Red Moon
Page 35
“Yes. Which is to say, they found me. I’m trying to hide them, to keep them out of worse trouble, but to do that I’m holding them. Chan Qi doesn’t like that.”
“I can imagine.”
“I’d be very happy to give them over to you, but what will you do with them?”
“We can’t do it with Bo and Dhu around. Tell me how you found them.”
“They came into the station needing fuel and food. They were traveling with a couple of helium three prospectors, so-called, and had driven cross-country from Fang Fei’s place on the far side.”
“Could you send them out again with these prospectors?”
“Yes, they want to do that, but it’s hard to stay hidden in those cars.”
“Doesn’t Chan Qi understand that?”
“The prospectors think they are better at hiding than they really are, apparently. And I guess she believes them.”
“I’m surprised she would be that naïve.”
“The moon makes people moony. We are all lunatics up here, hoping that the world has gone away.”
“I was hoping that myself,” Ta Shu admitted.
“Because here you are.”
“But even on Earth I hope that.”
“Actually, I think it’s easier on Earth than here. Hiding, I mean. Maybe even fooling yourself. Earth is crowded and fragmented. The noise-to-signal ratio is stupendous, so you can get in the noise and hide.”
“So should we try to get these two back to Earth again?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t know which would be better. A lot of people down there will be after her.”
“But here too.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure. Once you’ve been up here awhile, you don’t want to collaborate with Earth as much. There’s a lot of noncompliance up here. Once you click into it, you find it’s a pretty big network. If these two had only stayed in Fang Fei’s compound, for instance, they might have been fine. Fang doesn’t tolerate interference with his places.”
“Could we send them back there?” Ta Shu wondered.
“Maybe. But Peng knows they were there, right?”
“She sent them there in the first place.”
“So that would be walking back into her clutches.”
“Her clutches might be better than some other people’s clutches. I am still assuming she is the good guy here.”
“Maybe,” Zhou said. “But why does she want Qi?”
“I don’t know. She said that Qi was messing up her plans for reform by initiating the demonstrations back home, which will then cause a crackdown from the rightists, which will make the reforms more difficult.”
“Sounds plausible. But aren’t Peng and Qi’s father both candidates to become the next president, at this very congress?”
“Yes, so I understand. If you think a woman really has a chance.”
Zhou shrugged. “I’ve heard it said that Peng could do it. And that’s partly because she’s been so tough and effective. So, think about it: if you had the daughter of your rival in custody, it might help you, if a moment came where someone had to concede.”
Ta Shu sighed. “It doesn’t seem like her.”
“Nevertheless. People who might become president probably don’t ever seem much like their previous selves.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Ta Shu said, pondering it unhappily.
“We all present a persona to other people. Some have a wide range of personas. A real cast of characters.”
Ta Shu sighed. His cast had always been extremely small: just him. There was his cloud persona, of course, and there was the poet; but these had tended to be just him. Possibly his imagination was deficient in that regard. Although he did tend to try to encourage other people by pretending he was always happy. That was called cheerfulness. Maybe it was part of him, maybe it was a persona. “So what do you suggest?”
Zhou sat there thinking about it. “Ah,” he said, and gestured forward; the horizon was now pricked by a brilliant blue light, like a shard of glowing lapis lazuli. This blue wafer grew to left and right, then stabilized: Earth. The merest fingernail clipping on the white horizon, a slim crescent of blue so intense it looked radioactive, wedged there between the black and the white.
“I don’t know what to suggest,” Zhou confessed. “To me it looks like you have some secret police tailing you, waiting to arrest the very person you are trying to meet and keep from getting arrested. So maybe you shouldn’t meet her.”
“That’s fine by me, but what should I do instead to try and help her?”
Zhou thought about it as they watched the Earth creep upward. Slow as it was compared to moonrise on Earth, a matter of hours rather than minutes, the movement was still happening, as a creeping creep of blue.
So far from home. Vivid blue, the color of water, the color of breath. The cosmic yin-yang symbol enveloping that blue line was by contrast so obviously dead. They were looking from death toward life, like ghosts trying to figure out what they should have done when they were in the world.
Zhou finally said, “I just don’t know. You could slip away from these people and join your young friends in hiding, but then your ability to act would be constrained.”
“Being out here hasn’t seemed to have stopped Qi from acting.”
“You don’t know that. Could be she only got off that single message. Could be she would do a lot more if she were in Beijing. But in any case, on the other hand you could stay away from her, maybe lead your minders around by the nose, wait for an opportunity to do something to help her from the side.”
“I’m guessing I should do that.”
“Maybe so. The thing is, these two agents are not going to be able to hunt for her by themselves. There’s only a limited number of rooms on the moon, but people hiding her could move her and her friend around, staying in front of the hunt. And there are quite a few hidden spaces too. Much more hidden than Fang Fei’s China Dream.”
“What if Bo and Dhu get help from the authorities at the south pole?”
“If that happened, they might find her. If they had the right people helping. But Jiang Jianguo won’t help them, that I am sure of. The main thing is, can you find out who these guys are really working for?”
“I don’t know. What about you? Could you find out?”
“I don’t know. My first move would be to ask Jianguo for help.”
Slowly, slowly, the blue paring of Earth crept up over the white wall of the horizon. Time itself seemed slowed, congealed to a syrup they were caught in. Flies in amber; ghosts outside the world. Ta Shu pondered his options.
“Poem pair?” Zhou suggested.
“Oh dear,” Ta Shu protested.
“Come on,” Zhou Bao said. “One must keep a sense of propriety. Are we literati or not? Are we alive or not?”
“I’m not sure,” Ta Shu admitted. “I feel like a ghost.”
“I am sure,” Zhou said. “We are alive. And even ghosts write poetry.”
“Do they? I never heard that.”
“They do. Give it a try.”
Ta Shu sighed, pondered his wrist. Without thought, without volition, his fingers tapped out keys for ideograms. The pause in their conversation was no longer than their usual silences, and yet suddenly looking up at him was a poem:
Poised on the brink home so distant
No way forward no way back
River too deep to feel any stones
Tiger eyes watching from the bamboo
Follow the bank upstream or down?
Ghosts now or alive
He showed his wrist to Zhou Bao, who read it and smiled. “Very good. Very true. Here’s mine.”
Across empty space China beckons
Ancestral home trembling in fear
War can happen civil war the worst
How can I reach you how can I help?
Dynastic succession heeds no one person
All caught together in a rushing wave
Ta Shu said, “We are both soundin
g kind of worried, my friend.”
“And why not. Come on, let’s get back. There’s nothing more to say right now, and I’m worried I’ll miss messages from the Peaks. I’ve sent out some encrypted inquiries, and even that is looking suspicious now.”
“Sure, let’s get back.”
Zhou drove the rover in a circle on the mesa and they returned to the station. The midday sunlight was so bright that even the shadows were white, blasted by photons ricocheting sideways into any shaded place. Everything was white, with faint lines and gradations making what little texture there was. The wheel tracks on the road shimmered as they proceeded like mirages in a desert. When they approached the station’s garage outer door, Zhou clicked on the radio and announced they were coming in.
“Glad you’re back,” the lock keeper said. “Those cops that came here with Ta Shu found Chan Qi and arrested her.”
They rushed inside, Zhou taking the lead. Ta Shu found again that his ability to hurry in lunar gravity was severely limited. Loping after Zhou he flew immediately into the ceiling, shouted in dismay, landed on his feet several meters along, grabbed the handrail on the wall to keep from falling, stopped himself. Started again with a hand-over-hand motion, like a sailor on the flooded deck of a ship. Zhou had never slowed, and Ta Shu hurried after him around a corner and was startled to find him coming right back at him, hunched over in his rapid big-headed shuffle. Ta Shu got out of Zhou’s way, turned around and followed him again, guessing he had gone first to his office and was now headed to wherever Qi and Fred might be, but now with a small pistol in hand. He was talking fast into his wristpad, so that the gun, which Ta Shu hoped and assumed was a Taser pistol, was pointed at the ceiling. Again Zhou was much faster than Ta Shu, and as the station’s hallways were filled with right-angle turns, he hustled quickly out of Ta Shu’s sight, and Ta Shu had to hurry as best he could after him, following a blue line on the floor which he hoped indicated the way Zhou had taken.
Luckily this turned out to be the case, and he staggered into a room just in time to see everyone shouting, Zhou ordering everyone to freeze but none of the others able to achieve that status even if they had wanted to, and Bo trying to get at Chan Qi past some local officials, while Qi was trying to slap him in the face but missing. Dhu was shouting to Bo, and Fred was yelling at both of them in English, his face beet red behind a pair of black-rimmed spectacles.
“Everyone stop!” Zhou Bao yelled at the top of his lungs.
For a moment everyone stopped, though all of them but Zhou were teetering this way and that. Zhou had his Taser gun pointed at the ceiling, but it still had the deadly look of any gun, so they were all working to bring themselves to a halt of some sort or another.
“These people are under arrest!” Bo said furiously.
“You don’t have any jurisdiction here,” Zhou told him coldly. “If you try to coerce anyone in my charge I’ll have to shoot you with this, and people shot by Tasers in this gravity have a tendency to flail around and injure themselves, sometimes quite badly. So let’s avoid that and stay still. I’m the police equivalent at this station, so I’ll be taking these two people back into my custody, and I’m ordering you visiting officials to stay here in this room while I sort this out.”
“We need to be there,” Dhu said.
“I need to be there,” Bo said.
“I’ll call you on the intercom after I’ve checked this out with my own superiors down at the Peaks. You hold still right here until then.”
He gestured at Qi and Fred, glanced briefly at Ta Shu. “Get out into the hall.”
They scuttled out as quickly as they could, banging around as if in zero g itself. Zhou aimed his Taser pistol right at Bo as they did so, then slipped out after them. He closed the door and punched the door pad hard enough to throw himself back a bit, apparently locking the door.
“Come with me,” he said grimly, and led them down the hall. As they crashed into each other and the walls after him, he turned and hissed “One at a time!” with a look of disgust at their clumsiness. But even he was bounding down the hall like a drunken kangaroo, his speedy shuffle temporarily lost. The moon was simply not made for human hastiness.
At the end of one long hall he directed them into another room. Doors in the other wall slid open onto a tram car.
“Off you go,” Zhou said. “This is the emergency return train, it will get you down to the pole faster than any other way we have here.”
“But what do we do when we get there?” Qi demanded. “Who will meet us?”
“I don’t know, but it won’t be Bo and Dhu. I’ll call ahead on my private line and tell Inspector Jiang you’re coming. Best for you to get with Inspector Jiang and his local security, and hope for the best after that.”
“What if Jiang is with Bo and Dhu on this?” Ta Shu asked.
Zhou shrugged. “I doubt that will be the case. Let me think about your next step while you get on your way. I’ll talk to you en route and let you know what I’ve set up.”
Qi started to object, but Zhou waved her off. “Later! For now, be quick. The sooner you get to the big base, the more options we’ll have.”
Qi saw the sense in this, and turned and went through the door into the tram. Fred followed, then Ta Shu, and when they were seated and strapped in, the tram jerked forward and off they went.
The tram they were on was floating over a piste laid in as straight and flat a line over the landscape as they had been able to build. On Earth they would have been inside hyperloops. Here the moon gave them a near vacuum to move in, but they had to either hew to a straight line or risk flying off the piste. In a couple of places, where the line had to take an unavoidable swerve, the train slowed to a crawl, but most of the time it floated along at a rocketlike speed that nevertheless included no vibration or noise, so that looking out the windows was like looking at an image on a screen.
Then for a while they skirted the edge of a long drop into the South Pole–Aitken Basin, and could see part of its immensity. Ta Shu found himself so amazed by its size that he was startled out of his focus on his young friends and the general trouble. From rim to floor the drop was thirteen vertical kilometers, meaning about forty-five thousand feet, and for a few minutes they could see that drop for what it was. He was reminded that some impacts were so violent they changed everything, even the axis of the world. This feng shui perception, mixing geology and deep time into a history of everything, overwhelmed him: they were in it, they were part of it even now, or especially now. A bang like this could happen to them.
On they flew, moving at jet speed a centimeter above the ground, over the piste and its euclidean line. In another hour they would reach the Peaks of Eternal Light and be thrown back into their troubles. Qi and Fred were squabbling about this already. How can we make a plan when we don’t know who will be meeting us? Haven’t you ever heard of contingency plans? It was obvious they had spent a lot of time together. Maybe too much time. And Qi was very near term with her pregnancy. Ta Shu watched them bicker, wondered what they had become over their time together.
Eventually Fred pursed his mouth unhappily and stared at the floor. Suddenly he glanced up at Ta Shu. “So you’re back,” he noted.
“Yes.”
“What about your mom?”
“She died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry to hear,” Qi added quickly, giving Ta Shu a shocked look. She had forgotten why he had left Fang Fei’s refuge, he saw, and was surprised now that he didn’t look more changed by what had happened. She had thought he would be visibly shattered. She was young.
“Thank you,” he said to her. “She had a good life.”
“Why are you back?” Qi asked.
“I was trying to help you.” He looked at her and smiled a little. “I’m not sure it’s working.”
She shrugged and looked away. “Thank you for trying.”
“It was Peng Ling who sent me.”
She frowned at that.
“To the Americans?” Ta Shu said.
“Yes. You need to go there and ask for political asylum for Qi. For Fred it should be just his own country’s ordinary sovereignty. This is your best option. If you continue on to Eighty-Five, you’ll be detained immediately. It looks like Bo and Dhu have more authority up here than I thought they did. Inspector Jiang says he has been overruled, and can’t control the situation. He’s hopping mad.”
Ta Shu thought about it. “Does that mean you’re in trouble too?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got my colleagues there at Eighty-Five, they’ll make my case for me. These people can’t just come up here and do whatever they want. But I don’t know how they took control at Eighty-Five, so I’m not sure what’s going on right now. Could be Red Spear has gotten more people back up here. Best if you get in with the Americans and then we’ll figure out what to do next.”
“Okay, thanks. I’ll give you a call when we’re there.”
“Good, I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”
So when the train stopped at Worsley Station, they got off into a little concrete-walled room and headed for the locks, passing by some strangers who fortunately seemed entirely concerned with their own business. This was a new station to Ta Shu, and he was interested to see that it didn’t have the kind of crowd control evident in the big stations closer to the pole. This one appeared to be too small for that, was maybe even a private station.
At one door an American waved them through a lock and into a big rover. After they were in the lock, its outer door closed and its inner door clicked and slid open, and they stepped up and in.
Here a quartet of Americans met them, two men and two women. One of the women, who looked as Chinese as Qi but spoke English with a Californian accent, introduced herself as Valerie Tong. “It’s good to see you again,” she said to Fred.