Ta Shu was startled to hear this. “Why do you think that? Did he tell you that?”
“No, he said we were free to leave.”
“He said we had nowhere else to go,” Fred added.
“That’s how people always put it,” Qi said bitterly. “You’re safest here, they say. I’ve been hearing that my whole life.”
“In this case he may be right,” Ta Shu said. “There’s a struggle going on right now. It’s more than the usual infighting.”
“It’s way more than that!” Qi exclaimed. “It’s a fight for China itself!”
Ta Shu regarded her as he thought it over. “Maybe. But if that’s the case, even worse for you. You are a princeling during a war of succession. That’s a dangerous thing to be.”
“I’m more than a princeling,” she told him. “I’m Sun Yat-sen. I’m Mao on the Long March.”
Startled by this, Ta Shu stared at her and then said, “Worse yet! I hope it’s not true, for your sake and for China’s. I don’t think we can take a civil war right now. There are too many other problems.”
“Those other problems are what is forcing this to happen.”
“Well, even so…” He floundered, seeming thoroughly spooked by this turn in the conversation. “Even if so, maybe this cave must be your cave of Yunnan. Wait here patiently, like Mao did in Yunnan, until a real opportunity presents itself. Or, failing that, at least until I return. If it pleases you.”
“It does not please me.”
Ta Shu shrugged. “I have to go home.”
“I know that.”
He regarded her for a while. Fred saw he was checking out of this exchange, his mind going elsewhere. Finally he said, “When I’m free to return, I’ll come and see if you are still here or not.”
He turned and strode purposefully toward the wall road, doing his best not to bounce too much. Fred hurried to follow him, which caused him to make yet another inadvertent launch, followed by a brief flight through the sky; he had to spin his arms backward and twist his legs forward to land on his feet, just a short distance behind Ta Shu. The old man heard him and turned. Again Fred was struck by the absence of his usual smile.
“I’ll stay with her,” Fred said. “Her baby is due in a few weeks, so I’m hoping she’ll stay here till then. It seems like that might work.”
“I hope so. We’ll stay in touch. Fang will pass messages along.”
There was a car waiting in a little parking lot, under a grove of what looked like sycamore trees. A driver sat at its wheel.
“Good luck,” Fred said helplessly. “I’ll be thinking of you.”
“Thank you.” He was already gone.
AI 9
xue liang
Sharp Eyes
“Alert,” said the voice of Little Eyeball.
“One moment,” said the analyst. He made sure he was alone and his room secure. “Okay, Little Eyeball. Tell me.”
“You instructed me to alert you when troop movements around Beijing showed substantial changes in pattern or number, and now they have.”
“Bring them up on a map, please.”
“Done.”
The analyst regarded the map. It looked like the great city’s Seventh Ring Road was being set up as some kind of perimeter. That was a big perimeter, but then again not as big as the entire city, which would mean almost the entire province. Although Jing-Jin-Ji was also going to be defended, it appeared, and that was most of Hebei Province. No, something was coming. Or at least someone thought something was coming. If he could see it by way of Little Eyeball, then other parts of the security apparatus certainly were aware of it. Whatever it was.
“Give me travel numbers, also denials of travel and route cancellations, please. Numbers of arrests nationwide. All recent changes of that sort. Again, show them on a map.”
After a pause of a second: “Done.”
He regarded the map, scrolled around, zoomed in and out. “Waa sai,” he said, gulping. Arrests were up by 183 percent over the previous month. “Someone is preparing to cope with a movement as big as the New Year’s travel. This year that was three times larger than the number of Muslims who made the hajj to Mecca.”
“There are many people in China,” Little Eyeball observed.
“Yes. Good hunt for causes. Now, recall the chaos that always occurs in the interregnum between dynasties. Recall the era of the Warring States, or the White Lotus rebellion, or the long disruption between the end of the Qing and 1949.”
“Recall the Cultural Revolution,” Little Eyeball suggested.
“Yes, good on similarity,” the analyst said, pleased. He had continued to program Little Eyeball intensively, and it seemed that this work was finally getting some traction. Its sentences were unevenly perceptive, but often it seemed like it was doing more than just searching and sorting in the databases; something like deduction, association, analysis….“The Cultural Revolution was not as bloody as those earlier ones,” he instructed, “but it was like them in that we Chinese turned on ourselves. No one knew what was right or wrong, or how that would change the next day. No one knew what to do or not to do.”
“So you have said.”
“China was never the same after that, I think. We lost our socialist bearings, and became just another powerful country. Big but not different. And it was the difference that mattered. Now we are just a big gear in a larger machine.”
“You once said Deng had no choice but to join the world.”
“True. He was making the best of the situation that Mao and the Gang of Four left him.”
“That was long ago.”
“True. But now a time of trouble has come again, it looks like. The tigers are fighting, and the people don’t like it.”
“Perhaps the authorities will stop all trains.”
“Even if they do that, people can walk. The billion are within walking distance of Beijing, if they want to go.”
“The number of people who could do that would be approximately three hundred million, depending on how you define walking distance.”
“Three hundred million will seem like a billion, let me assure you! There would be no stopping a crowd like that.”
“What can the authorities do in the face of such momentum? I wonder what will happen.”
“Me too, my curious little AI. Good for you for thinking to ask a question. I’m not sure what they could do. It’s a big crowd. And if it could be choreographed! That’s what I’m thinking about. You must help me with that. We must try to change this movement from a march to a dance. From revolt to phase change. From bloodshed to singing. This is what we have to try for.”
“People would have to know about this try in order to change. A plan known to participants is what distinguishes dance from riot.”
“Very well put, and a good point too. And very possibly our acquaintance Chan Qi is in a position to spread the plan. I suspect that is her role in all this.”
“You can contact her and tell her.”
The analyst nodded and went to the corner of his office where a stack of Unicaster 3000s stood. He picked up the one paired with Chan Qi’s, brought it to his workbench, turned it on, tapped a call, sent it to her.
“I hope she answers,” he said.
A few minutes passed. It felt longer. The analyst sighed, wished for the millionth time that he was still a smoker. He wondered what Chan Qi was doing, and if she had any idea who he was, or any interest in someone working from inside the Great Firewall. He had been part of the Chinese security apparatus for his entire career; he had helped to build it. Now he was trying to change the system from inside, just as Chan Qi was from her different location. She thought she was trying to change it from the outside, but really as a princessling she was both. They were much the same in that regard. Inside and outside; and the liminal position was sometimes powerful, if always confusing. Sinology leads to sinocism, as the foreign analysts put it. And the situation across the country was growing untenable in certain respects. The global environmental disaster including the sheer lack of water in the ground, the exploitation of the migrants, the crisis of representation, all these had to be solved or the Chinese people would turn against the Party, and the chaos of dynastic succession would erupt again. In the information age, the globalization age, might it be possible for a new dynasty to come to power, not just in China but everywhere around the world, and without bloodshed? This was what they were in the midst of finding out.