On the vast continent on the other side of the Pacific, a civilization had already endured for five thousand years. Now, in that ancient land, people were heading day and night toward the capital of that age-old kingdom carrying huge quantities of ancient books collected from every corner of the land. The imperial edict to compile the Sikuquanshu had been issued two years ago, and books were still streaming endlessly toward the capital. In a massive wooden hall in the Forbidden City, the Qianlong Emperor was constantly making the rounds of the rows of bookcases holding the works amassed for the library project, now divided into four general categories, Classics, Histories, Masters, and Collections, and stored on these huge shelves.
Leaving his attendants outside the door, the emperor carefully entered the archives, three scholars wearing peacock feathers on their hats,[2] Dai Zhen, Yao Nai, and Ji Yun, leading the way carrying lanterns. It was they, not the titled imperial clansmen, who were the true compilers of the encyclopedia. The tall cases slipped slowly past the four men, like black city walls in the dim lantern light. They came to a pile of bamboo slips; the emperor picked up one bundle in trembling hands, the wavering yellow light making him feel as if he were at the dark floor of a book canyon, the canyon of time’s mountain, and beneath the book cliff face, countless ghosts from across five thousand years took silently to the air.
“How time flows onward, Your Majesty,”[3] whispered one compiler.
Unimaginably far out in space, the Dead Star continued its march toward doomsday. There were more helium flashes, but smaller in scale than the first, and helium fusion produced a new core of carbon and oxygen. Then that core ignited, producing neon, sulfur, and silicon, and then a huge number of neutrinos appeared in the star, spooky particles that carried off the core’s energy without interacting with any matter.
Over time, the center of the Dead Star grew unable to support its heavy crust, and the gravity that had given it life now worked the reverse. Under gravity’s pull, the Dead Star collapsed into a dense ball, its constituent atoms shattered under the impossibly huge stresses, neutron crushing into neutron. Now a teaspoon of matter from the Dead Star had a mass of a billion tons. First the core collapsed, and then the unsupported crust smashed into the tightly packed center, triggering a final fusion reaction.
An epic of gravity and fire spanning 500 million years came to an end in a cosmos-splitting snow-white blast, and the Dead Star shattered into trillions of fragments and a giant quantity of dust. Its enormous energy, converted into a torrent of EM radiation and high-energy particles, surged outward in all directions. Three years after the explosion, the tide of energy slipped easily through that cosmic dust cloud, heading for the sun.
When the Dead Star exploded, humanity was flourishing eight light-years away. Though they knew they were living on but a speck of dust in the cosmos, they had not truly come to accept this fact. In the millennium that had just ended, they had harnessed the immense power of nuclear fission and fusion and had created complex thinking machines using electrical impulses confined in silicon, imagining they had the power to conquer the universe. No one knew that the energy from the Dead Star was making its inexorable way toward their small blue planet at the speed of light.
After passing the three stars of Centaurus, the Dead Star’s light spent another four years in vast, lonely outer space until at last it reached the outskirts of the solar system. In that region, inhabited only by tailless comets, the energy from the Dead Star had its first encounter with humanity: More than a billion kilometers away from Earth, a man-made body was making its lonely sojourn into the Milky Way—Voyager, an interstellar probe launched from Earth in the 1970s. It was shaped like a weird umbrella, its parabolic antenna opened toward the Earth. The probe carried humanity’s calling card, a lead-alloy plate inscribed with two naked humans, a disc bearing the UN secretary general’s greeting to alien civilization, recordings of Earth’s oceans, birdcalls, and the traditional Chinese tune “Liu Shui.”
Earth had its first taste of the grimness of the cosmos when its emissary to the galaxy passed into the light of the Dead Star and turned immediately into a hunk of blazing metal. Its umbrella antenna warped as its temperature suddenly shot up from near absolute zero. The intensity of the high-energy radiation overloaded a Geiger counter and caused it to read out only zeros. The UV probe and magnetic-field instruments remained operational, and in the just two seconds before the circuits were fried by radiation, Voyager sent back to its creators on Earth a stream of unbelievable data that, owing to the damage to its antenna, would never be received by the high-sensitivity arrays in Nevada and Australia. No matter; humanity would soon be able to measure the unbelievable for themselves.
The Dead Star’s beam crossed the boundary of the solar system and kicked up steam on the blue crystalline solid-nitrogen ground of Pluto, and then met Neptune and Uranus, turning their rings crystal clear. The storm of high-energy particles passed Saturn and Jupiter, phosphorescing their liquid matter, just after the Beijing schoolchildren began their graduation party. The energy traveled for another half hour at light speed and reached the moon, shedding blinding light on Mare Imbrium and the crater of Copernicus. It lit up the set of footprints left behind by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin four decades earlier under the watchful eyes of hundreds of millions of television viewers on the nearby blue planet, who in that moment of excitement were convinced that the cosmos had been put there for them.
One second later, the Dead Star’s light completed its eight-year journey across space to Earth.
THE MIDNIGHT SUN
It was midday!
That was the children’s first reaction when their vision returned. The light had come so suddenly it was like the flip of some cosmic light switch, and they had been momentarily blinded.
It was 8:18 in the evening, but the children were standing in the blazing light of noon. They looked up into the blue and took in a cold breath. This was most definitely not the same blue as usual; the sky was a startling blue-black, like color recorded on ultrasensitive film. And it seemed unusually clean, as if a grayish-white layer of skin had been peeled off and the sky’s pure-blue flesh was liable to start bleeding at any moment. The city was lit bright by the light, and the sight of the sun made the children cry out in alarm.
This was not humanity’s sun!
The light that had broken into the night sky was too powerful to look at directly, but through the gaps in their fingers they caught glimpses of a sun that wasn’t round—it was a shapeless point like other visible stars, an intense white light emitting from some point in the universe, but it didn’t seem small. It had an extremely high brightness of −51.23, almost an order of magnitude greater than the sun, and its light scattered in the atmosphere, turning it into an enormous, blinding poison spider hanging in the western sky.
The Dead Star appeared suddenly and reached peak brightness in a matter of seconds. Earth’s eastern hemisphere was the first to see it, and the largest panic began almost immediately. Everyone lost all capacity for normal reason and action; the entire world was paralyzed. The spectacle was grandest for viewers in the Atlantic, and on the west coast of Europe and Africa. Here is an eyewitness account from an observer in the Atlantic:
At daybreak we discovered an anomaly: after the sun rose above the ocean, light continued to pour over the eastern horizon, white light, radiating from some unknown source below the surface of the water, as if a huge lamp were hidden beneath the eastern ocean. The light intensified. It was so strange it unsettled everyone on board. There was nothing but static on the radio. The second daybreak grew brighter and brighter, and “dawn” clouds shone with a blinding light, like lightbulb filaments…. Our fear grew with the light. We all knew that the light source would rise at some point, but no one knew what we would see. At last, three hours after dawn, we saw a second sunrise. The captain later offered this apt description of the new sun: “It’s like a giant cosmic welder!” Of the two suns in the sky, it was our old one that was the most frightening: it was so much dimmer than the new one that it looked black by comparison! Not everyone could handle the nightmare, and some people tore madly about the decks, or jumped overboard….