Hold Up The Sky

by Liu Cixin

  “That’s a clever comparison.”

  “Now, if we exhaust all the possible permutations of these three characters in this poem format, how many poems can we write? Let me tell you: 3361, or, let me think, 10172!”

  “Is … is that a lot?”

  “Idiot!” Bigtooth spat the word at him for the third time. “In all the universe, there are only … grargh!” He was too infuriated to speak.

  “How many?” Yi Yi still wore a befuddled expression.

  “1080 atoms! You idiot bug-bug—”

  Only now did Yi Yi show any sign of astonishment. “You mean to say, if we could save one poem in every atom, we might use up every atom in the universe and still not be able to fit all of his quantum computer’s poems?”

  “Far from it! Off by a factor of 1092! Besides, how can one atom store a whole poem? The memory devices of human bug-bugs would have needed more atoms to store one poem than your population. As for us, ai, technology to store one bit per atom is still in the laboratory stage….”

  “Here you display your shortsightedness and lack of imagination, Emissary, one of the reasons behind the laggardly advancement of Devouring Empire technology,” Li Bai said, laughing. “Using quantum storage devices based on the quantum superposition principle, the poems can be stored in very little matter. Of course, quantum storage is none too stable. To preserve the poems forever, it needs to be used in tandem with more traditional storage techniques. Nonetheless, the amount of matter required is minuscule.”

  “How much?” Bigtooth asked, looking as if his heart were in his throat.

  “Approximately 1057 atoms, a pittance really.”

  “That’s … that’s exactly the amount of matter in the solar system!”

  “Correct, including all the planets orbiting the sun, and of course including the Devouring Empire.”

  Li Bai said this last sentence easily and naturally, but it struck Yi Yi like a bolt out of the blue. Bigtooth, on the other hand, seemed to have calmed down. After the long torment of sensing disaster on the horizon, the actual onslaught only left a sense of relief.

  “Can’t you convert pure energy into matter?” asked Bigtooth.

  “You should know how much energy it would take to create such an enormous amount of matter. The prospect is unimaginable even to us. We’ll go with ready-made.”

  “His Majesty’s concerns weren’t unjustified,” Bigtooth murmured to himself.

  “Yes, yes,” Li Bai said happily. “I informed the Emperor of the Devourers the day before yesterday. This great ring-world empire shall be used for an even greater goal. The dinosaurs should feel honored.”

  “Esteemed god, you’ll see how the Devouring Empire feels,” Bigtooth said darkly. “I also have one more concern. Compared to the sun, the amount of matter in the Devouring Empire is insignificantly minuscule. Is it really necessary to destroy a civilization millions of years of evolution in the making, just to obtain a few scraps?”

  “I fully understand your reservations. But you must know, extinguishing, cooling, and disassembling the sun will take a long time. The quantum calculations should begin before then, and we need to save the resulting poems elsewhere so that the computer can clear its internal storage and continue work. Therefore the planets and the Devouring Empire, which can immediately provide matter for manufacturing storage devices, are crucial.”

  “I understand, esteemed god. I have one last question: Is it necessary to store all the results? Why can’t you add an analytical program at the end, to delete all the poems that don’t warrant saving? From what I know, Classical Chinese poetry has to follow a strict structure. If we delete all the poems that violate the formal rules, we’ll greatly decrease the volume of the results.”

  “Formal rules? Ha.” Li Bai shook his head contemptuously. “Shackles upon inspiration, and nothing more. Classical Chinese poetry wasn’t bound by these rules before the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Even after the Tang Dynasty, which popularized the strict jintishi form, many master poets ignored the rules to write some extraordinary biantishi works. That’s why, for this ultimate poetry composition, I won’t take formal rules into consideration.”

  “But, you should still consider the poem’s content, right? Ninety-nine percent of the results are obviously going to be rubbish. What’s the point of storing a bunch of randomly generated character arrays?”

  “Rubbish?” Li Bai shrugged. “Emissary, you are not the one who decides whether a poem is meaningful. Neither am I, nor any other person. Time decides. Many poems once considered worthless at the time of their writing were later lauded as masterpieces. Many of the masterpieces of today and tomorrow would have been considered worthless in the distant past. I’m going to write all the poems there are. Trillions of years from now, who knows which of them mighty Time will choose as the finest?”

  “That’s absurd!” Bigtooth bellowed, startling several birds hidden in the distant grass into flight. “If we go by the human bug-bugs’ preexisting Chinese character database, the first poem your quantum computer writes should be:

  “a a a a a

  a a a a a

  a a a a a

  a a a a ai

  “Might I ask, would mighty Time choose this as a masterpiece?!”

  Yi Yi broke his silence to cheer. “Wow! Who needs mighty Time to choose? It’s a masterpiece right now! The first three lines and the first four characters of the fourth are the exclamations—ah!—of living beings witnessing the majestic grandeur of the universe. The last character is the clincher, where the poet, having witnessed the vastness of the universe, expresses the insignificance of life in the infinity of time and space with a single sigh of inevitability.”

  “Hahahaha …” Li Bai stroked his whiskers, unable to stop smiling. “A fine poem, my bug-bug Yi Yi, a fine poem indeed, hahaha …” He took up the gourd and poured Yi Yi wine.

  Bigtooth raised his massive claws and flung Yi Yi into the distance with one swat. “Nasty bug-bug, I know you’re happy now. But don’t forget, once the Devouring Empire is destroyed, your kind won’t survive either!”

  Yi Yi rolled all the way to the riverbank. It took a long time before he could crawl back up. A grin cracked across his dirt-covered face; he was laughing despite his pain, truly happy. “This is great! This universe is motherfucking incredible!” he yelled with no thought to dignity.

  “Any other questions, Emissary?” asked Li Bai. Bigtooth shook his head. “Then I’ll leave tomorrow. The day after the next, the quantum computer will execute its poetry-writing software, commencing the ultimate poetry composition. At the same time, the work to extinguish the sun and dismantle the planets and the Devouring Empire shall commence.”

  Bigtooth straightened. “Esteemed god, the Devouring Empire will complete preparations for battle tonight!” he said solemnly.

  “Good, very good, the coming days will be interesting. But before all else, let us finish this gourd.” Li Bai nodded happily as he took up the gourd and poured the remaining wine. He looked at the river, now shrouded in night, and continued to savor those words: “A fine poem indeed, the first, haha, the first and already so fine.”

  THE ULTIMATE POETRY COMPOSITION

  The poetry-composition software was in fact very simple. Represented in humanity’s C language, it would be no more than two thousand lines of code, with an additional database of modest size appended storing the Chinese characters. Once the software was uploaded onto the quantum computer in the orbit of Neptune, an enormous transparent cone floating in the vacuum, the ultimate poetry composition began.

  Only now did the Devouring Empire learn that the god version of Li Bai was merely one individual member of his ultra-advanced civilization. The dinosaurs had previously assumed that any society that had advanced to this level of technology would have melded their consciousness into one being long ago; all five of the ultra-advanced civilizations they’d met in the past ten million years had done so. That Li Bai’s race had preserved their individ
ual existences also somewhat explained their extraordinary ability to grasp art. When the poetry composition began, more individuals from Li Bai’s race jumped into the solar system from various places in distant space and began construction on the storage device.

  The humans living in the Devouring Empire couldn’t see the quantum computer in space, or the new arrivals from the race of gods. To them, the process of the ultimate poetry composition was simply the increase and decrease of the number of suns in space.

  One week after the poetry software began execution, the gods successfully extinguished the sun, reducing the sun count to zero. But the cessation of nuclear fission inside the sun caused the star’s outer layer to lose support, and it quickly collapsed into a new star that illuminated the darkness once more. However, this sun’s luminosity was a hundred times greater than before; smoke rose from the grass and trees on the surface of the Devouring Empire. The new star was once again extinguished, but a while later it burst alight again. So it went on, lighting only to be extinguished, extinguishing only to light once more, as if the sun were a cat with nine lives, struggling stubbornly. But the gods were highly practiced at killing stars. They patiently extinguished the new star again and again, until its matter had, as much as possible, fused into the heavier elements needed in the construction of the storage device. Only after the eleventh star dimmed was the sun snuffed out for good.

  At this point, the ultimate poetry composition had run for three Earth months. Long before then, during the appearance of the third new star, other suns had appeared in space. These suns rose and fell in succession throughout space, brightening and dimming. At one point, there were nine new suns in the sky. They were releases of energy as the gods dismantled the planets. With the star-sized sun diminishing in brightness later on, people could no longer tell the suns apart.

  The dismantlement of the Devouring Empire commenced the fifth week after the start of the poetry composition. Before it, Li Bai had made a suggestion to the Empire: The gods could jump all the dinosaurs to a world on the other side of the Milky Way. The civilization there was much less advanced than the gods’, its members being unable to convert themselves into pure energy, but still much more advanced than the Devourers’ civilization. There, the dinosaurs would be raised as a form of livestock and live happy lives with all their needs taken care of. But the dinosaurs would rather break than bend, and angrily refused this suggestion.

  Next, Li Bai made another request: that humanity be allowed to return to their mother planet. To be sure, Earth had been dismantled, and most of it went toward the storage device. But the gods saved a small amount of matter to construct a hollow Earth, about the same size as the original, but with only a hundredth of its mass. To say that the hollow Earth was Earth hollowed-out would be incorrect, because the layer of brittle rock that originally covered the Earth could hardly be used to make the spherical shell. The shell material was perhaps taken from the Earth’s core. In addition, razor-thin but extremely strong reinforcing hoops crisscrossed the shell, like lines of latitude and longitude, made from the neutronium produced in the collapse of the sun.

  Movingly, the Devouring Empire not only immediately agreed to Li Bai’s request, allowing all humans to leave the great ring world, but also returned the seawater and air they’d taken from Earth in their entirety. The gods used them to restore all of Earth’s original continents, oceans, and atmosphere inside the hollow Earth.

  Next, the terrible battle to defend the great ring began. The Devouring Empire launched barrages of nuclear missiles and gamma rays at the gods in space, but these were useless against their foe. The gods launched a powerful, invisible force that pushed at the Devourers’ ring, spinning it faster and faster, until it finally fell apart under the centrifugal forces of such rapid rotation. At this time, Yi Yi was en route to the hollow Earth. From twelve million kilometers away, he witnessed the complete course of the Devouring Empire’s destruction:

  The ring came apart very slowly, dreamlike. Against the pitch-black backdrop of space, this immense world dispersed like a piece of milk foam on coffee, the fragments at its edges slowly sinking into darkness, as if being dissolved by space. Only by the flashes of sporadic explosions would they reappear.

  Excerpt from Devourer

  The great, fierce civilization from ancient Earth was thus destroyed, to Yi Yi’s deepest lament. Only a few dinosaurs survived, returning to Earth with humanity, including the emissary Bigtooth.

  On the return journey to Earth, the humans were largely in low spirits, but for different reasons than Yi Yi: Once they were back on Earth, they’d have to farm and plow if they wanted to eat. To humans accustomed to having every need provided for in their long captivity, grown indolent and ignorant of labor, it really did seem like a nightmare.

  But Yi Yi believed in Earth’s future. No matter how many challenges lay ahead, humans were going to become people once more.

  THE CLOUD OF POEMS

  The poetry voyage arrived on the shores of Antarctica.

  The gravity here was already weak; the waves cycled slowly in a dreamlike dance. Under the low gravity, the impact of waves upon shore sent spray dozens of meters into the air, where the seawater contracted under surface tension into countless spheres, some as large as soccer balls, some as small as raindrops, which fell so slowly that one could draw rings around them with one’s hand. They refracted the rays of the little sun, so that when Yi Yi, Li Bai, and Bigtooth disembarked, they were surrounded by crystalline brilliance.

  Due to the forces of rotation, the Earth was slightly stretched at the North and South Poles, causing the hollow Earth’s pole regions to maintain their old chilly state. Low-gravity snow was a wonder, loose and foamy, waist-high in the shallow parts and deep enough at others that even Bigtooth disappeared beneath it. But having disappeared, they could still breathe normally inside the snow! The entire Antarctic continent was buried underneath this snow-foam, creating an undulating landscape of white.

  Yi Yi and company rode a snowmobile toward the South Pole. The snowmobile skimmed across the snow-foam like a speedboat, throwing waves of white to either side.

  The next day, they arrived at the South Pole, marked by a towering pyramid of crystal, a memorial dedicated to the Earth Defense War of two centuries ago. Neither writing nor images marked its surface. There was just the crystal form in the snow-foam at the apex of the Earth, silently refracting the sunlight.

  From here, one could gaze upon the entire world. Continents and oceans surrounded the radiant little sun, so that it looked as if it had floated up from the waters of the Arctic Sea.

  “Will that little sun really be able to shine forever?” Yi Yi asked Li Bai.

  “At the very least, it will last until the new Earth civilization is advanced enough to create a new sun. It is a miniature white hole.”

  “White hole? Is that the inverse of a black hole?” asked Bigtooth.

  “Yes, it’s connected through a wormhole to a black hole orbiting a star, two million light-years away. The black hole sucks in the star’s light, which is released here. Think of the sun as one end of a fiber-optic cable running through hyperspace.”

  The apex of the monument was the southern starting point of the Lagrangian axis, the thirteen-thousand-kilometer line of zero gravity between the North and South Poles of the hollow Earth, named after the zero-gravity Lagrangian point that had existed between the Earth and moon before the war. In the future, people were certain to launch various satellites onto the Lagrangian axis. Compared to the process on Earth before the war, this would be easy: one would only have to ship the satellite to the North or South Pole, by donkey if one wanted to, and give it a good kick up with one’s foot.

  As the party viewed the memorial, another, larger snowmobile ferried over a crowd of young human tourists. After disembarking, the tourists bent their legs and jumped straight into the air, flying high along the Lagrangian axis, turning themselves into satellites. From here, one could see many sma
ll, black specks in the air, marking out the position of the axis: tourists and vehicles drifting in zero gravity. They would have been able to fly directly to the North Pole if it weren’t for the sun, placed at the midpoint of the Lagrangian axis. In the past, some tourists flying along the axis had discovered their handheld miniature air-jet thrusters broken, been unable to decelerate, and flown straight into the sun. Well, in truth, they vaporized a considerable distance from it.

  In the hollow Earth, entering space was also easy. One only needed to jump into one of the five deep wells on the equator (called Earthgates) and fall (fly?) a hundred kilometers through the shell, then be flung by the centrifugal forces of the hollow Earth’s rotation into space.

  Yi Yi and company also needed to pass through the shell to see the Cloud of Poems, but they were heading through the Antarctic Earthgate. Here, there were no centrifugal forces, so instead of being flung into space, they would only reach the outer surface of the hollow Earth. Once they’d put on lightweight space suits at the Antarctic control station, they entered the one-hundred-kilometer well—although, without gravity, it was better termed a tunnel. Being weightless here, they used the thrusters on their space suits to move forward. This was much slower than the free fall on the equator; it took them half an hour to arrive on the outside.

  The outer surface of the hollow Earth was completely barren. There were only the crisscrossing reinforcing hoops of neutronium, which divided the outside by latitude and longitude into a grid. The South Pole was indeed where all the longitudinal hoops met. When Yi Yi and company walked out of the Earthgate, they saw that they were located on a modestly sized plateau. The hoops that reinforced Earth resembled many long mountain ranges, radiating in every direction from the plateau.

  Looking up, they saw the Cloud of Poems.

  In place of the solar system was the Cloud of Poems, a spiral galaxy a hundred astronomical units across, shaped much like the Milky Way. The hollow Earth was situated at the edge of the Cloud, much as the sun had been in the actual Milky Way. The difference was that Earth’s position was not coplanar with the Cloud of Poems, which allowed one to see one face of the Cloud head-on, instead of only edge-on as with the Milky Way. But Earth wasn’t nearly far enough from the plane to allow people here to observe the full form of the Cloud of Poems. Instead, the Cloud blanketed the entire sky of the southern hemisphere.