“Art is the only reason for a civilization to exist!” someone else said.

“Fuck that, I have plenty of reasons to go on,” Yan Dong said loudly.

Everyone laughed, then fell silent as they thought back on ten years of hard times. One by one, they counted their reasons to go on. Finally, they changed themselves from survivors of a disaster back to artists again.

Yan Dong took a bottle of sorghum liquor from her bag. They warmed up as each one took a swig then passed it on to the next. They built a fire on the vast riverbank and heated up a chainsaw until it would start in the bitter cold. They all stepped onto the river, and the chainsaw growled as it cut into the ice. White crumbs of ice fell around them. Soon, they pulled their first block of glittering, translucent ice from the Songhua River.

CLOUD OF POEMS

TRANSLATED BY CARMEN YILING YAN

A yacht bore Yi Yi and his two companions across the South Pacific on a voyage dedicated to poetry. Their destination was the South Pole. Upon a successful arrival in a few days, they would climb through the Earth’s crust to view the Cloud of Poems.

Today, the sky and seas were clear. For the purposes of poem making, the workings of the world seemed to be laid out in glass. Looking up, one could see the North American continent in rare clarity in the sky. On the vast world-encompassing dome as seen from the eastern hemisphere, the continent looked like a patch of missing plaster on a wall.

Oh, yes, humanity lived inside the Earth nowadays. To be more accurate, humanity lived inside the Air, for the Earth had become a gas balloon. The Earth had been hollowed out, leaving only a thin shell about a hundred kilometers thick. The continents and oceans remained in their old places, only they had all migrated to the inside of the shell. The atmosphere also remained, moved inside as well. So now the Earth was a balloon, with the oceans and continents clinging to its inner surface. The hollow Earth still rotated, but the significance of the rotation was much different than before: It now produced gravity. The attractional force generated by the bit of mass forming Earth’s crust was so weak as to be insignificant, so now the Earth’s “gravity” had to come from the centrifugal force of rotation. But this kind of “gravity” was unevenly distributed across the regions of the world.

It was strongest at the equator, being about 1.5 times Earth’s original gravity. With increase of latitude came a gradual decrease in gravity—the two poles experienced weightlessness. The yacht was currently at the exact latitude that experienced 1.0 gees as per the old scale, but Yi Yi nonetheless found it difficult to recall the sensation of standing on the old, solid Earth.