Death's End (The Three-Body Problem)

by Cixin Liu

  ROVINSKI: Everyone. Everyone onboard Bronze Age had to eat in one of the four mess halls, and there was only one source of food.

  JUDGE: Did they know what they were eating?

  ROVINSKI: Of course.

  JUDGE: How did they react?

  ROVINSKI: I’m sure a few were uncomfortable with it. But there was no protest. Oh, I do recall eating in the officer’s mess hall once and hearing someone say, “Thank you, Carol Joiner.”

  JUDGE: What did he mean?

  ROVINSKI: Carol Joiner was the communications officer aboard Quantum. He was eating a part of her.

  JUDGE: How could he know that?

  ROVINSKI: We were all fitted with a tracking and identification capsule about the size of a grain of rice. It was implanted under the skin of the left arm. Sometimes the cooking process didn’t remove it. I’m sure he just found it on his plate and used his communicator to read it.

  JUDGE: Order! Order in the courtroom! Please remove those who have fainted. Mr. Rovinski, surely you must have understood that you were violating the most fundamental laws that make us human?

  ROVINSKI: We were constrained by other morals that you don’t understand. During the Doomsday Battle, Bronze Age had to exceed its designed acceleration parameters. The power systems were overloaded, and the life support systems lost power for almost two hours, leading to massive damage throughout. The repairs had to be conducted slowly. Meanwhile, the hibernation systems were also affected, and only about five hundred people could be accommodated. Since more than one thousand people had to eat, if we didn’t introduce additional food sources, half of the population would have starved to death.

  Even without these constraints, considering the interminable voyage that lay in front of us, to abandon so much precious protein in space would have been truly unconscionable....

  I’m not trying to defend myself, and I’m not trying to defend anyone else on Bronze Age. Now that I’ve recovered the thinking patterns of humans anchored to the Earth, it is very difficult for me to speak these words. Very difficult.

  Final statement made by Captain Neil Scott

  I don’t have much to say except a warning.

  Life reached an evolutionary milestone when it climbed onto land from the ocean, but those first fish that climbed onto land ceased to be fish.

  Similarly, when humans truly enter space and are freed from the Earth, they cease to be human. So, to all of you I say this: When you think about heading into outer space without looking back, please reconsider. The cost you must pay is far greater than you could imagine.

  In the end, Captain Neil Scott and six other senior officers were convicted of murder and crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment. Of the remaining 1,768 members of the crew, only 138 were declared innocent. The rest received sentences ranging from twenty to three hundred years.

  The Fleet International prison was located in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Thus, the prisoners had to leave Earth again. Although Bronze Age had reached geosynchronous orbit, the prisoners were doomed never to travel the last thirty thousand kilometers of their 350-billion-kilometer voyage home.

  As the prisoner transport ship accelerated, they once again drifted and fell against the portholes at the stern, like fallen leaves doomed to never reach the root of the tree. They looked outward as the blue globe that had haunted their dreams shrank and, once again, became just another star.

  Before departing the fleet base, former Commander Rovinski, former Lieutenant Commander Schneider, and about a dozen other officers returned under guard to Bronze Age for the last time to assist with some details of the handover of the ship to her new crew.

  For more than a decade, this ship had been their entire world. They had carefully decorated the inside with holograms of grasslands, forests, and oceans; cultivated real gardens; and built fishing ponds and water fountains, turning the ship into a real home. But now, all that was gone. All traces of their existence on the ship had been wiped away. Bronze Age was once again just a cold stellar warship.

  Everyone they encountered in the halls looked at them coldly or simply ignored them. When they saluted, they made sure their eyes did not waver, to make it clear to the prisoners that the salute was for the military police escorting them only.

  Schneider was brought to a spherical cabin to discuss technical details of the ship’s targeting system with three officers. The three officers treated Schneider like a computer. They asked him questions in an emotionless voice and waited for his answers. There was not a hint of politeness, and not a single wasted word.

  It took only an hour to complete the session. Schneider tapped the floating control interface a few times, as though closing some windows out of habit. All of a sudden, he kicked the spherical wall of the cabin hard, and propelled himself to the other end of the chamber. Simultaneously, the walls shifted and divided the cabin into two halves. The three officers and the military policeman were trapped in one half, and Schneider was alone in the other.

  Schneider brought up a floating window. He tapped on it, his fingers a blur. It was the control interface for the communications system. Schneider brought the ship’s high-powered interstellar communications antenna online.

  A faint pop. A small hole appeared in the cabin wall, and the cabin was filled with white smoke. The barrel of the military policeman’s gun poked through the hole and aimed at Schneider.

  “This is your last warning. Stop what you’re doing immediately and open the door.”

  “Blue Space, this is Bronze Age.” Schneider’s voice was quiet. He knew how far his message could travel had nothing to do with how loudly he spoke.

  A laser beam shot through Schneider’s chest. Red steam from vaporized blood erupted from the hole. Surrounded by a red fog made of his own blood, Schneider croaked out his last words:

  “Don’t come back. This is no longer your home!”

  Blue Space had always responded to Earth’s entreaties with more hesitation and suspicion than Bronze Age had, so they had only been decelerating slowly. Thus, by the time they received Bronze Age’s warning, they were still heading away from the Solar System.

  After Schneider’s warning, Blue Space instantly shifted from decelerating to accelerating full speed ahead.

  When Earth received the intelligence report from the sophons of Trisolaris, the two civilizations had a shared enemy for the first time in history.

  Earth and Trisolaris were comforted by the fact that Blue Space didn’t currently possess the ability to engage in dark forest deterrence against the two worlds. Even if it tried to broadcast the locations of the two solar systems to the universe at full power, it would be almost impossible for anyone to hear it. To reach Barnard’s Star, the nearest star that Blue Space could use as a superantenna to repeat Ye Wenjie’s feat, would take three hundred years. However, it hadn’t shifted its course toward Barnard’s Star. Instead, it was still heading toward NH558J2, which it wouldn’t reach for two thousand more years.

  Gravity, as the only Solar System ship capable of interstellar flight, immediately began to pursue Blue Space. Trisolaris brought up the idea of sending a speedy droplet—formally, it was called a strong-interaction space probe—to pursue and destroy Blue Space. But Earth unequivocally refused. From humanity’s perspective, Blue Space should be dealt with as a matter of internal affairs. The Doomsday Battle was humanity’s greatest wound, and after more than a decade, the pain had not lessened one whit. Permitting another droplet attack on humans was absolutely politically unacceptable. Even though the crew of Blue Space had become aliens in the minds of most people, only humanity should bring them to justice.

  Out of consideration for the ample time that remained before Blue Space could become a threat, Trisolaris acquiesced. However, Trisolaris emphasized that, since Gravity possessed the ability to broadcast via gravitational waves, its security was a matter of life and death for Trisolaris. Therefore, droplets would be sent as escorts, but wou
ld also ensure an overwhelming advantage against Blue Space.

  Thus, Gravity cruised in formation with two droplets a few thousand meters away. The contrast between the sizes of the two ship types couldn’t be greater. If one pulled back far enough to see the entirety of Gravity, the droplets would be invisible. And if one pulled close enough to a droplet to observe it, its smooth surface would clearly reflect an image of Gravity.

  Gravity was built about a decade after Blue Space. Other than the gravitational wave antenna, it was not significantly more advanced. Its propulsion systems, for example, were only slightly more powerful than Blue Space’s. Gravity’s confidence in the success of their hunt was due to their overwhelming advantage in fuel reserves.

  Even so, based on the ships’ current velocities and accelerations, it would take fifty years for Gravity to catch Blue Space.

  Deterrence Era, Year 61 The Swordholder

  Cheng Xin gazed up at her star from the top of a giant tree. It was why she had been awakened.

  During the brief life of the Stars Our Destination Project, a total of fifteen individuals were granted ownership of seventeen stars. Other than Cheng Xin, the other fourteen owners were lost to history, and no legal heirs could be located. The Great Ravine acted like a giant sieve, and too many did not make it through. Now, Cheng Xin was the only one who held legal title to a star.

  Though humanity still hadn’t begun to reach for any star beyond the Solar System, the rapid pace of technological progress meant that stars within three hundred light-years of the Earth were no longer of mere symbolic value. DX3906, Cheng Xin’s star, turned out to have planets after all. Of the two planets discovered so far, one seemed very similar to Earth based on its mass, orbit, and a spectrum analysis of its atmosphere. As a result, its value rose to stratospheric heights. To everyone’s surprise, they discovered that this star already had an owner.

  The UN and the Solar System Fleet wanted to reclaim DX3906, but this couldn’t be done legally unless the owner agreed to transfer the title. Thus Cheng Xin was awakened from her slumber after 264 years of hibernation.

  The first thing she found out after emerging from hibernation was this: As she had expected, there was no news whatsoever about the Staircase Program. The Trisolarans had not intercepted the probe, and they had no idea of its whereabouts. The Staircase Program had been forgotten by history, and Tianming’s brain was lost in the vastness of space. But this man, this man who had merged into nothingness, had left a real, solid world for his beloved, a world composed of a star and two planets.

  A Ph.D. in astronomy named 艾 AA* had discovered the planets around DX3906. As part of her dissertation, AA had developed a new technique that used one star as a gravitational lens through which to observe another.

  To Cheng Xin, AA resembled a vivacious bird fluttering around her nonstop. AA told Cheng Xin that she was familiar with people like her, who had come from the past—known as “Common Era people” after the old calendar—since her own dissertation advisor was a physicist from back then. Her knowledge of Common Era people was why she had been appointed as Cheng Xin’s liaison from the UN Space Development Agency as her first job after her doctorate.

  The request from the UN and the fleet to sell the star back to them put Cheng Xin in an awkward position. She felt guilty possessing a whole world, but the idea of selling a gift that had been given to her out of pure love made her ill. She suggested that she could give up all claim of ownership over DX3906 and keep the deed only as a memento, but she was told that was unacceptable. By law, the authorities could not accept such valuable real estate without compensating the original owner, so they insisted on buying it. Cheng Xin refused.

  After much reflection, she came up with a new proposal: She would sell the two planets, but retain ownership of the star. At the same time, she would sign a covenant with the UN and the fleet granting humanity the right to use the energy produced by the star. The legal experts eventually concluded that this proposal was acceptable.

  AA told Cheng Xin that since she was only selling the planets, the amount of compensation offered by the UN was much lower. But it was still an astronomical sum, and she would need to form a company to manage it properly.

  “Would you like me to help you run this company?” AA asked.

  Cheng Xin agreed, and AA immediately called the UN Space Development Agency to resign.

  “I’m working for you now,” she said, “so let me speak for a minute about your interests. Are you nuts?! Of all the choices available to you, you picked the worst! You could have sold the star along with the planets, and you would have become one of the richest people in the universe! Alternatively, you could have refused to sell, and kept the entire solar system for yourself. The law’s protection of private property is absolute, and no one could have taken it away from you. And then you could have entered hibernation and woken up only when it’s possible to fly to DX3906. Then you could go there! All that space! The ocean, the continents... you can do whatever you want, of course, but you should take me with you—”

  “I’ve already made my decision,” Cheng Xin said. “There’s almost three centuries separating us. I don’t expect us to understand each other right away.”

  “Fine.” AA sighed. “But you should reevaluate your conception of duty and conscience. Duty drove you to give up the planets, and conscience made you keep the star, but duty again made you give up the star’s energy output. You’re one of those people from the past, like my dissertation advisor, torn by conflict between two ideals. But, in our age, conscience and duty are not ideals: an excess of either is seen as a mental illness called social-pressure personality disorder. You should seek treatment.”

  Even with the glow from the lights of the city below, Cheng Xin easily found DX3906. Compared to the twenty-first century, the air was far clearer. She turned from the night sky to the reality around her: She and AA stood like two ants on top of a glowing Christmas tree, and all around them stood a forest of Christmas trees. Buildings full of lights hung from branches like leaves. But this giant city was built on top of the earth, not below it. Thanks to the peace of the Deterrence Era, humanity’s second cave-dwelling phase had come to an end.

  They walked along the bough toward the tip. Each branch of the tree was a busy avenue full of floating translucent windows filled with information. They made the street look like a varicolored river. From time to time, a window or two left the traffic in the road and followed them for a while, and drifted back into the current when AA and Cheng Xin showed no interest. All the buildings on this branch-street hung below. Since this was the highest branch, the starry sky was right above them. If they had been walking along one of the lower branches, they would be surrounded by the bright buildings hanging from the branch above, and they would have felt like tiny insects flying through a dream forest, in which every leaf and fruit sparkled and dazzled.

  Cheng Xin looked at the pedestrians along the street: a woman, two women, a group of women, another woman, three women—all of them were women, all beautiful. Dressed in pretty, luminous clothes, they seemed like the nymphs of this magical forest. Once in a while, they passed some older individuals, also women, their beauty undiminished by age. As they reached the end of the branch and surveyed the sea of lights below them, Cheng Xin asked the question that had been puzzling her for days. “What happened to the men?” In the few days since she had been awakened, she had not seen a single man.

  “What do you mean? They’re everywhere.” AA pointed at the people around them. “Over there: See the man leaning against the balustrade? And there are three over there. And two walking toward us.”

  Cheng Xin stared. The individuals AA indicated had smooth, lovely faces; long hair that draped over their shoulders; slender, soft bodies—as if their bones were made of bananas. Their movements were graceful and gentle, and their voices, carried to her by the breeze, were sweet and tender.... Back in her century, these people would have been considered ultra-feminine.
<
br />   Understanding dawned on her after a moment. The trend had been obvious even earlier. The decade of the 1980s was probably the last time when masculinity, as traditionally defined, was considered an ideal. After that, society and fashion preferred men who displayed traditionally feminine qualities. She recalled the Asian male pop stars of her own time who she had thought looked like pretty girls at first glance. The Great Ravine interrupted this tendency in the evolution of human society, but half a century of peace and ease brought about by the Deterrence Era accelerated the trend.

  “It’s true that Common Era people usually have trouble telling men and women apart at first,” AA said. “But I’ll teach you a trick. Pay attention to the way they look at you. A classical beauty like you is very attractive to them.”

  Cheng Xin looked at her, a bit flustered.

  “No, no!” AA laughed. “I really am a woman, and I don’t like you that way. But, honestly, I can’t see what’s attractive about the men of your era. Rude, savage, dirty—it’s like they hadn’t fully evolved. You’ll adjust to and enjoy this age of beauty.”

  Close to three centuries ago, when Cheng Xin had been preparing for hibernation, she had imagined all kinds of difficulties she would face in the future, but this was something she was unprepared for. She imagined what it would be like to live the rest of her life in this feminine world... and her mood turned melancholic. She looked up and searched for her star.

  “You’re thinking of him again, aren’t you?” AA grabbed her by the shoulders. “Even if he hadn’t gone into space and had spent the rest of his life with you, the grandchildren of your grandchildren would be dead by now. This is a new age; a new life. Forget about the past!”

  Cheng Xin tried to think as AA suggested and forced herself to return to the present. She had only been here for a few days, and had just grasped the broadest outline of the history of the past three centuries. The strategic balance between the humans and the Trisolarans as a result of dark forest deterrence had shocked her the most.