The Three-Body Problem (42 page)

“Professor, all this will pass.”

Judgment Day
was below them now, passing through the deadly zither. When its prow first contacted the plane between the two steel pillars, the space that seemed empty, Wang’s scalp tightened. But nothing happened. The immense hull of the ship continued to slowly sail past the two steel pillars. When half the ship had passed, Wang began to doubt whether the nanofilaments between the steel pillars really existed.

But a small sign soon negated his doubt. He noticed a thin antenna located at the very top of the superstructure breaking at its base, and the antenna tumbling down.

Soon, there was a second sign indicating the presence of the nanofilaments, a sign that almost made Wang break down.
Judgment Day
’s wide deck was empty save for one man standing near the stern hosing down the ship’s bollards. From his vantage point, Wang saw everything clearly. The moment that that section of the ship passed between the pillars, the hose broke into two pieces not too far from the man, and water spilled out. The man’s body stiffened, and the nozzle tumbled from his hand. He remained standing for a few seconds, then fell. As his body contacted the deck, it came apart in two halves. The top half crawled through the expanding pool of blood, but had to use two arms that were bloody stumps. The hands had been cleanly sliced off.

After the stern of the ship went between the two pillars,
Judgment Day
continued to sail forward at the same speed, and everything seemed normal. But then Wang heard the sound of the engine shift into a strange whine, before turning into chaotic noise. It sounded like a wrench being thrown into the rotor of a large motor—no, many, many wrenches. He knew this was the result of the rotating parts of the engine having been cut. After a piercing, tearing sound, a hole appeared in the side of the stern of
Judgment Day,
made by a large metallic piece punching through the hull. A broken component flew out of the hole and fell into the water, causing a large column of water to shoot up. As it briefly flew past, Wang recognized it as a section of the engine crankshaft.

A thick column of smoke poured out of the hole.
Judgment Day,
which had been sailing along the right shore, now began to turn, dragging this smoky tail. Soon it crossed over the canal and smashed into the left shore. As Wang looked, the giant prow deformed as it collided into the slope, slicing open the hill like water, causing waves of earth to spill in all directions. At the same time,
Judgment Day
began to separate into more than forty slices, each slice half a meter thick. The slices near the top moved faster than the slices near the bottom, and the ship spread open like a deck of cards. As the forty-some metal slices moved past each other, the piercing noise was like countless giant fingernails scratching against glass.

By the time the intolerable noise ended,
Judgment Day
was spilled on the shore like a stack of plates carried by a stumbling waiter, the plates near the top having traveled the farthest. The slices looked as soft as cloth, and rapidly deformed into complicated shapes impossible to imagine as having once belonged to a ship.

Soldiers rushed toward the shore from the slope. Wang was surprised to find so many men hidden nearby. A fleet of helicopters arrived along the canal with their engines roaring; crossed the canal surface, which was now covered by an iridescent oil slick; hovered over the wreckage of
Judgment Day
; and began to drop large quantities of fire suppression foam and powder. Shortly, the fire in the wreckage was under control, and three other helicopters began to drop searchers into the wreckage with cables.

Colonel Stanton had already left. Wang picked up the binoculars he’d left on top of his hat. Overcoming his trembling hands, he observed
Judgment Day
. By this time, the wreckage was mostly covered by fire-extinguishing foam and powder, but the edges of some of the slices were left exposed. Wang saw the cut surfaces, smooth as mirrors. They reflected the fiery red light of dusk perfectly. He also saw a deep red spot on the mirror surface. He wasn’t sure if it was blood.

Three days later

INTERROGATOR:
Do you understand Trisolaran civilization?

YE WENJIE:
No. We received only very limited information. No one has real, detailed knowledge of Trisolaran civilization except Mike Evans and other core members of the Adventists who intercepted their messages.

INTERROGATOR:
Then why do you have such hope for it, thinking that it can reform and perfect human society?

YE:
If they can cross the distance between the stars to come to our world, their science must have developed to a very advanced stage. A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards.

INTERROGATOR:
Do you think this conclusion you drew is scientific?

YE:
…

INTERROGATOR:
Let me presume to guess: Your father was deeply influenced by your grandfather’s belief that only science could save China. And you were deeply influenced by your father.

YE:
(sighing quietly)
I don’t know.

INTERROGATOR:
We have already obtained all the Trisolaran messages intercepted by the Adventists.

YE:
Oh … what happened to Evans?

INTERROGATOR:
He died during the operation to capture
Judgment Day
. But the posture of his body pointed us to the computers holding copies of the Trisolaran messages. Thankfully, they were all encoded with the same self-interpreting code used by Red Coast.

YE:
Was there a lot of data?

INTERROGATOR:
Yes, about twenty-eight gigabytes.

YE:
That’s impossible. Interstellar communication is very inefficient. How can so much data have been transmitted?

INTERROGATOR:
We thought so at first, too. But things were not at all as we had imagined—not even in our boldest, most fantastic imaginations. How about this? Please read this section of the preliminary analysis of the captured data, and you can see the reality of the Trisolaran civilization, compared with your beautiful fantasies.

32

Trisolaris: The Listener

The Trisolaran data contained no descriptions of the biological appearance of Trisolarans. Since humans would not lay eyes on actual Trisolarans until more than four hundred years later, Ye could only envision the Trisolarans as humanoid as she read the messages. She filled in the blanks between the lines with her imagination.

*   *   *

Listening Post 1379 had already been in existence for more than a thousand years. There were several thousand posts like it on Trisolaris, all of them dedicating their efforts to detecting possible signs of intelligent life in the universe.

Initially, each listening post had several hundred listeners, but as technology advanced, there was only one person on duty. Being a listener was a humble career. Though they lived in listening posts that were kept at a constant temperature, with support systems that guaranteed their survival without requiring them to dehydrate during Chaotic Eras, they also had to live their lives within the narrow confines of these tiny spaces. The amount of joy they got from Stable Eras was far less than others got.

The listener at Post 1379 looked through the tiny window at the world of Trisolaris outside. This was a Chaotic Era night. The giant moon had not yet risen, and most people remained in dehydrated hibernation. Even plants had instinctively dehydrated and turned into lifeless bundles of dry fiber lying against the ground. Under the starlight, the ground looked like a giant sheet of cold metal.

This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What the listener of Post 1379 disliked the most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise the listening post picked up from space. He felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row: lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end.

On this day, however, the listener saw something odd when he glanced at the waveform display. Even experts had a hard time telling with the naked eye whether a waveform carried information. But the listener was so familiar with the noise of the universe that he could tell that the wave that now moved in front of his eyes had something extra. The thin curve, rising and falling, seemed to possess a soul. He was certain that the radio signal before him had been modulated by intelligence.

He rushed in front of another terminal and checked the computer’s rating of the signal’s recognizability: a Red 10. Before this, no radio signal received by the listening post had ever garnered a recognizability rating above a Blue 2. A Red rating meant the likelihood that the transmission contained intelligent information was greater than 90 percent. A rating of Red 10 meant the received transmission contained a self-interpreting coding system! The deciphering computer worked at full power.

Still caught up by the dizzying excitement and confusion, the listener stared at the waveform display. Information continued to stream from the universe into the antenna. Because of the self-interpreting code, the computer was able to perform real-time translation, and the message began to show up immediately.

The listener opened the resulting document, and, for the first time, a Trisolaran read a message from another world.

With the best of intentions, we look forward to establishing contact with other civilized societies in the universe. We look forward to working together with you to build a better life in this vast universe.

*   *   *

During the next two Trisolaran hours, the listener learned of the existence of Earth, learned of the world that had only one sun and remained always in a Stable Era, learned of the human civilization that had been born in a paradise where the climate was eternally mild.

The transmission from the solar system ended. The deciphering computer now ran uselessly. The post was once again only hearing the noise of the universe.

But the listener was certain that what he had just experienced was not a dream. He knew as well that the several thousand listening posts spread across Trisolaris had also received this message, which Trisolaran civilization had awaited for eons. Two hundred cycles of civilization had been crawling through a dark tunnel, and there was finally a glimmer of light before them.

The listener read over the message from the Earth again. His thoughts drifted over the blue ocean that never froze and the green forests and fields, enjoying the warm sunlight and the caress of a cool breeze.
What a beautiful world! The paradise we imagined really exists!

The thrill and excitement cooled, and all that remained was a sense of loss and desolation. During the long loneliness of the past, the listener had asked himself more than once:
Even if one day a message from an extra-Trisolaran civilization were to arrive, what would that have to do with me?
His own lonely and humble life would not change one iota because of it.

But I can at least possess it in my dream.…
And the listener drifted off to sleep. In their harsh environment, the Trisolarans had evolved the ability to switch sleep on and off. A Trisolaran could put himself to sleep in seconds.

But he did not get the dream that he wanted. The blue Earth did appear in his dream, but under the bombardment of an enormous interstellar fleet, the beautiful continents of Earth were burning, the deep blue oceans were boiling and evaporating.…

The listener woke up from his nightmare and saw the giant moon, just risen, casting a thin ray of cold light through the small window. He looked at the frozen ground outside the window and reviewed his lonely life. By now, he had lived six hundred thousand Trisolaran hours. The life expectancy of Trisolarans ranged between seven hundred to eight hundred thousand Trisolaran hours. Most people, of course, would have lost the ability to work productively long before then. They would have been forcibly dehydrated, and the resulting dry fibers cast to the flames. Trisolaris did not keep the idle around.

But now the listener saw another possibility. It was inaccurate to say that the receipt of the extra-Trisolaran message had no influence on his life. After confirmation, Trisolaris would surely reduce the number of listening posts. And posts like this one, behind the times, would be among the first to be cut. Then he would be unemployed. A listener’s skills were very specialized, consisting only of some routine operations and maintenance. It would be very difficult to find another job. If he couldn’t find another job within five thousand Trisolaran hours, he would be forcibly dehydrated and then burnt.

The only way to escape this fate was to mate with a member of the opposite sex. When that happened, the organic material making up their bodies would meld into one. Two-thirds of the material would then become fuel to power the biochemical reaction that would completely renew the cells in the remaining one-third and create a new body. Then this body would divide into three to five tiny new lives: their children. They would inherit some of the memories of their parents, continue their lives, and begin the cycle of life anew. But given the listener’s low social position, lonely and enclosed workspace, and advanced age, what member of the opposite sex would be interested in him?

In the last few years, the listener had asked himself millions of times:
Is this all there is to my life?
And millions of times he had answered himself:
Yes, this is all there is. All that you have in this life is the endless loneliness in the tiny space of this listening post.