Hold Up the Sky

THE VILLAGE TEACHER

He knew he’d have to teach his final lesson early.

He felt another shot of pain in his liver, so strong he almost fainted. He didn’t have the strength to get out of bed, and, with great difficulty, he pulled himself closer to the bedside window, whose paper panes glowed in the moonlight. The little window looked like a doorway leading into another world, one where everything shone with silver light, a diorama of silver and frostless snow. He shakily lifted his head and looked out through a hole in the paper window, and his fantasy of a silver world receded. He found himself looking into the distance, at the village where he had spent his life.

The village lay serenely in the moonlight, and it looked as if it had been abandoned for a hundred years. The small flat-roofed houses were almost indistinguishable from the mounds of soil surrounding them. In the muted colors of moonlight, it was as if the entire place had dissolved back into the hills. Only the old locust tree could be seen clearly, a few black crows’ nests scattered among its withered branches, like stark drops of black ink on a silver page.

The village had its good times, like the harvest. When young men and women, who had left the village in droves to find work, came back, and the place was bustling and full of laughter. Ears of corn glistened on the rooftops, and children did somersaults in the piles of stalks on the floor of the threshing ground. The Spring Festival was another cheerful time, when the threshing ground was lit with gas lamps and decorated with red lanterns. The villagers gathered there to parade lucky paper boats and do lion dances. Now, only the clattering wooden frames of the lions’ heads were left, stripped of paint. The village had no money to buy new trains for the heads, so they had been using bedsheets as the lions’ bodies, which worked in a pinch. But as soon as the Spring Festival ended, all the youths of the village left again to look for work, and the place fell back into torpor.

At dusk every day, as thin wisps of smoke rose from the chimneys of the houses, one or two elderly villagers, their faces grooved like walnuts, would stand and gaze down the road that led beyond the mountains, until the last ray of gloaming light got caught in the locust tree and disappeared. People turned their lamps off and went to bed early in the village. Electricity was expensive, at ¥1.8 per kilowatt hour.

He could hear a dog softly whimpering somewhere in the village, whining in its sleep, perhaps. He looked out at the moonlit yellow soil surrounding the village, which suddenly seemed to him like a placid sheet of water. If only it were water—this year was the fifth consecutive year of drought, and they had had to carry water to the fields to irrigate them.

His gaze drifted into the distance, landing on the fields on the mountain, which looked in the moonlight like the footprints of a giant. Small, scattered plots were the only way to farm that rocky mountain, covered as it was with vines and brush. The terrain was too rough for agricultural equipment—even oxen would have had no good footing—so people were obliged to do all the labor by hand.

Last year, a manufacturer of agricultural machines had visited to sell a kind of miniature walking tractor, small enough to work those meager fields. It wasn’t a bad little machine, but the villagers weren’t having it. How much grain could those tiny plots produce? Planting them was detailed work, more like sewing than sowing, and a crop that could feed a man for a year was considered a success. In a year of drought, as it was, those fields might not even produce enough to recoup the cost of planting. A five-thousand-yuan tractor, and on top of that, diesel fuel at more than two yuan a liter—outsiders just didn’t understand the difficulties of life in these mountains.

A few small silhouettes walked past the window. They formed a circle on a ridge between two fields and squatted down, inscrutable. He knew these were his students—as long as they were nearby, he could detect their presence even without seeing them. This intuition had developed in him over a lifetime, and it was particularly keen now that his life was drawing to a close.

He could even recognize the children in the moonlight. Liu Baozhu and Guo Cuihua were there. Those two were originally from the village and didn’t have to live at school; nevertheless, he had taken them in.

Liu Baozhu’s father had paid the dowry for a bride from Sichuan ten years before, and she had come and given birth to Baozhu. Five years after that, when Baozhu had grown a bit, his father began to neglect his wife, the small bit of closeness they’d had slipping away, and eventually she left him and returned to her family in Sichuan.

After that, Baozhu’s father lost his way. He began gambling, just like the old bachelors of the village, and before long he had lost everything but four walls and a bed. Then he began drinking. Every night, he sold roasted sweet potatoes for eighty fen a kilogram and drank himself useless with the money. Useless and angry: he hit his son every day, and twice a week he hit him hard. One night the month before, he’d nearly beaten his son to death with a sweet potato skewer.

Guo Cuihua’s home life was even worse. Her father had found a bride for himself through decent channels, a rare thing here, and he was proud. But good things seldom last, and right after the wedding, it became apparent that Cuihua’s mother was unwell. No one could tell at the wedding—she’d likely been given a drug to calm her. Why would a respectable woman come to a village like this in the first place, so poor that even the birds wouldn’t shit as they flew over? Nevertheless, Cuihua was born and grew up, and her mother got sicker and sicker. She attacked people with cooking knives in the daytime, and at night she would try to burn the house down. She spent most of her time laughing to herself like a ghoul, with a sound that would set your hair on end.

The rest of the children were from other villages, the closest of which was at least ten miles away on mountain roads, so they had to live at school. In a crude village school like this, they would spend the whole term there. The students brought their own bedding, and each hauled a sack of wheat or rice from home, which they cooked themselves on the school’s big stove. As night fell in the winter, the children would gather around the stove and watch the cooking grain bubble and purl in the pot, their faces lit by straw-orange flames. It was the most tender sight he’d ever seen. He would take it with him into the next world.

On the ridge outside the window, within the ring of children, little stars of fire began to shine, bright in the moonlit night. They were burning incense and paper, and their faces were lit red in the firelight against the silver-gray night. He was reminded of the sight of the children by the stove. Another scene emerged from the pool of his memory. The electricity had gone out at school (due perhaps to a faulty circuit, or, as happened more often, a lack of funds) while he was teaching an evening class. He held a candle in his hand to illuminate the blackboard. “Can you see it?” he’d asked, and the children answered, as they always did, “Not yet!” It really was hard to read the blackboard with so little light, but they had a lot of material to cover, so night class was the only option. He lit a second candle and held them both up. “It’s still too dark!” yelled the children, so he lit a third candle. It was still too dark to read the board, but the children stopped yelling. They knew their teacher wouldn’t light another candle no matter how much they yelled. He couldn’t afford to. He looked down at their faces flickering in the candlelight, those kids, who had fought off darkness with every fiber of their beings.

The children and firelight, the children and firelight. It was always the children and firelight, always the children at night, in the firelight. The image was forever embedded in his mind, though he never understood what it meant.

He knew the children were burning incense and paper for him, as they had done so many times before, but this time he didn’t have the strength to criticize them for being superstitious. He had spent his whole life trying to ignite the flame of science and culture in the children’s hearts, but he knew that, compared to the fog of ignorance and superstition that enshrouded this remote mountain village, it was a feeble flame indeed, like the flame of his candles in the classroom that night. Six months earlier, a few villagers had come to the school to scavenge rafters from the roof of the already-dilapidated dorm, with which they meant to renovate the temple at the entrance to the village. He asked where the children would sleep if the dorm had no roof, and they said they could sleep in the classroom.

“In the classroom? The wind blows right through the walls. How can the children sleep there in the winter?”

“Who cares? They’re not from here.”

He picked up a pole and fought them fiercely, and he wound up with two broken ribs. A kind villager propped him up and walked with him all the way to the nearest town hospital, fifteen miles or more on mountain roads.

While assessing his injuries, the doctor had discovered that he had esophageal cancer. There was a high incidence of this sort of cancer in the region, so it wasn’t a rare diagnosis. The doctor congratulated him on his good fortune—he had come while the cancer was still in an early stage, before it had started to metastasize. It was curable with surgery; in fact, esophageal cancer was one of the types of cancer against which surgery was most effective. His broken ribs might well have saved his life.

After, he had gone to the province’s main city, which had an oncology hospital, and asked a doctor there how much such a surgery would cost. The doctor told him that, considering his situation, he could stay in the hospital’s welfare ward, and that his other expenses could also be reduced commensurately. The final amount wouldn’t be too much—around twenty thousand yuan. Recalling that his patient came from such a remote place, the doctor proceeded to explain the details of hospitalization and surgery.

He listened silently and suddenly asked: “If I don’t get the surgery, how long do I have?”

The doctor regarded him blankly for a long moment and said, “Maybe six months.”

The teacher heaved a long sigh, as if greatly relieved, and the doctor was nonplussed. At least he could see this graduating class off.

He really had no way to pay twenty thousand yuan. Over his life, he could have saved up some money. Community teachers may not make much, but he had worked for so many years, and he had never married, nor did he have other financial obligations. But he had spent it all on the children. He couldn’t remember how many children’s tuition he had paid, how many of their incidental expenses he had covered. Recently, there were Liu Baozhu and Guo Cuihua, but more often, he would see that the school’s big cooking pot had no oil in it, so he would buy meat and lard for the children. All the money he had left would cover perhaps a tenth of the surgery.

After the appointment with the doctor, he had walked along the city’s wide avenue toward the train station. It was already dark out, and neon lights had come on in a dazzling blur of stripes and dots, bewildering him. At night, the tall buildings of the city were like rows of enormous lamps extending into the clouds, and snippets of music, alternately frenetic and gentle, filled the air along his way.

In that strange world of the city, he reflected on his own short life. He was feeling philosophical, calmly considering that each person has their own path in life, and that he had chosen his own path twenty years prior, when he had graduated from middle school and decided to return to the village. In fact, his destiny had been given to him by another village teacher.

He had spent his own childhood at the school where he now taught. His father and mother had died early, and the school had been his home. His teacher had raised him as a son, and while his childhood might have been poor, it was not lacking in love. When school had gone on winter break one year, his teacher decided to take him home for the season.

His teacher’s home was far away, and snow had lain deep on the mountain road. It was the middle of the night by the time they laid eyes on the lights of his teacher’s village. Not far behind them, they saw four glints of green, the eyes of two wolves. There were many wolves in the mountains back then, and you could find piles of wolf shit all around the school. Once, as a prank, he had taken a gray-white pile of the stuff, lit it on fire, and thrown it into the classroom, which filled with acrid smoke, choking his classmates. His teacher was furious.

The two wolves in the forest had slowly approached them. While his teacher had snapped a thick branch off a tree and brandished it in the wolves’ path, yelling loudly, he had run off toward the village, scared out of his wits, running with all his might. He worried the wolves would go around his teacher and come after him; he worried he would run into another wolf on his way. He ran heaving into the village. Several men assembled with hunting rifles, and he went back with them to look for his teacher. They found him lying in a pool of blood and slush, half of his leg and most of his arm bitten off. His teacher took his final breath on the way to the town hospital, and he saw his teacher’s eyes in a ray of torchlight. A large chunk of his cheek had been bitten off and he was unable to speak, but his eyes expressed an urgent plea, one that he’d understood and remembered.

After he graduated from middle school, he had turned down a promising opportunity to work in the town’s municipal government. Instead, despite having no family or friends there, he returned directly to the mountain village, to the village primary school that his teacher had pleaded with him to save. By the time he returned, the school was abandoned, having had no teacher for several years.

Not long before that, the Board of Education had begun enforcing a policy that replaced community teachers with state-supported teachers. Some community teachers were able to obtain state support by taking a test. He passed that test and got his teaching certificate, and when he found out he was a licensed, state-supported teacher, he was happy, but that was the extent of his reaction. Other members of his cohort had been elated. But he didn’t care whether he was a community teacher or a state-supported teacher; he only cared about the classes of children who would graduate from his primary school and go out into the world. Regardless of whether they left the mountains or stayed, their lives would be different in some way from the lives of children who had never gone to school.

Those mountains were one of the most impoverished areas in the country. But worse than the poverty was the apathy of the people there toward their condition. He remembered how, many years ago, when agricultural output quotas were set for each household, the village had divided and distributed its fields, and then its possessions. The village had one tractor, and the villagers couldn’t come to a consensus on how to pay for its fuel or allot time to use it. The only solution everyone could accept was to divide the tractor itself. They literally disassembled it—you get a wheel, he gets an axle. And two months ago, a factory had sent poverty relief in the form of a submersible pump, and, electricity being expensive, they also sent a diesel generator along with plenty of fuel to operate it. They had barely left the village before the villagers sold the machines, the pump and the generator together, for just two hundred and fifty yuan. Everyone ate two good meals, more than in most years.

Another time, a leather manufacturer had bought some land in the village on which to build a tannery—who knew how it got sold to them in the first place. Once the tannery was up, lye and niter flowed into the river and seeped into the well water. The people who drank it broke out in red boils all over their bodies—but no one cared! They were just happy the land sold for a good price. It was a village of old, hopeless bachelors who spent all day gambling and drinking, never planting. They had it figured out—as long as they stayed poor, the county would receive small amounts of poverty relief every year, more than they could make plowing their tiny fields of rocks and dust. They had come to accept this sort of life because they knew nothing else. The village’s fruitless ground and poison water were dispiriting, but what could truly make you lose hope was the dull eyes of the villagers.

He had reflected on all these things as he had walked from the doctor’s office through the province’s main city. His diagnosis still didn’t feel real; the doctor’s words felt far away. This walking had tired him, though, so he sat down next to the sidewalk. In front of him was a large, glamorous restaurant. Its façade was a single, transparent window, through which the restaurant’s chandeliers cast their light onto the street. The restaurant looked like a huge aquarium, and the customers inside, in their fancy clothes, looked like a school of colorful fish. A heavyset man sat at a table by the window. His hair and face were slicked with oil, making him look like a painted wax sculpture. Two tall young women sat next to him, one on each side. The man turned and said something to one of the women, which made her burst out in laughter, and he started laughing, too. Who knew women could get so tall, he thought. Xiuxiu would have only come up to their waists. He sighed—he was thinking about Xiuxiu again.

Xiuxiu had been the only girl in the village who hadn’t married out of the mountains. Maybe she was afraid of the outside world because she, like most of the villagers, had never left. Maybe she had a different reason. Either way, the two of them had spent more than two years together, and it had seemed things might work out—her family had asked for a reasonable birth-pain price,1 only fifteen hundred yuan. But soon, some villagers who had left to find work came back with a bit of money. One of them, about the same age as him, was a clever guy, though illiterate. He had left for the city, where he’d gone door-to-door, cleaning people’s kitchen exhaust hoods, and in a year he had made a bundle.

This cleaner had spent a month in the village two years ago, and Xiuxiu had somehow wound up with him. Her family turned a blind eye. The rough walls of her family’s home were covered in melon seeds and scratched tallies of her father’s debts over the years. Xiuxiu hadn’t gone to school, but she had an affinity for people who could read. He knew that was the main reason she had initially been attracted to him. But the village boy gave her bottles of perfume, gold-plated necklaces, and eventually won her over.

“Being able to read won’t put food on the table,” she told him. He knew it could, but with his job, it wasn’t good food, especially compared to what the cleaner could give her. So, he’d had no response. Xiuxiu had walked out the door and left only the smell of her perfume, which made him scrunch up his nose.

A year after marrying the village boy, Xiuxiu died in childbirth. He still remembered the midwife holding her rusty forceps over a flame for a second before poking them inside her. Xiuxiu’s blood filled the copper basin beneath her. She died on the way to the town hospital. The village boy had spent thirty thousand yuan on the wedding, and it had been a spectacle like nothing the village had seen. Why wasn’t he willing to part with a little more money so Xiuxiu could give birth in the hospital? He had asked around about the cost of delivering a child in the hospital. It was only two or three hundred yuan. But the village had its ways, and no villager had ever gone to the hospital to give birth. No one blamed the boy. They threw up their hands and said it was her fate. He heard later that compared to the cleaner’s mother, Xiuxiu had been lucky. His mother had gone into obstructed labor. When the cleaner’s father heard from the midwife that the child was a boy, he’d chosen to save the child. His mother was placed on the back of a donkey and driven around in circles, in order to spin the baby out. People who were there said that there was a ring of her blood in the dust.

The teacher took a deep breath and felt the ignorance and despair of the village sitting heavily on his chest. It was an ever-present sensation, and even here in the city he felt it just as strongly.

There was still hope for the children, he told himself, even as they sat in the freezing classroom in the winter and looked at the blackboard by candlelight. He was the candle. For as long as he could, with as much brightness as he could muster, he would burn, body and soul, for those children.

Eventually, he had risen from the city sidewalk and continued walking for a while, before stepping into a bookstore. The city was a good place—it even had bookstores that were open at night. There he spent all the money he had brought on books for the school’s tiny library, saving for himself only enough to cover the fare home. In the middle of the night, clutching two heavy bundles of books, he had boarded the train.

In the center of the Milky Way, fifty thousand light-years from Earth, an interstellar war that had lasted for twenty thousand years was nearing its resolution.

A square-shaped, starless region was visible there, as distinctly as if it had been cut from the background of shining stars with a pair of scissors. Its sides were six thousand miles long, and its interior was blacker even than the blackness of space—a void within a void. Several objects began to emerge from within the square. They were of various shapes, but each was as large as Earth’s moon, and their color was a dazzling silver. As more appeared, they took on a regular, cube-shaped formation. The cube of objects continued to emerge from the square, a mosaic set into the eternal wall of the universe itself, whose base was the complete, velvet blackness of the square and whose tiles were the luminescent silver objects. They were like a cosmic symphony given physical form. Slowly, the black square dissolved back into the stars, leaving only the cube-shaped array of silver objects floating ominously.

The interstellar fleet of the Galactic Federation of Carbon-Based Life had completed the first space-time warp of its journey.

The High Archon of the Carbon Federation looked out from the fleet’s flagship onto a metallic, silver landscape. An intricate network of paths snaked across the land like circuits etched into an infinitely wide, silver circuit board. Teardrop-shaped craft appeared occasionally on the surface of the land; they shot at blinding speed along the paths, and after a few seconds, noiselessly disappeared into ports that suddenly opened in the surface to receive them. Cosmic dust had clung to the fleet during its warp travel; it formed clouds over the landscape that glowed faintly red as they ionized.

The High Archon was known for his cool demeanor. The endlessly tranquil, azure smart field that usually surrounded him was like a symbol of his personality. At this moment, however, traces of yellow light emerged from his smart field, as they did from the fields of the people around him.

“It’s finally over.” The High Archon’s smart field vibrated, transmitting his message to the senator and the fleet commander, who stood on either side of him.

“Yes, it’s over. This war went on too long—so long that we have forgotten its beginning,” the senator replied.

The fleet began to cruise at sub-light speed. The ships’ sub-light engines engaged simultaneously, and thousands of blue suns suddenly appeared around the flagship. The silver land below them reflected the engines’ lights like an edgeless, infinite mirror, and each blue sun was doubled in the reflection.

The beginning of the war was a distant, ancient memory, and though it seemed to have been burned away in the fighting, no one had truly forgotten it. It was a memory that had passed through hundreds of generations, but to the trillion citizens of the Carbon Federation, it was still vivid, engraved into their hearts and minds.

Twenty thousand years earlier, the Silicon-Based Empire had launched a full-scale attack against the Carbon Federation from the periphery of the galaxy. The Empire’s five million warships leapt from star to star along the ten-thousand-light-year-long battlefront. Each ship first drew power from its star to open a wormhole through space-time, then traveled through the wormhole to another star, which it likewise harnessed to create another wormhole and continue its travel.

Opening a wormhole depleted a large amount of a star’s energy and shifted its light toward the red end of the spectrum. After the ship had jumped, the star’s light would gradually return to its original state. The collective effect of millions of ships traveling in this way was terrifying. A band of red light ten thousand light-years long appeared at the edge of the galaxy and began moving toward its center, invisible to light-speed observations but clearly visible on hyperspace monitors. The band, created by the red-shifted light of stars, rushed toward the borders of Carbon Federation space, a tide of blood ten thousand light-years across.

The first Carbon Federation planet to be hit by the vanguard of the Silicon Empire forces was Greensea. It was a beautiful planet that orbited a pair of binary stars. Its surface was covered completely by ocean, on which floated great forests of soft, long, vine-like plants. These forests were home to the temperate, beautiful inhabitants of Greensea, who, swimming lithely among the plants with their crystal-clear bodies, had created an Edenic civilization. Tens of thousands of harsh beams of light suddenly pierced the sky of the planet—the lasers of the Silicon Empire fleet—and began evaporating the ocean. In a short time, Greensea’s surface became a boiling cauldron, and all life on the planet, including its five billion inhabitants, died in agony in the boiling water. The ocean was completely evaporated in the end, and Greensea, which had once been so beautiful, was left a hellish, gray planet, shrouded in thick steam.

There was virtually nowhere in the galaxy untouched by the war. It was a ruinous fight for survival between carbon-based and silicon-based civilization. Yet neither side had expected the war to last twenty thousand galactic years!

Except for historians, no one remembers how many battles were waged between forces of a million or more ships. The largest-scale battle was the Battle of the Second Arm, which took place in the second spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. In total, more than ten million warships from both fleets participated as combatants. Historical records tell that more than two thousand stars went supernova in the huge battle zone, like fireworks in the black void. They turned the whole spiral arm into an ocean of super-strong radiation, with groups of black holes floating like ghosts in its midst.

By the end of the battle, both sides had lost nearly their entire fleets. Fifteen thousand years had elapsed, and the story of the battle sounded like an ancient myth, except for the fact that the battle zone itself still existed. Ships rarely entered the zone. It was the most terrifying region of the galaxy, and not just because of the radiation and black holes.

During the battle, squadrons of ships from both unthinkably huge fleets made short-distance space-time jumps as a tactical maneuver. It was thought that in dogfights, some interstellar fighters made almost incredible jumps of a few miles at most! These jumps left space-time in the battle zone riddled with holes, more like rags than fabric. Any ship unfortunate enough to stray into the region risked hitting a patch of distorted space. A patch like that could twist a ship into a long, thin, metal pole, or press it into a sheet hundreds of millions of square miles in area and a few atoms thick, which the gale of radiation would immediately shred to pieces. More often, a ship that hit a patch of distorted space-time would regress into the pieces of steel it was made of, or immediately age into a broken husk, everything inside the ship decaying into ancient dust. Anyone aboard would revert in an instant to an embryonic state, or collapse into a pile of bones….

The war’s decisive battle was not a myth. It took place a year ago. The Silicon Empire assembled its remaining forces, a fleet of 1.5 million warships, in the desolate space between the galaxy’s first and second spiral arms. They set up an antimatter cloud barrier around their location, with a radius of one thousand light-years.

The first Carbon Federation squadron to attack jumped directly to the edge of the cloud and entered it. The cloud was very thin, but it was lethal against warships, and it turned those ships into brilliant fireballs. Dragging long tails of flame from their hulls, the ships bravely continued to advance on their target, streaks of fluorescence in their wakes. An array of thirty thousand or more shooting stars, rushing bravely forward—it was the most magnificent, tragic image from the Carbon-Silicon War.

But these shooting stars thinned out as they passed through the antimatter cloud, and at a location very close to the battle array of the Silicon Empire fleet, they disappeared. They had sacrificed themselves to open a tunnel through the cloud for the rest of the attack fleet. In the battle, the last fleet of the Silicon Empire was driven back to the most desolate region in the Milky Way: the tip of the first spiral arm.

Now, the Carbon Federation fleet was about to complete its final mission: constructing a five-hundred-light-year-wide isolation belt in the middle of the spiral arm. They would destroy most of the stars in the belt to prevent the Silicon Empire from making interstellar jumps. Interstellar jumps were the only way in the Milky Way system for large battleships to carry out fast, long-range attacks, and the greatest distance a ship could jump was two hundred light-years. Once the belt was built, the heavy warships of the Silicon Empire would have to cross five hundred light-years of space at sub-light speeds to get to the central region of the galaxy. In effect, the Silicon Empire would be imprisoned at the tip of the first spiral arm, unable to pose any serious threat to carbon-based civilization in the center of the galaxy.

The senator used his vibrating smart field to speak to the High Archon. “The will of the Senate is as follows: We maintain our strong recommendation to conduct a life-level protective screening in the belt before commencing stellar destruction.”

“I understand the Senate’s caution,” said the High Archon. “In this long war, the blood of all forms of life has flowed, enough to fill the oceans of thousands of planets. Now that the war has ended, the most pressing concern for the galaxy is to reestablish respect for life—all forms of life, not only carbon-based life, but silicon-based life, as well. The Federation stopped short of completely annihilating silicon-based civilization on the basis of this ideal. Yet the Silicon Empire has no such qualms. They have an instinctual love for warfare and conquest. It has always been so, even before the Carbon-Silicon War. Now, these inclinations are embedded in each of their genes and in each line of their code. They are the ultimate goals of the Empire. Silicon-based life is far superior to us at storing and processing information. Even here, at the tip of the first spiral arm, their civilization will recover and develop quickly. It is therefore imperative that we construct a sufficiently wide isolation belt between the Federation and the Empire. Given the circumstances, a life scan on each of the hundred million stars in the belt is unrealistic. The first spiral arm may be the most barren region of the galaxy, but there are likely enough stars with inhabited planets to achieve leap density. Medium warships could use them to cross the belt, and just one Silicon Empire medium warship could cause immense damage if it managed to enter Federation space. We cannot conduct a life-level protective screening for each planet, only civilization-level. We must sacrifice the primitive life-forms in the belt, in order to save the advanced and primitive life-forms in the rest of the galaxy. I have explained this to the Senate.”

“The Senate recognizes this imperative, sir. You have explained it, as has the Federal Defense Committee. The Senate’s statement is a recommendation, not a piece of legislation. However, stars in the belt with life-forms that have reached 3C-civilization status and above must be protected.”

“Rest assured,” said the High Archon, his smart field flashing a determined red. “We will be extremely thorough in conducting civilization tests for each planetary system in the isolation belt!”

For the first time, the fleet commander’s smart field emitted a message. “I think you are worried over nothing. The first spiral arm is the most barren wasteland in the galaxy. There won’t be any 3Cs or above.”

“I hope you are right,” said the High Archon and the senator simultaneously. Their smart fields vibrated in resonance and sent a solitary ripple of plasma into the sky above the metallic land below.

The fleet began its second space-time leap, traveling at near-infinite speed toward the first spiral arm of the galaxy.

It was late at night. The children had gathered by candlelight at the foot of their teacher’s sickbed.

“Teacher, you should rest. You can teach us the lesson tomorrow,” said a boy.

The teacher managed a pained smile. “Tomorrow we have tomorrow’s lesson.”

If he could make it to tomorrow, then he would teach tomorrow’s lesson. But his gut told him he wouldn’t last the night.

He made a gesture, and one of the children placed a small blackboard on the sheet covering his chest. This was how he had been teaching them for a month. The children passed him a half-worn piece of chalk; he grabbed it weakly and put its tip to the blackboard with great effort. A sharp, strong pain shot through him. His hand trembled, knocking the chalk against the blackboard and leaving white dots.

He had not gone to the hospital since he returned from the city. His liver had begun to ache two months later—the cancer had spread.

The pain got worse with time until it overwhelmed everything. He groped under his pillow for a pain pill, the common, over-the-counter kind, packaged in plastic. They were completely ineffective at relieving the agony of late-stage cancer, but they had a bit of value as a placebo. Demerol wasn’t expensive, but patients weren’t allowed to take it out of the hospital, and even if they were, there was no one to administer the shot. As usual, he pushed two pills out of the plastic strip. He thought for a moment, then pushed out the remaining twelve pills and swallowed them all. He knew he would have no use for them later.

Again, he turned his attention to the blackboard and struggled to write out the lesson, but a cough overcame him. He turned his head to the side, where a child had rushed to hold up a bowl next to his mouth. He spit out a mouthful of red and black blood, then reclined on his pillow to catch his breath.

Several of the children stifled sobs.

He abandoned his effort to write on the blackboard. He waved his hand, and a child came over to remove it from his chest. In a small voice, almost a whisper, he began to speak.

“Like our lessons yesterday and the day before, today’s lesson is meant for middle schoolers. It is not on your syllabus. Most of you will never have a chance to attend middle school, so I thought I would give you a taste of what it’s like to study a subject in greater depth. Yesterday, we read Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman. You probably didn’t understand much of it, but I want you to read it a few more times, or, better yet, learn to recite it from memory. You’ll understand it when you’re older. Lu Xun was a remarkable man. Every Chinese person should read his books. I know all of you will in the future.”

He stopped speaking to rest for a moment and catch his breath. He looked at the flickering candle flame. Another passage of Lu Xun came to him. It wasn’t from Diary of a Madman, and it hadn’t been in his textbook. He had encountered it many years before, in his own incomplete, thumbed-through set of Lu Xun’s collected works. Since the first time he read it, he hadn’t forgotten a single word.

With the last of his strength, he continued his lecture.

“Today’s class is middle school physics. You may not have heard of physics before. It is the study of the principles of the physical world. It’s an extremely rich, deep field of knowledge.

“We will learn about Newton’s three laws. Newton was an important English scientist who lived a long time ago. He came up with three remarkable rules. These rules apply to everything in heaven and on Earth, from the sun and moon in the sky down to the water and air of our own planet. Nothing can escape Newton’s three truths. With them, we can calculate to the second when solar eclipses—when the ‘sun dog eats the sun,’ as our village elders say—will happen. Humans can fly to the moon using Newton’s three laws.

“The first law is as follows: A body at rest or moving in a straight line at a constant speed will maintain its velocity unless an outside force acts upon it.”

The children watched him silently in the candlelight. No one stirred.

“This means that if you took the grindstone from the mill and gave it a good push, it should keep rolling, all the way to the horizon. What are you laughing at, Baozhu? You’re right, that wouldn’t actually happen. That’s because a force called friction will bring the stone to a halt. There is nowhere in the world without friction.”

That’s right, nowhere in the world without friction—his life, especially. He didn’t have the village surname,2 so his words carried no weight. And he was so stubborn! Over the years he had offended practically everyone in the village in one way or another. He had gone door-to-door persuading each family to put their kids in school, and he had gotten some kids to stop following their parents to work by swearing he’d cover their tuition himself. None of this endeared him to the villagers. The plain truth was that his ideas about how to live were just too different from theirs. He talked all day about things that were meaningless to them, and it annoyed them.

Before he’d learned of his cancer, he had gone once to town and brought back some funds from the Education Bureau to repair the school. The villagers took a bit of the money to hire an opera troupe to perform for two days in an upcoming festival. This bothered the teacher deeply. He went to town again, and this time he brought back a vice county head, who made the villagers return the money. They had already built a stage for the singers. The school was repaired, but that was the end of what little goodwill there was for him in the village, and his life was even more difficult from then on.

First, the village electrician, the village head’s nephew, cut off the school’s electricity. Then they stopped giving the school cornstalks for heating and cooking, forcing him to abandon planting and spend his time in the hills instead, looking for kindling. Then there was the incident with the rafters in the dorm. Friction was omnipresent, exhausting his body and soul, making him unable to move in a straight line at a constant speed. He had to come to a stop.

Maybe the place he was heading was a frictionless world where everything was smooth and lovely. But what was there for him in a place like that? His heart would still be in this world of dust and friction, in the primary school he had devoted his whole life to. After he left, the two remaining teachers would leave, too, and the school would grind to a halt, like the village millstone. He fell into a deep sorrow—in this world or the next, he had no hope of finding peace.

“Newton’s second law is a little tricky, so we’ll leave it for last. His third law is as follows: When a body exerts force on a second body, the second body will exert an equal force on the first body in the opposite direction.”

The children were silent for a long time.

“Do you understand? Who can explain it back to me?”

Zhao Labao, his best student, stood and spoke. “I get the idea, but it doesn’t make sense. This morning I got into a fight with Li Quangui and he hit me right in the face. It really hurt, and I’ve got a lump, right here. Those aren’t equal forces!”

The teacher took a while to catch his breath, then explained, “The reason you hurt is that your cheek is softer than Quangui’s fist. They exerted equal forces against each other.”

He wanted to make a gesture to illustrate his point, but he couldn’t lift his hand anymore. His limbs felt as heavy as iron, and soon his whole body felt heavy enough to collapse the bed and sink into the ground.

There wasn’t much time.

The hundred thousand warships of the Carbon Federation’s interstellar fleet had spread out across a ten-thousand-light-year-long band of space to begin construction of the isolation belt. The first stage of the project was the trial destruction of five thousand stars. Only 137 of those star systems had planets; this was the first planet they had found with life.

“The first spiral arm is truly a barren place,” said the High Archon, sighing. His smart field vibrated, initiating a holographic projection that concealed the floor of the flagship and the stars overhead. The High Archon, the fleet commander, and the senator all appeared to be floating in a limitless void. Then, the High Archon switched the hologram feed to display the information sent back by the probe, and a glowing, blue fireball appeared in the middle of the void. The High Archon’s smart field produced a white, square box; it adjusted its shape and moved to enclose the image of the star, plunging the space into near-darkness again. This time, however, a small point of yellow light remained. The focal length of the image adjusted rapidly, and in an instant, the yellow dot zoomed into the foreground, fully occupying half of the void. The three of them were bathed in its reflected, orange radiance.

It was a planet covered in a thick, tempestuous atmosphere, like an orange ocean. The motion of the gas produced an extremely complex, ever-changing lattice of lines. The image of the planet continued to grow until it seemed to occupy the whole universe, and they were swallowed by its orange, gaseous ocean. The probe took them through the thick clouds to a place where the fog was slightly thinner, enabling them to see the planet’s life-forms.

In the upper part of the thick atmosphere floated a school of balloon-shaped animals. Their bodies were covered in kaleidoscopic patterns that changed from stripes to spots to all sorts of wonderful designs—perhaps a sort of visual language. Each balloon had a long tail whose tip occasionally produced a flash of light that traveled up the tail and into the balloon’s body, where it became a diffuse fluorescence.

“Commence the four-dimensional scan!” said the pilot in command of Vessel Red 69012.

An extremely thin beam swept quickly across the balloons from top to bottom. Though the beam was only a few atoms thick, the interior of the beam had one more spatial dimension than normal space. It transmitted data from the scan back to the ship, and in the storage of the ship’s main computer, the balloon creatures were cut into hundreds of billions of thin slices. Each slice was an atom-thick cross section that recorded everything with near-perfect accuracy, down to the state of each quark.

“Commence data mirror assembly!”

The ship’s computer rearranged the hundreds of billions of cross-sectional images in its storage in their original order, superimposing them. Soon, a hollow balloon took shape—a perfect replica of the life-form they had found on the planet, re-created in the computer’s vast digital universe.

“Commence 3C Civilization Test!”

The computer quickly identified the being’s thinking organ, an elliptical structure that hung at the center of an intricate plexus of nerves. The computer analyzed the structure of the brain in an instant and established a direct, high-speed information interface with it, bypassing all of the creature’s lower sensory organs.

The civilization test consisted of a set of questions selected at random from an enormous database. Three correct answers were considered a pass. If a life-form failed to answer the first three questions correctly, the tester had two options: He could end the test and declare a failure, or he could provide more questions. Three correct answers were considered a pass, regardless of how many questions the tester asked.

“3C Civilization Test, Question One: Please describe the smallest unit of matter you have discovered.”

“Dee-dee, doo-doo-doo, dee-dee-dee-dee,” answered the balloon.

“Incorrect. 3C Civilization Test, Question Two: According to your observations, in what direction does thermal energy flow through matter? Can its flow be reversed?”

“Doo-doo-doo, dee-dee, dee-dee-doo-doo,” answered the balloon.

“Incorrect. 3C Civilization Test, Question Three: What is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter?”

“Dee-dee-dee-dee-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo,” answered the balloon.

“Incorrect. 3C Civilization Test, Question Four…”

“That’s enough,” said the High Archon, after the tenth question. “We don’t have much time.” He turned and signaled to the fleet commander.

“Fire the singularity bomb!” ordered the commander.

Strictly speaking, a singularity bomb was a sizeless object, a point in space, infinitely smaller than an atom. It had mass, though: the largest singularity bombs were billions of tons, and the smallest were more than ten million tons. When the bomb slid out of the arsenal of Vessel Red 69012, it appeared as a sphere, several thousand feet in diameter, that glowed with a faint fluorescence—radiation generated as the miniature black hole consumed the space dust in its path.

Unlike black holes formed by the collapse of stars, these miniature black holes were formed at the beginning of the universe, tiny models of the universal singularity that preceded the big bang. Both the Carbon Federation and the Silicon Empire maintained fleets of ships that cruised the empty space beyond the galactic equator collecting these primordial black holes. Inhabitants of some marine planets called these fleets “deep-sea trawlers.” The “catches” that these fleets brought back were one of the most potent weapons in the galaxy, and the only weapon that could annihilate a star.

The singularity bomb left its guide rail and accelerated along a force-field beam from the ship toward its target star. It arrived in short order, a dusty black hole that quickly plunged into the star’s fiery exterior. Stellar matter rushed from all directions in a turbulent arc toward the center of the black hole, where it disappeared. Copious radiation poured from the black hole, which appeared now as a blinding ball of light on the surface of the star, a diamond on the ring of the star’s circumference.

As the black hole sank into the star’s interior, the radiant orb grew dimmer, revealing the enormous, hundred-million-mile-wide vortex that encircled the orb. The rotating vortex scattered the orb’s light in a kaleidoscopic display that looked, from the vantage of the ship, like a hideous, prismatic face. A moment later, the orb disappeared, as did the vortex, though more slowly; the star appeared to have returned to its original color and luminosity. This was the eye of the storm, the final moment of silence before annihilation.

The voracious black hole sank toward the dense center of the star, devouring everything in its path. In less than a second, it swallowed a mass of stellar material greater than the mass of a hundred medium-sized planets. Super-strong radiation spread out from the black hole toward the surface of the star. Some of it escaped, but most of it was blocked by stellar material, adding enough energy to the star to disrupt its convection and knock it out of equilibrium. The star’s color began to shift, first from red to bright yellow, then to bright green, then to a deep, sapphire blue, and then to a forbidding violet. The radiation from the black hole by now was orders of magnitude more intense than the radiation from the star itself, and as more energy flowed out of the star in the form of nonvisible light, its violet color intensified—a spirit in agony, floating in the vastness of space. Within an hour, the star’s billion-year journey had come to a close.

There was a flash of light that seemed to swallow the whole universe, then faded slowly away. Where the star had been, there was now a thin, spherical layer of material expanding rapidly, like a balloon being blown up. This was the surface of the star, swept outward in the explosion. As it expanded, it became transparent, and a second hollow sphere grew in its center, followed by a third. These waves of material were like exquisitely painted glass orbs, one inside another, and even the smallest of them had a surface area tens of thousands times larger than the original surface area of the star. The first wave vaporized the orange planet in an instant, though it was impossible to see its destruction against such a magnificent background. Compared to the size of the expanding stellar layer, the planet was a speck of dust, not even a dot on the surface of the orb.

The smart fields of the High Archon and the senator darkened. “Do you find this work distressing?” asked the fleet commander.

“Another species gone, like dew in the sun.”

“Think of the Battle of the Second Arm, Your Excellency—more than two thousand supernovas detonated, one hundred and twenty thousand planets with life vaporized. We do not have the luxury to be sentimental.”

The senator ignored the fleet commander. He addressed the High Archon directly. “Random planetary spot checks are unreliable. There may be signs of civilization elsewhere on a planet’s surface. We should implement area scans, as well.”

The High Archon said, “I have discussed that possibility with the Senate. We must destroy hundreds of millions of stars in the isolation belt. We estimate the belt contains ten million planetary systems and fifty million planets. Our time is limited; we will not be able to conduct a full area scan on each planet. All we can feasibly do is widen the detection beam to scan larger random samples… and pray the civilizations that might exist here have spread uniformly across their planets’ surfaces.”

“Next, we’ll learn Newton’s second law.”

He spoke as quickly as he could, to teach the children as much as possible in the short time he had left.

“An object’s acceleration is directly proportional to the force acting on it, and inversely proportional to its mass. To understand that, you need to know what acceleration is. Acceleration is the rate at which an object’s speed changes over time. It’s different from speed—an object that’s moving fast isn’t necessarily accelerating rapidly, and a quickly accelerating object may not be moving fast. For example, say there’s an object moving at 110 meters per second. Two seconds later, it is moving at 120 meters per second. Its acceleration is 120 minus 110, divided by two… that’s five meters per second—no, five meters per second squared. Another object is moving at ten meters per second, but two seconds later, it’s moving at thirty meters per second. Its acceleration is thirty minus ten, divided by two—ten meters per second squared. The second object may not be as fast as the first, but its acceleration is greater! I mentioned squares—a square is just a number multiplied by itself…”

He was surprised that his thinking was suddenly so clear. He knew what this meant: If life is a candle, his had burned to its base, and its wick had fallen and ignited the last bit of wax there, with a flame ten times brighter than before. His pain was gone and his body no longer felt heavy; in fact, he was barely aware of his body at all. The life he had left seemed to be in his brain, which worked furiously to convey all its knowledge to the children gathered around him. Language was a bottleneck—he knew he didn’t have enough time. He fantasized that the knowledge he had spent his life accumulating—not much, but dear to him—was lodged in his brain like small pearls, and that as he spoke, a crystal ax chopped the pearls out of his brain onto the floor, where the children scrambled to gather them like sweets at New Year’s. It was a happy fantasy.

“Do you understand?” he asked restlessly. He could no longer see the children around him, but he could still hear them.

“We understand! Now please rest, teacher!”

He felt his flame begin to sputter. “I know you don’t understand, but memorize it anyway. Someday, it will make sense to you. The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the force acting on it, and inversely proportional to the object’s mass.”

“We really do understand, teacher! Please, please rest!”

With his last ounce of strength, he gave the children a command. “Recite it!”

Through tears, the children began to chant. “The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the force acting on it, and inversely proportional to the object’s mass. The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the force acting on it, and inversely proportional to the object’s mass….”

Hundreds of years ago, one of the world’s great minds emerged in Europe, wrote down these words. Now, in the twentieth century, they filled the air of China’s most remote mountain village, recited by a chorus of children in a thick, rural accent. In the sound of that sweet hymn, his candle burned out.

The children gathered around his body and wept.

“What an exquisite planetary system,” the fleet commander exclaimed.

The High Archon agreed. “Indeed. Its small, rocky planets and gas giants are spaced with wonderful harmony, and its asteroid belt is in a beautiful location, like a necklace. And its farthest planet, a little dwarf covered in methane ice, suggesting the end of one thing and the beginning of another, like the final note of a musical cadence…”

“This is Vessel Blue 84210. We are commencing a life scan on Planet One. This planet has no atmosphere, a slow rotation, and a huge temperature differential. Scan beam is firing. First random site: white. Second random site: white…. Tenth random site: white. Vessel Blue 84210 reports that this planet has no life.”

“You could smelt iron on the surface of that planet. We shouldn’t waste time,” said the fleet commander.

“We are commencing a life scan on Planet Two. This planet has a thick atmosphere; a high, uniform temperature; and substantial acidic cloud cover. Scan beam is firing. First random site: white. Second random site: white…. Tenth random site: white. Vessel Blue 84210 reporting—this planet has no life.”

“I have a strong feeling that Planet Three harbors life. Scan thirty random sites,” said the High Archon, his message traveling instantly over the four-dimensional communicator to the duty officer of Vessel Blue 84210, over one thousand light-years away.

“Excellency, our schedule is very tight,” said the fleet commander.

“You have your orders,” said the High Archon resolutely.

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“We are commencing a life scan on Planet Three. This planet has a medium-density atmosphere, and most of its surface is covered by ocean…”

The first shot of the life-scan beam struck a circle of land in Asia around three miles across. In the light of day, the effect of the beam would have been visible to the naked eye—it turned every nonliving object in its field transparent. The scan hit the mountains of northwest China; in daylight, an observer would have seen a spectacular sight as sunlight refracted through the mountain range and the ground under her feet seemed to disappear, revealing an abyss into the depths of the planet. Living things—people, trees, grass—remained opaque, and their forms would have stood out clearly against the crystal background. However, this effect only lasted for the half a second it took the beam to initialize, and onlookers would likely assume they had imagined it. Besides, it was nighttime.

In the direct center of the beam’s field was the village school.

“First random site… we’ve got green! Vessel Blue 84210 reporting—we have discovered life on target number 500921473, Planet Three!”

The beam began automatically to sort the many life-forms it had hit, entering them into its database in order of complexity and according to an initial intelligence estimate. At the top of the list was a group of life-forms inside a square shelter. The beam narrowed and focused on the shelter.

The High Archon’s smart field received an image transmission from Vessel Blue 84210. He projected it onto the black background, and in an instant, he was standing within a projection of the village school. The image-processing system had removed the shelter from view, but the life-forms inside were still hard to make out, as their bodies were so similar to the silicon-based planetary surface around them. The computer eliminated all nonliving objects in the image, including the larger, lifeless body the other beings encircled, and the beings now appeared suspended in a void. Even so, they were still dull and colorless, like a bunch of plants. This was clearly not a species with any remarkable phenotypic features.

Vessel Blue 84210 was an interstellar warship as large as Earth’s moon, and in its position outside Jupiter’s orbit, it was like an extra planet in the solar system. It fired a four-dimensional beam that moved through three-dimensional space nearly instantaneously. In a moment, the beam had arrived at Earth and pierced the roof of the village school’s dorm. It scanned the eighteen children inside down to their elementary particles and transmitted the enormous amount of data back into space at an unimaginable rate. The main computer of Vessel Blue 84210 had a storage capacity larger than the universe itself; in an instant, digital copies of the children were constructed and stored there.

The eighteen children floated in an endless void whose color was indescribable. In fact, it didn’t strictly have a color. It was a limitless field of perfect transparency. The children instinctively tried to grab hold of nearby classmates, but their hands passed through their bodies without resistance. They were terrified. The computer detected their fear and judged that they required some familiar objects for comfort, so it altered the color of the simulation’s background to match their home planet’s sky. Immediately, the children saw a cloudless, sunless, deep blue sky. There was no ground beneath them, just endless blue, the same as above, and they were the only things in it.

The computer reassessed the digital children and found they were still panicking. In a hundred-millionth of a second, it understood why: Whereas most life in the galaxy had no fear of floating, these creatures were different in that they lived on land. The computer added Earth-like gravity and a ground to the simulation. The children were astonished to find under their feet a pure white plain, extending into infinity in all directions and crossed by a neat, regular black grid, like a huge piece of writing paper. A few children crouched down to touch the ground, and it was the smoothest surface they had ever touched; they tried taking a few steps, but the ground was completely frictionless and didn’t move beneath them. They wondered why they didn’t fall down. One child took off a shoe and threw it level with the ground. It slid along at a regular speed, and the children watched it glide off into the distance, never decelerating.

They had seen Newton’s first law.

A melodious, ethereal voice permeated the digital universe.

“Commencing 3C Civilization Test. Question One: Please describe the basic principles of biological evolution on your planet. Is it driven by natural selection or spontaneous mutations?”

The children had no idea. They stayed silent.

“3C Civilization Test, Question Two: Please briefly describe the source of a star’s power.”

Silence.

…

“3C Civilization Test, Question Ten: Please describe the chemical composition of the liquid in your planet’s oceans.”

The children still did not speak.

The shoe had slid off into the horizon, where it became a black point and disappeared.

“That’s enough!” said the fleet commander to the High Archon, one thousand light-years distant. “We won’t be able to complete the first phase of the project on time if we keep on like this.”

The High Archon’s smart field vibrated slightly, signaling his consent.

“Fire the singularity bomb!”

The beam containing the command shot through four-dimensional space and arrived immediately at Vessel Blue 84210, which was holding its position in the solar system. A faintly glowing ball left the long track at the front of the ship and accelerated along an invisible force field toward the sun.

The High Archon, the senator, and the fleet commander turned their attention to another region of the isolation belt, where several planetary systems with life had been discovered, the most advanced of which was a brainless, mud-dwelling worm. Exploding stars filled the region, like galactic fireworks. They all thought of the Battle of the Second Arm.

A while later, a small portion of the High Archon’s smart field split off from the rest and turned its attention back to the solar system. He heard the captain of Vessel Blue 84210.

“Prepare to exit the blast radius. T minus thirty to warp. Commence countdown!”

“A moment, please. How long until the singularity bomb reaches its target?” asked the High Archon, attracting the attention of the fleet commander and the senator.

“It’s passing the orbit of the system’s first planet. Approximately ten minutes to impact.”

“We will take five minutes to continue the test.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

The duty officer of Vessel Blue 84210 continued administering the test. “3C Civilization Test, Question Eleven: What is the relationship between the three sides of a right triangle on a flat plane in three-dimensional space?”

Silence.

“3C Civilization Test, Question Twelve: Where is your planet’s position relative to the other planets in your star system?”

Silence.

“This is pointless, Your Excellency,” said the fleet commander.

“3C Civilization Test, Question Thirteen: How does an object move when it is not subjected to any external forces?”

Beneath the endless blue sky of the simulated universe, the children recited, “A body at rest or moving in a straight line at a constant speed will maintain its velocity unless an outside force acts upon it.”

“Correct! 3C Civilization Test, Question Fourteen…”

“Wait!” called out the senator, interrupting the duty officer administering the test. “The next question is also about heuristics in low-speed mechanics. Doesn’t that violate the test guidelines?” he asked the High Archon.

“Of course not, as long as the question is in the database,” interjected the fleet commander. He was shocked that these unassuming life-forms had answered a question correctly, and all his attention was now on them.

“3C Civilization Test, Question Fourteen: Please describe how two objects exerting force on each other interact.”

“When a body exerts force on a second body, the second body will exert an equal force on the first body in the opposite direction!” said the children.

“Correct! 3C Civilization Test, Question Fifteen: Please describe the relationship between an object’s mass and acceleration when an external force acts upon it.”

In unison, the children said, “The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the force acting on it, and inversely proportional to the object’s mass!”

“Correct! You have passed the Civilization Test! Confirming that there is a 3C-level civilization on Planet Three of Target Star 500921473.”

“Reverse the singularity bomb! Disengage!!” The High Archon’s smart field flashed and vibrated frantically as he sent his order through hyperspace to Vessel Blue 84210.

The force-field beam began to bend. Its hundred-million-mile path through the solar system curved away from the sun, like a tree branch that had been weighed down. As the force-field engine on board Vessel Blue 84210 worked at maximum power, its enormous heat sink glowed, first dark red, then with a bright white incandescence. The beam’s new thrust vector began to affect the trajectory of the singularity bomb, which curved away from its target. However, it was already inside the orbit of Mercury, very close to the sun, and no one was confident that the force-field engine could bend its course enough to prevent impact.

The whole galaxy watched over hyperspace as the fuzzy, dark ball veered and grew substantially brighter, a worrisome sign that it had already entered the particle-rich space around the sun. The captain’s hand rested on the red hyperspace button, ready to leap away from the solar system the moment before impact.

In the end, the bomb shot by the very edge of the sun, only a few dozen miles from its surface, sucking in huge amounts of material from the sun’s atmosphere as it brushed past. It glowed intensely with a blue-white light, and for a moment, the sun appeared to have a brighter twin star locked in close, binary orbit, a phenomenon that was to become an enduring mystery to the inhabitants of Earth. The sun’s fiery surface darkened beneath the bomb, like the wake of a speedboat in calm water, and as the black hole swept past the solar surface, its gravity consumed the sun’s light, scratching a dark, crescent scar into the sun’s surface which grew to eclipse the whole solar hemisphere. As the bomb left the sun, it dragged an enormous solar prominence behind it, a beautiful string of flame one million miles long. The tip of the prominence flared violently outward, blossoming into a mass of whirling plasma vortices.

After the singularity bomb brushed past the sun, it grew dark again. Soon, it disappeared into the infinite night of space.

“We almost destroyed a carbon-based civilization,” said the senator, heaving a sigh of relief.

“A 3C-level civilization here, in this desert—unbelievable!” exclaimed the fleet commander.

“Yes. Neither the Carbon Federation nor the Silicon Empire has included this region in its plans for expansion and cultivation. If this civilization were to have evolved entirely on its own, that would be a rare thing indeed,” said the High Archon.

“Vessel Blue 84210, you are to hold your position in that star system and commence a full-surface civilization test on Planet Three. Another ship will take over your prior mission,” ordered the fleet commander.

The children in the village didn’t notice anything amiss, unlike their digital replicas outside of Jupiter’s orbit. They were still crying over their teacher’s body in their candlelit dormitory. After a long time, they quieted down.

“We should go tell a grown-up,” said Guo Cuihua, stifling a sob.

“What for?” asked Liu Baozhu, his eyes on the floor. “No one in this village cared about him when he was alive. I bet they won’t even pay for a coffin!”

In the end, the children decided to bury their teacher themselves. With pickaxes and shovels, they dug a grave in a hill next to the school, and the brilliant stars above silently watched them work.

The senator watched Vessel Blue 84210’s test results as they streamed instantly across a thousand light-years of space. “The civilization on this planet isn’t 3C—it’s 5B!” he exclaimed, astonished.

The skyscrapers of human cities appeared as holograms aboard the flagship.

“They have already begun using nuclear energy, and they can fly into space using chemical propellants. They’ve even landed on their moon.”

“What are their basic features?” asked the fleet commander.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” said the duty officer of Vessel Blue 84210.

“Well, how advanced is their heritable memory?”

“They don’t inherit memories. They acquire all their memories during their lives.”

“What method do they use to communicate information to each other?”

“It’s very primitive, and very rare. There is a thin organ in their bodies that vibrates, producing waves in their planet’s atmosphere, which is primarily composed of nitrogen and oxygen. By modulating the vibrations, they encode information into the waves. They have separate organs—thin membranes—that receive the waves.”

“What’s the transmission rate of that method?”

“Approximately one to ten bits per second.”

“What?!” Everyone on the flagship laughed out loud.

“It’s true. We were incredulous at first, but it’s been verified repeatedly.”

“Captain, this is lunacy!” yelled the fleet commander. “You are telling us that an organism without any hereditary memory that transmits information using sound waves at one to ten bits per second can form a 5B-level civilization?! And that they developed this civilization entirely on their own, without any external assistance from an advanced civilization?!”

“Sir, that is the case.”

“If that’s so, they have no way to pass knowledge between generations. Accumulated knowledge across generations is necessary for civilization to evolve!”

“There is a class of individuals, a certain proportion of the population spread evenly among their civilization. They act as mediums for the transmission of knowledge between generations.”

“That sounds like a myth.”

“It’s not,” said the senator. “Such a concept existed in the galaxy in prehistoric times, but even then, it was extremely rare. No one would know about it except historians of the evolution of civilization in the star systems where the idea had currency.”

“By ‘concept,’ you mean individuals that transmit knowledge between generations of a species?”

“Yes. They’re called ‘teachers.’”

“Tea—cher?”

“An ancient word that was once in currency among a few long-lost civilizations. It’s rare enough that it does not appear in most ancient vocabulary databases.”

The holographic feed from the solar system zoomed out to display the blue orb of Earth rotating slowly in space.

The High Archon said, “A civilization evolving independently is rare enough, but I know of no other civilization in the Milky Way that has attained 5B level on its own, at least in the era of the Carbon Federation. We should let this civilization continue its evolution without interference, observing it as it does, not only to further our understanding of ancient civilizations, but also, perhaps, to gain insight into our broader galactic civilization.”

“I’ll have Vessel Blue 84210 leave the star system immediately and designate a hundred-light-year no-fly zone around it,” said the fleet commander.

Insomniacs in the northern hemisphere might have seen a small group of stars begin to flutter slightly, then the stars around those, and so on across the whole sky, as if a finger had been dipped into the still water of the night sky.

The space-time shock wave caused by Vessel Blue 84210’s hyperspace leap was considerably attenuated by the time it hit Earth. Every clock jumped three seconds ahead. Humans, confined as we are to three-dimensional space, were unaware of the disturbance.

“It’s a pity,” said the High Archon. “They’ll be confined to sub-light speeds and three-dimensional space for another two thousand years without the intervention of a more advanced civilization. It will be at least a thousand years before they can harness the energy of matter-antimatter annihilation. Two thousand more years before they can transmit and receive multidimensional communications… and as for hyperspace galactic travel, that will take them at least five thousand years. It will be at least ten thousand years before they attain the minimum conditions for entry into the galactic family of carbon-based life-forms.”

The senator said, “Independent evolution of this sort happened only in the prehistoric era of the galaxy. If our records of those times are correct, my distant ancestors lived in the deep ocean of a marine planet. They lived and died there in darkness, their governments rose and fell, and then, at some point, they felt adventurous. They launched a craft toward space—a buoyant, transparent ball that rose slowly to the surface of the ocean. It was the dead of night when they reached the surface. The people inside the craft were the first of my ancestors to see the stars. Can you imagine how they felt? Can you imagine how glorious and mysterious that sight was to them?”

The High Archon said, “It was an era full of passion and yearning. A terrestrial planet was a complete, limitless world to our ancestors. From their home in a planet’s green waters or on its purple grasslands, they looked up at the stars with awe. We have not known such a feeling for tens of millions of years.”

“I feel it now!” said the senator, pointing at the holographic image of Earth. It was a lustrous, blue ball, with white clouds floating above its surface, streaking and billowing. The senator felt as if he had found a pearl in the depths of his ancestors’ ocean home. “Such a small planet, populated by organisms living their lives, dreaming their dreams, completely oblivious to us and to the strife and destruction in their galaxy. To them, the universe must seem like a bottomless well of hopes and dreams. It’s like an ancient song.”

And he began to sing. The smart fields of the three became as one, rippling with rose-colored waves. The song he sang was old, passed down from the forgotten beginnings of civilization itself. It sounded distant, mysterious, forlorn, and as it propagated through hyperspace to the hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy, countless beings heard its sound and felt a long-forgotten kind of comfort and peace.

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,”3 said the High Archon.

“The most comprehensible thing about the universe is that it is incomprehensible,” said the senator.

There was light in the east by the time the children had finished digging the grave. They tore the door off the classroom and put their teacher’s body on it, and they buried him with two boxes of chalk and a used textbook. They stood a stone slab on top of the mound, and wrote on it in chalk: Mister Li’s Grave.

The faint letters would wash off in the first rainfall, and not long after that, the grave and the person it contained would be forgotten completely.

The tip of the sun rose above the hills, casting a golden ray into the sleeping village. The grass of the valley was still in shadow, but its dew glowed with the light of dawn. A bird or two began timidly to sing.

The children walked along the narrow road back into the village. Their little shadows soon disappeared into the pale blue morning mist of the valley.

They were going to live their lives on that ancient, barren land, and though their harvests would be meager, they would always have hope.

1 A form of dowry payment in some rural areas of northwestern China, meant to compensate the bride’s mother for the pain of having borne her.

2 In many Chinese villages, residents share a common, ancestral surname.

3 Albert Einstein, Physics and Reality.