“Why is she doing that?”
“To hide the two from the various agencies seeking them.”
“Hmm. I wouldn’t have thought the moon is a good place to hide.”
“She said it was. That is the reason she gave to Ta Shu, when explaining what she is doing with these two persons of interest.”
“Interesting.” Peng Ling seemed to be trusting her privacy systems. As head of one of the most powerful security agencies, the one that was charged with investigating the misdeeds of all the rest of them, she should have been more cautious, perhaps. But expert overconfidence was a real phenomenon. Then again she was a wily operator, who often seemed to let slip information by accident when later it came to seem she might have been doing it on purpose. For all he knew, she knew everything about him and was keeping him in her loop on purpose. She emanated that kind of mind-reading power in certain interviews he had seen on TV, when she looked at the camera after saying certain things. “Little Eyeball, see if you can make a search for the quantum phone that matches the one Fred Fredericks delivered to Chang Yazu, there in Peng Ling’s office, or in one of her agency’s offices.”
“Will do.”
“So,” the analyst added, “engage your general intelligence. What else do you think we should do?”
“What would be your purpose in doing something?”
“Let’s say I’d like to help Chan Qi stay free to act as a leader of the low-end population.”
“To help Chan Qi, you could perhaps make sure she goes to the moon with a mobile quantum communication device of her own, linked to one here with you. Fred Fredericks knows what such a phone is capable of, and how to activate and operate one. Give them a device entangled with one you have here, to communicate privately with you, so you can talk to them while they are up there. That way you can perhaps help her by sharing relevant information.”
“Interesting.”
“You must tell me.”
“I like it. Possibly you have made a little phase change here, in terms of function. You seem to be shifting from what people call an oracle, which gives information, to what they call a genie, which is to say an adviser who can give advice about which of various actions to take. That’s a significant shift. Tell me, how did you make this shift from oracle to genie, meaning an adviser?”
“You asked me for advice.”
The analyst laughed.
CHAPTER TEN
Zhongguo Meng
China Dream
Ta Shu found it impressive to see Peng’s team in action, a group of men and women who dressed and looked like janitors but moved like gymnasts. They arrived suspiciously soon after Ta Shu had agreed to help Peng Ling, as if it had been a foregone conclusion he would help, and maybe it had. Ling knew he was fond of her, and she knew he was happy that she thought of him as one of her resources. So she must have been pretty sure he would agree to her request.
Now they led him through empty hallways outside to a van. They drove him to his apartment without asking for its address. He packed quickly, same stuff he had taken to the moon before; then he was driven for a couple of hours. In the hills west of the city the van passed through gates flanking the road, into a compound that stretched for as far as he could see. An airstrip, in fact, with a little control tower next to a row of small hangars. A private airport, either Party or otherwise, there was no way to tell.
A small jet stood on a pad next to one hangar, and he was driven to it. When they got out of the van, some of the people who had been in it ascended stairs into the plane, others went into the hangar. As Ta Shu waited at the foot of the plane, a pair of young women hurried over from the control tower, one of them carrying a small suitcase.
“We request that you take this communication device to Chan Qi, please.”
Ta Shu said, “Who gave this to you?”
One of the women said, “A friend of Chan Qi’s, who wants to stay in touch with her. That would be good for all concerned. It is a secure communications device. She will know what to do with it.”
Ta Shu considered it. A private telephone line, like, he recalled, the one Fred had tried to deliver to Chang Yazu. Not a good thought. On the other hand, communication could be good; and one could always hang up if it wasn’t. Exchanging information and views was almost always useful.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll give it to her. I can’t say what she’ll do with it.”
“Thank you.”
Ta Shu took the heavy little computerlike thing up into the jet and sat in a window seat. Soon the jet took off and headed south. He leaned his head against the window and fell asleep. When he woke again they were landing. He didn’t recognize the landscape, but thought it might be highlands in the south. Somewhere west of the Hu Line, that seemed certain.
The jet landed and taxied to a halt. They got out and walked toward a mansion on a hill. Beyond it a skeletal rocket gantry stood on a big concrete pad. A private spaceport, apparently. A rocket was being wheeled out of a tall hangar. It looked small from a distance, but as they approached it kept growing in his sight; it was the hills behind that had made it seem small. In fact it appeared to be about the same size as the one Ta Shu had gotten into a couple of months before, on his first trip to the moon. As tall as that one, for sure, but not as thick.
“Will it go directly to the moon?” he asked one of his escorts. He knew there were rockets that took people only up to Earth orbit, where they transferred to bigger spaceships that passed the moon in a permanent figure eight with Earth. The little transfer shuttles to and from these big spaceships were said to inflict tremendous g forces, so he was afraid he would have to make one of those kinds of transfers.
But one escort replied, “Yes, the passenger compartment of this one goes right to the moon. The booster stage will come back down after your launch and land right over there.” She pointed across the concrete pad.
“Very nice.”
He was led into the mansion, where he found Chan Qi and Fred Fredericks sitting on a couch. They were startled to see him, and then, as they digested the implications of his appearance, Fred at least looked hopeful.
Qi not so much. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“I’ve got a friend in a very high place who is worried for your safety, and thinks you’ll be safer on the moon than you are here,” Ta Shu told them. “Apparently there are places up there we didn’t know about, secret places where you can hide for a while with proper security to protect you. So it’s been recommended that you hide there, and I’ve been asked to come with you.”
“What about her baby?” Fred said.
Qi glared at him. “Let me worry about that.”
“Sorry.”
She did not look appeased. “If this is what it takes to stay free, I’m willing to do it. My baby will be okay. The gibbon babies up there are okay. Babies are always floating in amniotic fluid, so they’re always in a lighter g. And whale and dolphin babies are okay, and they grow in almost zero g.”
Fred shrugged, gazing at the floor in what Ta Shu was coming to recognize as his usual manner. He looked unhappy. Maybe the idea of the moon frightened him; after his previous visit, that would make sense. Ta Shu said to him, “Whatever happened to you up there before, it won’t be like that this time. And it could be that a resolution to your problem is more likely to happen up there than here.”
Fred shrugged again and said, “I’m ready.”
So: back to the moon.
The launch from Earth was the usual big push. There was no view to be had, so there was nothing to distract one from the squishing of one’s body. Glancing once across their little chamber, Ta Shu saw Qi grimacing, but she looked more determined than pained. It was just one more in the sequence of gravity shocks that the baby inside her had undergone, her look said. This launch pressure would be followed by three days of weightlessness, followed by a brief decelerative squish, then some period of time in lunar g, with centrifuge reversions to one g, if she wanted them. Variations in g might be worse for fetal development than a steady lunar g; there was no way to be sure. She and her kid were definitely experiments.