Qi was going to act. She had a lot of true feelings. She tapped her wristpad. The prospectors’ laser beam was now flashing an encrypted message to one very small circle in China, where her intended recipients were looking up to receive it. If anyone else caught sight of this lased green flash and recorded it, it would be coded and incomprehensible to them. That was the hope, apparently. Although without the encryption of a mobile quantum key, most codes could eventually be broken.
When she was done transmitting, she clicked off their laser and sat back in her chair. Fred’s internal Qi-glasses now read her as relieved; even perhaps pleased. Also curious. What had she started? Even she didn’t know.
Xuanzang and Ah Q now insisted they drive immediately to Petrov Crater Station to resupply. “We’re almost out of everything.”
“Okay, do it,” Qi said. “Go.”
So they took off again, grinding slowly over the frozen waves of the battered old moon. Here in the libration zone, where the Chinese apparently were pushing infrastructure north, they began to cross more and more vehicle tracks, including some complicated intersections. Xuanzang came to one such crossroads and pointed at his dashboard screens. “We’re back in the land of the living.”
“Someone spotted you?” Qi asked.
“It might just be a motion sensor. How that sensor will algorithm us is an open question. It’s almost sure to ID us, but that might not matter. We pop in and out of surveillance visibility all the time, and so do lots of other rovers. So the people checking might not be that interested. We’ll see when we get there.”
It was slow going, as always. Qi fell asleep, waking when Ah Q started cooking again, drawn to consciousness no doubt by the smell of sesame and rice. They ate together at the rover’s table, and only Fred winced when the rover tilted hard this way and that. Seemed to him they could slide into some miniature crater at any moment and get stuck for good, but the others trusted the autopilot, and they were all hungry. When they were done Qi fell asleep again. The track they were following became flatter. Earth continued to hang over the horizon, gorgeous as any jewel, looking like some fabulous geode. Its glowing blue kept snagging Fred’s eye.
Finally they came to the top of a small crater rim, and there before them was a round station walled by black windows and roofed by a stacked mound of moon rock, like a yurt topped with a thick cake of gray snow. Petrov Crater Station. Northern end of the libration zone’s development. Xuanzang drove the rover to the fuel resupply station and tapped off the motor.
“Made it!” he said with obvious relief.
“How many kilometers did we have left?” Fred asked.
Xuanzang quoted something: “‘The amount of gas left in the tank wouldn’t have filled a cigarette lighter.’”
“What does that mean?”
“About ten kilometers.”
From inside the station, someone behind a control window pointed them to one of the hookups. Once they were settled in place before it, the various arms of the refueling station extended from the wall and attached to the rover with no sign that anyone was operating them. As probably they weren’t.
When their car was hooked up and the juice had started to flow, there came an audio request asking to enter the rover, and when Xuanzang granted it and opened the door’s locks, four Chinese men came through, one after the next.
“Come with us,” one of them said to Qi.
“No,” Qi said.
“You’re under arrest,” the man explained.
“No!”
“Just come with us.” The man looked at Fred and the two miners. “All of you.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
tianxia
All Under Heaven
Ta Shu made two more trips on the rented bike, taking trailer loads of his mom’s detritus out to the garbage station. On his final trip, as he headed back into the city center, he found the streets growing more and more crowded. Eventually things clogged entirely. Gridlock. Something had happened up ahead. Cars and trucks stopped, motors were turned off, drivers and passengers got out and stood beside their vehicles, talking things over, even sitting on the street to heat up tea over camping stoves. Only bikes and motor scooters were still moving, weaving slowly through the maze of cars as they dodged not just vehicles but people. That made for slow going, and yet it was almost as fraught with peril as when the trucks and cars were moving, because a fair number of the people standing around were annoyed, and inclined to take that out on people still trundling through.
Near the Third Ring Road the mass of vehicles and people thickened to the point that he had to get off his bike and walk it. Even that was difficult. There was no space to move forward. He stood there holding his bike handles, puzzled. Everyone he could see looked equally mystified. Most of them wanted to be somewhere else, that was clear. So it was still a traffic jam, but for some reason it had locked up completely. And it felt different too. People stood around talking to each other or to their wrists, either agitated or resigned. The crush was so unusual that more and more faces were looking worried. What could have caused the city to seize up like this? It was always very crowded, always just a few people per block from jamming, but why today?
Ta Shu stopped by a man standing by his truck: broad flat face, red cheeks, maybe Tibetan, friendly look. Ta Shu asked what was happening and the man pointed north. Word was that something was going on. Maybe some kind of demonstration. Of course there were demonstrations every day in China, but they were always elsewhere, out in the west or down south. Here in Beijing, and this big? It was strange, even spooky. It was too big to be a demonstration.
Ta Shu stood next to his bike, resting his weight on its handlebars. He interrogated his wristpad like so many others. Traffic maps were very slow to load, they were all stalling out. Finally he got one that showed the city red everywhere, farther to the south than the north. Then an alert appeared on the map, announcing that Tiananmen Square and the area around it was closed. Ta Shu felt a stab of dread. To empty the center of the capital, the heart of China in feng shui terms, scene of so many national moments, from the glory of the declaration of national independence to the horror of July 339th—that was a clear sign that city officials, or more probably the national leadership, thought that something was very wrong. The crowd around him did not seem anything like a terrorist threat, or even a protest—too many people were involved. Although many of them, now that he looked around, did seem headed north. It was true on both sides of the street. To the extent this mass of people was moving at all, it was moving north, toward the city center.
Ta Shu found seams in the crowd and nosed his bike along. Other bicyclists were trying this, and the people stuck with their cars were getting more and more annoyed with them. The empty boxes on his bike’s trailer made it wider than it needed to be, so he untied them and left them on the ground. On he pushed, following lines of walking people he could follow north or east. Slowly the logjam was resolving into eddies of movement in various directions, as some people gave up and turned around, while others pressed on, or headed to the side. Sometimes moving lanes of people crossed each other, taking turns one by one. Everything went slowly, as if they were caught in syrup. People were more and more distant with each other, their harmony impersonal and brittle. Some still shared rumors or sympathy, but mostly they ignored the people around them, withdrawing into themselves. The whole situation was just too disconcerting. There were many, many thousands of people on the streets.
Now Ta Shu was beginning to see groups that seemed to have formed before the gridlock began. These were mostly lines of young people snaking through the crowd, holding banners and following multiperson dragons, as during New Year’s parades, some speaking through megaphones, others chanting or singing. These tuanpai, if they were youth league groups, were singing slogans like The united masses will always be victorious, or The rule of law is the rule of the land. Also: Law yes, corruption no. Also: Law over Party, law over Party.