Wandering earth

Chapter 3 Bring Her Eyes
After working continuously for more than two months, I was really tired, so I asked the director to give me two days off to go on a short trip to relax.The director agreed, on the condition that I bring another pair of eyes.I also agreed, so he took me to get the eyes.The eyes are kept in a small room at the end of the corridor in the control center, and there are still a dozen pairs left.

The director handed me a pair of eyes, pointed to the big screen in front, and introduced the owner of the eyes to me.She was a little girl, petite in her fat space suit, looking pathetic, apparently just realizing that space was not the romantic paradise she imagined in her university library, and maybe even worse than hell in some ways. some.

"I'm sorry to trouble you." She bowed to me again and again.It was the softest sound I'd ever heard, and I imagined it wafting from outer space like a breeze blowing through the massive, crude steel structures of the track, making them instantly as soft as plasticine.

"Not at all, I'm glad to have company. Where do you want to go?" I said boldly.

"What, you haven't decided where to go yet?" She looked very happy, but I immediately felt two doubts.First, there is a delay in communication between the ground and outer space.Even on the moon, there was a two-second delay, and the asteroid belt was even longer, but her responses barely felt the delay.That is to say, she is now in low-earth orbit, there is no need to transfer back to the ground, the cost and time are not much, and there is no need to ask others to take the eyes on vacation.The second is the space suit on her body.As a personal space suit engineer, I find this spacesuit odd: There is no radiation protection system visible on the suit, and there is no glare protection system on the visor of the helmet next to her.I also noticed that the insulation and cooling system of this suit is very well developed.

"Which space station is she on?" I turned to ask the director.

"Don't ask this yet." The director said with a gloomy face.

"Don't ask, okay?" She also said on the screen, still with that pitiful and soft-hearted look.

"Aren't you in confinement?" I joked, because the cabin she was in was very narrow, apparently the cockpit of a spacecraft, with various complicated navigation systems flickering one after another, without windows or Looking at the screen, only a weightless pencil swirling above her head indicates that she is in space.After hearing what I said, she and the director seemed to be taken aback for a moment, and I quickly said, "Okay, I won't ask you what I shouldn't know, you should hurry up and decide where we are going."

With her hands clasped across her chest and her eyes half-closed, she seemed to be deciding whether to live or die, or to think that Earth would blow up after our short trip.I couldn't help laughing out loud.

"Oh, it's not easy for me. If you read Helen Keller's "If You Give Me Three Days of Light", you can understand how difficult it is!"

"We don't have three days, only two days. In terms of time, people in this era are poor. But luckier than that blind man born in the nineteenth century, my eyes and yours can reach any place on the earth within three hours." place."

"Then go where we went before we set sail!" She told me about the place, and I went with her eyes.

Prairie
This is the intersection of mountains and plains, grasslands and forests. It is more than 2000 kilometers away from the space center where I work, and it only takes a few minutes to get there by ionospheric plane.The Taklamakan in front of us, after several generations of hard work, has turned from a desert into a grassland, and after several generations of strong population control, it has once again become an inaccessible place.Now, the prairie stretches from my front to the sky, and the Tianshan Mountains in the distance are covered with dark green forests, and several mountains have silver snow caps.I pulled out her eyes and put them on.

The so-called eyes are a pair of sensor glasses.When you wear it, all the images you see will be sent out by UHF information waves, and will be received by another person who also wears sensor glasses in the distance, so that person can see what you see Everything, as if you were wearing that person's eyes.

Now, there are millions of people who have been working on the moon and the asteroid belt for many years, and the cost of their vacations back to the earth is staggering.Therefore, the stingy space agency designed this thing, so that every astronaut living in outer space has another pair of eyes on the earth, and the lucky ones who can really go on vacation on the earth will bring this pair of eyes, so that the body A homesick in outer space shares his joy.At first, the gadget was considered a laughing stock, but later it became popular due to the considerable subsidies that people who took it "vacation" could get.The most cutting-edge technology has been adopted, and the artificial eye has become more and more refined. Now, it can collect the brain waves of the person wearing it, and emit his sense of touch and taste together.Therefore, taking an extra pair of eyes on vacation has become a public welfare activity undertaken by the ground staff of the aerospace system.Of course, not everyone is happy to wear eyes again due to privacy etc. on vacation, but I don't mind this time.

I sighed over it all, but from her eyes I heard a soft sob.

"After I left last time, I often dreamed here, and now I am back in my dream!" Her thin voice came, "I feel like I rushed out of the deep, deep water to breathe air. I'm too scared It's closed."

I literally heard her take a deep breath.

I said, "However, compared with the space around you, this grassland is too small."

She was silent, and seemed to have stopped breathing.

"Ah, of course, people in space are still closed. In the [-]th century, a pilot named Yeager once said that he described the astronauts in the spaceship, saying that they were like..."

"Meat in a can."

We all laughed.She suddenly exclaimed: "Ah, flowers, there are flowers! I didn't have them when I came last time!" Yes, the vast grasslands are dotted with little flowers everywhere. "Can you take a closer look at that flower?" I knelt down and looked, "Oh, it's so beautiful! Can you smell it? No, don't pull it out!" I had to lie half down on the ground and smell a faint fragrance , "Ah, I smell it too, it's really like a faint serenade!"

I smiled and shook my head. This is an era of unpredictable trends. Girls are extremely impetuous. Sister Lin who sheds tears like this is really too rare.

"Shall we give this little flower a name? Well...let's call it Mengmeng. Shall we take a look at that one again? What should it be called? Well, let's call it Xiaoyu. Let's look at that one—— Ah, thanks - look at its light blue color, its name should be Moonlight..."

We just look at the flowers one by one, smell the flowers, and then name them.She was intoxicated by it, endlessly, and forgot everything.I got so tired of this little girl game that by the time I finally could stop it, we had named hundreds of flowers.

When I looked up, I found that I had walked a long way, so I went back to get the backpack I left behind.When I picked up the backpack on the grass, I heard her scream again: "Oh my god, you stepped on Xiaoxue!" I picked up the white wild flower and thought it was ridiculous, so I covered it with both hands. A little flower asked her, "What are their names?"

"Be careful, don't hurt them again! The one on the left is called Crystal, which is also white, and has three separate leaves on its stem; the one on the right is called Flamingo, pink, with four leaves on the stem, and two One piece is single, and the next two pieces are connected together."

She was right, and I was a little moved.

"You see, I know each other with them. In the long days to come, I will think about each of them over and over again, like reading a beautiful fairy tale book. The world there is so wonderful!"

"If you keep on being so boyishly sentimental, those critical space psychics will keep you on Earth forever."

I wandered aimlessly on the prairie, and soon came to a small stream hidden in the grass.I stepped over and continued to move forward. She stopped me and said, "I really want to put my hand into the stream." I squatted down and put my hand into the stream, and a coolness flowed through my body.Her eyes transmitted this feeling to her far away in space with UHF information waves, and I heard her exclamation again.

"It's hot there, isn't it?" I thought of her cramped control cabin and her highly insulated spacesuit.

"Hot, hot as hell. Oh my god, this is the wind of the prairie!" I just took my hands out of the water, and the breeze blew on my wet hands, "No, don't move, this is really heaven the wind!" I held my hands up to the prairie breeze until the water was blown dry.Then, at her request, I soaked my hand in the stream again, and then lifted it into the wind to pass on the feeling of heaven to her.We spent a long time like this.

I went on the road again, and after walking in silence for a while, she said softly, "The world over there is really nice."

I said, "I don't know, the gray life has dulled my senses on that side."

"How can it be! How many feelings this world can give people! To explain these feelings clearly is like explaining how many raindrops there are in a thunderstorm. Looking at the big white clouds in the sky, they are silver and white. I think they seem to be solid. , like a high mountain made of luminous jade. The grassland below seems to be gaseous, as if all the green grass flew away from the earth and became a sea of ​​green clouds. Look! When the cloud covered the sun and drifted away, the grassland How majestic is the change of light and shadow! Look at these, can't you really feel something?"

……

I took her eyes around the grassland for a day.She is eager to see every wild flower and every grass on the prairie, to see every ray of sunshine jumping in the grass, and to hear every sound on the prairie.A stream that suddenly appeared, a small fish in the stream, would make her excited; an unexpected breeze, and the fragrance of green grass in the wind would make her cry... I feel that she is very interested in this The world is emotionally rich to a morbid degree.

Before sunset, I walked to a lonely white cottage in the grassland.It was a small hotel for tourists, and it seemed that no one had visited it for a long time. Only a dull old-fashioned robot looked after everything in the hotel.I was tired and hungry, but I was only halfway through dinner, and she suggested that we go to watch the sunset right away.

"Watching the sunset gradually disappear and the night slowly fall into the forest, it's like listening to the most beautiful symphony in the universe." She said intoxicated.I secretly groaned, but I still dragged my heavy legs.

The sunset on the prairie is indeed beautiful, but her emotion for this beauty casts a strange color on it all.

"You cherish these ordinary things very much." I said to her on the way back.By this time the night was dark and the sky was full of stars.

"Why don't you? It's like living," she said.

"It is impossible for me, and most of the others, to do this. In this day and age, it is too easy to get. Needless to say, material things, even the beautiful environment of blue sky and green water, the tranquility of the countryside and isolated islands are all worth it. It is hard to get; even the love that people thought was the hardest to find before, can be experienced at least temporarily on the virtual reality network. So people no longer value anything, and when faced with a lot of fruits at their fingertips, they pick up a bite and throw it away Lost."

"But there are people who don't have these fruits in front of them." She whispered.

I felt like I stung her, but for some reason, we didn't speak any more on the way back.

That night, I dreamed of her, wearing a spacesuit in that small control cabin, with tears in her eyes, she stretched out her hand and shouted to me: "Take me out quickly, I'm afraid of being sealed!" I woke up and found her Really calling me.I slept lying down with her eyes on.

"Would you please take me out? Let's go see the moon, it's time for the moon to rise!"

My head was heavy, and I got up in a daze and reluctantly.When I got outside, I found that the moon had really just risen, and the night fog on the grassland made it a little red.The grassland under the moonlight is also sleeping, and the dim light of countless fireflies floats on the hazy sea of ​​grass, as if the dream of the grassland is manifesting itself.

I stretched and said to the night sky: "Hey, did you see the moonlight shining here from orbit? Tell me the approximate position of your spaceship, maybe I can still see it, I'm sure it is in low Earth orbit."

She didn't answer my words, but hummed a tune softly.After a short melody, she said: "This is Debussy's "Moonlight"." Then she continued humming, completely forgetting my existence. The melody of "Moonlight" falls from space to the grassland together with the moonlight.I pictured that frail girl in space - with the silvery moon above her, the blue earth below, and little she flew through the middle, making music into the moonlight...

When I went back to lie on the bed an hour later, she was still humming, but I don't know if it wasn't Debussy's.That soft music has been lingering in my dreams.

After some time, the music turned into a call.She woke me up again and had to go out.

"Haven't you seen the moon?" I said angrily.

"But it's different now. Remember? There were clouds in the west just now, and those clouds may have drifted over now, and the moon is appearing and disappearing in the clouds... Think about the light and shadow on the grassland, how beautiful it is, that is Another kind of music. Please take my eyes and get out!"

I was very annoyed, but went out anyway.The clouds really floated over, the moon passed through the clouds, and the large spots of light on the grassland were slowly floating, like ancient memories emerging from the depths of the earth.

"You are like a sentimental poet from the [-]th century, completely unsuitable for this era, and even less suitable for being an astronaut." I said to the night sky, then took off her eyes and hung them on the branch of a red willow nearby, "Look at the moon yourself. I really have to go to sleep. I have to rush back to the space center tomorrow to continue my life without poetry."

There was a thin voice in her eyes.I couldn't hear what she said, so I went back.

It was broad daylight when I awoke, the sky was overcast with clouds, and the prairie was shrouded in a drizzle of rain.Her eyes were still hanging on the red willow branches, and the lenses were covered with mist.I dry the lenses carefully and put them on.I thought she watched the moon all night and was still sleeping now, but I heard low sobs from her eyes.My heart suddenly softened.

"I'm sorry, I was really tired last night."

"No, it's not because of you, woo, it's been cloudy since 03:30, and it's raining again after five o'clock..."

"You didn't sleep all night?!"

"...Woooo, it's raining, I, I can't see the sunrise, I really want to see the sunrise on the grassland. Woooo, I really want to see it, woo..."

My heart seemed to be melted by something, and I could see her teary, twitching little nose, and her eyes were a little moist in my mind.I have to admit that in the past day and night, she taught me something, something indescribable, as dim as the light and shadow on the grassland in a moonlit night.Because of her, the world in my eyes will be a little different from before.

"There will always be a sunrise on the grassland. I will definitely bring your eyes to see it again in the future, or I will bring you to see it in person, okay?"

She stopped crying.Suddenly, she whispered, "Listen..."

I heard nothing but tensed up.

"This is the first bird song of the day. There are birds in the rain!" she said excitedly, as if hearing the solemn century bell.

"Sunset Six"

Returning to the gray life and busy work, the above experience was quickly forgotten.A long time later, when I was washing some travel clothes, I found two or three grass seeds on the bottom of my trousers.In the depths of my consciousness, there is also a small seed left.In my solitary spiritual desert, that seed has sprouted imperceptibly green shoots.Although unconsciously, after a hard day's work, I can already feel the faint poetry of the evening wind blowing on my face, and the chirping of birds has caught my attention. I even stand on the bridge at dusk and watch As night falls to the city... the world is still gray in my eyes, but dots of green have appeared and are increasing.When the change developed to the point where I became aware of it, I thought of her again.

Also unconsciously, in my spare time or even in my sleep, the environment she lived in often appeared in my mind-the airtight and narrow control cabin, the strange heat-insulated spacesuit... Later, these things were hidden in my consciousness. gone, only one thing stood out, and that was the weightless pencil swirling above her head.For some reason, when I close my eyes, that pencil always appears in front of my eyes.Finally one day, when I walked into the tall lobby of the space center, I was attracted by a huge mural that I had seen countless times. The mural was a blue earth photographed from space.The floating pencil appeared in front of my eyes again, overlapping with the mural, and I heard her voice again: "I'm afraid of being closed..." A flash of lightning flashed through my mind.

In addition to space, there is another place where there is weightlessness!

I frantically ran upstairs and slammed the door of the director's office.He was not there, and I knew where he was by a tacit understanding, so I ran to the small room where the eyes were kept.Sure enough, the director was inside, looking at the big screen.She was on the big screen, still in that enclosed control pod, in that "space suit."The picture is paused, it was previously recorded. "Is it for her?" said the director, still looking at the screen.

"Where the hell is she?" I asked aloud.

"As you may have guessed, she was the navigator of the 'Sunset Six'."

Everything was clear, and I fell powerlessly on the carpet.

The "Sunset" project originally planned to launch ten spacecraft, from "Sunset One" to "Sunset Ten", but the plan was interrupted by the crash of "Sunset Six".

A century and a half after the first spaceflight, human exploration began in the opposite direction.

The "Sunset" series of spacecraft are not spaceships, but "terrestrial" spacecraft, which sail in the formation and dive into the depths of the earth.

Four years ago, I saw the launch of "Sunset One" on TV.It was late at night at that time, and a fireball as dazzling as the sun appeared in the center of the Turpan Basin. The light of the fireball turned the clouds in the night sky in Xinjiang into a gorgeous morning glow.When the fireball went dark, "Sunset One" had dived into the ground.The earth was burned red, and in the center of this circular glowing area was a magma lake. The white-hot magma was boiling, stirring up bright waves... That night, as far as Urumqi, You can feel the slight vibration transmitted to the earth when the spacecraft passes through the formation.

The first five spacecraft of the "Sunset" project all successfully completed the formation navigation and returned to the ground safely.Among them, "Sunset V" created the depth record of human stratum voyage so far - 3100 kilometers below sea level. "Sunset Six" does not intend to break this record.Because according to the theory of geophysics, at 3400-3500 kilometers underground, there is an interface between the mantle and the core, which is academically called "Gutenberg discontinuity".Once it passes through this interface, it enters the liquid iron-nickel core of the earth, where the density of matter suddenly increases, and the design strength of "Sunset [-]" does not allow it to sail in such a large density.

Sunset Six's voyage started off well, with the spacecraft crossing the interface between the Earth's crust and mantle -- the Moho discontinuity -- in two hours and staying on the slippery surface of drifting continental plates for five hours , and then it began a long voyage of more than 3000 kilometers in the mantle.Space travel is lonely, but astronauts can see the boundless space and magnificent star clusters; while the ground astronauts on the ground spaceship can only feel the high-density matter that is constantly moving upward around the spaceship.From the holographic rear view TV on the spaceship, we can see such a scene - the hot magma is glaringly shining, rolling, and as the spaceship dives, it quickly closes up at the stern, instantly filling the space the spaceship passes through .According to the memory of a ground pilot, as soon as they closed their eyes, they would see the magma quickly closing and pressing down. This illusion made them realize the huge amount of continuously thickening material pressing above them.A feeling of oppression incomprehensible to people on the ground afflicted everyone in the ground spacecraft, and they were all attacked by claustrophobia.

"Sunset 15" has accomplished various research tasks excellently.The speed of the spacecraft is about 200 kilometers per hour, and the spacecraft needs to sail for more than 6.3 hours to reach the predetermined depth.However, the material density in the navigation area suddenly increased from 9.5 grams per cubic centimeter to 2500 grams, the material composition suddenly changed from silicates to iron-nickel-based metals, and the material state also changed from solid to liquid.Although "Sunset Six" only reached a depth of 1000 kilometers at that time, all the signs cruelly showed that they broke into the core of the earth!It was later learned that this was a fissure in the mantle leading to the core.The high-pressure liquid iron and nickel in the earth's core filled this crack, making the Gutenberg discontinuity extend upward for nearly 1600 kilometers on the route of the "Sunset Six"!The spaceship immediately made an emergency turn, trying to rush out of this gap, but unfortunately happened at this moment: the hull made of neutron materials withstood the huge pressure suddenly increased to [-] tons per square centimeter, but the front part of the spaceship burned. There are three parts: the fusion engine, the middle main cabin and the rear propulsion engine. When the spacecraft turns in the liquid iron-nickel with a density and pressure much greater than the design, the joint between the fusion engine and the main cabin breaks. In the picture sent back by the neutrino communication, we can see that the burning engine that has been separated from the hull is swallowed up by the liquid iron and nickel glowing dark red in an instant.The melting engine of the formation spacecraft uses ultra-high temperature jets to cut through the material ahead of the spaceship’s channel. Without it, “Sunset [-]” with only one propulsion engine is left unable to move an inch in the formation.The density of the earth's core is astonishing, but the neutron materials that make up the spaceship are even denser, and the buoyancy produced by liquid iron and nickel on the spaceship is less than its own weight, so "Sunset [-]" sank toward the center of the earth.

After humans landed on the moon, it took a century and a half to be able to sail to Saturn.In terms of stratigraphic exploration, it will take the same amount of time for humans to be able to navigate from the mantle to the core.Today's earth-flying spacecraft strays into the earth's core, just like the moon landing spacecraft in the middle of the twentieth century deviates from the moon and loses itself in outer space. There is no hope of rescue.

Fortunately, the hull of the main cabin of "Sunset Six" is reliable, and the neutrino communication system on the ship still maintains smooth communication with the ground control center.In the next year, the "Sunset [-]" navigation team persisted in their work, sending a large amount of valuable data obtained from the earth's core to the ground.They are wrapped in a material thousands of kilometers thick. Not to mention air and life, there is no space here. The surrounding is full of liquid iron and nickel with a temperature as high as [-] degrees and a pressure that can turn carbon into diamond in a second!They are packed so densely around Sunset [-] that only neutrinos can pass through. "Sunset Six" is like being in a huge steelmaking furnace!In such a world, "Inferno" in "Divine Comedy" seems to be describing heaven.In such a world, what is life?Can it be described only in terms of fragility?
The heavy psychological pressure bit the nerves of the crew of "Sunset [-]" like a poisonous snake.One day, the geological engineer on board suddenly jumped up from his sleep and opened the hot door of the airtight compartment where he was!Although this was only the first of the four extremely hot shots, the heat wave that rushed in instantly burned him into a wisp of green smoke.The commander quickly closed the thermal door in another airtight cabin, avoiding the complete destruction of "Sunset Six".But he himself was badly burned and died after writing the last page of his logbook.

From then on, in the deepest part of the planet, on Sunset Six, she was alone.

Now, the interior of "Sunset 6300" is completely in a state of weightlessness, and the spacecraft has sunk to a depth of [-] kilometers, which is the deepest part of the earth, and she is the first person to reach the center of the earth.

Her world in the center of the earth is the stuffy control cabin with an activity range of less than 10 square meters.The ship has a pair of neutrino-sensing glasses, a device that keeps her in somewhat emotional contact with the surface world.But this lifeline connection cannot last for a long time. The energy of the neutrino communication equipment in the spacecraft will soon be exhausted, and the existing energy can no longer maintain the ultra-high-speed data transmission of the sensor glasses.Finally, three months ago, when I took her eyes off and put them in my travel bag on the plane back to the space center from the grasslands, the connection was broken.

That rainy grassland morning without sunrise was the last thing she saw on the surface of the world.

The neutron material shell of "Sunset 80" is strong enough to resist the huge pressure of the earth's core, and the life cycle system on the spacecraft can still run for 10 to [-] years, and she will spend it in the earth's core world of less than [-] square meters the rest of my life.

I dare not imagine her final farewell to the surface world, but the recording that the director let me listen to was beyond my expectation.The neutrino beam from the center of the earth is already weak, and her voice is intermittent, but very calm:
"...Your last supplementary suggestion has been received. I will work hard according to the research plan. In the future, maybe a few generations later, there will be an earth-centered spacecraft to find 'Sunset Six' and dock with it , someone will enter here again, I hope that the information I left will be useful. Please rest assured that I will arrange my life here. I have adapted to this place and no longer feel cramped and closed. The whole world Surround me, I can see the prairie above when I close my eyes, and I can clearly see every little flower that I named. Goodbye."

transparent earth
In the years that followed, I traveled to many places.Everywhere I go, I like to lie on the ground there.I used to lie on the beach of Hainan Island, on the ice and snow of Alaska, in the birch forest of Russia, in the desert of the Sahara... Whenever at this time, the earth became transparent in my eyes.At a depth of more than 6000 kilometers below me, in the center of this huge crystal ball, I saw the ground spacecraft "Sunset [-]" parked there, and felt her heartbeat coming from the center of the earth thousands of kilometers deep.I imagined the golden sunlight and the silvery moonlight penetrating into the center of this planet, and I heard her singing "Moonlight" from there, and heard her soft voice:

"...how beautiful, this is another kind of music..."

There is a thought that comforts me: no matter where I go to the ends of the earth, I will never be far away from her.

Published in the first issue of "Science Fiction World" in 1999

Won the first prize of the Galaxy Award in 1999 (the 11th session)
(End of this chapter)