Ken Liu - Broken Stars

“I thought dolphins couldn’t talk,” I said to one of them (this was many years later).

“Not only can we talk, but we also sing,” they replied. “Singing isn’t an art limited to the larger cetaceans.”

After spring, Giana was considered fully grown.

She was an interesting creature. Many years ago, she had fallen in love with a submarine. She also loved to chase dangerous propellers and screws, and that was how she had discovered a graveyard of ships.

“Lots and lots of wrecks!” She always told me stories about her adventures when we met, her voice as joyous as a twittering bird. “Some were at the sea bottom, but others were still afloat—I’m sure some kind of whirlpool there was responsible. I can tell you that my submarine will never go there. Oh there were so many ships, all covered by seaweed. It was hideous!”

Oddly, the professor’s machine was incapable of capturing the speech of the dolphins. The nautilus had no trouble recording other sounds: the scraping of an electric eel’s scales across the sand, the crack of eggshells as baby turtles hatched… even whale song posed no difficulty to its sensitive mechanisms.

But the conversation of dolphins stymied it.

“Your feathers are no good,” said a laughing Giana as her tail slapped against the water. “The machine can’t hear us.”

“Then how do you hear each other? Do you rely on sonar?”

“The heart, silly!” She laughed even harder and began to swim in circles. “You can hear us as well because you’re listening with your heart.”

Sometimes I enjoyed sitting on reef rocks and gazing up at the sky.

Giana often came to Shallow Bay in those times. Moonglow dusted the sea spray and distant isles on the horizon like frosted sugar. I took off the ear-feathers and strained to detect sounds coming from beyond the crystal sky. I would then experience the illusion that the moon was a spotlight that gazed down at us from the sky curtain, casting the softest rays onto a pair of players: a human and a dolphin.

“Do you see those stars?” Giana would always ask.

There were no stars at the center of the sky over Rainville. The Milky Way broke there, replaced by a disordered shadow. The stars, seemingly frightened by the shadow, shrank away to the sides.

“Do you see those stars? Do you see them?”

The stars were faint, powerless, distant, their light pale.

“There! That’s the constellation Delphinus!” Giana went on talking to herself. “That was my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s… Hey, are you listening? Look, although the stars are so faint, every time I see them, I think of my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s… kind smile—even though I’ve never met him.

“Long ago, in the time of the ancient Greeks, the greatest human musician, Arion, went to a place called Sicily for a musical competition. On the way back, pirates attacked him, and poor Arion was blindfolded and made to walk the plank. Suspended over the sea, he asked his captors, ‘Let me play one more song.’ The pirates agreed, and he began to strum his lyre.

“As you can see, humans haven’t always been so dumb. His music managed to attract my ancestor, who was hunting for squids nearby. Arion heard a voice say to him, ‘Jump on my back,’ and that he did.”

“Is this the story behind Delphinus?”

“That’s right.” Giana lifted her eyes to look at the stars. “But they’re so faint! I wish they would glow brighter.”

Starglow reflected from her eyes as her voice grew more excited. “If… if only we could pierce the crystal sky and go visit the stars….” She turned to me. “Do you think they’ll glow brighter?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Your mind is filled with such strange notions: submarines, the crystal sky, distant stars…. Are these the concerns of a dutiful child?”

“I can’t stop thinking about them. A voice is always in my head, telling me, Hey Giana, why not go visit the stars? ”

The dolphin swept her tail gently through the water and dipped her head into the moonlit sea.

Many people have compared the world with an apple. Rainville itself was also like an apple. The fountain at the center of the Thumb Sea was like the apple’s core, pointing straight up at the distorted shadow that interrupted the Milky Way. People were like bugs living inside the apple, never having glimpsed what it was like outside the peel—only in some places where the peel was a bit translucent could they see, through the mosaic skin, the blurred shadow cast by a distant leaf under the noonday sun.

The only way out was the fountain.

You had to follow the core’s vascular tissue upward, all the way to the long, narrow stem, and out of the apple. Only then would you see that the world was full of other apples and countless leaves. The sky that you had been so entranced by before was nothing more than the shadow of a single leaf.

The fountain was the path through the core. The gigantic, transparent tree sculpted from seawater had its roots deep in the Thumb Sea. As it shot toward the sky, it sprouted new branches and leaves, until, at the top, the lush crown spread out in every direction, turning into surging mist and billowing clouds.

The beanstalk was still here, even if Jack was gone.

No one had ever seen beyond the crystal sky; no one had peeked into the giant’s floating castle.

I knew, long before it happened, what Giana was going to do.

She was familiar with every current and wave in the Thumb Sea; she knew where the water could carry her. The whirlpools at the graveyard of ships were dangerous, but the fountain would rocket her into the heavens.

That night, Rainville was drenched by a violent thunderstorm. The rain slowly seeped through seams in my seaside cottage, leaving meandering trails across the ceiling. The lamp hanging under the eaves creaked and swayed. Muffled pops came from the nautilus shell lying in the corner, like seasoned firewood cracking in a fire. I pulled out the pair of feathered headphones, long neglected, and placed them over my ears.

The wind from the harbor caressed the smooth feathers, and the soft down undulated like the sea, bringing me sounds from the storm.

Struck by a premonition, I got out of bed and rushed into the rain.

I reached the shore of Shallow Bay at the same time as the eye of the storm. Clouds retreated to reveal a patch of clear night sky. Far away over the sea, the sky-bridging fountain was pumping furiously. Behind me, Rainville lay deep in slumber, blanketed by the storm. Not a single light was on.

The air above the Thumb Sea was unusually tranquil. The moon and the stars gleamed tenderly.

Do you see those stars? Do you see them?

I strained to see the fountain more clearly. Under the dark blue welkin, innumerable currents had gathered like so many vines, twisting together as they rose. The watery vines shone with the moon’s brilliance, and as they reached the spot closest to heaven, they scattered into millions of mysterious, glittering stars. It was just like that night many years ago when I had first heard the speech of the dolphins: my sight tangled with the moonbeams, and the curtain over the world was gradually pulled away. The fountain turned into the enchanted beanstalk, which was growing irrepressibly, pumping water infused with the strength of the ocean’s heart, sprouting branch after branch, brushing up against the crystal sky.

But they’re so faint! I wish they would glow brighter.

The spraying droplets at the top of the fountain dissolved into the chaotic maw at the center of the sky dome. Thousands of new stars were born in that shadow before coalescing into thick fog. Away from that gloomy patch, the silver stars of Delphinus twinkled with an enigmatic light.