Death's End

“Fuck them all!” Camille screamed. Even with the helicopters thundering overhead, a few onlookers turned to stare. “Fucking pigs don’t know how to do anything except fuck around down here in the mud.”

“Who are you talking about?” asked Vadimov.

“Everyone! The human race! Half a century ago, we walked on the moon. But now, we have nothing, can’t change anything!”

Cheng Xin bent down and picked up the document. Indeed, it was the interim feasibility report. She and Vadimov flipped through it, but it was highly technical and difficult to skim. Wade had also returned to their circle—the PDC secretary had informed him that the session would begin in fifteen minutes.

Camille calmed down a bit in the presence of the PIA chief. “NASA has conducted two small tests of nuclear pulse propulsion in space, and you can read the results in the report. Basically, our proposed spacecraft is still too heavy to reach the required speed. They calculate the entire assembly needs to be one-twentieth its proposed mass. One-twentieth! That’s ten kilograms!

“But wait, they also sent us some good news. The sail, it turns out, can be reduced to under ten kilograms. They took pity on us and told us that we can have an effective payload of half a kilogram. But that is the absolute limit, because any increase in the payload will require thicker cables for attachment to the sail. Every additional gram in the payload means three more grams of cables. Thus, we’re stuck with zero point five kilograms. Haha, it’s just like our angel predicted: light as a feather!”

Wade smiled. “We should ask Monnier, my mother’s kitten, to go. Though, even she would have to lose half of her weight.”

Whenever others were happily absorbed by their work, Wade appeared gloomy; when others were forlorn, he became relaxed and jokey. Initially, Cheng Xin had attributed this quirk to part of his leadership style. But Vadimov told her that she didn’t know how to read people. Wade’s behavior had nothing to do with his leadership style or rallying the troops—he just enjoyed watching others lose hope, even if he himself was among those who ought to be in despair. He took pleasure in the desperation of others. Cheng Xin had been surprised that Vadimov, who always tried to speak of others generously, held such an opinion of Wade. But right now, it did look as though Wade took pleasure in watching the three of them suffer.

Cheng Xin felt weak. Days of exhaustion hit her at once, and she sank to the lawn.

“Get up,” said Wade.

For the first time, Cheng Xin refused to obey an order from him. She remained on the ground. “I’m tired.” Her voice was wooden.

“You, and you,” Wade said, pointing to Camille and Cheng Xin. “You’re not allowed to lose control like this in the future. You must advance, stop at nothing to advance!”

“There’s no way forward,” said Vadimov. “We have to give up.”

“The reason you think there’s no path forward is because you don’t know how to disregard the consequences.”

“What about the PDC session? Cancel it?”

“No, we should proceed as though nothing has happened. But we can’t prepare new documents, so we have to orally present the new plan.”

“What new plan? A five-hundred-gram cat?”

“Of course not.”

Vadimov’s and Camille’s eyes brightened. Cheng Xin also seemed to have recovered her strength. She stood up.

Accompanied by military escort vehicles and helicopters, an ambulance departed with the Fourth Wallfacer. Against the lights of New York City, Wade’s figure appeared as a black ghost, his eyes glinting with a cold light.

“We’ll send only a brain,” he said.

Excerpt from A Past Outside of Time The Staircase Program

In fourteenth-century China, during the Ming Dynasty, the Chinese navy invented a weapon called Huolong Chu Shui, literally meaning “fiery dragon issuing from water.” This was a multistage gunpowder rocket similar in principle to antiship missiles of the Common Era. The missile itself (Huolong) was augmented with booster rockets. When launched, the booster rockets propelled the missile toward the enemy ship by flying just above the surface of the water. As the booster rockets burnt out, they ignited a cluster of smaller rocket arrows stored inside the missile, and these would shoot out the front, causing massive damage to enemy ships.

Ancient warfare also saw the use of repeating crossbows, which prefigured Common Era machine guns. These appeared in both the West and the East, and Chinese versions have been discovered in tombs dating from the fourth century B.C.

Both of these weapon systems were attempts to utilize primitive technology in novel ways that demonstrated a power incongruous for their time period.