The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection

PREFACE

I had been working for two months straight, and I was tired. I needed to get out, relax and clear my mind, if just for a few days.

So, I asked the Director for two days of leave. He approved it, but only on the condition that I take a pair of eyes along. I agreed and so he took me to pick them up from the Control Center. The eyes were kept in a small room at the end of a long corridor. There were about a dozen pairs left when we got there. The Director pointed to a large screen as he handed me one of the pairs. I was greeted on the screen by the owner of the eyes I now held, staring at me. She appeared to be very young, probably fresh out of the university, her petite frame only accentuated by the massive spacesuit encasing her. The fact that her face looked like a mask of misery did nothing to help the situation. Just a few months ago, she had probably dreamt of the romance of space in the safety of her university library; now she faced the hellish reality of the infinite void.

“I am very sorry for imposing upon you,” she opened, bowing to me. Her soft words sounded as if they were floating to me, a gentle breeze out of the deeps of space.

“Not at all. I’m happy to have a companion,” I replied sincerely. “Where do you want to go?”

“Really?” She could barely contain her excitement and joy. “You haven’t decided where you’ll go?”

As she spoke, I felt my attention drawn to two peculiarities. On the one hand, there was the fact that space-to-surface communications always suffered some degree of lag. Just calling the Moon meant a delay of about two seconds and communications with the Asteroid Belt had to deal with considerably longer lag-times. Her answers, however, seemed to arrive without any perceptible delay at all. That meant that she had to be in low Earth orbit, but there was no reason to link-up from there. Returning to the surface from there was cheap and quick, so why ever would she want me to carry her eyes on vacation?

On the other hand, she was outfitted as an aerospace engineer, but her spacesuit seemed rather odd; it lacked any visible anti-radiation system and the helmet hanging at her side apparently lacked glare guards. The suit’s insulation and cooling systems were of a strange design as well.

“What station is she on?” I asked, turning to the Director.

“Just don’t ask,” he answered glumly.

“Leave it, okay?” the young woman on the screen echoed abjectly enough to tug at my heartstrings.

“You aren’t in lock-up, are you?” I asked, more in jest than earnest. It was not entirely without basis, however; her station appeared terribly cramped. It looked like some sort of cockpit. An almost endless array of complex navigation equipment and displays flickered and glowed behind her, yet I could see no window, not even an observation screen. In fact, the only proof that she was actually in outer space was a pencil that was slowly floating around her head.

Both she and the Director responded to my question with stunned silence, so I hurriedly continued. “Very well, I will not ask about things that shouldn’t concern me, but you still need to decide where we should go.”

To her, making the decision seemed to be a genuine struggle. Clutching her gloved hands to her chest, she almost closed her eyes as she focused. If I had not known the circumstances, I could easily have been fooled into believing that she had been faced with a decision of life and death, or perhaps that she was convinced that the Earth would explode after our short vacation. I could not help but snicker at the thought.

“Oh, this isn’t easy for me. If you know Helen Keller’s Three Days to See, then you can understand how hard this is for me!” Her soft voice momentarily mustered surprising force.

“We don’t have three days; just two,” I replied. “We are all beggars for time these days. Then again, we’re lucky when compared to Helen: In three hours, I can take your eyes anywhere on Earth.”

“Then let’s go somewhere that we’ve been before!”

After she told me the location, I left with her eyes.

CHAPTER 1 The Taklamakan

It was a place where towering mountains and flat plains, grasslands, and forest met and embraced◦— a mighty grassland located a good thousand miles from the Aerospace Center where I worked. Flying via the ionosphere, our journey took a mere 15 minutes. Many generations of perseverance and hard work had transformed the Taklamakan from a sandy desert to verdant grassland. Now, after decades of vigorous population control, it was once again left deserted, if only of human habitation. Before me, the grasslands stretched straight to the horizons. Behind me, the Tian Shan Mountains were covered in the luscious green of a thick forest, punctuated only by the occasional silvery white snowcaps of the highest peaks.

I took out her eyes and put them on.

The so-called “eyes” were actually a pair of remote-sensing glasses. When worn, they transmitted visual information to a designated receiver pair of “eyes” via an ultra high frequency signal. This allowed the often very distant receiver to see everything the wearer saw just as if viewing through his or her very own eyes.

Nowadays, millions worked all year round on the Moon and the Asteroid Belt. These workers faced truly daunting costs if they wished to return to Earth for a vacation. The Aerospace Agency, always concerned with its bottom line, had devised these gadgets to solve their dilemma◦— and so extra-orbital astronaut had another pair of eyes planet-side. Those on Earth, lucky enough to go on a real-life vacation, could take someone else’s pair along, allowing a homesick space worker to share the joy of their trip. Even though these gadgets had become the butt of many a joke, the fact that those willing to wear them received significant subsidies for their travels had made them very popular indeed.

The artificial eyes were cutting-edge technology and were continuously being developed and improved. Nowadays, they could even transmit a wearer’s sensation of touch and smell by picking up his or her brainwaves. Wearing these eyes on vacation was often seen as a charitable act by the earthbound Aerospace Systems staff, but due to the invasion of privacy the eyes necessitated, far from everyone was happy with the arrangement. As for myself, I hardly saw a problem with them.

The vista that stretched before my own eyes was truly marvelous. Taking it all in, I drew a deep sigh of sheer delight from the depths of my being. Her eyes, however, rang with soft sobs.

“I have dreamed of this place ever since my last trip, and now I am back in that dream!” Her gentle voice replaced the sobs. “I feel like I am rising from the depths of the oceans, like I am taking my first breath of air. I am so very afraid of being sealed away.”

I could clearly hear her take deep, long breaths. “But you are not at all sealed away now,” I said. “Compared to the vastness of space all around you, this grassland is tiny.”

She replied with total silence. Even her breathing seemed to have stopped.

With a nod, I continued, if just to break the silence. “Ah, of course, people in space are sealed away. It’s like when Chuck Yeager described Mercury astronauts as being—”

“—spam in a can,” she finished the thought for me.

We both laughed. Suddenly her laughter turned to a scream. “Oh, flowers! There are flowers! They weren’t here the last time!”

She was right; the vast grassland was adorned with countless small blossoms.

“Can you have a look at the flowers next to you?” she asked.

I squatted and did as she asked.

“Oh, so beautiful! Can you smell it? No, don’t pick it!”

So I had to lie almost flat on my belly to smell the flower’s faint fragrance.

“Hmm, I smell it; it’s like a faint serenade!” Pure joy echoed in her voice.

I shook my head, laughing. In this age of ever-changing crazed fads, most girls were restless to a fault. I could barely think of another young woman like her◦— someone who actually stopped to smell the flowers.

“Let’s give this little flower a name, shall we? Mm…” She thought for a few seconds. “Yes, we’ll call this one Dreamflourish. Let’s have another look at that flower, okay?”

I knew she was referring to another flower now.

“What should we call her? Mm, let’s call her Drizzles. Now, go to that one over there… Oh, thank you! Will you look at the depth of that green? Her name should really be Moonglow…”

In this manner we perused the flowers. We smelled each tiny blossom and then we gave them names. She was intoxicated, the rush of it all having completely absorbed her. I, however, soon grew tired of the girl in the spacesuit’s games, but by the time I finally insisted she give it a rest, we had already given hundreds of flowers their names.

When I raised my eyes again later, I saw we had actually crossed a good distance of the grassland. I went back to gather the backpack I had left behind. Just as I bent down to pick it up, I again heard her cry out.

“Oh heavens, you stepped on Snowy!”

So I straightened that little white wild flower back up. Feeling somewhat silly, I began by covering a flower with both hands, then I asked her, “What are they called? What do they look like?”

“That one on the left is Crystal; it is a white one and there are three separate leaves on its stem. To the right we have Firebloom. It is a pink one with four leaves. The top two leaves are singles, while the bottom two are joined,” she replied without hesitation or error.

She got them all right and I could not help but feel at least somewhat moved.

“You see,” she said wistfully, “we all know each other and in the many, many days to come, I will think of them over and over again. It will be like retelling a wonderful fairytale. That world of yours really is magnificent!”

“This world of mine?” I asked, a little irritated. “If you keep up your childish melodramatics maybe you should get those space psychologists to send you back to the surface permanently. This is your world, too.”

With that I began to aimlessly roam about the grassland. Soon, I came upon the bank of a small stream, hidden in the thick grass. I decided to forge ahead, but her voice called me back.

“I’d really like it if you would put your hands in that river.”

So I squatted down and let my hands dangle into the water. A wave of wonderful cool refreshment flowed through my entire body. I knew that she would feel it, too, as the high frequency waves carried the feeling into the far distance of space. Again I heard her sigh.

“It’s very hot where you are?” I asked, thinking of her cramped cockpit and the insulation system of her strange spacesuit.

“Hot,” she replied. “Hot like hell.” Suddenly her tone changed. “Heavens, what’s that? Is that the prairie wind?”

I had taken my hands out of the water and a gentle breeze was blowing coolly against my wet fingers.

“No, don’t go,” she pleaded. “It feels like its blowing right out of paradise.”

I raised both my hands into the breeze until they were dry. Then, at her request, I dipped them back into the stream and again I lifted them into the wind. Again it felt divine, and again we shared the experience. We idled away a good while like this.

I set out again, wordlessly wandering for a while. Then I heard her soft voice again, “That world of yours really is magnificent.”

“I don’t know; the gray of life has dulled it all,” I replied.

“How ever is that possible?” she almost shouted. “This world has so much to offer! So many experiences and feelings! Trying to describe it all would be no different than counting the raindrops in the rain. Look at those clouds on the horizon, their silvery whiteness. Right now, they seem solid to me, like towering mountains of glittering jade. And the grassland below◦— that looks wispy, as if all the grass was taking off and flying away, becoming a green cloud-ocean. Look! Watch that cloud cover the Sun and float away again. What a majestic play of light and shadow on the grassland! Look at it. Can you really not feel it?”

It was my turn to reply with silence.

I spent the entire day carrying her eyes over the grassland. As we strolled, she longed to look at each and every wild flower, all the grasses and every strand of sunlight beaming over the thick green of the prairie. She thirsted for every sound the Taklamakan could offer. When we chanced upon another rivulet and saw a small fish swimming in it, she could barely contain herself. Any random breeze carrying the delicate fragrance of the grass moved her to tears. I could not help but get the impression that the intensity of her emotions was slightly pathological.

Before the Sun set, I made my way to a small, white cabin standing forlornly on the grassland. It was a guesthouse awaiting tourists, but it looked like it had not seen any guests in a while. A lone, long-outdated robot looked after the entire guesthouse. When we arrived, I was tired and hungry. I had barely had a chance to sit down and take a few bites of my meal before she asked me to get up at once so that we could watch the sunset.

“Let’s see the afterglow disappear as the night slowly falls over the forest. It will be like hearing the most beautiful symphony in all the cosmos…” Her voice was all but slurred by the sheer pleasure of it all.

I grumbled to myself, but still I dragged my heavy legs out the door.

The sunset over the Taklamakan was truly beautiful, but her emotional outpour at the sight bathed it all in a still stranger light.

“You really do cherish these ordinary things,” I noted as I walked back inside later. By now, the thick, black curtain of night had fallen and the stars had begun to twinkle above.

“And why don’t you?” she asked. “It is life.”

“I, like most everyone else, simply can’t. You know how easy things come these days, and I am not just talking about material things; it’s also things like the beauty of a bright blue sky or a crystal clear river. The peace and tranquility of the countryside or of a remote island◦— all of it is available for next to nothing. Even love. Just think about how elusive that was for previous generations and how desperately they chased it, and now it can be experienced in virtual reality, at least for a while. That is why people don’t cherish these things. There is a huge pile of succulent fruits right within arm’s reach, so we just grab one whenever we feel like it, take a bite, and throw the rest away.”

“But not everyone has fruit within reach,” she said in a small voice.

I felt that I was causing her pain, but I had no idea why. On the way back, we did not speak.

That night, I saw her in my dreams. She was in her spacesuit, confined to her tiny cockpit, her eyes wet with tears. She reached out to me, screaming, “Carry me away! I am afraid of being sealed away!”

My eyes flashed open as I woke with a start, only to discover that she really was shouting at me. I had fallen asleep on my back, wearing her eyes.

“Please, will you take me outside?” she beseeched me. “Let’s go see the Moon. By now the Moon will have risen!”

My head felt like lead as I reluctantly stumbled out of bed. Finally outside, I groggily discovered that the Moon really did shine brightly in the sky. In the night mists of the grassland it appeared almost crimson. The vast wilderness below was fast asleep, with only a few roaming fireflies casting their dim light on the shadowy ocean of grass. It looked like a dream of the Taklamakan, painted into life.

I raised my arms as I addressed the night sky. “Hey, can you see the Moon shine down here from orbit? Just tell me whereabouts your spaceship is, maybe I’ll spot it. I’m sure it’s got to be in low Earth orbit.”

She did not answer me. However, she did begin to gently hum a song. As she finished the short melody, she said, “It’s Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ suite; that’s moonlight suite in French.” Then she continued to hum, completely absorbed in the music. She seemed to have forgotten all about me. From orbit, melody and moonlight descended upon the grassland in unison. I imagined that delicate girl in space, the silvery light of the Moon shining from above, the blue Earth below, and her petite self flying in-between, her song melding with the moonlight…

An hour passed before I returned to my bed. She was still humming. I didn’t know if it was still something by Debussy or not. With her soft melody in my ear, I drifted off to sleep.

I don’t know how much time had passed, but the melody had changed to a shout. She was waking me again, wanting to go outside.

“Didn’t you just see the Moon?!” I was angry.

“But it’s different now,” she implored. “Don’t you remember the clouds in the west? By now they have probably floated on and are covering the Moon. Just imagine how the light and shadow will dance on the grassland; so beautiful… It is music of another kind. Please, take my eyes outside!”

I was very annoyed with her, but I still left the guesthouse. The clouds had floated on and the Moon was shining through them. Its light slowly drifted over the grassland, seeming to rise from the depths of the Earth, like a long-forgotten memory.

“You’re like one of those sentimental poets of the Romantic era, completely out of place in this age, and most certainly out place in space,” I said to the night sky. Then, I took out her eyes and hung them from a nearby Red Willow. “You can look at the Moon yourself; I am so off to sleep. Tomorrow, I’ll hustle myself back to the Aerospace Center and continue my utterly prosaic life.”

Her eyes continued to emanate her tiny voice, but I could no longer hear what she was saying. I headed straight back inside.

When I woke, the Sun had already risen for awhile. Dark clouds had come to cover the sky, shrouding the Taklamakan in a light drizzle. I went outside to find that her eyes still hung from the tree, their lenses covered in mist. I carefully wiped them dry and put them on. I assumed that having watched the moonlit night she would be well asleep now, but instead I heard her sobbing softly. What anger I still carried dissolved as my heart reached out to her.

“I’m really sorry about yesterday, but I was dead tired,” I apologized.

“No, it’s not because of you,” she all but whimpered. “The sky darkened at three-thirty and then, around five, it started to rain—”

“You haven’t slept all night?” I interrupted her in shock.

She continued to sob. “It started to rain. I, I could not see the sunrise. I so wanted to see the Sun rise over the grassland.” She choked in sheer despair. “…so wanted to see it.”

My heart felt like melting. By my mind’s eye, I saw her eyes, her real eyes, brimming with tears; I saw the quivering of her slender nose, and to my surprise, I felt my own eyes moisten. I had to admit it◦— the past day and night she had taught me something, but I could not put my finger on exactly what. It felt somehow obscured, like the shadowy grassland, half-hidden in the moonlight. Even so, it had changed the world to my eyes. Something was different now.

“The Taklamakan will always have its sunrises. I am sure that I can take your eyes again to see it. Or, take you in person, all right?” I offered.

Her sobbing had stopped. Suddenly, I heard her soft voice again. “Listen…”

Nothing followed. I tensed, waiting.

“That is today’s first birdsong! There are birds in the rain!” Excitement bubbled in her voice. She sounded as if she had just heard the Century Bell in Tianjin, ringing-in another new millennium.

CHAPTER 2 Setting Sun VI

I returned to the gray of life and the bustle of work. The memory of my journey with her eyes soon began to fade. A long time passed. Then one day, as I was just about to wash the clothes I had worn on that trip, I discovered a few minute grass seeds embedded in the leg of my trouser.

A seed had also been left in the deepest recesses of my subconscious. In the lonely desert of my soul, that seed had already grown into a little green sprout. But it was still tiny, all but disappearing in surrounding vastness. And while I was not aware of it yet, at the end of another overworked day, I, for the first time, felt the natural poetry of the night breeze brushing my face. The singing birds drew my attention and I even once stopped on a bridge on my way home to watch the curtain of night fall over the city.

Certainly, the world was still dull to my eyes, but tiny specks of verdant green had begun to sneak their way into the gray. As I finally began to realize this change, my mind returned to her; the memory of her, too, germinated in my subconscious. Slowly she began to drift into my idle mind and into my dreams. Over and over again she appeared before my mind’s eye, locked in that cramped cockpit, wearing her strangely insulated spacesuit.

But it all sank into the depths of my subconscious. Only one thing stood out, distinct and clear: It was that weightless pencil, slowly drifting around her head. I did not know why, but I hardly needed to close my eyes to see it float right in front of me.

Then one day as I was making my way into the Aerospace Center, I suddenly felt myself drawn to the giant mural that adorned the center’s massive entrance hall. I had passed it countless times before, but never really paid it much heed. But now something about it caught my eye. The mural depicted Earth, viewed from outer space. That pencil again floated before my mind’s eye and across the mural. Again, I heard her voice, “I am afraid of being sealed…” Realization struck like lightning.

Space was not the only place free of gravity!

There was a mad dash up the floors and then I was fiercely pounding on the Director’s door. He was not in, but I somehow knew where he had to be. I rushed to the small room where the eyes were kept. He was there, just as I had expected. The Director was looking at the girl on the large screen. She was still shut in that tiny cockpit, still wearing that “spacesuit”. The picture was frozen, almost certainly the image of a prior recording. The Director did not turn his gaze away from the screen as he addressed me.

“You’re here because of her.” It was not a question.

“Where is she really?” I almost shouted the question.

“You probably already guessed it,” he replied. “She is the pilot of the Setting Sun VI.”

It all made sense and I all but collapsed onto the carpet.

The original plan of the “Setting Sun Project” had foreseen the launch of 10 vessels, the Setting Suns I — X. After the Setting Sun VI Disaster, however, the plan had been abandoned. The Setting Sun Project was an exploration mission like many before it and its procedures were almost like any other launched by the Aerospace Center.

There was just one difference: The Setting Sun vessels did not fly into space. They descended into the depths of the Earth.

More than one and a half centuries after the first space flight, humanity began to explore in the opposite direction. The Setting Sun subterranean ships were the first attempt at this form of exploration.

Four years ago, I had seen the launch of the Setting Sun I on TV. It had been the dead of night when a blinding fireball bright as the Sun had suddenly erupted from the heart of the Turpan Depression in the entire west of China. The glorious light had turned the night clouds into the gorgeous rosé of dawn. When the fireball had faded, the Setting Sun I was already well below ground. Where it had been, a large swathe of earth had been scorched. In the very center of this circle of red-hot, burned earth now churned a lake of molten magma. White-hot, liquid rock boiled and seethed, raising a white plume to the sky…

That night, one could feel the faint tremors all the way to Urumchi as the ship dug into the Earth.

The first five Setting Sun ships successfully carried out their missions into the deep strata of the Earth and all returned safely to the surface. On its dig, the Setting Sun V set a new depth record for humanity, tunneling its way almost a full 2,000 miles below sea level. The Setting Sun VI had no intentions of breaking this record. Geophysicists had determined that the boundary between the Earth’s mantle and core could be found at a depth of roughly 2,100 miles. The scientists called it the “Gutenberg Discontinuity”. Once through this boundary, one would enter Earth’s liquid iron-nickel core. This also meant that the density of the surrounding matter would abruptly and exponentially increase beyond this boundary. The design specifications of the Setting Sun VI did not allow it to navigate through densities of such magnitude.

At first, the mission of the Setting Sun VI progressed without a hitch. In only two hours, the ship had penetrated the boundary between Earth’s crust and its mantle, the Mohorovicic Discontinuity. Then it stopped for five hours on the sliding surface of the drifting continental plate before beginning its 1,800-mile journey through the Earth’s mantle. Space is a lonely place, but at least astronauts can see the infinity of the universe and majesty of the stars; stratonauts in their sub-ships, on the other hand, had nothing but the sensation of endlessly increasing density to guide them. All they could glean from their rear-mounted holographic screen was the blinding glare of seething magma following in their ship’s wake, instantaneously closing the tunneled space behind their ship’s stern. A stratonaut once described the experience, saying they just needed to close their eyes to see the onrushing magma gather behind them, pressing down and sealing them in. It was a sensation that kept every stratonaut aware of the immensity of ever-denser material pressing down upon them, tormenting them with a feeling of intense oppression that was hard for those on the surface to comprehend. No one was spared these intense attacks of claustrophobia.

Even as it descended, the Setting Sun VI’s research work was above and beyond the mission targets. The ship was traveling at roughly 10 miles an hour, making its journey to its target depth a matter of 20 hours. Fifteen hours and 40 minutes after its launch, however, the ship’s descent was interrupted by the shrill sound of an alarm. The subsurface radar had picked up a sudden increase of density, jumping from 393 pounds per cubic-foot to 593 pounds. The material the Setting Sun VI was suddenly faced with was no longer silicates but a metallic substance primarily composed of nickel and iron. Furthermore, it was no longer solid, but liquid. Even though the Setting Sun VI had only reached a depth of 1,500 miles below the surface, all signs seemed to point to one chilling conclusion: They had broken into the Earth’s core!

Later it was discovered that they had chanced upon a fissure in the Earth’s mantle that cut straight to the core. This fissure was completely filled with the highly pressurized liquid iron-nickel of the Earth’s core. In the path of the Setting Sun VI, the Gutenberg Discontinuity reached up to a depth of 1,500 miles! The ship turned on the spot, attempting to escape the fissure. And that was when it happened: The neutron material of the ship’s hull easily held up as the pressure suddenly increased to a massive 11,500 tons per square-inch, but the ship itself was composed of three parts, a front-facing fusion engine, a central cabin, and a rear-mounted drive engine. When the ship turned, the fusion engine separated from the cabin, snapped off by density and pressure that well-exceeded the ship’s operating limits. The pictures broadcast by the neutrino communicator of the Setting Sun VI clearly showed the fusion engine splitting from the hull, only to be instantly swallowed by the crimson glow of the liquid metal.

A subterranean ship’s fusion engine fired a super-heated jet that cut through the material in front of the vessel. Without it, the drive engine could not push the Setting Sun VI even an inch through the earth. And while the density of the Earth’s core was truly terrifying, the density of the neutron material of the Setting Sun VI was even greater. As the buoyant force of the liquid nickel-iron was less than the vessel’s weight, the Setting Sun VI sank, plummeting ever further down into the Earth.

A century and a half after landing on the Moon, humanity had mastered the technology needed to reach Saturn. It was planned that the hurdle between mantle and core be leapt in a similar time-frame. Now, a sub-ship had accidentally entered the core and just like an off-course Moon rocket would have drifted into the depths of space in the twentieth century, not even the slightest hope of rescue remained.

Fortunately, the hull of the ship’s cabin was sturdy and its neutrino communication system allowed it to maintain uninterrupted contact with the control center on the surface. In the following year, the crew of the Setting Sun VI continued with its work, prying much valuable data from the Earth’s core and sending it to the surface. Encased as they were in thousands of miles of rock, the crew was obviously cut from all air and any life. They were bereft of space, floating in temperatures reaching 9,000 degrees and surrounded by pressures that could crush carbon to diamonds within seconds! Only neutrinos could escape the massive density of the material in which the Setting Sun VI was entombed. The ship was thoroughly trapped in a giant furnace of molten steel. In this world, Dante’s Inferno would have been paradise; in this world, what could life mean? How could anyone even begin to describe it?

The immense psychological pressure bearing down on the crew of the Setting Sun VI cracked nerves and percolated into the deepest layers of their minds. One day, the ship’s geological engineer woke, leapt out of bed and without warning unsealed the nearest insulated gate protecting the cabin. Even though this was only the first of four, it opened the way for a wave of incandescent air that instantly burned him to charcoal. The ship’s commander, who was in the cabin at the time, immediately closed the insulated gate, managing to avert the outright destruction of the Setting Sun VI by the skin of his teeth. He himself, however, suffered severe burns. He had barely completed his final logbook entry, before succumbing to his injuries.

From that moment on, only a single person remained aboard the Setting Sun VI, trapped in the deepest recesses of the planet.

By now, the sub-ship was in an area of almost total weightlessness. The ship had sunk to a depth of 4,000 miles, reaching the deepest point imaginable. And so the last remaining stratonaut of the Setting Sun VI became the first person to reach the Earth’s core.

In the heart of the planet she lived in a cramped cockpit of barely a hundred square-feet. Her only reprieve was the fact that the ship was equipped with a pair of remote-sensing glasses that allowed her to maintain at least some sensory contact to the surface world far, far above. This lifeline, however, would hardly last forever as the energy of the ship’s neutrino communication system quickly depleted. Already, the energy did not suffice to maintain the transmission of the ultra high-speed data the remote-sensing glasses required. The system had lost contact three months ago, just as I was taking the plane back to the Aerospace Center from the Taklamakan. At the time, her eyes had been in my luggage.

Because I had put them there.

That sunless, drizzly dawn over the grassland had been her last sight of the surface world.

From then on, the Setting Sun VI had only been able to maintain communication with the surface via voice and data transmissions. But in the dead of night these systems, too, had recently failed, leaving her forever alone, sealed away in the Earth’s core.

The outer neutron material shell of the Setting Sun VI was strong enough to withstand the core’s pressure and the ship’s life-support systems could run for another 50 to 80 years, so she would remain alive, until the end, in her tiny one-hundred square-foot world at the center of the Earth.

I hardly dared imagine her final farewell to the surface world, but when the Director played the recording, it exceeded my wildest expectations. The neutrino beam to the surface had already been very weak and her voice faded in and out, but even as it did, it conveyed nothing but calm and peace.

“…have received your final advisement. From now on, I will devote all my efforts to my work on these research projects. In the future, maybe many generations from today, a core-ship will perhaps find the Setting Sun VI and dock with it. Someone will then perhaps enter here. I can only hope that the material I leave behind will then be of some use. Please, rest assured; I have made a life for myself here. I now no longer feel constrained or sealed away. The entire world surrounds me. All I need to do to see the vast Taklmakan above is to close my eyes, and then I can clearly see every last little flower I named. But now, I must bid you farewell.”

CHAPTER 3 The World, Clear as Crystal

Many years have passed and I have visited many places. Everywhere I go, I lie upon the earth. I have lain on a beach on the island of Hainan, on the ice- and snow-covered soil of Alaska, in the middle of the Siberian White Taiga, on the burning sands of the Sahara…

Every time, the planet below opened to my mind’s eye, making the Earth clear as crystal. Four thousand miles below me, anchored to the very heart of this immense, translucent sphere, I could see the Setting Sun VI. And I could feel her heartbeats echo through thousands of miles, right to me. I imagined the golden light of the Sun and the silvery glow of the Moon shining down to the planet’s core and in my heart I could hear her humming Clair de Lune and her soft voice saying,

“…so beautiful. It is music of another kind…”

There was one thought that always soothed my soul: Even if we were worlds apart, I would never be any farther from her.