Hold Up The Sky

by Liu Cixin

  “When the Senior Official finished, Lu Wenming began. I’ll take care of things with the Central Commission. You just make sure you take over properly from the cadres in that project group. I’ll break off training at the Central Party School next week and come back to help you—

  “Scoundrel! The Senior Official once again slammed the table. Lu Wenming jumped in fright. Is that how you took my words? You thought I was trying to get this young man to abandon his principles and duty?! Wenming, you’ve known me for years. From the depths of your heart, do you really think I have so little sense of Party and principle? When did you become so oily? It saddens me. Then he turned to you. Young man, you’ve done a truly exceptional job so far on your work. You must stand fast in the face of interference and pressure, and hand the corrupt elements their comeuppance! This case hurts the eyes and heart to look upon. You must not spare them, in the name of the people, in the name of justice! Don’t let what I just said burden you. I was just reminding you as an old Party member to be careful, to avoid serious consequences beyond your prediction. But there’s one thing I know—you must get to the bottom of this terrible corruption case. The Senior Official took out a piece of paper as he spoke, handing it to you solemnly. Is this wide enough in scope for you?”

  Song Cheng had known right then that they’d set up a sacrificial altar and were ready to lay out the offerings. He looked at the list of names. It was wide enough in scope, truly enough, enough in both rank and quantity. It would be a corruption case to astound the entire nation, and with the case’s triumphant conclusion, Song Cheng would become known throughout the country as an anti-corruption hero, revered by the people as a paragon of justice and virtue.

  But he was clear in his heart that this was nothing more than a lizard severing its own tail in a crisis. The lizard would escape; the tail would grow back in no time. He saw the Senior Official watching him, and in that moment he really did think of a lizard, and he shivered. But Song Cheng knew, too, that the Senior Official was afraid, that he’d made him afraid, and it made Song Cheng proud. The pride made him vastly overestimate his own capabilities at that moment, but more vitally, there was that ineffable thing running in the blood of every scholar-idealist. He made the fatal choice.

  “You stood and took up the pile of documents with both hands. You said to the Senior Official, By the Internal Supervision Regulations of the CCP, the secretary of discipline inspection has the authority to conduct inspections upon Party officials of the same rank. According to the rules, sir, these documents can’t stay with you. I’ll take them.

  “Lu Wenming went to stop you, but the Senior Official gently tugged him back. At the door, you heard your classmate say in a low voice behind you, You’ve gone too far, Song Cheng.

  “The Senior Official walked you to your car. As you were about to leave, he took your hand and said slowly, Come again soon, young man.”

  Only later did Song Cheng fully realize the deeper meaning to his words: Come again soon. You don’t have much time left.

  THE BIG BANG

  “Who the hell are you?” Song Cheng stared at Bai Bing fearfully. How could he know this much? No one could know this much!

  “Okay, we’ll end the reminiscing here.” Bai Bing cut off his narrative with a wave of his hand. “Let me go into the whys and wherefores, to clear up the questions you have. Hmm … do you know what the big bang is?”

  Song Cheng stared blankly at Bai Bing, his brain unable to immediately process Bai’s words. At last he managed the response of a normal human and laughed.

  “Okay, okay,” Bai Bing said. “I know that was sudden. But please trust that I’m all there in the head. To go through everything clearly, we really do need to start with the big bang. This … Damn, how do I even explain it to you? Let’s return to the big bang. You probably know at least a little.

  “Our universe was created in a massive explosion twenty billion years ago. Most people picture the big bang like some ball of fire bursting forth in the darkness of space, but that’s incorrect. Before the big bang, there was nothing, not even time and space. There was only a singularity, a single point of undefined size that rapidly expanded to form our universe today. Anything and everything, including us, originated from the singularity’s expansion. It is the seed from which all living things grew! The theory behind it all is really deep, and I don’t fully understand it myself, but the relevant part is this: With the advancement of physics and the appearance of ‘theories of everything’ like string theory, physicists are starting to figure out the structure of that singularity and create a mathematical model for it. This is different from the quantum-theory models they had before. If we can determine the fundamental parameters of the singularity before the big bang, we can determine everything in the universe it forms too. An uninterrupted chain of cause and effect running through the entire history of the universe …” He sighed. “Seriously, how am I supposed to explain it all?”

  Bai Bing saw Song Cheng shake his head, as if he didn’t understand, or as if he didn’t even want to keep listening.

  Bai Bing said, “Take my advice and stop thinking about the suffering you’ve gone through. Honestly, I haven’t been much luckier. Like I said, I’m just an ordinary person, but now they’re hunting me, and I may end up even worse than you, all because I know everything. You can hold on to the fact that you were martyred for your sense of duty and faith, but I’m … I just have really shitty luck. Enough shit luck for eight reincarnations. I’ve been screwed over even worse than you.”

  Song Cheng only continued to look at him, silently, as if to say: No one can be screwed over worse than me.

  FRAMED

  A week after he met with the Senior Official, Song Cheng was arrested for murder.

  To be fair, Song Cheng had already known they’d take extraordinary measures against him. The usual administrative and political methods were too risky to use on someone who knew so much and was already in the process of taking action. But he hadn’t imagined his opponent would move so quickly, or strike so viciously.

  The victim was a nightclub dancer called LuoLuo, and he’d died in Song Cheng’s car. The doors were locked from the outside. Two canisters of propane, the type used to refill cigarette lighters, had been tossed into the car, both slit open. The liquid inside had completely evaporated, and the high concentration of propane vapor in the car had fatally poisoned the victim. When the body was discovered, it was clutching a battered, broken cell phone in one hand, clearly used in an attempt to smash the car windows.

  The police produced ample evidence. They had two hours of recordings to prove that Song Cheng had been in most irregular association with LuoLuo for the last three months. The most incriminating piece of evidence was the 110 call LuoLuo had made to the police shortly before his death.

  LuoLuo

  … Hurry. Hurry! I can’t open the car doors! I can’t breathe, my head hurts …

  110

  Where are you? Can you clarify your situation?!

  LuoLuo

  … Song … Song Cheng wants to kill me …

  [End of transmission]

  Afterward, the police found a short phone-call recording on the victim’s cell, preserving an exchange between Song Cheng and the victim.

  Song Cheng

  Now that we’ve gone this far, how about you break things off with Xu Xueping?

  LuoLuo

  Why the need, Brother Song? Me and Sister Xu just have the usual man-woman relations. It won’t affect our thing. Hell, it might help.

  Song Cheng

  It makes me uncomfortable. Don’t make me take action.

  LuoLuo

  Brother Song, let me live my life.

  [End of transmission]

  This was a highly professional frame-up. Its brilliance lay in that the evidence the police held was just about 100 percent real.

  Song Cheng really had been associating with LuoLuo for a while, in secret, and it could indeed be called irregular. The tw
o recordings weren’t faked, although the second had been distorted.

  Song Cheng met LuoLuo because of Xu Xueping, director general of Changtong Group, who held intimate financial ties to many nodes of the network of corruption and no doubt considerable knowledge of its background and inner workings. Of course, Song Cheng couldn’t get any information directly from her, but with LuoLuo he had an in.

  LuoLuo didn’t provide Song Cheng information out of any inner sense of righteousness. In his eyes, the world was already good for nothing but wiping his ass on. He was in it for revenge.

  This hinterland city shrouded in industrial smog and dust might have been ranked at the bottom of the list of similar-sized Chinese cities for average income, but it had some of the most opulent nightclubs in the nation. The young scions of Beijing’s political families had to watch their image in the capital city, unable to indulge their desires like the rich without Party affiliations. Instead, they got in their cars every weekend and zipped four or five hours along the highway to this city, spent two days and one night in hedonistic extravagance, and zipped back to Beijing on Sunday night.

  LuoLuo’s Blue Wave was the highest-end of all the nightclubs. Requesting a song cost at least three thousand yuan, and bottles of Martell and Hennessy priced at thousands each sold multiple cases every night. But Blue Wave’s real claim to fame was that it catered exclusively to female guests.

  Unlike his fellow dancers, LuoLuo didn’t care about how much his clients paid, but how much that money meant to them. A white-collar foreign worker making just two or three hundred thousand yuan a year (rare paupers in Blue Wave) could give him a few hundred and he’d accept. But Sister Xu wasn’t one. Her fortune of billions had made waves south of the Yangtze the last few years, and likewise she was smashing the opposition in her expansion northward. But after several months spent together, she’d sent LuoLuo off with a mere four hundred thousand.

  It had taken a lot to catch Sister Xu’s eye; after she had broken it off, any other dancer would have, in LuoLuo’s words, swigged enough champagne to make his liver hurt. But not LuoLuo, who was now filled with hatred for Xu Xueping. The arrival of a high-ranking Discipline Inspection official gave him hope of revenge, and he used his talents to entangle himself with Sister Xu once more. Normally, Xu Xueping was closemouthed even with LuoLuo, but once they had too many drinks or snorted too many lines, it was a different story. LuoLuo knew how to take the initiative, too; in the darkest hours before dawn, while Sister Xu slept soundly beside him, he’d silently climb out of bed and search her briefcase and drawers, snapping pictures of documents that he and Song Cheng needed.

  Most of the video recordings the police used to prove Song Cheng’s association with LuoLuo had been taken in the main dance hall in Blue Wave. The camera liked to start with the pretty young boys dancing enthusiastically on the stage, before shifting to the expensively dressed female guests gathered in the dim areas, pointing at the stage, now and then smiling confidentially. The final shot always captured Song Cheng and LuoLuo, often sitting in some corner in the back, seeming very intimate as they conversed quietly with heads bent close. As the only male guest in the club, Song Cheng was instantly recognizable….

  Song Cheng didn’t have anything to say to that. Most of the time, he could only find LuoLuo at Blue Wave. The lighting in the dance hall was always dim, but these recordings were high resolution and clear. They could only have been taken with a high-end low-light camera, not the sort of equipment normal people would have. That meant they’d noticed him from the very beginning, showing Song Cheng how very amateur he had been compared to his opponent.

  That day, LuoLuo wanted to report his latest findings. When Song Cheng met him at the nightclub, LuoLuo uncharacteristically asked to talk in the car. Once they were done, he’d told Song that he felt unwell. If he went back to the club now, his boss would make him get on stage for sure. He wanted to rest for a while in Song Cheng’s car.

  Song Cheng had thought that LuoLuo’s addiction might have been acting up again, but he didn’t have a choice. He could only drive back to his office to take care of the work he hadn’t finished during the day, parking in front of the department building with LuoLuo waiting in the car. Forty minutes later, when he came back out, someone had already found LuoLuo dead in a car full of propane fumes. Song Cheng had to open the car door from the outside.

  Later, a close friend in the police force who’d participated in the investigation told Song that the lock on his car door didn’t show any signs of sabotage, and the evidence elsewhere really was enough to rule out the possibility of another killer. Logically enough, everyone assumed that Song Cheng had killed LuoLuo. But Song Cheng knew the only possible explanation: LuoLuo had brought the two propane canisters into the car himself.

  This was too much for Song Cheng to fight against. He gave up his attempts to clear his name: if someone had used his own life and death as a weapon to frame him, he didn’t have a chance of escape.

  Really, LuoLuo committing suicide didn’t surprise Song Cheng; his HIV test had returned positive. But someone else must have prompted him to use his death to frame Song Cheng. What would have been in it for him? What would money be worth to him now? Was the money for someone else? Or maybe his recompense wasn’t money. But what was it, then? Was there some temptation or fear even stronger than his hatred of Xu Xueping? Song Cheng would never know now, but here he could see even more clearly his opponent’s capabilities, and his own naïveté.

  This was his life as the world knew it: a high-ranked Discipline Inspection cadre living a secret life of corruption and affairs, arrested for murdering his paramour in a lover’s spat. The temperance he’d previously displayed in his heterosexual relationship only became further proof in the public mind. Like a trampled stinkbug, everything he had possessed disappeared without a trace.

  Now Song Cheng realized that he’d been so prepared to sacrifice everything for faith and duty only because he hadn’t even understood what sacrificing everything entailed. He’d of course imagined that death would be the bottom line. Only later did he realize that sacrifice could be far, far crueler. The police took him home one time when they searched his house. His wife and daughter were both there. He reached toward his daughter, but the child shrieked in disgust and buried her face in her mother’s arms, shrinking into a corner. He’d seen the look they gave him only once before, one morning when he’d found a mouse in the trap under the wardrobe, and showed it to them….

  “Okay, let’s set aside the big bang and the singularity and all the abstract stuff for now.” Bai Bing broke off Song Cheng’s painful reminiscences and hauled the large briefcase onto the table. “Take a look at this.”

  SUPERSTRING COMPUTER, ULTIMATE CAPACITY, DIGITAL MIRROR

  “This is a superstring computer,” Bai Bing said, patting the briefcase. “I brought it over, or, if you prefer, stole it from the Center for Meteorological Modeling. I’ll depend on it to escape pursuit.”

  Song Cheng shifted his gaze to the briefcase, clearly confused.

  “These are expensive. There are only two in the province as of now. According to superstring theory, the fundamental particles of matter aren’t point-like objects, but an infinitely thin one-dimensional string vibrating in eleven dimensions. Nowadays, we can manipulate this string to store and process information along the dimension of its length. That’s the theory behind a superstring computer.

  “A CPU or piece of internal storage in a traditional electronic computer is just an atom in a superstring computer! The circuits are formed by the particles’ eleven-dimensional microscale structure. This higher-dimensional subatomic array has given humanity practically infinite storage and operational capacity. Comparing the supercomputers of the past to superstring computers is like comparing our ten fingers to those supercomputers. A superstring computer has ultimate capacity, that is to say, it has the capacity to store the current status of every fundamental particle existing in the known universe and perform o
perations with them. In other words, if we only look at three dimensions of space and one of time, a superstring computer can model the entire universe on the atomic level….”

  Song Cheng alternately looked at the briefcase and Bai Bing. Unlike before, he seemed to be listening to Bai Bing’s words with full attention. In truth, he was desperately seeking any kind of relief, letting this mysterious visitor’s rambling extricate him from his painful memories.

  “Sorry for going on and on like this—big bang this and superstring that. It must seem completely unrelated to the reality we’re facing, but to give a proper explanation I can’t sidestep it. Let’s talk about my career next. I’m a software engineer specializing in simulation software. That is, you create a mathematical model and run it in a computer to simulate some object or process in the real world. I studied mathematics, so I do both the model-creating and the programming. In the past I’ve simulated sandstorms, soil erosion on the Loess Plateau, energy generation and economic development trends in the Northeast, so on. Now I’m working on large-scale weather models. I love my work. Watching a piece of the real world running and evolving inside a computer is honestly fascinating.”