The Three-Body Problem (47 page)

“In fact, there are currently only three accelerators with sufficient power to produce results that can lead to possible breakthroughs. After Sophon One and Sophon Two arrive on Earth, they will have a lot of extra capacity. In order to fully utilize the sophons, we will assign them other tasks in addition to interfering with the three accelerators. For example, they will be the main means to carry out the Miracle Plan.”

“Sophons can create miracles?”

“For humans, yes. Everyone knows that high-energy particles can expose film. This is one of the ways that primitive accelerators on Earth once showed individual particles. When a sophon passes through the film at high energy, it leaves behind a tiny exposed spot. If a sophon passes back and forth through the film many times, it can connect the dots to form letters or numbers or even pictures, like embroidery. The process is very fast, and far quicker than the speed at which humans expose film when taking a picture. Also, the human retina is similar to the Trisolaran one. Thus, a high-energy sophon can also use the same technique to show letters, numbers, or images on their retina.… And if these little miracles can confuse and terrify humans, then the next
great
miracle will be sufficient to frighten their scientists—no better than bugs—to death: Sophons can cause background cosmic radiation to flash in their eyes.”

“This would be very frightening for our scientists as well. How would this be accomplished?”

“Very simple. We have already written the software to allow a sophon to unfold itself into two dimensions. After the unfolding is complete, the huge plane can wrap itself around the Earth. This software can also adjust the membrane so that it’s transparent, but the degree of transparency can be tuned in the frequencies of the cosmic microwave background.… Of course, as sophons fold and unfold into different dimensions, they can display even more amazing ‘miracles.’ The software for accomplishing these is still being developed, but these ‘miracles’ will create a mood sufficient to divert human scientific thought onto the wrong path. This way, we can use the Miracle Plan to effectively restrain scientific endeavors outside of physics on Earth.”

“One last question: Why not send all four of the completed sophons to Earth?”

“Quantum entanglement can work at a distance. Even if four sophons were placed at opposite ends of the universe, they could still sense each other instantaneously, and the quantum formation between them would still exist. Keeping Sophon Three and Sophon Four here will enable them to receive the information sent back by Sophon One and Sophon Two instantaneously. This gives us a way to monitor the Earth in real time. Also, the sophon formation allows Trisolaris to communicate in real time with the alienated forces within Earth civilization.”

Unnoticed, the sun that had just risen disappeared below the horizon and turned into a sunset. Another Chaotic Era had arrived on Trisolaris.

*   *   *

While Ye Wenjie was reading the messages from Trisolaris, the Battle Command Center was hosting another important meeting to perform further analysis of the captured data. Before the meeting, General Chang said, “Comrades, please be aware that our meeting is probably already being monitored by sophons. From now on, there will be no more secrets.”

When he said this, the surroundings were still familiar. The shadows of summer trees swayed against the drawn curtains, but in the eyes of the attendees, the world was no longer the same. They felt the gaze of omnipresent eyes. Under these eyes, there was nowhere to hide in the world. This feeling would follow them all their lives, and their descendants would not be able to escape it. It would take many, many years before humans finally made the mental adjustment to this situation.

Three seconds after General Chang finished his remark, Trisolaris communicated with humanity outside the ETO for the first time. After this, they terminated all communications with the Adventists. For the remainder of the lives of all attendees, Trisolaris never sent another message.

Everyone in the Battle Command Center saw the message in their eyes, just like Wang Miao’s countdown. The message flashed into existence for only two seconds and then disappeared, but everyone got it. It was only a single sentence:

You’re bugs!

34

Bugs

By the time Shi Qiang entered the door of Ding Yi’s home, Wang Miao and Ding Yi were already very drunk.

The two were excited to see Shi Qiang. Wang stood up and hugged the newcomer’s shoulders. “Ah, Da Shi, Officer Shi…”

Ding, who couldn’t even stand straight, found a glass and put it on the pool table. He poured some liquor into it, and said, “Your out-of-the-box thinking was not helpful. Whether we look at those messages or not, the result four hundred years from now will be the same.”

Da Shi sat down in front of the pool table, glancing at the two with a crafty gaze. “Is it really like you say? Everything’s over?”

“Of course. It’s all over,” Ding said.

“You can’t use the accelerators and can’t study the structure of matter. That means it’s all over?” Da Shi asked.

“Um … what do you think?”

“Technology is still making progress. Academician Wang and his people just created the nanomaterial—”

“Imagine an ancient kingdom, if you will. Their technology is advancing. They can invent better swords, knives, spears, et cetera. Maybe they can even invent auto-repeating crossbows that can shoot many arrows like a machine gun—”

Da Shi nodded, understanding. “But if they don’t know that matter is made from molecules and atoms, they will never create missiles and satellites. They’re limited by their level of science.”

Ding patted Da Shi on the shoulder. “I always knew that our Officer Shi was smart. It’s just that you—”

Wang took over. “The study of the deep structure of matter is the foundation of the foundations of all other sciences. If there’s no progress here, everything else—I’ll put it your way—is bullshit.”

Ding pointed at Wang. “Academician Wang will be busy for the rest of his life, and continue to improve our swords and knives and spears. What the fuck am
I
going to do? Who the hell knows?” He threw an empty bottle onto the table and picked up a billiard ball to smash it.

“This is a good thing!” Wang lifted his glass. “We will be able to live out the rest of our lives one way or another. After this, decadence and depravity can be justified! We’re bugs! Bugs that are about to go extinct! Haha…”

“Exactly!” Ding also lifted his glass. “They think so little of us that they don’t even bother to disguise their plans for us, telling the Adventists everything. It’s like how you don’t need to hide the bottle of bug spray from the little critters. Let’s toast the bugs! I never thought the end of the world would feel so good. Long live bugs! Long live sophons! Long live the end of the world!”

Da Shi shook his head and drained the glass. He shook his head again. “Bunch of pussies.”

“What do you want?” Ding stared at Da Shi drunkenly. “You think you can cheer us up?”

Da Shi stood up. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“To find something to cheer you up.”

“Whatever, buddy. Sit back down. Drink.”

Da Shi took the two by their arms and dragged them up. “Let’s go. Bring the liquor if you have to.”

Downstairs, the three got into Da Shi’s car. As the car started, Wang asked in slurred speech where they were going. Da Shi said, “My hometown. Not too far.”

The car left the city and sped west along the Beijing-Shijiazhuang Highway. It exited the highway as soon as they were inside Hebei Province. Da Shi stopped the car and dragged his two passengers out.

As soon as Ding and Wang got out of the car, the bright afternoon sun made them squint. The wheat fields of the North China Plain spread out before them.

“What did you bring us here for?” Wang asked.

“To look at bugs.” Da Shi lit one of the cigars Colonel Stanton had given him and pointed at the wheat fields with it.

Wang and Ding now noticed that the fields were covered by a layer of locusts. Every wheat stalk had a few crawling over it. On the ground, more locusts wriggled, like some thick liquid.

“They’re plagued by locusts here?” Wang brushed away some locusts from a small area near the edge of the field and sat down.

“Like the dust storms, they started ten years ago. But this year is the worst.”

“So what? Nothing matters now, Da Shi.” Ding spoke, his voice still drunk.

“I just want to ask the two of you one question: Is the technological gap between humans and Trisolarans greater than the one between locusts and humans?”

The question hit the two scientists like a bucket of cold water. As they stared at the clumps of locusts before them, their expressions grew solemn. They got Shi Qiang’s point.

*   *   *

Look at them, the bugs. Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them: every kind of poison, aerial sprays, introducing and cultivating their natural predators, searching for and destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize them, burning with fire, drowning with water. Every family has bug spray, every desk has a flyswatter under it … this long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization. But the outcome is still in doubt. The bugs have not been eliminated. They still proudly live between the heavens and the earth, and their numbers have not diminished from the time before the appearance of the humans.

The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.

A small black cloud covered the sun and cast a moving shadow against the ground. This was not a common cloud, but a swarm of locusts that had just arrived. As the swarm landed in the fields nearby, the three men stood in the middle of a living shower, feeling the dignity of life on Earth. Ding Yi and Wang Miao poured the two bottles of wine they had with them on the ground beneath their feet, a toast for the bugs.

“Da Shi, thank you.” Wang held out his hand.

“I thank you as well.” Ding gripped Da Shi’s other hand.

“Let’s get back,” Wang said. “There’s so much to do.”

35

The Ruins

No one believed that Ye Wenjie could climb Radar Peak by herself, but she did it anyway. She didn’t allow anyone to help her along the way, only resting a couple of times in the abandoned sentry posts. She consumed her own vitality, the vitality that could not be renewed, without pity.

After learning the truth of Trisolaran civilization, Ye had become silent. She rarely spoke, but did make one request: She wanted to visit the ruins of Red Coast Base.

When the group of visitors ascended Radar Peak, its tip had just emerged from the cloud cover. After walking a whole day in the foggy haze, seeing the bright sun in the west and the clear blue sky was like climbing into a new world. From the top of the peak, the clouds appeared as a silver-white sea, and the rise and fall of the waves seemed like abstractions of the Greater Khingan Mountains below.

The ruins that the visitors had imagined did not exist. The base had been dismantled thoroughly, and only a patch of tall grass was left at the top. The foundations and the roads were buried below, and the whole place appeared to be a desolate wilderness. Red Coast seemed to have never happened.

But Ye soon discovered something. She walked next to a tall rock and pulled away the vines covering it, revealing the mottled, rusty surface below. Only now did the visitors understand that the rock was actually a large metallic base.

“This was the base for the antenna,” Ye said. The first cry from Earth heard by an extraterrestrial world was sent from the antenna that had been here to the sun, and then, amplified, broadcast to the whole universe.

They discovered a small stone tablet next to the base, almost completely lost in the grass.

S
ITE OF
R
ED
C
OAST
B
ASE
(1968–1987)

C
HINESE
A
CADEMY OF
S
CIENCES
1989.03.21

The tablet was so tiny. It didn’t seem so much a memorial as an attempt to forget.

Ye walked to the lip of the cliff. Here, she had once ended the lives of two soldiers with her own hands. She did not look over the sea of clouds as the others were doing, but focused her gaze in one direction. Below the clouds, there was a small village called Qijiatun.

Ye’s heart beat with effort, like a string on some musical instrument about to break. Black fog appeared before her eyes. She used the last bit of her strength to stay upright. Before everything sank into darkness, she wanted to see sunset at Red Coast Base one more time.

Over the western horizon, the sun that was slowly sinking into the sea of clouds seemed to melt. The ruddy sun dissolved into the clouds and spread over the sky, illuminating a large patch in magnificent, bloody red.

“My sunset,” Ye whispered. “And sunset for humanity.”

AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT FOR THE AMERICAN EDITION

A night from my childhood remains crisply etched in my memory: I was standing by a pond before a village somewhere in Luoshan County, Henan Province, where generations of my ancestors had lived. Next to me stood many other people, both adults and children. Together, we gazed up at the clear night sky, where a tiny star slowly glided across the dark firmament.

It was the first artificial satellite China had ever launched:
Dongfanghong I (“The East is Red I”)
. The date was April 25, 1970, and I was seven.

It had been thirteen years since
Sputnik
had been launched into space, and nine years since the first cosmonaut had left the Earth. Just a week earlier,
Apollo 13
had safely returned from a perilous journey to the moon.

But I didn’t know any of that. As I gazed at that tiny, gliding star, my heart was filled with indescribable curiosity and yearning. And etched in my memory just as deeply as these feelings was the sensation of hunger. At that time, the region around my village was extremely poor. Hunger was the constant companion of every child. I was relatively fortunate because I had shoes on my feet. Most of the friends standing by my side were barefoot, and some of the tiny feet still had unhealed frostbite from the previous winter. Behind me, faint light from kerosene lamps shone out of cracks in the walls of dilapidated thatched huts—the village wasn’t wired for electricity until the eighties.