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Ten thousand times the web could be destroyed, and ten thousand times the spider would rebuild it. There was neither annoyance nor despair, nor any delight, just as it had been for a billion years.
The critical question is who gets to leave, and who has to stay. This isn’t ordinary inequality. It’s a question of survival, and no matter who gets to leave—elites, the rich, or ordinary people—so long as some people get left behind, it means the collapse of humanity’s fundamental value system and ethical bottom line.
“I know you’re alone. But are you with her?”
“Like I’ve said before, this is wartime. A war to defend all humanity. Even if you’ve forgotten that you’re an American, you at least remember you’re human, right?”
“But what else can we do? The public will believe whatever it wants. I’ve been in this job for a while now, and I haven’t seen any major space project that they haven’t misinterpreted.”
On the short journey, it was like he had returned to a child’s sense of helplessness and wanted someone to hold his hand and guide him forward. But no one extended a hand.
And so Luo Ji the Wallfacer walked as if sleepwalking through absurd fantastic reality. In his trance, he had lost the capacity for rational thought and was unaware of where he came from, much less where he was going.
They had homes in England and in Japan, but Hines preferred his Japanese home. He said that the moonlight of the East calmed his heart.
Her voice was soft, but the summer insects stopped chirping and peace flooded like water over everything.
“Keiko, come with me to the end of days,” Hines murmured.
Mom, I’m going to be a firefly.
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,”
This is the biggest difference between you and me: I’m just someone who faithfully carries out orders. You, you’re someone who always has to ask why.” “Is that wrong?”
“Let it stay a legend. You have your wealth and technology. Legends are all we have.”
“I sympathize with you. After so many years, you still don’t know what our needs truly are.” “You can tell me.” “Weapons? Money? No, no. What we need is far more precious. The organization doesn’t exist because of Seldon’s ambitious goals. You can’t get a sane, rational person to believe in and die for that. It exists because it possesses something, something that’s its air and blood, and without which the organization would wither away immediately.” “What’s that?” “Hatred.”
“You see, hatred is a treasure more precious than gold or diamonds, and a weapon keener than any in the world, but now it’s gone. It’s not yours to give back. So the organization, like me, does not have long to live.”
“Ah, the wise always die young. May he find heaven, whichever one it is.…”
He slowed his pace—not for the artwork, which didn’t interest him at all, but to let the distance between them grow and allow him to appreciate her among this world of art, gazing upon the beauty of this Eastern woman along with the full-figured Greek gods, angels, and the Blessed Virgin in the surrounding classical oil paintings. Like the glass pyramid in the courtyard, she soon blended into the environment and became part of the sacred realm of art. Without her, this place would be missing something. In a reverie or a dream or a vision, he let time pass by quietly.
The dam in Luo Ji’s soul had sprung a tiny leak, and this trickle eroded it, expanding the tiny fissure into a turbulent stream. He grew afraid and strove to patch the crack in the dam, but was unable to. A collapse was inevitable.
“I know skepticism is just a way to comfort myself, but I wanted to live out my life in comfort. God, now I’m not even lucky enough for that.”
The only constant in a world of tremendous change is the swift passage of time. Five years passed like a blur.
What will I do without them? What will I do without them? his heart asked over and over. Finally it slipped out of his mouth as he slid down the pillar to the ground.
My love, wait for me at doomsday.
As Rey Diaz feared the sun, Luo Ji had acquired a severe phobia of the stars. He bowed his head, and through chattering teeth, said to himself: “Wallfacer Luo Ji, I am your Wallbreaker.”
“General, what are you talking about? God wouldn’t choose a mouthpiece from an atheist nation.”
You don't know that.
Give me your hopeless souls, Your fearful crowds that thirst for victory, The dazed refuse of your treacherous shoals. Send these, the downcast, wand’ring ones to me, For lo, my lamp of golden faith consoles.
“Gentlemen, I won’t miss this place. I’ve wasted these two decades, and no one here understands me. I want to go back to my homeland, back to my people. Yes, my homeland and my people. I miss them.” To everyone’s surprise, the big man’s eyes shone with tears. At last he said, “I want to go back to my homeland. This is not part of the plan.” When he walked out the door of the UN General Assembly building, Rey Diaz opened his arms wide to the sun and called out with relish, “Ah, my sun!” His two-decade-long heliophobia had vanished.
“Right now, the greatest obstacle to humanity’s survival comes from itself.”
Rey Diaz held up his hands, and, with tears in his eyes, called out to the crowd in a voice dripping with emotion, “Ah, my people!” The first stone thrown by his people struck him on his outstretched left hand, the second hit him in the chest, and the third smashed into his forehead and nearly knocked him out. After that, the people’s stones came like raindrops, and had practically buried his lifeless body by the end. The last stone that hit Wallfacer Rey Diaz was thrown by an old woman, who struggled to carry it up to his corpse, then said, in Spanish, “Evildoer! You would kill everyone. My
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Time is the one thing that can’t be stopped. Like a sharp blade, it silently cuts through hard and soft, constantly advancing. Nothing is capable of jolting it even the slightest bit, but it changes everything.
“How many times have I saved your life today, my boy?” Shi Qiang asked, rubbing his hands.
“When I entered hibernation, desertification was just starting,” another neighbor said. “It’s not what you imagine, like the desert advancing from the Great Wall. No! It was patchwork erosion. Perfectly fine plots of land in the interior began turning to desert simultaneously, and it spread from those points, like how a damp cloth dries in the sun.”
“The Great Ravine lasted for about half a century, and in those fifty-odd years, the world population dropped from 8.3 billion to 3.5 billion. Think about what that means!”
‘Make time for life, or life won’t make time.’
The ocean was space in miniature on Earth.
“Remember the Meditation Room in the UN Assembly Building?” Hines said. “It was always deserted. Tourists only visited occasionally.… Do you remember the chunk of iron ore? She committed seppuku on top of it.” “Oh…”
“I wouldn’t usually bother the girls I liked. I believed in what Goethe said: ‘If I love you, what business is it of yours?’”
“Then … what’s it here for?” the lieutenant colonel blurted out. “Who knows? Maybe it really is just a messenger. But it’s here to give humanity a different message,” Ding Yi said, turning his gaze away from the droplet. “What?” “If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?”
But the four members of the expedition team never saw the second halo emerge, because the first one was accompanied by ultra-high temperatures approaching that of the sun’s core, which vaporized them instantly.
The droplet continued to traverse the length of the array, penetrating one stellar-class warship after another at intervals of less than a second.
The droplet continued its advance, following a straight line through more warships and leaving a line of ten nuclear fireballs behind it. The entire fleet shone in the flames of these burning small suns as if it had been set ablaze and turned into a sea of light. Behind the line of fireballs, the melted warships continued to fling waves of hot molten metal into space, as if massive rocks were being pitched into a magma sea. In one minute and eighteen seconds, the droplet had completed a two-thousand-kilometer course, passing through each of the hundred ships in the first row of the combined
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Only two things were certain: 1. The enemy space force was located at the position occupied by the droplet, and 2. The force was invisible to every means of detection they possessed.
For nearly two centuries, research into space strategy and tactics had dreamed up every possible kind of extreme battle condition, but witnessing a hundred warships blowing up like a string of firecrackers in under a minute was beyond what their minds could comprehend.
But now the combined fleet had to face facts: Their only enemy was a tiny probe, one drop of water out of the enormous ocean of Trisolaran strength, and this probe attacked using one of the oldest and most primitive tactics known to human navies: ramming.
Some people must die, or everyone will die.
“Children,” Zhang Beihai said, the first time he had addressed them this way. Even though his back was turned, they could imagine that his eyes were as calm as water. “Let me do this.”
The two dark ships became one with the darkness, separated by the Solar System and drifting further apart. Carrying with them the entirety of human thoughts and memories, and embracing all of the Earth’s glory and dreams, they quietly disappeared into the eternal night.
The past was like a handful of sand you thought you were squeezing tightly, but which had already run out through the cracks between your fingers. Memory was a river that had run dry long ago, leaving only scattered gravel in a lifeless riverbed. He had lived life always looking out for the next thing, and whenever he had gained, he had also lost, leaving him with little in the end.
“What? You don’t believe I’m an angel of justice?” “You’d have to beat me to death before I’d say that.”
