge in his uncle. Later, he applied for an ordinary university without telling his parents. My uncle is a neighbor of Lao Zhao. He is an alcoholic. His marital status is divorced, divorced and killed several times. In the end, he died alone and didn't even have a child ... Two years ago, there was a snowstorm. He drank a few more drinks in a small hotel and passed out in the street. The next morning, people found his body under the thick snow.

"When it comes to being a soldier, I thought about it when I was young ..." Lao Zhao said, "At that time, I thought being a soldier was awesome, so I entered the military school and was admitted to the same year as your father. However, he was admitted, and I failed the list and was admitted to the police academy. " He patted the gun on his belt. "For more than 20 years, this gun has not even fired a bullet."

Zheng said: "My father went to a military school when he was a child because his family was poor. Military schools are provided with food and shelter, and no tuition fees are charged. He often says that it is hard work. Fifteen years ago, fifty students in their class went to the battlefield, and only five came back alive ... ... He knew that soldiers died quickly, and now he wants me to die! "

Lao Zhao said, "I guess what your father means is that he has finally been promoted to the rank of colonel and has more or less friends in the military school." You can get a high degree and then find a civilian in the army, which is much safer than the frontline soldiers and easier to get promoted. "

"I don't care," Zheng simply wouldn't listen. "Anyway, my motorcycle is gone. Remember to take me home after work. "

Second, the teahouse in Chinatown.

There are many exotic things in Chinatown, such as signs with traditional Chinese characters, banks deliberately decorated as classical money houses, world-famous Chinese restaurants … and of course this teahouse.

People are always homesick when they are away from home, right? On the Phaeton Starship, many people may have been working in the space station in spacesuits yesterday, but they rushed back to the ground as soon as they rested today. They took a hot bath in the famous "Old Hutong Impression" bathhouse on this street, looked at the water-stained ceiling and specially mossy walls, and discussed the news of a galaxy ... They didn't care about money, but bought the feeling of hometown. After taking a shower, I put on old-fashioned clothes and went to occupy a stall half a street. It is said that this place has an authentic earthy taste.

Camel Teahouse is a famous teahouse in Chinatown. There is a storyteller in the teahouse, five sunflower fans and old robes who come to drink tea and chat every day, and sometimes even some curious "foreigners" (aliens). Since the opposite Mazhangbei Teahouse closed down, the business of Camel Teahouse has been better. After Mazhangbei Teahouse was discovered to use robots as waiters, no customers came to the house-these days, customers spend money to buy traditions, and going to the teahouse to drink tea is a symbol of status, and good is second.

At that time, my grandparents were worried that my uncle could not support himself, so they gave him this camel teahouse facing the street. Although the income of the teahouse can't make a fortune, it won't be hungry.

Zheng thought: Maybe it's time to hire more people. The old man who played erhu in the talent market last time looked good. I heard that he is a retired teacher in an art college, but his salary is too high ... In fact, even if all the employees are fired, this teahouse can still operate well with the help of a group of robots-even better. At least the robot won't tell you about salary increase and vacation. However, as we all know, you can get the benefits of tax reduction by hiring more employees. If the enterprise is full of robots, the tax collectors will come to you the next day and say that you deliberately oppose the government's goal of reducing unemployment, and the tax rate you have to pay will be so high that even the profits will not be posted.

When I was in Zhang Yun that night, I found a girl standing at the gate of Zheng. The girl asked him, "Excuse me, are you recruiting people here?" The girl is wearing an old dress that doesn't fit well. She has long hair, is timid and carries an erhu. She is thin and small, and looks like a poor student looking for a job.

The door panel in Zheng's hand almost missed her toe-the girl looked like a female ghost in the cold light of the artificial moon in the sky. His eyes rested on the old erhu. "You play" Two Springs Reflecting the Moon "to listen."

The girl sat on the stone emblem in front of the door, and earth times's ancient music flowed gently from the strings of the erhu. Spring-like ancient music tells a calm story:

A long time ago, in the Earth Times, a blind man sat in the street, quietly playing the erhu, staring blankly at the people handing out leaflets in the street without pupil eyes, and turned a deaf ear to the bloody noise in the street. He knew that the storm was coming, but he just kept quiet in his heart, just like a quiet flowing spring, reflecting the dark clouds gathered in the sky. The rainstorm is loud and the dark clouds are silent, so on the eve of the rainstorm, the spring water is as quiet as before.

In history, many stories have the same beginning. In earth times, the same storm will happen again. On the eve of the last storm, bureaucrats exiled hundreds of millions of criminals to outer space, just like the practice of banishing prisoners to the United States and Australia in the era of great geographical discovery.

Zheng remembered that his father had said that the starship alliance government received a signal from the earth a long time ago-first an order, then a humble request, and finally a bitter plea, begging the descendants of these exiles to go back and save them. ...

"The music is over. Do you think you can hire me? " The girl's voice brought Zheng back to reality.

"hmm ... great music, very good." In fact, Zheng has been distracted for a long time. "I'm afraid I can't pay you much, but I'm here to eat and live, as long as you don't mind living under the same roof with me." He doesn't know why he kept her. "By the way, what's your name?"

"Han Dan." The girl said.

Zheng quickly found himself a reason to keep her: he couldn't watch her a weak woman wandering around in a strange city, could he?

"Have we met before?" Manager Zheng thinks she looks familiar.

Han Dan has a diary, which uses that kind of ancient electronic ink to show handwriting on a film that can be rolled up. Its data storage space is only 80GB, but if each Chinese character takes up two bytes, she will never be satisfied.

This kind of diary rolls up like a scroll. In order to cater to customers' preferences, merchants painted the "scroll" with the same color as rice paper, which looked more like an ancient scroll.

Keeping a diary is not a good habit, especially for people like Han Dan who have too many secrets. She opened the diary, fingers gently across the film, leaving some handwriting:

..... I may live here for a while, do some short-term work to support myself, and leave here to continue wandering before he finds me unusual. ...

Third, the meteor shower

Han Dan lived here for a month, and his daily job was to play erhu in the teahouse to attract customers. The teahouse is open from eleven in the morning to ten in the evening. It's not easy to find a job these days, so just make do.

In the evening, the teahouse pretends. Zheng said that he had something urgent to go out and had not come back at eleven o'clock. Han Dan went back to his room, turned on the computer and entered a website. He skillfully tapped a lengthy password with his finger, and a picture similar to "Google Earth" in ancient earth times appeared on the screen. She found the city of Xinjinshan on the spherical map, and dragged it with the mouse to enlarge it. The street as thin as a spider's web was enlarged to the size of the whole screen, and even the fallen leaves on the street green belt were clearly visible-she found Zheng who was queuing up to buy things in front of the convenience store 24 hours a day.

The Meteorological Bureau issued a meteor shower warning, and many people lined up in front of large and small shops to buy supplies. Han Dan fidgeted and always felt at a loss. She found some boards from the utility room to reinforce the doors and windows, and suddenly remembered that it was meaningless to do so. Han Dan remembered an old legend on the earth: When a meteor streaks across the horizon, you close your eyes and make a wish at the meteor, and your wish will surely come true. There are still many people who wish under the meteor, but usually there is only one wish-let these damn meteor showers end soon!

At half past eleven in the evening, Zheng came back, carrying two barrels of pure water and some emergency supplies. "Let's live in the basement tonight." He said.

The buildings in Xinjin Mountain City are usually not too high. According to the regulations, if a house has eighteen floors on the ground, it must have eighteen floors in the basement, otherwise it is illegal; If a city can accommodate150,000 people, it must have underground buildings with150,000 people and supplies for three months-all of which are forced by the harsh living environment.

Zheng's basement is a suite with two rooms and one living room. In addition to a staircase leading to the ground, there is also a door leading to the air defense tunnel under the street outside-this composite door with a thickness of more than 500 mm is enough to resist the general meteorite attack.

At 3: 30 in the morning, the meteor shower finally came, the earth trembled, and the whistling sound of shells and the crash of houses collapsed overhead. It seems that this meteor shower is really not small. Zheng couldn't sleep under the pale explosion-proof lamp. When Han Dan came out of the room, "You can't sleep either?" He asked.

Zheng turned on the TV casually, and the TV signal was very poor. The picture of the meteor shower hitting the ground rustled in front of them. Conscientious reporters braved the deadly meteor shower to stick to the news scene and report the first-hand news for everyone. Countless fireballs splashed in the atmosphere, dragging their long tails down like a rainstorm, and hail hit the city. The intense high temperature ignited everything that can be ignited in the city, and the raging fire in Xinjin Mountain City lit up the whole night sky.

Although the basement has powerful refrigeration equipment and oxygen recovery equipment, you can still feel the heat coming from the ceiling. Small meteor showers are suitable for little girls who love affairs, but big ones can smash the whole city upside down like carpet bombing!

Han Dan said: "I heard that there are two giant planets in the solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, which have resisted many dangerous small celestial bodies for the earth."

"This is not the solar system ..." Zheng took out an old photo in which several people were dressed as soldiers. "I have two uncles. My uncle was a noncommissioned officer of the No.1 17 fleet and died fifteen years ago. My second uncle was on the nearest rescue boat, because the engine of the boat was damaged by a meteorite, and he could only watch his own brother die without any help. Later, the second uncle collapsed and drank hard until he died. "

In this ethereal universe, there are almost no alien civilizations that can really be called "enemies". As soldiers, they are faced with a more dangerous natural environment in the universe.

The TV suddenly rustled and there was no signal. The earth above is shaking and dust is falling from the ceiling. Zheng Hanwei Dunong said, "I have seen such a big meteor shower for the first time in my life ..." But he didn't care too much. In any case, this natural phenomenon will occur every three or two years. Depending on the number of votes, the government will give some compensation to the damaged house and rebuild it. For many years, people here have come like this.

The sudden explosion shook the whole basement. After a while, there was a quick knock at the door outside. Zheng opened the door and saw Lao Zhao standing in front of him barefoot in his pajamas, with a belt and a pistol. "Come to the emergency boarding port!" The meteor shower smashed the sun! "

Zheng was startled: "This is impossible!" But seeing Lao Zhao nervous, he knew it wouldn't be a joke.

Above each starship, there is an artificial sun loaded with a giant nuclear fusion reactor. One side of the sun always faces the earth, providing light and heat for the earth continuously. If it is smashed, the whole starship will be frozen into a mass of ice!

The underground of Xinjin Mountain City, like the ground, is divided into blocks, and every two blocks are separated by a sealed door that is enough to resist nuclear explosion. The intricate passages of cobwebs generally look a bit like the internal structure of spacecraft.

Lao Zhao continued to inform other residents to evacuate, while Zheng He and Han Dan immediately rushed to the boarding gate of the underground spaceship. The waiting hall is covered with thick dust. This place has not been used for many years. It's like a life raft on a ship. It's impossible without it, but no one wants to see it come in handy. The old LCD screen keeps refreshing, showing the latest news: the underground city of Zhouren Street was smashed through by meteorites, and the fire on it quickly sucked oxygen from the underground city, and the whole block was suffocated. No one dared to open the sealed door to see if there were any survivors in that block. Everyone knows that as soon as the door is opened, toxic smoke and flames will spread to the underground city in the next block, killing more people.

The earthquake made the earth tremble like a wounded beast. The spaceship is refueling. According to the emergency escape plan of ancient starships, the boarding order is infants, children, teenagers, and finally the elderly. If you are an extremely precious person, such as a well-known scholar and professor, you can take your children and leave on the first spaceship. Although the police who maintain public order have repeatedly stressed that there are enough spaceships here for everyone to escape, we all know that the longer we wait, the less chance we have of surviving. Someone desperately squeezed into the spaceship and shouted, "whoever makes room for me, I will give him half of my hundreds of millions of property!" " "This man's answer is a bullet from the police.

Many old people spontaneously stayed to maintain order and said to their children and grandchildren, "You go first, and we will leave by the last batch of spacecraft." In fact, as we all know, the last batch of spacecraft will probably never have a chance to take off.

It's Zheng's turn to get on board. Behind him is a crying woman. Her two children have left on the last ship, and she was unfortunately assigned to the next one. At this time, the flame has jumped to the edge of the spaceship silo. "Can I let her go first?" The police around Chen Uen. The policeman said nothing but pointed a dark gun at his head. Zheng bowed his head and quickly boarded the ship.

Han Dan boarded the ship before him, and now he is sitting in the seat next to him. She skillfully fixed herself on the chair with a metal seat belt the thickness of her arm: "Fasten your seat belt! This old spaceship does not have the artificial gravity field and pleasant cabin environment operated by passenger transport companies! "

The spacecraft suddenly started, and the heavy acceleration made people ache all over, and the cabin creaked, as if it would disintegrate at any time. The launch port of the escape spacecraft is located directly below the block square. It doesn't have a manhole cover at all, but uses directional blasting to directly blow up the buildings on the ground and let the spacecraft come out.

The city collapsed in flames and the meteor shower kept hitting the earth. Looking down from the spaceship, the city was torn out of several crater-like spaceship silos, bustling streets, antique buildings, green trees standing neatly like guards ... swept down by the fiery air billow and reduced to ashes. ...

Fourth, the starship

This is a spaceship and a planet. It is said to be a planet because its volume and mass are similar to those of the old earth. It has an atmosphere, a blue ocean and vast land, and a complete biosphere. It is called a spaceship because it has a propeller and can move slowly in the universe, unlike real planets revolving around stars, so people call it a "starship".

Long ago, people's ancestors roamed the universe in spaceships. Later, the spacecraft became bigger and bigger, and naturally these interstellar spacecraft as big as the earth were created.

Starship, the largest spaceship in history, is large enough to generate considerable gravity to bind enough air to form the atmosphere, so it doesn't need to have a shell like a traditional spaceship. Its South Pole has eternal Huaguang, where stands a large forest-like giant propeller, and the high-energy particles thrown by those propellers leave strips of tracks in space, pushing the whole starship forward.

The starship is very big, and there are white clouds, oceans and land under the thin atmosphere. It looks beautiful, but it is also fragile-in the boundless cosmic background, the thin atmosphere is as fragile as soap bubbles. So it is not difficult to understand why the starship alliance has formed such a huge army and set up so many defense lines to protect it.

Unfortunately, the huge army and many lines of defense failed to resist the attack. The loss this time is too great. According to news reports, a huge star crashed into the airspace of the Star Fleet Alliance at a very fast speed. The government dispatched a large number of combat troops to intercept the planet. They originally wanted to drag the star out of orbit, but it was so fast that they had to break it. Judging from the data released by the news, this is an impact that even the old earth in the solar system will be knocked off track! Big things with the same quality, if they directly hit the starship, will completely destroy the starship; However, if it is blown into small enough fragments and burned on the way into the atmosphere, the damage will be much less.

The military has done its best. Han Dan looked at the wreckage floating outside the side window of the flying ship, and some wreckage of warships also mixed in. She even saw the mutilated bodies of several soldiers floating through the porthole ... This starship has its own meteorite defense system. If it encounters a particularly serious disaster, the system will be unable to maintain, and the only option is to send troops.

People have long been accustomed to such sacrifices. I remember that when people groped for the first starship, nearly one-third of the descendants of hundreds of millions of exiles gave their lives.

Far more than one starship. After the completion of the Europa starship, people built two more starships-the Asian starship and the American starship, and gradually became familiar with it. There are only seven continents on the earth. When the eighth starship was built, they found that the names of the seven continents were not enough, so they began to use the names of mythical figures from all over the world, so there were starships like Gaia, Phaeton, Perseus and kronos. Anyway, the continents on the earth were named after mythical figures at first, which is not bad.

In the pioneering era, the Earth Alliance Space Development Agency was a famous name. When its first alien spacecraft slowly left the solar system, the whole world was deserted, and the solar sails on the brand-new spacecraft slowly opened like flowers. The beautiful female commentator was so excited that tears welled up in her eyes, and she was incoherent, searching for words of praise, calling those pioneers "heroes" one after another, as if the whole galaxy was in front of her-no one saw the scars under those "heroes" spacesuits.

"May you discover a new continent in outer space!" It is said that in "earth times", every jailer will send such a "blessing" before throwing the beaten prisoner into the spaceship and sending it to the outer space for pioneering. Someone asked, "What if they can't find a planet to colonize?" The bureaucrats of the Earth Alliance Space Development Agency replied: "This is not a problem. There are 10,000 male and 10,000 female astronauts on each spaceship. Even if you can't find a suitable planet, you can reproduce on the spacecraft from generation to generation. " At least the exiles of the ancient earth have a home, and these "heroes" have to find their own exile places.

After losing the artificial sun, the atmospheric temperature of Phaeton starship suddenly dropped! The strong temperature difference set off a strong wind, and heavy rain poured down with hail. The bad weather forced the life-saving spacecraft to take off forcibly, and a large number of people were abandoned on the ground. The monstrous flood soon froze, and the cities on Phaeton Starship were frozen together with those who had no time to escape, and some spaceships that had no time to fly away were frozen to the ground.

Ice is a bad conductor. As the temperature continues to drop, the temperature on the ice is much lower than that under the ice. Under the action of the temperature difference between inside and outside, hundreds of meters thick ice snapped, and long ice cracks spread from one end of the starship to the other. Under the great stress distortion, the huge ice sheet forms deep rifts and high mountains, which will be mercilessly torn by frozen cities, grasslands, forests and even oceans. Then, flocculent snowflakes floated down-carbon dioxide snowflakes were frozen into dry ice. In a few days, it will be snowy and blue here-the snowflake condensed by oxygen and nitrogen is blue. Without the artificial sun, the whole atmosphere will be frozen into solid.

Someone in the escaped spaceship was crying, and the screen in the engine room kept playing the lakes and mountains of the old earth, which seemed to remind people that this was not the first time to lose their hometown, as if this could slightly alleviate the pain of losing Phaeton Starship.

Han Dan opened his diary and wrote some words casually:

At this moment, the victims of the whole ship seem to forget their usual leisurely life and return to their ancestors' way of life-escape, escape, and then escape. From the moment you bet on the spaceship, you gave your life to the spaceship. Whether they can escape from the disaster is beyond their control. Behind me, two spaceships were hit by meteors and exploded. Many parents will never find their children, and many children will lose their parents forever. ...

Verb (abbreviation for verb) "Europe", Chang 'an

The older generation used to call Europa "Europe". This is the first starship built by man. Chang 'an, the largest city on all starships, is the seat of the highest center of the starship alliance government. Chang 'an is located on the Europa starship, and people familiar with history will feel a little puzzled.

At that time, before the first starship was built, there was a heated debate about how to name it. In principle, people plan to name the earth's time after the continent of the earth, but they can't decide which continent to use. Finally, people wrote the names of the seven continents on a piece of paper and decided to castrate them. They accidentally caught "Europa" and named it "Europa Starship".

After the starship was built, people established the first city in the most beautiful estuary. What shall we name this city? Everyone wrote the most important city name of the Earth Times on a piece of paper and began to draw lots. Among the tens of thousands of cities such as Washington, Paris, Jerusalem, Babylon, Delhi and Machu Picchu, Chang 'an was the winner, so Chang 'an went to Europe.

In the center of Chang 'an, a large number of ambulances and medical staff eagerly looked up at the Tower of Babel. The police set up a yellow cordon around the square to prevent ordinary people and journalists from entering, and groups of victims were sent down from the tower.

The role of the Tower of Babel is similar to that of a port in earth times, except that it berths spaceships instead of ships. Its principle is simple: connect the geostationary orbit space station outside the atmosphere with the ground with a cable, install an elevator on the cable, transport passengers to the space station, and they will transfer between interstellar spacecraft.

As soon as Zheng got off the spaceship, he was taken to the medical staff to check whether he was injured during the escape. An official found his identity file in the database of the civil affairs department, gave him a card as temporary id card, credit card and driver's license, and said, "Your parents' home is on this starship? There seems to be no need to prepare accommodation for you in the resettlement center for the victims. Sorry, the beds there are very tight. "

When the official checked Han Dan's identity, he was shocked, and his mouth opened as if he could fit an ostrich egg into it.

Out of the tower of Babel is the downtown square, and many victims are frantically looking for their loved ones regardless of the staff's dissuasion. After a while, some parents who have lost their children will go to orphanages to claim orphans. They always like to claim those children who lost their parents in the same disaster. Zheng saw Lao Zhao's wife with two children and was eagerly looking at the exit of the Tower of Babel. Everyone knows that the police must be the last to leave, and Lao Zhao may not come back.