The Supernova Era

by Cixin Liu

  “That’s fascinating.”

  “You French like revolutions. This might count as one.”

  “You’ll need to find candidates.”

  Green pulled a sheaf of holograms from a pocket in his evening jacket and passed them to Pierre. Ten candidates for queen. The French president flipped through the holograms, sighing in admiration at each one. Practically every child in the hall gathered round to pass the photos, and they sighed in admiration along with him. The girls in the photos were like ten little suns in their radiant beauty.

  “Gentlemen,” said the band conductor, “the next song is dedicated to these ten queens.”

  The band struck up “Für Elise,” and in its hands the gentle piano tune remained as touching as ever, even more absorbing than the piano version. Awash in music, the children felt that the world, life, and the future would be as beautiful as those ten suns, and as adorable.

  When it finished, Davey asked Green politely, “So what about the queen’s husband?”

  “Also decided by election. The prettiest and most adorable boy, of course.”

  “Any candidates?”

  “Not yet. There will be once the queen is elected.”

  “Oh, right. You’ve got to listen to the queen’s opinion,” Davey said, nodding in agreement. Then, with that particular brand of American pragmatism, he said, “One more question. How can such a young queen give birth to a prince?”

  Green snorted rather than answering, as in contempt for Davey’s lack of breeding. Few of the other children present were well-versed in the specifics, so they all just pondered the question and for a while no one spoke. Eventually Pierre broke the silence: “I imagine it’s like this. Their marriage is just, well, what’s the word, symbolic. They’re not going to live together like adults do. They’ll have kids after they grow up. Is that it?”

  Green nodded, as did Davey, to show he understood. Then Davey cleared his throat, seeming suddenly shy. “Um . . . ​about the pretty boy.”

  “What about him?”

  Davey tugged at his white gloves and gave a self-conscious shrug. “I mean . . . ​there’s no candidate yet.”

  “That’s right, there isn’t.”

  Davey crooked a finger back toward himself and said, “So how about me. Do I qualify?”

  The surrounding crowd tittered, to the annoyance of the president, who barked, “Quiet!,” then turned back to Green and waited patiently for his response. Green turned slowly toward the banquet table and picked up an empty glass, and then made a subtle motion for a refill to the server beside him. When his glass was full, he carried it over to Davey and waited until the surface was still. Then he said, “Why not see for yourself?”

  The group burst out laughing. The laughter spread until even the servers and army band members were cackling uncontrollably at their president, chief of staff Benes the giddiest of all.

  In the center of it all, the president’s face contorted. In point of fact, he wouldn’t have been found wanting; what disqualified him was his lack of British citizenship. The international mockery annoyed him, of course, but he was most irritated by Green. As he had met with the heads of NATO countries for the past several days, it had been the prime minister who had bothered him the most. No sooner had he arrived in the United States than he began asking for things—steel, oil, and above all, weapons. Three five-billion-dollar Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and eight twobilliondollar ballistic nuclear submarines, in one fell swoop, as if angling to re-create the Royal Navy of Admiral Nelson’s time.

  Even worse, he wanted land. Just the return of a few former colonies in the Pacific and the Middle East at first, but then he rolled out a stinky old seventeenth-century parchment, a map with no lines of latitude or longitude, nothing at all at the north and south poles, and brimming with errors in Africa and the Americas.

  Pointing out areas of the map, Green informed Davey of all the places that once were England and remained so (only omitting any mention of North and South America prior to the revolutionary wars). He felt that due to the special relationship Britain had with the US, even if the US was unwilling to aid it in recovering those lands, it should at least permit it to reclaim some of them, since the measly territory it now occupied was tremendously disproportionate to the immense contributions it had made to Western civilization through the ages. The United Kingdom had been a cherished ally of the US in two world wars, and in the second had exhausted its national power to protect the British Isles and prevent the Nazis from crossing the Atlantic, only to suffer such a precipitous decline as a result.

  Now the cake needed to be redivided; surely Uncle Sam’s children would not be as stingy as their fathers and grandfathers! However, when Davey made the demand that once conditions were ripe, NATO would place a dense installation of medium-range ballistic missiles in Britain to prepare for an advance to the East, he immediately turned as tough as the Iron Lady and declared that his country, and all of western Europe for that matter, would not become a nuclear battlefield. No new missile installations; as a matter of fact, he was going to dismantle some existing ones.

  Now on top of that, making jokes at the expense of the president of the United States, in the manner of a fallen aristocrat who can’t resist grandstanding like a fool. Davey’s anger bubbled over at the thought, and he threw a fist into Green’s jaw.

  The sudden punch sent the skinny prime minister, smugly holding a wineglass up as a mirror for Davey, tumbling backward over the banquet table. The hall erupted into chaos. Children pressed around Davey shouting angrily, and the prime minister managed, with some help, to get to his feet. Ignoring the caviar and mayonnaise on his clothes, the first thing he did was straighten his tie. He was helped up by the foreign secretary, a brawny boy, who made a dash for Davey but was held back by the prime minister. Even before he stood up, Green’s mind had made the transition from overheated to cool, and he understood that now was not the time to lose sight of the bigger picture. Amid the chaos, he was the only one who retained an enviable calm. With aristocratic grace, he extended his right index finger and said to the foreign secretary, in a tone entirely unchanged from usual, “Please draft a diplomatic protest.”

  Reporters’ flashbulbs popped, and the following day, large photos of Green, in evening wear covered in a spectrum of ice cream flavors and raising a genteel finger, ran in every major newspaper, informing all of Europe and the Americas of the prime minister’s noble demeanor as a politician. He exploited this stroke of luck to the full, while Davey could only blame drunkenness. Now, facing a crowd of furious young heads of state and sneering reporters, Davey began to defend himself: “What’re you calling me? Hegemonic? If America’s hegemonic, what about the English? Just wait till you see how hegemonic they can be!”

  Green raised a finger to the foreign secretary again. “Please draft another diplomatic protest against this shameless attack on the United Kingdom by the president of the United States of America. This is our statement: We, and our fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, are the most courteous people in the world. They have never, and will never, take such uncultured barbaric acts.”

  “Don’t listen to him!” Davey said, waving both hands at the crowd. “I’m telling you, back in the tenth century, England called itself King of the Seas, and they called all the waters they could navigate the British Seas. On these seas, when another country’s ship met an English ship, it had to lower its flag in salute, or else the English navy would fire on it. In 1554, Prince Philip of Spain sailed to England to wed Queen Mary, and because the salute was forgotten, he was fired upon several times. In 1570, again because of the naval salute, the English navy almost fired upon the Queen of Spain’s ship. Ask him if it’s true!”

  Davey remained Davey, and his fiery retort rendered Green speechless. He continued, “You want to talk hegemony? That’s a word invented by adults. But it’s really just a simple thing. A few centuries ago, England had the world’s biggest navy, so
what they did wasn’t hegemonic, it was glorious history. Today, America has the world’s biggest navy. We’ve got Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, planes as numerous as mosquitoes and tanks as numerous as ants. But we’ve never forced anyone to lower their flag to salute US ships! How dare you call us hegemonic? One of these days—”

  Before he finished, his jaw was the recipient of a heavy fist, and like Green he went toppling head over heels over the banquet table. He brushed away the arms trying to help him up, but twisted like a fish back to his feet, in the process grabbing a bottle of French champagne as long as his arm and brandishing it in the direction from which the blow had come. But he stopped midswing, and the remaining champagne bubbled out of the bottle and into a foamy pool on the oak floor.

  Standing opposite him was Ōnishi Fumio, the prime minister of Japan. The tall, thin Asian boy wore a calm expression, and if you didn’t look at his eyes it was hard to believe that he was the one who threw the punch. Davey relaxed his grip and let the empty bottle fall away.

  Two days earlier, Davey had seen a report shot by CNN showing the famous statue in Hiroshima of a girl who died as a result of the atomic bomb holding aloft a paper crane. Now there was a mountain of white objects, piled up like snow to half the statue’s height. At first glance Davey thought they were the same paper cranes children had always offered at the statue, but when the camera zoomed in for a closer look, he realized what they actually were: paper fighter jets. Groups of children in white hachimakis emblazoned with the sun flag came forward singing “Drawn Sword Corps” and throwing more folded fighter planes toward the statue. Those paper planes spiraled round the girl like white spirits, and piled higher and higher at her feet, bringing her ever closer to burial.

  And then the Chinese guests arrived, weary from the journey. Huahua and the ambassador to the US, Du Bin, were accompanied by the American vice president, William Mitchell.

  Davey met them at the foot of the stairs and greeted them with an enthusiastic embrace. Then he said to the rest of the children, “Good. Now that children from every country are here, we can begin discussing the important issues of the children’s world.”

  CANDYTOWN IN AMERICA

  When the Chinese plane finally reached the end of its arduous journey and arrived in the airspace over New York’s JKF Airport, all they could see below them was empty ocean. The tower informed the pilot that the water on the runway was shallow, not even midcalf, so they could safely land using two files of widely spaced black dots as runway markers. Through binoculars they determined that the dots were vehicles parked in the water on the runway. The landing itself produced clouds of spray, and when it dispersed, Huahua noticed that the airport was under heavy security. Armed soldiers were standing everywhere in the water. When the plane came to a complete stop, it was quickly surrounded by a dozen armored vehicles that had been following it like speedboats through the shallow water. A group of fully armed soldiers in field camouflage jumped out of the vehicles and began running around like weird insects, and they and the vehicles quickly formed a perimeter around the plane. The soldiers, guns in hand, faced away from the plane and looked around warily, as did the machine gunners atop the armored cars.

  The hatch opened and several American children hurried up the stair that had been put in place. Most of them were carrying rifles, and one had a large bag. Huahua’s two armed guards flanked the aircraft door to prevent them from entering, but Huahua had them make way, since he had seen a Chinese kid at the front of the group, the ambassador Du Bin.

  Once the children entered the cabin and had caught their breath, Du Bin introduced a blond-haired boy to Huahua: “This is vice president of the United States William Mitchell, here to welcome you.” Huahua took stock of the boy, the large gun he had strapped at his waist that looked extremely out of place next to his tailored suit. Du Bin then introduced another boy, wearing fatigues. “This is Major General Dowell, who’s in charge of security for UN attendees.”

  “This is how we’re being welcomed?” Huahua asked Mitchell, which Du Bin translated.

  “You can have the red carpet and an honor guard if you’d like. The day before yesterday the president of Finland was given a ceremony on a temporary stage, and had his leg shattered by a bullet,” Mitchell said, and Du Bin translated for Huahua.

  Huahua said, “We’re not here to visit the United States, so we don’t need such formalities. But this is a little unusual.”

  Mitchell sighed and shook his head. “Please forgive our situation. I’ll explain in detail on the way.”

  Then from his bag Dowell pulled out jackets for the Chinese children to wear, bulletproof clothing, he said. Then from another bag he took out a few snub-nosed black pistols and handed them to Huahua and his entourage, saying, “Careful. They’re fully loaded.”

  “Why do we need these?” asked Huahua in surprise.

  Mitchell said, “In today’s America, if you go out unarmed it’s like going out without pants!”

  They all deplaned and walked down the stairs, and, closely surrounded by a group of soldiers to shield them from any stray bullets, Mitchell led Huahua and Du Bin to an armored car parked in the water. The others got into separate cars. The cars were dark and cramped and smelled of fuel. The children sat on hard benches fixed to either side, and then the fully armed motorcade sped away.

  “The ocean level’s rising quickly. Is Shanghai like this?” Mitchell asked Huahua.

  “It is. Hongqiao Airport is flooded, but the adults rushed some dikes in place so the water hasn’t reached the city yet. It won’t last for much longer, though.”

  “New York is still free of water, but it’s not really suited for a UN General Assembly.”

  The motorcade headed toward the city and eventually reached dry roads. At times, overturned vehicles on the roadside were visible through the armored car’s small windows, their sides pockmarked with bullet holes, and some of them on fire. There were also large numbers of armed children, clearly not military, walking along the road in groups, or crossing nervously, clutching guns nearly as big as themselves, their bodies slung with ammo belts. When Huahua’s car passed one group, they suddenly threw themselves to the ground as practically simultaneously a rain of bullets from one side impacted on the car’s armor shell with a thunderous din.

  “None of this looks normal,” Huahua said, after a glance out the window.

  “It’s the times, man. Abnormal is normal,” Mitchell countered. “We ought to have received you in bulletproof cars, but yesterday a Lincoln was shot up by special armor-piercing bullets, and the Belgian ambassador was injured. So we’re taking these armored vehicles as extra insurance. Tanks would be even better, of course, but the city’s elevated roadways won’t hold up under their weight.”

  *

  It was dark when the motorcade reached the city. The buildings of New York’s skyline gleamed like a miniature Milky Way. Like every child, Huahua had been full of desire to visit one of the world’s biggest cities, and he looked eagerly out the window at the dazzling skyscrapers. But he soon noticed another light flickering in the buildings, the crimson of firelight, and pillars of smoke reaching to the sky. Sometimes a ball of fire rose in the air, and the shadows of the skyscrapers wavered in its magnesium glare. Closer to downtown, he heard the crackle of gunfire, the whine of stray bullets, and the odd explosion.

  The motorcade came to a halt, and they received word that the road was barricaded up ahead. Ignoring warnings, Huahua got out to have a look, and saw sandbags piled up into a fortification that cut off the road. Behind the barricade, children were feeding belts into three heavy machine guns. Dowell was negotiating with them.

  One of the children behind the sandbags waved a handgun and said, “The game won’t be over till midnight. Take a detour!”

  Angrily, the major general said, “Don’t be cheeky. Do you really want me to call in a squadron of Apaches to take you out?”

  Another boy behind the barricade said
, “Why can’t you be reasonable? We’re not playing against you. We arranged it with the Blue Devils this morning. If we don’t play, then we’re the untrustworthy ones, you see? If you really don’t have anyone to play with, then wait back there. We might be done early.”

  Just then Mitchell walked up behind Dowell, and one of the kids behind the barricade recognized him. “Hey, isn’t that the vice president? That might really be a government motorcade.”

  A kid with a shaved head jumped out from behind the barricade and inspected Mitchell and the others from closer up. Then he waved back at the others. “We shouldn’t obstruct official business. Let’s let them pass.”

  The children jumped up and began moving sandbags, but as they were doing so, rapid gunfire sounded from the other end of the street, and then the air around them was filled with the whine of bullets and of armor being struck. Everyone out in the open dove into armored cars or behind sandbags. Du Bin pulled Huahua back into the car, and then they heard a kid behind the barricade shout through a loudspeaker, “Hey, Blue Devil leader! Stop! Stop!”

  The gunfire stopped, and from that same direction came a kid’s voice over a loudspeaker: “Red Devils, what’s the problem? Check your watches. Didn’t we decide to start the game at eighteen thirty Eastern time?”

  “A government motorcade is passing through. It’s a foreign head of state going to the UN General Assembly. Wait for them to leave first.”

  “Okay. Hurry up, though.”

  “Then you all send over a few people to help.”

  “Fine. Here we come. Hold your fire!”

  A few children came running from a grassy slope opposite the road. They threw their weapons down into a pile and helped the others move sandbags. Before long an opening was made. When they were done, the Blue Devil children picked up their guns and headed back, but the shaved-head kid called after them, “Don’t go yet. Help us rebuild the fortification in a bit. Also, two of us got injured just now.”