The Wandering Earth (4 page)

When the dot turned green, she leapt with joy. I, on the other hand, did not really know what to feel. Would it be fortune or folly to bring a child into this miserable age? The official, at least was jubilant. He told us that it always made him a little happier when he got to see a newlywed couple get their “green dot”. He retrieved a bottle of vodka and poured each of us a drink. We slammed it down, toasting to humanity's survival.

Behind us the feeble light of the distant Sun bathed the Statue of Liberty in a golden glow. Before us stood the long abandoned skyscrapers of Manhattan, the Sun's weak light casting their long shadows across the quiet ice of the New York Harbor. In my tipsy haze, tears began to gush down my cheeks.

Earth, oh, my wandering Earth!

Before we parted, the official gave us a key ring. In a drunken drawl he said, “These are for your newly allotted home in Asia. Go home; oh, your wonderful home!”

“Why is it wonderful?” I asked coldly. “Asia's subterranean cities are full of dangers; but you in the Western Hemisphere wouldn't know that.”

“We are about to experience a danger that you have never known,” he shot back. “The Earth will soon make its pass through the asteroid belt and this time the Western Hemisphere is facing right toward it.”

This somewhat sobered me. “We passed through the asteroid belts a couple of times in the past few orbits; isn't it a non-issue?”

The official shook his head as he responded. “We just scraped the edges of the asteroid belt. Of course, the space fleet could handle that. They have the lasers and nukes to get rid of all the small rocks in the Earth's path. But this time…” He choked. “Haven't you seen the news? This time the Earth will pass directly through the asteroid belt! The fleet can only deal with those big rocks; but the small one…”

As we were flying back to Asia, Kayoko asked me, “Are those asteroids very big?”

My father was in orbit then, tasked with securing Earth's journey. Therefore, despite the government's news blackout aimed at avoiding a panic, I had some idea what we were facing. I told Kayoko some of that. “The Earth is heading towards asteroids the size of large mountains; even a fifty megaton nuclear bomb would do no more than leave a small scar on their surface. They will have to use humanity's most powerful weapon!” I added in an enigmatic tone.

“Are you talking about anti-matter bombs?” she asked.

“What else could it be?” I replied.

“What is the fleet's operating range?” she asked.

“Currently it is limited. My father told me it’s about a million miles away,” I answered.

“Oh, then we will be able to see it!” she said excitedly.

I gave her a look of warning. “But it would be best not to look.”

But Kayoko did look, and did so without protective goggles. The first flash of an anti-matter bomb arrived from outer space shortly after our plane had taken off. Kayoko was looking out a window admiring the stars at the exact moment it happened. The flash blinded her for more than an hour. Even a month later her eyes were still red, swollen, and teary.

It shook every one of us to our core. The anti-matter shells continued to bombard the asteroid. Over and over again, the brilliant, destructive flashes seared the black heavens as if a crazed horde of titanic paparazzi surrounded the Earth and was snapping away with abandon.

Half an hour later, we saw the first meteors, their long, blazing tails cutting across the sky, enthralling us all with their terrible beauty. Ever more followed in their wake, each streaking farther than the last.

Then, the sky suddenly shook behind us with a loud boom, immediately followed by continuing rumbling and more shaking. Kayoko, under the impression that a meteor had hit the plane, screamed in fear and jumped almost right into my arms.

Just then the captain's voice came through the speakers. “To all passengers; please do not panic. That was the sonic boom of a meteor breaking the sound barrier. I do ask everyone to use their headphones in order to avoid permanent hearing loss. Because the flight's continued safety cannot be guaranteed, we will make an emergency landing in Hawaii.”

As the captain spoke, I saw a meteor much larger than the others fall. As I watched the fireball plummet, I became convinced that it would not burn up in the sky like the ones before it. Sure enough, it sped across half the sky and while it shrunk smaller and smaller, it struck the frozen ocean in the end. Looking at it from 30,000 feet, the point of impact was just a small white dot. But that white dot immediately spread into a white circle, rapidly expanding across the ocean's surface.

“Is that a wave?” Kayoko asked me, her voice quivering.

“It is a wave, a hundreds of feet high wave,” I answered. ”But the ocean is frozen. The ice cover will soon weaken it.” I had concluded with the last part, trying to calm myself, no longer looking down.

We soon landed in Honolulu, where the local government had already arranged to take us to a subterranean city. Our bus traveled along the shore, giving us a glimpse at a sky covered in meteors. From here it looked as if a legion of fiery-haired demons had all at once burst from a single point in space.

One meteor hit the ocean not far from the shore. There was no column of water; instead we saw steam rise to form a giant white mushroom cloud above the impact site. The swell of it surged to the shore under the frozen surface as thick layers of ice shattered with loud thunder. The ice rolled like waves, as if a school of giant, sinuous sea monsters was swimming under the surface toward the shore.

“How big was that one?” I asked the official who had come to pick us up.

“Less than a dozen pounds, no bigger than your head,” he told us. “But I have just been informed that a twenty-ton one is going down over the ocean five hundred miles north of us.” His wrist communicator began beeping. He glimpsed at it and then immediately told the driver, “We won't make it to Gate 244; just head for the closest entrance!”

The bus turned a corner and stopped in front of an entrance to the subterranean city. As we got out we saw a group of soldiers at the entrance. They stood motionless, staring into the distance, their eyes filled with dread. We followed their gaze to the horizon where the ocean joined the sky. There we saw a black barrier. At first glance, it looked like a low layer of clouds on the horizon, but its height was far too even for it to be a “layer of clouds”. It was more like a long wall lying across the horizon. On longer inspection, we could make out a gleam of white on top of that wall.

“What is that?” Kayoko asked an officer, a soft fear in her voice.

His answer made every hair on my body stand on end. “A wave.”

The tall metal gates of the subterranean city were shut with a rumble. About ten minutes later we felt and heard a low rumble emanate from the surface, as if a titan was rolling about on the ground far above. We looked at each other, our faces blank with dismay, for we all knew that a 300-foot wave was now rolling over Hawaii. Before long it would impact every continent; but the shocks that followed provided for an even greater terror. It was as if a giant fist had reached from the heavens and had begun pounding the Earth. Underground these shocks were faint, hardly noticeable, but each tremor shook our very souls. It was meteors, unceasingly striking the Earth without mercy.

This brutal bombardment of our planet continued intermittently for an entire week. When we finally left the subterranean city, Kayoko shouted, “Heavens, what happened to the sky?”

All above us was gray; gray because the upper atmosphere was filled with the dust that had been kicked up as the asteroids impacted the dry land. Sun and stars had disappeared behind this endless gray, as if the entire universe had been covered with a dense fog. On the surface, the water left behind by the billowing waves had frozen solid, covering those lonely buildings fortunate enough to survive with long veils of ice. The falling impact dust had also covered the frozen ocean, leaving a monochrome world. A world of gray.

Kayoko and I continued our return to Asia with the very next flight. As the plane crossed the now long meaningless international dateline, we witnessed humanity's darkest night. It was as if the plane had dived into inky depths. Not a single ray of light could be seen in the world outside the window. And with this world, our moods turned pitch black.

“When will it end?” Kayoko mumbled into the dark.

I did not know whether she meant our journey or our miserable and adversity-ridden life. It wouldn't have mattered anyway; at that moment, both seemed equally everlasting. Even if the Earth made it beyond the reach of the helium flash and we escaped with our lives, so what? We would just have made it onto the first rung of an unfathomably tall ladder. Even if, in a hundred generations, our descendants should see the light of new life, our bones would have long turned to dust. I could not even dare think of all our future suffering and deprivations, much less dare consider that I would be dragging my wife and child along that endless, muddy road with me.

I was tired, too tired to go on …

Just as despair and sorrow threatened to suffocate me, I heard a woman cry out: “Ah! No! You can't, love!”

As I turned to look, I saw a woman a few rows away from us. She held a gun that she had wrestled from the hands of the man next to her. It was apparent that he had just attempted to put the gun's barrel to his temple. The man looked wane and emaciated, his dull and lifeless eyes staring out into infinity. The woman buried her head in his lap and began to sob.

“Quiet,” the man said, devoid of all emotion.

The sobbing stopped, leaving only the sound of the engine softly humming a funeral dirge. In my mind the plane was stuck in the vast blackness surrounding us. We seemed absolutely motionless. All that was left in the entire universe was the darkness and us, nothing else. Kayoko pressed herself tightly into my embrace, her entire body ice-cold.

Suddenly, a commotion started in the front of the cabin and people began whispering excitedly. I looked out the window to see a dim light emerge from the darkness in front of the plane. The light was blue and formless, spreading uniformly through the impact dust suffused sky.

It was the glow of the Earth Engines.

A third of the Western Hemisphere's Earth Engines had been destroyed by the meteorite strikes — fewer losses than the calculations projected at the start of our journey. The Earth Engines of the Eastern Hemisphere had suffered no losses, being on the reverse side of the impacts. In terms of power, there was nothing stopping the Earth from completing its escape.

The dim light before us left me feeling like a deep sea diver finally seeing the light of the surface after a long ascent from the abyss. I began to breathe easy again. Behind me, I heard the woman's voice.

“My dear, we can only feel fear and pain while we are alive,” she said. “Death…death leaves nothing. On the other side there is only darkness. It is better to be alive, wouldn't you say?”

The thin man did not reply. He was staring at the blue glow, tears welling in his eyes. I knew that he would be able to hold on; we would all be able to hold on, just as long as that promising blue light remained. Watching him and the glow, I remembered my father's words of hope.

After we landed, Kayoko and I did not go directly to our new home in the subterranean city. Instead, we went to visit my father at his surface-side space fleet base. When we arrived, however, all that remained of him was a posthumously awarded medal, cold as ice. I was given the medal by a rear admiral of the fleet. He told me that it happened during the operation to clear the asteroids in Earth's path. An anti-matter explosion had blasted an asteroid fragment straight into my father's single-seater.

“When it happened, the relative speed of rock and spaceship had been sixty miles per second,” the officer told me. “The collision instantly vaporized his micro spaceship. He did not experience any pain; I can assure you, there was no pain.”

When the Earth again began its descent toward the Sun, Kayoko and I ascended to the surface to see the spring. But there was none.

The world was still a vista of gray below the gloomy sky. On the surface, frozen lakes had formed from the residual ocean water, but nowhere was there even a speck of green. The impact dust in the atmosphere blocked the Sun's rays, preventing the temperature from rising. The surface and oceans did not even thaw at the perihelion. All throughout, the Sun remained a faint, dim glow, a ghost looming beyond the impact dust.