“What happened?” he said.
“Accident.”
“Mr. Chang? How is he?”
No one said anything.
“Please,” Fred said. “Let me speak with someone who speaks English. Someone who can help me.”
All the faces went away.
The next time he came to, there was another set of faces over him, a different set, he felt. He remembered who he was, and most of what had happened.
“Were we poisoned?” he asked them. “How is Mr. Chang?”
One of them shook her head. “Alas Mr. Chang die. Same poison as you, but he did not fare so well as you.” She shrugged. “We could not save him.”
“Oh no. Poison?”
“It seems so.”
“But how? What was it?”
The one talking to him shrugged. “You must ask policeman when he comes. You are guarded. Under inspection.”
Fred shook his head, which made him feel sick again. “I need to talk to someone,” he said.
“Someone will surely make a visit.”
Fred receded into a fog of nausea and exhaustion, dreams of drowning. When he came to again, a different group of faces surrounded him. Again they were East Asian faces.
“How are you doing?” a woman at the foot of the bed asked. She sounded like she was from California. Taller than the others, narrow attractive face, refined-looking, serious and intent. “I’m Valerie Tong, assistant at the American consulate? I’m here to help you.”
“My lawyer?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. I’m not a lawyer. I’m sure there will be some lawyers who can represent you. There always are.” She frowned at this. “Actually I’m not sure they have a court system here. It’s possible you may be remanded to Earth. If so we’ll be keeping track of your situation, and helping as we can.”
“You can’t take possession of me? Diplomatic immunity or like that?”
“Well, you’re not a diplomat. And you’re under arrest, as I understand it. They have some… some evidence, they tell me.”
“How could they! Evidence of what?”
Valerie Tong squinted. “Murder, I guess. So they say.”
“What?” The fear jolting through Fred put him well behind what he heard himself saying: “I just met that guy, I don’t know him or anything! Why would I want to kill him?”
She shrugged. “I’m sure that will be something that will help you going forward. For now, I just want you to know that we’ll be keeping track of your progress.”
“My progress?”
“I’m sorry. Your case.”
“I hope so!”
Then another wave rolled over him, and he went under.
TA SHU 1
yueliang de fenmian
The Birth of the Moon
Now, my friends, I am on the moon. A very strange thing to say. Also to experience, but aside from the weird lightness of my body here, I must admit that the idea is even stranger than the reality. At least so far. But this is just because it is such a very strange idea. I am standing on the moon. Sitting, actually. And because of that, I am now very interested to discover: what is this place? What is the moon? And to understand this, we have to go right back to the beginning.
The solar system began as a swirl of dust. Not like our dust, dust isn’t quite the right word for it, because bits of all the elements were included in this swirling mass of particles, and it was a lumpy swirl to begin with, because of gravity. Then it got lumpier as time passed and gravity caused the lumps to come together, one way or another.
The lightest elements were the most common and the most likely to clump together, and by the nature of their distribution and their intrinsic qualities, most of these elements clumped at the center of this particular dust cloud. Feng shui principle number one: gravity. In the Chinese system of primary qua as described in the Yijing, the Book of Change, gravity would be kun, in other words, the yin in yin-yang. It works on everything equally and without exception. Nothing escapes it. So in the case of this swirl of dust, most of the particles fell in toward the center, and finally they massed so hugely that the pressure of their own weight caused them to catch fire. It was a nuclear fusion fire, in which atoms crush together and release energy, and so the sun ignited. The two lightest elements, helium and hydrogen, mostly clumped inward and ended up in the sun—ninety-nine percent of the solar system’s hydrogen and helium is in the sun—but smaller whirlpools of these elements formed our four gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
The heavier elements—which were mostly created in the stupendous explosions called supernovas—bumped around the solar system closer to the sun, gathering and clumping into balls that were molten from the energy of their impacts, and from gravity’s crushing draw inward onto themselves. These clumps grew as they ran into one another, forming eventually the rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The asteroid belt would have become another one of these rocky planets, but the gravity of nearby Jupiter kept pulling all these bits of a planet away from one another, until those that were not jerked into the sun or out of the solar system ended up in the wide band they are in now.
Each of the four rocky planets was made of smaller planetesimals, which attracted one another and ran into one another and then held together. This process was cumulative, which means that near the end of the process, around four and a half billion years ago, the collisions were often between quite large planetesimals—really they were small planets at this point, making their final combinations. Each of the four rocky planets we ended up with shows signs of gigantic collisions in their final years of accumulation. Mars’s northern hemisphere is four kilometers lower than its southern hemisphere, and is now regarded as the impact basin of a giant impactor. Mercury is far denser and more metallic than it should be given the expected spread of elements, and it’s now postulated that a giant impact with another planetesimal knocked away much of its surface and mantle, which flew out into its orbit. These chunks of Mercury would have fallen back onto it and recoalesced eventually, but being so close to the sun, many pieces were driven by the photon wind of sunlight out of Mercury’s orbit, ending up eventually on Venus, or even the Earth.
Venus shows signs of a giant impact that hit with an angular momentum that stopped its rotation in its tracks, so that even now it spins very slowly, and in the opposite direction to the other planets.
Then there is Earth and its moon, a moon so immense compared to its planet’s size that it is proportionately by far the biggest satellite in the solar system. How did that happen? The theory is this: in the beginning, up to around 4.51 billion years ago, there were two planets that had coalesced in Earth’s orbit, called now Earth and Theia, or Gaia and Theia. They were almost the same size, and Theia was in the L5 position of Earth, which is a gravitational resonance point along Earth’s orbit that makes an equilateral triangle with the sun and the Earth. Lagrange positions are pretty stable, but there are other powerful gravitational bodies in the system, and so a time came when some pull from Jupiter or Venus, or both together in a cosmic coincidence, yanked Theia out of its place and sent it spinning toward Earth. Its approach appears to have resembled Ptolemy’s epicycles, little orbits spiraling along in a bigger orbit, and as the two planets came together, their mutual attraction caused them to accelerate at each other. Theia also seems to have been rapidly spinning. When they finally collided, it appears to have been an almost direct hit, with a very high angular momentum.