This cleaner had spent a month in the village two years ago, and Xiuxiu had somehow wound up with him. Her family turned a blind eye. The rough walls of her family’s home were covered in melon seeds and scratched tallies of her father’s debts over the years. Xiuxiu hadn’t gone to school, but she had an affinity for people who could read. He knew that was the main reason she had initially been attracted to him. But the village boy gave her bottles of perfume, gold-plated necklaces, and eventually won her over.
“Being able to read won’t put food on the table,” she told him. He knew it could, but with his job, it wasn’t good food, especially compared to what the cleaner could give her. So, he’d had no response. Xiuxiu had walked out the door and left only the smell of her perfume, which made him scrunch up his nose.
A year after marrying the village boy, Xiuxiu died in childbirth. He still remembered the midwife holding her rusty forceps over a flame for a second before poking them inside her. Xiuxiu’s blood filled the copper basin beneath her. She died on the way to the town hospital. The village boy had spent thirty thousand yuan on the wedding, and it had been a spectacle like nothing the village had seen. Why wasn’t he willing to part with a little more money so Xiuxiu could give birth in the hospital? He had asked around about the cost of delivering a child in the hospital. It was only two or three hundred yuan. But the village had its ways, and no villager had ever gone to the hospital to give birth. No one blamed the boy. They threw up their hands and said it was her fate. He heard later that compared to the cleaner’s mother, Xiuxiu had been lucky. His mother had gone into obstructed labor. When the cleaner’s father heard from the midwife that the child was a boy, he’d chosen to save the child. His mother was placed on the back of a donkey and driven around in circles, in order to spin the baby out. People who were there said that there was a ring of her blood in the dust.
The teacher took a deep breath and felt the ignorance and despair of the village sitting heavily on his chest. It was an ever-present sensation, and even here in the city he felt it just as strongly.
There was still hope for the children, he told himself, even as they sat in the freezing classroom in the winter and looked at the blackboard by candlelight. He was the candle. For as long as he could, with as much brightness as he could muster, he would burn, body and soul, for those children.
Eventually, he had risen from the city sidewalk and continued walking for a while, before stepping into a bookstore. The city was a good place—it even had bookstores that were open at night. There he spent all the money he had brought on books for the school’s tiny library, saving for himself only enough to cover the fare home. In the middle of the night, clutching two heavy bundles of books, he had boarded the train.
In the center of the Milky Way, fifty thousand light-years from Earth, an interstellar war that had lasted for twenty thousand years was nearing its resolution.
A square-shaped, starless region was visible there, as distinctly as if it had been cut from the background of shining stars with a pair of scissors. Its sides were six thousand miles long, and its interior was blacker even than the blackness of space—a void within a void. Several objects began to emerge from within the square. They were of various shapes, but each was as large as Earth’s moon, and their color was a dazzling silver. As more appeared, they took on a regular, cube-shaped formation. The cube of objects continued to emerge from the square, a mosaic set into the eternal wall of the universe itself, whose base was the complete, velvet blackness of the square and whose tiles were the luminescent silver objects. They were like a cosmic symphony given physical form. Slowly, the black square dissolved back into the stars, leaving only the cube-shaped array of silver objects floating ominously.
The interstellar fleet of the Galactic Federation of Carbon-Based Life had completed the first space-time warp of its journey.
The High Archon of the Carbon Federation looked out from the fleet’s flagship onto a metallic, silver landscape. An intricate network of paths snaked across the land like circuits etched into an infinitely wide, silver circuit board. Teardrop-shaped craft appeared occasionally on the surface of the land; they shot at blinding speed along the paths, and after a few seconds, noiselessly disappeared into ports that suddenly opened in the surface to receive them. Cosmic dust had clung to the fleet during its warp travel; it formed clouds over the landscape that glowed faintly red as they ionized.
The High Archon was known for his cool demeanor. The endlessly tranquil, azure smart field that usually surrounded him was like a symbol of his personality. At this moment, however, traces of yellow light emerged from his smart field, as they did from the fields of the people around him.
“It’s finally over.” The High Archon’s smart field vibrated, transmitting his message to the senator and the fleet commander, who stood on either side of him.
“Yes, it’s over. This war went on too long—so long that we have forgotten its beginning,” the senator replied.
The fleet began to cruise at sub-light speed. The ships’ sub-light engines engaged simultaneously, and thousands of blue suns suddenly appeared around the flagship. The silver land below them reflected the engines’ lights like an edgeless, infinite mirror, and each blue sun was doubled in the reflection.
The beginning of the war was a distant, ancient memory, and though it seemed to have been burned away in the fighting, no one had truly forgotten it. It was a memory that had passed through hundreds of generations, but to the trillion citizens of the Carbon Federation, it was still vivid, engraved into their hearts and minds.
Twenty thousand years earlier, the Silicon-Based Empire had launched a full-scale attack against the Carbon Federation from the periphery of the galaxy. The Empire’s five million warships leapt from star to star along the ten-thousand-light-year-long battlefront. Each ship first drew power from its star to open a wormhole through space-time, then traveled through the wormhole to another star, which it likewise harnessed to create another wormhole and continue its travel.
Opening a wormhole depleted a large amount of a star’s energy and shifted its light toward the red end of the spectrum. After the ship had jumped, the star’s light would gradually return to its original state. The collective effect of millions of ships traveling in this way was terrifying. A band of red light ten thousand light-years long appeared at the edge of the galaxy and began moving toward its center, invisible to light-speed observations but clearly visible on hyperspace monitors. The band, created by the red-shifted light of stars, rushed toward the borders of Carbon Federation space, a tide of blood ten thousand light-years across.
The first Carbon Federation planet to be hit by the vanguard of the Silicon Empire forces was Greensea. It was a beautiful planet that orbited a pair of binary stars. Its surface was covered completely by ocean, on which floated great forests of soft, long, vine-like plants. These forests were home to the temperate, beautiful inhabitants of Greensea, who, swimming lithely among the plants with their crystal-clear bodies, had created an Edenic civilization. Tens of thousands of harsh beams of light suddenly pierced the sky of the planet—the lasers of the Silicon Empire fleet—and began evaporating the ocean. In a short time, Greensea’s surface became a boiling cauldron, and all life on the planet, including its five billion inhabitants, died in agony in the boiling water. The ocean was completely evaporated in the end, and Greensea, which had once been so beautiful, was left a hellish, gray planet, shrouded in thick steam.
There was virtually nowhere in the galaxy untouched by the war. It was a ruinous fight for survival between carbon-based and silicon-based civilization. Yet neither side had expected the war to last twenty thousand galactic years!