“But I can’t get to them!” Li Bai stomped his foot, which shot him meters into the air. He curled into a ball in midair, miserably burying his face between his knees in a fetal position; he slowly descended under the weak gravitational pull of the Earth’s shell. “At the start of the poetry composition, I immediately set out to program software that could analyze poetry. At that point, technology once again met that unsurpassable obstacle in the pursuit of art. Even now, I’m still unable to write software that can judge and appreciate poetry.” He pointed up at the Cloud of Poems. “Yes, with the help of mighty technology, I’ve written the ultimate works of poetry. But I can’t find them amid the Cloud of Poems, ai …”

“Is the soul and essence of intelligent life truly untouchable by technology?” Bigtooth loudly asked the Cloud of Poems above. He’d become increasingly philosophical after all he’d endured.

“Since the Cloud of Poems encompasses all possible poems, then naturally some portion of those poems describes all of our pasts and all of our futures, possible and impossible. The bug-bug Yi Yi would certainly find a poem that describes how he felt one night thirty years ago while clipping his fingernails, or a menu from a lunch twelve years in his future. Emissary Bigtooth, too, might find a poem that describes the color of a particular scale on his leg five years from now….”

Li Bai had touched down once more on the ground; as he spoke, he took out two chips, shimmering under the light of the Cloud of Poems. “These are my parting gifts for you two. The quantum computer used your names as keywords to search through the Cloud of Poems, and found several quadrillion poems that describe your various possible future lives. Of course, these are only a tiny portion of the poems with you as subject in the Cloud of Poems. I’ve only read a couple dozen of these. My favorite is a seven-character-line poem about Yi Yi describing a romantic riverbank scene between him and a beautiful woman from a faraway village….

“After I leave, I hope humanity and the remaining dinosaurs can get along with each other, and that humanity can get along with itself even better. If someone nukes a hole into the shell of the hollow Earth, it’s going to be a real problem…. The good poems in the Cloud of Poems don’t belong to anyone yet. Hopefully humans will be able to write some of them.”

“What happened to me and the woman, afterward?” Yi Yi asked.

Under the silver light of the Cloud of Poems, Li Bai chuckled. “Together, you lived happily ever after.”

THE THINKER

TRANSLATED BY JOHN CHU

THE SUN