Ken Liu - Broken Stars

Zhu Dagun took a step closer. “Your Highness, how are we going to defeat the Song army?”

“We can’t,” said Prince Lu. “We don’t have the soldiers or the food, and we can’t mass-produce firearms. Flintlock muskets are easy to manufacture, but we don’t have nearly enough sulfur to make gunpowder. We scoured the city and only found a couple dozen pounds. We can’t do more than occasionally fire a cannon to give a scare. But that brings me to my next point. Though we can’t defeat the Song troops, we can hold out pretty easily. As long as Zhao Guangyi doesn’t find out how Liao is sending us grain under the surface of the water, Jinyang survives another day. Tying empty barrels to full barrels and sending them along the bottom of the Fen River is a trick you ancients would never think of.”

Zhu Dagun raised his voice. “But the commoners are hungry and weary, and the soldiers wail with pain and exhaustion! The longer Jinyang holds on, the more its tens of thousands of residents suffer, Your Highness!”

“Hey, good point.” Prince Lu turned on his stool. “Everyone else is delighted to work here—not only are they pardoned for their crimes, they can even earn some money. But you don’t sound like them. Let’s talk, then. I haven’t had anyone normal to talk to in months. It’s been”—he pulled out a piece of paper, took a look, and drew another X on it—“three months, seven and a half days since I was dropped here. I’ve got twenty-three and a half days before the observational platform automatically returns. The schedule will be tight, but judging from my current progress, I should be able to make it.”

Zhu Dagun understood only the faint longing for home that underlay his words. He immediately recited, “The Master said: as long as parents are alive, one should not journey far from them without method. When one’s father lives, observe one’s aspirations; when he does not, observe one’s actions; if in time they do not deviate from the father’s way one can be termed filial. Your Highness has long been away from your home and must miss your parents dearly. Foxes die with their heads pointing toward their burrow; crows feed their parents in their old age; lambs kneel before they drink from their mother’s teat; stallions will not mate with their dam—”

Prince Lu sighed. “Okay, we’re still not on the same frequency here. Can you shut up and listen?”

Zhu Dagun immediately shut up.

Prince Lu spoke slowly. “I’m sure you don’t know the alternate universe theory or quantum mechanics, so I’ll go over them briefly. My name is Wang Lu. I was an ordinary nerd, amateur writer of chuanyue [17] Chuanyue (穿越) is an enormously popular Chinese genre similar to time travel, but with its own distinct tropes. Typically, the protagonist is from the modern day and travels into the historical past (or a secondary-world version of the historical past), often but not always through reincarnating into the body of someone of that era. Their anachronistic knowledge and upbringing sets them apart from others and allows them to break the status quo. novels, and professional time traveler. In my time, we’d perfected the multiverse theory, so that anyone could go to an agency, rent an observational platform, and go time traveling. At one time, people estimated the number of parallel universes overlaying each other to be around 10^(10^118), but more precise calculations later on indicated that, due to overlap between different diverged branches, only about three hundred quadrillion universes exist at any one time. Countless particle-level possibilities cause universes to endlessly emerge, split, merge, and disappear, and yet even the two parallel universes with the most differences are astonishingly similar on a physical level, even as their places on a timeline diverge further and further.

“In a way, this makes things boring, since humanity’s exploration of deep space remains stalled, and its understanding of the universe as a whole is very shallow. Even in the most advanced universe I’ve been to, humanity’s reach has gone no further than Alpha Centauri, just next door. But in another way, this makes things interesting, since with the invention of the wave function engine it means that we can step across to other parallel universes at our convenience. For topological reasons, the more similar the destination universe, the less energy it takes to travel there. The most advanced observational station we have can send travelers three hundred trillion universes away, though the commercially available equipment only has a maximum range of around forty trillion.”

Zhu Dagun kept nodding while he felt his sleeve pouch, inwardly debating whether to take out the dagger and persuade Prince Lu’s heart or take out the Analects and persuade his mind once he finished his raving. There was no one else in the room, creating a prime opportunity to make his move. It wasn’t that Zhu Dagun didn’t want to act promptly, but that he himself still felt somewhat undecided as to which esteemed personage he should act on behalf of.

Prince Lu picked up his teacup and took a sip, then continued. “I accepted a job from the Peking University history department, a research task to tally the population of the Sixteen Prefectures during the late Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. [18] The Sixteen Prefectures, comprising a region around Beijing and along the Great Wall, had been under Han Chinese or more Sinicized Hu control for centuries until they were ceded to Liao in 938 CE. The strategically and symbolically valuable territory would remain a major point of contention between Liao and Song for years to come. A parallel universe like yours is located toward the front of the timeline, which makes it an excellent place for historical observation.

“Don’t think just anyone can get a time travel license. You have to train systematically in quantum theory, computer operation, ground transportation, emergency drills, and more, and pass the test to get a job. If you want to lead tour groups, you have to take the Time Travel Tour Guide Examinations too. Due to the physical similarity between parallel universes, I activated the observational platform at Xuanwu Gate in Beijing to travel nine hundred billion forty-two universes and arrive here. By my calculations of revolution and rotation elements, I should have been able to arrive in You Prefecture. Who knew that my observational platform was getting long in the tooth? The wave function engine radiator boiled over, right in the middle of the trip! I had to pour in eight bottles of mineral water and a crate of Red Bull to get it to limp to the destination. The moment I arrived in this universe, the crown bar burst through the tank. That was the end of the engine. I crashed into a gully in Shanxi by the Fen River. My luggage, equipment, and spare fuel tanks were wiped out.

“It took me ten days to patch together the engine, only to discover all the fuel had leaked out. The bit left in the oil lines could hop me two or three universes over at most. What use would a few hours forward be?”

The sounds of shouting and fighting from outside grew louder. The Song army had begun another assault on East City Gate. Prince Lu turned to glance at the report scrolling out above the text tray and typed a few characters himself. “Don’t worry.” He laughed. “We’ll take care of it as usual. I’ll move two bladder catapults over… Where was I? Ah, right, the wave function engine could just barely start, and raising the angular speed made the engine oil give off blue smoke like a tractor, but the main problem was that I didn’t have any fuel. Taking that census was of course out of the question, but even worse, since I hadn’t filed this private job with the Ministry of Civil Affairs’ Multiverse Administrative Office, I couldn’t just call the time police for help when they’d put me in jail for three to five years! If I wanted to get home, I needed some way to gather fuel. I didn’t have a choice but to hide my things in the gully and sneak into Jinyang.”