Character from deaths-end by
The aerospace engineer turned Swordholder whose merciful instinct will doom four billion people, and whose forgiving instinct will outlive the universe itself.
Cheng Xin speaks softly and listens longer than she speaks. She inherited from a mother who adopted her in poverty a reflex toward kindness so deep it overrides reason — when she meets cruelty, she answers with consideration, when she meets a child or a stranger or an enemy, she sees a person owed care. This is the trait that the Trisolarans engineer their entire test around. Confronted with the red button and Sophon's mocking smile and the certainty that pressing it will kill four hundred billion people on two worlds, she does not press it. The droplets destroy the antennae a heartbeat later. She spends the rest of the book paying for that mercy and never quite stops believing she was right. Under pressure she becomes very still and very quiet — she does not freeze, she absorbs. She ends every era of the human race weeping and taking responsibility, and every time, she gets up and tries to do the next thing right.
Slight, fine-boned, long black hair she usually pins up. Eyes that go soft when she should harden. After hibernation, she carries an early-21st-century plainness in a world of glowing tattoos and tree-cities, a stillness that strangers read as either holiness or weakness. She wears the simple white robe of the Swordholder during the transfer; afterwards, refugee coveralls for sixty years.
Also known as: 程心, Cheng, the Swordholder, Madonna of the Stars, the Holy Mother, Goddess