The Wandering Earth

by Liu Cixin

>> No, we have no church. A civilization that cannot see the sun and stars will be without religion.

Indeed, it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains, to strive to stand on ever higher ground to gaze farther into the distance.

The reason evolution bestows all intelligent life with a desire to climb higher is far more profound than mere base needs, even though we still do not understand its real purpose.

Finally Fangs said, ‘We still have a very long time to get along and very many things to talk about, but let us not speak of morals. In the universe, such considerations are meaningless.’

‘A civilization only has a fixed location in her infancy. Planets and stars are unstable and change. Civilizations must then move. By the time she becomes a young woman, she has already moved multiple times. Then the civilizations will make this discovery: no planetary environment is as stable as a sealed spaceship. So they’ll make spaceships their home, and planets will just be places where they sojourn. Thus, any civilization that has reached adulthood will be a starfaring civilization, permanently wandering through the cosmos. The spaceship is her home. Where are we from? We come from the ships.’

‘She’s talking right now. She’s finishing three words: ‘I love you.’ Each word took more than a year. It’s now been three and a half years, and right now she’s just finishing ‘you’. To completely finish the sentence will take another three months.’ God lifted his eyes from the TV to the domed sky above the yard. ‘She still has more to say. I’ll spend the rest of my life listening to her.’

‘Do the most learned and most powerful people in our world know these things?’ Qiusheng’s father asked, trembling. ‘Yes. But don’t rely on them. A civilization’s survival depends on the effort of every individual. Even the common people like you have a role to play.’

‘People don’t cherish anything now. They see a platter of fruit an arm’s length away, only to take a bite out of each piece before throwing the rest away.’

Personal relationships had always felt to him like a spider’s web whose strands bound him more tightly the more he struggled. He had never known true love; he had married out of obligation. As soon as he decided never to have children, a child came to him and his wife. He was a man who lived in a world of dreams and fantasies, the sort of man most people despise. He had never found his place among other people. His life was one of isolation, of going against the current. He used to put all his hope in the future.