Ark by Charles McCarry

like a younger and taller version of the late Zhou Enlai—same handsome face and obsidian eyes, same coiled manner. I was glad I had dressed up a little. He handed me his business card. I tried to make points by reading the side printed in Mandarin. His name thereon was Ng Fred. He was chairman and CEO of CyberSci, Inc., of Beijing.
     
    He said, in Mandarin, “The Ng is pronounced Wu. It’s a long story. The Cantonese ideograph is the same as the Mandarin character but has a different sound. But maybe you already know that.”
     
    In English, I said, “Is Fred really your first name?”
     
    “My business name,” he replied.
     
    “So what should I call you?” I asked in Mandarin, showing off again.
     
    “Fred is fine,” he replied in native American English. “Your Mandarin is quite good. You have a Shanghai accent. Where did you pick it up?”
     
    “In Shanghai. I taught there for a year after grad school.”
     
    “What subject?”
     
    “Western art history, in a high school.”
     
    “So you taught in Mandarin?”
     
    “Sort of, sometimes. I was supposed to talk English, a twofer. Lots of giggles from the kids when I broke into Chinese.”
     
    He gave me a real look of amusement. I liked this guy.
     
    As Henry explained while we dined, the topic he wanted to discuss was defense systems for the spaceship. Fred’s company, in which Henry held a lot of stock, was going to build the ship—in fact, had already built a factory not far from Henry’s yurts in Hsi-tau. He and Henry were old friends—classmates—roommates, even. Fred’s mother was an American Chinese who as a Movement chick had been such a fervent Maoist that she moved to China and married a Red Guard. She sent Fred to a New England prep school, but I had already heard that in his voice just as he had heard Shanghai in mine. Later he had gone to Caltech, where he met Henry.
     
    “I used to copy his notes,” Fred said.
     
    Henry and Fred had been exchanging ideas about a defense system for the ship. The question of weaponizing a spacecraft was a difficult one, ethically speaking. Should humanity go unarmed into the cosmos or not? Theoretically mankind had no enemies except itself, in space or anywhere else. I said as much.
     
    Henry said, “So what are you saying? That we should concentrate on countering a threat from Earth? That human beings would destroy the ship out of resentment or disappointment?”
     
    I’m no great believer in the proposition that human beings will act rationally if given the opportunity to do so. Their natural state is irrationality, especially when they turn into a mob, which is essentially what they would become in the hypothetical circumstances we were talking about.
     
    “The people who are being left behind might go crazy,” I said. “That’s always been the expectation in a worst-case scenario. But however crazy they went, I don’t think they’d be stupid enough to shoot down the spaceship. That would mean shooting down their only hope of escape.”
     
    “Maybe not,” Ng Fred said. “But a boarding party might be dispatched to capture the ship before it launched—or if it had already left, to pursue it, overtake it, and commandeer it.”
     
    Henry said, “Where would they get the ships for an expedition like that?”
     
    “Do you really think the U.S. government is not going to build its own ship when it finds out about yours? Not to mention the government of every other technological state in the world.”
     
    “So how do we protect the ship?”
     
    “You find a new way to protect it without destroying it or killing too many pirates.”
     
    Ng Fred said, “That rules out sabers and muskets.”
     
    I said, “Hornets, maybe.”
     
    I was kidding. Henry liked the idea.
     
    “Not a bad thought,” he said. “Hornets wouldn’t kill, but they’d disable and confuse the attacking force without damaging anything on either ship. And afterward they’d return to the