The Reincarnated Giant: Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction Read online

  I also had a strong feeling that in the year of the disaster, the architect did not really achieve regeneration through making bricks; all he did was make a preview. He did in fact, however, assist in my mother’s regeneration, so does his regeneration now require arrangement by my mother?

  There is a matter here that has heretofore been overlooked—namely, the disposition of the architect’s wife, about whom we are completely in the dark. Because of this we did not solicit her opinion about the architect’s funeral arrangements. I don’t know whether we behaved correctly or not.

  But was the person that was buried actually the architect?

  Later, taking advantage of my being away from home, Mother infused the air of the architect’s daughter into that brick and moved it to the new house. It was only through this that Mother seemed to be able to set her mind at rest; moreover, she would constantly measure me up with an expression of victory, but in an unsteady fashion that even seemed a bit mischievous.

  I could not dispute about anything with Mother. But in the night people would frequently hear the sound of an older man and a young woman coming from the isolated house at the edge of the village.

  In that period I frequently returned home. I would remember odd things that took place when I was little, some that I had heard about and some that I had actually witnessed.

  The village as a whole had not undergone any great changes, but the disaster zone section of it had undergone a huge transformation, which made me feel a stranger. A great many things became simpler and plainer but seemed increasingly mythological.

  Sometimes people would see children in the fields jumping rope in groups of five. Their whole bodies were coated in white wax, with their viscera exposed, which were clearly fragments of brick and were interlocked with one another and stopped up. These children were not the ones from our village who had perished in the disaster but were perhaps from neighboring villages or perhaps from town. Some among them, however, seemed to be wearing ancient Chinese clothing, as if they had been assembled from the dust of time. But as they vigorously jumped and leaped about, they shot up into the air, each of them changing into a shadow and dispersing. Then there would immediately be a new bunch. As a result, although their torsos were structured of dry brick, they very possibly were not solid, since some people said that when they came across them, they could walk right through their bodies, as if walking into air. At the time, however, extraterrestrial spaceships had yet to land on earth, so people had not yet connected them with extraterrestrial life.

  When I woke up one morning I noticed that outside my window the sky above the village had taken on the characteristics of a solid, with some of the disorder of a construction site, densely packed with material, like a pomegranate; it was only through narrow fissures in the mudstone that wisps of white cloud could be seen floating by. This feeling was extremely unnatural, and I asked other children if they had seen it or not. Some said they had while others said they had not. There were yet others who had seen sound waves reverberating off the rigid structure, like ringlets of ripples on a pond. Still others said that they had seen something like a whirlpool carved out of purple willow, but which when looked at carefully turned into the growth rings on a ficus. As for Mother, she said she had seen a golden Buddha light, as viscous as corn porridge. All these things displayed themselves in the sky above the village, like a vast expanse of mirage. Neither the villagers nor the city dwellers had ever heard of such structures. They seemed to suggest the establishment of a new cosmology, which affirmed that which we had never affirmed previously but also negated what we had negated in the past. Its perfect gradations and orderly system restored the elegance and delicacy of the Ptolemaic world. It may not, however, have been our world but a parallel one, one of the grains of sand in the Ganges.

  I later left the village to attend university in a far-away city. My mother escorted me as far as the village entrance, but we already had nothing to say to each other, exhibiting the awkwardness that exists between many mothers and sons. I had a CD in my backpack on which I had recorded the sounds from the brick house. I later gave it to my girlfriend.

  In a continuation of the work of Webb and Hubble, a massive new celestial telescope was shot into space, after which people were finally able to clearly see the macrostructure of the universe.

  It was a sort of reticular structure with a brick pattern. Within it there seemed to be landscapes, beasts, as well as stagnant disk-shaped objects like bee swarms; there were also tombstones spread throughout the galaxies, neatly arranged in macroarrays like dominoes. There were no striking colors to any of this, but they were not imaginary, being actually extant. They also seemed to be signs, and although they were crude representations, they were full of energy along with a considerable width of field, background, and atmosphere.

  For the first time the universe has been connected by a continuous and visible entity.

  But was it a work of art?

  Where was its exhibition hall?

  Standing on earth, I could clearly hear sounds coming from the universe. Some were human, while others were from unknown beings. Some came from hundreds of millions of years ago, while others were produced only within the past few hours. Some seemed like people whom I knew well, while others were strangers. Once I thought I heard my girlfriend calling out to me. I hadn’t forgotten about her, had I? Was she still thinking about me? Had she actually gone to heaven? She had quite possibly regenerated some other place but had formed a quantum tangle with my soul. At these times I thought the universe was closed, that there was nothing random about it at all.

  Just then there appeared a new trade specializing in selling an interconnection technique that assisted customers in finding the whereabouts of old friends and relatives via the sounds from bricks and tiles. Whenever they would be found, however, the correspondent would not know about it. In spite of this, people would still wish to continue the search.

  American scientists hypothesized that the universe in which we live was constructed upon a building that was on a huge ruin. But it was unknown what it was a ruin of or how it had taken shape. This was the mysteriousness of the universe. Research on this question had come to replace the Big Bang and superstring theories as the central propositions of cosmology. Some scientists conjectured that the universe was just then within a period of regeneration, and that the disasters it had endured in its early years probably far surpassed anything we could imagine. And the tragic experiences we insignificant humans had undergone were really nothing in comparison.

  —Thereupon, with this as the basic content of literature, there was a renaissance of poetry in Japan and Korea. It revolved mainly around construction themes and became a new school of poetry. The poets rhapsodized: the world is a brick.

  Later on a British scientist discovered regenerated atoms, which he considered to be basic particles of matter, and whoever grasped this would be able to avoid free energy reverting to zero and thus would never reach absolute entropy. As with ether and phlogiston, however, this generated controversy.

  Several Russian spaceships successfully explored the Galactic Supermassive Black Hole, and the cosmonauts said that they had seen a structure like a ruin that was similar to a Cauliflower Snake, which was actually real space constituted by continuous particles. This also suggests that differential equations are the basic mathematical forms that ultimately describe the laws of life. They could not, however, describe it well.

  Once it was realized that the universe was very possibly a ruin that could be described by using quantum matrix mechanics, people were able to set their minds at rest, believing that this resource could be used for hundreds of millions of years. At least the manufacture of great quantities of regenerated brick would pose no problem.

  Since the universe continued to exist, people were encouraged and wished to make some contribution. In this way making regenerated brick was part of this glorious enterprise of detaching from the limitations of individual people.
Before the ultimate catastrophe arrived, could this negligible human race be put to some definite use? We will wish to prepare sufficient regenerated brick before this disaster arrives. We have fully comprehended the significance of disaster in our once again moving toward prosperity.

  Dispute over the question of what regenerated brick was, however, continued and seemed to be a bottomless pit.

  Mother had grown old. After she constructed the small house, she turned the management of the brick factory over to my younger brother, while she herself became a tour guide. Every morning she would don the traditional ethnic garb of the region and, resembling someone out of a Western oil painting, she appeared all the more young and elegant, not at all like someone from the country. Moreover, from her shoulders on down, she was dressed in divine, buttery hues, right down to the blade-thin heels of her dark green cotton shoes. She had never wanted to live in the city, since, she said, the cities were built on even more ancient ruins so were in actuality even more rural than the countryside. And she did not like the country at all.

  She would come nimbly to the village entrance and fight noisily over the tourists with the young tour guides. In general, Mother would win the greater victories in this, leaving the competitors, who were two or three generations younger than her, deeply envious. Leading a group of visitors, she would enthusiastically stride into our house to look around. She walked so fast that the urban visitors from afar would be having misgivings as they jogged behind her. Going into houses to call on the residents was an established part of the disaster tour. Mother enunciated clearly and did not tremble as she introduced the visitors to the house, saying that in the very year of the disaster she had personally built it out of regenerated brick. After that she related how her husband and child had perished, something she still remembered without a single error. The visitors much preferred this sort of story, and without fail they would click their tongues in amazement. They were of the new generation that had no experience of disaster whatsoever.

  Mother: That afternoon the house suddenly began to rock. My husband shouted out, “Earthquake!” and picked up a piece of clothing that he used to cover my head as he pushed me outside. But before we got out the house collapsed. As the house was collapsing he continued to use his arms to protect me; I couldn’t see anything at the time, since the air was filled with dust. We fell into a narrow space between two buildings.

  Visitor: How seriously were you hurt at the time?

  Mother: My right leg was crushed by a chunk of the house, but I was completely clearheaded. My husband continued to determinedly protect me with his arm. I told him to let up a bit, and he said I may be done for; I reckon I’m going to die. I told him that we were safe now, so why would you say such a thing. But I felt his back and it was covered with blood. I was sure his head had been smashed.

  Visitor: And what did he say?

  Mother: He wanted me to be more firm. We also had a child, who had started middle school the year before. He wanted me to be a bit more strict with the child, to have him adhere to the correct path. If he took one misstep, his entire life would be ruined. I told him I got it. Both of us had always been very exacting with the child, but I would try to be even stricter.

  Visitor: And after that?

  Mother: I continued to shout at him. He responded at first, but after about half an hour he went silent. I continued to hold him tight. There was a small bowl-sized hole in the ruins that were on top of me. The ruins were made of crisscrossed pieces of concrete. My leg continued to bleed and the pain was acute. When I was thirsty I had to drink my own urine.

  Visitor: Oh …!

  Mother: When I could urinate no more I of course thought, Why don’t I just die. But when I thought of what my husband had said to me I wanted to continue living. I continued to hold him. My right leg was no longer bleeding—I assumed it had clotted up. I later grabbed a chunk of brick, using it to strike at my right calf; when I’d struck it enough it began to bleed and I propped it against my husband’s back, and as the blood flowed down, I was able to get it into my mouth and drink it. When I was confined in there that was the only way I was able to drink any blood … After three days I was pulled out by soldiers. It was only then that I learned that the child had also died. The classroom building at the town school had collapsed.

  …

  It is said that when my mother was pulled out by the army, she was almost completely naked. As soon as she saw the bloodred sun, she burst out crying, very loudly, and also pursed up her purple lips and began seeking out water to drink.

  When the visitors came to our house Mother would provide snacks, as well as rice wine she had fermented herself. She would bring these to the table and partake along with everyone else; she charged very little. Although they were strangers, she got along with them informally as if they were family. Some of the young or middle-aged guests would on occasion get drunk and stay on at the house; in the middle of the night Mother would lead them group by group like candy on a stick to go listen to the sounds coming from the walls. Her charge for the lodging was also quite reasonable. Some guests liked to linger at our house for several months, just not wanting to leave, eventually admitting sheepishly that they hoped to experience so-called aftershocks. Sometimes there would really be some, and Mother’s guests would glance at one another, burst out laughing, and vie with one another to climb up on the roof. The result was that one could see countless other similar travelers standing on every roof in the village, like the little monkeys on Flower-Fruit Mountain, raising their arms like flags, swaying back and forth along with the waving of the earth. The scene resembled a heavy-metal rock concert. At such times Mother would hold her knees and sit on the ground with her eyes closed, as if taking a nap; she would snore gently.

  The year she turned eighty-two Mother suddenly went deaf and could hear nothing at all. There was nothing the doctors could do. So she decided to attend the deaf-dumb school in the village. At the time, many of the elderly in the disaster area were in the same condition. It seemed as if this were a fixed plan for them to serenely pass their later years.

  Every day Mother would put on the book bag she had sewn herself and like a child go happily to school, humming a folk song as she went. She would always pass by the little house she had built herself of regenerated brick, the house enduring at the eastern edge of the village under the morning sun like a wisp of fog, seeming to be incessantly evaporating. Mother would pass by without looking at it, as if it didn’t exist. There was a photographer who took photos of it and sent them to a Dutch contest and won a major prize. In the photo Mother was but a drifting yellow silhouette looking as if she didn’t know where she was going or where she was from, the boundless earth under her feet at an indeterminate distance from her. The solid dark green house was the real subject, lurking like an old-fashioned graveyard. In fact, however, it had become a temple, with incense winding around it all day. The villagers said it was dedicated to the god of brick. This was, however, merely superstition. Even with the production of such a huge quantity of regenerated brick, such that even extraterrestrials had visited, the scientific level of the villagers had not achieved any appreciable elevation. They seemed to pass their days much as they had prior to the disaster. Low-tech, therefore, was most practical for them.

  I saw from the photo that everything had subsided into near quiet, and that there was no participation in the discussion of disputed matters. This was all, however, precisely the effect of the expression of the technological ideas of those years. It can only be said that in the history of the fading away of the human race, those who had worked under the pure principles of technology had been extremely fortunate.

  —Actually at this time Mother and I had both begun to consider the method of our own regeneration hereafter. And such arrangements, aside from implementing them personally, could not be put into writing. It was, however, not a great concern.

  2

  THE VILLAGE SCHOOLTEACHER

  LIU CIXIN r />
  TRANSLATED BY CHRISTOPHER ELFORD AND JIANG CHENXIN

  He realized that the final class would have to be moved forward.

  The pain in his side surged up again, nearly knocking him unconscious. He didn’t have the strength to get out of bed and could move only with great difficulty to the bedside window. The moonlight shone on the paper window a brilliant silver, making the small portal look like a door leading to another world, a world where everything was silvery, like a bonsai terrarium made of silver coins and snow that wasn’t cold. Quivering slightly, he raised his head to look through a hole in the window paper, and all at once the mirage vanished. He saw in the distance the village where he’d spent his entire life.

  Spread out under the moonlight, the silent village looked as though it had been abandoned a century before. The houses, with the characteristic flat-topped roofs found on the Loess Plateau, were of a shape no different from the loess mounds that surrounded them. In the moonlight they were of the same tinge, as though the village had merged with the hillside. Only the old pagoda tree, standing out in front, could be seen clearly. The crows’ nests in its withered branches stood out a blacker black, like large ink drops on the deep-silver tableau. The village did have its moments of beauty and warmth. At harvesttime, the young men and women who had gone off to work in the city would return, and the village would fill with the sounds of their joyous laughter; every rooftop was stacked high with golden corn and children could be seen rolling about in the freshly cut hay on the threshing ground. Or there was the New Year when the gas lamps over the threshing ground burned bright and there would be several days of wild festivities, the rowing of the “land boat,” and the dancing of the lion dance. Of these lions not much remained save some clicking wooden skulls with the paint worn off and a few bedsheets, since the village could not afford to replace the coverings with proper lion skins … yet everyone had great fun. But after the fifteenth, the young people would all have returned to their jobs and the village had nothing to enliven it. Only at dusk, when the smoke rose from the chimneys in thin wisps, would one or two old men appear on the outskirts of the village, their faces, wrinkled like mountain hickory nuts, raised and peering eagerly at the road that led out of the mountains, till the last rays of the sun hanging from the branches of the pagoda tree faded away. By nightfall the lights in the village had long been put out. Electricity was expensive. It was now up to 1.8 yuan per kilowatt hour.