Cixin Liu - The Three-Body Problem

“Trisolaris’s place in the universe is even more grim than we had imagined. What will happen the next time frozen flying stars occur? Very likely, our planet will not just skim past the edge of the sun, but will plunge into the fiery sea of the sun itself. Given enough time, this possibility will become certainty.

“This was originally just a frightening speculation, but a recent astronomical discovery has caused us to lose all hope for the fate of Trisolaris. The researchers had intended to recover the history of the formation of the stars and the planets based on signs in this stellar system. Instead, they discovered that, in the distant past, the Trisolaran stellar system had twelve planets. Yet, now only this one remains.

“There is only one explanation: The other eleven planets have all been consumed by the three suns! Our world is nothing more than the sole survivor of a Great Hunt. The fact that civilization has been reincarnated a hundred and ninety-two times is only a kind of luck. Also, after further study, we discovered the phenomenon of ‘breathing’ by the three stars.”

“The stars breathe?”

“It’s only a metaphor. You discovered the gaseous outer layer of the suns, but you didn’t know that this gaseous layer expands and contracts over cycles lasting eons, like breathing. When the gaseous layer expands, its thickness can grow by more than a dozen times. This greatly increases the diameter of the sun, like a giant mitt that can catch planets more easily. When a planet passes by a sun at close range, it will enter the sun’s gaseous layer. Friction will cause it to lose speed, and finally, like a meteor, it will fall into the blazing sea of the sun, dragging a long, fiery tail.

“The study results show that in the long history of the Trisolaran stellar system, every time the suns’ gaseous layers expanded, one or two planets were consumed. The other eleven planets all fell into a fiery sea during times when the gaseous layers were at their greatest. Right now, the gaseous layers of the three suns are in a contracted stage—otherwise our planet would have already fallen into one of them the last time they skimmed past. But scholars predict that the next expansion will occur in one thousand years.”

“We can’t stay in this terrible place anymore,” Einstein said, crouched down on the ground like an old beggar.

The secretary general nodded. “We can’t stay here any longer. The only path left for Trisolaran civilization is to gamble with the universe.”

“How?” Wang asked.

“We must leave the Trisolaran stellar system and fly into the wide open sea of stars. We must find in the galaxy a new world to emigrate to.”

Wang heard a grinding noise. He saw that the giant weight of the pendulum was being pulled up by a thin cable whose other end was attached to an elevated winch. As it rose to its highest point, a great waning crescent moon descended slowly in the sky behind it.

The secretary general solemnly announced, “Start the pendulum.”

The elevated winch released the cable tied to the pendulum, and the weight noiselessly fell along a smooth arc. Initially, it fell slowly, but then it accelerated, reaching maximum speed at the bottom of the arc. As it sliced through the air, the sound of the wind was deep and resonant. By the time the noise disappeared, the pendulum had followed the arc to its highest point on the other side, and, after pausing for a moment, began its backward swing.

Wang felt the great force generated by the movement of the pendulum, as though the ground was shaken by its swings. Unlike a pendulum in the real world, this giant pendulum’s period was not stable, but changed constantly. This was due to the continually shifting gravitational attraction of the giant moon. When the giant moon was on this side of the planet, its gravity partially canceled out the gravity of the planet, causing the pendulum to lose weight. When it was on the other side of the planet, its gravity was added to the gravity of the planet, causing the pendulum’s weight to increase, almost to the level it would have had before the great rip.

As he gazed up at the awe-inspiring swings of the Trisolaran Pendulum Monument, Wang asked himself, Does it represent the yearning for order, or the surrender to chaos? Wang also thought of the pendulum as a gigantic metal fist, swinging eternally against the unfeeling universe, noiselessly shouting out Trisolaran civilization’s indomitable battle cry….

As Wang Miao’s eyes blurred with tears, he saw a line of text appear against the background of the swinging pendulum:

Four hundred and fifty-one years later, Civilization 192 was destroyed by the fiery flames of twin suns appearing together. It had reached the Atomic Age and the Information Age.

Civilization 192 was a milestone in Trisolaran civilization. It finally proved that the three-body problem had no solution. It gave up the useless effort that had already lasted through 191 cycles and set the course for future civilizations. Thus, the goal of Three Body has changed.

The new goal is: Head for the stars; find a new home.

We invite you to log on again.

After logging out of Three Body , Wang felt exhausted, the same way he did after each previous session. But this time, he only rested half an hour before logging in again.

This time, against the pitch-black background, an unexpected line of text appeared:

The situation is urgent. The Three Body servers are about to be shut down. Please log on freely during the remaining time. Three Body will now go directly to the final scene.

The chilly dawn revealed a bare landscape. There was no pyramid, no United Nations Headquarters, no sign of the Pendulum Monument. Only a dark desert extended to the horizon, just as Wang had seen the first time he had logged in.

But Wang soon realized that he was wrong. What he thought were numerous stones arrayed across the desert were not stones at all, but human heads. The ground was filled with a densely packed crowd.

From where he stood on a small hill, Wang could see no end to the sea of people. He estimated the number of individuals within his view alone to be in the hundreds of millions. All the Trisolarans on the planet were probably gathered here.

The silence of hundreds of millions created a suffocating sense of strangeness. What are they waiting for? Wang looked around and noticed everyone was gazing up at the sky.

Wang lifted his face and found the starry sky had been transformed to an astonishing sight: The stars were arrayed in a square formation! However, Wang soon realized that the stars in the formation were in a synchronous orbit above the planet, moving together against the dimmer, more distant background of the Milky Way.

The stars in the formation closest to the direction of dawn were also the brightest, shining with a silver light that cast shadows on the ground. The brightness decreased as one moved away from that edge. Wang counted more than thirty stars along each edge of the formation, which meant a total of more than a thousand stars. The slow movement of the obviously artificial formation against the starry universe exuded a solemn power.

A man standing next to him nudged him lightly and spoke in a low voice, “Ah, Great Copernicus, why have you come so late? Three cycles of civilizations have passed, and you’ve missed many great enterprises.”

“What is that?” Wang asked, pointing at the formation in the sky.

“The Trisolaran Interstellar Fleet. It’s about to begin its expedition.”

“Trisolaran civilization has already achieved the capacity for interstellar flight?”