The Three-Body Problem

21 Rebels of Earth

There were many more attendees this time than at the last Three Body meet-up. They met at the employee cafeteria of a chemical plant. The factory had already been moved elsewhere, and the interior of the building, which was about to be demolished, was worn out but spacious. About three hundred people were gathered here, and Wang Miao noticed many familiar faces: celebrities and elites of various fields; famous scientists, writers, politicians, and so on.

The first thing to attract Wang’s attention was the strange device at the center of the cafeteria. Three silver spheres, each slightly smaller than a bowling ball, hovered and swirled over a metal base. Wang guessed the device was probably based on magnetic levitation. The orbits of the three spheres were completely random: a real-life version of the three-body problem.

The others didn’t pay much mind to the artistic portrayal of the three-body problem. Instead, they focused on Pan Han, who was standing on top of a broken table in the middle of the cafeteria.

“Did you murder comrade Shen Yufei?” a man asked.

“Yes,” Pan said, perfectly calm. “It’s because the Adventists have traitors like her in our midst that the Organization faces the crisis it does today.”

“Who gave you the right to kill?”

“I did it out of a sense of duty to the Organization.”

“Duty? I think you’ve always had malice in your heart!”

“What do you mean by that?”

“What has the Environment Branch done under your leadership? Your charge is to exploit and create environmental problems to make the population loathe science and modern industry. But in reality, you’ve only used our Lord’s technology and predictions to gain riches and fame for yourself!”

“Do you think I became famous for myself? To my eyes, the entire human race is a pile of garbage. Why would I care what they think? But if I’m not famous, how do I direct and channel their thinking?”

“You always pick the easy tasks. What you’ve done could have been better accomplished by regular environmentalists. They’re more sincere and passionate than you, and with just a little guidance, we could easily take advantage of their actions. Your Environment Branch should be creating environmental disasters and then exploiting them. For example, disseminating poison in reservoirs, leaking toxic waste from chemical plants… have you done any of those? No, not a single one!”

“We had devised numerous programs and plans, but the commander vetoed them all. Anyway, such acts would have been stupid, at least until recently. The Biology and Medicine Branch once created a catastrophe from the overuse of antibiotics, but that was soon detected. And the rash actions of the European Detachment almost drew attention to us.”

“Talk about drawing attention to us—you just murdered someone!”

“Listen to me, comrades! Sooner or later, it would have been unavoidable. You must already know that the governments of the world are preparing for war. In Europe and North America, they’re already cracking down on the Organization. Once the crackdown begins here, the Redemptionists will no doubt side with the government. So our first priority is to purge the Redemptionists from the Organization.”

“That is not within your authority.”

“Of course the commander must decide. But, comrades, I can tell you right now that the commander is an Adventist!”

“Now you’re just making things up. Everyone knows the scope of the commander’s power. If the commander really is an Adventist, then the Redemptionists would have been purged long ago.”

“Maybe the commander knows something we don’t. Perhaps that’s what the meeting today is about.”

After this, the crowd’s attention turned away from Pan Han to the crisis before them. A famous scientist who had won the Turing Award jumped onto the table and began to speak. “The time for talk is over. Comrades, what should be our next step?”

“Start a global rebellion!”

“Then we’re asking to be killed.”

“Long live the spirit of Trisolaris! We shall persevere like the stubborn grass that resprouts after every wildfire!”

“A rebellion will finally reveal our existence to the world. As long as we have an appropriate plan of action, I’m sure many people will support us.”

This last remark came from Pan Han, and many applauded.

Someone yelled, “The commander is here!” The crowd parted to form a path.

Wang looked up and felt dizzy. The world turned white and black in his eyes, and the only spot of color was the person who had just appeared.

Surrounded by a group of young bodyguards, the commander in chief of the Earth-Trisolaris rebels, Ye Wenjie, walked steadily into the crowd.

Ye stood in the middle of the space the crowd cleared for her, raised a bony fist, and—with a resolve and strength that Wang could not believe she possessed—said, “Eliminate human tyranny!”

The crowd responded in a way that had clearly been rehearsed countless times: “The world belongs to Trisolaris!”

“Hello, comrades,” Ye said. Her voice returned to the gentleness that Wang knew. It was only now that he could be sure that it was really her. “I haven’t been well lately, and haven’t spent much time with all of you. But now the situation is urgent, and I know everyone is under a great deal of pressure, so I’ve come to see you.”

“Commander, take care of yourself,” someone in the crowd said. Wang could hear the heartfelt concern.

Ye said, “Before we move on to more important matters, let’s take care of one small detail. Pan Han—” She kept her eyes on the crowd even as she called his name.

“Here, Commander.” Pan emerged from the crowd. Earlier, he had tried to lose himself in the throng. He appeared calm, but the terror in his heart was obvious. The commander had not called him comrade, a bad sign.

“You committed a severe violation of the Organization’s rules.” Ye spoke without looking at Pan. Her voice remained kind, as though talking to a child who had been naughty.

“Commander, the Organization is facing a crisis of survival! If we don’t take decisive measures and cleanse the traitors and enemies within, we will lose everything!”

Ye looked up at Pan, her eyes affectionate. But his breath stopped for a few seconds. “The ultimate goal and ideal of the ETO is to lose everything. Everything that now belongs to the human race, including us.”

“Then you must be an Adventist! Commander, please openly declare this to be true, because it’s very important. Am I right, comrades? Very important!” he shouted, and waved an arm as he looked around. But the crowd remained mute.

“This request is not yours to make. You have seriously violated our code of conduct. If you want to make an appeal, now is the time. Otherwise, you must bear the responsibility.” Ye spoke slowly, enunciating every word, as though afraid the child she was teaching had trouble understanding.

“I went intending to eliminate Wei Cheng, that math prodigy. The decision was made by Comrade Evans and ratified by the committee unanimously. If he really succeeds in creating a mathematical model of the three-body problem that gives a complete solution, our Lord will not come, and the great enterprise of Trisolaris on Earth will be ruined. I only shot at Shen Yufei since she shot at me first. I was acting in self-defense.”

Ye nodded. “Let us believe you. This is, after all, not the most important issue. I hope we can continue to trust you. Now, please repeat the request you made to me just now.”

Pan was stunned for a second. That she had moved on didn’t seem to relax him. “I… asked that you openly declare yourself to be an Adventist. After all, the action plan of the Adventists is also your ideal.”

“Then repeat the plan of action.”

“Human society can no longer rely on its own power to solve its problems. It can also no longer rely on its own power to restrain its madness. Therefore, we ask our Lord to come to this world, and with Its power, forcefully watch over us and transform us, so as to create a brand-new, perfect human civilization.”

“Are the Adventists loyal believers in this plan?”

“Of course! Commander, please do not believe false rumors.”

“It’s not a false rumor!” a man shouted. He made his way to the front. “I’m Rafael, from Israel. Three years ago, my fourteen-year-old son died in an accident. I had his kidney donated to a Palestinian girl suffering kidney failure as an expression of my hope that the two peoples could live together in peace. For this ideal, I was willing to give my life. Many, many Israelis and Palestinians sincerely strove toward the same goal by my side. But all this was useless. Our home remained trapped in the quagmire of cycles of vengeance.

“Eventually, I lost hope in the human race and joined the ETO. Desperation turned me from a pacifist into an extremist. Also, probably because I donated so much money to the Organization, I became a core member of the Adventists. Let me tell you now, the Adventists have their own secret agenda.

“And it is this: The human race is an evil species. Human civilization has committed unforgivable crimes against the Earth and must be punished. The ultimate goal of the Adventists is to ask our Lord to carry out this divine punishment: the destruction of all humankind.”

“The real program of the Adventists is already an open secret,” someone shouted.

“But what you don’t know is that this was not a program they evolved into. It was the goal set out at the very beginning; it’s been the life-long dream of Mike Evans, the mastermind behind the Adventists. He lied to the Organization and fooled everyone, including the commander! Evans has been working toward this goal from the very start. He turned the Adventists into a kingdom of terror populated by extreme environmentalists and madmen who hated the human race.”

“I didn’t know Evans’s real thoughts until much later,” Ye said. “Still, I tried to patch over the differences to allow the ETO to remain whole. But some of the other acts committed by Adventists lately have made the effort impossible.”

Pan said, “Commander, the Adventists are the core of ETO. Without us, there is no Earth-Trisolaris Movement.”

“But this is no excuse for you to monopolize all communications between our Lord and the Organization.”

“We built the Second Red Coast Base; of course we should operate it.”

“The Adventists took advantage of this and committed an unforgivable betrayal of the Organization: You intercepted the messages from our Lord to the Organization and passed on only a small portion of them. Even those, you distorted. Also, through the Second Red Coast Base, you sent a large amount of information to our Lord without the Organization’s approval.”

Silence descended over the meeting like a monstrous thing. Wang’s scalp began to tingle.

Pan did not answer. His expression became cold, as if to say, Finally, it has happened.

“There is much evidence of the Adventists’ betrayal. Comrade Shen Yufei was one of the witnesses. Though she belonged to the core group of Adventists, in her heart, she remained a resolute Redemptionist. You only discovered this recently, and she already knew too much. When Evans sent you, he wanted you to kill two people, not one.”

Pan looked around, apparently reassessing the situation. His gesture didn’t go unnoticed by Ye.

“You can see that most people attending this meeting are comrades from the Redemptionist faction. I trust that the few Adventists who are here will stand on the side of the Organization. But men like Evans and you can no longer be saved. To protect the program and ideals of the ETO, we must completely solve the problem of the Adventists.”

Silence returned. A few moments later, one of the bodyguards near Ye, a young woman, smiled. She walked toward Pan Han casually.

Pan’s face changed. He stuck a hand inside the lapel of his jacket, but the young woman dashed quicker than the eye could follow. Before anyone could react, she wrapped one of her slender arms around Pan’s neck, placed her other hand on top of his head, and, by applying her unexpected strength at just the right angle, she twisted Pan’s head 180 degrees with practiced ease. The cracks from his cervical vertebrae breaking stood out against the complete silence.

The young woman’s hands immediately let go, as though Pan’s head was too hot. Pan fell to the ground, and the gun that had killed Shen Yufei slid under the table. His body still spasmed, and his eyes remained open, his tongue sticking out. But his head no longer moved, as though it were never a part of the rest of his body. Several men came and dragged him away, the blood oozing from his mouth leaving a long trail.

“Ah, Xiao Wang, you’re here too. How have you been?” Ye’s gaze fell on Wang Miao. She smiled kindly at him and nodded. Then she turned to the others. “This is Professor Wang, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and my friend. He researches nanomaterials. This is the first technology our Lord wishes to extinguish from the Earth.”

No one looked at Wang, and Wang had no strength to express himself in any way. He had to pull at the sleeve of the man next to him so that he wouldn’t fall, but the man lightly brushed his hand away.

“Xiao Wang, why don’t I continue to tell you the story of Red Coast from last time? All the comrades here can listen too. This is not a waste of time. In this extraordinary moment, it is a fine time to review the history of our Organization.”

“Red Coast…. You weren’t done?” Wang asked foolishly.

Ye slowly approached the three-body model, seemingly absorbed by the swirling silver spheres. Through the broken window, the setting sun’s light fell on the model, and the flying spheres intermittently reflected the light onto the rebel commander, like sparks from a bonfire.

“No. I’ve only just started,” Ye said softly.

22 Red Coast V

Since she entered Red Coast Base, Ye Wenjie had never thought of leaving. After she learned the real purpose of the Red Coast Project, top-secret information that even many mid-level cadres at the base didn’t know, she cut off her spiritual connection to the outside world and devoted herself to her work. Thereafter, she became even more deeply embedded in the technical core of Red Coast, and began to take on more important research topics.

Commissar Lei never forgot that it was Chief Yang who first trusted Ye, but Lei was happy to assign important topics to her. Given Ye’s status, she had no rights to the results of her research. And Lei, who had studied astrophysics, was a political officer who was also an intellectual, rare at the time. Thus he could take credit for all of Ye’s research results and papers, and cast himself as an exemplary political officer with both technical acumen and revolutionary zeal.

The Red Coast Project had initially requisitioned Ye because of a paper on an attempted mathematical model of the sun she had published in the Journal of Astrophysics as a graduate student. Compared to the Earth, the sun was a far simpler physical system, made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. Though its physical processes were violent, they were relatively straightforward, only fusing hydrogen into helium. Thus, it was likely that a mathematical model of the sun could describe it rather precisely. The paper was basic, but Lei and Yang saw in it a hope for a solution to a technical difficulty faced by the Red Coast monitoring system.

Solar outages, a common problem in satellite communications, had always plagued the Red Coast monitoring operations.

When the Earth, an artificial satellite, and the sun are in a straight line, the line of sight from the ground-based antenna to the satellite will have the sun as its background. The sun is a giant source of electromagnetic radiation, and, as a result, satellite transmissions to the ground will be overwhelmed by interference from the solar radiation. This problem could not be completely solved, even in the twenty-first century.

The interference that Red Coast had to deal with was similar, but the source of interference (the sun) was between the source of the transmission (outer space) and the ground-based receiver. Compared to communication satellites, the solar outages suffered by Red Coast were more frequent and more severe. Red Coast Base as constructed was also much more modest than its original design, such that the transmission and monitoring systems shared the same antenna. This made the times available for monitoring even more precious, and solar outages even more of a problem.

Lei and Yang’s idea for eliminating interference was very simple: ascertain the frequency spectrum and characteristics of solar radiation in the monitored range, and then filter it out digitally. Both of them were technical, and at that time, when the ignorant often led the knowledgeable, that was a rare bit of fortune. But Yang wasn’t a specialist in astrophysics, and Lei had taken the path of becoming a political officer, which prevented him from accruing in-depth technical know-how. In reality, electromagnetic radiation from the sun is only stable within the limited range from near-ultraviolet to mid-infrared (including visible light). In other ranges, the radiation is quite volatile and unpredictable.

To set the right expectations, Ye made it clear in her first research report that during periods of intense solar activity—sunspots, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and so on—it was impossible to eliminate solar interference. Thus, her research target was limited to radiation within the frequency ranges monitored by Red Coast during periods of normal solar activity.

Research conditions at the base weren’t too bad. The library could obtain foreign-language materials related to the topic, including timely European and American academic journals. In those years, this was no easy feat. Ye also could use the military phone line to connect to the two groups conducting solar science research within the Chinese Academy of Sciences and obtain their observation data by fax.

After half a year of study, Ye saw no glimpse of hope. She quickly discovered that within the frequency ranges monitored by Red Coast, solar radiation fluctuated unpredictably. By analyzing large amounts of observed data, Ye discovered a puzzling mystery. Sometimes, during one of the sudden fluctuations in solar radiation, the surface of the sun was calm. Since hundreds of thousands of kilometers of solar material would absorb any shortwave and microwave radiation originating from the core of the sun, the radiation must have come from activities on its surface, so there should have been observable surface activity when these fluctuations occurred. If there were no corresponding surface disturbances, what caused these sudden changes to the narrow frequency ranges? The more she thought about it, the more mysterious it seemed.

Eventually Ye ran out of ideas and decided to give up. In her last report, she conceded that she could not solve the problem. This shouldn’t have been a big deal. The military had asked several groups within universities and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to research the same issue, and all of those efforts had failed. But Yang wanted to try one more time, relying on Ye’s extraordinary talent.

Lei’s agenda was even simpler: He just wanted Ye’s paper. The research topic was highly theoretical and would show off his expertise and skill. Now that the chaos in society was finally subsiding, the demands on cadres were also changing. There was an acute need for men like him, politically mature and academically accomplished. Of course he would have a bright future. As to whether the problem of interference from solar outages could be solved, he didn’t really care.

But in the end, Ye didn’t hand in her report. She thought that if the research project were terminated, the base library would stop receiving foreign language journals and other research materials, and she would no longer have access to such a rich trove of astrophysics references. So she nominally continued her research, while in reality she focused on refining her mathematical model of the sun.

One night, Ye was, as usual, the only person in the cold reading room of the base library. On the long table in front of her, a pile of documents and journals were spread open. After completing a set of tedious and cumbersome matrix calculations, she blew on her hands to warm them, and picked up the latest issue of the Journal of Astrophysics to take a break. As she flipped through it, a brief note about Jupiter caught her attention:

Ye clearly remembered the two dates noted in the paper. During those windows, the Red Coast monitoring system had also received strong interference from solar outages. She checked the operations diary and confirmed her memory. The times were close, but the solar outages had occurred sixteen minutes and forty-two seconds after the arrival of the Jovian radio outbursts on Earth.

The sixteen minutes and forty-two seconds are critical! Ye tried to calm her wild heartbeat, and asked the librarian to contact the National Observatory to obtain the ephemeris of the Earth’s and Jupiter’s positions during those two time periods.

She drew a big triangle on the blackboard with the sun, the Earth, and Jupiter at the vertices. She marked the distances along the three edges, and wrote down the two arrival times next to the Earth. From the distance between the Earth and Jupiter it was easy to figure out the time it took for the radio outbursts to travel between the two. Then she calculated the time it would take the radio outbursts to go from Jupiter to the sun, and then from the sun to the Earth. The difference between the two was exactly sixteen minutes and forty-two seconds.

Ye referred to her solar structure mathematical model and tried to find a theoretical explanation. Her eyes were drawn to her description of what she called “energy mirrors” within the solar radiation zone.

Energy produced by reaction within the solar core is initially in the form of high-energy gamma rays. The radiation zone, the region of the sun’s interior that surrounds the core, absorbs these high-energy photons and re-emits them at a slightly lower energy level. After a long period of successive absorption and re-emission (a photon might take a thousand years to leave the sun), gamma rays become x-rays, extreme ultraviolet, ultraviolet, then eventually turn into visible light and other forms of radiation.

Such were the known facts about the sun. But Ye’s model led to a new result: As solar radiation dropped through these different frequencies on its way through the radiation zone, there were boundaries between the subzones for each type of radiation. As energy crossed each boundary, the radiation frequency stepped down a grade sharply. This was different from the traditional view that the radiation frequency lowered gradually as energy passed from the core outwards. Her calculations showed that these boundaries would reflect radiation coming from the lower-frequency side, which was why she named the boundaries “energy mirrors.”

Ye had carefully studied these membranelike boundary surfaces suspended in the high-energy plasma ocean of the sun and discovered them to be full of wonderful properties. One of the most incredible characteristics she named “gain reflectivity.” However, the characteristic was so bizarre that it was hard to confirm, and even Ye herself didn’t quite believe it was real. It seemed more likely an artifact of some error in the dizzying, complex calculations.

But now, Ye made the first step in confirming her guess about the gain reflectivity of solar energy mirrors: The energy mirrors not only reflected radiation coming from the lower-frequency side, but amplified it. All the mysterious sudden fluctuations within narrow frequency bands that she had observed were in fact the result of other radiation coming from space being amplified after reflecting off an energy mirror in the sun. That was why there were no observable disturbances on the surface of the sun.

This time, after the Jovian radio outbursts reached the sun, they were re-emitted, as if by a mirror, after being amplified about a hundred million times. The Earth received both sets of emissions, before and after the amplification, separated by sixteen minutes and forty-two seconds.

The sun was an amplifier for radio waves.

However, there was a question: The sun must be receiving electromagnetic radiation from space every second, including radio waves emitted by the Earth. Why were only some of the waves amplified? The answer was simple: In addition to the selectivity of the energy mirrors for frequencies they would reflect, the main reason was the shielding effect of the solar convection zone. The endlessly boiling convection zone situated outside the radiation zone was the outermost liquid layer of the sun. The radio waves coming from space must first penetrate the convection zone to reach the energy mirrors in the radiation zone, where they would be amplified and reflected back out. This meant that in order to reach the energy mirrors, the waves would have to be more powerful than a threshold value. The vast majority of Earth-based radio sources could not cross this threshold, but the Jovian radio outburst did—

And Red Coast’s maximum transmission power also exceeded the threshold.

The problem with solar outages was not resolved, but another exciting possibility presented itself: Humans could use the sun as a superantenna, and, through it, broadcast radio waves to the universe. The radio waves would be sent with the power of the sun, hundreds of millions of times greater than the total usable transmission power on Earth.

Earth civilization had a way to transmit at the level of a Kardashev Type II civilization.

The next step was to compare the waveforms of the two Jovian radio outbursts with the waveforms of the solar outages received by Red Coast. If they matched, then her guess would receive further confirmation.

Ye made her request to the base leadership to contact Harry Peterson and obtain the waveform records of the two Jovian radio outbursts. This was not easy. It was difficult to find the right communication channels, and numerous bureaucracies required layers of formal paperwork. Any error could lead to her being suspected of acting as a foreign spy. So Ye had to wait.

But there was a more direct way to prove the hypothesis: Red Coast itself could transmit radio waves directly at the sun at a power level exceeding the threshold value.

Ye again made her request to the base leadership. But she didn’t dare to give her real reason—it was too fantastic, and she would have been turned down for certain. Instead, she explained that she wanted to do an experiment for her solar research: The Red Coast transmission system would be used as a solar exploration radar whose echoes could be analyzed to obtain some information about solar radiation. Lei and Yang both had deep technical backgrounds, and wouldn’t have been easily fooled, but the experiment described by Ye did have real precedents in Western solar research. In fact, her suggestion was technically easier than the radar exploration of terrestrial planets already being conducted.

“Ye Wenjie, you’re getting out of line,” said Commissar Lei. “Your research should be focused on theory. Do we really need to go to so much trouble?”

Ye begged, “Commissar, it’s possible that a big discovery will be made. Experiments are absolutely necessary. I just want to try it once, please?”

Chief Yang said, “Commissar Lei, maybe we should try once. It doesn’t seem to be too difficult operationally. Receiving the echoes after transmission would take—”

“Ten, fifteen minutes,” Lei said.

“Then Red Coast has just enough time to switch from transmission mode to monitoring mode.”

Lei shook his head again. “I know that it’s technically and operationally feasible. But you… eh, Chief Yang, you just lack the sensitivity for this kind of thing. You want to aim a superpowerful radio beam at the red sun. Have you thought about the political symbolism of such an experiment?”[32]

Yang and Ye were both utterly stunned, but they did not think Lei’s objection ridiculous. Just the opposite: They were horrified that they themselves had not thought of it. During those years, finding political symbolism in everything had reached absurd levels. The research reports Ye turned in had to be carefully reviewed by Lei so that even technical terms related to the sun could be repeatedly revised to remove political risk. Terms like “sunspots” were forbidden.[33] An experiment that sent a powerful radio transmission at the sun could of course be interpreted in a thousand positive ways, but a single negative interpretation would be enough to bring political disaster on everyone. Lei’s reason for refusing to allow the experiment was truly unassailable.

Ye didn’t give up, though. In fact, as long as she didn’t take excessive risk, it wasn’t difficult to accomplish her goal. The Red Coast transmitter was ultra-high-powered, but all of its components were domestically produced during the Cultural Revolution. As the quality of the components was not up to par, the fault rate was very high. After every fifteenth transmission, the entire system had to be overhauled, and after each overhaul, there would be a test transmission. Few people attended these tests, and the targets and other parameters were arbitrarily selected.

One time when she was on duty, Ye was assigned to work during one of the test transmissions after an overhaul. Because a test transmission omitted many operational steps, only Ye and five others were present. Three of them were low-level operators who knew little about the principles behind the equipment. The remaining two were a technician and an engineer, both exhausted and not paying much attention after two days of overhaul work. Ye first adjusted the test transmission power to exceed the threshold value for her gain-reflective solar energy mirror theory, using the maximum power of the Red Coast transmission system. Then she set the frequency to the value most likely to be amplified by the energy mirror. And under the guise of testing the antenna’s mechanical components, she aimed it at the setting sun in the west. The content of the transmission remained the same as usual.

This was a clear afternoon in the autumn of 1971. Afterwards, Ye recalled the event many times but couldn’t remember any special feelings except anxiety, a desire for the transmission to be completed quickly. First, she was afraid to be discovered by her colleagues. Even though she had thought of some excuses, it was still unusual to use maximum power for a test transmission, because doing so would wear down the components. In addition, the Red Coast transmission system’s positioning equipment was never designed to be aimed at the sun. Ye could feel the eyepiece growing hot. If it burnt out she would be in real trouble.

As the sun set slowly in the west, Ye had to manually track it. The Red Coast antenna seemed like a giant sunflower at that moment, slowly turning to follow the descending sun. By the time the red light indicating transmission completion lit up, she was already soaked in sweat.

She glanced around. The three operators at the control panel were shutting down the equipment piece by piece in accordance with the instructions in the operating manual. The engineer was drinking a glass of water in a corner of the control room, and the technician was asleep in his chair. No matter how historians and writers later tried to portray the scene, the reality at the time was completely prosaic.

The transmission completed, Ye rushed out of the control room and dashed into Yang Weining’s office. Catching her breath, she said, “Tell the base station to begin monitoring the twelve thousand megahertz channel!”

“What are we receiving?” Chief Yang looked in surprise at Ye, strands of hair stuck to her sweaty face. Compared to the highly sensitive Red Coast monitoring system, the conventional military-grade radio—normally used by the base for communicating with the outside—was only a toy.

“Maybe we’ll get something. There’s no time to change the Red Coast systems to monitoring mode!” Normally, warming up and switching over to the monitoring system required a little more than ten minutes. But right now the monitoring system was also being overhauled. Many modules had been taken apart and remained unassembled, rendering them inoperable in the short term.

Yang stared at Ye for a few seconds, and then picked up the phone and ordered the communications office to follow Ye’s direction.

“Given the low sensitivity of that radio, we can probably only receive signals from extraterrestrials on the moon.”

“The signal comes from the sun,” Ye said. Outside the window, the sun’s edge was already approaching the mountains on the horizon, red as blood.

“You used Red Coast to send a signal to the sun?” Yang asked anxiously.

Ye nodded.

“Don’t tell anyone else. This must never happen again. Never!” Yang looked behind him to be sure there was no one at the door.

Ye nodded again.

“What’s the point? The echo wave must be extremely weak, far outside the sensitivity of a conventional radio.”

“No. If my guess is right, we should get an extremely strong echo. It will be more powerful than… I can hardly imagine. As long as the transmission power exceeds a certain threshold, the sun can amplify the signal a hundred million–fold.”

Yang looked at Ye strangely. Ye said nothing. They both waited in silence. Yang could clearly hear Ye’s breath and heartbeat. He hadn’t paid much attention to what she had said, but the feelings he had buried in his heart for many years resurfaced. He could only restrain himself, waiting.

Twenty minutes later, Yang picked up the phone, called the communications office, and asked a few simple questions.

He put the phone down. “They received nothing.”

Ye let out a long-held breath and eventually nodded.

“That American astronomer responded, though.” Yang took out a thick envelope covered with customs stamps and handed it to Ye. She tore the envelope open and scanned Harry Peterson’s letter. The letter said that he had not imagined that there would be colleagues in China studying planetary electromagnetism, and that he wished to collaborate and exchange more information in the future. He had also sent two stacks of paper: the complete record of the waveforms of the radio outbursts from Jupiter. They were clearly photocopied from the long signal recording tape, and would have to be pieced together.

Ye took the dozens of sheets of photocopier paper and started lining them up in two columns on the floor. Halfway through the effort she gave up any hope. She was very familiar with the waveforms of the interference from the two solar outages. They didn’t match these two.

Ye slowly picked up the photocopies from the floor. Yang crouched down to help her. When he handed the stack of paper to this woman he loved with all his heart, he saw her smile. The smile was so sad that his heart trembled.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, not realizing that he had never spoken to her so softly.

“Nothing. I’m just waking up from a dream.” Ye smiled again. She took the stack of photocopies and the envelope and left the office. She went back to her room, picked up her lunch box, and went to the cafeteria. Only mantou buns and pickles were left, and the cafeteria workers told her impatiently that they were closing. So she had no choice but to carry her lunch box outside and walk next to the lip of the cliff, where she sat down on the grass to chew the cold mantou.

The sun had already set. The Greater Khingan Mountains were gray and indistinct, just like Ye’s life. In this gray life, a dream appeared especially colorful and bright. But one always awoke from a dream, just like the sun—which, though it would rise again, brought no fresh hope. In that moment Ye saw the rest of her life suffused with an endless grayness. With tears in her eyes, she smiled again, and continued to chew the cold mantou.

Ye didn’t know that at that moment, the first cry that could be heard in space from civilization on Earth was already spreading out from the sun to the universe at the speed of light. A star-powered radio wave, like a majestic tide, had already crossed the orbit of Jupiter.

Right then, at the frequency of 12,000 MHz, the sun was the brightest star in the entire Milky Way.

23 Red Coast VI

The next eight years were among the most peaceful of Ye Wenjie’s life. The horror experienced during the Cultural Revolution gradually subsided, and she was finally able to relax a little. The Red Coast Project completed its testing and breaking-in phases, settling down into routine operation. Fewer and fewer technical problems remained, and both work and life became regular.

In peace, what had been suppressed by anxiety and fear began to reawaken. Ye found that the real pain had just begun. Nightmarish memories, like embers coming back to life, burned more and more fiercely, searing her heart. For most people, perhaps time would have gradually healed these wounds. After all, during the Cultural Revolution, many people suffered fates similar to hers, and compared to many of them, Ye was relatively fortunate. But Ye had the mental habits of a scientist, and she refused to forget. Rather, she looked with a rational gaze on the madness and hatred that had harmed her.

Ye’s rational consideration of humanity’s evil side began the day she read Silent Spring. As she grew closer to Yang Weining, he was able to get her many classics of foreign-language philosophy and history under the guise of gathering technical research materials. The bloody history of humanity shocked her, and the extraordinary insights of the philosophers also led her to understand the most fundamental and secret aspects of human nature.

Indeed, even on top of Radar Peak, a place the world almost forgot, the madness and irrationality of the human race were constantly on display. Ye saw that the forest below the peak continued to fall to the deranged logging by her former comrades. Patches of bare earth grew daily, as though those parts of the Greater Khingan Mountains had had their skin torn off. When those patches grew into regions and then into a connected whole, the few surviving trees seemed rather abnormal. To complete the slash-and-burn plan, fires were lit on the bare fields, and Radar Peak became the refuge for birds escaping the fiery inferno. As the fires raged, the sorrowful cries of birds with singed feathers at the base never ceased.

The insanity of the human race had reached its historical zenith. The Cold War was at its height. Nuclear missiles capable of destroying the Earth ten times over could be launched at a moment’s notice, spread out among the countless missile silos dotting two continents and hidden within ghostlike nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines patrolling deep under the sea. A single Lafayette- or Yankee-class submarine held enough warheads to destroy hundreds of cities and kill hundreds of millions, but most people continued their lives as if nothing was wrong.

As an astrophysicist, Ye was strongly against nuclear weapons. She knew this was a power that should belong only to the stars. She knew also that the universe had even more terrible forces: black holes, antimatter, and more. Compared to those forces, a thermonuclear bomb was nothing but a tiny candle. If humans obtained mastery over one of those other forces, the world might be vaporized in a moment. In the face of madness, rationality was powerless.

Four years after entering Red Coast Base, Ye and Yang married. Yang truly loved her. For love, he gave up his future.

The fiercest stage of the Cultural Revolution was over, and the political climate had grown somewhat milder. Yang wasn’t persecuted, exactly, for his marriage. However, because he married a woman who had been deemed to be a counter-revolutionary, he was viewed as politically immature and lost his position as chief engineer. The only reason that he and his wife were allowed to stay on the base as ordinary technicians was because the base could not do without their technical skills.

Ye accepted Yang’s proposal mainly out of gratitude. If he hadn’t brought her into this safe haven in her most perilous moment, she would probably no longer be alive. Yang was a talented man, cultured and with good taste. She didn’t find him unpleasant, but her heart was like ashes from which the flame of love could no longer be lit.

As she pondered human nature, Ye was faced with an ultimate loss of purpose and sank into another spiritual crisis. She had once been an idealist who needed to give all her talent to a great goal, but now she realized that all that she had done was meaningless, and the future could not have any meaningful pursuits, either. As this mental state persisted, she gradually felt more and more alienated from the world. She didn’t belong. The sense of wandering in the spiritual wilderness tormented her. After she made a home with Yang, her soul became homeless.

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end.

On this day, however, Ye saw something odd when she glanced at the waveform display. Even experts had a hard time telling with the naked eye whether a waveform carried information. But Ye was so familiar with the noise of the universe that she could tell that the wave that now moved in front of her eyes had something extra. The thin curve, rising and falling, seemed to possess a soul. She was certain that the radio signal before her had been modulated by intelligence.

She rushed to another terminal and checked the computer’s rating of the signal’s recognizability: AAAAA. Before this, no radio signal received by Red Coast ever garnered a recognizability rating above C. An A rating meant the likelihood that the transmission contained intelligent information was greater than 90 percent. A rating of AAAAA was a special, extreme case: It meant the received transmission used the exact same coding language as Red Coast’s own outbound transmission.

Ye turned on the Red Coast deciphering system. The software attempted to decipher any signal whose recognizability rating was above B. During the entire time that the Red Coast Project had been running, it had never been invoked even once in real use. Based on test data, deciphering a transmission suspected of being a message might require a few days or even a few months of computing time, and the result would be failure more than half the time. But this time, as soon as the file containing the original transmission was submitted, the display showed that the deciphering was complete.

Ye opened the resulting document, and, for the first time, a human read a message from another world.

The content was not what anyone had imagined. It was a warning repeated three times.

Still caught up by the dizzying excitement and confusion, Ye deciphered a second message.

As she read the flashing green text on the display, Ye was no longer capable of thinking clearly. Her mind, inhibited by shock and excitement, could only understand this: No more than nine years had passed since the time she had sent the message to the sun. Then the source of this transmission must be around four light-years away. It could only have come from the closest extra-solar stellar system: Alpha Centauri.[34]

The universe was not desolate. The universe was not empty. The universe was full of life! Humankind had cast their gaze to the end of the universe, but they had no idea that intelligent life already existed around the stars closest to them!

Ye stared at the waveform display: The signal continued to stream from the universe into the Red Coast antenna. She opened up another interface and began real-time deciphering. The messages began to show up immediately on the screen.

During the next four hours, Ye learned of the existence of Trisolaris, learned of the civilization that had been reborn again and again, and learned of their plan to migrate to the stars.

At four in the morning, the transmission from Alpha Centauri ended. The deciphering system continued to run uselessly and emitted an unceasing string of failure codes. The Red Coast monitoring system was once again only hearing the noise of the universe.

But Ye was certain that what she had just experienced was not a dream.

The sun really was an amplifying antenna. But why had her experiment eight years ago not received any echoes? Why had the waveforms of Jupiter’s radio outbursts not matched the later radiation from the sun? Later, Ye came up with many reasons. It was possible that the base communication office couldn’t receive radio waves at that frequency, or maybe the office did receive the echo but it sounded like noise and so the operator thought it was nothing. As for the waveforms, it was possible that when the sun amplified the radio waves, it also added another wave to it. It would likely be a periodic wave that could be easily filtered out by the alien deciphering system, but to her unaided eye, the waveform from Jupiter and from the sun would appear very different. Years later, after Ye had left Red Coast, she would manage to confirm her last guess: The sun had added a sine wave.

She looked around alertly. There were three others in the main computer room. Two of the three were chatting in a corner, while the last was napping before a terminal. In the data analysis section of the monitoring system, only the two terminals in front of her could view the recognizability rating of a signal and access the deciphering system.

Maintaining her composure, she worked quickly and moved all of the received messages to a multiply-encrypted, invisible subdirectory. Then she copied over a segment of noise received a year ago as a substitute for the transmission received during the last five hours.

Finally, from the terminal, she placed a short message into the Red Coast transmission buffer.

Ye got up and left the monitoring main control room. A chilly wind blew against her feverish face. Dawn had just brightened the eastern sky, and she followed the dimly lit pebble-paved path to the transmission main control room. Above her, the Red Coast antenna lay open, silently, like a giant palm toward the universe. The dawn turned the guard at the door into a silhouette, and as usual, he did not pay attention to Ye as she entered.

The transmission main control room was much dimmer than the monitoring main control room. Ye passed through rows of cabinets to stand in front of the control panel and flipped more than a dozen switches with practiced ease to warm up the transmission system. The two men on duty next to the control panel looked up at her with sleepy eyes, and one turned to glance at the clock. Then one of them went back to his nap while the other flipped through a well-thumbed newspaper. At the base, Ye had no political status, but she did have some freedom in technical matters. She often tested the equipment before a transmission. Although she was early today—the transmission wasn’t scheduled to occur until three hours later—warming up a bit early wasn’t that unusual.

What happened next was the longest half hour of her life. During this time, Ye adjusted the transmission frequency to the optimal frequency for amplification by the solar energy mirror, and increased the transmission power to maximum. Then, putting her eyes to the eyepiece of the optical positioning system, she watched the sun rise above the horizon, activated the positioning system for the antenna, and slowly aligned it with the sun. As the gigantic antenna turned, the rumbling noise shook the main control room. One of the men on duty looked at Ye again, but said nothing.

The sun was now completely above the horizon. The crosshair of the Red Coast positioning system was aimed at its upper edge to account for the time it would take for the radio wave to travel to the sun. The transmission system was ready.

The Transmit button was a long rectangle—very similar to the Space key on a computer keyboard, except that it was red.

Ye’s hand hovered two centimeters above it.

The fate of the entire human race was now tied to these slender fingers.

Without hesitation, Ye pressed the button.

“What are you doing?” one of the men on duty asked, still sleepy.

Ye smiled at him and said nothing. She pressed a yellow button to stop the transmission. Then she moved the control stick until the antenna was pointed elsewhere. She left the control panel and walked away.

The man looked at his watch. It was time to get off work. He picked up the diary and thought about recording Ye’s operation of the transmission system. It was, after all, out of the ordinary. But then he looked at the paper tape and saw that she had transmitted for no more than three seconds. He tossed the diary back, yawned, put on his army cap, and left.

The message that was winging its way to the sun said, Come here! I will help you conquer this world. Our civilization is no longer capable of solving its own problems. We need your force to intervene.

The newly risen sun dazzled Ye Wenjie. Not too far from the door of the main control room, she collapsed onto the lawn in a faint.

When she woke up, she found herself in the base clinic. Next to her bed sat Yang, watching her with concern, like that time many years ago on the helicopter. The doctor told Ye to be careful and get plenty of rest.

“You are pregnant,” he said.

24 Rebellion

After Ye Wenjie finished recounting the history of her first contact with Trisolaris, the abandoned cafeteria remained silent. Many present were apparently just hearing the complete story for the first time. Wang was deeply absorbed by the narrative and temporarily forgot about the danger and terror he faced. Unable to stop himself, he asked, “How did the ETO then develop to its present scale?”

Ye replied, “I’d have to start with how I got to know Evans…. But every comrade here already knows that part of history, so we shouldn’t waste time on it now. I can tell you later. However, whether we’ll have such an opportunity depends on you…. Xiao Wang, let’s talk about your nanomaterial.”

“This… Lord that you talk about. Why is it so afraid of nanomaterial?”

“Because it can allow humans to escape gravity and engage in space construction at a much larger scale.”

“The space elevator?” Wang suddenly understood.

“Yes. If ultrastrong nanomaterials could be mass produced, then that would lay the technical foundation for building a space elevator from the ground up to a geostationary point in space. For our Lord, this is but a tiny invention; but for humans on Earth, its meaning would be significant. With this technology, humans could easily enter near-Earth space and build up large-scale defensive structures. Thus, this technology must be extinguished.”

“What is at the end of the countdown?” Wang asked the question that frightened him the most.

Ye smiled. “I don’t know.”

“But trying to stop me is useless! This is not basic research. Based on what we’ve already found out, someone else can figure out the rest.” Wang’s voice was loud but anxious.

“Yes, it is rather useless. It’s far more effective to confuse the researchers’ minds. But, like you point out, we didn’t stop the progress in time. After all, what you do is applied research. Our technique is far more effective against basic research….”

“Speaking of basic research, how did your daughter die?”

The question silenced Ye for a few seconds. Wang noticed that her eyes dimmed almost imperceptibly. But she then resumed the conversation. “Indeed, compared to our Lord, who possesses peerless strength, everything we do is meaningless. We’re just doing whatever we can.”

Just as she finished speaking, several loud booms rang out and the doors to the cafeteria broke open. A team of soldiers holding submachine guns rushed in. Wang realized that they were not armed police, but the real army. Noiselessly they proceeded along the walls and soon surrounded the rebels of the ETO. Shi Qiang was the last to enter. His jacket was open, and he held the barrel of a pistol so that the grip was like the head of a hammer.

Da Shi looked around arrogantly, then suddenly dashed forward. His hand flashed and there was the dull thud of metal striking against a skull. An ETO rebel fell to the ground, and the gun that he was trying to draw tumbled to fall some distance away. Several soldiers began to shoot at the ceiling, and dust and debris fell. Someone grabbed Wang Miao and pulled him away from the ETO ranks until he was safe behind a row of soldiers.

“Drop all your weapons onto the table! I swear I’m going to kill the next son of a bitch who tries anything.” Da Shi pointed at the submachine guns arrayed behind him. “I know that none of you is afraid to die, but we’re not afraid either. I’m going to say this up front: Normal police procedures and laws don’t apply to you. Even the human laws of warfare no longer apply to you. Since you’ve decided to treat the entire human race as your enemy, there’s no longer anything we wouldn’t do to you.”

There was some commotion among the ETO members, but no one panicked. Ye’s face remained impassive. Three people suddenly rushed out of the crowd, including the young woman who had twisted Pan Han’s neck. They ran toward the three-body sculpture, and each grabbed one of the spheres and held it in front of his or her chest.

The young woman raised the bright metal sphere before her with both hands, as though she were getting ready to start a gymnastics routine. Smiling, she said, “Officers, we hold in our hands three nuclear bombs, each with a yield of about one point five kilotons. Not too big, since we like small toys. This is the detonator.”

Everyone in the cafeteria froze. The only one who moved was Shi Qiang. He put his gun back into the holster under his left arm and placed his hands together calmly.

“Our demand is simple: Let the commander go,” the young woman said. “Then we can play whatever game you want.” Her tone suggested that she wasn’t afraid of Shi Qiang and the soldiers at all.

“I stay with my comrades,” Ye said, calmly.

“Can you confirm her claim?” Da Shi asked an officer next to him, an explosives expert.

The officer threw a bag in front of the three ETO members holding the spheres. One of the ETO fighters picked up the bag and took out a spring scale, a bigger version of the ones some customers brought to street markets to verify the portions measured by vendors. He placed his metal sphere into the bag, attached it to the spring scale, and held it aloft. The gauge extended about halfway and stopped.

The young woman chuckled. The explosives expert also laughed, contemptuously.

The ETO member took out the sphere and tossed it on the ground. Another ETO fighter picked up the scale and the bag and repeated the procedure with his sphere, and ended up also tossing the sphere to the ground.

The young woman laughed once more and picked up the bag herself. She loaded her sphere into the bag, hung it on the hook of the scale, and the gauge immediately dropped to its bottom, the spring in the scale having been fully extended.

The smile on the explosives expert’s face froze. He whispered to Da Shi, “Damn! They really do have one.”

Da Shi remained impassive.

The explosives expert said, “We can at least confirm that there are heavy elements—fissile material—inside. We don’t know if the detonation mechanism works.”

The flashlights attached to the soldiers’ guns focused on the young woman holding the nuclear bomb. While she held the destructive power of 1.5 kilotons of TNT in her hands, she smiled brightly, as though enjoying applause and praise on a spotlit stage.

“I have an idea: Shoot the sphere,” the explosives expert whispered to Da Shi.

“Won’t that set off the bomb?”

“The conventional explosives around the outside will go off, but the explosion will be scattered. It won’t lead to the kind of precise compression of the fissile material in the center necessary for a nuclear explosion.”

Da Shi stared at the nuclear woman, saying nothing.

“How about snipers?”

Almost imperceptibly, Da Shi shook his head. “There’s no good position. She’s sharp as a tack. As soon as she’s targeted by a sniper scope, she’ll know.”

Da Shi strode forward. He pushed the crowd apart and stood in the middle of the empty space.

“Stop,” the young woman warned Da Shi, staring at him intently. Her right thumb was poised over the detonator. Her face was no longer smiling in the flashlight beams.

“Calm down,” Da Shi said, standing about seven or eight meters from her. He took an envelope from his pocket. “I have some information you’ll definitely want to know. Your mother has been found.”

The young woman’s feverish eyes dimmed. At that moment her eyes were truly windows to her soul.

Da Shi took two steps forward. He was now no more than five meters from her. She raised the bomb and warned him with her eyes, but she was already distracted. One of the two ETO members who had tossed away fake bombs strode toward Da Shi to take the envelope from him. As the man blocked the woman’s view of Da Shi, he drew his gun with a lightning-fast motion. The woman only saw a flash by the ear of the man trying to take the letter from Da Shi before the bomb in her hands exploded.

After hearing the muffled explosion, Wang saw nothing before his eyes but darkness. Someone dragged him out of the cafeteria. Thick, yellow smoke poured out of the door, and a cacophony of shouting and gunshots came from inside. From time to time, people rushed through the smoke and out of the cafeteria.

Wang got up and tried to go back into the cafeteria, but the explosives expert grabbed him around the waist and stopped him.

“Careful. Radiation!”

The chaos eventually subsided. More than a dozen ETO fighters were killed in the gunfight. The rest—more than two hundred, including Ye Wenjie—were arrested. The explosion had turned the nuclear woman into a bloody mess, but she was the only casualty of the aborted bomb. The man who had tried to take the letter from Da Shi was severely injured, but since his body had shielded Da Shi, his wounds were light. However, like everyone else who remained in the cafeteria after the explosion, Shi suffered severe radiation contamination.

Through the small window of an ambulance, Wang stared at Da Shi, who was lying inside. A wound on Da Shi’s head continued to ooze blood. The nurse who was dressing the wound wore transparent protective gear. Da Shi and Wang could only talk through their mobile phones.

“Who was that young woman’s mother?” Wang asked.

Da Shi grinned. “Fucked if I know. Just a guess. A girl like that most likely has mother issues. After doing this for more than twenty years, I’m pretty good at reading people.”

“I bet you’re happy to be proven right. There really was someone behind all this.” Wang forced himself to smile, hoping Da Shi could see it.

“Buddy, you’re the one who was right!” Da Shi laughed, shaking his head. “I would never have thought that actual fucking aliens would be involved!”

25 The Deaths of Lei Zhicheng and Yang Weining

INTERROGATOR: Name?

YE WENJIE: Ye Wenjie.

INTERROGATOR: Birth date?

YE: June 1943.

INTERROGATOR: Employment?

YE: Professor of Astrophysics at Tsinghua University. Retired in 2004.

INTERROGATOR: In consideration of your health, you may stop the interrogation temporarily at any time.

YE: Thank you. I’m fine.

INTERROGATOR: We’re only conducting a regular criminal investigation now and won’t get into more sensitive matters. We would like to finish quickly. We hope you’ll cooperate.

YE: I know what you’re referring to. Yes, I’ll cooperate.

INTERROGATOR: Our investigation revealed that while you were working at Red Coast Base, you were suspected of murder.

YE: I did kill two people.

INTERROGATOR: When?

YE: The afternoon of October 21, 1979.

INTERROGATOR: Names of the victims?

YE: Base Commissar Lei Zhicheng, and my husband, Base Engineer Yang Weining.

INTERROGATOR: Explain your motive for murder.

YE: Can I… assume that you understand the relevant background?

INTERROGATOR: I know the basics. If something is unclear I’ll ask you.

YE: Good. On the day when I received the extraterrestrial communication and replied, I learned that I wasn’t the only one to get the message. Lei did as well.

Lei was a typical political cadre of the time, so he possessed an extremely keen sense for politics and saw everything through an ideological lens. Unbeknownst to most of the technical staff at Red Coast Base, he ran a small program in the background on the main computer. This program constantly read from the transmission and reception buffers and stored the results in a hidden encrypted file. This way, there would be a copy of everything Red Coast sent and received that only he could read. It was from this copy that he discovered the extraterrestrial message.

On the afternoon after I sent my message toward the rising sun, and shortly after I learned that I was pregnant at the base clinic, Lei called me to his office, and I saw that his terminal displayed the message from Trisolaris that I had received the night before….

“Eight hours have passed since you received the first message. Instead of making a report, you deleted the original message and maybe hid a copy. Isn’t that right?”

I kept my head down and did not reply.

“I know your next move. You plan to reply. If I hadn’t discovered this in time, you could have ruined all human civilization! Of course I’m not saying that we’re afraid of an interstellar invasion. Even if we assumed the worst and that really did happen, the outer space invaders would surely drown in the ocean of the people’s righteous war!”

I realized then that he didn’t know that I’d already replied. When I placed the answer into the transmission buffer, I didn’t use the regular file interface. Luckily, this got around his monitoring program.

“Ye Wenjie, I knew you were capable of something like this. You’ve always held a deep hatred toward the Party and the people. You would seize any opportunity for revenge. Do you know the consequences of your actions?”

Of course I knew, so I nodded. Lei was silent for a moment. But what he said next was unexpected. “Ye Wenjie, I have no pity for you at all. You’ve always been a class enemy who views the people as your adversaries. But I’ve served many years with Yang. I cannot bear to see him ruined along with you, and I certainly cannot allow his child to be ruined as well. You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

What he said wasn’t idle speculation. During that era, my deeds would certainly have implicated my husband if revealed, regardless of whether he had anything to do with them.

Lei kept his voice very low. “Right now, only you and I know what happened. What we must do is to minimize the impact of your actions. Pretend that it never happened and never mention it to anyone, including Yang. I’ll take care of the rest. As long as you cooperate, you can avoid the disastrous consequences.”

I immediately knew what Lei was after. He wanted to become the first man to discover extraterrestrial intelligence. It really was a great opportunity to get his name into the history textbooks.

I assented. Then I left his office. I’d already decided everything.

I took a small wrench and went to the equipment closet for the processing module of the receiver. Because I often needed to inspect the equipment, no one paid attention. I opened the main cabinet and carefully loosened the bolt that secured the ground wire to the bottom. The interference on the receiver suddenly increased and the ground resistance went up from 0.6 ohms to 5 ohms. The technician on duty thought it was a problem with the ground wire, because that kind of malfunction happened a lot. It was an easy diagnosis. He would never have guessed that the problem was at this end, at the top of the ground wire, because this end was securely fastened, out of the way, and I told him that I had just inspected it.

The top of Radar Peak had an unusual geological feature: a layer of clay more than a dozen meters thick—poor conductivity—covered it. When the ground wire wasn’t buried deeply, ground resistance was invariably too high. However, the ground wire couldn’t be sunk too deep, either, because the clay layer had a strong corrosive effect, and after a while, it would corrode the middle section of the ground wire. In the end, the only solution was to drape the ground wire over the lip of the cliff until the tip was below the clay layer, and then bury the ground terminal into the cliff at that point. Even so, the grounding wasn’t very stable, and the resistance was often excessive. Whenever such problems occurred, the trouble always involved the part of the wire going into the cliff. Whoever was assigned to repair it would have to go over the edge of the cliff, dangling on ropes.

The technician on duty informed the maintenance squad of the issue. One of the soldiers in the squad tied a rope to an iron post and then rappelled down the cliff. After half an hour down below, he climbed back up, soaked in sweat, saying that he couldn’t find the malfunction. It seemed that the next monitoring session would have to be delayed. There was no choice but to inform the Base Command Center. I waited by the iron post at the top of the cliff. Very soon, just as I had planned, Lei Zhicheng came back with that soldier.

To be honest, Lei was very dedicated to his job and faithfully followed the demands placed on political officers during that era: Become a part of the masses and always be on the front line. Maybe it was all for show, but he really was a good performer. Whenever there was some difficult and perilous work at the base, he was sure to volunteer. One of the tasks that he performed more than anyone else was to repair the ground wire, a task both dangerous and tiring. Even though this job wasn’t particularly demanding technically, it did benefit from experience. There were many causes of malfunction: a loose contact due to exposure to open air—difficult to detect—or possibly the location where the ground wire went into the cliff was too dry. The volunteer soldiers responsible for external maintenance were all new, and none had much experience. So I had guessed that Lei would most likely show up.

He put on the safety harness and went over the cliff edge on the rope, as though I didn’t exist. I made some excuse to get rid of the soldier who brought him so that I was the only one left on the cliff. Then I took a short hacksaw out of my pocket. It was made from a longer saw blade broken into three pieces and then stacked together. With the stacked blades, any cut I made would be particularly ragged, and it would not be obvious later that the rope was cut through with a tool.

Just then, my husband, Yang Weining, showed up.

After I explained to him what had happened, he looked over the cliff edge. Then he said that to inspect the ground terminal in the cliff face required digging, and the work would be too much for just Lei. He wanted to go down to help, so he put on the safety harness left by that other soldier. I asked him to use another rope, but he said no—the rope that Lei was on was thick and sturdy and could easily bear the weight of two. I insisted, so he told me to go get the rope. By the time I rushed back to the cliff with the rope, he had already gone down over the side. I poked my head over the edge and saw that he and Lei had already finished their inspection and were climbing back up. Lei was in the front.

There would never be another chance. I took out my hacksaw and cut through the rope.

INTERROGATOR: I want to ask a question, but I won’t record the answer. How did you feel at the time?

YE: Calm. I did it without feeling anything. I had finally found a goal to which I could devote myself. I didn’t care what price had to be paid, either by me or by others. I also knew that the entire human race would pay an unprecedented price for this goal. This was a very insignificant beginning.

INTERROGATOR: All right. Continue.

YE: I heard two or three surprised cries, and then the sound of bodies slamming against the rocks at the cliff bottom. After a while, I saw that the stream at the foot of the cliff had turned red…. That’s all I’ll say about that.

INTERROGATOR: I understand. This is the record. Please check it over carefully. If there are no errors, please sign it.

26 No One Repents

The deaths of Lei and Yang were treated as accidents. Everybody at the base knew that Ye and Yang were a happy couple, and no one suspected her.

A new commissar came to the base, and life returned to its habitual peace. The tiny life inside Ye grew bigger every day, and she also felt the world outside change.

One day, the security platoon commander asked Ye to come to the gatehouse at the entrance to the base. When she entered the gatehouse, she was surprised to see three children: two boys and a girl, about fifteen or sixteen. They all wore old coats and dog fur hats, obviously locals. The guard on duty told her that they came from the village of Qijiatun. They had heard that the people on Radar Peak were learned and had come to ask some questions related to their studies.

Ye wondered how they dared to come onto Radar Peak. This was a restricted military zone, and the guards were authorized to warn intruders only once before shooting. The guard saw that Ye was puzzled and explained that they had just received orders that Red Coast Base’s security rating had been reduced. The locals were allowed onto Radar Peak as long as they stayed outside the base. Several local peasants had already come yesterday to bring vegetables.

One of the children took out a worn-out middle school physics textbook. His hands were dirty and cracked like tree bark. In a thick Northeastern accent, he asked a simple physics question: The textbook said that a body in free fall is under constant acceleration but will always reach a terminal velocity. They had been thinking about this for several nights and could not understand why.

“You walked all this way just to ask this?” Ye asked.

“Teacher Ye, don’t you know that they’ve restarted the exam?” the girl said excitedly.

“The exam?”

“The National College Entrance Exam! Whoever studies hard and gets the best score gets to go to college! It began two years ago. Didn’t you know?”

“There’s no need for recommendations anymore?”

“No. Anyone can take the exam. Even the children of the Five Black Categories in the village can take it.”[35]

Ye was stunned. This change left her with mixed feelings. Only after a while did she realize that the children were still waiting with their books held up. She hurriedly answered their question, explaining that it was due to air resistance reaching equilibrium against the force of gravity. Then she promised that if they encountered any difficulties in their studies in the future, they could always come to her for help.

Three days later, seven children came to seek Ye. In addition to the three who had come last time, there were four more from villages located even farther away. The third time, fifteen children came to find her, and even a teacher at a small-town high school came along.

Because there was a shortage of teachers, he had to teach physics, math, and chemistry, and he came to ask Ye for some help on teaching. The man was over fifty years old, and his face was already full of wrinkles. He was very nervous in front of Ye, and spilled books everywhere. After they left the gatehouse, Ye heard him say to the students: “Children, that was a scientist. A real, bona fide scientist!”

After that, children would come to her for tutoring every few days. Sometimes there were so many of them that the gatehouse couldn’t accommodate them all. With the permission of the officers in charge of base security, the guards would escort them to the cafeteria. There, Ye put up a small blackboard and taught the children.

It was dark by the time Ye got off work on the eve of Chinese New Year, 1980. Most people at the base had already left Radar Peak for the three-day holiday, and it was quiet everywhere. Ye returned to her room. This was once the home of her and Yang Weining, but now it was empty, her only companion the unborn child within her. In the night outside, the cold wind of the Greater Khingan Mountains screamed, carrying with it the faint sound of firecrackers going off in the village of Qijiatun. Loneliness pressed down on Ye like a giant hand, and she felt herself being crushed; compressed until she was so small that she disappeared into an invisible corner of the universe….

Just then, someone knocked on her door. When she opened it, Ye first saw the guard, and then, behind him, the fire of several pine branch torches flickering in the cold wind. The torches were held aloft by a crowd of children, their faces bright red from the cold, and icicles hung from their hats. When they came into her room, they seemed to bring the cold air in with them. Two of the boys, thinly dressed, had suffered the most. They had taken off their thick coats and wrapped them around something that they carried in their arms. Unwrapping the coats revealed a large pot, the fermented cabbage and pork dumplings inside still steaming hot.

That year, eight months after she sent her signal toward the sun, Ye went into labor. Because the baby was malpositioned and her body was weak, the base clinic couldn’t handle her case and had to send her to the nearest town hospital.

This became one of the hardest times in Ye’s life. After enduring a great deal of pain and losing a large amount of blood, she sank into a coma. Through a blur she could only see three hot, blinding suns slowly orbiting around her, cruelly roasting her body. This state lasted for some time, and she hazily thought it was probably the end for her. It was her hell. The fire of the three suns would torment her and burn her forever. This was punishment for her betrayal, the betrayal that exceeded all others. She sank into terror: not for her, but for her unborn child—was the child still in her? Or had she already been born into this hell to suffer eternally with her?

She didn’t know how much time had passed. Gradually the three suns moved farther away. After a certain distance, they suddenly shrank and turned into crystalline flying stars. The air around her cooled, and her pain lessened. She finally awoke.

Ye heard a cry next to her. Turning her head with great effort, she saw the baby’s pink, wet, little face.

The doctor told Ye that she had lost more than 2,000 ml of blood. Dozens of peasants from Qijiatun had come to donate blood to her. Many of the peasants had children who Ye had tutored, but most had no connection to her at all, having only heard her name from the children and their parents. Without them, she would certainly have died.

Ye’s living situation became a problem after the birth of her child. The difficult birth had damaged her health. It was impossible for her to stay at the base with the baby all by herself, and she had no relatives who could help. Just then, an old couple living in Qijiatun came to talk to the base leaders and explained that they could take Ye and her baby home with them and take care of them. The old man used to be a hunter and also gathered some herbs for traditional medicine. Later, after the forest around the area was lost to logging, the couple had turned to farming, but people still called him Hunter Qi out of habit. They had two sons and two daughters. The daughters were married and had moved out. One of the sons was a soldier away from home, and the other was married and lived with them. The daughter-in-law had also just given birth.

Ye still hadn’t been rehabilitated politically, and the base leadership was unsure about this suggested solution. But in the end, there was no other way, and so they allowed the couple to take Ye and the baby home from the hospital on a sled.

Ye lived for more than half a year with this peasant family in the Greater Khingan Mountains. She was so weak after giving birth that her milk did not come in. During this time, the baby girl, Yang Dong, was breastfed by all the women of the village. The one who nursed her the most was Hunter Qi’s daughter-in-law, called Feng. Feng had the strong, solid frame of the women of the Northeast. She ate sorghum every day, and her large breasts were full of milk even though she was feeding two babies at the same time. Other nursing women in Qijiatun also came to feed Yang Dong. They liked her, saying that the baby had the same clever air as her mother.

Gradually, Hunter Qi’s home became the gathering place for all the women of the village. Old and young, matrons and maidens, they all liked to stop by when they had nothing else going on. They admired Ye and were curious about her, and she found that she had many women’s topics to discuss with them.

On countless days, Ye held Yang Dong and sat with the other women of the village in the yard, surrounded by birch posts. Next to her was a lazy black dog and the playing children, bathing in the warm sunlight. She paid attention especially to the women with the copper tobacco pipes. Leisurely, they blew smoke out of their mouths, and the smoke, filled with sunlight, gave off a silvery glow much like the fine hairs on their plump limbs. One time, one of them handed her the long-stemmed cupronickel pipe and told her it would make her feel better. She took only two hits before she became dizzy, and they laughed about it for several days.

As for the men, Ye had little to say to them. The matters that occupied them all day also seemed outside her understanding. She gathered that they were interested in planting some ginseng for cash while the government seemed to be relaxing policies a little, but they didn’t quite have the courage to try. They all treated Ye with great respect and were very polite toward her. She didn’t pay much attention to this at first. But after a while, after observing how those men roughly beat their wives and flirted outrageously with the widows in the village, saying things that made her blush, she finally realized how precious their respect was. Every few days, one of them would bring a hare or pheasant he had caught to Hunter Qi’s home. They also gave Yang Dong strange and quaint toys that they’d made with their own hands.

In Ye’s memory, these months seemed to belong to someone else, like a segment of another life that had drifted into hers like a feather. This period condensed in her memory into a series of classical paintings—not Chinese brush paintings but European oil paintings. Chinese brush paintings are full of blank spaces, but life in Qijiatun had no blank spaces. Like classical oil paintings, it was filled with thick, rich, solid colors. Everything was warm and intense: the heated kang stove-beds lined with thick layers of ura sedge, the Guandong and Mohe tobacco stuffed in copper pipes, the thick and heavy sorghum meal, the sixty-five-proof baijiu distilled from sorghum—all of these blended into a quiet and peaceful life, like the creek at the edge of the village.

Most memorable to Ye were the evenings. Hunter Qi’s son was away in the city selling mushrooms—the first to leave the village to earn money elsewhere, so she shared a room in his house with Feng. Back then, there was no electricity in the village, and every evening, the two huddled around a kerosene lamp. Ye would read while Feng did her needlework. Ye would lean closer and closer to the lamp without noticing, and her bangs would often get singed, at which point the two of them would glance up and smile at each other. Feng, of course, never had this happen to her. She had very sharp eyes, and could do detailed work even in the dim light from heating charcoal. The two babies, not even half a year old, would be sleeping together on the kang next to them. Ye loved to watch them sleep, their even breathing the only sound in the room.

At first, Ye did not like sleeping on the heated kang, and often got sick, but she gradually got used to it. As she slept, she would imagine herself becoming a baby sleeping in someone’s warm lap. The person who held her wasn’t her father or mother, or her dead husband. She didn’t know who it was. The feeling was so real that she would wake up with tears on her face.

One time, she put down her book and saw that Feng was holding the cloth shoe she was stitching over her knee and staring into the kerosene lamp without moving. When she realized that Ye was looking at her, Feng asked, “Sister, why do you think the stars in the sky don’t fall down?”

Ye examined Feng. The kerosene lamp was a wonderful artist and created a classical painting with dignified colors and bright strokes: Feng had her coat draped over her shoulders, exposing her red belly-band, and a strong, graceful arm. The glow from the kerosene lamp painted her figure with vivid, warm colors, while the rest of the room dissolved into a gentle darkness. Close attention revealed a dim red glow, which didn’t come from the kerosene lamp, but the heating charcoal on the ground. The cold air outside sculpted beautiful ice patterns on the windowpanes with the room’s warm, humid air.

“You’re afraid of the stars falling down?” Ye asked softly.

Feng laughed and shook her head. “What’s there to be afraid of? They’re so tiny.”

Ye did not give her the answer of an astrophysicist. She only said, “They’re very, very far away. They can’t fall.”

Feng was satisfied with this answer, and went back to her needlework. But Ye could no longer be at peace. She put down her book and lay down on the warm surface of the kang, closing her eyes. In her imagination, the rest of the universe around their tiny cottage disappeared, just the way the kerosene lamp hid most of the room in darkness. Then she substituted the universe in Feng’s heart for the real one. The night sky was a black dome that was just large enough to cover the entirety of the world. The surface of the dome was inlaid with countless stars shining with a crystalline silver light, none of which was bigger than the mirror on the old wooden table next to the bed. The world was flat and extended very far in each direction, but ultimately there was an edge where it met the sky. The flat surface was covered with mountain ranges like the Greater Khingan Mountains, and with forests dotted with tiny villages, just like Qijiatun…. This toy-box-like universe comforted Ye, and gradually it shifted from her imagination into her dreams.

In this tiny mountain hamlet deep in the Greater Khingan Mountains, something finally thawed in Ye Wenjie’s heart. In the frozen tundra of her soul, a tiny, clear lake of meltwater appeared.

Ye eventually returned to Red Coast Base with Yang Dong. Another two years passed, divided between anxiety and peace. Ye then received a notice: Both she and her father had been politically rehabilitated. Soon after, a letter arrived for her from Tsinghua, stating that she could return to teach right away. Accompanying the letter was a sum of money: the back pay owed to her father after his rehabilitation. Finally, at base meetings, her supervisors could call her comrade.

Ye faced all these changes with equanimity, showing no sign of excitement or elation. She had no interest in the outside world, only wanting to stay at the quiet, out-of-the-way Red Coast Base. But for the sake of Yang Dong’s education, she finally left the base that she had once thought would be her home for the rest of her life, and returned to her alma mater.

Leaving the mountains, Ye felt spring was everywhere. The cold winter of the Cultural Revolution really was over, and everything was springing back to life. Even though the calamity had just ended, everything was in ruins, and countless men and women were licking their wounds. The dawn of a new life was already evident. Students with children of their own appeared on college campuses; bookstores sold out of famous literary works; technological innovation became the focus in factories; and scientific research now enjoyed a sacred halo. Science and technology were the only keys to opening the door to the future, and people approached science with the faith and sincerity of elementary school students. Though their efforts were naïve, they were also down-to-earth. At the first National Conference on Science, Guo Moruo, president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, declared that it was the season of rebirth and renewal for China’s battered science establishment.

Was this the end of the madness? Were science and rationality really coming back? Ye asked herself these questions repeatedly.

Ye never again received any communication from Trisolaris. She knew that she would have to wait at least eight years to hear that world’s response to her message, and after leaving the base, she no longer had any way of receiving extraterrestrial replies.

It was such an important thing, and yet she had done it all by herself. This gave her a sense of unreality. As time passed, that sense grew ever stronger. What had happened resembled an illusion, a dream. Could the sun really amplify radio signals? Did she really use it as an antenna to send a message about human civilization into the universe? Did she really receive a message from the stars? Did that blood-hued morning, when she had betrayed the entire human race, really happen? And those murders…

Ye tried to numb herself with work so as to forget the past—and almost succeeded. A strange kind of self-protective instinct caused her to stop recalling the past, to stop thinking about the communication she had once had with another civilization. Her life passed this way, day after day, in tranquility.

After she had been back at Tsinghua for a while, Ye took Dong Dong to see her grandmother, Shao Lin. After her husband’s death, Shao had soon recovered from her mental breakdown and found ways to survive in the tiny cracks of politics. Her attempts to chase the political winds and shout the right slogans finally paid off, and later, during the “Return to Class, Continue the Revolution” phase, she went back to teaching.[36]

But then Shao did something that no one expected. She married a persecuted high-level cadre from the Education Ministry. At that time, the cadre still lived in a “cowshed” for reform through labor.[37] This was part of Shao’s long-term plan. She knew that the chaos in society could not last long. The young rebels who were attacking everything in sight had no experience in managing a country. Sooner or later, the persecuted and sidelined old cadres would be back in power.

Her gamble paid off. Even before the end of the Cultural Revolution, her husband was partially restored to his old position. After the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh CPC Central Committee,[38] he was soon promoted to the level of a deputy minister. Based on this background, Shao Lin also rose quickly as intellectuals became favored again. After becoming a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, she very wisely left her old school and was promoted to be the vice president of another famous university.

Ye Wenjie saw this new version of her mother as the very model of an educated woman who knew how to take care of herself. There was not a hint of the persecution that she went through. She enthusiastically welcomed Ye and Dong Dong, inquired after Ye’s life during those years with concern, exclaimed that Dong Dong was so cute and smart, and meticulously directed the cook in preparing Ye’s favorite dishes. Everything was done with skill, practice, and the appropriate level of care. But Ye could clearly detect an invisible wall between her mother and herself. They carefully avoided sensitive topics and never mentioned Ye’s father.

After dinner, Shao Lin and her husband accompanied Ye and Dong Dong down to the street to say good-bye. Then Shao Lin returned home while the deputy minister asked to have a word with Ye. In a moment, the deputy minister’s kind smile turned to frost, as though he had impatiently pulled off his mask.

“We’re happy to have you and the child visit in the future under one condition: Do not try to pursue old historical debts. Your mother bears no responsibility for your father’s death. She was a victim as well. Your father clung to his own faith in a manner that was not healthy and walked all the way down a blind alley. He abandoned his responsibility to his family and caused you and your mother to suffer.”

“You have no right to speak of my father,” Ye said, anger suffusing her voice. “This is between my mother and me. It has nothing to do with you.”

“You’re right,” Shao Lin’s husband said coldly. “I’m only passing on a message from your mother.”

Ye looked up at the residential apartment building reserved for high-level cadres. Shao Lin had lifted a corner of the curtain to peek down at them. Without a word, Ye bent down to pick up Dong Dong and left. She never returned.

Ye searched and searched for information about the four female Red Guards who had killed her father, and eventually managed to locate three of them. All three had been sent down to the countryside[39] and then returned, and all were unemployed. After Ye got their addresses, she wrote a brief letter to each of them, asking them to meet her at the exercise grounds where her father had died. Just to talk.

Ye had no desire for revenge. Back at Red Coast Base, on that morning of the transmission, she had gotten revenge against the entire human race, including those Red Guards. But she wanted to hear these murderers repent, wanted to see even a hint of the return of humanity.

That afternoon after class, Ye waited for them on the exercise grounds. She didn’t have much hope, and was almost certain that they wouldn’t show up. But at the time of the appointment, the three old Red Guards came.

Ye recognized them from a distance because they were all dressed in now-rare green military uniforms. When they came closer, she realized that the uniforms were likely the same ones they had worn at that mass struggle session. The clothes had been laundered until their color had faded, and they had been conspicuously patched. Other than the uniforms, the three women in their thirties no longer resembled the three young Red Guards who had looked so valiant on that day. They had lost not only youth, but also something else.

The first impression Ye had was that, though the three had once seemed to be carved out of the same mold, they now looked very different from each other. One had become very thin and small, and her uniform hung loose on her. Already showing her age, her back was bent and her hair had a yellow tint. Another had become thick framed, so that the uniform jacket she wore could not even be buttoned. Her hair was messy and her face dark, as though the hardship of life had robbed her of any feminine refinement, leaving behind only numbness and rudeness. The third woman still had hints of her youthful appearance, but one of her sleeves was now empty and hung loose as she walked.

The three old Red Guards stood in front of Ye in a row—just like they had stood against Ye Zhetai—trying to recapture their long-forgotten dignity. But the demonic spiritual energy that had once propelled them was gone. The thin woman’s face held a mouselike expression. The thickset woman’s face showed only numbness. The one-armed woman gazed up at the sky.

“Did you think we wouldn’t dare to show up?” the thickset woman asked, her tone trying to be provocative.

“I thought we should see each other. There should be some closure to the past,” Ye said.

“The past is finished. You should know that.” The thin woman’s voice was sharp, as though she was always frightened of something.

“I meant spiritual closure.”

“Then you want to hear us repent?” the thick woman asked.

“Don’t you think you should?”

“Then who will repent to us?” the one-armed woman asked.

The thickset woman said, “Of the four of us, three had signed the big-character poster at the high school attached to Tsinghua. Revolutionary tours, the great rallies in Tiananmen, the Red Guard Civil Wars, First Red Headquarters, Second Red Headquarters, Third Red Headquarters, Joint Action Committee, Western Pickets, Eastern Pickets, New Peking University Commune, Red Flag Combat Team, The East is Red—we went through every single milestone in the history of the Red Guards from birth to death.”

The one-armed woman took over. “During the Hundred-Day War at Tsinghua, two of us were with the Jinggang Mountain Corps, and the other two were with the April Fourteenth Faction. I held a grenade and attacked a homemade tank from the Jinggang Mountain faction. My arm was crushed by the treads on the tank. My blood and muscle and bones were ground into the mud. I was only fifteen years old.”[40]

“Then, we were sent to the wilderness!” The thickset woman raised her arms. “Two of us were sent to Shaanxi, the other two to Henan, all to the most remote and poorest corners. When we first went, we were still idealistic, but that didn’t last. After a day of laboring in the fields, we were so tired that we couldn’t even wash our clothes. We lay in leaky straw huts and listened to wolves cry in the night, and gradually we woke from our dreams. We were stuck in those forgotten villages and no one cared about us at all.”

The one-armed woman stared at the ground numbly. “While we were down in the countryside, sometimes, on a trail across the barren hill, I’d bump into another Red Guard comrade or an enemy. We’d look at each other: the same ragged clothes, the same dirt and cow shit covering us. We had nothing to say to each other.”

The thickset woman stared at Ye. “Tang Hongjing was the girl who gave your father the fatal strike with her belt. She drowned in the Yellow River. There was a flood that carried off a few of the sheep kept by the production team. So the Party secretary called to the sent-down students, ‘Revolutionary youths! It’s time to test your mettle!’ And so, Hongjing and three other students jumped into the river to save the sheep. It was early spring, and the surface of the river was still covered by a thin layer of ice. All four died, and no one knew if it was from drowning or freezing. When I saw their bodies… I… I… can’t fucking talk about this anymore.” She covered her eyes and sobbed.

The thin woman sighed, tears in her eyes. “Then, later, we returned to the city. But so what if we’re back? We still have nothing. Rusticated youths who have returned don’t lead very good lives. We can’t even find the worst jobs. No job, no money, no future. We have nothing.”

Ye had no words.

The one-armed woman said, “There was a movie called Maple recently. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. At the end, an adult and a child stand in front of the grave of a Red Guard who had died during the faction civil wars. The child asks the adult, ‘Are they heroes?’ The adult says no. The child asks, ‘Are they enemies?’ The adult again says no. The child asks, ‘Then who are they?’ The adult says, ‘History.’”

“Did you hear that?” The thickset woman waved an arm excitedly at Ye. “History! History! It’s a new age now. Who will remember us? Who will think of us, including you? Everyone will forget all this completely!”

The three old Red Guards departed, leaving only Ye on the exercise grounds. More than a dozen years ago, on that rainy afternoon, she had stood alone here as well, gazing at her dead father. The old Red Guard’s final remark echoed endlessly in her mind….

The setting sun cast a long shadow from Ye’s slender figure. The small sliver of hope for society that had emerged in her soul had evaporated like a drop of dew in the sun. Her tiny sense of doubt about her supreme act of betrayal had also disappeared without a trace.

Ye finally had her unshakable ideal: to bring superior civilization from elsewhere in the universe into the human world.

27 Evans

Half a year after her return to Tsinghua, Ye took on an important task: the design of a large radio astronomy observatory. She and the task force traveled around the country to find the best site for the observatory. The initial considerations were purely technical. Unlike traditional astronomy, radio astronomy didn’t have as many demands on atmospheric quality, but required minimal electromagnetic interference. They traveled to many places and finally picked a place with the cleanest electromagnetic environment: a remote, hilly area in the Northwest.

The loess hills here had little vegetation cover. Rifts from erosion made the slopes look like old faces full of wrinkles. After selecting a few possible sites, the task force stayed for a brief rest at a village where most of the inhabitants still lived in traditional cave dwellings. The village’s production team leader recognized Ye as an educated person and asked her whether she knew how to speak a foreign language. She asked him which foreign language, and he said he didn’t know. However, if she did know a foreign tongue, he would send someone up the hill to call down Bethune, because the production team needed to discuss something with him.[41]

“Bethune?” Ye was amazed.

“We don’t know the foreigner’s real name, so we just call him that.”

“Is he a doctor?”

“No. He’s planting trees up in the hills. Has been at it for almost three years.”

“Planting trees? What for?”

“He says it’s for the birds. A kind of bird that he says is almost extinct.”

Ye and her colleagues were curious and asked the production team leader to bring them for a visit. They followed a trail until they were on top of a small hillock. The team leader showed them a place among the barren loess hills. Ye felt it brighten before her eyes. There was a slope covered by green forests, as though an old, yellowing canvas had been accidentally blessed with a splash of green paint.

Ye and the others soon saw the foreigner. Other than his blond hair and green eyes and tattered jeans and a jacket that reminded her of a cowboy, he didn’t look too different from the local peasants who had labored all their lives. Even his skin had the same dark hue from the sun as the locals. He didn’t show much interest in the visitors. He introduced himself as Mike Evans without mentioning his nationality, but his English was clearly American-accented. He lived in a simple two-room adobe hut, which was filled with tools for planting trees: hoes, shovels, saws for pruning tree branches, and so on, all of which were locally made and crude. The dust that permeated the Northwest lay in a thin layer over his simple and rough-hewn bed and kitchen implements. A pile of books, most of which dealt with biology, sat on his bed. Ye noticed a copy of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. The only sign of modernity was a small radio set, hooked up to an external D battery. There was also an old telescope.

Evans apologized for not being able to offer them anything to drink. He hadn’t had coffee for a while. There was water, but he only had one cup.

“May we ask what you’re really doing here?” one of Ye’s colleagues asked.

“I want to save lives.”

“Save… save the locals? It’s true that the ecological conditions here—”

“Why are you all like this?” Evans suddenly became furious. “Why does one have to save people to be considered a hero? Why is saving other species considered insignificant? Who gave humans such high honors? No, humans do not need saving. They’re already living much better than they deserve.”

“We heard that you are trying to save a type of bird.”

“Yes, a swallow. It’s a subspecies of the northwestern brown swallow. The Latin name is very long, so I won’t bore you with it. Every spring, they follow ancient, established migratory paths to return from the south. They nest only here, but as the forest disappears year after year, they can no longer find the trees in which to build their nests. When I discovered them, the species had less than ten thousand individuals left. If the trend continues, within five years it will be extinct. The trees I’ve planted now provide a habitat for some of them, and the population is rising again. I must plant more trees and expand this Eden.”

Evans allowed Ye and the others to look through his telescope. With his help, they finally saw a few tiny black birds darting through the trees.

“Not very pretty, are they? Of course, they’re not as crowd-pleasing as giant pandas. Every day on this planet some species that doesn’t draw the attention of humans goes extinct.”

“Did you plant all of these trees by yourself?”

“Most of them. Initially I hired some locals to help, but soon I ran out of money. Saplings and irrigation all cost a lot—but you know something? My father is a billionaire. He is the president of an international oil company, but he will not give me any more funding, and I don’t want to use his money anymore.”

Now that Evans had opened up, he seemed to want to pour his heart out. “When I was twelve, a thirty-thousand-ton oil tanker from my father’s company ran aground along the Atlantic coast. More than twenty thousand tons of crude oil spilled into the ocean. At the time, my family was staying at a coastal vacation home not too far from the site of the accident. After my father heard the news, the first thing he thought of was how to avoid responsibility and minimize damage to the company.

“That afternoon, I went to see the hellish coast. The sea was black, and the waves, under the sticky, thick film of oil, were smooth and weak. The beach was also covered by a black layer of crude oil. Some volunteers and I searched for birds on the beach that were still alive. They struggled in the sticky oil, looking like black statues made out of asphalt, only their eyes proving that they were still alive. Those eyes staring out of the oil still haunt my dreams to this day. We soaked those birds in detergent, trying to get rid of the oil stuck to their bodies. But it was extremely difficult: crude oil was infused into their feathers, and if you brushed a little too hard, the feathers would come off with the oil…. By that evening, most of the birds had died. As I sat on the black beach, exhausted and covered in oil, I stared at the sun setting over a black sea and felt like it was the end of the world.

“My father came up behind me without my noticing. He asked me if I still remembered the small dinosaur skeleton. Of course I remembered. The nearly complete skeleton had been discovered during oil exploration. My father spent a large sum to buy it, and installed it on the grounds of my grandfather’s mansion.

“My father then said, ‘Mike, I’ve told you how dinosaurs went extinct. An asteroid crashed into the Earth. The world first became a sea of fire, and then sank into a prolonged period of darkness and coldness…. One night, you woke from a nightmare, saying that you had dreamt that you were back in that terrifying age. Let me tell you now what I wanted to tell you that night: If you really lived during the Cretaceous Period, you’d be fortunate. The period we live in now is far more frightening. Right now, species on Earth are going extinct far faster than during the late Cretaceous. Now is truly the age of mass extinctions! So, my child, what you’re seeing is nothing. This is only an insignificant episode in a much vaster process. We can have no sea birds, but we can’t be without oil. Can you imagine life without oil? Your last birthday, I gave you that lovely Ferrari and promised you that you could drive it after you turned fifteen. But without oil, it would be a pile of junk metal and you’d never drive it. Right now, if you want to visit your grandfather, you can get there on my personal jet and cross the ocean in a dozen hours or so. But without oil, you’d have to tumble in a sailboat for more than a month…. These are the rules of the game of civilization: The first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary.’

“My father placed a great deal of hope in me, but in the end I didn’t turn out the way he wanted. In the days after that, the eyes of those drowned birds always followed me and determined my life. When I was thirteen, my father asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I said I wanted to save lives. My dream wasn’t that great. I only wanted to save a species near extinction. It could be a bird that wasn’t very pretty, a drab butterfly, or a beetle that no one would even notice. Later, I studied biology, and became a specialist on birds and insects. The way I see it, my ideal is worthy. Saving a species of bird or insect is no different from saving humankind. ‘All lives are equal’ is the basic tenet of Pan-Species Communism.”

“What?” Ye wasn’t sure she had heard the last term correctly.

“Pan-Species Communism. It’s an ideology I invented. Or maybe you can call it a faith. Its core belief is that all species on Earth are created equal.”

“That is an impractical ideal. Our crops are also living species. If humans are to survive, that kind of equality is impossible.”

“Slave owners must also have thought that about their slaves in the distant past. And don’t forget technology—there will be a day when humanity can manufacture food. We should lay down the ideological and theoretical foundation long before that. Indeed, Pan-Species Communism is a natural continuation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The French Revolution was two hundred years ago, and we haven’t even taken a step beyond that. From this we can see the hypocrisy and selfishness of the human race.”

“How long do you intend to stay here?”

“I don’t know. I’m prepared to devote my life to the task. The feeling is beautiful. Of course, I don’t expect you to understand.”

Evans seemed to lose interest. He said that he had to go back to work, so he picked up a shovel and a saw and then left. When he said good-bye, he glanced at Ye again, as though there was something unusual about her.

On the way back, one of Ye’s colleagues recited from Chairman Mao’s essay “Remembering Bethune”: “‘Noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests.’” He sighed. “There really are people who can live like that.”

Others also expressed their admiration and conflicted feelings. Ye seemed to be speaking to herself as she said, “If there were more men like him, even just a few more, things would have turned out differently.”

Of course, no one understood what she really meant.

The task force leader turned the conversation back to their work. “I think this site isn’t going to work. Our superiors won’t approve it.”

“Why not? Of the four possible sites, this has the best electromagnetic environment.”

“What about the human environment? Comrades, don’t just focus on the technical side. Look at how poor this place is. The poorer a village, the craftier the people. Do you understand? If the observatory were located here, there would be trouble between the scientists and the locals. I can imagine the peasants thinking of the astronomy complex as a juicy piece of meat that they can take bites from.”

This site was indeed not approved, and the reason was just what the task force leader had said.

Three years passed without Ye hearing anything more about Evans.

But one spring day, Ye received a postcard from Evans with only a single line: “Come here. Tell me how to go on.”

Ye rode the train for a day and a night, and then switched to a bus for many hours until she arrived at the village nestled in the remote hills of the Northwest.

As soon as she climbed onto that small hillock, she saw the forest again. Because the trees had grown, it now seemed far denser, but Ye noticed that the forest had once been much bigger. Newer parts that had grown in the past few years had already been cut.

The logging was in full swing. In every direction, trees were falling. The entire forest seemed like a mulberry leaf being devoured by silkworms on all sides. At the current rate, it would disappear soon. The workers doing the logging came from two nearby villages. Using axes and saws, they cut down those barely grown trees one by one, and then dragged them off the hill using tractors and ox carts. There were many loggers, and fights frequently erupted among them.

The fall of each small tree didn’t make much sound, and there was no loud buzzing from chain saws, but the almost-familiar scene made Ye’s chest tighten.

Someone called out to her—that production team leader, now the village chief. He recognized Ye. When she asked him why they were cutting down the forest, he said, “This forest isn’t protected by law.”

“How can that be? The Forestry Law has just been promulgated.”

“But who ever gave Bethune permission to plant trees here? A foreigner coming here to plant trees without approval would not be protected by any law.”

“You can’t think that way. He was planting on the barren hills and didn’t take up any arable land. Also, back when he started, you didn’t object.”

“That’s true. The county actually gave him an award for planting the trees. The villagers originally planned to cut down the forest in a few more years—it’s best to wait until the pig is fat before slaughtering it, am I right? But those people from Nange Village can’t wait any longer, and if my village doesn’t join in, we won’t get any.”

“You must stop immediately. I will go to the government to report this!”

“There’s no need.” The village chief lit a cigarette and pointed to a truck loading the cut trees in the distance. “See that? That’s from the deputy secretary of the County Forestry Bureau. And there are also people here from the town police department. They’ve carried off more trees than anyone else! I told you, these trees have no status and aren’t protected. You’ll never find anyone who cares. Also, comrade, aren’t you a college professor? What does this have to do with you?”

The adobe hut looked the same, but Evans wasn’t inside. Ye found him in the woods holding an ax and carefully pruning a tree. He had obviously been at it for a while, his posture full of exhaustion.

“I don’t care if this is meaningless. I can’t stop. If I stop I’ll fall apart.” Evans cut down a crooked branch with a practiced swing.

“Let’s go together to the county government. If they won’t do anything, we’ll go up to the provincial government. Someone will stop them.” Ye looked at Evans with concern.

Evans stopped and stared at Ye in surprise. Light from the setting sun slanted through the trees and made his eyes sparkle. “Ye, do you really think I’m doing this because of this forest?” He laughed and shook his head, then dropped the ax. He sat down, his back against a tree. “If I want to stop them, it’d be easy. I just returned from America. My father died two months ago, and I inherited most of his money. My brother and sister only got five million each. This wasn’t what I expected at all. Maybe in his heart, he still respected me. Or maybe he respected my ideals. Not including fixed assets, do you know how much money I have at my disposal? About four point five billion dollars. I could easily ask them to stop and get them to plant more trees. I could make all the loess hills within sight be covered by quick-growth forest. But what would be the point?

“Everything you see before you is the result of poverty. But how are things any better in the wealthy countries? They protect their own environments, but then shift the heavily polluting industries to the poorer nations. You probably know that the American government just refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol…. The entire human race is the same. As long as civilization continues to develop, the swallows I want to save and all the other swallows will go extinct. It’s just a matter of time.”

Ye sat silently, gazing at the rays of light cast among the trees by the setting sun, listening to the noise from the loggers. Her thoughts returned to twenty years ago, to the forests of the Greater Khingan Mountains, where she had once had a similar conversation with another man.

“Do you know why I came here?” Evans continued. “The seeds of Pan-Species Communism had sprouted long ago in the ancient East.”

“You’re thinking of Buddhism?”

“Yes. The focus of Christianity is Man. Even though all the species were placed into Noah’s Ark, other species were never given the same status as humans. But Buddhism is focused on saving all life. That was why I came to the East. But… it’s obvious now that everywhere is the same.”

“Yes, that’s true. Everywhere, people are the same.”

“What can I do now? What is the purpose of my life? I have four point five billion dollars and an international oil company. But what good is all that? Humans have surely invested more than forty-five billion dollars in saving species near extinction. And probably more than four hundred and fifty billion has already been spent on saving the environment from degradation. But what’s the use? Civilization continues to follow its path of destruction of all life on Earth except humans. Four point five billion is enough to build an aircraft carrier, but even if we build a thousand aircraft carriers, it would be impossible to stop the madness of humanity.”

“Mike, this is what I wanted to tell you. Human civilization is no longer capable of improving by its own strength.”

“Can there be any source of power outside of humanity? Even if God once existed, He died long ago.”

“Yes, there are other powers.”

The sun had set and the loggers had left. The forest and the loess hills were silent. Ye now told Evans the whole story of Red Coast and Trisolaris. Evans listened quietly, and the loess hills and the forest in dusk seemed to listen as well. When Ye was finished, a bright moon rose from the east and cast speckled shadows on the forest floor.

Evans said, “I still can’t believe what you just told me. It’s too fantastic. But luckily, I have the resources to confirm this. If what you told me is true”—he extended his hand and spoke the words that every new member of the future ETO would have to say upon joining—“let us be comrades.”

28 The Second Red Coast Base

Three more years passed. Evans seemed to have disappeared. Ye didn’t know if he really was somewhere in the world working to confirm her story, and had no idea how he would confirm it. Even though, by the scale of the universe, a gap of four light-years was as close as touching, it was still a distance that was unimaginably far for fragile life. The two worlds were like the source and mouth of a river that crossed space. Any connections between them would be extremely attenuated.

One winter, Ye received an invitation from a not-very-prominent university in Western Europe to be a visiting scholar for half a year. After she landed at Heathrow for her interview, a young man came to meet her. They didn’t leave the airport, but instead turned back to the landing strip. There, he escorted her onto a helicopter.

As the helicopter roared into the foggy air over England, time seemed to rewind and Ye experienced déjà vu. Many years ago, when she first rode in a helicopter, her life was transformed. Where would fate bring her now?

“We’re going to the Second Red Coast Base.”

The helicopter passed the coastline and continued toward the heart of the Atlantic. After half an hour, the helicopter descended toward a huge ship in the ocean. As soon as Ye saw the ship, she thought of Radar Peak. Only now did she realize that the shape of the peak did resemble a giant ship. The Atlantic appeared like the forest of the Greater Khingan Mountains, but the thing that reminded her most of Red Coast Base was the huge parabolic antenna erected in the middle of the ship, which resembled a round sail. The ship was modified from a sixty-thousand-ton oil tanker, like a floating steel island. Evans had built his base on a ship—maybe it was so that it would always be at the best position for transmission and reception, or maybe it was to hide from detection. Later, she learned that the ship was called Judgment Day.

Ye stepped off the helicopter and heard a familiar howl. It was caused by the giant antenna slicing through the wind over the sea. The sound again drew her thoughts to the past. On the broad deck below the antenna, about two thousand people stood in a dense crowd.

Evans walked up to her and solemnly said, “Using the frequency and coordinates you provided, we received a message from Trisolaris. We’ve confirmed everything you told me.”

Ye nodded calmly.

“The great Trisolaran Fleet has already set sail. Their target is this solar system, and they will arrive in four hundred and fifty years.”

Ye remained calm. Nothing could surprise her anymore.

Evans pointed to the crowd behind him. “You’re looking at the first members of the Earth-Trisolaris Organization. Our ideal is to invite Trisolaran civilization to reform human civilization, to curb human madness and evil, so that the Earth can once again become a harmonious, prosperous, sinless world. More and more people identify with our ideal, and our organization is growing rapidly. We have members all over the world.”

“What can I do?” Ye asked in a soft voice.

“You will become the commander in chief of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement. This is the wish of all ETO fighters.”

Ye remained silent for a few seconds. Then she nodded slowly. “I’ll do my best.”

Evans raised a fist and shouted at the crowd, “Eliminate human tyranny!”

Accompanied by the sound of crashing waves and the wind howling against the antenna, the ETO fighters shouted as one, “The world belongs to Trisolaris!”

This was the day that the Earth-Trisolaris Movement formally began.

29 The Earth-Trisolaris Movement

The most surprising aspect of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement was that so many people had abandoned all hope in human civilization, hated and were willing to betray their own species, and even cherished as their highest ideal the elimination of the entire human race, including themselves and their children.

The ETO was called an organization of spiritual nobles. Most members came from the highly educated classes, and many were elites of the political and financial spheres. The ETO had once tried to develop membership among the common people, but these efforts all failed. The ETO concluded that the common people did not seem to have the comprehensive and deep understanding of the highly educated about the dark side of humanity. More importantly, because their thoughts were not as deeply influenced by modern science and philosophy, they still felt an overwhelming, instinctual identification with their own species. To betray the human race as a whole was unimaginable for them. But intellectual elites were different: Most of them had already begun to consider issues from a perspective outside the human race. Human civilization had finally given birth to a strong force of alienation.

As astounding as the speed of the ETO’s growth had been, the number of members did not tell the whole story of the ETO’s strength. Because most of its members had high social status, they held a lot of power and influence.

As commander in chief of the ETO rebels, Ye was only their spiritual leader. She did not participate in the details of the organization’s operation, didn’t know how the ETO grew so large, and wasn’t even aware of the exact number of members.

In order to grow fast, the organization operated semi-openly, but the governments of the world never paid much attention to the ETO. The ETO knew that they would be protected by the governments’ conservatism and lack of imagination. In those organs wielding the powers of the state, no one took the ETO’s proclamations seriously, thinking that they were like other extremists who spewed nonsense. And because of its members’ social status, governments always treated it carefully. By the time it was recognized as a threat, the rebels were already everywhere. It was only when the ETO began to develop an armed force that some national security organs began to notice it and realized how unusual it was. Consequently, it was only within the last two years that they had begun to attack the ETO effectively.

The members of the ETO were not of a single mind. Within the organization were complicated factions and divisions of opinion. Mainly, they fell into two factions.

The Adventist group was the purest, most fundamentalist strand of the ETO, comprised mainly of believers in Evans’s Pan-Species Communism. They had completely given up hope in human nature. This despair began with the mass extinctions of the Earth’s species caused by modern civilization. Later, other Adventists based their hatred of the human race on other foundations, not limited to issues such as the environment or warfare. Some raised their hatred to very abstract, philosophical levels. Unlike how they would be imagined later, most of them were realists, and did not place too much hope in the alien civilization they served either. Their betrayal was based only on their despair and hatred of the human race. Mike Evans gave the Adventists their motto: We don’t know what extraterrestrial civilization is like, but we know humanity.

The Redemptionists didn’t appear until long after the ETO’s founding. This group’s nature was a religious organization, and the members were believers in the Trisolaran faith.

A civilization outside the human race would doubtlessly greatly attract the highly educated classes, and it was easy for them to develop many beautiful fantasies about such a civilization. The human race was a naïve species, and the attraction posed by a more advanced alien civilization was almost irresistible. To make an imperfect analogy: Human civilization was like a young, unworldly person walking alone across the desert of the universe, who has found out about the existence of a potential lover. Though the person could not see the potential lover’s face or figure, the knowledge that the other person existed somewhere in the distance created lovely fantasies about the potential lover that spread like wildfire. Gradually, as fantasies about that distant civilization grew more and more elaborate, the Redemptionists developed spiritual feelings toward Trisolaran civilization. Alpha Centauri became Mount Olympus in space, the dwelling place of the gods; and so the Trisolaran religion—which really had nothing to do with religion on Trisolaris—was born. Unlike other human religions, they worshipped something that truly existed. Also unlike other human religions, it was the Lord who was in crisis, and the duty of salvation fell on the shoulders of the believer.

The main path of spreading Trisolaran culture to society was the Three Body game. The ETO invested enormous effort to develop this massive piece of software. The initial goals were twofold: one, to proselytize the Trisolaran religion; and two, to allow the tentacles of the ETO to spread from the highly educated intelligentsia to the lower social strata, and recruit younger ETO members from the middle and lower classes.

Using a shell that drew elements from human society and history, the game explained the culture and history of Trisolaris, thus avoiding alienating beginners. Once a player had advanced to a certain level and had begun to appreciate Trisolaran civilization, the ETO would establish contact, examine the player’s sympathies, and finally recruit those who passed the tests to be members of the ETO. But Three Body didn’t attract much notice, because the game required too much background knowledge and in-depth thinking, and most young players didn’t have the patience or skill to discover the shocking truth beneath its apparently common surface. Those who were attracted by it were still mostly intellectuals.

Most of those who became Redemptionists got to know Trisolaran civilization through the Three Body game, and so Three Body could be said to be the cradle of the Redemptionists.

While the Redemptionists developed religious feelings toward Trisolaran civilization, they were also not as extreme as the Adventists in their attitude toward human civilization. Their ultimate ideal was to save the Lord. In order to allow the Lord to continue to exist, they were willing to sacrifice the human world to some degree. But most of them believed that the ideal solution would be to find a way to allow the Lord to continue to live in the Trisolaris stellar system and avoid the invasion of the Earth. Naïvely, they believed that solving the three-body problem would achieve this goal, saving both Trisolaris and the Earth. Admittedly, perhaps this thought wasn’t all that naïve. Trisolaran civilization itself had thought so through many eons. The effort to solve the three-body problem was a thread that ran through several hundreds of cycles of Trisolaran civilization. Most Redemptionists with some in-depth math and physics knowledge had attempted the three-body problem, and even after knowing that the problem was mathematically unsolvable as posed, the effort did not cease, because solving the three-body problem had become a religious ritual of their faith. Even though the Redemptionists had many first-class physicists and mathematicians, research in this area never yielded any important results. It took someone like Wei Cheng, a prodigy who had no connection to the ETO or the Trisolaran faith, to accidentally come up with a breakthrough in which the Redemptionists placed much hope.

The Adventists and the Redemptionists were always in sharp conflict. The Adventists believed that the Redemptionists were the greatest threat to the ETO. This view wasn’t without reason: It was only through some Redemptionists who had a sense of duty that the governments of the world gradually came to understand the shocking background of the ETO rebels. The two factions were of approximately equal strength within the organization, and the armed forces of both had developed to the point of starting a civil war. Ye Wenjie used her authority and reputation to try to patch over the division between the two, but the result was never ideal.

As the ETO movement continued to develop, a third faction appeared: the Survivors. After confirming the existence of the alien invasion fleet, surviving that war became a most natural human desire. Of course, that war wouldn’t occur for another 450 years, and had nothing to do with those living today, but many people hoped that if humans did lose, at least their descendants who were alive in four and a half centuries could live on. Serving the Trisolaran invaders would clearly help with this goal. Compared to the other two factions, the Survivors tended to come from the lower social classes, and most were from the East, and especially from China. Their numbers were still small, but they were growing rapidly. As Trisolaran culture continued to spread, they would become a force that could not be ignored in the future.

The ETO members’ alienation developed variously from the faults of human civilization itself, the yearning and adoration for a more advanced civilization, and the strong desire for one’s descendants to survive that final war. These three powerful motives propelled the ETO movement to develop rapidly.

By then, the extraterrestrial civilization was still in the depths of space, more than four light-years away, separated from the human world by a long journey of four and a half centuries. The only thing they had sent to the Earth was a radio transmission.

Bill Mathers’s “contact as symbol” theory thus received chillingly perfect confirmation.

30 Two Protons

INTERROGATOR: We will now begin today’s investigation. We hope you’ll cooperate again as you did last time.

YE WENJIE: You already know everything I know. In fact, by now there are many things that I’d like to learn from you.

INTERROGATOR: I don’t think you’ve told us everything. First, we want to know this: Among the messages that Trisolaris sent to Earth, what were the contents of those portions that the Adventists intercepted and withheld?

YE: I can’t tell you. They have a tight organization. I only know that they did withhold some messages.

INTERROGATOR: Change of subject. After the Adventists monopolized communications with Trisolaris, did you build a third Red Coast Base?

YE: I did have such a plan. But we only built a receiver, and then construction stopped. The equipment and the base were all dismantled.

INTERROGATOR: Why?

YE: Because there were no more messages coming from Alpha Centauri. There was nothing on any frequency. I think you’ve already confirmed this.

INTERROGATOR: Yes. In other words—at least as of four years ago—Trisolaris decided to terminate all communications with Earth. This makes the messages intercepted by the Adventists even more important.

YE: True. But there’s really nothing more I can tell you about them.

INTERROGATOR: (pausing a few seconds) Then let’s find some topic where you can tell me more. Mike Evans lied to you, is that right?

YE: You could put it that way. He never revealed to me the thoughts buried deep in his heart, and only expressed his sense of duty toward the other species on this planet. I never realized that this sense of duty had caused his hatred of human civilization to develop to such extremes that he could make the destruction of the human race his ultimate ideal.

INTERROGATOR: Let’s look at the current composition of the ETO. The Adventists would like to destroy the human race by means of an alien power; the Redemptionists worship the alien civilization as a god; the Survivors wish to betray other humans to buy their own survival. None of these is in line with your original ideal of using the alien civilization as a way to reform humanity.

YE: I started the fire, but I couldn’t control how it burnt.

INTERROGATOR: You had a plan to eliminate the Adventists from within the ETO, and you even began to implement this plan. But Judgment Day is the core base and command center for the Adventists, and Mike Evans and other Adventist leaders usually reside there. Why didn’t you attack the ship first? Most of the armed forces of the Redemptionists are loyal to you, and you should have enough firepower to sink it or capture it.

YE: It’s because of the messages from the Lord that they intercepted. All those messages are stored in the Second Red Coast Base, on some computer on Judgment Day. If we attacked that ship, the Adventists could erase all the messages when they realized that loss was imminent. Those messages are too important for us to risk losing them. For Redemptionists, losing those messages would be as if Christians lost the Bible or Muslims lost the Koran. I think you are faced with the same problem. The Adventists are holding the Lord’s messages hostage, and that is why Judgment Day has remained unmolested so far.

INTERROGATOR: Do you have any advice for us?

YE: No.

INTERROGATOR: You also call Trisolaris your “Lord.” Does this mean that you’ve also developed religious feelings for Trisolaris like the Redemptionists? Are you already a follower of the Trisolaran faith?

YE: Not at all. It’s just a habit…. I do not wish to discuss it further.

INTERROGATOR: Let’s get back to those intercepted messages. Maybe you don’t know the exact contents, but surely you must have heard rumors of some of the details?

YE: Probably only baseless rumors.

INTERROGATOR: Such as?

YE:…

INTERROGATOR: Did Trisolaris transfer certain technologies to the Adventists, technologies more advanced than current human technology?

YE: Not likely. Because such technology would risk falling into your hands.

INTERROGATOR: One last question, and also the most important: Until now, has Trisolaris sent only radio waves to the Earth?

YE: Almost true.

INTERROGATOR: Almost?

YE: The current Trisolaran civilization is capable of space travel at one-tenth the speed of light. This technology leap occurred a few decades ago in Earth years. Before that point, their maximum speed had hovered around one-thousandth the speed of light. The tiny probes that they sent to the Earth have not even completed one-hundredth of the journey between there and here.

INTERROGATOR: Then I have a question. If the Trisolaran Fleet that had been launched is capable of flight at one-tenth the speed of light, it should take only forty years to reach the solar system. So why do you say that it would take more than four hundred years?

YE: Here’s the thing. The Trisolaran Interstellar Fleet is composed of incredibly massive spaceships. Accelerating them is a slow process. One-tenth the speed of light is only their maximum speed, but they cannot cruise at this speed for long before decelerating as they approach the Earth. Also, the source of propulsion for the Trisolaran ships is matter-antimatter annihilation. In front of each ship is a large magnetic field shaped like a funnel to collect antimatter particles from space. This collection process is slow, and only after a long wait can it gather enough antimatter to allow the ship to accelerate for a brief period. Thus, the fleet’s acceleration occurs in spurts, interspersed by long periods of coasting to collect fuel. This is why the time it takes the Trisolaran Fleet to reach the solar system is ten times longer than the flight time of a small probe.

INTERROGATOR: Then what did you mean by “almost” just now?

YE: We’re talking about the speed of space flight within a certain context. Outside this context, even backward human beings are capable of accelerating certain objects to close to the speed of light.

INTERROGATOR: (a pause) By “context,” do you mean at the macro scale? At a micro scale, humans can already use high-energy particle accelerators to speed up subatomic particles to near the speed of light. These particles are the “objects” you meant, correct?

YE: You’re very clever.

INTERROGATOR: (points to his earpiece) I have the world’s foremost scientists behind me.

YE: Yes, I meant subatomic particles. Six years ago, in the distant Trisolaran stellar system, Trisolaris accelerated two hydrogen nuclei to near the speed of light and shot them toward the solar system. These two hydrogen nuclei, or protons, arrived at the solar system two years ago, then reached the Earth.

INTERROGATOR: Two protons? They only sent two protons? That’s almost nothing.

YE: (laughs) You also said “almost.” That’s the limit of Trisolaran power. They can only accelerate something as small as a proton to near the speed of light. So over a distance of four light-years, they can only send two protons.

INTERROGATOR: At the macroscopic level, two protons are nothing. Even a single cilium on a bacterium would include several billion protons. What’s the point?

YE: They’re a lock.

INTERROGATOR: A lock? What are they locking?

YE: They are sealing off the progress of human science. Because of the existence of these two protons, humanity will not be able to make any important scientific developments during the four and a half centuries until the arrival of the Trisolaran Fleet. Evans once said that the day of arrival of the two protons was also the day that human science died.

INTERROGATOR: That’s… too fantastic. How can that be?

YE: I don’t know. I really don’t know. In the eyes of Trisolaran civilization, we’re probably not even primitive savages. We might be mere bugs.

It was near midnight by the time Wang Miao and Ding Yi walked out of the Battle Command Center. They had been invited to listen to Ye’s interrogation due to Wang’s involvement in the case and Ding Yi’s connection to Ye’s daughter.

“Do you believe what Ye Wenjie said?” Wang asked.

“Do you?”

“Many things that have happened recently are incredible. But for two protons to block all progress of human science? That seems…”

“Let’s focus on one thing first. The Trisolarans were able to shoot two protons at the Earth from four light-years away and they both reached the target! That accuracy is incredible! There are numerous obstacles between there and here: interstellar dust, for example. And both the solar system and the Earth are moving. It would require more precision than shooting a mosquito here from Pluto. The shooter is beyond imagination.”

Wang’s heart clenched when he heard “shooter.” “What do you think this means?”

“I don’t know. In your impression, what do subatomic particles such as neutrons and protons look like?”

“They would just look like a point. Though the point has internal structure.”

“Luckily, the image in my head is more realistic than yours.” As Ding spoke, he tossed his cigarette butt away. “What do you think that is?” He pointed at the butt.

“A cigarette filter.”

“Good. Looking at that tiny thing from this distance, how would you describe it?”

“It’s practically just a point.”

“Right.” Ding walked over and picked up the butt. In front of Wang’s eyes he tore it open and revealed the yellowed spongy material inside. Wang smelled burnt tar. Ding continued, “Look, if you spread this little thing open, the adsorbent surface area can be as large as a living room.” He tossed the filter away. “Do you smoke pipes?”

“I no longer smoke anything.”

“Pipes use another type of more advanced filter. You can get one for three yuan. The diameter is about the same as a cigarette filter, but it’s longer: a small paper tube filled with active charcoal. If you take out all the active charcoal, it will look like a little pile of black particles, like mouse droppings. But added together, the adsorbent surface formed by the tiny holes inside is as large as a tennis court. This is why active charcoal is so adsorbent.”

“What are you trying to say?” Wang asked, listening intently.

“The sponge or active charcoal inside a filter is three-dimensional. Their adsorbent surfaces, however, are two-dimensional. Thus, you can see how a tiny high-dimensional structure can contain a huge low-dimensional structure. But at the macroscopic level, this is about the limit of the ability for high-dimensional space to contain low-dimensional space. Because God was stingy, during the big bang He only provided the macroscopic world with three spatial dimensions, plus the dimension of time. But this doesn’t mean that higher dimensions don’t exist. Up to seven additional dimensions are locked within the micro scale, or, more precisely, within the quantum realm. And added to the four dimensions at the macro scale, fundamental particles exist within an eleven-dimensional space-time.”

“So what?”

“I just want to point out this fact: In the universe, an important mark of a civilization’s technological advancement is its ability to control and make use of micro dimensions. Making use of fundamental particles without taking advantage of the micro dimensions is something that our naked, hairy ancestors already began back when they lit bonfires within caves. Controlling chemical reactions is just manipulating micro particles without regard to the micro dimensions. Of course, this control also progressed from crude to advanced: from bonfires to steam engines, and then generators. Now, the ability for humans to manipulate micro particles at the macro level has reached a peak: We have computers and nanomaterials. But all of that is accomplished without unlocking the many micro dimensions. From the perspective of a more advanced civilization in the universe, bonfires and computers and nanomaterials are not fundamentally different. They all belong to the same level. That’s also why they still think of humans as mere bugs. Unfortunately, I think they’re right.”

“Can you be more specific? What does all this have to do with those two protons? Ultimately, what can the two protons that have reached the Earth do? Like the interrogator said, a single cilium on a bacterium can contain several billion protons. Even if these two protons turned entirely into energy on the tip of my finger, at most it would feel like a pinprick.”

“You wouldn’t feel anything. Even if they turned into energy on a bacterium, the bacterium probably wouldn’t feel anything.”

“Then what were you trying to say?”

“Nothing. I don’t know anything. What can a bug know?”

“But you’re a physicist among bugs. You know more than I do. At least you aren’t completely at a loss when faced with the knowledge of these protons. I beg you. Tell me. Otherwise I won’t be able to sleep tonight.”

“If I tell you more, you really won’t be able to sleep. Forget it. What’s the point of worrying? We should learn to be as philosophical as Wei Cheng and Shi Qiang. Just do the best within your responsibility. Let’s go drinking and then go back to sleep like good bugs.”

31 Operation Guzheng

“Don’t worry,” Shi Qiang said to Wang, as he sat down next to him at the meeting table. “I’m not radioactive anymore. The last couple of days they’ve washed me inside and outside like a flour sack. They didn’t originally think you needed to attend this meeting, but I insisted. Heh. I bet the two of us are going to be important this time.”

As Da Shi spoke, he picked a cigar butt out of the ashtray, lit it, and took a long drag. He nodded, and, in a slow, relaxed manner, blew the smoke into the faces of the attendees sitting on the other side of the table. One of the people sitting opposite him was the original owner of the cigar, Colonel Stanton of the U.S. Marine Corps. He gave Da Shi a contemptuous look.

Many more foreign military officers were at this meeting than the last. They were all in uniform. For the first time in human history, the armed forces of the world’s nations faced the same enemy.

General Chang said, “Comrades, everyone at this meeting now has the same basic understanding of the situation. Or, as Da Shi here would put it, we have information parity. The war between alien invaders and humanity has begun. Our descendants won’t face the Trisolarans for another four and a half centuries. For now, our opponents are still human. Yet, in essence, these traitors to the human race can also be seen as enemies from outside human civilization. We have never faced an enemy like this. The next war objective is very clear: We must capture the intercepted Trisolaran messages stored on Judgment Day. These messages may have great significance for our survival.

“We haven’t yet done anything to draw the suspicion of Judgment Day. The ship still sails the Atlantic freely. It has already submitted plans to the Panama Canal Authority to pass through the canal in four days. This is a great opportunity for us. As the situation develops, such an opportunity may never arise again. Right now, all the Battle Command Centers around the globe are drafting up operation plans, and Central will select one within ten hours and begin implementation. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss possible plans of operation, and then report one to three of our best suggestions to Central. Time is of the essence, and we must work efficiently.

“Note that any plan must guarantee one thing: the secure capture of the Trisolaran messages. Judgment Day was rebuilt from an old tanker, and both the superstructure and the interior have been extensively renovated with complex structures to contain many new rooms and passageways. Supposedly even the crew relies on a map when entering unfamiliar areas. We, of course, know even less about the ship’s layout. Right now, we cannot even be certain of the location of the computing center on Judgment Day, and we don’t know whether the intercepted Trisolaran messages are stored in servers located in the computing center, or how many copies they have. The only way to achieve our objective is to completely capture and control Judgment Day.

“The most difficult part is preventing the enemy from erasing Trisolaran data during our attack. Destroying the data would be very easy. The enemy would not use conventional methods to erase the data during an attack, because it’s easy to recover the data using known technology. But if they just emptied a cartridge clip at the server hard drive or other storage media, it would all be over, and doing so would take no more than ten seconds. So we must disable all enemies near the storage equipment within ten seconds of their detecting an attack. Since we don’t know the exact location of the data storage or the number of copies, we must eliminate all enemies on Judgment Day within a very brief period of time, before the target has been alerted. At the same time, we can’t heavily damage the facilities within, especially computer equipment. Thus, this is a very difficult task. Some think it’s impossible.”

A Japanese Self-Defense Forces officer said, “We believe that the only chance for success is to rely on spies on Judgment Day. If they’re familiar with where the Trisolaran information is stored, they can control the area or move the storage equipment elsewhere right before our operation.”

Someone asked, “Reconnaissance and monitoring of Judgment Day have always been the responsibility of NATO military intelligence and the CIA. Do we have such spies?”

“No,” the NATO liaison said.

“Then we have nothing more to discuss except bullshit,” said Da Shi. He was met with annoyed looks.

Colonel Stanton said, “Since the objective is eliminating all personnel within an enclosed structure without harming other equipment within, our first thought was to use a ball lightning weapon.”

Ding Yi shook his head. “The existence of this kind of weapon is now public knowledge. We don’t know if the ship has been equipped with magnetic walls to shield against ball lightning. Even if it hasn’t, a ball lightning weapon can indeed kill all personnel within the ship, but it cannot do so simultaneously. Also, after the ball lightning enters the ship, it may hover in the air for some time before releasing its energy. This wait time can last from a dozen seconds to a minute or longer. They will have enough time to realize they’ve been attacked and destroy the data.”

Colonel Stanton asked, “What about a neutron bomb?”

“Colonel, you should know that’s not going to work.” The speaker was a Russian officer. “The radiation from a neutron bomb cannot kill right away. After a neutron bomb attack, the amount of time left to the enemy would be more than enough for them to have a meeting just like this one.”

“Another thought was to use nerve gas,” a NATO officer said. “But releasing it and having it spread throughout the ship would take time, so it still doesn’t achieve General Chang’s requirements.”

“Then the only choices left are concussion bombs and infrasonic waves,” Colonel Stanton said. Others waited for him to finish his thought, but he said nothing more.

Da Shi said, “I use concussion bombs in police work, but they’re toys. They’re indeed capable of stunning people inside a building into unconsciousness, but they’re only good for a room or two. Do you have any concussion bombs big enough to stun a whole oil tanker full of people?”

Stanton shook his head. “No. Even if we did, such a large explosive device would certainly damage equipment inside the ship.”

“So what about infrasonic weapons?” someone asked.

“They’re still experimental and cannot be used in live combat. Also, the ship is very large. At the power level available to current experimental prototypes, the most that a full assault on Judgment Day could do is to make the people inside feel dizzy and nauseous.”

“Ha!” Da Shi extinguished the cigar butt, now as tiny as a peanut. “I told you all we have left to discuss is bullshit. We’ve been at it for a while now. Let’s remember what the general said: ‘Time is of the essence!’” He gave a sly grin to the translator, a female first lieutenant who looked unhappy with his language. “Not easy to translate, eh, comrade? Just get the approximate meaning across.”

But Stanton seemed to understand what he was saying. He pointed at Shi Qiang with a fresh cigar that he had just taken out. “Who does this policeman think he is, that he can talk to us this way?”

“Who do you think you are?” Da Shi asked.

“Colonel Stanton is an expert in special ops,” a NATO officer said. “He has been a part of every major military operation since the Vietnam War.”

“Then let me tell you who I am. More than thirty years ago, my reconnaissance squad managed to sneak dozens of kilometers behind Vietnamese lines and capture a hydroelectric station under heavy guard. We prevented the Vietnamese plan to demolish the dam with explosives, which would have flooded the attack route for our army. That’s who I am. I defeated an enemy who once defeated you.”

“That’s enough!” General Chang slammed the table. “Don’t bring up irrelevant matters. If you have a plan, say what it is.”

“I don’t think we need to waste time on this policeman,” Colonel Stanton said contemptuously, as he lit his cigar.

Without waiting for a translation, Da Shi jumped up. “‘Pao-Li-Si’—I heard that word twice. What? You look down on the police? If you’re talking about dropping some bombs and turning that ship into smithereens, yeah, you military are the experts. But if you’re talking about retrieving something out of it without damage, I don’t care how many stars are on your shoulder, you aren’t even as good as a thief. For this kind of thing, you have to think outside the box. OUT. OF. THE. BOX! You will never be as good at it as criminals, masters of out-of-the-box thinking.

“You know how good they are? I once handled a robbery where the criminals managed to steal one car out of a moving train. They reconnected the cars before and after the one they were interested in so that the train got all the way to its destination without anyone noticing. The only tools they used were a length of wire cable and a few steel hooks. Those are the real special ops experts. And someone like me, a criminal cop who has been playing cat and mouse with them for more than a decade, has received the best education and training from them.”

“Tell us your plan, then,” General Chang said. “Otherwise, shut up!”

“There are so many important people here that I didn’t think it was my place to speak. And I was afraid that you, General, would say I was being rude again.”

“You’re already the definition of rudeness. Enough! Tell me what your out-of-the-box plan is.”

Da Shi picked up a pen and drew two parallel curves on the table. “That’s the canal.” He put the ashtray between the two lines. “This is Judgment Day.” Then he reached across the table and pulled Colonel Stanton’s just-lit cigar out of his mouth.

“I can no longer tolerate this idiot!” the colonel shouted, standing up.

“Da Shi, get out of here!” General Chang said.

“Give me one minute. I’ll be done soon.” Da Shi extended a hand in front of Colonel Stanton.

“What do you want?” the colonel asked, puzzled.

“Give me another one.”

Stanton hesitated for a second before taking another cigar out of a beautiful wooden box and handing it to Da Shi. Da Shi took the smoking end of the first cigar and pressed it against the table so that it stood on the shore of the Panama Canal that he’d drawn on the table. He flattened the end of the other cigar and erected it on the other shore of the canal.

“We set up two pillars on the shores of the canal, and then between them we string many parallel, thin filaments, about half a meter apart. The filaments should be made from the nanomaterial called ‘Flying Blade,’ developed by Professor Wang. A very appropriate name, in this case.”

After Shi Qiang finished speaking, he stood and waited a few seconds. Then he raised his hands, said to the stunned crowd, “That’s it,” turned, and left.

The air seemed frozen. Everyone present stayed still like stone statues. Even the droning from the computers all around them seemed more careful.

After a long while, someone timidly broke the silence, “Professor Wang, is ‘Flying Blade’ really in the form of filaments?”

Wang nodded. “Given our current molecular construction technique, the only form we can make is a filament. The thickness is about one-hundredth the thickness of human hair…. Officer Shi got this information from me before the meeting.”

“Do you have enough material?”

“How wide is the canal? And how tall is the ship?”

“The narrowest point of the canal is one hundred fifty meters wide. Judgment Day is thirty-one meters tall, with a draft of eight meters or so.”

Wang stared at the cigars on the table and did some mental calculations. “I think I should have enough.”

Another long silence. Everyone was trying to recover from their astonishment.

“What if the equipment storing Trisolaran data, such as hard drives and optical disks, is also sliced?”

“That doesn’t seem likely.”

“Even if they were sliced,” a computer expert said, “it’s not a big deal. The filaments are extremely sharp, and the cut surfaces would be very smooth. Given that premise, whether it’s hard drives, optical disks, or integrated circuit storage, we could recover the vast majority of the data.”

“Anyone got a better idea?” Chang looked around the table. No one spoke. “All right. Then let’s focus on this and work out the details.”

Colonel Stanton, who had been silent the whole time, stood up. “I will go and ask Officer Shi to come back.”

General Chang indicated that he should remain seated. Then he called out, “Da Shi!”

Da Shi returned, grinning at everyone. He picked up the cigars on the table. The one that had been lit he put into his mouth, and the other he stuffed into his pocket.

Someone asked, “When Judgment Day passes, can those two pillars bear the force applied against the Flying Blade filaments? Maybe the pillars would be sliced apart first.”

Wang said, “That’s easy to solve. We have some small amounts of Flying Blade material that are flat sheets. We can use them to protect the parts of the column where the filaments are attached.”

The discussion after that was mainly between the naval officers and navigation experts.

“Judgment Day is at the upper limit in terms of tonnage that can pass through the Panama Canal. It has a deep draft, so we have to consider installing filaments below the waterline.”

“That will be very difficult. If there’s not enough time, I don’t think we should worry about it. The parts of the ship below the waterline are used for engines, fuel, and ballast, causing a lot of noise, vibration, and interference. The conditions are too poor for computing centers and other similar facilities to be located there. But for the parts above water, a tighter nanofilament net will give better results.”

“Then it’s best to set the trap at one of the locks along the canal. Judgment Day is built to Panamax specifications, just enough to fill the thirty-two-meter locks. Then we would only need to make the Flying Blade filaments thirty-two meters long. This will also make it easier to erect the pillars and string the filaments between them, especially for the underwater parts.”

“No. The situation around the locks is too unpredictable. Also, a ship inside the lock must be pulled forward by four ‘mules,’ electric locomotives on rails. They move slowly, and the time inside the locks will also be when the crew is most alert. An attempt to slice through the ship during that time would most likely be discovered.”

“What about the Bridge of the Americas, right outside the Miraflores Locks? The abutments at the two ends of the bridge can serve as the pillars for stringing the filaments.”

“No. The distance between the abutments is too great. We don’t have enough Flying Blade material.”

“Then it’s decided: The site of operation should be the narrowest point of the Gaillard Cut, a hundred and fifty meters across. Add in some slack for the pillars… let’s call it a hundred seventy meters.”

Wang said, “If that’s the plan, then the smallest distance between the filaments will be fifty centimeters. I don’t have enough material for a tighter net.”

“In other words, we have to make sure the ship crosses during the day,” Da Shi said, blowing out another mouthful of smoke.

“Why?”

“At night the crew will be sleeping, which means they’ll all be lying down. Fifty centimeters between filaments leaves too much of a gap. But during the day, even if they’re sitting or crouching, the distance is sufficient.”

A few scattered laughs. The attendees, all under heavy stress, felt a bit of release tinged with the smell of blood.

“You’re truly a demon,” a female UN official said to Da Shi.

“Will innocent bystanders be hurt?” Wang asked, his voice trembling.

A naval officer replied, “When the ship goes through the locks, more than a dozen cable workers will come onboard, but they’ll all get off after the ship passes. The Panama Canal pilot will have to accompany the ship the entire eighty-two kilometers, so the pilot will have to be sacrificed.”

A CIA officer said, “And some of the crew aboard Judgment Day probably don’t know the real purpose of the ship.”

“Professor,” General Chang said, “do not concern yourself with these thoughts. The information we need to obtain has to do with the very survival of human civilization. Someone else will make the call.”

As the meeting ended, Colonel Stanton pushed the beautiful cigar box in front of Shi Qiang. “Captain, the best Havana has to offer. They’re yours.”

Wang could not even tell that he was in a foreign country. He knew that to the west, not too far away, was beautiful Gatun Lake. To the east was the magnificent Bridge of the Americas and Panama City. But he had had no chance to see either of them.

Two days earlier, he had arrived by direct flight from China to Tocumen International Airport near Panama City and then rode a helicopter here. The sight before him was very common: The construction work under way to widen the canal caused the tropical forest on both slopes to be quite sparse, revealing large patches of yellow earth. The color felt familiar to Wang. The canal didn’t seem very special, probably because it was so narrow here, but a hundred thousand people had dug out this part of the canal in the previous century, one hoe at a time.

Wang and Colonel Stanton sat on lounge chairs under an awning halfway up the slope. Both wore loose, colorful shirts, with their Panama hats tossed to the side, looking like two tourists.

Below, on each shore of the canal, a twenty-four-meter steel pillar lay flat against the ground, parallel to the shore. Fifty ultrastrong nanofilaments, each 160 meters long, were strung between the pillars. At the end on the eastern shore, every filament was connected to a length of regular steel wire. This was to give the filaments enough slack so that they could sink to the bottom of the canal, aided by attached weights. The setup permitted other ships safe passage. Luckily, traffic along the canal wasn’t quite as busy as Wang had imagined. On average, only about forty large ships passed through each day.

The operation’s code name was “Guzheng,” based on the similarity between the structure and the ancient Chinese zither by that name. The slicing net of nanofilaments was thus called the “zither.”

An hour earlier, Judgment Day had entered the Gaillard Cut from Gatun Lake.

Stanton asked Wang whether he had ever been to Panama before. Wang said no.

“I came here in 1989,” the colonel said.

“Because of that war?”

“Yes, that was one of those wars that left me with no impression. I only remember being in front of the Vatican embassy as ‘Nowhere to Run’ by Martha and the Vandellas played for the holed-up Noriega. That was my idea, by the way.”

In the canal below them, a pure white French cruise ship slowly sailed past. Several passengers in colorful clothing strolled leisurely on the green-carpeted deck.

“Second Observation Post reporting: There are no more ships in front of the target.” Stanton’s walkie-talkie squawked.

Stanton gave the order. “Raise the zither.”

Several men wearing hard hats appeared on both shores, looking like maintenance workers. Wang stood up, but the colonel pulled him down. “Professor, don’t worry. They know what to do.” Wang watched as those on the eastern shore rapidly winched back the steel wires attached to the nanofilaments and secured the tightened nanofilaments to the pillar. Then, slowly, the two pillars were stood upright using their mechanical hinges. As a disguise, the pillars were decorated with some navigational markings and water depth indicators. The workers proceeded leisurely, as though they were simply carrying out their boring jobs. Wang gazed at the space between the pillars. There seemed to be nothing there, but the deadly zither was already in place.

“Target is four kilometers from the zither,” the voice in the walkie-talkie said.

Stanton put the walkie-talkie down. He continued the conversation with Wang. “The second time I came to Panama was in 1999, to attend the ceremony for the handover of the canal to Panama. Oddly, by the time we got to the Authority’s building, the Stars and Stripes were already gone. Supposedly the U.S. government had requested that the flag be lowered a day early to avoid the embarrassment of lowering the flag in front of a crowd…. Back then, I thought I was witnessing history. But now that seems so insignificant.”

“Target is three kilometers from the zither.”

“Yes, insignificant,” Wang mumbled. He wasn’t listening to Stanton at all. The rest of the world had ceased to exist for him. All of his attention was focused on the spot where Judgment Day would appear. By now the sun that had risen over the Atlantic was falling toward the Pacific. The canal sparkled with golden light. Close by, the deadly zither stood quietly. The two steel pillars were dark and reflected no sunlight, looking even older than the canal that flowed between them.

“Target is two kilometers from the zither.”

Stanton seemed to not have heard the voice from the walkie-talkie. He continued, “After learning that the alien fleet is coming toward the Earth, I’ve been suffering from amnesia. It’s so strange. I can’t recall many things from the past. I don’t remember the details of the wars I experienced. Like I just said, those wars all seem so insignificant. After learning this truth, everyone becomes a new person spiritually, and sees the world anew. I’ve been thinking: Suppose two thousand years ago, or even earlier, humanity learned that an alien invasion fleet would arrive a few thousand years later. What would human civilization be like now? Professor, can you imagine it?”

“Ah, no…” Wang answered perfunctorily, his mind elsewhere.

“Target is one point five kilometers from the zither.”

“Professor, I think you will be the Gaillard of this new era. We’re waiting for your new Panama Canal to be built. Indeed, the space elevator is a canal. Just as the Panama Canal connected two oceans, the space elevator will connect space with the Earth.”

Wang knew that the colonel’s babbling was meant to help him through this very difficult time. He was grateful, but it wasn’t working.

“Target is one kilometer from the zither.”

Judgment Day appeared. In the light from the setting sun coming over the hills to the side, it was a dark silhouette against the golden waves of the canal. The sixty-thousand-ton ship was much larger than Wang had imagined. Its appearance was like another peak abruptly inserted among the hills. Even though Wang knew that the canal was capable of accommodating ships as large as seventy thousand tons, witnessing such a large ship in such a narrow waterway was a strange feeling. Given its immensity, the canal below seemed to no longer exist. The ship was a mountain gliding across solid earth. After he grew used to the sunlight, Wang saw that Judgment Day’s hull was pitch black, and the superstructure was painted pure white. The giant antenna was gone. They heard the roar from the ship’s engines, accompanied by the churning sound of waves that had been generated by the round prow slapping against the shores of the canal.

As the distance between Judgment Day and the deadly zither closed, Wang’s heart began to beat faster, and his breath became short. He had a desire to run away, but he felt so weak that he could no longer control his body. All at once, he was overwhelmed by a deep hatred for Shi Qiang. How could the bastard have come up with such an idea? Like that UN official said, he is a demon! But the feeling passed. He thought that if Da Shi were by his side, he would probably feel better. Colonel Stanton had invited Shi Qiang to come, but General Chang refused to give permission because he said that Da Shi was needed where he was. Wang felt the colonel’s hand on his back.

“Professor, all this will pass.”

Judgment Day was below them now, passing through the deadly zither. When its prow first contacted the plane between the two steel pillars, the space that seemed empty, Wang’s scalp tightened. But nothing happened. The immense hull of the ship continued to slowly sail past the two steel pillars. When half the ship had passed, Wang began to doubt whether the nanofilaments between the steel pillars really existed.

But a small sign soon negated his doubt. He noticed a thin antenna located at the very top of the superstructure breaking at its base, and the antenna tumbling down.

Soon, there was a second sign indicating the presence of the nanofilaments, a sign that almost made Wang break down. Judgment Day’s wide deck was empty save for one man standing near the stern hosing down the ship’s bollards. From his vantage point, Wang saw everything clearly. The moment that that section of the ship passed between the pillars, the hose broke into two pieces not too far from the man, and water spilled out. The man’s body stiffened, and the nozzle tumbled from his hand. He remained standing for a few seconds, then fell. As his body contacted the deck, it came apart in two halves. The top half crawled through the expanding pool of blood, but had to use two arms that were bloody stumps. The hands had been cleanly sliced off.

After the stern of the ship went between the two pillars, Judgment Day continued to sail forward at the same speed, and everything seemed normal. But then Wang heard the sound of the engine shift into a strange whine, before turning into chaotic noise. It sounded like a wrench being thrown into the rotor of a large motor—no, many, many wrenches. He knew this was the result of the rotating parts of the engine having been cut. After a piercing, tearing sound, a hole appeared in the side of the stern of Judgment Day, made by a large metallic piece punching through the hull. A broken component flew out of the hole and fell into the water, causing a large column of water to shoot up. As it briefly flew past, Wang recognized it as a section of the engine crankshaft.

A thick column of smoke poured out of the hole. Judgment Day, which had been sailing along the right shore, now began to turn, dragging this smoky tail. Soon it crossed over the canal and smashed into the left shore. As Wang looked, the giant prow deformed as it collided into the slope, slicing open the hill like water, causing waves of earth to spill in all directions. At the same time, Judgment Day began to separate into more than forty slices, each slice half a meter thick. The slices near the top moved faster than the slices near the bottom, and the ship spread open like a deck of cards. As the forty-some metal slices moved past each other, the piercing noise was like countless giant fingernails scratching against glass.

By the time the intolerable noise ended, Judgment Day was spilled on the shore like a stack of plates carried by a stumbling waiter, the plates near the top having traveled the farthest. The slices looked as soft as cloth, and rapidly deformed into complicated shapes impossible to imagine as having once belonged to a ship.

Soldiers rushed toward the shore from the slope. Wang was surprised to find so many men hidden nearby. A fleet of helicopters arrived along the canal with their engines roaring; crossed the canal surface, which was now covered by an iridescent oil slick; hovered over the wreckage of Judgment Day; and began to drop large quantities of fire suppression foam and powder. Shortly, the fire in the wreckage was under control, and three other helicopters began to drop searchers into the wreckage with cables.

Colonel Stanton had already left. Wang picked up the binoculars he’d left on top of his hat. Overcoming his trembling hands, he observed Judgment Day. By this time, the wreckage was mostly covered by fire-extinguishing foam and powder, but the edges of some of the slices were left exposed. Wang saw the cut surfaces, smooth as mirrors. They reflected the fiery red light of dusk perfectly. He also saw a deep red spot on the mirror surface. He wasn’t sure if it was blood.

INTERROGATOR: Do you understand Trisolaran civilization?

YE WENJIE: No. We received only very limited information. No one has real, detailed knowledge of Trisolaran civilization except Mike Evans and other core members of the Adventists who intercepted their messages.

INTERROGATOR: Then why do you have such hope for it, thinking that it can reform and perfect human society?

YE: If they can cross the distance between the stars to come to our world, their science must have developed to a very advanced stage. A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards.

INTERROGATOR: Do you think this conclusion you drew is scientific?

YE: …

INTERROGATOR: Let me presume to guess: Your father was deeply influenced by your grandfather’s belief that only science could save China. And you were deeply influenced by your father.

YE: (sighing quietly) I don’t know.

INTERROGATOR: We have already obtained all the Trisolaran messages intercepted by the Adventists.

YE: Oh… what happened to Evans?

INTERROGATOR: He died during the operation to capture Judgment Day. But the posture of his body pointed us to the computers holding copies of the Trisolaran messages. Thankfully, they were all encoded with the same self-interpreting code used by Red Coast.

YE: Was there a lot of data?

INTERROGATOR: Yes, about twenty-eight gigabytes.

YE: That’s impossible. Interstellar communication is very inefficient. How can so much data have been transmitted?

INTERROGATOR: We thought so at first, too. But things were not at all as we had imagined—not even in our boldest, most fantastic imaginations. How about this? Please read this section of the preliminary analysis of the captured data, and you can see the reality of the Trisolaran civilization, compared with your beautiful fantasies.

32 Trisolaris: The Listener

The Trisolaran data contained no descriptions of the biological appearance of Trisolarans. Since humans would not lay eyes on actual Trisolarans until more than four hundred years later, Ye could only envision the Trisolarans as humanoid as she read the messages. She filled in the blanks between the lines with her imagination.

Listening Post 1379 had already been in existence for more than a thousand years. There were several thousand posts like it on Trisolaris, all of them dedicating their efforts to detecting possible signs of intelligent life in the universe.

Initially, each listening post had several hundred listeners, but as technology advanced, there was only one person on duty. Being a listener was a humble career. Though they lived in listening posts that were kept at a constant temperature, with support systems that guaranteed their survival without requiring them to dehydrate during Chaotic Eras, they also had to live their lives within the narrow confines of these tiny spaces. The amount of joy they got from Stable Eras was far less than others got.

The listener at Post 1379 looked through the tiny window at the world of Trisolaris outside. This was a Chaotic Era night. The giant moon had not yet risen, and most people remained in dehydrated hibernation. Even plants had instinctively dehydrated and turned into lifeless bundles of dry fiber lying against the ground. Under the starlight, the ground looked like a giant sheet of cold metal.

This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What the listener of Post 1379 disliked the most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise the listening post picked up from space. He felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row: lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end.

On this day, however, the listener saw something odd when he glanced at the waveform display. Even experts had a hard time telling with the naked eye whether a waveform carried information. But the listener was so familiar with the noise of the universe that he could tell that the wave that now moved in front of his eyes had something extra. The thin curve, rising and falling, seemed to possess a soul. He was certain that the radio signal before him had been modulated by intelligence.

He rushed in front of another terminal and checked the computer’s rating of the signal’s recognizability: a Red 10. Before this, no radio signal received by the listening post had ever garnered a recognizability rating above a Blue 2. A Red rating meant the likelihood that the transmission contained intelligent information was greater than 90 percent. A rating of Red 10 meant the received transmission contained a self-interpreting coding system! The deciphering computer worked at full power.

Still caught up by the dizzying excitement and confusion, the listener stared at the waveform display. Information continued to stream from the universe into the antenna. Because of the self-interpreting code, the computer was able to perform real-time translation, and the message began to show up immediately.

The listener opened the resulting document, and, for the first time, a Trisolaran read a message from another world.

During the next two Trisolaran hours, the listener learned of the existence of Earth, learned of the world that had only one sun and remained always in a Stable Era, learned of the human civilization that had been born in a paradise where the climate was eternally mild.

The transmission from the solar system ended. The deciphering computer now ran uselessly. The post was once again only hearing the noise of the universe.

But the listener was certain that what he had just experienced was not a dream. He knew as well that the several thousand listening posts spread across Trisolaris had also received this message, which Trisolaran civilization had awaited for eons. Two hundred cycles of civilization had been crawling through a dark tunnel, and there was finally a glimmer of light before them.

The listener read over the message from the Earth again. His thoughts drifted over the blue ocean that never froze and the green forests and fields, enjoying the warm sunlight and the caress of a cool breeze. What a beautiful world! The paradise we imagined really exists!

The thrill and excitement cooled, and all that remained was a sense of loss and desolation. During the long loneliness of the past, the listener had asked himself more than once: Even if one day a message from an extra-Trisolaran civilization were to arrive, what would that have to do with me? His own lonely and humble life would not change one iota because of it.

But I can at least possess it in my dream…. And the listener drifted off to sleep. In their harsh environment, the Trisolarans had evolved the ability to switch sleep on and off. A Trisolaran could put himself to sleep in seconds.

But he did not get the dream that he wanted. The blue Earth did appear in his dream, but under the bombardment of an enormous interstellar fleet, the beautiful continents of Earth were burning, the deep blue oceans were boiling and evaporating….

The listener woke up from his nightmare and saw the giant moon, just risen, casting a thin ray of cold light through the small window. He looked at the frozen ground outside the window and reviewed his lonely life. By now, he had lived six hundred thousand Trisolaran hours. The life expectancy of Trisolarans ranged between seven hundred to eight hundred thousand Trisolaran hours. Most people, of course, would have lost the ability to work productively long before then. They would have been forcibly dehydrated, and the resulting dry fibers cast to the flames. Trisolaris did not keep the idle around.

But now the listener saw another possibility. It was inaccurate to say that the receipt of the extra-Trisolaran message had no influence on his life. After confirmation, Trisolaris would surely reduce the number of listening posts. And posts like this one, behind the times, would be among the first to be cut. Then he would be unemployed. A listener’s skills were very specialized, consisting only of some routine operations and maintenance. It would be very difficult to find another job. If he couldn’t find another job within five thousand Trisolaran hours, he would be forcibly dehydrated and then burnt.

The only way to escape this fate was to mate with a member of the opposite sex. When that happened, the organic material making up their bodies would meld into one. Two-thirds of the material would then become fuel to power the biochemical reaction that would completely renew the cells in the remaining one-third and create a new body. Then this body would divide into three to five tiny new lives: their children. They would inherit some of the memories of their parents, continue their lives, and begin the cycle of life anew. But given the listener’s low social position, lonely and enclosed workspace, and advanced age, what member of the opposite sex would be interested in him?

In the last few years, the listener had asked himself millions of times: Is this all there is to my life? And millions of times he had answered himself: Yes, this is all there is. All that you have in this life is the endless loneliness in the tiny space of this listening post.

He couldn’t lose that paradise, even if it was only in a dream.

The listener knew that at the scale of the universe, due to the lack of a sufficiently long measurement baseline, it was impossible to determine the distance of a source of low-frequency radio transmission from space, only the direction. The source could be high-powered but far away, or low-powered but close by. In that direction were billions of stars, each shining against a sea of other stars at different distances. Without knowing how far away the source was, it was impossible to ascertain its exact coordinates.

Distance, the key was distance.

Indeed, there was an easy way to ascertain the distance of the transmission source. Just respond to the message, and if the other party replies quickly to the response, the Trisolarans could determine the distance based on the round-trip time and the speed of light. Or maybe they would take a really long time to reply and cause the Trisolarans to be unable to determine how long the message was en route.

But the question was: Would the other party reply? Since this source had actively sent out a call into the universe, it was very likely that they would reply after getting a response from Trisolaris. And the listener was sure that the Trisolaran government had already given the order to send a message to that distant world to lure them to respond. Maybe the message had already been sent, but maybe not. If the latter was true, then the listener had a singular chance to make his own humble life glow.

The listener dashed in front of the operations screen and composed a short, simple message on the computer. He directed the computer to translate the message into the same language as the message received from the Earth. Then, he pointed the listening post’s antenna in the direction the message from Earth had come from.

The Transmit button was a red rectangle. The listener’s fingers hovered above it.

The fate of Trisolaran civilization was now tied to these slender fingers.

Without hesitation, the listener pressed the button. A high-powered radio wave carried that short message, a message that could save another civilization, into the darkness of space.

We don’t know what the official residence of the princeps of Trisolaris looked like, but we can be sure that thick walls separated him from the outside so as to protect him against the extreme weather. The pyramid from the Three Body game was one guess about what it could look like. That they built the residence deep underground is another.

Five Trisolaran hours earlier, the princeps received the report of the extra-Trisolaran communication. Two Trisolaran hours earlier, he received another report: Listening Post 1379 had sent out a warning message in the direction of the transmission.

The first report did not cause him to leap up in ecstasy, and the second report did not cause him to sink into depression. He wasn’t even angry or resentful. All of these emotions—and other emotions, such as fear, sorrow, happiness, and appreciation of beauty—were things that the Trisolaran civilization strove to avoid and eliminate. Such emotions caused the individual and society to be weak spiritually and did not help with survival in the harsh environment of this world. The mental states that Trisolarans needed were calmness and numbness. The history of the past two hundred-some cycles of civilization proved that civilizations that relied on these two states as their spiritual core were the most capable of survival.

“Why did you do this?” the princeps asked the listener from Post 1379.

“So that my life isn’t wasted,” the listener answered calmly.

“The warning you sent out may have cost Trisolaran civilization the chance at survival.”

“But it gave Earth civilization such a chance. Princeps, Trisolaran civilization’s desire to possess living space is like the desire of a man who has been starving for a long time for food, and it is similarly boundless. We cannot share the Earth with the people of that world. We could only destroy Earth civilization and completely take over that solar system…. Am I right?”

“Yes. But there is another reason for destroying Earth civilization. They’re also a warlike race. Very dangerous. If we try to coexist with them on the same planet, they will shortly learn our technology. Continuing in that state would allow neither civilization to thrive. Let me ask you: You wish to be the savior of the Earth, but do you not feel any sense of responsibility for your own race?”

“I am tired of Trisolaris. We have nothing in our lives and spirit except the fight for survival.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“There’s nothing wrong, of course. Existence is the premise for everything else. But, Princeps, please examine our lives: Everything is devoted to survival. To permit the survival of the civilization as a whole, there is almost no respect for the individual. Someone who can no longer work is put to death. Trisolaran society exists under a state of extreme authoritarianism. The law has only two outcomes: The guilty are put to death, and the not guilty are released. For me, the most intolerable aspects are the spiritual monotony and desiccation. Anything that can lead to spiritual weakness is declared evil. We have no literature, no art, no pursuit of beauty and enjoyment. We cannot even speak of love…. Princeps, is there meaning to such a life?”

“The kind of civilization you yearn for once existed on Trisolaris, too. They had free, democratic societies, and they left behind rich cultural legacies. You know barely anything about them. Most details have been sealed away and forbidden from view. But in all the cycles of Trisolaran civilization, this type of civilization was the weakest and most short-lived. A modest Chaotic Era disaster was enough to extinguish them. Look again at the Earth civilization that you wish to save. A society born and bred in the eternal spring of a beautiful hothouse would not be able to survive even a million Trisolaran hours if it were transplanted here.”

“That flower may be delicate, but it possesses peerless splendor. She enjoys freedom and beauty in the ease of paradise.”

“If Trisolaran civilization ultimately possesses that world, we can also create such lives for ourselves.”

“Princeps, I’m doubtful. The metallic Trisolaran spirit has infiltrated each of our cells and solidified. You really believe it can melt again? I’m an ordinary man living at the bottom of society. No one would pay any attention to me. My life is spent alone, without wealth, without status, without love, and without hope. If I can save a distant, beautiful world that I have fallen in love with, then my life has not been wasted. Of course, Princeps, this also gave me a chance to see you. If I had not done this, a man like me could only ever hope to admire you on TV. So permit me to express myself as honored.”

“You’re guilty beyond doubt. You’re the greatest criminal in all the cycles of Trisolaran civilization. But now we make an exception in Trisolaran law: You’re free to go.”

“Why?”

“For you, dehydration followed by burning is not even remotely adequate as punishment. You’re old, and you will not live to see the final destruction of Earth civilization. But I will at least make sure that you know that you cannot save her. I want to let you live until the day she loses all hope.

“All right. You may leave.”

After the listener from Post 1379 left, the princeps called in the consul responsible for the monitoring system. The princeps also avoided being angry at him. He dealt with it as a routine matter. “How could you allow such a weak and evil man into the monitoring system?”

“Princeps, the monitoring system employs hundreds of thousands. To screen them all strictly is very difficult. After all, the man managed to perform his duties at Listening Post 1379 without error for most of his life. Of course, this most serious mistake is my responsibility.”

“How many others bear some responsibility for this failure in the Trisolaran Space Monitoring System?”

“My preliminary investigation shows about six thousand, accounting for all levels.”

“They’re all guilty.”

“Yes.”

“Dehydrate all six thousand and burn them together in the square in the middle of the capital. As for you, you can be the kindling.”

“Thank you, Princeps. This will at least calm our consciences a little.”

“Before carrying out this punishment, let me ask you: How far can that warning message travel?”

“Listening Post 1379 is a small facility without high transmission power. The maximum range may be twelve million light-hours, about twelve hundred light-years.”

“That’s far enough. Do you have any suggestions for what Trisolaran civilization should do next?”

“How about transmitting a carefully composed message to that world to lure them to respond?”

“No. That might make matters worse. At least the warning message is very short. We can only hope that they ignore it, or misunderstand its contents… All right. You may leave.”

After the consul left, the princeps summoned the commander of the Trisolaran Fleet.

“How long would it take to complete the preparations for the first wave of the fleet?”

“Princeps, the fleet is still in the last phase of construction. At least sixty thousand more hours are needed before the ships are spaceworthy.”

“I will soon present my plan for approval by the Joint Session of Consuls. After construction is complete, the fleet should set sail in that direction at once.”

“Princeps, given the frequency of the transmission, even the direction of the source cannot be ascertained with great accuracy. The fleet is only capable of cruising at one-hundredth the speed of light. Also, it only has enough power in reserve to perform one deceleration, making it impossible to conduct a wide-area search in that direction. If the distance to the target is unclear, the fleet will ultimately fall into the abyss of space.”

“But look at the three suns around us. At any moment, the plasma outer layer of one of them may begin to expand and swallow its last planet, our world. We have no other choice. We must make this gamble.”

33 Trisolaris: Sophon

The princeps had ordered an emergency meeting of all Trisolaran consuls. This was very unusual. Something important must have happened.

Twenty thousand Trisolaran hours ago, the Trisolaran Fleet had launched. The ships knew the approximate direction of their target but not its distance. It was possible that the target was millions of light-hours away, or even at the other end of the galaxy. Faced with the endless sea of stars, the expedition had little hope.

The meeting of consuls occurred under the Pendulum Monument. [As Wang Miao read about this episode, he couldn’t help but recall the session at the UN Building in the Three Body game. In reality, the Pendulum Monument was one of the few objects in the game that really did exist on Trisolaris.]

The princeps’s choice of meeting site confused most of the attendees. The Chaotic Era wasn’t over yet, and a small sun had just risen over the horizon, though it could also set at any moment. The temperature was cold, and all the attendees were forced to wear fully enclosed electric-heating suits. The massive metal pendulum swung magnificently, pounding the frigid air. The small sun cast a long shadow against the ground, as if a giant whose head touched the sky were striding there. Under the watchful eyes of the crowd, the princeps ascended onto the base of the pendulum and flipped a red switch.

He turned to the consuls and said, “I have just shut off power to the pendulum. It will gradually stop under the influence of air resistance.”

“Princeps, why?” a consul asked.

“We all understand the historical significance of the pendulum. It’s intended to hypnotize God. But now we know it’s better for Trisolaran civilization to have God awake, because God is now blessing us.”

Everyone was silent, pondering the meaning of the princeps’s words. After three more swings from the pendulum, someone asked, “Has the Earth responded?”

The princeps nodded. “Yes. Half an hour ago I received the report. It was a response to the warning that was sent.”

“So soon! Only eighty thousand hours have passed since then, which means… which means…”

“Which means that the Earth is only forty thousand light-hours from us.”

“Isn’t that the closest star from here?”

“Yes. That is why I said God is blessing Trisolaran civilization.”

The attendees grew ecstatic, but they couldn’t express the feeling, so the crowd seemed like a pent-up volcano. The princeps knew that allowing such weak emotions to explode would be dangerous. So he poured cold water on their sentiments.

“I have already ordered the Trisolaran Fleet to turn toward this star. But things are not quite as optimistic as you think. Given what we know, right now the fleet is sailing toward certain death.”

The consuls calmed down.

“Does anyone understand my conclusion?”

“I do,” said the science consul. “We’ve all studied the first messages from Earth carefully. The section most worthy of attention is their history. Let’s observe the facts: Humans took more than a hundred thousand Earth years to progress from the Hunter-Gatherer Age to the Agricultural Age. To get from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age took a few thousand Earth years. But to go from the Industrial Age to the Atomic Age took only two hundred Earth years. Thereafter, in only a few Earth decades, they entered the Information Age. This civilization possesses the terrifying ability to accelerate their progress.

“On Trisolaris, of the more than two hundred civilizations, including our own, none has ever experienced such accelerating development. The progress of science and technology in all Trisolaran civilizations has been at a constant or decelerating pace. In our world, each technology age requires approximately the same amount of time for steady, slow development.”

The princeps nodded. “The fact is that four million and five hundred thousand hours from now, when the Trisolaran Fleet has reached the Earth, that civilization’s technology level will have long surpassed ours, due to their accelerating development. The journey of the Trisolaran Fleet is long and arduous, and the fleet must pass through two interstellar dust belts. It’s very likely that only half of the ships will reach the Earth’s solar system, while the rest perish along the way. And then, the Trisolaran Fleet will be at the mercy of a much more powerful Earth civilization. This is not an expedition, but a funeral procession!”

“But if this is true, Princeps, then there are even more frightening consequences…” the military consul said.

“Yes. It’s easy to imagine. The location of Trisolaris has been exposed. To eliminate future threats, an interstellar fleet from Earth will launch a counterattack against us. It’s very possible that long before an expanded sun swallows this planet, Trisolaran civilization will have already been extinguished by humans.”

The bright future had suddenly turned impossibly grim. The attendees fell silent.

The princeps said, “What we must do next is contain the progress of science on Earth. Luckily, as soon as we received the first messages from Earth, we began to develop plans to do so. As of now, we’ve discovered a favorable condition for realizing these plans: The response we just received was sent by an Earth traitor. Thus, we have reason to believe that there are many alienated forces within Earth civilization, and we must exploit such forces to the fullest.”

“Princeps, that is not at all easy. We have but a thin thread of communication with the Earth. It takes more than eighty thousand hours to complete an exchange.”

“But remember that, like us, the knowledge that there are extraterrestrial civilizations will shock all of Earth society and leave profound marks. We have reason to believe that the alienated forces within Earth civilization will coalesce and grow.”

“What can they do? Sabotage?”

“Given a time gap of forty thousand hours, the strategic value of any traditional tactics of war or terror is insignificant, and they can recover from them. To effectively contain a civilization’s development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way: kill its science.”

The science consul said, “The plan focuses on emphasizing the negative environmental effects of scientific development and showing signs of supernatural power to the population of Earth. In addition to highlighting the negative effects of progress, we’ll also attempt to use a series of ‘miracles’ to construct an illusory universe that cannot be explained by the logic of science. After these illusions have been maintained for some time, it’s possible that Trisolaran civilization may become a target of religious worship there. Then, unscientific ways of thinking will dominate scientific thinking among human intellectuals, and lead to the collapse of the entire scientific system of thought.”

“How do we create miracles?”

“The key to miracles is that they cannot be seen as tricks. This may require that we transfer certain technologies far above current human technology level to the alienated forces on Earth.”

“That’s too risky! Who knows who will ultimately control such technologies? That’s playing with fire.”

“Of course, which specific technologies should be transferred to produce miracles requires further study….”

“Please hold on for a moment, Science Consul,” said the military consul as he stood up. “Princeps, I am of the opinion that this plan will be almost useless in terms of stopping human science.”

“But it’s better than nothing,” the science consul argued.

“Barely,” the military consul said contemptuously.

“I agree with your view,” the princeps said. “This plan will only interfere slightly with human scientific development. We need a decisive act that will completely suffocate science on Earth and freeze it at its current level. Let’s focus on the key here: Overall technological development depends on the advancement of basic science, and the foundation of basic science lies in the exploration of the deep structure of matter. If there’s no progress in this field, there can be no major breakthrough in science and technology as a whole. Of course, this is not specific to civilization on Earth. It is applicable to all targets that Trisolaran civilization intends to conquer. We had begun work in this area even before receiving the first extra-Trisolaran communication. But we’ve recently stepped up the effort.

“Now, everyone, look up. What’s that?”

The princeps pointed at the sky. The consuls lifted their heads to gaze in that direction. They saw a ring in space giving off a metallic glow in the sunlight.

“Is that the dock for building the second space fleet?”

“No. That’s a large particle accelerator still under construction. The plans for building a second space fleet have been scrapped. All resources are now devoted to Project Sophon.”

“Project Sophon?”

“Yes. We’ve kept this plan secret from most of you present. I now ask the science consul to give an introduction.”

“I knew about this plan, but didn’t know it had progressed so far.” The speaker was the industry consul.

The culture and education consul said, “I knew about this plan as well, but thought it was like a fairy tale.”

The science consul said, “Project Sophon, to put it simply, aims to transform a proton into a superintelligent computer.”[42]

“This is a science fantasy that most of us have heard about,” the agricultural consul said. “But can it be realized? I know that physicists can already manipulate nine of the eleven dimensions of the micro-scale world, but we still can’t imagine how they could stick a pair of tiny tweezers into a proton to build large-scale integrated circuits.”

“Of course that’s impossible. The etching of micro integrated circuits can only occur at the macro scale, and only on a macroscopic two-dimensional plane. Thus, we must unfold a proton into two dimensions.”

“Unfold a nine-dimensional structure into two dimensions? How big would the area be?”

“Very big, as you will see.” The science consul smiled.

Another sixty thousand Trisolaran hours went by. Twenty thousand Trisolaran hours after the completion of the huge particle accelerator in space, the unfolding of the proton into two dimensions was about to begin in a synchronous orbit around Trisolaris.

It was a beautiful and mild Stable Era day. The sky was particularly clear. Like the day when the fleet had set sail eighty thousand Trisolaran hours ago, the entire population of Trisolaris looked up into the sky, gazing at that giant ring. The princeps and all the consuls again came and stood under the Pendulum Monument. The pendulum had long stopped, and the weight hung still like a solid rock between the tall pillars. Looking at it, it was hard to believe that it had once moved.

The science consul gave the order to unfold into two dimensions. In space, three cubes drifted around the ring—the fusion generators that powered the accelerator. Their winglike heat sinks gradually began to glow with a dim reddish light. The crowd anxiously stared at the accelerator, but nothing seemed to happen.

A tenth of a Trisolaran hour later, the science consul held his earpiece to his ear and listened intently. Then he said, “Princeps, unfortunately, the unfolding failed. We reduced the dimensions by one too many, and the proton became one-dimensional.”

“One-dimensional? A line?”

“Yes. An infinitely thin line. Theoretically, it should be about fifteen hundred light-hours long.”

“We spent the resources intended for another space fleet,” said the military consul, “just to obtain a result like this?”

“In scientific experiments, there has to be a process during which kinks are worked out. After all, this was the very first time the unfolding has been tried.”

The crowd dispersed in disappointment, but the experiment wasn’t over. Originally, it was thought that the one-dimensional proton would stay in synchronous orbit around Trisolaris forever, but due to friction from solar winds, pieces of the string fell back into the atmosphere. Six Trisolaran hours later, everyone outside noticed the strange lights in the air, gossamer threads that flickered in and out of existence. They soon learned from the news that this was the one-dimensional proton drifting to the ground under the influence of gravity. Even though the string was infinitely thin, it produced a field that could still reflect visible light. It was the first time people had ever seen matter not made out of atoms—the silky strands were merely small portions of a proton.

“These things are so annoying.” The princeps brushed his hand against his face over and over. He and the science consul were standing on the wide steps in front of Government Center. “My face always feels itchy.”

“Princeps, the feeling is purely psychological. All the strings added together have the mass of a single proton, so it’s impossible for them to have any effect on the macroscopic world. They can’t do any harm. It’s as if they don’t exist.”

But the threads that fell from the sky grew more numerous and denser. Closer to ground, tiny sparkling lights filled the air. The sun and the stars all appeared inside silvery halos. The strings clung to those who went outside, and as they walked, they dragged the lights behind them. When people returned indoors, the lines glimmered under the lamps. As soon as they moved, the reflection from the strings revealed the patterns in the air currents they disturbed. Although the one-dimensional string could only be seen under light and couldn’t be felt, people became upset.

The torrent of one-dimensional strings continued for more than twenty Trisolaran hours before finally ending, though not because the strings had all fallen to the ground. Although their mass was unimaginably minuscule, they still had some, and so their acceleration under gravity was the same as normal matter. However, once inside the atmosphere, they were completely dominated by the air currents and would never fall to the ground. After being unfolded into one dimension, the strong nuclear force within the proton became far more attenuated, weakening the string. Gradually, it broke into tiny pieces, and the light they reflected was no longer visible. People thought they had disappeared, but pieces of the one-dimensional string would drift in the air of Trisolaris forever.

Fifty Trisolaran hours later, the second attempt to unfold a proton into two dimensions began. Soon, the crowd on the ground saw something odd. After the heat sinks of the fusion generators began to glow red, several colossal objects appeared near the accelerator. All of them were in the form of regular geometric solids: spheres, tetrahedrons, cubes, cones, and so on. Their surfaces had complex coloration, but close examination showed that they were, in fact, colorless. The surfaces of the geometric solids were completely reflective, and what the people saw were just distorted, reflected images of the surface of Trisolaris.

“Have we succeeded?” the princeps asked. “Is that the proton unfolded into two dimensions?”

The science consul replied, “Princeps, it’s still a failure. I just received the report from the accelerator control center. The unfolding left one too many dimensions in, and the proton was unfolded into three dimensions.”

The giant, reflective geometric solids continued to pop into existence in great numbers, and their forms became more various. There were tori, solid crosses, and even something that looked like a Möbius strip. All the geometric solids drifted away from the location of the accelerator. About half an hour later, the solids filled more than half the sky, as though a giant child had emptied a box of building blocks in the firmament. The light reflected from the mirror surfaces doubled the brilliance of the light hitting the ground, but the intensity continuously shifted. The shadow of the giant pendulum flickered in and out, and swayed from side to side.

Then, all the geometric solids began to deform. They gradually lost their regular shapes, as though they were melting in heat. The deformation accelerated and the resulting lumps became more and more complex. Now the objects in the sky no longer reminded people of building blocks, but of a giant’s dismembered limbs and disemboweled viscera. Because their shapes were no longer so regular, the light they reflected to the ground became softer, but their own surface coloration turned even more strange and unpredictable.

Out of the mess of three-dimensional objects, a few in particular drew special attention from observers on the ground. At first, it was only because the objects in question were very similar to each other. But upon closer examination, people recognized them, and a wave of terror swept Trisolaris.

They were all eyes! [Of course, we don’t know what Trisolaran eyes look like, but we can be certain that any intelligent life would be very sensitive to representations of eyes.]

The princeps was one of the few who kept calm. He asked the science consul, “How complicated can the internal structure of a subatomic particle be?”

“It depends on the number of dimensions of your observation perspective. From a one-dimensional perspective, it’s only a point—that’s how ordinary people think of the particles. From a two- or three-dimensional perspective, the particle begins to show internal structure. From a four-dimensional perspective, a fundamental particle is an immense world.”

The princeps said, “To use a word like ‘immense’ to describe a subatomic particle such as a proton seems incredible to me.”

The science consul ignored the princeps and continued, “As we move to higher dimensions, the complexity and number of structures within a particle increase dramatically. The comparisons I’m about to make will not be precise, but should give you an idea of the scale. A particle seen from a seven-dimensional perspective has a complexity comparable to our Trisolaran stellar system in three dimensions. From an eight-dimensional perspective, a particle is a vast presence like the Milky Way. When the perspective has been raised to nine dimensions, a fundamental particle’s internal structures and complexity are equal to the whole universe. As for even higher dimensions, our physicists haven’t been able to explore them, so we cannot yet imagine the degree of complexity.”

The princeps pointed to the giant eyes in space. “Do these show that the microcosmos contained within the unfolded proton harbors intelligent life?”

“Our definition of ‘life’ is probably not appropriate for the high-dimensional microcosmos. More accurately, we can only say that universe contains intelligence or wisdom. Scientists have long predicted this possibility. It would have been odd for such a complex and vast world to not have evolved something akin to intelligence.”

“Why have they transformed into eyes to look at us?” The princeps looked up at the eyes in space, beautiful, lifelike sculptures, all of them gazing upon the planet below strangely.

“Maybe they just want to demonstrate their presence.”

“Can they fall down here?”

“Not at all. You may rest easy, Princeps. Even if they were to fall, the mass of all these huge structures added together is only that of a proton. Just like the one-dimensional string from last time, they won’t have any effect on our world. People just have to get used to the strange sight.”

But this time, the science consul was wrong.

People noticed the eyes moved faster than the other solids filling the sky, and they were gathering into one spot. Soon, two eyes met and merged into one bigger eye. More and more eyes joined this big eye, and its volume grew. Finally, all the eyes melded into one. It was so large that it seemed to represent the gaze of the universe upon Trisolaris. The iris was clear and bright, and at the center was the image of a sun. Over the broad surface of the eyeball, various colors cascaded in a flood. Soon, the details over the giant eye faded and gradually disappeared, until it became a pupil-less blind eye. Then it began to deform until it finally lost the shape of an eye and became a perfect circle. When the circle began to slowly rotate, people realized that it was not flat, but parabolic, like a slice cut from a giant sphere.

As the military consul stared at the slowly spinning colossal object in space, he suddenly understood and shouted, “Princeps and others, please go into the underground bunker right away.” He pointed upward. “That is—”

“A parabolic mirror,” the princeps said calmly. “Direct the space defense forces to destroy it. We will stay right here.”

The parabolic mirror focused the sun’s beams onto the surface of Trisolaris. Initially, the spot of light was very large, and the heat at the focal point wasn’t yet lethal. This spot moved across the ground, searching for its target. The mirror discovered the capital, the largest city of Trisolaris, and the light spot began to move toward it. Soon, the beam was over the city.

Those standing under the Pendulum Monument only saw a great brightness in space. It overwhelmed everything else, accompanied by a wave of extreme heat. Then the light spot over the capital shrank as the parabolic mirror began to focus the light more tightly. The brightness from space grew stronger until no one could lift up his head, and those standing within the spot felt the temperature rise rapidly. Just as the heat became unbearable, the edge of the light spot swept past the Pendulum Monument and everything dimmed. It took a while before the crowd’s sight readjusted to normal light.

When they looked up, the first sight that greeted them was a pillar of light between the sky and earth, shaped like an inverted cone. The mirror in space formed the base of the cone, and the tip stabbed into the heart of the capital, turning everything there incandescent at once. Waves of smoke began to rise. Tornadoes caused by the uneven heat of the light cone formed several other pillars made of dust that connected to the sky, twisting and dancing around the light cone….

Several brilliant fireballs appeared in different parts of the mirror, their blue color distinct from the light reflected from the mirror. These were the exploding nuclear warheads launched by the Trisolaran space defense corps. Because the explosions were happening outside the atmosphere, there was no sound. By the time the fireballs disappeared, several large holes appeared in the mirror, and then the entire surface of the mirror began to tear and crack, until it had broken into more than a dozen pieces.

The deadly light cone disappeared and the world returned to a normal level of illumination. For a moment, the sky was as dim as a moonlit night. Those broken pieces of the mirror, now devoid of intelligence, continued to deform and soon could not be distinguished from the other geometric solids in space.

“What will happen with the next experiment?” The princeps’s expression was derisive as he spoke to the science consul. “Will you unfold a proton into four dimensions?”

“Princeps, even if that were to occur, it’s nothing to worry about. A proton unfolded into four dimensions will be much smaller. If the space defense corps is prepared to attack its projection in three-dimensional space, it can be destroyed just the same.”

“You’re deceiving the princeps!” said a furious military consul. “You have not mentioned the real danger. What if the proton is unfolded into zero dimensions?”

“Zero dimensions?” The princeps was interested. “Wouldn’t that be a point with no size?”

“Yes, a singularity! Even a proton would be infinitely big compared to it. The entire mass of the proton will be contained in this singularity, and its density will be infinite. Princeps, I’m sure you can imagine what that would be.”

“A black hole?”

“Yes.”

“Princeps, let me explain,” the science consul broke in. “The reason we picked a proton instead of a neutron to unfold into two dimensions is precisely to avoid this kind of risk. If we really were to unfold into zero dimensions, the charge of a proton would also be carried over into the unfolded black hole. We can then capture and control it using electromagnetism.”

“What if you can’t find it or control it?” the military consul asked. “It can then land on the ground, suck in everything it encounters, and increase its mass. Then it will sink into the core of this planet and eventually suck down all of Trisolaris.”

“That will never happen. I guarantee it! Why are you always making things difficult for me? Like I said, this is a scientific experiment—”

“That’s enough!” the princeps said. “What is the probability of success next time?”

“Almost one hundred percent! Princeps, please believe in me. Through these two failures, we have already mastered the principles governing unfolding subatomic structures into low-dimensional macro space.”

“All right. To ensure the survival of Trisolaran civilization, we must take this risk.”

“Thank you!”

“But if you fail again, you and all the scientists working on Project Sophon will be guilty.”

“Yes, of course, all guilty.” If Trisolarans could perspire, the science consul must have been soaked in cold sweat.

It was much easier to clean up the three-dimensional remnants of the unfolded proton in synchronous orbit than it was to clean up the one-dimensional string. Small spaceships were able to drag the pieces of proton matter away from Trisolaris and prevent them from entering the atmosphere. Those objects, some as large as mountains, had almost no mass. They were like immense silver illusions; even a baby could have moved them easily.

Afterwards, the princeps asked the science consul, “Did we destroy a civilization in the microcosmos in this experiment?”

“It was at least an intelligent body. Also, Princeps, we destroyed the entire microcosmos. That miniature universe is immense in higher dimensions, and it probably contained more than one intelligence or civilization that never had a chance to express themselves in macro space. Of course, in higher dimensional space at such micro scales, the form that intelligence or civilization may take is beyond our imagination. They’re something else entirely. And such destruction has probably occurred many times before.”

“Oh?”

“In the long history of scientific progress, how many protons have been smashed apart in accelerators by physicists? How many neutrons and electrons? Probably no fewer than a hundred million. Every collision was probably the end of the civilizations and intelligences in a microcosmos. In fact, even in nature, the destruction of universes must be happening at every second—for example, through the decay of neutrons. Also, a high-energy cosmic ray entering the atmosphere may destroy thousands of such miniature universes…. You’re not feeling sentimental because of this, are you?”

“You amuse me. I will immediately notify the propaganda consul and direct him to repeatedly publicize this scientific fact to the world. The people of Trisolaris must understand that the destruction of civilizations is a common occurrence that happens every second of every hour.”

“Why? Do you wish to encourage the people to face the possible destruction of Trisolaran civilization with equanimity?”

“No. It’s to encourage them to face the destruction of Earth civilization with equanimity. You know very well that after we publicized our policy toward the Earth civilization, there was a wave of extremely dangerous pacifism. We have only now discovered that there are many like the listener of Post 1379. We must control and eliminate these weak sentiments.”

“Princeps, this is mainly the result of recent messages received from the Earth. Your prediction has come true: The alienated forces on Earth really are growing. They have built a new transmission site completely under their control, and have begun to send us large amounts of information about Earth civilization. I must admit that their civilization has great appeal on Trisolaris. For our people, it sounds like sacred music from Heaven. The humanism of Earth will lead many Trisolarans onto the wrong path. Just as Trisolaran civilization has already become a religion on Earth, Earth civilization has this potential on Trisolaris.”

“You’ve pointed out a great danger. We must strictly control the flow of information from the Earth to the populace, especially cultural information.”

The third attempt to unfold a proton into two dimensions began thirty Trisolaran hours later. This time, it was at night. From the ground, it was impossible to see the ring of the accelerator in space. Only the red glow from the heat sinks of the fusion reactors around it marked its location. Shortly after the accelerator was started, the science consul announced success.

People gazed up at the night sky. Initially, there was nothing to see. But soon, they saw a miraculous sight: The heavens separated into two pieces. Between the two, the pattern of the stars did not match, as though two photographs of the sky had been stacked together, with the smaller one overlaid on top of the big one. The Milky Way broke at the border between the two. The smaller portion of the star-studded firmament was circular, and it rapidly expanded against the normal night sky.

“That constellation in there belongs to the southern hemisphere!” the culture and education consul said, pointing at the expanding, circular patch of the sky.

As people exercised their imaginations to understand how stars that could be seen only from the other side of the planet were now superimposed over the northern hemisphere’s view, an even more astonishing sight appeared: At the edge of the expanding patch of the night sky from the southern hemisphere, a part of a giant globe appeared. The globe was brownish, and it was being revealed a stripe at a time, as though on a display with a very slow refresh rate. Everyone recognized the globe: On it were the clear outlines of familiar continents. By the time the entire globe came into view, it already occupied one-third of the sky. More details on the globe could be made out: the wrinkles of mountain ranges covering the brownish continents, the scattered cloud cover like patches of snow over the continents…

Someone finally blurted out, “That’s our planet!”

Yes, another Trisolaris had appeared in the sky.

Next, the sky brightened. Next to the second Trisolaris in space, the expanding circle of the night sky from the southern hemisphere revealed another sun. This was clearly the same sun that currently was shining over the southern hemisphere, but it appeared at only half the size.

Finally, someone figured it out. “It’s a mirror.”

The immense mirror that appeared over Trisolaris was the proton being unfolded, a geometric plane without any meaningful depth.

By the time the unfolding was complete, the entire sky had been replaced by the reflection of the night sky of the southern hemisphere. Directly overhead, the sky was dominated by the reflection of Trisolaris and the sun. And then the sky began to deform just above the horizon all around, and the reflections of the stars stretched and twisted as though they were melting. The deformation began at the edges of the mirror, but climbed up toward the center.

“Princeps, the proton plane is being bent by our planet’s gravity,” the science consul said. He pointed to the numerous spots of light in the starry sky. They looked as though people were waving flashlights up at the domed vault. “Those are electromagnetic beams being sent up from the ground to adjust the curvature of the plane under gravity. The goal is to eventually wrap the unfolded proton completely around Trisolaris. Afterwards, the electromagnetic beams will continue to hold up and stabilize this enormous sphere, like so many spokes. Thus, Trisolaris will be the workbench to secure the two-dimensional proton, and the work to etch electronic circuits on the surface of the proton plane can begin.”

The process of wrapping the two-dimensional proton plane around Trisolaris took a long time. By the time the deformation of the reflection reached the image of Trisolaris at the plane’s zenith, the stars had all disappeared because the proton plane, now curved around the other side of the planet, blocked them completely. Some sunlight continued to leak inside the curved proton plane, and the image of Trisolaris in this fun-house mirror in space was distorted beyond recognition. But, finally, after the last ray of sunlight was blocked, everything sank into the darkest night in the history of Trisolaris. As gravity and the electromagnetic beams balanced each other, the proton plane formed a gigantic shell in synchronous orbit around Trisolaris.

Bitter cold followed. The completely reflective proton plane deflected all sunlight back into space. The temperature on Trisolaris dropped precipitously, reaching levels comparable to the appearance of three flying stars, which had ruined many cycles of civilization in the past. Most of the population of Trisolaris dehydrated and were stored. A deathly silence fell over much of the darkness-enclosed surface. In the sky, only the faint light spots from the beams that held up the proton membrane flickered. Occasionally, a few other tiny, sharp lights could be seen in synchronous orbit: the spaceships etching circuits into the gigantic membrane.

The principles governing micro-scale integrated circuits were completely different from those of conventional circuits, as the base material wasn’t made of atoms, but matter from a single proton. The “p-n junctions” of the circuits were formed by twisting the strong nuclear forces locally on the surface of the proton plane, and the conducting lines were made of mesons that could transmit the nuclear force. Because the surface area for the circuit was extremely large, the circuits were also very large. The circuit lines were as thick as hairs, and an observer close enough could see them with the naked eye. Flying close to the proton membrane, it could be seen as a vast plane made of complex, elaborate integrated circuits. The total area covered by the circuits was dozens of times the area of the continents on Trisolaris.

Etching the proton circuits was a huge engineering feat, and thousands of spaceships worked for more than fifteen thousand Trisolaran hours to complete it. The software debugging process took another five thousand Trisolaran hours. But finally, it was time to test the sophon for the first time.

The big screen at the sophon control center deep underground showed the progress of the long self-test sequence. Next came the loading of the operating system. Finally, the blank blue screen showed a line of large-font text: Micro-Intelligence 2.10 loaded. Sophon One ready to accept commands.

The science consul said, “A sophon has been born. We have endowed a proton with wisdom. This is the smallest artificial intelligence that we can make.”

“But right now, it appears as the largest artificial intelligence,” said the princeps.

“As soon as we increase the dimensionality of this proton, it will become very small.”

The science consul entered a query at the terminal:

After this command was issued, the two-dimensional proton membrane that had wrapped itself around Trisolaris began to shrink rapidly, as though a giant’s hand was pulling away a curtain over the world. In a moment, sunlight bathed the ground. The proton folded from two dimensions into three and became a gargantuan sphere in synchronous orbit, about the size of the giant moon. The sophon was over the dark side of the planet, but the sunlight reflected from its mirror surface turned the night into day. The surface of Trisolaris was still extremely cold, so the crowd inside the control center could only observe these changes through a screen.

Dimensionality adjustment successful. Sophon One is ready to accept commands.

>Adjust dimensionality to four.

In space, the gargantuan sphere shrank until it eventually looked to be the size of a flying star. Night again descended over this side of the planet.

“Princeps, the sphere we see now is not the complete sophon. It’s only the projection of the sophon’s body into three-dimensional space. It is, in fact, a giant in four-space, and our world is like a thin, three-dimensional sheet of paper. The giant stands on this sheet of paper, and we can only see the trace where its feet touch the paper.”

The sphere in the sky disappeared.

“How big is a six-dimensional proton?” the princeps asked.

“About fifty centimeters in radius,” the science consul replied.

“What is it saying?” The princeps was stunned.

“A sophon observing three-space from six-space is akin to us looking at a picture on a two-dimensional plane. Of course it can see inside us.”

“Can it go through the ground?” the princeps asked.

“It’s not exactly going ‘through.’ Rather, it’s entering from a higher dimension. It can enter any enclosed space within our world. This is again similar to the relationship between us, existing in three-space, and a two-dimensional plane. We can easily enter any circle drawn on the plane by coming in from above. But no two-dimensional creature on the plane can do such a thing without breaking the circle.”

Just as the science consul finished, a mirror-surfaced sphere appeared in the middle of the control center, floating in air. The princeps walked over and gazed at his own distorted reflection. “This is a proton?” He was amazed.

“This is the six-dimensional body of the proton projected into three-space.”

The princeps extended a hand. When he saw that the science consul did not object, he touched the surface of the sophon. A very light touch pushed the sophon a considerable distance.

“It’s very smooth. Even though it has only the mass of a proton, I could feel some resistance against my hand.” The princeps was puzzled.

“That’s due to air resistance against the surface of the sphere.”

“Can you increase its dimensionality to eleven, and make it as small as a regular proton?”

As soon as the princeps said this, the science consul shouted to the sophon, his voice tinged with fear, “Attention! This is not a command!”

“Princeps, if we increased the dimensionality to eleven, we would lose it forever. When the sophon shrinks to the size of a regular subatomic particle, the internal sensors and I/O ports will be smaller than the wavelength of any electromagnetic radiation. That means it would not be able to sense the macro world, and would not be able to receive our commands.”

“But we must eventually make it shrink back to a subatomic particle.”

“Yes, but that must await the completion of Sophon Two, Sophon Three, and Sophon Four. Multiple sophons may be able to form a system to sense the macro world through quantum effects. For example, suppose a nucleus has two protons. The two of them will interact and follow certain patterns of motion. Take spin: Maybe the direction of spin of the two protons must be opposite from each other. When these two protons are taken out of the nucleus, no matter how far apart they are, this pattern will remain in effect. When both protons are made into sophons, they will, based on this effect, create a mutual-sensing system. More sophons can then form a mutual-sensing formation. This formation’s scale can be adjusted to any size, and can thus receive electromagnetic waves to sense the macro world at any frequency. Of course, the actual quantum effects necessary to create such a sophon formation are very complicated. My explanation is only an analogy.”

The unfolding of the next three protons into two dimensions succeeded on the first try. The construction of each sophon also took only half as long as Sophon One. After the construction of Sophon Two, Sophon Three, and Sophon Four, the quantum sensing formation was also created successfully.

The princeps and all the consuls once again came to the Pendulum Monument. Above them hovered four sophons shrunk to six-space. In the crystalline mirrored surface of each was an image of the rising sun, recalling the three-dimensional eyes that had once appeared in space.

After the command was issued, the four mirrored spheres disappeared. The science consul said, “Princeps, now Sophon One and Sophon Two will be launched toward the Earth. Using the large knowledge base stored in the micro circuits, the sophons understand the nature of space. They can draw energy from the vacuum and become high-energy particles in a moment, and navigate through space at nearly the speed of light. This might appear to violate the law of conservation of energy, but in fact the sophons are only ‘borrowing’ energy from the structure of vacuum. However, the time for returning such energy is far in the future, when the proton decays. By then, the end of the universe will not be far.

“After the two sophons arrive on Earth, their first mission is to locate the high-energy particle accelerators used by humans for physics research and hide within them. At the level of science development on the Earth, the basic method for exploring the deep structure of matter is to use accelerated high-energy particles to collide with target particles. After the target particles have been smashed, they analyze the results to try to find information reflecting the deep structure of matter. In actual experiments, they use the substance containing the target particles as the bull’s-eye for the accelerated bullets.

“But the inside of the substance being struck is almost all vacuum. Suppose an atom is the size of a theater; the nucleus is like a walnut hovering in the center of the theater. Thus, successful collisions are very rare. Often large quantities of high-energy particles must be directed against the target substance for a sustained period of time before a collision occurs. This kind of experiment is akin to looking for a raindrop of a slightly different color in a summer thunderstorm.

“This gives the sophons an opening. A sophon can take the place of a target particle and accept the collision. Because they’re highly intelligent, they can precisely determine through the quantum sensing formation the paths that the accelerated particles will follow within a very short period of time and move to the appropriate location. Thus, the likelihood that a sophon will be struck will be billions of times greater than the actual target particle. After a sophon is struck, it can deliberately give out wrong and chaotic results. Thus, even if the actual target particle is occasionally struck, Earth physicists will not be able to tell the correct result from the numerous erroneous results.”

“Wouldn’t this destroy the sophon as well?” asked the military consul.

“No. When a sophon is smashed into several pieces, several new sophons are born. And they continue to have secure quantum entanglements between them, just like how, if you break a magnet in half, you would get two magnets. Even though each partial sophon’s capabilities will be much lower than the original, whole sophon, under the direction of the self-healing software, the pieces will move together and reassemble into the original sophon. This process only requires a microsecond and will occur after the collision in the accelerator, and after the pieces of the sophon have left the wrong results in the bubble chamber or on sensitive film.”

Someone asked, “Would it be possible for Earth scientists to find a way to detect sophons and then use a strong magnetic field to imprison them? Protons have positive charge.”

“That’s impossible. To detect sophons requires humans to make breakthroughs in the study of the deep structure of matter. But their high-energy accelerators will all have been turned into heaps of junk. How can they make progress in such research? The hunter’s eyes have already been blinded by the prey he intends to catch.”

“Humans may still resort to a brute-force method,” the industry consul said. “They can build a large number of accelerators, faster than the rate at which we can build sophons. Then, at least some accelerators on Earth will not be infiltrated by sophons and can yield the correct results.”

“This is one of the most interesting aspects of Project Sophon!” The science consul was visibly excited by the question. “Mister Industry Consul, do not worry that creating large numbers of sophons will cause the collapse of the Trisolaran economy. We will not need to resort to that. We might build a few more, but not too many. Indeed, just these two are more than enough, because each sophon is capable of multitasking.”

“Multitasking?”

“This is a bit of jargon related to ancient serial computers. Back then, a computer’s central processing unit could only carry out a single instruction at a time. But, because it was so fast, and aided by interrupt scheduling, from our low-speed perspective, the computer was carrying out multiple programs at the same time. As you know, the sophons move at close to the speed of light. The surface of the Earth is a tiny space for sophons. If sophons patrol around the accelerators on Earth at this speed, then, from the perspective of humans, it is as if they simultaneously exist in all the accelerators and can almost simultaneously create erroneous results in all the accelerators.

“By our calculations, each sophon is capable of controlling more than ten thousand high-energy accelerators. It takes about four to five years for humans to build each of these accelerators, and it seems unlikely that they can be mass produced based on their economy and available resources. Of course, they can increase the distance between the accelerators, for example, by building accelerators on the different planets in their planetary system. That would indeed destroy the multitasking operation of the sophons. But in the time it would take to do that, it would not be difficult for Trisolaris to build ten or more sophons.

“More and more sophons will wander in that planetary system. Added all together, they still won’t add up to the mass of even one-billionth of a bacterium. But they will cause the physicists on Earth to never be able to glimpse the secrets hidden deep in the structure of matter. Humans will never be able to access the micro dimensions, and the ability for them to manipulate matter will be limited to below five dimensions. From now on, whether it’s four point five million hours or four hundred and fifty trillion hours, Earth civilization’s technology will never achieve this fundamental breakthrough. They will remain forever in the primitive stage. The science of Earth has been completely locked down, and the lock is so secure that humans will never be able to escape from it by their own strength.”

“That’s wonderful! Please forgive my lack of respect for Project Sophon in the past.” The military consul’s tone was sincere.

“In fact, there are currently only three accelerators with sufficient power to produce results that can lead to possible breakthroughs. After Sophon One and Sophon Two arrive on Earth, they will have a lot of extra capacity. In order to fully utilize the sophons, we will assign them other tasks in addition to interfering with the three accelerators. For example, they will be the main means to carry out the Miracle Plan.”

“Sophons can create miracles?”

“For humans, yes. Everyone knows that high-energy particles can expose film. This is one of the ways that primitive accelerators on Earth once showed individual particles. When a sophon passes through the film at high energy, it leaves behind a tiny exposed spot. If a sophon passes back and forth through the film many times, it can connect the dots to form letters or numbers or even pictures, like embroidery. The process is very fast, and far quicker than the speed at which humans expose film when taking a picture. Also, the human retina is similar to the Trisolaran one. Thus, a high-energy sophon can also use the same technique to show letters, numbers, or images on their retina…. And if these little miracles can confuse and terrify humans, then the next great miracle will be sufficient to frighten their scientists—no better than bugs—to death: Sophons can cause background cosmic radiation to flash in their eyes.”

“This would be very frightening for our scientists as well. How would this be accomplished?”

“Very simple. We have already written the software to allow a sophon to unfold itself into two dimensions. After the unfolding is complete, the huge plane can wrap itself around the Earth. This software can also adjust the membrane so that it’s transparent, but the degree of transparency can be tuned in the frequencies of the cosmic microwave background…. Of course, as sophons fold and unfold into different dimensions, they can display even more amazing ‘miracles.’ The software for accomplishing these is still being developed, but these ‘miracles’ will create a mood sufficient to divert human scientific thought onto the wrong path. This way, we can use the Miracle Plan to effectively restrain scientific endeavors outside of physics on Earth.”

“One last question: Why not send all four of the completed sophons to Earth?”

“Quantum entanglement can work at a distance. Even if four sophons were placed at opposite ends of the universe, they could still sense each other instantaneously, and the quantum formation between them would still exist. Keeping Sophon Three and Sophon Four here will enable them to receive the information sent back by Sophon One and Sophon Two instantaneously. This gives us a way to monitor the Earth in real time. Also, the sophon formation allows Trisolaris to communicate in real time with the alienated forces within Earth civilization.”

Unnoticed, the sun that had just risen disappeared below the horizon and turned into a sunset. Another Chaotic Era had arrived on Trisolaris.

While Ye Wenjie was reading the messages from Trisolaris, the Battle Command Center was hosting another important meeting to perform further analysis of the captured data. Before the meeting, General Chang said, “Comrades, please be aware that our meeting is probably already being monitored by sophons. From now on, there will be no more secrets.”

When he said this, the surroundings were still familiar. The shadows of summer trees swayed against the drawn curtains, but in the eyes of the attendees, the world was no longer the same. They felt the gaze of omnipresent eyes. Under these eyes, there was nowhere to hide in the world. This feeling would follow them all their lives, and their descendants would not be able to escape it. It would take many, many years before humans finally made the mental adjustment to this situation.

Three seconds after General Chang finished his remark, Trisolaris communicated with humanity outside the ETO for the first time. After this, they terminated all communications with the Adventists. For the remainder of the lives of all attendees, Trisolaris never sent another message.

Everyone in the Battle Command Center saw the message in their eyes, just like Wang Miao’s countdown. The message flashed into existence for only two seconds and then disappeared, but everyone got it. It was only a single sentence:

34 Bugs

By the time Shi Qiang entered the door of Ding Yi’s home, Wang Miao and Ding Yi were already very drunk.

The two were excited to see Shi Qiang. Wang stood up and hugged the newcomer’s shoulders. “Ah, Da Shi, Officer Shi…”

Ding, who couldn’t even stand straight, found a glass and put it on the pool table. He poured some liquor into it, and said, “Your out-of-the-box thinking was not helpful. Whether we look at those messages or not, the result four hundred years from now will be the same.”

Da Shi sat down in front of the pool table, glancing at the two with a crafty gaze. “Is it really like you say? Everything’s over?”

“Of course. It’s all over,” Ding said.

“You can’t use the accelerators and can’t study the structure of matter. That means it’s all over?” Da Shi asked.

“Um… what do you think?”

“Technology is still making progress. Academician Wang and his people just created the nanomaterial—”

“Imagine an ancient kingdom, if you will. Their technology is advancing. They can invent better swords, knives, spears, et cetera. Maybe they can even invent auto-repeating crossbows that can shoot many arrows like a machine gun—”

Da Shi nodded, understanding. “But if they don’t know that matter is made from molecules and atoms, they will never create missiles and satellites. They’re limited by their level of science.”

Ding patted Da Shi on the shoulder. “I always knew that our Officer Shi was smart. It’s just that you—”

Wang took over. “The study of the deep structure of matter is the foundation of the foundations of all other sciences. If there’s no progress here, everything else—I’ll put it your way—is bullshit.”

Ding pointed at Wang. “Academician Wang will be busy for the rest of his life, and continue to improve our swords and knives and spears. What the fuck am I going to do? Who the hell knows?” He threw an empty bottle onto the table and picked up a billiard ball to smash it.

“This is a good thing!” Wang lifted his glass. “We will be able to live out the rest of our lives one way or another. After this, decadence and depravity can be justified! We’re bugs! Bugs that are about to go extinct! Haha…”

“Exactly!” Ding also lifted his glass. “They think so little of us that they don’t even bother to disguise their plans for us, telling the Adventists everything. It’s like how you don’t need to hide the bottle of bug spray from the little critters. Let’s toast the bugs! I never thought the end of the world would feel so good. Long live bugs! Long live sophons! Long live the end of the world!”

Da Shi shook his head and drained the glass. He shook his head again. “Bunch of pussies.”

“What do you want?” Ding stared at Da Shi drunkenly. “You think you can cheer us up?”

Da Shi stood up. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“To find something to cheer you up.”

“Whatever, buddy. Sit back down. Drink.”

Da Shi took the two by their arms and dragged them up. “Let’s go. Bring the liquor if you have to.”

Downstairs, the three got into Da Shi’s car. As the car started, Wang asked in slurred speech where they were going. Da Shi said, “My hometown. Not too far.”

The car left the city and sped west along the Beijing-Shijiazhuang Highway. It exited the highway as soon as they were inside Hebei Province. Da Shi stopped the car and dragged his two passengers out.

As soon as Ding and Wang got out of the car, the bright afternoon sun made them squint. The wheat fields of the North China Plain spread out before them.

“What did you bring us here for?” Wang asked.

“To look at bugs.” Da Shi lit one of the cigars Colonel Stanton had given him and pointed at the wheat fields with it.

Wang and Ding now noticed that the fields were covered by a layer of locusts. Every wheat stalk had a few crawling over it. On the ground, more locusts wriggled, like some thick liquid.

“They’re plagued by locusts here?” Wang brushed away some locusts from a small area near the edge of the field and sat down.

“Like the dust storms, they started ten years ago. But this year is the worst.”

“So what? Nothing matters now, Da Shi.” Ding spoke, his voice still drunk.

“I just want to ask the two of you one question: Is the technological gap between humans and Trisolarans greater than the one between locusts and humans?”

The question hit the two scientists like a bucket of cold water. As they stared at the clumps of locusts before them, their expressions grew solemn. They got Shi Qiang’s point.

Look at them, the bugs. Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them: every kind of poison, aerial sprays, introducing and cultivating their natural predators, searching for and destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize them, burning with fire, drowning with water. Every family has bug spray, every desk has a flyswatter under it… this long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization. But the outcome is still in doubt. The bugs have not been eliminated. They still proudly live between the heavens and the earth, and their numbers have not diminished from the time before the appearance of the humans.

The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.

A small black cloud covered the sun and cast a moving shadow against the ground. This was not a common cloud, but a swarm of locusts that had just arrived. As the swarm landed in the fields nearby, the three men stood in the middle of a living shower, feeling the dignity of life on Earth. Ding Yi and Wang Miao poured the two bottles of wine they had with them on the ground beneath their feet, a toast for the bugs.

“Da Shi, thank you.” Wang held out his hand.

“I thank you as well.” Ding gripped Da Shi’s other hand.

“Let’s get back,” Wang said. “There’s so much to do.”

35 The Ruins

No one believed that Ye Wenjie could climb Radar Peak by herself, but she did it anyway. She didn’t allow anyone to help her along the way, only resting a couple of times in the abandoned sentry posts. She consumed her own vitality, the vitality that could not be renewed, without pity.

After learning the truth of Trisolaran civilization, Ye had become silent. She rarely spoke, but did make one request: She wanted to visit the ruins of Red Coast Base.

When the group of visitors ascended Radar Peak, its tip had just emerged from the cloud cover. After walking a whole day in the foggy haze, seeing the bright sun in the west and the clear blue sky was like climbing into a new world. From the top of the peak, the clouds appeared as a silver-white sea, and the rise and fall of the waves seemed like abstractions of the Greater Khingan Mountains below.

The ruins that the visitors had imagined did not exist. The base had been dismantled thoroughly, and only a patch of tall grass was left at the top. The foundations and the roads were buried below, and the whole place appeared to be a desolate wilderness. Red Coast seemed to have never happened.

But Ye soon discovered something. She walked next to a tall rock and pulled away the vines covering it, revealing the mottled, rusty surface below. Only now did the visitors understand that the rock was actually a large metallic base.

“This was the base for the antenna,” Ye said. The first cry from Earth heard by an extraterrestrial world was sent from the antenna that had been here to the sun, and then, amplified, broadcast to the whole universe.

They discovered a small stone tablet next to the base, almost completely lost in the grass.

The tablet was so tiny. It didn’t seem so much a memorial as an attempt to forget.

Ye walked to the lip of the cliff. Here, she had once ended the lives of two soldiers with her own hands. She did not look over the sea of clouds as the others were doing, but focused her gaze in one direction. Below the clouds, there was a small village called Qijiatun.

Ye’s heart beat with effort, like a string on some musical instrument about to break. Black fog appeared before her eyes. She used the last bit of her strength to stay upright. Before everything sank into darkness, she wanted to see sunset at Red Coast Base one more time.

Over the western horizon, the sun that was slowly sinking into the sea of clouds seemed to melt. The ruddy sun dissolved into the clouds and spread over the sky, illuminating a large patch in magnificent, bloody red.

“My sunset,” Ye whispered. “And sunset for humanity.”