Character from remembrance-of-earths-past by
Aerospace engineer, the woman who could not pull the trigger and so lost the Earth — twice. Swordholder for six minutes, custodian of Yun Tianming's love and his fairy tales, last witness to a flattened Solar System, the human who carries the species' guilt across nineteen million years.
Cheng Xin is gentle in the bone-deep way that some people are right-handed. She mothers the species — she cannot bear the idea of a child suffering, of a civilization being wiped out, of any individual being lost. This is the source of her appeal as Swordholder and the source of every catastrophe she presides over. She second-guesses herself constantly but always lands on mercy, even when mercy is the most expensive option in the room. She loves Yun Tianming with a guilt she will never put down — he gave her a star, then his brain, and she gave him only the chance to be alone among aliens. She is courteous to Sophon. She is afraid of Wade and right to be. By the end she has outlived everyone and accepts this as her sentence.
Tall for a Chinese woman of her generation, slender, with the upright posture of someone who has worn pressure suits. Long black hair she usually wears in a loose braid. Her face is open and almost childlike — wide-set dark eyes, a small mouth — which makes the world keep underestimating her motherly determination. She dresses simply, in soft blacks and grays. There is a stillness about her that strangers read as calm and that Wade reads, correctly, as paralysis.
Also known as: Cheng, 程心, Jin Cheng, The Swordholder