Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

“So… you’re doing a kind of united front?” Fred ventured.

“Exactly!” She stared at him, surprised. “Where did you get that? Are you pretending to be stupider than you really are?”

“No,” Fred said promptly.

She laughed at this promptness.

“So,” he said, pleased to have made her laugh in the midst of her chopping the world to bits, “all this happens offline?”

“Yes. It has to. But there are spies everywhere, of course. So the security agencies know what’s going on, and they’re trying to stop it. But the migrants use guanxi networks and word of mouth. It’s like a big family, and if you don’t trust someone with your life, you don’t talk to them about this stuff. The old cell structures have come back too, so if a cell gets penetrated it can’t bring down more than that one. And it helps a lot that the security agencies overlap, and they fight each other.”

“Why are there overlapping systems?”

She shrugged. “That’s China. The street council decides things, then the district, the town, the province, then the various economic agencies, all the way up to the top. So surveillance isn’t any more coordinated than resistance. And we’ve got the numbers. There’s about a hundred million Party members, and about five hundred million internal migrants. That’s too many to control. Half a billion people—they can’t put them all in prison!”

“But they could put the leaders in prison,” Fred pointed out. “Then hope that that messes things up enough to keep a lid on dissent.”

She nodded, looking grim. “Right. So here we are.” She shrugged. She was back in hiding again, her look said. No choice. Trapped. Everything on the cutting board was chopped. It was going to be the finest-chopped salad Fred had ever eaten. Lucky they were using chopsticks rather than forks. “Let’s eat.”

Another time they were sitting in their little living room after eating a meal, sweating in the heat, both half-asleep. When they roused from this torpor, there was nothing to do. They had been in the apartment for nineteen days, by Fred’s count. Qi was bigger than ever. Her belly was growing day by day. She had cooked three meals already, and there was still time to kill.

“Tell me a story,” she demanded of him.

“I don’t know any stories,” he said, alarmed.

“Everybody knows some stories.”

“Not me.” Then he added, “What about those Swiss boarding schools? Why did you keep running away from them? I thought they were supposed to be nice.”

“No.”

“So you ran away, how many times did you say?”

“I don’t know. I can hardly remember.”

“Hard to believe.”

She laughed at this. “I guess that’s right. I remember.”

She sat there thinking for a while. There was no hurry. Finally she said, “When I was first sent to Switzerland, I was really mad. Hurt. It was my father’s doing, of course, although my mother went along with it, I’m sure. But he wanted me out of China, mostly to get an international education. Learn English, all that. He was probably right,” she added, nodding to herself. “So he sent me, and I was young enough that I decided it was because he didn’t love me.”

“How old were you?”

“About eleven or twelve, I guess. It was 2026 I think? So wait, I was nine. Wow, I had it wrong. That’s interesting. Anyway, I loved my father, and I thought he loved me, so he explained and explained why he was doing it, but I still felt betrayed. I was very mad at him. And at my mom too, for not defending me. But, you know. They bundled me off. And as it turned out, they sent me to a boarding school they had never been to, called Nouvelle École de l’Humanité, in the lower Alps, above Bern. I don’t know how or why they chose that one, because my mom wouldn’t have approved if she had known what it was like. But I think a friend of theirs raved about it, said it had been great for their daughter, another Party princess. So they sent me there sight unseen.”

“And it was bad?”

“I thought so at first. It was some kind of weirdo alternative education, based on Pestalozzi, or Steiner, or Piaget, I mean really who knows. The Swiss can be very theoretical. The couple who founded it were hippies of some kind, pretty crazy from the sound of it.”

“ Baizuo ?”

She laughed. “No, they just loved nature. The Alps in particular. So, we always got up before dawn and took cold showers to start the day, and then we cleaned out the stables, and then we farmed, and we killed and chopped up chickens, and climbed some Alps, and cooked and cleaned, and did lots of exercises, and like that.”

“And you hated it?” Fred guessed.

“Of course I did! At least at first. But then, just as I was getting used to it, my parents finally paid attention to the letters I was sending home. I had to write them on paper and send them by mail, it was like throwing them into the Aare in a bottle. None of us ever heard back from anyone. We had been forgotten. We were stuck in a hippie gulag. But finally my parents came for a visit, and they were horrified. Politely and without saying a word, I mean they were perfectly inscrutable Orientals to the people in charge there, but I could see it no problem. Oh my God, their princess getting her hands dirty! Their precious daughter shoveling horseshit! All of their Chinese elite instincts were appalled. The whole point of joining the Party is to get off the farm! So they got me out of there as fast as they could and put me in another boarding school near Geneva, in Lausanne. Beautiful place, looking across the lake at Mont Blanc, all that. But the girls there, this was a girls-only school, they were from all over, with money leaking out of every pore. And there weren’t any boys around to distract them and make them be nice. Very soon I hated those girls with all my heart. They were the ones who made me into a Maoist.”

“Radicalized by rich girls in a Swiss boarding school?”

“Definitely. I hated them so much. Racist assholes, that’s what they were. There’s an age where you shouldn’t put a bunch of girls by themselves. The mean girls’ club is a real thing. They’re worse than any boys I ever saw.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Lord of the Flies is like some Christian support group compared to the mean girls’ club. I think you probably need boys and girls together at that age more than any other. Anyway I hated them.”

“What did they do?”

“Oh, just the usual shit. I don’t want to tell you. It’s always the same kind of stuff. Just saying it repeats it, somehow.”

“Okay.”

“Like one time I came in on them and they were wearing some of my clothes and pulling their eyes to the side and singing ‘We are Siamese, if you please, we are Siamese if you don’t please.’”

“Siamese?”

“Whatever! It was a cartoon song. I looked it up. About Siamese cats, it turns out. Pretty funny in fact. But to them I was a gook, a slant, a chink!”

Just saying it repeats it, Fred knew not to say; although it was painful to hear that grating sound in her voice. He said, “I’m surprised the school’s administrators let that kind of thing happen.”

“They never know what really goes on in the dorms.”

“I guess not. And so…”

“So that’s when I started making my escapes. You don’t just run away from those places, you’re locked in. You have to escape. So that took some work, because that place was a real prison. Part of the deal is if you pay a ton of money to put your daughter in a place like that, they stay there.”

“They’re safe.”

“Safe! Safe to live with horrible racist bitches! That’s right. So, I got away three times, got caught three times. The Swiss have way better surveillance than China, and I didn’t know what I was doing, and I had no friends or money. Once I just walked into the forest and got lost out there. But the Swiss even have their forests surveilled. So the third time they caught me, I begged my father to send me back to my first school. The École was looking like utopia at that point. And he let me do it. After that I was fine.”