Yes yes, the two agents’ faces said. All very interesting. And yet here they were. Something was going on. Could they please get on with it? Even Dhu had this look.
Ta Shu said, “My acquaintances here work for the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Now they are helping Minister Peng in her attempt to stabilize the situation at home. They have information that suggests that some of the unrest at home is being organized from up here on the moon, and are hoping to find out if that is the case.”
“Messages came from here,” Bo added.
Zhou frowned. “Do you mean from this station specifically?”
Bo and Dhu regarded each other. “From the moon,” Bo clarified. “And from the edge of the moon, the limb. This limb, in fact. From the right edge as you look up from Earth. It was a brief message conveyed by laser light. An amateur astronomer observing the moon was in the beam’s target circle, and captured a recording of part of it. It was an encrypted message.”
“And you broke the code?”
“No. But the timing of this message is suggestive. An hour after this light from the moon was seen, people from all over China began to head for Beijing.”
“Coincidence?” Zhou suggested. “Correlation, not causation?”
Bo and Dhu did not reply.
Ta Shu saw that Zhou was not going to share anything with these two, just out of a general sense of caution. War of the agencies at least, and maybe something more. The discipline inspection commission didn’t have much direct presence on the moon, so far as Ta Shu knew, even if they did oversee the Lunar Authority as they did all the agencies. So as interlopers these two were not going to get very far with locals like Zhou. For these two to make any headway would take some combination of bureaucratic power and personal diplomacy that they had not yet shown any sign of having. They could barely even stand, and so naturally they had no standing. Ta Shu wondered what Peng Ling had had in mind when she sent them to accompany him. But of course there was so much he didn’t know. More than ever he realized he didn’t even know for sure that Peng Ling had ordered them to join him. Her recorded message had been brief. He really did need to have a private conversation with her to confirm it.
Now Zhou continued to play bland ignorance, easily read as noncooperation. Bo and Dhu didn’t press very hard, and after a while they gave up and pronged clumsily toward the residency centrifuge they had been assigned to, claiming moon fatigue.
When they were gone, Zhou eyed the room in a way that told Ta Shu they were likely to be on camera and recorded. In a friendly voice he invited Ta Shu to go out with him for a short drive to Earth View Point, the highest prominence in the area. Ta Shu readily agreed, and they bounced down to the garage, got in a rover, and drove out.
“Sorry to hear about your mother,” Zhou Bao said. “My condolences.”
“Thanks. She had a good life.”
The road to the point was marked by the wheels of many previous rovers. In the brilliant light of the lunar day the land to each side of the tracks looked like the glazed layer of refrozen snow that one often saw around McMurdo Station in Antarctica. After one uphill stretch they got onto the flatter height of a prominence somewhat like a mesa top. Like almost every other topographical feature on the moon, it was a remnant arc of an old crater rim. From up here the horizon lay quite a bit farther off, maybe twenty kilometers, it was hard to judge; the horizon from here was a wildly undulating border between the painfully white moon below and the deep black of space above. The white of the moon was flecked with shadows, the black of space was spangled with stars; that symmetry combined with an accidental curve of the horizon to make it all resemble the Daoist taijitu, the ancient yin-yang symbol here ballooning out to encompass the entire universe, confirming the visionary insight of Zhou Dunyi, who had first drawn the divided circle a thousand years before. A geomancer of great talent.
“Yin-yang,” Ta Shu noted, gesturing at the view with a curve of his hand.
“Yes,” Zhou said. “And soon Earth will rise and break the pattern, as it always does.” Zhou consulted his wrist. “Twelve minutes or so, in fact.”
“I look forward to that. So,” Ta Shu said, “what’s going on? Can we speak freely in this car?”
“Yes. It’s my own private office, you might say, and I’ve had it thoroughly privatized. As to what’s going on, I was hoping you would tell me!”
Ta Shu nodded. “From my side, these two were sicced on me by Peng, or so they said. I can’t be sure what they’re up to, but they have me in hand, and they mentioned her name, and had a recorded message for me from her. She’s my patron and she wants my help, so I have to go with what she gives me. I thought she was on my side, or I was on her side, but now I don’t even know what I mean by that. For sure she’s in a dogfight at the Party congress, I know that.”
“Of course. Are they really from national security?”
“I don’t know. Dhu is government, Bo is a Party cadre, or so they say. A team, as in the old days.”
“So it seems.”
“What about you? Have you found our young wanderers?”
“Yes. Which is to say, they found me. I’m trying to hide them, to keep them out of worse trouble, but to do that I’m holding them. Chan Qi doesn’t like that.”
“I can imagine.”
“I’d be very happy to give them over to you, but what will you do with them?”
“We can’t do it with Bo and Dhu around. Tell me how you found them.”
“They came into the station needing fuel and food. They were traveling with a couple of helium three prospectors, so-called, and had driven cross-country from Fang Fei’s place on the far side.”
“Could you send them out again with these prospectors?”
“Yes, they want to do that, but it’s hard to stay hidden in those cars.”
“Doesn’t Chan Qi understand that?”
“The prospectors think they are better at hiding than they really are, apparently. And I guess she believes them.”
“I’m surprised she would be that naïve.”
“The moon makes people moony. We are all lunatics up here, hoping that the world has gone away.”
“I was hoping that myself,” Ta Shu admitted.
“Because here you are.”
“But even on Earth I hope that.”
“Actually, I think it’s easier on Earth than here. Hiding, I mean. Maybe even fooling yourself. Earth is crowded and fragmented. The noise-to-signal ratio is stupendous, so you can get in the noise and hide.”
“So should we try to get these two back to Earth again?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t know which would be better. A lot of people down there will be after her.”
“But here too.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure. Once you’ve been up here awhile, you don’t want to collaborate with Earth as much. There’s a lot of noncompliance up here. Once you click into it, you find it’s a pretty big network. If these two had only stayed in Fang Fei’s compound, for instance, they might have been fine. Fang doesn’t tolerate interference with his places.”
“Could we send them back there?” Ta Shu wondered.
“Maybe. But Peng knows they were there, right?”
“She sent them there in the first place.”
“So that would be walking back into her clutches.”
“Her clutches might be better than some other people’s clutches. I am still assuming she is the good guy here.”