To Hold Up the Sky

by Liu Cixin

He was surprised that his thinking was suddenly so clear. He knew what this meant: If life is a candle, his had burned to its base, and its wick had fallen and ignited the last bit of wax there, with a flame ten times brighter than before. His pain was gone and his body no longer felt heavy; in fact, he was barely aware of his body at all. The life he had left seemed to be in his brain, which worked furiously to convey all its knowledge to the children gathered around him. Language was a bottleneck—he knew he didn’t have enough time. He fantasized that the knowledge he had spent his life accumulating—not much, but dear to him—was lodged in his brain like small pearls, and that as he spoke, a crystal ax chopped the pearls out of his brain onto the floor, where the children scrambled to gather them like sweets at New Year’s. It was a happy fantasy.

“Such a small planet, populated by organisms living their lives, dreaming their dreams, completely oblivious to us and to the strife and destruction in their galaxy. To them, the universe must seem like a bottomless well of hopes and dreams. It’s like an ancient song.”

Outside of perception time slipped past, the sun swept through the sky like a shooting star, and birth, love, death, joy, sorrow, loss, pursuit, struggle, failure, and everything else from the outside world screamed past like a freight train …

“That’s right. I didn’t feel so aloof and ethereal after this stage. I started to despair. I had discovered that practically all the history we know is a lie. Of all the noble, vaunted heroes we hear about, at least half were contemptible liars and schemers who used their influence to claim achievements and write the histories, and managed to succeed. Of those who really did give everything for truth and justice, two-thirds choked to death horribly and quietly in the dust of history, forgotten by everyone, and the remaining one-third had their reputations smeared into eternal infamy, just like Song Cheng. Only a tiny percentage were remembered as they were by history, less than the exposed corner of the iceberg.”

“It’s an immoral and irresponsible life to begin with!” Song Cheng said, anger entering his voice. “But doesn’t everyone live like that? Who doesn’t have some sort of secret? If you want to be happy these days, sometimes, you have to bend a little. How many people can be shining spotless saints like you? If the digital mirror makes everyone into perfect people who can’t take a step out of line, then—then what’s even fucking left?”

“How does the sound make you feel?” the secretary general asked the Chinese president. “Like the whole universe is a huge palace, one that’s twenty billion light-years tall. And the sound fills it completely.” “Can you still deny the existence of God after hearing that?” the US president asked. The Chinese president eyed him, and said, “The sound comes from the real world. If it can produce such a sound, then God is even less essential.”

One time at dinner, I asked the human I was about to eat, what were the atomic bombs used by the humans in the Earth Defense War made of? He told me they were made of atoms!” “Hahahaha…” The god joined Bigtooth in laughter, the sphere vibrating so hard it became an ellipsoid. “It’s certainly the most accurate answer of them all, hahaha…”

“I concede that your technology far exceeds my understanding. It’s indistinguishable from human ideas of magic and acts of God. Even in the fields of art and poetry, you’ve astonished me. Despite such an enormous cultural, spatial, and temporal gap, you’ve managed to sense the hidden nuances of Classical Chinese poetry.… But understanding Li Bai is one matter, and exceeding him is another. I continue to believe that you face an unsurpassable body of art.”

It was a stage floating in the void of the universe, on which a dinosaur, a human raised as dinosaur livestock, and a technological god in period dress planning to surpass Li Bai were performing bizarre live theater. With that thought, Yi Yi shook his head and laughed wanly.