To Hold Up the Sky

by Cixin Liu

  “Perhaps you think it no more than tossing a pebble into the sea. But that’s not the case, Papa. This is dropping a grain of sand into an eye.

  “From the mathematical model, we know that the sun is in an extremely fine-tuned and sensitive state of energy equilibrium. If correctly placed, a small disturbance will create a chain reaction from the surface to a considerable distance down, spreading to disrupt the local equilibrium. There are recorded precedents: the latest incident was in early August of 1972, when a powerful but highly localized eruption created a massive EMP that heavily affected Earth. Compasses in planes and boats jumped wildly, long-distance wireless communications failed, the sky shone with dazzling red lights in high northern latitudes, electric lights flickered in villages as if they were in the center of a thunderstorm. The reactions continued for more than a week. A well-accepted theory nowadays is that a celestial body even smaller than the Vechnyy Buran collided with the surface of the sun at that time.

  “These disruptions on the sun’s surface certainly occurred many times, but most would have happened before humanity invented wireless equipment, and therefore went undetected. In addition, since these collisions were placed by random chance, the disturbances in equilibrium wouldn’t have been optimal in strength and area.

  “But the Vechnyy Buran’s impact location has been meticulously calculated, and the disturbance it will create will be orders of magnitude larger than the natural examples mentioned. This time, the sun will blast powerful electromagnetic radiation into space in every frequency, from the highest to the lowest. In addition, the powerful X-ray radiation generated by the sun will collide violently with Earth’s ionosphere, blocking off short-wave radio communications, which are reliant on the layer.

  “During the disturbance, the majority of wireless communications outside of the millimeter radio range will fail. The effect will weaken somewhat at night, but during the day, it will even exceed your jamming of the previous two days. Based on calculations, the disturbances will last a week.

  “Papa, the two of us always did live in worlds far away from each other’s. We could never interact much with each other. But now our worlds have come together. We’re fighting for the same goal, for which I’m proud. Papa, like all your soldiers, I await your order.”

  “Everything Dr. Levchenko said is true,” said the general director. “Last year, we sent a probe to enact a small-scale collision with the sun according to calculations based on the mathematical model. The experiment confirmed the model’s predictions of the disturbance. Dr. Levchenko and his research group even hypothesized that this method could be used to alter Earth’s climate in the future.”

  Marshal Levchenko walked into a side room and picked up the red telephone that was a direct line to the president. A little later, he walked back out.

  The historical records give different accounts of this moment: some claim that he spoke immediately, while others recount that for a minute he was silent. But they concur on the words he said.

  “Tell Misha to carry out his plan.”

  JANUARY 12TH, NEAR-SUN ORBIT, ABOARD THE VECHNYY BURAN

  The Vechnyy Buran fired all ten fission engines, jets of plasma hundreds of kilometers long erupting from every engine nozzle as it made final corrections to trajectory and orientation.

  In front of the Vechnyy Buran was an enormous and lovely solar prominence, a current of superheated hydrogen wheeling upward from the sun’s surface. Like long ribbons of gauze drifting high above the fiery sea of the sun, they shifted and changed like a dreamscape. Their ends anchored to the surface of the sun, forming a gigantic gateway.

  The Vechnyy Buran passed slow and stately through the four-hundred-thousand-kilometer-tall triumphal arch. More solar prominences appeared in front, one end attached to the sun, but the other extending into the depths of space. The Vechnyy Buran with its blinking blue engine lights threaded through them like a firefly amid burning trees. Then the blue lights slowly dimmed. The engines stopped. The Vechnyy Buran’s trajectory had been meticulously established; the rest depended on the law of gravity.

  As the spaceship entered the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, the black backdrop of space above turned a magenta all-pervading in its radiance. Below was a clear view of the sun’s chromosphere, twinkling with countless needle-shaped structures: discovered in the nineteenth century, they were jets of incandescent gas emanating from the surface of the sun. They made the atmosphere of the sun look like a burning grassland, where each stalk of grass was thousands of kilometers tall. Underneath the burning plain was the sun’s photosphere, a sea of endless fire.

  From the last images relayed from the Vechnyy Buran, people saw Misha rise to his feet in front of the giant monitoring screen. He pressed a button to retract the protective cover outside the transparent dome, revealing the magnificent sea of fire before him. He wanted to see the world of his childhood dreams with his own eyes. The view was distorting and rippling; that was the half-meter-thick insulation glass melting. Soon the glass barrier fell in a sheet of transparent liquid. Like someone who had never seen the sea facing the ocean wind in rapture, Misha spread his arms to greet the six-thousand-degree hurricane that roared toward him. In the last seconds of video before the camera and transmission equipment melted, one could see Misha’s body catching alight, a slender torch melding into the sun’s sea of fire.…

  What sight would have followed could only be conjecture. The Vechnyy Buran’s solar panels and protruding structures would have melted first, surface tension making silver beads of fluid of them on the spaceship’s surface. As the Vechnyy Buran traversed the boundary between the corona and chromosphere, its main body would begin to melt, fully liquefying at a depth of two thousand kilometers into the chromosphere. The beads of liquid metal would cohere into a huge silvery droplet, diving unerringly toward the target its now-melted computers had calculated. The effect of the sun’s atmosphere would become apparent: a pale blue flame would emanate from the droplet, trailing hundreds of meters behind it, its color gradating from the pale blue, to yellow, to a gorgeous orange at the tail.

  At last, this lovely phoenix would disappear into the endless sea of flames.

  JANUARY 13TH, EARTH

  Humanity returned to the world as it had been before Marconi.

  As night fell, undulating auroras flooded the sky, even into the equatorial zones.

  Facing television screens filled with white noise, most people could only guess and imagine at the situation in that vast land where war raged.

  JANUARY 13TH, MOSCOW FRONT LINE

  General Baker pushed aside the division commander of the Eighty-second Airborne and the assorted NATO frontline commanders attempting to drag him onto a helicopter. He raised his binoculars to continue surveilling the horizon, where the Russian front was rumbling in advance.

  “Calibrate to four thousand meters! Load number-nine ammunition, delayed fuse, fire!”

  From the sounds of artillery behind him, Baker could tell that no more than thirty of their 105 mm grenade launchers, last of the defensive heavy artillery, could still fire.

  An hour ago, the German tank battalion that had been the last remaining armored-vehicle force in the position had launched an admirably courageous counterattack. They’d achieved outstanding results: eight kilometers away, they’d destroyed half again their number of Russian tanks. But under the crushing disadvantage in numbers, they had disappeared under the Russian army’s roaring torrent of steel like dew under the noon sun.

  “Calibrate to thirty-five hundred meters, fire!”

  The explosive missiles hissed as they flew, and flung up a barrier of earth and fire in front of the Russian tank lines. But they were like a landslide before a flood, the earth a short-lived impediment against the implacable waters.

  Once the earth blasted up by the explosions fell back to the ground, the Russian armored cars reappeared in view through the dense smoke. Baker saw that they were arranged as densely as if
they were receiving inspection. Attacking in this formation would have been suicide a few days ago, but now, with almost all of NATO’s aerial and long-distance firepower jammed, it was a perfectly feasible way to concentrate armored-vehicle strength as much as possible, ensuring a break in the enemy line.

  Baker had expected that the defensive line would be poorly arranged. Under the electromagnetic conditions on the battlefield, it had been effectively impossible to quickly and accurately determine the direction the main enemy assault would take. As to how the defense would proceed, he didn’t know. With the C3I system completely down, quickly adjusting the defensive dispositions would be enormously difficult.

  “Calibrate to three thousand meters, fire!”

  “General, you were looking for me?” The French commander Lieutenant General Rousselle came over. Beside him were only a French lieutenant colonel and a helicopter pilot. He wasn’t wearing camouflage, and the medals on his chest and general’s stars on his shoulders shone brightly polished, making the steel helmet he wore and the rifle he held seem incongruous.

  “I hear that the French Foreign Legion is withdrawing from the fortifications on our left wing.”

  “Yes, General.”

  “General Rousselle, seven hundred thousand NATO troops are in the process of retreat behind us. Their successful breakthrough of the enemy encirclement depends on our steadfast defense!”

  “Depends on your steadfast defense.”

  “Care to explain that comment?”

  “You have plenty to explain yourself! You hid the real battle situation from us. You knew from the beginning that the Rightist allies would independently negotiate a cease-fire in the east!”

  “As the commander in chief of the NATO forces, I had the right to do so. General, I think you’re also clear on the duty placed on you and your troops to follow the orders given.”

  A silence.

  “Calibrate to twenty-five hundred meters, fire!”

  “I only obey the orders of the president of the French Republic.”

  “I do not believe you could have received orders to that effect right now.”

  “I received them months ago, at the National Day reception at Élysée Palace. The president personally informed me of how the French army should conduct itself under the present conditions.”

  Baker finally lost his temper. “You bastards haven’t changed a bit since de Gaulle’s time!”*

  “Don’t make it sound so unpleasant. If you won’t leave, I will stay here without my retinue as well. We will fight and die honorably together on the snowy plain. Napoleon lost here too. It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Rousselle said, gesturing with his French-made FAMAS rifle.

  A silence.

  “Calibrate to two thousand meters, fire!”

  Baker turned slowly to face the frontline commanders in front of him. “Relay these words to the American soldiers defending these lines: We didn’t start out as an army dependent on computers to fight our battles. We come from an army of farming men. Decades ago, on Okinawa, we fought the Japanese foxhole by foxhole through the jungle. At Khe Sanh, we deflected the North Vietnamese soldiers’ grenades with shovels. Even longer ago, on that cold winter night, our great Washington himself led his barefoot soldiers across the icy Delaware to make history—”

  “Calibrate to fifteen hundred meters, fire!”

  “I order you, destroy all documents and excess supplies—”

  “Calibrate to twelve hundred meters, fire!”

  General Baker put on his helmet, strapped on his Kevlar vest, and clipped his 9 mm pistol to his left side. The grenade launchers went silent; the gunners were shoving the grenades into the barrels. Next sounded a mess of explosions.

  “Troops,” Baker said, looking at the Russian tanks spread in front of them like the veil of death. “Bayonets up!”

  The sun faded in and out of the thick smoke of the battlefield, throwing shifting light and shadow onto the snowy plain as the battle raged.

  SEA OF DREAMS

  TRANSLATED BY JOHN CHU

  FIRST HALF

  The Low-Temperature Artist

  It was the Ice and Snow Arts Festival that lured the low-temperature artist here. The idea was absurd, but once the oceans had dried, this was how Yan Dong always thought of it. No matter how many years passed by, the scene when the low-temperature artist arrived remained clear in her mind.

  At the time, Yan Dong was standing in front of her own ice sculpture, which she’d just completed. Exquisitely carved ice sculptures surrounded her. In the distance, lofty ice structures towered over a snowfield. These sparkling and translucent skyscrapers and castles were steeped in the winter sun. They were short-lived works of art. Soon, this glittering world would become a pool of clear water in the spring breeze. People were sad to see them melt but the process embodied many of life’s ineffable mysteries. This, perhaps, was the real reason why Yan Dong clung dearly to the ice and snow arts.

  Yan Dong tore her gaze away from her own work, determined not to look at it again before the judges named the winners. She sighed, then glanced at the sky. It was at this moment that she saw the low-temperature artist for the first time.

  Initially, she thought it was a plane dragging a white vapor trail behind it, but the flying object was much faster than a plane. It swept a great arc through the air. The vapor trail, like a giant piece of chalk, drew a hook in the blue sky. The flying object suddenly stopped high in the air right above Yan Dong. The vapor trail gradually disappeared from its tail to its head, as though the flying object were inhaling it back in.

  Yan Dong studied the bit of the vapor trail that was the last to disappear. It was flickering oddly, and she decided it had to be from something reflecting the sunlight. She then saw what that it was—a small, ash-gray spheroid. Then quickly realized that the spheroid wasn’t small—it looked small in the distance, but was now expanding rapidly. The spheroid was falling right toward her, it seemed, and from an incredibly high altitude. When the people around her realized, they fled in all directions. Yan Dong also ducked her head and ran, darting in and around the ice sculptures.

  An enormous shadow hung over the area, and for a moment, Yan Dong’s blood seemed to freeze. The expected impact never came, though. The artists and judges and festival spectators stopped running. They gazed upward, dumbstruck. She looked up, too. The massive gray spheroid floated a hundred meters over their heads. It wasn’t wholly spheroid, as if the vapor expelled during its high-speed flight had warped its shape. The half in the direction of its flight was smooth, glossy, and round. The other half sprouted a large sheaf of hair, making it look like a comet whose tail had been trimmed. It was massive, well over one hundred meters in diameter, a mountain suspended in midair. Its presence felt oppressive to everyone beneath it.

  After the spheroid halted, the air that had driven it charged the ground, sending up a rapidly expanding ring of dirt and snow. It’s said that when people touched something they didn’t expect to be as cold as an ice cube, it’d feel so hot that they’d shout as their hand recoiled. In the instant that the mass of air fell on her, that’s how Yan Dong felt. Even someone from the bitterly cold Northeast would have felt the same way. Fortunately, the air diffused quickly, or else everyone on the ground would have frozen stiff. Even so, practically everyone with exposed skin suffered some frostbite.

  Yan Dong’s face was numb from the sudden cold. She looked up, transfixed by the spheroid’s surface. It was made of a translucent ash-gray substance she recognized intimately: ice. This object suspended in the air was a giant ball of ice.

  Once the air settled, large snowflakes were fluttering around the floating mountain of ice. An oddly pure white against the blue sky, they glittered in the sunlight. However, these snowflakes were only visible within a certain distance around the spheroid. When they floated farther away, they dissolved. They formed a snow ring with the spheroid as its center, as though the spheroid were a streetlamp lighting the snowflakes around it o
n a cold night.

  “I am a low-temperature artist!” a clear, sharp voice emitted from the ball of ice. “I am a low-temperature artist!”

  “This ball of ice is you?” Yan Dong shouted back.

  “You can’t see my true form. The ball of ice you see is formed by my freeze field from the moisture in the air,” the low-temperature artist replied.

  “What about those snowflakes?”

  “They are crystals of the oxygen and nitrogen in the air. In addition, there’s dry ice formed from the carbon dioxide.”

  “Wow. Your freeze field is so powerful!”

  “Of course. It’s like countless tiny hands holding countless tiny hearts tight. It forces all the molecules and atoms within its range to stop moving.”

  “It can also lift this gigantic ball of ice into the air?”

  “That’s a different kind of field, the antigravity field. The ice-sculpting tools you all use are so fascinating. You have small shovels and small chisels of every shape. Not to mention watering cans and blowtorches. Fascinating! To make low-temperature works of art, I also have a set of tiny tools. They are various types of force fields. Not as many tools as you have, but they work extremely well.”

  “You create ice sculptures, too?”

  “Of course. I’m a low-temperature artist. Your world is extremely suitable for the ice- and snow-molding arts. I was shocked to discover they’ve long existed in this world. I’m thrilled to say that we’re colleagues.”

  “Where do you come from?” the ice sculptor next to Yan Dong asked.

  “I come from a faraway place, a world you have no way to understand. That world is not nearly as interesting as yours. Originally, I focused solely on the art. I didn’t interact with other worlds. However, seeing exhibitions like this one, seeing so many colleagues, I found the desire to interact. But, frankly, very few of the low-temperature works below me deserve to be called works of art.”