Galaxy Era, Year 409 Our Star（2）

Did you build this four-dimensional fragment?

You told me that you came from the sea. Did you build the sea?

Are you saying that for you, or at least for your creators, this four-dimensional space is like the sea for us?

More like a puddle. The sea has gone dry.

Why are so many ships, or tombs, gathered in such a small space?

When the sea is drying, the fish have to gather into a puddle. The puddle is also drying, and all the fish are going to disappear.

Are all the fish here?

The fish responsible for drying the sea are not here.

We're sorry. What you said is really hard to understand.

The fish that dried out the sea went onto land before they did this. They moved from one dark forest to another dark forest.

"Is it worth it to pay such a price for victory in war?" Cheng Xin asked. She could not imagine how it was possible to live in a world of one fewer dimension. In two-dimensional space, the visible world consisted of a few line segments of different lengths. Could anyone who was born in three-dimensional space willingly live in a thin sheet of paper with no thickness? Living in three dimensions must be equally confining and unimaginable for those born to a four-dimensional world.

"It's better than death," said Yifan.

While Cheng Xin was still recovering from the shock, Yifan continued, "The speed of light is also frequently used as a weapon. I'm not talking about building light tombs—or, as you call them, black domains. Those are just defensive mechanisms employed by weak worms like us. The gods do not stoop so low. In war, it's possible to make reduced-lightspeed black holes to seal the enemy inside. But more commonly, the technique is used to construct the equivalents of pits and city walls. Some reduced-lightspeed belts are large enough to traverse an entire arm of a galaxy. In places where the stars are dense, many reduced-lightspeed black holes can be connected together into chains that stretch for tens of millions of light-years. That's a Great Wall at the scale of the universe. Even the most powerful fleets, once trapped, would not be able to escape. Those barriers are very difficult to cross."

"What is the ultimate result of all this manipulation of space-time?"

"Dimensional strikes will eventually cause more and more of the universe to become two-dimensional, until one day the entire universe is two-dimensional. Similarly, the construction of fortifications will eventually cause all the reduced-lightspeed areas to connect, until the different lowered lightspeeds all average out: This new average will be the new c for the universe.

"At that time, any scientist from a baby civilization—like us—would think that the speed of light through vacuum is barely a dozen kilometers per second, and this is an ironclad universal constant, just like we now think the same of three hundred thousand kilometers per second.

"Of course, I've only brought up two examples. Other universal laws of physics have been used as weapons as well, though we don't know all of them. It's very possible that every law of physics has been weaponized. It's possible that in some parts of the universe, even... Forget it, I don't even believe that."

"What were you going to say?"

"The foundation of mathematics."

Cheng Xin tried to imagine it, but it was simply impossible. "That's... madness." Then she asked, "Will the universe turn into a war ruin? Or, maybe it's more accurate to ask: Will the laws of physics turn into war ruins?"

"Maybe they already are.... The physicists and cosmologists of the new world are focused on trying to recover the original appearance of the universe before the wars more than ten billion years ago. They've already constructed a fairly clear theoretical model describing the pre-war universe. That was a really lovely time, when the universe itself was a Garden of Eden. Of course, the beauty could only be described mathematically. We can't picture it: Our brains don't have enough dimensions."

Cheng Xin thought back to the conversation with the Ring again.

Did you build this four-dimensional fragment?

You told me that you came from the sea. Did you build the sea?

"You are saying that the universe of the Edenic Age was four-dimensional, and that the speed of light was much higher?"

"No, not at all. The universe of the Edenic Age was ten-dimensional. The speed of light back then wasn't only much higher—rather, it was close to infinity. Light back then was capable of action at a distance, and could go from one end of the cosmos to the other within a Planck time.... If you had been to four-dimensional space, you would have some vague hint of how beautiful that ten-dimensional Garden must have been."

"You're saying—"

"I'm not saying anything." Yifan seemed to have awakened from a dream. "We've only seen small hints; everything else is just guessing. You should treat it as a guess, just a dark myth we've made up."

But Cheng Xin continued to follow the course of the discussion taken so far. "—that during the wars after the Edenic Age, one dimension after another was imprisoned from the macroscopic into the microscopic, and the speed of light was reduced again and again.... "

"As I said, I'm not saying anything, just guessing." Yifan's voice grew softer. "But no one knows if the truth is even darker than our guesses.... We are certain of only one thing: The universe is dying."

The ship stopped accelerating, and weightlessness returned. Before Cheng Xin's eyes, space and the stars appeared more and more hallucinatory, more and more like a nightmare. Only the 3G hypergravity had brought some sense of solidity. She had welcomed the powerful embrace of those arms, an embrace that had provided some protection against the terror and frigidity of the dark myths of the universe. But now the hypergravity was gone, and only nightmare remained. The Milky Way appeared as a patch of ice hiding bloody remains, and DX3906 nearby appeared as a cremator burning over an abyss.

"Can you turn off the holographic display?" Cheng Xin asked.

Yifan turned it off, and Cheng Xin returned from the vastness of space to the cramped eggshell interior of the cabin. Here, she recovered a trace of the security she craved.

"I shouldn't have told you all that," Yifan said. His sorrow was sincere.

"I would have found out sooner or later," Cheng Xin said.

"Let me repeat: They are just guesses. There's no real scientific proof. Don't think about it too much. Focus on what's before your eyes; focus on the life you must live." Yifan put a hand over hers. "Even if what I told you is true, those events are measured at the scale of hundreds of millions of years. Come with me to our world, which is now also your world. Live out your life and stop skipping across the surface of time. As long as you live your life within a hundred thousand years and a thousand light-years, none of those things need concern you. That ought to be enough for anyone."

"Yes, it is enough, thank you." Cheng Xin held Yifan's hand.

Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan spent the rest of the journey in the forced slumber of the sleep-aid machine. The trip lasted four days. By the time they awakened in the hypergravity of deceleration, Planet Gray took up most of their field of view.

Planet Gray was a small planet. It visually resembled the moon, a barren rock, but instead of craters, much of Planet Gray's surface was taken up by desolate plains. Hunter entered orbit around Planet Gray. Due to the lack of an atmosphere, the orbit was very low. The ship approached the coordinates provided by the monitoring satellite, where the five unidentified spacecraft had landed and then taken off. Yifan had planned to land the shuttle there and investigate the traces left by the spacecraft, but he and Cheng Xin had not anticipated that the mysterious visitors would leave behind such large signs that they were visible from space.

"What is that?" Cheng Xin cried out.

"Death lines." Yifan recognized them right away. "Don't get too close," he said to the AI.

He was referring to five black lines. One end of each line was connected to the surface of the planet, and the other end extended into space, like five black hairs growing out of Planet Gray. Each line stretched higher than Hunter's orbit.

"What are they?"

"Trails left by curvature propulsion. Those lines are the result of extreme curvature manipulation. The speed of light within the trails is zero."

On the next orbit, Guan Yifan and Cheng Xin entered the shuttle and descended toward the surface. Due to the low orbit and the lack of an atmosphere, the descent was smooth and fast. The shuttle landed about three kilometers from the death lines.

They leapt across the surface under 0.2G. A thin layer of dust covered the surface of Planet Gray, along with gravel of various sizes. Due to the lack of atmospheric scattering of sunlight, shadows and lit areas were sharply delineated. When they were about a hundred meters from the death lines, Yifan waved Cheng Xin to a stop. Each death line was about twenty or thirty meters in diameter, and from here, they resembled death columns.

"These are probably the darkest things in the universe," Cheng Xin said. The death lines showed no details except an exceptional blackness showing the boundaries of the zero-lightspeed region, with no real surface. Looking up, the lines showed up clearly even against the dark backdrop of space.

"These are the deadest things in the universe as well," said Guan Yifan. "Zero-lightspeed means absolute, one hundred percent death. Inside it, every fundamental particle, every quark is dead. There is no vibration. Even without a source of gravity inside, each death line is a black hole. A zero-gravity black hole. Anything that falls in cannot reemerge."

Yifan picked up a rock and tossed it toward one of the death lines. The rock disappeared inside the absolute darkness.

"Can your lightspeed ships produce death lines?" Cheng Xin asked.

"Far from it."

"So you've seen these before, then?"

"Yes, but only rarely."

Cheng Xin gazed up at the giant black columns reaching into space. They lifted up the domed sky and seemed to turn the universe into a Palace of Death. Is this the ultimate end for everything?

In the sky, Cheng Xin could see the end of the columns. She pointed in that direction. "So the ships entered lightspeed at the end?"

"That's right. These are only about a hundred kilometers high. We've seen columns even shorter than these, presumably left by ships that entered lightspeed almost instantaneously."

"Are these the most advanced lightspeed ships?"

"Maybe. But this is a rarely seen technique. Death lines are usually the products of Zero-Homers."

"Zero-Homers?"

"They're also called Resetters. Maybe they're a group of intelligent individuals, or a civilization, or a group of civilizations. We don't know exactly who they are, but we've confirmed their existence. The Zero-Homers want to reset the universe and return it to the Garden of Eden."

"How?"

"By moving the hour hand of the clock past twelve. Take spatial dimensions as an example. It's practically impossible to drag a universe in lower dimensions back into higher dimensions, so maybe it's better to work forward in the other direction. If the universe can be lowered into zero dimensions and then beyond, the clock might be reset and everything returned to the beginning. The universe might possess ten macroscopic dimensions again."

"Zero dimensions! Have you seen such a thing done?"

"No. We've only witnessed two-dimensionalization. We've never even seen one-dimensionalization. But somewhere, some Zero-Homers must be trying. No one knows if they've ever succeeded. Comparatively, it's easier to lower the speed of light to zero, so we've seen more evidence of such attempts to lower the speed of light past zero and return it to infinity."

"Is that even theoretically possible?"

"We don't know. Maybe the Zero-Homers have theories that say yes, but I don't think so. Zero-lightspeed is an impassable wall. Zero-lightspeed is absolute death for all existence, the cessation of all motion. Under such conditions, the subjective cannot influence the objective in any way, so how can the 'hour hand' be shifted past it? I think the Zero-Homers are practicing a kind of religion, a kind of performance art."

Cheng Xin stared at the death lines, her terror mixed with awe. "If these are trails, why don't they spread?"

Guan Yifan clutched Cheng Xin's arm. "I was just getting to that. We've got to get out of here. Leave not just Planet Gray, but the entire system. This is a very dangerous place. Death lines are not like regular trails. Without disturbance, they'll stay like this, with a diameter equal to the effective surface of the curvature engine. But if they're disturbed, they'll spread very rapidly. A death line of this size can expand to cover a region the size of a solar system. Scientists call this phenomenon a death line rupture."

"Does a rupture make the speed of light zero in the entire region?"

"No, no. After rupture, it turns into a regular trail. The speed of light inside goes up as the trail dissipates over a wider region, but it will never be much more than a dozen meters per second. After these death lines expand, this entire system might turn into a reduced-lightspeed black hole, or a black domain.... Let's go."

Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan turned toward the shuttle and began to run and leap.

"What kind of disturbance makes them spread?" Cheng Xin asked. She turned to give the death lines another glance. Behind them, the five death lines cast long shadows that stretched across the plain to the horizon.

"We're not sure. Some theories suggest that the appearance of other curvature trails nearby would cause disturbance. We've confirmed that curvature trails within a short distance can influence each other."

"So, if Halo accelerates—"

"That's why we must get farther away using only the fusion engine before engaging the curvature engine. We've got to move... using your units of measurement... at least forty astronomical units away."

After the shuttle took off, Cheng Xin continued to stare at the receding death lines. She said, "The Zero-Homers give me a bit of hope."

Yifan said, "The universe contains multitudes. You can find any kind of 'people' and world. There are idealists like the Zero-Homers, pacifists, philanthropists, and even civilizations dedicated only to art and beauty. But they're not the mainstream; they cannot change the direction of the universe."

"It's just like the world of humans."

"At least the Zero-Homers' task will ultimately be completed by the cosmos itself."

"You mean the end of the universe?"

"That's right."

"But based on what I know, the universe will continue to expand, and become sparser and colder forever."

"That's the old cosmology you know, but we've disproved it. The amount of dark matter had been underestimated. The universe will stop expanding and then collapse under gravity, finally forming a singularity and initiating another big bang. Everything will return to zero, or home. And so Nature remains the final victor."

"Will the new universe have ten dimensions?"

"Who knows? There are infinite possibilities. That's a brand-new universe, and a brand-new life."

The trip back to Planet Blue was as uneventful as the trip to Planet Gray. Most of the time, Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan remained asleep under the sleep-aid machines. By the time they were awakened, Hunter was in orbit around Planet Blue. Looking down at the blue-and-white world, Cheng Xin almost thought she was home.

AA hailed them, and Yifan replied. "Hunter here. What's wrong?"

AA's voice was agitated. "I've called you multiple times, and the ship's AI refused to wake you!"

"I told you we have to maintain radio silence. What happened?"

"Yun Tianming is here!"

Cheng Xin was thunderstruck. The last traces of sleep left her, and even Yifan's jaw hung open.

"What?" Cheng Xin said softly.

"Yun Tianming is here! His ship landed three hours ago."

"Oh," Cheng Xin answered mechanically.

"He's still young, as young as you!"

"Really?" Cheng Xin's voice seemed to come from far away, even to herself.

"He brought a gift for you."

"He already gave me a gift. We're inside his gift now."

"That's nothing. Let me tell you, this is an awesome gift, and much bigger.... He's outside right now. Let me get him."

Yifan interrupted. "No. We're coming down right now. So much radio transmission is dangerous. I'm cutting it off."

Yifan and Cheng Xin stared at each other, and then laughed. "Are we really awake?" Cheng Xin asked.

Even if it was just a dream, Cheng Xin wanted to be dreaming for longer. She turned on the holographic display, and the starry sky no longer seemed so dark and cold—in fact, it seemed filled with a clear beauty like the sky after a fresh rain. Even the starlight seemed to exude the fragrance of spring buds. It was the feeling of being reborn.

"Let's get into the shuttle and land," Yifan said.

Hunter initiated the shuttle separation sequence. Inside the cramped cabin, Yifan used an interface window to perform the final check prior to atmospheric reentry.

"How did he get here so fast?" Cheng Xin muttered, as if still dreaming.

Yifan was now completely calm. "This confirms our guess. The First Trisolaran Fleet founded a colony nearby, within a hundred light-years of here. They must have received the gravitational wave signal from Halo."

The shuttle separated from Hunter. They could see the tiny pyramid of Hunter recede on the monitoring system.

"What kind of gift is bigger than a sun and its planetary system?" Yifan asked, smiling.

An excited Cheng Xin shook her head.

The shuttle's fusion reactor activated, and the cooling ring outside began to glow red. The thrusters were preheating, and the control interface window showed that deceleration would begin in thirty seconds. The shuttle was about to descend rapidly as it entered Planet Blue's atmosphere.

Cheng Xin heard an abrupt noise, as though something had sliced across the shuttle from bow to stern. Sharp jolts followed. And then, she experienced an eerie moment—eerie, because she couldn't be sure it was just a moment. The moment seemed to be infinitely short but also infinitely long. She had a strange feeling of stepping across time but being situated outside of time.

Later, Yifan would explain to her that she had experienced a "time vacuum." The length of that moment could not be measured in time because, during that moment, time did not exist.

At the same time, she felt herself collapse, as though she was going to turn into a singularity. Meanwhile, the mass of her, Guan Yifan, and the shuttle approached infinity.

And then everything plunged into darkness. At first, Cheng Xin thought something was wrong with her eyes. She couldn't believe the inside of the shuttle could be so dark, so dark that she couldn't see her fingers waving before her eyes. Cheng Xin called for Guan Yifan, but there was only silence in the space suit's earpiece.

Yifan felt around in the darkness until he grabbed Cheng Xin's head. She felt her own face touching his. She did not resist; she only felt comfort. Then she understood that Yifan was only trying to talk to her. The communications system inside the space suits had shut down, and the only way they could talk to each other was to press the visors of their helmets together so that their voices could be transmitted across.

"Don't be scared. Don't panic. Listen to me and don't move!" Cheng Xin heard Yifan's voice from the visor. She could tell from the vibrations that he was shouting, but what she heard was very faint, like a whisper. She felt his hand moving around in the dark until the inside of the cabin lit up. The light came from something held in his hand, a strip about the size of a cigarette. Cheng Xin knew it was some kind of chemical light source. Halo was equipped with similar emergency supplies. Bending it caused it to emit a cold light.

"Don't move. The space suits are no longer providing oxygen. Slow down your breathing. I'll repressurize the cabin now. It won't take long!" Yifan handed the glow stick to Cheng Xin, pulled open a storage unit next to his seat, and took out a metal bottle that resembled a small fire extinguisher. He twisted the bottle's opening, and a white gas rushed out of the bottle in raging torrents.

Cheng Xin's breath quickened. All she had left was the air remaining in her helmet, and the harder she inhaled, the more suffocated she felt. Her hand reached instinctively for the visor of her helmet, but Yifan stopped her in time. He embraced her again, this time to calm her down. She imagined that he was trying to rescue her from drowning. In the cold light, she saw his eyes, which seemed to be telling her that they were almost at the surface. Cheng Xin could feel the air pressure in the cabin rising, and just when she was about to pass out from lack of air, Yifan snapped her visor open, as well as his own. The two gulped air.

After she caught her breath, Cheng Xin examined the metal bottle. She noticed the pressure gauge near the neck of the bottle, an ancient analog dial with a swinging needle that was now pointing into the green zone.

Yifan said, "The oxygen from that won't last long, and the cabin is going to get very cold very fast. We need to change space suits." He pushed off from his seat and dragged out two metal boxes from the back of the cabin. He opened one and showed Cheng Xin the space suit inside.

Modern space suits—in the Solar System and here—were very lightweight. If one kept the suit unpressurized, left off the small life-support pack, and took off the helmet, a modern space suit was virtually indistinguishable from ordinary clothes. However, the space suits in the boxes were heavy and clumsy, resembling Common Era space suits.

They could now see their breaths. Cheng Xin took off her original space suit and felt the bone-chilling cold inside the cabin. The heavy space suit was difficult to put on, and Yifan had to help her. She felt like a child dependent on this man, a feeling that she had not experienced in a long time. Before Cheng Xin put on the helmet, Yifan explained the suit's features to her in detail—the oxygen dial, the pressurization toggle, the knob for temperature adjustment, the switches for communications and illumination, and so on. The space suit had no automatic systems, and everything required manual operation.

"There are no computer chips inside this suit at all. Right now, none of our computers—electronic or quantum—work anymore."

"Why?"

"The speed of light right now is less than twenty kilometers per second."

Yifan helped Cheng Xin put on her helmet. Her body was almost frozen. He turned on the oxygen and the heater in her suit, and she felt herself thawing out. Yifan now turned to put on his own suit. He worked fast, but it took some work between when he put on his helmet and the two suits could be connected for communications. Neither was able to speak until their chilled bodies had recovered.

The suits were so heavy and clumsy that Cheng Xin could imagine how difficult it would be to move around in them under 1G. Her suit wasn't so much a suit as a house, the only place where she could find refuge. The light-emitting strip drifting in the cabin was dimming, so Yifan turned on the lamp on his own suit. Inside the cramped space, Cheng Xin thought they were like ancient miners trapped underground.

"What happened?" Cheng Xin asked.

Yifan floated up from his seat and struggled until he managed to open the screen over one of the portholes—the automatic controls for the porthole screens were also nonfunctional. He drifted to the other side of the cabin and repeated the operation with another porthole.

Cheng Xin looked at the transformed universe outside.

She saw two star clusters at the two ends of space: The cluster in front glowed blue and the cluster behind glowed red. Cheng Xin had seen a similar sight earlier when Halo was flying at lightspeed, but the two star clusters she saw now were not stable. Their shapes shifted abruptly like two balls of flame in fierce wind. Instead of stars leaping from the blue cluster into the red cluster from time to time, two light belts connected the two ends of the universe, only one of which was visible on each side of the ship.

The wider belt took up half the space on one side. Its two ends were not connected to the blue and red star clusters; instead, the belt ended in two round tips. Cheng Xin could tell that this "belt" was actually an extremely flattened oval—or perhaps a circle that had been stretched out. Colored patches of various sizes flitted across the wide belt: blue, white, and light yellow. Instinctively, Cheng Xin understood that she was looking at Planet Blue.

The light belt on the other side of the ship was thinner but brighter, and its surface showed no details. Unlike Planet Blue, this belt's length cycled rapidly between a bright line that connected the red and blue clusters, and a bright circle. The belt's periodic circular state told Cheng Xin that she was looking at the star DX3906.

"We're orbiting Planet Blue at lightspeed," said Guan Yifan. "Except the speed of light is now very slow."

The shuttle had been moving far faster, but as the speed of light was an absolute speed limit, the shuttle's velocity had been cut down to that.

"The death lines ruptured?"

"Yes. They spread out to cover the entire solar system. We're trapped here."

"Was it due to the disturbance from Tianming's ship?"

"Perhaps. He didn't know the death lines were here."

Cheng Xin didn't want to ask what their next step was, knowing that nothing more could be done. No computer could operate when the speed of light was below twenty kilometers per second. The shuttle's AI and control systems were all dead. Under such conditions, not even a light inside the spacecraft could be turned on—it was just a metal can with no electricity or power. Hunter was the same, also dead. Before falling into reduced lightspeed, the shuttle had not yet began decelerating, and so the small spaceship should be nearby—but it might as well be on the other side of the planet. Without the control systems, neither the shuttle nor Hunter could open their doors.

Cheng Xin thought about Yun Tianming and 艾 AA. They were both on the ground, and should be safe. But now there was no way for the two sides to communicate. She never even got to say hello to him.

Something light gently struck the visor of her helmet: the metal bottle. Cheng Xin looked at the ancient pressure gauge on it again, and touched her own space suit. Hope, once extinguished, lit up again like a firefly.

"You've been preparing for situations like this?" she asked.

"Yes." Yifan's voice sounded distorted in Cheng Xin's earpiece due to the use of ancient analog signals. "Not for ruptured death lines, of course, but we were prepared for accidentally drifting into the trails of lightspeed ships. The situations are similar: The reduced lightspeed stops everything.... Next, we need to start the neurons."

"What?"

"Neural computers. Computers that can operate under reduced lightspeed. The shuttle and Hunter both have two control systems, one of which is based on neural computers."

Cheng Xin was amazed that such machines existed.

"The key isn't the speed of light, but the system design. The transmission of chemical signals in the brain is even slower, only two or three meters per second—not much faster than us walking. Neural computers can still work because they imitate the highly parallel processing found in the brains of higher animals. All the chips are designed specifically to function under reduced-lightspeed conditions."

Yifan opened a metal bulkhead decorated with many dots connected in a complex web like the tentacles of an octopus. Inside was a small control panel with a flat display, as well as several switches and indicator lights. The whole assembly was built from components deemed obsolete by the end of the Crisis Era. He toggled a red switch and the screen lit up: text scrolling by. Cheng Xin could tell it was the boot sequence of some operating system.

"The parallel neural mode hasn't been started yet, so we have to load the operating system serially. You'll probably have a hard time believing how slow serial data transmission is under reduced lightspeed: look, the data rate is a few hundred bytes per second. Not even a kilobyte."

"Then the boot sequence will take a long time."

"That's right. But as the parallel mode gradually builds up, the loading will speed up. Still, it really will take a long time to complete the sequence." Yifan pointed to the progress indicator, a line of text on the bottom of the screen.

Remaining load time for boot module: 68 hours 43 minutes [flickering] seconds. Total remaining system load time: 297 hours 52 minutes [flickering] seconds.

"Twelve days!" Cheng Xin exclaimed. "What about Hunter?"

"Its systems will detect the reduced-lightspeed condition and automatically boot the neural computer. But it will take about as long to complete."

Twelve days. They could only get to the survival resources in the shuttle and on Hunter after twelve days. Until then, they had to rely on their primitive space suits. If the space suits were powered by nuclear batteries, the electricity should last long enough, but they didn't have enough oxygen.

"We have to hibernate," said Yifan.

"Do we have the equipment for hibernation on the shuttle?" As soon as she asked the question, Cheng Xin realized her error. Even if the shuttle had such equipment, it would be controlled by the computer, which was out of commission right now.

Yifan opened the storage unit from which he had taken the oxygen bottle earlier and took out a small box. He opened it to show Cheng Xin a few capsules. "These are drugs for short-term hibernation. Unlike regular hibernation, you won't need an external life-support system. Once you are in hibernation, your respiration will slow down to the point where you consume very little oxygen. One capsule is enough for fifteen days of hibernation."

Cheng Xin opened her visor and swallowed one of the pills. She watched as Yifan also took one. Then she looked outside the portholes.

Patches of color now moved so fast over Planet Blue—the broad belt that connected the blue and red ends of the lightspeed universe on one side of the ship—that they turned into a blur.

"Can you see the patterns on the belt repeating periodically?" Yifan wasn't looking outside at all. His eyes were half-closed as he strapped himself into the hypergravity seat.

"They're moving too fast."

"Try to follow the motion with your eyes."

Cheng Xin tried to match her moving gaze with the patterns flowing across the belt. For a moment, she could see the blue, white, and yellow patches, but they blurred almost immediately. "I can't," she said.

"That's all right. They're moving too fast. The pattern could be repeating several hundred times per second." Yifan sighed. Cheng Xin noticed his sorrow, despite his effort to hide it. And she knew why.

She understood that every time the pattern repeated on the broad belt, it meant that the shuttle had completed another orbit around Planet Blue at lightspeed. Even at reduced lightspeed, the demonic rules of the theory of special relativity still held. In the planet's frame of reference, time was passing tens of millions of times faster than in here, like blood seeping out of her heart.

A moment here; eons there.

Cheng Xin turned away from the porthole and strapped herself into the seat as well. Light flickered through the porthole on the other side. Outside, the sun of this world was alternately a bright line that connected the two ends of the universe, and a ball of light. It was dancing the mad dance of death.

"Cheng Xin." Yifan called for her softly. "It's possible that when we wake up, we'll find the screen telling us that an error has occurred."

Cheng Xin turned and smiled at him through the visor. "I'm not afraid."

"I know you're not afraid. I just want to tell you something in case we don't... I know about your experience as the Swordholder. I want to let you know that you didn't do anything wrong. Humanity chose you, which meant they chose to treat life and everything else with love, even if they had to pay a great price. You fulfilled the wish of the world, carried out their values, and executed their choice. You really didn't do anything wrong."

"Thank you," Cheng Xin said.

"I don't know what happened to you after that, but you still didn't do anything wrong. Love isn't wrong. A single individual cannot destroy a world. If that world was doomed, then it was the result of the efforts of everyone, including those living and those who had already died."

"Thank you," Cheng Xin said. Her eyes felt hot and wet.

"As for what will happen next, I'm not afraid either. When I was on Gravity, all those stars in the emptiness made me afraid and tired, and I wanted to stop thinking about the universe. But it was like a drug, and I couldn't stop. Well, now I can stop."

"That's good. You know something? The only thing I'm scared of is that you'll be afraid."

"I'm the same."

They held hands, and as the sun continued its mad dance, they gradually lost consciousness and stopped breathing.

* Translator's Note: This is a wordplay in Chinese. 幕 (mu), or "curtain," is a pun for 墓 (mu), or "tomb."