“Sure. Who are they?”
“Frederick Fredericks and Chan Qi.”
Their guide tapped on his wrist for a while. “No, no one here by those names.”
“Could they be here under fake names, or off the record?”
“No. We start with full disclosure here. Everyone enters their full real legal identity, including their national ID numbers. Then we forget about that.”
“So, can you tell us anything about those two?” Valerie persisted. “We’ve heard they’re back on the moon now, after some time on Earth.”
“If they’re on the moon now, we might be able to see something,” Anna said after none of the others replied. She tapped around for a while. “Oh, those two! Yes, they are back all right. They came up in Fang Fei’s system. An odd couple.”
“How do you mean?” Valerie asked.
“He’s the one who was involved in the killing of Chang Yazu, right? And Chang was working with Peng Ling to keep China moon on her side during the upcoming Party congress. Chang used to work for Minister Huyou, in Shaanxi, and there were investigations of corruption focused on their time there. It’s possible Chang had something on Huyou that he was going to pass along to Peng, to use in the fight for the succession to President Shanzhai. Another person in the running for that is Chan Guoliang, whose daughter has been seen with this man who was involved in Chang Yazu’s murder. So that makes them an odd couple, if you ask me.”
“Could Chan Qi be working against her dad?” John Semple asked.
Anna shrugged. “Don’t know. Jianguo is still working on getting to the bottom of it. He’s really mad. I mean, a friend of his was killed right in his prefecture. So he won’t be forgetting.”
“Can you find out where Fred and Chan Qi are now?” Valerie asked.
Anna looked dubious. “We can always ask Fang Fei. We’ve opened a new direct private line with him, it’s very cool.”
“How so?”
“It’s a neutrino telegraph.”
“What does that mean?” John asked.
“We send a beam of neutrinos right through the moon to where Fang Fei has a receptor set up. It’s very hard to catch neutrinos with anything smaller than a few city blocks’ worth of stuff, but we’ve gotten a system running where you can catch enough to send simple messages. That’s why we call it a telegraph. The bit rate is laughable, but it works for texting.”
“The neutrinos go right through the moon?” John asked.
“They go right through everything. A trillion just went through us right now.” Anna snapped her fingers. “Fang Fei likes the idea because his base is on the far side, and with this device he can shoot messages right through the moon to his people in China, without having to use satellites. It’s another one of his toys, at least now, but we’re pitching in because we thought there might be some potential there. Meanwhile it gives us a way of talking to him privately. Anyway, I’ll send him a query about those two, and we’ll see what he says.”
A bunch of the other freebies dropped down onto them and informed them it was time for the day’s performance.
“Okay,” their host said to John, “are you ready to be a dancer in our opera?”
“No way,” John said. “I can’t dance here! I can barely dance even on Earth.”
They just laughed at him. You can join anyway, they said. They needed extras. It was a case of the more the merrier, and this performance took everyone in the crater.
“Which opera?” Valerie inquired.
“Satyagraha.”
“Isn’t that one kind of hard?” she asked. She had seen it performed once in New York, a modernist thing full of dancers with banners, weaving around a stage to a score like industrial music. Libretto in Sanskrit, she seemed to recall.
No, they told her, it was easy. The crowd scenes were supposed to be chaotic, indeed in their version they aspired to a state of complete Brownian motion. The gravity made that easy, and often it created all kinds of accidental grace.
John was shaking his head. Valerie said, “I love to dance,” which wasn’t quite true, but she was still working on wiping that amused look off John’s face. Time to finish that off for good.
They rode up in a basket at the end of a counterweighted crane lift, and were taken to a cluster of midair platforms. There they joined one of the groups congregating on a big central platform, and after introductions, their hosts jumped up to a slightly higher platform, then crossed it and jumped again. Valerie and John had to follow as best they could, both of them often misjudging how much of a leap was needed to get to the same platform as their hosts. John flew far toward the dome, while Valerie barely made it to the first available platform, which she struck with a shock more impactful than she had expected; it wasn’t like falling into the mesh. But this was just one lesson of many to come concerning unforeseen differences between weight, mass, and inertia, and she made adjustments as she could, while struggling to keep her hosts in sight and identified as hers, lost as they were among all the other people flying through the space of the aerial city.
By the time she caught up to them the great opera was in full swing, and an orchestra and chorus of several hundred people on a big platform in about the center of the space was filling the air with the complex, pulsating music. Valerie had learned a bit about this opera after seeing it in New York, at first because she was curious, and then because of its subject, which was the concept of “peaceful force” suggested by the word satyagraha, a word Gandhi had made up during his campaign for Indian independence. This word could be said to express a vision of diplomacy and intelligence work at its best, or so it seemed to Valerie, and although this opera’s libretto was in Sanskrit and thus incomprehensible to almost every person who had ever sung or heard it—and although the score by Glass was extraordinarily dense and repetitive, sending percussive waves of sound echoing through the city such that it would have been dizzying even without the low-g flights—still, once she and her group had all grasped handholds like subway straps at the ends of long lines extending from a central spinner, something like a scary ride in a carnival, and it began to spin and their bodies lifted out and away from each other, either just holding on like Valerie, or dancing in space like most of her group—once that was all accomplished, she began to enjoy herself. She began to join both the spirit and the body of the dance.
Knowing the music helped a lot. When the battles of the middle act began, she kicked and flailed as rhythmically as she could, and when her entire group let go of their ropes all at once and were cast like dandelion seeds in all directions, never to meet again during the course of this opera at least, she was quick to follow, and with an almost gymnastic twist she let go, and found herself cast high over other spinning dancers. Apparently many people had let go of similar spinning mechanisms at around the same time, and the weave of flying dancers through the air was beautiful to see, although it also had to be said that if two dancers happened to be on a collision course, nothing they could do would keep them from running into each other. Or so it seemed, until Valerie saw she was headed right at a young woman dressed in scarlet, and the young woman saw her too; this allowed them to contort themselves as they flew by each other such that they just missed colliding, a nifty trick that caused them both to laugh and wave at each other as they diverged. Then the moon’s g exerted its pull, and Valerie curved down and down until she hit a bunch of netting and managed not to injure herself as she bounced to a halt. Another group of singers hanging there welcomed her and invited her by gesture to join them in their singing. This Valerie declined, at least at first; but then she recognized where the opera had gotten to, and could join in under her breath, making up the words as she went along. She knew the tune, such as it was, and at this point her group’s part was a staccato buh-buh-buh-buh buh-buh-buh-buh buh-buh-buh-buh buh-buh-buh-buh, repeated over and over and over, great fun to enunciate with the rest of them, and after a while she was actually shouting it as loud as she could shout.