Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

We entered a restaurant with low lighting, few people, and a piano playing soft music.

“The military environment suits you,” I said after we sat down.

“Perhaps. I grew up in the army.”

As I watched her carefully under the dim lights, my attention was drawn to her brooch, the sole piece of jewelry she wore, a sword the length of a matchstick with a tiny pair of wings on the handle. It was exquisitely beautiful, glistening silver in the dimness like a star hanging from her collar.

“Do you think it’s pretty?” she asked me as she looked down at the brooch.

I nodded and said it was, feeling slightly awkward that, as with the perfume the day before, she had noticed that I noticed. A fault of the small circles I moved in. I was unaccustomed to being alone with the opposite sex, or to their refined sensitivity. But to find those feminine qualities so concentrated in a woman piloting a land mine–equipped car was breathtaking.

Then I discovered that the elegant brooch and terrifying bamboo were one and the same.

Lin Yun took off the brooch and pinched the handle of the small sword in one hand, while she picked up a fork and spoon from the table with the other. Holding them together vertically, she swept the sword gently past. To my astonishment, the metal spoon and fork handles severed as if they were wax.

“This is a silicone material produced using molecular arrangement technology, with an edge just a few molecules thick. It’s the keenest blade in the world.”

Gingerly I took the brooch she handed me and inspected it under the light. The blade was practically transparent.

“Isn’t it dangerous to wear something like that?”

“I like the feeling. Just like the Inuit like the cold. It’s a feeling that can accelerate your thinking, and give birth to inspiration.”

“Inuit don’t like the cold. They just don’t have any alternative. You… you’re very special.”

She nodded. “I get that sense too.”

“You like weapons, and danger. So what about war? Do you like that?”

“In the present circumstances, it’s not an issue of whether or not we like war.” She adroitly evaded my question, and I knew she was nowhere near opening up. Maybe that day would never come.

But we still talked easily, and had lots to talk about. Her mind was as sharp as her little sword, nicking and slicing and giving me chills; her cool rationality was something I’d never seen in other women.

She never revealed her family background, carefully changing the topic when things moved in that direction. All I knew was that her parents were military.

Before we knew it, it was two in the morning. The candelabra on our table was nearly extinguished, and we were the only ones left in the restaurant. The piano player came over to ask what we wanted to hear, in a clear bid to push us out.

I tried to come up with something obscure, so that we might be able to stay a while longer if he couldn’t play it. “There’s a movement from Scheherazade where Sinbad is voyaging. I’ve forgotten what it’s called.”

The piano player shook his head and asked us to choose another piece.

Lin Yun told him, “Play The Four Seasons .” Then she said, “You must like ‘Summer,’ the season of thunder and lightning.”

We continued to talk through the melody of The Four Seasons, on subject matter much less serious than before. She said, “I am convinced that you never spoke to the prettiest girl in your class.”

“I did.” I remembered the night in the library when the pretty girl asked me what I was looking for, but I couldn’t remember what her name was.

When the piece was finished, it was at last time for us to leave, but Lin Yun smiled and told me to wait. “I’ll play that piece from Scheherazade for you.”

She sat down at the piano and the Rimsky-Korsakov that had accompanied me on countless lonely nights wafted over like a breeze on a spring evening. Watching her lithe fingers dance on the keys, I suddenly realized that I’d wanted to hear this piece because this place was like a harbor. A beautiful major was telling me the story of Sinbad’s voyages with music, telling me of the ocean with its storms and calms, of princesses, fairies, monsters, and gemstones, and palm trees and sandy beaches under the setting sun.

On the table before me, in the light of the guttering candles, the world’s sharpest sword lay quietly.

Again I began to count the angels on the head of a pin, but this time Lin Yun was counting them with me.

In the process of building a mathematical model, I found that while Lin Yun’s mathematical abilities were no match for mine, she possessed vast knowledge and was accomplished in a wide range of disciplines, as her field required. She was strong in computers, so she was the one who programmed the models. Her programs had visualizations for the results. If the mathematics were successful, they would display a slow-motion view of ball lightning on the screen with every last detail visible, capable of clearly showing the release of energy upon the lightning’s disappearance as its trajectory was tracked on a three-dimensional axis in a second view. Compared to the dry tables and curves of my earlier program, this was much better, and not just because of visuals and aesthetics: When the earlier data was outputted, it required time-consuming detailed analysis before the success of the simulation could be determined, but now this was done automatically by the computer. The software caused a material change in our study of the theory of ball lightning.

An infinite number of mathematical models could be created for ball lightning, just like an essay prompt. You just have to build a mathematically consistent system compatible with physical laws that uses an electromagnetic field to constrain energy into a stable ball, and that satisfies all known characteristics of ball lightning. But doing this wasn’t easy. An astronomer once made an interesting observation: “Take stars. If they didn’t exist, it’d be very easy to prove that their existence is impossible.” That applied to ball lightning, too. Conceptualizing a means by which electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light could be confined into such a small ball was maddening.

But with enough patience, and enthusiasm for a hopeless cause, such mathematical models could be constructed. Whether they would withstand experimental tests was another matter altogether. Truth be told, I was almost certain that experiments would not succeed. The models we had built only exhibited a subset of the characteristics of ball lightning. Some unexpressed by one model were easily found in another, but none exhibited all of its known characteristics.

Apart from the aforementioned confined EM waves, one of ball lightning’s most mysterious properties was the selectivity of its release of energy. In the computer, the virtual ball lightning produced by the mathematical model was like a bomb that reduced everything around it to ash when it touched an object or released energy of its own accord. Whenever I saw this, my mind pulled up those charred books on an unharmed bookshelf, and the cooked seafood in the likewise unharmed refrigerator, and the burnt tee shirt next to my skin underneath a completely intact jacket, and the cool surfaces of the oranges beside the spot where my incinerated parents had been sitting…. But most deeply imprinted upon my memory was the notebook Zhang Bin had shown me with the alternating burnt pages: the arrogant demonstration of some mysterious force that had mercilessly destroyed my confidence.

Most of my time was spent working at the Lightning Institute, but sometimes I went to New Concepts.