The Wandering Earth

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Reference: 《流浪地球》

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The Wandering Earth · 刘慈欣

Part One: The Braking Era

I have never seen the night, I have never seen the stars, and I have never seen spring, autumn, or winter.

I was born at the end of the Braking Era, just after the Earth had stopped rotating.

It took forty-two years to brake the Earth’s rotation, three years longer than the United Earth Government had planned. My mother told me about the day our whole family watched the last sunset: the sun sank very slowly, as if it had halted on the horizon, and it took three days and three nights to go down. Of course, after that there was no more “day” and no more “night.” For quite a long time (a dozen years or so), the Eastern Hemisphere would remain in an eternal twilight, because the sun had not sunk deep below the horizon and still cast its light from half the sky. It was during that long, drawn-out sunset that I was born.

Twilight did not mean darkness. The Earth Engines lit the entire Northern Hemisphere as bright as day. They were installed on the continents of Asia and the Americas, because only these two continents had plate structures solid and complete enough to withstand the immense thrust the engines exerted on the Earth. There were twelve thousand Earth Engines in total, scattered across the plains of Asia and the Americas.

From where I lived, I could see the plasma beams shooting from hundreds of engines. Picture a gigantic palace as vast as the Parthenon on the Acropolis, filled with countless pillars that reach from the floor to the heavens, each pillar blazing with intense blue-white light like an enormous fluorescent tube. And you are a bacterium on the floor of that giant palace. That is how you can imagine what the world I lived in looked like. Actually, even that description is not quite accurate: it was the tangential component of the engines’ thrust that braked the Earth’s rotation, so the beams had to be angled, which meant those giant columns of light in the sky were tilted—we were inside a colossal palace on the verge of toppling over! When people from the Southern Hemisphere came north and were suddenly plunged into this environment, many of them went insane.

Even more terrifying than the spectacle was the scorching heat the engines produced. Outdoor temperatures reached seventy or eighty degrees Celsius, and you had to wear a cooling suit to go outside. In such heat there were often torrential rains, and the sight of the engine beams piercing the dark clouds was nothing short of a nightmare! The blue-white glare scattered through the clouds, turning into a frenzied, churning halo of countless colors, and the whole sky seemed covered in white-hot volcanic lava. Grandpa had grown muddled with age. Once, tormented beyond endurance by the heat, he was overjoyed to see heavy rain and rushed out bare-chested. We could not stop him in time. Outside, the raindrops had already been heated by the ultra-high-temperature plasma beams of the Earth Engines, and they scalded a layer of skin right off his body.

But for those of us born in the Northern Hemisphere in this generation, all of this was natural—just as the sun, stars, and moon had been natural for people before the Braking Era. We called all of human history before that the Pre-Solar Era. What a golden age it must have been, one that fills the heart with longing!

When I entered primary school, as part of the curriculum, the teacher took the thirty children in our class on a journey around the world. By then the Earth had come to a complete stop. Apart from maintaining the planet’s state of rest, the Earth Engines now only made minor attitude adjustments, so during the three years from when I was three to when I was six, the brightness of the beams had diminished greatly, which allowed us to better come to know our world on this journey.

We first saw an Earth Engine up close at its exit point in the Taihang Mountains near Shijiazhuang. It was a metal mountain towering before us, occupying half the sky. Beside it, the Taihang range to the west looked like a string of small hills. Some of the children exclaimed that it was as tall as Mount Everest. Our homeroom teacher, Miss Xiaoxing, a pretty young woman, smiled and told us that this engine was eleven thousand meters tall—more than two thousand meters taller than Everest—and people called them “God’s blowtorches.” We stood in its enormous shadow, feeling the vibration it sent through the earth.

Earth Engines fell into two categories: the larger ones were called “Mountains,” the smaller ones “Peaks.” We climbed “North China Mountain No. 794.” Climbing a “Mountain” took longer than a “Peak,” because “Peaks” were accessed by giant elevators, while to ascend a “Mountain” you had to take a car along a winding “mountain” road. Our car joined an endless convoy creeping upward along a smooth steel highway. To our left was a sheer cliff of blue-green metal; to our right, a bottomless abyss.

The convoy consisted of fifty-ton giant dump trucks, fully loaded with rock excavated from the Taihang Mountains. The cars soon climbed above five thousand meters, and the ground below no longer showed any detail—all we could see was the bluish reflection cast by the Earth Engines. Miss Xiaoxing had us put on oxygen masks. As we drew closer to the nozzle, both the brightness and the heat increased dramatically. The masks darkened in color, and the miniature compressors in our cooling suits whirred at full power. At six thousand meters we reached the intake, where truckload after truckload of boulders was dumped into a great pit glowing with a faint red light, without a sound escaping. I asked Miss Xiaoxing how the Earth Engines turned rock into fuel.

“Heavy-element fusion is a profound subject, and I can’t explain it clearly to you yet. You only need to know that the Earth Engines are the most powerful machines ever built by humanity. For example, North China No. 794, where we are now, can produce 15 billion tons of thrust against the earth when running at full power.”

Our car finally reached the summit, with the nozzle right above our heads. Because the beam’s diameter was so vast, when we looked up we saw a giant wall of blue-glowing plasma extending upward to an infinite height.

At that moment, I suddenly remembered a philosophy class from not long before, when our haggard teacher had given us a riddle.

“You’re walking along a plain and suddenly come face to face with a wall. This wall is infinitely high upward, infinitely deep downward, infinitely far to the left, infinitely far to the right. What is this wall?”

I shuddered, then told the riddle to Miss Xiaoxing beside me. She thought for a long while, then shook her head in puzzlement. I leaned close to her ear and told her the terrible answer.

Death.

She looked at me silently for a few seconds, then suddenly hugged me tightly to her chest. Over her shoulder I gazed as far as I could: across the misty vastness of the land, a forest of giant metal peaks stood, stretching from all around us to the horizon. The beams they spat out were like a tilted cosmic forest, piercing our tottering sky.

We soon reached the sea, where we saw the tips of the city’s skyscrapers jutting out above the water. At low tide, frothy white seawater poured from the countless windows of the buildings, forming cascading waterfalls… The Braking Era had only just ended, and its impact on the Earth was already shocking: the tides caused by the acceleration of the Earth Engines had swallowed two-thirds of the major cities in the Northern Hemisphere, and the global heat the engines produced had melted the polar glaciers, adding further force to the great flood until it reached even the Southern Hemisphere. Thirty years ago, Grandpa had witnessed with his own eyes a hundred-meter-high wave swallow Shanghai; even now, his eyes went glassy whenever he told the story. In fact, our planet had been changed beyond recognition before it even set out. Who knew how much more suffering awaited us in the long wanderings through outer space to come? We boarded an ancient means of transport called a ship and sailed across the sea. The beams of the Earth Engines fell farther and farther behind us, until after a day they were completely out of sight. Now the ocean lay between two bands of afterglow: to the west, the blue-green glow cast by the Earth Engine beams; to the east, the pink glow of the sun beneath the sea’s horizon. Their reflections split the sea itself into two halves shimmering with two colors, and our ship sailed right along the boundary between them—a truly wondrous sight. But as the blue-green glow gradually faded and the pink glow gradually strengthened, a mood of unease spread through the ship. No children could be seen on deck anymore; they had all hidden themselves in their cabins and would not come out, and the curtains over the portholes had been tightly drawn. A day later, the moment we had dreaded finally arrived. We gathered in the large cabin used as a classroom, and Miss Xiaoxing solemnly announced: “Children, we are going to watch the sunrise.” No one moved. Our eyes were dull, and we stood frozen as if suddenly turned to ice. Miss Xiaoxing urged us several times, but still no one budged. One of her male colleagues said, “I said all along that the round-the-world experience course should come before the modern history course—it would be easier for the students to adapt psychologically.”

“It’s not that simple. Before the modern history course, they had already learned everything from society,” Miss Xiaoxing said. Then she turned to a few class officers: “You go first, children. Don’t be afraid. When I was little, I was very nervous the first time I watched a sunrise too, but once you’ve seen it, it’s fine.”

The children finally stood up one by one and shuffled toward the cabin door. Then I felt a small, damp hand grab mine. I turned and saw Ling’er.

“I’m scared…” she whimpered.

“We’ve seen the sun on TV too. It’s the same thing anyway,” I said to comfort her.

“How could it be the same? Is watching a snake on TV the same as seeing a real snake?”

“…Anyway, we have to go up there, or we’ll lose points in this class!”

Ling’er and I held hands tightly and, together with the other children, walked trembling toward the deck to face the first sunrise of our lives.

“Actually, it’s only in the last three or four centuries that humans have come to associate the sun with fear. Before that, humans weren’t afraid of the sun—on the contrary, they saw it as solemn and magnificent. Earth was still rotating then, and people could see the sunrise and sunset every day. They cheered at the rising sun and praised the beauty of the setting sun.” Teacher Xiaoxing stood at the bow and spoke to us, the sea breeze stirring her long hair. Behind her, several shafts of light shot out from where sea met sky, like the breath spouting from an unimaginably huge monster beneath the waves.

At last we saw that chilling flame. At first it was just a bright point on the line where sky met water, then it quickly grew and gradually took on the shape of an arc. Then I felt as if something were clamping down on my throat; fear suffocated me, and the deck beneath my feet seemed to suddenly vanish. I was falling into the abyss of the sea, falling, falling… And falling with me was Ling’er, her frail little body, thin as spider silk, pressed against me and trembling; and the other children, and everyone else, and the whole world, all falling. Then I thought of that riddle again. I had once asked my philosophy teacher what color that wall was, and he said it should be black. I thought that was wrong—the wall of death in my imagination should be dazzling white, which is why that plasma wall reminded me of it. In this era, death is no longer black; it is the color of lightning. When the final lightning comes, the world will turn to steam in an instant.

More than three centuries ago, astrophysicists discovered that the rate at which hydrogen was being converted into helium inside the sun had suddenly accelerated. So they launched tens of thousands of probes through the sun and eventually built a complete and precise mathematical model of this star.

Calculations run on supercomputers against this model showed that the sun’s evolution had already shifted away from the main sequence: helium fusion would spread through the entire interior of the sun in a very short time, producing a violent explosion called a helium flash. After that, the sun would become a giant but dim red giant, swelling so large that Earth would orbit inside the sun!

In fact, during the helium flash before that, our planet had already been vaporized.

All of this will happen within four hundred years. Three hundred and eighty have already passed.

The sun’s catastrophe will blast apart and swallow all the habitable terrestrial planets in the solar system, and completely alter the form and orbits of all the Jovian planets. After the first helium flash, as heavy elements repeatedly accumulate in the sun’s core, helium flashes will recur over a period of time. This “period of time” is relative to stellar evolution; its length could equal a thousand human histories. So humanity can no longer survive in the future solar system. The only way out is interstellar migration to outer space, and given humanity’s current technological capacity, the only feasible destination for the migration of all humankind is Proxima Centauri in the Alpha Centauri system—the nearest star to us, 4.3 light-years away. Consensus has been reached on the above; the debate centers on the method of migration.

To reinforce the educational effect, our ship turned back twice across the Pacific, giving us two more sunrises. By now we had fully adapted, and we believed that the children in the Southern Hemisphere who faced the sun every day really could survive.

After that we sailed under the sun. The sun rose higher and higher in the sky, and the weather, which had cooled for a few days, grew hot again. I was dozing off in my cabin when I heard a commotion of voices outside. Ling’er pushed the door open and poked her head in.

“Hey, the Ship Faction and the Earth Faction are fighting again!”

I wasn’t interested. They’d been fighting for four centuries. But I still went outside to take a look. Among the several boys tangled in the brawl, I spotted at once that the one who had started it was Adong. His father was a diehard Ship Faction member who was still in prison for taking part in a riot against the United Government. Like father, like son.

Teacher Xiaoxing and a few sturdy crew members barely managed to pull them apart. Adong, his nose smeared with blood, raised his arm and shouted:

“Throw the Earth Faction into the sea!”

“I’m Earth Faction too. Should I be thrown into the sea as well?” Teacher Xiaoxing asked.

“Throw all the Earth Faction into the sea!” Adong refused to back down. Now, with Ship Faction sentiment on the rise again worldwide, they had become cocky once more.

“Why do you hate us so much?” Teacher Xiaoxing asked. Several other Ship Faction kids started shouting:

“We won’t wait to die on Earth with you Earth Faction fools!”

“We’re going by ship! Long live the ships!”

…

Teacher Xiaoxing pressed the holographic display on her wrist, and a holographic image immediately appeared in the air before us. The children’s attention was instantly drawn to it, and they quieted down for the moment. It was a crystal-clear sealed glass sphere, about 10 centimeters in diameter, two-thirds filled with water. In the water were a small shrimp, a small branch of coral, and some green algae, with the shrimp swimming leisurely about. Teacher Xiaoxing said: “This is a design project Adong did for natural science class. Besides these things, the sphere also contains some invisible bacteria, which depend on and interact with one another inside the sealed glass ball. The shrimp feeds on the algae, takes in oxygen from the water, and then excretes organic waste and carbon dioxide. The bacteria break these down into inorganic substances and carbon dioxide, and then the algae use these inorganic substances and artificial sunlight to carry out photosynthesis, producing nutrients, growing and reproducing, while releasing oxygen for the shrimp to breathe. This kind of ecological cycle should allow the organisms in the glass sphere to thrive endlessly with only sunlight supplied. This is the best course project I’ve ever seen. I know it embodies the dream of Adong and all the Ship Faction children—it’s a miniature of the ship in your dreams! Adong told me that, following a strict mathematical model in the computer, he genetically designed every organism in the sphere so that their metabolisms reached exactly the right balance. He firmly believed that the living world in the sphere would survive for a long time, until the end of the shrimp’s lifespan. The teachers all loved this project. We placed it under artificial sunlight of the required intensity, and we too believed in Adong’s prediction, silently blessing this little world he had created. But now, only a dozen or so days have passed…”

Teacher Xiaoxing carefully took the glass sphere out of a small box she had brought along. The dead shrimp floated on the surface, the water was utterly murky, and the rotted algae had lost their green, turning into a lifeless mass of fuzz covering the coral.

“This little world is dead. Children, who can tell me why?” Teacher Xiaoxing held the dead world up before the children.

“It’s too small!”

"That’s right, too small. A small ecosystem, no matter how precise, cannot withstand the storms of time.

The same goes for the ships the Ship Faction imagines."

“Our ship could be built as big as Shanghai or New York,” Adong said, his voice much lower than before.

“Yes, with humanity’s current technology we can only build them that big. Compared with Earth, such an ecosystem is still too small, far too small.”

“We’ll find new planets.”

“You don’t even believe that yourselves. Alpha Centauri has no planets. The nearest star with planets is more than 850 light-years away. The fastest ship humanity can build at present can only reach 0.5 percent of the speed of light, so it would take 170,000 years to get there. A ship-sized ecosystem can’t last even a tenth of that time. Children, only an ecosystem on the scale of Earth, with a grand ecological cycle like that, can keep life going for generation after generation! When humans leave Earth in the universe, it’s like a baby leaving its mother in the desert!”

“But… Teacher, we don’t have time. Earth doesn’t have time. Before it can accelerate enough and travel far enough, the sun will explode!”

“There is enough time. You must believe in the United Government! How many times have I said this? If you still don’t believe it, let’s put it this way: humanity will go to its death with pride, because we have done our utmost!”

Humanity’s escape is divided into five steps: first, use the Earth Engines to stop Earth’s rotation, fixing the engine nozzles opposite to the direction of Earth’s motion; second, run the Earth Engines at full power to accelerate Earth to escape velocity and fly out of the solar system; third, continue accelerating in outer space, heading for Proxima Centauri; fourth, midway, set Earth rotating again, reverse the engines’ direction, and begin decelerating; fifth, Earth parks in orbit around Proxima Centauri and becomes a satellite of that star. People call these five steps the Braking Era, the Escape Era, the Wandering Era I (acceleration), the Wandering Era II (deceleration), and the New Sun Era.

The entire migration process will last 2,500 years, across a hundred generations.

Our ship sailed on, reaching the night side of the Earth, where neither sunlight nor the beams of the Earth Engines could reach. In the cool sea breeze of the Atlantic, we children saw the starry sky for the first time. Oh God, what a sight it was—so beautiful it made our hearts ache. Ms. Xing held us with one arm and pointed at the stars with the other. Look, children, that’s Centaurus, that’s Proxima Centauri, that’s our new home! Then she began to cry, and we all cried with her. The sailors and the captain around us—those men of iron—shed tears too. Everyone gazed through tear-filled eyes at where the teacher was pointing; the starry sky twisted and trembled in our tears, and only that one star stayed still. It was the lighthouse of distant land in the raging dark sea, the flickering firelight appearing ahead of a lone traveler freezing to death in a frozen wasteland, the sun in our hearts, humanity’s only hope and support in the sea of suffering of the next hundred generations…

On the voyage home, we saw the first signal of departure: a giant comet appeared in the night sky—that was the Moon. Humanity could not take the Moon with it, so planetary engines were installed on the Moon as well, pushing it out of Earth’s orbit to prevent a collision when the Earth accelerated. The enormous comet tail produced by the Moon’s planetary engines bathed the sea in blue light, and the stars were no longer visible. The gravitational tides caused by the Moon’s movement sent giant waves surging into the sky, so we switched to airplanes and flew to our home in the Southern Hemisphere.

The day of departure finally arrived!

The moment we got off the plane, the beams of the Earth Engines blinded us. These beams were several times brighter than before, and all of them had shifted from slanted to perfectly vertical. The Earth Engines were running at maximum power, and the hundred-meter waves raised by the acceleration roared across every continent. Scorching hurricanes laden with boiling spray howled madly among the towering, sky-piercing plasma beams, uprooting every large tree on land… Seen from space at this moment, our planet had also become a giant comet, its blue tail piercing the dark void.

The Earth set out, and humanity set out.

Just as we departed, Grandfather passed away; the burns on his body had become infected. In his final moments he kept repeating one sentence: “Ah, Earth, my Wandering Earth…”

Part Two: The Escape Era

---

The school was about to move into the underground city, and we were among the first residents to enter. The school bus drove into a tall tunnel that sloped gently downward into the earth. After about half an hour, we were told we had entered the city—but where outside the windows was anything that looked like a city? We saw only a constant stream of intricate branching tunnels and countless sealed doors on the walls; beneath a row of floodlights on the high ceiling, everything was a monotonous metallic blue. At the thought of spending most of the rest of our lives in this world, we couldn’t help feeling gloomy.

“Primitive people lived in caves, and now we’re living in caves again,” Ling’er whispered, but Ms. Xing heard her anyway.

“There’s no help for it, children. The environment on the surface will soon become very, very terrible. When it’s cold, you spit, and before it hits the ground it freezes into a little ice pellet; when it’s hot, you spit again, and before it hits the ground it turns to steam!”

“I know about the cold, because the Earth is getting farther and farther from the Sun; but why would it get hot too?” asked a little lower-grade kid on the same bus.

“Dummy, haven’t you learned about orbital acceleration?” I said irritably.

“No.”

Ling’er patiently explained, as if to distract from the sorrow of a moment ago. "It’s like this: unlike what you think, the Earth Engines aren’t that powerful—they can only give the Earth a very small acceleration, not enough to fling it out of solar orbit all at once. Before the Earth leaves the Sun, it still has to go around it 15 times! Over those 15 orbits the Earth gradually accelerates.

Right now the Earth is going around the Sun in a fairly round circle, but the faster it goes, the flatter the circle becomes—faster and flatter, faster and flatter—and the Sun shifts more and more to one side of this flattened ellipse. So later on, the Earth will sometimes be very, very far from the Sun, and of course it’ll be cold…"

“But… that’s still not right! It’s cold when the Earth is at its farthest point, but at the other end of the ellipse, it’s… let me think, according to orbital dynamics, still just as close to the Sun as now, so how could it get hotter?”

What a little genius. Memory-inheritance technology has made such small children ordinary, and that is humanity’s good fortune—otherwise a miracle like the Earth Engines, which even the gods would not dare imagine, would never have become reality within four centuries.

I said, “But there are still the Earth Engines, you little fool. Right now more than ten thousand giant blowtorches like that are running at full power, and the Earth has become the retaining ring of a rocket nozzle… Quiet down, will you? I’m upset!”

And so we began our underground life. Cities with populations of over a million, five hundred meters below ground like this one, were scattered across every continent. In such underground cities I finished primary school and entered middle school. Schooling focused on science and engineering; education in the arts and philosophy had been cut to a minimum—humanity had no energy to spare for such things. This was humanity’s busiest era; everyone had more work than they could finish. Interestingly, all the religions on Earth vanished overnight without a trace. People finally understood that even if there really were a God, he was a bastard. History classes still existed, but the human history of the pre-solar era in our textbooks seemed to us like a myth from the Garden of Eden.

Father was a near-Earth-orbit astronaut in the air force and was seldom home. I remember that in the fifth year of orbital acceleration, when the Earth was at aphelion, our whole family went to the seaside once. The day the Earth reached the top of its orbit was a holiday like New Year’s or Christmas, because at that time the Earth was farthest from the Sun and people had an illusory sense of security. As before, when going up to the surface, we had to wear fully sealed heated suits with nuclear batteries. Outside, the dazzling towering beams of the Earth Engines were the main thing visible; the rest of the surface world was drowned in the glare of the beams, and no change could be made out. We flew for a long time in a flying car, until we reached a place the beams could not reach, a stretch of shore where the Sun was visible. By then the Sun had become the size of a baseball, hanging motionless at the edge of the sky; its light cast only a halo of dawnlike brightness around itself, the sky was a dark, deep blue, and the stars were still clearly visible. Looking around, where was the sea? Before us was a vast, white frozen plain. On this frozen ocean was a great crowd of revelers. Fireworks bloomed in the dark blue sky, and the people on the frozen sea reveled with a kind of abnormal fervor. Everywhere there were drunks rolling on the ice, and more people were hoarsely singing different songs, each trying to drown out the others with their voice.

“Everyone is desperately living the life they want to live, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” Dad suddenly remembered something. “Ah, I forgot to tell you—I’ve fallen in love with Li Xing, and I’m leaving you to be with her.”

“Who is she?” Mom asked calmly.

“My primary school teacher,” I answered for Dad. I had been in middle school for two years now, and I didn’t know how Dad and Ms. Xing had met—maybe at that graduation ceremony two years ago?

“Then go,” Mom said.

“I’ll surely get tired of it after a while, and then I’ll come back, what do you think?”

“Of course, if you want to.” Mom’s voice was as steady as the frozen sea, but she quickly grew excited. “Ah, that one’s really beautiful—it must have a holographic scatterer inside!” She pointed at a firework that had just burst in the sky, praising it sincerely.

In this era, people were baffled when they watched films and novels from four centuries earlier; they couldn’t understand how people of the pre-solar era could pour so much emotion into matters of no life-or-death consequence. When they saw the hero and heroine suffering or weeping for love, their astonishment was beyond words. In this era, the threat of death and the desire to escape had overwhelmed everything; apart from the current state of the Sun and the position of the Earth, nothing could truly draw their attention or move them. This highly concentrated attention had gradually and fundamentally changed humanity’s psychological state and spiritual life. As for things like love, they merely glimpsed it out of the corner of their eye, the way a gambler snatches a few seconds to drink water while staring at the roulette wheel.

Two months later, Dad really did come back from Ms. Xing’s place. Mom was neither happy nor unhappy.

Dad said to me, “Li Xing thinks very highly of you. She says you’re a creative student.”

Mom looked blank. “Who is she?”

“Ms. Xing, my primary school teacher. Dad has been with her these past two months!”

“Oh, now I remember!” Mom shook her head and laughed. “I’m not even forty yet, and my memory’s already like this.”

She looked up at the holographic starry sky on the ceiling, then at the holographic forest on the four walls. “It’s good that you’re back. Change these images, will you? The child and I are tired of looking at them, but neither of us knows how to adjust the damn things.”

By the time the Earth plunged toward the Sun once more, our whole family had forgotten all about it.

One day, the news reported that the sea was melting, so our whole family went to the seaside again. This was when the Earth was passing through Mars’s orbit. Given the amount of sunlight at that time, the Earth’s temperature should still have been very low, but because of the Earth Engines, the surface temperature was just right. Being able to go to the surface without a heated or cooled suit felt wonderful. On this hemisphere, where the Earth Engines were located, the sky still looked the same, but when we reached the other hemisphere, we truly felt the sun’s approach: the sky was a clear, pure blue, and the sun in the sky was already as bright as it had been before departure. But from the air, we saw that the sea had not melted; it was still a vast white field of ice. As we stepped out of the flying car in disappointment, we heard an earth-shaking rumble, a sound that seemed to come from the very depths of the planet, as if the Earth were about to explode.

“That’s the sound of the ocean!” Dad said. “Because the temperature rose so abruptly, the thick ice layer is heated unevenly—much like an earthquake on land.”

Suddenly, a sharp, thunderous crash cut into the low rumble, and the people behind us watching the sea cheered. I saw a long fissure tear open across the sea’s surface, splitting as fast as a black bolt of lightning suddenly appearing across the vast ice field. Then, amid relentless booming, one such fissure after another opened in the sea ice, and seawater gushed from every crack, forming rapidly spreading torrents across the ice field…

On the way home, we saw that on the long-barren land, wild grass was sprouting from the ground in great swaths, all kinds of flowers were in full bloom, and tender leaves were clothing the dead forests in green… All life was seizing the moment to burst forth with vitality.

As the Earth drew closer and closer to the sun, people’s hearts tightened day by day. Fewer and fewer came to the surface to enjoy the spring scenery; most people hid deep in the underground cities—not to escape the coming heat, rainstorms, and hurricanes, but to escape the fear that grew as the sun drew nearer. One day after I had gone to bed, I heard Mom say to Dad in a low voice, “It really might be too late.”

Dad said, “There were the same rumors at the first four perihelions.”

“But this time it’s real. I heard it from Dr. Chandler’s wife—her husband is that astronomer on the Navigation Committee, you all know him. He told her himself that he’s observed the helium accumulation accelerating.”

“Listen to me, dear. We must hold on to hope—not because hope truly exists, but because we must be noble people. In the pre-solar age, to be a noble person you had to have money, power, or talent; today, all you need is hope. Hope is the gold and gems of this age. However long we live, we must have it! Tell the child this tomorrow.”

Like everyone else, I grew restless as the perihelion approached. One day after school, I found myself wandering to the city-center plaza. I stood blankly by the circular fountain pool in the middle of the plaza, sometimes looking down at the blue, glimmering water, sometimes looking up at the dreamlike ripples of light on the plaza’s circular dome—reflections cast up by the pool. Then I saw Ling’er. She was holding a small bottle and a little tube, blowing soap bubbles. With each string of bubbles she blew, she would stare blankly at the bubbles floating in the air, watch them vanish one by one, then blow another string…

“You’re this big and still doing that? Is it even fun?” I walked over and asked her.

Ling’er was overjoyed to see me. “Let’s go on a trip!”

“A trip? Where to?”

“The surface, of course!” She swept her hand through the air and flicked a hologram out of the computer on her wrist, showing a beach at sunset. A breeze stirred the palm trees, white waves rolled in, and pairs of lovers stood on the golden sand, their dark silhouettes set against a sea paved with shattered gold. “Mona and Dagang sent this back. They’re still traveling all over the world. They say it’s not too hot out there yet, that it’s wonderful out there. Let’s go!”

“They just got expelled from school for skipping class.”

“Hmph, that’s not what you’re afraid of. You’re afraid of the sun!”

“Aren’t you? Don’t forget you saw a psychiatrist because you were afraid of the sun.”

“But I’m different now. I’ve had a revelation! Look—” Ling’er blew a string of soap bubbles with the little tube. “Stare at it!” She pointed at one bubble.

I stared at that bubble and saw the wild surge of light and color across its surface, surging with a complexity and fineness beyond human perception, as if the bubble knew the length of its own life and was frantically performing for the world the countless dreams and legends from its vast sea of memories. Soon the wild surge of light and color vanished in a silent explosion. I saw a tiny wisp of vapor, barely there and barely not, which lasted only half a second—and then there was nothing, as if nothing had ever existed.

“See that? The Earth is just a little soap bubble in the universe. Pop—and it’s gone. What’s there to be afraid of?”

“That’s not how it is. According to calculations, when the helium flash happens, it will take at least a hundred hours for the Earth to be completely vaporized.”

“That’s the most terrifying part!” Ling’er cried. “We’re five hundred meters underground, like the filling in a pie—first slowly baked, then vaporized!”

A chill ran through my whole body.

“But on the surface it’s different. Everything there is vaporized in an instant. The people on the surface are like that bubble—pop… So when the helium flash comes, it’s better to be on the surface.”

For some reason, I didn’t go with her; she went with Adong instead, and I never saw either of them again.

The helium flash did not happen. The Earth sped past the perihelion and rose toward aphelion for the sixth time, and people’s taut nerves relaxed. Since the Earth’s rotation had stopped, on this side of the solar orbit the Earth Engines on the Asian continent were facing the direction of travel, so they had all stopped before passing the perihelion, with only occasional attitude-adjustment maneuvers. We here were in a calm, endless night. The engines on the American continent were running at full power, and that place had become the blast ring of a rocket nozzle. Since the sun was also over the Western Hemisphere at this time, the heat there was even more terrifying—vegetation smoldered.

And so the Earth’s orbital acceleration went on year after year. Each time the Earth rose toward aphelion, people’s hearts eased as the distance between the Earth and the sun grew; and when it plunged toward the sun in the new year, people’s hearts tightened day by day. Every time perihelion arrived, rumors sprang up everywhere that the solar helium flash was about to happen then; and not until the Earth rose toward aphelion again did people’s fear subside along with the shrinking sun in the sky—only to brew the next round of fear… The human spirit seemed to be swinging on a cosmic swing—or, more aptly, experiencing a cosmic game of Russian roulette: the ascent to aphelion and the plunge toward the sun were the spinning of the cylinder, and passing the perihelion was the pulling of the trigger! Each pull was more nerve-wracking than the last, and I spent my entire adolescence in this alternating fear. Actually, if you think about it carefully, even at aphelion the Earth had not escaped the lethal range of the solar helium flash. If the sun erupted then, the Earth would not be vaporized but slowly liquefied—and that outcome would be even worse than at perihelion.

In the Escape Era, great disasters came one after another.

Because of the acceleration produced by the Earth Engines and the change in orbit, the equilibrium of the iron-nickel core at the Earth’s center was disturbed, and the effects passed through the Gutenberg discontinuity and spread to the mantle. Geothermal heat escaped from every continent, volcanoes ran rampant—a lethal threat to humanity’s underground cities. After the sixth orbital-change cycle, magma-intrusion disasters occurred frequently in the underground cities of every continent.

That day, when the alarm sounded, I was on my way home from school. I heard the broadcast from the city hall:

“Attention, all citizens of City F112. The northern barrier of the city has been breached by crustal stress. Magma intrusion! Magma intrusion! The magma flow has now reached District Four! The highway exits are sealed off. All citizens, assemble at the central plaza and evacuate to the surface via the lifts. Note: during evacuation, follow Article Five of the Emergency Law. I repeat: during evacuation, follow Article Five of the Emergency Law!”

I looked around at the maze-like passages; the underground city seemed normal enough now. But I knew the danger: there were only two underground highways leading outside, and one of them had been blocked last year to reinforce the barrier. If the remaining one was also blocked, the only way out would be the lifts that ran straight up the shafts to the surface.

The lifts had very little capacity, and moving the city’s 360,000 people out would take a long time. But there was no need to fight for a chance to survive—the Emergency Law of the United Government had arranged everything.

In ancient times there had been an ethical question: when a flood comes, a man who can save only one person—should he save his father or his son? To the people of this era, even posing such a question was incomprehensible.

When I reached the central plaza, I saw that people had already formed a long queue ordered by age. Closest to the elevator entrance were infants held by robot caregivers, then kindergarten children, then primary school students… I was in the front half of the middle section. Dad was on duty in low Earth orbit now; only Mom and I were in the city. I couldn’t see Mom, so I ran along the long line, but before I had gone far a soldier stopped me. I knew she was in the last section, because this city was mainly a concentration of schools and there were few families; she already counted among the older group.

The line moved forward at an infuriatingly slow pace. When my turn came to step into the elevator three hours later, I felt not the least bit relieved, because between Mom and survival there were still more than twenty thousand university students! And I could already smell a strong sulfurous odor…

Two and a half hours after I reached the surface, the magma swallowed the entire city five hundred meters underground. My heart twisted as I imagined Mom’s final moments: together with the eighteen thousand people who had failed to evacuate, she watched the magma pour into the central plaza. The power was already out by then; the only light in the whole underground city was the magma’s terrifying dark red glow. The plaza’s tall white dome gradually turned black in the high temperature, and all the victims may have been killed by the heat of over a thousand degrees before they even touched the magma.

But life went on. In this harsh and terrifying reality, love still flashed its enchanting sparks from time to time. To ease people’s tension, when Earth reached aphelion for the twelfth time, the United Earth Government actually revived the Olympic Games, which had been interrupted for two centuries. I took part as a competitor in the motorized ice-sled rally: driving a motorized ice sled from Shanghai across the frozen Pacific on the ice to the finish line in New York.

After the starting gun, more than a hundred sleds set off across the frozen ocean at about two hundred kilometers per hour. At first a few sleds stayed with me, but after two days they had all disappeared beyond the horizon, some ahead and some behind.

By then the glow of the Earth Engines behind me was no longer visible; I was in the darkest part of Earth. To my eyes, the world consisted only of a vast starry sky and an ice field stretching endlessly in all directions—an ice field that seemed to reach the edge of the universe, or perhaps was itself the edge of the universe. And in a universe made of infinite stars and infinite ice, there was only me! An avalanche of loneliness overwhelmed me, and I wanted to cry. I raced onward desperately; ranking no longer mattered. I only wanted to escape this terrible loneliness as soon as possible before it killed me, and that imagined far shore seemed not to exist at all.

Just then I saw a figure appear on the horizon. As I got closer, I found it was a girl standing beside her sled, her long hair fluttering in the cold wind over the ice field. You know what it means to meet a girl at a time like that: the rest of our lives was decided from that moment. She was Japanese, and her name was Kayoko Yamazaki. The women’s group had started twelve hours before us. Her sled had gotten stuck in a crevasse and snapped one of its runners. As I helped her repair the sled, I told her what I had just been feeling.

"You’re absolutely right—I felt exactly the same way! Yes, as if you were the only person in the whole universe!

Do you know, when I saw you appear in the distance, it was like seeing the sun rise!"

“Why didn’t you call for a rescue plane?”

“This is a race that expresses the human spirit. You should know that the Wandering Earth can’t call for rescue in the universe!”

She waved her little fist and spoke with a persistence characteristic of the Japanese.

“But now we’ll have to call one anyway. Neither of us has a spare runner, and your sled can’t be repaired.”

“Then may I ride with you on your sled? If you don’t care about your ranking, that is.”

Of course I didn’t care, so Kayoko and I completed the rest of the long journey together across the frozen Pacific.

After we passed Hawaii, we saw the dawn on the horizon. On the boundless ice field lit by that small sun, we sent our marriage application to the Civil Affairs Department of the United Earth Government.

When we reached New York, the judges for the event had long since grown impatient and packed up and left. But an official from the civil affairs bureau was waiting for us. He offered his congratulations on our marriage, then began to perform his duties: he waved his hand and drew a holographic image in the air, on which tens of thousands of dots were neatly arranged—the number of marriages registered with the United Earth Government worldwide over the past few days. Because the environment was so harsh, the law stipulated that only one of every three newly married couples had the right to have children, to be decided by lot. Kayoko hesitated for a long time over the tens of thousands of dots suspended in midair, then chose one in the middle.

When the dot turned green, she jumped for joy. But I did not know what to feel. Was my child lucky or unlucky to be born in this age of suffering? The official, however, was elated. He said he was always overjoyed whenever a couple “went green.” He produced a bottle of vodka, and the three of us passed it around, each taking a sip, and drank to the continuation of humanity. Behind us, the distant sun gilded the Statue of Liberty with its faint light; opposite us stood the uninhabited skyscrapers of Manhattan, their shadows cast long by the weak sunlight across the silent ice of New York Harbor. Drunk and hazy, I burst into tears.

Earth, my Wandering Earth!

Before we parted, the official handed us a set of keys and said drunkenly, “This is the home you’ve been allotted in Asia. Go home. Oh, home is so wonderful!”

“What’s so wonderful about it?” I said indifferently. “The underground cities in Asia are full of danger. You in the Western Hemisphere naturally can’t imagine that.”

“Soon we’ll have dangers you can’t imagine, too. Earth is about to pass through the asteroid belt again, and this time the Western Hemisphere will be facing the direction of travel.”

“The last few orbit-change cycles also passed through the asteroid belt. Wasn’t it no big deal?”

“That was only skirting the edge of the asteroid belt. The space fleet could naturally handle it; they could use lasers and nuclear bombs to clear away all those small rocks along Earth’s route. But this time… haven’t you seen the news? This time Earth is going straight through the middle of the asteroid belt! The fleet can only deal with the big rocks. Ah…”

On the plane back to Asia, Kayoko asked me, “Are those rocks very big?”

My father was now doing that very work in the space fleet, so although the government had as usual imposed a news blackout to prevent panic, I still knew something about the situation. I told Kayoko that some of those rocks were as big as a mountain, and a fifty-megaton thermonuclear bomb could only make a small crater in one. “They’re about to use the most powerful weapon in human hands!”

I told Kayoko mysteriously.

“You mean antimatter bombs?”

“What else could it be?”

“What’s the space fleet’s patrol range?”

“Their strength is limited now. My dad says it’s only about one and a half million kilometers.”

“Ah, then we’ll be able to see it!”

“Better not look.”

Kayoko looked anyway, and she looked without goggles. The first flash of the antimatter bombs came from space shortly after we took off. Kayoko was admiring the stars outside the plane’s window at the time, and it blinded her for more than an hour; for over a month afterward her eyes were red, swollen, and watering. It was truly a heart-stopping moment. Antimatter shells kept striking asteroids, and the intense light of annihilation flashed one after another in the pitch-black space, as if a group of giants in the universe were circling Earth and taking frantic photographs with flashbulbs.

Half an hour later, we saw fireballs streaking across the sky, trailing long fiery tails and giving off a terrifying beauty. There were more and more of them, and each one streaked farther across the sky than the last. Suddenly the fuselage shuddered amid a loud boom, followed by a series of booms and tremors. Kayoko screamed and threw herself into my arms; she clearly thought the plane had been hit by a meteor. Then the captain’s voice came over the cabin speakers.

“Please do not panic, passengers. These are sonic booms produced by meteors breaking the sound barrier. Please put on your headphones, or your hearing may be permanently damaged. Since flight safety can no longer be guaranteed, we will make an emergency landing in Hawaii.”

Then I fixed my eyes on one fireball. It was much larger than the others, and I did not believe it could burn up completely in the atmosphere. Sure enough, the fireball raced across most of the sky, growing smaller and smaller, but still plunged into the frozen sea. From ten thousand meters up, I saw a small white dot appear where it struck the surface; the dot immediately spread into a white circle

Then the communicator on his wrist buzzed. He glanced at it and said to the driver, “There’s no time to reach Gate 204. Find the nearest entrance!”

The car turned a corner and stopped in front of an entrance to an underground city. When we got out, we saw several soldiers at the entrance, all standing motionless and staring at something far off in one direction, their eyes full of terror. We followed their gaze. At the line where the sky met the sea, we saw a black barrier. At first glance it looked like a low bank of clouds at the horizon, but the top of those “clouds” was far too level, like a long wall stretched across the edge of the sky; and looking closer, we saw that the crest of the wall was edged with a line of white.

“What is that?” Kayoko asked an officer timidly, and the answer made our hair stand on end.

“Waves.”

The great iron gates of the underground city rumbled shut. About ten minutes later we felt a low sound rising from the surface, a rumbling, like a giant rolling over on the ground. We looked at one another. We all knew that a hundred-meter wall of water was rolling across Hawaii, and would roll across every continent as well. But another kind of vibration was even more frightening, as though a gigantic fist were pounding the Earth again and again from space. Underground the shaking was not strong—we could only sense it faintly—but every tremor reached straight down into our souls. It was meteors striking the ground, over and over.

The cruel bombardment our planet suffered continued, on and off, for a week.

When we came out of the underground city, Kayoko cried out in shock: “My God, what’s happened to the sky?”

The sky was gray. The upper atmosphere was thick with dust kicked up when the asteroids struck the land, and both stars and sun had vanished into that boundless gray, as though the whole universe were shrouded in fog. On the ground, the seawater left behind by the towering waves had frozen solid before it could recede; the surviving high-rises of the city stood alone on the ice, hung with long icicles. A layer of impact dust had settled over the ice, so that the world was left with only one color: gray.

Kayoko and I continued our journey back to Asia. When the plane crossed the International Date Line—long since meaningless—we saw the blackest night human beings have ever seen. The aircraft seemed to be gliding through an ocean of ink. Looking out at that world without a single ray of light, our spirits sank to their lowest point.

“When will it end?” Kayoko murmured. I did not know whether she meant this journey or this life so full of suffering and disaster; at that moment I felt that neither had an end. Yes—even if the Earth navigated out of the danger zone of the helium flash and we escaped with our lives, so what? We were only the lowest step of an endless staircase. By the time our hundredth-generation descendants climbed to the top and saw the light of a new life, our bones would have turned to ash. I did not dare imagine the suffering and hardship ahead, and even less did I dare imagine walking this endless muddy road with my beloved and my child. I was tired, too tired to go on… Just as grief and despair were suffocating me, a woman’s cry rang out in the cabin: “Ah! No! You can’t, darling!”

I looked toward the sound and saw the woman snatching a pistol from the hand of a man beside her; he had clearly been about to put the muzzle to his temple. He was frail, staring blankly at something infinitely far ahead. The woman buried her head in his lap and began to sob.

“Quiet,” the man said coldly.

The sobbing stopped. Only the hum of the engines remained, soft and unchanging, like a funeral march. It seemed to me that the plane had stuck fast in that vast darkness, motionless, and that the entire universe held nothing but darkness and the plane. Kayoko pressed close against me, her whole body icy cold.

Suddenly there was a stir at the front of the cabin, and excited whispers. I looked out the window and saw a hazy glow ahead of the plane. The light was blue, without shape, spread evenly through the night sky that was thick with impact dust.

It was the glow of the Earth Engines.

A third of the Earth Engines in the Western Hemisphere had been destroyed by the meteorites, but the loss was smaller than predicted before departure; the engines of the Eastern Hemisphere, being on the side facing away from the impacts, were intact. In terms of power, they were enough to carry the Earth through its escape voyage.

To me, that hazy blue light ahead was like the brightness of the sea surface seen after a long ascent from the deep ocean, and my breathing came easily again.

Then I heard the woman’s voice again: “Darling, pain and fear—things like that can only be felt while you’re alive. Dead, once you’re dead, there’s nothing. Over there is only darkness. Better to be alive. Don’t you think so?”

The frail man did not answer. He stared at the blue light ahead, and tears ran down his face. I knew he could go on living. As long as that blue light of hope still shone, we could all go on living. And I thought again of what my father had said about hope.

As soon as we got off the plane, Kayoko and I did not go to our new home in the underground city. Instead we went to the space fleet base on the surface to find my father. But at the base all I received was a cold medal awarded to him posthumously. An air force major general gave it to me and told me that during the operation to clear asteroids from the Earth’s route, a fragment of an asteroid blasted apart by an antimatter bomb had struck my father’s single-seat micro-spacecraft.

“The relative velocity of that rock and the ship was a hundred kilometers per second. The impact vaporized the cockpit instantly. He felt no pain, I assure you—no pain at all,” the general said.

When the Earth fell back toward the sun again, Kayoko and I went up to the surface to look for spring, but we did not find it.

The world was still gray. Beneath the gloomy sky, the land was dotted with frozen lakes formed from the leftover seawater, and not a trace of green was to be seen. The impact dust in the atmosphere blocked the sunlight, making it hard for temperatures to rise. Even at perihelion, neither the oceans nor the land thawed; the sun was a hazy halo, like a ghost behind the impact dust.

Only three years later did the impact dust in the air begin to disperse. Humanity passed through perihelion one last time and began to climb toward aphelion. At this perihelion, people in the Eastern Hemisphere had the fortune to witness the fastest sunrise and sunset in Earth’s history. The sun leaped up from the sea horizon and streaked swiftly across the sky; the shadows of all things on the ground rapidly changed their angles, like the second hands of countless clocks. It was also the shortest day on Earth, less than an hour long.

When, an hour later, the sun dropped below the horizon and darkness fell over the land, I felt a pang of sorrow. That fleeting day seemed like a brief summation of Earth’s four and a half billion years of evolution in the solar system. Until the end of the universe, it would never return.

“It’s dark,” Kayoko said sadly.

“The longest night,” I said. This night in the Eastern Hemisphere would last twenty-five hundred years; only after a hundred generations would the dawn of Alpha Centauri light this continent again. The Western Hemisphere would face the longest day, but far shorter than the night here. There the sun would quickly rise to the zenith, then stand motionless in that position, growing slowly smaller, until within half a century it would merge into the stars and become indistinguishable.

Following the planned course, the Earth ascended toward its rendezvous with Jupiter. The plan of the Navigation Committee was this: the Earth’s fifteenth orbital revolution was so elliptical that its aphelion reached the orbit of Jupiter; the Earth would brush past Jupiter at a distance of near collision, and dragged by Jupiter’s immense gravity, would finally reach escape velocity.

Two months after leaving perihelion, Jupiter could be seen with the naked eye. At first it was only a blurry point of light, but it soon took on the shape of a disc. Another month later, Jupiter had grown to the size of a full moon above the Earth, a dark red color, its bands faintly visible. At this time some of the Earth Engine light columns, which had stood vertical for fifteen years, began to swing: the Earth was making its final attitude adjustments before the rendezvous. Jupiter gradually sank below the horizon, and for the next three months or so it remained on the far side of the Earth. We could not see it, but we knew the two planets were converging.

Then one day we were suddenly told that Jupiter could be seen from the Eastern Hemisphere too, and people flocked up from the underground cities to the surface. When I came out of the city’s sealed gate onto the surface, I found that the Earth Engines, which had run for fifteen years, had all been shut down. I saw the starry sky again, which showed that the final rendezvous with Jupiter was under way. Everyone was staring tensely at the western horizon. A patch of dark red light appeared there, and the lit area gradually expanded until it stretched across the entire width of the horizon. I now noticed that the upper edge of that dark red region formed a neat boundary against the pitch-black starry sky. The boundary was an arc—a gigantic arc reaching from one end of the horizon to the other, rising slowly. The sky beneath that enormous arc had all turned dark red, as though a dark red curtain the size of the starry sky itself were separating the Earth from the whole universe. When I came to my senses, I could not help drawing a sharp breath: that dark red curtain was Jupiter! I had long known that Jupiter’s volume is 1,300 times that of Earth, but only now did I truly feel its immensity. The fear and oppression produced by that cosmic monster as it rose across the entire horizon are hard to describe in words. A reporter later wrote:

“Am I in a nightmare, or is this entire universe a nightmare inside the huge and twisted mind of some creator!” Jupiter was rising terrifyingly, gradually occupying half the sky. By then we could clearly see the storms in its cloud layers, storms that churned the clouds into baffling, chaotic streaks, and I knew that beneath those thick clouds lay an ocean of boiling liquid hydrogen and liquid helium. The famous Great Red Spot appeared, a vortex on Jupiter’s surface that had persisted for hundreds of thousands of years, so vast it could swallow three Earths whole. Jupiter now filled the entire sky, and Earth seemed to float like a balloon above Jupiter’s boiling, dark-red sea of clouds! And the Great Red Spot sat dead center in the sky, like a giant red eye staring at our world, the land shrouded in its sinister red glow… At that moment no one could believe that the tiny Earth could escape the gravitational field of this enormous monster; seen from the ground, Earth could not even become a moon of Jupiter—we were about to fall into that hell covered by a boundless sea of clouds! But the navigational engineers’ calculations were precise. The dark red, chaotic sky drifted slowly, and after an unknowable length of time, a black corner appeared at the western horizon; the blackness expanded rapidly, with stars twinkling within it, and Earth was breaking free from Jupiter’s gravitational grasp. Then the alarms shrieked: the gravitational tide generated by Jupiter was advancing inland, and we later learned that this great tide, waves over a hundred meters high, had once again swept across the entire continent. As I ran into the sealed door of the underground city, I took one last look at Jupiter, still occupying half the sky, and noticed a distinct scratch in its sea of clouds; I later learned that it was the mark left by Earth’s gravity on Jupiter’s surface—our planet, too, had raised mountain-like waves of liquid hydrogen and liquid helium on Jupiter. At that moment Jupiter’s immense gravity was accelerating Earth and slinging it out toward deep space.

As Earth left Jupiter, it had already reached escape velocity; it no longer needed to return to the sun that harbored death, and it flew out toward the vastness of outer space. The long era of wandering had begun.

Right there in Jupiter’s dark-red shadow, my son was born deep within the earth.

Part Two: The Rebellion

---

After leaving Jupiter, the more than ten thousand Earth engines on the Asian continent fired up again at full power; this time they would run ceaselessly for 500 years, accelerating Earth without pause. Over those 500 years, the engines would consume half the mountains of the Asian continent as fuel.

Freed from the fear of death that had lasted more than four centuries, people breathed a long sigh of relief. But the anticipated revelry did not come; what happened next was beyond anyone’s imagination.

After the celebration gathering in the underground city, I put on a sealed suit alone and went up to the surface. The mountains familiar from my childhood had been leveled by giant excavators; on the land there was only bare rock and hard frozen soil, and scattered across the frozen ground were white patches—salt stains left by the great ocean tides. The once-populous great city before me, where my grandfather and father had spent their entire lives, was now a ruin; the wreckage of high-rises with exposed rebar cast long shadows in the blue light of the Earth engines’ beams, like fossils of prehistoric beasts… Flood after flood and asteroid impacts had destroyed everything on the ground; the cities and vegetation of every continent were gone, and Earth’s surface had become a wasteland like Mars.

During this period, Kayoko was restless. She often left the child behind and drove off alone in the flying car to travel, and when she came back she would only say she had gone to the Western Hemisphere. Finally, she dragged me along.

Our flying car flew at four times the speed of sound for two hours, and at last we could see the sun. It had just risen over the Pacific, and it looked only the size of a baseball, casting a faint, cold light on the frozen ocean surface.

Kayoko hovered the flying car at 5,000 meters, then took out something long from the back; after removing the cover I saw it was an astronomical telescope, the kind amateurs use. Kayoko opened the car window, aimed the telescope at the sun, and told me to look.

Through the tinted lens I saw the sun magnified hundreds of times; I could even clearly see the light and dark spots drifting slowly across its surface, and the faint prominences at the edge of the solar sphere.

Kayoko connected the telescope to the car’s computer and captured an image of the sun. Then she brought up another solar image and said, “This is the sun from four centuries ago.” The computer then compared the two images.

“See it?” Kayoko said, pointing at the screen. “Their luminosity, pixel arrangement, pixel probability, gradation statistics—all parameters are exactly the same!”

I shook my head and said, “What does that prove? A toy telescope, a low-grade image-processing program, plus an ignorant layman like you… Don’t go looking for trouble. Don’t believe those rumors!”

“You’re an idiot,” she said, putting the telescope away and driving the flying car back. At that moment, above and below us, I saw several more flying cars in the distance, hovering in the air just as we had, each with a telescope sticking out of its window pointed at the sun.

Over the following months, a terrifying claim spread across the world like wildfire. More and more people spontaneously observed the sun with larger and more precise instruments. Later, a civilian organization launched a group of probes at the sun, and three months later they passed through the solar sphere. The data the probes sent back finally confirmed that fact.

Compared with four centuries ago, the sun had not changed at all.

Now the underground cities of every continent had become simmering volcanoes, and the situation could explode at any moment. One day, in accordance with a decree of the United Government, Kayoko and I sent our son to a rearing center. On the way home we both felt that the only bond holding our relationship together no longer existed. Reaching the central plaza, we saw someone giving a speech, while others were handing out weapons to the citizens around the speaker.

"Citizens! Earth has been betrayed! Humanity has been betrayed! Civilization has been betrayed! We are all the victims of a colossal hoax! A hoax so vast and so terrible that even God would go into shock over it! The sun is still the same sun; it will not flare up—not in the past, not now, not in the future. It is a symbol of eternity! What flared up was the sinister ambition of those people in the United Government! They fabricated all of this solely to establish their dictatorial empire! They have destroyed Earth!

They have destroyed human civilization! Citizens, citizens with conscience! Take up arms and save our planet! Save human civilization! We must overthrow the United Government, seize control of the Earth engines, and fly our planet from this cold outer space back to its original orbit! Back into the warm embrace of our sun!"

Kayoko walked forward silently, took a submachine gun from the hands of the people distributing weapons, and joined the queue of citizens who had received arms. She did not look back, and together with that vast column she disappeared into the mist of the underground city. I stood there dumbly, my hand clenching tightly in my pocket the medal my father had earned with his life and his loyalty; its edge cut my hand until it bled…

Three days later, rebellion broke out simultaneously on every continent.

Everywhere the rebel army went, the people rose up in response; by now, few people doubted that they had been deceived. But I joined the army of the United Government—not out of firm belief in the government, but because three generations of my forebears had served in the military, and they had planted the seed of loyalty in my heart. Under no circumstances could betraying the United Government ever be conceivable to me.

The Americas, Africa, Oceania, and Antarctica fell one after another, and the United Government pulled back its defenses to hold the Earth engines in East and Central Asia to the death. The rebel army soon formed an encircling posture around this region; they held overwhelming superiority over the government forces, and the reason their offensive made no progress for quite a long time was entirely due to the Earth engines. The rebels did not want to destroy the Earth engines, so they did not use heavy weapons in this vast theater of war, which allowed the United Government to linger on. Thus the two sides were deadlocked for three months, until twelve group armies of the United Government turned coat one after another on the battlefield, and the defense lines in Central and East Asia collapsed entirely. Two months later, the United Government, its cause lost, together with fewer than a hundred thousand troops, was surrounded in the Earth engine control center near the coast.

I was a major in that remnant army. The control center was the size of a medium-sized city, and at its heart was the Earth bridge. I lay in the wounded station of the control center, dragging an arm burned by a laser beam. It was there that I learned Kayoko had died in battle in the Australian campaign. Like everyone else in the station, I drank myself into a stupor all day, completely unaware of and uninterested in the fighting outside. I don’t know how long it was before I heard someone speaking loudly.

“Do you know why you’re like this? You’re blaming yourselves. In this war you stood on the side of anti-humanity—and so did I.”

I turned my head and saw that the speaker had a general’s star on his shoulder. He went on: “It doesn’t matter. We still have one last chance to save our souls. The Earth bridge is only three blocks from here. Let’s take it and hand it over to the rational human beings outside! We have fulfilled our duty to the United Government; now it’s time to fulfill our duty to humanity!”

I drew the pistol with my uninjured hand, and along with this crowd of suddenly fanatical wounded and unwounded people, I rushed along the steel passageways toward the Earth’s control room. Unexpectedly, we met almost no resistance along the way; instead, more and more people joined us from every branch of the intricate steel corridors. At last we came to an enormous door, a steel gate so tall its top was out of sight. It opened with a rumbling roar, and we surged into the Earth’s control room.

Although everyone had seen it countless times on television, we were all stunned by the magnificence of the control room. Its size could not be judged visually, because the control room was submerged in a gigantic hologram—a simulation of the solar system. The whole image was in fact a black space extending infinitely in all directions, and the moment we entered, we were suspended within it. Because it sought to reflect true proportions as closely as possible, the Sun and the planets were tiny, tiny as distant fireflies, yet still distinguishable. Centered on that remote point of light representing the Sun, a striking red spiral unfurled, like a red ripple spreading rapidly across a vast black ocean. This was the Earth’s route. At the outermost point of the spiral, the route turned bright green—that was the journey the Earth had not yet completed. That green line swept over our heads; following it with our eyes, we saw a resplendent sea of stars, and the green line vanished into its depths, its end beyond our sight. In this vast black space, many shining specks of dust also floated; as a few drifted near, I realized they were virtual screens, complex numbers and curves tumbling across them.

I saw the Earth control console, the focus of all humanity’s attention. It seemed to float in the black space like a silvery-white asteroid, and seeing it made it even harder for me to grasp the immensity of this place—the console itself was a plaza, and now more than five thousand people stood densely upon it, including the principal members of the United Government, most of the Interstellar Migration Committee responsible for implementing the Earth’s navigation plan, and those who had remained loyal to the government to the last. Then I heard the voice of the Supreme Executive Officer ring out through the entire black space.

“We could have fought to the end, but that might have caused the Earth’s engines to spiral out of control. Should that happen, the excess fusion matter would burn through the Earth, or evaporate all the oceans, so we have decided to surrender. We understand all people, because in a bitter struggle that has already lasted forty generations and will continue for a hundred more, to remain rational forever is truly too much to ask. But please remember us, all of you—the more than five thousand people standing here. Among us is the Supreme Executive Officer of the United Government, and there are ordinary privates too. We held fast to our faith to the very end. We all know we will not live to see the truth vindicated, but if humanity endures for ten thousand generations, then all who come after will shed their tears at our graves, and this planet called Earth will be our eternal monument!”

The enormous sealed door of the control center rumbled open, and the five thousand-odd last Earth-faction members came out in groups, escorted by the rebels toward the coast. Crowds packed both sides of the way; everyone spat on them and pelted them with ice chunks and stones. The faceplates of some among them were smashed, and the bitter cold of more than a hundred degrees below zero outside numbed those faces, yet they still struggled onward. I saw a little girl raise a large block of ice and hurl it with all her might at an old man, her eyes shooting mad fury through her faceplate.

When I heard that all five thousand had been sentenced to death, I felt it was too lenient. Was death alone enough? Could death alone pay for their crimes? Could it pay for the crime of destroying the Earth and human civilization with a bizarre, perverse imagination and a hoax? They deserved to die ten thousand times! Then I thought of the astrophysicists who had predicted the solar eruption, of the engineers who had designed and built the Earth’s engines—they had passed away a century ago, and now I truly wanted to dig them from their graves and let them die ten thousand times too.

I was truly grateful to the executioners, who had found a good way for these criminals to die: they took away the nuclear batteries that heated each condemned person’s thermal suit, then left them on the ice surface of the sea, letting the bitter cold of a hundred degrees below zero slowly take their lives.

These most vicious and shameful criminals in the history of human civilization stood across the frozen sea in a dense black mass, while on shore more than a hundred thousand people watched them, a hundred thousand sets of teeth grinding audibly, a hundred thousand pairs of eyes spitting the same fury as that little girl’s.

By then all the Earth’s engines had been shut down, and the magnificent stars appeared above the ice field.

I could imagine the bitter cold piercing their bodies like countless knives, their blood congealing, life draining from them bit by bit, and this imagined sensation turned into a thrill that spread through my whole body. Watching those people slowly die in the torment of the cold, the people on shore grew merry, and together they began to sing “O Sole Mio.”

I sang, my eyes fixed on one direction of the starry sky, where a slightly larger star, just showing a disc, gave off a yellow light—that was the Sun.

Ah, my Sun, mother of life, father of all things, my great god, my Lord! What could be more stable than you, what more eternal? We tiny carbon-based bacteria, less than dust, crowding on a little stone that orbits you, dared to predict your end—how could we be so foolish!

An hour passed, and though those anti-human criminals on the sea still all stood, not one was alive; their blood had frozen.

Suddenly I could see nothing at all. After a few seconds my sight gradually returned, and the ice field, the coast, and the crowd on shore slowly reappeared before my eyes, at last perfectly clear—clearer than before, for the world was now bathed in an intense white light, and my momentary blindness had been caused by the shock of that sudden brightness.

But the starry sky did not reappear; all the starlight was drowned by this glare, as if the entire universe had been melted by it. The light burst forth from a single point in space, a point that had now become the center of the universe—a point precisely in the direction I had just been staring at.

The Sun had erupted in a helium flash.

The chorus of “O Sole Mio” broke off abruptly, and the hundred thousand people on shore stood frozen, seeming, like those on the sea, to have frozen into stiff rock.

For the last time, the Sun poured its light and heat upon the Earth. The frozen carbon dioxide dry ice on the ground melted first, sending up a burst of white vapor; then the surface of the sea ice began to melt too, and the unevenly heated layers of sea ice gave out earth-shaking roars; gradually the light falling on the ground softened, and a faint blue appeared in the sky; later, the auroras produced by the fierce solar wind appeared in the air, great curtains of color drifting across the vault of heaven…

Beneath this suddenly blazing sunlight, the last Earth-faction members on the sea still stood steady as could be, like more than five thousand statues.

The solar eruption lasted only a very short time; two hours later the glare began to fade sharply, and soon it died out.

In the Sun’s place appeared a dark red sphere. Its volume slowly swelled, until, seen from here, it had reached the size the Sun appears from Earth’s orbit—which meant its actual volume had grown beyond the orbit of Mars, and Mercury, Mars, and Venus, the three companion planets of Earth, had by then been reduced to wisps of smoke in radiation of hundreds of millions of degrees.

But it was no longer the Sun. It gave off no light or heat; it looked like a cold red paper pasted onto space, and its dark red glow seemed merely the scattered light of the surrounding stars. This is the end point of the evolution of a low-mass star: a red giant.

Five billion years of splendor had become a drifting dream; the Sun was dead.

Fortunately, some people were still alive.

The Wandering Era

By the time I recall all this, half a century has passed. Twenty years ago, the Earth sailed out of Pluto’s orbit and out of the solar system, continuing its lonely voyage through the cold, vast reaches of outer space.

My most recent trip to the surface was over a decade ago; my son and daughter-in-law accompanied me. My daughter-in-law is a girl with golden hair and blue eyes, and she was about to become a mother.

Once on the surface, the first thing I noticed was that although all the Earth’s engines were still running at full power, the enormous pillars of light could no longer be seen, because the Earth’s atmosphere had vanished and there was nothing to scatter the glow of the plasma. I saw the ground covered with strange, semi-transparent crystalline blocks of alternating yellow and green—solid oxygen and nitrogen, air that had frozen.

Interestingly, the air had not frozen evenly over the Earth’s surface but had formed irregular mounds like little hills; over the once smooth sea ice, these semi-transparent hills made a peculiar landscape. The river of the Milky Way stretched motionless across the vault of the sky, as if frozen too, but the starlight was very bright—stare at it too long and it dazzled the eyes.

The Earth’s engines will run without interruption for 500 years, by which time the Earth will have accelerated to five-thousandths the speed of light. Then the Earth will coast at that speed for 1,300 years, completing two-thirds of its voyage; it will then reverse the direction of its engines and begin a deceleration lasting 500 years. After 2,400 years of travel, the Earth will reach Proxima Centauri, and 100 years after that, it will settle into orbit around that star and become its satellite.

I know that I have been forgotten
　　　　The voyage of wandering is too long, too long
　　　　But at that moment, call out to me
　　　　When the glow of dawn appears once more in the East
　　　　I know that I have been forgotten
　　　　The age of departure is too far, too far
　　　　But at that moment, call out to me
　　　　When mankind sees the blue sky again
　　　　I know that I have been forgotten
　　　　The past of the Solar System is too long ago, too long ago
　　　　But at that moment, call out to me
　　　　When flowers hang once more from the branches
　　　　……

Whenever I hear this song, a warm current floods into this aged, stiffened body of mine, and my dried-up old eyes grow moist again. I seem to see the three golden suns of Alpha Centauri rising one after another above the horizon, all things bathed in their warm light. The solid air melts and turns into a deep blue sky. Seeds from more than two thousand years ago revive from the thawing soil, and the earth turns green. I see my hundredth-generation grandchildren laughing on the green grasslands, where clear streams run and silver fish swim in them… I see Kayoko, running toward me across the green land, young and beautiful, like an angel…

Ah, Earth, my wandering Earth…

—THE END—

(This is part 9 of 9 of the same post.)