The sky was a misty, dark gray. A familiar afternoon drizzle enveloped the lake in a gentle mist. The grass at the shore dipped and swayed in the breeze, thirstily drinking the sweet raindrops. A toy boat woven from blades of grass drifted over the water, riding farther and farther from the bank on ripples spawned by the rain.
As though it’s heading for the world’s end …
Yun Tianming sat on the shore and aimlessly tossed pebbles into the lake, watching the ripples crisscross each other. A woman sat next to him, gazing at him without speaking. The breeze lifted strands of her long hair to brush against his cheeks, the caress arousing his desire.
For a moment, Tianming experienced the illusion of being in another time and another place, as though he had returned to that college outing in the suburbs of Beijing with his classmates, returned to that happy afternoon he had spent by the side of Cheng Xin. But the lemon-colored water, the blue grass, and the varicolored pebbles around him reminded him that this was a different era in a different world, a planet three hundred light-years away and almost seven centuries later.
And a different woman.
Slanting rain, gentle breeze, no need to return home.1
Tianming didn’t know why he’d thought of a line of Classical Chinese poetry, something that his parents, who had admired classical education so much, had forced him to memorize. He could no longer imagine going home. There was no home to return to; he could only endure the cold wind and rain on this alien planet.
What a fool! Tianming castigated himself. Did I really think I was going to get another chance with Cheng Xin, my beloved, and make toy boats by a lake? Wake up! The very idea that he might reunite with the woman of his dreams seven centuries later was absurd. The fact that he was now sitting next to a female of the same species was already an incredible miracle.
But a greater miracle had once been within his grasp. After being apart for seven hundred years, he could have seen that woman if only he had gotten here a few hours—even a few minutes—earlier. He could have spent the rest of his life with the woman he had been in love with for seven centuries on the shore of this lake, never again parting from her. The woman who sat next to him now, on the other hand, would have been only his wife’s best friend and married to another man.
Even now, Cheng Xin was not so far from him, at most only a few hundred kilometers away. On clear nights, he could even see her spaceship orbiting this planet slowly. However, though he could admire her from afar, she was forever out of his reach.
He had once given her a star. But now, because of the sudden expansion of the death line, she would never be able to land on this world. She had become his star.
Tianming grimaced and glanced at the sky out of habit. Today, because of the rain and clouds, he could see nothing. But he knew that she was there, above the clouds, perhaps even drifting overhead at that moment …
Tianming pulled his gaze back and realized that her eyes were still staring at him; he pretended not to notice. A pair of arms, like vines, entwined around his neck. He was readying himself to enjoy this moment of intimacy when the arms’ owner spoke, asking a question that lovers across eons and galaxies and species and sexes had all asked: “Hey, who do you like more, me or her?”
“You, of course!”
“But in what way?” 艾 AA refused to give up. “You have to be specific! I thought Cheng Xin—” But her question was interrupted by a kiss. Numerous similar experiences had taught Tianming the painful lesson that there was no appropriate answer under such circumstances, nor was there any need to speak.
艾 AA gave in to the kiss, and once the kiss had ended, she did not pursue the previous line of questioning. Shyly, she bit Tianming’s earlobe; a moment later, as though unsatisfied, she bit his shoulder, hard.
Tianming screamed and pushed her away. Hallucinations that had long been buried in his memory erupted forth, weighing down his consciousness. He had trouble breathing and could not think. He pressed his head between his hands in pain.
“I was just playing!” Although 艾 AA’s immediate reaction was that he was being dramatic, when she saw the pallor in his face and the tremors that racked his body she realized that he was terrified, perhaps delirious. She had seen him going through such episodes from time to time. “Tianming, what’s wrong?” she asked with concern.
Tianming stared back at her, confused and frightened, panting heavily. After a long pause, he asked, “You … are you real?”
“What are you talking about?” Now AA was frightened. She approached him, arms open for an embrace, but Tianming backed away and gazed at her suspiciously, his body crouched defensively. He repeated his question: “Are you a real person or just a hallucination? Is this whole world a trick in my mind?”
AA grasped the seriousness of the situation. Taking a deep breath, she spoke slowly. “I am real. Tianming, look at me. I’m standing right here in front of you. Every inch of my skin, every hair on my head—they’re all real. The planet we’re on is absolutely real. This … this is our world!”
“Our … world?” Tianming asked.
“Yes! Do you remember that day when we stood here waiting for Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan? We watched as their spaceship entered orbit around Planet Blue. You laughed like a child, holding my hand and telling me that you were going to surprise her, lead her into that marvelous little universe that even you had not seen. And then, all of a sudden, the death line expanded and the sky darkened; there was no more sun, no more stars. When you figured out what had happened, you just stood there like a zombie, not crying, not screaming. I didn’t understand how much you loved her until I saw the depth of your despair.”
“I do remember,” Tianming muttered, but his expression remained far away.
“For three days and three nights, you didn’t drink or eat and barely slept. I kept on telling you that they didn’t die; they were just living in a different frame of reference, and maybe one day you would see each other again. But you didn’t seem to hear me. Finally, on the third night, you cried. At first silently, and then weeping and sobbing, and finally howling and wailing. And I … I put my arms around you. And I heard you say to me, ‘There are only the two of us on this planet! Only the two of us!’ Do you remember what I said to you next?”
“You said, ‘You are my Adam and I’m your Eve.’” Tianming closed his eyes, remembering.
“I don’t know how I found the words.” 艾 AA bit her lip and blushed. “Anyway … that was how you and I became a couple. We couldn’t be free of the despair, of course, but on that day at least, we let go and … it was wonderful. The next day, you told me, ‘From now on, this is our world.’ Do you remember?”
A smile appeared on Yun Tianming’s face, perhaps without him even realizing it. “Yes, of course.”
“Then how can all of that be unreal?” AA asked.
Smiling encouragingly, she took a step toward Tianming. This time, he did not back away. She picked up his hands and wrapped his arms around herself as she hugged him, pressing her ear against his chest to listen to his heartbeat. Still confused, Tianming looked into the distance, allowing her to cling to him. Gently, she kissed his face, and gradually, hesitantly, Tianming returned her embrace. His gaze warmed and he returned her kiss, which she returned with even more ardor …
Tianming received the most primitive and most authentic proof of the reality of the universe.
*
The rain had stopped some time ago, and the blue grass swayed in the evening breeze. The light of dusk pierced the clouds and painted a golden edge on the azure hills.
What happened next would have been unimaginable on Earth: The blue trees and shrubs of the forest came to life. They stretched as they woke, turning hundreds of thousands of leaves toward the warmth of the setting sun, absorbing every drop of energy. A few branches, fighting for more light, shoved and jostled against each other, filling the air with a susurrating noise. Dragonfly-like amphibious insects took off from the lake and danced in the air, spreading their four transparent wings to absorb the nutrients released by the blue grass and singing in high-pitched chirps to attract mates. Insects of the opposite sex responded with their own songs, and then, pairs began the complicated mating dance above the lake, enacting the sacred ritual that allowed life to multiply and continue … all these sounds fused into one composition, Planet Blue’s unique cantata of life.
At the heart of this new black domain, life seemed to go on as before, except for the intrusion of two wanderers from afar. They clung to each other, and they would remain on this world forever. But to this planet that had already existed for billions of years and would continue to exist for billions more, the pair were nothing—they would disappear in a flash, leaving no trace behind, like the ripples passing over the surface of the lake.
Gazing at the setting sun, Yun Tianming spoke softly. “I’d already thought of this world as a dream. AA, forgive me for my behavior earlier. Even now, I still can’t tell if I’m truly awake. I can no longer tell when a dream starts or when it ends. All of this … seems to have no end.”
“No end? What do you mean?” asked AA.
“How old are you now?” Tianming asked.
“I can’t remember. At least four hundred,” said AA.
“What if you don’t count the years you were in hibernation?”
“I guess twenty … thirty something? I really can’t remember,” AA said.
“By the standards of the Deterrence Era, you’re still very young. But do you know how old I am?”
“A smidgen over seven hundred, I’d say. But if you don’t count the years of hibernation I don’t think you’re much older than I am.”
“No.” As he spoke, Yun Tianming’s eyes seemed ancient. “My mind is at least several thousand years old, maybe even tens of thousands.”
艾 AA found this incomprehensible. But instead of asking more questions, she listened.
With a grimace, Tianming explained, “I know it’s hard to believe. Here’s the difference between the two of us: I spent the vast majority of my life in a dream, a dream that lasted tens of thousands of years.
“From the first year of the Crisis Era, from the moment I—no, my brain—was frozen, I began to dream. Endless dreams filled my time as I drifted in the abyss of space. In retrospect, I’m sure much of that was false memory constructed later by my mind, since a brain kept near absolute zero could not possibly generate dreams … And then, once the Trisolarans captured me, they seized on dreams as their most potent weapon and employed them to stimulate me, to study me … to use me.”
Tianming kept his voice calm, as though describing a stroll by the lake. But AA shivered. She knew, without needing Tianming to elaborate, that he had elided an unimaginable amount of suffering, pain, and terror.
艾 AA and Yun Tianming had been living together for a year on Planet Blue, since the day of the death line’s expansion.2 They depended on each other and supported each other, and during this time, Tianming had suffered similar bouts of delirium multiple times. Tianming had never explained, and AA had never pried, though she suspected that it had something to do with his experience among the Trisolarans.
AA understood that Tianming was the greatest spy in the history of the human race. Embodied in an isolated brain, he managed to infiltrate an alien species and gave humans invaluable intelligence. Knowing that such success could not have been achieved without paying a dear price, she could imagine the extent of the bloody, cruel tortures the Trisolarans inflicted on Tianming, and she yearned to understand the truth, to have Tianming share with her the weight of his past suffering and pain, to comfort him. But she dared not ask him lest the questions rip the scabs off his wounds. Sometimes she even wondered whether the fragile bonds of love between them could truly heal the aftereffects of his painful ordeal.
And so, today, as Tianming seemed finally ready to unburden himself, a bittersweet joy filled her heart.
“Just now, I couldn’t help but remember those nightmares.” Tianming fidgeted with the pebbles at his feet. “In many of those Trisolaran-manufactured dreams, I was back at that college outing, sitting next to Cheng Xin, conversing intimately. Then she would pull me to her, kiss me, engulf me in indescribable sweetness and happiness … and then, abruptly, she would turn into a terrible monster, her skin covered in scales, her red lips revealing sharp fangs, and she would lock her jaws around my throat and drag me into the bottomless lake, there to drown in frigid terror.”
“How horrible!” AA cried out.
“Horrible?” Tianming let out a laugh that sounded more like a sob. “I haven’t even gotten to the truly horrible parts. Many have suffered nightmares far worse than this. But what distinguished my dreams was their level of detail. I can still vividly recall the sharp teeth that penetrated my body and the soulless compound eyes that stared into mine. The sensations of agony and suffocation are indistinguishable from reality. That’s not all; my nightmares never ended. I couldn’t breathe in the lake, but I didn’t wake up nor did I black out, and I certainly couldn’t die. Time stopped, and the pain went on and on.
“My consciousness flickered in and out of focus. One moment I understood it was a hallucination, but the next I had forgotten, struggling helplessly as the monster continued to devour me …”
Tianming’s voice grew faint, as though he were talking in his sleep. “In those moments, I held on to the memory of one person. Like Dante’s Beatrice, she appeared in the clouds, surrounded by angels, a crown woven from flowers on her head, flames wrapped about her body like a dress. That holy light pierced the dark water of the lake, giving me a ray of hope. I told myself, ‘Cheng Xin is not a monster; she is a goddess who will bring me salvation. I won’t be deceived. This is just the devil playing tricks on me …’ But the world isn’t governed by fairy tales. Just because I called out to my goddess didn’t mean that she would come to save me. Thinking of Cheng Xin and holding on to that slender thread of hope did not bring me relief; instead, it ripped my heart apart.”
“Stop,” AA said, caressing his stubbly cheeks lovingly. “I understand. Forget about those nightmares. They were only dreams, and long in the past.”
“No, you don’t understand anything at all!” Tianming pushed her hand away and stood up, agitated. “These weren’t ‘dreams’ at all. Don’t you get it? The Trisolarans stimulated my neurons with electrical signals. For me, these signals were reality, as real as seeing you, touching you now. There’s no difference at the level of neural activity. They injected those nightmares into my brain and made them real by taking advantage of biological mechanisms to which I had no defense. I wasn’t fighting illusions with reality; instead, I was making illusions to fight reality—a battle that I couldn’t win.
“What use was it for me to conjure Cheng Xin? In response to my pleas, my tormentors could make her show up in my mind, giving me hope that a miracle had occurred, that salvation was at hand. But then they would turn the visitation into an even worse hell, one a thousand times worse than the one I had just suffered.
“In one dream, I lived together with Cheng Xin for ten years, and we even had a wonderful little daughter. But those ten years of joy and tranquility were but a prelude for the inferno to follow: A great famine struck the land, and all of us were so emaciated we were barely more than skin and bones, close to dying. Yet one day, somehow Cheng Xin made a pot of meat stew for me. I was baffled; where did we get the meat? After eating some, I discovered a clump of hair and a patch of skin in a corner of the kitchen. I was shocked. Cheng Xin then lifted something out of the pot for me with a ladle—it was round and fleshy, boiled for so long that it was almost falling apart … I recognized it as the head of my daughter. Smiling, Cheng Xin said to me, ‘Delicious, isn’t it? Have some more!’”
“Ah!” AA grabbed Tianming’s arm, utterly nauseated. She could not imagine living through such a nightmare.
But Tianming continued to explain, almost cruelly, “The worst part was that even though I wanted to throw up and I was racked with grief and terror, my hunger seemed to have a mind of its own. I couldn’t help it. Mouthful by mouthful, I ate my daughter, until I was so full that I burped. Once satiated, Cheng Xin and I even made love next to my daughter’s bones before falling asleep.
“When I woke up, I found myself tightly bound and unable to move. Cheng Xin knelt down next to me and explained that she had to eat me to survive. As I watched in horror, she bit into my arm, tore off a piece of flesh with her teeth, chewed, and swallowed. She continued until all the flesh had been picked off the bones—”
AA could not stand it anymore. “Stop! Stop it! I beg you!” She turned around and retched, and her mouth filled with the foul taste of acid.
When she had recovered, she asked, “But why? Why did the Trisolarans torture you with such grotesque visions?”
“To understand humanity,” Tianming answered. “If you think about it, it’s not strange at all. Although the sophons helped them keep everything happening on Earth under surveillance, they couldn’t understand our emotional responses or physical reactions without experimentation. The nightmare I just described to you wouldn’t have struck the Trisolarans as a tragedy since they operated according to a moral code completely alien to us. They often consumed the flesh of other dehydrated Trisolarans, and so they were baffled by the human revulsion against cannibalism. I can tell you stories that are far more disgusting. For example—”
“Why don’t we save such unpleasant stories for another time?” AA interrupted. She finally understood why Tianming never mentioned his experiences among the Trisolarans. “No matter what, Tianming, you have to remember this: You survived those trials and won their trust and respect; you inserted yourself into the heart of an alien society. Your sacrifices were worth it.”
Tianming looked at her, grimacing. “Yes, of course my sacrifices were worth it. They brought about the destruction of Earth and the human race.”
AA stared at Tianming in confusion. Taking a deep breath, he finally revealed to her the secret he had always kept from everyone. “Don’t you understand, AA? The only reason that I could win the trust of the Trisolarans and ‘infiltrate’ their society was because I surrendered. The droplet attack that ended the Deterrence Era was, in large measure, my work.”
*
If one were to pick a single individual to bear the responsibility for the destruction of humanity’s cradle, the most appropriate choice would not be Cheng Xin, Yun Tianming, or anyone else whose decisions swayed the lives of billions. It would have to be Thomas Wade, who had dedicated himself to the task of saving the human race through a program of violent struggle. More than six hundred years ago, he had uttered the fateful words that determined the ultimate fate of two species.
“We’ll send only a brain.”
This stroke of genius propelled the Staircase Program out of its darkest moments and handed the Trisolarans a precious human brain specimen. Although the sophons were capable of observing the human brain in minute detail, such passive observation was insufficient to gain an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms of human cognition. Moreover, after Wallfacer Bill Hines’s efforts at mental sabotage, humanity’s leaders grew increasingly concerned with the dangers of neuroscience research. Researchers were forbidden to delve into the specifics of how bioelectric signals between neurons gave rise to thought, lest such research give the Trisolarans the capability to read human thoughts through detailed neuroelectric monitoring.
Two centuries after initial contact, human cognition still presented an impenetrable black box to the Trisolarans. The aliens desperately wanted to experiment on a live human. Their enthusiasm wasn’t driven entirely by scientific curiosity; rather, it was out of a desperate, practical need for strategic deception.
Throughout the Crisis Era, the Trisolarans saw no need for practicing strategic deception against humans—just as humans needed only pesticides, not lies, to take care of troublesome bugs. However, that didn’t mean the Trisolarans were unaware of the value of such deception against other targets. Ever since they had discovered the dark forest state of the cosmos, the Trisolarans had lived in a state of perpetual terror of the rest of the universe. They knew that countless hunters were concealed in the galaxy, and the previous communications between Trisolaris and Earth were likely to be discovered and posed a threat for their own survival. Strategic deception was an important defensive weapon they had to consider, but to wield it, the Trisolarans first had to understand the only species known to possess such a capability—humans.
A branch of advanced knowledge known as “deceptionology” arose among the Trisolaran elite soon after Evans revealed this unique feature of human cognition. The Trisolarans at first hoped to learn this human skill quickly, but that hope was soon dashed. Theoretically, understanding the principles of deception posed little difficulty; one simply had to purposefully make a false statement, which would achieve the desired goal when the target of deception believed it. Unfortunately, the Trisolaran scientists soon realized that their species lacked the biological instinct for lying, and they could not put this simple principle into operation. It wasn’t very different from how human scientists could describe the mathematical underpinnings for four-dimensional space in detail, but could not construct even very simple four-dimensional figures in their minds.
Like all sentient beings, the Trisolarans occasionally made mistakes, but as their language consisted of the electrical patterns of thought being emitted directly, there was no way for them to speak of a known falsehood while pretending it was true. If a Trisolaran believed that a statement was false, the cognitive markers were immediately exhibited externally. Although in certain special situations, such as technology-enabled long-distance communication, it was possible to manufacture the signals of false brain activity, the deep biological instinct of the Trisolarans, inherited from their long evolutionary march up from primitive life-forms, prevented them from taking such a step.
The Trisolarans had hoped that they could gain the ability to practice the art of deception by studying human history, including advanced works in politics, military strategy, commerce, and game theory. But they soon discovered that they could not understand human history, nor could they decipher theoretical tomes on these subjects by human authors. (To be sure, few humans understood those works either.)
They turned to works of fiction, which seemed easier to understand. For some time, various popular tales of deception were required reading for Trisolaran scientists and politicians. Books like The Count of Monte Cristo, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms became bestsellers. But the aliens didn’t have the capacity to appreciate these books, either. Novels that humans consumed for entertainment and leisure appeared to the Trisolarans as abstruse, incomprehensible treatises. Even after years of study, the most intelligent Trisolaran strategists could understand only the simple deceptions presented in fairy tales like “Little Red Riding Hood.” Such techniques were, of course, useless for devising grand strategies applicable to interstellar warfare.
After decades of fruitless effort, the Trisolarans had to give up the ambitious plan to fundamentally change their own nature; they redirected their efforts to devising computer simulations to generate potential strategic deception scenarios. However, computers were capable of nothing more than reproducing and extending the abilities of their creators. In order to endow computers with special skills, it was necessary to write the requisite software; and to write such software, it was necessary to understand the relevant principles in depth. If human beings were not capable of coming up with a proof for Goldbach’s conjecture, they could hardly expect computers produced by humans to calculate such a proof. Similarly, since the Trisolarans did not understand deception, neither did their computers.
Finally, after years of concentrated development and repeated trials by generations of the best Trisolaran minds—aided by access to data equivalent to the storage capacity of all human libraries—the most advanced Trisolaran computers attained the ability to practice deception at the level of the average twelve-year-old human, although such performance was only possible in environments familiar to humans (since all scenarios used to train the computers were derived from such environments). Such skills were of limited applicability to potential conflicts between the Trisolaran civilization and other undiscovered alien civilizations. In many cases, computers running deception software could not even carry out a sensible conversation, failing the basic Turing test.
After having wasted so many years on a wild-goose chase, Trisolaran scientists concluded that in order to acquire the capacity for strategic deception it was vital to study an actual human specimen. Before the Trisolaran Fleet reached the Earth and conquered it, the only available human specimen was Yun Tianming’s brain, which had already left the Solar System. At the end of the Crisis Era, the Trisolaran Fleet diverted a ship for the sole purpose of intercepting the probe carrying the brain of Yun Tianming.
Humanity then mistakenly interpreted the departure of this ship as an attempt by the Trisolarans to seek peace in the face of overwhelming human strength, and this misinterpretation then indirectly led to the destruction of the human fleet at the Doomsday Battle. In that sense, this act of unintended “strategic deception” by the Trisolarans was rather successful.
The Trisolaran Fleet succeeded in capturing the probe with Yun Tianming’s brain only after Luo Ji had established strategic deterrence. By then, Earth and Trisolaris were locked in a delicate balance of power. After years of being blocked by the sophons, Earth’s technological development took off by leaps and bounds; Trisolaris, on the other hand, saw its advantage slip day by day. The primary target for Trisolaran strategic deception was no longer some unknown alien species in the future, but humanity. Although there were still some spiritual successors of the ETO on Earth willing to plot and scheme for the aliens, the Trisolarans were unwilling to engage in any trickery right under the eyes of humans and risk triggering a universal broadcast. Probing and understanding Yun Tianming thus took on an unprecedented importance.
It took the Trisolarans about ten Earth years to figure out the basic structure of Yun Tianming’s brain. Taking into account Trisolaran efficiency—which far exceeded that of humans—their progress was equivalent to a century’s worth of work by humans. They constructed a simulated body for the captured brain so that it could experience sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, and then they studied it to understand how sensory signals were generated and transmitted.
Next, the aliens tried to interpret the information contained in Tianming’s memories. To accomplish this feat, the Trisolarans stimulated the language center of Tianming’s brain at the appropriate times so that he would tell them what he was seeing, what he was hearing, what he was thinking, and so on. Although they still couldn’t read his thoughts directly, by means of trial and error with different stimuli, they learned to inject any information they wished into his brain, and then observed his responses through his narration.
At first, the Trisolarans were very careful with their test subject, and the experiments were gentle and mild. Indeed, they fed Tianming many beautiful sights and comforting scenes. These experiments left illusory memories in Tianming’s mind of dreaming during his long flight through the darkness of space. But as the Trisolarans mastered the details of Tianming’s brain, their experiments grew crueler and more violent. Many times, they pushed Tianming to the precipice of mental breakdown, but they knew enough to stop just at the edge and to calm him with tranquilizing chemicals, giving Tianming a chance to recover.
Although they learned to read Tianming’s thoughts with relative precision, the Trisolarans discovered that due to the unique neural topology of each individual, what they learned from him was applicable to other humans only at a very basic level. The neural structures and patterns for higher thought they learned belonged to Tianming alone. The Trisolaran dream of reading all human thought remained out of reach.
The individuality of experience and memory thus preserved the black-box nature of human thought. If the Trisolarans had had access to thousands or millions of test subjects, they probably could have broken through this barrier as well. Alas, the Trisolarans had only Yun Tianming.
Still, what they accomplished with just one brain was immense.
With seven Earth years of additional, concentrated study of Tianming’s brain, the Trisolarans completed the first digital model of the organ. This model contained all the information in his mind at the quantum level and could be used to simulate his basic thoughts. After the Trisolarans deleted all the “useless” human sentiments and sense of belonging from this digital brain, they filled it with their own data, hoping that the machine mind could then help the Trisolarans with devising plots and schemes. The Trisolarans called this invention “cloud” computing, because it concealed the light of truth like a cloud and because “Yun” in Chinese meant “cloud.”
As Trisolaran civilization grew increasingly commercialized, low-cost versions of Yun Tianming’s simulated digital brain found applications as consumer technology. The Trisolarans installed these cloud-computing devices on their organs of cognition and relied on them to disguise their own true thoughts, thereby achieving novel effects impossible for the unenhanced Trisolaran.
For example, a traditional conversation during the Trisolaran mating season might go something like this:
“My dear sex-one entity, this humble sex-two entity wishes to join our bodies.” The imploring Trisolaran would wave its feelers in a gesture of desire. (Like humans, the Trisolarans are also divided into two sexes, though they are entirely different from human sexes.)
“Get away from me, you ugly thing! The very sight of you makes me wish to expel fecal matter!” The other Trisolaran would release thought waves that indicated extreme disgust.
Such honesty from the second Trisolaran often led to fierce fights between the two parties, an unfortunate state of affairs no one desired. The invention of cloud computing allowed uninterested Trisolarans to answer in a more indirect manner.
“Thank you! I think you’re wonderful. But I don’t think I’m good enough for you.”
The imploring Trisolaran would then leave, satisfied and proud, perhaps even happier than if it had mated.
This was without a doubt a major improvement in Trisolaran society, but some other applications of the technology did not seem so wonderful. Due to the lack of deception and the almost eidetic memory of Trisolarans, there was no cash or coinage on Trisolaris. Most business transactions were not even recorded, but involved only the recitation of desired prices and remaining balances. A typical Trisolaran market exchange, described below, was practically unimaginable for humans:
“I’d like to purchase this rapid-action dehydrator. I still have 12,563 credits. I’ll now pay you 231 credits, leaving me with 12,332 credits.”
“Agreed. I had 73,212 credits. I’ve just received 231 credits, giving me a total of 73,443 credits.”
“Done. I’ll now take the rapid-action dehydrator and leave.”
In reality, market exchanges didn’t involve such ponderous dialogue. The two parties simply projected their separate calculations and observed the changes in the counterparty. If one side made a mistake, the other side would immediately correct it. But cloud computing allowed a Trisolaran to disguise true thought waves and project falsified results. A poor Trisolaran without the funds for luxuries could claim to be a billionaire, and no matter what they bought their account balances never decreased. Merchants could similarly claim that the basest goods were really special high-quality specimens and jack up the prices.
The popularity of cloud computing almost led to the total collapse of the Trisolaran economy. The Trisolaran government had to ban the direct installation of cloud-computing devices on organs of cognition on penalty of immediate dehydration followed by incineration. To enforce the ban, cloud detectors were installed in various locations. Finally, market order was restored.
But even if cloud-computing devices could not be integrated directly with Trisolaran thinking, it was fun for the average Trisolaran to converse with an imitation Yun Tianming brain. If one controlled for the relative slowness of human thought and the pronounced forgetfulness, a human was not unintelligent compared with a Trisolaran. In fact, the human mind possessed some qualities that were unmatched by the Trisolaran mind. Other than being deceptive, a human was also sensitive to nature, curious, imaginative, and creative—unpredictably so. In some sense, mastering human thinking processes—specifically Yun Tianming’s mind—was the key to the Trisolaran technology explosion at the end of the Deterrence Era, culminating in the invention of curvature propulsion.
This was the real reason for the high honor and genuine gratitude the Trisolarans accorded Yun Tianming. Later, after he demonstrated loyalty to Trisolaris, they granted him a very elevated social status.
Cloud computing nonetheless proved inadequate for directly advancing the strategic goals of the Trisolarans. The second-generation simulated Yun Tianming brains used digital models specifying quantum-level details. But just as Hines had discovered during the Common Era, human thought was affected by quantum uncertainty. The Trisolarans couldn’t replicate the activities in Yun Tianming’s brain at the quantum level, so they couldn’t master the essence of human thought. To achieve the level of complexity and intricacy characteristic of true human cognition, they had to rely on a genuine human brain.
After three generations of experimental cloud computing, the Trisolarans had to admit that simulation was no answer. They settled on the last choice available to them: wake Yun Tianming from his endless dreams and, by coercion or inducement, make him serve Trisolaris.
*
Yun Tianming paused in his story. AA stared at him, her face tense. “And did you … did you agree?” She held her breath, afraid that his answer would dash her hopes.
Tianming shook his head, but AA wasn’t completely relieved. She had guessed the answer: He had at first refused, but after a regimen of nonstop, inventive torture, in the end he gave in. She knew that there was a limit to the suffering a mind could endure, and she wasn’t so naive as to despise him for it. Still, deep in her heart, she found it hard to accept that the man she loved was responsible for the destruction of humanity. She did not want to hear any more.
“I’m cold,” she said, shivering and hugging herself. “Why don’t we return to the spaceship?” The sun had already set, and the eerie starlight of the black domain lit up the heavens. The temperature dropped precipitously, and AA hadn’t a stitch of clothing on.
Not too long ago they had welcomed summer on Planet Blue. Their initial judgment of the climate on the planet had been slightly off. Due to the extreme eccentricity of the orbit, the planet’s coldest season left almost two-thirds of its surface in a condition akin to Antarctica on Earth, but during the hottest season, parts of the planet reached fifty degrees Celsius. As the heat was simply too much to bear, the two decided to discard their clothing and live in a prelapsarian manner. But seasons on Planet Blue changed quickly, and after a few storms, it was now chilly autumn.
Tianming twisted a ringlike ornament on his finger—the only item of clothing or jewelry he wore—and a protective force field with a radius of three meters appeared around them. The temperature within the field quickly rose to a comfortable level. AA could see no obvious heat source. She gave a wry smile. Humans during the Deterrence Era could manipulate force fields with the same precision, and such technology was used to maintain an atmosphere suitable for life in space without the use of physical barriers. However, humanity accomplished the feat only with the aid of enormous machines that consumed a great deal of energy, while Yun Tianming did it with nothing more than a ring on his finger.
She did not know where Tianming had acquired the advanced technology he brought with him. Although his ship couldn’t escape the black domain, it was able to satisfy virtually all their other needs. Even on this desolate planet, the two of them lived a life of relative ease that rivaled conditions back in the Solar System.
A few days earlier, while bathing in the lake—the water did contain some trace metals, but was safe enough to bathe in—she had been reminded of the time in her life when she and Cheng Xin had experimented with antique bath soap bars. She told Tianming the story, and then, half joking, she said, “Oh, I wish I could get a bar of sweet-smelling bath soap! Wouldn’t it be nice to take a bubble bath here?”
She wasn’t serious, of course, but to her surprise, Tianming entered his ship and returned a few minutes later to toss her a bar of soap. The fragrance was even stronger than the bar she had found in the museum hundreds of years ago. She had no idea how Tianming had managed it.
There was also the miniature universe that Tianming had brought as a gift for Cheng Xin. She had seen the floating rectangular outline with her own eyes. Although she had never entered it, the very concept seemed to her an almost inconceivable invention. A small, self-contained universe that existed independent of the larger universe around? How could the Trisolarans possess such advanced technology? If they did, they wouldn’t have worried about the destruction of Trisolaris, because moving to mini-universes would have solved all their problems. So how did such a marvel end up in the hands of Yun Tianming?
She changed her mind. “I’m warm now. Why don’t you continue? It’s better to let it all out. No matter what, I’m on your side.”
Tianming lifted his face to the sky, deep in reverie. Only after a long pause did he speak again. “I’ll tell you about the day I woke up, a day I will never forget.”
*
Tianming woke up and saw that he was lying in bed.
He had a body.
It must be a clone, he realized. This was a body without cancer cells, and he felt healthier and stronger than he had on Earth. Everything around him was automated; he didn’t see any Trisolarans. Perhaps the extraterrestrials don’t want to reveal themselves to me, lest their frightening alien appearance become a barrier for effective communication.
He got up and surveyed the room. There was a door, unlocked. After a moment of hesitation, he pushed it open, stepped through, and found himself in a garden. It was filled with sights familiar to him from the Common Era: an open lawn, a bridge over a thin stream, a rock formation, a small pagoda … replicas made by the Trisolarans based on their understanding of Earth. The garden was surrounded by a tall wall that blocked his view of what lay beyond. Puffy clouds drifted in the clear sky, and the sun was bright and warm.
He figured that this whole place was just a part of a Trisolaran ship, which had been modified into a comfortable cage for him. The sky was probably the result of holographic projection. How did the Trisolarans plan to communicate with him?
A line of text appeared in the sky: “Dear Mr. Yun Tianming, welcome to our world.”
The greeting, which was the first time the Trisolarans had talked to him, shocked him. But he maintained a calm demeanor and nodded. “How are you?” he asked.
“Fine.” The Trisolarans got right to the point. “We woke you because we need you to help us complete the plan for the conquest of Earth.”
This is it.
A complicated smile curved up the corners of Tianming’s mouth. He wasn’t entirely surprised by the request. When he had refused to pledge his loyalty toward the human race at the United Nations, he had known such a day might come. It was time to make a decision.
“Why should I betray my people?” he asked coldly.
“Divisions between species do not represent unbridgeable gaps. On Earth, many have already pledged their allegiance to us without our asking.”
“I’m sorry, but you’re severely mistaken if you equate me with those pathetic cowards in the ETO.”
The Trisolarans weren’t angered by his response. “We all know that humans on Earth didn’t treat you with kindness. It was no coincidence that you came to be among us. For the last few years, by studying your brain and mind, our society has already made great strides, and your name is highly esteemed by the Trisolaran people. If you agree to help us, you will become the most honored citizen of Trisolaris, with privileges second only to the princeps. We understand that our material goods may be of no interest to you, but once our fleet arrives at Earth, you will have the resources of the entire planet at your disposal, and you can have whatever humans dream of.”
Tianming sneered. “What would I do with any of that if humanity is exterminated?”
“We won’t eradicate all humans; your species will certainly continue. The need for scientific research alone requires a small number of humans to be preserved—say, in the range of a few hundred thousand to a few million. We’ll set aside a reservation on Earth for them, and we’ll make you their absolute ruler. With the help of our advanced technology, you’ll live better than any king or emperor in the history of your world.”
Since the Trisolarans were incapable of lying, Tianming knew that their promises were genuine.
“What if I refuse?” he asked.
“We would be sorry to hear that. But we won’t do anything to you … except return you to sleep in our dreams.”
Tianming trembled uncontrollably. He knew what the Trisolarans were promising: a perpetual nightmare from which he would never wake up. This was far worse than any physical torture they could devise.
Tianming had had enough. Why should he continue to live in that hell in his head? For the sake of his human compatriots? What was humanity? They were the ones who pulled him out of a quiet end in euthanasia, cut out his brain, froze it in a space probe, and then sent it here to a fate worse than death. Why should he care about them?
The dark thoughts flitted across his mind, demanding that he not be foolish. Tianming knew that the Trisolarans were waiting patiently for his answer.
“I’m sorry, but I have to say no,” he said. He didn’t know exactly why he chose to resist. He knew that if he yielded, even if every human being on Earth cursed his name, he wouldn’t have felt guilty at all. This wasn’t a burden that he should have been made responsible for. Perhaps he refused not out of any sense of duty, but because of an anachronistic sense of nobility.
To hold on to one’s independent will, to refuse to submit to enslavement, to despise enticements as well as threats—such was the dignity and pride of each individual human being. This was something that the Trisolarans, guided by the philosophy of survival above all else, could never understand and perhaps did not want to understand.
“Do you need more time to consider our proposal? We have noticed that humans seem to require some time to think before making important decisions.”
“There’s no need,” Tianming said.
*
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed.
He found himself standing on a tree-lined path with golden leaves drifting down around him. It was fall, and he was next to the open lawn at the heart of his college campus. A few students sat on the grass, reading; in the distance a couple held each other tightly; on the basketball court next to the lawn a group of athletes played, cheering and shouting … Aimlessly, he walked along the path. He decided that he must still be a student here, but he was too shocked to think about how he had returned.
The whole world seemed to brighten as a familiar figure appeared at the end of the path, gradually growing as the distance between them closed: a young woman dressed in a pale yellow windbreaker. She stopped in front of him, a smile on her face.
“You came,” she said.
Tianming heard the affectionate tone in Cheng Xin’s voice. He saw her take his arm and lean against his side as though they were lovers. He was perplexed. When … how …
Love and tenderness filled his heart, but he immediately realized that it was all too perfect and too sweet to be true. With a deep shudder, he realized that this was yet another dream, the beginning of another horrible session of torture.
“No!” he cried out. But he didn’t wake up. Cheng Xin gazed at him, puzzled.
Anxiously, Tianming looked around. Was the sky going to open up and rain down blood? Would the earth crack under his feet? Would all those students around them turn into zombies and attack him and Cheng Xin? For that matter, was Cheng Xin about to turn into a mummy with wispy white hair or a monster with bloody boils all over her body? Would the two of them be buried alive or slaughtered in cold blood? What kind of horrors and evil lay in wait for them in this dream of paradise?
“What’s wrong, Tianming? Are you all right?” Cheng Xin asked, concerned.
He gazed into her clear and innocent eyes; he could not imagine the trials and tortures that would be inflicted on her. He fell to the ground, unable to bear this twisted version of “life.”
“Stop it! Please. Please don’t make me dream any more. I … I will cooperate. Do you hear me?!”
Everything around him disappeared. Tianming found himself lying in bed in the room in which he had awakened earlier. Sweat drenched his body.
“I will ask for only one thing,” he said. “I want to dream of being together with Cheng Xin every night. Dreams of happiness, not nightmares.”
“That’s not a problem at all,” replied the Trisolarans with a line of floating text. Tianming imagined the alien sneer on the faces of the Trisolarans behind the text: You’re nothing but a bug. No matter how you struggle, in the end we will win.
*
Though he paused in his account, Tianming remained mired in reminiscence. From behind, 艾 AA wrapped her arms about him and muttered, “It’s not your fault. It’s not.” But she couldn’t sort through her own complicated emotions; a sense of dread and bitterness grew in her heart.
The hero she worshiped turned out be as vulnerable as any ordinary human.
Tianming gave another wry smile. “My story isn’t so simple.”
*
Having reached an understanding with him, the Trisolarans gave Yun Tianming all the data and references he requested. In total, the information amounted to the capacity of a large library. After perusing the files for some time, Tianming explained that the task of helping the Trisolarans deceive humans was extremely difficult, and he needed time to think.
The Trisolarans left him alone. Tianming paced back and forth in his artificial environment, sitting down to rest from time to time. There was a seven-story pagoda in the garden, and he climbed to the top to survey his world from that elevated perch, deep in thought.
The next day, he returned to the top of the pagoda and sat there for about an hour. The Trisolarans did not bother him. He concluded that perhaps the Trisolarans had relaxed their vigilance against him.
On the third day, he climbed the pagoda again as before, but when he had reached the top, he leapt over the guardrail and plunged toward the ground more than twenty meters below.
He had planned the entire sequence of initial refusal, surrender in the dream, and postdream proposal to collaborate; the goal of his deception was his own death. The gravity here was similar to gravity on Earth, and he had thought long and hard about where and how to make his leap. He was accelerating toward the ground with his head first, and as soon as his skull cracked open, his brain would be splattered. No matter how advanced Trisolaran technology was, he suspected that they couldn’t put back together this cracked egg. The only fear he had was that the Trisolarans might possess the ability to generate a force field in midair to prevent him from striking the ground.
As the ground neared and filled his sight, he barely had time for a flash of relief and joy before it all went dark. Tianming was the happiest suicide in the history of the world.
*
“So how did they revive you?” AA’s voice trembled. The knowledge that Tianming had survived the suicide attempt couldn’t dispel a nameless terror from her.
“I woke up again and found myself, unharmed, lying in that same room. Everything had been reset,” Tianming said.
“How … how was that possible? Do you mean … oh—” AA had guessed at the truth.
“That’s right. I never jumped off the pagoda.” Tianming’s face now held a self-mocking expression. “There was no pagoda, no ‘waking up,’ no cloned body. The entire experience was nothing more than another dream injected into my mind by the Trisolarans. They didn’t care what I did, because I was never in any real danger. This wasn’t a deliberate act of deception on their part; they didn’t inform me of this detail because they didn’t think it was important. Although communicating with me through a dream had been done out of convenience, the Trisolarans later told me that they were impressed by my attempt at deception followed by suicide, a trick they could never have devised. If they had truly revived me in a cloned body, they suspected that they wouldn’t have been able to stop me. This only reassured them that I was the right person to carry out strategic deception. Ironic, isn’t it?
“After that, the contest of wills between the Trisolarans and me heated up. Since I refused to collaborate, they invented a variety of cruel nightmares to punish me. Whenever I couldn’t take it anymore, I would agree to help them and then come up with excuses for delay or bad suggestions. Of course, such tricks became harder and harder to pull off, because the Trisolarans had studied my brain for such a long time that my thoughts were comparatively more transparent to them than other human beings’. Deceiving them grew increasingly difficult.
“On the other hand, my mind also grew more inured to various scenes of horror and mental tortures, and I even learned to consciously override some of the sensations of physical pain they injected into me. Finally, they grew tired of this cat-and-mouse game, and decided to bypass my consent and use my brain directly.”
“Use your brain directly?” AA asked.
Tianming explained that the human brain was to some extent a problem-solving machine. When stimulated, it responded in certain predictable ways. Much of the process didn’t require the participation of consciousness. Many important cognitive tasks were carried out subconsciously, with consciousness only providing supplemental functions like monitoring, storing, organizing, and refining. Nonetheless, if a person was unwilling to cooperate, they could consciously disrupt the nearly automatic processes. In order to make Yun Tianming’s brain serve them subconsciously, the Trisolarans carefully isolated his consciousness from the rest of his mind, and then used their computers to control and direct what remained of his cognitive functions.
The test, however, resulted in a failure. The Trisolarans discovered that a computer could not substitute for the reflective and refining functions of consciousness itself, especially not a Trisolaran computer that was ill-matched to human minds. The Trisolarans had to make all of Tianming serve them, including his conscious will.
So, the Trisolarans resorted to other techniques to induce some semblance of cooperation. For example, they used drugs to bring Tianming’s brain into a hallucinatory state and attempted to question him for ideas on strategic deception. However, Tianming’s confused and unfocused mental state while drugged prevented him from giving useful suggestions.
The Trisolarans also tried a technique that Tianming later dubbed “soul-shock therapy.” This involved injecting questions into Tianming’s brain and forcing him to think about how to solve them. Whenever Tianming tried to resist, his brain center emitted a specific signal, which triggered a “soul shock,” a powerful surge of stimuli that caused Tianming extreme mental anguish and the sensation of physical pain. By this means, the Trisolarans hoped to remove his resistance through aversive conditioning.
They were somewhat successful at first. But eventually Tianming learned mental techniques familiar to yoga and Chan Buddhism practitioners. Instead of actively resisting, Tianming made his mind go blank. By not thinking of anything, he created a hidden partition in his mind in which thoughts could continue without interruption. He also developed the nearly superhuman capacity to endure the painful tortures the Trisolarans subjected him to without breaking down.
The average person used only a small part of the potential of their brain, and the cruel Trisolarans unintentionally forced Tianming to realize more and more of his mind’s infinite potential. Despite repeated all-out assaults in this epic of psychomachia, the technologically far superior Trisolarans failed to breach the fortress Tianming had constructed in his mind, and had to admit defeat.
*
AA was now even more baffled. “If the Trisolarans couldn’t conquer your mind, why did you surrender to them in the end?”
“What do you think is the key to a successful lie?” Tianming countered.
AA hesitated. “I guess … to account for the details? Or maybe to understand the other side’s psychology?”
“No. It’s sincerity. To be so sincere that even the liar believes it.” Tianming sighed.
The Trisolarans were not of a single mind. Encounter with human civilization had shocked their society to the core. The early years of the Deterrence Era, when Tianming and the Trisolarans struggled over his soul, also saw Trisolaran society face its own unprecedented crisis. The creation of the deterrence system put the dream of Earth’s conquest out of reach, and the sense of defeat led to social instability. The popularity of Earth culture and the advent of cloud computing further buffeted the foundation of traditional Trisolaran society. Gradually, the sparks of revolution spread both on Trisolaris and in the Trisolaran Fleet. And soon after, an unexpected Chaotic Era struck, leading to social collapse and the turbulence of the Trisolaran Revolution.
Because they lived in such an inhospitable environment, stability was the overriding goal of Trisolaran political philosophy. Throughout Trisolaran history, there were few events that could be classified as true revolutions. Even if there had been seeds of rebellion, the Trisolarans’ inability to lie meant that revolutionary techniques such as secret plots and underground organizations were inapplicable—it was impossible for Trisolarans harboring rebellious thoughts to disguise them, and they would have been prosecuted for their thought crimes long before they could put them into action. It wasn’t until the Trisolarans encountered humans that they realized that a secret organization aiming to change the status quo was even possible.
But now they had cloud computing. Although the devices were forbidden to ordinary citizens, government research institutes and the military still possessed some. The revolutionaries took advantage of the deceptive capabilities of these devices and remained undetected until the period of instability between the Stable Era and the Chaotic Era, at which point they instigated a riot that snowballed out of control. The revolution succeeded beyond their wildest dreams because the ruling elite were completely unprepared, and the old order collapsed overnight.
The rebels overthrew the old princeps and nobles on Trisolaris, and renounced plans for a strategic counterattack against Earth. The new government held romantic notions about Earth civilization, and the new leaders desired to maintain peace with humanity in exchange for a new home on one of the other planets in the Solar System. Through the use of instantaneous sophon communication, they took charge of the Trisolaran Fleet. Although the fleet was dominated by hawks who preferred to conquer Earth and exterminate humans, they obeyed the orders of the new government. Obedience was the instinctive reaction of most Trisolarans, who had no tradition of saying one thing while planning another.
On the Trisolaran ship, Tianming’s understanding of the details of the revolution was limited, but he quickly sensed that something seemed to have changed among his Trisolaran captors. The tortures they subjected him to slackened and then ceased. After some time, the Trisolarans reestablished contact with him and informed him that there had been a change back home on Trisolaris. They now wished him to serve as a bridge between the two peoples and build trust and friendship.
“Wait a minute!” AA cried out. “This must be a trick! Did you believe them?” Although AA had once been a believer in the “friendly” nature of the Trisolarans, the experience of the alien conquest of Earth had completely shattered such faith. She could never trust anything the Trisolarans said.
“No, it wasn’t a trick,” Tianming said, shaking his head. “If the Trisolarans were capable of devising such an elaborate plot, they would have had no need for my services. If I had believed them, then perhaps I really could have helped the two peoples to find a way to live together in peace. But history is full of unexpected turns and ironic twists … I missed the opportunity.”
Tianming had refused to believe the Trisolarans’ sincerity and had continued to refuse to cooperate. This time, the Trisolarans, beset by all the problems in the wake of a revolution, left him alone to dream on in his long sleep. They didn’t torture him with manufactured nightmares, and they didn’t wake him. From then on, Tianming lived in his dreamworld, and he had no idea how much subjective time he lived through. It might have been two thousand years, but it could also have been five thousand or ten thousand.
“How many years was it really?” AA asked.
“Given that there are no objective markers such as sunsets or sunrises, I can’t tell you for sure. In reality, perhaps about twenty years had passed in the real world, but it felt to me like thousands of years. In one dream, I even founded a civilization and observed its rise and fall—”
“They trapped you in a dream for thousands of years? That … that is even more cruel than a life sentence!” AA was enraged.
“Not at all,” Tianming said. “I count that long dream as the happiest period of my life. No one bothered me as I lived in my own mind. This was a happiness I never enjoyed even back on Earth.
“After so many years in the crucible of Trisolaran mental torture, my mind had been refined into a keen instrument. Not only did I wield it to create an unimaginatively vast interior landscape, I was also the master of this fresh domain. I could use my will to drive and describe the details of every dream. The education in classical literature that my parents had forced on me in my youth turned out to be incredibly helpful, and provided me with the raw materials for the construction of my dreamworld. Sometimes I set off with the heroes aboard Argo in search of the Golden Fleece, ready to slay sea serpents and fight monsters; other times I followed Gringoire through the dark alleys of medieval Paris, listening to the tolling of the bell by Quasimodo; still other times I rode cloud carriages drawn by flying horses and traversed thousands of snow-topped peaks to visit Queen Mother of the West in the Kunlun Mountains …
“I was not a mere visitor to these worlds, but a creator. I conceived every detail of these universes: the Jerusalem of the New Testament, the Hell and Heaven of Divina Commedia, the Bianliang of Along the River During the Qingming Festival, the Heavenly Palace and the Buddha’s pure land as portrayed in Journey to the West … I also invented many marvels that had never been portrayed before: kingdoms found in flower petals, universes bound in nutshells, seafloor metropolises and gardens floating in space …
“As a creator in dreams, I did not need to understand technical details or follow scientific laws. All I had to do was to imagine it, and it was so. Let there be light, I declared, and the universe was luminous. I devised buildings that could not exist under mechanical principles, but they were magnificent, august, sublime. I constructed wonders that scrambled time and space: a Venice in the desert, a primeval forest at the heart of a metropolis, waterfalls that hung from the stars to the earth, tropical islands suspended in air …
“I also populated my worlds with colorful characters and astounding tales: war among the gods, mysterious treasures, legendary heroes, youthful adventures, love that seared the soul and shattered the heart … indeed, most of the hundred-plus fairy tales I told the Trisolarans later were first conceived of during that time.”
“I had no idea,” exclaimed AA. “I thought you worked hard to invent all those other fairy tales in order to disguise the fact that the three stories you told Cheng Xin held secrets.”
“The work wasn’t that hard,” said a smiling Tianming. “When you have only limited time, somehow all you want to do is to procrastinate, nap, waste time. But when the time available to you is unlimited, you don’t want to do anything else except create. Those fairy tales were an insignificant portion of my output.”
“Why don’t you tell me one of your romantic stories then?” AA said. She was so entranced by his account that she had forgotten the purpose of Tianming’s story. Tenderly, she wrapped her arms about his neck and leaned on his shoulder.
“All right. But let me think about which story to tell you … Oh, I know. I’ll tell you one of my favorite tales.
“In ancient China, at the source of the Yangtze River, there was a Tibetan boy who lived in a village at the foot of the Tanggula Mountains. The boy liked to imagine the world outside the mountains, which he had never left. One day, a merchant from China’s heartland passed through the village. The boy followed the merchant everywhere and asked him about the sights he had seen. The merchant told the boy that the stream passing by their village flowed east to join many other streams and brooks, grew wider and deeper, progressed between peaks and over plains, through canyons and around hills, and after a journey of twelve thousand li, plunged into the endless sea as the mightiest river in the land.
“The boy didn’t know what a sea was, and so the merchant told him that it was a body of water so large that a ship could not sail to its edge. The whole world’s rivers commingled there into a mirror broader than any land, reflecting a blue as pure as the sky. Next to the sea, situated in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, was the Jiangnan region, a land of verdant hills and misty lakes, where painted pavilions and delicate houses dotted the countryside like figures in a painting or words in a poem. Women dressed in flowing silk dresses oared elegant barges over the placid waterways, singing folk ditties in the gentle, refined accents of the Wu topolect …
“The boy was utterly entranced by the merchant’s tale, and he wanted to follow the man to Jiangnan, but none of the villagers believed the merchant’s fantastical descriptions, and the boy’s parents refused to let him go. Finally, the merchant had to leave, but he left the boy with a small bottle from Jiangnan. The boy then wrote a letter in Tibetan that described his dreams and fantasies and sealed it into the bottle along with a piece of pure jade from the nearby mountains. He set the bottle down in the stream by the village and hoped that the river would bring it to Jiangnan, thousands of li away.
“Half a year later, as a lonely girl walked by the shore of the Yangtze outside the walls of Jiankang, the City of Stones and the largest metropolis in the world, she saw a bottle bobbing in the river—”
Tianming stopped because he saw the look on AA’s face, a look of horror at the realization of a cruel secret.
“That’s … that’s A Fairy Tale of Yangtze!” she finally cried out. A few hundred years ago, she had played the popular and award-winning film for Cheng Xin. Since she had spent the vast majority of the intervening centuries in hibernation, the film was still fresh in her mind.
You live at one end of the Yangtze, and I the other.
I think of you each day, beloved, though we cannot meet.
We drink from the same river …
She had been so excited to share the film with Cheng Xin, telling her that it was an amazing artistic creation by the Trisolarans. But now Tianming was telling her that the story had been woven by him in a dream …
“That’s right, I’m telling you the story of A Fairy Tale of Yangtze.” Tianming’s tone was calm as he continued his revelation. “That film and the vast majority of so-called Trisolaran artistic creations were dreamed up by me. The Trisolarans gained the trust of humanity with my dreams.”
*
The Trisolarans’ strategic goal was to destroy humanity’s gravitational-wave universal broadcast system without triggering a broadcast, thereby ending the deterrence standoff. A prerequisite for reaching this goal was to induce humanity to elect as the Swordholder someone as kindhearted and weak as Cheng Xin. And the only way to accomplish that was to persuade humans that the Trisolarans no longer posed a threat.
There were many ways to lull humans into thinking that the Trisolarans had been defanged, but the most effective was to build trust and goodwill. In order for humans to trust aliens, the humans had to be made to feel a sense of empathy with the aliens, to think “we are all the same.”
The chain of reasoning so far had long been the consensus of Trisolaran strategists after many rounds of theoretical debate and deduction. But they could not see how to accomplish the first link in the chain: changing the human perception of Trisolarans as irreducibly alien. The differences between the two civilizations were too vast. At the beginning of the Deterrence Era, the Trisolarans, lacking experience, had revealed some true facts about their social organization to the humans. For example, Trisolaran parents, after joining bodies in mating, would essentially die as they “exploded” into baby Trisolarans. As another example, aged and disabled Trisolarans were forcibly dehydrated and incinerated to improve social efficiency. These facts caused humanity to view the Trisolarans with great horror and disgust. The famous one-liner that had once been used by Trisolarans to describe humans was turned around and applied to the Trisolarans.
You’re bugs!
The Trisolarans had used such a description for humans to summarize the vast gulf between the two civilizations’ scientific knowledge and technology levels. But as used by the humans, the sentiment was also imbued with moral and cultural disgust. Once the peaceful Trisolarans took power on Trisolaris, they attempted to improve relations between the two peoples, but the weight of history and the cultural gap meant that their efforts had little effect. Trisolarans were a rational species little affected by emotions and sentiments in their decisions, but humans could not forget the atrocities committed by the Trisolarans during the Doomsday Battle. The intensity of this human hatred seemed to the Trisolarans completely irrational, and they could not understand how to deal with it.
And so the Trisolarans remembered Yun Tianming and hoped to discover the secret of overcoming this obstacle in his mind. They recorded all of his dreams, which they viewed as a treasure trove. Tianming himself became an idol for Trisolaran fans of Earth culture. After suitable processing, his dream creations were released as literary and visual compositions to wide acclaim among the Trisolarans. And after some careful adaptation, these works were transmitted to Earth under the guise of Trisolaran creations.
It was unclear whether the Trisolarans intended to deceive humans from the start. Sending Tianming’s works to Earth probably began as a simple gesture to demonstrate their goodwill. In addition, due to the extreme collectivist nature of Trisolaran culture, the concept of authorship was almost absent among the Trisolarans. Once they had slightly adapted Tianming’s dreams to their own tastes, they naturally felt that the dreams could be called their own. By then the Trisolarans had more or less learned the basic idea of keeping secrets, and so when humans inquired after the source of these artistic works, they didn’t give a direct answer; such omission was the height of their capacity for deception. Humans, of course, could never have dreamed that the Trisolarans possessed a human brain that was unconsciously churning out works of art for them, and came to the natural conclusion that the Trisolarans themselves were the artists.
That Tianming’s dreams were imbued with so much humanistic value and so rooted in Earth culture should have aroused suspicion among the humans, but the overconfidence of the Deterrence Era and the Trisolarans’ genuine admiration for Earth culture led to a blindness on Earth. Humans believed that although their culture was still but a budding sprout in the dark forest, they had mastered universal moral values that were applicable everywhere in the cosmos regardless of time or space. That these barbaric aliens would express such admiration for Earth culture and imitate it was perfectly natural. The very proof that Earth values were universal was provided by the fact that the Trisolarans, another advanced civilization, generated similar art as the Earth’s when stimulated in appropriate ways. Moreover, the Trisolarans did add a few Trisolaran elements in the process of adaptation. Mixed in with a few genuine Trisolaran works of art done in imitation of Earth examples (though they were not of the same quality as Tianming’s dreams), the result was a story that compelled the belief of humans on Earth.
As she listened to Tianming’s explanation, AA recalled another “humanistic” Trisolaran creation.
“Wait a minute … Did you also have a hand in the creation of Sophon?” AA shuddered as she thought of the Trisolaran “ambassador” who appeared sometimes as a ninja and other times as a classical Japanese beauty.
Tianming’s expression was a bit awkward as he nodded. “Yes. Sophon came out of my dreams as well …”
Since Tianming had lived a socially awkward and isolated life on Earth, few female figures appeared in the visions his brain spun on the Trisolaran ship except for his mother, his sister, and Cheng Xin. But one other woman appeared often in his imagination, sometimes gentle and shy, sometimes passionate and bold. The Trisolarans were very interested in this mysterious woman, and after much research by the sophons, they discovered that she was a Japanese actress from the Common Era by the name of Ran Asakawa. During college, Tianming had often enjoyed her clips online in his dorm room when he was alone, and after he started working he had bought a box set of all her films. Ran was apparently the representative of an aspect of Japanese culture that was extremely popular in much of Asia during that era.
The Trisolarans had not initially paid much attention to Japan, but Tianming’s dreams led their strategists to focus on this geographically confined state. They learned that the Japanese islands were subject to extreme natural disasters. Located on the fault line between two tectonic plates, the islands were often struck by earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. A major tsunami near the end of the Common Era had taken the lives of tens of thousands … Many Japanese leaders had expressed concern that the islands were not a stable environment, and over Japan’s history had launched multiple invasions of the mainland. Many humans spoke of the Japanese people as hardy, orderly, disciplined … Clearly, the Japanese experience could be quite illuminating for the Trisolarans.
Most instructive of all, decades before the birth of Yun Tianming, Japan had initiated a bloody invasion of Yun Tianming’s homeland, China, resulting in deep animosity between the two nations—yet within decades Japanese entertainment products had swept China, and millions of young Chinese worshiped Japanese culture and followed Japanese stars, greatly ameliorating the historical enmity. This led numerous Trisolaran scholars to conclude that in order to induce humans to forget the historical wounds of the Doomsday Battle, the Trisolarans should imitate Japan’s success.
Thus, Sophon appeared as a Japanese woman modeled after Ran Asakawa.
“Ah!” AA exclaimed. “After Cheng Xin met Sophon, she told me that the robot reminded her of a foreign actress from her time, but she didn’t tell me who. I didn’t realize that you and she were both fans of the same actress.”
“Cheng Xin was a fan of Ran Asakawa?”
“Why are you so surprised?” AA wasn’t sure why Tianming’s tone was so odd.
“Um … never mind.” Tianming grinned awkwardly and shook his head.
Sophon’s presentation achieved great success on Earth. In the middle years of the Deterrence Era, the trend was for growing valorization of traditionally “feminine” qualities, and Sophon’s ultra-feminine act played to the taste of the time. Her dress, makeup, and jewelry all became marks of fashion. The appearance of Sophon accelerated the trends she was playing into. Many humans came to the conclusion that if the once brutal, savage Trisolarans were choosing to adopt such an image of nonthreatening, gentle femininity, it was a sign that a similar evolution among humans would be most in line with the universal values of civilization. That classical line from Faust, slightly modified, became the symbol of a new conception of cosmic civilization:
“The eternal feminine draws us as well as the Trisolarans ever onward and upward!”
Soon, however, the Trisolarans were no longer willing to be led by human civilization.
The Trisolaran reform movement didn’t last long. Blindly introducing and imitating Earth culture was not useful for solving the many practical problems facing Trisolaran society. The Chaotic Era wasn’t going to go away just because of the advent of a “humanistic” society. On the contrary, due to rising individualism on Trisolaris, the old authoritarian, militaristic chain of command had broken down. During the Stable Era, various factions pursued their own goals, leading to the fragmentation of Trisolaran society. Once the Chaotic Era arrived, the factions fought against each other with no coordination, leading to the deaths of billions. After twenty years of living under the new regime, the average Trisolaran had little good to say about the way things were going, and many even contemptuously called the Trisolaran government “Government of the Earth bugs, by the Earth bugs, for the Earth bugs.”
The reformists tried to solve their political difficulties by introducing democratic elections—another import from Earth. But the result was not what they expected. Candidates representing the ancien régime received the vast majority of votes and swept back into power, immediately purging and punishing the “pro-Earth” faction. After decades of tumult, the Trisolarans had seen enough of the weaknesses of human values, and the old yearning for military dominance came back into fashion. Once again, the plan to engage in strategic deception and attack Earth was on the agenda.
The new hawks discovered, to their delight, that the grand strategic deception had somehow already succeeded. Humans were now of the general opinion that the Trisolarans were a friendly and kind species. The key ingredients of the success of this strategic deception were none other than Yun Tianming’s artistic creations and the once-sincere admiration of the Trisolarans for Earth culture.
Continuing the deception didn’t pose a great difficulty. The Trisolaran scholars came to the conclusion that the self-defanging of human society was an irreversible trend that would continue unabated for at least a century more. With greater than 90 percent certainty, the complacent humans would elect as their next Swordholder someone gentle and kind, and there were still many more artistic creations in Tianming’s brain that could be employed as opiates for the humans. The Trisolarans might still be relatively naive when it came to schemes and plots, but they knew enough to let Sophon keep on arranging flowers and performing tea ceremonies to please the humans.
This was also when Trisolaran scientists first successfully tested lightspeed spaceships with curvature propulsion. Humans in later ages were sometimes puzzled by why the Trisolarans were still intent on conquering Earth if they possessed such advanced technology. The answer came down to the persistence of the Trisolarans. The First Trisolaran Fleet had already been launched to conquer Earth, so they might as well finish their mission. The lightspeed ships provided an additional bit of insurance. Even if the plan for conquest failed and humanity initiated gravitational-wave universal broadcast, the Trisolarans figured that they had almost 150 years to produce massive lightspeed ships to evacuate the vast majority of Trisolarans from their home world before the arrival of any dark forest attack. Based on how long it took for Luo Ji’s “spell” to take effect, this was a reasonable estimate.
No one could have predicted how quickly the dark forest strike would follow the subsequent universal broadcast. It was only three years before Trisolaris was obliterated.
*
As plans for the conquest of Earth proceeded apace, the Trisolarans finally decided to awaken Tianming. They had no more need to study. The satisfied Trisolarans informed him that they wanted him to see the benefit of actively collaborating with them, but if he insisted on being contrary, they wouldn’t force him. Due to his many “contributions” to the success of the Trisolaran deception of Earth, the glorious and generous Trisolaran civilization was happy to allow him to live out the rest of his life in peace. He could choose to do it as a dreaming brain, or he could even join Trisolaran society as a full-fledged member.
If Yun Tianming chose to collaborate, he would give the Trisolarans some advantages. He could, for instance, suggest better ways for them to disguise their true intentions. The Trisolaran scholars calculated that the probability that a strike against Earth at the moment of the next Swordholder handover would succeed was 87.53 percent. If Tianming chose to help them, the probability of success increased to 93.27 percent. If Tianming collaborated, the Trisolarans were willing to leave about ten million humans alive after the invasion and pen them in Australia. This was a breeding population more than sufficient to preserve the seeds of human civilization.
If Tianming refused to collaborate, the Trisolarans were happy enough with their 87.53 percent probability of success. And once they conquered Earth, they would engage in a program of total extermination of all humans and other Earth organisms—though for scientific research purposes they might preserve a few specimens and a genetic databank. They would, they vowed, not only eliminate humans from the Solar System, but launch droplet strikes against Blue Space and ensure that human bugs did not survive anywhere in the universe.
“That’s an impossible choice!” AA couldn’t help interrupting. She saw that no matter which path Tianming chose, he would be judged to have committed crimes against humanity. The only way out was if the humans could somehow seize the slight advantage provided by Tianming’s noncollaboration—reducing the chances of Trisolaran success from 93.27 percent to 87.53 percent. But such hope was too dim to be relied on.
“If you had been in my place, what would you have done?” Tianming asked.
“I … I don’t know. I can’t choose.” AA shook her head.
“What if you had to answer?”
After a long silence, AA answered. “I … I would collaborate.”
Such was Tianming’s choice as well. Collaboration would ensure the survival of at least a small population, and it was the only way to pass on a warning to the humans. After using sophon surveillance to verify that the Trisolaran claims of conditions on Earth and the fleet’s readiness for war were true, Tianming continued to negotiate with his Trisolaran captors. He extracted from them the promise to increase the postconquest human reservation population to fifty million. Only then did he pledge fealty to Trisolaris.
The Trisolarans had no tradition of loyalty oaths or anything equivalent. Because their thoughts were transparent, determining whether someone was loyal was not a problem they ever needed to solve. Since Tianming was not a transparent Trisolaran, however, they wanted a ceremony to mark the special occasion. They scoured records of the ETO from centuries earlier to design a special oath-taking ceremony that could be broadcast to all Trisolarans on Trisolaris and in the fleet. Facing a camera, a grim-faced Tianming raised his fist and declared, “Eliminate human tyranny! The world belongs to Trisolaris!”
One wonders what Ye Wenjie, Mike Evans, and all the other pioneers of the ETO would have thought of that moment.
The Trisolarans also carefully examined Tianming’s brain activity to ensure that they weren’t being deceived. But after decades of fighting Trisolaran torturers for his own soul, Tianming had learned to disguise his deeper thoughts from Trisolaran probes: He simply tapped into the natural human instinct for self-deception. He had only to recall all the ways he had been mistreated and used by humans back on Earth and imagine the wonderful life he was going to lead as king of the surviving humans. The Trisolaran scientists observing his brain saw fear, anger, and finally surrender based on cost-benefit analysis. Tianming helpfully organized these superficial thoughts into layers: resentment toward humanity and despair, shame at his betrayal, self-justifying arguments, and greed for all the benefits he was going to enjoy later. The thoughts matched what the Trisolarans knew of human psychology and convinced them that Tianming’s collaboration was genuine.
Even after he had sworn the oath of loyalty, however, the Trisolarans still refused to show themselves to him. He had never once laid eyes on a Trisolaran. The Trisolarans explained to him that because their two species lived in such different environments, physical presence in the same space would require substantial work. Besides, the two sides could communicate effectively at any time through virtual windows appearing out of thin air, rendering face-to-face meetings unnecessary. Tianming puzzled over why the Trisolarans refused to let him see them and prevented him from looking up any images of Trisolarans. Eventually, he put the riddle aside, as he had more pressing matters to worry about.
The main tasks required of Tianming were creating additional works of art for human consumption, revising and adding polish to diplomatic communiqués from Trisolaris to Earth, and directing some nonofficial exchanges between the two worlds. His existence had to be kept hidden from the humans, and everything he did had to go through a special censoring group of Trisolaran officials to prevent him from secretly passing on intelligence information. Of course, this was exactly what Tianming intended to do: warn humanity that the Trisolarans were intent on conquering Earth.
Tianming soon discovered that the Trisolaran censors were as unskilled at counterdeception as at deception. They could not tell when messages contained hidden meanings, and so it was easy to slip warnings past them in his work intended for humans. During the next decade, Tianming warned humanity many times, often through Sophon herself.
“What?” AA was shocked. “But I don’t remember any such warnings!”
“I sent plenty of secret messages! For example, do you remember the science fiction novel The Trojan Nebula? It’s a retelling of the classic tale of the Trojan War in a space opera setting. I deliberately emphasized the plot point where the space Greeks only pretended to give up, but then used gifts to the space Trojans to disguise their plot of conquest. The book sold well on Earth, but no one seemed to understand the real theme.”
“Oh, so that’s what that book was about!” AA was amazed. “I did think the book was probably trying to make some political point, but I thought it was about how Luo Ji and Zhang Beihai had only pretended to give up or run away from the Trisolarans in order to use plots and schemes to triumph over the Trisolarans in the end. I had no idea you meant the opposite.”
“Your interpretation was shared by nine people out of ten on Earth.” Tianming sighed. “Arrogant humans always imagined themselves as the victors, even when reading fiction. I realized after a while that such hidden messages were too obscure to be of use. As the years went by, I was running out of time. Finally, I took a big risk and wrote a film script that laid out the truth in plain sight: The Betrayal of Heaven.”
The Betrayal of Heaven was an alternate history tale. In this fictional universe, shortly after the establishment of dark forest deterrence the Trisolarans murdered Luo Ji through a series of clever plots and then invaded Earth. The scenes involving the conquest of Earth by the Trisolaran Fleet were extremely brutal and shocking. Tianming thought he was being too obvious and was prepared to die when the Trisolaran censors reviewed his work. However, the Trisolarans not only approved his script, but even turned it into a holographic film for transmission to Earth. The film did cause a great deal of controversy and debate on Earth, but not in the ways Tianming intended. Critics praised the film as a “profound distillation of Trisolaran rumination on the horrors of their warlike past and the depth of their commitment to humanistic values.” It won Best Picture at the Oscars, and Sophon, dressed in an elegant kimono, accepted the award on behalf of Trisolaris.
Not all blame could be laid at the feet of human arrogance and stupidity. The film was a paradox. Since it was presented to Earth as a Trisolaran creation, the more it showed the Trisolarans to be cruel and bloodthirsty, the more humans viewed it as the Trisolarans engaging in honest reflection. Moreover, since everyone knew that the Trisolarans were incapable of lying, the idea that it represented some kind of elaborate Trisolaran plot was unthinkable. Although a few suspicious humans who advocated a hard line against the Trisolarans claimed that the film was a confession of the Trisolarans’ true intentions, most people ignored these Cassandras.
But Tianming had one more trick up his sleeve.
Besides composing novels and scripts, Tianming was also tasked with helping Trisolaran scientists come up with false fundamental scientific theories to give to the humans. To be effective, such theories had to appear correct while being wrong, and such advanced deception was beyond the capacity of almost all Trisolaran scientists. They thus left the job to Yun Tianming. But Tianming had only a college degree from the twentieth century, and it was difficult for him to grasp many advanced scientific concepts.
He took inspiration from the wuxia fantasy novels he had read during his youth, in which evildoers would sometimes kidnap heroes and force them to teach them supersecret, advanced martial arts skills. The heroes would pretend to teach them these techniques, but alter key breathing instructions or meridian qi flow paths to sabotage their efforts. Tianming took real Trisolaran scientific theories and altered the numbers in them—adding a zero to a quark-related constant here, erasing a radical sign from a formula relating to space curvature there, and so on. Given the rate that human science was progressing, it would take them decades before they could experimentally falsify any of these numbers. After the Trisolaran scientists learned his technique, they hailed him as a genius. What Tianming did wasn’t difficult, but the scientists were disgusted by the very idea of having to deceive anyone with made-up numbers. Whenever they had to do such a thing themselves, they felt the urge to expel fecal matter.
“So that explains it!” AA said. “When I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation, I was confused by how a constant provided by Trisolaran scientists just didn’t fit. I worked and worked at it, and had to give up in the end. I almost failed my defense because of it. It’s all your fault!”
Tianming smiled helplessly. “That was actually a deliberate plant from me intended as a hint. While most of my changes could not be experimentally falsified for many years, there were a few changes I made that could be shown to be nonsense through theoretical derivation alone. I was hoping that these could serve as clues for human scientists and alert them to be vigilant against Trisolaran treachery.”
“Oh, you idiot!” It was now Dr. 艾 AA’s turn to lecture him. “This is because you only have an undergraduate degree and don’t understand how academia really works. Your way of dropping hints is useless. Even if someone managed to experimentally falsify your numbers, the immediate response from the professors would be to question whether the experiment had been designed and conducted correctly. How could you expect an experiment to disprove theories handed to us by Trisolaran scientists, widely accepted as being at least several centuries ahead of Earth scientists?
“Other labs wouldn’t bother trying to replicate your result, and even if you could somehow get others to repeat the experiment and show that the number was wrong, the established theoreticians would come up with one supplemental theory after another to explain away the discrepancy. They’d built their entire academic reputation and careers on Trisolaran theories, and they’d defend their paychecks to the death. Even if they ran out of explanations, they’d demand that you provide a better theory that could explain the results. And God help you if your new theory had even one imperfection. They’d attack you like a swarm of bees and focus on that one weakness and ignore the rest of it. And even then, you’d be lucky. The most likely result is they would just ignore you as a mere upstart. To get the entire scientific establishment to recant would require all the old tenured professors to die of old age.”
In any event, all of Tianming’s attempts at warning humanity failed. His collaboration did in fact increase the chances of the success of Trisolaran deception. The silver lining was that it got the Trisolarans to believe that he really was loyal to the interests of Trisolaris. Tianming’s status in Trisolaran society shot up, and shortly before the final invasion, he gained the authority to direct the sophons to observe Earth wherever he wanted, though he still couldn’t initiate contact with the humans.
“That was when I saw Cheng Xin being awakened from hibernation. After that, I was with the two of you constantly—”
“I think you mean that you were with her,” said AA. “I was the third wheel without knowing it.”
Her outburst of jealousy was actually rooted in a secret only she knew, a secret concerning Cheng Xin and Yun Tianming. The secret had started two hundred years before her birth, during the Common Era, when aliens existed only in science fiction.
It involved someone who was AA, and also not AA.
“I really did mean both of you,” Tianming said. “AA, during all these years you were always by Cheng Xin’s side, and I knew you like a best friend. Actually, come to think of it, I felt a sense of familiarity with you as soon as I saw you—”
“Are you telling me I reminded you of Ran Asa … something?” AA interrupted.
“Of course not! I don’t know how to explain it … Maybe you just have a natural charisma that makes people feel close to you. You were always running around, and sometimes the sophons couldn’t even keep up—”
“Wait a minute. You were watching us all the time with the sophons?”
“That’s right. Through the sophons, I was by your side throughout all the years of your suffering. I experienced your trials and tribulations as though I was there myself,” Tianming said. “I know everything. I’ve always been with you.”
This line had deeply moved Cheng Xin when he said it to her, but AA’s reaction was completely different. She gazed at Tianming with narrowed eyes. “Did you watch us while we were in the shower? While we were changing?”
Tianming’s mouth hung open. He had not expected this development.
“Hey, answer me!”
“No. Really no!” Tianming protested, hoping AA was joking. AA continued to gaze at him suspiciously, and Tianming flushed. “All right. I confess. I … I did look in on Cheng Xin a few times while she was … but it was to protect her! I really didn’t look at you at all!”
“Oh! So, I was not even attractive enough for you to sneak a peek?” Somehow AA had grown even more angry.
“Um … okay, let me amend that.” Tianming had no idea how to get out of this minefield. “In Australia, one time, when you two were both in the shower … you remember how so many people wanted to harm Cheng Xin back then—”
“So, you did look! You bastard!” AA raised a fist, ready to punch him.
Tianming decided that there was no way out of this trap except to pull AA into another kiss; at last, his answer was satisfactory.
*
Some time later, Tianming asked, gingerly, “So, you’re not mad anymore?”
AA giggled.
“Oh, it’s just too easy! Did you think I was really mad? Only you Common Era men think this is a big deal.”
Tianming held her and gently kissed her forehead. Tenderness filled his heart. He knew well that AA was trying to keep it light, but the reality was that they were reliving the most harrowing period in human history. Her jokes were intended to relieve the oppressive psychological weight of history, but it was a burden he couldn’t set down.
“You were saying that you kept watch over us,” AA said. “But not long after Cheng Xin woke from hibernation, that madman Wade almost killed her. Did … did you see that?”
The grin on Tianming’s face disappeared, and sorrow and guilt took its place. AA immediately regretted it.
“I’m sorry, Tianming. I know it wasn’t your fault. You were light-years away and all you could do was to watch helplessly. It must have felt terrible. Don’t blame yourself. After all, Cheng Xin ended up all right.”
Tianming let out a laugh that was closer to a sob. Under the eerie black domain sky, the sound seemed even more pitiful. “Helpless! Oh, I wish I was helpless. If I really couldn’t do a thing, it would have been a great fortune for humanity. But I was responsible for eliminating the last opportunity for Earth to escape total destruction. Tell me, why shouldn’t I blame myself?”
“What are you talking about?”
Tianming’s answer shocked AA to the core. “On that day, I saved Cheng Xin.”
The other half of the truth behind that failed murder four hundred years ago would be revealed only now.
“Once Cheng Xin awakened from hibernation, I kept on watching over her. I missed her so much that her every gesture and expression seemed entrancing. After being apart for several hundred years, I never imagined I’d see her again in this manner. Though light-years separated us, I felt I was right next to her. For a few days, I did nothing but watch her, until she got that phone call from Wade in which he disguised his voice as yours.”
“The phone call …” AA struggled to remember.
“Since the caller invited her to meet at an out-of-the-way spot, I grew suspicious and used the sophons to trace the call. Soon, I found that the caller wasn’t you at all, but Thomas Wade with a voice mask. I didn’t know who he was, of course, but the sophons soon discovered his real identity and other activities. I immediately recognized his motive: He wanted to be the Swordholder.
“When I found out the truth, I was stupefied. I had been so absorbed with Cheng Xin that I failed to notice that she was already being discussed as the most favored candidate for the Swordholder. What an improbable occurrence. Everything had happened because I gave Cheng Xin that star, our star. Cheng Xin could have lived out the rest of her life in peace, but because of that star, she had become a saintly woman possessing a whole world in the eyes of the worshipful public. They even saw her as an embodiment of the Virgin Mother!
“I knew very well that Cheng Xin was exactly the kind of Swordholder the Trisolarans were waiting for. As soon as she won the election, the Trisolarans would attack without hesitation. They believed that she was incapable of pressing the button to initiate the broadcast. And because the Trisolarans believed this, it was irrelevant whether Cheng Xin would push the button at the decisive moment—whatever she chose, it would be too late. Humanity was doomed.
“Because of a star, I pushed my beloved onto the path that would lead to her destruction, as well as the destruction of the human race.
“I followed Wade and saw him conceal an antique pistol under his jacket before he left for the meeting place. I didn’t know everything about him, and so I harbored the hope that he was going to use the gun merely as a way to threaten Cheng Xin. He would not use it if she agreed to exit the race. I actually hoped that he would succeed in convincing her to withdraw, which would be better for her, better for humanity, better in every way.
“But then I saw Wade point the gun at her before even speaking, and I knew I was wrong. Thomas Wade was not someone who merely threatened. Laws and morals were no restraints for a man like that, who would pay any price to achieve his goal. Even if she agreed to withdraw, Cheng Xin might tell others what he had done. But a corpse told no tales.
“And the goal he had in mind—to become the Swordholder and eliminate the Trisolaran threat—was also one that I wanted to come true. Ironic, isn’t it?” Tianming’s smile was bitter.
“But what could you do?” AA asked. “The sophons could do nothing at that moment.”
“That’s not quite right. Though subatomic in size, the sophons could affect the world in tangible, visible ways. For example, by repeatedly striking the retinas at a high speed, the sophons could cause people to see images. This was a technique used back in the last years of the Common Era. I didn’t have the authorization to direct the sophons to do such a thing, or I would have reported Wade’s plans to the police, even if that meant exposing my identity. However, I could report what I saw to the Trisolarans. This involved no delay at all, because they had installed a chip in my brain. If I directed my thought at them, the Trisolarans would understand the situation right away and guide the sophons to protect Cheng Xin.”
“But even if you hadn’t told them, didn’t the Trisolarans keep all the Swordholder candidates under surveillance?” AA asked.
“They should have. But you have to remember that the Trisolarans still lacked in-depth understanding of human society. Even if they had kept Cheng Xin under surveillance, a simple trick like Wade’s fake phone call would have taken them a long time to figure out, and would have required the use of cloud computing. They wouldn’t have responded quickly enough. Also, they had to be cautious. If they were found to be interfering in the elections using the sophons, that would have made humans far more vigilant against Trisolaran influence. At least based on what I knew at the time, only sophons under my control were at the site of Wade and Cheng Xin’s meeting.
“I don’t know if the Trisolarans would have done something if I had not alerted them. But the fact was: In the end, I acted.
“So many thoughts went through my mind at that moment. Other than my love for Cheng Xin, I had numerous other reasons to save her. Cheng Xin had a gentle heart, but her will was iron. Who could say for sure that she wouldn’t be a capable Swordholder? Maybe she would keep the Trisolarans in line even more effectively than Wade. And even if Cheng Xin was a bad choice, if humanity was set on electing her, with her out of contention maybe they would elect someone else just like her. Wade and his supporters still had no chance. Fundamentally, Cheng Xin’s death wouldn’t have altered humanity’s fate.”
“I agree, Tianming. You made the right choice. You were dealing with history, with the collective decision of all of humanity that set them on their path to doom. Cheng Xin’s own death wouldn’t have changed things,” AA comforted.
“I didn’t know if I was right, but I knew that I wasn’t thinking rationally. I was just trying to look for excuses to save her. It was … self-deception. After I realized that, I made the decision—or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I thought I made the decision—to sacrifice my beloved and protect humanity. I was already a criminal, and I wanted to carry out my last duty to the human race.
“And so, I watched as Wade shot Cheng Xin. But he didn’t aim for her head. His shot shattered her left shoulder instead. I knew that it wasn’t out of mercy; the madman enjoyed the suffering of others.
“But Wade didn’t realize that he had made a fatal mistake.
“I had thought after enduring so much torture and pain, I would be able to bear any loss. I thought I could watch my beloved die in front of my eyes and still hold fast to my faith. But when I saw blood pouring from Cheng Xin’s shattered shoulder, a heartrending love seized me. Rationality and sense of duty disappeared. I knew only that I could not let her die no matter what. Even if all of humanity would die because of my decision, I didn’t care. As long as she lived, I was willing to commit the greatest sin in the world.
“Without hesitation, I directed my brain implant to issue a warning to the Trisolarans and send them the feed from the sophons. ‘You must stop Wade and save Cheng Xin. Without her your plot will not work.’
“And then Wade made his second shot.
“Wade had aimed his gun at Cheng Xin’s head, but somehow, his hand drooped a fraction of an inch at the last second, and the bullet pierced Cheng Xin’s belly instead. My sophon informed me that a different sophon had arrived on the scene at lightspeed and was active around Wade’s eyes at the moment of the second shot. Clearly, that sophon had been interfering with Wade’s sight, causing his aim to be off. Due to the lack of time, the sophon had not been able to make Wade miss Cheng Xin completely.”
A puzzle that had long bothered AA was finally resolved. By the time Wade attempted to assassinate Cheng Xin, he had already lived long enough during the Deterrence Era to know that advances in medical technology meant that a head shot was the only way to ensure her death. His first shot could be explained as a manifestation of his cruelty and perhaps as an attempt to disable Cheng Xin’s ability to fight back, but his second shot should not have missed. Given his high intelligence and professional skills, it was an inexcusable error. She had later discussed this puzzle with Cheng Xin, and they could find no reasonable answer except the rather strained explanation that perhaps Wade, as a man of the Common Era, was entranced by Cheng Xin’s beauty and could not bear to ruin it by shooting at her face. They never could have guessed that the truth involved Yun Tianming directing the sophons to interfere from light-years away.
“The sophon’s interference with his sight was very subtle, and based on records of Wade’s interrogation, he did notice that his vision had seemed to waver for a split second, which he attributed to his age and nerves. He wasn’t very focused on the second shot anyway. Rather, he was upset that his third shot had been a dud. He was certain that if the third shot had fired, Cheng Xin would have died. In the end, he called it all just a series of unfortunate coincidences.
“The dud was indeed a coincidence that also disguised sophon involvement. But in truth, even if he had been able to fire the third shot, the bullet would have simply swept by Cheng Xin’s ear. By then the sophon had already created a perfect illusion in his eyes.”
There was a kind of perfect symmetry to Wade’s failure. He had been responsible for picking Yun Tianming’s brain to be sent into the abyss of space, and that very brain, ultimately, frustrated his plan and pushed humanity toward the abyss of annihilation through the unpredictable currents and eddies of history.
“And so, I saved Cheng Xin but also ruined the last hope for humanity. What happened after that … you already know.”
Tianming dropped his face into his hands and sobbed.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, my darling … It’s not your fault. You did everything you could.” AA’s words of comfort came from the heart. After hearing his incredible tale, she really didn’t blame him; instead, she loved him even more.
When did I fall in love with such a man, strong and fragile at once?
艾 AA didn’t know the answer to her own question. She only knew that the fate she had struggled against for so long had finally arrived. She was going to put aside all doubt and love him with her whole heart. She had to awaken his love with her own, to rebuild his strength with her own.
Should I tell him my secret? AA started to speak, stopped, started again, and stopped again. Through the years, she had lost count of the number of lovers she had taken, but she had never been so nervous as now. She knew that her secret was extraordinary, and would change the way he understood the intertwined history between the three of them as well as the inflection point of humanity’s fate. She needed Tianming to understand and forgive her secret, or else the two of them would never share true intimacy, no matter how long they lived together.
She remembered what she had told Cheng Xin back when they first met during the Deterrence Era: “You’re thinking of him again, aren’t you? This is a new age, a new life. Forget about the past!”
She had been wrong, utterly wrong. Fate liked to play games, and the past, as Faulkner said, was never dead; it wasn’t even the past. It always returned and forced you to confront it. That was true of Cheng Xin, of Yun Tianming, and certainly of her.
But perhaps now was not yet the time …
*
Tianming was still lost in the pain of the past.
He spoke to AA next of the ten momentous minutes after the Swordholder handover ceremony, when the droplets launched their attack against Earth. Although by then the destruction of Earth was already a fait accompli, he kept on hoping that Cheng Xin would press the button and force the Trisolaran bugs to experience the same despair of losing everything in their desperate gamble. At least then he would experience the pleasure of vengeance for the suffering he had endured for the last few decades. He wanted to watch the Trisolarans face the reality of their own end and to see their pain and regret.
He watched Cheng Xin, knowing that all the Trisolarans on the home planet and in the fleet were also watching. One minute passed. Another. Cheng Xin trembled, her hand hesitating over the button. His heart and the whole Trisolaran world trembled with her, but the outcomes they wished to see were polar opposites.
Press it! Damn it. Why don’t you press it? Press the button and give voice to justice. Press the button and punish evil. Let them die with us. His voiceless scream echoed in his mind.
But in the end, Cheng Xin did not push the button. Instead, she tossed the trigger away. She stopped shaking, and a preternatural calm came over her. She had made her decision.
The air around Tianming filled with text messages from his Trisolaran colleagues. Did you see that? Tianming, we won! We won! She couldn’t do it. The Earth is ours!
For a species that despised emotions as much as the Trisolarans, this was an unprecedented display of joy.
Tianming hated Cheng Xin then for the first time. Why are you so weak? Why won’t you at least give us the satisfaction of mutual destruction? Why are you protecting these faithless bugs? Send them to the grave with us! Are you a human being or an alien?
Somehow, he again recalled that college outing to Miyun Reservoir. On that trip, Cheng Xin had picked up a caterpillar wriggling along the trail and gently deposited it on the grass so it wouldn’t be stepped on. Several of the other girls shrieked in disgust, but Tianming had been deeply touched. Because of Cheng Xin, he memorized the identifying characteristics of the caterpillar and later looked it up in a thick reference book in the library. The caterpillar was the larva of a plain gray moth, without the colorful wings of butterflies.
The moth belonged to an ancient branch of the Lepidoptera order, tracing its fossil lineage all the way back to the Jurassic period and even earlier. When the first ancestors of that caterpillar saved by Cheng Xin had wriggled over the soil of Pangaea and spread their fresh wings in dinosaur-filled jungles, there had been no civilization on Trisolaris, and humans would not arrive for eons. The moth had certainly a more ancient claim to the right of existence on Earth. But during the last few decades of the Common Era, human activity had destroyed its habitat, and the species was on the verge of extinction. No live specimen had been seen for many years by the time of their college outing.
Cheng Xin had saved a precious life.
After that, whenever Tianming thought of how Cheng Xin might have saved an entire species, a certain sweetness filled his heart, as though he’d had something to do with it. He imagined the caterpillar turning into a moth, finding a mate in the mountains near Beijing, multiplying for generations, thereby continuing an ancient lineage … and Cheng Xin was their protector, their goddess.
He could never have imagined that such an insignificant event was a preview of the fate of two worlds.
No matter how much he thought about her, Tianming did not understand Cheng Xin completely. All he knew was that the woman he loved had not changed over the course of two centuries. She wasn’t at fault; those who made her the Swordholder—including himself—were at fault. In a moment, his hatred had turned into self-loathing and guilt.
Messages from other Trisolarans continued to swarm the air around him. This species, so lacking in emotional intelligence, now thought of Tianming as one of theirs. They shared their joy with him without reservation and mocked and ridiculed Cheng Xin.
“To be honest,” they told him, “we really had no faith in the princeps’s plan back when it was first announced. For decades, Luo Ji had been our nightmare. We knew of no way to defeat him. But his successor! Oh, how weak! How silly! Tianming, thank you! Thank you! You helped us deceive the humans. The pleasure we experienced when that foolish female bug tossed away the trigger for the universal broadcast was greater even than joining during mating! But what was that female bug thinking? Since you were once also a bug from Earth, can you explain her thoughts to us?”
The entire Trisolaran world hung on his answer.
Tianming suppressed the tumult in his heart and said, simply, “She loves you.”
“Love?” The Trisolarans were confused. “Are you talking about … that emotion that encourages altruistic behavior in order to enhance the reproductive fitness of the species? We experience such emotions, too. But how could such an emotion be applied to an alien species from across the stars? Such an act has no benefit to the reproduction of her species!”
“A man once said, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’”
“What … what nonsense is that? That sounds like a paradox.”
“No, this is a lesson from one of the greatest teachers of our species. Many still believe that this is the greatest truth in the universe, far more important than mere survival.”
The Trisolarans did not respond for some time, as though sensing the spiritual power in those words. After a while, they said, “If every species in the cosmos believed this, perhaps there would be no dark forest.”
“Perhaps,” Tianming said. He gazed at the darkness of space outside the portholes, and he suddenly wondered whether the dark forest existed in only this dim corner of the universe—perhaps only this galaxy, or maybe even the few hundred square light-years at the end of one spiral arm. In the rest of the grand universe, the light of love had long illuminated every leaf, every blade of grass, every trail in the forest. What would such a sunlit forest look like?
He smiled wryly. Such a puzzle was not his to solve. His fate was to follow the Trisolaran Fleet back to the Solar System, where he would live out the rest of his life on Earth as the greatest traitor to the human race. He would endure hatred and contempt all his days, assuming he wasn’t killed soon by an angry mob. He would never see the universe outside the region dominated by the war between Earth and Trisolaris. What was the point of thinking about anything else?
At that moment, completely unprepared, he had entered the sunlit forest. And everything—Earth, the Trisolarans, the whole universe—changed.
“What is the sunlit forest?” AA asked. “Does this have anything to do with the mini-universe?”
“I … don’t know.” Tianming shook his head.
He really didn’t. But in that moment, his surroundings had glowed as though suffused by a sudden beam of sunlight—no, the light of a thousand suns. He saw that he and the ship he was on had been transported from the abyss of deep space to some indescribable there. An infinite space—no, an infinity of worlds—opened for him. If forced to put what he saw into words, he would have said that it was like what an ant must see upon suddenly emerging from a dark tunnel into a bright garden. Every flower petal, every leaf, every dew puddle was a grand world to him, and in that moment, he saw … everything.
“You entered four-dimensional space!?” Tianming’s description reminded AA of the adventures of Blue Space.
“No, it’s not a higher dimension. I was still in the three-dimensional world, and I’ve never been to four-dimensional space. But I think that sense of indescribable magnificence I experienced surpassed even four-dimensional space. It’s … it’s … it’s like what Plato said. Emerging from the dark cave, I saw reality; I saw the infinitely beautiful ocean itself …”
AA had never read Plato, but she soon found a suitable comparison. “Is it like the first time you saw me?”
Tianming laughed and kissed her.
After his eyes adjusted to the sudden light that transformed the world around him, the first concrete thing Tianming saw was a solid figure that glowed with a silvery light, suspended before his eyes. At first glance, the figure seemed to be a nearly perfect ringlike structure containing an infinite number of circles of an infinite variety of sizes. But closer examination revealed that the circles were not perfect, because each circle itself was made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny circles, and the circles were connected to each other with complex, subtle structures. The circles appeared at first to be made from translucent lines that glowed with a soft light, but looking closer, he saw that each curve was itself a solid figure with an extremely complex, refined internal structure. It seemed to him that each part of the figure also encompassed the whole, and no matter how closely he looked, he found yet more detailed structures; the level of detail exceeded the capacity of his eyes.
“You mean like a fractal?” AA struggled to map Tianming’s description to her own scientific knowledge.
“No, not a fractal. But I guess that’s a barely adequate analogy … Imagine a blooming rose, and this rose forms a part of one petal of another, much grander rose, and the larger rose is in turn just part of the petal of yet another, bigger rose. Repeat this process to infinity. And then, if you examine the rose you started with, you find that it is formed from smaller roses, each of which is made of yet smaller roses, and so on ad infinitum. Marvelously, each rose in this image is different in shape, size, appearance—as though they belonged to a billion billion different varieties … I can’t do better than that.”
AA shook her head in confusion, unable to imagine what that would look like.
Tianming had dared not gaze at the figure any longer. Its soul-wrenching beauty threatened to overwhelm his identity. He shifted his focus and realized that the circular figure was itself part of a much larger circular structure in midair that filled the entire interior of the ship and continued through and beyond the hull. As in the analogy of the rose, the figures at each level were similar to the figures in the previous level, yet completely different.
As Tianming looked around, he noticed that the entire Trisolaran ship had been transformed by the marvelous circular structures into what seemed to be semitransparency, but wasn’t; the bulkheads and hull were still opaque, and he could see their surfaces clearly, but he could see what lay beyond equally clearly, as though images captured by different eyes were stacked together. And what he saw involved far more than two eyes! He could see “through” bulkheads and other barriers and view each nook and cranny of the ship—including places he had never seen—but at the same time he could also see the bulkheads and barriers themselves.
Later, when Tianming found out about high-dimensional space, he wondered if he had indeed been to such a space during that time. But ultimately he came to the conclusion that that was not the case. The incredible structures he saw around the ship were still clearly three-dimensional, though nothing could block his view.
The infinitely rich and complex glowing structure spilled out of the Trisolaran ship in all directions without extending too far beyond it. A few meters outside the hull—which he could now look through—the glowing curves dimmed and disappeared against the background of stars. The structure he could see was evidently part of some grander whole rather than an isolated, standalone component. It was as though the ship had somehow discharged the energy stored within this mysterious structure and caused the part touching it to glow.
As Tianming would find out later, at the moment Cheng Xin tossed away the trigger in her hand the Trisolaran Fleet had noticed, via gravitational-wave sensors, some barely detectable object a few million kilometers ahead of the fleet. The object moved along a complicated, chaotic course, as patternless as Brownian motion. The object’s strange movements suggested that it was not a natural phenomenon. The Trisolaran Fleet Command, ever vigilant, placed every department on high alert. The Trisolaran crew members, however, were consumed with wild celebrations, and before they could deploy any defensive measures, the mysterious object changed course and rushed toward them at near lightspeed. It enveloped the several hundred ships of the fleet instantly.
Every ship of the fleet was now “wrapped” in similar eerie, glowing structures. The object adjusted its own speed and course to match the fleet’s at the moment of interception so as to stay at relative rest.
However, the structure penetrated only into the ship Yun Tianming was on.
More precisely, it affected only Tianming.
At first, Tianming thought he was once again caught in some hallucinatory dream manufactured by the Trisolarans, but he knew that, given their cognitive habits, they were not capable of producing such an image. The aliens lacked artistic skills and imagination, and when they created dreams to torture or study him, they relied on elements taken from his memories and subconscious, and rarely inserted anything outside of his experience. This magnificent, beautiful three-dimensional figure was far beyond the aesthetic capabilities of the Trisolarans and exceeded human imagination. It couldn’t be a dream.
But if it wasn’t a dream, how could he see into every hidden corner of the ship? How could light rays blocked by opaque bulkheads enter his eyes? This was simply incompatible with the laws of physics. Tianming’s brain churned chaotically as he tried to come up with an answer.
Because light’s nature is infinite.
It was a voice—no, a thought—in his mind. Tianming knew that the thought didn’t belong to him or to any Trisolaran. The aliens often communicated with him by directly injecting electrical signals into his brain, and he was familiar with that sensation. This thought was different. It seemed not to come from outside, but to emerge from the depth of his own mind.
At the same moment this thought came into his head, Tianming experienced a pang of unprecedented pain that took his breath away. It wasn’t a physical sensation so much as a spiritual wound. A flood of other thoughts and emotions seemed to press against his subconscious, threatening to erupt into his consciousness and drown out what was left of his rationality: the birth of the universe, the light of heaven, the infinity of the cosmos, the profundity of space … unfamiliarity, mystery, terror, sorrow, joy …
Tianming was as frightened as Zeus was before Athena burst forth from his head. He held his head in pain, moaning uncontrollably. But he forced himself to focus, and used the Chan-meditation-like techniques he had developed over years of resisting Trisolaran mental torture to isolate himself from the surging torrent of random thoughts. The violent, chaotic thought stream solidified into ice, then melted into a vast, calm ocean.
“Who are you?” he asked, once he had recovered somewhat.
I’m the Spirit.
Treeshade in summer, shadows in moonlight, reflection in water, the self in the mirror …
Tianming felt another heavy blow against his mind. His consciousness teetered on the edge of an abyss. He struggled, and asked, “What … spirit?”
The Spirit of Light.
Light and shadow, brightness and darkness, a clarion call and perpetual silence, the deep and the firmament …
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters …
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light …
The light pierced the darkness, but the darkness did not know the light …
Still another torrent of thoughts buffeted the surface of Tianming’s consciousness, barely held together by his will. Tianming’s head felt as though it were about to split open. He finally understood the source of his pain. The voice did not converse with him in the usual sense; instead, it was arranging all his knowledge and memories to express concepts that he could not understand. Every moment brought him a nearly infinite amount of information, like that infinitely complicated glowing figure in which a grand meaning contained within it smaller understandings, and each smaller understanding was made up of even smaller significations. The various conceptual levels were connected to each other through refined, dense webs of logic, and not a single detail was extraneous. But his biological cognitive machinery was so limited that he could grasp only the most superficial layer and turn it into human linguistic symbols. The rest of the semantic structure inundated his mind, where memory and imagination stirred up a typhoon of emotions and ideas.
This was an experience the human mind was never meant to endure. Indeed, if he had not developed superhuman levels of self-control and psychological fortitude in his struggles against the Trisolarans, he would have long collapsed into madness.
“Are you a messenger of God?” Tianming asked, panting, his voice full of awe. Though he was not a Christian, he had gone to church a few times with his mother when he was a child. He remembered a minister who had told him, “If you pray, God will hear you. He will send angels to fill your heart. ‘And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them …’”
Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
And now, at the moment when the Trisolarans had betrayed humanity’s kindness and love to invade their home, to eradicate them from the face of the Earth, it was time for the God of justice to appear. The bugs would get what they deserved.
And the next thought almost drove him to ecstasy:
From your vantage point, yes, I am the Spirit of the Master.
But then, Tianming’s dream was shattered.
The Master is dead; I am only the dead Spirit.
Tianming was now growing somewhat used to this strenuous way of having a conversation. Gingerly, he asked, “Are you an extraterrestrial?”
Patiently, his interlocutor corrected him.
No, I’m the Spirit.
“What do you mean exactly by ‘Spirit’?”
The answer this time was an incomprehensible concept that could not be translated into any fragment of language. Again, his mind was slammed by a tsunami of nearly paradoxical ideas: an arid ocean, the end of the Earth, a war between dragons and giants, the treasure of the gods, songs hidden in stones …
He screamed and fell to the ground. “Stop! Stop doing this to me. I can’t bear it.” Tianming didn’t know if he was speaking or merely thinking.
This is the only way for us to communicate. In our universe, this is the simplest and most efficient means of exchanging information. But intelligence in this universe has devolved far too quickly, and you can receive ideabstractions only with great difficulty.
Tianming did not know what an “ideabstraction” was and didn’t dare to ask. But he seized on the phrase “our universe” and asked, “Are you not from this universe then?”
Another incomprehensible ideabstraction struck him, and Tianming’s head felt near explosion. Gasping, he wiped the sweat from his brow and said, despairingly, “I can’t tolerate the ideabstractions. Why don’t you go talk to them?”
By “them” he meant the Trisolarans, of course. Tianming had had enough. He had thought he could endure any kind of mental and physical torture, but he felt weaker than a baby against the power of ideabstractions. Forget it. The Earth is gone. I don’t care about universes or masters, or anything at all anymore. Let those heartless Trisolarans try making sense of fucking ideabstractions.
I tried. But they are far weaker than you mentally and cannot even grasp a single ideabstraction.
“Why?”
They are bugs.
“Bugs” was how Tianming contemptuously thought of the Trisolarans, and the Spirit had borrowed the term and now endowed it with a very strange ideabstraction. Surprised, Tianming suddenly realized something. He looked around.
Under the influence of the strangely glowing structure, he could see into every nook and cranny of the ship. Yet something was missing.
He couldn’t see any Trisolarans.
He couldn’t see anything that might be a reasonable match for an intelligent extraterrestrial: not little green men, not walking lizards, not octopuses with eight clawed hands. Nothing.
Could this ship be without any Trisolarans? How was that possible?
Tianming noticed something about the design of the ship that he had not paid attention to before. There were no conduits or corridors similar to those found on a human spaceship. Other than the large compartment he was in, there were very few other cabins or open spaces. Most of the ship consisted of thin tubes and tiny cubbies, some the size of matchboxes, others as large as a drawer in a dresser. Each cubby contained numerous tiny apparatuses or devices glowing with an eerie light, each about the size of a grain of rice. Some of the grains squirmed and writhed on the floor …
They are bugs.
Tianming sucked in a breath. Everything finally made sense.
Those silvery “devices” were the Trisolarans, each not much bigger than an ant.
For centuries, the best human minds had dedicated their efforts to the study of the Trisolarans, and an area of intense focus in this research involved the physiology of the aliens. Although scientists on Earth could not gain access to any specimens, they were able to make some educated guesses based on what they knew of Trisolaris—an environment far more inhospitable to life than Earth’s: the Trisolarans were capable of rapidly dehydrating and rehydrating; the Trisolarans could be arranged into a living formation computer; and so on. The consensus among human scholars was that Trisolarans were likely diminutive in size, perhaps no more than fifty centimeters in height. (Some scholars went as far as suggesting that they were about the size of rats.) In some science-fictional films depicting the Trisolaran invasion, the aliens were portrayed as large praying mantises with sharp mandibles and claws.
But no one had ever seriously suggested that Trisolarans were only a few millimeters in length. It seemed obvious that a creature about the size of an ant could not possibly evolve a complex brain or build an advanced civilization. In this matter, however, the human scholars committed a major error. Trisolaran cognition was very different from individual-based, human cognition. Because Trisolarans enjoyed a direct correspondence between thought and expression, their communication was highly efficient. They thus evolved a collective intelligence that was the foundation of the living-formation computer innovation. Although each individual Trisolaran could to some degree think independently, they primarily relied on exchanging information with each other to build up a large collective databank that was their primary source of intelligence. Moreover, after joining during mating, each set of Trisolaran parents split into multiple larvae who each possessed some memories inherited from the parents. This adaptation allowed young Trisolarans to acquire basic living skills in a very short period of time, because their relatively simple brains handled modular memory effectively.
But human scholars were not entirely wrong in their speculation. The adaptations that allowed the Trisolarans to survive extremes in planetary climate and build a lasting civilization also limited the size and development of individual Trisolaran brains. As a result, the Trisolarans lacked imagination and creativity, and relied primarily on proven techniques and collective wisdom from the past. Historically, the Trisolarans rarely experienced the kind of technology explosion common in human history. Even if they left their troubled home world and found a more hospitable environment, they would continue to be merely social insects, albeit insects with civilization and technology.
This was why the Trisolarans were intent on exterminating the humans even at the risk of triggering a gravitational-wave universal broadcast. They well knew that even if the two species broke through the dark forest state between them to coexist peacefully, humans would soon catch up to and then surpass them technologically. In addition, the Trisolarans experienced an atavistic terror of the gigantic humans, each of whom could flatten hundreds of Trisolarans with a single palm.
The relatively low intelligence level of individual Trisolarans had been masked from the humans by the unfamiliarity of their alien society. Humans simply could not imagine that a civilization far more advanced than theirs had been constructed by individuals who were much “stupider” than humans. This was the fundamental reason the Trisolarans had concealed from the humans their appearance, which they viewed as a weakness.
Now, however, the Spirit had revealed the truth with its mysterious light. The individual Trisolaran mind was too weak and barren to bear the power of ideabstractions, and the Trisolarans, panicked, couldn’t engage in the kind of large-scale group communication that would have formed a collective intelligence.
Yun Tianming was in fact the only life who could converse with the Spirit.
“What are these … fibers?” Tianming pointed to the intricate, glowing structure all around him. One of his fingers accidently struck one of the fibers, and a colorful splash of light flickered around the site. Startled, Tianming examined his finger and saw that it was unharmed. The glowing fiber had simply passed through his finger and hand as though it wasn’t made of matter at all.
This is my projection into this universe.
Tianming struggled to make sense of this. “You’re saying that your body isn’t in this universe? You are from another universe?”
I come from Eden. What you see is the projection of Eden.
“Eden? Like from the Bible? Is this a metaphor of some sort?”
I come from the Eden of this universe, the perfect world at the beginning.
A torrent of ideas followed “perfect world”: the dazzling stars of galaxies; a placid lake; a classical garden arranged in perfect symmetry; the Venus de Milo; Mona Lisa’s smile; Ingres’s The Source … Then came scenes taken from his dreams: a heavenly kingdom found in a flower; a magnificent palace built over a rainbow … The sights piled one on top of the other, but each captured only a trace of perfection. Finally, the Spirit gave up trying to convey the sense of a “perfect world” to him and left his mind with only a simple geometric figure: a crystalline sphere floating against a dark background, the perfect circle.
“Where is this world?” Tianming asked. Even with such an imperfect glance, he already sensed the indescribable beauty and grace of that world.
Destroyed.
The visions he had seen earlier returned, but now changed: dark clouds covered the stars; a storm wrinkled the lake; Venus’s arms broke; Mona Lisa cried … blood and fire appeared; the demons of hell sacked the heavenly kingdom; darkness corroded the perfect silvery sphere from two sides until it was only a thin sheet, and then a line, and then just a pinprick of light.
Then the bright dot expanded rapidly and filled his consciousness before fading into darkness. But in this new night, millions of galaxies appeared: the Milky Way, the sun, the moon, the Earth … Tianming knew he was witnessing the birth of his world.
Tianming was too shocked to speak. The whole universe that he knew was but an insignificant fragment of the perfect world, the remnants of countless cycles of destruction.
Like Guan Yifan and Cheng Xin later, Tianming learned the deep secrets of the universe.
“Who destroyed that perfect world?” Tianming asked.
The Lurker.
“The Lurker?” Severe pain seized Tianming’s head again. He understood that he was approaching the limits of understanding, but he refused to give up. “Why did it destroy Eden?”
I don’t know. Only the Lurker knows.
“Why is it called the Lurker? Is it an individual or a civilization? Or something else? Doesn’t every civilization conceal itself in the dark forest?”
At first, in the perfect world, there was no dark forest as you understand it. But rebellious intelligences brought forth the dark forest … The perfect world collapsed, but the traitors escaped. They are concealed in this universe.
The Spirit gave Tianming systematic and complete information, but Tianming could only comprehend a minuscule portion of the flood. The rest was beyond the limits of his mind.
*
“Wait!” said AA, who was having trouble breathing. “Are you telling me that some piece of the civilization of a previous universe has survived into our universe?” Although she didn’t know what Guan Yifan had told Cheng Xin on the spaceship, she did remember the words of the Ring: The fish responsible for drying the sea are not here.
She was beginning to understand what the Ring had meant.
“I don’t know … or maybe I once did, but no longer remember.” Tianming said, dazed.
*
Tianming asked the Spirit, “Is there a way to end the dark forest and rebuild the perfect world?” He seized upon this last hope as Earth’s salvation.
Yes.
“How?”
Destroy the Lurker, and I will be able to restore the perfect world.
“How do we do that?”
The Spirit was silent for a moment before answering.
I need you to become a Seeker …
Another tsunami of thoughts and images inundated him. He understood only the first half of what the Spirit said before the ideabstraction broke down his last mental defense. He was drowning in a sea of ideas, grasping for anything to keep himself afloat. He struggled, but no one came to save him. The Spirit insisted on injecting increasingly more information into his head, and didn’t seem to care as he sank under the infinite storm of dreams and thoughts. A second before he blacked out, something seemed to illuminate his mind. He thought he understood an important point, but it was too late. His brain activated the final defense of its own sanity, and he lost consciousness.
*
“And then?” AA asked. She had also been taken by the dream of restoring the perfect world. If the perfect world could be recovered, perhaps it was also possible to recover the Solar System and Earth, and the human world of the past …
Tianming shook his head. “Then nothing. By the time I recovered, the Spirit and its projection were both gone.”
*
He looked around; everything had returned to normal. The Trisolaran ship was once again sailing through the darkness of space, with no trace of the Spirit anywhere to be found. According to the Trisolaran surveillance data that Tianming examined later, the glowing structure had vanished not long after he fell unconscious. Gravitational-wave sensors detected the structure moving away from the Trisolaran Fleet at near lightspeed along a strange course, and it was soon dozens of astronomical units away. Even Trisolaran technology could not follow it.
When the Trisolaran scientists analyzed the Spirit’s movements, they discovered that if they eliminated the effects of the motion of the Milky Way Galaxy, the Local Group, and the Laniakea Supercluster, the Spirit’s course was extremely simple. In other words, relative to the universe, or at least the immediate vicinity of the fleet, the Spirit likely was stationary in an absolute frame of reference. The near-lightspeed motion was the result of the universe moving, not the Spirit. It was only after the Spirit had discovered the Trisolaran Fleet that it had approached on its own to make contact.
What kind of unimaginable power could cause such a structure to remain still and resist the power of galaxies in motion?
Further research revealed that the Spirit itself was without mass. The mass effect detected by the gravitational-wave sensors was caused by a force field around it. The force field isolated the structure from the rest of the universe, but the isolated region was almost without volume. The immense glowing structure had been projected from a tiny point.
The Spirit was telling the truth: It was only a projection, without substance.
The Trisolarans understood that the Spirit was from a highly advanced civilization. That civilization seemed to bear them no ill will and had attempted to communicate with them, but no Trisolarans had been able to converse with its representative, the Spirit. More than two hundred individuals had gone insane trying, and had to be dehydrated and incinerated; their cognitive organs collapsed as soon as they received an ideabstraction, and their biology was such that they couldn’t even protect themselves by blacking out.
Even Tianming seemed to lose his mind. It took more than a month for him to fully recover his faculties. But the Trisolarans had not given up on him in the interim. In surveillance recordings of the encounter, they saw Tianming muttering and looking thoughtful, which suggested that he had successfully carried on a conversation with the Spirit.
Patiently, they cared for Tianming, hoping to glean some advanced technology from his recollections of his conversation with the superior civilization. After he recovered, Tianming recalled the early part of his encounter with the Spirit, but despite his best efforts he couldn’t remember what he had learned. Repeated interrogation, hypnosis, and dream analysis all yielded little of use. The Trisolarans scanned his brain in detail and found that a large region previously devoid of neural activity had been filled to the brim with information. But the Trisolarans could make no sense of the data stored there, and the region seemed to be completely isolated from the rest of his brain.
Only a dread of inescapable doom was left in Tianming’s mind. Though he couldn’t recall exactly what he was afraid of, the sense of foreboding persisted and often woke him at night.
As time passed, bits and pieces of the information hidden in Tianming’s subconscious surfaced. One day, when the Trisolarans described to Tianming the marvels of their new lightspeed spaceships, Tianming suddenly remembered the following fragment from his conversation with the Spirit:
The most primitive means for achieving security is … use the speed of light … turn yourself into a black hole …
Tianming had no idea what it meant to “turn yourself into a black hole” and no guess as to how that related to lightspeed ships; he only knew there was a connection. But after mulling over the matter for some time—or perhaps guided by some mysterious force—he finally understood the secret of black domains.
He proposed revealing a new way to escape from the dark forest state of the universe to the Trisolarans—he needed them to verify his theory—in exchange for their promise to cease the invasion of Earth.
“Impossible,” the commander of the Trisolaran Fleet informed him. “We will not give up our grand invasion of the Solar System for some vague promise of a ‘safety notice.’ In any event, the Earth bugs have not initiated the universal broadcast and will never be able to do so. We don’t need such a measure, at least not now.”
“Then you’ll never get any information out of me concerning that godlike civilization,” said Tianming.
“Well, we do want what you have to tell us,” said the Trisolaran commander. “But we won’t buy it with the hard-won Earth. Perhaps we have something else you want.” He showed Tianming some scenes transmitted by the sophons on Earth: the worldwide chaos after the droplet attacks; the anarchy that reigned everywhere; the millions of deaths caused by panicked stampedes, massacres, streaming refugees, famines …
One scene in particular caught Tianming’s attention. In a suburb somewhere on the west coast of the United States, a young woman who resembled Cheng Xin was found in the midst of a group of refugees.
Someone shouted, “That’s the bitch! That’s the bitch who fucked up everything!” And then the mob surrounded her and began to punch and kick, tearing her clothes off …
A man by her side screamed and sobbed for the mob to stop. “Please! She’s not Cheng Xin! We’re Koreans!” But it was useless. Like a pack of wild beasts, the mob scratched and tore and bit and chomped until they literally gnawed chunks of flesh from her …
“That woman isn’t Cheng Xin,” the Trisolaran commander informed him. “Right now, she’s under the protection of the United Nations. But we think the situation on Earth is going to deteriorate further, and perhaps she’ll meet a fate even worse than the woman you just saw.”
Tianming clenched his fists in rage. He had no choice.
“All right,” he said through gritted teeth. “I will tell you about the safety notice, but only after you direct Sophon to form an Earth Security Force to maintain order and prevent needless deaths. They must also protect Cheng Xin and her friends.”
And so the Trisolarans received the secret of the cosmic safety notice: reduction of the speed of light. Since they didn’t know that the location of Trisolaris would soon be exposed to the universe, they didn’t put much effort into constructing a black domain. Later, after the Trisolarans found out about the gravitational-wave broadcast from Gravity, they did try to create a black domain, but because the dark forest attack came so quickly, they couldn’t get it ready in time.
The humans, who had plenty of time, also missed this chance.
*
Tianming dreamed that he had turned into the “Seeker” that the Spirit had described. He flew through the universe aimlessly, searching for the hidden “Lurker.” He swept by millions of stars and through spiral arm after spiral arm, finding nothing. In the end, he arrived at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, where the core was orders of magnitude brighter than any spiral arm, where millions of ancient stars orbited and twirled around one another, in a dazzling cosmic dance … and in the heart of the core was an invisible, monstrous black hole, whose existence was revealed by its massive accretion disk. Humanity’s sun, if placed on this disk, would be nothing more than a speck of dust upon a vinyl record.
Tianming realized that the disk was so thin as to be two-dimensional. Like a record, it spun slowly around the black hole. He approached the disk to examine it in more detail and saw that it was inscribed with a massive picture that portrayed every stellar system in the universe in astounding detail. Coming closer, he could discern individual spaceships and odd-looking extraterrestrials. Every detail of every object was perfectly captured in this picture, though it was all lifeless. Tianming felt a powerful force tugging at him, trying to drag him into the picture. He struggled to get away, but the irresistible force, like a magical spell, gradually pulled him down toward this two-dimensional plane.
He fought hard, and at last escaped the mysterious spell and departed the surface of the accretion disk. But immediately he fell into the frightening black hole, passed through the event horizon, and plunged into the lightless abyss … In the darkness he saw a ghostly fire, and by its light a warlock wearing a black cape and a pointy hat and grinning viciously. He was busily painting on a large scroll, which he unfurled and pushed out of the black hole as he filled it with his work. The unrolling sheet of paper joined the accretion disk, and he saw that the sun, the moon, and the Earth had all been painted into the picture. The warlock glanced at him, and instantly an image of Tianming appeared in the painting, including each strand of his hair, each wrinkle in his skin, even the frightened expression in his eyes. He was then pulled into the image, merging with his own two-dimensional portrait …
Tianming screamed and woke from his nightmare.
Some have already been dimension-reduced; others are being dimension-reduced; still others will be dimension-reduced, until finally …
This is all part of their plan …
Snatches of his conversation with the Spirit peeked out of a hidden part of his mind, almost forgotten, and suddenly he understood the meaning of the dream.
*
“Dimensional strike!” AA’s voice quavered. She recalled the terrible sight of the Solar System’s collapse: flattened Neptune and Saturn like a pair of eyes; the space cities whose every detail had been preserved in two dimensions; snowflakes bigger than the moon … Tianming’s absurd dream had become reality, and that reality was even more terrifying than the nightmare.
Tianming nodded, his expression grave.
“If your dream was really a message from the Spirit, then the effects of the two-dimensional foil will never end. Does that mean”—she shuddered in horror—“that the whole universe will eventually be only two dimensions?”
“Not only that.” Tianming sighed. “The Spirit told me that our own three-dimensional space is the result of a dimensional strike. The original universe was of a higher dimension.”
“So you’re saying …” Although what Tianming was suggesting wasn’t hard to understand, it was simply too incredible to accept. “The universe was originally four-dimensional? Those four-dimensional fragments were how things used to be?”
She recalled the words of the Ring:
When the sea is drying, the fish have to gather into a puddle. The puddle is also drying, and all the fish are going to disappear.
“Not four-dimensional, but ten-dimensional,” Tianming said. “The four-dimensional universe is itself the result of many other dimensional strikes. The ten-dimensional universe was the perfect world that was the home of the Spirit. Pythagoras called ten the perfect number, and now I finally understand what he meant.”
“Ten dimensions!” AA was only mildly surprised. For her, the difference between four dimensions and ten was just an abstract difference between two numbers.
“Human scientists had already discovered that fundamental particles have ten dimensions, though only three dimensions are fully extended, with the rest curled up within the quantum realm. Scientists had proposed many theories explaining this fact, but they never guessed that this was the result of intelligent life waging destructive warfare, which led to the collapse of the fundamental structure of the universe.”
AA soon thought of a more practical question. “Do you think the Lurker was responsible for the dimensional strike against the Solar System?”
“I’m not sure.” Tianming thought about this some more. “It’s possible that other advanced civilizations can also produce dimension-reduction weapons for dark forest attacks. But I can guess that the goal of the Lurker is to reduce the dimensions of the cosmos.”
“Why?” AA asked.
“I don’t know.” Tianming let out a long sigh. “That’s probably the biggest mystery in the universe. Do you remember the sophon blind zones?”
艾 AA nodded. Blind zones were mysterious regions of space that caused the sophons to lose their power, and they could be found all over the universe. As an astronomer, she was very familiar with them.
“What do you think the universe would be like without such blind zones?”
AA shuddered. This hypothetical once had very practical implications. At the beginning of the Deterrence Era, scholars debated the question of whether the dark forest state applied across the whole universe. One influential group of scholars believed that any species that reached the technology level of the Trisolarans should possess the power to produce sophons or sophon-like communication techniques that relied on quantum entanglement. After billions of years, the most advanced civilizations should be able to send sophons to every corner of the universe, and with instant communication being available everywhere, the dark forest state should not persist. They believed that the threat of dark forest strikes that worried both humans and Trisolarans were only a phenomenon local to this part of the universe that had been improperly assumed to be universal.
The discovery of the blind zones negated their theory. A variety of evidence indicated that the blind zones were the result of artifice rather than nature. They darkened the universe and eliminated the hope of instant communication. Therefore, the dark forest state probably did persist everywhere.
The blind zones also posed challenges to dark forest theory. Imagine: If a civilization was powerful enough to establish blind zones across the universe, then such a civilization was also capable of influencing the whole universe. Such a civilization had no need to establish blind zones at all. It could simply use sophon-like technology to surveil and monitor the entire cosmos and slaughter any baby civilizations as they appeared, thereby achieving perfect security.
Unless it had some other goal in mind.
“Is it possible that … that the Lurker is responsible for setting up blind zones everywhere, thus ensuring the dark forest state persists in the universe?” AA voiced the most terrifying possibility of all.
“I have no idea,” Tianming replied. “But it is possible. Without a universe-spanning, superadvanced civilization going around to set up these barriers, it’s unlikely that the dark forest would still be with us. But if that was what really happened, it must have been an unimaginably evil civilization. Not only did it destroy Eden, but it also treated the whole universe as its plaything. Could Satan be real?”
They continued to discuss and debate clues regarding the identity of the Lurker without coming to any conclusions. It was possible that even more knowledge was buried in Tianming’s mind, but even now, he could recall only a few fragments here and there. The deepest secrets of the universe were still hidden.
After a while, AA asked, “Did you make up that story about Princess Dewdrop and Prince Deep Water to warn humanity about dimensional strikes?”
“I didn’t make up all of it. Like I said, some parts of that story came from my dream.”
“Why didn’t the Trisolarans suspect you? The metaphor in the fairy tale was so transparent.”
“One of the biggest weaknesses of the Trisolarans is their lack of imagination,” Tianming explained. “If they already knew about dimensional strikes, then they might have been able to see through my story. But they had no knowledge of it at all. If even humans couldn’t solve my riddle, the Trisolarans had no hope at all. They had no experiences to draw on.”
Tianming didn’t tell the Trisolarans what he had figured out, because he couldn’t see how the reality of the universe’s loss of dimensions could contribute to solving the conflict between the Trisolarans and the humans. The Trisolarans had scanned this dream, but among numerous other strange dreams Tianming had had it didn’t stand out. The Trisolarans couldn’t figure out the true meaning of the dream, and Tianming wasn’t going to help them.
Then, more than a year later, the Trisolaran Fleet finally received news of Gravity’s broadcast. The plan to invade Earth had to be abandoned because both the Earth’s and Trisolaris’s locations had been exposed. Though Tianming no longer had to bear the moral responsibility for the destruction of Earth by the Trisolaran invasion, he realized that he had been burdened with an even heavier duty: saving humanity from the dark forest strikes that would be launched by more advanced civilizations.
Although the Spirit had come from the ten-dimensional universe, it had extensive knowledge of the three-dimensional universe as well. It informed Tianming of seven possible types of dark forest attacks. The two-dimensional foil was one of the more advanced techniques. During the year after his encounter with the Spirit, Tianming was able to gradually recall the Spirit’s teachings of all seven techniques. The Trisolarans made it a priority to obtain the valuable intelligence from Tianming to prepare defenses, and he shared six of the techniques with them. However, he kept dimensional strikes a secret from them, instinctively feeling that this was the technique most likely to be used against the Solar System. He also knew that if he revealed all that he knew to the Trisolarans, they weren’t going to pass on the knowledge to the humans in the Solar System. Nor would they permit him to contact them.
In exchange for informing the Trisolarans of six dark forest attack techniques, Tianming extracted from them the precious opportunity to meet Cheng Xin through the sophons at a distance. During their meeting, he carefully mixed his dream with other elements and created three fairy tales for Cheng Xin. He constructed elaborate metaphors to conceal the intelligence concerning the black domain and curvature propulsion, but the rather naked description of dimensional strikes was beyond Trisolaran knowledge and understanding.
“But what if you had guessed wrong and advanced civilizations didn’t launch a dimensional strike against the Earth but used one of the other techniques?” AA asked.
“It wouldn’t have been a big deal. Lightspeed ships fast enough to escape a dimensional strike would have been sufficient to escape the other techniques. This was the safest way. I couldn’t pack everything into my stories, and so I had to pick the most critical details.”
“But there’s another problem … During your meeting, you said that you and Cheng Xin knew each other from childhood and often told each other stories. But if the Trisolarans could look through your memories, wouldn’t that lie have stood out?” For personal reasons, 艾 AA had long wanted to ask this question. But she hadn’t dared to probe too deeply into Tianming’s memories. Now she finally asked, but it wasn’t for herself, it was for …
Tianming gazed up at the dark dome of the sky and thought of the past that already seemed to belong to another self, a self that had died long ago. Softly, he said, “That … wasn’t entirely a lie. I did know a girl like that.”
*
When Yun Tianming was a child, a girl briefly appeared in his life. A neighbor’s niece, she was three years younger than he. One summer break, she came to his city to visit her aunt and got to know Tianming, who often recounted to her stories he had read in books: the Trojan War, King Solomon’s treasures, the Knights of the Round Table, the Merchant of Venice, and so on. Most of these had come from the thick books his classics-worshiping parents had made him read.
The girl also told him many stories she had made up: the naughty prince, the clever princess, the happy pudgy pig, and so on. She was too young to create coherent plots, and some of these were barely stories at all. Tianming loved listening to her. He had no friends, and his parents refused to let him play with children whose families his parents thought “low class.” Tianming’s parents disliked his spending so much time with this girl, because he was in middle school and they wanted him to focus on his studies. However, by then his parents were in the midst of their own messy divorce and couldn’t spare the energy to keep a close eye on him.
The girl stayed in Tianming’s city for only a month. At the end of summer break, before she returned home, the two promised to see each other the next summer. However, not long after, Tianming’s parents finalized their divorce, and he moved away with his father. He never saw the girl again. Even more socially isolated, he retreated into himself and sealed away those memories.
But the young girl left him a trace of warmth from his childhood, and the stories the girl told him were the prototypes for the fairy tales that he later told Cheng Xin.
“To kill Princess Dewdrop, Prince Evil used black magic. Many, many meteors fell from the sky … The little fairy descended to earth to protect her, and made a magic umbrella out of clouds to protect the princess from the falling rocks …
“Later, the little fairy, the princess, and the captain of the guards went to No-Worry Island, where they found Prince Tall Mountain. The prince had also learned magic, and he could make himself as big as a mountain or as tiny as a grain of sand …
“Prince Tall Mountain killed Prince Evil, and then the princess and the captain lived happily ever after. Prince Tall Mountain and the little fairy also left the kingdom and returned to No-Worry Island, where they married …”
Tianming could still vaguely recall the serious, childish face of the girl as she told him stories. He also remembered asking, “Why didn’t Prince Tall Mountain marry Princess Dewdrop?”
“Ah, you weren’t listening!” The girl pouted. “Prince Tall Mountain is Dewdrop’s brother! That’s why Prince Tall Mountain has to end up with the little fairy, and Princess Dewdrop has to end up with the captain …”
There was little resemblance between this young girl and Cheng Xin, but after meeting Cheng Xin, Tianming sometimes fantasized that they had known each other when they were very young and lost touch as they grew up. He projected the image of Cheng Xin into his childhood memories, and the girl he had known briefly one summer became the image of young Cheng Xin. The Trisolarans’ understanding of his memories did not extend to differences this subtle. As Tianming deliberately confused his own memories, he persuaded the Trisolarans that he and Cheng Xin did know each other as children, and the Trisolarans didn’t detect his misleading memory edits.
“What about that young girl?” AA asked, a tremor creeping into her voice. “Did you … did you ever see her again?”
“No. The world is so large; what are the chances of meeting her again? I can’t even remember her name. I just know that everyone called her Weiwei … What’s wrong, AA?” Tianming saw that her eyes were full of tears and her breath had quickened. Even the way she gazed at him was odd.
AA’s smile was closer to a grimace. “You can’t even recall her name? Let me help you there. Her name was Ai Xiaowei.”
*
Tianming had once thought that after he’d found out the truth of the ten-dimensional universe, nothing else could ever shock him. He was wrong. We are moved most not by the grand mysteries of the universe, but by the emotional personal truths that define our individual pasts.
Tianming’s mind went blank. He had never imagined that the young girl he once knew would have any connection to 艾 AA, who wasn’t even born until more than two centuries after that long-ago summer.
But AA was right. That young girl was indeed named Ai Xiaowei. Tianming hadn’t really forgotten her name; he simply hadn’t wanted to recall the details. Subconsciously, he still preferred to maintain the absurd illusion that the girl had perhaps been the young Cheng Xin.
How does AA know this? Tianming stared at her and recalled the strange sense of familiarity that he always felt with her. This couldn’t be just a lucky guess. Gradually, as he examined AA, he saw traces of Weiwei in her features. Back then, Weiwei had been only eleven, and even if 艾 AA was the same person as Ai Xiaowei—an impossibility—he would have had a hard time recognizing her.
It was inconceivable for AA to be from the Common Era. Although he had not researched AA’s past in detail, he could tell that her habits, speech, and general demeanor were without a doubt the products of the world two hundred years after his own childhood. It was impossible to fake such characteristics. From what he knew of her—both by observing her through the sophons earlier and by spending every moment of every day with her for the past year—he was 100 percent certain on this point.
Unless she went into hibernation as an eleven-year-old? But that was … the 1990s, far too early for hibernation technology.
Countless theories pressed themselves against Tianming’s awareness, but none of them seemed plausible. He had to ask her for the truth, but he found himself incapable of even forming a coherent sentence.
“How … you … what …”
“Stop asking questions,” said AA, and gently placed a hand over his mouth. “Just listen, all right? There’s something important that I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while, but I didn’t know how to bring it up.
“You don’t need to feel guilty about the destruction of humanity, my darling. The one who is responsible isn’t you or Cheng Xin; it’s … me.”
“What are you talking about?!”
“I’ve played a far larger role in these events than you realize. But I have to start from the Common Era. There’s one more person involved in the complicated relationship between you and Cheng Xin during the Common Era—she’s the ‘Lurker’ in that story.
“Her name was Ai Xiaowei, or Weiwei, as everyone called her. She was a girl who loved fairy tales and who loved to fantasize. One summer break, she went to visit her aunt in another city. Her aunt lived in a tall building, one in a forest of other towers just like it. The first few days after her arrival, she still didn’t know the neighborhood well. One day, she knocked on the door of an apartment she thought was her aunt’s. When a strange boy a few years older opened the door, she realized that she had ended up in the wrong building. Terrified, she began to cry. The boy brought her into the living room and offered her some ice cream, which calmed her down.”
As Tianming recalled the scene of meeting Weiwei for the first time, the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile. The intense curiosity to find out the truth gave way to the warmth of reminiscence.
“The boy offered to bring her home, but Weiwei couldn’t tell him the exact address; she only knew that it was in a building nearby. They checked out corresponding apartments in other towers in the area, but either no one answered, or something else in the building told her that it wasn’t the right one. Finally, having run out of ideas, the boy brought her to the garden at the foot of his building, hoping that her aunt would come looking for her.
“They waited for hours. To pass the time, the boy told Weiwei several stories. Weiwei also told him some stories she had made up. They were having a good time when Weiwei’s aunt finally showed up to take her home.”
AA paused and asked, “Tianming, do you remember the story that Weiwei didn’t finish telling you?”
Tianming shook his head. He really couldn’t recall such a detail.
“The story was called ‘The Star-Giver.’ In it, a young princess met a strange boy on a tour of the kingdom. The boy told the princess that he was going to give her a star, but she didn’t believe him, and told the guards to drive him out of her sight.
“After a series of other plot twists, the princess’s stepmother, the queen, wanted to kill her, and the princess escaped the palace. The queen chased after her at the head of an army. Just as the princess was about to give up all hope, a rope ladder dropped down from a star. The princess grabbed the ladder and climbed, higher and higher. The queen and her army also climbed up after her. Finally, a hand reached down from the star to pull the princess up—it was the strange boy. The two cut the rope ladder, and the queen and her army tumbled to their deaths.
“The princess and the boy lived happily ever after.”
A long-buried memory gradually surfaced in Tianming’s mind. He recalled this story and much more. During the thousands of subjective years of his long sleep in Trisolaran captivity, this crude, childish story had made its appearance in his dreams under various guises. He had thought it an echo of his gift of a star to Cheng Xin. However, it now seemed that the truth was perhaps the opposite: He had come up with the idea of giving Cheng Xin a star because subconsciously he remembered this story. It had changed the course of his life without his awareness.
“After that, Weiwei often went to look for you to play, and that summer break became one of her fondest memories. You probably remember that you and she had promised to meet the next summer, but the next year, when she returned to your city, you had already moved away. You lost touch after that.”
AA was no longer her lighthearted, carefree self. Her voice was calm but laced with the chill of autumn. A breeze blew by them, as sorrowful and lonesome as a night breeze on Earth. Tianming felt his eyes grow moist.
“And so ended a childhood friendship. More than ten years passed, and Weiwei graduated from college and found a job. Coincidentally, she ended up in the same city as you. She hadn’t seen you since the summer she was eleven. Occasionally, she thought about the boy she had known once and wondered how he was. What kind of work was he doing? Was he married? It was mere idle curiosity.
“But then, she and you met under completely unexpected circumstances.”
“We met again?” Tianming was shocked into silence. He couldn’t remember ever seeing the grown-up Ai Xiaowei. But as he stared at the sweet and sorrowful face before him, the vague sense of familiarity grew stronger. Finally, a hazy scene from deep in his memory came into focus.
“AA, I … I did see you! During the Common Era, I must have seen you somewhere!”
*
Tianming’s thoughts were thrown into chaos as he struggled to search through his memories for the owner of that familiar face. High school, college, his company, the hospital … before leaving Earth, his life had been very simple, and he knew few women his age. But he couldn’t remember anyone who looked like 艾 AA, though he was sure now he had seen her somewhere. Where?
Was she a student who had sat across the table from him at the library? Was she someone who had gotten on the elevator with him at work? Maybe a roommate that had shared an apartment? Faces flitted by his mind’s eye, but none matched. He could recall only a fragment: a face that resembled AA’s looking at him with a curious expression. But when was that? Where was it? Everything except that face had disappeared from his memories.
AA laughed self-mockingly. “I was hoping you would remember at least a little. It was an important event in your life, possibly the most important. On that day”—she pointed in the direction of the setting sun—“you bought this star.”
That day!
The memory, long sealed away, came to life, as clear as though it were yesterday: He had gotten the text from Hu Wen, and then he asked Dr. Zhang for permission to leave the hospital. He took a taxi to the UNESCO Beijing office, walked into the headquarters for the Stars Our Destination Project, and met the director of the project as well as Dr. He … Wait, wasn’t there someone else? Who? Think! He walked into the office, and the first person he saw was …
Oh, God, could it be?
Tianming sucked in a breath. He pointed at AA and stuttered, “You … you were the receptionist! But … but … but how?”
“That wasn’t me.” AA shook her head. “That was your childhood friend Ai Xiaowei, my … previous incarnation.”
Tianming had no idea what AA meant by “previous incarnation.” He thought back to that day: Yes, the receptionist was especially solicitous, bringing him tea and making sure he was comfortable, stopping from time to time to gaze at him, sometimes curiously and sometimes admiringly. He couldn’t remember much else. Her extraordinary beauty should have left him with a deeper impression, but he was a dying man, his mood ashen, his mind on Cheng Xin. He had never thought of the receptionist after that, and he certainly couldn’t have guessed that the woman had anything to do with 艾 AA.
“To you, she was only a stranger passing through your life, no different from the thousands who brush by you in the street every day. But that encounter with you changed her life.
“Xiaowei didn’t recognize you at first. When you told her that you wanted to buy a star, her reaction was that you were some rich man’s son who had run out of ways to spend money. Though superficially enthusiastic, she laughed at you behind your back. Later, when you explained to Dr. He that you were buying the star for a woman, she remembered the story she had told you. As she looked at you some more, she thought you looked familiar. But you refused to reveal your name. She only knew that you were buying the star for a woman named Cheng Xin. By the time she finally got up the courage to ask you if you were who she thought you were, Dr. He had already taken you away outside the city to look for the star you had bought.
“That was the last time she laid eyes on you.
“Later, Weiwei figured out your name based on the information you left in the files, and she knew she was right. She thought you had somehow gotten rich, and she didn’t want to bother you. Then, the next day, Dr. He told her that he could tell you were suffering from some terminal illness, and probably didn’t have too much time left. She felt such pity for you and wanted to find you. But other than your name, she didn’t know anything about you.
“Finally, do you know what she did? She had the brilliant idea of getting on a website called ‘Facelook’ and searching for your name. Since your name was pretty rare, she managed to find your page.”
“I don’t think you mean ‘Facelook,’” Tianming said. “I think it was ‘Facebook.’”
“I think you’re right. What kind of website was it?”
“It was a—” As Tianming struggled to explain the ancient technology, he also tried to remember when he had signed up for such a thing. He didn’t remember doing much with it. It probably just contained some basic information about himself.
“I see,” said AA. “I think you also linked yourself to a friend named Hu Wen? He seemed to be a good friend in college—”
“My only friend,” Tianming interrupted.
“He was a clever businessman, and he had thousands of friends on Facebook. After a few days, Weiwei finally managed to get in touch with Hu Wen and got your contact information. She rushed to the hospital but found out that Cheng Xin had already taken you away. The official explanation was that Cheng Xin had taken you to the United States for advanced treatment.
“Weiwei thought it was the most beautiful love story she had ever heard, but she didn’t know the truth … Anyway, she was deeply moved by your hopeless romanticism. And, perhaps from that day, she … fell in love with you, and vowed to find you. She didn’t know what she hoped to accomplish, only that she wanted to see you again. She couldn’t have known that you had already been launched into deep space.
“The rest of her life was rather tragic. For the next three or four years, she searched for you. She quit her job and went to America to look for Cheng Xin. But by then Cheng Xin had gone into hibernation, and she made no progress. Finally, she heard a rumor that you had also entered hibernation to go to the future. Weiwei had no way to go to the future, so she had to give up.
“Later, she made a decent life for herself. She started an internet business and made some money. A man fell in love with her, and though he had little money, he was almost as romantic as you, which moved her. She became his lover and enjoyed a period of happiness. Soon, however, the man was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and she gave him all her money to find a cure. Unfortunately, that turned out to be just a scam, and the man disappeared with the funds. I imagine if he hadn’t reminded her of you, she wouldn’t have fallen for such a simple trick.”
Tianming sighed, and AA’s voice grew even more somber. “The worst is yet to come. Weiwei tried to recover, but she found out that the con man had given her HIV. After a few years of suffering, she died.”
Tianming would never have imagined such a terrible end for his friend. He remembered again that happy woman and her sunny disposition as he opened the door to the office of the Stars Our Destination Project. How could he have known at that moment the fondness between them in their past or the unpredictable future that lay ahead?
“She knew that her life was ruined, but she refused to accept it. Absolutely refused.” AA’s eyes glistened with tears.
“When she died, she was just over thirty, childless. She sold what little property she had left to preserve some stem cells in a gene bank. She hoped that she could be cloned in the future and live a new life. At the time, many harbored similar hopes, and there must have been millions who could not afford to go to the future but who spent what money they had to leave their cells in gene banks across the world. Later, during the Great Ravine and the Crisis Era, no one cared about them, and no one bothered to clone them. Most of these cells were destroyed in the intervening years, and it was by pure luck that Ai Xiaowei’s cells were preserved.
“Based on the contract she signed, her cells would only be preserved for two hundred years. If no one was interested in cloning her by then, the cells would be destroyed. Two hundred years later, in the middle of the Deterrence Era, humanity had returned to a stable track, and humanism and associated values were once again on the rise. Some people formed a genetic protection league and argued that the cells waiting to be cloned were all potential humans with the right to life, and they raised some money to clone us. Lacking funds to clone everyone, they were forced to clone only about one to two percent of the surviving cells. Maybe because I was pretty, I was picked. And so, two hundred years later, I carried on the dream of my previous incarnation—”
“Why do you keep on using that term?” Tianming asked.
“It’s just a habit for us clones. If our donors were still alive at the time of our birth, we’d call them parents; but if our donors were dead, we’d call them previous incarnations. Maybe it’s a way for all of us, orphans really, to find for ourselves some roots in time. My previous incarnation left me a long letter in which she told me her life story in detail. She also reminded me not to be foolish, and to live an easygoing life. This was how I became familiar with your story from the Common Era and how I knew about the star named DX3906. It was why I chose it as the topic for my dissertation.” AA fell silent, as though she found it hard to broach the next topic.
Seven centuries’ worth of fate’s vicissitudes churned around them. What had seemed a coincidental meeting turned out to be a love sealed in a past life. At that moment, they each seemed to hear the heartbeats of the other.
To break the awkward mood, AA laughed carelessly. “Please don’t misunderstand me, Tianming. ‘Previous incarnation’ is just a term we use, but I’m not Ai Xiaowei. I’m certainly not that foolish. I just want to let you know that you’ve never been alone. Even in the years when you felt most isolated, someone was always thinking of you. When your frozen brain was hurtling through the darkness of space, someone was searching for you back on Earth—” She stopped herself from uttering the sentence she really wanted to say next.
It wasn’t Cheng Xin.
After a long silence, Tianming whispered, “I’m Jean-Christophe, and she’s my Antoinette.”
*
After a while, AA took a deep breath and continued to reveal her secrets.
“Actually, I was responsible for waking Cheng Xin. After I found out that Cheng Xin had gone into hibernation during the Common Era, I tried to look for her. The year of the Swordholder election, I finally located her record. She wasn’t an important figure, and the government had no plans to wake her. But I wanted her to be revived so that I could meet your first love, a woman my previous incarnation never got to meet. That was also when I discovered the two planets orbiting DX3906—one of them the world we are standing on now. Since hundreds of extraterrestrial planets were discovered every year, most people paid no attention to such news. However, I sent the discovery to a reporter friend, who dug up the story of how Cheng Xin had been given a star nearly three centuries earlier. She wrote up the story with enough exaggerations to arouse the interest of the public and the government. As a result, I managed to get Cheng Xin awakened from hibernation. I made sure that I was assigned to help her so that I could get to know her better, and unexpectedly, we became friends … I never intended to generate so much public fervor as to make her the Swordholder.”
Blood drained from Tianming’s face. He never could have imagined that Cheng Xin’s friend was responsible for her fate.
“I’m sorry, Tianming. I was just curious. I really didn’t mean to …” AA’s voice trailed off, her expression full of sorrow.
Tianming couldn’t speak. He tried to imagine how everything would have been different if AA hadn’t interfered or if she had awakened Cheng Xin a few years later.
Even if some other Cheng Xin–like candidate stood for election, maybe Thomas Wade’s gamble would have paid off, and the Earth wouldn’t have been destroyed? Then perhaps Cheng Xin could have lived out the rest of her life peacefully on Earth … or maybe …
“I’ve carried this secret with me for so many years. In a way, the one most responsible for the destruction of Earth wasn’t Cheng Xin or you, but me. I tried to comfort Cheng Xin after the disaster, but a lot of things I said were for myself. If I hadn’t been so curious, things would have been so different.”
Tianming closed his eyes, looking somber as he tried to remember something. AA, her face pale, said, “You can blame me, but please don’t blame Ai Xiaowei. She had nothing to do with any of this. She wanted to tell you—”
“No,” Tianming interrupted her. “I won’t blame you. I was just thinking now that if someone else had been the candidate for the Swordholder and Wade tried to kill them, I would have saved them, too.
“There is a cause for every effect, AA, but not all causes are responsible for all effects. To trace all causes and all effects is to end up in a twisted web with no end. No single person can make decisions independently; every choice is the result of changes and inputs from everyone else. Viewed from a higher vantage point, Cheng Xin was chosen by all of humanity to be the Swordholder, and her choice was humanity’s choice, her values humanity’s values. Viewed from specifics, Cheng Xin made her choice because you woke her; you woke her because of me; I was sent into space by Cheng Xin; Cheng Xin went into hibernation because of me … and the one who started it all was Wade, who wanted to kill Cheng Xin. It’s a tangled mess.
“Stepping back even farther, Ye Wenjie, Luo Ji, and Zhang Beihai all could have made different choices in history and changed the course of humanity. Who knows what could have happened? But it’s pointless to debate such hypotheticals, because we have to live with the facts: Humanity is gone … No, not quite. Based on what you’ve told me about Guan Yifan, it seems that the Galactic humans have already pioneered a new path. But the Earth and the Solar System are no more, and that is an unchangeable fact.”
“True,” said AA. “No one can change that.”
“But that isn’t everything!” Tianming grew excited. “Perhaps the Earth and the Solar System are only insignificant beginnings. A thousand years from now, ten thousand, or even longer, those who look back on the destruction of Earth may see it only as another fall of Constantinople. Do you know about what happened there?”
AA nodded, but then shook her head again. “I read about it in middle school textbooks, but I don’t know any details.”
“I knew only a rough outline at first,” said Tianming. “But while on the Trisolaran Fleet, I had endless time to devote to reading and thinking about the fate of humanity, and I found history to be an unpredictable guide. More than twelve centuries ago, in the year 1453, Constantinople fell to the forces of the Ottoman Empire, thereby extinguishing the Eastern Roman Empire, which had lasted more than a thousand years. As the fortress of Europe fell, the entire continent trembled before the might of the Ottoman invaders.
“No one at the time could have thought that this tragedy would turn out to be the catalyst for the rebirth of Europe and the beginning of modern civilization. Many scholars from Constantinople fled to Western Europe, bringing with them the best that Hellenistic-Roman culture had to offer and facilitating the start of the Renaissance. Also, since the Ottoman Empire lay between Europe and Asia, European merchants had to find new ways to travel to India and China, thereby opening the Age of Exploration. Only a century later, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English explorers had already circumnavigated the globe, creating in the process a new civilization capable of wonders that would have been unimaginable to the Romans, let alone the denizens of the Middle Ages.
“With that history in mind, who can say that the destruction of the Solar System isn’t the beginning of a far more brilliant and magnificent Galactic Age?”
AA’s eyes also glowed with excitement as they enthusiastically debated the future of humanity. Maybe humans would hop from one planetary system to another, spreading colonies across the whole Milky Way and founding new republics, empires, and federations; or maybe they would build a superfleet containing billions and billions of ships and wander forever among the stars; maybe their civilization would advance to be nearly like gods, capable of reversing time and changing history …
In the end, Tianming returned to the present and laughed self-mockingly. “All our speculation is useless. We will never leave this black domain for the rest of our lives, and if there is going to be a Galactic Era, we will have turned to dust long before its advent.
“Still, I must thank you, AA.” Tianming’s gaze on her was full of love. “You liberated me from the shackles of the past. My love for Cheng Xin weighed me down, as did my guilt over humanity’s destruction. But as long as we did what we believed was right, there’s no reason to bind ourselves with the empty sentiments of duty. Not you, and not me. Let’s seize the present and cherish the joys of the future, all right?”
AA laughed, though tears spilled from the corners of her eyes. They embraced, closer than they’d ever been before.
After a long time, AA gently whispered to Tianming, “At the end of Xiaowei’s letter to me, she asked me to tell you something if I ever managed to see you.”
A message that had traversed seven hundred years in the stream of time was about to be retrieved. Tianming’s heart beat wildly.
“She said, ‘I wish you a happy life.’”
Tianming said nothing, but AA felt something wet fall against her bare shoulders.
“We will lead a happy life,” Tianming said.
Night didn’t last long on Planet Blue. Rosy fingers appeared over the eastern horizon, and the long-suffering lovers who had only just truly fallen in love were bathed in a gentle, warm glow. All around them, the vegetation of Planet Blue stretched and faced east to begin its morning cantata: quaint and amiable, like a celebration of romance composed just for the two of them.
The pair of lovers, absorbed as they were by each other, did not notice a moving dot of light disappearing into the brightening sky along with the fading stars. On that ship traveling at the reduced speed of light in this black domain, only a second had passed. Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan had still not recovered from the terror and shock of the sudden expansion of the death lines. Yifan cradled Cheng Xin’s head and their faces were pressed against each other. They were like that bottle the Tibetan boy tossed into the river, washed downstream by the heartless passage of time, not knowing where they would end up.
The two pairs of lovers, divided by the river of time, grew farther and farther apart. Perhaps they would never meet again.
Perhaps.
1 Translator’s Note: The line is from a poem about a fisherman out in the drizzle by the Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Zhihe (732–774 CE).
2 A year on Planet Blue consists of about four hundred days, and each day on Planet Blue is equal to about two-thirds of a day on Earth. All in all, a Planet Blue year is slightly shorter than an Earth year.