Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

They loped easily over to the pavilion, Ta Shu trying some little hops and pliés that he wouldn’t have attempted before witnessing the gibbons’ bravura performance. If they could do it, why not him? It needed a little loosening up, a better recognition that all movement was dance.

He followed Zhou into a lounge with a long window and sat down on a couch. A digital clock on the wall was running down, Ta Shu noticed: a timer, not a clock. “Soon,” Zhou said. “Near that notch there in that hill, do you see?” He pointed.

“Always the same?”

“No, never the same. It moves above the horizon in what is called a Lissajous figure, meaning an irregular circle within a rectangular space. It’s a little different every time, but it always comes up somewhere over that rise, and goes down over the hill to the left of it.”

“Good to have variety I guess.”

“Yes. So, will you be staying on the moon long?”

“Not long. Another month or so. How about you?”

“This stint is almost over. I must go home and build my bones again. Even the centrifuge time isn’t enough for me now.”

“How long have you been up here?”

“Four hundred days, this time.”

“And you want to come back here?”

“Oh yes. Sometimes I think of giving up on Earth entirely.”

“That isn’t allowed, is it?”

“No. Probably for the best.”

“Do some people do it anyway? Slip through the nets?”

“Maybe. There are some private settlements, and some prospectors roving around. Maybe they do what they want. But most of us are accounted for.”

“And yet an American I met as I arrived has gone missing.”

“Which one? What’s this?”

Ta Shu explained the situation. Zhou Bao frowned and tapped on his wrist for a while.

“Not good,” he remarked. “I can’t tell you where he is.”

“You thought you would be able to?”

“Yes.”

“So what do you think has happened?”

Zhou sighed. “Well, as you can imagine, the infighting is pretty fierce up here.”

“As everywhere.”

“Yes. So, whoever took this American could be trying to embarrass the authorities here, make it look like they’re out of control of the situation, thus requiring someone more reliable to take over. And in fact if they can’t keep something like this from happening, they are out of control. This disappearance could turn into a major problem for relations with the Americans.”

“But surely the authorities in charge must know where this man is!”

Zhou Bao shook his head. “I don’t think so. If they did they would produce him. Because they’re going to be in big trouble if they can’t.” He gestured at the window. His timer was nearing zero. “But now let’s look.”

A chime rang. At that same moment the line of the horizon, an intense border where the very black sky met a very white hill, was pricked by a spot of vivid blue.

Ta Shu found himself standing, lofted by some feeling that now threatened to topple him backward. No unconscious moves could keep one’s balance in this gossamer gravity, under the blow of this startling blue—he had to rock forward, step back, reestablish his equilibrium. He reached out and touched the cool glass of the window, aware he was marring its pristine surface with his fingerprints. The blue dot on the horizon spread left and right, whitening as it did: clouds down there covered what must be ocean.

“Do you ever see it pure blue?” Ta Shu asked.

“Oh yes. Very fine. The Pacific is half the Earth almost, and occasionally it’s clear of clouds, and the first part to rise.”

“It must look beautiful then.”

“Yes.” Zhou gestured. “Always. You can see it’s home. You can feel it.”

“Yes.” Ta Shu put his hand on his heart. “It’s a kind of hunger. Or fear.”

“Nostalgia,” Zhou suggested. “Or the sublime.”

Zhou used the Western words for these two concepts, and Ta Shu shook his head as he considered them. “I think the old ones caught it best,” he said. “The nameless ones from the beginning.” To show what he meant, he recited one of his favorite poems from the ancient anthology Yueh fu , which seemed to him strangely perfect for this moment:

“Ah yes, the Yueh fu ,” Zhou said. “Those guys already knew everything, didn’t they?”

“Yes.” Ta Shu gestured at their home, now a thin blue arc lying on the white hill, a mere fingernail paring; once it was fully up, it was going to be four times wider than the moon as seen from Earth, thus an area some fourteen times bigger than the moon seen from Earth. “So beautiful!” he exclaimed, hungry to see the whole thing. “This is what the old ones were always saying.”

Zhou nodded. “It’s why we’re here, to see it rise and set like this.”

“And how long does it stay up in your sky?”

“It takes a couple of days to rise fully, then it’s visible for sixteen days or so, then gone again for about eight days, until next month’s rise.”

“And this zone is two hundred kilometers wide?”

“Yes, if you count the part that only sees a sliver of Earth come over the horizon. Naturally we’ve been building closer to the near side, to maximize the view.”

Ta Shu regarded their home world, creeping up over the white hill so slowly that he could not quite see the movement, though it was now a slightly bigger blue sliver, capping a stretch of the horizon. “It looks even bigger than in the photos, don’t you think?”

“A sign of our attention, perhaps.”

“Of our love,” Ta Shu said.

“Or our fear! That’s home, after all. Big but small. We’re a long way from home.”

They watched for a while in silence. Blue, the color of life.

“Home seems troubled,” Ta Shu suggested, to see what his old friend would say.

“Yes. The billion are troubled.”

“Perhaps the Party will have to dismiss the people and elect another one.”

Zhou laughed. “Who said that again?”

“Bertolt Brecht.”

“Ah yes. We performed his play Galileo , at his crater last year.”

“At Galileo’s crater or Brecht’s?”

“Brecht Crater? That would have to be on Mercury, if anywhere.”

Ta Shu shook his head. “I don’t think Communist artists are allowed there yet.”

They laughed.

Zhou said, “You’re not a Party member, I think?”

“No. Geomancy is not favorably regarded, nor poetry.”

“But you’re famous. And poetry is highly regarded. Chairman Mao’s favorite activity, I once heard.”

“Yes, but no. My poetry days are over.”

“Truly?” Zhou gestured out the window. “You don’t feel inspired to pen a few lines?”

“No. Antarctica taught me that there are times when language doesn’t have the words. I think this might be one of them.”

“You should never stop writing poems, my friend. We all read you when we were young.”

“That was long ago. When people still read poetry.”

“I think they still do. It’s good on wristpads. And here we are—this is a very poetical situation! We should do like Li Po and Du Fu, have a bottle of wine and trade poems about the view.”

“I like the idea of the wine.”

Zhou laughed, went to a cabinet to pour them drinks. “Wine is useless without poetry,” he said. “Just a little ethanol poisoning.”