Hold Up The Sky

by Liu Cixin

  There was virtually nowhere in the galaxy untouched by the war. It was a ruinous fight for survival between carbon-based and silicon-based civilization. Yet neither side had expected the war to last twenty thousand galactic years!

  Except for historians, no one remembers how many battles were waged between forces of a million or more ships. The largest-scale battle was the Battle of the Second Arm, which took place in the second spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. In total, more than ten million warships from both fleets participated as combatants. Historical records tell that more than two thousand stars went supernova in the huge battle zone, like fireworks in the black void. They turned the whole spiral arm into an ocean of super-strong radiation, with groups of black holes floating like ghosts in its midst.

  By the end of the battle, both sides had lost nearly their entire fleets. Fifteen thousand years had elapsed, and the story of the battle sounded like an ancient myth, except for the fact that the battle zone itself still existed. Ships rarely entered the zone. It was the most terrifying region of the galaxy, and not just because of the radiation and black holes.

  During the battle, squadrons of ships from both unthinkably huge fleets made short-distance space-time jumps as a tactical maneuver. It was thought that in dogfights, some interstellar fighters made almost incredible jumps of a few miles at most! These jumps left space-time in the battle zone riddled with holes, more like rags than fabric. Any ship unfortunate enough to stray into the region risked hitting a patch of distorted space. A patch like that could twist a ship into a long, thin, metal pole, or press it into a sheet hundreds of millions of square miles in area and a few atoms thick, which the gale of radiation would immediately shred to pieces. More often, a ship that hit a patch of distorted space-time would regress into the pieces of steel it was made of, or immediately age into a broken husk, everything inside the ship decaying into ancient dust. Anyone aboard would revert in an instant to an embryonic state, or collapse into a pile of bones….

  The war’s decisive battle was not a myth. It took place a year ago. The Silicon Empire assembled its remaining forces, a fleet of 1.5 million warships, in the desolate space between the galaxy’s first and second spiral arms. They set up an antimatter cloud barrier around their location, with a radius of one thousand light-years.

  The first Carbon Federation squadron to attack jumped directly to the edge of the cloud and entered it. The cloud was very thin, but it was lethal against warships, and it turned those ships into brilliant fireballs. Dragging long tails of flame from their hulls, the ships bravely continued to advance on their target, streaks of fluorescence in their wakes. An array of thirty thousand or more shooting stars, rushing bravely forward—it was the most magnificent, tragic image from the Carbon-Silicon War.

  But these shooting stars thinned out as they passed through the antimatter cloud, and at a location very close to the battle array of the Silicon Empire fleet, they disappeared. They had sacrificed themselves to open a tunnel through the cloud for the rest of the attack fleet. In the battle, the last fleet of the Silicon Empire was driven back to the most desolate region in the Milky Way: the tip of the first spiral arm.

  Now, the Carbon Federation fleet was about to complete its final mission: constructing a five-hundred-light-year-wide isolation belt in the middle of the spiral arm. They would destroy most of the stars in the belt to prevent the Silicon Empire from making interstellar jumps. Interstellar jumps were the only way in the Milky Way system for large battleships to carry out fast, long-range attacks, and the greatest distance a ship could jump was two hundred light-years. Once the belt was built, the heavy warships of the Silicon Empire would have to cross five hundred light-years of space at sub-light speeds to get to the central region of the galaxy. In effect, the Silicon Empire would be imprisoned at the tip of the first spiral arm, unable to pose any serious threat to carbon-based civilization in the center of the galaxy.

  The senator used his vibrating smart field to speak to the High Archon. “The will of the Senate is as follows: We maintain our strong recommendation to conduct a life-level protective screening in the belt before commencing stellar destruction.”

  “I understand the Senate’s caution,” said the High Archon. “In this long war, the blood of all forms of life has flowed, enough to fill the oceans of thousands of planets. Now that the war has ended, the most pressing concern for the galaxy is to reestablish respect for life—all forms of life, not only carbon-based life, but silicon-based life, as well. The Federation stopped short of completely annihilating silicon-based civilization on the basis of this ideal. Yet the Silicon Empire has no such qualms. They have an instinctual love for warfare and conquest. It has always been so, even before the Carbon-Silicon War. Now, these inclinations are embedded in each of their genes and in each line of their code. They are the ultimate goals of the Empire. Silicon-based life is far superior to us at storing and processing information. Even here, at the tip of the first spiral arm, their civilization will recover and develop quickly. It is therefore imperative that we construct a sufficiently wide isolation belt between the Federation and the Empire. Given the circumstances, a life scan on each of the hundred million stars in the belt is unrealistic. The first spiral arm may be the most barren region of the galaxy, but there are likely enough stars with inhabited planets to achieve leap density. Medium warships could use them to cross the belt, and just one Silicon Empire medium warship could cause immense damage if it managed to enter Federation space. We cannot conduct a life-level protective screening for each planet, only civilization-level. We must sacrifice the primitive life-forms in the belt, in order to save the advanced and primitive life-forms in the rest of the galaxy. I have explained this to the Senate.”

  “The Senate recognizes this imperative, sir. You have explained it, as has the Federal Defense Committee. The Senate’s statement is a recommendation, not a piece of legislation. However, stars in the belt with life-forms that have reached 3C-civilization status and above must be protected.”

  “Rest assured,” said the High Archon, his smart field flashing a determined red. “We will be extremely thorough in conducting civilization tests for each planetary system in the isolation belt!”

  For the first time, the fleet commander’s smart field emitted a message. “I think you are worried over nothing. The first spiral arm is the most barren wasteland in the galaxy. There won’t be any 3Cs or above.”

  “I hope you are right,” said the High Archon and the senator simultaneously. Their smart fields vibrated in resonance and sent a solitary ripple of plasma into the sky above the metallic land below.

  The fleet began its second space-time leap, traveling at near-infinite speed toward the first spiral arm of the galaxy.

  *

  It was late at night. The children had gathered by candlelight at the foot of their teacher’s sickbed.

  “Teacher, you should rest. You can teach us the lesson tomorrow,” said a boy.

  The teacher managed a pained smile. “Tomorrow we have tomorrow’s lesson.”

  If he could make it to tomorrow, then he would teach tomorrow’s lesson. But his gut told him he wouldn’t last the night.

  He made a gesture, and one of the children placed a small blackboard on the sheet covering his chest. This was how he had been teaching them for a month. The children passed him a half-worn piece of chalk; he grabbed it weakly and put its tip to the blackboard with great effort. A sharp, strong pain shot through him. His hand trembled, knocking the chalk against the blackboard and leaving white dots.

  He had not gone to the hospital since he returned from the city. His liver had begun to ache two months later—the cancer had spread.

  The pain got worse with time until it overwhelmed everything. He groped under his pillow for a pain pill, the common, over-the-counter kind, packaged in plastic. They were completely ineffective at relieving the agony of late-stage cancer, but they had a bit of value as a placebo. Demerol wasn’t expensive, but patient
s weren’t allowed to take it out of the hospital, and even if they were, there was no one to administer the shot. As usual, he pushed two pills out of the plastic strip. He thought for a moment, then pushed out the remaining twelve pills and swallowed them all. He knew he would have no use for them later.

  Again, he turned his attention to the blackboard and struggled to write out the lesson, but a cough overcame him. He turned his head to the side, where a child had rushed to hold up a bowl next to his mouth. He spit out a mouthful of red and black blood, then reclined on his pillow to catch his breath.

  Several of the children stifled sobs.

  He abandoned his effort to write on the blackboard. He waved his hand, and a child came over to remove it from his chest. In a small voice, almost a whisper, he began to speak.

  “Like our lessons yesterday and the day before, today’s lesson is meant for middle schoolers. It is not on your syllabus. Most of you will never have a chance to attend middle school, so I thought I would give you a taste of what it’s like to study a subject in greater depth. Yesterday, we read Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman. You probably didn’t understand much of it, but I want you to read it a few more times, or, better yet, learn to recite it from memory. You’ll understand it when you’re older. Lu Xun was a remarkable man. Every Chinese person should read his books. I know all of you will in the future.”

  He stopped speaking to rest for a moment and catch his breath. He looked at the flickering candle flame. Another passage of Lu Xun came to him. It wasn’t from Diary of a Madman, and it hadn’t been in his textbook. He had encountered it many years before, in his own incomplete, thumbed-through set of Lu Xun’s collected works. Since the first time he read it, he hadn’t forgotten a single word.

  Imagine a windowless, iron room. Many people lie asleep inside. They will soon suffocate and die in their sleep. You shout, and a few hopeless sleepers awaken to a wretched fate that you are powerless to prevent. Have you done them a favor?

  Unless you wake them up, what hope do they have of escape?

  With the last of his strength, he continued his lecture.

  “Today’s class is middle school physics. You may not have heard of physics before. It is the study of the principles of the physical world. It’s an extremely rich, deep field of knowledge.

  “We will learn about Newton’s three laws. Newton was an important English scientist who lived a long time ago. He came up with three remarkable rules. These rules apply to everything in heaven and on Earth, from the sun and moon in the sky down to the water and air of our own planet. Nothing can escape Newton’s three truths. With them, we can calculate to the second when solar eclipses—when the ‘sun dog eats the sun,’ as our village elders say—will happen. Humans can fly to the moon using Newton’s three laws.

  “The first law is as follows: A body at rest or moving in a straight line at a constant speed will maintain its velocity unless an outside force acts upon it.”

  The children watched him silently in the candlelight. No one stirred.

  “This means that if you took the grindstone from the mill and gave it a good push, it should keep rolling, all the way to the horizon. What are you laughing at, Baozhu? You’re right, that wouldn’t actually happen. That’s because a force called friction will bring the stone to a halt. There is nowhere in the world without friction.”

  That’s right, nowhere in the world without friction—his life, especially. He didn’t have the village surname,2 so his words carried no weight. And he was so stubborn! Over the years he had offended practically everyone in the village in one way or another. He had gone door-to-door persuading each family to put their kids in school, and he had gotten some kids to stop following their parents to work by swearing he’d cover their tuition himself. None of this endeared him to the villagers. The plain truth was that his ideas about how to live were just too different from theirs. He talked all day about things that were meaningless to them, and it annoyed them.

  Before he’d learned of his cancer, he had gone once to town and brought back some funds from the Education Bureau to repair the school. The villagers took a bit of the money to hire an opera troupe to perform for two days in an upcoming festival. This bothered the teacher deeply. He went to town again, and this time he brought back a vice county head, who made the villagers return the money. They had already built a stage for the singers. The school was repaired, but that was the end of what little goodwill there was for him in the village, and his life was even more difficult from then on.

  First, the village electrician, the village head’s nephew, cut off the school’s electricity. Then they stopped giving the school cornstalks for heating and cooking, forcing him to abandon planting and spend his time in the hills instead, looking for kindling. Then there was the incident with the rafters in the dorm. Friction was omnipresent, exhausting his body and soul, making him unable to move in a straight line at a constant speed. He had to come to a stop.

  Maybe the place he was heading was a frictionless world where everything was smooth and lovely. But what was there for him in a place like that? His heart would still be in this world of dust and friction, in the primary school he had devoted his whole life to. After he left, the two remaining teachers would leave, too, and the school would grind to a halt, like the village millstone. He fell into a deep sorrow—in this world or the next, he had no hope of finding peace.

  “Newton’s second law is a little tricky, so we’ll leave it for last. His third law is as follows: When a body exerts force on a second body, the second body will exert an equal force on the first body in the opposite direction.”

  The children were silent for a long time.

  “Do you understand? Who can explain it back to me?”

  Zhao Labao, his best student, stood and spoke. “I get the idea, but it doesn’t make sense. This morning I got into a fight with Li Quangui and he hit me right in the face. It really hurt, and I’ve got a lump, right here. Those aren’t equal forces!”

  The teacher took a while to catch his breath, then explained, “The reason you hurt is that your cheek is softer than Quangui’s fist. They exerted equal forces against each other.”

  He wanted to make a gesture to illustrate his point, but he couldn’t lift his hand anymore. His limbs felt as heavy as iron, and soon his whole body felt heavy enough to collapse the bed and sink into the ground.

  There wasn’t much time.

  Target Number: 1033715

  Absolute Magnitude: 3.5

  Evolutionary Stage: Upper Main Sequence

  Two planets found, average orbital radii 1.3 and 4.7 Distance Units

  Life discovered on Planet One

  This is Vessel Red 69012 reporting

  The hundred thousand warships of the Carbon Federation’s interstellar fleet had spread out across a ten-thousand-light-year-long band of space to begin construction of the isolation belt. The first stage of the project was the trial destruction of five thousand stars. Only 137 of those star systems had planets; this was the first planet they had found with life.

  “The first spiral arm is truly a barren place,” said the High Archon, sighing. His smart field vibrated, initiating a holographic projection that concealed the floor of the flagship and the stars overhead. The High Archon, the fleet commander, and the senator all appeared to be floating in a limitless void. Then, the High Archon switched the hologram feed to display the information sent back by the probe, and a glowing, blue fireball appeared in the middle of the void. The High Archon’s smart field produced a white, square box; it adjusted its shape and moved to enclose the image of the star, plunging the space into near-darkness again. This time, however, a small point of yellow light remained. The focal length of the image adjusted rapidly, and in an instant, the yellow dot zoomed into the foreground, fully occupying half of the void. The three of them were bathed in its reflected, orange radiance.

  It was a planet covered in a thick, tempestuous atmosphere, like an orange ocean. The motion of the gas pr
oduced an extremely complex, ever-changing lattice of lines. The image of the planet continued to grow until it seemed to occupy the whole universe, and they were swallowed by its orange, gaseous ocean. The probe took them through the thick clouds to a place where the fog was slightly thinner, enabling them to see the planet’s life-forms.

  In the upper part of the thick atmosphere floated a school of balloon-shaped animals. Their bodies were covered in kaleidoscopic patterns that changed from stripes to spots to all sorts of wonderful designs—perhaps a sort of visual language. Each balloon had a long tail whose tip occasionally produced a flash of light that traveled up the tail and into the balloon’s body, where it became a diffuse fluorescence.

  “Commence the four-dimensional scan!” said the pilot in command of Vessel Red 69012.

  An extremely thin beam swept quickly across the balloons from top to bottom. Though the beam was only a few atoms thick, the interior of the beam had one more spatial dimension than normal space. It transmitted data from the scan back to the ship, and in the storage of the ship’s main computer, the balloon creatures were cut into hundreds of billions of thin slices. Each slice was an atom-thick cross section that recorded everything with near-perfect accuracy, down to the state of each quark.

  “Commence data mirror assembly!”

  The ship’s computer rearranged the hundreds of billions of cross-sectional images in its storage in their original order, superimposing them. Soon, a hollow balloon took shape—a perfect replica of the life-form they had found on the planet, re-created in the computer’s vast digital universe.