Epilogue: The Return

‘There really is water!’ a young lieutenant shouted with joyous surprise. It was true; a vast surface of water stretched out before them.Sparkling waves shimmered under the dusky heavens.

The Marshal removed the gloves of his spacesuit. With both hands,he scooped up some water. Opening his visor, he ventured a taste. As he quickly closed his visor again, he called, ‘Hey, it’s not too salty.’ When he saw that the lieutenant was about to open his own visor, he stopped him.‘You’ll suffer decompression sickness. The composition of the atmosphere is actually not the problem; the poisonous sulphuric components in the air have already thinned out. However, the atmospheric pressure is too low.Without a visor, it is like what being at thirty thousand was before the war.’

A general dug in the sand at his feet. ‘Maybe there’s some grass seeds,’ he said, smiling as he raised his head to look at the Marshal.

The Marshal shook his head. ‘Before the war, this was the bottom of the ocean.’

‘We can go have a look at New Land Eleven. It’s not far from here.Maybe we can find some there,’ the lieutenant suggested.

‘Any will have been burnt long ago,’ someone commented with a sigh.

Each of them scanned the horizon in all directions. They were surrounded by an unbroken chain of mountains only recently born by the orogenic movements of the Earth. They were dark blue massifs made of bare rock. Rivers of magma spilling from their peaks glowed crimson,like blood oozing from the body of a slain stone titan.

The magma rivers of the Earth below had burned out.

This was Earth, two hundred and thirty years after the war.

After the war had ended, the more than one hundred people aboard the control ship had entered the hibernation chambers. There they waited for the Devourer to spit out the Earth; then they would return home.During their wait, their ship had become a satellite, circling the new joint planet of Devourer and Earth in a wide orbit. In all that time, the Devourer Empire had done nothing to harass them.

One hundred and twenty-five years after the war, the command ship’s sensors picked up that the Devourer was in the process of leaving the Earth. In response, it roused some of those in hibernation. By the time they woke, the Devourer had already left the Earth and flown on to Venus. The Earth had been transformed into a wholly alien world, a strange planet, perhaps best described as a lump of charcoal freshly out of the oven. The oceans had all disappeared, and the land was covered in a web of magma rivers.

The personnel of the control ship could only continue their hibernation. They reset their sensors and waited for the Earth to cool. This wait lasted another century.

*

When they again woke from hibernation, they found a cooled planet,its violent geology having subsided; but now the Earth was a desolate,yellow wasteland. Even though all life had disappeared, there was still a sparse atmosphere. They even discovered remnants of the oceans of old.

So they landed at the shore of such a remnant, barely the size of a pre-war continental lake.

A blast of thunder, deafening in this thin atmosphere, roared above them as the familiar, crude form of a Devourer Empire ship landed not far from their own vessel. Its gigantic doors opened, and Fangs took his first tottering steps out, leaning heavily on a walking stick the size of a power pole.

‘Ah, you are still alive, sir!’ the Marshal greeted him. ‘You must be around five hundred now?’

‘How could I live that long? I, too, went into hibernation, thirty years after the war. I hibernated just so I could see you again,’ Fangs retorted.

‘Where is the Devourer now?’ the Marshal asked.

Fangs pointed into the sky above as he answered. ‘You can still see it at night; it is but a dim star now, just having passed Jupiter’s orbit.’

‘It is leaving the solar system?’ the Marshal queried.

Fangs nodded. ‘I will set out today to follow it.’

The Marshal paused before speaking. ‘We are both old now.’

Fangs sadly nodded his giant head. ‘Old…’ he said, his walking stick trembling in his hand. ‘The world, now…’ He continued pointing from heaven to Earth.

‘A small amount of water and atmosphere remains. Should we consider this an act of mercy from the Devourer Empire?’ the Marshal asked quietly.

Fangs shook his head. ‘It has nothing to do with mercy; it is your doing.’

The Earth’s soldiers looked at Fangs in puzzlement.

‘Oh, in this war the Devourer Empire suffered an unprecedented wound. We lost hundreds of millions in those tears,’ Fangs admitted.‘Our ecosystem, too, suffered critical damage. After the war, it took us fifty Earth years just to complete preliminary repairs, and only once that was done could we begin to chew the Earth. But we knew that our time in the solar system was limited. If we did not leave in time, a cloud of interstellar dust would float right into our flight path. And if we took the long way round, we would lose seventeen thousand years on our way to the next star. In that time, the star’s state would have already changed,burning the planets that we wished to consume. Because of this we had to chew the planets of the Sun in great haste and could not pick them clean.’Fangs explained.

‘That fills us with great comfort and honour.’ the Marshal said,looking at the soldiers surrounding him.

‘You are most worthy of it. It truly was a great interstellar war. In the lengthy annals of the Devourer’s wars, ours was one of the most remarkable battles! To this day, all throughout our world, minstrels sing of the epic achievements of the Earth’s soldiers,’ Fangs stated.

‘We would sooner hope that humanity would remember the war. So,how is humanity?’ the Marshal queried.

‘After the war, approximately two billion humans were migrated to the Devourer Empire, about half of all of humanity,’ Fangs answered,activating the large screen of his portable computer where pictures of life on the Devourer appeared. The screen revealed a beautiful grassland under blue skies. On the grass, a group of happy humans was singing and dancing, and at first it was difficult to distinguish the gender of these humans. Their skin was a soft, subtle white, and they were all dressed in fine, gauzy clothes with beautiful wreaths of flowers on their heads. In the distance, one could make out a magnificent castle, clearly modelled on something from an Earth fairytale. Its vibrant colours made it look as if it were made of cream and chocolate.

The camera’s lens drew closer, giving the Marshal a chance to study these people’s countenances in detail. He was soon completely convinced that they were truly happy. It was an utterly carefree happiness, pure as crystal. It reminded him of the few short years of innocent childhood joy that pre-war humans had experienced.

‘We must ensure their absolute happiness,’ Fangs said. ‘It is the minimum requirement for raising them. If we do not, we cannot guarantee the quality of their meat. And it must be said that Earth people are seen as food of the highest quality; only the upper class of the Devourer Empire society can afford to enjoy them. We do not take such delicacies for granted.’ Fangs paused for a moment. ‘Oh, Marshal. We found your great grandson, sir. We recorded something from him to you. Do you care to see it?’

The Marshal gazed at Fangs in surprise, then nodded his head.

A fair-skinned, beautiful boy appeared on the screen. Judging by his face he was only ten years old, but his stature was already that of a grown man. He held a flower wreath in his effeminate hands, having obviously just been called from a dance.

Blinking his large, shimmering eyes, he said, ‘I hear that my great grandfather still lives. I ask only one thing of you, sir. Never, ever come see me! I am nauseated! When we think of hum anity’s life before the war, we are all nauseated! What a bar baric life that was, the life of cockroaches! You and your soldiers of Earth wanted to preserve that life!You almost stopped humanity from entering this beautiful heaven! How perverse! Do you know how much shame, how much embarrassment you have caused me? Bah! Do not come looking for me! Bah! Go and die!’After he had finished, he skipped off to join the dancing on the grassland.

Fangs was first to break the awkward silence that followed. ‘He will live past the age of sixty. He will have a long life and will not be slaughtered.’

‘If it is because of me, then I am truly grateful.’ the Marshal said,smiling miserably.

‘It does not. After learning about his ancestry, he became very depressed and filled with feelings of hatred toward you. Such emotions prevented his meat from meeting our standards.’ Fangs explained.

As Fangs looked at these last few humans before him, genuine emotions played across his massive eyes. Their spacesuits were extremely old and shabby, and the many years past were etched into their faces. In the pale yellow of the Sun, they looked like a group of rust-stained statues.Fangs closed his computer and, full of regret, said, ‘At first, I did not want you to see this, but you are all true warriors, more than capable of dealing with the truth, ready to recognize,’ he paused for a long moment before continuing ‘that human civilization has come to an end.’

‘You certainly destroyed Earth’s civilization,’ the Marshal said,staring into the distance. ‘You have committed a monstrous crime!’

‘We finally have started to talk about morals again.’ Fangs said with a laugh and a grin.

‘After invading our home and brutally devouring everything in it,I would think that you had forfeited all right to talk about morals.’ the Marshal said coldly.

The others had already stopped paying attention; the extreme,cold brutality of the Devourer civilization was just beyond human understanding. Nothing could have been less interesting to the others than a discussion with them about morals.

‘No, we have the right. I now truly wish to talk about morals with humanity,’ Fangs said before again pausing. ‘How, sir, could you just pick him up and eat him?’ he continued, quoting the then Captain. Those last words left nobody unshaken. They did not emanate from the translator, but came directly from Fangs’ mouth. Even though his voice was deafening,Fangs somehow managed to imitate those three-hundred-year-old words with perfection.

Fangs continued, resuming his use of the translator. ‘Marshal,three hundred years ago, your intuition did not mislead you: When two civilizations – separated by interstellar space – meet, any similarities should be far more shocking than their differences. It certainly shouldn’t be as it is with our species.’

As all present focused their gaze on Fangs’ frame, they were overcome with a sense of premonition that a world-shaking mystery was about to be revealed.

Fangs straightened himself on his walking-stick and, looking into the distance, said, ‘Friends, we are both children of the Sun; and while the Earth is both our species’ fraternal home, my people have the greater claim to her! Our claim is one hundred and forty million years older than yours. All those millennia ago, we were the first to live on this beautiful planet, and this is where we established our magnificent civilization.’

The Earth’s soldiers stared blankly at Fangs. The waters of the remnant ocean rippled in the pale of the yellow sunlight. Red magma flowed from the distant new mountains. Sixty million years down the rivers of time, two species, each the ruler of this Earth in their own time,met in desolation on their plundered home world.

‘Dino… saur!’ someone exclaimed in a shocked whisper.

Fangs nodded. ‘The Dinosaur Civilization arose one hundred million years ago on Earth, during what you call the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic. At the end of the Cretaceous, our civilization reached its zenith,but we are a large species, and our biological needs were equally great.In the wake of our population increase, the ecosystem was stretched to its limit, and the Earth was pushed to its brink as it struggled to support our society. To survive, we completely consumed Mars’ elementary ecosystem.

‘The Dinosaur Civilization lasted twenty thousand years on Earth,’he continued, ‘but its true expansion was a matter of a few thousand years.From a geological perspective, its effects are indistinguishable from those of an explosive catastrophe; what you call the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event.

‘Finally, one day all the dinosaurs boarded ten giant generation ships and, with these ships, sailed into the vast sea of stars. In the end, all ten of these ships were joined together. Then, whenever this newly united ship reached another star’s planet, it expanded. Now, sixty million years later,it has become the Devourer Empire you now know.’

‘Why would you eat your own home world? Are dinosaurs bereft of all sentiment?’ someone asked.

Fangs answered, lost in thought. ‘It is a long story. Interstellar space is indeed vast and boundless, but it is also different than you would imagine. The places that truly suit us, as advanced carbon-based life forms, are few and far between. A dust cloud blocks the way to the centre of the Milky Way just two thousand light years from here. There is no way for us to pass through it, and no way for us to survive in it. And after that it becomes an area of powerful radiation and a large group of wandering black holes.’ Fangs paused, before continuing, still speaking more to himself than to the humans before him. ‘If we should travel in the opposite direction, we would just come to the end of the Milky Way’s spiral arm and then, not far beyond, there is nothing but a limitless,desolate void. The Devourer Empire has already completely consumed almost all the planets that could be found in the habitable areas that exist between these two barriers. Now, the only way out is to fly to another arm of the Milky Way. We have no idea what awaits us there, but if we stay here we will certainly be doomed. It will be a journey of fifteen million years, taking us right through the void. To survive it, we must build large stocks of all possible expendables.

‘Right now, the Devourer Empire is just like a fish in a drying stream. It must make a desperate leap before its water completely evaporates. It realizes that the most likely end is reaching dry land and succumbing to death under the scorching Sun; but there is the slight chance that it may fall into a neighbouring water hole and so survive.’Fangs lowered his gaze toward the humans, bending down to almost eye level. ‘As far as sentiment is concerned, we have lived through tens of millions of arduous years and fought stellar wars beyond number. The hearts of the dinosaur race have long since hardened. Now the Devourer Empire must consume as much as it possibly can in preparation for our million-year journey.’ Fangs again paused, deep in thought. ‘What is civilization? Civilization is devouring, ceaselessly eating, endlessly expanding; everything else comes second.’

The Marshal, too, was deep in thought. Looking at Fangs, he asked, ‘Can the struggle for existence be the universe’s only law of biological and cultural evolution? Can we not establish a self-sufficient,introspective civilization where all life exists in symbiosis? A civilization like that of the Eridanians?’

Fangs answered without hesitation or pause. ‘I am no philosopher;perhaps it can be done. The crux is, who will take the first step? If one’s survival is based on the subjugation and consumption of others and if that should be the universe’s iron law of life and civilization, then whoever first rejects it in favour of introspection will certainly perish.’

With that Fangs returned to his spaceship, but he re-emerged, now carrying a thin, flat box in both talons. The box was about ten feet square,and it would have easily taken four men to carry it. Fangs placed the box on the ground and opened its top. To the humans’ surprise, the box was filled with dirt, and grass was growing on it. On this lifeless world, its green left no heart untouched.

As Fangs opened the box, he turned to the humans. ‘This is pre war soil. After the war, I put all of our planet’s plants and all of its insects into suspended animation. Now, after more than two centuries, they have awoken. Originally, I wanted to take this soil with me as a memento. Alas,I have thought more about it, and I have changed my mind. I have decided to return it to where it truly belongs. We have taken more than enough from our home world.’

As they gazed upon this tiny piece of Earth, so full of life, the humans’ eyes began to moisten. They now knew the dinosaurs’ hearts had not turned to stone. Behind those scales, colder and crueller than steel and rock, beat hearts that longed for home.

Fangs rattled his claws, almost as if he wanted to cast off the emotions that had gripped him. Slightly shaken, he said, ‘All right then,my friends, we will go together, back to the Devourer Empire.’ Seeing the expression on the humans’ faces, he raised a claw before continuing. ‘You will, of course, not be food there. You are great warriors and you will be made citizens of the Empire. And there is still work that needs your attention. A museum to the human civilization needs to be built.’

The eyes of every single Earth soldier turned to the Marshal. He stood deep in thought, then slowly nodded.

One after the other, the Earth’s soldiers boarded Fangs’ spaceship.Because its ladder was intended for dinosaurs, they had to pull the full length of their bodies up each rung to climb inside. The Marshal was the last human to board the ship. Grasping the lowest rung of the ship’s ladder, he pulled his body off the ground. Just at that moment, something in the ground beneath his feet caught his eye. He stopped in mid-pull,looking down. For a long time he hung there, motionless.

He had seen… an ant.

The ant had climbed out of that box of soil. Never losing sight of the tiny insect, the Marshal let go of the ladder and squatted down.Lowering his hand, he let the ant clamber onto his glove. Raising it to his face, he carefully studied the small creature, its obsidian body glinting in the sunlight. Holding it, the Marshal walked over to the box, where he cautiously returned the ant to the tiny blades of grass. As he lowered his hand, he noticed more ants climbing about the soil beneath the grass.

Raising himself, he turned to Fangs who was standing right by his side. ‘When we leave, this grass and these ants will be the dominant species on Earth.’

Fangs was at a loss for words.

‘Earth’s civilized life seems to be getting smaller and smaller.Dinosaurs, humans and now probably ants,’ the Marshal said, squatting back down. He looked on, his eyes deep with love and admiration as he watched these small beings live their lives in the grass. ‘It is their turn.’

As he spoke, the Earth’s soldiers re-emerged from the spaceship.Climbing down to Earth, they returned to the box of living soil. Standing around it they, too, were filled with deep love.

Fangs shook his head. ‘The grass cannot survive. It might even tually rain here at the seaside, but it won’t be enough for the ants.’

‘Is the atmosphere too thin? They seem to being doing just fine at the moment,’ someone noted.

‘No, the air is not the problem. They are not like humans and can live well in this atmosphere. The real crux of the matter is that they will have nothing to eat.’ Fangs replied.

‘Can’t they eat the grass?’ another voice joined in.

‘And then? How will they live on? In this thin air, the grass will grow very slowly. Once the ants have eaten all the blades, they will starve. In many ways, their situation mirrors the destiny of the Devourer civilization.’ Fangs mused.

‘Can you leave behind some food from your spaceship for them?’another soldier asked, almost pleaded.

Fangs again shook his massive head. ‘There is nothing on my spaceship besides water and the hibernation system. On that note, we will hibernate until we catch up with the Devourer. But what about your spaceship, do you have any food on board?’

Now it was the Marshal’s turn to shake his head. ‘Nothing but a few injections of nourishment solution. Useless.’

Pointing to the spaceship, Fangs interrupted the discussion. ‘We must hurry. The Empire is accelerating quickly. If we tarry, we will not catch up.’

Silence.

‘Marshal, we will stay behind.’ It was the young lieutenant who broke the silence.

The Marshal forcefully nodded.

‘Stay behind? What are you up to?’ Fangs asked in astonishment,turning from one to the other. ‘The hibernation equipment on your spaceship is almost completely depleted and you have no food. Do you plan to stay and wait for death?’

‘Staying will be the first step.’ the Marshal calmly answered.

‘What?’ Fangs asked, ever more perplexed.

‘You just mentioned the first step toward a new civilization.’ the Marshal explained.

‘You,’ Fangs could hardly believe his own words, ‘want to be the ants’ food?’

Earth’s soldiers all nodded. Without a word, Fangs gazed at them for what seemed like forever, before turning and slowly hobbling back to his spaceship, leaning heavily on his walking stick.

‘Farewell, friend.’ the Marshal shouted after Fangs.

Fangs replied with a long, drawn-out sigh. ‘An interminable darkness lies before me and my descendants: the darkness of endless war and a vast universe. Oh, where in it could there be a home for us?’

As he spoke, the humans saw that the ground beneath his feet had grown damp, but they could not tell if he had, or even could, shed tears.

With a thunderous roar, the dinosaur’s spaceship lifted off and quickly disappeared into the sky. Where it had vanished, the Sun was now setting.

The last warriors of Earth seated themselves around the living soil in silence. Then, beginning with the Marshal, they all, one by one, opened their visors and stretched out on the sandy earth.

As time passed, the Sun set. Its afterglow bathed the plundered Earth in a beautiful red. As it faded, a few stars began to twinkle in the sky. To his surprise, the Marshal saw that the dusky sky was a beautiful blue. Just as the thin atmosphere began to render him unconsciousness, the Marshal felt the tiny movements of an ant on his temple, filling him with a deep sense of contentment. As the ant climbed up to his forehead, he was transported back to his so very distant childhood. He was at the beach, lying in a small hammock that hung between two palm trees. Looking up to the splendid sea of stars above, he felt his mother’s hand gently stroke his forehead…

Darkness fell. The remnant ocean lay flat as a mirror, pristinely reflecting the Milky Way above. It was the most tranquil night in the planet’s history.

In this tranquillity, the Earth was reborn.

霍爾格·南（Holger Nahm）　譯

精彩翻譯品讀

1．“您怎麽這麽肯定他能吃呢？一個相距如此遙遠的世界上的生物能被食用，從生物化學上講幾乎是不可能的。”

‘Sir, how could you have known that you can eat him?From a biochemical perspective, it is almost impossible that a being from such a distant world should be edible.’

2．“我們以後有很長的時間相處，有很多的事要談，但不要再從道德的角度談了，在宇宙中，那東西沒意義。”

‘We still have a very long time to get along and very many things to talk about, but let us not speak of morals.In the universe, such considerations are meaningless.’

3．“其實你們完全沒有必要費這麽大勁兒，在銀河係，一個文明成為更強大文明的家禽是很正常的，你們會發現被飼養是一種多麽美妙的生活，衣食無憂，快樂終生，有些文明還求之不得呢。你們感到不舒服，完全是陳腐的人類中心論在作怪。”

‘Truth be told, there is no reason at all for you to work so hard at it. In the Milky Way, it is perfectly commonplace for a weaker civilization to become the livestock of a stronger

civilization. You will discover that being raised for food is a splendid life indeed. You will have no wants and will live happily to the end. Some civilizations have sought to become livestock, only to be turned down. That you should feel uncomfortable with the idea is entirely the fault of a most banal anthropocentrism.’