The special team had told Cheng Xin again and again that the flight itself would be routine, no more special than the airplane rides she used to take. The distance between the terminal station and the Lagrangian point was about 1.5 million kilometers, or one hundredth of an astronomical unit. This was considered an extremely short spaceflight, and the craft she rode in was well suited for such brief trips. Cheng Xin recalled that three centuries ago, one of the things that had lured her into aerospace engineering was a great accomplishment by humankind during the twentieth century: fifteen men had managed to step onto the moon. Their voyage had only been a fifth as long as the journey she was about to undertake.
Ten minutes later, Cheng Xin got to see a sunrise in space. The Sun slowly rose over the curved edge of the Earth. From such distance, the waves over the Pacific were invisible, and the ocean was like a mirror reflecting sunlight. The clouds appeared as soapy foam over the mirror. From this vantage point, the Sun appeared much smaller than the Earth, like a shining golden egg being birthed by this dark blue world. By the time the Sun had completely emerged from the curved horizon, the side of the Earth facing the Sun turned into a giant crescent. The crescent was so bright that the rest of the Earth merged into dark shadow, and the Sun and the crescent seemed to form a giant symbol hovering in space. Cheng Xin thought of the mark as symbolizing rebirth.
She knew that this could very well be her last sunrise. In the upcoming meeting, even if she and Tianming faithfully followed the rules around their conversation, there was a possibility that the distant Trisolarans would not permit her to live, and she wasn’t interested in following the rules at all. But she thought everything was perfect; she had no regrets.
As the dinghy progressed, the lit portion of the Earth expanded. Cheng Xin saw the outlines of the continents, and easily picked out Australia. It resembled a dry leaf floating in the Pacific. The continent was emerging from the shadow, and the terminator was right in the middle of the continent. It was morning in Warburton, and she thought of the desert sunrise seen by Fraisse from the edge of the wood.
Her dinghy swept over the Earth. By the time the curved horizon had finally disappeared over the edge of the viewport, acceleration stopped. As the hypergravity disappeared, Cheng Xin felt as though a pair of arms hugging her tightly had relaxed. The dinghy coasted toward the Sun, and the light from the Sun overwhelmed all the stars. The transparent hull adjusted and dimmed until the Sun was a disc whose brightness was no longer blinding. Cheng Xin reached out to adjust it even more, until the Sun resembled the full moon. She still had six more hours to travel. She drifted in weightlessness, drifted in the moonlight-like sun.
Five hours later, the dinghy turned 180 degrees and the engine came to life for deceleration. As the dinghy turned, Cheng Xin saw the Sun gradually move away, and then the stars and the Milky Way swept past her vision like a long scroll. By the time the dinghy stopped, the Earth was once again at the center of her view. It now looked about as big as the moon from the surface of the Earth, and the immensity it had displayed a few hours ago was gone. Now it looked fragile, like a fetus floating in blue amniotic fluid about to emerge from the warm womb and be exposed to the frigidity and darkness of space.
With the engine turned on, gravity returned to embrace Cheng Xin. The deceleration lasted about half an hour before the drive started to pulse for precision position maneuvers. Finally, gravity disappeared again, and everything became quiet.
This was the Lagrangian point. Here, the dinghy was a satellite of the Sun, orbiting in synch with the Earth.
Cheng Xin glanced at her watch. The voyage had been planned very well. She still had ten minutes before the meeting. The space around her was empty, and she struggled to empty her mind as well. She was preparing herself for the task of memorization: The only thing that could retain anything from the meeting was her brain. She had to turn herself into an emotionless audio and video recorder so that during the next two hours she could remember as much as possible of what she saw and heard.
She imagined the corner of space she happened to be in. Here, the Sun’s gravity overcame the Earth’s, reaching balance, so this place held an extra measure of emptiness compared to other spots in space. She was in this emptiness of zero, a lonely, independent presence that had no connections to any other part of the cosmos…. In this way, she managed to drive her complicated emotions out of her consciousness, until she achieved the blank, transcendent state she wanted.
