Cixin Liu - Death's End

Cheng Xin said what he couldn’t bring himself to say. “There were thirty-five years between the Halo City Incident and the completion of the Mercury base. Thirty-five precious years were lost.”

Luo Ji nodded. Cheng Xin thought the way he looked at her was no longer kind, but rather resembled the fires of the Last Judgment. His gaze seemed to say, Child, look at what you’ve done.

Cheng Xin now understood that of the three paths of survival presented to humanity—the Bunker Project, the Black Domain Plan, and lightspeed ships—only lightspeed ships were the right choice.

Yun Tianming had pointed this out, but she had blocked it.

If she hadn’t stopped Wade, Halo City might have achieved independence. Even if the independence was short-lived, they could have discovered the effects of lightspeed trails and changed the government’s attitude toward lightspeed ships. Humanity might have had time to construct a thousand lightspeed ships and build the black domain, to avoid this dimensional strike.

Humanity could have divided into two parts: those who wanted to fly to the stars, and those who wanted to stay within the black domain and live in tranquility. Each would have gotten what they wanted.

In the end, she had committed another grave error.

Twice, she had been placed in a position of authority second only to God, and both times she had pushed the world into the abyss in the name of love. This time, no one could fix her mistake for her.

She began to hate someone: Wade. She hated that he had kept his promise. Why? Out of his masculine pride, or for her? Cheng Xin understood that Wade did not know the effects of curvature propulsion trails. His goal in researching lightspeed ships was stated eloquently by that anonymous Halo City soldier: a fight for freedom, for a chance to live as free men in the cosmos, for the billions and billions of new worlds out there. She believed that if he had known that lightspeed spaceflight was the only path to life for humanity, he would not have kept his promise.

She could not shirk her responsibility. It didn’t matter whether she really was second only to God—if she was in that position, she had to carry out her duty.

Not long ago on Pluto, Cheng Xin had experienced one of the most relaxed moments of her life. Indeed, it was easy to face the end of the world: All responsibilities were gone, as were all worries and anxieties. Life was as simple and pure as the moment when one first emerged from the mother’s womb. Cheng Xin just had to wait in peace for her poetic, artistic end, for her moment to join the giant painting of the Solar System.

But now, everything had been turned upside down. Early cosmology had presented a paradox: If the universe was infinite, then every spot in the universe would feel the cumulative effects of the infinite gravity exerted by an infinity of celestial bodies. Cheng Xin really did feel an infinite gravity now. The power came from every corner of the universe, ruthlessly tearing at her soul. The horror of her last moments as the Swordholder 127 years ago resurfaced as four billion years of history pressed down on her and suffocated her. The sky was full of eyes staring at her: the eyes of dinosaurs, trilobites, ants, birds, butterflies, bacteria… just the number of men and women who had lived on the Earth possessed a hundred billion pairs of eyes.

Cheng Xin saw AA’s eyes, and understood the words in her gaze: You’ve finally experienced something worse than death.

Cheng Xin knew that she had no choice but to live on. She and AA were the last two survivors of human civilization. Her death would mean the death of half of all that was left of humanity. Living on was the appropriate punishment for her mistake.

But the course ahead was a blank. In her heart, space was no longer black, but colorless. What was the point of going anywhere?

“Where should we go?” Cheng Xin muttered.

“Go find them,” Luo Ji said. His image was even more blurred and now only black and white.

His words illuminated Cheng Xin’s dark thoughts like lightning. She and AA looked at each other and immediately understood who “them” meant.

Luo Ji continued, “They’re still alive. The Bunker World received a gravitational wave transmission from them five years ago. It was a short message, and didn’t explain where they were. Halo will periodically hail them with gravitational waves. Maybe you’ll find them; maybe they’ll find you.”

Luo Ji’s black-and-white image disappeared as well, but they could still hear his voice. He said one last thing, “Ah, it’s time for me to go into the picture. Safe travels, children.”

The transmission from Pluto was cut off.

On the monitor, they could see Pluto light up and expand in two dimensions. The part of Pluto containing the museum was the first to touch the plane.

The Doppler effect of Halo ’s speed was now visible. The light from the stars ahead shifted to bluish, while the light from the stars behind shifted to reddish. The color shift was apparent in the two-dimensional Solar System.

Outside, no other fleeing spaceships could be seen; Halo had passed them all. All the fleeing spaceships were now falling onto the two-dimensional space like drops of rain against glass.

Very few transmissions could now be received from the direction of the Solar System. Due to the Doppler effect, the brief bursts of voices sounded strange, like singing.

“We’re very close! Are you behind us?”…“Don’t do this! No!”…“There’s no pain. I’m telling you, it’ll be over in a flash.”…“You still don’t believe me, after all this? Fine, don’t believe me.”…“Yes, sweetie, we’ll become very thin.”…“Come here! We should be together.”

Cheng Xin and AA listened. The voices became fewer and fewer, and separated by longer gaps. After thirty minutes, they heard the last voice coming out of the Solar System:

“Ahhhhhhhhh—”

The voice was cut off. The giant painting called the Solar System was complete.

Halo continued to fall toward the plane. The speed it had already achieved was slowing down its fall, but the ship still hadn’t achieved escape velocity. By now, Halo was the only man-made three-dimensional object in the Solar System, and Cheng Xin and AA were the only people not in the painting. Halo was very close to the plane, and from this angle, looking at the two-dimensional Sun was like looking at the sea from shore: the dim, dark red surface stretched into the distance without bounds. The freshly flattened Pluto was now very large, and still expanded at a rate that was visible to the naked eye. Cheng Xin examined the exquisite “tree rings” of Pluto and tried to find traces of the museum, but she couldn’t see anything—it was too small. The giant waterfall that was three-dimensional space tumbling into the flat plane seemed inexorable. Cheng Xin began to doubt whether the curvature propulsion engine really was capable of propelling the ship to lightspeed. She hoped for everything to be over.

But then, the ship’s AI spoke.

“ Halo will enter lightspeed in one hundred and eighty seconds. Please select a destination.”

“We don’t know where to go,” said AA.

“You can select a destination after we’ve entered lightspeed. However, you won’t subjectively be spending much time in lightspeed, and it’s easy to overshoot your destination. It’s best if you select it now.”

“We don’t know where to find them,” Cheng Xin said. Their existence gave the future some light, but she still felt lost.

AA clutched Cheng Xin’s hands. “Have you forgotten? Other than them, he also exists in the universe.”

Yes, he still exists. Cheng Xin was overwhelmed by heartache. She had never yearned to see anyone as much as him.