“Boring, useless knowledge. Your breeder turns a blind eye to your classes because their spiritual effects improve the bug-bugs’ meat quality…. From what I’ve observed, you think highly of yourself and give little notice to others. They must be very interesting traits for a head of livestock to have.”
“All poets are like this!” Yi Yi stood tall in the pocket. Even though he knew that Bigtooth couldn’t see, he raised his head proudly.
“Did your ancestors participate in the Earth Defense War?”
Yi Yi shook his head. “My ancestors from that era were also poets.”
“The most useless kind of bug-bug. Your kind was already rare on Earth back then.”
“They lived in the world of their innermost selves, untouched by changes to the outside world.”
“Shameless… ha, we’re almost there.”
Hearing this, Yi Yi stuck his head out of the pocket. Through the huge window port, he could see the two white, glowing objects ahead of the ship: a square and a sphere, floating in space. When the spaceship reached the level of the square, the latter briefly disappeared against the backdrop of the stars, revealing that it had virtually zero thickness. The perfect sphere hovered directly above the plane. Both shone with soft, white light, so evenly distributed that no features could be distinguished on their surfaces. They looked like objects taken from a computer database, two concise yet abstract concepts in a disorderly universe.
“Where’s the god?” Yi Yi asked.
“He’s the two geometric objects, of course. Gods like to keep it nice and simple.”
As they approached, Yi Yi saw that the plane was the size of a soccer field. The spaceship descended upon the plane thruster side down, but the flames left no marks on the surface, as if the plane were nothing but an illusion. Yet Yi Yi felt gravity, and the jarring sensation when the spaceship touched down proved that the plane was real.
Bigtooth must have come here before; he opened the hatch without hesitation and walked out. Yi Yi’s heart seized up when he saw that Bigtooth had simultaneously opened the hatches on both side of the airlock, but the air inside the chamber didn’t howl outward. As Bigtooth walked out of the ship, Yi Yi smelled fresh air from inside his pocket. When he poked his head out, a soft, cool breeze caressed his face. This was ultra-advanced technology beyond the comprehension of either humans or dinosaurs. Its comfortable, casual application astounded Yi Yi, in a way that pierced the soul more deeply than what humanity must have felt in its first encounter with Devourers. He looked up. The sphere floated overhead against the backdrop of the radiant Milky Way.
“What little gift have you brought me this time, Emissary?” asked the god in the language of the Devourers. His voice was not loud, seeming to come from a boundless distance away, from the deep void of outer space. It was the first time Yi Yi had found the crude language of the dinosaurs pleasing to the ear.
Bigtooth extended a claw into his pocket, caught Yi Yi, and set him down on the plane. Yi Yi could feel the elasticity of the plane through the soles of his feet.
“Esteemed god,” Bigtooth said. “I heard you like to collect small organisms from different star systems, so I brought you this very entertaining little thing: a human from Earth.”
“I only like perfect organisms. Why did you bring me such a filthy insect?” said the god. The sphere and the plane flickered twice, perhaps to express disgust.
“You know about this species?” Bigtooth raised his head in astonishment.
“Not intimately, but I’ve heard about them from certain visitors to this arm of the galaxy. They made frequent visits to Earth in the brief course of these organisms’ evolution, and were revolted at the vulgarness of their thoughts, the lowliness of their actions, the disorder and filth of their history. Not a single visitor would deign to establish contact with them up to the destruction of Earth. Hurry and throw it away.”
Bigtooth seized Yi Yi, rotating his massive head to look for a place to throw him. “The trash incinerator is behind you,” said the god. Bigtooth turned and saw that a small, round opening had appeared in the plane behind him. Inside shimmered a faint blue light….
“Don’t dismiss us like that! Humanity created a magnificent civilization!” Yi Yi shouted with all his might in the language of the Devourers.
The sphere and plane again flickered twice. The god gave two cold laughs. “Civilization? Emissary, tell this insect what civilization is.”
Bigtooth lifted Yi Yi to his eye level; Yi Yi could even hear the gululu of the dinosaur’s giant eyeballs turning in their sockets. “Bug-bug, in this universe, the standard measure of any race’s level of civilization is the number of dimensions it can access. The basic requirement for joining civilization at large is six or more. Our esteemed god’s race can already access the eleventh dimension. The Devouring Empire can access the fourth dimension in small-scale laboratory environments, and only qualifies as a primitive, uncivilized tribe in the Milky Way. You, in the eyes of a god, are in the same category as weeds and lichen.”
“Throw it away already, it’s disgusting,” the god urged impatiently.
Having finished speaking, Bigtooth headed for the incinerator’s aperture. Yi Yi struggled frantically. Numerous pieces of white paper fluttered loose from his clothing. The sphere shot out a needle-thin beam of light, hitting one of the sheets, which froze unmoving in midair. The beam scanned rapidly over its surface.
“Oh my, wait, what’s this?”
Bigtooth allowed Yi Yi to dangle over the incinerator’s aperture as he turned to look at the sphere.
“That’s… my students’ homework!” Yi Yi managed laboriously, struggling in the dinosaur’s giant claw.
“These squarish symbols are very interesting, and the little arrays they form are quite amusing too,” said the god. The sphere’s beam of light rapidly scanned over the other sheets of paper, which had since landed on the plane.
“They’re Ch-Chinese characters. These are poems in Classical Chinese!”
“Poems?” the god exclaimed, retracting its beam of light. “I trust you understand the language of these insects, Emissary?”
“Of course, esteemed god. Before the Devouring Empire ate Earth, we spent a long time living on their world.” Bigtooth set Yi Yi down on the plane next to the incinerator, bent over, and picked up a sheet of paper. He held it just in front of his eyes, trying with effort to distinguish the small characters on it. “More or less, it says—”
“Forget it, you’ll distort the meaning!” Yi Yi waved a hand to interrupt Bigtooth.
“How so?” asked the god interestedly.
“Because this is a form of art that can only be expressed in Classical Chinese. Even translating these poems into other human languages alters them until they lose much of their meaning and beauty.”
“Emissary, do you have this language in your computer database? Send me the relevant data, as well as all the information you have on Earth history. Just use the communications channel we established during our last meeting.”
Bigtooth hurried back to the spaceship and banged around on the computer inside for a while, muttering, “We don’t have the Classical Chinese portion here, so we’ll have to upload it from the Empire’s network. There might be some delay.” Through the open hatchway, Yi Yi saw the morphing colors of the computer screen reflected off the dinosaur’s huge eyeballs.
By the time Bigtooth got off the ship, the god could already read the poem on one sheet of paper with perfect modern Chinese pronunciation.