Cixin Liu - Death's End

At least until they got killed.

However, as applied to this particular case, the situation was more complicated. The first three communications were followed nine time grains later by the coordinate broadcast. Then, sixty time grains after that, there was another long-membrane coordinate broadcast from somewhere else, pointing at the dead three-star world. The chain of events painted an uneasy picture, a picture that indicated danger. The cleansing against the dead three-star world had happened twelve time grains ago, so the Star-Pluckers must have realized that their own position had been revealed. Their only choice was to shroud themselves in slow fog so that they would appear perfectly safe and no one would bother them.

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

Perhaps they didn’t want to shroud themselves.

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

Hide yourself well; cleanse well.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m just curious.”

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

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

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

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

“Permission granted,” said the Elder.

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

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

“It’s not like this is very costly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheng Xin awakened to find herself in weightlessness.

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

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

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

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

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