As the plane descended, Ta Shu caught sight of what had to be the Three Gorges Dam. He stared down, startled at the sight. When the dam was nearing completion he had publicly grieved, recalling trips through the gorge made in his childhood. One of the great dragon arteries of China drowned, an ecological debacle: he had said this many times on his cloud show, and ever since then he had avoided visiting it.
Now he saw that he had been right to avoid it. He almost pulled down the window shade. But there was a fascination too, as when witnessing some immense catastrophe. From the perspective of the plane as it descended, the dam appeared to cross the entire visible world. It was hard to believe humans had made it; the Great Wall was a mere thread on the land in comparison. The reservoir of water extended as far to the west as he could see. Seven hundred kilometers upstream, he seemed to recall. An entire watershed drowned, two million people moved, a thousand archeological sites lost, including everything that had remained of the proto-Chinese culture that had lived there in the time before history. Earthquakes had been caused by the weight of the water, landslides, sedimentation, pollution: an ecological disaster, just as he had predicted. Not that this fulfilled prophecy gave him any satisfaction. It was the kind of devastation that should have been reserved for the moon, the land of death. To turn Earth into that kind of thing…
Well, this was what was happening. And since nothing lived on the moon, nothing died there either. So the moon was not the land of death but rather the land of nothingness, which was not the same. Earth was the land of life and death; the moon was a blank white ball in the sky. Now they were making the moon into something more than that, but what that new thing was he could not make clear to himself; nor he suspected could anyone else. They were doing it first, and later they would understand it. Or not. Just like with this dam.
When the little plane landed, the door opened and the other passengers got off. But as Ta Shu was following them, two men came up the stairs and introduced themselves: Bo Chuanli and Dhu Dai. Bo was tall and bulky, Dhu short and slight. Associates of Peng’s, they said they were, instructed to join Ta Shu on his trip. Dhu held out his wristpad and tapped it, and a small image of Peng Ling appeared on the screen and said, “Ta Shu, please let these men Bo and Dhu accompany you to the moon, it will be safest that way for all.”
“Ah,” Ta Shu said.
“Really no reason to get off the plane, if you don’t mind,” Bo said, standing in Ta Shu’s way.
“No?” Ta Shu said.
“It seems as if we should hurry a little,” Bo said calmly. Dhu stared past Bo’s elbow at Ta Shu, inspecting him to see how he would react. Suddenly this made Ta Shu wary.
“We’re from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection,” Bo added. “Dhu is with the agency, which is run by Peng Ling, and I am the Party cadre who has been helping him.”
“I see,” Ta Shu said. “And how will you help in this situation?”
“We think that these people you are hoping to meet on the moon are involved with the recent unrest in Beijing. You think so as well, correct?”
“I don’t know,” Ta Shu prevaricated. “How they could be involved with these events on Earth when they’re on the moon?”
They regarded him skeptically, unconvinced he could be so stupid.
“There are ways,” Dhu said. “Talking on private radios. Sending coded signals. We don’t know if any of those ways explain this, but we have been told to help you get there, and to help you in every way while you are there.”
Ta Shu looked at their faces. Security operatives. Peng Ling must have decided he needed protecting. A disturbing thought. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
When they were seated, with the attached agents up near the front of the plane, Ta Shu tapped a message to Peng Ling on their private WeChat line. When several minutes passed without a response, Ta Shu began to worry. Usually she got back to him immediately. Possibly she was busy. He had no other way of contacting her, and there were no third parties who knew both of them.
As the plane took off, Ta Shu looked down again on the concrete evidence, so to speak, of the power of the Chinese Communist Party: the big dam. If he recalled correctly, it was about two hundred meters high and a few kilometers long. It seemed much bigger than that from this angle: massive, crushing, universal.
Now it seemed he might be in the grip of another part of that great power. Bo’s presence made it tangible and personal. Ta Shu knew this feeling was simply seeing the whole in a part: he had never been out of the grip of the Party, not just since being joined by these men, but for the entire length of his life. Seeing it personified by these two men changed nothing.
And now he was part of a little team organized by Peng. It was difficult to feel too resentful about this, as she had reason to want security people of her own along. Still it was worrying. He couldn’t be sure what this team’s purpose was, he was simply its front man. Maybe even its bait.
Well, bait could bite, as his father used to say. He needed to find out what Peng really wanted from him on this trip. If she was in the running to become the next president, as she had more or less confirmed in the waffle shop, then the jockeying must be intense now, an all-absorbing dogfight even in the midst of the general crisis. And what a crisis—the whole world caught up in something, it seemed, even though no one was sure what it was. Maybe they were living through a transition to some new world order, unnamed and inchoate. Maybe this was a wrestling match between elements among the elite; but maybe it was a wrestling match in which the many were trying yet again to seize power from the few. For the bait could bite.
The little plane got to altitude, and again the hills of South China filled the world. Then they flew higher, south and west, over the steep-sided mountains of Sichuan, dark green forests flanking the lower slopes of black rock ridges, with snow on the north faces of the highest peaks.
They landed on the northeast edge of the Tibetan plateau, Ta Shu thought. It wasn’t where they had taken off from the previous time Fang Fei’s organization had flown them to the moon. It looked like Fang Fei kept a personal estate up here, extending to the horizon as far as one could see. Leader Xi’s plan to make all of Tibet into a national park, which would have dwarfed any other such park on Earth, and incidentally turned the Tibetan people into something like protected wildlife, had never been implemented. But the proposal had over time changed Beijing’s treatment of the region, and the absence of a new incarnation of the Dalai Lama had left Tibetans and everyone else in a state of confusion as to what Tibet really was. Of course the Party liked it that way. And at certain times vast tracts of state-owned land had been offered for sale to individuals. As apparently here.
They got off the plane and walked into a low building with a central courtyard. All here was cool and quiet. A separate world. Bo and Dhu had disappeared with some of Fang’s people, and Ta Shu was left in the hands of a young woman named Shuling.
“How long before we take off?” he asked her.
“If you have no objections, the plan is to launch in two hours.”
“Two hours! It’s like making a connecting flight at an airport!”
She smiled nervously. “We hope you don’t mind?”
“No, it’s fine.”
He spent the interval napping. After he woke up he went outside to say goodbye to the world. He walked around in the crisp cool air, feeling the altitude in his lungs and seeing it in the sharp outlines of the low mountains to the east and south. The horizon was huge, the gravity heavy. He was tired and confused. The feng shui of this place was awesome, but he was having trouble focusing on things, and feeling them. In his mind he was still stuck in that amazing crowd, or in his mom’s apartment. At the same time, there in the distance across the sere high plain a herd of some kind of deer or antelope grazed, round-sided in the sun. Under the cobalt sky, autumn grass gleamed like gold. Life. The contrast to the little dead ball they were headed for could not have been greater. There it was above him, visible in the sky even by day—a half-moon, making the color of the sky darker by contrast—its shadowed half quite visible. It was hard to believe they were headed there.