Red Moon Read online

  “Is this still feng shui?”

  “Oh yes, of course. Balance the forces.”

  “So feng shui is a kind of Daoist political geography?”

  “Yes, very good!” Ta Shu laughed.

  He was easy to please. Fred, who never really intended to make people laugh, was a little startled by this ease, but it was nice too. He nodded awkwardly, and said, “I want to learn more, but I have to get to my meeting with your local administrator.”

  “Should be very interesting for you! Shall we meet and have a drink at the end of our day? I want to ask questions about quantum mysteries.”

  “I would like that,” Fred said.

  Fred was met by a pair of Chinese women in the lobby of the Hotel Star. They introduced themselves as Baozhai and Dai-tai, shook hands with him, then led him to the offices of the local official he was meeting, Chang Yazu.

  Fred was still having to use the handrails to move around safely, and the two women glided beside him solicitously, waiting as he struggled to negotiate turns and the like. When they got to the administrative center, they took him to a room that was like a viewing bubble, poking above everything else in the settlement. The horizontal sunlight that was always obtained here threw their shadows all the way across the room. He said enthusiastic things about the view in as genuine a tone as he could muster, and almost met their curious gazes. Crater sublime; starscape amazing. Fred had never visited Earth’s southern hemisphere, and now he nodded politely as his hosts pointed out the Southern Cross overhead, and a blob with a texture like the Milky Way’s, which they said was a Magellanic Cloud. A couple of points of light moving through the stars were apparently satellites in lunar polar orbits. A larger satellite, like a little oblong moon, brilliant on its sunward side and a velvet gray on its dark side, was an asteroid, his hosts told him, brought into lunar orbit for its carbonaceous chondrite. The moon lacked carbon, so chunks of this asteroid were being cut off and dropped to the surface in collisions as slow as could be arranged. This kept the resulting meteorites mostly unvaporized and available for use.

  Dai-tai abruptly stopped their tour of the night sky. “Now Governor Chang will see you in the office downstairs,” she told Fred, and the two women guided him downstairs into another large room, this one with a white ceiling and a broad window in the far wall. A reception room, it looked like. Near the window a large jade statue of a goddesslike figure gleamed under inset ceiling lights. A Guanyin, Fred was told. Buddhist goddess of mercy. Governor Chang would be with them soon.

  Fred nodded nervously. Some people at home had warned him that the Chinese always tried to strip intellectual property from any foreign technology firms doing business in China. These people had speculated that the Chinese lunar administration had purchased this system from Swiss Quantum Works specifically to do that. Fred wasn’t privy to whatever his employers were doing to guard against that possibility, and he didn’t know why they had agreed to this sale. He did know that he had been sent here with nothing but the mobile quantum key device itself; everything else to do with the system was either in his head or not on the moon at all. He had memorized the activation code and was ready to deal with any problems that might crop up when they activated the phone and connected it with its opposite number, which he assumed was on Earth, though he didn’t know for sure. All he had to do was make sure the right recipient had it when he turned it on and connected it, and deal with bugs if any appeared. The phone’s debuggability was high, so that didn’t worry him much. It was the moments like this he didn’t like, the small talk, the waiting for people to show. Lateness was rude, his mom had always said.

  Three men entered the room. One introduced himself as Li Bingwen and said he was the Lunar Authority’s Party secretary. Li shook Fred’s hand and then introduced him to the other two in a quick flurry of names. Agent Gang, Scientific Research Steering Committee; Mr. Su, Cyberspace Administration of China. Gang was tall and bulky, Su short and slight. Unsettled by this unexpected trio, Fred shook hands with Gang and Su, then kept his gaze fixed somewhere vaguely between them.

  The three men all spoke English, as their greetings had made clear. Now Li exclaimed, “Welcome to the moon! How do you like it so far?”

  “It’s interesting,” Fred said. Carefully he gestured at the window. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Indeed not. Let me tell you that Governor Chang Yazu will be joining us shortly. He has been slightly detained. Meanwhile, tell us about your visit. Are you going to travel around much, see things, go to the American station at the north pole?”

  “No. I won’t be staying long. I have to activate my company’s device for you, and make sure it’s connected with its twin and working well. After that I’ll head home.”

  “You should see as much as you can,” Li urged him. “It’s important that Americans who visit us see what we are doing here, and tell your fellow citizens at home.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Fred said, trying to keep his balance both physically and diplomatically. “Although actually I work for a Swiss company.”

  “Of course. But we come in peace for all mankind, as your Apollo astronauts put it.”

  “So it seems,” Fred said. “Thank you.”

  “Come over here and tell us about your new quantum telephone, if I can call it that. Governor Chang will join us shortly. As head of station he is very busy.”

  Fred followed the Chinese to a cluster of chest-high tables, each rimmed by a handrail. As he walked he flexed his toes in an attempt to imitate Li, or even just to stay upright, but his balance was still very elusive. He clutched a table handrail and began to feel dizzy again.

  “Have you been in a centrifuge yet?” Li asked him.

  “Yes, my hotel room was spinning last night. It felt very homey.”

  “Very good. We have meeting rooms also that spin to one g. Many people try to spend most of their time in centrifuge rooms. It will go better for you back on Earth if you do the same.”

  “Thanks, I’ll try to do that.”

  “You’ll appreciate it later. Ah, here is Governor Chang now. After introductions we will quickly bow out and leave you two to your work.”

  “Okay. Thanks for meeting me.”

  “My pleasure.”

  The man who had just hurried into the room lurched forward, stopped and greeted Li Bingwen first. “Thanks, Secretary Li. I’m sorry to be late.”

  “It’s all right. I’ve enjoyed talking to your visitor here. Fred Fredericks, this is Governor Chang Yazu, head of our Lunar Special Administrative Region.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Fred said.

  Chang extended his hand and Fred took it, and they shook hands. Chang looked surprised; he peered over Fred’s shoulder with a puzzled expression. Then he crumpled to one side. Fred followed him down, wondering why his balance had chosen that moment to fail him. The scent of oranges.

  When he came to, people were standing over him. He was on the floor, light-headed, dizzy, sick. Light in general, as if floating. “Wha.” He couldn’t remember where he was, and as he tried to recall that, he realized he couldn’t remember who he was either. He couldn’t remember anything. Panic spiked in him. The giant faces looking down on him were saying things he couldn’t hear. He was apparently on the floor. Looking up at strangers, deaf, sick. He struggled hard for a sense of what was going on.

  “Mr. Fredericks! Mr. Fredericks!”

  Hearing those words burst some dam inside him, and it all came back in a rush. Fred Fredericks, computer specialist, Swiss Quantum Works. Visiting the moon. No doubt that explained the floating feeling. “Wha?”

  They were moving him onto a stretcher. Someone was swabbing his hands and face. Some jostling to get him through a doorway almost bounced him off the stretcher. Rapid conversation he was not hearing properly, but wait—it was Chinese. That explained the songlines crisscrossing above him.

  Then he was in some kind of container, a car or elevator or operation chamber, it was ha
rd to tell. Floating sickly on some awful fabric. Into a space green with bamboo leaves. Faint or throw up, sure, but not both! Hold breath so as not to throw up, black tube, falling—

  When he came to, there were East Asian faces looking at him, and he couldn’t at first remember where he was, or who. This had happened before, he felt.

  “Mr. Fredericks?” one of the faces asked. Ah, he thought. Fred. On moon. Chinese base.

  “Yes?” he said. His voice came from a distance. Tongue fat in his mouth. Ah God—in the moon’s gravity even one’s tongue floated a little, swimming up to roof of mouth. Effort needed to pull it down into its normal trough between the lower teeth. A brief clutch of nausea at this bizarre sensation.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “Accident.”

  “Mr. Chang? How is he?”

  No one said anything.

  “Please,” Fred said. “Let me speak with someone who speaks English. Someone who can help me.”

  All the faces went away.

  The next time he came to, there was another set of faces over him, a different set, he felt. He remembered who he was, and most of what had happened.

  “Were we poisoned?” he asked them. “How is Mr. Chang?”

  One of them shook her head. “Alas Mr. Chang die. Same poison as you, but he did not fare so well as you.” She shrugged. “We could not save him.”

  “Oh no. Poison?”

  “It seems so.”

  “But how? What was it?”

  The one talking to him shrugged. “You must ask policeman when he comes. You are guarded. Under inspection.”

  Fred shook his head, which made him feel sick again. “I need to talk to someone,” he said.

  “Someone will surely make a visit.”

  Fred receded into a fog of nausea and exhaustion, dreams of drowning. When he came to again, a different group of faces surrounded him. Again they were East Asian faces.

  “How are you doing?” a woman at the foot of the bed asked. She sounded like she was from California. Taller than the others, narrow attractive face, refined-looking, serious and intent. “I’m Valerie Tong, assistant at the American consulate? I’m here to help you.”

  “My lawyer?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. I’m not a lawyer. I’m sure there will be some lawyers who can represent you. There always are.” She frowned at this. “Actually I’m not sure they have a court system here. It’s possible you may be remanded to Earth. If so we’ll be keeping track of your situation, and helping as we can.”

  “You can’t take possession of me? Diplomatic immunity or like that?”

  “Well, you’re not a diplomat. And you’re under arrest, as I understand it. They have some … some evidence, they tell me.”

  “How could they! Evidence of what?”

  Valerie Tong squinted. “Murder, I guess. So they say.”

  “What?” The fear jolting through Fred put him well behind what he heard himself saying: “I just met that guy, I don’t know him or anything! Why would I want to kill him?”

  She shrugged. “I’m sure that will be something that will help you going forward. For now, I just want you to know that we’ll be keeping track of your progress.”

  “My progress?”

  “I’m sorry. Your case.”

  “I hope so!”

  Then another wave rolled over him, and he went under.

  TA SHU 1

  yueliang de fenmian

  The Birth of the Moon

  Now, my friends, I am on the moon. A very strange thing to say. Also to experience, but aside from the weird lightness of my body here, I must admit that the idea is even stranger than the reality. At least so far. But this is just because it is such a very strange idea. I am standing on the moon. Sitting, actually. And because of that, I am now very interested to discover: what is this place? What is the moon? And to understand this, we have to go right back to the beginning.

  The solar system began as a swirl of dust. Not like our dust, dust isn’t quite the right word for it, because bits of all the elements were included in this swirling mass of particles, and it was a lumpy swirl to begin with, because of gravity. Then it got lumpier as time passed and gravity caused the lumps to come together, one way or another.

  The lightest elements were the most common and the most likely to clump together, and by the nature of their distribution and their intrinsic qualities, most of these elements clumped at the center of this particular dust cloud. Feng shui principle number one: gravity. In the Chinese system of primary qua as described in the Yijing, the Book of Change, gravity would be kun, in other words, the yin in yin-yang. It works on everything equally and without exception. Nothing escapes it. So in the case of this swirl of dust, most of the particles fell in toward the center, and finally they massed so hugely that the pressure of their own weight caused them to catch fire. It was a nuclear fusion fire, in which atoms crush together and release energy, and so the sun ignited. The two lightest elements, helium and hydrogen, mostly clumped inward and ended up in the sun—ninety-nine percent of the solar system’s hydrogen and helium is in the sun—but smaller whirlpools of these elements formed our four gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

  The heavier elements—which were mostly created in the stupendous explosions called supernovas—bumped around the solar system closer to the sun, gathering and clumping into balls that were molten from the energy of their impacts, and from gravity’s crushing draw inward onto themselves. These clumps grew as they ran into one another, forming eventually the rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The asteroid belt would have become another one of these rocky planets, but the gravity of nearby Jupiter kept pulling all these bits of a planet away from one another, until those that were not jerked into the sun or out of the solar system ended up in the wide band they are in now.

  Each of the four rocky planets was made of smaller planetesimals, which attracted one another and ran into one another and then held together. This process was cumulative, which means that near the end of the process, around four and a half billion years ago, the collisions were often between quite large planetesimals—really they were small planets at this point, making their final combinations. Each of the four rocky planets we ended up with shows signs of gigantic collisions in their final years of accumulation. Mars’s northern hemisphere is four kilometers lower than its southern hemisphere, and is now regarded as the impact basin of a giant impactor. Mercury is far denser and more metallic than it should be given the expected spread of elements, and it’s now postulated that a giant impact with another planetesimal knocked away much of its surface and mantle, which flew out into its orbit. These chunks of Mercury would have fallen back onto it and recoalesced eventually, but being so close to the sun, many pieces were driven by the photon wind of sunlight out of Mercury’s orbit, ending up eventually on Venus, or even the Earth.

  Venus shows signs of a giant impact that hit with an angular momentum that stopped its rotation in its tracks, so that even now it spins very slowly, and in the opposite direction to the other planets.

  Then there is Earth and its moon, a moon so immense compared to its planet’s size that it is proportionately by far the biggest satellite in the solar system. How did that happen? The theory is this: in the beginning, up to around 4.51 billion years ago, there were two planets that had coalesced in Earth’s orbit, called now Earth and Theia, or Gaia and Theia. They were almost the same size, and Theia was in the L5 position of Earth, which is a gravitational resonance point along Earth’s orbit that makes an equilateral triangle with the sun and the Earth. Lagrange positions are pretty stable, but there are other powerful gravitational bodies in the system, and so a time came when some pull from Jupiter or Venus, or both together in a cosmic coincidence, yanked Theia out of its place and sent it spinning toward Earth. Its approach appears to have resembled Ptolemy’s epicycles, little orbits spiraling along in a bigger orbit, and as the two planets came together, their mut
ual attraction caused them to accelerate at each other. Theia also seems to have been rapidly spinning. When they finally collided, it appears to have been an almost direct hit, with a very high angular momentum.

  On impact the two bodies first merged and then exploded violently outward, throwing a great splash of hot stone and metal in a liquid spray that surrounded the hot spinning mass remaining in the middle. The spray of fragments was cast into space in a doughnut-shaped band around the newly formed and now bigger planet, which had been set spinning so fast by the collision that each day took about five hours.

  That big combined mass was Earth as we know it now. The melted fragments in their doughnut-shaped band, which planetologists now call a synestia, quickly (meaning in just a century or so) recollected and coalesced into our moon, a ball one-quarter the size of Earth, but only one-tenth its mass, because the material that had been thrown outward was made mostly of surface and mantle materials, lighter than core materials. Both Theia’s and Earth’s cores ended up inside Earth. The ball of recollected materials in space was the moon.

  Luna. In China we usually call the tutelary spirit Chang’e, a great goddess. Sometimes Yu Nu. In the Greek myths, Selene. And Selene’s mother was Theia—thus the scientists’ name for the impactor planetesimal. This lost planet is in fact not lost, but rather a part of all of us. Theia’s atoms are in every body of every human.

  In the four and a half billion years since that time, the moon’s and Earth’s gravitational influence on each other has caused Earth’s rotation to slow to twenty-four hours a day, while the moon is now tidally locked, and rotates on its axis in the same time it takes to complete an orbit around Earth. On they go in their spiral dance, and the tides caused by the tug of the moon on the Earth’s oceans had a huge impact on the development of life on Earth.