To Hold Up the Sky Read online

  “The Senate recognizes this imperative, sir. You have explained it, as has the Federal Defense Committee. The Senate’s statement is a recommendation, not a piece of legislation. However, stars in the belt with life-forms that have reached 3C-civilization status and above must be protected.”

  “Rest assured,” said the High Archon, his smart field flashing a determined red. “We will be extremely thorough in conducting civilization tests for each planetary system in the isolation belt!”

  For the first time, the fleet commander’s smart field emitted a message. “I think you are worried over nothing. The first spiral arm is the most barren wasteland in the galaxy. There won’t be any 3Cs or above.”

  “I hope you are right,” said the High Archon and the senator simultaneously. Their smart fields vibrated in resonance and sent a solitary ripple of plasma into the sky above the metallic land below.

  The fleet began its second space-time leap, traveling at near-infinite speed toward the first spiral arm of the galaxy.

  * * *

  It was late at night. The children had gathered by candlelight at the foot of their teacher’s sickbed.

  “Teacher, you should rest. You can teach us the lesson tomorrow,” said a boy.

  The teacher managed a pained smile. “Tomorrow we have tomorrow’s lesson.”

  If he could make it to tomorrow, then he would teach tomorrow’s lesson. But his gut told him he wouldn’t last the night.

  He made a gesture, and one of the children placed a small blackboard on the sheet covering his chest. This was how he had been teaching them for a month. The children passed him a half-worn piece of chalk; he grabbed it weakly and put its tip to the blackboard with great effort. A sharp, strong pain shot through him. His hand trembled, knocking the chalk against the blackboard and leaving white dots.

  He had not gone to the hospital since he returned from the city. His liver had begun to ache two months later—the cancer had spread.

  The pain got worse with time until it overwhelmed everything. He groped under his pillow for a pain pill, the common, over-the-counter kind, packaged in plastic. They were completely ineffective at relieving the agony of late-stage cancer, but they had a bit of value as a placebo. Demerol wasn’t expensive, but patients weren’t allowed to take it out of the hospital, and even if they were, there was no one to administer the shot. As usual, he pushed two pills out of the plastic strip. He thought for a moment, then pushed out the remaining twelve pills and swallowed them all. He knew he would have no use for them later.

  Again, he turned his attention to the blackboard and struggled to write out the lesson, but a cough overcame him. He turned his head to the side, where a child had rushed to hold up a bowl next to his mouth. He spit out a mouthful of red and black blood, then reclined on his pillow to catch his breath.

  Several of the children stifled sobs.

  He abandoned his effort to write on the blackboard. He waved his hand, and a child came over to remove it from his chest. In a small voice, almost a whisper, he began to speak.

  “Like our lessons yesterday and the day before, today’s lesson is meant for middle schoolers. It is not on your syllabus. Most of you will never have a chance to attend middle school, so I thought I would give you a taste of what it’s like to study a subject in greater depth. Yesterday, we read Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman. You probably didn’t understand much of it, but I want you to read it a few more times, or, better yet, learn to recite it from memory. You’ll understand it when you’re older. Lu Xun was a remarkable man. Every Chinese person should read his books. I know all of you will in the future.”

  He stopped speaking to rest for a moment and catch his breath. He looked at the flickering candle flame. Another passage of Lu Xun came to him. It wasn’t from Diary of a Madman, and it hadn’t been in his textbook. He had encountered it many years before, in his own incomplete, thumbed-through set of Lu Xun’s collected works. Since the first time he read it, he hadn’t forgotten a single word.

  Imagine a windowless, iron room. Many people lie asleep inside. They will soon suffocate and die in their sleep. You shout, and a few hopeless sleepers awaken to a wretched fate that you are powerless to prevent. Have you done them a favor?

  Unless you wake them up, what hope do they have of escape?

  With the last of his strength, he continued his lecture.

  “Today’s class is middle school physics. You may not have heard of physics before. It is the study of the principles of the physical world. It’s an extremely rich, deep field of knowledge.

  “We will learn about Newton’s three laws. Newton was an important English scientist who lived a long time ago. He came up with three remarkable rules. These rules apply to everything in heaven and on Earth, from the sun and moon in the sky down to the water and air of our own planet. Nothing can escape Newton’s three truths. With them, we can calculate to the second when solar eclipses—when the ‘sun dog eats the sun,’ as our village elders say—will happen. Humans can fly to the moon using Newton’s three laws.

  “The first law is as follows: A body at rest or moving in a straight line at a constant speed will maintain its velocity unless an outside force acts upon it.”

  The children watched him silently in the candlelight. No one stirred.

  “This means that if you took the grindstone from the mill and gave it a good push, it should keep rolling, all the way to the horizon. What are you laughing at, Baozhu? You’re right, that wouldn’t actually happen. That’s because a force called friction will bring the stone to a halt. There is nowhere in the world without friction.”

  That’s right, nowhere in the world without friction—his life, especially. He didn’t have the village surname,* so his words carried no weight. And he was so stubborn! Over the years he had offended practically everyone in the village in one way or another. He had gone door-to-door persuading each family to put their kids in school, and he had gotten some kids to stop following their parents to work by swearing he’d cover their tuition himself. None of this endeared him to the villagers. The plain truth was that his ideas about how to live were just too different from theirs. He talked all day about things that were meaningless to them, and it annoyed them.

  Before he’d learned of his cancer, he had gone once to town and brought back some funds from the Education Bureau to repair the school. The villagers took a bit of the money to hire an opera troupe to perform for two days in an upcoming festival. This bothered the teacher deeply. He went to town again, and this time he brought back a vice county head, who made the villagers return the money. They had already built a stage for the singers. The school was repaired, but that was the end of what little goodwill there was for him in the village, and his life was even more difficult from then on.

  First, the village electrician, the village head’s nephew, cut off the school’s electricity. Then they stopped giving the school cornstalks for heating and cooking, forcing him to abandon planting and spend his time in the hills instead, looking for kindling. Then there was the incident with the rafters in the dorm. Friction was omnipresent, exhausting his body and soul, making him unable to move in a straight line at a constant speed. He had to come to a stop.

  Maybe the place he was heading was a frictionless world where everything was smooth and lovely. But what was there for him in a place like that? His heart would still be in this world of dust and friction, in the primary school he had devoted his whole life to. After he left, the two remaining teachers would leave, too, and the school would grind to a halt, like the village millstone. He fell into a deep sorrow—in this world or the next, he had no hope of finding peace.

  “Newton’s second law is a little tricky, so we’ll leave it for last. His third law is as follows: When a body exerts force on a second body, the second body will exert an equal force on the first body in the opposite direction.”

  The children were silent for a long time.

  “Do you understand? Who can explain it back to me?�
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  Zhao Labao, his best student, stood and spoke. “I get the idea, but it doesn’t make sense. This morning I got into a fight with Li Quangui and he hit me right in the face. It really hurt, and I’ve got a lump, right here. Those aren’t equal forces!”

  The teacher took a while to catch his breath, then explained, “The reason you hurt is that your cheek is softer than Quangui’s fist. They exerted equal forces against each other.”

  He wanted to make a gesture to illustrate his point, but he couldn’t lift his hand anymore. His limbs felt as heavy as iron, and soon his whole body felt heavy enough to collapse the bed and sink into the ground.

  There wasn’t much time.

  Target Number: 1033715

  Absolute Magnitude: 3.5

  Evolutionary Stage: Upper Main Sequence

  Two planets found, average orbital radii 1.3 and 4.7 Distance Units

  Life discovered on Planet One

  This is Vessel Red 69012 reporting

  The hundred thousand warships of the Carbon Federation’s interstellar fleet had spread out across a ten-thousand-light-year-long band of space to begin construction of the isolation belt. The first stage of the project was the trial destruction of five thousand stars. Only 137 of those star systems had planets; this was the first planet they had found with life.

  “The first spiral arm is truly a barren place,” said the High Archon, sighing. His smart field vibrated, initiating a holographic projection that concealed the floor of the flagship and the stars overhead. The High Archon, the fleet commander, and the senator all appeared to be floating in a limitless void. Then, the High Archon switched the hologram feed to display the information sent back by the probe, and a glowing, blue fireball appeared in the middle of the void. The High Archon’s smart field produced a white, square box; it adjusted its shape and moved to enclose the image of the star, plunging the space into near-darkness again. This time, however, a small point of yellow light remained. The focal length of the image adjusted rapidly, and in an instant, the yellow dot zoomed into the foreground, fully occupying half of the void. The three of them were bathed in its reflected, orange radiance.

  It was a planet covered in a thick, tempestuous atmosphere, like an orange ocean. The motion of the gas produced an extremely complex, ever-changing lattice of lines. The image of the planet continued to grow until it seemed to occupy the whole universe, and they were swallowed by its orange, gaseous ocean. The probe took them through the thick clouds to a place where the fog was slightly thinner, enabling them to see the planet’s life-forms.

  In the upper part of the thick atmosphere floated a school of balloon-shaped animals. Their bodies were covered in kaleidoscopic patterns that changed from stripes to spots to all sorts of wonderful designs—perhaps a sort of visual language. Each balloon had a long tail whose tip occasionally produced a flash of light that traveled up the tail and into the balloon’s body, where it became a diffuse fluorescence.

  “Commence the four-dimensional scan!” said the pilot in command of Vessel Red 69012.

  An extremely thin beam swept quickly across the balloons from top to bottom. Though the beam was only a few atoms thick, the interior of the beam had one more spatial dimension than normal space. It transmitted data from the scan back to the ship, and in the storage of the ship’s main computer, the balloon creatures were cut into hundreds of billions of thin slices. Each slice was an atom-thick cross section that recorded everything with near-perfect accuracy, down to the state of each quark.

  “Commence data mirror assembly!”

  The ship’s computer rearranged the hundreds of billions of cross-sectional images in its storage in their original order, superimposing them. Soon, a hollow balloon took shape—a perfect replica of the life-form they had found on the planet, re-created in the computer’s vast digital universe.

  “Commence 3C Civilization Test!”

  The computer quickly identified the being’s thinking organ, an elliptical structure that hung at the center of an intricate plexus of nerves. The computer analyzed the structure of the brain in an instant and established a direct, high-speed information interface with it, bypassing all of the creature’s lower sensory organs.

  The civilization test consisted of a set of questions selected at random from an enormous database. Three correct answers were considered a pass. If a life-form failed to answer the first three questions correctly, the tester had two options: He could end the test and declare a failure, or he could provide more questions. Three correct answers were considered a pass, regardless of how many questions the tester asked.

  “3C Civilization Test, Question One: Please describe the smallest unit of matter you have discovered.”

  “Dee-dee, doo-doo-doo, dee-dee-dee-dee,” answered the balloon.

  “Incorrect. 3C Civilization Test, Question Two: According to your observations, in what direction does thermal energy flow through matter? Can its flow be reversed?”

  “Doo-doo-doo, dee-dee, dee-dee-doo-doo,” answered the balloon.

  “Incorrect. 3C Civilization Test, Question Three: What is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter?”

  “Dee-dee-dee-dee-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo,” answered the balloon.

  “Incorrect. 3C Civilization Test, Question Four…”

  “That’s enough,” said the High Archon, after the tenth question. “We don’t have much time.” He turned and signaled to the fleet commander.

  “Fire the singularity bomb!” ordered the commander.

  Strictly speaking, a singularity bomb was a sizeless object, a point in space, infinitely smaller than an atom. It had mass, though: the largest singularity bombs were billions of tons, and the smallest were more than ten million tons. When the bomb slid out of the arsenal of Vessel Red 69012, it appeared as a sphere, several thousand feet in diameter, that glowed with a faint fluorescence—radiation generated as the miniature black hole consumed the space dust in its path.

  Unlike black holes formed by the collapse of stars, these miniature black holes were formed at the beginning of the universe, tiny models of the universal singularity that preceded the big bang. Both the Carbon Federation and the Silicon Empire maintained fleets of ships that cruised the empty space beyond the galactic equator collecting these primordial black holes. Inhabitants of some marine planets called these fleets “deep-sea trawlers.” The “catches” that these fleets brought back were one of the most potent weapons in the galaxy, and the only weapon that could annihilate a star.

  The singularity bomb left its guide rail and accelerated along a force-field beam from the ship toward its target star. It arrived in short order, a dusty black hole that quickly plunged into the star’s fiery exterior. Stellar matter rushed from all directions in a turbulent arc toward the center of the black hole, where it disappeared. Copious radiation poured from the black hole, which appeared now as a blinding ball of light on the surface of the star, a diamond on the ring of the star’s circumference.

  As the black hole sank into the star’s interior, the radiant orb grew dimmer, revealing the enormous, hundred-million-mile-wide vortex that encircled the orb. The rotating vortex scattered the orb’s light in a kaleidoscopic display that looked, from the vantage of the ship, like a hideous, prismatic face. A moment later, the orb disappeared, as did the vortex, though more slowly; the star appeared to have returned to its original color and luminosity. This was the eye of the storm, the final moment of silence before annihilation.

  The voracious black hole sank toward the dense center of the star, devouring everything in its path. In less than a second, it swallowed a mass of stellar material greater than the mass of a hundred medium-sized planets. Super-strong radiation spread out from the black hole toward the surface of the star. Some of it escaped, but most of it was blocked by stellar material, adding enough energy to the star to disrupt its convection and knock it out of equilibrium. The star’s color began to shift, first from red to bright yellow, then to bright green, then t
o a deep, sapphire blue, and then to a forbidding violet. The radiation from the black hole by now was orders of magnitude more intense than the radiation from the star itself, and as more energy flowed out of the star in the form of nonvisible light, its violet color intensified—a spirit in agony, floating in the vastness of space. Within an hour, the star’s billion-year journey had come to a close.

  There was a flash of light that seemed to swallow the whole universe, then faded slowly away. Where the star had been, there was now a thin, spherical layer of material expanding rapidly, like a balloon being blown up. This was the surface of the star, swept outward in the explosion. As it expanded, it became transparent, and a second hollow sphere grew in its center, followed by a third. These waves of material were like exquisitely painted glass orbs, one inside another, and even the smallest of them had a surface area tens of thousands times larger than the original surface area of the star. The first wave vaporized the orange planet in an instant, though it was impossible to see its destruction against such a magnificent background. Compared to the size of the expanding stellar layer, the planet was a speck of dust, not even a dot on the surface of the orb.