Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

As often happens in these situations, infrastructure came to the rescue. A great wall traversing thousands of kilometers? Good idea. A grand canal traversing hundreds of kilometers? Perfect! An entire new capital city? Great idea, no matter the bad location. In fact, if you need to spend lots of capital, the worse the location of your new city the better! So in that sense Beijing was just right. And the fact that the Forbidden City got burned to the ground by a lightning strike, just as its construction was being completed: wonderful! Necessity to do it all again! More money spent; and by the time the Yongle emperor was done, so much capital had been disbursed that that particular dynastic cycle was brought to an abrupt end. The bankruptcy and crash of the Ming dynasty led to the rise of the Qing dynasty, which being from Manchuria was used to living even farther to the north than Beijing. For the Manchu, Beijing was down to the south, more or less in the center of things. A very nice location.

Beijing, the Grand Canal, the Great Wall—and now the moon. You see the pattern. A pattern which sometimes includes dynastic succession.

Note for later: probably best to drop that last line, considering all that is going on. Don’t want to upset the censors.

During her tenure in the Secret Service’s intelligence division, a superblack division unknown to the other agencies and to Congress, Valerie Tong had often been sent into the field as part of the State Department’s foreign service, as now on the moon. It was a bit obvious, the seemingly minor foreign service functionary who was really the spook on station, and the State Department didn’t like hosting her, but the president got to call the shots in the executive branch, and this one liked to have one of his own agents on the scene of anything he was interested in. So she went where he wanted her to go.

On the moon she was finding that different protocols obtained. The American consulate at the Chinese south pole was so small that everyone in it had to do double or triple duty, which meant almost everyone there was gathering intelligence for someone or other, while also being too busy to pay much attention to the details of other people’s work.

She had an encrypted link home, and now it gave her a new directive: Fred Fredericks, the American who had disappeared while in Chinese custody a couple of months before, causing an intense diplomatic dispute that by now was folded into the larger Chinese-American scrum, was thought to have been moved to China, and now it was reported that he had gone back to the moon, traveling with the daughter of the Chinese finance minister. It would be extremely useful if these two could be located. Highest priority.

Not coincidentally, she suspected, John Semple asked her to accompany him on a visit to the main American base, at the moon’s north pole. She was given an hour to get ready.

“What’s going on?” Valerie asked John Semple during their flight north.

“What do you mean?” John asked with that little smile.

Valerie was really getting tired of the way she seemed to amuse him. She said, “I got a request from home to look for that Fred Fredericks again. He’s supposed to be back up here with a Chinese woman.”

“A Chinese woman?”

“Daughter of their finance minister.”

“Exactly. Chan Qi, daughter of Chan Guoliang, one of their biggest tigers. He’s the finance minister now, although he’s held a lot of positions, like they all have. They treat governing like a profession there. It makes a difference.”

“Maybe that makes it harder to compete with them here.”

“We’re not competing with them here.”

“No?”

“No. They’ve already got this place sewn up. A head start like they got, you can’t catch up. They’re faster at infrastructure anyway, and up here that’s what it’s all about.”

“So there’s no fight for the moon.”

“I didn’t say that. I said it wasn’t between us and them. It’s between various Chinese factions.”

“Which ones?”

“Who can tell? I’m not even sure they know themselves.”

“That must make it hard for them to know what to do.”

“I think so. That’s where their system lets them down, if you ask me. The Party is above the law, so they’re always improvising.”

“What about on Earth?”

“We just don’t know. Anyone who’s been in their Politburo, when they retire they aren’t allowed to leave China. They go to the countryside and aren’t seen anymore. None of them do interviews or write their memoirs. So no one on the outside knows what’s going on in there. Who’s fighting for what? We don’t know. We only see that they’re fighting. Wolidou , isn’t that the word they use for it?”

“Infighting,” Valerie confirmed. “But might that fighting help us?”

“No. We have allies in Chinese government, and we do good things with them. But our allies there have enemies there. When those enemies mess with us, they’re usually mainly trying to mess with their enemies there. So, you know. China and the US are like Siamese twins.”

“Conjoined twins.”

“Exactly. Joined at the hip. Producer and consumer. Saviors of the world. Partners in crime. All that. So when China’s having trouble, we’re having trouble. And we’ve already got enough trouble. That householders’ strike is bringing down Wall Street, and no one knows what will come of that. People are withdrawing their deposits and putting them in various blockchain currencies, or carboncoins, or new credit unions. So finance is crashing and the Fed is going to have to intervene. Then there’s that little matter you came up to look at, the cloud currency called the virtual US Dollar.”

Valerie said, “Some tests we’ve done seem to show that it really is convertible to real dollars. It looks like that’s being funded by some part of the Chinese government. One of the regional banks says they’ll convert these crypto US Dollars to the Fed’s real US dollars at par.”

“Right,” John said. “And they have two trillion dollars in treasury bonds to back that up. So, if Chan Guoliang is involved with using those bonds to back this virtual dollar, as it seems like he should be, seeing as he’s minister of finance, then that’s bad, because we thought he was on our side. But if it’s President Shanzhai, going through one of their regional banks to hurt Chan during their Party congress, then that’s a different kind of bad.”

“But you don’t think they’re aiming it at us?”

“No. They don’t want us to crash.”

“Why not?”

“Because if you owe a million, that’s your problem, but if you owe a trillion, that’s your debt holder’s problem. China needs us to do well so we can pay what we owe them. So this attack on the dollar doesn’t make sense, except in terms of infighting at the top there. Which is totally opaque.”

“And the moon?”

“This might be a place where their infighting is easier to see. Like that murder of Governor Chang, have you found out any more about that?”

Valerie said, “I’ve kept asking Inspector Jiang what’s happening with the investigation, like every couple of days. It’s clear he’s angry that he isn’t making more progress, maybe that’s one example of what you were saying about seeing them better here. He did tell me that he found out Chang used to work for their minister of state security, Huyou.”

“Hmmm. That could cut both ways.”

“Sure. Jiang’s trying to find out whether Chang might have split with Huyou, or worked with him on something questionable. Jiang was pretty vague about it, but he was clearly onto something he found interesting. Then he also said he found out that the phone paired with the one that Fredericks gave to Chang was delivered to Huairen Hall in Beijing, where the standing committee has its offices.”