Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

She stared at me for a moment, then said, “I know you’ve got a place of your own deep in your heart. I have one, too. It’s been so many years, after all…. You can keep it, but you shouldn’t bring it into our lives!”

“There really is a flower in that vase. A blue rose,” I stammered, in a much softer voice.

My wife ran out, covering her tears with her hand.

And so the invisible rose in the amethyst vase caused a fracture between Dai Lin and me.

“You’ve got to tell me what imaginary person put that imaginary rose in the vase, or I’m not going to be able to take it!” my wife said many times.

“It’s not imaginary. There really is a rose in the vase. A blue one,” I answered every time.

Eventually, when the rift between us was almost beyond being patched over, it was our son who saved our marriage. Early one morning, he woke up, yawned, and said, “Mom, that amethyst vase on the writing desk has a rose in it, a blue one. It’s pretty! But it’s gone as soon as you look at it.”

My wife looked at me in alarm. The first time we had argued about it, he hadn’t been born yet, and our later quarrels hadn’t been in front of him, so he couldn’t have known about the blue rose.

A few days later, my wife fell asleep at the desk while writing a paper late at night. When she awoke, she roused me with a nudge, and there was fear in her eyes. “I woke up just now and I smelled… the scent of a rose. It came from that vase! But when I tried to smell it more closely, it disappeared. I mean it. There’s no mistake. It really was a rose scent. I’m not lying to you!”

“I know you’re not lying. There really is a rose there. A blue rose,” I said.

From then on, my wife never brought up the matter again, just left the vase there. Sometimes she would carefully wipe it, keeping it upright, as if she was afraid the rose inside would fall out. And on several occasions, she filled it with distilled water.

I never saw the blue rose again, but it was enough to know it was there. Sometimes in the still of the night I would move the amethyst vase to the window, then stand with my back to it. On these occasions, I could always smell that ethereal aroma, and I knew the rose was there. With my heart’s eye I could clearly see every detail, I could caress every petal, I could watch it sway slightly in the night breeze from the window….

It was a flower I could only see with my heart.

But I still held out the hope of getting another glimpse of that blue rose in my lifetime. Ding Yi said that, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, death is the process of transitioning from a strong observer to a weak observer, and then to a non-observer. When I become a weak observer, the rose’s probability cloud will collapse to a destroyed state more slowly, giving me the hope of seeing it again.

When I come to death’s door and open my eyes for the final time, all of my intellect and memories will be lost into the abyss of the past, and I will return to the pure feeling and fantasies of childhood. At that moment, I’m sure the quantum rose will smile at me.

It was a stormy night. When blue arcs of electricity flashed, you could perceive individual raindrops outside the window for the briefest instant. The thunder and lightning had only grown more intense since the downpour began that evening. After one dazzling burst, an object materialized beneath a tree and drifted ghostlike through the air, illuminating the surrounding rain with its orange glow. And as it floated, it seemed to play the sound of a xun . Less than twenty seconds later, it disappeared….

This is no science fiction story, but my eyewitness account of a thunderstorm during the summer of 1982 in the city of Handan, Hebei province, at the southern end of Zhonghua Road, which was remote in those days. After that, you were into farmland. Over the course of the next two decades I found myself accumulating all sorts of fanciful ideas about ball lightning.

That same year, I read two books by the British writer Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 and Rendezvous with Rama . The translation of those two books into Chinese marked the introduction of modern western science fiction to mainland China; previously, the country’s exposure to western science fiction had been limited to the work of Verne and Wells.

In these two events I was fortunate, since only about one person in a hundred claims to have seen ball lightning (this figure comes from a paper published in a domestic meteorology journal, but I suspect it is too high), while the number of people in China who have read those two books is probably fewer than one in a thousand. Those books set the foundation for my concept of science fiction and were a catalyst for the later Three-Body trilogy; however, their influence did not extend to Ball Lightning . When I wrote this novel in 2003, I already had a mostly complete Three-Body series, but I felt that Chinese readers would respond more readily to a novel like Ball Lightning at that time.

China’s science fiction was born more than a century ago, at the close of the Qing Dynasty, but for most of its history it developed in relative isolation, and for a long period was entirely cut off from modern western science fiction. The field’s independent development gave the work of that period a distinct style, a difference that is clearly evident from a comparison of Ball Lightning and the Three-Body series.

Chinese science fiction during that closed-off period was dominated by the invention story, a form that was preoccupied with the description of a futuristic technological device and speculation on its immediate positive effects, but which barely touched the invention’s deeper social implications, much less the tremendous ways such technology would transform society. And so it is with Ball Lightning : the emergence of such a powerful technological force is bound to have huge, far-reaching effects on human society—in politics, economics, and even in culture. The book addresses none of this.

But this similarity to early-period Chinese science fiction is only skin-deep; at its heart, this is not a Chinese-style story. The ball lightning described in the book may resemble that sort of futuristic device, but the flights of fancy it gives rise to are nowhere to be found in the science fiction of that period. And while the book is set in a China that is altogether real, those little balls of lightning seem like they’re trying to transcend that reality, like how a man’s tie, within the confines of its narrow dimensions, has the freedom to indulge in a riot of colors and patterns unbounded by the rigid formula of a business suit.

In a way, Ball Lightning is a prequel to the Three-Body series, since it concludes with the first appearance of the aliens that would eventually threaten humanity and features a version of Ding Yi, who also appears in later books. At the end of the novel, when humanity detects the presence of a mysterious, omnipresent observer that causes ball lightning’s quantum state to collapse, the narrator, Dr. Chen, remarks, “If you are really able to prove that a super-observer is watching our world, then human activity becomes very indiscreet…. You could say human society is in a quantum state, and a super-observer will force it to collapse to a state of reason again.” However, society’s reaction is the exact opposite of what Chen predicts, because the super-observer is far more sinister than even humanity: unlike ball lightning, which coexists with the human world, the alien super-observer will overturn human society and push Earth civilization to the brink of extinction.