The Redemption of Time Page 5

  But now they had cloud computing. Although the devices were forbidden to ordinary citizens, government research institutes and the military still possessed some. The revolutionaries took advantage of the deceptive capabilities of these devices and remained undetected until the period of instability between the Stable Era and the Chaotic Era, at which point they instigated a riot that snowballed out of control. The revolution succeeded beyond their wildest dreams because the ruling elite were completely unprepared, and the old order collapsed overnight.

  The rebels overthrew the old princeps and nobles on Trisolaris, and renounced plans for a strategic counterattack against Earth. The new government held romantic notions about Earth civilization, and the new leaders desired to maintain peace with humanity in exchange for a new home on one of the other planets in the Solar System. Through the use of instantaneous sophon communication, they took charge of the Trisolaran Fleet. Although the fleet was dominated by hawks who preferred to conquer Earth and exterminate humans, they obeyed the orders of the new government. Obedience was the instinctive reaction of most Trisolarans, who had no tradition of saying one thing while planning another.

  On the Trisolaran ship, Tianming’s understanding of the details of the revolution was limited, but he quickly sensed that something seemed to have changed among his Trisolaran captors. The tortures they subjected him to slackened and then ceased. After some time, the Trisolarans reestablished contact with him and informed him that there had been a change back home on Trisolaris. They now wished him to serve as a bridge between the two peoples and build trust and friendship.

  “Wait a minute!” AA cried out. “This must be a trick! Did you believe them?” Although AA had once been a believer in the “friendly” nature of the Trisolarans, the experience of the alien conquest of Earth had completely shattered such faith. She could never trust anything the Trisolarans said.

  “No, it wasn’t a trick,” Tianming said, shaking his head. “If the Trisolarans were capable of devising such an elaborate plot, they would have had no need for my services. If I had believed them, then perhaps I really could have helped the two peoples to find a way to live together in peace. But history is full of unexpected turns and ironic twists … I missed the opportunity.”

  Tianming had refused to believe the Trisolarans’ sincerity and had continued to refuse to cooperate. This time, the Trisolarans, beset by all the problems in the wake of a revolution, left him alone to dream on in his long sleep. They didn’t torture him with manufactured nightmares, and they didn’t wake him. From then on, Tianming lived in his dreamworld, and he had no idea how much subjective time he lived through. It might have been two thousand years, but it could also have been five thousand or ten thousand.

  “How many years was it really?” AA asked.

  “Given that there are no objective markers such as sunsets or sunrises, I can’t tell you for sure. In reality, perhaps about twenty years had passed in the real world, but it felt to me like thousands of years. In one dream, I even founded a civilization and observed its rise and fall—”

  “They trapped you in a dream for thousands of years? That … that is even more cruel than a life sentence!” AA was enraged.

  “Not at all,” Tianming said. “I count that long dream as the happiest period of my life. No one bothered me as I lived in my own mind. This was a happiness I never enjoyed even back on Earth.

  “After so many years in the crucible of Trisolaran mental torture, my mind had been refined into a keen instrument. Not only did I wield it to create an unimaginatively vast interior landscape, I was also the master of this fresh domain. I could use my will to drive and describe the details of every dream. The education in classical literature that my parents had forced on me in my youth turned out to be incredibly helpful, and provided me with the raw materials for the construction of my dreamworld. Sometimes I set off with the heroes aboard Argo in search of the Golden Fleece, ready to slay sea serpents and fight monsters; other times I followed Gringoire through the dark alleys of medieval Paris, listening to the tolling of the bell by Quasimodo; still other times I rode cloud carriages drawn by flying horses and traversed thousands of snow-topped peaks to visit Queen Mother of the West in the Kunlun Mountains …

  “I was not a mere visitor to these worlds, but a creator. I conceived every detail of these universes: the Jerusalem of the New Testament, the Hell and Heaven of Divina Commedia, the Bianliang of Along the River During the Qingming Festival, the Heavenly Palace and the Buddha’s pure land as portrayed in Journey to the West … I also invented many marvels that had never been portrayed before: kingdoms found in flower petals, universes bound in nutshells, seafloor metropolises and gardens floating in space …

  “As a creator in dreams, I did not need to understand technical details or follow scientific laws. All I had to do was to imagine it, and it was so. Let there be light, I declared, and the universe was luminous. I devised buildings that could not exist under mechanical principles, but they were magnificent, august, sublime. I constructed wonders that scrambled time and space: a Venice in the desert, a primeval forest at the heart of a metropolis, waterfalls that hung from the stars to the earth, tropical islands suspended in air …

  “I also populated my worlds with colorful characters and astounding tales: war among the gods, mysterious treasures, legendary heroes, youthful adventures, love that seared the soul and shattered the heart … indeed, most of the hundred-plus fairy tales I told the Trisolarans later were first conceived of during that time.”

  “I had no idea,” exclaimed AA. “I thought you worked hard to invent all those other fairy tales in order to disguise the fact that the three stories you told Cheng Xin held secrets.”

  “The work wasn’t that hard,” said a smiling Tianming. “When you have only limited time, somehow all you want to do is to procrastinate, nap, waste time. But when the time available to you is unlimited, you don’t want to do anything else except create. Those fairy tales were an insignificant portion of my output.”

  “Why don’t you tell me one of your romantic stories then?” AA said. She was so entranced by his account that she had forgotten the purpose of Tianming’s story. Tenderly, she wrapped her arms about his neck and leaned on his shoulder.

  “All right. But let me think about which story to tell you … Oh, I know. I’ll tell you one of my favorite tales.

  “In ancient China, at the source of the Yangtze River, there was a Tibetan boy who lived in a village at the foot of the Tanggula Mountains. The boy liked to imagine the world outside the mountains, which he had never left. One day, a merchant from China’s heartland passed through the village. The boy followed the merchant everywhere and asked him about the sights he had seen. The merchant told the boy that the stream passing by their village flowed east to join many other streams and brooks, grew wider and deeper, progressed between peaks and over plains, through canyons and around hills, and after a journey of twelve thousand li, plunged into the endless sea as the mightiest river in the land.

  “The boy didn’t know what a sea was, and so the merchant told him that it was a body of water so large that a ship could not sail to its edge. The whole world’s rivers commingled there into a mirror broader than any land, reflecting a blue as pure as the sky. Next to the sea, situated in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, was the Jiangnan region, a land of verdant hills and misty lakes, where painted pavilions and delicate houses dotted the countryside like figures in a painting or words in a poem. Women dressed in flowing silk dresses oared elegant barges over the placid waterways, singing folk ditties in the gentle, refined accents of the Wu topolect …

  “The boy was utterly entranced by the merchant’s tale, and he wanted to follow the man to Jiangnan, but none of the villagers believed the merchant’s fantastical descriptions, and the boy’s parents refused to let him go. Finally, the merchant had to leave, but he left the boy with a small bottle from Jiangnan. The boy then wrote a letter in Tibetan that described his dream
s and fantasies and sealed it into the bottle along with a piece of pure jade from the nearby mountains. He set the bottle down in the stream by the village and hoped that the river would bring it to Jiangnan, thousands of li away.

  “Half a year later, as a lonely girl walked by the shore of the Yangtze outside the walls of Jiankang, the City of Stones and the largest metropolis in the world, she saw a bottle bobbing in the river—”

  Tianming stopped because he saw the look on AA’s face, a look of horror at the realization of a cruel secret.

  “That’s … that’s A Fairy Tale of Yangtze!” she finally cried out. A few hundred years ago, she had played the popular and award-winning film for Cheng Xin. Since she had spent the vast majority of the intervening centuries in hibernation, the film was still fresh in her mind.

  You live at one end of the Yangtze, and I the other.

  I think of you each day, beloved, though we cannot meet.

  We drink from the same river …

  She had been so excited to share the film with Cheng Xin, telling her that it was an amazing artistic creation by the Trisolarans. But now Tianming was telling her that the story had been woven by him in a dream …

  “That’s right, I’m telling you the story of A Fairy Tale of Yangtze.” Tianming’s tone was calm as he continued his revelation. “That film and the vast majority of so-called Trisolaran artistic creations were dreamed up by me. The Trisolarans gained the trust of humanity with my dreams.”

  *

  The Trisolarans’ strategic goal was to destroy humanity’s gravitational-wave universal broadcast system without triggering a broadcast, thereby ending the deterrence standoff. A prerequisite for reaching this goal was to induce humanity to elect as the Swordholder someone as kindhearted and weak as Cheng Xin. And the only way to accomplish that was to persuade humans that the Trisolarans no longer posed a threat.

  There were many ways to lull humans into thinking that the Trisolarans had been defanged, but the most effective was to build trust and goodwill. In order for humans to trust aliens, the humans had to be made to feel a sense of empathy with the aliens, to think “we are all the same.”

  The chain of reasoning so far had long been the consensus of Trisolaran strategists after many rounds of theoretical debate and deduction. But they could not see how to accomplish the first link in the chain: changing the human perception of Trisolarans as irreducibly alien. The differences between the two civilizations were too vast. At the beginning of the Deterrence Era, the Trisolarans, lacking experience, had revealed some true facts about their social organization to the humans. For example, Trisolaran parents, after joining bodies in mating, would essentially die as they “exploded” into baby Trisolarans. As another example, aged and disabled Trisolarans were forcibly dehydrated and incinerated to improve social efficiency. These facts caused humanity to view the Trisolarans with great horror and disgust. The famous one-liner that had once been used by Trisolarans to describe humans was turned around and applied to the Trisolarans.

  You’re bugs!

  The Trisolarans had used such a description for humans to summarize the vast gulf between the two civilizations’ scientific knowledge and technology levels. But as used by the humans, the sentiment was also imbued with moral and cultural disgust. Once the peaceful Trisolarans took power on Trisolaris, they attempted to improve relations between the two peoples, but the weight of history and the cultural gap meant that their efforts had little effect. Trisolarans were a rational species little affected by emotions and sentiments in their decisions, but humans could not forget the atrocities committed by the Trisolarans during the Doomsday Battle. The intensity of this human hatred seemed to the Trisolarans completely irrational, and they could not understand how to deal with it.

  And so the Trisolarans remembered Yun Tianming and hoped to discover the secret of overcoming this obstacle in his mind. They recorded all of his dreams, which they viewed as a treasure trove. Tianming himself became an idol for Trisolaran fans of Earth culture. After suitable processing, his dream creations were released as literary and visual compositions to wide acclaim among the Trisolarans. And after some careful adaptation, these works were transmitted to Earth under the guise of Trisolaran creations.

  It was unclear whether the Trisolarans intended to deceive humans from the start. Sending Tianming’s works to Earth probably began as a simple gesture to demonstrate their goodwill. In addition, due to the extreme collectivist nature of Trisolaran culture, the concept of authorship was almost absent among the Trisolarans. Once they had slightly adapted Tianming’s dreams to their own tastes, they naturally felt that the dreams could be called their own. By then the Trisolarans had more or less learned the basic idea of keeping secrets, and so when humans inquired after the source of these artistic works, they didn’t give a direct answer; such omission was the height of their capacity for deception. Humans, of course, could never have dreamed that the Trisolarans possessed a human brain that was unconsciously churning out works of art for them, and came to the natural conclusion that the Trisolarans themselves were the artists.

  That Tianming’s dreams were imbued with so much humanistic value and so rooted in Earth culture should have aroused suspicion among the humans, but the overconfidence of the Deterrence Era and the Trisolarans’ genuine admiration for Earth culture led to a blindness on Earth. Humans believed that although their culture was still but a budding sprout in the dark forest, they had mastered universal moral values that were applicable everywhere in the cosmos regardless of time or space. That these barbaric aliens would express such admiration for Earth culture and imitate it was perfectly natural. The very proof that Earth values were universal was provided by the fact that the Trisolarans, another advanced civilization, generated similar art as the Earth’s when stimulated in appropriate ways. Moreover, the Trisolarans did add a few Trisolaran elements in the process of adaptation. Mixed in with a few genuine Trisolaran works of art done in imitation of Earth examples (though they were not of the same quality as Tianming’s dreams), the result was a story that compelled the belief of humans on Earth.

  As she listened to Tianming’s explanation, AA recalled another “humanistic” Trisolaran creation.

  “Wait a minute … Did you also have a hand in the creation of Sophon?” AA shuddered as she thought of the Trisolaran “ambassador” who appeared sometimes as a ninja and other times as a classical Japanese beauty.

  Tianming’s expression was a bit awkward as he nodded. “Yes. Sophon came out of my dreams as well …”

  Since Tianming had lived a socially awkward and isolated life on Earth, few female figures appeared in the visions his brain spun on the Trisolaran ship except for his mother, his sister, and Cheng Xin. But one other woman appeared often in his imagination, sometimes gentle and shy, sometimes passionate and bold. The Trisolarans were very interested in this mysterious woman, and after much research by the sophons, they discovered that she was a Japanese actress from the Common Era by the name of Ran Asakawa. During college, Tianming had often enjoyed her clips online in his dorm room when he was alone, and after he started working he had bought a box set of all her films. Ran was apparently the representative of an aspect of Japanese culture that was extremely popular in much of Asia during that era.

  The Trisolarans had not initially paid much attention to Japan, but Tianming’s dreams led their strategists to focus on this geographically confined state. They learned that the Japanese islands were subject to extreme natural disasters. Located on the fault line between two tectonic plates, the islands were often struck by earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. A major tsunami near the end of the Common Era had taken the lives of tens of thousands … Many Japanese leaders had expressed concern that the islands were not a stable environment, and over Japan’s history had launched multiple invasions of the mainland. Many humans spoke of the Japanese people as hardy, orderly, disciplined … Clearly, the Japanese experience could be quite illuminating for the Tris
olarans.

  Most instructive of all, decades before the birth of Yun Tianming, Japan had initiated a bloody invasion of Yun Tianming’s homeland, China, resulting in deep animosity between the two nations—yet within decades Japanese entertainment products had swept China, and millions of young Chinese worshiped Japanese culture and followed Japanese stars, greatly ameliorating the historical enmity. This led numerous Trisolaran scholars to conclude that in order to induce humans to forget the historical wounds of the Doomsday Battle, the Trisolarans should imitate Japan’s success.

  Thus, Sophon appeared as a Japanese woman modeled after Ran Asakawa.

  “Ah!” AA exclaimed. “After Cheng Xin met Sophon, she told me that the robot reminded her of a foreign actress from her time, but she didn’t tell me who. I didn’t realize that you and she were both fans of the same actress.”

  “Cheng Xin was a fan of Ran Asakawa?”

  “Why are you so surprised?” AA wasn’t sure why Tianming’s tone was so odd.

  “Um … never mind.” Tianming grinned awkwardly and shook his head.

  Sophon’s presentation achieved great success on Earth. In the middle years of the Deterrence Era, the trend was for growing valorization of traditionally “feminine” qualities, and Sophon’s ultra-feminine act played to the taste of the time. Her dress, makeup, and jewelry all became marks of fashion. The appearance of Sophon accelerated the trends she was playing into. Many humans came to the conclusion that if the once brutal, savage Trisolarans were choosing to adopt such an image of nonthreatening, gentle femininity, it was a sign that a similar evolution among humans would be most in line with the universal values of civilization. That classical line from Faust, slightly modified, became the symbol of a new conception of cosmic civilization: