The Dark Forest

Year 8, Crisis Era

Tyler had been jumpy lately. Despite the setbacks, the mosquito swarm plan eventually won PDC approval. Development of the space fighters began, but progress was slow due to a lack of advanced technologies. Humanity continued to improve on the technology of its stone age axes and clubs, inventing chemically propelled rockets. Tyler’s supplemental project, the study of Europa, Ceres, and various comets, was odd enough that some people suspected that he had come up with it purely to add a sense of mystery to the overly direct main plan. However, since it could be incorporated into the mainstream defense program, he was allowed to start working on that as well.

So Tyler had to wait. He went home and, for the first time in his five years as a Wallfacer, led the life of a normal person.

The Wallfacers were subject to increasing scrutiny from the community. Whether they had asked for the role or not, they had been set up in the eyes of the masses as messiah figures. Accordingly, a Wallfacer cult sprang up. No matter how many explanations the UN and PDC issued, legends of their supernatural abilities circulated widely and grew increasingly fanciful. In science fiction movies, they were shown as superheroes, and, in the eyes of many, they were the sole hope for humanity. This gave the Wallfacers an enormous amount of popular and political capital that guaranteed things would go smoothly when they tapped huge amounts of resources.

Luo Ji was the exception. He remained in seclusion, never showing his face. No one knew where he was or what he was doing.

One day, Tyler had a visitor. Like the other Wallfacers, his home was under heavy guard, and all visitors had to pass stringent background checks. But when he first saw the visitor in the living room, he knew that the man would pass through easily, because it was obvious at a glance that he posed no threat to anyone. On this hot day he wore a wrinkled suit, a similarly wrinkled tie, and, more annoyingly, the sort of bowler hat no one wore anymore. He evidently wanted to present a more formal appearance for his visit, since he had probably never attended a formal occasion before. Pale and emaciated, he looked malnourished. His glasses sat heavily on his skinny, pale face, his neck hardly seemed able to support the weight of his head, and his suit looked practically empty, as if it was hanging on a rack. As a politician, Tyler saw at a glance that he belonged to one of those mean social classes whose poverty was more spiritual than material, like Gogol’s petty bureaucrats who, despite their lowly social station, still worry about preserving that status and spend their whole lives engaged in uncreative, exhausting random tasks that they carry out exactingly. In everything they do, they fear making mistakes; with everyone they meet, they fear causing displeasure; and they dare not take the slightest glance through the glass ceiling to a higher plane of society. Tyler detested those people. They were utterly dispensable, and when he thought about how they made up the majority of the world that he wanted to save, it left a bad taste in his mouth.

The man walked gingerly through the living room door, but did not dare venture further. He seemed afraid of marking the carpet with the dirty soles of his shoes. He took off his hat and looked at the master of the house through his thick glasses as he bowed repeatedly. Tyler made up his mind to send him off as soon as he spoke his first sentence, for even if what the man had to say was important to him, to Tyler it was meaningless.

In a frail voice, the pitiful man uttered his first sentence. It struck Tyler like a bolt of lightning and so dazed him that he practically sat down on the ground. Every word was like a thunderclap.

“Wallfacer Frederick Tyler, I am your Wallbreaker.”

“Who would have thought we’d one day be facing a battle map like this,” Chang Weisi exclaimed as he looked at a one-to-one-trillion-scale chart of the Solar System displayed on a monitor large enough to be a movie screen. It was almost entirely dark, except for the tiny spot of yellow in the center that was the sun. The chart radius reached the middle of the Kuiper Belt. When it was displayed in its entirety, it was like looking down on the Solar System from a distance of fifty AU above the ecliptic plane. The chart accurately marked the orbits of planets and satellites, as well as the conditions of known asteroids, and it could display a precise sectional layout of the Solar System for any point in the next millennium. Now that positional markings for celestial bodies had been turned off, the chart display was bright enough that you could make out Jupiter if you looked closely enough. It was just an indistinct, tiny bright spot, but from this distance the other seven major planets were invisible.

“Yes, we are facing major changes,” Zhang Beihai said. The military had just completed a meeting to assess its first space map, and now only the two of them remained in the spacious war room.

“Commander, I wonder if you noticed the eyes of our comrades when they saw this map,” he said.

“Of course I noticed. It’s understandable. They would have imagined a space map to be like what you find in popular science books. A couple of colored billiard balls rotating around a fireball. It’s only when they’re faced with one drawn to an accurate scale that they come to an appreciation of the vastness of the Solar System. And, whether they’re air force or navy, the furthest their air and water craft can go doesn’t even amount to one pixel on the big screen.”

“It seems that looking at the battlefield of the future did not inspire a stitch of confidence or passion for battle in our comrades.”

“And now we’re back to defeatism.”

“Commander, I don’t want to talk about the reality of defeatism today. That’s a subject for a formal meeting. What I’d like to discuss is… well…” He faltered, and smiled, a rare thing for someone who was usually so outspoken.

Chang Weisi turned away from the map and smiled back at him. “Seems you’ve got something highly unorthodox to say.”

“Yes. Or something unprecedented, at least. I’m making a recommendation.”

“Proceed. Get right down to the topic. Of course, you don’t need encouragement for that.”

“Yes, Commander. Over the past five years, little progress has been made in basic planetary defense and space travel research. The preliminary technology in those two programs—controlled nuclear fusion and the space elevator—are still at square one, with no hope in sight, and there are all kinds of problems with higher-thrust chemical rockets. If things continue in this vein, then I fear a space fleet, even at the low-tech level, will remain science fiction forever.”

“You chose high-tech, Comrade Beihai. You ought to be well aware of the rules of scientific research.”

“Of course I’m aware of them. Research is a process of leaping forward, and qualitative change is only produced by long-term quantitative accumulation. Breakthroughs in theory and technology are mostly achieved in concentrated bursts…. Still, Commander, how many people understand the problem like I do? It’s very likely that in ten or twenty or fifty years, or even a century, we still won’t have any major breakthroughs in any scientific or technical field, and at that point, how far will defeatist thinking have developed? What spiritual and mental state will have taken hold in the space force? Commander, am I really taking this too far?”

“Beihai, what I most admire about you is that you always keep the long term in mind as you work. It’s a rare thing among political cadres in this military. Please go on.”

“Well, I can only speak from the scope of my own work. Working under the above assumptions, what sort of difficulties and pressures will be faced by our future comrades engaged in political and ideological work in the space force?”

“A grimmer question is, how many ideologically qualified political cadres will be left in the forces?” added Chang Weisi. “To contain defeatism, we first need to have a firm faith in victory ourselves. But this is certain to be more difficult in your hypothetical future.”

“That’s where my worry lies, Commander. When that time comes, political work in the space force won’t be up to the task.”

“Your recommendation?”

“Send reinforcements!”

Chang Weisi looked at Zhang Beihai for a few seconds, then turned back to the big screen. He moved the cursor and enlarged the sun until their epaulets reflected the sunlight.

“Commander, what I mean is…”

He raised a hand. “I know what you mean.” Then he pulled back until the entire map was displayed, plunging the war room back into gloom, and then brought the sun forward again… and again and again as he thought, until at last he said, “Has it ever occurred to you that if political and ideological work in the space force is a complex and difficult task right now, it will considerably weaken today’s work to hibernate the most outstanding political officers and send them to the future?”

“I realize that, Commander. I’m just voicing a personal suggestion. Big-picture thinking is, of course, up to my superiors.”

Chang Weisi stood up and turned on the lights, illuminating the war room. “No, Comrade Beihai, this is a job for you now. Drop everything else. Starting tomorrow, you will focus on the Space Force Political Department, do some research into the other branches, and draft a preliminary report for the Central Military Commission as soon as possible.”

The sun was setting behind the mountains when Tyler arrived. Exiting the car, he faced a vision of paradise: the softest light of the day shining on the snow peaks, the lake, and the forest, and Luo Ji and his family enjoying the otherworldly evening in the grass on the lakeshore. What first caught his eye was the mother, so young-looking, like an older sister to the one-year-old child. From a distance it was hard to make her out, but as he drew closer, his attention shifted to the child. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he wouldn’t have believed that such an adorable little being actually existed. Like a stem cell of beauty, the embryonic state of all that is beautiful. Mother and child were drawing on a large sheet of white paper as Luo Ji stood off to one side watching with interest as he had in the Louvre, gazing from a distance at his beloved, now a mother. Moving closer still, Tyler saw in his eyes an infinite bliss, a happiness that seemed to permeate everything between mountain and lake in this Garden of Eden….

Having just arrived from the grim outside world made the scene before his eyes feel unreal. He had been married twice but was now single, and the joys of family had meant little to him in his pursuit of a man’s glory. Now, for the first time ever, he felt he had lived an empty life.

Luo Ji, captivated by his wife and child, only noticed Tyler when he had gotten quite close. Due to the psychological barriers erected by their common situation, there had been no personal contact between Wallfacers up to this point. But having spoken with him on the phone, Luo Ji showed no surprise at Tyler’s arrival, and met him with polite warmth.

“Madam, please excuse the interruption,” Tyler said with a slight bow to Zhuang Yan, who had come over with the child.

“Welcome, Mr. Tyler. We seldom have guests, so we are pleased that you could come.” Her English was strained, but her voice retained a childlike softness and she still had that cool spring of a smile, which stroked his weary soul like an angel’s hands. “This is our daughter, Xia Xia.”

He wanted to hug the child, but was afraid of losing control of his feelings, so he simply said, “Seeing you two angels is worth the trip.”

“We’ll let you talk. I’ll go and prepare dinner,” she said as she smiled at the two men.

“No, that’s not necessary. I just want to have a brief chat with Dr. Luo. I won’t take up too much time.”

Zhuang Yan warmly insisted that he stay for dinner, then left with the child.

Luo Ji motioned for Tyler to sit on a white chair in the grass. When he sat down, his whole body went limp, as if his tendons had been removed. He was a traveler who had at last reached his destination after a long voyage. “Doctor, it seems like you’ve been lost to the world for the past two years,” Tyler said.

“Yes.” Luo Ji remained standing. He swept a hand about him. “This is my everything.”

“You are truly a smart man, and at least from one perspective, a more responsible man than me.”

“What do you mean by that?” Luo Ji asked, with a puzzled smile.

“At least you haven’t wasted resources…. So she doesn’t watch TV either? I mean, your angel.”

“Her? I don’t know. She’s always with Xia Xia these days, so I don’t think she watches much.”

“Then you really don’t know what’s happened out there over the past few days?”

“What happened? You don’t look well. Are you tired? What can I get you to drink?”

“Anything,” Tyler said, watching the last golden rays of the setting sun on the lake dazedly. “Four days ago, my Wallbreaker appeared.”

Luo Ji stopped pouring the wine, and after a moment’s silence, said, “So soon?”

Tyler nodded heavily. “That’s the first thing I said to him, too.”

“So soon?” Tyler said to the Wallbreaker. He tried to keep his voice calm but it ended up sounding feeble.

“I’d liked to have come sooner, but I thought I’d collect more comprehensive evidence, so I’m late. I am sorry,” the Wallbreaker said. He stood behind Tyler like a servant and spoke slowly, with a servant’s humility. His final sentence even contained a meticulousness and thoughtfulness, the understanding that an executioner shows to his victim.

Then a suffocating silence took hold. At last Tyler screwed up the courage to look at the Wallbreaker, who then asked respectfully, “Sir, shall I go on?”

Tyler nodded but averted his gaze. He sat down on the sofa and did his best to calm down.

“Thank you, sir.” The Wallbreaker bowed again, his hat still in hand. “First, I’ll briefly describe the plan you’ve shown to the outside world: Using a fleet of nimble space fighters carrying hundred-megaton-class superbombs, your fighters will assist Earth’s fleet by executing a suicide strike on the Trisolaris Fleet. Perhaps I’ve oversimplified, but that’s basically it, right?”

“There’s no point in discussing this with you,” Tyler said. He had been considering whether to terminate the conversation. The moment the Wallbreaker revealed himself, Tyler’s intuition as a politician and strategist informed him that the other man was the victor, but at this point he would be lucky if his mind had not been laid entirely bare.

“If that’s the case, sir, then I don’t have to go on, and you can arrest me. But you surely must know that regardless of what happens, your true strategy, and all of the evidence used to prove my hypothesis, will make the news across the world tomorrow, or maybe even tonight. At the cost of the rest of my life I stand before you today, and I hope that you will value my sacrifice.”

“You may continue,” Tyler said with a wave of his hand.

“Thank you, sir. I am truly honored, and I will not use up too much time.” The Wallbreaker bowed again. A humble respect so rarely seen among modern people seemed to be in his blood, able to manifest at any time, like a noose gradually tightening around Tyler’s neck. “Then, sir, was my rendition of your strategy just now correct?”

“It was.”

“It was not,” the Wallbreaker said. “Sir, pardon my saying it, but it was not correct.”

“Why?”

“Given humanity’s technological capabilities, the most powerful weapons we are likely to possess in the future are super hydrogen bombs. In a space-battle environment, the bombs must be detonated in direct contact with their target to be capable of destroying enemy ships. Space fighters are nimble and can be deployed in large numbers, so sending the fighter fleet in for swarmlike suicide strikes is undoubtedly the best option. Your plan is eminently reasonable. All of your behavior, including trips to Japan, China, and even the mountains of Afghanistan in search of space kamikaze pilots with a spirit of self-sacrifice, and your plan to put the mosquito fleet under your direct control once that search failed, was also entirely reasonable.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Tyler asked, sitting up on the sofa.

“Nothing’s wrong with that. But that’s just the strategy you presented to the outside.” The Wallbreaker bent down, drew near to Tyler’s ear, and continued speaking in a soft voice. “Your true strategy had small alterations. For quite a long time, you had me stumped. It was agonizing for me, and I nearly gave up.”

Tyler realized that he had a death grip on a sofa handle, and tried to relax.

“But then you gave me the key to unlock the whole puzzle. It was such a good fit that for a moment I doubted my good fortune. You know what I’m referring to: Your study of several bodies in the solar system, Europa, Ceres, and the comets. What do they have in common? Water. They all possess water, and in large quantities! On their own, Europa and Ceres have more water than in all of the oceans on Earth….

“Rabies sufferers fear the water and can go into spasms at the mere mention of the word. I imagine you have similar feelings right now.”

The Wallbreaker drew close to Tyler and spoke directly into his ear. His breath was not the least bit warm, but felt like a ghostly wind flavored with the grave. “Water,” he whispered, as if talking in his sleep. “Water…”

Tyler remained silent, his face like a statue’s.

“Is there any need for me to continue?” the Wallbreaker asked, standing up.

“No,” Tyler said in a low voice.

“But I’ll continue anyway,” the Wallbreaker said, almost gleefully. “I’ll leave historians with a complete record, even if history won’t endure for much longer. And an explanation for the Lord as well, of course. Not everyone has the keen intellect of the two of us, able to grasp the whole from the merest part. Particularly the Lord, who may not even understand a complete explanation.” He raised up a hand, as if acknowledge the Trisolaran listeners, and laughed. “Forgive me.”

Tyler’s features slackened, and then his bones seemed to melt. He slumped into the sofa. He was finished, and his spirit no longer inhabited his body.

“Now then. Setting aside the water, let’s talk about the mosquito swarm. Its first attack target will not be the Trisolaran invaders, but Earth’s own space force. This hypothesis is a bit of a reach based on the barest of signs, but I maintain that it is correct. You went around the world seeking to establish a kamikaze force for humanity, but your efforts failed. You anticipated this, but from this failure you were able to obtain two things you desired. One was total despair in humanity—this, you have achieved fully. The second I’ll discuss in a moment.”

The blade fell.

“After traveling the world you became utterly disillusioned with modern humanity’s dedication. You also became convinced that Earth’s space force did not stand a chance of defeating Trisolaris via standard combat. You therefore hatched a strategy even more extreme. In my opinion, this is a very faint hope, and an immense risk. Nevertheless, the principles of the Wallfacer Project dictate that in this war, the safest bet is to take a risk.”

“Of course, this was only the beginning. Your betrayal of humanity would be a long process, but you had time on your side. In the following months and years, you were prepared to engineer events that would add to the wall you erected between yourself and the human race. Your despair would gradually grow and your sorrow intensify, and you would leave the human world further and further behind, growing closer and closer to the ETO and Trisolaris. In fact, you took your first steps on this road when you urged mercy for the ETO at the PDC hearing not long ago. That wasn’t just for show, though. You truly need them to endure. You need members of the ETO to pilot your space fighters in the Doomsday Battle. It is a matter of time and patience, but you would succeed, because the ETO also needs you. It needs your assistance, and the resources you possess. It wouldn’t be difficult to turn over the mosquito fleet to the ETO, so long as it was kept a secret from the outside world. And if it were discovered, you could claim that it was all part of the plan.”

Tyler did not seem to be listening to the Wallbreaker. He sat on his sofa with his eyes half-closed, looking fatigued, as if he had already given up and was beginning to relax.

“Very well. Let’s talk about the water now. In the Doomsday Battle, the ETO-controlled mosquito fleet would likely launch a sneak attack on Earth’s fleet and then flee to the Lord’s fleet. Because they had just demonstrated their disloyalty to earth, Trisolaris might be willing to let them join the fleet, but the Lord would not be so fast to accept the turncoat army. A sufficiently meaningful gift would be required to win them over. What would the Lord need that the Solar System possesses? Water. On their four-century voyage, most of the water in the Trisolaran Fleet would be used up. As they approached the Solar System, dehydrated Trisolarans on board would need to be rehydrated. Since the water used for this would become part of their bodies, clean water would certainly be preferred to the stale water that had been recycled innumerable times on the ship. The mosquito fleet would offer the Lord an iceberg formed out of huge quantities of water obtained from Europa, Ceres, and the comets. I’m not certain of the specifics—I expect you don’t know right now either—but let’s say tens of thousands of tons.

“This giant chunk of ice would be propelled by the mosquito group. The mosquito fleet would likely draw very close to the Lord’s fleet when presenting the gift, at which point the second consequence of the failure of your attempt to build a kamikaze force would be put to use. That failure prompted your very logical request for independent control of the entire mosquito fleet. When Earth’s fleet draws close to the Lord’s fleet, you would take over control of the fighters from the ETO pilots and switch them to drone mode, ordering the fighters to strike their chosen targets. The superbombs would be detonated at point-blank range, annihilating all of the Lord’s ships.

The Wallbreaker straightened up and, leaving Tyler’s side, approached the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the garden. The hellish wind he had blown into Tyler’s ear dissipated, but not before the chill had penetrated his body.

“An outstanding plan. That’s not a lie. But certain oversights are inexplicable. Why were you so eager to pursue the study of water-bearing heavenly bodies? The technology to extract and transport water in quantity does not exist right now, and engineering-side R&D could take years or even decades. Even if you felt you had to start right away, why not toss in a few targets that don’t contain water—the moons of Mars, for instance? If you had done so, although it wouldn’t have prevented me from eventually exposing your plan, it would have vastly increased the difficulty. How could a great strategist such as yourself overlook such simple tricks? On the other hand, I do recognize the pressure you are under.”

The Wallbreaker placed a gentle hand on Tyler’s shoulder, and Tyler felt a flash of tenderness, as of an executioner for his victim. He was even a little moved.

“Don’t beat yourself up. You did well enough, really. I hope history remembers you.” The Wallbreaker removed his hand, a flush of restored energy on his formerly wan and sickly face. He stretched out his arms. “Well, Mr. Tyler, I’m done. Call your people.”

Tyler, his eyes still shut, said without energy, “You may leave.”

When the Wallbreaker opened the door, Tyler croaked out a final question: “If what you say is true, so what?”

The Wallbreaker turned back toward him. “So nothing. Mr. Tyler, regardless of whether or not I’ve broken your plan, the Lord does not care.”

Luo Ji was rendered speechless for a long while after hearing Tyler’s account.

When an ordinary person spoke with one of them, they would always be thinking, He’s a Wallfacer, his words can’t be trusted, and those suggestions would present a barrier to communication. But when two Wallfacers spoke with each other, the suggestions that existed in both minds cross-multiplied those communication barriers. Such an exchange, in fact, rendered anything either side said meaningless, so that communication itself lost all significance. This was why there had been no private interaction between Wallfacers.

“How do you evaluate the Wallbreaker’s analysis?” Luo Ji asked to break the silence, even though he knew there was no point to the question.

“He guessed right,” Tyler said.

Luo Ji wanted to say something, but what? What could be said? They were both Wallfacers.

“That was my true strategy,” Tyler went on. He evidently had a strong desire to speak and didn’t care whether or not his listener believed him. “Of course, it’s still in the preliminary stages. The technology alone is quite difficult, although I expected a gradual resolution to all of the theoretic and technical issues over the course of four centuries. But judging from the enemy’s attitude toward the plan, it wouldn’t make any difference. They don’t care, and that’s the height of contempt.”

“And that was… ?” Luo Ji felt like a machine for meaningless dialogue.

“The day after the Wallbreaker’s visit, a complete analysis of my strategy was posted online. The material ran into the millions of words, most of it obtained through sophon monitoring, and it caused a sensation. The day before yesterday, the PDC called a hearing on the issue, at which it resolved the following: ‘Wallfacer Plans may not contain anything that poses a threat to human life.’ If my plan actually existed, then its execution would be a crime against humanity. It must be stopped, and its Wallfacer punished by law. Notice how they invoke crimes against humanity, a term that’s being thrown around more than ever these days? But the resolution concluded by saying, ‘According to the basic principles of the Wallfacer Project, the evidence available to the outside world may just be a part of the Wallfacer’s strategy of deception and cannot be used to prove that the Wallfacer has actually developed and is executing this plan.’ So I won’t be charged.”

“I’d thought as much,” Luo Ji said.

“But at the hearing, I declared that the Wallbreaker’s analysis was correct, and that my strategy was indeed the mosquito swarm. I asked to be tried in accordance with national and international law.”

“I can imagine their reaction.”

“The PDC’s rotating chair and all the permanent member representatives looked at me with that Wallfacer smile on their face, and the chair declared the meeting adjourned. Those bastards!”

“I know the feeling.”

“I had a total breakdown. I fled out of the hall and into the square outside, shouting, ‘I am Wallfacer Frederick Tyler! My Wallbreaker exposed my strategy! He was right! I’m going to attack the Earth fleet with the mosquito swarm! I’m anti-human! I’m a devil! Punish me and kill me!’”

“That was a meaningless act, Mr. Tyler.”

“What I hate the most is the expression people have when they look at me. A crowd of people surrounded me in the square, their eyes revealing the fantasies of children, the reverence of the middle-aged, and the concern of the elderly. All of their eyes said, ‘Look, he’s a Wallfacer. He’s at work, but he’s the only one in the world who knows what he’s doing. See what a great job he’s doing? He’s pretending so well. How will the enemy know what his real strategy is? That great, great, great strategy that only he knows and that will be the salvation of the world…’ Complete and utter crap! Those idiots!”

At last Luo Ji decided to remain silent, and merely smiled wordlessly at Tyler.

As Tyler stared at him, a thin smile wavered on his pale face and then developed into full-blown hysterical laughter. “Ha! You’re smiling the Wallfacer smile! A smile from one Wallfacer to another! You think I’m at work. You believe I’m acting the part, and you think I’ll save the world!” He cackled again. “How did we end up in such a hilarious situation?”

“This is a vicious cycle we’ll never be free of, Mr. Tyler,” Luo Ji said, and sighed softly.

Tyler’s laughter stopped abruptly. “Never be free? No, Dr. Luo, there’s a way out. There really is a way, and I’m here today to tell it to you.”

“You need a break. Rest here for a few days,” Luo Ji said.

Tyler nodded slowly. “Yeah, I need a break. We’re the only ones who understand each other’s pain, Doctor. That’s why I’ve come.” He looked up. The sun had set a while ago, and the Garden of Eden had grown indistinct in the twilight. “This is paradise. Can I go for a walk alone by the lake?”

“You may do whatever you like here. Take it easy, and I’ll call you to dinner in a while.”

Tyler walked down to the lake, leaving Luo Ji to sit down, sunken in heavy thoughts.

For five years, he had bathed in an ocean of happiness. The birth of his Xia Xia in particular had made him forget everything about the outside world. The love of his wife and child blended together and intoxicated his soul, and, in this gentle home isolated from the rest of the world, he had fallen deeper and deeper into an illusion: Perhaps the outside world really was something akin to a quantum state, and did not exist unless he observed it.

But it was a state that could no longer endure now that the abominable outside world had burst into his Garden of Eden to confuse and frighten him. His thoughts shifted to Tyler, whose last words still resounded in his ears. Was it really possible for Wallfacers to break free of the vicious cycle, to shatter the iron shackles of logic… ?

He jerked to his senses and ran toward the lake. He wanted to shout, but was afraid of scaring Zhuang Yan and Xia Xia, so he just ran as fast as he could through the quiet twilight, the swish of his feet against the grass on the hillside the only sound. But into this rhythm a soft crack inserted itself.

The sound of a gunshot from the lake.

Luo Ji returned home late that evening after the child was sound asleep. Zhuang Yan asked softly, “Did Mr. Tyler leave?”

“Yes. He’s gone,” he said wearily.

“He seemed worse off than you.”

“Yes. That’s because he didn’t take an easy path…. Yan, have you watched TV recently?”

“No. I…” She paused, and Luo Ji knew what she was thinking. With the outside world growing more serious by the day, and the gap widening between life here and life outside, the difference made her uneasy. “Is our life really part of the Wallfacer plan?” she asked, looking at him with that same innocent face.

“Of course. What is there to doubt?”

“But can we truly be happy when all humanity is unhappy?”

“My love, your responsibility when all of humanity is unhappy is to make yourself happy. With Xia Xia, your happiness gains a point, and the Wallfacer plan gains a point toward its success.”

Zhuang Yan stared silently at him. The language of facial expressions she had envisioned in front of the Mona Lisa five years ago seemed to have been partially realized between her and Luo Ji. More and more, he could read her mind through her eyes, and what he read now was, How can I believe that?

Luo Ji pondered this for a long time, and finally said, “Yan, everything has an ending. The sun and the universe will die one day, so why should humanity believe that it ought to be immortal? Listen, this world is paranoid. Fighting a hopeless war is a fool’s errand, so look at the Trisolar Crisis from a different perspective and leave your cares behind. Not just the ones involving the crisis, but everything else from before that. Use the time that’s left to enjoy life. Four hundred years! Or, if we refuse the Doomsday Battle, then nearly five hundred. That’s a fair amount of time. Humanity used the same period to go from the Renaissance to the information age, and in the same space could create a carefree, comfortable life. Five idyllic centuries without needing to worry about the distant future, where the sole responsibility is to enjoy life. How wonderful….”

He realized that he had spoken unwisely. Claiming that the happiness of her and the child were part of the plan added another layer of protection to her life by making her happiness into a responsibility. This was the only way to ensure that she maintained a balanced mind in the face of the cruel world. He could never resist her eternally innocent eyes, so he didn’t dare look at her when she questioned him. But now, because of the Tyler factor, he had involuntarily told the truth.

“When you say that, are you being a Wallfacer?” she asked.

“Yes, of course I am,” he said, to fix the situation.

But her eyes said, You really did seem to believe that!

At the start of the hearing, the rotating chair spoke to strongly urge that Luo Ji be required to attend the next hearing, arguing that refusal to participate was not part of the Wallfacer plan because the PDC’s supervisory authority over the Wallfacers trumped the Wallfacers’ own strategic plans. The proposal was unanimously adopted by all permanent member representatives, and with the emergence of the first Wallbreaker and the suicide of Wallfacer Tyler in mind, the other two Wallfacers attending the meeting heard the unspoken implications of the chairman’s words.

Hines spoke first. His neuroscience-based plan was still in its infancy, but he described the equipment he was envisioning as a basis for further research. He called it the Resolving Imager. Based on computed tomography and nuclear magnetic resonance, it operated by scanning in all cross sections of the brain at once, which required cross sectional accuracy on the scale of the internal structure of brain cells and neurons. This would bring the number of simultaneous CT scans to several million, to be synthesized by computer into a digital model of the brain. Other technical requirements were even greater: The scan needed to be conducted at a rate of twenty-four frames per second to produce a dynamic synthetic model that could capture all brain activity at a neuron-level resolution, making it possible to precisely observe thought activity in the brain, or even replay all neural activity throughout the thinking process.

Then Rey Diaz described the progress of his plan. After five years of research, the digital star model for super-high-yield nuclear weapons had been completed and was now being thoroughly debugged.

Next, the PDC scientific advisory panel presented a report on its feasibility study of the two Wallfacers’ plans.

The advisory panel felt that although there were in theory no obstacles to Hines’s Resolving Imager, the technical difficulties far exceeded current conditions, and modern CT scanning was about as far from RI technology as black-and-white film was from modern high-definition cameras. Data processing presented the biggest technical hurdle to the RI device, because scanning and modeling an object the size of the human brain with neuron-level precision required power that was unavailable to modern computers.

The obstacle to Rey Diaz’s stellar bomb was the same: present computing power was insufficient. After inspecting the calculations required by the completed portion of the model, the panel’s expert group felt that the most powerful of today’s computers would take twenty years to model a hundredth of a second of the fusion process. Since the model would need to be run repeatedly in the course of research, practical application was an impossibility.

The panel’s chief computer scientist said, “Right now, computer technology based on traditional integrated circuits and Von Neumann architecture is nearing the limit of its technological development. Moore’s law is going to collapse. Of course, we can still squeeze out the last few drops of lemonade from these traditional electronic and technological lemons. In our opinion, even given the present deceleration in supercomputer progress, the computing power required by the two plans is still achievable. It just requires time. Optimistically, twenty to thirty years. Those goals, if they are reached, will represent the peak of human computing technology, and any further progress will be difficult. With frontier physics under sophon lockdown, the next-gen and quantum computers that we once dreamed of are now very unlikely to be realized.”

“We’ve reached the wall that the sophons have erected across our scientific road,” the chair said.

“Then there’s nothing that we can do for twenty years,” Hines said.

“Twenty years is the most optimistic estimate. As a scientist, you ought to know what cutting-edge research is like.”

“Then the only thing to do is hibernate and wait the arrival of capable computers,” Rey Diaz said.

“I’ve decided to hibernate, too,” Hines said.

“If that’s the case, then I will ask the two of you to greet my successor in twenty years,” the chair said with a smile.

The mood of the hearing relaxed. Now that the two Wallfacers had decided to enter hibernation, the hearing’s participants sighed with relief. The emergence of the first Wallbreaker and his Wallfacer’s suicide had dealt a heavy blow to the entire project. Tyler’s suicide in particular had been a foolish act. If he had lived, people would still be in doubt about whether the mosquito swarm had really been his plan. His death was tantamount to a final confirmation of the existence of the terrible plan. He had vaulted out of the vicious cycle at the cost of his life, prompting increasing murmurs of criticism of the Wallfacer Project among the international community. Public opinion demanded further restrictions on Wallfacer power, but the very nature of the Wallfacer Project meant that too many restrictions would make it difficult for the Wallfacers to conduct their strategic deceptions, rendering the entire project meaningless. The Wallfacer Project possessed a leadership structure that human society had never before seen, and it required time to adjust and adapt to it. It was clear that the hibernation of the two Wallfacers would provide a buffer period for that to take place.

A few days later, in a top-secret underground structure, Rey Diaz and Hines entered hibernation.

Luo Ji found himself in an ominous dream. He dreamt he was walking the halls of the Louvre. It was a dream he had never had before, because the past five years of bliss had given him no cause to dream of previous joys. In this dream, he was alone with the loneliness that had been absent for five years. His every footstep reverberated through the palace halls, and something seemed to leave him with every reverberation, until at last he dared not take another step. In front of him was the Mona Lisa. She no longer smiled, but looked on him with compassion in her eyes. When his footsteps stopped, the sound of the outdoor fountains trickled in and gradually grew louder, at which point he awoke to find that the sound was coming from the real world. It was raining.

Luo Ji reached out to hold his beloved’s hand, and discovered that his dream had become a reality.

Zhuang Yan was gone.

He rolled out of bed and entered the nursery, where a lamp was softly glowing, but Xia Xia wasn’t there. On the little bed, tidily made up, was one of Zhuang Yan’s paintings, a favorite of both of theirs. It was practically blank, and from a distance it looked like a sheet of paper. Closer in, you could see fine reeds in the lower left, and in the upper right the traces of a vanishing goose. In the blank center were two infinitesimally tiny people. But now, a graceful line of text had been added to it:

My love, we’re waiting for you at doomsday.

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Could such a dream life last forever? It was bound to happen, so don’t worry. You’re mentally prepared for it, Luo Ji told himself, but a wave of dizziness came over him. As he picked up the painting and went toward the living room, his legs quavered and he felt as if he was floating.

The living room was empty, but the embers in the fireplace glowed a hazy red that made everything look like melting ice. The rain continued outside. It was to the same sound of rain that she had walked out of his dreams five years ago, and now she had returned to them, taking their child with her.

He picked up the phone to call Kent, but then he heard soft footsteps outside. A woman’s footsteps, but not Zhuang Yan’s. Even so, he tossed the phone down and went outside.

Luo Ji immediately recognized the slender figure standing on the porch in the rain, even though he could only see a silhouette.

“Hello, Dr. Luo,” Secretary General Say said.

“Hello… Where are my wife and child?”

“They’re waiting for you at doomsday,” she said, repeating the words in the painting.

“Why?”

“This is a PDC resolution, to let you work and fulfill your Wallfacer responsibilities. No harm will come to them, and children are better suited to hibernation than adults.”

“You’ve kidnapped them! That’s criminal!”

“We did not kidnap anyone.”

Luo Ji’s heart quaked at the implications of Say’s statement, and he pushed them out of his mind rather than face that reality. “I said that having them here was part of the plan!”

“But after a thorough investigation, the PDC decided that it was not part of the plan, and so took steps to prompt you to get to work.”

“Even if it’s not kidnapping, you took away my child without my consent, and that’s against the law.” When he realized who he was including in “you,” his heart quaked again and he leaned back feebly against the pillar behind him.

“True, but it is well within acceptability. Do not forget, Dr. Luo, that this and all of the resources you have tapped do not fall under existing legal frameworks, so the UN’s actions in the present time of crisis can be justified under the law.”

“Are you still working on behalf of the UN?”

“Yes.”

“You were reelected?”

“Yes.”

He wanted to change the subject to avoid facing the cold facts, but he failed. What will I do without them? What will I do without them? his heart asked over and over. Finally it slipped out of his mouth as he slid down the pillar to the ground. It felt like everything was collapsing around him, turning to magma from the top down, except that this time the magma was burning and pooled inside his heart.

“They’re still here, Dr. Luo. They’re waiting for you safe and sound in the future. You’ve always been a sober person, and you must become even more sober now. If not for all humanity, then for your family.” Say looked down at the ground, where Luo Ji sat beside the column on the brink of a breakdown.

Then a gust of wind blew rain onto the porch. Its refreshing chill and Say’s words managed to cool the fire raging in Luo Ji’s heart to an extent.

“This was your plan from the beginning, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but this step was taken only when there was no other choice.”

“So she was… When she came, was she really a woman who did traditional painting?”

“Yes.”

“From the Central Academy of Fine Arts?”

“Yes.”

“Then was she…”

“Everything you saw was the real her. Everything you knew about her was true. Everything that made her her: Her past life, her family, her personality, and her mind.”

“You mean she really was that kind of woman?”

“Yes. Do you really think she could have faked it for five years? That’s how she really was. Innocent and gentle, like an angel. She didn’t fake anything, including her love for you, which was very real.”

“Then how could she carry out such a cruel deception? To never let anything slip for five years?”

“How do you know she never let anything slip? Her soul was shrouded in melancholy from the first time you saw her on that rainy night five years ago. She didn’t hide it. That melancholy stayed with her for five years like an ever-present background music that never stopped the whole time, and that’s why you didn’t notice.”

Now he understood. When he first saw her, what had it been that had touched the softest place in his heart? That made him feel like the entire world was an injury to her? That made him willing to protect her with his life? It was that gentle sadness concealed within her clear, innocent eyes—a sadness that, like the light in the fireplace, shone gently through her beauty. It was indeed an imperceptible background music that had quietly permeated his subconscious and pulled him step by step into the abyss of love.

“I can’t find them, can I?” he asked.

“That’s right. Like I said, this is a PDC resolution.”

“Then I’ll go with them to doomsday.”

“You may.”

Luo Ji had imagined he would be turned down, but—just as when he had given up his Wallfacer status—there was practically no space between his statement and Say’s reply. He knew that things weren’t as easy as that. He asked, “Is there a problem?”

“No. This time it really is fine. You know, since the birth of the Wallfacer Project there has always been dissent within the international community. Out of their own interests, most countries have supported some of the Wallfacers while opposing others, so there was always going to be a side that wants to be rid of you. Now that the first Wallbreaker is out and Tyler has failed, forces opposed to the project have grown more powerful and have driven its supporters to a stalemate. If at this point you proposed going directly to doomsday, it would be a compromise plan acceptable to both sides. But, Dr. Luo, are you truly willing to do that while humanity is fighting for survival?”

“You politicians sound off about humanity at the drop of a hat, but I can’t see humanity. I can only see individuals. I’m just one individual, an ordinary person, and I can’t take on the responsibility of saving all of humanity. I just want to live my own life.”

“Very well. But Zhuang Yan and Xia Xia are two of those individuals. Don’t you want to fulfill your responsibility to them? Even if she hurt you, I can see you still love her. And there’s the child, too. From the moment Hubble II finally confirmed the Trisolaran invasion, one thing has been certain: Humanity will fight to the end. When your beloved and your child awaken in four centuries, doomsday and the flames of war will be upon them, but by that time you’ll have lost your Wallfacer status and will be powerless to protect them. They will only be able to share a hellish existence with you while you await the final annihilation of the world. Is that what you want? Is that the life you want to give your wife and child?”

Luo Ji said nothing.

“If you won’t think of anything else, then just imagine that Doomsday Battle four centuries from now, and the look in their eyes when they see you! What sort of a person will they see? A man who abandoned the woman he loves most, together with all of humanity? A man unwilling to save all of the world’s children? A man who wouldn’t even save his own child? Are you, as a man, capable of withstanding their gaze?”

Luo Ji bent his head in silence. The sound of the nighttime rain falling on grass and lake was like myriad entreaties from another time and space.

“Do you really believe that I can change all of that?” Luo Ji asked, raising his head.

“Why not try? Of all the Wallfacers, you may have the greatest hope of success. I’ve come today to tell you that.”

“Go on, then. Why?”

“Because out of all of humanity, you are the only person that Trisolaris wants dead.”

Leaning against the pillar, Luo Ji stared at Say, but saw nothing. He struggled to remember.

Say went on. “That car crash was meant for you. It just accidentally hit your girlfriend.”

“But that really was an accident. That car changed direction because two other cars collided.”

“They had been planning that for a long time.”

“But I was just an ordinary person back then, with no special protection. It would’ve been simple to kill me. Why go to such lengths?”

“To make the murder look like an accident, so as not to attract any attention. They almost succeeded. There were fifty-one traffic accidents that killed five people in the city that day. But a scout hidden within the ETO provided an intelligence report confirming that the ETO had orchestrated the attempt on your life. And what’s most frightening is this: The order came from Trisolaris itself, conveyed to Evans through the sophons. To this date, that is the only assassination they’ve ever ordered.”

“Me? Trisolaris wants to kill me? For what reason?” Again, Luo Ji felt displaced from himself.

“I don’t know. No one knows, now. Evans may have known, but he’s dead. He was evidently the one who added the requirement to the assassination order that it not attract attention. That only reinforces your importance.”

“Importance?” Luo Ji shook his head with a wry smile. “Look at me. Do I really look like someone with superpowers?”

“You don’t have superpowers, so don’t let your thoughts go in that direction. It’ll only lead you astray,” Say said, gesturing emphatically. “You had no special powers in your prior research, be they supernatural abilities or extraordinary technical skills within the known laws of nature. Or, at least, none that we have been able to discover. That Evans required that the assassination not attract attention demonstrates this point as well, because it proves that your ability can be acquired by others.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We were afraid of influencing whatever it is you have. Too many unknowns. We felt it best to let things ride.”

“I’d once had a notion to work on cosmic sociology, because…” Then a small voice deep within him said, You’re a Wallfacer! This was the first time he had heard that voice. He also heard another nonexistent sound: the buzzing of the sophons as they flew about him. He even thought he saw a few blurry, firefly-like points of light. So for the first time, he acted like a Wallfacer and swallowed his words, saying only, “Is that relevant?”

Say shook her head. “Probably not. As far as we are aware, that’s just the topic of a research application that never actually went forward, much less obtained any results. Besides, even if you had done the research, we wouldn’t expect you to come up with results any more valuable than any other researcher.”

“And why is that?”

“Dr. Luo, we’re speaking frankly here. As I understand it, you’re a failure of a scholar. You perform research not out of any thirst for exploration, nor out of a sense of duty and mission, but simply as a way to make a living.”

“Isn’t that the way things are these days?”

“There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but you exhibit all kinds of behaviors unbecoming a serious and dedicated scholar. Your research is utilitarian, your techniques opportunistic, you seek out sensationalism, and you have a history of embezzling funding. Character-wise, you’re cynical and irresponsible, and you harbor a mocking attitude toward a scholar’s vocation…. We’re actually well aware of the fact that you don’t care about the fate of the human race.”

“And that’s why you would stoop to such despicable means to coerce me. You’ve despised me all along, haven’t you?”

“Under normal circumstances, a man like you would never be tasked with such an important duty, but there is this one overriding detail: Trisolaris is afraid of you. Be your own Wallbreaker. Find out why.”

When Say finished, she stepped off the porch, got into the waiting car, and disappeared into the rainy mist.

Standing there, Luo Ji lost his sense of time. Gradually, the rain stopped and the wind picked up, blowing the night sky free of clouds, revealing the snow peaks, and letting the bright round moon bathe the world in silvery light.

Before going back inside, Luo Ji took one last look at the silver Garden of Eden, and his heart said to Zhuang Yan and Xia Xia, My love, wait for me at doomsday.

Standing in the giant shadow cast by the space plane High Frontier and looking up at its massive body, Zhang Beihai was involuntarily reminded of the carrier Tang, now long dismantled, and even wondered if the hull of High Frontier could contain a few steel plates from Tang. Over the course of more than thirty reentries, the burning heat had left scorch marks on the body of the space plane, and it really did look the way Tang had when it was under construction. The body had the same sense of age, but the two cylindrical booster rockets beneath the wings were new, making it resemble repairs to ancient architecture in Europe: The newness of the patches stood in stark contrast to the coloring of the original building, reminding visitors that those parts were modern additions. But if the boosters were removed, High Frontier would look like a big old transport plane.

The space plane was a very new thing, one of the few breakthroughs in aerospace technology over the last five years, and quite possibly the last generation of chemically propelled spacecraft. The concept had been proposed the previous century as a replacement for the space shuttle that could take off from a runway like an ordinary plane and fly conventionally to the top layer of the atmosphere, at which point the rockets would be turned on for spaceflight and it would enter orbit. High Frontier was the fourth such space plane in operation, and many more were under construction. They would, in the near future, take on the task of building the space elevator.

“I once imagined that we would never get the chance to go to space in our lifetime,” Zhang Beihai said to Chang Weisi, who had come to see him off. He and twenty other space force officers, all of them members of the three strategic institutes, would take High Frontier to the ISS.

“Are there naval officers who’ve never been to sea?” Chang Weisi said, smiling.

“Of course there are. Lots of them. Some people in the navy sought exactly that. But I’m not that sort of person.”

“Beihai, be aware of one thing: The active-duty astronauts are still air force personnel, so you are the first representatives of the space force to go into space.”

“It’s a shame there’s no specific mission.”

“Experience is the mission. A space strategist ought to have a consciousness of space. This wasn’t feasible before the space plane, since sending up one person cost tens of millions, but it’s much cheaper now. We’ll try to put more strategists into space soon, since we’re the space force, after all. Right now we’re more like a college of bullshit, and that just won’t do.”

Then the boarding call was issued, and the officers began climbing the airstair to the plane. They wore uniforms but not space suits, and looked no different than if they were taking standard air travel. It was a sign of progress, demonstrating that going to space was a little more normal than it had been. From the uniforms, Zhang Beihai noticed that there were people from other departments boarding the plane as well.

“Ah, Beihai, there’s another important thing,” Chang Weisi said as Beihai was about to pick up his carry-on. “The CMC has studied the report we submitted on sending political cadres to the future as reinforcements, and the brass feel that conditions are still premature.”

Zhang Beihai squinted, as if warding against a glare, though they were still in the space plane’s shadow. “Commander, my feeling is that we ought to keep the entire four-century period in mind when making plans, and to be clear about what’s urgent and what’s important…. But please be assured that I won’t say that in any formal setting. I know very well that our superiors are considering the bigger picture.”

“The higher-ups have affirmed your long-term thinking and commend you for it. The document stresses one point: The plan to send reinforcements to the future has not been denied. Research and planning will continue, but present conditions are still premature for execution. I feel—and this is of course my personal opinion—that we need additional qualified political cadres in our ranks to lessen the current work pressures before we can consider it.”

“Commander, surely you are aware of what ‘qualified’ means in the context of the Space Force Political Department, and what the basic requirements are. Qualified people are becoming increasingly rare.”

“But we’ve got to look forward. If there are breakthroughs in the two key technologies of phase one, the space elevator and controlled fusion—and there’s hope of this in our lifetimes—then things will be better…. Okay then. Off with you.”

Zhang Beihai saluted him and then stepped onto the stairs. His first feeling upon entering the cabin was that it wasn’t much different than a civilian airliner, except the seats were wider, having been designed to accommodate space suits. During the first flights of the space plane, all passengers had to wear space suits as a precaution, but there was no need for that now.

He had a window seat, and the seat immediately next to his was also occupied. A civilian, judging from his clothing. Zhang Beihai nodded to him in greeting before turning his attention to fastening the seat’s complicated safety belt.

There was no countdown. High Frontier started its air engines and began taxiing. Because of its weight, it spent longer on the ground during takeoff than an ordinary plane, but at last it lifted ponderously off the ground and embarked on its voyage into space.

“This is the thirty-eighth flight of the space plane High Frontier. The aviation phase has started and will last approximately thirty minutes. Please do not unfasten your safety belts,” said a voice over the intercom.

As he watched the ground recede through the cabin window, Zhang Beihai’s thoughts turned to the past. During training to become a carrier captain, he had completed naval aviation pilot training and had passed the level three fighter pilot exam. On his first solo trip he had watched Earth recede like this and suddenly discovered that he loved the sky even more deeply than the ocean. Now, his longing was for the space beyond the sky.

He was a man destined to fly high and fly far.

“Not much different from civil aviation, you think?”

He turned to see the speaker sitting in the next seat, and recognized him at last. “You must be Dr. Ding Yi. I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

“But it’s going to get rough in just a little bit,” the man said, ignoring Zhang Beihai’s salutation. He went on, “The first time, I didn’t take off my glasses after the aviation phase, and they crushed my nose with the weight of a brick. The second time I took them off, but then they flew off after gravity went away. It wasn’t easy for the guy to find them for me in the air filter in the plane’s tail.”

“I thought you went up on the space shuttle the first time. On TV, that didn’t look like a very nice trip,” Zhang Beihai said with a grin.

“Oh, I’m talking about taking the space plane. If we count the shuttle, then this is my fourth time. On the shuttle, they took away my glasses before takeoff.”

“Why are you going to the station this time? You’ve just been put in charge of a controlled fusion project. The third branch, isn’t it?”

Four branches had been set up for the controlled fusion project, each pursuing a different direction of research.

Restrained by the safety belt, Ding Yi lifted a hand to point at Zhang Beihai. “You study controlled fusion and you can’t go to space? You sound the same as those guys. The ultimate goal of our research is spaceship engines, and the real power held by the aerospace industry today remains to a large degree in the hands of the people who used to make chemical rocket engines. They’re saying now that we’re just supposed to devote ourselves to controlled fusion on the ground, and that we basically have no say in the general plan of the space fleet.”

“Dr. Ding, your views are identical to mine.” Zhang Beihai loosened his safety belt and leaned over. “For a space fleet, space travel is an entirely different concept from chemical rocketry. Even the space elevator is different from today’s aerospace techniques. But right now the aerospace industry of the past still holds too much power. Its people are ideologically ossified and legalistic, and if things continue, there will be all kinds of trouble.”

“There’s nothing to be done. At least they’ve managed to come up with this in the course of five years.” He pointed around him. “And this gives them the capital to squeeze out outsiders.”

The cabin intercom started up. “Please take care: We are approaching an altitude of twenty thousand meters. Due to the thin atmosphere we will now be flying through, there may be sharp drops in altitude that will produce momentary weightlessness. Please do not panic. Again, please keep your safety belts fastened.”

Ding Yi said, “But our trip to the station this time is unrelated to the controlled fusion project. It’s to recover those cosmic ray catchers. That’s some expensive stuff.”

“The space-based high-energy physics research project has been stopped?” asked Zhang Beihai, retightening his safety belt.

“It’s stopped. Knowing that there’s no need to waste effort in the future counts as a kind of success.”

“The sophons won.”

“That’s right. So humanity only has a few reserves of theory remaining: classical physics, quantum mechanics, and a still-embryonic string theory. How far their applications can be pushed is up to fate.”

High Frontier continued to climb, its aviation engines rumbling under the strain as if it were struggling up a tall mountain, but there were no sudden drops. The space plane was now approaching thirty thousand meters, the limit of aviation. Looking out, Zhang Beihai saw that the blue of the sky was fading as it got dark, even though the sun became even more dazzling.

“Our current flight altitude is thirty-one thousand meters. The aviation phase is complete and the spaceflight phase is about to begin. Please adjust your seats according to the illustration onscreen to minimize the discomfort of hypergravitation.”

Then Zhang Beihai felt the plane rise gently, as if it had discarded a burden.

“Aircraft engine assembly separated. Aerospace engine ignition countdown: ten, nine, eight…”

“For them, this is the real launch. Enjoy,” Ding Yi said, and closed his eyes.

When the countdown reached zero, there was a huge roar, as if the entire sky outside was shouting, and then hypergravity came like a giant, slowly tightening fist. With effort, Zhang Beihai twisted his head to look out the window. He was unable to see the flames spurting from the engine, but a wide swath of the rarified air of the sky outside was painted red, as if High Frontier was floating through a sunset.

Five minutes later, the boosters detached, and after another five minutes of acceleration, the main engine cut off. High Frontier had entered orbit.

The giant hand of hypergravity suddenly let go and Zhang Beihai’s body bounced back from the depths of his seat. Although the restraint of his safety belt kept him from floating away, to his senses he and the High Frontier were no longer parts of the same whole. The gravity that had once bonded them together was gone, and he and the plane were now flying in parallel paths through space. Out the window were the brightest stars he had ever seen in his life. Later, when the space plane adjusted its attitude, the sun streamed in through the windows and myriad points of light danced in its beams: dust particles that had weightlessly taken to the air. As the plane gradually rotated, he saw the Earth. From this low orbital position he couldn’t see the entire sphere, only the arc of the horizon, but he could clearly make out the shapes of the continents.

Then the starfield, that long-awaited sight, finally came into view, and he said in his heart, Dad, I’ve taken the first step.

For five years, General Fitzroy had felt like a Wallfacer in the actual sense of the word, in that the wall he faced was the big screen with the image of the stars between Earth and Trisolaris. At first glance it was entirely black, but closer inspection of the screen revealed points of starlight. He had grown so well acquainted with those stars that when he had attempted to sketch their position on a piece of paper at a dull meeting the previous day and compared it to the actual photo afterward, he was basically correct. The three stars of Trisolaris lying inconspicuously at the center looked like a single star in the standard view, but every time he magnified them he found that their positions had changed. This chaotic cosmic dance so fascinated him that he forgot what he was looking for in the first place. The brush that had been observed five years ago had gradually faded away, and no second brush had appeared. The Trisolaran Fleet left a visible wake only when it passed through interstellar dust clouds. Earth’s astronomers had verified through observations of the absorption of background starlight that during the fleet’s four-century-long voyage through space, it would pass through five of them. People dubbed these “snow patches” after the way that passersby left tracks on snowy ground.

If the Trisolaran Fleet had maintained a constant acceleration over the past five years, it would pass the second snow patch today.

Fitzroy arrived at the Hubble II Space Telescope Control Center early. Ringier laughed when he saw him. “General, why do you remind me of a child who wants another present so soon after Christmas?”

“Didn’t you say that they would cross the snow patch today?”

“That’s right, but the Trisolaran Fleet has only traveled 0.22 light-years, so it’s still four light-years away. Light reflected from its passage through the snow won’t reach Earth for another four years.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot about that,” Fitzroy said with an embarrassed shake of his head. “I really wanted to see them again. This time, we’ll be able to measure their speed and acceleration at the time of passage, and that’s very important.”

“I’m sorry. We’re outside the light cone.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s what physicists call the cone shape that light describes as it emanates along the time axis. It’s impossible for people outside the cone to comprehend events taking place inside the cone. Think about it: Information about who-knows-how-many major events in the universe is flying toward us right now at the speed of light. Some of it has been traveling for hundreds of millions of years, but we’re still outside the light cones of those events.”

“Fate lies within the light cone.”

Ringier considered this, then gave him an appreciative nod. “General, that’s an excellent analogy! But sophons outside the light cone can see events on the inside.”

“So the sophons have changed fate,” Fitzroy said with feeling, and turned back to an image-processing terminal. Five years before, the young engineer Harris had started to cry at the sight of the brush, and afterward had suffered from depression so severe that he became practically useless at his job and was let go. No one knew where he had ended up.

Fortunately, there weren’t many people like him.

Temperatures were cooling rapidly these days, and it had started to snow, causing the green to gradually disappear from the surrounding area and a thin layer of ice to freeze on the surface of the lake. Nature lost its bright coloring, like a color photograph turned black-and-white. Warm weather here had always been short-lived, but to Luo Ji, the Garden of Eden felt like it had lost its aura since the departure of his wife and child.

Winter was a season for thinking.

When Luo Ji began to think, he was surprised to find that his thoughts were already in progress. He remembered back to middle school and a lesson a teacher had taught him for language arts exams: First, take a look at the final essay question, then start the exam from the top, so that as you work on the exam, your subconscious will be thinking over the essay question, like a background process in a computer. Now he knew that from the moment he became a Wallfacer, his thinking had started up and had never stopped. The entire process was subconscious and he had never been aware of it.

He quickly retraced the steps his thoughts had already completed.

He was now certain that everything about his current situation stemmed from his chance encounter with Ye Wenjie nine years ago. Afterward, he had never spoken of the meeting with anyone for fear of causing unnecessary trouble for himself, but with Ye Wenjie gone, the meeting was a secret known only to him and Trisolaris. In those days, only two sophons had reached Earth, but he could be certain that on that evening, they had been there by Yang Dong’s grave, listening to their every word. And the fluctuation in their quantum formation that instantly crossed the space of four light-years meant that Trisolaris had also been listening.

But what had Ye Wenjie said?

Secretary General Say had been wrong about one thing. Luo Ji’s never-begun research into cosmic sociology was quite likely the immediate reason why Trisolaris wanted to kill him. Of course, Say didn’t know that the project had been Ye Wenjie’s suggestion, and although it had just seemed to Luo Ji like an excellent opportunity to make scholarship entertaining, he had been looking for just such an opportunity. Prior to the Trisolar Crisis, the study of alien civilization was indeed a sensational project that would have garnered easy media attention.

The aborted research project wasn’t important in and of itself. What mattered was the instruction that Ye Wenjie had given him, so that’s where Luo Ji’s mind was stuck.

Over and over again he recalled her words: Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of detectable stars. Lots and lots of them. The mathematical structure of cosmic sociology is far clearer than that of human sociology.

The factors of chaos and randomness in the complex makeups of every civilized society in the universe get filtered out by the immense distance, so those civilizations can act as reference points that are relatively easy to manipulate mathematically.

First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.

One more thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion and the technological explosion. I’m afraid there won’t be that opportunity…. Well, you might as well just forget I said anything. Either way, I’ve fulfilled my duty.

He had returned countless times to these words, analyzing each sentence from every angle and chewing over every word. The component words had been strung into a set of prayer beads, and like a pious monk he stroked them time and again; and unstrung them, scattered them, and restrung them in different orders until a layer of each had been worn away.

Try as he might, he couldn’t extract the clue from those words, the clue that made him the only person that Trisolaris wanted to destroy.

During his lengthy contemplation he strolled aimlessly. He walked along the desolate lakeside, walked through the wind as it grew ever colder, oftentimes completing a circuit of the lake unawares. Twice he even walked to the foot of the snow peak, where the patch of exposed rock that looked like a moonscape was blanketed with snow, becoming one with the snowcap ahead of him. Only then did his mood leave the track of his thoughts, Zhang Yan’s eyes appearing before his own in the boundless blank white of the natural painting. But he was now able to keep his mood in check and continue turning himself into a thinking machine.

A month went by without him knowing it, and then winter came in full force. But he still conducted his lengthy thought process outside, sharpening his mind on the cold.

By this time, most of the prayer beads had been worn faint, except for twenty-one of them. These ones seemed only to get newer the more he polished them, and now emitted a faint light:

Survival is the primary need of civilization.

Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.

He fixated on these two sentences, the axioms Ye Wenjie had proposed for cosmic civilization. Although he did not know their ultimate secret, his long meditation told him that the answer lay within them.

But it was too simple a clue. What could he and the human race gain from two self-evident rules?

Don’t dismiss simplicity. Simple means solid. The entire mansion of mathematics was erected on a foundation of this kind of irreducibly simple, yet logically rock-solid, axiom.

With this in mind, he looked around him. All that surrounded him was huddled up against the icy cold of winter, but most of the world still teemed with life. It was a living world brimming with a complex profusion of oceans, land, and sky as vast as the foggy sea, but all of it ran according to a rule even simpler than the axioms of cosmic civilization: survival of the fittest.

Luo Ji now saw his problem: Where Darwin had taken the boundless living world and made a rule to sum it up, Luo Ji had to use the rules he knew to uncover a picture of cosmic civilization. It was the opposite road to Darwin’s, but a more difficult one.

So he began sleeping in the daytime and thinking at night. Whenever the perils of his mental roadway terrified him, he found comfort in the stars overhead. Like Ye Wenjie had said, the distance hid the complex structure of each star, making them just a collection of points in space with a clear mathematical configuration. It was a thinker’s paradise, his paradise. To Luo Ji, at least, it felt like the world in front of him was far clearer and more concise than Darwin’s.

But this simple world held a perplexing riddle: The entire galaxy was a vast empty desert, but a highly intelligent civilization had appeared on the star nearest to us. In this mystery, his thoughts found an entry point.

Gradually, the two concepts Ye Wenjie had left unexplained came into focus: chains of suspicion and the technology explosion.

The weather that day was colder than usual, and from Luo Ji’s vantage point on the lakeshore, the cold seemed to make the stars into an even purer silver lattice against the black sky, solemnly displaying for him their clear mathematical configuration. All of a sudden, he found himself in a state that was entirely new. In his perception, the entire universe froze, all motion stopped, and everything from stars down to atoms entered a state of rest, with the stars just countless cold, dimensionless points reflecting the cold light of an outside world…. Everything was at rest, waiting for his final awakening.

The distant bark of a dog brought him back to reality. Probably a service canine belonging to the security forces.

Luo Ji was beside himself with excitement. Although he hadn’t actually glimpsed that final mystery, he had clearly felt its presence just now.

He collected his thoughts and tried to reenter that state, but was unsuccessful. Though the stars remained the same, the world around him interfered with his thinking. All was shrouded in darkness, but he could make out the distant snowcap, the lakeside forest and grassland, and the house behind him, and through the house’s half-open door he could see the dark glow of the fire…. Next to the simple clarity of the stars, everything in the vicinity represented a complexity and chaos that mathematics would be forever unable to grasp, so he attempted to remove them from his perception.

He walked out onto the frozen lake—cautiously, at first, but when he found that the icy surface seemed solid, he walked and slid ahead more quickly, until he reached a point where he could no longer make out the lakeshore through the night around him. Now he was surrounded on all sides by smooth ice. This distanced him somewhat from earthly complexity and chaos, and by imagining that the icy plane extended infinitely in every direction, he obtained a simple, flat world; a cold, planar mental platform. Cares vanished, and soon his perception reentered that state of rest, where the stars were waiting for him….

Then, with a crunch, the ice beneath Luo Ji’s feet broke and his body plunged straight into the water.

At the precise instant the icy water covered Luo Ji’s head, he saw the stillness of the stars shatter. The starfield curled up into a vortex and scattered into turbulent, chaotic waves of silver. The biting cold, like crystal lightning, shot into the fog of his consciousness, illuminating everything. He continued to sink. The turbulent stars overhead shrank into a fuzzy halo at the break in the ice above his head, leaving nothing but cold and inky blackness surrounding him, as if he wasn’t sinking into ice water, but had jumped into the blackness of space.

In the dead, lonely, cold blackness, he saw the truth of the universe.

He surfaced quickly. His head surged out of the water and he spat out a mouthful. He tried crawling onto the ice at the edge of the hole but could only bring his body up halfway before the ice collapsed again. He crawled and collapsed, forging a path through the ice, but progress was slow and his stamina began to give out from the cold. He didn’t know whether the security team would notice anything unusual on the lake before he drowned or froze to death. Stripping off his soaked down jacket to lessen the burden on his movement, he had the idea that if he spread out the jacket on the ice, it might distribute the pressure and allow him to crawl onto it. He did so, and then, with just enough energy left for one last attempt, he used every last ounce of strength to crawl onto the down jacket at the edge of the ice. This time the ice didn’t collapse, and at last his entire body was lying on top of it. He crept carefully ahead, daring to stand up only after putting a fair distance between him and the hole. Then he saw flashlights waving on the shore and heard shouts.

He stood on the ice, his teeth chattering in the cold, a cold that seemed to come not from the lake water or icy wind, but from a direct transmission from outer space. He kept his head down, knowing that from this moment on, the stars were not like they once were. He didn’t dare look up. As Rey Diaz feared the sun, Luo Ji had acquired a severe phobia of the stars. He bowed his head, and through chattering teeth, said to himself:

“Wallfacer Luo Ji, I am your Wallbreaker.”

“Your hair’s turned white over the years,” Luo Ji said to Kent.

“For many years to come, at least, it’s not going to get any whiter,” Kent said, laughing. In Luo Ji’s presence, he had always worn a courteous, studied face. This was the first time Luo Ji had seen him with such a sincere smile. In his eyes, he saw the words that remained unspoken: You’ve finally begun to work.

“I need someplace safer,” he said.

“Not a problem, Dr. Luo. Any particular requests?”

“Nothing apart from safety. It must be absolutely secure.”

“Doctor, an absolutely safe place does not exist, but we can come very close. I’ll have to warn you, though, these places are always underground. And as for comfort…”

“Disregard comfort. However, it’d be best if it’s in China.”

“Not a problem. I’ll take care of it immediately.”

When Kent was about to leave, Luo Ji stopped him. Pointing out the window at the Garden of Eden, which was now completely blanketed in snow, he said, “Can you tell me the name of this place? I’m going to miss it.”

Luo Ji traveled more than ten hours under tight security before reaching his destination. When he exited the car, he knew immediately where he was: It was here, in the broad, squat hall that looked like an underground parking garage, that he had embarked on his fantastic new life five years before. Now, after five years of dreams alternating with nightmares, he had returned to the starting point.

Greeting him was a man named Zhang Xiang, the same young man who—along with Shi Qiang—had sent him off five years ago, and who now was in charge of security. He had aged considerably in five years and now looked like a middle-aged man.

The elevator was still operated by an armed soldier—not the one from back then, of course, but Luo Ji still felt a certain warmth in his heart. The old-style elevator had been swapped for one that was completely automated and did not require an operator, so the soldier merely pressed the “-10” button and the elevator started its descent.

The underground structure had clearly undergone a recent renovation: The ventilation ducts in the hallways had been hidden, the walls coated with moisture-proof tile, and all traces of the civil air defense slogans had disappeared.

Luo Ji’s living quarters took up the whole of the tenth basement floor. While it was no match in comfort for the house he had just left, it was equipped with comprehensive communications and computer equipment, along with a conference room set up with a remote video conferencing system, giving the place the feel of a command center.

The administrator made a particular point of showing Luo Ji a set of light switches in the room, each of which bore a small picture of the sun. The administrator called them “sun lamps” and said they needed to be turned on for no fewer than five hours a day. Originally intended as labor-safety products for mine workers, they could simulate sunlight, including UV rays, as supplementary daylight for people spending long periods underground.

The next day, as Luo Ji had requested, the astronomer Albert Ringier visited the tenth basement.

When he saw him, Luo Ji said, “You were the first to observe the flight path of the Trisolaran Fleet?”

Ringier looked a little unhappy to hear this. “I’ve repeatedly issued statements to reporters, but they insist on forcing this honor on my head. It should be credited to General Fitzroy. He was the one who demanded that Hubble II observe Trisolaris during testing. Otherwise we might have missed the chance, since the wake in the interstellar dust would have faded.”

“What I’d like to talk to you about isn’t connected to that. I did a bit of astronomy once, but not in much depth, and I’m no longer familiar with the subject. My first question is this: If, in the universe, there exists another observer apart from Trisolaris, has Earth’s position been revealed to them?”

“No.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes.”

“But Earth has exchanged communication with Trisolaris.”

“That low-frequency communication would reveal only the general direction of Earth and Trisolaris in the Milky Way Galaxy, and the distance between the two worlds. That is, if there’s a third-party recipient, the communication would make it possible for them to know of the existence of two civilized worlds 4.22 light-years apart in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, but they would still be ignorant of the precise position of those two worlds. In fact, determining each other’s position through this kind of exchange is only feasible for stars in close proximity, like the sun and the stars of Trisolaris. For a slightly more distant third-party observer, however, even if we communicate directly with them, we wouldn’t be able to determine each other’s position.”

“Why is that?”

“Marking the position of a star for another observer in the universe is hardly as easy as people imagine. Here’s an analogy: You’re taking a plane through the Sahara Desert and a grain of sand below you shouts ‘Here I am!’ You hear the shout, but can you fix a location for that grain of sand from the plane? There are nearly two hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. It’s practically a desert of stars.”

Luo Ji nodded in apparent relief. “I understand. So that’s it, then.”

“What is?” Ringier asked in confusion.

Luo Ji didn’t answer, but asked instead, “Using our present level of technology, is there a way to indicate the position of a star in the universe?”

“Yes, by using directed very high frequency electromagnetic waves, equal to or higher in frequency than visible light, and then harnessing stellar power to transmit information. In simple terms, you’d make the star flash, like a cosmic lighthouse.”

“This far exceeds our present technical capabilities.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I overlooked your precondition. At our present technical capabilities, it would be fairly difficult to show a star’s position to the far reaches of the universe. There’s still a way, but interpreting the positional information requires a level of technology far beyond that of humanity, and even, I believe, beyond that of Trisolaris.”

“Tell me about that approach.”

“The key information is the relative position of stars. If you specify a region of space in the Milky Way that contains a sufficient number of stars—perhaps a few dozen would be sufficient—their relative arrangement in three-dimensional space would be totally unique, like a fingerprint.”

“I’m starting to understand. We send out a message containing the position of the star we wish to point out, relative to the surrounding stars, and the recipient compares the data to its star map to determine the star’s location.”

“Right. But things aren’t that simple. The recipient must possess a three-dimensional model of the entire galaxy that precisely indicates the relative position of every one of a hundred billion stars. Then, after receiving our message, they would have to search through that enormous database to find an area of space that matches the pattern of positions we sent out.”

“No, it’s not simple at all. It’s like recording the relative position of every grain of sand in the desert.”

“Even harder than that. The Milky Way, unlike the desert, is in motion, and the relative positions of its stars are constantly changing. The later the position information is received, the greater the error caused by these changes. This means the database has to be able to predict the changes in position of each of those hundred billion stars. In theory, it’s not a problem, but to actually do it… God…”

“Would it be hard for us to send that positional information?”

“No, because we would only need to have a position pattern for a limited number of stars. And now that I’ve had time to think about it, given the average stellar density of the outer arm of the galaxy, a position pattern with no more than thirty stars should be sufficient. That’s a small amount of information.”

“Good. Now I’ll ask a third question: Outside the Solar System, there are other stars with planets. You’ve discovered several hundred, right?”

“More than a thousand to date.”

“And the closest to the sun?”

“244J2E1, sixteen light-years from the sun.”

“As I remember it, the serial numbers are set like this: the prefix digits represent the order of discovery; the letters J, E, and X stand for Jupiter-type planets, Earth-type planets, and other planets, respectively; and the digits following the letter indicate the number of that type of planet in the system.”

“That’s right. 244J2E1 is a star with three planets, two of them Jupiter-type and one Earth-type.”

Luo Ji thought for a moment, then shook his head. “That’s too close. How about a little farther, like… around fifty light-years?”

“187J3X1, 49.5 light-years from the sun.”

“That one’s fine. Can you draw up a position pattern for that star?”

“Of course I can.”

“How long would it take? Would you need help?”

“I can do it here if there’s a computer with Internet. For a pattern of, say, thirty stars, I can give it to you tonight.”

“What time is it now? It’s not nighttime already?”

“I’d say it’s probably morning, Dr. Luo.”

Ringier went to the computer room next door, and Luo Ji called in Kent and Zhang Xiang. He first explained to Kent that he wanted the PDC to hold the next Wallfacer hearing as soon as possible.

Kent said, “There are lots of PDC meetings these days. Once you’ve submitted the application, you’ll probably only have to wait a few days.”

“Then I’ll have to wait. But I’d really like it as soon as possible. Also, I have a request: to attend the hearing here via video rather than go to the UN.”

Kent looked reluctant. “Dr. Luo, don’t you think that’s a little inappropriate? For such a high-level international meeting… It’s a question of respect for the participants.”

“It’s part of the plan. All those bizarre requests I made in the past were fulfilled, but this one’s over the line?”

“You know…” Kent faltered.

“I know that a Wallfacer’s status isn’t like it once was, but I insist on this.” When he continued, it was in a softer voice, even though he knew that the sophons hanging in the vicinity could still hear. “There are two possibilities now: One, if everything is like it used to be, I wouldn’t mind going to the UN. But there’s another possibility: I may be in a very dangerous situation, and I can’t take that risk.”

Then he said to Zhang Xiang, “That’s why I’ve brought you here. We may become a target for a concentrated enemy attack, so security must be strengthened.”

“Don’t worry, Dr. Luo. We’re located two hundred meters below ground. The area above us is under lockdown, an antimissile system has been deployed, and a state-of-the-art subterranean warning system has been installed to detect the digging of a tunnel from any direction. I guarantee to you that our security is foolproof.”

When the two men left, Luo Ji took a walk down the hallway, his thoughts turning involuntarily to the Garden of Eden (he knew its name now, but still called it that in his heart) and its lake and snow peak. He knew that it was quite likely he would spend the rest of his life underground.

He looked around at the sunlamps in the hallway ceiling. The light they emitted was nothing like the sun.

Two meteors moved slowly across the starfield. All was dark on the ground, and the distant horizon blended into one with the night sky. A burst of whispers sounded through the dark, although the speakers remained unseen, as if the voices themselves were invisible creatures floating in the darkness.

With a clink, a small flame appeared in the darkness, its dim light revealing three faces: Qin Shi Huang, Aristotle, and Von Neumann. The flame came from a lighter in Aristotle’s hand. When a few torches were extended, he lit one, which then passed fire among the others to form a shaky light in the wilderness and illuminate a group of people drawn from every era. Their whispers continued.

Qin Shi Huang leapt up on a stone and brandished his sword, and the crowd fell silent.

“The Lord has issued a new command: Destroy Wallfacer Luo Ji,” he said.

“We too have received this command. This is the second assassination order that the Lord has issued for Luo Ji,” Mozi said.

“But it will be difficult to kill him now,” someone said.

“Difficult? It’s impossible!”

“If Evans hadn’t added that condition to the first assassination order, he would have been dead five years ago.”

“Perhaps Evans was right to do so. After all, we don’t know his reasons. Luo Ji was lucky to escape a second time in the UN Plaza.”

Qin Shi Huang stopped the debate with a wave of his sword. “Shall we talk instead about what to do?”

“There’s nothing we can do. Who can even get anywhere near a bunker two hundred meters deep, much less get inside? It’s guarded too tightly.”

“Shall we consider nuclear weapons?”

“The place is an antinuke bunker from the Cold War, damn it.”

“The only viable option is sending someone to infiltrate security.”

“Can that be done? We’ve had years. Has there ever been a successful infiltration?”

“Infiltrate his kitchen!” This prompted some laughter.

“Cut the crap. The Lord ought to tell us the truth, and maybe we can come up with a better option.”

Qin Shi Huang answered the last speaker: “I also made that request, but the Lord said the truth was the most important secret in the universe and could not be revealed. The Lord spoke of it with Evans under the impression that humanity already knew but later learned otherwise.”

“Then ask the Lord to transfer technology!”

Many other voices echoed this. Qin Shi Huang said, “This was another request I made. To my surprise, the Lord uncharacteristically did not reject it entirely.”

A commotion took hold of the crowd, but Qin Shi Huang’s next words quieted the excitement: “But once the Lord learned the location of the target, the request was swiftly rejected. It said that as far as the target’s location was concerned, any technology It could transfer to us would be ineffective.”

“Is he really that important?” Von Neumann asked, unable to conceal a note of jealousy in his voice. As the first successful Wallbreaker, he had risen rapidly in the organization.

“The Lord is afraid of him.”

Einstein said, “I have thought this over for a long time, and I believe that the Lord’s fear of Luo Ji has only one possible reason: He is the mouthpiece of certain power.”

Qin Shi Huang shut down further discussion of the subject: “Don’t get into that. Instead, let’s think of how to fulfill the Lord’s command.”

“It can’t be done.”

“It really can’t be done. It’s a mission that can’t be completed.”

Qin Shi Huang clanged his sword on the rock beneath his feet. “This mission is crucial. The Lord may really be under threat. Besides, if we complete it, the organization will be greatly elevated in the Lord’s eyes! Gathered here are the elite of every sphere throughout the world, so how can we fail to think of something? Go back and think it over, and send your plans here to me through other channels. We’ve got to get on this!”

The torches burned out in succession and darkness swallowed everything. But the whispering went on.

The PDC Wallfacer Project Hearing did not convene for two weeks. After Tyler’s failure and the hibernation of the other two Wallfacers, the PDC’s main priority and attention had turned to mainstream defense.

Luo Ji and Kent awaited the start of the meeting in the videoconference room. The conference video connection had been made, and the big screen displayed the PDC auditorium, where the circular table familiar from the Security Council days was still completely empty. Luo Ji had arrived early as something of an apology for not attending in person.

While they waited, he chatted with Kent and asked him how he was managing. Kent said that he had lived in China for three years when he was younger, so he was quite accustomed to it and was doing well. At any rate, he didn’t have to spend all day underground like Luo Ji, and his rusty Chinese had recently regained its fluency.

“You sound like you have a cold,” Luo Ji said.

“I’ve just caught the bed flu,” he replied.

“Bird flu?” Luo Ji said in alarm.

“No. Bed flu. That’s what the media’s calling it. It started going around in a nearby city a week ago. It’s infectious, but symptoms are light. There’s no fever, just a runny nose, and some patients get a sore throat. There’s no need for medication, and it goes away on its own in three days or so after a little bed rest.”

“The flu is usually more serious than that.”

“Not this time. A lot of soldiers and staff here have already been infected. Haven’t you noticed that they replaced the caretaker? She caught the bed flu too, but was afraid of giving it to you. But as your liaison, I can’t be replaced for the time being.”

Onscreen the national delegates had begun to enter the auditorium. They sat down and started talking in low voices, as if they hadn’t noticed Luo Ji’s presence. The incumbent rotating chair of the PDC opened the meeting, saying, “Wallfacer Luo Ji, the Wallfacer Act was amended at the special session of the UN General Assembly that just adjourned. You’ve seen it?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“Then you must have noticed that the Act strengthens the examinations and restrictions on Wallfacer resource allocation. I hope that the plan you will submit to the hearing today will comply with the Act’s requirements.”

“Mr. Chair,” Luo Ji said, “the other three Wallfacers have allocated an enormous amount of resources to the execution of their own strategic plans. To limit my plan’s resources in this way is unfair.”

“Resource allocation privileges depend on the plan itself, and you must be aware that the other three Wallfacer plans are not in conflict with mainstream defense. In other words, the research and engineering they are conducting would have been carried out even without the Wallfacer Project. I hope that your strategic plan is also of this nature.”

“I’m sorry to say that my plan is not of this nature. It has absolutely nothing to do with mainstream defense.”

“Then I’m sorry, too. Under the new Act, the resources you can allocate to this plan are very limited.”

“Even under the old plan, I couldn’t allocate all that much. However, this isn’t a problem, Mr. Chair. My strategic plan consumes practically no resources at all.”

“Just like your previous plans?”

The chair’s remark prompted snickers from several participants.

“Even less than in the past. Like I said, it consumes practically no resources at all,” he said simply.

“Then let’s have a look,” the chair said, nodding.

“The specifics of the plan will be introduced by Dr. Albert Ringier, although I presume you all received the corresponding file. To sum up, using the radio wave magnification capabilities of the sun, a message will be sent into the cosmos containing three simple images, along with additional information to demonstrate that these images have been sent by an intelligence as opposed to occurring naturally. The images are included in the file.”

The sound of rustling paper filled the auditorium as the attendees located the three sheets. The images were also displayed on the screen. They were quite simple. Each consisted of black dots, seemingly scattered at random, but they all noticed that each image contained one conspicuously larger dot that was marked with an arrow.

“What is it?” asked the US representative, who, like the rest of the attendees, was inspecting the images carefully.

“Wallfacer Luo Ji, according to the basic principles of the Wallfacer Project, you do not need to answer that question,” the chair said.

“It’s a spell,” he said.

The rustling and murmuring in the auditorium stopped abruptly. Everyone looked up in the same direction, so that Luo Ji now knew the location of the screen displaying his feed.

“What?” asked the chair, with narrowed eyes.

“He said it’s a spell,” someone seated at the circular table said loudly.

“A spell against whom?”

Luo Ji answered, “Against the planets of star 187J3X1. Of course, it could also work directly against the star itself.”

“What effect will it have?”

“That’s unknown right now. But one thing is certain: The effect of the spell will be catastrophic.”

“Er, is there a chance these planets have life?”

“I consulted repeatedly with the astronomical community on that point. From present observational data, the answer is no,” Luo Ji said, narrowing his eyes like the chair had. He prayed silently, May they be right.

“After the spell is sent out, how long will it take to work?”

“The star is around fifty light-years from the sun, so the spell will be complete in fifty years at the earliest. But we won’t be able to observe its effects for one hundred years. This is just the earliest estimate, however. The actual time it takes might stretch out much farther.”

After a moment of silence in the auditorium, the US representative was the first to move, tossing the three sheets and their printed black dots onto the table. “Excellent. We finally have a god.”

“A god hiding in a cellar,” added the UK representative, to peals of laughter.

“More like a sorcerer,” sniffed the representative of Japan, which had never been admitted to the Security Council, but had been accepted immediately once the PDC was established.

“Dr. Luo, you have succeeded in making your plan weird and baffling, at least,” said Garanin, the Russian representative who had held the rotating chair on several occasions during Luo Ji’s five years as a Wallfacer.

The chair banged the gavel, silencing the commotion in the auditorium. “Wallfacer Luo Ji, I have a question for you. Given that this is a spell, why don’t you direct it at the enemy’s world?”

Luo Ji said, “This is a proof of concept. Its actual implementation will wait for the Doomsday Battle.”

“Can’t Trisolaris be used as the test target?”

Luo Ji shook his head with finality. “Absolutely not. It’s too close. It’s close enough that the effects of the spell might reach us. That’s why I rejected any planetary star system within fifty light-years.”

“One final question: Over the next hundred or more years, what do you plan on doing?”

“You’ll be free of me. Hibernation. Wake me when the effects of the spell on 187J3X1 are detected.”

As he was preparing for hibernation, Luo Ji came down with the bed flu. His initial symptoms were no different from everyone else, just a runny nose and a slight throat inflammation, and neither he nor anyone else paid it any attention. But two days later his condition worsened and he began to run a fever. The doctor found this abnormal and took a blood sample back to the city for analysis.

Luo Ji spent the night in a fevered torpor, haunted endlessly by restless dreams in which the stars in the night sky swirled and danced like grains of sand on the skin of a drum. He was even aware of the gravitational interaction between these stars: It wasn’t three-body motion, but the 200-billion-body motion of all of the stars in the galaxy! Then the swirling stars clustered into an enormous vortex, and in that mad spiral the vortex transformed again into a giant serpent formed from the congealed silver of every star, which drilled into his brain with a roar….

At around four in the morning, Zhang Xiang was awakened by his phone. It was a call from the Planetary Defense Council Security Department leadership who, in severe tones, demanded that he report immediately on Luo Ji’s condition, and ordered the base to be put under a state of emergency. A team of experts was on its way over.

As soon as he hung up the phone, it rang again, this time with a call from the doctor in the tenth basement, who reported that the patient’s condition had sharply deteriorated and he was now in a state of shock. Zhang Xiang descended the elevator at once, and the panicked doctor and nurse informed him that Luo Ji had begun spitting up blood in the middle of the night and then had gone unconscious. Zhang Xiang saw Luo Ji lying on the bed with a pale face, purple lips, and practically no signs of life in his body.

The team, consisting of experts from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, doctors from the general hospital of the PLA, and an entire research team from the Academy of Military Medical Sciences soon arrived.

As they observed Luo Ji’s condition, one expert from the AMMS took Zhang Xiang and Kent outside and described the situation to them. “This flu came to our attention a while ago. We felt that its origin and characteristics were highly abnormal, and it’s clear now that it’s a genetic weapon, a genetic guided missile.”

“A guided missile?”

“It’s a genetically altered virus that is highly infectious, but only causes mild flu symptoms in most people. However, the virus has a recognition ability which allows it to identify the genetic characteristics of a particular individual. Once the target has been infected, it creates deadly toxins in his blood. We now know who the target is.”

Zhang Xiang and Kent glanced at each other, first in incredulity and then in despair. Zhang Xiang blanched and bowed his head. “I accept full responsibility.”

The researcher, a senior colonel, said, “Director Zhang, you can’t say that. There’s no defense against this. Although we had begun to suspect something odd about the virus, we never even considered this possibility. The concept of genetic weapons first appeared in the last century, but no one believed that anyone would actually produce one. And although this one’s imperfect, it truly is a frightening tool for assassination. All you need to do is spread the virus in the target’s general vicinity. Or, rather, you don’t even need to know where the target is: You could just spread it across the globe, and because the virus causes little to no illness in ordinary people, it will spread quickly and would probably strike its target in the end.”

“No, I accept full responsibility,” Zhang said, covering his eyes. “If Captain Shi was here, this wouldn’t have happened.” He dropped his hand and his eyes shone with tears. “The last thing he said to me before hibernation was to warn me of what you said about no defense. He said, ‘Xiao Zhang, in this job of ours we need to sleep with one eye open. There’s no certainty of success, and some things we can’t defend against.’”

“So what do we do next?” Kent asked.

“The virus has penetrated deep. The patient’s liver and cardiopulmonary functions have failed, and modern medicine is helpless. Hibernate him as soon as possible.”

After a long while, when Luo Ji recovered a little of the consciousness that had totally disappeared, he had sensations of cold, a cold that seemed to emanate from within his body and diffuse outward like light to freeze the entire world. He saw a snow-white patch in which there first was nothing but infinite white. Then a small black dot appeared its very center, and he could gradually make out a familiar figure, Zhuang Yan, holding their child. He walked with difficulty through a snowy wilderness so empty that it lost all dimension. She was wrapped in a red scarf, the same one she had worn seven years ago on the snowy night he first saw her. The child, red-faced from the cold, waved two small hands at him from her mother’s embrace, and shouted something that he couldn’t hear. He wanted to chase them through the snow, but the young mother and child vanished, as if dissolved into snow. Then he himself vanished, and the snowy white world shrank into a thin silver thread, which in the unbounded darkness was all that remained of his consciousness. It was the thread of time, a thin, motionless strand that extended infinitely in both directions. His soul, strung on this thread, was gently sliding off at a constant speed into the unknowable future.

Two days later, a stream of high-power radio waves was sent off from Earth toward the sun, penetrating the convection zone and reaching the energy mirror in the radiation zone, where its reflection, magnified hundreds of millions of times, carried Wallfacer Luo Ji’s spell into the cosmos at the speed of light.

Year 12, Crisis Era

Another brush had appeared in space. The Trisolaran Fleet had crossed the second patch of interstellar dust, and because Hubble II had been closely monitoring the area, the fleet’s wake was captured as soon as it appeared. This time, it looked nothing like a brush. Rather, it resembled a patch of grass that had just begun to sprout in the dark abyss of space. Those thousand blades of grass grew with a speed that was perceptible to the naked eye, and they were much clearer than the wake had been nine years before, due to nine years of acceleration that had greatly increased the fleet’s speed and had made its impact on the interstellar dust more dramatic.

“General, look closely here. What can you see?” Ringier said to Fitzroy as he pointed to the magnified image on the screen.

“There still seem to be about a thousand.”

“No, look closer.”

Fitzroy looked carefully for a long moment, then pointed to the middle of the brush. “It looks like… one, two, three, four… ten bristles are longer than the others. They’re extended out.”

“Right. Those ten wakes are quite weak. They’re only visible after image enhancement.”

Fitzroy turned to Ringier, wearing the same expression he had when the Trisolaran Fleet had been discovered a decade earlier. “Doctor, does this mean that those ten warships are accelerating?”

“All of them are accelerating. But those ten show a greater acceleration. But they’re not ten warships. The number of wakes has increased by ten, to one thousand and ten. An analysis of the morphology of those ten wakes shows that they are far smaller than the warships behind them: about one ten-thousandth the size, or about the size of a truck. But due to their high speed, they still produce detectable wakes.”

“So small. Are they probes?”

“Yes, they must be probes.”

This was another of Hubble II’s shocking discoveries: Humanity would make contact with Trisolaran entities ahead of schedule, even if they were just ten small probes.

“When will they reach the Solar System?” Fitzroy asked nervously.

“We can’t say for certain. It depends on the acceleration, but they will definitely arrive before the fleet. A conservative estimate would be half a century earlier. The fleet acceleration is evidently at a maximum, but for some reason we don’t understand, they want to reach the Solar System as quickly as possible, so they launched probes that can accelerate even faster.”

“If they have sophons, then what’s the need for probes?” one engineer asked.

This question made them all stop and think, but Ringier soon broke the silence. “Forget it. This isn’t something we can figure out.”

“No,” Fitzroy said, raising a hand. “We can figure out at least a part of it…. We’re looking at events from four years ago. Can you determine the exact date that the fleet launched the probes?”

“We’re fortunate that the fleet launched them on the snow… I mean, in the dust… allowing us to pinpoint the time from our observations of the intersection of the probe wakes and the fleet tracks.” Then Ringier told him the date.

Fitzroy was speechless for a moment, then lit a cigarette and sat down to smoke. After a while, he said, “Doctor, you’re not politicians. Just like I couldn’t make out those ten longer bristles, you can’t tell that this is a crucial fact.”

“What’s so special about that date?” Ringier asked, uncertainly.

“On that day four years ago, I attended the PDC Wallfacer Hearing, at which Luo Ji proposed using the sun to send a spell out into the universe.”

The scientists and engineers glanced at each other.

Fitzroy went on, “And it was right around that time that Trisolaris issued a second command to the ETO calling for Luo Ji’s elimination.”

“Him? Is he really that important?”

“You think he was first a sentimental playboy and then a pretentious sham sorcerer? Of course. We thought so too. Everyone did, except for Trisolaris.”

“Well… what do you think he is, General?”

“Doctor, do you believe in God?”

The suddenness of the question left Ringier momentarily speechless. “…God? That’s got a variety of meanings on multiple levels today, and I don’t know which you—”

“I believe, not because I have any proof, but because it’s relatively safe: If there really is a God, then it’s right to believe in him. If there isn’t, then we don’t have anything to lose.”

The general’s words prompted laughter, and Ringier said, “The second half is untrue. There is something to lose, at least as far as science is concerned…. Still, so what if God exists? What’s he got to do with what’s right in front of us?”

“If God really exists, then he may have a mouthpiece in the mortal world.”

They all stared at him for ages before they understood the implication of his words. Then one astronomer said, “General, what are you talking about? God wouldn’t choose a mouthpiece from an atheist nation.”

Fitzroy ground out his cigarette end and spread out his hands. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Can you think of a better explanation?”

Ringier mused, “If by ‘God’ you mean a force of justice in the universe that transcends everything—”

Fitzroy stopped him with a raised hand, as if the divine power of what they had just learned would be reduced if it were stated outright. “So believe, all of you. You can now start believing.” And then he made the sign of the cross.

The trial run of Tianti III was airing on television. Construction on three space elevators had begun five years ago, and since Tianti I and Tianti II had been put into operation at the start of the year, the test of Tianti III did not cause much of a commotion. All space elevators were currently being built with just a single primary rail, giving them a far smaller carrying capacity than the four-rail models still under design, but this was already an altogether different world from the age of chemical rockets. Setting aside construction, the cost of going into space by elevator was substantially lower than by civilian aircraft. This in turn had led to an increase in the number of bodies in motion in Earth’s night sky: These were humanity’s large-scale orbiting structures.

Tianti III was the only space elevator based on the ocean. Its base was located on the Equator on an artificial floating island in the Pacific Ocean that could navigate at sea under its own nuclear power, which meant that the elevator’s position on the Equator could be adjusted if necessary. The floating island was a real-life version of the Propeller Island Jules Verne had described, and so it had been dubbed “Verne Island.” The ocean wasn’t even visible on the television, which was showing a shot of a metal, pyramid-shaped base surrounded by a steel city, and—at the bottom of the rail—the cylindrical transport cabin that was ready to launch. From this distance, the guide rail extending into space was invisible due to its sixty-centimeter diameter, although at times you could catch a glint of reflected light from the setting sun.

Three old men, Zhang Yuanchao and his two old neighbors, Yang Jinwen and Miao Fuquan, were watching this on television. All of them were now past seventy, and while no one would call them doddering, they were now definitely old. For them, recalling the past and looking toward the future were both burdens, and since they were powerless to do anything about the present, their only option was to live out their waning years without thinking about anything in this unusual era.

Zhang Yuanchao’s son Zhang Weiming led his grandson Zhang Yan through the door. He was carrying a paper sack, and said, “Dad, I’ve picked up your ration card and your first batch of grain tickets.” Then he took out a pack of colorful tickets from the bag and gave them to his father.

“Ah, just like in the old days,” Yang Jinwen said, as he watched from the side.

“It’s come back. It always comes back,” Zhang Yuanchao murmured emotionally to himself, as he took the tickets.

“Is that money?” asked Yan Yan, looking at the bits of paper.

Zhang Yuanchao said to his grandson, “It’s not money, child. But, from now on, if you want to buy nonquota grain, like bread or cake, or want to eat at a restaurant, you’ll need to use these along with money.”

“This is a little different from the old days,” Zhang Weiming said, taking out an IC card. “This is a ration card.”

“How much is on it?”

“I get twenty-one and a half kilos, or forty-three jin. You and Xiaohong get thirty-seven jin, and Yan Yan gets twenty-one jin.”

“About the same as back then,” the elder man said.

“That should be enough for a month,” Yang Jinwen said.

Zhang Weiming shook his head. “Mr. Yang, you lived through those days. Don’t you remember? It might be fine now, but very soon there’ll be fewer nonstaples, and you’ll need numbers to buy vegetables and meat. So this paltry bit of grain really won’t be enough to eat!”

“It’s not that serious,” Miao Fuquan said with a wave of his hand. “We’ve been through times like these a few decades ago. We won’t starve. Drop it, and watch TV.”

“Oh, and industrial coupons[1] may be coming soon, too,” Zhang Yuanchao said, putting the grain tickets and ration card on the table and turning his attention to the television.

On the screen, the cylindrical cabin was rising from the base. It ascended quickly and accelerated rapidly, then disappeared into the evening sky. Because the guide rail was invisible, it looked like it was ascending on its own. The cabin could reach a maximum speed of five hundred kilometers per hour, but even at that speed it would take sixty-eight hours to reach the space elevator’s terminus in geostationary orbit. The scene cut to a downward-facing camera installed beneath the cabin. Here, the sixty-centimeter rail occupied the larger part of the screen. Its slick surface made motion practically undetectable, except for the fleeting scale markings that showed the camera’s upward velocity. The rail quickly tapered into nothing as it extended downward, but it pointed at a spot far below where Verne Island, now visible in total, seemed like a giant platter suspended from the lower end of the rail.

Something occurred to Yang Jinwen. “I’ll show you two a real rarity,” he said, as he got up and walked somewhat less nimbly out the door, perhaps to his own home. He soon returned with a thin slice of something about the size of a cigarette box and laid it on the table. Zhang Yuanchao picked it up and looked at it: The object was gray, translucent, and very lightweight, like a fingernail. “This is the material Tianti is made out of!” Yang Jinwen said.

“Great. Your son stole strategic materials from the public sector,” Miao Fuquan said, pointing at the slice.

“It’s just a leftover scrap. He said that when Tianti was under construction, thousands upon thousands of tons of this stuff was shot into space, and it was made into the guide rail there and then hung back down from orbit again…. Soon, space travel will be popularized. I’ve asked my son to hook me up with business in that area.”

“You want to go to space?” asked Zhang Yuanchao, surprised.

“It’s not such a big deal. I’ve heard there’s not even hypergravity when you go up. It’s just like taking a long-distance sleeper train,” Miao Fuquan said dismissively. In the many years he had been unable to operate his mines, his family had gone into decline. He had sold off his villa four years ago, leaving this as his only residence. Yang Jinwen, whose son worked on the space elevator project, had in a single bound become the wealthiest of the three, and this sometimes made old Miao jealous.

“I’m not going to space,” Yang Jinwen said, looking up, and when he saw that Weiming had taken the boy to another room, he went on. “But my remains will. Hey, you two fellows don’t have any taboos about talking about this, do you?”

“What’s taboo about it? Still, why do you want to put your remains up there?” Zhang Yuanchao asked.

“You know there’s an electromagnetic launcher at the end of Tianti. When it’s time, my casket will be fired off at the third cosmic velocity and will fly out of the Solar System. It’s called a cosmic burial, you know. After I die, I don’t want to stay on an alien-occupied Earth. It’s a form of Escapism, I guess.”

“And if the aliens are defeated?”

“That’s practically impossible. Still, if it really happens, it’s no great loss. I get to roam the universe!”

Zhang Yuanchao shook his head. “You intellectuals with your weird ideas. They’re pointless. The fallen leaf returns to the root. I’m going to be buried in the yellow soil of the Earth.”

“Aren’t you afraid that the Trisolarans will dig up your grave?”

At this, Miao Fuquan, who had been silent, suddenly grew excited. He motioned for the others to draw closer, and lowered his voice, as if afraid that the sophons would hear: “Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve thought of something. I have lots of empty mines in Shanxi….”

“You want to be buried there?”

“No, no. They’re all small pit mines. How deep can they be? But in several places they’re connected to major state-owned mines, and by following their abandoned works, you can get all the way down to four hundred meters below ground. Is that deep enough for you? Then we blast the shaft wall. I don’t think the Trisolarans will be able to dig down there.”

“Sheesh. If Earthlings can dig that far, why can’t the Trisolarans? They’ll find a tombstone and just keep digging down.”

Looking at Zhang Yuanchao, Miao Fuquan was unable to hold back his laughter. “Lao Zhang, have you gone stupid?” Seeing him still at a loss, he pointed to Yang Jinwen, who had grown bored with their conversation and was watching the television broadcast again. “Let an educated man tell it to you.”

Yang Jinwen chuckled. “Lao Zhang, what do you want a tombstone for? Tombstones are meant for people to see. By then, there won’t be any people left.”

All along the way to the Third Nuclear Fusion Test Base, Zhang Beihai’s car drove through deep snow. But as he neared the base, the snow melted entirely, the road turned muddy, and the cold air turned warm and humid, like a breath of springtime. On the slopes lining the road he noticed patches of peach flowers blooming, unseasonable in this harsh winter. He drove on toward the white building in the valley ahead, a structure that was merely the entrance for the majority of the base, which was underground. Then he noticed someone on the hillside picking peach flowers. Looking closer, he saw it was the very person he had come to see, and he stopped his car.

“Dr. Ding!” he called to him. When Ding Yi came over to the car carrying a bunch of flowers, he laughed and asked, “Who are those flowers for?”

“They’re for myself, of course. They’re flowers that have bloomed from fusion heat.” He practically beamed under the influence of the brightly colored flowers. Evidently he was still in the throes of excitement at the breakthrough that had just been achieved.

“It’s pretty wasteful, letting all this heat disperse.” Zhang Beihai got out of the car, took off his sunglasses, and took stock of the mini-spring. He couldn’t see his breath, and he could feel the heat of the ground even through the soles of his shoes.

“There’s no money or time to build a power plant. But that doesn’t matter. From now on, energy is not something that Earth needs to conserve.”

Zhang Beihai pointed at the flowers in Ding Yi’s hands. “Dr. Ding, I really was hoping that you had gotten distracted. This breakthrough would have happened later without you.”

“Without me here, it would’ve happened even earlier. There are over a thousand researchers at the base. I just pointed them in the right direction. I’ve felt for a long time that the tokamak approach[2] is a dead end. Given the right approach, a breakthrough was a certainty. Me, I’m a theoretician. I don’t get experimentation. My blind pointing probably only delayed the progress of research.”

“Can’t you postpone the announcement of your results? I’m being serious here. And I’m also informally conveying the wish of Space Command.”

“How could we postpone it? The media has been actively tracking the progress of all three fusion test bases.”

Zhang Beihai nodded and let out a sigh. “That’s bad news.”

“I know a few of the reasons, but why don’t you tell me why.”

“If controlled nuclear fusion is achieved, spacecraft research will begin immediately. Doctor, you know about the two current research forks: media-propelled spacecraft and non-media radiation-drive spacecraft. Two opposing factions have formed around these two directions of research: the aerospace faction advocates research into media-propelled spacecraft, while the space force is pushing radiation-drive spacecraft. The projects will consume enormous resources, and if the two directions can’t progress simultaneously on equal footing, then one direction must take the mainstream.”

“The fusion people and I are in favor of the radiation drive. For my part, I feel that it’s the only plan that enables interstellar cosmic voyages. Of course, I’ll grant that Aerospace has its logic, too. Media-propelled spacecraft are actually a variant of chemical rockets that use fusion energy, so the prospects are a little safer for that line of research.”

“But there’s nothing safe in the space war of the future! As you said, media-propelled spacecraft are just huge rockets. They have to devote two-thirds of their carrying capacity to their propulsion media, and it’s consumed very quickly. That type of spacecraft requires planetary bases in order to navigate through the Solar System. We do that, and we would be reenacting the tragedy of the Sino-Japanese War, with the Solar System as Weihaiwei.”[3]

“That’s a keen analogy,” Ding Yi said, raising his bouquet at Zhang Beihai.

“It’s a fact. A navy’s front line defenses ought to be at the enemy’s ports. We can’t do that, of course, but our defensive line ought to be pushed out as far as the Oort Cloud, and we should ensure that the fleet possesses sufficient flanking capabilities in the vast reaches outside the Solar System. This is the foundation of space force strategy.”

“Internally, Aerospace isn’t entirely monolithic,” Ding Yi said. “It’s the old guard left over from the chemical rocket era that’s pushing for media spacecraft, but forces from other disciplines have entered the sector. Take the people on our fusion system. They’re mostly pushing for radiation spacecraft. These two forces are evenly matched, and all that’s needed is three or four people in key positions to break the equilibrium. Their opinions will decide the ultimate course of action. But those three or four key people are, I’m afraid, all part of the old guard.”

“This is the most critical decision in the entire master strategy. If it’s a misstep, the space fleet will be built atop a mistaken foundation, and we might waste a century or two. And by that time, I’m afraid there will be no way to change direction.”

“But you and I aren’t in a position to fix it.”

After lunching with Ding Yi, Zhang Beihai left the fusion base. Before he had driven very far, the moist ground was again covered with wet snow that glowed white under the sun. As the air temperature plummeted, his heart also chilled.

He was in dire need of a spacecraft capable of interstellar travel. If other roads led nowhere, then just one was left. No matter how dangerous it might be, it had to be taken.

When Zhang Beihai entered the home of the meteorite collector, situated in a courtyard house in the depths of a hutong alleyway, he noticed that the old, dimly lit home was like a miniature geological museum. Each of its four walls was lined with glass cases in which professional lights shone on rock after unremarkable rock. The owner, in his fifties, hale in spirit and complexion, sat at a workbench examining a small stone with a magnifying lens, and he greeted the visitor warmly when he saw him. He was, Zhang Beihai noticed immediately, one of those fortunate people who inhabited a beloved world of his own. No matter what changes befell the larger world, he could always immerse himself in his own and find contentment.

In the old-fashioned atmosphere unique to old houses, Zhang Beihai was reminded that he and his comrades were fighting for the survival of the human race, while the majority of people were still clinging to their existing lives. This gave him a sense of warmth and peace of mind.

The completion of the space elevator and the breakthrough in controlled fusion technology were two enormous encouragements to the world, and eased defeatist sentiment to a considerable extent. But sober leaders were aware that this was only the beginning: If the construction of the space fleet was analogous to naval fleets, then humanity had just now arrived at the seashore, carrying tools. Not even the shipbuilding dockyards had been built yet. Apart from the construction of the main spacecraft body, research into space weapons and recirculating ecosystems, as well as the construction of space ports, represented an unprecedented technological frontier for humanity. Just getting the foundations in place might take a century.

Human society faced another challenge aside from the terrifying abyss: The construction of a space defense system would consume an enormous amount of resources, and this consumption would likely drag the quality of life back a century, which meant that the greatest challenge to the human spirit was still to come. With that in mind, the military leadership had decided to begin implementing the plan to use political cadres from the space force as future reinforcements. As the initial proponent of the plan, Zhang Beihai had been named commander of the Special Contingent of Future Reinforcements. Upon accepting the mission, he proposed that all of the officers in the special contingent ought to undergo at least a year of space-based training and work before entering hibernation in order to provide them with the necessary preparations for their future work in the space force. “The brass won’t want their political commissars to be landlubbers,” he said to Chang Weisi. This request was swiftly approved, and one month later, he and the first special contingent of thirty comrades went to space.

“You’re a soldier?” the collector asked as he served tea. After receiving a nod, he went on: “Soldiers these days aren’t much like soldiers used to be, but you, I could tell at a glance.”

“You were a soldier once too,” Zhang Beihai said.

“Good eye. I spent most of my life serving in the General Staff Department’s Surveying and Mapping Bureau.”

“How did you get interested in meteors?” Zhang Beihai asked as he looked appreciatively at the rich collection.

“Over a decade ago I went with a survey team to Antarctica in search of meteorites buried beneath the snow, and I got hooked. They come from outside of Earth, from distant space, so naturally they’ve got that attraction. Whenever I pick one up, it’s like I’m going to a new and alien world.”

Zhang Beihai shook his head with a smile. “That’s just a feeling. The Earth itself is formed out of aggregated interstellar matter, so it’s basically just a giant meteorite. The stone beneath our feet is meteorite. This teacup I’m holding is meteorite. Besides, they say that the water on Earth was brought here by comets, so”—he raised the teacup—”what’s contained in this cup is meteorite, too. There’s nothing particularly special about what you have.”

The collector pointed at him and laughed. “You’re sharp. You’ve already started to bargain…. Still, I trust my feelings.”

The collector couldn’t resist taking Zhang Beihai on a tour, and he even opened a safe to show him the treasure of his house: a Martian achondrite the size of a fingernail. He had him view the small round pits on the meteorite’s surface and said that they might be microbial fossils. “Five years ago, Robert Haag wanted to buy her for a thousand times the price of gold, but I didn’t agree.”

“How many of these did you collect on your own?” asked Zhang Beihai, pointing around the room.

“Only a small part. The majority were bought from the private sector or traded from the community…. So, let’s hear it. What sort do you want?”

“Nothing too valuable. It should be high density, shouldn’t break easily under impact, and should be easily workable.”

“I see. You want to engrave it.”

He nodded. “You could say that. It would be great if I could use a lathe.”

“Then an iron meteorite,” the collector said as he opened a glass case and took out a dark-colored stone the size of a walnut. “This one. It’s composed mainly of iron and nickel, with cobalt, phosphorus, silicon, sulfur, and copper. You want dense? This one’s eight grams to the cubic centimeter. It’s easily workable, and highly metallic, so the lathe won’t be a problem.”

“Good. It’s just a little too small.”

The collector took out another piece the size of an apple.

“Do you have anything even bigger?”

The collector looked at him and said, “This stuff’s not sold by weight. The big ones are expensive.”

“Well, do you have three the size of this one?”

The collector brought out three iron meteorites of roughly the same size and began to lay the groundwork for his asking price: “Iron meteorites are not very common. They represent just five percent of all meteorites, and these three are fine specimens. See here—this one’s an octahedrite. Look at the crisscross pattern on the surface. They’re called Widmanstätten patterns. And here’s a nickel-rich ataxite. These parallel lines are called Neumann lines. This piece contains kamacite, and this one is taenite, a mineral not found on Earth. This piece is one I found in the desert using a metal detector, and it was like fishing a needle out of the ocean. The car got stuck in the sand and the drive shaft snapped. I almost died.”

“Name your price.”

“On the international market, a specimen of this size and grade would have a price of about twenty USD per gram. So how’s this: sixty thousand yuan per piece, or three for one hundred eighty thousand?”[4]

Zhang Beihai took out his phone. “Tell me your account number. I’ll pay right away.”

The collector said nothing for quite some time. When Zhang Beihai looked up, he gave a slightly embarrassed laugh. “Actually, I was ready for you to counter-offer.”

“No. I accept.”

“Look. Now that space travel is for everyone, the market price has dropped somewhat even though it’s not as easy to get meteorites in space as it is on the ground. These, well, they’re worth—”

Zhang Beihai cut him off decisively. “No. That’s the price. Treat it as a sign of respect for their recipients.”

After leaving the collector’s house, Zhang Beihai took the meteorites to a modeling workshop in a research institute belonging to the space force. Work had let out and the workshop, which contained a state-of-the-art CNC mill, was empty. First, he used the mill to slice the three meteorites into cylinders of equal diameter, about the thickness of a pencil lead, and then cut them into small segments of equal length. He worked very carefully, trying to minimize waste as much as possible, and ended up with thirty-six small meteorite rods. When this was done, he carefully collected the cutting debris, removed the special blade he had selected for cutting the stone from the machine, and then left the workshop.

The remainder of the work he conducted in a secret basement. He set thirty-six 7.62 mm pistol cartridges on the table before him and removed each projectile in turn. If they had been old-style brass cartridges, this would have required a lot of effort, but two years ago the entire military had updated its standard guns to use caseless ammunition, whose projectile was glued directly to the propellant and was easy to detach. Next, he used a special adhesive to affix a meteorite rod onto each propellant. The adhesive, originally developed to repair the skin of space capsules, ensured that the bond would not fail in the extreme hot and cold temperatures of space. In the end he had thirty-six meteorite bullets.

He inserted four meteorite bullets into a magazine, which he then loaded into a P224 pistol and fired at a sack in the corner. The gunshot was deafening in the narrow basement room and left behind a strong scent of gunpowder.

He carefully examined the four holes in the sack, noting that they were small, which meant that the meteorite had not shattered upon firing. He opened the sack and withdrew a large hunk of fresh beef, and with a knife carefully extracted the meteorite that had penetrated it. The four meteorite rods had shattered completely, leaving a small pile of rubble that he poured onto his palm. It showed practically no sign of having been worked. This outcome satisfied him.

The sack that held the beef was made out of materials used in space suits. To make the simulation even more realistic, it had been arranged in layers that sandwiched insulation sponges, plastic tubing, and other material.

He carefully packed up the remaining thirty-two meteorite bullets and exited the basement, heading off to make preparations for his visit to space.

Zhang Beihai hung in space five kilometers out from Yellow River Station, a wheel-shaped space station that lay three hundred kilometers above the space elevator terminus as a counterweight. It was the largest structure humanity had ever constructed in space and it could house over a thousand long-term residents.

The region of space within a five-hundred-kilometer radius of the space elevator was home to other space facilities, all of them much smaller than Yellow River Station and scattered about like the nomadic tents that dotted the prairie during the opening of the American West. These formed the prelude of humanity’s large-scale entrance into space. The shipyards that had just commenced construction were the largest yet and would eventually cover an area ten times greater than Yellow River Station, but right now, all that had been put up was scaffolding that looked like the skeleton of a leviathan. Zhang Beihai had come from Base 1, a separate space station eighty kilometers away and just one-fifth the size of Yellow River Station, the space force’s base in geostationary orbit. He had been living and working with the other members of the first Special Contingent of Future Reinforcements for three months now and had only been back to Earth once.

At Base 1, he had been waiting for an opportunity, and now an opportunity presented itself: the aerospace faction was holding a high-level work conference on Yellow River Station, and all three of his targets for elimination would be attending. Once Yellow River Station went into operation, Aerospace had held quite a few meetings there, as if to make up for the regrettable fact that most of the people in the aerospace sector had never gotten the chance to go to space.

Before leaving Base 1, Zhang Beihai had dropped his space suit’s positioning unit in his own cabin so the surveillance system would not be aware that he had left the base and there would be no record of his movements. Using the thrusters on his suit, he flew eighty kilometers through space to the position he had selected. Then he waited.

The meeting was over, but he was waiting for the participants to come out and take a group photo.

It was a tradition for all meeting participants to take a group photo in space. Usually, the photograph would be taken against the sun, because that was the only way to get a clear shot of the space station. Since every person in the group shot had to turn their helmet visors to transparent to expose their face during the photo, they would have to keep their eyes shut against the sun’s intense rays if they faced it, not to mention the fact that the inside of their helmets would get intolerably hot. So the best time for a group shot was when the sun was just about to rise or fall over the horizon of the Earth. In geosynchronous orbit, one sunrise and one sunset took place every twenty-four hours, although the night was very short. Zhang Beihai was waiting for the sun to set.

He knew that Yellow River Station’s surveillance system was able to detect his presence, but that wouldn’t attract any attention. As the point of origin for space development, the region was littered with construction materials both unused and abandoned, as well as an even greater quantity of garbage. Much of this floating material was roughly the size of a human. Moreover, the space elevator and the surrounding facilities had a relationship like a metropolis and its surrounding villages, with the supplies for the latter coming entirely from the former, so traffic between them was quite busy. As people became used to the environment of space, they gradually adopted the habit of crossing solo. Using space suits as a sort of space bicycle with thrusters that could push them to speeds of up to five hundred kilometers per hour was the easiest means of travel within a few hundred kilometers of the space elevator. By this point, people were flying between the space elevator and the surrounding stations all the time.

But right now, Zhang Beihai knew the surrounding space was empty. Apart from the Earth (which was visible as a complete sphere from geosynchronous orbit) and the sun, about to dip below its edge, everything in all directions was a pitch-black abyss, and the myriad stars were shining dust that was powerless to alter the emptiness of the universe. He knew that his suit’s life-support system would only hold up for twelve hours, and before that time ran out he had to make it eighty kilometers back to Base 1, now just a shapeless point far off in the distance of the abyss of space. The base itself would not survive very long, either, if it left the umbilical cord of the space elevator. But now, as he floated in the vast void, he felt like his contact with the blue world down below had been cut off. He was an independent presence in the universe, unattached to any world, dangling in the cosmos, no ground beneath his feet and surrounded by empty space on all sides, with no origin or destination, like the Earth, the sun, and the Milky Way. He simply existed, and he liked this feeling.

He even sensed that his father’s departed spirit might share this very same feeling.

The sun made contact with the edge of the Earth.

Zhang Beihai raised one hand. The glove of his suit held a telescopic sight which he used to observe one of Yellow River Station’s exits, ten kilometers distant. On the large, curved-metal exterior wall, the round air lock door was still sealed.

He turned his head toward the sun, which had now set halfway and looked like a glittering ring atop the Earth.

Looking back through the scope at the station, this time he saw that the beacon light next to the exit had turned from red to green, indicating that the air inside the air lock had been emptied. Immediately afterward, the hatch slid open and a group of figures wearing white space suits filed out. There were about thirty of them. As they flew off in a group, the shadow they cast on the outer wall of Yellow River Station expanded.

They had to fly a considerable distance to fit the entire station into frame, but before long they slowed down and began their weightless lineup under the photographer’s direction. By now the sun had sunk by two-thirds. The remainder looked like a luminous object inlaid into the Earth above a smooth sea mirror that was half blue and half orange-red, its top covered by sun-soaked clouds that looked like pink feathers.

As the light dropped in intensity, the people in the distant group photo began to turn their visors transparent, revealing the faces in the helmets. Zhang Beihai increased his scope’s focal length and quickly found his targets. Just as he had expected, due to their rank, they were in the center of the front row.

He released the scope, leaving it suspended in front of him, and with his left hand he twisted the metal retaining ring of his right glove to detach it. Now that his right hand was wearing just a thin cloth glove, he immediately felt the minus-one-hundred-degree temperature of space, so to avoid a quick freeze he turned his body to an angle that let the weak sunlight shine on his hand. He extended the hand into a side pocket of his suit and withdrew a pistol and two magazines. Then, with his left hand, he grasped the floating scope and affixed it to the pistol. The scope had been a rifle sight that he had modified with a magnetic attachment so it could be used on a pistol.

The vast majority of firearms on Earth could shoot in space. The vacuum was not a problem, because the bullet’s propellant contained its own oxidizer, but you did need to worry about the temperature of space: Both extremes differed greatly from atmospheric temperatures and had the potential to affect the gun and ammunition, so he was afraid to leave the pistol and magazines exposed for too long. To shorten that time, over the past three months he had drilled repeatedly in taking out the gun, mounting the sight, and changing magazines.

He started to aim, and captured his first target in the cross hairs of the scope.

In Earth’s atmosphere, even the most sophisticated sniper rifles couldn’t hit a target at a distance of five kilometers, but an ordinary pistol could in space. The bullets moved in a zero-gravity vacuum, free of any outside interference, so as long as their aim was true, they would follow an extremely stable trajectory directly to the target. Zero air resistance, meanwhile, meant that the bullets would not decelerate during flight and would strike the target with the initial muzzle velocity, ensuring a lethal blow from a distance.

He pulled the trigger. The pistol fired in silence, but he saw the muzzle flash and felt the recoil. He fired ten rounds at the first target, then quickly replaced the magazine and fired another ten rounds at the second target. Replacing the magazine again, he fired the last ten rounds at the third target. Thirty muzzle flashes. If anyone in the direction of Yellow River Station had been paying attention, they would have seen a firefly against the dark backdrop of space.

Now the thirty meteorites were speeding toward their targets. The Type 2010 pistol had a muzzle velocity of five hundred meters per second, so they would take around ten seconds to cross the distance, during which Zhang Beihai could only pray that his targets did not change position. This hope wasn’t groundless, because the two back rows had not yet gotten situated for the group photo, and even when they were all situated, the photographer had to wait until the mist sprayed out by the space suit thrusters dissipated, so the leaders in the front row had to wait. But since the targets were, after all, floating in space and weightless, they could easily drift, causing the bullets to not only miss their targets but possibly hurt innocents.

Innocent? The three people he was about to kill were innocent, too. In the years before the Trisolar Crisis, they had made what, looking back now, seemed like particularly meager investments, and had crept carefully over the thin ice toward the dawn of the space age. That experience had imprisoned their thinking. They had to be destroyed for the sake of interstellar-capable spacecraft. Their deaths could be viewed as their final contribution to the cause of humanity’s endeavors in space.

As a matter of fact, Zhang Beihai had deliberately sent a few bullets wide of the mark in the hope of hitting people other than his targets. Ideally he would only wound them, but if he happened to kill an extra person or two, that didn’t matter. That would only serve to reduce any potential suspicion.

He lifted the empty gun and looked soberly through the scope. He was prepared for failure. In that eventuality, he would dispassionately begin the search for a second opportunity.

Time passed second by second, and at last there were signs that a target had been hit. Zhang Beihai did not see the hole in the space suit, but a white gas spurted out. Immediately afterward, an even larger burst of white steam erupted from between the first and second rows, perhaps because the bullet had passed out the target’s back and penetrated his thruster pack. He was confident of the bullets’ power: When the meteorite projectiles struck their targets with practically no decrease in speed, it would be like being shot at gunpoint. Cracks suddenly appeared across the helmet visor of one target, rendering it opaque, but he could still see the blood that splashed up on the inside before mixing with leaking gasses and spraying out of the bullet hole, where it quickly froze into snowflake-like crystals. His observations soon confirmed that five people, including the three targets, had been hit, and each target had been struck at least five times.

Through their visors he saw everyone in the crowd screaming in terror, and from the shape of their lips he knew that their words included the ones he was expecting:

“Meteor shower!”

Everyone in the photo group turned their thrusters to full power and sped back to the station, trailing tails of white mist behind them, and then they were through the round hatch and back inside Yellow River Station. Zhang Beihai saw that the five who had been hit were dragged back with them.

He activated his own thruster pack and accelerated toward Base 1. His heart was now as cold and calm as the empty space around him. He knew that the death of the three key aerospace figures did not guarantee that the non-media radiation drive would become the mainstream of spacecraft research, but he had done all he could. No matter what happened next, as far as the watchful eyes of his father in the beyond were concerned, he could now relax.

At practically the same time as Zhang Beihai was returning to Base 1, back on Earth’s Internet, a group of people hastily assembled in the wilderness of the virtual Three Body world to discuss what had just happened.

“This time, the information transmitted via sophon was very thorough, or we wouldn’t have believed he actually did it,” Qin Shi Huang said as he waved the sword about him in his uneasiness. “Look at what he did, and then look at our three attempts on Luo Ji.” He sighed. “Sometimes we’re just too nerdy. We don’t have that kind of cool competency.”

“Are we just going to sit by and let him do this?” Einstein asked.

“In accordance with the Lord’s intentions, that’s all we can do. The man is an extremely stubborn holdout and a triumphalist, and the Lord doesn’t want us to interfere unnecessarily with that type of human. Our attention must be focused on Escapism. The Lord believes that defeatism is more dangerous than triumphalism,” Newton said.

“If we are to work sincerely and seriously in the service of the Lord, we can’t wholly believe the Lord’s strategy. After all, it’s just the counsel of a child,” Mozi said.

Qin Shi Huang knocked his sword on the ground. “Nevertheless, nonintervention is correct as far as this matter is concerned. Let them turn their development in the direction of radiation drive spacecraft. With physics under sophon lockdown, that will be a technological peak that’s practically unsurpassable. Not to mention a bottomless abyss into which humanity will pour all of their time and energy and end up with nothing.”

“We are agreed on this point. But I believe this man is critical. He’s dangerous,” Von Neumann said.

“Precisely!” Aristotle said, nodding repeatedly. “We used to think he was a pure soldier, but is this the behavior of a soldier who acts in accordance with strict discipline and rules?”

“He is indeed dangerous. His faith is rock-solid, he’s farsighted and dispassionately ruthless, and he acts with calm resolve. Ordinarily he’s precise and serious, but when there’s a need he can go outside the lines and take extraordinary action,” Confucius said with a sigh. “Just like the First Emperor said, this is the sort of person we lack.”

“He won’t be hard to deal with. All we have to do is denounce his murders,” Newton said.

“It’s not that simple!” Qin Shi Huang said, flipping a sleeve at him. “It’s all your fault. You’ve been using the information you receive from the sophons to sow discord in the space force and the UN, so how did this happen? Denunciation would be an honor, or even a symbol of loyalty!”

“And we don’t have any conclusive evidence,” Mozi said. “His plans were thorough. The bullets shattered when they hit, so any autopsy would retrieve only authentic meteorites from the bodies of the dead and wounded. Everyone is going to think they died in a meteor shower. The truth is so bizarre that no one would believe it.”

“It’s a good thing he’s going to reinforce the future. At least he won’t be making trouble for us for a while.”

Einstein let out a long sigh. “Gone. Everyone’s gone. Some of us should go to the future too.”

Although they said they would meet again, everyone knew in their hearts that this was a final farewell.

When the Special Contingent of Future Reinforcements headed to the hibernation center, Chang Weisi and a number of other senior space force generals came to the airport to see them off. He handed a letter to Zhang Beihai.

“This letter is for my future successor. In it, I explain your circumstances and strongly recommend you to the future Space Command. You’ll awaken no sooner than fifty years in the future, possibly longer than that, at which time you may be faced with a more challenging work environment. You’ll have to adapt to the future first, even as you preserve the spirit of the soldiers of our time. You must be cognizant of our working methods today, and know which are obsolete and which should be carried on. This may turn out to be your greatest advantage in the future.”

Zhang Beihai said, “Commander, for the first time I feel a bit of regret that I’m an atheist. Otherwise, we’d have the hope of meeting again at some other time and place.”

Chang Weisi was a little taken aback at this sentiment coming from the ordinarily sober man, and the words resonated in the hearts of everyone else. But, as soldiers, they kept the beating of their hearts deeply hidden.

“I’m gratified that we’ve been able to meet in this lifetime. Be sure to greet our future comrades for us,” Chang Weisi said.

After a final salute, the special contingent boarded the plane.

Chang Weisi’s eyes did not leave Zhang Beihai’s back for a moment. A steadfast soldier was leaving, and there might never be another like him. Where did his firm faith come from? The question had always lain hidden in the depths of his mind, and sometimes it even prompted a bit of jealousy. A soldier with faith in victory was fortunate. In the Doomsday Battle, those lucky people would be few and far between. As Zhang Beihai’s tall frame disappeared inside the cabin door, Chang Weisi had to admit that, up to the very end, he had never really understood him.

The plane took off, carrying those who would perhaps have the chance to see humanity’s final outcome, then disappeared behind thin, pale clouds. It was a bleak winter’s day. The sun that shone listlessly behind a shroud of gray clouds and the chilly wind that blew across the empty airport gave the air the feel of solidified crystal, conjuring up the sense that the springtime might never really arrive. Chang Weisi tightened the collar of his army coat. He turned fifty-four years old today, and in the dreary winter wind he saw his own end, and the end of the human race.

Year 20, Crisis Era

Rey Diaz and Hines were awakened from hibernation at the same time to the news that the technology they awaited had appeared.

“So soon?!” they exclaimed upon learning that just eight years had passed.

They were informed that due to unprecedented investment, technology had progressed with amazing speed over the past few years. But not everything was optimistic. Humanity was simply making a final sprint across the distance between them and the sophon barrier, so the progress they were making was purely technological. Cutting-edge physics remained stopped up like a pool of stagnant water, and the reservoir of theory was being drained. Technological progress would begin to decelerate and eventually come to a complete halt. But, for the time being at least, no one knew when the end of technology would arrive.

On feet that were still stiff from hibernation, Hines walked into a stadium-like structure whose interior was shrouded in a white fog, although it felt dry to him. He couldn’t identify what it was. A soft moonlight glow illuminated the fog, which was fairly sparse at the height of a person but grew dense enough up above that the roof was obscured. Through the fog, he saw a petite figure whom he recognized at once as his wife. When he ran to her through the fog, it was like chasing a phantom, except that in the end they came together in an embrace.

“I’m sorry, love. I’ve aged eight years,” Keiko Yamasuki said.

“Even so, you’re still a year younger than me,” he said as he looked her over. Time seemed to have left no mark on her body, but she looked pale and weak in the fog’s watery moonlight. In the fog and moonlight, she reminded him of that night in the bamboo grove in their yard in Japan. “Didn’t we agree that you would enter hibernation two years after me? Why have you waited all this time?”

“I wanted to work on preparations for our post-hibernation work, but there was too much to do, so that’s what I’ve been doing,” she said as she brushed a strand of hair from her forehead.

“Was it hard?”

“It was very hard. Six next-gen supercomputer research projects were launched not long after you went into hibernation. Three of them employed traditional architecture, one used non–Von Neumann architecture, and the other two were quantum and biomolecular computing projects. But two years later, the lead scientists of those six projects told me that the computing power we desired was impossible. The quantum computing project was the first to be terminated, because it failed to find sufficient support in current theoretic physics: Research had run into the sophon barrier. Next, the biomolecular project was discontinued. They said it was only a fantasy. The last to end was the non–Von Neumann computer. Its architecture was actually a simulation of the human brain, but they said it was a shapeless egg that would never turn into a chicken. Only the three traditional architecture projects were still ongoing, but for a long time there was never any progress.”

“So that’s it…. I ought to have been with you the whole time.”

“It would have been no use. You only would have wasted eight years. It was only recently, during a period of time when we were totally discouraged, that we came up with the crazy idea of simulating the human brain in a practically barbaric way.”

“And what was that?”

“To put the previous software simulation into hardware by using a microprocessor to simulate one neuron, letting all the microprocessors interact, and allowing for dynamic changes to the connection model.”

Hines thought about this for a few seconds, then realized what she meant. “Do you mean manufacturing a hundred billion microprocessors?”

She nodded.

“That’s… that’s practically the sum total of all the microprocessors that have been manufactured in human history!”

“I didn’t run the numbers, but it’s probably more than that.”

“Even if you really had all those chips, how long would it take to connect them all together?”

Keiko Yamasuki smiled wearily. “I knew it wasn’t workable. It was just a desperate idea. But we really thought about doing it back then, and making as many as we could.” She pointed around her. “This here is one of the thirty virtual brain assembly shops we had planned. But it’s the only one that got built.”

“I really should have been here with you,” Hines repeated with more emotion.

“Fortunately we still got the computer we wanted. Its performance is ten thousand times better than when you entered hibernation.”

“Traditional architecture?”

“Traditional architecture. A few more drops squeezed out of the lemon of Moore’s law. It astonished the computing community—but this time, my love, we’ve really come to the end.”

A peerless computer. If humanity failed, it would never be equaled, Hines thought, but did not say it out loud.

“With this computer, research on the Resolving Imager became much easier.” Then she suddenly asked, “Love, do you have any idea of what a hundred billion looks like?” When he shook his head, she smiled and stretched out her hands around her. “Look. This is a hundred billion.”

“What?” At a loss for words, Hines looked at the white fog around him.

“We’re in the middle of the supercomputer’s holographic display,” she said as she manipulated a gadget hanging at her chest. He noticed a scroll wheel on it, and thought it might be something like a mouse.

As she adjusted it, he felt a change in the surrounding fog. It thickened in what was clearly a magnification of a particular region. Then he noticed that it was made up of an uncountable number of tiny glowing particles, and these particles were emitting the moonlike illumination rather than scattering light from an outside source. As the magnification continued, the particles became shining stars, but instead of seeing the starry sky over Earth, it was like he was situated at the heart of the Milky Way, where the stars were dense and left practically no room for darkness.

“Every star is a neuron,” she said. Their bodies were plated in silver by the ocean formed from a hundred billion stars.

As the hologram continued to enlarge, he noticed innumerable thin tentacles extending radially from every star to form intricate connections, wiping out the starfield and situating him inside an infinitely large network structure.

The image enlarged further, and every star began to exhibit a structure that was familiar to him from electron microscopy, that of brain cells and synapses.

She pressed the mouse and the image returned instantly to the white fog state. “This is a full view of the structure of the brain captured using the Resolving Imager scanning three million cross sections simultaneously. Of course, what we’re seeing now is the processed image—for the convenience of observation, the distance between neurons has been magnified by four or five orders of magnitude so it looks like we vaporized a brain. However, the topology of the connections between them has been preserved. Now, let’s take a look at a dynamic view….”

Disturbances appeared in the fog, glittering points in the mist that looked like a pinch of gunpowder sprinkled onto a flame. Keiko Yamasuki enlarged the image until it resembled a starfield, and Hines saw the surging of startide in a brain-universe, the disturbances in the ocean of stars appearing in different forms at different locations: some like streams, others like vortexes, and others like the sweeping tides, all of it instantly mutable and giving rise to stunning pictures of self-organization within the teeming chaos. Then the image changed again to resemble a network, and he saw myriad nerve signals busily passing messages along thin synapses, like flashing pearls within the flow of an intricate network of pipes….

“Whose brain is this?” he asked in wonder.

“Mine,” she said, looking lovingly at him. “When this thought picture was taken, I was thinking of you.”

The statements were displayed in succession on the small screen in front of the test subject. Each proposition was displayed for four seconds, and the subject pressed the left-hand or right-hand buttons according to his own judgment. His head was encased in a metal cover that allowed the Resolving Imager to capture a holographic view of his brain, which the computer would process into a dynamic neural network model for analysis.

In this, the initial stage of Hines’s research project, the subject engaged in only the simplest of critical thinking, and the test propositions had concise and clear answers. During such simple thoughts, the operation of the cerebral neural network was relatively easy to identify and provided a starting point for a more in-depth study of the nature of thought.

The research teams led by Hines and Keiko Yamasuki had made some progress. They discovered that critical thinking was not produced in any specific location in the cerebral neural network but used a particular mode of nerve impulse transmission, and that with the powerful computer’s assistance, this model could be retrieved and located from among the vast network of neurons using a method quite similar to the star positioning the astronomer Ringier had provided to Luo Ji. Unlike finding a particular position pattern in a starfield, in the universe of the brain the pattern was dynamic and was only identifiable by its mathematical characteristics. It was a little like looking for a small whirlpool in an expansive ocean, which meant that the computing power it required was many orders of magnitude greater than that of the starfield and was only feasible on this latest machine.

Hines and his wife strolled through the cloud map of the brain in the holographic display. Every time a point of critical thinking was identified in the subject’s brain, the computer would indicate its position on the image with a flashing red light. This was actually just a way to provide a more intuitive feast for the eyes and was not strictly required by the study. The important thing was the analysis of the internal structure of nerve impulse transmission at the point of thought, for there lay hidden the mysteries of the essence of the mind.

Just then the research team’s medical director came in and said that Subject 104 was experiencing problems.

When the Resolving Imager had just been developed, scanning such a huge quantity of cross sections generated powerful radiation that was fatal to any life being scanned, but successive improvements had brought the radiation below the danger line, and a large number of tests had demonstrated that so long as filming was kept below a set length of time, the Resolving Imager would not cause any damage to the brain.

“He seems to have caught hydrophobia,” the medical director said, as they hurried toward the medical center.

Hines and Keiko Yamasuki stopped in their tracks in surprise. Hines stared at the medical director: “Hydrophobia? Did he somehow get rabies?”

The medical director raised a hand and tried to sort out his thoughts: “Oh, I’m sorry. That wasn’t accurate. He doesn’t have any physical problems, and his brain and other organs have not been damaged at all. It’s just that he’s afraid of the water, like someone with rabies. He refuses to drink, and he won’t even eat moist food. It’s an entirely psychological effect. He just believes that water is toxic.”

“Persecutory delusion?” Keiko Yamasuki asked.

The medical director waved a hand. “No, no. He doesn’t think that anyone put poison in the water. He just believes the water itself is toxic.”

Again, Hines and his wife stopped still, and the medical director shook his head helplessly. “But psychologically, he’s completely normal in every other way…. I can’t explain it. You’ve got to see it for yourselves.”

Subject 104 was a volunteer college student who had come to earn some pocket money. Before they entered the patient’s room, the director told Hines and his wife, “He hasn’t had a drink in two days. If this continues, he’ll become severely dehydrated and we’ll have to hydrate him by force.” Standing at the door he pointed to a microwave oven, and said, “You see that? He wants bread and other food baked completely dry before he’ll eat it.”

Hines and his wife entered the patient’s room. Subject 104 looked at them with fear in his eyes. His lips were cracked and his hair disheveled, but otherwise he looked entirely normal. He tugged at Hines’s sleeve and said in a hoarse voice, “Dr. Hines, they want to kill me. I don’t know why.” Then he pointed a finger at a glass of water sitting on the cabinet next to the head of the bed. “They want me to drink water.”

Hines looked at the glass of clear water, certain that the subject did not have rabies, because true hydrophobia would cause spasms of terror at the mere sight of it. The sound of running water would induce madness, and there might even be an intense fear response if others simply talked about it.

“From his eyes and speech, he ought to be in a normal psychological state,” Keiko Yamasuki said to Hines in Japanese. She had a degree in psychology.

“Do you really believe that water is toxic?” Hines asked.

“Is there any question? Just like the sun has light and the air has oxygen. You can’t deny this basic fact, can you?”

Hines leaned on his shoulder and said, “Young man, life was born in the water and can’t exist without it. Your own body is seventy percent water.”

Subject 104’s eyes darkened, and he slumped back in bed, clutching his head. “That’s right. This question tortures me. It’s the most incredible thing in the universe.”

“Let me see Subject 104’s experiment record,” Hines said to the medical director after they left the patient’s room. When they reached the director’s office, Keiko Yamasuki said, “Look at the test propositions first.”

The test propositions displayed on the computer screen one by one:

“Stop,” Hines said, pointing to Proposition 5.

“His answer was ‘false,’” the director said.

“Look at all parameters and operations following the answer to Proposition 5.”

The records indicated that once Proposition 5 was answered, the Resolving Imager increased the strength of its scan of the critical thinking point in the subject’s cerebral neural network. To improve the accuracy of the scan of this area, the intensity of the radiation and the magnetic field were increased in this small region. Hines and Keiko Yamasuki carefully examined the long list of recorded parameters on the screen.

“Has this enhanced scan been done to other subjects and on other propositions?” Hines asked.

The director said, “Because the effect of the enhanced scan was not particularly good, it was canceled after four tries due to fears of excessive localized radiation. The previous three…” He consulted the computer, and then said, “were all benign true propositions.”

“We should use the same scanning parameters and repeat the experiment for Proposition 5,” Keiko Yamasuki said.

“But… who will do it?” asked the director.

“I will,” Hines said.

Proposition 5 appeared in black text on a white background. Hines pressed the left “False” button, but he felt nothing apart from a slight sensation of heat produced by the intensive scanning at the back of his head.

He exited the Resolving Imager lab and sat down at a table, as a crowd, which included Keiko Yamasuki, watched. On the table stood a glass of clear water. He picked up the glass and slowly drew it to his lips and took a sip. His movements were relaxed and he wore an expression of quiet calm. Everyone began to sigh with relief, but then they noticed that his throat wasn’t moving to swallow the water. The muscles of his face stiffened and then twitched slightly upward, and into his eyes came the same fear Subject 104 exhibited, as if his spirit was fighting with some powerful, shapeless force. Finally he spat out all of the water in his mouth and knelt down to vomit, but nothing came out. His face turned purple. Hugging Hines to her, Keiko Yamasuki clapped him on the back with one hand.

When he had recovered his senses, he held out a hand: “Give me some paper towels,” he said. He took them and carefully wiped off the droplets of water that had splashed on his shoes.

“Do you really believe that water is toxic, love?” Yamasuki asked, tears in her eyes. Prior to the experiment she had asked him repeatedly to replace the proposition with a false one that was entirely harmless, but he had refused.

He nodded. “I do.” He looked up at the crowd, helplessness and confusion in his eyes. “I do. I really do.”

“Let me repeat your words,” she said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Life was born in the water and can’t exist without it. Your own body is seventy percent water!”

Hines bowed his head and looked at the water stains on the floor. Then he shook his head. “That’s right, dear. This question tortures me. It’s the most incredible thing in the universe.”

Three years after the breakthrough in controlled nuclear fusion, new and unusual heavenly bodies had taken their place in the Earth’s night sky, up to five of them now simultaneously visible in one hemisphere. The bodies changed dramatically in luminance, outshining Venus at their brightest, and often blinked rapidly. Sometimes one of them would suddenly erupt with a rapid increase in brightness, then go out after two or three seconds. They were fusion reactors undergoing tests in geosynchronous orbit.

Non-media radioactive propulsion had won out as the research path for future spacecraft. This type of propulsion required high-powered reactors that could only be tested in space, leading to these glowing reactors thirty thousand kilometers out in space known as nuclear stars. Every time a nuclear star erupted, it represented a disastrous defeat. But contrary to what most people believed, nuclear star eruptions were not explosions in the nuclear reactor, but the exposure of the core when the outer hull of the reactor melted from the heat produced by fusion. The fusion core was like a small sun, and because it melted Earth’s most heat-tolerant materials as if they were wax, it had to be contained by an electromagnetic field. These restraints frequently failed.

On the balcony of the top floor of Space Command, Chang Weisi and Hines had just witnessed one such eruption. Its moonlike glow cast its shadows onto the wall before disappearing. Hines was the second Wallfacer that Chang Weisi had met, after Tyler.

“The third time this month,” Chang Weisi said.

Hines looked out at the now-darkened night sky. “The power of these reactors only reaches one percent of what’s needed for future spacecraft engines, and they don’t operate stably. And even if the required reactors were developed, engine technology will be even more difficult. We’re sure to encounter the sophon block there.”

“That’s true. The sophons are blocking our every path,” Chang Weisi said as he looked off into the distance. The sea of lights in the city seemed even more brilliant now that the light in the sky had disappeared.

“A glimmer of hope fades as soon as it is born, and one day it will be destroyed forever. It’s like you said: The sophons block our every path.”

Chang Weisi said, with a laugh, “Dr. Hines, you’re not here to talk defeatism with me, are you?”

“That’s precisely what I want to talk about. The resurgence of defeatism is different this time. It’s based on the drastically reduced living conditions in the general population and has an even greater impact in the military.”

Chang Weisi looked back from the distance but said nothing.

“I understand your difficulties, General, and I’d like to help you.”

Chang Weisi looked at Hines in silence for a few seconds, his expression unreadable to the other man. Then, without replying to his offer, he said, “The evolution of the human brain needs twenty thousand to two hundred thousand years to achieve noticeable changes, but human civilization has a history of just five thousand years. So what we’re using right now is the brain of primitive man…. Doctor, I really applaud your unique ideas, and perhaps this is where the real answer lies.”

“Thank you. All of us are basically Flintstones.”

“But is it really possible to use technology to enhance mental ability?”

This got Hines excited. “General, you’re not so primitive, at least compared to others! I notice you said ‘mental ability’ rather than ‘intelligence.’ The former is much broader than the latter. To overcome defeatism, for example, we can’t simply rely on intelligence. Given the sophon block, the higher your intelligence, the more trouble you have establishing a faith in victory.”

“So give me an answer. Is it possible?”

Hines shook his head. “How much do you know about my and Keiko Yamasuki’s work before the Trisolar Crisis?”

“Not too much. I believe it was: The essence of thought is not on the molecular level but is carried out on the quantum level. I wonder, does that imply—”

“It implies that the sophons are waiting for me. Just like we’re waiting for them,” Hines said pointing at the sky. “But right now, our research is still quite a ways from our goal. Still, we’ve come up with an unexpected by-product.”

Chang Weisi smiled and nodded, showing cautious interest.

“I won’t talk about the details. Basically, we discovered the mind’s mechanism for making judgments in the cerebral neural network, as well as the ability to have a decisive impact on them. If we compare the process by which a human mind makes judgments to a computer’s process, there’s the input of external data, calculation, and then the final outcome. What we’re able to do is omit the calculation step of the process and directly produce an outcome. When a certain piece of information enters the brain, it exerts an influence on a particular part of the neural network, and we can cause the brain to render a judgment—to believe that the information is genuine—without even thinking about it.”

“Has this already been achieved?” Chang Weisi asked softly.

“Yes. It started with a chance discovery, which we subjected to in-depth research, and now we’ve done it. We call it the ‘mental seal.’”

“And if the judgment—or if you will, faith—is at odds with reality?”

“Then the faith will eventually be overturned. But the process will be quite painful, because the judgment produced in the mind by the mental seal is particularly stubborn. Once, this had me convinced that water was toxic, and it was only after two months of psychotherapy that I was able to drink unimpeded. That process is… not something I want to remember. But the toxicity of water is an extremely clear false proposition. Other beliefs may not be. Like the existence of God, or whether humanity will be victorious in war. These don’t have a clearly determined answer, and in the normal course of establishing these beliefs, the mind is slightly tilted in a certain direction by all sorts of choices. If the belief is established by the mental seal, it will be rock-solid and absolutely unshakeable.”

“That is truly a great achievement.” Chang Weisi grew serious. “I mean, for neuroscience. But in the real world, Dr. Hines, you have created a truly troublesome thing. Really. The most troublesome thing in history.”

“You don’t want to use this thing, the mental seal, to create a space force possessing an unshakeable faith in victory? In the military, you have political commissars and we have chaplains. The mental seal is just a technological means of accomplishing their work more efficiently.”

“Political and ideological work establishes faith through rational, scientific thinking.”

“But is it possible to establish faith in a victory in this war on the basis of rational, scientific thought?”

“If not, Doctor, we’d rather have a space force that lacks faith in victory yet retains independent thought.”

“Apart from this one belief, the rest of the mind would of course be entirely autonomous. We would just be performing a tiny intervention in the mind, using technology to leapfrog thought to implant a conclusion—just one alone—into the mind.”

“But one is enough. Technology is now capable of modifying thoughts just like modifying a computer program. After the modifications, are people still people, or are they automatons?”

“You must have read A Clockwork Orange.”

“It’s a profound book.”

“General, your attitude is what I expected,” Hines said with a sigh. “I’ll continue my efforts in this area, the efforts a Wallfacer must exert.”

At the next PDC Wallfacer Project Hearing, Hines’s introduction of his mental seal triggered rare emotion in the assembly. The US representative’s concise evaluation expressed the feeling of the majority of the attendees: “With their extraordinary talent, Dr. Hines and Dr. Yamasuki have opened up a great door into darkness for humanity.”

The French representative left his seat in his excitement. “Which is more tragic for humanity: the loss of the ability and right to think freely, or defeat in this war?”

“Of course the latter is more tragic!” Hines retorted, standing up. “Because under the first condition, humanity at least has the chance of regaining independent thought!”

“I have doubts about that. If this thing really does get used… Look at all you Wallfacers,” the Russian representative said, raising his hands toward the ceiling. “Tyler wanted to deprive people of their lives, and you want to deprive them of their minds. What are you trying to do?”

His words caused a commotion.

The UK representative said, “Today we are merely proposing a motion, but I believe that the governments of all countries will be unanimous in banning this thing. Regardless of what happens, nothing is more evil than thought control.”

Hines said, “Why is it that everyone gets so sensitive at the mention of thought control? From commercial advertising to Hollywood culture, thought control is everywhere in modern society. You are, to use a Chinese phrase, mocking people for retreating a hundred paces when you’ve retreated fifty yourselves.”

The US representative said, “Dr. Hines, you haven’t gone just one hundred paces. You’ve walked up to the threshold of darkness and are threatening the very foundations of modern society.”

Another commotion swept through the assembly, and Hines knew that now was the time to seize control of the situation. He raised his voice and said, “Learn from the little boy!”

Sure enough, there was a lull in the noise after his utterance. “What little boy?” asked the rotating chair.

“I think we’re all familiar with this story: In a forest, a little boy got his leg caught under a fallen tree. He was alone at the time, and his leg was bleeding uncontrollably. It would have killed him, except that he made a decision that would shame every one of you delegates: He took up his saw and sawed off the leg that was pinned, then climbed into a car and found a hospital. He saved his own life.”

Hines saw with satisfaction that no one in the meeting room had attempted to interrupt him, at least. He went on. “Humanity is now facing a life-and-death problem. The life or death of our species and civilization as a whole. In these circumstances, how can we not give up a few things?”

Two light thumps sounded. The chair was banging the gavel, even though there wasn’t much noise in the assembly. The attendees were reminded that the German man had maintained an unusual silence during the course of the hearing. In a gentle voice, the chair said, “First of all, I hope that each of you can take a good look at the current situation. Investment in building a space defense system is constantly increasing, and the world economy is experiencing a sharp recession during this time of transition. The prediction that the standard of living will retreat a century may come to pass in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile, space defense–related scientific research is running up against the sophon block, and technological progress is slowing. This will trigger a new wave of defeatism in the international community, and this time, it may cause the total collapse of the Solar System Defense Program.”

The chair’s words calmed the assembly completely. After a silence of nearly half a minute, he continued. “Like each of you, when I learned of the existence of the mental seal, I felt the kind of fear and loathing I’d get from seeing a poisonous snake. But the most rational approach to take right now is to calm down and seriously consider it. When the devil does actually appear, the best option is calmness and rationality. At this hearing, we are simply putting forward a votable motion.”

Hines saw a thread of hope. “Mr. Chair, Representatives, since my initial proposal is unable to be put to an assembly vote, maybe we all can take a step back.”

“No matter how many steps back you take, thought control is absolutely unacceptable,” the French representative said, but in a slightly softer tone than before.

“And if it weren’t thought control? Perhaps something in between control and freedom?”

“The mental seal equals thought control,” the Japanese representative said.

“Not so. In thought control, there must be a controller and a subject. If someone voluntarily places a seal in their own mind, then tell me, where is the control in that?”

The assembly fell silent again. Feeling that success was near, Hines went on, “I propose that the mental seal be opened up, like a public facility. It would have but one proposition: belief in a victory in the war. Anyone willing to gain that faith through the use of the seal could, totally voluntarily, take advantage of the facility. Of course, all of this would be conducted under strict supervision.”

The assembly opened up a discussion and added to Hines’s basic proposal a fair number of new restrictions on the use of the mental seal. The most crucial of these was the one limiting its use to the space forces, because it was relatively easy for people to accept the idea of uniform thinking in the military. The hearing continued for nearly eight hours, the longest ever, and eventually formulated a motion to be voted on at the next meeting, and which the permanent member states would take back to their own governments.

“Shouldn’t we come up with a name for this facility?” asked the US representative.

“How about calling it the Faith Relief Center?” the UK representative said. The British humor of the odd name drew a burst of laughter.

“Take out ‘relief,’ and call it the Faith Center,” Hines said, in all earnestness.

At the gate to the Faith Center stood a reduced-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty. Its purpose was unknown—perhaps it was an attempt to use “liberty” to dilute the feeling of “control”—but the most notable thing about the statue was the altered poem on its base:

The golden faith of the poem was prominently inscribed in many different languages on a black granite stone called the Faith Monument that stood beside the statue:

The Faith Center had been open for three days, during which time Hines and Keiko Yamasuki had been waiting in the majestic foyer. The smallish building erected near the United Nations Plaza had become the latest tourist attraction, with people constantly coming up to take photos of the Statue of Liberty and the Faith Monument, but no one had entered. They all seemed to be maintaining a cautious distance.

“Do you get the feeling we’re running a struggling mom-and-pop store?” she said.

“My dear, one day this will be a sacred place,” Hines said solemnly.

On the afternoon of the third day, someone finally walked into the Faith Center. The bald, melancholy-looking, middle-aged man walked unsteadily and smelt of alcohol when he approached. “I’ve come to get faith,” he slurred out.

“The Faith Center is only open to members of national space forces. Please show your ID,” Keiko Yamasuki said while bowing. She seemed to Hines like a polite waitress at the Tokyo Plaza Hotel.

The man fished out his ID. “I’m a space force member. Civilian personnel. Is that okay?”

After inspecting the ID, Hines nodded. “Mr. Wilson, do you want to do it now?”

“That would be great,” he said, and nodded. “The… the thing you call a belief proposition. I’ve written it here. I want to believe this.” He pulled a neatly folded piece of paper from his breast pocket.

Keiko Yamasuki wanted to explain that according to the PDC resolution, the mental seal was only permitted to operate on one proposition, the one written on the monument at the gate. It had to be done exactly as written, and any alteration was prohibited. But Hines gently stopped her. He wanted to take a look at the proposition the man had submitted first. Unfolding the paper, he read what was written on it:

Keiko Yamasuki stifled a laugh, but Hines angrily crumpled up the paper and tossed it in the drunken man’s face. “Get the hell out!”

After Wilson left, another man passed the Faith Monument, the boundary beyond which ordinary tourists maintained their distance. As the man paced behind the monument, he soon came to Hines’s attention. Hines called Keiko Yamasuki over and said, “Look at him. He must be a soldier!”

“He looks mentally and physically exhausted,” she said.

“But he’s a soldier. Believe me,” he said. He was about to go out and talk to the man when he saw him heading up the steps. The man looked about Wilson’s age and, though his Asian features were handsome, it was like Keiko Yamasuki had said: He seemed a little melancholy, but in a different way from the previous hard-luck case. His melancholy looked lighter, but also deeper, as if it had been with him for years.

“My name is Wu Yue. I’d like to get belief,” the visitor said. Hines noticed how he referred to “belief” instead of “faith.”

Keiko Yamasuki bowed and repeated her earlier line: “The Faith Center is only open to members of every country’s space force. Please show your ID.”

Wu Yue did not move, but he said, “Sixteen years ago, I spent a month serving in the space force, and then I retired.”

“You served for one month? Well, if you don’t mind my asking, what was your reason for retiring?” Hines asked.

“I’m a defeatist. My superiors and I felt that I was no longer suited to work in the space force.”

“Defeatism is a common mentality. You’re evidently just an honest defeatist, and stated your own ideas forthrightly. Your colleagues who continued serving may have harbored an even stronger defeatist complex, but they just kept it hidden,” Keiko Yamasuki said.

“Maybe. But I’ve been lost all these years.”

“Because you left the service?”

Wu Yue shook his head. “No. I was born into a family of scholars, and the education I received made me treat humanity as a single unit, even after I became a soldier. I always felt that a soldier’s highest honor would be to fight for the entire human race. This opportunity came, but it was a war that we were destined to lose.”

Hines was about to say something, but was interrupted by Keiko Yamasuki. “Permit me to ask a question. How old are you?”

“Fifty-one.”

“If you are really able to return to the space force after obtaining faith in victory, don’t you think that at your age it’s a little late to start up in the service again?”

Hines could see that she didn’t have the heart to refuse him directly. No doubt this deeply melancholy man was very attractive to a woman’s eyes. But this didn’t worry him, because the man was obviously so consumed by his despair that nothing else had any meaning for him.

Wu Yue shook his head. “You misunderstand. I don’t want to gain faith in victory. I’m just looking for peace for my soul.”

Hines wanted to speak, but again Keiko Yamasuki stopped him.

Wu Yue went on. “I met my present wife when I was studying at the naval academy in Annapolis. She was a fervent Christian and faced the future with a calmness that made me jealous. She said that God had everything planned out, from the past to the future. We children of the Lord did not need to understand his plans. We just needed to firmly believe that this plan was the most reasonable one in the universe, and then live peacefully according to the Lord’s will.”

“So you mean that you’ve come to gain a belief in God?”

Wu Yue nodded. “I’ve written out my belief proposition. Please have a look.” He reached into his shirt pocket as he spoke.

Again Keiko Yamasuki stopped Hines from saying anything. She said to Wu Yue, “If that’s the case, then just go and believe. There’s no need to resort to such extreme, technological means.”

The former space force captain showed a trace of a wry smile. “I grew up under a materialist education. I’m a staunch atheist. Do you think gaining this belief would be easy for me?”

“Absolutely not!” Hines said, getting out in front of Keiko Yamasuki. He decided to clear things up as quickly as he could. “You ought to know that according to the UN resolution, the mental seal can only operate on one proposition.” As he spoke, he took out a large, exquisitely fashioned red card case and opened it up for Wu Yue to see. There, on the black velvet lining, in letters engraved in gold, was the victory oath from the Faith Monument. He said, “This is a faith book.” He took out a set of cases in different colors. “These are faith books in different languages. Mr. Wu, let me tell you how stringent the supervision is for use of the mental seal. To guarantee safe and reliable operation, the proposition is not put up on a display but is given to the volunteer to read from this primitive faith book. As a reflection of the voluntary principle, the specific procedure is completed by the volunteer. He opens up this faith book, then presses the Start button on the mental seal device. Prior to actually performing the procedure, the system will give three confirmation opportunities. Before each procedure, the faith book is inspected by a panel of ten special commissioners from the members of the UN Human Rights Commission and the permanent member states of the PDC. During the operation of the mental seal device, the ten-member panel will be on site to strictly supervise the entire affair. So, sir, your request can’t be fulfilled. Forget about your proposition for religious belief. Changing even one word in the faith book is a crime.”

“Then I’m sorry to have troubled you,” Wu Yue said, nodding. He appeared to have anticipated this outcome. As he turned to walk out, he appeared lonely and old from the back.

“The rest of his life will be hard,” Keiko Yamasuki said softly, with a voice full of tenderness.

“Sir!” Hines called, stopping Wu Yue just outside the door. He ran out to where the light of the setting sun was reflecting like fire off the Faith Monument and the glass-walled UN building in the distance. He squinted his eyes against the flames and said, “You might not believe me, but I nearly did the exact opposite.”

Wu Yue looked puzzled. Hines looked back and, seeing that Keiko Yamasuki had not followed him, took out a piece of paper from his pocket and opened it for Wu Yue. “This is the mental seal I wanted to apply to myself. I was hesitant, of course, and in the end didn’t do it.” The bold text on the paper read:

“Why?” asked Wu Yue, raising his head.

“Isn’t it obvious? Isn’t God dead? Screw the Lord’s plan. Screw his mild yoke!”

Wu Yue looked at Hines in silence for a moment, then turned and walked down the steps.

When Wu Yue walked into the shadow cast by the Faith Monument, Hines called after him, “Sir, I wish I could disguise my contempt for you, but I can’t.”

The next day, the people Hines and Keiko Yamasuki were waiting for finally started to arrive. In the bright sunshine that morning, four people walked in, three men with European faces and one woman with Asian features. Young, standing straight and tall, and walking at a steady pace, they looked confident and mature. But Hines and Keiko Yamasuki saw in their eyes something familiar, the same melancholy confusion that had been in Wu Yue’s.

They set their documents neatly down on the reception desk, and their leader said solemnly, “We’re space force officers, and we’ve come to get faith in victory.”

The mental seal process was quite fast. After the faith books were passed among the ten members of the oversight panel, each of whom carefully checked the contents, they signed their names to the notary certificate. Then, under their supervision, the first volunteer received the faith book and sat down in front of the mental seal scanner. In front of him was a small platform on which he placed the book, and which had a red button in the lower right-hand corner. When he opened the faith book, a voice asked, “Are you certain that you want to obtain a faith in this proposition? If so, please press the button. If not, please leave the scanning area.”

The question was repeated three times, and each time it was asked, the button glowed red. A positioning apparatus slowly contracted to fix the volunteer’s head in place, and then the voice said, “The mental seal procedure is ready to start. Please read the proposition silently and then press the button.”

When the button was pressed, it turned green, and after about half a minute, it went out. The voice said, “The mental seal procedure is complete.” The positioning apparatus separated, and then the volunteer got up and left.

After all four officers completed the procedure and returned to the foyer, Keiko Yamasuki carefully looked them over, confirming almost immediately that her perception of their improved moods was not just her imagination. The melancholy and confusion had disappeared from the four pairs of eyes, which now were serene as water.

“How do you feel?” she asked, smiling.

“Excellent,” one young officer said, returning her smile. “How it ought to be.”

When they left, the Asian woman turned around and added, “Doctor, I really feel great. Thank you.”

At that moment, the future was certain, at least in the minds of those four young people.

From that day forward, members of the space force came without pause to obtain faith—at first mostly on their own, but eventually in larger groups. They wore civilian clothes at first, but later most of them wore military uniforms. If more than five people came at a time, the supervisory panel convened a review meeting to verify that no one had been coerced.

One week later, more than a hundred space force members had obtained faith in victory through the mental seal. They ranged in rank from private to senior colonel, the highest rank permitted by national space forces to use the mental seal.

That night, in the moonlight at the Faith Monument, Hines said to Keiko Yamasuki, “Dear, we need to go.”

“To the future?”

“That’s right. We’re not any better than other scientists in the study of the mind, and we’ve accomplished everything we needed to. We have pushed forward the wheel of history, so now let’s go to the future and wait for it.”

“How far?”

“Very far, Keiko. Very far. To the day when the Trisolaran probes reach the Solar System.”

“Before we do that, let’s go back to that house in Tokyo for a while. After all, this age is going to be buried forever.”

“Of course, dear. I miss it too.”

Six months later, as Keiko Yamasuki sank into the deepening cold and was about to enter hibernation, the cold froze and filtered out the riot of noise in her mind. This brought the thread of her focused thoughts into sharp relief in the lonely darkness, like the moment ten years before when Luo Ji plunged into the icy lake. All of a sudden, her hazy thoughts became unusually clear, like the chilly sky in the dead of winter.

She wanted to shout for the hibernation to stop, but it was too late. The ultra-low temperatures had seeped into her body and she had lost the ability to produce sound.

The operators and doctors noticed that just as she was entering hibernation, her eyes suddenly opened a crack, revealing an expression full of horror and despair. If the cold hadn’t frozen her eyelids, her eyes would have been wide open. But this was just a normal reflex during the process that had been seen on previous hibernators, so they paid it no mind.

The UN PDC Wallfacer Project Hearing deliberated the stellar hydrogen bomb test.

The giant breakthrough in computing technology meant that computers were at last capable of handling the theoretical stellar model of a nuclear explosion developed over the past decade, and the manufacture of large-yield stellar hydrogen bombs could begin forthwith. The projected yield of the first bomb was the equivalent of 350 megatons of TNT, or seven times more powerful than the largest hydrogen bomb ever manufactured by humanity. It was impossible for this superbomb to be tested in the atmosphere, and a detonation in an underground shaft of the depth previously used would eject the surrounding rock into the air, so testing on Earth would require digging an ultra-deep shaft. But even detonating in an ultra-deep shaft would cause powerful shock waves to spread across the world and might have an unanticipated effect on a broad range of geological structures, possibly touching off disasters including earthquakes and tsunamis. Therefore, the stellar hydrogen bomb could only be tested in space. Yet it was impossible in high orbit, because at that distance, the electromagnetic pulse the bomb generated would have a catastrophic effect on Earth’s telecommunications and power systems. The ideal test location, then, was on the back side of the moon. However, Rey Diaz chose differently.

“I’ve decided to conduct the tests on Mercury,” he said.

This proposal surprised the representatives in attendance, and they voiced questions about the meaning of the plan.

“According to the basic principles of the Wallfacer plan, I do not have to explain,” he answered icily. “The tests should be conducted underground. We need to dig ultra-deep shafts on Mercury.”

The Russian representative said, “We can consider tests on the surface of Mercury, but underground tests are too expensive. Digging deep shafts there could cost a hundred times what a similar engineering project would cost on Earth. Besides, the effects of a nuclear bomb on the environment of Mercury would tell us nothing useful.”

“Even a surface test on Mercury is impossible!” the US representative said. “To date, Rey Diaz has consumed the most resources of all of the Wallfacers. The time has come to stop him!” This sentiment was echoed by representatives from the UK, France, and Germany.

Rey Diaz said with a laugh, “Even if I used as few resources as Dr. Luo, you’d still be keen to veto my plan.” He turned to the rotating chair. “I would ask the chair and each representative to remember that out of all the strategies proposed by the Wallfacers, my plan is most closely in harmony with mainstream defense, to the point that you could view it as part of the mainstream. In absolute numbers the consumption of resources might look large, but a considerable portion of that overlaps the mainstream. Therefore—”

The UK representative cut him off. “You still ought to explain why you need to conduct underground tests on Mercury. Unless you’re just doing it to spend money. We can’t find any explanation for it.”

“Mr. Chair, Representatives,” Rey Diaz countered calmly, “you may have noticed that the PDC no longer has even the barest respect for Wallfacers or for the Wallfacer principle. If we have to explain every detail of our plans, then how is the Wallfacer Project meaningful?” One by one, he turned his scorching gaze on every representative, forcing them to turn away.

He went on, “Even so, I am willing to offer an explanation of the issue just raised. The goal of conducting deep underground tests on Mercury is to blast out a large cave on the planet to serve as a future Mercury base. This is clearly the most economical way of conducting an engineering project of this kind.”

His words stirred up whispers, and one representative asked, “Wallfacer Rey Diaz, do you mean you want to use Mercury as the launch base for stellar hydrogen bombs?”

With confidence, Rey Diaz answered, “Yes. Current strategic theory in mainstream defense holds that emphasis should be placed on the outer planets, and so the inner planets, which are not believed to be defensively significant, have not been given sufficient attention. The Mercury base I have planned is intended to mend this weak link in mainstream defense.”

“He’s afraid of the sun, but he wants to go to the planet closest to it. Isn’t that a little strange?” the US representative said. There was a bit of laughter, followed by a warning from the chair.

“It doesn’t matter, Mr. Chair. I’ve grown accustomed to this lack of respect. I was used to it even before I became a Wallfacer,” Rey Diaz said with a wave of his hand. “But all of you should respect the facts at hand. When the outer planets and Earth have fallen, the Mercury base will be the last bastion of humanity. Backed by the sun and situated amid the cover of radiation, it will be the most rugged of positions.”

“Wallfacer Rey Diaz, does this mean that your plan’s entire significance lies in a last stand when humanity’s situation is already hopeless? This is quite consistent with your character,” the French representative said.

“Gentlemen, we can’t simply refuse to consider the final resistance,” Rey Diaz said gravely.

“Very well, Wallfacer Rey Diaz,” the chair said. “Now, would you be able to tell us, in your overall deployment scenario, how many stellar hydrogen bombs you’ll need, all told?”

“The more the better. Manufacture as many as the Earth has capacity to produce. The specific number depends on the yield that hydrogen bombs will be able to achieve in the future, but according to current figures, the first batch in the deployment plan requires at least a million.”

Laughter shook the auditorium at Rey Diaz’s words.

“Evidently Wallfacer Rey Diaz doesn’t just want to make a small sun. He wants to make a small galaxy!” the US representative said loudly. Then he leaned toward Rey Diaz. “Do you really think that the ocean’s protium, deuterium, and tritium were prepared just for you? Because of your perverted affection for the bomb, the Earth should be turned into a bomb workshop?”

By this point Rey Diaz was the only one in the assembly with a straight face. He waited quietly until the clamor he had sparked died down, and then said, one word at a time, “This is the ultimate war of the human race, so the number I ask for is not at all large. But I did anticipate today’s outcome. Nevertheless, I will work hard. I will build bombs. I will build as many as I can, I tell you. I will work hard and I won’t stop.”

In response, the representatives of the US, UK, and France put forth a joint proposal, P269, to terminate the strategic plan of Wallfacer Rey Diaz.

Only two colors were visible on the surface of Mercury: black and gold. The black was the planet’s land, and its low reflectance meant that even under close illumination from the fierce sun, it remained a sheet of black. The gold was the sun, which occupied a considerable portion of the sky. In its broad wheel you could clearly see the surging of its fiery seas and the sunspots drifting by like black clouds, and, at its edges, the graceful dance of solar prominences.

And on this hard chunk of rock suspended atop the sun’s fiery sea, humanity was planting another small sun.

With the completion of the space elevator, humanity had begun the large-scale exploration of the other planets in the Solar System. Manned spacecraft landings on Mars and the moons of Jupiter had not caused much of a stir because people knew that the purpose of these expeditions was much clearer and more practical than in the past: They were purely intended to establish bases for the defense of the Solar System. These voyages, which relied mainly on chemical-propulsion rockets and spacecraft, were merely the tiniest of steps toward that goal. Initial explorations focused primarily on the outer planets, but as the study of space strategy deepened, neglecting the strategic value of the inner planets was increasingly called into question. Hence the exploration of Venus and Mercury was stepped up, and so it was that the PDC narrowly passed Rey Diaz’s plan to test the stellar hydrogen bomb on Mercury.

Excavating the shaft through the rock of Mercury was the first large-scale engineering project humanity had undertaken on another planet in the Solar System. Because construction could only take place during Mercury’s night, in stretches of eighty-eight Earth days, the project would take three years to complete. However, in the end it only reached one-third of the projected depth, due to the discovery of an unusually hard layer farther down, a mixture of metal and rock. Continued excavation would be much slower and far more costly. Ultimately, it was decided to terminate the project. If tests were carried out at the present depth, the surrounding rock would most certainly be ejected by the blast and would form a crater, making it basically a watered-down atmospheric test. And because of the interference from the surrounding crust, it would be far harder to observe the test’s outcome than with a purely atmospheric test. But Rey Diaz thought that if a cover were fitted onto this crater, it could still serve as a base, and insisted on conducting the test underground at the current depth.

The test was carried out at dawn. Sunrise on Mercury was a process that took over ten hours, and a faint light had just appeared on the horizon. When the detonation countdown reached zero, rings of ripples centered on ground zero spread outward, and the ground on Mercury seemed momentarily to become soft as satin. Then, at the blast site, a mountain slowly rose like the back of a waking giant. When the peak had risen to around three thousand meters, the entire mountain exploded, sending billions of tons of mud and rock flying into the air in a towering display of rage by the ground toward the sky. And alongside the surging ground came the radiant light of the underground nuclear fireball, which shone on the rock and earth flying through the air to cause a grand spectacle of fireworks in the black Mercury sky. The fireball lasted for five minutes, as chunks of rock fell to the ground amid a nuclear glow, before it went out.

Ten hours after the conclusion of the blast, observers noticed that a ring had appeared around Mercury. This was due to the considerable amount of rock that had achieved cosmic velocity in the violent explosion and had turned into myriad satellites of various sizes. They spread out evenly in orbit, making Mercury the first ringed terrestrial planet. The ring was thin, and as it sparkled in the harsh light of the sun, it looked almost like someone had taken a highlighter to the planet.

Another proportion of the rocks achieved escape velocity and left Mercury behind entirely, becoming satellites of the sun in their own right and forming an extremely sparse asteroid belt in Mercury’s orbit.

Rey Diaz lived underground not out of any concern for security, but because of his heliophobia. The claustrophobic environment, far removed from the sunshine, made him feel a little more comfortable. He watched the live broadcast of the Mercury test from the basement where he lived. It wasn’t actually live, since the images took about seven minutes to reach Earth. When the blast on Mercury had concluded and the rock rain was still falling in the post-fireball darkness, he received a telephone call from the rotating chair of the PDC, who said that the tremendous power of the stellar hydrogen bombs had made a deep impression on the PDC leadership, and that the permanent member states had requested that the next Wallfacer hearing be held as soon as possible to discuss the bombs’ manufacture and deployment. The chair said that although the number of bombs Rey Diaz had requested was an impossibility, the major powers were indeed interested in the production of this weapon.

Over ten hours after the conclusion of the Mercury test, as he was watching Mercury’s new ring sparkling on the television, a guard’s voice came over the intercom to tell him that his psychiatrist had arrived for an appointment.

“I never asked for any psychiatrist. Send him away!” He felt exasperated, like he had suffered some great indignity.

“Don’t be like that, Mr. Rey Diaz,” said another, calmer voice, evidently the visitor’s. “I can let you see the sun…”

“Get the hell out,” he shouted, but then immediately changed his mind. “No. Seize that idiot and find out where he came from.”

“…because I know the cause of your condition,” the voice continued, still calm. “Mr. Rey Diaz, please believe me. You and I are the only ones in the world who know.”

At this, Rey Diaz suddenly grew alert, and said, “Let him in.” He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds through haggard eyes, then got up slowly and picked up a tie from the cluttered sofa, only to toss it back again. He walked over to the mirror, straightened his collar, and combed his hair with his hands, like he was preparing for a solemn event.

He knew that it was indeed a solemn event.

The visitor was a handsome middle-aged man who walked in but did not introduce himself. He frowned slightly at the room’s heavy odor of cigars and alcohol, then simply stood there calmly as Rey Diaz looked him over.

“Why do I have the feeling I’ve seen you before?” he said, as he looked at the visitor.

“That’s not strange, Mr. Rey Diaz. Everyone says I look like Superman, from the old movies.”

“Do you really believe you’re Superman?” Rey Diaz said. He sat down on the sofa, picked up a cigar, bit off the end, and began to light it.

“That question shows that you already know what kind of man I am. I’m not Superman, Mr. Rey Diaz. Nor are you.” As he spoke, the younger man took a step forward. Rey Diaz found that the man was standing directly in front of him, peering down at him through the cloud of smoke he had just exhaled. So he stood up.

The visitor said, “Wallfacer Manuel Rey Diaz, I am your Wallbreaker.”

Gloomily, Rey Diaz nodded.

“May I sit down?” the Wallbreaker asked.

“You may not,” Rey Diaz said, slowly blowing smoke in the other man’s face.

“Don’t be depressed,” the Wallbreaker said with a considerate smile.

“I’m not,” Rey Diaz said, his voice cold and hard like stone.

The Wallbreaker walked over to the wall and flipped a switch. Somewhere, ventilator fans started humming.

“Don’t mess with things around here,” Rey Diaz warned.

“You need a little fresh air. And, more than that, you need sun. I’m quite familiar with this room, Wallfacer Rey Diaz. In the images sent by the sophons I have often watched you pace back and forth like a caged beast. No one in the world has stared at you for as long as I have, and on those days, believe me, it wasn’t any easier for me.”

The Wallbreaker looked straight at Rey Diaz, whose expression was as blank as an ice sculpture, and then he went on. “Compared to Frederick Tyler, you are a brilliant strategist. A competent Wallfacer. Please trust that this is not flattery. I must admit that for quite some time, for nearly a decade, you had me fooled. Your mania for the superbomb, such an inefficient weapon in a space battle, successfully concealed your own strategic direction, and for a long while I couldn’t find any clue to crack your true strategy. I struggled in the maze that you laid down, and at one point almost despaired.” The Wallbreaker looked up at the ceiling, overcome by the memory of those difficult times. “Later, I thought of checking out information from before you became a Wallbreaker, but this wasn’t easy, because the sophons were unable to help. You know, in those days, only a limited number of sophons had reached Earth, and as a South American head of state you had not attracted their attention. So I had to resort to conventional means to gather materials. This took three years. In those materials, one man stood out: William Cosmo. You met him in secret on three occasions. The sophons did not record the content of your conversations, so I will never know, but for the head of a small, undeveloped country to meet three times with a Western astrophysicist is highly unusual. We now know that at that time you had already been preparing to become a Wallfacer.

“No doubt what interested you was the fruit of Dr. Cosmo’s research. How those results first came to your attention I am not clear on at this time, but you had a background in engineering, and you had the successful experience of your socialism-loving predecessor, who had equal enthusiasm for a nation ruled by engineers. This was a major reason why you became his successor. So you ought to have had the capability and sensitivity to notice the potential significance of Cosmo’s research.

“Once the Trisolar Crisis began, Dr. Cosmo’s research team worked on studying the atmosphere of the Trisolaran stellar system. They speculated that the atmosphere had been produced by a former planet that had collided with a star. As it collided, it broke apart the outer layers, its photosphere and troposphere, causing the stellar matter inside to be ejected into space and form a surrounding atmosphere. Due to the total irregularity of the system’s motion, there are times when the stars pass each other quite closely, and at those times, one star’s atmosphere is dispersed by the gravity of the other star, only to be replenished by eruptions on the stellar surface. These aren’t constant eruptions, more like volcanoes that experience sudden outbreaks. This is the reason for the continual contraction and expansion of the stars’ atmosphere. To prove this hypothesis, Cosmo searched the universe to find another star with an atmosphere that was ejected following a collision with a planet. In the third year of the Crisis Era, he succeeded.

“Dr. Cosmo’s team discovered planetary system 275E1, about eighty-four light-years from the Solar System. Hubble II had not gone into operation at that time, so they used the wobble method. By observing and calculating the wobble frequency and light mask, they learned that the planet was quite close to its parent star. At first, this discovery did not attract too much attention because the astronomy community had by then discovered more than two hundred planetary systems, but further observations revealed a shocking fact: The distance between planet and star was continually shrinking, and the rate of shrinkage was accelerating. This meant that humanity would, for the first time, observe a planet falling into a star. One year later—or, rather, eighty-four years prior to observation—it happened. Observational conditions at the time meant that the collision could only be determined based on the gravitational wobble and the periodic light mask. But then something wondrous happened: A spiral of matter appeared around the star, and this spiral flow continued to expand. It looked like a mainspring slowly unwinding with the star as its center. Cosmo and his colleagues realized that the material flow had been ejected from the planet’s crash point. The chunk of rock had crashed through the shell of that distant sun and ejected its stellar matter into space, where, due to the star’s own rotation, it formed a spiral.

“There were several key pieces of data here, sir. The star is a yellow G2 class with an absolute magnitude of 4.3 and a diameter of 1.2 million kilometers. Quite similar to our sun. The planet was about four percent of the mass of Earth, or a little smaller than Mercury, and the spiral cloud of material produced from the collision had a radius of up to three AU, more than the distance between our sun and the asteroid belt.

“And it was in this discovery that I found the crack with which to break open your real strategic plan. Now, as your Wallbreaker, I will explain your grand strategy.

“Supposing that you are ultimately able to obtain those million or more stellar hydrogen bombs, you will, as you promised to the PDC, stockpile them all on Mercury. If the bombs are detonated in the rock of Mercury, they’ll be like a turbo-engine decelerating the planet. Eventually its speed will no longer be able to keep it in low orbit and it will fall into the sun. Next, what happened on 275E1 eighty-four light-years away is reenacted here: Mercury punctures the sun’s convective shell and ejects a huge amount of stellar matter from its radiation layer into space at high speed; which, as the sun rotates, forms a spiral atmosphere similar to that in 275E1. The sun differs from the Trisolaran system in that, as a lone star, it will never cross paths with another star, and therefore its atmosphere will continue to increase uninhibited until it becomes even thicker than the atmosphere of those stars. This was also confirmed by observations of 275E1. When the spiral flow of ejected matter expands outward from the sun like an unwound mainspring, its thickness eventually passes Mars’s orbit, at which point a magnificent chain reaction begins.

“First, three terrestrial planets—Venus, Earth, and Mars—pass through the sun’s spiraling atmosphere, losing speed due to the atmospheric friction and turning into three giant meteors that eventually crash into the sun. But well before this happens, the Earth’s atmosphere is stripped away by the intense friction of the solar matter. The oceans evaporate, and the lost atmosphere and evaporated oceans turn the Earth into a giant comet whose tail extends along its orbit to wrap all the way around the sun. The surface of the Earth returns to the fiery magma sea of its birth, where no life can survive.

“When Venus, Earth, and Mars crash into the sun, it exacerbates the sun’s ejection of solar matter into space. The single spiral flow of matter increases to four flows. Because the total mass of those three planets is forty times that of Mercury, and because their higher orbits mean they impact the sun at a much higher speed, each new spiral is ejected with a ferocity tens of times greater than Mercury’s. The existing spiral atmosphere rapidly expands until its edge approaches the orbit of Jupiter.

“Friction produces only a very small deceleration effect on the huge mass of Jupiter, so it is quite some time before the spiral has a noticeable effect on Jupiter’s orbit. But Jupiter’s satellites meet one of the following two fates: friction strips them away from Jupiter and they lose speed and fall into the sun, or they lose speed in Jovian orbit and fall into the liquid planet.

“As the chain reaction continues, the decrease in speed from the spiral atmosphere, though small, is still present, and Jupiter’s orbit gradually decays. This causes it to pass through an increasingly dense atmosphere whose friction accelerates its loss in speed, thereby causing the orbit to decay even more quickly…. In this way, Jupiter eventually falls into the sun, too. Its mass is six hundred times that of the previous four planets, and the impact that such a massive body makes on the sun will, even according to the most conservative reasoning, produce an even more violent ejection of stellar matter, increasing the density of the spiral atmosphere and exacerbating the bitter cold of Uranus and Neptune. But another possibility is more likely: The fall of the Jovian giant pushes the edge of the spiral atmosphere out to the orbit of Uranus or even Neptune, and though the atmosphere is quite thin at the top, friction’s decelerating effects pull these two planets and their satellites toward the sun, too. What state the sun will be in and how the Solar System will have been transformed after the chain reaction finishes and the four dense terrestrial planets and four gas giants are consumed is unknowable. But one thing is certain: For life and for civilization, this will be a hell even crueler than attack by Trisolaris.

“As for Trisolaris, the Solar System is their only hope before their planet is engulfed by their stars. There is no other world they can migrate to in time, and therefore, their civilization will follow humanity into total destruction.

“This is your strategy: death for both sides. Once everything is prepared, with all of the stellar hydrogen bombs in place on Mercury, you will use it to coerce Trisolaris to surrender and gain the ultimate victory for humanity.

“What I’ve just presented is the outcome of the years of work that I, your Wallbreaker, have performed. I am not seeking your opinion or critique, because I know that all of this is true.”

As the Wallbreaker spoke, Rey Diaz had been listening quietly. The cigar in his hand was more than halfway gone, and he now turned it about as if appreciating the glow of the tip.

The Wallbreaker sat down on the sofa, close beside him. Like a teacher evaluating a student’s homework, he continued unfatigued: “Mr. Rey Diaz, I said you are a brilliant strategist, or at least you demonstrated many excellent qualities in the formulation and implementation of this plan.

“For one thing, you took advantage of your own background. Right now, people clearly remember the humiliations you and your country suffered when the Orinoco nuclear facility was forced to be taken down as you were developing nuclear energy. The whole world saw your gloomy face, and you took advantage of outside perceptions of your paranoia about nuclear weapons to reduce or even eliminate any possible suspicion.

“But every detail in the execution of your plan demonstrates your talent as well. I will mention but one example: During the Mercury test, you wanted the rock to be blasted into the sky, but you insisted on excavating an ultra-deep shaft in a farsighted gambit. You quite precisely understood the tolerance of the PDC’s permanent member states for the cost of this enormous undertaking, and that is admirable.

“But you had one major slipup. Why did the first test have to be carried out on Mercury? There would have been plenty of time to bring the bombs there in a later phase, but maybe you got impatient and wanted to see the outcome of a stellar hydrogen bomb blast there. You saw it: lots of rock matter blasted to escape velocity, perhaps even exceeding your expectations. You were satisfied. But this provided the final confirmation of my hypothesis.

“Yes, Mr. Rey Diaz, even given all my previous work, without that final event I might never have been able to determine your true strategic intentions. The notion was too mad. But it was grand, and even beautiful. If the chain reaction triggered by Mercury’s fall actually took place, then it would be the most magnificent movement of the entire symphony of the Solar System… although, unfortunately, humanity would only be able to enjoy the first section. Mr. Rey Diaz, you are a Wallfacer with the makings of a god. It is my honor to become your Wallbreaker.”

The Wallbreaker stood up and offered Rey Diaz a genial bow.

Rey Diaz did not look at him. He took a puff of his cigar and blew out the smoke as he continued to examine it. “Fine. Then I’ll ask the question that Tyler asked.”

The Wallbreaker asked the question for him. “If what I say is true, then so what?”

Rey Diaz stared at the lit end of the cigar and nodded.

“My answer is the same as Tyler’s Wallbreaker’s: The Lord does not care.”

Rey Diaz lifted his eyes from the cigar and looked questioningly at his Wallbreaker.

“You look crude, but your mind is sharp. Yet in the depths of your soul, you’re still crude. Your nature is that of a crude man. And this crudeness is revealed in the basis of this strategic plan. It’s greedy. Humanity doesn’t have the ability to manufacture so many stellar hydrogen bombs. Even if all of Earth’s industrial resources were exhausted, it wouldn’t produce even one-tenth of that number. And a million stellar hydrogen bombs is far from enough to decelerate Mercury into the sun. With a soldier’s recklessness, you formulated this impossible plan, and then stubbornly carried it forward step by step with the wily calculations of a superior strategist. Wallfacer Rey Diaz, this is truly a tragedy.”

As Rey Diaz looked at the Wallbreaker, his expression gradually filled with an elusive softness, and hints of convulsions showed on his coarsely lined face, gradually taking shape, until at last his suppressed laughter erupted.

“Ha ha ha ha ha…” he laughed, pointing at the Wallbreaker. “Superman! Ha ha ha ha. I remember now. That… that old Superman. He could fly, and he could reverse the rotation of the Earth, but when he was riding a horse… ha ha ha ha… when he was riding a horse, he fell and broke his neck… ah ha ha ha…”

“It was Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman, who fell and broke his neck,” the Wallbreaker corrected him, quietly.

“Do you imagine… imagine that your fate will be better than his? Ha ha ha ha…”

“Since coming here, I have no regard for my fate. I’ve lived a full life,” the Wallbreaker said evenly. “But you, Mr. Rey Diaz, ought to think about your own fate.”

“You’ll die first,” Rey Diaz said, smiling with his entire face as he pressed the cigar end directly between the Wallbreaker’s eyes. Then, when the Wallbreaker was covering his face with his hands, Rey Diaz took up a military-issue belt from the sofa, wrapped it around the Wallbreaker’s neck, and strangled him with every ounce of his strength. Although the Wallbreaker was young, he had no way to defend himself against Rey Diaz’s agile strength, and was thrown to the floor by his neck. Rey Diaz bellowed, “I’ll wring your neck! You bastard! Who sent you here to play smart? Who the hell are you? Bastard! I’ll wring your neck!” He tightened the belt and slammed the Wallbreaker’s head into the ground repeatedly, to the crunch of teeth smacking into the floor. When the guards burst in to separate them, the Wallbreaker’s face was purple, he was foaming at the mouth, and his eyes were protruding like a goldfish’s.

Rey Diaz, still in a fury, struggled with the guards as he continued to shout, “Wring his neck! String him up and hang him! Right now! This is part of the plan! Do you fucking hear me? Part of the plan!”

But the three guards did not carry out his order. One of them held Rey Diaz tightly while the other two lifted up the Wallbreaker, who had recovered his breath somewhat, and started to carry him out.

“Just wait, you bastard. You won’t die easy,” he said, abandoning his efforts to escape the guard and have another go at the Wallbreaker. He let out a long sigh.

The Wallbreaker looked back over the guard’s shoulder, a smile on his bruised and swollen face. He opened up a mouth that was missing several teeth and said, “I’ve lived a full life.”

As the meeting commenced, the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany put up another proposition, this one demanding the immediate suspension of Rey Diaz’s position as Wallfacer and his trial before the International Court of Justice for crimes against humanity.

The US representative declared, “After substantial investigation, we believe that Rey Diaz’s strategic intent as disclosed by the Wallbreaker is credible. What we are facing now is a person whose crime dwarfs all of the crimes ever committed in human history. We were unable to find a single law applicable to his crime, so we recommend that the crime of Extinction of Life on Earth be added to international law, and that Rey Diaz be tried under it.”

Rey Diaz appeared quite relaxed at the hearing. Sneering, he said to the US representative, “You’ve been trying to get rid of me, haven’t you? Ever since the Wallfacer Project began, you have all applied a double standard to the Wallfacers. I’m the one you like least.”

The UK representative retorted, “Wallfacer Rey Diaz’s claim is baseless. In fact, the countries he is accusing are the ones who invested the most money into his plan, far exceeding what they invested in the other three Wallfacers.”

“Sure,” Rey Diaz said with a nod, “but the real reason you invested so heavily in my plan is because you wanted to get your hands on the stellar hydrogen bombs.”

“Ridiculous! What would we do with them?” the US representative shot back. “They’re incredibly inefficient weapons in a space battle, and on the Earth, there’s no practical significance even for those old twenty-megaton hydrogen bombs, much less a three-hundred-megaton monster.”

Rey Diaz responded calmly, “But the bombs will be the most effective weapon in battles on other planets, particularly in wars among humans. On the desolate surface of other planets, there’s no need to be concerned with civilian casualties or environmental damage, so you’re free to carry out wide-area destruction, or even a devastating sweep of the entire surface. Here’s where the stellar hydrogen bombs will prove useful. You must have anticipated that, as humanity expands into the Solar System, Earth’s conflicts will expand outward as well. This won’t change even with Trisolaris as a common enemy, and you’re preparing for it. Right now, it’s politically indefensible to develop superweapons for use against humans, so you took advantage of me to make them.”

The US representative said, “That’s the preposterous logic of a terrorist and a dictator. Rey Diaz is the kind of man who, granted the status and power of a Wallfacer, turns the Wallfacer Project into as big a danger as the Trisolaran invasion. We must take decisive action to correct this mistake.”

“They’re as good as their word,” Rey Diaz said, turning to Garanin, the incumbent rotating chair. “The CIA has men waiting outside to arrest me as soon as I go outside after this hearing.”

The rotating chair glanced in the direction of the US representative, who was fiddling intently with his pen. Garanin had first taken office at the start of the Wallfacer Project, and even he had forgotten the number of short terms in office he had served during the ensuing two decades. But this was the last time. Now white-haired, he was about to retire.

“Wallfacer Rey Diaz, if what you say is true, then that is inappropriate. So long as the principles of the Wallfacer Project still hold, Wallfacers have legal immunity, and none of their words and actions can be used as evidence to charge them of a crime,” he said.

“Additionally, please remember that this is international territory,” the Japanese representative said.

“So does that mean,” the US representative said, raising a pencil, “that even when Rey Diaz is about to detonate the million superbombs he’s buried on Mercury, society still won’t be able to charge him with a crime?”

“According to the relevant provisions in the Wallfacer Act, placing limitations and curbs on the strategic plans of Wallfacers who exhibit dangerous tendencies is an entirely separate matter from the Wallfacer’s own legal immunity,” Garanin said.

“Rey Diaz’s crimes have crossed outside the boundary of legal immunity. He must be punished. This is a precondition for the continued existence of the Wallfacer Project,” the UK representative said.

“May I remind the chair and the representatives,” Rey Diaz said, rising from his seat, “that this is a PDC Wallfacer hearing, and that I’m not on trial.”

“You’ll stand in court soon,” the US representative said, with a chilly smile.

“I agree with Wallfacer Rey Diaz. We should return to the discussion of his strategic plan,” Garanin said, seizing the opportunity to temporarily bypass the thorny issue.

The Japanese representative broke his silence. “From the way it looks now, the representatives have reached a consensus on the following point: Rey Diaz’s strategic plan exhibits dangerous tendencies toward clear violations of human rights, and according to the relevant principles in the Wallfacer Act, it should be stopped.”

“Then Proposition P269, proposed at the previous Wallfacer hearing, regarding halting Rey Diaz’s strategic plan, can now be put to a vote,” Garanin said.

“Mr. Chair, wait one moment.” Rey Diaz raised his hand. “Before the vote, I hope I might be able to offer a final explanation of some of the details of my plan.”

“If they’re just details, is this really necessary?” someone asked.

“Save it for court,” the UK representative said sarcastically.

“No, these details are important,” Rey Diaz persisted. “Right now, let us assume that what the Wallbreaker has disclosed about my strategic intentions is true. One representative spoke of the moment when the million hydrogen bombs deployed on Mercury are ready to be detonated, at which point I will face the omnipresent sophons and declare to Trisolaris humanity’s intent to die with them. What will happen then?”

“The Trisolarans’ reaction can’t be predicted, but on Earth, it’s certain that billions of people will want to wring your neck, just like you did to that Wallbreaker,” the French representative said.

“Exactly. So I took certain measures to deal with such a situation. Take a look at this.” Rey Diaz raised his left hand and displayed his wristwatch to the assembly. It was entirely black, and the dial was twice as large and thick as a normal men’s watch, although it didn’t appear large on his thick wrist. “This is a transmitter sending a signal through a space link directly to Mercury.”

“You’ll use it to send the detonation signal?” someone asked.

“Precisely the opposite. It sends a non-detonation signal.”

His words focused the attention of the entire assembly. He went on: “The system is code-named ‘cradle,’ meaning that when the cradle stops rocking, the baby will wake. It sends a continuous signal, received continuously on Mercury. If the signal is interrupted, then the system will immediately detonate the hydrogen bomb.”

“It’s called a dead-man’s switch,” the US representative said stoically. “In the Cold War there was research into using anti-triggers and dead-man’s switches on strategic nukes, but they were never implemented. Only a madman would actually do it.”

Rey Diaz brought down his left hand and covered the cradle with his sleeve. “I was taught this wonderful idea not by an expert in nuclear strategy but by an American film. In it, a man has one of these gadgets that sends out a continuous signal, but if his heart stops beating, the signal is terminated. Another man has a bomb strapped to him that’s impossible to remove, and if the bomb doesn’t receive the signal, it’ll explode. So even though this hapless fool doesn’t like the first guy, he has to do everything he can to protect him…. I like watching American blockbusters. Even today I can still recognize the old version of Superman.”

“Do you mean that this device is tied to your heartbeat?” the Japanese representative asked. He reached over to Rey Diaz, who was standing next to him, to touch the device under his sleeve, but Rey Diaz moved his arm and stood a bit farther away.

“Of course. But the cradle is more advanced and refined than that. It monitors not just the heartbeat but lots of other physiological indicators such as blood pressure, body temperature, and so forth, and conducts a comprehensive analysis of these parameters. If they’re not normal, then it immediately stops the anti-trigger signal in the dead-man’s switch. It can also recognize many of my simple voice commands.”

A nervous-looking man entered the auditorium and whispered something into Garanin’s ear. Before he had finished whispering, Garanin glanced up at Rey Diaz with a peculiar look in his eyes, which did not escape the keen-eyed representatives.

“There’s a way to disarm your cradle. Countermeasures for anti-triggers were studied during the Cold War, too,” the US representative said.

“It’s not my cradle. It’s the cradle for those hydrogen bombs. If the cradle stops rocking, they’ll wake up,” Rey Diaz said.

“I’ve thought of the same technique,” the German representative said. “When the signal is transmitted from your watch to Mercury, it must pass through a complicated communications link. Destroying or shielding any node, then using a false signal source to continue to transmit the anti-trigger signal farther down the chain, will render your cradle system useless.”

“That is indeed a problem,” Rey Diaz said, with a nod at the German representative. “Without the sophons, the problem is easily solved. All the nodes are loaded with an identical encryption algorithm that generates every signal sent. To the outside world, it looks as if the signal values are random and different every time, but the cradle’s sender and recipient produce a sequence of values that are identical. Only when the recipient receives a signal corresponding to its own sequence is the signal considered valid. Without this encryption algorithm, the signal sent out by your false source won’t match the recipient’s sequence. But the damn sophons can detect the algorithm.”

“You’ve perhaps come up with another approach?” someone asked.

“A crude approach. Me, all my approaches are clumsy and crude,” Rey Diaz said, with a self-mocking laugh. “I have increased the sensitivity of each node’s monitoring of its own state. Specifically, each communication node is composed of several units that may be separated by a large distance, but are connected into a whole by continuous communication. If any one unit fails, the entire node will issue a command terminating the anti-trigger, after which, even if the false signal source resumes sending a signal to the next node, it will not be acknowledged. The monitoring of every unit can achieve a microsecond level of accuracy, which means that—using the German representative’s approach—every unit of a node must be simultaneously destroyed and the signal resumed from the false signal source within the space of a microsecond. Every node is composed of at least three units, but may have dozens of them. These units are separated by a distance of about three hundred kilometers. Each one is built to be extremely rugged, and it will issue its warning upon any outside touch. Causing these units to fail within the space of a microsecond might be possible for the Trisolarans, but it’s not currently possible for humans.”

His final sentence put everyone on alert.

“I have just received a report that the thing on Rey Diaz’s wrist has been sending out an electromagnetic signal,” Garanin said. The atmosphere of the assembly turned tense at the news. “I’d like to ask you, Wallfacer Rey Diaz: Is the signal from your wristwatch being sent to Mercury?”

Rey Diaz chuckled a few times, then said, “Why would I be sending it to Mercury? There’s nothing there but a giant pit. Besides, the cradle’s space communication link hasn’t been set up yet. No, no, no. You don’t need to worry. The signal isn’t going to Mercury. It’s going somewhere in New York City, very close to us.”

The air froze, and everyone in the assembly, apart from Rey Diaz, stood as shocked as wooden chickens.

“If the signal sustaining the cradle is terminated, what will it trigger?” the UK representative asked sharply, no longer attempting to mask his tension.

“Oh, something will be triggered, all right,” Rey Diaz said to him with a broad laugh. “I’ve been a Wallfacer for more than twenty years, and I’ve always been able to get a few things of my own.”

“Well then, Mr. Rey Diaz, would you be able to answer an even more direct question?” the French representative said. He looked entirely calm, but there was a tremble in his voice. “How many lives will you, or will we, be responsible for?”

Rey Diaz widened his eyes at the Frenchman, as if he thought the question bizarre. “What? The number of people makes a difference? I thought all of you here were respectable gentlemen who prize human rights above all. What’s the difference between one life and 8.2 million? If it’s the former, then you don’t have to respect it?”

The US representative stood up and said, “More than twenty years ago when the Wallfacer Project began, we pointed out what he was.” Pointing a finger at Rey Diaz and spraying saliva as he spoke, he strove to contain himself, but ended up losing control. “He’s a terrorist. An evil, filthy terrorist! A devil! You unstopped the bottle and let him loose, and you must take responsibility! The UN must be held responsible!” he shouted hysterically, sending his papers flying.

“Calm down, Mr. Representative,” Rey Diaz said with a slight smile. “The cradle is very sensitive to my physiological indices. If I were to go into hysterics like you, if my mood wavered, it would immediately stop sending the anti-trigger signal. So you, and all of you sitting here, shouldn’t make me too upset. It would be better for all of us if you could try and keep me happy.”

“What are your conditions?” Garanin asked softly.

A bit of sadness crept into the smile on Rey Diaz’s face as he turned toward Garanin and shook his head. “Mr. Chair, what other conditions could I name? To leave here and return to my own country. A charter plane is waiting for me at Kennedy Airport.”

The assembly was silent. Unconsciously, they had all gradually turned their attention from Rey Diaz to the US representative, who, unable to stand all the eyes on him, threw himself back into his chair and hissed, “Get the hell out.”

Rey Diaz slowly nodded, then stood up and walked out.

“Mr. Rey Diaz, I’ll take you home,” Garanin said, leaving the rostrum.

Rey Diaz stood waiting for Garanin as he walked over, less nimbly than before. “Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thought you might like to get out of here too.”

The two were at the door when Rey Diaz grabbed Garanin and turned with him back toward the auditorium. “Gentlemen, I won’t miss this place. I’ve wasted these two decades, and no one here understands me. I want to go back to my homeland, back to my people. Yes, my homeland and my people. I miss them.”

To everyone’s surprise, the big man’s eyes shone with tears. At last he said, “I want to go back to my homeland. This is not part of the plan.”

When he walked out the door of the UN General Assembly building, Rey Diaz opened his arms wide to the sun and called out with relish, “Ah, my sun!” His two-decade-long heliophobia had vanished.

Rey Diaz’s flight took off, and crossed the eastern coastline to fly over the vast Atlantic Ocean.

In the cabin, Garanin said to him, “With me here, this aircraft is safe. Please tell me the location of the device you have connected to the dead-man’s switch.”

“There’s no device. There’s nothing. It was just a trick to escape.” Rey Diaz took off his watch and handed it to Garanin. “This is just a simple transmitter converted from a Motorola phone. It’s not connected to my heartbeat, either. It’s been turned off. Keep it as a souvenir.”

For a long time neither of them spoke. Then Garanin sighed and said, “How did this happen? The Wallfacers’ privilege of sealed-off strategic thinking was meant to be used against the sophons and Trisolaris. But you and Tyler both used it against humanity.”

“There’s nothing strange about that,” Rey Diaz said. He sat next to the window, enjoying the sunlight shining in from the outside. “Right now, the greatest obstacle to humanity’s survival comes from itself.”

Six hours later, the plane touched down at Caracas International Airport on the Caribbean coast. Garanin did not get off. He would be taking the plane back to the UN.

When they parted, Rey Diaz said, “Don’t abort the Wallfacer Project. It really is a hope amid this war. There are still two Wallfacers. Please wish them the best for me.”

“I won’t be seeing them, either,” Garanin said, with emotion. By the time Rey Diaz walked off, leaving him alone in the cabin, he was in tears.

The sky over Caracas was as clear as in New York. Rey Diaz walked down the airstair and smelled the familiar tropical atmosphere, then bent down and gave a long kiss to the ground of his homeland. Then, guarded by a large detachment of military police, he took a motorcade to the city. After half an hour on a winding mountain road, they entered the capital and drove up to the city center and Plaza Bolívar. At the statue of Simón Bolívar, Rey Diaz got out of the car and stood on the statue’s base. Above him on horseback was the great armor-clad hero who had defeated the Spanish and tried to establish a unified Republic of Gran Colombia in South America. In front of him, a crowd of frenetic people boiled under the sun, swelling forward, only to be met with the vigorous resistance of the military police. Shots were fired into the air, but the tide of people eventually surged past the police line and poured toward the living Bolívar at the foot of the statue.

Rey Diaz held up his hands, and, with tears in his eyes, called out to the crowd in a voice dripping with emotion, “Ah, my people!”

The first stone thrown by his people struck him on his outstretched left hand, the second hit him in the chest, and the third smashed into his forehead and nearly knocked him out. After that, the people’s stones came like raindrops, and had practically buried his lifeless body by the end. The last stone that hit Wallfacer Rey Diaz was thrown by an old woman, who struggled to carry it up to his corpse, then said, in Spanish, “Evildoer! You would kill everyone. My grandson would have been there. You’d have killed my grandson!”

Then, using all the strength in her trembling hands, she slammed her stone against Rey Diaz’s broken skull, where it lay exposed beneath the pile of rocks.

Time is the one thing that can’t be stopped. Like a sharp blade, it silently cuts through hard and soft, constantly advancing. Nothing is capable of jolting it even the slightest bit, but it changes everything.

The same year as the Mercury test, Chang Weisi retired. In his final media appearance, he frankly acknowledged that he himself had no confidence in victory, but this did not affect history’s high opinion of the work of the space force’s first commander. Working for so many years in a state of anxiety had damaged his health, and he died at the age of sixty-eight. The general was lucid on his deathbed and mentioned Zhang Beihai’s name many times.

After leaving her second term in office, Secretary General Say launched the Human Memorial Project, whose goal was the comprehensive collection of data and commemorative artifacts of human civilization that would ultimately be sent out into the cosmos on unmanned spacecraft. The project’s most influential component was called the Human Diary, a Web site that was set up to allow as many people as possible to record their lifetimes in the form of text and images from their everyday lives, to become part of the data of civilization. The Human Diary Web site eventually grew to have more than two billion users and formed the largest-ever body of information on the Internet. Later, the PDC, believing that the Human Memorial Project contributed to defeatism, passed a resolution stopping its further development, and even equated it with Escapism. But Say continued to pour her individual efforts into the project until she passed away at the age of eighty-four.

After retirement, Garanin and Kent made the same choice: to seclude themselves in that Garden of Eden in northern Europe where Luo Ji had lived for five years. They were never again seen by the outside world, and no one even knew the exact date they died. But one thing was certain: They lived a long time. Some said that the two of them reached the century mark before dying a natural death.

Just as Keiko Yamasuki had predicted, Wu Yue spent the remainder of his life in depression and confusion. He worked for more than a decade on the Human Memorial Project but was unable to find any solace in it, and he passed away in loneliness at the age of seventy-seven. Like Chang Weisi, Wu Yue had Zhang Beihai’s name on his lips in his final moments. They pinned their shared hopes for the future on the stalwart warrior now hibernating through time.

Dr. Albert Ringier and General Fitzroy both lived into their eighties and saw the completion of the hundred-meter Hubble III Space Telescope, which they used to look at the planet Trisolaris. But they never again saw the Trisolaran Fleet or the probes now flying ahead of it. They did not live long enough for them to cross the third patch of snow.

The lives of ordinary people continued and ended as well. Out of the three old Beijing neighbors, Miao Fuquan was the first to depart, passing away at the age of seventy-five. He really did have his son bury him two hundred meters down an abandoned mine, and his son obeyed his last wishes to blow up the mine wall and erect a tombstone to remember him. According to his father’s will, the last generation before the Doomsday Battle was supposed to clear out the tombstone, and if humanity won, then it could be restored to its original location. But, in fact, less than half a century after his death, the area over the mine shaft became a desert. The tombstone disappeared, the mine’s location was lost, and the Miao family’s descendants couldn’t be bothered to look for it.

Zhang Yuanchao died of illness like an ordinary person at the age of eighty, and, like an ordinary person, he was cremated. His ashes were laid in an ordinary rectangular slot on a long rack in a public cemetery.

Yang Jinwen lived till ninety-two, and the alloy vessel containing his remains headed out of the Solar System and into the vast cosmos at the third cosmic velocity. This consumed all of his savings.

But Ding Yi lived on. After the breakthrough in controlled fusion technology, he turned his attention to theoretical physics, looking for ways to escape sophon interference in high-energy particle physics experiments. He had no success. When he reached his seventies, he had, like other physicists, abandoned all hope of the possibility of a breakthrough. He entered hibernation and planned to wake at the Doomsday Battle. His sole desire was to be able to see with his own eyes the superior technology of Trisolaris.

In the century following the start of the Trisolar Crisis, everyone who had lived through the Golden Age passed away. It was an era that was constantly recalled, and the old folks who had lived through those grand times chewed over their memories of it like ruminants, savoring the flavors. They always closed with one line: “Ah, if only we knew how to cherish things back then.” Young people would listen to their stories with a mixture of envy and skepticism. That fabled peace, prosperity, and happiness, that ideal utopia free from care: Did it ever really exist?

As the elderly passed away, the departed Golden Shore vanished into the smoke of history. The ship of human civilization floated alone in the vast ocean, surrounded on all sides by endless, sinister waves, and no one knew if there even was an opposite shore.