"Don't tell anyone else. This must never happen again. Never!" Yang looked behind him to be sure there was no one at the door.

Ye nodded again.

"What's the point? The echo wave must be extremely weak, far outside the sensitivity of a conventional radio."

"No. If my guess is right, we should get an extremely strong echo. It will be more powerful than ... I can hardly imagine. As long as the transmission power exceeds a certain threshold, the sun can amplify the signal a hundred millionfold."

Yang looked at Ye strangely. Ye said nothing. They both waited in silence. Yang could clearly hear Ye's breath and heartbeat. He hadn't paid much attention to what she had said, but the feelings he had buried in his heart for many years resurfaced. He could only restrain himself, waiting.

Twenty minutes later, Yang picked up the phone, called the communications office, and asked a few simple questions.

He put the phone down. "They received nothing."

Ye let out a long-held breath and eventually nodded.

"That American astronomer responded, though." Yang took out a thick envelope covered with customs stamps and handed it to Ye. She tore the envelope open and scanned Harry Peterson's letter. The letter said that he had not imagined that there would be colleagues in China studying planetary electromagnetism, and that he wished to collaborate and exchange more information in the future. He had also sent two stacks of paper: the complete record of the waveforms of the radio outbursts from Jupiter. They were clearly photocopied from the long signal recording tape, and would have to be pieced together.

Ye took the dozens of sheets of photocopier paper and started lining them up in two columns on the floor. Halfway through the effort she gave up any hope. She was very familiar with the waveforms of the interference from the two solar outages. They didn't match these two.

Ye slowly picked up the photocopies from the floor. Yang crouched down to help her. When he handed the stack of paper to this woman he loved with all his heart, he saw her smile. The smile was so sad that his heart trembled.

"What's wrong?" he asked, not realizing that he had never spoken to her so softly.

"Nothing. I'm just waking up from a dream." Ye smiled again. She took the stack of photocopies and the envelope and left the office. She went back to her room, picked up her lunch box, and went to the cafeteria. Only mantou buns and pickles were left, and the cafeteria workers told her impatiently that they were closing. So she had no choice but to carry her lunch box outside and walk next to the lip of the cliff, where she sat down on the gra.s.s to chew the cold mantou.

The sun had already set. The Greater Khingan Mountains were gray and indistinct, just like Ye's life. In this gray life, a dream appeared especially colorful and bright. But one always awoke from a dream, just like the sun-which, though it would rise again, brought no fresh hope. In that moment Ye saw the rest of her life suffused with an endless grayness. With tears in her eyes, she smiled again, and continued to chew the cold mantou.

Ye didn't know that at that moment, the first cry that could be heard in s.p.a.ce from civilization on Earth was already spreading out from the sun to the universe at the speed of light. A star-powered radio wave, like a majestic tide, had already crossed the orbit of Jupiter.

Right then, at the frequency of 12,000 MHz, the sun was the brightest star in the entire Milky Way.

23.

Red Coast VI The next eight years were among the most peaceful of Ye Wenjie's life. The horror experienced during the Cultural Revolution gradually subsided, and she was finally able to relax a little. The Red Coast Project completed its testing and breaking-in phases, settling down into routine operation. Fewer and fewer technical problems remained, and both work and life became regular.

In peace, what had been suppressed by anxiety and fear began to reawaken. Ye found that the real pain had just begun. Nightmarish memories, like embers coming back to life, burned more and more fiercely, searing her heart. For most people, perhaps time would have gradually healed these wounds. After all, during the Cultural Revolution, many people suffered fates similar to hers, and compared to many of them, Ye was relatively fortunate. But Ye had the mental habits of a scientist, and she refused to forget. Rather, she looked with a rational gaze on the madness and hatred that had harmed her.

Ye's rational consideration of humanity's evil side began the day she read Silent Spring. As she grew closer to Yang Weining, he was able to get her many cla.s.sics of foreign-language philosophy and history under the guise of gathering technical research materials. The b.l.o.o.d.y history of humanity shocked her, and the extraordinary insights of the philosophers also led her to understand the most fundamental and secret aspects of human nature.

Indeed, even on top of Radar Peak, a place the world almost forgot, the madness and irrationality of the human race were constantly on display. Ye saw that the forest below the peak continued to fall to the deranged logging by her former comrades. Patches of bare earth grew daily, as though those parts of the Greater Khingan Mountains had had their skin torn off. When those patches grew into regions and then into a connected whole, the few surviving trees seemed rather abnormal. To complete the slash-and-burn plan, fires were lit on the bare fields, and Radar Peak became the refuge for birds escaping the fiery inferno. As the fires raged, the sorrowful cries of birds with singed feathers at the base never ceased.

The insanity of the human race had reached its historical zenith. The Cold War was at its height. Nuclear missiles capable of destroying the Earth ten times over could be launched at a moment's notice, spread out among the countless missile silos dotting two continents and hidden within ghostlike nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines patrolling deep under the sea. A single Lafayette- or Yankee-cla.s.s submarine held enough warheads to destroy hundreds of cities and kill hundreds of millions, but most people continued their lives as if nothing was wrong.

As an astrophysicist, Ye was strongly against nuclear weapons. She knew this was a power that should belong only to the stars. She knew also that the universe had even more terrible forces: black holes, antimatter, and more. Compared to those forces, a thermonuclear bomb was nothing but a tiny candle. If humans obtained mastery over one of those other forces, the world might be vaporized in a moment. In the face of madness, rationality was powerless.

Four years after entering Red Coast Base, Ye and Yang married. Yang truly loved her. For love, he gave up his future.

The fiercest stage of the Cultural Revolution was over, and the political climate had grown somewhat milder. Yang wasn't persecuted, exactly, for his marriage. However, because he married a woman who had been deemed to be a counter-revolutionary, he was viewed as politically immature and lost his position as chief engineer. The only reason that he and his wife were allowed to stay on the base as ordinary technicians was because the base could not do without their technical skills.

Ye accepted Yang's proposal mainly out of grat.i.tude. If he hadn't brought her into this safe haven in her most perilous moment, she would probably no longer be alive. Yang was a talented man, cultured and with good taste. She didn't find him unpleasant, but her heart was like ashes from which the flame of love could no longer be lit.

As she pondered human nature, Ye was faced with an ultimate loss of purpose and sank into another spiritual crisis. She had once been an idealist who needed to give all her talent to a great goal, but now she realized that all that she had done was meaningless, and the future could not have any meaningful pursuits, either. As this mental state persisted, she gradually felt more and more alienated from the world. She didn't belong. The sense of wandering in the spiritual wilderness tormented her. After she made a home with Yang, her soul became homeless.

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from s.p.a.ce. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance-without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end.

On this day, however, Ye saw something odd when she glanced at the waveform display. Even experts had a hard time telling with the naked eye whether a waveform carried information. But Ye was so familiar with the noise of the universe that she could tell that the wave that now moved in front of her eyes had something extra. The thin curve, rising and falling, seemed to possess a soul. She was certain that the radio signal before her had been modulated by intelligence.

She rushed to another terminal and checked the computer's rating of the signal's recognizability: AAAAA. Before this, no radio signal received by Red Coast ever garnered a recognizability rating above C. An A rating meant the likelihood that the transmission contained intelligent information was greater than 90 percent. A rating of AAAAA was a special, extreme case: It meant the received transmission used the exact same coding language as Red Coast's own outbound transmission.

Ye turned on the Red Coast deciphering system. The software attempted to decipher any signal whose recognizability rating was above B. During the entire time that the Red Coast Project had been running, it had never been invoked even once in real use. Based on test data, deciphering a transmission suspected of being a message might require a few days or even a few months of computing time, and the result would be failure more than half the time. But this time, as soon as the file containing the original transmission was submitted, the display showed that the deciphering was complete.

Ye opened the resulting doc.u.ment, and, for the first time, a human read a message from another world.

The content was not what anyone had imagined. It was a warning repeated three times.

Do not answer!

Do not answer!!

Do not answer!!!

Still caught up by the dizzying excitement and confusion, Ye deciphered a second message.

This world has received your message.

I am a pacifist in this world. It is the luck of your civilization that I am the first to receive your message. I am warning you: Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!

There are tens of millions of stars in your direction. As long as you do not answer, this world will not be able to ascertain the source of your transmission.

But if you do answer, the source will be located right away. Your planet will be invaded. Your world will be conquered!

Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!

As she read the flashing green text on the display, Ye was no longer capable of thinking clearly. Her mind, inhibited by shock and excitement, could only understand this: No more than nine years had pa.s.sed since the time she had sent the message to the sun. Then the source of this transmission must be around four light-years away. It could only have come from the closest extra-solar stellar system: Alpha Centauri.34 The universe was not desolate. The universe was not empty. The universe was full of life! Humankind had cast their gaze to the end of the universe, but they had no idea that intelligent life already existed around the stars closest to them!

Ye stared at the waveform display: The signal continued to stream from the universe into the Red Coast antenna. She opened up another interface and began real-time deciphering. The messages began to show up immediately on the screen.

During the next four hours, Ye learned of the existence of Trisolaris, learned of the civilization that had been reborn again and again, and learned of their plan to migrate to the stars.

At four in the morning, the transmission from Alpha Centauri ended. The deciphering system continued to run uselessly and emitted an unceasing string of failure codes. The Red Coast monitoring system was once again only hearing the noise of the universe.

But Ye was certain that what she had just experienced was not a dream.

The sun really was an amplifying antenna. But why had her experiment eight years ago not received any echoes? Why had the waveforms of Jupiter's radio outbursts not matched the later radiation from the sun? Later, Ye came up with many reasons. It was possible that the base communication office couldn't receive radio waves at that frequency, or maybe the office did receive the echo but it sounded like noise and so the operator thought it was nothing. As for the waveforms, it was possible that when the sun amplified the radio waves, it also added another wave to it. It would likely be a periodic wave that could be easily filtered out by the alien deciphering system, but to her unaided eye, the waveform from Jupiter and from the sun would appear very different. Years later, after Ye had left Red Coast, she would manage to confirm her last guess: The sun had added a sine wave.

She looked around alertly. There were three others in the main computer room. Two of the three were chatting in a corner, while the last was napping before a terminal. In the data a.n.a.lysis section of the monitoring system, only the two terminals in front of her could view the recognizability rating of a signal and access the deciphering system.

Maintaining her composure, she worked quickly and moved all of the received messages to a multiply-encrypted, invisible subdirectory. Then she copied over a segment of noise received a year ago as a subst.i.tute for the transmission received during the last five hours.

Finally, from the terminal, she placed a short message into the Red Coast transmission buffer.

Ye got up and left the monitoring main control room. A chilly wind blew against her feverish face. Dawn had just brightened the eastern sky, and she followed the dimly lit pebble-paved path to the transmission main control room. Above her, the Red Coast antenna lay open, silently, like a giant palm toward the universe. The dawn turned the guard at the door into a silhouette, and as usual, he did not pay attention to Ye as she entered.

The transmission main control room was much dimmer than the monitoring main control room. Ye pa.s.sed through rows of cabinets to stand in front of the control panel and flipped more than a dozen switches with practiced ease to warm up the transmission system. The two men on duty next to the control panel looked up at her with sleepy eyes, and one turned to glance at the clock. Then one of them went back to his nap while the other flipped through a well-thumbed newspaper. At the base, Ye had no political status, but she did have some freedom in technical matters. She often tested the equipment before a transmission. Although she was early today-the transmission wasn't scheduled to occur until three hours later-warming up a bit early wasn't that unusual.

What happened next was the longest half hour of her life. During this time, Ye adjusted the transmission frequency to the optimal frequency for amplification by the solar energy mirror, and increased the transmission power to maximum. Then, putting her eyes to the eyepiece of the optical positioning system, she watched the sun rise above the horizon, activated the positioning system for the antenna, and slowly aligned it with the sun. As the gigantic antenna turned, the rumbling noise shook the main control room. One of the men on duty looked at Ye again, but said nothing.

The sun was now completely above the horizon. The crosshair of the Red Coast positioning system was aimed at its upper edge to account for the time it would take for the radio wave to travel to the sun. The transmission system was ready.

The Transmit b.u.t.ton was a long rectangle-very similar to the s.p.a.ce key on a computer keyboard, except that it was red.

Ye's hand hovered two centimeters above it.

The fate of the entire human race was now tied to these slender fingers.

Without hesitation, Ye pressed the b.u.t.ton.

"What are you doing?" one of the men on duty asked, still sleepy.

Ye smiled at him and said nothing. She pressed a yellow b.u.t.ton to stop the transmission. Then she moved the control stick until the antenna was pointed elsewhere. She left the control panel and walked away.

The man looked at his watch. It was time to get off work. He picked up the diary and thought about recording Ye's operation of the transmission system. It was, after all, out of the ordinary. But then he looked at the paper tape and saw that she had transmitted for no more than three seconds. He tossed the diary back, yawned, put on his army cap, and left.

The message that was winging its way to the sun said, Come here! I will help you conquer this world. Our civilization is no longer capable of solving its own problems. We need your force to intervene.

The newly risen sun dazzled Ye Wenjie. Not too far from the door of the main control room, she collapsed onto the lawn in a faint.

When she woke up, she found herself in the base clinic. Next to her bed sat Yang, watching her with concern, like that time many years ago on the helicopter. The doctor told Ye to be careful and get plenty of rest.

"You are pregnant," he said.

24.

Rebellion After Ye Wenjie finished recounting the history of her first contact with Trisolaris, the abandoned cafeteria remained silent. Many present were apparently just hearing the complete story for the first time. w.a.n.g was deeply absorbed by the narrative and temporarily forgot about the danger and terror he faced. Unable to stop himself, he asked, "How did the ETO then develop to its present scale?"

Ye replied, "I'd have to start with how I got to know Evans.... But every comrade here already knows that part of history, so we shouldn't waste time on it now. I can tell you later. However, whether we'll have such an opportunity depends on you.... Xiao w.a.n.g, let's talk about your nanomaterial."

"This ... Lord that you talk about. Why is it so afraid of nanomaterial?"

"Because it can allow humans to escape gravity and engage in s.p.a.ce construction at a much larger scale."

"The s.p.a.ce elevator?" w.a.n.g suddenly understood.

"Yes. If ultrastrong nanomaterials could be ma.s.s produced, then that would lay the technical foundation for building a s.p.a.ce elevator from the ground up to a geostationary point in s.p.a.ce. For our Lord, this is but a tiny invention; but for humans on Earth, its meaning would be significant. With this technology, humans could easily enter near-Earth s.p.a.ce and build up large-scale defensive structures. Thus, this technology must be extinguished."

"What is at the end of the countdown?" w.a.n.g asked the question that frightened him the most.

Ye smiled. "I don't know."

"But trying to stop me is useless! This is not basic research. Based on what we've already found out, someone else can figure out the rest." w.a.n.g's voice was loud but anxious.

"Yes, it is rather useless. It's far more effective to confuse the researchers' minds. But, like you point out, we didn't stop the progress in time. After all, what you do is applied research. Our technique is far more effective against basic research...."

"Speaking of basic research, how did your daughter die?"

The question silenced Ye for a few seconds. w.a.n.g noticed that her eyes dimmed almost imperceptibly. But she then resumed the conversation. "Indeed, compared to our Lord, who possesses peerless strength, everything we do is meaningless. We're just doing whatever we can."

Just as she finished speaking, several loud booms rang out and the doors to the cafeteria broke open. A team of soldiers holding submachine guns rushed in. w.a.n.g realized that they were not armed police, but the real army. Noiselessly they proceeded along the walls and soon surrounded the rebels of the ETO. Shi Qiang was the last to enter. His jacket was open, and he held the barrel of a pistol so that the grip was like the head of a hammer.

Da Shi looked around arrogantly, then suddenly dashed forward. His hand flashed and there was the dull thud of metal striking against a skull. An ETO rebel fell to the ground, and the gun that he was trying to draw tumbled to fall some distance away. Several soldiers began to shoot at the ceiling, and dust and debris fell. Someone grabbed w.a.n.g Miao and pulled him away from the ETO ranks until he was safe behind a row of soldiers.

"Drop all your weapons onto the table! I swear I'm going to kill the next son of a b.i.t.c.h who tries anything." Da Shi pointed at the submachine guns arrayed behind him. "I know that none of you is afraid to die, but we're not afraid either. I'm going to say this up front: Normal police procedures and laws don't apply to you. Even the human laws of warfare no longer apply to you. Since you've decided to treat the entire human race as your enemy, there's no longer anything we wouldn't do to you."

There was some commotion among the ETO members, but no one panicked. Ye's face remained impa.s.sive. Three people suddenly rushed out of the crowd, including the young woman who had twisted Pan Han's neck. They ran toward the three-body sculpture, and each grabbed one of the spheres and held it in front of his or her chest.

The young woman raised the bright metal sphere before her with both hands, as though she were getting ready to start a gymnastics routine. Smiling, she said, "Officers, we hold in our hands three nuclear bombs, each with a yield of about one point five kilotons. Not too big, since we like small toys. This is the detonator."

Everyone in the cafeteria froze. The only one who moved was Shi Qiang. He put his gun back into the holster under his left arm and placed his hands together calmly.

"Our demand is simple: Let the commander go," the young woman said. "Then we can play whatever game you want." Her tone suggested that she wasn't afraid of Shi Qiang and the soldiers at all.

"I stay with my comrades," Ye said, calmly.

"Can you confirm her claim?" Da Shi asked an officer next to him, an explosives expert.

The officer threw a bag in front of the three ETO members holding the spheres. One of the ETO fighters picked up the bag and took out a spring scale, a bigger version of the ones some customers brought to street markets to verify the portions measured by vendors. He placed his metal sphere into the bag, attached it to the spring scale, and held it aloft. The gauge extended about halfway and stopped.

The young woman chuckled. The explosives expert also laughed, contemptuously.

The ETO member took out the sphere and tossed it on the ground. Another ETO fighter picked up the scale and the bag and repeated the procedure with his sphere, and ended up also tossing the sphere to the ground.