The High Archon said, “It was an era full of passion and yearning. A terrestrial planet was a complete, limitless world to our ancestors. From their home in a planet’s green waters or on its purple grasslands, they looked up at the stars with awe. We have not known such a feeling for tens of millions of years.”
“I feel it now!” said the senator, pointing at the holographic image of Earth. It was a lustrous, blue ball, with white clouds floating above its surface, streaking and billowing. The senator felt as if he had found a pearl in the depths of his ancestors’ ocean home. “Such a small planet, populated by organisms living their lives, dreaming their dreams, completely oblivious to us and to the strife and destruction in their galaxy. To them, the universe must seem like a bottomless well of hopes and dreams. It’s like an ancient song.”
And he began to sing. The smart fields of the three became as one, rippling with rose-colored waves. The song he sang was old, passed down from the forgotten beginnings of civilization itself. It sounded distant, mysterious, forlorn, and as it propagated through hyperspace to the hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy, countless beings heard its sound and felt a long-forgotten kind of comfort and peace.
“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,”3 said the High Archon.
“The most comprehensible thing about the universe is that it is incomprehensible,” said the senator.
There was light in the east by the time the children had finished digging the grave. They tore the door off the classroom and put their teacher’s body on it, and they buried him with two boxes of chalk and a used textbook. They stood a stone slab on top of the mound, and wrote on it in chalk: Mister Li’s Grave.
The faint letters would wash off in the first rainfall, and not long after that, the grave and the person it contained would be forgotten completely.
The tip of the sun rose above the hills, casting a golden ray into the sleeping village. The grass of the valley was still in shadow, but its dew glowed with the light of dawn. A bird or two began timidly to sing.
The children walked along the narrow road back into the village. Their little shadows soon disappeared into the pale blue morning mist of the valley.
They were going to live their lives on that ancient, barren land, and though their harvests would be meager, they would always have hope.
1 A form of dowry payment in some rural areas of northwestern China, meant to compensate the bride’s mother for the pain of having borne her.
2 In many Chinese villages, residents share a common, ancestral surname.
3 Albert Einstein, Physics and Reality.
THE TIME MIGRATION
MIGRATION
An Open Letter to All People
Due to insupportable environmental and population pressures, the government has been forced to undertake a time migration. A first group of 80 million time-migrants will migrate 120 years.
The ambassador was the last to leave. She stood on empty ground before an enormous cold-storage warehouse that held four hundred thousand frozen people, as did another two hundred like it throughout the world. They resembled, the ambassador thought with a shudder, nothing so much as tombs.
Hua was not going with her. Although he met all of the conditions for migration and possessed a coveted migration card, he felt an attachment to the present world, unlike those headed toward a new life in the future. He would stay behind and leave the ambassador to travel 120 years on her own.
The ambassador set off an hour later, drowned by liquid helium that froze her life at near absolute zero, leading eighty million people on a flight along the road of time.
THE TREK
Outside of perception time slipped past, the sun swept through the sky like a shooting star, and birth, love, death, joy, sorrow, loss, pursuit, struggle, failure, and everything else from the outside world screamed past like a freight train…
…10 years… 20 years… 40 years… 60 years… 80 years… 100 years… 120 years.
STOP 1: THE DARK AGE
Consciousness froze along with the body during zero-degree supersleep, leaving time’s very existence imperceptible until the ambassador awoke with the impression that the cooling system had malfunctioned and she had thawed out shortly after departure. But the atomic clock’s giant plasma display informed her that 120 years had passed, a lifetime and a half, rendering them time’s exiles.
An advance team of one hundred had awakened the previous week to establish contact. Its captain now stood next to the ambassador, whose body had not yet recovered enough for speech. Her inquiring gaze, however, drew only a head shake and forced smile from the captain.
The head of state had come to the freezer hall to welcome them. He looked weatherworn, as did his entourage, which came as a bit of a surprise 120 years into the future. The ambassador handed over the letter from the government of her time and passed on her people’s greetings. The head said little, but clasped the ambassador’s hand tightly. It was as rough as his face, and gave the ambassador the sense that things had not changed as much as she had imagined. It warmed her.
But the feeling vanished the moment she left the freezer. Outside was all black: black land, black trees, a black river, black clouds. The hovercar they rode in swirled up black dust. A column of oncoming tanks formed a line of black patches moving along the road, and low-flying clusters of helicopters passing overhead were groups of black ghosts, all the more so since they flew silently. The earth seemed scorched by fire from heaven. They passed a huge hole as large as an open-pit mine from the ambassador’s time.
“A crater.”
“From a… bomb?” the ambassador said, unable to say the word.
“Yes. Around fifteen kilotons,” the head of state said lightly, as if the misery was unremarkable for him.
The atmosphere of the cross-time meeting grew weighty.
“When did the war start?”
“This one? Two years ago.”
“This one?”
“There’ve been a few since you left.”
Then he changed the subject. He seemed less like a younger man from the future than an elder of the ambassador’s own time, someone to show up at work sites or farms and gather up every hardship in his embrace, letting none slip by. “We will accept all immigrants, and will ensure they live in peace.”
“Is that even possible, given the present circumstances?” The question was put by someone accompanying the ambassador, who herself remained silent.
“The current administration and the entire public will do all they can to accomplish it. That’s our duty,” he said. “Of course, the immigrants must do their best to adapt. That might be hard, given the substantial changes over one hundred and twenty years.”
“What kind of changes?” the ambassador asked. “There’s still war, there’s still slaughter…”
“You’re only seeing the surface,” a general in fatigues said. “Take war for example. Here’s how two countries fight these days. First, they declare the type and quantity of all of their tactical and strategic weapons. Then a computer can determine the outcome of the war according to their mutual rates of destruction. Weapons are purely for deterrence and are never used. Warfare is a computer execution of a mathematical model, the results of which decide the victor and loser.”