Yan Dong saw in the distance a group of people gathered on the ice. She walked to them, gliding with each step. When they spotted her, they began to run toward her. Some slipped and fell, then picked themselves up and raced to catch up with the others.
“Our old friend! Hello!” The first one to reach Yan Dong wrapped her in a warm hug. Yan Dong recognized him. He was one of the ice sculpture judges from so many ice and snow festivals before the Ring of Ice Era.
As they neared, she recognized the others, most of them ice sculptors from before the Ring of Ice Era. Like everyone else of this era, they wore tattered clothes. Suffering and time had dyed the hair on their temples white. Yan Dong felt as though she’d come home after years of wandering.
“I heard that the Ice and Snow Arts Festival has started back up again?” she asked.
“Of course. Otherwise, what are we all doing here?”
“I’ve been thinking. Times are so hard…”
Yan Dong wrapped her large overcoat tighter around herself. She shivered in the cold wind, constantly stamping her numb feet against the ice. Everyone else did the same, shivering, stamping their feet, like a group of begging refugees.
“So what if times are hard? Even in hard times, you can’t not make art, right?” an old ice sculptor said through chattering teeth.
“Art is the only reason for a civilization to exist!” someone else said.
“Fuck that, I have plenty of reasons to go on,” Yan Dong said loudly.
Everyone laughed, then fell silent as they thought back on ten years of hard times. One by one, they counted their reasons to go on. Finally, they changed themselves from survivors of a disaster back to artists again.
Yan Dong took a bottle of sorghum liquor from her bag. They warmed up as each one took a swig then passed it on to the next. They built a fire on the vast riverbank and heated up a chainsaw until it would start in the bitter cold. They all stepped onto the river, and the chainsaw growled as it cut into the ice. White crumbs of ice fell around them. Soon, they pulled their first block of glittering, translucent ice from the Songhua River.
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.