from
Ball Lightning
by
Liu Cixin

The storm that night made it seem as if the whole universe held nothing but rapid flashes of lightning surrounding our small dining room. Electric blue bursts froze the rain into solid drops for an instant, forming dense strands of glittering crystal beads suspended between heaven and earth. A thought struck me: the world would be a fascinating place if that instant were sustained. You could walk through streets hung with crystal, surrounded on all sides by the sound of chimes. But in such a dazzling world, the lightning would be unbearable. . . . I had always seen a different world from the one others saw. I wanted to transform the world: that was the one thing I knew about myself at that age.

“He’s the sort of person who, if he drops his keys, won’t look for them in the place the sound came from. Instead, he’ll get a piece of chalk and divide the room into a grid and then search section by section. . . .”

We broke down into fits of laughter.

“People like him are suited only to the sort of work that will be done entirely by machines in the future. Creativity and imagination have no meaning for them, and they employ rigor and discipline in their scholarship to cover up their mediocrity. You know the universities are full of them. Still, with enough time, you can find things going section by section, so they manage to do well in their field.”

“When you’re captivated by something, striving after it is enough. That’s a kind of success.”

“Thank you for your consolation,” he said weakly.

“I’m saying it for myself, too. When I get to your age, that’s how I’ll console myself.”

She pointed at the mine. “What an exquisite piece of art.”

“I’ll admit that weapons do possess an indescribable allure, but it’s built on top of murder. If this bamboo were just bamboo, that beauty would no longer exist.”

“Have you ever thought about why such a brutal thing as murder can bring with it such beauty?”

“A profound question indeed. I’m not much for that kind of thinking.”

The car turned onto a narrow road. Lin Yun continued: “The beauty of an object can be completely separated from its practical function. Like a stamp: its actual function is irrelevant in a collector’s eyes.”

An astronomer once made an interesting observation: “Take stars. If they didn’t exist, it’d be very easy to prove that their existence is impossible.” That applied to ball lightning, too. Conceptualizing a means by which electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light could be confined into such a small ball was maddening.

But with enough patience, and enthusiasm for a hopeless cause, such mathematical models could be constructed. Whether they would withstand experimental tests was another matter altogether.

“I’ll agree to setting up the research project, but there won’t be any money.”

Lin Yun was livid. “That’s the same as not doing anything. What can we do without money? The Western media says you’re one of the most technically minded top brass, but it looks like they have you wrong.”

“I’ve got a technically minded daughter, but can she do anything apart from taking money and washing it down the drain?”

“You’re like a ship on the night sea making its way toward a lighthouse. Nothing in the world has any meaning for you but that flashing lighthouse. Nothing else is visible.”

“How poetic. But don’t you think you’re describing yourself as well?”

I knew she was right. Sometimes what we find hardest to tolerate in others is our own reflection.

“In the briefest period after the Big Bang, all of space was flat. Later, as energy levels subsided, wrinkles appeared in space, which gave birth to all of the fundamental particles. What’s been so mystifying for us is why the wrinkles should only appear at the microscopic level. Are there really no macroscopic wrinkles? Or, in other words, are there no macroscopic fundamental particles? Now we know there are.”

My first thought at this point was that I could breathe at last. My mind had been asphyxiating for more than a decade, and all that time it felt like I’d been immersed in water that was murky at every turn. Now I had burst to the surface, and I took my first breath of air, and saw the vast sky. A blind man probably has the same feeling on regaining his sight.

“What I study is on a scale of less than a femtometer, or more than ten million light-years. At those scales, the Earth and human life are insignificant.”

“Life is insignificant?”

“From a physics perspective, the form of matter movement known as life has no more meaning than any other movement of matter. You can’t find any new physical laws in life, so from my standpoint, the death of a person and the melting of an ice cube are essentially the same thing. Dr. Chen, you tend to overthink things. You should learn to look at life from the perspective of the ultimate law of the universe. You’ll feel much better if you do.”

It was a flower I could only see with my heart.

But I still held out the hope of getting another glimpse of that blue rose in my lifetime. Ding Yi said that, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, death is the process of transitioning from a strong observer to a weak observer, and then to a non-observer. When I become a weak observer, the rose’s probability cloud will collapse to a destroyed state more slowly, giving me the hope of seeing it again.

When I come to death’s door and open my eyes for the final time, all of my intellect and memories will be lost into the abyss of the past, and I will return to the pure feeling and fantasies of childhood. At that moment, I’m sure the quantum rose will smile at me.

It was a stormy night. When blue arcs of electricity flashed, you could perceive individual raindrops outside the window for the briefest instant. The thunder and lightning had only grown more intense since the downpour began that evening. After one dazzling burst, an object materialized beneath a tree and drifted ghostlike through the air, illuminating the surrounding rain with its orange glow. And as it floated, it seemed to play the sound of a xun. Less than twenty seconds later, it disappeared. . . .

This is no science fiction story, but my eyewitness account of a thunderstorm during the summer of 1982 in the city of Handan, Hehei province, at the southern end of Zhonghua Road, which was remote in those days. After that, you were into farmland. Over the course of the next two decades I found myself accumulating all sorts of fanciful ideas about ball lightning.

That same year, I read two books by the British writer Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 and Rendezvous with Rama. The transation of those two books into Chinese marked the introduction of modern western science fiction to mainland China; previously, the country’s exposure to western science fiction had been limited to the work of Verne and Wells.