Cixin Liu - The Three-Body Problem

The woman, of course, was Shen Yufei. Like now, she was concise and authoritarian, but she was more attractive then. I’m naturally a cold person. I had less interest in women than the monks around me. This woman who didn’t adhere to conventional ideas about femininity was different, though. She attracted me. Since I had nothing to do anyway, I agreed right away.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I draped a shirt over my shoulders and walked out into the yard. In the distance, I saw Shen in the dim temple hall. She knelt before the Buddha with lit joss sticks, and all her movements seemed full of piety. I approached noiselessly, and as I came by the door to the temple hall, I heard her whisper a prayer: “Buddha, please help my Lord break away from the sea of misery.”

I thought I must have heard wrong, but she chanted the prayer again.

“Buddha, please help my Lord break away from the sea of misery.”

I didn’t understand religion and had no interest in any of them, but I really couldn’t think of any prayer odder than this one. “What are you saying?” I blurted.

Shen ignored me. She kept her eyes barely closed, her hands clasped together in front of her, as though watching her prayer rise with the incense smoke toward the Buddha. After a long while, she finally opened her eyes and turned toward me. “Go to sleep. We have to get up early.” She didn’t even look at me.

“This ‘Lord’ you mentioned, is he part of Buddhism?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then…?”

Shen said nothing, just hurried away. I didn’t get a chance to ask anything else. I repeated the prayer to myself over and over, and it seemed to grow even stranger. Eventually, I became frightened. I rushed over to the abbot’s room and knocked on his door.

“What does it mean if someone prays to the Buddha to help another Lord?” I then told him the details of what I saw.

The abbot silently looked at the book in his hand, but he was thinking about what I said, not reading. Then he said, “Please leave me for a bit. Let me think.”

I turned and left, knowing that it was unusual. The abbot was very learned. Usually, he could answer any question about religion, history, and culture without having to think. I waited outside the door for about the time it took to smoke a cigarette, and the abbot called for me.

“I think there’s only one possibility.” His expression was grim.

“What? What could it be? Could there be some religion whose god needs worshippers to pray to the gods of other religions to save it?”

“Her Lord really exists.”

This response confused me. “Then… the Buddha doesn’t exist?” As soon as I said it I realized how rude it sounded. I apologized.

The abbot slowly waved his hand at me. “I told you, the two of us can’t talk about Buddhism. The existence of the Buddha is a kind of existence that you cannot comprehend. But the Lord she’s talking about exists in a way that you can understand…. I can say no more concerning this matter. All I can do is counsel you against leaving with her.”

“Why?”

“It’s just a feeling. I feel that behind her are things that you and I cannot imagine.”

I left the abbot’s room and walked through the temple toward my room. The night had a full moon. I looked up at it and thought it a silvery, strange eye that gazed down at me, the light suffused with an eerie chill.

The next day, I did leave with Shen—I couldn’t stay in the temple the rest of my life, after all. But I didn’t think that over the next few years, I would live the life of my dreams. Shen fulfilled her promise. I had a minicomputer and a comfortable environment. I even left the country several times to use supercomputers—not time-sharing, but having the whole CPU to myself. She had a lot of money, though I didn’t know where it came from.

Later, we got married. There wasn’t much love or passion, just mutual convenience. We both had things we wanted to get done. As for me, the few years after that could be described as a single day. My time passed peacefully. In her house, I was taken care of and did not have to worry about food or clothing, so that I could devote myself to the study of the three-body problem. Shen never interfered with my life. The garage had a car that I could drive anywhere. I’m sure she wouldn’t even have minded if I brought another woman home. She only paid attention to my research, and the only thing we talked about day to day was the three-body problem.

“Do you know what else Shen has been up to?” Shi Qiang asked.

“Just the Frontiers of Science. She’s busy with it all the time. Lots of people show up every day.”

“She didn’t ask you to join?”

“Never. She never even talks to me about it. I don’t care, either. That’s just the way I am. I don’t want to care about anything. She knows it, and says I’m an indolent man without any sense of purpose. The organization doesn’t suit me and would interfere with my research.”

“Have you made any progress with the three-body problem?” Wang asked.

Compared with the general state of the field, my progress could be said to be a breakthrough. Some years ago, Richard Montgomery of UCSC and Alain Chenciner of Université Paris Diderot discovered another stable, periodic solution to the three-body problem. [30] Translator’s Note: For details, please see Alain Chenciner and Richard Montgomery, “A remarkable periodic solution of the three-body problem in the case of equal masses,” Annals of Mathematics , 152 (2000), 881–901. Under appropriate initial conditions, the three bodies will chase each other around a fixed figure-eight curve. After that, everyone was keen to find such special stable configurations, and every discovery was greeted with joy. Only three or four such configurations have been found so far.

But my evolutionary algorithm has already discovered more than a hundred stable configurations. Drawings of their orbits would fill a gallery with postmodern art, but that’s not my goal. The real solution to the three-body problem is to build a mathematical model so that, given any initial configuration with known vectors, the model can predict all subsequent motion of the three-body system. This is also what Shen Yufei craves.

But my peaceful life ended yesterday.

“This is the crime you’re reporting?” Shi Qiang asked.

“Yes. A man called yesterday and told me that if I didn’t cease my research, I would be killed.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Phone number?”

“Don’t know. Caller ID showed nothing.”

“Anything related to report?”

“Don’t know.”

Da Shi laughed and tossed his cigarette butt into an ashtray. “You went on and on forever, and in the end all you have to report is one line and a few ‘I don’t know’s?”

“If I hadn’t gone on like that, would you have understood the import of that call? Also, if that were all, I wouldn’t have come here. I’m lazy, remember? But there was another thing: It was the middle of the night—I don’t know if it was today or yesterday—and I was in bed. As I was drifting halfway between sleep and wakefulness, I felt something cold moving on my face. I opened my eyes and saw Shen Yufei, and I almost died of fright.”

“What’s so frightening about seeing your wife in the middle of the night?”

“She stared at me in a way that I had never seen. The light from outside fell on her face, and she looked like a ghost. She held something in her hand: a gun! Moving the barrel over my face, she told me that I had to continue working on the three-body problem. Otherwise she’d kill me.”

“Oh, now this is getting interesting.” Da Shi gave a satisfied nod. He lit another cigarette.