Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

“I didn’t recognize you!” she cried.

“No reason to. You only met me once, and I had hair then.”

“What are you doing here!”

“What do you think? We’re working on the project. We work for you!”

“So you’re not mining helium?”

Both the men laughed heartily.

“Who would do something that stupid?” Xuanzang asked. “We’re not lunatics, we’re lunatics .”

They laughed at their old joke.

“These are friends from Hong Kong,” Qi said to Fred. “Cai here, Xuanzang I mean, is my fourth or fifth cousin, we think. They’re part of the group you met in Shekou.”

“I see,” Fred said, which he didn’t. “What’s this about not helium mining?”

“We use that as our way to get around,” Ah Q explained. “It’s our legend. Mr. Fang has supported us in that effort, which is nice of him.” They laughed again. Giddy guys.

“Does he know what you’re really doing?” Qi asked.

“We’re not sure. It seems like he doesn’t want us to know whether he knows or not, so we don’t press it. We keep it at the level of prospecting for helium. He seems happy to see us on that basis, and on it goes.”

“Anyway we can get you out of here, if you want,” Xuanzang said. “Our rover has a Mechanical Turk compartment, and we visit here all the time, so no one pays us much attention. And if it doesn’t work, I don’t think you’ll pay too heavily for trying. Mr. Fang isn’t like the security police.”

“Qi,” Fred warned.

“I’m going!” she exclaimed. “You can stay here if you want!”

“Really?” he said. “You’re eight months pregnant.”

“Exactly! I don’t want to have my baby in this jail!”

“Do you have access to medical facilities?” Fred asked Xuanzang.

“Why yes, we do.”

“In your rover?”

“No, but where we’re going.”

“Damn,” Fred said. His mind spun but failed to catch. “Well, I guess I’m coming too,” he heard himself say.

“You don’t have to,” Qi snapped. “I don’t want someone nagging me! I’m tired of that!”

“I’m coming,” Fred insisted mulishly. He looked toward the road, as if to remind her he could tip the guards if she tried to stop him from coming along.

“Why!” she exclaimed. “I don’t want you if you’re not willing! Why do you keep following me!”

“I don’t know,” he said. It was the truth. Looking at the pavilion floor, he muttered, “I guess we’re entangled.”

He felt her staring at him. “Maybe we’re superposed,” she suggested. “Maybe we’re the dead cat and the live cat, in that box together.”

He knew which cat she would think he was, and felt his lower lip thrusting out. “Maybe I’m your pilot wave,” he countered.

She inspected him awhile longer. “Maybe you are,” she said at last. “Maybe that’s why I don’t know where I’m going. Lead on then! Why stop now?”

Fred sighed. “That’s what I was thinking.”

So they went back to their rooms and packed their few things into the little daypacks they had been given by Fang Fei’s space crew. Xuanzang and Ah Q came to the guesthouse and walked them to the tunnels at the end of the lava tube that led to the cave in the crater wall. Here several rovers were parked alongside a number of rocket launchpads. Xuanzang and Ah Q led Fred and Qi up into their rover’s big upper room, where they opened a hatch in the floor, and Fred followed Qi down into a chamber under the driver’s seat. He squashed against her side to side. Their knees scrunched up under their chins, her pregnant belly bulging out and forcing her to shove her left leg far into his space, as there was no way she could keep her legs together. It seemed they were fated to a physical intimacy that was only driving them mentally further apart, but no matter how that was going, Fred could only put his head back against the vibrating wall of the compartment and hope it was somehow protected from scanners in a way that would keep them hidden, as it would be embarrassing to get caught and hauled out of there. And he was quite sure he didn’t want to see what Fang Fei was like when he was angry. He asked about this matter of scanners before the door was closed on them, and Xuanzang told him that the compartment was not just Faraday-caged, but also broadcasting for surveillance instrumentation an output that created an image of one of the rover’s motor parts. Very clever, and it occurred to Fred to wonder why they should need such a system in their rover. But it seemed clear that the answer involved smuggling of one sort or another, so he decided to leave it for later, or never.

“Don’t worry,” Xuanzang said as he closed the hatch. “They usually let us out without any searches, because Fang is our patron. This is just to be sure.”

So they lay scrunched there in the dark as the two prospectors drove their rover out of the cave. There was one pause of some minutes, worrisome to Fred, hot and sweaty despite the single vent of cool air wafting onto them from above, bringing with it the scent of Qi’s hair which was becoming so familiar to him, possibly a shampoo scent in part, but also just the smell of her person. It was like the scent of a baby, or of the head of a beloved that you were accustomed to inhale, but in this case always including a whiff of danger. Strange the ways of the body, because this scent in the dark, despite the danger always associated with it, was filling him with a sensation of well-being, even the first pulse or two of an inappropriate erection, blocked immediately by a twist of his pants, for which he felt grateful. He was mad at her right now for calling him a dead cat, so it didn’t make sense anyway.

Then it was just discomfort and enforced intimacy and boredom—Fred wondered briefly if this was what marriage would be like, although of course he had no idea—and for a time he fell asleep. Then the door opened and they were being helped out of the compartment, blinking in the light, and he groaned at the release from their position and slapped his left leg awake as he crawled out, doing his best not to kick Qi as he emerged into the cabin of the rover. She pushed his right foot up to help him get out and stay off her, and again the feel of her hands on him sent a little jolt up his leg. When he was out and on the bench behind the driver’s seat, he reached back and grabbed her wrist and she grabbed his, and in the lunar g it was more a matter of not yanking her into the roof of the compartment than of hauling her weight up. It took a little care to get her belly out without scraping the doorway with it, but they managed, and then they were sitting on the bench behind the hatch door, looking around.

The entrance cave to Fang Fei’s China Dream, Xuanzang and Ah Q told them, lay under the inside of the rim of Tsiolkovsky Crater, the floor of which was one of the only areas on the far side covered by flat basalt. There were no big mare on the far side, Ah Q said; it was entirely rough highlands blasted by a zillion overlapping craters. The explanation for the difference in surface between the near and far hemispheres was something selenologists still argued about, he added, but clearly the proximate cause was that the crust was simply thicker on the far side than on the near side.

The crater floor extended as far they could see, with the crater’s central peak tall in the distance, its upper half white in the sunlight. The curving crater wall extended to the horizons to left and right, then stayed visible over the closer black horizon and created a more distant lit horizon of its own, yet another immense lunar curve. Above everything stretched a low blacker-than-black sky punctuated by a dense field of stars.