Author: Cixin Liu
Date: 2021-06-29 01:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Graphic Novels; Science Fiction; Comics; Art; Graphic Novels Comics; Asia; Fiction; China

The Low-Temperature Artist arrives from outer space, with plans for a fantastic work of art made of ice. He won’t talk to any Earth people but ice sculptor Yan Dong, who struggles to get the alien not to use up all the water for his sculpture.

Liu Cixin

Sea of Dreams
ePub r1.2

Watcher 18.12.2019

Original title:

Liu Cixin, 2015

Translation: John Chu

Cover art: Wang Heng

Cover design: Watcher

Digital editor: Watcher
ePub base r2.1

PART ONE

The Low-Temperature Artist

It was the Ice and Snow Arts Festival that lured the low-temperature artist here. The idea was absurd, but once the oceans had dried, this was how Yan Dong always thought of it. No matter how many years passed by, the low-temperature artist’s arrival remained clear in his mind.

At the time, Yan Dong was standing in front of his own ice sculpture, which he’d just completed. Exquisitely carved ice sculptures surrounded him. In the distance, lofty ice structures towered over a snowfield. These sparkling, translucent skyscrapers and castles were steeped in the winter sun. They were short-lived works of art. Soon, this glittering world would become a pool of clear water in the spring breeze. People were sad to see them melt, but the process embodied many ineffable mysteries. This, perhaps, was the real reason Yan Dong clung dearly to the ice and snow arts.

Yan Dong tore his gaze away from his own work, determined not to look again before the judges named the winners. He sighed, then glanced at the sky. It was at this moment that he saw the low-temperature artist for the first time.

Initially, he thought it was a plane dragging a white vapor trail behind it, but the flying object was much faster than a plane. It swept a great arc through the air. The vapor trail, like a giant piece of chalk, drew a hook in the blue sky. The flying object suddenly stopped high in the air right above Yan Dong. The vapor trail gradually disappeared from its tail to its head, as though the flying object were inhaling it back in.

Yan Dong studied the bit of the trail that was the last to disappear. He noticed it was flickering and realized that something had to be reflecting the sunlight. Then he saw what that was—a small, ash gray spheroid. Soon he realized that the spheroid wasn’t small. It only looked small because it was far away. Now it expanded at lightning speed. The spheroid fell from a high altitude toward where he was standing. People around him fled in all directions. Yan Dong ducked his head and ran with them, twisting and turning through the ice sculptures.

Suddenly, the ground was enveloped in a gigantic shadow. Yan Dong’s scalp tightened. For a moment, his blood seemed to freeze. Yet the expected impact didn’t happen. Everyone around him stopped running. They gazed upward, dumbstruck. He looked up, too. The gigantic spheroid hung about a hundred meters over their heads.

It wasn’t wholly spheroid, as if the vapor expelled during its high-speed flight had changed its shape. The half in the direction of its flight was smooth, glossy, and round. The other half sprouted a large sheaf of hair, like a comet whose tail had been trimmed. It was massive, well over one hundred meters in diameter, like a hill suspended in mid-air. He was sure that everyone below it felt oppressed.

After the spheroid halted, the air that propelled it charged the ground, sending up a rapidly expanding ring of dirt and snow. It was said that when people touched something unexpectedly as cold as an ice cube, it’d feel so hot they’d shout as their hand recoiled. In the instant that the mass of air pushed into him, that’s how Yan Dong felt. Even someone from the bitterly cold northeast would have felt the same.

Fortunately, the air diffused quickly, or else they would have frozen stiff. Even so, most of those with exposed skin suffered some frostbite.

Yan Dong’s face was numb from the sudden cold. He looked up, carefully studying the spheroid’s surface. The translucent ash gray substance was one he knew intimately: ice. This object suspended in the air was a giant ball of ice.

Once the air settled, Yan Dong discovered—to his surprise—large snowflakes fluttering around the great ball of ice. An oddly pure white against the blue sky, they glittered in the sunlight. These snowflakes were only visible within a certain distance of the spheroid. When they floated away, they immediately dissolved. They formed a snow ring with the spheroid as its center—as though the spheroid were a street lamp lighting the snowflakes around it on a snowy night.

“I am a low-temperature artist!” A clear, sharp, male voice emitted from the ball of ice. “I am a low-temperature artist!”

“This gigantic ball of ice is you?” Yan Dong shouted.

“You can’t see my true form. The ball of ice you see is formed by my freeze field from the moisture in the air,” the low-temperature artist replied.

“What about those snowflakes?”

“They are oxygen and nitrogen crystals. In addition, dry ice has formed from the carbon dioxide.”

“Your freeze field is so powerful!”

“Of course. It’s like countless tiny hands holding countless tiny hearts tight. It forces all the molecules and atoms within its range to stop moving.”

“It can also lift this gigantic ball of ice into the air?”

“That’s a different kind of field—the anti-gravity field. The ice sculpting tools you all use are so fascinating. You have small shovels and chisels of every shape. Not to mention watering cans and blowtorches. Fascinating! To make low-temperature works of art, I too have a set of tiny tools. They are various types of force fields. Not as many tools as you, but they work extremely well.”

“You create ice sculptures?”

“Of course. I’m a low-temperature artist. Your world is extremely suitable for the ice and snow modeling arts. I was shocked to discover they’ve long existed in this world. I’m thrilled to say that we’re colleagues.”

“Where do you come from?” the ice sculptor next to Yan Dong asked.

“I come from a faraway place, a world you have no way to understand. That world is not nearly as interesting as yours. Originally, I focused solely on the art. I didn’t interact with other worlds. Seeing exhibitions like this one, seeing so many colleagues, gave me the desire to change that. But, frankly, very few of the low-temperature works below me deserve to be called art.”

“Why?” someone asked.

“Excessively realistic, too reliant on form and detail. Besides space, there’s nothing in the Universe. The actual world is just a big pile of curved spaces. Once you understand this, you’ll see how risible these works are. However, hm, this piece moves me a little.”

Just as the voice faded away, a delicate thread extended from the snowflakes around the ball of ice, as if it flowed down an invisible funnel. The snowflake thread stretched from midair to the top of Yan Dong’s ice sculpture before dissolving. Yan Dong stood on his tiptoes. Tentatively, he stretched out a gloved hand toward the snowflake thread.

When he got close to it, his fingers felt that burning sensation once more. He quickly jerked his hand back, but it was already frozen stiff inside the glove.

“Are you pointing at my work?” Yan Dong’s other hand rubbed his frozen one. “I, I didn’t use traditional methods. That is, I didn’t carve it from ready-made blocks of ice. I built a structure composed of several large membranes. For a long time, steam produced from boiling water rose from the bottom of the structure. The steam froze to the membrane, forming a complex crystal. Once the crystal grew thick enough, I removed the membrane, and the result is what you see here.”

“Very good. So interesting. It so expresses the beauty of the cold. The inspiration for this work comes from…”

“Windowpanes! I don’t know whether you will understand my description: when you wake during a hard winter’s night just before sunrise, your bleary gaze falls on the windowpane filled with crystals. They reflect the dark blue first light of early dawn, as though they were something you dreamed up overnight…”

“Yes, yes, I understand!” The snowflakes around the low-temperature artist danced in a lively pattern. “I have been inspired. I want to create! I must create!”

“The Songhua River is that way. You can select a block of ice, or…”

“What? Your form of art is as pathetic as bacteria. Do you think my form of low-temperature art is anything like that? This place doesn’t have the sort of ice I need.”

The ice sculptors on the ground looked bewildered at the interstellar low-temperature artist. Yan Dong said, blankly, “Then, you want to go…”

“I want to go to the ocean!”

Collecting Ice

An immense fleet of airplanes flew at an altitude of five kilometers along the coastline. This was the most motley collection of airplanes in history. Boeing jumbo jets accompanied mosquito-like light aircraft. Every major press service had dispatched news planes. Research organizations and governments had dispatched observation planes. This chaotic air armada trailed closely behind the low-temperature artist’s short wake of thick white vapor, like a flock of sheep chasing its shepherd. It constantly urged the planes to fly faster. To wait for them, it endured a rate of flight that seemed slower than crawling. (For someone who jumped through space-time at will, light-speed was already crawling.) It grumbled non-stop that this would kill its inspiration.

In the airplanes, reporters asked endless questions over the radio. The low-temperature artist had no desire to answer any of them. He was only interested in talking to Yan Dong, sitting in the Harbin Y-12 that China Central Television had rented. Eventually the reporters grew quiet. They simply listened carefully to the dialogue 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. He could see the flying ball of ice inter-mittently at the head of the vapor. The wake was formed by the oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere condensing in the ultra-low temperatures around the ice ball. Sometimes the plane would accidentally brush the wake’s billows of white mist. A thick layer 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 world 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 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 his earpiece. Later, he discovered the speaker was a theoretical physicist in one of the planes behind him.

“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 lazily passed below him.

“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 he looked at vast blue water.

“Wherever a low-temperature artist goes, there will be ice.”

* * *

The low-temperature artist flew for over another hour. Yan Dong looked down from his plane. The view had long become a boundless surface of water. Suddenly the plane pulled up. He nearly blacked out from deceleration.

“Whoa, we almost hit it!” the pilot shouted.

The low-temperature artist had stopped abruptly. Taken by surprise, the planes behind it hurriedly changed 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.

At the same time, he steered the plane around. The other planes did the same. The ball of ice, rotating majestically, lingered in midair. It produced oxygen and nitrogen snowflakes, but due to strong wind at that altitude, the snowflakes were 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 dropped straight down as if the giant invisible hand that had held it had suddenly let go. The ball 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 his 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 disc. The plane descended and Yan Dong could observe in detail.

The white disc was a white fog that covered the ocean. Soon, between its quick expansion and the airplane’s continued descent, the only ocean Yan Dong 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 stuck close to sea level. Yan Dong carefully observed 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 him, though, was the discovery that the waves had become solid and motionless.

“Good heavens. The ocean froze!”

“Are you crazy?” The pilot turned his head to glance at him.

“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. He 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, he heard the low-temperature artist’s voice: “Get your flying machine out of the way immediately. Don’t block the path of the rising ice. If there weren’t a colleague in the flying machine, I’d just crash into you. While I’m creating, I can’t stand disruptions to my inspiration. Fly west, fly west, fly west. That direction is closer to the edge.”

“Edge? The edge of what?” Yan Dong asked, not comprehending.

“The cube of ice I’m taking!”

Planes flew off like a flock of startled birds, simultaneously climbing into the sky and heading in the direction the low-temperature artist indicated. Below them, the white fog created by the temperature drop had dissipated, and the dark blue ice field stretched to the horizon. Although the plane was climbing, the ice field climbed even faster. The distance between the plane and the ice field continued to shrink.

“Damn, the Earth is chasing us!” the pilot screamed.

Gradually, the plane 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.”

Just at that moment, the Harbin Y-12 reached the end of the ice. A straight edge swept past the fuselage. Below them, liquid sea reemerged, rippling and shimmer-ing. It was similar to what a fighter jet saw the instant it leapt off the deck of an aircraft carrier, except the “aircraft carrier” was several kilometers tall.

Yan Dong snapped his head around. An immense, dark blue cliff retreated behind him. Its surface was extremely level and stretched out. He couldn’t see both ends of the cliff at the same time. The bottom of the cliff met the water. A white edge formed where waves lapped the cliff. It disappeared a few seconds later, replaced by another straight edge. The bottom of the giant chunk of ice had cleared the ocean.

The giant chunk of ice rose faster and faster. The Harbin Y-12 descended at the same time. Soon, its altitude was between the sea and the chunk of ice in the sky.

Yan Dong saw another vast ice field. Unlike before, it was above him and formed an extremely dark, oppressive sky.

As the chunk of ice continued to rise, Yan Dong confirmed with his own eyes what the low-temperature artist had said: this was a giant block of ice, a regular cuboid in shape. The whole thing was now visible overhead. The dark blue cube occupied two-thirds of the sky. Its flat surface reflected the sunlight, like streaks of eye-piercing lightning high in the sky. Against the giant backdrop it formed, several planes slowly climbed into the sky like small birds spiraling around a skyscraper. One could only see them through careful inspection. Afterward, radar observation indicated that the block of ice was sixty kilometers long, twenty kilometers wide, and five kilometers tall—a thin and flat cuboid.

The giant block of ice kept rising. Gradually, it shrank until its size in the air was one the mind could accept. At the same time, it cast an enormous shadow onto the sea. As it shifted, it revealed on the ocean the most terrifying sight since the dawn of history.

The planes were flying in a long, narrow basin, the empty space in the ocean that was left once the giant block of ice was removed. On each side was a mountain of seawater five kilometers high. Humanity had never seen water form this sort of structure.

Cliffs stood several kilometers high! Hundred-meter high waves surged at the bottom of these liquid cliffs. At the top, the cliffs were collapsing, advancing as they did. Their surface rippled, but it remained perpendicular to the sea floor. As the seawater fronts advanced, the basin shrank. The planes lifted their way back into the sky.

This was the reverse of Moses parting the Red Sea.

What startled Yan Dong the most was how slow the entire process was. This was obviously due to the scale. He’d seen the Huangguoshu waterfalls. The water seemed to fall slowly there, too. The cliffs of seawater he was faced with were two orders of magnitude larger than those waterfalls. He had plenty of time to enjoy this unparalleled wonder.

The shadow cast by the block of ice had completely disappeared. Yan Dong looked up. The block of ice was now the size of two full moons, much less conspicuous in the sky.

As the two seawater cliffs advanced, the basin shrank into a canyon. Then the cliffs—tens of kilometers long, five thousand meters high—crashed into each other.

A loud thud echoed between the sea and sky. The space in the ocean the ice block left was completely gone.

“We aren’t dreaming, are we?” Yan Dong said to himself.

“If this were a dream, everything would be fine. Look!”

The pilot pointed below. Where the water met, the sea hadn’t yet settled. Two waves as long as the former cliffs rose, as if they were their reincarnation on the sea surface. They parted, heading in opposite directions. From high above, the waves weren’t that impressive, but careful measurements showed they were over two hundred meters tall. Viewed from up close, they’d seem like moving mountain ranges.

“Tidal waves?” Yan Dong asked.

“Yes. They could be the largest ever. The coast is in for a disaster.”

Yan Dong looked up. He could no longer see the ice block in the blue sky. According to radar, it had already become an ice satellite of Earth.

For the rest of the day, the low-temperature artist removed, in the same way, hundreds of blocks of ice of the same size from the Pacific Ocean. He sent them into orbit around the Earth.

In the hemisphere that was experiencing night, every couple of hours or so, a cluster of twinkling points could be seen flying across the sky. What differentiated them from the background stars was that, upon careful inspection, one could make out the shape of each point. Each was a small cuboid. They spun on their own axes in their own orientations. As a result, they reflected the sunlight and twinkled at different rates. A reporter came up with an analogy that got some traction.

“This is a handful of crystalline dominos scattered by a space giant.”

A Dialogue Between Two Artists

“We ought to have a chat.” Yan Dong said.

“I asked you to come to just do that, but only about art,” the low-temperature artist said.

Yan Dong stood on a giant block of ice suspended five thousand meters in the air.

It was the low-temperature artist who had invited him here. The helicopter that had brought him sat to the side. Its rotors were still spinning, ready to take off at any moment. Ice fields stretched to the horizon on all sides. The ice surface reflected the dazzling sunlight. The layer of blue ice below him seemed bottomless. At this altitude, the sky was clear and boundless. The wind blew stiffly.

This was one of the five thousand giant blocks of ice the low-temperature artist had taken from the oceans. In the previous five days, he’d taken a thousand blocks a day, then sent them into orbit. From all over the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, after a giant block of ice was frozen, it rose into the air to become one of an increasing number of glittering “space dominos.” Tidal waves assaulted every major city along the world’s coasts. Over time, though, these disasters became less frequent. The reason was simple: the sea level had dropped.

Earth’s oceans had become blocks of ice revolving around it.

Yan Dong stamped his feet on the hard ice surface. “Such a large block of ice, how did you freeze it in an instant? How did you do it in one piece without it cracking?

What force are you using to send it into orbit? All of this is beyond our understanding and imagination.”

The low-temperature artist said, “This is nothing. In the course of creation, we’ve often destroyed stars! Didn’t we agree to discuss only art? I, creating art in this way, you, using small knives and shovels to carve ice sculptures, from the perspective of art, aren’t all that different.”

“When those ice blocks orbiting in space are exposed to intense sunlight, why don’t they melt?”

“I covered every ice block with a layer of extremely thin, transparent, light filtering membrane. It only allows cold light, whose frequencies don’t generate heat, to get into the block of ice. The frequencies that do generate heat are all reflected. As a result, the block of ice doesn’t melt. This is the last time I’ll answer this sort of question. I didn’t stop work to discuss these boring things. From now on, we’ll discuss only art, or else you might as well leave. We’ll no longer be colleagues and friends.”

“In that case, how much ice do you ultimately plan to take from the oceans? This is surely relevant to the creation of art!”

“Of course, I’ll only take as much as there is. I’ve talked to you before about my design. I’d like to realize it perfectly. If it turns out the Earth’s oceans aren’t enough, I once planned to take ice from Jupiter’s satellites, but that’s too much trouble. I’ll just make do instead.”

The wind mussed Yan Dong’s hair. He smoothed it back into place. The cold at this high altitude made him shiver. “Is art important to you?”

“It’s everything.”

“But… there are other things in life. For example, we still need to work to survive. I’m an engineer at the Changchun Institute of Optics. I can only make art in my spare time.”

The low-temperature artist’s voice rumbled up from the depths of the ice. The vibrating ice surface tickled Yan Dong’s feet. “Survival. Ha! It’s just the diaper of a civilization’s infancy that needs to be changed. Later, that’s as easy as breathing. We forget that there was a time when it took effort to survive.”

“What about societal and political matters?”

“The existence of individuals is also a troublesome part of infant civilizations. Later, individuals melt into the whole. There’s no society or politics as such.”

“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 been carried out to the proper extent, even the slightest mystery 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 billions of people on this planet below us and even more of the 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 makes me so disappointed. You ought to be ashamed. Go. I’m going to work.”

“Fuck your ancestors!” Yan Dong finally lost his patience. He swore in a northeastern Chinese dialect.

“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,” he 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, our arts use different tools, but there’s no essential difference.”

“I’ve changed my perspective. At first, I thought I’d run into a real artist, but, as it turns out, he’s a mediocre, pitiful creature who chatters on about the oceans drying, ecological collapse, and other trivialities that have nothing to do with art. Too trivial, too trivial, I tell you. Artists can’t be like this.”

“Fuck your ancestors anyway.”

“Whatever. I’m going to work. Go.”

For a moment, Yan Dong felt heavy. He fell ass first onto the slick ice. At the same time, a gust of wind swept down from above. The ice block was rising again. He scrambled into the helicopter. With difficulty, it took off from the nearest edge of the block of ice. It nearly crashed in the tornado produced as the block of ice rose.

Communication between humanity and the low-temperature artist had been an utter failure.

Sea of Dreams

Yan Dong stood in a white world. The ground below his feet and the surrounding mountains were covered in a silvery white cloak. The mountains were steep and treacherous. He felt as though he were in the snow-covered Himalayas. In fact, here was at the opposite of there. This was the lowest place on Earth. This was the Marianas Trench, what once was the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. The white material that covered everything was not snow but the minerals that once made the water salty.

After the sea water froze, these minerals separated out and were deposited on the sea floor. At the thickest, these deposits were as much as one hundred meters deep.

In two hundred days, the oceans of the Earth had been 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 his work’s final rite.

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 sea floor. 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, he dipped his hand into the lightly rippling sea. The water was so saturated with salt that its waves seemed sluggish. A gentle breeze blew Yan Dong’s hand dry, separating out a layer of white salt.

The sharp squeal that Yan Dong knew so well pierced his ears. The sound tore through the air whenever the low-temperature artist slid toward the ground. Yan Dong quickly spotted it in the sky. It was still a ball of ice, but because it had returned directly from space and hadn’t flown for too long in the atmosphere, it was much smaller than the first time he’d seen it. As the blocks of ice were entering orbit, people had tried all sorts of ways to observe the low-temperature artist leaving them, but no one was successful. Only after it entered the atmosphere did the constantly growing ball of ice indicate its existence and position.

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. A familiar scene emerged: a disc 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 dissipating fog 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. There were no frozen waves on the ocean surface. It was as smooth as a mirror. Throughout the freezing process, Yan Dong had felt a cold draft blowing against his face.

The now frozen final ocean was raised off the ground. At first, it was lifted only several careful centimeters. 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 fissure, filling the newly created space. It blew the salt around and buried Yan Dong’s feet. The rate at which the lake rose increased. In the blink of an eye, the final ocean was 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 spat salt out of his mouth. It tasted bitter, 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 sea floor. Yan Dong watched it rise until it became a small point of light that dissolved into the mighty ring of ice.

The ring was about as wide as the Milky Way that traversed from east to west across the sky. Unlike the rings of Uranus and Neptune, the surface of the ice ring was neither perpendicular nor parallel to the surface of the Earth. It was like a broad belt of light in space. The belt was composed of two hundred thousand blocks of ice that completely surrounded the Earth. From the surface, one could clearly make out each block, even its shape. Some rotated while others seemed static. The two hundred thousand points of light, some twinkling, some not, formed a majestic, heavenly river that flowed solemnly across the Earth’s sky.

At different times throughout the day, the ring of ice varied with dramatic changes in brightness and color.

The colors were the most dramatic at dawn and dusk. The ring changed gradually from the orange red of the horizon to a dark red, then to dark green and dark blue, like a rainbow in space.

During the daytime, the ring assumed a dazzling silver color against the blue sky, like a great river of diamonds flowing across a blue plain. The daytime ice ring looked most spectacular during an eclipse, when it blocked the Sun. The massive blocks of ice refracted the sunlight—a strange and magnificent fireworks show appeared in the sky.

How long the Sun was blocked depended on whether it was an intersecting eclipse or a parallel eclipse. The parallel eclipse occurred when the Sun followed the ring of ice for some distance. Every year, there would be one total parallel eclipse.

For a day, the Sun, from sunrise to sunset, would follow the path of the ice ring for its entire journey. On this day, the ring of ice would seem like a belt of silver gun-powder set loose on the sky. Ignited at sunrise, the dazzling fireball would burn wildly across the sky. When it set in the west, the sight would be magnificent, too difficult to put into words. Just as some people proclaimed, “Today, God strolled across the sky.”

Even so, the ring of ice’s most enchanting moment was at night. It was twice as bright as a full moon. Its silver light covered the Earth. It was as though every star in the Universe had lined up to march solemnly across the night sky. In this mighty river of stars, one could clearly make out each cuboid. Half of them glittered. Those hundred thousand twinkling stars formed a ripple that surged, as though driven by a gale. It transformed the river of stars into an intelligent whole.…

With a sharp squeal, the low-temperature artist returned from space for the last time. The ball of ice was suspended over Yan Dong. A ring of snowflakes immediately wrapped itself tightly around it.

“I’ve completed it. What you do think?” it asked.

Yan Dong stayed silent for a long time, then said only one short phrase: “I give up.”

He had truly given up. Once, he had stared up at the ring of ice for three consecutive days and nights until he collapsed. When he could finally get out of bed, he went outside to stare at the ice ring again. He felt he could stare forever, and it wouldn’t be enough. Beneath the ring of ice, he was sometimes dazed, sometimes steeped in an indescribable happiness. This was the happiness of an artist finding ultimate beauty. He was completely conquered by this immense beauty. His soul was dissolved in it.

“As an artist, now that you’re able to see such work, are you still striving for it?”

the low-temperature artist asked.

“Truly, I’m not.” Yan Dong answered sincerely.

“However, you’re merely looking. Certainly, you can’t create such beauty. You’re too trivial.”

“Yes. I’m too trivial. We’re too trivial. How can we? We have to support ourselves and our spouses and children.”

Yan Dong sat on the saline soil. Steeped in sorrow, he buried his head in his hands.

This was the deep sorrow of seeing beauty he could never produce, realizing he would never transcend his limitations.

“So, shall we name this work together? Call it— Ring of Dreams, perhaps?”

Yan Dong thought about this a bit. Slowly, he shook his head. “No, it came from the sea or, rather, was sublimated from the sea. Not even in our dreams could we conceive that the sea possessed this form of beauty. It should be called— Sea of Dreams.”

“Sea of Dreams… very good, very good. We’ll call it that, Sea of Dreams.”

Just then, Yan Dong remembered his mission. “I’d like to ask, before you leave, can you return Sea of Dreams to our actual seas?”

“Have me personally destroy my own work? Ridiculous!”

“Then, after you leave, can we restore the seas ourselves?”

“Of course you can. Just return these blocks of ice and everything should be fine, right?”

“How do we do that?” Yan Dong asked, his head raised. All of humanity strained to hear the answer.

“How should I know?” The low-temperature artist said indifferently.

“One final question: As colleagues, we all know that works of art made from ice and snow are short-lived. So Sea of Dreams…”

“Sea of Dreams is also short-lived. A block of ice’s light-filtering membrane will age.

It’ll no longer be able to block heat. But they will dissolve differently than your ice sculptures. The process will be more violent and magnificent. Blocks of ice will vaporize. The pressure will cause the membrane to burst. Every block of ice will turn into a small comet. The entire ring of ice will blur into a silver fog. Then Sea of Dreams will disappear into that silver fog, which will scatter and disappear into space. The Universe can only look forward to my next work on some other distant world.”

“How long until this happens?” Yan Dong’s voice quivered.

“The light-filtering membrane will become ineffective, as you reckon time, hm, in about twenty years. Oh, why are we talking about things other than art again? Trivial, trivial! Okay, colleague. Goodbye until never. Enjoy the beauty I have left you!”

The ball of ice shot into the air, rapidly disappearing into the sky. According to the measurements of every major astronomical organization in the world, the ice flew rapidly along perpendicular to the elliptic plane. Once it had accelerated to half the speed of light, it abruptly disappeared thirteen astronomical units away from the Sun, as if it’d squeezed into an invisible hole. It never returned.

PART TWO

Monument and Waveguide

The drought had already lasted five years.

Seared ground swept past the car window. It was midsummer, and there was not a bit of green anywhere. The trees were all withered. Cracks like black spiderwebs covered the ground. Frequent dry, hot winds kicked up sand that concealed everything.

Quite a few times, Yan Dong could swear he saw along the railroad tracks the corpses of people who had died of thirst, but they might have just been fallen, dry tree branches, nothing to be afraid of. This harsh, arid world contrasted sharply with the silver Sea of Dreams in the sky.

Yan Dong licked his parched lips. He couldn’t bring himself to drink from his water flask. That was four days’ rations for his entire family. His wife had forced it on him at the train station. Yesterday, his workmates had protested, demanding to be paid in water. In the market, non-rationed water grew scarcer and scarcer. Even the rich weren’t able to buy any… Someone patted him on the shoulder. It was the person sitting next to him.

“You’re that alien’s colleague, aren’t you?”

Since he’d become the low-temperature artist’s messenger, Yan Dong had also become a celebrity. At first, he was a positive role model and hero. After the low-temperature artist left, the situation changed. Perhaps he had inspired the low-temperature artist at the Ice and Snow Arts Festival. Perhaps without that, none of this would have happened. Most people understood that this was utter nonsense, but a scape-goat was a good thing. So, in people’s eyes he’d become the low-temperature artist’s co-conspirator. Fortunately there were other things to worry about. People gradually forgot about him. But this time, despite his sunglasses, he’d been recognized.

“Ask me to drink some water!” That guy said with a husky voice. Two flakes of dry skin fell from his lips.

“What are you doing? Do you want to rob me?”

“Be smart, or I’ll scream!”

Yan Dong felt obliged to hand over his water flask. The jerk downed the flask in one swallow. The people around them looked at him, surprised. A train attendant passing by in the aisle stopped and gazed at him, stupefied. They couldn’t believe someone could be so wasteful. It was like back in the Oceaned Days watching a rich person eat a sumptuous dinner that cost a hundred thousand yuan.

The man returned the empty flask to Yan Dong. Patting Yan Dong’s shoulder again, the man said in a low voice, “It doesn’t matter. Soon, it’ll all be over.”

Yan Dong understood what he meant.

Cars seldom appeared on the capital’s streets any more. The rare few were now air-cooled. Conventional liquid-cooled cars were strictly prohibited. The Chinese branch of the World Crisis Organization had sent a car to pick him up. Otherwise, he’d have had no way to reach their offices. On the way, he saw that storms had covered the roads with yellow sand. He didn’t see many pedestrians. Walking around in the hot, dry wind was too dangerous.

The world was like a fish out of water, already begging for a breath.

When he arrived at the World Crisis Organization, Yan Dong reported to the bureau chief. The chief brought him to a large office, then told him that this was the group he would be working in. Yan Dong looked at the office door. Unlike the other ones, this one had no nameplate. The bureau chief said:

“This is a secret group. Everything done here is strictly confidential. In order to avoid social unrest, we call this group the Monument Division.”

Entering the office, Yan Dong noticed the others’ eccentricities: hair was either too long or nonexistent. Despite these difficult times, some were immaculately dressed.

Some wore nothing but shorts. Some seemed dejected, others abnormally excited…

Strangely shaped models sat on a long table in the middle of the office. Yan Dong couldn’t tell what they were for.

“Welcome, Mr. Ice Sculptor.” The head of the Monument Division enthusiastically extended his hand to Yan Dong. “Please to elaborate on the inspiration you received from the alien. Alas, this time, you can’t use ice. What we must build is a work that will last forever.”

“What for?” Yan Dong asked, not understanding.

The division head looked at the bureau chief, then back at Yan Dong. “You still don’t know? We want to establish a monument to humanity!”

Yan Dong felt even more at a loss.

“It’s humanity’s tombstone,” an artist to his side said. This person had long hair, tattered clothes, and gave the impression of decadence. One hand held a bottle of sorghum liquor, and the man appeared tipsy. The liquor was left over from the Oceaned Days and was now much cheaper than water.

Yan Dong looked all around, then said, “But… we’re not dead yet.”

“If we wait until we’re dead, it’ll be too late,” the bureau chief said. “We ought to plan for the worst case. The time to think about this is now.”

The division head nodded. “This is humanity’s final and greatest work of art. For an artist, what can be more profound than to join in its creation?”

“Fucking, actually… much more,” the long-haired man said, waving the bottle.

“Tombstones are for your descendants to pay homage to. We’ll have no descendants, but we’ll still erect a fucking tomb?”

“Pay attention to the name. It’s a monument,” the division head corrected solemnly. Laughing, he said to Yan Dong, “However, the idea he put forth is very good: this man proposed that everyone in the world donate a tooth. Those teeth can be used to create a gigantic tablet. Carving a word on each tooth is sufficient to engrave the most detailed history of human civilization on the tablet.” He pointed at a model that looked like a white pyramid.

“This is blasphemy against humanity,” a bald-headed artist shouted. “The worth of humanity lies in its brains, but he wants to commemorate us with our teeth!”

The long-haired artist took another swig from his bottle. “Teeth… Teeth are easy to preserve.”

“The vast majority of people are still alive!” Yan Dong repeated solemnly.

“But for how long?” the long-haired artist said. As he asked this question, his enunciation became precise. “Water no longer falls from the sky. The rivers have dried. Our crops have failed for three years now. Ninety percent of the factories have stopped production. The remaining food and water, how long can that sustain us?”

“You heap of waste,” the bald-headed artist pointed at the bureau chief. “Bustling around for five years, and you still can’t bring even one block of ice back from space.”

The bureau chief laughed off the bald-headed artist’s criticism. “It’s not that simple.

Given current technology, forcing down a block of ice from orbit isn’t hard. Forcing down a hundred, to a thousand blocks of ice is doable. But forcing back all two hundred thousand blocks of ice orbiting the Earth, that’s another matter completely. If we use conventional techniques, a rocket engine would decelerate a block of ice into the atmosphere. That would mean building a large number of reusable high-power engines, then sending them into space. That’s a massive-scaled engineering project.

Given our current technology level and what resources we’ve stockpiled, there are many insurmountable obstacles. For example, in order to save the Earth’s ecosystem, if we start now, we’d need to force down half the blocks of ice within four years, an average of twenty-five thousand per year. The weight of rocket fuel required would be greater than the amount of gasoline humanity used in one year during the Oceaned Days! Except it isn’t gasoline. It’s liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, dinitrogen tetroxide, unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, and so on. They need over a hundred times more energy and natural resources to produce than gasoline. Just this one thing makes the entire plan impossible.”

The long-haired artist nodded. “In other words, doomsday is not far off.”

The bureau chief said, “No, not necessarily. We can still adopt some unconventional techniques. There’s still hope. While we’re working on this, though, we must plan for the worst.”

“This is exactly why I came,” Yan Dong said.

“To plan for the worst?” the long-haired artist asked.

“No, because there’s still hope.” He turned to the bureau chief. “It doesn’t matter why you brought me here. I came for my own purpose.” He pointed to his extremely bulky travel bag. “Please take me to the Ocean Recovery Division.”

“What can you do in the Ocean Recovery Division? They’re all scientists and engineers there,” the bald-headed artist wondered.

“I’m a research fellow in applied optics.” Yan Dong’s gaze swept past the artists.

“Besides daydreaming along with you, I can also be practical.”

After Yan Dong insisted, the bureau chief brought him to the Ocean Reclamation Division. The mood here was completely different from the Monument Division.

Everyone was tense, working on their computers. A drinking fountain stood in the middle of the office. They could take a drink whenever they wanted. This was treatment worthy of kings. But considering the hope of the world was focused on them, the situation wasn’t so surprising.

Yan Dong told the Ocean Reclamation Division’s lead engineer, “I’ve brought a plan for reclaiming the ice blocks.”

As he spoke, he opened his travel bag. He took out a white tube about as thick as an arm followed by a cylinder about a meter long. Yan Dong walked to a window that faced the Sun and stuck the cylinder out the window before shaking it back and forth. The cylinder opened like an umbrella, exposing a concave side plated with a mirrored coating that turned it into something like a parabolic reflector for a solar stove. Next, Yan Dong pushed the tube through a small hole at the bottom of the paraboloid, then adjusted the reflector so that it focused sunlight at the end of the tube.

Immediately, the other end of the tube cast an eye-stabbing point of light on the floor. Because the tube lay flat on the floor, the point was an exaggerated oval.

Yan Dong said: “This uses the latest optical fiber to create a waveguide. There’s very little attenuation. Naturally, an actual system would be much larger than this.

In space, a parabolic reflector only about twenty meters in diameter can create a point of light at the other end of the waveguide with a temperature of over three thousand degrees.”

Yan Dong looked around. His demonstration hadn’t produced the reaction he’d expected. The engineers took a look before returning to their computer screens, paying him no mind. It wasn’t until a stream of dark smoke rose from the point of light on the anti-static floor that the nearest person came over and said, “What did you do? I doubt it’s hot.”

At the same time, the person nudged back the waveguide, moving the light coming through the window away from the focal length of the parabolic reflector. Although the point was still on the floor, it immediately darkened and lost heat. Yan Dong was surprised at how adept the person was at adjusting the thing.

The lead engineer pointed at the waveguide. “Pack up your gear and drink some water. I heard you took the train. The one to here from Changchun is still running?

You must be extremely thirsty.”

Yan Dong desperately wanted to explain his invention, but he really was extremely thirsty. His burning throat couldn’t croak a single word.

“Very good. This is a practical plan.” The lead engineer handed Yan Dong a glass of water.

Yan Dong drained the glass of water in one gulp. He gazed at the lead engineer blankly. “Are you saying that someone has already thought of this?”

The lead engineer laughed. “Spending time with aliens has made you underestimate human intellect. In fact, from the moment the low-temperature artist sent the first block of ice into space, many people have come up with this plan. Afterward, there were lots of variants. For example, some used solar panels instead of reflectors. Some used wires and electric heating elements instead of waveguides. The advantage is that the equipment is easy to manufacture and transport. The disadvantage is that waveguides are more efficient. We’ve been researching this for five years now. The technology is already mature. The equipment we need has mostly been manufactured.”

“Then why haven’t you carried the plan out?”

An engineer next to them said, “With this plan, the Earth will lose 21 percent of its water in the process. Either during propulsion as vaporized steam or during reentry from high-temperature dissociation.”

The lead engineer turned to that engineer. “You probably don’t know that the latest American simulations show, below the ionosphere, the hydrogen produced by high-temperature dissociation during reentry will immediately recombine with the surrounding oxygen into water. We overestimated the high-temperature dissociation loss. The total loss estimate is around 18 percent.” She turned to Yan Dong. “But this percentage is high enough.”

“Then do you have a plan to bring back all of the water from space?”

The lead engineer shook her head. “The only possibility is to use a nuclear fusion engine. But, right now, on Earth, we can’t do controlled nuclear fusion.”

“Then why aren’t you acting more quickly? You know, if you dither around, the Earth will lose 100 percent of its water.”

The lead engineer nodded. “So, after a long time of hesitation, we’ve decided to act.

Soon, the Earth will be in for the fight of its life.”

Reclaiming the Oceans

Yan Dong joined the Ocean Reclamation Division, in charge of receiving and checking the waveguides that had been produced. Although this wasn’t a core posting, he found it fulfilling.

One month after Yan Dong arrived at the capital, humanity’s project to reclaim the oceans started.

Within a week, eight hundred large-scale carrier rockets shot into the sky from every launch site in the world, sending fifty thousand tons of freight into Earth orbit. Then, from the North American launch site, twenty space shuttles ferried three hundred astronauts into space. Because launches generally followed the same route, the skies above the launch sites all had a single rocket contrail that never dispersed.

Viewed from orbit, it seemed like threads of spider silk stretching up from every continent into space.

These launches increased human space activity by an order of magnitude, but it was still twentieth-century technology. People realized that under existing conditions, if the entire world worked together and risked everything on one attempt, humanity could do anything.

On live television, Yan Dong and everyone else witnessed the first time a deceleration propulsion system was installed on a block of ice.

To make things easier, the first blocks of ice they forced back weren’t the ones that rotated on their own axes. Three astronauts landed on a block of ice. They brought with them an artillery-shell-shaped vehicle that could drill a hole into the block of ice, three waveguides, one expeller tube, and three folded up parabolic reflectors. It was only now that one could get the sense of the immense size of a block of ice. The astronauts seemed to land on a tiny crystalline world. Under intense sunlight in space, the giant field of ice under their feet seemed unfathomable.

Near and far, innumerable similar crystalline worlds hung in the black sky. Some of them continued to rotate. The surrounding rotating and non-rotating blocks reflected and refracted the sunlight. Where the three astronauts stood, they cast a dazzling pattern of ever-changing light and shadow. In the distance, the blocks of ice in the ring looked smaller and smaller, but gathered closer and closer together, gradually shrinking into a delicate silver belt twisting toward the other side of the Earth.

The closest block of ice was only three thousand meters away from this one. Because it rotated about its minor axis, such a rotation had a breathtaking momentum. It was as though they were three tiny ants watching a crystalline skyscraper collapsing over and over again. Due to gravity, these two ice blocks would eventually crash into each other. The light-filtering membranes would rupture and the blocks of ice would disintegrate. The smashed blocks of ice would quickly evaporate in the sunlight and disappear. Such collisions had already happened twice in the ring of ice.

This was why this block was the first to be forced back.

First, an astronaut started the driller vehicle. As the drill head spun, crumbs of ice flew out in a cone-shaped spray, twinkling in the sunlight. The driller vehicle broke through the invisible light-filtering membrane. Like a twisting screw, it dug into the ice, leaving a round hole in its wake. Along with the hole that stretched into the depths of the ice, a faint white line could be seen in the ice itself. Once the hole reached the prescribed depth, the vehicle headed out toward another part of the ice.

It then bored another hole. At last it drilled four holes in total. They all intersected at one point deep in the ice. The astronauts inserted the three waveguides into three of the holes, then inserted the expeller into the wider fourth hole. The expeller tube’s mouth pointed in the direction of the ice block’s motion. The astronauts then used a thin tube to caulk the gap the three waveguides and the expeller tube left against their holes’ walls with a fast-sealing liquid to create a good seal. Finally, they opened the parabolic reflectors. If the initial phase of ocean reclamation employed the latest technology, it was these parabolic reflectors. They were a miracle created by nan-otechnology. Folded up, each was only a cubic meter. Unfolded, each formed a giant reflector five hundred meters in diameter. These three reflectors were like three silver lotus leaves that grew on the block of ice. The astronauts adjusted each waveguide so that its receiver coincided with the focal point of its reflector.

A bright point of light appeared where the three holes intersected deep in the ice. It seemed like a tiny sun, illuminating within the block of ice spectacular sights of mythic proportions: a school of silver fish, dancing seaweed drifting with the waves.…

Though long dead, they all retained their life like appearance at the instant they were frozen. Even the strings of bubbles spat from the fishes’ mouths were clear and distinct. Over one hundred kilometers away, inside another ice block being reclaimed, the sunlight that the waveguides led into the ice revealed a giant black shadow. It was a blue whale over twenty meters long. This had to be the Earth’s seas of old.

Deep in the ice, steam soon blurred the point of light. As the steam dispersed, the point changed into a bright white ball that swelled as the ice melted. Once the pressure built up to a predetermined level, the expeller mouth cover broke open, and a violent gush of turbulent steam exploded out. Because there were no obstructions, it formed a sharp cone that scattered in the distance. Finally, it disappeared in the sunlight. Some portion of the steam entered another ice block’s shadow and condensed into ice crystals that seemed like a swarm of flickering fireflies.

The deceleration propulsion system in the first batch of one hundred blocks of ice activated. Because the blocks of ice were so massive, the thrust the system produced was, relatively speaking, very small. As a result, they needed to orbit fifteen days to a month before they could slow the blocks of ice down enough for them to fall into the atmosphere. Before that happened, astronauts landed on the blocks again to recover the waveguides and reflectors. If they wanted to force all two hundred thousand blocks down, this equipment had to be reused as much as possible.

Later, reclaiming ice blocks that rotated would be much more complicated. The propulsion system had to stop the rotation first, then slow down the block of ice.

Ice meteors

Yan Dong and the members of the Crisis Committee arrived together at the flatlands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to watch the first batch of ice meteors fall.

The ocean bed of former days was a snowy white plain that reflected the intense sunlight. Without wearing sunglasses, no one could open their eyes. But this didn’t make Yan Dong think of the snowfields of his native northeast, because here it was as hot as hell. The temperature was near fifty degrees Celcius. Hot winds kicked up salty dirt, which stung his face. A hundred-thousand-ton oil tanker was in the distance. The gigantic hull lay tilted on the ground. Its propeller —several stories tall— and rudder completely covered the salt bed. An unbroken chain of white mountains stood even farther away, a mountain range on the sea floor humanity had never before seen. A two-sentence poem immediately poured out of Yan Dong’s mind: The open sea is a boat’s land. Night is love’s day.

He laughed bitterly. He’d experienced this tragedy, yet couldn’t shake off thinking like an artist.

Cheers erupted. Yan Dong raised his head and looked into the distance. A bright red point appeared in the silver ring of ice that traversed the sky. The point of light drifted out of the ring. It swelled into a fireball. A white contrail dragged behind the fireball. This contrail of steam grew ever longer and thicker. Its color became even denser, even whiter. Soon, the fireball split into ten pieces, which continued to split.

A long bright contrail dragged behind every small piece. This field of contrails filled half the sky, as though it were a white Christmas tree and a small, glowing lamp hung on the tip of every branch…

Even more ice meteors appeared. Their sonic booms shook the Earth like the rumble of spring thunder. As old contrails gradually dissipated, new contrails appeared to replace them. They covered the sky in a complex white net. Several trillion tons of water now belonged to the Earth once more.

Most meteors broke apart and vaporized in the air, but one large fragment of ice fell to the ground about forty kilometers from Yan Dong. The loud crash shook the flatlands. A colossal mushroom cloud rose from somewhere in the distant mountain range. The water vapor shone a dazzling white in the sunlight. Gradually it dispersed in the wind and became the sky’s first cloud layer. The clouds multiplied and, for the first time, blocked the Sun that had scorched the Earth for five years. They covered the entire sky. Yan Dong felt a pleasant coolness that oozed into his heart and lungs.

The cloud layer grew thick and dark. Red light flickered within it. Maybe it was lightning or the light from the continuous waves of ice meteors falling toward the Earth.

It rained! This was a downpour so heavy it would have been rare even in the Oceaned Days. Yan Dong and the others ran around screaming wildly in the storm.

They felt their souls dissolve in the rain. Then they retreated into their cars and helicopters because, right now, people would suffocate in the rain.

The rain fell nonstop until dusk. Many waterlogged depressions appeared on the sea floor flatlands. A crack in the clouds revealed the golden, flickering rays of the setting Sun, as though the Earth had just opened its eyes.

Yan Dong followed the crowd, stepping through the thick, salty mud. They ran to the nearest depression. He cupped some water, then splashed that thick brine on his face. As it fell, mixed with his tears, he said, choking with sobs:

“The ocean, our ocean…”

EPILOGUE

Ten years later.

Yan Dong walked onto the frozen-over Songhua River. He was wrapped in a tattered overcoat. His travel bag held the tools that he’d kept for fifteen years: several knives and shovels of various shapes, a hammer, and a watering can. He stamped his feet to make sure the river had truly frozen. The Songhua River had had water as early as five years ago, but this was the first time it had frozen, and during the summer no less.

Due to the arid conditions and the many ice meteors converting into thermal energy in the atmosphere, the global climate had stayed hotter than ever. But in the final stage of ocean reclamation, the largest blocks of ice were forced down. These blocks of ice broke into larger fragments. Most of them crashed onto the ground. This not only destroyed a few cities but also kicked up dust that blocked the sun’s heat.

Temperatures fell rapidly all over the world. Earth entered a new ice age.

Yan Dong looked at the night sky. This was the starscape of his childhood. The ring of ice had disappeared. He could only make out the vestiges of the remaining blocks of ice from their rapid motion against the background of stars. Sea of Dreams had turned back into actual seas again. This magnificent work of art, its cruel beauty as well as nightmare, would forever be inscribed in the collective memory of humanity.

Although the ocean reclamation effort had been completed, Earth’s climate would always be harsh from now on. Its ecosystem would take eons to recover. For the foreseeable future, humanity’s existence would be extremely difficult. Nevertheless, existence was possible. Most people felt content with that. Indeed, the ice ring era had helped humanity find contentment, but humanity learned something even more important.

The World Crisis Organization would change its name to the Space Water Retrieval Organization. They were considering another great engineering project: humanity intended to fly to distant Jupiter and take water from Jupiter’s moons and the rings of Saturn back to Earth to make up for the 18 percent lost in the course of the Ocean Reclamation Project. At first, people intended to use the technology for propelling blocks of ice that they’d already mastered to drive blocks of ice from the rings of Saturn to Earth. Of course, that far away, the sunlight was too weak. Only using nuclear fusion to vaporize the cores of the ice blocks could provide the necessary thrust. As for the water from Jupiter’s moons, that required even larger and more complex technology to acquire. Some people had already proposed pulling the whole of Europa out of Jupiter’s deep gravity well, pushing it to Earth, and making it Earth’s second moon. This way, Earth would receive much more water than 18 percent. It could turn Earth’s ecosystem into a glorious paradise. Naturally, this was a matter for the far future. No one alive would live to see it. Yet despite their hard lives, this hope made people feel a happiness they’d never felt before. This was the most valuable thing humanity received from the ring of ice era: Reclaiming Sea of Dreams made humanity see its own strength—taught it to dream what it had never before dared to dream.

In the distance, Yan Dong saw a group of people gathered on the ice. He walked to them, gliding with each step. They ran toward him when they spied him. Some slipped and fell, then picked themselves up.

“Hey, old friend!” The person out in front gave Yan Dong 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. Yan Dong had once sworn never to talk to these judges again because of their biased awards.

He recognized the rest of the people. They were mostly ice sculptors from before the ring of ice era. Like everyone else, they wore tattered clothes. Suffering and time had dyed the hair on their temples white. Yan Dong felt as though he’d come home after years of wandering.

“I heard that the Ice and Snow Arts Festival has started back up again?” he asked.

“Of course. Otherwise, what are we all doing here?”

“I’ve been thinking. Times are so hard…”

Yan Dong wrapped his large overcoat around him. He shivered in the cold wind, constantly stamping his numb feet against the ice. Everyone else was doing 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.

The others laughed, then fell silent. They reviewed the ten years of hard times.

One by one, they counted their reasons to go on. Finally, they changed from survivors of a disaster back to artists.

Yan Dong took a bottle of sorghum liquor from his bag. Everyone warmed up as they took a swig, then passed the bottle on to the next. They built a fire on the vast riverbank then heated up a chainsaw until it would start in the bitter cold. Together they walked onto the river. The chainsaw growled as it cut into the ice. White crumbs fell all around. Soon, they took their first block of glittering, translucent ice from the Songhua River.

Table of Contents

- Sea of Dreams

- Part One

- The Low-Temperature Artist
- Collecting Ice
- A Dialogue Between Two Artists
- Sea of Dreams

- Part Two

- Monument and Waveguide
- Reclaiming the Oceans
- Ice meteors

- Epilogue

- Ten years later.