Death's End

Cheng Xin tried to imagine it, but it was simply impossible. “That’s… madness.” Then she asked, “Will the universe turn into a war ruin? Or, maybe it’s more accurate to ask: Will the laws of physics turn into war ruins?”

“Maybe they already are…. The physicists and cosmologists of the new world are focused on trying to recover the original appearance of the universe before the wars more than ten billion years ago. They’ve already constructed a fairly clear theoretical model describing the pre-war universe. That was a really lovely time, when the universe itself was a Garden of Eden. Of course, the beauty could only be described mathematically. We can’t picture it: Our brains don’t have enough dimensions.”

Cheng Xin thought back to the conversation with the Ring again.

Did you build this four-dimensional fragment?

You told me that you came from the sea. Did you build the sea?

“You are saying that the universe of the Edenic Age was four-dimensional, and that the speed of light was much higher?”

“No, not at all. The universe of the Edenic Age was ten-dimensional. The speed of light back then wasn’t only much higher—rather, it was close to infinity. Light back then was capable of action at a distance, and could go from one end of the cosmos to the other within a Planck time…. If you had been to four-dimensional space, you would have some vague hint of how beautiful that ten-dimensional Garden must have been.”

“You’re saying—”

“I’m not saying anything.” Yifan seemed to have awakened from a dream. “We’ve only seen small hints; everything else is just guessing. You should treat it as a guess, just a dark myth we’ve made up.”

But Cheng Xin continued to follow the course of the discussion taken so far. “—that during the wars after the Edenic Age, one dimension after another was imprisoned from the macroscopic into the microscopic, and the speed of light was reduced again and again…. ”

“As I said, I’m not saying anything, just guessing.” Yifan’s voice grew softer. “But no one knows if the truth is even darker than our guesses…. We are certain of only one thing: The universe is dying.”

The ship stopped accelerating, and weightlessness returned. Before Cheng Xin’s eyes, space and the stars appeared more and more hallucinatory, more and more like a nightmare. Only the 3G hypergravity had brought some sense of solidity. She had welcomed the powerful embrace of those arms, an embrace that had provided some protection against the terror and frigidity of the dark myths of the universe. But now the hypergravity was gone, and only nightmare remained. The Milky Way appeared as a patch of ice hiding bloody remains, and DX3906 nearby appeared as a cremator burning over an abyss.

“Can you turn off the holographic display?” Cheng Xin asked.

Yifan turned it off, and Cheng Xin returned from the vastness of space to the cramped eggshell interior of the cabin. Here, she recovered a trace of the security she craved.

“I shouldn’t have told you all that,” Yifan said. His sorrow was sincere.

“I would have found out sooner or later,” Cheng Xin said.

“Let me repeat: They are just guesses. There’s no real scientific proof. Don’t think about it too much. Focus on what’s before your eyes; focus on the life you must live.” Yifan put a hand over hers. “Even if what I told you is true, those events are measured at the scale of hundreds of millions of years. Come with me to our world, which is now also your world. Live out your life and stop skipping across the surface of time. As long as you live your life within a hundred thousand years and a thousand light-years, none of those things need concern you. That ought to be enough for anyone.”

“Yes, it is enough, thank you.” Cheng Xin held Yifan’s hand.

—————

Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan spent the rest of the journey in the forced slumber of the sleep-aid machine. The trip lasted four days. By the time they awakened in the hypergravity of deceleration, Planet Gray took up most of their field of view.

Planet Gray was a small planet. It visually resembled the moon, a barren rock, but instead of craters, much of Planet Gray’s surface was taken up by desolate plains. Hunter entered orbit around Planet Gray. Due to the lack of an atmosphere, the orbit was very low. The ship approached the coordinates provided by the monitoring satellite, where the five unidentified spacecraft had landed and then taken off. Yifan had planned to land the shuttle there and investigate the traces left by the spacecraft, but he and Cheng Xin had not anticipated that the mysterious visitors would leave behind such large signs that they were visible from space.

“What is that?” Cheng Xin cried out.

“Death lines.” Yifan recognized them right away. “Don’t get too close,” he said to the AI.