Collecting Ice

An immense fleet of airplanes flew at an altitude of five kilometers along the coastline. This was the most motley collection of airplanes in history. It was composed of all types, ranging from Boeing jumbo jets to mosquito-like light aircraft. Every major press service in the world had dispatched news planes. In addition, research organizations and governments had dispatched observation planes. This chaotic air armada trailed closely behind a short wake of thick white vapor, like a flock of sheep chasing after its shepherd. The wake was left by the low-temperature artist. It constantly urged the planes behind it to fly faster. To wait for them, it had to endure a rate of flight slower than crawling. (For someone who jumped through space-time at will, light speed was already crawling.) The whole way, it grumbled that this pace would kill its inspiration.

In the airplanes behind it, reporters rattled away, asking endless questions over the radio. The low-temperature artist had no desire to answer any of them. It was only interested in talking to Yan Dong, sitting in the Harbin Y-12 that China Central Television had rented. As a result, the reporters grew quiet. They listened carefully to the conversation between the two artists.

“Is your home within the Milky Way?” Yan Dong asked. The Harbin Y-12 was the plane closest to the low-temperature artist. She could see the flying ball of ice intermittently through the white vapor. This wake trailing it was formed from oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere condensing in the ultralow temperatures around the ice ball. Sometimes, the plane would accidentally brush the wake’s billows of white mist. A thick coat of frost would immediately coat the plane’s windows.

“My home isn’t part of any galaxy. It sits in the vast and empty void between galaxies.”

“Your planet must be extremely cold.”

“We don’t have a planet. The low-temperature civilization developed in a cloud of dark matter. That realm is indeed extremely cold. With difficulty, life snatched a little heat from the near-absolute-zero environment. It sucked in every thread of radiation that came from distant stars. Once the low-temperature civilization learned how to leave, we couldn’t wait to go to the closest warm planet in the Milky Way. On this world, we had to maintain a low-temperature environment to live, so we became that warm planet’s low-temperature artists.”

“The low-temperature art you’re talking about is sculpting ice and snow?”

“Oh, no. No. Using a temperature far lower than a world’s mean temperature to affect the world so as to produce artistic effects, this is all part of the low-temperature art. Sculpting ice and snow is just the low-temperature art that suits this world. The temperature of ice and snow is what this world considers a low temperature. For a dark-matter world, that would be a high temperature. For a stellar world, lava would be considered low-temperature material.”

“We seem to overlap in what art we consider beautiful.”