She smiled. “Thank you. I hope you can balance all the forces up there.”
Ta Shu shook his head. “I can’t do anything myself. Hard to say what will happen. But I can try.”
“When can you go?”
“Now.”
But now there was no way out of the mass of people. Beijing was locked in the greatest gridlock ever seen in the history of the world. Peng Ling had to call a drone helicopter to the roof of the building that held the waffle shop. Ta Shu found it disturbing to get into a plastic box, what seemed to him a big toy with no pilot in it, and then to get lofted abruptly into the air above Beijing—into police-controlled air, in fact, where drones at this point were routinely being shot down by other drones. There were a lot of them out and about, the sky was crowded with them. So it was a matter of trusting machines and algorithms all around. Also a tribute to Peng Ling’s importance, that she could go up like this into such a proscribed space.
But go she did; she went up with him in the drone, so that she could look down from above and see Beijing, the great capital of the world, awash in a sea of people. It was astonishing: the billion were all there, it seemed literally. There was no place below them that wasn’t black with the heads of Chinese people, a granular mass of humanity—everywhere except for Tiananmen Square itself, the heart of China, looking suddenly small in the middle of the immensity of the city and its crowd. A gray rectangular dot like a postage stamp.
Peng Ling stared down at it impassively. There was no denying the awesome truth of this sight. This was power, the power of the Chinese people; also the power of whoever could conjure such a crowd. Peng could not have done it, and judging by the blank look on her face, Ta Shu could see she found this truth daunting. Was this Chan Qi’s doing? And if so, how had she done it? And if not her, who?
Ta Shu told her to pass on going by his mother’s compound. Go straight to the Party’s airport, he suggested, and get him on a Party jet south. She nodded, relieved. She gave instructions aloud and the drone changed direction.
Ta Shu watched her profile as she looked down. A tiger; maybe the biggest tiger. Which meant he was part of the hierarchy now, no doubt about it. Maybe he had been all along. He didn’t know what that meant. Famous, yes. But maybe it just meant he was a tool. An instrument of power. But he had his ideas too. Possibly something could be achieved.
“What will you do?” he asked her, gesturing down. Ultimately the crowd below was a direct challenge to the Party’s rule of China, and it was huge. So it was a crisis for the Party, no doubt about it.
Peng Ling shrugged. Business had to get done, she muttered. Life had to go on. Lanes of movement would be established by necessity, then kept open by the police. Brutal means would be hopefully minimized. After that, they would probably deal with this the way they had dealt with the umbrella revolution in Hong Kong: they would wait it out. Leave people alone until they grew bored or hungry or sick, or, this being Beijing in autumn, cold; then let them disperse without incident. Catch as many faces as possible on camera, dock people in their citizen scores as those got reassembled. Wait it out, in other words; and when it went away, forget it ever happened. That would be the strategy, the hope.
“Lean to the side,” Ta Shu remarked when she fell silent. Mao’s old strategy, to duck away from the blows of one’s enemies, or even from their attention.
She nodded. Yes, her look down at the city said. If the entire population of China was moving at you, you definitely wanted to lean to the side.
But appearances could be deceiving, even this most amazing appearance. Beijing was jammed, shut down, in crisis; but elsewhere around the country, life was mostly going on as usual. News from Beijing was spread by some social media, and by phone conversations, pigeons, word of mouth; but not by the media controlled by the Party and its immense censorship complex. The Great Firewall would try to stop even this great flood. So in the end it was hard to tell what was going on. Even looking down at the real city, it was hard to tell what was real.
On the way to the airport, he changed his mind and asked Peng Ling to arrange two stops. First on the roof of a Second Ring Road crematorium, where he picked up his mother’s ashes, contained in a rectangular gold box inside a velvet bag, with a rope tie that he could close and hold. He held it as the drone lofted them to the Buddhist shrine near the North Gate, where on certain memorial days his mom had sometimes visited to burn incense. She had not been particularly devout in that way, but there was a columbarium there willing to take her ashes and place them in a wall behind a nameplate. He got out of the drone with the box, and as a monk helped him secure the box in its slot in the wall, he was reminded of his weird trip to the landfill with her junk. He hefted the box one last time, curious as to the weight of its contents, and muttered so that the monk couldn’t hear, “Ma, you have been compacted.”
But these were just her mortal remains. Her spirit was somewhere else. If it was anywhere at all, it seemed to him, it was in his brain. Her soul was now a pattern of neurons in his brain, making a certain set of memories, certain habits of mind. He himself was what remained of her in this world. He made a quick vow to her to take on the burden of keeping her going, and gave a final turn to the little wrench that the monk handed him, tightening shut the door on her remains, feeling that she would approve of his filial resolve. She had been resolute, he would be resolute. She had done her best, he would do his best. This felt almost like serenity. In any case it was resolve. He would persevere.
Then it was off to the airport.
At the Party airport he said goodbye to Peng Ling and got in a little jet with two other passengers. None of them greeted the others or said anything after they were in the air. Ta Shu sat in a right-side window seat and fell asleep for a while, overwhelmed by his long week home. If he could call it home anymore.
When he woke it was early morning. The plane flew over bare brown hills, shorn to dirt after centuries of deforestation, although here it had the look of recent work. In some places the Great Greening had proceeded, in other places it had been ignored or contradicted. Here below, the slash marks still scored the hillsides, and raw dirt roads wound down in widening spirals to the flatlands. The feng shui was simply awful. Kill the body and the spirit will go away. Then it will not be an issue. This country had been chopped up, murdered, desecrated. But what if the people who had cut down the forest on these hills were desperate to cook that night’s food? But no, it didn’t have that look. It hadn’t been cut down by hand, tree by tree, ax by ax. This had all the marks of an industrial process. Forest genocide. Thirty thousand square kilometers of China were poisoned beyond use. This patch below had just been added to that dismal total. Already there was no groundwater to speak of in the entire north.
Strangely, the plane crossed a ridge and suddenly the next watershed below them was dark green, hills glowing with a forest that looked primeval, eternal, untouched through all the dynasties. Could it be? Or had it been restored in the last few decades? It was more likely to have been restored than to have escaped history like some hidden Shambhala, but from this height it looked ancient. A very heartening sight, given what they had just been flying over. He wondered if that watershed ridge marked the Hu Line. Ninety-five percent of the Chinese population lived on the third of China that lay to the southeast of the Hu Line, five percent lived on the two-thirds of the country to the northwest of the line. That was strange, though perhaps it only marked how much people needed to live by water and fertile soil. This too was feng shui; wind and water made all the difference.
He watched the world sliding below from a consciousness that did not feel like his own. He was history; he was time; he was a buddha; he was his mother, looking back and down. Five thousand years of struggle, and where had it brought them? They were pressed against that day’s crisis, their options as small as a wedge in a crack—no way forward, no way back. What was China now? What had it been, what would it become?
As the plane descended, Ta Shu
caught sight of what had to be the Three Gorges Dam. He stared down, startled at the sight. When the dam was nearing completion he had publicly grieved, recalling trips through the gorge made in his childhood. One of the great dragon arteries of China drowned, an ecological debacle: he had said this many times on his cloud show, and ever since then he had avoided visiting it.
Now he saw that he had been right to avoid it. He almost pulled down the window shade. But there was a fascination too, as when witnessing some immense catastrophe. From the perspective of the plane as it descended, the dam appeared to cross the entire visible world. It was hard to believe humans had made it; the Great Wall was a mere thread on the land in comparison. The reservoir of water extended as far to the west as he could see. Seven hundred kilometers upstream, he seemed to recall. An entire watershed drowned, two million people moved, a thousand archeological sites lost, including everything that had remained of the proto-Chinese culture that had lived there in the time before history. Earthquakes had been caused by the weight of the water, landslides, sedimentation, pollution: an ecological disaster, just as he had predicted. Not that this fulfilled prophecy gave him any satisfaction. It was the kind of devastation that should have been reserved for the moon, the land of death. To turn Earth into that kind of thing …
Well, this was what was happening. And since nothing lived on the moon, nothing died there either. So the moon was not the land of death but rather the land of nothingness, which was not the same. Earth was the land of life and death; the moon was a blank white ball in the sky. Now they were making the moon into something more than that, but what that new thing was he could not make clear to himself; nor he suspected could anyone else. They were doing it first, and later they would understand it. Or not. Just like with this dam.
When the little plane landed, the door opened and the other passengers got off. But as Ta Shu was following them, two men came up the stairs and introduced themselves: Bo Chuanli and Dhu Dai. Bo was tall and bulky, Dhu short and slight. Associates of Peng’s, they said they were, instructed to join Ta Shu on his trip. Dhu held out his wristpad and tapped it, and a small image of Peng Ling appeared on the screen and said, “Ta Shu, please let these men Bo and Dhu accompany you to the moon, it will be safest that way for all.”
“Ah,” Ta Shu said.
“Really no reason to get off the plane, if you don’t mind,” Bo said, standing in Ta Shu’s way.
“No?” Ta Shu said.
“It seems as if we should hurry a little,” Bo said calmly. Dhu stared past Bo’s elbow at Ta Shu, inspecting him to see how he would react. Suddenly this made Ta Shu wary.
“We’re from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection,” Bo added. “Dhu is with the agency, which is run by Peng Ling, and I am the Party cadre who has been helping him.”
“I see,” Ta Shu said. “And how will you help in this situation?”
“We think that these people you are hoping to meet on the moon are involved with the recent unrest in Beijing. You think so as well, correct?”
“I don’t know,” Ta Shu prevaricated. “How they could be involved with these events on Earth when they’re on the moon?”
They regarded him skeptically, unconvinced he could be so stupid.
“There are ways,” Dhu said. “Talking on private radios. Sending coded signals. We don’t know if any of those ways explain this, but we have been told to help you get there, and to help you in every way while you are there.”
Ta Shu looked at their faces. Security operatives. Peng Ling must have decided he needed protecting. A disturbing thought. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
When they were seated, with the attached agents up near the front of the plane, Ta Shu tapped a message to Peng Ling on their private WeChat line. When several minutes passed without a response, Ta Shu began to worry. Usually she got back to him immediately. Possibly she was busy. He had no other way of contacting her, and there were no third parties who knew both of them.
As the plane took off, Ta Shu looked down again on the concrete evidence, so to speak, of the power of the Chinese Communist Party: the big dam. If he recalled correctly, it was about two hundred meters high and a few kilometers long. It seemed much bigger than that from this angle: massive, crushing, universal.
Now it seemed he might be in the grip of another part of that great power. Bo’s presence made it tangible and personal. Ta Shu knew this feeling was simply seeing the whole in a part: he had never been out of the grip of the Party, not just since being joined by these men, but for the entire length of his life. Seeing it personified by these two men changed nothing.
And now he was part of a little team organized by Peng. It was difficult to feel too resentful about this, as she had reason to want security people of her own along. Still it was worrying. He couldn’t be sure what this team’s purpose was, he was simply its front man. Maybe even its bait.
Well, bait could bite, as his father used to say. He needed to find out what Peng really wanted from him on this trip. If she was in the running to become the next president, as she had more or less confirmed in the waffle shop, then the jockeying must be intense now, an all-absorbing dogfight even in the midst of the general crisis. And what a crisis—the whole world caught up in something, it seemed, even though no one was sure what it was. Maybe they were living through a transition to some new world order, unnamed and inchoate. Maybe this was a wrestling match between elements among the elite; but maybe it was a wrestling match in which the many were trying yet again to seize power from the few. For the bait could bite.
The little plane got to altitude, and again the hills of South China filled the world. Then they flew higher, south and west, over the steep-sided mountains of Sichuan, dark green forests flanking the lower slopes of black rock ridges, with snow on the north faces of the highest peaks.
They landed on the northeast edge of the Tibetan plateau, Ta Shu thought. It wasn’t where they had taken off from the previous time Fang Fei’s organization had flown them to the moon. It looked like Fang Fei kept a personal estate up here, extending to the horizon as far as one could see. Leader Xi’s plan to make all of Tibet into a national park, which would have dwarfed any other such park on Earth, and incidentally turned the Tibetan people into something like protected wildlife, had never been implemented. But the proposal had over time changed Beijing’s treatment of the region, and the absence of a new incarnation of the Dalai Lama had left Tibetans and everyone else in a state of confusion as to what Tibet really was. Of course the Party liked it that way. And at certain times vast tracts of state-owned land had been offered for sale to individuals. As apparently here.
They got off the plane and walked into a low building with a central courtyard. All here was cool and quiet. A separate world. Bo and Dhu had disappeared with some of Fang’s people, and Ta Shu was left in the hands of a young woman named Shuling.
“How long before we take off?” he asked her.
“If you have no objections, the plan is to launch in two hours.”
“Two hours! It’s like making a connecting flight at an airport!”
She smiled nervously. “We hope you don’t mind?”
“No, it’s fine.”
He spent the interval napping. After he woke up he went outside to say goodbye to the world. He walked around in the crisp cool air, feeling the altitude in his lungs and seeing it in the sharp outlines of the low mountains to the east and south. The horizon was huge, the gravity heavy. He was tired and confused. The feng shui of this place was awesome, but he was having trouble focusing on things, and feeling them. In his mind he was still stuck in that amazing crowd, or in his mom’s apartment. At the same time, there in the distance across the sere high plain a herd of some kind of deer or antelope grazed, round-sided in the sun. Under the cobalt sky, autumn grass gleamed like gold. Life. The contrast to the little dead ball they were headed for could not have been greater. There it was above him, visible in the sky even by day—a half-m
oon, making the color of the sky darker by contrast—its shadowed half quite visible. It was hard to believe they were headed there.
He was rejoined by Bo and Dhu, which reminded him: still no response from Peng Ling. This was unlike her. The three of them were led through hallways and up in an elevator to a launch deck, where they stepped into another tall slender spaceship and settled onto thick seats. His seat tilted back, flight assistants connected up his seatbelts, and shortly after that the rockets rumbled distantly under them, their chairs vibrated, and off they went. Crushing pressure for a while, then no pressure at all. It was interesting to see it all become routine. Oh yes, going back to the moon—one did it all the time. He kept quiet, fell asleep.
In the hypnagogic state of drifting off, he thought he heard Bo say to Dhu, “We will follow the old man to the source of the peach blossom stream.”
Somewhere a tiger roared. He floated on a pond like a black swan.
AI 12
houhui
Regret
The analyst sat on the concrete floor of a cell. A standard prison cell, plastic bucket for a toilet, nothing else. No windows. Door solid. Air vent above. Neither comfortable nor horrid.
In his head he talked to Little Eyeball. I hope you are following the protocol for this situation, he said to the program. I hope you can help the situation even in my absence.
From here it was impossible to say, and it seemed very unlikely he would ever find out. Well, maybe. Much depended on how his friends on the outside reacted, and on many other forces outside any one person’s control. He would either be released or not. If not, he would either be questioned, which might involve torture, or shot; or left alive but incarcerated in isolation forever; or allowed to join some prison population, for some period of time or for the rest of his days. Possibly there were other options, but he didn’t want to think too much about them. It was hard not to think of the varieties of interrogation he might be subjected to, but there was no use in that, so he kept directing his mind elsewhere. The painful possibilities were known to all people at all times, everything from simple deprivations and impositions to luridly ingenious Ming mutilations. Of course the basic methods were as effective as anything fancier, old things like the ankle press (he had bad ankles), or fingernail pulling (he had arthritis in his hands). Even to think of it was painful. He had always known this possibility had existed, but it was easy to ignore when you were in your own life and felt safe. Clever, protected, shielded. In fact he wasn’t sure how they had found him. Probably he would never know. There was so much he would never know.
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