Death's End

If she hadn’t stopped Wade, Halo City might have achieved independence. Even if the independence was short-lived, they could have discovered the effects of lightspeed trails and changed the government’s attitude toward lightspeed ships. Humanity might have had time to construct a thousand lightspeed ships and build the black domain, to avoid this dimensional strike.

Humanity could have divided into two parts: those who wanted to fly to the stars, and those who wanted to stay within the black domain and live in tranquility. Each would have gotten what they wanted.

In the end, she had committed another grave error.

Twice, she had been placed in a position of authority second only to God, and both times she had pushed the world into the abyss in the name of love. This time, no one could fix her mistake for her.

She began to hate someone: Wade. She hated that he had kept his promise. Why? Out of his masculine pride, or for her? Cheng Xin understood that Wade did not know the effects of curvature propulsion trails. His goal in researching lightspeed ships was stated eloquently by that anonymous Halo City soldier: a fight for freedom, for a chance to live as free men in the cosmos, for the billions and billions of new worlds out there. She believed that if he had known that lightspeed spaceflight was the only path to life for humanity, he would not have kept his promise.

She could not shirk her responsibility. It didn’t matter whether she really was second only to God—if she was in that position, she had to carry out her duty.

Not long ago on Pluto, Cheng Xin had experienced one of the most relaxed moments of her life. Indeed, it was easy to face the end of the world: All responsibilities were gone, as were all worries and anxieties. Life was as simple and pure as the moment when one first emerged from the mother’s womb. Cheng Xin just had to wait in peace for her poetic, artistic end, for her moment to join the giant painting of the Solar System.

But now, everything had been turned upside down. Early cosmology had presented a paradox: If the universe was infinite, then every spot in the universe would feel the cumulative effects of the infinite gravity exerted by an infinity of celestial bodies. Cheng Xin really did feel an infinite gravity now. The power came from every corner of the universe, ruthlessly tearing at her soul. The horror of her last moments as the Swordholder 127 years ago resurfaced as four billion years of history pressed down on her and suffocated her. The sky was full of eyes staring at her: the eyes of dinosaurs, trilobites, ants, birds, butterflies, bacteria… just the number of men and women who had lived on the Earth possessed a hundred billion pairs of eyes.

Cheng Xin saw AA’s eyes, and understood the words in her gaze: You’ve finally experienced something worse than death.

Cheng Xin knew that she had no choice but to live on. She and AA were the last two survivors of human civilization. Her death would mean the death of half of all that was left of humanity. Living on was the appropriate punishment for her mistake.

But the course ahead was a blank. In her heart, space was no longer black, but colorless. What was the point of going anywhere?

“Where should we go?” Cheng Xin muttered.

“Go find them,” Luo Ji said. His image was even more blurred and now only black and white.

His words illuminated Cheng Xin’s dark thoughts like lightning. She and AA looked at each other and immediately understood who “them” meant.

Luo Ji continued, “They’re still alive. The Bunker World received a gravitational wave transmission from them five years ago. It was a short message, and didn’t explain where they were. Halo will periodically hail them with gravitational waves. Maybe you’ll find them; maybe they’ll find you.”

Luo Ji’s black-and-white image disappeared as well, but they could still hear his voice. He said one last thing, “Ah, it’s time for me to go into the picture. Safe travels, children.”

The transmission from Pluto was cut off.

On the monitor, they could see Pluto light up and expand in two dimensions. The part of Pluto containing the museum was the first to touch the plane.

The Doppler effect of Halo’s speed was now visible. The light from the stars ahead shifted to bluish, while the light from the stars behind shifted to reddish. The color shift was apparent in the two-dimensional Solar System.

Outside, no other fleeing spaceships could be seen; Halo had passed them all. All the fleeing spaceships were now falling onto the two-dimensional space like drops of rain against glass.

Very few transmissions could now be received from the direction of the Solar System. Due to the Doppler effect, the brief bursts of voices sounded strange, like singing.