by Cixin Liu
“What are you doing?” Levine shouted.
“Children,” Zhang Beihai said, the first time he had addressed them this way. Even though his back was turned, they could imagine that his eyes were as calm as water. “Let me do this.”
“You mean, ‘If I don’t go to hell, who will?’24 Is that it?” Dongfang Yanxu said in a loud voice.
“From the moment I became a soldier, I was prepared to go there if necessary,” he said, continuing with the weapons’ prelaunch operations. From outside, the three of them saw that while he wasn’t skilled at these operations, every step he took was correct.
Tears welled up in Dongfang Yanxu’s eyes, and she cried, “Let’s go together. Let me in. I’ll go to hell with you!”
He made no answer, but continued his manipulations. He set the guided missiles for manual self-destruct so that they could be detonated by the mother ship while in flight. Only after finishing the last step did he say, “Dongfang, think. Could we have made this choice before? Absolutely not. But now we can make it, because space has turned us into new humans.” He set the missiles’ warheads to explode at a distance of fifty kilometers from each target. This would avoid causing the targets any internal damage, but an even greater distance would still be within the fatal range for any life aboard the targets. “The birth of a new civilization is the formation of a new morality.” He removed the first safety lock on the H-bomb warheads. “When they look back in the future on everything we’ve done, it may seem entirely normal. So, we won’t go to hell, children.” The second safety lock was removed.
Suddenly, the alert sounded throughout the ship like the crying of ten thousand ghosts in the darkness of space. Display interfaces popped up in midair like snowflakes, showing a huge quantity of information that Natural Selection’s defense systems had received about the incoming missiles, but no one had time to read it.
There was a space of just four seconds from the sounding of the alert to the detonation of the infrasonic H-bombs.
Images transmitted back to Earth from Natural Selection showed that Zhang Beihai may have understood all of this in just one second. He had imagined that his heart had grown as hard as iron through the arduous procession of more than two centuries, but he had overlooked something hidden in the deepest part of his soul, and had hesitated before making the final decision. He tried to restrain the trembling of his heart, and it was that last moment’s softness that killed him and everyone on board Natural Selection. After the month-long face-off in the darkness, he was just a few seconds slower than the other ship was.
Three small suns lit up the blackness of space, forming an equilateral triangle with Natural Selection at the center, at an average distance of forty kilometers. The fusion fireball lasted for twenty seconds and sparkled with infrasonic frequencies that were invisible to the naked eye.
The returned images showed that in the three seconds that remained, Zhang Beihai turned to Dongfang Yanxu, flashed her a smile, and spoke: “It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same.”
The exact words were only a guess, because he didn’t have time to finish before a powerful electromagnetic pulse arrived from three directions, vibrating Natural Selection’s enormous hull like a cicada’s wings. The energy in these vibrations was converted to infrasonic waves, which, in the image, looked like a fog of blood that enveloped everything.
The attack had come from Ultimate Law, which had fired twelve cloaked missiles armed with infrasonic H-bombs at the four other ships. The three missiles fired at Natural Selection, which was two hundred thousand kilometers away, had been launched before the others so that the ones fired at its three neighboring ships would reach their detonation points at the same time. A vice-captain had taken over after the suicide of Ultimate Law’s captain, but it was unknown who ultimately made the decision to launch the attack. And it would never be known.
Ultimate Law was not one of the lucky ones remaining in the Garden of Eden at the end.
Of the three other pursuing ships, Blue Space had been the best prepared against unexpected incidents. Before it was attacked, it had turned its interior into a vacuum and put all personnel in space suits. Because infrasonic waves were impossible in a vacuum, no personnel were injured, and the body of the ship suffered only minimal damage from the electromagnetic pulse.
Right after the nuclear fireballs exploded, Blue Space began its counterattack with lasers, the fastest response possible. It lit up Ultimate Law with five gamma-ray laser beams and burned five huge holes in its hull. Its insides quickly caught fire and there were minor explosions, causing the ship to lose all combat capability. Harsher attacks from Blue Space followed, and under continuous attack by nuclear missiles and a rain of railgun fire, Ultimate Law exploded violently, leaving no survivors.
At almost the same time as Starship Earth’s Battle of Darkness was going on, a similar tragedy was taking place far on the other side of the Solar System. Bronze Age launched a sudden strike on Quantum, using the same infrasonic H-bombs to kill off all life inside its target, but preserving the target ship whole. Because the two ships had sent only minimal information back to Earth, no one knew exactly what had taken place between them. They had both gone into intense acceleration to escape from the probe attack, but they had not decelerated like Natural Selection’s pursuers had, so their remaining fuel ought to have been more than enough to return to Earth.
The boundlessness of space nurtured a dark new humanity in its dark embrace.
In the expanding metal cloud formed from the explosion of Ultimate Law, Blue Space rendezvoused with Enterprise and Deep Space, neither of which showed signs of life, and collected all of their fusion fuel. After stripping them of their hardware, Blue Space flew the two hundred thousand kilometers to Natural Selection and did the same to that ship. Starship Earth was like a construction site in space now, the massive hulls of the three dead ships dotted with the sparks of laser welding. If Zhang Beihai had still been alive, the scene would certainly have reminded him of the aircraft carrier Tang two centuries before.
Blue Space took pieces of the three derelict warships and set them up in a Stonehenge formation, forming a tomb in outer space. There, they held a funeral for all the victims of the Battle of Darkness.
Wearing space suits, the 1,273 crew members of Blue Space assembled in a floating formation at the center of the tomb. These were the remaining citizens of Starship Earth. Around them, huge pieces of spaceships towered like a ring of mountains, the gashes cut into the wreckage like enormous mountain caves. The bodies of 4,247 victims remained within this debris, which cast its shadows over all of the living as if they were a mountain valley at midnight. The only light was the iciness of the Milky Way where it shone through the gaps between the wreckage.
Moods remained calm during the funeral. The new space humans had passed through their infancy.
A small votive lamp was lit. It was a fifty-watt bulb with a hundred spare bulbs next to it that would be automatically substituted in the lamp. Powered by a small nuclear battery, the votary lamp could remain continuously lit for tens of thousands of years. Its dim light was like a candle in the mountain valley, casting a small halo onto a high cliff of the wreckage and shining on a piece of titanium bulkhead engraved with the names of the victims. There was no epitaph.
One hour later, the space tomb was illuminated one final time by the light of Blue Space’s acceleration. The tomb was traveling at 1 percent of the speed of light. In several hundred years it would decelerate to 0.03 percent of light speed due to the drag from interstellar dust clouds. It would still reach NH558J2 in sixty thousand years, but Blue Space would already have headed off toward its next star system more than fifty thousand years before that.
Blue Space traveled deep into space carrying plenty of fusion fuel and an eight-fold redundant supply of critical parts. There was so much material it was impossible to fit it all inside the craft, so several external storage compartments were attached to the hull, completely altering the s
hip’s appearance and turning it into an enormous, ugly, irregular body. Indeed, it looked like a traveler on a long journey.
The previous year, on the opposite side of the Solar System, Bronze Age had accelerated away from the ruins of Quantum in the direction of Taurus.
Blue Space and Quantum had come from a world of light, but they had become two ships of darkness.
The universe had once been bright, too. For a short time after the big bang, all matter existed in the form of light, and only after the universe turned to burnt ash did heavier elements precipitate out of the darkness and form planets and life. Darkness was the mother of life and of civilization.
On Earth, an avalanche of curses and abuse rolled out into space toward Blue Space and Bronze Age, but the two ships made no reply. They cut off all contact with the Solar System, for to those two worlds, the Earth was already dead.
The two dark ships became one with the darkness, separated by the Solar System and drifting further apart. Carrying with them the entirety of human thoughts and memories, and embracing all of the Earth’s glory and dreams, they quietly disappeared into the eternal night.
* * *
“I knew it!”
That was the first thing Luo Ji said upon learning about the Battle of Darkness that had taken place at the edges of the Solar System. Leaving behind a baffled Shi Qiang, he ran out of the room and raced through the neighborhood until he stood facing the northern China desert.
“I was right! I was right!” he shouted at the sky.
It was late at night, and, perhaps because of the rain that had just fallen, atmospheric visibility was excellent. The stars were visible, although they weren’t nearly as clear as in the twenty-first century, and they were far sparser than before, since only the brightest could be seen. Yet he still swelled with that feeling he had on that cold night on the frozen lake two centuries ago: Luo Ji the ordinary person had disappeared, and he became a Wallfacer once again.
“Da Shi, I have in my hands the key to human victory!” he said to Shi Qiang, who had followed after him.
Shi Qiang laughed. “Oh?”
Shi Qiang’s slightly mocking laughter dashed Luo Ji’s excitement. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”
“So what will you do now?” Shi Qiang asked.
Luo Ji sat down on the sand, and his mood crashed rapidly. “What should I do? It looks like there’s nothing I can do.”
“You could at least find a way to report it upstairs.”
“I don’t know if that would work, but I’ll give it a try. Even if it’s just to fulfill my responsibility.”
“How high up will you go?”
“The highest. The UN secretary general. Or the chair of the SFJC.”
“That won’t be easy, I’m afraid. We’re just ordinary people now.… Still, you’ve got to try. You can, uh, go to the city government first. Find the mayor.”
“Very well. I’ll go to the city, then.” He stood up.
“I’ll go with you.”
“No, I’ll go alone.”
“Even at this rank, I’m still an official. I’ll have an easier time meeting the mayor.”
Luo Ji looked up at the sky and asked, “When does the droplet reach Earth?”
“The news said it’ll arrive in ten or twenty hours.”
“Do you know what it’s coming to do? Its mission wasn’t to destroy the combined fleet. Nor was it to attack the Earth. It’s here to kill me. I don’t want you to be with me when it does.”
Shi Qiang laughed the same mocking laugh again. “There’s still ten hours, right? By that time, I’ll just stay farther away from you.”
Luo Ji shook his head with a wry smile. “You’re not taking me seriously at all. So why do you want to help me?”
“My boy, it’s up to the top whether they believe you or not. I always play things safe. If you were selected from out of billions of people two centuries ago, there’s got to be a reason, right? If I delay you here, then won’t I be condemned by the ages? If the higher-ups don’t take you seriously, I won’t have lost anything. It’s just a trip into the city. But there’s one thing: You say that the thing that’s flying toward Earth is coming to kill you. I don’t believe that at all. I’m well acquainted with killing, and that’s excessive, even for Trisolarans.”
They reached the passage from the old city to the underground city in the early hours of morning and saw that the elevators going down were still functioning normally. Lots of people were coming out carrying large quantities of luggage. Few were going down, however, and on their elevator there were only two other people.
“Are you hibernators? They’re all going up top. Why are you going down?”
“The city’s in chaos,” one of them, a young man, said. On his clothes, fireballs shone continually against a black background. A closer look revealed that it was an image of the destruction of the combined fleet.
“Then what are you going down for?” Shi Qiang asked.
“I’ve found a place to live on the surface, so I’m going down to get a few things,” he said. Then he nodded at them. “You on the surface are going to get rich. We don’t have any houses there, and the property rights to the surface houses are mostly in your hands. We’ll have to buy them off you.”
“If the underground city collapses and all those people rush to the surface, there’s probably not going to be any actual buying or selling,” Shi Qiang said.
A middle-aged man huddling in a corner of the elevator was listening to them, and he suddenly covered his face with his hands and let out a whine. “No. Oh…” Then he squatted down and started crying. His clothing showed a classical biblical scene: a naked Adam and Eve standing beneath a tree in the Garden of Eden as a bewitching snake crawled between them. It may have been a symbol for the recent Battle of Darkness.
“There are lots of people like him,” the young man said, pointing disdainfully at the weeping man. “Unsound of mind.” His eyes lit up. “Actually, doomsday is a wonderful time. The most wonderful time, even. This is the only time in history where there’s a chance for people to abandon all of their cares and burdens and belong entirely to themselves. It’s stupid to be like him. The most responsible way of life right now is to enjoy ourselves while we can.”
When the elevator reached the bottom, Luo Ji and Shi Qiang exited the hall and immediately smelled the strong, strange odor of something burning. The underground city was brighter than before, but it was an irritating white light. Looking around, what Luo Ji saw through the gaps in the huge trees wasn’t the blue sky, but a total blank. The projection of the sky on the vault of the underground city had vanished. The blankness reminded him of spherical spaceship cabins he had seen on the news. The lawns were littered with a mess of debris that had fallen from the huge trees. Not far off was the wreckage of several crashed flying cars, one of which was in flames and surrounded by a crowd of people who were picking up other combustibles from the lawn and throwing them into the flames. Someone even threw in his own clothing while it was still flashing images. A ruptured underground pipe sprayed a high column of water, drenching a group of people who played around in it like children. From time to time they would scream excitedly in unison and scatter to avoid debris falling from the trees, then they would regroup and continue their revels. Luo Ji looked up again and saw fires in several places on the trees. The sirens of flying firefighting vehicles screamed as they flew through the air, dangling plucked tree leaves that had caught fire.…
He noticed that the people they met on the streets fell into two types, much like the two people they had encountered in the elevator. One type was depressed, walking with dull eyes or simply sitting on the lawns enduring the torment of despair, a despair whose cause had now shifted from humanity’s defeat to the present difficult living conditions. The other type was in a state of crazed excitement and grew intoxicated from indulgence.
Traffic in the city was in chaos. It took Luo Ji and Shi Qiang half an hour to hail a taxi, and
when the driverless flying car that carried them passed through the huge trees, Luo Ji was reminded of his first horrific day in the city and felt the tension of riding a roller coaster. Fortunately, the car soon arrived at City Hall.
Shi Qiang had been here several times because of work, and was fairly familiar with the place. After a considerable number of steps, they finally received permission to meet the mayor, but they had to wait until the afternoon. Luo Ji had expected complications, so the mayor’s acceptance of the meeting caught him by surprise, since this was an extraordinary time, and they were little people. At lunch, Shi Qiang told Luo Ji that the mayor had taken office the day before. He used to be the official in charge of hibernator affairs in the city government and was, in a way, Shi Qiang’s superior, so he knew him fairly well.
“He’s one of our countrymen,” Shi Qiang said.
In this age, the meaning of the term “countryman” had shifted from geography to temporality. But it wasn’t used between all hibernators. Only those who had entered hibernation at roughly the same time counted as countrymen. When they got together across the long years, temporally based countrymen shared an even closer affinity than geographically based countrymen used to.
They waited until half past four to see the mayor. High-ranking officials in this age typically possessed a star quality, with only the most attractive getting elected, but the current mayor was plain. He was about Shi Qiang’s age, but far thinner, and he had one trait that made him identifiable as a hibernator at a glance: He wore glasses. They were definitely antiques from two centuries ago, because even contact lenses had long since disappeared. But people who used to wear glasses tended to feel that something was wrong with their appearance when they didn’t wear them, so lots of hibernators wore them even after their vision was repaired.
