“What about science? There must be science, right? Doesn’t a civilization need to understand the universe?”
“That is also a course of study infant civilizations take. Once exploration has carried out to the proper extent, everything down to the slightest will be revealed. You will discover that the universe is so simple, even science is unnecessary.”
“So that just leaves art?”
“Yes. Art is the only reason for a civilization to exist.”
“But we have other reasons. We want to survive. The several billion people on this planet below us and even more of other species want to survive. You want to dry our oceans, to make this living planet a doomed desert, to make us all die of thirst.”
A wave of laughter propagated from the depths of the ice. Again, it tickled Yan Dong’s feet.
“Colleague, look, once the violent surge of creative inspiration had passed, I talked to you about art. But, every time, you gossip with me about trivialities. It disappoints me greatly. You ought to be ashamed. Go. I’m going to work.”
Yan Dong finally lost her patience. “Fuck your ancestors!” she shouted, then continued to swear in a Northeastern dialect of Chinese.
“Are those obscenities?” the low-temperature artist asked placidly. “Our species is one where the same body matures as it evolves. No ancestors. As for treating your colleague like this…” It laughed. “I understand. You’re jealous of me. You don’t have my ability. You can only make art at the level of bacteria.”
“But, you just said that our art requires different tools but there’s no essential difference.”
“I’ve just now changed my perspective. At first, I thought I’d run into a real artist, but, as it turns out, you’re a mediocre, pitiful creature who chatters on about the oceans drying, ecological collapse, and other inconsequential things that have nothing to do with art. Too trivial, too trivial, I tell you. Artists cannot be like this.”
“Fuck your ancestors anyway.”
“Yes, well. I’m working. Go.”
For a moment, Yan Dong felt heavy. She fell ass-first onto the slick ice as a gust of wind swept down from above. The ice block was rising again. She scrambled into the helicopter, which, with difficulty, took off from the nearest edge of the block of ice, nearly crashing in the tornado produced as the block of ice rose.
Communication between humanity and the low-temperature artist had failed.
Sea of Dreams
Yan Dong stood in a white world. The ground below her feet and the surrounding mountains were covered in a silvery white cloak. The mountains were steep and treacherous. She felt as though she were in the snow-covered Himalayas. But in fact, it was the opposite; she was at the lowest place on Earth. The Marianas Trench. Once the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. The white material that covered everything was not snow but the minerals that had once made the water salty. After the seawater froze, these minerals separated out and were deposited on the seafloor. At the thickest, these deposits were as much as one hundred meters deep.
In the past two hundred days, the oceans of the Earth were exhausted by the low-temperature artist. Even the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica were completely pillaged.
Now, the low-temperature artist invited Yan Dong to participate in its work’s final rite of completion.
In the ravine ahead lay a surface of blue water. The blue was pure and deep. It seemed all the more touching among so many snow-white mountain peaks. This was the last ocean on Earth. It was about the area of Dianchi Lake in Yunnan. Its great waves had long ceased. Only gentle ripples swayed on the water, as though it were a secluded lake deep in the mountains. Three rivers converged into this final ocean. These were great rivers that had survived by luck, trudging through the vast, dehydrated seafloor. They were the longest rivers on Earth. By the time they’d arrived here, they’d become slender rivulets.
Yan Dong walked to the oceanfront. Standing on the white beach, she dipped her hand into the lightly rippling sea. Because the water was so saturated with salt, its waves seemed sluggish. A gentle breeze blew Yan Dong’s hand dry, leaving a layer of white salt.
The sharp sound that Yan Dong knew so well pierced the air. It tore through the air whenever the low-temperature artist slid toward the ground. Yan Dong spotted it in the sky as it approached.
The low-temperature artist didn’t greet Yan Dong. The ball of ice fell into the middle of this last ocean, causing a tall column of water to spout. Afterward, once again, a familiar scene emerged: A disk of white fog oozed out from the point where the low-temperature artist hit the water. Rapidly, the white fog covered the entire ocean. The water quickly froze with a loud cracking sound. Once again, the fog dissipating revealed a frozen ocean surface. Unlike before, this time, the entire body of water was frozen. There wasn’t a drop of liquid water left. The ocean surface also didn’t have frozen waves. It was as smooth as a mirror. Throughout the freezing process, Yan Dong felt a cold draft on her face.
The now-frozen final ocean was lifted off the ground. At first, it was lifted only several careful centimeters off the ground. A long black fissure emerged from the edge of the ice field between the ice and white salt beach. Air, forming a strong wind low to the ground, rushed into the long fissure, filling the newly created space. It blew the salt around, so that it now buried Yan Dong’s feet. The rate the lake was rising at increased. In the blink of an eye, the final ocean was in midair. So much volume rising so quickly produced violent, chaotic winds. A gust swirled up the salt into a white column in the ravine. Yan Dong spit out the salt that flew into her mouth. It wasn’t salty like she’d imagined. It tasted bitter in a way that was hard to express, like the reality that humanity was up against.
The final ocean wasn’t a cuboid. Its bottom was an exact impression of the contours of the seafloor. Yan Dong watched it rise until it became a small point of light that dissolved into the mighty ring of ice.
The ring of ice was about as wide as the Milky Way in the sky. Unlike the rings of Uranus and Neptune, the surface of the ring of ice was neither perpendicular nor parallel to the surface of the Earth. It was like a broad belt of light in space. A broad belt composed of two hundred thousand blocks of ice completely surrounding the Earth. From the ground, one could clearly make out every block of ice. Some of them rotated while others seemed static. Throughout the day, the ring of ice varied with dramatic changes in brightness and color. The two hundred thousand points of light, some twinkling, some not, formed a majestic, heavenly river that flowed solemnly across the Earth’s sky.
Its colors were the most dramatic at dawn and dusk. The ring of ice changed gradually from the orange-red of the horizon to a dark red and then to dark green and dark blue, like a rainbow in space.
During the daytime, the ring of ice assumed a dazzling silver color against the blue sky, like a great river of diamonds flowing across a blue plain. The daytime ring of ice looked most spectacular during an eclipse, when it blocked the sun. Massive blocks of ice refracted the sunlight. Like a strange and magnificent fireworks show in the sky.
How long the sun was blocked by the ice ring depended on whether it was an intersecting eclipse or a parallel eclipse. What was known as a parallel eclipse was when the sun followed the ring of ice for some distance. Every year, there was one total parallel eclipse. For a day, the sun, from sunrise to sunset, followed the path of the ice ring for its entire journey. On this day, the ring of ice seemed like a belt of silver gunpowder set loose on the sky. Ignited at sunrise, the dazzling fireball burned wildly across the sky. When it set in the west, the sight was magnificent, too difficult to put into words. Some people proclaimed, “Today, God strolled across the sky.”