Red Moon

CHAPTER SIXTEEN tianxia All Under Heaven

Ta Shu made two more trips on the rented bike, taking trailer loads of his mom’s detritus out to the garbage station. On his final trip, as he headed back into the city center, he found the streets growing more and more crowded. Eventually things clogged entirely. Gridlock. Something had happened up ahead. Cars and trucks stopped, motors were turned off, drivers and passengers got out and stood beside their vehicles, talking things over, even sitting on the street to heat up tea over camping stoves. Only bikes and motor scooters were still moving, weaving slowly through the maze of cars as they dodged not just vehicles but people. That made for slow going, and yet it was almost as fraught with peril as when the trucks and cars were moving, because a fair number of the people standing around were annoyed, and inclined to take that out on people still trundling through.

Near the Third Ring Road the mass of vehicles and people thickened to the point that he had to get off his bike and walk it. Even that was difficult. There was no space to move forward. He stood there holding his bike handles, puzzled. Everyone he could see looked equally mystified. Most of them wanted to be somewhere else, that was clear. So it was still a traffic jam, but for some reason it had locked up completely. And it felt different too. People stood around talking to each other or to their wrists, either agitated or resigned. The crush was so unusual that more and more faces were looking worried. What could have caused the city to seize up like this? It was always very crowded, always just a few people per block from jamming, but why today?

Ta Shu stopped by a man standing by his truck: broad flat face, red cheeks, maybe Tibetan, friendly look. Ta Shu asked what was happening and the man pointed north. Word was that something was going on. Maybe some kind of demonstration. Of course there were demonstrations every day in China, but they were always elsewhere, out in the west or down south. Here in Beijing, and this big? It was strange, even spooky. It was too big to be a demonstration.

Ta Shu stood next to his bike, resting his weight on its handlebars. He interrogated his wristpad like so many others. Traffic maps were very slow to load, they were all stalling out. Finally he got one that showed the city red everywhere, farther to the south than the north. Then an alert appeared on the map, announcing that Tiananmen Square and the area around it was closed. Ta Shu felt a stab of dread. To empty the center of the capital, the heart of China in feng shui terms, scene of so many national moments, from the glory of the declaration of national independence to the horror of July 339th—that was a clear sign that city officials, or more probably the national leadership, thought that something was very wrong. The crowd around him did not seem anything like a terrorist threat, or even a protest—too many people were involved. Although many of them, now that he looked around, did seem headed north. It was true on both sides of the street. To the extent this mass of people was moving at all, it was moving north, toward the city center.

Ta Shu found seams in the crowd and nosed his bike along. Other bicyclists were trying this, and the people stuck with their cars were getting more and more annoyed with them. The empty boxes on his bike’s trailer made it wider than it needed to be, so he untied them and left them on the ground. On he pushed, following lines of walking people he could follow north or east. Slowly the logjam was resolving into eddies of movement in various directions, as some people gave up and turned around, while others pressed on, or headed to the side. Sometimes moving lanes of people crossed each other, taking turns one by one. Everything went slowly, as if they were caught in syrup. People were more and more distant with each other, their harmony impersonal and brittle. Some still shared rumors or sympathy, but mostly they ignored the people around them, withdrawing into themselves. The whole situation was just too disconcerting. There were many, many thousands of people on the streets.

Now Ta Shu was beginning to see groups that seemed to have formed before the gridlock began. These were mostly lines of young people snaking through the crowd, holding banners and following multiperson dragons, as during New Year’s parades, some speaking through megaphones, others chanting or singing. These tuanpai, if they were youth league groups, were singing slogans like The united masses will always be victorious, or The rule of law is the rule of the land. Also: Law yes, corruption no. Also: Law over Party, law over Party.

So maybe it was a protest after all. And the content of these slogans was startling to Ta Shu, as he had been under the impression that young urban people were almost entirely molded by their social media. These netizens usually parroted the Party line, exuding an intense nationalism and rejecting any talk of the rule of law as nothing but baizuo, white left nonsense. The rule of law was self-interested pseudo universalism, they often said, promulgated by the West in its usual imperialist attempt to take over the world. A very convenient opinion from the Party’s point of view, and vigorously reiterated by many supposedly independent voices who were actually in the Party’s pay. But it had also gotten into many people’s heads who did not think of themselves as Party hacks. Even in Hong Kong a youthful attack on “leftards” was common, and to Ta Shu’s way of thinking, a discouraging sign of the mind-wiping conformism of cloudpolitics. Not that Ta Shu was a New Leftist; he was an old leftist. Laozi was his favorite political theorist.

In any case now here they were, long lines of young people snaking through the crowds singing joyfully, intensely, looking eerily like the young faces seen in photos from the time of the Cultural Revolution, or the Communist revolution, or the 1911 national revolution. No doubt if there had been cameras on hand during the White Lotus revolt they would have captured the same look, because it was always the same feeling bursting into the world: the return of the repressed. Or even dynastic succession. Perhaps the wheel had come around again.

Ta Shu hoped not with all his heart. He could not imagine China without the Party in charge. It would surely collapse into the most horrible chaos. If democracy came to China they would end up electing idiots, as in America. Best of a bad situation to let professionals work on these matters, meaning engineers, technicians, bureaucrats. Maybe.

Or maybe not. Now he began to see that many or even most of these lines of young people snaking through the crowd were not urban youth, not the netizen precariat with their wristpads and part-time service jobs. These marchers were workers, looking weather-beaten even though young. They were the hardened and hungry internal migrants, the three withouts, the billion. Many of them had to have come to Beijing from far away, although quite a few looked as if they had arrived directly from work sites. Quite a few looked like they owned little more than the clothes they stood in. Usually one saw such people in one’s peripheral vision, on work sites or through factory windows, or in the subway intent on their own lives. Now that Ta Shu had noticed them, he saw they were a big part of the mix here. They had come to Beijing to do this. A line of young women, slight and stylish, busy as sparrows, slipped forward chanting something. Factory girls, shoving people out of the way in trios or quartets of cheerful minor mayhem, moving in time to their chant, ready to gang up on obstructions. Who would oppose these dangerous young people?

His wristpad vibrated his forearm with its little electrocution, reminding him that he was still shackled to this moment of the world. He had been thinking that the cloud had probably shut down. But his wrist was vibrating insistently, and he checked it. Peng Ling wanted to talk to him.

“Hello, Ling!” he said into his wristpad. “I’m glad you called!”

“I need to see you,” she said peremptorily. The tiny image of her face on his wristpad looked unusually serious. “Can you come to me?”

“I’m caught in traffic on the south side of town,” Ta Shu told her. “Something’s going on down here.”

“It’s going on everywhere!” Peng exclaimed. “Your friend Chan Qi has triggered a march on Beijing.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes.”

“Why don’t you tell her to stop it?” Ta Shu asked.

“She’s disappeared. She and her American friend slipped out of Fang Fei’s place on the moon.”

“How did it happen? When?”

“Fang likes to be friendly. I don’t blame him. The whole idea of house arrest is weak to begin with. There were some visitors there who probably smuggled them out. I’ve just heard from Zhou Bao that their rover may have been spotted near Petrov Crater. Chan Qi has to have reached the near side if she’s sending laser messages home, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you get over here to talk?”

“I’m not sure. Is Tiananmen Square really closed?”

“Yes.”

“It could be hard to get to the north side.”

“That’s true. How about meeting at that waffle shop?”

“That would be easier. I can try.”

“Meet me there in two hours. That should give us both time to get there.”

“I’ll try.”

Ta Shu walked his bike east, which proved to be somewhat easier than pushing north, as he could skirt the back side of every crush. Geomancy of crowds, feeling the dragon arteries and the tangled knots. Now that this one was confirmed to be some kind of demonstration, Ta Shu could not help but think of May Thirty-fifth, also known as April Sixty-fifth, or any of the other dates that the Great Firewall had created by its ban on any mention of June Fourth, infamous for the deaths that had occurred in Tiananmen Square on that day in 1989. In that crisis some kind of pro-democracy, pro-reformist demonstration had been finally suppressed and dispersed, on Deng’s orders. They had done it by way of an influx into the city of a huge number of soldiers from all over China, moving them by train into the capital, after which some of them had fired on the crowd of students and their supporters filling the great national square. A disaster in China’s history—nothing much in terms of deaths, compared to the Cultural Revolution or any other of the earlier disasters, but undeniably it had been a moment when Chinese authorities had killed Chinese, with no involvement or incitement from outsiders. In this case it had not even been a civil war against reactionaries, but a case of civil unrest that could have been resolved without violence. The idea could not be avoided that the situation had had better solutions than to order the Chinese army to kill Chinese people. Such an act had no ren, Confucius’s central notion of ruler benevolence. Very little intelligence either. In retrospect it didn’t seem that desperate of a moment for China, or even for the Party. The leadership had probably overreacted to events elsewhere in the world, in particular the ongoing collapse of the Soviet empire. Seeing the trouble in Moscow they had panicked in Beijing, and so a number of idealistic protesters had died.

Now he was caught in a crowd of such people. Workers and urban precariat, the three withouts and the two maybe withouts, some exploited by their hukou status, some by the gig economy, some simply unemployed. The so-called billion, converging on Beijing to support the rule of law, but also, Ta Shu thought, just a decent living. The return of the iron rice bowl, or maybe even the whole work unit system, which had given several generations some stability in China’s constantly shifting economy.

Around Ta Shu people were energetically shouting. There was no way to be sure what had caused all these people to come out. They looked ready and willing to charge at tanks should those appear. But this time it wouldn’t be tanks, he thought. This time it would be drones from the sky, and what would they do then? Fear of this made him lean hard on his bike’s handlebars. But the people around him were not afraid. They had a project, a collective project, and maybe that’s what had caused this to happen, because people craved a project. Chinese history was full of them, and now one had sprung up again. Out of nothing, out of material conditions, out of the cloud—it might be very hard to find out how this had started. Although Peng Ling had all the resources of the government to look into it. But as he jammed his bike into the narrow gaps between people, Ta Shu knew for sure that this was not just one person’s doing. This was mass action, this was what mass action looked like, felt like. Despite his age, he himself had never seen it.

He followed a line of people snaking east toward Tiantan and Longtan, then turned up an alley too narrow to allow a crowd like this one to move in it, so that it was only crowded in the usual way, or a little more so. The alley snaked through its neighborhood like the lines of moving people snaked through the crush on the big streets. Though he still couldn’t ride his bike, he could walk it at a decent speed. Even so, it took more than two hours to make his way to the waffle shop, and near the end of it he felt like he was shoving the bike up a steep hill. He wished he was still wearing a body bra. What if a time came when wearing such a thing was always preferable, or even necessary? Then he would be truly old.

When he got to the waffle shop he found it was closed, but as he stood there, exhausted and stupid, a tap came on the window and one of the owners opened up the door for him and quickly locked it behind him. “She’s not here yet. She’ll be here soon.”

He groaned and handed over his bike to the woman, then hauled himself up by the banister to the upper floor of the shop. He flopped into an armchair, stared up into the constellations of antique chandeliers filling the space. The surreal sight hypnotized him into sleep.

When he woke Peng Ling was sitting on a couch across from him, sipping tea and reading her wrist.

“Sorry,” he said. “I fell asleep.”

“I just got here. You look tired.”

“Yes,” he said. “Sorry. I must smell like the garbage place and the highway both.” He shifted, groaned.

“My sympathies about your mother. I was sorry to hear.”

“She had a good life.”

“Yes. Still, when your mother goes, it changes something inside you.”

“It does. No more umbrella.”

“No more umbrella.”

Peng sipped her tea, watching him. “Maybe it would be a good thing for you to have something to do now. And I need you. This girl on the moon is causing big problems.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s wrecking my plan!”

Ta Shu shifted in his chair. “Pour me some tea and tell me about this plan.”

Peng gestured at one of her staff to get more hot water brought to them. When it came she poured Ta Shu’s tea and stirred the cup nine times. Ta Shu sipped it and sighed happily at the taste of an oolong, possibly the one called Iron Goddess of Mercy. That would be right for his tiger friend.

“This is a big moment,” Peng Ling said. “The Party congress is in session, and a lot of the Politburo and the standing committee are aged out, including President Shanzhai. He’s trying to stack the new standing committee and get Huyou into the presidency, and then stay in charge from behind. A lot of us don’t want that. At the same time Hong Kong has returned fully to us, and people there are anxious. So as I told you before, I’m trying to slip some reforms in with all this.”

“Your reconciliation of liberal and New Left.”

“Well, at this point it might not rise to that exalted level, but yes. I have plans. But now this hotheaded girl has gotten the youth into the streets. All trains and flights to Beijing have been canceled. You have to prove you’re a resident even to come to the city now. That’s just the start of the disruptions. No one can tell how the crowd out there now will be dispersed. Even if that gets managed successfully, which will take time, that won’t be the end of it. No. It’s a mess.”

Ta Shu sipped his tea and thought it over. “Maybe the mess could help you. You are trying for top-down reform, and the people out there are trying from the bottom up. Ultimately you need both.”

Peng shook her head. “I wish it was true. Maybe you can help make it true with your political feng shui. That’s what I’m asking you to try, I suppose. But from my perspective, much as it helps to have the people behind a cause, if there is civil unrest like this now, bringing bad memories of May Thirty-fifth, and even worse, then this only hurts reform efforts from the top. There will be elements using this unrest to justify opposing anything that smacks of liberal or left reforms, as showing weakness in a time of danger. Lots of powerful people will be urging a crackdown. That will make the Party congress that much less of an opportunity!” Peng Ling shook her head, getting more upset the more she thought about it.

“Maybe,” Ta Shu said, thinking it over. “You know more than I do, of course. Still I think this may make more of an opportunity.”

She shook her head harder. “You don’t know!”

“I know.”

“You don’t know!”

“That’s what I meant,” he said wearily. “I know that I don’t know. You know the situation better. But you are inside it. Right at its center. You might even become the next president, isn’t that right?”

“Don’t say that,” she said, glancing at her aides, who were downstairs and seemed well out of earshot.

“No words, just hopes. My point is, when you are inside something, you can see only parts of it. No one can see all of it. So, I see it from the outside.”

She sipped and thought about it. “I don’t know how much that’s worth. But you can help me. If you were to go to the moon again, you could help to control this young firebrand, and you might also be helpful in dealing with the Americans there. They’ve got their own problems right now, they’re falling apart, and that’s impacting us here. Have you heard what’s happening there?”

“No.”

“It’s kind of like here. The withouts and the young people have joined together into something called a householders’ union, and now they’re all withdrawing whatever they have in the banks and converting their savings to a cryptocurrency called carboncoin. Basically they’ve started a political run on the banks, and the banks are so overleveraged that they’ve had to close. And that’s caused a general panic. It looks like their federal government will soon nationalize their banks to stabilize their economy.”

“So they’ll become more like us.”

“Sort of. So that may be a good thing, if it works. Because their economy is our economy, and if they could control theirs better, we would benefit. But there’s a pushback to that from their right wing, just like here. As part of that, there are elements of American military and intelligence agencies trying to insert themselves into their moon program, and now they’re seeing our troubles here, and will try even harder. The military here is trying the same things. You have friends there among the Americans, so you could be a go-between.”

“I would be happy to do that,” Ta Shu said. “And I wasn’t done up there anyway.”

“Good. You can go there in Fang Fei’s system again. I don’t know how much I can trust our space agencies right now. For sure the news of you going back up there could spread fast, and my enemies might try to stop you. Fang Fei will be safer for you. He’s been helping me quite a bit lately.”

“That’s good. I’ll do it.”

She smiled. “Thank you. I hope you can balance all the forces up there.”

Ta Shu shook his head. “I can’t do anything myself. Hard to say what will happen. But I can try.”

“When can you go?”

“Now.”

But now there was no way out of the mass of people. Beijing was locked in the greatest gridlock ever seen in the history of the world. Peng Ling had to call a drone helicopter to the roof of the building that held the waffle shop. Ta Shu found it disturbing to get into a plastic box, what seemed to him a big toy with no pilot in it, and then to get lofted abruptly into the air above Beijing—into police-controlled air, in fact, where drones at this point were routinely being shot down by other drones. There were a lot of them out and about, the sky was crowded with them. So it was a matter of trusting machines and algorithms all around. Also a tribute to Peng Ling’s importance, that she could go up like this into such a proscribed space.

But go she did; she went up with him in the drone, so that she could look down from above and see Beijing, the great capital of the world, awash in a sea of people. It was astonishing: the billion were all there, it seemed literally. There was no place below them that wasn’t black with the heads of Chinese people, a granular mass of humanity—everywhere except for Tiananmen Square itself, the heart of China, looking suddenly small in the middle of the immensity of the city and its crowd. A gray rectangular dot like a postage stamp.

Peng Ling stared down at it impassively. There was no denying the awesome truth of this sight. This was power, the power of the Chinese people; also the power of whoever could conjure such a crowd. Peng could not have done it, and judging by the blank look on her face, Ta Shu could see she found this truth daunting. Was this Chan Qi’s doing? And if so, how had she done it? And if not her, who?

Ta Shu told her to pass on going by his mother’s compound. Go straight to the Party’s airport, he suggested, and get him on a Party jet south. She nodded, relieved. She gave instructions aloud and the drone changed direction.

Ta Shu watched her profile as she looked down. A tiger; maybe the biggest tiger. Which meant he was part of the hierarchy now, no doubt about it. Maybe he had been all along. He didn’t know what that meant. Famous, yes. But maybe it just meant he was a tool. An instrument of power. But he had his ideas too. Possibly something could be achieved.

“What will you do?” he asked her, gesturing down. Ultimately the crowd below was a direct challenge to the Party’s rule of China, and it was huge. So it was a crisis for the Party, no doubt about it.

Peng Ling shrugged. Business had to get done, she muttered. Life had to go on. Lanes of movement would be established by necessity, then kept open by the police. Brutal means would be hopefully minimized. After that, they would probably deal with this the way they had dealt with the umbrella revolution in Hong Kong: they would wait it out. Leave people alone until they grew bored or hungry or sick, or, this being Beijing in autumn, cold; then let them disperse without incident. Catch as many faces as possible on camera, dock people in their citizen scores as those got reassembled. Wait it out, in other words; and when it went away, forget it ever happened. That would be the strategy, the hope.

“Lean to the side,” Ta Shu remarked when she fell silent. Mao’s old strategy, to duck away from the blows of one’s enemies, or even from their attention.

She nodded. Yes, her look down at the city said. If the entire population of China was moving at you, you definitely wanted to lean to the side.

But appearances could be deceiving, even this most amazing appearance. Beijing was jammed, shut down, in crisis; but elsewhere around the country, life was mostly going on as usual. News from Beijing was spread by some social media, and by phone conversations, pigeons, word of mouth; but not by the media controlled by the Party and its immense censorship complex. The Great Firewall would try to stop even this great flood. So in the end it was hard to tell what was going on. Even looking down at the real city, it was hard to tell what was real.

On the way to the airport, he changed his mind and asked Peng Ling to arrange two stops. First on the roof of a Second Ring Road crematorium, where he picked up his mother’s ashes, contained in a rectangular gold box inside a velvet bag, with a rope tie that he could close and hold. He held it as the drone lofted them to the Buddhist shrine near the North Gate, where on certain memorial days his mom had sometimes visited to burn incense. She had not been particularly devout in that way, but there was a columbarium there willing to take her ashes and place them in a wall behind a nameplate. He got out of the drone with the box, and as a monk helped him secure the box in its slot in the wall, he was reminded of his weird trip to the landfill with her junk. He hefted the box one last time, curious as to the weight of its contents, and muttered so that the monk couldn’t hear, “Ma, you have been compacted.”

But these were just her mortal remains. Her spirit was somewhere else. If it was anywhere at all, it seemed to him, it was in his brain. Her soul was now a pattern of neurons in his brain, making a certain set of memories, certain habits of mind. He himself was what remained of her in this world. He made a quick vow to her to take on the burden of keeping her going, and gave a final turn to the little wrench that the monk handed him, tightening shut the door on her remains, feeling that she would approve of his filial resolve. She had been resolute, he would be resolute. She had done her best, he would do his best. This felt almost like serenity. In any case it was resolve. He would persevere.

Then it was off to the airport.

At the Party airport he said goodbye to Peng Ling and got in a little jet with two other passengers. None of them greeted the others or said anything after they were in the air. Ta Shu sat in a right-side window seat and fell asleep for a while, overwhelmed by his long week home. If he could call it home anymore.

When he woke it was early morning. The plane flew over bare brown hills, shorn to dirt after centuries of deforestation, although here it had the look of recent work. In some places the Great Greening had proceeded, in other places it had been ignored or contradicted. Here below, the slash marks still scored the hillsides, and raw dirt roads wound down in widening spirals to the flatlands. The feng shui was simply awful. Kill the body and the spirit will go away. Then it will not be an issue. This country had been chopped up, murdered, desecrated. But what if the people who had cut down the forest on these hills were desperate to cook that night’s food? But no, it didn’t have that look. It hadn’t been cut down by hand, tree by tree, ax by ax. This had all the marks of an industrial process. Forest genocide. Thirty thousand square kilometers of China were poisoned beyond use. This patch below had just been added to that dismal total. Already there was no groundwater to speak of in the entire north.

Strangely, the plane crossed a ridge and suddenly the next watershed below them was dark green, hills glowing with a forest that looked primeval, eternal, untouched through all the dynasties. Could it be? Or had it been restored in the last few decades? It was more likely to have been restored than to have escaped history like some hidden Shambhala, but from this height it looked ancient. A very heartening sight, given what they had just been flying over. He wondered if that watershed ridge marked the Hu Line. Ninety-five percent of the Chinese population lived on the third of China that lay to the southeast of the Hu Line, five percent lived on the two-thirds of the country to the northwest of the line. That was strange, though perhaps it only marked how much people needed to live by water and fertile soil. This too was feng shui; wind and water made all the difference.

He watched the world sliding below from a consciousness that did not feel like his own. He was history; he was time; he was a buddha; he was his mother, looking back and down. Five thousand years of struggle, and where had it brought them? They were pressed against that day’s crisis, their options as small as a wedge in a crack—no way forward, no way back. What was China now? What had it been, what would it become?

As the plane descended, Ta Shu caught sight of what had to be the Three Gorges Dam. He stared down, startled at the sight. When the dam was nearing completion he had publicly grieved, recalling trips through the gorge made in his childhood. One of the great dragon arteries of China drowned, an ecological debacle: he had said this many times on his cloud show, and ever since then he had avoided visiting it.

Now he saw that he had been right to avoid it. He almost pulled down the window shade. But there was a fascination too, as when witnessing some immense catastrophe. From the perspective of the plane as it descended, the dam appeared to cross the entire visible world. It was hard to believe humans had made it; the Great Wall was a mere thread on the land in comparison. The reservoir of water extended as far to the west as he could see. Seven hundred kilometers upstream, he seemed to recall. An entire watershed drowned, two million people moved, a thousand archeological sites lost, including everything that had remained of the proto-Chinese culture that had lived there in the time before history. Earthquakes had been caused by the weight of the water, landslides, sedimentation, pollution: an ecological disaster, just as he had predicted. Not that this fulfilled prophecy gave him any satisfaction. It was the kind of devastation that should have been reserved for the moon, the land of death. To turn Earth into that kind of thing…

Well, this was what was happening. And since nothing lived on the moon, nothing died there either. So the moon was not the land of death but rather the land of nothingness, which was not the same. Earth was the land of life and death; the moon was a blank white ball in the sky. Now they were making the moon into something more than that, but what that new thing was he could not make clear to himself; nor he suspected could anyone else. They were doing it first, and later they would understand it. Or not. Just like with this dam.

When the little plane landed, the door opened and the other passengers got off. But as Ta Shu was following them, two men came up the stairs and introduced themselves: Bo Chuanli and Dhu Dai. Bo was tall and bulky, Dhu short and slight. Associates of Peng’s, they said they were, instructed to join Ta Shu on his trip. Dhu held out his wristpad and tapped it, and a small image of Peng Ling appeared on the screen and said, “Ta Shu, please let these men Bo and Dhu accompany you to the moon, it will be safest that way for all.”

“Ah,” Ta Shu said.

“Really no reason to get off the plane, if you don’t mind,” Bo said, standing in Ta Shu’s way.

“No?” Ta Shu said.

“It seems as if we should hurry a little,” Bo said calmly. Dhu stared past Bo’s elbow at Ta Shu, inspecting him to see how he would react. Suddenly this made Ta Shu wary.

“We’re from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection,” Bo added. “Dhu is with the agency, which is run by Peng Ling, and I am the Party cadre who has been helping him.”

“I see,” Ta Shu said. “And how will you help in this situation?”

“We think that these people you are hoping to meet on the moon are involved with the recent unrest in Beijing. You think so as well, correct?”

“I don’t know,” Ta Shu prevaricated. “How they could be involved with these events on Earth when they’re on the moon?”

They regarded him skeptically, unconvinced he could be so stupid.

“There are ways,” Dhu said. “Talking on private radios. Sending coded signals. We don’t know if any of those ways explain this, but we have been told to help you get there, and to help you in every way while you are there.”

Ta Shu looked at their faces. Security operatives. Peng Ling must have decided he needed protecting. A disturbing thought. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

When they were seated, with the attached agents up near the front of the plane, Ta Shu tapped a message to Peng Ling on their private WeChat line. When several minutes passed without a response, Ta Shu began to worry. Usually she got back to him immediately. Possibly she was busy. He had no other way of contacting her, and there were no third parties who knew both of them.

As the plane took off, Ta Shu looked down again on the concrete evidence, so to speak, of the power of the Chinese Communist Party: the big dam. If he recalled correctly, it was about two hundred meters high and a few kilometers long. It seemed much bigger than that from this angle: massive, crushing, universal.

Now it seemed he might be in the grip of another part of that great power. Bo’s presence made it tangible and personal. Ta Shu knew this feeling was simply seeing the whole in a part: he had never been out of the grip of the Party, not just since being joined by these men, but for the entire length of his life. Seeing it personified by these two men changed nothing.

And now he was part of a little team organized by Peng. It was difficult to feel too resentful about this, as she had reason to want security people of her own along. Still it was worrying. He couldn’t be sure what this team’s purpose was, he was simply its front man. Maybe even its bait.

Well, bait could bite, as his father used to say. He needed to find out what Peng really wanted from him on this trip. If she was in the running to become the next president, as she had more or less confirmed in the waffle shop, then the jockeying must be intense now, an all-absorbing dogfight even in the midst of the general crisis. And what a crisis—the whole world caught up in something, it seemed, even though no one was sure what it was. Maybe they were living through a transition to some new world order, unnamed and inchoate. Maybe this was a wrestling match between elements among the elite; but maybe it was a wrestling match in which the many were trying yet again to seize power from the few. For the bait could bite.

The little plane got to altitude, and again the hills of South China filled the world. Then they flew higher, south and west, over the steep-sided mountains of Sichuan, dark green forests flanking the lower slopes of black rock ridges, with snow on the north faces of the highest peaks.

They landed on the northeast edge of the Tibetan plateau, Ta Shu thought. It wasn’t where they had taken off from the previous time Fang Fei’s organization had flown them to the moon. It looked like Fang Fei kept a personal estate up here, extending to the horizon as far as one could see. Leader Xi’s plan to make all of Tibet into a national park, which would have dwarfed any other such park on Earth, and incidentally turned the Tibetan people into something like protected wildlife, had never been implemented. But the proposal had over time changed Beijing’s treatment of the region, and the absence of a new incarnation of the Dalai Lama had left Tibetans and everyone else in a state of confusion as to what Tibet really was. Of course the Party liked it that way. And at certain times vast tracts of state-owned land had been offered for sale to individuals. As apparently here.

They got off the plane and walked into a low building with a central courtyard. All here was cool and quiet. A separate world. Bo and Dhu had disappeared with some of Fang’s people, and Ta Shu was left in the hands of a young woman named Shuling.

“How long before we take off?” he asked her.

“If you have no objections, the plan is to launch in two hours.”

“Two hours! It’s like making a connecting flight at an airport!”

She smiled nervously. “We hope you don’t mind?”

“No, it’s fine.”

He spent the interval napping. After he woke up he went outside to say goodbye to the world. He walked around in the crisp cool air, feeling the altitude in his lungs and seeing it in the sharp outlines of the low mountains to the east and south. The horizon was huge, the gravity heavy. He was tired and confused. The feng shui of this place was awesome, but he was having trouble focusing on things, and feeling them. In his mind he was still stuck in that amazing crowd, or in his mom’s apartment. At the same time, there in the distance across the sere high plain a herd of some kind of deer or antelope grazed, round-sided in the sun. Under the cobalt sky, autumn grass gleamed like gold. Life. The contrast to the little dead ball they were headed for could not have been greater. There it was above him, visible in the sky even by day—a half-moon, making the color of the sky darker by contrast—its shadowed half quite visible. It was hard to believe they were headed there.

He was rejoined by Bo and Dhu, which reminded him: still no response from Peng Ling. This was unlike her. The three of them were led through hallways and up in an elevator to a launch deck, where they stepped into another tall slender spaceship and settled onto thick seats. His seat tilted back, flight assistants connected up his seatbelts, and shortly after that the rockets rumbled distantly under them, their chairs vibrated, and off they went. Crushing pressure for a while, then no pressure at all. It was interesting to see it all become routine. Oh yes, going back to the moon—one did it all the time. He kept quiet, fell asleep.

In the hypnagogic state of drifting off, he thought he heard Bo say to Dhu, “We will follow the old man to the source of the peach blossom stream.”

Somewhere a tiger roared. He floated on a pond like a black swan.