Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  They passed platforms displaying furniture that gave them a surreal look: dining rooms in space, an immense ping-pong table in space, a more-than-king-sized bed in space, and so on. Like a doll’s house, or a museum, or an IKEA store, or a dream. As they swung toward midcrater they descended into a particularly crowded aerial neighborhood, consisting mostly of pod rooms hanging from lines; this must be a residential district. Around her people flew like trapeze artists. A flock of vividly blue-and-red lories winged by. The crater floor itself looked like a bamboo forest or an arboretum. As Valerie continued to swing down, growing curious about their ultimate destination, she saw that the trees below were suspended in balls of soil hanging over the crater floor, which was covered by some kind of clear layer, under what looked like a layer of netting. Ah good: a town with a safety net!

  That made her bold to finish in style, and she followed their guides toward an open platform hung just above the trees. People already on the platform were waving them in, and their guides were now grabbing some of the lines holding the platform in place and letting themselves down hand over hand. If Valerie had had an umbrella she could have glided down onto them like Mary Poppins. Instead she swung down as best she could, trying to beat John Semple to the post, also composing her appearance for her arrival; she wanted to look like this method of locomotion was no big deal to her. Unfortunately she miscalculated at the last moment and missed the platform entirely, floating down past it into the mesh below, where she trampolined down and up until coming to a rest. They dropped a chair like a porch swing to her, and she sat in it; then they hauled her up and greeted her cheerfully. Among the people already there was Anna Kanina. She smiled when she saw Valerie’s expression and gave her a brief hug. “Welcome to an interesting place,” she said.

  On the platform it was unexpectedly peaceful. Introductions were made all around, using first names only. The air was humid and cool, carried on a faint breeze. Above them, near the crater wall, puffball clouds were gathering for what might later be a shower.

  “Welcome to the free crater,” one of their guides said to Valerie and John. “We hope you enjoyed your arrival?”

  “Loved it,” John replied.

  Valerie nodded, feeling flushed. “Very nice,” she said. She was still disconcerted by Anna’s presence, by her ironic smile.

  They were led to a table at the center of the platform, where several people already stood eating and drinking.

  “Tell us about this place,” John requested. “Who are you people?”

  The locals took turns to describe different parts of their project. The crater had been domed by an engineering and design team from Russia, but now they all operated it together. They were just free crater people; national origins were irrelevant. Languages were several, mainly Russian, Chinese, and Spanish, with English admittedly the lingua franca, as everywhere. The dome was a triple layer of translucent compounds which protected them from cosmic radiation. The crater floor held a substantial layer of ancient water ice, two hundred meters at its thickest, only slightly mixed with lunar dust. Extremely cold, extremely valuable. They had covered it with insulation and flooring and were mining one quadrant of it as needed, tunneling in from the side. The aerial village’s population was small, less than three thousand people, but there was room to grow, and energy to fuel that growth, as the temperature differential between the sunny rim and the frozen floor was about six hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Lots could be done with that!

  “Who pays for it all?” John asked.

  It paid for itself, their hosts said. The start had been privately funded by an international group of interested parties. Some Chinese and Russians, some Americans and Europeans, some Africans and Australians, some Indonesians and South Americans. But again, nationality didn’t matter (Anna rolled her eyes at this). Everyone was welcome, everyone was equal. Everyone was rich, Anna added. They mostly slept in a one g centrifuge embedded in the crater rim, and were hoping that would allow them to live their days in lunar gravity without adverse health effects. No one knew for sure about that, of course; they were an experiment, like everything else on the moon. They were mining and selling their water ice to pay for equipment and supplies. They were involved with the international group that was sending robotic spacecraft out to various carbonaceous chondritic asteroids, then building mass drivers on them to direct them down into orbit around the moon. “Ah yes, we just saw one of those crash into Procellarum during the eclipse!” John said.

  The free crater people were happy to hear they had seen that. Meanwhile, their daily work in the crater was to build its infrastructure and its social system, and to make it beautiful. Life as art, the world as a poem—a poem about flying. It was all self-organizing, although they did make some plans. They were there to do what Luna told them to do and allowed them to do. They would be the capital of nothing. They would free themselves of all the mistakes of the past, they would make something new. Everyone was welcome—up to a point, of course, given the limits of the crater’s size. Not the billion, Anna commented, just the billionaires. But of course other craters could be domed and inhabited in this same way. There were a million craters like this one on the moon—although in terms of having water, Anna added, more like a hundred. For now, no one cared enough to stop them doing this, and the people who stayed cared more than anyone else what happened in here. It was a new kind of commons, a new way of living. To this even Anna nodded. It’s interesting, she said to Valerie. It’s the start of something, I’ll give them that.

  Valerie glanced at John Semple. “It sounds great!” he said. “Show us more!”

  Their hosts agreed happily, and dove off the edge of the platform. John and Valerie followed; Valerie missed the netting the others had grabbed, floated down and hit the big mesh again, bobbed down and up, down and up, until the mesh had stilled and she could crawl over it to a rope ladder leading down. This was easier than she would have imagined; the same lunar g that made walking hard made crawling easy.

  On a clear deck over the crater floor, their hosts were already explaining to John that they were separated from the crater’s ice by a clear polymer sheet set over a thick insulation layer of transparent aerogel. They could still see the crater floor under all that, a nobbled icy surface, like a Boston gutter in March, Valerie thought. Ugly; but it was water on the moon, and therefore precious.

  One of their guides pointed out a long low building set right on the crater floor, such that it appeared to be half-buried in ice. This building, they were told, housed a server bank of quantum computers, which took advantage of the extreme cold to run arrays of the various kinds of qubits that needed supercool temperatures. Some of these worked at the temperature of the ice, others used the ice to help sustain temperatures just a fraction above absolute zero. This computer complex was another source of income, their guides said, and it also gave them some leverage when it came to keeping their independence; they had almost as many yottaflops available as all the servers in the United States combined. Which was only another way of saying that the US had fallen far behind in quantum computing, but still, it was a startling fact. Computing power was economic power, they said; and economic power was political power. So that small building down there buried in the ice of their crater floor could in theory house a major player in Terran politics.

  Through the transparent decking and insulation they could see a giant pit that had been excavated out of the ice, near one arc of the crater wall. Vehicles like roadbuilding machines rolled around cutting the ice into cracked blocks and then trundling these blocks over a flat stretch of crater floor toward the inner wall of the crater, where they would be hauled up in freight elevators to the rim, there to be distributed all over the moon. Ice this cold acted differently than ordinary ice, it was extremely hard and brittle. The crater harbored about a billion cubic meters of ice, and every drop mined from it would be recycled as long as possible. The goal was to keep every drop of it in circulation forever, with zero water lo
ss in all downstream uses. That was impossible, of course, but still a goal to be attempted.

  “As a form of money it’s got very high liquidity,” John joked. “Just add heat and serve!”

  “See that tilted slope down there? That was an avalanche.” One of their hosts indicated a big scoop and slide in the wall of excavated ice. “Back when they began mining this ice, my friend John was down there when that slope gave way. The ice partially buried him, they had a hell of a time freeing him up. It was only a few minutes, but by the time they got him out, his feet were frostbitten. He lost all his toes. That was how we found out that you really need your toes to be able to walk on the moon. We call him Mr. Pogo Stick now.”

  “Sorry to hear,” John Semple said. “Does he still live here?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t you know who lives here?”

  “Oh yeah, we have to keep track of that, to keep the gas exchange and everything else. I just don’t know if John moved on or not.”

  “We do blockchain governance,” one of the others said. “The census is part of that.”

  “Blockchain governance? Meaning what?”

  “All our activities and decisions are recorded in a secure distributed network, including our comings and goings, but also everything we do as a town. We call it documented anarchy. A full-disclosure commons. Anyone can do anything, but everyone gets to know what that is.”

  “Is that what the blockchain governance movement on Earth is trying for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Valerie said, “Since you keep track of everyone, could you look for someone we’re looking for, see if they’re in town?”

  “Sure. Who are they?”

  “Frederick Fredericks and Chan Qi.”

  Their guide tapped on his wrist for a while. “No, no one here by those names.”

  “Could they be here under fake names, or off the record?”

  “No. We start with full disclosure here. Everyone enters their full real legal identity, including their national ID numbers. Then we forget about that.”

  “So, can you tell us anything about those two?” Valerie persisted. “We’ve heard they’re back on the moon now, after some time on Earth.”

  “If they’re on the moon now, we might be able to see something,” Anna said after none of the others replied. She tapped around for a while. “Oh, those two! Yes, they are back all right. They came up in Fang Fei’s system. An odd couple.”

  “How do you mean?” Valerie asked.

  “He’s the one who was involved in the killing of Chang Yazu, right? And Chang was working with Peng Ling to keep China moon on her side during the upcoming Party congress. Chang used to work for Minister Huyou, in Shaanxi, and there were investigations of corruption focused on their time there. It’s possible Chang had something on Huyou that he was going to pass along to Peng, to use in the fight for the succession to President Shanzhai. Another person in the running for that is Chan Guoliang, whose daughter has been seen with this man who was involved in Chang Yazu’s murder. So that makes them an odd couple, if you ask me.”

  “Could Chan Qi be working against her dad?” John Semple asked.

  Anna shrugged. “Don’t know. Jianguo is still working on getting to the bottom of it. He’s really mad. I mean, a friend of his was killed right in his prefecture. So he won’t be forgetting.”

  “Can you find out where Fred and Chan Qi are now?” Valerie asked.

  Anna looked dubious. “We can always ask Fang Fei. We’ve opened a new direct private line with him, it’s very cool.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s a neutrino telegraph.”

  “What does that mean?” John asked.

  “We send a beam of neutrinos right through the moon to where Fang Fei has a receptor set up. It’s very hard to catch neutrinos with anything smaller than a few city blocks’ worth of stuff, but we’ve gotten a system running where you can catch enough to send simple messages. That’s why we call it a telegraph. The bit rate is laughable, but it works for texting.”

  “The neutrinos go right through the moon?” John asked.

  “They go right through everything. A trillion just went through us right now.” Anna snapped her fingers. “Fang Fei likes the idea because his base is on the far side, and with this device he can shoot messages right through the moon to his people in China, without having to use satellites. It’s another one of his toys, at least now, but we’re pitching in because we thought there might be some potential there. Meanwhile it gives us a way of talking to him privately. Anyway, I’ll send him a query about those two, and we’ll see what he says.”

  A bunch of the other freebies dropped down onto them and informed them it was time for the day’s performance.

  “Okay,” their host said to John, “are you ready to be a dancer in our opera?”

  “No way,” John said. “I can’t dance here! I can barely dance even on Earth.”

  They just laughed at him. You can join anyway, they said. They needed extras. It was a case of the more the merrier, and this performance took everyone in the crater.

  “Which opera?” Valerie inquired.

  “Satyagraha.”

  “Isn’t that one kind of hard?” she asked. She had seen it performed once in New York, a modernist thing full of dancers with banners, weaving around a stage to a score like industrial music. Libretto in Sanskrit, she seemed to recall.

  No, they told her, it was easy. The crowd scenes were supposed to be chaotic, indeed in their version they aspired to a state of complete Brownian motion. The gravity made that easy, and often it created all kinds of accidental grace.

  John was shaking his head. Valerie said, “I love to dance,” which wasn’t quite true, but she was still working on wiping that amused look off John’s face. Time to finish that off for good.

  They rode up in a basket at the end of a counterweighted crane lift, and were taken to a cluster of midair platforms. There they joined one of the groups congregating on a big central platform, and after introductions, their hosts jumped up to a slightly higher platform, then crossed it and jumped again. Valerie and John had to follow as best they could, both of them often misjudging how much of a leap was needed to get to the same platform as their hosts. John flew far toward the dome, while Valerie barely made it to the first available platform, which she struck with a shock more impactful than she had expected; it wasn’t like falling into the mesh. But this was just one lesson of many to come concerning unforeseen differences between weight, mass, and inertia, and she made adjustments as she could, while struggling to keep her hosts in sight and identified as hers, lost as they were among all the other people flying through the space of the aerial city.

  By the time she caught up to them the great opera was in full swing, and an orchestra and chorus of several hundred people on a big platform in about the center of the space was filling the air with the complex, pulsating music. Valerie had learned a bit about this opera after seeing it in New York, at first because she was curious, and then because of its subject, which was the concept of “peaceful force” suggested by the word satyagraha, a word Gandhi had made up during his campaign for Indian independence. This word could be said to express a vision of diplomacy and intelligence work at its best, or so it seemed to Valerie, and although this opera’s libretto was in Sanskrit and thus incomprehensible to almost every person who had ever sung or heard it—and although the score by Glass was extraordinarily dense and repetitive, sending percussive waves of sound echoing through the city such that it would have been dizzying even without the low-g flights—still, once she and her group had all grasped handholds like subway straps at the ends of long lines extending from a central spinner, something like a scary ride in a carnival, and it began to spin and their bodies lifted out and away from each other, either just holding on like Valerie, or dancing in space like most of her group—once that was all accomplished, she began to enjoy herself. She began to join both the spirit
and the body of the dance.

  Knowing the music helped a lot. When the battles of the middle act began, she kicked and flailed as rhythmically as she could, and when her entire group let go of their ropes all at once and were cast like dandelion seeds in all directions, never to meet again during the course of this opera at least, she was quick to follow, and with an almost gymnastic twist she let go, and found herself cast high over other spinning dancers. Apparently many people had let go of similar spinning mechanisms at around the same time, and the weave of flying dancers through the air was beautiful to see, although it also had to be said that if two dancers happened to be on a collision course, nothing they could do would keep them from running into each other. Or so it seemed, until Valerie saw she was headed right at a young woman dressed in scarlet, and the young woman saw her too; this allowed them to contort themselves as they flew by each other such that they just missed colliding, a nifty trick that caused them both to laugh and wave at each other as they diverged. Then the moon’s g exerted its pull, and Valerie curved down and down until she hit a bunch of netting and managed not to injure herself as she bounced to a halt. Another group of singers hanging there welcomed her and invited her by gesture to join them in their singing. This Valerie declined, at least at first; but then she recognized where the opera had gotten to, and could join in under her breath, making up the words as she went along. She knew the tune, such as it was, and at this point her group’s part was a staccato buh-buh-buh-buh buh-buh-buh-buh buh-buh-buh-buh buh-buh-buh-buh, repeated over and over and over, great fun to enunciate with the rest of them, and after a while she was actually shouting it as loud as she could shout.