Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

The three of them worked on getting all that prepped while Fred looked into the eyepiece of their telescope, adjusting the focus until the Earth’s edge curved across his view screen. A thin band of vivid turquoise, arcing over the dark cobalt of the Pacific: that was Earth’s atmosphere, terrifyingly thin. The gorgeous pair of blues stuck Fred like a pin to the heart. He wanted off this dead satellite, he wanted to go home.

No chance of that now. Qi was absorbed in her wristpad and the devices on top of the rover. She bossed the prospectors around and they ate it up. They were happy to oblige, because… because why? Because they were part of her movement. Because she was a star. They did what she said because she expected them to. She had charisma. Charisma: whatever it was, it was definitely real. Fred felt it as much as anyone, no doubt about it. Although right now he was a little tired of her charisma.

“What are you telling them down there?” he asked her.

She grimaced as if to say Don’t distract me, I’m working. Yes, by now he was in full possession of an internal set of translation glasses that shifted her facial expressions into English sentences. She was eloquent in that language. He had no trouble understanding her, even though this ability was not at all typical for him. He could do it with his parents and brother, however, so maybe it was just a matter of giving the ability some data to work with. Looking at people helped. Right now he was understanding her so well he might have laughed, or on the other hand made that little snick of disapproval that his father used to emit by pulling his tongue fast off the roof of his mouth, but he couldn’t decide how he felt and so kept silent. At least for a while; after which the feeling in him clarified and he said, “Come on, tell me! What are you telling them down there?”

She rolled her eyes, which really did not need translation glasses, being an exclamation in a universal language, and indeed one Fred had seen too many times in his life.

“Tell me!” he insisted.

“I’m telling them that I’m okay.”

“That’s it?”

“And I’m telling them that they should proceed with the plan.”

“What plan?”

“It’s a secret plan,” she said curtly, casting a glance at the two prospectors, who were listening and nodding as they worked on aiming the laser.

“If you really want to change things,” Fred said, still irritated at her eye roll, “you can’t do it with a secret plan.”

“How would you know?”

“Because everyone knows that. You have to share the plan. That’s what makes it something that might actually happen.”

“Maybe so. But now I’m sharing the plan. And before I couldn’t.”

“Or else what?”

“Or else we would have gotten arrested and jailed before anything could happen! Which is what is happening down there right now. So we have to act fast.”

“Just how illegal is this plan?”

“Anything that tries to change China without the Party initiating it is as illegal as things can get. You cross certain lines and they can do anything to you.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning a quick trial in a fake court and then they kill you! Or no trial and you just disappear forever! Is that illegal enough for you?”

She was more upset than usual. Xuanzang and Ah Q were regarding her thoughtfully. Fred, seeing her mouth so tight, said, “Yes. I get it. Sorry.”

She nodded unhappily. She typed on her wristpad. She glanced at Xuanzang. “Okay, we’re locked in. I’ll need to tap your batteries for this.”

“We don’t have that much power left, I have to warn you.”

“I need all you have to spare.”

“I don’t know how much that is.”

“Leave enough to get to Petrov, of course. Give me the rest of it. I need to power this message for about ten minutes, if we have that.”

Xuanzang tapped away at his consoles, reading closely. “Okay. We’re keeping enough to get to Petrov. Do it and then let’s get going. We’ll be cutting it close.”

She nodded and studied her wristpad. She typed for a while, then read. If this was Lenin on the train to Russia, Fred thought, it was also much like everything else in the cloud: tapping on screens; things then appearing on other screens; then later, perhaps, things happening in the physical world. But what was the relationship between cloud and world, between tap and act? This was always the question no one could answer. Maybe, Fred thought, the two were the same now. Maybe the question itself was simply wrong. Maybe they had always been the same. Words were acts, words were always acts; that was why he was always so hesitant to speak. He remembered a phrase that someone trying to help him had once said: If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling. That was a thought that made him uneasy every time he remembered it, so mostly he didn’t; but it kept cropping up, usually at precisely those times when he saw he wasn’t going to act, even though he was feeling something pretty strongly.

Qi was going to act. She had a lot of true feelings. She tapped her wristpad. The prospectors’ laser beam was now flashing an encrypted message to one very small circle in China, where her intended recipients were looking up to receive it. If anyone else caught sight of this lased green flash and recorded it, it would be coded and incomprehensible to them. That was the hope, apparently. Although without the encryption of a mobile quantum key, most codes could eventually be broken.

When she was done transmitting, she clicked off their laser and sat back in her chair. Fred’s internal Qi-glasses now read her as relieved; even perhaps pleased. Also curious. What had she started? Even she didn’t know.

Xuanzang and Ah Q now insisted they drive immediately to Petrov Crater Station to resupply. “We’re almost out of everything.”

“Okay, do it,” Qi said. “Go.”

So they took off again, grinding slowly over the frozen waves of the battered old moon. Here in the libration zone, where the Chinese apparently were pushing infrastructure north, they began to cross more and more vehicle tracks, including some complicated intersections. Xuanzang came to one such crossroads and pointed at his dashboard screens. “We’re back in the land of the living.”

“Someone spotted you?” Qi asked.

“It might just be a motion sensor. How that sensor will algorithm us is an open question. It’s almost sure to ID us, but that might not matter. We pop in and out of surveillance visibility all the time, and so do lots of other rovers. So the people checking might not be that interested. We’ll see when we get there.”

It was slow going, as always. Qi fell asleep, waking when Ah Q started cooking again, drawn to consciousness no doubt by the smell of sesame and rice. They ate together at the rover’s table, and only Fred winced when the rover tilted hard this way and that. Seemed to him they could slide into some miniature crater at any moment and get stuck for good, but the others trusted the autopilot, and they were all hungry. When they were done Qi fell asleep again. The track they were following became flatter. Earth continued to hang over the horizon, gorgeous as any jewel, looking like some fabulous geode. Its glowing blue kept snagging Fred’s eye.

Finally they came to the top of a small crater rim, and there before them was a round station walled by black windows and roofed by a stacked mound of moon rock, like a yurt topped with a thick cake of gray snow. Petrov Crater Station. Northern end of the libration zone’s development. Xuanzang drove the rover to the fuel resupply station and tapped off the motor.

“Made it!” he said with obvious relief.

“How many kilometers did we have left?” Fred asked.