Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

The paring of sun gilding them was intense even through treated glass. Outside they could see only a clash of blackest black and whitest white, and yet they stood in a little forest of green highlighted by red, brown, madder alizarin. All God’s children! But no, don’t think of that tune! Think Wagner, think Verdi!

“We’re going to need the lawyers back home,” Valerie said now to John. “This Fredericks guy is in big trouble.”

“Did he really kill someone? Why would he do that?”

“He says he didn’t. He almost died himself, and he’s still confused. He doesn’t know what happened. And he doesn’t look like the type of guy that gets in trouble.”

“But I was told they found the poison that killed Chang on his hand.”

“I know. It made him sick too. But he had no reason to do it.”

“Not that we know of. These two might have gotten caught up in something, you never know. There’s a lot of IP theft still going on, also a lot of pay-to-play. Sometimes those payola deals go sour.”

“I know.” Val had been sent to the moon precisely to look into just such a problem. A cryptocurrency called “US Dollars” was being offered in the black cloud, supposedly redeemable in real dollars, and there was evidence suggesting some of the monster servers involved were located on the moon. Only the Chinese had such powerful computers up here, or so it was believed, so it was a tricky situation, smacking of cyberwarfare, and Valerie had been sent up to see if she could discover anything on station, using her Chinese language ability and her fiscal skills, and the expertise she could call on back home. John knew this.

“Well, there you have it,” he went on. “Maybe a deal went bad. And I hear Fredericks’s company has been complaining about IP theft.”

“They all do. That doesn’t explain something like this. No one murders a business contact to cover up bribery or theft.”

“No?” John tilted his head to the side. His was a friendly face, brown eyes observant and attentive; he really looked at you. He let you know that you were of interest to him, and now, in Valerie’s case, that you were a source of almost constant amusement. Black hair close-cropped, graying at the temples: a good-looking man. “Maybe our Fred was more than a business representative.”

This was theoretically possible, but Valerie said, “I think it’s more likely that someone used him. When I saw him he was like a deer in the headlights. And if they found the poison on his hand, it means he must have poisoned himself too. Why would he do that?”

“To cover himself? I don’t know. He was here to deliver a new secure comms device, right?”

“Yes. A private phone, with mobile quantum key delivery.”

“Who was going to be on the moon end of this device?”

“Probably Chang himself, right?”

“Fredericks will know.”

“Maybe. He could just be a courier.”

“Maybe we can ask Secretary Li about that.”

“Li got sent back to Earth right after this happened.”

“Hmmmm,” John Semple grumbled, thinking it over. “We need to know more about Chang and his connections back home.”

“I can look into that.”

“It will be murky,” John predicted. “The Chinese agencies like to be opaque. You’re going to be swimming in mud. Although that will be easier up here with the light g and all, yuk yuk.”

“Ha ha,” Valerie retorted. To her an American citizen in trouble was not a joking matter.

Semple just laughed at her with his eyes. Hard-core Secret Service rule-following academic with station-appropriate language skills, and no doubt a dragon mama who beat her with books as a child! Lighten up! his eyes were saying.

To which she responded by becoming even more stony. He didn’t know her at all; he was just reacting to the fact that she was a professional and a Chinese-American woman. It was offensive.

“Look into it,” he suggested cheerfully as he saw this emanating from her.

He turned off his cone of silence, and they walked inexpertly down the rows of bamboo, then descended broad stairs to the floor below. Here long tubes of green bamboo trunks were being prepared for use as building materials—either segmented into long tubes for use as beams, or split into slats to be woven into sheets of varying thicknesses. The leaves themselves were being pulped for paper and cloth. The contrast with the greenhouse above was startling: green life up there, green boards down here. It was a bamboo shambles, loud with the harsh whines of table saws. Against one wall, giant tubs set at a tilt rotated as they rumbled soil around inside them, sounding like wet concrete sloshing in a cement truck and providing a bass continuo for the saws’ shrieking. Workers were dumping front loaders full of bamboo dust and chips into these soil tubs to serve as more humus. Lots of Chinese workers were moving around, all of them much more graceful than Valerie and John. It was like a Chinese socialist-realist ballet with industrial music as the score, reminiscent of Nixon in China . Give Adams or Glass an orchestra of table saws, Valerie thought, and this would be the result.

The broad tunnels of the undercity were striped by moving walkways, as in airports on Earth. Valerie and John stood on one to return to the American consulate, a little rented space in the big Chinese complex. When they walked in the consulate door, John’s assistant, Emily List, looked up from her screen.

“Oh good,” she said. “I was just trying to call you. That Fred Fredericks is gone.”

“What do you mean gone?”

“The doctor we sent over to look at him couldn’t see him. They said they moved him. The doctor asked to see him wherever he was, but the people there just kept saying he’s been moved.”

“Did they say where?”

“No.”

John and Valerie exchanged a look. “Okay, Agent Tong,” John said to her. “Why don’t you go ask some questions, see what you can find out.”

The Chinese workers who had built the lunar south pole complex must have endured a lot of danger and suffering, Valerie thought as she headed to the far side of Shackleton Crater. And there must have been a lot of them. Even when construction was mostly a matter of programming robots and 3-D printers, a lot of digging and jackhammering would still have to be done. Humans remained the best construction robots around, being the cheapest and most versatile. For sure a lot of man-hours had been devoted to this project. Its architectural style straddled 1960s Brutalism and sheer adhocitecture; in other words, not that different from most of the infrastructure back in China, where the glamorous skyscrapers were few and far between.

Valerie was making her inquiry alone, per John’s request. He thought a single woman speaking Chinese would find out more than an officious group, and he was probably right about that. She flowed carefully from walkway to subway to walkway to corridor, all underground, arriving at last at the Chinese security headquarters, out near the settlement’s transport station, somewhere under Shackleton Crater’s broad apron. All these interior spaces were made of concrete and aluminum, with the walls decorated by tapestries of woven bamboo. Living bamboo plants were also growing in giant concrete pots placed all over, accenting greenly the ubiquitous lunar gray.

Most rooms in the complex were buried well below the surface. All the moon’s surface was composed of rock shattered by eons of meteor impact, so the structural integrity of every excavated space was suspect, at least to Valerie. Heavily ribbed and reinforced ceilings were surely advisable, and yet to her the concrete ribs arcing overhead looked too tall and slender and unsupported to be safe. But this was the judgment of a Terran eye and brain, she told herself, which hadn’t factored in lunar gravity. Presumably the engineers had calculated everything.