Лю Цысинь - Supernova Era

“Is he dangerous?” asked an agent with a big-bore revolver at his backside.

“Not to America.”

She had spent the previous day busy with various presidential duties and had not slept a wink the previous night. Now an acute drowsiness hit her, and without knowing it she slept the entire afternoon, waking up only after it was dark. She snatched up the phone and inquired about Vaughn’s status, but the kids on duty in the basement informed her that he had spent the entire day motionless in front of the map; during the entire time he had only murmured one thing to himself: “God, would that I had Wegener’s inspiration!”

Benes hurriedly called in a few advisors to study that statement. One advisor told her that Wegener was a geologist from the Common Era, a German. On one occasion, on his sickbed, bored out of his mind and staring at a map of the world, he suddenly realized that several continental borders matched, giving him an idea: Long ago the surface of the Earth might have had just one continent. It had subsequently been broken up by some unknown force, and the various pieces of the crust had drifted apart, forming the world of the present day. This was the beginning of Wegener’s epochal continental drift theory. There was, Benes realized, no mystery to Vaughn’s words; he was only aching to come up with a continental drift theory of international politics. And so she sent the advisors away and went back to sleep on the sofa.

When she next awoke it was after 1:00 A.M. She grabbed the phone and called the basement, and learned that the weird kid in the Oval Office was still standing motionless. “We wonder if maybe he died on his feet,” one of the special agents said. Benes had them transfer the feed to her room. A shaft of light from the Rose Nebula fell through the window and directly onto Vaughn, who appeared wraithlike with the indistinct map beyond him. She sighed, switched off the monitor, and went back to sleep.

She slept till it was light and she was awakened by the ringing of her phone.

“Madam President, the guy in the office wants to see you.”

Benes flew out the door, still in her pajamas, and raced to the door of the Oval Office, where Vaughn’s ghastly gaze was waiting for her.

“We have a new game, Madam President,” Vaughn said gravely.

“We do? Tell me!”

Vaughn held out his hands, each of which held an oddly shaped piece of paper. She snatched them eagerly to take a look, and then raised her head in confusion. They were two fragments that Vaughn had cut out of a world map: one was America, the other was China.

In a small motorcade heading toward Capital Airport, Huahua sat in the lead vehicle with a bespectacled interpreter next to him. The minister of foreign affairs was in the car behind them, and the third held the US ambassador, an eleven-year-old boy named George Friedman who was the son of a former military attaché. A truck at the rear of the motorcade held an army band, and several of the band members were practicing on their instruments, squawking audibly even at this distance.

Two nights before, the Chinese children in the NIT had received an email from the US president. Its contents were simple:

I really, really want to visit your country. I would like to go immediately. May I?

Best Regards,

Frances Benes

President of the United States of America

When the motorcade reached the airport, a flashing silvery-white dot was already circling overhead. The children in the control tower signaled permission to land, and the dot rapidly increased in size. Ten minutes later, Air Force One touched down. Due to the young pilot’s limited technical abilities, the big metal object bounced back up again a few times before landing for good, and then traced a dangerous S curve right up to the end of the runway, where it finally stopped.

The hatch opened. A few small heads poked out and watched anxiously as the airstair was brought in from a few hundred meters away. Once it was in place, the first to exit was a pretty blond-haired girl whom Huahua recognized from TV news as the new president. Right behind her were a few senior officials he didn’t know. They crowded into each other, jostling into Benes so that she nearly tripped. She righted herself and turned back to them to shake a fist and shout a few words of warning, and they slowed down.

The president continued a graceful descent, keeping a clear picture in mind of the history she was making. At the two-thirds point, a gaggle of reporters with cameras strapped round their necks pushed their way out of the hatch and down the stairs, overtaking the officials. The fastest made it to the ground a step ahead of Benes and turned around to train his lens on her. She erupted into fury, bounded down the rest of the stairs to grab the photographer by the collar, and started shouting angrily at him.

The interpreter told Huahua, “The president says that she was supposed to descend first, so that she would be the first American to set foot in China in the Supernova Era. But the reporter stole it from her. The reporter is arguing that he only came down first so he could get a photo of her, but the president is calling him a jackass, and says that she made it very clear aboard the plane that no one was to go in front of her. They were already being privileged; when Nixon came to China he went down by himself, and when he was shaking hands with Zhou Enlai everyone else was still stuck on board. That reporter is the AP’s old pro in the White House and he’s furious. He’s saying, ‘Who the hell are you? You’ll be gone in four years, but we’ll still be in the White House!’ Now the president is saying, ‘Go to hell. I’ll still be there in four years. I’ll be there in eight. I’ll be there forever!’”

Now all the children had come down the stairs, and the argument had turned physical. The president extracted herself from the scrum and strode over to greet the Chinese children.

“I am overjoyed to meet you on the cusp of the rebirth of human history. Wow, your face is covered in frostbite scars. They’re medals of valor! Do you know that in America there are lots of special beauty salons now that give kids frostbite scars using dry ice? They do good business!” Benes said to Huahua through the translator.

“I wish I didn’t have these medals,” Huahua said. “They itch like crazy, and I think they’ll be that way every winter. I really don’t want to have to relive that time in Antarctica over and over. Our two countries suffered such immense trouble and loss due to the World Games.”

“That’s why we’re here. We have a new game!” Benes said with a smile and a bow. Then she looked into the distance. “Where’s the Great Wall?” And around her. “And the pandas?” Clearly she imagined that she would see the Great Wall as soon as she set foot in Chinese territory, and that pandas would be as common as dogs are in the US.

Then a thought struck her. Glancing about again, she asked, “Where’s Vaughn?”

It took a few kids shouting back at the plane for a while before Chester Vaughn emerged. He came down slowly, his arms cradling a thick book. “He’s always reading,” she said to Huahua. “He didn’t even realize we’d landed.”

Shaking his hand, Huahua glanced at the book. It was a volume of Mao Zedong’s commentary on the Twenty-Four Histories, a thread-bound Chinese edition.

Vaughn’s eyes were half closed, as if he were in a trance, and he took a deep breath. “It’s the air I’ve dreamed about,” he said.

“What?” Benes asked in wonder.

“The air of antiquity,” he said, practically inaudible to anyone but himself. Then he stood silently in place, detached, taking everything in.