by Cixin Liu
“If those old black-and-white movies hadn’t been playing on TV all day, who would even remember Shirley Temple?”
“That was our campaign strategy!” Benes said with another sweet smile.
“The Democrats are blind.”
Vaughn said, “It’s actually fairly easy to understand. After the war games, the people needed someone more moderate to represent their will.”
Davey frowned in distaste. “And this Barbie doll can represent the will of America? Right now the whole country is consumed by the Antarctic failure. The country is going to slide back into violent games. The crisis facing the republic right now is far more frightening than the Antarctic war, since we could collapse at any moment. At this critical juncture, to put the American children in the hands of this—”
“Mr. Vaughn will find a solution for us,” Benes said with a nod in his direction.
Davey was stunned for a moment, but then nodded thoughtfully. “I get it. Mr. Vaughn is using us as tools to realize his ideas. The country and the world are his stage, and any individual is a puppet whose strings he can pull at will. Yes, that’s what he thinks.…” Then he jumped to his feet in exasperation and pulled an object from his pocket: a full-lug snub-nosed revolver, which he leveled at Vaughn. He said, “You’re far too sinister and frightening. I should blast your brains open. I’ve been fed up with that head of yours for a long time.”
Benes yelped and reached for the alarm, but Vaughn stopped her with a gentle wave. “You’re not going to pull the trigger. If you do, you’re not walking out of this old house alive. You’re an exemplary American. In whatever you do, you act according to one iron law: Outputs always need to exceed inputs. That’s your fundamental weakness!”
Davey put away the gun. “Of course outputs should exceed inputs!”
“But that’s not the way to make history.”
“I’m not making history anymore. I’m tired of it!” Davey said, and bounded to the door, where he took one last look around the Oval Office, where so many of his dreams remained. Then he ran out alone.
Carrying a motorcycle helmet, Davey exited the White House by the back door. He found the Lincoln Town Car he had parked there and got inside. He put on the helmet, and then found a pair of sunglasses in the car and put those on. Then he started the engine and headed off. Just outside the White House a hundred children were gathered, looking to settle their score with him, but his car didn’t attract their attention and they let him pass.
He glanced out at the crowd as he did so and saw they had hung a banner:
HERMAN HERMAN GO AWAY, FRANCES HAS NEW GAMES TO PLAY!
Davey drove aimlessly around the capital. Very little of D.C.’s population was left, since the majority of children had moved in search of work to larger cities with denser concentrations of industry, so apart from the government it was practically a ghost town. It was past nine in the morning, but the city showed no signs of waking up. His surroundings were as silent as the dead of night, which only heightened the impression he had of the city: It was a tomb. He thought fondly of bustling New York. That’s where he came from, and that’s where he’d return.
The Lincoln was too flashy, he thought, and such a high-end thing no longer suited him. He parked it in a secluded spot by the Potomac River and from the trunk retrieved the FN Minimi light machine gun that Vaughn had given him. He checked the translucent plastic magazine; it was almost half full. He hefted the gun level and aimed it at the Lincoln a few meters away, and then ratatatat let fly a burst. The muzzle spurted flame three times, and the recoil dropped him back on his ass. He sat there staring at the car for a moment, and when nothing else happened, pulled himself up by the barrel, adjusted the gas valve to the fastest rate of fire, and again leveled the swaying gun. Again he fired at the car, the rapid reports echoing across the river, and again he fell back onto the ground. There was no reaction from the car. He stood up again, two round dirt stains on the butt of his jeans, and sprayed the car again, emptying the magazine. With a boom the Lincoln burst into flames and started smoking, and Davey crowed “Woohoo!” and bounded away, carrying the gun with him.
* * *
Benes finished clipping her nails and turned to plucking her eyebrows, using tweezers and a small mirror. Vaughn pointed to two buttons on the presidential desk, and said, “Lots of people are very curious about those buttons. The media has even speculated that they are tied to the fate of the nation, and if the president presses one, it will immediately contact all NATO countries. Press the other, and a nationwide war alert is issued, scrambling bombers and dispatching nuclear bombs from their silos … things like that.”
But in fact, one button called for coffee, and the other alerted housekeeping to clean the room. During the time she had spent with Vaughn, Benes had discovered that he was sometimes quite eager to talk to her. He proved a good conversationalist, although he held forth only on insignificant and nonessential topics, and deflected serious matters with practiced evasion.
She said to him, “I know my own strengths, and I don’t share the outside world’s misapprehensions about those two buttons. I’m not too clever, I know that, but I’m better than Davey’s reverse cleverness, at least.”
Vaughn nodded. “You’re certainly clever about that.”
“I’m riding on this horse of history but I’m not holding the reins. It can trot wherever it pleases. Not like Davey, clutching the reins and forcing it to the edge of a precipice.”
Vaughn nodded again. “That’s very wise.”
Benes set down her mirror and looked at Vaughn for a moment. “You’re clever. You can create history. But you need to give me most of the credit.”
“Not a problem,” Vaughn said. “I don’t have any interest in having my name in the history books.”
Benes gave him a playful smile. “I’ve noticed that. Otherwise you’d have been president already. But you still ought to say something to me when you want to make history, so I’m able to speak to Congress and the press.”
“That’s what I’m going to tell you now.”
“I’m listening,” Benes said with another smile, setting down her tweezers and mirror and commencing to paint her nails.
“The world will enter a period of brutal struggle for control. A redivision of land and resources. There’s no returning to the adults’ model of the world. The children’s world will operate on an entirely new concept, a new model that no one can foresee. But one thing is certain: If America wants to command the same position it did in the Common Era, or even if it wishes to survive at all, it must awaken its slumbering might!”
“That’s right. Strength is ours!” Benes said, shaking a fist.
“So, Madam President, do you know the source of America’s strength?”
“You mean it’s not aircraft carriers and spaceships?”
“No—” Here Vaughn shook his head meaningfully. “Those things are extraneous. Our strength took shape earlier, during the opening up of the West.”
“Oh, yeah! Those cowboys were so handsome!”
“They lived lives far less romantic than in the movies. In the Wild West they faced a constant threat of hunger and disease, and their lives were always in danger from attacking wildfires, wolf packs, and Native Americans. With just a horse and a revolver, they rode off smiling into a cruel world to forge the American miracle, pen the American epic, their strength drawn from a desire for hegemony over the new world.
“Those knights of the West were the true Americans; theirs was the true American spirit. That is where our strength derives. But where are those riders now? Before the supernova, our fathers and mothers hid themselves inside the hard shells of skyscrapers, under the impression that they had the world in their pocket. Ever since the purchase of Alaska and Hawaii, they no longer expanded into new territory, no longer dreamed of new conquests, but turned slow and lazy, and the fat on their bellies and necks grew thick. They turned numb, became fragile and sentimental, trembled uncontrollably a
t the slightest casualty in war, and wailed and agitated disgracefully outside the White House. Later, when a new generation saw the world as nothing more than a scrap of toilet paper, hippies and punks became the new symbols of America. Now in the new era, children have lost their way and anesthetize themselves through violent games in the streets.”
Benes asked soberly, “But how can America’s strength be awakened?”
“We need a new game.”
“What kind of game?”
Vaughn then uttered a sentence Benes had never heard him say before: “I don’t know.”
“No!” the girl president exclaimed. “You do know. You know everything! You’ve got to tell me!”
“I’ll think of it, but I need time. Right now I’m only certain of one thing: The new game will be, and can only be, the most imaginative and dangerous game in history, so I hope that you won’t be overly surprised when you hear what it is.”
“I won’t. Come on, think up something soon!”
“Leave me alone here for a while, and don’t let anyone come in. Including you,” Vaughn said, and waved her away.
The president made a silent exit. She headed straight for the basement, to the White House security control center crammed with monitors of all sizes, one of which had a direct view of the Oval Office. No president liked being under surveillance, so the system was only operable in special circumstances with the president’s express permission. The old equipment hadn’t been used in years, and it took the young special agents on duty in the basement quite a while to bring an image up on the screen. Vaughn was standing motionless in front of the huge world map in the office, lost in thought. In the cramped basement room, under the curious gaze of the other children, President Benes stared unblinking at the screen, like a child waiting long into the night on Christmas Eve for Santa to arrive with a sack of toys. One hour passed, then another … all through the afternoon, Vaughn stood there like a statue. Finally losing her patience, Benes turned to the kids on duty and ordered them to notify her immediately if Vaughn made any movements.
“Is he dangerous?” asked an agent with a big-bore revolver at his backside.
“Not to America.”
She had spent the previous day busy with various presidential duties and had not slept a wink the previous night. Now an acute drowsiness hit her, and without knowing it she slept the entire afternoon, waking up only after it was dark. She snatched up the phone and inquired about Vaughn’s status, but the kids on duty in the basement informed her that he had spent the entire day motionless in front of the map; during the entire time he had only murmured one thing to himself: “God, would that I had Wegener’s inspiration!”
Benes hurriedly called in a few advisors to study that statement. One advisor told her that Wegener was a geologist from the Common Era, a German. On one occasion, on his sickbed, bored out of his mind and staring at a map of the world, he suddenly realized that several continental borders matched, giving him an idea: Long ago the surface of the Earth might have had just one continent. It had subsequently been broken up by some unknown force, and the various pieces of the crust had drifted apart, forming the world of the present day. This was the beginning of Wegener’s epochal continental drift theory. There was, Benes realized, no mystery to Vaughn’s words; he was only aching to come up with a continental drift theory of international politics. And so she sent the advisors away and went back to sleep on the sofa.
When she next awoke it was after 1:00 A.M. She grabbed the phone and called the basement, and learned that the weird kid in the Oval Office was still standing motionless. “We wonder if maybe he died on his feet,” one of the special agents said. Benes had them transfer the feed to her room. A shaft of light from the Rose Nebula fell through the window and directly onto Vaughn, who appeared wraithlike with the indistinct map beyond him. She sighed, switched off the monitor, and went back to sleep.
She slept till it was light and she was awakened by the ringing of her phone.
“Madam President, the guy in the office wants to see you.”
Benes flew out the door, still in her pajamas, and raced to the door of the Oval Office, where Vaughn’s ghastly gaze was waiting for her.
“We have a new game, Madam President,” Vaughn said gravely.
“We do? Tell me!”
Vaughn held out his hands, each of which held an oddly shaped piece of paper. She snatched them eagerly to take a look, and then raised her head in confusion. They were two fragments that Vaughn had cut out of a world map: one was America, the other was China.
A VISIT
In a small motorcade heading toward Capital Airport, Huahua sat in the lead vehicle with a bespectacled interpreter next to him. The minister of foreign affairs was in the car behind them, and the third held the US ambassador, an eleven-year-old boy named George Friedman who was the son of a former military attaché. A truck at the rear of the motorcade held an army band, and several of the band members were practicing on their instruments, squawking audibly even at this distance.
Two nights before, the Chinese children in the NIT had received an email from the US president. Its contents were simple:
I really, really want to visit your country. I would like to go immediately. May I?
Best Regards,
Frances Benes
President of the United States of America
When the motorcade reached the airport, a flashing silvery-white dot was already circling overhead. The children in the control tower signaled permission to land, and the dot rapidly increased in size. Ten minutes later, Air Force One touched down. Due to the young pilot’s limited technical abilities, the big metal object bounced back up again a few times before landing for good, and then traced a dangerous S curve right up to the end of the runway, where it finally stopped.
The hatch opened. A few small heads poked out and watched anxiously as the airstair was brought in from a few hundred meters away. Once it was in place, the first to exit was a pretty blond-haired girl whom Huahua recognized from TV news as the new president. Right behind her were a few senior officials he didn’t know. They crowded into each other, jostling into Benes so that she nearly tripped. She righted herself and turned back to them to shake a fist and shout a few words of warning, and they slowed down.
The president continued a graceful descent, keeping a clear picture in mind of the history she was making. At the two-thirds point, a gaggle of reporters with cameras strapped round their necks pushed their way out of the hatch and down the stairs, overtaking the officials. The fastest made it to the ground a step ahead of Benes and turned around to train his lens on her. She erupted into fury, bounded down the rest of the stairs to grab the photographer by the collar, and started shouting angrily at him.
The interpreter told Huahua, “The president says that she was supposed to descend first, so that she would be the first American to set foot in China in the Supernova Era. But the reporter stole it from her. The reporter is arguing that he only came down first so he could get a photo of her, but the president is calling him a jackass, and says that she made it very clear aboard the plane that no one was to go in front of her. They were already being privileged; when Nixon came to China he went down by himself, and when he was shaking hands with Zhou Enlai everyone else was still stuck on board. That reporter is the AP’s old pro in the White House and he’s furious. He’s saying, ‘Who the hell are you? You’ll be gone in four years, but we’ll still be in the White House!’ Now the president is saying, ‘Go to hell. I’ll still be there in four years. I’ll be there in eight. I’ll be there forever!’”
Now all the children had come down the stairs, and the argument had turned physical. The president extracted herself from the scrum and strode over to greet the Chinese children.
“I am overjoyed to meet you on the cusp of the rebirth of human history. Wow, your face is covered in frostbite scars. They’re medals of valor! Do you know that in America there are lots of special beauty salons now that give kids
frostbite scars using dry ice? They do good business!” Benes said to Huahua through the translator.
“I wish I didn’t have these medals,” Huahua said. “They itch like crazy, and I think they’ll be that way every winter. I really don’t want to have to relive that time in Antarctica over and over. Our two countries suffered such immense trouble and loss due to the World Games.”
“That’s why we’re here. We have a new game!” Benes said with a smile and a bow. Then she looked into the distance. “Where’s the Great Wall?” And around her. “And the pandas?” Clearly she imagined that she would see the Great Wall as soon as she set foot in Chinese territory, and that pandas would be as common as dogs are in the US.
Then a thought struck her. Glancing about again, she asked, “Where’s Vaughn?”
It took a few kids shouting back at the plane for a while before Chester Vaughn emerged. He came down slowly, his arms cradling a thick book. “He’s always reading,” she said to Huahua. “He didn’t even realize we’d landed.”
Shaking his hand, Huahua glanced at the book. It was a volume of Mao Zedong’s commentary on the Twenty-Four Histories, a thread-bound Chinese edition.
Vaughn’s eyes were half closed, as if he were in a trance, and he took a deep breath. “It’s the air I’ve dreamed about,” he said.
“What?” Benes asked in wonder.
“The air of antiquity,” he said, practically inaudible to anyone but himself. Then he stood silently in place, detached, taking everything in.
NEW WORLD GAMES
Warily, the children entered the solemn, mysterious hall. Deep red carpets, snow-white armchairs arranged into a large semicircle, and behind them elegant embroidered silk screens and a magnificent cloisonné vase the size of a person … all of it was spotless, and they passed through air so still it felt like swimming through the phantoms of history.