by Liu Cixin
And I soon had a secret of my own.
* * *
It was two in the morning one night in late autumn. I was at my desk working, and when I looked up, the amethyst vase on the desk caught my eye. It was a lovely wedding gift from Ding Yi, but the flowers that had been placed in it had dried up at some point. I took them out and tossed them into the wastebasket and thought, with a bitter smile, Life’s responsibilities keep getting heavier. I don’t know when I’ll find the time to put fresh flowers in the vase.
Then I leaned back in my chair, shut my eyes, and sat thinking about absolutely nothing. Late every night I would sit for a while at the stillest moment of the day, when it seemed like I was the only one awake in the whole world.
My nose caught a hint of freshness.
It was an aroma absent any sweetness: comforting, slightly bitter, bringing to mind the first sunlight on green grass after a storm has passed, the last wisp of cloud in a clear blue sky, the fleeting chime in a deep mountain valley … only more ethereal this time. By the time I noticed its existence, it had already disappeared, only to reappear once I turned my attention away from my nose.
Do you like this perfume?
Oh … don’t they stop you from wearing perfume in the army?
Sometimes it’s allowed.
“Is it you?” I asked softly, without opening my eyes.
There was no answer.
“I know it’s you,” I said, eyes still closed.
But there was still no answer, only a great stillness.
I opened my eyes with a jerk, and there, in the amethyst vase on the desk, was a blue rose. But no sooner had I seen it than it vanished, leaving the vase empty.
Every detail of the rose had been imprinted on my mind, so full of life, with such a cold aura.
I closed my eyes and opened them again, but the rose did not reappear. But I knew she was there, sitting in the amethyst vase.
“Who are you calling?” my wife asked sleepily, as she sat up in bed.
“It’s nothing. Go back to sleep,” I said gently. I got up and picked up the vase, then carefully filled it halfway with clean water and set it back on the table. Then I sat in front of it until morning.
My wife saw there was water in the vase and brought back a bouquet of flowers on her way home from work. I stopped her as she was about to put it in the vase.
“Don’t. There’s a flower in there.”
She looked at me strangely.
“It’s a blue rose.”
“Oh, the most expensive kind,” she said, laughing, clearly thinking I was joking. Then she reached out to put her flowers in again.
I grabbed the vase from her and returned it gently to the desk, then snatched the flowers out of her hands and tossed them in the wastebasket. “I said there’s a flower in there. What’s wrong with you?”
She stared at me for a moment, then said, “I know you’ve got a place of your own deep in your heart. I have one, too. It’s been so many years, after all.… You can keep it, but you shouldn’t bring it into our lives!”
“There really is a flower in that vase. A blue rose,” I stammered, in a much softer voice.
My wife ran out, covering her tears with her hand.
And so the invisible rose in the amethyst vase caused a fracture between Dai Lin and me.
“You’ve got to tell me what imaginary person put that imaginary rose in the vase, or I’m not going to be able to take it!” my wife said many times.
“It’s not imaginary. There really is a rose in the vase. A blue one,” I answered every time.
Eventually, when the rift between us was almost beyond being patched over, it was our son who saved our marriage. Early one morning, he woke up, yawned, and said, “Mom, that amethyst vase on the writing desk has a rose in it, a blue one. It’s pretty! But it’s gone as soon as you look at it.”
My wife looked at me in alarm. The first time we had argued about it, he hadn’t been born yet, and our later quarrels hadn’t been in front of him, so he couldn’t have known about the blue rose.
A few days later, my wife fell asleep at the desk while writing a paper late at night. When she awoke, she roused me with a nudge, and there was fear in her eyes. “I woke up just now and I smelled … the scent of a rose. It came from that vase! But when I tried to smell it more closely, it disappeared. I mean it. There’s no mistake. It really was a rose scent. I’m not lying to you!”
“I know you’re not lying. There really is a rose there. A blue rose,” I said.
From then on, my wife never brought up the matter again, just left the vase there. Sometimes she would carefully wipe it, keeping it upright, as if she was afraid the rose inside would fall out. And on several occasions, she filled it with distilled water.
I never saw the blue rose again, but it was enough to know it was there. Sometimes in the still of the night I would move the amethyst vase to the window, then stand with my back to it. On these occasions, I could always smell that ethereal aroma, and I knew the rose was there. With my heart’s eye I could clearly see every detail, I could caress every petal, I could watch it sway slightly in the night breeze from the window.…
It was a flower I could only see with my heart.
But I still held out the hope of getting another glimpse of that blue rose in my lifetime. Ding Yi said that, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, death is the process of transitioning from a strong observer to a weak observer, and then to a non-observer. When I become a weak observer, the rose’s probability cloud will collapse to a destroyed state more slowly, giving me the hope of seeing it again.
When I come to death’s door and open my eyes for the final time, all of my intellect and memories will be lost into the abyss of the past, and I will return to the pure feeling and fantasies of childhood. At that moment, I’m sure the quantum rose will smile at me.
AFTERWORD
It was a stormy night. When blue arcs of electricity flashed, you could perceive individual raindrops outside the window for the briefest instant. The thunder and lightning had only grown more intense since the downpour began that evening. After one dazzling burst, an object materialized beneath a tree and drifted ghostlike through the air, illuminating the surrounding rain with its orange glow. And as it floated, it seemed to play the sound of a xun. Less than twenty seconds later, it disappeared.…
This is no science fiction story, but my eyewitness account of a thunderstorm during the summer of 1982 in the city of Handan, Hebei province, at the southern end of Zhonghua Road, which was remote in those days. After that, you were into farmland. Over the course of the next two decades I found myself accumulating all sorts of fanciful ideas about ball lightning.
That same year, I read two books by the British writer Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 and Rendezvous with Rama. The translation of those two books into Chinese marked the introduction of modern western science fiction to mainland China; previously, the country’s exposure to western science fiction had been limited to the work of Verne and Wells.
In these two events I was fortunate, since only about one person in a hundred claims to have seen ball lightning (this figure comes from a paper published in a domestic meteorology journal, but I suspect it is too high), while the number of people in China who have read those two books is probably fewer than one in a thousand. Those books set the foundation for my concept of science fiction and were a catalyst for the later Three-Body trilogy; however, their influence did not extend to Ball Lightning. When I wrote this novel in 2003, I already had a mostly complete Three-Body series, but I felt that Chinese readers would respond more readily to a novel like Ball Lightning at that time.
China’s science fiction was born more than a century ago, at the close of the Qing Dynasty, but for most of its history it developed in relative isolation, and for a long period was entirely cut off from modern western science fiction. The field’s independent development gave the work of that period a distinct style, a difference that is clearly evident from
a comparison of Ball Lightning and the Three-Body series.
Chinese science fiction during that closed-off period was dominated by the invention story, a form that was preoccupied with the description of a futuristic technological device and speculation on its immediate positive effects, but which barely touched the invention’s deeper social implications, much less the tremendous ways such technology would transform society. And so it is with Ball Lightning: the emergence of such a powerful technological force is bound to have huge, far-reaching effects on human society—in politics, economics, and even in culture. The book addresses none of this.
But this similarity to early-period Chinese science fiction is only skin-deep; at its heart, this is not a Chinese-style story. The ball lightning described in the book may resemble that sort of futuristic device, but the flights of fancy it gives rise to are nowhere to be found in the science fiction of that period. And while the book is set in a China that is altogether real, those little balls of lightning seem like they’re trying to transcend that reality, like how a man’s tie, within the confines of its narrow dimensions, has the freedom to indulge in a riot of colors and patterns unbounded by the rigid formula of a business suit.
In a way, Ball Lightning is a prequel to the Three-Body series, since it concludes with the first appearance of the aliens that would eventually threaten humanity and features a version of Ding Yi, who also appears in later books. At the end of the novel, when humanity detects the presence of a mysterious, omnipresent observer that causes ball lightning’s quantum state to collapse, the narrator, Dr. Chen, remarks, “If you are really able to prove that a super-observer is watching our world, then human activity becomes very indiscreet.… You could say human society is in a quantum state, and a super-observer will force it to collapse to a state of reason again.” However, society’s reaction is the exact opposite of what Chen predicts, because the super-observer is far more sinister than even humanity: unlike ball lightning, which coexists with the human world, the alien super-observer will overturn human society and push Earth civilization to the brink of extinction.
* * *
Eight years after this book’s first publication, during a thunderstorm in the city of Lanzhou in July 2012, a research team from Northwest Normal University conducted spectral and video observations of a ball of lightning five meters in diameter that appeared unexpectedly. The team’s recording, from the initial appearance of the phenomenon until it vanished, marked the first scientific observation of ball lightning in the wild.
In fact, ball lightning is not an especially rare phenomenon, and the progress of research in recent years suggests that its mystery is close to being solved. When that day comes, one thing is certain: the scientific explanation for ball lightning will be nothing like what’s described in this book. Science fiction writers may consider many angles on a subject, but they always choose to write about the least likely. Of the myriad possible predictions of the behavior of cosmic civilization, the Three-Body series selected the darkest, most disastrous one. So too with this novel, which describes what may be the most outlandish of possibilities, but also the most interesting and romantic. It is purely a creation of the imagination: curved space filled with lightning energy, an incorporeal bubble, an electron the size of a soccer ball. The world of the novel is the gray world of reality—the familiar gray sky and clouds, gray landscape and sea, gray people and life—but within that gray, mundane world something small and surreal drifts by unnoticed, like a speck of dust tumbling out of a dream, suggesting the vast mysteries of the cosmos, the possibility of a world entirely unlike our own.
One last thing: It’s the seemingly unlikeliest of possibilities in science fiction stories that tend to become reality, so in the end, who knows?
TOR BOOKS BY CIXIN LIU
The Three-Body Problem
The Dark Forest
Death’s End
Ball Lightning
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CIXIN LIU is a prolific and popular science fiction writer in the People’s Republic of China. Liu is a winner of the Hugo and Locus Awards, as well as a multiple winner of the Galaxy Award (the Chinese Hugo) and the Xingyun Award (the Chinese Nebula). He lives with his family in Yangquan, Shanxi. You can sign up for email updates here.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
JOEL MARTINSEN is the translator of The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu and (with Alice Xin Liu) of The Problem with Me, a collection of essays by Han Han. His translations of short fiction have appeared in Pathlight, Chutzpah!, and Words Without Borders. He lives in Bejing. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prelude
Part One
College
Strange Phenomena I
Ball Lightning
Lin Yun I
Zhang Bin
Strange Phenomena II
A Bolt from the Blue
Seti@home
Siberia
Part Two
Lighthouse Inspiration
General Lin Feng
Attack Bees
Skynet
Ball Lightning
Thunderballs
Ding Yi
Empty Bubbles
Macro-Electrons
Weapons
Observers
Burnt Chips
Strange Phenomena III
The Nuclear Power Plant
Strange Phenomena IV
Part Three
Tornadoes
Zhufeng
Chip Destruction
Ambush at Sea
Strings
The Special Leading Group
Macro-Fusion
Lin Yun II
Victory
The Quantum Rose
Afterword
Tor Books by Cixin Liu
About the Author and Translator
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BALL LIGHTNING
Copyright © 2005 by 刘慈欣 (Liu Cixin)
English translation © 2018 by China Educational Publications Import & Export Corp., Ltd.
Translation by Joel Martinsen
Originally published as 球状闪电 in 2005 by Sichuan Science & Technology Press in Chengdu, China.
All rights reserved.
The first three chapters of this translation appeared in the online magazine Words Without Borders in a slightly different form in 2009.
Cover art by Stephan Martiniere
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-9407-1 (hardcover)
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eISBN 9780765394088
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First Edition: August 2018
* A respectful form of address for an elder.
* An affectionate form of address for someone younger.
* Plans for th
e Sanmenxia Dam, a gravity dam on the Yellow River in Henan Province near the border with Shanxi Province, were drawn up in the mid-1950s with the help of Soviet engineers. Construction lasted from 1957 to 1960, and the reservoir began to silt up immediately afterward, causing flooding on the Wei River that required decades of renovation work to control.
* George Gamow (1904–1968), theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He defected in 1933 and ended up in the United States.
† “Main Intelligence Directorate,” the foreign military intelligence agency under the General Staff of the Soviet Army.
* A line from the Su Shi poem, “Inscribed on the Wall of Xilin Temple”: “One cannot know the true face of Lushan while standing among its peaks.”
* The Diaoyutai State Guesthouse is a historic hotel located in Beijing that hosts visiting dignitaries.
* This elite university was known as Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics until 2002.
* The Analects of Confucius, Chapter 15: Wei Ling Gong, translation by James Legge.
* Only combatants wearing the uniform of their country enjoy the rights of captured soldiers under the Geneva Convention.
* Zhenbao Island, also known as Damanskii Island, was the site of a border clash in March 1969 during the seven-month undeclared conflict that marked the height of the Sino-Soviet Split.
