Novels, Deep-Read · Liu Cixin · No.76
With Her Eyes · Yuanyuan's Bubbles · Mountain · Liu Cixin · 1999–2006
Wind moves across the grassland. An engineer who hasn't had a day off in longer than he can remember crouches by a stream and, because the young woman in his earpiece asked him to, puts his hand in the water so she can feel it. It's cold. On the other end she is too overcome to speak.
He's a little impatient. It's a ditch with water in it.
He doesn't know that she is more than six thousand kilometres beneath his feet, in a cabin smaller than ten cubic metres. This stream is the last one she will ever touch.
Three short stories, three directions. A young navigator sinks down to the centre of the Earth and is left with a borrowed pair of eyes to see the surface through. A girl wants to blow a soap bubble bigger, until it is big enough to cover a city that is dying of thirst. A climber who once cut a rope swears never to go up again, until a nine-kilometre mountain of water rises out of the Pacific on its own. All three are about the same thing: how large the hunger to see can grow in one person, and what it costs.
Liu Cixin (b. 1963) was still a computer engineer at the Niangziguan power plant in Shanxi when he wrote these. "With Her Eyes" appeared in Science Fiction World in 1999, won that year's Galaxy Award, and later entered the Chinese middle-school curriculum, which makes it probably his most-read story at home. "Yuanyuan's Bubbles" followed in 2004. "Mountain" ran in the January 2006 issue of Science Fiction World, reworked from an earlier piece of his from 2003. "With Her Eyes" and "Mountain" are both in the English collection The Wandering Earth.
They belong together because they share something people rarely credit Liu with: warmth. The man who gave us the dark forest, who had a whole solar system flattened by a sheet of two-dimensional space, here writes a woman asking a stranger to touch a stream for her, and a father recognising his dead wife's dream inside his daughter's soap bubble. The hardness hasn't gone anywhere — each ending rests on a cold physical fact — but this time the physics is there to hold a person up.
The narrator is an engineer worn down to nothing by work. His director finally grants him leave, and hands him one more thing on the way out: a pair of "eyes." The device is nothing unusual in this world — sensor glasses that let someone far away see what you see, hear what you hear, and talk to you while you go. People who can't travel borrow other people's bodies to do it. The director asks him to take "her" along.
He isn't thrilled, but he puts them on. He notices one small detail: on her end, a pencil is floating. clue ① Weightlessness. He draws the obvious conclusion — she's an astronaut somewhere, probably going stir-crazy on a ship.
He takes her to the grassland, and what follows strikes him as slightly unhinged. She wants to see every wildflower. She wants him to lean in close to the light on a blade of grass, to stand still in the wind. When they come upon a stream she begs him to put his hand in it. A sudden gust leaves her speechless. Little by little he decides that her feeling for the world has been turned up so high it's almost a sickness.
He tries to make conversation, and her answers keep sliding off the questions. He remarks that however big the grassland is, it's nothing next to space — she goes quiet. He asks whether it's hot where she is, and her reply comes in fragments. He asks roughly where her ship is, and instead of answering she starts humming Debussy's Clair de lune into his ear. clue ②
At one point she says something odd: being here feels like bursting up from very, very deep water and finally getting a breath — she is so afraid of being shut in. clue ③ He files it as the standard complaint of anyone cooped up too long in a spacecraft.
Near the end she says she won't get to see a sunrise, and she'd so love to see one on the grassland. clue ④ The last morning is drizzly and grey; there is no sunrise. On the way home the video link drops, and later the sound goes too.
Only afterwards does he find out who she was.
She wasn't in space. She was the navigator of Sunset 6, a geo-ship — a vessel built to travel through the inside of the Earth, sinking through rock and magma the way a submarine sinks through the sea. Sunset 6 had an accident, lost control and kept sinking until it came to rest at the centre of the planet, more than 6,300 kilometres down. The other two crew members were injured in the accident and didn't survive. She became the first human being to reach the Earth's core, and its only survivor.
The hull is made of an ultra-dense material that can withstand the pressure down there, and the life support will run for another fifty to eighty years. In other words, she is going to live a long time — inside less than ten cubic metres, never to see the surface again. The only signal that can pass through the whole planet to reach her is a neutrino link. The grassland trip was her last look at the world above, through someone else's eyes.
And now every "unhinged" thing turns over. Why was the pencil floating? payoff ① ↑ Because the centre of the Earth is weightless: the planet's mass pulls equally from every direction and cancels itself out. That pencil is the most honest clue in the story. Liu leaves it in plain sight, and the reader, like the narrator, explains it away with the laziest answer available — space. The beauty of it is that it isn't a trick; it's real physics, and you simply never thought to look down.
Why was she so afraid of being shut in? payoff ③ ↑ "Bursting up from deep water for a breath" wasn't a figure of speech. It was her literal situation: she is deeper than any ocean, and the glasses were her only snorkel. And that rainy morning without a sunrise payoff ④ ↑ turns out to be the last surface she ever saw. All she wanted was one sunrise, and the sky didn't give it. The story doesn't protest on her behalf. It just sets the fact down.
The ending belongs to the narrator's later years. Often, in his mind, the Earth turns transparent: he can see the ship lying 6,000-odd kilometres beneath him, feel a heartbeat rising from the centre of the planet, hear her humming Clair de lune. payoff ② ↑ The tune she used to dodge the question of where she was has become her location — she wouldn't tell him where she was, and now he can hear her from anywhere. He even takes some comfort in it: wherever he goes from now on, to the ends of the Earth, he will never be any farther from her, because she lies directly beneath every place there is.
The second story is set in Silk Road City, out in China's arid northwest. Decades earlier a generation of young people came up from the prosperous south and built a city in the gravel desert by sheer force of will. Yuanyuan's parents were among them. Her mother, a researcher working on halting the desert with trees, died in an accident on an afforestation project.
From childhood Yuanyuan is fascinated by one thing: blowing soap bubbles. Not the way children play — she wants bigger ones, and bigger, the biggest bubble in the world. Her father worries. He wants her to grow into her mother: responsible, driven by a mission, spending her intelligence on things that help people — not on something that pops at a touch and leaves nothing behind. clue ⑤
Yuanyuan grows up and takes a doctorate, and the technology from her thesis becomes a company worth hundreds of millions. She still dreams about the giant bubble.
Meanwhile Silk Road City is dying. Drought has gone months without a drop of rain; at noon the streets are drowned in dust. The water is running out, the city can no longer sustain itself, and relocation is on the agenda. Her father has become mayor — the last mayor of a city about to disappear. What he and his late wife built with their youth, and in her case her life, is going to be signed away on his watch.
For his birthday Yuanyuan gives her father a present. She has spent a hundred million yuan to blow a bubble over the city — one big enough to enclose the whole of it, transparent and trembling, the sky turned iridescent through it.
By the values he's lived by for half his life, it is the most absurd money ever spent: a hundred million, a bubble, and the city about to be abandoned. But standing under that vast, shivering dome, he finds himself thinking something else — a bubble can carry things. What if you blew countless enormous bubbles out over the ocean, filled them with moist sea air, let the wind push them inland all the way to the parched northwest and burst them there? That would be a river flowing through the sky.
The idea connects to the dream he and Yuanyuan's mother had when they were young: to keep this land alive. Ten years later the skies of the northwest are full of bubbles, like something out of a dream, and Silk Road City is not abandoned.
At the end Yuanyuan comes home. Memories of childhood come back one by one. And she discovers that her aged father has started blowing soap bubbles himself. payoff ⑤ ↑ The man who frowned at his daughter's bubbles at the start is holding the wand at the finish, and that second appearance of a single gesture settles their whole argument without anyone having to apologise. Underneath it is a deeper rhyme: Silk Road City was itself a soap bubble — a beautiful, breakable thing two generations blew into being where no city should stand. The father thought his daughter's dream too fragile, but he had bet his own life on a dream just as fragile. He simply never called it a bubble.
The third story opens aboard an ocean research vessel, the Blue Water. One of the geologists on board is Feng Fan, once a fanatical climber. At university he organised a group of classmates to attempt Everest, and it ended in disaster: five of them hanging from one rope, his ice axe wedged in a crevasse that could never hold the weight of five. He cut the steel clip on the line and let four of his teammates fall — one of them the woman he loved. He survived.
Public opinion nailed him to the wall. He passed his own sentence: never to climb again, to keep as far from every mountain as he could. So he went to sea. clue ⑥ The ocean is the place on Earth farthest from any mountain.
While the captain is talking with him about all this, a "star" overhead grows brighter, then bigger. It is an alien ship of unimaginable size, and it settles into geosynchronous orbit directly above the stretch of ocean where the Blue Water is working. Its mass is so great that its gravity hauls the sea upward. The surface swells into a mountain: a mountain of water 9,100 metres high, taller than Everest. A man who fled to the middle of the ocean to escape mountains watches the tallest mountain on Earth rise beneath him, in the one place farthest from all the others.
The atmosphere around the water mountain is churned into chaos and a storm forms. The Blue Water turns and runs; Feng Fan is left in a lifeboat. And he grasps something the captain didn't: on the slope of the water mountain, the component of gravity along the slope doesn't exist — water always lies level with respect to gravity, so to anything floating on it, the "slope" is flat. And the summit sits in the eye of the storm, the calmest place for miles. The place he fears most is the only safe place there is.
So he climbs. He flies from wave to wave through the storm, is flung by the wind into the water at the summit, goes under, comes up again. He is standing at 9,100 metres with the stars overhead. payoff ⑥ ↑ His vow never to climb again has been honoured and answered at once: he didn't go back to any mountain — the mountain came out to sea to find him. What makes the arrangement so good is that it lets him off without absolving him. He is still the man who wants to go higher; it's just that this time there is no one on the other end of the rope.
At the summit the beings aboard the ship speak to him, and tell him where they come from. They are from a "bubble world": a spherical cavity, about three thousand kilometres in radius, sealed inside endless rock. They were born and evolved inside it, and naturally concluded that this was the universe — one bubble, surrounded by infinite solid stone. That was their first cosmology, the theory of a dense universe.
Then they started digging. Generation after generation, they tunnelled outward through the rock to test the theory, to overturn it, to see what was out there. At last they broke through, built a "rocket," shot up out of a sea, and saw the stars for the first time. Once the awe passed, they understood it the old way: this was merely a bigger bubble world, twenty billion light-years across, with rock beyond it still. So they built ships and have been flying toward the edge of the universe ever since. Earth is just on the way.
The alien tells Feng Fan that the urge to stand higher and see farther is the nature of every intelligent species; for them, the speed of light and space itself are just the foot of the next mountain. It turns the question around: living in such a narrow valley, don't you humans feel cramped? At nine kilometres up, from the mouth of another species, Feng Fan finally hears why he climbed in the first place. Then the ship departs, its pull withdraws, and the water mountain begins to fall as the Pacific takes it back. The mountain is gone almost as soon as it came, and Feng Fan is the only person who ever stood on its peak.
Set side by side, the three stories run on a single fuse: no outside force drives these people outward. It is the small, stubborn urge in each of them to take one look — an urge that can kill a person and can also save a city. Sunset 6's navigator went down because humanity wanted to see what the inside of the Earth looked like. Yuanyuan, chasing a useless bubble, ended up blowing a river into the sky. Feng Fan, to stand on the highest point, let four people die, and was taken back in by a mountain in the place farthest from mountains. Liu neither defends the urge nor condemns it. He pushes it to its extreme three times and lets you see what is attached to each end.
Back to that stream. He puts his hand in the water; at the other end she can't speak. On a first reading this is an over-sensitive young woman and the tired engineer who finds her a bit much. On a second, it is a person buried alive touching running water for the last time.
The power of the scene comes entirely from the choice of point of view. Liu puts the camera on the narrator — a dull, exhausted man whose sense of beauty has gone numb. Told from her side, the reader would know at once where she was, and the story would become a tearful monologue. Told from his, the reader makes his mistakes with him and shares his impatience, so that when the truth lands, the shame is the reader's own, not something the author hands over. That is the engine of the whole story: information held back until the end, and every detail meaning one thing before it arrives and another after.
The bubble enclosing Silk Road City is the most beautiful image in the three stories, and the most cleverly handled.
Notice whom Liu gives the moment to: not Yuanyuan, who blew it, but her father, looking up. For her the bubble is a dream come true; for him it ought to be evidence — proof that his daughter has wasted her money and talent on useless things after all. Instead the story lets this man, who should be furious, go quiet beneath it, and lets his thought slide from "this is useless" to "what could this hold?" The turn of the whole story happens in no line of dialogue; it happens in the few seconds a man spends looking up at the sky. The way a father forgives his daughter is by seeing his own life's work in her toy.
Feng Fan falls into the water at the top of the mountain, goes under, and for a moment in the dark feels the terror of drowning — then surfaces, and above him are the stars.
The rhythm is compression and release. Before this comes a long passage of storm, waves, spinning, falling, and the reader is as breathless as he is. At the summit, in the eye, everything goes still at once and the frame opens into a sky full of stars. That stillness is physical (the eye of a storm is calm), psychological (he has made the summit at last) and structural (what follows is the longest dialogue in the story, the history of the bubble world). Liu sets an enlightenment on a cosmic scale inside the quietest moment of one man's life. You have to leave someone gasping before the stars he sees will count.
Weightlessness at the core is real physics. Newton proved long ago that a uniform spherical shell exerts zero net gravitational force on anything inside it — the shell theorem. At the exact centre of the Earth, the planet's mass pulls on you from every direction and cancels out, so you float. The pencil isn't a gimmick; it's a gift from physics to the novelist. What doesn't hold up is the rest: the pressure at the core is around 3.6 million atmospheres and the temperature somewhere around 5,000°C. No known material could make a ship that survives intact down there; the hull that can take it is a fictional premise, and the story doesn't really explain how a geo-ship "sails" through solid rock either. The neutrino link has a real basis: neutrinos barely interact with matter and pass straight through the whole planet — which is exactly why they are fiendishly hard to catch, and why sending live video by neutrino is far beyond anything possible today.
Moving water by bubble: right direction, wrong order of magnitude. Warm, humid air over a tropical sea holds roughly twenty grams of water vapour per cubic metre. A bubble a kilometre across has a volume of about 500 million cubic metres — fill it and you are carrying something like ten thousand tonnes of water. A city of a million people needs on the order of a hundred thousand tonnes a day just for household use, before agriculture or ecology. So for a river in the sky to work, the bubbles would have to number in the astronomical, survive thousands of kilometres without popping, leaking or tearing in the wind, and then actually make that vapour condense and fall as rain at the destination. This is the story's optimism, not an engineering result. But it is pointing at a real problem: what the northwest lacks is not land but the transport of water vapour, and meteorologists and water engineers are thinking about exactly that.
The water mountain: half physics, half poetry. A body's gravity can pull up the surface of the sea — that's a tide, and the Moon does it every day. Turning a one-metre tide into a nine-kilometre one only requires something heavy enough and close enough. But a mass that could lift the sea nine kilometres from geosynchronous orbit would wreak havoc on the whole planet — crust, atmosphere, rotation, orbit — and the story keeps only the effect on the ocean. Feng Fan's insight about the flat slope, though, is lovely: still water always spreads along a surface of equal gravitational potential, so for anything floating on it, the nine-kilometre "slope" really is level ground in the gravitational sense. A mountain you don't have to climb — a physical fact that happens to offer a way out to a man who swore never to climb again.
The bubble world's cosmology is a thought experiment rather than physics. The question it answers is how a civilisation that has never seen a sky might overturn its picture of the universe step by step. Incidentally, by the same shell theorem, if that cavity sat at the exact centre of its planet, the life inside it ought to be weightless — a quiet echo of the navigator at the Earth's core. The two deepest places in these three stories are both places where nothing holds you up.
Question 1 · Should he have been told where she was?
When the director handed over the glasses, he didn't say who she was or where. If you were the director, would you have told him?
The case for silence: She wanted an ordinary trip, not a farewell ceremony. Once he knew she'd been buried alive at the centre of the Earth, what would he have done? He would tiptoe, hunt for pretty views, find himself asking whether she was scared, maybe weep by the stream. Then she wouldn't be seeing a grassland any more — she'd be seeing a stranger's pity. For someone about to spend fifty years in ten cubic metres, the greatest luxury left is being treated as an ordinary person — even by an impatient ordinary person. The director's silence protected the last bit of normal she would ever have.
The case for telling: But that "normal" was bought with his ignorance, and she paid for it. He found her sentimental, told her the grassland was small next to space, brushed off every rush of feeling she had. Had he known, he would have looked at every flower longer and touched that stream as if it were the last stream on Earth. More fundamentally, this was a journey for two, and when only one of them knows it is the last, the other is robbed of the chance to say goodbye properly. Concealment makes a decision on one person's behalf and leaves another to carry the regret for life.
Where does the story stand? It never brings the director back to explain himself, and never has the narrator blame anyone; it only tells us he spent years afterwards listening for a heartbeat beneath his feet. You may well have lived this structure: whether to tell the relatives visiting a gravely ill family member, whether to make a final gathering feel "just like normal." Dignity and honesty often can't both be had, and the person who chooses is usually not the one who lives with the consequences.
Question 2 · In a city dying of thirst, is blowing bubbles a sin?
Cover up the ending and go back to the middle. The city is drying out, the mother died fighting the desert, the father is serving as the last mayor, and the daughter, with hundreds of millions to hand, spends a hundred million on a bubble.
The father's side: Talent and money don't belong to a person in a vacuum. This city raised Yuanyuan; her mother died for it. In a place where everyone is fighting to survive, burning resources that could save people on something that bursts in seconds is not innocence but a luxurious kind of indifference. "Doing what you love" is only something you can say while other people are holding up the business of staying alive for you.
Yuanyuan's side: But who decides what's useful? Her father's generation's useful things — canals, tree belts, water diversion — have been tried on this land for decades, and the city is dying anyway. Genuinely new solutions almost never grow out of "I will solve this problem"; they grow out of someone's unreasonable curiosity. If every talent had to prove its usefulness before it was allowed to exist, the most useful things would never appear.
It has to be said honestly: the story cheats on Yuanyuan's behalf — the bubble turns out to be useful after all. That makes the question too easy. What if the bubble had only been beautiful and saved nothing? That is the real question, and it plays out between every child who wants to study art or philosophy or do research that will never pay, and their parents. Liu clearly leans toward curiosity — but with a happy ending he sidesteps the hardest case curiosity ever faces: when it is simply useless.
Question 3 · Should Feng Fan have cut the rope?
Five people hang from one line; the ice axe can't hold them. Don't cut, and all five die. Cut, and four die and one lives. Feng Fan cut. Was he wrong?
The case that he wasn't: This is arithmetic, and it has one answer. The four were beyond saving whether he cut or not; the only thing still undecided was whether a fifth would die with them. Refusing to cut looks like loyalty, but it is really buying a clean conscience with your own death — not morality, but fastidiousness. Climbers live by the brutal understanding that each person answers for their own rope, precisely because on a mountain there's no time for sentiment. Most of the condemnation he endured came from people who have never hung over a void.
The case that he was: The problem isn't the cut; it's everything before it. He organised the climb. He brought a group of students to Everest. He tied five people to a rope his own ice axe couldn't hold. At that final moment, cutting may have been the only rational choice — but bringing things to the point where only arithmetic was left was his responsibility. And there's one thing arithmetic can't capture: he made that cut with his own hand. Four people didn't simply die; he let go of them, and for the one who survives, those two things will never be the same.
The story's answer is unusual. It declares him neither guilty nor innocent. Instead, nine kilometres up, it has him hear from an alien civilisation that the urge to climb belongs to every intelligent species, and that every climb exacts a price. It reads like forgiveness — or like a way of dissolving one man's guilt into the destiny of a species. Whether you accept it depends on whether you care more about outcomes or hands. The question turns up in ordinary life too: whose name goes on the redundancy list, which patient the limited money goes to first, which project gets cut when everything is failing. The person who decides often got the sums right — and remembers their own hand for the rest of their life.
Liu returns again and again to one image: a person looks up at the sky and is willing to give everything to see it a little more clearly. In "Zhao Wen Dao" (roughly, "to hear the Way at dawn"), scientists queue up to trade their lives for the answer to the ultimate question about the universe; in The Three-Body Problem, Ye Wenjie, at Red Coast Base, hands humanity's location to the stars. In these three stories the same longing is shrunk to the scale of a single person — a navigator, a girl with soap bubbles, a climber.
The other thread is the "cold equations": physics has no mercy, and people choose only within what it allows. Feng Fan's cut belongs to the same family of sums as the repeated sacrifices of the few for the many across the Three-Body trilogy; so does the core in "With Her Eyes," from which there is no rescue, no miracle, and never was going to be. The difference is that in these stories, once the cold equation has been solved, Liu stays behind for a while with the person it solved away. That is what "tender" means here: not softening the physics, but admitting that beneath its hard shell a heart is still beating.
A quieter thread runs underneath: he keeps writing about how one generation's dream gets translated by the next. The father and daughter in "Yuanyuan's Bubbles," the dying teacher and the mountain children in "The Village Teacher," Ye Wenjie and her father's physics in The Three-Body Problem — an older generation's ideal survives only when a younger one says it in a completely different form.
① All three stories are about taking one look — at the surface, at a giant bubble, at the stars from a summit — at prices ranging from one life to four.
② The floating pencil at the start is an honest clue: the centre of the Earth really is weightless. Nobody thinks to look down.
③ Tell it through a dull narrator and, when the truth lands, the shame belongs to the reader rather than being handed over by the author.
④ She wanted one sunrise on the grassland. It rained. The story doesn't protest for her; it just states the fact.
⑤ She wouldn't say where she was. In the end he can hear her from anywhere — she is directly beneath every place there is.
⑥ Silk Road City was itself a soap bubble: something beautiful and breakable that two generations blew into being where no city should stand.
⑦ A father forgives his daughter by seeing his life's work in her toy — and at the end he is blowing bubbles too.
⑧ The story cheats for curiosity: the bubble turns out to be useful. The truly hard case — that it's simply useless — is stepped around.
⑨ Feng Fan never breaks his vow not to climb; the mountain comes out to sea for him. He is let off, but not absolved.
⑩ Liu's tenderness isn't softer physics. It's staying behind, once the cold equation is solved, with the person it solved away.