Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

They moved into the two seats again, facing each other, the black window beside them creating their transparent twins. Through their reflections the moonlit countryside flickered as it flowed. Lights here and there dotted the countryside, which appeared hilly and uncrowded, mysterious and moony.

“Will this child of yours be the first one conceived on the moon?” Fred asked.

“I don’t know. I doubt it, but I don’t know.”

“So it’s dangerous?”

“No one knows. Some people think so. But do you know the gibbons?”

“The gibbons?”

“There’s a group of gibbons being kept at a base up the libration zone. Too bad you didn’t see them, they’re great. I did some work with them, and I love them. Even on Earth they fly around their enclosures like crazy trapeze artists. On the moon, it’s just—” She waved a hand to indicate the inexpressible.

“Out of this world,” Fred suggested.

She smiled a little. “Yes. And the thing is, they’ve had their babies up there. Three or four generations now. And there haven’t been any problems that people have noticed.”

“They might not be able to test them for, you know,” Fred ventured to say.

She frowned at his presumption. “I know. But I’ve spent a lot of time with them, watching them, and…”

“And they seem all right?”

This was a game his brother used to make him play. His brother would start a sentence and stop midway through, then make Fred guess how to finish it. Fred had been terrible at it, but it had amused his brother, and there were worse ways to pass the time. And his mother liked it when they did it. A good exercise, she called it.

“Yes,” Qi had said, and now he started listening to her again: “—hard to tell. No, this is a kind of experiment. I can’t deny that.” She looked up at his face and added sharply, as if contradicting him, “Of course I didn’t want to experiment with something like this! But I made a mistake. And I don’t want to end the pregnancy. I’m going to have the baby. And then we’ll see what we see. I’ll love it no matter what. Lots of moms have to bring up kids with problems.”

Like mine, Fred thought. Not something to say; nor did he add, It didn’t look like it was that easy. After a while he did think to say, “Yes.” Then: “So you have friends where we’re going?”

“Yes. That’s why we’re going there.”

“I thought so.”

“Tell me,” she said, “what happened to you on the moon?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what do you remember happening?”

“There are gaps. When I was awake, I didn’t know what was going on. I had to deduce it from the questions I was asked. Someone said I almost died, and I believe it. I felt really sick. I’ve never felt that sick before. But instead of being another victim, I was a suspect.”

She shrugged. “Sounds like you’re better off with me. At least for the time being.”

“Yes,” he said.

Meaning maybe. But it was definitely interesting, sitting there in a night train across from her. She was holding in her hand the chip he had cut out of her. She was getting sleepy. Gravity was crushing them. She was stretching like a cat. She got up and lay on their narrow bed, her head toward him. Eventually she shifted up and used his thigh as her pillow, without asking him, her black hair spilling like shot silk over his legs. Asleep then, with one hand in an ex-thumb-sucker’s position, breathing deeply, with a little asthmatic wheeze.

For now he was stuck with her. Or rather she was stuck with him! Traveling with a Westerner had to get her some unwanted extra attention, but she was doing it anyway. That was interesting. And all his life he had struggled to find things that were interesting. 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.

In the gray of predawn the landscape out their window slid by, shifting in quick stages from a classic Chinese ink-brush painting, in which washes of mist separated tree-lined lakes from jagged peaks, to an industrial wasteland fallen into ruin while still under construction. Construction cranes poked the gray night sky like giant gallows built to hang any surviving remnants of Nature. This bleak zone slid by for most of an hour, then the train slowed down. Fred nudged Qi and she sat up, rubbing her eyes.

“Shekou?” Fred asked.

“I don’t know.” She peered out the window. “I’ve never been there.”

As the train slowed it vibrated and shuddered more than it had through the night. Qi moved to sit across from Fred and their knees bounced together and apart. The gray cityscape out the window was a jumble of concrete blocks, liberally spangled with what seemed to be semitropical foliage. That suggested their trip had been southward. Many of the buildings, both old and new, had curving facades. These curves and the greenery gave the city a certain ramshackle aplomb. A tall bamboo cluster reminded Fred of the moon, as did all the predawn grays.

When the train stopped, Qi stood and led Fred down the crowded hall and off the train, then through the crowd on the platform. When she passed an open door on the train across the platform, she tossed her chip up into it with a casual offhand flip. Then they joined the flow of people leaving the station, passing through its tall gates without trouble.

“If I have to, I’ll be telling people you were part of my host family when I went to school in America,” she told him as they hurried down a narrow street. “They won’t be surprised you don’t know Chinese. Thank you is xiexie .”

“Shee shay?”

“Close enough.”

The curving streets in this part of the city were very narrow. The buildings flanking them, four or five stories tall, curved with the streets in a way that suggested they all had grown together. None of the buildings looked foursquare, and it didn’t seem like they could have been easy to build, given all the curves. It was as if the whole city had been twisted by immense gravitational waves and then frozen in place.

“Why does everything curve?” Fred asked Qi.

She shrugged and looked around as if trying to see what Fred was talking about. “Goats?” she ventured.

They came to a widening in one street, a square filled by an open-sided market in which a great number of stalls and tables were all roofed by tarps stretched over aluminum poles.

“Wet market,” Qi said. “Let’s get something to eat.”

She pulled him between rows of vegetables piled in mounds. Stacked in huge numbers were gorgeous eggplants, cucumbers, melons, carrots, and many other vegetables or fruits, quite a few of which Fred did not recognize and felt he had never seen before. These intensely colored glossy globes and cylinders exploded in his sight, deprived as it had been by the monochrome moon and their nighttime wander in Beijing. Orange, yellow, green, purple, red, everything vibrating with the intensity of its particular color. Qi stopped at one stand to buy a string bag, then some small oranges, then some green orbs Fred didn’t recognize. After that they continued into the wet part of the wet market, where water-filled plastic tubs held living fish and eels and crabs and shellfish and baby squid and every other variety of sea creature. Hanging over the tubs were wire baskets of live toads and turtles, and sitting on stools between these baskets were shopkeepers chatting among themselves or staring out at the morning. Fred saw clams and oysters in burbling clear plastic tanks, also shrimp or crayfish—scallops—seahorses! No doubt the live presentation guaranteed freshness, and was possibly a response to the food safety issues that he had once read still vexed consumers and government in China.