The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu Page B

above the cloud layer, Luo Ji struggled to collect his thoughts. Involuntarily, his mind drifted to thoughts of the woman: her voice and laughing face appeared in the dimness, and a sorrow he had never felt before weighed upon his heart. This was followed closely by self-reproach, a disdain he had felt on countless prior occasions, but never so intensely. Why was she on his mind now? Up to this point, his only reaction to her death apart from fear and astonishment had been self-absolution, and only now that he knew her role in the situation was negligible did he spare her any of his precious sorrow. What sort of a person was he?
    But what could be done? That’s just the sort of person he was.
    In his bed, the minute oscillations of the plane gave Luo Ji the feeling of being in a cradle. He had slept in a cradle as a baby, he remembered, and one day in his parents’ basement he had seen, covered in dust under an old kid’s bed, the rockers of a cradle. Now when he closed his eyes and imagined the couple rocking his cradle, he asked himself, From the day you left that cradle, have you ever cared about anyone else besides those two people? Have you ever made even a small, permanent bit of room in your heart for anyone else?
    Yes, he had made room, once. Five years before, the golden light of love had inhabited his heart. But that had been an unreal experience.
    Everything had started with Bai Rong, an author of young-adult novels. She wrote them in her spare time but had gained enough of a following to bring her more in royalties than she made in salary. Out of all the women he had met, he had spent the most time with Bai Rong, and had even reached the point of considering marrying her. Their relationship was the ordinary sort, not particularly intense or unforgettable, but they felt it suited them to be relaxed and happy together. Despite a certain dread of marriage, they felt giving it a try was the responsible thing to do.
    At Bai Rong’s behest, he had read all of her work, and while he wouldn’t say he appreciated it, it wasn’t as torturous as the other works in the genre he had flipped through. She had an elegant style, and a mature lucidity that her peers lacked. But this style was not complemented by the novels’ content. Reading them was like looking at dewdrops on the undergrowth: pure and transparent, but distinguished from each other only by the way the light reflected and refracted through them and how they rolled about on the leaves, fusing together where they met and separating when they fell, until they evaporated entirely within the space of a few minutes after sunrise. Every time he read one of her books, beneath the graceful style he was left with one question: What do these people live on if they spend twenty-four hours a day in love?
    “That love you write about—do you think it exists in the real world?” he asked one day.
    “I do.”
    “Something you’ve seen, or something you’ve experienced yourself?”
    She squeezed his neck. “Either way, I’m telling you that it exists,” she said cryptically into his ear.
    Sometimes he would give her suggestions for the novels she was working on, or even help her revise them.
    “It’s like you’re more talented than I am,” she said once. “You’re not revising plot, but character, and that’s the hardest thing to do. Every time, you’re adding the touches that make the characters most vivid. Your skill at creating literary figures is first rate.”
    “You’ve got to be kidding. My background’s in astronomy.”
    “Wang Xiaobo 9 studied mathematics, remember.”
    On her birthday last year, she had asked him for a specific present: “Can you write a novel for me?”
    “A whole novel?”
    “Well, at least fifty thousand characters long.”
    “With you as the protagonist?”
    “No. I saw a really interesting exhibition of paintings by male artists of the most beautiful women they could imagine. The protagonist of your novel should be