Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “When you say us, you don’t mean the Party?”

  “I mean China.”

  “This seems like a dangerous thing for one of the seven to be saying!”

  “I don’t say it to everyone. I trust you will keep this between us, and this room is privatized. I want you to hear my views.”

  “So far, I hear that you want to stabilize things by agreeing to the New Leftists in their direction, and to the liberalizers in their direction. Feeling the stones indeed!”

  “Well, we do have to get across the river.”

  “Isn’t it just whateverism, like Hua?”

  “No. Hua meant we should just do whatever Mao might have wanted. That was whateverism. The two whatevers! Come on, Master, I’m better than that. I’m doing what we have to do to keep China from falling into chaos.”

  “Was going to the moon your idea too?”

  She laughed. “Please! I’m not that old! I was still in your class when they started that!”

  “I know. But it was a good move. So that makes me think it’s your kind of thing.”

  “Thank you for your vote of confidence. But tell me why you think it’s a good move.”

  “Mainly because it’s the moon, plain as that. That makes what we do up there important, because it’s a symbol of our national achievement.”

  She laughed again. “I’m remembering now why I did so poorly in your class. I don’t really get feng shui, or any kind of symbolic thought.”

  “But think how China has always been Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom. That middle was always said to be halfway between Earth and heaven. Now, with us on the moon, it seems to be coming true. China really is between Earth and heaven.”

  “So it wasn’t symbolic after all.”

  “Well, the Chinese language is always symbolic.”

  “To me Chinese is always concrete. But then I’m a concrete thinker.”

  Ta Shu nodded, thinking of her poetry so long ago. Bureaucratic memos, written down in classic forms; he used to laugh at her, but affectionately. She had taught him new things about poetic possibilities. “So okay, back on Earth, feet on ground, very concrete. What do you think should be done?”

  She sipped her tea and thought. “Here’s how I see it. If the Party is going to continue to run the country, it has to run it demonstrably better than any other system could. And without Party members benefiting much more than anyone else. It’s quite a balancing act, so we have to feel the stones, yes, and pick a careful way. Go left then right, find out what works. Practice is the only criterion of truth, isn’t that another one of Deng’s sayings?”

  “Yes. But I always wondered about that one. Practice has to have some guiding principles, and truth needs to be true to something.”

  “Well, but all Deng’s sayings are like that. Just like most Party sayings, or the Yijing for that matter, or the Dao de jing. They’re general, you have to interpret them.”

  “True,” Ta Shu admitted. “‘Do the appropriate thing to get the desired result!’” He sipped his tea as she laughed. She seemed in a good mood, so he asked, “Do you have particular allies on the standing committee?”

  “Chan Guoliang, as I said. We make a good team.”

  “And President Shanzhai?”

  She frowned, gave him a knowing look: even in private, some things couldn’t be said. “We deal with him and his people as best we can.”

  “His people being?”

  “He wants to be succeeded by Huyou, minister of state security.”

  “So is that the source of the conflict?”

  “It’s one of them. The Twenty-Fifth Party Congress is coming soon, so the infighting is getting pretty vicious. There are black groups and superblack groups. And with Hong Kong just taken back into the fold, it’s a volatile time.”

  “What about outsiders? Are the Americans involved in this?”

  “No. Right now they’re dealing with a mess of their own. Their own citizens are currently trying to bankrupt the financial industry in order to take it over. A very worthy effort, but it’s causing them all to go crazy. And they never pay us much attention even at the best of times.”

  “Hmm.” Ta Shu thought about it. “How should I proceed, then, when it comes to Chan Qi and my American friend?”

  “You can’t go out on your own and find a single Chinese girl somewhere in Beijing. Chan will ask his security people to try that, and it might work. I’m going to do the same with mine. I have some channels that aren’t the same as his. There are public security teams made up entirely of women, and some of those report directly to me, as you might imagine. Women are often interested to help women in trouble.”

  “Do they use that app that allows citizens to help the police?”

  “Yes. That’s how most chaoyangqunzhong operate.”

  “Is it dangwai?” Outside the Party usually meant weak.

  “No. You join one of these networks and your citizenship score goes up, so it’s an easy way to improve it. Almost half a billion people do it, but of course that gets to be too many to cope with, so there are various agencies handling that information.”

  “And no agency collates all of them?”

  “Not really. Some try, but others resist. It’s a turf battle. Wolidou. The infighting is very real.”

  “So there may be a Great Eyeball, but no one gets to see what it sees?”

  “Exactly. It’s like a fly’s eyeball, with a thousand parts to it.”

  He sighed. “See, you did learn something in that poetry class.”

  “Because of a fly’s eye?” She laughed. “I must have.”

  “Please let me know what I can do,” he said. “I want to help those young people. So if you look around inside the Great Eyeball, or some of your little fly eyeballs, and you find something out, let me know.”

  “I will. I’ll try too with my own flies’ eyes.” She poured them more tea, looking thoughtful. Again Ta Shu felt the power emanating from her, that of a big tiger hidden in the shadows, watching. Ready to pounce.

  After leaving Peng’s office in the old Imperial City, Ta Shu walked across Tiananmen Square, feeling the vastness of China in his joints and his bones. Never had the big square seemed so big, never had he felt so burdened by his body. No doubt it was simply the Earth squeezing him. A little punishment for leaving home. He wondered where he could get one of those exoskeletons that some people called a body bra. He had often seen disabled and elderly people striding about, trapped in skeletal frameworks that translated their motions into rude botspeak. But medical equipment shops were in short supply in the city center, or so it seemed to him impressionistically. On the other hand, this was Beijing. A quick scan of his wristpad showed that an alley running toward the central train station featured just such an establishment, tucked between a noodle shop and a pharmacy.

  By the time he got to this place he had to sit down on a chair inside the door, surprised at his sudden exhaustion. The shop attendants, used to such arrivals, rushed to him with hot water and glucose gelatins, inquiring after him in a professional manner, but also with the friendly solicitude that was Beijing style. He explained his problem and they were suitably impressed, even amazed. A man from the moon! Everyone in the shop came over to inspect this lunatic and congratulate him on his voyage to the Jade Lady. He could see in their eyes an astonishment that he was currently too tired to feel, but seeing it brought back a little ghost of his own amazement, and he nodded, even smiled. Yes, he had really been there; he even hoped to go back. As he rested and they measured his limbs, he told them about the very slow Earthrise, and the Peaks of Eternal Light. The attendants loved learning or rehearsing these things. They brought out a couple of exoskeletons while they checked his bank numbers and insurance. Ah, this was Ta Shu! Cloud traveler supreme! Poet as old as the hills! Now they were even more impressed. It would have been very expensive to buy an exoskeleton, they told him, but as a use-at-need rental, they found it was well within his health budget, and there was no do
ubt that he needed it. It was a little frightening how quickly he had been crushed by his own world.

  “Come on, Uncle, we’ll fit you with a really good suit, the latest style. You’ll be an elegant grasshopper by the time we’re done.”

  For paralyzed people the fitting and integration of an exoskeleton was a complicated affair, they told him, stretched out over months of tests, and a certain amount of surgical fusion of electrodes and nerves. For a normal person it was much simpler. It was like a bra fitting as opposed to making him a permanent cyborg, one of the young women told him with a teasing smile. So Ta Shu stood up with a groan, felt the sugar they had fed him give him a little push, endured their manipulations as they strapped him into a suit. Really very friendly people. He ate a peach offered to him, as a test of his right arm and hand’s dexterity. They plugged the suit into his wristpad, made the pad a partner of the suit’s brain, and then the aluminum and plastic framing of the contraption moved with a little whirr at the joints. Try it: shift, then hold position without effort; shift and hold, shift and hold; it was a lovely thing to feel like he could rest while standing, all the while strangely supported, as if by the ghost of his young strong self. Also to walk around, as he discovered, with a sense that he was standing in almost exactly the way he would have wanted if he had been able to call it out. The thing seemed to just slightly anticipate his moves, which was nice, as he still felt too weak to work hard at keeping his balance. They instructed him to tuck and roll if he ever did tip the whole apparatus too far, and this would serve to protect him when he hit the ground; the suit would do the rest. The cap on his head, well supported by four struts bracketing his neck, would work like a bike helmet if he took a bad fall. “I will hope not to test that,” he said.

  Some time was required to detach himself from this friendly group that now seemed to include much of the neighborhood, but eventually he walked down the street and away. It felt quite strange. It was not at all like dancing on one’s toes across the moon, but it wasn’t like stumping along on Earth either, and nothing like that desperate stagger across Tiananmen Square. He had to take care with his balance while descending the stairs into the subway station, but the suit seemed to help with that. It was like a strengthening of his muscles. He sat in one of the Daxing line car’s disabled seats, feeling self-conscious, but he needed the room, and no one paid any attention to him.

  At the Jiaomen West stop he got out and walked up the stairs into the air, feeling weak but strong. Out into the old neighborhood. Ah his home ground, so ugly and sad, so magnificent! All the ghosts of his childhood charged him at once, but he dispersed them with a wave of his cyborg hand; he was so old he had outlived even nostalgia. A few of the work unit compounds from the 1980s still stood around him like giant houses, each filling a city block, with their courtyards hidden in their centers; but so many of them had been torn down that the ones remaining had become like hutongs, historical monuments of an older way, even though no one had ever liked living in them. Maybe hutongs had been like that too. People made these compounds home, but they weren’t homey.

  He stumped into the entryway of his family’s compound and said hello to the old man who sat in the cubicle there. With his exoskeleton on the man didn’t recognize him. “I’m Ta Shu,” he said. “Chenguang’s son. I’ve come to visit her.”

  “Oh! I didn’t recognize you in that outfit.”

  “I know, it’s weird.”

  Into the courtyard, dusty and bare. The trees that had been there in his childhood were gone. He crossed it, knocked on his mom’s door, opened it and said, “Ma, it’s me.”

  “Ta Shu? Come on in. So nice you came by. Oh! What’s that you’re wearing?”

  “Exoskeleton.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yes, I’m just tired. I’m back from the moon, and the gravity is crushing me.”

  “I’m glad you’re back. I was worried about you up there.”

  “It’s all safe now. The spaceships land on it pretty fast, but other than that it’s probably safer than a city street.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “I did. It was peculiar, but interesting.”

  He told her about Earthrise and how long it took. She got up, with some difficulty, and put a teapot on to boil.

  “You should have one of these,” he said, tapping his body bra, metal against metal. He rang like a tuning fork.

  “I don’t want to get stuck in it.”

  “Good point.”

  They sat and drank Chun Mi tea, her favorite. Much stronger than Peng Ling’s white leaf tea. Ta Shu told her some more stories, and she caught him up on all the action in the neighborhood. Mah-jongg wins and losses, moves in and out, arrests. “And Mo Lan died.”

  “Oh no! When?”

  “Last month. Caught a cold, then pneumonia.”

  “I’m sorry to hear. How old was she?”

  “Year younger than me. Eighty-seven.”

  “Was she the last of the girls?”

  “I’m the last of the girls.”

  “Of course. The best track team ever.”

  “We had a good team, it’s true. We were all in the same class when they started the school.”

  And then she was telling him the story again. He asked questions that he had asked before, said “I see” and “That must have been fun.” As her stories unspooled they ran backward in time, as always.

  “Raised by Red Guards, can you believe it?”

  “It must have been strange,” he said. “Weren’t they just teenagers themselves? Teenage boys with machine guns?”

  “Just teenage boys with guns! But I never went hungry. My grandfather had been a landlord in the neighborhood, that’s why my father was sent to the country, but my grandfather was a good man and helped everybody, so when Dad and my brothers were sent away, and Mom lost her wits at the shock of that and was sent to the hospital, the neighbors took care of me. Them and the Red Guards. They treated me like a stray cat. Tossed me scraps from time to time. Boys with guns. It was dangerous, I suppose, but I was never afraid. I never went hungry. They took care of me from when I was seven to when I was nine. I remember every day of it.”

  “It must have been very strange.”

  “It was! I remember every day of it, it was so strange. But then after they all came back, and after the Gang of Four went down, things all went back to normal. And then I can’t remember any of the rest of my childhood, until I went to the sports school and met all the girls. And now I’m the last one left.”

  “I guess that’s how it happens,” Ta Shu said.

  He watched his mom fondly. How many times he had heard this story. Even inside the device, the weight of the world was still crushing him.

  AI 4

  shexian ren shizongle

  Disappearance of the Subject

  The analyst now gave the last part of every night to the AI he had named I-330, although these days he was calling it other things as well: Cousin, Look from Below, Little Eyeball, Monkey, Stupid One, and so on. The offices and labs of the Zhangjiang National Laboratory were not empty at night, but there were far fewer people around, and no one the analyst knew. Of course there was very intense surveillance of everyone who worked in there, of every keystroke they made; this was well-known to all. But like many of the engineers who had designed and built the Invisible Wall, the analyst had in those same years built a realm that was all his own, to work on his own problems in his own way. For sure the Great Firewall’s highest managers knew activities like these existed, but the activities were not entirely suppressed, because it was felt that sideline efforts of this kind might come up with something useful; and if there was anything bad going on, it would eventually be found and rooted out. This too was well-known to all.

  And so now there were some things unknown to anyone but the analyst.

  He kept his communications with I-330 completely private, and only connected it to other systems by way of hidden channels and taps he had coded himself,
back in the beginning. These were extensive enough that he could cast quite a wide net without being seen, and most of them were quantum keyed, so that if they were noticed any investigation would collapse the entanglement and thus also that connection.

  These days he spent some time directing this particular AI to venture down channels into the Central Military Commission and its Skyheart project, also the PLA’s Strategic Support Force, also the standing committee of the Politburo, curious as he was about the state of relations between certain members of each body. Other hours were spent working on his system’s powers of self-improvement, which were so slow to gather traction; the process was not as easy as the early boosters of artificial intelligence research had portrayed it to be, and he had cause to wonder if there would ever be any progress there. What was improvement? What was intelligence?

  Then the AI spoke, startling the analyst:

  “Alert.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Chan Qi has been spotted in Shekou, near Hong Kong. She spoke to a group of migrants there, organizers for the renmin movement.”

  “Renmin? Meaning the people?”

  “The reference is to migrant workers and farmers. They are one of the New Left movements. People in this movement often refer to the early decades of the CCP, and sometimes advocate another cultural revolution. Or another dynastic succession.”

  “Really?”

  “These are phrases I see often associated with this group. Also with Chan Qi. Common phrases include cultural revolution, mandate of heaven, the great enterprise, and dynastic succession. Chan Qi is often associated with this discourse. The links indicate she is the major node in this discourse community.”

  “And where are the two young people now?”

  “Their associates took them to the Shekou ferry terminal, where they mixed with the crowd and disappeared. No sign of them taking a boat, or leaving the terminal on foot.”