The Redemption of Time Read online

  “The eternal feminine draws us as well as the Trisolarans ever onward and upward!”

  Soon, however, the Trisolarans were no longer willing to be led by human civilization.

  The Trisolaran reform movement didn’t last long. Blindly introducing and imitating Earth culture was not useful for solving the many practical problems facing Trisolaran society. The Chaotic Era wasn’t going to go away just because of the advent of a “humanistic” society. On the contrary, due to rising individualism on Trisolaris, the old authoritarian, militaristic chain of command had broken down. During the Stable Era, various factions pursued their own goals, leading to the fragmentation of Trisolaran society. Once the Chaotic Era arrived, the factions fought against each other with no coordination, leading to the deaths of billions. After twenty years of living under the new regime, the average Trisolaran had little good to say about the way things were going, and many even contemptuously called the Trisolaran government “Government of the Earth bugs, by the Earth bugs, for the Earth bugs.”

  The reformists tried to solve their political difficulties by introducing democratic elections—another import from Earth. But the result was not what they expected. Candidates representing the ancien régime received the vast majority of votes and swept back into power, immediately purging and punishing the “pro-Earth” faction. After decades of tumult, the Trisolarans had seen enough of the weaknesses of human values, and the old yearning for military dominance came back into fashion. Once again, the plan to engage in strategic deception and attack Earth was on the agenda.

  The new hawks discovered, to their delight, that the grand strategic deception had somehow already succeeded. Humans were now of the general opinion that the Trisolarans were a friendly and kind species. The key ingredients of the success of this strategic deception were none other than Yun Tianming’s artistic creations and the once-sincere admiration of the Trisolarans for Earth culture.

  Continuing the deception didn’t pose a great difficulty. The Trisolaran scholars came to the conclusion that the self-defanging of human society was an irreversible trend that would continue unabated for at least a century more. With greater than 90 percent certainty, the complacent humans would elect as their next Swordholder someone gentle and kind, and there were still many more artistic creations in Tianming’s brain that could be employed as opiates for the humans. The Trisolarans might still be relatively naive when it came to schemes and plots, but they knew enough to let Sophon keep on arranging flowers and performing tea ceremonies to please the humans.

  This was also when Trisolaran scientists first successfully tested lightspeed spaceships with curvature propulsion. Humans in later ages were sometimes puzzled by why the Trisolarans were still intent on conquering Earth if they possessed such advanced technology. The answer came down to the persistence of the Trisolarans. The First Trisolaran Fleet had already been launched to conquer Earth, so they might as well finish their mission. The lightspeed ships provided an additional bit of insurance. Even if the plan for conquest failed and humanity initiated gravitational-wave universal broadcast, the Trisolarans figured that they had almost 150 years to produce massive lightspeed ships to evacuate the vast majority of Trisolarans from their home world before the arrival of any dark forest attack. Based on how long it took for Luo Ji’s “spell” to take effect, this was a reasonable estimate.

  No one could have predicted how quickly the dark forest strike would follow the subsequent universal broadcast. It was only three years before Trisolaris was obliterated.

  *

  As plans for the conquest of Earth proceeded apace, the Trisolarans finally decided to awaken Tianming. They had no more need to study. The satisfied Trisolarans informed him that they wanted him to see the benefit of actively collaborating with them, but if he insisted on being contrary, they wouldn’t force him. Due to his many “contributions” to the success of the Trisolaran deception of Earth, the glorious and generous Trisolaran civilization was happy to allow him to live out the rest of his life in peace. He could choose to do it as a dreaming brain, or he could even join Trisolaran society as a full-fledged member.

  If Yun Tianming chose to collaborate, he would give the Trisolarans some advantages. He could, for instance, suggest better ways for them to disguise their true intentions. The Trisolaran scholars calculated that the probability that a strike against Earth at the moment of the next Swordholder handover would succeed was 87.53 percent. If Tianming chose to help them, the probability of success increased to 93.27 percent. If Tianming collaborated, the Trisolarans were willing to leave about ten million humans alive after the invasion and pen them in Australia. This was a breeding population more than sufficient to preserve the seeds of human civilization.

  If Tianming refused to collaborate, the Trisolarans were happy enough with their 87.53 percent probability of success. And once they conquered Earth, they would engage in a program of total extermination of all humans and other Earth organisms—though for scientific research purposes they might preserve a few specimens and a genetic databank. They would, they vowed, not only eliminate humans from the Solar System, but launch droplet strikes against Blue Space and ensure that human bugs did not survive anywhere in the universe.

  “That’s an impossible choice!” AA couldn’t help interrupting. She saw that no matter which path Tianming chose, he would be judged to have committed crimes against humanity. The only way out was if the humans could somehow seize the slight advantage provided by Tianming’s noncollaboration—reducing the chances of Trisolaran success from 93.27 percent to 87.53 percent. But such hope was too dim to be relied on.

  “If you had been in my place, what would you have done?” Tianming asked.

  “I … I don’t know. I can’t choose.” AA shook her head.

  “What if you had to answer?”

  After a long silence, AA answered. “I … I would collaborate.”

  Such was Tianming’s choice as well. Collaboration would ensure the survival of at least a small population, and it was the only way to pass on a warning to the humans. After using sophon surveillance to verify that the Trisolaran claims of conditions on Earth and the fleet’s readiness for war were true, Tianming continued to negotiate with his Trisolaran captors. He extracted from them the promise to increase the postconquest human reservation population to fifty million. Only then did he pledge fealty to Trisolaris.

  The Trisolarans had no tradition of loyalty oaths or anything equivalent. Because their thoughts were transparent, determining whether someone was loyal was not a problem they ever needed to solve. Since Tianming was not a transparent Trisolaran, however, they wanted a ceremony to mark the special occasion. They scoured records of the ETO from centuries earlier to design a special oath-taking ceremony that could be broadcast to all Trisolarans on Trisolaris and in the fleet. Facing a camera, a grim-faced Tianming raised his fist and declared, “Eliminate human tyranny! The world belongs to Trisolaris!”

  One wonders what Ye Wenjie, Mike Evans, and all the other pioneers of the ETO would have thought of that moment.

  The Trisolarans also carefully examined Tianming’s brain activity to ensure that they weren’t being deceived. But after decades of fighting Trisolaran torturers for his own soul, Tianming had learned to disguise his deeper thoughts from Trisolaran probes: He simply tapped into the natural human instinct for self-deception. He had only to recall all the ways he had been mistreated and used by humans back on Earth and imagine the wonderful life he was going to lead as king of the surviving humans. The Trisolaran scientists observing his brain saw fear, anger, and finally surrender based on cost-benefit analysis. Tianming helpfully organized these superficial thoughts into layers: resentment toward humanity and despair, shame at his betrayal, self-justifying arguments, and greed for all the benefits he was going to enjoy later. The thoughts matched what the Trisolarans knew of human psychology and convinced them that Tianming’s collaboration was genuine.

  Even after he had sworn the
oath of loyalty, however, the Trisolarans still refused to show themselves to him. He had never once laid eyes on a Trisolaran. The Trisolarans explained to him that because their two species lived in such different environments, physical presence in the same space would require substantial work. Besides, the two sides could communicate effectively at any time through virtual windows appearing out of thin air, rendering face-to-face meetings unnecessary. Tianming puzzled over why the Trisolarans refused to let him see them and prevented him from looking up any images of Trisolarans. Eventually, he put the riddle aside, as he had more pressing matters to worry about.

  The main tasks required of Tianming were creating additional works of art for human consumption, revising and adding polish to diplomatic communiqués from Trisolaris to Earth, and directing some nonofficial exchanges between the two worlds. His existence had to be kept hidden from the humans, and everything he did had to go through a special censoring group of Trisolaran officials to prevent him from secretly passing on intelligence information. Of course, this was exactly what Tianming intended to do: warn humanity that the Trisolarans were intent on conquering Earth.

  Tianming soon discovered that the Trisolaran censors were as unskilled at counterdeception as at deception. They could not tell when messages contained hidden meanings, and so it was easy to slip warnings past them in his work intended for humans. During the next decade, Tianming warned humanity many times, often through Sophon herself.

  “What?” AA was shocked. “But I don’t remember any such warnings!”

  “I sent plenty of secret messages! For example, do you remember the science fiction novel The Trojan Nebula? It’s a retelling of the classic tale of the Trojan War in a space opera setting. I deliberately emphasized the plot point where the space Greeks only pretended to give up, but then used gifts to the space Trojans to disguise their plot of conquest. The book sold well on Earth, but no one seemed to understand the real theme.”

  “Oh, so that’s what that book was about!” AA was amazed. “I did think the book was probably trying to make some political point, but I thought it was about how Luo Ji and Zhang Beihai had only pretended to give up or run away from the Trisolarans in order to use plots and schemes to triumph over the Trisolarans in the end. I had no idea you meant the opposite.”

  “Your interpretation was shared by nine people out of ten on Earth.” Tianming sighed. “Arrogant humans always imagined themselves as the victors, even when reading fiction. I realized after a while that such hidden messages were too obscure to be of use. As the years went by, I was running out of time. Finally, I took a big risk and wrote a film script that laid out the truth in plain sight: The Betrayal of Heaven.”

  The Betrayal of Heaven was an alternate history tale. In this fictional universe, shortly after the establishment of dark forest deterrence the Trisolarans murdered Luo Ji through a series of clever plots and then invaded Earth. The scenes involving the conquest of Earth by the Trisolaran Fleet were extremely brutal and shocking. Tianming thought he was being too obvious and was prepared to die when the Trisolaran censors reviewed his work. However, the Trisolarans not only approved his script, but even turned it into a holographic film for transmission to Earth. The film did cause a great deal of controversy and debate on Earth, but not in the ways Tianming intended. Critics praised the film as a “profound distillation of Trisolaran rumination on the horrors of their warlike past and the depth of their commitment to humanistic values.” It won Best Picture at the Oscars, and Sophon, dressed in an elegant kimono, accepted the award on behalf of Trisolaris.

  Not all blame could be laid at the feet of human arrogance and stupidity. The film was a paradox. Since it was presented to Earth as a Trisolaran creation, the more it showed the Trisolarans to be cruel and bloodthirsty, the more humans viewed it as the Trisolarans engaging in honest reflection. Moreover, since everyone knew that the Trisolarans were incapable of lying, the idea that it represented some kind of elaborate Trisolaran plot was unthinkable. Although a few suspicious humans who advocated a hard line against the Trisolarans claimed that the film was a confession of the Trisolarans’ true intentions, most people ignored these Cassandras.

  But Tianming had one more trick up his sleeve.

  Besides composing novels and scripts, Tianming was also tasked with helping Trisolaran scientists come up with false fundamental scientific theories to give to the humans. To be effective, such theories had to appear correct while being wrong, and such advanced deception was beyond the capacity of almost all Trisolaran scientists. They thus left the job to Yun Tianming. But Tianming had only a college degree from the twentieth century, and it was difficult for him to grasp many advanced scientific concepts.

  He took inspiration from the wuxia fantasy novels he had read during his youth, in which evildoers would sometimes kidnap heroes and force them to teach them supersecret, advanced martial arts skills. The heroes would pretend to teach them these techniques, but alter key breathing instructions or meridian qi flow paths to sabotage their efforts. Tianming took real Trisolaran scientific theories and altered the numbers in them—adding a zero to a quark-related constant here, erasing a radical sign from a formula relating to space curvature there, and so on. Given the rate that human science was progressing, it would take them decades before they could experimentally falsify any of these numbers. After the Trisolaran scientists learned his technique, they hailed him as a genius. What Tianming did wasn’t difficult, but the scientists were disgusted by the very idea of having to deceive anyone with made-up numbers. Whenever they had to do such a thing themselves, they felt the urge to expel fecal matter.

  “So that explains it!” AA said. “When I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation, I was confused by how a constant provided by Trisolaran scientists just didn’t fit. I worked and worked at it, and had to give up in the end. I almost failed my defense because of it. It’s all your fault!”

  Tianming smiled helplessly. “That was actually a deliberate plant from me intended as a hint. While most of my changes could not be experimentally falsified for many years, there were a few changes I made that could be shown to be nonsense through theoretical derivation alone. I was hoping that these could serve as clues for human scientists and alert them to be vigilant against Trisolaran treachery.”

  “Oh, you idiot!” It was now Dr. 艾 AA’s turn to lecture him. “This is because you only have an undergraduate degree and don’t understand how academia really works. Your way of dropping hints is useless. Even if someone managed to experimentally falsify your numbers, the immediate response from the professors would be to question whether the experiment had been designed and conducted correctly. How could you expect an experiment to disprove theories handed to us by Trisolaran scientists, widely accepted as being at least several centuries ahead of Earth scientists?

  “Other labs wouldn’t bother trying to replicate your result, and even if you could somehow get others to repeat the experiment and show that the number was wrong, the established theoreticians would come up with one supplemental theory after another to explain away the discrepancy. They’d built their entire academic reputation and careers on Trisolaran theories, and they’d defend their paychecks to the death. Even if they ran out of explanations, they’d demand that you provide a better theory that could explain the results. And God help you if your new theory had even one imperfection. They’d attack you like a swarm of bees and focus on that one weakness and ignore the rest of it. And even then, you’d be lucky. The most likely result is they would just ignore you as a mere upstart. To get the entire scientific establishment to recant would require all the old tenured professors to die of old age.”

  In any event, all of Tianming’s attempts at warning humanity failed. His collaboration did in fact increase the chances of the success of Trisolaran deception. The silver lining was that it got the Trisolarans to believe that he really was loyal to the interests of Trisolaris. Tianming’s status in Trisolaran society shot up, and shortly before the final i
nvasion, he gained the authority to direct the sophons to observe Earth wherever he wanted, though he still couldn’t initiate contact with the humans.

  “That was when I saw Cheng Xin being awakened from hibernation. After that, I was with the two of you constantly—”

  “I think you mean that you were with her,” said AA. “I was the third wheel without knowing it.”

  Her outburst of jealousy was actually rooted in a secret only she knew, a secret concerning Cheng Xin and Yun Tianming. The secret had started two hundred years before her birth, during the Common Era, when aliens existed only in science fiction.

  It involved someone who was AA, and also not AA.

  “I really did mean both of you,” Tianming said. “AA, during all these years you were always by Cheng Xin’s side, and I knew you like a best friend. Actually, come to think of it, I felt a sense of familiarity with you as soon as I saw you—”

  “Are you telling me I reminded you of Ran Asa … something?” AA interrupted.

  “Of course not! I don’t know how to explain it … Maybe you just have a natural charisma that makes people feel close to you. You were always running around, and sometimes the sophons couldn’t even keep up—”

  “Wait a minute. You were watching us all the time with the sophons?”

  “That’s right. Through the sophons, I was by your side throughout all the years of your suffering. I experienced your trials and tribulations as though I was there myself,” Tianming said. “I know everything. I’ve always been with you.”