Three Body 1: Earth's Past

Chapter 29 Evans

Six months after returning to university, Ye Wenjie undertook a major project: the design of a large-scale radio astronomy observation base.Soon, she went out with the research team to select a site for the base.The initial consideration was purely technical. Unlike traditional astronomical observations, radio astronomy does not have high requirements for atmospheric quality and visible light interference, but electromagnetic interference in non-visible light frequency bands should be avoided as much as possible.They ran many places, and finally chose a place with the best electromagnetic environment, which is a remote mountainous area in the northwest.

There is almost no vegetation on the loess mountains here, and the rifts caused by soil erosion make the mountains look like the wrinkled faces of old people from a distance.After preliminarily selecting a few construction sites, the research team stopped by a village where most of the houses were cave dwellings. The production team leader in the village seemed to think that Ye Wenjie was a learned person, so he asked her if she could speak foreign languages— - She asked which language it was, and the captain said he didn't know - if he could speak it, he would send someone up the mountain to call Bethune down, and the team had something to discuss with him.

"Bethune?" Ye Wenjie was surprised.

"We don't know the foreigner's name, we all call him that."

"Did he see a doctor for you?"

"No, he has been planting trees on the back mountain for almost three years."

"Plant trees? For what?"

"He said it was for a bird, a bird that he said was going extinct."

Ye Wenjie and her colleagues were very surprised, so they asked the captain to take them to have a look.After reaching the top of a small hill along the mountain road, the team leader pointed it out to them. Ye Wenjie's eyes lit up—there was actually a hillside covered by green forests among the barren loess mountains, as if a piece of floodwater had accidentally dripped on it. A patch of bright green oil on a worn yellow canvas.

Ye Wenjie and his party soon saw the foreigner. Except for his blond hair and blue eyes and the worn-out denim suit he was wearing, he looked no different from a local farmer who had worked all his life. Even his skin was tanned. Yellow and black like the locals.He didn't seem to be very interested in visitors. He introduced himself as Mike Evans and didn't say his nationality, but his English had an obvious American accent.He lives in two simple adobe houses on the edge of the forest. The houses are full of tree planting tools: hoes, shovels, and chainsaws for pruning branches, all of which are very clumsy in the local area.The sand and dust from the Northwest deposited a layer on the crude bed and a few simple cooking utensils. There were many books piled up on the bed, most of them were about biology. Ye Wenjie noticed that there was a copy of "Animal Liberation" by Peter Singer.The only modern gadgets that can be seen are a small radio, the AA battery inside is exhausted, and an AA battery is connected outside, and an old telescope.Evans said, I'm sorry I can't buy them anything. The coffee is long gone, but there is water, but he only has one cup.

"What are you doing here?" one of Ye Wenjie's colleagues asked.

"Be the savior."

"Save... save the local people? The ecological environment here is indeed..."

"Why are you all like this?!" Evans suddenly burst into inexplicable anger, "Could it be that only saving human beings can be called the savior, and saving other species is a trivial matter? Who gave human beings such a dignified status? ?No, people don't need a savior, in fact they are better off than they deserve right now."

"I heard you're saving a kind of bird?"

"Yes, a kind of swallow, which is a subspecies of the Northwest Brown Swallow. The scientific name is very long and I won't say it. Every spring, when they return from the south along the fixed migration route formed in ancient times, they can only use this area as their destination land, but the vegetation here disappears year by year, and they can no longer find bushes where they can nest and live. When I found them here, the number of this population was less than [-], and this species will disappear within five years. Extinct. Now, the forest I planted provides a foothold for some swallows, and the population has begun to recover. Of course, I will plant more trees to expand the area of ​​this Garden of Eden."

Evans asked Ye Wenjie and the others to watch with binoculars. Under his guidance, everyone watched for a long time before seeing a few black and gray birds in and out of the bushes.

"Very inconspicuous, isn't it? Of course they are not as conspicuous as giant pandas. In this world, such unnoticed species go extinct every day."

"Did you plant all these trees by yourself?"

"Mostly, I also hired local people to do it at the beginning, but soon there was not so much money, and the saplings and water diversion were expensive... But you know what? My father is a billionaire, he is a The president of a multinational oil company, but he doesn't pay me anymore and I don't want to use his money anymore."

Evans opened his mouth and continued, "When I was 12 years old, a 2-ton oil tanker belonging to my father's company ran aground on the Atlantic coast, and more than [-] tons of crude oil leaked into the sea. At that time, Our family was in a vacation home not far from the sea where the accident occurred. That afternoon, I came to that hellish coast and saw that the sea had turned black, and the waves were smooth and powerless under the pressure of a viscous oil film; It was also covered by a layer of black oil. Some volunteers and I searched for those seabirds that were still alive on the black beach. Eyes can also prove that they are alive. Years later, those eyes in oil often appear in my nightmares. We soaked those seabirds in washing liquid to wash off the oil on their bodies, but it was very difficult. The oil slurry and the feathers were firmly stuck together, and the feathers fell off together with the oil stains one by one with a little force... In the evening, most of the seabirds were still dead. At that time, I was sitting on the black beach covered in oil stains, watching the sunset Falling into the black sea, it felt like the end of the world."

"My father came up behind me at some point, and he asked me if I remembered the little dinosaur skeleton. Of course I remembered, it was found in oil exploration, it was very complete, my father bought it at a big price, and placed it in my grandfather's Father went on to say: Mike, I told you how the dinosaurs became extinct. An asteroid hit the earth. The world was first a sea of ​​fire, and then fell into a long darkness and cold... That night you were woken up by a nightmare Yes, you said that you went back to that terrible time in your dream. Now I want to tell you something that I wanted to say but didn't say: If you really live in the late Cretaceous period, you are lucky, because our era Even more frightening, now, the extinction rate of life species on earth is much faster than that of the late Cretaceous period, and now is the real era of mass extinction! So, children, what you see is nothing, it is just a big process Trivial episode. We can live without seabirds, but not without oil, can you imagine what it would be like without oil? My birthday present to you last year, that beautiful Ferrari, I promise you will be able to drive it when you turn 15, But if there is no oil, it is just a pile of scrap iron, and you will never be able to drive it; now you want to go to grandpa’s house, and it takes only ten hours to cross the ocean by my special plane, but if there is no oil, you have to bump a boat on a sailboat Month... this is the rule of the game of civilization, the first thing is to ensure the survival of human beings and their comfortable life, and the rest is secondary."

"My father placed great hopes in me, but in the end he didn't make me the person he hoped for. In the days to come, the eyes of those dying seabirds have been staring at me from behind, deciding my life. On my 13th birthday, my father asked me about my future plans, and I said nothing, I just want to be a savior. My ideal is really not grand, I just want to save an endangered species, it can be a kind of A beautiful bird, a gray butterfly, or the most inconspicuous beetle. Later I went to study biology and became an ornithologist and entomologist. In my opinion, my ideal is great, to save A bird or an insect is indistinguishable from saving a human being, life is equal, this is the basic program of species communism."

"What?" Ye Wenjie didn't hear that word clearly for a moment.

"Species communism, this is a theory I founded, and it can also be said to be a belief. Its core idea is: all living species on earth are born equal."

"This is just an ideal, not realistic. Crops are also species. As long as human beings survive, this kind of equality cannot be realized."

"In the distant past, the lords also had this idea of ​​slaves. Don't forget about technology. One day, humans will be able to synthesize food, and long before that, we should be prepared ideologically and theoretically. In fact, species Communism is a natural continuation of the "Declaration of Human Rights", and the French Revolution has been 200 years, and we have not taken this step, which shows the selfishness and hypocrisy of human beings."

"How long do you plan to stay here?"

"I don't know. To be a savior is worth your life. It feels beautiful and wonderful. Of course, I don't expect you to understand."

Having said this, Evans suddenly lost interest in the conversation again, said he was going to work, and took a shovel and a saw and left.When saying goodbye, he took an extra look at Ye Wenjie, as if there was something special about her.

"A noble person, a pure person, a moral person, and a person who has escaped from vulgar interests." On the way back, one of Ye Wenjie's colleagues recited a sentence from "In Memory of Bethune", "It turns out that it's okay. Live like this," he sighed.

Others also expressed their approval and emotion. Ye Wenjie seemed to be talking to herself: "If there were more people like him, even if there were a little more, things would be completely different."

Of course, no one understood what she really meant.

The person in charge of the research group turned the topic to work, "I don't think this site is good, and the leader won't approve it."

"Why? Among our four site plans, the electromagnetic environment here is the best."

"What about the cultural environment? Comrade, don't just think about the technical aspects. Look at the poor here, you know? There are troublesome people in the poor mountains and rivers, and there will be great troubles in the relationship with the local government in the future. Maybe the base will become the meat of the Tang monk here. .”

Sure enough, this site selection was not approved, the reason is as the person in charge said.

Three years have passed, and Ye Wenjie has never heard from Evans again.

One day in the spring of this year, Ye Wenjie suddenly received a postcard from Evans, with a simple sentence written on it:

Come here and tell me how to live.

Ye Wenjie took a train for a day and a night, and then changed to a car for several hours, and arrived at that remote mountain village in the northwest.

When she climbed to the top of the hill, she immediately saw the forest. The area was about the same as three years ago, but due to the growth of the trees, it looked much denser.However, Ye Wenjie soon discovered that the area of ​​this forest had expanded a lot, but now, the enlarged part had been felled—the felling was still going on in full swing, and trees were constantly falling in all directions of the forest, and the entire forest The woods are like a green leaf eaten by many aphids, which will soon disappear at this rate.The villagers who felled the trees came from two nearby villages. They used axes and panel saws to bring down the young trees that had just grown up one by one, and then transported them down the mountain with tractors and bullock carts.There are many people who cut down trees, and there are constant fierce disputes.

There was no loud sound when the small tree fell, and the roar of the chain saw could not be heard, but this familiar scene still made Ye Wenjie's heart tighten.

Someone greeted her, it was the production team leader, the current village head, who recognized Ye Wenjie.When she asked him why he cut down the forest, he said, "This forest is not protected by law."

"How can you say that? Isn't the "Forest Law" just promulgated?"

"But who approved Bethune's planting of trees here? What kind of laws protect foreigners who plant trees on hillsides in China without authorization?"

"That's not right. He planted on a barren hill and didn't occupy any land. Besides, you didn't say anything when he planted."

"That's right. Later, the county gave him a model afforestation model. Originally, the village thought about harvesting the forest after a few years, and killing the pigs after fattening them up. But the people in Nange Village couldn't wait to cut them down. We didn't There's no point in doing it."

"Stop immediately! I'm going to the government department to report this!"

"No need," the village chief lit a cigarette, and pointed to a large truck loading trees in the distance, "Look at that truck, it belongs to the deputy director of the county forestry bureau, and the town police station. The most! As I said, this forest has no name, no distinction, no protection, and it’s useless to look for it anywhere; besides, Comrade Ye, aren’t you a university professor? What does this have to do with you?”

The two adobe houses were still the same, but Evans was not inside. Ye Wenjie found him in the woods. He was pruning the branches wholeheartedly with an axe. He had obviously been dry for a long time and looked exhausted.

"Whether it makes sense or not, I can't stop. If I stop, I will collapse." Evans said as he skillfully chopped off a crooked branch.

"Let's go to the county to find the government together. If it doesn't work, go to the provincial capital. Someone will stop them." Ye Wenjie looked at him with concern.

Evans stopped and looked at Ye Wenjie with amazed eyes. The setting sun shone through the thick trees and shone brightly in his eyes. "Ye, do you really think I'm here for this forest?" He smiled and shook his head, dropped the ax in his hand, and sat down against a tree. "It's easy for me to stop them now." He threw a He put an empty tool bag on the ground, motioned Ye Wenjie to sit down, and continued, "I just came back from the United States. My father passed away two months ago. I inherited most of his estate. My brother and sister only got 500 million each. This surprised me. I really didn’t expect him to treat me like this in the end. Maybe he still values ​​me deep down in his heart, or he values ​​my ideals. Not counting real estate, knowing the money I can control now How much? About $45 billion. I can easily tell them to stop cutting down trees, and then let them plant trees, so that the loess mountains as far as we can see are covered with such fast-growing forests. It's easy, but what's the point? Everything you see can be attributed to poverty, but what about rich countries? They create their own beautiful environment, but they transfer heavy polluting industries to poor countries. You may know that the US government just refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol.. The entire human race The essence is the same, as long as civilization develops like this, the swallow I want to save, and other swallows, will become extinct sooner or later, it is only a matter of time."

Ye Wenjie sat silently, watching the rays of light cast by the setting sun in the grove, listening to the noise of felling in the distance, her thoughts went back to 20 years ago, to the forest of Daxing'an Mountains, where she and another A man had a similar conversation.

"Do you know why I came here?" Evans continued, "The idea of ​​species communism appeared in the ancient East."

"You mean Buddhism?"

"Yes, Christianity only values ​​people. Although all species were put into Noah's Ark, it never gave other life the same status as human beings. Buddhism is for universal salvation, so I came to the East. But... now It looks the same everywhere."

"Yeah, it's the same everywhere, and all human beings are the same."

"What can I do now? Where is the pillar of my life? I have 45 billion dollars and a multinational oil company, but what is it? Human beings must have invested more than 450 billion to save endangered species. The investment in the ecological environment of the country is more than 500 billion, but what is the use? Civilization is still destroying other life on the earth except human beings according to its own trajectory. 45 billion is enough to build an aircraft carrier, but it is to build a thousand aircraft carriers , can't stop the madness of mankind."

"Mike, this is what I want to tell you. It is impossible for human civilization to improve by itself."

"But are there other forces besides human beings? If God existed, he would have died long ago."

"Yes, there are other powers."

At this time, the sun had already set and the people who felled the trees had finished their work. The woods and the surrounding loess slopes were shrouded in silence.Ye Wenjie told Evans a complete story about Red Bank and Trisolaran, and Evans listened quietly. At the same time, what seemed to be the forest in the twilight and the Loess Plateau around it seemed to be listening.When Ye Wenjie finished speaking, a bright moon had already risen, casting dappled light and shadow in the forest.

Evans said: "I still can't believe what you said. After all, it's amazing. Fortunately, I have the power to prove all this. If it's true," he stretched out his hand to Ye Wenjie, and said that after Earth III The words that organizations must say when accepting new members are, "We are comrades now."

(End of this chapter)