It’s clear, then, that always our real interest has been not in any particular place, but rather in our ability to get to that place. It’s the process of exploration itself that fascinates us, not the places we explore. There is perhaps something of narcissism in this. So, these days we hear all about the asteroids, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the clouds of Venus, and so on. These places are the new focus of our interest, of our primal urge to walk over the next ridge and see what’s there. They are the next hardest place to reach, and said to be supremely fascinating, but what will happen when we reach them?
Anyway, now here I am, on the moon. After the Americans got to it in the twentieth century, they left, and for a long time it rolled in our sky, empty as it had always been. A bone-white ball of rubble. Airless, freeze-dried, unlivable, without extractable resources. Why go back, having been there already?
That’s a question for another show. For now, we can say that we did go back, as you will see in the programs I will be sending to you in this coming month. First to return were private trips to the moon, funded by the Four Space Cadets and other people interested in space. These efforts relit the fire. The Chinese effort followed these, because at the Twentieth People’s Congress, in 2022, the Chinese Communist Party and its Great Leader President Xi Jinping decided that the moon should be a place for Chinese development, as one part of the Chinese Dream. In the twenty-five years since that resolution was made, much has been accomplished in China’s lunar development.
So here we are, back on the moon. It is an interesting place, I am finding. Bare, harshly lit, strange to look at, even disturbing. I have visited 232 countries on Earth, and now the moon too. One might say I have been everywhere. But no matter where I go, I can never escape myself, the country no one can ever really know. In that sense travel is useless. Maybe we look to the next step in order to avoid seeing ourselves. Not narcissism, then, but an attempt to forget.
CHAPTER FOUR
di chu
Earthrise
Ta Shu stopped recording for his cloud show, feeling that his remarks were veering off track again into an area he did not want to share with his viewers, an area reserved for his poetry if anywhere. He was quite sure the world was more interesting than an old man’s thoughts, so he tried to keep his travel narrations focused on the world.
He was traveling north on the libration zone train, recording one of his travelogue narrations to distract himself from his worry about his new young American acquaintance, among other worries. As happened more and more often these days, his narration had wandered away from its intended path. But he could cut and paste later.
Anyway his train ride was ending, and it was time to join his old friend Zhou Bao in his viewing pavilion, perched on the rim of Petrov Crater. When the train came to a halt he stood carefully, feeling a tentative toddlerlike ability to manage his walking. He could bounce gently on the balls of his feet and move in a kind of slow-motion dance. Down the halls following an escort, up broad stairs, into the pavilion. The trick was to move slowly, to flow.
Zhou Bao greeted him happily. “We have some time before Earthrise,” he said. “Let me show you some of my friends here, you will enjoy them.”
“Please do,” Ta Shu said.
Zhou gestured to an open hallway, then crabbed along in his usual way. On Earth he had a limp, and walked almost sideways. His head rested right on his hunched shoulders—a big bald head, almost round, looking like a bowling ball with human features lightly sketched on its front side. His little wide-set eyes peered out with superhuman intelligence and confidence. He did not need to look or move like other people, his calm gaze said. Here on the moon his limp was more like a skip step. The cause of the limp, a long-ago car accident that had killed his wife, he and she having been broadsided by a drunk driver, was no longer ever mentioned. That was an event from a past life, a previous reincarnation; time now, his calm regard said, to live this moment.
He led Ta Shu down a gallery walled by a clear window on one side, a green and blue tapestry on the other. Outside the long window they could see another building, presumably like the one they were in, with two long windows set one above the other, facing theirs; on top of those, a mound of rubble that was about the same height as the building. This, Zhou said, was the common style up here: buried buildings with windows facing each other across a trench. That arrangement protected them from incoming radiation and micro-meteorites, while also being well lit and friendly. Lunar gravity meant they could pile a lot of rock on top of a building without straining it. Even now robotic bulldozers and dump trucks were at work trundling more regolith onto the building across the way. All over the south polar region, Zhou said, similar construction was happening. The work wasn’t entirely robotic, but almost. Between the standardized building design, the robotic labor, and the new technique of sleeping in centrifuges, the moon was becoming much safer for humans than it had been in the earliest days, which even though only twenty years past, felt like a time of distant pioneers, no doubt because almost no one here now had been here then.
Zhou led him into a tall room, warm and humid. Quickly Ta Shu saw it was some kind of zoo. Or maybe just a primate house, as a big central glass-walled chamber was filled with trapezes and hanging barrels and knotted ropes looping around—and gibbons. In fact, maybe it was just a gibbon enclosure.
“Gibbons!” Ta Shu exclaimed. He liked these small cousins, whom he had spent many an hour watching in zoos all over Earth. They were as stone-faced as Buster Keaton, and even more wonderful acrobats than Keaton had been. And more remarkable singers than any human ever, if you wanted to call it singing. Vocalizations might have been more accurate. It was maybe their least human aspect.
“Yes, gibbons,” Zhou said. “Also some siamangs, and smaller monkeys in another room around the corner. They’re here to help the doctors conduct tests. But I think they do a wonderful job of keeping us company. They teach us how to move here. I spend a lot of time watching them.”
“Good idea,” Ta Shu said. “I used to visit their cages at the Beijing Zoo.”
“Then you’ll appreciate what they can do up here.”
A family, or pair of families, came out of doors set about halfway up the wall, across from the window Zhou and Ta Shu were behind. The youngsters immediately launched themselves into space, and Ta Shu shouted as they arced down through the air like flying squirrels, arms and legs extended, falling slowly, it was true, but downward for what seemed would be a fatal distance on landing, until they grabbed loops of rope and cast themselves back up. It looked absurd compared to what Ta Shu was used to seeing, even though gibbons on Earth jumped amazing distances. One bold one here grabbed a hanging rope and swung across the enclosure, then yanked up and let go and flew, feet overhead like a pole vaulter.
“Beautiful!” Ta Shu exclaimed.
Then one of the older ones hooted, a rising tone that sounded not quite human, but not quite animal either. Ooooooooop! This inspired some of the others to cry out as well, until the room rang with the crisscrossing glissandos of primate music. Was this joy, laughter, anger, warning? No way to tell; as language, even as music, it was completely alien. Ta Shu joined in, doing his best to imitate the tone if not the soaring range of the little cousins, which was completely beyond the human vocal apparatus. Whether they understood him, whether they even heard him, was not at all clear. But it was a pleasure to try to make their sound.
Zhou Bao laughed and hooted himself, though not quite as fluently as Ta Shu, who had practiced a lot during his hours at the Beijing Zoo. Zhou pointed out one particularly zany acrobat, and they watched as most of them followed this genius and joined in an aerial act as beautiful as it was impossible. “It’s like an old circus!” Zhou said.
“They’re fantastic,” Ta Shu said. “It’s enough to make you want to try it, don’t you think?”
“No. Although they do make it look easy.” Zhou looked back at the wall over their heads. “Oh, we should get back to the
pavilion. I want you to see the first moment.”
They loped easily over to the pavilion, Ta Shu trying some little hops and pliés that he wouldn’t have attempted before witnessing the gibbons’ bravura performance. If they could do it, why not him? It needed a little loosening up, a better recognition that all movement was dance.
He followed Zhou into a lounge with a long window and sat down on a couch. A digital clock on the wall was running down, Ta Shu noticed: a timer, not a clock. “Soon,” Zhou said. “Near that notch there in that hill, do you see?” He pointed.
“Always the same?”
“No, never the same. It moves above the horizon in what is called a Lissajous figure, meaning an irregular circle within a rectangular space. It’s a little different every time, but it always comes up somewhere over that rise, and goes down over the hill to the left of it.”
“Good to have variety I guess.”
“Yes. So, will you be staying on the moon long?”
“Not long. Another month or so. How about you?”
“This stint is almost over. I must go home and build my bones again. Even the centrifuge time isn’t enough for me now.”
“How long have you been up here?”
“Four hundred days, this time.”
“And you want to come back here?”
“Oh yes. Sometimes I think of giving up on Earth entirely.”
“That isn’t allowed, is it?”
“No. Probably for the best.”
“Do some people do it anyway? Slip through the nets?”
“Maybe. There are some private settlements, and some prospectors roving around. Maybe they do what they want. But most of us are accounted for.”
“And yet an American I met as I arrived has gone missing.”
“Which one? What’s this?”
Ta Shu explained the situation. Zhou Bao frowned and tapped on his wrist for a while.
“Not good,” he remarked. “I can’t tell you where he is.”
“You thought you would be able to?”
“Yes.”
“So what do you think has happened?”
Zhou sighed. “Well, as you can imagine, the infighting is pretty fierce up here.”
“As everywhere.”
“Yes. So, whoever took this American could be trying to embarrass the authorities here, make it look like they’re out of control of the situation, thus requiring someone more reliable to take over. And in fact if they can’t keep something like this from happening, they are out of control. This disappearance could turn into a major problem for relations with the Americans.”
“But surely the authorities in charge must know where this man is!”
Zhou Bao shook his head. “I don’t think so. If they did they would produce him. Because they’re going to be in big trouble if they can’t.” He gestured at the window. His timer was nearing zero. “But now let’s look.”
A chime rang. At that same moment the line of the horizon, an intense border where the very black sky met a very white hill, was pricked by a spot of vivid blue.
Ta Shu found himself standing, lofted by some feeling that now threatened to topple him backward. No unconscious moves could keep one’s balance in this gossamer gravity, under the blow of this startling blue—he had to rock forward, step back, reestablish his equilibrium. He reached out and touched the cool glass of the window, aware he was marring its pristine surface with his fingerprints. The blue dot on the horizon spread left and right, whitening as it did: clouds down there covered what must be ocean.
“Do you ever see it pure blue?” Ta Shu asked.
“Oh yes. Very fine. The Pacific is half the Earth almost, and occasionally it’s clear of clouds, and the first part to rise.”
“It must look beautiful then.”
“Yes.” Zhou gestured. “Always. You can see it’s home. You can feel it.”
“Yes.” Ta Shu put his hand on his heart. “It’s a kind of hunger. Or fear.”
“Nostalgia,” Zhou suggested. “Or the sublime.”
Zhou used the Western words for these two concepts, and Ta Shu shook his head as he considered them. “I think the old ones caught it best,” he said. “The nameless ones from the beginning.” To show what he meant, he recited one of his favorite poems from the ancient anthology Yueh fu, which seemed to him strangely perfect for this moment:
“Walk again walk.
From you separated alive.
Between us a million miles,
Each at one end of sky.
The roads difficult and long:
To meet where, how, when?
Separation each day farther.
Floating clouds veil white sun.
Wandering no thought of return.
Thinking of you makes me feel old.
Months, years—all the sudden dusk.
Forget it! Say no more!
With redoubled effort, eat, eat.”
“Ah yes, the Yueh fu,” Zhou said. “Those guys already knew everything, didn’t they?”
“Yes.” Ta Shu gestured at their home, now a thin blue arc lying on the white hill, a mere fingernail paring; once it was fully up, it was going to be four times wider than the moon as seen from Earth, thus an area some fourteen times bigger than the moon seen from Earth. “So beautiful!” he exclaimed, hungry to see the whole thing. “This is what the old ones were always saying.”
Zhou nodded. “It’s why we’re here, to see it rise and set like this.”
“And how long does it stay up in your sky?”
“It takes a couple of days to rise fully, then it’s visible for sixteen days or so, then gone again for about eight days, until next month’s rise.”
“And this zone is two hundred kilometers wide?”
“Yes, if you count the part that only sees a sliver of Earth come over the horizon. Naturally we’ve been building closer to the near side, to maximize the view.”
Ta Shu regarded their home world, creeping up over the white hill so slowly that he could not quite see the movement, though it was now a slightly bigger blue sliver, capping a stretch of the horizon. “It looks even bigger than in the photos, don’t you think?”
“A sign of our attention, perhaps.”
“Of our love,” Ta Shu said.
“Or our fear! That’s home, after all. Big but small. We’re a long way from home.”
They watched for a while in silence. Blue, the color of life.
“Home seems troubled,” Ta Shu suggested, to see what his old friend would say.
“Yes. The billion are troubled.”
“Perhaps the Party will have to dismiss the people and elect another one.”
Zhou laughed. “Who said that again?”
“Bertolt Brecht.”
“Ah yes. We performed his play Galileo, at his crater last year.”
“At Galileo’s crater or Brecht’s?”
“Brecht Crater? That would have to be on Mercury, if anywhere.”
Ta Shu shook his head. “I don’t think Communist artists are allowed there yet.”
They laughed.
Zhou said, “You’re not a Party member, I think?”
“No. Geomancy is not favorably regarded, nor poetry.”
“But you’re famous. And poetry is highly regarded. Chairman Mao’s favorite activity, I once heard.”
“Yes, but no. My poetry days are over.”
“Truly?” Zhou gestured out the window. “You don’t feel inspired to pen a few lines?”
“No. Antarctica taught me that there are times when language doesn’t have the words. I think this might be one of them.”
“You should never stop writing poems, my friend. We all read you when we were young.”
“That was long ago. When people still read poetry.”
“I think they still do. It’s good on wristpads. And here we are—this is a very poetical situation! We should do like Li Po and Du Fu, have a bottle of wine and trade poems about the view.”
“
I like the idea of the wine.”
Zhou laughed, went to a cabinet to pour them drinks. “Wine is useless without poetry,” he said. “Just a little ethanol poisoning.”
“Maybe so.” They clinked glasses, sipped. “Here’s to the moon goddess Chang’e and her immortality drug.”
“And her devotion to her husband Yi,” Zhou added.
“Is that what it was? I thought she stole the potion from him.”
“No. She drank it only to keep the thief Fengmeng from stealing it. After that she flew up to the moon to hide what she had done.”
“It sounds suspicious to me,” Ta Shu said. He tried to remember the myth. Chang’e had not only stolen the immortality drug from her husband, she had also taken his rabbit—that rabbit which was now what one saw when looking up from Earth at the full moon—Yi’s rabbit, stirring a bowl with the potion for immortality in it. Something like that.
Now the Earth was a slim blue-and-white crescent sitting on the white hill. A patch of land could be seen under its clouds, which were delicately textured. The land was both brown and green. It was surprising how much detail could be discerned at this distance. “Wait,” Ta Shu said. “Is that the bottom of South America there, but pointing up?”
“We’re in the southern hemisphere here, remember? So we’re upside down, I guess you’d say.”
“Ah, of course. As a geomancer I should have known.”
“But you are not a lunatic, my friend. Not yet.”
Ta Shu stared at the blue world, entranced. He traced its outline on the window. Such a complicated place. Even China by itself, no one could understand. Then add the rest of the world. …
The two old friends drank their wine, watched the world creep into view. Zhou poured them another glass. They sat by the window and talked over old times. After a while Zhou suggested again that they play at Li Po and Du Fu. Ta Shu had drunk enough wine to agree, warning his old friend that he would not deviate from the laconic style he had developed in Antarctica, which had served him well, at least until it contracted his poetry down to nothing at all.
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