The Three-Body Problem Part 24

On the way back, one of Ye's colleagues recited from Chairman Mao's essay "Remembering Bethune": "'n.o.ble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests.'" He sighed. "There really are people who can live like that."

Others also expressed their admiration and conflicted feelings. Ye seemed to be speaking to herself as she said, "If there were more men like him, even just a few more, things would have turned out differently."

Of course, no one understood what she really meant.

The task force leader turned the conversation back to their work. "I think this site isn't going to work. Our superiors won't approve it."

"Why not? Of the four possible sites, this has the best electromagnetic environment."

"What about the human environment? Comrades, don't just focus on the technical side. Look at how poor this place is. The poorer a village, the craftier the people. Do you understand? If the observatory were located here, there would be trouble between the scientists and the locals. I can imagine the peasants thinking of the astronomy complex as a juicy piece of meat that they can take bites from."

This site was indeed not approved, and the reason was just what the task force leader had said.

Three years pa.s.sed without Ye hearing anything more about Evans.

But one spring day, Ye received a postcard from Evans with only a single line: "Come here. Tell me how to go on."

Ye rode the train for a day and a night, and then switched to a bus for many hours until she arrived at the village nestled in the remote hills of the Northwest.

As soon as she climbed onto that small hillock, she saw the forest again. Because the trees had grown, it now seemed far denser, but Ye noticed that the forest had once been much bigger. Newer parts that had grown in the past few years had already been cut.

The logging was in full swing. In every direction, trees were falling. The entire forest seemed like a mulberry leaf being devoured by silkworms on all sides. At the current rate, it would disappear soon. The workers doing the logging came from two nearby villages. Using axes and saws, they cut down those barely grown trees one by one, and then dragged them off the hill using tractors and ox carts. There were many loggers, and fights frequently erupted among them.

The fall of each small tree didn't make much sound, and there was no loud buzzing from chain saws, but the almost-familiar scene made Ye's chest tighten.

Someone called out to her-that production team leader, now the village chief. He recognized Ye. When she asked him why they were cutting down the forest, he said, "This forest isn't protected by law."

"How can that be? The Forestry Law has just been promulgated."

"But who ever gave Bethune permission to plant trees here? A foreigner coming here to plant trees without approval would not be protected by any law."

"You can't think that way. He was planting on the barren hills and didn't take up any arable land. Also, back when he started, you didn't object."

"That's true. The county actually gave him an award for planting the trees. The villagers originally planned to cut down the forest in a few more years-it's best to wait until the pig is fat before slaughtering it, am I right? But those people from Nange Village can't wait any longer, and if my village doesn't join in, we won't get any."

"You must stop immediately. I will go to the government to report this!"

"There's no need." The village chief lit a cigarette and pointed to a truck loading the cut trees in the distance. "See that? That's from the deputy secretary of the County Forestry Bureau. And there are also people here from the town police department. They've carried off more trees than anyone else! I told you, these trees have no status and aren't protected. You'll never find anyone who cares. Also, comrade, aren't you a college professor? What does this have to do with you?"

The adobe hut looked the same, but Evans wasn't inside. Ye found him in the woods holding an ax and carefully pruning a tree. He had obviously been at it for a while, his posture full of exhaustion.

"I don't care if this is meaningless. I can't stop. If I stop I'll fall apart." Evans cut down a crooked branch with a practiced swing.

"Let's go together to the county government. If they won't do anything, we'll go up to the provincial government. Someone will stop them." Ye looked at Evans with concern.

Evans stopped and stared at Ye in surprise. Light from the setting sun slanted through the trees and made his eyes sparkle. "Ye, do you really think I'm doing this because of this forest?" He laughed and shook his head, then dropped the ax. He sat down, his back against a tree. "If I want to stop them, it'd be easy. I just returned from America. My father died two months ago, and I inherited most of his money. My brother and sister only got five million each. This wasn't what I expected at all. Maybe in his heart, he still respected me. Or maybe he respected my ideals. Not including fixed a.s.sets, do you know how much money I have at my disposal? About four point five billion dollars. I could easily ask them to stop and get them to plant more trees. I could make all the loess hills within sight be covered by quick-growth forest. But what would be the point?

"Everything you see before you is the result of poverty. But how are things any better in the wealthy countries? They protect their own environments, but then shift the heavily polluting industries to the poorer nations. You probably know that the American government just refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol.... The entire human race is the same. As long as civilization continues to develop, the swallows I want to save and all the other swallows will go extinct. It's just a matter of time."

Ye sat silently, gazing at the rays of light cast among the trees by the setting sun, listening to the noise from the loggers. Her thoughts returned to twenty years ago, to the forests of the Greater Khingan Mountains, where she had once had a similar conversation with another man.

"Do you know why I came here?" Evans continued. "The seeds of Pan-Species Communism had sprouted long ago in the ancient East."

"You're thinking of Buddhism?"

"Yes. The focus of Christianity is Man. Even though all the species were placed into Noah's Ark, other species were never given the same status as humans. But Buddhism is focused on saving all life. That was why I came to the East. But ... it's obvious now that everywhere is the same."

"Yes, that's true. Everywhere, people are the same."

"What can I do now? What is the purpose of my life? I have four point five billion dollars and an international oil company. But what good is all that? Humans have surely invested more than forty-five billion dollars in saving species near extinction. And probably more than four hundred and fifty billion has already been spent on saving the environment from degradation. But what's the use? Civilization continues to follow its path of destruction of all life on Earth except humans. Four point five billion is enough to build an aircraft carrier, but even if we build a thousand aircraft carriers, it would be impossible to stop the madness of humanity."

"Mike, this is what I wanted to tell you. Human civilization is no longer capable of improving by its own strength."

"Can there be any source of power outside of humanity? Even if G.o.d once existed, He died long ago."

"Yes, there are other powers."

The sun had set and the loggers had left. The forest and the loess hills were silent. Ye now told Evans the whole story of Red Coast and Trisolaris. Evans listened quietly, and the loess hills and the forest in dusk seemed to listen as well. When Ye was finished, a bright moon rose from the east and cast speckled shadows on the forest floor.

Evans said, "I still can't believe what you just told me. It's too fantastic. But luckily, I have the resources to confirm this. If what you told me is true"-he extended his hand and spoke the words that every new member of the future ETO would have to say upon joining-"let us be comrades."

28.

The Second Red Coast Base Three more years pa.s.sed. Evans seemed to have disappeared. Ye didn't know if he really was somewhere in the world working to confirm her story, and had no idea how he would confirm it. Even though, by the scale of the universe, a gap of four light-years was as close as touching, it was still a distance that was unimaginably far for fragile life. The two worlds were like the source and mouth of a river that crossed s.p.a.ce. Any connections between them would be extremely attenuated.

One winter, Ye received an invitation from a not-very-prominent university in Western Europe to be a visiting scholar for half a year. After she landed at Heathrow for her interview, a young man came to meet her. They didn't leave the airport, but instead turned back to the landing strip. There, he escorted her onto a helicopter.

As the helicopter roared into the foggy air over England, time seemed to rewind and Ye experienced dej vu. Many years ago, when she first rode in a helicopter, her life was transformed. Where would fate bring her now?

"We're going to the Second Red Coast Base."

The helicopter pa.s.sed the coastline and continued toward the heart of the Atlantic. After half an hour, the helicopter descended toward a huge ship in the ocean. As soon as Ye saw the ship, she thought of Radar Peak. Only now did she realize that the shape of the peak did resemble a giant ship. The Atlantic appeared like the forest of the Greater Khingan Mountains, but the thing that reminded her most of Red Coast Base was the huge parabolic antenna erected in the middle of the ship, which resembled a round sail. The ship was modified from a sixty-thousand-ton oil tanker, like a floating steel island. Evans had built his base on a ship-maybe it was so that it would always be at the best position for transmission and reception, or maybe it was to hide from detection. Later, she learned that the ship was called Judgment Day.

Ye stepped off the helicopter and heard a familiar howl. It was caused by the giant antenna slicing through the wind over the sea. The sound again drew her thoughts to the past. On the broad deck below the antenna, about two thousand people stood in a dense crowd.

Evans walked up to her and solemnly said, "Using the frequency and coordinates you provided, we received a message from Trisolaris. We've confirmed everything you told me."

Ye nodded calmly.

"The great Trisolaran Fleet has already set sail. Their target is this solar system, and they will arrive in four hundred and fifty years."

Ye remained calm. Nothing could surprise her anymore.

Evans pointed to the crowd behind him. "You're looking at the first members of the Earth-Trisolaris Organization. Our ideal is to invite Trisolaran civilization to reform human civilization, to curb human madness and evil, so that the Earth can once again become a harmonious, prosperous, sinless world. More and more people identify with our ideal, and our organization is growing rapidly. We have members all over the world."

"What can I do?" Ye asked in a soft voice.

"You will become the commander in chief of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement. This is the wish of all ETO fighters."

Ye remained silent for a few seconds. Then she nodded slowly. "I'll do my best."

Evans raised a fist and shouted at the crowd, "Eliminate human tyranny!"

Accompanied by the sound of crashing waves and the wind howling against the antenna, the ETO fighters shouted as one, "The world belongs to Trisolaris!"

This was the day that the Earth-Trisolaris Movement formally began.

29.

The Earth-Trisolaris Movement The most surprising aspect of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement was that so many people had abandoned all hope in human civilization, hated and were willing to betray their own species, and even cherished as their highest ideal the elimination of the entire human race, including themselves and their children.

The ETO was called an organization of spiritual n.o.bles. Most members came from the highly educated cla.s.ses, and many were elites of the political and financial spheres. The ETO had once tried to develop membership among the common people, but these efforts all failed. The ETO concluded that the common people did not seem to have the comprehensive and deep understanding of the highly educated about the dark side of humanity. More importantly, because their thoughts were not as deeply influenced by modern science and philosophy, they still felt an overwhelming, instinctual identification with their own species. To betray the human race as a whole was unimaginable for them. But intellectual elites were different: Most of them had already begun to consider issues from a perspective outside the human race. Human civilization had finally given birth to a strong force of alienation.

As astounding as the speed of the ETO's growth had been, the number of members did not tell the whole story of the ETO's strength. Because most of its members had high social status, they held a lot of power and influence.

As commander in chief of the ETO rebels, Ye was only their spiritual leader. She did not partic.i.p.ate in the details of the organization's operation, didn't know how the ETO grew so large, and wasn't even aware of the exact number of members.

In order to grow fast, the organization operated semi-openly, but the governments of the world never paid much attention to the ETO. The ETO knew that they would be protected by the governments' conservatism and lack of imagination. In those organs wielding the powers of the state, no one took the ETO's proclamations seriously, thinking that they were like other extremists who spewed nonsense. And because of its members' social status, governments always treated it carefully. By the time it was recognized as a threat, the rebels were already everywhere. It was only when the ETO began to develop an armed force that some national security organs began to notice it and realized how unusual it was. Consequently, it was only within the last two years that they had begun to attack the ETO effectively.

The members of the ETO were not of a single mind. Within the organization were complicated factions and divisions of opinion. Mainly, they fell into two factions.

The Adventist group was the purest, most fundamentalist strand of the ETO, comprised mainly of believers in Evans's Pan-Species Communism. They had completely given up hope in human nature. This despair began with the ma.s.s extinctions of the Earth's species caused by modern civilization. Later, other Adventists based their hatred of the human race on other foundations, not limited to issues such as the environment or warfare. Some raised their hatred to very abstract, philosophical levels. Unlike how they would be imagined later, most of them were realists, and did not place too much hope in the alien civilization they served either. Their betrayal was based only on their despair and hatred of the human race. Mike Evans gave the Adventists their motto: We don't know what extraterrestrial civilization is like, but we know humanity.

The Redemptionists didn't appear until long after the ETO's founding. This group's nature was a religious organization, and the members were believers in the Trisolaran faith.

A civilization outside the human race would doubtlessly greatly attract the highly educated cla.s.ses, and it was easy for them to develop many beautiful fantasies about such a civilization. The human race was a nave species, and the attraction posed by a more advanced alien civilization was almost irresistible. To make an imperfect a.n.a.logy: Human civilization was like a young, unworldly person walking alone across the desert of the universe, who has found out about the existence of a potential lover. Though the person could not see the potential lover's face or figure, the knowledge that the other person existed somewhere in the distance created lovely fantasies about the potential lover that spread like wildfire. Gradually, as fantasies about that distant civilization grew more and more elaborate, the Redemptionists developed spiritual feelings toward Trisolaran civilization. Alpha Centauri became Mount Olympus in s.p.a.ce, the dwelling place of the G.o.ds; and so the Trisolaran religion-which really had nothing to do with religion on Trisolaris-was born. Unlike other human religions, they worshipped something that truly existed. Also unlike other human religions, it was the Lord who was in crisis, and the duty of salvation fell on the shoulders of the believer.

The main path of spreading Trisolaran culture to society was the Three Body game. The ETO invested enormous effort to develop this ma.s.sive piece of software. The initial goals were twofold: one, to proselytize the Trisolaran religion; and two, to allow the tentacles of the ETO to spread from the highly educated intelligentsia to the lower social strata, and recruit younger ETO members from the middle and lower cla.s.ses.

Using a sh.e.l.l that drew elements from human society and history, the game explained the culture and history of Trisolaris, thus avoiding alienating beginners. Once a player had advanced to a certain level and had begun to appreciate Trisolaran civilization, the ETO would establish contact, examine the player's sympathies, and finally recruit those who pa.s.sed the tests to be members of the ETO. But Three Body didn't attract much notice, because the game required too much background knowledge and in-depth thinking, and most young players didn't have the patience or skill to discover the shocking truth beneath its apparently common surface. Those who were attracted by it were still mostly intellectuals.

Most of those who became Redemptionists got to know Trisolaran civilization through the Three Body game, and so Three Body could be said to be the cradle of the Redemptionists.

While the Redemptionists developed religious feelings toward Trisolaran civilization, they were also not as extreme as the Adventists in their att.i.tude toward human civilization. Their ultimate ideal was to save the Lord. In order to allow the Lord to continue to exist, they were willing to sacrifice the human world to some degree. But most of them believed that the ideal solution would be to find a way to allow the Lord to continue to live in the Trisolaris stellar system and avoid the invasion of the Earth. Navely, they believed that solving the three-body problem would achieve this goal, saving both Trisolaris and the Earth. Admittedly, perhaps this thought wasn't all that nave. Trisolaran civilization itself had thought so through many eons. The effort to solve the three-body problem was a thread that ran through several hundreds of cycles of Trisolaran civilization. Most Redemptionists with some in-depth math and physics knowledge had attempted the three-body problem, and even after knowing that the problem was mathematically unsolvable as posed, the effort did not cease, because solving the three-body problem had become a religious ritual of their faith. Even though the Redemptionists had many first-cla.s.s physicists and mathematicians, research in this area never yielded any important results. It took someone like Wei Cheng, a prodigy who had no connection to the ETO or the Trisolaran faith, to accidentally come up with a breakthrough in which the Redemptionists placed much hope.

The Adventists and the Redemptionists were always in sharp conflict. The Adventists believed that the Redemptionists were the greatest threat to the ETO. This view wasn't without reason: It was only through some Redemptionists who had a sense of duty that the governments of the world gradually came to understand the shocking background of the ETO rebels. The two factions were of approximately equal strength within the organization, and the armed forces of both had developed to the point of starting a civil war. Ye Wenjie used her authority and reputation to try to patch over the division between the two, but the result was never ideal.

As the ETO movement continued to develop, a third faction appeared: the Survivors. After confirming the existence of the alien invasion fleet, surviving that war became a most natural human desire. Of course, that war wouldn't occur for another 450 years, and had nothing to do with those living today, but many people hoped that if humans did lose, at least their descendants who were alive in four and a half centuries could live on. Serving the Trisolaran invaders would clearly help with this goal. Compared to the other two factions, the Survivors tended to come from the lower social cla.s.ses, and most were from the East, and especially from China. Their numbers were still small, but they were growing rapidly. As Trisolaran culture continued to spread, they would become a force that could not be ignored in the future.

The ETO members' alienation developed variously from the faults of human civilization itself, the yearning and adoration for a more advanced civilization, and the strong desire for one's descendants to survive that final war. These three powerful motives propelled the ETO movement to develop rapidly.

By then, the extraterrestrial civilization was still in the depths of s.p.a.ce, more than four light-years away, separated from the human world by a long journey of four and a half centuries. The only thing they had sent to the Earth was a radio transmission.

Bill Mathers's "contact as symbol" theory thus received chillingly perfect confirmation.

30.

Two Protons INTERROGATOR: We will now begin today's investigation. We hope you'll cooperate again as you did last time.

YE WENJIE: You already know everything I know. In fact, by now there are many things that I'd like to learn from you.

INTERROGATOR: I don't think you've told us everything. First, we want to know this: Among the messages that Trisolaris sent to Earth, what were the contents of those portions that the Adventists intercepted and withheld?

YE: I can't tell you. They have a tight organization. I only know that they did withhold some messages.

INTERROGATOR: Change of subject. After the Adventists monopolized communications with Trisolaris, did you build a third Red Coast Base?

YE: I did have such a plan. But we only built a receiver, and then construction stopped. The equipment and the base were all dismantled.

INTERROGATOR: Why?

YE: Because there were no more messages coming from Alpha Centauri. There was nothing on any frequency. I think you've already confirmed this.

INTERROGATOR: Yes. In other words-at least as of four years ago-Trisolaris decided to terminate all communications with Earth. This makes the messages intercepted by the Adventists even more important.

YE: True. But there's really nothing more I can tell you about them.

INTERROGATOR: (pausing a few seconds) Then let's find some topic where you can tell me more. Mike Evans lied to you, is that right?

YE: You could put it that way. He never revealed to me the thoughts buried deep in his heart, and only expressed his sense of duty toward the other species on this planet. I never realized that this sense of duty had caused his hatred of human civilization to develop to such extremes that he could make the destruction of the human race his ultimate ideal.

INTERROGATOR: Let's look at the current composition of the ETO. The Adventists would like to destroy the human race by means of an alien power; the Redemptionists worship the alien civilization as a G.o.d; the Survivors wish to betray other humans to buy their own survival. None of these is in line with your original ideal of using the alien civilization as a way to reform humanity.