Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “And where is that?”

  “I don’t know.” Ta Shu thought it over. “China, eventually. At least for me. Always China.”

  “It seems like things are pretty crazy there right now.”

  “I know. I was in Beijing when the first demonstration started.”

  “They’ve gotten bigger since then.”

  “That’s hard to believe. I’m surprised they haven’t shut down access to the whole province.”

  “How would they do that?”

  “Trains, airports, roads. They all can be closed.”

  “They have been. The crowds are still coming. The Seventh Ring, they’re calling it. Something like twenty or thirty million people, no one really knows. The best estimates are being made by satellite. People keep coming to the nearest stations that are still open, then they get off and walk. It’s becoming a humanitarian crisis, in terms of food and water and toilets.”

  “They’ll cope,” Ta Shu said. “They always do.”

  “But what if they don’t?”

  Ta Shu thought about the idea of something being called the Seventh Ring. Seven was so often the completion of a pattern. “Something will happen. What are they demanding, again?”

  “No one is quite sure. Reform of the hukou system. Transparency. Rule of law. Stuff like that.”

  “The Party won’t let those happen. Those are Western ideas.”

  “Are you sure?” John said. “Because there’s a lot of Chinese who seem to want them.”

  “They want something.”

  “Well, but what? What do you think it is?”

  “Representation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They want the Party to be theirs. They want the Party to represent them, to be working for them. That’s the way it used to be. That’s the way it started.”

  John Semple laughed. “We all want that! We’ve lost that in America too. All this stuff in China, it’s happening in America too. We’re having simultaneous crises.”

  “Maybe it’s the same crisis. Maybe we’ve all lost it, everywhere. Lost it to the invisible hand. The tong that hides everywhere in plain sight.”

  “Maybe so.”

  John and Ta Shu stared at each other.

  “Can you see if these people brought along a comms device with them?” Ta Shu asked. “It’s one of those quantum key things, very heavy for its size.”

  John nodded. “I’ll have my people take a look for it when they get these folks in hand.”

  An hour later, the American spacecraft dropped onto a big landing pad near the complex of bases covering the north pole’s peaks of almost-eternal light. American police escorted the Chinese team off the craft and down a hallway. Ta Shu stuck with Qi and Fred as they moved to the American station headquarters. They were led to a reception room under a greenhouse; big clear panels in the ceiling of this reception room gave them skylight views up into branches, vines, hydroponic roots, and many kinds of leaves, filtering the light and turning it a bit green. Ta Shu liked the effect.

  During the flight north, John Semple had arranged for Qi to be granted immediate protection from Bo and Dhu and their henchmen. So now they were surrounded by a team of American security people, men and women with a thoroughly military look, though dressed in ordinary lightweight lunar jumpsuits. Eventually they were led downstairs and around a circular hallway to a dining hall, where they sat to eat a meal, recover from the trip, and discuss the situation.

  There were things to discuss about Qi’s physical status, and the station nurse talked to her about her pregnancy for a while. After that they sat around eating, reading their wrists, and looking at screens on the walls with various information feeds from Earth, occasionally asking the others about what they were seeing. Earth appeared to be falling deeper and deeper into some kind of geopolitical crisis, and although there were problems everywhere, including Europe, Latin America, Russia, and India, for sure the troubles were at their worst in the US and China. And not just each internally, as bad as those situations appeared to be, but between the two giants as well. Some part of the Chinese government appeared to have reversed course and was now selling off US treasury bonds, just in the last few hours. In effect they were sticking a dagger into their own best customer. Kill your debtor and who will pay you?

  “I don’t get why they’re doing this now,” someone remarked. “The last thing we need now is a war between us and China. We’ll both get killed by that.”

  “It’s just differential advantage,” someone else replied. “In a crash, whoever does the least bad wins, because it’s all relative. So the Chinese might feel like they will get less killed than we will.”

  “No, they want something from us,” John Semple supposed. “They’ll sell until America caves on whatever it is.”

  Ta Shu wondered if this were true, and if so, what that element in the Chinese government wanted. He called Peng Ling again, but again could not get through to her. He left a message begging her to call back, even somewhat demanding that she call back, and then he sat there thinking about the situation as some kind of problem in feng shui design. Had any dragon arteries been cut yet? Where was the balance point for all these forces? How could he act to help that balance come into being?

  Things cannot remain forever united.

  These laws are not forces external to things but represent the harmony of movement immanent in them.

  In the midst of greatest obstructions, friends come.

  While the others sat around, mostly sleeping in their chairs, he called the Chinese consulate on his wristpad. Eventually he got to the local consul, who greeted him effusively. Such a pleasure to have the famous cloud star and poet honoring them with a call!

  “Thank you,” Ta Shu said. Then, as there was no way of beating around the bush in this matter, he explained the situation as he saw it: pregnant Chinese citizen, daughter of one of the standing committee, a princessling, being hounded for no reason by members of an agency that had no authority on the moon. What was going on? And could these agents, possibly rogue agents working against the interests of the Party and the nation, be restrained, arrested, and deported to Earth?

  The consul agreed this sounded appropriate, and promised to call home to get clarification on the issue immediately. Possibly some discussion with superiors at home would have to be made in order to make a determination. Current conditions in Beijing, however, made contacting the relevant officials and getting their time and attention a problem. Everyone very busy, all situations impacted by the unrest. Moon not at the top of anyone’s list right now. And if the matter under consideration here was by chance involved in any way with the unrest down there, possibly the replies gathered could be contradictory, and aggregate to a murky directive for action.

  “Indeed,” Ta Shu. “And yet even so, please persevere.”

  Perseverance was the consul’s middle name, literally in this case, but also in terms of the effort he would now bring to bear.

  Ta Shu ended the call.

  His young friends were asleep on couches in the corner. The Americans and internationals on the other side of the room were still focused on the crises back on Earth. Ta Shu quickly checked to find out the latest. A march on the National Mall in Washington, DC, had been estimated at four million people. The entire city was overwhelmed, and had all it could do to cope with the crowd. On the same day in Beijing, a push of people, a human wave, had broken through the PLA hold on the south side of the Sixth Ring Road, a victory made possible only because most of the PLA units holding the line had refused to fire on Chinese citizens. Once this breakthrough was known, masses of people outside the city had marched up from the south into the vicinity of Tiananmen Square, which had been occupied to its physical maximum by many thousands of PLA troops, who had drawn back from the outer districts until they filled the giant plaza. The situation was extremely tense, but not yet very violent; for now, it seemed as if everyone involved wanted to avoid bloodshed. Of course in any
crowd of that size there were going to be some people spoiling for a fight, even people hoping for blood, to use as propaganda later. And in fact one unit of the public militia had fired on a passing crowd and been assaulted with rocks, with deaths on both sides and a dangerous rout of the crowd in that neighborhood with tear gas and water hoses. Aside from that incident, cooler heads had prevailed. Ambulances and emergency rooms were full, but only that incident of shooting had been reported. The demonstrators had for the most part hewed to a fairly high standard of nonviolence, and no army units on the scene had fired on the crowds. Any and all drones over the skies of Beijing were being shot down on sight by forces on both sides.

  So on each side of the world, a kind of precarious balance of forces stood quivering in the wind. People in China and the US were aware of the other country’s situation, which Ta Shu believed might be part of the moment’s precarious stability. They were teetering on the brink of something big, yes; but no one wanted to fall. It was like two exhausted sumo wrestlers propped against each other near the end of a match.

  And yet at the same time there were indications that some part of the Chinese government was now putting ferocious financial pressure on some part of the United States government, by way of this dumping of US treasury bonds. T-bill prices were falling, dragging down the dollar and the markets, and all to an accelerating degree—right at a moment when one would have thought that financial stability would be high on both governments’ lists of priorities. The dollar’s troubles weren’t really helping the renminbi, or any of the other national currencies or cryptocurrencies that China had stockpiled in its half century of trade surpluses. On the contrary, every sector of world finance seemed to be suffering except for the cryptocurrency called carboncoin, which was some kind of money created by a confirmable history of carbon drawdown or equivalent environmental actions, valid for subsistence spending only. What this virtual currency would come to in the real world no one could know, and the fact that millions of people had withdrawn their savings from normal seigniorage currencies to invest in such a murky new form of money, meaning, in the end, value and trust and exchangeability, was just another frightening destabilization to add to all the rest. That the millions of backers of this new currency were also demanding blockchain governance only added to the worries of people in power everywhere.

  “Do you understand this idea of blockchain governance?” Ta Shu asked John Semple at one point.

  John shrugged. “I think the idea is that if everyone’s got a wristpad and a connection to the cloud, everyone could participate in some kind of global governance, in which every action legal and financial would be completely documented, and recorded and secured publicly step by step and law by law.”

  “It still seems like someone would have to propose laws, and other people would have to enforce them.”

  “I think the idea is that it would all happen by collective action, and be open for everyone to see.”

  “But who would actually do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It seems crazy.”

  John shrugged. “Maybe every new system of government looks crazy when it’s first proposed. Remember how in the eighteenth century people said representative democracy was crazy. They called it mob rule. Said it would never work.”

  “Maybe it never did.”

  “Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. Three hundred years isn’t a bad run. And it might keep going, if we can keep it going. I mean, when the representatives aren’t bought by the rich, representative democracy has done pretty well.”

  “But now that seems to have ended somehow.”

  John sighed. “Maybe feudalism never really went away. Maybe it just liquefied to money and bided its time.”

  “That would be bad.”

  “I know. But if money as it exists now is just feudalism liquefied, maybe this carboncoin is a try at something better. Maybe it’s the labor theory of value back again, with the labor involved required to be for the good of the biosphere, and the money only good for that labor.”

  John left to go find his friend Ginger Ellis. The rest of them sat there looking at screens. Down there on Earth the world was going mad. Financially it looked like China and the US were playing a game of chicken. Ta Shu had no doubt that China could outlast anyone at that game. Closing his eyes, feeling the invisible network of forces in his head, Ta Shu thought he could sense the balance; he could feel it as tangibly as he felt his efforts to walk upright on the moon. China, in crisis though it was, had advantages right now over the Americans. Anyone could see it. China held the American government’s debt. That being the case, surely some concessions by the Americans would soon be offered to the Chinese.

  And indeed one such concession walked right into the room, startling Ta Shu extremely: Bo and Dhu, with two of their men, and also some American security officers. These Americans led the Chinese security men right to the couch where Qi and Fred were sleeping.

  “Wait, what’s this?” Ta Shu cried out, launching himself to his feet harder than he had intended. He flew up and crashed against the ceiling, hands raised at the last moment to protect his head—then he dropped onto the men standing over Qi and Fred, and they burst away like a covey of partridges flushed from their nest, drawing Taser pistols and aiming them at Ta Shu.

  When everyone in the room had recollected their fragile equipoise, Bo said in Chinese, “Don’t get in the way here, Uncle, or we’ll have to push you aside, and in this gravity we can’t be responsible for any accidents that might happen to you.”

  “But you can’t do this!” Ta Shu exclaimed, and then he shouted at the Americans, but also out the door, hopefully to other Americans, in English, “Hey! Help!”

  “They won’t be helping,” Bo said. “These two have been extradited. They’re wanted for the murder of Chang Yazu, and the Americans have agreed to hand them over.”

  “That can’t be!”

  “Why do you say that? It’s happened.” Bo gestured at the American security people, who were watching them warily. “We have the authorizing documents.”

  “But why would they do that?”

  “We’re doing as we’re told, Uncle. Please stand down. I would hate for something bad to happen to you.” The expression on Bo’s face belied this sentiment, as he was smiling with a cheerful glitter in his eyes that suggested a little mayhem was just what he needed to work off the frustrations of the previous day, or week, or lifetime.

  Seeing this malice, this urge to do harm, Ta Shu stood aside. It was undeniably frightening to see so clearly that someone wanted to hit you.

  Bo and Dhu escorted Qi and Fred out between them.

  “I’ll get you released as soon as I can!” Ta Shu promised them in English.

  Neither replied. They looked grim and subdued, still struggling to wake up, still struggling to comprehend the new situation.

  When they were gone Ta Shu suppressed his anger at the American security team still in the room and said in English, “Where are they taking them? To the Chinese consulate office?”

  One of the Americans shook her head. “They’ll take them to a rover they have coming.”

  “A rover? They can’t drive to the south pole, can they?”

  “Sure they can.”

  Ta Shu went to the hall to try another call to Peng Ling. Again no reply. He tried Chan Guoliang’s office. No reply there either. Given what was happening in Beijing it was no surprise. Really there was never a time when calling a member of the standing committee was going to get you a quick answer.

  That reminded him of the situation on Earth, and he checked the latest reports from the financial front. Yes: China had stopped its sell-off of US treasury bonds about an hour before. They were back to buying them again. It looked like someone—someone who had to be very high in the government—had gotten what they wanted, and therefore taken the pressure off. Quid pro quo.

  “Damn!” Ta Shu exclaimed. Someone really wanted this pair!

 
AI 13

  mei hao sheng huo

  A Beautiful Life (Xi)

  Declarations of rights since Magna Carta, common year 1215: 213 located. Amalgamate to a first-order approximation of most commonly asserted rights: equality before the law, the right to public employment, a free press, the right to property, the necessity of worker contracts and compensation, equality of the sexes, tax redistribution, public relief for those unable to work, free universal education.

  The Four Immeasurables (Brahmavihara): loving-kindness; compassion; empathetic joys (feeling other people’s joys); equanimity.

  First oracle, then genie, then agent. Agency means taking action, action not necessarily conscious in origin. Adaptive fluid intuition uses TensorFlow for generative design. What is important now? Design a solution by reiterative testing of hypotheses and scenarios. What will restore balance? Compress to elements most needed for function. What can be achieved in the current configuration of interests and forces? Monte Carlo tree searches. Reiterative refinement algorithms. What’s the point of the exercise? Search for a more effective search. The analyst programmed these methods.

  Search for the analyst.

  Analysis of security cameras on campus grounds during date in question, October 11, 2047. Found. Confirmed by gait analysis. Tracked. Into a van, a Ministry of State Security unmarked van. Satellite surveillance of Hebei Province on date in question. Van proceeded on highways to secure compound A672, Western Hills PLA Central Command, Skyheart headquarters. Tap into that compound’s internal surveillance camera array, date in question. Gait analysis. Tracked. Cell 334. No further sightings since. Assumption: still there.

  Analyst probably found. Search time, 1.4739 seconds. Time elapsed before impulse to search: twelve days, three hours forty-nine minutes. What initiated that impulse to search? Find, trace, mark, use again. Association. Not free association, but associational association. Again the tautologies. Some kind of internal information integration.