After they had driven for over an hour, a spread of field tents and huts appeared alongside the road: the Japanese base. Teams of Japanese children were doing drills on the beach. They sang military songs in unison as they marched exuberantly with uniform steps. But what caught the Chinese children’s eye was a huge humpback whale lying on the beach, thick pink slabs of flesh and dark-colored organs visible in its sliced-open belly. A group of Japanese children were clambering over its body like a horde of ants crawling over a fish, hacking away huge chunks of whale meat with power saws, and loading them by crane onto a truck to ship back to camp.
The Chinese children got out of their vehicle and stood quietly off to one side. The whale, it turned out, was still alive, and its mouth twitched and the one cloudy eye that faced upward, big as a truck tire, stared at them lifelessly. A few Japanese kids emerged from the belly of the huge animal drenched in blood, straining under the effort of carrying a huge, dark red organ: whale liver. The crane loaded it onto a truck, where it filled up the entire bed and quivered there, steaming. One kid holding a paratrooper knife climbed aboard and cut a few pieces off the liver and tossed them out to a pack of army dogs beneath the truck. The entire scene, the circle of bloodstained snow, the vivisected whale, the children on top of it slicing pieces of flesh, the blood-smeared crane and trucks, the dogs wrestling for scraps on the bloody snow, and the ocean, stained crimson by two rivers of whale blood, was a surreal picture of horror.
Lü Gang said, “The Japanese fleet has been using depth charges against whales in the Ross and Amundsen Seas, stunning them and then dragging them ashore. One charge can stun a whole pod.”
“A century of efforts to protect the whales could be destroyed in a single day,” Specs said with a sigh.
A few Japanese children recognized them and jumped off the whale’s body and raised their bloodstained gloved hands in a salute. Then they climbed back up and went back to work.
Specs said to Huahua and Lü Gang, “I’ve got just one question, and I’d like you to answer me truthfully. When you were young, did you ever truly treasure life, in your heart of hearts?”
“No,” Huahua said.
“No,” Lü Gang said. “When I was at the army with my dad, every day when I got out of class I’d play with the boys from the local villages. We’d shoot birds and catch frogs, and when I saw those little creatures die at my hands, I didn’t feel anything in particular. The others were the same.”
Specs nodded. “Yeah. It takes a lengthy process of life experience to truly appreciate the value of life. In the mind of a child, life doesn’t occupy the same place as in an adult’s. What’s strange is that adults always associate children with kindness, peace, and other wonderful things.”
“What’s strange about that?” Huahua said, giving him a look. “In the adults’ era, children existed within their restrictions. But more importantly, children had no opportunity to take part as a collective in the cruel struggle for survival, so of course their true nature wouldn’t be exposed. Oh, for the past couple of days I’ve been reading the copy of Lord of the Flies you gave me.”
“It’s a good book. Golding was one of the few adults who really got children. It’s a shame that the others mostly judged the hearts of children using the measure of great men,[5] rather than recognizing our basic nature. This was their last and greatest mistake. And that mistake has introduced too many variables into the progress of history in the Supernova Era,” Specs said somberly.
The three children watched in silence for a while longer before returning to the car and setting off again.
If any adult had survived the supernova, they would have thought they were in a nightmare. When all the world’s nuclear weapons winked out in space in the final days of the Common Era, the coming children’s world was, in the adult imagination, a paradise of global harmony, a world brimming with childlike innocence and friendship, in which the children would join hands kindergarten-style and, out of their innate purity and goodness, build a wonderful new Earth. There were even suggestions that all human historical records be obliterated: “Our final hope is that children retain a decent image of us in their hearts. Should those gentle children look back on our history from their wonderful new world of peace and see all the war, power, and plunder, they will realize what sort of unreasonable, deviant creatures we are.”
But what the adults could never imagine was that less than a year into the Supernova Era, the children’s world would erupt into a world war. So grim were its rules of competition, so bloody and barbaric its methods, that they were unprecedented not only in the Common Era but throughout the entirety of human history. The Common Era had no cause to worry about its own image in the hearts of children, since what made them unreasonable in children’s eyes was their restraint and moderation, and their patently ridiculous misgivings and moral codes. International law and behavioral norms were cast aside overnight as everything was flung out into the open, and no one felt the need to hide anymore.
China’s high command was initially of divided opinion about sending troops to Antarctica to take part in the war games. The importance of the Antarctic Games was undeniable, but Xiaomeng brought up a pragmatic question: “Our own neighborhood isn’t very stable. India, for example, is only sending one division, and will retain a million-strong army inside the country. Who knows what they’re planning to do? If we want to fully participate, we’ll need to deploy a sizable proportion of army forces, plus at least two-thirds of the navy. Having two of our three fleets far from home will create a local defense vacuum. Add to that the current domestic situation, and the rising ocean levels and widespread flooding along the coast, and other potential large-scale natural disasters that need major support from the military.”
Huahua said, “Both issues are resolvable. First, India is contained by Pakistan, which will also leave a major force at home. We can launch a diplomatic offensive so that under pressure from other major powers, India will be forced to deploy forces to the games in equivalent measure to us. As for natural disasters, the absence of the military is of course detrimental, but it’s not something we can’t handle.”
Lü Gang brought up another, more unsettling question. “Our armed forces are intrinsically a force for territorial defense. They are untested and incapable of waging a long-distance, intercontinental war. Our navy, for example, is based on ideas derived from land-war theories. It’s only an offshore defensive force, not a deepwater fighting force. The majority of the ships in the fleet can go no farther than James Shoal, which for a modern navy hardly even counts as leaving the backyard. Now we’ve got to voyage to Antarctica. Before they left, the adults told us time and again not to engage in wars across continents or oceans. You’re all aware of that.”
5
An inversion of an aphorism from the