Red Moon

CHAPTER FIFTEEN mozhe shitou guo he Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones (Deng)

The far side of the moon quickly revealed itself to be a very rough landscape. The low sun they had emerged into meant they traveled in black shadow at first, made even blacker by the brilliant white arcs where Tsiolkovsky’s crater rim poked up into the light. Ah Q drove them up a natural ramp formed by a collapse of the rim onto the crater floor, a thing of natural switchbacks that had been regularized and made into a road by some major roadbuilding work, it looked like to Fred.

Eventually they were up and onto the broad rim of Tsiolkovsky, and could look around and see the bangscape of the back side. It was a truly crazy terrain. Four and a half billion years of impacts had thrown ring after ring of shattered rock up and out, forming a chaos unlike anything Fred had ever seen, unless maybe it was the water in his bathtub when he was five years old and had played with a toy boat he liked to sink by slapping the water until the rebounding waves overwhelmed it. If that bathwater had frozen instantly in place, it would have looked like the moon out here.

Their rover was therefore somewhat like Fred’s toy boat, and although its cabin was roomy enough, the size of the rock waves they were traversing made the rover seem even smaller than that toy boat. More like an ant. They were therefore reduced to the size of creatures that would live inside a hollow ant. Meanwhile the hills were often steep. Everywhere they were blanketed by a layer of dust, made of rock sputtered by the blast of billions of years of sunlight. This soft layer of omnipresent dust at least gave them a way to judge angles of repose, and although the land looked steep everywhere, there were actually visible networks of almost flatness where steep slopes had enjambed, forming narrow flat places as ridges or benches or valley bottoms. The two prospectors and other drivers had threaded this maze before, so their way was programmed for them; it was like running a maze with its Ariadne thread already in place. Every so often they had to surmount a steep spot, either in blazing sun or in deep shadow, and then the hum of the rover’s motor rose to a whine, which alarmed Fred each time it happened. With nothing human nearby for hundreds of kilometers, there was no margin for error or mechanical failure. If something went wrong with the rover they would freeze, or at best starve or suffocate. No, the rover had to work. So its whining was not welcome. Nevertheless it whined, and each time it did Fred felt his heart beat a little harder. Then the whine would drop back to a normal hum, and they would continue to roll along, angling with the tilt of the land. The wheel tracks they left on previous wheel tracks would mark this land for a billion years. But that was true all over the moon. Luna was now covered with wheel tracks, and always would be.

Up a slope, whining; down a slope, grinding. Traverse a slope, tilting. White and black; black and white. The sheer desolation of the moon. The nihilism of no nature, no life. A dead world. A dead world that could kill you at any moment. Fred could feel that in the vibration of the rover. He heard it in the whine of the motor. He was not happy. It was hard to take deep breaths, it took an effort.

As the sun crept higher, the land began to display shades of gray. The gray slopes were lit not by direct sunlight—those slopes were white—but by reflected sunlight that had bounced off some other hill. Thus shadows were not all the same, and these various grays thereby created a legible articulation of the land, even conveying some information over the horizon, as hills they couldn’t see reflected light onto hillsides they could.

All this was explained to Fred and Qi at lunatic length by Xuanzang, who obviously loved the moon with the kind of passion that only selenologists and prospectors seemed to have for it. This too Xuanzang explained to them: both types of lunatic were on the hunt in search of treasure; it was only the nature of the treasure that differed. And maybe it didn’t differ that much; prospectors were after money, which made them close students of the moon’s information; scientists were after the moon’s information, which if found would turn into a good living for them. So money and information were fungible and kept turning into each other. But in the end it was being on the hunt that mattered.

“There will be a spy satellite over us in about an hour,” Xuanzang mentioned to Qi, interrupting his rhapsody in gray. “Do you want to hide from it?”

“Yes, if you can, but how?”

“We’re on a road now, don’t you see the tracks we’re following?”

“Sure, but so what?”

“There are hidey-holes everywhere along this road, shelters we’ve dug. It’s just being cautious, you know. Just little caves to drive into. Can’t be seen from above.”

“You want to hide?”

“From solar storms, yes. If people see us it’s usually okay, because we want to be seen. We’re registered, they see us and know where we are. Could save our ass if we had car trouble. But there are solar storms you want to get out of. And a lot of us feel like it’s also good to be able to hide when you need to. You know how that is.”

“Yes I do,” Qi said. “Okay, hide us if you can. There might be people looking for us.”

“Aren’t there satellites overhead all the time?” Fred asked.

Xuanzang and Ah Q shook their heads. “Coverage is spotty.”

“Coverage or coordination of coverage?”

“A little of both,” Xuanzang said. “Whatever’s up there is fragmented, that’s for sure. The biggest system is Fang Fei’s, and he isn’t a problem for us. Not usually anyway,” glancing at Qi.

“I’m surprised there isn’t continuous coverage by the Ministry of State Security,” Qi said. “Satellites rating you for the Social Credit System.”

“The Social Credit System never really recovered from its sabotage,” Xuanzang said.

“It wasn’t backed up?”

“Backups were whacked too.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“They didn’t want you to know.”

“Who did it?”

“No one knows. The Balkanization Assistance Division’s Administrative System Society might have done it, it’s supposed to be a real thing, although it may be just a name people like. Citizen scores were identifying so many enemies of the state that a lot of resistance to them developed. And it’s still possible to do some anonymous sabotage in the cloud.”

“Like everywhere,” Ah Q noted.

“True. But wiping out the citizen scores stuck a needle right in the Great Eyeball. A big victory!”

Qi smiled that smile that Fred had seen only a couple of times, her real smile as opposed to her usual one, the ironic grimace that indicated she would have been amused if she were amused. This one was for real.

They followed faint tracks on the land. The view seen through the compartment’s windows looked like arty black-and-white photos of dirt roads in the American Southwest, overexposed to emphasize the sterile deathly vibe of the place. Death on the Oregon Trail, or any desert rat’s Mojave Magnificence. On it went endlessly, and as the hours passed, Qi settled into one seat and sometimes slept. Fred often lay on the floor, to nap or just to change position. During those times the other three spoke in Chinese to each other, and if Fred put his glasses on he could read what they were saying. It seemed to him they spoke as if he couldn’t understand them; possibly they had succumbed to the fallacy that if he wasn’t looking at them his glasses wouldn’t work. Or they thought he was asleep. Or they didn’t care.

Ah Q liked to tell moon stories. Did you know Buzz Aldrin, second man on moon, followed Neil Armstrong’s famous quote about one small step for mankind by jumping to ground and saying That might have been a small step for Neil but for me it was really big! So second sentence spoken on moon was a joke about first sentence. I like that so much. Aldrin was the real intellectual among the Apollos. His brain spin so fast is why they call him buzz.

A lot of them were intellectuals, Xuanzang said. They were astronauts.

Astronauts are pilots. Even if they were engineers, does not mean intellectual. Many a pilot and engineer, many a scientist too, without a thought in their head.

Everyone is an intellectual, Qi said from out of her sleep.

Qi is right, Xuanzang said. I remember reading one Apollo guy took a sleeping pill to fall asleep on moon, then had dream in which they drove one of their rovers cross-country until they came on other tracks, and met another rover with people like them, people who had been on the moon for thousands of years. Not a nightmare, he said. On the contrary. One of the most real experiences of his life, he said.

See? Qi said. Everyone is an intellectual. Never think otherwise.

Fred got up and sat back in his chair. It would be easy on the moon to imagine a dream was a real experience, he thought, because when you looked out the window at the chaotic white hills it was easy to lose the sense that any of it was real. It resembled one of those dreams he often had in which he felt quite powerfully that he existed at the end of a long cord tying him to safety, a cord which could be cut anywhere along its length, at any time.

More time passed. Fred sat in his seat looking out the window. Bland in color, starkly majestic, the hills and hollows rolled up over the horizon. Despite reading the grays as best he could, he could never anticipate what would come next, hill or hollow. Always the blacker-than-black sky curved over the white lines of the horizon. It felt like they were the only four people on this world, and yet at the same time it felt like they weren’t alone, like something was out there with them. That was either frightening or comforting, Fred couldn’t tell which. The two emotions superposed and could not be disentangled. He was confused.

He lay back down on the floor. Later, when the others started talking again, he slipped on his glasses to listen to them.

What about your friend here? Is he an intellectual?

No he is just a mechanic.

You just said everyone was an intellectual! Fred objected silently from the floor.

Xuanzang seemed to feel something similar. A quantum mechanic is not the same as ordinary mechanic. Probably takes being a bit intellectual.

He lives in clouds. Zen or something like that. A fool.

But intellectuals are often fools.

Intellectuals are always fools, Qi corrected.

But you said before that everyone is an intellectual.

And so yes, everyone is a fool. Look at us!

They laughed easily.

Ah Q said, He wanted to stick with you. Maybe a touch of yellow fever?

I do not think so. Or just a little. He is so shy he can barely stand to look at people. But that is okay. I am a bit that way myself.

The two prospectors laughed at this. Pardon dear cousin but this does not seem to match what we know of you! Fearless leader dragon queen!

That is just an act. Pick a part and play it. Perform your self like a role in a play. The role says nothing about how you feel about it.

So this guy cannot act?

That is right. That is what shyness is. He thinks he has to be real. So he has stuck to me. But there is no harm in him. Could be he just thinks he is safer with me than anywhere else!

They laughed hard at that idea.

From the fire, the frying pan looks cool.

At a certain point Xuanzang and Ah Q consulted their dashboard closely. “Ah shit,” Ah Q said.

“What?” Qi asked.

“A big solar storm is coming,” Xuanzang replied, looking unhappy. “X5 or 6, meaning a big coronal mass ejection. It was predicted to miss the moon, but that just got updated, looks like it expanded or something. The plasma’s coming at us fast. It’ll hit in about a half an hour. We’re going to have to do a swanwick.”

“What’s that?”

“We have to suit up and get under the rover. Storm this big, we need all the protection we can get. We don’t want to get sputtered.”

“Sputtered?”

“That’s what plasma does to the lunar surface,” Ah Q said. “That’s what made the layer of dust you see all over the moon. Sputtering. Very bad for people. There’s a lot of sieverts in an X5 storm.”

“Not sintering?” Fred asked.

“Sintering is when you laser dust into a solid. Sputtering is when light knocks a solid apart into dust.”

“The auroras around Earth will be pretty,” Xuanzang offered. “You can see them from here really well, on the near side I mean. Anyway let’s get out there and under the car. The really hard X-rays won’t last long.”

So they got into spacesuits, and the two miners checked Fred’s and Qi’s seals. Qi could barely fit into a spacesuit now, they had to put her in one that was two sizes larger than her true size. It wouldn’t have worked very well for walking around, but for crawling under the rover it would be okay. Into the rover air lock they went, then outside.

On the surface of the moon: it was Fred’s first time. As advertised, he felt hollow and clumsy, and was sure he was going to fall over. The two prospectors led them around to the front of the rover, where the gap between ground and car was higher. After a couple of inadvertent pliés, Fred managed to get down on his knees without actually falling on his face, although he came very close. But the g was so light that crumpling to his knees and catching himself with his hands had no consequences. Big puffs of gray dust shot up into the non-air around his knees and hands, then slowly lofted down, making minuscule impact craters to add to all the rest. He wondered how much dust would stick to their suits and get back into the cabin with them. The sputtered fines of the moon were said to be as fine as the wind-milled fines on Mars. Maybe they were so fine they wouldn’t hurt you, would pass through you like neutrinos. Unlike hard X-rays, which crashed through you like little bullets, wreaking untold genetic damage if they didn’t luckily pass between your cells or at least miss any important ones.

He followed Qi as they crawled on their hands and knees under the rover. The dust looked black on their spacesuits, and slightly coated their faceplates.

“Get right in here,” Xuanzang instructed them. “Lie together like logs. We’re under the rover’s water and fuel supplies here, we’ll be good.”

As they lay there a light appeared on the horizon.

“Is that the flare?” Fred asked.

“No, that’s Earth. It’s rising.”

“We’ve reached the near side?” Qi asked, sounding surprised.

“We’re just into the libration zone. The far edge of it. Earth won’t even get all the way above the horizon. From here on the ground we’ll only see a sliver of it.”

“At least we’re close. I’ve got to send a message to my friends in China.”

“For now you’ll have to be patient.”

This was not Qi’s strong suit, and Fred wondered how well she would do. That bright spot on the horizon, which looked to be only a mile or two away, turned distinctly blue. A paring of blue, wedged between black sky and white world. It rose so slowly they could not see its movement. Home sweet home.

When Xuanzang declared it safe to emerge, they crawled back out. A couple of hours had passed, and the Earth was as thin a sliver as when they had gotten under the rover. Luna’s Earthrise was slow.

In the rover’s air lock, a combination of electric charges and blasts of compressed air blew the dust from their suits. When the process was over they bounced carefully into the next lock and took their suits off while keeping their helmets on; only when they were ready to get into the main cabin did they take helmets off and hurry in. Xuanzang checked the gauges on his suit and in the cabin and nodded. “We took about ninety micro-sieverts,” he said. “Not bad!”

Qi headed straight for the rover’s little bathroom.

Moving through the libration zone toward the near side, the land became a little less rough. They circled the rims of some big craters, staying on their aprons when they were flat enough to allow that. This route brought them eventually onto an intersection of two big rims, the contact zone between craters Phillips (very big) and Humboldt (immense). Here they came to another little wall cave under a boulder, with its open side facing Earthward. They had driven far enough toward the near side that Luna’s big blue moon bulked now entirely over the horizon, a sliver of black space separating it from the white hills. Earth was about half lit, and Fred thought he could see Africa in the part that was lit, but he wasn’t sure, because it was upside down and there was a lot of swirling cloud cover. The dark half was dusted here and there with clusters of pinprick lights, as if a tiny Milky Way had been caught inside that half circle. It was huge compared to the moon seen from Earth, much bigger than it looked in the photos Fred had seen. He felt stunned by the sight, it was hard for him to grasp. Hard to believe it was real.

The three Chinese were also mesmerized by it, but soon Qi said in Chinese, I want to send that message. You have a laser communication system?

Sure. We use it all the time to send messages to friends.

Good. Find me China, please. They are in Sichuan. I have got an attachment with me that will code the message.

Remember we can only send if China is facing us.

Oh curses! But that will happen within the next twelve hours at most, right?

The two prospectors looked at each other, then peered up at Earth. If we just missed it, it could be more like twenty hours, Xuanzang said. We need to resupply pretty soon. We need battery charges, fuel, air, and food. Pretty much everything.

What I need to do will not take long. I want to tell my people to strike. In case they are waiting on me, which I hope they are not.

The two men stared at her. You are sure it is the time?

Yes! I just hope they are not waiting on my word!

Xuanzang said, Dear cousin, the billion is certainly waiting on you.

No! she cried. Why?

They think you are Mao, dear cousin.

Or the Maitreya, Ah Q added. Or the latest version of the Dalai Lama. You are the newest reincarnation, they say.

No!

Yes.

No! I hate that bad feces.

Xuanzang waved a hand in front of her face. Cousin! Please! No matter Ah Q’s mystical tomfoolery, the point is, if people believe you are an important leader, then you are. And leaders lead. So now is the time.

“That’s Australia,” Fred guessed, pointing at the blue ball. “Australia upside down. How weird is that. So but China must be facing us too?”

“Yes. Good.”

Qi consulted her wristpad. My people will make a daily check in an hour or so. I can catch their laser and get a point-to-point aimed.

Unless it is cloudy over your people, Ah Q said.

Why? What then?

Then lasers do not work.

Curses.

Have faith, dear cousin. Fusion efforts have rendered strong lasers. We should be good to go, except in very worst weather.

The prospectors got to work. They often had encrypted laser conversations with their investors and allies on Earth, they said, so they knew the drill and could make the contact. Qi had the data for her code in a small hard drive in her daypack, which she took out and plugged into a port in their rover’s computer. The laser projector was mounted on the roof of their rover. It looked just like a beer keg, the prospectors said.

The three of them worked on getting all that prepped while Fred looked into the eyepiece of their telescope, adjusting the focus until the Earth’s edge curved across his view screen. A thin band of vivid turquoise, arcing over the dark cobalt of the Pacific: that was Earth’s atmosphere, terrifyingly thin. The gorgeous pair of blues stuck Fred like a pin to the heart. He wanted off this dead satellite, he wanted to go home.

No chance of that now. Qi was absorbed in her wristpad and the devices on top of the rover. She bossed the prospectors around and they ate it up. They were happy to oblige, because… because why? Because they were part of her movement. Because she was a star. They did what she said because she expected them to. She had charisma. Charisma: whatever it was, it was definitely real. Fred felt it as much as anyone, no doubt about it. Although right now he was a little tired of her charisma.

“What are you telling them down there?” he asked her.

She grimaced as if to say Don’t distract me, I’m working. Yes, by now he was in full possession of an internal set of translation glasses that shifted her facial expressions into English sentences. She was eloquent in that language. He had no trouble understanding her, even though this ability was not at all typical for him. He could do it with his parents and brother, however, so maybe it was just a matter of giving the ability some data to work with. Looking at people helped. Right now he was understanding her so well he might have laughed, or on the other hand made that little snick of disapproval that his father used to emit by pulling his tongue fast off the roof of his mouth, but he couldn’t decide how he felt and so kept silent. At least for a while; after which the feeling in him clarified and he said, “Come on, tell me! What are you telling them down there?”

She rolled her eyes, which really did not need translation glasses, being an exclamation in a universal language, and indeed one Fred had seen too many times in his life.

“Tell me!” he insisted.

“I’m telling them that I’m okay.”

“That’s it?”

“And I’m telling them that they should proceed with the plan.”

“What plan?”

“It’s a secret plan,” she said curtly, casting a glance at the two prospectors, who were listening and nodding as they worked on aiming the laser.

“If you really want to change things,” Fred said, still irritated at her eye roll, “you can’t do it with a secret plan.”

“How would you know?”

“Because everyone knows that. You have to share the plan. That’s what makes it something that might actually happen.”

“Maybe so. But now I’m sharing the plan. And before I couldn’t.”

“Or else what?”

“Or else we would have gotten arrested and jailed before anything could happen! Which is what is happening down there right now. So we have to act fast.”

“Just how illegal is this plan?”

“Anything that tries to change China without the Party initiating it is as illegal as things can get. You cross certain lines and they can do anything to you.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning a quick trial in a fake court and then they kill you! Or no trial and you just disappear forever! Is that illegal enough for you?”

She was more upset than usual. Xuanzang and Ah Q were regarding her thoughtfully. Fred, seeing her mouth so tight, said, “Yes. I get it. Sorry.”

She nodded unhappily. She typed on her wristpad. She glanced at Xuanzang. “Okay, we’re locked in. I’ll need to tap your batteries for this.”

“We don’t have that much power left, I have to warn you.”

“I need all you have to spare.”

“I don’t know how much that is.”

“Leave enough to get to Petrov, of course. Give me the rest of it. I need to power this message for about ten minutes, if we have that.”

Xuanzang tapped away at his consoles, reading closely. “Okay. We’re keeping enough to get to Petrov. Do it and then let’s get going. We’ll be cutting it close.”

She nodded and studied her wristpad. She typed for a while, then read. If this was Lenin on the train to Russia, Fred thought, it was also much like everything else in the cloud: tapping on screens; things then appearing on other screens; then later, perhaps, things happening in the physical world. But what was the relationship between cloud and world, between tap and act? This was always the question no one could answer. Maybe, Fred thought, the two were the same now. Maybe the question itself was simply wrong. Maybe they had always been the same. Words were acts, words were always acts; that was why he was always so hesitant to speak. He remembered a phrase that someone trying to help him had once said: If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling. That was a thought that made him uneasy every time he remembered it, so mostly he didn’t; but it kept cropping up, usually at precisely those times when he saw he wasn’t going to act, even though he was feeling something pretty strongly.

Qi was going to act. She had a lot of true feelings. She tapped her wristpad. The prospectors’ laser beam was now flashing an encrypted message to one very small circle in China, where her intended recipients were looking up to receive it. If anyone else caught sight of this lased green flash and recorded it, it would be coded and incomprehensible to them. That was the hope, apparently. Although without the encryption of a mobile quantum key, most codes could eventually be broken.

When she was done transmitting, she clicked off their laser and sat back in her chair. Fred’s internal Qi-glasses now read her as relieved; even perhaps pleased. Also curious. What had she started? Even she didn’t know.

Xuanzang and Ah Q now insisted they drive immediately to Petrov Crater Station to resupply. “We’re almost out of everything.”

“Okay, do it,” Qi said. “Go.”

So they took off again, grinding slowly over the frozen waves of the battered old moon. Here in the libration zone, where the Chinese apparently were pushing infrastructure north, they began to cross more and more vehicle tracks, including some complicated intersections. Xuanzang came to one such crossroads and pointed at his dashboard screens. “We’re back in the land of the living.”

“Someone spotted you?” Qi asked.

“It might just be a motion sensor. How that sensor will algorithm us is an open question. It’s almost sure to ID us, but that might not matter. We pop in and out of surveillance visibility all the time, and so do lots of other rovers. So the people checking might not be that interested. We’ll see when we get there.”

It was slow going, as always. Qi fell asleep, waking when Ah Q started cooking again, drawn to consciousness no doubt by the smell of sesame and rice. They ate together at the rover’s table, and only Fred winced when the rover tilted hard this way and that. Seemed to him they could slide into some miniature crater at any moment and get stuck for good, but the others trusted the autopilot, and they were all hungry. When they were done Qi fell asleep again. The track they were following became flatter. Earth continued to hang over the horizon, gorgeous as any jewel, looking like some fabulous geode. Its glowing blue kept snagging Fred’s eye.

Finally they came to the top of a small crater rim, and there before them was a round station walled by black windows and roofed by a stacked mound of moon rock, like a yurt topped with a thick cake of gray snow. Petrov Crater Station. Northern end of the libration zone’s development. Xuanzang drove the rover to the fuel resupply station and tapped off the motor.

“Made it!” he said with obvious relief.

“How many kilometers did we have left?” Fred asked.

Xuanzang quoted something: “‘The amount of gas left in the tank wouldn’t have filled a cigarette lighter.’”

“What does that mean?”

“About ten kilometers.”

From inside the station, someone behind a control window pointed them to one of the hookups. Once they were settled in place before it, the various arms of the refueling station extended from the wall and attached to the rover with no sign that anyone was operating them. As probably they weren’t.

When their car was hooked up and the juice had started to flow, there came an audio request asking to enter the rover, and when Xuanzang granted it and opened the door’s locks, four Chinese men came through, one after the next.

“Come with us,” one of them said to Qi.

“No,” Qi said.

“You’re under arrest,” the man explained.

“No!”

“Just come with us.” The man looked at Fred and the two miners. “All of you.”