Ken Liu - Invisible Planets - Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

“Ha, you’re very generous, you old fool! How dare you eat our food while giving it away?” Yulian began to curse loudly.

Qiusheng’s father slammed the table and got up. “You idiot! Get out of here! You miss those Gods by the river? Why don’t you go and join them?”

God sat silently for a while, thinking. Then he stood up, went to his tiny room, and packed up his few belongings. Leaning on his bamboo cane, he slowly made his way out the door, heading in the direction of the river.

Qiusheng didn’t eat with the rest of his family. He squatted in a corner with his head lowered and not speaking.

“Hey, dummy! Come here and eat. We have to go into town to buy feed this afternoon,” Yulian shouted at him. Since he refused to budge, she went over to yank his ear.

“Let go,” Qiusheng said. His voice was not loud, but Yulian let him go as though she had been shocked. She had never seen her husband with such a gloomy expression on his face.

“Forget about him,” Qiusheng’s father said carelessly. “If he doesn’t want to eat, then he’s a fool.”

“Ha, you miss your God? Why don’t you go join him and his friends in that field by the river, too?” Yulian poked a finger at Qiusheng’s head.

Qiusheng stood up and went upstairs to his bedroom. Like God, he packed a few things into a bundle and put it in a duffel bag he had once used when he had gone to the city to work. With the bag on his back, he headed outside.

“Where are you going?” Yulian yelled. But Qiusheng ignored her. She yelled again, but now there was fear in her voice. “How long are you going to be out?”

“I’m not coming back,” Qiusheng said without looking back.

“What? Come back here! Is your head filled with shit?” Qiusheng’s father followed him out of the house. “What’s the matter with you? Even if you don’t want your wife and kid, how dare you leave your father?”

Qiusheng stopped but still did not turn around. “Why should I care about you?”

“How can you talk like that? I’m your father! I raised you! Your mother died early. You think it was easy to raise you and your sister? Have you lost your mind?”

Qiusheng finally turned back to look at his father. “If you can kick the people who created our ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestors out of our house, then I don’t think it’s much of a sin for me not to support you in your old age.”

He left, and Yulian and his father stood there, dumbfounded.

Qiusheng went over the ancient arched stone bridge and walked toward the tents of the Gods. He saw a few of the Gods had set up a pot to cook something in the grassy clearing strewn with golden leaves. Their white beards and the white steam coming out of the pot reflected the noon sunlight like a scene out of an ancient myth.

Qiusheng found his God and said stubbornly, “Gramps God, let’s go.”

“I’m not going back to that house.”

“I’m not, either. Let’s go together into town and stay with my sister for a while. Then I’ll go into the city and find a job, and we’ll rent a place together. I’ll support you for the rest of my life.”

“You’re a good kid,” God said, patting his shoulder lightly. “But it’s time for us to go.” He pointed to the watch on his wrist. Qiusheng now noticed that all the watches of all the Gods were blinking with a red light.

“Go? Where to?”

“Back to the ships,” God said, pointing at the sky. Qiusheng lifted his head and saw that two spaceships were already hovering in the sky, standing out starkly against the blue. One of them was closer, and its shape and outline loomed huge. Behind it, another was much farther away and appeared smaller. But the most surprising sight was that the first spaceship had lowered a thread as thin as spider silk, extending from space down to Earth. As the spider silk slowly drifted, the bright sun glinted on different sections like lightning in the bright blue sky.

“A space elevator,” God explained. “Already more than a hundred of these have been set up on every continent. We’ll ride them back to the ships.” Later Qiusheng would learn that when a spaceship dropped down a space elevator from a geostationary orbit, it needed a large mass on its other side, deep in space, to act as a counterweight. That was the purpose of the other ship he saw.

When Qiusheng’s eyes adjusted to the brightness of the sky, he saw that there were many more silvery stars deep in the distance. Those stars were spread out very evenly, forming a huge matrix. Qiusheng understood that the twenty thousand ships of the God Civilization were coming back to Earth from the asteroid belt.

Twenty thousand spaceships once again filled the sky above Earth. In the two months that followed, space capsules ascended and descended the various space elevators, taking away the two billion Gods who had briefly lived on Earth. The space capsules were silver spheres. From a distance, they looked like dewdrops hanging on spider threads.

The day that Xicen’s Gods left, all the villagers showed up for the farewell. Everyone was affectionate toward the Gods, and it reminded everyone of the day a year ago when the Gods first came to Xicen. It was as though all the abuse and disdain the Gods had received had nothing to do with the villagers.

Two big buses were parked at the entrance to the village, the same two buses that had brought the Gods here a year ago. More than a hundred Gods would now be taken to the nearest space elevator and ride up in space capsules. The silver thread that could be seen in the distance was in reality hundreds of kilometers away.

Qiusheng’s whole family went to send off their God. No one said anything along the way. As they neared the village entrance, God stopped, leaned against his cane, and bowed to the family. “Please stop here. Thank you for taking care of me this year. Really, thank you. No matter where I will be in this universe, I will always remember your family.” Then he took off the large watch from his wrist and handed it to Bingbing. “A gift.”

“But… how will you communicate with the other Gods in the future?” Bingbing asked.

“We’ll all be on the spaceships. I have no more need for this,” God said, laughing.

“Gramps God,” Qiusheng’s father said, his face sorrowful, “your ships are all ancient. They won’t last much longer. Where can you go then?”

God stroked his beard and said calmly, “It doesn’t matter. Space is limitless. Dying anywhere is the same.”

Yulian suddenly began to cry. “Gramps God, I… I’m not a very nice person. I shouldn’t have made you the target of all my complaints, which I’d saved up my whole life. It’s just as Qiusheng said: I’ve behaved as if I don’t have a conscience…” She pushed a bamboo basket into God’s hands. “I boiled some eggs this morning. Please take them for your trip.”

God picked up the basket. “Thank you.” Then he took out an egg, peeled it, and began to eat, savoring the taste. Yellow flakes of egg yolk soon flaked his white beard. He continued to talk as he ate. “Actually, we came to Earth not only because we wanted to survive. Having already lived for two, three thousand years, what did we have to fear from death? We just wanted to be with you. We like and cherish your passion for life, your creativity, your imagination. These things have long disappeared from the God Civilization. We saw in you the childhood of our civilization. But we didn’t realize we’d bring you so much trouble. We’re really sorry.”

“Please stay, Gramps,” Bingbing said, crying. “I’ll be better in the future.”

God shook his head slowly. “We’re leaving not because of how you treated us. The fact that you took us in and allowed us to stay was enough. But one thing made us unable to stay any longer: in your eyes, the Gods are pathetic. You pity us. Oh, you pity us.”