Death's End

“The location of Trisolaris has been exposed—which of course means the Solar System is exposed as well. The Trisolarans are running away. The Second Fleet has changed direction to head away from the Solar System. All the droplets are gone. Sophon was explaining that there’s no more need to worry about them invading the Solar System. Like the Trisolaran system, this is now a place of death that everyone will want to escape from.”

How!?

“We’re going home. Sophon has ordered the Earth Security Force to make every effort to assist with the evacuation of Australia. The process will get faster over time, but moving all the refugees out of Australia will take three to six months. You can leave first. The mayor wants me to take you to the provincial government.”

“Was it Blue Space?”

“No one knows the details, not even Sophon. But Trisolaris received the universal broadcast, and it was initiated a year ago, when deterrence failed.”

“Can you let me be by myself for a while?”

“All right, Dr. Cheng. But you should be happy. They did what you needed to do.”

The man stopped talking, but Cheng Xin could still feel his presence. The commotion around her gradually died down, and was followed by a rainstorm of footsteps. The footsteps grew sparse—everyone must be leaving the city government tent to take care of their own business. Cheng Xin felt the sea retreat around her, revealing solid land beneath. She stood in the middle of an empty continent, the sole survivor after the Flood. Her face felt a trace of warmth: The sun was rising.

Post-Deterrence Era, Day 1–Day 5 Gravity and Blue Space, Deep Space Beyond the Oort Cloud

“It’s possible to detect the warped points using the naked eye,” Chu Yan said. “But the best way is to monitor the electromagnetic radiation. The emission from these points is very faint, but it has a distinct spectral signature. The regular sensors on our ships can detect and locate them. Typically, a volume of space as large as a ship in this region contains one to two warped points, but we once found twelve at once. Look, right now there are three.”

Chu Yan, Morovich, and Guan Yifan were floating through a long corridor on Blue Space. In front of them drifted an information window showing a map of the interior of the ship. Three red dots flashed on the map, and the three of them were approaching one of these dots now.

“Right there!” Guan pointed straight ahead.

In the bulkhead in front of them was a circular hole about a meter in diameter. The edge was smooth, mirrorlike. Through the hole they could see tubes of various thicknesses. Several tubes had entire sections missing in the middle. In two of the thicker tubes, they could see liquid flowing. The liquid seemed to flow from one section, disappear, and then reappear in the corresponding section of the tube on the other side. The missing sections were of different lengths, but overall seemed to describe a spherical space. Based on the shape of the missing sections, part of the invisible bubble protruded into the corridor. Morovich and Guan carefully avoided it.

Chu Yan carelessly extended a hand into the invisible bubble, and half of his arm disappeared. Standing to the side, Guan Yifan saw a clear cross section of his cut-off arm, like the cross sections of Vera’s legs that had been seen by Sublieutenant Ike aboard the Gravity. Chu Yan pulled his arm back and showed the astonished Morovich and Guan that it was unharmed. Then he encouraged them to try it. The two carefully reached into the invisible bubble. They watched their hands, and then arms, vanish, but they felt nothing.

“Let’s go in,” said Chu Yan. Then he jumped into the bubble, as though diving into a pool. Morovich and Guan watched in consternation as Captain Chu disappeared from head to toe. The cross section of his body on the surface of the invisible bubble rapidly changed shape, and the mirrorlike edge of the hole threw reflections onto the surrounding bulkheads like ripples.

As Morovich and Guan stared at each other, two hands and forearms emerged from the bubble and remained suspended in midair. Each hand grabbed hold of one of theirs, and they were pulled into fourth-dimensional space.

All who had experienced it agree that the sensation of being in four-dimensional space was indescribable. They would even say that it was the only thing encountered by humanity thus far that absolutely could not be captured by language.

People usually resorted to this analogy: Imagine a race of flat beings living inside a two-dimensional picture. No matter how rich or colorful the picture was, the flat people could only see the profile of the world around them. In their eyes, everything consisted of line segments of various lengths. Only when such a two-dimensional being was taken up out of the picture into three-dimensional space and looking down on the world could he see the entirety of the image.