Hold Up The Sky

by Liu Cixin

  Silence.

  “3C Civilization Test, Question Twelve: Where is your planet’s position relative to the other planets in your star system?”

  Silence.

  “This is pointless, Your Excellency,” said the fleet commander.

  “3C Civilization Test, Question Thirteen: How does an object move when it is not subjected to any external forces?”

  Beneath the endless blue sky of the simulated universe, the children recited, “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.”

  “Correct! 3C Civilization Test, Question Fourteen …”

  “Wait!” called out the senator, interrupting the duty officer administering the test. “The next question is also about heuristics in low-speed mechanics. Doesn’t that violate the test guidelines?” he asked the High Archon.

  “Of course not, as long as the question is in the database,” interjected the fleet commander. He was shocked that these unassuming life-forms had answered a question correctly, and all his attention was now on them.

  “3C Civilization Test, Question Fourteen: Please describe how two objects exerting force on each other interact.”

  “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!” said the children.

  “Correct! 3C Civilization Test, Question Fifteen: Please describe the relationship between an object’s mass and acceleration when an external force acts upon it.”

  In unison, the children said, “The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the force acting on it, and inversely proportional to the object’s mass!”

  “Correct! You have passed the Civilization Test! Confirming that there is a 3C-level civilization on Planet Three of Target Star 500921473.”

  “Reverse the singularity bomb! Disengage!!” The High Archon’s smart field flashed and vibrated frantically as he sent his order through hyperspace to Vessel Blue 84210.

  The force-field beam began to bend. Its hundred-million-mile path through the solar system curved away from the sun, like a tree branch that had been weighed down. As the force-field engine on board Vessel Blue 84210 worked at maximum power, its enormous heat sink glowed, first dark red, then with a bright white incandescence. The beam’s new thrust vector began to affect the trajectory of the singularity bomb, which curved away from its target. However, it was already inside the orbit of Mercury, very close to the sun, and no one was confident that the force-field engine could bend its course enough to prevent impact.

  The whole galaxy watched over hyperspace as the fuzzy, dark ball veered and grew substantially brighter, a worrisome sign that it had already entered the particle-rich space around the sun. The captain’s hand rested on the red hyperspace button, ready to leap away from the solar system the moment before impact.

  In the end, the bomb shot by the very edge of the sun, only a few dozen miles from its surface, sucking in huge amounts of material from the sun’s atmosphere as it brushed past. It glowed intensely with a blue-white light, and for a moment, the sun appeared to have a brighter twin star locked in close, binary orbit, a phenomenon that was to become an enduring mystery to the inhabitants of Earth. The sun’s fiery surface darkened beneath the bomb, like the wake of a speedboat in calm water, and as the black hole swept past the solar surface, its gravity consumed the sun’s light, scratching a dark, crescent scar into the sun’s surface which grew to eclipse the whole solar hemisphere. As the bomb left the sun, it dragged an enormous solar prominence behind it, a beautiful string of flame one million miles long. The tip of the prominence flared violently outward, blossoming into a mass of whirling plasma vortices.

  After the singularity bomb brushed past the sun, it grew dark again. Soon, it disappeared into the infinite night of space.

  “We almost destroyed a carbon-based civilization,” said the senator, heaving a sigh of relief.

  “A 3C-level civilization here, in this desert—unbelievable!” exclaimed the fleet commander.

  “Yes. Neither the Carbon Federation nor the Silicon Empire has included this region in its plans for expansion and cultivation. If this civilization were to have evolved entirely on its own, that would be a rare thing indeed,” said the High Archon.

  “Vessel Blue 84210, you are to hold your position in that star system and commence a full-surface civilization test on Planet Three. Another ship will take over your prior mission,” ordered the fleet commander.

  The children in the village didn’t notice anything amiss, unlike their digital replicas outside of Jupiter’s orbit. They were still crying over their teacher’s body in their candlelit dormitory. After a long time, they quieted down.

  “We should go tell a grown-up,” said Guo Cuihua, stifling a sob.

  “What for?” asked Liu Baozhu, his eyes on the floor. “No one in this village cared about him when he was alive. I bet they won’t even pay for a coffin!”

  In the end, the children decided to bury their teacher themselves. With pickaxes and shovels, they dug a grave in a hill next to the school, and the brilliant stars above silently watched them work.

  The senator watched Vessel Blue 84210’s test results as they streamed instantly across a thousand light-years of space. “The civilization on this planet isn’t 3C—it’s 5B!” he exclaimed, astonished.

  The skyscrapers of human cities appeared as holograms aboard the flagship.

  “They have already begun using nuclear energy, and they can fly into space using chemical propellants. They’ve even landed on their moon.”

  “What are their basic features?” asked the fleet commander.

  “You’ll have to be more specific,” said the duty officer of Vessel Blue 84210.

  “Well, how advanced is their heritable memory?”

  “They don’t inherit memories. They acquire all their memories during their lives.”

  “What method do they use to communicate information to each other?”

  “It’s very primitive, and very rare. There is a thin organ in their bodies that vibrates, producing waves in their planet’s atmosphere, which is primarily composed of nitrogen and oxygen. By modulating the vibrations, they encode information into the waves. They have separate organs—thin membranes—that receive the waves.”

  “What’s the transmission rate of that method?”

  “Approximately one to ten bits per second.”

  “What?!” Everyone on the flagship laughed out loud.

  “It’s true. We were incredulous at first, but it’s been verified repeatedly.”

  “Captain, this is lunacy!” yelled the fleet commander. “You are telling us that an organism without any hereditary memory that transmits information using sound waves at one to ten bits per second can form a 5B-level civilization?! And that they developed this civilization entirely on their own, without any external assistance from an advanced civilization?!”

  “Sir, that is the case.”

  “If that’s so, they have no way to pass knowledge between generations. Accumulated knowledge across generations is necessary for civilization to evolve!”

  “There is a class of individuals, a certain proportion of the population spread evenly among their civilization. They act as mediums for the transmission of knowledge between generations.”

  “That sounds like a myth.”

  “It’s not,” said the senator. “Such a concept existed in the galaxy in prehistoric times, but even then, it was extremely rare. No one would know about it except historians of the evolution of civilization in the star systems where the idea had currency.”

  “By ‘concept,’ you mean individuals that transmit knowledge between generations of a species?”

  “Yes. They’re called ‘teachers.’”

  “Tea—cher?”

  “An ancient word that was once in currency among a few long-lost civilizations. It’s rare enough that it does not appear in most ancien
t vocabulary databases.”

  The holographic feed from the solar system zoomed out to display the blue orb of Earth rotating slowly in space.

  The High Archon said, “A civilization evolving independently is rare enough, but I know of no other civilization in the Milky Way that has attained 5B level on its own, at least in the era of the Carbon Federation. We should let this civilization continue its evolution without interference, observing it as it does, not only to further our understanding of ancient civilizations, but also, perhaps, to gain insight into our broader galactic civilization.”

  “I’ll have Vessel Blue 84210 leave the star system immediately and designate a hundred-light-year no-fly zone around it,” said the fleet commander.

  Insomniacs in the northern hemisphere might have seen a small group of stars begin to flutter slightly, then the stars around those, and so on across the whole sky, as if a finger had been dipped into the still water of the night sky.

  The space-time shock wave caused by Vessel Blue 84210’s hyperspace leap was considerably attenuated by the time it hit Earth. Every clock jumped three seconds ahead. Humans, confined as we are to three-dimensional space, were unaware of the disturbance.

  “It’s a pity,” said the High Archon. “They’ll be confined to sub-light speeds and three-dimensional space for another two thousand years without the intervention of a more advanced civilization. It will be at least a thousand years before they can harness the energy of matter-antimatter annihilation. Two thousand more years before they can transmit and receive multidimensional communications … and as for hyperspace galactic travel, that will take them at least five thousand years. It will be at least ten thousand years before they attain the minimum conditions for entry into the galactic family of carbon-based life-forms.”

  The senator said, “Independent evolution of this sort happened only in the prehistoric era of the galaxy. If our records of those times are correct, my distant ancestors lived in the deep ocean of a marine planet. They lived and died there in darkness, their governments rose and fell, and then, at some point, they felt adventurous. They launched a craft toward space—a buoyant, transparent ball that rose slowly to the surface of the ocean. It was the dead of night when they reached the surface. The people inside the craft were the first of my ancestors to see the stars. Can you imagine how they felt? Can you imagine how glorious and mysterious that sight was to them?”

  The High Archon said, “It was an era full of passion and yearning. A terrestrial planet was a complete, limitless world to our ancestors. From their home in a planet’s green waters or on its purple grasslands, they looked up at the stars with awe. We have not known such a feeling for tens of millions of years.”

  “I feel it now!” said the senator, pointing at the holographic image of Earth. It was a lustrous, blue ball, with white clouds floating above its surface, streaking and billowing. The senator felt as if he had found a pearl in the depths of his ancestors’ ocean home. “Such a small planet, populated by organisms living their lives, dreaming their dreams, completely oblivious to us and to the strife and destruction in their galaxy. To them, the universe must seem like a bottomless well of hopes and dreams. It’s like an ancient song.”

  And he began to sing. The smart fields of the three became as one, rippling with rose-colored waves. The song he sang was old, passed down from the forgotten beginnings of civilization itself. It sounded distant, mysterious, forlorn, and as it propagated through hyperspace to the hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy, countless beings heard its sound and felt a long-forgotten kind of comfort and peace.

  “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,”3 said the High Archon.

  “The most comprehensible thing about the universe is that it is incomprehensible,” said the senator.

  *

  There was light in the east by the time the children had finished digging the grave. They tore the door off the classroom and put their teacher’s body on it, and they buried him with two boxes of chalk and a used textbook. They stood a stone slab on top of the mound, and wrote on it in chalk: Mister Li’s Grave.

  The faint letters would wash off in the first rainfall, and not long after that, the grave and the person it contained would be forgotten completely.

  The tip of the sun rose above the hills, casting a golden ray into the sleeping village. The grass of the valley was still in shadow, but its dew glowed with the light of dawn. A bird or two began timidly to sing.

  The children walked along the narrow road back into the village. Their little shadows soon disappeared into the pale blue morning mist of the valley.

  They were going to live their lives on that ancient, barren land, and though their harvests would be meager, they would always have hope.

  1 A form of dowry payment in some rural areas of northwestern China, meant to compensate the bride’s mother for the pain of having borne her.

  2 In many Chinese villages, residents share a common, ancestral surname.

  3 Albert Einstein, Physics and Reality.

  THE TIME MIGRATION

  TRANSLATED BY JOEL MARTINSEN

  Where, before me, are the ages that have gone?

  And where, behind me, are the coming generations?

  I think of heaven and earth, without limit, without end,

  And I am all alone and my tears fall down.

  Chen Zi’ang (661–702), “On the Gate Tower at Yuzhou”1

  MIGRATION

  An Open Letter to All People

  Due to insupportable environmental and population pressures, the government has been forced to undertake a time migration. A first group of 80 million time-migrants will migrate 120 years.

  The ambassador was the last to leave. She stood on empty ground before an enormous cold-storage warehouse that held four hundred thousand frozen people, as did another two hundred like it throughout the world. They resembled, the ambassador thought with a shudder, nothing so much as tombs.

  Hua was not going with her. Although he met all of the conditions for migration and possessed a coveted migration card, he felt an attachment to the present world, unlike those headed toward a new life in the future. He would stay behind and leave the ambassador to travel 120 years on her own.

  The ambassador set off an hour later, drowned by liquid helium that froze her life at near absolute zero, leading eighty million people on a flight along the road of time.

  THE TREK

  Outside of perception time slipped past, the sun swept through the sky like a shooting star, and birth, love, death, joy, sorrow, loss, pursuit, struggle, failure, and everything else from the outside world screamed past like a freight train …

  … 10 years … 20 years … 40 years … 60 years … 80 years … 100 years … 120 years.

  STOP 1: THE DARK AGE

  Consciousness froze along with the body during zero-degree supersleep, leaving time’s very existence imperceptible until the ambassador awoke with the impression that the cooling system had malfunctioned and she had thawed out shortly after departure. But the atomic clock’s giant plasma display informed her that 120 years had passed, a lifetime and a half, rendering them time’s exiles.

  An advance team of one hundred had awakened the previous week to establish contact. Its captain now stood next to the ambassador, whose body had not yet recovered enough for speech. Her inquiring gaze, however, drew only a head shake and forced smile from the captain.

  The head of state had come to the freezer hall to welcome them. He looked weatherworn, as did his entourage, which came as a bit of a surprise 120 years into the future. The ambassador handed over the letter from the government of her time and passed on her people’s greetings. The head said little, but clasped the ambassador’s hand tightly. It was as rough as his face, and gave the ambassador the sense that things had not changed as much as she had imagined. It warmed her.

  But the feeling vanished the moment she left the freezer. Outside was all black: black land, bla
ck trees, a black river, black clouds. The hovercar they rode in swirled up black dust. A column of oncoming tanks formed a line of black patches moving along the road, and low-flying clusters of helicopters passing overhead were groups of black ghosts, all the more so since they flew silently. The earth seemed scorched by fire from heaven. They passed a huge hole as large as an open-pit mine from the ambassador’s time.

  “A crater.”

  “From a … bomb?” the ambassador said, unable to say the word.

  “Yes. Around fifteen kilotons,” the head of state said lightly, as if the misery was unremarkable for him.

  The atmosphere of the cross-time meeting grew weighty.

  “When did the war start?”

  “This one? Two years ago.”

  “This one?”

  “There’ve been a few since you left.”

  Then he changed the subject. He seemed less like a younger man from the future than an elder of the ambassador’s own time, someone to show up at work sites or farms and gather up every hardship in his embrace, letting none slip by. “We will accept all immigrants, and will ensure they live in peace.”

  “Is that even possible, given the present circumstances?” The question was put by someone accompanying the ambassador, who herself remained silent.

  “The current administration and the entire public will do all they can to accomplish it. That’s our duty,” he said. “Of course, the immigrants must do their best to adapt. That might be hard, given the substantial changes over one hundred and twenty years.”

  “What kind of changes?” the ambassador asked. “There’s still war, there’s still slaughter …”

  “You’re only seeing the surface,” a general in fatigues said. “Take war for example. Here’s how two countries fight these days. First, they declare the type and quantity of all of their tactical and strategic weapons. Then a computer can determine the outcome of the war according to their mutual rates of destruction. Weapons are purely for deterrence and are never used. Warfare is a computer execution of a mathematical model, the results of which decide the victor and loser.”