Distance of the Trisolaran Fleet from the Solar System: 4.15 light-years
Rey Diaz and Hines were awakened from hibernation at the same time to the news that the technology they awaited had appeared.
“So soon?!” they exclaimed upon learning that just eight years had passed.
They were informed that due to unprecedented investment, technology had progressed with amazing speed over the past few years. But not everything was optimistic. Humanity was simply making a final sprint across the distance between them and the sophon barrier, so the progress they were making was purely technological. Cutting-edge physics remained stopped up like a pool of stagnant water, and the reservoir of theory was being drained. Technological progress would begin to decelerate and eventually come to a complete halt. But, for the time being at least, no one knew when the end of technology would arrive.
*
On feet that were still stiff from hibernation, Hines walked into a stadium-like structure whose interior was shrouded in a white fog, although it felt dry to him. He couldn’t identify what it was. A soft moonlight glow illuminated the fog, which was fairly sparse at the height of a person but grew dense enough up above that the roof was obscured. Through the fog, he saw a petite figure whom he recognized at once as his wife. When he ran to her through the fog, it was like chasing a phantom, except that in the end they came together in an embrace.
“I’m sorry, love. I’ve aged eight years,” Keiko Yamasuki said.
“Even so, you’re still a year younger than me,” he said as he looked her over. Time seemed to have left no mark on her body, but she looked pale and weak in the fog’s watery moonlight. In the fog and moonlight, she reminded him of that night in the bamboo grove in their yard in Japan. “Didn’t we agree that you would enter hibernation two years after me? Why have you waited all this time?”
“I wanted to work on preparations for our post-hibernation work, but there was too much to do, so that’s what I’ve been doing,” she said as she brushed a strand of hair from her forehead.
“Was it hard?”
“It was very hard. Six next-gen supercomputer research projects were launched not long after you went into hibernation. Three of them employed traditional architecture, one used non–Von Neumann architecture, and the other two were quantum and biomolecular computing projects. But two years later, the lead scientists of those six projects told me that the computing power we desired was impossible. The quantum computing project was the first to be terminated, because it failed to find sufficient support in current theoretic physics: Research had run into the sophon barrier. Next, the biomolecular project was discontinued. They said it was only a fantasy. The last to end was the non–Von Neumann computer. Its architecture was actually a simulation of the human brain, but they said it was a shapeless egg that would never turn into a chicken. Only the three traditional architecture projects were still ongoing, but for a long time there was never any progress.”
“So that’s it.... I ought to have been with you the whole time.”
“It would have been no use. You only would have wasted eight years. It was only recently, during a period of time when we were totally discouraged, that we came up with the crazy idea of simulating the human brain in a practically barbaric way.”
“And what was that?”
“To put the previous software simulation into hardware by using a microprocessor to simulate one neuron, letting all the microprocessors interact, and allowing for dynamic changes to the connection model.”
Hines thought about this for a few seconds, then realized what she meant. “Do you mean manufacturing a hundred billion microprocessors?”
She nodded.
“That’s... that’s practically the sum total of all the microprocessors that have been manufactured in human history!”
“I didn’t run the numbers, but it’s probably more than that.”
“Even if you really had all those chips, how long would it take to connect them all together?”
Keiko Yamasuki smiled wearily. “I knew it wasn’t workable. It was just a desperate idea. But we really thought about doing it back then, and making as many as we could.” She pointed around her. “This here is one of the thirty virtual brain assembly shops we had planned. But it’s the only one that got built.”
“I really should have been here with you,” Hines repeated with more emotion.
“Fortunately we still got the computer we wanted. Its performance is ten thousand times better than when you entered hibernation.”
“Traditional architecture?”
“Traditional architecture. A few more drops squeezed out of the lemon of Moore’s law. It astonished the computing community—but this time, my love, we’ve really come to the end.”
A peerless computer. If humanity failed, it would never be equaled, Hines thought, but did not say it out loud.
“With this computer, research on the Resolving Imager became much easier.” Then she suddenly asked, “Love, do you have any idea of what a hundred billion looks like?” When he shook his head, she smiled and stretched out her hands around her. “Look. This is a hundred billion.”
“What?” At a loss for words, Hines looked at the white fog around him.
“We’re in the middle of the supercomputer’s holographic display,” she said as she manipulated a gadget hanging at her chest. He noticed a scroll wheel on it, and thought it might be something like a mouse.
As she adjusted it, he felt a change in the surrounding fog. It thickened in what was clearly a magnification of a particular region. Then he noticed that it was made up of an uncountable number of tiny glowing particles, and these particles were emitting the moonlike illumination rather than scattering light from an outside source. As the magnification continued, the particles became shining stars, but instead of seeing the starry sky over Earth, it was like he was situated at the heart of the Milky Way, where the stars were dense and left practically no room for darkness.
“Every star is a neuron,” she said. Their bodies were plated in silver by the ocean formed from a hundred billion stars.
As the hologram continued to enlarge, he noticed innumerable thin tentacles extending radially from every star to form intricate connections, wiping out the starfield and situating him inside an infinitely large network structure.
The image enlarged further, and every star began to exhibit a structure that was familiar to him from electron microscopy, that of brain cells and synapses.
She pressed the mouse and the image returned instantly to the white fog state. “This is a full view of the structure of the brain captured using the Resolving Imager scanning three million cross sections simultaneously. Of course, what we’re seeing now is the processed image—for the convenience of observation, the distance between neurons has been magnified by four or five orders of magnitude so it looks like we vaporized a brain. However, the topology of the connections between them has been preserved. Now, let’s take a look at a dynamic view....”
Disturbances appeared in the fog, glittering points in the mist that looked like a pinch of gunpowder sprinkled onto a flame. Keiko Yamasuki enlarged the image until it resembled a starfield, and Hines saw the surging of startide in a brain-universe, the disturbances in the ocean of stars appearing in different forms at different locations: some like streams, others like vortexes, and others like the sweeping tides, all of it instantly mutable and giving rise to stunning pictures of self-organization within the teeming chaos. Then the image changed again to resemble a network, and he saw myriad nerve signals busily passing messages along thin synapses, like flashing pearls within the flow of an intricate network of pipes....
“Whose brain is this?” he asked in wonder.
“Mine,” she said, looking lovingly at him. “When this thought picture was taken, I was thinking of you.”
Please note: When the light turns green, the sixth batch of test propositions will appear. If the proposition is true, press the right-hand button. If the proposition is false, press the left-hand button.
Proposition 1: Coal is black.
Proposition 2: 1 
1 
2.
Proposition 3: The temperature in winter is lower than in summer.
Proposition 4: Men are generally shorter than women.
Proposition 5: A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
Proposition 6: The moon is brighter than the sun.
The statements were displayed in succession on the small screen in front of the test subject. Each proposition was displayed for four seconds, and the subject pressed the left-hand or right-hand buttons according to his own judgment. His head was encased in a metal cover that allowed the Resolving Imager to capture a holographic view of his brain, which the computer would process into a dynamic neural network model for analysis.
In this, the initial stage of Hines’s research project, the subject engaged in only the simplest of critical thinking, and the test propositions had concise and clear answers. During such simple thoughts, the operation of the cerebral neural network was relatively easy to identify and provided a starting point for a more in-depth study of the nature of thought.
The research teams led by Hines and Keiko Yamasuki had made some progress. They discovered that critical thinking was not produced in any specific location in the cerebral neural network but used a particular mode of nerve impulse transmission, and that with the powerful computer’s assistance, this model could be retrieved and located from among the vast network of neurons using a method quite similar to the star positioning the astronomer Ringier had provided to Luo Ji. Unlike finding a particular position pattern in a starfield, in the universe of the brain the pattern was dynamic and was only identifiable by its mathematical characteristics. It was a little like looking for a small whirlpool in an expansive ocean, which meant that the computing power it required was many orders of magnitude greater than that of the starfield and was only feasible on this latest machine.
Hines and his wife strolled through the cloud map of the brain in the holographic display. Every time a point of critical thinking was identified in the subject’s brain, the computer would indicate its position on the image with a flashing red light. This was actually just a way to provide a more intuitive feast for the eyes and was not strictly required by the study. The important thing was the analysis of the internal structure of nerve impulse transmission at the point of thought, for there lay hidden the mysteries of the essence of the mind.
Just then the research team’s medical director came in and said that Subject 104 was experiencing problems.
When the Resolving Imager had just been developed, scanning such a huge quantity of cross sections generated powerful radiation that was fatal to any life being scanned, but successive improvements had brought the radiation below the danger line, and a large number of tests had demonstrated that so long as filming was kept below a set length of time, the Resolving Imager would not cause any damage to the brain.
“He seems to have caught hydrophobia,” the medical director said, as they hurried toward the medical center.
Hines and Keiko Yamasuki stopped in their tracks in surprise. Hines stared at the medical director: “Hydrophobia? Did he somehow get rabies?”
The medical director raised a hand and tried to sort out his thoughts: “Oh, I’m sorry. That wasn’t accurate. He doesn’t have any physical problems, and his brain and other organs have not been damaged at all. It’s just that he’s afraid of the water, like someone with rabies. He refuses to drink, and he won’t even eat moist food. It’s an entirely psychological effect. He just believes that water is toxic.”
“Persecutory delusion?” Keiko Yamasuki asked.
The medical director waved a hand. “No, no. He doesn’t think that anyone put poison in the water. He just believes the water itself is toxic.”
Again, Hines and his wife stopped still, and the medical director shook his head helplessly. “But psychologically, he’s completely normal in every other way.... I can’t explain it. You’ve got to see it for yourselves.”
Subject 104 was a volunteer college student who had come to earn some pocket money. Before they entered the patient’s room, the director told Hines and his wife, “He hasn’t had a drink in two days. If this continues, he’ll become severely dehydrated and we’ll have to hydrate him by force.” Standing at the door he pointed to a microwave oven, and said, “You see that? He wants bread and other food baked completely dry before he’ll eat it.”
Hines and his wife entered the patient’s room. Subject 104 looked at them with fear in his eyes. His lips were cracked and his hair disheveled, but otherwise he looked entirely normal. He tugged at Hines’s sleeve and said in a hoarse voice, “Dr. Hines, they want to kill me. I don’t know why.” Then he pointed a finger at a glass of water sitting on the cabinet next to the head of the bed. “They want me to drink water.”
Hines looked at the glass of clear water, certain that the subject did not have rabies, because true hydrophobia would cause spasms of terror at the mere sight of it. The sound of running water would induce madness, and there might even be an intense fear response if others simply talked about it.
“From his eyes and speech, he ought to be in a normal psychological state,” Keiko Yamasuki said to Hines in Japanese. She had a degree in psychology.
“Do you really believe that water is toxic?” Hines asked.
“Is there any question? Just like the sun has light and the air has oxygen. You can’t deny this basic fact, can you?”
Hines leaned on his shoulder and said, “Young man, life was born in the water and can’t exist without it. Your own body is seventy percent water.”
Subject 104’s eyes darkened, and he slumped back in bed, clutching his head. “That’s right. This question tortures me. It’s the most incredible thing in the universe.”
“Let me see Subject 104’s experiment record,” Hines said to the medical director after they left the patient’s room. When they reached the director’s office, Keiko Yamasuki said, “Look at the test propositions first.”
The test propositions displayed on the computer screen one by one:
Proposition 1: Cats have a total of three legs.
Proposition 2: Rocks are not living.
Proposition 3: The sun is shaped like a triangle.
Proposition 4: Iron is heavier than cotton of the same volume.
Proposition 5: Water is toxic.
“Stop,” Hines said, pointing to Proposition 5.
“His answer was ‘false,’” the director said.
“Look at all parameters and operations following the answer to Proposition 5.”
The records indicated that once Proposition 5 was answered, the Resolving Imager increased the strength of its scan of the critical thinking point in the subject’s cerebral neural network. To improve the accuracy of the scan of this area, the intensity of the radiation and the magnetic field were increased in this small region. Hines and Keiko Yamasuki carefully examined the long list of recorded parameters on the screen.
“Has this enhanced scan been done to other subjects and on other propositions?” Hines asked.
The director said, “Because the effect of the enhanced scan was not particularly good, it was canceled after four tries due to fears of excessive localized radiation. The previous three...” He consulted the computer, and then said, “were all benign true propositions.”
“We should use the same scanning parameters and repeat the experiment for Proposition 5,” Keiko Yamasuki said.
“But... who will do it?” asked the director.
“I will,” Hines said.
Water is toxic.
Proposition 5 appeared in black text on a white background. Hines pressed the left “False” button, but he felt nothing apart from a slight sensation of heat produced by the intensive scanning at the back of his head.
He exited the Resolving Imager lab and sat down at a table, as a crowd, which included Keiko Yamasuki, watched. On the table stood a glass of clear water. He picked up the glass and slowly drew it to his lips and took a sip. His movements were relaxed and he wore an expression of quiet calm. Everyone began to sigh with relief, but then they noticed that his throat wasn’t moving to swallow the water. The muscles of his face stiffened and then twitched slightly upward, and into his eyes came the same fear Subject 104 exhibited, as if his spirit was fighting with some powerful, shapeless force. Finally he spat out all of the water in his mouth and knelt down to vomit, but nothing came out. His face turned purple. Hugging Hines to her, Keiko Yamasuki clapped him on the back with one hand.
When he had recovered his senses, he held out a hand: “Give me some paper towels,” he said. He took them and carefully wiped off the droplets of water that had splashed on his shoes.
“Do you really believe that water is toxic, love?” Yamasuki asked, tears in her eyes. Prior to the experiment she had asked him repeatedly to replace the proposition with a false one that was entirely harmless, but he had refused.
He nodded. “I do.” He looked up at the crowd, helplessness and confusion in his eyes. “I do. I really do.”
“Let me repeat your words,” she said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Life was born in the water and can’t exist without it. Your own body is seventy percent water!”
Hines bowed his head and looked at the water stains on the floor. Then he shook his head. “That’s right, dear. This question tortures me. It’s the most incredible thing in the universe.”
*
Three years after the breakthrough in controlled nuclear fusion, new and unusual heavenly bodies had taken their place in the Earth’s night sky, up to five of them now simultaneously visible in one hemisphere. The bodies changed dramatically in luminance, outshining Venus at their brightest, and often blinked rapidly. Sometimes one of them would suddenly erupt with a rapid increase in brightness, then go out after two or three seconds. They were fusion reactors undergoing tests in geosynchronous orbit.
Non-media radioactive propulsion had won out as the research path for future spacecraft. This type of propulsion required high-powered reactors that could only be tested in space, leading to these glowing reactors thirty thousand kilometers out in space known as nuclear stars. Every time a nuclear star erupted, it represented a disastrous defeat. But contrary to what most people believed, nuclear star eruptions were not explosions in the nuclear reactor, but the exposure of the core when the outer hull of the reactor melted from the heat produced by fusion. The fusion core was like a small sun, and because it melted Earth’s most heat-tolerant materials as if they were wax, it had to be contained by an electromagnetic field. These restraints frequently failed.
On the balcony of the top floor of Space Command, Chang Weisi and Hines had just witnessed one such eruption. Its moonlike glow cast its shadows onto the wall before disappearing. Hines was the second Wallfacer that Chang Weisi had met, after Tyler.
“The third time this month,” Chang Weisi said.
Hines looked out at the now-darkened night sky. “The power of these reactors only reaches one percent of what’s needed for future spacecraft engines, and they don’t operate stably. And even if the required reactors were developed, engine technology will be even more difficult. We’re sure to encounter the sophon block there.”
“That’s true. The sophons are blocking our every path,” Chang Weisi said as he looked off into the distance. The sea of lights in the city seemed even more brilliant now that the light in the sky had disappeared.
“A glimmer of hope fades as soon as it is born, and one day it will be destroyed forever. It’s like you said: The sophons block our every path.”
Chang Weisi said, with a laugh, “Dr. Hines, you’re not here to talk defeatism with me, are you?”
“That’s precisely what I want to talk about. The resurgence of defeatism is different this time. It’s based on the drastically reduced living conditions in the general population and has an even greater impact in the military.”
Chang Weisi looked back from the distance but said nothing.
“I understand your difficulties, General, and I’d like to help you.”
Chang Weisi looked at Hines in silence for a few seconds, his expression unreadable to the other man. Then, without replying to his offer, he said, “The evolution of the human brain needs twenty thousand to two hundred thousand years to achieve noticeable changes, but human civilization has a history of just five thousand years. So what we’re using right now is the brain of primitive man.... Doctor, I really applaud your unique ideas, and perhaps this is where the real answer lies.”
“Thank you. All of us are basically Flintstones.”
“But is it really possible to use technology to enhance mental ability?”
This got Hines excited. “General, you’re not so primitive, at least compared to others! I notice you said ‘mental ability’ rather than ‘intelligence.’ The former is much broader than the latter. To overcome defeatism, for example, we can’t simply rely on intelligence. Given the sophon block, the higher your intelligence, the more trouble you have establishing a faith in victory.”
“So give me an answer. Is it possible?”
Hines shook his head. “How much do you know about my and Keiko Yamasuki’s work before the Trisolar Crisis?”
“Not too much. I believe it was: The essence of thought is not on the molecular level but is carried out on the quantum level. I wonder, does that imply—”
“It implies that the sophons are waiting for me. Just like we’re waiting for them,” Hines said pointing at the sky. “But right now, our research is still quite a ways from our goal. Still, we’ve come up with an unexpected by-product.”
Chang Weisi smiled and nodded, showing cautious interest.
“I won’t talk about the details. Basically, we discovered the mind’s mechanism for making judgments in the cerebral neural network, as well as the ability to have a decisive impact on them. If we compare the process by which a human mind makes judgments to a computer’s process, there’s the input of external data, calculation, and then the final outcome. What we’re able to do is omit the calculation step of the process and directly produce an outcome. When a certain piece of information enters the brain, it exerts an influence on a particular part of the neural network, and we can cause the brain to render a judgment—to believe that the information is genuine—without even thinking about it.”
“Has this already been achieved?” Chang Weisi asked softly.
“Yes. It started with a chance discovery, which we subjected to in-depth research, and now we’ve done it. We call it the ‘mental seal.’”
“And if the judgment—or if you will, faith—is at odds with reality?”
“Then the faith will eventually be overturned. But the process will be quite painful, because the judgment produced in the mind by the mental seal is particularly stubborn. Once, this had me convinced that water was toxic, and it was only after two months of psychotherapy that I was able to drink unimpeded. That process is... not something I want to remember. But the toxicity of water is an extremely clear false proposition. Other beliefs may not be. Like the existence of God, or whether humanity will be victorious in war. These don’t have a clearly determined answer, and in the normal course of establishing these beliefs, the mind is slightly tilted in a certain direction by all sorts of choices. If the belief is established by the mental seal, it will be rock-solid and absolutely unshakeable.”
“That is truly a great achievement.” Chang Weisi grew serious. “I mean, for neuroscience. But in the real world, Dr. Hines, you have created a truly troublesome thing. Really. The most troublesome thing in history.”
“You don’t want to use this thing, the mental seal, to create a space force possessing an unshakeable faith in victory? In the military, you have political commissars and we have chaplains. The mental seal is just a technological means of accomplishing their work more efficiently.”
“Political and ideological work establishes faith through rational, scientific thinking.”
“But is it possible to establish faith in a victory in this war on the basis of rational, scientific thought?”
“If not, Doctor, we’d rather have a space force that lacks faith in victory yet retains independent thought.”
“Apart from this one belief, the rest of the mind would of course be entirely autonomous. We would just be performing a tiny intervention in the mind, using technology to leapfrog thought to implant a conclusion—just one alone—into the mind.”
“But one is enough. Technology is now capable of modifying thoughts just like modifying a computer program. After the modifications, are people still people, or are they automatons?”
“You must have read A Clockwork Orange.”
“It’s a profound book.”
“General, your attitude is what I expected,” Hines said with a sigh. “I’ll continue my efforts in this area, the efforts a Wallfacer must exert.”
*
At the next PDC Wallfacer Project Hearing, Hines’s introduction of his mental seal triggered rare emotion in the assembly. The US representative’s concise evaluation expressed the feeling of the majority of the attendees: “With their extraordinary talent, Dr. Hines and Dr. Yamasuki have opened up a great door into darkness for humanity.”
The French representative left his seat in his excitement. “Which is more tragic for humanity: the loss of the ability and right to think freely, or defeat in this war?”
“Of course the latter is more tragic!” Hines retorted, standing up. “Because under the first condition, humanity at least has the chance of regaining independent thought!”
“I have doubts about that. If this thing really does get used... Look at all you Wallfacers,” the Russian representative said, raising his hands toward the ceiling. “Tyler wanted to deprive people of their lives, and you want to deprive them of their minds. What are you trying to do?”
His words caused a commotion.
The UK representative said, “Today we are merely proposing a motion, but I believe that the governments of all countries will be unanimous in banning this thing. Regardless of what happens, nothing is more evil than thought control.”
Hines said, “Why is it that everyone gets so sensitive at the mention of thought control? From commercial advertising to Hollywood culture, thought control is everywhere in modern society. You are, to use a Chinese phrase, mocking people for retreating a hundred paces when you’ve retreated fifty yourselves.”
The US representative said, “Dr. Hines, you haven’t gone just one hundred paces. You’ve walked up to the threshold of darkness and are threatening the very foundations of modern society.”
Another commotion swept through the assembly, and Hines knew that now was the time to seize control of the situation. He raised his voice and said, “Learn from the little boy!”
Sure enough, there was a lull in the noise after his utterance. “What little boy?” asked the rotating chair.
“I think we’re all familiar with this story: In a forest, a little boy got his leg caught under a fallen tree. He was alone at the time, and his leg was bleeding uncontrollably. It would have killed him, except that he made a decision that would shame every one of you delegates: He took up his saw and sawed off the leg that was pinned, then climbed into a car and found a hospital. He saved his own life.”
Hines saw with satisfaction that no one in the meeting room had attempted to interrupt him, at least. He went on. “Humanity is now facing a life-and-death problem. The life or death of our species and civilization as a whole. In these circumstances, how can we not give up a few things?”
Two light thumps sounded. The chair was banging the gavel, even though there wasn’t much noise in the assembly. The attendees were reminded that the German man had maintained an unusual silence during the course of the hearing. In a gentle voice, the chair said, “First of all, I hope that each of you can take a good look at the current situation. Investment in building a space defense system is constantly increasing, and the world economy is experiencing a sharp recession during this time of transition. The prediction that the standard of living will retreat a century may come to pass in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile, space defense–related scientific research is running up against the sophon block, and technological progress is slowing. This will trigger a new wave of defeatism in the international community, and this time, it may cause the total collapse of the Solar System Defense Program.”
The chair’s words calmed the assembly completely. After a silence of nearly half a minute, he continued. “Like each of you, when I learned of the existence of the mental seal, I felt the kind of fear and loathing I’d get from seeing a poisonous snake. But the most rational approach to take right now is to calm down and seriously consider it. When the devil does actually appear, the best option is calmness and rationality. At this hearing, we are simply putting forward a votable motion.”
Hines saw a thread of hope. “Mr. Chair, Representatives, since my initial proposal is unable to be put to an assembly vote, maybe we all can take a step back.”
“No matter how many steps back you take, thought control is absolutely unacceptable,” the French representative said, but in a slightly softer tone than before.
“And if it weren’t thought control? Perhaps something in between control and freedom?”
“The mental seal equals thought control,” the Japanese representative said.
“Not so. In thought control, there must be a controller and a subject. If someone voluntarily places a seal in their own mind, then tell me, where is the control in that?”
The assembly fell silent again. Feeling that success was near, Hines went on, “I propose that the mental seal be opened up, like a public facility. It would have but one proposition: belief in a victory in the war. Anyone willing to gain that faith through the use of the seal could, totally voluntarily, take advantage of the facility. Of course, all of this would be conducted under strict supervision.”
The assembly opened up a discussion and added to Hines’s basic proposal a fair number of new restrictions on the use of the mental seal. The most crucial of these was the one limiting its use to the space forces, because it was relatively easy for people to accept the idea of uniform thinking in the military. The hearing continued for nearly eight hours, the longest ever, and eventually formulated a motion to be voted on at the next meeting, and which the permanent member states would take back to their own governments.
“Shouldn’t we come up with a name for this facility?” asked the US representative.
“How about calling it the Faith Relief Center?” the UK representative said. The British humor of the odd name drew a burst of laughter.
“Take out ‘relief,’ and call it the Faith Center,” Hines said, in all earnestness.
*
At the gate to the Faith Center stood a reduced-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty. Its purpose was unknown—perhaps it was an attempt to use “liberty” to dilute the feeling of “control”—but the most notable thing about the statue was the altered poem on its base:
Give me your hopeless souls,
Your fearful crowds that thirst for victory,
The dazed refuse of your treacherous shoals.
Send these, the downcast, wand’ring ones to me,
For lo, my lamp of golden faith consoles.
The golden faith of the poem was prominently inscribed in many different languages on a black granite stone called the Faith Monument that stood beside the statue:
In the war of resistance against the invasion from Trisolaris, humanity will be victorious. The enemy invading the Solar System will be destroyed. Earth will endure in the cosmos for ten thousand generations.
The Faith Center had been open for three days, during which time Hines and Keiko Yamasuki had been waiting in the majestic foyer. The smallish building erected near the United Nations Plaza had become the latest tourist attraction, with people constantly coming up to take photos of the Statue of Liberty and the Faith Monument, but no one had entered. They all seemed to be maintaining a cautious distance.
“Do you get the feeling we’re running a struggling mom-and-pop store?” she said.
“My dear, one day this will be a sacred place,” Hines said solemnly.
On the afternoon of the third day, someone finally walked into the Faith Center. The bald, melancholy-looking, middle-aged man walked unsteadily and smelt of alcohol when he approached. “I’ve come to get faith,” he slurred out.
“The Faith Center is only open to members of national space forces. Please show your ID,” Keiko Yamasuki said while bowing. She seemed to Hines like a polite waitress at the Tokyo Plaza Hotel.
The man fished out his ID. “I’m a space force member. Civilian personnel. Is that okay?”
After inspecting the ID, Hines nodded. “Mr. Wilson, do you want to do it now?”
“That would be great,” he said, and nodded. “The... the thing you call a belief proposition. I’ve written it here. I want to believe this.” He pulled a neatly folded piece of paper from his breast pocket.
Keiko Yamasuki wanted to explain that according to the PDC resolution, the mental seal was only permitted to operate on one proposition, the one written on the monument at the gate. It had to be done exactly as written, and any alteration was prohibited. But Hines gently stopped her. He wanted to take a look at the proposition the man had submitted first. Unfolding the paper, he read what was written on it:
Katherine loves me. She has never and will never have an affair!
Keiko Yamasuki stifled a laugh, but Hines angrily crumpled up the paper and tossed it in the drunken man’s face. “Get the hell out!”
After Wilson left, another man passed the Faith Monument, the boundary beyond which ordinary tourists maintained their distance. As the man paced behind the monument, he soon came to Hines’s attention. Hines called Keiko Yamasuki over and said, “Look at him. He must be a soldier!”
“He looks mentally and physically exhausted,” she said.
“But he’s a soldier. Believe me,” he said. He was about to go out and talk to the man when he saw him heading up the steps. The man looked about Wilson’s age and, though his Asian features were handsome, it was like Keiko Yamasuki had said: He seemed a little melancholy, but in a different way from the previous hard-luck case. His melancholy looked lighter, but also deeper, as if it had been with him for years.
“My name is Wu Yue. I’d like to get belief,” the visitor said. Hines noticed how he referred to “belief” instead of “faith.”
Keiko Yamasuki bowed and repeated her earlier line: “The Faith Center is only open to members of every country’s space force. Please show your ID.”
Wu Yue did not move, but he said, “Sixteen years ago, I spent a month serving in the space force, and then I retired.”
“You served for one month? Well, if you don’t mind my asking, what was your reason for retiring?” Hines asked.
“I’m a defeatist. My superiors and I felt that I was no longer suited to work in the space force.”
“Defeatism is a common mentality. You’re evidently just an honest defeatist, and stated your own ideas forthrightly. Your colleagues who continued serving may have harbored an even stronger defeatist complex, but they just kept it hidden,” Keiko Yamasuki said.
“Maybe. But I’ve been lost all these years.”
“Because you left the service?”
Wu Yue shook his head. “No. I was born into a family of scholars, and the education I received made me treat humanity as a single unit, even after I became a soldier. I always felt that a soldier’s highest honor would be to fight for the entire human race. This opportunity came, but it was a war that we were destined to lose.”
Hines was about to say something, but was interrupted by Keiko Yamasuki. “Permit me to ask a question. How old are you?”
“Fifty-one.”
“If you are really able to return to the space force after obtaining faith in victory, don’t you think that at your age it’s a little late to start up in the service again?”
Hines could see that she didn’t have the heart to refuse him directly. No doubt this deeply melancholy man was very attractive to a woman’s eyes. But this didn’t worry him, because the man was obviously so consumed by his despair that nothing else had any meaning for him.
Wu Yue shook his head. “You misunderstand. I don’t want to gain faith in victory. I’m just looking for peace for my soul.”
Hines wanted to speak, but again Keiko Yamasuki stopped him.
Wu Yue went on. “I met my present wife when I was studying at the naval academy in Annapolis. She was a fervent Christian and faced the future with a calmness that made me jealous. She said that God had everything planned out, from the past to the future. We children of the Lord did not need to understand his plans. We just needed to firmly believe that this plan was the most reasonable one in the universe, and then live peacefully according to the Lord’s will.”
“So you mean that you’ve come to gain a belief in God?”
Wu Yue nodded. “I’ve written out my belief proposition. Please have a look.” He reached into his shirt pocket as he spoke.
Again Keiko Yamasuki stopped Hines from saying anything. She said to Wu Yue, “If that’s the case, then just go and believe. There’s no need to resort to such extreme, technological means.”
The former space force captain showed a trace of a wry smile. “I grew up under a materialist education. I’m a staunch atheist. Do you think gaining this belief would be easy for me?”
“Absolutely not!” Hines said, getting out in front of Keiko Yamasuki. He decided to clear things up as quickly as he could. “You ought to know that according to the UN resolution, the mental seal can only operate on one proposition.” As he spoke, he took out a large, exquisitely fashioned red card case and opened it up for Wu Yue to see. There, on the black velvet lining, in letters engraved in gold, was the victory oath from the Faith Monument. He said, “This is a faith book.” He took out a set of cases in different colors. “These are faith books in different languages. Mr. Wu, let me tell you how stringent the supervision is for use of the mental seal. To guarantee safe and reliable operation, the proposition is not put up on a display but is given to the volunteer to read from this primitive faith book. As a reflection of the voluntary principle, the specific procedure is completed by the volunteer. He opens up this faith book, then presses the Start button on the mental seal device. Prior to actually performing the procedure, the system will give three confirmation opportunities. Before each procedure, the faith book is inspected by a panel of ten special commissioners from the members of the UN Human Rights Commission and the permanent member states of the PDC. During the operation of the mental seal device, the ten-member panel will be on site to strictly supervise the entire affair. So, sir, your request can’t be fulfilled. Forget about your proposition for religious belief. Changing even one word in the faith book is a crime.”
“Then I’m sorry to have troubled you,” Wu Yue said, nodding. He appeared to have anticipated this outcome. As he turned to walk out, he appeared lonely and old from the back.
“The rest of his life will be hard,” Keiko Yamasuki said softly, with a voice full of tenderness.
“Sir!” Hines called, stopping Wu Yue just outside the door. He ran out to where the light of the setting sun was reflecting like fire off the Faith Monument and the glass-walled UN building in the distance. He squinted his eyes against the flames and said, “You might not believe me, but I nearly did the exact opposite.”
Wu Yue looked puzzled. Hines looked back and, seeing that Keiko Yamasuki had not followed him, took out a piece of paper from his pocket and opened it for Wu Yue. “This is the mental seal I wanted to apply to myself. I was hesitant, of course, and in the end didn’t do it.” The bold text on the paper read:
God is dead.
“Why?” asked Wu Yue, raising his head.
“Isn’t it obvious? Isn’t God dead? Screw the Lord’s plan. Screw his mild yoke!”
Wu Yue looked at Hines in silence for a moment, then turned and walked down the steps.
When Wu Yue walked into the shadow cast by the Faith Monument, Hines called after him, “Sir, I wish I could disguise my contempt for you, but I can’t.”
The next day, the people Hines and Keiko Yamasuki were waiting for finally started to arrive. In the bright sunshine that morning, four people walked in, three men with European faces and one woman with Asian features. Young, standing straight and tall, and walking at a steady pace, they looked confident and mature. But Hines and Keiko Yamasuki saw in their eyes something familiar, the same melancholy confusion that had been in Wu Yue’s.
They set their documents neatly down on the reception desk, and their leader said solemnly, “We’re space force officers, and we’ve come to get faith in victory.”
The mental seal process was quite fast. After the faith books were passed among the ten members of the oversight panel, each of whom carefully checked the contents, they signed their names to the notary certificate. Then, under their supervision, the first volunteer received the faith book and sat down in front of the mental seal scanner. In front of him was a small platform on which he placed the book, and which had a red button in the lower right-hand corner. When he opened the faith book, a voice asked, “Are you certain that you want to obtain a faith in this proposition? If so, please press the button. If not, please leave the scanning area.”
The question was repeated three times, and each time it was asked, the button glowed red. A positioning apparatus slowly contracted to fix the volunteer’s head in place, and then the voice said, “The mental seal procedure is ready to start. Please read the proposition silently and then press the button.”
When the button was pressed, it turned green, and after about half a minute, it went out. The voice said, “The mental seal procedure is complete.” The positioning apparatus separated, and then the volunteer got up and left.
After all four officers completed the procedure and returned to the foyer, Keiko Yamasuki carefully looked them over, confirming almost immediately that her perception of their improved moods was not just her imagination. The melancholy and confusion had disappeared from the four pairs of eyes, which now were serene as water.
“How do you feel?” she asked, smiling.
“Excellent,” one young officer said, returning her smile. “How it ought to be.”
When they left, the Asian woman turned around and added, “Doctor, I really feel great. Thank you.”
At that moment, the future was certain, at least in the minds of those four young people.
From that day forward, members of the space force came without pause to obtain faith—at first mostly on their own, but eventually in larger groups. They wore civilian clothes at first, but later most of them wore military uniforms. If more than five people came at a time, the supervisory panel convened a review meeting to verify that no one had been coerced.
One week later, more than a hundred space force members had obtained faith in victory through the mental seal. They ranged in rank from private to senior colonel, the highest rank permitted by national space forces to use the mental seal.
That night, in the moonlight at the Faith Monument, Hines said to Keiko Yamasuki, “Dear, we need to go.”
“To the future?”
“That’s right. We’re not any better than other scientists in the study of the mind, and we’ve accomplished everything we needed to. We have pushed forward the wheel of history, so now let’s go to the future and wait for it.”
“How far?”
“Very far, Keiko. Very far. To the day when the Trisolaran probes reach the Solar System.”
“Before we do that, let’s go back to that house in Tokyo for a while. After all, this age is going to be buried forever.”
“Of course, dear. I miss it too.”
*
Six months later, as Keiko Yamasuki sank into the deepening cold and was about to enter hibernation, the cold froze and filtered out the riot of noise in her mind. This brought the thread of her focused thoughts into sharp relief in the lonely darkness, like the moment ten years before when Luo Ji plunged into the icy lake. All of a sudden, her hazy thoughts became unusually clear, like the chilly sky in the dead of winter.
She wanted to shout for the hibernation to stop, but it was too late. The ultra-low temperatures had seeped into her body and she had lost the ability to produce sound.
The operators and doctors noticed that just as she was entering hibernation, her eyes suddenly opened a crack, revealing an expression full of horror and despair. If the cold hadn’t frozen her eyelids, her eyes would have been wide open. But this was just a normal reflex during the process that had been seen on previous hibernators, so they paid it no mind.
*
The UN PDC Wallfacer Project Hearing deliberated the stellar hydrogen bomb test.
The giant breakthrough in computing technology meant that computers were at last capable of handling the theoretical stellar model of a nuclear explosion developed over the past decade, and the manufacture of large-yield stellar hydrogen bombs could begin forthwith. The projected yield of the first bomb was the equivalent of 350 megatons of TNT, or seven times more powerful than the largest hydrogen bomb ever manufactured by humanity. It was impossible for this superbomb to be tested in the atmosphere, and a detonation in an underground shaft of the depth previously used would eject the surrounding rock into the air, so testing on Earth would require digging an ultra-deep shaft. But even detonating in an ultra-deep shaft would cause powerful shock waves to spread across the world and might have an unanticipated effect on a broad range of geological structures, possibly touching off disasters including earthquakes and tsunamis. Therefore, the stellar hydrogen bomb could only be tested in space. Yet it was impossible in high orbit, because at that distance, the electromagnetic pulse the bomb generated would have a catastrophic effect on Earth’s telecommunications and power systems. The ideal test location, then, was on the back side of the moon. However, Rey Diaz chose differently.
“I’ve decided to conduct the tests on Mercury,” he said.
This proposal surprised the representatives in attendance, and they voiced questions about the meaning of the plan.
“According to the basic principles of the Wallfacer plan, I do not have to explain,” he answered icily. “The tests should be conducted underground. We need to dig ultra-deep shafts on Mercury.”
The Russian representative said, “We can consider tests on the surface of Mercury, but underground tests are too expensive. Digging deep shafts there could cost a hundred times what a similar engineering project would cost on Earth. Besides, the effects of a nuclear bomb on the environment of Mercury would tell us nothing useful.”
“Even a surface test on Mercury is impossible!” the US representative said. “To date, Rey Diaz has consumed the most resources of all of the Wallfacers. The time has come to stop him!” This sentiment was echoed by representatives from the UK, France, and Germany.
Rey Diaz said with a laugh, “Even if I used as few resources as Dr. Luo, you’d still be keen to veto my plan.” He turned to the rotating chair. “I would ask the chair and each representative to remember that out of all the strategies proposed by the Wallfacers, my plan is most closely in harmony with mainstream defense, to the point that you could view it as part of the mainstream. In absolute numbers the consumption of resources might look large, but a considerable portion of that overlaps the mainstream. Therefore—”
The UK representative cut him off. “You still ought to explain why you need to conduct underground tests on Mercury. Unless you’re just doing it to spend money. We can’t find any explanation for it.”
“Mr. Chair, Representatives,” Rey Diaz countered calmly, “you may have noticed that the PDC no longer has even the barest respect for Wallfacers or for the Wallfacer principle. If we have to explain every detail of our plans, then how is the Wallfacer Project meaningful?” One by one, he turned his scorching gaze on every representative, forcing them to turn away.
He went on, “Even so, I am willing to offer an explanation of the issue just raised. The goal of conducting deep underground tests on Mercury is to blast out a large cave on the planet to serve as a future Mercury base. This is clearly the most economical way of conducting an engineering project of this kind.”
His words stirred up whispers, and one representative asked, “Wallfacer Rey Diaz, do you mean you want to use Mercury as the launch base for stellar hydrogen bombs?”
With confidence, Rey Diaz answered, “Yes. Current strategic theory in mainstream defense holds that emphasis should be placed on the outer planets, and so the inner planets, which are not believed to be defensively significant, have not been given sufficient attention. The Mercury base I have planned is intended to mend this weak link in mainstream defense.”
“He’s afraid of the sun, but he wants to go to the planet closest to it. Isn’t that a little strange?” the US representative said. There was a bit of laughter, followed by a warning from the chair.
“It doesn’t matter, Mr. Chair. I’ve grown accustomed to this lack of respect. I was used to it even before I became a Wallfacer,” Rey Diaz said with a wave of his hand. “But all of you should respect the facts at hand. When the outer planets and Earth have fallen, the Mercury base will be the last bastion of humanity. Backed by the sun and situated amid the cover of radiation, it will be the most rugged of positions.”
“Wallfacer Rey Diaz, does this mean that your plan’s entire significance lies in a last stand when humanity’s situation is already hopeless? This is quite consistent with your character,” the French representative said.
“Gentlemen, we can’t simply refuse to consider the final resistance,” Rey Diaz said gravely.
“Very well, Wallfacer Rey Diaz,” the chair said. “Now, would you be able to tell us, in your overall deployment scenario, how many stellar hydrogen bombs you’ll need, all told?”
“The more the better. Manufacture as many as the Earth has capacity to produce. The specific number depends on the yield that hydrogen bombs will be able to achieve in the future, but according to current figures, the first batch in the deployment plan requires at least a million.”
Laughter shook the auditorium at Rey Diaz’s words.
“Evidently Wallfacer Rey Diaz doesn’t just want to make a small sun. He wants to make a small galaxy!” the US representative said loudly. Then he leaned toward Rey Diaz. “Do you really think that the ocean’s protium, deuterium, and tritium were prepared just for you? Because of your perverted affection for the bomb, the Earth should be turned into a bomb workshop?”
By this point Rey Diaz was the only one in the assembly with a straight face. He waited quietly until the clamor he had sparked died down, and then said, one word at a time, “This is the ultimate war of the human race, so the number I ask for is not at all large. But I did anticipate today’s outcome. Nevertheless, I will work hard. I will build bombs. I will build as many as I can, I tell you. I will work hard and I won’t stop.”
In response, the representatives of the US, UK, and France put forth a joint proposal, P269, to terminate the strategic plan of Wallfacer Rey Diaz.
*
Only two colors were visible on the surface of Mercury: black and gold. The black was the planet’s land, and its low reflectance meant that even under close illumination from the fierce sun, it remained a sheet of black. The gold was the sun, which occupied a considerable portion of the sky. In its broad wheel you could clearly see the surging of its fiery seas and the sunspots drifting by like black clouds, and, at its edges, the graceful dance of solar prominences.
And on this hard chunk of rock suspended atop the sun’s fiery sea, humanity was planting another small sun.
With the completion of the space elevator, humanity had begun the large-scale exploration of the other planets in the Solar System. Manned spacecraft landings on Mars and the moons of Jupiter had not caused much of a stir because people knew that the purpose of these expeditions was much clearer and more practical than in the past: They were purely intended to establish bases for the defense of the Solar System. These voyages, which relied mainly on chemical-propulsion rockets and spacecraft, were merely the tiniest of steps toward that goal. Initial explorations focused primarily on the outer planets, but as the study of space strategy deepened, neglecting the strategic value of the inner planets was increasingly called into question. Hence the exploration of Venus and Mercury was stepped up, and so it was that the PDC narrowly passed Rey Diaz’s plan to test the stellar hydrogen bomb on Mercury.
Excavating the shaft through the rock of Mercury was the first large-scale engineering project humanity had undertaken on another planet in the Solar System. Because construction could only take place during Mercury’s night, in stretches of eighty-eight Earth days, the project would take three years to complete. However, in the end it only reached one-third of the projected depth, due to the discovery of an unusually hard layer farther down, a mixture of metal and rock. Continued excavation would be much slower and far more costly. Ultimately, it was decided to terminate the project. If tests were carried out at the present depth, the surrounding rock would most certainly be ejected by the blast and would form a crater, making it basically a watered-down atmospheric test. And because of the interference from the surrounding crust, it would be far harder to observe the test’s outcome than with a purely atmospheric test. But Rey Diaz thought that if a cover were fitted onto this crater, it could still serve as a base, and insisted on conducting the test underground at the current depth.
The test was carried out at dawn. Sunrise on Mercury was a process that took over ten hours, and a faint light had just appeared on the horizon. When the detonation countdown reached zero, rings of ripples centered on ground zero spread outward, and the ground on Mercury seemed momentarily to become soft as satin. Then, at the blast site, a mountain slowly rose like the back of a waking giant. When the peak had risen to around three thousand meters, the entire mountain exploded, sending billions of tons of mud and rock flying into the air in a towering display of rage by the ground toward the sky. And alongside the surging ground came the radiant light of the underground nuclear fireball, which shone on the rock and earth flying through the air to cause a grand spectacle of fireworks in the black Mercury sky. The fireball lasted for five minutes, as chunks of rock fell to the ground amid a nuclear glow, before it went out.
Ten hours after the conclusion of the blast, observers noticed that a ring had appeared around Mercury. This was due to the considerable amount of rock that had achieved cosmic velocity in the violent explosion and had turned into myriad satellites of various sizes. They spread out evenly in orbit, making Mercury the first ringed terrestrial planet. The ring was thin, and as it sparkled in the harsh light of the sun, it looked almost like someone had taken a highlighter to the planet.
Another proportion of the rocks achieved escape velocity and left Mercury behind entirely, becoming satellites of the sun in their own right and forming an extremely sparse asteroid belt in Mercury’s orbit.
*
Rey Diaz lived underground not out of any concern for security, but because of his heliophobia. The claustrophobic environment, far removed from the sunshine, made him feel a little more comfortable. He watched the live broadcast of the Mercury test from the basement where he lived. It wasn’t actually live, since the images took about seven minutes to reach Earth. When the blast on Mercury had concluded and the rock rain was still falling in the post-fireball darkness, he received a telephone call from the rotating chair of the PDC, who said that the tremendous power of the stellar hydrogen bombs had made a deep impression on the PDC leadership, and that the permanent member states had requested that the next Wallfacer hearing be held as soon as possible to discuss the bombs’ manufacture and deployment. The chair said that although the number of bombs Rey Diaz had requested was an impossibility, the major powers were indeed interested in the production of this weapon.
Over ten hours after the conclusion of the Mercury test, as he was watching Mercury’s new ring sparkling on the television, a guard’s voice came over the intercom to tell him that his psychiatrist had arrived for an appointment.
“I never asked for any psychiatrist. Send him away!” He felt exasperated, like he had suffered some great indignity.
“Don’t be like that, Mr. Rey Diaz,” said another, calmer voice, evidently the visitor’s. “I can let you see the sun...”
“Get the hell out,” he shouted, but then immediately changed his mind. “No. Seize that idiot and find out where he came from.”
“...because I know the cause of your condition,” the voice continued, still calm. “Mr. Rey Diaz, please believe me. You and I are the only ones in the world who know.”
At this, Rey Diaz suddenly grew alert, and said, “Let him in.” He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds through haggard eyes, then got up slowly and picked up a tie from the cluttered sofa, only to toss it back again. He walked over to the mirror, straightened his collar, and combed his hair with his hands, like he was preparing for a solemn event.
He knew that it was indeed a solemn event.
The visitor was a handsome middle-aged man who walked in but did not introduce himself. He frowned slightly at the room’s heavy odor of cigars and alcohol, then simply stood there calmly as Rey Diaz looked him over.
“Why do I have the feeling I’ve seen you before?” he said, as he looked at the visitor.
“That’s not strange, Mr. Rey Diaz. Everyone says I look like Superman, from the old movies.”
“Do you really believe you’re Superman?” Rey Diaz said. He sat down on the sofa, picked up a cigar, bit off the end, and began to light it.
“That question shows that you already know what kind of man I am. I’m not Superman, Mr. Rey Diaz. Nor are you.” As he spoke, the younger man took a step forward. Rey Diaz found that the man was standing directly in front of him, peering down at him through the cloud of smoke he had just exhaled. So he stood up.
The visitor said, “Wallfacer Manuel Rey Diaz, I am your Wallbreaker.”
Gloomily, Rey Diaz nodded.
“May I sit down?” the Wallbreaker asked.
“You may not,” Rey Diaz said, slowly blowing smoke in the other man’s face.
“Don’t be depressed,” the Wallbreaker said with a considerate smile.
“I’m not,” Rey Diaz said, his voice cold and hard like stone.
The Wallbreaker walked over to the wall and flipped a switch. Somewhere, ventilator fans started humming.
“Don’t mess with things around here,” Rey Diaz warned.
“You need a little fresh air. And, more than that, you need sun. I’m quite familiar with this room, Wallfacer Rey Diaz. In the images sent by the sophons I have often watched you pace back and forth like a caged beast. No one in the world has stared at you for as long as I have, and on those days, believe me, it wasn’t any easier for me.”
The Wallbreaker looked straight at Rey Diaz, whose expression was as blank as an ice sculpture, and then he went on. “Compared to Frederick Tyler, you are a brilliant strategist. A competent Wallfacer. Please trust that this is not flattery. I must admit that for quite some time, for nearly a decade, you had me fooled. Your mania for the superbomb, such an inefficient weapon in a space battle, successfully concealed your own strategic direction, and for a long while I couldn’t find any clue to crack your true strategy. I struggled in the maze that you laid down, and at one point almost despaired.” The Wallbreaker looked up at the ceiling, overcome by the memory of those difficult times. “Later, I thought of checking out information from before you became a Wallbreaker, but this wasn’t easy, because the sophons were unable to help. You know, in those days, only a limited number of sophons had reached Earth, and as a South American head of state you had not attracted their attention. So I had to resort to conventional means to gather materials. This took three years. In those materials, one man stood out: William Cosmo. You met him in secret on three occasions. The sophons did not record the content of your conversations, so I will never know, but for the head of a small, undeveloped country to meet three times with a Western astrophysicist is highly unusual. We now know that at that time you had already been preparing to become a Wallfacer.
“No doubt what interested you was the fruit of Dr. Cosmo’s research. How those results first came to your attention I am not clear on at this time, but you had a background in engineering, and you had the successful experience of your socialism-loving predecessor, who had equal enthusiasm for a nation ruled by engineers. This was a major reason why you became his successor. So you ought to have had the capability and sensitivity to notice the potential significance of Cosmo’s research.
“Once the Trisolar Crisis began, Dr. Cosmo’s research team worked on studying the atmosphere of the Trisolaran stellar system. They speculated that the atmosphere had been produced by a former planet that had collided with a star. As it collided, it broke apart the outer layers, its photosphere and troposphere, causing the stellar matter inside to be ejected into space and form a surrounding atmosphere. Due to the total irregularity of the system’s motion, there are times when the stars pass each other quite closely, and at those times, one star’s atmosphere is dispersed by the gravity of the other star, only to be replenished by eruptions on the stellar surface. These aren’t constant eruptions, more like volcanoes that experience sudden outbreaks. This is the reason for the continual contraction and expansion of the stars’ atmosphere. To prove this hypothesis, Cosmo searched the universe to find another star with an atmosphere that was ejected following a collision with a planet. In the third year of the Crisis Era, he succeeded.
“Dr. Cosmo’s team discovered planetary system 275E1, about eighty-four light-years from the Solar System. Hubble II had not gone into operation at that time, so they used the wobble method. By observing and calculating the wobble frequency and light mask, they learned that the planet was quite close to its parent star. At first, this discovery did not attract too much attention because the astronomy community had by then discovered more than two hundred planetary systems, but further observations revealed a shocking fact: The distance between planet and star was continually shrinking, and the rate of shrinkage was accelerating. This meant that humanity would, for the first time, observe a planet falling into a star. One year later—or, rather, eighty-four years prior to observation—it happened. Observational conditions at the time meant that the collision could only be determined based on the gravitational wobble and the periodic light mask. But then something wondrous happened: A spiral of matter appeared around the star, and this spiral flow continued to expand. It looked like a mainspring slowly unwinding with the star as its center. Cosmo and his colleagues realized that the material flow had been ejected from the planet’s crash point. The chunk of rock had crashed through the shell of that distant sun and ejected its stellar matter into space, where, due to the star’s own rotation, it formed a spiral.
“There were several key pieces of data here, sir. The star is a yellow G2 class with an absolute magnitude of 4.3 and a diameter of 1.2 million kilometers. Quite similar to our sun. The planet was about four percent of the mass of Earth, or a little smaller than Mercury, and the spiral cloud of material produced from the collision had a radius of up to three AU, more than the distance between our sun and the asteroid belt.
“And it was in this discovery that I found the crack with which to break open your real strategic plan. Now, as your Wallbreaker, I will explain your grand strategy.
“Supposing that you are ultimately able to obtain those million or more stellar hydrogen bombs, you will, as you promised to the PDC, stockpile them all on Mercury. If the bombs are detonated in the rock of Mercury, they’ll be like a turbo-engine decelerating the planet. Eventually its speed will no longer be able to keep it in low orbit and it will fall into the sun. Next, what happened on 275E1 eighty-four light-years away is reenacted here: Mercury punctures the sun’s convective shell and ejects a huge amount of stellar matter from its radiation layer into space at high speed; which, as the sun rotates, forms a spiral atmosphere similar to that in 275E1. The sun differs from the Trisolaran system in that, as a lone star, it will never cross paths with another star, and therefore its atmosphere will continue to increase uninhibited until it becomes even thicker than the atmosphere of those stars. This was also confirmed by observations of 275E1. When the spiral flow of ejected matter expands outward from the sun like an unwound mainspring, its thickness eventually passes Mars’s orbit, at which point a magnificent chain reaction begins.
“First, three terrestrial planets—Venus, Earth, and Mars—pass through the sun’s spiraling atmosphere, losing speed due to the atmospheric friction and turning into three giant meteors that eventually crash into the sun. But well before this happens, the Earth’s atmosphere is stripped away by the intense friction of the solar matter. The oceans evaporate, and the lost atmosphere and evaporated oceans turn the Earth into a giant comet whose tail extends along its orbit to wrap all the way around the sun. The surface of the Earth returns to the fiery magma sea of its birth, where no life can survive.
“When Venus, Earth, and Mars crash into the sun, it exacerbates the sun’s ejection of solar matter into space. The single spiral flow of matter increases to four flows. Because the total mass of those three planets is forty times that of Mercury, and because their higher orbits mean they impact the sun at a much higher speed, each new spiral is ejected with a ferocity tens of times greater than Mercury’s. The existing spiral atmosphere rapidly expands until its edge approaches the orbit of Jupiter.
“Friction produces only a very small deceleration effect on the huge mass of Jupiter, so it is quite some time before the spiral has a noticeable effect on Jupiter’s orbit. But Jupiter’s satellites meet one of the following two fates: friction strips them away from Jupiter and they lose speed and fall into the sun, or they lose speed in Jovian orbit and fall into the liquid planet.
“As the chain reaction continues, the decrease in speed from the spiral atmosphere, though small, is still present, and Jupiter’s orbit gradually decays. This causes it to pass through an increasingly dense atmosphere whose friction accelerates its loss in speed, thereby causing the orbit to decay even more quickly.... In this way, Jupiter eventually falls into the sun, too. Its mass is six hundred times that of the previous four planets, and the impact that such a massive body makes on the sun will, even according to the most conservative reasoning, produce an even more violent ejection of stellar matter, increasing the density of the spiral atmosphere and exacerbating the bitter cold of Uranus and Neptune. But another possibility is more likely: The fall of the Jovian giant pushes the edge of the spiral atmosphere out to the orbit of Uranus or even Neptune, and though the atmosphere is quite thin at the top, friction’s decelerating effects pull these two planets and their satellites toward the sun, too. What state the sun will be in and how the Solar System will have been transformed after the chain reaction finishes and the four dense terrestrial planets and four gas giants are consumed is unknowable. But one thing is certain: For life and for civilization, this will be a hell even crueler than attack by Trisolaris.
“As for Trisolaris, the Solar System is their only hope before their planet is engulfed by their stars. There is no other world they can migrate to in time, and therefore, their civilization will follow humanity into total destruction.
“This is your strategy: death for both sides. Once everything is prepared, with all of the stellar hydrogen bombs in place on Mercury, you will use it to coerce Trisolaris to surrender and gain the ultimate victory for humanity.
“What I’ve just presented is the outcome of the years of work that I, your Wallbreaker, have performed. I am not seeking your opinion or critique, because I know that all of this is true.”
As the Wallbreaker spoke, Rey Diaz had been listening quietly. The cigar in his hand was more than halfway gone, and he now turned it about as if appreciating the glow of the tip.
The Wallbreaker sat down on the sofa, close beside him. Like a teacher evaluating a student’s homework, he continued unfatigued: “Mr. Rey Diaz, I said you are a brilliant strategist, or at least you demonstrated many excellent qualities in the formulation and implementation of this plan.
“For one thing, you took advantage of your own background. Right now, people clearly remember the humiliations you and your country suffered when the Orinoco nuclear facility was forced to be taken down as you were developing nuclear energy. The whole world saw your gloomy face, and you took advantage of outside perceptions of your paranoia about nuclear weapons to reduce or even eliminate any possible suspicion.
“But every detail in the execution of your plan demonstrates your talent as well. I will mention but one example: During the Mercury test, you wanted the rock to be blasted into the sky, but you insisted on excavating an ultra-deep shaft in a farsighted gambit. You quite precisely understood the tolerance of the PDC’s permanent member states for the cost of this enormous undertaking, and that is admirable.
“But you had one major slipup. Why did the first test have to be carried out on Mercury? There would have been plenty of time to bring the bombs there in a later phase, but maybe you got impatient and wanted to see the outcome of a stellar hydrogen bomb blast there. You saw it: lots of rock matter blasted to escape velocity, perhaps even exceeding your expectations. You were satisfied. But this provided the final confirmation of my hypothesis.
“Yes, Mr. Rey Diaz, even given all my previous work, without that final event I might never have been able to determine your true strategic intentions. The notion was too mad. But it was grand, and even beautiful. If the chain reaction triggered by Mercury’s fall actually took place, then it would be the most magnificent movement of the entire symphony of the Solar System... although, unfortunately, humanity would only be able to enjoy the first section. Mr. Rey Diaz, you are a Wallfacer with the makings of a god. It is my honor to become your Wallbreaker.”
The Wallbreaker stood up and offered Rey Diaz a genial bow.
Rey Diaz did not look at him. He took a puff of his cigar and blew out the smoke as he continued to examine it. “Fine. Then I’ll ask the question that Tyler asked.”
The Wallbreaker asked the question for him. “If what I say is true, then so what?”
Rey Diaz stared at the lit end of the cigar and nodded.
“My answer is the same as Tyler’s Wallbreaker’s: The Lord does not care.”
Rey Diaz lifted his eyes from the cigar and looked questioningly at his Wallbreaker.
“You look crude, but your mind is sharp. Yet in the depths of your soul, you’re still crude. Your nature is that of a crude man. And this crudeness is revealed in the basis of this strategic plan. It’s greedy. Humanity doesn’t have the ability to manufacture so many stellar hydrogen bombs. Even if all of Earth’s industrial resources were exhausted, it wouldn’t produce even one-tenth of that number. And a million stellar hydrogen bombs is far from enough to decelerate Mercury into the sun. With a soldier’s recklessness, you formulated this impossible plan, and then stubbornly carried it forward step by step with the wily calculations of a superior strategist. Wallfacer Rey Diaz, this is truly a tragedy.”
As Rey Diaz looked at the Wallbreaker, his expression gradually filled with an elusive softness, and hints of convulsions showed on his coarsely lined face, gradually taking shape, until at last his suppressed laughter erupted.
“Ha ha ha ha ha...” he laughed, pointing at the Wallbreaker. “Superman! Ha ha ha ha. I remember now. That... that old Superman. He could fly, and he could reverse the rotation of the Earth, but when he was riding a horse... ha ha ha ha... when he was riding a horse, he fell and broke his neck... ah ha ha ha...”
“It was Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman, who fell and broke his neck,” the Wallbreaker corrected him, quietly.
“Do you imagine... imagine that your fate will be better than his? Ha ha ha ha...”
“Since coming here, I have no regard for my fate. I’ve lived a full life,” the Wallbreaker said evenly. “But you, Mr. Rey Diaz, ought to think about your own fate.”
“You’ll die first,” Rey Diaz said, smiling with his entire face as he pressed the cigar end directly between the Wallbreaker’s eyes. Then, when the Wallbreaker was covering his face with his hands, Rey Diaz took up a military-issue belt from the sofa, wrapped it around the Wallbreaker’s neck, and strangled him with every ounce of his strength. Although the Wallbreaker was young, he had no way to defend himself against Rey Diaz’s agile strength, and was thrown to the floor by his neck. Rey Diaz bellowed, “I’ll wring your neck! You bastard! Who sent you here to play smart? Who the hell are you? Bastard! I’ll wring your neck!” He tightened the belt and slammed the Wallbreaker’s head into the ground repeatedly, to the crunch of teeth smacking into the floor. When the guards burst in to separate them, the Wallbreaker’s face was purple, he was foaming at the mouth, and his eyes were protruding like a goldfish’s.
Rey Diaz, still in a fury, struggled with the guards as he continued to shout, “Wring his neck! String him up and hang him! Right now! This is part of the plan! Do you fucking hear me? Part of the plan!”
But the three guards did not carry out his order. One of them held Rey Diaz tightly while the other two lifted up the Wallbreaker, who had recovered his breath somewhat, and started to carry him out.
“Just wait, you bastard. You won’t die easy,” he said, abandoning his efforts to escape the guard and have another go at the Wallbreaker. He let out a long sigh.
The Wallbreaker looked back over the guard’s shoulder, a smile on his bruised and swollen face. He opened up a mouth that was missing several teeth and said, “I’ve lived a full life.”
PDC Wallfacer Hearing
As the meeting commenced, the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany put up another proposition, this one demanding the immediate suspension of Rey Diaz’s position as Wallfacer and his trial before the International Court of Justice for crimes against humanity.
The US representative declared, “After substantial investigation, we believe that Rey Diaz’s strategic intent as disclosed by the Wallbreaker is credible. What we are facing now is a person whose crime dwarfs all of the crimes ever committed in human history. We were unable to find a single law applicable to his crime, so we recommend that the crime of Extinction of Life on Earth be added to international law, and that Rey Diaz be tried under it.”
Rey Diaz appeared quite relaxed at the hearing. Sneering, he said to the US representative, “You’ve been trying to get rid of me, haven’t you? Ever since the Wallfacer Project began, you have all applied a double standard to the Wallfacers. I’m the one you like least.”
The UK representative retorted, “Wallfacer Rey Diaz’s claim is baseless. In fact, the countries he is accusing are the ones who invested the most money into his plan, far exceeding what they invested in the other three Wallfacers.”
“Sure,” Rey Diaz said with a nod, “but the real reason you invested so heavily in my plan is because you wanted to get your hands on the stellar hydrogen bombs.”
“Ridiculous! What would we do with them?” the US representative shot back. “They’re incredibly inefficient weapons in a space battle, and on the Earth, there’s no practical significance even for those old twenty-megaton hydrogen bombs, much less a three-hundred-megaton monster.”
Rey Diaz responded calmly, “But the bombs will be the most effective weapon in battles on other planets, particularly in wars among humans. On the desolate surface of other planets, there’s no need to be concerned with civilian casualties or environmental damage, so you’re free to carry out wide-area destruction, or even a devastating sweep of the entire surface. Here’s where the stellar hydrogen bombs will prove useful. You must have anticipated that, as humanity expands into the Solar System, Earth’s conflicts will expand outward as well. This won’t change even with Trisolaris as a common enemy, and you’re preparing for it. Right now, it’s politically indefensible to develop superweapons for use against humans, so you took advantage of me to make them.”
The US representative said, “That’s the preposterous logic of a terrorist and a dictator. Rey Diaz is the kind of man who, granted the status and power of a Wallfacer, turns the Wallfacer Project into as big a danger as the Trisolaran invasion. We must take decisive action to correct this mistake.”
“They’re as good as their word,” Rey Diaz said, turning to Garanin, the incumbent rotating chair. “The CIA has men waiting outside to arrest me as soon as I go outside after this hearing.”
The rotating chair glanced in the direction of the US representative, who was fiddling intently with his pen. Garanin had first taken office at the start of the Wallfacer Project, and even he had forgotten the number of short terms in office he had served during the ensuing two decades. But this was the last time. Now white-haired, he was about to retire.
“Wallfacer Rey Diaz, if what you say is true, then that is inappropriate. So long as the principles of the Wallfacer Project still hold, Wallfacers have legal immunity, and none of their words and actions can be used as evidence to charge them of a crime,” he said.
“Additionally, please remember that this is international territory,” the Japanese representative said.
“So does that mean,” the US representative said, raising a pencil, “that even when Rey Diaz is about to detonate the million superbombs he’s buried on Mercury, society still won’t be able to charge him with a crime?”
“According to the relevant provisions in the Wallfacer Act, placing limitations and curbs on the strategic plans of Wallfacers who exhibit dangerous tendencies is an entirely separate matter from the Wallfacer’s own legal immunity,” Garanin said.
“Rey Diaz’s crimes have crossed outside the boundary of legal immunity. He must be punished. This is a precondition for the continued existence of the Wallfacer Project,” the UK representative said.
“May I remind the chair and the representatives,” Rey Diaz said, rising from his seat, “that this is a PDC Wallfacer hearing, and that I’m not on trial.”
“You’ll stand in court soon,” the US representative said, with a chilly smile.
“I agree with Wallfacer Rey Diaz. We should return to the discussion of his strategic plan,” Garanin said, seizing the opportunity to temporarily bypass the thorny issue.
The Japanese representative broke his silence. “From the way it looks now, the representatives have reached a consensus on the following point: Rey Diaz’s strategic plan exhibits dangerous tendencies toward clear violations of human rights, and according to the relevant principles in the Wallfacer Act, it should be stopped.”
“Then Proposition P269, proposed at the previous Wallfacer hearing, regarding halting Rey Diaz’s strategic plan, can now be put to a vote,” Garanin said.
“Mr. Chair, wait one moment.” Rey Diaz raised his hand. “Before the vote, I hope I might be able to offer a final explanation of some of the details of my plan.”
“If they’re just details, is this really necessary?” someone asked.
“Save it for court,” the UK representative said sarcastically.
“No, these details are important,” Rey Diaz persisted. “Right now, let us assume that what the Wallbreaker has disclosed about my strategic intentions is true. One representative spoke of the moment when the million hydrogen bombs deployed on Mercury are ready to be detonated, at which point I will face the omnipresent sophons and declare to Trisolaris humanity’s intent to die with them. What will happen then?”
“The Trisolarans’ reaction can’t be predicted, but on Earth, it’s certain that billions of people will want to wring your neck, just like you did to that Wallbreaker,” the French representative said.
“Exactly. So I took certain measures to deal with such a situation. Take a look at this.” Rey Diaz raised his left hand and displayed his wristwatch to the assembly. It was entirely black, and the dial was twice as large and thick as a normal men’s watch, although it didn’t appear large on his thick wrist. “This is a transmitter sending a signal through a space link directly to Mercury.”
“You’ll use it to send the detonation signal?” someone asked.
“Precisely the opposite. It sends a non-detonation signal.”
His words focused the attention of the entire assembly. He went on: “The system is code-named ‘cradle,’ meaning that when the cradle stops rocking, the baby will wake. It sends a continuous signal, received continuously on Mercury. If the signal is interrupted, then the system will immediately detonate the hydrogen bomb.”
“It’s called a dead-man’s switch,” the US representative said stoically. “In the Cold War there was research into using anti-triggers and dead-man’s switches on strategic nukes, but they were never implemented. Only a madman would actually do it.”
Rey Diaz brought down his left hand and covered the cradle with his sleeve. “I was taught this wonderful idea not by an expert in nuclear strategy but by an American film. In it, a man has one of these gadgets that sends out a continuous signal, but if his heart stops beating, the signal is terminated. Another man has a bomb strapped to him that’s impossible to remove, and if the bomb doesn’t receive the signal, it’ll explode. So even though this hapless fool doesn’t like the first guy, he has to do everything he can to protect him.... I like watching American blockbusters. Even today I can still recognize the old version of Superman.”
“Do you mean that this device is tied to your heartbeat?” the Japanese representative asked. He reached over to Rey Diaz, who was standing next to him, to touch the device under his sleeve, but Rey Diaz moved his arm and stood a bit farther away.
“Of course. But the cradle is more advanced and refined than that. It monitors not just the heartbeat but lots of other physiological indicators such as blood pressure, body temperature, and so forth, and conducts a comprehensive analysis of these parameters. If they’re not normal, then it immediately stops the anti-trigger signal in the dead-man’s switch. It can also recognize many of my simple voice commands.”
A nervous-looking man entered the auditorium and whispered something into Garanin’s ear. Before he had finished whispering, Garanin glanced up at Rey Diaz with a peculiar look in his eyes, which did not escape the keen-eyed representatives.
“There’s a way to disarm your cradle. Countermeasures for anti-triggers were studied during the Cold War, too,” the US representative said.
“It’s not my cradle. It’s the cradle for those hydrogen bombs. If the cradle stops rocking, they’ll wake up,” Rey Diaz said.
“I’ve thought of the same technique,” the German representative said. “When the signal is transmitted from your watch to Mercury, it must pass through a complicated communications link. Destroying or shielding any node, then using a false signal source to continue to transmit the anti-trigger signal farther down the chain, will render your cradle system useless.”
“That is indeed a problem,” Rey Diaz said, with a nod at the German representative. “Without the sophons, the problem is easily solved. All the nodes are loaded with an identical encryption algorithm that generates every signal sent. To the outside world, it looks as if the signal values are random and different every time, but the cradle’s sender and recipient produce a sequence of values that are identical. Only when the recipient receives a signal corresponding to its own sequence is the signal considered valid. Without this encryption algorithm, the signal sent out by your false source won’t match the recipient’s sequence. But the damn sophons can detect the algorithm.”
“You’ve perhaps come up with another approach?” someone asked.
“A crude approach. Me, all my approaches are clumsy and crude,” Rey Diaz said, with a self-mocking laugh. “I have increased the sensitivity of each node’s monitoring of its own state. Specifically, each communication node is composed of several units that may be separated by a large distance, but are connected into a whole by continuous communication. If any one unit fails, the entire node will issue a command terminating the anti-trigger, after which, even if the false signal source resumes sending a signal to the next node, it will not be acknowledged. The monitoring of every unit can achieve a microsecond level of accuracy, which means that—using the German representative’s approach—every unit of a node must be simultaneously destroyed and the signal resumed from the false signal source within the space of a microsecond. Every node is composed of at least three units, but may have dozens of them. These units are separated by a distance of about three hundred kilometers. Each one is built to be extremely rugged, and it will issue its warning upon any outside touch. Causing these units to fail within the space of a microsecond might be possible for the Trisolarans, but it’s not currently possible for humans.”
His final sentence put everyone on alert.
“I have just received a report that the thing on Rey Diaz’s wrist has been sending out an electromagnetic signal,” Garanin said. The atmosphere of the assembly turned tense at the news. “I’d like to ask you, Wallfacer Rey Diaz: Is the signal from your wristwatch being sent to Mercury?”
Rey Diaz chuckled a few times, then said, “Why would I be sending it to Mercury? There’s nothing there but a giant pit. Besides, the cradle’s space communication link hasn’t been set up yet. No, no, no. You don’t need to worry. The signal isn’t going to Mercury. It’s going somewhere in New York City, very close to us.”
The air froze, and everyone in the assembly, apart from Rey Diaz, stood as shocked as wooden chickens.
“If the signal sustaining the cradle is terminated, what will it trigger?” the UK representative asked sharply, no longer attempting to mask his tension.
“Oh, something will be triggered, all right,” Rey Diaz said to him with a broad laugh. “I’ve been a Wallfacer for more than twenty years, and I’ve always been able to get a few things of my own.”
“Well then, Mr. Rey Diaz, would you be able to answer an even more direct question?” the French representative said. He looked entirely calm, but there was a tremble in his voice. “How many lives will you, or will we, be responsible for?”
Rey Diaz widened his eyes at the Frenchman, as if he thought the question bizarre. “What? The number of people makes a difference? I thought all of you here were respectable gentlemen who prize human rights above all. What’s the difference between one life and 8.2 million? If it’s the former, then you don’t have to respect it?”
The US representative stood up and said, “More than twenty years ago when the Wallfacer Project began, we pointed out what he was.” Pointing a finger at Rey Diaz and spraying saliva as he spoke, he strove to contain himself, but ended up losing control. “He’s a terrorist. An evil, filthy terrorist! A devil! You unstopped the bottle and let him loose, and you must take responsibility! The UN must be held responsible!” he shouted hysterically, sending his papers flying.
“Calm down, Mr. Representative,” Rey Diaz said with a slight smile. “The cradle is very sensitive to my physiological indices. If I were to go into hysterics like you, if my mood wavered, it would immediately stop sending the anti-trigger signal. So you, and all of you sitting here, shouldn’t make me too upset. It would be better for all of us if you could try and keep me happy.”
“What are your conditions?” Garanin asked softly.
A bit of sadness crept into the smile on Rey Diaz’s face as he turned toward Garanin and shook his head. “Mr. Chair, what other conditions could I name? To leave here and return to my own country. A charter plane is waiting for me at Kennedy Airport.”
The assembly was silent. Unconsciously, they had all gradually turned their attention from Rey Diaz to the US representative, who, unable to stand all the eyes on him, threw himself back into his chair and hissed, “Get the hell out.”
Rey Diaz slowly nodded, then stood up and walked out.
“Mr. Rey Diaz, I’ll take you home,” Garanin said, leaving the rostrum.
Rey Diaz stood waiting for Garanin as he walked over, less nimbly than before. “Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thought you might like to get out of here too.”
The two were at the door when Rey Diaz grabbed Garanin and turned with him back toward the auditorium. “Gentlemen, I won’t miss this place. I’ve wasted these two decades, and no one here understands me. I want to go back to my homeland, back to my people. Yes, my homeland and my people. I miss them.”
To everyone’s surprise, the big man’s eyes shone with tears. At last he said, “I want to go back to my homeland. This is not part of the plan.”
When he walked out the door of the UN General Assembly building, Rey Diaz opened his arms wide to the sun and called out with relish, “Ah, my sun!” His two-decade-long heliophobia had vanished.
Rey Diaz’s flight took off, and crossed the eastern coastline to fly over the vast Atlantic Ocean.
In the cabin, Garanin said to him, “With me here, this aircraft is safe. Please tell me the location of the device you have connected to the dead-man’s switch.”
“There’s no device. There’s nothing. It was just a trick to escape.” Rey Diaz took off his watch and handed it to Garanin. “This is just a simple transmitter converted from a Motorola phone. It’s not connected to my heartbeat, either. It’s been turned off. Keep it as a souvenir.”
For a long time neither of them spoke. Then Garanin sighed and said, “How did this happen? The Wallfacers’ privilege of sealed-off strategic thinking was meant to be used against the sophons and Trisolaris. But you and Tyler both used it against humanity.”
“There’s nothing strange about that,” Rey Diaz said. He sat next to the window, enjoying the sunlight shining in from the outside. “Right now, the greatest obstacle to humanity’s survival comes from itself.”
Six hours later, the plane touched down at Caracas International Airport on the Caribbean coast. Garanin did not get off. He would be taking the plane back to the UN.
When they parted, Rey Diaz said, “Don’t abort the Wallfacer Project. It really is a hope amid this war. There are still two Wallfacers. Please wish them the best for me.”
“I won’t be seeing them, either,” Garanin said, with emotion. By the time Rey Diaz walked off, leaving him alone in the cabin, he was in tears.
The sky over Caracas was as clear as in New York. Rey Diaz walked down the airstair and smelled the familiar tropical atmosphere, then bent down and gave a long kiss to the ground of his homeland. Then, guarded by a large detachment of military police, he took a motorcade to the city. After half an hour on a winding mountain road, they entered the capital and drove up to the city center and Plaza Bolívar. At the statue of Simón Bolívar, Rey Diaz got out of the car and stood on the statue’s base. Above him on horseback was the great armor-clad hero who had defeated the Spanish and tried to establish a unified Republic of Gran Colombia in South America. In front of him, a crowd of frenetic people boiled under the sun, swelling forward, only to be met with the vigorous resistance of the military police. Shots were fired into the air, but the tide of people eventually surged past the police line and poured toward the living Bolívar at the foot of the statue.
Rey Diaz held up his hands, and, with tears in his eyes, called out to the crowd in a voice dripping with emotion, “Ah, my people!”
The first stone thrown by his people struck him on his outstretched left hand, the second hit him in the chest, and the third smashed into his forehead and nearly knocked him out. After that, the people’s stones came like raindrops, and had practically buried his lifeless body by the end. The last stone that hit Wallfacer Rey Diaz was thrown by an old woman, who struggled to carry it up to his corpse, then said, in Spanish, “Evildoer! You would kill everyone. My grandson would have been there. You’d have killed my grandson!”
Then, using all the strength in her trembling hands, she slammed her stone against Rey Diaz’s broken skull, where it lay exposed beneath the pile of rocks.
*
Time is the one thing that can’t be stopped. Like a sharp blade, it silently cuts through hard and soft, constantly advancing. Nothing is capable of jolting it even the slightest bit, but it changes everything.
The same year as the Mercury test, Chang Weisi retired. In his final media appearance, he frankly acknowledged that he himself had no confidence in victory, but this did not affect history’s high opinion of the work of the space force’s first commander. Working for so many years in a state of anxiety had damaged his health, and he died at the age of sixty-eight. The general was lucid on his deathbed and mentioned Zhang Beihai’s name many times.
After leaving her second term in office, Secretary General Say launched the Human Memorial Project, whose goal was the comprehensive collection of data and commemorative artifacts of human civilization that would ultimately be sent out into the cosmos on unmanned spacecraft. The project’s most influential component was called the Human Diary, a Web site that was set up to allow as many people as possible to record their lifetimes in the form of text and images from their everyday lives, to become part of the data of civilization. The Human Diary Web site eventually grew to have more than two billion users and formed the largest-ever body of information on the Internet. Later, the PDC, believing that the Human Memorial Project contributed to defeatism, passed a resolution stopping its further development, and even equated it with Escapism. But Say continued to pour her individual efforts into the project until she passed away at the age of eighty-four.
After retirement, Garanin and Kent made the same choice: to seclude themselves in that Garden of Eden in northern Europe where Luo Ji had lived for five years. They were never again seen by the outside world, and no one even knew the exact date they died. But one thing was certain: They lived a long time. Some said that the two of them reached the century mark before dying a natural death.
Just as Keiko Yamasuki had predicted, Wu Yue spent the remainder of his life in depression and confusion. He worked for more than a decade on the Human Memorial Project but was unable to find any solace in it, and he passed away in loneliness at the age of seventy-seven. Like Chang Weisi, Wu Yue had Zhang Beihai’s name on his lips in his final moments. They pinned their shared hopes for the future on the stalwart warrior now hibernating through time.
Dr. Albert Ringier and General Fitzroy both lived into their eighties and saw the completion of the hundred-meter Hubble III Space Telescope, which they used to look at the planet Trisolaris. But they never again saw the Trisolaran Fleet or the probes now flying ahead of it. They did not live long enough for them to cross the third patch of snow.
The lives of ordinary people continued and ended as well. Out of the three old Beijing neighbors, Miao Fuquan was the first to depart, passing away at the age of seventy-five. He really did have his son bury him two hundred meters down an abandoned mine, and his son obeyed his last wishes to blow up the mine wall and erect a tombstone to remember him. According to his father’s will, the last generation before the Doomsday Battle was supposed to clear out the tombstone, and if humanity won, then it could be restored to its original location. But, in fact, less than half a century after his death, the area over the mine shaft became a desert. The tombstone disappeared, the mine’s location was lost, and the Miao family’s descendants couldn’t be bothered to look for it.
Zhang Yuanchao died of illness like an ordinary person at the age of eighty, and, like an ordinary person, he was cremated. His ashes were laid in an ordinary rectangular slot on a long rack in a public cemetery.
Yang Jinwen lived till ninety-two, and the alloy vessel containing his remains headed out of the Solar System and into the vast cosmos at the third cosmic velocity. This consumed all of his savings.
But Ding Yi lived on. After the breakthrough in controlled fusion technology, he turned his attention to theoretical physics, looking for ways to escape sophon interference in high-energy particle physics experiments. He had no success. When he reached his seventies, he had, like other physicists, abandoned all hope of the possibility of a breakthrough. He entered hibernation and planned to wake at the Doomsday Battle. His sole desire was to be able to see with his own eyes the superior technology of Trisolaris.
In the century following the start of the Trisolar Crisis, everyone who had lived through the Golden Age passed away. It was an era that was constantly recalled, and the old folks who had lived through those grand times chewed over their memories of it like ruminants, savoring the flavors. They always closed with one line: “Ah, if only we knew how to cherish things back then.” Young people would listen to their stories with a mixture of envy and skepticism. That fabled peace, prosperity, and happiness, that ideal utopia free from care: Did it ever really exist?
As the elderly passed away, the departed Golden Shore vanished into the smoke of history. The ship of human civilization floated alone in the vast ocean, surrounded on all sides by endless, sinister waves, and no one knew if there even was an opposite shore.