“A few years later? Wouldn’t that be even harder?”
“No. It’s still a state of war now, so society can’t take care of us. In a few decades, after the peace talks, there’ll be peace and prosperity.”
“Peace talks? With whom?!”
“Trisolaris, of course.”
Shaken by Xiong Wen’s final statement, Luo Ji strove to sit up. A nurse entered and helped him up to a half-sitting position in bed.
“They said they want peace talks?” he asked anxiously.
“Not yet. But they’ll have no other choice,” Xiong Wen said, nimbly getting out of his bed and coming over to sit down on Luo Ji’s. He had clearly been anticipating the pleasure of introducing someone newly awakened to this era. “Don’t you know? Humanity is amazing now. Simply amazing!”
“How?”
“Our spacecraft are incredibly powerful. Far more powerful than Trisolaran ships!”
“How is that possible?”
“Why wouldn’t it be? Put the superweapons aside and look purely at speed. They can reach fifteen percent of the speed of light! Tons faster than the Trisolarans!”
When Luo Ji turned a skeptical eye toward the nurse, he noticed that she was exceptionally pretty. Everyone in this age seemed to be attractive. She nodded with a smile. “It’s true.”
Xiong Wen went on, “And do you know how many ships there are in the space fleet? I’ll tell you: two thousand! Twice as many as the Trisolarans! And the number’s still growing!”
Luo Ji glanced again at the nurse, who nodded.
“You know how badly off the Trisolaran Fleet is now? In two centuries they’ve passed through the, ah, the space dust they call the snow patch three times. I heard someone say that the most recent time was four years ago, and the telescope observed that their formation has become sparser. They’re not holding together. More than half of the ships stopped accelerating long ago, and they decelerated considerably when they crossed the dust. They’re crawling now, and they won’t reach the Solar System for more than eight hundred years. They might already be broken hulks. Projecting from their current speed, no more than three hundred ships will arrive on time two centuries from now. However, one Trisolaran probe will reach the Solar System soon. This year. The other nine are following afterward and will get here three years later.”
“The probe… What’s that?” Luo Ji asked in confusion.
The nurse said, “We don’t encourage the exchange of practical information. When the previous reawakened hibernator learned about these things, it took him many days to calm down. It’s not conducive to recovery.”
“It makes me happy, so what’s it to you?” Xiong Wen said with a shrug. Then he returned to his own bed to lie down. As he lay watching the soft light emitted by the ceiling, he sighed, “The kids are all right. They’re really all right.”
“Who’s a kid?” the nurse sniffed. “Hibernation doesn’t count as age. You’re the kid.” To Luo Ji’s eyes, she actually looked younger than Xiong Wen, although he knew that his appearance-based judgment of age might not be accurate in this era.
The nurse said to him, “The people from your time are all pretty despairing. But things aren’t really all that serious.”
To Luo Ji, this was the voice of an angel. He felt like he had turned into a child who had just awakened from a nightmare, and all the frightening things he had experienced were taken care of by a smile from an adult. When she spoke, her nurse’s uniform shone a fast-rising sun, and under its golden light, the dry yellow earth turned green, and flowers bloomed in wild abandon….
When the nurse had gone, Luo Ji asked Xiong Wen, “What about the Wallfacer Project?”
Xiong Wen shook his head in confusion. “Wallfacer… ? Never heard of it.”
Luo Ji asked when Xiong Wen had entered hibernation. It had been before the Wallfacer Project had started, when hibernation was very expensive. His family must have had money. But if he hadn’t heard anything about the Wallfacer Project in the five days he had been awake, that meant that even if the program hadn’t been forgotten in this era, it was no longer important.
Next, Luo Ji personally experienced the level of technology of this new age in two trivial areas.
Soon after he entered the ward, the nurse carried in his first meal after reawakening, a very small quantity of milk and bread and jam, because his stomach functions were still recovering. He took a bite of bread and felt like he was chewing sawdust.
“Your sense of taste is still recovering, too,” the nurse said.
“It’ll taste even worse once you’ve recovered,” Xiong Wen said.
The nurse laughed. “Of course, it’s not as good as the food grown on the surface in your era.”
“Then where does this come from?” Luo Ji asked, through his full mouth.
“It’s produced in a factory.”
“You’re able to synthesize grain?”
Xiong Wen answered for the nurse. “There’s no other option but to synthesize it. The land won’t grow any crops anymore.”
Luo Ji felt sorry for Xiong Wen. There had been people in his era who had become immune to technology and were indifferent to any sort of technological wonder, and Xiong Wen was apparently one of them. He was unable to properly appreciate this new age.
The next discovery was an incredible shock to Luo Ji, although the thing itself was still quite plain. The nurse pointed to the cup of milk and told him that it had been put into a heating cup especially for hibernators, because the people of this era generally did not drink hot liquids. Even coffee was taken cold. If he wasn’t used to drinking cold milk, he could heat it up simply by moving a slider near the bottom of the cup to the desired temperature. When he finished drinking, he inspected the cup. It looked like an ordinary glass cup apart from a thick, opaque base which must contain the heat source. But no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find any controls but the slider, and when he tried to twist the base, he found it was integrated with the rest of the cup.
“Don’t mess around with the supplies. You don’t understand them yet. It’s dangerous,” the nurse said after watching Luo Ji’s efforts.
“I’d like to know where it gets recharged.”
“Re… charged?” The nurse awkwardly repeated the word, evidently hearing it for the first time.
“Charge. Recharge,” Luo Ji said in English, but the nurse just shook her head in confusion.
“What happens when the batteries run out?”
“Batteries?”
“Batteries,” he said in English. “You don’t have batteries anymore?” When the nurse shook her head again, he said, “Then where does the electricity in the cup come from?”
“Electricity? There’s electricity everywhere,” the nurse said disapprovingly.
“The electricity in the cup won’t run out?”
“It won’t run out.”
“It’s inexhaustible?!”
“Inexhaustible. How could electricity run out?”
When the nurse left, Luo Ji still was unable to let go of the cup. He ignored Xiong Wen’s ridicule, for his surging emotions told him that he was holding a sacred object, the age-old dream of humanity: a perpetual motion machine. If humanity had really achieved inexhaustible energy, then they could achieve practically everything. Now he believed the words of the pretty nurse: Things might not be so serious.
When the doctor came into the ward for a routine checkup, Luo Ji asked him about the Wallfacer Project.
“I know of it. It’s an ancient joke,” the doctor replied offhandedly.
“What happened to the Wallfacers?”