The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection by Liu Cixin

by Cixin Liu

  “What, then, of humanity?” the Secretary General asked, his voice quivering ever so slightly.

  “That is something I will assuredly determine this very day,” Fangs replied.

  In the pause that followed, the heads of state exchanged meaningful glances. The Secretary General finally nodded and said, “This definitely requires that we enter into private consultations with one another.”

  Fangs shook his massive head, interrupting before they could speak further. “It is a very simple matter; I must merely have a taste ...”

  And with that, his giant claw reached into the gathered crowd and snatched up a European head of state. He gracefully tossed the man, a throw of 20-odd feet, straight into his mouth. Then he carefully began to chew. From the first crunch to last, his victim remained completely mute; it was impossible to tell whether it was dignity or terror that stayed his screams.

  In the terrible moments that followed, the only sound was that of the man's skeleton snapping and cracking between Fangs' giant, dagger-like teeth. After about half a minute, Fangs spat out the man's suit and shoes, much as a human might spit out watermelon seeds. Even though the clothes were covered in oozing blood, they remained horrifyingly intact.

  All the world seemed to have fallen completely silent, a deathly quiet seeming to be without beginning or end; without end, that is, until a human voice broke it.

  “How, sir, could you just pick him up and eat him?” the Captain asked as he stood amongst the crowd.

  Fangs walked toward him with colossal, thundering steps. The crowd scattered in his wake. He stood before the Captain and lowered his gaze of pitch black, basketball-sized eyes until he was staring right at him. He asked, “I shouldn't have?”

  “Sir, how could you have known that you can eat him?” the Captain asked flatly. “From a biochemical perspective it is almost impossible that a being from such a distant world should be edible.”

  Fangs nodded, his large maw almost seeming to grin. “I have had my eye on you. You watched me with cool detachment, lost in thought. What is it that you were contemplating?”

  The Captain returned his smile and replied, “Sir, you breathe our air and speak using sound waves. You have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. You have four limbs arranged along a bilateral symmetry…” He let his thought drift off into silence.

  “And you don't understand it?” Fangs asked, snaking his giant head right in front of the Captain's face. With a hiss, he exhaled a nauseating breath, reeking of blood and gore.

  “That is correct. I do understand the principle of the matter well enough to find it incomprehensible that we should be so similar,” the Captain answered, showing no signs of revulsion or fear.

  “There is something I do not understand. Why are you so calm? Are you a soldier?” Fangs asked in response.

  “I am warrior in defense of Earth,” the Captain answered.

  “Hm, but does pushing around small stones really make you a warrior?” Fangs countered with more than a hint of mockery.

  “I am ready for greater tests,” the Captain solemnly stated, raising his head.

  “You fascinating little worm.” Fangs laughed, nodding. Raising his body to its full height, he turned back to the heads of state. “But let us return to the real topic at hand: Humanity's fate. You are tasty. There is a smooth and mild quality about you that reminds me of certain blue berries we found on a planet in Eridanus. I therefore congratulate you. Your species will continue. We will raise you as livestock in the Devourer Empire. We will allow you to live a good sixty years before we bring you to market.”

  “Sir, do you not think that our meat will be too gamey at that age?” the Captain asked with a cold chuckle.

  Fangs roared with laughter, his voice like an erupting volcano. “Ha, ha, ha, ha! The Devourers like chewy snacks!”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Ants

  The United Nations engaged Fangs in several further meetings. Even though no one else was eaten, the verdict on humanity's fate remained unchanged.

  A meeting was scheduled to take place in a meticulously prepared archaeological excavation site in Africa.

  Fangs' ship landed right on schedule and about 50 feet away from the dig site. The deafening explosion and storm of debris that accompanied the craft's arrival had by this point become all too familiar.

  The Girl from Eridanus had advised them that the vessel's engine was powered by a miniature fusion reactor. The concept, like most of the information she had provided on the Devourers, was easy enough for the human scientists to understand; the things she told them about the technology of Eridanians, on the other hand, never failed to baffle the people of Earth. Her crystal, for example, began to melt in Earth's atmosphere. In the end, the entire section containing its propulsion system dissolved, leaving nothing but a thin slice of crystal gracefully floating through the air.

  As Fangs arrived at the excavation site, two UN staffers presented him with a large album, a full square yard in size. It had been meticulously designed to accommodate the Devourer's huge stature. The album's hundreds of beautifully wrought pages revealed all aspects of human culture in brilliantly colored detail. In some ways it resembled an opulent primer for children.

  Inside the large pit of the excavation site itself, an archaeologist vividly described the glorious history of Earth's civilizations. He threw all his passion into his desperate attempt to make this alien understand; understand that there was so much on this blue planet so worth cherishing. As he spoke, his fervor moved him to tears. It was a pitiable spectacle.

  Finally, he pointed to the excavation and intoned: “Honorable emissary, what you see here are the newly discovered remains of a town. This fifty-thousand-year-old site is the oldest human settlement discovered to date. Could the hearts of your people truly be hard enough to destroy this magnificent civilization of ours? A civilization that has developed, step by slow step, over fifty thousand years?”

  While all this was going on, Fangs began leafing through the album with obvious, playful amusement. As the archaeologist finished, Fangs raised his head and glanced at the excavation pit. “Hey, archaeologist worm, I care neither for your hole nor your old city in the hole. I would, however, very much want to see the earth you removed from the pit,” he said, pointing at a large pile of dirt.

  The archaeologist went from baffled to completely stunned as the artificial voice of the translator finished relaying Fangs' request. “Earth?” he asked, fumbling for words. “But there's nothing in that pile of dirt.”

  “That is your opinion,” Fangs said, approaching the mound of earth. Bending his gigantic body ground-ward, he reached into the pile with two of his huge claws and began digging. A circle of onlookers quickly formed, many gasping at the deceptive deftness of Fangs' seemingly unwieldy claws. Prodding the soft earth, he repeatedly retrieved tiny specks from the soil, only to place them on the album. Fangs seemed completely engrossed in this strange labor for a good 10 minutes. Having finished whatever he had been up to, he carefully lifted the album with both claws and straightened his body. Walking toward the gathered humans, he gave them a chance to see what it was that he had placed on the album.

  Only by looking very carefully could those gathered make out that it was hundreds of ants. They were gathered in a tight bunch, some alive, others curled up in death.

  “I want to tell you a story,” Fangs said as the humans studied the ants. “It is the story of a kingdom. This kingdom was descended from a great empire and it could trace its ancestry all the way back to ends of Earth's Cretaceous period, where its founders built a magnificent city in the shadow of the towering bones of a dinosaur.” Fangs paused, deep in thought, before continuing. “But that is long-lost, ancient history and when winter suddenly fell, only the last in a long line of queens remembered those glory days. It was a very long winter indeed, and the land was covered by glaciers. Tens of millions of years of vigorous life were lost as existence became ever more precarious.<
br />
  “After waking from her last hibernation, the queen could not rouse even one out of every hundred of her subjects. The others had been entombed by the cold, some being frozen to nothing but transparent, empty shells. Feeling the walls of her city, the queen realized that they were as cold as ice and hard as steel. She understood that the Earth remained frozen. In this age of terrible cold, even summer brought no thaw. The queen decided it was time to leave the homeland of her ancestors and to seek out unfrozen earth to establish a new kingdom.

  “And so the queen led her surviving subjects to the surface to begin their long and arduous journey in the shadow of looming glaciers,” Fang said. “Most of her remaining subjects perished during their protracted wanderings, consumed by the deadly cold. But the queen and a few straggling survivors finally found a patch of earth that remained untouched by frost. Overflowing geothermal energy warmed this sliver of land. The queen, of course, knew nothing of this. She did not understand why there should be moist and soft soil in this frozen world, but she was in no way surprised that she had found it: A race that persevered through sixty million long years could never suffer extinction!

  In the face of a glacier-covered Earth and a dim Sun, the queen proclaimed that it was here that they would found a new great kingdom, a kingdom that would endure for all eternity. Standing under the summit of a tall, white mountain, she declared that this new kingdom would be known as 'Realm of the White Mountain’,” he said grandly.

  “In fact, the eponymous summit was the skull of a mammoth,” he continued. “It was the zenith of the Late Pleistocene of the Quaternary Glaciation. In those days the human worms were still dumb animals, shivering in their scattered holes. It would still be ninety thousand years before the first candle light of your civilization would appear a continent away on the plains of Mesopotamia.

  Living off the frozen remains of mammoths in the vicinity the Realm of the White Mountain, they survived ten thousand hard years. Then, as the ice age ended, spring returned to Earth and the land was again draped in green. In this great explosion of life, the Realm of the White Mountain quickly entered a golden age of prosperity. Its subjects were beyond number and ruled a vast domain. In the next ten thousand years the kingdom was ruled by countless dynasties, and countless epics told its stories.”

  As he continued, Fangs pointed at the large pile of earth in front of them. “That is the final resting place of the Realm of the White Mountain. As you archaeologist worms were preoccupied by your excavations of a lost and dead fifty-thousand-year-old city, you completely failed to realize that the soil above those ruins was teeming with a city that was very much alive. In scale it was easily comparable to New York, and the latter is a city on merely two-dimensions. The city here was a grand three-dimensional metropolis with many layers. Every layer was densely packed with labyrinthine streets, spacious forums, and magnificent palaces. The design of the city's drainage and fire prevention systems handily outshone those of New York.

  “The city was home to a complex social structure and a strict division of labor,” he told his captive audience. “Its entire society ran with machine-like precision and harmonious efficiency. The vices of drug use and crime did not exist here and hence there was neither depravity nor confusion. But its inhabitants were by no means devoid of emotion, showing their abiding sorrow whenever a subject of the Realm passed away. They even had a cemetery on the surface at the edge of the city and there they would bury their dead an inch under the ground.

  “However, the greatest acclaim must be reserved for the grand library nestled in the lowest layer of this city. In this library one could find a multitude of ovoid containers. Each container was a book filled with pheromones. The exceedingly complex chemistry of these pheromones stored the city's knowledge. Here the epics detailing the enduring history of the Realm of the White Mountain were recorded. Here you could have learned that in a great forest fire all the subjects of the kingdom embraced each other to form countless balls, and that with heroic effort they were able to escape a sea of fire by floating down a stream. You could have learned the history of the hundred-year war against the White Termite Empire; or of the first time that an expedition from the kingdom saw the great ocean...” Fangs let his translator's voice trail off.

  Then his booming voice again rang out. “But it was all destroyed in three short hours. Destroyed when, with an Earth-shattering roar, the excavators came, blackening the sky. Then their giant steel claws came cutting down. They grabbed the soil of the city, utterly destroying it and crushing all within. They even destroyed the lowest layer where all the city's children and the tens of thousands of snow-white eggs, yet to become children, rested.”

  All of the world again seemed to have fallen deathly quiet. This silence outlasted the quiet that had followed Fangs' horrible feast. Standing before the alien emissary, humanity was, for the first time, at a loss of words.

  Finally Fangs said, “We still have a very long time to get along and very many things to talk about, but let us not speak of morals. In the universe, such considerations are meaningless.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  Acceleration

  Fangs left the people at the dig site in a state of deep shock and despair. The Captain again was the first to break the silence. He turned to the surrounding dignitaries of all nations and said, “I know that I am but a nobody and the only reason that I am fortunate enough to attend these occasions is because I was the first to come into contact with two alien intelligences. Nonetheless, I want to say two things: First, Fangs is right; second, humanity's only way out is to fight.”

  “Fight? Oh, captain, fight ...” the Secretary-General shook his head, bearing a bitter simile.

  “Right! Fight! Fight! Fight!” the Girl from Eridanus shouted from her crystal pane as she flitted several feet above the heads of those assembled. In her Sun-drenched crystal the long-haired girl's entire body erupted into a flowing flourish.

  “You people from Eridanus fought them. How did that end?” someone called out. “Humanity must think of its survival as a species, not of satisfying your twisted desire for vengeance.”

  “No, sir,” the Captain said, turning to face the assembled crowd. “The Eridanians engaged an enemy they knew nothing about in their war of self-defense. Furthermore, they were a society that had historically not known war. Given the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that they were defeated. Nonetheless, in a century of bitter warfare, they meticulously acquired a deep understanding of the Devourer. We now have been handed that vast reservoir of knowledge by this spaceship. It will be our advantage.

  “Judicious preliminary studies of the material have shown that the Devourer is by no means as terrible as we had first feared,” he told them. “Foremost, beyond the fact that it is inconceivably large, there is little about the Devourer that exceeds our understanding. Its life-forms, the ten billion-plus Devourers themselves, are carbon-based life forms, just like us. They even resemble us on a molecular level, and because we share a biological basis with the enemy, nothing about them will remain beyond our grasp. We should count our blessings; just consider that we could just as well have been faced with invaders made of energy fields and the stuff of neutron stars.

  “But there is even more cause for hope,” he said. “The Devourer possesses very little, shall we say, 'super-technology'. The Devourer's technology is certainly very advanced when compared to humanity's, but that is primarily a question of scale, not of theoretical basis. The main energy source of Devourer's propulsion system is nuclear fusion. In fact, the primary use for water plundered from planets – beyond providing basic life-support – is fuel for this system. The Devourer's propulsion technology is based on the principle of recoil and the conservation of momentum; it is not some sort of strange, space-time bending MacGuffin.” The Captain, paused looking at the faces before him. “All of this may dismay our scientists; after all, the Devourer, with its tens of millions of years of continuous development, clea
rly shows us the limits of science and technology; but it also clearly shows us that our enemy is no invincible god.”

  The Secretary-General mulled over the Captain's words, then asked, “But is that enough to ensure humanity's victory?”

  “Of course we have more specific information. Information that should allow us to formulate a strategy that will give a good shot at victory. For example –”

  “Acceleration! Acceleration!” the Girl from Eridanus shouted over their heads, interrupting the Captain.

  The Captain explained her outburst to the baffled faces around him. “We have learned from the Eridanian data that the Devourer's ability to accelerate is limited. The Eridanians observed it for two long centuries and they never once saw it exceed this specific limit. To confirm this, we used the data we received from the Eridanian spaceship to establish a mathematical model that accounts for the Devourer's architecture and material strength of its structural components. Calculations using this model verify the Eridanian's observations. There is a firm limit to the speed at which the Devourer can accelerate and this limit is determined by its structural integrity. Should it ever exceed it, the colossus will be torn to pieces.”

  “So what?” the head of a great nation asked, under-whelmed.

  “We should remain level-headed and carefully consider it,” the Captain answered with a laugh.

  CHAPTER

  5

  The Lunar Refuge

  Finally, humanity's negotiations with the alien emissary showed some small signs of progress. Fangs yielded to the demand for a lunar refuge.

  “Humans are homesick creatures,” the Secretary-General had said in one of their meetings, tears in his eyes.