Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

Qi sucked her chopsticks clean, inspected one, cracked it such that it split lengthwise. After that she worried the cracked end with her teeth until she had it reduced to a sharp point. A bamboo needle of sorts.

“Okay,” she said, holding it out to Fred. “I need you to dig that chip out of me.”

“What!”

“You heard me.”

“But with that?”

“We don’t have anything better. I bought us toothbrushes and toothpaste, but they didn’t have any little knives or clippers for sale. So this will have to do.”

“Where is it again?”

“In my back. Right where I can’t reach it myself.”

She pulled her blouse up and over her head, shocking him, and then lay facedown on the bed, and reached back and undid her bra. An ordinary human back, ribs and spine obvious, spine in a trough of muscle on both sides of it. She looked strong. Fred gulped.

“It’s right here,” she said, and reached around and pointed. “Next to the spine, but in the muscle. To the left side, I think. There should be a little scar.” Lower down, her backbone rose up toward her bottom, still covered by her pants. “Come on, find it. It should be easy to feel. I don’t think it’s too far in there.”

Fred clenched his teeth, steeled his nerve, and put his finger on her back where she had indicated. He rubbed the muscles to each side of her spine, pushing slightly. Her skin was smooth, as was the muscle under the skin.

He felt a hard little bump over the muscle to the right side of her backbone. Down there in the dermis. Just the slightest discoloration over it, and a faint scar. Shorter than a little fingernail and not as wide. Luckily it was well away from her spine. No way did he want to be digging around near her spinal cord with a sharp stick.

“It’ll hurt to get that out of you,” he told her.

“I don’t care. It has to go. There are lots of security systems my friends can’t fix.”

“What about the blood? It’ll probably bleed like crazy.”

She held up a roll of toilet paper. “I took this from the toilet. When you’ve got it out, just keep wiping me till it stops bleeding.”

“All right, if you say so.”

“I do say so.”

It turned out to be hard. The split bamboo of the chopstick was pointy but not that sharp, nor that rigid. What was wanted was a good knife, one with both a point and an edge. As it was he had to jab her a little, while not stabbing her deeper than was necessary, or getting near her spine. In the end he had to grab her skin and pull it to the side until the little bump was hard under the skin. He could feel her tense her back muscles to help him, which he found distracting. Her torso, her body, her lustrous skin, the curve of one breast still in its bra cup, squashed into the bed and sticking out to the side… Finally he just had to push the chopstick’s sharp point into her taut skin as hard as he could, at an angle away from her spine, and then, when it was at maximum pressure, smack the end of it with his free hand, harder and harder, trying to find the minimum poke that would actually break the skin.

“Just do it!” she exclaimed, her face in profile against the pillow looking fierce, her little eyeteeth exposed and ready to bite something.

So with an extra-sharp smack he punctured her skin, and she said “Ow!” and he had to start swabbing a trickle of blood out of her spinal trough, while also digging around in the wound he had made with the end of the chopstick, which caused her to curse violently, or so he assumed, as she was growling in Chinese, grimacing with eyes clamped shut. He suddenly became aware that she had reached back and was squeezing his knee as if to inflict an equivalent hurt on him, a pressure that he found comforting. He felt like he had fallen into one of his dreams of a quite frequent type, in which he had to perform something he didn’t know anything about, like surgery, as here. And yet it was also weirdly stimulating. Or maybe just intimate, yes, that was the right word. Fred had seldom been intimate with anybody, and he found it quite distracting.

Then he saw one end of the chip there swimming in her blood, and was able to get the chopstick tip under it, then lever it up and pluck it out of her. It was somewhat like taking a tick out of a dog’s skin, a memory that came to him from the lost depths of his childhood.

He put the bloody black pill in the palm of her hand, then focused on unrolling toilet paper and wiping the blood from her skin over and over, pressing hard with a little pad of it, pressing right on the tear in her skin until the toilet paper saturated and he replaced it with another pad, doing his best to keep blood from running into the trough of her spine.

Eventually the bleeding slowed. She sat up, her back to him. He could see the side of her left breast, there under her loose bra, but she obviously didn’t care, and he tried not to either. He was a doctor of sorts, or at least a first responder: time to be medical! And he was good at seeing himself from just behind the moment.

“When it stops completely,” he said, “I can make a pad of tissue and fit it under your bra strap. Then it might stay there like a bandage.”

“Good,” she said. “Thank you.”

She gestured, and after a moment he got what she meant; he put the toilet paper down and grabbed the two ends of her bra strap and pulled them in, hooked them together while she pulled the front of the bra down over her breasts and shrugged into it. After that he caught up on the blood flow, which was coagulating almost completely now. He made a pad of tissue to put in place when the time was right. The bleeding was definitely slowing down.

“What are you going to do with the thing?” he asked her.

“Get rid of it somewhere. Maybe put it in somebody’s stuff, let the watchers think I’m going somewhere else for a while.”

“Maybe put it on some other train when we get off, or even when we stop at a station, if we do. If there’s a chance. Throw it on board some other train and it will look like you’re going somewhere else.”

“Maybe so,” she said.

Fred kept pressing a wad of toilet paper hard against the cut he had made in her. “How long will this trip take?”

“All night. They let you sleep till morning in these compartments, if they arrive at the station in the middle of the night.”

“But you’ll want to leave as soon as we stop?”

“Yes. I think that will be morning anyway.”

“It looks like it’s almost done coagulating. You’ll have to be careful for a while.”

“Yes. Thanks for helping.”

“Sure. Are you comfortable?”

“I’m okay.”

“What about, you know, you being pregnant and all? You were lying on your stomach.”

“I could feel it.”

“Do you feel the baby move in you?”

“Maybe. My appetite’s been strange, but we were on the moon, so who knows what was what.”

“Indeed.”

For a while they sat there, feeling the train click and sway through the night. The slight vibration put them both aquiver, a tiny quiver that was always there under the rhythmic rocking of the train. It seemed to Fred like his thumb on her back might feel to Qi like something foreign and painful, and again the weird intimacy of what they were doing washed through him. What if the chip had been stuck in her butt! But no, it had to be put where she couldn’t reach it herself, of course. No, a very inappropriate thought.

He sighed, and she glanced at him.

“What?” she said.

“Oh, nothing. I wish I knew what was going on.”

She shook her head, stared at the wall. “It’s China,” she said. “Give up on that.”

More trembling through the night. Eventually Fred had to say, “I think you’ve stopped bleeding,” and after that he placed a fresh wad of toilet paper into place under her bra, and she pulled on her shirt and was dressed again. Goodbye, hour of contact. Gone at the speed of an old train clicking through the night.