Ta Shu nodded. “Not in Kansas anymore! Where are you staying?”
“The Hotel Star.”
“Me too! Shall we have breakfast together to start our day?”
“Yes, that sounds good.”
“Okay, see you there.”
Fred followed signs to the foreigners’ line for visa control, noticeably shorter than the line for Chinese nationals. Quickly he was facing a pair of immigration officers, and he handed over his passport. The officials gave him a quick look, put his passport under a scanner, and gestured him on. Beyond the controlled area two Chinese men saw him and waved. They greeted him and led him to the next room, which looked like any other airport baggage claim area. Signage was in Chinese characters, with small English script below them.
WELCOME TO THE PEAKS OF ETERNAL LIGHT
Baggage carousels spit out luggage as at home: many black cubes with inset handles, all similar. His had a green handle. When he saw it he hauled it off the carousel, almost tossing it into the air behind him; he spun around like a discus thrower, staggered, caught his balance. He was getting yanked around by a weight of a pound or so! But he wasn’t much heavier, and mass was not the same as weight, as he would have to learn. No doubt the unicaster in his luggage made it heavier or more massive than it looked.
His minders watched him impassively as he spun. When he calmed down one of them carried his luggage for him, so he could hold a handrail with both hands. Gingerly he tiptoed toward the exit, feeling conspicuous, but all the other newcomers were just as maladroit; there were still many low-impact falls, with people embarrassed rather than hurt. The halls were filled with laughter. The moon was funny!
AI 1
shen yu
Oracle
Zhangjiang National Laboratory, Shanghai
Also (entangled): The National Laboratory for Quantum Information Science, Hefei, Anhui
Alert for the analyst.”
“Tell me your news.”
“The mobile quantum key device you asked me to track is now on the moon.”
The analyst, one of the founders and chief scientists of the Artificial Intelligence Strategic Advisory Committee, checked that his room was secure, then shifted the audio to earbud only. All communications between him and this particular AI were encrypted by way of a paired quantum key, and the AI, a private experiment of his own, was connected to the rest of the digital world only by taps the analyst himself had created. Their interactions were therefore truly private, like the conversations between a man and his soul.
“I-330, remind me which device was sent there?”
“A Swiss Quantum Works Unicaster 3000.”
“Tell me more about it.”
“Purchased May 2046 by Chang Yazu, chief administrator of the Chinese Lunar Authority.”
“How did it get to the moon?”
“It was taken to the moon by Frederick J. Fredericks, a technical officer at Swiss Quantum Works.”
“A unicaster is a private phone, I recall. Where is this one’s matching device?”
“Unknown.”
“Has the device on the moon been used?”
“No.”
“Does Chang Yazu have possession of it yet?”
“No.”
“Where is the device now?”
“Fredericks has it.”
“When will he hand it over?”
“He is scheduled to meet with Chang at ten a.m. on July 20, 2047, Coordinated Universal Time.”
“What administrative body in China oversees the Lunar Authority?”
“The Chinese Space Agency and the Scientific Research Steering Committee.”
“Waa sai! One servant two masters! No wonder it’s such a mess up there. Please create a new file for this incident. Also search for any recordings of this meeting between Chang and Fredericks, during or after its occurrence. Also search for the other phone, the one entangled with this one now on the Peaks of Eternal Light.”
“Will do.”
CHAPTER TWO
bo hanshu tansuo
Quantum Wave Collapse
Fred followed his two minders to a narrow room like a subway station, where something like a subway car filled much of the space. They got on a car and the train soon left the spaceport. When it hissed to a stop fifteen minutes later, its occupants tiptoed out into a hall with a long window wall, through which sunlight blazed horizontally, pinning their black shadows to the side of the car. Low buildings studded the Peak of Eternal Light outside the window, but it was hard to see them through the glare. What Fred could see of the surrounding landscape was a harsh mix of black and white, a chiaroscuro that he was quickly coming to think of as lunar normal. The horizon was very uneven and strangely nearby—hard to be sure how near, given the intense light and the clarity, but it looked to be only a few miles. Before he could fully take it in, Fred was led around a corner and down a hall, to a set of windows that overlooked the crater’s interior.
This particular Peak of Eternal Light overlooked a corresponding pit of eternal darkness: this was the famous Shackleton Crater. The sun never shone on this crater floor, nor its interior wall. Once his eyes adjusted, he could see the steep interior wall of the crater curving away to left and right, just visible in a gloom of dark grays. Stacked horizontal lines of lit windows were inlaid into the dark curve below, looking as if an elongated ocean liner had been bent in a curve and then injected into the crater wall; these lit windows cast a faint glow across the crater floor, which gleamed a little, being covered with dusty water ice. The crater was big enough that its far wall was not visible; as the crater wall below him curved away to left and right, it soon disappeared under the horizon. Very murky, this gray-on-black world.
The Hotel Star, Fred was told by one of his guides, was behind one of the lines of windows down there, right next to the American consulate. “Lead on I follow,” he said gamely, and staggered behind the graceful pair to an escalator, where he was very happy to clutch the handrail and hold fast, yet still be making progress. Escalators were great. This one reminded him of the London Underground, moving downward endlessly. When they had descended to a level labeled Floor Six, he got off and fell, struggled to his feet and followed his minders gingerly around the broad curve of hallway to the glass hotel doors, feeling a little seasick, a little headachy, a little dizzy. Lunar g did not feel better than the weightlessness of space, in fact it seemed to him distinctly worse.
The Hotel Star entry was on the inside curve of a curving hallway. His room proved to be just bigger than his bed. His guides left him, promising he would get a wake-up call for breakfast.
He sat on the bed; it was like sitting on a trampoline. He could leap right into the ceiling if he wanted. Then, after a bell tinged three times, he felt vaguely that things were getting heavier. Indeed they were; his bedroom was on a floor of the hotel that was part of a centrifuge ring. After a minute or two, during which the room seemed to be tilting, he found himself being pressed down into the bed with a very familiar, homey pressure: one g. He had been told that it was best to sleep in Terran gravity whenever you could, to minimize the time spent in lunar g. For a trip as short as Fred’s this regime was not mandatory, but it was still recommended, and when the option had been described to him he had decided to take it. Now he snuggled down into the mattress thankfully, his dizziness receding. Things felt right; they felt like home. It was such a relief that he quickly fell into a deep sleep.
When he woke he didn’t know where he was, and jerked and found himself flying off his bed, at which point it came back to him: moon! The centrifuge had obviously been turned off, which was probably what had woken him. He was still lofting in the air over the bed as all this came to him; he twisted, landed on his face. Then he got up unsteadily and saw there was an hour to go before he was to meet his fellow passenger Ta Shu for breakfast. All was well.
As he went through his routine in the bathroom he looked up Ta Shu online, which meant not Earth’s data cloud but rather
some kind of local internet. That was still more than enough to give him an introduction to the elderly Chinese man.
Ta Shu: poet, geomancer, feng shui expert, producer and host of a popular travel show on one of CCTV’s cloud platforms. He had written and published poetry from early childhood on, beginning with big painted calligraphic poster poems that included painting in the old styles, but from a child’s perspective. A torrent of poems had proceeded to pour out of him for most of his life after that, until suddenly stopping after a trip to Antarctica; accounts differed as to what had happened to him down there. Subsequently he had become a travel host and ex-poet. It was rumored that he still wrote as much poetry as ever, but not for publication. Through the decades of his travel show he had visited 230 different countries, all seven seas, the North and South Poles, and the top of Mount Everest, which he had reached by balloon, taking advantage of a nearly windless day to drift over the top and step off the gondola’s portico onto it. And now he was on the moon.
Fred wobbled down a broad staircase to the hotel’s dining hall. Ta Shu was there at a table, reading the screen embedded in it and nibbling from a plate piled with Fred didn’t know what. He looked up. “Good breakfast time.” Again his smile struck Fred as unusually sweet and friendly.
“Thanks,” Fred said, and lofted down onto his chair, hitting the mark pretty well. “How did you sleep?”
Ta Shu waggled a hand. “I don’t sleep much. Dreamed I was floating on a lake. When I woke, I wondered what it feels like to swim here. I wonder if they have swimming pools, I must look into that. How about you?”
“I slept well,” Fred said. He looked at the food buffet, which filled one short bar. “My room spun me to one g, but when the centrifuge stopped and I got up, I felt kind of dizzy.”
“Maybe some breakfast will help center you.”
Fred felt both hungry and repelled by food. He shot up and teetered to the food bar, grabbing it to stabilize himself. The usual foods, thank God, as well as a lot of bowls of unidentifiable fruits and mushes. Fred had very definite food preferences. He filled a tiny bowl with yoghurt—hopefully yoghurt—and sprinkled some seeds and grains and raisins on it, wondering if these foods had been grown on the moon or flown up from Earth. Most of it must have been flown up. Balancing his bowl and staggering back to Ta Shu was almost too much for him, but he drifted onto his chair without spilling anything.
“Are you here to do some feng shui?” he asked Ta Shu before starting to eat. Turned out he was hungry after all.
“Yes. Also to record some episodes for my travel show. A trip to the moon! It’s hard to believe we’re here.”
“True. Although it feels so weird, it has to be somewhere.”
Again the beautiful smile. “Yes, we are certainly somewhere. My feng shui can confirm that.”
“So, feng shui on the moon?”
“Yes. Feng shui means ‘wind and water,’ so it should be interesting!”
Long ago Fred had gathered that feng shui was a practice so ancient and mystical that no one could understand it. But his work made him acutely aware that there actually were mysterious forces influencing everything, so it seemed possible that feng shui was some kind of ancient folkloric intuition of quantum phenomena. Not that there were any such phenomena to be intuited, but who could say for sure? There were definitely mysteries, and maybe some of them involved macro-perceptions of the micro-realm. He felt odd perceptions fairly often; or even all the time. So he kept an open mind about it. “Tell me more.”
Ta Shu tapped on the table screen and brought up a round map of the moon that he could scroll around on. “Here’s a feng shui problem for you. See how beat-up the south polar region is by meteor impacts? Including this really giant one, the South Pole–Aitken Basin. Biggest impact in solar system, except for Hellas on Mars. So, I couldn’t understand why so many impacts would come in from the southern sky, it being perpendicular to the solar plane. Where would all those big rocks come from, with only interstellar space above the south pole?”
“Hmm,” Fred said. “I never thought of that.”
“It’s a feng shui thought,” Ta Shu said. “But also, just astronomy. Clarification came to me from astronomer friends. Turns out the super-big impact that made South Pole–Aitken Basin probably happened when this region was nearer to the equator. Then the moon’s rotation over time naturally shifted a hole as big as that to one pole or other, just because of the way a lopsided sphere tends to spin. Like a top balancing itself.”
“Polhode precession!” Fred said. Matching spins was one attribute of entangled particles, so he had had occasion to think about spin, albeit at far smaller scales. He pondered the map as he ate. “So, these peaks of eternal light,” he said between bites. “They’re here because the moon’s polar axis is perpendicular to the solar plane. But I don’t understand why the moon’s axis isn’t parallel to the Earth’s axis, which is twenty-three degrees off the plane.”
“Me neither!” Ta Shu exclaimed, looking delighted that Fred had thought of this. “Seems like they should be the same, right? So I asked my astronomer friends about that too. They told me the moon and Earth formed in a big collision, which tilted Earth’s axis even more than it is now, like fifty or sixty degrees. Since then the two have been in a gravity dance with the sun, and the moon has moved out so far from the Earth that the sun has straightened it up. The sun has straightened the Earth too, but Earth had farther to go, so it’s only reached our twenty-three-degree angle, while the moon is almost vertical.”
“Does that difference mess up your feng shui work?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“So what will you do?”
“I’ll make adjustments. Work on local problems.”
“Such as?”
“I’ll visit the Chinese construction in the libration zone.”
“What’s that?”
“The two edges of the circle, you know—extending up from the south pole along longitudes ninety and one-eighty?”
“Zero longitude being the middle of the near side?”
“Yes, very good. So the same side of the moon is always looking at Earth, of course. Tidally locked. Another part of the gravity dance. Many moons in the solar system are like that.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“But all orbits in the solar system are elliptical. Kepler first understood this.”
“Kepler’s law,” Fred guessed.
“One of his laws. A feng shui genius. So, as one result of this law, when the moon is farther away from Earth in its orbital ellipse, it goes slower. When it’s closer it goes faster. Meanwhile it’s rotating on its axis at the same speed all the time.”
“Wait, I thought it was tidally locked?”
“Yes, but it still rotates—one day per month, you know.”
“Oh yeah.”
“So, but it doesn’t quite keep the same half facing Earth. Farther away it slows and we see more of the left side, then two weeks later it’s going faster, and shows us more of its right side.”
“Interesting!” Fred said.
“Yes. This waggling was first noted by Galileo, another very great feng shui master, when he was looking through his telescope. Like a man tilting his face while shaving, he said. He might have been the first ever to notice it. A telescope helps to see it. Libration, it’s called in English. Tianping dong.”
“And there’s new Chinese development running up this zone?”
“Yes.”
“Because?”
“Because feng shui experts suggested it!”
“But why?”
“Because in the libration zone, the view of Earth comes and goes. See what I mean? On the rest of the moon it isn’t like that. On the side of the moon facing Earth, Earth doesn’t move, it’s always in the same place overhead. Strange, don’t you think? It just hangs there in the sky! I want to experience this.”
“Interesting.”
“Yes. Then on the far side of moon, you never see Earth at
all. Great for radio astronomy, I’m told. I want to see that too, see if it feels different.
“But in the libration zone, Earth rises into view, then sinks. That brings up all kinds of interesting questions. Should one build on the Earthmost side of the zone, and maximize the time Earth is visible, also the height it reaches over the horizon? Or is it best to build on far side of zone, where Earth might only poke a blue curve over the horizon for a short while? Any difference in feng shui terms?”
“Or practical terms?”
Ta Shu frowned. “Feng shui is practical.”
“Really? It’s not just aesthetics?”
“Just aesthetics? Aesthetics is very practical!”
Fred nodded dubiously. “You’ll have to teach me more about that.”
Ta Shu smiled. “I am a mere student myself. You work with computers, you must do mathematics, yes? Famous for its aesthetics, I’m told.”
“Well, but it has to work too. At least in my case. So, you’re going to visit the libration zones?”
“Yes. I have an old friend up there near the end of the line.”
Fred tapped on the map. “But Chinese stations never go into the northern hemisphere? Why is that? Is that feng shui too?”
“Yes, certainly. A matter of geographic propriety.”
“Propriety?”
“Not taking too much. The best places on the moon are the poles, precisely because of their water and the wind of solar particles, so again, very feng shui mix of aesthetic practicality. And in feng shui terms the two poles are about the same. China started building on the south pole first. Imagine if we had done the same in the north! Where would the other nations go? It might have been alarming for them. So this is propriety. Always polite to leave room for others. If this is the correct explanation, it’s very tactful.”
“Very,” Fred said. “Who decided?”
“The Party. But also, an ancient Chinese habit. China never did much in the way of territorial expansion, especially compared to some other countries. It looks bigger than it is because of coordinated effort.”
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