Supernova Era

by Cixin Liu

  “You’ve got to be joking.”

  “We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?… Now, let’s discuss which country will host the next Olympics. That ought to be a major agenda item for this meeting. If I’m not mistaken, the next city scheduled to host in the adults’ era was Manchester.”

  “Absolutely not!” shouted Green, as if he’d been burned. “Do you really believe England will permit the world’s armed forces to enter its territory and turn it into a battlefield?”

  Davey smiled faintly at the prime minister. “So is the British Empire simply abandoning the honor it fought so hard to win in the Common Era?” Then he turned to the Turkish president. “How lucky you are. If I recall correctly, Istanbul received the second-highest number of votes after Manchester.”

  “No. We won’t do it!”

  Davey looked about him, and then clapped Ilyukhin on the shoulder and pointed down at the prime minister of Canada. “Russia and Canada have the largest uninhabited areas. They’re fully capable of holding the Olympics there.”

  “Shut up!” the Canadian prime minister yelled.

  “Since you all proposed the war games, the Olympics really ought to be held in America,” Ilyukhin said, to a round of applause.

  Davey burst out laughing. “I expected it would come to this. No one wants to hold the greatest Olympics of all time in their own country. But in fact this problem has a simple solution. You’re all forgetting that there’s a place on Earth that doesn’t belong to any country, and is entirely uninhabited. It’s as distant and as empty as the moon.”

  “You mean Antarctica?”

  “That’s right. And don’t forget, it’s not too cold anymore.”

  Huahua said, “That’s a gross violation of the Antarctic Treaty!”

  Davey smiled and shook his head. “The Antarctic Treaty? That’s an adult treaty. It doesn’t affect our play. Antarctica was an icebox that would freeze you to death in the Common Era, and that’s the condition underlying the treaty. If it had the climate it has now, hah! The continent would have been carved up long ago.”

  The heads of state were silent, their minds racing as they realized the true nature of the question before them. Antarctica had turned into a habitable new continent since the supernova, and that fact had not escaped the world’s attention. For the many countries that had lost sizable portions of land to rising waters, that continent was their last hope.

  Davey gazed meaningfully at the young leaders below him. “Once again, I note that participation in the World Games is completely voluntary. Perhaps, as President Ilyukhin said, no one will be willing to attend apart from us. Very well, we’ll go. The American children will go to Antarctica. Now let’s see which country doesn’t want to play!”

  No one said anything.

  “I told you,” Davey said smugly to Ilyukhin. “Everyone wants to play!”

  9

  THE SUPERNOVA WAR

  ANTARCTICA

  A low rumble came across the sea like spring thunder on the horizon.

  “The frequency of the breakaways is increasing,” Huahua said, looking in the direction of the sound.

  There was another rumble, clearer this time, from a collapse on a mountain of ice close to the shore, and they watched as a chunk of the big silver peak plunged into the ocean, kicking up a high spray. Huge waves quickly reached land and swamped a flock of penguins on the beach; the penguins waddled about in a chaotic scramble once the waves receded.

  Lü Gang said, “Last week, Specs and I took the destroyer Huangshan around the barrier, and chunks kept falling off all the time. So much crashing. It’s like the whole continent is melting!”

  “Half the shelf over the Ross Sea has melted. At this rate, Shanghai and New York will turn into Venice in two months,” Huahua said with concern.

  Huahua, Specs, and Lü Gang were standing on the Amundsen coast of Antarctica. They had arrived on Earth’s southernmost continent a month ago. On that day, after their plane had made its final fuel stop on Tierra del Fuego and crossed the Antarctic coastline for the first time, the pilot had said, “Hey, why does the land look like a panda?” From their high altitude the patchy black-and-white land was vastly different from the expanse of silvery white the children had always pictured in their minds. It was a new face for the continent. A ten-thousand-year-old snowpack was melting, revealing the black stone and dirt of the ground beneath. The patch beside the ocean on which the three children now stood was new ground free from snow. The polar sun hung low on the horizon, casting three long shadows behind them. The wind remained cold, but it had lost its bite, and it carried the damp breath of early spring, a flavor previously unknown here.

  “Check this out.” Lü Gang bent down and plucked a small plant from the dirt. It was a weird-looking thing, dark green with thick leaves.

  Huahua said, “Those things are everywhere. I’ve heard they’re prehistoric vegetation, extinct everywhere else in the world. Their seeds were preserved in the Antarctic soil, and now they’ve been resurrected after the climate change.”

  “Antarctica was warm once, long ago. The world keeps on oscillating,” Specs said.

  * * *

  The armies of the countries taking part in the World Games were assembling in Antarctica. So far, 102 army divisions, with roughly 1.5 million soldiers, had arrived, including twenty-five divisions from the US, twenty from China, eighteen from Russia, twelve from Japan, eight from Europe, and nineteen from other countries. Even if they managed only a single company, practically all of the countries in the world were participating. Troops were still coming in by sea and air, and many countries were shipping materials and troops through waypoints in Argentina and New Zealand.

  Since the majority of armies were using Argentina as a transit base and setting off for Antarctica from ports and airports in the southern part of the country, they made landfall across the Drake Passage on the Antarctic Peninsula. But they eventually realized that the peninsula was too narrow for large-scale war games, and so the gaming region was set in the broader region of Marie Byrd Land. In that vast wilderness, countries were at work building their own land bases; to facilitate bringing in supplies directly from the ocean, the bases were clustered near the shore of the Amundsen Sea, along a long, narrow strip between Thurston Island and Cape Dart, spaced anywhere from fifty to a hundred kilometers apart.

  * * *

  The three children watched the breakaways from the shore for a while, and then reboarded one of the three tracked all-terrain vehicles that were waiting. The small convoy set off to the west, heading to the American base for the first meeting of countries participating in the war games. The original plan had been to go by helicopter, but the three young leaders wanted to see the region up close and in person, so they went overland. Passable roads had not yet been cleared between the different countries’ bases, so they had to resort to specialized vehicles originally intended for polar scientific expeditions during the adults’ era.

  The scenery was monotonous. The left-hand side fluctuated between black exposed ground and white snow cover, and the terrain was predominantly level with low-lying hills. To the right was the Amundsen Sea and its host of icebergs, and a surface littered with chunks of various sizes broken off from the ice shelf. Farther out were the ships of various countries at anchor. The Ross and Amundsen Seas now held more than fifteen thousand ships, forming the largest fleet ever recorded in human history. They included aircraft carriers and supertankers, like ocean-borne iron cities, as well as fishing vessels of just a few hundred tons. It was this gigantic fleet that had delivered more than a million people and an enormous quantity of material to this desolate continent, and had replaced the loneliness of the Southern Ocean with crowded noise, as if an endless chain of cities had sprung out of the water.

  After they had driven for over an hour, a spread of field tents and huts appeared alongside the road: the Japanese base. Teams of Japanese children were doing drills on the beach. They sang military son
gs in unison as they marched exuberantly with uniform steps. But what caught the Chinese children’s eye was a huge humpback whale lying on the beach, thick pink slabs of flesh and dark-colored organs visible in its sliced-open belly. A group of Japanese children were clambering over its body like a horde of ants crawling over a fish, hacking away huge chunks of whale meat with power saws, and loading them by crane onto a truck to ship back to camp.

  The Chinese children got out of their vehicle and stood quietly off to one side. The whale, it turned out, was still alive, and its mouth twitched and the one cloudy eye that faced upward, big as a truck tire, stared at them lifelessly. A few Japanese kids emerged from the belly of the huge animal drenched in blood, straining under the effort of carrying a huge, dark red organ: whale liver. The crane loaded it onto a truck, where it filled up the entire bed and quivered there, steaming. One kid holding a paratrooper knife climbed aboard and cut a few pieces off the liver and tossed them out to a pack of army dogs beneath the truck. The entire scene, the circle of bloodstained snow, the vivisected whale, the children on top of it slicing pieces of flesh, the blood-smeared crane and trucks, the dogs wrestling for scraps on the bloody snow, and the ocean, stained crimson by two rivers of whale blood, was a surreal picture of horror.

  Lü Gang said, “The Japanese fleet has been using depth charges against whales in the Ross and Amundsen Seas, stunning them and then dragging them ashore. One charge can stun a whole pod.”

  “A century of efforts to protect the whales could be destroyed in a single day,” Specs said with a sigh.

  A few Japanese children recognized them and jumped off the whale’s body and raised their bloodstained gloved hands in a salute. Then they climbed back up and went back to work.

  Specs said to Huahua and Lü Gang, “I’ve got just one question, and I’d like you to answer me truthfully. When you were young, did you ever truly treasure life, in your heart of hearts?”

  “No,” Huahua said.

  “No,” Lü Gang said. “When I was at the army with my dad, every day when I got out of class I’d play with the boys from the local villages. We’d shoot birds and catch frogs, and when I saw those little creatures die at my hands, I didn’t feel anything in particular. The others were the same.”

  Specs nodded. “Yeah. It takes a lengthy process of life experience to truly appreciate the value of life. In the mind of a child, life doesn’t occupy the same place as in an adult’s. What’s strange is that adults always associate children with kindness, peace, and other wonderful things.”

  “What’s strange about that?” Huahua said, giving him a look. “In the adults’ era, children existed within their restrictions. But more importantly, children had no opportunity to take part as a collective in the cruel struggle for survival, so of course their true nature wouldn’t be exposed. Oh, for the past couple of days I’ve been reading the copy of Lord of the Flies you gave me.”

  “It’s a good book. Golding was one of the few adults who really got children. It’s a shame that the others mostly judged the hearts of children using the measure of great men,* rather than recognizing our basic nature. This was their last and greatest mistake. And that mistake has introduced too many variables into the progress of history in the Supernova Era,” Specs said somberly.

  The three children watched in silence for a while longer before returning to the car and setting off again.

  * * *

  If any adult had survived the supernova, they would have thought they were in a nightmare. When all the world’s nuclear weapons winked out in space in the final days of the Common Era, the coming children’s world was, in the adult imagination, a paradise of global harmony, a world brimming with childlike innocence and friendship, in which the children would join hands kindergarten-style and, out of their innate purity and goodness, build a wonderful new Earth. There were even suggestions that all human historical records be obliterated: “Our final hope is that children retain a decent image of us in their hearts. Should those gentle children look back on our history from their wonderful new world of peace and see all the war, power, and plunder, they will realize what sort of unreasonable, deviant creatures we are.”

  But what the adults could never imagine was that less than a year into the Supernova Era, the children’s world would erupt into a world war. So grim were its rules of competition, so bloody and barbaric its methods, that they were unprecedented not only in the Common Era but throughout the entirety of human history. The Common Era had no cause to worry about its own image in the hearts of children, since what made them unreasonable in children’s eyes was their restraint and moderation, and their patently ridiculous misgivings and moral codes. International law and behavioral norms were cast aside overnight as everything was flung out into the open, and no one felt the need to hide anymore.

  * * *

  China’s high command was initially of divided opinion about sending troops to Antarctica to take part in the war games. The importance of the Antarctic Games was undeniable, but Xiaomeng brought up a pragmatic question: “Our own neighborhood isn’t very stable. India, for example, is only sending one division, and will retain a million-strong army inside the country. Who knows what they’re planning to do? If we want to fully participate, we’ll need to deploy a sizable proportion of army forces, plus at least two-thirds of the navy. Having two of our three fleets far from home will create a local defense vacuum. Add to that the current domestic situation, and the rising ocean levels and widespread flooding along the coast, and other potential large-scale natural disasters that need major support from the military.”

  Huahua said, “Both issues are resolvable. First, India is contained by Pakistan, which will also leave a major force at home. We can launch a diplomatic offensive so that under pressure from other major powers, India will be forced to deploy forces to the games in equivalent measure to us. As for natural disasters, the absence of the military is of course detrimental, but it’s not something we can’t handle.”

  Lü Gang brought up another, more unsettling question. “Our armed forces are intrinsically a force for territorial defense. They are untested and incapable of waging a long-distance, intercontinental war. Our navy, for example, is based on ideas derived from land-war theories. It’s only an offshore defensive force, not a deepwater fighting force. The majority of the ships in the fleet can go no farther than James Shoal, which for a modern navy hardly even counts as leaving the backyard. Now we’ve got to voyage to Antarctica. Before they left, the adults told us time and again not to engage in wars across continents or oceans. You’re all aware of that.”

  “But the world is very different from what the adults imagined. We can’t be inflexible,” Huahua said.

  Specs then laid out his own viewpoint. “If the climate continues to follow the same pattern, half of our country will be drowned or rendered uninhabitably hot. Our future is linked to Antarctica, and so a global contest for the south pole is unavoidable. When the country first contemplated embarking on Antarctic expeditions, one national leader said, ‘In the midst of pressing concerns, taking an idle move like this shows vision.’* But for us, sending the army to Antarctica is not an idle move. It is a matter of urgency, and a mistake may cost us the game.”

  Huahua added, “Set aside Antarctica’s strategic significance for the time being and consider the war games on their own. The outcome may determine seating order in the children’s world.”

  They all agreed that Huahua’s point could have profound implications for the future, and so the question of taking part in the Antarctic Games was settled.

  * * *

  News of the games spread round the country, and it brought the Candytown period to a swift end. The country awoke with a start from its two-month slumber, “as if a tray of ice cubes had been dumped under the covers,” in the words of a later historian. But careful consideration reveals that this was nothing unusual. Nothing is a more powerful stimulant to society than war.

  Apart from exciteme
nt and tension, the new direction that Antarctica gave the children was a major factor in waking them out of the Candytown period. In the children’s minds, the far-off south pole, a wonderfully mysterious place, became their only hope for shaking off the boredom of life. They had faith that their army would be able to win for the Chinese children an expanse of land on the continent, where the children who settled there could start new lives. In the televised broadcast of the order mobilizing troops to Antarctica, Huahua had this to say:

  “Our territory is a paper covered with the adults’ drawings. Antarctica is an empty page where we can sketch whatever we desire, and build the paradise of our dreams!”

  His statement led to a serious misunderstanding. A rumor began circulating saying that the country would simultaneously execute two five-year plans, the boring one drafted by the adults for domestic use, and the glorious one the children had depicted in the virtual country for Antarctica. There they would build their parks. The idea whipped up all of the country’s children into a frenzy. For a time, the “Antarctic Park” was the hottest topic online and in the media, and the entire country focused its attention on the far-off war games. After the mobilization order was issued, the tidiness of the Inertia period returned. Children returned to their jobs and resumed work, and soon the country was humming again.

  * * *

  The Supernova War was the first children’s war in human history, and from the start it demonstrated their society’s idiosyncrasies. The adults of the Common Era had no capacity to imagine a war that took the form of a game and proceeded according to the rules of a sports tournament.