“What for?” asked Liu Baozhu, his eyes on the floor. “No one in this village cared about him when he was alive. I bet they won’t even pay for a coffin!”

In the end, the children decided to bury their teacher themselves. With pickaxes and shovels, they dug a grave in a hill next to the school, and the brilliant stars above silently watched them work.

The senator watched Vessel Blue 84210’s test results as they streamed instantly across a thousand light-years of space. “The civilization on this planet isn’t 3C—it’s 5B!” he exclaimed, astonished.

The skyscrapers of human cities appeared as holograms aboard the flagship.

“They have already begun using nuclear energy, and they can fly into space using chemical propellants. They’ve even landed on their moon.”

“What are their basic features?” asked the fleet commander.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” said the duty officer of Vessel Blue 84210.

“Well, how advanced is their heritable memory?”

“They don’t inherit memories. They acquire all their memories during their lives.”

“What method do they use to communicate information to each other?”

“It’s very primitive, and very rare. There is a thin organ in their bodies that vibrates, producing waves in their planet’s atmosphere, which is primarily composed of nitrogen and oxygen. By modulating the vibrations, they encode information into the waves. They have separate organs—thin membranes—that receive the waves.”

“What’s the transmission rate of that method?”

“Approximately one to ten bits per second.”

“What?!” Everyone on the flagship laughed out loud.

“It’s true. We were incredulous at first, but it’s been verified repeatedly.”

“Captain, this is lunacy!” yelled the fleet commander. “You are telling us that an organism without any hereditary memory that transmits information using sound waves at one to ten bits per second can form a 5B-level civilization?! And that they developed this civilization entirely on their own, without any external assistance from an advanced civilization?!”

“Sir, that is the case.”

“If that’s so, they have no way to pass knowledge between generations. Accumulated knowledge across generations is necessary for civilization to evolve!”

“There is a class of individuals, a certain proportion of the population spread evenly among their civilization. They act as mediums for the transmission of knowledge between generations.”

“That sounds like a myth.”

“It’s not,” said the senator. “Such a concept existed in the galaxy in prehistoric times, but even then, it was extremely rare. No one would know about it except historians of the evolution of civilization in the star systems where the idea had currency.”

“By ‘concept,’ you mean individuals that transmit knowledge between generations of a species?”

“Yes. They’re called ‘teachers.’”

“Tea—cher?”

“An ancient word that was once in currency among a few long-lost civilizations. It’s rare enough that it does not appear in most ancient vocabulary databases.”

The holographic feed from the solar system zoomed out to display the blue orb of Earth rotating slowly in space.