Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  And now we have a very extensive lunar complex, as I showed you a bit during my earlier visit. Our development of the south pole region is really something. There are also lava tubes on the moon that are much bigger than any lava tubes on Earth or Mars, as I have just recently learned to my own great surprise. An emotion that I might name feng shui astonishment. It seems that because there were giant basins of lava flowing on the surface of the moon in its last stage of cooling, moving from high regions to lower ones, hot flows of lava poured underground like dragon arteries, through areas already cooled on the surface, and when these hot flows stopped flowing, some very big tunnels were left behind in the remaining basalt. And in the gentle lunar gravity, and the absence of tectonic activity or any other big moonquakes, these tunnels could hold up through the eons without collapsing. The truth is that nothing much has happened here on the moon since the end of the period of heavy meteor bombardment, some 3.8 billion years ago. So some really big lava tunnels have endured.

  These lava tunnels provide spaces for human habitation on a much larger scale than anything we could easily excavate ourselves. I am visiting one such tunnel, which I will tell you more about in a later show, but what I can say now is, it’s very big! Wide, tall, and long. And the interior surface is hard and almost completely airtight. One only has to find the occasional cracks in the wall and coat these with a fixative of graphenated composites that look somewhat like sheets of diamond, and you have a space the size of a big long town, like a riverside town, which can be aerated and heated. Over it lies enough surface rock to protect living things from cosmic radiation and solar flares, and once fossil cometary water is brought in from the polar craters, you have the makings of a long and winding city-state, more like a complete little world than you can readily imagine.

  So much to be proud of in our efforts on the moon! And yet nevertheless, people in China ask me all the time, why the moon? We still have so many problems here in China, and everywhere on Earth. How does going to the moon help with those?

  Obviously I am not the only lunatic who gets asked this question. The Party came up with its Five Good Reasons, and others have since added more reasons, too instrumental or even cynical or rude to be given official voice. Now that I’ve been around the moon a little bit more, I have made my own list, which I call the Seven Good Reasons, or maybe the Seven Good Excuses. My rough definition of them is as follows:

  One, national pride;

  Two, removal of some of the most polluting industries out of China and off the Earth;

  Three, an attempt to find new sources for some of the Four Cheaps, in particular cheap power and cheap resources;

  Four, the creation of transfer stations that will give us good access to the rest of the solar system;

  Five, the creation of a work of landscape art, what I call Lunatic China;

  Six, the investment of a big capital surplus that has no better place to be invested; and

  Seven, the commitment to such a long-term project that if it eventually fails, no one alive today will know about it. Kicking the can down the road, as the Americans say, in an expression almost Chinese in its folksy pithiness.

  So, yes. We came to the moon mainly to displace our weird collection of problems onto a later time, when other generations will have to solve them. So it has ever been; it’s a standard move in both capitalist and Chinese history.

  In fact, in that sense, the moon project reminds me of the Yongle Emperor’s construction of the imperial capital in Beijing, including the Forbidden City and most of its supporting city. Recall please that the imperial capital at that time was Nanjing. And for a long time the greatest city in China had been Hangzhou. Both these cities had good access to the coast, whereas Beijing was too far from the sea, and too close to the Mongols. It was too cold, too windy, too smoggy—too much of all of those unhappy attributes of the capital we have all come to know too well. In feng shui terms, a complete disaster. Might as well have built it in the Gobi, or on top of Chomolungma.

  But the Yongle emperor had a very big surplus to deal with. This surplus had been accumulating over so many centuries that it is impossible now to calculate how big it was. It began much earlier than you might think, because a global economy has existed for far longer than many people realize. Most of the Roman silver coins ever minted ended up in China, for instance, and it just kept on like that, century after century. Our trade surplus with the rest of the world ran uninterrupted for more than a thousand years, and even by the Yongle’s time it was clogging the coffers. And capital accumulation without capitalism doesn’t have many opportunities for reinvestment; but silver unspent is just a lump of slag in your basement. Money needs to be spent to become wealth.

  As often happens in these situations, infrastructure came to the rescue. A great wall traversing thousands of kilometers? Good idea. A grand canal traversing hundreds of kilometers? Perfect! An entire new capital city? Great idea, no matter the bad location. In fact, if you need to spend lots of capital, the worse the location of your new city the better! So in that sense Beijing was just right. And the fact that the Forbidden City got burned to the ground by a lightning strike, just as its construction was being completed: wonderful! Necessity to do it all again! More money spent; and by the time the Yongle emperor was done, so much capital had been disbursed that that particular dynastic cycle was brought to an abrupt end. The bankruptcy and crash of the Ming dynasty led to the rise of the Qing dynasty, which being from Manchuria was used to living even farther to the north than Beijing. For the Manchu, Beijing was down to the south, more or less in the center of things. A very nice location.

  Beijing, the Grand Canal, the Great Wall—and now the moon. You see the pattern. A pattern which sometimes includes dynastic succession.

  Note for later: probably best to drop that last line, considering all that is going on. Don’t want to upset the censors.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  xiaokang

  Ideal Equal Society

  During her tenure in the Secret Service’s intelligence division, a superblack division unknown to the other agencies and to Congress, Valerie Tong had often been sent into the field as part of the State Department’s foreign service, as now on the moon. It was a bit obvious, the seemingly minor foreign service functionary who was really the spook on station, and the State Department didn’t like hosting her, but the president got to call the shots in the executive branch, and this one liked to have one of his own agents on the scene of anything he was interested in. So she went where he wanted her to go.

  On the moon she was finding that different protocols obtained. The American consulate at the Chinese south pole was so small that everyone in it had to do double or triple duty, which meant almost everyone there was gathering intelligence for someone or other, while also being too busy to pay much attention to the details of other people’s work.

  She had an encrypted link home, and now it gave her a new directive: Fred Fredericks, the American who had disappeared while in Chinese custody a couple of months before, causing an intense diplomatic dispute that by now was folded into the larger Chinese-American scrum, was thought to have been moved to China, and now it was reported that he had gone back to the moon, traveling with the daughter of the Chinese finance minister. It would be extremely useful if these two could be located. Highest priority.

  Not coincidentally, she suspected, John Semple asked her to accompany him on a visit to the main American base, at the moon’s north pole. She was given an hour to get ready.

  “What’s going on?” Valerie asked John Semple during their flight north.

  “What do you mean?” John asked with that little smile.

  Valerie was really getting tired of the way she seemed to amuse him. She said, “I got a request from home to look for that Fred Fredericks again. He’s supposed to be back up here with a Chinese woman.”

  “A Chinese woman?”

  “Daughter of their finance minister.”

  “Exac
tly. Chan Qi, daughter of Chan Guoliang, one of their biggest tigers. He’s the finance minister now, although he’s held a lot of positions, like they all have. They treat governing like a profession there. It makes a difference.”

  “Maybe that makes it harder to compete with them here.”

  “We’re not competing with them here.”

  “No?”

  “No. They’ve already got this place sewn up. A head start like they got, you can’t catch up. They’re faster at infrastructure anyway, and up here that’s what it’s all about.”

  “So there’s no fight for the moon.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said it wasn’t between us and them. It’s between various Chinese factions.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Who can tell? I’m not even sure they know themselves.”

  “That must make it hard for them to know what to do.”

  “I think so. That’s where their system lets them down, if you ask me. The Party is above the law, so they’re always improvising.”

  “What about on Earth?”

  “We just don’t know. Anyone who’s been in their Politburo, when they retire they aren’t allowed to leave China. They go to the countryside and aren’t seen anymore. None of them do interviews or write their memoirs. So no one on the outside knows what’s going on in there. Who’s fighting for what? We don’t know. We only see that they’re fighting. Wolidou, isn’t that the word they use for it?”

  “Infighting,” Valerie confirmed. “But might that fighting help us?”

  “No. We have allies in Chinese government, and we do good things with them. But our allies there have enemies there. When those enemies mess with us, they’re usually mainly trying to mess with their enemies there. So, you know. China and the US are like Siamese twins.”

  “Conjoined twins.”

  “Exactly. Joined at the hip. Producer and consumer. Saviors of the world. Partners in crime. All that. So when China’s having trouble, we’re having trouble. And we’ve already got enough trouble. That householders’ strike is bringing down Wall Street, and no one knows what will come of that. People are withdrawing their deposits and putting them in various blockchain currencies, or carboncoins, or new credit unions. So finance is crashing and the Fed is going to have to intervene. Then there’s that little matter you came up to look at, the cloud currency called the virtual US Dollar.”

  Valerie said, “Some tests we’ve done seem to show that it really is convertible to real dollars. It looks like that’s being funded by some part of the Chinese government. One of the regional banks says they’ll convert these crypto US Dollars to the Fed’s real US dollars at par.”

  “Right,” John said. “And they have two trillion dollars in treasury bonds to back that up. So, if Chan Guoliang is involved with using those bonds to back this virtual dollar, as it seems like he should be, seeing as he’s minister of finance, then that’s bad, because we thought he was on our side. But if it’s President Shanzhai, going through one of their regional banks to hurt Chan during their Party congress, then that’s a different kind of bad.”

  “But you don’t think they’re aiming it at us?”

  “No. They don’t want us to crash.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you owe a million, that’s your problem, but if you owe a trillion, that’s your debt holder’s problem. China needs us to do well so we can pay what we owe them. So this attack on the dollar doesn’t make sense, except in terms of infighting at the top there. Which is totally opaque.”

  “And the moon?”

  “This might be a place where their infighting is easier to see. Like that murder of Governor Chang, have you found out any more about that?”

  Valerie said, “I’ve kept asking Inspector Jiang what’s happening with the investigation, like every couple of days. It’s clear he’s angry that he isn’t making more progress, maybe that’s one example of what you were saying about seeing them better here. He did tell me that he found out Chang used to work for their minister of state security, Huyou.”

  “Hmmm. That could cut both ways.”

  “Sure. Jiang’s trying to find out whether Chang might have split with Huyou, or worked with him on something questionable. Jiang was pretty vague about it, but he was clearly onto something he found interesting. Then he also said he found out that the phone paired with the one that Fredericks gave to Chang was delivered to Huairen Hall in Beijing, where the standing committee has its offices.”

  “Interesting,” John said. “Well, it makes sense that Chang was well connected. The moon is a big prize for whoever is seen to be in charge here.”

  “So it might be caught up in the struggle for who becomes the next president?”

  “Yes.” John looked at her. “Is the Secret Service up on any of this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is the president up on any of this?”

  “I don’t know. You report to him too, right?”

  “We try.”

  On their flight north, their rocket made a stop in the Procellarum KREEP zone, to drop off a clutch of mining engineers. Valerie looked out a window at the moonscape expecting to see the same monochrome craterscape that seemed completely ubiquitous, but here it was surprisingly different: a broad white plane was marred only by a single mountain range, which was not arced like the crater rims always were, but instead ran straight across the flats surrounding it, thus resembling some big mountain range on Earth. The Harbinger Mountains, Valerie was told by one of the mining engineers.

  Procellarum was the most mineral-rich area on the moon, this engineer told her as their craft descended. It was the right eye of the Man in the Moon, a basin so big that it had been named Oceanus rather than Mare by the early astronomers. It had been the last part of the lunar crust to cool down and harden after the moon had recoalesced from the fragments of the Gaia-Theia collision, and because it was the last pool of liquid lava, all the lightest elements available had floated up into it and then hardened into the crust. Thus KREEP, the K standing for potassium, REE for rare earth elements, and P for phosphorus.

  “And now we’re mining that?” Valerie asked. “It’s an American operation?”

  The engineer nodded. They were sending the potassium and phosphorus to the north pole base to aid the local agriculture, and they threw the rare earths home to Earth. Some heavy-duty high-capacity launch rails had been built at the north end of Procellarum, to be as near the north pole base as possible. These launch rails cast freighters full of refined rare earths down to low-Earth orbit, and later piecemeal down to Earth. It was the biggest American operation on the moon by far, and almost the only way the moon was actually proving of use to humanity, in this miner’s opinion.

  “You’re not breaking the Outer Space Treaty?” Valerie asked.

  The engineer didn’t think so. The mines were kept underground and the surface therefore was left mostly unmarked. No open pit mines or strip mines. And they were taking less than a hundredth of one percent of the available minerals, if even that. And none of it was going to the military, not directly anyway. Basically it was claimed to be a scientific experiment, testing various aspects of mining. Kind of like how Japan did scientific testing on whales. So it conformed pretty well to treaty regulations.

  They came down on a landing pad cut into the lowlands next to the Harbinger Mountains, which as they got lower looked positively Himalayan in their stark vertical grandeur. The mining station looked like any small airport anywhere. Strangely, given Valerie’s preexisting conclusion that the moon was tediously the same everywhere, some patches of land flanking the mountain range were parti-colored. The colors were subtle but definite: tans, pinks, pale greens, even one patch of vivid lemon. KREEPy land, the engineer confirmed. Frozen lakes of rare earth elements, rising to the top when the moon had been a coalescing ball of liquid-hot elements.

  Inside the station everyone was led up into a bubble dome that poked out of the ground. From here th
ey had a magnificent view of the Harbingers, and after the sterile monochromatic grays of the rest of the moon, the pastel patchwork on the land struck Valerie’s eye as an intense relief: broad swathes of mauve, burgundy, olive, yellow. She hummed, she drank it in.

  But this was not what the locals were now excited to see; they were all getting prepared to witness a solar eclipse, and not only that, but the landing of a chunk of carbonaceous chondritic asteroid during this eclipse as well. The latter had been timed to happen during the former, apparently just to see how it would look.

  The sun overhead already had a big bite taken out of it, easy to see after they put eclipse glasses on. That black arc biting it was the Earth, getting between the sun and the moon. The colors on the land that Valerie was so enjoying were getting easier to see as the usual blaze of sunlight was reduced.

  Through the course of the next couple of hours, the rest of the sun was eaten. As the process reached its apotheosis, the lunar landscape around them darkened. Then the moment came when they could look up without their eclipse glasses, and see overhead a thin red ring in the sky, a glowing red tracery of a band, pulsing and shimmering. This apparently was Earth’s atmosphere, lit up and glowing like a corona around the black circle that was the Earth. The black circle was duskier than the starry black of space, and through binoculars and other scopes one could see what seemed to be stars dotting it; these were cities on Earth’s night side.

  Eclipses were fairly common on the moon, Valerie and John were told. The red annular band surrounding Earth was sunlight bending through the atmosphere; this phenomenon explained why people on Earth looking up at a lunar eclipse saw the moon turn a dusky red.