Part 30 (1/2)
”To find something to cheer you up.”
”Whatever, buddy. Sit back down. Drink.”
Da s.h.i.+ took the two by their arms and dragged them up. ”Let's go. Bring the liquor if you have to.”
Downstairs, the three got into Da s.h.i.+'s car. As the car started, w.a.n.g asked in slurred speech where they were going. Da s.h.i.+ said, ”My hometown. Not too far.”
The car left the city and sped west along the Beijing-s.h.i.+jiazhuang Highway. It exited the highway as soon as they were inside Hebei Province. Da s.h.i.+ stopped the car and dragged his two pa.s.sengers out.
As soon as Ding and w.a.n.g 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?” w.a.n.g asked.
”To look at bugs.” Da s.h.i.+ lit one of the cigars Colonel Stanton had given him and pointed at the wheat fields with it.
w.a.n.g 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?” w.a.n.g 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 s.h.i.+.” 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 s.h.i.+ 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 w.a.n.g Miao poured the two bottles of wine they had with them on the ground beneath their feet, a toast for the bugs.
”Da s.h.i.+, thank you.” w.a.n.g held out his hand.
”I thank you as well.” Ding gripped Da s.h.i.+'s other hand.
”Let's get back,” w.a.n.g 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s.
SITE OF RED COAST BASE (19681987) 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, b.l.o.o.d.y 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sed through the dense stellar cl.u.s.ters.
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 pa.s.sing 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 been 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing through the cold silence of s.p.a.ce 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.