Seventy-two hours later, a shuttle provided by Civilization R hung in the night sky above Beijing. Not a ship—a point of light, like a star in the wrong place. The four stood on the surface looking up at it, and Nadia murmured:
"All that way to come."
She was not speaking of the shuttle. She was speaking of the far end of Orion's Arm, the heartland of Civilization R. The notice had been sent from there, crossed hundreds of light-years, refracted for an instant across three thousand seven hundred and twenty-one nodes, and landed on Earth screens.
Léon's fingers moved in the air a few times. He was calculating distance. Then he stopped.
"Stop calculating." Gu Yuanzheng clapped him on the shoulder. "No matter how far, we have to go."
The shuttle's hatch opened beneath the four of them—not a physical hatch, but a column of faint blue light. Their bodies were wrapped in it. Their molecular structure was read, encoded, and transmitted in three-tenths of a second.
In his last moment of consciousness, Gu Yuanzheng saw Beijing's night sky. Gray-white. No stars visible—the Eye of Cangming's blue glow had left a thin haze in the upper atmosphere, hiding the stars for sixty-two years.
He thought of his grandfather's words. Dare to fight enemies ten thousand times stronger.
And still believe he could win.
He closed his eyes. Before the light swallowed him, the thought he did not say out loud was this: he just "felt he could win." But in his hand, until now, there had been nothing to prove that he could. Only a sentence heard at five years old, and four billion people converted into a sign. He was not sure it was enough.
But the light would not wait for him.