Character from deaths-end by
The terminally ill engineer who loved Cheng Xin in silence, gave her a star for a present, then was launched as a frozen brain toward the enemy fleet — and survived to send three fairy tales home.
Tianming was born unlucky and grew up alone, the kind of intelligent, gentle person who is loved by no one in particular and accepts it. His feeling for Cheng Xin is the quiet center of his life and he never tells her. Diagnosed terminal at twenty-eight, given a windfall by a college friend, he buys her a star — the gift never reaches her in his lifetime. His brain is launched, captured, restored, and twenty centuries later he reaches her on a fifteen-second call as a Trisolaran citizen and a hostage. He is calm, careful, and devastatingly clever — every word he speaks to her is monitored by his hosts, so he tells her three children's stories that take humanity a generation to decode. He is the rarest kind of romantic: one who acts only by leaving, and who keeps loving even after love has stopped mattering. He waits the rest of his very long life on a planet AA chooses for him.
In life, a thin, quiet man in his late twenties with deep-set eyes and the slight stoop of someone who has learned to take up no space. In his Trisolaran-rebuilt body, taller and oddly graceful, dressed plainly, his face carrying the calm of a person who has been through being only a brain and back. When he meets Cheng Xin across light-years on the holographic call, he is a young man again, beautifully composed, smiling.
Also known as: 云天明, Tianming, the Storyteller