by Cixin Liu
Huahua said, “All our hopes are on the ocean now. Time is too tight to transport so many people by air even if the routes were passable. The critical question is how to deal with the frozen harbors.”
Davey asked Ilyukhin, “When can your icebreakers get here?”
“They’re in the middle of the Atlantic. It’ll be ten days at the earliest before they make it here. Don’t count on them.”
“How about blasting a channel through the ice with heavy bombers?” Ōnishi suggested.
Davey and Ilyukhin shook their heads, and Scott said, “Bombers can’t even get off the ground in this weather.”
Lü Gang asked, “Aren’t the B-2 and Tu-22 all-weather bombers?”
“Pilots aren’t all-weather.”
Marshal Zavyalova nodded. “The adults didn’t actually think that all-weather meant wretched stuff like this. Besides, even if they did take off, visibility is so poor that it would be impossible to blast a precise channel. They’d just punch a few holes in the ice, and ships still couldn’t get in.”
“What about large-caliber naval guns? Or mines?” Pierre ventured.
The generals shook their heads. “Same problem with visibility. Even if they could make a navigable channel, there’s not enough time.”
“Besides,” Huahua said, “it’ll damage the ice surface and render the one viable solution impossible.”
“What solution?”
“Walking across the ice.”
*
The several kilometers of snow-blown coastline was densely dotted with abandoned cars and hastily erected tents, all covered in a thick layer of snow that made it a piece with the snowy plain behind and the frozen ocean on either side. When the children saw the group of young leaders walking toward them along the coast, they came out of tents and cars and ran over, surrounding them with a huge crowd of people. The children were shouting something, but their words were carried away by the wind. A few Chinese children were close to Huahua and Specs, and called to them, “Class Monitor, Studies Rep, what are we going to do?”
Huahua didn’t reply immediately, but climbed on top of a tank buried in the snow next to them and shouted down to the crowd below, “Children, walk across the ice. Walk to the edge of the ice shelf, where lots of ships are waiting for us!” He realized his voice wasn’t carrying very far in the gale, and crouched down to say to the nearest kid, “Pass that on back!”
His words spread through the crowd, passing to other nationalities through translation units, or through gestures that made his meaning clear enough to keep it from getting distorted.
“Have you gone crazy, CM? The wind is so stiff out on the ocean and the ice is so slippery, we’ll be blown away like sawdust!” yelled one of the children.
Specs said, “If everyone holds hands, we won’t blow away. Pass that back.”
And so, lines of children soon appeared out on the ice, almost a hundred in each, all holding hands and walking through the blizzard. As they crept away from the shoreline they looked like stubborn wriggling bugs. The line of national leaders advanced onto the ice first. Huahua had Davey to his left and Specs to his right, followed by Ilyukhin. Dense, windblown snow tumbled over their feet, making the children feel as if they were walking through the white deluge of surging rapids.
“So that’s how this period of history ends,” Davey said to Huahua through his translation unit, with the volume turned to maximum.
Huahua replied, “That’s right. Our adults had an old saying, ‘This too shall pass.’ No matter how hard things might get, time always just keeps going forward.”
“Makes sense. But things are going to be even harder. The passion that Antarctica sparked in children’s hearts has turned to disappointment, and American society may lapse back into violent games.”
“Chinese children might return to their indifferent stupor, and the interrupted Candytown might return.” He sighed. “It’s gonna be tough.”
“But I might not be involved in any of that.”
“Is Congress really going to impeach you?”
“Those sons of bitches!”
“But you might end up luckier than me. A head of state isn’t a job for anyone.”
“Yeah. Who would have thought that a thin page of history could fold up to be so thick?”
Huahua didn’t quite get Davey’s last reference, and he didn’t bother to explain. The bitter cold and strong ocean wind prevented them from speaking, and it was all they could do to keep moving forward, or occasionally help up companions who slipped on the ice.
*
A little more than one hundred meters away from Huahua, Second Lieutenant Wei Ming was also trudging arduously through the blizzard. During a sudden lull in the wind, he heard the call of a cat. At first he thought it was just a figment of his imagination, but when he looked around he noticed a stretcher he had just passed on the ice. It was buried in the snow and he had mistaken it for a snowdrift. The meowing was coming from underneath. He left his column and slipped and slid over to the stretcher, where the cat had jumped down and was shivering in the snow. He picked it up, and then recognized it: Watermelon.
Pulling the army blanket off the stretcher, he saw Morgan lying there, clearly seriously wounded. Her face wore a white beard of frost, and her eyes glittered with fever. She didn’t appear to recognize Wei Ming, and when she spoke a few words, her voice was as weak as a thread in the driving wind. Without a translation unit, Wei Ming couldn’t understand her anyway. He tucked the cat back under the blanket, pulled it over Morgan, and then went around to the front of the stretcher and started pulling. He made slow progress; when the next column of children caught up to him, a few members broke away and came over to help him carry the stretcher forward.
*
For ages, swirling snow was all the children could see in the expanse of white around them, and although they strove to move forward, they felt as if they were frozen in place on the ice. But just as they were too numb to move, hazy black silhouettes of ships appeared ahead of them, and they were informed via radio not to proceed any farther. They had reached the edge of the ice shelf, where the ice was not frozen solid, and they could fall through at any time. The ships would dispatch landing craft and hovercraft to fetch them. By the time they received the message, over a thousand children had already fallen through crevasses into the icy sea, but the vast majority of them managed to reach the edge of the ice.
Smaller black shadows, separate from the distant fleet, gradually took shape through the snow, dozens of landing craft pushing through the floating ice. When they reached the solid ice, they opened their rectangular maws to let the children swarm aboard.
*
Wei Ming and the other children carried the stretcher onto one of the landing craft. It was a vessel especially for the wounded, so his companions left at once and he never knew what countries they were from. Under the cabin’s dim yellow light, Wei Ming saw Morgan staring blankly at him from the stretcher. She clearly hadn’t recognized him yet, so Wei Ming picked up Watermelon and said, “You can’t take care of him anymore. Why don’t I take him with me to China?” He set the cat down and let it lick its master’s face. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. We went through so many devilish games and made it out alive, and life will go on. We’ve survived the impossible, so blessings must be in store. Goodbye.” Then he put Watermelon into his backpack and left the boat.
*
Huahua and a few generals from other countries were coordinating the boarding, and preventing the children who were temporarily unable to board from crowding too far forward and collapsing the ice shelf with their numbers. Farther back on the ice, children from different countries clustered together into large masses to shelter from the cold as they waited. All of a sudden Huahua heard someone call his name, and he turned around to see Wei Ming. The two former classmates embraced.
“You came to Antarctica too?” Huahua asked incredulously.
“I came a year ago with B Group Army’s advanc
e team. I’ve actually seen you and Specs quite a few times from far off, but it didn’t feel right to disturb you.”
“Out of our class, I think Wang Ran and Jin Yunhui also joined the army.”
“Correct. They came to Antarctica too,” Wei Ming said, his expression faltering.
“Where are they now?”
“Wang Ran was evacuated last month with the first batch of wounded, but I don’t know if he made it back home. He was seriously injured in the tank games. He managed to stay alive, but his spine was severed, and he’ll probably never walk again.”
“Oh . . . and Jin Yunhui? I recall he was a fighter pilot?”
“Correct. A J-10 in the First Airborne Division. His fate was much happier. He crashed into a Su-30 during a fighter game, and both planes were blown to bits. He was posthumously awarded a Nebula medal, but everyone knows he only hit the enemy plane by accident.”
To cover up his own sadness, Huahua asked another question: “Any other kids from our class?”
“We kept in touch the first few months, but by the start of Candytown, most of them, like all the other kids, left their assigned jobs. I don’t know where they ended up.”
“Didn’t Ms. Zheng leave a kid behind?”
“Correct. At first, Feng Jing and Yao Pingping were looking after him. Xiaomeng sent someone to look for the kid, but Ms. Zheng’s final instructions were ‘You may not use your connections to give him any special treatment,’ and so they didn’t let anyone find him. At the start of Candytown, the kid’s nursery was hit by an epidemic, and he ran a high fever. He survived, but the fever took away his hearing. The nursery was disbanded near the end of Candytown, and the last time I saw Feng Jing, she said he had been transferred to another one. No one knows where he is now.”
Huahua was too choked up to speak. A deep sadness came over him, and the numbness he had begun to acquire at the harsh pinnacle of power instantly melted away.
“Huahua,” Wei Ming said, “do you still remember our graduation party?”
Huahua nodded. “How could I forget?”
“Specs talked about how the future can’t be predicted. Anything could happen. He proved it using chaos theory.”
“That’s right. He also mentioned the uncertainty principle . . .”
“Who would have thought back then that we’d run across each other in a place like this?”
Huahua could no longer hold back his tears. The wind blew them cold on his face almost immediately, and then they froze. He looked up at his classmate. Wei Ming’s eyebrows were white with ice, and the skin on his face was dark and rough and patchy with scars and frostbite and the visible and invisible nicks and scratches left by life and war. His child’s face was already weathered by time.
“We’ve grown up, Wei Ming,” Huahua said.
“Correct. But you’ve got to grow up faster than us.”
“It’s hard for me. And for Specs and Xiaomeng, too.”
“Don’t let anyone know. You can’t let the country’s children know that.”
“And I can’t talk to you about it?”
“I can’t help you, Huahua. Give my regards to Specs and Xiaomeng. You’re the glory of our class. The absolute glory.”
“Take care of yourself, Wei Ming,” Huahua said with feeling as he shook his classmate’s hand.
“You too.” Wei Ming gripped his hand for a moment, and then turned and disappeared into the snow.
*
Davey boarded the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis. Anchored close to shore, this supercarrier launched in the 1990s was a black iron island in the blizzard. Across the runway on the snow-covered flight deck, Davey heard the sound of shots from the gun platform, and asked the captain who had greeted him what was going on.
“Lots of kids from other countries want to board. Marines are preventing them.”
“You dumbass!” Davey roared. “Let every kid aboard who can, no matter where they come from!”
“But . . . Mr. President, that’s impossible!”
“That’s an order! Tell those marines to get the hell away!”
“Mr. President, I have to be responsible for the safety of John C. Stennis.”
Davey smacked the captain across the head, knocking off his hat. “And you’re not responsible for the lives of the kids on the ice? You’re a criminal!”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President. As captain I cannot execute your order.”
“I am the commander in chief of the United States of America, for the time being at least. If I so desired, I could have you thrown into the sea this instant, just like your hat. Dare me to try?”
The captain hesitated, and then said to a marine captain, “Tell your people to withdraw. Let anyone who wants to come aboard.”
An unending stream of children from different countries surged up the gangway and onto the deck. The wind was fiercer here, and the leeward side of fighter jets was the only respite from it. Lots of children had fallen into the ocean while boarding the landing craft, and their soaked clothing had now frozen into sparkling coats of ice.
“Let them into the cabins. These kids won’t last long out here before they freeze to death,” Davey said to the captain.
“Can’t do that, Mr. President. The cabins are full to bursting with the American kids who came aboard first.”
“And the hangars? There’s tons of space in there, enough for a few thousand people. Are those full too?”
“They’re full up with planes!”
“Then bring the planes up onto the flight deck.”
“Impossible. The flight deck already has too many other fighters that the horrible weather forced to make an emergency landing here. See, the elevator to the hangars is completely blocked!”
“Then push them into the sea!”
And so, one after another, the ten-million-dollar fighter planes were pushed over the side of John C. Stennis and into the ocean, and the broad flight deck quickly filled with more planes brought up from the hangars on the enormous elevator. The international group of children left the deck for the warm refuge of the cavernous hangars, which soon held thousands of occupants. Once the children had warmed up a bit, they gasped in wonder at the sheer size of the carrier. But on the flight deck out in the snowstorm, over a hundred drenched children had frozen to death.
*
The final evacuation took three days, and then the huge fleet of more than fifteen hundred ships carrying the last three hundred thousand children off of the continent split into two groups bound for Argentina and New Zealand. More than thirty thousand children succumbed to the cold during the evacuation, the last group of casualties in the Supernova War to die in Antarctica.
The Amundsen Sea returned to its empty state free of its covering of ships. The snow had stopped, but the wind was as fierce as ever, scouring the cold air over the water. As the sky cleared up and a crack appeared in the clouds over the horizon, the newly risen sun shed golden light over Antarctica, onto the deep blanket of snow that now covered the once-exposed rocks and dirt. Perhaps, in some distant future, crowds of people would again set foot on this frigid land in search of the snow-covered bodies of five hundred thousand children, the wreckage of countless tanks, and the two ten-kilometer craters the nuclear blasts left behind. During the continent’s brief springtime, three million children from all over the world had fought each other amid flames and explosions, unleashing their lust for life. But now the epic tragedy of the Supernova War seemed little more than a bad dream in the long night, a mirage beneath the brilliant southern lights. In daylight, the land was a lonely expanse of white. It was as if nothing had ever happened.
* An inversion of an aphorism from the Zuo Zhuan, which warns against ascribing mean motives to virtuous people.
† Wu Heng (1914-1999), a geologist who chaired the National Antarctic Research Committee (later the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration) in the early eighties ahead of China’s first expedition, attributed this remark to Marshal Chen Yi
(1901-1972).
10
GENESIS
A NEW PRESIDENT
Davey burst into the Oval Office in a panic, and then let out a long sigh. He picked at the frostbite patches on his face, the mark carried by most children who returned from Antarctica. The girl Benes was sitting in the high-backed presidential chair leisurely clipping her nails. When she saw Davey enter, she rolled her eyes and said, “Mr. Herman Davey, you’ve been impeached and have no authority to return to this office. And in fact, you don’t have any authority to be in the White House at all.”
Davey rubbed his temples and said, “I want to leave, but that pack of thugs out there want to kill me!”
“You deserve it. You screwed everything up. You’ve done a worse job than any president in US history.”
“You . . . you have no right to say that to me! Why are you sitting in the presidential chair? You think you can just ignore etiquette when I’m away?”
Benes looked up at the ceiling. “You’re the one who needs to pay attention to etiquette.”
Davey was about to explode when Vaughn came in and said, “What you probably don’t know is that Frances Benes was elected the second president of the United States of the Supernova Era.”
“What?” Davey exclaimed, staring at the blond-haired girl clipping her nails in that hallowed seat. He looked back at Vaughn, and then burst out laughing. “Don’t joke around. That idiot doesn’t even know how to count!” He chuckled.
Benes furiously smacked the table, but then held her hand to her mouth to soothe the pain. Then she pointed a finger at Davey and said sharply, “Shut your mouth or you’ll be charged with defaming the president!”
“You’ve got to be responsible to the republic!” Davey said, pointing at Vaughn.
“She’s the choice of all American children. The new president was selected in a fair election.”
Davey spat in Benes’s direction. “When we were off facing death in Antarctica, you were back here flirting with the media!”