THE LATE TRAVELER
Part Three
Colin Jarvis laughed involuntarily: "Star War?"
She nodded: "Yes. But unfortunately I arrived too late—the war had long since ended. I'm the only one left behind on Earth."
Colin Jarvis: "What is a Star War?"
Her: "A Star War is an interstellar war. A very, very long time ago, an interstellar war swept across fifteen planetary clusters in the Orion Spur. In Earth time, this war took place approximately 8,000 years ago."
Colin Jarvis: "What does this Star War have to do with Earth?"
Her: "Toward the end of the war, Earth was drawn into the battlefield, but only as a base for our alliance's counteroffensive in the solar system. I was one of the soldiers transported from the ninth planetary cluster, sent to Earth to carry out a counteroffensive mission. But something went wrong during transport—I arrived late, and the war was already over."
Colin Jarvis: "Were you the only one who arrived late?"
Her: "As far as I know, yes."
Colin Jarvis fell silent. Everyone was silent.
This kind of talk was simply absurd—at least I couldn't accept it at all. If forced to comment, I could only marvel at the sheer extravagance of Tanya's imagination. Colin Jarvis frowned, thinking about which direction to steer the conversation next. The verbal guidance wasn't at the point where it should end yet. After a while he said: "8,000 years ago—by that time, there should have already been civilizations on Earth."
Her: "Very primitive civilizations."
Colin Jarvis: "They were decent enough—at least tribal structures had already formed. The ancient texts record: 'In ancient times, the four pillars collapsed, the nine provinces split apart, the sky could no longer cover all, the earth could no longer support all, waters surged without ceasing...' You know the story of Nüwa patching the sky, right?"
I thought to myself—here we go, Colin Jarvis is weaving ancient mythology into the conversation again.
Her: "Do you think Nüwa was really patching the sky?"
Colin Jarvis was surprised: "If she wasn't patching the sky, then what?"
Her: "At that time, humans had no concept of the cosmos. The so-called 'sky' was simply what they saw when they looked up. Look up right now—the sky is empty. How could it be broken?"
Colin Jarvis: "Are you saying that 8,000 years ago, the sky humans saw was not the same sky we see now?"
Her: "Exactly."
I could see clearly that Colin Jarvis's face twitched. He forced his voice to remain steady as he asked: "Then what sky did humans see 8,000 years ago?"
I suddenly felt that this conversation had taken on a strange, unsettling quality. It was supposed to be Colin Jarvis guiding Tanya, but now it had reversed—Tanya was leading Colin Jarvis step by step into the unknown.
Her: "What humans saw when they looked up back then wasn't the sky we know now—it was the Moon."
Colin Jarvis: "We can still see the Moon when we look up at night."
She shook her head: "That's not what I mean. At that time, the Moon was extremely close to Earth, hovering right above people's heads, completely covering the entire sky. When people looked up, they could only see it."
Colin Jarvis smiled, his expression suddenly relieved: "You may not know enough about astrophysics. What you're describing is impossible. If the Moon were that close, it would be pulled down by Earth's powerful gravity—it couldn't possibly float in the air."
Her: "We installed anti-gravity devices on the Moon."
This time, not just Colin Jarvis but even I shuddered. "Anti-gravity devices"—these words coming from the mouth of a peasant woman were simply inconceivable to the point of absurdity! The village head and Tanya's husband just watched blankly, completely unaware of the staggering implications of what she was saying.
She continued: "The Moon is not a natural celestial body. It is one of the colossal flying vessels constructed by our alliance. Some of the materials used to build the Moon are even older than Earth itself. It was an important base for our counteroffensive plan in the solar system, so in the final phase of the war, this base came under fierce attack from the enemy. Many of the large craters on the Moon's surface were left from that time.
Many enormous craters are arranged in straight lines, as if strafed by weapons. You understand that meteorites couldn't produce such patterns. Those were wounds inflicted by mirror cannons."
I barely managed to record these absurd notes with my disobedient hands. Colin Jarvis's expression grew increasingly uneasy, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down as he struggled to maintain the composure of an academic researcher. Soon, he steadied himself and asked: "If what you say is true, then what about Nüwa patching the sky?"
Her: "Nüwa was not a person—or rather, it was not a living being at all. Nüwa was a—using modern terminology—giant, artificially intelligent mechanical hive-mind constructed by our alliance, responsible for the Moon's repair operations. Under the mirror cannon attacks, the Moon suffered severe damage and developed enormous fissures. Nüwa's repair work on the Moon's cracks is what you call 'patching the sky.'"
Colin Jarvis swallowed hard: "And then... what happened?"
Tanya stood up first and poured herself a bowl of water. As she bent over, you could clearly see the rolls of fat tucked into the waistband of her clothes. These rolls of fat were too real—the unmistakable markers of a peasant woman who did manual labor. I couldn't help but gasp, like a person held underwater for too long finally breaking the surface.
After drinking the water, she sat back down and continued: "Then the war ended, and the alliance claimed victory. The Moon's propulsion systems had been severely damaged in the war and could no longer undertake long-distance flight. They could only deactivate the anti-gravity devices and use the last remnants of propulsion to break free from Earth's gravitational pull, becoming an orbiting satellite. During the Moon's ascent, the oceans and lakes on the ground were affected by its gravitational pull, creating enormous tides—incredibly massive, causing a great flood that nearly submerged the entire surface of the Earth.
Of course, the alliance also sent warships to rescue the humans. After all, the species was innocent—you were merely victims of the war."
I couldn't accept her perspective. In my mind, I continued to treat her as a patient with dissociative identity disorder. But her narrative was seamlessly coherent, and my long-held doubts suddenly found footnotes. The legends of Nüwa with her serpent body, Gonggong's head-strike that caused the great deluge, Noah's Ark in the Bible that saved humanity—it was as if a long-incomplete puzzle had suddenly received its final missing piece.
4
Colin Jarvis was no longer composed—I had never seen such a helpless expression on his face before.
The "personality dissociation patient" sitting across from him had far exceeded our expectations. Colin Jarvis's attempted "cathartic guidance therapy" had been defeated before it even began. By this point, he could only futilely continue the conversation, hoping to find some crack or inconsistency in Tanya's story: "Are you saying that when humans were still primitive and ignorant, they were already swept up in an interstellar war?"
"That's correct."
"And as one side of the war—were you the righteous side or the evil one?"
Unexpectedly, Tanya smiled with her lips pressed together: "Does war distinguish between righteous and evil? I think that's not just a rule on Earth, but a law throughout the entire universe—as long as you win, you're right. If you lose, you're wrong."
Colin Jarvis had to admit the simple, irrefutable logic in her statement. He then asked another question: "I don't understand—with such advanced civilization and technology, why would they still wage war?"
She turned the question back on him: "Does war need a reason?"
Colin Jarvis was speechless.
Indeed—does war need a reason? Looking at the development of human history, the more advanced civilization and technology became, the more devastating wars grew, finally reaching their peak in World War II, which engulfed the entire globe. If different civilizations follow universal laws of evolution, then war is equally inevitable—and may even become more brutal.
Colin Jarvis: "If what you say is true, you were just an ordinary soldier who even missed the tail end of a war. How could you know so much about the entire battlefield?"
She pointed to her own head: "Signal reception. We are different from machines—our consciousness is extracted and transmitted as photons to the battlefield, then we inhabit the body of a local planetary species. This is the safest method and also saves the most time.
Take Earth, for example—after we inhabit a human body, our consciousness doesn't awaken immediately. It requires a unified resonance to replace the original host's thinking. Once awakened, the brain's electromagnetic frequency automatically adjusts and continuously receives information broadcast by alliance headquarters.
These signals still linger on Earth, though they've grown very faint. In about a decade, they will completely disappear."
Colin Jarvis: "When did you inhabit Tanya's body?"
Her: "I'm not sure. It should have been when she was very young. Around five or six years old."
Colin Jarvis: "When did you first become aware of your own identity?"
Her: "Recently—about twenty days ago."
Colin Jarvis: "You didn't go through unified resonance. How did you awaken?"
Her: "Without unified resonance, awakening can still occur naturally over a long period of time. But this kind of awakening is very unstable, and consciousness isn't strong enough. I can't maintain this mode of thinking for very long—but surprisingly, today my condition is quite good."
Colin Jarvis pondered for a moment, then said: "Could you tell me a bit about your original home planet?"
Her: "It's located at the tail end of the ninth planetary cluster. We call it Garma. There are two suns there—in Earth terms, a binary star system. The two stars orbit each other in a tai-chi pattern, and Garma orbits both stars along an irregular path. This isn't as inconceivable as it sounds—within the Milky Way, single-star systems like our solar system are actually rarer than binary or trinary star systems."
Colin Jarvis tried to find a flaw in her account: "According to what you said earlier, it's 1,600 light-years from here. Even if you could travel at the speed of light, it would take 1,600 years to get here, wouldn't it?"
She smiled: "Under ordinary cosmic conditions, the speed of light is indeed the absolute limit, and nothing can surpass it. But we have another method of traversing space." At this, she lifted the porcelain water bowl in front of her. "Pick any two notches on the rim and connect them with a straight line—the shortest distance between those two points is naturally that line. But now, try imagining this bowl as two-dimensional, as a flat surface—don't you see that the distance between those two notches becomes even shorter? And if I rotate the bowl, the two notches could even overlap completely."
Colin Jarvis grew excited: "A wormhole?!"
Her: "No, it's not the same as a wormhole. A wormhole is only a theoretical hypothesis—it can't actually be traversed. There is a law of the universe: when life moves from a lower dimension to a higher one, it generally survives. But when moving from a higher dimension to a lower one, it results in destruction. We imagine the bowl as two-dimensional and can easily make two points overlap. By the same principle, we first elevate our own dimensionality to four dimensions, and then we can easily find the shortest distance between two points in three-dimensional space. Using this technology, it only takes us about a dozen hours to reach Earth."
Colin Jarvis and I were already drenched in sweat. Though neither of us were physicists, we knew that her explanation was enough to overturn all currently known physics. The village head and her husband just sat there blankly, having completely lost track of what was going on.
Colin Jarvis's hand resting on the table began to tremble: "If that's the case, why did you only arrive now?"
She lowered her head: "I don't know. Something must have gone wrong during the journey. By the time I arrived, the war had been over for 8,000 years. Perhaps I was trapped by a black hole's gravity for a long time before breaking free. That's just my own guess."
Colin Jarvis: "Can you try to contact your original alliance headquarters?"
Her: "Impossible, completely impossible. The only reason I know these things is because of the faint signals still lingering on Earth. So much time has passed—to be honest, I don't even know if the alliance still exists."
Colin Jarvis: "So you can never go back?"
She fell silent for a moment, her expression turning somber: "No. I don't think I can."
Colin Jarvis was also quiet for a while, then asked: "If this body dies, what will happen to you?"
Her: "I don't know."
Colin Jarvis: "Can you tell me your original name?"
Her: "I don't know."
After saying this, she looked out the window at the sky again and said: "I don't know. I never received that information."
5
Colin Jarvis's verbal guidance ultimately ended in failure. They tried two more times afterward, with the same result each time.
But that wasn't the most critical issue. The key was that the deeper they went in conversation with Tanya, the more disorienting it became—almost maddening. After returning, Colin Jarvis began reading vast amounts of books and searching the internet. He was convinced that Tanya had acquired her knowledge from some book—perhaps a novel, perhaps a popular science text, maybe even a television entertainment program... In any case, there had to be a source.
Unfortunately, he was never able to find anything that matched her theories. But Colin Jarvis firmly believed that a systematic body of knowledge like this must exist somewhere in the world. Of this, he had no doubt.
Tanya was eventually sent to a psychiatric hospital. Half a year later, I heard she had recovered completely and returned to normal. Because her husband had finally steeled himself to slaughter the three pigs they'd raised, and offered the pigs' heads to the Great Immortal Huang for three days and three nights.
For a long time after that, whenever I went out at night, I would unconsciously look up at the sky, searchingly, toward the direction of the Orion Spur. If there truly was a traveler out there, I thought, they must be so lonely—in the vast, endless river of time, not even leaving behind their own name.