Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

“We request that you take this communication device to Chan Qi, please.”

Ta Shu said, “Who gave this to you?”

One of the women said, “A friend of Chan Qi’s, who wants to stay in touch with her. That would be good for all concerned. It is a secure communications device. She will know what to do with it.”

Ta Shu considered it. A private telephone line, like, he recalled, the one Fred had tried to deliver to Chang Yazu. Not a good thought. On the other hand, communication could be good; and one could always hang up if it wasn’t. Exchanging information and views was almost always useful.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll give it to her. I can’t say what she’ll do with it.”

“Thank you.”

Ta Shu took the heavy little computerlike thing up into the jet and sat in a window seat. Soon the jet took off and headed south. He leaned his head against the window and fell asleep. When he woke again they were landing. He didn’t recognize the landscape, but thought it might be highlands in the south. Somewhere west of the Hu Line, that seemed certain.

The jet landed and taxied to a halt. They got out and walked toward a mansion on a hill. Beyond it a skeletal rocket gantry stood on a big concrete pad. A private spaceport, apparently. A rocket was being wheeled out of a tall hangar. It looked small from a distance, but as they approached it kept growing in his sight; it was the hills behind that had made it seem small. In fact it appeared to be about the same size as the one Ta Shu had gotten into a couple of months before, on his first trip to the moon. As tall as that one, for sure, but not as thick.

“Will it go directly to the moon?” he asked one of his escorts. He knew there were rockets that took people only up to Earth orbit, where they transferred to bigger spaceships that passed the moon in a permanent figure eight with Earth. The little transfer shuttles to and from these big spaceships were said to inflict tremendous g forces, so he was afraid he would have to make one of those kinds of transfers.

But one escort replied, “Yes, the passenger compartment of this one goes right to the moon. The booster stage will come back down after your launch and land right over there.” She pointed across the concrete pad.

“Very nice.”

He was led into the mansion, where he found Chan Qi and Fred Fredericks sitting on a couch. They were startled to see him, and then, as they digested the implications of his appearance, Fred at least looked hopeful.

Qi not so much. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“I’ve got a friend in a very high place who is worried for your safety, and thinks you’ll be safer on the moon than you are here,” Ta Shu told them. “Apparently there are places up there we didn’t know about, secret places where you can hide for a while with proper security to protect you. So it’s been recommended that you hide there, and I’ve been asked to come with you.”

“What about her baby?” Fred said.

Qi glared at him. “Let me worry about that.”

“Sorry.”

She did not look appeased. “If this is what it takes to stay free, I’m willing to do it. My baby will be okay. The gibbon babies up there are okay. Babies are always floating in amniotic fluid, so they’re always in a lighter g. And whale and dolphin babies are okay, and they grow in almost zero g.”

Fred shrugged, gazing at the floor in what Ta Shu was coming to recognize as his usual manner. He looked unhappy. Maybe the idea of the moon frightened him; after his previous visit, that would make sense. Ta Shu said to him, “Whatever happened to you up there before, it won’t be like that this time. And it could be that a resolution to your problem is more likely to happen up there than here.”

Fred shrugged again and said, “I’m ready.”

So: back to the moon.

The launch from Earth was the usual big push. There was no view to be had, so there was nothing to distract one from the squishing of one’s body. Glancing once across their little chamber, Ta Shu saw Qi grimacing, but she looked more determined than pained. It was just one more in the sequence of gravity shocks that the baby inside her had undergone, her look said. This launch pressure would be followed by three days of weightlessness, followed by a brief decelerative squish, then some period of time in lunar g, with centrifuge reversions to one g, if she wanted them. Variations in g might be worse for fetal development than a steady lunar g; there was no way to be sure. She and her kid were definitely experiments.

Nevertheless, they were on their way back to the moon. After all the launch pressure they floated around a small but luxurious cabin. Now Ta Shu and Fred could float into a corner and strap themselves in, and suck on some bulbs of tea, and finally catch up. Fred had had a busy time of it, to the point where he couldn’t seem to talk about it very well. Ta Shu had to excavate the story out of him question by question, but eventually he understood how Fred and Qi had stayed hidden for so long; they had gone to ground and stayed there, simple as that. Only after they ventured out had they been recaptured, Fred wasn’t sure how. In fact Ta Shu knew more about what had happened to them after their capture in Hong Kong than they did themselves. He could explain a bit of that, and also explain how returning to the moon might be helpful to Fred.

“You’ll be under the protection of a very powerful faction in the Chinese government, that’s the main thing. They’ll push the investigation of what happened to you last time. On Earth there were too many factions after you, some of them quite dangerous. So I think this makes sense.”

“I hope so. Do you know if my family got word that I was okay?”

“I don’t know, but I can ask people to find out.”

“I want them to know.”

“I understand, but it will be important to be discreet about that. If there are people trying to harm you, you don’t want to remind anyone of your family’s existence.”

He looked even more unhappy.

Ta Shu patted him on the arm, said to him, “This should keep you out of the hands of the factions down there who are Qi’s enemies, also her father’s enemies. That could have gotten bad.”

“It was bad.”

“I mean worse.”

Fred nodded to show he understood. Ta Shu was not sure he did, but then again, he looked much warier than he had when they had met during their first moon landing. He had gone through a lot since then. He was pale; he had gotten sick in Hong Kong, he said, and had not yet fully recovered.

Qi, on the other hand, looked full of energy. Sophisticated; powerful. Ta Shu was reminded of Peng Ling, and not just Ling the student of twenty years before, but the current chairperson of the standing committee. Qi had that same kind of tiger gaze. Well, she was the daughter of a tiger, and princelings often enjoyed the shade of trees planted by the ancestors. So it was not so surprising.

Now as they waited out their transit, moving from sleep to meals to gazing out the window, she had questions for him. First, of course, concerning who exactly it was he was referring to, when he spoke of their benefactor.

She was very interested when he told her it was Peng Ling. “Peng!” she said. “She used to be an ally of my father’s, but now that may be changing. They are both possible candidates for the next presidency. I don’t know if I trust her.”

“That’s something only you can decide,” Ta Shu said.

She was also very interested in the communication device Ta Shu now pulled from the luggage compartment and handed to her. As he gave it to her he said, “All I know about this is that someone who knew where you were going, and knew I was going to join you, wanted you to have it. They said it was from someone who wanted to help you. I can’t vouch for it beyond that.”