Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

“Playing? Where’s your instrument?” Richard Clayderman asked from the stage.

They realized the reflected Earth covering most of the sky had begun to slip swiftly toward the east. The change was frightening, like the sky falling, and a few people on the lawn involuntarily buried their head in their hands. Soon the reflection’s edge dipped below the horizon, but at practically the same time, everything turned hazy in a sudden bright light. When sight returned, they saw the sun sitting smack in the middle of the sky right where the reflected Earth had been. Brilliant sunlight illuminated their surroundings under a brilliant blue sky that had replaced the black night. The oceans of the reflected Earth blended with the blue of the sky so the land seemed like a patch of clouds. They stared in shock at the change, but then a word from the secretary general explained the change that had taken place.

“The mirror tilted.”

Indeed, the huge mirror had tilted in space, drawing the sun into the reflection and casting its light onto the Earth’s nighttime side.

“It rotates fast!” the Chinese president said.

The secretary general nodded. “Yes, and at that size, the edges must be nearing the speed of light!”

“No physical object can tolerate the stresses from that rotation. It’s a field, like our astronaut demonstrated. Near-light-speed motion is entirely normal for a field,” the US president said.

Then the mirror spoke: “This is my instrument. I am a star player. My instrument is the sun!”

These grand words silenced them all, and they stared mutely at the reflected sun for a long while before someone asked, their voice trembling with awe, how it was played.

“You’re all aware that many of the instruments you play have a sound chamber whose thin walls reflect and confine sound waves, allowing them to resonate and produce pleasing sounds. In the case of EM waves, the chamber is a star—it may lack visible walls, but it has a transmission speed gradient that reflects and refracts the waves, confining them to produce EM resonance and play beautiful music.”

“What does this instrument sound like?” Clayderman asked the sky.

“Nine minutes ago, I played tuning notes on the sun. The instrument’s sound is now being transmitted at the speed of light. Of course, it’s in EM form, but I can convert it to sound in your atmosphere through superstring waves. Listen….”

They heard a few delicate, sustained notes, similar to those of a piano, but with a magic that held everyone momentarily under its spell.

“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.”

THE BEAT

“Is the performance about to start?” the secretary general asked.

“Yes. I’m waiting for the beat,” the mirror replied.

“The beat?”

“The beat began four years ago and is being transmitted here at the speed of light.”

Then there was a fearsome change in the sky. The reflected Earth and sun disappeared, replaced by dancing bright silver ripples that filled the sky, making them feel like Earth had been plunged into an enormous ocean and they were looking up at the blazing sun beyond the water’s surface.

The mirror explained: “I’m blocking intense radiation from outer space. I can’t totally reflect it, so what you’re seeing is the small portion that gets through. The radiation comes from a star that went supernova four years ago.”

“Four years ago? That’s Centauri,” someone said.

“That’s right. Proxima Centauri.”

“But that star has none of the necessary conditions for supernova,” the Chinese president said.

“I created the conditions,” the mirror said.

They realized that when the mirror had said it made preparations for this concert four years ago, it was referring to that event; after selecting the sun as its instrument, it had detonated Proxima Centauri. Judging from the audio test of the sun, it was evidently capable of acting through hyperspace and pulsing the sun 1 AU away. But whether it possessed the same ability for a star four light-years away remained unknown. The detonation of Proxima Centauri could have been accomplished in one of two ways: from the solar system via hyperspace, or by teleporting to its vicinity, detonating it, and then teleporting back. Both were godlike power, so far as humanity was concerned, and in any case the light from the supernova would still take four years to reach to the sun. The mirror said that music it played would be transmitted to the cosmos by EM, so was the speed of light for that hypercivilization akin to the speed of sound for humans? And if light waves were their sound waves, what was light for them? Humanity would never know.

“Your ability to manipulate the physical world is alarming,” the US president said.

“Stars are stones in the cosmic desert, the most commonplace of objects in my world. Sometimes I use stars as tools, other times as weapons, and other times as musical instruments…. I’ve turned Proxima Centauri into a metronome, basically the same as the stones used by your ancestors. We both take advantage of ordinary objects in our world to enlarge and extend our abilities.”

But the occupants of the lawn could see no similarity between the two, and abandoned the attempt to discuss technology with the mirror. Humanity could no more comprehend it than an ant could understand the ISS.

Little by little the light in the sky began to dim, giving them the impression that it was moonlight shining on the ocean, not sunlight, and that the supernova was going out.

The secretary general said, “If the mirror hadn’t blocked the energy from the supernova, the Earth would be a dead planet.”

By this point the ripples in the sky were gone, and the Earth’s enormous reflection again occupied most of the sky.

“Where’s the beat?” Clayderman asked. He had left the stage and was sitting among the world leaders.

“Look to the east!” someone shouted, and they saw in the eastern sky a dividing line, ramrod straight, bisecting the heavens into two distinct images. The reflected Earth, partially cut off, remained on the western side, but in the east was a dazzling starfield that many of them knew was the correct one for the northern hemisphere rather than the reflected southern sky. The division line marched west, enlarging the starry sky and wiping out the reflected Earth.

“It’s flying away!” shouted the secretary general. And they realized he was right: the mirror was leaving the space over Earth. Its edge soon vanished beneath the western horizon, leaving them standing beneath the stars of an ordinary sky. It did not reappear—perhaps it had flown off to the vicinity of its sun instrument.

It comforted them somewhat to see the familiar world, the stars and city lights as they had been, and to smell the blossoms wafting over the lawn.

Then came the beat.

Day arrived without warning with a sudden blue sky and blazing sunlight that flooded the land and lit up their surroundings with brilliant light. But daytime lasted but a second before extinguishing into renewed night as stars and city lights returned. And the night lasted only a second before day returned, only for a second, and then it was night again. Day, and then night, then day, then night… like a pulse, or as if the world were a projector switching back and forth between two slides.