Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

Yan Dong’s face was numb from the sudden cold. She looked up, transfixed by the spheroid’s surface. It was made of a translucent ash-gray substance she recognized intimately: ice. This object suspended in the air was a giant ball of ice.

Once the air settled, large snowflakes were fluttering around the floating mountain of ice. An oddly pure white against the blue sky, they glittered in the sunlight. However, these snowflakes were only visible within a certain distance around the spheroid. When they floated farther away, they dissolved. They formed a snow ring with the spheroid as its center, as though the spheroid were a streetlamp lighting the snowflakes around it on a cold night.

“I am a low-temperature artist!” a clear, sharp voice emitted from the ball of ice. “I am a low-temperature artist!”

“This ball of ice is you?” Yan Dong shouted back.

“You can’t see my true form. The ball of ice you see is formed by my freeze field from the moisture in the air,” the low-temperature artist replied.

“What about those snowflakes?”

“They are crystals of the oxygen and nitrogen in the air. In addition, there’s dry ice formed from the carbon dioxide.”

“Wow. Your freeze field is so powerful!”

“Of course. It’s like countless tiny hands holding countless tiny hearts tight. It forces all the molecules and atoms within its range to stop moving.”

“It can also lift this gigantic ball of ice into the air?”

“That’s a different kind of field, the antigravity field. The ice-sculpting tools you all use are so fascinating. You have small shovels and small chisels of every shape. Not to mention watering cans and blowtorches. Fascinating! To make low-temperature works of art, I also have a set of tiny tools. They are various types of force fields. Not as many tools as you have, but they work extremely well.”

“You create ice sculptures, too?”

“Of course. I’m a low-temperature artist. Your world is extremely suitable for the ice- and snow-molding arts. I was shocked to discover they’ve long existed in this world. I’m thrilled to say that we’re colleagues.”

“Where do you come from?” the ice sculptor next to Yan Dong asked.

“I come from a faraway place, a world you have no way to understand. That world is not nearly as interesting as yours. Originally, I focused solely on the art. I didn’t interact with other worlds. However, seeing exhibitions like this one, seeing so many colleagues, I found the desire to interact. But, frankly, very few of the low-temperature works below me deserve to be called works of art.”

“Why?” someone asked.

“Excessively realistic, too reliant on form and detail. Besides space, there’s nothing in the universe. The actual world is just a big pile of curved spaces. Once you understand this, you’ll see how risible these works are. However, hm, this piece moves me a little.”

Just as the voice faded away, a delicate thread extended from the snowflakes around the ball of ice, as if it flowed down following an invisible funnel. The snowflake thread stretched from midair to the top of Yan Dong’s ice sculpture before dissolving. Yan Dong stood on her tiptoes, and tentatively stretched a gloved hand toward the snowflake thread. As she neared it, her fingers felt that burning sensation again. She jerked her hand back, but it was already painfully cold inside the glove.

“Are you pointing to my work?” Yan Dong rubbed her frozen hand with the other. “I, I didn’t use traditional methods. That is, carve it from ready-made blocks of ice. Instead, I built a structure composed of several large membranes. For a long time, steam produced from boiling water rose from the bottom of the structure. The steam froze to the membrane, forming a complex crystal. Once the crystal grew thick enough, I got rid of the membrane and the result is what you see here.”

“Very good. So interesting. It so expresses the beauty of the cold. The inspiration for this work comes from…”

“Windowpanes! I don’t know whether you will be able to understand my description: When you wake during a hard winter’s night just before sunrise, your bleary gaze falls on the windowpane filled with crystals. They reflect the dark blue first light of early dawn, as though they were something you dreamed up overnight….”

“Yes, yes, I understand!” The snowflakes around the low-temperature artist danced in a lively pattern. “I have been inspired. I want to create! I must create!”

“The Songhua River is that way. You can select a block of ice, or…”

“What? Your form of art is as pitiable as bacteria. Do you think my form of low-temperature art is anything like that? This place doesn’t have the sort of ice I need.”

The ice sculptors on the ground looked bewildered at the interstellar low-temperature artist. Yan Dong said, blankly, “Then, you want to go…”

“I want to go to the ocean!”

Collecting Ice

An immense fleet of airplanes flew at an altitude of five kilometers along the coastline. This was the most motley collection of airplanes in history. It was composed of all types, ranging from Boeing jumbo jets to mosquito-like light aircraft. Every major press service in the world had dispatched news planes. In addition, research organizations and governments had dispatched observation planes. This chaotic air armada trailed closely behind a short wake of thick white vapor, like a flock of sheep chasing after its shepherd. The wake was left by the low-temperature artist. It constantly urged the planes behind it to fly faster. To wait for them, it had to endure a rate of flight slower than crawling. (For someone who jumped through space-time at will, light speed was already crawling.) The whole way, it grumbled that this pace would kill its inspiration.

In the airplanes behind it, reporters rattled away, asking endless questions over the radio. The low-temperature artist had no desire to answer any of them. It was only interested in talking to Yan Dong, sitting in the Harbin Y-12 that China Central Television had rented. As a result, the reporters grew quiet. They listened carefully to the conversation between the two artists.

“Is your home within the Milky Way?” Yan Dong asked. The Harbin Y-12 was the plane closest to the low-temperature artist. She could see the flying ball of ice intermittently through the white vapor. This wake trailing it was formed from oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere condensing in the ultralow temperatures around the ice ball. Sometimes, the plane would accidentally brush the wake’s billows of white mist. A thick coat of frost would immediately coat the plane’s windows.

“My home isn’t part of any galaxy. It sits in the vast and empty void between galaxies.”

“Your planet must be extremely cold.”

“We don’t have a planet. The low-temperature civilization developed in a cloud of dark matter. That realm is indeed extremely cold. With difficulty, life snatched a little heat from the near-absolute-zero environment. It sucked in every thread of radiation that came from distant stars. Once the low-temperature civilization learned how to leave, we couldn’t wait to go to the closest warm planet in the Milky Way. On this world, we had to maintain a low-temperature environment to live, so we became that warm planet’s low-temperature artists.”

“The low-temperature art you’re talking about is sculpting ice and snow?”

“Oh, no. No. Using a temperature far lower than a world’s mean temperature to affect the world so as to produce artistic effects, this is all part of the low-temperature art. Sculpting ice and snow is just the low-temperature art that suits this world. The temperature of ice and snow is what this world considers a low temperature. For a dark-matter world, that would be a high temperature. For a stellar world, lava would be considered low-temperature material.”