The Dark Forest (26 page)

Luo Ji pointed out the sculptures, paintings, and old documents from Asia and Africa, and said, “These were taken by an advanced civilization from a backward one. Some were looted, others were stolen or defrauded, but look at them now: They’re all well preserved. Even during the Second World War, these objects were transferred to a safe place.” They stood before a Dunhuang mural sealed in a glass case. “Think about how much turmoil and war that land of ours has seen since the time Abbot Wang gave these to the Frenchman.
15
If the murals were left there, can you be certain they would have been this well preserved?”

“But will the Trisolarans preserve humanity’s cultural heritage? They have no regard for us at all.”

“Because they said we’re bugs? But that’s not what that means. Yan Yan, do you know what the greatest expression of regard for a race or civilization is?”

“No, what?”

“Annihilation. That’s the highest respect a civilization can receive. They would only feel threatened by a civilization they truly respect.”

They passed silently through the twenty-four galleries housing Asian art, walking through the distant past while imagining a gloomy future. Without realizing it, they reached the Egyptian Antiquities gallery.

“Do you know who I’m thinking of here?” Luo Ji stood beside a glass case containing the golden mask of a mummified pharaoh and tried out a lighter topic of conversation. “Sophie Marceau.”

“Because of
Belphegor, Phantom of the Louvre,
right? Sophie Marceau is gorgeous. She’s got Eastern looks, too.”

For some reason, right or wrong, Luo Ji sensed traces of jealousy and offense in her voice.

“Yan Yan, she’s not as beautiful as you. That’s the truth.” He also wanted to say,
One might be able to find her beauty among these works of art, but yours eclipses them,
but he didn’t want to come off as sarcastic. The hint of a shy smile flitted across her face like a cloud, the first time he had seen this smile he remembered from his dreams.

“Let’s go back to the oil paintings,” she said softly.

They returned to the Hall Napoléon, but forgot which entrance to use. The most visible signs pointed to the three jewels of the palace: the
Mona Lisa,
Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory.

“Let’s see the
Mona Lisa,
” he suggested.

As they headed in that direction, she said, “Our teacher said that after he visited the Louvre, he was a little disgusted with the
Mona Lisa
and Venus de Milo.”

“Why was that?”

“Because tourists come for those two objects but have no interest in less famous but equally great works of art.”

“I’m one of the great uncultured.”

They arrived at the mysterious smile, which was behind a thick wall of protective glass and much smaller than Luo Ji had imagined. Even Zhuang Yan didn’t seem particularly excited.

“Seeing her reminds me of all of you,” she said, pointing at the figure in the painting.

“All of us?”

“The Wallfacers, of course.”

“What’s she got to do with the Wallfacers?”

“Well, I wonder—and this is just speculation, so don’t laugh—I wonder whether we could find a form of communication that only humans can comprehend, but which the sophons never will. That way, humanity can be free of sophon monitoring.”

Luo Ji looked at her for several seconds, and then stared at the
Mona Lisa
. “I get what you mean. Her smile is something that the sophons and the Trisolarans will never understand.”

“That’s right. Human expressions, and people’s eyes in particular, are subtle and complex. A gaze or a smile can transmit so much information! And only humans can understand that information. Only humans have that sensitivity.”

“True. One of the biggest problems in artificial intelligence is identifying facial and eye expressions. Some experts even say that computers may never be able to read the eyes.”

“So is it possible to create a language of expressions and then speak with the face and the eyes?”

Luo Ji thought this over seriously, then shook his head with a smile. He pointed at the
Mona Lisa
. “We can’t even read
her
expression. When I stare at her, the meaning of her smile changes every second and never repeats itself.”

Zhuang Yan jumped up and down excitedly, like a child. “But that means that facial expressions really can convey complex information!”

“And if the information is: ‘The spacecraft have left Earth, destination Jupiter’? How would you convey that using facial expressions?”

“When primitive man began to speak, surely it was only to convey simple meanings. It may even have been less complex than birdcalls. Language gradually grew in complexity after that.”

“Well, let’s try to convey a simple meaning through facial expressions.”

“Okay!” She nodded her head excitedly. “Here, let’s each think of a message, and then exchange them.”

Luo Ji paused for a moment. “I’ve thought of mine.”

Zhuang Yan thought for a much longer time, and then nodded. “Then let’s begin.”

They stared at each other, but held that pose for less than half a minute before they burst out laughing at practically the same instant.

“My message was, ‘Tonight I’d like to invite you to have supper on the Champs-Élysées,’” he said.

She doubled over with laughter. “Mine was, ‘You … need to shave!’”

“These are grave matters concerning the fate of humanity, so we ought to remain serious,” Luo Ji said, holding in his laughter.

“This time, no laughing allowed!” she said, as serious as a child redefining the rules of a game.

They stood back to back, each thinking of a message, and then turned around and locked eyes once again. Luo Ji felt the urge to laugh and strove to suppress it, but the task soon became much easier, for Zhuang Yan’s clear eyes had begun to pluck at his heartstrings again.

And so it was that the Wallfacer and the young woman stood, gazes locked, in front of the smile of
Mona Lisa
in the Louvre in the dead of night.

The dam in Luo Ji’s soul had sprung a tiny leak, and this trickle eroded it, expanding the tiny fissure into a turbulent stream. He grew afraid and strove to patch the crack in the dam, but was unable to. A collapse was inevitable.

Then he felt like he was standing on a towering cliff top, and the girl’s eyes were the vast abyss beneath, covered in a pure white sea of clouds. But the sun shone down from all directions and turned the clouds into a brilliance of color that surged endlessly. He felt himself sliding downward, a very slow slide, but one he could not arrest under his own power. In a panic, he shook his limbs to try to find a place to hold on. But beneath his body was nothing but slick ice. His slide accelerated, until, finally, with a burst of vertigo, he began to fall into the abyss. In an instant, the joy of falling reached the upper limit of pain.

The
Mona Lisa
was deforming. The walls were deforming, melting like ice as the Louvre collapsed, its stones turning to red-hot magma as they fell. When the magma passed over their bodies, it felt cool as a clear spring. They fell with the Louvre, passing through a melted Europe toward the center of the Earth, and when they reached it, the world around them exploded in a shower of gorgeous cosmic fireworks. Then the sparks extinguished, and in the twinkling of an eye, space became crystal clear. The stars wove crystal beams into a giant silver blanket, and the planets vibrated, emitting beautiful music. The starfield grew dense like a surging tide. The universe contracted and collapsed, until at last everything was annihilated in the creative light of love.

*   *   *

“We need to observe Trisolaris right now!” General Fitzroy said to Dr. Ringier. They were in the control room of the Hubble II Space Telescope, a week after its assembly was completed.

“General, I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

“I have the feeling that the observations in progress right now are actually private work that you astronomers are doing on the side.”

“I’d have done my own work if it were possible, but Hubble II is still in the testing phase.”

“You’re working for the military. Carrying out orders is all you need to do.”

“No one here is military apart from you. We’re following NASA’s testing plan.”

The general’s tone softened. “Doctor, can’t you just use Trisolaris as a test target?”

“Test targets have been carefully selected according to distance and brightness classes, and the test plan has been formulated to be maximally economical, so that the telescope completes all tests after just one rotation. In order to observe Trisolaris now, we would need to rotate through an angle of nearly thirty degrees and back, and spinning this bad boy uses up propellant. We’re saving the military money, General.”

“Let’s have a look at how you’re saving it, then. I just found this on your computer,” Fitzroy said as he brought a hand out from behind his back. He held a printout of a photograph, an overhead shot of a group of people looking upward excitedly. They were recognizably the crew from this very control room, Ringier in their midst, along with three women in sexy poses who might have been the girlfriends of some in the group. The location of the photo was evidently the roof of the control room building, and the photo was very clear, as if it had been shot from ten or twenty meters above. Where it differed from an ordinary photograph was in the complicated numbers overlaid atop it. “Doctor, you’re standing on the highest point of the building. It doesn’t have a rocker arm like a movie set, does it? You’re telling me that rotating Hubble II thirty degrees costs money. Well, how much does it cost to rotate it three hundred sixty degrees? Besides, that ten-million-dollar investment wasn’t made so you could snap photos of you and your girlfriends from space. Should I add that sum to your bill?”

“General, your order must of course be carried out,” Ringier said hastily, and the engineers immediately went to work.

Coordinate data was quickly called up from the target database. In space, the enormous cylinder, over twenty meters in diameter and more than a hundred meters long, slowly started to turn, panning across the starfield displayed on the screen in the control room.

“This is what the telescope sees?” asked the general.

“No, this is just the image returned by the positioning system. The telescope returns still photos that need to be processed before they’re viewable.”

Five minutes later, the panning stopped. The control system reported that positioning had been achieved, and after another five minutes, Ringier said, “Good. Now return to the test position.”

In surprise, Fitzroy asked, “What? Is it done?”

“Yes. Now the images are being processed.”

“Can’t you take a few more?”

“General, we’ve captured two hundred ten images at multiple focal lengths.” At that moment the first observation image finished processing, and Ringier pointed to the screen. “Look, General. There’s the enemy world you want to see so badly.”

Fitzroy saw nothing but a group of three halos against a dark background. They were diffuse, like streetlights through fog. These were the three stars that would decide the fate of two civilizations.

“So we really can’t see the planet.” Fitzroy couldn’t hide his disappointment.

“Of course we can’t. Even when the hundred-meter Hubble III is finished, we’ll only be able to observe Trisolaris at a very few set positions, and we’ll only be able to make it out as a dot, with no detail at all.”

“But there’s something else here, Doctor. What do you think this is?” asked one of the engineers, pointing to a spot close to the three halos.

Fitzroy leaned in but saw nothing. It was so faint that only an expert could catch it.

“It’s got a diameter larger than a star,” an engineer said.

After enlarging the area several times, the thing covered the entire screen.

“It’s a brush!” shouted the general in alarm.

The layman always comes up with better names than the expert, which is why when experts name things they, too, work from an outsider’s perspective. And thus “brush” became the figure’s name, because the general’s description was accurate: It was a cosmic brush. Or, to be more precise, a set of cosmic bristles without a handle. Of course, you could also see it as hair standing on end.

“It must be a scratch in the coating! I mentioned in the feasibility study that a paste-up lens would cause problems,” Ringier said, shaking his head.

“All the coatings have been through stringent testing. A scratch of this sort wouldn’t happen. And it’s not generated by any other lens flaw, either. We’ve already returned tens of thousands of test images, and it’s never come up before,” said an expert from Zeiss, the lens’s manufacturer.

A hush fell over the control room. They all gathered to stare up at the image on the screen until it got so crowded that some of them called up the image on other terminals. Fitzroy sensed the change in the room’s atmosphere: People who had grown lazy from the fatigue of lengthy tests were anxious now, like they had been hit by a curse that rooted everything in place but their eyes, which grew ever brighter.

“God!” exclaimed several people at the same time.

The frozen formation abruptly turned into excited activity. The snatches of dialogue Fitzroy picked up were a bit too technical for him.

“Any dust around the target’s position? Check it—”

“No need. I completed that item. Observing the absorption of the background stellar radial movement, there’s an absorption peak at two hundred millimeters. It may be a carbon microparticle, F-class density.”

“Any opinions on the effect of high-speed impact?”

“The wake diffuses along the impact axis, but the diffusion scope … Do we have a model of that?”

“Yes. One moment.… Here it is. Impact speed?”

“A hundred times third cosmic velocity.”

“Is it already that high?”

“That’s a conservative figure.… For the impact cross section, use … Right, that’s right. That’s just about it. Just a rough estimate.”