“When can you go?”
“Now.”
But now there was no way out of the mass of people. Beijing was locked in the greatest gridlock ever seen in the history of the world. Peng Ling had to call a drone helicopter to the roof of the building that held the waffle shop. Ta Shu found it disturbing to get into a plastic box, what seemed to him a big toy with no pilot in it, and then to get lofted abruptly into the air above Beijing—into police-controlled air, in fact, where drones at this point were routinely being shot down by other drones. There were a lot of them out and about, the sky was crowded with them. So it was a matter of trusting machines and algorithms all around. Also a tribute to Peng Ling’s importance, that she could go up like this into such a proscribed space.
But go she did; she went up with him in the drone, so that she could look down from above and see Beijing, the great capital of the world, awash in a sea of people. It was astonishing: the billion were all there, it seemed literally. There was no place below them that wasn’t black with the heads of Chinese people, a granular mass of humanity—everywhere except for Tiananmen Square itself, the heart of China, looking suddenly small in the middle of the immensity of the city and its crowd. A gray rectangular dot like a postage stamp.
Peng Ling stared down at it impassively. There was no denying the awesome truth of this sight. This was power, the power of the Chinese people; also the power of whoever could conjure such a crowd. Peng could not have done it, and judging by the blank look on her face, Ta Shu could see she found this truth daunting. Was this Chan Qi’s doing? And if so, how had she done it? And if not her, who?
Ta Shu told her to pass on going by his mother’s compound. Go straight to the Party’s airport, he suggested, and get him on a Party jet south. She nodded, relieved. She gave instructions aloud and the drone changed direction.
Ta Shu watched her profile as she looked down. A tiger; maybe the biggest tiger. Which meant he was part of the hierarchy now, no doubt about it. Maybe he had been all along. He didn’t know what that meant. Famous, yes. But maybe it just meant he was a tool. An instrument of power. But he had his ideas too. Possibly something could be achieved.
“What will you do?” he asked her, gesturing down. Ultimately the crowd below was a direct challenge to the Party’s rule of China, and it was huge. So it was a crisis for the Party, no doubt about it.
Peng Ling shrugged. Business had to get done, she muttered. Life had to go on. Lanes of movement would be established by necessity, then kept open by the police. Brutal means would be hopefully minimized. After that, they would probably deal with this the way they had dealt with the umbrella revolution in Hong Kong: they would wait it out. Leave people alone until they grew bored or hungry or sick, or, this being Beijing in autumn, cold; then let them disperse without incident. Catch as many faces as possible on camera, dock people in their citizen scores as those got reassembled. Wait it out, in other words; and when it went away, forget it ever happened. That would be the strategy, the hope.
“Lean to the side,” Ta Shu remarked when she fell silent. Mao’s old strategy, to duck away from the blows of one’s enemies, or even from their attention.
She nodded. Yes, her look down at the city said. If the entire population of China was moving at you, you definitely wanted to lean to the side.
But appearances could be deceiving, even this most amazing appearance. Beijing was jammed, shut down, in crisis; but elsewhere around the country, life was mostly going on as usual. News from Beijing was spread by some social media, and by phone conversations, pigeons, word of mouth; but not by the media controlled by the Party and its immense censorship complex. The Great Firewall would try to stop even this great flood. So in the end it was hard to tell what was going on. Even looking down at the real city, it was hard to tell what was real.
On the way to the airport, he changed his mind and asked Peng Ling to arrange two stops. First on the roof of a Second Ring Road crematorium, where he picked up his mother’s ashes, contained in a rectangular gold box inside a velvet bag, with a rope tie that he could close and hold. He held it as the drone lofted them to the Buddhist shrine near the North Gate, where on certain memorial days his mom had sometimes visited to burn incense. She had not been particularly devout in that way, but there was a columbarium there willing to take her ashes and place them in a wall behind a nameplate. He got out of the drone with the box, and as a monk helped him secure the box in its slot in the wall, he was reminded of his weird trip to the landfill with her junk. He hefted the box one last time, curious as to the weight of its contents, and muttered so that the monk couldn’t hear, “Ma, you have been compacted.”
But these were just her mortal remains. Her spirit was somewhere else. If it was anywhere at all, it seemed to him, it was in his brain. Her soul was now a pattern of neurons in his brain, making a certain set of memories, certain habits of mind. He himself was what remained of her in this world. He made a quick vow to her to take on the burden of keeping her going, and gave a final turn to the little wrench that the monk handed him, tightening shut the door on her remains, feeling that she would approve of his filial resolve. She had been resolute, he would be resolute. She had done her best, he would do his best. This felt almost like serenity. In any case it was resolve. He would persevere.
Then it was off to the airport.
At the Party airport he said goodbye to Peng Ling and got in a little jet with two other passengers. None of them greeted the others or said anything after they were in the air. Ta Shu sat in a right-side window seat and fell asleep for a while, overwhelmed by his long week home. If he could call it home anymore.
When he woke it was early morning. The plane flew over bare brown hills, shorn to dirt after centuries of deforestation, although here it had the look of recent work. In some places the Great Greening had proceeded, in other places it had been ignored or contradicted. Here below, the slash marks still scored the hillsides, and raw dirt roads wound down in widening spirals to the flatlands. The feng shui was simply awful. Kill the body and the spirit will go away. Then it will not be an issue. This country had been chopped up, murdered, desecrated. But what if the people who had cut down the forest on these hills were desperate to cook that night’s food? But no, it didn’t have that look. It hadn’t been cut down by hand, tree by tree, ax by ax. This had all the marks of an industrial process. Forest genocide. Thirty thousand square kilometers of China were poisoned beyond use. This patch below had just been added to that dismal total. Already there was no groundwater to speak of in the entire north.
Strangely, the plane crossed a ridge and suddenly the next watershed below them was dark green, hills glowing with a forest that looked primeval, eternal, untouched through all the dynasties. Could it be? Or had it been restored in the last few decades? It was more likely to have been restored than to have escaped history like some hidden Shambhala, but from this height it looked ancient. A very heartening sight, given what they had just been flying over. He wondered if that watershed ridge marked the Hu Line. Ninety-five percent of the Chinese population lived on the third of China that lay to the southeast of the Hu Line, five percent lived on the two-thirds of the country to the northwest of the line. That was strange, though perhaps it only marked how much people needed to live by water and fertile soil. This too was feng shui; wind and water made all the difference.
He watched the world sliding below from a consciousness that did not feel like his own. He was history; he was time; he was a buddha; he was his mother, looking back and down. Five thousand years of struggle, and where had it brought them? They were pressed against that day’s crisis, their options as small as a wedge in a crack—no way forward, no way back. What was China now? What had it been, what would it become?