Death's End

Life in the resettlement zone was difficult. Near the beginning, when few people were there, it was still tolerable. The harassment by other people was far harder to bear than the material deprivations. At first, Cheng Xin and AA had a shelter-house all to themselves. But as additional migrants came, more people were packed into the shelter-house, until eight women in total shared it. The other six women had all been born during the paradise-like Deterrence Era. Here, for the first time in their lives, they encountered rationing of water and food, dead walls that did not come alive with information, rooms with no air-conditioning, public toilets and showers, bunk beds…. This was a society of absolute equality: Money had no use here, and everyone received exactly the same ration. They had only ever seen such austerity in historical films, and life in the resettlement zones felt like hell. Naturally, Cheng Xin became the target of their fury. Unprovoked, they would curse at her and accuse her of being a waste of space—after all, she had not been able to deter Trisolaris. Her worst sin had been giving up as soon as she received the warning: Had she activated the gravitational wave broadcast, the Trisolarans would have run away in terror, and at least humanity would enjoy a few more decades of happiness. Even if the broadcast led to the immediate destruction of the Earth, it would be better than the current conditions.

At the beginning, the abuse was merely verbal, but it soon turned physical, and they began to snatch Cheng Xin’s rations away from her. AA did all she could to protect her friend. She fought the other women, sometimes several times a day. Once, she grabbed the meanest one by the hair and slammed her head against a bedpost until blood covered her face. Thereafter, they left her and Cheng Xin alone.

But the enmity directed at Cheng Xin wasn’t limited to their roommates: The migrants in the shelter-houses nearby also came to harass her. Sometimes they threw stones at Cheng Xin’s shelter-house; sometimes a mob surrounded the shelter-house and shouted curses at her.

Cheng Xin bore all the abuse with equanimity. Indeed, the abuse even comforted her. As the failed Swordholder, she felt she deserved worse.

This persisted until an old man named Fraisse came and invited her and AA to move into his place. Fraisse was an Aboriginal man, over eighty years of age but still hale and hearty, with a white beard on his black face. As a native, he had been temporarily allowed to keep his own house. During the Common Era, he had been in charge of an organization for Aboriginal cultural preservation, and he had gone into hibernation at the beginning of the Crisis Era in order to continue his task in the future. When he awoke, he saw that his prediction had come true: The Australian Aboriginals and their culture were close to disappearing.

Fraisse’s house, built back in the twenty-first century, was old but solid and had a nice copse of trees nearby. Once they moved there, Cheng Xin and AA’s lives became much more stable. More importantly, the old man provided them with spiritual tranquility. He did not share the popular searing anger and bone-deep hatred toward the Trisolarans; indeed, he rarely talked about the crisis at all. All he said was, “Whatever people do, the gods remember.”

True. Even people still remembered whatever people did. Five centuries ago, civilized men of Earth—most of whom had actually been criminals in Europe—stepped onto this continent and shot the Aboriginal peoples in the woods for sport. Later, even when they recognized that their quarries were men and women, not beasts, the slaughter continued. The Aboriginal peoples had lived in this vast land for tens of thousands of years. By the time the white men arrived, the native population was more than a half million, but that number soon diminished to thirty thousand refugees who had to escape to the desolate western deserts to survive….

When Sophon proclaimed the establishment of “reservations,” people paid attention. It brought to mind the tragic fate of the native peoples of North America, another faraway continent where the arrival of civilized men of Earth brought sorrow.

When she first arrived at Fraisse’s, AA was curious about everything in the old house. It resembled a museum of Aboriginal culture. Everywhere there were rock and bark paintings, musical instruments made of wooden slats and hollow logs, woven grass skirts, boomerangs, spears, and other such objects. AA was most interested in a few pots of paint made of white clay and red and yellow ocher. She knew right away what they were for, and, dipping a finger into the pots, started to paint her own face. Then she began dancing in imitation of tribal dancers she had seen somewhere, making fearsome noises as she danced.

“This would have terrified those bitches living with us,” she said.