“Lean to the side,” Ta Shu suggested to them, hoping they recognized Mao’s old injunction.
He shifted across the floor to sit by Fred and Qi. The flight to the north pole would take an hour or so, and for the time being there was nothing to do but wait.
“What happened to you two after I left?” he asked the two of them in English. “Why did you leave Fang Fei’s place on the far side?”
Qi shrugged. She didn’t want to talk about it. Fred said, “She didn’t like it. She wanted to talk to some friends back on Earth, she said. And she thought that place was just a prison dressed up as a classical Chinese theme park.”
“A refuge,” Ta Shu suggested again.
“I know, that’s what you said, but she didn’t like it. Then these helium three prospectors said they could get us out and take us to the near side, where she could get a message to Earth. So that’s what we did.”
“And then?”
Fred regarded Qi, who was sitting with her eyes now shut, faking sleep. “We got to the edge between near side and far side.”
“The libration zone.”
“Yes. Then she used a laser comms device to get a message back to Earth. After that the prospectors needed to refuel their rover, so we went to the nearest station to do that, and as soon as we got there they arrested us. Then after a while you showed up, and you know the rest.”
“This keeps happening,” Ta Shu observed.
“I noticed,” Fred replied, looking at Ta Shu a little suspiciously. “I don’t like the look of these people, they seem familiar somehow, but I can’t place them. Who are they? Why do they want her so bad?”
“I was told they were working for an old student of mine who is very high in the government.”
“But if this student of yours is helping you, they should be helping us, right?”
“I don’t know if it’s that simple.”
Fred sighed. “Nothing is ever simple when it comes to you guys.”
“Very true. So, there’s nothing else that happened to you two?”
Fred frowned. “Qi used that mobile quantum key device you gave her when we came here this time, and she had a conversation with someone over it.”
“I see,” Ta Shu said, though he didn’t. “I wonder who that was. Do you still have the device?”
“No. These guys took it from us when they arrested us.”
“Maybe we can get it back.”
John Semple came over to sit by them.
“Sorry about this,” he said. “I didn’t have any other way to deal with the situation.”
“That’s all right,” Ta Shu said. “We’ll get where we are going eventually.”
“And where is that?”
“I don’t know.” Ta Shu thought it over. “China, eventually. At least for me. Always China.”
“It seems like things are pretty crazy there right now.”
“I know. I was in Beijing when the first demonstration started.”
“They’ve gotten bigger since then.”
“That’s hard to believe. I’m surprised they haven’t shut down access to the whole province.”
“How would they do that?”
“Trains, airports, roads. They all can be closed.”
“They have been. The crowds are still coming. The Seventh Ring, they’re calling it. Something like twenty or thirty million people, no one really knows. The best estimates are being made by satellite. People keep coming to the nearest stations that are still open, then they get off and walk. It’s becoming a humanitarian crisis, in terms of food and water and toilets.”
“They’ll cope,” Ta Shu said. “They always do.”
“But what if they don’t?”
Ta Shu thought about the idea of something being called the Seventh Ring. Seven was so often the completion of a pattern. “Something will happen. What are they demanding, again?”
“No one is quite sure. Reform of the hukou system. Transparency. Rule of law. Stuff like that.”
“The Party won’t let those happen. Those are Western ideas.”
“Are you sure?” John said. “Because there’s a lot of Chinese who seem to want them.”
“They want something.”
“Well, but what? What do you think it is?”
“Representation.”
“What do you mean?”
“They want the Party to be theirs. They want the Party to represent them, to be working for them. That’s the way it used to be. That’s the way it started.”
John Semple laughed. “We all want that! We’ve lost that in America too. All this stuff in China, it’s happening in America too. We’re having simultaneous crises.”
“Maybe it’s the same crisis. Maybe we’ve all lost it, everywhere. Lost it to the invisible hand. The tong that hides everywhere in plain sight.”
“Maybe so.”
John and Ta Shu stared at each other.
“Can you see if these people brought along a comms device with them?” Ta Shu asked. “It’s one of those quantum key things, very heavy for its size.”
John nodded. “I’ll have my people take a look for it when they get these folks in hand.”
An hour later, the American spacecraft dropped onto a big landing pad near the complex of bases covering the north pole’s peaks of almost-eternal light. American police escorted the Chinese team off the craft and down a hallway. Ta Shu stuck with Qi and Fred as they moved to the American station headquarters. They were led to a reception room under a greenhouse; big clear panels in the ceiling of this reception room gave them skylight views up into branches, vines, hydroponic roots, and many kinds of leaves, filtering the light and turning it a bit green. Ta Shu liked the effect.
During the flight north, John Semple had arranged for Qi to be granted immediate protection from Bo and Dhu and their henchmen. So now they were surrounded by a team of American security people, men and women with a thoroughly military look, though dressed in ordinary lightweight lunar jumpsuits. Eventually they were led downstairs and around a circular hallway to a dining hall, where they sat to eat a meal, recover from the trip, and discuss the situation.
There were things to discuss about Qi’s physical status, and the station nurse talked to her about her pregnancy for a while. After that they sat around eating, reading their wrists, and looking at screens on the walls with various information feeds from Earth, occasionally asking the others about what they were seeing. Earth appeared to be falling deeper and deeper into some kind of geopolitical crisis, and although there were problems everywhere, including Europe, Latin America, Russia, and India, for sure the troubles were at their worst in the US and China. And not just each internally, as bad as those situations appeared to be, but between the two giants as well. Some part of the Chinese government appeared to have reversed course and was now selling off US treasury bonds, just in the last few hours. In effect they were sticking a dagger into their own best customer. Kill your debtor and who will pay you?
“I don’t get why they’re doing this now,” someone remarked. “The last thing we need now is a war between us and China. We’ll both get killed by that.”
“It’s just differential advantage,” someone else replied. “In a crash, whoever does the least bad wins, because it’s all relative. So the Chinese might feel like they will get less killed than we will.”