Red Moon

CHAPTER NINETEEN daibiao xing weiji Crisis of Representation

Valerie led Ta Shu from the transport center to an elevator that took them up to the greenhouse. Through its windows the moonscape around Peary Crater looked just like the moonscape around Shackleton Crater. The black sky was the same overhead, the ground the same underfoot, the sun low on the horizon as always. Still Valerie felt a little upside down, a little giddy. She had left the reservation, she was in a new space. Acting on her own recognizance turned out to be a visceral thrill, and combined with the lunar g she felt like she might simply float away. It was, yes, like flying through the air of Satyagraha.

She found who she was looking for standing by a table covered with potting soil. “Ginger! This is Ta Shu. Ta Shu, this is Ginger Ellis. She’s head of the greenhouse here, also a liaison to interested parties back home. She’s one of the people who run things on the moon.”

Ginger frowned slightly at this description, shook Ta Shu’s hand. “Welcome to the north pole,” she said to him. “How can I help?”

“I’m not sure,” Ta Shu said.

He looked flustered, and Valerie took over, giving Ginger a brief explanation of what they had done with Fred and Qi. “So,” she concluded, “Ta Shu is now in enough trouble with some of the Chinese factions here that I think he could use asylum from us.”

“Sounds like you could use some asylum too,” Ginger said to her wryly. “Attacking guests, releasing prisoners—”

“It’s true,” Valerie interrupted, meeting Ginger’s gaze a little defiantly. “Look—Fredericks and Chan Qi were both just handed over to Chinese agents by our own security people. That struck me as seriously wrong, like illegal, or worse. So I did something about it.”

Ginger was shaking her head, but then she said, “Good for you.”

Valerie said, “So now I’m wondering if ordinary asylum will be enough for Ta Shu.”

“And for you.”

“Yes, well, I hope not. But it does seem like someone in Washington might now send word up here ordering us to allow those same Chinese agents to take Ta Shu into custody, like they must have done with Fredericks and Chan Qi.”

“Maybe.” Ginger was frowning now.

“Also,” Valerie said, “the situation on Earth is getting so weird. I wonder if we can use Ta Shu to liaise with the new Chinese leadership as we try to help things down there.”

“Possibly,” Ginger said. “If he has a contact, it might help. Hard to say.”

“Things are falling apart,” Valerie said. “I report to the president, and Ta Shu is working with someone on their standing committee. Seems like we could at least try to help. I mean, if China and the US both go chaotic at once, what happens to the world?”

Ginger shrugged. “We’re finding out. But, you know. There’s chaos and chaos. Things could be worse.”

“But they could get worse! That’s what we have to try to head off!”

“I agree.” Ginger was looking at her with the same expression John Semple had so often displayed: amusement. In this case, perhaps a little friendlier amusement. Now she looked at Ta Shu. “What do you think? Can we form a little brain trust up here, see what we can do?”

“I would like that,” Ta Shu said. “As to my contacts, I’m not sure I can contact them. Peng Ling hasn’t been answering my calls. But I’d like to keep helping my two young friends, if I can. For the moment they are free, thanks to Ms. Tong here, but the way Chinese agents keep showing up and snatching them has me convinced that people very high up in some part of the Chinese government want Chan Qi silenced. If they can’t take her into custody, I’m afraid they may try to kill her.”

“Any idea who they are?”

“Not really. One or more of the security agencies, no doubt. Possibly the military, or public security. Or state security. Her father Chan Guoliang may get selected as the next president in the Party congress that’s going on in Beijing now, so I presume the people going after his daughter are his enemies. But that doesn’t clarify things all that much, because he has several rivals for the leadership. There’s the current president’s chosen successor, Huyou. And then there’s Peng Ling herself. She’s a friend of mine, an old student, and she sent me up here to help Chan Qi. But—I’m not completely confident Peng is on my side, or—how can I say it? Supportive of the people I support.” He grimaced unhappily at the thought.

“Sounds like you don’t know much more than we do,” Ginger said. “It would be good if you could sort that out, about Peng I mean.”

Ta Shu stared at her for a while.

“It’s possible,” he continued more slowly, as if reluctant to say it, “that Peng Ling has been using me to locate and control Chan Qi. I think that’s possible. But she may be trying to do that in order to help Chan Guoliang. She’s been allied with Chan on the standing committee, and it could be they are cooking up something together. They are opposed to Shanzhai and his man Huyou, who are linked to rightist elements. Or, it could be that Peng has plans of her own. I can’t be sure about this, I’m sorry to say. Peng sent a couple of agents up here with me, and my friend Fred just told me he thought they were the men who killed Chang at the south pole.”

“What agency did these two say they were working for?”

“They said Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. That’s one of Peng’s units. And they convinced your people here to give them permission to take Chan Qi, along with one of your own citizens!”

“What are these agents’ names?”

“Bo and Dhu.”

Ginger tapped around on her pad for a while.

Finally she said, “You aren’t the only one having trouble figuring things out. There’s a lot of confusion right now.”

“Indeed.” Ta Shu was still regarding her closely, and now he repeated, “Some American in authority here handed Chan Qi and an American citizen over to Chinese security agents, just an hour ago. Do you know who authorized those Chinese agents to take the young pair into custody?”

Ginger tapped out the end of her message. “Yes.”

They waited for her to say more. Valerie wondered all of a sudden if she had brought Ta Shu right into the lion’s den. Not to mention herself. She had helped the two captives escape on her own recognizance; to trust that Ginger would approve of this was a roll of the dice, a snap judgment based on very little evidence. But they needed help now, and something about Valerie’s earlier interaction with Ginger had given her the feeling it was worth a try.

Finally Ginger said, “It wasn’t me. Our head of station made that call. Sam Houston. My boss.” She read her pad for a while, tapped some more. “I’m not sure who in Washington told him to do that. Meanwhile there’s someone in Chinese intelligence, in China as far as we can tell, who has just recently begun sending messages. Lots of messages, like a bot. A lot of people are getting these messages, both here and on Earth. I don’t know who this person is, or what they’re trying to do. But I replied to them right away, and I’m hoping we’ll hear from them again. If I can establish communications with them, we might have some kind of new contact in China. And I have some other lines to tug on.” She paused to read more. “Like a friend at Shackleton.” Then she tapped again and was speaking to her wristpad. “Jiang Jianguo! Good to hear from you, thanks for getting back to me.”

“Good to hear from you, Ginger!” Valerie recognized Jiang’s voice, even though it was coming from Ginger’s wrist, and speaking English.

“Listen, we have a situation. Some of your security people are throwing their weight around up here, and my head of station is letting them do it.”

“Are they calling themselves Bo and Dhu?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to hear they are troubling you too! But I think I can help you deal with them. We’ve assembled good evidence that they are the ones who murdered our Chang Yazu.”

“That seems to fit.”

Ta Shu said, “Fred Fredericks said that he thinks he remembers seeing them do it.”

“Good to know,” Jiang replied. “These two were the men who joined Li when Chang was meeting with Fredericks. They go by several different names, apparently, but a source of mine in the Great Firewall just correlated several of their covers. When they were here before, using the names Gang and Su, they left traces of the chemicals they used to attack Chang. It was a two-part sarin mix, one part called DF, the other an activator not dangerous by itself. When combined the two activate the poison. On that day, Gang and Su each had one chemical on his hand, and when they shook hands with Fredericks the two chemicals combined there, and Fredericks then shook hands with Chang. Looks like the activator got spread on Fredericks’s hand before the DF, so he had a little protection. Anyway, when he shook hands with Chang, it was lethal for Chang, but Fredericks just survived. We now have camera evidence, chemical evidence, and documentary evidence. It’s a solid case. So if you can send those two agents back to us, we can arrest them and hold them here, no matter their positions in China.”

“Do they work for Peng Ling?” Ta Shu asked anxiously.

Inspector Jiang’s voice sounded surprised. “No! At least not that I know of. My informant in China says they are with the Central National Security Commission, which is a secret unit of the Ministry of State Security. That connects them more obviously to Minister Huyou.”

Ta Shu heaved a sigh of relief. “I’m glad to hear that.”

Ginger regarded him for a while. “You still can’t be sure, you know.”

“I know.” He shrugged unhappily. “I’m going to try to believe it.”

“Who wanted Chang dead?” Valerie said to Ginger’s wristpad. “Why was he killed?”

Inspector Jiang replied, “We think it was because of the private communications device that Mr. Fredericks was delivering to him. Chang made the order himself with Swiss Quantum Works. My informant in the Great Firewall told us this, and told us also that the other device was to be delivered to Minister Peng Ling.”

Valerie looked at Ta Shu and saw that he did not seem to catch the implication of this. “So,” she said, “presumably Chang was working with Peng. So killing him isn’t something Peng would have wanted to do.”

“Ah,” Ta Shu said.

“That seems right,” Jiang added. “Also, I’ve been tracing Chang’s employment history back, and ten years ago he worked for Huyou when Huyou was governor of Shaanxi Province. There is an ongoing corruption investigation of that period that has come very close to Huyou himself, and if Chang knew anything about that, he might have been able to convey to Peng and the discipline inspection commission some damaging evidence against Huyou, right when they are in a fight for the succession. So there’s another reason Huyou might have wanted Chang silenced.”

Ginger nodded. “Let’s take that as determinative. It’s circumstantial but that’s all we’re going to get, and enough for now. Thanks for this news, Jianguo! I may have to slip past my boss Mr. Houston to get Bo and Dhu shipped to you, because I don’t trust Houston to do the right thing after what just happened here. But I can manage that. Bo and Dhu are incapacitated right now, because Ta Shu here shot them with a Taser.”

“Congratulations!” Inspector Jiang said.

“So we’ll try to put them in a rocket and pop them down to you while Mr. Houston is still out of the loop.”

“Thank you for that! I will be very happy to lock those two up.”

Ginger said goodbye, tapped her pad. “We need John Semple for this one,” she said to Valerie. “I’ve pinged him.” Then she gave instructions to someone to collect Bo and Dhu and all their men and put them on a rocket south.

John Semple called Ginger back. “What’s up?”

“Your colleague Ms. Tong here has taken it on herself to free Chan Qi and Fred Fredericks, and I’ve taken it on myself to have those two Chinese agents and their men put on a flight back to the south pole. Inspector Jiang wants to arrest them for murder.”

“Good to hear!” John said. “What about Houston?”

“Well, that’s why I’m calling. He could have all of us arrested, if he decided we’ve been acting on our own initiative in collusion with Chinese elements. Which we have.”

“So do you want to go to the south pole too?”

Ginger laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that. Don’t you think we could work around him here?”

“I’m not sure. You tell me.”

Ginger thought about it for a while. “What about heading out to the free crater for a while?” she said. “The comms there are as good as anywhere.”

“Good idea. Let me come over there right now, we can go together.”

“Please.”

“I’ll be right there. Hey, Valerie!”

“Yes?” Valerie said.

“Good job!”

“Thanks.”

Ginger regarded her two visitors. “Let’s see if this works. It would be nice if we could help solve the mess down on Earth too.”

Valerie said, “Did we really solve anything up here? Sounds like we’re on the run.”

“John will help us with that part. If both John and I tell the security people here to ignore Houston, they’ll probably do it. He’s a fingie.”

“A fingie?”

“A fucking new guy. A political appointment, and a fool, just between us. And no one here will try to snatch us out of the free crater. So we can work out of there until things settle down. The people out there will love it. They’ve got a beast of a computer they’ve been itching to put to work on something like this.”

Ta Shu said, “If I could succeed in getting in touch with Peng Ling, and if we’re sure she’s the one to back, then maybe we can put her in contact with Chan Qi somehow. Then they might come to an understanding, and balance the forces down there.”

“All right,” Ginger said. “Let’s get over to the free crater. From what John tells me,” she said to Valerie, “you’ll be happy to go back there.”

“Yes,” Valerie said.

The flight to the free crater came together quickly; despite their air of assurance, both Ginger and John Semple were working fast. Once off the launchpad, they flew south, of course—no one on this station ever seemed to tire of that joke. Ginger and John took turns on the hopper’s radio, communicating with colleagues at both lunar poles and also back on Earth. John got Valerie set up on a line to the White House, and she sent a message alerting them to the possibility of a new back channel to the highest levels in Beijing. When their hopper dropped onto the little crater starring the rim of the bigger crater, Ta Shu stared down curiously at the dome covering it. “What’s this?” he said.

“This is our fulcrum,” John Semple said with a smile. They all looked at him, and he said, “Give me a lever and I’ll move the world, right? So you need a fulcrum.”

He laughed happily. The hopper drifted onto the landing pad by the dome, with a sound that from inside the craft sounded like a gas stove. When they were down they bounced through a jetway into the receiving area on the rim and went to the overlook. Ta Shu gazed down in wonder at the space filled with its lines and hanging floors, plinths and balloons. “It reminds me of that restaurant in Beijing where I met Peng Ling.”

Valerie didn’t know what to make of that. Spotting Anna Kanina, she waved her over. “This is Anna,” she said to Ta Shu. “She’s a Russian astronomer and diplomat. She can tell you more about this place.”

“Do we jump to get down there?” Ta Shu asked Anna, pointing at some people far below who were flying from one platform to another.

“Yes,” Anna told him, “but not now. Come over to this table, we have the necessary links ready. White House for Ms. Tong, and some people in Beijing who say they work with Peng Ling. We’d like your help confirming that, if you can. Then also we have Fang Fei on a direct line.”

“Direct?” Ta Shu asked.

Anna said, “His new toy. It’s a neutrino telegraph. It has a very low bit rate because it’s so hard to detect neutrinos, but his people have a way to send a real flood of them, and the ice flooring this crater is just enough to catch a signal strength that is about the equal of the first telegraphs. So he keeps his messages brief.”

“Seems like a lot of trouble for a telegraph,” John Semple observed.

Anna nodded. “Just a toy, at least for now. The real power here is the quantum computer, down there in that building you see in the ice. That thing is a monster.”

“Strong AI?” Ta Shu asked.

“I don’t know what you mean by that, but definitely a lot of AI. Not strong in the philosophical sense, but, you know—fast. Yottaflops fast.”

“Yottaflops,” Ta Shu repeated. “I like that word. That means very fast?”

“Very fast. Not so much strong, in my opinion, because of how lame we are at programming. But fast for sure.”

Anna then introduced a few of the free crater residents around the table, and invited the visitors to sit down. Anna sat by Ta Shu and said to him, “One big problem for us right now is that we’re having trouble contacting Peng Ling directly, and we don’t have any sense of the people we’ve gotten on the line who say they speak for her. There’s also a really fast stream of messages coming from some kind of bot that’s infected a lot of Chinese systems. In both cases it might be a language thing, we’re not sure. Can you talk to them for us and see what you think?”

“Of course,” Ta Shu said. He put on a headset and began asking questions in Chinese. Valerie, who had sat down next to John Semple, found herself just barely following Ta Shu, he spoke so fast, but she gathered from his questions that the people in Beijing were saying Peng Ling had gone into hiding and was now in a secure location. Peng wanted to talk to Ta Shu, they were telling him, but it would take some time to patch him through to her, as she was very busy dealing with disruptions down there having to do with the demonstrations in Beijing, also some dissension in the military. She would get back to them as soon as she could.

Ta Shu explained this to the people around the table who didn’t speak Chinese. Valerie could tell he didn’t know whether to believe it. “She’s getting pushback,” he said with a worried look. “We’ll have to wait till she can call us.” He shrugged unhappily, stood, walked carefully to the railing overlooking the crater interior.

“Do you know what to tell her when you get her?” Valerie called after him.

“I think so.” He looked back at the group around the table: Americans, a Russian, some people Valerie had seen flying around the free crater. She couldn’t tell what Ta Shu thought of them. “As for that other speaker,” he added, “it identifies itself as an AI within the Great Firewall. It seems to want to help. It made me wonder if this big computer you mentioned you have here could serve as a refuge for this AI. Is there a way to transfer it up to here, and make some kind of backup for it? Do you have enough yottaflops for that?”

The free crater people looked at each other and conferred among themselves, with Anna asking them questions. Finally Anna said, “Yes, it’s not a question of capacity here, more a question of bandwidth for the transfer. But seems like we could set up laser comms. If this AI could latch onto us and beam its programs and memory up to us, we could house it. We’ve got the qubits.”

Ta Shu nodded. “Move it up here if you can. Seems like that could help.”

They went to work on it at screens distributed around the table. As they did so, Ta Shu came back to the screen he had been using and asked more questions, in another exchange so quick Valerie could barely follow it. Something about desperation, end games, last resort. At a certain point he hissed and looked up at Valerie. “Red Spear is losing, so they’re lashing out. They’re going to try and kill Chan Qi.”

He got up and walked unsteadily to the rail overlooking the crater. He leaned on it and stared down at the little floating city. After a while Valerie got up and went to his side.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

“Bad. The signs are clear. That AI overheard an order. It’s good you got them away when you did.”

“Are you able to get any help from down there?”

“I tried. I left another message for Peng.”

“Are you sure she’s on our side?”

Another painful grimace crossed his face. “I hope.” In his eye there was a haunted look, as if he was searching his memory for something he couldn’t find.

After a while he sighed, then gestured down at the crater interior. “It looks like the gibbon enclosure at Petrov,” he observed absently. “Very nice that people can now fly around like our little cousins. I hope I can try that.”

“Later,” Valerie said.

“Yes, later. Now we must be patient and wait.”

So she paced beside him, back and forth by the rail overlooking the flying city. As they did so, she overheard some of what Anna and Ginger were saying to John Semple about the situation in Washington, DC. It was now obviously a full-blown crisis there, possibly even more serious than the one in Beijing. If the American government had had a parliamentary system, the current administration would have had to resign and call for new elections; as it was, they had a year and a month to go before a significant election. So it wasn’t clear how they were going to try to cope with this householders’ revolt and the resulting crash of the financial system.

Two tall jugs of coffee were brought to the big table where everyone was working, and most of them filled cups, fueling themselves for what looked to be a long haul. Valerie went over to get some, and stood next to John Semple waiting for him to finish filling his cup. “You’re going to have to get used to this place as your base of operations,” he remarked to her as he spooned sugar into his cup. “It could be a while before it’s safe for you to go back.”

“Who says I’m going back?” Valerie said.

He laughed loudly. “I knew you would like this place!”

“No you didn’t,” Valerie said, filling her cup. She kept her eye on Ta Shu, who was wandering the rail alone, muttering uneasily to himself.