The Three-Body Problem

by Liu Cixin

  The crowd responded in a way that had clearly been rehearsed countless times: “The world belongs to Trisolaris!”

  “Hello, comrades,” Ye said. Her voice returned to the gentleness that Wang knew. It was only now that he could be sure that it was really her. “I haven’t been well lately, and haven’t spent much time with all of you. But now the situation is urgent, and I know everyone is under a great deal of pressure, so I’ve come to see you.”

  “Commander, take care of yourself,” someone in the crowd said. Wang could hear the heartfelt concern.

  Ye said, “Before we move on to more important matters, let’s take care of one small detail. Pan Han—” She kept her eyes on the crowd even as she called his name.

  “Here, Commander.” Pan emerged from the crowd. Earlier, he had tried to lose himself in the throng. He appeared calm, but the terror in his heart was obvious. The commander had not called him comrade, a bad sign.

  “You committed a severe violation of the Organization’s rules.” Ye spoke without looking at Pan. Her voice remained kind, as though talking to a child who had been naughty.

  “Commander, the Organization is facing a crisis of survival! If we don’t take decisive measures and cleanse the traitors and enemies within, we will lose everything!”

  Ye looked up at Pan, her eyes affectionate. But his breath stopped for a few seconds. “The ultimate goal and ideal of the ETO is to lose everything. Everything that now belongs to the human race, including us.”

  “Then you must be an Adventist! Commander, please openly declare this to be true, because it’s very important. Am I right, comrades? Very important!” he shouted, and waved an arm as he looked around. But the crowd remained mute.

  “This request is not yours to make. You have seriously violated our code of conduct. If you want to make an appeal, now is the time. Otherwise, you must bear the responsibility.” Ye spoke slowly, enunciating every word, as though afraid the child she was teaching had trouble understanding.

  “I went intending to eliminate Wei Cheng, that math prodigy. The decision was made by Comrade Evans and ratified by the committee unanimously. If he really succeeds in creating a mathematical model of the three-body problem that gives a complete solution, our Lord will not come, and the great enterprise of Trisolaris on Earth will be ruined. I only shot at Shen Yufei since she shot at me first. I was acting in self-defense.”

  Ye nodded. “Let us believe you. This is, after all, not the most important issue. I hope we can continue to trust you. Now, please repeat the request you made to me just now.”

  Pan was stunned for a second. That she had moved on didn’t seem to relax him. “I … asked that you openly declare yourself to be an Adventist. After all, the action plan of the Adventists is also your ideal.”

  “Then repeat the plan of action.”

  “Human society can no longer rely on its own power to solve its problems. It can also no longer rely on its own power to restrain its madness. Therefore, we ask our Lord to come to this world, and with Its power, forcefully watch over us and transform us, so as to create a brand-new, perfect human civilization.”

  “Are the Adventists loyal believers in this plan?”

  “Of course! Commander, please do not believe false rumors.”

  “It’s not a false rumor!” a man shouted. He made his way to the front. “I’m Rafael, from Israel. Three years ago, my fourteen-year-old son died in an accident. I had his kidney donated to a Palestinian girl suffering kidney failure as an expression of my hope that the two peoples could live together in peace. For this ideal, I was willing to give my life. Many, many Israelis and Palestinians sincerely strove toward the same goal by my side. But all this was useless. Our home remained trapped in the quagmire of cycles of vengeance.

  “Eventually, I lost hope in the human race and joined the ETO. Desperation turned me from a pacifist into an extremist. Also, probably because I donated so much money to the Organization, I became a core member of the Adventists. Let me tell you now, the Adventists have their own secret agenda.

  “And it is this: The human race is an evil species. Human civilization has committed unforgivable crimes against the Earth and must be punished. The ultimate goal of the Adventists is to ask our Lord to carry out this divine punishment: the destruction of all humankind.”

  “The real program of the Adventists is already an open secret,” someone shouted.

  “But what you don’t know is that this was not a program they evolved into. It was the goal set out at the very beginning; it’s been the life-long dream of Mike Evans, the mastermind behind the Adventists. He lied to the Organization and fooled everyone, including the commander! Evans has been working toward this goal from the very start. He turned the Adventists into a kingdom of terror populated by extreme environmentalists and madmen who hated the human race.”

  “I didn’t know Evans’s real thoughts until much later,” Ye said. “Still, I tried to patch over the differences to allow the ETO to remain whole. But some of the other acts committed by Adventists lately have made the effort impossible.”

  Pan said, “Commander, the Adventists are the core of ETO. Without us, there is no Earth-Trisolaris Movement.”

  “But this is no excuse for you to monopolize all communications between our Lord and the Organization.”

  “We built the Second Red Coast Base; of course we should operate it.”

  “The Adventists took advantage of this and committed an unforgivable betrayal of the Organization: You intercepted the messages from our Lord to the Organization and passed on only a small portion of them. Even those, you distorted. Also, through the Second Red Coast Base, you sent a large amount of information to our Lord without the Organization’s approval.”

  Silence descended over the meeting like a monstrous thing. Wang’s scalp began to tingle.

  Pan did not answer. His expression became cold, as if to say, Finally, it has happened.

  “There is much evidence of the Adventists’ betrayal. Comrade Shen Yufei was one of the witnesses. Though she belonged to the core group of Adventists, in her heart, she remained a resolute Redemptionist. You only discovered this recently, and she already knew too much. When Evans sent you, he wanted you to kill two people, not one.”

  Pan looked around, apparently reassessing the situation. His gesture didn’t go unnoticed by Ye.

  “You can see that most people attending this meeting are comrades from the Redemptionist faction. I trust that the few Adventists who are here will stand on the side of the Organization. But men like Evans and you can no longer be saved. To protect the program and ideals of the ETO, we must completely solve the problem of the Adventists.”

  Silence returned. A few moments later, one of the bodyguards near Ye, a young woman, smiled. She walked toward Pan Han casually.

  Pan’s face changed. He stuck a hand inside the lapel of his jacket, but the young woman dashed quicker than the eye could follow. Before anyone could react, she wrapped one of her slender arms around Pan’s neck, placed her other hand on top of his head, and, by applying her unexpected strength at just the right angle, she twisted Pan’s head 180 degrees with practiced ease. The cracks from his cervical vertebrae breaking stood out against the complete silence.

  The young woman’s hands immediately let go, as though Pan’s head was too hot. Pan fell to the ground, and the gun that had killed Shen Yufei slid under the table. His body still spasmed, and his eyes remained open, his tongue sticking out. But his head no longer moved, as though it were never a part of the rest of his body. Several men came and dragged him away, the blood oozing from his mouth leaving a long trail.

  “Ah, Xiao Wang, you’re here too. How have you been?” Ye’s gaze fell on Wang Miao. She smiled kindly at him and nodded. Then she turned to the others. “This is Professor Wang, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and my friend. He researches nanomaterials. This is the first technology our Lord wishes to extinguish from the Earth.”

  No one lo
oked at Wang, and Wang had no strength to express himself in any way. He had to pull at the sleeve of the man next to him so that he wouldn’t fall, but the man lightly brushed his hand away.

  “Xiao Wang, why don’t I continue to tell you the story of Red Coast from last time? All the comrades here can listen too. This is not a waste of time. In this extraordinary moment, it is a fine time to review the history of our Organization.”

  “Red Coast.… You weren’t done?” Wang asked foolishly.

  Ye slowly approached the three-body model, seemingly absorbed by the swirling silver spheres. Through the broken window, the setting sun’s light fell on the model, and the flying spheres intermittently reflected the light onto the rebel commander, like sparks from a bonfire.

  “No. I’ve only just started,” Ye said softly.

  22

  Red Coast V

  Since she entered Red Coast Base, Ye Wenjie had never thought of leaving. After she learned the real purpose of the Red Coast Project, top-secret information that even many mid-level cadres at the base didn’t know, she cut off her spiritual connection to the outside world and devoted herself to her work. Thereafter, she became even more deeply embedded in the technical core of Red Coast, and began to take on more important research topics.

  Commissar Lei never forgot that it was Chief Yang who first trusted Ye, but Lei was happy to assign important topics to her. Given Ye’s status, she had no rights to the results of her research. And Lei, who had studied astrophysics, was a political officer who was also an intellectual, rare at the time. Thus he could take credit for all of Ye’s research results and papers, and cast himself as an exemplary political officer with both technical acumen and revolutionary zeal.

  The Red Coast Project had initially requisitioned Ye because of a paper on an attempted mathematical model of the sun she had published in the Journal of Astrophysics as a graduate student. Compared to the Earth, the sun was a far simpler physical system, made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. Though its physical processes were violent, they were relatively straightforward, only fusing hydrogen into helium. Thus, it was likely that a mathematical model of the sun could describe it rather precisely. The paper was basic, but Lei and Yang saw in it a hope for a solution to a technical difficulty faced by the Red Coast monitoring system.

  Solar outages, a common problem in satellite communications, had always plagued the Red Coast monitoring operations.

  When the Earth, an artificial satellite, and the sun are in a straight line, the line of sight from the ground-based antenna to the satellite will have the sun as its background. The sun is a giant source of electromagnetic radiation, and, as a result, satellite transmissions to the ground will be overwhelmed by interference from the solar radiation. This problem could not be completely solved, even in the twenty-first century.

  The interference that Red Coast had to deal with was similar, but the source of interference (the sun) was between the source of the transmission (outer space) and the ground-based receiver. Compared to communication satellites, the solar outages suffered by Red Coast were more frequent and more severe. Red Coast Base as constructed was also much more modest than its original design, such that the transmission and monitoring systems shared the same antenna. This made the times available for monitoring even more precious, and solar outages even more of a problem.

  Lei and Yang’s idea for eliminating interference was very simple: ascertain the frequency spectrum and characteristics of solar radiation in the monitored range, and then filter it out digitally. Both of them were technical, and at that time, when the ignorant often led the knowledgeable, that was a rare bit of fortune. But Yang wasn’t a specialist in astrophysics, and Lei had taken the path of becoming a political officer, which prevented him from accruing in-depth technical know-how. In reality, electromagnetic radiation from the sun is only stable within the limited range from near-ultraviolet to mid-infrared (including visible light). In other ranges, the radiation is quite volatile and unpredictable.

  To set the right expectations, Ye made it clear in her first research report that during periods of intense solar activity—sunspots, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and so on—it was impossible to eliminate solar interference. Thus, her research target was limited to radiation within the frequency ranges monitored by Red Coast during periods of normal solar activity.

  Research conditions at the base weren’t too bad. The library could obtain foreign-language materials related to the topic, including timely European and American academic journals. In those years, this was no easy feat. Ye also could use the military phone line to connect to the two groups conducting solar science research within the Chinese Academy of Sciences and obtain their observation data by fax.

  After half a year of study, Ye saw no glimpse of hope. She quickly discovered that within the frequency ranges monitored by Red Coast, solar radiation fluctuated unpredictably. By analyzing large amounts of observed data, Ye discovered a puzzling mystery. Sometimes, during one of the sudden fluctuations in solar radiation, the surface of the sun was calm. Since hundreds of thousands of kilometers of solar material would absorb any shortwave and microwave radiation originating from the core of the sun, the radiation must have come from activities on its surface, so there should have been observable surface activity when these fluctuations occurred. If there were no corresponding surface disturbances, what caused these sudden changes to the narrow frequency ranges? The more she thought about it, the more mysterious it seemed.

  Eventually Ye ran out of ideas and decided to give up. In her last report, she conceded that she could not solve the problem. This shouldn’t have been a big deal. The military had asked several groups within universities and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to research the same issue, and all of those efforts had failed. But Yang wanted to try one more time, relying on Ye’s extraordinary talent.

  Lei’s agenda was even simpler: He just wanted Ye’s paper. The research topic was highly theoretical and would show off his expertise and skill. Now that the chaos in society was finally subsiding, the demands on cadres were also changing. There was an acute need for men like him, politically mature and academically accomplished. Of course he would have a bright future. As to whether the problem of interference from solar outages could be solved, he didn’t really care.

  But in the end, Ye didn’t hand in her report. She thought that if the research project were terminated, the base library would stop receiving foreign language journals and other research materials, and she would no longer have access to such a rich trove of astrophysics references. So she nominally continued her research, while in reality she focused on refining her mathematical model of the sun.

  One night, Ye was, as usual, the only person in the cold reading room of the base library. On the long table in front of her, a pile of documents and journals were spread open. After completing a set of tedious and cumbersome matrix calculations, she blew on her hands to warm them, and picked up the latest issue of the Journal of Astrophysics to take a break. As she flipped through it, a brief note about Jupiter caught her attention:

  Last issue, in “A New, Powerful Radiation Source Within the Solar System,” Dr. Harry Peterson of Mount Wilson Observatory published a set of data accidentally obtained while observing Jupiter’s precession on June 12 and July 2, during which strong electromagnetic radiation was detected, lasting 81 seconds and 76 seconds, respectively. The data included the frequency ranges of the radiation as well as other parameters. During the radio outbursts, Peterson also observed certain changes in the Great Red Spot. This discovery drew a lot of interest from planetary scientists. In this issue, G. McKenzie’s article argues that it was a sign of fusion starting within Jupiter’s core. In the next issue we will publish Inoue Kumoseki’s article, which attributes the Jovian radio outbursts to a more complicated mechanism—the movements of internal metallic hydrogen plates—and gives a complete mathematical description.

  Ye clearly remembered the two dates noted in
the paper. During those windows, the Red Coast monitoring system had also received strong interference from solar outages. She checked the operations diary and confirmed her memory. The times were close, but the solar outages had occurred sixteen minutes and forty-two seconds after the arrival of the Jovian radio outbursts on Earth.

  The sixteen minutes and forty-two seconds are critical! Ye tried to calm her wild heartbeat, and asked the librarian to contact the National Observatory to obtain the ephemeris of the Earth’s and Jupiter’s positions during those two time periods.

  She drew a big triangle on the blackboard with the sun, the Earth, and Jupiter at the vertices. She marked the distances along the three edges, and wrote down the two arrival times next to the Earth. From the distance between the Earth and Jupiter it was easy to figure out the time it took for the radio outbursts to travel between the two. Then she calculated the time it would take the radio outbursts to go from Jupiter to the sun, and then from the sun to the Earth. The difference between the two was exactly sixteen minutes and forty-two seconds.

  Ye referred to her solar structure mathematical model and tried to find a theoretical explanation. Her eyes were drawn to her description of what she called “energy mirrors” within the solar radiation zone.

  Energy produced by reaction within the solar core is initially in the form of high-energy gamma rays. The radiation zone, the region of the sun’s interior that surrounds the core, absorbs these high-energy photons and re-emits them at a slightly lower energy level. After a long period of successive absorption and re-emission (a photon might take a thousand years to leave the sun), gamma rays become x-rays, extreme ultraviolet, ultraviolet, then eventually turn into visible light and other forms of radiation.

  Such were the known facts about the sun. But Ye’s model led to a new result: As solar radiation dropped through these different frequencies on its way through the radiation zone, there were boundaries between the subzones for each type of radiation. As energy crossed each boundary, the radiation frequency stepped down a grade sharply. This was different from the traditional view that the radiation frequency lowered gradually as energy passed from the core outwards. Her calculations showed that these boundaries would reflect radiation coming from the lower-frequency side, which was why she named the boundaries “energy mirrors.”