“No, they want something from us,” John Semple supposed. “They’ll sell until America caves on whatever it is.”
Ta Shu wondered if this were true, and if so, what that element in the Chinese government wanted. He called Peng Ling again, but again could not get through to her. He left a message begging her to call back, even somewhat demanding that she call back, and then he sat there thinking about the situation as some kind of problem in feng shui design. Had any dragon arteries been cut yet? Where was the balance point for all these forces? How could he act to help that balance come into being?
Things cannot remain forever united.
These laws are not forces external to things but represent the harmony of movement immanent in them.
In the midst of greatest obstructions, friends come.
While the others sat around, mostly sleeping in their chairs, he called the Chinese consulate on his wristpad. Eventually he got to the local consul, who greeted him effusively. Such a pleasure to have the famous cloud star and poet honoring them with a call!
“Thank you,” Ta Shu said. Then, as there was no way of beating around the bush in this matter, he explained the situation as he saw it: pregnant Chinese citizen, daughter of one of the standing committee, a princessling, being hounded for no reason by members of an agency that had no authority on the moon. What was going on? And could these agents, possibly rogue agents working against the interests of the Party and the nation, be restrained, arrested, and deported to Earth?
The consul agreed this sounded appropriate, and promised to call home to get clarification on the issue immediately. Possibly some discussion with superiors at home would have to be made in order to make a determination. Current conditions in Beijing, however, made contacting the relevant officials and getting their time and attention a problem. Everyone very busy, all situations impacted by the unrest. Moon not at the top of anyone’s list right now. And if the matter under consideration here was by chance involved in any way with the unrest down there, possibly the replies gathered could be contradictory, and aggregate to a murky directive for action.
“Indeed,” Ta Shu. “And yet even so, please persevere.”
Perseverance was the consul’s middle name, literally in this case, but also in terms of the effort he would now bring to bear.
Ta Shu ended the call.
His young friends were asleep on couches in the corner. The Americans and internationals on the other side of the room were still focused on the crises back on Earth. Ta Shu quickly checked to find out the latest. A march on the National Mall in Washington, DC, had been estimated at four million people. The entire city was overwhelmed, and had all it could do to cope with the crowd. On the same day in Beijing, a push of people, a human wave, had broken through the PLA hold on the south side of the Sixth Ring Road, a victory made possible only because most of the PLA units holding the line had refused to fire on Chinese citizens. Once this breakthrough was known, masses of people outside the city had marched up from the south into the vicinity of Tiananmen Square, which had been occupied to its physical maximum by many thousands of PLA troops, who had drawn back from the outer districts until they filled the giant plaza. The situation was extremely tense, but not yet very violent; for now, it seemed as if everyone involved wanted to avoid bloodshed. Of course in any crowd of that size there were going to be some people spoiling for a fight, even people hoping for blood, to use as propaganda later. And in fact one unit of the public militia had fired on a passing crowd and been assaulted with rocks, with deaths on both sides and a dangerous rout of the crowd in that neighborhood with tear gas and water hoses. Aside from that incident, cooler heads had prevailed. Ambulances and emergency rooms were full, but only that incident of shooting had been reported. The demonstrators had for the most part hewed to a fairly high standard of nonviolence, and no army units on the scene had fired on the crowds. Any and all drones over the skies of Beijing were being shot down on sight by forces on both sides.
So on each side of the world, a kind of precarious balance of forces stood quivering in the wind. People in China and the US were aware of the other country’s situation, which Ta Shu believed might be part of the moment’s precarious stability. They were teetering on the brink of something big, yes; but no one wanted to fall. It was like two exhausted sumo wrestlers propped against each other near the end of a match.
And yet at the same time there were indications that some part of the Chinese government was now putting ferocious financial pressure on some part of the United States government, by way of this dumping of US treasury bonds. T-bill prices were falling, dragging down the dollar and the markets, and all to an accelerating degree—right at a moment when one would have thought that financial stability would be high on both governments’ lists of priorities. The dollar’s troubles weren’t really helping the renminbi, or any of the other national currencies or cryptocurrencies that China had stockpiled in its half century of trade surpluses. On the contrary, every sector of world finance seemed to be suffering except for the cryptocurrency called carboncoin, which was some kind of money created by a confirmable history of carbon drawdown or equivalent environmental actions, valid for subsistence spending only. What this virtual currency would come to in the real world no one could know, and the fact that millions of people had withdrawn their savings from normal seigniorage currencies to invest in such a murky new form of money, meaning, in the end, value and trust and exchangeability, was just another frightening destabilization to add to all the rest. That the millions of backers of this new currency were also demanding blockchain governance only added to the worries of people in power everywhere.
“Do you understand this idea of blockchain governance?” Ta Shu asked John Semple at one point.
John shrugged. “I think the idea is that if everyone’s got a wristpad and a connection to the cloud, everyone could participate in some kind of global governance, in which every action legal and financial would be completely documented, and recorded and secured publicly step by step and law by law.”
“It still seems like someone would have to propose laws, and other people would have to enforce them.”
“I think the idea is that it would all happen by collective action, and be open for everyone to see.”
“But who would actually do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“It seems crazy.”
John shrugged. “Maybe every new system of government looks crazy when it’s first proposed. Remember how in the eighteenth century people said representative democracy was crazy. They called it mob rule. Said it would never work.”
“Maybe it never did.”
“Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. Three hundred years isn’t a bad run. And it might keep going, if we can keep it going. I mean, when the representatives aren’t bought by the rich, representative democracy has done pretty well.”
“But now that seems to have ended somehow.”
John sighed. “Maybe feudalism never really went away. Maybe it just liquefied to money and bided its time.”
“That would be bad.”
“I know. But if money as it exists now is just feudalism liquefied, maybe this carboncoin is a try at something better. Maybe it’s the labor theory of value back again, with the labor involved required to be for the good of the biosphere, and the money only good for that labor.”
John left to go find his friend Ginger Ellis. The rest of them sat there looking at screens. Down there on Earth the world was going mad. Financially it looked like China and the US were playing a game of chicken. Ta Shu had no doubt that China could outlast anyone at that game. Closing his eyes, feeling the invisible network of forces in his head, Ta Shu thought he could sense the balance; he could feel it as tangibly as he felt his efforts to walk upright on the moon. China, in crisis though it was, had advantages right now over the Americans. Anyone could see it. China held the American government’s debt. That being the case, surely some concessions by the Americans would soon be offered to the Chinese.