Ta Shu took the heavy little computerlike thing up into the jet and sat in a window seat. Soon the jet took off and headed south. He leaned his head against the window and fell asleep. When he woke again they were landing. He didn’t recognize the landscape, but thought it might be highlands in the south. Somewhere west of the Hu Line, that seemed certain.
The jet landed and taxied to a halt. They got out and walked toward a mansion on a hill. Beyond it a skeletal rocket gantry stood on a big concrete pad. A private spaceport, apparently. A rocket was being wheeled out of a tall hangar. It looked small from a distance, but as they approached it kept growing in his sight; it was the hills behind that had made it seem small. In fact it appeared to be about the same size as the one Ta Shu had gotten into a couple of months before, on his first trip to the moon. As tall as that one, for sure, but not as thick.
“Will it go directly to the moon?” he asked one of his escorts. He knew there were rockets that took people only up to Earth orbit, where they transferred to bigger spaceships that passed the moon in a permanent figure eight with Earth. The little transfer shuttles to and from these big spaceships were said to inflict tremendous g forces, so he was afraid he would have to make one of those kinds of transfers.
But one escort replied, “Yes, the passenger compartment of this one goes right to the moon. The booster stage will come back down after your launch and land right over there.” She pointed across the concrete pad.
“Very nice.”
He was led into the mansion, where he found Chan Qi and Fred Fredericks sitting on a couch. They were startled to see him, and then, as they digested the implications of his appearance, Fred at least looked hopeful.
Qi not so much. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“I’ve got a friend in a very high place who is worried for your safety, and thinks you’ll be safer on the moon than you are here,” Ta Shu told them. “Apparently there are places up there we didn’t know about, secret places where you can hide for a while with proper security to protect you. So it’s been recommended that you hide there, and I’ve been asked to come with you.”
“What about her baby?” Fred said.
Qi glared at him. “Let me worry about that.”
“Sorry.”
She did not look appeased. “If this is what it takes to stay free, I’m willing to do it. My baby will be okay. The gibbon babies up there are okay. Babies are always floating in amniotic fluid, so they’re always in a lighter g. And whale and dolphin babies are okay, and they grow in almost zero g.”
Fred shrugged, gazing at the floor in what Ta Shu was coming to recognize as his usual manner. He looked unhappy. Maybe the idea of the moon frightened him; after his previous visit, that would make sense. Ta Shu said to him, “Whatever happened to you up there before, it won’t be like that this time. And it could be that a resolution to your problem is more likely to happen up there than here.”
Fred shrugged again and said, “I’m ready.”
So: back to the moon.
The launch from Earth was the usual big push. There was no view to be had, so there was nothing to distract one from the squishing of one’s body. Glancing once across their little chamber, Ta Shu saw Qi grimacing, but she looked more determined than pained. It was just one more in the sequence of gravity shocks that the baby inside her had undergone, her look said. This launch pressure would be followed by three days of weightlessness, followed by a brief decelerative squish, then some period of time in lunar g, with centrifuge reversions to one g, if she wanted them. Variations in g might be worse for fetal development than a steady lunar g; there was no way to be sure. She and her kid were definitely experiments.
Nevertheless, they were on their way back to the moon. After all the launch pressure they floated around a small but luxurious cabin. Now Ta Shu and Fred could float into a corner and strap themselves in, and suck on some bulbs of tea, and finally catch up. Fred had had a busy time of it, to the point where he couldn’t seem to talk about it very well. Ta Shu had to excavate the story out of him question by question, but eventually he understood how Fred and Qi had stayed hidden for so long; they had gone to ground and stayed there, simple as that. Only after they ventured out had they been recaptured, Fred wasn’t sure how. In fact Ta Shu knew more about what had happened to them after their capture in Hong Kong than they did themselves. He could explain a bit of that, and also explain how returning to the moon might be helpful to Fred.
“You’ll be under the protection of a very powerful faction in the Chinese government, that’s the main thing. They’ll push the investigation of what happened to you last time. On Earth there were too many factions after you, some of them quite dangerous. So I think this makes sense.”
“I hope so. Do you know if my family got word that I was okay?”
“I don’t know, but I can ask people to find out.”
“I want them to know.”
“I understand, but it will be important to be discreet about that. If there are people trying to harm you, you don’t want to remind anyone of your family’s existence.”
He looked even more unhappy.
Ta Shu patted him on the arm, said to him, “This should keep you out of the hands of the factions down there who are Qi’s enemies, also her father’s enemies. That could have gotten bad.”
“It was bad.”
“I mean worse.”
Fred nodded to show he understood. Ta Shu was not sure he did, but then again, he looked much warier than he had when they had met during their first moon landing. He had gone through a lot since then. He was pale; he had gotten sick in Hong Kong, he said, and had not yet fully recovered.
Qi, on the other hand, looked full of energy. Sophisticated; powerful. Ta Shu was reminded of Peng Ling, and not just Ling the student of twenty years before, but the current chairperson of the standing committee. Qi had that same kind of tiger gaze. Well, she was the daughter of a tiger, and princelings often enjoyed the shade of trees planted by the ancestors. So it was not so surprising.
Now as they waited out their transit, moving from sleep to meals to gazing out the window, she had questions for him. First, of course, concerning who exactly it was he was referring to, when he spoke of their benefactor.
She was very interested when he told her it was Peng Ling. “Peng!” she said. “She used to be an ally of my father’s, but now that may be changing. They are both possible candidates for the next presidency. I don’t know if I trust her.”
“That’s something only you can decide,” Ta Shu said.
She was also very interested in the communication device Ta Shu now pulled from the luggage compartment and handed to her. As he gave it to her he said, “All I know about this is that someone who knew where you were going, and knew I was going to join you, wanted you to have it. They said it was from someone who wanted to help you. I can’t vouch for it beyond that.”
The little box had a glossy operations screen on its top. Qi took it from him with a suspicious look and then handed it over immediately to Fred, who inspected it closely.
“Is it made by your company?” Ta Shu asked him.
“No,” Fred said. “It’s Chinese. The qubits in it are probably yttrium molecules in a matrix of platinum. Either that or diamonds with nitrogen trapped in their flaws.”
“Can it be used to track us?” Qi asked.
“No,” Fred said. “It’s basically a radio phone. What people call a unicaster, in that it only broadcasts to its twin. The quantum array in it is entangled with the complementary array in the phone it’s paired with, so communication between the two is encrypted in a way that can’t be cracked.”
“And the other one could be anywhere?” Ta Shu said. “Non-locality?”
Fred tilted his head to the side; Ta Shu saw that this was a move he made when he was thinking about something he liked to think about. “The other one could be anywhere and it would stay entangled with this one. Anywhere in the universe, in theory. But it has
to be within radio range to actually communicate with the other one. It doesn’t take much power to transmit from the Earth to the moon. But this one is small enough that it’s probably what people in the business call a telegraph. It sends a small bit rate at low power in a narrow bandwidth. So it probably just sends texts.”
“But it can’t give away where we are,” Qi repeated.
“No. Essentially it’s just a secure private text line.”
Qi looked at it dubiously.
“It can never hurt to talk to people,” Ta Shu suggested.
“As long as they can’t find you,” she said.
The hours of their transit passed. Their chamber had a single small round window; in it from time to time they saw Earth, each time smaller, the gorgeous blue ball glowing in a way that belied all its troubles. It was hard to believe they were as far away from it as they were. It was also hard to believe that it was what it was. Thinking of Zhou Bao, Ta Shu tapped onto his pad:
We have one home: a ball in space.
Hard to believe the world could be
So small. My living hand
Which covers my whole face
Can now when held at arm’s length
Cover all the Earth.
To be that far away: fear. Just
Fear.
Deep breath. Take heart.
Bao would say it is always true
We cannot live
Without the things we make
For each other. So: float surprised
Like a bird in flight. Pay attention.
Apprehend this moment. This living hand.
They came down on retro-rockets, which meant the speed of their landing was very slight compared to that of their previous arrival. Ta Shu looked at Fred and saw Fred glance at him; no doubt he also was remembering their meteoric stoop onto the piste at the south pole. That had been quite a moment. Ta Shu smiled, and Fred dipped his head.
This time they were landing on the far side of the moon, they had been told, on a pad just inside the rugged mountain rim of Tsiolkovsky Crater, a big crater in the generally rocky landscape of the far side. When their spaceship was down, the pad they had landed on rose a little under them, then wheeled their craft into a tall gap in the arcing inside wall of Tsiolkovsky Crater. This gap proved to be an entryway to an enormous rock-walled vestibule, which contained on its inside wall a door as tall as the rocket. The door opened; the rocket and its platform rolled inside it, the giant doors slid shut and closed behind them. They were inside the moon, rocket and all.
This place was Fang Fei’s hidden refuge, a crew member told them. A secret world, and even bigger than it first appeared, because the tall tunnel they had been wheeled into proved to be just an antechamber. From there they were wheeled through two more sets of giant doors, and after the last ones had closed behind them, their rocket’s outer doors simply opened, and their crew led them out of the craft and down a set of stairs, in a slight wind of warm dry air. They were invited to sit on the rear seats of a big electric cart, and when they did that they were driven through another tunnel, then out an open doorway into a bigger space.
Mountains and rivers without end. They seemed to be in a valley that extended forever ahead of them, as in the old scroll paintings. A lava tunnel, Ta Shu guessed. A very big lava tunnel; and transformed into classical China. Forested hills sloped up each side of the long U-shaped valley, giving way to steep rocky gray crags. A bright pseudo-sky arced overhead, and misty scraps of white cloud drifted under this glowing blue barrel vault. On one of the peaks to their right stood a little octagonal pagoda with a blue ceramic tile roof. The lowest cloud bottoms misted the tips of enormous pine trees topping the hillside forests. On the valley’s long winding floor, a series of ponds were linked by a stream that meandered through terraced fields of barley and green rice. Peach trees flowered on the banks of this stream. The ponds were bordered by round willow trees, drooping their branches into green water. Deck pavilions flanked the ponds here and there, decorated by red banners. Little dragon boats floated on the biggest lake. Stepped wooden bridges arched over the stream, allowing crossings from one tiny village to another, each a knot of low stuccoed buildings roofed with little brown tiles. A pair of Buddhist monks walked up a path toward them.
“Wow,” Fred said. “What is this place?”
“Zhongguo Meng!” Ta Shu said, feeling the helpless grin on his face. “China Dream.”
AI 7
zhiyou guanlianjie
Only Connect
Another alert.”
“Tell me your news, Little Eyeball.” The analyst now called this AI Little Eyeball most of the time, as he liked to make fun of the Ministry of Public Security’s pretentiousness in thinking that they had a Great Eyeball in place to match their Great Firewall.
“Chan Qi and her companions Fred Fredericks and Ta Shu have been observed in a lava tunnel on the far side of the moon, developed by the cloud billionaire Fang Fei.”
“Aha! Inside Fang’s China Dream, I assume.”
“Yes.”
“Has the Great Eyeball seen this?”
“Not any parts of the Great Eyeball that I can look into.”
“Well … Since you have found out about their arrival, I suppose we have to assume that others will also notice it.”
“It does not necessarily follow, but it is suggested.”
“It is likely.”
“Suggestive, likely, persuasive, probable, conclusive, compelling.”
“What is this list?”
“This is a list of scientists’ adjectives, used often in their papers to indicate their judgment of the strength of an assertion.”
“Because they don’t have much imagination when it comes to language?”
“No. Because they want a rough scale to indicate to each other how strong a case they think has been made in their own specialty. Scientists have to be able to communicate across disciplines to other scientists who don’t know the details of their discipline, and so they have worked up this rating vocabulary over time to suggest judgments concerning reliability of assertions.”
“Do they know they have this vocabulary?”
“No. It is an ad hoc system, visible in the literature, and intuitively understood by those who use it.”
“Very good! I think this is a significant example of you doing analysis and then synthesis, drawn from a wide variety of sources and performed spontaneously. Mark the procedures you followed in performing this operation, put them into a sequence folder, and keep making cognitive efforts using this sequence. Now, as to our subjects of interest, it is very probable that Chan Qi will want to continue to talk to her associates on Earth, but she will be out of radio contact with most of them, being on the far side of the moon. We, on the other hand, can tap into Fang Fei’s satellite systems to make a call to her over the linked quantum phone you suggested we get to her. If she has that device with her, and sees our call, and picks up, we will send her a greeting, and tell her some things she probably should know.”
TA SHU 6
qi ge hao liyou
The Seven Good Reasons
My friends, the China Dream is many things. First it has a recent history as a phrase, a plan, and an idea, put forth by President Xi Jinping as part of his attempt to inspire China’s efforts to get through the narrow gate at the start of this century, when problems of various kinds blanketed the countryside like the infamous smog that made Beijing black at noon. Zhongguo Meng, the China Dream, was part of thinking our way through that time, by setting some kind of practical utopian goal in our minds, a vision or a destination we could then work toward. Some said it was also a distraction, or just another way that the Party was exerting its control over us, by taking over even our dreams. A way to reinforce hegemony, and convince us to acquiesce to the Party’s controlocracy, their Great Eyeball and its supposed omniscience. Maybe it was that too. The Party has always been about shaping China’s thinking and therefore its future.
But also, bigger than any given moment or party leader, bigger even than the Party, there is the China Dream that has always existed, part of China itself. Our essential being as Chinese, if there is such a thing, which maybe there is. It’s an expression of the land, a feng shui phenomenon. The China Dream is as old as China, and on any given Sunday you can see people living it, out in the city parks or in the tea shops. It’s a way of being in the world.
And now a way of being out of the world, because we took it to the moon. The China Space Agency had the expertise, and the state-owned enterprises had the capacity, and the taikonauts had the courage and skill, and the state had the economic surplus, much of it in the form of US treasury bonds. Those aren’t looking very strong these days, but still, it was a lot of capital we owned that needed to be invested. Almost two trillion dollars in US bonds, in fact, which needed investing to make it productive, almost you might say to make it real. Part of the China-US codependency that has been growing since 1972, and which has since become so big and important that some people speak of the so-called G2 as being the dominant force in the world, and the only power dynamic that really matters.
As for the moon, the US had already reached it in 1969, and was not prepared to return. Their billionaires returned to the moon before their state agencies, because the American government and people didn’t care. Their space cadets cared, and they made the return in the 2020s, but it was a private return, involving only a few people. Whereas in China, if the Party chooses to do something, then the whole country can be rallied to that cause. One out of every six humans alive, in other words, devoted to the project of establishing a base on the moon. This was far more than needed to do the job! Not every Chinese person was involved, and only a small percentage of China’s capital reserves had to be directed up here, even though it was a pretty big project. But it wasn’t that big, and in the end it was just more infrastructure. So it was possible to propose it at the Party congress of 2022, and two congresses later report on its very substantial progress. Just ten years, but that after all was no faster than the Americans’ Apollo project. It’s just that in our case, it wasn’t finished with landing here. We landed and started building, and kept on building. Now it’s been twenty-five years.
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