Upon the planet, within a stretch of farmland,
a middle-aged man with a basket upon his back walked out onto a little path; and what the basket held was all of it newly ripened crops.
At this moment he marked a shuttle within the sky, coming suddenly out through the layer of cloud, and flying down.
"A shuttle?" The middle-aged man raised his head and looked at that shuttle in his doubt.
He no longer knows how many years it has been since last he saw a shuttle.
Thereafter he found, to his astonishment, that the shuttle seemed of all things to be coming down toward his own dwelling.
The middle-aged man was greatly startled; he threw down at once the basket upon his back, and rushed off toward his own dwelling.
Some ten minutes and more later, the middle-aged man, an iron bar in his hand, rushed up to the gateway of a courtyard; and at the first glance he saw the shuttle standing within it.
"Ah-Xiu!" the middle-aged man cried out in his alarm, but the next second he stood rooted where he was, and did not move.
For his voice had made a woman turn her head, and their eyes met exactly.
By that one meeting of eyes only, the two of them, somewhat strangers to one another, seemed to have some sense pass between them.
"Ah-Jun, you've come back!" A voice came, weeping and joyful together; and there was a middle-aged woman, her eyes red, waving to the middle-aged man.
That was his own wife.
And beside his wife stood an old man, and a young man.
When he saw that old man, the old man's whole body was trembling.
And he too trembled without cease.
"Chu Wenjun…" the old man called his name, quavering.
The iron bar in Chu Wenjun's hand fell to the ground; he looked at the old man past all belief. "Father?"
"It is truly you, boy!" Chu Changhe made three steps into two, came up before Chu Wenjun, and with his own weathered hand stroked his son's cheek, looking at the wrinkles that had come out upon it, and the white hair at his temples.
Those are all of them the marks of these several tens of years.
"You are alive, boy! Alive still!" Chu Changhe's palm struck again and again upon his son's chest, and his voice shook.
At this moment there was nothing at all about him of that Interstellar Marshal who commands a thousand armies and ten thousand horse.
"Father… how is it… you should be here? Can it be… that the Starlight Empire… has fallen already to the Machine Race?" Chu Wenjun thought of this possibility.
"It is not so; the Starlight Empire is well enough. Only that our case with the Machine Race at present… is somewhat particular. It is not to be explained in two or three words; we will talk it over with you in full hereafter. We too have only just come by the news that you were alive, and brought them straight here to seek you out. Chu Xuan, won't you go and see your father?" Zhao Chen came out and explained it, and pushed at the Chu Xuan who had all this while stood rooted where she was, saying nothing.
Chu Xuan?
Hearing this name, Chu Wenjun looked at the graceful young woman before his eyes, and his eyes grew wet. "Xuaner… you… are you truly Xuaner? I am… I am your father… ah… Xuaner…"
Chu Wenjun wept past all speaking.
A grown man of forty or fifty, and at this moment he was for all the world like a child.
Chu Xuan's eyes were somewhat red, but she said nothing for all that.
"When you went away, boy, Xuaner could not so much as walk; how should she possibly know you? Do not frighten the child!" Chu Changhe gave his son's head a slap outright.
"Come in and talk, come in and talk." Chu Xuan's mother wiped at her eyes, and pointed within the house.
This is an ordinary little courtyard, two stories high,
built in the shape of the character 凹: squared, and open upon one side.
Zhao Chen and the rest walked into the house.
No equipment of high technology was to be seen; yet the house was of cement, and Zhao Chen had only to lay a hand upon it to tell that this was, besides, an advanced heat-keeping and cold-resisting material.
It can only be said thus.
This house looks upon its face very like a dwelling of the planetary period, of the age of tilling; and yet hidden within it are the crystallized fruits of the interstellar age's technology.
"Sit, sit." Chu Wenjun waved them all to their seats, his eyes resting all the while upon his own daughter, unwilling to leave her.
Chu Xuan's mother set fruit upon the table, and they all fell to talking at their ease.
Naturally it began from that great interstellar war of Chu Wenjun and his wife's day; and that campaign can in truth be called no more than one of some hundreds of ordinary campaigns between the Starlight Empire and the Machine Race.
Only that, most unhappily, the legion fleet Chu Wenjun and his wife led was worsted; a great number of interstellar warships were destroyed, and taken captive besides!
"The Machine Race has a class of interstellar warship furnished with a gravity beam; and after they had won an absolute advantage in the campaign. They sent out this class of interstellar warship, and took our interstellar warships captive one by one. At the first, aboard ship, we were making ready for a fight of fish dying and net breaking with the Machine Race soldiers; but they injected an anesthetic gas straight into the ship. And by the time we woke, we had already been carried by interstellar transport ship to this planet. At that time one of the mechanical lives said that we should live here; that here was everything we required; but that we were not permitted to develop technology, and that any research project of technology, once discovered, would be destroyed." Chu Wenjun told of how they had come to this place.
"Then these several tens of years, you have been here all along? Did you never think to escape?" Chu Changhe asked, drawing his brows together.
Chu Wenjun sighed. "How should we not have thought of escaping? But upon this planet there is no product of modern technology to be found, not so much as a shuttle. This shuttle you came down in is the first I have seen in near ten years. At the first I thought that when others were sent across hereafter, we might seize a shuttle or an interstellar transport ship and so get away. But we found that those sent across are in fact all packed within a thing like a container, an air-drop device, and dropped straight down upon this planet. And when the drop is done, that container breaks itself down of itself, and becomes nourishment that this planet requires. This place is a cage cut off from the world; we have no chance whatever to leave."
Chu Xuan's mother, beside them, had peeled an apple[1] and set it before Chu Xuan; Chu Xuan took it with some constraint, for she has not yet accepted the case as it stands.
Chu Xuan's mother said, "Happily, by the time we came, everything upon this planet was already laid out. This house we live in, for instance, was allotted to us. And thereafter work would be allotted to us. Our part here belongs to the outskirts; further in there are cities besides. We, for instance, take farming for our chief work. The crops we grow may be bartered with others for goods, or exchanged directly with the mechanical intelligence here for certain goods of daily life: clothing, shoes and stockings, and such. Others may take up other basic labor as well. In the main, so long as one is willing, three hours' work a day will keep one fed. There is law here too, much the same as what we should reckon law; the mechanical intelligence has charge of it, and those who break the law are sent to prison, where the conditions are said to be very bad, so that nobody is willing to go, and they keep the law of themselves as a matter of course. Upon this planet the four seasons are like spring, and the crops planted are all of them excellent crops. In the matter of living, it may be said there is no trouble whatever. So we have lived, in this fashion, upon this planet these several tens of years. Who would have thought… that in this life there should be a chance to see you again." As Chu Xuan's mother said it, she wiped at her tears once more.