Death's End

Out of the porthole and on the monitor they could see the entirety of Pluto. Their initial impression of the dwarf planet was one of darkness, like an eye that remained perpetually shut. This far from the Sun, the light was extremely dim. Only when Halo entered low orbit could they see the colors on the surface of the planet: Pluto’s crust appeared to be made of patches of blue and black. The black was rocks—not necessarily black in color, but the light was too dim to tell otherwise. The blue was solidified nitrogen and methane. Two centuries ago, when Pluto had been near its perigee and inside Neptune’s orbit, the surface would have looked completely different. The ice cover would have partially melted and produced a thin atmosphere. From the distance, it would have appeared a deep yellow.

Halo continued to descend. On Earth, this would have involved a soul-stirring atmospheric reentry, but Halo continued to fly through the silent vacuum, decelerating by the power of its own thrusters. On the blue-black ground below, an attention-grabbing line of white text appeared:

EARTH CIVILIZATION

The text was written in the modern script that mixed Latin and Chinese elements. After it, there were a few more lines of smaller text repeating the same thing in different scripts. Cheng Xin noticed that none of them said “museum.” The yacht was still about one hundred kilometers above the surface, which meant that the text was gigantic. Cheng Xin couldn’t make an exact estimate of the size of the characters, but she was certain that these were the largest written characters ever produced by humankind, each big enough to contain a city. By the time Halo was only about ten thousand meters above the surface, one of the large characters took up the entire field of view. Finally, Halo touched down on the broad landing field, which was the topmost dot in the Chinese character qiu (球), a part of the word Earth.

With the guidance of the ship’s AI, Cheng Xin and AA put on light space suits and exited Halo onto the surface of Pluto. Given the frigid surroundings, the heating systems in their space suits were operating at maximum power. The landing field was empty, white, and seemed to phosphoresce in the starlight. The numerous burn marks left on the ground indicated that many spacecraft had once landed and taken off here, but Halo was the only ship here now.

During the Bunker Era, Pluto was akin to Antarctica on ancient Earth. No one lived here permanently, and few came to visit.

In the sky, a black sphere moved rapidly among the stars. It was large, but the surface was shrouded in darkness: Charon, Pluto’s moon. Its mass was a tenth of Pluto’s, and the two almost formed a double-planet system, revolving around a common center of mass.

Halo turned on its searchlights. Due to the lack of atmosphere, there wasn’t a visible beam of light. It cast a circle of light on a distant rectangular object. This black monolith was the only protrusion above the white ground. It gave off an eerie sense of simplicity, as though it was an abstraction of the real world.

“That looks a bit familiar,” Cheng Xin said.

“I don’t know what it is, but I don’t have a good feeling about it.”

Cheng Xin and AA headed for the monolith. Pluto’s gravity was only one-tenth of the Earth’s, and so they proceeded by leaping. Along the way, they noticed a row of arrows pointing toward the monolith on the ground. Only when they reached the monolith did its immensity impress itself on their minds. When they looked up, it was as though a chunk had been taken out of the starry sky. They looked around and saw that there were rows of arrows coming from other directions, all pointing toward the monolith. At the foot of the monolith was another prominent protuberance: a metal wheel about a meter in diameter. To their surprise, they found the wheel to be hand-operated. Above the wheel was a diagram formed from white lines against the black surface of the monolith. Two curved arrows indicated the directions in which the wheel could be turned. Next to one of the arrows was a drawing of a half-open door, while the other bore a drawing of a shut door. Cheng Xin turned to survey the arrows on the ground pointing to the monolith. All the simple, clear, wordless instructions gave her a strange feeling, which AA voiced.

“These things… I don’t think they’re intended for humans.”