The Sun is dying. Earth will perish too, consumed by the star in its final death throes. But rather than abandon their planet, humanity builds 12,000 mountainous fusion engines to propel the Earth out of orbit and onto a centuries-long voyage to Proxima Centaurai... Cixin Liu is one of the most important voices in world Science Fiction. A bestseller in China, his novel, The Three-Body Problem, was the first translated work of SF ever to win the Hugo Award. Here is the first collection of his short fiction: ten stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners. This collection's title story, The Wandering Earth, is the biggest SF movie ever to come out of China – taking the world's #1 box office ranking in February 2019. Liu's writing takes the reader to the edge of the universe and the end of time, to meet stranger fates than we could have ever imagined. With a melancholic and keen understanding of human nature, Liu's stories show humanity's attempts to reason, navigate and, above all, survive in a desolate cosmos. 'Cixin's trilogy is SF in the grand style, a galaxy-spanning, ideas-rich narrative of invasion and war' GUARDIAN. 'Wildly imaginative, really interesting ... The scope of it was immense' BARACK OBAMA, 44th President of the United States.
Release date:
October 12, 2021
Publisher:
Tom Doherty Associates
Print pages:
464
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I have never seen the night. I have never seen the stars. I have never seen spring, fall or winter. I was born as the Braking Era ended, just as the Earth stopped turning.
It had taken forty-two years to halt the Earth’s rotation, three years longer than the Coalition had planned. My mother told me about the time our family watched the last sunset. The Sun sank very slowly, as if stuck on the horizon. It took three days and three nights to finally set. Of course, afterward there was no more ‘day’ or ‘night’. The Eastern hemisphere was shrouded in perpetual dusk for a long time, maybe a decade or so. The Sun lay just below the horizon, its glow filling half the sky. During that endless sunset, I was born.
Dusk did not mean darkness. The Earth Engines brightly illuminated the whole Northern hemisphere. They had been installed all across Asia and North America – only the solid tectonic plate structure of these two continents could withstand the enormous thrust they exerted. In total, there were twelve thousand engines scattered across the Eurasian and North American plains.
From where I lived, I could see the bright plasma beams of hundreds of engines. Imagine an enormous palace, as big as the Parthenon on the Acropolis. Inside the palace, countless massive columns rise up to the vaulted ceiling, each one blazing with the blue-white light of a fluorescent tube. And you, you are just a microbe on the palace’s floor. That was the world I lived in. Actually, that description was not totally accurate. It was the tangential thrust component generated by the engines that halted the Earth’s rotation. Because of this, the engine jets needed to be set at a very precise angle, causing the massive beams to slant across the sky. It was like the grand palace that we lived in was teetering on the verge of collapse! When visitors from the Southern hemisphere were exposed to the spectacle, many of them suffered panic attacks.
But even more terrifying than the sight of the engines was the scorching heat they produced. Temperatures reached as high as seventy or eighty degrees Celsius, forcing us to don cooling suits before we stepped outside. The heat often raised torrential storms. When a plasma beam pierced the dark clouds, it was a nightmarish scene. The clouds would scatter the beam’s blue-white light, throwing off frenetic, surging rainbow halos. The entire sky glowed as if covered in white-hot lava. My grandfather had grown senile in his old age. One time, tormented by the implacable heat, he was so overjoyed to see a downpour arrive that he stripped to the waist and ran out the door. We were too late to stop him. The raindrops outside had been heated to boiling point by the superheated plasma beams, and his skin was scalded so badly that it sloughed off in large sheets.
To my generation, born in the Northern hemisphere, all of this was perfectly natural, just as the Sun, stars, and Moon had been natural to the people who lived before the Braking Era. We called that period of human history the Ante-solar Era – and what a captivating golden age it had truly been!
When I started primary school, as part of the curriculum, our teachers led our class of thirty children on a trip around the world. By then, Earth had completely stopped turning. Except for maintaining this stationary state, the Earth Engines were only being used to make small adjustments to the planet’s orientation. Because of this, during the three years from when I was three until I turned six, the plasma beams were less intensely luminous than when the engines were operating at full capacity. It was this period of relative inactivity that allowed us to take a trip to gain a better understanding of our world.
First, we visited an Earth Engine up close. The engine was located near Shijiazhuang, by the entrance to the railway tunnel that ran through the Taihang mountains. The great metallic mountain loomed over us, filling half the sky. To the west, the Taihang mountain range seemed like a series of gentle hills. Some children exclaimed that it must be as tall as Mount Everest. Our head teacher was a pretty young woman named Ms Stella. She laughed and told us that the engine was eleven thousand meters tall, two thousand meters taller than Mount Everest.
‘People call it “God’s Blowtorch”,’ she said. We stood in its massive shadow, feeling its tremors shake the earth.
There were two main types of Earth Engines. Larger engines were dubbed ‘Mountains’, while smaller ones were called ‘Peaks’. We ascended North China Mountain 794. It took a lot longer to scale Mountains than Peaks. It was possible to ride a giant elevator straight to the top of a Peak, but the top of a Mountain could only be reached via a long drive along a serpentine road. Our bus joined an endless procession of vehicles creeping up the smooth steel road. To our left, there was only a blank face of azure metal; to our right, a bottomless chasm.
The traffic mostly consisted of massive, fifty-ton dump trucks, laden with rubble from the Taihang mountains. Our bus quickly reached five thousand meters. From that height, the ground below appeared blank and featureless, washed out by the bluish glare of the Earth Engine. Ms Stella instructed us to put on our oxygen masks. As we drew closer to the mouth of the plasma beam, the light and heat increased rapidly. Our masks grew shaded, and the micro-compressors in our cooling suits whirred to life. At six thousand meters, we saw the fuel intake port. Truckload after truckload of rocks tumbled into the dull red glow of the gaping pit, consumed without a sound. I asked Ms Stella how the Earth Engines turned stones into fuel.
‘Heavy element fusion is a difficult field of study, too complex for me to explain it to you at this age,’ she replied. ‘All you need to know is that the Earth Engines are the largest machines ever built by humankind. For instance, North China Mountain 794 – where we are now – exerts fifteen billion tons of thrust upon the earth when operating at full capacity.’
Finally, our bus reached the summit. The mouth of the plasma beam was directly above us. The diameter of the beam was so immense that, when we raised our heads, all we could see was a glowing wall of blue plasma that stretched infinitely into the sky. At that moment, I suddenly recalled a riddle posed to us by our philosophy teacher.
‘You are walking across a plain when you suddenly encounter a wall,’ our haggard teacher had said. ‘The wall is infinitely tall and extends infinitely deep underground. It stretches infinitely to the left and infinitely to the right. What is it?’
A cold shiver washed over me. I recited the riddle to Ms Stella, who sat next to me. She teased it over for a while, but finally shook her head in confusion. I leaned in close and whispered the riddle’s dreadful answer in her ear.
Death.
She stared at me in silence for a few seconds, and then hugged me tightly against her. Resting my head on her shoulder, I gazed into the far distance. Gargantuan metal Peaks studded the hazy earth below, stretching all the way to the horizon. Each Peak spat forth a brilliant jet of plasma, like a tilted cosmic forest, piercing our teetering sky.
Soon after, we arrived at the seashore. We could see the spires of submerged skyscrapers protruding above the waves. As the tide ebbed, frothing seawater gushed from their countless windows, forming cascades of waterfalls. Even before the Braking Era ended, its effects upon the Earth had become horrifyingly apparent. The tides caused by the acceleration of the Earth Engines engulfed two-thirds of the Northern hemisphere’s major cities. Then, the rise in global temperatures melted the polar ice caps, which turned the flooding into a catastrophe that spread to the Southern hemisphere. Thirty years ago, my grandfather witnessed giant hundred-meter waves inundating Shanghai. Even now, when he described the sight, he would stare off into space. In fact, our planet had already changed beyond recognition before it even set out on its voyage. Who knew what trials and tribulations awaited us on our endless travels through outer space?
We boarded something called an ‘ocean liner’ – an ancient mode of transportation – and departed the shore. Behind us, the plasma beams of the Earth Engines grew ever more distant. After a day’s travel, they disappeared from view altogether. The sea was bathed in light from two different sources. To the west, the plasma beams still suffused the sky with an eerie bluish glow; to the east, rosy sunlight was creeping over the horizon. The competing rays split the sea in two, and our ship sailed right along the glittering seam where they met on the surface. It was a fantastic sight. But as the blue glow retreated, and the rosy glow strengthened, unease settled over the ship. My classmates and I were no longer to be seen above deck. We stayed hidden away in our cabins, blinds pulled tight across the portholes. A day later, the moment we most dreaded finally arrived. We all gathered in the large cabin that we used as a classroom to listen to Ms Stella’s announcement.
‘Children,’ she said solemnly, ‘we will now go to watch the Sun rise.’
No one moved. Every pair of eyes was fixed in a glassy stare, as if abruptly frozen to the spot. Ms Stella tried to urge us from the cabin, but everyone sat perfectly still. One of the other teachers remarked, ‘I’ve mentioned it before, but we really ought to schedule the Global Experience trip before we teach them modern history. The students would adapt more readily.’
‘It’s not that simple,’ Ms Stella replied. ‘They pick it up from their surroundings long before we teach them modern history.’ She turned to the class monitors. ‘You children go first. Don’t be afraid. When I was young, I was nervous about seeing my first sunrise, too. But once I saw it, I was just fine.’
Finally, we stood up and, one by one, trudged out through the cabin door. I suddenly felt a small clammy hand clasp my own, and looked back to see Linger.
‘I’m scared…’ she whimpered.
‘We’ve seen the Sun on TV before. It’s the same thing,’ I assured her.
‘How can it be? Is seeing a snake on TV the same as seeing a real live one?’
I did not know how to reply. ‘… Well, we have to go look anyway. Otherwise we’ll be marked down!’
Linger and I gripped hands tightly as we gingerly made our way to the deck with the other children. Stepping outside, we prepared to face our first sunrise.
‘In fact, we only began to fear the Sun three or four centuries ago. Before that, humans were not afraid of the Sun. It was just the opposite. In their eyes, the Sun was noble and majestic. The Earth still turned on its axis back then, and people saw the Sun rise and set every single day. They would rejoice at sunrise and praise the beauty of sunset.’ Ms Stella stood at the bow of the ship, the sea breeze playing with her long hair. Behind her, the first few rays of sunlight shot over the horizon, like breath expelled from the blowhole of some unimaginably colossal sea creature.
Finally, we glimpsed the soul-chilling flame. At first, it was just a point of light on the horizon, but it quickly grew into a blazing arc. I felt my throat close up in terror. It seemed as if the deck beneath my feet had suddenly vanished. I was falling into the blackness of the sea, falling … Linger fell with me, her spindly frame quivering against mine. Our classmates, everyone else – the entire world, even – all fell into the abyss. Then I remembered the riddle. I had asked our philosophy teacher what color the wall was. He told me that it was black. I thought he was wrong. I always imagined the wall of death would be bright as fresh snow. That was why I had remembered it when I saw the wall of plasma. In this era, death was no longer black. It was the glare of a lightning flash, and when that final bolt struck, the world would be vaporized in an instant.
Over three centuries ago, astrophysicists discovered that the conversion rate of hydrogen to helium in the interior of the Sun was accelerating. They launched thousands of probes straight into the Sun to investigate, and eventually developed a precise mathematical model of the star.
Using this model, supercomputers calculated that the Sun had already evolved away from the main sequence on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Helium would soon permeate the Sun’s core, triggering a violent explosion called a helium flash. Afterward, the Sun would become a massive, cool-burning red giant, swelling until its diameter encompassed the Earth’s orbit.
But our planet would have been vaporized in the preceding helium flash long before then.
All of this was projected to occur in the next four hundred years. Since then, three hundred and eighty years had passed.
This solar catastrophe would not only raze and consume every inhabitable terrestrial planet in the solar system – it would also completely transform the composition and orbits of the Jovian planets. After the first helium flash, as heavy elements re-accumulated in the Sun’s core, further runaway nuclear explosions would occur repeatedly for a period of time. While this period represented only a brief phase of stellar evolution, it might last thousands of times longer than all of human history. As long as we remained in the solar system, humanity stood no chance of surviving such a catastrophe. Interstellar emigration was our only way out. Given the level of technology available to humanity at the time, the only viable target for this migration was Proxima Centauri. It was the star closest to our own, a mere 4.3 light-years away. Reaching a consensus on a destination was enough, the real controversy lay in how to get there.
In order to reinforce the lesson, our ship doubled back twice on the Pacific, giving us two sunrises. By then we were accustomed to the sight and no longer needed to be convinced that children born in the Southern hemisphere could actually survive daily exposure to the Sun. We sailed on into the dawn. As the Sun rose higher in the sky, the cool ocean air of the past few days retreated, and temperatures began to rise. I was drifting off to sleep in my cabin when I heard a commotion outside. My door opened and Linger stuck her head in.
‘Hey, the Leavers and Takers are at it again!’
I could not have cared less. They had been fighting for the last four centuries. Even so, I got up to take a quick look. Outside, a group of several boys were fighting. One glance told me Tung was up to his usual tricks again. His father was a stubborn Leaver, and he was still serving a prison sentence for his part in an uprising against the Coalition. Tung was a chip off the old block.
With the help of several brawny crewmen, Ms Stella managed to pull the boys apart. Despite a bloody nose, Tung still raised a fist and shouted, ‘Throw the Takers overboard!’
‘I’m a Taker. Do you want to throw me overboard, too?’ asked Ms Stella.
‘I’ll throw every single Taker overboard!’ Tung refused to yield. Global support for the Takers had been rising of late, and they had grown unruly again.
‘Why do you hate us so much?’ asked Ms Stella. Several Leaver children immediately shouted in protest.
‘We won’t wait to die on Earth with you Taker fools!’
‘We will build spaceships and depart! All hail spaceships!’
Ms Stella pressed the holographic projector on her wrist. An image immediately materialized in the air before us, arresting our attention. We quieted down for a moment. The hologram showed a crystal-clear glass sphere. The sphere was about ten centimeters in diameter and two-thirds full of water. It held a small shrimp, a branch of coral, and a bit of green algae. The shrimp swam languidly around the coral.
‘This is a project Tung designed for his natural science class,’ said Ms Stella. ‘In addition to the things you can all see, the sphere also contains microscopic bacteria. Everything inside the sphere is mutually interdependent. The shrimp eats the algae and draws oxygen from the water, and then it discharges organic matter in its faeces and exhales carbon dioxide. The bacteria break down the shrimp’s waste into inorganic matter. The algae then use the inorganic matter and carbon dioxide to carry out photosynthesis under an artificial light source. They create nutrients, grow and reproduce, and release oxygen for the shrimp to breathe. As long as there is a constant supply of sunlight, the ecological cycle in the glass sphere should be able to sustain itself in perpetuity. This is the best design by a student I have ever seen. I know that this sphere embodies Tung’s dream and the dreams of all Leaver children. It is the spaceship you long after, in miniature! Tung told me he designed it according to the output of rigorous mathematical models. He modified the genes of every organism to ensure their metabolisms would be perfectly balanced. He firmly believed that the little world inside the sphere would survive until the shrimp reached the end of its natural life span. The teachers all adored this project. We placed it under an artificial light source at the required intensity. We were persuaded by Tung’s predictions, and we silently wished the tiny world he had created would succeed. But now, less than two weeks later…’
Ms Stella carefully withdrew the real glass sphere from a small box. The shrimp floated lifelessly at the surface of the murky water. The decaying algae had lost any hint of green and had turned into a dead, woolly film that coated the coral.
‘The little world is dead. Children, who can tell me why?’ Ms Stella raised the lifeless sphere so that everyone could see it.
‘It was too small!’
‘Indeed, it was too small. Small ecosystems like this, no matter how precisely designed, cannot endure the passage of time. The spaceships of the Leavers are no exception.’
‘We will build spaceships as large as Shanghai or New York City,’ Tung objected, his voice much quieter than before.
‘Yes, but anything larger is beyond the limits of human technology, and compared to Earth, those ecosystems would still be much too small.’
‘Then we will find a new planet!’
‘Even you Leavers don’t really believe that,’ replied Ms Stella. ‘There are no suitable planets in orbit around Proxima Centauri. The nearest fixed star with inhabitable planets is eight hundred and fifty light-years away. At present, the fastest spaceship we can build can only travel at 0.5 per cent of the speed of light, which means it would take us one hundred and seventy thousand years to get there. A spaceship-sized ecosystem would not last for even one-tenth of the voyage. Children, only an ecosystem the size of Earth, with its unstoppable ecological cycle, could sustain us indefinitely! If humanity leaves Earth behind,’ she proclaimed, ‘then we would be as vulnerable as an infant separated from its mother in the middle of a desert!’
‘But…’ Tung paused. ‘Ms Stella, it’s too late for us and too late for Earth. The Sun will explode before we accelerate and get far enough away!’
‘There is enough time,’ she replied firmly. ‘You must believe in the Coalition! How many times have I told you? Even if you don’t believe, at the very least we can say, “Humanity dies with pride, for we have done everything that we could!” ’
Humanity’s escape was a five-step process. First, the Earth Engines would generate thrust in the opposite direction of the Earth’s movement, halting its rotation. Second, operating at full capacity, the engines would accelerate the Earth until it reached escape velocity, flinging it from the solar system. Third, the Earth would continue to accelerate as it flew through outer space toward Proxima Centauri. Fourth, the engines would reverse direction, restarting the Earth’s rotation and decelerating gradually. Fifth, the Earth would enter into orbit around Proxima Centauri, becoming its satellite. People called these five steps the ‘Braking Era’, the ‘Deserting Era’, the ‘First Wandering Era’ (during acceleration), the ‘Second Wandering Era’ (during deceleration), and the ‘Neosolar Era’.
The entire migration process was projected to last 2,500 years, over one hundred generations.
The ocean liner continued its passage toward the part of the Earth shrouded in night. Neither sunlight nor the glow of the plasma beams could be seen here. As the chilly Atlantic breeze nipped at our faces, for the first time in our young lives we saw the stars in the night sky. God, it was a heartbreakingly beautiful sight! Ms Stella stood with one arm around Linger and I. ‘Look, children,’ she said, pointing to the stars with her other hand. ‘There is Centaurus, and that is Proxima Centauri, our new home!’ She began to cry, and we cried along with her. All around us, even the captain and the crew – hardened sailors all – began to well up. With tearful eyes, everyone gazed in the direction in which Ms Stella pointed, and the stars shimmered and danced. Only one star held steady; it was the beam of a distant lighthouse over dark and stormy seas, a flicker of fire beckoning to a lonely traveler freezing on the tundra. That star had taken the place of the Sun in our hearts. It was the only pillar of hope for one hundred future generations as they navigated a sea of troubles.
* * *
On our voyage home, I saw the first signal for Earth’s departure. A giant comet appeared in the night sky – the Moon. Because we could not take the Moon with us, engines had been installed on the lunar surface to push it out of Earth’s orbit, ensuring that there would be no collision during the acceleration period. The sweeping tail of the Lunar Engines bathed the sea in blue light, obscuring the stars. As it moved past, the Moon’s gravitational pull raised towering breakers. We had to transfer to a plane to fly home to the Northern hemisphere.
The day of departure had finally arrived!
As soon as we disembarked, we were blinded by the glare of the Earth Engines. They blazed many times brighter than before, no longer slanted but pointing straight toward the sky. The engines were running at maximum power. The planet’s acceleration created thunderous, hundred-meter waves that battered every continent. Blistering hurricanes howled through the towering columns of plasma, whipping up boiling froth and uprooting whole forests … Our planet had become a gigantic comet, its blue tail piercing the darkness of space.
Earth was on its way; humanity was on its way.
My grandfather passed away just before departure, his burnt body ravaged by infection. In his final moments, he repeated one phrase over and over: ‘Ah, Earth, my wandering Earth…’
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