by Cixin Liu
Then, the sky suddenly shook behind us with a loud boom, immediately followed by continuing rumbling and more shaking. Kayoko, under the impression that a meteor had hit the plane, screamed in fear and jumped almost right into my arms.
Just then the captain's voice came through the speakers. “To all passengers; please do not panic. That was the sonic boom of a meteor breaking the sound barrier. I do ask everyone to use their headphones in order to avoid permanent hearing loss. Because the flight's continued safety cannot be guaranteed, we will make an emergency landing in Hawaii.”
As the captain spoke, I saw a meteor much larger than the others fall. As I watched the fireball plummet, I became convinced that it would not burn up in the sky like the ones before it. Sure enough, it sped across half the sky and while it shrunk smaller and smaller, it struck the frozen ocean in the end. Looking at it from 30,000 feet, the point of impact was just a small white dot. But that white dot immediately spread into a white circle, rapidly expanding across the ocean's surface.
“Is that a wave?” Kayoko asked me, her voice quivering.
“It is a wave, a hundreds of feet high wave,” I answered. ”But the ocean is frozen. The ice cover will soon weaken it.” I had concluded with the last part, trying to calm myself, no longer looking down.
We soon landed in Honolulu, where the local government had already arranged to take us to a subterranean city. Our bus traveled along the shore, giving us a glimpse at a sky covered in meteors. From here it looked as if a legion of fiery-haired demons had all at once burst from a single point in space.
One meteor hit the ocean not far from the shore. There was no column of water; instead we saw steam rise to form a giant white mushroom cloud above the impact site. The swell of it surged to the shore under the frozen surface as thick layers of ice shattered with loud thunder. The ice rolled like waves, as if a school of giant, sinuous sea monsters was swimming under the surface toward the shore.
“How big was that one?” I asked the official who had come to pick us up.
“Less than a dozen pounds, no bigger than your head,” he told us. “But I have just been informed that a twenty-ton one is going down over the ocean five hundred miles north of us.” His wrist communicator began beeping. He glimpsed at it and then immediately told the driver, “We won't make it to Gate 244; just head for the closest entrance!”
The bus turned a corner and stopped in front of an entrance to the subterranean city. As we got out we saw a group of soldiers at the entrance. They stood motionless, staring into the distance, their eyes filled with dread. We followed their gaze to the horizon where the ocean joined the sky. There we saw a black barrier. At first glance, it looked like a low layer of clouds on the horizon, but its height was far too even for it to be a “layer of clouds”. It was more like a long wall lying across the horizon. On longer inspection, we could make out a gleam of white on top of that wall.
“What is that?” Kayoko asked an officer, a soft fear in her voice.
His answer made every hair on my body stand on end. “A wave.”
The tall metal gates of the subterranean city were shut with a rumble. About ten minutes later we felt and heard a low rumble emanate from the surface, as if a titan was rolling about on the ground far above. We looked at each other, our faces blank with dismay, for we all knew that a 300-foot wave was now rolling over Hawaii. Before long it would impact every continent; but the shocks that followed provided for an even greater terror. It was as if a giant fist had reached from the heavens and had begun pounding the Earth. Underground these shocks were faint, hardly noticeable, but each tremor shook our very souls. It was meteors, unceasingly striking the Earth without mercy.
This brutal bombardment of our planet continued intermittently for an entire week. When we finally left the subterranean city, Kayoko shouted, “Heavens, what happened to the sky?”
All above us was gray; gray because the upper atmosphere was filled with the dust that had been kicked up as the asteroids impacted the dry land. Sun and stars had disappeared behind this endless gray, as if the entire universe had been covered with a dense fog. On the surface, the water left behind by the billowing waves had frozen solid, covering those lonely buildings fortunate enough to survive with long veils of ice. The falling impact dust had also covered the frozen ocean, leaving a monochrome world. A world of gray.
Kayoko and I continued our return to Asia with the very next flight. As the plane crossed the now long meaningless international dateline, we witnessed humanity's darkest night. It was as if the plane had dived into inky depths. Not a single ray of light could be seen in the world outside the window. And with this world, our moods turned pitch black.
“When will it end?” Kayoko mumbled into the dark.
I did not know whether she meant our journey or our miserable and adversity-ridden life. It wouldn't have mattered anyway; at that moment, both seemed equally everlasting. Even if the Earth made it beyond the reach of the helium flash and we escaped with our lives, so what? We would just have made it onto the first rung of an unfathomably tall ladder. Even if, in a hundred generations, our descendants should see the light of new life, our bones would have long turned to dust. I could not even dare think of all our future suffering and deprivations, much less dare consider that I would be dragging my wife and child along that endless, muddy road with me.
I was tired, too tired to go on …
Just as despair and sorrow threatened to suffocate me, I heard a woman cry out: “Ah! No! You can't, love!”
As I turned to look, I saw a woman a few rows away from us. She held a gun that she had wrestled from the hands of the man next to her. It was apparent that he had just attempted to put the gun's barrel to his temple. The man looked wane and emaciated, his dull and lifeless eyes staring out into infinity. The woman buried her head in his lap and began to sob.
“Quiet,” the man said, devoid of all emotion.
The sobbing stopped, leaving only the sound of the engine softly humming a funeral dirge. In my mind the plane was stuck in the vast blackness surrounding us. We seemed absolutely motionless. All that was left in the entire universe was the darkness and us, nothing else. Kayoko pressed herself tightly into my embrace, her entire body ice-cold.
Suddenly, a commotion started in the front of the cabin and people began whispering excitedly. I looked out the window to see a dim light emerge from the darkness in front of the plane. The light was blue and formless, spreading uniformly through the impact dust suffused sky.
It was the glow of the Earth Engines.
A third of the Western Hemisphere's Earth Engines had been destroyed by the meteorite strikes — fewer losses than the calculations projected at the start of our journey. The Earth Engines of the Eastern Hemisphere had suffered no losses, being on the reverse side of the impacts. In terms of power, there was nothing stopping the Earth from completing its escape.
The dim light before us left me feeling like a deep sea diver finally seeing the light of the surface after a long ascent from the abyss. I began to breathe easy again. Behind me, I heard the woman's voice.
“My dear, we can only feel fear and pain while we are alive,” she said. “Death…death leaves nothing. On the other side there is only darkness. It is better to be alive, wouldn't you say?”
The thin man did not reply. He was staring at the blue glow, tears welling in his eyes. I knew that he would be able to hold on; we would all be able to hold on, just as long as that promising blue light remained. Watching him and the glow, I remembered my father's words of hope.
After we landed, Kayoko and I did not go directly to our new home in the subterranean city. Instead, we went to visit my father at his surface-side space fleet base. When we arrived, however, all that remained of him was a posthumously awarded medal, cold as ice. I was given the medal by a rear admiral of the fleet. He told me that it happened during the operation to clear the asteroids in Earth's path. An anti-matter explosion had blasted an asteroid fragmen
t straight into my father's single-seater.
“When it happened, the relative speed of rock and spaceship had been sixty miles per second,” the officer told me. “The collision instantly vaporized his micro space-ship. He did not experience any pain; I can assure you, there was no pain.”
When the Earth again began its descent toward the Sun, Kayoko and I ascended to the surface to see the spring. But there was none.
The world was still a vista of gray below the gloomy sky. On the surface, frozen lakes had formed from the residual ocean water, but nowhere was there even a speck of green. The impact dust in the atmosphere blocked the Sun's rays, preventing the temperature from rising. The surface and oceans did not even thaw at the perihelion. All throughout, the Sun remained a faint, dim glow, a ghost looming beyond the impact dust.
Three years later, the impact dust had at last begun to dissipate and humanity was finally approaching its ultimate perihelion. As we reached it, those living on the Eastern Hemisphere had the joy of seeing our world's fastest sunrise and sunset. The Sun leapt from the horizon, only to streak across the sky. The angle of all of Earth's shadows changed so quickly that they looked like the sweeping hands of countless clocks, racing around their imaginary chapter rings with manic determination. It was Earth's shortest day, over in less than an hour.
After that hour, the Sun plummeted back below the horizon and darkness fell across the Earth. I was left with a feeling of sadness. This fleeting day had been like an all too brief synopsis of Earth's 4.5 billion year history in the solar system. And until the end of the universe, Earth would not return.
“The dark has fallen,” Kayoko said then, stricken with grief.
“The longest night,” I replied. We had entered a night that would last 2,500 years. Not until a hundred generations later would the first light of Proxima Centauri again illuminate our hemisphere. The other side of the world was facing the longest day. Even so, it would last just a moment when compared to the age-long night. The Sun would quickly rise to its zenith, where it would remain, motionless, slowly shrinking. Half a century later, it would be difficult to pick out from among the surrounding stars.
The Earth's intended path led it straight to a rendezvous with Jupiter. The Navigation Committee plan was as follows: The Earth's fifteenth orbit would be so elliptical that the aphelion would reach Jupiter's orbit. There Earth would brush past Jupiter, nearly colliding with the giant planet. Using Jupiter's enormous gravity to assist its acceleration, Earth would finally achieve escape velocity.
We first caught sight of Jupiter two months after passing the perihelion. At first the naked eye could only see it as a dim point of light. Soon however, it grew into a small disk. Another month passed and Jupiter had grown to the size of Earth's lost Moon, but it was a sphere of dark crimson, not glowing silver. Already, one could faintly make out its bands. Then some of the Earth Engines beams, all of which had been perpendicular to the Earth for 15 years, began to tilt. Final adjustments were made to the Earth's angle as we approached our cosmic rendezvous.
Jupiter slowly sank below the horizon and three months later it vanished altogether. Now it was visible only to the Western Hemisphere and we knew that two planets had just met.
It almost came as a surprise, when one day we heard that Jupiter would again be visible from the Eastern Hemisphere. Throng upon throng made their way to the surface to witness the cosmic display. When I passed through the gates of the subterranean city and reached the surface, I saw that the Earth Engines that had driven our planet for 15 long years had all fallen completely silent.
Once again, we could see the starlit sky. Our final rendezvous with Jupiter was already in progress.
Everyone nervously stared toward the west as a dim red glow began to appear beyond the horizon. This glow slowly grew, stretching across the entire width of the horizon. Only then did I realize that a neat border had formed between the dim red light and the starry sky. The border was curved, its arc so massive that it spanned from one end of the horizon to the other. Ever so slowly it rose, and as it did, everything below the arc turned dim red. It was as if a theater curtain the size of the night sky was being raised to separate the Earth from the rest of the universe. I could not help but gasp as this occurred to me; that dim red curtain was Jupiter! Of course I knew that Jupiter was 1,300 times the volume of Earth, but only when I saw its immense splendor did I truly take in its incredible size. It is almost impossible to express the horrible feeling of oppression that this cosmic monster engendered as it rose across the entire horizon.
One reporter later wrote, “I could not help but wonder if I had woken in my own nightmare or if the entire universe is but a nightmare in the gigantic mind of that god!” As Jupiter continued its terrible rise, it gradually occupied half of the sky. We could then clearly see the tempests raging in its cloud layers; chaotic, swirling lines of those storms dazed all who beheld their maddening dance. As I stared, I recalled the boiling oceans of liquid hydrogen and liquid helium that lay beneath those thick cloud layers.
Then the famous great red spot of Jupiter rose, the cyclopean maelstrom that had raged for hundreds of thousands of years. It was large enough to swallow our insignificant planet three times over.
Jupiter now filled the entire sky. Earth seemed to be no more than a balloon, bobbing on Jupiter's boiling ocean of dim red clouds! Even worse, Jupiter's giant red spot had come to occupy the middle of our new heaven, like a titanic red eye staring at our world. All of Earth was shrouded in its ghastly red light; in that moment it was impossible for anyone to believe that our tiny Earth could escape the gravitational pull of that enormous monster. For us, it was not even imaginable that Earth could become Jupiter's satellite; we would certainly plummet straight into the inferno concealed beneath that boundless ocean of clouds!
But the navigator's calculations were exact. That bewildering, dim red heaven slowly began to move and, after some indeterminable time, the western sky began to reveal a black crescent. This black quickly grew in size and within it stars began to twinkle; Earth was rushing out of Jupiter's gravitational clutches.
As Earth escaped, sirens began to wail. The gravitational tide that Jupiter had drawn toward itself was rushing back to land. Later I learned that great waves reaching higher than 300 feet had again swept across the continents. As the waters rushed toward the sealed gates of the subterranean cities, I stole one last glimpse at Jupiter, now filling but half of the sky. As I did, I could clearly see streaks marring the planet's cloud oceans. Subsequently, I came to realize, that they had been the result of Earth's own gravitational pull; our planet, too, had caused massive waves on the Jupiter's liquid hydrogen and helium oceans.
Then the Earth, accelerated by Jupiter's gravitational forces, was hurled into deep space.
As we left Jupiter, the Earth reached escape velocity. It no longer needed to return, to lurk within the grasp of the doomed Sun. It was flying toward the vastness of outer space, to begin its long Wandering Age.
It was under the dark red shadow of Jupiter that my son was born, deep beneath the Earth.
CHAPTER
3
Rebellion
After leaving Jupiter behind, the more than 10,000 Asian Earth Engines again began firing at full power, and this time they would not stop for 500 years as they perpetually accelerated Earth toward its destination. In these 500 years, half of Asia's mountains would be consumed, burnt in the Earth Engine's nuclear fire.
Humanity was free, free from the dread of death that had been our constant companion for more than 400 years. What followed was one long, deep, and collective sigh of relief. But the revelry that everyone had expected never materialized. What in fact followed was beyond anything what anyone could have ever imagined.
After our subterranean city's celebratory rally had ended, I donned my thermal suit and ascended to the surface, alone. The mountains of my childhood had already been leveled by the super-excavators, leaving only bare rock face and frozen Earth. Th
e bleak emptiness was broken by splotches of stark white that covered the land as far as the eye could see; the salt marshes left behind by the great ocean tide. Before me loomed the city of my father and my grandfather. What had once been a home to 10 million now lay in a pile of ruins. The Earth Engines' blue glow dragged long shadows from the exposed steel skeletons of the city's skyscrapers as they reached from the Earth like the fossil remains of prehistoric beasts.
The repeated floods and meteorite strikes had destroyed virtually everything that had once stood on the Earth's surface. All that humankind and nature had wrought over millennia lay in ruins. Our world had been reduced to a Mars-like desolation.
Shortly thereafter I noticed that Kayoko had become restless. She would often leave our son to fly off in the car on her own. When she returned, she would only say that she had been to the Western Hemisphere. Then finally, one day she dragged me along.
We traveled for two hours at Mach 4 in our flying car until we could finally see the Sun rising over the Pacific, barely the size of a baseball. It illuminated the frozen ocean below with its faint, cold light.
Kayoko put the car into hover at an elevation of three miles. She then produced a long tube from behind our backs. As she removed its cover, I saw that it was an astronomical telescope, the type that hobbyists use. Kayoko opened the car's window and pointed the telescope at the Sun. Then she asked me to look.
Through the telescope's colored lens I could see the Sun, magnified by several hundred magnitudes. I could clearly see even the Sun's faint halo and the sunspots ever so slowly moving across its surface.
Kayoko connected the telescope to a computer that she had also brought along and captured an image of the Sun. She then opened another image of the Sun on the screen and said, “This is an image of the Sun from four hundred years ago.” As she spoke, the computer began comparing the two images.