Death's End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3)

by Liu Cixin

Other than the captain, you’re the only officer with the system authorization to prevent or terminate an attack. SCHNEIDER: Correct. JUDGE: And you didn’t. SCHNEIDER: I did not. JUDGE: What went through your mind at that time? SCHNEIDER: At that moment—not the moment of the attack, but the moment when I realized that Bronze Age would never return home, when the ship would be my entire world—I changed. There was no process; I was simply transformed from head to toe. It was like the legendary mental seal. JUDGE: Do you really think that’s a possibility? That your ship was equipped with mental seals? SCHNEIDER: Of course not. I was talking metaphorically. Space itself is a kind of mental seal.… In that moment, I gave up my individual self. My existence would be meaningful only if the collective survived.… I can’t explain it better than that. I don’t expect you to understand, Your Honor. Even if you boarded Bronze Age and sailed twenty thousand AU from the Solar System, or even farther, you still wouldn’t understand. JUDGE: Why? SCHNEIDER: Because you’d know that you could come back! Your soul would have remained on Earth. Only if the space behind the ship turned into a bottomless abyss—only if the Sun, the Earth, and everything else were swallowed by emptiness—would you have a chance of understanding the transformation that I went through.