Red Moon

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN shoulie laohu Tiger Hunting

The time of the flight back to the moon passed for Ta Shu in a kind of fugue state of mourning and apprehension. There was no way to communicate with Zhou Bao that might not be overheard, and he didn’t want that. Best to have his meals with Bo and Dhu, and ask them questions about their work, chat them up, see what he could find out by what they said. But as it turned out they were quite reticent, and mostly answered one question with another, playing the same game he was. These were very polite and uninformative meals. And eating in weightlessness was an effort, it took some concentration. He was getting better at it, but during these meals he could pretend he wasn’t, and thus avoid talk altogether.

Then he glimpsed the moon, looking big through the little window, and a few hours later he saw it again, rushing at him with the same rapidity that had given Fred Fredericks such a start on their first arrival. Ta Shu figured that landing in such a fashion was no more or less dangerous than any other time of a flight through space, no matter how alarming the speed. So he went to a window seat and watched with interest as they shot toward the great white ball. It did look like they were headed for an awful smash.

As before, however, they landed without incident, and again without even feeling the moment when their spaceship was magnetically captured by the long piste. All they knew was that their chairs swiveled around so that they were eyeballs in when deceleration began. That pressure was less bad than their launch g, and soon enough their ship was stopped and they were getting out of their restraints and learning again how to move in the lunar gravity so gently holding them down. For some reason Ta Shu found it harder this time than before, harder and less entertaining.

Bo and Dhu looked to be first-timers on the moon, perhaps a little overconfident at first, and as they walked ahead of Ta Shu they banged off walls, floor, even ceiling. By the time they got into the subway to the Peaks of Eternal Light the two men looked ready to sit and strap themselves in again, Bo chastened, Dhu chuckling uneasily. Off to the big central station on the highest peak of eternal light.

When they were in that station Ta Shu followed Bo and Dhu again. They were still bold, despite their frequent gaffes. “I thought we would be better this time,” one of them said to the other. Ta Shu couldn’t afford to run into things as hard as they were, and he gripped the handrails and pulled himself along cautiously. The people in the station included some familiar faces, but no one he knew. They treated him with a deference not shown to him before, and he supposed this might be one result of Peng Ling now being his sponsor (if that was the word for it). Emissary of a member of the standing committee: there would be few persons on the moon as well connected as that, and if it was known—and he guessed by the looks on people’s faces that it was—it would make a difference.

And indeed he was taken to a room on a level higher than the Hotel Star, clearly some kind of distinguished visitors’ quarters that he had not qualified for during his previous visit to this station. While he was putting his things away he felt a buzz on his wrist and saw something had come in from Zhou Bao. A brief message, asking him to come up the Libration Line to see him as soon as he could. No RSVP necessary.

As Ta Shu wanted to confer with Zhou, this message was welcome; but it wasn’t likely that he would be allowed to go up the Libration Line by himself. He thought about it for a while, wishing again he could consult with Peng directly about how best to accommodate Bo and Dhu. He had tried calling her again several times, but still she hadn’t answered. Were they to accompany him everywhere? And if Peng wanted that, did that necessarily mean that Ta Shu wanted it also? He wasn’t sure.

In the end he informed Bo and Dhu that he wished to go up the line to see his friend Zhou, and they nodded and asked if they could come along, and Ta Shu said yes, of course. The next day they met at the station and took the train line north to Petrov Crater.

When they got to the station at Petrov, they went to Zhou’s office on the top floor. Earth was currently below the horizon, the black sky overhead packed with stars, the great braided white cloud of the Milky Way arcing overhead. Uncountable stars, although someone said it was around ten thousand. Dhu was looking up the time for Earthrise on his wrist, Bo was looking around Zhou’s office. Zhou had known that Ta Shu was coming with guests, so he sidled in unsurprised, and more animated than usual, playing the part of the friendly host.

Still, they were now faced with a difficulty. Zhou had asked him to come, and now he was here. But what could Zhou say with Bo and Dhu there in the room?

Soon it became clear to Ta Shu that Zhou himself didn’t know the answer to this; Zhou spotted Dhu looking at his wrist and then at the horizon, and quickly followed that lead, talking about the slowness of Earthrise—how it pricked the horizon like a sapphire, how the lack of an atmosphere on the moon meant there was no warning of that arrival, how the sight of Earth oriented everything once it bulked there in the sky. How big it looked compared to the moon from Earth—eight times bigger, yes: amazing.

Yes yes, the two agents’ faces said. All very interesting. And yet here they were. Something was going on. Could they please get on with it? Even Dhu had this look.

Ta Shu said, “My acquaintances here work for the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Now they are helping Minister Peng in her attempt to stabilize the situation at home. They have information that suggests that some of the unrest at home is being organized from up here on the moon, and are hoping to find out if that is the case.”

“Messages came from here,” Bo added.

Zhou frowned. “Do you mean from this station specifically?”

Bo and Dhu regarded each other. “From the moon,” Bo clarified. “And from the edge of the moon, the limb. This limb, in fact. From the right edge as you look up from Earth. It was a brief message conveyed by laser light. An amateur astronomer observing the moon was in the beam’s target circle, and captured a recording of part of it. It was an encrypted message.”

“And you broke the code?”

“No. But the timing of this message is suggestive. An hour after this light from the moon was seen, people from all over China began to head for Beijing.”

“Coincidence?” Zhou suggested. “Correlation, not causation?”

Bo and Dhu did not reply.

Ta Shu saw that Zhou was not going to share anything with these two, just out of a general sense of caution. War of the agencies at least, and maybe something more. The discipline inspection commission didn’t have much direct presence on the moon, so far as Ta Shu knew, even if they did oversee the Lunar Authority as they did all the agencies. So as interlopers these two were not going to get very far with locals like Zhou. For these two to make any headway would take some combination of bureaucratic power and personal diplomacy that they had not yet shown any sign of having. They could barely even stand, and so naturally they had no standing. Ta Shu wondered what Peng Ling had had in mind when she sent them to accompany him. But of course there was so much he didn’t know. More than ever he realized he didn’t even know for sure that Peng Ling had ordered them to join him. Her recorded message had been brief. He really did need to have a private conversation with her to confirm it.

Now Zhou continued to play bland ignorance, easily read as noncooperation. Bo and Dhu didn’t press very hard, and after a while they gave up and pronged clumsily toward the residency centrifuge they had been assigned to, claiming moon fatigue.

When they were gone, Zhou eyed the room in a way that told Ta Shu they were likely to be on camera and recorded. In a friendly voice he invited Ta Shu to go out with him for a short drive to Earth View Point, the highest prominence in the area. Ta Shu readily agreed, and they bounced down to the garage, got in a rover, and drove out.

“Sorry to hear about your mother,” Zhou Bao said. “My condolences.”

“Thanks. She had a good life.”

The road to the point was marked by the wheels of many previous rovers. In the brilliant light of the lunar day the land to each side of the tracks looked like the glazed layer of refrozen snow that one often saw around McMurdo Station in Antarctica. After one uphill stretch they got onto the flatter height of a prominence somewhat like a mesa top. Like almost every other topographical feature on the moon, it was a remnant arc of an old crater rim. From up here the horizon lay quite a bit farther off, maybe twenty kilometers, it was hard to judge; the horizon from here was a wildly undulating border between the painfully white moon below and the deep black of space above. The white of the moon was flecked with shadows, the black of space was spangled with stars; that symmetry combined with an accidental curve of the horizon to make it all resemble the Daoist taijitu, the ancient yin-yang symbol here ballooning out to encompass the entire universe, confirming the visionary insight of Zhou Dunyi, who had first drawn the divided circle a thousand years before. A geomancer of great talent.

“Yin-yang,” Ta Shu noted, gesturing at the view with a curve of his hand.

“Yes,” Zhou said. “And soon Earth will rise and break the pattern, as it always does.” Zhou consulted his wrist. “Twelve minutes or so, in fact.”

“I look forward to that. So,” Ta Shu said, “what’s going on? Can we speak freely in this car?”

“Yes. It’s my own private office, you might say, and I’ve had it thoroughly privatized. As to what’s going on, I was hoping you would tell me!”

Ta Shu nodded. “From my side, these two were sicced on me by Peng, or so they said. I can’t be sure what they’re up to, but they have me in hand, and they mentioned her name, and had a recorded message for me from her. She’s my patron and she wants my help, so I have to go with what she gives me. I thought she was on my side, or I was on her side, but now I don’t even know what I mean by that. For sure she’s in a dogfight at the Party congress, I know that.”

“Of course. Are they really from national security?”

“I don’t know. Dhu is government, Bo is a Party cadre, or so they say. A team, as in the old days.”

“So it seems.”

“What about you? Have you found our young wanderers?”

“Yes. Which is to say, they found me. I’m trying to hide them, to keep them out of worse trouble, but to do that I’m holding them. Chan Qi doesn’t like that.”

“I can imagine.”

“I’d be very happy to give them over to you, but what will you do with them?”

“We can’t do it with Bo and Dhu around. Tell me how you found them.”

“They came into the station needing fuel and food. They were traveling with a couple of helium three prospectors, so-called, and had driven cross-country from Fang Fei’s place on the far side.”

“Could you send them out again with these prospectors?”

“Yes, they want to do that, but it’s hard to stay hidden in those cars.”

“Doesn’t Chan Qi understand that?”

“The prospectors think they are better at hiding than they really are, apparently. And I guess she believes them.”

“I’m surprised she would be that naïve.”

“The moon makes people moony. We are all lunatics up here, hoping that the world has gone away.”

“I was hoping that myself,” Ta Shu admitted.

“Because here you are.”

“But even on Earth I hope that.”

“Actually, I think it’s easier on Earth than here. Hiding, I mean. Maybe even fooling yourself. Earth is crowded and fragmented. The noise-to-signal ratio is stupendous, so you can get in the noise and hide.”

“So should we try to get these two back to Earth again?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t know which would be better. A lot of people down there will be after her.”

“But here too.”

“Maybe. I’m not sure. Once you’ve been up here awhile, you don’t want to collaborate with Earth as much. There’s a lot of noncompliance up here. Once you click into it, you find it’s a pretty big network. If these two had only stayed in Fang Fei’s compound, for instance, they might have been fine. Fang doesn’t tolerate interference with his places.”

“Could we send them back there?” Ta Shu wondered.

“Maybe. But Peng knows they were there, right?”

“She sent them there in the first place.”

“So that would be walking back into her clutches.”

“Her clutches might be better than some other people’s clutches. I am still assuming she is the good guy here.”

“Maybe,” Zhou said. “But why does she want Qi?”

“I don’t know. She said that Qi was messing up her plans for reform by initiating the demonstrations back home, which will then cause a crackdown from the rightists, which will make the reforms more difficult.”

“Sounds plausible. But aren’t Peng and Qi’s father both candidates to become the next president, at this very congress?”

“Yes, so I understand. If you think a woman really has a chance.”

Zhou shrugged. “I’ve heard it said that Peng could do it. And that’s partly because she’s been so tough and effective. So, think about it: if you had the daughter of your rival in custody, it might help you, if a moment came where someone had to concede.”

Ta Shu sighed. “It doesn’t seem like her.”

“Nevertheless. People who might become president probably don’t ever seem much like their previous selves.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Ta Shu said, pondering it unhappily.

“We all present a persona to other people. Some have a wide range of personas. A real cast of characters.”

Ta Shu sighed. His cast had always been extremely small: just him. There was his cloud persona, of course, and there was the poet; but these had tended to be just him. Possibly his imagination was deficient in that regard. Although he did tend to try to encourage other people by pretending he was always happy. That was called cheerfulness. Maybe it was part of him, maybe it was a persona. “So what do you suggest?”

Zhou sat there thinking about it. “Ah,” he said, and gestured forward; the horizon was now pricked by a brilliant blue light, like a shard of glowing lapis lazuli. This blue wafer grew to left and right, then stabilized: Earth. The merest fingernail clipping on the white horizon, a slim crescent of blue so intense it looked radioactive, wedged there between the black and the white.

“I don’t know what to suggest,” Zhou confessed. “To me it looks like you have some secret police tailing you, waiting to arrest the very person you are trying to meet and keep from getting arrested. So maybe you shouldn’t meet her.”

“That’s fine by me, but what should I do instead to try and help her?”

Zhou thought about it as they watched the Earth creep upward. Slow as it was compared to moonrise on Earth, a matter of hours rather than minutes, the movement was still happening, as a creeping creep of blue.

So far from home. Vivid blue, the color of water, the color of breath. The cosmic yin-yang symbol enveloping that blue line was by contrast so obviously dead. They were looking from death toward life, like ghosts trying to figure out what they should have done when they were in the world.

Zhou finally said, “I just don’t know. You could slip away from these people and join your young friends in hiding, but then your ability to act would be constrained.”

“Being out here hasn’t seemed to have stopped Qi from acting.”

“You don’t know that. Could be she only got off that single message. Could be she would do a lot more if she were in Beijing. But in any case, on the other hand you could stay away from her, maybe lead your minders around by the nose, wait for an opportunity to do something to help her from the side.”

“I’m guessing I should do that.”

“Maybe so. The thing is, these two agents are not going to be able to hunt for her by themselves. There’s only a limited number of rooms on the moon, but people hiding her could move her and her friend around, staying in front of the hunt. And there are quite a few hidden spaces too. Much more hidden than Fang Fei’s China Dream.”

“What if Bo and Dhu get help from the authorities at the south pole?”

“If that happened, they might find her. If they had the right people helping. But Jiang Jianguo won’t help them, that I am sure of. The main thing is, can you find out who these guys are really working for?”

“I don’t know. What about you? Could you find out?”

“I don’t know. My first move would be to ask Jianguo for help.”

Slowly, slowly, the blue paring of Earth crept up over the white wall of the horizon. Time itself seemed slowed, congealed to a syrup they were caught in. Flies in amber; ghosts outside the world. Ta Shu pondered his options.

“Poem pair?” Zhou suggested.

“Oh dear,” Ta Shu protested.

“Come on,” Zhou Bao said. “One must keep a sense of propriety. Are we literati or not? Are we alive or not?”

“I’m not sure,” Ta Shu admitted. “I feel like a ghost.”

“I am sure,” Zhou said. “We are alive. And even ghosts write poetry.”

“Do they? I never heard that.”

“They do. Give it a try.”

Ta Shu sighed, pondered his wrist. Without thought, without volition, his fingers tapped out keys for ideograms. The pause in their conversation was no longer than their usual silences, and yet suddenly looking up at him was a poem:

He showed his wrist to Zhou Bao, who read it and smiled. “Very good. Very true. Here’s mine.”

Ta Shu said, “We are both sounding kind of worried, my friend.”

“And why not. Come on, let’s get back. There’s nothing more to say right now, and I’m worried I’ll miss messages from the Peaks. I’ve sent out some encrypted inquiries, and even that is looking suspicious now.”

“Sure, let’s get back.”

Zhou drove the rover in a circle on the mesa and they returned to the station. The midday sunlight was so bright that even the shadows were white, blasted by photons ricocheting sideways into any shaded place. Everything was white, with faint lines and gradations making what little texture there was. The wheel tracks on the road shimmered as they proceeded like mirages in a desert. When they approached the station’s garage outer door, Zhou clicked on the radio and announced they were coming in.

“Glad you’re back,” the lock keeper said. “Those cops that came here with Ta Shu found Chan Qi and arrested her.”

They rushed inside, Zhou taking the lead. Ta Shu found again that his ability to hurry in lunar gravity was severely limited. Loping after Zhou he flew immediately into the ceiling, shouted in dismay, landed on his feet several meters along, grabbed the handrail on the wall to keep from falling, stopped himself. Started again with a hand-over-hand motion, like a sailor on the flooded deck of a ship. Zhou had never slowed, and Ta Shu hurried after him around a corner and was startled to find him coming right back at him, hunched over in his rapid big-headed shuffle. Ta Shu got out of Zhou’s way, turned around and followed him again, guessing he had gone first to his office and was now headed to wherever Qi and Fred might be, but now with a small pistol in hand. He was talking fast into his wristpad, so that the gun, which Ta Shu hoped and assumed was a Taser pistol, was pointed at the ceiling. Again Zhou was much faster than Ta Shu, and as the station’s hallways were filled with right-angle turns, he hustled quickly out of Ta Shu’s sight, and Ta Shu had to hurry as best he could after him, following a blue line on the floor which he hoped indicated the way Zhou had taken.

Luckily this turned out to be the case, and he staggered into a room just in time to see everyone shouting, Zhou ordering everyone to freeze but none of the others able to achieve that status even if they had wanted to, and Bo trying to get at Chan Qi past some local officials, while Qi was trying to slap him in the face but missing. Dhu was shouting to Bo, and Fred was yelling at both of them in English, his face beet red behind a pair of black-rimmed spectacles.

“Everyone stop!” Zhou Bao yelled at the top of his lungs.

For a moment everyone stopped, though all of them but Zhou were teetering this way and that. Zhou had his Taser gun pointed at the ceiling, but it still had the deadly look of any gun, so they were all working to bring themselves to a halt of some sort or another.

“These people are under arrest!” Bo said furiously.

“You don’t have any jurisdiction here,” Zhou told him coldly. “If you try to coerce anyone in my charge I’ll have to shoot you with this, and people shot by Tasers in this gravity have a tendency to flail around and injure themselves, sometimes quite badly. So let’s avoid that and stay still. I’m the police equivalent at this station, so I’ll be taking these two people back into my custody, and I’m ordering you visiting officials to stay here in this room while I sort this out.”

“We need to be there,” Dhu said.

“I need to be there,” Bo said.

“I’ll call you on the intercom after I’ve checked this out with my own superiors down at the Peaks. You hold still right here until then.”

He gestured at Qi and Fred, glanced briefly at Ta Shu. “Get out into the hall.”

They scuttled out as quickly as they could, banging around as if in zero g itself. Zhou aimed his Taser pistol right at Bo as they did so, then slipped out after them. He closed the door and punched the door pad hard enough to throw himself back a bit, apparently locking the door.

“Come with me,” he said grimly, and led them down the hall. As they crashed into each other and the walls after him, he turned and hissed “One at a time!” with a look of disgust at their clumsiness. But even he was bounding down the hall like a drunken kangaroo, his speedy shuffle temporarily lost. The moon was simply not made for human hastiness.

At the end of one long hall he directed them into another room. Doors in the other wall slid open onto a tram car.

“Off you go,” Zhou said. “This is the emergency return train, it will get you down to the pole faster than any other way we have here.”

“But what do we do when we get there?” Qi demanded. “Who will meet us?”

“I don’t know, but it won’t be Bo and Dhu. I’ll call ahead on my private line and tell Inspector Jiang you’re coming. Best for you to get with Inspector Jiang and his local security, and hope for the best after that.”

“What if Jiang is with Bo and Dhu on this?” Ta Shu asked.

Zhou shrugged. “I doubt that will be the case. Let me think about your next step while you get on your way. I’ll talk to you en route and let you know what I’ve set up.”

Qi started to object, but Zhou waved her off. “Later! For now, be quick. The sooner you get to the big base, the more options we’ll have.”

Qi saw the sense in this, and turned and went through the door into the tram. Fred followed, then Ta Shu, and when they were seated and strapped in, the tram jerked forward and off they went.

The tram they were on was floating over a piste laid in as straight and flat a line over the landscape as they had been able to build. On Earth they would have been inside hyperloops. Here the moon gave them a near vacuum to move in, but they had to either hew to a straight line or risk flying off the piste. In a couple of places, where the line had to take an unavoidable swerve, the train slowed to a crawl, but most of the time it floated along at a rocketlike speed that nevertheless included no vibration or noise, so that looking out the windows was like looking at an image on a screen.

Then for a while they skirted the edge of a long drop into the South Pole–Aitken Basin, and could see part of its immensity. Ta Shu found himself so amazed by its size that he was startled out of his focus on his young friends and the general trouble. From rim to floor the drop was thirteen vertical kilometers, meaning about forty-five thousand feet, and for a few minutes they could see that drop for what it was. He was reminded that some impacts were so violent they changed everything, even the axis of the world. This feng shui perception, mixing geology and deep time into a history of everything, overwhelmed him: they were in it, they were part of it even now, or especially now. A bang like this could happen to them.

On they flew, moving at jet speed a centimeter above the ground, over the piste and its euclidean line. In another hour they would reach the Peaks of Eternal Light and be thrown back into their troubles. Qi and Fred were squabbling about this already. How can we make a plan when we don’t know who will be meeting us? Haven’t you ever heard of contingency plans? It was obvious they had spent a lot of time together. Maybe too much time. And Qi was very near term with her pregnancy. Ta Shu watched them bicker, wondered what they had become over their time together.

Eventually Fred pursed his mouth unhappily and stared at the floor. Suddenly he glanced up at Ta Shu. “So you’re back,” he noted.

“Yes.”

“What about your mom?”

“She died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry to hear,” Qi added quickly, giving Ta Shu a shocked look. She had forgotten why he had left Fang Fei’s refuge, he saw, and was surprised now that he didn’t look more changed by what had happened. She had thought he would be visibly shattered. She was young.

“Thank you,” he said to her. “She had a good life.”

“Why are you back?” Qi asked.

“I was trying to help you.” He looked at her and smiled a little. “I’m not sure it’s working.”

She shrugged and looked away. “Thank you for trying.”

“It was Peng Ling who sent me.”

She frowned at that.

Then his wrist vibrated and he looked at his pad. No message, but then the pad’s speaker said, “Zhou here. Listen, the tram you’re on will stop a station short of Eighty-Five Percent. It’s called Worsley Station. Unless there’s some kind of interdiction, it should be the first place your tram stops. You’ll be picked up there by an American rover, and they’ll drive you to that new base of theirs that landed down there a while ago.”

“To the Americans?” Ta Shu said.

“Yes. You need to go there and ask for political asylum for Qi. For Fred it should be just his own country’s ordinary sovereignty. This is your best option. If you continue on to Eighty-Five, you’ll be detained immediately. It looks like Bo and Dhu have more authority up here than I thought they did. Inspector Jiang says he has been overruled, and can’t control the situation. He’s hopping mad.”

Ta Shu thought about it. “Does that mean you’re in trouble too?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got my colleagues there at Eighty-Five, they’ll make my case for me. These people can’t just come up here and do whatever they want. But I don’t know how they took control at Eighty-Five, so I’m not sure what’s going on right now. Could be Red Spear has gotten more people back up here. Best if you get in with the Americans and then we’ll figure out what to do next.”

“Okay, thanks. I’ll give you a call when we’re there.”

“Good, I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”

So when the train stopped at Worsley Station, they got off into a little concrete-walled room and headed for the locks, passing by some strangers who fortunately seemed entirely concerned with their own business. This was a new station to Ta Shu, and he was interested to see that it didn’t have the kind of crowd control evident in the big stations closer to the pole. This one appeared to be too small for that, was maybe even a private station.

At one door an American waved them through a lock and into a big rover. After they were in the lock, its outer door closed and its inner door clicked and slid open, and they stepped up and in.

Here a quartet of Americans met them, two men and two women. One of the women, who looked as Chinese as Qi but spoke English with a Californian accent, introduced herself as Valerie Tong. “It’s good to see you again,” she said to Fred.

“Good to see you too?” Fred said, clearly unsure if he remembered her or not. Nevertheless he introduced Qi and Ta Shu. “We were told you might be able to give us asylum?”

“We don’t have to give you asylum,” she said to him. “For your friends here, we’ll take you all to our local station chief, and you can discuss the situation with him. I’m happy to talk with you, but policy and personnel decisions are above my level.”

Qi looked unimpressed by this declaration, and indeed Valerie saw that and seemed embarrassed to have said it. Ta Shu quickly asked, “Is your station chief still John Semple?”

“Yes. He told me he knew you, and he’s looking forward to seeing you again. He’ll be at the base to meet you.”

“Good. I look forward to seeing him too. We worked together in Antarctica, long ago.”

This little diversion seemed to have been enough to distract Qi, who had looked like she was about to snap at this helpful American woman, but was now swiping her wrist and reading what came up.

“Is anything happening?” Fred asked her.

She shrugged. “Demonstrations have begun in Shanghai and Chengdu. Big enough that they can’t shut them down. They haven’t been able to do anything about the one in Beijing either. And now… now a big crowd from Hong Kong has crossed into Shenzhen and joined a demonstration there.”

“What will the police do?”

“They’ll probably wait them out and hope they go away. But maybe this time they won’t go away. The crowds keep getting bigger. And a lot of people are taking their savings out of the banks, like the Americans. A lot of them are moving it into a cryptocurrency called carboncoin.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not sure. I think it’s a coin that is created or validated by taking carbon out of the air. Something like that. It’s a credit system, and its coins can only buy sustainable subsistence necessities, but since everyone needs those, it’s looking like they’re getting widespread buy-in and acceptance. What will happen if everyone shifts their savings all at once?”

Fred shrugged. “I don’t know.”

The rover they were in was a very slow and vibratory experience compared to the train they had been on. Nevertheless they soon reached the American base, which was a single tall cylinder standing on six legs of various heights that together compensated for the bumpy ground it stood over. The transfer into it was by way of a short tube, which extended like a jetway and locked onto the rover’s door. The three travelers followed Valerie up the shallow steps and through the station’s lock, where they were greeted by John Semple.

“Welcome to Little America,” he said, giving Ta Shu a hug. “This place kind of reminds me of Pole, don’t you think?”

Ta Shu nodded politely. “Like the galley, maybe. Thanks for taking us in.”

“My pleasure. Sit down and tell me more about what happened.”

They sat around the table in the station’s common room. John Semple brought them up to speed on events of the last few days on Earth. The fiscal noncompliance campaign was going stronger than ever in America. Markets had crashed, banks had closed to stop depositors from withdrawing amounts beyond what the banks had on hand, and now most of the biggest ones were giving themselves over to control by the Federal Reserve to make themselves eligible for a government bailout, which they all now needed. In effect these banks were being nationalized. Everyone was now trying to understand terms like citizens’ fiscal revolution, cryptocurrencies, especially carboncoin, and blockchain governance. People were also trying to figure out whether these mass actions were going to create real representation. There were a million opinions, or maybe a billion, but no one actually seemed to understand what was happening.

To add to the confusion, China’s government was buying more US treasury bonds, which in effect meant China was supporting the US Federal Reserve Bank’s “salvation by nationalization” of the private banking industry. This looked to many in America like a takeover disguised as aid, and anti-China alarm in the States was rising in some quarters, while others were welcoming the help. Whether China buying American T-bills was a help or a hindrance no one could say for sure, but whatever else was happening, it looked like the dollar might be coming to the end of its long century of global dominance, as it was now being propped up by the renminbi. The scramble to leave the dollar for more stable currencies, assuming there were any, was getting desperate and chaotic. Nothing that China or anyone else could do was going to be enough to save the American economy from a huge disruption, which was either a self-induced collapse or a startling triumph for the idea of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That it had been caused by legal actions taken by millions of Americans intent on changing the political system made John Semple think that although it was confusing, there might be some promise in it. How many Americans were part of this takeback of their federal government from global finance was unclear, but the Householders’ Union now claimed two hundred million active members.

Meanwhile, back in China, John said, individual savings accounts were shifting at such a rate to carboncoin and other cryptocurrencies that withdrawals from the state-owned banks had been temporarily banned, as well as all traffic in cryptocurrencies of any kind. But stopping speculation in these currencies didn’t actually stop people from using them for exchanges. All this was now only a sideshow to the widespread street demonstrations, but possibly more important in the end. Demonstrations came and went, but law remained, money remained. Still, it was looking less and less likely that the policy of waiting for the demonstrations to sputter out, a tactic that had worked for many decades now, would succeed this time, or succeed fast enough. But the other options were so dangerous that no one wanted to see them tried, not even the PLA—or at least a majority of the PLA. Hostile pilot syndrome was of course always a real danger.

“Nothing will stop the people,” Qi said as she looked through a selection of photos and maps. “They can’t be stopped.”

John Semple regarded her. “So what do you think will happen?”

She gave him a quick glance. “Change!”

Part of Ta Shu would have been very interested to hear what Chan Qi thought change could be in the contemporary context. Dynastic succession—really? Who or what could replace the Chinese Communist Party, which had led the country and served as “the government of the government” since 1949? He had often wondered about that himself, feeling that they were all riding a tiger together, a tiger that these days ran along the edge of a cliff. He had sometimes felt that Winston Churchill’s description of democracy was equally suitable as a description of the Party’s rule in China: the worst possible system, except for all the rest.

And maybe it wasn’t even fair to call it the worst. Socialism with Chinese characteristics: it was, he felt, a good idea. And he was quite sure that no one could rule China without the Chinese people’s consent. So the fact that the Party still ruled meant de facto that the majority of the people still wanted the Party, and approved of its governance, feeling it was their system. In that sense, as long as that feeling endured, it was a representative system.

But now it appeared that everywhere in the world governments were suffering a crisis of representation. Possibly this was because it was all one system, which one could call global capitalism with national characteristics, each variation around the Earth marked by the remaining vestiges of an earlier nation-state system, but still making together one larger global thing: capitalism. When it came to those national characteristics, China had the Party, the US its federal government, the EU its union; but all were ruled by the globalized market.

So what would Chan Qi say to this?

But Ta Shu was not going to have his curiosity about Qi’s ideas answered at this particular moment, because the lock door leading out to the rover tubeway opened suddenly, shocking John Semple and all the other Americans in the common room; then even more shockingly, a crowd of Chinese men holding Taser pistols filed into the room and stood against the walls, watching the Americans and their guests closely, guns in hand pointed at the ceiling.

“What’s going on here?” John Semple cried angrily.

Bo and Dhu entered last. Tall and short. They were not holding weapons, but they were holding power. All eyes fixed on them.

Bo spoke in English, which surprised Ta Shu. “We have come to take in our charge this Chinese national”—gesturing at Qi—“who is accused of grave crimes against the state, including murder of a policeman.”

“This is an American base,” John Semple said. “You have no jurisdiction here, and in fact you’re trespassing. You must leave at once.”

Bo shook his head. “This is not American territory. There are no valid territorial claims on the moon. Each nation can make scientific experiments wherever they like here, then they have the right to continue those experiments. You placed this station here long after China started an experiment on this very ground.”

“What do you mean? We located this station on empty land!”

“No. We laid a network of wires over this entire area, as part of an experiment to determine strength of solar wind. You put your base right on top of a preexisting Chinese experiment. Very inappropriate. We stand on lunar territory first used by China, so we have jurisdiction here. And we must take this suspect into custody.”

“No.” Semple stared at Bo. “If you try to do that against our wishes, by force, you’ll have a dangerous fight on your hands, and then an international incident.”

Bo pursed his lips, shook his head. “Our authorization and command comes from the very top of Chinese government. They will deal with incident. As for fight here, please notice that we outnumber you greatly, with men who are peace officers, willing to use nonfatal tools to disable you.”

It occurred to Ta Shu that Tasers were probably more effective on the moon than guns, as being more likely to be used, because less likely to puncture the chamber holding both victim and assailant. A Taser would affect only its target person, and being nonlethal (hopefully) would keep any diplomatic repercussions from being too severe. And Tasers perhaps didn’t contravene the Outer Space Treaty—not the most pressing consideration in this moment, admittedly, although Bo and Semple were in fact trading legalisms.

Ta Shu watched John Semple think it over. Out of the blue he recalled something he had heard about law enforcement in McMurdo, back when he and Semple had first met: its thousand residents were policed by officials who had only a single handgun on station, a pistol which was disassembled into three parts that were kept in three different locked offices, to prevent anyone from going crazy and using it on their comrades or themselves. People stationed in remote places were self-regulating, for the most part. Weapons were dangerous to all. But sometimes there was a need, and when that happened, a Taser was no doubt the equivalent of McMurdo’s disassembled gun. Almost a symbolic show of force; but not quite.

Ta Shu decided to act. “You have no authority on the moon!” he exclaimed to Bo, standing as he spoke.

He saw that John Semple was surprised he had spoken. But a flicker of a glance from John suggested that John now wanted him to keep talking, to buy time perhaps. He was also flicking glances at his assistants, eyes roving in a way that might suggest confusion or pondering, but Ta Shu thought could be meaningful looks.

So Ta Shu continued. “The administrator of Petrov Crater Station declined to allow you permission to take this same action, and he is an official of the Lunar Authority and the Lunar Personnel Coordination Task Force, which outranks any other policing body here. All other regular lunar agencies would likewise refuse to acknowledge your authority, not to mention your illegal incursion into an American station, no matter where it happens to be located. So you are not in fact a Chinese administrative group. You’re some kind of rogue operation, soon to become a criminal operation, guilty of trespassing, and kidnapping, and who knows what will come next—maybe coercive interplanetary transport! Surely you must be members of a splinter group like the Red Spear, repudiated many times by the standing committee of the Politburo, and even the People’s Liberation Army’s Central Military Command. No one in Beijing will support you if you do this thing! Surely you must know that you yourselves will be sacrificed by any commanders you may have for this mad action, even if they ordered you to do it. They don’t care what happens to you afterward. You’re as much a tool to them as that Taser is to you.”

Bo and Dhu and all their men were looking completely unimpressed by Ta Shu’s argument. But a little time had passed.

“One moment,” John Semple said, glancing at his wrist. “Hold on, please.”

Then they were all shoved violently to the floor as the American base blasted off into space.

Normally at the moment of takeoff everyone would be lying down strapped into cushioned launch chairs, because old-fashioned chemical launches from the surface of the moon were very abrupt affairs. One-sixth of a g meant launch rockets exploding downward from the bottom of a spacecraft made it leap quite suddenly into space, as was now made evident by the fact they were all knocked to the floor by the hard lurch and subsequent powerful acceleration. Ta Shu thumped to his knees, then sat down and didn’t even try to rise. All the other people in the room fell over one way or another, and one of the men standing against the wall fired his Taser pistol, on purpose or by accident, hitting one of his fellows, who grunted and spasmed across the floor kicking people and furniture. For a moment all was chaos and noise; loudest of all was Bo, who had crashed to his knees shouting “What are you doing? What are you doing?”

John Semple had been prepared for the launch, Ta Shu presumed, and therefore had had time to grab a table. Holding himself upright, he stared down at Bo and said, “Put down your weapons. We’re headed for the American base at the north pole, guided there by an automatic pilot that you don’t know how to alter. Anything you do now to try to redirect or impede this craft could get us all killed. So put down your weapons and talk like civilized people.”

“Civilized people!” Bo cried. “You are protecting a criminal who is attacking the Chinese state! There will be trouble from this, big trouble!”

“That remains to be seen,” John Semple said. “For now, please tell your men here to stand down. That one appears to be hurt, and this guy’s been tasered by his own teammates. Let’s all sit down. It’s safer that way. Do any of your people have medical experience? No? We have a couple first responders on board. They can help your men if you want.”

Bo and Dhu and their men retreated to a corner and muttered among themselves in Chinese. Ta Shu couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he noticed Qi cocking an ear in their direction as she sat on a chair holding her belly up against the strain. He wondered if she could hear them, but in a way it didn’t matter; when they landed at the north pole they would be surrounded by Americans, also by an international community that included only one small Chinese consular office. Things were going to be resolved outside this flying room, and the people here were going to have to live with it one way or another. Bo and Dhu were smart enough to recognize that, presumably.

“Lean to the side,” Ta Shu suggested to them, hoping they recognized Mao’s old injunction.

He shifted across the floor to sit by Fred and Qi. The flight to the north pole would take an hour or so, and for the time being there was nothing to do but wait.

“What happened to you two after I left?” he asked the two of them in English. “Why did you leave Fang Fei’s place on the far side?”

Qi shrugged. She didn’t want to talk about it. Fred said, “She didn’t like it. She wanted to talk to some friends back on Earth, she said. And she thought that place was just a prison dressed up as a classical Chinese theme park.”

“A refuge,” Ta Shu suggested again.

“I know, that’s what you said, but she didn’t like it. Then these helium three prospectors said they could get us out and take us to the near side, where she could get a message to Earth. So that’s what we did.”

“And then?”

Fred regarded Qi, who was sitting with her eyes now shut, faking sleep. “We got to the edge between near side and far side.”

“The libration zone.”

“Yes. Then she used a laser comms device to get a message back to Earth. After that the prospectors needed to refuel their rover, so we went to the nearest station to do that, and as soon as we got there they arrested us. Then after a while you showed up, and you know the rest.”

“This keeps happening,” Ta Shu observed.

“I noticed,” Fred replied, looking at Ta Shu a little suspiciously. “I don’t like the look of these people, they seem familiar somehow, but I can’t place them. Who are they? Why do they want her so bad?”

“I was told they were working for an old student of mine who is very high in the government.”

“But if this student of yours is helping you, they should be helping us, right?”

“I don’t know if it’s that simple.”

Fred sighed. “Nothing is ever simple when it comes to you guys.”

“Very true. So, there’s nothing else that happened to you two?”

Fred frowned. “Qi used that mobile quantum key device you gave her when we came here this time, and she had a conversation with someone over it.”

“I see,” Ta Shu said, though he didn’t. “I wonder who that was. Do you still have the device?”

“No. These guys took it from us when they arrested us.”

“Maybe we can get it back.”

John Semple came over to sit by them.

“Sorry about this,” he said. “I didn’t have any other way to deal with the situation.”

“That’s all right,” Ta Shu said. “We’ll get where we are going eventually.”

“And where is that?”

“I don’t know.” Ta Shu thought it over. “China, eventually. At least for me. Always China.”

“It seems like things are pretty crazy there right now.”

“I know. I was in Beijing when the first demonstration started.”

“They’ve gotten bigger since then.”

“That’s hard to believe. I’m surprised they haven’t shut down access to the whole province.”

“How would they do that?”

“Trains, airports, roads. They all can be closed.”

“They have been. The crowds are still coming. The Seventh Ring, they’re calling it. Something like twenty or thirty million people, no one really knows. The best estimates are being made by satellite. People keep coming to the nearest stations that are still open, then they get off and walk. It’s becoming a humanitarian crisis, in terms of food and water and toilets.”

“They’ll cope,” Ta Shu said. “They always do.”

“But what if they don’t?”

Ta Shu thought about the idea of something being called the Seventh Ring. Seven was so often the completion of a pattern. “Something will happen. What are they demanding, again?”

“No one is quite sure. Reform of the hukou system. Transparency. Rule of law. Stuff like that.”

“The Party won’t let those happen. Those are Western ideas.”

“Are you sure?” John said. “Because there’s a lot of Chinese who seem to want them.”

“They want something.”

“Well, but what? What do you think it is?”

“Representation.”

“What do you mean?”

“They want the Party to be theirs. They want the Party to represent them, to be working for them. That’s the way it used to be. That’s the way it started.”

John Semple laughed. “We all want that! We’ve lost that in America too. All this stuff in China, it’s happening in America too. We’re having simultaneous crises.”

“Maybe it’s the same crisis. Maybe we’ve all lost it, everywhere. Lost it to the invisible hand. The tong that hides everywhere in plain sight.”

“Maybe so.”

John and Ta Shu stared at each other.

“Can you see if these people brought along a comms device with them?” Ta Shu asked. “It’s one of those quantum key things, very heavy for its size.”

John nodded. “I’ll have my people take a look for it when they get these folks in hand.”

An hour later, the American spacecraft dropped onto a big landing pad near the complex of bases covering the north pole’s peaks of almost-eternal light. American police escorted the Chinese team off the craft and down a hallway. Ta Shu stuck with Qi and Fred as they moved to the American station headquarters. They were led to a reception room under a greenhouse; big clear panels in the ceiling of this reception room gave them skylight views up into branches, vines, hydroponic roots, and many kinds of leaves, filtering the light and turning it a bit green. Ta Shu liked the effect.

During the flight north, John Semple had arranged for Qi to be granted immediate protection from Bo and Dhu and their henchmen. So now they were surrounded by a team of American security people, men and women with a thoroughly military look, though dressed in ordinary lightweight lunar jumpsuits. Eventually they were led downstairs and around a circular hallway to a dining hall, where they sat to eat a meal, recover from the trip, and discuss the situation.

There were things to discuss about Qi’s physical status, and the station nurse talked to her about her pregnancy for a while. After that they sat around eating, reading their wrists, and looking at screens on the walls with various information feeds from Earth, occasionally asking the others about what they were seeing. Earth appeared to be falling deeper and deeper into some kind of geopolitical crisis, and although there were problems everywhere, including Europe, Latin America, Russia, and India, for sure the troubles were at their worst in the US and China. And not just each internally, as bad as those situations appeared to be, but between the two giants as well. Some part of the Chinese government appeared to have reversed course and was now selling off US treasury bonds, just in the last few hours. In effect they were sticking a dagger into their own best customer. Kill your debtor and who will pay you?

“I don’t get why they’re doing this now,” someone remarked. “The last thing we need now is a war between us and China. We’ll both get killed by that.”

“It’s just differential advantage,” someone else replied. “In a crash, whoever does the least bad wins, because it’s all relative. So the Chinese might feel like they will get less killed than we will.”

“No, they want something from us,” John Semple supposed. “They’ll sell until America caves on whatever it is.”

Ta Shu wondered if this were true, and if so, what that element in the Chinese government wanted. He called Peng Ling again, but again could not get through to her. He left a message begging her to call back, even somewhat demanding that she call back, and then he sat there thinking about the situation as some kind of problem in feng shui design. Had any dragon arteries been cut yet? Where was the balance point for all these forces? How could he act to help that balance come into being?

Things cannot remain forever united.

These laws are not forces external to things but represent the harmony of movement immanent in them.

In the midst of greatest obstructions, friends come.

While the others sat around, mostly sleeping in their chairs, he called the Chinese consulate on his wristpad. Eventually he got to the local consul, who greeted him effusively. Such a pleasure to have the famous cloud star and poet honoring them with a call!

“Thank you,” Ta Shu said. Then, as there was no way of beating around the bush in this matter, he explained the situation as he saw it: pregnant Chinese citizen, daughter of one of the standing committee, a princessling, being hounded for no reason by members of an agency that had no authority on the moon. What was going on? And could these agents, possibly rogue agents working against the interests of the Party and the nation, be restrained, arrested, and deported to Earth?

The consul agreed this sounded appropriate, and promised to call home to get clarification on the issue immediately. Possibly some discussion with superiors at home would have to be made in order to make a determination. Current conditions in Beijing, however, made contacting the relevant officials and getting their time and attention a problem. Everyone very busy, all situations impacted by the unrest. Moon not at the top of anyone’s list right now. And if the matter under consideration here was by chance involved in any way with the unrest down there, possibly the replies gathered could be contradictory, and aggregate to a murky directive for action.

“Indeed,” Ta Shu. “And yet even so, please persevere.”

Perseverance was the consul’s middle name, literally in this case, but also in terms of the effort he would now bring to bear.

Ta Shu ended the call.

His young friends were asleep on couches in the corner. The Americans and internationals on the other side of the room were still focused on the crises back on Earth. Ta Shu quickly checked to find out the latest. A march on the National Mall in Washington, DC, had been estimated at four million people. The entire city was overwhelmed, and had all it could do to cope with the crowd. On the same day in Beijing, a push of people, a human wave, had broken through the PLA hold on the south side of the Sixth Ring Road, a victory made possible only because most of the PLA units holding the line had refused to fire on Chinese citizens. Once this breakthrough was known, masses of people outside the city had marched up from the south into the vicinity of Tiananmen Square, which had been occupied to its physical maximum by many thousands of PLA troops, who had drawn back from the outer districts until they filled the giant plaza. The situation was extremely tense, but not yet very violent; for now, it seemed as if everyone involved wanted to avoid bloodshed. Of course in any crowd of that size there were going to be some people spoiling for a fight, even people hoping for blood, to use as propaganda later. And in fact one unit of the public militia had fired on a passing crowd and been assaulted with rocks, with deaths on both sides and a dangerous rout of the crowd in that neighborhood with tear gas and water hoses. Aside from that incident, cooler heads had prevailed. Ambulances and emergency rooms were full, but only that incident of shooting had been reported. The demonstrators had for the most part hewed to a fairly high standard of nonviolence, and no army units on the scene had fired on the crowds. Any and all drones over the skies of Beijing were being shot down on sight by forces on both sides.

So on each side of the world, a kind of precarious balance of forces stood quivering in the wind. People in China and the US were aware of the other country’s situation, which Ta Shu believed might be part of the moment’s precarious stability. They were teetering on the brink of something big, yes; but no one wanted to fall. It was like two exhausted sumo wrestlers propped against each other near the end of a match.

And yet at the same time there were indications that some part of the Chinese government was now putting ferocious financial pressure on some part of the United States government, by way of this dumping of US treasury bonds. T-bill prices were falling, dragging down the dollar and the markets, and all to an accelerating degree—right at a moment when one would have thought that financial stability would be high on both governments’ lists of priorities. The dollar’s troubles weren’t really helping the renminbi, or any of the other national currencies or cryptocurrencies that China had stockpiled in its half century of trade surpluses. On the contrary, every sector of world finance seemed to be suffering except for the cryptocurrency called carboncoin, which was some kind of money created by a confirmable history of carbon drawdown or equivalent environmental actions, valid for subsistence spending only. What this virtual currency would come to in the real world no one could know, and the fact that millions of people had withdrawn their savings from normal seigniorage currencies to invest in such a murky new form of money, meaning, in the end, value and trust and exchangeability, was just another frightening destabilization to add to all the rest. That the millions of backers of this new currency were also demanding blockchain governance only added to the worries of people in power everywhere.

“Do you understand this idea of blockchain governance?” Ta Shu asked John Semple at one point.

John shrugged. “I think the idea is that if everyone’s got a wristpad and a connection to the cloud, everyone could participate in some kind of global governance, in which every action legal and financial would be completely documented, and recorded and secured publicly step by step and law by law.”

“It still seems like someone would have to propose laws, and other people would have to enforce them.”

“I think the idea is that it would all happen by collective action, and be open for everyone to see.”

“But who would actually do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“It seems crazy.”

John shrugged. “Maybe every new system of government looks crazy when it’s first proposed. Remember how in the eighteenth century people said representative democracy was crazy. They called it mob rule. Said it would never work.”

“Maybe it never did.”

“Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. Three hundred years isn’t a bad run. And it might keep going, if we can keep it going. I mean, when the representatives aren’t bought by the rich, representative democracy has done pretty well.”

“But now that seems to have ended somehow.”

John sighed. “Maybe feudalism never really went away. Maybe it just liquefied to money and bided its time.”

“That would be bad.”

“I know. But if money as it exists now is just feudalism liquefied, maybe this carboncoin is a try at something better. Maybe it’s the labor theory of value back again, with the labor involved required to be for the good of the biosphere, and the money only good for that labor.”

John left to go find his friend Ginger Ellis. The rest of them sat there looking at screens. Down there on Earth the world was going mad. Financially it looked like China and the US were playing a game of chicken. Ta Shu had no doubt that China could outlast anyone at that game. Closing his eyes, feeling the invisible network of forces in his head, Ta Shu thought he could sense the balance; he could feel it as tangibly as he felt his efforts to walk upright on the moon. China, in crisis though it was, had advantages right now over the Americans. Anyone could see it. China held the American government’s debt. That being the case, surely some concessions by the Americans would soon be offered to the Chinese.

And indeed one such concession walked right into the room, startling Ta Shu extremely: Bo and Dhu, with two of their men, and also some American security officers. These Americans led the Chinese security men right to the couch where Qi and Fred were sleeping.

“Wait, what’s this?” Ta Shu cried out, launching himself to his feet harder than he had intended. He flew up and crashed against the ceiling, hands raised at the last moment to protect his head—then he dropped onto the men standing over Qi and Fred, and they burst away like a covey of partridges flushed from their nest, drawing Taser pistols and aiming them at Ta Shu.

When everyone in the room had recollected their fragile equipoise, Bo said in Chinese, “Don’t get in the way here, Uncle, or we’ll have to push you aside, and in this gravity we can’t be responsible for any accidents that might happen to you.”

“But you can’t do this!” Ta Shu exclaimed, and then he shouted at the Americans, but also out the door, hopefully to other Americans, in English, “Hey! Help!”

“They won’t be helping,” Bo said. “These two have been extradited. They’re wanted for the murder of Chang Yazu, and the Americans have agreed to hand them over.”

“That can’t be!”

“Why do you say that? It’s happened.” Bo gestured at the American security people, who were watching them warily. “We have the authorizing documents.”

“But why would they do that?”

“We’re doing as we’re told, Uncle. Please stand down. I would hate for something bad to happen to you.” The expression on Bo’s face belied this sentiment, as he was smiling with a cheerful glitter in his eyes that suggested a little mayhem was just what he needed to work off the frustrations of the previous day, or week, or lifetime.

Seeing this malice, this urge to do harm, Ta Shu stood aside. It was undeniably frightening to see so clearly that someone wanted to hit you.

Bo and Dhu escorted Qi and Fred out between them.

“I’ll get you released as soon as I can!” Ta Shu promised them in English.

Neither replied. They looked grim and subdued, still struggling to wake up, still struggling to comprehend the new situation.

When they were gone Ta Shu suppressed his anger at the American security team still in the room and said in English, “Where are they taking them? To the Chinese consulate office?”

One of the Americans shook her head. “They’ll take them to a rover they have coming.”

“A rover? They can’t drive to the south pole, can they?”

“Sure they can.”

Ta Shu went to the hall to try another call to Peng Ling. Again no reply. He tried Chan Guoliang’s office. No reply there either. Given what was happening in Beijing it was no surprise. Really there was never a time when calling a member of the standing committee was going to get you a quick answer.

That reminded him of the situation on Earth, and he checked the latest reports from the financial front. Yes: China had stopped its sell-off of US treasury bonds about an hour before. They were back to buying them again. It looked like someone—someone who had to be very high in the government—had gotten what they wanted, and therefore taken the pressure off. Quid pro quo.

“Damn!” Ta Shu exclaimed. Someone really wanted this pair!