by Liu Cixin
The astronauts inserted the three waveguides into three of the holes, then inserted the expeller into the wider fourth hole. The expeller tube’s mouth was pointed in the direction of the motion of the block of ice. After that, the astronauts used a thin tube to caulk the gap the three waveguides and the expeller tube left against their holes’ walls with a fast-sealing liquid to create a good seal. Finally, they opened the parabolic reflectors. If the initial phase of ocean reclamation employed the latest technology, it was these parabolic reflectors. They were a miracle created by nanotechnology. Folded up, each was only a cubic meter. Unfolded, each formed a giant reflector five hundred meters in diameter. These three reflectors were like three silver lotus leaves that grew on the block of ice. The astronauts adjusted each waveguide so that its receiver coincided with the focal point of its reflector.
A bright point of light appeared where the three holes intersected deep in the ice. It seemed like a tiny sun, illuminating within the block of ice spectacular sights of mythic proportions: a school of silver fish, dancing seaweed drifting with the waves … Everything retained its lifelike appearance at the instant it was frozen. Even the strings of bubbles spat from fishes’ mouths were clear and distinct. Over one hundred kilometers away, inside another ice block being reclaimed, the sunlight that the waveguides led into the ice revealed a giant black shadow. It was a blue whale over twenty meters long! This had to be the Earth’s seas of old.
Deep in the ice, steam soon blurred the point of light. As the steam dispersed, the point changed into a bright white ball. It swelled in size as the ice melted. Once the pressure had built up to a predetermined level, the expeller mouth cover was broken open. A violent gush of turbulent steam exploded out. Because there were no obstructions, it formed a sharp cone that scattered in the distance. Finally, it disappeared in the sunlight. Some portion of the steam entered another ice block’s shadow and condensed into ice crystals that seemed like a swarm of flickering fireflies.
The deceleration propulsion system in the first batch of one hundred blocks of ice activated. Because the blocks of ice were so massive, the thrust the system produced was, relatively speaking, very small. As a result, they needed to orbit fifteen days to a month before they could slow the blocks of ice down enough for them to fall into the atmosphere. Later, reclaiming ice blocks that rotated was much more complicated. The propulsion system had to stop the rotation first, then slow down the block of ice.
Before the blocks of ice entered the atmosphere, astronauts would land on them again to recover the waveguides and reflectors. If they wanted to force all two hundred thousand blocks down, this equipment had to be reused as much as possible.
Ice Meteors
Yan Dong and members of the Crisis Committee arrived together at the flatlands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to watch the first batch of ice meteors fall.
The ocean bed of former days looked like a snowy white plain, reflecting the intense sunlight—no one could open their eyes unless they were wearing sunglasses. But the white plain before them didn’t make Yan Dong think of the snowfields of her native Northeast because, here, it was as hot as hell. The temperature was near fifty degrees Celsius. Hot winds kicked up salty dirt, which hurt when it hit her face. A hundred-thousand-ton oil tanker was in the distance. The gigantic hull lay tilted on the ground. Its propeller, several stories tall, and rudder completely covered the salt bed. An unbroken chain of white mountains stood even farther in the distance. That was a mountain range on the seafloor humanity had never seen until now. A two-sentence poem came to Yan Dong’s mind: The open sea is a boat’s land. Night is love’s day.
She laughed bitterly then. She’d experienced this tragedy, yet she still couldn’t shake off thinking like an artist.
Cheers erupted. Yan Dong raised her head and looked to where everyone was pointing. In the distance, a bright red point had appeared in the silver ring of ice that traversed the sky. The point of light drifted out of the ring. It swelled into a fireball. A white contrail dragged behind the fireball. This contrail of steam grew ever longer and thicker. Its color became even denser, even whiter. Soon, the fireball split into ten pieces. Each piece continued to split. A long white contrail dragged behind every small piece. This field of white contrails filled half the sky, as though it were a white Christmas tree and a small, bright lamp hung on the tip of every branch….
Even more ice meteors appeared. Their sonic booms shook the earth like rumbles of spring thunder. As old contrails gradually dissipated, new contrails appeared to replace them. They covered the sky in a complex white net. Several trillion tons of water now belonged to the Earth again.
Most of the ice meteors broke apart and vaporized in the air, but one large fragment of ice fell to the ground about forty kilometers from Yan Dong. The loud crash shook the flatlands. A colossal mushroom cloud rose from somewhere in the distant mountain range. The water vapor shone a dazzling white in the sunlight. Gradually, it dispersed in the wind and became the sky’s first cloud layer. The clouds multiplied and, for the first time, blocked the sun that had been scorching the earth for five years. They covered the entire sky. For a while, Yan Dong felt a pleasant coolness that oozed into her heart and lungs.
The cloud layer grew thick and dark. Red light flickered within it. Maybe it was lightning or the light from the continuous waves of ice meteors falling toward the earth.
It rained! This was a downpour so heavy it would have been rare even in the Oceaned Days. Yan Dong and everyone else there ran around screaming wildly in the storm. They felt their souls dissolve in the rain. Then they retreated into their cars and helicopters because, right now, people would suffocate in the rain.
The rain fell nonstop until dusk. Waterlogged depressions appeared on the seafloor flatlands. A crack in the clouds revealed the golden, flickering rays of the setting sun, as though the Earth had just opened its eyes.
Yan Dong followed the crowd, stepping through the thick salty mud. They ran to the nearest depression. She cupped some water in her hands, then splashed that thick brine on her face. As it fell, mixed with her tears, she said, choking with sobs:
“The ocean, our ocean …”
Epilogue
TEN YEARS LATER
Yan Dong walked onto the frozen-over Songhua River. She was wrapped in a tattered overcoat. Her travel bag held the tools that she’d kept for fifteen years: several knives and shovels of various shapes, a hammer, and a watering can. She stamped her feet to make sure that the river had truly frozen. The Songhua River had water as early as five years ago, but this was the first time it had frozen, and during the summer, no less.
Due to the arid conditions and, at the same time, the potential energy of the many ice meteors converting into thermal energy in the atmosphere, the global climate had stayed hotter than ever. But in the final stage of ocean reclamation, the largest blocks of ice were forced down. These blocks of ice broke into larger fragments. Most of them crashed onto the ground. This not only destroyed a few cities but also kicked up dust that blocked the sun’s heat. Temperatures fell rapidly all over the world. Earth entered a new ice age.
Yan Dong looked at the night sky. This was the starscape of her childhood. The ring of ice had disappeared. She could only make out the vestiges of the remaining small blocks of ice from their rapid motion against the background of stars. Sea of Dreams had turned back into actual seas again. This magnificent work of art, its cruel beauty as well as nightmare, would forever be inscribed in the collective memory of humanity.
Although the ocean-reclamation effort had been a success, Earth’s climate would be a harsh one from now on. The ecosystem would take a long time to recover. For the foreseeable future, humanity’s existence would be extremely difficult. Nevertheless, at least existence was possible. Most people felt content with that. Indeed, the Ring of Ice Era made humanity learn contentment, and also something even more important.
The World Crisis Organization would change its name to the Space Wate
r Retrieval Organization. They were considering another great engineering project: Humanity intended to fly to distant Jupiter, then take water from Jupiter’s moons and the rings of Saturn back to Earth in order to make up for the 18 percent lost in the course of the Ocean Reclamation Project.
At first, people intended to use the technology for propelling blocks of ice that they’d already mastered to drive blocks of ice from the rings of Saturn to Earth. Of course, that far away, the sunlight was too weak. Only using nuclear fusion to vaporize the cores of the blocks of ice could provide the necessary thrust. As for the water from Jupiter’s moons, that required even larger and more complex technology to acquire. Some people had already proposed pulling the whole of Europa out of Jupiter’s deep gravity well, pushing it to Earth, and making it Earth’s second moon. This way, Earth would receive much more water than 18 percent. It could turn Earth’s ecosystem into a glorious paradise. Naturally, this was a matter for the far future. No one alive hoped to see it during their lifetime. However, this hope made people in their hard lives feel a happiness they’d never felt before. This was the most valuable thing humanity received from the Ring of Ice Era: Reclaiming Sea of Dreams made humanity see its own strength, taught it to dream what it had never before dared to dream.
Yan Dong saw in the distance a group of people gathered on the ice. She walked to them, gliding with each step. When they spotted her, they began to run toward her. Some slipped and fell, then picked themselves up and raced to catch up with the others.
“Our old friend! Hello!” The first one to reach Yan Dong wrapped her in a warm hug. Yan Dong recognized him. He was one of the ice sculpture judges from so many ice and snow festivals before the Ring of Ice Era.
As they neared, she recognized the others, most of them ice sculptors from before the Ring of Ice Era. Like everyone else of this era, they wore tattered clothes. Suffering and time had dyed the hair on their temples white. Yan Dong felt as though she’d come home after years of wandering.
“I heard that the Ice and Snow Arts Festival has started back up again?” she asked.
“Of course. Otherwise, what are we all doing here?”
“I’ve been thinking. Times are so hard …”
Yan Dong wrapped her large overcoat tighter around herself. She shivered in the cold wind, constantly stamping her numb feet against the ice. Everyone else did the same, shivering, stamping their feet, like a group of begging refugees.
“So what if times are hard? Even in hard times, you can’t not make art, right?” an old ice sculptor said through chattering teeth.
“Art is the only reason for a civilization to exist!” someone else said.
“Fuck that, I have plenty of reasons to go on,” Yan Dong said loudly.
Everyone laughed, then fell silent as they thought back on ten years of hard times. One by one, they counted their reasons to go on. Finally, they changed themselves from survivors of a disaster back to artists again.
Yan Dong took a bottle of sorghum liquor from her bag. They warmed up as each one took a swig then passed it on to the next. They built a fire on the vast riverbank and heated up a chainsaw until it would start in the bitter cold. They all stepped onto the river, and the chainsaw growled as it cut into the ice. White crumbs of ice fell around them. Soon, they pulled their first block of glittering, translucent ice from the Songhua River.
CLOUD OF POEMS
TRANSLATED BY CARMEN YILING YAN
A yacht bore Yi Yi and his two companions across the South Pacific on a voyage dedicated to poetry. Their destination was the South Pole. Upon a successful arrival in a few days, they would climb through the Earth’s crust to view the Cloud of Poems.
Today, the sky and seas were clear. For the purposes of poem making, the workings of the world seemed to be laid out in glass. Looking up, one could see the North American continent in rare clarity in the sky. On the vast world-encompassing dome as seen from the eastern hemisphere, the continent looked like a patch of missing plaster on a wall.
Oh, yes, humanity lived inside the Earth nowadays. To be more accurate, humanity lived inside the Air, for the Earth had become a gas balloon. The Earth had been hollowed out, leaving only a thin shell about a hundred kilometers thick. The continents and oceans remained in their old places, only they had all migrated to the inside of the shell. The atmosphere also remained, moved inside as well. So now the Earth was a balloon, with the oceans and continents clinging to its inner surface. The hollow Earth still rotated, but the significance of the rotation was much different than before: It now produced gravity. The attractional force generated by the bit of mass forming Earth’s crust was so weak as to be insignificant, so now the Earth’s “gravity” had to come from the centrifugal force of rotation. But this kind of “gravity” was unevenly distributed across the regions of the world.
It was strongest at the equator, being about 1.5 times Earth’s original gravity. With increase of latitude came a gradual decrease in gravity—the two poles experienced weightlessness. The yacht was currently at the exact latitude that experienced 1.0 gees as per the old scale, but Yi Yi nonetheless found it difficult to recall the sensation of standing on the old, solid Earth.
At the heart of the hollow Earth hovered a tiny sun, which currently illuminated the world with the light of noon. The sun’s luminosity changed continuously in a twenty-four-hour cycle, from its maximum to total darkness, providing the hollow Earth with alternating day and night. On suitable nights, it even gave off cold moonlight. But the light came from a single point; there was no round, full moon to be seen.
Of the three people on the yacht, two of them were not, in fact, people. One was a dinosaur named Bigtooth. The yacht swayed and tilted with every shift of his ten-meter-tall body, to the annoyance of the one reciting poetry at the boat’s prow. This was a thin, wiry old man, garbed in the loose, archaic robes of the Tang Dynasty, whose snow-white hair and snow-white whiskers flowed in the wind as one. He resembled a bold calligraphy character splashed in the space between sea and sky.
This was the creator of the new world, the great poet Li Bai.
THE GIFT
The matter began ten years ago, when the Devouring Empire completed its two-century-long pillage of the solar system. The dinosaurs from Earth’s ancient past departed for Cygnus in their ring-shaped world fifty thousand kilometers in diameter, leaving the sun behind them. The Devouring Empire took 1.2 billion humans with them as well, to be raised as livestock. But as the ring world approached the orbit of Saturn, it suddenly began to decelerate, before, incredibly, returning along its earlier route to the inner reaches of the solar system.
One ring-world week after the Devouring Empire began its return, the emissary Bigtooth piloted away from the ring in his spaceship shaped like an old boiler, a human named Yi Yi in his pocket.
“You’re going to be a present!” Bigtooth told Yi Yi, eyes on the black void outside the window port. His booming voice rattled Yi Yi’s bones.
“For whom?” Yi Yi threw his head back and shouted from the pocket. From the opening, he could see the dinosaur’s lower jaw, like a boulder jutting out from the top of a giant cliff.
“You’ll be given to a god! A god came to the solar system. That’s why the Empire is returning.”
“A real god?”
“Their kind controls unimaginable technology. They’ve transformed into beings of pure energy, and can instantaneously jump from one side of the Milky Way to the other. They’re gods, all right. If we can get just a hundredth of their ultra-advanced technology, the Devouring Empire will have a bright future ahead. We’re entering the final step of this important mission. You need to get the god to like you!”
“Why did you pick me? My meat is very low-grade,” said Yi Yi. He was in his thirties. Next to the tender, pale-fleshed humans cultivated with so much care by the Devouring Empire, he appeared rather old and world-worn.
“The god doesn’t eat bug-bugs, just collects them. I heard from the breeder that you
’re really special. Apparently you have many students?”
“I’m a poet. I currently teach Classic literature to the livestock humans on the feedlot.” Yi Yi struggled to pronounce “poet” and “literature,” rarely used words in the Devourer language.
“Boring, useless knowledge. Your breeder turns a blind eye to your classes because their spiritual effects improve the bug-bugs’ meat quality…. From what I’ve observed, you think highly of yourself and give little notice to others. They must be very interesting traits for a head of livestock to have.”
“All poets are like this!” Yi Yi stood tall in the pocket. Even though he knew that Bigtooth couldn’t see, he raised his head proudly.
“Did your ancestors participate in the Earth Defense War?”
Yi Yi shook his head. “My ancestors from that era were also poets.”
“The most useless kind of bug-bug. Your kind was already rare on Earth back then.”
“They lived in the world of their innermost selves, untouched by changes to the outside world.”
“Shameless … ha, we’re almost there.”
Hearing this, Yi Yi stuck his head out of the pocket. Through the huge window port, he could see the two white, glowing objects ahead of the ship: a square and a sphere, floating in space. When the spaceship reached the level of the square, the latter briefly disappeared against the backdrop of the stars, revealing that it had virtually zero thickness. The perfect sphere hovered directly above the plane. Both shone with soft, white light, so evenly distributed that no features could be distinguished on their surfaces. They looked like objects taken from a computer database, two concise yet abstract concepts in a disorderly universe.
“Where’s the god?” Yi Yi asked.
“He’s the two geometric objects, of course. Gods like to keep it nice and simple.”
