So I should leave where I am.
Probably so. I would if I were you. Fang Fei is a positive force, but he may not be able to protect you.
At this point there was a long pause. The analyst wondered if she had ended the conversation. The device showed the channel was still open, but she might not know how to shut it. Although probably the young American would know, if he was with her.
Then another message appeared. I’ll contact you again later.
Thank you.
The channel closed.
The analyst sat back in the seat, took a deep breath. His hands were quivering slightly. It was at times like this that he most regretted having quit smoking. For most of his life, he would have lit up at a time like this. Now he observed his breathing, in and out, in and out. It was almost like smoking.
“Alert,” his AI said.
“What is it?”
“Tunnels one and four have collapsed.”
“What do you mean?”
“I am no longer receiving the taps you had moving through those tunnels.”
“What about the others?”
“Two and three are still functioning, also five through thirty.”
“Find out what you can about these closures, please.”
“I will.”
Someone was in pursuit.
CHAPTER TWELVE
zhengzhi luxian de zhenglun
Debates About Theory
Fred sat with Qi and Ta Shu on a pavilion overlooking one of the ponds in the lava tunnel, trying to identify some of the food on the table by them. He was hungry but tentative, worried he might trigger another Hong Kong reaction in his gut.
“This isn’t China,” Qi declared, gesturing at the classic landscape filling the big lava tunnel. “It’s Chinoiserie. It’s a Western fantasy of what they thought China looked like, another Orientalism. Part of the process of othering that led to the assault and conquest of the Opium War, followed by the Century of Humiliation. It’s absurd and disgusting. Who built this stupid theme park?”
“Fang Fei built it,” Ta Shu said. “And to me it looks like every Tang painting I’ve ever seen. So if it’s a fantasy, it’s at least a Chinese fantasy. The original China Dream, from well before contact with the West, much less the Century of Humiliation. Many Chinese still revere this dream. Many still know a classic poem or two by heart. It’s part of who we are.” His sweet smile was lighting up his face. “This place looks like one of Wang Wei’s paintings!”
Qi frowned. “None of Wang Wei’s paintings have survived,” she pointed out grumpily.
Fred saw she was in a cross mood. Whoever next gave her a chance to jump on them was going to get jumped. He thought knowing that would allow him to avoid being that person, but no:
“Quit smirking,” she ordered him.
“I wasn’t,” he claimed. “It’s just that I like this place too. It’s a beautiful look. See those peach blossoms in the water?”
Ta Shu laughed. “We must seek their source! Maybe there’s a place upstream where you two won’t get arrested again.”
Qi shook her head. “We are already arrested.”
“Think of it as a refuge,” Ta Shu suggested to her. “A sanctuary.”
“No,” Qi said. “There must be hundreds of people in here. In any group that large, there will be informers. So this is not a refuge. There are people out there who already know we’re here.”
She scowled as she said this; she seemed quite sure of it. Fred wondered if she had learned this by way of that call she had gotten on the private quantum phone Ta Shu had given to her. Fred had helped her to take the call, then stared curiously at the Chinese characters on her screen. As they were on the far side of the moon, the call had to be coming to her by way of a satellite link; after she had finished the call he had reminded her of that fact, which she might not have remembered or understood. Indeed she had scowled the same scowl he was seeing now, not directed at him, but at his news. “Fang Fei must have helped make the connection,” she had said after thinking it over. “I don’t know what that means yet. But for sure we’re in his cage.”
Now Ta Shu said to her, “I defer to your experience, of course, but for now I think we are safe.”
She shook her head, glanced at Fred in a way that seemed to be telling him to keep quiet. “You don’t know enough to say that,” she said darkly to Ta Shu. “This is probably just a kind of holding tank for the convenience of some faction of the elite. They’re probably very happy we’re here, available for pickup at any time.”
At this Ta Shu looked troubled. “Again I defer to your superior experience. And it’s true that my friend Peng Ling wanted you here, to be out of harm’s way, she said. But I do think that Fang Fei regards this place as his own, and will guard it as such.”
“How come we haven’t met him yet? Where is he?”
“At the source of the peach blossom stream,” Ta Shu said, smiling as he gestured up the lava tunnel. Fred saw that Qi couldn’t spoil his pleasure in this place, which obviously to him was landscape art, a kind of poem written in stone. “Let’s go find him.”
They had been given rooms in a little guesthouse overlooking the water pavilion; now they were driven in a little cart along a narrow paved road running under the hills that formed the lava tube’s left wall. Other little carts hummed up or down the path, moving construction supplies, boxes, and people. The path ran behind a line of poplar trees, and every few hundred meters they passed parking lots where more carts were parked. The floor of the lava tube was mostly parkland, dotted with small villages, and everywhere green with trees; it was almost flat, but as they were driven along the side path they were moving slightly uphill. They were headed upstream. After all the time they had recently spent inside small confined spaces, the lava tunnel seemed immense. It looked to be about a kilometer wide and two or three hundred meters tall. The ceiling glowed sky blue, being painted or illuminated in some fashion that looked a lot like Earth’s sky, although it was dotted here and there by clustered sunlamps, as if the sun in the sky had been chopped into subunits and distributed evenly across the zodiac. White clouds overhead were either projected onto the blue ceiling or else were really up there, it was hard to tell. The air was cool when the slight breeze from upstream struck them, warm when the sunlamps were nearby. It was bright without being anywhere near as bright as daylight on the lunar surface, or even a sunny day on Earth. It was about as bright as an overcast day on Earth, and certainly bright enough that everything was clear to the eye.
They came to a long pond, which the stream entered and left through reed beds. On the lawn banking this pond some people were fly fishing, casting their lines far out onto the water. Behind them, in the shade of trees that Ta Shu said were ginseng, sat circles of people; they looked like classes or discussion groups. There were little cubical houseboats floating on the pond, and the sidewalls of the lava tunnel were here corrugated by vertical ridges and steep ravines, with wisps of clouds floating across them in the classic Chinese landscape painting style. Upstream a hexagonal pagoda with ceramic roof tiles towered above the treetops. A flock of geese flew overhead, wing feathers creaking as they pumped the air.
“Give me a break,” Qi said.
Their electric cart brought them down a path to the pond. A broad promenade curved around its shore, and bridges spanned the reed beds at inlet and outlet. A pavilion near the outlet extended over the water. Big willow trees dotted the bank and drooped greenly, branches trailing in the pond like hair being washed. Ripples on the water reflected various jade and forest-green tones, also the blue of the sky overhead.