01　For the Benefit of Mankind003

‘Property is sacred in our world, too.’

‘On First Earth, it was upheld by something called the Social Machine,’ explained the alien. ‘The Social Machine was a powerful enforcement system, and its Enforcers could be found in every corner on the planet. Some of these units no bigger than mosquitoes, but they were capable of killing hundreds in single strike. They were not governed by the Three Laws proposed by your Asimov, but by the fundamental principle of the First Earth Constitution, that private property shall be inviolable. But it would be inaccurate to say they brought about autocracy.They enforced the law with absolute impartiality, and showed no favor to the wealthy. If the pitiful property of some poor fellow came under threat,they would protect it in strict accordance with the constitution.

‘Under the powerful protection of the Social Machine, the wealth of First Earth flowed relentlessly towards the pockets of an elite minority. To make matters worse, technological development eliminated the reliance of the propertied classes on the propertyless. On your world, the rich still need the poor, because factories still need workers. On First Earth,machines no longer needed human operators, and high-efficiency robots could perform any required task. The poor could not even sell their labor,and they sank into absolute destitution as a result. This transformed the economic reality of First Earth, vastly accelerating the concentration of wealth in just a few people’s hands.

‘I would not be able to explain the highly complex process of wealth concentration to you,’ the alien said, ‘but in essence it resembles the movements of capital on your world. During my great-grandfather’s lifetime, sixty percent of the wealth on First Earth was controlled by ten million people. During my grandfather’s lifetime, eighty percent of our world’s wealth was controlled by ten thousand people. During my father’s lifetime, ninety percent of the wealth belonged to just forty two people.When I was born, capitalism had reached its apex on First Earth, and had worked an unbelievable miracle: ninety-nine percent of the planet’s wealth was held by a single person! This person became known as the Last Capitalist.

‘While disparities in standards of living still existed among the other two billion, they controlled just one percent of the world’s wealth in total. That is to say, First Earth had become a world with one rich person and two billion impoverished people. All the while, the constitutional inviolability of private property remained in effect, and the Social Machine faithfully carried out its duty to protect the property of a sole individual.’

‘Do you want to know what the Last Capitalist owned?’ The alien raised his voice. ‘He owned First Earth! Every continent and ocean on the planet became his parlor rooms and private gardens. Even the atmosphere of First Earth was among his personal property.

‘The remaining two billion individuals inhabited fully enclosed dwellings – miniature, self-contained life-support units. They lived sealed away in their own tiny worlds, sustained by their own paltry supplies of water, air, soil, and other resources. The one resource that did not belong to the Last Capitalist, and the only thing they could lawfully take from the outside world, was sunlight.

‘My home sat next to a small river, edged by green grass. The meadows stretched down to the riverbed and beyond, sweeping all the way to the emerald foothills in the distance. From inside, we could hear the sounds of birds twittering and fish leaping from the water, and we could see unhurried herds of deer grazing by the riverbanks, but it was the sight of the grass rippling in the breeze that I found particularly bewitching.

‘But none of this belonged to us. My family was strictly cut off from the outside world, and we could only watch from airtight portholes that could never be opened. To go outside, it was necessary to pass through an airlock, as if we were exiting a spaceship into outer space. In truth, our home was very much like a spaceship – the difference was the hostile environment was on the inside! We could only breathe the foul air supplied by our life-support system, could only drink the water that had been re-filtered a million times over, could only choke down food produced using our own raw excrement. And all the while, only a single wall separated us from the vast, bountiful world of nature. When we stepped outside, we dressed like astronauts and brought our own food and water. We even brought our own oxygen tanks, because the air, after all,belonged not to us, but to the Last Capitalist.

‘Of course, we could afford the occasional splurge. On weddings or holidays, we would leave our closed little home and luxuriate in the great outdoors. That first breath of natural air was positively intoxicating. It was faintly sweet – sweet enough to make you cry. It wasn’t free, though. We had to swallow pill-sized air meters before we went out, which measured exactly how much air we breathed. Every time we inhaled, a fee was deducted from our bank account. This was a luxury for most of the poor,something they could afford once or twice a year. We never dared to exert ourselves while outdoors. We mostly just sat and controlled our breathing.Before we returned home, we had to carefully scrape the soles of our shoes, because the soil outside was not ours to keep.’

The First Earthling paused for a moment. ‘I will tell you how my mother died, he said slowly. ‘In order to cut down on expenditures, she refrained from leaving the house for three years. She could not bear to go out even on holidays. On the night it happened, she managed to slip past the airlock doors in her sleep. She had to have been dreaming about nature. When she was discovered by an Enforcer, she had already wandered quite far. It saw that she had not swallowed an air meter, so it dragged her back home, cuffing her about the neck with a metal claw. It never intended to strangle her. By preventing her breathing, it only meant to protect another citizen’s inviolable private property – the air. She was dead by the time she arrived home. The Enforcer dropped her corpse and informed us that she had committed larceny. We were fined, but we could not pay, so my mother’s body was confiscated instead. You should know that a corpse is a precious thing for a poor family – seventy percent of its weight is water, plus a few other resources. The value of my mother’s corpse, however, could not cover the fine, and the Social Machine siphoned off an amount of air that corresponded to the remainder of the debt.

‘The air supply in our family’s life-support system was already critically low, as we lacked the funds to replenish it. The removal of more air put our very survival at risk. In order to replace the lost oxygen, the life-support system was forced to separate some of its water resources through electrolysis. Unfortunately, this operation caused the entire system to deteriorate sharply. The main control computer issued an alarm:if we did not add fifteen liters of water to the system, it would crash in exactly thirty hours. The crimson glow of the warning lights filled every room.

‘We considered stealing water from the river outside, but soon abandoned the plan. We would not make it back home with the water without being shot dead by the omnipresent Enforcers. My father thought for a while, and then told me not to worry and to go to bed. Though I was terrified, oxygen deprivation crept in, and I slept. I do not know how much time had passed when a robot nudged me awake. It had entered via the resource conversion vehicle that was docked to my home. It pointed to a bucket of crystal clear water and told me: ‘This is your father.’

‘Resource conversion vehicles were mobile installations that converted human bodies into resources that could be utilized by household life-support systems. My father had utilized the service to extract every last drop of water from his own body, while not one hundred meters from our house, that pretty little river burbled in the moonlight. The resource conversion truck also extracted a few other useful things from his body for our life-support system: a container of grease, a bottle of calcium tablets,even a piece of iron as large as a coin.’

The alien paused again to collect himself. ‘The water from my father rescued our life-support system, and I lived on. I grew up day by day,and soon five years had passed. One fall evening, as I looked through the porthole at the world outside, I suddenly noticed someone jogging along the riverbank. I was astonished: who was so extravagant that they would dare breathe like that outside?! Upon a closer look, I realized it was the Last Capitalist himself!

‘He slowed his pace to a stroll, and then sat down on a rock by the river’s edge, dipping one bare foot into the water. He looked like a trim middle-aged man, but in reality, he was over two thousand years old.Genetic engineering guaranteed that he would live for at least another two millennia, perhaps even forever. But he seemed perfectly ordinary to me.

‘Two years later, my home’s life support system functions deteriorated once more. Small-scale ecosystems like that were bound to have limited lifespans. Eventually, the whole system broke down. As the oxygen content in the air supply dwindled, I swallowed an air meter and walked out the door before I fell into an anoxic coma. Like every other person whose life-support system had failed, I stoically accepted my fate:I would breathe away the last of the pitiful savings in my account, and then I would be suffocated or shot by an Enforcer.

‘I found there were many other people outside. The mass failures of household life-support systems had begun. A gargantuan Enforcer hovered above us and broadcast a final warning: ‘Citizens, you have intruded into someone else’s home. You have committed an act of trespassing. Please leave immediately! Otherwise…’

‘Leave? Where could we go? There was no air left to breathe in our homes. Together with the others, I bounded through the green grass along the river, letting the fresh, sweet spring breeze rush over our pallid faces,looking to go out in a blaze of glory…

‘I don’t know how long we ran before we realized we had long since breathed up the last of our savings, and yet the Enforcers had not taken action. Just then, the Last Capitalist’s voice boomed forth from the massive Enforcer floating in the air.

‘Hello, everyone. Welcome to my humble home!

‘I am pleased to have so many guests, and I hope you have enjoyed yourselves in my garden. You will have to forgive me,however, but there are just too many of you. As of this moment,almost one billion people worldwide have left their own homes as their life-support systems failed, and have walked into mine.Another billion may be close behind. You have trespassed on my private property and violated the habitation and privacy rights of your fellow citizen. The Social Machine is lawfully empowered to take action to end your lives, and if I had not dissuaded it from doing just that, you would all have been vaporized by the Enforcers’ lasers long ago. In any case, I did dissuade it. I am a gentleman who has received the best education available, and I treat guests in my home – even unlawful intruders – with courtesy and respect. But you must imagine things from my perspective. Two billion guests is a few too many for even the most thoughtful host, and I am someone who enjoys quiet solitude. Therefore, I must ask you all to leave. I recognize, of course, that there is nowhere on Earth for you to go, but I have taken it upon myself to prepare a fleet of twenty thousand spaceships for you.

‘Each ship is the size of a medium city, and can travel at one percent of the speed of light. While the ships are not equipped with complete life-support systems, there are enough cryogenic chambers onboard to hold all two billion of you for fifty thousand years. This is the only planet in our solar system, so you will have to search for a new homeland among the stars, but I am certain you will find such a place. In the vastness of the cosmos, is it really necessary to crowd this little cottage of mine? You have no cause to resent me. I obtained my home through perfectly reasonable and legitimate means.I got my start as the manager of a small feminine hygiene products company, and to this day, I have relied only on my own business savvy. I am a law-abiding citizen, so the Social Machine has protected and will continue to protect me and my legal property. It will not tolerate your wrongdoing, however,so I advise everyone to get going as soon as possible.

‘Out of respect for our common evolutionary origin, I will remember you, and I hope you will remember me. Take care.’

‘And that is how we came to Fourth Earth,’ concluded the First Earthling. ‘Our voyage lasted for thirty thousand years. We lost nearly half our fleet while wandering endlessly through the stars. Some disappeared amidst interstellar dust; some were swallowed by black holes… But ten thousand ships survived, and one billion of us reached this world. And that is the story of First Earth, the story of two billion poor people and one rich man.’

‘If you did not intervene, would our world repeat this tale?’Smoothbore asked after the First Earthling finished his narration.

‘I do not know. Perhaps, but perhaps not. The course of a civilization is like the fate of an individual – fickle and impossible to predict.’ The alien paused. ‘I should go now. I am only an ordinary census taker, and I must work for my living.’

‘I have things to attend to as well.’ replied Smoothbore.

‘Farewell, little brother.’

‘Farewell, elder brother.’

Under the light of the ring of stars, two men from two different worlds parted in two different directions.

*

As Smoothbore entered the Presidential Hall, the thirteen members of the standing committee of the Council for Liquidation of Social Wealth turned to face him. Zhu Hanyang spoke first: ‘We have verified your work, and you have done well. The second half of your payment has been transferred into your account, although it will not be of use for much longer.’ He trailed off. ‘There is something else you must already know:the Elder Brothers’ census takers have landed on Earth. Our work is meaningless now, and we have no further tasks to give you.’

‘Actually, I’ve taken another commission.’

As he spoke, Smoothbore drew his pistol with one hand and stretched his opposite hand forward, fist clenched.

Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang – seven glinting bullets fell to the table in front of him. Together with the six shots in Snubnose,that made thirteen in all.

Thirteen faces, shaped by the weight of their immense wealth,twisted in unison as shock and horror flashed across their refined features.Then a calm settled. Maybe they felt relief.

Outside, a hail of massive meteors split the sky. Their brilliant light pierced through the heavy curtains and eclipsed the crystal chandelier,and the ground shook violently. The ships of First Earth had entered the atmosphere.

‘Have you had dinner?’ Xu Xueping asked Smoothbore. She pointed towards a heap of instant noodles on the table. ‘Let’s eat first.’

They stacked a large silver punch basin atop three crystal ashtrays,and added water to the basin. Then, they lit a fire beneath it with one hundred yuan notes. Everyone took turns feeding bills into the fire, gazing absently at the yellow and green flames that leapt like a small joyful creature.

After the fire consumed 1.35 million yuan, the water began to boil.

韓恩立（Hanlon Elizabeth Courtney）　譯

精彩翻譯品讀

1．她的眼神很特別，滑膛習慣注意人的眼神，他這個職業的人都這樣，他平時看到的眼神有兩類——充滿欲望焦慮的和麻木的，但這雙眼睛充滿少見的平靜。

The look in her eyes was unusual. Smoothbore paid attention to people’s expressions – people in this business always did. He usually saw one of two expressions: anxious desire or numbness. But her eyes were filled with rare serenity.

2．世界最富有的13個人要殺死最窮的3個人，這不是一般的荒唐，這真是對他的想象力最大的挑戰。但思路沒走多遠就猛地刹住，滑膛自責地拍了一下方向盤，他突然想到自己已經違反了這個行業的最高精神準則，校長的那句話浮現在他的腦海中，這是行業的座右銘：

瞄準誰，與槍無關。

The thirteen wealthiest people on Earth desired to kill the three poorest people. It was beyond absurd, and any possible explanation escaped his imagination. But his mind had not strayed far before he slammed the brakes on his

thoughts. He slapped the steering wheel in self-reproach as he suddenly realized he had violated the cardinal rule of his own profession. His tutor’s words unfurled in his mind, laying out their profession’s maxim: the gun does not care at whom it is aimed.

3．對窮人的同情，關鍵在於一個“同”字，當雙方相同的物種基礎不存在時，同情也就不存在了。這是人類的第二次進化。第一次與猿分開來，靠的是自然選擇；這一次與窮人分開來，靠的是另一條同樣神聖的法則：私有財產不可侵犯。

Sympathy for poor people hinged on one shared characteristic – personhood. When the poor ceased to be people, and all commonalities between rich and poor vanished, sympathy followed suit. This was humanity’s second evolution. When we first split from apes, it was due to natural selection. When we split from the poor, it was due to an equally sacred law: the inviolability of private property.