And he began to sing. The smart fields of the three became as one, rippling with rose-colored waves. The song he sang was old, passed down from the forgotten beginnings of civilization itself. It sounded distant, mysterious, forlorn, and as it propagated through hyperspace to the hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy, countless beings heard its sound and felt a long-forgotten kind of comfort and peace.

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,”3 said the High Archon.

“The most comprehensible thing about the universe is that it is incomprehensible,” said the senator.

*

There was light in the east by the time the children had finished digging the grave. They tore the door off the classroom and put their teacher’s body on it, and they buried him with two boxes of chalk and a used textbook. They stood a stone slab on top of the mound, and wrote on it in chalk: Mister Li’s Grave.

The faint letters would wash off in the first rainfall, and not long after that, the grave and the person it contained would be forgotten completely.

The tip of the sun rose above the hills, casting a golden ray into the sleeping village. The grass of the valley was still in shadow, but its dew glowed with the light of dawn. A bird or two began timidly to sing.

The children walked along the narrow road back into the village. Their little shadows soon disappeared into the pale blue morning mist of the valley.

They were going to live their lives on that ancient, barren land, and though their harvests would be meager, they would always have hope.

1 A form of dowry payment in some rural areas of northwestern China, meant to compensate the bride’s mother for the pain of having borne her.

2 In many Chinese villages, residents share a common, ancestral surname.

3 Albert Einstein, Physics and Reality.

THE TIME MIGRATION

TRANSLATED BY JOEL MARTINSEN

Where, before me, are the ages that have gone?

And where, behind me, are the coming generations?

I think of heaven and earth, without limit, without end,

And I am all alone and my tears fall down.

Chen Zi’ang (661–702), “On the Gate Tower at Yuzhou”1

MIGRATION

An Open Letter to All People

Due to insupportable environmental and population pressures, the government has been forced to undertake a time migration. A first group of 80 million time-migrants will migrate 120 years.

The ambassador was the last to leave. She stood on empty ground before an enormous cold-storage warehouse that held four hundred thousand frozen people, as did another two hundred like it throughout the world. They resembled, the ambassador thought with a shudder, nothing so much as tombs.

Hua was not going with her. Although he met all of the conditions for migration and possessed a coveted migration card, he felt an attachment to the present world, unlike those headed toward a new life in the future. He would stay behind and leave the ambassador to travel 120 years on her own.