带上她的眼睛 3 中英故事版

When I returned to bed an hour later, she was still humming. I had no idea if it was still Debussy, but it made no difference. That delicate music fluttered through my dreams. Some time later – I’m not sure how long – her humming turned into shouting. Her cries stirred me from sleep. She wanted to go outside again. ‘Weren’t you just looking at the Moon?’ I was angry. ‘But it’s different now. Remember the clouds in the west? They might have floated over by now. The Moon will be darting in and out of the clouds; I want to see the light and shadows dance on the plains outside. How beautiful that must look. It’s a different kind of music. Please, take my eyes outside!’ My head throbbed with anger, but I went out. The clouds had floated on, and the Moon was shining through them. Its light filtered hazily over the grassland. It was as though the Earth were pondering deep and ancient memories. ‘You’re like a sentimental eighteenth-century poet. Tragically unfit for these times. Even more so for an astronaut,’ I said, peering into the night sky. I took off her eyes and hung them from a branch of a nearby salt cedar. ‘If you want to look at the Moon, you can do it by yourself. I really need to sleep. Tomorrow I have to get back to the space center and continue my woefully prosaic life.’ That soft voice whispered from her eyes, but I could no longer hear what she was saying. I went back to the cabin without another word. It was daytime when I awoke. Dark clouds covered the sky, shrouding the Taklamakan in a light drizzle. The eyes were still hanging from the tree, mist covering the lenses. I carefully wiped them clean and put them on. I assumed that after watching the Moon for an entire night she would be fast asleep by now. However, I heard her sobbing quietly. A wave of pity overwhelmed me. ‘I’m really sorry. I was just too tired last night.’ ‘No, it isn’t you,’ she said between sobs. ‘The sky grew overcast at half past three. And after five o’clock, it started to rain...’ ‘You didn’t sleep at all?’ I nearly shouted. ‘It started raining, and I... I couldn’t see the sun when it rose,’ she choked out. ‘I really wanted to see the sun rise over the plains. I wanted to see it more than anything...’ Something had melted my heart. Her tears flowed through my thoughts, and I pictured her small nose twitching as she sniveled. My eyes actually felt moist. I had to admit: she had taught me something over the past twenty-four hours, though I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what. It was hazy, like the light and shadows moving over the grasslands. My eyes now saw a different world because of it. ‘There’ll always be another sunrise. I’ll definitely take your eyes out again to see it. Or maybe I’ll see it with you in person. How does that sound?’ Her sobbing stopped. Suddenly she whispered to me. ‘Listen...’ I didn’t hear anything, but I tensed. ‘It’s the first bird of the morning. There are birds out, even in the rain.’ Her voice was solemn, as though she were listening to the peal of bells marking the end of an era.

Chapter 2     Sunset 6 

My memories of this experience quickly faded once I had returned to my drab existence and busy job. When I remembered to wash the clothes I had worn during my trip – which was some time afterwards – I discovered a few grass seeds in the cuffs of my trousers. At the same time, a tiny seed also remained buried within the depths of my subconscious. In the lonely desert of my soul, that seed had already sprouted, though its shoots were so tiny they were barely perceptible. This may have happened unconsciously, but at the end of each grueling work day I could feel the natural poetry of the evening breeze stir against my face. Birdsong could catch my attention. I would even stand on the overpass at twilight and watch as night enveloped the city... The world was still dreary to my eyes, but it was now sprinkled with specks of verdant green – specks that grew steadily in number. 

Once I began to perceive this change, I thought of her again. She began to drift into my idle mind and even into my dreams. Over and over again, I would see that cramped cockpit, that strangely insulated spacesuit... Later on, these things retreated from my consciousness. Only one thing protruded from the void: that pencil, drifting in zero gravity around her head. For some reason, I would see that pencil floating in front of me whenever I shut my eyes. One day I was walking into the vast lobby of the space center when a giant mural, one that I had passed countless times before, suddenly caught my eye. The mural depicted Earth viewed from space; a gem of deepest blue. That pencil again floated before my mind’s eye, but now it was superimposed over the mural. I heard her voice again. 

I don’t want to be closed in. 

Realization flashed through my brain like lightning. Space wasn’t the only place with zero gravity! I ran upstairs like a madman and banged on the Director’s door. He wasn’t in. Guided by what felt like a premonition, I flew down to the small room where the eyes were stored. The director was there, gazing at the girl on the large monitor. She was still inside that sealed-off cockpit, still wearing that ‘spacesuit’. The image was frozen; almost certainly a recording. ‘You’re here for her, I suppose,’ he said, still looking at the monitor. ‘Where is she?’ My voice boomed inside the small room. ‘You may have already guessed the truth. She’s the navigator of Sunset 6.’ The strength drained from my muscles and I collapsed onto the carpet. It all made sense now. 

The Sunset Project had originally planned to launch ten ships, from Sunset 1 to Sunset 10. After the Sunset 6 disaster, however, the project had been abandoned. The project was an exploratory flight mission like many before it. It followed the same basic procedures as each of the space center’s other flight missions. There was just one difference – the Sunset vessels were not headed to outer space. These ships were built to dive into the depths of the Earth. One-and-a-half centuries after the first space flight, humanity began to probe in the opposite direction. The Sunset-series terracraft were its first attempt at this form of exploration. Four years ago, I had watched the Sunset 1 launch on television. It was late at night. A blinding fireball lit up the heart of the Turpan Depression so bright it caused the clouds in Xinjiang’s night sky to glow with the gorgeous colors of dawn. By the time the fireball faded, Sunset 1 was already underground. At the center of this circle of red-hot, scorched earth now churned a lake of molten magma. White-hot lava seethed and boiled, hurling bright molten columns into the air... The tremors could be felt as far away as Urumqi as the terracraft burrowed through the planet’s inner layers. 

Each of the Sunset Project’s first five missions successfully completed their subterranean voyages and returned safely to the Earth’s surface. Sunset 5 set a record for the furthest any human had traveled beneath the planet’s surface: 3,100 kilometers. It was a record that Sunset 6 did not intend to break, and with good reason. Modern geophysics had concluded that the boundary between the Earth’s mantle and core lay between 3,400 and 3,500 kilometers underground; this convergence is referred to academically as the ‘Gutenberg Discontinuity’. Breaching this boundary meant entering the planet’s iron-nickel core. Upon entering the core, the density of the surrounding matter would abruptly and exponentially increase to levels that went beyond the Sunset 6’s design specifications to navigate.

Sunset 6’s voyage began smoothly. It took the terracraft all of two hours to pass through the boundary between the Earth’s surface and mantle, also known as the ‘Moho’. After resting upon the sliding surface of the Eurasian plate for five hours, the ship began its slow three-thousand-plus kilometer journey through the mantle. Space travel may be lonely, but at least astronauts can gaze at the infinity of the universe and the majesty of the stars. 

The terranauts voyaging through the planet, however, had nothing but the sensation of endlessly increasing density to guide them. All they could glean from peering into the terracraft’s holographic rearview monitors was the blinding glare of the seething magma following in their ship’s wake. As the craft plunged deeper, the magma would merge behind the aft section, instantly sealing the path that the ship had just forged. A terranaut once described the experience. Whenever she and her fellow crew members shut their eyes, they would see the onrushing magma gather behind them, pressing down and sealing them in all over again. The image followed them like a phantom, and it made the voyagers aware of the massive and ever-increasing immensity of matter pressing against their ship. This sense of claustrophobia was difficult for those on the surface to comprehend, but it tortured each and every terranaut. 

Sunset 6 completed each of its research tasks with flying colors. The craft traveled at approximately fifteen kilometers per hour; at this rate, it would require twenty hours to reach its target depth. Fifteen hours and forty minutes into their voyage, however, the crew received an alert. Subsurface radar had picked up a sudden increase of density in their vicinity, leaping from 6.3 grams per cubic centimeter to 9.5 grams. The surrounding matter was no longer silicate-based but primarily an iron-nickel alloy; it was also no longer solid but liquid. Despite having only achieved a depth of 2,500 kilometers, all signs currently indicated that Sunset 6 and its crew had entered the planet’s core. 

The crew would later learn that they had chanced upon a fissure in the Earth’s mantle – one that led directly to its core. The fissure was filled with a high-pressure liquid alloy of iron and nickel from the Earth’s core. Thanks to this crack, the Gutenberg discontinuity had reached up one thousand kilometers closer to the Sunset 6’s flight path. The ship immediately took emergency measures to change course. It was during this attempt to escape that disaster truly struck. The ship’s neutron-laced hull was strong enough to withstand the massive and sudden pressure increase to 1,600 tons per cubic centimeter, but the terracraft itself was comprised of three parts: a fusion engine at the bow, a central cabin, and a rear-mounted drive engine. When it attempted to change direction, the section linking the fusion engine to the main cabin fractured due to the density and pressure of liquid iron-nickel alloy that far exceeded the ship’s operating parameters. 

The images broadcast from Sunset 6’s neutrino communicator showed the forward engine splitting from the hull only to be instantly engulfed by the crimson glow of the liquid metal. A Sunset ship’s fusion engine fired a super-heated jet that cut through the material in front of the vessel. Without it, the drive engine could barely push the Sunset 6 an inch through the planet’s solid inner layers. The density of the Earth’s core is startling, but the neutrons in the ship’s hull were even denser. As the buoyancy created by the liquid iron-nickel alloy did not exceed the ship’s deadweight, Sunset 6 began to sink towards the Earth’s core. 

One-and-a-half centuries after landing on the Moon, humanity was finally capable of venturing to Mercury. It had been anticipated that we would travel from mantle to core in a similar time frame. Now a terracraft had accidentally entered the core, and, just like an Apollo-era vessel spinning off course and into the depths of space, the chance of a successful rescue was simply nonexistent. Fortunately, the hull of the ship’s main cabin was sturdy, and Sunset 6’s neutrino communications system maintained a solid connection with the control center on the surface. In the year that followed, the crew of the Sunset 6 persisted in their work, sending streams of valuable data gleaned from the core to the surface. Encased as they were in thousands of kilometers of rock, air and survival were the least of their worries – what they lacked more than anything else was space. They were pummeled by temperatures of over five thousand degrees Celsius and surrounded by pressures that could crush carbon into diamonds within seconds. 

Only neutrinos could escape the incredible density of the material in which the Sunset 6 was entombed. The ship was completely trapped in a giant furnace of molten metal. To the ship’s crew, Dante’s Inferno would depict a paradise. What could life mean in a world like this? Is there any word beyond ‘fragile’ that can describe it? Immense psychological pressure shredded the nerves of the Sunset 6’s crew. One day, the ship’s geological engineer woke, leapt from his cot and threw open the heat-insulation door protecting his cabin. Even though this was only the first of four such doors, the wave of incandescent heat that washed in through the remaining three layers instantly reduced him to charcoal. To prevent the ship’s imminent destruction, the commander rushed to seal the open door. Although he was successful, he suffered severe burns in the process. The man died after making one last entry into the ship’s log. With one crew member remaining, Sunset 6 continued its voyage through the planet’s darkest depths. 

By now, the interior of the vessel was entirely weightless. The ship had sunk to a depth of 6,800 kilometers – the planet’s deepest point. The last remaining terranaut aboard the Sunset 6 had become the first person to reach the Earth’s core. Her entire world had shrunk to the size of a cramped, stuffy cockpit. She had less than ten square meters to move around in. The ship’s onboard pair of neutrino glasses allowed her a small measure of sensory contact with the planet’s surface. However, this lifeline was doomed to be short-lived, as the craft’s neutrino communications system was nearly out of power. 

By now, the power levels were already too low to support the super-high-speed data relay that these sensory glasses relied on. In fact, the system had lost contact three months ago, just as I was taking the plane back from my vacation in the plains. 

By that time, her eyes were already stored inside my travel bag. That misty, sunless morning on the plains had been her final glimpse of the surface world. From then on, Sunset 6 could only maintain audio and data links with the surface. But late one night this connection had also ceased, sealing her permanently into the planet’s lonely core. Sunset 6’s neutron shell was strong enough to withstand the core’s massive pressure, and the craft’s cyclical life support systems were fully capable of an additional fifty to eighty years of operation. So she would remain alive, at the center of the Earth, in a room so small she could traverse its area in less than a minute. I hardly dared imagine her final farewell to the surface world. However, when the Director played the recording, I was shocked. The neutrino beam to the surface was already weak when the message was sent, and her voice occasionally cut out, but she sounded calm. 

‘...have received your final advisement. I’ll do all I can to follow the entire research plan in the days to come. Someday, maybe generations from now, another ship might find the Sunset 6 and dock with it. If someone does enter here, I can only hope that the data I leave behind will be of use. Please rest assured; I have made a life for myself down here and adapted to these surroundings; I don’t feel constrained or closed-in anymore. The entire world surrounds me. When I close my eyes, I see the great plains up there on the surface. I can still see every one of the flowers that I named. ‘Goodbye.’

that time, her eyes were already stored inside my travel bag. That misty, sunless morning on the plains had been her final glimpse of the surface world. From then on, Sunset 6 could only maintain audio and data links with the surface. But late one night this connection had also ceased, sealing her permanently into the planet’s lonely core. Sunset 6’s neutron shell was strong enough to withstand the core’s massive pressure, and the craft’s cyclical life support systems were fully capable of an additional fifty to eighty years of operation. So she would remain alive, at the center of the Earth, in a room so small she could traverse its area in less than a minute. I hardly dared imagine her final farewell to the surface world. However, when the Director played the recording, I was shocked. The neutrino beam to the surface was already weak when the message was sent, and her voice occasionally cut out, but she sounded calm. ‘...have received your final advisement. I’ll do all I can to follow the entire research plan in the days to come. Someday, maybe generations from now, another ship might find the Sunset 6 and dock with it. If someone does enter here, I can only hope that the data I leave behind will be of use. Please rest assured; I have made a life for myself down here and adapted to these surroundings; I don’t feel constrained or closed-in anymore. The entire world surrounds me. When I close my eyes, I see the great plains up there on the surface. I can still see every one of the flowers that I named. ‘Goodbye.’

Epilogue    A Transparent World 

Many years have passed, and I have visited many places. Everywhere I go, I stretch out upon the Earth. I have lain on the beaches of Hainan Island, on Alaskan snow, among Russia’s white birches and on the scalding sands of the Sahara. And every time the world became transparent to my mind’s eye. I saw the terracraft, anchored more than six thousand kilometers below me at the center of that translucent sphere, whose hull once bore the name Sunset 6; I felt her heartbeat echo up to me through thousands of kilometers. As I imagined the golden light of the sun and the silvery glow of the Moon shining down to the planet’s core, I could hear her humming ‘Clair de Lune’, and her soft voice: 

‘...How beautiful that must look. It’s a different kind of music...’ 

One thought comforted me: even if I traveled to the most distant corner of the Earth, I would never be any farther from her.

.The End.