Titan (37 page)

She let go of the book. It drifted off into the air like a yellowing bird, and the residual strength of its cracked spine closed it up, losing her place.

It had been a pretty good day. She’d managed to get through the whole of it without encountering the others once.

She closed her eyes.

I
n the end,
the launch actually brought Barbara Fahy some favorable publicity.

NASA’s PAO presented her as the woman who had lost
Columbia
, but who had redeemed herself by making the right decisions when rogue USAF officers had tried to shoot down
Endeavour.
It was a neat feel-good story. Even if not everyone agreed that those USAF assholes had gone rogue.

Hadamard promoted her out of Building 30, to a more senior program management role. But she found her time occupied by PR: TV interviews and newspaper profiles and goodwill tours.

Hadamard even asked her to accompany him to China.

Thus she found herself as part of a NASA-USAF party, headed up by Hadamard, on a goodwill visit to the Xi Chang launch center. Incredibly, Al Hartle came along, the notorious Chinese-basher who everyone suspected was at the heart of the X-15 plot. But Hartle was a close ally of Xavier Maclachlan, and in exercises like this, many constituencies had to be pacified.

They were flown into the sprawling city of Chengdu, at the heart of the green and mountainous Sichuan province, and then driven in a fleet of air-conditioned limousines towards the launch center. There, they would be met by Jiang Ling, the first of China’s dozen or so astronauts, who Fahy had gotten to know a little during her trip to Houston three years earlier.

Looking around the car at her companions—Hadamard’s passive stare, Hartle’s ferocious, paranoid bald-eagle scowl—she suspected that none of them really wanted to be here. This “friendship” tour was an empty gesture.

But the gesture was the whole point.

The White House had more or less forced this trip on NASA and the Air Force. Every poll indicated that Maclachlan was going to storm the election at the end of the year, and after that all bets were off; the outgoing Administration wanted to do whatever it could to cement Sino-American relations while it had the chance, before Maclachlan started building walls around the nation. Fahy applauded the motive; one look at Hartle’s body language today was enough to show her how fragile any kind of China-U.S. accord was likely to be.

But the huge reality of China soon began to overwhelm Fahy, diminishing the internal calculations of the Americans to absurdity.

The heart of Chengdu was impressive, but the city was choked by a huge shanty-town, a constricting girdle of wood and paper shacks. Children sprawled by the roadside. They stared at the cars, their bare bellies swollen, their palms lifted to their pretty, empty faces in the universal sign for “please.”

Out of the conurbation itself the convoy entered the eternal Chinese countryside. Fahy caught high-speed glimpses of peasants, scratching at the soil, as their forebears must have done for centuries. China was
crowded
: everywhere there were more people than she had expected—impossibly many of them, working in the dried-out paddies or stumbling along the fringe of the highways or squatting by the road.

Fahy was stunned by her glimpses of the immensity of the Chinese landscape, the huge human resources of the nation.

Like most modern Americans, she had never set foot outside the U.S. before, even though she had worked on a mission to another planet. But she was shamed to find how little she had really seen and understood of her own world.

The space center itself was little more than twenty years old. It had been designed as China’s door to geosynchronous orbit, using its Long March fleet. The center was cupped by green-clad hills. The sky was blue, the air fresh and clear; the parts were taken around by car and golf-cart buggy.

There were buildings for the horizontal assembly and checkout of Long March boosters, payload preparation bays, and a string of compact-looking launch pads, strung out along a rail line. Fahy endured the usual mind-numbing visits to propellant charging and draining facilities, cryogenic handling systems, pyrotechnics stores, the launch control center.

There was a heroic-pose statue of Jiang Ling. But there was no sign of any memorial to Chen Muqi, the third Chinese to be launched—officially—who had been killed when his oak-resin heatshield failed during reentry.

They were shown a proud display of China’s proposed Moon landing system. The Chinese weren’t planning to build a huge Saturn V-class booster. Their strategy would be based on smaller boosters and Earth orbit rendezvous: assembly of the Moon ship in Earth orbit. There was a little plastic mock-up of structures on the Moon’s surface: a proud lunar lander, hauntingly like the Apollo Lunar Module of four decades earlier, a compact surface shelter half-buried in the regolith, the Chinese flag surrounded by four or five toy astronauts.

Despite setbacks, the Chinese still claimed they believed they could achieve all this by 2019—the fiftieth anniversary of
Apollo 11.
Al Hartle growled at this, looking chagrined.

Fahy saw no reason to suppose the Chinese couldn’t achieve their target. Especially since the Chinese were adopting a strategy which some argued the Americans should have followed all along: to drop any attempt at perfect reliability, to accept lower-cost, more practical solutions—and the heroic deaths that would inevitably accompany them.

Such losses seemed to be acceptable here.

The party was hurried quickly away from any areas of technical sensitivity; the tour was actually, she thought, as shallow as a tourists’ visit to the Cape.

She grew bored, restless. She disliked spending her time as a mute geopolitical symbol.

Still, the launch site snagged her attention. Surrounded by mountains—by oxygen, by green growing things—it seemed a place of hope and renewal to her, a port to the future: a real contrast to Canaveral, suspended as it was between land and sea and space, subject to endless entropic degradation.

The party was whisked away by air to Shenzhen, a new city that had grown out of a border stop between Canton and Hong Kong. They were loaded into a fleet of fresh limousines, and Fahy found herself sharing a car with Jiang Ling.

The road south from Canton followed the Pearl River delta. There was development everywhere—gas stations, snack stands, car repair shops, stores, flophouses, restaurants, factories. Further away from the road Fahy could make out shanty-town clusters, washing up the hillsides like a gray tide. Some patches of green showed, but there were huge gashes in the red earth where new construction was being prepared. The journey was uncomfortable: hot and dusty, the road pot-holed and trash-strewn and full of expensive-looking cars, businessmen behind tinted windows making deals via image-tattoo phones on the backs of their hands as they drove, one-handed.

Jiang Ling apologized for the road. “There is a new highway to link Shenzhen and Canton.” Her English, learned since her historic flight, was clipped and precise. “But the highway is even more congested, generally at a standstill. There is another to link Shenzhen with Shantou, another of the SEZs here in Guangdong province—”

“SEZ?”

“Special Economic Zone.”

“Oh.” Deng’s old idea. Commercial enclaves; forward outposts of contact with the capitalists.

They reached a checkpoint, like a customs barrier. Tough-looking young soldiers checked papers passed up by the driver. To left and right a fence, of concrete and ditches and barbed wire, extended as far as Fahy could see.

Jiang caught Fahy looking. “A wall, eighty-six kilometers long. Not everyone, you see, can share in the benefits of the SEZ. Even today.”

The car glided on.

Shenzhen was a city of broad boulevards lined with high-rise apartment blocks, office buildings, luxury Western-style joint-venture hotels. The car entered a jungle of neon and softscreen signs announcing bars, discos, karaoke clubs, restaurants, fast-food joints; but in amongst the ads for Microsoft and Disney-Coke and Nike and the other Western giants, Fahy saw—translated for her by Jiang—stern admonitions to buy from the China National Cereals, Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation, and the China No. 2 Automobile Plant United.

On the seat back before Fahy a softscreen was tuned into some local channel. At the center a girl sang a brash, upbeat pop song—it sounded dated to Fahy’s inexpert ears—and her face was surrounded by multiple ads, thumbnail images of faces and products, flickering on and off, Cantonese voices shouting their messages like so many quacking ducks. Jiang began to sing along with the jingle. “…
The red in the East raises the Sun / China gives forth a Mao Zedong / He works for the happiness of the people / He shall be China’s saving star / The East Is Red!”
She laughed, like a child.

Revolutionary songs, Fahy thought, to a boogie beat and wah-wah guitars.

The convoy stopped at the Century Plaza Hotel. Hadamard, Hartle and the others ducked quickly into the lobby through the smoggy air, their heads averted from the Shenzhen cityscape. Jiang and Fahy followed more slowly.

The lobby was cool, glittering, anonymous. There were expensively dressed girls—and some boys—hanging out here, sitting at low tables and smoking, sparkling displays playing over their image-tattooed cheeks.

Jiang caught Fahy’s arm. “The others are planning to play golf later—”

“Where?”

“At Augusta. Or rather, in a VR sensorium in the basement of the hotel… Would you prefer that we slip away, see something of the rest of the city?”

Fahy frowned. “You mean a VR tour?”

Jiang smiled. “Actually I meant—ah—RL. On foot.”

The prospect terrified Fahy. But she didn’t feel she could refuse.

And so they walked out.

Shenzhen hit all her senses at once.

There were five-star hotels, and revolving restaurants, and a stock market. There were huge billboards, maybe half of them animated, all of them acoustic, bellowing out ads. There was construction everywhere, buildings rising like fragile plants from cages of bamboo scaffolding; huge robot piledrivers hammered, and dust and rock fragments billowed out in peals of concussive noise. Cars and bicycles jostled in the crammed streets.

Jiang, hidden behind softscreen one-way glasses and a smog-excluding facemask, kept hold of Fahy’s arm, and guided her away from the worst hassles. But still she saw prostitutes everywhere, painted girls in miniskirts or tight pants lining the curbs. There were child beggars in rags, running after cars, babies flapping like dolls in their arms. There were groups of young men wearing flashy softscreen-rich Western clothing, modish moustaches and elaborate coiffures; some of them wore rumpled, denim Mao jackets.

Over a main artery there was a huge softscreen picture of the Helmsman of the Nation, China’s antique revolutionaryera leader. The image of his masklike, cracked face repeated a phrase over and over, which Jiang translated:
Stick to the Communist Party’s line, one hundred years unwavering…

There were few foreigners, little evidence of ethnic diversity. Everywhere, short, skinny people stared at Fahy, curious and hostile.

Jiang leaned close to Fahy and murmured in her ear. “What do you think?”

Fahy lifted her smog mask. “I feel like I’ve arrived in hell.”

Jiang Ling laughed. “Perhaps you have. There are no cathedrals here. Shenzhen is a new city. There is nothing to do here but eat, buy sex, and do business.”

“There are so many people…”

“Of course. The city is a magnet for those from the country. It has always been thus. And besides, the countryside is failing.”

“Failing?”

“The country is suffering a severe water shortage. You must realize this is a global phenomenon. The Earth offers us only a finite amount of fresh water each year. Global warming is depleting the supply. And as the population and water usage grows, we may soon pass a fundamental limit… In China, much agriculture is water-intensive. The rice paddies, tended for a hundred generations, are drying out. So what is there to do? Life in a Shenzhen dorm—ten to a room, stinking metal bunks, locked in to mitigate against theft may be horrible, and prostitution may be morally foul. But it is better than starvation in a parched field. And then there are the plagues. Tuberculosis is the worst—”

Fahy couldn’t help but flinch at that.

Jiang’s hold on her arm tightened. “Don’t worry. There are monitors at the border fence, and medical patrols within. The TB is excluded from the city; cases are rare.”

“I wasn’t thinking about my own safety,” Fahy said, but she was lying. “There must be solutions to the water problem,” she said. “Dams, river diversions—”

“For many years such schemes have been proposed,” Jiang said. “There is a scheme to dam the Yangtze below the Three Gorges, for example, and another to divert half the Yangtze’s waters to the arid north. But the West has been reluctant to invest in such projects. Environmental concerns are raised, for example.”

“That must be valid.”

“But perhaps also there are ulterior motives: a continuing desire to contain China, to restrict its growth, using environmental factors as a pretext.” Jiang’s face, masked by her colorful softscreen glasses, was unreadable, betraying no resentment; her voice was even.