Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

The dismantlement of the Devouring Empire commenced the fifth week after the start of the poetry composition. Before it, Li Bai had made a suggestion to the Empire: The gods could jump all the dinosaurs to a world on the other side of the Milky Way. The civilization there was much less advanced than the gods’, its members being unable to convert themselves into pure energy, but still much more advanced than the Devourers’ civilization. There, the dinosaurs would be raised as a form of livestock and live happy lives with all their needs taken care of. But the dinosaurs would rather break than bend, and angrily refused this suggestion.

Next, Li Bai made another request: that humanity be allowed to return to their mother planet. To be sure, Earth had been dismantled, and most of it went toward the storage device. But the gods saved a small amount of matter to construct a hollow Earth, about the same size as the original, but with only a hundredth of its mass. To say that the hollow Earth was Earth hollowed-out would be incorrect, because the layer of brittle rock that originally covered the Earth could hardly be used to make the spherical shell. The shell material was perhaps taken from the Earth’s core. In addition, razor-thin but extremely strong reinforcing hoops crisscrossed the shell, like lines of latitude and longitude, made from the neutronium produced in the collapse of the sun.

Movingly, the Devouring Empire not only immediately agreed to Li Bai’s request, allowing all humans to leave the great ring world, but also returned the seawater and air they’d taken from Earth in their entirety. The gods used them to restore all of Earth’s original continents, oceans, and atmosphere inside the hollow Earth.

Next, the terrible battle to defend the great ring began. The Devouring Empire launched barrages of nuclear missiles and gamma rays at the gods in space, but these were useless against their foe. The gods launched a powerful, invisible force that pushed at the Devourers’ ring, spinning it faster and faster, until it finally fell apart under the centrifugal forces of such rapid rotation. At this time, Yi Yi was en route to the hollow Earth. From twelve million kilometers away, he witnessed the complete course of the Devouring Empire’s destruction:

The ring came apart very slowly, dreamlike. Against the pitch-black backdrop of space, this immense world dispersed like a piece of milk foam on coffee, the fragments at its edges slowly sinking into darkness, as if being dissolved by space. Only by the flashes of sporadic explosions would they reappear.

The great, fierce civilization from ancient Earth was thus destroyed, to Yi Yi’s deepest lament. Only a few dinosaurs survived, returning to Earth with humanity, including the emissary Bigtooth.

On the return journey to Earth, the humans were largely in low spirits, but for different reasons than Yi Yi: Once they were back on Earth, they’d have to farm and plow if they wanted to eat. To humans accustomed to having every need provided for in their long captivity, grown indolent and ignorant of labor, it really did seem like a nightmare.

But Yi Yi believed in Earth’s future. No matter how many challenges lay ahead, humans were going to become people once more.

THE CLOUD OF POEMS

The poetry voyage arrived on the shores of Antarctica.

The gravity here was already weak; the waves cycled slowly in a dreamlike dance. Under the low gravity, the impact of waves upon shore sent spray dozens of meters into the air, where the seawater contracted under surface tension into countless spheres, some as large as soccer balls, some as small as raindrops, which fell so slowly that one could draw rings around them with one’s hand. They refracted the rays of the little sun, so that when Yi Yi, Li Bai, and Bigtooth disembarked, they were surrounded by crystalline brilliance.

Due to the forces of rotation, the Earth was slightly stretched at the North and South Poles, causing the hollow Earth’s pole regions to maintain their old chilly state. Low-gravity snow was a wonder, loose and foamy, waist-high in the shallow parts and deep enough at others that even Bigtooth disappeared beneath it. But having disappeared, they could still breathe normally inside the snow! The entire Antarctic continent was buried underneath this snow-foam, creating an undulating landscape of white.

Yi Yi and company rode a snowmobile toward the South Pole. The snowmobile skimmed across the snow-foam like a speedboat, throwing waves of white to either side.

The next day, they arrived at the South Pole, marked by a towering pyramid of crystal, a memorial dedicated to the Earth Defense War of two centuries ago. Neither writing nor images marked its surface. There was just the crystal form in the snow-foam at the apex of the Earth, silently refracting the sunlight.

From here, one could gaze upon the entire world. Continents and oceans surrounded the radiant little sun, so that it looked as if it had floated up from the waters of the Arctic Sea.

“Will that little sun really be able to shine forever?” Yi Yi asked Li Bai.

“At the very least, it will last until the new Earth civilization is advanced enough to create a new sun. It is a miniature white hole.”

“White hole? Is that the inverse of a black hole?” asked Bigtooth.

“Yes, it’s connected through a wormhole to a black hole orbiting a star, two million light-years away. The black hole sucks in the star’s light, which is released here. Think of the sun as one end of a fiber-optic cable running through hyperspace.”

The apex of the monument was the southern starting point of the Lagrangian axis, the thirteen-thousand-kilometer line of zero gravity between the North and South Poles of the hollow Earth, named after the zero-gravity Lagrangian point that had existed between the Earth and moon before the war. In the future, people were certain to launch various satellites onto the Lagrangian axis. Compared to the process on Earth before the war, this would be easy: one would only have to ship the satellite to the North or South Pole, by donkey if one wanted to, and give it a good kick up with one’s foot.

As the party viewed the memorial, another, larger snowmobile ferried over a crowd of young human tourists. After disembarking, the tourists bent their legs and jumped straight into the air, flying high along the Lagrangian axis, turning themselves into satellites. From here, one could see many small, black specks in the air, marking out the position of the axis: tourists and vehicles drifting in zero gravity. They would have been able to fly directly to the North Pole if it weren’t for the sun, placed at the midpoint of the Lagrangian axis. In the past, some tourists flying along the axis had discovered their handheld miniature air-jet thrusters broken, been unable to decelerate, and flown straight into the sun. Well, in truth, they vaporized a considerable distance from it.

In the hollow Earth, entering space was also easy. One only needed to jump into one of the five deep wells on the equator (called Earthgates) and fall (fly?) a hundred kilometers through the shell, then be flung by the centrifugal forces of the hollow Earth’s rotation into space.

Yi Yi and company also needed to pass through the shell to see the Cloud of Poems, but they were heading through the Antarctic Earthgate. Here, there were no centrifugal forces, so instead of being flung into space, they would only reach the outer surface of the hollow Earth. Once they’d put on lightweight space suits at the Antarctic control station, they entered the one-hundred-kilometer well—although, without gravity, it was better termed a tunnel. Being weightless here, they used the thrusters on their space suits to move forward. This was much slower than the free fall on the equator; it took them half an hour to arrive on the outside.