Red Moon Read online

  What to make of this story? Hard to believe! Vast, earth-shattering collisions, followed by billions of years of spiral dancing—these are what made the peaceful harmonious world we live on, and made also this dead white rock in space, this moon. One collision, but with two very different outcomes, almost entirely dependent on gravity and the other laws of physics. That’s something to ponder. Worlds in collision! And then different outcomes, including some very good ones.

  Of course we would not want any such thing to happen again to us now! That would mean disaster. And the motions of the physical cosmos are not the same as the operations of human history. Not even close. Analogies always deceive more than they reveal; I am no fan of analogies, I do not use them. Even metaphor, that mental operation we use with almost every word we speak, is slippery and deceptive. I always speak as plainly as I can.

  And yet language, and therefore thought, is a strange and imprecise game of metaphors and analogies, one that we must play to stay alive. So now I want to suggest that even if there is a Theia looming out there in the orbit of our collective history, spiraling in toward us—as perhaps there is—and even if it has already been dislodged from its Lagrange point and is now bearing down on us, such that it is about to collide with some already-existing Gaia inside us, as seems inevitable, gravity and inertia being what they are—this has happened before. And the results, no matter how catastrophic at first, can still eventually turn to the good.

  CHAPTER THREE

  taoguang yanghui

  Keep a Low Profile (Deng)

  Valerie Tong sometimes met for private conversations with her station chief, John Semple, in one of the Chinese base’s greenhouses. This one was located on the broad rise where the rims of Faustini and Shoemaker Craters met, on what John liked to call the Peak of Eighty-Four Percent Eternal Light. Here, when they were experiencing their brief night, which in fact lasted for about three days, the lunar farmers, most of them from Henan, used supplementary grow lamps hung close over their crops. The result was a giant room filled everywhere with splashes of glowing green.

  All of the plants in this particular greenhouse were varieties of bamboo. Most greenhouses were devoted to agriculture; this one grew infrastructure. First they grew soil itself: lunar regolith, dead as a doornail, was mixed with carbon from carbonaceous chondritic meteorites, imported nitrates, inoculants, compost, and water, and thus grown to soil, the necessary first crop. In this soil they planted varieties of bamboo that had been engineered for growth so fast that grow lamps suspended over the plants had to be reeled up automatically to stay above the growth, which could be as much as a meter a day, and was always tilting toward the horizontal sunlight in ways that had to be compensated for with mirrors. When harvested, this bamboo became lunar lumber and fabric, used in all sorts of ways all over the settlements.

  Thus it was that John liked to suggest to Valerie that they “go watch the grass grow.” Luna’s only entertainment, he liked to add. And actually it was kind of mesmerizing. Against the quiet background hum of the ventilators, it seemed that the rustle of the artificial breezes through the leaves was the actual sound of the plants growing. The bunched and spiky but gracefully splayed leaves added a rich palette of color to the big space, not just greens but also the deep reds that infused certain bamboos’ new shoots, also the range of browns that were created when red and green mixed. One glossy brown in which the red and green were both still somehow evident Valerie had looked up on a color chart, and found it was called madder alizarin. “On the moon you get hungry for this stuff,” John Semple noted, rubbing the color square with his finger, looking amused that Valerie had called it up.

  This look of amusement Valerie was becoming all too familiar with, and in truth she didn’t like it. More and more John Semple was playing a game in which Valerie was the cultured Ivy League opera-loving bilingual finance expert with a stick up her butt, while he was the down-home blues brother sloping through a job he did offhandedly without even caring about it. These caricatures weren’t true in either direction, although the fact that John seemed to like making them did seem to indicate that he might indeed be somewhat lacking in taste. Beyond that it was just teasing, and she didn’t like being teased.

  John Semple was a tall angular black man who had started his career in the Secret Service before moving to the State Department’s foreign service, and Valerie presumed also to some other intelligence agency, probably NSA or CIA. Valerie herself was Secret Service only, part of the president’s Special Investigative Unit. Here on the moon her cover was as one of John’s State Department translators. John knew what she was really up to, but seldom mentioned it. They had that Secret Service bond between them, and despite his teasing, he seemed to like her; and she found him useful. She didn’t like to get close to other agents.

  They stood by a long tinted window and turned on what John called his cone of silence, which would keep their conversation private. The sun pricked the horizon and flooded the greenhouse with its tiny shard of light. It would take most of the day for it to creep fully over the nearby hill, but already John’s face glowed, a darker brown than madder alizarin, but just as rich and fine. He had mentioned once that he had Cherokee ancestry, making him, he said, a red man as well as a black man; and since Valerie’s parents were Chinese and Anglo-American, he went on, between them they had the old Sunday school hymn covered. She hadn’t known what he had meant by that, and so he had sung for her, in a jovial bass, “Red brown yellow black and white, we are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world!” He had a deep laugh, and had laughed then to see Valerie’s rolled eyes. Of course the song’s lyric was a little racist in an old-fashioned way, but also, even worse, Valerie was one of those music lovers very susceptible to earworms, and now this stupid little tune would stick in her head for many hours, even days, and would come back unwelcomely for years to come. So no doubt she had rolled her eyes and frowned her frown, an expression she could feel freezing the muscles of her face; this happened a little more often than she would have liked.

  The paring of sun gilding them was intense even through treated glass. Outside they could see only a clash of blackest black and whitest white, and yet they stood in a little forest of green highlighted by red, brown, madder alizarin. All God’s children! But no, don’t think of that tune! Think Wagner, think Verdi!

  “We’re going to need the lawyers back home,” Valerie said now to John. “This Fredericks guy is in big trouble.”

  “Did he really kill someone? Why would he do that?”

  “He says he didn’t. He almost died himself, and he’s still confused. He doesn’t know what happened. And he doesn’t look like the type of guy that gets in trouble.”

  “But I was told they found the poison that killed Chang on his hand.”

  “I know. It made him sick too. But he had no reason to do it.”

  “Not that we know of. These two might have gotten caught up in something, you never know. There’s a lot of IP theft still going on, also a lot of pay-to-play. Sometimes those payola deals go sour.”

  “I know.” Val had been sent to the moon precisely to look into just such a problem. A cryptocurrency called “US Dollars” was being offered in the black cloud, supposedly redeemable in real dollars, and there was evidence suggesting some of the monster servers involved were located on the moon. Only the Chinese had such powerful computers up here, or so it was believed, so it was a tricky situation, smacking of cyberwarfare, and Valerie had been sent up to see if she could discover anything on station, using her Chinese language ability and her fiscal skills, and the expertise she could call on back home. John knew this.

  “Well, there you have it,” he went on. “Maybe a deal went bad. And I hear Fredericks’s company has been complaining about IP theft.”

  “They all do. That doesn’t explain something like this. No one murders a business contact to cover up bribery or theft.”

  “No?” John tilted his head to the sid
e. His was a friendly face, brown eyes observant and attentive; he really looked at you. He let you know that you were of interest to him, and now, in Valerie’s case, that you were a source of almost constant amusement. Black hair close-cropped, graying at the temples: a good-looking man. “Maybe our Fred was more than a business representative.”

  This was theoretically possible, but Valerie said, “I think it’s more likely that someone used him. When I saw him he was like a deer in the headlights. And if they found the poison on his hand, it means he must have poisoned himself too. Why would he do that?”

  “To cover himself? I don’t know. He was here to deliver a new secure comms device, right?”

  “Yes. A private phone, with mobile quantum key delivery.”

  “Who was going to be on the moon end of this device?”

  “Probably Chang himself, right?”

  “Fredericks will know.”

  “Maybe. He could just be a courier.”

  “Maybe we can ask Secretary Li about that.”

  “Li got sent back to Earth right after this happened.”

  “Hmmmm,” John Semple grumbled, thinking it over. “We need to know more about Chang and his connections back home.”

  “I can look into that.”

  “It will be murky,” John predicted. “The Chinese agencies like to be opaque. You’re going to be swimming in mud. Although that will be easier up here with the light g and all, yuk yuk.”

  “Ha ha,” Valerie retorted. To her an American citizen in trouble was not a joking matter.

  Semple just laughed at her with his eyes. Hard-core Secret Service rule-following academic with station-appropriate language skills, and no doubt a dragon mama who beat her with books as a child! Lighten up! his eyes were saying.

  To which she responded by becoming even more stony. He didn’t know her at all; he was just reacting to the fact that she was a professional and a Chinese-American woman. It was offensive.

  “Look into it,” he suggested cheerfully as he saw this emanating from her.

  He turned off his cone of silence, and they walked inexpertly down the rows of bamboo, then descended broad stairs to the floor below. Here long tubes of green bamboo trunks were being prepared for use as building materials—either segmented into long tubes for use as beams, or split into slats to be woven into sheets of varying thicknesses. The leaves themselves were being pulped for paper and cloth. The contrast with the greenhouse above was startling: green life up there, green boards down here. It was a bamboo shambles, loud with the harsh whines of table saws. Against one wall, giant tubs set at a tilt rotated as they rumbled soil around inside them, sounding like wet concrete sloshing in a cement truck and providing a bass continuo for the saws’ shrieking. Workers were dumping front loaders full of bamboo dust and chips into these soil tubs to serve as more humus. Lots of Chinese workers were moving around, all of them much more graceful than Valerie and John. It was like a Chinese socialist-realist ballet with industrial music as the score, reminiscent of Nixon in China. Give Adams or Glass an orchestra of table saws, Valerie thought, and this would be the result.

  The broad tunnels of the undercity were striped by moving walkways, as in airports on Earth. Valerie and John stood on one to return to the American consulate, a little rented space in the big Chinese complex. When they walked in the consulate door, John’s assistant, Emily List, looked up from her screen.

  “Oh good,” she said. “I was just trying to call you. That Fred Fredericks is gone.”

  “What do you mean gone?”

  “The doctor we sent over to look at him couldn’t see him. They said they moved him. The doctor asked to see him wherever he was, but the people there just kept saying he’s been moved.”

  “Did they say where?”

  “No.”

  John and Valerie exchanged a look. “Okay, Agent Tong,” John said to her. “Why don’t you go ask some questions, see what you can find out.”

  The Chinese workers who had built the lunar south pole complex must have endured a lot of danger and suffering, Valerie thought as she headed to the far side of Shackleton Crater. And there must have been a lot of them. Even when construction was mostly a matter of programming robots and 3-D printers, a lot of digging and jackhammering would still have to be done. Humans remained the best construction robots around, being the cheapest and most versatile. For sure a lot of man-hours had been devoted to this project. Its architectural style straddled 1960s Brutalism and sheer adhocitecture; in other words, not that different from most of the infrastructure back in China, where the glamorous skyscrapers were few and far between.

  Valerie was making her inquiry alone, per John’s request. He thought a single woman speaking Chinese would find out more than an officious group, and he was probably right about that. She flowed carefully from walkway to subway to walkway to corridor, all underground, arriving at last at the Chinese security headquarters, out near the settlement’s transport station, somewhere under Shackleton Crater’s broad apron. All these interior spaces were made of concrete and aluminum, with the walls decorated by tapestries of woven bamboo. Living bamboo plants were also growing in giant concrete pots placed all over, accenting greenly the ubiquitous lunar gray.

  Most rooms in the complex were buried well below the surface. All the moon’s surface was composed of rock shattered by eons of meteor impact, so the structural integrity of every excavated space was suspect, at least to Valerie. Heavily ribbed and reinforced ceilings were surely advisable, and yet to her the concrete ribs arcing overhead looked too tall and slender and unsupported to be safe. But this was the judgment of a Terran eye and brain, she told herself, which hadn’t factored in lunar gravity. Presumably the engineers had calculated everything.

  She entered the Chinese Lunar Authority’s offices and took her turn identifying herself to a screen, then went through security arches, signed in, took a number, sat down. The TV show on the screen in the waiting room was a CCTV production about mining on the moon. She wondered how long they would make an American diplomat wait. It was a test of this particular agency’s regard for the United States. Chinese foreign policy was a matter of competing groups within their government trying to influence the leadership’s strategy, often by taking improvised actions designed to curry favor or embarrass rivals. As their Twenty-Fifth Party Congress approached, it looked like their current president, Shanzhai Yifan, was trying to pass along his supposedly distinguished mantle (he had even given himself the lingxiu leader designation in his second term) to his close ally the minister of state security, Huyou Tao. But there was said to be intense resistance to this plan, as neither man was well liked. So some leaders were going to win big at this congress, and others were going to lose entirely. Until that happened, everyone dealing with the Party’s elite players and even the top layer of bureaucrats was going to run into some capricious and inexplicable behavior, either too friendly or too hostile.

  After just ten minutes (so this was a friendly agency) she was called in to the cubicle-sized office of one Inspector Jiang Jianguo. Jianguo meant “construct the nation” and was a name from the Cultural Revolution, so possibly a gesture to a grandparent. He proved to be a handsome man, willowy and sincere, about Valerie’s age. Valerie had just hit forty the year before, and she was feeling like a hardened veteran, even a burnt-out case. Jiang looked happier.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” she said to Jiang in putonghua, the Chinese common language that sometimes still got called Mandarin. “I’m trying to see an American you have in custody, an employee of Swiss Quantum Works named Fred Fredericks.”

  He tilted his head to one side. “We know of this man,” he replied in Cantonese. He smiled. “You speak putonghua like you’re a Cantonese speaker, is that right?”

  “My father was,” Valerie said, blushing. She stuck to putonghua, feeling that would be better protocol. “He came to America from Shenzhen. In the Los Angeles Chinatown the older people still mostly speak Cantonese.”
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  “All over the world!” Jiang exclaimed. “Of course one has to speak the national language, but still, Cantonese will never stop speaking Cantonese.”

  “I suppose not,” Valerie said, face still hot. It had taken her a lot of work to learn to speak putonghua without a Cantonese accent, and obviously she still wasn’t quite there. But there were a lot of regional accents inflecting the national tongue, so she just had to live with it. Possibly she should have shifted to Cantonese with this man, but at this point she would have messed that up too.

  “So,” Jiang continued in putonghua, conforming to propriety with a friendly smile. “As to this American working for the Swiss, we have a file for him, but he isn’t where he was when you last visited him.”

  “No, but where is he?”

  “Because of the nature of his arrest, he has been moved to the custody of the Scientific Research Steering Committee.”

  “And where are they? Where is he now?”

  “Their facilities are in Ganswinch.”

  “Where is that?”

  “It’s north of here, sorry, that’s our little joke. Here, let me show you on a map.” He brought up a schematic map on his table screen. It looked like a slightly simplified version of the London tube map. “Here,” he said, pointing to a node in the colorful array.

  “How far is that? Can you take me there?”

  “It’s about twenty kilometers from here. Let me see if my schedule allows me to get away and escort you.”

  He made an inquiry to his wristpad. “Yes,” he said to her after a while. “I will show you where he is. It isn’t easy to find.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

  Jiang led Valerie out the door and down a hall to a much bigger chamber, like the interior of an underground mall. Walls, ceiling, and floor were again gray, all formed of what was called foamed rock, Jiang said, a lunar concrete made from crushed regolith and aluminum dust. Bas-relief swirls had been cut into some of the walls they passed; when they came closer to one of these etched walls, she could see that the swirls were formed by the indentations of thousands of overlapping faces, all of them recognizably Chinese. Essentially crowds of small faces had been arranged to make broader strokes that conveyed landscapes.