Red Moon

CHAPTER TEN Zhongguo Meng China Dream

Ta Shu found it impressive to see Peng’s team in action, a group of men and women who dressed and looked like janitors but moved like gymnasts. They arrived suspiciously soon after Ta Shu had agreed to help Peng Ling, as if it had been a foregone conclusion he would help, and maybe it had. Ling knew he was fond of her, and she knew he was happy that she thought of him as one of her resources. So she must have been pretty sure he would agree to her request.

Now they led him through empty hallways outside to a van. They drove him to his apartment without asking for its address. He packed quickly, same stuff he had taken to the moon before; then he was driven for a couple of hours. In the hills west of the city the van passed through gates flanking the road, into a compound that stretched for as far as he could see. An airstrip, in fact, with a little control tower next to a row of small hangars. A private airport, either Party or otherwise, there was no way to tell.

A small jet stood on a pad next to one hangar, and he was driven to it. When they got out of the van, some of the people who had been in it ascended stairs into the plane, others went into the hangar. As Ta Shu waited at the foot of the plane, a pair of young women hurried over from the control tower, one of them carrying a small suitcase.

“We request that you take this communication device to Chan Qi, please.”

Ta Shu said, “Who gave this to you?”

One of the women said, “A friend of Chan Qi’s, who wants to stay in touch with her. That would be good for all concerned. It is a secure communications device. She will know what to do with it.”

Ta Shu considered it. A private telephone line, like, he recalled, the one Fred had tried to deliver to Chang Yazu. Not a good thought. On the other hand, communication could be good; and one could always hang up if it wasn’t. Exchanging information and views was almost always useful.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll give it to her. I can’t say what she’ll do with it.”

“Thank you.”

Ta Shu took the heavy little computerlike thing up into the jet and sat in a window seat. Soon the jet took off and headed south. He leaned his head against the window and fell asleep. When he woke again they were landing. He didn’t recognize the landscape, but thought it might be highlands in the south. Somewhere west of the Hu Line, that seemed certain.

The jet landed and taxied to a halt. They got out and walked toward a mansion on a hill. Beyond it a skeletal rocket gantry stood on a big concrete pad. A private spaceport, apparently. A rocket was being wheeled out of a tall hangar. It looked small from a distance, but as they approached it kept growing in his sight; it was the hills behind that had made it seem small. In fact it appeared to be about the same size as the one Ta Shu had gotten into a couple of months before, on his first trip to the moon. As tall as that one, for sure, but not as thick.

“Will it go directly to the moon?” he asked one of his escorts. He knew there were rockets that took people only up to Earth orbit, where they transferred to bigger spaceships that passed the moon in a permanent figure eight with Earth. The little transfer shuttles to and from these big spaceships were said to inflict tremendous g forces, so he was afraid he would have to make one of those kinds of transfers.

But one escort replied, “Yes, the passenger compartment of this one goes right to the moon. The booster stage will come back down after your launch and land right over there.” She pointed across the concrete pad.

“Very nice.”

He was led into the mansion, where he found Chan Qi and Fred Fredericks sitting on a couch. They were startled to see him, and then, as they digested the implications of his appearance, Fred at least looked hopeful.

Qi not so much. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“I’ve got a friend in a very high place who is worried for your safety, and thinks you’ll be safer on the moon than you are here,” Ta Shu told them. “Apparently there are places up there we didn’t know about, secret places where you can hide for a while with proper security to protect you. So it’s been recommended that you hide there, and I’ve been asked to come with you.”

“What about her baby?” Fred said.

Qi glared at him. “Let me worry about that.”

“Sorry.”

She did not look appeased. “If this is what it takes to stay free, I’m willing to do it. My baby will be okay. The gibbon babies up there are okay. Babies are always floating in amniotic fluid, so they’re always in a lighter g. And whale and dolphin babies are okay, and they grow in almost zero g.”

Fred shrugged, gazing at the floor in what Ta Shu was coming to recognize as his usual manner. He looked unhappy. Maybe the idea of the moon frightened him; after his previous visit, that would make sense. Ta Shu said to him, “Whatever happened to you up there before, it won’t be like that this time. And it could be that a resolution to your problem is more likely to happen up there than here.”

Fred shrugged again and said, “I’m ready.”

So: back to the moon.

The launch from Earth was the usual big push. There was no view to be had, so there was nothing to distract one from the squishing of one’s body. Glancing once across their little chamber, Ta Shu saw Qi grimacing, but she looked more determined than pained. It was just one more in the sequence of gravity shocks that the baby inside her had undergone, her look said. This launch pressure would be followed by three days of weightlessness, followed by a brief decelerative squish, then some period of time in lunar g, with centrifuge reversions to one g, if she wanted them. Variations in g might be worse for fetal development than a steady lunar g; there was no way to be sure. She and her kid were definitely experiments.

Nevertheless, they were on their way back to the moon. After all the launch pressure they floated around a small but luxurious cabin. Now Ta Shu and Fred could float into a corner and strap themselves in, and suck on some bulbs of tea, and finally catch up. Fred had had a busy time of it, to the point where he couldn’t seem to talk about it very well. Ta Shu had to excavate the story out of him question by question, but eventually he understood how Fred and Qi had stayed hidden for so long; they had gone to ground and stayed there, simple as that. Only after they ventured out had they been recaptured, Fred wasn’t sure how. In fact Ta Shu knew more about what had happened to them after their capture in Hong Kong than they did themselves. He could explain a bit of that, and also explain how returning to the moon might be helpful to Fred.

“You’ll be under the protection of a very powerful faction in the Chinese government, that’s the main thing. They’ll push the investigation of what happened to you last time. On Earth there were too many factions after you, some of them quite dangerous. So I think this makes sense.”

“I hope so. Do you know if my family got word that I was okay?”

“I don’t know, but I can ask people to find out.”

“I want them to know.”

“I understand, but it will be important to be discreet about that. If there are people trying to harm you, you don’t want to remind anyone of your family’s existence.”

He looked even more unhappy.

Ta Shu patted him on the arm, said to him, “This should keep you out of the hands of the factions down there who are Qi’s enemies, also her father’s enemies. That could have gotten bad.”

“It was bad.”

“I mean worse.”

Fred nodded to show he understood. Ta Shu was not sure he did, but then again, he looked much warier than he had when they had met during their first moon landing. He had gone through a lot since then. He was pale; he had gotten sick in Hong Kong, he said, and had not yet fully recovered.

Qi, on the other hand, looked full of energy. Sophisticated; powerful. Ta Shu was reminded of Peng Ling, and not just Ling the student of twenty years before, but the current chairperson of the standing committee. Qi had that same kind of tiger gaze. Well, she was the daughter of a tiger, and princelings often enjoyed the shade of trees planted by the ancestors. So it was not so surprising.

Now as they waited out their transit, moving from sleep to meals to gazing out the window, she had questions for him. First, of course, concerning who exactly it was he was referring to, when he spoke of their benefactor.

She was very interested when he told her it was Peng Ling. “Peng!” she said. “She used to be an ally of my father’s, but now that may be changing. They are both possible candidates for the next presidency. I don’t know if I trust her.”

“That’s something only you can decide,” Ta Shu said.

She was also very interested in the communication device Ta Shu now pulled from the luggage compartment and handed to her. As he gave it to her he said, “All I know about this is that someone who knew where you were going, and knew I was going to join you, wanted you to have it. They said it was from someone who wanted to help you. I can’t vouch for it beyond that.”

The little box had a glossy operations screen on its top. Qi took it from him with a suspicious look and then handed it over immediately to Fred, who inspected it closely.

“Is it made by your company?” Ta Shu asked him.

“No,” Fred said. “It’s Chinese. The qubits in it are probably yttrium molecules in a matrix of platinum. Either that or diamonds with nitrogen trapped in their flaws.”

“Can it be used to track us?” Qi asked.

“No,” Fred said. “It’s basically a radio phone. What people call a unicaster, in that it only broadcasts to its twin. The quantum array in it is entangled with the complementary array in the phone it’s paired with, so communication between the two is encrypted in a way that can’t be cracked.”

“And the other one could be anywhere?” Ta Shu said. “Non-locality?”

Fred tilted his head to the side; Ta Shu saw that this was a move he made when he was thinking about something he liked to think about. “The other one could be anywhere and it would stay entangled with this one. Anywhere in the universe, in theory. But it has to be within radio range to actually communicate with the other one. It doesn’t take much power to transmit from the Earth to the moon. But this one is small enough that it’s probably what people in the business call a telegraph. It sends a small bit rate at low power in a narrow bandwidth. So it probably just sends texts.”

“But it can’t give away where we are,” Qi repeated.

“No. Essentially it’s just a secure private text line.”

Qi looked at it dubiously.

“It can never hurt to talk to people,” Ta Shu suggested.

“As long as they can’t find you,” she said.

The hours of their transit passed. Their chamber had a single small round window; in it from time to time they saw Earth, each time smaller, the gorgeous blue ball glowing in a way that belied all its troubles. It was hard to believe they were as far away from it as they were. It was also hard to believe that it was what it was. Thinking of Zhou Bao, Ta Shu tapped onto his pad:

They came down on retro-rockets, which meant the speed of their landing was very slight compared to that of their previous arrival. Ta Shu looked at Fred and saw Fred glance at him; no doubt he also was remembering their meteoric stoop onto the piste at the south pole. That had been quite a moment. Ta Shu smiled, and Fred dipped his head.

This time they were landing on the far side of the moon, they had been told, on a pad just inside the rugged mountain rim of Tsiolkovsky Crater, a big crater in the generally rocky landscape of the far side. When their spaceship was down, the pad they had landed on rose a little under them, then wheeled their craft into a tall gap in the arcing inside wall of Tsiolkovsky Crater. This gap proved to be an entryway to an enormous rock-walled vestibule, which contained on its inside wall a door as tall as the rocket. The door opened; the rocket and its platform rolled inside it, the giant doors slid shut and closed behind them. They were inside the moon, rocket and all.

This place was Fang Fei’s hidden refuge, a crew member told them. A secret world, and even bigger than it first appeared, because the tall tunnel they had been wheeled into proved to be just an antechamber. From there they were wheeled through two more sets of giant doors, and after the last ones had closed behind them, their rocket’s outer doors simply opened, and their crew led them out of the craft and down a set of stairs, in a slight wind of warm dry air. They were invited to sit on the rear seats of a big electric cart, and when they did that they were driven through another tunnel, then out an open doorway into a bigger space.

Mountains and rivers without end. They seemed to be in a valley that extended forever ahead of them, as in the old scroll paintings. A lava tunnel, Ta Shu guessed. A very big lava tunnel; and transformed into classical China. Forested hills sloped up each side of the long U-shaped valley, giving way to steep rocky gray crags. A bright pseudo-sky arced overhead, and misty scraps of white cloud drifted under this glowing blue barrel vault. On one of the peaks to their right stood a little octagonal pagoda with a blue ceramic tile roof. The lowest cloud bottoms misted the tips of enormous pine trees topping the hillside forests. On the valley’s long winding floor, a series of ponds were linked by a stream that meandered through terraced fields of barley and green rice. Peach trees flowered on the banks of this stream. The ponds were bordered by round willow trees, drooping their branches into green water. Deck pavilions flanked the ponds here and there, decorated by red banners. Little dragon boats floated on the biggest lake. Stepped wooden bridges arched over the stream, allowing crossings from one tiny village to another, each a knot of low stuccoed buildings roofed with little brown tiles. A pair of Buddhist monks walked up a path toward them.

“Wow,” Fred said. “What is this place?”

“Zhongguo Meng!” Ta Shu said, feeling the helpless grin on his face. “China Dream.”