To Hold Up the Sky

by Cixin Liu

  “But talented people have been thinking of solutions for us as society and science have advanced. Now we have a solution, one that has the hope of totally transforming our lives, bringing us out of the dark mines and into the sun to mine coal beneath blue skies! Miners will have the world’s most enviable job. This hope has now arrived. Don’t take my word for it, but look at the pillars of fire shooting skyward in the south valley. But these efforts have caused a catastrophe. We will explain all of this in detail later. Right now all you need to understand is that this may be the very last hardship for miners. This is the price for our wonderful tomorrow. So let’s stand together and face it. As so many generations have before—again, the sky hasn’t fallen!”

  The crowd dispersed in silence. Liu Xin said to the director, “I’ve known you and my father, and I can die without regret.”

  “Act, and think of nothing else,” the director said, clapping Liu Xin on the shoulder, then gripped him in an embrace.

  * * *

  The day after demolition work commenced on Shaft No. 4, Liu Xin and Li Minsheng walked side by side through the main tunnel, their footsteps echoing emptily. They were passing the first blast area, and in the dim light of their headlamps, they could see the boreholes densely distributed in the high ceiling, and the colorful waterfall of detonation wires streaming toward a pile on the floor.

  Li Minsheng said, “I used to hate the mine. Hate it, because it consumed my youth. But now I realize that I’ve become one with it. Hate it or love it, it’s what my youth was.”

  “We shouldn’t torture ourselves,” Liu Xin said. “We’ve done something with our lives, at least. If we’re not heroes, then at least we’ve gone down fighting.”

  They fell silent, realizing that they were talking about death.

  Then Aygul ran up, breathing hard. “Engineer Li, look at that,” he said, pointing at the ceiling. A few thick canvas hoses, used for ventilating the mine, were now limp and slack.

  Li Minsheng blanched. “Shit! When was ventilation cut off?”

  “Two hours ago.”

  Li Minsheng barked into his radio, and soon the chief of ventilation and two ventilation engineers showed up.

  “There’s no way to restore ventilation, Engineer Li. All of the equipment from down below—blowers, motors, anti-explosion switches, and even some pipes—have been taken out!” the ventilation chief said.

  “You fucking idiot! Who told you to take them out? Are you fucking suicidal?” Li Minsheng shouted, far past caring about decorum or professionalism.

  “Engineer Li, watch your language. Do you know who told us? The director expressly said for us to take out as much equipment as possible before the shaft is sealed. We all were at the meeting. We’ve been working day and night for two days and have taken out more than a million yuan worth of equipment. And now you’re cursing at us? What’s the point of ventilation anyway when the shaft’s going to be sealed?”

  Li Minsheng let out a long sigh. The truth of the situation had still not been disclosed, leading to this kind of coordination issue.

  “What’s the problem?” Liu Xin asked after the ventilation staff had left. “Shouldn’t the ventilation be stopped? Won’t that reduce the supply of oxygen to the mine?”

  “Dr. Liu, you’re a theoretical giant but a practical dwarf. You’re clueless in the face of reality. Like Engineer Li said, you only know how to dream!” Aygul said. He had not spoken courteously to Liu Xin since the fire had started.

  Li Minsheng explained, “This coal seam has a high incidence of gas. Once ventilation is shut off, the gas will quickly accumulate at the bottom of the shaft, and when the fire gets here, it may touch off an explosion powerful enough to blow out the seal. At the very least it will blow out new channels for oxygen. There’s no choice but to add another blast area.”

  “But Engineer Li, the two areas above us are only half done, and the third hasn’t even started. The fire is nearing the southern mining zone; there might not even be enough time to complete three zones.”

  “I…” Liu Xin said carefully. “I have an idea that may or may not work.”

  “Ha!” Aygul laughed coldly. “This is unprecedented. When has Dr. Liu ever been uncertain? When has Dr. Liu ever had to ask someone else before making a decision?”

  “What I mean is that we’ve got a blast zone already set up at this deep point. Can we detonate it first? That way, if there’s an explosion farther down the shaft, there will be one obstacle, at least.”

  “If that worked we would have done it already,” Li Minsheng said. “The blast will be large enough to fill the tunnels with toxic gas and dust that won’t disperse for a long time, impeding further work in the tunnels.”

  The ground fire’s advance was faster than anticipated. The construction group decided to detonate with only two blast zones in place, and ordered all personnel evacuated from the shaft as quickly as possible. It was near dark. They were standing around a chart in a production building not far off from the entrance, considering how to detonate at the shortest possible distance using a spur tunnel, when Li Minsheng suddenly said, “Listen!”

  A deep rumble was coming from somewhere below ground, as if the earth were belching. A few seconds later they heard it again.

  “Methane explosions. The fire has reached the mine,” Aygul said nervously.

  “Wasn’t it supposed to still be farther away?”

  No one answered. Liu Xin’s ground rats had been used up, and with the only sensing techniques now at their disposal it was difficult to precisely determine the fire’s position and speed.

  “Evacuate at once!”

  Li Minsheng snatched up his radio, but no matter how he shouted, there was no answer.

  “Before I came up, Chief Zhang was worried he’d smash a radio while working,” a miner from the demolition squad told him. “So he put them with the detonation wires. There are a dozen drills working simultaneously down there. It’s pretty loud!”

  Li Minsheng jumped up and dashed out of the building without even grabbing a helmet. He called a tram, then headed down the shaft at top speed. The moment the tram vanished into the shaft entrance, Liu Xin could see Li Minsheng waving at him, and there was a smile on his face. It had been a long time since he’d smiled.

  The ground belched a few more times, but then silence descended.

  “Did that series of explosions consume all of the methane in the mine?” Liu Xin asked an engineer standing beside him, who looked back at him in wonder.

  “Consume it all? You’ve got to be kidding. It will just release more methane from the seam.”

  A sky-spitting thunder rolled, as if the Earth itself were exploding under their feet. The mouth of the mine was engulfed in flames. The blast lifted Liu Xin up into the air, and the world spun madly about him. A mess of stones and crossties were thrown by the blast, and he saw a tramcar hurtle out of the flames, spit out of the entrance like an apple core. He landed heavily on the ground as rock rained down on him, and it felt as if each was coated in blood. He heard more deep rumbles, the sound of the explosives detonating in the mine. Before he lost consciousness, he saw the fire at the entrance disappear, replaced by thick clouds of smoke.…

  ONE YEAR LATER

  He walked as if through hell. Clouds of black smoke covered the sky, rendering the sun a barely visible disk of dark red. Static electricity from dust friction meant the smoke flickered with lightning, which lit up the hills above the ground fire with a blue light, exposing the image indelibly onto Liu Xin’s mind. Smoke issued from shaft openings that dotted the hills, the bottom of each column glowing a savage dark red from the ground fire before gradually blackening farther up the columns that swirled snakelike into the heavens.

  The road was bumpy, and the blacktop surface was melted enough that with every few steps it almost peeled the soles off his shoes. Refugees and their vehicles packed the roadway, all of them in masks against the stifling sulfurous air and the snowflake-like ash that fell end
lessly and turned their bodies white. Fully-armed soldiers kept order on the crowded road, and a helicopter cut through the smoke overhead, calling through a loudspeaker for no one to panic.… The exodus had begun in the winter and was initially planned to be completed in one year, but a sudden intensification of the ground fire meant they had to proceed more urgently. Chaos reigned. The court had repeatedly delayed Liu Xin’s hearing, but this morning he had been left unguarded in the detention center and had made his way uncertainly outside.

  The land around the road was parched and fractured into fissures filled with the same thick dust that billowed around him. A small pond steamed, its surface crammed with floating corpses of fish and frogs. It was the height of summer, but no stitch of green was visible. Grass was withered yellow and buried under dust. The trees were dead as well, and some were even smoking, their charcoal branches reaching toward the evening sky like grotesque hands. Smoke wafted from some of the windows of the empty buildings. He saw an astonishing number of rats, driven from their nests by the fire’s heat, crossing the road in waves.

  As he went farther into the hills, the heat became even more palpable, rising up around his ankles, and the air more choked and dirty.

  Even through his mask it was hard to breathe. The fire’s heat was not evenly distributed, and he instinctively skirted the most scorching places. It left him few paths. Where the fire was particularly fierce, the buildings had caught flame, and there were periodic crashes as structures collapsed.

  He had reached the mine entrances. He walked past a vertical shaft, now more of a chimney, its enormous rig red-hot under the heat and emitting a sharp hiss that made his skin crawl. He had to detour around its surging heat. The separator building was enveloped in smoke, and the piles of coal behind it had been burning for days. They had melted into a single enormous chunk of glowing coal flickering with flames.…

  There was no one here. The soles of his feet were burning, the sweat had almost dried off his body, his difficulty breathing pushed him to the edge of shock, but his mind was clear. With his last ounce of strength he walked toward his destination. The mouth of the shaft, glowing red from the fire within, beckoned to him. He had made it. He smiled.

  He turned in the direction of the production building. The roof might be smoking but it was not on fire, at least. He walked through the open door and entered the long changing room. Light from the shaft fire shining through the window filled the room with a hazy red glow and caused everything to shimmer, including the line of lockers. He walked along the long row, inspecting the numbers until he found the one he wanted.

  He remembered it from his childhood: His father had just been appointed head of extraction, the wildest team, well-known for being hard to handle. Those rough young workers had been dismissive of his father at first, because of the way he had timidly asked for a detached locker door to be nailed back in place before their first prework meeting. The crew had mostly ignored him, apart from a few insults, but his father had said only, “Then give me some nails and I’ll put it up myself.” Someone tossed him a few nails, and he said, “And a hammer too.” This time they really ignored him. But then they suddenly fell quiet, and watched in awe as his father pressed the nails into the wood with a bare thumb. At once the atmosphere changed, and the workers lined up and listened respectfully to his father’s prework talk.…

  The locker wasn’t locked, and upon opening it, Liu Xin found it still contained clothes. He smiled again, at the thought of the miners who had used his father’s locker over the past two decades. He took out the clothes and put them on, first the thick work trousers, then the equally thick jacket. The uniform smeared with layers of mud and coal dust had a sharp odor of sweat and oil that was surprisingly familiar, and a sense of peace came over him.

  He put on the boots, picked up the helmet, took the lantern out of the locker, wiped the dust off of it with his sleeve, and clipped it to the helmet. There were no batteries, so he looked in the next locker, which had one. He strapped the bulky lantern battery to his waist, then realized that it was drained: work had been halted for a year, after all. But he remembered where the lamp shop was, directly opposite the changing room, where in his youth female workers would spray the batteries with smoking sulfuric acid to charge them. That was impossible now; the lamp shop was shrouded in yellow sulfuric acid smoke. He solemnly put on the lamp-equipped helmet and walked over to a dust-covered mirror. There, in the flickering red light, he saw his father.

  “Dad, I’ll go down below in your place,” he said with a smile, then strode out toward the smoking mouth of the shaft.

  A helicopter pilot recalled later that during a low-altitude flyby of Shaft No. 2, a final sweep of the area, he thought he saw someone near the opening, a black silhouette against the red glow of the ground fire. The figure seemed to be heading down the shaft, but in the next instant there was only red light, and nothing else.

  120 YEARS LATER

  (A MIDDLE-SCHOOL STUDENT’S JOURNAL)

  People really were dumb in the past, and they really had a tough time.

  Do you know how I know? Today we visited the Mining Museum. What impressed me the most was this:

  They had solid coal!

  First, we had to put on weird clothing: there was a helmet, which had a light on it, connected by a wire to a rectangular object that we hung at our waists. I thought it was a computer at first (even if it was a little large), but it turned out to be a battery for the light. A battery that big could power a racing car, but they used it for a tiny light. We also put on tall rain boots. The teacher told us this was the uniform that early coal miners used for going down the mines. Someone asked what “down the mines” meant, and the teacher said we’d find out soon enough.

  We boarded a metallic, small-gauge segmented vehicle, like an early train, only much smaller and powered by an overhead wire. The vehicle started up and soon we entered the black mouth of a cave. It was very dark inside, with only an occasional dim lamp above us. Our headlamps were weak as well, only enough to make out the faces right beside us. The wind was strong and whistled in our ears; it felt like we were dropping into an abyss.

  “We’re going down the mine now, students!” the teacher said.

  After a long while, the vehicle stopped. We passed from this relatively wide tunnel into a considerably thinner and smaller spur, and if not for my helmet, I would have knocked a few lumps in my head. Our headlamps created small patches of light but we couldn’t see anything clearly. Students shouted that they were scared.

  After a while, the space opened up in front of us. Here the ceiling was supported by lots of columns. Opposite us, there were many points of light shining from lamps like the ones on our helmets. As we drew closer, I saw lots of people were at work, some of them making holes in the cave wall with a long-bore drill. The drills were powered by some sort of engine whose sound made my skin crawl. Other people with metal shovels were shoveling some sort of black material into railcars and leather satchels. Clouds of dust occasionally blocked them, and lanterns cast shafts of light through the dust.

  “Students, we’re now in what’s called the ore zone. What you see is a scene of early mining work.”

  A few miners came toward us. I knew they were holograms, so I didn’t move out of the way. Some of them passed through me, so I could see them very clearly, and I was astonished.

  “Did China hire black people to mine coal?”

  “To answer that question,” the teacher said, “we’ll have a real experience of the air of the ore zone. Please take out your breathing masks from your bags.”

  We put on our masks, and heard the teacher say, “Please remember that this is real, not a hologram.”

  A cloud of black dust came toward us. In the beams from our headlamps I was shocked to see the thick cloud of particles sparkling. Then someone started to scream, and like a chorus, a lot of other kids screamed as well. I turned to laugh at them, but I, too, yelped when I got a look: Everyone was complet
ely black, apart from the portion the masks covered. Then I heard another shout that turned my hair on end: It was the teacher’s voice!

  “My god, Seya! You don’t have your mask on!”

  Seya hadn’t put on his mask, and now he was as completely black as the holographic miners. “You said over and over in history class that the key goal was to get a feel for the past. I wanted a real feel!” he said, his teeth flashing white on his black face.

  An alarm sounded somewhere, and within a minute, a teardrop-shaped micro-hovercar stopped soundlessly in front of us, an unpleasant intrusion of something modern. Two doctors got out. By now, all of the real coal dust had been sucked away, leaving only the holographic dust floating around us, so their white coats stayed spotless as they passed through it. They pulled Seya off to the car.

  “Child,” one doctor said, looking straight into his eyes. “Your lungs have been seriously harmed. You’ll have to be hospitalized for at least a week. We’ll notify your parents.”

  “Wait!” Seya shouted, his hands fumbling with the rebreather. “Did miners a hundred years ago wear these?”

  “Shut your mouth and go to the hospital,” the teacher said. “Why can’t you ever just follow the rules?”

  “We’re human, just like our ancestors. Why…”

  Seya was shoved into the car before he could finish. “This is the first time the museum has had this kind of accident,” a doctor said severely, pointing at the teacher and adding, before getting into the hovercar, “This falls on you!” The hovercar left as silently as it had come.

  We continued our tour. The chastened teacher said, “Every kind of work in the mine was fraught with danger, and required enormous physical energy. For example, these iron supports had to be retrieved after extraction in this zone was completed, in a process called support removal.”

  We saw a miner with an iron hammer striking an iron pin in one of the supports, buckling it in two. Then he carried it off. Me and a boy tried to pick up another support that was lying on the ground, but it was ridiculously heavy. “Support removal was a dangerous job, since the roof overhead could collapse at any time…”