Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

The secretary general was the last to arrive. On the lawn, she ran across Richard Clayderman,1 one of the evening’s featured performers, and struck up a cheerful conversation.

“Your playing fascinates me,” she told the prince of pianists with a smile.

Clayderman, dressed in his favorite snow-white suit, looked uncomfortable. “If that’s genuine, then I’m overjoyed. But I’ve heard there have been complaints about my appearance at a concert like this.”

Not merely complaints. The head of UNESCO, a noted art theorist, had publicly criticized Clayderman’s playing as “busker-level,” and his performances as “blasphemy against piano artistry.”

The secretary general lifted a hand to stop him. “The UN can have none of classical music’s arrogance. You’ve erected a bridge from classical music to the masses, and so must we bring humanity’s highest ideals directly to the common people. That’s why you were invited here tonight. Believe me, when I first heard your music under the sweltering sun in Africa, I had the feeling of standing in a ditch looking up at the stars. It was intoxicating.”

Clayderman gestured toward the leaders on the lawn. “It feels more like a family gathering than a UN event.”

The secretary general looked over the crowd. “On this lawn, for tonight at least, we have realized a utopia.”

She crossed the lawn and reached the front row. It was a glorious evening. She had planned on switching off her political sixth sense and just relaxing for once, taking her place as an ordinary member of the audience, but this proved impossible. That sense had picked up a situation: The president of China, engaged in conversation with the president of the United States, looked up at the sky for a moment. The act itself was utterly unremarkable, but the secretary general noticed that it was a little on the long side, perhaps just an extra second or two, but she’d noticed it. When the secretary general sat down after shaking hands with the other world leaders in the front row, the Chinese president looked up at the sky again, confirming his perception. Where national leaders are concerned, apparently random actions are in fact highly precise, and under normal circumstances, this act would not have been repeated. The US president also noticed it.

“The lights of New York wash out the stars. The sky’s far brighter than this over DC,” he said.

The Chinese president nodded but said nothing.

The US president went on, “I like looking at the stars, too. In the ever-changing course of history, our profession needs an immovable reference object.”

“That object is an illusion,” the Chinese president said.

“Why do you say that?”

Instead of responding directly, the Chinese president pointed at a cluster of stars that had just come out. “Look, that’s the Southern Cross, and that’s Canis Major.”

The US president smiled. “You’ve proven they’re immovable enough. Ten thousand years ago, primitive man would have seen the same Southern Cross and Canis Major as we do today. They may have even come up with those names.”

“No, Mr. President. In fact, the sky might even have been different just yesterday.” The Chinese president looked up for a third time. He remained calm, but the steel in his eyes made the other two nervous. They looked at the same placid sky they had seen so many times before; nothing seemed wrong. They looked questioningly at the Chinese president.

“The two constellations I just noted should only be visible from the southern hemisphere,” he said without pointing them out or looking upward. He turned thoughtfully toward the horizon.

The secretary general and US president looked questioningly at him.

“We’re looking at the sky from the other side of the Earth,” he said.

The US president yelped, but then restrained himself and said in a voice even lower than before, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Look, what’s that?” the secretary general said, pointing at the sky with a hand raised only to eye level so as not to alarm the others.

“The moon, of course,” the US president said after a brief glance overhead. But when the Chinese president slowly shook his head, he looked up a second time and was less certain. At first, the semicircular shape in the sky looked like the moon in first quarter, but it was bluish, as if a scrap of daytime sky had gotten stuck. The US president looked more closely at the blue semicircle. He held out a finger and measured the blue moon against it. “It’s growing.”

The three politicians stared up at the sky, not caring anymore if they’d startle the others. The heads of state in the surrounding seats noticed their movements, and more people looked upward. The orchestra on the outdoor stage abruptly stopped its warm-up.

By now, it was clear that the blue semicircle was not the moon, because its diameter had grown to twice that, and its darkness-shrouded other half was now visible in dim blue. In its brighter half, details could be made out; its surface was not a uniform blue but had patches of brown.

“God! Isn’t that North America?” someone shouted. They were right. You could distinguish the familiar shape of the continent, which lay smack on the border between the light and dark halves. (It may have occurred to someone that was the very same position they occupied.) Then they found Asia, and the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Strait….

“It’s… Earth!”

The US president drew back his finger. The blue sphere in the sky was now growing at a rate visible without a reference object, and was now at least three times the diameter of the moon. At first, it looked like a balloon rapidly inflating in the sky, but then a shout from the crowd abruptly changed that impression:

“It’s falling!”

The shout provided a reasonable interpretation of the scene before them. Regardless of its accuracy, they immediately had a new sense of what was happening: another Earth was crashing toward them in space! The approaching blue planet now occupied a third of the sky, and surface details could be made out: brown continents covered in mountain wrinkles, cloud coverage looking like unmelted snow, outlined in black from the shadows cast on the ground. There was white at the North Pole, parts of which glittered—ice, rather than clouds. On a blue ocean, a snow-white object spiraled lazily with the delicate beauty of a velvet flower in a blue crystal vase—a newborn hurricane…. But when the huge blue sphere grew to cover half the sky, their perception experienced an almost simultaneous transformation.

“God! We’re falling!”

The feeling of inversion came in an instant. The sphere filling half the sky gave them a feeling of height, or that the ground beneath their feet had vanished and they were now falling toward the other Earth. Its surface was clearer now, and on the dark side, not far from the shadow line, those with keen eyes could see a faint glowing band: the lights of America’s East Coast cities, their own location in New York a somewhat brighter spot within it. The other planet now filled two-thirds of the sky, and it seemed as if the two Earths would collide. There were screams from the crowd, and many of them shut their eyes.

Then all was still. The Earth overhead was no longer falling (or the ground they stood on was no longer falling toward it). The sphere hung motionless covering two-thirds of the sky, bathing the land in its blue glow.

Now sounds of chaos could be heard from the city, but the occupants of the lawn had the strongest nerves on the planet in unstable situations, so they held back their panic at the nightmarish scene and approached it more quietly.

“It’s a hallucination,” the secretary general said.

“Yes,” the Chinese president said. “If it were real, we’d feel the gravity. And this close to the sea, we’d be drowned by the tide.”