Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Ta Shu pondered, wrote. When Zhou Bao asked him to recite, he said,

  “Black sky

  White hills

  Between them

  Something strange”

  Zhou tilted his big head sideways until it seemed it might roll right off his shoulder. “Maybe you should consider the idea that brevity was your middle style. In your youth you were as long-winded as Han Yü. Then in middle age, this brevity. So now it might be getting time to think about your late style, eh?”

  Ta Shu nodded, pondering this. Though he had not thought of it in those terms, it struck him that his friend Bao might be onto something. Certainly some kind of urge to poetry had been stirring in him lately.

  Zhou read his attempt:

  “Under the star that grew us all

  We sit and watch our world.

  Long lives, distant planets;

  All the years knocked down like sticks;

  Still that sure feeling

  You know where home is.

  Even from the moon

  You can see it.”

  For home he had used the word laojia, ancestral home, the place you came from. Your heart’s home. “Very good!” Ta Shu said. “You are the poet now.”

  Later, as Ta Shu was preparing for bed, but before his room block’s centrifuge had started to spin, Zhou knocked on his door and leaned in.

  “A new wrinkle,” he said, lifting a hand to indicate his wristpad. “Apparently the Americans have just landed right in the midst of our south pole complex. They say they are going to build a transmission relay tower on the Peak of Eighty-One Percent Eternal Light.”

  “Will that interfere with anything we’re doing there?”

  “No, it’s just outside our zone of construction.”

  “Maybe it’s okay then.”

  Zhou said, “I wonder if this has anything to do with the disappearance of your American friend.”

  “I don’t know, what do you think?”

  “I think everything up here knits together.”

  “Will you need to go down to the south pole to help sort things out?”

  Zhou Bao looked at him. “We both will, my friend. They want you there too, because of your time with the Americans in Antarctica.”

  Ta Shu sighed. “Can I take my walkabout before we have to leave?”

  “Yes. Tomorrow’s train leaves at three. We’ll get you outside tomorrow morning to do your feng shui walkabout.”

  TA SHU 3

  yueliang ren

  Moon Person

  My friends, it seems there is more happening on the moon than I knew. And as my friend Bao said, all of it knits together. Perhaps. Actually I am coming to doubt that. But certainly things go fast here.

  That’s what happens when factories build factories. Moon rocks have a lot of metals in them, and an infinity of silica. And at the Peaks of Eternal Light, there is always solar energy to power the extraction and rendering of all these materials. Computers, 3-D printers, and robotic assemblers did much of the work involved, and as always, humans were the lubricant that kept the machines working at their many points of systemic friction. Together we and our machines excavated and aerated underground lunar spaces, and mined materials and built machines, and imported carbon and nitrogen, and then in greenhouses we grew soil and food, and lumber for interior construction, and the more we accomplished the faster it all went, in the usual way now familiar to all.

  Of course there were many things needed for this process that we had to bring with us—nonhuman lubricants, plastics, all other oil-based materials, and many other useful elements that don’t exist on the moon, including almost all the carbon and nitrogen, which together are so crucial to life. We had to ship a lot of stuff up here, which meant building up our capacity for space flight. There’s really no good way of getting stuff off the Earth except by blasting it up in rockets, but it is possible to build those rockets on the moon, and easier to launch them from here than from Earth. If you are only moving materials and not people, you can build big freighters and throw them into semi-stable figure-eight orbits between Earth and moon. Shuttles can accelerate to catch up and transfer loads to these big craft, thus minimizing the costs of transport. With no humans aboard, these rockets can be simpler and cheaper, and can be made to accelerate and decelerate harder. So robotic interplanetary shipping has been part of the speed of our settling here.

  All this has made for impressive results, such as the big complex at the south pole, and this line of settlements running up the libration zone.

  Now I’ve left one of these new settlements, the Petrov Crater Station, to stand outside on the surface of the moon. To do so I have donned a spacesuit, and I exited the shelter through air locks, and now I am walking on the surface of the moon. This is the first time I have ever walked by myself on the moon. It feels very strange, I can assure you!

  Outside, it is daytime. I was told it is the lunar morning, about halfway between dawn and midday. Shadows are black, but not pitch-black; reflection of sunlight from other lit surfaces tints the shadows to varying degrees, giving me an extra sense of the shapes of the hills, derived from the shades of black and gray in the shadows. Where the land is in sunlight, it’s very bright. We’re at about twenty degrees latitude here, so the sun is fairly high in the sky. My faceplate is tinted and keeps the sunlight from damaging my eyes. I don’t know what it would look like if the tint wasn’t there. Although it’s adjustable, I was told, so let’s dial it down and see. Oh my. Oh. Yes. The tinting was much darker than I thought. No doubt also polarized and so on. Right now I can’t see a thing. I’m blinded. With the tint taken away, the world is simply bursting with white light. I can’t even see the shadows. It’s as if the sun were a god and has struck me with a bolt of lightning for my presumption in daring to look at it as it really is. Wow!

  I’ve got the tinting back up high now, but it will take a while for my pupils to dilate. I’m sure they were trying to close up completely! I wonder if that’s possible. The chiaroscuro effect as I regain my vision is extreme. No subtleties of gray now, just a very harsh white, and an absence of white that is a grainy black. No stars visible to me now. The sky is even blacker than any shadow on the land. A wrenching field of contrasts. Simply white and black, the black of those particular bird feathers that capture all the light that strikes them. It looks to me now as if I have gone mad or am suffering a seizure. But let’s agree to call this an exposure to reality. The sublime, in a certain strain of Western aesthetics, is said to be a fusion of beauty and terror. In China the Seven Feelings don’t mention this combination, but now I think I know what it is. It’s a true feeling, the sublime—it’s spirit confronted by sheer matter, as Hegel put it.

  Under my feet the ground is white, touched here and there by shadows of rocks. My vision is coming back. The rocks lie on a blanket of white dust that looks somewhat like snow, or loess. The rocks are isolatoes, and their appearance is random; they have not been distributed by any stream or glacier or wave—not by any water action of any kind. This is immediately obvious when you look around. The rocks don’t look right! Nothing has sorted them, and their sizes are also random—small, large, in between. They look like they have dropped here out of the sky, and they have. Many are the size of pots or baskets, and almost all of them look like roughly rounded cubes, without any of the sharp facets you see in the Earth’s mountains, where so many rocks have recently broken. These rocks are not weathered or weather-beaten; they are sun-beaten. Billions of years of photon rain, unfiltered by clouds or even air, have slowly knocked the edges off these rocks. That withering weathering of photonic rain looks different from other kinds of weathering, as for instance by water rain. And I recall the ventifacts of Antarctica’s Dry Valleys, rocks shaped by the abrasion of wind-blown sand. These by analogy could be called solarfacts. There are a lot of them. It’s necessary to step around them. The old movies of the Apollo astronauts don’t reveal this all that often, but those astronauts were just like
me; they had to avoid walking into rocks, or treading on rocks underfoot.

  Another way I am like the Apollo people, and everyone else walking on the moon, is that I have to adjust my gait to the gravity. In this it’s the same out here as indoors, except out here one has to wear a spacesuit, so really it isn’t the same. I weigh about ten kilos on the moon, and my spacesuit and its air supply weigh about the same. What that means is that about half my perceived weight is right there in my skin. I am feeling a bit hollow, in other words, as well as very light altogether. I jump, oh my! Look out! Oh my. Fallen to my knees, as you may have deduced from my visuals. But it’s very easy to push myself back up. Oh, wait—not so easy! Not so easy to keep my balance. Must restore balance, just a second here. Kind of a dance step. Might as well dance, hopping or skipping with one foot always kept in front leading the way. Beautiful!

  Spinning slowly around, trusting I can recover my balance if I lose it, or just get back up, I see the hills look odd too. Not tectonic action, nor rain, nor riverbeds, nor glaciers, nor wind shaped these hills. They are uncanny. You can see something is different here, and it’s hard not to feel it’s wrong. The uncanny is always wrong, always frightening. And these hills? They were made by meteors impacting the moon at cosmic speed, coming in faster than when we landed here in our very fast spaceship. Boom! Incredible impact! Huge masses of rock, vaporized to melted slag and thrown up and outward, to fall in circles or ovals around the impact site. Mostly circles. Apparently you have to hit at quite a glancing angle before an oval gets made. In any case, impact after impact, circle after circle, until eventually the circles lay on top of one another, in a palimpsest many layers deep. The later impacts therefore landed not on the hard basalt of old lava basins, but on earlier circles and their circumferences of rubble. Slowly but surely this made the land lumpy. Actually, given all that, it should look even more torn up than it does; but all of that happened long ago, and since then the sun has been breaking the rocks apart into this infinite blanket of dust.

  When I jump on this dust, I don’t sink in far. I think it has compressed under the pull of the moon’s gravity until it’s pretty well packed. This was a question they didn’t really have an answer for when they first landed on the moon. Those Apollo landers could have sunk right in and disappeared into soft dust, like a rock into quicksand! But they didn’t. The scientists figured it would be this way, and decided to test it and see, trusting their analysis. And the astronauts trusted the scientists. One of them said about this, Even from within the program I thought it was a little audacious. A little! Ha! This was a real trust in feng shui! And indeed we trust our geomancies every day of our lives.

  I’ve brought out with me today the items needed to conduct another Apollo experiment I learned about. The astronaut who performed it said it was inspired by Galileo, who predicted it would be this way. Here I have an ordinary hammer, and a feather. Looks like it’s a pigeon feather, one of the little fine ones from a pigeon’s neck. I hold out the hammer and the feather, one in each hand, and drop them at the same moment. Oh my! Ha ha ha, did you see it? I can’t believe it! I think that may be the strangest thing I have ever seen! They didn’t fall very fast, that in itself was a little surprising—but at the very same speed? Feather and hammer? I can hardly believe my eyes! Wait, I’m going to do it again. Difficult to pick up a feather with gloves. Dusty. Okay, here it goes. Wow. It happened again. Same speed down. Now I know for sure I am someplace different. In a vacuum. Well, it almost makes me afraid. No—no, it does make me afraid. This is not what I thought it was, this place is not what it looks like. It’s not just Xinjiang or Tibet. This is an alien shore, this is not a human place. I must trust my spacesuit not to fail. And I must remember, if I can, that really we are always in a spacesuit of one sort or another. We just don’t usually see it so clearly.

  Walking around again now. Wow, I can’t believe what I just saw. I feel like jumping, and I bet I can jump high, let’s try that. Wow. I’ll try a little higher, and come down and jump again. And again! Now I am a rabbit, maybe even a kangaroo! Ah ha ha ha, oh my, sorry, I will try to compose myself, but ha ha ha ha, oh my. Not so easy. Jumping! The moon is funny! It’s scary too, yes, terrifying actually, it shouldn’t be this funny but it is! I can’t stop jumping! And why should I? Excuse me while I fly!

  At the highest point of my jumps, I see the horizon shifts a bit. It is so near and so irregular that I can catch glimpses over the horizon, just by jumping into the sky! The white top of a hill pops into sight over a nearby shaded hollow, disappears again, reappears, disappears. Oh it is all so strange, it feels so strange!

  CHAPTER FIVE

  tao dao diqiu shang

  Escape to Earth

  That afternoon Ta Shu and Zhou Bao got on the train headed south. Ta Shu fell asleep, exhausted by his walkabout, and he woke only when the train hissed to a halt in Shackleton Crater. The big complex there looked pretty sophisticated after Petrov Station. Not that dissimilar to malls on Earth. Ta Shu recalled the way McMurdo had begun to look like a big city after one had been out in the Transantarctics for a while. It was the same here: Shackleton was the moon’s McMurdo, the outer stations like field camps.

  They found that most of the people they met in the big station were still flustered by the arrival of the American lander, which had come down on the northern flank of Ibn Bajja Crater, on a peak of Eighty-One Percent Eternal Light. That was the sunniest local highland not yet occupied by some kind of Chinese structure, which no doubt explained why the Americans had chosen it. Their lander was an old-style space cylinder, massive compared to anything the Chinese used anymore. Aside from a radio alert to the spaceport’s control center as they came over the horizon from the north, they had not communicated with the Chinese before landing. After they were down they had called Chinese headquarters to say hello and invite a group over for a discussion of their purpose.

  With Chang Yazu dead, and Commissioner Li Bingwen returned to Earth, the local chain of command was in a state of flux. It was Inspector Jiang Jianguo who asked Zhou Bao and Ta Shu if they would make the first visit to the newly arrived Americans. Ta Shu’s old friendship with John Semple was referenced, and Zhou’s English was said to be the best of any Chinese diplomat now on the moon.

  “Happy to try,” Ta Shu said. “Although it sounds as if John won’t be in charge of this American station anymore.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Inspector Jiang said. “It’s still better if you’re there. Personal relations always matter.”

  It was a short drive on the ridgelines between Shackleton and the American lander on the outside of Ibn Bajja Crater. Sun low on the horizon, as always. The American lander was a big fat cylinder propped on low stilts. Coming from the Chinese complex, Ta Shu could not help but think this vehicle was just a teeny thing, reminiscent of the Apollo landers that still dotted the near side. Here the Americans’ silver cylinder was about as wide as it was tall, with six legs splayed away from the fat rockets under the body of it.

  Zhou Bao drove them up to the cylinder and radioed in. An air-lock door in the cylinder opened, and then a tube extended out and adhered to their car’s door. They tiptoed through the tunnel and into the American lander. The three men in its lower chamber shook hands and introduced themselves: a Smith, an Allen, and another Smith, from NASA, the State Department, and the National Science Foundation, respectively. After they sat down, Ta Shu asked the NSF Smith if he knew any of Ta Shu’s old acquaintances from the US Antarctic Program. It turned out they both knew the current head of the USAP, and Smith brought Ta Shu up to date on his institutional work.

  Then with this little gesture to friendly diplomacy finished, Allen took up a globe of the moon and put it on the table they were sitting around. The south pole was uppermost, and marked in red by the various Chinese settlements.

  “So, here we are,” Allen said, pointing at a blue dot among the red rectangles.

  “Indeed,” Zhou said. “We noticed.” Adding a
little smile.

  Allen said, “We’re assuming it’s okay with you for us to settle here. We need a station at the south pole for several purposes.”

  “Anyone can settle anywhere on the moon that isn’t already occupied by another settlement,” Zhou said. “Outer Space Treaty. China is a signatory, and has adhered to all the stipulations in it. Article 9 of the treaty says that if any party to the treaty has reason to believe an activity planned by another state would cause potentially harmful interference with their activities in the peaceful exploration and use of outer space, they may request consultation concerning the activity.”

  “Yes,” Allen said. “Actually, we were going to invoke that clause ourselves. We had intended to make a geological survey of this area. We’re afraid your excavations here will make our scientific work impossible.”

  Zhou nodded. “The treaty says you can request consultation concerning the activity or experiment in question. So now you have requested consultation, and I acknowledge receipt of same. I will transmit the request to my superiors, and they will be discussing it with their superiors in Beijing. It shouldn’t take long.”

  “We understand.”

  “Meanwhile, we will surely want to reciprocate by taking a look at your settlement at the north pole.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Well, it’s an equivalent problem. We’ve been attempting to determine the origin and age of the water ice in the craters at both poles, and we’ve been very careful to keep most of the south polar craters pristine until the proper studies have been made. When it comes to the north pole’s ice, however, we’re concerned, because it seems from our orbital observations that you have been drilling in all of the icy craters up there.”