Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

It struck Fred that although professional security agents could be made too frightened to hold on to Qi, these ordinary young people were willing to shelter her. Surely they too would get in trouble if found with her. Maybe it was the difference between helping her and holding her, but he wasn’t sure what to make of it. It didn’t seem like a good idea to ask about it, and in fact their frequent nervous laughter might be covering a certain speediness in them that gave away their fear. They would leave in five hours, they said, as they had made an arrangement with a boat that would drop by the city’s ferry terminal soon after that, and they had the terminal itself rigged for that hour. In the meantime, one of them said, with an uncertain look at Qi, their group would like to see her, if she would agree to it. She pursed her lips unhappily, then nodded.

They were led to the back of the room they were in, where a doorway let them out into an airshaft surrounded entirely by ancient brick walls. They descended a metal spiral staircase into dimness. There was scarcely room to fit between the central pole and the spiraling outer rail of these stairs, and the steps were triangles where even the outermost section was barely big enough to hold a shoe. Fred followed Qi down, feeling blinder and blinder as they dropped. It seemed to him as if they were descending many more floors than they had gone up.

At the bottom of the spiral stair a shaft of light pierced him, and he stumbled into a room. When his eyes adjusted he saw that the room was quite large—a basement storage room, perhaps, about twenty feet high and extending back into shadows some indeterminate distance. Very hard to see all the way, because the room was jammed with people. Fred’s stomach vibrated with the characteristic buzz of a Faraday security cage.

Most of the people in there were standing, others sat on boxes or on the concrete floor. Someone gave a wooden box to Qi, and she took it to one wall and stood on it, and the room went quiet. Everyone stared at her. Faces were rapt. Their expressions reminded Fred suddenly of the musicians by the lake. These people too were flushed and transported.

Qi said something in greeting and many of them smiled and nodded or even said something back. Then she snapped something, in that waspish way Fred was coming to recognize, and it took them aback; they swayed back on their heels, and after that were more rapt than ever.

And then Qi began to talk at speed. Her eyes blazed as she looked around the room, staring at them, her cheeks flushed. She raised a finger, pointed it at them. She was challenging them, Fred thought—but then she spoke even faster and said something that made them laugh, and after that she laughed too, and shifted mode; she was explaining something to them now, telling a story to make a point. Her hands held up her points, chopped them apart, wove them together, handed them over to her listeners. They were about equal numbers of men and women. They looked like they had been working hard that day, like they worked hard every day. They had come into this cellar tired, he saw, and perhaps hungry, but more hungry for her than for food. They could eat later. For now she was their food. Their eyes were devouring her. They were lit, and she was the fire. Fred felt it himself; normally he couldn’t read faces at all, and here he was reading her like a book, even as she spoke in a language he didn’t know. It was very much like hearing that strange orchestra, a deep stab of recognition and longing.

He couldn’t have said how much time passed as she spoke. Half an hour or maybe an hour. He was feeling the weight of Earth, he was hungry, thirsty, sandy-eyed, sick; he should have been sleepy; but he was transfixed. He was a little curious to know what she was saying, but then again, while seeing the situation as clearly as he was, her words were irrelevant. They might even have been a distraction. The form of the situation said more than the content. These were poor people, he thought, in a big city. That meant they were probably urban workers. They would certainly already know a lot about whatever Qi was talking about—they owned phones, they lived lives. Suddenly he saw it: everyone knew everything. Of course. How could it be otherwise? This was the world, people knew it. Even he knew it, and he didn’t know anything. So these people weren’t here for knowledge; they already knew. Eyes bright, watching her like hawks, they were hungry for something besides information. They wanted some kind of leverage, some kind of recognition or acknowledgment. Qi was giving them that.

Finally she ended things with a series of jokes. She laughed, they laughed. She promised them things, and made them promise her back. All this was so clear! Even in this singsongy musical language of theirs, so alien to him, with not a single cognate word he could understand, it was perfectly clear, right there on their faces.

She stopped with a little wave and their applause started with a short roar, then quickly ended. She got off the box and walked through the room, touching arms, shaking hands, nodding formally, hugging informally. She was moving, Fred saw suddenly, from woman to woman. She was finding the women in the room and giving them some extra moment of female solidarity, while always listening to whatever any of them said to her. The men could watch, that was all they needed to do now. They saw this on her face and stayed clear and watched, eyes gleaming. She got to choose who spoke to her.

This went on for another fifteen or twenty minutes, then her friends were guiding her toward the door, and Fred followed. Back on the narrow metal spiral staircase, climbing through the gloom between the walls. The weight of the world made Fred sweat and gasp as he lifted his feet and found the little triangles of corrugated steel, step after step. By the time they got back up to the room they had been in before, he felt utterly wasted. His head was swimming.

And yet there was no time to rest. They were given turns in a bathroom to shower and relieve themselves, and a young woman went in with Qi, presumably to help her get the cut on her back bandaged properly. Lots of laughter in there as they worked on that. A young man sitting next to Fred gave him an inquiring look, but Fred just shrugged. In the state he was in, Qi was far beyond his ability to explain, in any language except for that shrug.

She came out looking refreshed. They dressed her with a hat, wig, sunglasses, and a nighttime mouth guard. Fred they gave a baseball hat with a Yankees logo on it (his brother would be appalled) and another mouth guard, which he bit down on uneasily. It didn’t fit.

Downstairs on the crowded street, four of them jammed onto an electric cart meant for two and zipped out onto a larger street, into the city proper, into a traffic jam. It seemed to Fred they were headed south again, although in a city as twisted as this one it was impossible to stay oriented; it was just a feeling he had. It seemed to be midafternoon.

They rounded a turn and a giant building came into view, half of it hanging over the water of a hill-circled bay. The ferry terminal, it appeared. It had a big triangular roof slanting up and out over the water. Its sides were covered by irregular metal circles, like bubbles of sea-foam, painted in colors that shifted as they got higher, from yellow to maroon to orange to blue.

The interior of this terminal turned out to be almost entirely a single giant room. Everything was built of either concrete or steel, both corroded by salt, so that like all the rest of the city, it looked both new and old at the same time. There were turnstiles as in a subway station, and also customs gates, as if they were at a border. But the gates were empty, and the turnstiles turned freely. Fred was curious about that, but he didn’t want to say anything aloud.