Chapter 41 Chapter Thirty-Nine

Like all residents of Wolfshen City (current population 56,521), Dr. Ted Khan was woken by an emergency siren just after midnight locally.His immediate reaction was: "God, it must be another ice quake!" He rushed to the window and yelled "Open the window!" so loudly that the room could not understand him, so he had to repeat it at his usual volume.The light of the sun is supposed to stream in, drawing patterns that would confuse visitors from Earth, because no matter how long you wait, the light won't move at all... The unchanging light had faded.Ted Khan looked out at the huge transparent dome of Langshen City in disbelief, and what he saw was Ganymede's sky that had disappeared for thousands of years.It was studded with stars again, and Tai Kui disappeared.

Gazing at the long-forgotten constellation, Khan noticed something even more terrifying.Where Tai Kui should be, is a small disk of total darkness, obscuring some unfamiliar stars. There was only one possible explanation, the Khan told himself blankly.Tai Wei was swallowed by the black hole, and it may be our turn next. On the balcony of the Davidson Hotel, Poole was looking at the same spectacle, but with more complicated emotions.His communications secretary had woken him up for a message from Harman before the emergency siren went off. "Beginning, we successfully infected the slate. But one of them - maybe several - virus entered our circuit. I don't know if the memory disc you gave us will be useful. If it succeeds, we I will meet you in Qian's Village."

The words that follow are surprising and even touching.It contains an emotional component that I'm afraid many generations will still debate endlessly. "If we can't back up, remember us..." From the room behind Poole heard the voice of the mayor, who was doing his best to reassure the now sleepless residents of Wolfshen.Although it begins with the most horrific official line: "There is no need to panic," the mayor does have good news. "We don't know what happened, but the sun is as bright as ever! I repeat, the sun is still bright! We have just received a message from the interorbital shuttle Subaru VI, which departed half an hour ago for Callisto. It's what they saw—"

Poole rushed into the room from the balcony, just in time to see the sun flashing on the video screen. "What's happening," continued the Mayor breathlessly, "is that something has caused a temporary eclipse—let's zoom in... Callisto Observatory, please teleport..." How did he know it was "temporary"?Poole thought and waited for the next scene. Tai Kui disappeared, replaced by a field of stars.At the same time, the mayor's voice faded away, and another voice took over: "—— you can see it with almost any telescope. It is a completely black disk, just over ten thousand kilometers wide, so thin that you can't tell its thickness. And it It happened just enough—apparently on purpose—to shade Ganymede from any light.

"Let's zoom in and see if we can reveal any detail, but I doubt..." From the vantage point of Callisto, the occultation's disk is oval in shape, twice as long as it is wide.It expands until it fills the entire screen; after that it is impossible to tell if the image is zoomed in, because its details are completely lost. "As I thought, there is nothing to see, let's move to the edge of this thing..." Again, there is no sense of camera movement at all, until a field of stars suddenly appears, cut sharply by the slightly arced edge of a planet-sized disk, as if they were on an airless and completely flat planet, As if looking towards the horizon.

No, it's not completely flat... "Interesting," commented the astronomer.Until now, his tone is still very flat, as if this kind of thing happens every day. "The edges look jagged, but very regular, as if jagged..." A circular saw, Poole whispered.Is it here to saw us?Do not be silly…… "We can only get so close, any further diffraction will destroy the image—we'll deal with that later so we can analyze the details." The magnification is so high that it can no longer be seen that it is a circle.Across the screen is a black band, jagged along the edges are very similar triangles.Poole can't get over that ominous association with the saw, but something else is sawing through his mind...

Like everyone else on Ganymede, he watched the many stars in the distance passing in and out of the triangular valleys, and it was likely that some people had drawn conclusions before he even thought of it. If you want to make a disc out of some rectangles, it doesn't matter if the sides of the rectangles are 1:4:9, you can't have smooth edges.Of course, you can make it as close to a circle as possible, as long as you use the smallest possible rectangle.But if it's just a disk big enough to shade the sun, why bother? The mayor was right that eclipses were indeed temporary.But it ends exactly the opposite of a solar eclipse.

The first ray of light pierces through the center, instead of the "Beili Bead" appearing from the edge like a solar eclipse.Fractured light radiates from a tiny hole—and now, at maximum magnification, the disk's structure reveals itself.It is composed of countless identical rectangles, perhaps all the same size as the "Great Wall" on Europa.Now they came apart, like a huge jigsaw puzzle falling apart. As the disk shattered, the sun's rays poured out through the widening rift, its eternal daylight (though just temporarily interrupted) slowly returning to Ganymede.Now those constituent units were disappearing, as if they needed the strength of contact with each other to maintain their shape.

Although the entire incident seemed to have lasted hours to the anxious residents of Langshen City, it was actually less than 15 minutes.No one noticed Europa itself until it was over. The "Great Wall" is gone.It was almost an hour before news came from Earth, Mars and the Moon that the sun had apparently also flickered for a few seconds before returning to normal. This is a highly selective binary eclipse, clearly aimed at humans.Nowhere else in the solar system would living things notice. Because of the commotion it caused, it took a while to notice that both TMA0 and TMA1 had also disappeared, leaving only the three-million-year-old imprint on the moon Tycho and Africa.

This is the first time that the Ouxing people can really face human beings.But they were neither wary nor surprised by the gigantic creatures that flew between them. Of course, parsing the emotional state of these creatures, which appear to be bare bushes with no apparent senses or communication behavior, is not easy.But if they were spooked by the approach of Pleiades 6, and the presence of its passengers, they would take refuge in their igloos. The protective suit and the gift of shiny copper wire slightly hindered Poole's actions. As he walked into the messy outskirts of Qian's Village, he wondered how the Europeans felt about these recent events.

For them, Taikai has never been concealed, but the disappearance of the "Great Wall" must be a shock.It has stood there since time immemorial, and undoubtedly has more functions besides being a barrier.Then, suddenly, it disappeared, as if it had never existed... The gigabit light sheet was waiting for him.A group of Ouxing duo surrounded the light sheet, showing a curiosity that Poole had never seen.He wondered whether Harman had told them in some way to guard this gift from space until Poole came to retrieve it. Then Poole was to take it to the only place where it could be safely stored.Because now it contains not only a sleeping friend, but also a horrible virus that may only be able to be eliminated in the next century.