Death's End

“All right. We’ll wait until Uranus is flattened so that we get to spend more time with you,” AA said. There really didn’t seem to be any point in insisting. Even if Luo Ji got on Halo, it would only delay the inevitable by another hour. He didn’t need that bit of time. Indeed, if Cheng Xin and AA didn’t have a mission to carry out, they wouldn’t care for that bit of time either.

“No. You must go now!” Luo Ji said. He struck the ground with his cane forcefully, which made him float up under the low gravity. “No one knows how much faster the collapse is happening now. Carry out your mission! We can stay in contact, and that’s no different from being together.”

Cheng Xin hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “All right. We’ll leave. Stay in contact!”

“Of course.” Luo Ji lifted his cane in farewell and turned to walk toward the monolith. With the light gravity, he almost floated over the snow on the ground and had to use the cane to slow himself. Cheng Xin and AA watched until the aged figure of this Wallfacer, Swordholder, and humanity’s final grave keeper disappeared behind the door of the monolith.

Cheng Xin and AA went back inside Halo. The yacht took off right away, its thrusters tossing up snow everywhere. Soon, the ship achieved Pluto’s escape velocity—just a hair above one kilometer per second—and reached orbit. From the porthole and the monitor they could see that swaths of white now joined the blue and black patches of the Plutonian surface. The giant words “Earth Civilization,” written in multiple scripts and languages, had been covered by the snow and were almost illegible. Halo passed through the gap between Pluto and Charon as though flying through a canyon, the two celestial bodies were so close.

In this “canyon” there were now many other moving stars—the escaping spaceships. They all moved far faster than Halo. One ship swept past Halo at a distance of no more than a hundred kilometers, and the glow from its nozzles lit up Charon’s smooth surface. They could clearly see its triangular hull and the nearly ten-kilometer-long blue flame shooting out of its nozzles.

The AI explained, “That’s Mycenae, a midsized planetary ship without an ecological cycling system. After leaving the Solar System, a passenger would not last five years, even if all the ship’s supplies were used to sustain only them.”

The AI didn’t know that Mycenae would not be able to leave the Solar System. Like all the other escaping ships, it would continue to exist for no more than three hours in three-dimensional space.

Halo flew out of the Pluto-Charon canyon and left the two dark worlds for open space. They saw the entirety of the two-dimensionalized Sun and Jupiter, whose flattening process was almost over. Now, except for Uranus, the vast majority of the Solar System had fallen into the plane.

“Oh, heavens! Starry sky!” AA cried out.

Cheng Xin knew that she was referring to Van Gogh’s painting. True, the universe really did look like the painting. The painting in her memory was almost a perfect copy of the two-dimensional Solar System before her eyes. Giant planets filled space, the areas of the planets seeming to exceed even the gaps between them. But the immensity of the planets did not give them any sense of substantiality. Rather, they looked like whirlpools in space-time. In the universe, every part of space flowed, churned, trembled between madness and horror like fiery flames that emitted only frost. The Sun and the planets and all substance and existence seemed to be only hallucinations produced by the turbulence of space-time.

Cheng Xin now recalled the strange feeling she had experienced each time she had looked at Van Gogh’s painting. Everything else in the painting—the trees that seemed to be on fire, and the village and mountains at night—showed perspective and depth, but the starry sky above had no three-dimensionality at all, like a painting hanging in space.

Because the starry night was two-dimensional.

How could Van Gogh have painted such a thing in 1889? Did he, having suffered a second breakdown, truly leap across five centuries and see the sight before them using only his spirit and delirious consciousness? Or, maybe it was the opposite: He had seen the future, and the sight of this Last Judgment had caused his breakdown and eventual suicide.

“Children, is everything all right? What are you going to do next?” Luo Ji appeared in a pop-up window. He had taken off his space suit, and his white hair and beard floated in the low gravity like in water. Behind him was the tunnel that had been intended to last a hundred million years.

“Hello! We’re going to toss the artifacts into space,” AA said. “But we want to keep Starry Night.”

“I think you should hold on to them all. Don’t toss any. Take them and leave.”

Cheng Xin and AA looked at each other. “Go where?” AA asked.