Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

Fred Fredericks, on the other hand, simply looked stunned. Ta Shu said to him, “I read that certain taikonauts have been subjected to something like twenty g’s without lasting ill effects.”

Fred nodded unhappily.

“We’ll stay far below that,” Ta Shu reassured him, to keep the chatter going. “I am Ta Shu,” he said to the young woman, “and this is Fred Fredericks.”

“Call me Qi,” she said.

Then they felt the push of the spaceship accelerating forward. Quickly they were shoved back hard in their chairs, and Ta Shu tensed his muscles to resist the pressure as best he could. He looked out the craft’s little window and wondered if things would go gray in his vision, then realized that would be difficult to determine on the moon. By the time they neared the end of the piste they were going six kilometers a second, and the landscape out the window flashed by. The pushback into his chair got more and more stifling.

Then they left the launch rail and were suddenly weightless, held in their chairs only by their restraints. The shift in pressure made Ta Shu feel a little woozy. “I’m getting too old for this,” he said to no one in particular.

The younger ones seemed too distracted to feel sick. They were both wrapped in their own dramas. Who could tell what they were thinking? Ta Shu glanced at them from time to time, saw they were also cautiously looking around. What had happened to them on the moon? What would happen to them when they got home?

They were joined by the ship’s sole attendant. She helped them out of their chairs. After that they floated around the room, a quiet and nervous group.

Later, when the attendant was in conversation with Qi, Ta Shu floated to Fred’s side and said to him in a low voice, “What happened to you?”

“I don’t know.” Fred shrugged, shook his head unhappily. Clearly he didn’t want to talk about it. His face was pinched shut. At their breakfast on the morning after their arrival, he had seemed a little tentative, but also quick and alert; now he looked crushed. He was trying hard not to be afraid. During their breakfast Ta Shu had guessed he was in his midthirties; now he looked about ten years old. Clearly he had had a very bad week.

Their transit home passed without incident, marked only by meals and naps. The rapidity of their launch off the rail meant the trip home took less than two days. The Earth grew bigger at a rate that was at first negligible, then alarming; all of a sudden it filled half their visible space, and was not a sphere but a concave curve under them. After that it was very obvious they were headed down . The world below grew huge. Its intense blue was composed of a vivid cobalt ocean sheathed under a turquoise arc of atmosphere, with the usual swirls of cloud layered between the two blues, all their characteristic patterns deeply textured and obviously three-dimensional. Ta Shu had not seen this sight on his voyage out, and he found himself breathing deep, squeezing his chair arms. Earth, blue world, living world, human world. He was going home.

They strapped in again. This descent, their attendant told them, was going to entail a pressure more severe than the departure from the moon. One of the ways the engineers had made the transit from moon to Earth so fast was to exploit the Terran atmosphere’s capacity to swiftly decelerate an incoming object. Improvements in materials had brought things to a point where the limiting factor in this deceleration was the human body’s ability to endure g forces without lasting harm. For ordinary civilian transit, they did not press this limit very hard. No reason to risk injury just to save a few hours of flight. Still, they were going to feel a hard squeeze.

They hit the atmosphere and immediately began quivering, then shuddering. While they were in the burn phase they sat facing backward, again to take the pressure eyeballs in. The ablation plate at the front of the ferry got so hot it shed atoms, and the air rushing by them therefore torched to burning.

They endured the pressure silently. A few minutes of solitude, then their spaceship was suddenly rocking back and forth at the bottom of a giant set of parachutes, then firing its retro-rockets and thumping down on the spaceport sands of the Gobi. One g felt pretty light after the crush of their deceleration.

They got out of their seats with help from the attendant, then followed one of the crew out a door into another jetway. Earth’s familiar gravity quickly got heavier for Ta Shu, until it became oppressive, even a little crushing. No doubt he would get used to it again, but for now it was not a happy feeling.

By the end of the jetway he was stumping along, hardly able to move. So heavy! They passed through a double set of glass doors where some people were waiting. Four men, three women. Qi saw them, paused, hissed. She glanced at Ta Shu, scowling, then continued through the doors. Immediately she was surrounded by the waiting group. Then three of the waiting men went to Fred and surrounded him too. Without a word the two young people were escorted away. Fred looked over his shoulder and gave Ta Shu a miserable, desperate glance. Then they were gone.

The analyst had long studied movement patterns among China’s internal migrant populations, sometimes called sanwu , the three withouts, sometimes diduan renkou , the low-end population, sometimes simply shi yi , the billion, although in fact there were only about half a billion of them. Now he was finding some interesting new patterns. People whose hukou registration gave them legal status and land in the rural areas where they had been born were of course still coming illegally to the cities and getting work in the informal urban economy. This would not stop until some kind of reform arrived. All these people, doing about eighty percent of the construction work and fifty percent of the service work, were unprotected by law and therefore badly exploited. They had to go back home when their jobs disappeared or if they got sick; their legal home was the only place they could take advantage of whatever pieces of the iron rice bowl were left. When they were mapped, the analyst saw these flows of humanity like floods after a storm, people flowing like water under the impact of economic storms.

Now he was also seeing evidence that those people whose household registration was located in rural areas nearest to the growing cities were staying at home, even when formal jobs would have allowed them to change their registration into the cities. Presumably this was because they hoped to get paid to leave their land, to make room for urban development. So now rings of population stability surrounded all the fastest-growing cities, especially the Jing-Jin-Ji megacity, formerly a great source of migrant labor, now stabilized by anticipation. Both inside and outside these rings the movement was as turbulent as ever, violent crosscurrents of exploitation and suffering, the ultimate result of sannong weiji , the three rural crises, which were behind all the migration out of the rural areas: that people’s lives were bitter, that the countryside was really poor, that agriculture was in crisis.

Then the sound of a mountain temple bell filled the room, and the AI he had named I-330 said in Zhou Xuan’s rich voice, “Alert.”

It had been a while, and he sat up and checked his security systems. The Chinese oversight apparatus, run by the Ministries of Public Security and Propaganda, and including Cyberspace Administration, the Great Firewall, the Invisible Wall, the Police Cloud, and the Invisible Ones, also the citizenship scores and the citizen reporting app called Sharp Eyes, had become in its proliferation what the most perceptive foreign sinologists were calling a “balkanized panopticon.” The optics of the con were not pan , in other words. In the analyst’s well-informed judgment, this was definitely the case; he had even helped to make it that way. And his knowledge of the nature of this balkanization gave him some advantages. Inserting I-330 into several aspects of the system now allowed it to send him uncorrelated and discontinuous information that he suspected no one else could gather so well. So when I-330 made reports, he was extremely interested to hear its news.