Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

Bai Bing scrolled the mouse wheel. “Let’s go down… good. We’re about ten kilometers above the surface now.” The land below was still shrouded in haze, but crisscrossing glowing red lines had appeared in it, a network like the blood vessels in an embryo.

“These are rivers of lava,” Bai Bing said, pointing. He kept scrolling down, past the thick acidic fog. The brown surface of the ocean appeared, and the point of view plunged lower, into the ocean. In the murky water were a few specks. Most were round, but a few were more complicated in shape, most obviously different from the other suspended particles in that they were moving on their own, not just floating with the current.

“Life, brand new,” Bai Bing said, pointing out the tiny things with the mouse.

He rapidly scrolled the mouse wheel in the other direction, raising their point of view back into space to once again show the young Earth in full. Then he moved the time slider. Countless years flew past; the thick haze covering Earth’s surface disappeared, the ocean began to turn blue, and the land began to turn green. Then the enormous supercontinent Pangaea split and broke apart like ice in spring. “If you want, we can watch the entire evolution of life, all the major extinctions and the explosions of life that followed them. But let’s skip them and save some time. We’re about to see what this all has to do with our lives.”

The fragmented ancient continents continued to drift until, at last, a familiar map of the world appeared. Bai Bing changed the slider-bar settings, advancing in smaller increments through time before coming to a stop. “Right, humans appear here.” He carefully shifted the slider a little further forward. “Now civilization appears.

“You can only see most of distant history on a macro scale. Finding specific events isn’t easy, and finding specific people is even harder. Searching history mainly relies on two parameters: location and time. It’s rare that historical records give them accurately this far back. But let’s try it out. We’re going down now!” Bai Bing double-clicked a location near the Mediterranean Sea as he spoke. The point of view hurtled downward with dizzying speed. At last, a deserted beach appeared. At the far side of the yellow sand was an unbroken grove of olive trees.

“The coast of Troy in the time of the ancient Greeks,” said Bai Bing.

“Then… can you move the time to the Trojan Horse and the Sack of Troy?” Lu Wenming asked excitedly.

“The Trojan Horse never existed,” Bai Bing said coolly.

Chen Xufeng nodded. “That sort of thing belongs in children’s stories. It would be impossible in a real war.”

“The Trojan War never happened,” said Bai Bing.

“If that’s the case, did Troy fall due to other reasons?” The Senior Official sounded surprised.

“The city of Troy never existed.”

The other three exchanged looks of astonishment.

Bai Bing pointed at the screen. “The video window is now displaying the real coast of Troy at the time the war supposedly happened. We can look five hundred years forward and back….” Bai Bing carefully shifted the mouse. The beach onscreen flashed rapidly as night and day alternated, and the shape of the trees changed quickly, too. A few shacks appeared at the far end of the beach, human silhouettes occasionally flickering past them. The shacks grew and fell in number, but even at their greatest they formed no more than a village. “See, the magnificent city of Troy only ever existed in the imaginations of the poet-storytellers.”

“How is that possible?” Lu Wenming cried. “We have archaeological evidence from the beginning of the last century! They even dug up Agamemnon’s gold mask.”

“Agamemnon’s gold mask? Fuck that!” Bai Bing laughed harshly. “Well, as the historical records improve in quality and quantity, later searches get increasingly easy. Let’s do it again.”

Bai Bing returned their point of view to Earth’s orbit. This time, he didn’t use the mouse, but entered the time and geographical coordinates by hand. The view descended toward western Asia. Soon, the screen displayed a stretch of desert, and a few people lying under the shade of a cluster of red willows. They wore ragged robes of rough cloth, their skin baked dark, their hair long and matted into strands by sweat and dust. From a distance, they looked like heaps of discarded rubbish.

“They aren’t far from a Muslim village, but the bubonic plague has been going around and they’re afraid to go there,” Bai Bing said.

A tall, thin man sat up and looked around. After checking that the others were soundly asleep, he picked up a neighbor’s sheepskin canteen and took a swig. Then he reached into another neighbor’s battered pack and took out a piece of traveler’s bread, broke off a third, and put it in his own bag. Satisfied, he lay back down.

“I’ve run this at normal speed for two days and seen him steal other people’s water five times and other people’s food three times,” Bai Bing said, gesturing with his mouse at the man who’d just lain down.

“Who is he?”

“Marco Polo. It wasn’t easy to search him up. The Genoan prison where he was imprisoned gave me fairly precise times and coordinates. I located him there, then backtraced to that naval battle he was in to extract some identifying traits. Then I jumped much earlier and followed him here. This is in what used to be Persia, near the city of Bam in modern Iran, but I could have saved myself the effort.”

“That means he’s on his way to China. You should be able to follow him into Kublai Khan’s palace,” said Lu Wenming.

“He never entered any palace.”

“You mean, he spent his time in China as just a regular commoner?”

“Marco Polo never went to China. The long and even more dangerous road ahead scared him off. He wandered around West Asia for a few years, and later told the rumors he heard along the way to his friend in prison, who wrote the famous travelogue.”

His three listeners once again exchanged looks of astonishment.

“It’s even easier to look up specific people and events later on. Let’s do it one more time with modern history.”

The room was large and very dim. A map—a naval map?—had been spread out on the broad wooden table, surrounded by several men in Qing Dynasty military uniforms. The room was too dark to see their faces.

“We’re in the headquarters of the Beiyang Fleet, quite a ways to go before the First Sino-Japanese War. We’re in the middle of a meeting.”

Someone was talking, but the heavy southlands accent and the poor sound quality made the words unintelligible. Bai Bing explained, “They’re saying that for coastal defense purposes, given their limited funds, purchasing heavy-tonnage ironclads from the West is less worthwhile than buying a large number of fast, steam-powered torpedo boats. Each vessel could hold four to six gas torpedoes, forming a large, fast attack force, maneuverable enough to evade Japanese cannon fire and strike at close range. I asked a number of naval experts and military historians about this. They unanimously believe that if this idea had been implemented, the Beiyang Fleet would have won their battles in the First Sino-Japanese War. He’s brilliantly ahead of his time, the first in naval history to discover the weaknesses of the traditional big-cannons-and-big-ships policy with the new innovations in armaments.”

“Who is it?” Chen Xufeng asked. “Deng Shichang?”

Bai Bing shook his head. “Fang Boqian.”

“What, that coward who ran away halfway through the Battle of the Yellow Sea?”

“The very one.”

“Instinct tells me that all this is what history was really like,” the Senior Official mused.