Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

The lights inside were off except for numerous small signal lamps. He felt as though he’d walked from a moonlit starry sky to a moonless starry sky. The only moonlight was a sliver that penetrated the crack in the spherical roof. It fell on the giant astronomical telescope, partially sketching out its contours in silver lines. The telescope looked like a piece of abstract art in a town square at night.

He stepped silently to the bottom of the telescope. In the weak light, he saw a large pile of machinery. It was more complex than he’d imagined. He searched for an eyepiece. A soft voice came from the door:

“This is a solar telescope. It doesn’t have an eyepiece.”

A figure wearing white work clothes walked through the door, as though a feather had drifted in from the moonlight. The woman walked over to him, bringing a light breeze along with her.

“A traditional solar telescope casts an image onto a screen. Nowadays, we usually use a monitor…. Doctor, you seem to be very interested in this.”

He nodded. “An observatory is such a sublime and rarefied place. I like how it makes me feel.”

“Then why did you go into medicine? Oh, that was very rude of me.”

“Medicine isn’t just some trivial skill. Sometimes, it, too, is sublime, like my specialty of brain medicine, for example.”

“Oh? When you use a scalpel to open up the brain, you can see thoughts?” she said.

Her smiling face in the weak light made him think of something he’d never seen before, the sun cast onto a screen. Once the violent flares disappeared, the magnificence that remained couldn’t help but make his heart skip a beat. He smiled, too, hoping she could see his smile.

“Oh, we can look at the brain all we want,” he said, “but consider this: Say a mushroom-shaped thing you can hold in one hand turns out to be a rich and varied universe. From a certain philosophical viewpoint, this universe is even grander than the one you observe. Even though your universe is tens of billions of light-years wide, it’s been established that it’s finite. My universe is infinite because thought is infinite.”

“Ah, not everybody’s thoughts are infinite but, Doctor, yours seem to be. As for astronomy, it’s not as rarefied as you think. Several thousand years ago on the banks of the Nile and several hundred years ago on a long sea voyage, it was a practical skill. An astronomer of the time often spent years marking the positions of thousands of stars on star charts. A census of the stars consumed their lives. Nowadays, the actual work of astronomical research is dull and meaningless. For example, I study the twinkling of stars. I make endless observations, take notes, then make more observations and take more notes. It’s definitely not sublime as well as not rarefied.”

His eyebrows rose in surprise. “The twinkling of stars? Like the kind we can see?” When he saw her laugh, he laughed, too, shaking his head. “Oh, I know, of course, that’s atmospheric refraction.”

“However, as a visual metaphor, it’s pretty accurate. Get rid of the constant terms, just show the fluctuations in their energy output, and stars really do look like they’re twinkling.”

“Is it because of sunspots?”

She stopped smiling. “No, this is the fluctuation of a star’s total energy. It’s like how when a lamp flickers, it’s not because of the moths surrounding it, but because of fluctuations in voltage. Of course, the fluctuations of a twinkling star are minuscule, detectable only by the most precise measurements. Otherwise, we’d have been burned by the twinkling of the sun long ago. Researching this sort of twinkling is one way of understanding the deep structure of stars.”

“What have you discovered so far?”

“It’ll be a while before we discover anything. For now, we’ve only observed the twinkling of the star that’s the easiest to observe—the sun. We can do this for years while we gradually expand out to the rest of the stars…. You know, we could spend ten, twenty years taking measurements of the universe before we make any discoveries and come to some conclusion. This is my dissertation topic, but I think I’ll be working on this for a long while, perhaps my whole life.”

“So you don’t think astronomy is dull, after all.”

“I think what I’m working on is beautiful. Entering the world of stars is like entering an infinitely vast garden. No two flowers are alike…. You have to think that’s a weird analogy, but it’s exactly how I feel.”

As she spoke, seemingly without realizing it, she gestured at the wall. A painting hung there, very abstract, just a thick line undulating from one end to the other. When she noticed what he was looking at, she took it down, then handed it to him. The thick, undulating line was a mosaic of colorful pebbles from the area.

“It’s lovely, but what does it represent? The local mountain range?”

“Our most recent measurements of the sun twinkling, it was so intense and we’d rarely ever seen it fluctuate like that this year. This is a picture of the curve of the energy radiated as it twinkled. Oh, when I hike, I like to collect pebbles, so…”

The scientist was only partially visible in the surrounding shadow. She looked like an elegant ink line a brilliant artist drew on a piece of fine, white calligraphy paper. The curve’s intelligence of spirit filled that perfect white paper immediately with vitality and intention…. In the city he lived in outside the mountains, at any given moment, more than a million young women, like a large group of particles in Brownian motion, chased the showy and vain, without even a moment of reflection. But who could imagine that on this mountain in the middle of nowhere, there was a gentle and quiet woman who stared for long stretches at the stars….

“You can reveal this kind of beauty from the universe. That’s truly rare and also very fortunate.” He realized he was staring and looked away. He returned the painting to her but, lightly, she pushed it back to him.

“Keep it as a souvenir, Doctor. Professor Wilson is my advisor. Thank you for saving his life.”

After ten minutes, the ambulance left under the moonlight. Slowly, he realized what he’d left on the mountain.

FIRST TIME

Once he married, he abandoned his effort to fight against time. One day, he moved his things out of his apartment to the one he now shared with his wife. Those things that two people shouldn’t share, he brought to his office at the hospital. As he riffled through them, he found a mosaic made of colorful pebbles. Seeing the multicolored curve, he suddenly realized that the trip to Mount Siyun was ten years ago.

ALPHA CENTAURI A

The hospital’s young employees’ group had a spring outing. He cherished this outing particularly, because it was getting less and less likely they’d invite him again. This time, the trip organizer was deliberately mysterious, pulling down the blinds on all the coach windows and having everyone guess where they were once they arrived. The first one to guess correctly won a prize. He knew where they were the instant he stepped off the coach, but he kept quiet.

The highest peak of Mount Siyun stood before him. The pearl-like spherical roofs on its summit glittered in the sunlight.

After someone guessed where they were, he told the trip organizer that he wanted to go to the observatory to visit an acquaintance. He left on foot, following the meandering road up the mountain.

He hadn’t lied, but the woman whose name he didn’t even know wasn’t part of the observatory staff. After ten years, she probably wasn’t here anymore. He didn’t actually want to go inside, just to look around at the place where, ten years ago, his soul, hot, dry, and as bright as the sun, spilled into a thread of moonlight.