Red Moon

CHAPTER ELEVEN xiaokang Ideal Equal Society

During her tenure in the Secret Service’s intelligence division, a superblack division unknown to the other agencies and to Congress, Valerie Tong had often been sent into the field as part of the State Department’s foreign service, as now on the moon. It was a bit obvious, the seemingly minor foreign service functionary who was really the spook on station, and the State Department didn’t like hosting her, but the president got to call the shots in the executive branch, and this one liked to have one of his own agents on the scene of anything he was interested in. So she went where he wanted her to go.

On the moon she was finding that different protocols obtained. The American consulate at the Chinese south pole was so small that everyone in it had to do double or triple duty, which meant almost everyone there was gathering intelligence for someone or other, while also being too busy to pay much attention to the details of other people’s work.

She had an encrypted link home, and now it gave her a new directive: Fred Fredericks, the American who had disappeared while in Chinese custody a couple of months before, causing an intense diplomatic dispute that by now was folded into the larger Chinese-American scrum, was thought to have been moved to China, and now it was reported that he had gone back to the moon, traveling with the daughter of the Chinese finance minister. It would be extremely useful if these two could be located. Highest priority.

Not coincidentally, she suspected, John Semple asked her to accompany him on a visit to the main American base, at the moon’s north pole. She was given an hour to get ready.

“What’s going on?” Valerie asked John Semple during their flight north.

“What do you mean?” John asked with that little smile.

Valerie was really getting tired of the way she seemed to amuse him. She said, “I got a request from home to look for that Fred Fredericks again. He’s supposed to be back up here with a Chinese woman.”

“A Chinese woman?”

“Daughter of their finance minister.”

“Exactly. Chan Qi, daughter of Chan Guoliang, one of their biggest tigers. He’s the finance minister now, although he’s held a lot of positions, like they all have. They treat governing like a profession there. It makes a difference.”

“Maybe that makes it harder to compete with them here.”

“We’re not competing with them here.”

“No?”

“No. They’ve already got this place sewn up. A head start like they got, you can’t catch up. They’re faster at infrastructure anyway, and up here that’s what it’s all about.”

“So there’s no fight for the moon.”

“I didn’t say that. I said it wasn’t between us and them. It’s between various Chinese factions.”

“Which ones?”

“Who can tell? I’m not even sure they know themselves.”

“That must make it hard for them to know what to do.”

“I think so. That’s where their system lets them down, if you ask me. The Party is above the law, so they’re always improvising.”

“What about on Earth?”

“We just don’t know. Anyone who’s been in their Politburo, when they retire they aren’t allowed to leave China. They go to the countryside and aren’t seen anymore. None of them do interviews or write their memoirs. So no one on the outside knows what’s going on in there. Who’s fighting for what? We don’t know. We only see that they’re fighting. Wolidou, isn’t that the word they use for it?”

“Infighting,” Valerie confirmed. “But might that fighting help us?”

“No. We have allies in Chinese government, and we do good things with them. But our allies there have enemies there. When those enemies mess with us, they’re usually mainly trying to mess with their enemies there. So, you know. China and the US are like Siamese twins.”

“Conjoined twins.”

“Exactly. Joined at the hip. Producer and consumer. Saviors of the world. Partners in crime. All that. So when China’s having trouble, we’re having trouble. And we’ve already got enough trouble. That householders’ strike is bringing down Wall Street, and no one knows what will come of that. People are withdrawing their deposits and putting them in various blockchain currencies, or carboncoins, or new credit unions. So finance is crashing and the Fed is going to have to intervene. Then there’s that little matter you came up to look at, the cloud currency called the virtual US Dollar.”

Valerie said, “Some tests we’ve done seem to show that it really is convertible to real dollars. It looks like that’s being funded by some part of the Chinese government. One of the regional banks says they’ll convert these crypto US Dollars to the Fed’s real US dollars at par.”

“Right,” John said. “And they have two trillion dollars in treasury bonds to back that up. So, if Chan Guoliang is involved with using those bonds to back this virtual dollar, as it seems like he should be, seeing as he’s minister of finance, then that’s bad, because we thought he was on our side. But if it’s President Shanzhai, going through one of their regional banks to hurt Chan during their Party congress, then that’s a different kind of bad.”

“But you don’t think they’re aiming it at us?”

“No. They don’t want us to crash.”

“Why not?”

“Because if you owe a million, that’s your problem, but if you owe a trillion, that’s your debt holder’s problem. China needs us to do well so we can pay what we owe them. So this attack on the dollar doesn’t make sense, except in terms of infighting at the top there. Which is totally opaque.”

“And the moon?”

“This might be a place where their infighting is easier to see. Like that murder of Governor Chang, have you found out any more about that?”

Valerie said, “I’ve kept asking Inspector Jiang what’s happening with the investigation, like every couple of days. It’s clear he’s angry that he isn’t making more progress, maybe that’s one example of what you were saying about seeing them better here. He did tell me that he found out Chang used to work for their minister of state security, Huyou.”

“Hmmm. That could cut both ways.”

“Sure. Jiang’s trying to find out whether Chang might have split with Huyou, or worked with him on something questionable. Jiang was pretty vague about it, but he was clearly onto something he found interesting. Then he also said he found out that the phone paired with the one that Fredericks gave to Chang was delivered to Huairen Hall in Beijing, where the standing committee has its offices.”

“Interesting,” John said. “Well, it makes sense that Chang was well connected. The moon is a big prize for whoever is seen to be in charge here.”

“So it might be caught up in the struggle for who becomes the next president?”

“Yes.” John looked at her. “Is the Secret Service up on any of this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is the president up on any of this?”

“I don’t know. You report to him too, right?”

“We try.”

On their flight north, their rocket made a stop in the Procellarum KREEP zone, to drop off a clutch of mining engineers. Valerie looked out a window at the moonscape expecting to see the same monochrome craterscape that seemed completely ubiquitous, but here it was surprisingly different: a broad white plane was marred only by a single mountain range, which was not arced like the crater rims always were, but instead ran straight across the flats surrounding it, thus resembling some big mountain range on Earth. The Harbinger Mountains, Valerie was told by one of the mining engineers.

Procellarum was the most mineral-rich area on the moon, this engineer told her as their craft descended. It was the right eye of the Man in the Moon, a basin so big that it had been named Oceanus rather than Mare by the early astronomers. It had been the last part of the lunar crust to cool down and harden after the moon had recoalesced from the fragments of the Gaia-Theia collision, and because it was the last pool of liquid lava, all the lightest elements available had floated up into it and then hardened into the crust. Thus KREEP, the K standing for potassium, REE for rare earth elements, and P for phosphorus.

“And now we’re mining that?” Valerie asked. “It’s an American operation?”

The engineer nodded. They were sending the potassium and phosphorus to the north pole base to aid the local agriculture, and they threw the rare earths home to Earth. Some heavy-duty high-capacity launch rails had been built at the north end of Procellarum, to be as near the north pole base as possible. These launch rails cast freighters full of refined rare earths down to low-Earth orbit, and later piecemeal down to Earth. It was the biggest American operation on the moon by far, and almost the only way the moon was actually proving of use to humanity, in this miner’s opinion.

“You’re not breaking the Outer Space Treaty?” Valerie asked.

The engineer didn’t think so. The mines were kept underground and the surface therefore was left mostly unmarked. No open pit mines or strip mines. And they were taking less than a hundredth of one percent of the available minerals, if even that. And none of it was going to the military, not directly anyway. Basically it was claimed to be a scientific experiment, testing various aspects of mining. Kind of like how Japan did scientific testing on whales. So it conformed pretty well to treaty regulations.

They came down on a landing pad cut into the lowlands next to the Harbinger Mountains, which as they got lower looked positively Himalayan in their stark vertical grandeur. The mining station looked like any small airport anywhere. Strangely, given Valerie’s preexisting conclusion that the moon was tediously the same everywhere, some patches of land flanking the mountain range were parti-colored. The colors were subtle but definite: tans, pinks, pale greens, even one patch of vivid lemon. KREEPy land, the engineer confirmed. Frozen lakes of rare earth elements, rising to the top when the moon had been a coalescing ball of liquid-hot elements.

Inside the station everyone was led up into a bubble dome that poked out of the ground. From here they had a magnificent view of the Harbingers, and after the sterile monochromatic grays of the rest of the moon, the pastel patchwork on the land struck Valerie’s eye as an intense relief: broad swathes of mauve, burgundy, olive, yellow. She hummed, she drank it in.

But this was not what the locals were now excited to see; they were all getting prepared to witness a solar eclipse, and not only that, but the landing of a chunk of carbonaceous chondritic asteroid during this eclipse as well. The latter had been timed to happen during the former, apparently just to see how it would look.

The sun overhead already had a big bite taken out of it, easy to see after they put eclipse glasses on. That black arc biting it was the Earth, getting between the sun and the moon. The colors on the land that Valerie was so enjoying were getting easier to see as the usual blaze of sunlight was reduced.

Through the course of the next couple of hours, the rest of the sun was eaten. As the process reached its apotheosis, the lunar landscape around them darkened. Then the moment came when they could look up without their eclipse glasses, and see overhead a thin red ring in the sky, a glowing red tracery of a band, pulsing and shimmering. This apparently was Earth’s atmosphere, lit up and glowing like a corona around the black circle that was the Earth. The black circle was duskier than the starry black of space, and through binoculars and other scopes one could see what seemed to be stars dotting it; these were cities on Earth’s night side.

Eclipses were fairly common on the moon, Valerie and John were told. The red annular band surrounding Earth was sunlight bending through the atmosphere; this phenomenon explained why people on Earth looking up at a lunar eclipse saw the moon turn a dusky red.

And indeed the land around them was now that same color. When they finally looked down from the mesmerizing sight of the red ring in the sky, they saw that the land around them had turned both dark and distinctly red. It was somewhat like the color of a red sunset on Earth, but darker and more intense, a subtly shifting array of dim blackish reds, all coated by a dusty copper sheen. The previously pastel patches of rare earths were now shifted to purples and forest greens and rusty browns. But these were highlights in what was for the most part a dark red land, strong in both color and mood. It reminded Valerie of the last scene in a Parsifal she had seen in New York the year before, in which the chorus had waded across a stage knee-deep in blood. The Harbinger Mountains now reared like a bloody dragon spine out of an ocean of blood. Harbingers indeed! War—chaos—bloodshed—

“Okay, here it comes,” someone said, and then a big gray blob shot over the horizon, a brilliant blaze of light pouring out of its forward end against the direction of its movement. Faster than Valerie could take in a breath it slammed into the moon, and a great gout of fire flew back up toward the stars, extra bright in the eclipse darkness, arcing down lazily like fireworks.

The locals cheered. “Carbon!” the miner explained to Valerie and John. “They cut off a chunk of the asteroid we put into lunar orbit, and drop it to the surface with a mass driver that works like a retro-rocket. It doesn’t completely work, but it doesn’t have to—all you need is a collision that doesn’t vaporize the impactor, and leaves it mostly at the crash site. So it augers in at about the same speed as a jet on Earth, and boom. Carbon.”

“KREEPy,” John Semple remarked. The miners laughed and popped champagne bottles, and wandered the room toasting the sight of the crimson metallic sheens out there around them. Valerie shuddered and kept her bloody thoughts to herself. She took a glass and drank with the rest, clinked her glass with John Semple’s when he offered.

“Red moon!” he said. “Awesome!”

“Yes,” Valerie agreed coolly.

He grinned at her. He knew she disliked his uncultured shtick, so he was tweaking her by playing it even harder; she saw that, she saw that he saw that she saw it, and so on to infinity; and still he did it. It was very irritating.

When the sun came back they flew on to the north pole.

The north pole’s permanently sunlit area was slightly smaller than the corresponding district at the south pole, but its permanently shadowed craters held a bit more water than the south’s, so the two regions were about equivalent as suitable places to settle. The north pole was the United States’ home base on the moon, as it was for the Swiss, the European Union, Russia, South Africa, India, Iran, and Brazil. The Chinese staffed a consulate in the Brazilian station.

As their shuttle descended, Valerie looked out a window and saw the usual overlapping gray craters, with several rims marked by a number of low settlements. Her view from above, showing as it did such a mix of design styles, reminded her of an architectural charrette. The American base was the biggest, naturally, but it had not managed to claim the highest ground on the rim of Peary, occupied by the Brazilians six months before the Americans had arrived. The Brazilian base enjoyed ninety-seven percent constant sunlight, the Americans eighty-nine percent; the rest of the bases ranged between those two, with the Iranians, slightly farther south on the near side, at eighty-three percent.

As they descended, Valerie asked John Semple whom she should talk to in order to pursue her various inquiries.

He shrugged. “NSA has good intel on this place, and I like their analysts on station. I’ll introduce you to them. And to some other friends of mine, because this town is the place where you can get a sense of how life on the moon can change your priorities.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hopefully you’ll find out. There’s a couple internationals you need to meet.”

“Like who?”

“You’ll find out.”

“How?”

He smiled. He really was amused by her far too often. “It’s called intelligence for a reason.”

The social life between the north pole stations resembled the embassy circuit in Washington, DC. Every station hosted a mixer for the rest to attend. On the moon that wasn’t so simple on the logistical level, because although the stations clustered fairly close around the pole to catch as much sunlight as possible, one still had to get in spacesuit or rover and then walk or drive to the other bases, then get through locks or jetways and get out of spacesuits, always a hassle. To avoid spacesuits most people drove, even if it was only to go a hundred meters. And after all that they had to assemble in rooms not quite big enough to hold the entire polar population. In truth, compared to the Chinese complex sprawling around the south pole, Valerie found the whole scene pretty unimpressive.

John had suggested she attend the mixer at the Brazilian base, so she did. There all the tropical plants and colorful décor combined with the lunar gravity to create a little Carnaval thrill. The crush of people made everyone dance a little just to keep their balance. People collided, held each other upright, said hi to strangers who barged unintentionally into conversations, and in general acted like they were swimming around in chest-high water, slightly tipsy, drinks in hand.

At a certain point in the evening Valerie turned to the only woman near her and introduced herself. This woman turned out to be Russian, her English accented but articulate. Anna Kanina. Not Karenina. Very likely some kind of equivalent role to Valerie’s, but no way to be sure.

“Have you been here long?” Anna asked.

“Not long,” Valerie said. “And you?”

“Almost a year. I go home soon.”

“Are you looking forward to that?”

“No. I like it here.”

“What’s your job up here?”

“Spy.” Anna then laughed at Valerie’s expression. “Not really! I say that to see if you are spy. Which I see you are. Actually I do radio astronomy, over on the back side.”

“Is that a Russian observatory?”

“International. Mostly EU, in terms of who built it. But now it’s run by the IAU. You should come to visit.”

“Is it interesting?”

“No. But it’s always good to get to far side of moon, if you’re an astronomer anyway.”

Valerie thought it over. “Are there Chinese bases on the far side?”

“I don’t know. I’m neither sinologist nor selenologist.”

“Just an astronomer.”

“Right. If you want to learn more about selenology, the political kind, you should talk to Ginger Ellis, who runs the greenhouse in your building.”

“Really?”

“If she’ll talk, you will learn.”

So she really was a spy.

Women on the moon were a minority. Among the Americans they were said to constitute thirty-five percent of the population. On the moon, as elsewhere, that gender balance could feel somewhat like parity, and certainly normal for a situation like this one, with its strong element of construction and engineering. Using your hands to build things outdoors usually meant you were male. Make it an exotic outdoors and the percentage of women usually rose, true here as elsewhere. But it was still not fifty-fifty. That meant there was a certain solidarity among the women on hand, or so it seemed to Valerie. Everyone said hi and exchanged a little conversation in the course of doing business. People usually explained what they did on the moon, especially if they were meeting for the first time.

So now Valerie went looking for Ginger Ellis, and found her in the base’s greenhouse. This was again a big glass-walled round room with a 360-degree view, as tight-horizoned and monotonous as those one saw from the Chinese greenhouses at the south pole. Valerie introduced herself as a presidential assistant, and Ginger nodded and said she knew that.

“Do the plants grow taller here?” Valerie asked, looking around.

“Taller and spindlier. We put the least happy crops in a centrifuge, but mostly we harvest early, or just plant low plants. It’s not a good place for corn.”

“I can see how that would be.”

Now Ginger Ellis was staring at her. “And what is it that you can’t see?”

“I can’t see why people in the other stations think you’re the person who runs this one.”

Ginger laughed. “I grow their food.”

“But most of the food is shipped up, right? Even freshies?”

“My tomatoes rule,” Ginger said. “Anyone will tell you that. Heirlooms, never refrigerated. People beg me for them. I don’t even wash them.”

“Is that good?”

“Of course. Vine-ripe organics? What, aren’t you a foodie?”

“I am. But I do wash my veggies.”

“Don’t. Especially here. It’s already too sterile here, people get sick from being too clean.”

“So I should eat some dirt from time to time?”

“I do that, yes. Just a little, but sure.”

Valerie made a face. “Maybe in a pill.”

Ginger shook her head. “Just eat dirt.”

“Okay,” Valerie said. “Farm to fork, dirt included. But tell me what the hell is going on up here.”

Ginger stared at her, unfazed. “What? We’re here. We’re doing the moon.”

“But why?”

“Because it’s there. As they say.”

“Because the Chinese are there, you mean.”

“Well, sure. They’ve got the south pole, we’ve got the north pole.”

“Lots of countries have got the north pole.”

“Which means we have friends and they don’t.”

“Which means they don’t have to share.”

“Share what? There’s nothing to share.”

“I’ve heard that, but I was wondering if you thought it was true. Aren’t there things up here that are getting scarce on Earth? Like from those mines I saw on the way here?”

“No.” Ginger laughed. “The moon isn’t good for anything. Except as a launchpad. That’s what I think the Chinese are really focused on.”

“But a launchpad to where?”

“To anywhere. It’s cheaper to launch stuff from here than from Earth, which makes it easier to go farther out.”

“Are the Chinese already going farther out?”

“Sure. Everyone is. The Chinese are focused on Venus and the asteroids.”

“Isn’t Venus useless?”

“Yes, but they’re building a floating station in its atmosphere, like a city inside a blimp. And they’re sending big chunks of aluminum from here to Venus orbit. Looks like they’re thinking of building a sunshade at Venus’s L2 point to shade Venus completely, to cool it down. It’s a very Chinese project, some kind of thousand-year plan or whatever. It’s crazy, but if you don’t include Venus in your thinking, you can’t really understand the Chinese presence here.”

“So the Chinese are going to be the first ones to yet another place?”

“Yes. But the solar system is big. We don’t have to worry about every crazy idea the Chinese choose to pursue.”

“Don’t we?”

“I don’t think so. It’s not a zero-sum game.”

“But what if there are people in Washington who think it is—wouldn’t they come up here and try to do something about it?”

“Like what?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

“I don’t know. People may be doing that, trying to mess with them, but it would be stupid. I don’t think there’s anything we can or should do about other governments’ activities in space.”

“You’re very unconcerned!”

“It’s true. Maybe that’s because I grow such fine tomatoes.”

“Can I have one?”

“Let’s slice a couple and have a caprese salad. I grow the basil too.”

She sliced the tomatoes on a big cutting block right next to her potting station. Ingredients were indeed unwashed. Valerie ate a delicious forkful or two and said, “Wow, they are good. The basil too.”

“I grow ten kinds of basil, it’s wonderful.”

“Where do you get the mozzarella?”

“From Italy. Lots of food is shipped up, like you said. It’s like any other local food movement. If the local stuff reaches thirty percent, you’re totally eating off the land.”

“So, but don’t you think there are some American agencies trying to mess with the Chinese up here?”

“No doubt. And vice versa too. This cryptocurrency called virtual US Dollars, for instance. That’s turning out to be really destabilizing. Combine that with the householder protests, it’s crashing the economy pretty bad. But that hurts the Chinese too, so it’s hard to understand who’s doing it. Here on the moon, neither side is doing much that I can see.”

“And you can see a lot.”

Ginger Ellis stopped chewing, stared at her; swallowed. “Everyone can see a lot. It’s a very small town, the moon. There’s not a lot of places to hide, and people talk.”

“Seems to me there’s tons of places to hide. I’m looking for an American citizen who went missing, for instance, and I’m having no luck finding him. I’m hearing about secret lava tubes and such where they might have hidden him.”

“Oh yeah, John mentioned that. Well, you should come out and see the free crater. Your person might even be out there.”

“Where’s that?”

“South of here.” She grinned at Valerie’s expression. “Worth a visit. Not supervised by any particular department, shall we say.”

“What about you, what department are you?”

“I’m the greenhouse manager.” Her look got sharper. “Don’t you ever get tired of it?”

“Tired of what?”

“Of being so nosy and officious. You’re on the moon, dear. So lighten up! You only weigh about twenty pounds here. Tell you what, let’s go out there together and visit the freebies. You can look for your missing guy, and John seems to want you to see it.”

“He wants the president to know about it?”

“He wants you to know about it.”

“Me?”

“It’s a compliment. He must think you have some potential.”

The free crater, apparently otherwise unnamed, turned out to be a small, high-rimmed, geometrically perfect circle marring the southernmost stretch of the rim of Rozhdestvenskiy Crater, one of the big ones that occupied the near side, to the south of Peary Crater of course, which lay almost exactly on the pole. Valerie joined Ginger at the American rocket facility and was surprised to find John Semple already there. He smiled at her expression. “You think I would miss this?”

They lofted in a small rocket that the pilot called a hopper. Except for a sickeningly fast lift-off, it reminded Valerie of a helicopter. They flew in a helicopteristic way over the dark floor of Rozhdestvenskiy, which had a strange look to it, rumply and glistening. Valerie was told that this was a scrim of ice, that Rozhdestvenskiy was one of the biggest of the ice-floored craters; these craters’ interiors never saw the sunlight, and thus held most of the comet ice that had been deposited in them over the previous four billion years. Apparently their nameless crater, though much smaller, had higher walls and so was even deeper in ice than Rozhdestvenskiy. Like all the sunless polar craters, it was one of the coldest spots in the solar system, never deviating far from 410 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Its rim now featured a flat landing pad, and as they came down on it, they saw that the entire crater was domed with a transparent bubble of some sort.

“Wow,” Valerie said. “Who made this?”

No one answered. They landed vertically with a small bump. A tube snaked out to them and covered their hopper’s lock door, and after some clanking and hissing they walked through the tube into a building. Inside they were led by three guides through hallways toward the inner rim of the crater, emerging onto a platform that was set just under the crater-covering dome.

Apparently the entire space of the crater was aerated and heated, and brightly lit by mirrors and floodlights set all around the rim. From the platform’s edge they could look down and see that the space between the dome and the crater floor was occupied by scores of hanging platforms, maybe hundreds of them; also tall plinths were holding up houses or bare floors, all connected by catwalks and rope ladders, trapezes, and loops of netting, also pod dwellings of various sizes suspended from the dome, or from networks of lines extending from high on the rim; also floating balloons, it seemed, from which hung open-sided rooms. Also floating balls of green bamboo, which grew in all directions, like some kind of Escher trees. The whole thing was Escheresque. An aerial town; and people, tiny in the distance, were jumping from one place to the next, swinging like apes or monkeys.

Startled at the sight, Valerie laughed out loud.

“Try it,” their guides offered, and then leaped off the platform into space. They caught some netting down below, swung gracefully farther on. Valerie, deeply surprised, looked at John Semple.

“Whoa,” John said. She saw he was as surprised as she was, which meant that it had to be his first time here too. Suddenly she saw a chance to get a jump on him, so to speak, because they were going to jump eventually, that was clear, and by going first she might wipe that little smile off his face, make him stop thinking of her as a condescending stick-in-the-mud. Without further ado she ran off the platform into space, shooting far over the network of lines their guides had dropped to. After that she could only look below for something else to catch onto. A bolt of panic shot through her as she felt the one-sixth of a g curving her down and accelerating her; it was slow, but not that slow, and she was feeling quite desperate when she managed to grab a passing rope and redirect herself. This worked; she could do it, she was light and strong enough; and now her mother’s insistence that she do dance and gymnastics finally paid off, in that she was finding some reflexes rising abruptly out of her childhood. Grab and hold on, swing to the side! Tarzan!

After that worked for her a couple more times, she started doing her best to follow their guides, who were proving to be as nimble as orangutans. It was hard to stay near them, because they knew what they were doing. She needed to be careful, but it was not a place for being too careful, because you needed some momentum to swing rather than just hang there. A succession of moves taught her that she could grab and pull herself one-handed if she had to, because she just didn’t weigh very much. It was uncanny. So she swung down net to net, looking for lines and nets ahead and below, following the guides as best she could. It would have helped to know where they were going, but since she didn’t, she didn’t even try to catch them. She just kept them in sight. Above her John was swinging down after her, whooping at each catch, a giant grin on his face. He was going to pass her soon, so she took off again.

They passed platforms displaying furniture that gave them a surreal look: dining rooms in space, an immense ping-pong table in space, a more-than-king-sized bed in space, and so on. Like a doll’s house, or a museum, or an IKEA store, or a dream. As they swung toward midcrater they descended into a particularly crowded aerial neighborhood, consisting mostly of pod rooms hanging from lines; this must be a residential district. Around her people flew like trapeze artists. A flock of vividly blue-and-red lories winged by. The crater floor itself looked like a bamboo forest or an arboretum. As Valerie continued to swing down, growing curious about their ultimate destination, she saw that the trees below were suspended in balls of soil hanging over the crater floor, which was covered by some kind of clear layer, under what looked like a layer of netting. Ah good: a town with a safety net!

That made her bold to finish in style, and she followed their guides toward an open platform hung just above the trees. People already on the platform were waving them in, and their guides were now grabbing some of the lines holding the platform in place and letting themselves down hand over hand. If Valerie had had an umbrella she could have glided down onto them like Mary Poppins. Instead she swung down as best she could, trying to beat John Semple to the post, also composing her appearance for her arrival; she wanted to look like this method of locomotion was no big deal to her. Unfortunately she miscalculated at the last moment and missed the platform entirely, floating down past it into the mesh below, where she trampolined down and up until coming to a rest. They dropped a chair like a porch swing to her, and she sat in it; then they hauled her up and greeted her cheerfully. Among the people already there was Anna Kanina. She smiled when she saw Valerie’s expression and gave her a brief hug. “Welcome to an interesting place,” she said.

On the platform it was unexpectedly peaceful. Introductions were made all around, using first names only. The air was humid and cool, carried on a faint breeze. Above them, near the crater wall, puffball clouds were gathering for what might later be a shower.

“Welcome to the free crater,” one of their guides said to Valerie and John. “We hope you enjoyed your arrival?”

“Loved it,” John replied.

Valerie nodded, feeling flushed. “Very nice,” she said. She was still disconcerted by Anna’s presence, by her ironic smile.

They were led to a table at the center of the platform, where several people already stood eating and drinking.

“Tell us about this place,” John requested. “Who are you people?”

The locals took turns to describe different parts of their project. The crater had been domed by an engineering and design team from Russia, but now they all operated it together. They were just free crater people; national origins were irrelevant. Languages were several, mainly Russian, Chinese, and Spanish, with English admittedly the lingua franca, as everywhere. The dome was a triple layer of translucent compounds which protected them from cosmic radiation. The crater floor held a substantial layer of ancient water ice, two hundred meters at its thickest, only slightly mixed with lunar dust. Extremely cold, extremely valuable. They had covered it with insulation and flooring and were mining one quadrant of it as needed, tunneling in from the side. The aerial village’s population was small, less than three thousand people, but there was room to grow, and energy to fuel that growth, as the temperature differential between the sunny rim and the frozen floor was about six hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Lots could be done with that!

“Who pays for it all?” John asked.

It paid for itself, their hosts said. The start had been privately funded by an international group of interested parties. Some Chinese and Russians, some Americans and Europeans, some Africans and Australians, some Indonesians and South Americans. But again, nationality didn’t matter (Anna rolled her eyes at this). Everyone was welcome, everyone was equal. Everyone was rich, Anna added. They mostly slept in a one g centrifuge embedded in the crater rim, and were hoping that would allow them to live their days in lunar gravity without adverse health effects. No one knew for sure about that, of course; they were an experiment, like everything else on the moon. They were mining and selling their water ice to pay for equipment and supplies. They were involved with the international group that was sending robotic spacecraft out to various carbonaceous chondritic asteroids, then building mass drivers on them to direct them down into orbit around the moon. “Ah yes, we just saw one of those crash into Procellarum during the eclipse!” John said.

The free crater people were happy to hear they had seen that. Meanwhile, their daily work in the crater was to build its infrastructure and its social system, and to make it beautiful. Life as art, the world as a poem—a poem about flying. It was all self-organizing, although they did make some plans. They were there to do what Luna told them to do and allowed them to do. They would be the capital of nothing. They would free themselves of all the mistakes of the past, they would make something new. Everyone was welcome—up to a point, of course, given the limits of the crater’s size. Not the billion, Anna commented, just the billionaires. But of course other craters could be domed and inhabited in this same way. There were a million craters like this one on the moon—although in terms of having water, Anna added, more like a hundred. For now, no one cared enough to stop them doing this, and the people who stayed cared more than anyone else what happened in here. It was a new kind of commons, a new way of living. To this even Anna nodded. It’s interesting, she said to Valerie. It’s the start of something, I’ll give them that.

Valerie glanced at John Semple. “It sounds great!” he said. “Show us more!”

Their hosts agreed happily, and dove off the edge of the platform. John and Valerie followed; Valerie missed the netting the others had grabbed, floated down and hit the big mesh again, bobbed down and up, down and up, until the mesh had stilled and she could crawl over it to a rope ladder leading down. This was easier than she would have imagined; the same lunar g that made walking hard made crawling easy.

On a clear deck over the crater floor, their hosts were already explaining to John that they were separated from the crater’s ice by a clear polymer sheet set over a thick insulation layer of transparent aerogel. They could still see the crater floor under all that, a nobbled icy surface, like a Boston gutter in March, Valerie thought. Ugly; but it was water on the moon, and therefore precious.

One of their guides pointed out a long low building set right on the crater floor, such that it appeared to be half-buried in ice. This building, they were told, housed a server bank of quantum computers, which took advantage of the extreme cold to run arrays of the various kinds of qubits that needed supercool temperatures. Some of these worked at the temperature of the ice, others used the ice to help sustain temperatures just a fraction above absolute zero. This computer complex was another source of income, their guides said, and it also gave them some leverage when it came to keeping their independence; they had almost as many yottaflops available as all the servers in the United States combined. Which was only another way of saying that the US had fallen far behind in quantum computing, but still, it was a startling fact. Computing power was economic power, they said; and economic power was political power. So that small building down there buried in the ice of their crater floor could in theory house a major player in Terran politics.

Through the transparent decking and insulation they could see a giant pit that had been excavated out of the ice, near one arc of the crater wall. Vehicles like roadbuilding machines rolled around cutting the ice into cracked blocks and then trundling these blocks over a flat stretch of crater floor toward the inner wall of the crater, where they would be hauled up in freight elevators to the rim, there to be distributed all over the moon. Ice this cold acted differently than ordinary ice, it was extremely hard and brittle. The crater harbored about a billion cubic meters of ice, and every drop mined from it would be recycled as long as possible. The goal was to keep every drop of it in circulation forever, with zero water loss in all downstream uses. That was impossible, of course, but still a goal to be attempted.

“As a form of money it’s got very high liquidity,” John joked. “Just add heat and serve!”

“See that tilted slope down there? That was an avalanche.” One of their hosts indicated a big scoop and slide in the wall of excavated ice. “Back when they began mining this ice, my friend John was down there when that slope gave way. The ice partially buried him, they had a hell of a time freeing him up. It was only a few minutes, but by the time they got him out, his feet were frostbitten. He lost all his toes. That was how we found out that you really need your toes to be able to walk on the moon. We call him Mr. Pogo Stick now.”

“Sorry to hear,” John Semple said. “Does he still live here?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Don’t you know who lives here?”

“Oh yeah, we have to keep track of that, to keep the gas exchange and everything else. I just don’t know if John moved on or not.”

“We do blockchain governance,” one of the others said. “The census is part of that.”

“Blockchain governance? Meaning what?”

“All our activities and decisions are recorded in a secure distributed network, including our comings and goings, but also everything we do as a town. We call it documented anarchy. A full-disclosure commons. Anyone can do anything, but everyone gets to know what that is.”

“Is that what the blockchain governance movement on Earth is trying for?”

“I don’t know.”

Valerie said, “Since you keep track of everyone, could you look for someone we’re looking for, see if they’re in town?”

“Sure. Who are they?”

“Frederick Fredericks and Chan Qi.”

Their guide tapped on his wrist for a while. “No, no one here by those names.”

“Could they be here under fake names, or off the record?”

“No. We start with full disclosure here. Everyone enters their full real legal identity, including their national ID numbers. Then we forget about that.”

“So, can you tell us anything about those two?” Valerie persisted. “We’ve heard they’re back on the moon now, after some time on Earth.”

“If they’re on the moon now, we might be able to see something,” Anna said after none of the others replied. She tapped around for a while. “Oh, those two! Yes, they are back all right. They came up in Fang Fei’s system. An odd couple.”

“How do you mean?” Valerie asked.

“He’s the one who was involved in the killing of Chang Yazu, right? And Chang was working with Peng Ling to keep China moon on her side during the upcoming Party congress. Chang used to work for Minister Huyou, in Shaanxi, and there were investigations of corruption focused on their time there. It’s possible Chang had something on Huyou that he was going to pass along to Peng, to use in the fight for the succession to President Shanzhai. Another person in the running for that is Chan Guoliang, whose daughter has been seen with this man who was involved in Chang Yazu’s murder. So that makes them an odd couple, if you ask me.”

“Could Chan Qi be working against her dad?” John Semple asked.

Anna shrugged. “Don’t know. Jianguo is still working on getting to the bottom of it. He’s really mad. I mean, a friend of his was killed right in his prefecture. So he won’t be forgetting.”

“Can you find out where Fred and Chan Qi are now?” Valerie asked.

Anna looked dubious. “We can always ask Fang Fei. We’ve opened a new direct private line with him, it’s very cool.”

“How so?”

“It’s a neutrino telegraph.”

“What does that mean?” John asked.

“We send a beam of neutrinos right through the moon to where Fang Fei has a receptor set up. It’s very hard to catch neutrinos with anything smaller than a few city blocks’ worth of stuff, but we’ve gotten a system running where you can catch enough to send simple messages. That’s why we call it a telegraph. The bit rate is laughable, but it works for texting.”

“The neutrinos go right through the moon?” John asked.

“They go right through everything. A trillion just went through us right now.” Anna snapped her fingers. “Fang Fei likes the idea because his base is on the far side, and with this device he can shoot messages right through the moon to his people in China, without having to use satellites. It’s another one of his toys, at least now, but we’re pitching in because we thought there might be some potential there. Meanwhile it gives us a way of talking to him privately. Anyway, I’ll send him a query about those two, and we’ll see what he says.”

A bunch of the other freebies dropped down onto them and informed them it was time for the day’s performance.

“Okay,” their host said to John, “are you ready to be a dancer in our opera?”

“No way,” John said. “I can’t dance here! I can barely dance even on Earth.”

They just laughed at him. You can join anyway, they said. They needed extras. It was a case of the more the merrier, and this performance took everyone in the crater.

“Which opera?” Valerie inquired.

“Satyagraha.”

“Isn’t that one kind of hard?” she asked. She had seen it performed once in New York, a modernist thing full of dancers with banners, weaving around a stage to a score like industrial music. Libretto in Sanskrit, she seemed to recall.

No, they told her, it was easy. The crowd scenes were supposed to be chaotic, indeed in their version they aspired to a state of complete Brownian motion. The gravity made that easy, and often it created all kinds of accidental grace.

John was shaking his head. Valerie said, “I love to dance,” which wasn’t quite true, but she was still working on wiping that amused look off John’s face. Time to finish that off for good.

They rode up in a basket at the end of a counterweighted crane lift, and were taken to a cluster of midair platforms. There they joined one of the groups congregating on a big central platform, and after introductions, their hosts jumped up to a slightly higher platform, then crossed it and jumped again. Valerie and John had to follow as best they could, both of them often misjudging how much of a leap was needed to get to the same platform as their hosts. John flew far toward the dome, while Valerie barely made it to the first available platform, which she struck with a shock more impactful than she had expected; it wasn’t like falling into the mesh. But this was just one lesson of many to come concerning unforeseen differences between weight, mass, and inertia, and she made adjustments as she could, while struggling to keep her hosts in sight and identified as hers, lost as they were among all the other people flying through the space of the aerial city.

By the time she caught up to them the great opera was in full swing, and an orchestra and chorus of several hundred people on a big platform in about the center of the space was filling the air with the complex, pulsating music. Valerie had learned a bit about this opera after seeing it in New York, at first because she was curious, and then because of its subject, which was the concept of “peaceful force” suggested by the word satyagraha, a word Gandhi had made up during his campaign for Indian independence. This word could be said to express a vision of diplomacy and intelligence work at its best, or so it seemed to Valerie, and although this opera’s libretto was in Sanskrit and thus incomprehensible to almost every person who had ever sung or heard it—and although the score by Glass was extraordinarily dense and repetitive, sending percussive waves of sound echoing through the city such that it would have been dizzying even without the low-g flights—still, once she and her group had all grasped handholds like subway straps at the ends of long lines extending from a central spinner, something like a scary ride in a carnival, and it began to spin and their bodies lifted out and away from each other, either just holding on like Valerie, or dancing in space like most of her group—once that was all accomplished, she began to enjoy herself. She began to join both the spirit and the body of the dance.

Knowing the music helped a lot. When the battles of the middle act began, she kicked and flailed as rhythmically as she could, and when her entire group let go of their ropes all at once and were cast like dandelion seeds in all directions, never to meet again during the course of this opera at least, she was quick to follow, and with an almost gymnastic twist she let go, and found herself cast high over other spinning dancers. Apparently many people had let go of similar spinning mechanisms at around the same time, and the weave of flying dancers through the air was beautiful to see, although it also had to be said that if two dancers happened to be on a collision course, nothing they could do would keep them from running into each other. Or so it seemed, until Valerie saw she was headed right at a young woman dressed in scarlet, and the young woman saw her too; this allowed them to contort themselves as they flew by each other such that they just missed colliding, a nifty trick that caused them both to laugh and wave at each other as they diverged. Then the moon’s g exerted its pull, and Valerie curved down and down until she hit a bunch of netting and managed not to injure herself as she bounced to a halt. Another group of singers hanging there welcomed her and invited her by gesture to join them in their singing. This Valerie declined, at least at first; but then she recognized where the opera had gotten to, and could join in under her breath, making up the words as she went along. She knew the tune, such as it was, and at this point her group’s part was a staccato buh-buh-buh-buh buh-buh-buh-buh buh-buh-buh-buh buh-buh-buh-buh, repeated over and over and over, great fun to enunciate with the rest of them, and after a while she was actually shouting it as loud as she could shout.

Eventually they came to the last great aria, which was made of a repeated scale of rising notes—just the eight notes of a C major scale begun on E, repeated as if someone were just learning to play the piano. This turned out to make a beautiful song, one of the composer’s finest discoveries, nicely saved for the ending. The whole population of the city sang this together, and the dance troupes had come to stillness somehow, wherever they were, so that everyone now hung suspended somewhere in the air under the dome. Valerie found herself with people she had never seen, people of all kinds floating there. In the distance across the city the other participants were small in her sight, so that suddenly it looked to her like she had fallen into the Disneyland ride called It’s a Small World. That ride had bowled her over when she was five years old, and now her head was suddenly hearing its simple tune, It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears, et cetera, leading to It’s a small world after all! Which was quite a tune to impinge on the sublimity of the finale of Satyagraha, but her earworm weakness had already latched onto it, and all she could do was try to braid the two tunes together in her head, and in this particular moment it even seemed to kind of work, as a counterpoint or fugue or descant.

That odd little duet accompanied her all the rest of that day, which was taken up mostly by relocating John Semple. She couldn’t find him, she couldn’t find Anna, and she couldn’t find their hosts from the platform, and she didn’t know any of their names, and couldn’t immediately recall their faces. She had to brachiate her way back to where she thought their first meeting had taken place, dodging other swingers as she swung. Lots of flushed and happy faces flying around out there, and she was sure she probably looked like the rest.

Finally she ran into John, sitting on a platform drinking tea and talking with what she thought was a completely different set of people. He welcomed her back with a real smile, a smile of acceptance, and she sat and took a cup of tea, and listened to them tell stories about the place, and looked at all their faces, glowing like paper lanterns. All the while she was hearing in her head “it’s a world of laughter, a world of tears,” chiming across the rising scale that ended Satyagraha, and this stranded tune persisted in her head through the rest of their stay in the little flying crater, and all the way back to the north pole.