Death's End (The Three-Body Problem)

by Cixin Liu

  But they hadn’t. Maybe they didn’t have the ability? But more than sufficient time had passed from the time they could pluck their star to send out a primitive membrane message for them to possess this ability.

  Perhaps they didn’t want to shroud themselves.

  If that was so, that made the Star-Pluckers very dangerous; far more dangerous than the dead world.

  Hide yourself well; cleanse well.

  Singer gazed at the world of the Star-Pluckers. It was an ordinary star that had at least a billion more time grains of life left. It possessed eight planets: four giant liquid planets and four solid ones. Singer’s experience told him that the low-entropy entities who had sent out the primitive membrane broadcast lived on one of the solid planets.

  Singer activated the process for the big eye—he rarely did this; he was exceeding his authority.

  “What are you doing?” asked the seed’s Elder. “The big eye is busy.”

  “I’d like to take a closer look at one of the low-entropy worlds.”

  “Your job doesn’t require close-up examinations.”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “The big eye has to observe more important targets. There’s no time for your curiosity. Go back to doing your job.”

  Singer didn’t persist in his request. The cleansing agent had the lowest position on the seed. Everyone thought of him contemptuously, thought of his work as easy and trivial. But they forgot that coordinates that had been broadcast often indicated far more danger than the vast majority who kept themselves well hidden.

  The only thing left was cleansing. Singer took a mass dot out of the magazine again, then realized that he couldn’t use a mass dot to cleanse the Star-Pluckers. Their planetary system had a different structure than the dead world’s system: it possessed blind corners. Using a mass dot might leave something behind, thereby wasting effort. He needed to use a dual-vector foil. However, Singer didn’t have the authority to retrieve a dual-vector foil out of the magazine; he had to ask the Elder for approval.

  “I need a dual-vector foil for cleansing.”

  “Permission granted,” said the Elder.

  The dual-vector foil drifted in front of Singer. It was sealed in its package, crystal clear. Although it was an ordinary object, Singer liked it a lot. He didn’t like the expensive tools too much; they were too violent. He liked the unyielding tenderness displayed by the dual-vector foil, a kind of aesthetic that could turn death into a song.

  Yet Singer felt a bit uneasy. “Why did you give it to me without so much as asking a question?”

  “It’s not like this is very costly.”

  “But if we make too much use of this—”

  “It’s being used everywhere in the cosmos.”

  “Yes, that is true. But in the past, we’ve always been restrained. Now—”

  “Have you heard something?” The Elder began to riffle through Singer’s thoughts, and Singer shuddered. Very quickly, the Elder found the rumor in Singer’s mind. It wasn’t a great sin—the rumor was an open secret on the seed.

  It was a rumor about the war between the home world and the fringe world. Before, news about the war had been frequent, but then the reports stopped, indicating that the war wasn’t going well, perhaps even heading into a crisis. But the home world couldn’t coexist with the fringe world. The fringe world had to be destroyed, lest the home world be destroyed by it. If the war couldn’t be won, then...

  “Has the home world decided to transform into two dimensions?” Singer asked. Of course, the Elder already knew the question.

  The Elder did not answer, which was also an answer.

  If the rumor was true, then it was a great sorrow. Singer couldn’t imagine such a life. On the tower of values, survival ranked above all. When survival was threatened, all low-entropy entities could only pick the lesser of two evils.

  Singer removed these thoughts from his organ of cogitation. These were not thoughts he should have, and he was only going to be uselessly troubled by them. He tried to remember where he had stopped in his song. It took a while before he found his place. He continued to sing:

  Lovely markings are carved into time

  As soft to the touch as the mud in shallow sea.

  She covers her body with time,

  And pulls me along to fly to the edge of existence.

  This is a spiritual flight:

  In our eyes, the stars appear as ghosts;

  In the eyes of the stars, we appear as ghosts.

  As he continued to sing, Singer picked up the dual-vector foil with a force field feeler and carelessly tossed it at the Star-Pluckers.

  Bunker Era, Year 67 Halo

  Cheng Xin awakened to find herself in weightlessness.

  Hibernation wasn’t like regular sleep. A hibernator didn’t feel the passage of time. Throughout the entire process, one could only feel time during the hour spent entering hibernation and the hour emerging from it. No matter how much time passed during hibernation, subjectively, the hibernator only felt that he or she had slept no more than two hours. Thus, waking up always involved a sharp break, a feeling that the self had passed through a door in time and emerged into a new world.

  Cheng Xin found herself in a white spherical space. She saw that 艾 AA was floating nearby, dressed in the same skintight hibernation suit. Her hair was wet and her limbs were spread out powerlessly; clearly, she had just been awakened as well. As their eyes met, Cheng Xin wanted to speak, but the numbness caused by the cold had still not left her, and she couldn’t make any noise. AA shook her head, meaning that she was in the same state and didn’t know anything.

  Cheng Xin noticed that the space was filled with a golden light like the setting sun. The light came in through a circular window—a porthole. Outside the porthole, Cheng Xin could see only blurred streaks and swirling lines. The lines were arranged into parallel bands of blue and yellow, revealing a world covered by raging storms and torrents, clearly the surface of Jupiter. Cheng Xin saw that the surface of Jupiter looked much brighter than she remembered.

  Strangely, the wide, raging cloud band in the middle reminded her of the Yellow River. She knew, of course, that an eddy in this “Yellow River” was big enough to contain the Earth. Against this background, Cheng Xin saw an object. The main body of the object was a long column whose sections were of different diameters. Three short cylinders were perpendicularly attached to the main column at different locations. The entire assembly slowly rotated around the axis of the column. Cheng Xin decided that she was looking at a combined space city formed from eight separate space cities docked together.

  She discovered another amazing fact as well: The place they were in stayed at rest relative to the combined space city, but Jupiter was slowly moving in the background. Based on the brightness of Jupiter, they were now on the side facing the Sun, and she could see the shadow of the combined space city against the gaseous surface of Jupiter. After a while, the Jovian terminator appeared, dividing Jupiter’s day from night, and she saw the monstrous eye that was the Great Red Spot drifting into view. Everything confirmed the fact that both the place they were in and the combined space city were not in Jupiter’s shadow and did not orbit the Sun in parallel with Jupiter; instead, they were Jupiter’s satellites and revolved around the gas giant.

  “Where are we?” Cheng Xin asked. She was finally able to speak in a hoarse voice, but she still couldn’t move her body.

  AA shook her head again. “No idea. I think we’re on a spaceship.”

  They continued to drift in the golden glow of Jupiter, like a dreamscape.

  “You’re on Halo.”

  The voice came from an information window that had just popped up next to them. In the window was an old man with a head full of white hair. Cheng Xin recognized him as Cao Bin. Based on his age, she realized that she had leapt across another long stretch of years. Cao Bin told her that it was now May 19 of Year 67 of the Bunker Era. She realized that fifty-six more years had pa
ssed since her last brief awakening.

  She avoided life by staying outside of time, and she watched as others aged, seemingly in an instant. Her heart was filled with regret and guilt. She decided that no matter what happened from now on, this was her last hibernation.

  Cao Bin told them that they were on the latest ship to bear the Halo name. It had been constructed only three years ago. After the Halo City Incident, more than half a century earlier, he and Bi Yunfeng had both been convicted, though both had served short sentences and then been released. Bi Yunfeng had died more than ten years earlier, and Cao Bin brought along his well wishes for her and AA. Cheng Xin’s eyes moistened.

  Cao Bin also told them that there were now fifty-two large space cities in the Jupiter cluster, most of which had been combined into bigger cities. What they could see was Jupiter Combination II. Since the advance warning system had been refined twenty years ago, all cities had decided to become Jovian satellites. Only after an alert was issued would the cities change orbit and go into hiding.

  “Life in the cities is once again like being in paradise. It’s too bad that you won’t get to see it, because there’s no time.” Cao Bin paused. Cheng Xin and AA exchanged uneasy glances. They realized that he had been so loquacious until now because he was trying to delay this moment.

  “Was there an attack alert?”

  Cao Bin nodded. “Yes, there’s been an alert. During the last half century, there were two false alarms, and each time, we almost awakened you. But this time it’s real. Children—I’m already one hundred and twelve years of age, so I think I can call you that—the dark forest strike is finally here.”

  Cheng Xin’s heart tensed. It wasn’t because the attack had arrived—humanity had been preparing for this moment for more than a century. Rather, she sensed that something was wrong. She and AA had been awakened by contract. It would have taken at least four to five hours for them to recover to this stage, which meant that the alert had been issued some time ago. But outside the porthole, Jupiter Combination II had not disassembled nor changed its orbit, but continued to drift as a Jovian satellite, as though nothing had happened. They turned to Cao Bin: The centenarian’s expression was too placid, as though hiding utter despair.

  “Where are you now?” AA asked.

  “I’m at the advance warning center,” Cao Bin said, and pointed behind him.

  Cheng Xin saw a hall behind him that looked like a control center. Information windows filled almost every bit of space. The windows drifted around the hall, but new windows kept on popping open before them, only to be covered in turn by still newer windows—like the flood after a burst dam. But the people in the hall seemed to be doing nothing. Half of them were in military uniforms, but they all either stood leaning against a desk or sat still. Everyone had dull eyes, and all had the same ominous calm expression that was on Cao Bin’s face.

  It shouldn’t be like this.

  This didn’t look like a world hunkered down inside a bunker, certain it could survive the attack. It looked more like three centuries ago—no, four centuries ago now—when the Trisolar Crisis had first developed. Back then, at the offices of the PIA and the PDC, Cheng Xin had seen this kind of atmosphere and expression everywhere: despair against some superpowerful force in the universe, a kind of numbness and indifference that said We give up.

  Most of the people in the control center were quiet, but a few whispered to each other with somber faces. Cheng Xin saw a man sitting numbly. A cup had fallen over on the table in front of him, and a blue liquid spilled off the table onto his pants, but he ignored it. On the other side, in front of a large information window that seemed to show some complicated, evolving situation, a man in military uniform embraced a woman dressed as a civilian. The woman’s face seemed wet....

  “Why aren’t we entering Jupiter’s shadow?” AA pointed at the combined city outside the porthole.

  “There’s no point. The bunker is useless,” Cao Bin said, lowering his eyes.

  “How far is the photoid from the Sun?” Cheng Xin asked.

  “There’s no photoid.”

  “Then what have you found?”

  Cao Bin gave a wretched laugh. “A slip of paper.”

  Bunker Era, Year 66 Outside the Solar System

  A year before Cheng Xin’s awakening, the advance warning system discovered an unknown flying object sweeping past the edge of the Oort Cloud at a speed close to lightspeed. At its closest approach, the object was only 1.3 light-years from the Sun. The object’s volume was immense, and at its near-lightspeed velocity, the radiation generated by its impact with the scattered dust and atoms in space was intense. The advance warning system also observed the object making a small course change during flight to avoid a patch of interstellar dust, before resuming its previous course. It was most certainly an intelligent spaceship.

  This was the first time that Solar System humans—as opposed to Galactic humans—had observed another extraterrestrial civilization besides the Trisolarans.

  Due to lessons learned from the previous three false alarms, the Federation Government did not publicize this discovery. No more than a thousand people in the entire Bunker World knew about it. During the few days when the spaceship had been closest to the Solar System, these individuals lived in extreme anxiety and terror. In the few tens of space observation units comprising the advance warning system, in the advance warning center (a space city in the Jupiter cluster), in the battle center of Federation Fleet Command, and in the office of the president of the Solar System Federation, people held their breaths and watched the spaceship’s course like a trembling school of fish hiding at the bottom of a pond, waiting for the trawler to pass overhead. These individuals’ terror developed to absurd levels later: They refused to use radio communications, walked noiselessly, and spoke only in whispers.... In reality, everyone understood that these gestures were meaningless, not the least because what the advance warning system observed had happened a year and four months ago. By now, the spaceship was already gone.

  After the extraterrestrial spaceship moved farther away, these individuals did not relax. The advance warning system discovered something else that was worrisome. The strange spaceship did not shoot a photoid at the Sun, but did launch something else. This object was also shot at the Sun at lightspeed, but it produced none of the emissions associated with photoids and was completely invisible electromagnetically. The advance warning system only managed to discover it through gravitational waves. The object continuously emitted weak gravitational waves whose strength and frequency remained constant. The waves clearly carried no message, and were probably the result of some physical characteristic of the projectile. When the advance warning system initially discovered these gravitational waves, the source was thought to be the extraterrestrial spaceship. But they soon found that the source was separate from the spaceship, and it was approaching the Solar System at lightspeed.

  Further analysis of the observation data revealed that the projectile wasn’t aimed precisely at the Sun. According to its current trajectory, it would sweep past the Sun outside the orbit of Mars. If the intended target had been the Sun, this was a relatively gross error. This showed another way that the projectile was different from a photoid: The data gathered from the previous two photoid strikes all showed that after a photoid was launched, it followed a precise, straight trajectory to the target star (taking into account the motion of the star) and did not require any course correction. It could be surmised that a photoid was essentially a rock flying under inertia at lightspeed. Tracking the gravitational wave source showed that the projectile did not make any course corrections, apparently indicating that its target was not the Sun. This provided some comfort for everyone involved.

  When the projectile was about 150 AU from the Sun, the gravitational waves it emitted began to rapidly decrease in frequency. The advance warning system discovered that this was due to its deceleration. Within a few days, the projectile’s velocity went from lightspeed
to one-thousandth of lightspeed, and continued to decrease. Such low speed meant that it wasn’t enough to threaten the Sun, which provided further comfort. In addition, at this speed, human spacecraft could keep up with it. In other words, it was possible to send out ships to intercept it.

  Revelation and Alaska departed the Neptune city cluster and flew in formation to investigate the unknown projectile.

  Both ships were equipped with gravitational wave reception systems and could form a positioning network to determine the location of the transmission source with precision at close range. Since the Broadcast Era, more ships had been built that could transmit and receive gravitational waves. But the design concepts used in these ships were very different from earlier antenna ships. One of the main innovations was separating the gravitational wave antenna from the ship itself so that they formed two independent units. The antenna could then be combined with different ships, and could be replaced after it failed due to decay. Revelation and Alaska were only medium-sized ships, but they had about the same total volumes as large ships because the gravitational wave antennas made up a large portion of their structures. The two ships resembled helium-filled airships of the Common Era: They looked immense, but the effective payload was just the small gondola hanging below the gasbags.

  Ten days after the two ships left port, General Vasilenko and 白 Ice,* dressed in lightweight space suits and magnetic shoes, took a stroll on the gravitational wave antenna of Revelation. They enjoyed doing this because there was much more space out here compared to the interior of the spaceship, and walking around the antenna made one feel like walking on solid earth. They were the leaders of the first exploratory team: Vasilenko was the commander while 白 Ice was in charge of technical matters.