Hold Up the Sky

CLOUD OF POEMS

A yacht bore Yi Yi and his two companions across the South Pacific on a voyage dedicated to poetry. Their destination was the South Pole. Upon a successful arrival in a few days, they would climb through the Earth’s crust to view the Cloud of Poems.

Today, the sky and seas were clear. For the purposes of poem making, the workings of the world seemed to be laid out in glass. Looking up, one could see the North American continent in rare clarity in the sky. On the vast world-encompassing dome as seen from the eastern hemisphere, the continent looked like a patch of missing plaster on a wall.

Oh, yes, humanity lived inside the Earth nowadays. To be more accurate, humanity lived inside the Air, for the Earth had become a gas balloon. The Earth had been hollowed out, leaving only a thin shell about a hundred kilometers thick. The continents and oceans remained in their old places, only they had all migrated to the inside of the shell. The atmosphere also remained, moved inside as well. So now the Earth was a balloon, with the oceans and continents clinging to its inner surface. The hollow Earth still rotated, but the significance of the rotation was much different than before: It now produced gravity. The attractional force generated by the bit of mass forming Earth’s crust was so weak as to be insignificant, so now the Earth’s “gravity” had to come from the centrifugal force of rotation. But this kind of “gravity” was unevenly distributed across the regions of the world.

It was strongest at the equator, being about 1.5 times Earth’s original gravity. With increase of latitude came a gradual decrease in gravity—the two poles experienced weightlessness. The yacht was currently at the exact latitude that experienced 1.0 gees as per the old scale, but Yi Yi nonetheless found it difficult to recall the sensation of standing on the old, solid Earth.

At the heart of the hollow Earth hovered a tiny sun, which currently illuminated the world with the light of noon. The sun’s luminosity changed continuously in a twenty-four-hour cycle, from its maximum to total darkness, providing the hollow Earth with alternating day and night. On suitable nights, it even gave off cold moonlight. But the light came from a single point; there was no round, full moon to be seen.

Of the three people on the yacht, two of them were not, in fact, people. One was a dinosaur named Bigtooth. The yacht swayed and tilted with every shift of his ten-meter-tall body, to the annoyance of the one reciting poetry at the boat’s prow. This was a thin, wiry old man, garbed in the loose, archaic robes of the Tang Dynasty, whose snow-white hair and snow-white whiskers flowed in the wind as one. He resembled a bold calligraphy character splashed in the space between sea and sky.

This was the creator of the new world, the great poet Li Bai.

THE GIFT

The matter began ten years ago, when the Devouring Empire completed its two-century-long pillage of the solar system. The dinosaurs from Earth’s ancient past departed for Cygnus in their ring-shaped world fifty thousand kilometers in diameter, leaving the sun behind them. The Devouring Empire took 1.2 billion humans with them as well, to be raised as livestock. But as the ring world approached the orbit of Saturn, it suddenly began to decelerate, before, incredibly, returning along its earlier route to the inner reaches of the solar system.

One ring-world week after the Devouring Empire began its return, the emissary Bigtooth piloted away from the ring in his spaceship shaped like an old boiler, a human named Yi Yi in his pocket.

“You’re going to be a present!” Bigtooth told Yi Yi, eyes on the black void outside the window port. His booming voice rattled Yi Yi’s bones.

“For whom?” Yi Yi threw his head back and shouted from the pocket. From the opening, he could see the dinosaur’s lower jaw, like a boulder jutting out from the top of a giant cliff.

“You’ll be given to a god! A god came to the solar system. That’s why the Empire is returning.”

“A real god?”

“Their kind controls unimaginable technology. They’ve transformed into beings of pure energy, and can instantaneously jump from one side of the Milky Way to the other. They’re gods, all right. If we can get just a hundredth of their ultra-advanced technology, the Devouring Empire will have a bright future ahead. We’re entering the final step of this important mission. You need to get the god to like you!”

“Why did you pick me? My meat is very low-grade,” said Yi Yi. He was in his thirties. Next to the tender, pale-fleshed humans cultivated with so much care by the Devouring Empire, he appeared rather old and world-worn.

“The god doesn’t eat bug-bugs, just collects them. I heard from the breeder that you’re really special. Apparently you have many students?”

“I’m a poet. I currently teach Classic literature to the livestock humans on the feedlot.” Yi Yi struggled to pronounce “poet” and “literature,” rarely used words in the Devourer language.

“Boring, useless knowledge. Your breeder turns a blind eye to your classes because their spiritual effects improve the bug-bugs’ meat quality…. From what I’ve observed, you think highly of yourself and give little notice to others. They must be very interesting traits for a head of livestock to have.”

“All poets are like this!” Yi Yi stood tall in the pocket. Even though he knew that Bigtooth couldn’t see, he raised his head proudly.

“Did your ancestors participate in the Earth Defense War?”

Yi Yi shook his head. “My ancestors from that era were also poets.”

“The most useless kind of bug-bug. Your kind was already rare on Earth back then.”

“They lived in the world of their innermost selves, untouched by changes to the outside world.”

“Shameless… ha, we’re almost there.”

Hearing this, Yi Yi stuck his head out of the pocket. Through the huge window port, he could see the two white, glowing objects ahead of the ship: a square and a sphere, floating in space. When the spaceship reached the level of the square, the latter briefly disappeared against the backdrop of the stars, revealing that it had virtually zero thickness. The perfect sphere hovered directly above the plane. Both shone with soft, white light, so evenly distributed that no features could be distinguished on their surfaces. They looked like objects taken from a computer database, two concise yet abstract concepts in a disorderly universe.

“Where’s the god?” Yi Yi asked.

“He’s the two geometric objects, of course. Gods like to keep it nice and simple.”

As they approached, Yi Yi saw that the plane was the size of a soccer field. The spaceship descended upon the plane thruster side down, but the flames left no marks on the surface, as if the plane were nothing but an illusion. Yet Yi Yi felt gravity, and the jarring sensation when the spaceship touched down proved that the plane was real.

Bigtooth must have come here before; he opened the hatch without hesitation and walked out. Yi Yi’s heart seized up when he saw that Bigtooth had simultaneously opened the hatches on both side of the airlock, but the air inside the chamber didn’t howl outward. As Bigtooth walked out of the ship, Yi Yi smelled fresh air from inside his pocket. When he poked his head out, a soft, cool breeze caressed his face. This was ultra-advanced technology beyond the comprehension of either humans or dinosaurs. Its comfortable, casual application astounded Yi Yi, in a way that pierced the soul more deeply than what humanity must have felt in its first encounter with Devourers. He looked up. The sphere floated overhead against the backdrop of the radiant Milky Way.

“What little gift have you brought me this time, Emissary?” asked the god in the language of the Devourers. His voice was not loud, seeming to come from a boundless distance away, from the deep void of outer space. It was the first time Yi Yi had found the crude language of the dinosaurs pleasing to the ear.

Bigtooth extended a claw into his pocket, caught Yi Yi, and set him down on the plane. Yi Yi could feel the elasticity of the plane through the soles of his feet.

“Esteemed god,” Bigtooth said. “I heard you like to collect small organisms from different star systems, so I brought you this very entertaining little thing: a human from Earth.”

“I only like perfect organisms. Why did you bring me such a filthy insect?” said the god. The sphere and the plane flickered twice, perhaps to express disgust.

“You know about this species?” Bigtooth raised his head in astonishment.

“Not intimately, but I’ve heard about them from certain visitors to this arm of the galaxy. They made frequent visits to Earth in the brief course of these organisms’ evolution, and were revolted at the vulgarness of their thoughts, the lowliness of their actions, the disorder and filth of their history. Not a single visitor would deign to establish contact with them up to the destruction of Earth. Hurry and throw it away.”

Bigtooth seized Yi Yi, rotating his massive head to look for a place to throw him. “The trash incinerator is behind you,” said the god. Bigtooth turned and saw that a small, round opening had appeared in the plane behind him. Inside shimmered a faint blue light….

“Don’t dismiss us like that! Humanity created a magnificent civilization!” Yi Yi shouted with all his might in the language of the Devourers.

The sphere and plane again flickered twice. The god gave two cold laughs. “Civilization? Emissary, tell this insect what civilization is.”

Bigtooth lifted Yi Yi to his eye level; Yi Yi could even hear the gululu of the dinosaur’s giant eyeballs turning in their sockets. “Bug-bug, in this universe, the standard measure of any race’s level of civilization is the number of dimensions it can access. The basic requirement for joining civilization at large is six or more. Our esteemed god’s race can already access the eleventh dimension. The Devouring Empire can access the fourth dimension in small-scale laboratory environments, and only qualifies as a primitive, uncivilized tribe in the Milky Way. You, in the eyes of a god, are in the same category as weeds and lichen.”

“Throw it away already, it’s disgusting,” the god urged impatiently.

Having finished speaking, Bigtooth headed for the incinerator’s aperture. Yi Yi struggled frantically. Numerous pieces of white paper fluttered loose from his clothing. The sphere shot out a needle-thin beam of light, hitting one of the sheets, which froze unmoving in midair. The beam scanned rapidly over its surface.

“Oh my, wait, what’s this?”

Bigtooth allowed Yi Yi to dangle over the incinerator’s aperture as he turned to look at the sphere.

“That’s… my students’ homework!” Yi Yi managed laboriously, struggling in the dinosaur’s giant claw.

“These squarish symbols are very interesting, and the little arrays they form are quite amusing too,” said the god. The sphere’s beam of light rapidly scanned over the other sheets of paper, which had since landed on the plane.

“They’re Ch-Chinese characters. These are poems in Classical Chinese!”

“Poems?” the god exclaimed, retracting its beam of light. “I trust you understand the language of these insects, Emissary?”

“Of course, esteemed god. Before the Devouring Empire ate Earth, we spent a long time living on their world.” Bigtooth set Yi Yi down on the plane next to the incinerator, bent over, and picked up a sheet of paper. He held it just in front of his eyes, trying with effort to distinguish the small characters on it. “More or less, it says—”

“Forget it, you’ll distort the meaning!” Yi Yi waved a hand to interrupt Bigtooth.

“How so?” asked the god interestedly.

“Because this is a form of art that can only be expressed in Classical Chinese. Even translating these poems into other human languages alters them until they lose much of their meaning and beauty.”

“Emissary, do you have this language in your computer database? Send me the relevant data, as well as all the information you have on Earth history. Just use the communications channel we established during our last meeting.”

Bigtooth hurried back to the spaceship and banged around on the computer inside for a while, muttering, “We don’t have the Classical Chinese portion here, so we’ll have to upload it from the Empire’s network. There might be some delay.” Through the open hatchway, Yi Yi saw the morphing colors of the computer screen reflected off the dinosaur’s huge eyeballs.

By the time Bigtooth got off the ship, the god could already read the poem on one sheet of paper with perfect modern Chinese pronunciation.

“You’re a fast learner!” Yi Yi exclaimed.

The god ignored him, silent.

Bigtooth explained, “It means, the star has set behind the orbiting planet’s mountains. A liquid river called the Yellow River is flowing in the direction of the ocean. Oh, the river and the ocean are both made of the chemical compound consisting of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. If you want to see further, you must climb further up the edifice.”

The god remained silent.

“Esteemed god, you visited the Devouring Empire not long ago. The scenery there is almost identical to that of the world known to this poem’s author bug-bug, with mountains, rivers, and seas, so…”

“So I understand the meaning of the poem,” said the god. The sphere suddenly moved so it was right above Bigtooth’s head. Yi Yi thought it looked like a giant pupilless eye staring at Bigtooth. “But, didn’t you feel something?”

Bigtooth shook his head, confused.

“That is to say, something hidden behind the outward meaning of that simple, elegant array of square symbols?”

Bigtooth looked even more confused, so the god recited another Classical poem:

Bigtooth hurried eagerly to explain. “This poem means, looking in front of you, you can’t see all the bug-bugs who lived on the planet in the distant past. Looking behind you, you can’t see all the bug-bugs who will live on the planet in the future. So you feel how time and space are just too big and end up crying.”

The god brooded.

“Ha, crying is one way for Earth bug-bugs to express their grief. So at that point their visual organs—”

“Do you still feel nothing?” the god interrupted Bigtooth. The sphere descended further, nearly touching Bigtooth’s snout.

Bigtooth shook his head firmly this time. “Esteemed god, I don’t think there’s anything inside. It’s just a simple little poem.”

Next, the god recited several more poems, one after the other. They were all short and simple, yet imbued with a spirit that transcended their topics. They included Li Bai’s “Downriver to Jiangling,” “Still Night Thoughts,” and “Bidding Meng Haoran Farewell at Yellow Crane Tower”; Liu Zongyuan’s “River Snow”; Cui Hao’s “Yellow Crane Tower”; Meng Haoran’s “Spring Dawn”; and so forth.

Bigtooth said, “The Devouring Empire has many historical epic poems with millions of lines. We would happily present them all to you, esteemed god! In comparison, the poems of human bug-bugs are so puny and simple, like their technology—”

The sphere suddenly departed its position above Bigtooth’s head, drifting in unthinking arcs in midair. “Emissary, I know your people’s greatest hope is that I’ll answer the question ‘The Devouring Empire has existed for eight million years, so why is its technology still stalled in the Atomic Age?’ Now I know the answer.”

Bigtooth gazed at the sphere passionately. “Esteemed god, the answer is crucial to us! Please—”

“Esteemed god,” Yi Yi called out, raising a hand. “I have a question too. May I speak?”

Bigtooth glared resentfully at Yi Yi, as if he wanted to swallow him in one bite. But the god said, “Though I continue to despise Earth insects, those little arrays have won you the right.”

“Is art common throughout the universe?”

The sphere vibrated faintly in midair, as if nodding. “Yes—I’m an intergalactic art collector and researcher myself, in fact. In my travels, I’ve encountered the various arts of numerous civilizations. Most are ponderous, unintelligible setups. But using so few symbols, in so small and clever an array, to encompass such rich sensory layers and subtle meaning, all the while operating under such sadistically exacting formal rules and rhyme schemes? I have to say, I’ve never seen anything like it…. Emissary, you may now throw away this insect.”

Once again, Bigtooth seized Yi Yi with his claw. “That’s right, we ought to throw it away. Esteemed god, we have fairly abundant resources on human civilization stored in the Devouring Empire’s central networks. All those resources are now in your memory, while this bug-bug probably doesn’t know any more than a couple of the little poems.” He carried Yi Yi toward the incinerator as he spoke.

“Throw away those pieces of paper too,” the god said. Bigtooth hurriedly returned and used his other claw to collect the papers. At this point, Yi Yi hollered from between the massive claws.

“O god, save these papers with the ancient poems of humanity, as a memento! You’ve discovered an unsurpassable art. You can spread it throughout the universe!”

“Wait.” The god once again stopped Bigtooth. Yi Yi was already hanging above the incinerator aperture, feeling the heat of the blue flames below him. The sphere floated over, coming to a stop a few centimeters from Yi Yi’s forehead. Yi Yi, like Bigtooth earlier, felt the force of the enormous pupilless eye’s gaze.

“Unsurpassable?”

Bigtooth laughed, holding up Yi Yi. “Can you believe the pitiable bug-bug, saying these things in front of a magnificent god? Hilarious! What remains to humanity? You’ve lost everything on Earth. Even the scientific knowledge you’ve managed to bring with you has been largely forgotten. One time at dinner, I asked the human I was about to eat, what were the atomic bombs used by the humans in the Earth Defense War made of? He told me they were made of atoms!”

“Hahahaha…” The god joined Bigtooth in laughter, the sphere vibrating so hard it became an ellipsoid. “It’s certainly the most accurate answer of them all, hahaha…”

“Esteemed god, all these dirty bug-bugs have left are a couple of those little poems! Hahaha—”

“But they cannot be surpassed!” Yi Yi said solemnly in the middle of the claw, puffing out his chest.

The sphere stopped vibrating. It said, in an almost intimate whisper, “Technology can surpass anything.”

“It has nothing to do with technology. They are the quintessence of the human spiritual realm. They cannot be surpassed!”

“Only because you haven’t witnessed the power of technology in its ultimate stage, little insect. Little, little insect. You haven’t seen.” The god’s tone of voice became as gentle as a father’s, but Yi Yi shivered at the icy killing edge hidden deep within. The god said, “Look at the sun.”

Yi Yi obeyed. They were in the vacuum between the orbits of Earth and Mars. The sun’s radiance made him squint.

“What’s your favorite color?” asked the god.

“Green.”

The word had barely left his lips before the sun turned green. It was a bewitching shade; the sun resembled a cat’s eye floating in the void of space. Under its gaze, the whole universe looked strange and sinister.

Bigtooth’s claw trembled, dropping Yi Yi onto the plane. When their reason returned, they realized a fact even more unnerving than the sun turning green: the light should have taken more than ten minutes to travel here from the sun, but the change had occurred instantaneously!

Half a minute later, the sun returned to its previous condition, emitting brilliant white light once more.

“See? This is technology. This is the force that allowed my race to ascend from slugs in ocean mud to gods. Technology itself is the true God, in fact. We all worship it devotedly.”

Yi Yi blinked his dazzled eyes. “But that god can’t surpass this art. We have gods too, in our minds. We worship them, but we don’t believe they can write poems like Li Bai and Du Fu.”

The god laughed coldly. “What an extraordinarily stubborn insect,” it said to Yi Yi. “It makes you even more loathsome. But, for the sake of killing time, let me surpass your array-art.”

Yi Yi laughed back. “It’s impossible. First of all, you aren’t human, so you can’t feel with a human’s soul. Human art to you is only a flower on a stone slab. Technology can’t help you surmount this obstacle.”

“Technology can surmount this obstacle as easily as snapping your fingers. Give me your DNA!”

Yi Yi was confused. “Give the god one of your hairs!” Bigtooth prompted him. Yi Yi reached up and plucked out a hair; an invisible suction force drew the hair into the sphere. A while later, the hair fell from the sphere, drifting to the plane. The god had only extracted a bit of skin from its root.

The sphere roiled with white light, then gradually became clear. It was now filled with transparent liquid in which strings of bubbles rose. Next, Yi Yi spotted a ball the size of an egg yolk inside the liquid, made pale red by the sunlight shining through, as if it were luminous in and of itself. The ball soon grew. Yi Yi realized that it was a curled-up embryo, its bulging eyes squeezed shut, its oversized head crisscrossed with red blood vessels. The embryo continued to mature. The tiny body finally uncurled and swam frog-like in the sphere of liquid. The liquid gradually became cloudy, so that the sunlight coming through the sphere revealed only a blurry silhouette that continued to rapidly mature until it became that of a swimming grown man. At this point, the sphere reverted to its original opaque, glowing state, and a naked human fell out of it and onto the plane.

Yi Yi’s clone stood up unsteadily, the sunlight glistening off his wet form. He was long-haired and long-bearded, but one could tell that he was only in his thirties or forties. Aside from the wiry thinness, he didn’t look at all like the original Yi Yi.

The clone stood stiffly, gazing dully into the infinite distance, as if completely oblivious to the universe he’d just joined. Above him, the sphere’s white light dimmed, before extinguishing altogether. The sphere itself disappeared as if evaporating. But just then, Yi Yi thought he saw something else light up, and realized that it was the clone’s eyes. The dullness had been replaced with the divine gleam of wisdom. In this moment, Yi Yi would learn, the god had transferred all his memories to the clone body.

“Cold… so this is cold?” A breeze had blown past. The clone had wrapped his arms around his slick shoulders, shivering, but his voice was full of delighted surprise. “This is cold! This is pain, immaculate, impeccable pain, the sensation I scoured the stars for, as piercing as the ten-dimensional string through time and space, as crystalline as a diamond of pure energy at the heart of a star, ah…” He spread his emaciated arms and beheld the Milky Way. “Qian bu jian gu ren, hou bu jian lai zhe, nian yu zhou zhi—” A spate of shivers left the clone’s teeth chattering. He hurriedly stopped commemorating his birth and ran over to warm himself over the incinerator.

The clone extended his hands over the blue flames inside the aperture, shivering as he said to Yi Yi, “Really, this is something I do all the time. When researching and collecting a civilization’s art, I always lodge my consciousness inside a member organism of that civilization, to ensure my complete understanding of the art.”

The flames inside the incinerator’s aperture suddenly flared. The plane surrounding it roiled with multicolored light as well, so that Yi Yi felt as if the entire plane were a sheet of frosted glass floating on a sea of fire.

“The incinerator has turned into a fabricator,” Bigtooth whispered to Yi Yi. “The god is performing energy-matter exchange.” Seeing Yi Yi’s continued puzzlement, he explained again, “Idiot, he’s making objects out of pure energy, the handicraft of a god!”

Suddenly, a white mass burst from the fabricator, unfurling in midair as it fell—clothing, which the clone caught and put on. Yi Yi saw that it was a loose, flowing Tang Dynasty robe, made of snow-white silk and trimmed with a wide band of black. The clone, who had appeared so pitiable earlier, looked like an ethereal sage with it on. Yi Yi couldn’t imagine how it had been made from the blue flames.

The fabricator completed another object. Something black flew from the aperture and thudded onto the plane like a rock. Yi Yi ran over and picked it up. He might not trust his eyes, but his hand clearly registered a heavy inkstone, icy cold at that. Something else smacked onto the plane; Yi Yi picked up a black rod. No doubt about it—it was an inkstick! Next came several brush pens, a brush holder, a sheet of snow-white mulberry paper (paper, out of the flames!), and several little decorative antiques. The last object out was also the largest: an old-fashioned writing desk! Yi Yi and Bigtooth hurriedly righted the desk and arranged the other objects on top of it.

“The amount of energy he converted into these objects could have pulverized a planet,” Bigtooth whispered to Yi Yi, his voice shaking slightly.

The clone walked over to the desk, nodding in satisfaction when he saw the arrangement on it. One hand stroked his newly dry beard. He said, “I, Li Bai.”

Yi Yi examined the clone. “Do you mean you want to become Li Bai, or do you really think you’re Li Bai?”

“I’m Li Bai, pure and simple. A Li Bai to surpass Li Bai!”

Yi Yi laughed and shook his head.

“What, do you question me even now?”

Yi Yi nodded. “I concede that your technology far exceeds my understanding. It’s indistinguishable from human ideas of magic and acts of God. Even in the fields of art and poetry, you’ve astonished me. Despite such an enormous cultural, spatial, and temporal gap, you’ve managed to sense the hidden nuances of Classical Chinese poetry…. But understanding Li Bai is one matter, and exceeding him is another. I continue to believe that you face an unsurpassable body of art.”

A mysterious amusement appeared on the clone’s—Li Bai’s—face, only to quickly vanish. He pointed at the desk. “Grind ink!” he bellowed to Yi Yi, before striding away. He was nearly at the edge of the plane before he stopped, stroking his whiskers, gazing toward the distant Milky Way, descending into thought.

Yi Yi took the Yixing clay pot on the desk and poured a trickle of clear water into the depression in the inkstone. Then he began to grind the inkstick against the stone. It was the first time he’d done this; he clumsily angled the stick to scrape at its corners. As he watched the liquid thicken and darken, Yi Yi thought of himself, 1.5 astronomical units away from the sun, perched on this infinitely thin plane in the vastness of outer space. (Even while it was making things out of pure energy, a distant viewer would have perceived zero thickness.) It was a stage floating in the void of the universe, on which a dinosaur, a human raised as dinosaur livestock, and a technological god in period dress planning to surpass Li Bai were performing bizarre live theater. With that thought, Yi Yi shook his head and laughed wanly.

Once he thought the ink was ready, Yi Yi stood and waited next to Bigtooth. The breeze on the plane had ceased by this time; the sun and Milky Way shone calmly, as if the whole universe were waiting in anticipation.

Li Bai stood steadily at the edge of the plane. The layer of air above the plane created almost no scattering effect, so that the sunlight cast him in crispest light and shadow. Aside from the movements of his hand when he smoothed his beard now and then, he was practically a statue hewn from stone.

Yi Yi and Bigtooth waited and waited. Time flowed past silently. The brush on the desk, plump with ink, began to dry. The position of the sun changed unnoticed in the sky; they, the desk, and the spaceship cast long shadows, while the white paper that was spread out on the desk appeared as if it had become part of the plane.

Finally, Li Bai turned and slowly stepped over to the desk. Yi Yi hurriedly re-dipped the brush in ink and offered it with both hands, but Li Bai held up a hand in refusal. He only stared at the blank paper on the desk in continued deep thought, something new in his gaze.

Yi Yi, with glee, saw that it was perplexity and unease.

“I need to make some more things. They’re all… fragile goods. Be sure to catch them.” Li Bai pointed at the fabricator; the flames within, which had dimmed, grew bright once more. Just as Yi Yi and Bigtooth ran over, a tongue of blue flame pushed out a round object. Bigtooth caught it agilely. Upon closer inspection, it was a large earthen jar. Next, three large bowls sprang out of the blue flames. Yi Yi caught two of them, but the third fell and shattered. Bigtooth carried the jar to the desk and carefully unsealed it. The powerful fragrance of wine emerged. Bigtooth and Yi Yi exchanged astonished looks.

“There wasn’t much documentation on human winemaking in the Earth-related data I received from the Devouring Empire, so I’m not sure I fabricated this correctly,” said Li Bai, pointing to the jar of wine to indicate that Yi Yi should taste it.

Yi Yi took a bowl, scooped a little from the jar, and took a sip. Fiery heat ran past his throat down into his belly. He nodded. “It’s wine, albeit much too strong compared to the kind we drink to improve our meat quality.”

Li Bai pointed to the other bowl on the desk. “Fill it up.” He waited for Bigtooth to pour a bowlful of the strong wine, then picked it up and glugged the whole thing down. Then he turned and once again walked off into the distance, weaving a stagger here and there along the way. Once he reached the edge of the plane, he stood there and resumed his pondering in the direction of the stars, only this time his body swayed rhythmically left and right, as if to some unheard melody. Li Bai didn’t ponder for long before returning to the desk once more, and on the walk back he staggered every step. He grabbed the brush being proffered by Yi Yi and threw it into the distance.

“Fill it up,” Li Bai said, eyes fixed on the empty bowl….

An hour later, Bigtooth’s two immense claws carefully lowered a passed-out Li Bai onto the cleared desk, only for him to roll over and fall right off, muttering something in a language incomprehensible to dinosaur and human alike. He’d already vomited a particolored pile (although no one knew when he’d had the occasion to eat in the first place), some of it staining his flowing robes. With the white light of the plane passing through, the vomit formed some sort of abstract image. Li Bai’s mouth was black with ink: after finishing his fourth bowl, he’d tried to write something on the paper, but had ended up merely stabbing his ink-plump brush heavily upon the table. After that, he’d tried to smooth the brush with his mouth, like a child at his first calligraphy lesson….

“Esteemed god?” Bigtooth bent down and asked carefully.

“Wayakaaaaa… kaaaayiaiwa,” said Li Bai, tongue lolling.

Bigtooth straightened, shook his head, and sighed. He said to Yi Yi, “Let’s go.”

THE SECOND PATH

Yi Yi’s feedlot was located on the Devourers’ equator. While the planet had lain within the inner reaches of the solar system, this had been a beautiful prairie between two rivers. When the Devourers left the orbit of Jupiter, a harsh winter had descended, the prairie disappearing and the rivers freezing. The humans raised there had all been relocated to an underground city. After the Devourers received the summons from the god and returned, spring had come back to the land with the approach of the sun. The two rivers quickly defrosted, and the prairie began to turn green as well.

In times of good weather, Yi Yi lived alone in the crude grass hut he’d built himself by the riverside, tilling the land and amusing himself. A normal human wouldn’t have been allowed, but as Yi Yi’s feedlot lectures on ancient literature had edifying properties, imparting a unique flavor to the flesh of his students, the dinosaur breeder didn’t stop him.

It was dusk, two months after Yi Yi had first met Li Bai, the sun just tipping over the perfectly straight horizon line of the Devouring Empire. The two rivers reflected the sunset, meeting at the edge of the sky. In the riverside hut, a breeze carried faint, distant sounds of song and celebration over the prairie. Yi Yi was alone, playing weiqi with himself.

He looked up and saw Li Bai and Bigtooth walking along the riverbank toward him. Li Bai was much changed from before: his hair was unkempt, his beard even longer, his face sun-browned. He had a rough cloth pack slung over his left shoulder and a large bottle-gourd in his right hand. His robes had been reduced to rags; his woven-straw shoes were mangled with wear. But Yi Yi thought that he now seemed more like a human being.

Li Bai walked over to the weiqi table. Like the last few times, he slammed the gourd down without looking at Yi Yi and said, “Bowl!” When Yi Yi had brought over the two wooden bowls, Li Bai uncorked the gourd and filled them with wine, then took a paper package from his pack. Yi Yi opened it to discover cooked meat, already sliced, its aroma greeting his nose enthusiastically. He couldn’t help but grab a piece and start chewing.

Bigtooth only stood, a few meters away, watching them silently. He knew from before that the two of them were going to discuss poetry again, a topic in which he had no interest and no ability.

“Delicious,” Yi Yi said, nodding approvingly. “Is the beef made directly from energy too?”

“No, I’ve gone natural for a long while now. You might not know, but there’s a pasture a long distance away from here where they raise Earth cows. I cooked the beef myself in the Shanxi Pingyao style. There’s a trick to it. When you stew the meat, you have to add…” Li Bai whispered mysteriously into Yi Yi’s ear, “Urea.”

Yi Yi looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“Oh, that’s what you get when you take human urine, let it evaporate, and extract the white stuff. It makes the cooked meat red and juicy with a tender texture, while keeping the fatty parts from being cloying and the lean parts from being leathery.”

“The urea… it’s made from pure energy, right?” Yi Yi asked, horrified.

“I told you, I’ve gone natural! It took me a lot of work to collect the urea from several human feedlots. This is a very traditional folk cuisine technique, faded from use long before the destruction of Earth.”

Yi Yi had already swallowed his bite of beef. He picked up the wine bowl to prevent himself from vomiting.

Li Bai pointed at the gourd. “Under my direction, the Devouring Empire has built a number of distilleries, already capable of producing many of the wines famous on Earth. This is bona-fide zhuyeqing, made by steeping bamboo leaves in sorghum liquor.”

Yi Yi only now discovered that the wine in his bowl was different from what Li Bai had brought previously. It was emerald green, with a sweet aftertaste of herbs.

“Looks like you’ve really mastered human culture,” Yi Yi said feelingly to Li Bai.

“That’s not all. I’ve also spent a lot of time on personal enrichment. As you know, the scenery of many parts of the Devouring Empire is near identical to what Li Bai saw on Earth. In these two months, I’ve wandered the mountains and waters, feasting my eyes on picturesque landscapes, drinking wine under moonlight, declaiming poetry on mountain summits, even having a few romantic encounters in the human feedlots everywhere…”

“Then, you should be ready to show me your works of poetry.”

Li Bai exhaled and set down his wine bowl. He stood and paced uneasily. “I’ve composed some poems, yes, and I’m certain you’d be astonished at them. You’d find that I’m already a remarkable poet, even more remarkable than you and your great-grandfather. But I don’t want you to see the poems, because I’m equally certain you’d think they fail to surpass Li Bai’s. And I…” He looked up and far away, at the residual radiance of the setting sun, his gaze dazed and pained. “I think so too.”

On the distant prairie, the dances had ended. People were happily turning to their abundant dinner. A group of girls ran to the riverbank to splash in the shallows near shore. Circlets of flowers adorned their heads, and light gauze like mist draped over their bodies, forming an intoxicating scene in the lighting of dusk. Yi Yi pointed at one girl near the hut. “Is she beautiful?”

“Of course,” Li Bai said, looking uncomprehendingly at Yi Yi.

“Imagine cutting her open with a sharp knife, removing her every organ, plucking out her eyes, scooping out her brain, picking out all her bones, slicing apart her muscles and fat according to position and function, gathering her blood vessels and nerves into two bundles. Finally, imagine laying out a big white cloth and arranging all those pieces, classified according to anatomical principles. Would you still think her beautiful?”

“How do you think of such a thing while drinking? Disgusting,” Li Bai said, wrinkling his brow.

“How is it disgusting? Is this not the technology you worship?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Li Bai saw nature like you see the girls down by the riverside. But in technology’s eyes, nature is its components, perfectly arrayed and dripping blood on a white cloth. Therefore, technology is antithetical to poetry.”

“Then you have a suggestion for me?” Li Bai said thoughtfully, stroking his beard.

“I still don’t think you stand a chance at surpassing Li Bai, but I can point your energies in the correct direction. Technology has clouded your eyes, blinding you to the beauty of nature. Therefore, you must first forget all your ultra-advanced technological knowledge. If you can transplant all your memories into your current brain, you can certainly delete some of them.”

Li Bai exchanged looks with Bigtooth. Both burst into laughter. “Esteemed god, I told you from the start, these are tricky bug-bugs,” said Bigtooth. “A moment of carelessness and you’ll fall into one of their traps.”

“Hahahaha, tricky indeed, but entertaining as well,” Li Bai said to Bigtooth, before turning toward Yi Yi with cold amusement. “Did you really think I came here to admit defeat?”

“You could not surpass the pinnacle of human poetry. That’s a fact.”

Abruptly, Li Bai raised a finger and pointed to the river. “How many ways are there to walk to the riverbank?”

Yi Yi looked uncomprehendingly at Li Bai for a few seconds. “It seems… there’s only one.”

“No, there’s two. I can also walk in this direction,” Li Bai indicated the direction opposite from the river, “and keep going, all the way around the Devouring Empire, crossing the river from the other side to reach this bank. I can even make a full circuit around the Milky Way and return here. With our technology, it’s just as easy. Technology can surpass anything! I am now forced to take the second path!”

Yi Yi pondered this for a long time before shaking his head in bewilderment. “Even if you have the technology of a god, I can’t think of a second path to surpassing Li Bai.”

Li Bai stood. “It’s simple. There are two ways to surpass Li Bai. The first is to write poems that surpass his. The other is to write every poem!”

Yi Yi looked even more confused, but Bigtooth beside him seemed to have had an epiphany.

“I will write every five-character-line and seven-character-line poem possible. They were Li Bai’s specialty. In addition, I’m going to write down every possible lyrical poem for the common line formats! How do you not understand? I’m going to try every possible permutation of Chinese characters that fits the format rules!”

“Ah, magnificent! What a magnificent undertaking!” Bigtooth crowed, forgetting all dignity.

“Is this hard?” Yi Yi asked ignorantly.

“Of course, incredibly so! The largest computer in the Devouring Empire might not be able to finish the calculations before the death of the universe!”

“Surely not,” Yi Yi said, skeptical.

“Of course yes!” Li Bai nodded with satisfaction. “But by using quantum computing, which you’re still a long way from mastering, we can complete the calculations in an acceptable length of time. Then I’ll have written every single poem, including everything that’s been written in the past, and, much more importantly, everything that may be written someday in the future! This will naturally include poems that surpass Li Bai’s best works. In fact, I’ve ended the art of poetry. Every poet from now on to the destruction of the universe, no matter how great, will be no more than a plagiarist. Their works will turn up in a search of my enormous storage device.”

Bigtooth suddenly gave a guttural cry, his gaze on Li Bai changing from excitement to shock. “An enormous… storage device? Esteemed god, do you mean to say, you’re going to… save all the poems the quantum computer writes?”

“What’s the fun in deleting everything right after I write it? Of course I’m going to save them! It will be a monument to the artistic contributions my race has made to this universe!”

Bigtooth’s expression changed from shock to horror. He extended his bulky claws and bent his legs, as if trying to kneel to Li Bai. “You mustn’t, esteemed god,” he cried. “You mustn’t!”

“What’s got you so scared?” Yi Yi regarded Bigtooth with astonishment.

“You idiot! Don’t you know that atomic bombs are made of atoms? The storage device will be made of atoms too, and its storage precision can’t possibly exceed the atomic level! Do you know what atomic-level storage is? It means that all of humanity’s books can be stored in an area the size of the point of a needle! Not the couple of books you have left, but all the books that existed before we ate Earth!”

“Ah, that sounds plausible. I’ve heard that a glass of water contains more atoms than the Earth’s oceans contained cups of water. Then, he can just write down those poems and take the needle with him,” Yi Yi said, pointing at Li Bai.

Bigtooth nearly burst with outrage. He had to rapidly pace a few steps to summon a little more patience. “Okay, okay, tell me, if the god writes all those five-character- and seven-character-line poems, and the common lyrical poetry formats, one time each, how many characters would that be?”

“Not many, no more than two or three thousand, right? Classical poetry is the most concise art form there is.”

“Fine, you idiot bug-bug, let me show you how concise it really is!” Bigtooth strode to the table and pointed at the game board with one claw. “What is it you call this stupid game… ah yes, weiqi. How many grid intersections are on the board?”

“There are nineteen lines in both the vertical and horizontal directions, for a total of three hundred and sixty-one points.”

“Very good, each intersection can be occupied by a black piece, a white piece, or no piece, a total of three states in all. So you can think of each game state as using three characters to write a poem of nineteen lines and three hundred and sixty-one characters.”

“That’s a clever comparison.”

“Now, if we exhaust all the possible permutations of these three characters in this poem format, how many poems can we write? Let me tell you: 3³⁶¹, or, let me think, 10¹⁷²!”

“Is… is that a lot?”

“Idiot!” Bigtooth spat the word at him for the third time. “In all the universe, there are only… grargh!” He was too infuriated to speak.

“How many?” Yi Yi still wore a befuddled expression.

“10⁸⁰ atoms! You idiot bug-bug—”

Only now did Yi Yi show any sign of astonishment. “You mean to say, if we could save one poem in every atom, we might use up every atom in the universe and still not be able to fit all of his quantum computer’s poems?”

“Far from it! Off by a factor of 10⁹²! Besides, how can one atom store a whole poem? The memory devices of human bug-bugs would have needed more atoms to store one poem than your population. As for us, ai, technology to store one bit per atom is still in the laboratory stage….”

“Here you display your shortsightedness and lack of imagination, Emissary, one of the reasons behind the laggardly advancement of Devouring Empire technology,” Li Bai said, laughing. “Using quantum storage devices based on the quantum superposition principle, the poems can be stored in very little matter. Of course, quantum storage is none too stable. To preserve the poems forever, it needs to be used in tandem with more traditional storage techniques. Nonetheless, the amount of matter required is minuscule.”

“How much?” Bigtooth asked, looking as if his heart were in his throat.

“Approximately 10⁵⁷ atoms, a pittance really.”

“That’s… that’s exactly the amount of matter in the solar system!”

“Correct, including all the planets orbiting the sun, and of course including the Devouring Empire.”

Li Bai said this last sentence easily and naturally, but it struck Yi Yi like a bolt out of the blue. Bigtooth, on the other hand, seemed to have calmed down. After the long torment of sensing disaster on the horizon, the actual onslaught only left a sense of relief.

“Can’t you convert pure energy into matter?” asked Bigtooth.

“You should know how much energy it would take to create such an enormous amount of matter. The prospect is unimaginable even to us. We’ll go with ready-made.”

“His Majesty’s concerns weren’t unjustified,” Bigtooth murmured to himself.

“Yes, yes,” Li Bai said happily. “I informed the Emperor of the Devourers the day before yesterday. This great ring-world empire shall be used for an even greater goal. The dinosaurs should feel honored.”

“Esteemed god, you’ll see how the Devouring Empire feels,” Bigtooth said darkly. “I also have one more concern. Compared to the sun, the amount of matter in the Devouring Empire is insignificantly minuscule. Is it really necessary to destroy a civilization millions of years of evolution in the making, just to obtain a few scraps?”

“I fully understand your reservations. But you must know, extinguishing, cooling, and disassembling the sun will take a long time. The quantum calculations should begin before then, and we need to save the resulting poems elsewhere so that the computer can clear its internal storage and continue work. Therefore the planets and the Devouring Empire, which can immediately provide matter for manufacturing storage devices, are crucial.”

“I understand, esteemed god. I have one last question: Is it necessary to store all the results? Why can’t you add an analytical program at the end, to delete all the poems that don’t warrant saving? From what I know, Classical Chinese poetry has to follow a strict structure. If we delete all the poems that violate the formal rules, we’ll greatly decrease the volume of the results.”

“Formal rules? Ha.” Li Bai shook his head contemptuously. “Shackles upon inspiration, and nothing more. Classical Chinese poetry wasn’t bound by these rules before the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Even after the Tang Dynasty, which popularized the strict jintishi form, many master poets ignored the rules to write some extraordinary biantishi works. That’s why, for this ultimate poetry composition, I won’t take formal rules into consideration.”

“But, you should still consider the poem’s content, right? Ninety-nine percent of the results are obviously going to be rubbish. What’s the point of storing a bunch of randomly generated character arrays?”

“Rubbish?” Li Bai shrugged. “Emissary, you are not the one who decides whether a poem is meaningful. Neither am I, nor any other person. Time decides. Many poems once considered worthless at the time of their writing were later lauded as masterpieces. Many of the masterpieces of today and tomorrow would have been considered worthless in the distant past. I’m going to write all the poems there are. Trillions of years from now, who knows which of them mighty Time will choose as the finest?”

“That’s absurd!” Bigtooth bellowed, startling several birds hidden in the distant grass into flight. “If we go by the human bug-bugs’ preexisting Chinese character database, the first poem your quantum computer writes should be:

“Might I ask, would mighty Time choose this as a masterpiece?!”

Yi Yi broke his silence to cheer. “Wow! Who needs mighty Time to choose? It’s a masterpiece right now! The first three lines and the first four characters of the fourth are the exclamations—ah!—of living beings witnessing the majestic grandeur of the universe. The last character is the clincher, where the poet, having witnessed the vastness of the universe, expresses the insignificance of life in the infinity of time and space with a single sigh of inevitability.”

“Hahahaha…” Li Bai stroked his whiskers, unable to stop smiling. “A fine poem, my bug-bug Yi Yi, a fine poem indeed, hahaha…” He took up the gourd and poured Yi Yi wine.

Bigtooth raised his massive claws and flung Yi Yi into the distance with one swat. “Nasty bug-bug, I know you’re happy now. But don’t forget, once the Devouring Empire is destroyed, your kind won’t survive either!”

Yi Yi rolled all the way to the riverbank. It took a long time before he could crawl back up. A grin cracked across his dirt-covered face; he was laughing despite his pain, truly happy. “This is great! This universe is motherfucking incredible!” he yelled with no thought to dignity.

“Any other questions, Emissary?” asked Li Bai. Bigtooth shook his head. “Then I’ll leave tomorrow. The day after the next, the quantum computer will execute its poetry-writing software, commencing the ultimate poetry composition. At the same time, the work to extinguish the sun and dismantle the planets and the Devouring Empire shall commence.”

Bigtooth straightened. “Esteemed god, the Devouring Empire will complete preparations for battle tonight!” he said solemnly.

“Good, very good, the coming days will be interesting. But before all else, let us finish this gourd.” Li Bai nodded happily as he took up the gourd and poured the remaining wine. He looked at the river, now shrouded in night, and continued to savor those words: “A fine poem indeed, the first, haha, the first and already so fine.”

THE ULTIMATE POETRY COMPOSITION

The poetry-composition software was in fact very simple. Represented in humanity’s C language, it would be no more than two thousand lines of code, with an additional database of modest size appended storing the Chinese characters. Once the software was uploaded onto the quantum computer in the orbit of Neptune, an enormous transparent cone floating in the vacuum, the ultimate poetry composition began.

Only now did the Devouring Empire learn that the god version of Li Bai was merely one individual member of his ultra-advanced civilization. The dinosaurs had previously assumed that any society that had advanced to this level of technology would have melded their consciousness into one being long ago; all five of the ultra-advanced civilizations they’d met in the past ten million years had done so. That Li Bai’s race had preserved their individual existences also somewhat explained their extraordinary ability to grasp art. When the poetry composition began, more individuals from Li Bai’s race jumped into the solar system from various places in distant space and began construction on the storage device.

The humans living in the Devouring Empire couldn’t see the quantum computer in space, or the new arrivals from the race of gods. To them, the process of the ultimate poetry composition was simply the increase and decrease of the number of suns in space.

One week after the poetry software began execution, the gods successfully extinguished the sun, reducing the sun count to zero. But the cessation of nuclear fission inside the sun caused the star’s outer layer to lose support, and it quickly collapsed into a new star that illuminated the darkness once more. However, this sun’s luminosity was a hundred times greater than before; smoke rose from the grass and trees on the surface of the Devouring Empire. The new star was once again extinguished, but a while later it burst alight again. So it went on, lighting only to be extinguished, extinguishing only to light once more, as if the sun were a cat with nine lives, struggling stubbornly. But the gods were highly practiced at killing stars. They patiently extinguished the new star again and again, until its matter had, as much as possible, fused into the heavier elements needed in the construction of the storage device. Only after the eleventh star dimmed was the sun snuffed out for good.

At this point, the ultimate poetry composition had run for three Earth months. Long before then, during the appearance of the third new star, other suns had appeared in space. These suns rose and fell in succession throughout space, brightening and dimming. At one point, there were nine new suns in the sky. They were releases of energy as the gods dismantled the planets. With the star-sized sun diminishing in brightness later on, people could no longer tell the suns apart.

The dismantlement of the Devouring Empire commenced the fifth week after the start of the poetry composition. Before it, Li Bai had made a suggestion to the Empire: The gods could jump all the dinosaurs to a world on the other side of the Milky Way. The civilization there was much less advanced than the gods’, its members being unable to convert themselves into pure energy, but still much more advanced than the Devourers’ civilization. There, the dinosaurs would be raised as a form of livestock and live happy lives with all their needs taken care of. But the dinosaurs would rather break than bend, and angrily refused this suggestion.

Next, Li Bai made another request: that humanity be allowed to return to their mother planet. To be sure, Earth had been dismantled, and most of it went toward the storage device. But the gods saved a small amount of matter to construct a hollow Earth, about the same size as the original, but with only a hundredth of its mass. To say that the hollow Earth was Earth hollowed-out would be incorrect, because the layer of brittle rock that originally covered the Earth could hardly be used to make the spherical shell. The shell material was perhaps taken from the Earth’s core. In addition, razor-thin but extremely strong reinforcing hoops crisscrossed the shell, like lines of latitude and longitude, made from the neutronium produced in the collapse of the sun.

Movingly, the Devouring Empire not only immediately agreed to Li Bai’s request, allowing all humans to leave the great ring world, but also returned the seawater and air they’d taken from Earth in their entirety. The gods used them to restore all of Earth’s original continents, oceans, and atmosphere inside the hollow Earth.

Next, the terrible battle to defend the great ring began. The Devouring Empire launched barrages of nuclear missiles and gamma rays at the gods in space, but these were useless against their foe. The gods launched a powerful, invisible force that pushed at the Devourers’ ring, spinning it faster and faster, until it finally fell apart under the centrifugal forces of such rapid rotation. At this time, Yi Yi was en route to the hollow Earth. From twelve million kilometers away, he witnessed the complete course of the Devouring Empire’s destruction:

The great, fierce civilization from ancient Earth was thus destroyed, to Yi Yi’s deepest lament. Only a few dinosaurs survived, returning to Earth with humanity, including the emissary Bigtooth.

On the return journey to Earth, the humans were largely in low spirits, but for different reasons than Yi Yi: Once they were back on Earth, they’d have to farm and plow if they wanted to eat. To humans accustomed to having every need provided for in their long captivity, grown indolent and ignorant of labor, it really did seem like a nightmare.

But Yi Yi believed in Earth’s future. No matter how many challenges lay ahead, humans were going to become people once more.

THE CLOUD OF POEMS

The poetry voyage arrived on the shores of Antarctica.

The gravity here was already weak; the waves cycled slowly in a dreamlike dance. Under the low gravity, the impact of waves upon shore sent spray dozens of meters into the air, where the seawater contracted under surface tension into countless spheres, some as large as soccer balls, some as small as raindrops, which fell so slowly that one could draw rings around them with one’s hand. They refracted the rays of the little sun, so that when Yi Yi, Li Bai, and Bigtooth disembarked, they were surrounded by crystalline brilliance.

Due to the forces of rotation, the Earth was slightly stretched at the North and South Poles, causing the hollow Earth’s pole regions to maintain their old chilly state. Low-gravity snow was a wonder, loose and foamy, waist-high in the shallow parts and deep enough at others that even Bigtooth disappeared beneath it. But having disappeared, they could still breathe normally inside the snow! The entire Antarctic continent was buried underneath this snow-foam, creating an undulating landscape of white.

Yi Yi and company rode a snowmobile toward the South Pole. The snowmobile skimmed across the snow-foam like a speedboat, throwing waves of white to either side.

The next day, they arrived at the South Pole, marked by a towering pyramid of crystal, a memorial dedicated to the Earth Defense War of two centuries ago. Neither writing nor images marked its surface. There was just the crystal form in the snow-foam at the apex of the Earth, silently refracting the sunlight.

From here, one could gaze upon the entire world. Continents and oceans surrounded the radiant little sun, so that it looked as if it had floated up from the waters of the Arctic Sea.

“Will that little sun really be able to shine forever?” Yi Yi asked Li Bai.

“At the very least, it will last until the new Earth civilization is advanced enough to create a new sun. It is a miniature white hole.”

“White hole? Is that the inverse of a black hole?” asked Bigtooth.

“Yes, it’s connected through a wormhole to a black hole orbiting a star, two million light-years away. The black hole sucks in the star’s light, which is released here. Think of the sun as one end of a fiber-optic cable running through hyperspace.”

The apex of the monument was the southern starting point of the Lagrangian axis, the thirteen-thousand-kilometer line of zero gravity between the North and South Poles of the hollow Earth, named after the zero-gravity Lagrangian point that had existed between the Earth and moon before the war. In the future, people were certain to launch various satellites onto the Lagrangian axis. Compared to the process on Earth before the war, this would be easy: one would only have to ship the satellite to the North or South Pole, by donkey if one wanted to, and give it a good kick up with one’s foot.

As the party viewed the memorial, another, larger snowmobile ferried over a crowd of young human tourists. After disembarking, the tourists bent their legs and jumped straight into the air, flying high along the Lagrangian axis, turning themselves into satellites. From here, one could see many small, black specks in the air, marking out the position of the axis: tourists and vehicles drifting in zero gravity. They would have been able to fly directly to the North Pole if it weren’t for the sun, placed at the midpoint of the Lagrangian axis. In the past, some tourists flying along the axis had discovered their handheld miniature air-jet thrusters broken, been unable to decelerate, and flown straight into the sun. Well, in truth, they vaporized a considerable distance from it.

In the hollow Earth, entering space was also easy. One only needed to jump into one of the five deep wells on the equator (called Earthgates) and fall (fly?) a hundred kilometers through the shell, then be flung by the centrifugal forces of the hollow Earth’s rotation into space.

Yi Yi and company also needed to pass through the shell to see the Cloud of Poems, but they were heading through the Antarctic Earthgate. Here, there were no centrifugal forces, so instead of being flung into space, they would only reach the outer surface of the hollow Earth. Once they’d put on lightweight space suits at the Antarctic control station, they entered the one-hundred-kilometer well—although, without gravity, it was better termed a tunnel. Being weightless here, they used the thrusters on their space suits to move forward. This was much slower than the free fall on the equator; it took them half an hour to arrive on the outside.

The outer surface of the hollow Earth was completely barren. There were only the crisscrossing reinforcing hoops of neutronium, which divided the outside by latitude and longitude into a grid. The South Pole was indeed where all the longitudinal hoops met. When Yi Yi and company walked out of the Earthgate, they saw that they were located on a modestly sized plateau. The hoops that reinforced Earth resembled many long mountain ranges, radiating in every direction from the plateau.

Looking up, they saw the Cloud of Poems.

In place of the solar system was the Cloud of Poems, a spiral galaxy a hundred astronomical units across, shaped much like the Milky Way. The hollow Earth was situated at the edge of the Cloud, much as the sun had been in the actual Milky Way. The difference was that Earth’s position was not coplanar with the Cloud of Poems, which allowed one to see one face of the Cloud head-on, instead of only edge-on as with the Milky Way. But Earth wasn’t nearly far enough from the plane to allow people here to observe the full form of the Cloud of Poems. Instead, the Cloud blanketed the entire sky of the southern hemisphere.

The Cloud of Poems emitted a silvery radiance bright enough to cast shadows on the ground. It wasn’t that the Cloud itself was made to glow, apparently, but rather that cosmic rays would excite it into silver luminescence. Due to the uneven spatial distribution of the cosmic rays, glowing masses frequently rippled through the Cloud of Poems, their varicolored light rolling across the sky like luminescent whales diving through the Cloud. Rarely, with spikes in the cosmic radiation, the Cloud of Poems emitted dapples of light that made the Cloud look utterly unlike a cloud. Instead, the entire sky seemed to be the surface of a moonlit sea seen from below.

Earth and the Cloud did not move in sync, so sometimes Earth lay in the gaps between the spiral arms. Through the gap, one could see the night sky and the stars, and most thrillingly, a cross-sectional view of the Cloud of Poems. Immense structures resembling Earthly cumulonimbuses rose from the spiraling plane, shimmering with silvery light, morphing through magnificent forms that inspired the human imagination, as if they belonged to the dreamscape of some super-advanced consciousness.

Yi Yi tore his gaze from the Cloud of Poems and picked up a crystal chip off the ground. These chips were scattered around them, sparkling like shards of ice in winter. Yi Yi raised the chip against a sky thick with the Cloud of Poems. The chip was very thin, and half the size of his palm. It appeared transparent from the front, but if he tilted it slightly, he could see the bright light of the Cloud of Poems reflect off its surface in rainbow halos. This was a quantum memory chip. All the written information created in human history would take up less than a millionth of a percent of one chip. The Cloud of Poems was composed of 1040 of these storage devices, and contained all the results of the ultimate poem composition. It was manufactured using all the matter in the sun and its nine major planets, of course including the Devouring Empire.

“What a magnificent work of art!” Bigtooth sighed sincerely.

“Yes, it’s beautiful in its significance: a nebula fifteen billion kilometers across, encompassing every poem possible. It’s too spectacular!” Yi Yi said, gazing at the nebula. “Even I’m starting to worship technology.”

Li Bai gave a long sigh. He had been in a low mood all this time. “Ai, it seems like we’ve both come around to the other person’s viewpoint. I witnessed the limits of technology in art. I—” He began to sob. “I’ve failed….”

“How can you say that?” Yi Yi pointed at the Cloud of Poems overhead. “This holds all the possible poems, so of course it holds the poems that surpass Li Bai’s!”

“But I can’t get to them!” Li Bai stomped his foot, which shot him meters into the air. He curled into a ball in midair, miserably burying his face between his knees in a fetal position; he slowly descended under the weak gravitational pull of the Earth’s shell. “At the start of the poetry composition, I immediately set out to program software that could analyze poetry. At that point, technology once again met that unsurpassable obstacle in the pursuit of art. Even now, I’m still unable to write software that can judge and appreciate poetry.” He pointed up at the Cloud of Poems. “Yes, with the help of mighty technology, I’ve written the ultimate works of poetry. But I can’t find them amid the Cloud of Poems, ai…”

“Is the soul and essence of intelligent life truly untouchable by technology?” Bigtooth loudly asked the Cloud of Poems above. He’d become increasingly philosophical after all he’d endured.

“Since the Cloud of Poems encompasses all possible poems, then naturally some portion of those poems describes all of our pasts and all of our futures, possible and impossible. The bug-bug Yi Yi would certainly find a poem that describes how he felt one night thirty years ago while clipping his fingernails, or a menu from a lunch twelve years in his future. Emissary Bigtooth, too, might find a poem that describes the color of a particular scale on his leg five years from now….”

Li Bai had touched down once more on the ground; as he spoke, he took out two chips, shimmering under the light of the Cloud of Poems. “These are my parting gifts for you two. The quantum computer used your names as keywords to search through the Cloud of Poems, and found several quadrillion poems that describe your various possible future lives. Of course, these are only a tiny portion of the poems with you as subject in the Cloud of Poems. I’ve only read a couple dozen of these. My favorite is a seven-character-line poem about Yi Yi describing a romantic riverbank scene between him and a beautiful woman from a faraway village….

“After I leave, I hope humanity and the remaining dinosaurs can get along with each other, and that humanity can get along with itself even better. If someone nukes a hole into the shell of the hollow Earth, it’s going to be a real problem…. The good poems in the Cloud of Poems don’t belong to anyone yet. Hopefully humans will be able to write some of them.”

“What happened to me and the woman, afterward?” Yi Yi asked.

Under the silver light of the Cloud of Poems, Li Bai chuckled. “Together, you lived happily ever after.”