Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

“Poem pair?” Zhou suggested.

“Oh dear,” Ta Shu protested.

“Come on,” Zhou Bao said. “One must keep a sense of propriety. Are we literati or not? Are we alive or not?”

“I’m not sure,” Ta Shu admitted. “I feel like a ghost.”

“I am sure,” Zhou said. “We are alive. And even ghosts write poetry.”

“Do they? I never heard that.”

“They do. Give it a try.”

Ta Shu sighed, pondered his wrist. Without thought, without volition, his fingers tapped out keys for ideograms. The pause in their conversation was no longer than their usual silences, and yet suddenly looking up at him was a poem:

He showed his wrist to Zhou Bao, who read it and smiled. “Very good. Very true. Here’s mine.”

Ta Shu said, “We are both sounding kind of worried, my friend.”

“And why not. Come on, let’s get back. There’s nothing more to say right now, and I’m worried I’ll miss messages from the Peaks. I’ve sent out some encrypted inquiries, and even that is looking suspicious now.”

“Sure, let’s get back.”

Zhou drove the rover in a circle on the mesa and they returned to the station. The midday sunlight was so bright that even the shadows were white, blasted by photons ricocheting sideways into any shaded place. Everything was white, with faint lines and gradations making what little texture there was. The wheel tracks on the road shimmered as they proceeded like mirages in a desert. When they approached the station’s garage outer door, Zhou clicked on the radio and announced they were coming in.

“Glad you’re back,” the lock keeper said. “Those cops that came here with Ta Shu found Chan Qi and arrested her.”

They rushed inside, Zhou taking the lead. Ta Shu found again that his ability to hurry in lunar gravity was severely limited. Loping after Zhou he flew immediately into the ceiling, shouted in dismay, landed on his feet several meters along, grabbed the handrail on the wall to keep from falling, stopped himself. Started again with a hand-over-hand motion, like a sailor on the flooded deck of a ship. Zhou had never slowed, and Ta Shu hurried after him around a corner and was startled to find him coming right back at him, hunched over in his rapid big-headed shuffle. Ta Shu got out of Zhou’s way, turned around and followed him again, guessing he had gone first to his office and was now headed to wherever Qi and Fred might be, but now with a small pistol in hand. He was talking fast into his wristpad, so that the gun, which Ta Shu hoped and assumed was a Taser pistol, was pointed at the ceiling. Again Zhou was much faster than Ta Shu, and as the station’s hallways were filled with right-angle turns, he hustled quickly out of Ta Shu’s sight, and Ta Shu had to hurry as best he could after him, following a blue line on the floor which he hoped indicated the way Zhou had taken.

Luckily this turned out to be the case, and he staggered into a room just in time to see everyone shouting, Zhou ordering everyone to freeze but none of the others able to achieve that status even if they had wanted to, and Bo trying to get at Chan Qi past some local officials, while Qi was trying to slap him in the face but missing. Dhu was shouting to Bo, and Fred was yelling at both of them in English, his face beet red behind a pair of black-rimmed spectacles.

“Everyone stop !” Zhou Bao yelled at the top of his lungs.

For a moment everyone stopped, though all of them but Zhou were teetering this way and that. Zhou had his Taser gun pointed at the ceiling, but it still had the deadly look of any gun, so they were all working to bring themselves to a halt of some sort or another.

“These people are under arrest!” Bo said furiously.

“You don’t have any jurisdiction here,” Zhou told him coldly. “If you try to coerce anyone in my charge I’ll have to shoot you with this, and people shot by Tasers in this gravity have a tendency to flail around and injure themselves, sometimes quite badly. So let’s avoid that and stay still. I’m the police equivalent at this station, so I’ll be taking these two people back into my custody, and I’m ordering you visiting officials to stay here in this room while I sort this out.”

“We need to be there,” Dhu said.

“I need to be there,” Bo said.

“I’ll call you on the intercom after I’ve checked this out with my own superiors down at the Peaks. You hold still right here until then.”

He gestured at Qi and Fred, glanced briefly at Ta Shu. “Get out into the hall.”

They scuttled out as quickly as they could, banging around as if in zero g itself. Zhou aimed his Taser pistol right at Bo as they did so, then slipped out after them. He closed the door and punched the door pad hard enough to throw himself back a bit, apparently locking the door.

“Come with me,” he said grimly, and led them down the hall. As they crashed into each other and the walls after him, he turned and hissed “One at a time!” with a look of disgust at their clumsiness. But even he was bounding down the hall like a drunken kangaroo, his speedy shuffle temporarily lost. The moon was simply not made for human hastiness.

At the end of one long hall he directed them into another room. Doors in the other wall slid open onto a tram car.

“Off you go,” Zhou said. “This is the emergency return train, it will get you down to the pole faster than any other way we have here.”

“But what do we do when we get there?” Qi demanded. “Who will meet us?”

“I don’t know, but it won’t be Bo and Dhu. I’ll call ahead on my private line and tell Inspector Jiang you’re coming. Best for you to get with Inspector Jiang and his local security, and hope for the best after that.”

“What if Jiang is with Bo and Dhu on this?” Ta Shu asked.

Zhou shrugged. “I doubt that will be the case. Let me think about your next step while you get on your way. I’ll talk to you en route and let you know what I’ve set up.”

Qi started to object, but Zhou waved her off. “Later! For now, be quick. The sooner you get to the big base, the more options we’ll have.”

Qi saw the sense in this, and turned and went through the door into the tram. Fred followed, then Ta Shu, and when they were seated and strapped in, the tram jerked forward and off they went.

The tram they were on was floating over a piste laid in as straight and flat a line over the landscape as they had been able to build. On Earth they would have been inside hyperloops. Here the moon gave them a near vacuum to move in, but they had to either hew to a straight line or risk flying off the piste. In a couple of places, where the line had to take an unavoidable swerve, the train slowed to a crawl, but most of the time it floated along at a rocketlike speed that nevertheless included no vibration or noise, so that looking out the windows was like looking at an image on a screen.

Then for a while they skirted the edge of a long drop into the South Pole–Aitken Basin, and could see part of its immensity. Ta Shu found himself so amazed by its size that he was startled out of his focus on his young friends and the general trouble. From rim to floor the drop was thirteen vertical kilometers, meaning about forty-five thousand feet, and for a few minutes they could see that drop for what it was. He was reminded that some impacts were so violent they changed everything, even the axis of the world. This feng shui perception, mixing geology and deep time into a history of everything, overwhelmed him: they were in it, they were part of it even now, or especially now. A bang like this could happen to them.