Death's End

“We’re very close! Are you behind us?”…“Don’t do this! No!”…“There’s no pain. I’m telling you, it’ll be over in a flash.”…“You still don’t believe me, after all this? Fine, don’t believe me.”…“Yes, sweetie, we’ll become very thin.”…“Come here! We should be together.”

Cheng Xin and AA listened. The voices became fewer and fewer, and separated by longer gaps. After thirty minutes, they heard the last voice coming out of the Solar System:

“Ahhhhhhhhh—”

The voice was cut off. The giant painting called the Solar System was complete.

Halo continued to fall toward the plane. The speed it had already achieved was slowing down its fall, but the ship still hadn’t achieved escape velocity. By now, Halo was the only man-made three-dimensional object in the Solar System, and Cheng Xin and AA were the only people not in the painting. Halo was very close to the plane, and from this angle, looking at the two-dimensional Sun was like looking at the sea from shore: the dim, dark red surface stretched into the distance without bounds. The freshly flattened Pluto was now very large, and still expanded at a rate that was visible to the naked eye. Cheng Xin examined the exquisite “tree rings” of Pluto and tried to find traces of the museum, but she couldn’t see anything—it was too small. The giant waterfall that was three-dimensional space tumbling into the flat plane seemed inexorable. Cheng Xin began to doubt whether the curvature propulsion engine really was capable of propelling the ship to lightspeed. She hoped for everything to be over.

But then, the ship’s AI spoke.

“Halo will enter lightspeed in one hundred and eighty seconds. Please select a destination.”

“We don’t know where to go,” said AA.

“You can select a destination after we’ve entered lightspeed. However, you won’t subjectively be spending much time in lightspeed, and it’s easy to overshoot your destination. It’s best if you select it now.”

“We don’t know where to find them,” Cheng Xin said. Their existence gave the future some light, but she still felt lost.

AA clutched Cheng Xin’s hands. “Have you forgotten? Other than them, he also exists in the universe.”

Yes, he still exists. Cheng Xin was overwhelmed by heartache. She had never yearned to see anyone as much as him.

“You have a date,” AA said.

“Yes, we have a date,” Cheng Xin repeated mechanically. The torrents of emotion left her numb.

“Then let’s go to your star.”

“Yes, let’s go to our star!” Cheng Xin turned to the ship’s AI. “Can you find DX3906? That was the assigned number back at the beginning of the Crisis Era.”

“Yes. The star is now numbered S74390E2. Please confirm.”

A large holographic star map appeared before them. It showed everything within five hundred light-years of the Solar System. One of the stars glowed bright red, and a white arrow pointed at it. Cheng Xin was very familiar with it.

“That’s the one. Let’s go there.”

“Course set and confirmed. Halo will enter lightspeed in fifty seconds.”

The holographic star map disappeared. In fact, the ship’s entire hull disappeared, and Cheng Xin and AA seemed to be floating in space itself. The AI had never employed this display mode before. In front of them was the starry sea that was the Milky Way, which was now pure blue, reminding them of the real sea. Behind them was the two-dimensional Solar System, suffused with a bloody red.

The universe shuddered and transformed. All the stars in front of them shot straight ahead, as though that half of the universe had transformed into a black bowl and all the stars were falling into the bottom. They clustered ahead of the ship and fused into a single glow, like a giant sapphire in which it was not possible to distinguish individual stars. From time to time, individual stars shot out of the sapphire and swept past the pure black space to fall behind the ship, changing color the whole way: from blue to green, then yellow, and turning red once they were behind the ship. Looking back from the ship, the two-dimensional Solar System and the stars fused into a red ball like a campfire at the end of the universe.

Halo flew at the speed of light toward the star that Yun Tianming had given Cheng Xin.

PART VI

Galaxy Era, Year 409 Our Star

Halo shut off the curvature engine and coasted at lightspeed.

During the voyage, AA tried to comfort Cheng Xin, even though she knew this was a hopeless task.

“It’s ridiculous for you to blame yourself for the destruction of the Solar System. Who do you think you are? Do you think if you stand on your hands, you’ve lifted the Earth? Even if you hadn’t stopped Wade, the outcome of that war would have been hard to predict.