Hold Up The Sky

by Liu Cixin

  “Listen!” Clayderman said, pointing at the sky, but it was a long moment before the rest of them heard the melody his trained ears had picked out at once. A simple structure of just two notes, reminiscent of a clock’s tick-tock. The notes repeated, separated by lengthy gaps. Then another two-note section, and a third, and a fourth … paired tones emerging ceaselessly from the chaos like fireflies in the night.

  Then a new melody emerged, four notes. Everyone turned toward Clayderman, who was listening attentively and seemed to have sensed something. The four-note phrases multiplied.

  “Here,” he said to the heads of state. “Let’s each of us remember a two-note measure.” And so they all listened carefully, and each found a two-note measure and then focused their energy on committing it to memory. After a while, Clayderman said, “Very well. Now concentrate on a four-note phrase. Quickly, though, or else the music will grow too complex for us to pick them out…. Yes, that one. Does anyone hear that?”

  “The first half is the pair of notes I memorized!” called the head of Brazil.

  “The second half is my pair!” said the head of Canada.

  They realized that every four-note phrase was made up of two of the previous note pairs, and as the four-note phrases multiplied they seemed to be depleting the isolated pairs. Then came eight-note phrases, similarly formed out of sets of four-note phrases.

  “What do you hear?” the secretary general asked the people around him.

  “A primeval ocean lit by flashes of lightning and volcanoes, and small molecules combining into larger ones … of course, that’s purely my own imagination,” the Chinese president said.

  “Don’t constrain your imagination to the Earth,” the US president said. “The clustering of these molecules may be taking place in a nebula glowing with starlight. Or maybe they’re not molecules, but the nuclear vortices inside a star …”

  Then came a high-pitched, multi-note phrase that repeated like a bright spark in the dim chaos. “It’s like it’s describing a fundamental transformation,” the Chinese president said.

  Then they heard a new instrument, a sustained violin-like string sound that repeated a gentle shadow of the standout melody.

  “It’s expressing a kind of duplication,” the Russian president said.

  Now came an uninterrupted melody from the violin voice, changing smoothly as if it were light in curvilinear motion. The UK prime minister said to the Chinese president, “To borrow your idea, that ocean has something swimming in it now.”

  At some point the background music, which they’d nearly forgotten about, had begun to change. From the sound of waves it had turned into an oscillating rush, like a storm assaulting the bare rock. Then it changed again, into wind-like bleakness. The US president said, “The swimmer has entered a new environment. The land, or perhaps the air.”

  Then all the instruments played in unison for a brief moment, a fearsomely loud sound like an enormous physical collapse, then they abruptly dropped out, leaving just the lonely sound of the surf. Then the simple note pairs started up again and turned gradually complex, and everything repeated….

  “I can say with certainty that a great extinction was just described, and now we’re listening to the revival afterward.”

  After another long and arduous process, the ocean swimmer ventured again into other parts of the world. Slowly, the melody grew grander and more complicated, and interpretations diversified. Some people thought it was a river rushing downhill, others imagined the advance of a great army across a vast plain, others saw billowing nebulae in the darkness of space caught in the vortex of a black hole, but they all agreed that it was expressing some grand process, an evolutionary process. The movement was long, and an hour had passed before the theme at last began to change. The melody gradually split into two vying parts that smashed wildly into each other or tangled together….

  “The classic style of Beethoven,” Clayderman declared, after a long stretch immersed in the grand music.

  The secretary general said, “It’s like a fleet smacking across huge waves on the sea.”

  “No,” said the US president, shaking his head. “Not that. You can tell that the two forces are not essentially different. I think it’s a battle that spans a world.”

  “Wait a moment,” interrupted the Japanese prime minister, breaking a long silence. “Do you really imagine you can comprehend alien art? Your understanding of the music may be no better than a cow’s appreciation for a lyre.”

  Clayderman said, “I think our understanding is basically correct. The common languages of the cosmos are mathematics and music.”

  The secretary general said, “Proving it won’t be difficult. Can we predict the theme or style of the next movement?”

  After a moment’s thought, the Chinese president said, “I’d say next will be an expression of worship, and the melody will possess a strict architectural beauty.”

  “You mean like Bach?”

  “Yes.”

  And so it was. The listeners seemed to hear a great imposing church and the echoes of their footsteps inside that magnificent space, and they were overcome by fear and awe of an all-encompassing power.

  Then the complicated melody turned simple again. The background music vanished, and a series of short, clear beats appeared in the infinite stillness: one, then two, then three, then four … and then one, four, nine, and sixteen … and then increasingly complex series.

  Someone asked, “Is this describing the emergence of mathematics and abstract thinking?”

  Then it turned even stranger. Isolated two- and three-note phrases from the violin, each of identically pitched notes held for different durations; then glissandos, rising, falling, and then rising again. They listened intently, and when the president of Greece said, “It’s … like a description of basic geometric shapes,” they immediately had the sense they were watching triangles and rectangles shoot by through empty space. The glides conjured up images of round objects, ovals and perfect circles…. The melody changed slowly as single-note lines turned into glides, but the previous impression of floating geometric shapes remained, only now they were floating on water and distorted….

  “The discovery of the secrets of time,” someone said.

  The next movement began with a constant rhythm that repeated along a period resembling a pulsar’s day-night beat. The music seemed to have stopped altogether but for the beat echoing in the silence, but it was soon joined by another constant rhythm, this one slightly faster. Then more rhythms at various frequencies were added, until finally a magnificent chorus emerged. But on the time axis the music was constant as a huge flat wall of sound.

  Astonishingly, their interpretation of this movement was unanimous: “A giant machine at work.”

  Then came a delicate new melody, a tinkle of crystal, volatile and dreamlike, that contrasted with the thick wall beneath it like a silver fairy flitting over the enormous machine. This tiny drop of a powerful catalyst touched off a wondrous reaction in the iron world: the constant rhythm began to waver, and the machine’s shafts and cogs turned soft and rubbery until the whole chorus turned as light and ethereal as the fairy melody.

  They debated it: “The machine has intelligence!” “I think the machine is drawing closer to its creator.”

  The sun music progressed into a new movement, the most structurally complicated yet, and the hardest to understand. First the piano voice played a lonely tune, which was then taken up and extended by an increasingly complex group that turned it grander and more magnificent with every repetition.

  After it had repeated several times, the Chinese president said, “Here’s my interpretation: A thinker stands on an island in the sea contemplating the cosmos. As the camera pulls back, the thinker shrinks in the field of view, and when the frame encompasses the entire island, the thinker is no more visible than a grain of sand. The island shrinks as the camera pulls back beyond the atmosphere, and now the entire planet is in frame, with the island
just a speck within it. As the camera pulls back into space, the entire planetary system is drawn into frame, but now only the star is visible, a lonely, shining billiard ball against the pitch-black sky, and the ocean planet has vanished like a speck….”

  Listening intently, the US president picked up the thought: “… The camera pulls back at light speed, and we discover that what from our scale is a vast and boundless cosmos is but glittering star dust, and when the entire galaxy comes into frame, the star and its planetary system vanish like specks. As the camera continues to cross unimaginable distances, a galaxy cluster is pulled into frame. We still see glittering dust, but the dust is formed not of stars but of galaxies …”

  The secretary general said, “… And our galaxy has vanished. But where does it end?”

  The audience once again immersed themselves in the music as it approached a climax. The musician’s mind had propelled the cosmic camera outside the bounds of known space so its frame captured the entire universe, reducing the Milky Way’s galaxy cluster to a speck of dust. They waited intently for the finale, but the grand chorus suddenly dropped out, leaving behind only a lonely piano-like sound, distant and empty.

  “A return to the thinker on the island?” someone asked.

  Clayderman shook his head. “No, it’s a completely different melody.”

  Then the cosmic chorus struck up again, but after a brief moment gave way to the piano solo. The two melodies alternated like this for a long while.

  Clayderman listened intently, and suddenly realized something: “The piano is playing an inversion of the chorus!”

  The US president nodded. “Or maybe it’s the mirror of the chorus. A cosmic mirror. That’s what it is.”

  The music had clearly reached a denouement, and now the piano’s inverted melody proceeded alongside the chorus, riding conspicuously on its back but gloriously harmonious.

  The Chinese president said, “It reminds me of the Silvers style of mid-twentieth-century architecture, in which, in order to avoid impact on the surrounding environment, buildings were clad entirely in mirrors. Reflections were a way of putting them in harmony with their surroundings as well as self-expression.”

  “Yes,” the secretary general answered thoughtfully. “When civilization reaches a certain level, it can express itself through its reflection of the cosmos.”

  The piano abruptly shifted to the uninverted theme, bringing it into unison with the chorus. The sun music had finished.

  ODE TO JOY

  “A perfect concert,” the mirror said. “Thank you to all who enjoyed it. And now I will be going.”

  “Wait a moment!” shouted Clayderman. “We have one last request. Could you play a human song on the sun?”

  “Yes. Which one?”

  The heads of state glanced around at each other. “Beethoven’s Fate Symphony?”2 asked the German premier.

  “No, not Fate,” said the US president. “It’s been proven that humanity is powerless to strangle fate. Our worth lies in that even knowing that fate can’t be resisted and death will have the final victory, we still devote our limited life span to creating beautiful lives.”

  “Then ‘Ode to Joy,’” said the Chinese president.

  The mirror said, “You all sing. I’ll use the sun to transmit the song out into the universe. It will be beautiful, I assure you.”

  More than two hundred voices joined in “Ode to Joy,” their song passed by the mirror to the sun, which again began vibrating to send powerful EM waves into all reaches of space.

  “Joy, thou beauteous godly lightning,

  Daughter of Elysium,

  Fire drunken we are ent’ring

  Heavenly, thy holy home!

  Thy enchantments bind together,

  What did custom stern divide,

  Every man becomes a brother,

  Where thy gentle wings abide.”3

  Five hours later, the song would exit the solar system. In four years, it would reach Proxima Centauri; in ten thousand, it would exit the galaxy; in two hundred thousand, it would reach the galaxy’s nearest neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud. In six million years, their song would have reached the forty-odd galaxies in the cluster, and in a hundred million years, the fifty-odd clusters in the supercluster. In fifteen billion years, the song would have spread throughout the known universe and would continue onward, should the universe still be expanding.

  “Joy commands the hardy mainspring

  Of the universe eterne.

  Joy, oh joy the wheel is driving

  Which the worlds’ great clock doth turn.

  Flowers from the buds she coaxes,

  Suns from out the hyaline,

  Spheres she rotates through expanses,

  Which the seer can’t divine.”

  The song concluded, everyone fell silent on the concert lawn. World leaders were lost in thought.

  “Maybe things aren’t so hopeless just yet, and we ought to renew our efforts,” the Chinese president said.

  The US president nodded. “Yes. The world needs the UN.”

  “Concessions and sacrifices are insignificant compared to the future disasters they prevent,” the Russian president said.

  “What we’re dealing with amounts to a grain of sand in the cosmos. It ought to be easy,” the UK prime minister said, looking up at the stars.

  The other leaders voiced their assent.

  “So then, do we all agree to extend the present session of the UN?” the secretary general asked hopefully.

  “This will of course require contacting our respective governments, but I believe that won’t be a problem,” the US president said with a smile.

  “Then, my friends, today is a day to remember,” the secretary general said, unable to hide his delight. “So let’s join once more in song.”

  “Ode to Joy” started up again.

  Speeding away from the sun at the speed of light, the mirror knew it would never return. In more than a billion years as a musician it had never held a repeat performance, just as a human shepherd will never toss the same stone twice. As it flew, it listened to the echoes of “Ode to Joy,” and a barely perceptible ripple appeared on its smooth mirror surface.

  “Oh, that’s a good song.”

  1 The French musician’s 1992 performance in China was the first by a major foreign pianist, and he has remained the most recognized classical musician in the decades since.

  2 Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is known as the Fate Symphony in Chinese.

  3 “Ode to Joy” by Friedrich Schiller.

  FULL-SPECTRUM BARRAGE JAMMING

  TRANSLATED BY CARMEN YILING YAN

  Dedicated with deep respect to the people of Russia, whose literature has influenced me all my life.

  Liu Cixin (2000)

  On the subject of selecting a method of electromagnetic jamming for the battlefield, this manual recommends the use of selective frequency-targeted jamming rather than engaging in barrage jamming over a wide range of simultaneous frequencies, as the latter will interfere with friendly electromagnetic communication and electronic support as well.

  —U.S. Army Electronic Warfare Handbook

  JANUARY 5TH, SMOLENSK FRONT LINE

  The fallen city had already disappeared from view. The front line had retreated forty kilometers in the span of a single night.

  Under the light of the early-morning sky, the snowy plain appeared a cold, dim blue. In the distance, black columns of smoke rose from destroyed targets. There was almost no wind; the smoke ascended straight and high, like thin strands of black gauze tying heaven to earth. As Kalina’s gaze followed the smoke upward, she started: the brightening sky was clogged with a vast, dense bramble of white, as if a demented giant had covered the sky in agitated scrawls. They were the tangled fighter plane contrails left by the Russian and NATO air forces in their fierce night battle for control over the airspace.

  The aerial and long-range precision strikes had continued throughout the night, too. To a ca
sual observer, the bombardment wouldn’t have seemed particularly concentrated. The explosions sounded seconds, even minutes apart. But Kalina knew that nearly every explosion had signified some important target hit, sparking punctuation marks in the black pages of the previous night. By dawn, Kalina wasn’t sure how much strength was left in the defensive lines, or even whether the defensive lines had survived at all. It seemed as if she were the last one standing against the onslaught.

  Major Kalina’s electronic-resistance platoon had been hit by six laser-guided missiles around midnight. She’d survived by pure luck. The BMP-2 armored tank carrying the radio-jamming equipment was still burning; the other electronic-warfare vehicles in the battery were now piles of blackened metal scattered around her. Residual heat was dissipating from the bomb crater Kalina was in, leaving her feeling the cold. She pushed herself to a sitting position with her hands. Her right hand touched something sticky and clammy. Covered in black ash, it looked like a lump of mud. She suddenly realized it was a piece of flesh. She didn’t know what body part it came from, much less whose. A first lieutenant, two second lieutenants, and eight privates had died in last night’s attack. Kalina vomited, though nothing came out but stomach acid. She shoved her hands in the snow, trying to wipe away the blood, but the smears of blackish red quickly congealed in the cold, as stark as before.

  The suffocating stillness of the last half hour signified that a new round of ground assault was about to begin. Kalina turned up the volume dial on the walkie-talkie strapped to her shoulder, but heard only static. Suddenly, a few blurry sentences emerged through the receiver, like birds flitting through thick fog.

  “… Observation Station Six reporting! Position 1437 at twelve o’clock sees thirty-seven M1A2s averaging sixty meters apart, forty-one Bradley IFVs five hundred meters behind the M1A2s’ vanguard; twenty-four M1A2s and eight Leclercs currently flanking Position 1633, already past the border of 1437. Positions 1437, 1633, and 1752, prepare to engage the enemy!”