by Cixin Liu
*
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:
HEAVEN SEALS OFF ALL EXITS!!!
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:
My husband and I huddled together on the sofa. Our psyches really couldn’t take it anymore. We were certain to die from the torment if our illness didn’t finish us off first. The picture came back on the TV, and the bottom scroll had the government’s announcement confirming children’s regenerative abilities. When we read it, it was like we’d come to the end of a marathon, and we exhaled heavily, letting our weary bodies and minds relax. Amid the worry for ourselves these past few days, we were more concerned with little Jingjing. I prayed with all my might that Jingjing wouldn’t get this fearsome illness! When I learned that children will live on, my heart could start beating again, and all of a sudden my own death turned less frightening. Now I’m extremely calm, and find it hard to believe I’m facing death so casually. But my husband hasn’t changed. He’s still trembling all over, practically fainting on top of me. He used to be so strong and confident. Maybe I’m calm because when I became a mother, I felt the power of life firsthand, and I know that there is nothing to fear from death! So long as boys and girls will live on, that resistance will continue, and soon there will be new mothers, and new children. Death doesn’t scare me. “What should we prepare for Jingjing,” I lean over and whisper to him, as if we’re about to go away on business for a few days. But god that painful anxiety returns as soon as I say it, since isn’t it an acknowledgment that the world will soon have no adults? What will the children do? Who will cook for Jingjing? Who will pat him to sleep? Who will help him across the road? What will he do in the summer? And in the winter? God, we can’t even leave him with someone else, since there’ll only be kids left. Just kids! It’s unreal, unreal! But so what? It’ll be winter soon. Winter! I’m only half-finished knitting Jingjing’s sweater. I have to stop writing and go work on it . . .
From Last Words at Doomsday, Sanlian Press, SE 8.
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 i
ts 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.”