Fred felt his mouth hanging open, and closed it. More skyscrapers than he’d ever seen in his life were bunched on both sides of a crowded strip of water. Above the far side of this clutch of skyscrapers, green peaks reared toward the sky, towering three or four times higher than the tallest buildings. On the tops of these green peaks stood more buildings.
Their boat passed to the west of this harbor city and continued around a point, headed south. Ahead of them lay an island, considerably lower than the high ridge backing the city, but equally green.
The boat drew up to a small concrete dock protruding into a little bay indenting the island. Behind the dock a village terraced the hill overlooking the bay. The water was still. The buildings were salt-chewed concrete blocks, as in Shekou, but the tallest buildings here were only three stories, each floor stepped back so that a balcony terrace overlooked the street. There were no vehicles except for a couple of small carts there on the corniche behind the dock. People were either on foot or riding bicycles. Palm trees, broad-leafed trees; Fred was unfamiliar with the foliage, but it reminded him of photos of Hawaii or places like that. The buildings looked like beach resorts in tourist brochures, but tackier. Fred saw quite a few Westerners walking the corniche, or sitting in the many open-air cafés. He didn’t know what to make of that. He heard English being spoken in the cafés they passed and kept his mouth shut. It was no trouble to look ignorant and confused.
They walked up a sidewalk that left the little harbor, and followed the sidewalk over a low hill, walking for half an hour to another harbor on the other side of the little island, where an even smaller village was built around a bay deeper than the first one. A variety of boats, including even some classic old-fashioned junks, were anchored next to a stretch of water roped off between buoys, possibly because it was filled with aquaculture pens; he could see little flags and metal rails just sticking out of the water. The concrete buildings around this little bay were shabbier even than those on the side the ferry had docked at.
The sidewalk that had crossed the island led them past a little cave where an old sign in English and Chinese explained that Japanese soldiers had hid in it during a war. Then down to the little harbor, which was faced by a line of open-walled restaurants that shared a single long awning roof. They approached a two-story concrete box near these restaurants, some kind of large cubical bungalow, it seemed. Qi’s friends unlocked a door painted green and they hurried inside and upstairs to the second floor, where the main room’s window overlooked the little bay and its scattering of boats.
“Okay,” Qi said to Fred as she looked around the room. “We’re here.”
“What here?” Fred asked. “What was that big city we passed?”
“Hong Kong!” she said, staring at him. “And this is Hong Kong too, for that matter.”
“Lamma Island,” one of their young companions explained. “One of Hong Kong’s outer islands.”
“It’s a good place to hide,” Qi said to Fred after they sat down heavily on worn-out rattan couches and armchairs placed in the middle of the little room. “This place is owned by friends. It’s usually a rental apartment for tourists, so lots of different people come and go, and sometimes it’s empty. So we can hide here for a while, until I figure out what to do next.”
“Okay,” Fred said, as if he had any choice in the matter.
CHAPTER SEVEN
fu nu neng ding ban bian tian
Women Hold Up Half the Sky (Mao)
At the Bayan Nur spaceport, after Ta Shu watched Fred and Chan Qi being escorted away through a security door, he went and spoke to a group of security officers still standing there.
“Those are friends of mine, what are you doing with them?”
“They’re being taken for questioning.”
“I’m going to send their lawyers to help them, where should I direct those lawyers?”
The security guards conferred among themselves, made a couple of calls. Then: “Ministry of Public Security, Beijing. Inquire there.”
“Thanks for that.”
Ta Shu left the spaceport very worried. He tried to see the pattern, but there was too little he knew about the middle ground. That vast space between the thread of events he had witnessed and the great tapestry of the overarching landscape was like the clouds of mist that floated between the tiny travelers at the bottom of a painting and the distant peaks at the top. He needed to talk to people in Beijing. One person in particular, of course.
He went back inside and found that a flight left for the capital in an hour. He bought a ticket, waited for departure, got on a jet, sat in it as it took off and headed east.
As it hummed along he pondered the problem, feeling more and more oppressed by the downward pull of the Earth. It was like a giant press, squeezing him like an olive. He tried to sleep, but it felt as though he needed to keep his muscles taut just to keep his lungs working—even to keep his ribs from cracking. One g! It was a little frightening to feel how big their planet was, how fervently it clutched them to its breast. Even his eyes hurt in their sockets.
Finally, mercifully, he managed to sleep for a while. When he woke and looked out the jet’s window, he saw the hills west of Beijing. Here a town of nuclear plants lofted thick plumes of steam at the sky, marking a cold but humid day. The solar power arrays surrounding the nuclear plants were mostly mirror fields that reflected sunlight to central heating elements, so as the jet flew over them, broad curves of diamond light sparked in his vision at the same speed as their flight.
The hills farther on were cloaked with thick dark green forests. Ta Shu could remember when dropping into Beijing had looked like a descent into hell, the hillsides all cut to shreds and eroded to bedrock, the streams brown, the air black. Now, looking down at the revivified landscape, he could feel in his bones just how long a human life could be. All that change stretching below him had happened since he was young. Of course this proved he was quite old, but also it was proof that landscape restoration had become a science of great power: feng shui for real. Ecology in action. Life was robust, of course, but the hills of the Mediterranean, deforested in ancient times, had never grown back in two thousand years. Yet here below them lay a new forest, more wild than the wild. That forest was a living result of human knowledge. And of immense amounts of labor. If they could do that to the world—wreck it, restore it—what else could they do?
From the airport he went to the little apartment he kept in Beijing, an indulgence he could afford because of his travel shows. He dropped his bag and looked at the little place unhappily. Han Shan in the city.
That very evening he made a visit to his old student and friend Peng Ling. This was a somewhat desperate move, one he made only when he had a serious problem. He had become close to Peng Ling twenty years before, in a poetry class he had taught at Beijing Normal University. Even then Peng Ling had been a rising power in the political elite. Ta Shu’s class had been recommended to her by her psychotherapist, she later told him—or rather the therapist had required her to choose between studying poetry with Ta Shu or joining a Jungian analysis program that worked by playing with dolls in a sandbox, a very fashionable form of therapy in Chinese psychology at that time. Ling had chosen Ta Shu’s class, something they both became glad of. She had not been much of a poet, but she had been a joy as a person, and during their two years of work together they had become good friends. Since then Peng Ling had become a very big tiger indeed, but as Ta Shu himself was a bit of a culture star, perhaps, they had remained friends and stayed in touch, and met fairly frequently when they were both in Beijing. But Ta Shu never wanted to impinge on her time, and as the years passed he had gotten into the habit of waiting to hear from her, and contacting her only if something crucial came up, like a friend in serious need. This was precisely that kind of moment, so he sent her a message by their private WeChat line, and within minutes she replied, Yes come have tea at the end of the day, 5 pm my office, let’s catch up.
She was ab
out twenty or twenty-five years younger than Ta Shu, and now in her prime in the Party hierarchy. Currently she was the member of the Politburo in charge of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, after holding many different posts through the years. One of the undeniable stars of the sixth generation of Party leadership, which was struggling to launch itself off the shoulders of the fifth generation, generally considered to be a weak one. By now these generations were quite nominal, extending back as they did to that first generation around Mao, the founders of the People’s Republic which had included Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping and the other Eight Immortals. The generations since had been calculated very roughly by general secretaryships, Party congresses, and mandatory retirement ages, which combined to suggest that nowadays a leadership generation passed every decade or two. A very artificial thing, in other words, and yet still widely used, combining as it did the Chinese love of numbered lists with a more general human desire to periodize history, pursuing a hopeless quest to make sense of human fate by doing a kind of feng shui on time itself.
Whether one believed in that periodization scheme or not, Peng Ling was definitely prominent among the current leaders. She was the only female member of the standing committee, and so now she was getting mentioned as the woman most likely to break the ancient Confucian patriarchal lock on the top job. That would be tough, but it could happen; someone was going to be replacing the unpopular President Shanzhai at the upcoming Party congress, and who that was going to be remained completely uncertain.
On this day, her follow-up confirmation on WeChat had ended with welcome back from the moon and a happy face. So she knew what he had been doing. And when he was ushered into her office in Huairen Hall, deep in the Zhongnanhai complex of the Imperial City in the center of Beijing, she circled her desk to give him a hug.
“Master, how are you?” she asked, smiling cheerfully. She looked older, of course. It was always a little shock to see people younger than him looking old, a sign of just how old he must be. But Peng Ling looked healthy too, as if power had been good for her. He had heard people say she had just the right look to be a woman in power, and he thought he saw why. Of course one should be able to look any way, it wasn’t relevant, but she was bucking five thousand years of patriarchy, so it was good luck, or perhaps not a coincidence, that she was attractive in a serious way, friendly but formidable—like a favorite teacher, or an aunt you wanted to please—and also wouldn’t want to cross. Just a tiny bit scary, yes; or maybe that was just the power she wielded. In the end she looked much like millions of women her age.
“I’m doing well enough,” Ta Shu said. “I’m just back from the moon, as apparently you know, and now I’m feeling extremely heavy. How about you?”
“I’m busy. Here, sit down and let your immense weight sink into a chair. So what brings you to me? Is it something you saw on the moon?”
“Yes, sort of. I met a young American man up there, and then a young woman, who turned out to be Chan Guoliang’s daughter. I came back to Earth with them—I helped to get them down here, or so I was told. They were both in trouble. And I was with them when they were detained at the Bayan Nur spaceport and taken away. I saw that just this morning.”
She nodded, looking unhappy. “You’ve had a long day! I must tell you, I heard that Chan Qi got pregnant up there, and was brought home for safety reasons.”
“Yes, that’s what we were told too. She looks to be about five months pregnant. But now she’s back on Earth, and, you know, confinement for confinement—it seems severe to me. I can see requiring her to return to Earth, but I don’t understand the arrest. I don’t think her father would allow any mistreatment of her, so I’m wondering what’s going on, and if you can help.”
“So you want to help her?”
“Yes, and also the American man she’s with, who is in a different kind of trouble. An official up there named Chang Yazu died during a meeting with this young man, and he almost died too. Looks like it was murder, in fact, but then he was disappeared from the hospital, taken by some unknown group. Then, to tell you the whole story as far as I know it, the head of security up there, Inspector Jiang Jianguo, recovered him, and then asked me to let him travel with me as my assistant, so that he could get back down here. Jiang was afraid agents of a hostile organization would seize him again.”
“So you helped him get back to Earth?”
“Yes. I liked him. He’s a technician in quantum communication, working for a Swiss firm. But the moment we arrived here, he and Chan’s daughter were taken into custody. So I decided to come to you to see if you could offer me any clarification, or advice.”
“Not very much of either, I’m afraid. I heard about Chang Yazu’s murder, of course. I knew him, so I’m having the inspection commission look into it. Here, let’s have some tea. I can at least tell you some of what I know.”
“Thank you.”
They sat across a low table from each other, and a young woman came in carrying a tea tray, leaving it on the table beside Ling. As she tested the hot water in a cup, then sniffed the dry tea leaves inquisitively, she asked Ta Shu to tell her about his moon adventures, and he gave her what he considered the most entertaining of his stories, which turned out to be Earthrise and the feather and hammer. As he told them, she tapped on her wristpad for a while, and then brewed the tea.
“Here’s a little about Chan Qi and your friend,” she said after reading for a time. “Listen to this—it appears they’ve been released by someone, and have gone missing here in Beijing.”
“Really?”
“So I’m told.”
“That couldn’t have been easy.”
“No. It suggests there are powers involved above the level of the people who arrested them. Those were part of Public Security, and they don’t really have a tiger in this fight. They probably wanted out of the crossfire.”
“So there’s some kind of infighting?”
Peng Ling nodded, looking at him over her teacup. She tested it with a tiny sip.
Ta Shu said, “Do you think Chan Guoliang could have had anything to do with it?”
“Of course. It may have been his security people who sent her back from the moon. I think he’s the one who sent her up there in the first place.”
“Why would he do that?”
“She’s a troublemaker. Involved with some dissident groups.”
“Oh my. Tail Wags Dog?”
“Both Hong Kong and mainland groups. While she was in China, Chan could never be sure he had gotten her away from them, so he sent her off to the moon. Or so I heard. But apparently she is capable of getting into trouble wherever she goes.”
“And out of it too.”
“Maybe. That will be hard to tell, until we find her again.”
“Are you going to look?”
“Yes. I like Chan Guoliang. We’ve been working together pretty well, we are allies on the standing committee. And I need to know what’s going on. If one of Chan’s enemies gets hold of his daughter, he could be forced to do their bidding. That could be bad for both of us.”
“Isn’t Chan a New Leftist?”
“I don’t like these names, but he is sympathetic to that line.”
“And you?”
She sipped again at her tea. “Try it, it’s good.”
He ventured a sip; it had cooled just enough for him to abide it. A white tea called Handful of Snow, Ling said. One of her favorites from Yunnan. Subtle but distinct, with a delicate fragrance. He took a bigger sip, enjoying the sense of being back on Earth, immersed in its substance. Grounded. And he seldom drank a white tea.
After this pause for sipping, and possibly reflection, Peng Ling said, “You know me, Master. I am always for weiwen. Maintenance of stability. All the old virtues. Lean to the side. Harmonious society. Scientific outlook on development. All the best old ways.”
“It’s really Daoism,” Ta Shu said.
“Confucius too. Or really it’s Neo-Confucian. Like Deng X
iaoping. I like it. It suits me, because I’m a practical person. But now we have the New Leftists, wanting to steer us back toward socialism.”
“Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Ta Shu added. This was what every system since 1978 had called itself.
“Of course. And don’t get me wrong, I like the New Leftists for that very reason. It’s a way to stay free of the snares of globalism. To keep us all together here in China. So I lean that way, just between you and me. Not so much toward the liberals, because they seem to want Western values imposed on us, and thus they become part of the globalization package. That said, the liberalizers have some good points too. Their best suggestions need to be taken into account. We need some kind of integration of both, or all.”
“Finding the pattern,” Ta Shu said. “Yin and yang.”
“All your feng shui patterns, sure. Harmonious balance. The triple strand.”
“And yet things are always slightly out of balance, being alive. So which do you like most of the liberalizers’ ideas?”
“That’s easy. The rule of law.”
“Including independent judges? I’m surprised you would say that.”
“Just between us, I do say it. I don’t see how rule of law can hurt the Party. Not the way the constitution is written. It would only mean a big clampdown on cronyism and corruption. Really, I think anything above the law is wrong.”
“You say that!”
“I do.”
“But the Party is above the law.”
“The Party makes the law, but then it shouldn’t be above it. Party members shouldn’t be above the law, that’s the important point. The people have to be able to trust the Party.”
Ta Shu sipped his tea, regarded her. “Isn’t this part of Tail Wags Dog?”
“Maybe it is. Rule of law was always Hong Kong’s great advantage over the mainland. They got it from the British, and they kept it during the fifty years of transition as best they could. That’s why they did so well. We built up Shanghai to try to make it a rival financial center and cut Hong Kong down a little, but Shanghai was always a Party town, so it’s never been trusted by the outside world like Hong Kong is. In that sense you could say that rule of law is an economic value. It makes us stronger.”
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