Death's End

Widnall’s eyes temporarily left the terminal showing the image from the telescope and looked out the porthole of the station. He could see a few irregularly shaped rocks drifting at some distance: fragments of asteroids left from the glass-making operation. They spun slowly in the cold sunlight and seemed to emphasize the desolation of space. The scene did seem to evoke a sense of the “mental space” the sublieutenant described.

Widnall said, “If we really discover a photoid, it would be better to not issue a warning at all. It’s useless, anyway. To die suddenly without even knowing what hit you is actually a rather fortunate fate. But you’d rather torture a few billion people for twenty-four hours. I think that’s akin to a crime against humanity.”

“By that logic, you and I would be the most unfortunate people in the world since we would know about our fate the longest.”

The observation station received new orders from Fleet Command to adjust the telescope and observe the remnants of the Trisolaran system. Widnall didn’t argue with Vasilenko this time, because he was very interested in that ruined world as well.

The floating lenses began to move around and adjust their positions, the plasma thrusters at the rims of the lenses emitting blue flames. Only now did the lenses in the distance reveal themselves, the blue flames marking out the overall shape of the telescope. The ten-kilometer-long group of lenses slowly turned, stopping when the telescope was pointed in the direction of the Trisolaran system. Then the lenses shifted up and down the axis to focus. Finally, most of the flames went out, with only a few fireflies flickering now and then as the lenses engaged in precision focus adjustments.

In the unprocessed view of the telescope, the Trisolaran system looked very ordinary, just a small patch of white against the background of space, like a feather. But after the image had been processed and magnified, it appeared as a magnificent nebula that took up the entire screen. It had been seven years since the explosion of the star, so what they were seeing now was the scene three years after the explosion. Under the influence of gravity and the exploded star’s angular momentum, the nebula had turned from sharp radiating rays into a soft blur of clouds, which was then flattened by the centrifugal force of the spin into a spiral. Above the nebula, the two remaining stars could be seen. One of them showed up as a disk, while the other one, more distant, remained a point of light distinguished only by its motion against the background stars.

The two stars that survived the catastrophe achieved the dream of generations on Trisolaris and formed a stable double-star system, but no life would enjoy their light, as the entire system was now uninhabitable. It was now apparent that the dark forest strike had destroyed only one star out of the three, not only because of economics, but also to achieve a more sinister goal: As long as the system still retained one or two stars, the material in the nebula would be constantly absorbed by the stars, generating powerful radiation in the process. The Trisolaran system was now a radiation furnace, a domain of death for life and civilization. It was the powerful radiation that caused the nebula itself to glow and appear so clear and bright on the telescope.

“I’m reminded of the clouds viewed from atop Mount Emei,” said Vasilenko. “That’s a mountain in China. Viewing the moon from the peak is an exquisite sight. The night I was there, the peak floated in a boundless sea of clouds, turned pure silver by the moon above. It looked a lot like this.”

Seeing this silvery graveyard more than forty trillion kilometers away made Widnall wax philosophical. “From a scientific perspective, ‘destroy’ isn’t really accurate. Nothing has disappeared. All the matter that used to be there is still there, and so is all the angular momentum. It’s only the arrangement of matter that has changed, like a deck of cards being reshuffled. But life is like a straight flush: Once you shuffle, it’s gone.”

Widnall examined the image some more and made an important discovery.

“What is that?!” He pointed at a spot in the image some distance from the nebula. By scale, it was about thirty AU from the nebula center.

Vasilenko stared at the spot. He lacked the trained eye of an astronomer, and couldn’t see anything unusual at first. But eventually, he saw a vague circular outline against the pitch-black background, like a soap bubble in space.

“It’s very large. The diameter is about… ten astronomical units. Is it dust?”

“Absolutely not. Dust doesn’t look anything like that.”

“You’ve never seen it before?”

“No one could have seen it. Whatever it is, it’s transparent, with a very faint border. The largest telescopes in the past wouldn’t have been able to detect it.”