Death's End

“No problems there. The antimatter engine was designed specifically for reduced-lightspeed conditions. When we’re on long expeditions like this, we equip all our spacecraft with reduced-lightspeed propulsion systems…. Our world puts a lot of effort into developing such technologies. The goal isn’t to solve the problem of accidentally entering trails left by curvature propulsion; rather, it’s because we have to plan for the possibility of having to conceal ourselves inside a light tomb, or a black domain.”

Half an hour later, the shuttle and Hunter both activated their antimatter engines and began decelerating. Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan were pressed against their seats by the hypergravity, and the porthole screens rose to block out the outside. Violent jolts seized the shuttle, but gradually subsided. The deceleration process took less than twenty minutes. Then the engines shut off, and they were again weightless.

“We’re out of lightspeed,” Guan Yifan said. He pressed a button, and the screens over the two portholes retracted.

Through the portholes, Cheng Xin saw that the blue and red star clusters were gone, and the sun was now a normal sun. But the sight of Planet Blue in the porthole on the other side surprised her: Planet Blue was now “Planet Purple.” Other than the ocean, which was still a light yellow, the rest of the planet was covered by purple—even the snow was gone. She was, however, most shocked by the appearance of space itself.

“What are those lines?” Cheng Xin cried out.

“I think they are… stars.” Yifan was as amazed as she.

All the stars in space had turned into thin lines of light. Cheng Xin was actually familiar with such a sight: She had seen plenty of long-exposure photographs taken of the starry sky from Earth. Due to the Earth’s rotation, the stars in the pictures all became concentric arcs of approximately the same length. But now, the stars she saw were segments of different lengths and aligned every which way. The longest few lines, in fact, took up almost a third of the sky. These lines crossed each other at different angles and made space appear far more confusing and chaotic than before.

“I think they’re stars,” repeated Yifan. “A star’s light must pass through two interfaces before getting to us: First, it must go through the interface between regular lightspeed and reduced lightspeed, and then through the event horizon of the black hole. That’s why the stars look so strange to us now.”

“We’re inside the black domain?”

“That’s right. We’re inside the light tomb.”

The DX3906 solar system was now a reduced-lightspeed black hole completely sealed off from the rest of the universe. The starry sky woven by the multitude of crisscrossing silver threads was a dream that could be seen but would never be achieved.

“Let’s go down to the surface,” Yifan said after a long silence.

The shuttle decelerated further and lowered its orbit. With a series of powerful jolts, it entered the atmosphere of the planet and descended toward the surface of this world in which the two of them were doomed to spend the rest of their lives.

The purple continents took up most of the view from the monitoring system. They were able to confirm that the purple was due to the color of the vegetation. The change in the sun’s radiation had probably caused the plants on Planet Blue to change from blue to purple as they evolved to adapt to the new light.

As a matter of fact, the very existence of the sun puzzled Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan. Since E = mc2, reduced-lightspeed nuclear fusion could produce only small amounts of energy. Perhaps the interior of the sun maintained normal lightspeed?

The shuttle’s landing coordinates were set to the same spot from which it had taken off and left Halo. As they approached the surface, they saw a dense purple forest at the landing spot. Just when the shuttle was about to lift off again in search of a more open spot, the trees dashed away to escape the flames from the shuttle’s thrusters. The shuttle then gently set itself down in the open space vacated by the fleeing trees.

The screen showed that the outside air was breathable. Compared to the last time they had been here, the oxygen content in the atmosphere was substantially higher. Moreover, the atmosphere was denser, and the atmospheric pressure was one and a half times higher than at the last landing.

Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan exited the shuttle and once again stepped onto the surface of Planet Blue. Warm, moist air welcomed them, and a layer of soft, bouncy humus covered the ground. The soil around them was filled with numerous holes left by the roots of the trees that had gotten out of the way. Those trees now huddled around the clearing, their broad leaves rustling in the breeze, like a crowd of whispering giants gathered around them. The clearing was completely covered by their shade. Such dense vegetation made Planet Blue a completely different world than the one they had seen before.