Supernova Era

^{THE WORLD CLASSROOM}

On the day the Great Learning started, Zheng Chen left the school to check in on her students. Out of her class of forty-three, eight had qualified in the valley for the central government; the remainder, distributed throughout the city, were now embarking on the toughest curriculum in history under their parents’ tutelage.

Yao Rui was the first student Zheng Chen thought of. Out of her thirty-five remaining students, he had the toughest course of study. She took a quick subway trip to the thermal power station, shut down on environmental grounds prior to the supernova but now saved from dismantling and returned to operation as a classroom.

She saw her student outside the gate. He was with his father, the station’s chief engineer. Chief Yao greeted her, and she replied out of a jumble of feelings, “It’s like you’re me teaching my first class six years ago.”

Chief Yao smiled and nodded. “Ms. Zheng, I’m probably even less confident than you were.”

“Back in parent-teacher conferences, you never were pleased with my teaching methods. Today we’re going to see how you go about it.”

They went through the gate alongside a host of other groups of parents and children.

“What a tall, thick smokestack!” Yao Rui shouted, pointing excitedly ahead of them.

“Silly boy. I’ve told you before, that’s not a smokestack. It’s a cooling tower. Over there, behind the plant, is a smokestack.”

Chief Yao led his son and Zheng Chen up into the cooling tower, where water rained down into a circular pool. Pointing at it, Chief Yao said, “That’s the cooled water that circulates in the generator. It’s pretty warm. When I first came to the plant fifteen years ago, I used to swim in it.” He sighed at the memory of his youth.

Then they came to several small mountains of black coal. “This is the coal yard. A thermal power plant produces electricity by burning coal. At full capacity, our plant will consume twelve thousand tons per day. I bet you have no idea how much that is. See that coal train with forty railcars? You’d need about six of those trains full of coal.”

Yao Rui stuck out his tongue. He said, “That’s scary, Ms. Zheng. I never used to think that Dad’s job could be so awesome.”

Chief Yao let out a long sigh. “Kiddo, this is all a dream for your dad, too.”

They followed the long coal belt for a while until they reached a huge machine dominated by a large, rotating drum whose thunderous rumble set Yao Rui’s and Zheng Chen’s skin crawling. Chief Yao shouted, close beside their ears, “That’s the pulverizer. The belt brings coal here where it’s milled to a powder as fine as flour.”

Then they came to the base of another tall steel building. There were four of them, all visible from a distance, just like the cooling towers and smokestacks. Chief Yao said, “This is the furnace. The coal dust milled by the pulverizer is sprayed by four nozzles into its belly where it burns in a fireball. The coal gets almost completely burned up; only a tiny amount is left behind. Look, here’s what’s left.” He extended a palm and showed his son a smattering of objects that looked like translucent glass beads, which he had scooped up from a square pond along their path. Then they came to a small window through which they could see the blazing furnace fire. “The wall of this giant boiler is lined with an enormous number of long pipes. Water flowing through the pipes absorbs the fire’s heat and turns to high-pressure steam.”

Then they entered a cavernous building holding four huge machines, half cylinders lying on the ground. “These are the turbine generator assemblies. Steam from the boiler is piped here to turn the turbines, which drive the generators to produce electricity.”

Finally they reached the main control room. It was clean and well-lit, with signal lights twinkling like stars on a tall instrument panel and a row of computer screens displaying complex images. In addition to the duty operator, a number of other parent-child pairs were in the room. Chief Yao said to his son, “We had only a drive-by look just now. A power plant is actually a highly sophisticated system that involves a host of separate disciplines, and requires the work of lots of people to operate. Dad’s field is electrics. Electrics is divided into high and low voltage; I work in high voltage.” He paused and looked quietly at his son for several seconds. “It’s a dangerous field, involving currents that can fry a person in a tenth of a second. To keep that from happening, you’ve got to fully understand the structure and principles of the entire system. That begins now.”

Chief Yao took out a roll of charts and peeled off one. “Let’s start with the main wiring diagram. It’s fairly simple.”

“I don’t think it’s simple at all,” Yao Rui said, staring in obvious disbelief at all of the lines and symbols crisscrossing on the chart.

“Those are generators,” his father said, pointing at a diagram made up of four circles. “Do you know the principles of an electric generator?” Yao Rui shook his head. “Well, this is the bus bar. The generated electricity is sent out here. It’s three-phase, you see. Do you know what three-phase is?” Yao Rui shook his head again, and his father pointed to four pairs of concentric circles. “Okay. These are the four MTs.”

“MTs?” Yao Rui asked.

“Er, the main transformers. And these two are the auxes.”

“Auxes?”

“Auxiliary transformers…. You know the principles of transformers?”

Yao Rui shook his head.

“What about the basics? The principle of electromagnetic induction?”

Another head shake.

“You’ve got to know Ohm’s law, at least?”

Another head shake. Chief Yao let the charts drop. “Then what the hell do you know? Did you eat your lessons?”

His son started to cry. “I’ve never studied any of this.”

Chief Yao turned to Zheng Chen. “Then what have you been teaching him for six years?”

“Your son’s just out of middle school, remember. He’s not going to learn anything with teaching methods like yours!”

“I’ve got ten months to take this kid through a complete course of study in electrics, and to hand over my own twenty years’ work experience.” He sighed and tossed the charts aside. “It seems like an impossible task, Ms. Zheng.”

“But you’ve got to do it, Chief Yao.”

He stared at her for a long while, and at last sighed, picked up the charts, and turned to his son. “Okay, okay. So you know about electric current and electric potential, right?” Yao Rui nodded. “Then what are the units for current?”

“It’s a certain number of volts.”

“Oh for the love of—”

“No! Right, that’s the unit for potential. For current, it’s… it’s…”

“Amps! Very well, we’ll start from there, my boy.”

Just then Zheng Chen’s mobile rang. It was the mother of another student, Lin Sha. The two families were neighbors, so she knew them quite well. Lin Sha’s mother told her that she was having trouble teaching her daughter, and asked Zheng Chen to give her a hand. And so after bidding a hasty farewell to Yao Rui and his father, she hurried back into the city.

At the major hospital where Lin Sha’s mother worked, the two of them were heatedly discussing something outside a room with a large red sign over the door reading AUTOPSY.

“I can’t stand that smell,” Lin Sha said, screwing up her eyebrows.

“It’s formalin, a kind of preservative. For soaking the bodies used in dissection.”

“I’m not going to watch a body get dissected, Mom. I’ve seen so many livers and lungs and stuff already.”

“But you’ve got to learn where the organs are situated in the body.”

“When I’m a doctor, can’t I just give the patients whatever medicine they’re supposed to get for whatever illness they have?”

“You’re a surgeon, Shasha. You’ve got to perform surgery.”

“Let the boys be surgeons.”

“Cut that out. Your mom’s a surgeon. There are lots of excellent women surgeons.”

Now clear about the situation, Zheng Chen said she would go into the room with Lin Sha, who then grudgingly agreed to the autopsy lesson. The girl’s hand, tightly clasping hers, trembled noticeably as they walked through the door, and Zheng Chen wasn’t doing much better herself, although she fought to keep her fear from showing. She felt a chill wind across her face. The walls and floors were white, and the fluorescent lights overhead cast a pale glow on the autopsy table ringed by a group of children and two adults all dressed in white lab coats; the only bit of color in this world of gloomy white was the dark red object on the table.

Lin Sha’s mother led her daughter by the hand to the autopsy table, and pointing at the object, said, “For the convenience of our autopsy, the body needs to be pretreated by removing a layer of skin.”

Lin Sha tore out of the autopsy room and began to retch, Zheng Chen close on her heels. She clapped her on the back, keeping a lid on her own nausea, but grateful for the excuse to leave the room and for the sunlight outside.

Lin Sha’s mother followed them, and bent down to tell her daughter, “Stop it, Shasha. Observing an autopsy is a valuable opportunity for an intern. You’ll get used to it over time. Think of the body as a stopped machine, where you can look at its parts. You’ll feel better that way.”

“You’re a machine too, Mom! A machine I hate!” she shouted, and turned to run off. But Zheng Chen held her back.

“Listen to me, Lin Sha. All jobs, not just being a doctor, require bravery. Some might be even tougher. You’ve got to grow up.”

It took some doing but eventually they convinced Lin Sha to return to the autopsy. Zheng Chen stood with her and they watched the sharp lancet separate soft tissue with a low scratching sound, and white ribs pushed aside to expose mulberry organs…. Afterward, she wondered what it was that had supported her through it, not to mention what had supported the girl who used to be afraid of bugs.

Zheng Chen spent all of the next day with Li Zhiping, a boy whose father was a letter carrier. Over and over, father and son traced the route he had walked for more than a decade, and then as evening fell, the boy walked it by himself for the first time. Before setting out, Li Zhiping tried to attach the huge mailbag onto his beloved mountain bike, but it didn’t fit, and so he had to return it to his father’s trusty old Flying Pigeon and drop the saddle to its lowest position before riding it out into the lanes and alleys of the city. Though the boy had committed all the roads and delivery points to memory, his father was still uneasy, and so he and Zheng Chen biked after him at a distance. When the boy reached the final stop on the road, the gate to a government building, his father caught up with him and clapped him on the shoulder.

“That’s good, son. It’s not that tough. I’ve done it for more than ten years, and I was set to do it my entire life. Now it’s in your hands. Dad’s got just one thing to tell you: I’ve never misdelivered a single letter the whole time. It might not be a big deal for other people, but it’s something I’m secretly proud of. Remember, son, no matter how ordinary the job, you’ll do well if you put your heart into it.”

The third day Zheng Chen visited three students, Chang Huidong, Zhang Xiaole, and Wang Ran. Like Li Zhiping, the first two were from ordinary families, but Wang Ran’s father was a well-known go player.

Chang Huidong’s parents ran their own barbershop. When Zheng Chen arrived, he was giving his third haircut of the day. It was even worse than the first two, but the customer merely laughed at the patchy result he saw in the mirror and said it was fine. Chang Huidong’s father apologized and refused payment, but the customer insisted. The fourth customer demanded a haircut from the boy, too, and when Chang Huidong draped a sheet over him, he said, “Practice your heart out on me, kiddo. I only have a few haircuts left, but you young people need barbers. They can’t all turn into long-haired wild children.”

Zheng Chen let him cut her hair, too, turning it into a tangled mess that his mother had to trim into a short cut that ended up looking not bad at all. When she left the shop, she felt much younger. It was a feeling she’d had since the supernova. On the brink of a strange new world, people reacted in two opposite ways: they grew younger or got older, and she fortunately fell into the former camp.

Zhang Xiaole’s father was a cook at a work unit cafeteria. When Zheng Chen saw her student, he and his companions were, under the adults’ direction, almost finished preparing rice and a large cauldron of food. For a few nervous minutes, several children stood shaking in front of the canteen window watching their efforts sell out bit by bit to a main dining hall packed with people, but it looked like nothing was amiss. Then Zhang Xiaole’s father rapped a ladle against the window frame and announced, “Listen up. Today’s meal was prepared by our children.”

After a few seconds of silence, the hall erupted into applause.

But it was Wang Ran and his father who most impressed Zheng Chen. The boy was about to head off to driving class when she got to their house, and his father walked with him a fair distance to see him off. He said to Zheng Chen with a sigh, “I’m useless. At my age, I can’t even teach my son any actual skill.”

Wang Ran reassured his father that he would learn how to drive and then become a good chauffeur.

His father handed him a small bag. “Carry this with you. Read and practice when you’ve got spare time. Just don’t throw it away, since it’ll come in useful some day.”

He didn’t open the bag until he and Zheng Chen had walked for a while. It held a container of go pieces and a few manuals. He looked back at his father, the ninth-dan go master, still there watching after him.

As it did for many children, a dramatic change lay in the future for Wang Ran. When Zheng Chen visited him again a month later, his plan to become a chauffeur had somehow landed him in a bulldozer, where he proved a quick study. She found him at a large building site in the inner suburbs, where he was working on his own in the huge machine. He was visibly pleased to see his teacher, and invited her into the cabin to watch him work. As he piloted the bulldozer back and forth to flatten the ground, she noticed two men watching them closely from not far off. To her surprise, they were soldiers. Three bulldozers were at work, all driven by children, but the two soldiers paid particular attention to Wang Ran’s, and occasionally pointed in his direction. At last they waved for him to stop, and a lieutenant colonel looked up at the cabin and called to him, “You’re not a bad driver, kid. Want to come with us and drive something even more fun?”

“A bigger bulldozer?” he asked, poking his head out of the cabin.

“No. A tank.”

Wang Ran was silent for a few seconds before throwing open the door and bounding to the ground.

“Here’s the thing,” the lieutenant colonel said. “Our branch has, for various reasons, only just now considered bringing children in to take over. Time is tight, and we’re looking for people with some driving fundamentals so we can get started quicker.”

“Is driving a tank like driving a bulldozer?”

“In some ways. They’re both caterpillar-track vehicles.”

“But a tank is harder to drive, right?”

“Not necessarily. For one thing, a tank doesn’t have that big blade, so you don’t have to worry about frontward force when you’re driving.”

And just like that, Wang Ran the son of a ninth-dan go master became a tank driver in an armored division.

On the fourth day, Zheng Chen visited Feng Jing and Yao Pingping, who had been assigned to work in a nursery. In the upcoming children’s world, the family unit would vanish and the nursery would be a key institution for a fairly long period. Lots of children would spend their remaining childhood years there bringing up infants even younger than themselves.

When Zheng Chen found her students, their mothers were instructing them in baby care, but like all the rest of the older children in the nursery, they were helpless in the face of wailing babies.

“I can’t stand it!” Yao Pingping said as she stared at the baby crying incessantly on the bed.

“You need to be patient,” her mother said. “Babies can’t use words. Crying is how they talk, so you have to figure out what they mean.”

“Then what’s he saying now? I’ve given him milk, but he won’t eat.”

“He wants to sleep.”

“He should just go to sleep, then! What’s he crying for? He’s so annoying.”

“Most children are like that. You’ve got to pick him up and walk with him, and he’ll stop crying.”

And that’s all it took.

Pingping asked her mom, “Was I like that when I was little?”

Her mother laughed. “You were hardly that compliant. You’d usually fuss for an hour before you fell asleep.”

“What a chore it must have been, bringing me up.”

“You’ll have it even harder,” her mother said sadly. “Babies in day care all have parents, but in the future it’ll be up to you all to raise them.”

Zheng Chen kept silent during her time at the nursery, to the point that Feng Jing and Yao Pingping asked her if she was feeling well. Her thoughts were on her own unborn child.

The nations of the world had all banned further procreation in what for many of them was their final legislation of the Common Era. But laws and ordinances were ineffective; half of pregnant women, Zheng Chen among them, chose to carry their babies to term.

On the fifth day she returned to school, where lower grades were still attending classes taught by upperclassmen training to become teachers. She entered her classroom and found Su Lin and her mother, also a teacher at the school, working on teacher training.

“These kids are idiots. I’ve told them over and over but they still don’t get how to add and subtract two-digit numbers!” Su Lin angrily pushed aside a stack of workbooks.

Her mother said, “Every student understands things at a different pace.” She flipped through the papers. “See, this one doesn’t know how to carry. And this one, no concept of places. You’ve got to address them independently. Take a look at this one….” She handed Su Lin a workbook.

“Idiots! Plain idiots. They don’t even know simple arithmetic.” She glanced at the workbook but tossed it aside. Shakily scrawled numbers formed lines of two-digit addition and subtraction problems, all of them making the same stupid mistakes she had grown tired of over the past two days.

“It’s your own workbook from five years ago. I saved it for you.”

Surprised, Su Lin picked up the workbook, but could hardly recognize the clumsy script as her own handwriting.

Her mother said, “A teacher has to have patience for hard work.” She sighed. “But your students are the fortunate ones. What about you? Who’s going to teach you?”

“I’ll teach myself. Mom, didn’t you tell me that the first college teacher had never been to college?”

“But you’ve never even been to middle school!” Her mother sighed again.

On the sixth day, Zheng Chen sent off three of her students at the West Railway Station. Wei Ming, whose father was a lieutenant colonel, and Jin Yunhui, whose father was an air force pilot, were headed to the military. Zhao Yuzhong’s parents were migrant workers, and they were taking their son back home to a village in Hebei. Zheng Chen promised to visit Jin Yunhui and Zhao Yuzhong, but Wei Ming would be stationed in Tibet on the Indian border, and she knew that she would never make it there in the ten months she had remaining.

“Ms. Zheng, when your baby is born you’ve got to write to tell us where he ends up, so we can take care of him,” Wei Ming said, and then shook her hand forcefully before boarding the train without looking back, resolute in his final farewell.

As she watched the train depart, she again broke down and had to cover her face to hide her tears. She had now become a child, but her students had grown into adults overnight.

The Great Learning was the most rational and orderly period in history, all things proceeding on an urgent, organized schedule. But before it began, the world very nearly succumbed to madness and despair.

After a brief moment of calm, various portents of doom began to make themselves known. First was the mutation of plants, and then mass die-offs of animals: bodies of birds and insects littered the ground, and the ocean surface was awash in dead fish. A great number of species vanished within the space of days. The rays’ effects on humans became apparent. People exhibited identical symptoms: low fever, full body fatigue, inexplicable bleeding. The regenerative ability of children had been discovered but was not definitively proven, and although national governments made plans for a world of children (the Valley World was in session during this time, so the children were unaware of the chaos outside), a few medical institutions concluded that everyone would eventually die of radiation sickness. The terrifying news quickly spread round the globe despite government efforts to suppress it.

Society’s initial reaction was to count on luck, to place their hope in the god of medical science. Rumors occasionally circulated saying that such-and-such an organization or research facility had developed a lifesaving drug. Meanwhile, leukemia drugs like cyclophosphamide, methotrexate, doxorubicin, and prednisone were worth more than gold, even though doctors explained time and again that what people were suffering was not leukemia. A significant number of people did place their hope on the possible existence of a real god, and for a while, cults of all kinds spread like wildfire, the huge-scale or peculiar forms of their devotion returning certain countries and regions to a picture of the Middle Ages.

But it wasn’t long before the bubble of hope popped, spurring a chain reaction of despair in which increasing numbers of people lost their senses, culminating in mass hysteria that spared not even the most unflappable. The government’s hold on the situation slipped away, since the police and military who ought to have maintained order were themselves in a highly unstable state. At times, the government was partially paralyzed under the most intense psychological pressure ever felt in human history. In the cities, car crashes piled up in the thousands, explosions and gunfire came in waves, and pillars of smoke rose from tall buildings burning out of control. Frenzied crowds were everywhere. Airports shut down due to the chaos, and air and surface links between Europe and the Americas were severed. The chaos and paralysis affected the news media, too. The universal mood of the time can be demonstrated by a headline that ran in The New York Times in scarily large type:

Religious adherents either grew more fervent, to bolster their spiritual strength in the face of death, or abandoned religion entirely in a torrent of verbal abuse. A newly invented tag, “GODOG,” began popping up in urban graffiti as a contraction of “God is a dog.”

However, once children’s regenerative abilities were confirmed, the mad world calmed down at once, at a speed one journalist described as “flipping a switch.” An entry in a woman’s diary on that day reveals the prevailing attitude:

As soon as this news broke, the Great Learning commenced.

This was one of the most peculiar phases in human history, in which human society assumed a form it had never taken before and was unlikely to take again. The world became an enormous school where children nervously studied all the skills necessary for humanity’s survival, to acquire a basic ability to run the world in the space of just a few months.

In most professions, children of the world succeeded their parents and learned from them the required skills. The approach brought about a number of social ills, but it was the most workably efficient solution that anyone could come up with.

The particular duties of relatively senior leaders meant they were typically recruited internally and then given training in their posts; selection standards varied from country to country. This approach proved difficult owing to the special characteristics of child society, and future events suggested that most selections were unsuccessful, although they nevertheless preserved basic social structures.

Most difficult was the selection of national leaders, a practically impossible task to accomplish in such a short time. The world’s countries independently arrived at the same unusual method: model countries. The scale of the simulations varied, but they all operated in a way almost cruelly similar to the way actual countries operate, in the hope that the hardships and extreme environment of blood and fire would reveal children with leadership ability. Later historians found this the most astonishing thing about the end of the Common Era, and the brief history of these simulated countries became rich fodder for the fantastic literature of the Supernova Era. The period gave birth to whole categories of novels and films, and these microhistories grew ever further disconnected from reality and gradually took on the color of myth. Opinions of that era varied, but most historians acknowledged that under the era’s extreme conditions, the choice they made was a rational one.

Without question, agriculture was a key skill, and fortunately this was one that children found relatively easy to acquire. Unlike urban children, rural kids had to a greater or lesser extent taken part in their parents’ labors; it was in the large-scale farms of more industrialized countries that they had a harder time of it. On a global scale, children could take advantage of existing agricultural equipment and irrigation systems to produce all the food they needed, which provided a cornerstone for the survival of humanity as a whole.

Children also proved relatively quick studies at other basic skills essential for a functioning society, such as commerce and the service sector. Finance was rather more complicated, but with enough effort they were able to make the sector partially operational. Besides, finance would operate far more simply in the children’s world.

Skilled labor was also a fairly easy acquisition, which came as a great surprise to the adults. Children quickly became basically qualified if not especially proficient at driving, machining, welding, and, most surprisingly, piloting fighter planes. Children, they now realized, had an inborn aptitude for dexterous work that slipped away when they got older.

But technical work requiring background knowledge was far more difficult. Children could learn to drive quite quickly, but they had a harder time becoming qualified auto mechanics. The young pilots could fly planes, but it was practically impossible for ground personnel to correctly assess and handle aircraft failures. Engineer-level technicians were even hard to find among the children. And so one of the most formidable tasks of the Great Learning was getting the complicated technologies essential for society’s operation, such as the power grid, up and running; this task was only partially completed. It was practically certain that technology would take a major step backward in the children’s world—half a century in the rosiest predictions, with many people anticipating a return to a preindustrial age.

But the areas that children had the biggest difficulty mastering were scientific research and high-level leadership.

It was hard to imagine science in a world where children with only an elementary education would have to follow the long road to acquire the abstract thought necessary for cutting-edge scientific theory. And although fundamental scientific research was imperative for humanity’s survival in the present circumstances, it faced a critical threat: Children were ill-equipped for theoretic thinking, meaning that scientific advancement would be suspended entirely for an indefinite period. Would scientific thinking ever return? If not, would the loss of science return humanity to the Dark Ages?

Senior leadership talent was a more practical, pressing problem. Maturity is hard to acquire, and top leaders need a broad knowledge of politics, economics, and history, a keen understanding of society, experience in large-scale management, skill at interpersonal relations, correct situational judgment, and the stable character required to make major decisions under pressure, all of which children lack. Moreover, it was impossible to teach character and experience in such a short time—those were unteachable skills, only acquired in a lengthy process. So the young senior leaders might end up making bad decisions acting on impulse and naïveté, decisions that had the potential for terrible, even catastrophic consequences, and that might prove to be the biggest threat to the children’s world. Future events would prove this fear correct.

For the next several months, Zheng Chen went about the city helping her students learn the adult world’s necessary survival skills. They may have been distributed throughout the city, but she felt as if they were still a single class occupying a citywide classroom.

Her unborn child grew day by day, as did her body weight, not solely because of her pregnancy, but because, like everyone older than thirteen, the symptoms of the supernova sickness were becoming increasingly obvious. She had a perpetual low-grade fever, her temples throbbed, her body was soft as mud from head to toe, and it was getting harder to move. Even though her fetus was developing well as a healthy little being unaffected by supernova sickness, she still wondered whether her own worsening condition would allow her to carry him to term.

Before being admitted to the hospital, she visited her students Jin Yunhui and Zhao Yuzhong as she’d promised.

Jin Yunhui was now training to be a fighter pilot at an air base a hundred kilometers outside of the city. At the start of the runway, she found him among a group of flight-suited children next to a few air force officers, enveloped in an atmosphere of nervous fear. They were looking at the sky ahead of them, and with enormous effort she was able to make out a silvery dot in that direction. Yunhui told her it was a fighter jet that had stalled at five thousand meters. The J-8 interceptor in a tailspin plummeted like a stone. They watched it pass two thousand meters, the optimum altitude for a parachute, but the expected chute didn’t appear. Was it an ejector failure? Or did the pilot miss the button? Or was he still trying to rescue the plane? These questions would never be answered. The officers set down their binoculars and watched with naked eyes the falling plane glittering in the midday sun before it vanished behind a distant ridge. Then they saw the rising fireball wreathed in smoke over the hillside, and heard the heavy sound of an explosion.

The senior colonel commander stood off to one side looking mutely at the distant column of smoke, still as a stone carving, as if the air had frozen around him. Yunhui whispered to Zheng Chen that the jet’s pilot had been his thirteen-year-old son.

After a long while, the political commissar broke the silence. Striving to keep his tears from flowing, he said, “I’ve said it before. Children can’t pilot high-performance fighters! They don’t measure up in any area: reaction time, bodily strength, or psychology. And letting them solo after just twenty hours in the air, and putting them in J-8s after thirty more? You’re just toying with their lives!”

“We’d be toying with them if we didn’t have them fly,” the commander said as he rejoined the group. His voice remained heavy. “As you all know, the kids over there have put two thousand hours in F-15s and Mirages. If we keep tiptoeing around, my son’s not the only one who’s going to die.”

“8311 on deck!” called another colonel. This was Jin Yunhui’s father, and he was calling his son’s number.

Yunhui picked up his helmet and flight bag. The pressurized suits had been hurriedly prepared for the children and fit them well, but the helmets were for adults and looked oversized. The handgun at his waist seemed too big and heavy, too. When he passed his father, the colonel saluted him.

“Weather conditions are poor today, so keep an eye out for crosscurrents. If you stall, first thing to do is to keep calm, and then determine the direction of your spin. Then extricate yourself using the steps we’ve been over again and again. Remember: above all else, keep calm!”

Yunhui nodded. Zheng Chen saw his father’s grip relax, but he still held on, as if something about his son held him there. Yunhui gently shrugged his shoulders to ease off his father’s hand, and then ran off to the J-10 multirole fighter. He didn’t look back at his father before climbing into the cockpit, but flashed Zheng Chen a smile.

She stayed at the base for more than an hour, watching the tiny silver dot leave a snow-white trail across the blue sky, and listening to the dull thunder of the engines, until Yunhui’s fighter had safely returned to earth. She was hardly able to believe that it was one of her students flying through the air.

She visited Zhao Yuzhong last, out in a field on the plains of Hebei. The winter wheat was planted, and the two of them sat in the warmth of the sun on warm, soft ground, like a mother’s embrace. Then the sunlight was blocked, and they looked up into the face of the old farmer, Yuzhong’s grandfather.

“Kid, the land’s generous. You put in the effort, and it’ll repay you. The land’s the most honest thing I’ve met in all my years, and it’s been worth every effort I’ve put into it.”

Looking out over the sown field, Zheng Chen let out a sigh. She knew that her own life was nearing completion and she could depart without worries. She wanted to enjoy her final moments, but threads of attachment kept her tied up. At first, she thought the attachment was to the child inside her, but she soon realized that the threads led three hundred miles away to Beijing, where in the beating heart of the country, eight children were enrolled in the toughest course in human history, studying things they could not possibly hope to learn.

^{THE CHIEF OF GENERAL STAFF}

“This is the territory you’ll be defending,” the chief of the general staff department said to Lü Gang, pointing to a map of the country. The map filled an entire wall of the room. It was the largest map Lü Gang had ever seen.

“And this is the world we’re in.” The chief pointed to a similarly sized world map.

“Sir, let me have a gun!”

The chief shook his head. “Kid, the day you have to fire on the enemy yourself is the day the country is lost. Let’s get to class.” As he spoke, he turned toward the map and passed a hand upward from Beijing. “In a moment we’re going to fly this distance. When you look at the map, picture the vast terrain in your mind, and imagine its every detail. This is a military commander’s basic skill. You’re a senior commander directing the entire army, so when you look at this map, you need to have an overall feel for the country’s entire territory.”

The chief led Lü Gang out of the hall and, along with two other colonel staff officers, boarded a military helicopter standing in the yard. Engine whining, the helicopter took off and in a flash they were soaring over the city.

Pointing at the cluster of buildings below them, the chief said, “The country’s got thirty-odd big cities like this. In a total war, they may become focal battlefields or launching points for campaigns.”

“General, are we going to learn how to defend large cities?” Lü Gang asked.

Again, the chief shook his head. “Specific urban defense plans are for the army and front commanders. What you need to do is decide whether to defend or abandon a city.”

“Can the capital be abandoned?”

The chief nodded. “For the sake of ultimate victory in the war, even the capital can be abandoned. The decision must be made according to the situation. Of course, there are many factors that have to be considered where the capital is concerned. But you can be certain of one thing: That is an extremely difficult decision to make. The easiest thing in war is desperate, death-defying use of effective force. However, the superior commander does not use death-defying measures, but arranges for the enemy to do so. Remember, child: War requires victory, not heroes.”

Soon the helicopter was outside of the city and over rolling hills.

The chief said, “If war breaks out in the children’s world, it’s unlikely to be a high-tech war as we currently understand it. The shape of war may be more like the Second World War. But that is just a guess. Your minds are very different from adults’. Children’s war may take a form completely unlike anything we’re capable of imagining. But adults’ war is all that we can teach you right now.”

The helicopter flew for around forty minutes. Beneath them the vast expanse of ground was dotted with hillocks, and a desertified stretch and the remains of ground cover, from which a few columns of sand and dust rose.

“Class starts now, kid,” the chief announced. “The area beneath us was, back in the early eighties, the site of the largest land war games in military history.[4] Now we’ve turned it into a battlefield simulation. We’ve assembled five field armies to conduct exercises here.”

Lü Gang looked down. “Five armies? Where?”

The helicopter dropped swiftly, and Lü Gang saw that the dust columns were rising from roadways bearing tanks and other military vehicles that crawled off like beetles toward somewhere indistinct on the horizon. Some of them, he noticed, weren’t following the roads, nor were they trailing dust. They were moving far faster: he realized they were low-flying helicopters.

The chief said, “The Blue Army is assembling below us. Very soon it will launch an attack on the Red Army.” He pointed southward and drew an invisible line across the rolling hills. “See, that’s the Red Army’s defensive line.”

The helicopter headed toward that line and landed at the foot of a hill. Here, the ground was crisscrossed with tire ruts slicing through the red soil. They disembarked and got into green coms vehicles that took them into a cave in the hillside. Lü Gang noticed that the soldiers busy at work outside the vehicles, as well as the guards that saluted them at the cave entrance, included both children and adults.

A heavy iron door opened and they entered a spacious chamber with situation maps of the battlefield displayed on three large screens on the opposite wall, red and blue arrows tangled up like some grotesque creeping animal. In the center of the chamber was a large sand table surrounded by bright computer screens attended by camouflaged officers. Half of them, Lü Gang noticed, were children. They all stood at attention and saluted when the chief entered.

“This is the Red Army battle display system?” the chief asked, pointing at the large screens.

“Yes, sir,” replied a colonel.

“Do the children know how to use them?”

The colonel shook his head. “They’re learning. But they still need adults’ assistance.”

“Hang up the combat map. It’s the most reliable, at any rate.”

As several officers unrolled a large combat map, the chief said to Lü Gang, “This is Red Army Command. In this simulation, several hundred thousand children are learning warfare. Their course of study ranges from how to be a private to how to be a field army general. You, my boy, have the hardest course of any of them. We don’t expect you to learn much in such a short time, but we’ve got to instill in you a correct, precise appreciation and instinct for warfare at a high level. And that’s not an easy thing, either. In the past, progressing from a military academy cadet to your present position would take at least thirty years, and without those thirty years of bottom-to-top experience, you’ll find it hard to understand some of the things I’m going to tell you. We’ll just do our best. Fortunately, your future opponents aren’t much better off than you are. Starting now, forget everything you’ve learned about war from the movies, as completely as you can. You’ll find out very soon that movie warfare is totally different from the real thing. It’s vastly different even from the battle you commanded in the valley. The battles you’ll command might be ten thousand times that size.”

The chief turned to a senior colonel: “Go ahead.”

The senior colonel saluted and went out. He returned not long afterward. “Sir, the Blue Army has launched an all-out offensive on the Red Army’s defensive line.”

Lü Gang looked around him but didn’t see any obvious changes. The tangle of arrows on the situation map were not moving. The sole difference was that the adults around the sand table and at the combat map had stopped their urgent explanations; the children had put in earpieces and microphones and were standing in wait.

The chief said to him, “We’ll get started, too. Kid, you’ve received a report on the enemy’s movements. What’s the first thing you need to do?”

“Order the defensive line to block the enemy!”

“That’s not an order.”

Lü Gang looked blankly at the chief. Another three generals came over from the exercise directorate. Then they felt muted tremors from outside.

The chief prompted him: “What does your order consist of? What are you basing your order on?”

He thought a moment. “Oh, right. Determine the main direction of the enemy’s attack.”

The chief nodded. “Correct. But how do you make that determination?”

“The place where the enemy has put the most troops and is attacking the fiercest is its main direction.”

“Basically correct. But how do you know where it’s putting most of its troops, and where it’s attacking the fiercest?”

“I’ll go observe from the highest hill on the front lines!”

The chief’s expression did not change, but the other three generals sighed softly. One seemed about to say something to Lü Gang but was stopped by the chief, who said, “Very well. Let’s go have a look.”

A captain handed helmets to Lü Gang and the chief, and handed binoculars to Lü Gang, and then opened the iron door for them. Explosions rolled in along with gusts of wind that smelled faintly of smoke, and the sound grew more deafening as they crossed the long passage to the outside. The ground vibrated under their feet, and the smoke grew thicker in the air. Squinting against the bright sunlight, Lü Gang looked about him, but the scene before him was little different from when he had arrived: the green coms vehicles, the rut-crossed ground, and a few placid-looking nearby hills. He couldn’t locate the shells’ impact points; the explosions sounded like they were coming from a different world, but somehow seemed right beside him. A few armored helicopters flew low over the opposite hilltop.

The waiting Jeep sped them along a winding mountain road, and in just a few minutes they reached the top of the hill, which held the command post and a radar station, an enormous, silently spinning antenna. A kid stuck his head out the half-open door of a radar control vehicle, his too-large helmet wobbling, and quickly drew back and shut the door.

They exited the car, and the chief swept a hand about him. “This high ground is an excellent vantage point. Make your observations.”

Lü Gang looked around. Visibility of the uneven, rolling terrain spread out before him was indeed excellent. He located the blast points, all of them far off, the newer ones still smoking. Some hills were shrouded in a thicker smoke and dust and seemed to have been under assault for quite some time, and all he could see were sporadic flashes of explosions.

The targets were visible in all directions, sparsely but evenly distributed throughout his field of vision rather than in a line like he had imagined. Picking up the binoculars, he scanned the scene with no particular target in mind. His viewfinder raced across the meager ground cover, exposed rock, and sand, but he saw nothing else.

When he trained the binoculars on a far-off hill currently under attack, all he could see was a haze of smoke blurring out the scene itself, which nevertheless remained ground cover, rock, and sand. He held his breath and looked more carefully, and at last in a dry streambed at the foot of the hill he found two armored vehicles, but in the blink of an eye they vanished into a valley. On another roadway between two hills he found a tank, but before long it turned and headed back the way it came. He set down the binoculars and watched the battlefield in a stupor.

Where was the defensive line, and where was the Blue Army’s attack? The Red Army’s position? He couldn’t even be certain of the existence of two huge armies, since all he could see was distant bomb targets and a few smoky mountains, which looked less like a pitched battle than a few lonely signal fires. Was this really a fierce engagement of five field armies?

Next to him, the chief laughed. “I know the kind of war you’re thinking of: a broad, flat plain, the attacking enemy force lined up in an orderly formation, charging over like they’re on an inspection parade, and your defensive line is like a Great Wall crossing the entire battlefield; as supreme commander, you stand on high ground beside the front lines, taking in the whole battlefield like it’s on a sand table, mobilizing units like pushing pieces on a chessboard…. Perhaps such a war existed in the age of cold weapons, but even then, it would have been limited to small conflicts. Genghis Khan or Napoleon would only have personally witnessed a small part of the battles they fought. In modern warfare, battlefield terrain is far more complicated, and highly mobile, long-rage heavy firepower further separates the opposing fighting forces, who conceal their movements. That means the modern battlefield is practically invisible to a distant observer. The approach you’ve taken may be suitable for a captain commanding a company. But like I said before, forget war movies. Let’s go back, back to the high commander’s spot.”

When they rejoined the command center, things had substantially changed. Its former calm had disappeared, and groups of adult and child officers were shouting into phones and radios; beside the sand table and maps, children, aided by adult officers, were urgently positioning markers according to the information transmitted through their earpieces; the situation maps on the big screens were in constant flux.

Motioning to all the activity, the chief said to Lü Gang, “Do you see it now? This is your battlefield. As high commander, you have a more limited range of motion than a lowly private, but from here, your eyes and ears can encompass the whole battlefield. You’ve got to adapt to your new senses and learn how to use them. To be a good commander, you’ve got to be able to create a realistic combat map in your mind, with every detail true to life. That’s not easy.”

Lü Gang scratched his head. “It’s still weird, thinking about issuing directives from here in this cave, based on intelligence from these computers and radios.”

“If you understand the nature of the intelligence reports, you won’t find it weird,” the chief said as he led him to one of the big screens. He picked up a laser pointer and, drawing a small circle, said to the child captain operating the computer next to them, “Blow up this section, fella.”

The little captain dragged a box around the designated area and enlarged it to the size of the screen. “This is a situation chart for hills 305, 322, and 374,” the chief said. Pointing to the two neighboring screens, he said to the captain, “Display charts for the same region but from two different intelligence reports.” The kid struggled for a while, and eventually an adult major took the mouse from him and flipped two situation charts up onto the screens. Lü Gang noticed that the three images showed identical geography, contour lines around three elevated points in an equilateral triangle, but there were significant differences in the number, direction, and thickness of the moving red and blue arrows.

The major described the charts to the chief. “Chart one is based on intelligence from D Army, Division 115, Third Regiment, which is defending hill 305. The report says two Blue Army platoons are attacking that region, focusing on hill 322. Chart two is based on aerial surveillance from D Army’s aviation regiment, and says the Blue Army has dispatched one platoon to this region in an assault focusing on hill 374. Chart three comes from F Army, Division 21, Second Regiment, which is defending hill 322. They say the Blue Army has put an entire division to attack the three hills, with a focus on hill 305, and is attempting to flank hills 322 and 374.”

Lü Gang asked, “These reports were sent at the same time?”

The major nodded. “Yes, half an hour ago, from the same region.”

Lü Gang looked at the three screens in confusion. “How can they be so different?”

The chief said to the major, “Bring out all of the reports on those three hills from that same time.” The major took out a stack of paper as thick as a copy of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

“Wow. That’s a lot!” Lu Gang exclaimed.

“There is an overabundance of intelligence from the battlefield in modern warfare. From a comprehensive analysis of all of the information, you need to find some direction that will allow you to judge correctly. What you’ve seen in the movies, where a hero infiltrates the enemy and then the commander uses the one intelligence report he sends back to decide strategy for the entire battle, is frankly ridiculous. Of course, it’s not like you have to read every single report. That’s a task for your advisors, and for taking advantage of the C3I system to process the enormous amount of information generated during battle. But the ultimate decision is still in your hands.”

“It’s really complicated….”

“It’s even more complicated than that. The trend you identify in that ocean of information might not even be real. It might be strategic deception on the part of the enemy.”

“Like when they had Patton command the Bodyguard deception during Normandy?”

“That’s right. Next, let’s see you determine the primary direction of the Blue Army’s attack from these reports.”

^{MSG AND SALT}

A small motorcade heading northward from Beijing arrived at a quiet spot ringed by low hills. The cars stopped, and the president and premier got out, along with three children: Huahua, Specs, and Xiaomeng.

“Look, children,” the president said, pointing ahead to a railway, where a long freight train was stopped on a single track, a line of cars stretching off in an enormous arc that bent round the foot of a hill with no end in sight.

“Wow, that’s a long train!” Huahua exclaimed.

The premier said, “Eleven trains in all, each with twenty cars.”

The president said, “This is a test-loop track. It’s a big circle where new locomotives were sent from the factory to test their functions.” Turning to a staffer, he said, “It’s out of use now, isn’t it?”

The staffer nodded. “That’s right. For quite some time. It was built in the seventies, and isn’t suited to high-speed-rail cars.”

“So you’ll have to build another one,” the premier said to the children.

“We might not need to test high-speed-rail cars,” Huahua said. When the president asked why, he pointed up at the sky, and said, “I’m envisioning a sky train, with a powerful nuclear airplane for a locomotive, pulling a chain of unpowered gliders. Much faster than a regular train.”

The premier said, “Fascinating. But how will your sky train take off and land?”

“It’ll be able to,” Specs said. “Precisely how, I don’t know. But there’s a historical precedent for it. In World War Two the Allies used a transport plane to tow a chain of gliders carrying paratroopers.”

The president said, “I remember that. It was to seize a Rhine bridge behind enemy lines. Operation Varsity. The largest airborne operation in history.”

The premier said, “If conventional-powered transport planes can be towed too, the thing might have real-world significance. It has the potential to cut air transport costs by ninety percent.”

The president asked, “Has anyone in the country suggested an idea like this before?”

The premier shook his head. “Never. Children clearly aren’t at a disadvantage on every front.”

The president looked up at the sky and said with feeling, “Yes. Sky trains, and maybe gardens in the sky as well. What a wonderful future. Still, first we’ve got to help the children overcome their disadvantages. After all, we didn’t come here to discuss trains.” He pointed at the train. “Children, go have a look at what’s on board.”

The three children ran off to the train. Huahua clambered up the ladder of one car, followed by Specs and Xiaomeng. They stood atop the big white plastic sacks that filled the car; from this vantage point, similar sacks were visible in cars farther down the train, gleaming in the sunlight. Squatting down, Specs poked a small hole in one, and translucent white needle-shaped grains spilled out. Huahua picked one up and licked it.

“Careful. It may be poisonous,” Specs said.

“It looks like MSG,” Xiaomeng said, and then licked a grain for herself. “Yep, it’s MSG.”

“You can pick out the taste of MSG?” Huahua asked, eyeing her suspiciously.

“It’s MSG, all right. Look!” Specs pointed to the row of sacks ahead of them, on which, written in large letters, was a logo familiar to them from TV ads. But they found it hard to reconcile the chef on TV in his large white hat tossing a sprinkle of white powder into a pot with this huge dragonload. They walked across the bags to the other end of the car and gingerly stepped over the coupling into the next, which was filled with the same white sacks of MSG. They went another three cars farther, all of them chock-full of MSG sacks; clearly the rest of the train would be the same. Even one train car seemed enormous to children used to passenger cars; they counted, and like the premier had said, there were twenty cars in this train, all of them full of MSG.

“Geez that’s a lot. All the MSG in the country must be here.”

As they descended the ladder they saw the president and premier approaching on the trackside path, and as they were about to run over and ask questions, the premier stopped them with a wave of his hand, and called, “Take a look at what’s in the other trains.”

And so the three of them ran along the path past a dozen cars, and then the locomotive, and then after a gap of ten meters they reached the tail of the second train and climbed up to the top of the car. This one was also brimming with white bags, but they were woven, not slick plastic, and they were labeled EDIBLE SALT. These bags were hard to puncture, but a small amount of dust had leaked and they dabbed their fingers and had a taste: indeed it was salt. Another huge white dragon stretched out ahead of them; all twenty cars in this train were carrying salt.

They returned to the trackside path, ran the length of the train, and climbed up onto the top of a car in the third train. Like the second, it was full of salt. They climbed down and ran to the fourth train. Also salt. Then Xiaomeng said she couldn’t run anymore, so they walked. It took quite a while to go past twenty cars to the fifth train. Salt again.

They were a little demoralized by what they saw from the top of the car. There was no end to the line of train cars, which curved and disappeared behind a hillside in the distance. They got down and passed another two trains filled with salt. The head of the second train was beyond the hill and from their vantage point on top of it they could see the end of the line of trains—another four ahead of them, they counted.

They sat down on the top of the car to catch a breath. Specs said, “I’m tired out. Let’s go back. There’s nothing but salt in the rest of them anyway.”

Huahua stood up and took another look. “Hmm. It’s like a world tour. We’ve traveled half of the big circle, so it’s the same distance whether we go ahead or turn back.”

And so they pressed onward, car after car, along uneven ground, like they were circumnavigating the globe. Now they didn’t need to climb up to know it was salt in the cars, since they could smell it. Specs said it was the smell of the sea. At last the three of them passed the final train and emerged from its long shadow into bright sunlight. Before them was a stretch of empty track, at the end of which stood the MSG-laden train they’d left at the start of their circuit. They walked toward it along the empty tracks.

“Hey, there’s a little lake over there,” Xiaomeng exclaimed delightedly. The pond in the center of the circular track reflected the light of the sun, now descending in the west, a sheet of gold.

“I saw that before, but you two were focused on salt and MSG,” Huahua said, walking atop a rail with both arms outstretched. “You get on that one and we’ll see who can walk the fastest.”

Specs said, “I’m sweating and my glasses keep slipping down, but I’ll beat you for sure. Stability over speed on the high wire—it’s all over if you fall off.”

Huahua took a few more quick steps. “See. Fast and stable. I can walk all the way to the end without falling off.”

Specs looked at him thoughtfully. “That may be true right now, but what if it was like a tightrope, and the rail was hanging in midair with a thousand-meter drop below you? Could you still make it to the end?”

Xiaomeng looked off at the golden water and said softly, “Yeah. Our rail is hanging in midair.”

Three thirteen-year-olds, who in nine months would be supreme leaders of the largest country in the world, fell silent.

Huahua jumped off the rail, stared at Specs and Xiaomeng for a bit, and then, with a shake of his head, declared, “I’m not keen on your lack of confidence. Still, it’s not like there will be much playtime in the future.” Then he hopped back up on the rail and teetered off.

Xiaomeng laughed. It was a laugh perhaps a little more mature than for a girl of thirteen, but Huahua found it touching. “I never had much playtime before. Specs, nerd as he is, doesn’t play much. You’re going to lose biggest out of the three of us.”

“Leading the country is fun enough in itself. Today was pretty fun. All of that salt and MSG, those long trains. Pretty impressive.”

“We were leading the country today?” Specs said with snicker.

Xiaomeng, too, was skeptical. “Yeah, why did they show us all this stuff?”

“Maybe so we’ll know about the national MSG and salt reserves,” Huahua said.

“Then they should have brought Zhang Weidong. He’s in charge of light industry.”

“That moron can’t even keep his own desk in order.”

Back at their starting point on the circular railway, the president and premier were standing beside the train. The premier was speaking, and the president was nodding his head slowly. Both of them looked grave, and it was clear they had been talking for quite some time, silhouetted against the backdrop of the great black train in a powerful tableau, like a centuries-old oil painting. But their expressions brightened immediately upon seeing the children’s approach. The president waved.

Huahua whispered, “Have you noticed that they’re different with us than they are among themselves? When we’re around, the sky could be falling and they’d remain optimistic. But when they’re together, they’re so serious it makes me feel the sky really is falling.”

Xiaomeng said, “That’s what adults are like. They can control their emotions. You can’t, Huahua.”

“So what? Is there something wrong with letting others see me for who I really am?”

“Self-control doesn’t mean being fake. Your emotions affect those around you, you know. Especially kids—they’re easily influenced. So you should find some self-control. You can learn from Specs.”

“Him?” He sniffed. “He’s only got half the normal number of nerves in his face—it’s always that same expression. You know, Xiaomeng, you’re more of a teacher than the adults.”

“That’s true. Have you noticed that the adults have taught us very little?”

Up ahead, Specs turned around, the same indifferent expression on his nerve-deficient face, and said, “This is the hardest course in human history, and they’re afraid of teaching it wrong. But I’ve got a feeling that instruction is about to kick into high gear.”

“You’ve done good work, children,” the president said when they reached him. “You’ve covered quite a distance. And you’ve been impressed with what you saw, I presume?”

Specs nodded. “Even the most ordinary things become marvelous in large quantities.”

Huahua added, “Yeah. I never imagined there’d be so much MSG and salt in the entire world.”

The president and premier exchanged a look and a trace of a smile. The premier said, “Here’s our question for you. How long would it take the country’s population to consume all of that MSG and salt?”

“At least a year,” Specs said at once.

The premier shook his head, as did Huahua, who said, “It won’t be gone in a year. Five, at least.”

Again, the premier shook his head.

“Ten?”

“Children, all of it is only enough for a single day.”

“One day?” The three children stood wide-eyed in shock for a moment, until Huahua laughed awkwardly at the premier. “You’re joking… right?”

The president said, “At one gram of MSG and ten grams of salt per person per day, it’s a simple matter of arithmetic: these train cars hold sixty tons, and there are one-point-two billion people in the country. You do the math.”

They wrestled with the long chain of zeros for a moment, and realized he was telling the truth.

Xiaomeng said, “But that’s just salt and MSG. What about oil? And grain?”

“The oil would fill the pond over there. Grain would pile up into the hills around us.”

The children stared at the pond and the hills and said nothing for a long time.

“God!” said Huahua.

“God!” said Specs.

“God!” said Xiaomeng.

The premier said, “Over the past couple of days we’ve been trying to find a way to give you an accurate feel for the size of the country, and that hasn’t been easy. But you’ve got to have a sense of it to lead a country like ours.”

The president said, “We took you here with one important goal in mind: to make you understand a fundamental rule of running a country. You’ll no doubt have imagined a country’s operation as something complicated, and indeed it is, more complicated than you know, but the underlying rule couldn’t be simpler. You know what I mean, I suspect.”

Xiaomeng said, “Above all, ensure that the country is fed. Every day we need to provide the people with a trainful of MSG, ten trains of salt, a lake of oil, and several hills of rice and flour. One day without, and the country will plunge into chaos. Ten days without, and there’s no country anymore.”

Specs nodded. “They say productive forces determine the relations of production, and the economic foundation determines the superstructure.”

Huahua nodded, too. “Any idiot could understand that by looking at that long train.”

The president looked off into the distance, and said, “But lots of highly intelligent people don’t understand it, children.”

The premier said, “Children, tomorrow we’ll take you to learn more about the country. We’ll visit bustling cities and remote mountain villages, show you established industry and agriculture, teach you about the way the people live. And we’ll tell you about history—that’s the best way to learn about the present day. We’ll give you lots more complicated information about running a country, but remember that nothing is more basic or profound than what you’ve learned today. The road you’re on will be fraught with difficulties, but so long as you remember that rule you won’t get lost.”

With a wave of his hand, the president said, “Let’s not wait for tomorrow. We’ll leave tonight. Time is short, children.”