Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  He wondered how the AI would respond to his absence. He had left a protocol in place, and once certain gates were unlocked, if they were, the program should have moved itself into the blind he had constructed for it, so that it would remain powered up for as long as the firewall itself was powered. If it did that it could then generate and send out a remarkable number of messages—trillions, or even quadrillions. If some of these messages were calls for people to locate and rescue the analyst, that might get some sort of response, including him being summarily executed by whoever was holding him. A bullet to the back of the head. Well, there were worse ways to die. Presumably he would lose consciousness before even registering the shot had happened. Anticipation worse than the act itself, as with so many things. Obviously you had to be alive to suffer.

  He shifted on the floor, sighed. He wondered if he had done right to try to alter the system from the inside. Possibly it had always been a false hope, a dream. A fantasy response, as happened so often. Watching the urban youth wander Beijing staring at their wristpads, underemployed and at risk of destitution at all times, oblivious to their own precarious situation—oblivious to history itself—unaware of all that China had gone through to get them into their bubble of precarious ease … seeing all that around him on the street every day had made him think he needed to strike directly, himself, from the inside. He had given up on mass action.

  But someday the streets would fill with people. Young and old—the young without prospects, the old without the iron rice bowl—they would all take to the streets. Thirty million more young men than young women—that in itself was enough to fuel a revolution. He wondered when it would happen, and what would come of it. If he had believed in the people more, perhaps he could have helped them more. Worked from the inside to help the outside. That had been his intention all along, but now he saw that when you did it alone, in solitude, with only your AI for companionship, the dangers rose, also the possibilities for failure. The whole point of a collective national success was undercut when you tried to do it alone. He was surprised he had gone for so long without seeing that.

  Well, he had done what he could with what he had. He had had to work in secret to stay inside. Public gestures of opposition to the Party by intellectuals or government officials had never done much, being always very quickly and effectively quashed. He had tried to find a different way, suited to his expertise and his temperament. Build a new society inside the shell of the old—a saying from an older time, from the international workers’ movement, or so they had called themselves. A return to some kind of solidarity with other people. Did the so-called netizens, each plugged in by their earbuds, staring at their screens, feel any of that anymore? Each time and place had its own particular structure of feeling, a cultural construct ordering and channeling the basic biological emotions. He knew this. And cut off from the rest of the world, so much older than the rest of the world, China had always had its own structure of feeling. Presumably every culture did. In China there had always been the feeling that China was a project they all created and owned together, often against the resistance of all the other people in the world, also against the resistance of the imperial overlords at home. China belonged to its people, and the Chinese Communist Party belonged to the people. And not so long ago there had been a time when farmers, workers, artists and intellectuals had banded together without any notion of fame or profit or power, simply out of a feeling of compassion and human solidarity, to work tirelessly their whole lives to make a socialist revolution in which no one exploited anyone else, and men and women lived together as equals. Now there was a structure of feeling!

  But power gathered too tightly into one place always grew out of hand, and often became monstrous. They had seen it time after time. Power had to be split up and distributed, by way of the Party and the government and all the agencies and commissions and committees and task forces, the entire massive intricate bureaucracy, and from there out to all the individuals involved. In theory all this splitting should have worked to keep the Party in service to the people and to China.

  Maybe all this happening now was part of that process working itself out. Impossible to say from here in a cell. Even when living his ordinary life, now so small in his memory, it had been impossible to say. He had done what he could with what he had. He had given his life. So many had given their lives. So many had died for China. If he became one of them, so be it. All for China; always for China. But it would be too bad. He would like to have seen what was going to happen next.

  TA SHU 7

  Tao Yuan Xing

  Source of the Peach Blossom Stream (Wang Wei)

  A try in English at the poem by Wang Wei, written in common year 718, when he was nineteen. The poem was his adaptation of a famous fable by Tao Yuanming, written in 421.

  Wandering we came on a swift river.

  Clear water, granite pebble bottom.

  Riffles and rapids and long still pools,

  Willows hanging over the banks,

  Big fish tucked in the shadows,

  And floating down like little boats,

  Peach blossoms. Lots of them.

  We climbed upstream to find the trees

  Dropping these petals of floating pink.

  The river narrowed, rose into a defile.

  We had to clamber, one side then the other,

  Feet wet at one crossing, hands on rock looking down.

  Then the gorge opened and we were in a high valley.

  Fields of grain, neat houses, and yes: peach trees.

  They lined the banks, dropping their blossoms

  On the slow meander of a little river.

  People came out to greet us:

  Where are you from? What’s the news?

  They fed us and showed us a bower to sleep in.

  These people were peaceful, calm, kind.

  The valley was fertile and full of animals.

  We stayed until we saw what it was: a good place.

  To live here would be fulfillment.

  So we said to each other, let’s get our families

  And bring them back. Let’s move here.

  We left that place and picked a way

  Down the narrow gorge, back into the world.

  Traveled home and made our accounting,

  Convinced who we could to go back with us.

  Off we went with packs on our backs,

  Back to that place where the peach blossoms fell.

  We could not find it. Somehow the hills were

  Not the same. No such river where we thought.

  Back and forth we made a search, back and forth

  But nothing. Different streams, different lands.

  That place in space was a moment in time:

  You can never find your way back.

  Search all your life you will only despair.

  Dustless garden, how to tell? Where to find?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  shoulie laohu

  Tiger Hunting

  The time of the flight back to the moon passed for Ta Shu in a kind of fugue state of mourning and apprehension. There was no way to communicate with Zhou Bao that might not be overheard, and he didn’t want that. Best to have his meals with Bo and Dhu, and ask them questions about their work, chat them up, see what he could find out by what they said. But as it turned out they were quite reticent, and mostly answered one question with another, playing the same game he was. These were very polite and uninformative meals. And eating in weightlessness was an effort, it took some concentration. He was getting better at it, but during these meals he could pretend he wasn’t, and thus avoid talk altogether.

  Then he glimpsed the moon, looking big through the little window, and a few hours later he saw it again, rushing at him with the same rapidity that had given Fred Fredericks such a start on their first arrival. Ta Shu figured that landing in such a fashion was no more or less dangerous than any other time of a flight through space, no matter how alarming the sp
eed. So he went to a window seat and watched with interest as they shot toward the great white ball. It did look like they were headed for an awful smash.

  As before, however, they landed without incident, and again without even feeling the moment when their spaceship was magnetically captured by the long piste. All they knew was that their chairs swiveled around so that they were eyeballs in when deceleration began. That pressure was less bad than their launch g, and soon enough their ship was stopped and they were getting out of their restraints and learning again how to move in the lunar gravity so gently holding them down. For some reason Ta Shu found it harder this time than before, harder and less entertaining.

  Bo and Dhu looked to be first-timers on the moon, perhaps a little overconfident at first, and as they walked ahead of Ta Shu they banged off walls, floor, even ceiling. By the time they got into the subway to the Peaks of Eternal Light the two men looked ready to sit and strap themselves in again, Bo chastened, Dhu chuckling uneasily. Off to the big central station on the highest peak of eternal light.

  When they were in that station Ta Shu followed Bo and Dhu again. They were still bold, despite their frequent gaffes. “I thought we would be better this time,” one of them said to the other. Ta Shu couldn’t afford to run into things as hard as they were, and he gripped the handrails and pulled himself along cautiously. The people in the station included some familiar faces, but no one he knew. They treated him with a deference not shown to him before, and he supposed this might be one result of Peng Ling now being his sponsor (if that was the word for it). Emissary of a member of the standing committee: there would be few persons on the moon as well connected as that, and if it was known—and he guessed by the looks on people’s faces that it was—it would make a difference.

  And indeed he was taken to a room on a level higher than the Hotel Star, clearly some kind of distinguished visitors’ quarters that he had not qualified for during his previous visit to this station. While he was putting his things away he felt a buzz on his wrist and saw something had come in from Zhou Bao. A brief message, asking him to come up the Libration Line to see him as soon as he could. No RSVP necessary.

  As Ta Shu wanted to confer with Zhou, this message was welcome; but it wasn’t likely that he would be allowed to go up the Libration Line by himself. He thought about it for a while, wishing again he could consult with Peng directly about how best to accommodate Bo and Dhu. He had tried calling her again several times, but still she hadn’t answered. Were they to accompany him everywhere? And if Peng wanted that, did that necessarily mean that Ta Shu wanted it also? He wasn’t sure.

  In the end he informed Bo and Dhu that he wished to go up the line to see his friend Zhou, and they nodded and asked if they could come along, and Ta Shu said yes, of course. The next day they met at the station and took the train line north to Petrov Crater.

  When they got to the station at Petrov, they went to Zhou’s office on the top floor. Earth was currently below the horizon, the black sky overhead packed with stars, the great braided white cloud of the Milky Way arcing overhead. Uncountable stars, although someone said it was around ten thousand. Dhu was looking up the time for Earthrise on his wrist, Bo was looking around Zhou’s office. Zhou had known that Ta Shu was coming with guests, so he sidled in unsurprised, and more animated than usual, playing the part of the friendly host.

  Still, they were now faced with a difficulty. Zhou had asked him to come, and now he was here. But what could Zhou say with Bo and Dhu there in the room?

  Soon it became clear to Ta Shu that Zhou himself didn’t know the answer to this; Zhou spotted Dhu looking at his wrist and then at the horizon, and quickly followed that lead, talking about the slowness of Earthrise—how it pricked the horizon like a sapphire, how the lack of an atmosphere on the moon meant there was no warning of that arrival, how the sight of Earth oriented everything once it bulked there in the sky. How big it looked compared to the moon from Earth—eight times bigger, yes: amazing.

  Yes yes, the two agents’ faces said. All very interesting. And yet here they were. Something was going on. Could they please get on with it? Even Dhu had this look.

  Ta Shu said, “My acquaintances here work for the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Now they are helping Minister Peng in her attempt to stabilize the situation at home. They have information that suggests that some of the unrest at home is being organized from up here on the moon, and are hoping to find out if that is the case.”

  “Messages came from here,” Bo added.

  Zhou frowned. “Do you mean from this station specifically?”

  Bo and Dhu regarded each other. “From the moon,” Bo clarified. “And from the edge of the moon, the limb. This limb, in fact. From the right edge as you look up from Earth. It was a brief message conveyed by laser light. An amateur astronomer observing the moon was in the beam’s target circle, and captured a recording of part of it. It was an encrypted message.”

  “And you broke the code?”

  “No. But the timing of this message is suggestive. An hour after this light from the moon was seen, people from all over China began to head for Beijing.”

  “Coincidence?” Zhou suggested. “Correlation, not causation?”

  Bo and Dhu did not reply.

  Ta Shu saw that Zhou was not going to share anything with these two, just out of a general sense of caution. War of the agencies at least, and maybe something more. The discipline inspection commission didn’t have much direct presence on the moon, so far as Ta Shu knew, even if they did oversee the Lunar Authority as they did all the agencies. So as interlopers these two were not going to get very far with locals like Zhou. For these two to make any headway would take some combination of bureaucratic power and personal diplomacy that they had not yet shown any sign of having. They could barely even stand, and so naturally they had no standing. Ta Shu wondered what Peng Ling had had in mind when she sent them to accompany him. But of course there was so much he didn’t know. More than ever he realized he didn’t even know for sure that Peng Ling had ordered them to join him. Her recorded message had been brief. He really did need to have a private conversation with her to confirm it.

  Now Zhou continued to play bland ignorance, easily read as noncooperation. Bo and Dhu didn’t press very hard, and after a while they gave up and pronged clumsily toward the residency centrifuge they had been assigned to, claiming moon fatigue.

  When they were gone, Zhou eyed the room in a way that told Ta Shu they were likely to be on camera and recorded. In a friendly voice he invited Ta Shu to go out with him for a short drive to Earth View Point, the highest prominence in the area. Ta Shu readily agreed, and they bounced down to the garage, got in a rover, and drove out.

  “Sorry to hear about your mother,” Zhou Bao said. “My condolences.”

  “Thanks. She had a good life.”

  The road to the point was marked by the wheels of many previous rovers. In the brilliant light of the lunar day the land to each side of the tracks looked like the glazed layer of refrozen snow that one often saw around McMurdo Station in Antarctica. After one uphill stretch they got onto the flatter height of a prominence somewhat like a mesa top. Like almost every other topographical feature on the moon, it was a remnant arc of an old crater rim. From up here the horizon lay quite a bit farther off, maybe twenty kilometers, it was hard to judge; the horizon from here was a wildly undulating border between the painfully white moon below and the deep black of space above. The white of the moon was flecked with shadows, the black of space was spangled with stars; that symmetry combined with an accidental curve of the horizon to make it all resemble the Daoist taijitu, the ancient yin-yang symbol here ballooning out to encompass the entire universe, confirming the visionary insight of Zhou Dunyi, who had first drawn the divided circle a thousand years before. A geomancer of great talent.

  “Yin-yang,” Ta Shu noted, gesturing at the view with a curve of his hand.

  “Yes,” Zhou said. “And soon Earth w
ill rise and break the pattern, as it always does.” Zhou consulted his wrist. “Twelve minutes or so, in fact.”

  “I look forward to that. So,” Ta Shu said, “what’s going on? Can we speak freely in this car?”

  “Yes. It’s my own private office, you might say, and I’ve had it thoroughly privatized. As to what’s going on, I was hoping you would tell me!”

  Ta Shu nodded. “From my side, these two were sicced on me by Peng, or so they said. I can’t be sure what they’re up to, but they have me in hand, and they mentioned her name, and had a recorded message for me from her. She’s my patron and she wants my help, so I have to go with what she gives me. I thought she was on my side, or I was on her side, but now I don’t even know what I mean by that. For sure she’s in a dogfight at the Party congress, I know that.”

  “Of course. Are they really from national security?”

  “I don’t know. Dhu is government, Bo is a Party cadre, or so they say. A team, as in the old days.”

  “So it seems.”

  “What about you? Have you found our young wanderers?”