Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

“Yes, yes,” Li Bai said happily. “I informed the Emperor of the Devourers the day before yesterday. This great ring-world empire shall be used for an even greater goal. The dinosaurs should feel honored.”

“Esteemed god, you’ll see how the Devouring Empire feels,” Bigtooth said darkly. “I also have one more concern. Compared to the sun, the amount of matter in the Devouring Empire is insignificantly minuscule. Is it really necessary to destroy a civilization millions of years of evolution in the making, just to obtain a few scraps?”

“I fully understand your reservations. But you must know, extinguishing, cooling, and disassembling the sun will take a long time. The quantum calculations should begin before then, and we need to save the resulting poems elsewhere so that the computer can clear its internal storage and continue work. Therefore the planets and the Devouring Empire, which can immediately provide matter for manufacturing storage devices, are crucial.”

“I understand, esteemed god. I have one last question: Is it necessary to store all the results? Why can’t you add an analytical program at the end, to delete all the poems that don’t warrant saving? From what I know, Classical Chinese poetry has to follow a strict structure. If we delete all the poems that violate the formal rules, we’ll greatly decrease the volume of the results.”

“Formal rules? Ha.” Li Bai shook his head contemptuously. “Shackles upon inspiration, and nothing more. Classical Chinese poetry wasn’t bound by these rules before the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Even after the Tang Dynasty, which popularized the strict jintishi form, many master poets ignored the rules to write some extraordinary biantishi works. That’s why, for this ultimate poetry composition, I won’t take formal rules into consideration.”

“But, you should still consider the poem’s content, right? Ninety-nine percent of the results are obviously going to be rubbish. What’s the point of storing a bunch of randomly generated character arrays?”

“Rubbish?” Li Bai shrugged. “Emissary, you are not the one who decides whether a poem is meaningful. Neither am I, nor any other person. Time decides. Many poems once considered worthless at the time of their writing were later lauded as masterpieces. Many of the masterpieces of today and tomorrow would have been considered worthless in the distant past. I’m going to write all the poems there are. Trillions of years from now, who knows which of them mighty Time will choose as the finest?”

“That’s absurd!” Bigtooth bellowed, startling several birds hidden in the distant grass into flight. “If we go by the human bug-bugs’ preexisting Chinese character database, the first poem your quantum computer writes should be:

“Might I ask, would mighty Time choose this as a masterpiece?!”

Yi Yi broke his silence to cheer. “Wow! Who needs mighty Time to choose? It’s a masterpiece right now! The first three lines and the first four characters of the fourth are the exclamations— ah! —of living beings witnessing the majestic grandeur of the universe. The last character is the clincher, where the poet, having witnessed the vastness of the universe, expresses the insignificance of life in the infinity of time and space with a single sigh of inevitability.”

“Hahahaha…” Li Bai stroked his whiskers, unable to stop smiling. “A fine poem, my bug-bug Yi Yi, a fine poem indeed, hahaha…” He took up the gourd and poured Yi Yi wine.

Bigtooth raised his massive claws and flung Yi Yi into the distance with one swat. “Nasty bug-bug, I know you’re happy now. But don’t forget, once the Devouring Empire is destroyed, your kind won’t survive either!”

Yi Yi rolled all the way to the riverbank. It took a long time before he could crawl back up. A grin cracked across his dirt-covered face; he was laughing despite his pain, truly happy. “This is great! This universe is motherfucking incredible!” he yelled with no thought to dignity.

“Any other questions, Emissary?” asked Li Bai. Bigtooth shook his head. “Then I’ll leave tomorrow. The day after the next, the quantum computer will execute its poetry-writing software, commencing the ultimate poetry composition. At the same time, the work to extinguish the sun and dismantle the planets and the Devouring Empire shall commence.”

Bigtooth straightened. “Esteemed god, the Devouring Empire will complete preparations for battle tonight!” he said solemnly.

“Good, very good, the coming days will be interesting. But before all else, let us finish this gourd.” Li Bai nodded happily as he took up the gourd and poured the remaining wine. He looked at the river, now shrouded in night, and continued to savor those words: “A fine poem indeed, the first, haha, the first and already so fine.”

THE ULTIMATE POETRY COMPOSITION

The poetry-composition software was in fact very simple. Represented in humanity’s C language, it would be no more than two thousand lines of code, with an additional database of modest size appended storing the Chinese characters. Once the software was uploaded onto the quantum computer in the orbit of Neptune, an enormous transparent cone floating in the vacuum, the ultimate poetry composition began.

Only now did the Devouring Empire learn that the god version of Li Bai was merely one individual member of his ultra-advanced civilization. The dinosaurs had previously assumed that any society that had advanced to this level of technology would have melded their consciousness into one being long ago; all five of the ultra-advanced civilizations they’d met in the past ten million years had done so. That Li Bai’s race had preserved their individual existences also somewhat explained their extraordinary ability to grasp art. When the poetry composition began, more individuals from Li Bai’s race jumped into the solar system from various places in distant space and began construction on the storage device.

The humans living in the Devouring Empire couldn’t see the quantum computer in space, or the new arrivals from the race of gods. To them, the process of the ultimate poetry composition was simply the increase and decrease of the number of suns in space.

One week after the poetry software began execution, the gods successfully extinguished the sun, reducing the sun count to zero. But the cessation of nuclear fission inside the sun caused the star’s outer layer to lose support, and it quickly collapsed into a new star that illuminated the darkness once more. However, this sun’s luminosity was a hundred times greater than before; smoke rose from the grass and trees on the surface of the Devouring Empire. The new star was once again extinguished, but a while later it burst alight again. So it went on, lighting only to be extinguished, extinguishing only to light once more, as if the sun were a cat with nine lives, struggling stubbornly. But the gods were highly practiced at killing stars. They patiently extinguished the new star again and again, until its matter had, as much as possible, fused into the heavier elements needed in the construction of the storage device. Only after the eleventh star dimmed was the sun snuffed out for good.

At this point, the ultimate poetry composition had run for three Earth months. Long before then, during the appearance of the third new star, other suns had appeared in space. These suns rose and fell in succession throughout space, brightening and dimming. At one point, there were nine new suns in the sky. They were releases of energy as the gods dismantled the planets. With the star-sized sun diminishing in brightness later on, people could no longer tell the suns apart.