The pain got worse with time until it overwhelmed everything. He groped under his pillow for a pain pill, the common, over-the-counter kind, packaged in plastic. They were completely ineffective at relieving the agony of late-stage cancer, but they had a bit of value as a placebo. Demerol wasn’t expensive, but patients weren’t allowed to take it out of the hospital, and even if they were, there was no one to administer the shot. As usual, he pushed two pills out of the plastic strip. He thought for a moment, then pushed out the remaining twelve pills and swallowed them all. He knew he would have no use for them later.
Again, he turned his attention to the blackboard and struggled to write out the lesson, but a cough overcame him. He turned his head to the side, where a child had rushed to hold up a bowl next to his mouth. He spit out a mouthful of red and black blood, then reclined on his pillow to catch his breath.
Several of the children stifled sobs.
He abandoned his effort to write on the blackboard. He waved his hand, and a child came over to remove it from his chest. In a small voice, almost a whisper, he began to speak.
“Like our lessons yesterday and the day before, today’s lesson is meant for middle schoolers. It is not on your syllabus. Most of you will never have a chance to attend middle school, so I thought I would give you a taste of what it’s like to study a subject in greater depth. Yesterday, we read Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman. You probably didn’t understand much of it, but I want you to read it a few more times, or, better yet, learn to recite it from memory. You’ll understand it when you’re older. Lu Xun was a remarkable man. Every Chinese person should read his books. I know all of you will in the future.”
He stopped speaking to rest for a moment and catch his breath. He looked at the flickering candle flame. Another passage of Lu Xun came to him. It wasn’t from Diary of a Madman, and it hadn’t been in his textbook. He had encountered it many years before, in his own incomplete, thumbed-through set of Lu Xun’s collected works. Since the first time he read it, he hadn’t forgotten a single word.
Imagine a windowless, iron room. Many people lie asleep inside. They will soon suffocate and die in their sleep. You shout, and a few hopeless sleepers awaken to a wretched fate that you are powerless to prevent. Have you done them a favor?
Unless you wake them up, what hope do they have of escape?
With the last of his strength, he continued his lecture.
“Today’s class is middle school physics. You may not have heard of physics before. It is the study of the principles of the physical world. It’s an extremely rich, deep field of knowledge.
“We will learn about Newton’s three laws. Newton was an important English scientist who lived a long time ago. He came up with three remarkable rules. These rules apply to everything in heaven and on Earth, from the sun and moon in the sky down to the water and air of our own planet. Nothing can escape Newton’s three truths. With them, we can calculate to the second when solar eclipses—when the ‘sun dog eats the sun,’ as our village elders say—will happen. Humans can fly to the moon using Newton’s three laws.
“The first law is as follows: A body at rest or moving in a straight line at a constant speed will maintain its velocity unless an outside force acts upon it.”
The children watched him silently in the candlelight. No one stirred.
“This means that if you took the grindstone from the mill and gave it a good push, it should keep rolling, all the way to the horizon. What are you laughing at, Baozhu? You’re right, that wouldn’t actually happen. That’s because a force called friction will bring the stone to a halt. There is nowhere in the world without friction.”
That’s right, nowhere in the world without friction—his life, especially. He didn’t have the village surname,2 so his words carried no weight. And he was so stubborn! Over the years he had offended practically everyone in the village in one way or another. He had gone door-to-door persuading each family to put their kids in school, and he had gotten some kids to stop following their parents to work by swearing he’d cover their tuition himself. None of this endeared him to the villagers. The plain truth was that his ideas about how to live were just too different from theirs. He talked all day about things that were meaningless to them, and it annoyed them.
Before he’d learned of his cancer, he had gone once to town and brought back some funds from the Education Bureau to repair the school. The villagers took a bit of the money to hire an opera troupe to perform for two days in an upcoming festival. This bothered the teacher deeply. He went to town again, and this time he brought back a vice county head, who made the villagers return the money. They had already built a stage for the singers. The school was repaired, but that was the end of what little goodwill there was for him in the village, and his life was even more difficult from then on.
First, the village electrician, the village head’s nephew, cut off the school’s electricity. Then they stopped giving the school cornstalks for heating and cooking, forcing him to abandon planting and spend his time in the hills instead, looking for kindling. Then there was the incident with the rafters in the dorm. Friction was omnipresent, exhausting his body and soul, making him unable to move in a straight line at a constant speed. He had to come to a stop.
Maybe the place he was heading was a frictionless world where everything was smooth and lovely. But what was there for him in a place like that? His heart would still be in this world of dust and friction, in the primary school he had devoted his whole life to. After he left, the two remaining teachers would leave, too, and the school would grind to a halt, like the village millstone. He fell into a deep sorrow—in this world or the next, he had no hope of finding peace.
“Newton’s second law is a little tricky, so we’ll leave it for last. His third law is as follows: When a body exerts force on a second body, the second body will exert an equal force on the first body in the opposite direction.”
The children were silent for a long time.
“Do you understand? Who can explain it back to me?”
Zhao Labao, his best student, stood and spoke. “I get the idea, but it doesn’t make sense. This morning I got into a fight with Li Quangui and he hit me right in the face. It really hurt, and I’ve got a lump, right here. Those aren’t equal forces!”
The teacher took a while to catch his breath, then explained, “The reason you hurt is that your cheek is softer than Quangui’s fist. They exerted equal forces against each other.”
He wanted to make a gesture to illustrate his point, but he couldn’t lift his hand anymore. His limbs felt as heavy as iron, and soon his whole body felt heavy enough to collapse the bed and sink into the ground.
There wasn’t much time.
Target Number: 1033715
Absolute Magnitude: 3.5
Evolutionary Stage: Upper Main Sequence
Two planets found, average orbital radii 1.3 and 4.7 Distance Units
Life discovered on Planet One
This is Vessel Red 69012 reporting
The hundred thousand warships of the Carbon Federation’s interstellar fleet had spread out across a ten-thousand-light-year-long band of space to begin construction of the isolation belt. The first stage of the project was the trial destruction of five thousand stars. Only 137 of those star systems had planets; this was the first planet they had found with life.
“The first spiral arm is truly a barren place,” said the High Archon, sighing. His smart field vibrated, initiating a holographic projection that concealed the floor of the flagship and the stars overhead. The High Archon, the fleet commander, and the senator all appeared to be floating in a limitless void. Then, the High Archon switched the hologram feed to display the information sent back by the probe, and a glowing, blue fireball appeared in the middle of the void. The High Archon’s smart field produced a white, square box; it adjusted its shape and moved to enclose the image of the star, plunging the space into near-darkness again. This time, however, a small point of yellow light remained. The focal length of the image adjusted rapidly, and in an instant, the yellow dot zoomed into the foreground, fully occupying half of the void. The three of them were bathed in its reflected, orange radiance.