Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

From the airport he went to the little apartment he kept in Beijing, an indulgence he could afford because of his travel shows. He dropped his bag and looked at the little place unhappily. Han Shan in the city.

That very evening he made a visit to his old student and friend Peng Ling. This was a somewhat desperate move, one he made only when he had a serious problem. He had become close to Peng Ling twenty years before, in a poetry class he had taught at Beijing Normal University. Even then Peng Ling had been a rising power in the political elite. Ta Shu’s class had been recommended to her by her psychotherapist, she later told him—or rather the therapist had required her to choose between studying poetry with Ta Shu or joining a Jungian analysis program that worked by playing with dolls in a sandbox, a very fashionable form of therapy in Chinese psychology at that time. Ling had chosen Ta Shu’s class, something they both became glad of. She had not been much of a poet, but she had been a joy as a person, and during their two years of work together they had become good friends. Since then Peng Ling had become a very big tiger indeed, but as Ta Shu himself was a bit of a culture star, perhaps, they had remained friends and stayed in touch, and met fairly frequently when they were both in Beijing. But Ta Shu never wanted to impinge on her time, and as the years passed he had gotten into the habit of waiting to hear from her, and contacting her only if something crucial came up, like a friend in serious need. This was precisely that kind of moment, so he sent her a message by their private WeChat line, and within minutes she replied, Yes come have tea at the end of the day, 5 pm my office, let’s catch up .

She was about twenty or twenty-five years younger than Ta Shu, and now in her prime in the Party hierarchy. Currently she was the member of the Politburo in charge of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, after holding many different posts through the years. One of the undeniable stars of the sixth generation of Party leadership, which was struggling to launch itself off the shoulders of the fifth generation, generally considered to be a weak one. By now these generations were quite nominal, extending back as they did to that first generation around Mao, the founders of the People’s Republic which had included Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping and the other Eight Immortals. The generations since had been calculated very roughly by general secretaryships, Party congresses, and mandatory retirement ages, which combined to suggest that nowadays a leadership generation passed every decade or two. A very artificial thing, in other words, and yet still widely used, combining as it did the Chinese love of numbered lists with a more general human desire to periodize history, pursuing a hopeless quest to make sense of human fate by doing a kind of feng shui on time itself.

Whether one believed in that periodization scheme or not, Peng Ling was definitely prominent among the current leaders. She was the only female member of the standing committee, and so now she was getting mentioned as the woman most likely to break the ancient Confucian patriarchal lock on the top job. That would be tough, but it could happen; someone was going to be replacing the unpopular President Shanzhai at the upcoming Party congress, and who that was going to be remained completely uncertain.

On this day, her follow-up confirmation on WeChat had ended with welcome back from the moon and a happy face. So she knew what he had been doing. And when he was ushered into her office in Huairen Hall, deep in the Zhongnanhai complex of the Imperial City in the center of Beijing, she circled her desk to give him a hug.

“Master, how are you?” she asked, smiling cheerfully. She looked older, of course. It was always a little shock to see people younger than him looking old, a sign of just how old he must be. But Peng Ling looked healthy too, as if power had been good for her. He had heard people say she had just the right look to be a woman in power, and he thought he saw why. Of course one should be able to look any way, it wasn’t relevant, but she was bucking five thousand years of patriarchy, so it was good luck, or perhaps not a coincidence, that she was attractive in a serious way, friendly but formidable—like a favorite teacher, or an aunt you wanted to please—and also wouldn’t want to cross. Just a tiny bit scary, yes; or maybe that was just the power she wielded. In the end she looked much like millions of women her age.

“I’m doing well enough,” Ta Shu said. “I’m just back from the moon, as apparently you know, and now I’m feeling extremely heavy. How about you?”

“I’m busy. Here, sit down and let your immense weight sink into a chair. So what brings you to me? Is it something you saw on the moon?”

“Yes, sort of. I met a young American man up there, and then a young woman, who turned out to be Chan Guoliang’s daughter. I came back to Earth with them—I helped to get them down here, or so I was told. They were both in trouble. And I was with them when they were detained at the Bayan Nur spaceport and taken away. I saw that just this morning.”

She nodded, looking unhappy. “You’ve had a long day! I must tell you, I heard that Chan Qi got pregnant up there, and was brought home for safety reasons.”

“Yes, that’s what we were told too. She looks to be about five months pregnant. But now she’s back on Earth, and, you know, confinement for confinement—it seems severe to me. I can see requiring her to return to Earth, but I don’t understand the arrest. I don’t think her father would allow any mistreatment of her, so I’m wondering what’s going on, and if you can help.”

“So you want to help her?”

“Yes, and also the American man she’s with, who is in a different kind of trouble. An official up there named Chang Yazu died during a meeting with this young man, and he almost died too. Looks like it was murder, in fact, but then he was disappeared from the hospital, taken by some unknown group. Then, to tell you the whole story as far as I know it, the head of security up there, Inspector Jiang Jianguo, recovered him, and then asked me to let him travel with me as my assistant, so that he could get back down here. Jiang was afraid agents of a hostile organization would seize him again.”

“So you helped him get back to Earth?”

“Yes. I liked him. He’s a technician in quantum communication, working for a Swiss firm. But the moment we arrived here, he and Chan’s daughter were taken into custody. So I decided to come to you to see if you could offer me any clarification, or advice.”

“Not very much of either, I’m afraid. I heard about Chang Yazu’s murder, of course. I knew him, so I’m having the inspection commission look into it. Here, let’s have some tea. I can at least tell you some of what I know.”

“Thank you.”

They sat across a low table from each other, and a young woman came in carrying a tea tray, leaving it on the table beside Ling. As she tested the hot water in a cup, then sniffed the dry tea leaves inquisitively, she asked Ta Shu to tell her about his moon adventures, and he gave her what he considered the most entertaining of his stories, which turned out to be Earthrise and the feather and hammer. As he told them, she tapped on her wristpad for a while, and then brewed the tea.

“Here’s a little about Chan Qi and your friend,” she said after reading for a time. “Listen to this—it appears they’ve been released by someone, and have gone missing here in Beijing.”

“Really?”

“So I’m told.”

“That couldn’t have been easy.”

“No. It suggests there are powers involved above the level of the people who arrested them. Those were part of Public Security, and they don’t really have a tiger in this fight. They probably wanted out of the crossfire.”