Ken Liu - Broken Stars

Everything the time traveler had created burned to ashes with Jinyang. After a new city was built nearby, people gradually came to think of those days of wonders as an old dream. Only Guo Wanchao would sometimes take out the “Ray-Ban” sunglasses while drinking with Zhao Da in the Ci Prefecture army camp. “If he’d been born in Song, the world would be a completely different place, huh.”

The Song conquest of Northern Han received only a brief description in the History of the Five Dynasties . One hundred sixty years later, the historian Li Tao at last wrote the great fire of Jinyang into the official histories, but naturally there were no mentions of a time traveler.

In [979 CE], the emperor visited Taiyuan from the north through Shahe Gate. He dispatched the residents in groups to the new governing city of Bingzhou, setting fire to their homes. Children and the elderly did not reach the city gates in time, and many burned to death.

Anna Wu is an author, screenwriter, and translator. She has a master’s degree in Chinese Literature, and her original screenplay, Mist , won a Xingyun Award. She has a short story collection, Double Life , and has been published in Science Fiction World , Galaxy’s Edge , and other places.

Anna lives in Shanghai and works as a screenwriter for a company specializing in science fiction films. She enjoys going to the movies, attending art shows, swimming, and yoga. An avid cook and foodie, she sometimes contributes to food columns. Her favorite writers are Arthur C. Clarke, Neil Gaiman, Robert Sawyer, and J. K. Rowling.

As a result of her graduate studies, she has a deep knowledge of Classical Chinese literature. Currently, she’s working on a science fiction novel set in ancient China. The world-building combines China’s legendary engineering marvels with modern science, with hints of fantasy and something darker.

“The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Laba Porridge” is the first of a series of stories all set in this science fictional eatery. Like the namesake dish, it’s a mix of many flavors.

At the end of the universe far away, there was a restaurant, and its name was The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. From a distance, it looked like a conch shell spinning silently in the void of space.

The restaurant was sometimes big, and sometimes small. The furnishings inside its walls changed often, as did the view outside its windows. It had a refrigerator that was always full of fresh ingredients; a cooking box that fried, baked, seared, steamed, and everything else; a clock that could regulate the flow of time within a modest area; and a melancholic android waiter named Marvin. A red lantern shone perpetually at the center of the restaurant.

Two people, father and daughter, ran the place. They came from a place called China on a planet called Earth. Going by the Traveler’s Guide to the Milky Way , the father was an exemplary specimen of the middle-aged Earthling male—perhaps even a few deciles handsomer than the median. He was black-haired and thin, and there was a scar on his left wrist. He didn’t talk much, but was well-versed in Earth cuisine. If a customer could name it, he could make it. The daughter, Mo, looked to be eleven or twelve years old. She had black hair too, and big, round eyes.

The nearest space-time hub was a small cargo station, a singularity primarily used for Earth shipping. Of course, as a singularity, only organisms with a civilization rating above 3A—capable of uploading their physical bodies into the network—could use it.

Few guests came. Most hailed from Earth, but there were the matchbox-sized three-body people of Alpha Centauri, too; Titanians with their vast balloon forms, adapted to the atmosphere of Saturn; even dazzling silver Suoyas from the center of the Milky Way, fifty thousand light-years from Earth. Intelligent beings of every shape and size might be seen in this restaurant’s blurred concept of time and space: waving their antennae, dribbling their mucus, crackling and sparking their energy fields.

Virtual reality may hold infinities, but wander long enough in it and your soul feels a little lost. Every once in a while, people still want to put on a real body, eat a real meal, and reminisce.

There was a rule for everyone who ate here. You could choose to tell the owner a story; as long as it was interesting enough, your meal was on the house, and the owner would personally cook you a special dish. And you could eat while you thought of the countless civilizations rising and falling, falling and rising, at every instant and in every corner of the universe outside this restaurant, like the births and deaths of the sextillion stars.

He’s not a regular, Mo thought. This is probably his first time here.

Today, the restaurant was furnished for a Chinese winter’s night. There were four or five little tables made of rough-hewn wood and three guests sitting at them. The kitchen station was tucked into a corner. A man and a woman sat at the table under the red lantern. The woman looked to be from Earth, maybe a second-generation clone—her legs were unusually long and slim. The man was probably from Venus, with his bulky cranium and deep purple irises.

And there was an Earth man sitting by himself in a corner, mechanically turning the wine cup in his hand. His pale face was devoid of expression, and his temples were gray. The smell of alcohol poured off of him. Today was the Chinese Laba Festival, and the restaurant had accordingly prepared sweet Laba porridge, whose fragrance filled the room. Yet the man hadn’t ordered it.

Mo had never seen eyes like his before: empty and dark as a dry well, they reminded her of the eyes of a dead insect.

While the business was still slow, Mo stuffed the menu into Marvin’s hand. She waited.

Marvin took the menu and gazed at the falling snow outside the window, sighing. His eyes glimmered blue to indicate melancholy. “They’ve been dead for centuries. Why do they bother eating anyway?” he muttered, even as he ambled over to the Venusian’s table on his short legs.

“Dad, that Earth man should have a good story.” Mo slipped into the kitchen station, grinning. It might count as a gift of sorts—give her a group of people, and she could always pick out the one with the best stories at a glance.

Her father paused in his tasks. He stared at a pile of dishes, silent.

His expression was odd: interest, worry, disgust, perhaps even a little fear?

Time went by. The din of the restaurant floated around them as lightly as the snowflakes outside the window.

“Mo, I think you’ve heard of the Agency of Mysteries.”

“All laws are one; all things are eternal,” Mo said without thinking. The organization’s motto—one Earth language version of it, at least. It was renowned in many eras and many planets. It ignored all interstellar laws and regulations and could provide any service imaginable—but only if your request was entertaining enough to catch its interest. And you couldn’t buy its services with money; you had to… trade. What you needed to trade was a secret that no client had ever revealed. No one knew who the boss was, either—he was too clever to be caught by the space-time police.