by Liu Cixin
The Cloud of Poems emitted a silvery radiance bright enough to cast shadows on the ground. It wasn’t that the Cloud itself was made to glow, apparently, but rather that cosmic rays would excite it into silver luminescence. Due to the uneven spatial distribution of the cosmic rays, glowing masses frequently rippled through the Cloud of Poems, their varicolored light rolling across the sky like luminescent whales diving through the Cloud. Rarely, with spikes in the cosmic radiation, the Cloud of Poems emitted dapples of light that made the Cloud look utterly unlike a cloud. Instead, the entire sky seemed to be the surface of a moonlit sea seen from below.
Earth and the Cloud did not move in sync, so sometimes Earth lay in the gaps between the spiral arms. Through the gap, one could see the night sky and the stars, and most thrillingly, a cross-sectional view of the Cloud of Poems. Immense structures resembling Earthly cumulonimbuses rose from the spiraling plane, shimmering with silvery light, morphing through magnificent forms that inspired the human imagination, as if they belonged to the dreamscape of some super-advanced consciousness.
Yi Yi tore his gaze from the Cloud of Poems and picked up a crystal chip off the ground. These chips were scattered around them, sparkling like shards of ice in winter. Yi Yi raised the chip against a sky thick with the Cloud of Poems. The chip was very thin, and half the size of his palm. It appeared transparent from the front, but if he tilted it slightly, he could see the bright light of the Cloud of Poems reflect off its surface in rainbow halos. This was a quantum memory chip. All the written information created in human history would take up less than a millionth of a percent of one chip. The Cloud of Poems was composed of 1040 of these storage devices, and contained all the results of the ultimate poem composition. It was manufactured using all the matter in the sun and its nine major planets, of course including the Devouring Empire.
“What a magnificent work of art!” Bigtooth sighed sincerely.
“Yes, it’s beautiful in its significance: a nebula fifteen billion kilometers across, encompassing every poem possible. It’s too spectacular!” Yi Yi said, gazing at the nebula. “Even I’m starting to worship technology.”
Li Bai gave a long sigh. He had been in a low mood all this time. “Ai, it seems like we’ve both come around to the other person’s viewpoint. I witnessed the limits of technology in art. I—” He began to sob. “I’ve failed….”
“How can you say that?” Yi Yi pointed at the Cloud of Poems overhead. “This holds all the possible poems, so of course it holds the poems that surpass Li Bai’s!”
“But I can’t get to them!” Li Bai stomped his foot, which shot him meters into the air. He curled into a ball in midair, miserably burying his face between his knees in a fetal position; he slowly descended under the weak gravitational pull of the Earth’s shell. “At the start of the poetry composition, I immediately set out to program software that could analyze poetry. At that point, technology once again met that unsurpassable obstacle in the pursuit of art. Even now, I’m still unable to write software that can judge and appreciate poetry.” He pointed up at the Cloud of Poems. “Yes, with the help of mighty technology, I’ve written the ultimate works of poetry. But I can’t find them amid the Cloud of Poems, ai …”
“Is the soul and essence of intelligent life truly untouchable by technology?” Bigtooth loudly asked the Cloud of Poems above. He’d become increasingly philosophical after all he’d endured.
“Since the Cloud of Poems encompasses all possible poems, then naturally some portion of those poems describes all of our pasts and all of our futures, possible and impossible. The bug-bug Yi Yi would certainly find a poem that describes how he felt one night thirty years ago while clipping his fingernails, or a menu from a lunch twelve years in his future. Emissary Bigtooth, too, might find a poem that describes the color of a particular scale on his leg five years from now….”
Li Bai had touched down once more on the ground; as he spoke, he took out two chips, shimmering under the light of the Cloud of Poems. “These are my parting gifts for you two. The quantum computer used your names as keywords to search through the Cloud of Poems, and found several quadrillion poems that describe your various possible future lives. Of course, these are only a tiny portion of the poems with you as subject in the Cloud of Poems. I’ve only read a couple dozen of these. My favorite is a seven-character-line poem about Yi Yi describing a romantic riverbank scene between him and a beautiful woman from a faraway village….
“After I leave, I hope humanity and the remaining dinosaurs can get along with each other, and that humanity can get along with itself even better. If someone nukes a hole into the shell of the hollow Earth, it’s going to be a real problem…. The good poems in the Cloud of Poems don’t belong to anyone yet. Hopefully humans will be able to write some of them.”
“What happened to me and the woman, afterward?” Yi Yi asked.
Under the silver light of the Cloud of Poems, Li Bai chuckled. “Together, you lived happily ever after.”
THE THINKER
TRANSLATED BY JOHN CHU
THE SUN
He still remembered how he felt the first time he saw the Mount Siyun Astronomical Observatory thirty-four years ago. After his ambulance crossed the mountain ridge, Mount Siyun’s highest peak emerged in the distance. Its observatories’ spherical roofs reflected the golden light of the setting sun like pearls inlaid into the mountain peak.
At the time, he’d just graduated from medical school. A brain-surgery intern assisting the chief of surgery, he’d been rushed here to save a visiting research scholar from England who’d fallen on a hike. The scholar had injured his head too seriously to be moved. Once the ambulance arrived, they drilled a hole in the patient’s skull, then drained some blood out to reduce brain swelling. Once the patient had been stabilized enough to move, the ambulance took him to the hospital for surgery.
It was late at night by the time they could leave. Out of curiosity, while others carried the patient into the ambulance, he examined the several spherical observatories that surrounded him. How they were laid out seemed to imply some sort of hidden message, like a Stonehenge in the moonlight. Spurred on by some mystical force that he still didn’t understand even after a lifetime of contemplation, he walked to the nearest observatory, opened its door, then walked inside.
The lights inside were off except for numerous small signal lamps. He felt as though he’d walked from a moonlit starry sky to a moonless starry sky. The only moonlight was a sliver that penetrated the crack in the spherical roof. It fell on the giant astronomical telescope, partially sketching out its contours in silver lines. The telescope looked like a piece of abstract art in a town square at night.
He stepped silently to the bottom of the telescope. In the weak light, he saw a large pile of machinery. It was more complex than he’d imagined. He searched for an eyepiece. A soft voice came from the door:
“This is a solar telescope. It doesn’t have an eyepiece.”
A figure wearing white work clothes walked through the door, as though a feather had drifted in from the moonlight. The woman walked over to him, bringing a light breeze along with her.
“A traditional solar telescope casts an image onto a screen. Nowadays, we usually use a monitor…. Doctor, you seem to be very interested in this.”
He nodded. “An observatory is such a sublime and rarefied place. I like how it makes me feel.”
“Then why did you go into medicine? Oh, that was very rude of me.”
“Medicine isn’t just some trivial skill. Sometimes, it, too, is sublime, like my specialty of brain medicine, for example.”
“Oh? When you use a scalpel to open up the brain, you can see thoughts?” she said.
Her smiling face in the weak light made him think of something he’d never seen before, the sun cast onto a screen. Once the violent flares disappeared, the magnificence that remained couldn’t help but make his heart skip a beat. He smiled, too, hoping she could see his smile.
“Oh
, we can look at the brain all we want,” he said, “but consider this: Say a mushroom-shaped thing you can hold in one hand turns out to be a rich and varied universe. From a certain philosophical viewpoint, this universe is even grander than the one you observe. Even though your universe is tens of billions of light-years wide, it’s been established that it’s finite. My universe is infinite because thought is infinite.”
“Ah, not everybody’s thoughts are infinite but, Doctor, yours seem to be. As for astronomy, it’s not as rarefied as you think. Several thousand years ago on the banks of the Nile and several hundred years ago on a long sea voyage, it was a practical skill. An astronomer of the time often spent years marking the positions of thousands of stars on star charts. A census of the stars consumed their lives. Nowadays, the actual work of astronomical research is dull and meaningless. For example, I study the twinkling of stars. I make endless observations, take notes, then make more observations and take more notes. It’s definitely not sublime as well as not rarefied.”
His eyebrows rose in surprise. “The twinkling of stars? Like the kind we can see?” When he saw her laugh, he laughed, too, shaking his head. “Oh, I know, of course, that’s atmospheric refraction.”
“However, as a visual metaphor, it’s pretty accurate. Get rid of the constant terms, just show the fluctuations in their energy output, and stars really do look like they’re twinkling.”
“Is it because of sunspots?”
She stopped smiling. “No, this is the fluctuation of a star’s total energy. It’s like how when a lamp flickers, it’s not because of the moths surrounding it, but because of fluctuations in voltage. Of course, the fluctuations of a twinkling star are minuscule, detectable only by the most precise measurements. Otherwise, we’d have been burned by the twinkling of the sun long ago. Researching this sort of twinkling is one way of understanding the deep structure of stars.”
“What have you discovered so far?”
“It’ll be a while before we discover anything. For now, we’ve only observed the twinkling of the star that’s the easiest to observe—the sun. We can do this for years while we gradually expand out to the rest of the stars…. You know, we could spend ten, twenty years taking measurements of the universe before we make any discoveries and come to some conclusion. This is my dissertation topic, but I think I’ll be working on this for a long while, perhaps my whole life.”
“So you don’t think astronomy is dull, after all.”
“I think what I’m working on is beautiful. Entering the world of stars is like entering an infinitely vast garden. No two flowers are alike…. You have to think that’s a weird analogy, but it’s exactly how I feel.”
As she spoke, seemingly without realizing it, she gestured at the wall. A painting hung there, very abstract, just a thick line undulating from one end to the other. When she noticed what he was looking at, she took it down, then handed it to him. The thick, undulating line was a mosaic of colorful pebbles from the area.
“It’s lovely, but what does it represent? The local mountain range?”
“Our most recent measurements of the sun twinkling, it was so intense and we’d rarely ever seen it fluctuate like that this year. This is a picture of the curve of the energy radiated as it twinkled. Oh, when I hike, I like to collect pebbles, so …”
The scientist was only partially visible in the surrounding shadow. She looked like an elegant ink line a brilliant artist drew on a piece of fine, white calligraphy paper. The curve’s intelligence of spirit filled that perfect white paper immediately with vitality and intention…. In the city he lived in outside the mountains, at any given moment, more than a million young women, like a large group of particles in Brownian motion, chased the showy and vain, without even a moment of reflection. But who could imagine that on this mountain in the middle of nowhere, there was a gentle and quiet woman who stared for long stretches at the stars….
“You can reveal this kind of beauty from the universe. That’s truly rare and also very fortunate.” He realized he was staring and looked away. He returned the painting to her but, lightly, she pushed it back to him.
“Keep it as a souvenir, Doctor. Professor Wilson is my advisor. Thank you for saving his life.”
After ten minutes, the ambulance left under the moonlight. Slowly, he realized what he’d left on the mountain.
FIRST TIME
Once he married, he abandoned his effort to fight against time. One day, he moved his things out of his apartment to the one he now shared with his wife. Those things that two people shouldn’t share, he brought to his office at the hospital. As he riffled through them, he found a mosaic made of colorful pebbles. Seeing the multicolored curve, he suddenly realized that the trip to Mount Siyun was ten years ago.
ALPHA CENTAURI A
The hospital’s young employees’ group had a spring outing. He cherished this outing particularly, because it was getting less and less likely they’d invite him again. This time, the trip organizer was deliberately mysterious, pulling down the blinds on all the coach windows and having everyone guess where they were once they arrived. The first one to guess correctly won a prize. He knew where they were the instant he stepped off the coach, but he kept quiet.
The highest peak of Mount Siyun stood before him. The pearl-like spherical roofs on its summit glittered in the sunlight.
After someone guessed where they were, he told the trip organizer that he wanted to go to the observatory to visit an acquaintance. He left on foot, following the meandering road up the mountain.
He hadn’t lied, but the woman whose name he didn’t even know wasn’t part of the observatory staff. After ten years, she probably wasn’t here anymore. He didn’t actually want to go inside, just to look around at the place where, ten years ago, his soul, hot, dry, and as bright as the sun, spilled into a thread of moonlight.
One hour later, he reached the mountaintop and the observatory’s white railings. Its paint had cracked and faded. Silently, he took in the individual observatories. The place hadn’t changed much. He quickly located the domed building that he’d once entered. He sat on a stone block on the grass, lit a cigarette, then studied the building’s iron door, spellbound. The scene he’d long cherished replayed from the depths of his memory: with the iron door half open, in the midst of a ray of moonlight like water, a feather drifted in….
He was so completely steeped in that long-gone dream that when the miracle happened, he wasn’t surprised: the observatory’s iron door opened for real. The feather that once had emerged from the moonlight drifted into the sunlight. She left in a hurry to go into another observatory. This couldn’t have taken more twenty seconds, but he knew he wasn’t mistaken.
Five minutes later, they reunited.
This was the first time he’d seen her with adequate light. She was exactly as he’d imagined. He wasn’t surprised. It’d been ten years, though. She shouldn’t have looked exactly like the woman barely lit by a few signal lamps and the moon. He was puzzled.
She was pleasantly surprised to see him, but no more than that. “Doctor, I make a round of every observatory for my project. In a given year, I’m only here for half a month. To run into you again, it must be fate!”
That last sentence, tossed off lightly, confirmed his initial impression: She didn’t feel anything more about seeing him again besides surprise. However, she still recognized him after ten years. He took a shred of comfort in that.
They exchanged a few words about what had happened to the visiting English scholar who’d suffered the brain injury. Finally, he asked, “Are you still researching the twinkling of stars?”
“Yes. After observing the sun’s twinkling for two years, I moved on to other stars. As I’m sure you understand, the techniques necessary to observe other stars are completely different from those to observe the sun. The project didn’t have new funding. It halted for many years. We just started it back up three years ago. Right now, we are only observing twenty-five stars. The numbe
r and scope are still growing.”
“Then you must have produced more mosaics.”
The moonlit smile that had surfaced so many times from the depths of memory over the past ten years now emerged in the sunlight. “Ah, you still remember! Yes, every time I come to Mount Siyun, I collect pretty pebbles. Come, I’ll show you!”
She took him into the observatory where they’d first met. A giant telescope confronted him. He didn’t know whether it was the same telescope from ten years ago, but the computers that surrounded it were practically new. Familiar things hung on a tall curved wall: mosaics of all different sizes. Each one was of an undulating curve. They were all of different lengths. Some were as gentle as the sea. Others were violent, like a row of tall towers strung together at random.
One by one, she told him which waves came from which stars. “These twinklings, we call type A twinklings. They don’t occur as much as other types. The difference between type A twinklings and those of other types, besides that their energy fluctuations are orders of magnitude larger, is that the mathematics of their curves is even more elegant.”
He shook his head, puzzled. “You scientists doing basic research are always talking about the elegance of mathematics. I guess that’s your prerogative. For example, you all think that Maxwell’s equations are incredibly elegant. I understood them once, but I couldn’t see where the elegance was….”
Just like ten years ago, she suddenly grew serious. “They’re elegant like crystals, very hard, very pure, and very transparent.”