Is this Löss?

[Cataphrak]

April 2nd, 1976, Somewhere North of Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, Republic of China

Doctor Qin Liansheng had known disappointment almost her entire life.

It had started innocuously enough, a childhood as the daughter of a tenant farmer amidst the hills and caves of Shaanxi Province, growing up thin and malnourished, looking over her shoulder for the clouds of dust which would announce the arrival of the Christian General, or the Dogmeat General, or the Iron General, or the Red General, or whatever warlord that had decided to take Shaanxi for his own. Not that it made sense to her, of course. Shaanxi's soil was poor, and whatever fertility it might have had faded with every year, washed out by the rains into the silty bottom of the Yellow River.

"This land used to be rich beyond compare", her grandfather had once told her, when she had asked him. "Long ago, the whole of the Yellow Earth Plateau fed a quarter of China, if not more. Xi'an was built here because this was the most fertile land under heaven. Only when we over-tamed the soil did it die, like an ox struck too many times."

It had seemed ludicrous then. But it had gotten her wondering, and what she had learned only drove her on even further. Her education was a piecemeal, irregular sort: secondary school under the Communists, university in a bombed out ruin, a graduate degree from the one university that the Shanxi Clique allowed to admit women. Yet by the time she was thirty, her interest in the once-fertile lands of her birth had become an obsession, one which had gotten her a Doctorate in Agricultural Science, and a dream:

One day, she wished to see the leached out remains of her home's farmland restored to its past glory, to see the ground covered with the rich dusty soil - the stuff which her textbooks called Löss - once again. To see her nephews and nieces and a hundred million others till the rich land, and reap a bounty which could at long last raise them out of the crushing poverty which seemed like an eternal constant. If the Yellow Earth - the Löss - could be restored after two thousand years of neglect and over-farming, the benefit would go to all of China.

But it was a dream which few seemed to share. She had made her case to the warlords of the Shanxi Clique. She had told them of the possibilities, of croplands that could feed half a billion people, of towns and villages restored to life and bursting with industrial capacity, of a Yellow River which once again ran clear, instead of carrying the precious Löss into the sea. But the Warlords of Shanxi did not care about such things. They worried only about the short-term, about new ways to smuggle opium and make guns. They had given her a pittance of a research grant, and sent her out into the countryside, to make studies which would never be read, and develop plans which would never be realised.

Qin Liansheng was forty-one when the Republic came, young enough to still be familiar with the concept of hope. They had passed by her research site with more trucks and cars than she had ever seen in her life, with aircraft so swift that they seemed almost magical. The commanding officer of one of the passing columns even detailed a group of soldiers to guard her research, and promised to send a report back to the capital in Guangzhou for further study. For a time, Qin Liansheng thought that maybe at last, someone would take her seriously, someone would help her dream come true.

And for a time, that seemed the case. Not only did the Republic continue her funding, it quadrupled it. In a few months, she had a travel stipend, three assistants, official credentials, new equipment, and two beat-up old English trucks to carry it all in. With renewed energy, she made new studies, developed models, she was even able to begin a pilot project, rejuvenating the soil through cutting new terraces and planting belts of grass to keep the soil in place. Within five years, she had restored over a hundred acres of farmland, enough to feed nearly five hundred people.

But by then, the government had made up its priorities, and they did not include the long process of restoring the soil of a region still associated with China's past. Guangzhou's priorities were heavy industry, electronics, roads, trains, aircraft, and submarines. Their power base was in the cities, so it was in the cities they concentrated. Electricity came to Shaanxi, but only so radios and televisions could show how bad they had it here. Roads were built, but only so people could leave. Hospitals came, but only to care for the elderly left behind. Funding for soil research dried up. The assistants were let go, the trucks broke down. It was almost as bad as it had been under the warlords. Only that single patch of rejuvenated land remained: a speck of achievement in a sea of failure.

Then, one morning, Doctor Qin Liansheng awoke to the sound of engines.

She got up, out of her little nickel-steel research hut just in time for two army trucks emblazoned with the white sun of the central government to pull up beside her. Perhaps they had come to tell her that the last of her funding had finally been cut, that even this little research camp was to be dismantled.

But no, the immaculately man who stepped out of the first truck's cab didn't look like the sort of person who'd come to get an unpleasant task over with. Instead, he quickly looked the doctor up and down. "Are you Doctor Qin Liansheng?"

The doctor nodded.

Then, the man did something quite extraordinary. He walked across the campsite, towards the stretch of rejuvenated land. Abruptly, he dropped to one knee, the rich yellow earth staining his expensive suit trousers. When he rose again and returned, he carried in his perfectly manicured hand a pile of dusty, yellowish soil.

"Doctor, Is this Löss?"

Qin Liansheng nodded. "It is, mister-"

"Liu Shen, Deputy Minister of the Interior - the new one, any way."

That was a surprise.

The suit should have been a giveaway, of course. The army escort too, for that matter. But if the this man was a senior member of the newly elected government then maybe-

"Mister Deputy Minister," she began, the half-forgotten words with which she had once haggled for funding years ago returning to her. "This is just the smallest example of what's possible with modern agricultural restoration methods. If I were to receive an increase of funding of say... a hundred thousand Yuan annually, I would have the resources to restore the soil of the entire valley in less than a decade. We could feed ten thousand - perhaps even twelve thousand people, and bring even more out of poverty, if-"

But the government man raised a placating hand. "Spare me your sales pitch, Doctor. You won't need it. The Central Government has already decided to massively increase your funding. It's their intention to extend your project of soil rejuvenation."

"Extend?" The doctor fought down the renegade surge of hope at the bottom of her stomach. "How far?"

"The whole Yellow Earth Plateau."

Qin Liansheng resisted the urge to laugh. "This is a joke, right?"

The Deputy Minister shrugged. "I'm not a clown, Doctor. That's what the DPP is for." He offered her a bare and most humourless smile. "We have your studies from 1968 on file. Do you still agree with those conclusions?"

"Yes but-"

"So it can be done?"

"It can but-" The doctor bit her lip. "It would require immense resources. If we were to begin work on every site simultaneously, we'd need a gargantuan level of funding-"

"The Legislative Yuan just passed the appropriations bill last week. You have two and a half billion for the 1977 fiscal year. Four billion for 1978, if you can show results in twelve months."

"I'll need labour-"

"You've been authorised to recruit up to one hundred and fifty thousand workers for this project. The administrative details are in the truck, but really, they're just your original specifications, translated into bureaucrat-speak."

"Not just strong hands for coolie work, I'll need-"

"You'll have two battalions of army engineers, and a hundred and fifteen labour colleges have already expressed a willingness to provide students. Another sixty two are offering alumni as well. I have been assigned to handle administration, and the army will be detaching a Colonel Tang to handle logistics, but you'll have full authority over the scientific aspects."

Doctor Qin Liansheng's mouth hung open. For once in a very, very long time, she truly had no idea what to say.

"Doctor?"

This was... incredible. It had to be a dream. Surely, the government would not just... give her the resources to fulfill her life's hope over the space of a morning.

"Doctor!"

"Yes?" She replied, in a near complete stupor.

"Can it be done?"

When she answered next, the doctor's eyes were entirely clear. "It can. Follow me, I'll show you my more recent notes."

With that, she turned back to the tent, her limbs stiffened with a white-hot resolve. If this was a dream, then Qin Liansheng was about to see just how far it went...

[Cataphrak]