To Hold Up the Sky Page 5

  “We should go tell a grown-up,” said Guo Cuihua, stifling a sob.

  “What for?” asked Liu Baozhu, his eyes on the floor. “No one in this village cared about him when he was alive. I bet they won’t even pay for a coffin!”

  In the end, the children decided to bury their teacher themselves. With pickaxes and shovels, they dug a grave in a hill next to the school, and the brilliant stars above silently watched them work.

  The senator watched Vessel Blue 84210’s test results as they streamed instantly across a thousand light-years of space. “The civilization on this planet isn’t 3C—it’s 5B!” he exclaimed, astonished.

  The skyscrapers of human cities appeared as holograms aboard the flagship.

  “They have already begun using nuclear energy, and they can fly into space using chemical propellants. They’ve even landed on their moon.”

  “What are their basic features?” asked the fleet commander.

  “You’ll have to be more specific,” said the duty officer of Vessel Blue 84210.

  “Well, how advanced is their heritable memory?”

  “They don’t inherit memories. They acquire all their memories during their lives.”

  “What method do they use to communicate information to each other?”

  “It’s very primitive, and very rare. There is a thin organ in their bodies that vibrates, producing waves in their planet’s atmosphere, which is primarily composed of nitrogen and oxygen. By modulating the vibrations, they encode information into the waves. They have separate organs—thin membranes—that receive the waves.”

  “What’s the transmission rate of that method?”

  “Approximately one to ten bits per second.”

  “What?!” Everyone on the flagship laughed out loud.

  “It’s true. We were incredulous at first, but it’s been verified repeatedly.”

  “Captain, this is lunacy!” yelled the fleet commander. “You are telling us that an organism without any hereditary memory that transmits information using sound waves at one to ten bits per second can form a 5B-level civilization?! And that they developed this civilization entirely on their own, without any external assistance from an advanced civilization?!”

  “Sir, that is the case.”

  “If that’s so, they have no way to pass knowledge between generations. Accumulated knowledge across generations is necessary for civilization to evolve!”

  “There is a class of individuals, a certain proportion of the population spread evenly among their civilization. They act as mediums for the transmission of knowledge between generations.”

  “That sounds like a myth.”

  “It’s not,” said the senator. “Such a concept existed in the galaxy in prehistoric times, but even then, it was extremely rare. No one would know about it except historians of the evolution of civilization in the star systems where the idea had currency.”

  “By ‘concept,’ you mean individuals that transmit knowledge between generations of a species?”

  “Yes. They’re called ‘teachers.’”

  “Tea—cher?”

  “An ancient word that was once in currency among a few long-lost civilizations. It’s rare enough that it does not appear in most ancient vocabulary databases.”

  The holographic feed from the solar system zoomed out to display the blue orb of Earth rotating slowly in space.

  The High Archon said, “A civilization evolving independently is rare enough, but I know of no other civilization in the Milky Way that has attained 5B level on its own, at least in the era of the Carbon Federation. We should let this civilization continue its evolution without interference, observing it as it does, not only to further our understanding of ancient civilizations, but also, perhaps, to gain insight into our broader galactic civilization.”

  “I’ll have Vessel Blue 84210 leave the star system immediately and designate a hundred-light-year no-fly zone around it,” said the fleet commander.

  Insomniacs in the northern hemisphere might have seen a small group of stars begin to flutter slightly, then the stars around those, and so on across the whole sky, as if a finger had been dipped into the still water of the night sky.

  The space-time shock wave caused by Vessel Blue 84210’s hyperspace leap was considerably attenuated by the time it hit Earth. Every clock jumped three seconds ahead. Humans, confined as we are to three-dimensional space, were unaware of the disturbance.

  “It’s a pity,” said the High Archon. “They’ll be confined to sub-light speeds and three-dimensional space for another two thousand years without the intervention of a more advanced civilization. It will be at least a thousand years before they can harness the energy of matter-antimatter annihilation. Two thousand more years before they can transmit and receive multidimensional communications … and as for hyperspace galactic travel, that will take them at least five thousand years. It will be at least ten thousand years before they attain the minimum conditions for entry into the galactic family of carbon-based life-forms.”

  The senator said, “Independent evolution of this sort happened only in the prehistoric era of the galaxy. If our records of those times are correct, my distant ancestors lived in the deep ocean of a marine planet. They lived and died there in darkness, their governments rose and fell, and then, at some point, they felt adventurous. They launched a craft toward space—a buoyant, transparent ball that rose slowly to the surface of the ocean. It was the dead of night when they reached the surface. The people inside the craft were the first of my ancestors to see the stars. Can you imagine how they felt? Can you imagine how glorious and mysterious that sight was to them?”

  The High Archon said, “It was an era full of passion and yearning. A terrestrial planet was a complete, limitless world to our ancestors. From their home in a planet’s green waters or on its purple grasslands, they looked up at the stars with awe. We have not known such a feeling for tens of millions of years.”

  “I feel it now!” said the senator, pointing at the holographic image of Earth. It was a lustrous, blue ball, with white clouds floating above its surface, streaking and billowing. The senator felt as if he had found a pearl in the depths of his ancestors’ ocean home. “Such a small planet, populated by organisms living their lives, dreaming their dreams, completely oblivious to us and to the strife and destruction in their galaxy. To them, the universe must seem like a bottomless well of hopes and dreams. It’s like an ancient song.”

  And he began to sing. The smart fields of the three became as one, rippling with rose-colored waves. The song he sang was old, passed down from the forgotten beginnings of civilization itself. It sounded distant, mysterious, forlorn, and as it propagated through hyperspace to the hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy, countless beings heard its sound and felt a long-forgotten kind of comfort and peace.

  “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,”* said the High Archon.

  “The most comprehensible thing about the universe is that it is incomprehensible,” said the senator.

  * * *

  There was light in the east by the time the children had finished digging the grave. They tore the door off the classroom and put their teacher’s body on it, and they buried him with two boxes of chalk and a used textbook. They stood a stone slab on top of the mound, and wrote on it in chalk: Mister Li’s Grave.

  The faint letters would wash off in the first rainfall, and not long after that, the grave and the person it contained would be forgotten completely.

  The tip of the sun rose above the hills, casting a golden ray into the sleeping village. The grass of the valley was still in shadow, but its dew glowed with the light of dawn. A bird or two began timidly to sing.

  The children walked along the narrow road back into the village. Their little shadows soon disappeared into the pale blue morning mist of the valley.

  They were going to live their lives on that ancient, barren land, and though their harvests would be m
eager, they would always have hope.

  THE TIME MIGRATION

  TRANSLATED BY JOEL MARTINSEN

  Where, before me, are the ages that have gone?

  And where, behind me, are the coming generations?

  I think of heaven and earth, without limit, without end,

  And I am all alone and my tears fall down.

  Chen Zi’ang (661–702), “On the Gate Tower at Yuzhou”*

  MIGRATION

  An Open Letter to All People

  Due to insupportable environmental and population pressures, the government has been forced to undertake a time migration. A first group of 80 million time-migrants will migrate 120 years.

  The ambassador was the last to leave. She stood on empty ground before an enormous cold-storage warehouse that held four hundred thousand frozen people, as did another two hundred like it throughout the world. They resembled, the ambassador thought with a shudder, nothing so much as tombs.

  Hua was not going with her. Although he met all of the conditions for migration and possessed a coveted migration card, he felt an attachment to the present world, unlike those headed toward a new life in the future. He would stay behind and leave the ambassador to travel 120 years on her own.

  The ambassador set off an hour later, drowned by liquid helium that froze her life at near absolute zero, leading eighty million people on a flight along the road of time.

  THE TREK

  Outside of perception time slipped past, the sun swept through the sky like a shooting star, and birth, love, death, joy, sorrow, loss, pursuit, struggle, failure, and everything else from the outside world screamed past like a freight train …

  … 10 years … 20 years … 40 years … 60 years … 80 years … 100 years … 120 years.

  STOP 1: THE DARK AGE

  Consciousness froze along with the body during zero-degree supersleep, leaving time’s very existence imperceptible until the ambassador awoke with the impression that the cooling system had malfunctioned and she had thawed out shortly after departure. But the atomic clock’s giant plasma display informed her that 120 years had passed, a lifetime and a half, rendering them time’s exiles.

  An advance team of one hundred had awakened the previous week to establish contact. Its captain now stood next to the ambassador, whose body had not yet recovered enough for speech. Her inquiring gaze, however, drew only a head shake and forced smile from the captain.

  The head of state had come to the freezer hall to welcome them. He looked weatherworn, as did his entourage, which came as a bit of a surprise 120 years into the future. The ambassador handed over the letter from the government of her time and passed on her people’s greetings. The head said little, but clasped the ambassador’s hand tightly. It was as rough as his face, and gave the ambassador the sense that things had not changed as much as she had imagined. It warmed her.

  But the feeling vanished the moment she left the freezer. Outside was all black: black land, black trees, a black river, black clouds. The hovercar they rode in swirled up black dust. A column of oncoming tanks formed a line of black patches moving along the road, and low-flying clusters of helicopters passing overhead were groups of black ghosts, all the more so since they flew silently. The earth seemed scorched by fire from heaven. They passed a huge hole as large as an open-pit mine from the ambassador’s time.

  “A crater.”

  “From a … bomb?” the ambassador said, unable to say the word.

  “Yes. Around fifteen kilotons,” the head of state said lightly, as if the misery was unremarkable for him.

  The atmosphere of the cross-time meeting grew weighty.

  “When did the war start?”

  “This one? Two years ago.”

  “This one?”

  “There’ve been a few since you left.”

  Then he changed the subject. He seemed less like a younger man from the future than an elder of the ambassador’s own time, someone to show up at work sites or farms and gather up every hardship in his embrace, letting none slip by. “We will accept all immigrants, and will ensure they live in peace.”

  “Is that even possible, given the present circumstances?” The question was put by someone accompanying the ambassador, who herself remained silent.

  “The current administration and the entire public will do all they can to accomplish it. That’s our duty,” he said. “Of course, the immigrants must do their best to adapt. That might be hard, given the substantial changes over one hundred and twenty years.”

  “What kind of changes?” the ambassador asked. “There’s still war, there’s still slaughter…”

  “You’re only seeing the surface,” a general in fatigues said. “Take war for example. Here’s how two countries fight these days. First, they declare the type and quantity of all of their tactical and strategic weapons. Then a computer can determine the outcome of the war according to their mutual rates of destruction. Weapons are purely for deterrence and are never used. Warfare is a computer execution of a mathematical model, the results of which decide the victor and loser.”

  “And the mutual destruction rates are obtained how?”

  “From the World Weapons Test Organization. Like in your time there was a … World Trade Organization.”

  “War is as regular and ordered as economics?”

  “War is economics.”

  The ambassador looked through the car window at the black world. “But the world doesn’t look like war is only a calculation.”

  The head of state looked at the ambassador with heavy eyes. “We did the calculations but didn’t believe the results.”

  “So we started one of your wars. With bloodshed. A ‘real’ war,” the general said.

  The head changed the subject again. “We’re going to the capital now to study the issues involved with immigrant unfreezing.”

  “Take us back,” the ambassador said.

  “What?”

  “Go back. You can’t take on any additional burdens, and this isn’t a suitable age for immigrants. We’ll go on a little further.”

  The hovercar returned to Freezer No. 1. Before leaving, the head handed the ambassador a hardbound book. “A chronicle of the past hundred and twenty years,” he said.

  Then an official led over a 123-year-old man, the only known individual who had lived alongside the immigrants, and who had insisted on seeing the ambassador. “So many things happened after you left. So many things!” The old man brought out two bowls from the ambassador’s time and filled them to the brim with alcohol. “My parents were migrants. They left me this when I was three to drink with them when they were thawed out. But now I won’t see them. And I’m the last person from your time you’ll see.”

  After they had drunk, the ambassador looked into the man’s dry eyes, and just as she was wondering why the people of this era seemed not to cry, the old man began to shed tears. He knelt down and clasped the ambassador’s hands.

  “Take care, ma’am. ‘West of Yang Pass, there are no more old friends!’”*

  Before the ambassador felt the supercooled freezing of the liquid helium, her husband suddenly appeared in her fragmented consciousness. Hua stood on a fallen leaf in autumn, and then the leaf turned black, and then a tombstone appeared. Was it his?

  THE TREK

  Outside of perception, the sun swept through the sky like a shooting star, and time slipped past in the outside world.

  … 120 years … 130 years … 150 years … 180 years … 200 years … 250 years … 300 years … 350 years … 400 years … 500 years … 620 years.

  STOP 2: THE LOBBY AGE

  “Why did you wait so long to wake me up?” the ambassador asked, looking in surprise at the atomic clock.

  “The advance team has mobilized five times at century intervals and even spent a decade awake in one age, but we didn’t wake you because immigration was never possible. You yourself set that rule,” the advance-team captain said. He was noticeably older than at their last meeting, the am
bassador realized.

  “More war?”

  “No. War is over forever. And although the environment continued to deteriorate over the first three centuries, it began to rebound two hundred years ago. The last two ages refused immigrants, but this one has agreed to accept them. The ultimate decision is up to you and the commission.”

  There was no one in the freezer lobby. When the giant door rumbled open, the captain whispered to the ambassador, “The changes are far greater than you imagine. Prepare yourself.”

  When the ambassador took her first step into the new age, a note sounded, haunting, like some ancient wind chime. Deep within the crystalline ground beneath her feet she saw the play of light and shadows. The crystal looked rigid, but it was as soft as carpet underfoot, and every step produced that wind-chime tone and sent concentric halos of color expanding from the point of contact, like ripples on still water. The ground was a crystalline plane as far as the eye could see.

  “All the land on Earth is covered in this material. The whole world looks artificial,” the captain said, and laughed at the ambassador’s flabbergasted expression, as if to say, This surprise is only the beginning! The ambassador also saw her own shadow in the crystal—or rather, shadows—spreading out from her in all directions. She looked up …

  Six suns.

  “It’s the middle of the night, but night was gotten rid of two hundred years ago. What you see are six mirrors, each several hundred square kilometers in area, in synchronous orbit to reflect sunlight onto the dark side of the Earth.”

  “And the mountains?” The ambassador realized that the line of mountains on the horizon was nowhere to be seen. The separation between ground and sky was ruler-straight.

  “There aren’t any. They’ve been leveled. All the continents are flat plains now.”