These lava tunnels provide spaces for human habitation on a much larger scale than anything we could easily excavate ourselves. I am visiting one such tunnel, which I will tell you more about in a later show, but what I can say now is, it’s very big! Wide, tall, and long. And the interior surface is hard and almost completely airtight. One only has to find the occasional cracks in the wall and coat these with a fixative of graphenated composites that look somewhat like sheets of diamond, and you have a space the size of a big long town, like a riverside town, which can be aerated and heated. Over it lies enough surface rock to protect living things from cosmic radiation and solar flares, and once fossil cometary water is brought in from the polar craters, you have the makings of a long and winding city-state, more like a complete little world than you can readily imagine.
So much to be proud of in our efforts on the moon! And yet nevertheless, people in China ask me all the time, why the moon? We still have so many problems here in China, and everywhere on Earth. How does going to the moon help with those?
Obviously I am not the only lunatic who gets asked this question. The Party came up with its Five Good Reasons, and others have since added more reasons, too instrumental or even cynical or rude to be given official voice. Now that I’ve been around the moon a little bit more, I have made my own list, which I call the Seven Good Reasons, or maybe the Seven Good Excuses. My rough definition of them is as follows:
In fact, in that sense, the moon project reminds me of the Yongle Emperor’s construction of the imperial capital in Beijing, including the Forbidden City and most of its supporting city. Recall please that the imperial capital at that time was Nanjing. And for a long time the greatest city in China had been Hangzhou. Both these cities had good access to the coast, whereas Beijing was too far from the sea, and too close to the Mongols. It was too cold, too windy, too smoggy—too much of all of those unhappy attributes of the capital we have all come to know too well. In feng shui terms, a complete disaster. Might as well have built it in the Gobi, or on top of Chomolungma.
But the Yongle emperor had a very big surplus to deal with. This surplus had been accumulating over so many centuries that it is impossible now to calculate how big it was. It began much earlier than you might think, because a global economy has existed for far longer than many people realize. Most of the Roman silver coins ever minted ended up in China, for instance, and it just kept on like that, century after century. Our trade surplus with the rest of the world ran uninterrupted for more than a thousand years, and even by the Yongle’s time it was clogging the coffers. And capital accumulation without capitalism doesn’t have many opportunities for reinvestment; but silver unspent is just a lump of slag in your basement. Money needs to be spent to become wealth.
As often happens in these situations, infrastructure came to the rescue. A great wall traversing thousands of kilometers? Good idea. A grand canal traversing hundreds of kilometers? Perfect! An entire new capital city? Great idea, no matter the bad location. In fact, if you need to spend lots of capital, the worse the location of your new city the better! So in that sense Beijing was just right. And the fact that the Forbidden City got burned to the ground by a lightning strike, just as its construction was being completed: wonderful! Necessity to do it all again! More money spent; and by the time the Yongle emperor was done, so much capital had been disbursed that that particular dynastic cycle was brought to an abrupt end. The bankruptcy and crash of the Ming dynasty led to the rise of the Qing dynasty, which being from Manchuria was used to living even farther to the north than Beijing. For the Manchu, Beijing was down to the south, more or less in the center of things. A very nice location.
Beijing, the Grand Canal, the Great Wall—and now the moon. You see the pattern. A pattern which sometimes includes dynastic succession.
Note for later: probably best to drop that last line, considering all that is going on. Don’t want to upset the censors.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
xiaokang
Ideal Equal Society
During her tenure in the Secret Service’s intelligence division, a superblack division unknown to the other agencies and to Congress, Valerie Tong had often been sent into the field as part of the State Department’s foreign service, as now on the moon. It was a bit obvious, the seemingly minor foreign service functionary who was really the spook on station, and the State Department didn’t like hosting her, but the president got to call the shots in the executive branch, and this one liked to have one of his own agents on the scene of anything he was interested in. So she went where he wanted her to go.
On the moon she was finding that different protocols obtained. The American consulate at the Chinese south pole was so small that everyone in it had to do double or triple duty, which meant almost everyone there was gathering intelligence for someone or other, while also being too busy to pay much attention to the details of other people’s work.
She had an encrypted link home, and now it gave her a new directive: Fred Fredericks, the American who had disappeared while in Chinese custody a couple of months before, causing an intense diplomatic dispute that by now was folded into the larger Chinese-American scrum, was thought to have been moved to China, and now it was reported that he had gone back to the moon, traveling with the daughter of the Chinese finance minister. It would be extremely useful if these two could be located. Highest priority.
Not coincidentally, she suspected, John Semple asked her to accompany him on a visit to the main American base, at the moon’s north pole. She was given an hour to get ready.
“What’s going on?” Valerie asked John Semple during their flight north.
“What do you mean?” John asked with that little smile.