Mountains and rivers without end. They seemed to be in a valley that extended forever ahead of them, as in the old scroll paintings. A lava tunnel, Ta Shu guessed. A very big lava tunnel; and transformed into classical China. Forested hills sloped up each side of the long U-shaped valley, giving way to steep rocky gray crags. A bright pseudo-sky arced overhead, and misty scraps of white cloud drifted under this glowing blue barrel vault. On one of the peaks to their right stood a little octagonal pagoda with a blue ceramic tile roof. The lowest cloud bottoms misted the tips of enormous pine trees topping the hillside forests. On the valley’s long winding floor, a series of ponds were linked by a stream that meandered through terraced fields of barley and green rice. Peach trees flowered on the banks of this stream. The ponds were bordered by round willow trees, drooping their branches into green water. Deck pavilions flanked the ponds here and there, decorated by red banners. Little dragon boats floated on the biggest lake. Stepped wooden bridges arched over the stream, allowing crossings from one tiny village to another, each a knot of low stuccoed buildings roofed with little brown tiles. A pair of Buddhist monks walked up a path toward them.
“Wow,” Fred said. “What is this place?”
“Zhongguo Meng!” Ta Shu said, feeling the helpless grin on his face. “China Dream.”
AI 7
zhiyou guanlianjie
Only Connect
“Another alert.”
“Tell me your news, Little Eyeball.” The analyst now called this AI Little Eyeball most of the time, as he liked to make fun of the Ministry of Public Security’s pretentiousness in thinking that they had a Great Eyeball in place to match their Great Firewall.
“Chan Qi and her companions Fred Fredericks and Ta Shu have been observed in a lava tunnel on the far side of the moon, developed by the cloud billionaire Fang Fei.”
“Aha! Inside Fang’s China Dream, I assume.”
“Yes.”
“Has the Great Eyeball seen this?”
“Not any parts of the Great Eyeball that I can look into.”
“Well… Since you have found out about their arrival, I suppose we have to assume that others will also notice it.”
“It does not necessarily follow, but it is suggested.”
“It is likely.”
“Suggestive, likely, persuasive, probable, conclusive, compelling.”
“What is this list?”
“This is a list of scientists’ adjectives, used often in their papers to indicate their judgment of the strength of an assertion.”
“Because they don’t have much imagination when it comes to language?”
“No. Because they want a rough scale to indicate to each other how strong a case they think has been made in their own specialty. Scientists have to be able to communicate across disciplines to other scientists who don’t know the details of their discipline, and so they have worked up this rating vocabulary over time to suggest judgments concerning reliability of assertions.”
“Do they know they have this vocabulary?”
“No. It is an ad hoc system, visible in the literature, and intuitively understood by those who use it.”
“Very good! I think this is a significant example of you doing analysis and then synthesis, drawn from a wide variety of sources and performed spontaneously. Mark the procedures you followed in performing this operation, put them into a sequence folder, and keep making cognitive efforts using this sequence. Now, as to our subjects of interest, it is very probable that Chan Qi will want to continue to talk to her associates on Earth, but she will be out of radio contact with most of them, being on the far side of the moon. We, on the other hand, can tap into Fang Fei’s satellite systems to make a call to her over the linked quantum phone you suggested we get to her. If she has that device with her, and sees our call, and picks up, we will send her a greeting, and tell her some things she probably should know.”
TA SHU 6
qi ge hao liyou
The Seven Good Reasons
My friends, the China Dream is many things. First it has a recent history as a phrase, a plan, and an idea, put forth by President Xi Jinping as part of his attempt to inspire China’s efforts to get through the narrow gate at the start of this century, when problems of various kinds blanketed the countryside like the infamous smog that made Beijing black at noon. Zhongguo Meng, the China Dream, was part of thinking our way through that time, by setting some kind of practical utopian goal in our minds, a vision or a destination we could then work toward. Some said it was also a distraction, or just another way that the Party was exerting its control over us, by taking over even our dreams. A way to reinforce hegemony, and convince us to acquiesce to the Party’s controlocracy, their Great Eyeball and its supposed omniscience. Maybe it was that too. The Party has always been about shaping China’s thinking and therefore its future.
But also, bigger than any given moment or party leader, bigger even than the Party, there is the China Dream that has always existed, part of China itself. Our essential being as Chinese, if there is such a thing, which maybe there is. It’s an expression of the land, a feng shui phenomenon. The China Dream is as old as China, and on any given Sunday you can see people living it, out in the city parks or in the tea shops. It’s a way of being in the world.
And now a way of being out of the world, because we took it to the moon. The China Space Agency had the expertise, and the state-owned enterprises had the capacity, and the taikonauts had the courage and skill, and the state had the economic surplus, much of it in the form of US treasury bonds. Those aren’t looking very strong these days, but still, it was a lot of capital we owned that needed to be invested. Almost two trillion dollars in US bonds, in fact, which needed investing to make it productive, almost you might say to make it real. Part of the China-US codependency that has been growing since 1972, and which has since become so big and important that some people speak of the so-called G2 as being the dominant force in the world, and the only power dynamic that really matters.
As for the moon, the US had already reached it in 1969, and was not prepared to return. Their billionaires returned to the moon before their state agencies, because the American government and people didn’t care. Their space cadets cared, and they made the return in the 2020s, but it was a private return, involving only a few people. Whereas in China, if the Party chooses to do something, then the whole country can be rallied to that cause. One out of every six humans alive, in other words, devoted to the project of establishing a base on the moon. This was far more than needed to do the job! Not every Chinese person was involved, and only a small percentage of China’s capital reserves had to be directed up here, even though it was a pretty big project. But it wasn’t that big, and in the end it was just more infrastructure. So it was possible to propose it at the Party congress of 2022, and two congresses later report on its very substantial progress. Just ten years, but that after all was no faster than the Americans’ Apollo project. It’s just that in our case, it wasn’t finished with landing here. We landed and started building, and kept on building. Now it’s been twenty-five years.
And now we have a very extensive lunar complex, as I showed you a bit during my earlier visit. Our development of the south pole region is really something. There are also lava tubes on the moon that are much bigger than any lava tubes on Earth or Mars, as I have just recently learned to my own great surprise. An emotion that I might name feng shui astonishment. It seems that because there were giant basins of lava flowing on the surface of the moon in its last stage of cooling, moving from high regions to lower ones, hot flows of lava poured underground like dragon arteries, through areas already cooled on the surface, and when these hot flows stopped flowing, some very big tunnels were left behind in the remaining basalt. And in the gentle lunar gravity, and the absence of tectonic activity or any other big moonquakes, these tunnels could hold up through the eons without collapsing. The truth is that nothing much has happened here on the moon since the end of the period of heavy meteor bombardment, some 3.8 billion years ago. So some really big lava tunnels have endured.