Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

“Your reconciliation of liberal and New Left.”

“Well, at this point it might not rise to that exalted level, but yes. I have plans. But now this hotheaded girl has gotten the youth into the streets. All trains and flights to Beijing have been canceled. You have to prove you’re a resident even to come to the city now. That’s just the start of the disruptions. No one can tell how the crowd out there now will be dispersed. Even if that gets managed successfully, which will take time, that won’t be the end of it. No. It’s a mess.”

Ta Shu sipped his tea and thought it over. “Maybe the mess could help you. You are trying for top-down reform, and the people out there are trying from the bottom up. Ultimately you need both.”

Peng shook her head. “I wish it was true. Maybe you can help make it true with your political feng shui. That’s what I’m asking you to try, I suppose. But from my perspective, much as it helps to have the people behind a cause, if there is civil unrest like this now, bringing bad memories of May Thirty-fifth, and even worse, then this only hurts reform efforts from the top. There will be elements using this unrest to justify opposing anything that smacks of liberal or left reforms, as showing weakness in a time of danger. Lots of powerful people will be urging a crackdown. That will make the Party congress that much less of an opportunity!” Peng Ling shook her head, getting more upset the more she thought about it.

“Maybe,” Ta Shu said, thinking it over. “You know more than I do, of course. Still I think this may make more of an opportunity.”

She shook her head harder. “You don’t know!”

“I know.”

“You don’t know!”

“That’s what I meant,” he said wearily. “I know that I don’t know. You know the situation better. But you are inside it. Right at its center. You might even become the next president, isn’t that right?”

“Don’t say that,” she said, glancing at her aides, who were downstairs and seemed well out of earshot.

“No words, just hopes. My point is, when you are inside something, you can see only parts of it. No one can see all of it. So, I see it from the outside.”

She sipped and thought about it. “I don’t know how much that’s worth. But you can help me. If you were to go to the moon again, you could help to control this young firebrand, and you might also be helpful in dealing with the Americans there. They’ve got their own problems right now, they’re falling apart, and that’s impacting us here. Have you heard what’s happening there?”

“No.”

“It’s kind of like here. The withouts and the young people have joined together into something called a householders’ union, and now they’re all withdrawing whatever they have in the banks and converting their savings to a cryptocurrency called carboncoin. Basically they’ve started a political run on the banks, and the banks are so overleveraged that they’ve had to close. And that’s caused a general panic. It looks like their federal government will soon nationalize their banks to stabilize their economy.”

“So they’ll become more like us.”

“Sort of. So that may be a good thing, if it works. Because their economy is our economy, and if they could control theirs better, we would benefit. But there’s a pushback to that from their right wing, just like here. As part of that, there are elements of American military and intelligence agencies trying to insert themselves into their moon program, and now they’re seeing our troubles here, and will try even harder. The military here is trying the same things. You have friends there among the Americans, so you could be a go-between.”

“I would be happy to do that,” Ta Shu said. “And I wasn’t done up there anyway.”

“Good. You can go there in Fang Fei’s system again. I don’t know how much I can trust our space agencies right now. For sure the news of you going back up there could spread fast, and my enemies might try to stop you. Fang Fei will be safer for you. He’s been helping me quite a bit lately.”

“That’s good. I’ll do it.”

She smiled. “Thank you. I hope you can balance all the forces up there.”

Ta Shu shook his head. “I can’t do anything myself. Hard to say what will happen. But I can try.”

“When can you go?”

“Now.”

But now there was no way out of the mass of people. Beijing was locked in the greatest gridlock ever seen in the history of the world. Peng Ling had to call a drone helicopter to the roof of the building that held the waffle shop. Ta Shu found it disturbing to get into a plastic box, what seemed to him a big toy with no pilot in it, and then to get lofted abruptly into the air above Beijing—into police-controlled air, in fact, where drones at this point were routinely being shot down by other drones. There were a lot of them out and about, the sky was crowded with them. So it was a matter of trusting machines and algorithms all around. Also a tribute to Peng Ling’s importance, that she could go up like this into such a proscribed space.

But go she did; she went up with him in the drone, so that she could look down from above and see Beijing, the great capital of the world, awash in a sea of people. It was astonishing: the billion were all there, it seemed literally. There was no place below them that wasn’t black with the heads of Chinese people, a granular mass of humanity—everywhere except for Tiananmen Square itself, the heart of China, looking suddenly small in the middle of the immensity of the city and its crowd. A gray rectangular dot like a postage stamp.

Peng Ling stared down at it impassively. There was no denying the awesome truth of this sight. This was power, the power of the Chinese people; also the power of whoever could conjure such a crowd. Peng could not have done it, and judging by the blank look on her face, Ta Shu could see she found this truth daunting. Was this Chan Qi’s doing? And if so, how had she done it? And if not her, who?

Ta Shu told her to pass on going by his mother’s compound. Go straight to the Party’s airport, he suggested, and get him on a Party jet south. She nodded, relieved. She gave instructions aloud and the drone changed direction.

Ta Shu watched her profile as she looked down. A tiger; maybe the biggest tiger. Which meant he was part of the hierarchy now, no doubt about it. Maybe he had been all along. He didn’t know what that meant. Famous, yes. But maybe it just meant he was a tool. An instrument of power. But he had his ideas too. Possibly something could be achieved.

“What will you do?” he asked her, gesturing down. Ultimately the crowd below was a direct challenge to the Party’s rule of China, and it was huge. So it was a crisis for the Party, no doubt about it.

Peng Ling shrugged. Business had to get done, she muttered. Life had to go on. Lanes of movement would be established by necessity, then kept open by the police. Brutal means would be hopefully minimized. After that, they would probably deal with this the way they had dealt with the umbrella revolution in Hong Kong: they would wait it out. Leave people alone until they grew bored or hungry or sick, or, this being Beijing in autumn, cold; then let them disperse without incident. Catch as many faces as possible on camera, dock people in their citizen scores as those got reassembled. Wait it out, in other words; and when it went away, forget it ever happened. That would be the strategy, the hope.

“Lean to the side,” Ta Shu remarked when she fell silent. Mao’s old strategy, to duck away from the blows of one’s enemies, or even from their attention.

She nodded. Yes, her look down at the city said. If the entire population of China was moving at you, you definitely wanted to lean to the side.