He followed a line of people snaking east toward Tiantan and Longtan, then turned up an alley too narrow to allow a crowd like this one to move in it, so that it was only crowded in the usual way, or a little more so. The alley snaked through its neighborhood like the lines of moving people snaked through the crush on the big streets. Though he still couldn’t ride his bike, he could walk it at a decent speed. Even so, it took more than two hours to make his way to the waffle shop, and near the end of it he felt like he was shoving the bike up a steep hill. He wished he was still wearing a body bra. What if a time came when wearing such a thing was always preferable, or even necessary? Then he would be truly old.
When he got to the waffle shop he found it was closed, but as he stood there, exhausted and stupid, a tap came on the window and one of the owners opened up the door for him and quickly locked it behind him. “She’s not here yet. She’ll be here soon.”
He groaned and handed over his bike to the woman, then hauled himself up by the banister to the upper floor of the shop. He flopped into an armchair, stared up into the constellations of antique chandeliers filling the space. The surreal sight hypnotized him into sleep.
When he woke Peng Ling was sitting on a couch across from him, sipping tea and reading her wrist.
“Sorry,” he said. “I fell asleep.”
“I just got here. You look tired.”
“Yes,” he said. “Sorry. I must smell like the garbage place and the highway both.” He shifted, groaned.
“My sympathies about your mother. I was sorry to hear.”
“She had a good life.”
“Yes. Still, when your mother goes, it changes something inside you.”
“It does. No more umbrella.”
“No more umbrella.”
Peng sipped her tea, watching him. “Maybe it would be a good thing for you to have something to do now. And I need you. This girl on the moon is causing big problems.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s wrecking my plan!”
Ta Shu shifted in his chair. “Pour me some tea and tell me about this plan.”
Peng gestured at one of her staff to get more hot water brought to them. When it came she poured Ta Shu’s tea and stirred the cup nine times. Ta Shu sipped it and sighed happily at the taste of an oolong, possibly the one called Iron Goddess of Mercy. That would be right for his tiger friend.
“This is a big moment,” Peng Ling said. “The Party congress is in session, and a lot of the Politburo and the standing committee are aged out, including President Shanzhai. He’s trying to stack the new standing committee and get Huyou into the presidency, and then stay in charge from behind. A lot of us don’t want that. At the same time Hong Kong has returned fully to us, and people there are anxious. So as I told you before, I’m trying to slip some reforms in with all this.”
“Your reconciliation of liberal and New Left.”
“Well, at this point it might not rise to that exalted level, but yes. I have plans. But now this hotheaded girl has gotten the youth into the streets. All trains and flights to Beijing have been canceled. You have to prove you’re a resident even to come to the city now. That’s just the start of the disruptions. No one can tell how the crowd out there now will be dispersed. Even if that gets managed successfully, which will take time, that won’t be the end of it. No. It’s a mess.”
Ta Shu sipped his tea and thought it over. “Maybe the mess could help you. You are trying for top-down reform, and the people out there are trying from the bottom up. Ultimately you need both.”
Peng shook her head. “I wish it was true. Maybe you can help make it true with your political feng shui. That’s what I’m asking you to try, I suppose. But from my perspective, much as it helps to have the people behind a cause, if there is civil unrest like this now, bringing bad memories of May Thirty-fifth, and even worse, then this only hurts reform efforts from the top. There will be elements using this unrest to justify opposing anything that smacks of liberal or left reforms, as showing weakness in a time of danger. Lots of powerful people will be urging a crackdown. That will make the Party congress that much less of an opportunity!” Peng Ling shook her head, getting more upset the more she thought about it.
“Maybe,” Ta Shu said, thinking it over. “You know more than I do, of course. Still I think this may make more of an opportunity.”
She shook her head harder. “You don’t know!”
“I know.”
“You don’t know!”
“That’s what I meant,” he said wearily. “I know that I don’t know. You know the situation better. But you are inside it. Right at its center. You might even become the next president, isn’t that right?”
“Don’t say that,” she said, glancing at her aides, who were downstairs and seemed well out of earshot.
“No words, just hopes. My point is, when you are inside something, you can see only parts of it. No one can see all of it. So, I see it from the outside.”
She sipped and thought about it. “I don’t know how much that’s worth. But you can help me. If you were to go to the moon again, you could help to control this young firebrand, and you might also be helpful in dealing with the Americans there. They’ve got their own problems right now, they’re falling apart, and that’s impacting us here. Have you heard what’s happening there?”
“No.”
“It’s kind of like here. The withouts and the young people have joined together into something called a householders’ union, and now they’re all withdrawing whatever they have in the banks and converting their savings to a cryptocurrency called carboncoin. Basically they’ve started a political run on the banks, and the banks are so overleveraged that they’ve had to close. And that’s caused a general panic. It looks like their federal government will soon nationalize their banks to stabilize their economy.”
“So they’ll become more like us.”
“Sort of. So that may be a good thing, if it works. Because their economy is our economy, and if they could control theirs better, we would benefit. But there’s a pushback to that from their right wing, just like here. As part of that, there are elements of American military and intelligence agencies trying to insert themselves into their moon program, and now they’re seeing our troubles here, and will try even harder. The military here is trying the same things. You have friends there among the Americans, so you could be a go-between.”
“I would be happy to do that,” Ta Shu said. “And I wasn’t done up there anyway.”
“Good. You can go there in Fang Fei’s system again. I don’t know how much I can trust our space agencies right now. For sure the news of you going back up there could spread fast, and my enemies might try to stop you. Fang Fei will be safer for you. He’s been helping me quite a bit lately.”
“That’s good. I’ll do it.”
She smiled. “Thank you. I hope you can balance all the forces up there.”
Ta Shu shook his head. “I can’t do anything myself. Hard to say what will happen. But I can try.”