Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

1.

Once again, God had upset Qiusheng’s family.

This had begun as a very good morning. A thin layer of white fog floated at the height of a man over the fields around Xicen village like a sheet of rice paper that had just become blank: the quiet countryside being the painting that had fallen out of the paper. The first rays of morning fell on the scene, and the year’s earliest dewdrops entered the most glorious period of their brief life… but God had ruined this beautiful morning.

God had gotten up extra early and gone into the kitchen to warm some milk for himself. Ever since the start of the Era of Support, the milk market had prospered. Qiusheng’s family had bought a milk cow for a bit more than ten thousand yuan, and then, imitating others, mixed the milk with water to sell. The unadulterated milk had also become one of the staples for the family.

After the milk was warm, God took the bowl into the living room to watch TV without turning off the liquefied petroleum gas stove.

When Qiusheng’s wife, Yulian, returned from cleaning the cowshed and the pigsty, she could smell gas all over the house. Covering her nose with a towel, she rushed into the kitchen to turn off the stove, opened the window, and turned on the fan.

“You old fool! You’re going to get the whole family killed!” Yulian shouted into the living room. The family had switched to using liquefied petroleum gas for cooking only after they began supporting God. Qiusheng’s father had always been opposed to it, saying that gas was not as good as honeycomb coal briquettes. Now he had even more ammunition for his argument.

As was his wont, God stood with his head lowered contritely, his broom-like white beard hanging past his knees, smiling like a kid who knew he had done something wrong. “I… I took down the pot for heating the milk. Why didn’t it turn off by itself?”

“You think you’re still on your spaceship?” Qiusheng said, coming down the stairs. “Everything here is dumb. We aren’t like you, being waited on hand and foot by smart machines. We have to work hard with dumb tools. That’s how we put rice in our bowls!”

“We also worked hard. Otherwise how did you come to be?” God said carefully.

“Enough with the ‘how did you come to be?’ Enough! I’m sick of hearing it. If you’re so powerful, go and make other obedient children to support you!” Yulian threw her towel on the ground.

“Forget it. Just forget it,” Qiusheng said. He was always the one who made peace. “Let’s eat.”

Bingbing got up. As he came down the stairs, he yawned. “Ma, Pa, God was coughing all night. I couldn’t sleep.”

“You don’t know how good you have it,” Yulian said. “Your dad and I were in the room next to his. You don’t hear us complaining, do you?”

As though triggered, God began to cough again. He coughed like he was playing his favorite sport with great concentration.

Yulian stared at God for a few seconds before sighing. “I must have the worst luck in eight generations.” Still angry, she left for the kitchen to cook breakfast.

God sat silently through breakfast with the rest of the family. He ate one bowl of porridge with pickled vegetables and half a mantou bun. During the entire time he had to endure Yulian’s disdainful looks—maybe she was still mad about the liquefied petroleum gas, or maybe she thought he ate too much.

After breakfast, as usual, God got up quickly to clean the table and wash the dishes in the kitchen. Standing just outside the kitchen, Yulian shouted, “Don’t use detergent if there’s no grease on the bowl! Everything costs money. The pittance they pay for your support? Ha!”

God grunted nonstop to show that he understood.

Qiusheng and Yulian left for the fields. Bingbing left for school. Only now did Qiusheng’s father get up. Still not fully awake, he came downstairs, ate two bowls of porridge, and filled his pipe with tobacco. At last he remembered God’s existence.

“Hey, old geezer, stop the washing. Come out and play a game with me!” he shouted into the kitchen.

God came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his apron. He nodded ingratiatingly at Qiusheng’s father. Playing Chinese Chess with the old man was a tough chore for God; winning and losing both had unpleasant consequences. If God won, Qiusheng’s father would get mad: You fucking old idiot! You trying to show me up? Shit! You’re God! Beating me is no great accomplishment at all. Why can’t you learn some manners? You’ve lived under this roof long enough! But if God lost, Qiusheng’s father would still get mad: You fucking old idiot! I’m the best chess player for fifty kilometers. Beating you is easier than squishing a bedbug. You think I need you to let me win? You… to put it politely, you are insulting me!

In any case, the final result was the same: the old man flipped the board, and the pieces flew everywhere. Qiusheng’s father was infamous for his bad temper, and now he’d finally found a punching bag in God.

But the old man didn’t hold a grudge. Every time after God picked up the board and put the pieces back quietly, he sat down and played with God again—and the whole process was repeated. After a few cycles of this, both of them were tired, and it was almost noon.

God then got up to wash the vegetables. Yulian didn’t allow him to cook because she said God was a terrible cook. But he still had to wash the vegetables. Later, when Qiusheng and Yulian returned from the fields, if the vegetables hadn’t been washed, she would be on him again with another round of bitter, sarcastic scolding.

While God washed the vegetables, Qiusheng’s father left to visit the neighbors. This was the most peaceful part of God’s day. The noon sun filled every crack in the brick-lined yard and illuminated the deep crevasses in his memory. During such periods God often forgot his work and stood quietly, lost in thought. Only when the noise of the villagers returning from the fields filled the air would he be startled awake and hurry to finish his washing.

He sighed. How could life have turned out like this?

This wasn’t only God’s sigh. It was also the sigh of Qiusheng, Yulian, and Qiusheng’s father. It was the sigh of more than five billion people and two billion Gods on Earth.

2.

It all began with an autumn evening three years ago.

“Come quickly! There are toys in the sky!” Bingbing shouted in the yard. Qiusheng and Yulian raced out of the house, looked up, and saw that the sky really was filled with toys, or at least objects whose shapes could only belong to toys.

The objects spread out evenly across the dome of the sky. In the dusk, each reflected the light of the setting sun—already below the horizon—and each shone as bright as the full moon. The light turned Earth’s surface as bright as it is at noon. But the light came from every direction and left no shadow, as though the whole world was illuminated by a giant surgical lamp.

At first, everyone thought the objects were within our atmosphere because they were so clear. But eventually, humans learned that these objects were just enormous. They were hovering about thirty thousand kilometers away in geostationary orbits.

There were a total of 21,530 spaceships. Spread out evenly across the sky, they formed a thin shell around Earth. This was the result of a complex set of maneuvers that brought all the ships to their final locations simultaneously. In this manner, the alien ships avoided causing life-threatening tides in the oceans due to their imbalanced mass. The gesture assured humans somewhat, as it was at least some evidence that the aliens did not bear ill will toward Earth.

During the next few days, all attempts at communicating with the aliens failed. The aliens maintained absolute silence in the face of repeated queries. At the same time, Earth became a nightless planet. Tens of thousands of spaceships reflected so much sunlight onto the night side of Earth that it was as bright as day, while on the day side, the ships cast giant shadows onto the ground. The horrible sight pushed the psychological endurance of the human race to the limit, so that most ignored yet another strange occurrence on the surface of the planet and did not connect it with the fleet of spaceships in the sky.

Across the great cities of the world, wandering old people had begun to appear. All of them had the same features: extreme old age, long white hair and beards, long white robes. At first, before the white robe, white beard, and white hair got dirty, they looked like a bunch of snowmen. The wanderers did not appear to belong to any particular race, as though all ethnicities were mixed in them. They had no documents to prove their citizenship or identity and could not explain their own history.

All they could do was to gently repeat, in heavily accented versions of various local languages, the same words to all passersby:

“We are God. Please, considering that we created this world, would you give us a bit of food?”

If only one or two old wanderers had said this, then they would have been sent to a shelter or nursing home, like the homeless with dementia. But millions of old men and women all saying the same thing—that was an entirely different thing.

Within half a month, the number of old wanderers had increased to more than thirty million. All over the streets of New York, Beijing, London, Moscow… these old people could be seen everywhere, shuffling around in traffic-stopping crowds. Sometimes it seemed as if there were more of them than the original inhabitants of the cities.

The most horrible part of their presence was that they all repeated the same thing: “We are God. Please, considering that we created this world, would you give us a bit of food?”

Only now did humans turn their attention from the spaceships to the uninvited guests. Recently, large-scale meteor showers had been occurring over every continent. After every impressive display of streaking meteors, the number of old wanderers in the corresponding region greatly increased. After careful observation, the following incredible fact was discovered: the old wanderers came out of the sky, from those alien spaceships.

One by one, they leaped into the atmosphere as though diving into a swimming pool, each wearing a suit made from a special film. As the friction from the atmosphere burned away the surface of the suits, the film kept the heat away from the wearer and slowed their descent. Careful design ensured that the deceleration never exceeded 4G, well within the physical tolerance of the bodies of the old wanderers. Finally, at the moment of their arrival at the surface, their velocity was close to zero, as though they had just jumped down from a bench. Even so, many of them still managed to sprain their ankles. Simultaneously, the film around them had been completely burned away, leaving no trace.

The meteor showers continued without stopping. More wanderers fell to Earth. Their number rose to almost one hundred million.

The government of every country attempted to find one or more representatives among the wanderers. But the wanderers claimed that the “Gods” were absolutely equal, and any one of them could represent all of them. Thus, at the emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly, one random old wanderer, who was found in Times Square and who now spoke passable English, entered the General Assembly Hall.

He was clearly among the earliest to land: his robe was dirty and full of holes, and his white beard was covered with dirt, like a mop. There was no halo over his head, but a few loyal flies did hover there. With the help of a ratty bamboo walking stick, he shuffled his way to the round meeting table and lowered himself under the gaze of the leaders. He looked up at the Secretary-General, and his face displayed the childlike smile particular to all the old wanderers.

“I… ha—… I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

So breakfast was brought. All across the world, people stared as he ate like a starved man, choking a few times. Toast, sausages, and a salad were quickly gone, followed by a large glass of milk. Then he showed his innocent smile to the Secretary-General again.

“Haha… uh… is there any wine? Just a tiny cup will do.”

So a glass of wine was brought. He sipped at it, nodding with satisfaction. “Last night, a bunch of new arrivals took over my favorite subway grille, one that blew out warm air. I had to find a new place to sleep in the Square. But now with a bit of wine, my joints are coming back to life.… You, can you massage my back a little? Just a little.”

The Secretary-General began to massage his back. The old wanderer shook his head, sighed, and said, “Sorry to be so much trouble to you.”

“Where are you from?” asked the President of the United States.

The old wanderer shook his head. “A civilization only has a fixed location in her infancy. Planets and stars are unstable and change. The civilization must then move. By the time she becomes a young woman, she has already moved multiple times. Then they will make this discovery: no planetary environment is as stable as a sealed spaceship. So they’ll make spaceships their home, and planets will just be places where they sojourn. Thus, any civilization that has reached adulthood will be a starfaring civilization, permanently wandering through the cosmos. The spaceship is her home. Where are we from? We come from the ships.” He pointed up with a finger caked in dirt.

“How many of you are there?”

“Two billion.”

“Who are you really?” The Secretary-General had cause to ask this. The old wanderers looked just like humans.

“We’ve told you many times.” The old wanderer impatiently waved his hand. “We are God.”

“Could you explain?”

“Our civilization—let’s just call her the God Civilization—had existed long before Earth was born. When the God Civilization entered her senescence, we seeded the newly formed Earth with the beginnings of life. Then the God Civilization skipped across time by traveling close to the speed of light. When life on Earth had evolved to the appropriate stage, we came back, introduced a new species based on our ancestral genes, eliminated its enemies, and carefully guided its evolution until Earth was home to a new civilized species just like us.”

“How do you expect us to believe you?”

“That’s easy.”

Thus began the half-year-long effort to verify these claims. Humans watched in astonishment as spaceships sent the original plans for life on Earth and images of the primitive Earth. Following the old wanderer’s direction, humans dug up incredible machines from deep below Earth’s crust, equipment that had through the long eons monitored and manipulated the biosphere on this planet.

Humans finally had to believe. At least with respect to life on Earth, the Gods really were God.

3.

At the third emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Secretary-General, on behalf of the human race, finally asked God the key question: why did they come to Earth?

“Before I answer this question, you must have a correct understanding of the concept of civilization.” God stroked his long beard. This was the same God who had been at the first emergency session half a year ago. “How do you think civilizations evolve over time?”

“Civilization on Earth is currently in a stage of rapid development. If we’re not hit by natural disasters beyond our ability to resist, I think we will continue our development indefinitely,” said the Secretary-General.

“Wrong. Think about it. Every person experiences childhood, youth, middle age, and old age, finally arriving at death. The stars are the same way. Indeed, everything in the universe goes through the same process. Even the universe itself will have to terminate one day. Why would civilization be an exception? No, a civilization will also grow old and die.”

“How exactly does that happen?”

“Different civilizations grow old and die in different ways, just like different people die of different diseases or just plain old age. For the God Civilization, the first sign of her senescence was the extreme lengthening of each individual member’s life span. By then, each individual in the God Civilization could expect a life as long as four thousand Earth years. By age two thousand, their thoughts had completely ossified, losing all creativity. Because individuals like these held the reins of power, new life had a hard time emerging and growing. That was when our civilization became old.”

“And then?”

“The second sign of the civilization’s senescence was the Age of the Machine Cradle.”

“What?”

“By then our machines no longer relied on their creators. They operated independently, maintained themselves, and developed on their own. The smart machines gave us everything we needed: not just material needs, but also psychological ones. We didn’t need to put any effort into survival. Taken care of by machines, we lived as though we were lying in comfortable cradles.

“Think about it; if the jungles of primitive Earth had been filled with inexhaustible supplies of fruits and tame creatures that desired to become food, how could apes evolve into humans? The Machine Cradle was just such a comfort-filled jungle. Gradually we forgot about our technology and science. Our civilization became lazy and empty, devoid of creativity and ambition, and that only sped up the aging process. What you see now is the God Civilization in her final dying gasps.”

“Then… can you now tell us the goal for the God Civilization in coming to Earth?”

“We have no home now.”

“But…” The Secretary-General pointed upward.

“The spaceships are old. It’s true that the artificial environment on the ships is more stable than any natural environment, including Earth’s. But the ships are so old, old beyond your imagination. Old components have broken down. Accumulated quantum effects over the eons have led to more and more software errors. The system’s self-repair and self-maintenance functions have encountered more and more insurmountable obstacles. The living environment on the ships is deteriorating. The amount of life necessities that can be distributed to individuals is decreasing by the day. We can just about survive. In the twenty thousand cities on the various ships, the air is filled with pollution and despair.”

“Are there no solutions? Perhaps new components for the ships? A software upgrade?”

God shook his head. “The God Civilization is in her final years. We are two billion dying men and women each more than three thousand years old. But before us, hundreds of generations had already lived in the comfort of the Machine Cradle. Long ago, we forgot all our technology. Now we have no way to repair these ships that have been operating for tens of millions of years on their own. Indeed, in terms of the ability to study and understand technology, we are even worse than you. We can’t even connect a circuit for a lightbulb or solve a quadratic equation…

“One day, the ships told us that they were close to complete breakdown. The propulsion systems could no longer push the ships near the speed of light. The God Civilization could only drift along at a speed not even one-tenth the speed of light, and the ecological support systems were nearing collapse. The machines could no longer keep two billion of us alive. We had to find another way out.”

“Did you ever think that this would happen?”

“Of course. Two thousand years ago, the ships already warned us. That was when we began the process of seeding life on Earth so that in our old age we would have support.”

“Two thousand years ago?”

“Yes. Of course I’m talking about time on the ships. From your frame of reference, that was three-point-five billion years ago, when Earth first cooled down.”

“We have a question: you say that you’ve lost your technology. But doesn’t seeding life require technology?”

“Oh. To start the process of evolving life on a planet is a minor operation. Just scatter some seeds, and life will multiply and evolve on its own. We had this kind of software even before the Age of the Machine Cradle. Just start the program, and the machines can finish everything. To create a planet full of life, capable of developing civilization, the most basic requirement is time, a few billion years of time.

“By traveling close to the speed of light, we possess almost limitless time. But now, the God Civilization’s ships can no longer approach the speed of light. Otherwise we’d still have the chance to create new civilizations and more life, and we would have more choices. We’re trapped by slowness. Those dreams cannot be realized.”

“So you want to spend your golden years on Earth.”

“Yes, yes. We hope that you will feel a sense of filial duty toward your creators and take us in.” God leaned on his walking stick and trembled as he tried to bow to the leaders of all the nations, and he almost fell on his face.

“But how do you plan to live here?”

“If we just gathered in one place by ourselves, then we might as well stay in space and die there. We’d like to be absorbed into your societies, your families. When the God Civilization was still in her childhood, we also had families. You know that childhood is the most precious time. Since your civilization is still in her childhood, if we can return to this era and spend the rest of our lives in the warmth of families, then that would be our greatest happiness.”

“There are two billion of you. That means every family on Earth would have to take in one or two of you.” After the Secretary-General spoke, the meeting hall sank into silence.

“Yes, yes, sorry to give you so much trouble…” God continued to bow while stealing glances at the Secretary-General and the leaders of all the nations. “Of course, we’re willing to compensate you.”

He waved his cane, and two more white-bearded Gods walked into the meeting hall, struggling under the weight of a silvery, metallic trunk they carried between them. “Look, these are high-density information storage devices. They systematically store the knowledge the God Civilization had acquired in every field of science and technology. With this, your civilization will advance by leaps and bounds. I think you will like this.”

The Secretary-General, like the leaders of all the nations, looked at the metal trunk and tried to hide his elation. “Taking care of God is the responsibility of humankind. Of course this will require some consultation between the various nations, but I think in principle…”

“Sorry to be so much trouble. Sorry to be so much trouble…” God’s eyes filled with tears, and he continued to bow.

After the Secretary-General and the leaders of all the nations left the meeting hall, they saw that tens of thousands of Gods had gathered outside the United Nations building. A white sea of bobbing heads filled the air with murmuring words. The Secretary-General listened carefully and realized that they were all speaking, in the various tongues of Earth, the same sentence:

“Sorry to be so much trouble. Sorry to be so much trouble…”

4.

Two billion Gods arrived on Earth. Enclosed in suits made of their special film, they fell through the atmosphere. During that time, one could see the bright, colorful streaks in the sky even during the day. After the Gods landed, they spread out into 1.5 billion families.

Having received the Gods’ knowledge about science and technology, everyone was filled with hopes and dreams for the future, as though humankind was about to step into paradise overnight. Under the influence of such joy, every family welcomed the coming of God.

That morning, Qiusheng and his family and all the other villagers stood at the village entrance to receive the Gods allocated to Xicen.

“What a beautiful day,” Yulian said.

Her comment wasn’t motivated solely by her feelings. The spaceships had disappeared overnight, restoring the sky’s wide open and limitless appearance. Humans had never been allowed to step onto any of the ships. The Gods did not really object to that particular request from the humans, but the ships themselves refused to grant permission. They did not acknowledge the various primitive probes which Earth sent and sealed their doors tightly. After the final group of Gods leaped into the atmosphere, all the spaceships, numbering more than twenty thousand, departed their orbit simultaneously. But they didn’t go far, only drifting in the asteroid belt.

Although these ships were ancient, the old routines continued to function. Their only mission was to serve the Gods. Thus, they would not move too far. When the Gods needed them again, they would come.

Two buses arrived from the county seat, bringing the one hundred and six Gods allocated to Xicen. Qiusheng and Yulian met the God assigned to their family. The couple stood on each side of God, affectionately supported him by the arms, and walked home in the bright afternoon sun. Bingbing and Qiusheng’s father followed behind, smiling.

“Gramps, um, Gramps God.” Yulian leaned her face against God’s shoulder, her smile as bright as the sun. “I hear that the technology you gave us will soon allow us to experience true Communism! When that happens, we’ll all have things according to our needs. Things won’t cost any money. You just go to the store and pick them up.”

God smiled and nodded at her, his white hair bobbing. He spoke in heavily accented Chinese. “Yes. Actually, ‘to each according to need’ fulfills only the most basic needs of a civilization. The technology we gave you will bring you a life of prosperity and comfort surpassing your imagination.”

Yulian’s laughed so much her face opened up like a flower. “No, no! ‘To each according to need’ is more than enough for me!”

“Uh-huh,” Qiusheng’s father agreed emphatically.

“Can we live forever without aging like you?” Qiusheng asked.

“We can’t live forever without aging. It’s just that we can live longer than you. Look at how old I am! In my view, if a man lives longer than three thousand years, he might as well be dead. For a civilization, extreme longevity for the individual can be fatal.”

“Oh, I don’t need three thousand years. Just three hundred.” Qiusheng’s father was now laughing as much as Yulian. “In that case, I’d still be considered a young man right now. Maybe I can… hahahaha.”

The village treated the day like it was Chinese New Year. Every family held a big banquet to welcome its God, and Qiusheng’s family was no exception.

Qiusheng’s father quickly became a little drunk with cups of vintage huangjiu. He gave God a thumbs-up. “You’re really something! To be able to create so many living things—you’re truly supernatural.”

God drank a lot, too, but his head was still clear. He waved his hand. “No, not supernatural. It was just science. When biology has developed to a certain level, creating life is akin to building machines.”

“You say that. But in our eyes, you’re no different from immortals who have deigned to live among us.”

God shook his head. “Supernatural beings would never make mistakes. But for us, we made mistake after mistake during your creation.”

“You made mistakes when you created us?” Yulian’s eyes were wide open. In her imagination, creating all those lives was a process similar to her giving birth to Bingbing eight years ago. No mistake was possible.

“There were many. I’ll give a relatively recent example. The world-creation software made errors in the analysis of the environment on Earth, which resulted in the appearance of creatures like dinosaurs: huge bodies and low adaptability. Eventually, in order to facilitate your evolution, they had to be eliminated.

“Speaking of events that are even more recent, after the disappearance of the ancient Aegean civilizations, the world-creation software believed that civilization on Earth was successfully established. It ceased to perform further monitoring and microadjustments, like leaving a wound-up clock to run on its own. This resulted in further errors. For example, it should have allowed the civilization of ancient Greece to develop on her own and stopped the Macedonian conquest and the subsequent Roman conquest. Although both of these ended up as the inheritors of Greek civilization, the direction of Greek development was altered…”

No one in Qiusheng’s family could understand this lecture, but all respectfully listened.

“And then two great powers appeared on Earth: Han China and the Roman Empire. In contrast to the earlier situation with ancient Greece, the two shouldn’t have been kept apart and left to develop in isolation. They ought to have been allowed to come into full contact…”

“This ‘Han China’ you’re talking about? Is that the Han Dynasty of Liu Bang and Xiang Yu?” Finally Qiusheng’s father heard something he knew. “And what is this ‘Roman Empire’?”

“I think that was a foreigners’ country at the time,” Qiusheng said, trying to explain. “It was pretty big.”

Qiusheng’s father was confused. “Why? When the foreigners finally showed up during the Qing Dynasty, look how badly they beat us up. You want them to show up even earlier? During the Han Dynasty?”

God laughed at this. “No, no. Back then, Han China was just as powerful as the Roman Empire.”

“That’s still bad. If those two great powers had met, it would have been a great war. Blood would have flowed like a river.”

God nodded. He reached out with his chopsticks for a piece of beef braised in soy sauce. “Could have been. But if those two great civilizations, the Occident and the Orient, had met, the encounter would have generated glorious sparks and greatly advanced human progress.… Eh, if those errors could have been avoided, Earth would now probably be colonizing Mars, and your interstellar probes would have flown past Sirius.”

Qiusheng’s father raised his bowl of huangjiu and spoke admiringly. “Everyone says that the Gods have forgotten science in their cradle, but you are still so learned.”

“To be comfortable in the cradle, it’s important to know a bit about philosophy, art, history, etc—just some common facts, not real learning. Many scholars on Earth right now have much deeper thoughts than our own.”

For the Gods, the first few months after they entered human society were a golden age, when they lived very harmoniously with human families. It was as though they had returned to the childhood of the God Civilization, fully immersed in the long-forgotten warmth of family life. This seemed the best way to spend the final years of their extremely long lives.

Qiusheng’s family’s God enjoyed the peaceful life in this beautiful southern Chinese village. Every day he went to the pond surrounded by bamboo groves to fish, chat with other old folks from the village, play chess, and generally enjoy himself. But his greatest hobby was attending folk operas. Whenever a theatre troupe came to the village or the town, he made sure to go to every performance.

His favorite opera was The Butterfly Lovers. One performance was not enough. He followed one troupe around for more than fifty kilometers and attended several shows in a row. Finally Qiusheng went to town and bought him a VCD of the opera. God played it over and over until he could hum a few lines of Huangmei opera and sounded pretty good.

One day Yulian discovered a secret. She whispered to Qiusheng and her father-in-law, “Did you know that every time Gramps God finishes his opera, he always takes a little card out from his pocket? And while looking at the card, he hums lines from the opera. Just now I stole a glance. The card is a photo. There’s a really pretty young woman on it.”

That evening, God played The Butterfly Lovers again. He took out the photograph of the pretty young woman and started to hum. Qiusheng’s father quietly moved in. “Gramps God, is that your… girlfriend from a long time ago?”

God was startled. He hid the photograph quickly and smiled like a kid at Qiusheng’s father. “Haha. Yeah, yeah. I loved her two thousand years ago.”

Yulian, who was eavesdropping, grimaced. Two thousand years ago! Considering his advanced age, this was a bit gag inducing.

Qiusheng’s father wanted to look at the photograph. But God was so protective of it that it would have been embarrassing to ask. So Qiusheng’s father settled for listening to God reminisce.

“Back then we were all so young. She was one of the very few who wasn’t completely absorbed by life in the Machine Cradle. She initiated a great voyage of exploration to sail to the end of the universe. Oh, you don’t need to think too hard about that. It’s very difficult to understand. Anyway, she hoped to use this voyage as an opportunity to awaken the God Civilization, sleeping so soundly in the Machine Cradle. Of course, that was nothing more than a beautiful dream. She wanted me to go with her, but I didn’t have the courage. The endless desert of the universe frightened me. It would have been a journey of more than twenty billion light-years. So she went by herself. But in the two thousand years after that, I never stopped longing for her.”

“Twenty billion light-years? So like you explained to me before, that’s the distance that light would travel in twenty billion years? Oh my! That’s way too far. That’s basically good-bye for life. Gramps God, you have to forget about her. You’ll never see her again.”

God nodded and sighed.

“Well, isn’t she now about your age, too?”

God was startled out of his reverie. He shook his head. “Oh, no. For such a long voyage, her explorer ship would have to fly at close to the speed of light. That means she would still be very young. The only one that has grown old is me. You don’t understand how large the universe is. What you think of as ‘eternity’ is nothing but a grain of sand in space-time.

“Well, the fact that you can’t understand and feel this is sometimes a blessing.”

5.

The honeymoon between the Gods and humans quickly ended.

People were initially ecstatic over the scientific material received from the Gods, thinking that it would allow mankind to realize its dreams overnight. Thanks to the interface equipment provided by the Gods, an enormous quantity of information was retrieved successfully from the storage devices. The information was translated into English, and in order to avoid disputes, a copy was distributed to every nation in the world.

But people soon discovered that realizing these God-given technologies was impossible, at least within the present century. Consider the situation of the ancient Egyptians if a time traveler had provided information on modern technology to them, and you will have some understanding of the awkward situation these humans faced.

As the exhaustion of petroleum supplies loomed over the human race, energy technology was at the top of everyone’s minds. But scientists and engineers discovered that the God Civilization’s energy technology was useless for humans at this time. The Gods’ energy source was built upon the basis of matter-antimatter annihilation. Even if people could understand all the materials and finally create an annihilation engine and generator (a basically impossible task within this generation), it would still have been for naught. This was because the fuel for these engines, antimatter, had to be mined from deep space. According to the material provided by the Gods, the closest antimatter ore source was between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, about 550,000 light-years away.

The technology for interstellar travel at near the speed of light also involved every field of scientific knowledge, and the greater part of the theories and techniques revealed by the Gods were beyond human comprehension. Just to get a basic understanding of the foundations would require human scholars to work for perhaps half a century. Scientists, initially full of hope, had tried to search the material from the Gods for technical information concerning controlled nuclear fission, but there was nothing. This was easy to understand: our current literature on energy science contained no information on how to make fire from sticks, either.

In other scientific fields, such as information science and life sciences (including the secret of human longevity), it was the same. Even the most advanced scholars could make no sense of the Gods’ knowledge. Between the Gods’ science and human science, there was still a great abyss of understanding that could not be bridged.

The Gods who arrived on Earth could not help the scientists in any way. Like the God at the United Nations had said, among the Gods now there were few who could even solve quadratic equations. The spaceships adrift among the asteroids also ignored all hails from the humans. The human race was like a group of new elementary school students who were suddenly required to master the material of Ph.D. candidates, and were given no instructor.

On the other hand, Earth’s population suddenly grew by two billion. These were all extremely aged individuals who could no longer be productive. Most of them were plagued by various diseases and put unprecedented pressure on human society. As a result, every government had to pay each family living with a God a considerable support stipend. Health care and other public infrastructures were strained beyond the breaking point. The world economy was pushed near the edge of collapse.

The harmonious relationship between God and Qiusheng’s family was gone. Gradually the family began to see him as a burden that fell from the sky. They began to despise him, but each had a different reason.

Yulian’s reason was the most practical and closest to the underlying problem: God made her family poor. Among all the members of the family God also worried the most about her; she had a tongue as sharp as a knife, and she scared him more than black holes and supernovas. After the death of her dream of true Communism, she unceasingly nagged God: Before you came, our family had lived so prosperously and comfortably. Back then everything was good. Now everything is bad. All because of you. Being saddled with an old fool like you was such a great misfortune. Every day, whenever she had the chance, she would prattle on like this in front of God.

God also suffered from chronic bronchitis. This was not a very expensive disease to treat, but it did require ongoing care and a constant outlay of money. Finally one day Yulian forbade Qiusheng from taking God to the town hospital to see doctors and stopped buying medicine for him. When the Secretary of the village branch of the Communist Party found out, he came to Qiusheng’s house.

“You have to pay for the care of your family God,” the Secretary said to Yulian. “The doctor at the town hospital already told me that if left untreated, the chronic bronchitis might develop into pulmonary emphysema.”

“If you want him treated, then the village or the government can pay for it,” Yulian shouted at the Secretary. “We’re not made of money!”

“Yulian, according to the God Support Law, the family has to bear these kinds of minor medical expenses. The government’s support fee already includes this component.”

“That little bit of support fee is useless!”

“You can’t talk like that. After you began getting the support fee, you bought a milk cow, switched to liquefied petroleum gas, and bought a big, new color TV! You’re telling me now that you don’t have money for God to see a doctor? Everyone knows that in your family, your word is law. I’m going to make it clear to you: right now I’m helping you save face, but don’t push your luck. Next time, it won’t be me standing here trying to persuade you. It will be the County God Support Committee. You’ll be in real trouble then.”

Yulian had no choice but to resume paying for God’s medical care. But after that she became even meaner to him.

One time, God said to Yulian, “Don’t be so anxious. Humans are very smart and learn fast. In only another century or so, the easiest aspects of the Gods’ knowledge will become applicable to human society. Then your life will become better.”

“Damn. A whole century. And you say ‘only.’ Are you even listening to yourself?” Yulian was washing the dishes and didn’t even bother looking back at God.

“That’s a very short period of time.”

“For you! You think we can live as long as you? In another century, you won’t even find my bones! But I want to ask you a question: how much longer do you think you’ll be living?”

“Oh, I’m like a candle in the wind. If I can live another three or four hundred years, I’ll be very satisfied.”

Yulian dropped a whole stack of bowls on the ground. “This is not how ‘support’ is supposed to work! Ah, so you think not only I should spend my entire life taking care of you, but you have to have my son, my grandson, for ten generations and more!? Why won’t you die?”

As for Qiusheng’s father, he thought God was a fraud, and in fact, this view was pretty common. Since scientists couldn’t understand the Gods’ scientific papers, there was no way to prove their authenticity. Maybe the Gods were playing a giant trick on the human race. For Qiusheng’s father, there was ample support for this view.

“You old swindler, you’re way too outrageous,” he said to God one day. “I’m too lazy to expose you. Your tricks are not worth my trouble. Heck, they’re not even worth my grandson’s trouble.”

God asked him what he had discovered.

“I’ll start with the simplest thing: our scientists know that humans evolved from monkeys, right?”

God nodded. “More accurately, you evolved from primitive apes.”

“Then how can you say that you created us? If you were interested in creating humans, why not directly make us in our current form? Why bother first creating primitive apes and then go through the trouble of evolving? It makes no sense.”

“A human begins as a baby, and then grows into an adult. A civilization also has to grow from a primitive state. The long path of experience cannot be avoided. Actually, humans began with the introduction of a much more primitive species. Even apes were already very evolved.”

“I don’t believe these made-up reasons. All right, here’s something more obvious. This was actually first noticed by my grandson. Our scientists say that there was life on Earth even three billion years ago. Do you admit this?”

God nodded. “That estimate is basically right.”

“So you’re three billion years old?”

“In terms of your frame of reference, yes. But according to the frame of reference of our ships, I’m only thirty-five hundred years old. The ships flew close to the speed of light, and time passed much more slowly for us than for you. Of course, once in a while a few ships dropped out of their cruise and decelerated to come to Earth so that further adjustments to the evolution of life on Earth could be made. But this didn’t require much time. Those ships would then return to cruise at close to the speed of light and continue skipping over the passage of time here.”

“Bullshit,” Qiusheng’s father said contemptuously.

“Dad, this is the Theory of Relativity,” Qiusheng interrupted. “Our scientists already proved it.”

“Relativity, my ass! You’re bullshitting me, too. That’s impossible! How can time be like sesame oil, flowing at different speeds? I’m not so old that I’ve lost my mind. But you—reading all those books has made you stupid!”

“I can prove to you that time does indeed flow at different rates,” God said, his face full of mystery. He took out that photograph of his beloved from two thousand years ago and handed it to Qiusheng. “Look at her carefully and memorize every detail.”

The second Qiusheng looked at the photograph, he knew that he would be able to remember every detail. It would be impossible to forget. Like the other Gods, the woman in the picture had a blend of the features of all ethnicities. Her skin was like warm ivory, her two eyes were so alive that they seemed to sing, and she immediately captivated Qiusheng’s soul. She was a woman among Gods, the God of women. The beauty of the Gods was like a second sun. Humans had never seen it and could not bear it.

“Look at you! You’re practically drooling!” Yulian grabbed the photograph from the frozen Qiusheng. But before she could look at it, her father-in-law took it away from her.

“Let me see,” Qiusheng’s father said. He brought the photograph to his ancient eyes, as close as possible. For a long time he did not move, as though the photograph provided sustenance.

“Why are you looking so close?” Yulian said, her tone contemptuous.

“Shut it. I don’t have my glasses,” Qiusheng’s father said, his face still practically on the photograph.

Yulian looked at her father-in-law disdainfully for a few seconds, curled her lips, and left for the kitchen.

God took the photograph out of the hands of Qiusheng’s father, whose hands lingered on the photo for a long while, unwilling to let go. God said, “Remember all the details. I’ll let you look at it again this time tomorrow.”

The next day, father and son said little to each other. Both thought about the young woman, so there was nothing to say. Yulian’s temper was far worse than usual.

Finally the time came. God had seemingly forgotten about it and had to be reminded by Qiusheng’s father. He took out the photograph that the two men had been thinking about all day and handed it first to Qiusheng. “Look carefully. Do you see any change in her?”

“Nothing really,” Qiusheng said, looking intently. After a while, he finally noticed something. “Aha! The opening between her lips seems slightly narrower. Not much, just a little bit. Look at the corner of the mouth here…”

“Have you no shame? To look at some other woman that closely?” Yulian grabbed the photo again, and again, her father-in-law took it away from her.

“Let me see—” Qiusheng’s father put on his glasses and carefully examined the picture. “Yes, indeed the opening is narrower. But there’s a much more obvious change that you didn’t notice. Look at this wisp of hair. Compared to yesterday, it has drifted farther to the right.”

God took the picture from Qiusheng’s father. “This is not a photograph, but a television receiver.”

“A… TV?”

“Yes. Right now it’s receiving a live feed from that explorer spaceship heading for the end of the universe.”

“Live? Like live broadcasts of football matches?”

“Yes.”

“So… the woman in the picture, she’s alive!” Qiusheng was so shocked that his mouth hung open. Even Yulian’s eyes were now as big as walnuts.

“Yes, she’s alive. But unlike a live broadcast on Earth, this feed is subject to a delay. The explorer spaceship is now about eighty million light-years away, so the delay is about eighty million years. What we see now is how she was eighty million years ago.”

“This tiny thing can receive a signal from that far away?”

“This kind of super long-distance communication across space requires the use of neutrinos or gravitational waves. Our spaceships can receive the signal, magnify it, and then rebroadcast to this TV.”

“Treasure, a real treasure!” Qiusheng’s father praised sincerely. But it was unclear whether he was talking about the tiny TV or the young woman on the TV. Anyway, after hearing that she was still “alive,” Qiusheng and his father both felt a deeper attachment to her. Qiusheng tried to take the tiny TV again, but God refused.

“Why does she move so slowly in the picture?”

“That’s the result of time flowing at different speeds. From our frame of reference, time flows extremely slowly on a spaceship flying close to the speed of light.”

“Then… can she still talk to you?” Yulian asked.

God nodded. He flipped a switch behind the TV. Immediately a sound came out of it. It was a woman’s voice, but the sound didn’t change, like a singer holding a note steady at the end of a song. God stared at the screen, his eyes full of love.

“She’s talking right now. She’s finishing three words: ‘I love you.’ Each word took more than a year. It’s now been three and a half years, and right now she’s just finishing ‘you.’ To completely finish the sentence will take another three months.” God lifted his eyes from the TV to the domed sky above the yard. “She still has more to say. I’ll spend the rest of my life listening to her.”

Bingbing actually managed to maintain a pretty good relationship with God for a while. The Gods all had some childishness to them, and they enjoyed talking and playing with children. But one day, Bingbing wanted God to give him the large watch he wore, and God steadfastly refused. He explained that the watch was a tool for communicating with the God Civilization. Without it, he would no longer be able to connect with his own people.

“Hmm, look at this. You’re still thinking about your own civilization and race. You’ve never thought of us as your real family!” Yulian said angrily.

After that, Bingbing was no longer nice to God. Instead, he often played practical tricks on him.

The only one in the family who still had respect and feelings of filial piety toward God was Qiusheng. Qiusheng had graduated from high school and liked to read. Other than a few people who passed the college-entrance examination and went away for college, he was the most learned individual in the village. But at home, Qiusheng had no power. On practically everything he listened to the direction of his wife and followed the commands of his father. If somehow his wife and father had conflicting instructions, then all he could do was to sit in a corner and cry. Given that he was such a softy, he had no way to protect God at home.

6.

The relationship between the Gods and humans had finally deteriorated beyond repair.

The complete breakdown between God and Qiusheng’s family occurred after the incident involving instant noodles. One day, before lunch, Yulian came out of the kitchen with a paper box and asked why half the box of instant noodles she had bought yesterday had already disappeared.

“I took them,” God said in a small voice. “I gave them to those living by the river. They’ve almost run out of things to eat.”

He was talking about the place where the Gods who had left their families were gathering. Recently there had been frequent incidents of abuse of the Gods in the village. One particularly savage couple had been beating and cursing out their God, and even withheld food from him. Eventually that God tried to commit suicide in the river that ran in front of the village, but luckily others were able to stop him.

This incident caused a great deal of publicity. It went beyond the county, and the city’s police eventually came, along with a bunch of reporters from CCTV and the provincial TV station, and took the couple away in handcuffs. According to the God Support Law, they had committed God abuse and would be sentenced to at least ten years in jail. This was the only law that was universal among all the nations of the world, with uniform prison terms.

After that, the families in the village became more careful and stopped treating the Gods too poorly in front of other people. But at the same time, the incident worsened the relationship between the Gods and the villagers. Eventually, some of the Gods left their families, and other Gods followed. By now almost one-third of the Gods in Xicen had already left their assigned families. These wandering Gods set up camp in the field across the river and lived a primitive, difficult life.

In other parts of the country and across the world, the situation was the same. Once again, the streets of big cities were filled with crowds of wandering, homeless Gods. The number quickly increased like a repeat of the nightmare three years ago. The world, full of Gods and people, faced a gigantic crisis.

“Ha, you’re very generous, you old fool! How dare you eat our food while giving it away?” Yulian began to curse loudly.

Qiusheng’s father slammed the table and got up. “You idiot! Get out of here! You miss those Gods by the river? Why don’t you go and join them?”

God sat silently for a while, thinking. Then he stood up, went to his tiny room, and packed up his few belongings. Leaning on his bamboo cane, he slowly made his way out the door, heading in the direction of the river.

Qiusheng didn’t eat with the rest of his family. He squatted in a corner with his head lowered and not speaking.

“Hey, dummy! Come here and eat. We have to go into town to buy feed this afternoon,” Yulian shouted at him. Since he refused to budge, she went over to yank his ear.

“Let go,” Qiusheng said. His voice was not loud, but Yulian let him go as though she had been shocked. She had never seen her husband with such a gloomy expression on his face.

“Forget about him,” Qiusheng’s father said carelessly. “If he doesn’t want to eat, then he’s a fool.”

“Ha, you miss your God? Why don’t you go join him and his friends in that field by the river, too?” Yulian poked a finger at Qiusheng’s head.

Qiusheng stood up and went upstairs to his bedroom. Like God, he packed a few things into a bundle and put it in a duffel bag he had once used when he had gone to the city to work. With the bag on his back, he headed outside.

“Where are you going?” Yulian yelled. But Qiusheng ignored her. She yelled again, but now there was fear in her voice. “How long are you going to be out?”

“I’m not coming back,” Qiusheng said without looking back.

“What? Come back here! Is your head filled with shit?” Qiusheng’s father followed him out of the house. “What’s the matter with you? Even if you don’t want your wife and kid, how dare you leave your father?”

Qiusheng stopped but still did not turn around. “Why should I care about you?”

“How can you talk like that? I’m your father! I raised you! Your mother died early. You think it was easy to raise you and your sister? Have you lost your mind?”

Qiusheng finally turned back to look at his father. “If you can kick the people who created our ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestors out of our house, then I don’t think it’s much of a sin for me not to support you in your old age.”

He left, and Yulian and his father stood there, dumbfounded.

Qiusheng went over the ancient arched stone bridge and walked toward the tents of the Gods. He saw a few of the Gods had set up a pot to cook something in the grassy clearing strewn with golden leaves. Their white beards and the white steam coming out of the pot reflected the noon sunlight like a scene out of an ancient myth.

Qiusheng found his God and said stubbornly, “Gramps God, let’s go.”

“I’m not going back to that house.”

“I’m not, either. Let’s go together into town and stay with my sister for a while. Then I’ll go into the city and find a job, and we’ll rent a place together. I’ll support you for the rest of my life.”

“You’re a good kid,” God said, patting his shoulder lightly. “But it’s time for us to go.” He pointed to the watch on his wrist. Qiusheng now noticed that all the watches of all the Gods were blinking with a red light.

“Go? Where to?”

“Back to the ships,” God said, pointing at the sky. Qiusheng lifted his head and saw that two spaceships were already hovering in the sky, standing out starkly against the blue. One of them was closer, and its shape and outline loomed huge. Behind it, another was much farther away and appeared smaller. But the most surprising sight was that the first spaceship had lowered a thread as thin as spider silk, extending from space down to Earth. As the spider silk slowly drifted, the bright sun glinted on different sections like lightning in the bright blue sky.

“A space elevator,” God explained. “Already more than a hundred of these have been set up on every continent. We’ll ride them back to the ships.” Later Qiusheng would learn that when a spaceship dropped down a space elevator from a geostationary orbit, it needed a large mass on its other side, deep in space, to act as a counterweight. That was the purpose of the other ship he saw.

When Qiusheng’s eyes adjusted to the brightness of the sky, he saw that there were many more silvery stars deep in the distance. Those stars were spread out very evenly, forming a huge matrix. Qiusheng understood that the twenty thousand ships of the God Civilization were coming back to Earth from the asteroid belt.

7.

Twenty thousand spaceships once again filled the sky above Earth. In the two months that followed, space capsules ascended and descended the various space elevators, taking away the two billion Gods who had briefly lived on Earth. The space capsules were silver spheres. From a distance, they looked like dewdrops hanging on spider threads.

The day that Xicen’s Gods left, all the villagers showed up for the farewell. Everyone was affectionate toward the Gods, and it reminded everyone of the day a year ago when the Gods first came to Xicen. It was as though all the abuse and disdain the Gods had received had nothing to do with the villagers.

Two big buses were parked at the entrance to the village, the same two buses that had brought the Gods here a year ago. More than a hundred Gods would now be taken to the nearest space elevator and ride up in space capsules. The silver thread that could be seen in the distance was in reality hundreds of kilometers away.

Qiusheng’s whole family went to send off their God. No one said anything along the way. As they neared the village entrance, God stopped, leaned against his cane, and bowed to the family. “Please stop here. Thank you for taking care of me this year. Really, thank you. No matter where I will be in this universe, I will always remember your family.” Then he took off the large watch from his wrist and handed it to Bingbing. “A gift.”

“But… how will you communicate with the other Gods in the future?” Bingbing asked.

“We’ll all be on the spaceships. I have no more need for this,” God said, laughing.

“Gramps God,” Qiusheng’s father said, his face sorrowful, “your ships are all ancient. They won’t last much longer. Where can you go then?”

God stroked his beard and said calmly, “It doesn’t matter. Space is limitless. Dying anywhere is the same.”

Yulian suddenly began to cry. “Gramps God, I… I’m not a very nice person. I shouldn’t have made you the target of all my complaints, which I’d saved up my whole life. It’s just as Qiusheng said: I’ve behaved as if I don’t have a conscience…” She pushed a bamboo basket into God’s hands. “I boiled some eggs this morning. Please take them for your trip.”

God picked up the basket. “Thank you.” Then he took out an egg, peeled it, and began to eat, savoring the taste. Yellow flakes of egg yolk soon flaked his white beard. He continued to talk as he ate. “Actually, we came to Earth not only because we wanted to survive. Having already lived for two, three thousand years, what did we have to fear from death? We just wanted to be with you. We like and cherish your passion for life, your creativity, your imagination. These things have long disappeared from the God Civilization. We saw in you the childhood of our civilization. But we didn’t realize we’d bring you so much trouble. We’re really sorry.”

“Please stay, Gramps,” Bingbing said, crying. “I’ll be better in the future.”

God shook his head slowly. “We’re leaving not because of how you treated us. The fact that you took us in and allowed us to stay was enough. But one thing made us unable to stay any longer: in your eyes, the Gods are pathetic. You pity us. Oh, you pity us.”

God threw away the pieces of eggshell. He lifted his face, trailing a full head of white hair, and stared at the sky, as though through the blue he could see the bright sea of stars. “How can the God Civilization be pitied by man? You have no idea what a great civilization she was. You do not know what majestic epics she created, or how many imposing deeds she accomplished.

“It was 1857, during the Milky Way Era, when astronomers discovered a large number of stars was accelerating toward the center of the Milky Way. Once this flood of stars was consumed by the supermassive black hole found there, the resulting radiation would kill all life found in the galaxy.

“In response, our great ancestors built a nebula shield around the center of the galaxy with a diameter of ten thousand light-years so that life and civilization in the galaxy would continue. What a magnificent engineering project that was! It took us more than fourteen hundred years to complete…

“Immediately afterward, the Andromeda galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud united in an invasion of our galaxy. The interstellar fleet of the God Civilization leaped across hundreds of thousands of light-years and intercepted the invaders at the gravitational balance point between Andromeda and the Milky Way. When the battle entered into its climax, large numbers of ships from both sides mixed together, forming a spiraling nebula the size of the Solar System.

“During the final stages of the battle, the God Civilization made the bold decision to send all remaining warships and even the civilian fleet into the spiraling nebula. The great increase in mass caused gravity to exceed the centrifugal force, and this nebula, made of ships and people, collapsed under gravity and formed a star! Because the proportion of heavy elements in this star was so high, immediately after its birth, the star went supernova and illuminated the deep darkness between Andromeda and the Milky Way! Our ancestors thus destroyed the invaders with their courage and self-sacrifice, and left the Milky Way as a place where life could develop peacefully…

“Yes, now our civilization is old. But it is not our fault. No matter how hard one strives, a civilization must grow old one day. Everyone grows old, even you.

“We really do not need your pity.”

“Compared to you,” Qiusheng said, full of awe, “the human race is really nothing.”

“Don’t talk like that,” God said. “Earth’s civilization is still an infant. We hope you will grow up fast. We hope you will inherit and continue the glory of your creators.” God threw down his cane. He put his hands on the shoulders of Bingbing and Qiusheng. “I have some final words for you.”

“We may not understand everything you have to say,” Qiusheng said, “but please speak. We will listen.”

“First, you must get off this rock!” God spread out his arms toward space. His white robe danced in the autumn wind like a sail.

“Where will we go?” Qiusheng’s father asked in confusion.

“Begin by flying to the other planets in the solar system, then to other stars. Don’t ask why, but use all your energy toward the goal of flying away, the farther the better. In that process, you will spend a lot of money, and many people will die, but you must get away from here. Any civilization that stays on her birth world is committing suicide! You must go into the universe and find new worlds, new homes, and spread your descendants across the galaxy like drops of spring rain.”

“We’ll remember,” Qiusheng said and nodded, even though neither he nor his wife nor father nor son really understood God’s words.

“Good,” God sighed, satisfied. “Next I will tell you a secret, a great secret.” He stared at everyone in the family with his blue eyes. His stare was like a cold wind and caused everyone’s heart to shudder. “You have brothers.”

Qiusheng’s family looked at God, utterly confused. But Qiusheng finally figured out what God meant. “You’re saying that you created other Earths?”

God nodded slowly. “Yes, other Earths, other human civilizations. Other than you, there were three others. All are close to you, within two hundred light-years. You are Earth Number Four, the youngest.”

“Have you been to the other Earths?” Bingbing asked.

God nodded again. “Before we came to you, we went first to the other three Earths and asked them to take us in. Earth Number One was the best among the bunch. After they obtained our scientific materials, they simply chased us away.

“Earth Number Two, on the other hand, kept one million of us as hostages and forced us to give them spaceships as ransom. After we gave them one thousand ships, they realized that they could not operate the ships. They then forced the hostages to teach them how, but the hostages didn’t know how, either, since the ships were autonomous. So they killed all the hostages.

“Earth Number Three took three million of us as hostages and demanded that we ram Earth Number One and Earth Number Two with several spaceships each because they were in a prolonged state of war with the other two Earths. Of course, even a single hit from one of our antimatter-powered ships would destroy all life on a planet. We refused, and so they killed all the hostages.”

“Unfilial children!” Qiusheng’s father shouted in anger. “You should punish them!”

God shook his head. “We will never attack civilizations we created. You are the best of the four brothers. That’s why I’m telling you all this. Your three brothers are drawn to invasion. They do not know what love is or what morality is. Their capacity for cruelty and bloodlust are impossible for you to imagine.

“Indeed, in the beginning we created six Earths. The other two were in the same solar systems as Earth Number One and Earth Number Three, respectively. Both were destroyed by their brothers. The fact that the other three Earths haven’t yet destroyed one another is only due to the great distances separating their solar systems. By now, all three know of the existence of Earth Number Four and possess your precise coordinates. Thus, you must go and destroy them first before they destroy you.”

“This is too frightening!” Yulian said.

“For now, it’s not yet too frightening. Your three brothers are indeed more advanced than you, but they still cannot travel faster than one-tenth the speed of light, and cannot cruise more than thirty light-years from home. This is a race of life and death to see which one among you can achieve near-light-speed space travel first. It is the only way to break through the prison of time and space. Whoever can achieve this technology first will survive. Anyone slower will die a sure death. This is the struggle for survival in the universe. Children, you don’t have much time. Work hard!”

“Do the most learned and most powerful people in our world know these things?” Qiusheng’s father asked, trembling.

“Yes. But don’t rely on them. A civilization’s survival depends on the effort of every individual. Even the common people like you have a role to play.”

“You hear that, Bingbing?” Qiusheng said to his son. “You must study hard.”

“When you fly into the universe at close to the speed of light to resolve the threat of your brothers, you must perform another urgent task: find a few planets suitable for life and seed them with some simple, primitive life from here, like bacteria and algae. Let them evolve on their own.”

Qiusheng wanted to ask more questions, but God picked up his cane and began to walk. The family accompanied him toward the bus. The other Gods were already aboard.

“Oh, Qiusheng.” God stopped, remembering. “I took a few of your books with me. I hope you don’t mind.” He opened his bundle to show Qiusheng. “These are your high school textbooks on math, physics, chemistry.”

“No problem. Take them. But why do you want these?”

God tied up the bundle again. “To study. I’ll start with quadratic equations. In the long years ahead, I’ll need some way to occupy myself. Who knows? Maybe one day, I’ll try to repair our ships’ antimatter engines and allow us to fly close to the speed of light again!”

“Right,” Qiusheng said, excited. “That way, you’ll be able to skip across time again. You can find another planet, create another civilization to support you in your old age!”

God shook his head. “No, no, no. We’re no longer interested in being supported in our old age. If it’s time for us to die, we die. I want to study because I have a final wish.” He took out the small TV from his pocket. On the screen, his beloved from two thousand years ago was still slowly speaking the final word of that three-word sentence. “I want to see her again.”

“It’s a good wish, but it’s only a fantasy,” Qiusheng’s father said. “Think about it. She left two thousand years ago at the speed of light. Who knows where she is now? Even if you repair your ship, how will you ever catch her? You told us that nothing can go faster than light.”

God pointed at the sky with his cane. “In this universe, as long as you’re patient, you can make any wish come true. Even though the possibility is minuscule, it is not nonexistent. I told you once that the universe was born out of a great explosion. Now gravity has gradually slowed down its expansion. Eventually the expansion will stop and turn into contraction. If our spaceship can really fly again at close to the speed of light, then we will endlessly accelerate and endlessly approach the speed of light. This way, we will skip over endless time until we near the final moments of the universe.

“By then, the universe will have shrunk to a very small size, smaller even than Bingbing’s toy ball, as small as a point. Then everything in the entire universe will come together, and she and I will also be together.”

A tear fell from God’s eye and rolled onto his beard, glistening brightly in the morning sun. “The universe will then be the tomb at the end of The Butterfly Lovers. She and I will be the two butterflies emerging from the tomb…”

8.

A week later, the last spaceship left Earth. God left.

Xicen village resumed its quiet life.

On this evening, Qiusheng’s family sat in the yard, looking at a sky full of stars. It was deep autumn, and insects had stopped making noises in the fields. A light breeze stirred the fallen leaves at their feet. The air was slightly chilly.

“They’re flying so high. The wind must be so severe, so cold—” Yulian murmured to herself.

“There isn’t any wind up there,” Qiusheng said. “They’re in space, where there isn’t even air. But it is really cold. So cold that in the books they call it absolute zero. It’s so dark out there, with no end in sight. It’s a place that you can’t even dream of in your nightmares.”

Yulian began to cry again. But she tried to hide it with words. “Remember those last two things God told us? I understand the part about our three brothers. But then he told us that we had to spread bacteria onto other planets and so on. I still can’t make sense of that.”

“I figured it out,” Qiusheng’s father said. Under the brilliant, starry sky, his head, full of a lifetime of foolishness, finally opened up to insight. He looked up at the stars. He had lived with them above his head all his life, but only today did he discover what they really looked like. A feeling he had never had before suffused his blood, making him feel as if he had been touched by something greater. Even though it did not become a part of him, the feeling shook him to his core. He sighed at the sea of stars, and said,

“The human race needs to start thinking about who is going to support us in our old age.”