Cheng Jingbo’s fiction has won many accolades, among them the Yinhe Award and Xingyun Award as well as selections to various “Year’s Best” anthologies. She was among the first genre writers to be published in People’s Literature, perhaps the most prestigious mainstream literary market in China.
A children’s book editor, she also translates from English to Chinese. One of her notable translations is Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Recently, she has begun adapting one of her stories into a screenplay for production.
“Under a Dangling Sky” is from the earlier part of Cheng’s career. Sketched with bold, impressionistic strokes, it tells a charming story set in a vibrant world in which magic and science are indistinguishable.
More of Cheng’s fiction may be found in Invisible Planets.
UNDER A DANGLING SKY
Last autumn I moved to Port Gladius in Rainville. At first, I helped the muscle-bound stevedores sort silver shells at the docks, and that was how I met a professor who had come from afar. Because we got along so well, I agreed to give up the silver shells and go work for him.
I loved my new job: collecting a certain kind of sound in Shallow Bay. The bay was the quietest part of the harbor, and no one ever bothered me in my work. The professor gave me a strange contraption that looked like the ear of an outlandish beast. When I immersed the ear in the sea, sounds from below the surface came into my headphones, and the giant nautilus shell on my back (also a machine) would identify the sounds. The sounds the professor wanted would also be recorded.
My headphones stuck up like the feathered crest of a cockatiel. When the sea was calm, I could see my reflection like a slender, lonesome cormorant.
In the sea breeze, my ear-feathers trembled. They were so sensitive that not a single whiff of wind could escape. Most of the time, I would shut my eyes and concentrate on the underwater music. Like Jack’s beanstalk, the fish-slick line slipped through my fingers, dropped into the sea, and drifted with the current into the deep. At the end of the line, heading into the aphotic abyss, was the beast’s ear. Only this time, Jack stood onshore, and the magic beanstalk grew downward without cease.
Standing next to the serene bay, I listened to the whispers from the bottom of the sea thousands of meters below.
The crisp smacks of lazy jellyfish tentacles striking coral reefs; the agitation of brisk schools of fish making sharp turns; even the gentle pop as a single air bubble struggled out of a seam between rocks, only to break apart in its hurried ascent to the surface….
Yet, each evening, as I reeled in the seemingly endless line and returned to the cottage by the shore, the professor shook his head at me, disappointed.
“Still nothing…” He sighed in the last rays of the setting sun. “I’ve wandered all over the world without finding it. Will I ever hear the singing dolphin?”
Whales can sing, but there were no whales around Rainville. This was a paradise for dolphins, and every year, thousands of dolphins came to the bay, following the warm flow of the Pollex Current. None of them sang.
The sky over Rainville was a mystery.
You’d never see such a beautiful sky anywhere else in the world: a crystalline welkin crisscrossed by countless tiny cracks. Everything in the heavens was broken into a mosaic by these lines. From an overcast day to the scarlet clouds of dawn, patches of color gently expanded and percolated, their edges blurring against the dreamlike firmament.
They called this fantastic sight the crystal sky.
It was said that the sky also had to do with Jack and his beanstalk. After the lucky young man climbed down with the golden-egg-laying hen and the talking harp, he chopped down the stalk with an ax. Thereafter, he wandered the world in disguise. To prevent a repeat of Jack’s robbery, the giant above the clouds constructed a large ice dome to cover everywhere the young man traveled to. Some believed that Jack finally arrived in Rainville and never left. The rest of his life was spent under the crystal dome, and the story of Jack and his magic beans became a legend under the ice cover’s seal.
No one had seen the world outside the crystal sky. Clouds and stars had always been mere patterns in the mosaic constructed by a mysterious hand above.
In all Rainville, the spot closest to the mystery was the center of the Thumb Sea in Shallow Bay. There, a giant fountain erupted into the clouds. Some powerful force drew the water from the ocean’s depths and sprayed it miles high. A rainbow-hued halo hovered at the fountain’s misty apex, where the seawater turned into millions of droplets that diffused in the air like wispy fog.
The purple mist, driven by winds high above, drifted back over Port Gladius, and then inland. There, the droplets coalesced into larger globules, and the mist thickened from lavender to royal blue, resulting finally in inky, spongy clouds that could not help but fall as rain. This was why it always rained in the city.
In the region around Rainville, only Shallow Bay enjoyed relatively clear skies. At night, it was possible to see the moon and the stars.
With the arrival of the month of Brumaire, the professor packed up and left, leaving the strange contraption with me. After the departure of that kind old man, I continued to collect undersea sounds, especially at night.
One particularly clear evening, I heard a woman’s voice in the sea.
“My poor Giana…”
Next, the unconcerned voice of a middle-aged man. “What’s wrong?”
“Her eyes aren’t so good.”
“My dear, none of us has great eyesight. That’s nothing to worry about.”
“She fell in love a while ago, but everyone could tell her sweetheart was a submarine—”
“What? Are you telling me that our daughter fell in love with a submarine?”
I glanced around but saw no one. A sea star jumped off the barnacled rocks and splashed into the water.
The night breeze ruffled my ear-feathers. I turned my head and saw a smooth, moon-washed rock rising slowly out of the sea. Before I could doubt my eyes, a second rock rose from the sea as well. Soon, I was surrounded by similar rocks.
Finally, I realized that I was looking at a pod of dolphins. Their exposed backs glowed with a mysterious sheen under the moon.
“I thought dolphins couldn’t talk,” I said to one of them (this was many years later).
“Not only can we talk, but we also sing,” they replied. “Singing isn’t an art limited to the larger cetaceans.”
After spring, Giana was considered fully grown.
She was an interesting creature. Many years ago, she had fallen in love with a submarine. She also loved to chase dangerous propellers and screws, and that was how she had discovered a graveyard of ships.
“Lots and lots of wrecks!” She always told me stories about her adventures when we met, her voice as joyous as a twittering bird. “Some were at the sea bottom, but others were still afloat—I’m sure some kind of whirlpool there was responsible. I can tell you that my submarine will never go there. Oh there were so many ships, all covered by seaweed. It was hideous!”
Oddly, the professor’s machine was incapable of capturing the speech of the dolphins. The nautilus had no trouble recording other sounds: the scraping of an electric eel’s scales across the sand, the crack of eggshells as baby turtles hatched… even whale song posed no difficulty to its sensitive mechanisms.
But the conversation of dolphins stymied it.
“Your feathers are no good,” said a laughing Giana as her tail slapped against the water. “The machine can’t hear us.”