Cixin Liu - The Dark Forest

When the force of acceleration subsided, he struck up a conversation with Xizi, who was sitting next to him. “Child, are you from Hangzhou?”

Xizi was staring straight ahead, as if trying to locate Mantis, which was still hundreds of kilometers away. Then she recovered and shook her head. “No, Master Ding. I was born in the Asian Fleet. I don’t know whether my name has anything to do with Hangzhou. [3] Translator’s Note: X ī z ǐ is another name for Xi Shi, one of the Four Beauties of ancient China, who lived near Hangzhou. West Lake ( X ī h ú) in Hangzhou has a particular association with Xi Shi. I’ve been there, though. It’s a nice place.”

“It was a nice place back in our day. But West Lake has now turned into Crescent Lake, and it’s in a desert…. Still, even though the desert’s everywhere, today’s world still reminds me of the south, and the age in which the women were as graceful as the water.” As he said this, he looked at Xizi, whose enchanting silhouette was set off by the soft light of the distant sun that streamed in through the porthole. “Child, looking at you, I’m reminded of someone I once loved. Like you, she was a major, and although she wasn’t as tall as you, she was just as beautiful….”

“In the old days, lots of girls must have been in love with you,” Xizi said to Ding Yi, turning back to him.

“I wouldn’t usually bother the girls I liked. I believed in what Goethe said: ‘If I love you, what business is it of yours?’”

Xizi laughed.

He went on, “Oh, if only I had the same attitude toward physics! My life’s biggest regret is that we’ve been blinded by the sophons. But here’s a more positive way of thinking about it: If we’re exploring laws, what business is that of the laws? One day, perhaps, humanity—or maybe someone else—will explore the laws so thoroughly that they’ll be able to alter not only their own reality, but perhaps the entire universe. They’ll be able to turn every star system into whatever shape they require, like kneading a ball of dough. But so what? The laws still won’t have changed. Yes, she’ll still be there, the one unchanging presence, forever young, like how we remember a lover….” As he spoke, he pointed out the porthole at the brilliant Milky Way. “And when I think about that, my worries go away.”

Xizi said nothing, and they fell into a heavy silence. Mantis soon came into view, albeit as a point of light two hundred kilometers away. The shuttle rotated 180 degrees, and the engine nozzle, now pointing ahead of them, began their deceleration.

The fleet was now directly ahead of the shuttle, around eight hundred kilometers away, a trivial distance in space, but one that turned the massive warships into barely visible points. The fleet itself was distinguishable from the starry background only by its neatly arranged ranks. The entire rectangular array seemed like a grid covering the Milky Way, its regularity standing in stark contrast to the chaos of the starfield. With its great size made tiny by the distance, the power of the formation was made apparent. Many people in the fleet and the distant Earth behind it who were watching this image sensed that it was a visual display of what Ding Yi had just been talking about.

The shuttle reached Mantis and the force of deceleration cut off. To the shuttle’s passengers, the speed of the process made it feel as if Mantis had suddenly popped up in space.

Docking was completed quickly. Since Mantis was unmanned, there was no air in the cabin, so the four members of the expedition team put on light space suits. Upon receiving final instructions from the fleet, they filed weightlessly through the docking hatch and into Mantis .

The droplet floated dead center in Mantis ’s one spherical main cabin. Its colors were entirely different from the image seen aboard Quantum, paler and softer, evidently due to differences in the scene reflected on its surface—the droplet’s total reflectance meant that it had no color of its own. Arranged in the main cabin of Mantis was the folded robotic arm, an assortment of equipment, and several piles of asteroid rock samples. Floating in a mechanical and stony environment, the droplet once again presented a contrast between exquisiteness and crudeness, aesthetics and technology.

“It’s the tear of the blessed mother,” Xizi said.

Her words were transmitted from Mantis at the speed of light, first to the fleet and then resonating three hours later throughout the entire human world. Xizi, the lieutenant colonel, and the major from the European Fleet—ordinary people on the expedition team placed, by unexpected circumstance, in a central position at the pinnacle moment in the history of civilization—shared a common feeling now that they were so close to the droplet: All sense of the distant world’s unfamiliarity vanished, replaced by an intense desire for recognition. Yes, in the cold expanse of the universe, all carbon-based life shared a common destiny, one that might take billions of years to cultivate, but a destiny that cultivated feelings of love that transcended time and space. And now, they sensed that love in the droplet, a love that could bridge the chasm of any enmity. Xizi’s eyes were wet, and three hours later, the eyes of billions of people like her would fill with tears.

But Ding Yi watched all of this dispassionately from the rear. “I see something else,” he said. “Something far more sublime. A realm where both self and other are forgotten, an effort to encompass everything by shutting out everything.”

“That’s too much philosophy for me to understand,” Xizi laughed through her tears.

“Dr. Ding, we don’t have much time.” The lieutenant colonel motioned for Ding Yi to come forward to be the first to touch the droplet.

Ding Yi floated slowly toward the droplet and placed a hand on its surface. To avoid frostbite from the cold mirror surface, he had to touch it with a gloved hand. Then the three officers touched it, too.

“It looks so fragile. I’m afraid of breaking it,” Xizi said softly.

“I can’t feel any friction at all,” the lieutenant colonel marveled. “It’s so smooth.”

“How smooth is it?” Ding Yi asked.

To answer that question, Xizi took out a cylindrical instrument, a microscope, from a pocket in her space suit. She touched the lens to the droplet, and they could see a magnified image of the surface on the instrument’s small display. Displayed on the screen was a smooth mirror.

“What’s the magnification?” Ding Yi asked.

“A hundred times.” Xizi pointed to a number in the corner of the screen, then adjusted the magnification to one thousand.

The enlarged surface remained a smooth mirror.

“Your device is broken,” the lieutenant colonel said.

Xizi removed the microscope from the droplet and placed it against her space suit visor. The other three drew closer to look at the screen, where the visor—a surface which, to the naked eye, looked as smooth as the droplet—was a rough and rocky beach on the screen under one-thousand-times magnification. Xizi returned the microscope to the surface of the droplet, and the screen once again displayed a smooth mirror, no different from the surrounding, unmagnified surface.

“Increase it by another factor of ten,” Ding Yi said.

This was beyond the capabilities of optical magnification, so Xizi carried out a series of operations to switch the microscope from optical to electron tunneling mode. Now the magnification power stood at ten thousand.

The magnified surface remained a smooth mirror. The smoothest surface that human technology could produce revealed itself as rough at just one thousand times magnification, like Gulliver’s impression of the face of the beautiful giantess.