by Cixin Liu
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 Water 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.
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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.”
As they approached, Yi Yi saw that the plane was the size of a soccer field. The spaceship descended upon the plane thruster side down, but the flames left no marks on the surface, as if the plane were nothing but an illusion. Yet Yi Yi felt gravity, and the jarring sensation when the spaceship touched down proved that the plane was real.
Bigtooth must have come here before; he opened the hatch without hesitation and walked out. Yi Yi’s heart seized up when he saw that Bigtooth had simultaneously opened the hatches on both side of the airlock, but the air inside the chamber didn’t howl outward. As Bigtooth walked out of the ship, Yi Yi smelled fresh air from inside his pocket. When he poked his head out, a soft, cool breeze caressed his face. This was ultra-advanced technology beyond the comprehension of either humans or dinosaurs. Its comfortable, casual application astounded Yi Yi, in a way that pierced the soul more deeply than what humanity must have felt in its first encounter with Devourers. He looked up. The sphere floated overhead against the backdrop of the radiant Milky Way.
“What little gift have you brought me this time, Emissary?” asked the god in the language of the Devourers. His voice was not loud, seeming to come from a boundless distance away, from the deep void of outer space. It was the first time Yi Yi had found the crude language of the dinosaurs pleasing to the ear.
Bigtooth extended a claw into his pocket, caught Yi Yi, and set him down on the plane. Yi Yi could feel the elasticity of the plane through the soles of his feet.
“Esteemed god,” Bigtooth said. “I heard you like to collect small organisms from different star systems, so I brought you this very entertaining little thing: a human from Earth.”
“I only like perfect organisms. Why did you bring me such a filthy insect?” said the god. The sphere and the plane flickered twice, perhaps to express disgust.
“You know about this species?” Bigtooth raised his head in astonishment.
“Not intimately, but I’ve heard about them from certain visitors to this arm of the galaxy. They made frequent visits to Earth in the brief course of these organisms’ evolution, and were revolted at the vulgarness of their thoughts, the lowliness of their actions, the disorder and filth of their history. Not a single visitor would deign to establish contact with them up to the destruction of Earth. Hurry and throw it away.”
Bigtooth seized Yi Yi, rotating his massive head to look for a place to throw him. “The trash incinerator is behind you,” said the god. Bigtooth turned and saw that a small, round opening had appeared in the plane behind him. Inside shimmered a faint blue light.…
“Don’t dismiss us like that! Humanity created a magnificent civilization!” Yi Yi shouted with all his might in the language of the Devourers.
The sphere and plane again flickered twice. The god gave two cold laughs. “Civilization? Emissary, tell this insect what civilization is.”
Bigtooth lifted Yi Yi to his eye level; Yi Yi could even hear the gululu of the dinosaur’s giant eyeballs turning in their sockets. “Bug-bug, in this universe, the standard measure of any race’s level of civilization is the number of dimensions it can access. The basic requirement for joining civilization at large is six or more. Our esteemed god’s race can already access the eleventh dimension. The Devouring Empire can access the fourth dimension in small-scale laboratory environments, and only qualifies as a primitive, uncivilized tribe in the Milky Way. You, in the eyes of a god, are in the same category as weeds and lichen.”
“Throw it away already, it’s disgusting,” the god urged impatiently.
Having finished speaking, Bigtooth headed for the incinerator’s aperture. Yi Yi struggled frantically. Numerous pieces of white paper fluttered loose from his clothing. The sphere shot out a needle-thin beam of light, hitting one of the sheets, which froze unmoving in midair. The beam scanned rapidly over its surface.
“Oh my, wait, what’s this?”
Bigtooth allowed Yi Yi to dangle over the incinerator’s aperture as he turned to look at the sphere.
“That’s … my students’ homework!” Yi Yi managed laboriously, struggling in the dinosaur’s giant claw.
“These squarish symbols are very interesting, and the little arrays they form are quite amusing too,” said the god. The sphere’s beam of light rapidly scanned over the other sheets of paper, which had since landed on the plane.
“They’re Ch-Chinese characters. These are poems in Classical Chinese!”
“Poems?” the god exclaimed, retracting its beam of light. “I trust you understand the language of these insects, Emissary?”
“Of course, esteemed god. Before the Devouring Empire ate Earth, we spent a long time living on their world.” Bigtooth set Yi Yi down on the plane next to the incinerator, bent over, and picked up a sheet of paper. He held it just in front of his eyes, try
ing with effort to distinguish the small characters on it. “More or less, it says—”
“Forget it, you’ll distort the meaning!” Yi Yi waved a hand to interrupt Bigtooth.
“How so?” asked the god interestedly.
“Because this is a form of art that can only be expressed in Classical Chinese. Even translating these poems into other human languages alters them until they lose much of their meaning and beauty.”
“Emissary, do you have this language in your computer database? Send me the relevant data, as well as all the information you have on Earth history. Just use the communications channel we established during our last meeting.”
Bigtooth hurried back to the spaceship and banged around on the computer inside for a while, muttering, “We don’t have the Classical Chinese portion here, so we’ll have to upload it from the Empire’s network. There might be some delay.” Through the open hatchway, Yi Yi saw the morphing colors of the computer screen reflected off the dinosaur’s huge eyeballs.
By the time Bigtooth got off the ship, the god could already read the poem on one sheet of paper with perfect modern Chinese pronunciation.
“Bai ri yi shan jin,
Huang he ru hai liu,
Yu qiong qian li mu,
Geng shang yi ceng lou.”
“You’re a fast learner!” Yi Yi exclaimed.
The god ignored him, silent.
Bigtooth explained, “It means, the star has set behind the orbiting planet’s mountains. A liquid river called the Yellow River is flowing in the direction of the ocean. Oh, the river and the ocean are both made of the chemical compound consisting of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. If you want to see further, you must climb further up the edifice.”
