Free The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin Page A

better.
    First, we visited an Earth Engine up close. The engine was in Shijiazhuang, near the foot of the Taihang Mountains. The engine was a towering metallic mountain, looming over us, filling half the sky. To the west of it the Taihang Mountains seemed to be no more than a ridge of small hills. Some of us children exclaimed in wonder that it must be as tall as Mount Everest. Our beautiful teacher, Ms. Xing, smiled as she told us that it was in fact 36,000 feet tall, a good 6,000 feet taller than Mount Everest.
    “People call it ‘God’s Blowtorch’,” she said.
    We stood in its enormous shadow, feeling its tremors shake the very Earth.
    There were two major types of Earth Engines. The larger ones were dubbed “Mountains”, while the smaller ones were called “Summits”. We ascended North China Mountain 794. Let me tell you, it took a lot longer to scale a “Mountain” than to ascend a “Summit”. The top of a Summit could be reached via a giant elevator, while you could only go up a Mountain in a car, snaking your way up a coiled road. Our bus weaved into the endless procession of other vehicles, following the smooth steel road up the outer side of the Mountain. To our left, there was only a blank face of azure metal; to our right, a yawning abyss.
    The traffic mostly consisted of 50-ton dump trucks, fully loaded with rocks from the Taihang Mountains. Our bus quickly ascended to 16,000 feet as the Earth below almost completely disappeared, obscured by the reflection of the Earth Engine's greenish blue light. Ms. Xing then told us to put on our oxygen masks. As we approached the plasma plume, the light and heat increased immensely, causing the visors we wore to gradually dim and the mini-compressors in our thermal suits to whir along with all their might. At 20,000 feet we came upon the material intake. Truckload after truckload of large rocks was dumped into the faint, red sparkling light of its giant maw. It devoured the rocks without sound.
    Fascinated, I asked my teacher about it. “How is the Earth Engine able to turn those rocks into fuel?”
    “Heavy element fusion is a very arcane field of study,” she told me, “too difficult to understand at your age. You can content yourself to understand that the Earth Engines are the most powerful machines mankind has ever built. The one we are standing on, North China 794, operating at full power has the capability of exerting 15 billion tons of thrust on the Earth.”
    Finally, our bus reached the very top of the engine. Here the mouth of the plasma jet was directly above us. The beam emanating from it was so enormous that, when we tilted our heads up, all we could see was a gargantuan wall of blue plasma reaching into infinity above us. Looking far up at that blue, I then recalled a riddle posed to us in philosophy class:
    “You are walking along on a plain when you suddenly come across a wall,” I told my teacher. “It stretches endlessly upward, endlessly downward, endlessly to your left and endlessly to your right. What is this wall?” Our haggard teacher had asked our class that riddle. I now asked Ms. Xing, curious at her answer. Even the memory of that question made me shudder as we stood atop the engine.
    Ms. Xing stood next to me, thinking of the answer. After a perplexed moment, she shook her head as she contemplated my query.
    Leaning close, I whispered the riddle’s terrible answer into her ear. “Death.”
    For a few seconds she stared at me in silence, and then she suddenly embraced me. As she held me tight, I gazed over her shoulder into the distance. Rising from the hazy Earth below, I could see a range of gigantic metal peaks. The range stretched in all directions as far as the eyes could see, each peak shooting forth a beam of bright plasma. It looked just like a gigantic, slanting cosmic forest, puncturing our teetering sky.
    After a while, we made our way to the ocean. Standing on the seashore we could see the pinnacles of submerged