Up a slope, whining; down a slope, grinding. Traverse a slope, tilting. White and black; black and white. The sheer desolation of the moon. The nihilism of no nature, no life. A dead world. A dead world that could kill you at any moment. Fred could feel that in the vibration of the rover. He heard it in the whine of the motor. He was not happy. It was hard to take deep breaths, it took an effort.
As the sun crept higher, the land began to display shades of gray. The gray slopes were lit not by direct sunlight—those slopes were white—but by reflected sunlight that had bounced off some other hill. Thus shadows were not all the same, and these various grays thereby created a legible articulation of the land, even conveying some information over the horizon, as hills they couldn’t see reflected light onto hillsides they could.
All this was explained to Fred and Qi at lunatic length by Xuanzang, who obviously loved the moon with the kind of passion that only selenologists and prospectors seemed to have for it. This too Xuanzang explained to them: both types of lunatic were on the hunt in search of treasure; it was only the nature of the treasure that differed. And maybe it didn’t differ that much; prospectors were after money, which made them close students of the moon’s information; scientists were after the moon’s information, which if found would turn into a good living for them. So money and information were fungible and kept turning into each other. But in the end it was being on the hunt that mattered.
“There will be a spy satellite over us in about an hour,” Xuanzang mentioned to Qi, interrupting his rhapsody in gray. “Do you want to hide from it?”
“Yes, if you can, but how?”
“We’re on a road now, don’t you see the tracks we’re following?”
“Sure, but so what?”
“There are hidey-holes everywhere along this road, shelters we’ve dug. It’s just being cautious, you know. Just little caves to drive into. Can’t be seen from above.”
“You want to hide?”
“From solar storms, yes. If people see us it’s usually okay, because we want to be seen. We’re registered, they see us and know where we are. Could save our ass if we had car trouble. But there are solar storms you want to get out of. And a lot of us feel like it’s also good to be able to hide when you need to. You know how that is.”
“Yes I do,” Qi said. “Okay, hide us if you can. There might be people looking for us.”
“Aren’t there satellites overhead all the time?” Fred asked.
Xuanzang and Ah Q shook their heads. “Coverage is spotty.”
“Coverage or coordination of coverage?”
“A little of both,” Xuanzang said. “Whatever’s up there is fragmented, that’s for sure. The biggest system is Fang Fei’s, and he isn’t a problem for us. Not usually anyway,” glancing at Qi.
“I’m surprised there isn’t continuous coverage by the Ministry of State Security,” Qi said. “Satellites rating you for the Social Credit System.”
“The Social Credit System never really recovered from its sabotage,” Xuanzang said.
“It wasn’t backed up?”
“Backups were whacked too.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“They didn’t want you to know.”
“Who did it?”
“No one knows. The Balkanization Assistance Division’s Administrative System Society might have done it, it’s supposed to be a real thing, although it may be just a name people like. Citizen scores were identifying so many enemies of the state that a lot of resistance to them developed. And it’s still possible to do some anonymous sabotage in the cloud.”
“Like everywhere,” Ah Q noted.
“True. But wiping out the citizen scores stuck a needle right in the Great Eyeball. A big victory!”
Qi smiled that smile that Fred had seen only a couple of times, her real smile as opposed to her usual one, the ironic grimace that indicated she would have been amused if she were amused. This one was for real.
They followed faint tracks on the land. The view seen through the compartment’s windows looked like arty black-and-white photos of dirt roads in the American Southwest, overexposed to emphasize the sterile deathly vibe of the place. Death on the Oregon Trail, or any desert rat’s Mojave Magnificence. On it went endlessly, and as the hours passed, Qi settled into one seat and sometimes slept. Fred often lay on the floor, to nap or just to change position. During those times the other three spoke in Chinese to each other, and if Fred put his glasses on he could read what they were saying. It seemed to him they spoke as if he couldn’t understand them; possibly they had succumbed to the fallacy that if he wasn’t looking at them his glasses wouldn’t work. Or they thought he was asleep. Or they didn’t care.
Ah Q liked to tell moon stories. Did you know Buzz Aldrin, second man on moon, followed Neil Armstrong’s famous quote about one small step for mankind by jumping to ground and saying That might have been a small step for Neil but for me it was really big! So second sentence spoken on moon was a joke about first sentence. I like that so much. Aldrin was the real intellectual among the Apollos. His brain spin so fast is why they call him buzz.
A lot of them were intellectuals, Xuanzang said. They were astronauts.
Astronauts are pilots. Even if they were engineers, does not mean intellectual. Many a pilot and engineer, many a scientist too, without a thought in their head.
Everyone is an intellectual, Qi said from out of her sleep.
Qi is right, Xuanzang said. I remember reading one Apollo guy took a sleeping pill to fall asleep on moon, then had dream in which they drove one of their rovers cross-country until they came on other tracks, and met another rover with people like them, people who had been on the moon for thousands of years. Not a nightmare, he said. On the contrary. One of the most real experiences of his life, he said.
See? Qi said. Everyone is an intellectual. Never think otherwise.
Fred got up and sat back in his chair. It would be easy on the moon to imagine a dream was a real experience, he thought, because when you looked out the window at the chaotic white hills it was easy to lose the sense that any of it was real. It resembled one of those dreams he often had in which he felt quite powerfully that he existed at the end of a long cord tying him to safety, a cord which could be cut anywhere along its length, at any time.
More time passed. Fred sat in his seat looking out the window. Bland in color, starkly majestic, the hills and hollows rolled up over the horizon. Despite reading the grays as best he could, he could never anticipate what would come next, hill or hollow. Always the blacker-than-black sky curved over the white lines of the horizon. It felt like they were the only four people on this world, and yet at the same time it felt like they weren’t alone, like something was out there with them. That was either frightening or comforting, Fred couldn’t tell which. The two emotions superposed and could not be disentangled. He was confused.