The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin Read Free Book Online Page B

never materialized. What in fact followed was beyond anything what anyone could have ever imagined.
    After our subterranean city's celebratory rally had ended, I donned my thermal suit and ascended to the surface, alone. The mountains of my childhood had already been leveled by the super-excavators, leaving only bare rock face and frozen Earth. The bleak emptiness was broken by splotches of stark white that covered the land as far as the eye could see; the salt marshes left behind by the great ocean tide. Before me loomed the city of my father and my grandfather. What had once been a home to 10 million now lay in a pile of ruins. The Earth Engines' blue glow dragged long shadows from the exposed steel skeletons of the city's skyscrapers as they reached from the Earth like the fossil remains of prehistoric beasts.
    The repeated floods and meteorite strikes had destroyed virtually everything that had once stood on the Earth's surface. All that humankind and nature had wrought over millennia lay in ruins. Our world had been reduced to a Mars-like desolation.
    Shortly thereafter I noticed that Kayoko had become restless. She would often leave our son to fly off in the car on her own. When she returned, she would only say that she had been to the Western Hemisphere. Then finally, one day she dragged me along.
    We traveled for two hours at Mach 4 in our flying car until we could finally see the Sun rising over the Pacific, barely the size of a baseball. It illuminated the frozen ocean below with its faint, cold light.
    Kayoko put the car into hover at an elevation of three miles. She then produced a long tube from behind our backs. As she removed its cover, I saw that it was an astronomical telescope, the type that hobbyists use. Kayoko opened the car's window and pointed the telescope at the Sun. Then she asked me to look.
    Through the telescope's colored lens I could see the Sun, magnified by several hundred magnitudes. I could clearly see even the Sun's faint halo and the sunspots ever so slowly moving across its surface.
    Kayoko connected the telescope to a computer that she had also brought along and captured an image of the Sun. She then opened another image of the Sun on the screen and said, “This is an image of the Sun from four hundred years ago.” As she spoke, the computer began comparing the two images.
    “Do you see that?” she asked, pointing at the screen. “All the parameters, the luminosity, the pixel arrays, the pixel probability, the layer statistics — they are all exactly the same!”
    I shook my head. “And what does that show? A toy telescope, a basic image processing program and you, an ignorant amateur.” I paused, but then continued. “Just forget about it; don't believe the rumors!”
    “You're an idiot,” she shot back, taking back the telescope and turning the flying car around.
    Only as she did so did I notice a number of other flying cars in the distance, both above and below us. They were hovering in the air, like we had been, a telescope extending from every car toward the Sun.
    Several months later the terrible theory began spreading across the entire world like a wildfire. More and more people took it upon themselves to study the Sun with ever larger and more precise instruments. An NGO even came to launch a group of probes toward the Sun. After three months the probes hit the Sun. The data they sent back finally proved the fact: In the past 400 years, the Sun had not changed, not changed at all.
    All around the world, the subterranean cities turned into bubbling volcanoes of unrest threatening to explode at any moment. In this atmosphere, Kayoko and I placed our son in a fostering center in accordance with the laws of the Unity Government. As we returned home, we both felt the undeniable truth that the only strand holding us together had been removed. As we passed the central plaza, we came upon a rally in full swing. We saw that some of the instigators were handing out weapons to the