The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Oh, by the way, people now live inside the Earth, or to be more exact, people now live inside a balloon. That’s right, the Earth has been turned into a balloon. It has been hollowed out, leaving behind only a thin crust about a hundred kilometres thick. The continents and oceans still remain exactly the same, however, except for the fact that they are now on the inside. The atmosphere is still there but it has also moved to the inside. So the Earth is now a balloon, a balloon with continents and oceans stuck to its inner surface. This hollow Earth still revolves on its axis, but the effect of the spin is very different: it now provides the Earth’s gravity. The mass of the thin crust is so small that the gravity produced by it is not even worth mentioning. Gravity is now mainly generated by the centrifugal force caused by Earth’s rotation. This gravity is, however, not evenly spread across the world: it is strongest at the equator—roughly equivalent to 1.5 times the original gravitational force on Earth—and decreases as the latitude increases, until it becomes zero at the North and South Poles. The latitude that the yacht now sails on has exactly the standard gravitational force of the original Earth, but Yiyi still finds it very difficult to regain the feelings of the old world, the feelings that one would have felt on the now disappeared solid Earth.

  A tiny sun hovered at the core of the hollow Earth, bathing the whole world in brilliant midday rays. The sun’s intensity changes constantly in the course of twenty-four hours, gradually dimming from maximum brightness till it extinguishes completely, giving the inside of the hollow Earth days and nights. On some nights, it also casts the cold gleam of the moon, but as the light only shines from one spot, one cannot see the full moon.

  Of the three on board, two are not actually human. One is a ten-metre-tall dinosaur named Big-tooth, who rocks the yacht left and right with his every movement, causing much annoyance to the poet standing in the bow of the yacht. He is an old bony man, with snowy white hair and beard that mingle together in the breeze. He is wearing a wide ancient-style robe, like those of the Tang dynasty, with an immortal air about him, much like a character written in a wild cursive style with the sky and ocean as backdrop.

  This is the creator of the new world, the great Li Bai.

  A GIFT

  It all started ten years ago. At the time, the Devourer Empire had just ended its two-century-long plunder of the solar system. These prehistoric dinosaurs directed their gigantic Ring-world, which was fifty thousand kilometres in diameter, away from the sun and glided towards the Cygnus constellation. The empire carried away with it 1.2 billion humans, which the dinosaurs planned to raise like poultry. But just as the Ring-world was about to reach the orbit of Saturn, it suddenly began to decelerate, actually turning back along its original track and reentering the inner solar system.

  A Ring-world week after the Devourer Empire began its return, Ambassador Big-tooth set off from their world in a spaceship shaped like an ancient boiler, carrying in his pocket a human named Yiyi.

  “You’re a gift,” Big-tooth told Yiyi, his eyes peeping through the porthole into the dark space outside, his deep voice vibrating so hard that it turned Yiyi numb from head to toe.

  “For whom?” Yiyi raised his head and shouted out loudly from within the pocket. From the pocket’s opening, he could only see the dinosaur’s lower jaw, which looked like a giant rock protruding from the side of a cliff.

  “For the gods! The gods have come to the solar system, and that’s why the empire returned.”

  “Are they real gods?”

  “They’ve mastered unimaginable technologies, and exist in the form of pure energy. They can jump from one end of the Milky Way to the other in a flash. That makes them gods enough. If we could but master one-hundredth of that super technology, the Devourer Empire would have a bright future. We are completing a grand mission, and you must learn to please the gods.”

  “Why me? My meat is of very inferior quality,” Yiyi said. He was more than thirty years old, and compared to the fair and juicy humans carefully raised by the empire, his appearance was much more haggard.

  “Gods don’t eat bugs; they just like to collect them. According to the breeders you are quite special, and it’s said that you have many students?”

  “I’m a poet. I teach classical literature to the humans kept in the breeding farms.” Yiyi pronounced the words poet and literature with some difficulty, as these were very rarely used words in Devourish.

  “A boring and useless learning indeed! But the breeders have turned a blind eye to your teaching activities as the contents seem to be mentally helpful to you bugs, and thus improve the quality of your meat….I’ve noticed that you think yourself noble and pure, and others to be beneath your notice. Very interesting feelings for a little fowl from a feedlot.”

  “Thus the way with all poets.” Yiyi straightened himself in the pocket, proudly holding his head high, though he knew that Big-tooth could not see this.

  “Were your ancestors in the Earth Defense War?”

  “No,” answered Yiyi, shaking his head. “My ancestors from back then were also poets.”

  “A most useless kind of bug, very rare on Earth even then.”

  “He lives in his own inner world, and does not care for the changes happening around him.”

  “Good-for-nothings…Ah, we’re nearly there.”

  Upon hearing this, Yiyi poked his head out from the pocket and peered through the porthole. There were two white, glowing objects floating in space before them, one a square plane, the other a sphere. As the spaceship drew level with the plane, the plane suddenly disappeared for a second into the backdrop of the starry sky, which meant that it had almost no thickness. The perfectly shaped sphere hovered above the plane, both of them casting off soft white glows, their surfaces so smooth and even that nothing distinctive could be seen. They were like two elements drawn out from a graphic database, two simple and abstract concepts within the mess and confusion of the universe.

  “Where are the gods?” asked Yiyi.

  “Those two geometric shapes. Gods like to be concise.”

  As they drew near, Yiyi saw that the plane was about the size of a football field. The spaceship landed on the plane; the flames from the engine touched the plane first, but left no marks whatsoever. It was as if the plane was nothing more than an illusion. Yet Yiyi felt the gravitational pull and a tremor as the spaceship came in contact with the plane, which meant that it could not be an illusion. Big-tooth had obviously been here before, as he opened the cabin door and jumped out without hesitation. Yiyi’s heart churned when he saw Big-tooth simultaneously open both doors on either end of the air lock cabin. However, he did not hear the swoosh of air gushing out from within. As Big-tooth stepped outside, Yiyi could even smell the fresh air as he stood in the pocket and felt the cold breeze brushing past his face….This was a kind of wondrous technology that neither man nor dinosaur could comprehend. Its gentleness and effortlessness astounded Yiyi. This astonishment pierced even deeper into the soul than when humans saw the Devourers for the first time. Yiyi looked up; the sphere was hovering above them and, behind it, the galaxy glittered and shone.

  “Ambassador, what little offering have you brought me this time?” inquired the god. He spoke in Devourish, his voice low, as if echoing from the depths of an abyss in the infinite distance, and for the first time, Yiyi felt that even this coarse dinosaur language could sound pleasant to the ear.

  Big-tooth dug his claw into his pocket and grabbed Yiyi, then put him down onto the plane. Yiyi felt its elasticity with his foot. Big-tooth began, “My venerable god, we know that you like to collect little creatures from various universes, and I have brought you this interesting little specimen, a human from the Earth.”

  “I only care for perfect little creatures. Why have you brought me this filthy little bug?” asked the god. The glows of the sphere and plane flickered twice, a probable sign of disgust.

  “You know this species of bug?” Big-tooth raised his head in astonishment.

&nb
sp; “I’ve heard travellers from this spiral arm mention them, but I do not know much about them. In these bugs’ relatively short evolutionary history, the travellers have often visited Earth, and they were all disgusted by the bugs’ dirty thoughts, low behaviours, and the chaos and filth in the course of their history. Hence, till the Earth’s destruction, no one had bothered to establish contact with them….Throw it away at once!”

  Big-tooth grabbed Yiyi and turned his huge head around to see where he could dump him. “The rubbish incinerator is behind you,” the god’s voice interjected. Big-tooth turned and saw a small hole suddenly appear on the plane, with eerie bluish lights flickering from within….

  “Don’t you say that! Humans have created great civilizations!” Yiyi shouted in Devourish at the top of his lungs, his face turning blue.

  The white radiance of the sphere and plane again flickered twice and the god’s voice sounded in a sneer, “Civilization? Ambassador, tell this bug the meaning of civilization.”

  Big-tooth raised Yiyi to eye level, and held him so close that Yiyi could even hear the gurgling sound of his eyeballs turning in their sockets. “Bug, the uniform measurement of how civilized a race is in this universe is the space dimension that it has entered. Only those that have entered the sixth dimension or above can be regarded as having met with the basic criteria for joining the circle of civilized races. The race of our venerable god already possesses the ability to enter the eleventh dimension. The Devourer Empire is able to, on a small scale limited to laboratory trials, enter the fourth dimension, which means that we can only be regarded as a primitive tribe, while your race is nothing more than weed or moss to the gods.”

  “Throw him away this minute! Such filth!” the god pressed, already out of patience.

  Big-tooth ended his speech and marched towards the incinerator holding Yiyi. Yiyi struggled with all his might and several sheets of white paper fell from his clothes. As the sheets floated in the air, a thin ray of light shot out from the sphere, hitting one of them, suspending it in midair, and scanning it in a flash.

  “Wait! What’re these?”

  Holding Yiyi suspended right above the incinerator, Big-tooth turned towards the sphere.

  “Those…are my students’ homework!” Yiyi answered, struggling hard inside the dinosaur’s claw.

  “Those square symbols are very interesting, and so are the little matrixes they create,” the god muttered, sending out rays and swiftly scanning the other sheets of paper that had already landed on the plane.

  “Those are Chinese…Chinese characters. These are classical poems written in Chinese characters!”

  “Poems?” the god asked in amazement, and withdrew the rays of light. “Ambassador, you are no doubt familiar to some degree with this bug script?”

  “Of course, my venerable god. I lived in their world for a long time before the Earth was consumed by the Devourer Empire.” Big-tooth placed Yiyi on the plane near the edge of the incinerator, and bending down, picked up one of the sheets. Raising it to his eyes, he with great difficulty tried to make out the words. “It roughly means—”

  “Don’t bother, you will only misinterpret it.” Yiyi stopped Big-tooth with a wave of his hand.

  “Why?” the god asked with a good deal of interest.

  “Because it is an art that can only be expressed in classical Chinese. Even when translated into another human language, it still loses the better part of its meaning and beauty, and is transformed into something quite different.”

  “Ambassador, do you have this language’s database in your computer? And all knowledge relevant to the Earth’s history too? Fine, then transmit them to me. Use the channel we established during our previous interview.”

  Big-tooth hurried back to the spaceship, mumbling to himself as he fumbled with the computer aboard. “The classical Chinese part is missing and will have to be downloaded from the empire’s network; there might be delays.” Yiyi could see through the open cabin door the changing colours of the computer screen reflected in the dinosaur’s giant eyeballs. When Big-tooth exited the spaceship, the god could already read the classical poem aloud in perfect Chinese.

  “Behind a mountain the day fades, the Yellow River uniting with the ocean. Scenes a thousand miles away, one may survey from a higher floor.”

  “You are a very fast learner!” Yiyi exclaimed in amazement.

  The god took no notice of him, and remained silent.

  Big-tooth explained, “It means a star has fallen behind a mountain on a planet, and a river called the Yellow River flowed towards an ocean. You see, both river and ocean are formed by compounds of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. And if someone wants to see further away, he should climb higher on a building.”

  The god stayed silent.

  “My venerable god, you have, not that long ago, honoured the Devourer Empire with your presence; the scenery there is very similar to the bug’s world portrayed in this poem. There are also rivers and mountains and oceans, so—”

  “So I do know the meaning,” the god said, and the sphere suddenly moved, stopping right above Big-tooth’s head. Yiyi thought that it was like a giant eye without a pupil, glaring fixedly at Big-tooth. “But do you not feel anything at all?”

  Big-tooth shook his head in bewilderment.

  “I mean, things that are hidden within the apparent meanings of this simple matrix of symbols?”

  Big-tooth became more puzzled still, and so the god recited another poem.

  “I see none that have come before, nor any who might follow. Reflecting on a world so ancient and vast, my tears fall in lonely sorrow.”

  Big-tooth at once eagerly offered an explanation. “This poem means: Looking forward, one cannot see the bugs that lived long ago on this planet; looking back, one cannot see the bugs that will later live on this planet. So one feels the vastness of time and space, and so one cries.”

  Still perfect silence.

  “Um, crying is how the bugs of the Earth express sorrow. When this happens, their visual sense organs—”

  “Do you still not feel anything?” the god interrupted, the sphere lowering a little more, until it almost touched Big-tooth’s nose.

  This time, Big-tooth shook his head with great firmness and said, “My venerable god, I believe there is nothing more to it, just a simple short poem.”

  The god recited a few more poems, all short and simple, all on transcendent themes, including poems like Li Bai’s “Going down to Jiangling,” “Night Thoughts,” and “Seeing Meng Haoran Off from Yellow Crane Tower as He Took His Departure for Guangling,” Liu Zongyuan’s “River Snow,” Cui Hao’s “Yellow Crane Tower,” and Meng Haoran’s “Spring Dawn.”

  Big-tooth said, “There are quite a number of long epics in the Devourer Empire, some are millions of lines in length. My venerable god, I will gladly present them to you. The bugs’ poetry is, by comparison, so short and simple, much like their technology….”

  The sphere suddenly flew away from Big-tooth’s head, floating in random curves in midair. “Ambassador, I believe that your greatest wish is for me to answer one question: why is the Devourer Empire still struggling in the atomic age after its eighty million years of existence? I now have the answer.”

  Big-tooth looked at the sphere with the keenest interest. “My venerable god! The answer is everything to us! Please…”

  “My venerable god”—Yiyi raised his hand and spoke out loud—“I too have a question, if I may?”

  Big-tooth glared angrily at Yiyi, looking as though he would like to swallow him whole. But the god agreed: “I still despise the bugs of Earth, but those little matrixes have earned you the right.”

  “Does art exist everywhere in the universe?”

  The sphere trembled a little in midair, as if nodding. “Yes, I myself am a collector and researcher of the art of the universe. I travel between nebulas and have made contact with various art forms of numerous civilizations. Most are complicated and obscure. Bu
t this, with such few symbols, making up such tiny matrixes yet expressing such complex layers and subdivisions of feelings, all composed under such strict, almost brutal, restrictions of style, metre, and rhyme, is, I admit, something I had never seen before….Ambassador, you can now dispose of the bug.”

  Big-tooth again grabbed Yiyi. “Yes, throw it away, my venerable god. There is enough data stored on the Devourer Empire Central Network on human culture, and you now have all these stored in your memory. This bug, on the other hand, probably only knows a few simple poems.” With that, he again marched towards the incinerator with Yiyi in his claw. “And those papers too,” the god added. Bigtooth at once turned back and began collecting the sheets of paper with his free claw. Yiyi started to scream wildly from within Big-tooth’s grasp, “God, please keep those sheets of paper as relics of human classical poetry! You have collected an unsurpassable art form; transmit it to other parts of the universe.”

  “Wait.” The god again stopped Big-tooth, even as Yiyi was dangling above the incinerator; he could feel the heat of the blue flames below him. The sphere floated near, stopped, and hovered just a few centimetres away from his forehead. He now was under the intense gaze of the gigantic pupil-less eye just as Big-tooth had been.

  “Unsurpassable?”

  “Ha-ha-ha…” Big-tooth held Yiyi up and laughed, “This poor little bug dares to say this in front of this mighty god! Hilarious! What do humans have left? You’ve lost everything on Earth, and have forgotten most of your scientific knowledge—the only thing you might have taken away. Once at the dinner table, I asked a human this question before I ate him: ‘What was the atomic bomb used by humans in the Earth Defence War made of?’ And he answered, ‘Atoms’!”

  “Ha-ha-ha-ha…” The god was amused by Big-tooth, and the sphere shook so much that it turned into an ovoid. “There could not be a more correct answer, ha-ha-ha…”