by Cixin Liu
“There are two billion of you. That means every family on Earth would have to take in one or two Gods.” After the Secretary-General spoke, the meeting hall sank into silence.
“Yes, yes, sorry to give you so much trouble…” the god continued to bow, while stealing glances at the Secretary-General and the leaders of all the nations. “Of course, we’re willing to compensate you.”
He waved his cane, and two more white-bearded gods walked into the meeting hall, struggling under the weight of a silvery, metallic trunk they carried between them. “Look, these are high-density information storage devices. They systematically store the knowledge the God Civilization acquired in every field of science and technology. With this, your civilization will advance by leaps and bounds. I think you will like this.”
The Secretary-General, like the leaders of all the nations, looked at the metal trunk and tried to hide his elation. “Taking care of Gods is the responsibility of humankind. Of course this will require some consultation between the various nations, but I think, in principle…”
“Sorry to be so much trouble. Sorry to be so much trouble…” The god’s face was filled with tears, and he continued to bow.
After the Secretary-General and the leaders of all the nations left the meeting hall, they saw that tens of thousands of gods had gathered outside the United Nations building. A white sea of bobbing heads filled the air with murmuring words. The Secretary-General listened carefully and realized that they were all speaking, in the various tongues of Earth, the same sentence:
“Sorry to be so much trouble. Sorry to be so much trouble…”
CHAPTER
4
Two billion gods arrived on Earth. Enclosed in the suits made of special film, they fell through the atmosphere. One could see the bright, colorful streaks in the sky even during the day. After the gods landed, they spread out into 1.5 billion families.
Having received the gods’ knowledge about science and technology, everyone was filled with hopes and dreams for the future, as though humankind was about to step into paradise overnight. Under the influence of such joy, every family welcomed the coming of a god or two.
That morning, Qiusheng and his family and all the other villagers stood at the village entrance to receive the gods allocated to Xicen.
“What a beautiful day,” Yulian said.
Her comment wasn’t solely an expression of her feelings. The spaceships had disappeared overnight, restoring the sky’s wide open and limitless appearance. Humans had never been allowed to step onto any of the ships. The gods hadn’t objected to that particular request from the humans, but the ships themselves refused to grant permission. They did not acknowledge the various primitive probes that Earth sent and sealed their doors tightly. After the final group of gods leapt into the atmosphere, all the spaceships, numbering more than twenty thousand, departed their orbit simultaneously. But they didn’t go far, only drifting in the asteroid belt.
Although the ships were ancient, the old routines continued to function. Their only mission was to serve the gods. Thus they would not move too far. When the gods needed them again, they would come.
Two buses arrived from the county seat, bringing the one hundred and six Gods allocated to Xicen. Qiusheng and Yulian met the god assigned to their family. The couple stood on each side of the god, affectionately supported him by the arms, and walked home in the bright afternoon sun. Bingbing and Qiusheng’s father followed behind, smiling.
“Gramps, um, Gramps god.” Yulian leaned her face against the god’s shoulder, her smile as bright as the sun. “I hear that the technology you gave us will soon allow us to experience true communism! When that happens, we’ll all have things according to our needs. Things won’t cost any money. You’ll just go to the store and pick them up.”
The god smiled and nodded at her, his white hair bobbing. He spoke in heavily-accented Chinese, “Yes. Actually ‘to each according to need’ fulfills only the most basic needs of a civilization. The technology we gave you will bring you a life of prosperity and comfort surpassing your imagination.”
Yulian laughed so much her face opened up like a flower. “No, no! ‘To each according to need’ is more than enough for me!”
“Uh huh.” Qiusheng’s father agreed emphatically.
“Can we live forever without aging, like you?” Qiusheng asked.
“We can’t live forever without aging. It’s just that we can live longer than you. Look at how old I am! In my view, if a man lives longer than three thousand years, he might as well be dead. For a civilization, extreme longevity can be fatal for the individual.”
“Oh, I don’t need three thousand years. Just three hundred.” Qiusheng’s father was now laughing as much as Yulian.
The village treated the day like it was Chinese New Year. Every family held a big banquet to welcome their god, and Qiusheng’s family was no exception.
Qiusheng’s father quickly became a little drunk with cups of vintage huangjiu. He gave the god a thumbs up.
“You’re really something! To be able to create so many living things – you’re truly supernatural.”
the god drank a lot too, but his head was still clear. He waved his hand. “No, not supernatural. It was just science. When biology has developed to a certain level, creating life is akin to building machines.”
“You say that. But in our eyes, you’re no different from immortals who have deigned to live among us.”
The god shook his head. “Supernatural beings would never make mistakes. But we made mistake after mistake during your creation.”
“You made mistakes when you created us?” Yulian’s eyes were wide open. In her imagination, creating all those lives was a process similar to her giving birth to Bingbing eight years ago. No mistake was possible.
“There were many. I’ll give a relatively recent example. The world-creation software made errors in the analysis of the environment on Earth, which resulted in the appearance of creatures like dinosaurs: huge bodies and low adaptability. Eventually, in order to facilitate your evolution, they had to be eliminated.
“Speaking of events that are even more recent, after the disappearance of the ancient Aegean civilizations, the world-creation software believed that civilization on Earth was successfully established. It ceased to perform further monitoring and micro-adjustments, like leaving a wound-up clock to run on its own. This resulted in further errors. For example, it should have allowed the civilization of ancient Greece to develop on her own and stopped the Macedonian conquest and the subsequent Roman conquest. Although both of these ended up as the inheritors of Greek civilization, the direction of Greek development was altered…”
No one in Qiusheng’s family could understand this lecture, but all respectfully listened.
“And then, two great powers appeared on Earth: Han China and the Roman Empire. In contrast to what had happened previously, the two shouldn’t have been kept apart and left to develop in isolation. They ought to have been allowed to come into full contact…”
“This ‘Han China’ you’re talking about? Is that the Han Dynasty of Liu Bang and Xiang Yu?” Finally Qiusheng’s father heard something that he knew. “And what is this ‘Roman Empire’?”
“I think that was a foreigners’ country at the time,” Qiusheng said, trying to explain. “It was pretty big.”
Qiusheng’s father was confused. “Why? When the foreigners finally showed up during the Qing Dynasty, look how badly they beat us up. You want them to show up even earlier? During the Han Dynasty?”
The god laughed at this. “No, no. Back then, Han China was just as powerful as the Roman Empire.”
“That’s still bad. If those two great powers had met, it would have been a great war. Blood would have been spilled.”
The god nodded. He reached out with his chopsticks for a piece of beef braised in soy sauce. “It could have. But if those two great civilizations, the Occident and the Orient, had met, the encounter would have generat
ed glorious sparks and greatly advanced human progress… If only those errors could have been avoided, Earth would now probably be colonizing Mars, and your interstellar probes would have flown past Sirius.”
Qiusheng’s father raised his bowl of huangjiu and spoke admiringly, “Everyone says that the gods have forgotten science in their cradle, but you are still so learned.”
“To be comfortable in the cradle, it’s important to know a bit about philosophy, art, history, etc – just some common facts, not real learning. Many scholars on Earth right now have much deeper thoughts than our own.”
For the gods, the first few months after they entered human society were a golden age, when they lived harmoniously with human families. It was as though they had returned to the childhood of the God Civilization, fully immersed in the long-forgotten warmth of family life. This seemed the best way to spend the final years of their extremely long lives.
Qiusheng’s family’s god enjoyed the peaceful life in this beautiful southern Chinese village. Every day, he went to the pond surrounded by bamboo groves to fish, chat with other old folks from the village, play chess, and generally enjoy himself. But his greatest hobby was going to folk opera. Whenever a theater troupe came to the village or the town, he made sure to go to every performance.
His favorite opera was The Butterfly Lovers. One performance was not enough. He followed one troupe around for more than fifty kilometers and attended several shows in a row. Finally Qiusheng went to town and bought him a VCD of the opera.The god played it over and over until he could hum a few lines of Huangmei opera and sounded pretty good.
One day, Yulian discovered a secret. She whispered to Qiusheng and her father-in-law, “Did you know that every time the gramps god finishes his opera, he always takes a little card out from his pocket? And while looking at the card, he hums lines from the opera. Just now I stole a glance. The card is a photo. There’s a really pretty young woman on it.”
That evening, The god played The Butterfly Lovers again. He took out the photograph of the pretty young woman and started to hum. Qiusheng’s father quietly moved in. “Gramps god, is that your… girlfriend from a long time ago?”
The god was startled. He hid the photograph quickly, and smiled like a kid at Qiusheng’s father. “Ha… Yeah, yeah. I loved her two thousand years ago.”
Yulian, who was eavesdropping, grimaced. Two thousand years ago! Considering his advanced age, this was a bit gag inducing.
Qiusheng’s father wanted to look at the photograph. But the god was so protective of it that it would have been embarrassing to ask. So he settled for listening to the god reminisce.
“Back then we were all so young. She was one of the very few who wasn’t completely absorbed by life in the Machine Cradle. She initiated a great voyage of exploration to sail to the end of the universe. Oh, you don’t need to think too hard about that. It’s very difficult to understand. Anyway, she hoped to use this voyage as an opportunity to awaken the God Civilization, sleeping so soundly in the Machine Cradle. Of course, that was nothing more than a beautiful dream. She wanted me to go with her, but I didn’t have the courage. The endless desert of the universe frightened me. It would have been a journey of more than twenty billion light years. So she went by herself. But in the two thousand years after that, I never stopped longing for her.”
“Twenty billion light years? So, like you explained to me before, that’s the distance that light would travel in twenty billion years? Oh my! That’s way too far. That’s basically goodbye for life. Gramps god, you have to forget about her. You’ll never see her again.”
The god nodded and sighed.
“Well, isn’t she now about your age too?”
The god was startled out of his reverie. He shook his head. “Oh, no. For such a long voyage, her explorer ship would have to fly at close to the speed of light. That means she would still be very young. The only one that has grown old is me. You don’t understand how large the universe is. What you think of as ‘eternity’ is nothing but a grain of sand in space-time.
“Well, the fact that you can’t understand and feel this is sometimes a blessing.”
CHAPTER
5
The honeymoon between the gods and the humans quickly ended.
People were initially ecstatic over the scientific material received from the gods, thinking that it would allow mankind to realize their dreams overnight. Thanks to the interface equipment provided by the gods, an enormous quantity of information was retrieved successfully from the storage devices. The information was translated into English, and in order to avoid disputes, a copy was distributed to every nation in the world.
But people soon discovered that realizing these god-given technologies was impossible, at least within the present century. Consider what would happen if a time traveler had provided modern technological information to the ancient Eyptians, and you will have some understanding of the awkward situation these humans faced.
As the exhaustion of petroleum supplies loomed over the human race, energy technology was at the top of everyone’s minds. But scientists and engineers discovered that the God Civilization’s energy technology was useless for humans at this time. The gods’ energy source was based on the principle of matter-antimatter annihilation. Even if people could understand all the materials and finally create an annihilation engine and generator (impossible to realize within one generation), it would still have been for naught. That was because the fuel for these engines, antimatter, must be mined from deep space. According to the material provided by the gods, the closest antimatter ore source was between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, about 550,000 light years away.
The technology for interstellar travel at near light speed also involved every field of scientific knowledge, and the greater part of the theories and techniques revealed by the gods were beyond human comprehension. Just to get a basic understanding of the foundations would require human scholars to work for perhaps half a century. Scientists, initially full of hope, had tried to search the gods’ materials for technical information concerning controlled nuclear fission, but there was nothing. This was easy to understand: our current literature on energy science contained no information on how to make fire from sticks either.
In other scientific fields, such as information science and life sciences (including the secret of human longevity), it was the same. Even the most advanced scholars could make no sense of the gods’ knowledge. Between the gods’ science and the humans’ science there was still a great abyss of understanding that could not be bridged.
The gods who arrived on Earth could not help the scientists in any way. Like the god at the United Nations had said, among the gods now, there were few who could even solve quadratic equations. The spaceships adrift among the asteroids ignored all attempts at contact from the humans. The human race was like a group of new elementary school students who were suddenly required to master the material of a PhD candidate, and were given no instructor.
On the other hand, the Earth’s population suddenly grew by two billion. These were all extremely aged individuals who could no longer be productive. Most of them were plagued by various diseases, and put unprecedented pressure on human society. As a result, every government had to pay each family living with a god a considerable stipend. Healthcare and other public infrastructure were strained beyond the breaking point. The world economy was pushed to the edge of collapse.
The harmonious relationship between the god and Qiusheng’s family was gone. Gradually, the family began to see him as a burden that had fallen from the sky. They began to despise him, but each for a different reason.
Yulian’s reason was the most practical and closest to the underlying problem: The god made her family poor. Out of all the members of the family, the god also worried the most about her. She had a tongue as sharp as a knife, and she scared him more than black holes and supernovas. After the death of her dream of true communism, she unceasingly nagged the god: before he cam
e, their family had lived so prosperously and comfortably. Back then everything was good. Now everything was bad. All because of him. Being saddled with an old fool like him was such a great misfortune. Every day, whenever she had the chance, she would prattle like this in front of the god.
The god also suffered from chronic bronchitis. This was not a very expensive disease to treat, but it did require ongoing care and a constant outlay of money. Finally, Yulian forbade Qiusheng from taking the god to the town hospital to see doctors and stopped buying medicine for him. When the Secretary of the village branch of the Communist Party found out, he came to Quisheng’s house.
“You have to pay for the care of your family god,” the Secretary said to Yulian. “The doctor at the town hospital told me that if it’s left untreated, chronic bronchitis might develop into pulmonary emphysema.”
“If you want him treated, then the village or the government can pay for it,” Yulian shouted at the Secretary. “We’re not made of money!”
“Yulian, according to the God Support Law, the family has to bear these kinds of minor medical expenses. The government’s support fee already includes this component.”
“That little bit of support fee is useless!”
“You can’t talk like that. After you began getting the support fee, you bought a milk cow, switched to liquefied petroleum gas, and bought a big new color TV! You’re telling me now that you don’t have money for the god to see a doctor? Everyone knows that in your family, your word is law. I’m going to make it clear to you: right now I’m helping you save face, but don’t push your luck. Next time, it won’t be me standing here trying to persuade you. It will be the County God Support Committee. You’ll be in real trouble then.”
Yulian had no choice but to resume paying for the god’s medical care. But after that she became even meaner to him.