by Cixin Liu
“Why?” someone asked.
“Excessively realistic, too reliant on form and detail. Besides space, there’s nothing in the universe. The actual world is just a big pile of curved spaces. Once you understand this, you’ll see how risible these works are. However, hm, this piece moves me a little.”
Just as the voice faded away, a delicate thread extended from the snowflakes around the ball of ice, as if it flowed down following an invisible funnel. The snowflake thread stretched from midair to the top of Yan Dong’s ice sculpture before dissolving. Yan Dong stood on her tiptoes, and tentatively stretched a gloved hand toward the snowflake thread. As she neared it, her fingers felt that burning sensation again. She jerked her hand back, but it was already painfully cold inside the glove.
“Are you pointing to my work?” Yan Dong rubbed her frozen hand with the other. “I, I didn’t use traditional methods. That is, carve it from ready-made blocks of ice. Instead, I built a structure composed of several large membranes. For a long time, steam produced from boiling water rose from the bottom of the structure. The steam froze to the membrane, forming a complex crystal. Once the crystal grew thick enough, I got rid of the membrane and the result is what you see here.”
“Very good. So interesting. It so expresses the beauty of the cold. The inspiration for this work comes from…”
“Windowpanes! I don’t know whether you will be able to understand my description: When you wake during a hard winter’s night just before sunrise, your bleary gaze falls on the windowpane filled with crystals. They reflect the dark blue first light of early dawn, as though they were something you dreamed up overnight.…”
“Yes, yes, I understand!” The snowflakes around the low-temperature artist danced in a lively pattern. “I have been inspired. I want to create! I must create!”
“The Songhua River is that way. You can select a block of ice, or…”
“What? Your form of art is as pitiable as bacteria. Do you think my form of low-temperature art is anything like that? This place doesn’t have the sort of ice I need.”
The ice sculptors on the ground looked bewildered at the interstellar low-temperature artist. Yan Dong said, blankly, “Then, you want to go…”
“I want to go to the ocean!”
Collecting Ice
An immense fleet of airplanes flew at an altitude of five kilometers along the coastline. This was the most motley collection of airplanes in history. It was composed of all types, ranging from Boeing jumbo jets to mosquito-like light aircraft. Every major press service in the world had dispatched news planes. In addition, research organizations and governments had dispatched observation planes. This chaotic air armada trailed closely behind a short wake of thick white vapor, like a flock of sheep chasing after its shepherd. The wake was left by the low-temperature artist. It constantly urged the planes behind it to fly faster. To wait for them, it had to endure a rate of flight slower than crawling. (For someone who jumped through space-time at will, light speed was already crawling.) The whole way, it grumbled that this pace would kill its inspiration.
In the airplanes behind it, reporters rattled away, asking endless questions over the radio. The low-temperature artist had no desire to answer any of them. It was only interested in talking to Yan Dong, sitting in the Harbin Y-12 that China Central Television had rented. As a result, the reporters grew quiet. They listened carefully to the conversation between the two artists.
“Is your home within the Milky Way?” Yan Dong asked. The Harbin Y-12 was the plane closest to the low-temperature artist. She could see the flying ball of ice intermittently through the white vapor. This wake trailing it was formed from oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere condensing in the ultralow temperatures around the ice ball. Sometimes, the plane would accidentally brush the wake’s billows of white mist. A thick coat of frost would immediately coat the plane’s windows.
“My home isn’t part of any galaxy. It sits in the vast and empty void between galaxies.”
“Your planet must be extremely cold.”
“We don’t have a planet. The low-temperature civilization developed in a cloud of dark matter. That realm is indeed extremely cold. With difficulty, life snatched a little heat from the near-absolute-zero environment. It sucked in every thread of radiation that came from distant stars. Once the low-temperature civilization learned how to leave, we couldn’t wait to go to the closest warm planet in the Milky Way. On this world, we had to maintain a low-temperature environment to live, so we became that warm planet’s low-temperature artists.”
“The low-temperature art you’re talking about is sculpting ice and snow?”
“Oh, no. No. Using a temperature far lower than a world’s mean temperature to affect the world so as to produce artistic effects, this is all part of the low-temperature art. Sculpting ice and snow is just the low-temperature art that suits this world. The temperature of ice and snow is what this world considers a low temperature. For a dark-matter world, that would be a high temperature. For a stellar world, lava would be considered low-temperature material.”
“We seem to overlap in what art we consider beautiful.”
“That’s not unusual. So-called warmth is just a brief effect of an equally brief spasm produced after the universe was born. It’s gone in an instant like light after sunset. Energy dissipates. Only the cold is eternal. The beauty of the cold is the only enduring beauty.”
“So you’re saying the final fate of the universe is heat death?!” Yan Dong heard someone ask over her earpiece. Later, she learned the speaker was a theoretical physicist sitting in one of the planes following behind.
“No digressions. We will discuss only art,” the low-temperature artist scolded.
“The ocean is below us!” Yan Dong happened to glance out the porthole. The crooked coastline passed below.
“Further ahead, we’ll reach the deepest part of the ocean. That will be the most convenient place to collect ice.”
“Where will there be ice?” Yan Dong asked, uncomprehending, as she looked at the vast, blue ocean.
“Wherever a low-temperature artist goes, there will be ice.”
* * *
The low-temperature artist flew for another hour. Yan Dong stared out the window as they traveled. The view had long become a boundless surface of water. At that moment, the plane suddenly pulled up. She nearly blacked out from acceleration.
“We almost hit it!” the pilot shouted.
The low-temperature artist had stopped suddenly. Taken by surprise, the planes behind it scrambled to change direction.
“Damn it! The law of inertia doesn’t apply to the fucker. Its speed seemed to drop to zero in an instant. By all rights, this sort of deceleration should have cracked the ball of ice into pieces,” the pilot said to Yan Dong.
As he spoke, he steered the plane around. The other pilots did the same. The ball of ice, rotating majestically, lingered in midair. It produced oxygen and nitrogen snowflakes, but due to strong wind at the altitude, the snowflakes were all blown away. They seemed like white hair whirling in the wind around the ball of ice.
“I am about to create!” the low-temperature artist said. Without waiting for Yan Dong to respond, it suddenly dropped straight down as if the giant invisible hand that had held it suddenly let it go. It free-fell faster and faster until it disappeared into the blue backdrop that was the ocean, leaving only a faint thread of atoms stretching down from midair. A ring of white spray shot up from the sea surface. When it fell, a wave spread out in a circle on the water.
“This alien threw itself into the ocean and committed suicide,” the pilot said to Yan Dong.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Yan Dong stretched out her Northeastern accent and glared at the pilot. “Fly a little lower. The ball of ice will float back up any moment now.”
But the ball of ice didn’t float back up. In its place, a white dot appeared on the ocean. It quickly expanded into a disk. The plane descended and Yan Dong c
ould observe in detail.
The white disk was actually a white fog that covered the ocean. Soon, between its quick expansion and the airplane’s continued descent, the only ocean she could see oozed a white fog from its surface. A noise from the sea covered the roaring of the plane’s engine. It sounded both like rolling thunder and the cracking of the plains and mountains.
The airplane hovered close to sea level. Yan Dong peered at the surface of the ocean below the fog. The light the ocean reflected was mild, not like moments ago when glints of gold had slashed Yan Dong’s eyes. The ocean grew deeper in color. Its rough waves grew level and smooth. What shocked her, though, was the next discovery: The waves became solid and motionless.
“Good heavens. The ocean froze!”
“Are you crazy?” The pilot turned his head to look at Yan Dong.
“See for yourself.… Hey! Why are you still descending? Do you want to land on the ice?!”
The pilot yanked the control stick. Once again, the world in front of Yan Dong grew black. She heard the pilot say, “Ah, no, fuck, how strange…” The pilot looked as though he were sleepwalking. “I wasn’t descending. The ocean, no, the ice is rising by itself!”
At that moment, Yan Dong heard the low-temperature artist’s voice: “Get your flying machine out of the way. Don’t block the path of the rising ice. If there weren’t a colleague in the flying machine, I would simply crash into you. I can’t stand disruptions to my inspiration while I’m creating. Fly west, fly west, fly west. That direction is closer to the edge.”
“Edge? The edge of what?” Yan Dong asked.
“The cube of ice I’m taking!”
Planes took off like a flock of startled birds, climbing into the sky and heading in the direction the low-temperature artist indicated. Below, because the white fog created by the temperature drop had dissipated, the dark blue ice field stretched to the horizon. Even though the plane was climbing, the ice field climbed even faster. As a result, the distance between the planes and the ice field continued to shrink.
“The Earth is chasing us!” the pilot screamed.
The plane now flew pressed against the ice field. Frozen dark blue waves roiled past the plane’s wings.
The pilot yelled, “We have no choice but to land on the ice field. My god, climbing and landing at the same time. That’s just too strange.”
Just at that moment, the Harbin Y-12 reached the end of the ice. A straight edge swept past the fuselage. Below them, liquid sea reemerged, rippling and shimmering. It was like what a fighter jet saw the instant it leapt off the deck of an aircraft carrier, except the “aircraft carrier” was several kilometers tall.
Yan Dong snapped her head around. Behind them, an immense, dark blue cliff could be seen. The bottom of the massive block of ice had cleared the ocean.
As the chunk of ice continued to rise, Yan Dong finally understood what the low-temperature artist had meant: This was literally a giant block of ice. The dark blue cube occupied two-thirds of the sky. Afterward, radar observation indicated that the block of ice was sixty kilometers long, twenty kilometers wide, and five kilometers tall, a thin and flat cuboid. Its flat surface reflected the sunlight, like streaks of eye-piercing lightning high in the sky.
The giant block of ice kept rising, casting an unimaginably large shadow onto the sea. And when it shifted, it revealed the most terrifying sight since the dawn of history.
The planes were flying over a long, narrow basin, the empty space in the ocean that was left once the giant block of ice was removed. On each side was a mountain of seawater five kilometers high. Hundred-meter-high waves surged at the bottom of these liquid cliffs. At the top, the cliffs were collapsing, advancing as they did. Their surface rippled, but they remained perpendicular to the seafloor. As the seawater cliffs advanced, the basin shrank.
This was the reverse of Moses parting the Red Sea.
What startled Yan Dong the most was how slow the entire process seemed. This was, she assumed, due to the scale. She’d seen the Huangguoshu waterfalls. The water had seemed to fall slowly there, too. And these cliffs of seawater before her were magnitudes larger than those waterfalls. Watching them felt like an endless moment of unparalleled wonder.
The shadow cast by the block of ice had completely disappeared. Yan Dong looked up. The block of ice was now just the size of two full moons.
As the two seawater cliffs advanced, the basin shrank into a canyon. Then the two seawater cliffs, tens of kilometers long, five thousand meters high, crashed into each other. An incredible roar echoed between the sea and sky. The space in the ocean the ice block left was gone.
“We aren’t dreaming, are we?” Yan Dong said to herself.
“If this were a dream, everything would be fine. Look!”
The pilot pointed below. Where the two cliffs had crashed into each other, the sea hadn’t yet settled. Two waves as long as those cliffs rose, as if they were the reincarnation of those two seawater cliffs on the sea’s surface. They parted, heading in opposite directions. From high above, the waves weren’t that impressive, but careful measurements showed they were over two hundred meters tall. Viewed from up close, they’d seem like two moving mountain ranges.
“Tidal waves?” Yan Dong asked.
“Yes. Could be the largest ever. The coast is in for a disaster.”
Yan Dong looked up. She could no longer see the frozen block in the blue sky. According to radar, it had become an ice satellite of Earth.
* * *
For the rest of the day, the low-temperature artist removed, in the same way, hundreds of blocks of ice of the same size from the Pacific Ocean. It sent them into orbit around the Earth.
By nightfall, a cluster of twinkling points could be seen flying across the sky every couple of hours. You could distinguish them from the usual stars because, on careful inspection, someone could make out the shape of each point. They were each a small cuboid. They all, in their own orientations, spun on their own axes. As a result, they reflected the sunlight and twinkled at different rates.
People thought for a long time, but were never quite able to adequately describe these small objects in space. Finally, a reporter came up with an analogy that got some traction.
“They’re like a handful of crystalline dominoes scattered by a space giant.”
A Dialogue Between Two Artists
“We ought to have a chat,” Yan Dong said.
“I asked you to come just to do that, but only about art,” the low-temperature artist said.
Yan Dong stood on a giant block of ice suspended five thousand meters in the air. The low-temperature artist had invited her here. The helicopter that had brought her had landed and now waited to the side. Its rotors were still spinning, ready to take off at any moment.
Ice fields stretched to the horizon on all sides. The ice surface reflected the dazzling sunlight. The layer of blue ice below her seemed bottomless. At this altitude, the sky was clear and boundless. The wind blew stiffly.
This was one of the five thousand giant blocks of ice the low-temperature artist had taken from the oceans. Over the past five days, it had taken, on average, one thousand blocks a day from the oceans and sent them into orbit. All across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, giant blocks of ice were being frozen and then carried into the air to become one of an increasing number of glittering “space dominoes.” Tidal waves assaulted every major city along the world’s coasts. Over time, though, these disasters became less frequent. The reason was simple: The sea level had dropped.
Earth’s oceans had become blocks of ice revolving around it.
Yan Dong stamped her feet on the hard ice surface. “Such a large block of ice, how did you freeze it in an instant? How did you do it in one piece without it cracking? What force are you using to send it into orbit? All of this is beyond our understanding and imagination.”
The low-temperature artist said, “This is nothing. In the course of creation, we’ve often destroyed stars! Didn’t we agree
to discuss only art? I, creating art in this way, you, using small knives and shovels to carve ice sculptures, from the view from the perspective of art, aren’t all that different.”
“When those ice blocks orbiting in space are exposed to intense sunlight, why don’t they melt?”
“I covered every ice block with a layer of extremely thin, transparent, light-filtering membrane. It only allows cold light, whose frequencies don’t generate heat, to get into the block of ice. The frequencies that do generate heat are all reflected. As a result, the block of ice doesn’t melt. This is the last time I’ll answer this sort of question. I didn’t stop work to discuss these trivial things. From now on, we’ll discuss only art, or else you might as well leave. We’ll no longer be colleagues and friends.”
“In that case, how much ice do you ultimately plan to take from the oceans? This is surely relevant to the creation of art!”
“Of course, I’ll only take as much as there is. I’ve talked to you before about my design. I’d like to realize it perfectly. Initially, I planned to take ice from Jupiter’s satellites if it had turned out that Earth’s oceans aren’t enough, but it seems there’s enough to make do.”
The wind mussed Yan Dong’s hair. She smoothed it back into place. The cold at this altitude made her shiver. “Is art important to you?”
“It’s everything.”
“But … there are other things in life. For example, we still need to work to survive. I’m an engineer at the Changchun Institute of Optics. I can only make art in my spare time.”
The low-temperature artist’s voice rumbled from the depths of the ice. The vibrating ice surface tickled Yan Dong’s feet. “Survival. Ha! It’s just the diaper of a civilization’s infancy that needs to be changed. Later, that’s as easy as breathing. You’ll forget there ever was a time when it took effort to survive.”
“What about societal and political matters?”