Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

Then, just as the analyst was concluding that Chan Qi wasn’t going to reply, characters appeared on the little screen.

What do you want?

He took a deep breath. How to say it?

We see clear signs that the security apparatus and the military are taking actions to preemptively crush your movement. Arrests have increased tenfold and most transport systems are being sharply curtailed.

Why is that happening now?

I don’t know. They must have seen signs.

He forbore to give her advice. He wasn’t sure what to say in that regard, and saying anything would very likely alienate her. She would only listen to advice that helped her organize her previous thoughts, whatever they were. You can’t push the river.

You’re sure about this? she asked.

Quite sure. Arrests are occurring even now. Travel is curtailed.

Okay, thanks. More later.

And with that she signed off.

The analyst sat back in his chair and heaved a sigh. He reread the transcript of their exchange, sighed again. If only a cigarette. No way to know what effect this would have. She had her resources, he had his. He could only do what he could do from his own position. The front was broad, the allies in a cause had to help each other—

Then the power went off, and the analyst was sitting in the dark. He muttered under his breath, turned on his wristpad’s light, looked around his room, which suddenly seemed smaller. A little cave under a mountain. A dark refuge in a dark time.

Noises came from without, the door burst open, powerful beams of light splintered his sight and cut the room into shards of black and white. He was seized by the arms and lifted into the air.

“You’re under arrest,” a voice said.

Return to Earth: a journey in the bardo. Weightless and confined, sad and boring. His remorse was as deep as the starry space out the windows. He could not make himself read, nor watch movies, nor talk to his cloud audience. He couldn’t even think. After the usual crush of the rail launch, he could only float from bed to chair to bed, looking at status updates from the hospital in Beijing, each only a few characters long. Severe stroke. Sick; dying. Come as quick as you can.

His mind wandered, or spun feverishly, or went blank. Time passed.

He thought of his friend Zhou Bao, patiently watching the Earth rise, then hang spinning like a kind of clock, then set behind the white hills of the moon. So far from home, a friend. A man who could face misfortune with a brave spirit. You face it, you persevere. You enjoy Earthrise and write poems.

He made his way to a window and looked back at the moon, almost full now, almost as small as when it rose fatly over Earth’s eastern hills. So white, so dead. Thinking of Zhou Bao, he tapped out characters on his wrist. Then, thinking of Fred, he translated the poem into English, as a kind of exercise in friendship. Writing in English was hard, and he used an old Anglo-Saxon form, with a gap in each line, as a cover for his own primeval sense of the language.

The ferry juddered violently down through the atmosphere, like the shooting star it so much resembled, then at the end of the fiery descent popped its parachute and dropped him and the other passengers onto the broad empty plain of the Bayan Nur spaceport. From there a big vehicle, with tires taller than a man, came out to the lander and they were helped up and into it. Again Ta Shu felt the wicked press of Earth’s gravity crush him to an invalid. The vehicle jounced to the terminal. There Ta Shu agreed to put on a bodysuit, feeling old and ashamed, even though most of his fellow passengers were doing the same. After the fitting he stalked over to the hyperloop train to Beijing, which was more expensive but slightly faster than flying. Off they went, almost all of them encased in exoskeletons, red-eyed and withdrawn. Back to Earth.

In the transfers between stations he focused on learning his suit and avoiding a fall, then sat down thankfully in each new train or tram car. Beijing shuffle, the whole population of the city seemingly on the move. When the subway cars ran aboveground he stared out the windows incuriously. Traffic bad as always. Sky still blue, still a surprise. Bikes with trailers still doddering along right in the middle of the crazy mash of vehicles. Amazing to see such foolhardy recklessness. No doubt whole lifetimes had been spent in that danger. No different from a sailor going out to sea. Dangerous, yes, but not automatically fatal. A mode of being. Suddenly he saw they were all like those bicyclists, all the time. Someday every one of them would get run over.

Finally he walked carefully into the hospital in his mother’s neighborhood. It was two and a half days since he had heard the news. They signed him in at the desk and led him up to her room. She had been found at home collapsed on the floor, they told him on the way. Apparently a major stroke. Never quite conscious since. It had happened just a couple of hours before he found out about it. Meaning three days had passed.

She was connected to monitors and had tubes in her nose. A nurse said to her, “Your son is here.” She cracked one eye, her right eye; her left side was paralyzed, the nurse told him. Ta Shu sat on a chair by her right side. Monitors blinked, machines hummed, nurses came and went.

At some point his mother regained consciousness. She looked at him curiously, as if uncertain of everything. He saw it in her look: she didn’t know who he was; who she was; where they were.

“ Teshu changhe ,” she said with some effort. Special occasion. Then she was out again.

After a while, Ta Shu slept in his chair. In the middle of the night some hospital noise woke both of them at the same time. This time his mother looked at him and whispered, “Why are you here?”

“You’re sick,” he explained. “I came as fast as I could.”

She slept again.

Sitting in the chair, in the bodysuit, in the heavy gravity but at the same time in some kind of vacuum of the spirit, he could not get comfortable enough to fall back asleep. Eventually he arranged two chairs to face each other, then curled up flat on them, head on one and feet on the other, pushing a button on the bodysuit that stiffened it so that it served as a kind of plank or basket to bridge the gap between chairs. That worked pretty well.

When he woke up again, a nurse was gently squeezing his arm.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Your mother died a few minutes ago. We were out in the hall, at our station.”

He pushed the button that released his bodysuit to movement, stood at her side. There she lay in the hospital bed, looking as she had while sleeping, or indeed as she had for the past decade or more. Maybe more calm, more pale. He kissed her forehead, stood upright, left the room.

After all the arrangements at the hospital had been made, he walked the ten or twelve blocks to her apartment. There was nowhere else to go; he had lent his apartment to one of his show’s assistants while he was gone.

At his mom’s, everything was just as it had been during his last several visits. Twenty years and more she had lived in this crowded little pair of rooms. Now they were empty, and yet all her furniture and things vibrated silently around him, as if speaking for her. It was as if she were in the tiny bathroom and would call to him at any moment. Ta Shu? He could hear exactly how she always said it, the timbre of her voice, the rising intonation, the question that she put into his name every time she said it. Ta Shu?