Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

“He wants to be succeeded by Huyou, minister of state security.”

“So is that the source of the conflict?”

“It’s one of them. The Twenty-Fifth Party Congress is coming soon, so the infighting is getting pretty vicious. There are black groups and superblack groups. And with Hong Kong just taken back into the fold, it’s a volatile time.”

“What about outsiders? Are the Americans involved in this?”

“No. Right now they’re dealing with a mess of their own. Their own citizens are currently trying to bankrupt the financial industry in order to take it over. A very worthy effort, but it’s causing them all to go crazy. And they never pay us much attention even at the best of times.”

“Hmm.” Ta Shu thought about it. “How should I proceed, then, when it comes to Chan Qi and my American friend?”

“You can’t go out on your own and find a single Chinese girl somewhere in Beijing. Chan will ask his security people to try that, and it might work. I’m going to do the same with mine. I have some channels that aren’t the same as his. There are public security teams made up entirely of women, and some of those report directly to me, as you might imagine. Women are often interested to help women in trouble.”

“Do they use that app that allows citizens to help the police?”

“Yes. That’s how most chaoyangqunzhong operate.”

“Is it dangwai ?” Outside the Party usually meant weak.

“No. You join one of these networks and your citizenship score goes up, so it’s an easy way to improve it. Almost half a billion people do it, but of course that gets to be too many to cope with, so there are various agencies handling that information.”

“And no agency collates all of them?”

“Not really. Some try, but others resist. It’s a turf battle. Wolidou . The infighting is very real.”

“So there may be a Great Eyeball, but no one gets to see what it sees?”

“Exactly. It’s like a fly’s eyeball, with a thousand parts to it.”

He sighed. “See, you did learn something in that poetry class.”

“Because of a fly’s eye?” She laughed. “I must have.”

“Please let me know what I can do,” he said. “I want to help those young people. So if you look around inside the Great Eyeball, or some of your little fly eyeballs, and you find something out, let me know.”

“I will. I’ll try too with my own flies’ eyes.” She poured them more tea, looking thoughtful. Again Ta Shu felt the power emanating from her, that of a big tiger hidden in the shadows, watching. Ready to pounce.

After leaving Peng’s office in the old Imperial City, Ta Shu walked across Tiananmen Square, feeling the vastness of China in his joints and his bones. Never had the big square seemed so big, never had he felt so burdened by his body. No doubt it was simply the Earth squeezing him. A little punishment for leaving home. He wondered where he could get one of those exoskeletons that some people called a body bra. He had often seen disabled and elderly people striding about, trapped in skeletal frameworks that translated their motions into rude botspeak. But medical equipment shops were in short supply in the city center, or so it seemed to him impressionistically. On the other hand, this was Beijing. A quick scan of his wristpad showed that an alley running toward the central train station featured just such an establishment, tucked between a noodle shop and a pharmacy.

By the time he got to this place he had to sit down on a chair inside the door, surprised at his sudden exhaustion. The shop attendants, used to such arrivals, rushed to him with hot water and glucose gelatins, inquiring after him in a professional manner, but also with the friendly solicitude that was Beijing style. He explained his problem and they were suitably impressed, even amazed. A man from the moon! Everyone in the shop came over to inspect this lunatic and congratulate him on his voyage to the Jade Lady. He could see in their eyes an astonishment that he was currently too tired to feel, but seeing it brought back a little ghost of his own amazement, and he nodded, even smiled. Yes, he had really been there; he even hoped to go back. As he rested and they measured his limbs, he told them about the very slow Earthrise, and the Peaks of Eternal Light. The attendants loved learning or rehearsing these things. They brought out a couple of exoskeletons while they checked his bank numbers and insurance. Ah, this was Ta Shu! Cloud traveler supreme! Poet as old as the hills! Now they were even more impressed. It would have been very expensive to buy an exoskeleton, they told him, but as a use-at-need rental, they found it was well within his health budget, and there was no doubt that he needed it. It was a little frightening how quickly he had been crushed by his own world.

“Come on, Uncle, we’ll fit you with a really good suit, the latest style. You’ll be an elegant grasshopper by the time we’re done.”

For paralyzed people the fitting and integration of an exoskeleton was a complicated affair, they told him, stretched out over months of tests, and a certain amount of surgical fusion of electrodes and nerves. For a normal person it was much simpler. It was like a bra fitting as opposed to making him a permanent cyborg, one of the young women told him with a teasing smile. So Ta Shu stood up with a groan, felt the sugar they had fed him give him a little push, endured their manipulations as they strapped him into a suit. Really very friendly people. He ate a peach offered to him, as a test of his right arm and hand’s dexterity. They plugged the suit into his wristpad, made the pad a partner of the suit’s brain, and then the aluminum and plastic framing of the contraption moved with a little whirr at the joints. Try it: shift, then hold position without effort; shift and hold, shift and hold; it was a lovely thing to feel like he could rest while standing, all the while strangely supported, as if by the ghost of his young strong self. Also to walk around, as he discovered, with a sense that he was standing in almost exactly the way he would have wanted if he had been able to call it out. The thing seemed to just slightly anticipate his moves, which was nice, as he still felt too weak to work hard at keeping his balance. They instructed him to tuck and roll if he ever did tip the whole apparatus too far, and this would serve to protect him when he hit the ground; the suit would do the rest. The cap on his head, well supported by four struts bracketing his neck, would work like a bike helmet if he took a bad fall. “I will hope not to test that,” he said.

Some time was required to detach himself from this friendly group that now seemed to include much of the neighborhood, but eventually he walked down the street and away. It felt quite strange. It was not at all like dancing on one’s toes across the moon, but it wasn’t like stumping along on Earth either, and nothing like that desperate stagger across Tiananmen Square. He had to take care with his balance while descending the stairs into the subway station, but the suit seemed to help with that. It was like a strengthening of his muscles. He sat in one of the Daxing line car’s disabled seats, feeling self-conscious, but he needed the room, and no one paid any attention to him.

At the Jiaomen West stop he got out and walked up the stairs into the air, feeling weak but strong. Out into the old neighborhood. Ah his home ground, so ugly and sad, so magnificent! All the ghosts of his childhood charged him at once, but he dispersed them with a wave of his cyborg hand; he was so old he had outlived even nostalgia. A few of the work unit compounds from the 1980s still stood around him like giant houses, each filling a city block, with their courtyards hidden in their centers; but so many of them had been torn down that the ones remaining had become like hutongs , historical monuments of an older way, even though no one had ever liked living in them. Maybe hutongs had been like that too. People made these compounds home, but they weren’t homey.