“You should never stop writing poems, my friend. We all read you when we were young.”
“That was long ago. When people still read poetry.”
“I think they still do. It’s good on wristpads. And here we are—this is a very poetical situation! We should do like Li Po and Du Fu, have a bottle of wine and trade poems about the view.”
“I like the idea of the wine.”
Zhou laughed, went to a cabinet to pour them drinks. “Wine is useless without poetry,” he said. “Just a little ethanol poisoning.”
“Maybe so.” They clinked glasses, sipped. “Here’s to the moon goddess Chang’e and her immortality drug.”
“And her devotion to her husband Yi,” Zhou added.
“Is that what it was? I thought she stole the potion from him.”
“No. She drank it only to keep the thief Fengmeng from stealing it. After that she flew up to the moon to hide what she had done.”
“It sounds suspicious to me,” Ta Shu said. He tried to remember the myth. Chang’e had not only stolen the immortality drug from her husband, she had also taken his rabbit—that rabbit which was now what one saw when looking up from Earth at the full moon—Yi’s rabbit, stirring a bowl with the potion for immortality in it. Something like that.
Now the Earth was a slim blue-and-white crescent sitting on the white hill. A patch of land could be seen under its clouds, which were delicately textured. The land was both brown and green. It was surprising how much detail could be discerned at this distance. “Wait,” Ta Shu said. “Is that the bottom of South America there, but pointing up?”
“We’re in the southern hemisphere here, remember? So we’re upside down, I guess you’d say.”
“Ah, of course. As a geomancer I should have known.”
“But you are not a lunatic, my friend. Not yet.”
Ta Shu stared at the blue world, entranced. He traced its outline on the window. Such a complicated place. Even China by itself, no one could understand. Then add the rest of the world.…
The two old friends drank their wine, watched the world creep into view. Zhou poured them another glass. They sat by the window and talked over old times. After a while Zhou suggested again that they play at Li Po and Du Fu. Ta Shu had drunk enough wine to agree, warning his old friend that he would not deviate from the laconic style he had developed in Antarctica, which had served him well, at least until it contracted his poetry down to nothing at all.
Ta Shu pondered, wrote. When Zhou Bao asked him to recite, he said,
Zhou tilted his big head sideways until it seemed it might roll right off his shoulder. “Maybe you should consider the idea that brevity was your middle style. In your youth you were as long-winded as Han Yü. Then in middle age, this brevity. So now it might be getting time to think about your late style, eh?”
Ta Shu nodded, pondering this. Though he had not thought of it in those terms, it struck him that his friend Bao might be onto something. Certainly some kind of urge to poetry had been stirring in him lately.
Zhou read his attempt:
For home he had used the word laojia, ancestral home, the place you came from. Your heart’s home. “Very good!” Ta Shu said. “You are the poet now.”
Later, as Ta Shu was preparing for bed, but before his room block’s centrifuge had started to spin, Zhou knocked on his door and leaned in.
“A new wrinkle,” he said, lifting a hand to indicate his wristpad. “Apparently the Americans have just landed right in the midst of our south pole complex. They say they are going to build a transmission relay tower on the Peak of Eighty-One Percent Eternal Light.”
“Will that interfere with anything we’re doing there?”
“No, it’s just outside our zone of construction.”
“Maybe it’s okay then.”
Zhou said, “I wonder if this has anything to do with the disappearance of your American friend.”
“I don’t know, what do you think?”
“I think everything up here knits together.”
“Will you need to go down to the south pole to help sort things out?”
Zhou Bao looked at him. “We both will, my friend. They want you there too, because of your time with the Americans in Antarctica.”
Ta Shu sighed. “Can I take my walkabout before we have to leave?”
“Yes. Tomorrow’s train leaves at three. We’ll get you outside tomorrow morning to do your feng shui walkabout.”
TA SHU 3
yueliang ren
Moon Person
My friends, it seems there is more happening on the moon than I knew. And as my friend Bao said, all of it knits together. Perhaps. Actually I am coming to doubt that. But certainly things go fast here.
That’s what happens when factories build factories. Moon rocks have a lot of metals in them, and an infinity of silica. And at the Peaks of Eternal Light, there is always solar energy to power the extraction and rendering of all these materials. Computers, 3-D printers, and robotic assemblers did much of the work involved, and as always, humans were the lubricant that kept the machines working at their many points of systemic friction. Together we and our machines excavated and aerated underground lunar spaces, and mined materials and built machines, and imported carbon and nitrogen, and then in greenhouses we grew soil and food, and lumber for interior construction, and the more we accomplished the faster it all went, in the usual way now familiar to all.
Of course there were many things needed for this process that we had to bring with us—nonhuman lubricants, plastics, all other oil-based materials, and many other useful elements that don’t exist on the moon, including almost all the carbon and nitrogen, which together are so crucial to life. We had to ship a lot of stuff up here, which meant building up our capacity for space flight. There’s really no good way of getting stuff off the Earth except by blasting it up in rockets, but it is possible to build those rockets on the moon, and easier to launch them from here than from Earth. If you are only moving materials and not people, you can build big freighters and throw them into semi-stable figure-eight orbits between Earth and moon. Shuttles can accelerate to catch up and transfer loads to these big craft, thus minimizing the costs of transport. With no humans aboard, these rockets can be simpler and cheaper, and can be made to accelerate and decelerate harder. So robotic interplanetary shipping has been part of the speed of our settling here.
All this has made for impressive results, such as the big complex at the south pole, and this line of settlements running up the libration zone.
Now I’ve left one of these new settlements, the Petrov Crater Station, to stand outside on the surface of the moon. To do so I have donned a spacesuit, and I exited the shelter through air locks, and now I am walking on the surface of the moon. This is the first time I have ever walked by myself on the moon. It feels very strange, I can assure you!
Outside, it is daytime. I was told it is the lunar morning, about halfway between dawn and midday. Shadows are black, but not pitch-black; reflection of sunlight from other lit surfaces tints the shadows to varying degrees, giving me an extra sense of the shapes of the hills, derived from the shades of black and gray in the shadows. Where the land is in sunlight, it’s very bright. We’re at about twenty degrees latitude here, so the sun is fairly high in the sky. My faceplate is tinted and keeps the sunlight from damaging my eyes. I don’t know what it would look like if the tint wasn’t there. Although it’s adjustable, I was told, so let’s dial it down and see. Oh my. Oh. Yes. The tinting was much darker than I thought. No doubt also polarized and so on. Right now I can’t see a thing. I’m blinded. With the tint taken away, the world is simply bursting with white light. I can’t even see the shadows. It’s as if the sun were a god and has struck me with a bolt of lightning for my presumption in daring to look at it as it really is. Wow!