Red Moon

CHAPTER TWO bo hanshu tansuo Quantum Wave Collapse

Fred followed his two minders to a narrow room like a subway station, where something like a subway car filled much of the space. They got on a car and the train soon left the spaceport. When it hissed to a stop fifteen minutes later, its occupants tiptoed out into a hall with a long window wall, through which sunlight blazed horizontally, pinning their black shadows to the side of the car. Low buildings studded the Peak of Eternal Light outside the window, but it was hard to see them through the glare. What Fred could see of the surrounding landscape was a harsh mix of black and white, a chiaroscuro that he was quickly coming to think of as lunar normal. The horizon was very uneven and strangely nearby—hard to be sure how near, given the intense light and the clarity, but it looked to be only a few miles. Before he could fully take it in, Fred was led around a corner and down a hall, to a set of windows that overlooked the crater’s interior.

This particular Peak of Eternal Light overlooked a corresponding pit of eternal darkness: this was the famous Shackleton Crater. The sun never shone on this crater floor, nor its interior wall. Once his eyes adjusted, he could see the steep interior wall of the crater curving away to left and right, just visible in a gloom of dark grays. Stacked horizontal lines of lit windows were inlaid into the dark curve below, looking as if an elongated ocean liner had been bent in a curve and then injected into the crater wall; these lit windows cast a faint glow across the crater floor, which gleamed a little, being covered with dusty water ice. The crater was big enough that its far wall was not visible; as the crater wall below him curved away to left and right, it soon disappeared under the horizon. Very murky, this gray-on-black world.

The Hotel Star, Fred was told by one of his guides, was behind one of the lines of windows down there, right next to the American consulate. “Lead on I follow,” he said gamely, and staggered behind the graceful pair to an escalator, where he was very happy to clutch the handrail and hold fast, yet still be making progress. Escalators were great. This one reminded him of the London Underground, moving downward endlessly. When they had descended to a level labeled Floor Six, he got off and fell, struggled to his feet and followed his minders gingerly around the broad curve of hallway to the glass hotel doors, feeling a little seasick, a little headachy, a little dizzy. Lunar g did not feel better than the weightlessness of space, in fact it seemed to him distinctly worse.

The Hotel Star entry was on the inside curve of a curving hallway. His room proved to be just bigger than his bed. His guides left him, promising he would get a wake-up call for breakfast.

He sat on the bed; it was like sitting on a trampoline. He could leap right into the ceiling if he wanted. Then, after a bell tinged three times, he felt vaguely that things were getting heavier. Indeed they were; his bedroom was on a floor of the hotel that was part of a centrifuge ring. After a minute or two, during which the room seemed to be tilting, he found himself being pressed down into the bed with a very familiar, homey pressure: one g. He had been told that it was best to sleep in Terran gravity whenever you could, to minimize the time spent in lunar g. For a trip as short as Fred’s this regime was not mandatory, but it was still recommended, and when the option had been described to him he had decided to take it. Now he snuggled down into the mattress thankfully, his dizziness receding. Things felt right; they felt like home. It was such a relief that he quickly fell into a deep sleep.

When he woke he didn’t know where he was, and jerked and found himself flying off his bed, at which point it came back to him: moon! The centrifuge had obviously been turned off, which was probably what had woken him. He was still lofting in the air over the bed as all this came to him; he twisted, landed on his face. Then he got up unsteadily and saw there was an hour to go before he was to meet his fellow passenger Ta Shu for breakfast. All was well.

As he went through his routine in the bathroom he looked up Ta Shu online, which meant not Earth’s data cloud but rather some kind of local internet. That was still more than enough to give him an introduction to the elderly Chinese man.

Ta Shu: poet, geomancer, feng shui expert, producer and host of a popular travel show on one of CCTV’s cloud platforms. He had written and published poetry from early childhood on, beginning with big painted calligraphic poster poems that included painting in the old styles, but from a child’s perspective. A torrent of poems had proceeded to pour out of him for most of his life after that, until suddenly stopping after a trip to Antarctica; accounts differed as to what had happened to him down there. Subsequently he had become a travel host and ex-poet. It was rumored that he still wrote as much poetry as ever, but not for publication. Through the decades of his travel show he had visited 230 different countries, all seven seas, the North and South Poles, and the top of Mount Everest, which he had reached by balloon, taking advantage of a nearly windless day to drift over the top and step off the gondola’s portico onto it. And now he was on the moon.

Fred wobbled down a broad staircase to the hotel’s dining hall. Ta Shu was there at a table, reading the screen embedded in it and nibbling from a plate piled with Fred didn’t know what. He looked up. “Good breakfast time.” Again his smile struck Fred as unusually sweet and friendly.

“Thanks,” Fred said, and lofted down onto his chair, hitting the mark pretty well. “How did you sleep?”

Ta Shu waggled a hand. “I don’t sleep much. Dreamed I was floating on a lake. When I woke, I wondered what it feels like to swim here. I wonder if they have swimming pools, I must look into that. How about you?”

“I slept well,” Fred said. He looked at the food buffet, which filled one short bar. “My room spun me to one g, but when the centrifuge stopped and I got up, I felt kind of dizzy.”

“Maybe some breakfast will help center you.”

Fred felt both hungry and repelled by food. He shot up and teetered to the food bar, grabbing it to stabilize himself. The usual foods, thank God, as well as a lot of bowls of unidentifiable fruits and mushes. Fred had very definite food preferences. He filled a tiny bowl with yoghurt—hopefully yoghurt—and sprinkled some seeds and grains and raisins on it, wondering if these foods had been grown on the moon or flown up from Earth. Most of it must have been flown up. Balancing his bowl and staggering back to Ta Shu was almost too much for him, but he drifted onto his chair without spilling anything.

“Are you here to do some feng shui?” he asked Ta Shu before starting to eat. Turned out he was hungry after all.

“Yes. Also to record some episodes for my travel show. A trip to the moon! It’s hard to believe we’re here.”

“True. Although it feels so weird, it has to be somewhere.”

Again the beautiful smile. “Yes, we are certainly somewhere. My feng shui can confirm that.”

“So, feng shui on the moon?”

“Yes. Feng shui means ‘wind and water,’ so it should be interesting!”

Long ago Fred had gathered that feng shui was a practice so ancient and mystical that no one could understand it. But his work made him acutely aware that there actually were mysterious forces influencing everything, so it seemed possible that feng shui was some kind of ancient folkloric intuition of quantum phenomena. Not that there were any such phenomena to be intuited, but who could say for sure? There were definitely mysteries, and maybe some of them involved macro-perceptions of the micro-realm. He felt odd perceptions fairly often; or even all the time. So he kept an open mind about it. “Tell me more.”

Ta Shu tapped on the table screen and brought up a round map of the moon that he could scroll around on. “Here’s a feng shui problem for you. See how beat-up the south polar region is by meteor impacts? Including this really giant one, the South Pole–Aitken Basin. Biggest impact in solar system, except for Hellas on Mars. So, I couldn’t understand why so many impacts would come in from the southern sky, it being perpendicular to the solar plane. Where would all those big rocks come from, with only interstellar space above the south pole?”

“Hmm,” Fred said. “I never thought of that.”

“It’s a feng shui thought,” Ta Shu said. “But also, just astronomy. Clarification came to me from astronomer friends. Turns out the super-big impact that made South Pole–Aitken Basin probably happened when this region was nearer to the equator. Then the moon’s rotation over time naturally shifted a hole as big as that to one pole or other, just because of the way a lopsided sphere tends to spin. Like a top balancing itself.”

“Polhode precession!” Fred said. Matching spins was one attribute of entangled particles, so he had had occasion to think about spin, albeit at far smaller scales. He pondered the map as he ate. “So, these peaks of eternal light,” he said between bites. “They’re here because the moon’s polar axis is perpendicular to the solar plane. But I don’t understand why the moon’s axis isn’t parallel to the Earth’s axis, which is twenty-three degrees off the plane.”

“Me neither!” Ta Shu exclaimed, looking delighted that Fred had thought of this. “Seems like they should be the same, right? So I asked my astronomer friends about that too. They told me the moon and Earth formed in a big collision, which tilted Earth’s axis even more than it is now, like fifty or sixty degrees. Since then the two have been in a gravity dance with the sun, and the moon has moved out so far from the Earth that the sun has straightened it up. The sun has straightened the Earth too, but Earth had farther to go, so it’s only reached our twenty-three-degree angle, while the moon is almost vertical.”

“Does that difference mess up your feng shui work?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“So what will you do?”

“I’ll make adjustments. Work on local problems.”

“Such as?”

“I’ll visit the Chinese construction in the libration zone.”

“What’s that?”

“The two edges of the circle, you know—extending up from the south pole along longitudes ninety and one-eighty?”

“Zero longitude being the middle of the near side?”

“Yes, very good. So the same side of the moon is always looking at Earth, of course. Tidally locked. Another part of the gravity dance. Many moons in the solar system are like that.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“But all orbits in the solar system are elliptical. Kepler first understood this.”

“Kepler’s law,” Fred guessed.

“One of his laws. A feng shui genius. So, as one result of this law, when the moon is farther away from Earth in its orbital ellipse, it goes slower. When it’s closer it goes faster. Meanwhile it’s rotating on its axis at the same speed all the time.”

“Wait, I thought it was tidally locked?”

“Yes, but it still rotates—one day per month, you know.”

“Oh yeah.”

“So, but it doesn’t quite keep the same half facing Earth. Farther away it slows and we see more of the left side, then two weeks later it’s going faster, and shows us more of its right side.”

“Interesting!” Fred said.

“Yes. This waggling was first noted by Galileo, another very great feng shui master, when he was looking through his telescope. Like a man tilting his face while shaving, he said. He might have been the first ever to notice it. A telescope helps to see it. Libration, it’s called in English. Tianping dong.”

“And there’s new Chinese development running up this zone?”

“Yes.”

“Because?”

“Because feng shui experts suggested it!”

“But why?”

“Because in the libration zone, the view of Earth comes and goes. See what I mean? On the rest of the moon it isn’t like that. On the side of the moon facing Earth, Earth doesn’t move, it’s always in the same place overhead. Strange, don’t you think? It just hangs there in the sky! I want to experience this.”

“Interesting.”

“Yes. Then on the far side of moon, you never see Earth at all. Great for radio astronomy, I’m told. I want to see that too, see if it feels different.

“But in the libration zone, Earth rises into view, then sinks. That brings up all kinds of interesting questions. Should one build on the Earthmost side of the zone, and maximize the time Earth is visible, also the height it reaches over the horizon? Or is it best to build on far side of zone, where Earth might only poke a blue curve over the horizon for a short while? Any difference in feng shui terms?”

“Or practical terms?”

Ta Shu frowned. “Feng shui is practical.”

“Really? It’s not just aesthetics?”

“Just aesthetics? Aesthetics is very practical!”

Fred nodded dubiously. “You’ll have to teach me more about that.”

Ta Shu smiled. “I am a mere student myself. You work with computers, you must do mathematics, yes? Famous for its aesthetics, I’m told.”

“Well, but it has to work too. At least in my case. So, you’re going to visit the libration zones?”

“Yes. I have an old friend up there near the end of the line.”

Fred tapped on the map. “But Chinese stations never go into the northern hemisphere? Why is that? Is that feng shui too?”

“Yes, certainly. A matter of geographic propriety.”

“Propriety?”

“Not taking too much. The best places on the moon are the poles, precisely because of their water and the wind of solar particles, so again, very feng shui mix of aesthetic practicality. And in feng shui terms the two poles are about the same. China started building on the south pole first. Imagine if we had done the same in the north! Where would the other nations go? It might have been alarming for them. So this is propriety. Always polite to leave room for others. If this is the correct explanation, it’s very tactful.”

“Very,” Fred said. “Who decided?”

“The Party. But also, an ancient Chinese habit. China never did much in the way of territorial expansion, especially compared to some other countries. It looks bigger than it is because of coordinated effort.”

“Is this still feng shui?”

“Oh yes, of course. Balance the forces.”

“So feng shui is a kind of Daoist political geography?”

“Yes, very good!” Ta Shu laughed.

He was easy to please. Fred, who never really intended to make people laugh, was a little startled by this ease, but it was nice too. He nodded awkwardly, and said, “I want to learn more, but I have to get to my meeting with your local administrator.”

“Should be very interesting for you! Shall we meet and have a drink at the end of our day? I want to ask questions about quantum mysteries.”

“I would like that,” Fred said.

Fred was met by a pair of Chinese women in the lobby of the Hotel Star. They introduced themselves as Baozhai and Dai-tai, shook hands with him, then led him to the offices of the local official he was meeting, Chang Yazu.

Fred was still having to use the handrails to move around safely, and the two women glided beside him solicitously, waiting as he struggled to negotiate turns and the like. When they got to the administrative center, they took him to a room that was like a viewing bubble, poking above everything else in the settlement. The horizontal sunlight that was always obtained here threw their shadows all the way across the room. He said enthusiastic things about the view in as genuine a tone as he could muster, and almost met their curious gazes. Crater sublime; starscape amazing. Fred had never visited Earth’s southern hemisphere, and now he nodded politely as his hosts pointed out the Southern Cross overhead, and a blob with a texture like the Milky Way’s, which they said was a Magellanic Cloud. A couple of points of light moving through the stars were apparently satellites in lunar polar orbits. A larger satellite, like a little oblong moon, brilliant on its sunward side and a velvet gray on its dark side, was an asteroid, his hosts told him, brought into lunar orbit for its carbonaceous chondrite. The moon lacked carbon, so chunks of this asteroid were being cut off and dropped to the surface in collisions as slow as could be arranged. This kept the resulting meteorites mostly unvaporized and available for use.

Dai-tai abruptly stopped their tour of the night sky. “Now Governor Chang will see you in the office downstairs,” she told Fred, and the two women guided him downstairs into another large room, this one with a white ceiling and a broad window in the far wall. A reception room, it looked like. Near the window a large jade statue of a goddesslike figure gleamed under inset ceiling lights. A Guanyin, Fred was told. Buddhist goddess of mercy. Governor Chang would be with them soon.

Fred nodded nervously. Some people at home had warned him that the Chinese always tried to strip intellectual property from any foreign technology firms doing business in China. These people had speculated that the Chinese lunar administration had purchased this system from Swiss Quantum Works specifically to do that. Fred wasn’t privy to whatever his employers were doing to guard against that possibility, and he didn’t know why they had agreed to this sale. He did know that he had been sent here with nothing but the mobile quantum key device itself; everything else to do with the system was either in his head or not on the moon at all. He had memorized the activation code and was ready to deal with any problems that might crop up when they activated the phone and connected it with its opposite number, which he assumed was on Earth, though he didn’t know for sure. All he had to do was make sure the right recipient had it when he turned it on and connected it, and deal with bugs if any appeared. The phone’s debuggability was high, so that didn’t worry him much. It was the moments like this he didn’t like, the small talk, the waiting for people to show. Lateness was rude, his mom had always said.

Three men entered the room. One introduced himself as Li Bingwen and said he was the Lunar Authority’s Party secretary. Li shook Fred’s hand and then introduced him to the other two in a quick flurry of names. Agent Gang, Scientific Research Steering Committee; Mr. Su, Cyberspace Administration of China. Gang was tall and bulky, Su short and slight. Unsettled by this unexpected trio, Fred shook hands with Gang and Su, then kept his gaze fixed somewhere vaguely between them.

The three men all spoke English, as their greetings had made clear. Now Li exclaimed, “Welcome to the moon! How do you like it so far?”

“It’s interesting,” Fred said. Carefully he gestured at the window. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Indeed not. Let me tell you that Governor Chang Yazu will be joining us shortly. He has been slightly detained. Meanwhile, tell us about your visit. Are you going to travel around much, see things, go to the American station at the north pole?”

“No. I won’t be staying long. I have to activate my company’s device for you, and make sure it’s connected with its twin and working well. After that I’ll head home.”

“You should see as much as you can,” Li urged him. “It’s important that Americans who visit us see what we are doing here, and tell your fellow citizens at home.”

“I’ll do my best,” Fred said, trying to keep his balance both physically and diplomatically. “Although actually I work for a Swiss company.”

“Of course. But we come in peace for all mankind, as your Apollo astronauts put it.”

“So it seems,” Fred said. “Thank you.”

“Come over here and tell us about your new quantum telephone, if I can call it that. Governor Chang will join us shortly. As head of station he is very busy.”

Fred followed the Chinese to a cluster of chest-high tables, each rimmed by a handrail. As he walked he flexed his toes in an attempt to imitate Li, or even just to stay upright, but his balance was still very elusive. He clutched a table handrail and began to feel dizzy again.

“Have you been in a centrifuge yet?” Li asked him.

“Yes, my hotel room was spinning last night. It felt very homey.”

“Very good. We have meeting rooms also that spin to one g. Many people try to spend most of their time in centrifuge rooms. It will go better for you back on Earth if you do the same.”

“Thanks, I’ll try to do that.”

“You’ll appreciate it later. Ah, here is Governor Chang now. After introductions we will quickly bow out and leave you two to your work.”

“Okay. Thanks for meeting me.”

“My pleasure.”

The man who had just hurried into the room lurched forward, stopped and greeted Li Bingwen first. “Thanks, Secretary Li. I’m sorry to be late.”

“It’s all right. I’ve enjoyed talking to your visitor here. Fred Fredericks, this is Governor Chang Yazu, head of our Lunar Special Administrative Region.”

“Nice to meet you,” Fred said.

Chang extended his hand and Fred took it, and they shook hands. Chang looked surprised; he peered over Fred’s shoulder with a puzzled expression. Then he crumpled to one side. Fred followed him down, wondering why his balance had chosen that moment to fail him. The scent of oranges.

When he came to, people were standing over him. He was on the floor, light-headed, dizzy, sick. Light in general, as if floating. “Wha.” He couldn’t remember where he was, and as he tried to recall that, he realized he couldn’t remember who he was either. He couldn’t remember anything. Panic spiked in him. The giant faces looking down on him were saying things he couldn’t hear. He was apparently on the floor. Looking up at strangers, deaf, sick. He struggled hard for a sense of what was going on.

“Mr. Fredericks! Mr. Fredericks!”

Hearing those words burst some dam inside him, and it all came back in a rush. Fred Fredericks, computer specialist, Swiss Quantum Works. Visiting the moon. No doubt that explained the floating feeling. “Wha?”

They were moving him onto a stretcher. Someone was swabbing his hands and face. Some jostling to get him through a doorway almost bounced him off the stretcher. Rapid conversation he was not hearing properly, but wait—it was Chinese. That explained the songlines crisscrossing above him.

Then he was in some kind of container, a car or elevator or operation chamber, it was hard to tell. Floating sickly on some awful fabric. Into a space green with bamboo leaves. Faint or throw up, sure, but not both! Hold breath so as not to throw up, black tube, falling—

When he came to, there were East Asian faces looking at him, and he couldn’t at first remember where he was, or who. This had happened before, he felt.

“Mr. Fredericks?” one of the faces asked. Ah, he thought. Fred. On moon. Chinese base.

“Yes?” he said. His voice came from a distance. Tongue fat in his mouth. Ah God—in the moon’s gravity even one’s tongue floated a little, swimming up to roof of mouth. Effort needed to pull it down into its normal trough between the lower teeth. A brief clutch of nausea at this bizarre sensation.

“What happened?” he said.

“Accident.”

“Mr. Chang? How is he?”

No one said anything.

“Please,” Fred said. “Let me speak with someone who speaks English. Someone who can help me.”

All the faces went away.

The next time he came to, there was another set of faces over him, a different set, he felt. He remembered who he was, and most of what had happened.

“Were we poisoned?” he asked them. “How is Mr. Chang?”

One of them shook her head. “Alas Mr. Chang die. Same poison as you, but he did not fare so well as you.” She shrugged. “We could not save him.”

“Oh no. Poison?”

“It seems so.”

“But how? What was it?”

The one talking to him shrugged. “You must ask policeman when he comes. You are guarded. Under inspection.”

Fred shook his head, which made him feel sick again. “I need to talk to someone,” he said.

“Someone will surely make a visit.”

Fred receded into a fog of nausea and exhaustion, dreams of drowning. When he came to again, a different group of faces surrounded him. Again they were East Asian faces.

“How are you doing?” a woman at the foot of the bed asked. She sounded like she was from California. Taller than the others, narrow attractive face, refined-looking, serious and intent. “I’m Valerie Tong, assistant at the American consulate? I’m here to help you.”

“My lawyer?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. I’m not a lawyer. I’m sure there will be some lawyers who can represent you. There always are.” She frowned at this. “Actually I’m not sure they have a court system here. It’s possible you may be remanded to Earth. If so we’ll be keeping track of your situation, and helping as we can.”

“You can’t take possession of me? Diplomatic immunity or like that?”

“Well, you’re not a diplomat. And you’re under arrest, as I understand it. They have some… some evidence, they tell me.”

“How could they! Evidence of what?”

Valerie Tong squinted. “Murder, I guess. So they say.”

“What?” The fear jolting through Fred put him well behind what he heard himself saying: “I just met that guy, I don’t know him or anything! Why would I want to kill him?”

She shrugged. “I’m sure that will be something that will help you going forward. For now, I just want you to know that we’ll be keeping track of your progress.”

“My progress?”

“I’m sorry. Your case.”

“I hope so!”

Then another wave rolled over him, and he went under.