Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

“I want to be an agnotologist,” he said to Qi. “I want to study what we don’t know.”

“You would be good at that,” Qi said.

The next day one of Qi’s friends tapped at the door and stepped in to give them a couple of plastic bags of food. Fred put it all away while Qi talked to the young woman in Chinese. He was relieved to see that dishwashing soap had been included, per his request to their previous visitor.

This one left unusually soon after arriving, leaving Qi scowling.

“Uh-oh, what?” Fred asked, straightening up.

She glanced at him, looked away. “One of the people who has been bringing us supplies has gone missing.”

Fred considered this. He saw why she was upset. “So what do we do?” he said after a while.

“I don’t know.” After a while she said, “I guess I should stay away from the windows, but could you sit where you can look down, and see if you think anyone is hanging around down there watching us?”

“I can try.” If spotted, he could be any Western tourist. On the other hand he was definitely Fred Fredericks, presumably being looked for by at least someone in the world, with his photo easily available, he presumed. “We have Venetian blinds. I can tilt the blinds so that I can see out and people can’t see in.”

“Good idea.”

After that he spent a fair amount of time looking out their window at the village’s sidewalk and restaurant row. No one appeared to be at all interested in their place. He began to sort out who the regulars were and what they were doing, and they all seemed to have restaurant or fishing business. Almost all; some people just passed through. Tourists, locals, it was hard to tell. It was a very sleepy village. Still, the new tension in the room was palpable. There was no way to be sure they weren’t being watched. Proving a negative was always hard.

“Could this person who went missing just have left or something?” he asked one day.

“His name is Wei,” Qi said sharply. Her look turned dark. “I don’t think so. I mean, maybe, but I can’t think what it would be. So I’m really worried about him.”

And about us, Fred didn’t say.

“I wish I could go back to his last visit and warn him,” she said. “Tell him to get away somewhere.”

“Maybe someone else did that instead of us.”

“Maybe.”

Fred could see, even in his sidelong glances, that she was very worried about this Wei. A friend, perhaps. He wondered again if his family had gotten word that he was okay. “Too bad we can’t take advantage of quantum backdating,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a couple of experiments you can do that show quantum effects that are like going backward in time, or changing the past.”

“Really?”

“Sort of. If you make a certain kind of molecule that combines particular kinds of atoms, you can heat and chill them such that the colder atom in the molecule gives its heat to the hotter one, which breaks entropy and is like a little instance of time going backward. Also, if you do the half-silvered mirror experiment in a certain way, it’s like the two-slit experiment, in that you can tweak it to get either wave results or particle results, but in this version of it, if you tweak the device after the photon has gone through the mirror, it retroactively changes what happened at the mirror. So it’s like you’ve changed the past.”

“Wow,” Qi said. Then, wistfully: “Can’t you make one of your quantum phones do that? I want to call Wei last week.”

“These aren’t actions that can convey information,” Fred explained. “Also they only last milliseconds. They’re just more ways in which the quantum realm is strange. Down at that level, things appear to be a kind of mush. Somehow by the time they layer up to our realm the usual laws of physics hold.”

“Alas,” she said. She sighed, looking grim. “I guess we’re stuck twixt and tween.”

“Like Schrödinger’s cat,” Fred said, trying to distract her.

“Meaning right now we’re both alive and dead? That feels about right.”

“I think we’re alive,” Fred ventured.

“No. Someone has to look at us first, right? Then we’ll find out. Right now we’re both at once.”

“Maybe there’s a pilot wave that already knows,” Fred said. He didn’t know what he meant.

Once Qi woke up out of an uneasy nap and said, “Wow, I can feel it. Come here and feel.”

Fred got up and went to her. She pulled up her shirt and bared her big belly, took his hand and put it to one side of her belly button. This was as much as Fred had ever touched a woman who wasn’t a relative or a dance partner, and he was distracted by that, until he felt a distinct thrust outward from inside her, very startling.

“Whoa,” he said.

“You felt it?”

“Of course.” He felt it again. “What, is it kicking?”

“I think so.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No. It feels weird, but not painful.” Then she winced. “Uncomfortable sometimes.”

“Like it’s turning over in bed,” Fred suggested.

She shook her head, but smiling a little. “Getting crowded in there.”

She stood and let her shirt down, put her hands overhead, leaned to right and left, then forward and back. Some rotations. She put her back to a wall, causing a gecko to relocate in haste. Squats up and down against the wall. Pink-cheeked and sweating. The AC came on. She sat down, then got up again and went over to the kitchen corner. Poured rice and two cups of water in the rice cooker and turned it on. Banged around in their food cabinet and at the sink.

Fred regarded her. Now, even when her back was turned to him, he could see she was pregnant. He thought about how fermions had to rotate 720 degrees before they returned to their original position. This was one of the first facts that had snagged his mind when learning about the subatomic realm. Fermions existed in a Hilbert four-space, in dimensions beyond what humans could see at the macro-scale. What would it be like to see something like a fermion’s spin? Would it pulsate in place, would it shimmer and gleam, would it overwhelm the senses to look at it? Maybe it would look like Qi did now.

Then one day she spent a lot of time in the bathroom, sighing and groaning to the point that Fred got worried. It wasn’t typical. In the late afternoon, after she came out, he ventured to say,

“Can I help?”

“No.”

She looked around the room for a while and then announced, “I can’t stand this. Let’s go down and have dinner on the water. I want some food that isn’t this same stuff. I’m sick of my own cooking.”

I never liked it, Fred didn’t say. “Are you sure that’s smart?”

“I’m sure it’s not smart. And yet nevertheless in spite of that.”

“All right, whatever you say.”

She stared at him as if he had said something offensive. Maybe he had.

“I’m tired of this,” she said.

“I know.”

It had been thirty-six days, he thought. He realized suddenly that he was probably finding these days more interesting than she was. Realizing that did not help his mood. So he liked to sit around doing nothing in particular, thinking things over—was that strange? Yes, it was. He sighed.

She looked out the window. After a while she said, “I think we can do it. Have dinner right at the water’s edge, no one will see us.”

“The waiters?”

“I’ll wear a hat and glasses.”

You can’t hide those cheekbones, he didn’t say. Nor the way you walk. Probably they should trade shoes. Probably she would think that was stupid.

“Come on,” she said. “I can’t stand it anymore.”