Red Moon

CHAPTER NINE tao dao yueliang shang Escape to the Moon

Ta Shu tried to settle back into his Beijing life, but he found himself at loose ends most of the time, fretting. He visited the studio where his cloud show was produced, making attempts to distract himself with that work. The team there was happy to see him, and he recorded some new monologues and helped to edit some new broadcasts from the moon, focusing on the parts of his experiences up there that he had not had time to make into shows while actually there. Reviewing the footage he had taken there was unsettling. The moon looked like its own ghost, all sterile grayness and cool indoorness, with the lunar g lofting people in slo-mo. All that seeped out of the visuals and grabbed him a little. He couldn’t decide whether he wanted to go back or not.

He stopped wearing the exoskeleton as soon as he felt stronger; after that he kept it around for a while, to put on when he got tired to the point of collapse. But after a couple more weeks he could dispense with it entirely, and he had it returned by bike cart courier to its shop. Reality had returned to his body, and he was relieved to find he was not as old as he had thought on first return.

During the days he kept trying to record and edit episodes of his show. At night he walked the streets. It remained a perpetual pleasure to see the stars so well from Beijing. Like everyone else of a certain age, he was extremely impressed by the clean air. Then a wind from the north brought with it clouds of loess, that Ice Age dust and sand from the north that turned the air yellow and the sunsets lurid. This some older people at the studio found nostalgic, as it brought back their youths. They said, Remember when the sky was black by day and white by night? Remember when you could chew it? It was dirty, sure, poisonous, no doubt, but there was a kind of excitement in it too. We were changing the world so fast we turned the sky black!

We were killing ourselves, Ta Shu would reply. We were breathing coal dust, it gave you miners’ lung.

But it was so exciting!

Poison is exciting, I suppose.

He recorded an audio piece about that, and about the feeling of walking on Earth after walking on the moon; and about the old work unit compounds, and the breaking of the iron rice bowl. About the people he saw in the city whose bike was their home. Almost all these recordings were unusable.

Then after some weeks had passed, with very little to show for them, he got a call from Peng Ling. “Want to hear a good story?”

“Yes.”

She instructed him to meet her at a certain waffle shop near the city center.

This restaurant turned out to be a big tall room with a balcony at the back, its airy space entirely filled with antique chandeliers, perhaps fifty of them, individually junky, together rather magnificent. Ta Shu noticed the feng shui mirrors carefully set in their proper places, also the considered angles of the doorways; these interior designers had known what they were doing. They had flair.

Peng Ling was tucked into a little corner table on the balcony, where one could see everything without being much seen.

Ta Shu sat down across from her, and after the niceties, and the arrival of tea and waffles, he said, “Please tell me this good story you mentioned.”

“Sure. It’s funny. I’ve been digging around in the intelligence and security maze, a real house of mirrors I’m sorry to say, and one of my friends on the inside wanted to tell this tale on a colleague of his. Apparently Chan Qi and the young American man you met were seized at the spaceport by agents of the Ministry of Public Security. That’s what you saw. But the boss of that field unit didn’t want them—he didn’t want to be the one holding Chan Qi when Chan Guoliang found out what had happened. Chan can be very tough, he has a temper, and his people were already on the hunt for his daughter, as you can imagine. If it had been State Security, they would have held on to Qi to give her to Huyou, but Public Security just wants to stay out of trouble. So the local boss ordered his field unit to give her to someone else—but no one wanted to take her!” Ling laughed at this. “And all the while she was threatening them with what her father would do to them. And she was smart, I’m told—she emphasized they would lose their funding, have their whole unit disbanded, then get fired and thrown out of their homes. For people like that, this was a worse threat than any ankle press. And she had all the details right as to how it would go down. She even knew some of their names! So that’s why they let her go.”

“But then no one knew where they went.”

“That’s right. Turns out they headed south, probably by train. It looks like she has some helpers who can give her IDs when she needs them, and they must have generated one for the American too. So the two got off in Shekou, and after some meetings there, they went down to the ferry port and disappeared.”

“Truly?”

“It seems so. Pretty impressive. All her helpers seem to have an ability to disappear, which implies there are some real powers involved. To disrupt surveillance like that suggests people inside the Great Eyeball are involved, but maybe not. Disappearing might be easier than some people think it is. Although eventually people do tend to reappear, one way or another. So, just last week our two missing ones were spotted in Hong Kong and picked up by one of the security agencies. Some of my own agents witnessed this, and because quite a few intelligence agencies have concluded Chan Qi is in the top leadership of the migrant rights movement, and is working with the Hong Kong separatists and other dissident groups, there was a bit of a fight to claim her for questioning. I thought that could get ugly, so I had my people go in and take her and her American friend.”

“Good to hear,” Ta Shu said. “She’s that powerful, then?”

“I think so. All the dissident groups in South China, and maybe everywhere, appear to be coalescing into a single larger social force, and some say that’s because of her. She’s more and more often said to be the real power in all that.”

“That can be dangerous, to be seen as that,” Ta Shu suggested.

Peng Ling nodded deeply, as if to say Don’t I know it. “Very dangerous. Some elements of the security apparatus would clearly now prefer that she be disappeared outright, as being a danger to the state. There’s enough people thinking that way, and the infighting is getting so intense, that I fear for her safety. Someone could decide that if she just disappeared forever, then they couldn’t be blamed either for having her or harming her, because no one would know who to blame! So for a lot of people it’s just a question of getting rid of her without being known to be the last one in possession of her. If they could be sure of that, then boom. No one would ever see her again. No body would ever be found.”

Ta Shu shook his head grimly. He could see the forces colliding like some horrific car crash, with Chan Qi and Fred at the center of it, defenseless. “Really dangerous,” he agreed. “But you said your agency has them now.”

“Yes, but my people are not all-powerful. No one is.”

“So what do you think we should do?”

“We?”

“What do you think I should do, then?”

She sipped her tea. “I think you could help. You know Fang Fei, right?”

“I’ve met him a few times.”

“He’s a fan of your work.”

“So I’ve been told. He’s never said it to me directly.”

“I’ve heard it. A lot of people are fans of yours.”

“Thirty years ago.”

“No, that’s your poetry. Now it’s your cloud show that has lots of fans. And Fang Fei is one of them. He said that to me once when your name came up.”

“I bet he’s really just a fan of yours.”

“Maybe so. Anyway, he’s got his own space company.”

“I know. One of the Four Space Cadets.” This referred to four billionaires of a certain age who had had an interest in space, forming companies and pushing human activities above the atmosphere.

Ling said, “He’s the spaciest of the four. And I’ve asked him for help. Because I’m thinking that these two young people would be safer back on the moon than they can be here. They’re so hot right now that I’m afraid they’re putting my own agents in danger. So I’d like to get them up to Fang Fei, who can hide them on the moon until whatever trouble they’re in can either be resolved or just waited out. Then they could come home.”

“You think so?” Ta Shu said.

“My security advisers think it’s the best of our not very good options. My people had to throw their weight around to take possession of those two, so now tensions are high. We need to move them off the map for a while. After that tensions will go down, I hope. So I want to tuck them away in Fang Fei’s refuge on the moon. Fang Fei is willing to take them, but I mentioned to him that they had traveled with you last time, and he liked the idea that you would join them again. He wants to meet you again, and it’s true that on the way to him, no one would dare to disappear you, so when they’re with you they would be safer. Basically, you can escort them to a safer place.”

“But what place is safe up there?”

“I’m told Fang has some secret bases of his own. And his space company generates their own manifests and cargoes. Everyone registers with the China Space Agency when they leave Earth, but a system as big as Fang’s can slip a few people by. It’s like I told you, there is no total system. In the fracturing there are informational bubbles cut off from everywhere else. Get them into such a bubble, move it to the moon, stash them away for a while, see if their problems can be solved while keeping them safe. What do you think?”

Ta Shu shrugged. “Better than their situation here, it sounds like. But I have to say, it’s a very little world up there.”

“Maybe not as little as you thought. Did you see any of these secret bases, or even hear about them?”

“No.”

“Well, they’re there.”

“I don’t see how anything could truly hide up there.”

“Apparently there are ways. So what do you say?”

“I’d like to help, so I guess I’m willing to try.”

“Good. My people will get you to Fang Fei’s spaceport.”

“When?”

“As soon as you can pack.”