The Dark Forest (21 page)

Tears in his eyes, Shi Xiaoming ground the cigarette back and forth repeatedly on the edge of the bed, like he was extinguishing the latter half of his life.

“Prison is like a criminal training course. Forget about reform when you go in, just don’t get mixed up with the other prisoners. And learn how to protect yourself a little. Take these—” Shi Qiang placed a plastic bag on the bed. Inside were two cartons of ordinary Yun Yan cigarettes. “And if you need anything else, your mother will send it to you.”

Shi Qiang went to the door, then turned and said to his son, “Ming, you may still meet your dad again. You’ll probably be older than me at that point, and then you’ll understand what’s in my heart right now.”

Through the small window in the door, Shi Xiaoming watched his father exit the detention center. From the back, he looked quite old.

*   *   *

In an era where anxiety had taken hold of everything, Luo Ji was now the world’s most laid-back man. He strolled beside the lake, took a boat out into the water, had the chef turn the mushrooms he picked and the fish he caught into tasty delicacies, browsed through the library’s rich collection, and when he tired of that, went outside and golfed with the guards. He rode on horseback through the grassland and on the forest path in the direction of the snow peak, but he never reached the foot of the mountain. Oftentimes, he would sit on a bench on the lakeside and look at the mountain’s reflection in the water, doing and thinking nothing as an entire day passed unknowingly.

He was alone during this time, with no connection to the outside world. Kent was in the manor, too, but he had his own small office and rarely bothered him. Luo Ji had only spoken once to the officer in charge of security, to ask that the security detail not trail along behind him, and if they absolutely had to, to make sure that he could not see them.

He felt like the boat in the water, floating quietly with its sail furled, ignorant of where it was moored and not caring where it floated. Now and then when he thought about his former life, he was surprised to discover that in the short space of a few days, he could no longer recognize it. This state satisfied him.

He was particularly interested in the wine cellar. He knew that the dust-covered bottles lying horizontally on the racks held nothing but the best. He drank in the living room, he drank in the library, and sometimes he drank on the boat; but never too much, just enough to keep him in that perfect, half-drunk, half-sober state, and then he would take out that long-stemmed pipe left by the previous owner and puff away.

Even when it rained and the living room grew chilly, Luo Ji never had the fireplace lit. He knew it wasn’t yet time.

He never went online here, but he sometimes watched television, skipping over the news and watching programs that had nothing to do with current events or even the present day. This sort of content was still possible to find, although it was growing increasingly rare in the last ebbs of the Golden Age.

Late one night, he got carried away by a bottle of cognac that, from the label, was thirty-five years old. Wielding the remote, he skipped past the several news stations on the high-definition television, but one English-language news item caught his eye. It concerned the salvage of a mid-seventeenth-century wreck, a clipper that had sailed from Rotterdam to Faridabad and had sunk off Cape Horn. Among the objects that divers had retrieved from the wreck was a small, sealed cask of fine wine that experts speculated was still drinkable. Not only that, but after three centuries in storage at the bottom of the ocean, its taste would be unparalleled. Luo Ji recorded most of the program, and then called for Kent.

“I want that cask. Buy it for me,” he said.

Kent went to make a call. Two hours later he told Luo Ji that the price of the cask was astonishingly high: Bidding would start at three hundred thousand euros.

“That amount is nothing to the Wallfacer Project. Buy it. It’s part of the plan.”

And thus, the Wallfacer Project produced a second idiom after the “Wallfacer smile.” Anything that was clearly absurd but which had to be done anyway was called “part of the Wallfacer plan,” or simply, “part of the plan.”

Two days later, the cask, its aged surface covered in shells, was placed in the villa’s living room. Luo Ji took out a tap with a twist drill specially made for wooden casks, which he found in the cellar, and carefully drilled it into the side to pour out the first glass. The liquid was a tempting emerald green. He sniffed it, and then put the glass to his lips.

“Doctor, is this part of the plan too?” Kent asked softly.

“That’s right. It’s part of the plan.” Luo Ji was about to drink, but seeing the people present in the room, he said, “All of you, out.”

Kent and the rest of them did not move.

“Sending you out is part of the plan too. Out!” He glared at them. Kent gently shook his head and led the others out.

Luo Ji took a sip. Although he did his utmost to convince himself that the flavor was heavenly, in the end he did not have the guts to take a second sip. But that one sip didn’t let him go unscathed. That night he was sick out both ends until he spat up bile the color of the wine and his body was so weak he couldn’t get out of bed. Later, after doctors and experts opened the cask lid, they found that it had a rather large brass label on the inside wall, as was the custom in those days. Over time there had been some sort of reaction between the normally peacefully coexisting copper and the wine, and some sort of substance had dissolved into the wine.… When the cask was carried off, Luo Ji could see the schadenfreude on Kent’s face.

Deeply exhausted, he lay in bed watching his IV drip, and an intense loneliness seized him. He knew that his recent leisure was merely the weightlessness of tumbling into the abyss of loneliness, and now he had reached the bottom. But he had anticipated this moment, and he had been prepared. He was waiting for someone, and then the next step of the plan would begin. He was waiting for Da Shi.

*   *   *

Tyler stood holding an umbrella against the Kagoshima drizzle. Behind him, two meters away, stood defense chief Koichi Inoue, whose umbrella remained unopened. The past two days he had maintained the same separation from Tyler, both physically and mentally. They were at the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots, and in front of them was a statue of a special attack unit next to a white plane, call sign 502. A light layer of rain painted the surface of the statue and the aircraft and made them deceptively lifelike.

“Isn’t there any room for discussion of my proposal?” Tyler asked.

“I strongly advise you not to speak of this to the media. It will cause trouble.” Koichi Inoue’s words were as icy as the rain.

“Is it still that sensitive, even today?”

“What’s sensitive isn’t the history, but your proposal to restore the kamikaze special attack units. Why don’t you do it in the US or some other place? Are the Japanese people the only ones in the world who can die out of duty?”

Tyler closed up his umbrella and drew closer to Koichi Inoue, who—although he didn’t recoil—seemed to have a force field surrounding him that prevented Tyler from getting close. “I’ve never said that the future kamikaze forces would be made up only of Japanese members. It’s an international force, but since it originated in your great country, isn’t it only natural to revive it here?”

“In interplanetary war, does this mode of attack really have any significance? You should realize that victories for those special attack units were limited, and they didn’t turn the tide of battle.”

“Commander, sir, the space force I have established is a fleet of fighters equipped with super hydrogen bombs.”

“Why do you need humans? Can’t computer-controlled fighters get close enough to attack?”

This question seemed to give Tyler the opportunity he was waiting for, and he grew exited. “That’s exactly the problem! Today’s computers are unable to replace human brains, and advancements in fundamental theory would be necessary for quantum and other next-gen computers. But that’s been locked up by the sophons. So four centuries from now, computing intelligence will still be limited, and human-controlled weapons will be indispensable.… To tell you the truth, reviving the kamikaze squads only has moral significance now, because it will be ten generations before any of them go to their death. But establishing that spirit and faith means starting now!”

Koichi Inoue turned around to face Tyler for the first time. His wet hair was plastered against his forehead and the raindrops on his face looked like tears. “That approach violates the basic moral principles of modern society: Human lives come first, and the state and the government can’t require any individual to take up a death mission. I seem to remember a line Yang Wen-li said in
Legend of the Galactic Heroes
:
12
‘In this war lies the fate of the country, but what does it matter next to individual rights and freedoms? All of you just do your best.’”

Tyler sighed. “You know what? You have thrown away your most precious resource.” Then he snapped open his umbrella and turned and walked angrily away. When he reached the gate of the memorial, he looked back and saw Koichi Inoue still standing in the rain before the statue.

As Tyler walked in the sea breeze, his mind returned to a sentence from a suicide note from a kamikaze pilot to his mother that he had seen in the exhibit:

Mom, I’m going to be a firefly.

*   *   *

“It’s worse than I imagined,” Allen said to Rey Diaz. They were standing next to a black obelisk made of lava rock, the monument marking ground zero of humankind’s first atom bomb.

“Is its structure really that different?” Rey Diaz asked.

“Totally different from today’s nuclear bombs. Constructing its mathematical model might be more than a hundred times more complicated than today’s bombs. This is an enormous undertaking.”

“What do I need to do?”

“Cosmo’s on your staff, right? Get him to come to my lab.”

“William Cosmo?”

“Yes.”

“But he’s … he’s…”

“An astrophysicist. An authority on stars.”

“What’s he going to do?”

“That’s what I’m gonna tell you. To your mind, a nuclear bomb is detonated and then explodes, but the actual process is more like burning. The greater the yield, the longer the combustion. A twenty-megaton nuclear explosion, for example, has a fireball that can last for over twenty seconds. The superbomb we’re designing is two hundred megatons, and its fireball will burn for several minutes. Think about that. What will it look like?”

“A small sun.”

“Correct! Its fusion structure is very like that of a star, and it reproduces stellar evolution over a very abbreviated period. So the mathematical model we need to construct is essentially the model of a star.”

White sands stretched out in front of them. In the moments just before dawn, the details of the dark desert couldn’t be made out. As they gazed at the scenery, they were involuntarily reminded of the basic setting of
Three Body
.

“I’m very excited, Mr. Rey Diaz. Please forgive me for our lack of enthusiasm at the start. Looking at the project now, the significance far exceeds the construction of a superbomb itself. Do you know what we’re doing? We’re creating a virtual star!”

Rey Diaz shook his head in disapproval. “What does that have to do with the defense of Earth?”

“Don’t be limited by planetary defense. Me and my colleagues in the lab are scientists, after all. Besides, this thing is not without practical significance. So long as you input the appropriate parameters, the star could be a model for our sun. Think about it. It’s always useful to have the sun in your computer memory. It’s the biggest presence that’s close to us in the cosmos, but we could take more advantage of it. The model may have many more discoveries lying in wait.”

Rey Diaz said, “One previous use of the sun is what brought humanity to the brink, and brought you and me to this place.”

“But new discoveries might bring humanity back. So today, I’ve invited you here to watch the sunrise.”

The rising sun was now just peeking its head over the horizon. The desert in front of them came into focus like a developing photograph, and Rey Diaz could see that this place, once blasted by the fires of hell, was now covered in sparse undergrowth.

“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Allen exclaimed.

“What?” Rey Diaz whipped his head around, as if someone had shot him from behind.

“Oppenheimer said that when he watched the first nuclear explosion. I think it’s a quote from the Bhagavad Gita.”

The wheel in the east expanded rapidly, casting light across the Earth like a golden web. The same sun was there on that morning when Ye Wenjie had tuned the Red Shore antenna, and even before that, the same sun had shone upon the dust settling after the first bomb blast. Australopithecus a million years ago and the dinosaurs a hundred million years ago had turned their dull eyes upon this very sun, and even earlier than that, the hazy light that penetrated the surface of the primeval ocean and was felt by the first living cell was emitted by this same sun.

Allen went on, “And then a man called Bainbridge followed up Oppenheimer’s statement with something completely nonpoetic: ‘Now we are all sons of bitches.’”

“What are you talking about?” Rey Diaz said. Watching the rising sun, his breathing became ragged.

“I’m thanking you, Mr. Rey Diaz, because from now on we’re not sons of bitches.”

In the east, the sun rose in overarching solemnity, as if declaring to the world, “Everything is as fleeting as a shadow before me.”

“What’s the matter, Mr. Rey Diaz?” Allen saw that Rey Diaz had fallen into a crouch, one hand on the ground, and was convulsing in dry heaves. His face had turned pale and was covered in a cold sweat, and he had no strength to move his hand from the clump of thorns it was pressing on.

“Go, go to the car,” he said weakly. He turned his head in the direction opposite the sun, and he raised his other hand to block the sunlight. He was unable to get up. Allen tried to assist but couldn’t budge his stocky body. “Drive the car over.…” Rey Diaz wheezed out, while pulling his hand back to cover his eyes. When Allen drove over to him, he had fallen to the ground. With difficulty, Allen helped him into the backseat. “Sunglasses. I need sunglasses.…” He half-reclined into the backseat, his hands clawing at the air. Allen handed Rey Diaz a pair of sunglasses he found on the dashboard. After he put them on his breathing grew smoother. “I’m all right. Let’s get out of here. Quickly,” he said feebly.