Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

“This one is called Six Scenes from a Floating Life , by a Shen Fu.”

She groaned. “A classic.”

“It seems interesting.”

“What does it say to you right now? What sentence were you reading?”

“‘The Sage taught us, Do not use nets with too fine a mesh.’”

“Please, no Confucius! Something else.”

Fred flipped the page. “‘Now the clouds are flying past me; who will play the jade flutes over May plums by city and stream?’”

She sighed. “We need a different book.” She picked up a tattered oversized paperback called Eight Dime Novels . “I hope this book cost eighty cents.” She read from a page:

“‘It was the tightest fix in which he had ever been caught, and his mind, fertile as it was in expedients at such crises, could see no way of meeting the danger.’ Oh dear how will they escape!”

“Read on,” Fred suggested.

“‘When all the wood was thrown in that the stove could contain, and portions of the iron sheeting could be seen becoming red-hot, he ceased to heap in wood. They were ready to run at any moment; the gold was always secured about their persons. “When it blows up, run!” was the admonition of the boy.’ Wait—first it blows up and then they run? How are they going to avoid getting killed when it blows up?”

“Read on,” Fred said again.

And after that they spent part of every day reading aloud to each other. They read all eight of the dime novels, each taking up about twenty pages of the skinny oversized Dover paperback. Lots of laughs there, although the frequent blatant racism also made Qi shout “See? See?” But she shouted just as much, and also laughed a lot, at a Chinese book of quotations from Chairman Mao, which she translated extempore for Fred’s benefit. For a day or two they alternated passages, her from Mao, him from the Dover, and then from a fat little bird guide, which he picked up after seeing a brilliant red bird out the kitchen window.

“‘People of the world, be courageous, dare to fight, defy all difficulties, and advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the people. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.’”

“That’s his pilot wave interpretation,” Fred observed.

“Aha! So the pilot wave theory is Leninist?”

“I don’t know, what does that mean?”

“You don’t know—come on. Leninism is what I was doing in that basement in Shekou.”

“I see,” Fred said, though he didn’t. He read from the bird guide: “‘Rufous-sided towhee. Note the rufous sides,’ thank you for that! ‘Smaller and more slender than robin; rummages noisily among dead leaves. Voice: note, chwee or shrenk . Song, a buzzy chweeee ; sometimes chup chup chup zeeeeee .’” He enjoyed making the sounds.

Qi then read, “‘All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are really powerful. Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again, and so on till victory; this is the logic of the people.’”

“From a long-term point of view,” Fred repeated. “But how long?”

“Don’t make fun,” Qi commanded. “I like Mao. Listen to this: ‘Not to have a correct political view is like having no soul.’ You hear that?”

“I do,” Fred said. “But what’s correct?”

“Maybe you can learn that here, it’s the very next quote. ‘Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice: the struggle to make things, the class struggle, and scientific experiment.’”

“Interesting,” Fred said.

Qi nodded and read on: “‘The history of humanity is one of continuous development from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.’ That’s Marx, as I hope you know, but of course you don’t.”

“Groucho or Harpo?”

“Ha ha. Listen to Mao here, this is important: ‘This process is never ending. In any society in which classes exist, class struggle will never end. In a classless society, the struggle between new and old and between truth and falsehood will never end. In the fields of the struggle for production and scientific experiment, humanity makes constant progress and nature undergoes constant change, they never remain at the same level. Therefore people have to go on discovering, inventing, creating and advancing. Ideas of stagnation, pessimism, and complacency are all wrong. They are wrong because they agree neither with the historical facts of social development, nor with the facts of nature so far known to us, as revealed in the history of celestial bodies, the earth, life, and other natural phenomena,’ no doubt he is referring to your quantum world there.”

“No doubt,” Fred said. “That’s actually a pretty good summary of the situation.”

“Yes it is.”

“‘Skylark,’” he interjected. “‘Slightly larger than a sparrow, brown, strongly streaked; underparts buff white. Voice; note, a clear, liquid chirr-up . Song, in hovering flight, a high-pitched, tireless torrent of runs and trills, very long sustained.’”

She nodded, distracted by Mao, who had clearly caught her attention. “‘Youth, the world is yours as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, so full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you.’”

“So full of vigor and vitality,” Fred said, and Qi smiled; they were both sprawled listlessly over the furniture. “I like that ‘eight or nine in the morning.’ He has a specific angle in mind.”

“A specific moment.”

“An angle.”

“But morning light. At sunset it’s not the same.”

“True. Anyway, Mao is more interesting than I would have thought.”

“I know, me too.”

“I thought you knew all about him.”

“Everybody gets told the story at school, but no one reads him. Maybe his poetry. Mostly he’s just a face, or an idea. And I’m only reading you the good stuff. The amount of crap is unbelievable.”

The refrigerator, then the air conditioner. The air conditioner, then the refrigerator. The cheep of birds. An hour of rain. Men in rowboats, harvesting fish. A pilot wave, crossing the bay.

Dozing in the heat, Fred dreamily pondered the pilot wave theory. Their kitchen experiment had been an imitation of a macroscopic analog of the real microscopic two-slit experiments with photons. In the real analog experiments, during which they had gotten tiny oil droplets to skid across the water like skipping stones, they had been able to reproduce all kinds of quantum effects at the macro-scale, suggesting that the same kinds of things were happening down there at the micro. Stochastic electrodynamics, which was one current extension of pilot wave theory, postulated and described an electromagnetic zero-point field, a kind of subquantum realm through which the pilot wave moved. Possibly wave and particle quantum effects were just well-coordinated emergent phenomena that in fact were primarily happening in this speculated subquantum realm. Could there be something smaller than quanta? Sure. Reality shrank beyond their senses and no doubt could go smaller still, until it was smaller than their ability to detect by any means whatsoever. Same in the other direction, with things big beyond the visible universe; for all they knew, their universe could extend forever, or be a neutrino in some larger universe. They could only see what they could see. Beyond that, the unknown. The unknowable.