Cixin Liu - The Dark Forest

“Turn it up,” he said. His words sounded distant without a term of endearment, but he didn’t care about that now.

“You really seem to be interested.” She sat combing her hair but didn’t adjust the sound.

Luo Ji reached over to the bedside table and picked up a lighter and a cigarette and lit it as he stretched his bare feet out of his towel and wiggled his big toes in satisfaction.

“Look at you. You call yourself a scholar?” She watched his wriggling toes in the mirror.

“A young scholar,” he added, “with few accomplishments. But that’s because I don’t put in the effort. I’m actually full of inspiration. Sometimes, what other people might spend a lifetime working on, I can figure out with a moment’s thought…. Believe it or not, I was almost famous once.”

“Because of that subculture stuff?”

“No, not that. It was another thing I was working on at the same time. I established cosmic sociology.”

“What?”

“It’s the sociology of aliens.”

She snickered, then tossed her comb aside and began putting on her makeup.

“Don’t you know about the celebrity tendency in academia? I could’ve been a star.”

“Alien researchers are a dime a dozen these days.”

“That’s only after all this new crap came out,” Luo Ji said as he pointed at the mute television, which was still showing the large table and the people seated round it. The segment was awfully long. Was it live? “Academics didn’t use to study aliens. They sifted through piles of old paper and become celebrities that way. But later the public got tired of the cultural necrophilia of that old crew, and that’s when I came along.” He stretched his bare arms toward the ceiling. “Cosmic sociology, aliens, and lots of alien races. More of them than there are people on Earth, tens of billions! The producer of that Lecture Room television program talked about doing a series with me, but then it all actually happened, and then…” He swept a circle with a finger, and sighed.

She wasn’t listening too closely to him, reading the subtitles on the television instead: “‘We reserve all options in regard to Escapism…’ What does that mean?”

“Who’s talking?”

“It looks like Karnoff.”

“He’s saying that Escapism needs to be treated as harshly as the ETO, and that a guided missile needs to be dropped on anyone making a Noah’s Ark.”

“That’s kind of harsh.”

“No,” he said forcefully. “It’s the wisest strategy. I came up with it long ago. And even if it doesn’t come to that, no one’s going to fly away, anyway. You ever read a book by Liang Xiaosheng called Floating City ?”

“I haven’t. It’s pretty old, isn’t it?”

“Right. I read it when I was a kid. Shanghai’s about to fall into the ocean, and a group of people go house to house seizing life preservers and then destroying them en masse, for the sole purpose of making sure that no one would live if everyone couldn’t. I remember in particular there was one little girl who took the group to the door of one house and cried out, ‘They still have one!’”

“You’re just the sort of asshole that always sees society as trash.”

“Bullshit. The fundamental axiom of economics is the human mercenary instinct. Without that assumption, the entire field would collapse. There isn’t any fundamental axiom for sociology yet, but it might be even darker than economics. The truth always picks up dust. A small number of people could fly off into space, but if we knew it would come to that, why would we have bothered in the first place?”

“Bothered with what?”

“Why would we have had the Renaissance? Why the Magna Carta? Why the French Revolution? If humanity had stayed divided into classes, kept in place by the law’s iron rule, then when the time came, the ones who needed to leave would leave, and the ones who had to stay behind would stay. If this took place in the Ming or Qing Dynasties, then I’d leave, of course, and you’d stay behind. But that’s not possible now.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you took off right now,” she said.

Which was, in fact, the truth. They had reached a mutual parting of ways. He had been able to reach this point with all of his previous lovers, never early or late. He was especially pleased with his control over the pace this time. He had known her for just one week, and the breakup proceeded smoothly, as elegantly as a rocket discarding its booster.

He backtracked to an earlier topic: “Hey, it wasn’t my idea to establish cosmic sociology, you know. Do you want to know whose it was? You’re the only one I’m going to tell, so don’t get scared.”

“Whatever. I can’t believe most of what you say anyway, apart from one thing.”

“Uh… forget it. What one thing?”

“Come on and get up. I’m hungry.” She picked up his clothes from the carpet and threw them on the bed.

They ate breakfast in the main restaurant of the hotel. Most of the occupants of the tables around them looked serious, and at times they could catch snatches of conversation. Luo Ji didn’t want to listen, but he was like a candle on a summer night. The words, like insects crowding around the flame, kept working their way into his head: Escapism, socialized technology, ETO, transformation to a wartime economy, equatorial base, charter amendment, PDC, near-Earth primary warning and defensive perimeter, independent integrated mode…

“Our age has gotten really dull, hasn’t it?” Luo Ji said. He stopped cutting his egg and set down his fork.

She nodded. “I agree. I saw a game show question on TV yesterday that was really moronic. Hands on buzzers.” She pointed a fork at Luo Ji in imitation of the host. “One hundred and twenty years before the doomsday, your thirteenth generation will be alive. True or false?”

Luo Ji picked up his fork again and shook his head. “It’s not going to be any generation of mine.” He folded his hands as if in prayer. “My grand family line will die out with me.”

She gave a dismissive snort. “You asked me which of your lines I believe. That’s the one. You’ve said it before. That’s the sort of person you are.”

So that’s why she was leaving him? He didn’t want to ask about it for fear of complicating the issue, but she seemed to read his thoughts, and said, “I’m that sort of person too. It’s really annoying to see certain things about yourself in other people.”

“Particularly in a member of the opposite sex,” Luo Ji said, nodding.

“But if you need to justify it, it’s perfectly responsible behavior.”

“What behavior? Not having kids? Of course it is.” Luo Ji pointed his fork at the people around them discussing economic transformation. “You know what sort of lives their descendants will be living? They’ll be spending their days slaving away in the shipyards—the spaceship yards—and then they’ll line up at the canteen, bellies rumbling as they hold out their lunch pails waiting for that ladle of porridge… and when they’re older, it’ll be Uncle Sam Wants… no, Earth Wants You, and it’s off to find glory in the army.”

“It’ll be better for the doomsday generation.”

“Retiring to face doomsday. How miserable. And besides, that last generation’s grandparents might not get enough to eat. Still, even that future’s not going to come to pass. Just look at how stubborn the people of Earth are. I bet they resist till the end, at which point the real mystery is how they’ll eventually die.”

They left the hotel after their meal and emerged into the warm embrace of the morning sun. The air had a sweetness that was intoxicating.

“I’ve got to learn how to live. If I can’t swing that, it’ll be a damn shame,” Luo Ji said as he watched the passing traffic.