To Hold Up the Sky

by Cixin Liu

  The lights inside were off except for numerous small signal lamps. He felt as though he’d walked from a moonlit starry sky to a moonless starry sky. The only moonlight was a sliver that penetrated the crack in the spherical roof. It fell on the giant astronomical telescope, partially sketching out its contours in silver lines. The telescope looked like a piece of abstract art in a town square at night.

  He stepped silently to the bottom of the telescope. In the weak light, he saw a large pile of machinery. It was more complex than he’d imagined. He searched for an eyepiece. A soft voice came from the door:

  “This is a solar telescope. It doesn’t have an eyepiece.”

  A figure wearing white work clothes walked through the door, as though a feather had drifted in from the moonlight. The woman walked over to him, bringing a light breeze along with her.

  “A traditional solar telescope casts an image onto a screen. Nowadays, we usually use a monitor.… Doctor, you seem to be very interested in this.”

  He nodded. “An observatory is such a sublime and rarefied place. I like how it makes me feel.”

  “Then why did you go into medicine? Oh, that was very rude of me.”

  “Medicine isn’t just some trivial skill. Sometimes, it, too, is sublime, like my specialty of brain medicine, for example.”

  “Oh? When you use a scalpel to open up the brain, you can see thoughts?” she said.

  Her smiling face in the weak light made him think of something he’d never seen before, the sun cast onto a screen. Once the violent flares disappeared, the magnificence that remained couldn’t help but make his heart skip a beat. He smiled, too, hoping she could see his smile.

  “Oh, we can look at the brain all we want,” he said, “but consider this: Say a mushroom-shaped thing you can hold in one hand turns out to be a rich and varied universe. From a certain philosophical viewpoint, this universe is even grander than the one you observe. Even though your universe is tens of billions of light-years wide, it’s been established that it’s finite. My universe is infinite because thought is infinite.”

  “Ah, not everybody’s thoughts are infinite but, Doctor, yours seem to be. As for astronomy, it’s not as rarefied as you think. Several thousand years ago on the banks of the Nile and several hundred years ago on a long sea voyage, it was a practical skill. An astronomer of the time often spent years marking the positions of thousands of stars on star charts. A census of the stars consumed their lives. Nowadays, the actual work of astronomical research is dull and meaningless. For example, I study the twinkling of stars. I make endless observations, take notes, then make more observations and take more notes. It’s definitely not sublime as well as not rarefied.”

  His eyebrows rose in surprise. “The twinkling of stars? Like the kind we can see?” When he saw her laugh, he laughed, too, shaking his head. “Oh, I know, of course, that’s atmospheric refraction.”

  “However, as a visual metaphor, it’s pretty accurate. Get rid of the constant terms, just show the fluctuations in their energy output, and stars really do look like they’re twinkling.”

  “Is it because of sunspots?”

  She stopped smiling. “No, this is the fluctuation of a star’s total energy. It’s like how when a lamp flickers, it’s not because of the moths surrounding it, but because of fluctuations in voltage. Of course, the fluctuations of a twinkling star are minuscule, detectable only by the most precise measurements. Otherwise, we’d have been burned by the twinkling of the sun long ago. Researching this sort of twinkling is one way of understanding the deep structure of stars.”

  “What have you discovered so far?”

  “It’ll be a while before we discover anything. For now, we’ve only observed the twinkling of the star that’s the easiest to observe—the sun. We can do this for years while we gradually expand out to the rest of the stars.… You know, we could spend ten, twenty years taking measurements of the universe before we make any discoveries and come to some conclusion. This is my dissertation topic, but I think I’ll be working on this for a long while, perhaps my whole life.”

  “So you don’t think astronomy is dull, after all.”

  “I think what I’m working on is beautiful. Entering the world of stars is like entering an infinitely vast garden. No two flowers are alike.… You have to think that’s a weird analogy, but it’s exactly how I feel.”

  As she spoke, seemingly without realizing it, she gestured at the wall. A painting hung there, very abstract, just a thick line undulating from one end to the other. When she noticed what he was looking at, she took it down, then handed it to him. The thick, undulating line was a mosaic of colorful pebbles from the area.

  “It’s lovely, but what does it represent? The local mountain range?”

  “Our most recent measurements of the sun twinkling, it was so intense and we’d rarely ever seen it fluctuate like that this year. This is a picture of the curve of the energy radiated as it twinkled. Oh, when I hike, I like to collect pebbles, so…”

  The scientist was only partially visible in the surrounding shadow. She looked like an elegant ink line a brilliant artist drew on a piece of fine, white calligraphy paper. The curve’s intelligence of spirit filled that perfect white paper immediately with vitality and intention.… In the city he lived in outside the mountains, at any given moment, more than a million young women, like a large group of particles in Brownian motion, chased the showy and vain, without even a moment of reflection. But who could imagine that on this mountain in the middle of nowhere, there was a gentle and quiet woman who stared for long stretches at the stars.…

  “You can reveal this kind of beauty from the universe. That’s truly rare and also very fortunate.” He realized he was staring and looked away. He returned the painting to her but, lightly, she pushed it back to him.

  “Keep it as a souvenir, Doctor. Professor Wilson is my advisor. Thank you for saving his life.”

  After ten minutes, the ambulance left under the moonlight. Slowly, he realized what he’d left on the mountain.

  FIRST TIME

  Once he married, he abandoned his effort to fight against time. One day, he moved his things out of his apartment to the one he now shared with his wife. Those things that two people shouldn’t share, he brought to his office at the hospital. As he riffled through them, he found a mosaic made of colorful pebbles. Seeing the multicolored curve, he suddenly realized that the trip to Mount Siyun was ten years ago.

  ALPHA CENTAURI A

  The hospital’s young employees’ group had a spring outing. He cherished this outing particularly, because it was getting less and less likely they’d invite him again. This time, the trip organizer was deliberately mysterious, pulling down the blinds on all the coach windows and having everyone guess where they were once they arrived. The first one to guess correctly won a prize. He knew where they were the instant he stepped off the coach, but he kept quiet.

  The highest peak of Mount Siyun stood before him. The pearl-like spherical roofs on its summit glittered in the sunlight.

  After someone guessed where they were, he told the trip organizer that he wanted to go to the observatory to visit an acquaintance. He left on foot, following the meandering road up the mountain.

  He hadn’t lied, but the woman whose name he didn’t even know wasn’t part of the observatory staff. After ten years, she probably wasn’t here anymore. He didn’t actually want to go inside, just to look around at the place where, ten years ago, his soul, hot, dry, and as bright as the sun, spilled into a thread of moonlight.

  One hour later, he reached the mountaintop and the observatory’s white railings. Its paint had cracked and faded. Silently, he took in the individual observatories. The place hadn’t changed much. He quickly located the domed building that he’d once entered. He sat on a stone block on the grass, lit a cigarette, then studied the building’s iron door, spellbound. The scene he’d long cherished replayed from the depths of his memory: with the iron door half open, in the midst
of a ray of moonlight like water, a feather drifted in.…

  He was so completely steeped in that long-gone dream that when the miracle happened, he wasn’t surprised: the observatory’s iron door opened for real. The feather that once had emerged from the moonlight drifted into the sunlight. She left in a hurry to go into another observatory. This couldn’t have taken more twenty seconds, but he knew he wasn’t mistaken.

  Five minutes later, they reunited.

  This was the first time he’d seen her with adequate light. She was exactly as he’d imagined. He wasn’t surprised. It’d been ten years, though. She shouldn’t have looked exactly like the woman barely lit by a few signal lamps and the moon. He was puzzled.

  She was pleasantly surprised to see him, but no more than that. “Doctor, I make a round of every observatory for my project. In a given year, I’m only here for half a month. To run into you again, it must be fate!”

  That last sentence, tossed off lightly, confirmed his initial impression: She didn’t feel anything more about seeing him again besides surprise. However, she still recognized him after ten years. He took a shred of comfort in that.

  They exchanged a few words about what had happened to the visiting English scholar who’d suffered the brain injury. Finally, he asked, “Are you still researching the twinkling of stars?”

  “Yes. After observing the sun’s twinkling for two years, I moved on to other stars. As I’m sure you understand, the techniques necessary to observe other stars are completely different from those to observe the sun. The project didn’t have new funding. It halted for many years. We just started it back up three years ago. Right now, we are only observing twenty-five stars. The number and scope are still growing.”

  “Then you must have produced more mosaics.”

  The moonlit smile that had surfaced so many times from the depths of memory over the past ten years now emerged in the sunlight. “Ah, you still remember! Yes, every time I come to Mount Siyun, I collect pretty pebbles. Come, I’ll show you!”

  She took him into the observatory where they’d first met. A giant telescope confronted him. He didn’t know whether it was the same telescope from ten years ago, but the computers that surrounded it were practically new. Familiar things hung on a tall curved wall: mosaics of all different sizes. Each one was of an undulating curve. They were all of different lengths. Some were as gentle as the sea. Others were violent, like a row of tall towers strung together at random.

  One by one, she told him which waves came from which stars. “These twinklings, we call type A twinklings. They don’t occur as much as other types. The difference between type A twinklings and those of other types, besides that their energy fluctuations are orders of magnitude larger, is that the mathematics of their curves is even more elegant.”

  He shook his head, puzzled. “You scientists doing basic research are always talking about the elegance of mathematics. I guess that’s your prerogative. For example, you all think that Maxwell’s equations are incredibly elegant. I understood them once, but I couldn’t see where the elegance was.…”

  Just like ten years ago, she suddenly grew serious. “They’re elegant like crystals, very hard, very pure, and very transparent.”

  Unexpectedly, he recognized one of the mosaics. “Oh, you re-created one?” Seeing her uncomprehending expression, he continued. “That’s the waveform of the sun twinkling in the mosaic you gave me ten years ago.”

  “But … that’s the waveform from a type A twinkling from Alpha Centauri A. We observed it, um, last October.”

  He trusted that she was genuinely puzzled, but he trusted his own judgment as well. He knew that waveform too well. Moreover, he could even recall the color and shape of every stone that made up the curve. He didn’t want her to know that, until he got married last year, that mosaic had always hung on his wall. There were a few nights every month when moonlight would seep in after he’d turned out the lights, and he could make out the mosaic from his bed. That was when he’d silently count the pebbles that made up the curve. His gaze crawled along the curve like a beetle. Usually, by the time he’d crawled along the entire curve and gone halfway back, he’d fallen asleep. In his dreams, he continued to stroll along this curve that came from the sun, like stepping from colorful stone to colorful stone to cross a river whose banks he’d never see.…

  “Can you look up the curve of the sun twinkling from ten years ago? The date was April twenty-third.”

  “Of course.”

  She gave him an odd look, obviously startled that he remembered that date so easily. At the computer, she pulled up that waveform of the sun twinkling followed by the waveform of Alpha Centauri A twinkling that was on the wall. She stared at the screen, dumbfounded.

  The two waveforms overlapped perfectly.

  When her long silence grew unbearable, he suggested, “Maybe these two stars have the same structure, so they also twinkle the same way. You said before that type A twinkling reflects the star’s deep structure.”

  “They are both on the main sequence and they both have spectral type G2, but their structures are not identical. The crux, though, is that even for two stars with the same structure, we still wouldn’t see this. It’s like banyan trees. Have you ever seen two that were absolutely identical? For such complex waveforms to actually overlap perfectly, that’s like having two large banyan trees where even their outermost branches were exactly the same.”

  “Perhaps there really are two large banyan trees that are exactly the same,” he consoled, knowing his words were meaningless.

  She shook her head lightly. Suddenly, she thought of something and leapt to stand. Fear joined the surprise already in her gaze.

  “My god,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You … Have you ever thought about time?”

  He quickly caught on to what she was thinking. “As far as I know, Alpha Centauri A is our closest star. It’s only about … four light-years away.”

  “1.3 parsecs is 4.25 light-years.” She was still in the grip of astonishment. It was as if she couldn’t believe the things she herself was saying.

  Now it was all clear: The two identical twinklings occurred eight years and six months apart, just long enough for light to make a round trip between the two stars. After 4.25 years, when the light of the sun’s twinkling reached Alpha Centauri A, the latter twinkled in the same way, and after the same amount of time, the light of Alpha Centauri’s twinkling was observed here.

  She hunched over her computer, making calculations and talking to herself. “Even if we take into account the several years where the two stars regressed from each other, the result still fits.”

  “I hope what I said doesn’t cause you too much worry. There’s ultimately nothing we can do to confirm this, right? It’s just a theory.”

  “Nothing we can do to confirm this? Don’t be so sure. That light from the sun twinkling was broadcast into space. Perhaps that’ll lead to another star twinkling in the same way.”

  “After Alpha Centauri, the next closest star is…”

  “Barnard’s Star, 1.81 parsecs away, but it’s too dim. There’s no way to measure it. The next star out, Wolf 359, 2.35 parsecs away, is just as dim. Can’t measure it. Yet farther out, Lalande 21185, 2.52 parsecs away, is also too dim.… That leaves Sirius.”

  “That seems like a star bright enough to see. How far is it?”

  “2.65 parsecs away, just 8.6 light-years.”

  “The light from the sun twinkling has already traveled for ten years. It’s already reached there. Perhaps Sirius has already twinkled back.”

  “But the light from it twinkling won’t arrive for another seven years.” She seemed to wake all of a sudden from a dream, then laughed. “Oh, dear, what am I thinking? It’s too ridiculous!”

  “So you’re saying, as an astronomer, the idea is ridiculous?”

  She studied him earnestly. “What else can it be? As a brain surgeon, how do you feel when someone discusses with yo
u where thought comes from, the brain or the heart?”

  He had nothing to say. She glanced at her watch, so he started to leave. She didn’t urge him to stay, but she accompanied him quite a distance along the road that led down the mountain. He stopped himself from asking for her number because he knew, in her eyes, he was just some stranger who bumped into her again by chance ten years later.

  After they said goodbye, she walked up toward the observatory. Her white lab coat swayed in the mountain breeze. Unexpectedly, it stirred up in him how it had felt when they’d said goodbye ten years ago. The sunlight seemed to change into moonlight. That feather disappeared in the distance … like a straw of rice, sinking into the water, that someone desperately tries to grab. He decided he wanted to maintain that cobweb-like connection between them. Almost instinctively, he shouted at her back:

  “If, seven years from now, you see Sirius actually twinkles like that…”

  She stopped walking and turned toward him. With a smile, she answered, “Then we’ll meet here!”

  SECOND TIME

  With marriage, he entered a completely different life, but what changed his life thoroughly was a child. After the child was born, the train of life suddenly changed from the local to the express. It rushed past stop after stop in its never-ending journey onward. He grew numb from the journey. His eyes shut, he no longer paid attention to the unchanging scenery. Weary, he went to sleep. However, as with so many others sleeping on the train, a tiny clock deep in his heart still ticked. He woke the minute he reached his destination.

  One night, his wife and child slept soundly but he couldn’t sleep. On some mysterious impulse, he threw on his clothes, then went to the balcony. Overhead, the fog of city lights dimmed the many stars in the sky. He was searching for something, but what? It was a good while before his heart answered him: He was looking for Sirius. He couldn’t help but shiver at that.