Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

“We seem to overlap in what art we consider beautiful.”

“That’s not unusual. So-called warmth is just a brief effect of an equally brief spasm produced after the universe was born. It’s gone in an instant like light after sunset. Energy dissipates. Only the cold is eternal. The beauty of the cold is the only enduring beauty.”

“So you’re saying the final fate of the universe is heat death?!” Yan Dong heard someone ask over her earpiece. Later, she learned the speaker was a theoretical physicist sitting in one of the planes following behind.

“No digressions. We will discuss only art,” the low-temperature artist scolded.

“The ocean is below us!” Yan Dong happened to glance out the porthole. The crooked coastline passed below.

“Further ahead, we’ll reach the deepest part of the ocean. That will be the most convenient place to collect ice.”

“Where will there be ice?” Yan Dong asked, uncomprehending, as she looked at the vast, blue ocean.

“Wherever a low-temperature artist goes, there will be ice.”

The low-temperature artist flew for another hour. Yan Dong stared out the window as they traveled. The view had long become a boundless surface of water. At that moment, the plane suddenly pulled up. She nearly blacked out from acceleration.

“We almost hit it!” the pilot shouted.

The low-temperature artist had stopped suddenly. Taken by surprise, the planes behind it scrambled to change direction.

“Damn it! The law of inertia doesn’t apply to the fucker. Its speed seemed to drop to zero in an instant. By all rights, this sort of deceleration should have cracked the ball of ice into pieces,” the pilot said to Yan Dong.

As he spoke, he steered the plane around. The other pilots did the same. The ball of ice, rotating majestically, lingered in midair. It produced oxygen and nitrogen snowflakes, but due to strong wind at the altitude, the snowflakes were all blown away. They seemed like white hair whirling in the wind around the ball of ice.

“I am about to create!” the low-temperature artist said. Without waiting for Yan Dong to respond, it suddenly dropped straight down as if the giant invisible hand that had held it suddenly let it go. It free-fell faster and faster until it disappeared into the blue backdrop that was the ocean, leaving only a faint thread of atoms stretching down from midair. A ring of white spray shot up from the sea surface. When it fell, a wave spread out in a circle on the water.

“This alien threw itself into the ocean and committed suicide,” the pilot said to Yan Dong.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Yan Dong stretched out her Northeastern accent and glared at the pilot. “Fly a little lower. The ball of ice will float back up any moment now.”

But the ball of ice didn’t float back up. In its place, a white dot appeared on the ocean. It quickly expanded into a disk. The plane descended and Yan Dong could observe in detail.

The white disk was actually a white fog that covered the ocean. Soon, between its quick expansion and the airplane’s continued descent, the only ocean she could see oozed a white fog from its surface. A noise from the sea covered the roaring of the plane’s engine. It sounded both like rolling thunder and the cracking of the plains and mountains.

The airplane hovered close to sea level. Yan Dong peered at the surface of the ocean below the fog. The light the ocean reflected was mild, not like moments ago when glints of gold had slashed Yan Dong’s eyes. The ocean grew deeper in color. Its rough waves grew level and smooth. What shocked her, though, was the next discovery: The waves became solid and motionless.

“Good heavens. The ocean froze!”

“Are you crazy?” The pilot turned his head to look at Yan Dong.

“See for yourself…. Hey! Why are you still descending? Do you want to land on the ice?!”

The pilot yanked the control stick. Once again, the world in front of Yan Dong grew black. She heard the pilot say, “Ah, no, fuck, how strange…” The pilot looked as though he were sleepwalking. “I wasn’t descending. The ocean, no, the ice is rising by itself!”

At that moment, Yan Dong heard the low-temperature artist’s voice: “Get your flying machine out of the way. Don’t block the path of the rising ice. If there weren’t a colleague in the flying machine, I would simply crash into you. I can’t stand disruptions to my inspiration while I’m creating. Fly west, fly west, fly west. That direction is closer to the edge.”

“Edge? The edge of what?” Yan Dong asked.

“The cube of ice I’m taking!”

Planes took off like a flock of startled birds, climbing into the sky and heading in the direction the low-temperature artist indicated. Below, because the white fog created by the temperature drop had dissipated, the dark blue ice field stretched to the horizon. Even though the plane was climbing, the ice field climbed even faster. As a result, the distance between the planes and the ice field continued to shrink.

“The Earth is chasing us!” the pilot screamed.

The plane now flew pressed against the ice field. Frozen dark blue waves roiled past the plane’s wings.

The pilot yelled, “We have no choice but to land on the ice field. My god, climbing and landing at the same time. That’s just too strange.”

Just at that moment, the Harbin Y-12 reached the end of the ice. A straight edge swept past the fuselage. Below them, liquid sea reemerged, rippling and shimmering. It was like what a fighter jet saw the instant it leapt off the deck of an aircraft carrier, except the “aircraft carrier” was several kilometers tall.

Yan Dong snapped her head around. Behind them, an immense, dark blue cliff could be seen. The bottom of the massive block of ice had cleared the ocean.

As the chunk of ice continued to rise, Yan Dong finally understood what the low-temperature artist had meant: This was literally a giant block of ice. The dark blue cube occupied two-thirds of the sky. Afterward, radar observation indicated that the block of ice was sixty kilometers long, twenty kilometers wide, and five kilometers tall, a thin and flat cuboid. Its flat surface reflected the sunlight, like streaks of eye-piercing lightning high in the sky.

The giant block of ice kept rising, casting an unimaginably large shadow onto the sea. And when it shifted, it revealed the most terrifying sight since the dawn of history.

The planes were flying over a long, narrow basin, the empty space in the ocean that was left once the giant block of ice was removed. On each side was a mountain of seawater five kilometers high. Hundred-meter-high waves surged at the bottom of these liquid cliffs. At the top, the cliffs were collapsing, advancing as they did. Their surface rippled, but they remained perpendicular to the seafloor. As the seawater cliffs advanced, the basin shrank.

This was the reverse of Moses parting the Red Sea.

What startled Yan Dong the most was how slow the entire process seemed. This was, she assumed, due to the scale. She’d seen the Huangguoshu waterfalls. The water had seemed to fall slowly there, too. And these cliffs of seawater before her were magnitudes larger than those waterfalls. Watching them felt like an endless moment of unparalleled wonder.

The shadow cast by the block of ice had completely disappeared. Yan Dong looked up. The block of ice was now just the size of two full moons.

As the two seawater cliffs advanced, the basin shrank into a canyon. Then the two seawater cliffs, tens of kilometers long, five thousand meters high, crashed into each other. An incredible roar echoed between the sea and sky. The space in the ocean the ice block left was gone.

“We aren’t dreaming, are we?” Yan Dong said to herself.