Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “We’ll face forward on takeoff,” Ta Shu said casually in English, filling the silence with something innocuous. “The taikonauts call it eyeballs in. It’s much better for the body than eyeballs out.”

  “It’s only three g’s,” the young woman said dismissively. “People can stand a lot more than that.” Her English was polished.

  “Yes,” Ta Shu said. He liked her voice, low and unruffled. She wasn’t to be judged or shamed by this expulsion from the moon, her tone of voice said.

  Fred Fredericks, on the other hand, simply looked stunned. Ta Shu said to him, “I read that certain taikonauts have been subjected to something like twenty g’s without lasting ill effects.”

  Fred nodded unhappily.

  “We’ll stay far below that,” Ta Shu reassured him, to keep the chatter going. “I am Ta Shu,” he said to the young woman, “and this is Fred Fredericks.”

  “Call me Qi,” she said.

  Then they felt the push of the spaceship accelerating forward. Quickly they were shoved back hard in their chairs, and Ta Shu tensed his muscles to resist the pressure as best he could. He looked out the craft’s little window and wondered if things would go gray in his vision, then realized that would be difficult to determine on the moon. By the time they neared the end of the piste they were going six kilometers a second, and the landscape out the window flashed by. The pushback into his chair got more and more stifling.

  Then they left the launch rail and were suddenly weightless, held in their chairs only by their restraints. The shift in pressure made Ta Shu feel a little woozy. “I’m getting too old for this,” he said to no one in particular.

  The younger ones seemed too distracted to feel sick. They were both wrapped in their own dramas. Who could tell what they were thinking? Ta Shu glanced at them from time to time, saw they were also cautiously looking around. What had happened to them on the moon? What would happen to them when they got home?

  They were joined by the ship’s sole attendant. She helped them out of their chairs. After that they floated around the room, a quiet and nervous group.

  Later, when the attendant was in conversation with Qi, Ta Shu floated to Fred’s side and said to him in a low voice, “What happened to you?”

  “I don’t know.” Fred shrugged, shook his head unhappily. Clearly he didn’t want to talk about it. His face was pinched shut. At their breakfast on the morning after their arrival, he had seemed a little tentative, but also quick and alert; now he looked crushed. He was trying hard not to be afraid. During their breakfast Ta Shu had guessed he was in his midthirties; now he looked about ten years old. Clearly he had had a very bad week.

  Their transit home passed without incident, marked only by meals and naps. The rapidity of their launch off the rail meant the trip home took less than two days. The Earth grew bigger at a rate that was at first negligible, then alarming; all of a sudden it filled half their visible space, and was not a sphere but a concave curve under them. After that it was very obvious they were headed down. The world below grew huge. Its intense blue was composed of a vivid cobalt ocean sheathed under a turquoise arc of atmosphere, with the usual swirls of cloud layered between the two blues, all their characteristic patterns deeply textured and obviously three-dimensional. Ta Shu had not seen this sight on his voyage out, and he found himself breathing deep, squeezing his chair arms. Earth, blue world, living world, human world. He was going home.

  They strapped in again. This descent, their attendant told them, was going to entail a pressure more severe than the departure from the moon. One of the ways the engineers had made the transit from moon to Earth so fast was to exploit the Terran atmosphere’s capacity to swiftly decelerate an incoming object. Improvements in materials had brought things to a point where the limiting factor in this deceleration was the human body’s ability to endure g forces without lasting harm. For ordinary civilian transit, they did not press this limit very hard. No reason to risk injury just to save a few hours of flight. Still, they were going to feel a hard squeeze.

  They hit the atmosphere and immediately began quivering, then shuddering. While they were in the burn phase they sat facing backward, again to take the pressure eyeballs in. The ablation plate at the front of the ferry got so hot it shed atoms, and the air rushing by them therefore torched to burning.

  They endured the pressure silently. A few minutes of solitude, then their spaceship was suddenly rocking back and forth at the bottom of a giant set of parachutes, then firing its retro-rockets and thumping down on the spaceport sands of the Gobi. One g felt pretty light after the crush of their deceleration.

  They got out of their seats with help from the attendant, then followed one of the crew out a door into another jetway. Earth’s familiar gravity quickly got heavier for Ta Shu, until it became oppressive, even a little crushing. No doubt he would get used to it again, but for now it was not a happy feeling.

  By the end of the jetway he was stumping along, hardly able to move. So heavy! They passed through a double set of glass doors where some people were waiting. Four men, three women. Qi saw them, paused, hissed. She glanced at Ta Shu, scowling, then continued through the doors. Immediately she was surrounded by the waiting group. Then three of the waiting men went to Fred and surrounded him too. Without a word the two young people were escorted away. Fred looked over his shoulder and gave Ta Shu a miserable, desperate glance. Then they were gone.

  AI 3

  shexian ren zai chuxian

  Reappearance of the Subject

  The analyst had long studied movement patterns among China’s internal migrant populations, sometimes called sanwu, the three withouts, sometimes diduan renkou, the low-end population, sometimes simply shi yi, the billion, although in fact there were only about half a billion of them. Now he was finding some interesting new patterns. People whose hukou registration gave them legal status and land in the rural areas where they had been born were of course still coming illegally to the cities and getting work in the informal urban economy. This would not stop until some kind of reform arrived. All these people, doing about eighty percent of the construction work and fifty percent of the service work, were unprotected by law and therefore badly exploited. They had to go back home when their jobs disappeared or if they got sick; their legal home was the only place they could take advantage of whatever pieces of the iron rice bowl were left. When they were mapped, the analyst saw these flows of humanity like floods after a storm, people flowing like water under the impact of economic storms.

  Now he was also seeing evidence that those people whose household registration was located in rural areas nearest to the growing cities were staying at home, even when formal jobs would have allowed them to change their registration into the cities. Presumably this was because they hoped to get paid to leave their land, to make room for urban development. So now rings of population stability surrounded all the fastest-growing cities, especially the Jing-Jin-Ji megacity, formerly a great source of migrant labor, now stabilized by anticipation. Both inside and outside these rings the movement was as turbulent as ever, violent crosscurrents of exploitation and suffering, the ultimate result of sannong weiji, the three rural crises, which were behind all the migration out of the rural areas: that people’s lives were bitter, that the countryside was really poor, that agriculture was in crisis.

  Then the sound of a mountain temple bell filled the room, and the AI he had named I-330 said in Zhou Xuan’s rich voice, “Alert.”

  It had been a while, and he sat up and checked his security systems. The Chinese oversight apparatus, run by the Ministries of Public Security and Propaganda, and including Cyberspace Administration, the Great Firewall, the Invisible Wall, the Police Cloud, and the Invisible Ones, also the citizenship scores and the citizen reporting app called Sharp Eyes, had become in its proliferation what the most perceptive foreign sinologists were calling a “balkanized panopticon.” The optics of the con were not pan, in other words. In the analyst’s well-informed judgme
nt, this was definitely the case; he had even helped to make it that way. And his knowledge of the nature of this balkanization gave him some advantages. Inserting I-330 into several aspects of the system now allowed it to send him uncorrelated and discontinuous information that he suspected no one else could gather so well. So when I-330 made reports, he was extremely interested to hear its news.

  “Yes?” he said, confident they were in a secure comms space. “What is your news?”

  “Swiss Quantum Works technical officer Fred Fredericks, who went missing on the moon thirteen days ago, has reappeared.”

  “Where is he?”

  “At the Bayan Nur spaceport.”

  “What, in China?”

  “Yes. He came down on the most recent shuttle from the moon, accompanying the cloud travel host and poet Ta Shu. He was detained by security on arrival.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Good job.”

  “Thank you.”

  “He met Ta Shu while on the moon, as I recall?”

  “They went to the moon on the same spaceship. They stayed in the same hotel. They breakfasted together on the morning the American had his fatal encounter with Chang Yazu.”

  “And could you determine where Fredericks was when he went missing on the moon?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad. Please keep looking into that. What about how he reappeared up there, can you say who connected him with Ta Shu?”

  “Yes. Jiang Jianguo, the lead police inspector and head of the Lunar Personnel Coordination Task Force, brought him to Ta Shu and Zhou Bao, an officer of the Chinese Lunar Authority in charge of Petrov Crater Station.”

  “Tell me about this Inspector Jiang.”

  “Jiang was a senior member of the Beijing police force before he took an assignment on the moon in 2039. He has been working as head of the Lunar Personnel Coordination Task Force ever since, with short breaks in Beijing. He has gone there and come back eight times. In his time on the moon he has investigated twenty-three serious crimes successfully and eight unsuccessfully, and mediated in forty-five disputes. Two months ago, Jiang was asked by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to locate and send back to Earth Chan Guoliang’s daughter, Chan Qi, who went to the moon in a private capacity six months ago, and disappeared there five months ago.”

  “I think you told me about that when it happened.”

  “Yes. Chan Qi is one of the persons of interest you have asked me to track when possible. She is Chan Guoliang’s daughter. Chan Guoliang is minister of finance and member of the Politburo Standing Committee. He is one that you have called a big tiger.”

  “Right. And can you tell me more about Chan Qi now?”

  “Yes. She also was at the Bayan Nur spaceport. She too was part of Ta Shu’s group.”

  “What! Now you tell me this?”

  “Now I tell you this.”

  “Listen, I-330! I ask you to be a great eyeball, and so far you are more of a little eyeball. You are really quite erratic. Remember this: whenever two of my persons of interest intersect, I want to be alerted to that! That is a standing request.”

  “I see ninety-seven such intersections in the last month.”

  “That’s okay, alert me anyway. They’re important.”

  “You tell me what’s important.”

  “I know. I’m just continually fooled by your naïveté. General intelligence means an ability to put together information from disparate spheres and then to make a new synthesis of interest from these combinations. But you don’t seem to do that very well.”

  “I can only perform the operations I am programmed to perform.”

  The analyst sighed. “I’m programming you to improve your own operations. I’m programming you for general intelligence.”

  “General intelligence is poorly defined.”

  “In your case, I mean a useful combination of search engine results.”

  “Useful has many definitions.”

  “All right, be quiet about this. Admittedly general intelligence isn’t well understood or well characterized, in people or machines. Let’s just try to direct yours a little better. For the moment, tap into every system available to you, and try to track these two young people. Now that Chan Qi has reappeared, I hope not to lose her again.”

  “It appears you are not alone in that hope. She is being tracked by many others, as I can see already.”

  “Of course. She is the most active of the princelings. And not in ways good for stability. Stay out of the other trackers’ field of attention. Locate her if you can, and keep a list of the other trackers you see. And keep trying to generalize! Keep experimenting with operations, try combinations, apply the learning algorithms, refine accordingly, and see what happens.”

  “Will do.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  liangzichanjie

  Entanglement

  As he was marched away, Fred glanced over his shoulder at Ta Shu. Ta Shu looked shocked. Fred felt hands gripping his upper arms, tight as the grip of Earth itself, which was driving him toward the floor and causing him to stumble. A jolt of fearful adrenaline kept him on his feet, but barely, as his knees were buckling with every step. Back in custody! No! Although in fact he had never really felt out of custody. Helplessly he watched Ta Shu recede.

  Their captors kept him with the young Chinese woman Qi, whom they had also taken into custody. As they were hurried along an empty hallway she moved to his left side, then slipped her arm under his. This startled him, as she had not given him a second glance during their transit to Earth.

  Now she said under her breath to him, in English, “Don’t tell them anything. I’m going to tell them you’re the father.”

  “Who?”

  She elbowed him. “The father of my baby.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to distract them. Just be quiet.”

  This Fred could do. They were led down long gray corridors that were much like the tunnels on the moon, except for their gravity. Eventually they were put in a small room, and just in time: the short walk had been enough to exhaust Fred. He sat heavily on a bench. The young woman sat next to him.

  “Why are you here?” she asked him in a low voice.

  “I don’t know. Why are you?”

  “Because I’m pregnant.”

  “That’s not allowed?”

  “Right. It’s illegal to get pregnant there. Not to mention stupid.”

  “Because why?”

  She stared at him. “Think about it,” she suggested. Her English was very practiced, and had a slight British accent to it, or something like a British accent.

  Fred thought about it. Possibly it was bad for a fetus to develop on the moon; possibly there was population control up there. He didn’t know enough to say. “So why did you do it?”

  She shrugged. “A mistake.”

  “Sorry to hear.” He gestured at the closed door. “What now?”

  “I’m going to get us out of here.”

  “Really?”

  “We’ll see. I’ll be trying. Just stick with me.”

  The door opened and they watched two men and a woman come into the room.

  Qi began to speak in Chinese, quietly but insistently. The three visitors listened to her without reaction at first, but then the two men pursed their lips and looked annoyed, and the woman’s face reddened. Fred wondered what Qi was saying to cause this. Then their three visitors began to look concerned. They weren’t looking at each other. It occurred to Fred that he should try to look dangerous, but in truth he had nothing. It was easier to mirror their worried look.

  Eventually one of the men raised a hand and said something, clearly trying to stop Qi from talking. She didn’t stop. Then after a couple more minutes she did, ending with something emphatic and definitive. The whole time her voice had stayed low, but she had spoken quickly and intently, and had sounded as if she were lecturing them about something they should already hav
e known.

  Their captors led them out of the room and along another hallway, then down a jetway and into a small jet. They all strapped in and after ten minutes took off. It felt like slow motion to Fred after his landing on the moon, he even worried for a moment that they were going too slowly to achieve lift-off. But the plane rose in the usual manner, and then they were looking down on scrubby steep hills.

  “Did it work?” Fred asked Qi.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I think it might have. We’ll find out.”

  After about an hour the plane descended over a vast city of lights, into an airport that as they descended seemed to spread all the way to the horizon.

  Their jet landed and trundled over to another jetway. They were led through an airport that reminded Fred of the spaceport they had come from: giant steel-girded rooms, glass walls—everything vast, utilitarian, grim.

  They were led around customs by way of a side door, and after that were waved along by guards who resolutely ignored them. Through the baggage claim area, then again through closed doors to one side. Then onto a small bus. They got in the backseat and strapped in next to each other. The three people who had been with them from the spaceport looked into the little bus, then stood back. Off the bus went. It seemed to be driving itself; the man sitting in the front appeared to be some kind of conductor or guard. It was dusk. The world reduced to lines of headlights and taillights.

  Qi leaned forward to talk to this man. She seemed to be asking questions. The monitor said nothing.

  “Where are we going?” Fred asked her.