Her comment wasn’t motivated solely by her feelings. The spaceships had disappeared overnight, restoring the sky’s wide open and limitless appearance. Humans had never been allowed to step onto any of the ships. The Gods did not really object to that particular request from the humans, but the ships themselves refused to grant permission. They did not acknowledge the various primitive probes which Earth sent and sealed their doors tightly. After the final group of Gods leaped into the atmosphere, all the spaceships, numbering more than twenty thousand, departed their orbit simultaneously. But they didn’t go far, only drifting in the asteroid belt.
Although these ships were ancient, the old routines continued to function. Their only mission was to serve the Gods. Thus, they would not move too far. When the Gods needed them again, they would come.
Two buses arrived from the county seat, bringing the one hundred and six Gods allocated to Xicen. Qiusheng and Yulian met the God assigned to their family. The couple stood on each side of God, affectionately supported him by the arms, and walked home in the bright afternoon sun. Bingbing and Qiusheng’s father followed behind, smiling.
“Gramps, um, Gramps God.” Yulian leaned her face against God’s shoulder, her smile as bright as the sun. “I hear that the technology you gave us will soon allow us to experience true Communism! When that happens, we’ll all have things according to our needs. Things won’t cost any money. You just go to the store and pick them up.”
God smiled and nodded at her, his white hair bobbing. He spoke in heavily accented Chinese. “Yes. Actually, ‘to each according to need’ fulfills only the most basic needs of a civilization. The technology we gave you will bring you a life of prosperity and comfort surpassing your imagination.”
Yulian’s laughed so much her face opened up like a flower. “No, no! ‘To each according to need’ is more than enough for me!”
“Uh-huh,” Qiusheng’s father agreed emphatically.
“Can we live forever without aging like you?” Qiusheng asked.
“We can’t live forever without aging. It’s just that we can live longer than you. Look at how old I am! In my view, if a man lives longer than three thousand years, he might as well be dead. For a civilization, extreme longevity for the individual can be fatal.”
“Oh, I don’t need three thousand years. Just three hundred.” Qiusheng’s father was now laughing as much as Yulian. “In that case, I’d still be considered a young man right now. Maybe I can… hahahaha.”
The village treated the day like it was Chinese New Year. Every family held a big banquet to welcome its God, and Qiusheng’s family was no exception.
Qiusheng’s father quickly became a little drunk with cups of vintage huangjiu. He gave God a thumbs-up. “You’re really something! To be able to create so many living things—you’re truly supernatural.”
God drank a lot, too, but his head was still clear. He waved his hand. “No, not supernatural. It was just science. When biology has developed to a certain level, creating life is akin to building machines.”
“You say that. But in our eyes, you’re no different from immortals who have deigned to live among us.”
God shook his head. “Supernatural beings would never make mistakes. But for us, we made mistake after mistake during your creation.”
“You made mistakes when you created us?” Yulian’s eyes were wide open. In her imagination, creating all those lives was a process similar to her giving birth to Bingbing eight years ago. No mistake was possible.
“There were many. I’ll give a relatively recent example. The world-creation software made errors in the analysis of the environment on Earth, which resulted in the appearance of creatures like dinosaurs: huge bodies and low adaptability. Eventually, in order to facilitate your evolution, they had to be eliminated.
“Speaking of events that are even more recent, after the disappearance of the ancient Aegean civilizations, the world-creation software believed that civilization on Earth was successfully established. It ceased to perform further monitoring and microadjustments, like leaving a wound-up clock to run on its own. This resulted in further errors. For example, it should have allowed the civilization of ancient Greece to develop on her own and stopped the Macedonian conquest and the subsequent Roman conquest. Although both of these ended up as the inheritors of Greek civilization, the direction of Greek development was altered…”
No one in Qiusheng’s family could understand this lecture, but all respectfully listened.
“And then two great powers appeared on Earth: Han China and the Roman Empire. In contrast to the earlier situation with ancient Greece, the two shouldn’t have been kept apart and left to develop in isolation. They ought to have been allowed to come into full contact…”
“This ‘Han China’ you’re talking about? Is that the Han Dynasty of Liu Bang and Xiang Yu?” Finally Qiusheng’s father heard something he knew. “And what is this ‘Roman Empire’?”
“I think that was a foreigners’ country at the time,” Qiusheng said, trying to explain. “It was pretty big.”
Qiusheng’s father was confused. “Why? When the foreigners finally showed up during the Qing Dynasty, look how badly they beat us up. You want them to show up even earlier? During the Han Dynasty?”
God laughed at this. “No, no. Back then, Han China was just as powerful as the Roman Empire.”
“That’s still bad. If those two great powers had met, it would have been a great war. Blood would have flowed like a river.”
God nodded. He reached out with his chopsticks for a piece of beef braised in soy sauce. “Could have been. But if those two great civilizations, the Occident and the Orient, had met, the encounter would have generated glorious sparks and greatly advanced human progress… Eh, if those errors could have been avoided, Earth would now probably be colonizing Mars, and your interstellar probes would have flown past Sirius.”
Qiusheng’s father raised his bowl of huangjiu and spoke admiringly. “Everyone says that the Gods have forgotten science in their cradle, but you are still so learned.”
“To be comfortable in the cradle, it’s important to know a bit about philosophy, art, history, etc.—just some common facts, not real learning. Many scholars on Earth right now have much deeper thoughts than our own.”
For the Gods, the first few months after they entered human society were a golden age, when they lived very harmoniously with human families. It was as though they had returned to the childhood of the God Civilization, fully immersed in the long-forgotten warmth of family life. This seemed the best way to spend the final years of their extremely long lives.
Qiusheng’s family’s God enjoyed the peaceful life in this beautiful southern Chinese village. Every day he went to the pond surrounded by bamboo groves to fish, chat with other old folks from the village, play chess, and generally enjoy himself. But his greatest hobby was attending folk operas. Whenever a theatre troupe came to the village or the town, he made sure to go to every performance.
His favorite opera was The Butterfly Lovers. One performance was not enough. He followed one troupe around for more than fifty kilometers and attended several shows in a row. Finally Qiusheng went to town and bought him a VCD of the opera. God played it over and over until he could hum a few lines of Huangmei opera and sounded pretty good.
One day Yulian discovered a secret. She whispered to Qiusheng and her father-in-law, “Did you know that every time Gramps God finishes his opera, he always takes a little card out from his pocket? And while looking at the card, he hums lines from the opera. Just now I stole a glance. The card is a photo. There’s a really pretty young woman on it.”