“Grandpa, tell us a story!” the last group of children on earth—who didn’t wear even a scrap of bark, much less animal skin—begged the old man pitifully.
This world, where the mountains and plains were bereft of flowers and no water flowed in the riverbeds, was silent and sorrowful. The lives of the children, who had no lessons to go to and no games to play, were even more dull and barren. And so, all day long they surrounded the elders and pleaded for stories.
“Hmm, all right, all right.”
“Thank you, Grandpa! Thank you …” The overjoyed children clapped their little hands.
“Once upon a time, there was a princess who was as beautiful as the moon on the fifteenth …”
“Grandpa, what’s a moon?”
“The moon? Oh, well, a long time ago the moon was the closest heavenly body to our earth. Every thirty days it would rise in the sky at dusk, looking just like the curved eyebrow of a pretty girl. With each passing day it would grow rounder and clearer, and after about ten days it was all white and round—absolutely beautiful. For that reason, the ancients always compared a pretty girl to the moon.”
“Well, why isn’t it here anymore?”
The old man sighed. “Then let me tell you the story of the moon. In the time of my grandfather, we human beings had very advanced science and technology, and the achievements of these skills were many. But some scientists thought that the natural environment of the earth was bad, and the reason for global climate change was that the orbit of the earth was slightly askew. If, when the moon passed over Antarctica, they could blow it up with explosives, a large amount of lunar soil would fall into the Pacific Ocean, and then the orbit of the earth would be corrected.
“Back then, human beings had many nuclear weapons with the power to destroy the earth ten times over, and the moon was only a quarter the size of the earth, so needless to say they would have had no problem blowing it up.
“The scientists ignored people’s protests. With all their technology—spaceships, space stations, lasers, nuclear facilities, radio telescopes, supercomputers, robots—and with the help of all the brightest and best minds in science, they blew the beautiful moon to smithereens.
“Upon witnessing this fearsome spectacle, the peoples of other planets—whose science was very very advanced—thought, So badly have the terrestrials defiled the mother Earth on which they depend that living beings there can hardly breathe anymore, and now they’ve even stretched their claws into space and destroyed the most beautiful of the heavenly bodies in the solar system. How terrible! We can’t let them carry on like this, no matter what. And so they destroyed all civilization on earth. Not only was all of humankind cast back once more into a primitive state, but waves of natural disasters and epidemics on an even greater scale than in the past wiped out hundreds of millions of people, leaving us in the situation you see today.”
“Grandpa, you just made that up! It’s not a true story. Go back to the story of the princess.”
The children didn’t like the story of the moon because they’d never heard of things like “science and technology,” “nuclear weapons,” and “space stations,” and they had no idea what those words meant.
The old man had no choice but to tell them a story from the age of civilization, about a princess who died of a drug overdose and destroyed her whole family.…