Death's End

by Cixin Liu

  “As for Dewdrop, what can a mere girl do? I’ll tear that umbrella away from her.” Ice Sand lifted his flagon.

  The celebratory feast ended in a subdued atmosphere. The ministers left with worried expressions, and only Ice Sand remained in the empty hall.

  After an unknown amount of time, Ice Sand saw Needle-Eye return. Ice Sand’s heart sped up—it wasn’t because Needle-Eye’s hands were empty, and it wasn’t because of Needle-Eye’s appearance: He looked as sensitive and careful as before. Rather, it was because Ice Sand heard Needle-Eye’s footsteps. Before, the painter had always moved in complete silence, like a squirrel gliding across the floor, but now, Ice Sand heard the echoes of his loud steps, like a heartbeat that couldn’t be suppressed.

  “I saw Prince Deep Water,” said Needle-Eye, his eyes lowered. “But I couldn’t paint him.”

  “Did he have wings?” Ice Sand’s voice was chilly.

  “Even if he did, I could still capture him. I could paint each feather in his wing and make it lifelike. But, my king, the truth is more frightening than if he had sprouted wings: He does not obey the laws of perspective.”

  “What is perspective?”

  “The principles of perspective dictate that objects farther away appear smaller than those up close. I am a painter trained in Western traditions, and Western painting follows the rules of perspective. I cannot paint him.”

  “Are there schools of painting that do not follow the rules of perspective?”

  “Indeed. My king, look at those Eastern paintings.” Needle-Eye pointed to a brush-painting landscape scroll hanging on one of the walls in the hall. The scroll showed an elegant, ethereal landscape where the negative space, the emptiness, resembled water and fog. The style contrasted sharply with the colorful, solid oil paintings nearby. “You can tell that the scroll does not obey the laws of perspective. But I never studied Eastern painting. Master Ethereal refused to teach me—perhaps he had foreseen today.”

  “You may leave.” Ice Sand’s face was impassive.

  “Of course. Deep Water will arrive at the palace soon. He will kill me, and he will kill you. But I won’t wait helplessly for death. I will take my own life by painting a masterpiece with it.” Needle-Eye left, again moving noiselessly.

  Ice Sand summoned his guards. “Bring me my sword.”

  Dense hoofbeats came into the hall from the outside: at first barely audible, then growing to resemble a thunderstorm. The sounds abruptly ceased right outside the palace.

  Ice Sand stood up and exited the hall with his sword. He saw that Deep Water was ascending the stairs in front of the palace, and Dewdrop was behind him, with Auntie Wide next to her, holding up the umbrella. In the plaza below the stairs, the army stood in dense array. The soldiers waited quietly, not clearly showing their support for either side. When Ice Sand saw Deep Water for the first time, he seemed twice as tall as an ordinary man. But as he came closer, he seemed to shrink to a more normal size.

  Ice Sand’s thoughts returned in a flash to his childhood more than twenty years ago. He had known that the glutton fish were amassing around Tomb Island, but he nonetheless lured Deep Water to go fishing there. Back then, their father had been in the grip of some disease, and he told Deep Water that Tomb Island was the home to a special kind of fish whose liver oil could cure the king’s illness. Deep Water, normally so careful, believed him, and, as Ice Sand had wanted, left without coming back. That had always been one of Ice Sand’s proudest plots, and no one in the kingdom knew the truth.

  Ice Sand’s thoughts returned to the present. Deep Water was now on the dais at the top of the stairs, before the door to the palace. He looked as tall as a regular person.

  “My brother,” said Ice Sand. “I’m glad to see you and Dewdrop. But you must understand that this is my kingdom, and I am the king. You must immediately pledge fealty to me.”

  One of Deep Water’s hands was on the grip of his rusty sword, and the other hand pointed at Ice Sand. “You have committed unforgivable crimes.”

  Ice Sand chuckled. “Needle-Eye may not be able to paint you, but I can pierce your heart.” He unsheathed his sword.

  Ice Sand and Deep Water were equally skilled swordsmen, but since Deep Water didn’t obey the laws of perspective, it was very hard for Ice Sand to judge accurately how far away his opponent was. The fight quickly came to an end when Deep Water’s sword stabbed through Ice Sand’s chest. Ice Sand tumbled down the stairs and left a long trail of blood on the stone steps.

  The army cheered and declared their fealty to Prince Deep Water and Princess Dewdrop.

  While Deep Water and Ice Sand struggled, Captain Long-Sail had been searching for Needle-Eye in the palace. Someone informed him that the painter had gone to his own studio, which was in a distant corner of the palace. The captain saw that only one sentry stood at the door. He had served under Long-Sail.

  “He came here an hour ago,” said the sentry. “He’s been inside since.”

  The captain broke down the door and stepped in.

  The studio was windowless. The candles on the two silver candelabras had mostly burnt out, and the studio was as dim as an underground bunker. The place was empty.

  But Long-Sail saw a painting on the easel. It had just been completed, and the paint wasn’t even dry: a self-portrait of Needle-Eye. The painting truly was a masterpiece. It was like a window to another world, and Needle-Eye stood there gazing at this world. Although an uplifted corner of the snow-white paper showed that this was but a painting, the captain felt compelled to avoid the piercing gaze of the man in the painting.

  Long-Sail looked around and saw other portraits hanging on the wall: the king, the queen, and the ministers loyal to them. He saw the painting of Princess Dewdrop, and the beautiful princess in the painting seemed to make this dim studio as bright as heaven. The eyes in the picture seized his soul, and he felt himself growing intoxicated. But in the end, Long-Sail came to his senses. He took down the painting, tossed away the frame, and lit the rolled-up scroll with one of the candles.

  Just as the flames consumed the painting, the door to the studio opened and the real Princess Dewdrop came in. She was still dressed in the garb of a commoner, and she held up the spinning black umbrella by herself.

  “Where’s Auntie Wide?”

  “I told her to stay outside; I have some things I want to say … just to you.”

  “Your portrait is gone.” Long-Sail pointed to the still-glowing ashes on the ground. “You don’t need the umbrella anymore.”

  The princess slowed down the spinning, and the umbrella began to cry like a nightingale. As the canopy fell, the cries grew louder and faster, until they resembled the screams of jackdaws—the final warning before the advent of Death. Then the umbrella closed and the stone spheres at the rim collided together in a series of sharp snaps.

  The princess was unharmed.

  The captain looked at the princess and let out a long sigh of relief. He turned to the ashes. “It’s too bad. The portrait was lovely, and I would have liked you to see it. But I dared not delay … it was really, really beautiful.”

  “Prettier than me?”

  “It was you.”

  The princess retrieved the two bars of He’ershingenmosiken bath soap. She let go, and the weightless, white bars floated in the air like feathers.

  “I’m going to leave the kingdom and sail the seas. Will you come with me?” asked the princess.

  “What? But Prince Deep Water already announced that your coronation is tomorrow. He pledged to aid you with all his heart.”

  The princess shook her head. “My brother is more suited to be king than I. And if he hadn’t been imprisoned on Tomb Island, he ought to have inherited the throne. When he’s the king, he can stand somewhere high in the palace, and the entire kingdom can see him. But I don’t want to be a queen. I like the outside more than the palace. I don’t want to live the rest of my life in the Storyless Kingdom. I want to go where there are stories.”

&n
bsp; “That life is full of danger and hardship.”

  “I’m not afraid.” The princess’s eyes glowed with the spark of life in the candlelight. Long-Sail felt everything around him growing brighter again.

  “I’m not afraid, either. Princess, I will follow you to the end of the sea, to the end of the world.”

  “Then we’ll be the last two to leave the kingdom.” The princess reached out and grabbed the two floating bars of soap.

  “We’ll take a sailboat.”

  “Yes, with snow-white sails.”

  The next morning, on a beach somewhere in the kingdom, people saw a white sail appear in the sea. Behind the sail was a long wake of cloudlike foam. It headed away from the kingdom by the light of the rising sun.

  Thereafter, no one in the kingdom knew what happened to Princess Dewdrop and Long-Sail. As a matter of fact, the kingdom never received any information of the outside world. The princess had taken away the last bars of He’ershingenmosiken bath soap, and no one could break through the barriers formed by the schools of glutton fish. But no one complained. The people were used to their serene lives. After this story, there were never any other stories in the Storyless Kingdom.

  But sometimes, late at night, some would tell stories that were not stories: imagined lives of Princess Dewdrop and Long-Sail. Everyone imagined different things, but all agreed that they journeyed to many exotic, mysterious kingdoms, including continents as vast as the sea. They lived ever after in wandering and trekking, and no matter where they went, they were happily together.

  Broadcast Era, Year 7

  Yun Tianming’s Fairy Tales

  In the sophon-free room, those who had finished reading began to talk amongst themselves, though most were still absorbed in the world of the Storyless Kingdom, the sea, the princess and the princes. Some remained deep in thought; some stared at the document, as though hoping to glean more meaning from the cover.

  “That princess is a lot like you,” said AA to Cheng Xin.

  “Try to focus on the serious business here … and am I really that delicate?! I would have held up the umbrella myself.” Cheng Xin was the only one who didn’t bother reading the document. The stories were seared into her memory. She had, of course, wondered many times if Princess Dewdrop was modeled in some measure on herself. But the captain of the guards didn’t resemble Yun Tianming.

  Does he think I’m going to sail away somehow? With another man?

  Once the chair noticed that everyone present had finished reading, he asked for opinions—mainly suggested directions for next steps to be taken by the various working groups under the IDC.

  The committee member representing the literary analysis group asked to speak first. This group had been a last-minute addition, composed mainly of writers and scholars of Common Era literature. It was thought that there might be a minuscule chance—unlikely though it was—that they could be of use.

  The speaker was a writer of children’s stories. “I know that from now on, my group is unlikely to make any useful contributions. But I wanted to say a few words first.” He lifted the blue-covered document. “I’m sorry to say that I don’t believe this message can ever be deciphered.”

  “Why do you say that?” asked the chair.

  “To be clear, we’re trying to ascertain the strategic direction of humanity’s struggles for the future. If this message really exists, no matter what it is, it must have a concrete meaning. We can’t take vague, ambiguous information and turn it into strategic directions. But vagueness and ambiguity are at the heart of literary expression. Out of security considerations, I’m sure the true meaning behind these three stories is buried very deeply, and this makes the interpretations even more vague and ambiguous. The difficulty we are facing isn’t that we can’t get anything useful out of these three stories, but that there are too many plausible interpretations, and we can’t be certain of any of them.

  “Let me say something else that’s not directly relevant here. As a writer, I want to express my respect for the author. As fairy tales, these are very good.”

  * * *

  The next day, the IDC’s work of deciphering Yun Tianming’s message began in earnest. Very soon, everyone came to appreciate the warning by the children’s story writer.

  The three tales of Yun Tianming were rich in metaphors and symbolism; every detail could be interpreted in multiple ways, and each interpretation could find some support, but it was impossible to tell which one was the message intended by the author, and thus it was impossible to take any interpretation as strategic intelligence.

  For instance, the idea of painting people into pictures was, by consensus, a rather obvious metaphor. But experts in different fields could not agree on a single interpretation. Some believed that the paintings were a reference to the digitization trend in the modern world, and thus this detail in the story suggested that humans should also be digitized as a way to avoid dark forest strikes. Scholars who held this view also noted that those who had been painted into the paintings were no longer able to harm those in the real world, and so digitizing humanity was perhaps a way to promulgate the cosmic safety notice.

  But another camp held that the paintings were intended to suggest special dimensions. The real world and the world of the paintings were of different dimensionalities, and when a person was painted, that person disappeared from three-dimensional space. This brought to mind the experiences of Blue Space and Gravity in the four-dimensional fragment, and so perhaps Tianming had intended to suggest that humanity could use four-dimensional space as a refuge, or broadcast the cosmic safety notice in some manner through four-dimensional space. Some scholars pointed to Prince Deep Water’s violations of the rules of perspective as further evidence that the author meant four-dimensional space.

  As another example, what was the meaning of the glutton fish? Some focused on their large numbers, their habit of remaining hidden, and their fierce, aggressive tendency, and reached the conclusion that they symbolized cosmic civilization as a whole in the dark forest state. The soap that allowed the glutton fish to feel so comfortable as to forget to attack represented some unknown principles behind the cosmic safety notice. Others, however, reached the opposite conclusion: They believed that the glutton fish represented intelligent machines that must be built by humankind. These machines would be small in size and capable of self-replication. Once released into space, the machines would use the matter found in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud to self-replicate in large numbers until they formed an intelligent barrier around the Solar System. The barrier could have multiple functions, e.g., intercepting photoids headed for the Sun, or altering the appearance of the Solar System from a distance in a manner that would achieve the goal of a cosmic safety notice.

  This explanation, dubbed the Shoaling Interpretation, was given more attention than other competing interpretations. Compared to the other hypotheses, the Shoaling Interpretation offered a relatively clear technical framework and became one of the first interpretations to be treated as an in-depth research topic by the World Academy of Sciences. But the IDC never put too much hope in the Shoaling Interpretation—although the idea seemed technically feasible, further study revealed that it would take tens of thousands of years for the self-replicating “shoals of fish” to form a barrier around the Solar System. Moreover, the limited functionality of AI machines meant that the protective and safety notice functions of the barrier were at best impractical visions. Ultimately, the Shoaling Interpretation had to be abandoned.

  Countless competing interpretations were also offered for the spinning umbrella, the mysterious snow-wave paper and obsidian slab, the He’ershingenmosiken bath soap …

  Just like the writer of children’s literature had said, all these explanations seemed justifiable, but it was impossible to ascertain which one was really meant.

  It was not the case, however, that all the contents of the three stories were so vague and ambiguous. The IDC experts were certain that at least one det
ail in the story offered a concrete piece of intelligence, and was perhaps the key to unlocking the secrets of Yun Tianming’s message.

  They referred to the strange place name in the stories: He’ershingenmosiken.

  Tianming had told Cheng Xin his stories in Chinese. People noticed that most of the place names and names of the characters had clear meanings in Chinese: the Storyless Kingdom, the Glutton’s Sea, Tomb Island, Princess Dewdrop, Prince Ice Sand, Prince Deep Water, Needle-Eye, Master Ethereal, Captain Long-Sail, Auntie Wide, etc. However, mixed in was also this other name that appeared to be a phonetic transcription of the name of a foreign place. Not only was it strange phonetically for Chinese, it was also really long. The name also appeared repeatedly in the story in a way that clearly suggested something out of the ordinary: Needle-Eye and Master Ethereal had come from He’ershingenmosiken; the snow-wave paper they used also came from He’ershingenmosiken; the obsidian slab and iron used for pressing the paper were also of He’ershingenmosiken; Captain Long-Sail had been born in He’ershingenmosiken; the bath soap of He’ershingenmosiken; the glutton fish of He’ershingenmosiken.… The author seemed to be repeatedly emphasizing the importance of this name, but there was no detailed description of He’ershingenmosiken at all. Was it another large island like the Storyless Kingdom? A continent? An archipelago?

  Experts weren’t even sure what language the name came from. When Yun Tianming had left on the Staircase probe, his English proficiency wasn’t great, and he didn’t know a third language—but it was possible that he had learned another language later. The name didn’t resemble English, and it wasn’t even clear if the name belonged to some Romance language. Of course the name couldn’t be Trisolaran, since the Trisolaran language wasn’t spoken or expressed by sounds.

  Scholars tried to spell the name in all the world’s known languages, to seek help from all fields, to search for it on the web and in all kinds of specialized databases, but nothing came of these efforts. Before this name, the most brilliant minds of humanity in various fields of study stood helpless.