She tried to avoid thinking about those other grander things facing imminent destruction—annihilation covered the sky of her thoughts like a giant pair of black wings, and she dared not look directly up at it.

When the deterrent is the complete destruction of both the deterrer and the deteree, the system is said to be in a state of ultimate deterrence.

“Where are all these worlds?” Guan Yifan gently deposited AA on the ground and laughed. “A word of advice: In the future, no matter who you meet—human or otherwise—don’t ask for the location of their worlds. That’s a basic bit of manners in the cosmos—like how it’s impolite to ask a lady’s age.…

The place wasn’t at all what she had expected from an intelligence agency for the whole world; it reminded her more of a place where byzantine plots were hatched through whispers.

“I pity Solar System humans,” said Cheng Xin. “Even at the very end, most of them lived lives confined to a tiny portion of space-time, like those old men and women who never left their home villages during the Common Era. The universe remained a mystery to them until the end.” Yifan lifted his head to gaze at Cheng Xin. Under 3G, this was a very

If one viewed the stories as a two-dimensional plane, the dual-layer metaphor only provided one coordinate; the supporting single-layer metaphor provided a second coordinate that fixed the interpretation on the plane. Thus, this single-layer metaphor was also called the bearing coordinate. Viewed by itself, the bearing coordinate seemed

Cheng Xin now recalled the strange feeling she had experienced each time she had looked at Van Gogh’s painting. Everything else in the painting—the trees that seemed to be on fire, and the village and mountains at night—showed perspective and depth, but the starry sky above had no three-dimensionality at all, like a painting hanging in space.

Cheng Xin said what he couldn’t bring himself to say. “There were thirty-five years between the Halo City Incident and the completion of the Mercury base. Thirty-five precious years were lost.” Luo Ji nodded. Cheng Xin thought the way he looked at her was no longer kind, but rather resembled the fires of the Last Judgment. His gaze seemed to say,

I know about your experience as the Swordholder. I want to let you know that you didn’t do anything wrong. Humanity chose you, which meant they chose to treat life and everything else with love, even if they had to pay a great price. You fulfilled the wish of the world, carried out their values, and executed their choice. You really didn’t do