That evening, God played The Butterfly Lovers again. He took out the photograph of the pretty young woman and started to hum. Qiusheng’s father quietly moved in. “Gramps God, is that your… girlfriend from a long time ago?”
God was startled. He hid the photograph quickly and smiled like a kid at Qiusheng’s father. “Haha. Yeah, yeah. I loved her two thousand years ago.”
Yulian, who was eavesdropping, grimaced. Two thousand years ago! Considering his advanced age, this was a bit gag-inducing.
Qiusheng’s father wanted to look at the photograph. But God was so protective of it that it would have been embarrassing to ask. So Qiusheng’s father settled for listening to God reminisce.
“Back then we were all so young. She was one of the very few who wasn’t completely absorbed by life in the Machine Cradle. She initiated a great voyage of exploration to sail to the end of the universe. Oh, you don’t need to think too hard about that. It’s very difficult to understand. Anyway, she hoped to use this voyage as an opportunity to awaken the God Civilization, sleeping so soundly in the Machine Cradle. Of course, that was nothing more than a beautiful dream. She wanted me to go with her, but I didn’t have the courage. The endless desert of the universe frightened me. It would have been a journey of more than twenty billion light-years. So she went by herself. But in the two thousand years after that, I never stopped longing for her.”
“Twenty billion light-years? So like you explained to me before, that’s the distance that light would travel in twenty billion years? Oh my! That’s way too far. That’s basically good-bye for life. Gramps God, you have to forget about her. You’ll never see her again.”
God nodded and sighed.
“Well, isn’t she now about your age, too?”
God was startled out of his reverie. He shook his head. “Oh, no. For such a long voyage, her explorer ship would have to fly at close to the speed of light. That means she would still be very young. The only one that has grown old is me. You don’t understand how large the universe is. What you think of as ‘eternity’ is nothing but a grain of sand in space-time.
“Well, the fact that you can’t understand and feel this is sometimes a blessing.”
The honeymoon between the Gods and humans quickly ended.
People were initially ecstatic over the scientific material received from the Gods, thinking that it would allow mankind to realize its dreams overnight. Thanks to the interface equipment provided by the Gods, an enormous quantity of information was retrieved successfully from the storage devices. The information was translated into English, and in order to avoid disputes, a copy was distributed to every nation in the world.
But people soon discovered that realizing these God-given technologies was impossible, at least within the present century. Consider the situation of the ancient Egyptians if a time traveler had provided information on modern technology to them, and you will have some understanding of the awkward situation these humans faced.
As the exhaustion of petroleum supplies loomed over the human race, energy technology was at the top of everyone’s minds. But scientists and engineers discovered that the God Civilization’s energy technology was useless for humans at this time. The Gods’ energy source was built upon the basis of matter-antimatter annihilation. Even if people could understand all the materials and finally create an annihilation engine and generator (a basically impossible task within this generation), it would still have been for naught. This was because the fuel for these engines, antimatter, had to be mined from deep space. According to the material provided by the Gods, the closest antimatter ore source was between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, about 550,000 light-years away.
The technology for interstellar travel at near the speed of light also involved every field of scientific knowledge, and the greater part of the theories and techniques revealed by the Gods were beyond human comprehension. Just to get a basic understanding of the foundations would require human scholars to work for perhaps half a century. Scientists, initially full of hope, had tried to search the material from the Gods for technical information concerning controlled nuclear fission, but there was nothing. This was easy to understand: our current literature on energy science contained no information on how to make fire from sticks, either.
In other scientific fields, such as information science and life sciences (including the secret of human longevity), it was the same. Even the most advanced scholars could make no sense of the Gods’ knowledge. Between the Gods’ science and human science, there was still a great abyss of understanding that could not be bridged.
The Gods who arrived on Earth could not help the scientists in any way. Like the God at the United Nations had said, among the Gods now there were few who could even solve quadratic equations. The spaceships adrift among the asteroids also ignored all hails from the humans. The human race was like a group of new elementary school students who were suddenly required to master the material of Ph.D. candidates, and were given no instructor.
On the other hand, Earth’s population suddenly grew by two billion. These were all extremely aged individuals who could no longer be productive. Most of them were plagued by various diseases and put unprecedented pressure on human society. As a result, every government had to pay each family living with a God a considerable support stipend. Health care and other public infrastructures were strained beyond the breaking point. The world economy was pushed near the edge of collapse.
The harmonious relationship between God and Qiusheng’s family was gone. Gradually the family began to see him as a burden that fell from the sky. They began to despise him, but each had a different reason.
Yulian’s reason was the most practical and closest to the underlying problem: God made her family poor. Among all the members of the family God also worried the most about her; she had a tongue as sharp as a knife, and she scared him more than black holes and supernovas. After the death of her dream of true Communism, she unceasingly nagged God: Before you came, our family had lived so prosperously and comfortably. Back then everything was good. Now everything is bad. All because of you. Being saddled with an old fool like you was such a great misfortune. Every day, whenever she had the chance, she would prattle on like this in front of God.
God also suffered from chronic bronchitis. This was not a very expensive disease to treat, but it did require ongoing care and a constant outlay of money. Finally one day Yulian forbade Qiusheng from taking God to the town hospital to see doctors and stopped buying medicine for him. When the Secretary of the village branch of the Communist Party found out, he came to Qiusheng’s house.
“You have to pay for the care of your family God,” the Secretary said to Yulian. “The doctor at the town hospital already told me that if left untreated, the chronic bronchitis might develop into pulmonary emphysema.”
“If you want him treated, then the village or the government can pay for it,” Yulian shouted at the Secretary. “We’re not made of money!”
“Yulian, according to the God Support Law, the family has to bear these kinds of minor medical expenses. The government’s support fee already includes this component.”
“That little bit of support fee is useless!”
“You can’t talk like that. After you began getting the support fee, you bought a milk cow, switched to liquefied petroleum gas, and bought a big, new color TV! You’re telling me now that you don’t have money for God to see a doctor? Everyone knows that in your family, your word is law. I’m going to make it clear to you: right now I’m helping you save face, but don’t push your luck. Next time, it won’t be me standing here trying to persuade you. It will be the County God Support Committee. You’ll be in real trouble then.”