Лю Цысинь: The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection

For a few seconds Huabei only heard the mournful exhaling of Mr. Deng’s breath.

“Well, that is the story of the Antarctic Doorstep.”

As the speed of Huabei’s descent began to decrease, the walls’ blue light began first to flash, and then, slowly, he was again able to make out individual rings of blue lights on the wall. Above and below, he could again see the dense concentric rings form and disappear.

You have reached a height of 3,000 miles above the Earth’s core

Your speed is 3.1 miles / sec

You are reentering the rigid region of Earth’s mantle

“What happened to my son?” Huabei posed his final question.

Again, Mr. Deng readily obliged him. “After the closure, Shen Yuan stayed behind as one of the last workers in the Mohe station. I called him one day and all he told me was, ‘My daughter and I are reunited.’ Later, I learned that he had lived an almost inconceivable life in the intervening years: Every day he would don a sealed suit and drop down into the Earth Tunnel, swinging back and forth, he even slept in the tunnel. He only returned to the station to eat and refuel his suit’s energy tanks. Every day, he completed roughly thirty journeys through the Earth. This went on, day after day, year after year. He swung from Mohe to the Antarctic Peninsula, each full return journey taking eighty-four minutes as he oscillated seven-thousand-eight-hundred-thirty miles.”

You have reached a height of 3,700 miles above the Earth’s core

Your speed is 1.5 miles / sec

You are reentering the viscous region of Earth’s mantle

“Who knows what Shen Yuan did in his endless fall. According to his colleagues, he hailed his daughter with a neutrino communicator every time he passed through the Earth’s core,” Mr. Deng said. “As he plummeted, he would have long chats with his daughter; of course he was the only one doing the speaking, but Shen Jing, alive in the Setting Sun VI drifting around the Earth’s core in the flow of nickel-iron alloy, was probably able to hear him.

“Over the course of his long falls Shen Yuan’s body became accustomed to weightlessness, but he still needed to eat and recharge his suit at the station, exposing him to normal gravity two or three times every day. These constant shifts weakened his already old heart and in the middle of a fall, it finally gave out. No one noticed at the time, leaving his remains to swing through the Earth Tunnel for two days before his battery was completely exhausted. As his cooling system failed, the Earth Tunnel became his crematorium; his body burned to ash in his final plummet through the Earth’s core. The way I see it, your son’s final resting place is very fitting, indeed.”

You have reached a height of 3,850 miles above the Earth’s core

Your speed is 0.9 miles / sec

You have passed through the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, and entering the Earth’s crust

Attention!

You are approaching the Antarctic Terminal

“Am I right in thinking that this will be my final resting place as well?” Huabei quietly asked.

“It should please you,” Mr. Deng noted flatly. “Before you die, you saw what you wanted to see. We had considered throwing you into the tunnel without a suit, but we decided otherwise, and so you had the chance to see all your son had wrought.”

“Yes, I am pleased. This life has been enough. I sincerely thank you all!” Huabei answered, utterly at peace.

There was no answer, even the hum of the headphone suddenly disappeared. His avengers on the other side of the world had ended all communication.

Huabei could see the concentric circles again become ever sparser. Now it took him two or three seconds to fall through every circle and with every passing moment this interval grew longer and longer. Then he heard a sharp beep in his headphone and his visor display read:

You have reached the Antarctic Terminal of the Earth Tunnel!

The center of the last circle above was now empty and no new circles emerged. The final circle grew larger and larger. He passed through this last ring of blue lights. Falling ever more slowly, he approached a bridge, just like the one he had fallen off at the other terminal. Several suited people stood on this small bridge. As he reached the mouth of the well, they reached out and grabbed him, pulling him onto the bridge.

The Antarctic Terminal, too, was unlit, illuminated only by the blue light shining from the endless tunnel below. Looking up he saw a cylinder hanging above him. The cylinder was large by any standard, but its diameter seemed slightly smaller than the tunnels mouth. Walking over to the end of the bridge, Huabei again looked up. In the dusk above he could see an entire row of these cylinders suspended above the tunnel. He could count four, but more lay hidden, deeper in the darkness.

This, he knew, had to be the decommissioned Core Train.

Half an hour later, Huabei left the Antarctic Terminal together with the police officers that had rescued him. The Terminal stood on a barren, snow-less stretch of Antarctic plain. A long-abandoned city loomed in the distance. The Sun hung low on the horizon, casting its weak light feebly across this vast and lifeless land. The air was cleaner here than on the other side of the Earth and he could breathe it without respirator.

A police officer told Huabei that a few of their force remained in Antarctica. They had received an emergency call from Dr. Guo and immediately rushed to the Antarctic Terminal. At the time the tunnel’s mouth had been closed and they had had to put an emergency call of their own through to the Earth Tunnel management to open the wellhead. It had opened just in time for Huabei to rise out of the blue of the Earth Tunnel, like a strange creature floating from the depths of the ocean; a few seconds later and he would have certainly perished. The closed tunnel would have left him falling back down, straight through the Earth. His suit’s battery did not hold enough of a charge to make it through the core again and he would have joined his son in that crematorium at the center of the Earth.

“Deng Yang’s gang has already been arrested. They will face murder charges, but,” the police officer said, coldly staring at Huabei, “I understand what drove them.”

Still struggling with the vertigo induced by his prolonged weightlessness, Huabei looked toward the Sun. He heaved a heavy sigh and repeated, “This life has been enough.”

“If that is how you feel, you will find it that much easier to accept your fate,” another officer noted.

“My fate?” Huabei turned to the officer as he felt his mind jolt back to reality.

“You cannot live in this age or this sort of thing will happen over and over again. Fortunately for you, the government is running a temporal emigration plan; a quota of people who must enter cryo-sleep has been introduced to ease the burden the population places on the environment. These emigrants will be woken and live in the future. The government has decided to make you a temporal emigrant. You will re-enter cryo-sleep; I cannot tell you how long it will be before you will be awoken again.”

It took a few long moments before Huabei could make heads and tails of what he had just heard. When he finally comprehended what the officer had said, he bowed deeply. “Thank you, thank you! How is it that I am always so lucky?”

“So lucky?” It was now the police officer’s turn to not understand. “Even this age’s temporal emigrants will find it almost impossible to adapt to life in a future society, and that is to say nothing of people of past eras, like you!”