Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

“It does not seem well designed.”

“No it doesn’t. Let’s try another way. Please scan all files you have access to and look for this term ‘red darts.’”

“I will do this.” Then, about three seconds later: “Four thousand five hundred ninety-three results.”

“Let me see them on a screen.”

He skimmed down the various links and references. Most of them were offering darts for sale. A few hundred appeared to be names of dart-throwing teams. None of them when cross-referenced to other terms seemed to refer to surveillance or security. This was peculiar, he thought, given the way the phrase seemed to echo Red Spear, which, although it was a secret organization, was pretty well-known to the intelligence community. It was the kind of secret group that needed to be known about to create its full effect. Various elements used this one mainly to pursue advantages created by incidents of hostile pilot syndrome. It was part of the PLA’s undeniable power in the party-state’s infighting, and certain security agencies aligned with the military used it too. Possibly the Hong Kong agents in the recording had used the phrase red darts to refer to some splinter unit of Red Spear that he didn’t know about. Or perhaps they were making fun of Red Spear, unlikely though that seemed. But bravado often appeared when people were attempting to hide their fear. And those voices had been afraid.

Ta Shu tried to settle back into his Beijing life, but he found himself at loose ends most of the time, fretting. He visited the studio where his cloud show was produced, making attempts to distract himself with that work. The team there was happy to see him, and he recorded some new monologues and helped to edit some new broadcasts from the moon, focusing on the parts of his experiences up there that he had not had time to make into shows while actually there. Reviewing the footage he had taken there was unsettling. The moon looked like its own ghost, all sterile grayness and cool indoorness, with the lunar g lofting people in slo-mo. All that seeped out of the visuals and grabbed him a little. He couldn’t decide whether he wanted to go back or not.

He stopped wearing the exoskeleton as soon as he felt stronger; after that he kept it around for a while, to put on when he got tired to the point of collapse. But after a couple more weeks he could dispense with it entirely, and he had it returned by bike cart courier to its shop. Reality had returned to his body, and he was relieved to find he was not as old as he had thought on first return.

During the days he kept trying to record and edit episodes of his show. At night he walked the streets. It remained a perpetual pleasure to see the stars so well from Beijing. Like everyone else of a certain age, he was extremely impressed by the clean air. Then a wind from the north brought with it clouds of loess, that Ice Age dust and sand from the north that turned the air yellow and the sunsets lurid. This some older people at the studio found nostalgic, as it brought back their youths. They said, Remember when the sky was black by day and white by night? Remember when you could chew it? It was dirty, sure, poisonous, no doubt, but there was a kind of excitement in it too. We were changing the world so fast we turned the sky black!

We were killing ourselves, Ta Shu would reply. We were breathing coal dust, it gave you miners’ lung.

But it was so exciting!

Poison is exciting, I suppose.

He recorded an audio piece about that, and about the feeling of walking on Earth after walking on the moon; and about the old work unit compounds, and the breaking of the iron rice bowl. About the people he saw in the city whose bike was their home. Almost all these recordings were unusable.

Then after some weeks had passed, with very little to show for them, he got a call from Peng Ling. “Want to hear a good story?”

“Yes.”

She instructed him to meet her at a certain waffle shop near the city center.

This restaurant turned out to be a big tall room with a balcony at the back, its airy space entirely filled with antique chandeliers, perhaps fifty of them, individually junky, together rather magnificent. Ta Shu noticed the feng shui mirrors carefully set in their proper places, also the considered angles of the doorways; these interior designers had known what they were doing. They had flair.

Peng Ling was tucked into a little corner table on the balcony, where one could see everything without being much seen.

Ta Shu sat down across from her, and after the niceties, and the arrival of tea and waffles, he said, “Please tell me this good story you mentioned.”

“Sure. It’s funny. I’ve been digging around in the intelligence and security maze, a real house of mirrors I’m sorry to say, and one of my friends on the inside wanted to tell this tale on a colleague of his. Apparently Chan Qi and the young American man you met were seized at the spaceport by agents of the Ministry of Public Security. That’s what you saw. But the boss of that field unit didn’t want them—he didn’t want to be the one holding Chan Qi when Chan Guoliang found out what had happened. Chan can be very tough, he has a temper, and his people were already on the hunt for his daughter, as you can imagine. If it had been State Security, they would have held on to Qi to give her to Huyou, but Public Security just wants to stay out of trouble. So the local boss ordered his field unit to give her to someone else—but no one wanted to take her!” Ling laughed at this. “And all the while she was threatening them with what her father would do to them. And she was smart, I’m told—she emphasized they would lose their funding, have their whole unit disbanded, then get fired and thrown out of their homes. For people like that, this was a worse threat than any ankle press. And she had all the details right as to how it would go down. She even knew some of their names! So that’s why they let her go.”

“But then no one knew where they went.”

“That’s right. Turns out they headed south, probably by train. It looks like she has some helpers who can give her IDs when she needs them, and they must have generated one for the American too. So the two got off in Shekou, and after some meetings there, they went down to the ferry port and disappeared.”

“Truly?”

“It seems so. Pretty impressive. All her helpers seem to have an ability to disappear, which implies there are some real powers involved. To disrupt surveillance like that suggests people inside the Great Eyeball are involved, but maybe not. Disappearing might be easier than some people think it is. Although eventually people do tend to reappear, one way or another. So, just last week our two missing ones were spotted in Hong Kong and picked up by one of the security agencies. Some of my own agents witnessed this, and because quite a few intelligence agencies have concluded Chan Qi is in the top leadership of the migrant rights movement, and is working with the Hong Kong separatists and other dissident groups, there was a bit of a fight to claim her for questioning. I thought that could get ugly, so I had my people go in and take her and her American friend.”

“Good to hear,” Ta Shu said. “She’s that powerful, then?”

“I think so. All the dissident groups in South China, and maybe everywhere, appear to be coalescing into a single larger social force, and some say that’s because of her. She’s more and more often said to be the real power in all that.”

“That can be dangerous, to be seen as that,” Ta Shu suggested.

Peng Ling nodded deeply, as if to say Don’t I know it. “Very dangerous. Some elements of the security apparatus would clearly now prefer that she be disappeared outright, as being a danger to the state. There’s enough people thinking that way, and the infighting is getting so intense, that I fear for her safety. Someone could decide that if she just disappeared forever, then they couldn’t be blamed either for having her or harming her, because no one would know who to blame! So for a lot of people it’s just a question of getting rid of her without being known to be the last one in possession of her. If they could be sure of that, then boom. No one would ever see her again. No body would ever be found.”