Supernova Era

by Cixin Liu

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author and Translator

  Copyright Page

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  For my daughter, Liu Jing. May she live in a world of fun.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  ADULTS

  Zheng Chen, homeroom teacher for a graduating middle-school class

  Zhang Lin, agent with the Central Extraordinary Commission

  The president of China

  The premier of China

  CHINESE CHILDREN

  Huahua, a handsome, charismatic boy

  Specs, an introverted boy with a keen mind

  Xiaomeng, a quiet, respected girl mature beyond her years

  The preceding three make up the central leadership

  General Lü Gang, chief of general staff of the People’s Liberation Army

  Du Bin, ambassador to the United States

  Lieutenant Wang Ran, tank driver

  Second Lieutenant Wei Ming, armored infantry

  Air Force Major Jin Yunhui, J-10 fighter pilot

  Yao Rui, power station engineer

  Feng Jing, Yao Pingping, nursery staff

  Li Zhiping, letter carrier

  Chang Huidong, barber

  Zhang Xiaole, cook

  OTHER CHILDREN

  Secretary General Will Yagüe (UN)

  President Herman Davey (USA)

  Secretary of State Chester Vaughn (USA)

  Chief of Staff Frances Benes (USA)

  Major General Dowell (USA)

  Vice President William Mitchell (USA)

  General Harvey (USA)

  Prime Minister Nelson Green (UK)

  President Jean Pierre (FR)

  Prime Minister Ōnishi Fumio (JP)

  President Ilyukhin (RUS)

  Marshal Zavyalova, chief of general staff (RUS)

  Prime Minister Jairu (IND)

  Prime Minister Lê Sâm Lâm (VIE)

  PROLOGUE

  In those days, Earth was a planet in space.

  In those days, Beijing was a city on Earth.

  In the sea of lights of this city was a school, and in a classroom in that school, a class was holding a middle-school graduation party where, as in all such events, the children were talking about their aspirations.

  “I want to be a general!” said Lü Gang, a skinny kid who gave the impression of power disproportionate to his size.

  “Boring!” someone said. “There won’t be any fighting, so all a general can do is lead troops in drills.”

  “I want to be a doctor,” a girl named Lin Sha said in a quiet voice, to mocking laughter.

  “Yeah, right. Last time we went to the countryside, even the sight of cocoons freaked you out. And you want to cut people open?”

  “My mom’s a doctor,” she said, either as proof she wasn’t frightened, or to explain her reason for wanting to be one.

  Zheng Chen, their young homeroom teacher, had been staring out the window at the city lights, lost in thought, but now turned her attention back to the class.

  “What about you, Xiaomeng. What do you want to do when you grow up?” she asked the girl next to her, who had also been staring out the window. The girl was plainly dressed, and her large, spirited eyes revealed a melancholy and maturity beyond her years.

  “My family’s not well-off. I’ll only be able to go to a vocational high school,” she said with a small sigh.

  “What about you, Huahua?” Zheng Chen asked a good-looking boy whose large eyes were always lit up with delight, as if the world was perpetually a riot of newly exploded fireworks.

  “The future’s so cool I can’t decide. But whatever I do, I want to be the best!”

  Someone said they wanted to be an athlete, someone else a diplomat. When one girl said she wanted to be a teacher, Zheng Chen said gently, “It’s not easy,” and then turned back to stare out the window.

  “Did you know Ms. Zheng’s pregnant?” a girl whispered.

  “That’s right. And the school has cutback layoffs scheduled for right around the time she’ll be giving birth next year, so things don’t look good,” said a boy.

  At this, Zheng Chen laughed. “I’m not thinking about that right now. I’m wondering, what will the world be like when my kid is your age?”

  “This is boring,” said a small, scrawny kid. His name was Yan Jing, but everyone called him “Specs” because of the thick glasses he wore for nearsightedness. “No one knows what the future holds. It’s unpredictable. Anything could happen.”

  “Science can make predictions,” said Huahua. “Futurologists can.”

  Specs shook his head. “It’s science that tells us that the future’s unpredictable. Any predictions from those futurologists are imprecise, because the world is a chaotic system.”

  “I’ve heard about that. When a butterfly flaps its wings, there’s a hurricane on the other side of the world.”

  “That’s right,” Specs said, nodding. “A chaotic system.”

  Huahua said, “My dream is to be that butterfly.”

  Specs shook his head again. “You don’t understand at all. We’re all butterflies, just like every butterfly. Every grain of sand and every drop of rain is a butterfly. That’s why the world is unpredictable.”

  “You once talked about an uncertainty principle…”

  “That’s right. Microparticles can’t be predicted. They only exist as a probability. So the whole world is unpredictable. And there’s the theory of multiple worlds, where when you flip a coin the world splits in two, and the coin lands heads in one world and tails in the other…”

  Zheng Chen laughed. “Specs, you yourself are proof enough. When I was your age, I’d never have imagined that one day a middle school student would know so much.”

  “Specs has read lots of books!” said another child, and others nodded.

  “Ms. Zheng’s baby is going to be even more amazing. Who knows—maybe genetic engineering will let him grow a real pair of wings!” Huahua said, and everyone laughed.

  “Students,” their teacher said as she stood up, “take a last look at your campus.”

  They left the classroom and strolled with their teacher through the grounds. Most of the lights were off, and the city lights that shone in the distance lent the campus an air of hazy calm. They passed two classroom buildings, administration, the library, and finally the row of Chinese parasol trees before reaching the athletic field. The forty-three children stood in the center surrounding their young teacher, who opened her arms to the sky, its stars dim under the lights of the city, and said, “Now, children, childhood is over.”

  In those days, Earth was a planet in space.

  In those days, Beijing was a city on Earth.

  * * *

  It may seem like an insignificant story. Forty-three children leaving t
heir peaceful school and continuing their respective life journeys.

  It may seem like an ordinary night, a moment in the flow of time between the endless past and the limitless future. “One can’t step twice in the same river” is nothing more than the babbling of an ancient Greek, for the river of time is the river of life, and this river flows endlessly at the same unchanging speed, an eternal flow of life and history and time.

  That’s what the people of this city thought. That’s what the people of the plains of northern China thought. That’s what the people of Asia thought. And that’s what the carbon-based life-forms called humans everywhere on the planet thought. On this hemisphere, they were being lulled to sleep by the flow of time, convinced that the sacred eternal was unbreakable by any force, and they would wake up to a dawn identical to that of countless previous mornings. That faith, lurking in the depths of their consciousness, granted them the same peaceful dreams woven for untold generations.

  It was an ordinary school, in a peaceful corner of a brilliant night in the city.

  Forty-three thirteen-year-olds and their homeroom teacher looked up at the stars.

  The winter’s constellations, Taurus, Orion, and Canis Major, were already below the western horizon, and the summer’s, Lyra, Hercules, and Libra, had been up for a while. Each star was like a distant eye blinking at the human world from the depths of the universe. But on this night, the cosmic gaze was somewhat different.

  On this night, history as known to humanity came to an end.

  1

  THE DEAD STAR

  THE END

  In the space within a ten-light-year radius of Earth, astronomers discovered eleven stars: the triple-star system formed from Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri A, and Alpha Centauri B; two binary-star systems, Sirius A and Sirius B, and Luyten 726-8 A and Luyten 726-8 B; and four single stars, Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, Lalande 21185, and Ross 154. Astronomers have not ruled out the possibility that other stars, either especially dim or obscured by interstellar dust, are waiting to be detected.*

  Astronomers had noticed in this area the presence of a large amount of cosmic dust, like a dark cloud floating in the black night of space. When UV sensors on a satellite were trained on this distant cloud, a peak of 216 mm was found on the absorption spectrum, suggesting that the cloud was likely formed from carbon microparticles; the cloud’s reflectivity suggested that these particles were covered in a thin layer of ice. The particles were in the 2–200 nm range, roughly the same as the wavelength of visible light, rendering it opaque.

  It was this cloud that blocked a star eight light-years from Earth. Twenty-three times the diameter of the sun and sixty-seven times its mass, the star was no longer main sequence but was in the final phase of its long evolution, its waning years. We’ll call it the Dead Star.

  Even if it had a memory, the Dead Star would not remember its childhood. It was born five hundred million years ago out of a mother nebula. Atomic motion and radiation from the galactic center disrupted the stillness of the nebula, whose particles congealed around a center under gravitational attraction. This stately dust storm endured for two million years, while in its center, hydrogen atoms began to fuse into helium. The Dead Star was born out of this atomic furnace.

  After a dramatic childhood and rocky adolescence, fusion energy arrested the collapse of the stellar crust, and the Dead Star entered a lengthy middle age, an evolution that took place over hundreds of millions of years instead of the hours, minutes, and seconds of its childhood, bringing a new point of calm light to the galaxy’s vast starry ocean. But a flyby of the Dead Star’s surface would have revealed that this calm was illusory. It was an ocean of atomic fire, enormous waves of searing flames that churned red and flung high-energy particles out into space like a storm swell. Tremendous energy erupted from the star’s depths and surged in blinding waves in that sea, over which an endless nuclear storm of constant hurricanes raged, and dark red plasma undulated under a strong magnetic field in million-kilometer tornadoes reaching into space like the tendrils of a red tide.… No human mind could grasp the sheer size of the Dead Star; against that sea of fire, Earth was like a basketball tossed into the Pacific Ocean.

  The Dead Star ought to have been bright in the visible sky. With an apparent magnitude of −7.5, if not for the interstellar dust incubating another star that sat three light-years distant and blocked its light from reaching Earth, it would have shone on human history with a light more than five times brighter than Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, bright enough to cast shadows on a moonless night, a dreamy blue adding a dose of sentimentality to human history.

  The Dead Star burned a glorious existence without incident for 460 million years, but the cold hand of the law of conservation of energy made certain internal changes unavoidable: the fusion fire depleted hydrogen, and the helium by-product sank to the star’s center and accumulated over time. This change was an exceedingly slow process for such a giant object, one for whom the whole span of human history was the snap of a finger, but after 480 million years, the depletion had a tangible effect: enough of the more inert helium had accumulated that the source of the star’s energy waned. It had grown old.

  But other, more complicated physical laws determined that the Dead Star would end its life in a blaze of glory. The density of the helium at its center increased, and the fusion that continued in the surrounding hydrogen produced temperatures high enough to initiate fusion in the helium, consuming nearly all of it at once in a nuclear inferno. The helium fusion caused the Dead Star to shine with a powerful light, but since its energy was only a tenth of that of hydrogen, the effort only further weakened the star. Termed a helium flash by astronomers, the phenomenon’s light reached the patch of interstellar dust three years later, where the relatively long-wavelength red light penetrated the cosmic barrier. That light traveled for another five years before arriving at a far smaller, ordinary star, the Sun, as well as the handful of cosmic dust attracted by its gravitational pull, known to humans as Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and of course Earth. This took place in 1775.

  * * *

  That evening, in Earth’s northern hemisphere, in the English spa town of Bath, outside a high-end music hall, a German-born organist by the name of Frederick William Herschel was gazing hungrily into the universe through a telescope of his own design. The glittering Milky Way so called to him that he poured his entire life into telescopes, to the extent that his sister Caroline had to spoon him his meals while he continued observations. During the lifetime the most distinguished of eighteenth-century astronomers spent in front of the lens, he marked seventy thousand stars on the map, but he overlooked the one that became most significant to humanity. That night a red body suddenly appeared in the western sky in the constellation Auriga, at the midpoint between Capella and Beta Aurigae. An apparent magnitude 4.5, it wasn’t bright enough for a casual observer to pick out even if they knew its location, but to an astronomer, the red star was nothing less than an enormous lantern that Herschel might have discovered, were he viewing the heavens with the naked eye like pre-Galilean astronomers rather than being glued to the lens. And that discovery might have altered the course of human history some two centuries later. But his attention was entirely commanded by that telescope, just two inches in diameter, pointed in an entirely different direction, as, unfortunately, were telescopes at the observatories in Greenwich and Hven, and everywhere else in the world, for that matter.…

  The red star in Auriga shone for the whole night, but the next night it had disappeared.

  * * *

  That same night in that same year, on the continent called North America, eight hundred British soldiers crept along a road to the west of Boston, their red uniforms giving them the look of a line of ghosts in the night. Clutching muskets in the chilly spring wind, they hoped to reach the town of Concord, twenty-seven kilometers from Boston, before daybreak, and were under orders from the Massachusetts governo
r Thomas Gage to wipe out the minutemen’s arsenal and arrest their leadership. But when the sky turned gray and the woods, huts, and pasture fences took shape as silhouettes against the growing light, the soldiers looked about them and found they had only gotten as far as the town of Lexington. From a thicket ahead of them came a sudden flash, and an earsplitting crack broke the stillness of the North American dawn, closely followed by the whoosh of bullets: the quickening in the womb of the embryonic United States of America.

  * * *

  On the vast continent on the other side of the Pacific, a civilization had already endured for five thousand years. Now, in that ancient land, people were heading day and night toward the capital of that age-old kingdom carrying huge quantities of ancient books collected from every corner of the land. The imperial edict to compile the Sikuquanshu had been issued two years ago, and books were still streaming endlessly toward the capital. In a massive wooden hall in the Forbidden City, the Qianlong Emperor was constantly making the rounds of the rows of bookcases holding the works amassed for the library project, now divided into four general categories, Classics, Histories, Masters, and Collections, and stored on these huge shelves.

  Leaving his attendants outside the door, the emperor carefully entered the archives, three scholars wearing peacock feathers on their hats,* Dai Zhen, Yao Nai, and Ji Yun, leading the way carrying lanterns. It was they, not the titled imperial clansmen, who were the true compilers of the encyclopedia. The tall cases slipped slowly past the four men, like black city walls in the dim lantern light. They came to a pile of bamboo slips; the emperor picked up one bundle in trembling hands, the wavering yellow light making him feel as if he were at the dark floor of a book canyon, the canyon of time’s mountain, and beneath the book cliff face, countless ghosts from across five thousand years took silently to the air.