Not One of Us

by Neil Clarke

  “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 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 God’s medical care. But after that she became even meaner to him.

  One time, God said to Yulian, “Don’t be so anxious. Humans are very smart and learn fast. In only another century or so, the easiest aspects of the Gods’ knowledge will become applicable to human society. Then your life will become better.”

  “Damn. A whole century. And you say ‘only.’ Are you even listening to yourself ?” Yulian was washing the dishes and didn’t even bother looking back at God.

  “That’s a very short period of time.”

  “For you! You think we can live as long as you? In another century, you won’t even find my bones! But I want to ask you a question: how much longer do you think you’ll be living?”

  “Oh, I’m like a candle in the wind. If I can live another three or four hundred years, I’ll be very satisfied.”

  Yulian dropped a whole stack of bowls on the ground. “This is not how ‘support’ is supposed to work! Ah, so you think not only I should spend my entire life taking care of you, but you have to have my son, my grandson, for ten generations and more!? Why won’t you die?”

  As for Qiusheng’s father, he thought God was a fraud, and in fact, this view was pretty common. Since scientists couldn’t understand the Gods’ scientific papers, there was no way to prove their authenticity. Maybe the Gods were playing a giant trick on the human race. For Qiusheng’s father, there was ample support for this view.

  “You old swindler, you’re way too outrageous,” he said to God one day. “I’m too lazy to expose you. Your tricks are not worth my trouble. Heck, they’re not even worth my grandson’s trouble.”

  God asked him what he had discovered.

  “I’ll start with the simplest thing: our scientists know that humans evolved from monkeys, right?”

  God nodded. “More accurately, you evolved from primitive apes.”

  “Then how can you say that you created us? If you were interested in creating humans, why not directly make us in our current form? Why bother first creating primitive apes and then go through the trouble of evolving? It makes no sense.”

  “A human begins as a baby, and then grows into an adult. A civilization also has to grow from a primitive state. The long path of experience cannot be avoided. Actually, humans began with the introduction of a much more primitive species. Even apes were already very evolved.”

  “I don’t believe these made-up reasons. All right, here’s something more obvious. This was actually first noticed by my grandson. Our scientists say that there was life on Earth even three billion years ago. Do you admit this?”

  God nodded. “That estimate is basically right.”

  “So you’re three billion years old?”

  “In terms of your frame of reference, yes. But according to the frame of reference of our ships, I’m only thirty-five hundred years old. The ships flew close to the speed of light, and time passed much more slowly for us than for you. Of course, once in a while a few ships dropped out of their cruise and decelerated to come to Earth so that further adjustments to the evolution of life on Earth could be made. But this didn’t require much time. Those ships would then return to cruise at close to the speed of light and continue skipping over the passage of time here.”

  “Bullshit,” Qiusheng’s father said contemptuously.

  “Dad, this is the Theory of Relativity,” Qiusheng interrupted. “Our scientists already proved it.”

  “Relativity, my ass! You’re bullshitting me, too. That’s impossible! How can time be like sesame oil, flowing at different speeds? I’m not so old that I’ve lost my mind. But you—reading all those books has made you stupid!”

  “I can prove to you that time does indeed flow at different rates,” God said, his face full of mystery. He took out that photograph of his beloved from two thousand years ago and handed it to Qiusheng. “Look at her carefully and memorize every detail.”

  The second Qiusheng looked at the photograph, he knew that he would be able to remember every detail. It would be impossible to forget. Like the other Gods, the woman in the picture had a blend of the features of all ethnicities. Her skin was like warm ivory, her two eyes were so alive that they seemed to sing, and she immediately captivated Qiusheng’s soul. She was a woman among Gods, the God of women. The beauty of the Gods was like a second sun. Humans had never seen it and could not bear it.

  “Look at you! You’re practically drooling!” Yulian grabbed the photograph from the frozen Qiusheng. But before she could look at it, her father-in-law took it away from her.

  “Let me see,” Qiusheng’s father said. He brought the photograph to his ancient eyes, as close as possible. For a long time he did not move, as though the photograph provided sustenance.

  “Why are you looking so close?” Yulian said, her tone contemptuous.

  “Shut it. I don’t have my glasses,” Qiusheng’s father said, his face still practically on the photograph.

  Yulian looked at her father-in-law disdainfully for a few seconds, curled her lips, and left for the kitchen.

  God took the photograph out of the hands of Qiusheng’s father, whose hands lingered on the photo for a long while, unwilling to let go. God said, “Remember all the details. I’ll let you look at it again this time tomorrow.”

  The next day, father and son said little to each other. Both thought about the young woman, so there was nothing to say. Yulian’s temper was far worse than usual.

  Finally the time came. God had seemingly forgotten about it and had to be reminded by Qiusheng’s father. He took out the photograph that the two men had been thinking about all day and handed it first to Qiusheng. “Look carefully. Do you see any change in her?”

  “Nothing really,” Qiusheng said, looking intently. After a while, he finally noticed something. “Aha! The opening between her lips seems slightly narrower. Not much, just a little bit. Look at the corner of the mouth here . . .”

  “Have you no shame? To look at some other woman that closely?” Yulian grabbed the photo again, and again, her father-in-law took it away from her.

  “Let me see—” Qiusheng’s father put on his glasses and carefully examined the picture. “Yes, indeed the opening is narrower. But there’s a much more obvious change that you didn’t notice. Look at this wisp of hair. Compared to yesterday, it has drifted farther to the right.”

  God took the picture from Qiusheng’s father. “This is not a photograph, but a television receiver.”

  “A . . . TV?”

  “Yes. Right now it’s receiving a live feed from that explorer spaceship heading for the end of the universe.”

  “Live? Like live broadcasts of football matches?”

  “Yes.”

  “So . . . the woman in the picture, she’s alive!” Qiusheng was so shocked that his mouth hung open. Even Yulian’s eyes were now as big as walnuts.

  “Yes, she’s alive. But unlike a live broadcast on Earth, this feed is subject to a delay. The explorer spaceship is now about eighty million light-years away, so the delay is about eighty million years. What we see now is how she w
as eighty million years ago.”

  “This tiny thing can receive a signal from that far away?”

  “This kind of super long-distance communication across space requires the use of neutrinos or gravitational waves. Our spaceships can receive the signal, magnify it, and then rebroadcast to this TV.”

  “Treasure, a real treasure!” Qiusheng’s father praised sincerely. But it was unclear whether he was talking about the tiny TV or the young woman on the TV. Anyway, after hearing that she was still “alive,” Qiusheng and his father both felt a deeper attachment to her. Qiusheng tried to take the tiny TV again, but God refused.

  “Why does she move so slowly in the picture?”

  “That’s the result of time flowing at different speeds. From our frame of reference, time flows extremely slowly on a spaceship flying close to the speed of light.”

  “Then . . . can she still talk to you?” Yulian asked.

  God nodded. He flipped a switch behind the TV. Immediately a sound came out of it. It was a woman’s voice, but the sound didn’t change, like a singer holding a note steady at the end of a song. God stared at the screen, his eyes full of love.

  “She’s talking right now. She’s finishing three words: ‘I love you.’ Each word took more than a year. It’s now been three and a half years, and right now she’s just finishing ‘you.’ To completely finish the sentence will take another three months.” God lifted his eyes from the TV to the domed sky above the yard. “She still has more to say. I’ll spend the rest of my life listening to her.”

  Bingbing actually managed to maintain a pretty good relationship with God for a while. The Gods all had some childishness to them, and they enjoyed talking and playing with children. But one day, Bingbing wanted God to give him the large watch he wore, and God steadfastly refused. He explained that the watch was a tool for communicating with the God Civilization. Without it, he would no longer be able to connect with his own people.

  “Hmm, look at this. You’re still thinking about your own civilization and race. You’ve never thought of us as your real family!” Yulian said angrily.

  After that, Bingbing was no longer nice to God. Instead, he often played practical tricks on him.

  The only one in the family who still had respect and feelings of filial piety toward God was Qiusheng. Qiusheng had graduated from high school and liked to read. Other than a few people who passed the college-entrance examination and went away for college, he was the most learned individual in the village. But at home, Qiusheng had no power. On practically everything he listened to the direction of his wife and followed the commands of his father. If somehow his wife and father had conflicting instructions, then all he could do was to sit in a corner and cry. Given that he was such a softy, he had no way to protect God at home.

  6.

  The relationship between the Gods and humans had finally deteriorated beyond repair.

  The complete breakdown between God and Qiusheng’s family occurred after the incident involving instant noodles. One day, before lunch, Yulian came out of the kitchen with a paper box and asked why half the box of instant noodles she had bought yesterday had already disappeared.

  “I took them,” God said in a small voice. “I gave them to those living by the river. They’ve almost run out of things to eat.”

  He was talking about the place where the Gods who had left their families were gathering. Recently there had been frequent incidents of abuse of the Gods in the village. One particularly savage couple had been beating and cursing out their God, and even withheld food from him. Eventually that God tried to commit suicide in the river that ran in front of the village, but luckily others were able to stop him.

  This incident caused a great deal of publicity. It went beyond the county, and the city’s police eventually came, along with a bunch of reporters from CCTV and the provincial TV station, and took the couple away in handcuffs. According to the God Support Law, they had committed God abuse and would be sentenced to at least ten years in jail. This was the only law that was universal among all the nations of the world, with uniform prison terms.

  After that, the families in the village became more careful and stopped treating the Gods too poorly in front of other people. But at the same time, the incident worsened the relationship between the Gods and the villagers. Eventually, some of the Gods left their families, and other Gods followed. By now almost one-third of the Gods in Xicen had already left their assigned families. These wandering Gods set up camp in the field across the river and lived a primitive, difficult life.

  In other parts of the country and across the world, the situation was the same. Once again, the streets of big cities were filled with crowds of wandering, homeless Gods. The number quickly increased like a repeat of the nightmare three years ago. The world, full of Gods and people, faced a gigantic crisis.

  “Ha, you’re very generous, you old fool! How dare you eat our food while giving it away?” Yulian began to curse loudly.

  Qiusheng’s father slammed the table and got up. “You idiot! Get out of here! You miss those Gods by the river? Why don’t you go and join them?”

  God sat silently for a while, thinking. Then he stood up, went to his tiny room, and packed up his few belongings. Leaning on his bamboo cane, he slowly made his way out the door, heading in the direction of the river.

  Qiusheng didn’t eat with the rest of his family. He squatted in a corner with his head lowered and not speaking.

  “Hey, dummy! Come here and eat. We have to go into town to buy feed this afternoon,” Yulian shouted at him. Since he refused to budge, she went over to yank his ear.

  “Let go,” Qiusheng said. His voice was not loud, but Yulian let him go as though she had been shocked. She had never seen her husband with such a gloomy expression on his face.

  “Forget about him,” Qiusheng’s father said carelessly. “If he doesn’t want to eat, then he’s a fool.”

  “Ha, you miss your God? Why don’t you go join him and his friends in that field by the river, too?” Yulian poked a finger at Qiusheng’s head.

  Qiusheng stood up and went upstairs to his bedroom. Like God, he packed a few things into a bundle and put it in a duffel bag he had once used when he had gone to the city to work. With the bag on his back, he headed outside.

  “Where are you going?” Yulian yelled. But Qiusheng ignored her. She yelled again, but now there was fear in her voice. “How long are you going to be out?”

  “I’m not coming back,” Qiusheng said without looking back.

  “What? Come back here! Is your head filled with shit?” Qiusheng’s father followed him out of the house. “What’s the matter with you? Even if you don’t want your wife and kid, how dare you leave your father?”

  Qiusheng stopped but still did not turn around. “Why should I care about you?”

  “How can you talk like that? I’m your father! I raised you! Your mother died early. You think it was easy to raise you and your sister? Have you lost your mind?”

  Qiusheng finally turned back to look at his father. “If you can kick the people who created our ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestors out of our house, then I don’t think it’s much of a sin for me not to support you in your old age.”

  He left, and Yulian and his father stood there, dumbfounded.

  Qiusheng went over the ancient arched stone bridge and walked toward the tents of the Gods. He saw a few of the Gods had set up a pot to cook something in the grassy clearing strewn with golden leaves. Their white beards and the white steam coming out of the pot reflected the noon sunlight like a scene out of an ancient myth.

  Qiusheng found his God and said stubbornly, “Gramps God, let’s go.”

  “I’m not going back to that house.”

  “I’m not, either. Let’s go together into town and stay with my sister for a while. Then I’ll go into the city and find a job, and we’ll rent a place together. I’ll support you for the rest of my life.”

  “You’re a good kid,” God s
aid, patting his shoulder lightly. “But it’s time for us to go.” He pointed to the watch on his wrist. Qiusheng now noticed that all the watches of all the Gods were blinking with a red light.

  “Go? Where to?”

  “Back to the ships,” God said, pointing at the sky. Qiusheng lifted his head and saw that two spaceships were already hovering in the sky, standing out starkly against the blue. One of them was closer, and its shape and outline loomed huge. Behind it, another was much farther away and appeared smaller. But the most surprising sight was that the first spaceship had lowered a thread as thin as spider silk, extending from space down to Earth. As the spider silk slowly drifted, the bright sun glinted on different sections like lightning in the bright blue sky.

  “A space elevator,” God explained. “Already more than a hundred of these have been set up on every continent. We’ll ride them back to the ships.” Later Qiusheng would learn that when a spaceship dropped down a space elevator from a geostationary orbit, it needed a large mass on its other side, deep in space, to act as a counterweight. That was the purpose of the other ship he saw.

  When Qiusheng’s eyes adjusted to the brightness of the sky, he saw that there were many more silvery stars deep in the distance. Those stars were spread out very evenly, forming a huge matrix. Qiusheng understood that the twenty thousand ships of the God Civilization were coming back to Earth from the asteroid belt.

  7.

  Twenty thousand spaceships once again filled the sky above Earth. In the two months that followed, space capsules ascended and descended the various space elevators, taking away the two billion Gods who had briefly lived on Earth. The space capsules were silver spheres. From a distance, they looked like dewdrops hanging on spider threads.

  The day that Xicen’s Gods left, all the villagers showed up for the farewell. Everyone was affectionate toward the Gods, and it reminded everyone of the day a year ago when the Gods first came to Xicen. It was as though all the abuse and disdain the Gods had received had nothing to do with the villagers.