Valerie was really getting tired of the way she seemed to amuse him. She said, “I got a request from home to look for that Fred Fredericks again. He’s supposed to be back up here with a Chinese woman.”
“A Chinese woman?”
“Daughter of their finance minister.”
“Exactly. Chan Qi, daughter of Chan Guoliang, one of their biggest tigers. He’s the finance minister now, although he’s held a lot of positions, like they all have. They treat governing like a profession there. It makes a difference.”
“Maybe that makes it harder to compete with them here.”
“We’re not competing with them here.”
“No?”
“No. They’ve already got this place sewn up. A head start like they got, you can’t catch up. They’re faster at infrastructure anyway, and up here that’s what it’s all about.”
“So there’s no fight for the moon.”
“I didn’t say that. I said it wasn’t between us and them. It’s between various Chinese factions.”
“Which ones?”
“Who can tell? I’m not even sure they know themselves.”
“That must make it hard for them to know what to do.”
“I think so. That’s where their system lets them down, if you ask me. The Party is above the law, so they’re always improvising.”
“What about on Earth?”
“We just don’t know. Anyone who’s been in their Politburo, when they retire they aren’t allowed to leave China. They go to the countryside and aren’t seen anymore. None of them do interviews or write their memoirs. So no one on the outside knows what’s going on in there. Who’s fighting for what? We don’t know. We only see that they’re fighting. Wolidou, isn’t that the word they use for it?”
“Infighting,” Valerie confirmed. “But might that fighting help us?”
“No. We have allies in Chinese government, and we do good things with them. But our allies there have enemies there. When those enemies mess with us, they’re usually mainly trying to mess with their enemies there. So, you know. China and the US are like Siamese twins.”
“Conjoined twins.”
“Exactly. Joined at the hip. Producer and consumer. Saviors of the world. Partners in crime. All that. So when China’s having trouble, we’re having trouble. And we’ve already got enough trouble. That householders’ strike is bringing down Wall Street, and no one knows what will come of that. People are withdrawing their deposits and putting them in various blockchain currencies, or carboncoins, or new credit unions. So finance is crashing and the Fed is going to have to intervene. Then there’s that little matter you came up to look at, the cloud currency called the virtual US Dollar.”
Valerie said, “Some tests we’ve done seem to show that it really is convertible to real dollars. It looks like that’s being funded by some part of the Chinese government. One of the regional banks says they’ll convert these crypto US Dollars to the Fed’s real US dollars at par.”
“Right,” John said. “And they have two trillion dollars in treasury bonds to back that up. So, if Chan Guoliang is involved with using those bonds to back this virtual dollar, as it seems like he should be, seeing as he’s minister of finance, then that’s bad, because we thought he was on our side. But if it’s President Shanzhai, going through one of their regional banks to hurt Chan during their Party congress, then that’s a different kind of bad.”
“But you don’t think they’re aiming it at us?”
“No. They don’t want us to crash.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you owe a million, that’s your problem, but if you owe a trillion, that’s your debt holder’s problem. China needs us to do well so we can pay what we owe them. So this attack on the dollar doesn’t make sense, except in terms of infighting at the top there. Which is totally opaque.”
“And the moon?”
“This might be a place where their infighting is easier to see. Like that murder of Governor Chang, have you found out any more about that?”
Valerie said, “I’ve kept asking Inspector Jiang what’s happening with the investigation, like every couple of days. It’s clear he’s angry that he isn’t making more progress, maybe that’s one example of what you were saying about seeing them better here. He did tell me that he found out Chang used to work for their minister of state security, Huyou.”
“Hmmm. That could cut both ways.”
“Sure. Jiang’s trying to find out whether Chang might have split with Huyou, or worked with him on something questionable. Jiang was pretty vague about it, but he was clearly onto something he found interesting. Then he also said he found out that the phone paired with the one that Fredericks gave to Chang was delivered to Huairen Hall in Beijing, where the standing committee has its offices.”
“Interesting,” John said. “Well, it makes sense that Chang was well connected. The moon is a big prize for whoever is seen to be in charge here.”
“So it might be caught up in the struggle for who becomes the next president?”
“Yes.” John looked at her. “Is the Secret Service up on any of this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is the president up on any of this?”
“I don’t know. You report to him too, right?”
“We try.”
On their flight north, their rocket made a stop in the Procellarum KREEP zone, to drop off a clutch of mining engineers. Valerie looked out a window at the moonscape expecting to see the same monochrome craterscape that seemed completely ubiquitous, but here it was surprisingly different: a broad white plane was marred only by a single mountain range, which was not arced like the crater rims always were, but instead ran straight across the flats surrounding it, thus resembling some big mountain range on Earth. The Harbinger Mountains, Valerie was told by one of the mining engineers.
Procellarum was the most mineral-rich area on the moon, this engineer told her as their craft descended. It was the right eye of the Man in the Moon, a basin so big that it had been named Oceanus rather than Mare by the early astronomers. It had been the last part of the lunar crust to cool down and harden after the moon had recoalesced from the fragments of the Gaia-Theia collision, and because it was the last pool of liquid lava, all the lightest elements available had floated up into it and then hardened into the crust. Thus KREEP, the K standing for potassium, REE for rare earth elements, and P for phosphorus.
“And now we’re mining that?” Valerie asked. “It’s an American operation?”
The engineer nodded. They were sending the potassium and phosphorus to the north pole base to aid the local agriculture, and they threw the rare earths home to Earth. Some heavy-duty high-capacity launch rails had been built at the north end of Procellarum, to be as near the north pole base as possible. These launch rails cast freighters full of refined rare earths down to low-Earth orbit, and later piecemeal down to Earth. It was the biggest American operation on the moon by far, and almost the only way the moon was actually proving of use to humanity, in this miner’s opinion.
“You’re not breaking the Outer Space Treaty?” Valerie asked.
The engineer didn’t think so. The mines were kept underground and the surface therefore was left mostly unmarked. No open pit mines or strip mines. And they were taking less than a hundredth of one percent of the available minerals, if even that. And none of it was going to the military, not directly anyway. Basically it was claimed to be a scientific experiment, testing various aspects of mining. Kind of like how Japan did scientific testing on whales. So it conformed pretty well to treaty regulations.
They came down on a landing pad cut into the lowlands next to the Harbinger Mountains, which as they got lower looked positively Himalayan in their stark vertical grandeur. The mining station looked like any small airport anywhere. Strangely, given Valerie’s preexisting conclusion that the moon was tediously the same everywhere, some patches of land flanking the mountain range were parti-colored. The colors were subtle but definite: tans, pinks, pale greens, even one patch of vivid lemon. KREEPy land, the engineer confirmed. Frozen lakes of rare earth elements, rising to the top when the moon had been a coalescing ball of liquid-hot elements.