Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Luna. In China we usually call the tutelary spirit Chang’e, a great goddess. Sometimes Yu Nu. In the Greek myths, Selene. And Selene’s mother was Theia—thus the scientists’ name for the impactor planetesimal. This lost planet is in fact not lost, but rather a part of all of us. Theia’s atoms are in every body of every human. In the four and a half billion years since that time, the moon’s and Earth’s gravitational influence on each other has caused Earth’s rotation to slow to twenty-four hours a day, while the moon is now tidally locked, and rotates on its axis in the same time it takes to complete an orbit around Earth. On they go in their spiral dance, and the tides caused by the tug of the moon on the Earth’s oceans had a huge impact on the development of life on Earth.

I have visited 232 countries on Earth, and now the moon too. One might say I have been everywhere. But no matter where I go, I can never escape myself, the country no one can ever really know. In that sense travel is useless. Maybe we look to the next step in order to avoid seeing ourselves. Not narcissism, then, but an attempt to forget.

It needed a little loosening up, a better recognition that all movement was dance.

They sat by the window and talked over old times. After a while Zhou suggested again that they play at Li Po and Du Fu. Ta Shu had drunk enough wine to agree, warning his old friend that he would not deviate from the laconic style he had developed in Antarctica, which had served him well, at least until it contracted his poetry down to nothing at all.

Many are the size of pots or baskets, and almost all of them look like roughly rounded cubes, without any of the sharp facets you see in the Earth’s mountains, where so many rocks have recently broken. These rocks are not weathered or weather-beaten; they are sun-beaten. Billions of years of photon rain, unfiltered by clouds or even air, have slowly knocked the edges off these rocks. That withering weathering of photonic rain looks different from other kinds of weathering, as for instance by water rain.

Quantum mechanics, yes, very interesting; but that particular source of interest had taken him far away from other people. He had lived at a remove, uncertain how to find other interesting things; and uncertain more generally, in part because of things people said to him that they seemed to think would help him. They hadn’t helped; possibly the reverse. Now, however, the world had become undeniably interesting. Even though it might be like getting slapped in the face to wake up, well, still—he was awake. Here they were, in a mystery. In a potentiality. A situation that was without question pretty interesting.

Mao wanted things for the Chinese people; that we can say for sure. In fact his urge to modernize fast, to reduce the suffering of the masses, resulted in utmost catastrophe for both nature and people. Millions of people dead, millions more lives destroyed. Just try something! A great leap forward, yes! Oh—thirty million people dead? Twenty-five thousand square kilometers of farmland poisoned? Try again! Try a cultural revolution, sure! Destroy the lives of an entire generation? Destroy half the physical remnants of Chinese history? Oh well! Try again!

“Shrimp.” “Really? This big?” “Around here that’s how big they get.” “Hard to believe.” “And yet here it is.” “I’m trying to imagine the first person who hauled one of these out of the ocean and said, Oh yeah, let’s eat this.” She laughed again. “My dad used to say, we Chinese eat everything with legs except the table.”

The mines were kept underground and the surface therefore was left mostly unmarked. No open pit mines or strip mines. And they were taking less than a hundredth of one percent of the available minerals, if even that. And none of it was going to the military, not directly anyway. Basically it was claimed to be a scientific experiment, testing various aspects of mining. Kind of like how Japan did scientific testing on whales.

“Sure. Everyone is. The Chinese are focused on Venus and the asteroids.” “Isn’t Venus useless?” “Yes, but they’re building a floating station in its atmosphere, like a city inside a blimp. And they’re sending big chunks of aluminum from here to Venus orbit. Looks like they’re thinking of building a sunshade at Venus’s L2 point to shade Venus completely, to cool it down. It’s a very Chinese project, some kind of thousand-year plan or whatever. It’s crazy, but if you don’t include Venus in your thinking, you can’t really understand the Chinese presence here.”

“The Rain Cleared and the Breeze and Sunshine Are Superb as I Stroll Outside the Gate.” By Lu Yu, Song dynasty: Old Chang, sick three years, finally died; Grandpa one evening went where he couldn’t hear us. I alone, with this body strong as iron, Lean on the gate, looking at green evening hills.

Sputtering. Very bad for people. There’s a lot of sieverts in an X5 storm.” “Not sintering?” Fred asked. “Sintering is when you laser dust into a solid. Sputtering is when light knocks a solid apart into dust.”

But what was the relationship between cloud and world, between tap and act? This was always the question no one could answer. Maybe, Fred thought, the two were the same now. Maybe the question itself was simply wrong. Maybe they had always been the same. Words were acts, words were always acts; that was why he was always so hesitant to speak. He remembered a phrase that someone trying to help him had once said: If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling. That was a thought that made him uneasy every time he remembered it, so mostly he didn’t; but it kept cropping up, usually at precisely those times when he saw he wasn’t going to act, even though he was feeling something pretty strongly.

“The moon makes people moony. We are all lunatics up here, hoping that the world has gone away.”

“Nevertheless. People who might become president probably don’t ever seem much like their previous selves.”

A lot of them are moving it into a cryptocurrency called carboncoin.” “What’s that?” “I’m not sure. I think it’s a coin that is created or validated by taking carbon out of the air. Something like that. It’s a credit system, and its coins can only buy sustainable subsistence necessities, but since everyone needs those, it’s looking like they’re getting widespread buy-in and acceptance. What will happen if everyone shifts their savings all at once?”

A situation may be effectively computable without being effectively actionable. We know, but we can’t act. Speak now, or forever rest in peace.

That person I was talking to on that quantum phone has just given every person in the world a million carboncoins and invited them to join a global householders’ union, and something like four billion people have already joined!”