“Fred Fredericks?” Jiang said.
They stared at him. He walked to the end bed and looked at the man there. “Fred Fredericks?”
The man shook his head. “Xi Dao.”
“When did you move to this tent?” Jiang asked.
“Three months ago,” the man replied.
Jiang squinted at him. He looked at the other men. “He’s been here all this last week?” he asked them.
They nodded.
Jiang looked at Valerie. “Let’s go back.”
They returned to the tent outside the fence, went back to the woman who had sent them off. “Fred Fredericks isn’t in Tent Six,” Jiang said. “What’s become of him?”
Startled, the woman tapped at her desktop. She gestured to Jiang as she read her screen, and he came around and read next to her.
“Ho,” he said.
The two Chinese officials looked up at Valerie. “He’s not where he’s listed as being,” Jiang said.
“So I gathered,” Valerie said. “But you must have recorded all his movements?”
“We did, but they lead here.”
“What about the cameras here?”
“He’s not on them.”
“How can that be?”
“Don’t know. It isn’t possible.” He glanced at the woman. “Possibly certain other services are taking precedence here.”
“Intelligence services?” Valerie asked.
The two Chinese didn’t reply.
“How can we find out?” Valerie asked. “This man is an American citizen, working for a Swiss company.” It was possible the Swiss connection would carry even more weight than the American one, given all the work the Swiss had done in China and here.
Jiang looked unhappily at his colleague. “We should be able to find out by way of the Lunar Personnel Coordination Task Force, which is the agency I head,” he said. “We keep track of everyone on the moon. So now I will instruct my people to look for him.”
“How will they look?”
“Everyone is chipped, among other things.”
“Am I chipped?” Valerie asked sharply.
They regarded her. “You’re a diplomat,” Jiang suggested. “Do you have your passport with you?”
“Yes.”
“That serves as your chip. Really I should have said that people who are arrested are chipped. Fredericks should have gotten one. We’ll look into that.” Jiang was tapping at his wristpad as he spoke, and after a while he sighed. “From what I see here, it looks like his chip might have been deactivated, or taken out of him and destroyed.”
“Diplomatic incident,” Valerie said stiffly, clenching her jaw and staring at him.
“Possibly so,” Jiang admitted.
He looked annoyed. This was happening above his level, his look said, even though he was supposed to be in charge of Chinese security at the south pole. Which meant there had been an incursion on his turf. For sure he would not like that, no one would. But in the face of such outside interventions, what could a local official do?
Valerie returned with Jiang to his office, and on the way she saw, as one always did when retracing a new route, that the way to Ganswinch was simpler and shorter than it had seemed on her trip out. All the halls and subway cars were crowded this time.
On return to the Shackleton Crater complex she said goodbye to Jiang, who was clearly distracted, even angry. He wanted her gone so that he could pursue lines of inquiry at full speed. She understood that and got herself back to the American consulate, where she reported to John Semple.
He frowned as he heard her news. “They’re fighting among themselves again.”
“Wolidou,” Valerie confirmed. “Infighting. But to involve an American?”
“One group may be trying to embarrass another one, get it in trouble with Beijing.”
“So how do we find our guy? And is there some way we can turn this situation to our advantage?”
“I was wondering about that myself. I think both State and the Pentagon have been hoping to find a good moment to plant a flag down here at the south pole. Something bigger than our office, I mean. The Chinese won’t like it, but I don’t think they would try to stop it right now, because they’re being backfooted by this guy going missing on their watch. Plus the Outer Space Treaty forbids territorial claims anyway.”
He started tapping on his wristpad.
Valerie said, “What about that quantum comms device Fredericks brought with him?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what about finding him?”
“We can’t do that ourselves. We’ll have to demand that they do it.”
One of John’s assistants came into the cubicle and said, “John, there’s a Chinese national here to see you, a DV of some sort, says he knows you. His name is Ta Shu?”
“Ta Shu?” John said, startled. “He’s here?”
“He is.”
“Show him in!”
John smiled at Valerie as the assistant went to do this. “This could be helpful. Ta Shu is a cloud star, very famous in China. I met him in Antarctica a long time ago.”
The assistant reappeared with an elderly Chinese gentleman in tow. After he and John embraced, John said, “What brings you here? Are you doing a piece for your travel show?”
Ta Shu nodded. He was short and stocky, tentative in the lunar g. He had a nice smile, which he bestowed on John and then Valerie. “Yes, I’m broadcasting my travels again. Also I’m consulting as a geomancer for local builders in the libration zone.”
“Good idea!” John said mockingly. “Well, I’m glad to see you again. I remember how much I enjoyed your shows from Antarctica.”
“Thank you. A wonderful adventure. It’s almost more unearthly there than here, I think. Here you are always in rooms, it’s like being in a mall, except lighter on your feet. Down there you’re on an ice planet, like Europa or something.”
“I know what you mean. So what can we do for you here?”
“I’ve been wondering what happened to a new friend of mine, a man I met when I arrived, named Fred Fredericks. He was staying in the same hotel as me, and we breakfasted together, and were going to meet for drinks at the end of our first day, but he didn’t show up, and the hotel people said he was gone.”
John and Valerie looked at each other.
“Well, that’s right,” John said to Ta Shu. “We’re worried about him too. He got caught up in something bad, and now he’s missing.”
He explained the situation. When he was done, and Valerie had described what her day had been like in pursuit of Fredericks, Ta Shu looked seriously concerned.
“Not good,” he said. “Things can get complicated when something like this happens.”
John’s expression translated to No shit, and Ta Shu appeared to know him well enough to get that, Valerie noted. John said, “Do you think you can help us to find him?”
“I can try.”
AI 2
ganrao shebei
Interference with the Device
The analyst in the Hefei office of the Artificial Intelligence Strategic Advisory Committee got another alert from the AI that he now considered to be the most interesting of the ones he was actively programming, even though it was still frustratingly simpleminded and obtuse. But they all were. Quantum computers were magnitudes faster than classic computers in several classes of operation, but they were still limited by their tendency to decohere, also by the inadequacies of their programming; which was to say the inadequacies of their programmers. So it was like being confronted with one’s own stupidity.
“Alert,” the AI said.
The analyst had recently given it a voice modeled on that of Zhou Xuan, the classic actress featured in the 1937 movie Street Angel. Now he checked his own security protocols, then said, “Tell me.”