Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

Cheng Jingbo’s fiction has won many accolades, among them the Yinhe Award and Xingyun Award as well as selections to various “Year’s Best” anthologies. She was among the first genre writers to be published in People’s Literature, perhaps the most prestigious mainstream literary market in China.

A children’s book editor, she also translates from English to Chinese. One of her notable translations is Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Recently, she has begun adapting one of her stories into a screenplay for production.

“Under a Dangling Sky” is from the earlier part of Cheng’s career. Sketched with bold, impressionistic strokes, it tells a charming story set in a vibrant world in which magic and science are indistinguishable.

More of Cheng’s fiction may be found in Invisible Planets.

UNDER A DANGLING SKY

Last autumn I moved to Port Gladius in Rainville. At first, I helped the muscle-bound stevedores sort silver shells at the docks, and that was how I met a professor who had come from afar. Because we got along so well, I agreed to give up the silver shells and go work for him.

I loved my new job: collecting a certain kind of sound in Shallow Bay. The bay was the quietest part of the harbor, and no one ever bothered me in my work. The professor gave me a strange contraption that looked like the ear of an outlandish beast. When I immersed the ear in the sea, sounds from below the surface came into my headphones, and the giant nautilus shell on my back (also a machine) would identify the sounds. The sounds the professor wanted would also be recorded.

My headphones stuck up like the feathered crest of a cockatiel. When the sea was calm, I could see my reflection like a slender, lonesome cormorant.

In the sea breeze, my ear-feathers trembled. They were so sensitive that not a single whiff of wind could escape. Most of the time, I would shut my eyes and concentrate on the underwater music. Like Jack’s beanstalk, the fish-slick line slipped through my fingers, dropped into the sea, and drifted with the current into the deep. At the end of the line, heading into the aphotic abyss, was the beast’s ear. Only this time, Jack stood onshore, and the magic beanstalk grew downward without cease.

Standing next to the serene bay, I listened to the whispers from the bottom of the sea thousands of meters below.

The crisp smacks of lazy jellyfish tentacles striking coral reefs; the agitation of brisk schools of fish making sharp turns; even the gentle pop as a single air bubble struggled out of a seam between rocks, only to break apart in its hurried ascent to the surface….

Yet, each evening, as I reeled in the seemingly endless line and returned to the cottage by the shore, the professor shook his head at me, disappointed.

“Still nothing…” He sighed in the last rays of the setting sun. “I’ve wandered all over the world without finding it. Will I ever hear the singing dolphin?”

Whales can sing, but there were no whales around Rainville. This was a paradise for dolphins, and every year, thousands of dolphins came to the bay, following the warm flow of the Pollex Current. None of them sang.

The sky over Rainville was a mystery.

You’d never see such a beautiful sky anywhere else in the world: a crystalline welkin crisscrossed by countless tiny cracks. Everything in the heavens was broken into a mosaic by these lines. From an overcast day to the scarlet clouds of dawn, patches of color gently expanded and percolated, their edges blurring against the dreamlike firmament.

They called this fantastic sight the crystal sky.

It was said that the sky also had to do with Jack and his beanstalk. After the lucky young man climbed down with the golden-egg-laying hen and the talking harp, he chopped down the stalk with an ax. Thereafter, he wandered the world in disguise. To prevent a repeat of Jack’s robbery, the giant above the clouds constructed a large ice dome to cover everywhere the young man traveled to. Some believed that Jack finally arrived in Rainville and never left. The rest of his life was spent under the crystal dome, and the story of Jack and his magic beans became a legend under the ice cover’s seal.

No one had seen the world outside the crystal sky. Clouds and stars had always been mere patterns in the mosaic constructed by a mysterious hand above.

In all Rainville, the spot closest to the mystery was the center of the Thumb Sea in Shallow Bay. There, a giant fountain erupted into the clouds. Some powerful force drew the water from the ocean’s depths and sprayed it miles high. A rainbow-hued halo hovered at the fountain’s misty apex, where the seawater turned into millions of droplets that diffused in the air like wispy fog.

The purple mist, driven by winds high above, drifted back over Port Gladius, and then inland. There, the droplets coalesced into larger globules, and the mist thickened from lavender to royal blue, resulting finally in inky, spongy clouds that could not help but fall as rain. This was why it always rained in the city.

In the region around Rainville, only Shallow Bay enjoyed relatively clear skies. At night, it was possible to see the moon and the stars.

With the arrival of the month of Brumaire, the professor packed up and left, leaving the strange contraption with me. After the departure of that kind old man, I continued to collect undersea sounds, especially at night.

One particularly clear evening, I heard a woman’s voice in the sea.

“My poor Giana…”

Next, the unconcerned voice of a middle-aged man. “What’s wrong?”

“Her eyes aren’t so good.”

“My dear, none of us has great eyesight. That’s nothing to worry about.”

“She fell in love a while ago, but everyone could tell her sweetheart was a submarine—”

“What? Are you telling me that our daughter fell in love with a submarine?”

I glanced around but saw no one. A sea star jumped off the barnacled rocks and splashed into the water.

The night breeze ruffled my ear-feathers. I turned my head and saw a smooth, moon-washed rock rising slowly out of the sea. Before I could doubt my eyes, a second rock rose from the sea as well. Soon, I was surrounded by similar rocks.

Finally, I realized that I was looking at a pod of dolphins. Their exposed backs glowed with a mysterious sheen under the moon.

“I thought dolphins couldn’t talk,” I said to one of them (this was many years later).

“Not only can we talk, but we also sing,” they replied. “Singing isn’t an art limited to the larger cetaceans.”

After spring, Giana was considered fully grown.

She was an interesting creature. Many years ago, she had fallen in love with a submarine. She also loved to chase dangerous propellers and screws, and that was how she had discovered a graveyard of ships.

“Lots and lots of wrecks!” She always told me stories about her adventures when we met, her voice as joyous as a twittering bird. “Some were at the sea bottom, but others were still afloat—I’m sure some kind of whirlpool there was responsible. I can tell you that my submarine will never go there. Oh there were so many ships, all covered by seaweed. It was hideous!”

Oddly, the professor’s machine was incapable of capturing the speech of the dolphins. The nautilus had no trouble recording other sounds: the scraping of an electric eel’s scales across the sand, the crack of eggshells as baby turtles hatched… even whale song posed no difficulty to its sensitive mechanisms.

But the conversation of dolphins stymied it.

“Your feathers are no good,” said a laughing Giana as her tail slapped against the water. “The machine can’t hear us.”

“Then how do you hear each other? Do you rely on sonar?”

“The heart, silly!” She laughed even harder and began to swim in circles. “You can hear us as well because you’re listening with your heart.”

Sometimes I enjoyed sitting on reef rocks and gazing up at the sky.

Giana often came to Shallow Bay in those times. Moonglow dusted the sea spray and distant isles on the horizon like frosted sugar. I took off the ear-feathers and strained to detect sounds coming from beyond the crystal sky. I would then experience the illusion that the moon was a spotlight that gazed down at us from the sky curtain, casting the softest rays onto a pair of players: a human and a dolphin.

“Do you see those stars?” Giana would always ask.

There were no stars at the center of the sky over Rainville. The Milky Way broke there, replaced by a disordered shadow. The stars, seemingly frightened by the shadow, shrank away to the sides.

“Do you see those stars? Do you see them?”

The stars were faint, powerless, distant, their light pale.

“There! That’s the constellation Delphinus!” Giana went on talking to herself. “That was my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s… Hey, are you listening? Look, although the stars are so faint, every time I see them, I think of my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s… kind smile—even though I’ve never met him.

“Long ago, in the time of the ancient Greeks, the greatest human musician, Arion, went to a place called Sicily for a musical competition. On the way back, pirates attacked him, and poor Arion was blindfolded and made to walk the plank. Suspended over the sea, he asked his captors, ‘Let me play one more song.’ The pirates agreed, and he began to strum his lyre.

“As you can see, humans haven’t always been so dumb. His music managed to attract my ancestor, who was hunting for squids nearby. Arion heard a voice say to him, ‘Jump on my back,’ and that he did.”

“Is this the story behind Delphinus?”

“That’s right.” Giana lifted her eyes to look at the stars. “But they’re so faint! I wish they would glow brighter.”

Starglow reflected from her eyes as her voice grew more excited. “If… if only we could pierce the crystal sky and go visit the stars….” She turned to me. “Do you think they’ll glow brighter?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Your mind is filled with such strange notions: submarines, the crystal sky, distant stars…. Are these the concerns of a dutiful child?”

“I can’t stop thinking about them. A voice is always in my head, telling me, Hey Giana, why not go visit the stars?”

The dolphin swept her tail gently through the water and dipped her head into the moonlit sea.

Many people have compared the world with an apple. Rainville itself was also like an apple. The fountain at the center of the Thumb Sea was like the apple’s core, pointing straight up at the distorted shadow that interrupted the Milky Way. People were like bugs living inside the apple, never having glimpsed what it was like outside the peel—only in some places where the peel was a bit translucent could they see, through the mosaic skin, the blurred shadow cast by a distant leaf under the noonday sun.

The only way out was the fountain.

You had to follow the core’s vascular tissue upward, all the way to the long, narrow stem, and out of the apple. Only then would you see that the world was full of other apples and countless leaves. The sky that you had been so entranced by before was nothing more than the shadow of a single leaf.

The fountain was the path through the core. The gigantic, transparent tree sculpted from seawater had its roots deep in the Thumb Sea. As it shot toward the sky, it sprouted new branches and leaves, until, at the top, the lush crown spread out in every direction, turning into surging mist and billowing clouds.

The beanstalk was still here, even if Jack was gone.

No one had ever seen beyond the crystal sky; no one had peeked into the giant’s floating castle.

I knew, long before it happened, what Giana was going to do.

She was familiar with every current and wave in the Thumb Sea; she knew where the water could carry her. The whirlpools at the graveyard of ships were dangerous, but the fountain would rocket her into the heavens.

That night, Rainville was drenched by a violent thunderstorm. The rain slowly seeped through seams in my seaside cottage, leaving meandering trails across the ceiling. The lamp hanging under the eaves creaked and swayed. Muffled pops came from the nautilus shell lying in the corner, like seasoned firewood cracking in a fire. I pulled out the pair of feathered headphones, long neglected, and placed them over my ears.

The wind from the harbor caressed the smooth feathers, and the soft down undulated like the sea, bringing me sounds from the storm.

Struck by a premonition, I got out of bed and rushed into the rain.

I reached the shore of Shallow Bay at the same time as the eye of the storm. Clouds retreated to reveal a patch of clear night sky. Far away over the sea, the sky-bridging fountain was pumping furiously. Behind me, Rainville lay deep in slumber, blanketed by the storm. Not a single light was on.

The air above the Thumb Sea was unusually tranquil. The moon and the stars gleamed tenderly.

Do you see those stars? Do you see them?

I strained to see the fountain more clearly. Under the dark blue welkin, innumerable currents had gathered like so many vines, twisting together as they rose. The watery vines shone with the moon’s brilliance, and as they reached the spot closest to heaven, they scattered into millions of mysterious, glittering stars. It was just like that night many years ago when I had first heard the speech of the dolphins: my sight tangled with the moonbeams, and the curtain over the world was gradually pulled away. The fountain turned into the enchanted beanstalk, which was growing irrepressibly, pumping water infused with the strength of the ocean’s heart, sprouting branch after branch, brushing up against the crystal sky.

But they’re so faint! I wish they would glow brighter.

The spraying droplets at the top of the fountain dissolved into the chaotic maw at the center of the sky dome. Thousands of new stars were born in that shadow before coalescing into thick fog. Away from that gloomy patch, the silver stars of Delphinus twinkled with an enigmatic light.

Suddenly, the constellation fell into the sea. As the sea roiled with unaccustomed brilliance, a silvery curved blade leapt out of the water. Weaving and dodging, slashing and slicing, the blade cut through moonbeams and swam for the enchanted beanstalk.

Giana!

If… if only we could pierce the crystal sky and go visit the stars….

The mad child was going to climb up the beanstalk to the giant’s castle. But… if the crystal sky was truly an ice cover intended to keep us from the secrets of heaven, how could Giana reach the stars? Striving up the raging torrents rising from the heart of the Thumb Sea, Giana’s nimble figure could be glimpsed from time to time. Would the fountain carry her miles and miles up? Would she see what was above the clouds? Would she break through the crystal sky and find the stars?

I can’t stop thinking about them. A voice is always in my head, telling me, Hey Giana, why not go visit the stars?

Finally, the silvery blade cut through the silky moonlight and, propelled by the surging currents, reached the top of the fountain. Innumerable dolphins—more than I had ever seen in Shallow Bay—poked their heads out of the sea, gazing at the top of the fountain. Their high-pitched chatter was like the drip-drip-drip from stalactites.

Giana! Giana! You’re a credit to all dolphinkind!

The silver figure drifted into the sky like the millions of scattering droplets. It floated above the purple mist. Soon, it disappeared beyond the clouds.

A long moment hung suspended, passing and not passing.

The sky brightened abruptly. A deafening noise crashed from the top of the fountain. Countless cracks zigzagged from the center of the dark blue welkin. Wind and stars tumbled through the opening and fell into the sea. The dome continued to crack open, as if the beanstalk was pushing, growing, forcing its way deeper beyond the barrier. My head rang from the thunderous noise, and my eyes were filled with fantastic visions that eventually melded into a single blinding brightness.

The crystal sky fell.

A moment later, the moon and stars revealed their true nature.

I had never imagined the moon would be full of shadows on its unblemished face. I had never imagined the stars… to be so bright.

And the mystery, the chaotic center, also revealed its truth—

It was a planet.

Our world had always been right next to another: two apples in a cluster. Though it loomed so close to us, we had never been aware of its presence. The shadow it cast hid the heart of the Milky Way, and its own true shape had been obscured by the crystal sky.

It was Giana who revealed the secret. The spot where the gravities of the two planets balanced each other was also the top of the fountain. There, droplets of water, weightless, scattered in every direction. The arrival of Giana gave weight again to this silent terminus of the world—she had been caught by the gravity of the other planet…. And so, the crystal sky cracked as a bug tried to climb out of the apple, broke apart as Giana fell toward a new ocean.

But… Giana… I recalled the graveyard of ships she had once described to me. The whirlpools had torn apart the sails and spars, broken the decks and oars…. Giana’s fall had been powerful enough to shatter the crystal sky. Where was she now?

Under the dim, reddish glow of the moon, all the dolphins gazed up silently.

“There! That’s the constellation Delphinus!” Giana used to tell me all the time.

All the stars were falling toward the sea. They glowed for a while in the water before fading. Far away, new stars were rising… one… another one… so many of them… and soon, every watching dolphin recognized the silvery pattern.

Giana, a credit to all dolphinkind, had smashed the barrier that had blinded us all from the truth and leapt into heaven. Just like Jack climbing up the beanstalk to the giant’s castle; just like a bug climbing up the stem to stare at the noonday sun.

She had become one with the eternal stars.

This was the story of Delphinus.

There are several Greek myths about Delphinus. The tale about Arion is just one of them.

Here, I tell a story about Delphinus using the language of science fiction. It was published in Science Fiction World magazine in a section known as the “gray area.” It’s hard to say if stories published there meet the definition of science fiction.

Thanks to David Brin for inspiring me with his story “The Crystal Spheres.”