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English to Chinese: Science Fiction Translation+ General field: Art/Literary
Source text - English Elena grabbed my arm. ‘Oh, my God.’
Adrenaline shot through me. ‘What?’
‘Turn off your lights.’ I did. She did. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing.
For a moment, there was nothing. My eyes hurried to conform to the darkness, trying to parse the edge between black sky and black ice. But before they could, something else appeared, about a meter ahead of us.
Red. A small patch of soft, fluorescent red, shining quietly up through a hazy pane of ice.
It moved.
I should note that autonomous movement detectable to the human eye is not a conclusive indicator of life. A rock slipping down a hill is not alive. A river is not alive. Lichen, on the other hand, is very much alive, as is pond scum, and the yeast in bread dough, but you won’t see any of these pick up and scurry across a room (one would hope). Even so, if you see something wiggle its way forward when nothing else around it is moving, there’s not a scientist in the world that wouldn’t make an assumption there.
Elena remembered protocol before I did. ‘Camera,’ she said.
Her voice snapped me into action. ‘Camera.’ I heard a faint click in my helmet as the onboard recording equipment got to work.
‘There’s a light in the ice ahead of us,’ she said, delivering her words with academic composure. ‘We noticed it a few seconds before we began recording. Not sure how long it’s been there. Flight Engineer O’Neill and I are approaching carefully to take a closer look.’
The ice crunched beneath our boots as we walked. My pulse raced as my brain helpfully supplied images of angler fish and glow-worms, luring in the hypnotised to a toothy end. I imagined the ice splintering, the solid surface destroyed as a monstrous alien maw rose up and swallowed us whole and screaming. But Elena walked steady, and so I walked steady, wearing her bravery as my own.
To my relief (and perhaps surprise), there was no splintering, no swallowing. What there was was light – more light, another and another and another. We could tell their sources were bright, and I’m sure if we’d seen them in clear water, their silhouettes would’ve been crisp and precise. But the ice muted the light, blurring its edges, scattering it in hazy auras that shimmered well beyond the source. New colours joined the party – orange, pink – and new shapes as well. There were snake-like things, full-bodied things, worms and flowers and combs. Some shoaled by the dozens. Some travelled alone. Some bobbed. Some chased. The ice sheet below us became a luminescent symphony, and Elena stopped narrating for the camera. I understood why. None of our words in the moment were good enough. Imagine a summer carnival behind a wintered windowpane. Imagine the most fabulous aurora you’ve ever seen, shimmering below your feet.
Source: CHAMBERS, B 2019, To Be Taught, If Fortunate, Hodder & Stoughton, London.
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