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.
SITE OF RED COAST BASE (1968–1987)
CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 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.
The adults standing nearby said that the satellite wasn’t like an airplane because it flew outside of the Earth. Back then the dust and smoke of industry hadn’t yet polluted the air, and the starry sky was especially clear, with the Milky Way clearly visible. In my mind, the stars that filled the heavens weren’t much farther away than the tiny, gliding satellite, and so I thought it was flying among them. I even worried that it might collide with one as it passed through the dense stellar clusters.
My parents weren’t with me because they were working at a coal mine more than a thousand kilometers away, in Shanxi Province. A few years earlier, when I had been even younger, the mine had been a combat zone for the factional civil wars of the Cultural Revolution. I remembered gunshots in the middle of the night, trucks passing in the street, filled with men clutching guns and wearing red armbands.… But I had been too young back then, and I can’t be sure whether these images are real memories, or mirages constructed later. However, I know one thing for certain: Because the mine was too unsafe and my parents had b
een impacted by the Cultural Revolution, they had had no choice but to send me to my ancestral home village in Henan. By the time I saw Dongfanghong I, I had already lived there for more than three years.
A few more years passed before I understood the distance between that satellite and the stars. Back then I was reading a popular set of basic science books called A Hundred Thousand Whys. From the astronomy volume, I learned the concept of a light-year. Before then, I had already known that light could traverse a distance equal to seven and a half trips around the Earth in a single second, but I had not contemplated what kind of terrifying distance could be crossed by flying at such a speed for a whole year. I imagined a ray of light passing through the cold silence of space at the speed of 300,000 kilometers per second. I struggled to grasp the bone-chilling vastness and profundity with my imagination, felt the weight of an immense terror and awe, and simultaneously enjoyed a druglike euphoria.
From that moment, I realized that I had a special talent: Scales and existences that far exceeded the bounds of human sensory perception—both macro and micro—and that seemed to be only abstract numbers to others, could take on concrete forms in my mind. I could touch them and feel them, much like others could touch and feel trees and rocks. Even today, when references to the 15-billion-light-year radius of the universe and “strings” many orders of magnitude smaller than quarks have numbed most people, the concepts of a light-year or a nanometer can still produce lively, grand pictures in my mind and arouse in me an ineffable, religious feeling of awe and shock. Compared to most of the population who do not experience such sensations, I don’t know if I’m lucky or unlucky. But it is certain that such feelings made me first into a science fiction fan, and later a science fiction author.
In that same year when I was first awed by the concept of a light-year, a flood (known as the Great Flood of August ’75) occurred near my home village. In a single day, a record-breaking 100.5 centimeters of rain fell in the Zhumadian region of Henan. Fifty-eight dams of various sizes collapsed, one after another, and 240,000 people died in the resulting deluge. Shortly after the floodwaters had receded, I returned to the village and saw a landscape filled with refugees. I thought I was looking at the end of the world.
And so, satellite, hunger, stars, kerosene lamps, the Milky Way, the Cultural Revolution’s factional civil wars, a light-year, the flood … these seemingly unconnected things melded together and formed the early part of my life, and also molded the science fiction I write today.
As a science fiction writer who began as a fan, I do not use my fiction as a disguised way to criticize the reality of the present. I feel that the greatest appeal of science fiction is the creation of numerous imaginary worlds outside of reality. I’ve always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science. The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read.
The creation myths of the various peoples and religions of the world pale when compared to the glory of the big bang. The three-billion-year history of life’s evolution from self-reproducing molecules to civilization contains twists and romances that cannot be matched by any myth or epic. There is also the poetic vision of space and time in relativity, the weird subatomic world of quantum mechanics … these wondrous stories of science all possess an irresistible attraction. Through the medium of science fiction, I seek only to create my own worlds using the power of imagination, and to make known the poetry of Nature in those worlds, to tell the romantic legends that have unfolded between Man and Universe.
But I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains. In science fiction, humanity is often described as a collective. In this book, a man named “humanity” confronts a disaster, and everything he demonstrates in the face of existence and annihilation undoubtedly has sources in the reality that I experienced. The wonder of science fiction is that it can, when given certain hypothetical world settings, turn what in our reality is evil and dark into what is righteous and bright, and vice versa. This book and its two sequels try to do just that, but no matter how reality is twisted by imagination, it ultimately remains there.
I’ve always felt that extraterrestrial intelligence will be the greatest source of uncertainty for humanity’s future. Other great shifts, such as climate change and ecological disasters, have a certain progression and built-in adjustment periods, but contact between humankind and aliens can occur at any time. Perhaps in ten thousand years, the starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent, but perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the moon parked in orbit. The appearance of extraterrestrial intelligence will force humanity to confront an Other. Before then, humanity as a whole will never have had an external counterpart. The appearance of this Other, or mere knowledge of its existence, will impact our civilization in unpredictable ways.
There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naïveté and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct.
I think it should be precisely the opposite: Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth and build up the trust and understanding between the different peoples and civilizations that make up humanity. But for the universe outside the solar system, we should be ever vigilant, and be ready to attribute the worst of intentions to any Others that might exist in space. For a fragile civilization like ours, this is without a doubt the most responsible path.
* * *
As a fan of science fiction, it has molded my life, and a considerable part of the science fiction I’ve read comes from America. The fact that American readers can now enjoy my book makes me both pleased and excited. Science fiction is a literature that belongs to all humankind. It portrays events of interest to all of humanity, and thus science fiction should be the literary genre most accessible to readers of different nations. Science fiction often describes a day when humanity will form a harmonious whole, and I believe the arrival of such a day need not wait for the appearance of extraterrestrials.
I express my heartfelt thanks to Ken Liu, the translator of this and the third volume, and to Joel Martinsen, the translator of the second volume. Their diligence and care created the English edition. I am grateful to China Educational Publications Import & Export Corporation Ltd. (CEPIEC), Science Fiction World Publishing, and Tor Books, whose trust and faith have made this publication possible.
—Liu Cixin (),
December 28, 2012
TRANSLATOR’S POSTSCRIPT
When I was asked to translate The Three-Body Problem, I was incredibly honored, but also full of trepidation: Translating another writer’s work is a heavy responsibility. It’s almost like being asked to care for someone’s child.
The act of translation involves breaking down one piece of work in one language and ferrying the pieces across a gulf to reconstitute them into a new work in another language. When the gulf separating the two is as wide as the Pacific Ocean that separates China from America, the task can be daunting.
The obvious difficulties, such as differences in linguistic structure and cultural references, are actually relatively easy to resolve. The Three-Body Pr
oblem begins with the Cultural Revolution, and there are numerous allusions to Chinese history. I’ve tried to keep the number of explanatory footnotes to a bare minimum by, wherever possible, filling in the necessary knowledge for non-Chinese readers by the judicious addition of a few informational phrases in the text (all approved by the author).
But there are more subtle issues involving literary devices and narrative techniques. The Chinese literary tradition shaped and was shaped by its readers, giving rise to different emphases and preferences in fiction compared to what American readers expect. In some cases, I tried to adjust the narrative techniques to ones that American readers are more familiar with. In other cases, I’ve left them alone, believing that it’s better to retain the flavor of the original.
I’ve also tried, wherever possible, to avoid shading Western interpretations into those passages dealing with Chinese history and politics.
Overly literal translations, far from being faithful, actually distort meaning by obscuring sense. But translations can also pay so little attention to the integrity of the source that almost nothing of the original’s flavor or voice survives. Neither of these approaches is a responsible fulfillment of the translator’s duty. In a sense, translating may be harder than writing original fiction because a translator must strive to satisfy the same aesthetic demands while being subjected to much more restrictive creative constraints.
In translating, my goal is to act as a faithful interpreter, preserving as much of the original’s nuances of meaning as possible without embellishment or omission. Yet a translator must also balance fidelity to the source, aptness of expression, and beauty of style. The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture’s patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language’s rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people’s gestures and movements.