To Hold Up the Sky Read online

  He had spent his own childhood at the school where he now taught. His father and mother had died early, and the school had been his home. His teacher had raised him as a son, and while his childhood might have been poor, it was not lacking in love. When school had gone on winter break one year, his teacher decided to take him home for the season.

  His teacher’s home was far away, and snow had lain deep on the mountain road. It was the middle of the night by the time they laid eyes on the lights of his teacher’s village. Not far behind them, they saw four glints of green, the eyes of two wolves. There were many wolves in the mountains back then, and you could find piles of wolf shit all around the school. Once, as a prank, he had taken a gray-white pile of the stuff, lit it on fire, and thrown it into the classroom, which filled with acrid smoke, choking his classmates. His teacher was furious.

  The two wolves in the forest had slowly approached them. While his teacher had snapped a thick branch off a tree and brandished it in the wolves’ path, yelling loudly, he had run off toward the village, scared out of his wits, running with all his might. He worried the wolves would go around his teacher and come after him; he worried he would run into another wolf on his way. He ran heaving into the village. Several men assembled with hunting rifles, and he went back with them to look for his teacher. They found him lying in a pool of blood and slush, half of his leg and most of his arm bitten off. His teacher took his final breath on the way to the town hospital, and he saw his teacher’s eyes in a ray of torchlight. A large chunk of his cheek had been bitten off and he was unable to speak, but his eyes expressed an urgent plea, one that he’d understood and remembered.

  After he graduated from middle school, he had turned down a promising opportunity to work in the town’s municipal government. Instead, despite having no family or friends there, he returned directly to the mountain village, to the village primary school that his teacher had pleaded with him to save. By the time he returned, the school was abandoned, having had no teacher for several years.

  Not long before that, the Board of Education had begun enforcing a policy that replaced community teachers with state-supported teachers. Some community teachers were able to obtain state support by taking a test. He passed that test and got his teaching certificate, and when he found out he was a licensed, state-supported teacher, he was happy, but that was the extent of his reaction. Other members of his cohort had been elated. But he didn’t care whether he was a community teacher or a state-supported teacher; he only cared about the classes of children who would graduate from his primary school and go out into the world. Regardless of whether they left the mountains or stayed, their lives would be different in some way from the lives of children who had never gone to school.

  Those mountains were one of the most impoverished areas in the country. But worse than the poverty was the apathy of the people there toward their condition. He remembered how, many years ago, when agricultural output quotas were set for each household, the village had divided and distributed its fields, and then its possessions. The village had one tractor, and the villagers couldn’t come to a consensus on how to pay for its fuel or allot time to use it. The only solution everyone could accept was to divide the tractor itself. They literally disassembled it—you get a wheel, he gets an axle. And two months ago, a factory had sent poverty relief in the form of a submersible pump, and, electricity being expensive, they also sent a diesel generator along with plenty of fuel to operate it. They had barely left the village before the villagers sold the machines, the pump and the generator together, for just two hundred and fifty yuan. Everyone ate two good meals, more than in most years.

  Another time, a leather manufacturer had bought some land in the village on which to build a tannery—who knew how it got sold to them in the first place. Once the tannery was up, lye and niter flowed into the river and seeped into the well water. The people who drank it broke out in red boils all over their bodies—but no one cared! They were just happy the land sold for a good price. It was a village of old, hopeless bachelors who spent all day gambling and drinking, never planting. They had it figured out—as long as they stayed poor, the county would receive small amounts of poverty relief every year, more than they could make plowing their tiny fields of rocks and dust. They had come to accept this sort of life because they knew nothing else. The village’s fruitless ground and poison water were dispiriting, but what could truly make you lose hope was the dull eyes of the villagers.

  He had reflected on all these things as he had walked from the doctor’s office through the province’s main city. His diagnosis still didn’t feel real; the doctor’s words felt far away. This walking had tired him, though, so he sat down next to the sidewalk. In front of him was a large, glamorous restaurant. Its façade was a single, transparent window, through which the restaurant’s chandeliers cast their light onto the street. The restaurant looked like a huge aquarium, and the customers inside, in their fancy clothes, looked like a school of colorful fish. A heavyset man sat at a table by the window. His hair and face were slicked with oil, making him look like a painted wax sculpture. Two tall young women sat next to him, one on each side. The man turned and said something to one of the women, which made her burst out in laughter, and he started laughing, too. Who knew women could get so tall, he thought. Xiuxiu would have only come up to their waists. He sighed—he was thinking about Xiuxiu again.

  Xiuxiu had been the only girl in the village who hadn’t married out of the mountains. Maybe she was afraid of the outside world because she, like most of the villagers, had never left. Maybe she had a different reason. Either way, the two of them had spent more than two years together, and it had seemed things might work out—her family had asked for a reasonable birth-pain price,* only fifteen hundred yuan. But soon, some villagers who had left to find work came back with a bit of money. One of them, about the same age as him, was a clever guy, though illiterate. He had left for the city, where he’d gone door-to-door, cleaning people’s kitchen exhaust hoods, and in a year he had made a bundle.

  This cleaner had spent a month in the village two years ago, and Xiuxiu had somehow wound up with him. Her family turned a blind eye. The rough walls of her family’s home were covered in melon seeds and scratched tallies of her father’s debts over the years. Xiuxiu hadn’t gone to school, but she had an affinity for people who could read. He knew that was the main reason she had initially been attracted to him. But the village boy gave her bottles of perfume, gold-plated necklaces, and eventually won her over.

  “Being able to read won’t put food on the table,” she told him. He knew it could, but with his job, it wasn’t good food, especially compared to what the cleaner could give her. So, he’d had no response. Xiuxiu had walked out the door and left only the smell of her perfume, which made him scrunch up his nose.

  A year after marrying the village boy, Xiuxiu died in childbirth. He still remembered the midwife holding her rusty forceps over a flame for a second before poking them inside her. Xiuxiu’s blood filled the copper basin beneath her. She died on the way to the town hospital. The village boy had spent thirty thousand yuan on the wedding, and it had been a spectacle like nothing the village had seen. Why wasn’t he willing to part with a little more money so Xiuxiu could give birth in the hospital? He had asked around about the cost of delivering a child in the hospital. It was only two or three hundred yuan. But the village had its ways, and no villager had ever gone to the hospital to give birth. No one blamed the boy. They threw up their hands and said it was her fate. He heard later that compared to the cleaner’s mother, Xiuxiu had been lucky. His mother had gone into obstructed labor. When the cleaner’s father heard from the midwife that the child was a boy, he’d chosen to save the child. His mother was placed on the back of a donkey and driven around in circles, in order to spin the baby out. People who were there said that there was a ring of her blood in the dust.

  The teacher took a deep breath and felt the ignorance and despair of the village sit
ting heavily on his chest. It was an ever-present sensation, and even here in the city he felt it just as strongly.

  There was still hope for the children, he told himself, even as they sat in the freezing classroom in the winter and looked at the blackboard by candlelight. He was the candle. For as long as he could, with as much brightness as he could muster, he would burn, body and soul, for those children.

  Eventually, he had risen from the city sidewalk and continued walking for a while, before stepping into a bookstore. The city was a good place—it even had bookstores that were open at night. There he spent all the money he had brought on books for the school’s tiny library, saving for himself only enough to cover the fare home. In the middle of the night, clutching two heavy bundles of books, he had boarded the train.

  * * *

  In the center of the Milky Way, fifty thousand light-years from Earth, an interstellar war that had lasted for twenty thousand years was nearing its resolution.

  A square-shaped, starless region was visible there, as distinctly as if it had been cut from the background of shining stars with a pair of scissors. Its sides were six thousand miles long, and its interior was blacker even than the blackness of space—a void within a void. Several objects began to emerge from within the square. They were of various shapes, but each was as large as Earth’s moon, and their color was a dazzling silver. As more appeared, they took on a regular, cube-shaped formation. The cube of objects continued to emerge from the square, a mosaic set into the eternal wall of the universe itself, whose base was the complete, velvet blackness of the square and whose tiles were the luminescent silver objects. They were like a cosmic symphony given physical form. Slowly, the black square dissolved back into the stars, leaving only the cube-shaped array of silver objects floating ominously.

  The interstellar fleet of the Galactic Federation of Carbon-Based Life had completed the first space-time warp of its journey.

  The High Archon of the Carbon Federation looked out from the fleet’s flagship onto a metallic, silver landscape. An intricate network of paths snaked across the land like circuits etched into an infinitely wide, silver circuit board. Teardrop-shaped craft appeared occasionally on the surface of the land; they shot at blinding speed along the paths, and after a few seconds, noiselessly disappeared into ports that suddenly opened in the surface to receive them. Cosmic dust had clung to the fleet during its warp travel; it formed clouds over the landscape that glowed faintly red as they ionized.

  The High Archon was known for his cool demeanor. The endlessly tranquil, azure smart field that usually surrounded him was like a symbol of his personality. At this moment, however, traces of yellow light emerged from his smart field, as they did from the fields of the people around him.

  “It’s finally over.” The High Archon’s smart field vibrated, transmitting his message to the senator and the fleet commander, who stood on either side of him.

  “Yes, it’s over. This war went on too long—so long that we have forgotten its beginning,” the senator replied.

  The fleet began to cruise at sub-light speed. The ships’ sub-light engines engaged simultaneously, and thousands of blue suns suddenly appeared around the flagship. The silver land below them reflected the engines’ lights like an edgeless, infinite mirror, and each blue sun was doubled in the reflection.

  The beginning of the war was a distant, ancient memory, and though it seemed to have been burned away in the fighting, no one had truly forgotten it. It was a memory that had passed through hundreds of generations, but to the trillion citizens of the Carbon Federation, it was still vivid, engraved into their hearts and minds.

  Twenty thousand years earlier, the Silicon-Based Empire had launched a full-scale attack against the Carbon Federation from the periphery of the galaxy. The Empire’s five million warships leapt from star to star along the ten-thousand-light-year-long battlefront. Each ship first drew power from its star to open a wormhole through space-time, then traveled through the wormhole to another star, which it likewise harnessed to create another wormhole and continue its travel.

  Opening a wormhole depleted a large amount of a star’s energy and shifted its light toward the red end of the spectrum. After the ship had jumped, the star’s light would gradually return to its original state. The collective effect of millions of ships traveling in this way was terrifying. A band of red light ten thousand light-years long appeared at the edge of the galaxy and began moving toward its center, invisible to light-speed observations but clearly visible on hyperspace monitors. The band, created by the red-shifted light of stars, rushed toward the borders of Carbon Federation space, a tide of blood ten thousand light-years across.

  The first Carbon Federation planet to be hit by the vanguard of the Silicon Empire forces was Greensea. It was a beautiful planet that orbited a pair of binary stars. Its surface was covered completely by ocean, on which floated great forests of soft, long, vine-like plants. These forests were home to the temperate, beautiful inhabitants of Greensea, who, swimming lithely among the plants with their crystal-clear bodies, had created an Edenic civilization. Tens of thousands of harsh beams of light suddenly pierced the sky of the planet—the lasers of the Silicon Empire fleet—and began evaporating the ocean. In a short time, Greensea’s surface became a boiling cauldron, and all life on the planet, including its five billion inhabitants, died in agony in the boiling water. The ocean was completely evaporated in the end, and Greensea, which had once been so beautiful, was left a hellish, gray planet, shrouded in thick steam.

  There was virtually nowhere in the galaxy untouched by the war. It was a ruinous fight for survival between carbon-based and silicon-based civilization. Yet neither side had expected the war to last twenty thousand galactic years!

  Except for historians, no one remembers how many battles were waged between forces of a million or more ships. The largest-scale battle was the Battle of the Second Arm, which took place in the second spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. In total, more than ten million warships from both fleets participated as combatants. Historical records tell that more than two thousand stars went supernova in the huge battle zone, like fireworks in the black void. They turned the whole spiral arm into an ocean of super-strong radiation, with groups of black holes floating like ghosts in its midst.

  By the end of the battle, both sides had lost nearly their entire fleets. Fifteen thousand years had elapsed, and the story of the battle sounded like an ancient myth, except for the fact that the battle zone itself still existed. Ships rarely entered the zone. It was the most terrifying region of the galaxy, and not just because of the radiation and black holes.

  During the battle, squadrons of ships from both unthinkably huge fleets made short-distance space-time jumps as a tactical maneuver. It was thought that in dogfights, some interstellar fighters made almost incredible jumps of a few miles at most! These jumps left space-time in the battle zone riddled with holes, more like rags than fabric. Any ship unfortunate enough to stray into the region risked hitting a patch of distorted space. A patch like that could twist a ship into a long, thin, metal pole, or press it into a sheet hundreds of millions of square miles in area and a few atoms thick, which the gale of radiation would immediately shred to pieces. More often, a ship that hit a patch of distorted space-time would regress into the pieces of steel it was made of, or immediately age into a broken husk, everything inside the ship decaying into ancient dust. Anyone aboard would revert in an instant to an embryonic state, or collapse into a pile of bones.…

  The war’s decisive battle was not a myth. It took place a year ago. The Silicon Empire assembled its remaining forces, a fleet of 1.5 million warships, in the desolate space between the galaxy’s first and second spiral arms. They set up an antimatter cloud barrier around their location, with a radius of one thousand light-years.

  The first Carbon Federation squadron to attack jumped directly to the edge of the cloud and entered it. The cloud was very thin, but it was lethal against warships, and
it turned those ships into brilliant fireballs. Dragging long tails of flame from their hulls, the ships bravely continued to advance on their target, streaks of fluorescence in their wakes. An array of thirty thousand or more shooting stars, rushing bravely forward—it was the most magnificent, tragic image from the Carbon-Silicon War.

  But these shooting stars thinned out as they passed through the antimatter cloud, and at a location very close to the battle array of the Silicon Empire fleet, they disappeared. They had sacrificed themselves to open a tunnel through the cloud for the rest of the attack fleet. In the battle, the last fleet of the Silicon Empire was driven back to the most desolate region in the Milky Way: the tip of the first spiral arm.

  Now, the Carbon Federation fleet was about to complete its final mission: constructing a five-hundred-light-year-wide isolation belt in the middle of the spiral arm. They would destroy most of the stars in the belt to prevent the Silicon Empire from making interstellar jumps. Interstellar jumps were the only way in the Milky Way system for large battleships to carry out fast, long-range attacks, and the greatest distance a ship could jump was two hundred light-years. Once the belt was built, the heavy warships of the Silicon Empire would have to cross five hundred light-years of space at sub-light speeds to get to the central region of the galaxy. In effect, the Silicon Empire would be imprisoned at the tip of the first spiral arm, unable to pose any serious threat to carbon-based civilization in the center of the galaxy.

  The senator used his vibrating smart field to speak to the High Archon. “The will of the Senate is as follows: We maintain our strong recommendation to conduct a life-level protective screening in the belt before commencing stellar destruction.”

  “I understand the Senate’s caution,” said the High Archon. “In this long war, the blood of all forms of life has flowed, enough to fill the oceans of thousands of planets. Now that the war has ended, the most pressing concern for the galaxy is to reestablish respect for life—all forms of life, not only carbon-based life, but silicon-based life, as well. The Federation stopped short of completely annihilating silicon-based civilization on the basis of this ideal. Yet the Silicon Empire has no such qualms. They have an instinctual love for warfare and conquest. It has always been so, even before the Carbon-Silicon War. Now, these inclinations are embedded in each of their genes and in each line of their code. They are the ultimate goals of the Empire. Silicon-based life is far superior to us at storing and processing information. Even here, at the tip of the first spiral arm, their civilization will recover and develop quickly. It is therefore imperative that we construct a sufficiently wide isolation belt between the Federation and the Empire. Given the circumstances, a life scan on each of the hundred million stars in the belt is unrealistic. The first spiral arm may be the most barren region of the galaxy, but there are likely enough stars with inhabited planets to achieve leap density. Medium warships could use them to cross the belt, and just one Silicon Empire medium warship could cause immense damage if it managed to enter Federation space. We cannot conduct a life-level protective screening for each planet, only civilization-level. We must sacrifice the primitive life-forms in the belt, in order to save the advanced and primitive life-forms in the rest of the galaxy. I have explained this to the Senate.”