by Cixin Liu
“Yes! What a beautiful age it was!” the others chimed in, their eyes brimming with tears.
The Forerunner could not help but laugh. “You little people really don't understand melancholy. Real melancholy spills no tears.”
“You can show us!” the High Counselor shouted, returning to her exuberant state.
“I hope not,” the Forerunner said, gently sighing.
“Look, this is our monument to the macro-age!” the High Counselor announced as the feathers flew over another square in the city.
The Forerunner saw the monument. It was a massive black pillar, vaguely reminding him of a giant broadcast tower. Its rough outside was covered with countless tiles, each about the size of a wheel. It almost looked as if it had been covered in fish-scales.
Staring at the towering structure, it took the Forerunner a long while to understand: It was a strand of macro-human hair.
CHAPTER
5
The Banquet
Flying upwards, the feather-fliers emerged from the transparent hemisphere, passing through some unseen hole. As they left their city's cover behind, the High Counselor turned to the Forerunner through the video screen in his specs.
“We are now a hundred miles or so from your spacecraft. If we can land on your fingers, you can carry us. It would greatly speed our journey.”
The Forerunner turned his head to his lander, which was right behind him. There was no conclusion to her reference, other than that units of measurement had also shrunk in the micro-age. He stretched out his hand and the feather-fliers landed. They looked like a fine white powder, drifting onto his fingers.
In the video lens he could now see his fingerprints. They looked like massive, semi-translucent ranges of mountains that seemed to swallow these feathers as they floated into their great canyons. The High Counselor was the first to leap from a feather. Immediately she fell, sprawling prone on the Forerunner's finger.
“Your oily skin is far too slippery!” she loudly complained, taking off her shoes. In frustration she tossed them into the distance. Now barefoot, she curiously turned, looking around as the others, too, leapt onto his skin. A sea of people soon gathered between the semi-opaque cliffs of his fingers. By the Forerunner's best guess, there were now more than 10,000 micro-humans gathered on his hand!
The Forerunner raised himself and very, very carefully walked toward his lander, keeping his hand stretched out and steady before him.
He had not even fully entered the lander when the crowd of micro-humans began to shout. “Wow! Just look; a metal sky! An artificial Sun!”
“Don't be so dramatic; you're being silly! This is just a small shuttle. The ship above is much larger!” the High Counselor chastened her people. But she, too, was staring in wonder, turning her head in all directions, and as she turned, the crowd again began singing their strange song:
“Oh, glorious macro-age,
Magnificent macro-age,
Melancholic macro-age,
Oh, vanished vision! In the fires the dream did burn.”
As the lander took off, setting out on its flight to the UNS Ark, the High Counselor finally continued her account of the history of the micro-age,
“For a time, mirco- and macro-society co-existed. During this period the early micro-humans came to fully absorb the knowledge of the macro-world and so we inherited macro-human culture,” she told the Forerunner. “At the same time, the micro-humanity began developing its own extremely technologically advanced society. It was a society based on nano-technology. This transitional era, in-between the macro-age and micro-age, lasted for about…hmm…” the High Counselor's tiny mouth twisted ever so slightly as she recalled. “About twenty generations or so.
“Then, as the Catastrophe approached, the macro-humans ceased bearing children and their numbers dwindled by the day. At the same time, the micro-human population skyrocketed and the scope of our society expanded along with it. Soon it exceeded that of macro-human society. It was at this point that the micro-humans requested that they be handed the reins of global governance. This demand shook macro-society to its core and lead to a powerful backlash. Some diehards refused to surrender political power. They claimed it would have been like a batch of bacteria ruling mankind. It ended with a global war between macro- and micro-humanity!”
“How horrible for your people!” The Forerunner gasped in sympathy.
“Horrible for the macro-humans; they were quickly defeated,” the High Counselor replied.
“However did that happen? A single macro-human with a sledgehammer could obliterate a micro-city of millions,” the perplexed Forerunner objected.
“But micro-humanity did not fight them in its cities, and macro-humanity's arsenal was utterly unsuitable for fighting an unseen enemy,” she told him. “The only real weapon at their disposal was disinfectant. Throughout the history of their civilization they had used it to battle micro-organisms, yet it had never yielded a decisive victory. Now that they were seeking to vanquish micro-humans, an enemy equal to them in intelligence, their chances of victory was even slimmer. They could not track the movements of the micro-armies and so we could corrupt their computer chips right under their eyes. And what could they do without their computers? Power does not come from size,” the High Counselor explained.
The Forerunner nodded in agreement. “Now that I think about it ...”
The High Counselor continued, a fierce fire now burning brightly in her eyes. “Those war criminals met their just fate. Several thousand micro-human special forces armed with laser drills parachuted onto their retinas ...” She let the Forerunner’s imagination do the rest before continuing more calmly. “After the war, the micro-humans had claimed control of Earth. As the macro-age ended, the micro-age began!”
“Very interesting!” the Forerunner exclaimed.
The lander docked with the Ark in low Earth orbit. The micro-humans immediately boarded their feathers-fliers again and began exploring their new surroundings. The enormous size of the spacecraft left them dumbstruck. The Forerunner at first considered their utterances an indication of their admiration, but the High Counselor soon explained her feelings about all this.
“Now we understand; even without the Sun's energy flash, the macro-age could not have endured,” she said. “You consume billions of times more resources than we do!”
“But consider that this spaceship is capable of traveling at near light-speed. It can reach stars hundreds of light-years away. This is something, small people, which could only be produced in the great macro-age,” the Forerunner countered.
“We at the moment certainly cannot create its equal. As of now, our spaceships can only reach one-tenth of the speed of light,” the High Counselor conceded.
“You are capable of space travel?” the Forerunner almost stammered. The sheer surprise was enough to knock the color out of his face.
“Certainly not as capable as you were. The spaceships of the micro-age can reach no further than Venus. In fact, we have just heard back from them and they tell us that as things stand, it seems far more habitable than Earth,” the High Counselor answered, paying no mind to his shock.
“How big are your ships?” the Forerunner asked as he regained his composure.
“The big ones are the size of your age's…hmm…” She paused, searching for the right analogy. “Soccer ball,” she finally said. “They can carry hundreds of thousands of passengers. The small ones, on the other hand, are only the size of a golf ball; a macro-age golf-ball, of course.”
These words shattered the last slivers of the Forerunner's feelings of superiority..
“Forefather, would you please offer us something to eat? We are starving!” the High Counselor asked, speaking for her people as the feather-fliers gathered on the Ark's control console.
The Forerunner could see ten-thousands of micro-humans on his command console, looking at him eagerly.
“I never expected that I would be asked to invite so many to lunc
h,” he answered with a smile.
“We would certainly not want to ask too much of you!” the girl said, bristling with anger.
The Forerunner retrieved a tin of canned meat from storage. Opening it, he used a small knife to carefully scoop out a tiny piece. He then cautiously placed it to one side of the ten-thousands standing on the command console. The Forerunner could make out their position with his naked eye. It was a tiny, circular area on the console, about the size of a coin. This area was just a bit less smooth than the surrounding surface, just as if someone's breath had smudged it.
“Why did you take so much? That is very wasteful!” the Earth's Leader scolded.
Now using a large monitor, the Forerunner could see her; and behind her stood a towering mountain of meat toward which her people were swarming. As they reached the pink massif, they extracted small pieces and ate them.
Looking back to the console before him the Forerunner could not make out even the slightest change in the size of that small piece of meat. On the screen he could see that the crowd had quickly dispersed, some discarding half-eaten pieces of meat on the way. The High Counselor picked a piece for herself and took a bite.
As she chewed she began shaking her head. “This is not very nice at all,” she commented as she finally finished.
“Of course, it was synthesized in the eco-cycler; it isn’t possible to taste any better. It has limited capacities for taste,” the Forerunner acknowledged apologetically.
“Give us some booze to wash it down!” The Earth's Leader raised another request almost immediately. This demand caused a cheer to erupt among the gathered micro-humans. The Forerunner raised an eyebrow; after all, he knew that alcohol could kill micro-organisms!
“You drink beer?” he cautiously asked.
“No, we drink scotch or vodka!” the Earth's Leader replied with gusto.
“Maotai would also do!” someone shouted.
In fact, the Forerunner still had a bottle of Maotai, a bottle he had kept on the Ark ever since its departure from Earth. He had intended it for the day that they found a colonizable world. He fetched it.
Wistfully holding the white porcelain bottle, he removed its cap. He then carefully poured some of the spirits into the cap, and then set it down next to the crowd.
On the screen he could see that the micro-humans had begun to scale the unassailable cliff-face that was the cap. On the micro-scale the seemingly smooth surface of the cap offered many holds. Using the climbing skills they had honed on their home's skyscrapers, the micro-humans were quickly able to ascend to the cap's rim.
“Wow, what a beautiful lake!” the chorus of micro-humans shouted in admiration.
On the screen, the Forerunner could see that the surface of that vast lake of alcohol bulge upward in a giant arc formed by the forces of its surface tension. The micro-human camera operator followed the High Counselor as she first tried to scoop out some of the liquid with her hand. This attempt failed, however, as her tiny arms could not reach. Instead, she then sat herself down on the edge of the cap. From there she let a slender foot scratch the surface of the alcohol. Her delicate foot was immediately encased in a clear bead of liquid. Lifting her leg she used her hands to extract a small drop of alcohol from the bead. She let the drop fall into her mouth.
“Wow!” she exclaimed, nodding in satisfaction. “Macro-age alcohol really is a lot better than our micro-age spirits.”
“I am very glad to hear that we still have something that is better. But, using your feet to drink like that, that's very unhygienic,” the Forerunner noted.
“I don't understand,” she replied, looking up at him in puzzlement.
“You walked around on your bare feet for quite a while; they will likely be covered in germs,” the Forerunner explained.
“Oh, now I see!” the Earth's leader called out. She was handed a box that one of her attendants had been carrying. She opened the box and immediately a strange animal emerged. It was a football-sized round thing with countless tiny, chaotically twitching legs. The High Counselor lifted the creature by one of its small legs and explained. “Look, this is one of our city's gifts to you! A lacto-chicken!”
The Forerunner strained his mind trying to recall his microbiology. “Are you saying that that is a…” He paused in disbelief. “A lactobacillus?”
“That is what it was called in the macro-age. It is a creature that gives yogurt its taste. A very useful animal indeed!” the High Councilor replied.
“A very useful bacterium,” the Forerunner corrected. “But I now understand that bacteria certainly cannot harm you. Our concept of hygiene has become meaningless in the micro-era.”
Earth's Leader shook her head. “Not necessarily. Some animals, ah,” she caught herself, “some bacteria, can seriously hurt us. For example, there are the coli-wolves. Overpowering one of them is a great feat. But most animals, like the yeast-pigs, are quite lovable.” As she spoke, she took another drop from her foot and into her mouth. When she shook off the remains of the alcohol bead from her foot and stood, the High Councilor was already quite tipsy and her speech had begun to slur.
“I really never would have expected that alcohol would still be around!” The Forerunner frowned, genuinely astonished.
“We,” the Earth's Leader said, her speech faltering, “we have inherited all that was beautiful about civilization. But those Macros thought that we had no right.” She stumbled a step. “The right to become the carriers of human civilization,” she slurred. Feeling a bit of vertigo, she plopped herself back down.
“We inherited all of humanity's philosophy – Western, Eastern, Greek and Chinese!” the crowd shouted with one voice.
Sitting, the Earth's leader stretched her hands toward heaven and intoned, “No man ever steps in the same river twice; the Tao gave birth to One. The One gave birth to Two. The Two gave birth to Three. The Three gave birth…” Her words faltered to nothing, but she immediately slurred on: “…Gave birth to all of creation! We appreciate the paintings of van Gogh. We listen to Beethoven's music. We perform Shakespeare's plays! To be or not to be; that is…” Again she slurred. “That is the question.” She again rose, tipsily stumbling as she gave her best Hamlet.
“In our era, a girl like you would have never even dreamt of becoming the world's leader,” the Forerunner noted.
“The macro-age was a melancholic age with melancholic politics. The micro-age is a carefree age. We need happy leaders,” the High Councilor replied, already looking a good deal more sober.
“We have not finished our discussion.” She paused, gathering herself. “Our discussion of history. We had just talked about…” She halted again, thinking. “Ah, yes, war. After the war between macro- and micro-humanity, a world war broke out amongst micro-humanity.”
The Forerunner interrupted in shock. “What? Certainly not for territory?”
“Of course not,” the High Councilor answered. “If there is one thing that is truly inexhaustible in the micro-age, it is territory. It was because of some,” here she again paused, this time for more inscrutable reasons before continuing, “some reasons that a macro-human could not understand. But know that in one of our largest campaigns, the fronts were so large they covered…” She paused a final time. “Oh, in your units, more than three-hundred-feet. Imagine, the battlefield was that vast!”
“You inherited much more from the macro-age than I could have ever imagined,” the Forerunner stated soberly.
“Later, the micro-age focused all of its energies on preparing for the impending Catastrophe. In five centuries we built thousands of super-cities, deep within the Earth's crust. These cities would have looked to you like six-foot-wide, stainless steel balls. Every one could house tens of millions. These cities were built 50,000 miles underground ...”
“Wait just a second; the Earth's radius is just less than four thousand miles,” the Forerunner interjected.
“Oh, I again used our units,” the Earth's leader apologized. “In y
our units it would be about…” She did the calculation in her head. “Yes, half a mile! When the first signs of the Sun's energy flash were observed, the entire micro-world migrated beneath the Earth's surface. Then, then, the Catastrophe struck.
“Four hundred years after the Catastrophe, the first group of micro-humans made their way up through a massive tunnel roughly the size of a macro-era water pipe. Boring their way through the solidified magma with a laser drill, they made it to the surface,” she explained. “It would, however, be another five centuries before micro-humanity could establish a new world for humanity on the surface. When we finally did, we built a world of tens of thousands of cities, a world of eighteen-billion inhabitants.
“We were full of optimism about humanity's future then. It was an all-pervading, boundless optimism that would have been unimaginable in the macro-age. We were optimistic precisely because of our micro-society's tiny scale. It meant that humanity's ability to survive in this universe had been increased many million-fold. For example,” she said, “what was inside that can you just opened could feed our entire city for two years. And the can itself could supply our city with all the metal it needs for those two years.”
“As a macro-human, I now have a much better understanding of the enormous advantages of the micro-age. It’s all just mythic, so very epic!” the Forerunner wholeheartedly extolled.
The High Councilor smiled and continued. “Evolution trends toward the small. Size does not make great. Microscopic life has a much easier time co-existing with nature in harmony. When the giant dinosaurs died out, their contemporaries, the ants, persisted. Now, should another great disaster approach, a spaceship the size of your lander could evacuate all of humanity. Micro-humanity could rebuild its civilization on a smallish asteroid and live comfortably.”
A long silence followed.
Finally, the Forerunner, firmly focusing on that coin-sized sea of humanity before him, solemnly stated, “When I saw the Earth again, when I thought myself the last human in the universe, I was the most forlorn human. My heart was broken and I felt all hope die. No one had ever faced such heartrending straits. But now, now, I am the happiest person alive; at least, I am the happiest macro-human there is. I see that humanity's civilization has persisted. In fact, civilization has achieved much more than just surviving; yours is the true sublimation of civilization! We are all human, hailing from the same strain. So now, I entreat micro-humanity to accept me as a citizen of your society.”