To Hold Up the Sky

by Cixin Liu

  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?”* 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.”*

  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.”

  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 casual 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!”

  Kalina forced back shivers from cold and fear, so that the horizon line steadied in her binoculars. She saw blurry masses of snow spray, edging the horizon with fuzzy trim.

  That was when Kalina heard the rumble of engines behind her. A row of Russian tanks passed her position as they charged the enemy, more T-90 tanks leaving the highway behind them. Kalina heard a different rumble: enemy helicopters were appearing in the sky ahead in neat array, a black lattice in the ghastly white sky of dawn. The exhaust pipes of the tanks around Kalina kicked into action with low splutters, cloaking the battleground in white fog. Through its crevices she could also see Russian helicopters passing low overhead.

  The tanks’ 120 mm guns stormed and thundered, and the white fog became a wildly flashing pink light display. Almost simultaneously, the first enemy shells fell, the pink light replaced by the blue-white lightning of their explosion. Kalina, lying on her stomach at the bottom of the bomb crater, felt the ground reverberate with the intense percussion like a drumhead. Nearby dirt and rock flew into the air and landed all over her back. Amid the explosions, she could dimly hear the whinny of anti-tank missiles. Kalina felt as if her viscera were tearing apart in the cacophony, and all the universe, the pieces falling toward an endless abyss—

  Just as her mind teetered on the breaking point, the tank battle ended. It had lasted only thirty seconds.

  When the smoke cleared, Kalina saw that the snowy ground in front of her was scattered with destroyed Russian tanks, heaps of raging flames crowned with black smoke. She looked farther; even without binoculars, she could see a similar swath of destroyed NATO tanks in the distance, appearing as black smoking specks on the snow. But more enemy tanks were rushing past the wreckage, wreathed in the snow spray churned up by their treads. Now and then the Abramses’ ferocious broad wedge heads emerged from the spray like snapping turtles launching themselves out of the waves, their smooth-bore muzzles flashing sporadically like eyes. Just above, the helicopters were still embroiled in their melee. Kalina saw an Apache explode in midair not far away. A Mi-28 wobbled low overhead, trailing fuel from a leak. It hit the ground a few dozen meters away and exploded into a fireball. Short-range air-to-air missiles slashed countless parallel white lines low in the air—

  Kalina heard a bang behind her. She turned; not far away, a damaged and badly smoking T-90 dropped its rear hatch. No one got out, but she could see a hand hanging down from it. Kalina leapt from the bomb crater and rushed to the back of the tank. She grabbed hold of the hand and pulled. An explosion rumbled inside the tank. A blast of blazing air forced Kalina back several steps. Her hand held something soft and very hot: a piece of skin pulled loose from the tank crew member’s hand, cooked through. Kalina raised her head and saw flames burst from the hatch. Through it, she could see that the tank interior was already an inferno in miniature. Among the flames, dimly red and transparent, she could clearly see the silhouette of the unmoving crewman, rippling as if in water.

  She heard two new shrills. The artillery crew to her front and left fired its last two anti-tank missiles. The wire-guided Sagger missile successfully destroyed an Abrams; the other, radio-guided missile found its signal jammed and veered upward at an angle, missing its target. Meanwhile the six missile crewmen retreated from their bunker, running toward Kalina’s bomb crater as a Comanche helicopter dove for them, its angular chassis resembling the profile of a savage alligator. Machine-gun bullets struck the ground in a long row, their impact abruptly standing snow and dirt up in a fence that just as quickly toppled. The fence crossed through the little squadron, felling four of them. Only a first lieutenant and a private made it over to the crater. There Kalina noticed that the lieutenant was wearing an antishock tank helmet, perhaps taken from a destroyed tan
k. The two of them held an RPG each.

  The lieutenant jumped into the crater. He took a shot at the nearest enemy tank, hitting the M1A2 head-on, triggering its reactive armor, the sound of the rocket explosion and the armor explosion mingling peculiarly. The tank charged out of the cloud of smoke, scraps of reactive armor dangling from its front like a tattered shirt. The young private was still aiming, his RPG jittering with the tank’s rise and fall, too uncertain to fire. Then the tank was just fifty, forty meters away, heading into a dip in the ground, and the private could only stand on the rim of the crater to aim downward.

  His RPG and the Abrams’s 120 mm gun sounded simultaneously.

  The tank gunner had fired a nonexplosive depleted-uranium armor-piercing round in his desperation. With an initial velocity of eight hundred meters per second, it turned the soldier’s upper body into a spray of gore upon impact. Kalina felt scraps of blood and meat strike her steel helmet, pitter-pattering. She opened her eyes. Just in front of her, at the edge of the crater, the private’s legs were two black tree stumps, soundlessly rolling their way to the bottom of the crater next to her feet. The shattered remains of the rest of his body had spattered a radial pattern of red speckles in the snow.

  The rocket had struck the Abrams, the focused jet of the explosion cutting through its armor. Thick smoke billowed from the chassis. But the steel monster was still charging toward them, trailing smoke. It was within twenty meters of them before an explosion from within stopped it in its tracks, hurling the top of its turret sky-high.

  The NATO tank line went past them immediately after, the ground trembling under the heavy impact of treads, but these tanks took no interest in their bomb crater. Once the first wave of tanks was past, the lieutenant grabbed Kalina’s hand and leapt from the crater, pulling her after him to the side of an already bullet-scarred jeep. Two hundred meters away, the second wave of armored assault was bearing down on them.