To Hold Up the Sky

by Cixin Liu

  Liu Xin followed him up a hill on the north side of the valley, his confusion growing all the while. First, this was the safest direction, separated from the main seam by more than a kilometer. Second, Aygul had led him nearly to the top of the hill, but the curtain ring was far, far beneath them. What was there to go wrong here? When they reached the top, Liu Xin was about to gasp out a question when Aygul pointed in a different direction, to a place even farther off. Liu Xin laughed in relief—there was no disaster. The mine was directly ahead of where Aygul pointed, and between that hill and the one beneath their feet was an even slope that led to a meadow at the bottom. That was Aygul’s target. The mine and the meadow seemed peaceful at this distance, but after a longer look Liu Xin saw something strange about the meadow: in one circular spot, the grass appeared darker than the surrounding area, a difference only noticeable upon careful observation. He felt his heart seize, then he and Aygul raced down the hill to that patch of darker green.

  When they got there, Liu Xin examined the round patch of grass, which had wilted to the ground as if it had been scalded. He put his hand on it and felt heat emanating from the ground. In the center of the circle a puff of steam rose in the light of the rising sun.…

  After a morning of emergency drilling and the dispatch of another thousand-odd ground rats, Liu Xin confirmed the nightmarish fact: the main seam had caught fire. The scope of the fire was unknown for the time being, since the ground rats had a maximum below-ground speed of around ten meters per hour. However, with the fire so much deeper than the test seam, the fact that its heat was radiating above ground meant it had been burning for quite some time. It was a big fire.

  The strange thing was that the thousand meters of earth and stone between the main seam and the test seam was whole and unbroken. The ground fire had ignited on either side of the thousand-meter buffer zone, leading someone to suggest that it was unrelated to the experiment. But that was no more than self-delusion; even the person who had said it didn’t really believe the two weren’t in some way connected. Deeper exploration cleared up the matter late that night.

  Eight narrow coal belts extended from the test seam. Only half a meter at their narrowest point, they were hard to detect. Five of them were bisected by the fire curtain, but the other three led downward and just skirted the curtain’s bottom edge. Two of these terminated, but the last one led directly to the main seam a kilometer away. All of them were actually ground fissures that had been filled up by coal; their connection to the surface provided them with an excellent supply of oxygen. The one linking the test seam and the main seam thus acted as a fuse.

  None of the three was marked on the materials Li Minsheng had provided, and in fact, such long and narrow belts were extremely rare in the field of coal geology. Mother Nature had played a cruel joke.

  “I had no choice. My kid’s got uremia and needs continual dialysis. The money from this project was too important to me, so I didn’t fight you as strongly as I could have.…” Li Minsheng’s face was pale, and he avoided Liu Xin’s eyes.

  The three of them stood atop the hill between the two ground fires. It was another early morning. The entire meadow between the mine and the peak was now dark green, apart from the previous day’s circular area, which was now a burnt yellow. Steam wafted from the ground, obscuring their view of the mine.

  Aygul said to Liu Xin, “My fire brigade from Xinjiang has landed in Taiyuan with equipment, and they’ll be here soon. Teams from elsewhere in the country are headed here too. The fire looks to be spreading fast.”

  Liu Xin looked silently at Aygul for a long moment before he asked in a low voice, “Can you tame it?”

  Aygul shook his head.

  “Then tell me: How much hope is there? If we seal off the vents, or inject water to quell the fire…”

  Again, Aygul shook his head. “I’ve been doing this my whole life, but ground fire still consumed my hometown. I told you that where ground fire is concerned, you’re still just a child. You don’t know what it is. That far underground it’s slipperier than a viper, wilier than a ghost. Mortals can’t stop it from going where it wants. Under our feet is a huge quantity of high-quality anthracite, and this devil’s been coveting it for millions of years. Now you’ve released it, and given it limitless energy and power. The ground fire here will be a hundred times worse than in Xinjiang.”

  Liu Xin shook the Uighur man by the shoulders in desperation. “Tell me how much hope we have! Tell me the truth, I beg you!”

  “Zero,” Aygul said with a slow shake of his head. “Dr. Liu, you can’t atone for your sins in this lifetime.”

  * * *

  An emergency meeting was held in the main bureau building attended by the bureau leadership and the heads of the five mines, as well as a group of alarmed officials from the city government, including the mayor. The meeting’s first act was to establish an emergency command center headed up by the director, with Liu Xin and Li Minsheng as members of the leading group.

  “Engineer Li and I will do our utmost, but I’d like to remind you all that we’re now criminals,” Liu Xin said, as Li Minsheng sat silently, head bowed.

  “Now’s not the time for recrimination,” the director said. “Act, and think of nothing else. Do you know who said that? Your father. Once, back when I was a technician on his squad, I ignored his warning and enlarged the extraction range so I could meet production targets. As a result, a huge quantity of water entered the works, trapping more than twenty squad members in the corner of a passageway. Our lamps had gone out, and we didn’t dare strike a lighter, afraid of gas on the one hand and of using up the oxygen on the other, since the water had sealed us off completely. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, it was so dark. Then your father told me he remembered there was another passageway above us, and our ceiling was probably not all that thick. Next thing I heard was him scratching at the ceiling with a pick. The rest of us felt around for our picks and joined him, digging in the darkness. As the oxygen level dropped, we began to feel woozy and tight-chested. And on top of that there was the darkness, an absolute blackness no one on the surface is able to imagine, but for the glint of picks striking the ceiling. Staying alive was sheer torture, but it was your father who kept me going. Over and over he said to me in the darkness, ‘Act, and think of nothing else.’ I don’t know how long we dug, but just when I was about to faint from lack of breath, a chunk of the ceiling fell in and the glare of the explosion-proof lamps from the overhead passageway shone through the hole.… Later your father told me that he had no idea how thick the roof was, but it was the only thing we could do: act, and think of nothing else. Your father’s words have been etched ever deeper on my brain over the years, and now I pass them on to you.”

  Experts who had rushed from all over the country to attend the meeting soon drafted a plan for fighting the fire. The options at hand were limited to just three. First, cut off the underground fire’s oxygen. Second, use a grout curtain to cut the path of the fire. Third, inject massive quantities of water underground to quench the fire. These three techniques were to proceed simultaneously, but the first had been demonstrated ineffective long ago. Air vents supplying oxygen to the fire were difficult to pinpoint, and they would be hard to seal off even if located. The second method was effective only against shallow coal-seam fires and was much slower than the pace of the underground fire’s advance. The third method was most promising.

  News was still embargoed, and the firefighting proceeded quietly. High-power drilling rigs, emergency transfers from Renqiu Oil Field, passed through the mining city under the eyes of curious onlookers; the army entered the hills; whirling choppers appeared in the sky … a cloud of uncertainty descended over the mine, and rumors spread like wildfire.

  The drills were lined up at the head of the subterranean fire, and once drilling was complete, more than a hundred high-pressure pumps began injecting water into the hot, smoking boreholes. The sheer quantity of water meant that the wate
r supply to both the mine and the city was cut off, which only increased uncertainty and unrest among the public. But initial results were encouraging: On the big screen in the command center, dark spots appeared surrounding the position of the boreholes at the head of the red-colored fire, indicating that the water had dramatically dropped the fire temperature. If the line of dots connected, then there was hope for stopping the fire’s spread.

  But this slightly comforting situation did not last long. The leader of the oil field drilling crew found Liu Xin at the foot of the enormous rig.

  “Dr. Liu, no more drilling can be done at two-thirds of the well positions!” he shouted over the roar of the drills and pumps.

  “Are you joking? We’ve got to add more water-injection holes to the fire.”

  “No. Well pressure at those positions is growing too quickly. Any more drilling and there’ll be a blowout!”

  “Bullshit. This isn’t an oil field. There’s no high-pressure gas reservoir. What’s going to blow?”

  “You know nothing! I’m shutting down the drills and pulling out.”

  Enraged, Liu Xin grabbed his collar. “You will not. I order you to continue drilling. There will not be a blowout. You hear me? There won’t!”

  Even before he finished speaking, they heard a loud crash from the direction of the rig, and they turned in time to witness the well’s heavy seal fly off in two pieces as a yellowish-black mud spurted into the air together with pieces of broken drill pipe. Bystanders shouted in alarm, and the mud gradually lightened in color as its particulate content reduced. Then it turned snow-white, and they realized that the ground fire had heated the injected water into pressurized steam. High up on the rig they saw the body of the drill driver, suspended and twisting slowly in the roiling steam. There was no trace of the other three engineers who had been on the platform.

  What happened next was even more terrifying. The head of the white dragon broke free from the ground and gradually took flight, until finally the white steam had risen above the rig like a white-haired demon in the sky. There was nothing in the space between the demon and the mouth of the well apart from the wreckage of the rig. Nothing but that terrifying hiss. A few young engineers, under the impression that the blowout had stopped, took hesitant steps forward, but Liu Xin grabbed two of them and shouted, “That’s suicide! It’s superheated steam!”

  They watched in terror as the damp headframe was blasted dry in the steam’s heat, and the thick rubber pipes strung from it liquefied like wax. The infernal steam assaulted the frame with a hair-curling thunder.…

  Further water injection was impossible, and even if it weren’t, it would act more to combust than to quench the fire.

  All emergency command center personnel assembled at the third mine, by Shaft No. 4, the nearest to the fire line.

  “The fire is nearing the mine’s extraction zone,” Aygul said. “If it gets there, then the mine passages will supply it with oxygen and multiply its strength considerably.… That’s the present situation.” He broke off, and glanced at the bureau director and the heads of the five mines uncomfortably, unwilling to violate the greatest taboo in mining.

  “And conditions in the shafts?” the director asked without emotion.

  “Excavation and extraction are proceeding as normal in eight shafts, primarily for stability’s sake,” the head of one mine said.

  “Shut down production altogether. Evacuate all staff in the shafts. Then…” The director paused and remained silent for a few seconds.

  Those few seconds felt immeasurably long.

  “Seal the shafts,” the director said at last, uttering the heartbreaking words.

  “No! You can’t!” The cry burst from Li Minsheng before he could stop himself. “What I mean is…” He grasped for counterlogic to present the director. “Sealing the shafts … sealing the shafts … will throw everything into chaos. And…”

  “Enough,” the director said with a gentle wave of his hand. His expression said everything: I know how you feel. I feel the same way. We all do.

  Li Minsheng crouched on the ground, head in hands, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. The mining leadership and engineers stood silently before the shaft. The cavernous entrance stared back at them like a giant eye, just as Shaft No. 2 had stared at Liu Xin two decades before.

  They shared a moment of silence for the century-old mine.

  After a while, the bureau’s chief engineer broke the silence with a low voice: “Let’s take up as much equipment as we can from down below.”

  “Then,” the mine chief said, “we ought to get together demolition squads.”

  The director nodded. “Time is of the essence. You get to work. I’ll file a request with the ministry.”

  The bureau party secretary said, “Can’t we use military engineers? If we use miners for the demolition squad, and anything happens…”

  “I’ve considered it,” said the director. “But we only have one detachment of military engineers at the moment, far too few even for one shaft. Besides, they’re not familiar with subterranean demolitions.”

  * * *

  Shaft No. 4, closest to the fire, was the first to shut down. When the tramloads of miners reached the entrance, they found a hundred-strong demolition squad waiting around a pile of drills. They inquired, but the demolition squad members didn’t know what they were expected to do; their orders were only to assemble beside the drilling equipment. Suddenly, their attention was seized by a convoy heading toward the entrance. The first truck bristled with armed police, who jumped down to secure a perimeter around a parking area for the vehicles that followed. When the eleven trucks stopped, the canvas was pulled back to reveal neat stacks of yellow wooden crates. The miners were stunned. They knew what was in these crates.

  Each crate held twenty-four kilos of ammonium nitrate fuel oil, fifty tons of it altogether in the ten trucks. The final, somewhat smaller truck carried a few bundles of bamboo strips for lashing the explosives together, and a pile of black plastic bags, which the miners knew held electronic detonators.

  Liu Xin and Li Minsheng hopped down from the cab of one of the trucks and saw the newly appointed captain of the demolition squad, a muscular, bearded man, coming their way with a roll of charts.

  “What are you making us do, Engineer Li?” the captain asked as he unrolled the paper.

  Li Minsheng pointed to a spot on the chart, his finger trembling slightly. “Three blast lines, each thirty-five meters long. Detailed positions are on the chart underneath. One-hundred-fifty-millimeter and seventy-five-millimeter boreholes, filled with twenty-eight kilos and fourteen kilos of explosives, respectively, at a density of…”

  “I’m asking, what are you trying to make us do?”

  Li Minsheng went silent and bowed his head under the captain’s fiery stare.

  The captain turned toward the crowd. “Brothers, they want us to blow up the tunnels!” he shouted. There was a moment of commotion among the miners, but a wall of armed police came forward in a semicircle to block the crowd from reaching the trucks. But the police line distorted under the pressure of the surging black human sea, until it was at the breaking point. All of this took place in a heavy silence, with the scuffle of footsteps and clack of gun bolts the only sounds. At the last moment, the crowd ceased its tumult as the director and mine head stepped up onto the bed of one of the trucks.

  “I started work in this mine when I was fifteen. Are you just going to destroy it?” shouted one old miner. The wrinkles carved into his face were visible even beneath the thick cover of coal dust.

  “What are we going to live on after it’s closed?”

  “Why are you blowing it up?”

  “Life in the mine was difficult enough without you all messing around.”

  The crowd exploded, waves of anger surging ever fiercer over the sea of coal-blackened faces flashing white teeth. The director waited silently until the crowd’s anger turned to restless movement, then, when it was just about t
o get out of control, he spoke.

  “Take a look in that direction,” he said, pointing to a small rise near the mine entrance. His voice was not loud, but it quieted the angry storm, and everyone looked where he was pointing.

  “We all call that the old coal column, but do you realize that when it was erected, it wasn’t a column, but a huge cube of coal? That was in the Qing Dynasty, more than a hundred years ago, when Governor Zhang Zhidong erected it at the founding of the mine. A century of wind and rain have weathered it into a column. Our mine has weathered so much wind and rain during that century, so many difficulties and disasters, more than anyone can remember. That’s more than a brief moment, comrades. That’s four or five generations! If there’s nothing else we’ve learned or remembered over the past century, then we must remember this—”

  The director raised his hands toward the sea of faces.

  “The sky won’t fall!”

  The crowd stood frozen. It seemed as if even their breathing had ceased.

  “Out of all of China’s industrial workers, all of its proletariat, none has a longer history than us. None has a history with more hardship and tumult than ours. Has the sky fallen for miners? No! That all of us can stand here and look at that old coal column is proof of that. Our sky won’t fall. It never did, and it never will!

  “Hardship? There’s nothing new about that, comrades. When have we miners ever had it easy? From the time of our ancestors, when have miners ever had an easy day in their lives? Rack your brains: Of all the industries and all the professions in China and the rest of the world, are any of them harder than ours? None. None at all. What’s new about hardship? If it were easy, now that would be surprising. We’re holding up both the sky and the earth! If we feared hardship, we’d have died out long ago.