Death's End Read online

  But Lao Li selected 4.

  Noiselessly, the injector came to life. Tianming could see the column of yellowish liquid in the glass tube shorten and then disappear. Lao Li never moved. He closed his eyes and went to sleep.

  The crowd around Tianming dissipated, but he remained where he was, his hand pressed against the glass. He wasn’t looking at the lifeless body lying within. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t looking at all.

  “There was no pain.” Dr. Zhang’s voice was so low that it sounded like the buzzing of a mosquito. Tianming felt a hand land on his left shoulder. “It’s a combination of a massive dose of barbitone, muscle relaxant, and potassium chloride. The barbitone takes effect first and puts the patient into a deep sleep, the muscle relaxant stops his breathing, and the potassium chloride stops the heart. The whole process takes no more than twenty, thirty seconds.”

  After a while, Dr. Zhang’s hand left Tianming’s shoulder, and Tianming heard his departing footsteps. Tianming never turned around.

  He suddenly remembered how he knew the doctor. “Doctor,” Tianming called out softly. The footsteps stopped. Tianming still didn’t turn around. “You know my sister, don’t you?”

  The reply came after a long pause. “Yes. We were high school classmates. When you were little, I remember seeing you a couple of times.”

  Mechanically, Tianming left the main building of the hospital. Everything was clear now. Dr. Zhang was working for his sister; his sister wanted him dead. No, wanted him to “conduct the procedure.”

  Although Tianming often recalled the happy childhood he had shared with his sister, they had grown apart as they grew up. There was no overt conflict between them, and neither had hurt the other. But they had come to see each other as completely different kinds of people, and each felt that the other held them in contempt.

  His sister was shrewd but not smart, and she had married a man who was the same way. They were not successful in their careers, and even with grown children, the couple couldn’t afford to buy a home. Since her husband’s parents had no room for them, the family had ended up living with Tianming’s father.

  Tianming, on the other hand, was a loner. In career and personal life, he wasn’t any more successful than his sister. He had always lived by himself in dormitories that belonged to his employer, and left the responsibility for taking care of his frail father entirely to his sister.

  Tianming suddenly understood his sister’s thinking. The medical insurance was insufficient to cover the expenses for his hospitalization, and the longer it went on, the bigger the bill grew. Their father had been paying for it out of his life savings, but he had never offered to use that same money to help Tianming’s sister and her family to buy a house—a clear case of favoritism. From his sister’s point of view, their father was spending money that should be hers. Besides, the money was being wasted on treatments that could only prolong, but not cure, the illness. If Tianming chose euthanasia, his sister’s inheritance would be preserved, and he would suffer less.

  The sky was filled with misty, gray clouds, just like in his dream. Looking up at this endless grayness, Tianming let out a long sigh.

  All right. If you want me to die, I’ll die.

  He thought of “The Judgment” by Franz Kafka, in which a father curses his son and sentences him to death. The son agrees, as easily as someone agreeing to take out the trash or to shut the door, and leaves the house, runs through the streets onto the bridge, and leaps over the balustrade to his death. Later, Kafka told his biographer that as he wrote the scene, he was thinking of “a violent ejaculation.”

  Tianming now understood Kafka, the man with the bowler hat and briefcase, the man who walked silently through Prague’s dim streets more than a hundred years ago, the man who was as alone as he was.

  * * *

  Someone was waiting for Tianming when he returned to his hospital room: Hu Wen, a college classmate.

  Wen was the closest thing to a friend from Tianming’s college days, but what they had wasn’t friendship, exactly. Wen was one of those people who got along with everyone and who knew everyone’s name; but even for him, Tianming was in the most peripheral ring of his social network. They had had no contact since graduation.

  Wen didn’t bring a bouquet or anything similar; instead, he brought a cardboard box full of canned beverages.

  After a brief, awkward exchange of greetings, Wen asked a question that surprised Tianming. “Do you remember the outing back when we were first years? That first time we all went out as a group?”

  Of course Tianming remembered. That was the first time Cheng Xin had ever sat next to him, had ever spoken to him.

  If she hadn’t taken the initiative, he doubted if he ever would have gotten the courage to speak to her for the rest of their four years in college. At the outing, he had sat by himself, staring at the broad expanse of the Miyun Reservoir outside Beijing. She had sat down next to him and begun talking.

  While they talked, she tossed pebbles into the reservoir. Their conversation meandered over usual topics for classmates who were becoming acquainted for the first time, but Tianming could still recall every word. Later, Cheng Xin had made a little origami boat out of a sheet of paper and deposited it on the water. A breeze carried the boat away slowly until it turned into a tiny dot in the distance.…

  That most lovely day of his time in college held a golden glow in his mind. In reality, the weather that day hadn’t been ideal: There was a drizzle, and the surface of the reservoir was filled with ripples, and the pebbles they tossed felt wet in the hand. But from that day on, Tianming fell in love with drizzly days, fell in love with the smell of damp ground and wet pebbles, and from time to time he made origami boats and placed them on his nightstand.

  With a start, he wondered if the world in his peaceful dream had been born from this memory.

  But Wen wanted to talk about what had happened later in the outing—events that did not make much of an impression on Tianming. However, with prompts from Wen, Tianming managed to recall those faded memories.

  A few of Cheng Xin’s friends had come by and called her away. Wen then sat down next to Tianming.

  Don’t be too pleased with yourself. She’s nice to everyone.

  Of course Tianming knew that. But then Wen saw the bottle of mineral water in Tianming’s hand and the conversation shifted.

  What in the world are you drinking?!

  The water in the bottle was a green color, and bits of grass and leaves floated in it.

  I crumpled some weeds and added them to the water. It’s the most organic drink.

  He was in a good mood and so he was more loquacious than usual.

  Someday I may start a company to produce this drink. It will surely be popular.

  It must taste awful.

  Do you think cigarettes and liquor really taste that good? Even Coca-Cola probably tasted medicinal the first time you tried it. Anything addictive is like that.

  “Buddy, that conversation changed my life!” Wen said. He opened the cardboard box and took out a can. The outside was deep green, and on it was a picture of a grassland. The trademark was “Green Tempest.”

  Wen pulled the tab and handed the can to Tianming. Tianming took a sip: fragrant, herbal, with a trace of bitterness. He closed his eyes and was back at the shore of the drizzly reservoir, and Cheng Xin was next to him.…

  “This is a special version. The mass market recipe is sweeter,” Wen said.

  “Does it sell well?”

  “Sells great! The main hurdle now is cost. You might think grass is cheap, but until I can scale up, it’s more expensive than fruits or nuts. Also, to make it safe, the ingredients have to be detoxified and processed, a complicated procedure. The prospects are fantastic, though. Lots of investors are interested, and Huiyuan Juice wants to buy my company. Fuck them.”

  Tianming stared at Wen, not knowing what to say. Wen had graduated as an aerospace engineer, but now he had turned into a beverage entrepr
eneur. He was someone who did things, who got things done. Life belonged to people like that. But people like Tianming could only watch life pass them by, abandoned and left behind.

  “I owe you,” Wen said. He handed three credit cards and a slip of paper to Tianming, looked around, leaned in, and whispered, “There’s three million yuan in the account. The password is on the note.”

  “I never applied for a patent or anything like that,” Tianming said.

  “But it’s your idea. Without you, there would be no Green Tempest. If you agree, we’ll just call it even, at least legally. But as a matter of our friendship, I’ll always owe you.”

  “You don’t owe me anything, legally or otherwise.”

  “You have to accept it. I know you need money.”

  Tianming said no more. For him, the sum was astronomical, but he wasn’t excited. Money wasn’t going to save him.

  Still, hope was a stubborn creature. After Hu Wen left, Tianming asked for a consultation with a doctor. He didn’t want Dr. Zhang; instead, after much effort, he got the assistant director of the hospital, a famous oncologist.

  “If money were no issue, would there be a cure for me?”

  The old doctor brought up Tianming’s case file on his computer, and after a while, he shook his head.

  “The cancer has spread from your lungs throughout your body. Surgery is pointless; all you have are chemo and radiation, conservative techniques. Even with money …

  “Young man, remember the saying: A physician can only cure diseases meant to be cured; the Buddha can only save those meant to be saved.”

  The last bit of hope died in Tianming, and his heart was at peace. That afternoon, he filled out an application for euthanasia.

  He handed the application to his attending physician, Dr. Zhang. Zhang seemed to suffer some internal, moral conflict, and did not meet Tianming’s gaze. He did say to Tianming that he might as well stop the chemo sessions; there was no point for him to continue to suffer.

  The only matter that Tianming still had to take care of was deciding how to spend the money from Wen. The “right” thing to do would have been to give it to his father, and then let him distribute it to the rest of the family. But that was the same as handing the money to his sister, and Tianming didn’t want to do that. He was already going to die, just as she wanted; he didn’t feel he owed her any more.

  He tried to see if he had any unfulfilled dreams. It would be nice to take a trip around the world on some luxury cruise ship … but his body wasn’t up for it, and he didn’t have much time left. That was too bad. He would have liked to lie on a sun-drenched deck and review his life as he gazed at the hypnotic sea. Or he could step onto the shores of some strange country on a drizzly day, sit next to a little lake and toss wet pebbles onto a surface full of ripples.…

  Once again, he was thinking of Cheng Xin. These days, he thought of her more and more.

  That night, Tianming saw a news report on TV:

  The twelfth session of the UN Planetary Defense Council has adopted Resolution 479, initiating the Stars Our Destination Project. A committee formed from the UN Development Program, the UN Committee on Natural Resources, and UNESCO is authorized to implement the project immediately.

  The official Chinese website for the Stars Our Destination Project begins operation this afternoon. According to an official at the UNDP resident representative office in Beijing, the Project will accept bids from individuals and enterprises, but will not consider bids from non-governmental organizations.…

  Tianming got up and told his nurse that he wanted to take a walk. But as it was already after lights out, the nurse refused to let him leave. He returned to his dark room, pulled open the curtains, and lifted the window. The new patient in Lao Li’s old bed grumbled.

  Tianming looked out. The lights of the city cast a haze over the night sky, but it was still possible to pick out a few silvery specks.

  He knew what he wanted to do with his money: He was going to buy Cheng Xin a star.

  Excerpt from A Past Outside of Time

  Infantilism at the Start of the Crisis

  Many of the events during the first twenty years of the Crisis Era were incomprehensible to those who came before and those who came after; historians summarized them under the heading of “Crisis Infantilism.”

  It was commonly thought that Infantilism was a response to an unprecedented threat to the entirety of civilization. That might have been true for individuals, but it was too simple an explanation when applied to humanity as a whole.

  The Trisolar Crisis’s impact on society was far deeper than people had imagined at first. To give some imperfect analogies: In terms of biology, it was equivalent to the moment when the ancestors of mammals climbed from the ocean onto land; in terms of religion, it was akin to when Adam and Eve were banished from Eden; in terms of history and sociology … there are no suitable analogies, even imperfect ones. Compared to the Trisolar Crisis, everything heretofore experienced by human civilization was nothing. The Crisis shook the very foundation of culture, politics, religion, and economics. Although the impact reached the deepest core of civilization, its influence manifested most quickly at the surface. The root cause for Crisis Infantilism may well be found in the interaction between these manifestations and the tremendous inertia of human society’s inherent conservatism.

  The classic examples of Crisis Infantilism were the Wallfacer Project and the Stars Our Destination Project, both international efforts within the framework of the United Nations—initiatives that soon became incomprehensible to anyone from outside that period. The Wallfacer Project changed history, and its influence so permeated the course of civilization that it must be discussed in another chapter. The same elements that led to the birth of the grand Wallfacer Project simultaneously conceived the Stars Our Destination Project. That project, on the other hand, quickly faded away after launch and was never heard from again.

  There were two main motivations for the Stars Our Destination Project: first, to increase the power of the UN at the beginning of the Crisis; second, the genesis and popularity of Escapism.

  The Trisolar Crisis was the first time that all of humanity faced a common enemy, and it was only natural that many placed their hopes in the UN. Even conservatives agreed that the UN ought to be completely reformed and given more power and more resources. Radicals and idealists pushed for an Earth Union and for making the UN into a world government.

  Smaller countries, in particular, favored elevating the status of the UN because they saw the Crisis as an opportunity to get more technological and economic aid. The great powers, on the other hand, responded to this coolly. In actuality, the great powers all invested heavily in space defense after the Crisis. In part, this was because they realized that contribution to space defense would become the foundation for national strength and political status in future international relations; it was also because they had always wanted to invest in such large-scale basic research, but the domestic demands of their citizenry and constraints imposed by international politics had made such efforts impractical in the past. In a sense, the Trisolar Crisis provided the leaders of the great powers with an opportunity similar to the opportunity given to Kennedy by the Cold War—similar, but a couple of orders of magnitude greater. While all the great powers were reluctant to place their efforts under the aegis of the United Nations, due to the rising tide of calls for true globalization, they were forced to cede to the UN some symbolic, political commitments that they had no intention of honoring. The common space defense system advocated by the UN, for example, received little substantive support from the great powers.

  In the history of the early Crisis Era, UN Secretary General Say was a key figure. She believed that the time for a new UN had arrived and advocated transforming the institution from what was little more than a meeting place for the great powers and an international forum, into an independent political body with the power to genuinely direct the construction of the Solar S
ystem’s defenses.

  To achieve this goal, the UN needed sufficient resources, a requirement that appeared impossible to meet given the realities of international relations. The Stars Our Destination Project was an attempt by Say to acquire such resources for the UN. No matter the results, the very attempt was a testament to her political intelligence and imagination.

  The basis for the project lay in the Space Convention, which was a product of pre-Crisis politics. Based on the principles enacted in the Law of the Sea Convention and the Antarctic Treaty, the Space Convention was negotiated and drafted over a long period of time. But the pre-Crisis Space Convention was limited to resources within the Kuiper Belt; the Trisolar Crisis forced the nations of the world to set their sights farther out.

  Since humans had not even been able to set foot on Mars, any discussion of outer space was meaningless, at least prior to the expiration date of the Space Convention fifty years after it was drafted. But the great powers viewed the Convention as the perfect venue for political theater and amended it with provisions regarding resources outside the Solar System. The amendment provided that the development of natural resources outside the Kuiper Belt, and other economic activities regarding them, had to take place under the auspices of the United Nations. The amendment went into excruciating detail to define “natural resources,” but, basically, the phrase referred to resources not already occupied by nonhuman civilizations. This treaty also offered the first international law definition for “civilization.” Historically, this document was referred to as the Crisis Amendment.

  The second motivation for the Stars Our Destination Project was Escapism. At the time, the Escapist movement was still in its early stages, and its consequences were not yet apparent, such that many still considered it a valid choice for humanity in crisis. Under such conditions, other stars, especially stars with their own planets, became valuable.

  The initial resolution proposing the Stars Our Destination Project would have the UN auction off the rights to certain stars and their planets. The intended bidders were states, businesses, NGOs, and individuals, and the proceeds from the auction would be used to fund the UN’s basic research into a Solar System defense system. Secretary General Say explained that the universe had an abundance of stars. There were more than three hundred thousand stars within one hundred light-years of the Solar System, and more than ten million within one thousand light-years. A conservative estimate suggested that at least one-tenth of these stars had planets. Auctioning off a small proportion of these would not affect the future of space development much.