Wang felt the great force generated by the movement of the pendulum, as though the ground was shaken by its swings. Unlike a pendulum in the real world, this giant pendulum’s period was not stable, but changed constantly. This was due to the continually shifting gravitational attraction of the giant moon. When the giant moon was on this side of the planet, its gravity partially canceled out the gravity of the planet, causing the pendulum to lose weight. When it was on the other side of the planet, its gravity was added to the gravity of the planet, causing the pendulum’s weight to increase, almost to the level it would have had before the great rip.
As he gazed up at the awe-inspiring swings of the Trisolaran Pendulum Monument, Wang asked himself, Does it represent the yearning for order, or the surrender to chaos? Wang also thought of the pendulum as a gigantic metal fist, swinging eternally against the unfeeling universe, noiselessly shouting out Trisolaran civilization’s indomitable battle cry….
As Wang Miao’s eyes blurred with tears, he saw a line of text appear against the background of the swinging pendulum:
Four hundred and fifty-one years later, Civilization 192 was destroyed by the fiery flames of twin suns appearing together. It had reached the Atomic Age and the Information Age.
Civilization 192 was a milestone in Trisolaran civilization. It finally proved that the three-body problem had no solution. It gave up the useless effort that had already lasted through 191 cycles and set the course for future civilizations. Thus, the goal of Three Body has changed.
The new goal is: Head for the stars; find a new home.
We invite you to log on again.
After logging out of Three Body, Wang felt exhausted, the same way he did after each previous session. But this time, he only rested half an hour before logging in again.
This time, against the pitch-black background, an unexpected line of text appeared:
The situation is urgent. The Three Body servers are about to be shut down. Please log on freely during the remaining time. Three Body will now go directly to the final scene.
20
Three Body: Expedition
The chilly dawn revealed a bare landscape. There was no pyramid, no United Nations Headquarters, no sign of the Pendulum Monument. Only a dark desert extended to the horizon, just as Wang had seen the first time he had logged in.
But Wang soon realized that he was wrong. What he thought were numerous stones arrayed across the desert were not stones at all, but human heads. The ground was filled with a densely packed crowd.
From where he stood on a small hill, Wang could see no end to the sea of people. He estimated the number of individuals within his view alone to be in the hundreds of millions. All the Trisolarans on the planet were probably gathered here.
The silence of hundreds of millions created a suffocating sense of strangeness. What are they waiting for? Wang looked around and noticed everyone was gazing up at the sky.
Wang lifted his face and found the starry sky had been transformed to an astonishing sight: The stars were arrayed in a square formation! However, Wang soon realized that the stars in the formation were in a synchronous orbit above the planet, moving together against the dimmer, more distant background of the Milky Way.
The stars in the formation closest to the direction of dawn were also the brightest, shining with a silver light that cast shadows on the ground. The brightness decreased as one moved away from that edge. Wang counted more than thirty stars along each edge of the formation, which meant a total of more than a thousand stars. The slow movement of the obviously artificial formation against the starry universe exuded a solemn power.
A man standing next to him nudged him lightly and spoke in a low voice, “Ah, Great Copernicus, why have you come so late? Three cycles of civilizations have passed, and you’ve missed many great enterprises.”
“What is that?” Wang asked, pointing at the formation in the sky.
“The Trisolaran Interstellar Fleet. It’s about to begin its expedition.”
“Trisolaran civilization has already achieved the capacity for interstellar flight?”
“Yes. All those magnificent ships can reach one-tenth the speed of light.”
“That is a great accomplishment, as far as I understand it, but it still seems too slow for interstellar flight.”
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. The key is finding the right target.”
“What’s the fleet’s destination?”
“A star with planets about four light-years away—the closest star to the Trisolaran system.”
Wang was surprised. “The closest star to us is also about four light-years away.”
“You?”
“The Earth.”
“Oh, that’s not very surprising. In most regions of the Milky Way, the distribution of stars is fairly even. It’s the result of star clusters acting under the influence of gravity. The distance between most stars is between three and six light-years.”
A loud, joyous cry erupted from the crowd. Wang looked up and saw that every star in the square formation was rapidly growing brighter. This was due to the light emitted by the ships themselves. Their combined illumination soon overwhelmed the dawn, and one thousand stars became one thousand little suns. Trisolaris was bathed in glorious daylight, and the crowd raised their hands and formed an endless prairie of uplifted arms.
The Trisolaran Fleet began to accelerate, solemnly gliding across the dome of the sky, skimming past the giant, just-risen moon’s tip, casting a dim blue glow against the moon’s mountains and plains.
The joyous cry subsided. The people of Trisolaris mutely gazed as their hope gradually shrunk in the western sky. They would not know the outcome of the launch in their lifetimes, but four or five hundred years from now, their descendants would receive the news from a new world, the beginning of a new life for Trisolaran civilization. Wang stood with them, silently gazing, until the phalanx of a thousand stars shrank into a single star, and until that star disappeared in the western night sky. Then the following text appeared:
The Trisolaran Expedition to the new world has begun. The fleet is still in flight….
Three Body is over. When you have returned to the real world, if you remain true to the promise you’ve made, please attend the meet-up of the Earth-Trisolaris Organization. The address will be in the follow-up e-mail you receive.
PART III
SUNSET FOR HUMANITY
21
Rebels of Earth
There were many more attendees this time than at the last Three Body meet-up. They met at the employee cafeteria of a chemical plant. The factory had already been moved elsewhere, and the interior of the building, which was about to be demolished, was worn out but spacious. About three hundred people were gathered here, and Wang Miao noticed many familiar faces: celebrities and elites of various fields; famous scientists, writers, politicians, and so on.
The first thing to attract Wang’s attention was the strange device at the center of the cafeteria. Three silver spheres, each slightly smaller than a bowling ball, hovered and swirled over a metal base. Wang guessed the device was probably based on magnetic levitation. The orbits of the three spheres were completely random: a real-life version of the three-body problem.
The others didn’t pay much mind to the artistic portrayal of the three-body problem. Instead, they focused on Pan Han, who was standing on top of a broken table in the middle of the cafeteria.