The Dark Forest (61 page)

Xizi said nothing, and they fell into a heavy silence.
Mantis
soon came into view, albeit as a point of light two hundred kilometers away. The shuttle rotated 180 degrees, and the engine nozzle, now pointing ahead of them, began their deceleration.

The fleet was now directly ahead of the shuttle, around eight hundred kilometers away, a trivial distance in space, but one that turned the massive warships into barely visible points. The fleet itself was distinguishable from the starry background only by its neatly arranged ranks. The entire rectangular array seemed like a grid covering the Milky Way, its regularity standing in stark contrast to the chaos of the starfield. With its great size made tiny by the distance, the power of the formation was made apparent. Many people in the fleet and the distant Earth behind it who were watching this image sensed that it was a visual display of what Ding Yi had just been talking about.

The shuttle reached
Mantis
and the force of deceleration cut off. To the shuttle’s passengers, the speed of the process made it feel as if
Mantis
had suddenly popped up in space.

Docking was completed quickly. Since
Mantis
was unmanned, there was no air in the cabin, so the four members of the expedition team put on light space suits. Upon receiving final instructions from the fleet, they filed weightlessly through the docking hatch and into
Mantis
.

The droplet floated dead center in
Mantis
’s one spherical main cabin. Its colors were entirely different from the image seen aboard
Quantum,
paler and softer, evidently due to differences in the scene reflected on its surface—the droplet’s total reflectance meant that it had no color of its own. Arranged in the main cabin of
Mantis
was the folded robotic arm, an assortment of equipment, and several piles of asteroid rock samples. Floating in a mechanical and stony environment, the droplet once again presented a contrast between exquisiteness and crudeness, aesthetics and technology.

“It’s the tear of the blessed mother,” Xizi said.

Her words were transmitted from
Mantis
at the speed of light, first to the fleet and then resonating three hours later throughout the entire human world. Xizi, the lieutenant colonel, and the major from the European Fleet—ordinary people on the expedition team placed, by unexpected circumstance, in a central position at the pinnacle moment in the history of civilization—shared a common feeling now that they were so close to the droplet: All sense of the distant world’s unfamiliarity vanished, replaced by an intense desire for recognition. Yes, in the cold expanse of the universe, all carbon-based life shared a common destiny, one that might take billions of years to cultivate, but a destiny that cultivated feelings of love that transcended time and space. And now, they sensed that love in the droplet, a love that could bridge the chasm of any enmity. Xizi’s eyes were wet, and three hours later, the eyes of billions of people like her would fill with tears.

But Ding Yi watched all of this dispassionately from the rear. “I see something else,” he said. “Something far more sublime. A realm where both self and other are forgotten, an effort to encompass everything by shutting out everything.”

“That’s too much philosophy for me to understand,” Xizi laughed through her tears.

“Dr. Ding, we don’t have much time.” The lieutenant colonel motioned for Ding Yi to come forward to be the first to touch the droplet.

Ding Yi floated slowly toward the droplet and placed a hand on its surface. To avoid frostbite from the cold mirror surface, he had to touch it with a gloved hand. Then the three officers touched it, too.

“It looks so fragile. I’m afraid of breaking it,” Xizi said softly.

“I can’t feel any friction at all,” the lieutenant colonel marveled. “It’s so smooth.”

“How smooth is it?” Ding Yi asked.

To answer that question, Xizi took out a cylindrical instrument, a microscope, from a pocket in her space suit. She touched the lens to the droplet, and they could see a magnified image of the surface on the instrument’s small display. Displayed on the screen was a smooth mirror.

“What’s the magnification?” Ding Yi asked.

“A hundred times.” Xizi pointed to a number in the corner of the screen, then adjusted the magnification to one thousand.

The enlarged surface remained a smooth mirror.

“Your device is broken,” the lieutenant colonel said.

Xizi removed the microscope from the droplet and placed it against her space suit visor. The other three drew closer to look at the screen, where the visor—a surface which, to the naked eye, looked as smooth as the droplet—was a rough and rocky beach on the screen under one-thousand-times magnification. Xizi returned the microscope to the surface of the droplet, and the screen once again displayed a smooth mirror, no different from the surrounding, unmagnified surface.

“Increase it by another factor of ten,” Ding Yi said.

This was beyond the capabilities of optical magnification, so Xizi carried out a series of operations to switch the microscope from optical to electron tunneling mode. Now the magnification power stood at ten thousand.

The magnified surface remained a smooth mirror. The smoothest surface that human technology could produce revealed itself as rough at just one thousand times magnification, like Gulliver’s impression of the face of the beautiful giantess.

“Adjust to a hundred thousand times,” the lieutenant colonel said.

Still they saw a smooth mirror.

“A million times.”

A smooth mirror.

“Ten million times.”

Macromolecules would be visible at this magnification, but what they saw on the screen remained a smooth mirror without the slightest sign of roughness, no difference in smoothness from the surrounding unmagnified surface.

“Push it up again!”

Xizi shook her head. This was the electron microscope’s highest level of magnification.

More than two centuries before, in his novel
2001: A Space Odyssey,
Arthur C. Clarke had described a black monolith left on the moon by an advanced alien civilization. Surveyors had measured its dimensions with ordinary rulers and had found a ratio of one to four to nine. When these were rechecked using the most high-precision measurement technology on Earth, the ratio remained an exact one to four to nine, with no error at all. Clarke described it as a “passive yet almost arrogant display of geometrical perfection.”

Now, humanity was facing a far more arrogant display of power.

“Can an absolutely smooth surface really exist?” Xizi gasped.

“Yes,” Ding Yi said. “The surface of a neutron star is nearly absolutely smooth.”

“But this has a normal mass!”

Ding Yi considered this, then looked about him. “Hook up to the spaceship computer and find the spot that the robot arm gripped during capture.”

This was accomplished remotely by a fleet surveillance officer. The
Mantis
computer projected thin red laser beams to mark the position on the droplet surface that had been gripped by the steel claw. Xizi examined one of the spots with the microscope, and at a magnification of ten million times, she still saw a smooth, flawless mirror.

“How high was the pressure at the point of contact?” the lieutenant colonel asked, and soon received a reply from the fleet: approximately two hundred kilograms per square centimeter.

Smooth surfaces are easily scratched, but the strong metal clamp did not leave any scratches on the droplet’s surface.

Ding Yi floated away in search of something within the cabin. He returned with a rock pick, perhaps dropped in the cabin by someone during collection of rock samples. Before anyone could stop him, he slammed it forcefully into the mirror surface. There was a clang, crisp and melodious, like the pick had smashed into jade-paved ground. The sound traveled through his body, but the other three didn’t hear it because of the vacuum. With the handle of the pick, he pointed out the spot he had struck, and Xizi examined it with the microscope.

At ten million times magnification, it was still a smooth mirror.

Ding Yi tossed the pick aside dejectedly and looked away from the droplet, deep in thought. The eyes of the three officers, and the eyes of the million people in the fleet, were all focused on him.

“All we can do is guess,” he said, looking up. “The molecules in this thing are neatly arranged, like an honor guard, and they’re mutually solidifying. Do you know how solid it is? It’s as if the molecules are nailed into place. Even their own vibrations are gone.”

“That’s why it’s at absolute zero!” Xizi said. She and the other two officers understood what Ding Yi was getting at: At normal densities of matter, the separation between atomic nuclei is quite large. It would be no easier to fix them all in place than it would be to join the sun to the eight planets with rods to form a stationary truss.

“What force would allow that?”

“There’s only one option: strong interaction.”
23
Through his visor, it was obvious that Ding Yi’s forehead was covered in sweat.

“But … that’s like shooting the moon with a bow and arrow!”

“Indeed, they’ve shot the moon with a bow and arrow.… The tear of the blessed mother?” He gave a chilly laugh, a mournful sound that made them shiver, and the three officers knew what it meant: The droplet wasn’t fragile like a tear. Entirely the opposite: Its strength was a hundred times greater than the sturdiest material in the Solar System. All known substances were as fragile as paper by comparison. It could pass through the Earth like a bullet through cheese, without even the slightest harm to its surface.

“Then … what’s it here for?” the lieutenant colonel blurted out.

“Who knows? Maybe it really is just a messenger. But it’s here to give humanity a different message,” Ding Yi said, turning his gaze away from the droplet.

“What?”

“If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?”

The words were followed by a momentary silence as the three other members of the expeditionary team and the million members of the combined fleet ruminated over their meaning. Then, all of a sudden, Ding Yi said, “Run.” The word was uttered softly, but then he raised his hands and shouted hoarsely, “Stupid children. Run!”

“Run where?” Xizi asked in fright.

Just seconds after Ding Yi, the lieutenant colonel realized the truth. Like Ding Yi, he shouted desperately: “The fleet! Evacuate the fleet!”

But it was too late. Powerful interference had already wiped out their communication channels. The image being transmitted from
Mantis
vanished, and the fleet was unable to hear the lieutenant colonel’s final call.

A blue halo emerged from the tip of the droplet’s tail. It was small at first, but very bright, and cast a blue shroud over its surroundings. Then it dramatically expanded, turning from blue to yellow and finally to red. It almost seemed as if the droplet wasn’t producing the halo, but had just drilled out from within it. The halo weakened in luminosity as it expanded, and when it had reached a diameter twice that of the largest part of the droplet, it vanished. The instant it vanished, a second small blue halo emerged from the tip. Like the first one, it expanded, changed color, weakened, and quickly disappeared. The halos continued to emerge from the droplet’s tail at a rate of two or three a second, and under their propulsion, the droplet began to move forward, and then rapidly accelerated.

But the four members of the expedition team never saw the second halo emerge, because the first one was accompanied by ultra-high temperatures approaching that of the sun’s core, which vaporized them instantly.

The hull of
Mantis
glowed red, resembling from the outside a paper lantern whose candle had just been lit. Its metal body melted like wax, but no sooner had the ship begun to melt than it exploded, dispersing into space as an incandescent liquid with hardly any solid fragments left behind.

From a thousand kilometers away, the fleet had a clear view of
Mantis
’s explosion, but the initial analysis was that the droplet had self-destructed. Everyone felt sorrow for the sacrifice of the four expedition team members, followed by disappointment that the droplet was not a messenger of peace. But the human race did not have even the slightest bit of psychological preparation for what was about to happen.

The first anomaly was identified by the fleet’s space surveillance computer, which discovered during the course of processing images of
Mantis
’s explosion that one of the fragments was abnormal. Most of the pieces were molten metal that flew uniformly through space following the explosion, but this one was accelerating. Of course, only a computer was able to find a tiny object among the massive quantity of flying fragments. From an immediate search of its database and knowledge bank, which included an enormous amount of information on
Mantis,
it arrived at several dozen possible explanations for the peculiar debris, but none was correct.

Neither computer nor human realized that the explosion had destroyed only
Mantis
and the four-member expedition team, but not the droplet.

As for the accelerating fragment, the fleet’s space surveillance system issued only a level-three attack alarm, because the approaching object was not a warship and was headed toward one corner of the rectangular formation. On its current heading, it would pass outside the formation and would not strike any warship. Due to the large number of level-one alarms issued following the
Mantis
explosion, this level-three alarm was completely ignored. The computer had, however, also noted the fragment’s high rate of acceleration. By three hundred kilometers it had already passed the third cosmic velocity and was continuing to gain speed. The alert was upgraded to level two, but was still ignored.

By the time the fragment had flown roughly 1,500 kilometers from the explosion site toward the corner of the formation, only fifty-one seconds had elapsed. By the time it reached the corner, it was traveling at a speed of 31.7 kilometers per second. Now it was on the periphery of the formation, 160 kilometers away from
Infinite Frontier,
the first warship in this corner of the array. The fragment did not pass by the formation, but executed a thirty-degree turn, and, without slowing down, sped straight toward
Infinite Frontier
. In the roughly two seconds it took to cover that distance, the computer actually dropped its alert from level two back to level three, concluding that the fragment wasn’t actually a physical object due to the fact that its motion was impossible under aerospace mechanics. At twice the third cosmic velocity, executing a sharp turn without a drop in speed was like slamming into an iron wall. If it was a vessel containing a metal block, the change in direction would have exerted such force as to flatten that metal block into a thin film. So the fragment had to be an illusion.