The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection by Liu Cixin

by Cixin Liu

  “Over the course of his long falls Shen Yuan's body became accustomed to weightlessness, but he still needed to eat and recharge his suit at the station, exposing him to normal gravity two or three times every day. These constant shifts weakened his already old heart and in the middle of a fall, it finally gave out. No one noticed at the time, leaving his remains to swing through the Earth Tunnel for two days before his battery was completely exhausted. As his cooling system failed, the Earth Tunnel became his crematorium; his body burned to ash in his final plummet through the Earth's core. The way I see it, your son's final resting place is very fitting, indeed.”

  You have reached a height of 3,850 miles above the Earth's core

  Your speed is 0.9 miles / sec

  You have passed through the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, and entering the Earth's crust

  Attention!

  You are approaching the Antarctic Terminal

  “Am I right in thinking that this will be my final resting place as well?” Huabei quietly asked.

  “It should please you,” Mr. Deng noted flatly. “Before you die, you saw what you wanted to see. We had considered throwing you into the tunnel without a suit, but we decided otherwise, and so you had the chance to see all your son had wrought.”

  “Yes, I am pleased. This life has been enough. I sincerely thank you all!” Huabei answered, utterly at peace.

  There was no answer, even the hum of the headphone suddenly disappeared. His avengers on the other side of the world had ended all communication.

  Huabei could see the concentric circles again become ever sparser. Now it took him two or three seconds to fall through every circle and with every passing moment this interval grew longer and longer. Then he heard a sharp beep in his headphone and his visor display read:

  You have reached the Antarctic Terminal of the Earth Tunnel!

  The center of the last circle above was now empty and no new circles emerged. The final circle grew larger and larger. He passed through this last ring of blue lights. Falling ever more slowly, he approached a bridge, just like the one he had fallen off at the other terminal. Several suited people stood on this small bridge. As he reached the mouth of the well, they reached out and grabbed him, pulling him onto the bridge.

  The Antarctic Terminal, too, was unlit, illuminated only by the blue light shining from the endless tunnel below. Looking up he saw a cylinder hanging above him. The cylinder was large by any standard, but its diameter seemed slightly smaller than the tunnels mouth. Walking over to the end of the bridge, Huabei again looked up. In the dusk above he could see an entire row of these cylinders suspended above the tunnel. He could count four, but more lay hidden, deeper in the darkness.

  This, he knew, had to be the decommissioned Core Train.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Antarctica

  Half an hour later, Huabei left the Antarctic Terminal together with the police officers that had rescued him. The Terminal stood on a barren, snow-less stretch of Antarctic plain. A long-abandoned city loomed in the distance. The Sun hung low on the horizon, casting its weak light feebly across this vast and lifeless land. The air was cleaner here than on the other side of the Earth and he could breathe it without respirator.

  A police officer told Huabei that a few of their force remained in Antarctica. They had received an emergency call from Dr. Guo and immediately rushed to the Antarctic Terminal. At the time the tunnel's mouth had been closed and they had had to put an emergency call of their own through to the Earth Tunnel management to open the wellhead. It had opened just in time for Huabei to rise out of the blue of the Earth Tunnel, like a strange creature floating from the depths of the ocean; a few seconds later and he would have certainly perished. The closed tunnel would have left him falling back down, straight through the Earth. His suit's battery did not hold enough of a charge to make it through the core again and he would have joined his son in that crematorium at the center of the Earth.

  “Deng Yang's gang has already been arrested. They will face murder charges, but,” the police officer said, coldly staring at Huabei, “I understand what drove them.”

  Still struggling with the vertigo induced by his prolonged weightlessness, Huabei looked toward the Sun. He heaved a heavy sigh and repeated, “This life has been enough.”

  “If that is how you feel, you will find it that much easier to accept your fate,” another officer noted.

  “My fate?” Huabei turned to the officer as he felt his mind jolt back to reality.

  “You cannot live in this age or this sort of thing will happen over and over again. Fortunately for you, the government is running a temporal emigration plan; a quota of people who must enter cryo-sleep has been introduced to ease the burden the population places on the environment. These emigrants will be woken and live in the future. The government has decided to make you a temporal emigrant. You will re-enter cryo-sleep; I cannot tell you how long it will be before you will be awoken again.”

  It took a few long moments before Huabei could make heads and tails of what he had just heard. When he finally comprehended what the officer had said, he bowed deeply. “Thank you, thank you! How is it that I am always so lucky?”

  “So lucky?” It was now the police officer's turn to not understand. “Even this age's temporal emigrants will find it almost impossible to adapt to life in a future society, and that is to say nothing of people of past eras, like you!”

  A faint smile slowly blossomed on Huabei's face. “I do not care; I will be able to see the Earth Tunnel again be the pride of humanity!”

  The police officer chortled in surprise. “However do you expect that to happen? This project has been a complete loss; it will forever be a pillar of shame for father and son.”

  “Ha, ha, ha, ha...” Huabei laughed out loud, swaying on his weightlessness-weakened legs. His spirit, however, burned strong with excitement. “The Great Wall and the Great Pyramids of Giza were a complete loss as well; the former failed to prevent the invasions of the rider people from the North and the latter never did resurrect the mummified pharaoh within. In the long run, that turned out to be utterly immaterial. Now all we see them as are eternal monuments to the human spirit!” He pointed to the Earth Tunnel's terminal towering in the distance. “And compared to this mighty Great Wall of the Earth's Core, you are pitiful wretches, wailing and railing against the inevitable! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha...” He continued to happily chuckle.

  Throwing his arms open, he embraced the cold Antarctic wind rushing over his body. “Yuan, my son, this life is enough,” he said, fully content and happy.

  Epilogue

  Earth Cannon

  Huabei woke again, another half-century later. After leaving cryo-sleep, things played out much as they had done when he had awakened 50 years ago: A group of strangers bundled him off into a car and to the Mohe Earth Tunnel Terminal; he was again put into a sealed suit for some reason that he did not understand. This suit was actually a good deal more massive than the one he had donned half a decade ago, but before he could question this strange development, he once more plummeted into the Earth Tunnel, beginning that long fall anew. Decades had passed, but the tunnel seemed completely unchanged and he was again greeted by the blue concentric rings of lights, marking his descent into that bottomless well.

  This time, however, he had company as he rushed downward. His fellow faller was a striking young woman who had introduced herself as his tour guide.

  “Tour guide? I was right! My premonition has come true – the Earth Tunnel really has become like the Great Wall and the pyramids!” Huabei almost shouted in elation as they fell.

  “No,” his guide replied. “The Earth Tunnel has not become like the Great Wall and the pyramids. It has become…” She took Huabei's hand as they descended weightlessly, carefully ensuring that they fell in unison.

  “What has it become?” Huabei asked, now anxious.

  “Our Earth Cannon!” the guide answered happily.

  Huab
ei did not understand. “What?” His head spun as his eyes shot from one side of the tunnel rushing by to the next. Again, he was to learn of past events while falling through the Earth as his guide began her account.

  “In the years after you entered cryo-sleep, the Earth's environment continued to deteriorate; pollution and the destruction of the ozone layer killed the world's plants. Breathable air became a valuable commodity.” She paused in a heavy sigh. “At the time, we were left with one option if we wanted to save the Earth: Shut down all heavy energy industries.”

  “That would probably allow the environment to recover, but it would mean the end of human civilization,” Huabei interrupted.

  “Given what we faced then, many would have gladly made that sacrifice, but there were many more that looked for another way out. The most workable option was to move all of Earth's industry into orbit and to the Moon,” she continued.

  “So, you built a space elevator?” Huabei assumed.

  “We did not. Not for lack of trying, though, but building up turned out to be much harder than digging down,” his guide explained.

  “Then, was a method of anti-gravity flight discovered?” Huabei gave his next guess.

  Again he was off the mark. “Not even close,” his guide said. “In fact, we understand enough to know that it is fundamentally impossible.”

  “Nuclear powered rockets?” Huabei was now grasping at straws as he fell.

  “Those we do have, but they cost almost as much as conventional rockets to get into orbit. Transferring Earth's industry to space with them would have been another economic catastrophe on the scale of the Earth Tunnel,” his guide said, revealing the problem with his latest idea.

  “So you never managed to transfer it? Has the world above then entered…” Huabei's face twisted to a bitter smile, “…a post-human age?”

  His guide did not answer and the two fell further down the bottomless abyss in silence. The lights rushing past them appeared to grow closer, finally again merging into a single blue glow that seemingly completely covered the tunnel's walls. Another 10 minutes passed and the blue lights changed to red, plummeting at five miles per second as they passed through the Earth's core without so much as a word. Moments later the tunnel's walls glowed blue again. As soon as they did, his guide nimbly spun herself a full 180 degrees, inverting her body's posture. Huabei followed her lead, clumsily turning himself around.

  “Oh!” he suddenly shouted in surprise as he realized that the display at the corner of his visor was showing a speed of 5.3 miles per second.

  The center of the Earth was behind them, but they were still accelerating!

  And there was something else that made him recoil: He no longer felt weightless! The moment they had fallen through the center of the Earth he had begun to feel gravity's pull; last time he had been weightless throughout his entire fall, yet he was now definitely feeling its forces pulling on his body! Huabei's scientific intuition quickly corrected his feelings: This was not gravity – it was thrust – thrust that allowed them to overcome the ever-growing pull of Earth's gravity, thereby continuing their acceleration.

  “You can surely recall Verne's Moon gun?” his guide suddenly asked, although it sounded more like a statement to Huabei.

  “I read that silly book when I was young,” he replied, not really paying her strange question any heed. More focused on his surroundings, he was still trying to figure out what exactly was happening.

  “It's not silly at all; using a large cannon is by far the easiest and fastest way to move significant numbers of humanity into space,” his guide explained.

  “Only if you want to crush everyone you shoot out of your cannon into a meat smoothie,” he answered off-handedly, distinctly uninterested in this bizarre digression.

  “The only reason they would be crushed is excessive acceleration and only a cannon that is too short would need to resort to excessive acceleration. With a sufficiently long cannon barrel, the 'shells' can be given a smooth and gentle acceleration, just like we are experiencing right now.” There was an air of mischief in his guide's voice.

  “Are you saying that we are in a Verne Cannon?” he asked incredulously.

  “Like I said, this is the Earth Cannon,” she finally said.

  Looking up at the blue glowing tunnel, Huabei did his level best to imagine it as the barrel of cannon. Their incredible speed had long left the tunnel's walls a single streak of blue, robbing him of any real sensation of movement. To Huabei it felt as if they were hanging motionless, suspended in a giant blue tube.

  “In the fourth year of your second cryo-sleep, we began manufacturing another kind of new solid state material. Beyond the usual qualities, this material was also a very potent conductor. Now, this half of the Earth Tunnel's surface is wholly wrapped in large coils made of this material. We have turned more than thirty-nine-hundred miles of Tunnel, stretching through half the Earth, into a gigantic electromagnetic coil,” she said, revealing the inner workings of the mystery.

  “Where does the current in the coil originate from?” Huabei asked with renewed curiosity.

  His guide explained. “The Earth's core provides us with powerful and abundant electric energy, the very energy that gives us the Earth's magnetic field. We used a Core Ship to drag cabling made from that new solid material around the Earth's core. The cables form more than a hundred immense loops, each one made of more than a thousand miles of cable. Using these loops, we harness the Earth's electric current and gather it in the tunnel's coil. Using this, we fill this part of the tunnel with a powerful magnetic field. Our suits' shoulder pads and waists are equipped with two super-conductive coils that produce an electric current directly opposed to that of the tunnel's magnetic field. That is what gives us our thrust.”

  Continuing to accelerate, they quickly approached the end of the tunnel. As they did, the walls again began to glow red.

  With excitement in her voice, his guide almost shouted out of his headphone: “We are now going at almost ten miles per second, fast enough to escape Earth's gravity! We are about to be fired from the Earth Cannon!”

  They closed in on the Antarctic Terminal exit. The towering Core Train station above had long been dismantled, replaced with nothing but a sealed gate, covering a simple opening right up into the sky.

  As they approached, their headphones loudly announced: “Attention tourists. You are about to take today's forty-third shot. Please confirm that you have donned your protective goggles and earplugs; without them you may suffer permanent vision and hearing loss.”

  Ten seconds later, the sealed gate slid aside with a loud hiss, revealing the mouth of the tunnel 30 feet in diameter. Air rushed into the vacuum of the well with a sharp scream. A giant plume of flame shot out the tunnel's mouth with a massive bang, its glare drowning out the dim light of the low-hanging Antarctic Sun. Instantly, the sealed gate slid close again, the tunnel's air pumps roaring to life. Soon they had removed all the air that had rushed into the tunnel during the three seconds that the gate had been open; then the cannon was ready for the next launch.

  Looking up, the people on the ground could see two shooting stars, streaking upward, trailing tails of fire as they quickly disappeared in the deep blue of the Antarctic sky.

  Huabei could never have imagined what rushing out of the tunnel would be like. Moving fast enough to leave everything a blur, he could only catch glimpses; the streaking red light glowing from the apparently infinite tunnel walls disappeared in the blink of an eye and he was in the blue of the Antarctic sky. There was no transition of any sort at all; the view switched like the image on a screen. With a jerk he looked down, only to see the Earth below his feet rush away. He could make out the Antarctic city and he watched it quickly shrink to the size of a basketball court. Looking back up, he saw the bright blue of the sky rapidly darken, like a screen fading to black. Turning his gaze back below, he now looked upon the long curve of the Antarctica Peninsula. Around it he could clearly see the ocea
n. He also saw the long tail of fire trailing behind him. Only then did he realize that his entire suit was wreathed in a thin sheathe of flames.

  Looking over, he saw his tour guide flying next to him, some 30 feet away. Like him, she was surrounded by flames, and like him, she trailed a long fire tail. To him, she looked like some fantastic creature of living flame.

  Immense air resistance was pressing down on his head and shoulders like the massive hand of a ruthless giant. As the sky darkened, this giant hand seemed to be conquered by an even greater force and the pressure slowly subsided. Looking down, he saw all of Antarctica. Huabei was pleasantly surprised to see that the continent had returned to white. In the distance, he could begin to see the curvature of the Earth and behind it, the rising Sun, its light scattering across the thin layers of the atmosphere conquering a beautiful glow, more wonderful than the most magnificent dawn. Again, Huabei looked up to see that the stars had appeared above his head. He had never seen them shine so brilliantly.

  The fire around his body vanished as they shot out of the atmosphere. Now they floated in the tranquil calm of space. Huabei felt as light as a feather as the weight of the suit – his spacesuit – all but disappeared. It had obviously done its job admirably; the heat shielding that he now realized covered its surface was glowing with the ferocity of his escape from the Earth's atmosphere, yet he felt comfortable.

  Their rapid ascent through the air had rendered their communicators temporarily inoperable. Free of the Earth, their channel reopened and Huabei soon heard the pleasant voice of his guide.