In the airplanes behind it, reporters rattled away, asking endless questions over the radio. The low-temperature artist had no desire to answer any of them. It was only interested in talking to Yan Dong, sitting in the Harbin Y-12 that China Central Television had rented. As a result, the reporters grew quiet. They listened carefully to the conversation between the two artists.
“Is your home within the Milky Way?” Yan Dong asked. The Harbin Y-12 was the plane closest to the low-temperature artist. She could see the flying ball of ice intermittently through the white vapor. This wake trailing it was formed from oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere condensing in the ultralow temperatures around the ice ball. Sometimes, the plane would accidentally brush the wake’s billows of white mist. A thick coat of frost would immediately coat the plane’s windows.
“My home isn’t part of any galaxy. It sits in the vast and empty void between galaxies.”
“Your planet must be extremely cold.”
“We don’t have a planet. The low-temperature civilization developed in a cloud of dark matter. That realm is indeed extremely cold. With difficulty, life snatched a little heat from the near-absolute-zero environment. It sucked in every thread of radiation that came from distant stars. Once the low-temperature civilization learned how to leave, we couldn’t wait to go to the closest warm planet in the Milky Way. On this world, we had to maintain a low-temperature environment to live, so we became that warm planet’s low-temperature artists.”
“The low-temperature art you’re talking about is sculpting ice and snow?”
“Oh, no. No. Using a temperature far lower than a world’s mean temperature to affect the world so as to produce artistic effects, this is all part of the low-temperature art. Sculpting ice and snow is just the low-temperature art that suits this world. The temperature of ice and snow is what this world considers a low temperature. For a dark-matter world, that would be a high temperature. For a stellar world, lava would be considered low-temperature material.”
“We seem to overlap in what art we consider beautiful.”
“That’s not unusual. So-called warmth is just a brief effect of an equally brief spasm produced after the universe was born. It’s gone in an instant like light after sunset. Energy dissipates. Only the cold is eternal. The beauty of the cold is the only enduring beauty.”
“So you’re saying the final fate of the universe is heat death?!” Yan Dong heard someone ask over her earpiece. Later, she learned the speaker was a theoretical physicist sitting in one of the planes following behind.
“No digressions. We will discuss only art,” the low-temperature artist scolded.
“The ocean is below us!” Yan Dong happened to glance out the porthole. The crooked coastline passed below.
“Further ahead, we’ll reach the deepest part of the ocean. That will be the most convenient place to collect ice.”
“Where will there be ice?” Yan Dong asked, uncomprehending, as she looked at the vast, blue ocean.
“Wherever a low-temperature artist goes, there will be ice.”
The low-temperature artist flew for another hour. Yan Dong stared out the window as they traveled. The view had long become a boundless surface of water. At that moment, the plane suddenly pulled up. She nearly blacked out from acceleration.
“We almost hit it!” the pilot shouted.
The low-temperature artist had stopped suddenly. Taken by surprise, the planes behind it scrambled to change direction.
“Damn it! The law of inertia doesn’t apply to the fucker. Its speed seemed to drop to zero in an instant. By all rights, this sort of deceleration should have cracked the ball of ice into pieces,” the pilot said to Yan Dong.
As he spoke, he steered the plane around. The other pilots did the same. The ball of ice, rotating majestically, lingered in midair. It produced oxygen and nitrogen snowflakes, but due to strong wind at the altitude, the snowflakes were all blown away. They seemed like white hair whirling in the wind around the ball of ice.
“I am about to create!” the low-temperature artist said. Without waiting for Yan Dong to respond, it suddenly dropped straight down as if the giant invisible hand that had held it suddenly let it go. It free-fell faster and faster until it disappeared into the blue backdrop that was the ocean, leaving only a faint thread of atoms stretching down from midair. A ring of white spray shot up from the sea surface. When it fell, a wave spread out in a circle on the water.
“This alien threw itself into the ocean and committed suicide,” the pilot said to Yan Dong.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Yan Dong stretched out her Northeastern accent and glared at the pilot. “Fly a little lower. The ball of ice will float back up any moment now.”
But the ball of ice didn’t float back up. In its place, a white dot appeared on the ocean. It quickly expanded into a disk. The plane descended and Yan Dong could observe in detail.
The white disk was actually a white fog that covered the ocean. Soon, between its quick expansion and the airplane’s continued descent, the only ocean she could see oozed a white fog from its surface. A noise from the sea covered the roaring of the plane’s engine. It sounded both like rolling thunder and the cracking of the plains and mountains.
The airplane hovered close to sea level. Yan Dong peered at the surface of the ocean below the fog. The light the ocean reflected was mild, not like moments ago when glints of gold had slashed Yan Dong’s eyes. The ocean grew deeper in color. Its rough waves grew level and smooth. What shocked her, though, was the next discovery: The waves became solid and motionless.
“Good heavens. The ocean froze!”
“Are you crazy?” The pilot turned his head to look at Yan Dong.
“See for yourself…. Hey! Why are you still descending? Do you want to land on the ice?!”
The pilot yanked the control stick. Once again, the world in front of Yan Dong grew black. She heard the pilot say, “Ah, no, fuck, how strange…” The pilot looked as though he were sleepwalking. “I wasn’t descending. The ocean, no, the ice is rising by itself!”
At that moment, Yan Dong heard the low-temperature artist’s voice: “Get your flying machine out of the way. Don’t block the path of the rising ice. If there weren’t a colleague in the flying machine, I would simply crash into you. I can’t stand disruptions to my inspiration while I’m creating. Fly west, fly west, fly west. That direction is closer to the edge.”
“Edge? The edge of what?” Yan Dong asked.
“The cube of ice I’m taking!”
Planes took off like a flock of startled birds, climbing into the sky and heading in the direction the low-temperature artist indicated. Below, because the white fog created by the temperature drop had dissipated, the dark blue ice field stretched to the horizon. Even though the plane was climbing, the ice field climbed even faster. As a result, the distance between the planes and the ice field continued to shrink.
“The Earth is chasing us!” the pilot screamed.
The plane now flew pressed against the ice field. Frozen dark blue waves roiled past the plane’s wings.
The pilot yelled, “We have no choice but to land on the ice field. My god, climbing and landing at the same time. That’s just too strange.”