Death's End

by Cixin Liu

  Two other prisoners—clearly also Common Era men—whistled at Cheng Xin. But once they realized who Cheng Xin had come to see, they shut up and went back to their work without looking up.

  As Cheng Xin approached Wade, she was a bit surprised to see that while he was serving his sentence in harsh conditions, he looked much better groomed than the last time they met. He was clean-shaven and his hair was combed neatly. Prisoners in this age no longer wore uniforms, but his white shirt was the cleanest here, even more so than the shirts worn by the guards. Holding a few nails between his lips, he took them out one at a time with his left hand and pounded them into the composite boards with precise, forceful blows from the hammer. He glanced at Cheng Xin without changing his indifferent expression and went on working.

  Cheng Xin knew right away that he had not given up. His ambitions, ideals, treachery, and whatever else was hidden in his heart, unknown to her—he had given up none of it.

  Cheng Xin extended a hand to Wade. He glanced at her again, put down the hammer, spat out the nails, and deposited them in her hand. Then she handed him the nails one by one as he pounded them in, until they were all gone.

  “Leave,” he said. He grabbed another handful of nails from the tool chest. He didn’t hand them over to Cheng Xin and didn’t put them in his mouth. Instead, he placed them on the ground next to his feet.

  “I … I just…” Cheng Xin didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m telling you to leave Australia.” Wade’s lips barely moved as he whispered. His gaze remained on the composite board. Anyone a little distance away would think he was concentrating on his work. “Hurry, before the resettlement is complete.”

  Like he had many times three centuries ago, Wade had managed to stun Cheng Xin with a single sentence. Each time it was as if he had tossed her a knotted ball of string that she must untangle layer by layer before she could understand the complex meaning hidden within. But this time, Wade’s words made her shiver. She didn’t even have the courage to begin to untangle his riddle.

  “Go.” Wade didn’t give her a chance to ask questions. Then he turned to her and once again revealed his special smirk, like a crack in a frozen-over pond. “Now I’m telling you to get out of this house.”

  On the way back to Warburton, Cheng Xin saw the densely packed shelter-houses stretching to the horizon, saw the busy crowd laboring in the cracks between the shelter-houses. Suddenly, she felt her vision shift, as though she were watching everything from somewhere outside the world, and everything she saw turned into a writhing nest of ants. A nameless terror gripped her and the bright Australian sunlight seemed as cold as rain in winter.

  * * *

  Three months after the start of the Great Resettlement, more than a billion people had been relocated to Australia. Simultaneously, the governments of the nations of the world began to relocate to large Australian cities. The UN moved its headquarters to Sydney. Each government directed the resettlement of its own citizens, with the UN Resettlement Commission coordinating the efforts. In their new land, the migrants gathered into districts based on their nation of origin, and Australia became a miniature replica of the whole Earth. Other than the names of the largest cities, old place names were abandoned. Now “New York,” “Tokyo,” and “Shanghai” were nothing more than refugee camps full of basic shelter-houses.

  No one had any experience in dealing with resettlement at such a large scale, either in the national governments or the UN, and many difficulties and dangers soon surfaced.

  First, there was the problem of shelter. Leaders soon realized that even if all the construction materials in the world were shipped to Australia, and per capita space were limited to the dimensions of a bed, not even one-fifth of the final total population would have a roof over their heads. By the time five hundred million migrants were in Australia, there was no more material for building shelter-houses. They had to resort to erecting large tents, each of which was the size of a stadium and capable of housing more than ten thousand. But under such poor living and sanitation conditions, epidemics were a constant threat.

  There was also the shortage of food. The agricultural factories in Australia were far from sufficient to satisfy the needs of the population, and it was necessary to transport food from across the world. As the population on the continent increased, the distribution of food became more complex and subject to more delays.

  But the greatest danger was the prospect of loss of social order. In the resettlement zones, the hyper-information society disappeared. Newcomers poked the walls, bedside stands, or even their own clothes until they realized that everything was dead, un-networked. Even basic communications could not be guaranteed. People could obtain news about the world only through very limited channels. For a population used to a super-networked world full of information, it was as if they had all gone blind. Modern governments lost all their techniques for mass communication and leadership, and were ignorant of how to maintain order in a massively overcrowded society.

  * * *

  Simultaneously, resettlement was also proceeding in space.

  At the end of the Deterrence Era, about 1.5 million people were living in space. About half a million spacers belonged to Earth International, living in space stations and space cities orbiting the Earth and bases on the moon. The rest belonged to the Solar System Fleet and were distributed between bases on Mars and around Jupiter, as well as warships patrolling the Solar System.

  The spacers who belonged to Earth International mostly lived below the orbit of the moon. They had no choice but to return to the Earth and migrate to Australia.

  The rest moved to the Martian base, which Trisolaris had designated as the second human reservation.

  After the Doomsday Battle, the Solar System Fleet had never returned to its former size. Even at the end of the Deterrence Era, the fleet had barely more than one hundred stellar-class warships. Though technology had continued to improve, the maximum speed of the ships never increased, as fusion propulsion had already been pushed to the limit. The overwhelming advantage the Trisolar ships held was not only their ability to reach lightspeed, but, more terrifyingly, their ability to leap into lightspeed without a prolonged process of acceleration. In order to reach even 15 percent of lightspeed, human ships had to accelerate for a year, taking into account fuel consumption rates and the need to reserve fuel for the return voyage. Compared to Trisolaran ships, Earth ships were slow as snails.

  When deterrence was dismantled, the stellar-class warships of the Solar System Fleet had a chance to escape into deep space. If the hundred-plus ships had sped away from the Solar System in different directions at maximum power, the eight droplets in the Solar System could not have caught them all. But not a single ship chose to do so; all obeyed Sophon and returned to Mars orbit. The reason for their obedience was simple: Resettlement on Mars was not like settling in Australia on Earth. Within the sealed habitat of the Martian base, a population of one million could maintain a comfortable, civilized existence. The base had been designed to accommodate the long-term needs of such a population. This was, without a doubt, superior to wandering deep space for the rest of their lives.

  Trisolaris remained very wary of the humans on Mars. The two droplets recalled from the Kuiper Belt spent most of their time patrolling the space above the Martian city. Unlike the resettlement process on the surface of the Earth, although the Solar System Fleet had essentially been disarmed, people living on Mars still had access to modern technology—required for maintaining the habitability of the city. But the people living on Mars dared not engage in any adventures such as building a gravitational wave transmitter. The sophons certainly would have detected a large-scale venture like that, and people hadn’t forgotten the terror of the Doomsday Battle. The Martian base was as fragile as an eggshell, and the depressurization caused by a single droplet impact would have meant complete disaster.

  The space resettlement process was completed in three months. Other than the Martian ba
se, there was no more human presence in space in the Solar System, save for empty cities and ships drifting in orbit around the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and through the asteroid belt. They seemed to form a silent, metallic graveyard, where humankind’s glory and dreams were buried.

  * * *

  From the safety of Fraisse’s house, Cheng Xin could only find out the situation in the larger world through TV. One day, she saw a live broadcast from a food distribution center. The holographic broadcast made her feel as if she were right there. The technology required ultra-broadband connections and was reserved for extremely important news these days. Most news was broadcast via simple 2-D.

  The distribution center was located in Carnegie, on the edge of the desert. A gigantic tent appeared in the holographic display, like a broken half of an egg dropped in the desert with people spilling out of it like albumen. The crowd was rushing out because a new shipment of food had just arrived. Two flying transports, small but powerful, dangled a huge cube of packed food in nets.

  After the first transport gently set down its cargo, the crowd surged like a flood from a burst dam and quickly overwhelmed the food pile. The security barrier formed by a few dozen soldiers collapsed at once, and the few food distribution workers climbed back into the hovering transport in terror. The pile of food disappeared into the crowd like a snowball thrown into muddy waters.

  The lens zoomed in. People were now snatching food from those who had grabbed it from the pile. The bags of food, like rice grains in a swarm of ants, were quickly torn apart, and the mob fought over whatever tumbled out. The second transport deposited another pile in an empty space a bit farther away. This time, there were no soldiers to provide security at all, and the distribution workers didn’t dare get out of the plane. The crowd swarmed this new pile like iron shavings toward a magnet and quickly covered it.

  A figure in green, slender and supple, leapt out of the transport and gracefully landed on the food pile about a dozen meters below. The crowd stopped. They saw that the figure standing atop it was Sophon. She was still dressed in camouflage, and the black scarf around her neck flapped in the hot wind, highlighting her pale face.

  “Form a line!” Sophon shouted.

  The lens zoomed in again. Sophon’s beautiful eyes glared at the crowd. Her voice was very loud and could be heard over the rumbling of the transport engines. But the crowd below only paused briefly before resuming their agitated motion. Those closest to the pile began to cut through the netting to get at the food bags inside. The crowd became more frenzied, and a few daring ones began to climb up the pile, ignoring Sophon.

  “You useless things! Why aren’t you out here keeping order?” Sophon lifted her face and shouted at the transport. In the open door of the transport stood a few shocked officials from the UN Resettlement Commission. “Where are your armies? Your police? What about the weapons we allowed you to bring here? Where is your responsibility?”

  The chair of the Resettlement Commission stood at the door of the transport. He held on to the doorframe with one hand for support, and waved his other hand at Sophon, shaking his head helplessly.

  Sophon unsheathed her katana. Moving faster than the eye could see, she swung it three times and sliced three of the men climbing up the pile into six pieces. The three killing strokes were exactly the same: beginning at the left shoulder and ending at the right hip. The six pieces fell, and the viscera spilled out midair to land with a shower of blood among the rest of the people. Amidst screams of terror, she leapt from the pile and landed with her sword swinging, quickly killing more than a dozen individuals around her. The refugees shied away from her as though a drop of detergent had been deposited into the oil film over a dirty bowl, quickly clearing out a space around her. The bodies left behind in that empty space were also split from the left shoulder to the right hip, a method that guaranteed the maximum spilling of organs and blood.

  Faced with so much gore and blood, many fainted. As Sophon walked forward, people hurried to back away. An invisible force field seemed to surround her, repelling the mob and keeping the space around her clear. She stopped after a few steps and the crowd froze.

  “Form a line,” Sophon said. Her voice was soft.

  The chaotic mob quickly organized itself into a long, winding line, as though the people were enacting an array-sorting algorithm. The line extended to the gigantic tent and wound around it.

  Sophon jumped back onto the pile and pointed at the line with her bloody katana. “The era for humanity’s degenerate freedom is over. If you want to survive here, you must relearn collectivism and retrieve the dignity of your race!”

  * * *

  Cheng Xin couldn’t sleep that night. Noiselessly, she stepped out of her room.

  The hour was late, and she could see a flickering light on the steps of the porch: Fraisse was smoking. On his knees lay a didgeridoo, an Aboriginal instrument made from a thick, hollowed-out branch about a meter long. Every night, he played it for a while. The sound made by the didgeridoo was a deep, rich, rumbling whine, not like music, but more akin to the snores of the ground itself. Every night, AA and Cheng Xin fell asleep listening to it.

  Cheng Xin sat down next to Fraisse. She liked being with the old man. His transcendence in the face of a miserable reality soothed the pain of her broken heart. He never watched TV and seemed to pay no attention to the events of the outside world. At night, he rarely returned to his room, but fell asleep leaning against the doorframe, waking up when the rising sun warmed his body. He did so even on stormy nights, saying that it was more comfortable than sleeping in a bed. Once, he said that if the government bastards ever came to take away his house, he would not move to the resettlement zones; instead, he would go into the woods and build himself a shelter out of woven grass. AA said that with his advanced age, such a plan was not realistic, but he countered that if his ancestors could live that way, then so could he. As early as the fourth ice age, his ancestors had crossed the Pacific from Asia in canoes. That had been forty thousand years ago, when Greece and Egypt didn’t even exist as ideas. Back in the twenty-first century, he had been a wealthy doctor, with his own clinic in Melbourne. After emerging from hibernation in the Deterrence Era, he had also lived the comfortable life of a modern man. But when the Great Resettlement began, something in his body seemed to awaken. He felt himself becoming a creature of the earth and the forest and realized that very few things were truly necessary for life. Sleeping in the open was fine—very comfortable, in fact.

  Fraisse said he didn’t know what kind of portent this was.

  Cheng Xin gazed at the resettlement zone in the distance. This late at night, the lights were sparse, and the endless rows of shelter-houses gave off a rarely-seen tranquility. A strange feeling seized her, as though she were seeing another age of immigration, the Australia of five centuries ago. The people sleeping in those houses were rough cowboys and ranchers, and she could even smell the fragrance of hay and the odor of horse excrement. Cheng Xin told Fraisse of the odd sensation.

  “It wasn’t so crowded back then,” said Fraisse. “They say that if a white man wanted to buy land from another white man, he needed only to pay the price of a box of whiskey, and then he would ride out with the sunrise and return at sunset. The area he circumnavigated would belong to him.”

  Cheng Xin’s past impressions of Australia had come from that old film of the same name. In the film, the hero and heroine crossed the spectacular landscape of north Australia on a cattle drive. However, the film wasn’t set during Australia’s age of immigration, but during the Second World War—still the recent past when she was a young woman, but now ancient history. She felt a pang of sorrow as she realized that Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman had both been dead for probably over two centuries. Then she thought about how Wade had resembled the movie’s hero as he labored in the shelter-house.

  Thinking of Wade, she repeated to Fraisse what the man had told her. She had been meaning to tell him, but had worried about disturbing hi
s transcendent state of mind.

  “I know the man,” Fraisse said. “Child, I can tell you that you should listen to him. But leaving Australia is impossible. Don’t worry about it. It’s useless to ponder what cannot be done.”

  It was true. Leaving Australia now would be very difficult. Not only did the droplets keep watch, but Sophon had recruited her own naval force of humans. Any aircraft or surface ship leaving Australia that was found to harbor resettled individuals would be attacked immediately. In addition, as Sophon’s deadline approached, few wanted to attempt to return to their home countries. Though conditions in Australia were harsh, staying here was better than going back to certain death. A few cases of small-scale smuggling happened here and there, but Cheng Xin was a public figure, and such a path was closed to her.

  Cheng Xin did not concern herself with these details. No matter what happened, she wasn’t going to leave.

  Fraisse seemed to want to change the topic, but Cheng Xin’s silence in the darkness demanded more from him. “I’m an orthopedist. You probably know that when a bone is broken, it heals stronger because a knot forms around the fracture. The body, when given an opportunity to make up for an absence, may do so excessively, and recover to the point where it has more of that quality than those who had never suffered such inadequacy.” He pointed up at the sky. “Compared to humans, the Trisolarans once lacked something. Do you think they also overcompensated? To what extent? No one knows.”

  Cheng Xin was stunned by the idea. But Fraisse was not interested in continuing the discussion. He looked up at the star-studded sky and began reciting poetry in a low voice. The poems spoke of dreams of long ago, of broken trust and shattered weapons, of the deaths of peoples and ways of life.

  Cheng Xin was moved the same way she had been when Fraisse played the didgeridoo.