The Three-Body Problem (37 page)

“Then, we were sent to the wilderness!” The thickset woman raised her arms. “Two of us were sent to Shaanxi, the other two to Henan, all to the most remote and poorest corners. When we first went, we were still idealistic, but that didn’t last. After a day of laboring in the fields, we were so tired that we couldn’t even wash our clothes. We lay in leaky straw huts and listened to wolves cry in the night, and gradually we woke from our dreams. We were stuck in those forgotten villages and no one cared about us at all.”

The one-armed woman stared at the ground numbly. “While we were down in the countryside, sometimes, on a trail across the barren hill, I’d bump into another Red Guard comrade or an enemy. We’d look at each other: the same ragged clothes, the same dirt and cow shit covering us. We had nothing to say to each other.”

The thickset woman stared at Ye. “Tang Hongjing was the girl who gave your father the fatal strike with her belt. She drowned in the Yellow River. There was a flood that carried off a few of the sheep kept by the production team. So the Party secretary called to the sent-down students, ‘Revolutionary youths! It’s time to test your mettle!’ And so, Hongjing and three other students jumped into the river to save the sheep. It was early spring, and the surface of the river was still covered by a thin layer of ice. All four died, and no one knew if it was from drowning or freezing. When I saw their bodies … I … I … can’t fucking talk about this anymore.” She covered her eyes and sobbed.

The thin woman sighed, tears in her eyes. “Then, later, we returned to the city. But so what if we’re back? We still have nothing. Rusticated youths who have returned don’t lead very good lives. We can’t even find the worst jobs. No job, no money, no future. We have nothing.”

Ye had no words.

The one-armed woman said, “There was a movie called
Maple
recently. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. At the end, an adult and a child stand in front of the grave of a Red Guard who had died during the faction civil wars. The child asks the adult, ‘Are they heroes?’ The adult says no. The child asks, ‘Are they enemies?’ The adult again says no. The child asks, ‘Then who are they?’ The adult says, ‘History.’”

“Did you hear that?” The thickset woman waved an arm excitedly at Ye. “History! History! It’s a new age now. Who will remember us? Who will think of us, including you? Everyone will forget all this completely!”

The three old Red Guards departed, leaving only Ye on the exercise grounds. More than a dozen years ago, on that rainy afternoon, she had stood alone here as well, gazing at her dead father. The old Red Guard’s final remark echoed endlessly in her mind.…

The setting sun cast a long shadow from Ye’s slender figure. The small sliver of hope for society that had emerged in her soul had evaporated like a drop of dew in the sun. Her tiny sense of doubt about her supreme act of betrayal had also disappeared without a trace.

Ye finally had her unshakable ideal: to bring superior civilization from elsewhere in the universe into the human world.

27

Evans

Half a year after her return to Tsinghua, Ye took on an important task: the design of a large radio astronomy observatory. She and the task force traveled around the country to find the best site for the observatory. The initial considerations were purely technical. Unlike traditional astronomy, radio astronomy didn’t have as many demands on atmospheric quality, but required minimal electromagnetic interference. They traveled to many places and finally picked a place with the cleanest electromagnetic environment: a remote, hilly area in the Northwest.

The loess hills here had little vegetation cover. Rifts from erosion made the slopes look like old faces full of wrinkles. After selecting a few possible sites, the task force stayed for a brief rest at a village where most of the inhabitants still lived in traditional cave dwellings. The village’s production team leader recognized Ye as an educated person and asked her whether she knew how to speak a foreign language. She asked him which foreign language, and he said he didn’t know. However, if she did know a foreign tongue, he would send someone up the hill to call down Bethune, because the production team needed to discuss something with him.
41

“Bethune?” Ye was amazed.

“We don’t know the foreigner’s real name, so we just call him that.”

“Is he a doctor?”

“No. He’s planting trees up in the hills. Has been at it for almost three years.”

“Planting trees? What for?”

“He says it’s for the birds. A kind of bird that he says is almost extinct.”

Ye and her colleagues were curious and asked the production team leader to bring them for a visit. They followed a trail until they were on top of a small hillock. The team leader showed them a place among the barren loess hills. Ye felt it brighten before her eyes. There was a slope covered by green forests, as though an old, yellowing canvas had been accidentally blessed with a splash of green paint.

Ye and the others soon saw the foreigner. Other than his blond hair and green eyes and tattered jeans and a jacket that reminded her of a cowboy, he didn’t look too different from the local peasants who had labored all their lives. Even his skin had the same dark hue from the sun as the locals. He didn’t show much interest in the visitors. He introduced himself as Mike Evans without mentioning his nationality, but his English was clearly American-accented. He lived in a simple two-room adobe hut, which was filled with tools for planting trees: hoes, shovels, saws for pruning tree branches, and so on, all of which were locally made and crude. The dust that permeated the Northwest lay in a thin layer over his simple and rough-hewn bed and kitchen implements. A pile of books, most of which dealt with biology, sat on his bed. Ye noticed a copy of Peter Singer’s
Animal Liberation
. The only sign of modernity was a small radio set, hooked up to an external D battery. There was also an old telescope.

Evans apologized for not being able to offer them anything to drink. He hadn’t had coffee for a while. There was water, but he only had one cup.

“May we ask what you’re really doing here?” one of Ye’s colleagues asked.

“I want to save lives.”

“Save … save the locals? It’s true that the ecological conditions here—”

“Why are you all like this?” Evans suddenly became furious. “Why does one have to save
people
to be considered a hero? Why is saving other species considered insignificant? Who gave humans such high honors? No, humans do not need saving. They’re already living much better than they deserve.”

“We heard that you are trying to save a type of bird.”

“Yes, a swallow. It’s a subspecies of the northwestern brown swallow. The Latin name is very long, so I won’t bore you with it. Every spring, they follow ancient, established migratory paths to return from the south. They nest only here, but as the forest disappears year after year, they can no longer find the trees in which to build their nests. When I discovered them, the species had less than ten thousand individuals left. If the trend continues, within five years it will be extinct. The trees I’ve planted now provide a habitat for some of them, and the population is rising again. I must plant more trees and expand this Eden.”

Evans allowed Ye and the others to look through his telescope. With his help, they finally saw a few tiny black birds darting through the trees.

“Not very pretty, are they? Of course, they’re not as crowd-pleasing as giant pandas. Every day on this planet some species that doesn’t draw the attention of humans goes extinct.”

“Did you plant all of these trees by yourself?”

“Most of them. Initially I hired some locals to help, but soon I ran out of money. Saplings and irrigation all cost a lot—but you know something? My father is a billionaire. He is the president of an international oil company, but he will not give me any more funding, and I don’t want to use his money anymore.”

Now that Evans had opened up, he seemed to want to pour his heart out. “When I was twelve, a thirty-thousand-ton oil tanker from my father’s company ran aground along the Atlantic coast. More than twenty thousand tons of crude oil spilled into the ocean. At the time, my family was staying at a coastal vacation home not too far from the site of the accident. After my father heard the news, the first thing he thought of was how to avoid responsibility and minimize damage to the company.

“That afternoon, I went to see the hellish coast. The sea was black, and the waves, under the sticky, thick film of oil, were smooth and weak. The beach was also covered by a black layer of crude oil. Some volunteers and I searched for birds on the beach that were still alive. They struggled in the sticky oil, looking like black statues made out of asphalt, only their eyes proving that they were still alive. Those eyes staring out of the oil still haunt my dreams to this day. We soaked those birds in detergent, trying to get rid of the oil stuck to their bodies. But it was extremely difficult: crude oil was infused into their feathers, and if you brushed a little too hard, the feathers would come off with the oil.… By that evening, most of the birds had died. As I sat on the black beach, exhausted and covered in oil, I stared at the sun setting over a black sea and felt like it was the end of the world.

“My father came up behind me without my noticing. He asked me if I still remembered the small dinosaur skeleton. Of course I remembered. The nearly complete skeleton had been discovered during oil exploration. My father spent a large sum to buy it, and installed it on the grounds of my grandfather’s mansion.

“My father then said, ‘Mike, I’ve told you how dinosaurs went extinct. An asteroid crashed into the Earth. The world first became a sea of fire, and then sank into a prolonged period of darkness and coldness.… One night, you woke from a nightmare, saying that you had dreamt that you were back in that terrifying age. Let me tell you now what I wanted to tell you that night: If you really lived during the Cretaceous Period, you’d be fortunate. The period we live in now is far more frightening. Right now, species on Earth are going extinct far faster than during the late Cretaceous. Now is truly the age of mass extinctions! So, my child, what you’re seeing is nothing. This is only an insignificant episode in a much vaster process. We can have no sea birds, but we can’t be without oil. Can you imagine life without oil? Your last birthday, I gave you that lovely Ferrari and promised you that you could drive it after you turned fifteen. But without oil, it would be a pile of junk metal and you’d never drive it. Right now, if you want to visit your grandfather, you can get there on my personal jet and cross the ocean in a dozen hours or so. But without oil, you’d have to tumble in a sailboat for more than a month.… These are the rules of the game of civilization: The first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary.’

“My father placed a great deal of hope in me, but in the end I didn’t turn out the way he wanted. In the days after that, the eyes of those drowned birds always followed me and determined my life. When I was thirteen, my father asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I said I wanted to save lives. My dream wasn’t that great. I only wanted to save a species near extinction. It could be a bird that wasn’t very pretty, a drab butterfly, or a beetle that no one would even notice. Later, I studied biology, and became a specialist on birds and insects. The way I see it, my ideal is worthy. Saving a species of bird or insect is no different from saving humankind. ‘All lives are equal’ is the basic tenet of Pan-Species Communism.”

“What?” Ye wasn’t sure she had heard the last term correctly.

“Pan-Species Communism. It’s an ideology I invented. Or maybe you can call it a faith. Its core belief is that all species on Earth are created equal.”

“That is an impractical ideal. Our crops are also living species. If humans are to survive, that kind of equality is impossible.”

“Slave owners must also have thought that about their slaves in the distant past. And don’t forget technology—there will be a day when humanity can manufacture food. We should lay down the ideological and theoretical foundation long before that. Indeed, Pan-Species Communism is a natural continuation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The French Revolution was two hundred years ago, and we haven’t even taken a step beyond that. From this we can see the hypocrisy and selfishness of the human race.”

“How long do you intend to stay here?”

“I don’t know. I’m prepared to devote my life to the task. The feeling is beautiful. Of course, I don’t expect you to understand.”

Evans seemed to lose interest. He said that he had to go back to work, so he picked up a shovel and a saw and then left. When he said good-bye, he glanced at Ye again, as though there was something unusual about her.

On the way back, one of Ye’s colleagues recited from Chairman Mao’s essay “Remembering Bethune”: “‘Noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests.’” He sighed. “There really are people who can live like that.”

Others also expressed their admiration and conflicted feelings. Ye seemed to be speaking to herself as she said, “If there were more men like him, even just a few more, things would have turned out differently.”

Of course, no one understood what she really meant.

The task force leader turned the conversation back to their work. “I think this site isn’t going to work. Our superiors won’t approve it.”

“Why not? Of the four possible sites, this has the best electromagnetic environment.”

“What about the human environment? Comrades, don’t just focus on the technical side. Look at how poor this place is. The poorer a village, the craftier the people. Do you understand? If the observatory were located here, there would be trouble between the scientists and the locals. I can imagine the peasants thinking of the astronomy complex as a juicy piece of meat that they can take bites from.”

This site was indeed not approved, and the reason was just what the task force leader had said.