Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

She entered the Chinese Lunar Authority’s offices and took her turn identifying herself to a screen, then went through security arches, signed in, took a number, sat down. The TV show on the screen in the waiting room was a CCTV production about mining on the moon. She wondered how long they would make an American diplomat wait. It was a test of this particular agency’s regard for the United States. Chinese foreign policy was a matter of competing groups within their government trying to influence the leadership’s strategy, often by taking improvised actions designed to curry favor or embarrass rivals. As their Twenty-Fifth Party Congress approached, it looked like their current president, Shanzhai Yifan, was trying to pass along his supposedly distinguished mantle (he had even given himself the lingxiu leader designation in his second term) to his close ally the minister of state security, Huyou Tao. But there was said to be intense resistance to this plan, as neither man was well liked. So some leaders were going to win big at this congress, and others were going to lose entirely. Until that happened, everyone dealing with the Party’s elite players and even the top layer of bureaucrats was going to run into some capricious and inexplicable behavior, either too friendly or too hostile.

After just ten minutes (so this was a friendly agency) she was called in to the cubicle-sized office of one Inspector Jiang Jianguo. Jianguo meant “construct the nation” and was a name from the Cultural Revolution, so possibly a gesture to a grandparent. He proved to be a handsome man, willowy and sincere, about Valerie’s age. Valerie had just hit forty the year before, and she was feeling like a hardened veteran, even a burnt-out case. Jiang looked happier.

“Thank you for seeing me,” she said to Jiang in putonghua , the Chinese common language that sometimes still got called Mandarin. “I’m trying to see an American you have in custody, an employee of Swiss Quantum Works named Fred Fredericks.”

He tilted his head to one side. “We know of this man,” he replied in Cantonese. He smiled. “You speak putonghua like you’re a Cantonese speaker, is that right?”

“My father was,” Valerie said, blushing. She stuck to putonghua , feeling that would be better protocol. “He came to America from Shenzhen. In the Los Angeles Chinatown the older people still mostly speak Cantonese.”

“All over the world!” Jiang exclaimed. “Of course one has to speak the national language, but still, Cantonese will never stop speaking Cantonese.”

“I suppose not,” Valerie said, face still hot. It had taken her a lot of work to learn to speak putonghua without a Cantonese accent, and obviously she still wasn’t quite there. But there were a lot of regional accents inflecting the national tongue, so she just had to live with it. Possibly she should have shifted to Cantonese with this man, but at this point she would have messed that up too.

“So,” Jiang continued in putonghua , conforming to propriety with a friendly smile. “As to this American working for the Swiss, we have a file for him, but he isn’t where he was when you last visited him.”

“No, but where is he?”

“Because of the nature of his arrest, he has been moved to the custody of the Scientific Research Steering Committee.”

“And where are they? Where is he now?”

“Their facilities are in Ganswinch.”

“Where is that?”

“It’s north of here, sorry, that’s our little joke. Here, let me show you on a map.” He brought up a schematic map on his table screen. It looked like a slightly simplified version of the London tube map. “Here,” he said, pointing to a node in the colorful array.

“How far is that? Can you take me there?”

“It’s about twenty kilometers from here. Let me see if my schedule allows me to get away and escort you.”

He made an inquiry to his wristpad. “Yes,” he said to her after a while. “I will show you where he is. It isn’t easy to find.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.”

Jiang led Valerie out the door and down a hall to a much bigger chamber, like the interior of an underground mall. Walls, ceiling, and floor were again gray, all formed of what was called foamed rock, Jiang said, a lunar concrete made from crushed regolith and aluminum dust. Bas-relief swirls had been cut into some of the walls they passed; when they came closer to one of these etched walls, she could see that the swirls were formed by the indentations of thousands of overlapping faces, all of them recognizably Chinese. Essentially crowds of small faces had been arranged to make broader strokes that conveyed landscapes.

They got on a subway car and Jiang showed his wristpad to a conductor, who inspected it and Valerie, then nodded and moved on to the next passengers. The car was almost empty. The train jerked and took off, humming slightly. Jiang explained that they were headed up the Ninety Degree East corridor, which would pass under Amundsen Crater, then Hédervári Crater, then Hale Crater. The libration zone rail and piste would then rise and run over the surface like train tracks, with trains keeping to a regular schedule except when solar storms forced everyone to stay underground.

At Amundsen Station they got off the car and Jiang led her over to another platform, where they got on a much more crowded subway train headed to Ganswinch. That took longer, and it was most of an hour before they got off again, though they were never moving very fast either.

The Ganswinch terminal was guarded by men in uniforms, olive green with red shoulder patches. They looked like PLA to Valerie, but Jiang said they were Lunar Authority security agents—the moon being a demilitarized zone, of course, he explained in a possibly ironic tone. Although a Cantonese accent had a tendency to undercut expressions in putonghua , so it might have just been that. Again Jiang showed his wristpad to various people who then let them pass. There were only a few women out here, and Valerie began to wonder if this was an aspect of this station, or if the Chinese were generally sending mostly men to the moon. The official statistics said they weren’t, that there were almost as many women as men in the Chinese population here. But at this outpost it wasn’t true.

They took an escalator running downward, and at its lower end got off in an interior space bigger than Valerie had seen so far. “Ganswinch Station,” Jiang explained.

Again it was all gray walls marked by bamboo mesh tapestries and potted plants. Broad banks of lighting overhead made for a lit space that was slightly dim, like the light under a thick cloud layer on Earth. The excavated cavernous space was perhaps twelve meters tall and a hundred meters wide, and on its floor stood many house-sized green tents, made of bamboo fabric, Valerie assumed, and set in rows reminiscent of a refugee camp. At the far end of these rows stood a tall mesh fence with razor wire looping its top. Jiang led them to the tent next to this fence and entered through an unzipped flap door.

It was markedly warmer inside, which Valerie took to be the point of the tents. A woman took a look at Jiang’s wrist and then began to tap on her desktop, looking at records and photos. “Tent Six,” she said to Jiang. They left her and went into the fenced compound, where three male guards escorted them down another row of tents to one marked with the Chinese character for six.

Inside the tent were about a dozen metal-framed beds, in two rows, with men sitting on each bed. At first glance, then second glance, they were all Chinese.

“Fred Fredericks?” Jiang said.

They stared at him. He walked to the end bed and looked at the man there. “Fred Fredericks?”