“Hey there—comrade—are you also part of the—Space Industry—Development Program—First Cohort? I’m Zhang Haoyu—second lieutenant—pleased to meet you.” The man in front of me spoke in choppy fragments. He extended his hand, heedless of the puzzled looks coming from all around us.

“Hello, Comrade Zhang Haoyu, I’m your superior, here to relay an order from Command—you are to remain on Earth for now, and await liftoff at a later date.” My scalp was itching from the looks the bystanders were giving us, but I kept my posture strained ramrod-straight as I imitated an army man’s booming way of speaking. I projected my latest résumé beside me, pretending it was my military credentials.

“Yes, sir!” He clicked his heels, a forceful movement that made only a faint muffled sound, and lifted a hand to me in salute. Salute complete, he even thought to straighten his uniform cap, though his fingers touched only the soft contours of a knit hat. The incorrect detail sent a faint crease of puzzlement down his face, but it faded immediately. His lips pressed once more into the professional firmness of a military man.

“Comrade, our commanding officer has already briefed me on your place of residence. He’s appointed me to escort you home. I’d like to ask you to refrain from leaving your residence in the absence of further orders.”

“I’m grateful for my superiors’ consideration.” He bowed slightly and followed me out of the terminal, toward the parking lot.

As we approached the car, he caught my sleeve. “Son, I forgot you again, didn’t I?”

I angled my head faintly, avoiding his gaze, saying nothing. This time, he’d caught on. But what about the next time?

“It’s raining. Don’t catch a chill, come on.”

My father Zhang Haoyu was a hero. At the end of the previous century, when the completion of the “Stairway to Heaven” in Indonesia had sounded the clarion of humanity’s mass-scale entry into space, my father had out-competed a hundred and twenty of his elite peers for a place among the first cohort to ascend the Stairway, the leading edge of the space development wave. Before departure, he’d even represented the entire Development Corps in an interview with the media, where he’d casually tossed out the term, “Industrial Workers of the Cosmos,” that became the label and self-identity for his cohort. For thirty years, he’d fulfilled his mission and duty to the utmost, achieving countless great deeds, and receiving too many awards to fit on his chest.

But behind every hero were others paying a quiet price. Out of every year, he spent ten months in space on average. You normally remember someone by their presence, but in my memory, he existed largely as his absence. He wasn’t there when Grandma passed away. He never showed his face at a single parent-teacher conference, and birthdays and the like were too much to ask. At my mother’s funeral, every one of his in-laws gave him the cold shoulder. Aside from the massive sums wired like clockwork into Mom’s bank account, he was AWOL for practically my entire childhood.

No, it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say my entire childhood. Even now, I still remember my first impression of his face: a very high-resolution face, though a little laggy, framed by the screen of Mom’s cell phone. I would dream a lot at that age. In those dreams, the solar arrays reflected a glowing haze across those 6.5 inches of outer space, and through the haze, a multitude of men in red-and-white uniforms would turn in unison to look at me with kindly eyes, waiting for me to call them “Papa.”

And there’s one other thing that could count as presence in my childhood memories: a metal box, very finely made, but totally without identifying features, so that you couldn’t even tell which side of it was the front. On the eve of one of his departures from Earth, my father had sat at my bedside and set the box on the nightstand. I lay on the bed, very sleepy, with only a vague impression of his blurry silhouette. He said that if one day, a strange man suddenly came to the house, I should give the box to the man. He’d know how to open it.

That little box became one of my childhood toys; I was too young then to realize what the box must’ve contained. When I was a little older, and had entered the primary school for the children of space workers, I discovered that seemingly all of my classmates also had a little box at home. After school, we’d get together and try all sorts of tricks to open them, but we never did succeed. One day in second grade, a strange man suddenly appeared in class to call away one of the girls. She never returned. Later, we heard that she’d transferred to another school. We didn’t know what it had to do with the boxes, but even so, everyone stopped bringing them up, and soon we forgot about them.

The conversations through the phone screen, the farewell at my bedside . . . I still remembered all of it clearly, but he’d forgotten entirely.

“We’ve confirmed it’s Alzheimer’s disease. Which variant is unclear, but we can be certain that it’s progressed to the middle stages. Frankly, given the length of time Comrade Zhang Haoyu spent in space, he’s doing very well.”

The doctor didn’t beat around the bush. Both my father and I nodded calmly. Out of the Industrial Workers of the Cosmos who’d once lived and worked alongside my father, the vast majority were now either buried or basically vegetative. Next to them, his present condition ought to be reason to celebrate.

In fact, aside from the very low rates of economic return, Alzheimer’s was also a major reason behind the abrupt end to space development. Twenty years ago, many of the retired members of the Development Corps had started experiencing symptoms of memory loss and dementia. They were getting diagnosed with neurodegenerative diseases at many times above the normal rate, and when tested, it was found that the damage was almost entirely concentrated in a few specific areas of the brain. In the end, more than half the former corps were determined to have developed Alzheimer’s.

The research that followed indicated that this may well have been the result of long-term exposure to high doses of deep space radiation, a consequence that couldn’t have been detected in those early years of space industry. When you were working in space, it was impossible to avoid all kinds of radiation exposure, no matter how good your protective measures. Most illnesses resulting from the radiation could be treated with drugs and radiation therapy, but confronted with man’s still-uncharted hippocampus and dentate gyrus, modern medicine remained helpless. As a result, many of those once bold and spirited heroes became tongue-tied elderly children who couldn’t talk without needing someone to wipe their drool.

“Then, how long will I still maintain my cognitive abilities?” my father asked directly, as if inquiring as to the service life of a machine.

“It’s hard to say. Anywhere from a few weeks up to a few years. And your cognitive abilities won’t just decline linearly. Sometimes you’ll find yourself re-recalling something, regaining some abilities, only to lose them again. I’ve seen a late-stage patient calculating differential equations with pen and paper, but that’s no guarantee of anything.”

“Okay. So what can I do to slow down this process?”

“Regularly engaging in moderate mental exercise, like reading and writing. A fixed daily routine. And most importantly, your son’s solicitude.”

“No, I think I can—”

The doctor cut him off. “I know what you want to say. All you space workers are the same, insisting you can take care of yourselves. If you try, it inevitably ends in either forgetting to take your pills, or taking them several times a day. Trust me, Alzheimer’s disease needs to be confronted with you and your family as a team. There’s no shame in it.”

We left the hospital together. My father told me to leave him be as much as possible. He could take care of himself. I said okay.

---

After that day, he seemed to return to some of his habits from military life.

Every morning, his alarm would wake me from the other room. He’d get up at 7:30, fold his blanket into a neat “tofu block,” take a morning jog, then breakfast on a bowl of porridge with pickled vegetables and an egg. He shaved off the graying hair at his temples, and bought an eyebrow razor, trimming his unruly tufts into order. He’d sit at the windowsill and read books, mostly difficult textbooks on subjects related to space development—he’d in fact contributed to and edited some of them. A couple decades ago, these were the majors that all the college students were flocking to. I’d tangled with these texts myself during my college years, only to find that, not only were they beyond my understanding, they also wouldn’t help me with finding work. Purely looking at habits and quality of life, I thought that he seemed terrifically healthy, and that I was the one who was sick.

But the changes came in the end.

Peng!

The china cup fell, shards scattering across the floor. Coffee ran along the cracks between the floorboards. My father stared at the mess on the floor in bafflement, as if trying to comprehend the existence of gravity. Suddenly he realized: this was Earth, not space. Surprised, I started to rise to clean it up, but he lifted a hand to stop me. He made the mess, so he should do the cleaning. He considered it a matter of personal dignity.

Peng!

A wave of flames boiled up, scorching black marks across the white wall of the kitchen. I hurriedly grabbed the fire extinguisher and blasted away wildly. When the flames died and I broke apart the milk-white hardened foam, I found black charcoal, the original food ingredients long since rendered unrecognizable. This time, I really didn’t see why I should stand aside and watch as he mopped and scrubbed. We cleaned the kitchen together, and then I helped him order takeout.

Peng!

I jolted violently awake in my bed, my back covered in cold sweat. The house was very quiet, but an enormous noise still seemed to echo in my brain. Good, it had been only a nightmare.

I quietly snuck into my father’s bedroom. The sound of his snores remained steady. I opened his drawer: amid the neatly arranged notebooks lay an old-fashioned, real-deal handgun. The right side clearly had an ejector port for casings. I wasn’t a gun aficionado myself, but I remembered what my father had once mentioned to me when I was very small: in order not to create space debris, they’d been issued sidearms that only shot caseless ammunition. I groped around a little, surreptitiously took out all the bullets, and returned the gun to its place.

---

“I asked the doctor yesterday. He said it’s fine to have a few sips a day.” I sat across from my father and poured him a small cup. I’d rarely seen him drink, but I’d read books—in the stories, whether your father was a farmer, laborer, or CEO, a dad-son heart-to-heart never took place without a glass.

“We never drank in space. If there’s something you want to say, say it.” He spread the book pages-down over his thigh, propped forearms on knees, and looked at me.

“It’s nothing. I just wanted to hear your stories about space,” I ventured, taking a sip myself.

“You can watch the documentaries. I said quite a bit in those.” His voice was calm.

“I want to hear something I haven’t heard. It’ll be a nice exercise for you, too,” I laughed.

He shut the book and sat silently, looking down, thinking. It was some time before he spoke.

“I . . . had a brother-in-arms, Old Yu. Very tall guy, combed his hair in this big swept-back hairdo. At the time, he was my assistant. We’d do tethered hull crawls together.” He was remembering these details with effort.

“Oh, yeah, I remember him. He came to our house when I was little. I even rode on his back.”

“Ah . . . did he?” I’d interrupted his train of thought. The narrative came to an abrupt halt as he turned to trying to recall the details I’d mentioned.

“Yeah, on my fifth birthday. Uncle Yu and Uncle Cheng came down together.”

“Oh, yes, right. I remembered once you mentioned Old Cheng. Yes, they came by.” He nodded.

I knew he was pretending. The year of my fifth birthday, only Old Yu had come.

“Anyway, what happened to Uncle Yu?”

“He died.”

“He died?”

“One time on the outside, his RCS—his thruster system, for adjusting motion—started malfunctioning. One set of nozzles went out of control and he couldn’t turn it off. He started to spin, got caught by gravity. Started to fall, bit by bit. We weren’t able to save him in time. In the end, he took off his own helmet.”

“ . . . ”

“I’m not trying to imply anything. I just think that, compared to those guys, I’ve ended up pretty well all things considered.” My father took a sip too, to ease the atmosphere.

“Did you ever regret it all?”

“Never.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Why?”

“A couple days ago, when I was cleaning, I saw your drawer.”

My father paused, as if struggling to make sense of what I was saying. And then he startled, like a child caught making trouble. “You went through my things?”

“I’m the primary caregiver. The doctor gave me that right. Or, to put it in your terms, it’s called barracks standards.” I’d prepared my self-justification long ahead of time.

He sat back down, and was silent for a long while. He finally said, “I’ve really never regretted it.”

“Even the way you are now? You got a gun for yourself, and you nearly forgot about it.”

“Yes, even so. I’d prepared myself before I ever left.” Oddly, my father had calmed down. “The memory of an individual might be a puny thing, but there will always be people to remember us.”

“And what will they remember? After experiencing the failure of space development, what do you expect them to remember? They’ll only think of space development as the product of stupid arrogance. Your bunch wasted the futures of generations of people on that giant useless Stairway to Heaven, and in the end it was nothing more than pulling on your own hair to lift your feet off the ground!”

“Ridiculous! History will properly remember us!”

“History . . . there might well not be any more history. At least, people don’t think there will be.” I projected a book in front of me: On the End of History and the Last Man, the current bestseller. I swept my gaze over the foreword—the author had taken inspiration from the theory of a scholar from a hundred years in the past. In the scholar’s era, the theory had been dismissed as a joke, but in this book, he was revered as a great prophet.

“Don’t spend all day filling your head with those nonsense takes.” He’d raised his voice.

“I’m not the one with dem—cognitive impairment! It’s none of your business!” I raised my voice too.

“I, I—” He tried to retort, but suddenly got stuck, like a jammed cartridge. He struggled for a while, then gave up, swept up the glass, drained it in one, and slammed it back onto the table. Our heart-to-heart thus ended unhappily.

Once I calmed down, I wondered about the whole thing. Why had I fought with him? What was so important as to be worth this kind of fight? So I went back to him to talk it over, only to find him bewildered. He didn’t remember any argument at all.

After that, I again had him tell stories of the past. A small portion was utterly shocking, stories of his comrades who’d died in the line of duty. Brained by debris, struck by tethers . . . there were a thousand exotic ways to die in outer space, too horrible for any news media to air. The only consolation was that the victims generally wouldn’t have time for suffering and regret.

The rest of the stories were much more along the traditional lines. He told me how he’d salvaged an accident that might well have otherwise ended up in the history books, how he’d disassembled a bomb planted on the interior of the Stairway; he told me how he’d snuck rare free moments to gaze at Earth in outer space and look for his homeland, how he’d never tired of seeing the dazzling grandeur of the Milky Way. I could only relate to a small portion of what he talked about, but I had to admit, even if he really had gotten eaten by a space monster, he’d at least have lived a full and meaningful life.

---

But, for me, those days had barely gotten started, when a call from an unfamiliar number cut them short.

The caller claimed he was from the “Stairway to Heaven Management Committee.” He told me, the great Stairway was about to be dismantled, and the Committee could provide me with a job on the project. I cussed him out as a scammer. He said it was okay, I could think on it, he would welcome me to call back when I was ready.

The next morning, my father and I saw the press conference for the “Stairway Dismantlement Plan” on TV.

In any discussion of merit, half the credit for the prosperity of my father’s era of space development deserved to go to the Stairway to Heaven. Nowadays, living in the long economic depression, people could no longer even imagine how their elders had organized such monumental levels of manpower and resources to build this miracle of engineering. The Stairway to Heaven had cut the cost of a heaven-earth round-trip by 95%, and the cost of an Earth-Moon round-trip by 80%, making it possible for ordinary people to go to space. At the time, people had lavished it unstintingly with praise: it was like a dragon soaring into the nine heavens, a rainbow piercing the mists. They’d built the Tower of Babel, a miraculous conduit to the promised land.

But then the economic winter had come, and space development had come to a screeching halt. The volumes being transported on the Stairway to Heaven rapidly shrank, and within two years was down to just one percent of what they’d been at the peak, while the cost of maintenance remained constant.

And thus it became an unimaginable negative equity. Ten years ago, the income it received from shipping actually fell below the income from tourism, making it the world’s most money-burning scenic site. Despite many rounds of restructuring, there was simply no way to curtail the cost of maintaining the Stairway. One company had tried cutting the drone fleet used to monitor stress changes within the Stairway by one third, and had directly caused a Level 2 accident. Worse, demolishing the Stairway with oriented blasting would also be an enormous expenditure, and none of the conglomerates wanted to foot the bill. So the whole mess dragged on. The only certainty was that human society would collapse from this colossal money-eating dragon before the next outer space boom rolled around.

By now, the problem had gotten to the point where it couldn’t be put off any longer. The world’s great conglomerates had come together as they rarely did, assembling a committee, which had suggested the simplest method of disassembly: only demolishing the portion below the stratosphere.

To a layman, the Stairway to Heaven resembled a tall tower, rising from the Earth with its tip in outer space. But from an engineer’s perspective, it more resembled a rope dangling down from geostationary orbit. Above Indonesia, thirty-six kilometers in the sky, was the Stairway’s midway relay station, from which one end of the Stairway extended toward Earth, and the other deeper into space.

In fact, the majority of the Stairway’s maintenance cost came from the Earthside portion, in the troposphere region below twenty kilometers. This section was designed to endure ocean mist, typhoons, and even shock waves from mid- to close-range nuclear explosions. Meanwhile, the main expense of dismantling the Stairway came from the stretch above ten kilometers, because any space debris generated there would disperse unpredictably, without being incinerated by the atmosphere, potentially creating a disaster.

Therefore, the conglomerate committee proposed to dismantle just the twenty kilometers at either end of the Stairway to Heaven, turning it into a “geostationary orbit satellite.” After that, the only expense would be the use of Hall-effect thrusters to maintain its orbital equilibrium. This would wipe out over 95% of maintenance costs at one stroke, without any unpredictable consequences. It was a thoroughly practical proposal.

Even afflicted with Alzheimer’s, my father grasped the proposal more quickly than I did. He was thunderous, flicking off the TV on the spot, hurling the remote control to the floor, before sitting there to stew. I didn’t tell him that someone had wanted to use the opportunity to give me a job. Making him even angrier wouldn’t be good for his condition.

After some hesitation, I called that number back after all, and quietly heard out the other party’s request.

To put it in simple terms, they wanted me to be a mascot, or, one of the “forgotten minority behind the grand era of space development.” All I had to do was give one little speech at the opening ceremony for the Stairway to Heaven Dismantlement Project—relate a sob story about how the Space Development Plan had stolen my father from my childhood years; then bemoan the hardship of taking care of a senile old man; express some second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-hand bargain-bin critiques of the whole business; and, finally, exhort everyone to return their gazes to Earth. It would be that simple, to give them the bit of legitimacy they needed to dismantle the Stairway to Heaven. A three-minute pledge of allegiance, and I’d earn the equivalent of three years of my salary, just like that.

The stars were lofty, and money lowly. But the trend of the times swept us all up in its current. Economic conditions were getting worse by the day. It was too exorbitant a luxury these days to gaze up at the stars.

In the end, I agreed, behind my father’s back.

---

After the press conference about the Stairway dismantlement, my father’s mood grew very low. He read fewer and fewer books. His physical condition rapidly worsened. I still had him tell me stories every day, but he was telling less by the day, and would sometimes repeat stories he’d already told.

After some days, the people, dates, and cause-and-effect in the stories began to unravel as well; he rearranged and recombined them into many different versions. Every time he told the story, he’d leave some details out, and fill in new details. I felt like I was watching the dazzling Milky Way slowly distort into Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, then into a mere mass of colors, and finally into the undifferentiated gray-brown of the water used to rinse an artist’s brushes. By the end, he would repeat a sentence over and over, or get stuck on an adjective for ages, without realizing it was happening at all. When he finally did notice, he’d grow very agitated, thumping his fists furiously on his thighs, or the table, muttering obscenities, until, moments later, he forgot the failure.

But no matter how hard he tried, he could no longer tell a complete story.

And then one day, I went out for a stroll with him, and, without any warning, he made a turn right out of my line of sight. When I realized he’d disappeared, he’d been gone for nearly five minutes. I turned on navigation, looking for him via GPS, but only found his bracelet discarded on the side of the road. The neon lights from the upper strata cast down eye-dazzling halation. The passing cars roared deafeningly. I was starting to panic. I hurriedly contacted his primary physician.

“Don’t worry, this kind of thing is common in the late stage. Eight or nine out of ten he’s gone to the nearest Stairway to Heaven station. You should be able to find him there.”

I knew that the doctor didn’t mean the about-to-be-demolished “Stairway to Heaven.”

In my father’s day, the Stairway to Heaven was the “Space Elevator.” And these days, by “Stairway to Heaven,” people meant the completely different and increasingly obsolete vertical rail system. Built with the excess production capacity from the Space Elevator, they’d once supported the functioning of these crowded hive-cities. Most of them were only a few hundred meters tall, using some of the Stairway to Heaven’s technology to connect the surface with the financial centers and wealthy neighborhoods of the upper strata. If the vertical rails were becoming obsolete, it wasn’t because of any advances in technology, but because of the growing gulf between rich and poor. People had gradually lost the need to travel between the upper and lower strata of a hive-city.

Aside from commonalities in design, they had almost nothing in common with the original. To dignify them with the name “Stairway to Heaven” was like calling an ant a tree. But it was these, that had pulled the vast sky forty kilometers above to the paltry distance of a few hundred meters.

I reached the Stairway terminal, and saw my father, sitting erectly, staring intently at the white words on the big red screen, as if looking for his train, or as if waiting for the comrades-in-arms meant to ride out with him. He exuded a tranquil indifference I hadn’t seen in a long time, and in my strained, anxious state, it lit a new unnamable fire in my heart.

Seeing me appear in a lather in front of him, he seemed strangely surprised.

“Dad! What happened? Why did you take off the bracelet?”

My questioning brought him back to the real world. His tranquil mood quickly grew agitated again. He looked down, silent. After some time, he said, “I don’t want to be forgotten.”

Similar incidents happened several more times after that. I learned a script from the doctor, to pretend I was his commander, in order to cajole and trick him home.

---

“We can be fairly certain that it’s reached the late stage. It’s gone somewhat faster than I expected, but that’s not your fault. Some things can’t be held back.”

Despite the doctor’s words, I still felt a certain guilt. My father sat next to me, stiff-faced. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“Then, going to the Stairway to Heaven is . . . ”

“Many retired corps members experience similar symptoms once their disease progresses to this late stage. It’s understandable, really. That day was the highlight of their lives. Of course they’d remember it unshakably. They’ll instinctively look for the tallest structure they can find and make a beeline for it. In that empty ocean of lost memories, this often becomes their final life preserver.”

My father’s expression was as serene as the waters of an ancient well.

“Is there anything I can do now?”

“I’m afraid there’s nothing left in terms of emotional solicitude. All that’s left is physical caretaking, changing diapers and so on. To tell the truth, at this stage, provided your finances allow for it, I would personally suggest that you take your father to a senior home, where the staff can provide him with more professional care. The heavy burden of caretaking without any return can be hard on a person.”

“I’ve considered it, but I don’t know if he’d want to . . . ”

“By this point, it’s hard for him to feel much of anything about it. Rest easy, son, you’ve done very well.”

My father turned to me, as if wanting to say something.

“Oh, one more thing. I notice that, every time I find him at the Stairway terminal, he seems very calm, even happy. Should I regularly take him to the Stairway terminal to walk around?”

“If it makes you feel better, I don’t see why not. But I fear your father won’t feel anything special,” the doctor said, with a little wave.

“Okay. I’ll do that.”

“Oh, that reminds me.” The doctor dug up a rather aged-looking brochure for me. “I recommend this care center specializing in Alzheimer’s disease patients. It’s in a remodeled abandoned Stairway terminal, and exclusively takes in old spacefarers. It’s been open for a while. The prices are reasonable, and the reviews are pretty good. You might consider sending him there.”

“Thanks, but I want to do as much as I can myself.”

The consultation soon ended. Just as we were about to leave the office, my father finally remembered what he’d wanted to say.

“Hello, uncle. Who are you?” He took my hand; through it, I felt a faint trembling.

In the end, I admitted, the doctor was right.

Afterward, in one of my father’s more lucid periods, I had another talk with him. He, using a military tone of voice, ordered me to take him to the care center. Unable to withstand the dual assault of gentle persuasion and hard demand, I agreed. He went, “Yay,” like a child.

---

My father sat in the wheelchair while I pushed him up the hill, gazing at the Stairway to Heaven not far away—the real Stairway to Heaven. The conglomerates had wanted me to come over and walk around the place, familiarize myself with the course of the ceremony. I’d taken the opportunity to bring my father along, hoping to use one of his lucid spells to let him see the Stairway to Heaven up close one last time.

The elements, over the years, had left many scars on the Stairway to Heaven. Even through the filter of the golden setting sun, large quantities of rusted non-structural components still poked through the curtain of nostalgia, jabbing sharply at onlookers’ eyes. The non-critical sound-dampening structures had long since fallen away; the air now collided with the Stairway’s protrusions, stirring into some kind of current high above, generating unsettling, arrhythmic clashing noises like a death rattle.

Very soon, the portion we saw in front of us would be obliterated in a series of meticulously designed explosions. My father was still staring dumbly as I lifted my head, estimating the distances. After the demolition, it would be hard to perceive the Stairway’s presence from up close. Instead, on a clear day, people should be able to see it on the horizon. It ought to be even more striking at night, a long thin black thread cutting across the Milky Way, clearly etching out its chilly contours against the black swan down night.

I couldn’t help but think of the famous story of the Tower of Babel—people coming together to build a high tower, just so they could be closer to their god. We built the Tower of Babel, but found that the gods weren’t in fact there. So now we were going to take it apart.

I imagined the Stairway to Heaven after the demolition, floating in the sky—like a hanging Tower of Babel, dangling down from an infinitely high and infinitely far place, piercing the boundary between heaven and earth, but unable, despite all its might, to touch the realm of humanity.

I looked down. My father was still staring. I wanted to leave, but he tugged on my sleeve. So I draped my jacket over his shoulders and sat down, cross-legged, quietly keeping him company.

Gradually, the distant sky revealed a star or two. I didn’t know their names. If my father were lucid, he could probably recognize them at a glance. He held my hand, occasionally making some meaningless mumble. I straightened so that I could see his face. In the dimness of twilight, the sockets of his eyes appeared deeply sunken, but his eyes were clear.

At that moment, I dimly felt as if I were looking at a child, looking at my father in his childhood. The doctor had said that my father’s mental capabilities were currently equivalent to those of a child of five or six. Then, what was he thinking about now? Did he see in the sky his decades as an Industrial Worker of the Cosmos? That weighty history? Or was he back in childhood, quietly dreaming that one day, once he was all grown up, he’d ascend the Stairway to Heaven and soar into space?

He made some more noises, as if trying to convey something, but in the end, no sentence emerged. Yet, on that lonely hill, the wind seemed to sweep up those sounds and carry them across time, bringing with them an endless wealth of meaning. When our ancestors first lifted their heads to gaze at the stars, had they made sounds like these?

When my thoughts returned from the celestial vastness, back to reality, my father’s murmurs had come to an end as well. He was hunched slightly forward, propped up on his forearms, as if thinking deeply.

In the twilight at the foot of the Stairway to Heaven, this worker of the cosmos had stopped breathing.

---

A small, finely-made metal box lay in front of me.

I’d found it amid my father’s belongings. He must have secretly hidden it away in one of his lucid spells. I hadn’t seen it since second grade in elementary school, but I knew for certain that it was the box from my memories. As a child, I hadn’t known what lay inside, but now, I was ready.

I swiped with my father’s retirement card, then gently pried. The box parted in response. Inside were sheets upon sheets of paper, and a black-and-white photo. The paper bore his last will and testaments, one every two years from his first ascent into space until retirement, the handwriting neat, the cadence of the sentences well-crafted.

The first will had been written before he went into space. It contained only a line of Mao’s poetry:

Everywhere on the green mountains are buried the bones of the faithful/ No need to wrap the body in horsehide and bear it back.

He was really something.

The second will—two years after he went into space—bore his own words.

 . . . You might not have much of an impression of Papa, but remember that Papa loves you . . . the second will was about a hundred characters. At the time, I’d just learned to speak.

 . . . You memorized your multiplication tables very quickly. You deserve praise for it. I can see that you have a talent for math and the sciences. You shouldn’t waste it. Study hard, and when you’ve grown up, you can come to space to work in Papa’s place . . . This was the third will, three hundred characters. I was still in kindergarten.

 . . . Take good care of Mom. She gave up a lot for our family. Now that I’ve gone and stubbornly died, the responsibility of the man of the house lies on your shoulders . . . This was the fourth, five hundred characters. I’d started elementary school.

 . . . Yesterday, I went to see Old Yu’s family. I was really gutless, I couldn’t string together a single sentence. In the end, all I could do was hug the others and cry. I couldn’t sleep all night. I feel like whatever I write is bloodless . . . This was the seventh. He was guilt-ridden, spending almost the whole letter talking about Old Yu’s death.

 . . . Don’t blame Mom. She did the right thing. It’s all my fault that things ended up this way. Stay with her and live well. When you’re grown, do what you want to do . . . This was the tenth. That year I was twenty, and Mom had chosen divorce.

 . . . Old Cheng’s started having trouble with talking too. To be honest, if you see this, I’ll be pretty happy. A clean death. I won’t give you all trouble like Old Cheng . . . This was the fourteenth, from his last year on duty.

I finished reading all of them, and gasped down deep breaths, forcing myself not to cry.

He’d liked to say that each generation had its own destiny. I hadn’t believed him at first. I’d thought the destiny of my generation was to witness the end of history. But in this moment, the understanding and empathy I’d gained, accompanying my father to see the Stairway in Indonesia, seemed to have transformed into some emotion harder to put into words. I ought to do something for them. Posterity ought to remember them.

I dialed the Committee’s phone number.

---

Three months later.

“ . . . The Committee expresses that, after the dismantlement of the Stairway to Heaven, the remaining portion will house a new ‘Museum of the History of Space Development,’ a semi-permanent repository for artifacts related to deceased space workers, including their wills, space suits, equipment, and so on. It’s said that the original proponent of the project was the son of a space worker. He hopes that everyone can . . . ”

I let out a breath. They’d listened to my suggestion. After all, from their perspective, without much outlay on their part, they could profit off of sympathy for the elders of space development, and gild themselves with an additional layer of legitimacy. It was a win-win.

A chilly north wind blew. Drops of autumn rain fell past the beehive-shaped sky-dome that separated the city strata, landing on the hologram fountain at the city center, raising half-real half-illusory ripples. I stood under the eaves, gazing at the newsreel rolling past above my head. I stood there for a long time.

When I turned to leave, I saw a child tugging on her mother, asking, what was the Stairway to Heaven. I let out a puff of white vapor, lifting my head to look at the heavens. The starry night was luminous, like my father’s clear gaze.

Originally published in the Chinese edition of Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, Issue #15.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.