I went up and pulled the bed nets aside. But only a pair of empty sockets greeted me. It was a corpse. He had died long ago.
My game was over. The riddle revealed its answer. This dry husk of a body had once been famous—he was that priest who had escaped, the creator of Weightless City, the powerful wizard who once possessed two faces. I saw a ring on a string around his neck, and when I recognized it, I gasped.
From the day I was born, I also wore such a ring around my neck.
The inside of the ring was etched with a secret: the name of the lover my mother had lost a thousand years ago. He was once the most respected priest in the whole kingdom, but he had fallen in love with the princess, and they made love in her bedroom. The king, furious, ordered his guards to seize all nine high priests and cut off their heads. As for the princess who had lost her virginity, he sealed her inside a bronze mirror—she had been intended for the prince of another kingdom and was supposed to become a queen beloved by her subjects and husband alike.
I had read this story in an old book, but I did not know that the legendary princess who had been sealed away was, in fact, my mother. The priest with two faces did not have a chance to say good-bye to his beloved. He cut off half his head, handed it to the king’s guards, and then became a fugitive through the Door Into Summer. A thousand years later, the princess awoke from the bronze mirror and became the wife of a king, and then the queen regnant of a people. By the time I was born, my father—who had never gotten my mother’s heart—had already disappeared. My mother ruled over her realm as the disaster of the collapsing star unfolded, and then she led her people on the route her lover had taken a thousand years earlier.
Though the priest had built this timeless castle to wait for her, she had still come too late.
In his diary, she read of the suffering he had endured for a thousand years. His quill had turned into her lips, and she spoke to him every day. The diary I found had in fact been composed by the priest as he sank into these hallucinated conversations with my mother.
Finally one day, seized by the ecstasy and rage of waiting, he cut his own heart open. Loneliness poured out of it, bright, fresh, and so he died in this murky castle.
He spent a thousand years to extinguish each and every star; she spent a thousand years to escape to the last star that remained lit. He knew she would come; she knew he would wait—even though when he had cut off half his head with his sword, he had no chance to tell her anything.
My mother had known the truth for a long time. She had seen in the corpse’s empty sockets the cruelest ending possible. From then on, she became an insubstantial ghost wandering through this empty, massive, ancient castle. The fleeting glimpses and murmurs I had caught of her had been nothing but figments of my imagination.
I finally understood why my mother would rather turn her rotting passion into ghosts that danced at the edge of light than set foot outside this eternal hell. When she saw the stars wink out, one after another, she was the happiest woman in the world. When darkness covered her eyes like a flood, she and the man she loved disappeared together on the shore of life and time.
Now that I understood this most impossible love in the world, I found myself an orphan. Truly this time, my mother and my planet had abandoned me.
I lay on the cold floor of the castle, inches and seconds from death.
I seemed to be back on my little planet spinning in space, blue like water. Slender grass shot up wildly around me, extending farther and farther away. I put my ear to the tips of the grass, a few flowers twinkling here and there. I knew I was going to die. Everyone who was about to die saw visions of the most beautiful scenes in her life.
I saw all the flowers blooming, the rain falling, a bright red lantern shining in the forest. I saw legends that flared up and dimmed, the face of a youth, fragile but stubborn grass. I saw the Magician of Weightless City: his silver armor had been burnished by the ice and snow at the peak of the world’s tallest mountain, had been washed by the water in the deepest ocean, had protected him through desert, swamp, the ruins of mankind’s cities, and the Eden of fierce beasts, had been borne up a tower that reached into the sky and, following the planet that had abandoned me, reached an undying star—finally, the armor was dented, broken, full of holes. I saw the Magician’s long, narrow shadow sweep across the cold floor before my eyes. I saw the return of the Knight of the Rose.
I could recognize only his eyes, the rest of him hidden behind his long-suffering armor. I couldn’t tell if his chestnut hair had turned white. I could only smell wind and earth from the wounds in that silver shell.
My knight came before me, opened his left hand: a black pearl.
He found a slender thread and began to pull on it. The black pearl spun in his hand—ah, it was a tiny ball of thread. He pulled and pulled. In this castle of eternal night, the thread seemed to also have no end.
Finally he picked me up from the floor. Until that moment, his silence had caused me in my weakened state to suspect I had also turned into an insubstantial shade like my mother, a second living ghost wandering through the castle.
He pressed his left hand into my palm and squeezed my fingers into a fist. Then he pulled the rest of the thread out from between my fingers with his right hand. In that moment, I understood that I was still alive.
Thousands, millions of rays of searing light shot out of my clenched fist. He gave me the most dazzling light in the universe, a fistful of fireflies.
The Magician of Weightless City really did bring back a fragment of the star for me. My eyes had never seen such splendor. I saw my birth and death, feathers drifting down like volcanic ash, the clear, distant cries of Snow-No-More birds—that snowstorm had been kept on the other side of the Door Into Summer, and now the flakes fell into my eyes, dark as night.
My knight bent to kiss my forehead. The luminous heat dissolved his armor. He and I were pierced by a thousand, a million rays.
The light melted our hair and eyes, skin and organs, until he had no more lips and I no more forehead. Our bodies were fixed in place: two skeletons with our arms entwined about each other.
Many years later, more explorers would come here. They would smash through the gate in the robot where the bladder ought to be. They’d walk into the castle and discover in this perpetual radiance a strange skeleton.
“Maybe this was the priest who had escaped tens of thousands of years ago,” one of them would say.
The others, after long debate, would reach consensus and publicize the cause for the extinguishing stars: “Due to the irresistible gravity of their mass, the red giants tragically collapsed to death after exhausting the fuel in their cores.”
They would not be able to search through the entire castle—that fragment of an eternal star would blind many of the explorers. They would not be able to examine that strange skeleton closely because no one dared to look at it directly for even a thousandth of a second.
The priest extinguished all the lanterns in the universe just so he could recognize the woman he loved at a glance in a flood of refugees. My knight brought back that star fragment so the inextinguishable flame could warm the loneliness in my dark eyes. The night completed my mother; the day completed me.
Here in our luminous crypt, the fire can never be blown out.
LIU CIXIN
Liu Cixin is widely recognized as the leading voice in Chinese science fiction. He won China’s Galaxy (Yinhe) Award for eight consecutive years, from 1999 to 2006, and again in 2010. He received the Nebula (Xingyun) Award in both 2010 and 2011.