The Glass City

In the city of Aereth, every window was made of memory-glass, and the law was simple: a citizen's walls displayed, to any passer-by, whatever that citizen had most recently felt. Grief clouded the panes grey; joy set them ablaze. Privacy had been abolished a generation ago, in the name of a perfect and transparent society.

在艾瑞斯城，每一扇窗户都是用记忆玻璃做成的，法律规定得很简单：任何一位公民的墙壁，都要向路过的人展示这位公民最近感受到的一切。悲伤会让玻璃蒙上灰色；喜悦则会让玻璃燃烧般发亮。整整一代人以前，隐私就已经被废除了，理由是要建立一个完全透明的完美社会。

Sable, an archivist, had spent her life cataloguing the moods of strangers, and had grown expert at feeling nothing at all.

塞布尔是一名档案管理员，她一辈子都在记录陌生人的情绪，如今早已练就一身本领——什么都感觉不到。

Then the glass in her own apartment began to malfunction. Where it should have shown her practised emptiness, it flickered instead with colours she did not recognise as her own — a restless amber, a stubborn green.

后来，她自己公寓里的玻璃开始出现故障。原本该显示出她那份练就已久的空白，如今却闪烁着她认不出属于自己的颜色——一种不安分的琥珀色，一种固执的绿色。

She consulted the engineers, who found no fault in the mechanism. The fault, they implied delicately, was in her. Somewhere beneath the surface she had been cultivating, something unsanctioned had taken root.

她去请教了工程师，他们检查了机器，却没有发现任何故障。他们委婉地暗示，问题出在她自己身上。在她一直精心培养的那层表象之下，某种未经许可的东西已经生了根。

For the first time in years, Sable was curious about what she contained.

多年来第一次，塞布尔对自己内心究竟藏着什么，产生了好奇。

She stopped repairing the glass. She let it show whatever it wished, and she watched, as a stranger might, the slow return of a self she had disowned.

她不再修理那扇玻璃了。她任由它随心所欲地显现，像一个陌生人那样，看着一个她曾经否认过的自我缓缓归来。

Her neighbours were scandalised, and the council issued warnings. But others, quietly, began to let their own windows drift out of regulation, until whole streets glowed with the unruly, contradictory light of people who had remembered how to feel.

她的邻居们大为震惊，议会也发出了警告。可是渐渐地，其他人也开始悄悄让自己的窗户偏离规范，直到整条街道都亮起了那种不守规矩、自相矛盾的光——那是记起了如何去感受的人们所发出的光。

The transparent city, it turned out, had never truly been transparent. It had only been afraid. And fear, unlike glass, cannot be legislated into clarity.

原来，这座所谓透明的城市，从来都不曾真正透明过。它只是一直心怀恐惧。而恐惧，不像玻璃那样，是无法靠立法变得清澈的。