Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

When they woke they took turns in the bathroom, and Qi got some rice going in the kitchen’s rice cooker, then some vegetables in a wok hot with sesame oil. Fred discovered he was hungry, so hungry he found himself almost too queasy to eat when Qi dropped a plate on the table before him. He stared at it.

Qi tossed down her meal, displaying a thoughtless virtuosity in her chopstick technique. “What’s wrong?” she asked when her plate was empty.

“Oh,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“Something,” she suggested.

“Well,” he said, looking at the battered old hardwood floor. Suddenly he discovered it: “I’m concerned that my parents and brother don’t know where I am. They’re sure to be worried. It’s been over a week, right? I don’t even know how long exactly. They’ll be freaking out. I want to get word to them that I’m okay.”

She shook her head. “We need to stay completely hidden for a while.”

Fred pressed his lips together. “I want them to know I’m okay.”

“But what if contacting them gets you arrested again? I mean, which is worse, them worried or you in jail?”

“I don’t see why getting word to them should give us away. Won’t your friends be coming back here?”

“Not for a while. We need to be totally hidden for a while.”

“Then maybe I should just go to the American embassy in Hong Kong,” Fred suggested. “Go there myself, catch a ferry and just find it.”

She was staring at him unhappily, he could see that in his peripheral vision. “If they catch you,” she said, “they’ll catch me.”

He didn’t say anything.

“What, do you miss them?”

He shook his head. “I just don’t want them to worry about me!” He felt a spasm attempting to shake him, and held himself rigidly to forestall it.

“So you don’t miss them?”

“I live in Basel!” he said. “Actually, I miss my cat in Basel. But I want to get word to my family that I’m okay.”

“You’re not okay!”

“I’m alive. I want them to know that. Don’t you want your parents to know you’re alive?”

“They assume that until they hear otherwise.”

She was still staring at him, he could tell. Stubbornly he stared at the floor. He could outwait anybody, that he knew.

After a long pause she said, “Okay. When my friends come again, we’ll ask them to get word to your people. It will have to come to them from out of nowhere. I don’t know how reassuring that will be.”

“Better than nothing.”

“Okay. But it can’t happen for a few days more. I need to disappear completely for a while. There were some informers in that group I spoke to in Shekou, there always are. So now my friends are setting a track of sightings of me that will make it look like I went to Guangzhou. Nothing can interfere with that or else it won’t work.”

Fred shrugged. “As long as it happens as soon as possible.”

“Okay,” she said again, impatiently.

Fred could see she was frowning as she thought about things. He kept his eyes on the floor. Finally he levered some rice off the plate and into his mouth. The vegetables he couldn’t face.

Three days later, one of Qi’s friends came by to share some news. Qi gave her Fred’s brother’s contact information, with instructions to send word that Fred was okay, but by roundabout means, four cell steps at a minimum. The woman nodded and took off. After that Fred felt his stomach relax a little. Now he could settle into this apartment a little easier.

After that, Qi’s friends dropped by every four or five days. In between those times, the two of them sat in the apartment. The wristpads her friends had given them in Beijing were powered off and locked in a Faraday box. Cut off from the cloud, they spent their time reading the paperbacks that had been left there, or looking out the window at what Qi’s friends told her was called Picnic Bay. They saw no picnics. Clouds floated low over the green hills surrounding the bay, and the little boats at anchor were sometimes visited by people in rowboats. Other people in rowboats or small motor dinghies were harvesting fish from the aquaculture farms in the bay. Other than that, nothing much seemed to happen. From time to time a bigger boat, like the one that had brought them to the island, arrived at a dock protruding from the middle of the row of corniche restaurants that ran the whole length of the village. After these arrivals the restaurants had some customers; later that ferry would leave, taking the customers with it. The rest of the time the restaurants seemed mostly empty.

Qi was quiet through these days. She spent a fair bit of time in the bathroom, and sometimes came out looking pale and damp. She was looking quite pregnant now, rounded in front in that characteristic way. A slight woman otherwise, so it really showed. Fred wondered if she was suffering from morning sickness, but he didn’t want to ask her about it. Despite the slightly bloody intimacy of their train ride, or maybe because of it, she seemed very private, and even though they were living in a two-room apartment with a single bathroom, she kept to herself both physically and mentally, and was never less than fully dressed, even though the days in the apartment were hot. Sometimes it rained for an hour, then the skies cleared and it grew hot again. Usually they kept the window open, and the sea smells from the bay were fishier than Fred remembered other oceansides smelling. Despite the picturesque corniche of restaurants, which more and more looked like a hope for tourism rather than the real thing, it was a working bay.

Most days Qi spent a fair amount of time going through the kitchen cabinets, lining up ingredients and chopping vegetables at speed, then cooking and eating. She got hungry more often than Fred. He wasn’t sure if she was a good cook or not, because to him everything she cooked was spicy. Anyway she was definitely into it. She talked to herself as she cooked, muttering complaints, it sounded like, especially after ransacking the spice cabinet. Three meals a day, four meals a day—probably it was a way for her to pass the time. And she was of course eating for two. Finally Fred saw what people meant by that phrase.

One day, two of Qi’s friends dropped by chattering with news of some legal battle against Beijing won by Hong Kong advocates. The three Chinese discussed this in a mix of Chinese and English, the English a concession to Fred’s presence, he could see; even so he couldn’t follow the details, and didn’t want to ask for explanations. Despite his reticence they tried to tell him about it. Hong Kong had been a British city, built on land seized from the Chinese Empire, until Britain ceded it back to China in 1997. But that handover had come with a fifty-year period of semiautonomy attached to it. So now the time to submit to full control from Beijing had come, the turnover had happened just a month before: July 1, 2047. The uproar over reunification was still ongoing, with another umbrella revolution testing the rules Beijing had announced. Things were going to change one way or another. During the fifty-year interval period, the Beijing government had agreed to let Hong Kong keep some representative government of its own. One country two systems, this had been called. That made the city something like the Special Administrative Regions that had been set up elsewhere in China, but with its own particular history. This was true all over. Macau the stupid casino, Tibet the weirdo Buddhists, the moon and its band of technolunatics, they were all varieties of SAR. Long ago the offer had been made to Taiwan to become a new SAR, and supposedly they were considering this offer, although who would be so stupid as to take it; but because they might, Beijing had treated Hong Kong better than it would have otherwise, because it wanted to show Taiwan how good it was to its SARs, with the hope that Taiwan would then volunteer to rejoin the mainland. This meant that Hong Kong and Taiwan had had a relationship closer than what might have existed otherwise, as each helped the other stay a little freer of Beijing’s heavy rule. Now that too would change.